History of England 1-6 [Peter Ackroyd] (fb2) читать онлайн

Contents

List of Illustrations

1. Hymns of stone

2. The Roman way

3. Climate change

4. Spear points

5. The blood eagle

6. The measure of the king

7. The coming of the conquerors

8. The house

9. Devils and wicked men

10. The road

11. The law is lost

12. The names

13. The turbulent priest

14. The lost village

15. The great charter

16. Crime and punishment

17. A simple king

18. The seasonal year

19. The emperor of Britain

20. The hammer

21. The favourites of a king

22. Birth and death

23. The sense of a nation

24. The night schools

25. The commotion

26. Into the woods

27. The suffering king

28. Old habits

29. The warrior

30. How others saw us

31. A simple man

32. Meet the family

33. The divided realm

34. The world at play

35. The lion and the lamb

36. The staple of life

37. The king of spring

38. Come to town

39. The zealot king

40. The king of suspicions

41. A conclusion

Further reading

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Stonehenge, from an illuminated manuscript (© akg-images/British Library)

2. A silver relief of Cernunnos, the horned god of Iron Age worship (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

3. A mosaic from the Roman villa at Bignor in West Sussex (© akg-images/Florian Monheim/Bildarchiv Monheim)

4. A stylized depiction of some protagonists in the Roman conquest of Britain (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

5. The helmet of a great Germanic overlord, from Sutton Hoo (© akg-images/British Museum)

6. A nineteenth-century print of a Saxon manor (© akg-images/North Wind Picture Archives)

7. Saxon soldiers about to engage in battle (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

8. ‘Alfred in the Danish Camp’ (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

9. Aethelbert, the great king of Kent (© akg-images)

10. The Venerable Bede in his scriptorium (© akg-images/British Library)

11. The incipit of the Gospel of Saint Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels (© akg-images/British Library)

12. A Viking ship (© akg-images/British Library)

13. An image of Ethelred, commonly known as ‘the unready’ or ‘the ill-advised’ © akg-images/British Library)

14. Edward the Confessor, king of England from 1042 to 1066 (© akg-images/British Library)

15. The Normans crossing the Channel for the invasion of 1066 (© Getty Images/Bibliothèque Nationale)

16. The death of Harold in battle, from the Bayeux Tapestry (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

17. A man wielding an axe, taken from Topographia Hibernica (© akg-images/British Library)

18. An image of man and dogs from the Luttrell Psalter (© akg-images/British Library)

19. A nineteenth-century woodcut of a medieval manor (© akg-images/North Wind Picture Archives)

20. An image of Matilda, de facto queen of England from March to November 1141 (© akg-images/British Library)

21. Henry II confronting Thomas Becket (©akg-images/British Library)

22. Richard I, more commonly known as ‘Richard the Lionheart’ (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

23. ‘John Lackland’ on horseback (© akg-images/British Library)

24. The season of March as seen in The Bedford Book of Hours (© akg-images/British Library)

25. The varied labours of the agricultural year (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

26. The abbots, and monks, of a medieval monastery (© akg-images/British Library)

27. The building of a monastery (© akg-images)

28. Edward I addressing one of his parliaments (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

29. A view of Harlech Castle (© IAM/akg-images)

30. Queen Isabella, errant wife of Edward II (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

31. The Black Death (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

32. A woman who has contracted leprosy (© akg-images/British Library)

33. A bloodletting (© akg-images/British Library)

34. The Battle of Crécy (© akg-images/British Library)

35. The tomb of the Black Prince (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

36. The image of Richard II from the ‘Wilton Diptych’ (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

37. A page from Wycliffe’s Bible (© IAM/akg-images)

38. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral (© akg-images/Bildarchiv Monheim)

39. A scene from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (© akg-images/British Library)

40. The coronation of Henry IV in Westminster Abbey (© IAM/(akg-images)

41. The Battle of Agincourt (© akg-images/Bibliothèque Nationale)

42. The wedding of Henry V and Katherine of Valois (© akg-images/British Library)

43. Joan of Arc (© akg-images/Archives Nationales, Paris)

44. Henry VI in full martial array (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

45. The Warwick family tree, from John Rous of Warwick’s De Regius Angliae (© akg-images/British Library)

46. Edward IV (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

47. Elizabeth Woodville (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

48. Edward V (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

49. Richard III standing on a white boar (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

50. Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, from a nineteenth-century illustration (© Sarah, Countess of Essex/Getty Images)

51. An allegory of the Tudor dynasty (© akg-images/British Library)

1

Hymns of stone

When the first sarsen stone was raised in the circle of Stonehenge, the land we call England was already very ancient. Close to the village of Happisburgh, in Norfolk, seventy-eight flint artefacts have recently been found; they were scattered approximately 900,000 years ago. So the long story begins.

At least nine distinct and separate waves of peoples arrived from southern Europe, taking advantage of warm interglacial periods that endured for many thousands of years; they are races without a history, leaving only stones or bones as the evidence of their advance and retreat. Against the wall of a cave of the Gower Peninsula has been found the body of a man laid down 29,000 years ago. His bones were stained with a light patina of red, suggesting either that they were sprinkled with red ochre or that his burial garments were deeply dyed. He also wore shoes. Around him were various items of funereal tribute, including bracelets of ivory and perforated shells. His head had been removed, but his body had been placed in alignment with the skull of a mammoth.

He was young, perhaps no more than twenty-one, but in that far-off time all men and women were young. He was clearly some kind of clan leader or tribal chieftain. At the beginning of the human world, a social hierarchy already existed with marks of rank and status. The cave in which he was interred was visited by many generations, but we do not know what secrets it contained. The people whom he represented passed from the face of the earth.

Only the last of the arrivals to England survived. These people came some 15,000 years ago and settled in places as diverse as the areas now known as Nottinghamshire, Norfolk and Devon. In a Nottinghamshire cave the figures of animals and birds were carved 13,000 years ago into the soft limestone ceiling; the stag and the bear, the deer and the bison, are among them.

Generations passed away, with little or no evidence of change. They persisted. They endured. We do not know what language they spoke. Of how or what they worshipped, we have no idea. But they were not mute; their intellectual capacity was as great, or as small, as our own. They laughed, and wept, and prayed. Who were they? They were the forebears of the English, the direct ancestors of many of those still living in this nation. There is an authentic and powerful genetic pattern linking the living with the long dead. In 1995 two palaeontologists discovered that the material from a male body, found in the caves of Cheddar Gorge and interred 9,000 years ago, was a close match with that of residents still living in the immediate area. They all shared a common ancestor in the maternal line. So there is a continuity. These ancient people survive. The English were not originally ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Celtic’; they were a prehistoric island people.

The study of prehistory must also be the study of geography. When the settlers arrived in England, 15,000 years ago, the North Sea was a great plain of lakes and woodland. It now lies submerged, rich in the unseen evidence of the past. Yet we can in part rescue that which has been lost. Oak woods, marshes covered by reeds, and open grasslands covered the land. It was a warm and humid world. Red deer and voles inhabited the landscape; but they shared it with elephants and macaque monkeys. Among them wandered groups of humans, twentyfive or more in each group, pursuing their prey. They fired upon the animals with flint arrowheads, and used carved reindeer antlers as axes; they carried wooden spears. We do not know how they were organized but the discovery of ‘butchery sites’, where tools were manufactured and food prepared away from the main settlements, suggests a measure of social control.

We can still see the people walking towards us. On the sand at Formby Point, on the northwest coast of England, there are human footprints continuing for 32 feet (9.75 metres). The prints of many children are among them. The men were approximately 5 feet and 5 inches in height (1.55 metres), the women some 8 inches shorter (20 centimetres). They were looking for shrimps and razor shells. Footprints are found in other parts of England. Some appear on the foreshore of the Severn estuary; they fade away at the point where, 7,000 years before, the dry land became swamp. Now, on the flooding of the tide, they are gone.

These are the prints of what have been called Mesolithic people. The term, like its counterparts Palaeolithic and Neolithic, is loose but convenient. These people cleared the woods and forests by burning, in order to make way for settlements or to render the hunt for game more effective. Pine was also burned to make way for hazel, whose autumnal nuts were a popular source of food; they knew how to manage their resources. The early English have been called ‘hunter-gatherers’, with dogs employed for hunting, but their life was not that of undisciplined nomadic wandering; their activities took place within well-defined boundaries. They ranged through group territories that adjoined one another. They liked the areas where land and water meet.

Some 11,000 years ago a great lake covered what is now the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire. On the bank of this lake was built a platform of birch wood. It might have been used to expedite fishing, but it is more likely to have been a site of ritual ceremonial; the people wore amber beads, and left behind the bones of pig and red deer, crane and duck. A round house has also been discovered, 11.5 feet in diameter (3.5 metres), that has been dated to approximately 9000 BC; it was constructed of eighteen upright wooden posts, with a thick layer of moss and reeds to furnish a sleeping area.

Its inhabitants used barbed antler points, flint knives and scrapers; they started fires by means of iron pyrite. The house itself seems to have possessed a hearth. They used canoes to travel over the lake; one paddle has been found, but no craft is now visible. It has disintegrated through time. But there are survivals. At this site, known as Star Carr, were discovered twenty-one fragments of deer skull, some of them still with antlers. Were they a form of disguise for hunting? More likely, they were part of a shamanistic covering to enter the spirit of the deer. It might have been an early form of morris dancing, except that the numinous has now become simply quaint.

The Mesolithic English lived in settlements such as that found at Thatcham in Berkshire; the modern town itself is in fact the latest version of human community on the same site. Some atavistic impulse keeps habitations in the same place. 10,000 years ago the people lived on the shore of a lake. Burnt bones, burnt hazelnuts and patches of charcoal used for fires, were found; here, in other words, was all the panoply of daily domestic life. Cleared spaces represented the floors of small huts. The first English house was made of flexible saplings, bent over and covered with hides. It measured approximately 20 feet by 16 feet (6 metres by 4.8 metres).

Hundreds of other such settlements existed, many of them in coastal regions that now lie upon the seabed. The coasts were once between 70 and 100 feet (between 21 and 30 metres) higher than their present level and, as the seas rose, so the settlements were lost in the deluge. We may never know very much more about the Mesolithic English because their remains are beneath the waves. One submerged village came to light when some divers peered into a burrow made by a wandering lobster off the Isle of Wight; the crustacean was flinging out pieces of worked flint. A settlement of craftsmen and manufacturers, as well as hunters and fishermen, was then revealed. A wooden pole, with a flint knife embedded in it, was rescued from the waters. A canoe was found, carved from a log. The remains of structures like houses could clearly be seen. They were workers in wood as well as in stone. This is part of the lost English world under water.

The water rose so much that, after the melting of the ice sheets of the glacial era, it encircled what had become the archipelago of England, Scotland and Wales. 8,000 years ago, the marshes and forests of the plain lying between England and continental Europe were obliterated by the southern North Sea. It may not have come as a tidal wave, although earthquakes can precipitate great masses of water. It is more likely to have happened gradually, over 2,000 years, as the land slowly became swamp and then lake. In earlier ages of the earth, two catastrophic floods had already created the Channel between England and France. With the influx of new waters the archipelago (we may call it an island for the sake of lucidity) was formed; 60 per cent of the land surface became what is now the land of England.

The land then becomes the object of topographical enquiry. Where, for example, is the exact centre of England? It is marked by a stone cross at the village of Meriden in Warwickshire; the consonance of Meriden with meridian or middle of the day is striking, and that may indeed have been reason enough for a cross to be raised there. In fact the true centre of the country is to be found on Lindley Hall Farm in Leicestershire. The property was recently owned by a couple with the surname of Farmer.

The effects of this novel insularity eventually became evident in the tools which were fashioned in England. They became smaller than those shaped on the continent, and certain types of microlith were in fact unique to this country. Yet the island was no less inviting to the travellers who came across the waters in boats manufactured of wood or of osier covered with stitched skins. They came from northwestern Europe, proving that the Anglo-Saxon and Viking ‘invasions’ were the continuations of an ancient process.

They also came from the Atlantic coasts of Spain and southwestern France, but that migration was not a recent phenomenon. The Atlantic travellers had been colonizing the southwestern parts of England throughout the Mesolithic period, so that by the time of the formation of the island a flourishing and distinctive civilization existed in the western parts of the country. The travellers from Spain also settled in Ireland; hence the relationship between ‘Iberia’ and ‘Hibernia’. The Iron Age tribe of the Silures, established in South Wales, always believed that their ancestors had come from Spain in some distant past; Tacitus noted that these tribal people had dark complexions and curly hair. These are the people known later as ‘Celts’.

So differences between the English regions already existed 8,000 years ago. The flint tools of England, for example, have been divided into five separate and distinct categories. The artefacts of the southwest had a different appearance to those of the southeast, encouraging trade between the two areas. Individual cultures were being created that reinforced geographical and geological identities. There is bound to be a difference, in any case, between those cultures established upon chalk and limestone and those built upon granite.

A division is to be observed within England, established upon two broad zones. The Lowland Zone – comprising the midlands, the Home Counties, East Anglia, Humberside and the south central plain – is built upon soft limestone, chalk and sandstone. This is a place of low hills, plains and river valleys. It is a place of centralized power and settlement. It is soft, and various, and pliable. The Highland Zone in the north and west – comprising the Pennines, Cumbria, North Yorkshire, the Peak district of Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall – largely consists of granite, slate and ancient hard limestone. This is a place of mountains, high hills and moors. It is a region of scattered groups or families, independent one from another. It is hard, and gritty, and crystalline. These two regions do not face each other; they face outwards, towards the seas from where their inhabitants came. We can see the changes upon the ground itself. In Wessex the border of the ‘finds’ from one settlement stops at the point where the chalk meets the Kimmeridge clays. These people would move no further west. So regional differences began to spread.

Differences, in accent and in dialect, may already have existed. There was an original language in the southeast of which traces still survive in contemporary speech – the words ‘London’, ‘Thames’ and ‘Kent’ have no known Germanic or Celtic root. It is possible that the people of East Anglia and the southeast began to speak a language that developed into Germanic, and that the people of the southwest spoke a language that would become Celtic. The Germanic tongue became Middle English before flourishing as standard English; Celtic speech diverged into Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic. It is pertinent that in Wales and Cornwall Celtic inscriptions can be found in stone, carved during the Roman age, while in southern England there are none. Tacitus reports that, at the time of the Roman colonization, the south-eastern English spoke a language not unlike that of the Baltic tribes. But there can be no certainties in the matter. All lies in mist and twilight.

When the mist rises, we see extraordinary things. Beneath a burial mound in Wiltshire, near Avebury, was discovered what had once been a surface layer of soil dating from 3500 BC; it had been preserved by the construction of the barrow. The significance of this ancient ground was confirmed by the discovery of tiny grooves running at right angles, one to another, so that they form a crisscross pattern. These grooves were cut by a plough. It was a forked tree branch, strengthened by a stone tip, pulled by an ox. It is the first evidence of a field in England. It represents the beginning of farming. We have entered what has become known as Neolithic England. This small patch of land was cleared by the destruction of dense woodland; it was cultivated with the plough; it then became pasture for sheep and cattle; a boundary fence or hedge was erected; the barrow was then built some 1,500 years later. In this sequence of events we see the slow changes of prehistory.

The transition from hunting to farming was itself a very gradual one; there was no agricultural revolution in any meaningful sense, just the increments of days and years and centuries of habitual practice. Custom was the keystone of life. In this long period flint tools were replaced by sickles and polished axes; pottery was introduced to England; new forms of communal ritual emerged. But in the space of an individual generation, which we may estimate between twenty and thirty years, it must have seemed that nothing had changed. When we use terms like ‘Mesolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’, we should remember the underlying deep continuity that represents the nature of England itself.

The slow expansion of farming can be dated from 4000 BC. The woods and forests of the country were cleared, at first sporadically but then extensively; the moors of northern and southwestern England, and the heaths of East Anglia, were in part created by human activity. On this newly open ground wheat and barley crops were harvested. Domesticated pigs and cattle were kept, as well as sheep and goats. But sheep were not originally English. All of these animals were brought over in ships, not being native to the island, emphasizing the extent to which seafaring visitors contributed to the now familiar landscape.

This was a time of rising temperature, and in the glowing sun the people expanded; during the entire Neolithic period, from approximately 4700 BC to 2000 BC, the population trebled and has been estimated at 300,000. The pressure of ever-increasing numbers helped to accelerate the intensity of cultivation, and by 3000 BC the available countryside was marked out in small rectangular fields. Where there are fields there will be fences and ditches; there will be stone walls. Fences have been found beneath prehistoric burial mounds, testifying to their ancientness.

The presence of the barrows, where the dead reside upon the landscape, is a further sign of a settled society with its own forms of ritual and worship. Evidence can be found for the construction of houses and of scattered farmsteads with settlement pits, for enclosures where cattle might be herded or fairs and meetings held. One such enclosure, built in Cornwall before 3000 BC, was guarded by a great stone wall; the remains of houses were found here, sufficient accommodation for approximately 200 people. So the beginning of the English village, or of the English town, is to be found in the Neolithic period.

Roads and trackways were built from settlement to settlement. The Icknield Way took the prehistoric traveller from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. Lanes led from farmstead to farmstead. The Pilgrims Way linked the great religious centres of Canterbury and Winchester. Ermine Street is now known, in part, as the Old North Road. The Jurassic Way goes from Oxfordshire to Lincolnshire. Watling Street ran between Canterbury and St Albans, passing through what may have been prehistoric London. Long causeways were built across the soft fens of Somerset, from timber that was felled in approximately 3800 BC; the varieties of wood used in their construction, from ash and lime to hazel and holly, suggest that they were especially grown for the purpose. The specific properties of the wood, utilized by the Neolithic English, are not known to us. Their technology is lost.

Many of the roads loosely known as ‘Roman roads’ are much more ancient; the Romans simply made use of the prehistoric paths. Modern roads have been built along the routes of these ancient lines, so that we still move in the footsteps of our ancestors. They created a network of communication that extended throughout England. This was a populous and busy civilization, much more sophisticated than was once generally thought. Along these routes were transported axe-blades for the use of farmers or house-builders, pottery of all kinds, and leather goods. Flint was mined in underground galleries entered by hundreds of shafts reaching a depth of 50 feet (15.2 metres); then it was sent over the country.

Yet the great division was steadily growing more pronounced. On the Atlantic side rose up megalithic portal tombs and passage tombs, unknown in East Anglia, the midlands and the southeast. These great stone hymns to the dead, erected for 600 years from 3800 BC, are the emanations of a distinctive culture that originally came from southwestern Europe. The same tombs are found in Portugal and Brittany, Scotland and the Orkneys, suggesting that there was in essence a shared European religion inscribed in the siting of stone.

Causewayed enclosures of the same period are to be found predominantly in southern and eastern Britain; these are oval or circular spaces surrounded by a ditch cut into segments. They were used for the purposes of ritual, but the system of belief and practice was different from that of the southwest. Unlike the massive gateways of death revealed in the excavation of portal tombs, the open spaces suggest a more egalitarian or at least communal faith.

From the same epoch emerge the long parallel lines of ditches that have become known as cursus monuments; they cross what must have been cleared countryside, and can extend as far as 6 miles (9.6 kilometres). They are part of a ritual landscape of which the significance is now lost. Yet we know well enough that in this age of England the ground was holy; the stones, and the earth, were sacred. The English of the early Neolithic age had some direct communion with the terrain, and with the creatures that lived upon it, beyond the reach of the modern imagination.

All roads lead to Stonehenge, part of the greatest of all sacred sites. It began with a circle of fifty-six timbers, erected in approximately 2800 BC and placed in a ritual landscape that had already been in existence for 500 years. A cursus, 1½ miles long (2.4 kilometres), runs just to the north. Also found were pieces of rock crystal that must have been carried from Alpine regions. Salisbury Plain was then the spiritual centre of the island. From here radiate the chalk and limestone ranges of lowland Britain. A network of ridgeways and trading routes converged upon it. It was the largest area of habitable land. It was accessible by rivers. It was a great cauldron of human energy and purpose.

At some point, around 2200 BC, the first stone circle was being formed. The change from wood to stone has been related to a profound cultural movement, resulting in the building of monumental enclosures elsewhere, in the decline of ancestor worship and in bouts of warfare between opposing groups. In Peterborough a male and a female, with two children, were found within the same grave; the male was killed by an arrow in the back. In Dorset several bodies were found lying in a ditch, with a rampart fallen upon them; one of them had been killed by an arrow.

The building of Stonehenge was the largest and most protracted programme of public works in the history of England. A series of bluestones was first erected in 2200 BC; these stones were largely igneous in origin and were considered to have magical healing properties. The bluestones were then dismantled after a life of approximately 100 years and replaced by thirty sarsen stones; they formed a circle around five pairs of trilithons arranged in horseshoe pattern. At approximately the same time a wooden henge, or circular monument, of twenty-four obelisks was erected less than half a mile (0.8 kilometres) from its stone companion; it may have been a burial centre or the site of some other ritual activity.

Another henge and stone circle, known as Bluestonehenge, was erected a mile (1.6 kilometres) to the southeast along the bank of the Avon. A large village was also constructed, less than 2 miles away (3.2 kilometres), variously interpreted as a lodging for pilgrims, a ritual centre, a place of healing, or a home for those who erected the sarsen stones. Whatever the explanation, Salisbury Plain was the site of communal and spiritual settlement on a very large scale. It was once conceived to be a largely empty field, but now we find it to have been a field full of folk.

From this period was found the body of a man variously called ‘the Amesbury archer’ and ‘the king of Stonehenge’; his grave contained over 100 artefacts, including gold hair ornaments, copper knives, pots and boars’ tusks. Over his body, crouched in a foetal position, were scattered flint arrowheads. This was the last resting place of a tribal chieftain. Oxygen isotope analysis revealed that he had been brought up in the colder regions of northern Europe. What was a foreign king doing on Salisbury Plain? Was he on pilgrimage? There is evidence of an abscess and a painful bone infection. Had he crossed the sea to be healed? Or did he reign here as one of the tribal chieftains who, in an era without countries or nations, were not necessarily confined to one region?

In the final phase of building, approximately 1600 BC, the pits or holes for two circles of standing stones were hollowed out; but they were never filled. So the shape, and therefore possibly the nature, of Stonehenge has changed over a period of 1,200 years. It would be strange if it were not so. The same distance of time separates us from the Saxon age. It has been argued that the stones were a burial ground, a centre of pilgrimage and of ritual healing, a great observatory and a celestial clock, a place of public ceremonial and ritual. There is no reason why they could not have fulfilled all of these, as well as other, functions in the various eras of their existence. At the time of their erection these great stones seemed magnificent and immoveable in the earth; now, from a distance of 4,000 years, they dance in a pattern before us.

In all these eras, however, the stones are evidence of a controlling power that could organize vast numbers of people in a shared project. This was a hierarchical society with an elite, tribal or priestly, that could coerce or persuade many thousands of people into fulfilling its ritual will. The inhabitants of Salisbury Plain, to put it no broader, were under the guidance and protection of leaders who were rich in land and in cattle; the more we understand the material remains of this Neolithic culture, the more impressed we become by its range and authority. The construction of Silbury Hill, in the same region as Stonehenge, would have taken the labour of 1,000 men working every day for five years. The construction of Stonehenge itself would have entailed millions of hours of labour. Its bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, some 200 miles distant. So great parts of England were already under organized administration long before the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons came; land, labour and material resources were governed by some form of central control.

It is suggestive that, in the course of the formation of Stonehenge, communal burials were being replaced by individual burials. The ‘king of Stonehenge’ is just one example. In some graves the body of the chieftain is accompanied by weapons, and in others the corpse is surrounded by goods. These are the graves of leaders and high priests, often with their immediate families. England had become an aristocratic, rather than a tribal, society.

The contours of the Bronze Age, succeeding the Neolithic in the standard time-lines of prehistory, are still to be found everywhere. They have endured for almost 4,000 years, and can be seen in a certain light. In the hour before sunset, when the rays of the sun lie across the English fields, the old patterns of the earth rise up and the land seems to return to its origins. The banks and ditches of hundreds and hundreds of small rectangular fields can be discerned. The sweep and extent of these fields are truly extraordinary; they can only really be comprehended from the air and, seeing aerial photographs for the first time in 1929, the historian G. M. Trevelyan was moved to declare that ‘the discovery of these old Celtic fields, from under the palimpsest of later agricultural systems, is the most romantic thing that has come to stir our historical imaginations since the first Cretan finds’.

A lost world was revealed. The uplands and downlands of southern Britain were laid out in fields, with hedges and stone walls stretching for mile after mile; drove-ways and waterholes can be seen among these rectangular ditched fields. It is a feat of organization to rival that of the building of Stonehenge, and bears all the marks of powerful central planning. It seems likely that many thousands of square miles of land were laid out in one significant single act or set of acts, an example of land planning that has never since been rivalled in English history. In the process the English landscape was created.

This intensive cultivation is the best possible evidence for a steady rise in population. By 1900 BC there were as many as a million people, rising to more than 2 million by the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion in 55 BC. It was of course an agricultural society, with its own regional variations. More and more territory was brought into cultivation, and has continued as productive arable land ever since. The woodland was cleared. Grass for pasture was created. There were more sheep than there would be in the sixteenth century ad. There was little appetite, or perhaps leisure, for monumental construction; working the land had become a more important activity.

Settlements were to be found everywhere, most of them located away from the monumental sites. Single households, and small hamlets, abounded. Enclosures were surrounded by a fence or ditch. ‘Hut circles’ were in fact groups of round stone houses with beehive roofs where the perfume of burning peat mingled with the smells of the farmyard. If every settlement was a light, then the whole of England was now ablaze. The island people were settled on Dartmoor, in the Lake District and on the North York moors.

They buried their dead in family units, the bodies cremated and laid in decorated urns. So the cemeteries of the Late Bronze Age, from approximately 1300 BC, have become known as ‘urn fields’. Their discovery in the middle of the seventeenth century inspired the antiquary, Sir Thomas Browne, to compose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk. He was moved to declare that ‘what time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits.’ In this he has caught the remoteness of the long-dead, of whose rituals and customs we can have no conception.

Yet in certain respects they are not so distant as the philosopher implied. The men wore woollen cloaks, above a tunic known as a kirtle; the kirtle was still being worn in the sixteenth century. The women wore tunics and jackets, covered also by a woollen cloak. Shoes were made of skin, and men wore woollen caps. The women of more elevated status wore elaborate necklaces of jet, in the manner of Victorian ladies. One grave has yielded evidence of a woman who had a concealed ‘pad’ to bolster her hair. Men and women of the higher class sported ornaments of gold and bronze, as well as blue beads imported from Egypt. Amber jewellery was imported from the Baltic region, testifying to the range of international trade in Bronze Age England. Browne did not know that the people of this ancient period ate soups and stews as well as dressed meat; they consumed a kind of dried porridge made of wheat, barley and oats. Beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks were an integral part of the diet. Varieties of berry as well as hazelnut, herbs and seaweed, were eaten.

In his disquisition Browne went on to note that ‘the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity’. In the matter of their faith, at least, he has proved to be correct. The devotions of these people cannot be divined except in the broadest terms. The focus of ceremony and worship shifted from the sky to the earth; the steady exploitation of the land by Bronze Age farmers would have increased the significance of fertility rituals. There was in particular a pronounced attention to water and to watery places – springs, rivers, fens and marshes among them. The Thames, for example, became the home of Bronze Age weapons and other artefacts. In the Thames itself the offerings of weapons, bones and ornaments were kept separate and distinct; at Eton there are many skulls but no metal. Tools were left in dry, and weapons in wet, locations. An intricate taxonomy of worship cannot now be comprehended. Wooden platforms and causeways were built beside the river, part of the sacred space in which the priests of the people dwelled.

The significance of water is apparent throughout prehistory, with burial mounds and henge monuments sited by the rivers of England. For example, 368 Neolithic axes have been found in the Thames. It has been surmised that the deposition of Bronze Age work was part of a rite in propitiation of the dead and therefore a form of ancestor worship. If the dead were believed to cross between two worlds, they would have a particular affinity with the river; the river gains access to the underworld through a myriad passages, and springs ever fresh and renewed from its source. There is another, and perhaps more prosaic, explanation for the fervour elicited by water. There was literally water in the air. In the late Bronze Age the weather was growing cooler and wetter.

So we see the Bronze Age English in glimpses. A stirrup is found in a grave. Some seeds are deposited at the base of a bowl. The bones of a sheep are excavated from the refuse pit of a settlement. Weapons are uncovered everywhere – spearheads, socketed axes, rapiers and, at a slightly later date, swords. There is evidence of harnesses, and bronze fittings, for horses. And there were chariots. In Peterborough have been uncovered the traces of wheel ruts that would have supported a vehicle with a width of 3½ feet (1 metre).

From all these traces and tokens we can infer the presence of a warrior aristocracy, in a kingdom or group of sub-kingdoms that stretched from Dorset to Sussex. The culture of the middle and late Bronze Age is roughly contemporaneous with that of Troy, as depicted by Homer, and it had the same predilection for kings and warriors, feasting and ritual battle. It was a warrior society with small-scale sporadic fighting between elites, with gift exchanges between leaders, and tribute from the subject population in the form of food. That was one of the reasons why the land was so extensively farmed.

Defended settlements, and other enclosures containing buildings, were ubiquitous. These are the prototypes for the hill forts that are characteristic of southern England in the Iron Age. In Dorset, for example, a fence made out of great tree trunks – set in a trench some 10 feet (3 metres) deep – was built around an area of 11 acres (4.4 hectares).

Strong regional identities were already being formed, as well as regional divisions. The trading advantage of the Thames Valley region with its access to the European mainland, for example, helped to eclipse the agricultural wealth of Salisbury Plain. The north was engaged in stock-raising, while the south tended to concentrate upon cereal production. Trade encouraged interdependence.

Commerce of all kinds was increasing throughout this long epoch. Trade is the key to the growth of civilizations. Trade is the motor of wars. Trade fosters technologies. Trade creates towns and cities. Certain types of sword were manufactured in western France and found their way to England’s eastern counties. Highly embellished barbecue spits were fashioned in Spain and exported to England. Metal work from the ancient city of Mycenae, in Greece, has also been found. Gold ornaments were sent from Ireland. Linen and woollen fabrics were in turn exported to Europe, together with slaves and hunting dogs. Children worked in the tin mines of Cornwall, digging out the precious ore with bones and hammer-stones; the metal was then despatched to the coastal ports for shipment.

And of course when tin was added to molten copper, the metal from which this age is named was formed. Bronze implements changed everything, from the cutting down of forests to the building of houses. They made fighting more efficient. Bronze ornaments, bronze spears, bronze shields, bronze buckets, bronze chisels, bronze skewers and bronze knives were in abundant supply; the Bronze Age Englishman could shave himself with a bronze razor, using oil as the lubricant.

There is a theory that once a new process has been discovered and utilized, it appears in many other places simultaneously. Once something has been learned, it is conveyed across the whole human species. This is likely to explain the manufacture of bronze, since it could not have emerged from one source. Bronze of the same date has been found from Switzerland to Thailand. So people of approximately the same culture met on equal terms. We imagine visitors of high status sailing to England; there may have been embassies from Troy itself or from the court of the pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt.

The Bronze Age did not come to an end; the movement from bronze to iron reflects a change in technology leading to slow cultural change. The process took hundreds of years, during which period bronze and iron were simultaneously in use. Of course none of these ‘ages’ existed in the minds of those who experienced them. The Neolithic inhabitants of England lived in the same places as the Mesolithic people. Bronze Age fields and cemeteries are on the same sites as their Neolithic forebears; Bronze Age settlements were continuously in use through the Iron Age, and the people of the Iron Age consistently respected the burial mounds and boundary lines from the previous age of the human world. They honoured the structure of the landscape around them.

From the beginning of the Iron Age in approximately 700 BC, therefore, an advanced concept of territoriality governed relations between the land and the people. It had gathered strength over thousands of years. Leaders, and tribes, were firmly and specifically associated with certain regions. We see this in the laying out of boundaries and in the location of settlements. Yet through the Iron Age there was an intensification of this natural development. Engels once described iron as ‘the last and most important of all the raw materials that have played a revolutionary role in history’. New forms of alliance, and new networks of trade, were gradually established. Objects of ritual and ceremonial value were often made out of the new metal. The trade in iron contributed to the ultimate shape of England, where the various regions were becoming more intensely organized and controlled.

Hierarchy was marked out with chieftains and sub-chieftains, warriors and priests, farmers and craftsmen, workers and slaves. Slave irons have been found at a site near St Albans. A gang chain has been discovered on Anglesey. The funereal practices for the elite dead became more and more elaborate. In the burial places of the Iron Age chieftains the body was surrounded by molten silver, cloth of gold, ivory, suits of iron chain mail, precious cups and bowls. They predate the wealth of Sutton Hoo by a thousand years. Trampled earth was uncovered around the base of one mortuary chamber, suggesting dancing. The graves of women of high status contained many ornaments, including mirrors, brooches, bangles, beads, tweezers and bowls. In one burial a great bowl of bronze had been placed over the woman’s face.

Strong regional identities were in place. In the east undefended settlements, very much like villages, lay among open fields. In the southwest small communities lived in defended homesteads, together with unenclosed settlements sited at a distance; this has been interpreted as a division between tribal leaders and their subject people. In the north-east was found a pattern of defended homesteads, while in the northwest a tradition of roundhouses known as beehive huts existed. The culture of Salisbury Plain, sometimes known as ‘Wessex culture’, demanded a pattern of large territorial groupings based around hill forts. There are of course variations on all these themes, from the pit dwellings carved out of the chalk in Hampshire to the lake villages of Somerset where round huts were built upon floating islands of logs.

The hill forts themselves are evidence of a strongly ranked society. They seem to have originated in the neighbourhood of the Cotswolds and then spread over the whole of central southern England. They demonstrated the mastery of land and resources, and were therefore a symbol of proprietorship. Linear earthworks often mark out the boundaries of the territory controlled by each fort. They became more heavily defended over the period of the Iron Age and were sometimes occupied for hundreds of years. They resembled towns as much as forts, with clusters of buildings, streets, temples, storage facilities and ‘zones’ for separate industrial activities. The houses were circular, built of upright posts, woven together with wattle and sticks of hazel; they had doors and porches, facing east, and the roofs were generally thatched with reeds or straw. The thatch was held in place with a daub of dung, clay and straw; since soot from the peat fires was a valuable manure, it is likely to have been replaced each year. Archaeologists, reconstructing the interiors of these houses, have found small cupboards in which weapons were stored. Although their populations ranged only from 20 to 200 people, we may see in them the beginnings of urban life in England. The author believes that London was once just such a hill fort, but the evidence for it is now buried beneath the megalopolis it has become. All the evidence suggests, however, the existence of many small tribes living in a state of constant alert against rivals.

There were indeed cattle raids, conflicts between warriors and large-scale wars. Some hill forts were stormed and burned. Bodies have been found in the ramparts, their bones marked and hacked. We can expect a tradition of heroic songs and tales in which the exploits of an individual warrior or leader were celebrated. They are to be found in the early Irish epics, for example, which may incorporate stories and refrains from the prehistoric age of Irish tribes. An analogy with Homer’s Iliad can be made. Indeed it has been suggested that the epic poem in fact adverts to events in England, in myths and tales that were then carried by bards eastward to Anatolia.

Yet the various tribes or regional groupings did come together in a network of alliances and ties of kinship; how else could trade in commodities such as iron and salt flourish throughout the country? Many of these smaller clans were in time integrated and, perhaps in the face of threat, became large units of territory. These were the tribes of England whom the Romans confronted in their slow progress towards ascendancy. By the end of the Iron Age certain hill forts had become dominant and assumed the role of regional capitals. As the population steadily increased, so agriculture became ever more intensive. The clearance of woodland and forest continued without a break. The farmers began to work the thick clay soils in earnest, with the help of the heavy wheeled plough. This was the solid basis for the agricultural economy of England over the next 2,500 years. Wheat was grown in Somerset, and barley in Wiltshire; that broad pattern is still the same.

A visitor sailed to England’s shores. The Greek merchant and explorer Pytheas made landfall in 325 BC. He named the island as Prettanike or Brettaniai. This is the origin of the name of Britain. The land of the Picts was known by the diminutive of Prydyn. Pytheas visited Cornwall, and watched the inhabitants work the ore and purify the metal. On another stage of his journey he was told by the natives that the mother of Apollo, Leto, was born on this island ‘and for this reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo’.

He also reports that he had seen ‘a wonderful sacred precinct of Apollo and a celebrated temple festooned with many offerings’; it was ‘spherical in shape’ and close by there was a city ‘sacred to this god’ whose kings are called ‘Boreades’ after the god of the cold north wind. The identity of this precinct, temple and city have long been a matter of debate. Some argue that Pytheas was describing the sacred landscape of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill; others believe that it refers to a temple of Apollo where Westminster Abbey now stands, and the adjacent ‘city’ of London.

It is clear, however, that Pytheas was reporting the claims of a people deeply imbued in ritual worship, with the names of Apollo and Boreas simply being used by him as tokens of holiness. The Parthenon had already been built in Athens, and all foreign gods were seen by the Greeks in classical terms. The religion of the Iron Age in England, however, has always been associated with the cult of Druidism.

It may also be glimpsed within the sacred geometries of Iron Age art (still known inaccurately as Celtic art). It was an art of vision, penetrating beyond the appearances of things. It traced living lines of energy and purpose with spirals and swastikas, curves and circles, whirling together in an intricate network of shapes and patterns. It is in no sense primitive or barbaric; on the contrary it is ingenious and complex, showing a mastery of artificial form and linearity. These intricate patterns are clearly related to the whorls, spirals and concentric circles carved upon Mesolithic passage graves several thousand years earlier; they suggest a broad continuity of belief and worship throughout the prehistoric age.

At the core of Iron Age religion were the persistent and continuing native beliefs of England, enshrined in certain sacred places. Caves were often holy. The Druids themselves are known to have congregated in sacred groves, where ancient trees provided the setting for ritual practice. Powerful gods had to be propitiated. An early Bronze Age barrow in Yorkshire yielded up certain drum-shaped idols carved out of chalk, with what seem to be human eyebrows and noses. 2,000 years after these images were carved a British writer, Gildas, was still moved to condemn the ‘diabolical idols … of which we still see some mouldering away within or without the deserted temples, with the customary stiff and deformed features’. So there was a long tradition of worship that may have had its earliest origins in the Neolithic period. The image of the horned god Cernunnos has been found at Cirencester. The horse goddess Epona has been discovered in Wiltshire and in Essex. A carving of the hammer god Sucellus has been unearthed in East Stoke, Nottinghamshire. The mysterious god, Lud or Nud, is still commemorated by Ludgate Hill and Ludgate Circus in London.

Religious sanctuaries were established all over the land, and it is safe to assume that even the smallest settlement had its own central shrine. They have been discovered in hill forts, within ditched enclosures, along boundaries, and above barrow graves; they are often marked by the subsequent presence of Roman temples or early Christian churches. Certain places were deemed to be blessed. Many English churches will be lying upon prehistoric originals. In Iron Age England, it was believed that the cock served as a defence against thunderstorms; that is why cocks are still to be found on church steeples. They became known as weathercocks.

Human sacrifice helped to sanctify the land. A male body was found in a bog in Cheshire; he had been bludgeoned in the head, and his throat cut before being deposited in the marsh. Many skeletons have been found at the bottom of pits in southern England, their bodies flexed in an unnatural posture. There is also the known prehistoric affinity for severed heads, believed to be the site of the soul or spirit. Skulls have been found lined up in a row. The bodies of defeated enemies were often beheaded, and their heads buried or placed in running water. Three hundred skulls, dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, have been found in the Thames. The river was once an English Golgotha, the place of skulls.

Caesar’s account of the high priests of England, the Druids, adverts to the practice of human sacrifice. They created images of wicker-work which ‘they fill with living men and, setting them on fire, the men are destroyed by the flames’. In his account the Druid priests are the lawmakers of the land who determine rewards and punishments. They settle disputes over boundaries and over property.

The Roman writer Pliny records that they ‘esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe’; the high priests ‘select groves of oak, and use the leaves of the mistletoe in all sacred rites’. The sacrificial victim was tied to the trunk of the oak tree, and his priestly killers wore chaplets of oak leaves. They practised divination, magic and astrology; they believed in the immortality of the soul that passes through various incarnations. This doctrine of immortality was considered by the Roman writers to make clear the contempt for death revealed by the native English; the English were noted for this quality of indifference in subsequent centuries.

The Druids worshipped the sun and moon also, but their solar belief persisted long after the passing of the priestly caste. A butcher from Standon in Hertfordshire was accused, in 1452, of proclaiming that there was no god except the sun and the moon. In the second chapter of Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy remarks that ‘old customs’ last longer on clay soils. The power of the Druids was retained by the bishops of the Anglo-Saxon church, just as the tonsure of early Christian monks may reflect Druidical practice.

By 100 BC, at the very latest, the eyes of Rome were turned towards England as a source of wealth and of trade. What did they see? They saw a land made up of tribal kingdoms, large and small, that had kept to the old tribal boundaries. The Dumnonii inhabited the southwest peninsula, while the Durotriges were the people of Dorset; the Cantii of Kent comprised four separate kingdoms; the Iceni were of Norfolk. The Brigantes controlled the smaller tribes of the entire northern area from the Irish Sea to the North Sea; they occupied the Pennines and their tribal name means ‘the high ones’.

There were altogether fifteen large tribes in England, now coming under the control of leaders who were being described as kings. Suetonius named Cunobelinus, the leader of the Catuvellauni in the years preceding the main Roman invasion of Claudius, as ‘rex Britannorum’. From his capital at St Albans he controlled a great area north of the Thames – including Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire – and has since entered English mythology as the Cymbeline of Shakespeare’s play. His was a fully formed elite culture of warriors and priests, with its traditions going back to the early Bronze Age. One or two more recent tribal migrations have been identified. Members of a tribe from North Gaul, the Parisii, had settled in Yorkshire at some time in the fifth century BC and created an archaeologically distinctive community. More recent visitors arrived in Kent; a tribe known as the Belgae launched a small invasion in the first century BC and eventually settled in Hampshire, Essex and Kent. The Roman name for Winchester is Venta Belgarum, or the market of the Belgae.

The population of England in the late Iron Age has been estimated at approximately 2 million, rising to 3 million by the end of the Roman dominion. It was in every respect a wealthy and flourishing country. That is why the Romans chose to invade it. They wished to exploit the surplus of corn. There was in particular a spread of settlements in the southeast and central southern regions with extensive fields, shrines, cemeteries, industries, markets, towns and villages. In his Commentarii de Bello Gallico Julius Caesar remarked that ‘the population is very large, their homesteads thick on the ground and very much like those in Gaul, and the cattle numerous. As money they use either bronze or gold coins or iron bars with a fixed standard of weight.’ Coins, in particular, facilitated trade between tribes and bore the stamp of a powerful leader. The further north a traveller progressed, however, the fainter was the evidence for these material benefits.

That is because the southern tribes were engaged in extensive trade with Rome and Romanized Gaul long before Caesar’s invasion. They had, in a sense, already become Romanized with their predilection for certain foods and luxury goods. Yet, if you look beneath the surface, you find ancient tribal ways. There seems to have been consistent inter-tribal warfare, for example, with various leaders appealing to Rome for assistance. Large earthworks were created as boundaries. The warriors came to battle in chariots, their naked bodies covered with blue woad and pierced with tattoos. ‘They wear their hair long’, Caesar wrote, ‘and shave all their bodies with the exception of their heads and their upper lips.’ They had not quite left the domain of prehistory.

Nor have we yet. The legacy of prehistory is all around us. The clearances of prehistoric farmers helped to create the English landscape, and there are still places where the division of the land follows its prehistoric boundaries. In southern England the field systems of the Bronze Age and Iron Age inform and maintain the layout of modern farming. Modern roads follow the line of ancient paths and trackways. The boundaries of many parishes follow ancient patterns of settlement, and their irregular outlines enclose land sufficient to maintain a small farming community; ancient burials are often to be found on the boundaries of such a parish, and even the orientation of the church may obey old laws. Churches and monastic communities were placed close beside the sites of megalithic monuments, as well as sacred springs and early Bronze Age ritual spaces. The churchyard of the parish church of Rudston, in East Yorkshire, harbours the tallest Neolithic standing stone in England. The pilgrim routes of medieval Kent trace the same pattern as the prehistoric tracks to holy wells and shrines. We still live deep in the past.

Many villages, and towns, are built upon the sites of prehistoric originals. Leicester and Lincoln, Cambridge and Colchester, Rochester and Canterbury – to name only a few examples – were settled in the Iron Age or earlier. Village communities endure through recorded and unrecorded history. They may begin as simple family units, surrounded by ancestral spirits, before the natural process of extension. But we cannot dig down to the prehistoric origins of most English villages precisely because they are still in thriving occupation. Many Iron Age settlements became the market towns of the twenty-first century, where surplus produce has always been traded.

Certain customs, and festivals, belong to the prehistoric past. The celebrations of the Iron Age were incorporated into the Christian calendar, with the festival of the dead or ‘Samain’ becoming All Souls’ Day, and the midwinter solstice commemorated as Christmas. The Bronze Age practice of scattering white quartz stones upon freshly dug graves was still being observed in early twentiethcentury Wales. In nineteenth-century Scotland many inhabitants still lived in stone ‘beehive’ houses from the Neolithic period. The famous public house beside Hampstead Heath, Jack Straw’s Castle, stands on the site of an ancient earthwork. The historic and the prehistoric exist simultaneously. Catterick in North Yorkshire remains a military base, just as it was when the mead-drunk warriors of the Gododdin assailed it at the end of the sixth century AD. There is scarcely one spot in England that does not contain memorials of an ancient past.

2

The Roman way

Julius Caesar’s ‘invasion’ of 55 BC was more in the nature of a preliminary patrol; he said that he wanted to acquaint himself with ‘the lie of the land’. The Romans did not like the sea, but the pull of the island was irresistible. Britain was already a trading partner, and was rumoured to be rich in metal and wealthy with wheat. Some of its tribes had allied themselves with the northern Gauls whom Caesar was fighting. So there was every reason for a visit.

Several of the tribal leaders, informed in advance of his preparations, sent emissaries to treat with him; he in turn despatched an envoy who urged them to collaborate with their putative conqueror. Then Caesar set sail with two legions, each of approximately five thousand men, transported in eighty ships; when they eventually landed near Deal, the English were watching them. A skirmish took place on the beach, in which the Romans were victorious, and once more the tribal leaders sued for peace. Yet it was of short duration. A storm blew up, compounded by the force of a high tide at a time of full moon. The Romans were not aware of the phenomenon. All the ships were damaged.

The English tribes now broke the vow of peace, and a number of skirmishes took place in the immediate vicinity of Deal where Caesar was hard-pressed. His one thought now was of retreat across the water. He managed to repair the ships, and sought material aid from Gaul. Then, taking many hostages from the English, he sailed back vowing to return.

In the following year he kept his promise. On this occasion he was more determined and more resourceful. He brought with him 800 ships, 25,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. It was a true invasion. In the face of this threat the warring tribes of the region were animated by a single purpose and chose Cassivellaunus, king of territory north of the Thames, as their war leader. The English fought the Romans just as they fought each other – warriors on foot, warriors on horseback and warriors in chariots, each attacking and withdrawing at opportune moments. Cassivellaunus had an army of 4,000 chariots; the charioteer would drive to the front line, and the warrior would jump out while the driver retired and waited for his return. Caesar reported that, by steady practice, ‘they attain such proficiency that even on a steep incline they are able to control the horses at full gallop, and to check and turn them in a moment’. They were a difficult and formidable force, motivated by sheer courage and ingenuity.

Yet the steady and disciplined army of the Romans withstood them. After a number of battles, the English retreated into the woods. Caesar followed them, and laid waste to Cassivellaunus’ stronghold. The chieftains of the various tribes sought peace, and in the end Cassivellaunus himself capitulated. Taking hostages and exacting tribute, Caesar returned to Rome.

There was to be no subsequent invasion for ninety years, but the advent and victory of the Roman forces had left their mark. Their success, ironically, can be seen in the gradual Romanization of southern Britain where tribal leaders began to import wine and luxury goods from the Roman Empire. When old ways of life have been defeated, they begin to lose their potency. The dwellings of the elite were beginning to change their shape, from round to rectilinear; this is profound evidence of cultural transition. The tribal leaders of the south, at least, wished to imitate the victors.

Some of them changed their allegiance altogether, and became the client kings of Rome. According to one Greek historian, Strabo, they procured the friendship of the first master of the Roman Empire, Augustus, ‘by sending embassies and paying court to him’. They exported grain and iron and slaves, while in return obtaining glass vessels, amber ware and other goods on which they were obliged to pay duty to the Roman state. No better way could be found of binding them to mainland European culture.

The Romans had become well aware of the material benefits to be found on the island. They simply needed the right moment to strike. This was given to them when the leaders of the tribe or kingdom of the Atrebates appealed to Rome for assistance against one of their hostile neighbours. It is clear that certain tribes welcomed the intervention of Rome. The new emperor, Claudius, needed an opportunity to prove himself in the field. He had small military reputation and, in the words of Cicero, ‘glory in war exceeds all other forms of success’. Glory was also to be found on English soil.

In AD 43, under the leadership of Aulus Plautius, four legions comprising some 20,000 men landed in two separate locations, thus confusing any English counter-attack. The tribes dispersed in front of them, but rallied for a major battle by the Medway; the fighting lasted for two days but the native forces under the leadership of Caratacus were eventually defeated. It was one of the most significant battles in English history, but its precise site is not known. Plautius now sent for Claudius to deliver the final and triumphant coup de grâce. Two months later the emperor arrived, together with twenty-eight elephants; he stormed the native capital of Camulodunum, and Caratacus fled westward. When Claudius returned to Rome, he was celebrated for having received the surrender of eleven kings. The conquest of the country had begun. It would take almost forty years before it was complete.

Camulodunum, or Colchester, became the first Roman capital; a great fort was built on the site of the native earthworks as a token of dominion. From here the Roman army spread outwards; they advanced in three directions, north and west and northwest. The leader of the western army, Vespasian, fought thirty-three battles in his drive towards Wales and the southwest peninsula. On the banks of a hill fort in Dorset, Maiden Castle, has been found the body of a man with a Roman bolt from a crossbow in his spine. By AD 49 Roman soldiers were supervising mining operations in Somerset.

The armies to the north and northwest proceeded slowly along existing roads, such as Ermine Street, attempting to pacify or subdue the various tribes in their path. They built forts in the conquered areas, so that each tribal zone was dominated by at least one military settlement. By AD 51 the queen of the great northern tribe of the Brigantes, Cartimandua, was receiving Roman wine in Roman vessels as well as building tiles. She had become a client queen. The historians of Rome describe a smooth progress of colonization, but the natives are unlikely to have surrendered without a fight; the process was one of steady advance beset by tribal rebellions and occasional army mutinies. Ambushes, raids and battles were commonplace. All the land south of the Fosse Way, running from Exeter to Lincoln, was under Roman control; the land north of it was more treacherous. Some tribes had divided allegiances; other tribes fought one against another.

A revolt in AD 47 by members of the tribe of Iceni, living deep within the pacified zone of East Anglia, was an indication of continuing uncertainty. The uprising, over the right to bear arms, was put down easily enough; but it was a harbinger for a much more serious rebellion that occurred thirteen years later. The name of Boudicca, or Boadicea, has now become part of English folklore. She was the wife of the king of the Iceni, Prasutagus, whose death prompted the agents of the Roman provincial government to attempt a wholesale appropriation of Iceni wealth. Boudicca was flogged, and her two daughters were raped. It was a signal instance of imperialist brutality.

So Boudicca rose and fought. She gathered into her confederacy other English tribes and launched an attack upon the Roman capital of Colchester. It was a particular object of offence because it harboured hundreds of military veterans who had taken control of adjacent land. The tribal army went southward, burning and pillaging any evidence of incipient Romanization. Villas were destroyed, their inhabitants put to the sword. When the warriors descended upon Colchester itself, they were ferocious. The city was destroyed by fire, the shops looted. The veterans took shelter in the central temple but after two days they were overwhelmed and hacked to pieces. A great statue of Claudius was beheaded and thrown into the river. The temple itself was destroyed. Boudicca then proceeded to move further south in the direction of London; Chelmsford and St Albans were sacked, and an entire legion massacred.

The Roman military governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was aware of the gravity of the threat posed to his regime. He had marched quickly back from Wales, where he had been campaigning, but his arrival in London did not save the city. He could not yield to the demands and supplications of the citizens; it was his duty to save the whole imperial province by a battle at a place and time of his own choosing. Many Londoners left the city in haste, going further south to find haven with pro-Roman tribes; those who remained were destroyed. Tacitus reports that 70,000 people were killed in the attack. The city itself was razed by fire, and there still exists beneath the City of London’s streets a red level of oxidized iron. Towards the end of the twentieth century forty-eight human skulls were found embedded in the track of the river Walbrook.

Boudicca now went after Suetonius Paulinus, on the evident assumption that the time was right for a final blow against the Roman occupation. The site of the ensuing battle is not certainly known; it may have been near the village of Mancetter in Warwickshire, or at Messing in Essex. Whatever the location, it was drenched in blood. Suetonius Paulinus had 10,000 troops, but they were ranged against a force of 100,000. The legionaries had a forest behind them, a plain before them; the native warriors ran against them, across the plain, but many of them were struck down by a hailstorm of javelins. The Romans then began to move forward with their shields and short swords. Their discipline held them steady, and slowly Boudicca’s men were turned. General carnage ensued, with 80,000 of her forces dead by the end of the battle. Some 400 Romans were killed. It was one of the most bloody massacres on English soil. Some say that Boudicca then took poison, so that she would avoid capture by the enemy; other sources report that she fell ill and died. Her monument now stands on Westminster Bridge as a token of the fight for native independence.

The Romans wished to extirpate another particular enemy. The Druids, the guardians of the old faith, had to be silenced before the full work of pacification could be completed. They had been harried and pursued as they had retreated steadily westward; their last stand took place on the island of Anglesey in AD 61. The Roman historian Tacitus reports that the troops, crossing from the mainland, were confronted by a ‘dense line of armed warriors along the foreshore, while women were rushing about between the ranks garbed in black like the Furies, holding up lighted torches’. Close to them stood the Druids, offering sacrifices, holding their arms in the air and screeching terrible curses. Yet their gods did not come to their rescue; they were all cut down and their sanctuaries put to the flame.

After the east and south had been pacified the next Roman governor of the province, Julius Agricola, turned his attention to the western and northern regions. In AD 78 he conquered Wales. In the following year he sent his legions to the north-east, through Corbridge, and to the northwest, through Carlisle. He divided the enemy, and built up a network of forts to supervise those tribes that had surrendered to him. These tribes were more hostile and aggressive than those of the south, and there were according to Tacitus ‘many battles, some not unbloody’. The ultimate aim was to create and control a northern frontier, and as a result troops were sent in to subjugate what is now southern Scotland.

The general shape of militarized England was also now created; permanent fortresses, each harbouring a legion, were built at York and Chester. Manchester and Newcastle were also built around the site of Roman forts. The original name for Manchester was Mamucio, after the Latin word for a hill shaped like a breast; this was then misread as Mancunio, giving its name to the modern inhabitants of the city. A series of virtually straight roads were constructed, linking fort to fort. Garrison towns, inhabited by retired legionaries, were created at Lincoln and at Gloucester. The imposing colonial presence was emphasized by a network of encampments, forts, watchtowers and defensive walls. Posting stations were set up on the principal roads, and these staging posts eventually became villages. So the country was organized by military power into a landscape of farmsteads and villas, fields and settlements, drove-ways and enclosures. It was not unlike the vista of the Iron Age; yet it was more coherent.

This was not necessarily a benign process. One tribal chief is reported by Tacitus to have complained that ‘our goodsand money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors’. The military zone, including Wales and the north of England, required a standing force of 125,000 men. It would be wrong to think of the legionnaires as Romans; in the first century of occupation 40,000 soldiers were recruited from Gaul, Spain and Germany. The English also joined the army of occupation. The troops mixed and mingled with the indigenous population so that, within two or three generations, it had indeed become a native army.

One other pertinent development took place. A great wall, dividing Romanized England from the tribes of Scotland, was built on the orders of the emperor Hadrian. Twenty years later another wall was constructed, effectively separating south from north Scotland. The Romans had no intention of venturing into the Highlands, just as they dropped any plans for the invasion of Ireland. The Roman Empire had ceased to expand, and it became necessary to protect its borders so that it might enjoy the pleasures of peace. The territory just south of the wall was intensively cultivated. A great agricultural regime was established on the Cumbrian Plain. England was no longer a province easily shaken by tribal rebellion. It became prosperous once again, as rich and as productive as it had been during the Iron Age.

The process of Romanization was gradual and local. The conditions of the Iron Age still prevailed in the countryside, where the people largely remained faithful to old customs and habitual practice. The evidence of change comes from the towns, and from the administrative elite of English leaders who worked in them. These were the men who had welcomed, or at least exploited, the ascendancy of the Roman officials in their country. With the advice of these officials they began to erect temples, public squares and public buildings; they learned the Latin language, and took to wearing togas as an indication of their new identities. They put down their weapons and attended more to the abacus. The children of the leading English families were educated in the ‘civilized arts’ and some were sent to Rome. Bathing establishments and assembly rooms were built and, according to Tacitus, the natives began to attend ‘smart dinner parties’. There were many more plates, dishes, drinking vessels and bowls than in the Iron Age. Amphorae or storage vessels were imported; they contained wine and olive oil, olives and fish sauce. Tacitus went on to write, cuttingly enough, that ‘they called it civilization when in fact it was part of their servitude’.

The old hierarchies were still in existence, but now they were wearing Roman brooches and rings. The landowner had tenants, known as coloni, who were tied to the land. At the top of the scale were the tribal leaders who owned extensive territory and property; at the bottom was the large community of slaves. The word for slave, servus, eventually became serf. So the old bonds were perpetuated through the centuries. The social patterns of the Bronze Age and Iron Age were strengthened and deepened by the rule of a strong central power.

As part of the organization of the country, the Romans converted the old tribal regions into government districts or civitates. Each district had its own central town which, in many cases, was the old tribal capital or oppidum redressed in stone rather than in wood. A forum ‘complex’ of civic buildings represented the centre where all the affairs of the town were administered. The colonial power imposed its own forms of architecture, with monumental arches, sculptures, altars and bathhouses bringing order to what were once irregular settlements. Many of these public buildings were part of a state initiative that continued well into the second century AD. The forum and the basilica, the temple and the amphitheatre, rose above closely packed shops, houses and workshops still generally built out of timber and clay and with floors of earth. Many of the houses were in fact single-room lodgings; other buildings consisted of a shop at the front, a workshop behind it, and a room for accommodation at the back. The area of settlement was pitted with wells and hearths. Beyond the streets lay the cemeteries, the kilns, the quarries and the enclosures for livestock.

The government of the towns was controlled by a council or curia of the larger landowners, with a complement of clerks and other officials. All the elements of social differentiation, and specialization, are to be found here as kinship and tribal ties slowly gave way to group relations on an economic basis. The larger towns were independent and self-governing, with the magistrates and councillors taking care of such matters as drainage, sanitation and the repaving of roads. The most common ‘find’ for archaeologists of Roman England is the writing tablet.

Villas in the Roman style were soon rising in the countryside. The earliest of them, such as that discovered at Fishbourne in Sussex, were of very high status and were presumably designed for the convenience of Romanized tribal leaders or great officials of the empire. The fashion for luxury spread to the other leaders of the indigenous population, and more modest villas were built in the southeast; these would have been appropriate for a prosperous landowner or the chief family of an agricultural community. Villas were essentially farming establishments that enjoyed surplus wealth to be lavished upon display and decoration; they copied the Roman style, with walls of stone and costly mosaics. They might have had roofs of ceramic tiles, quite different from the thatch and wattle of the English roundhouse. Mosaics, underfloor heating and window glass, all carried the stamp of imperial civilization. Even the smaller houses might be plastered and decorated with wall-paintings; plain or painted plaster was also used as external protection from the elements. But it would be unwise to overestimate their presence in the English landscape. Hill forts were also to be found, for example, especially for the leading families of England who had remained in closer contact with their social and cultural traditions.

An Iron Age farm was still in use at the beginning of the second century AD at Keston in Kent. By the middle of that century a new wooden farmhouse had been erected, decorated with painted walls. At the beginning of the third century a house of stone rose upon the site, complete with a bathhouse in the Roman style. Wooden barns occupied part of the farmyard, and one of them was later rebuilt in stone. Ovens were in use for malting or corn-drying, and it is likely that the owner or owners of the villa also employed potters, blacksmiths and workers in bronze. An early Roman cremation cemetery has also been uncovered. A circular mausoleum was created at a later date. So by degrees a small Romanized community was created.

In the farming of the soil itself, the practices of the Bronze and Iron Ages were still maintained. In certain regions, such as the southwest, native habits persisted without change of any kind. Only in the southeast is there evidence of altering taste, albeit confined to the leaders of society. The Romans brought in cherries, mulberries and figs, previously unknown. Turnips, cabbages and peas first appeared under the aegis of Roman rule. One sticking point remained; the natives even of the Romanized areas still preferred beef to pork.

It can be said with some certainty that the majority of the people were still living in the Iron Age, and would continue to do so for several hundreds of years. One agricultural innovation, however, occurred as a direct result of imperial decree. The fenlands of East Anglia were drained, and the reclaimed soil made productive with hundreds of villages and farms planted in a pre-ordained manner. The whole area became an imperial estate, taxed for the benefit of the central government. The prosperous Salisbury Plain became another imperial estate.

Taxation, including a land tax and a poll tax, was the key of Roman exploitation. As the costs of maintaining the army, in the face of northern invaders, became ever higher so the burden of taxation increased. The Roman occupation hastened the process by which a tribal economy gave way to a monetary economy. The tribal coinage, more significantly, was replaced by imperial coinage. The Romans of course also levied taxes on the fruits of trade. Industrial centres, such as the potteries at the village of Castor in Cambridgeshire, altered parts of the landscape. Ironworks were established in all areas of the country from the coast of Kent to the banks of the Wye. Lead mines were in continuous use throughout the Roman period. Under the twin stimuli of demand and innovation, English production was never more buoyant. Coal was used for working iron and heating the bathhouses; it was also the fuel for the sacred fire at Minerva’s temple in Bath.

Two native woollen products were in demand by the subjects of the empire; one was known as the birrus Britannicus, a type of waterproof cloak and hood. The other, the tapete Britannicum, was a woollen rug. Other forms of merchandise included bears and bulldogs for the Roman arena. The men wore jackets of cattle hide and leather breeches. It was said that Caesar had invaded England so that he could get his hands on some excellent oysters.

In the early third century the country was divided into two provinces, Britannia Superior with London as its capital and Britannia Inferior with York as its centre. ‘Superior’ and ‘Inferior’ were geographical, not qualitative, terms. The two areas were later subdivided into four and then five provinces, emphasizing the fact that the country was being closely administered and exploited.

As the country became a settled part of the empire, its role changed. The armies of occupation became armies of defence; they became naturalized, with a selfconscious local or regional identity. Over one-tenth of the entire imperial army was stationed in the colony, which meant that its forces had extraordinary power over events in distant Rome. Mutinies, and uprisings, were not uncommon. In AD 268, one governor of England, Carausius, proclaimed himself emperor. He took his forces to the continent and, in his absence, the various towns and cities of the country took measures to defend themselves against possible reprisals from Rome. One hundred years later another Roman commander seized the province and declared it to be independent. He was disabused of this notion in a battle somewhere in central England, but it is a measure of the significance of the country in imperial calculations.

England was worth a fight. Its ports, its metals, its taxes, helped to sustain the vast engine of Roman commerce. Yet it remained wealthy and productive largely because of its agriculture. In AD 359 the emperor, Julian, organized a fleet of 600 ships to transport corn from England to the war zones of the Rhine. The country had become one of the bread baskets of Europe, and by the fourth century it had never been more prosperous. The villas of the grandees became larger and more luxurious, and there can be no doubt that the social stratification of the country grew ever more pronounced under the auspices of imperial rule. The Roman English controlled the Iron Age English.

The northern borders were always a source of conflict, with the weight of the Scots and the Picts pressing against them, but the general frontiers of the province soon came into jeopardy. There is a curious alignment of forts in southern England known generally as the ‘Saxon Shore’, but their purpose is not altogether clear. Were they a means of defending the coast against Saxon invaders from the northwest of Europe, or were they perhaps designed to harbour Saxon fighters and traders? They may thus have been designed to protect the seaways between England and Europe from pirates and other marauders.

Yet, as with so many aspects of England under imperial control, the evidence is fragmentary and inconclusive; we rely on chance inscriptions, the indications of archaeology and the occasional commentaries of Roman historians. The Roman governance of England lasted for 350 years – the same span of time that separates the contemporary reader from the Great Fire of London – and yet it is the least-known phase in the country’s history.

In particular we cannot see the people – the Romanized leaders in their fashionable and luxurious villas, the smaller landowners in farmsteads built of stone or timber, the townsmen inhabiting one-or two-room houses along narrow and squalid lanes, the civil servants working in offices while wearing their official togas and military belts, the landless labourers living in dormitories set well away from the villas, the whole general tide and swell of population unmoved by purges and coups and counter-purges that are evident in the pages of Roman histories.

There is much unknown, also, about the advance of Christianity. England had been introduced to that faith in the second century, but it was perforce a minority religion. The Roman English had been reconciled to the Roman gods, while the Iron Age English no doubt still venerated the ancient deities of hill and forest. Christianity was not an indigenous faith. Nevertheless, Christian vessels and plaques from the third century have been found in Huntingdonshire, close to the river Nene, and are clear evidence of a local shrine; they are in fact the earliest examples of such vessels from the whole of the empire. A Christian cemetery, of approximately the same date, has been uncovered at Poundbury in Dorset. Christianity had penetrated as far north as Carlisle by the fourth century.

Christianity only became the sacerdotal face of the empire after Constantine the Great’s conversion in AD 312; Constantine had in fact been acclaimed and appointed emperor at York in AD 306 and in subsequent years seems to have considered England to be one of the spiritual centres of his rule. York itself was refashioned in honour of his elevation, and he made three further visits to the province. He styled himself on Britannicus Maximus, and it seems likely that London itself was for a while renamed Augusta in his honour. So the Christianity of England was an important element of its later development.

It was a monotheistic faith in a period when the emperor himself aspired to single rule, and it assumed a uniform set of values and beliefs that could be transmitted across the empire. It helped to support the legislative and bureaucratic forces of the centre. Its adherents were, unsurprisingly, drawn from the governing class. There can be no doubt that in England, for example, the Romanized population were quick to embrace the delights of an institutionalized faith. That is why Christianity became associated with the culture of the villas. It was also a religion of the administrative elite in the towns and cities, where a bishop was charged with the care of his urban flock.

In AD 314 three English bishops, together with a priest and a deacon, were attending an ecclesiastical council at Arles in southern France. The bishops came from York, London and Lincoln; the deacon and priest arrived from Cirencester. Evidence for what may be a Christian cathedral, complete with marble and painted walls, has been found at excavations near Tower Hill. A holy well was located in the centre of the nave. This may have been the diocesan centre for Bishop Restitutus of London. There is precious little evidence for other churches of the third and fourth centuries (although one has been found at Silchester), but there is good reason for this. The earliest churches lie concealed beneath more recent ones in the long history of sacred spaces. We would find the churches of early English Christianity only if we could uproot the cathedrals and churches of the modern world.

No empire can last forever; no state can remain steady and unscathed. The frontiers of the Roman polity were steadily being threatened and, in many places, overwhelmed. The pressure of the northern tribes grew ever more insidious. The Franks had entered northern Gaul. The Visigoths were to settle in Aquitania. The threat to England was posed by the Picts and the Scots in the north, together with their tribal allies among the Franks and the Saxons. In AD 367 a force overcame Hadrian’s Wall, and then in dispersed bands moved southward to ravage the country; the commander of the forts of the Saxon Shore was murdered and the provincial leader known as Dux Britanniarum was captured. It was a notable defeat for the English. Roman intervention and rebuilding, including the refortification of key posts, helped to maintain prosperity and peace for forty years; but then the northern tribes came back.

A series of bids for imperial power by various pretenders meant that, at the beginning of the fifth century, England was effectively stripped of its military forces. They had gone off in search of glory. Civil war between the various pretenders to the imperial throne weakened the self-discipline and orderliness that had always been the sign of Roman rule. The administrative machinery was beginning to break apart. In 408 the northern tribes were emboldened once more to attack, and the Roman English had no choice but to defend themselves. A contemporary historian, Zosimus, records that they ‘took up arms and, braving danger for their own independence, freed the cities from the barbarians threatening them’. He also reports that they then expelled their Roman governors and established their own administrations.

Various levels of intrigue are embedded in this simple narrative. There would have been some Roman English who wished to retain the Roman administration from which they derived great benefits; there would have been others who wished to be rid of the burden of taxation and coercion associated with the central government. Two years later, in 410, one section of the English appealed to the emperor for arms and men; it is not clear whether they were needed against an external army of Saxons, or against an internal English enemy. In any case the emperor, Honorius, replied that the English must now fend for themselves. This was effectively the end of Roman England.

Another historian, Procopius of Caesarea, further reveals that after the disappearance of the Roman officials the various cities and regions were taken over by ‘tyrants’ or ‘usurpers’. They may have seemed like usurpers from Rome, but in actual fact they are likely to be the familiar English leaders descended from tribal chiefs or large landowning families. As the hand of Rome was lifted the English tribes and polities reacted in several significant ways. The Romanized English in the towns and cities, with the dependent estates all around them, are likely to have formed themselves into self-governing administrative units; the leaders of these small states were still known as ‘magistrates’. In the civil zone of the country – in the east and southeast – there rose small kingdoms that were defended by mercenaries. The kingdoms of eastern England, for example, were obliged to use Germanic soldiers; these troops would pose problems in subsequent years. The tribes in the more distant regions of the country, never properly Romanized, reverted to pre-Roman forms of social organization. The remaining detachments of the armies of the north were grouped under a commander who became their chieftain. One of the first Roman leaders of the north, Coelius or Coel Hen, became in English folk rhyme ‘Old King Cole’.

So the pattern of English life is localized and various in this period after the withdrawal of the Roman imperium. Signs of a more general change, however, can be found. The taxation system of Rome was dismantled, and the countryside was now controlled by an aristocracy of landowners. With the abandonment of taxation, the circulation of coinage diminished rapidly. By 410 the large centres of pottery manufacture had gone out of business; the demand no longer existed. Brick-making did not return to England until the fifteenth century. Villas were neglected or abandoned, becoming unused sites for later settlers.

The days of public and monumental display in the cities had gone. But this does not necessarily mean that the cities decayed or were in decline; they had simply changed their function. They remained centres of administration for the immediate area, and housed the local bishop and the local leader, but they no longer wanted or needed the imperial facades of the third century. The basilica at Silchester, for example, was converted into a centre for metalworking. The urban population remained, and there is evidence of rebuilding at York and Gloucester in the fifth century. A new water supply, with timber pipes, was introduced to Verulamium in the latter half of that century. So a civic organization was still in operation. The Roman city of Wroxeter has been unearthed from the fields of Shropshire. It did not disappear after the Romans had left. The basilica was razed, and in its place a large wooden hall was erected; this hall became the centre for a complex of timber buildings based on Roman models. A prosperous and busy life continued well into the medieval period.

Archaeologists have discovered, from the strata of the fifth century, a deposit spread over many towns and cities; they have named it ‘dark earth’. This was once thought to be evidence of abandonment and desolation. Now it is more correctly interpreted as the residue of wattle-and-daub dwellings. The towns and cities of the fifth century may have been heavily populated, maintaining a commercial life that never left them.

Self-sufficiency was established upon barter and local trading. There is evidence of hand-made pottery, and quantities of raw clay that might have been used for the building of walls. The lives of the farmers and labourers of the country were changed not at all by the dislocation of leaders.

The Confession of St Patrick, who was taken by Saxon slavers at the end of the fourth century, shows that the affluent life of the villa owner continued into the early decades of the fifth century. On Patrick’s return to England, six years after his capture, his father urged him to enter public service; local rhetoricians were employed, for example, to guide the populace. Some kind of working polity was based upon a Roman original. When Bishop Germanus came to England from Gaul in 429 he was greeted by the leading men of Verulamium in a gesture of civic unity. These are likely to have been the members of the diocesan or provincial council who had taken over the administration of the city. In the life of Germanus they are reported to have been ‘conspicuous for their wealth, fashionable in their dress, and surrounded by an adoring multitude of people’. This was not a country denuded of its prestige or affluence.

Germanus had come in part to assist the English in their fight against the Picts and Saxons, adding weight to the suggestion that there was some sudden or overwhelming Saxon ‘invasion’. But in fact the Saxons were already here. They had been in England from the third century. They were already part of the fabric of English life. The urban and tribal elites needed Saxon warriors to defend their property; many of these soldiers married native women, and settled down with their families. Germanic forces remained among the Roman army in the north. Saxon traders lived in the towns and cities. Saxon workers cultivated the lands of Kent in exchange for occasional military service.

Here we must confront questions of nomenclature. By common consent the native English, from the Iron Age forwards, have been called ‘Britons’. But the term is really only pertinent to the Atlantic English of the western coasts; these are the Britons who migrated to Gaul and established the province of Brittany. They are the people who spoke Celtic and Gaelic. The Britons were also strong in the north, as a permanent reminder of old tribal groupings. In the centre, south and east of the country were native English, too, but they inhabited the regions where Saxon settlers came to dominate, sometimes by peaceful and sometimes by violent means. It was from one band of these settlers, the Angles, that the name of England itself first emerged. ‘Engla land’ was the Viking description. It is characteristic of a country that, from the first century to the thirteenth century, was subject to almost continual foreign occupation. The ‘empire race’ was once a colonized and exploited people.

3

Climate change

The climate of England has been characterized as generally damp and relatively sunless but, as every native knows, the weather is as various as the land. In the southeast the summers are warm and the winters are cold, while in the northwest the winters are mild and the summers are cool. In the northwest four and a half hours of sunshine light up an average July day, while on the south coast six and a half hours can be anticipated; the western seaboard attracts 40 per cent more rainfall than the eastern. The predominant wind of autumn and of winter is from the southwest; in the spring it is the east. This was the weather that created a land of damp forests of oak and ash, of marshes and heath wrapped in mist. In the north and the west lay the moors and the mountains, where the soil was thin. This was the land of pasture rather than of crops, and the local farmers grew only as much corn as they needed for themselves. The south and east were the lowlands, with gradual undulations in the rich earth; this was ground as fit for corn as for cattle. It was the territory of ‘mixed farming’.

In the history of England these patterns of climate are of the utmost importance; if there is a drop in temperature of two degrees, as in the period from 500 to 300 BC, the prospect of adequate harvests in the north is noticeably curtailed. A difference of one degree made a failure of the harvest seven times more likely. In this period, then, we see the abandonment of upland farms and settlements. The southern land was warmer, and more stable; it was the home of the plentiful harvest, and the general dampness meant that crops could even be grown on lighter soils where sand and chalk prevailed. It is a general truth, therefore, that in the southeast the land was devoted to wheat whereas in the north it was given over to oats. But important regional variations were still found. Oxfordshire and north-east Suffolk grew wheat, whereas Norfolk grew more rye. Oats were the main crop in Lancashire, while rye was dominant in Yorkshire. Wheat and barley shared the ascendancy in Wiltshire whereas, in the rainier country west of that shire, barley predominated.

The people of the south were wealthier if not healthier than their counterparts in the north. So the climate is active in human history. It may also be that the drier east creates human communities different from those of the rainier west; marked contrasts of social systems in the first millennium BC are in fact evident, with small centres of lordly power in the west and more scattered settlements in the east. The isolated farmhouse and the small hamlet were characteristic of the north and west; the village and the manorial system of common cultivation were more usual in the south and east.

At the time of the Roman occupation the weather was warmer than at any period in subsequent history, but this was succeeded by colder and wetter conditions by the end of the fourth century. For ten years, beginning in AD 536, there was a very low level of sunlight; this would have been a time of dearth and famine, hitherto unrecorded. It might also be noted that Alfred was credited with the invention of a clock that allowed him to tell the time when the prevailing fogs obscured the sun.

The climate of 1009 and 1010 was recorded by a Benedictine monk, Byrhtferth, who dwelled in East Anglia; the winter lasted from 7 November to 6 February, being cold and moist; the spring from 7 February to 8 May was moist and hot; summer from 9 May to 6 August was hot and dry; autumn from 7 August to 6 November was dry and cold. He was only one of the clerics who kept a detailed record of the conditions of the weather.

The eleventh and twelve centuries were in fact warmer than those immediately preceding them, but a deterioration of climate took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the annals of these later centuries also mention the increasing incidence of floods and droughts, suggesting greater instability. Hard frosts lasted into spring, and violent gales brought down the trees of the forests. The Thames froze in the winter of 1309–10, and the years 1315 and 1316 were marked by endless rain. The harvests failed, and the dead were buried in common graves. It was a time of epidemic disease. Crime rates rose proportionately.

The increase of rainfall, in the fourteenth century, is marked by the construction of drainage ditches and house platforms; church floors were raised, and the lower halves of some villages were deserted. The carpenter in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ reveals an obsessive fear of another Great Flood covering the earth. The extraordinary wind of 14 January 1362 was widely believed to be a harbinger of the Day of Judgment. In the medieval period the weather is the lord of all. Outer weather creates inner weather. It would be possible to write the history of England as the history of the English climate.

4

Spear points

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, composed long after the events related, reports that in 449 ‘Hengist and Horsa, invited by Wyrtgeorn’ arrived in England; they had come to help the English against invaders, but they stayed only to fight against their hosts. Hengist and Horsa mean respectively ‘horse’ and ‘mare’. Wyrtgeorn, or Vortigern, is simply the term for an overlord or over-king. In some of the Welsh annals he is also known as Vortigern ‘of the repulsive mouth’. So, as always, there are elements of mythology embedded within the history. The dates are also wrong.

The evidence suggests that in 430 Vortigern, the leader of the confederacy of small kingdoms into which much of the country had divided, called in Saxon mercenaries to defend England against the Picts from Scotland and various marauding bands from Ireland. This was an old and familiar strategy, used by the Romanized English at various points in their history.

The Irish landed on the west coast, within easy reach of the Cotswolds; the central part of Vortigern’s kingdom lay in that hilly region, which may account for his leading role in the struggle. It is reported that the Picts had landed in Norfolk. The Pictish sailors painted their ships, and their bodies, the colour of the waves so that they could less easily be seen. So the decision to call in the Saxons was born out of fear and urgency. According to historical legend they came in three ships, holding at best only a few hundred men. There are likely to have been more ships but, in any case, these mercenaries were known for their ferocity as well as for their valour. The bands of warriors, under a war chieftain, worshipped the sun and the moon. They adored Woden, god of war, and Thor, god of thunder. They practised human sacrifice. They drank from the skulls of their enemies. The fronts of their heads were shaved, the hair grown long at the back, so that their faces might seem larger in battle. ‘The Saxon’, a Roman chronicler of the fifth century wrote, ‘surpasses all others in brutality. He attacks unforeseen, and when foreseen he slips away. If he pursues, he captures; if he flees, he escapes.’

The most significant elements of the Saxon force were stationed in Kent, and were given the island of Thanet in the Thames estuary. Other bands of soldiers were placed in Norfolk, and on the coast of Lincolnshire. The Icknield Way was guarded. London and the Thames estuary were defended. The remains of the Romanized armies, still in the north, were stationed in a strongly fortified York. Then, on the invitation of Vortigern, more Saxon mercenaries were brought to England. The show of strength seems to have been enough. The Picts abandoned their plans for the invasion. The Irish were in turn checked by the tribal armies of the west and the west midlands; the kingdom of the Cornovii, with its capital at Wroxeter, was instrumental in that repulse to the invaders.

Yet now a more insidious threat to Vortigern’s leadership emerged. His allies, alarmed at the cost of the Saxon presence, could not or would not pay them. They also refused to yield land in exchange for payment. After the immediate threat had passed, they declined to subsidize their defenders. According to the Kentish chronicles they declared that ‘we cannot feed and clothe you, because your numbers have grown. Leave us. We no longer need your assistance.’

The reaction of the mercenaries was immediate and strong. Their insurgency began in East Anglia, and then spread down to the Thames Valley. They took over many of the towns and countryside areas in which they had been stationed. They appropriated large estates, and enslaved many of the native English. They had seen at first hand the prosperity of the land and had acquired a taste for it. Thanet itself, as a granary, was a golden prize. The Saxon federates then sent out a call to their compatriots. Come and settle here. Together we can master the natives.

So the Germanic migrants kept on coming. Among them were four predominant tribes – the Angles from Schleswig, the Saxons from the territories around the river Elbe, the Frisians from the northern coast of the Netherlands, and the Jutes from the coast of Denmark. There were no such people as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ until the chroniclers invented them in the sixth century. The routes of settlement were already established by the river system. The settlers pushed along the Thames, the Trent and the Humber.

The Jutes settled in Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight; the New Forest was once Jutish land. The Saxons were established in the Upper Thames valley. The Frisians were scattered over the southeast, with an important influence in London. The Angles settled in eastern and north-eastern England; by the early sixth century the people of east Yorkshire were wearing Anglian clothes. These were small tribes, small communities under a leader or leading family. Some were resisted; some were welcomed. Others were simply accepted by a working population who had no real love for their earlier native masters. All were accommodated and, according to the best genetic evidence, eventually made up 5 per cent of the population we now call English; in the eastern regions it may have reached approximately 10 per cent, but there is no hint of deliberate genocide and replacement of the native population.

They came because they were being pushed by other tribes in the great westward migrations of that era, but they also came because their ancestral lands were in peril from the rising sea. This was the period in which the northern European coastline was sinking, as the archaeological evidence from Germany and the Netherlands testifies; there was urgent need to find land elsewhere.

The revolt of the Saxon federates was a decisive blow to the prestige and authority of Vortigern. He was overthrown by another Romanized English leader, Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led a counter-attack upon the Saxons and for ten years engaged in a series of strenuous battles. In 490 the English won a great victory at a place known to posterity as Mons Badonicus, believed to be near modern Bath. The leader of the English forces on that occasion is not recorded, but in this period the name of Arthur emerges as over-king. He is a shadow in the historical record, known only as dux bellorum or ‘leader of warfare’. He is said to have participated in twelve battles against the Saxons, but the places cannot now be identified. In the pages of the medieval romances he is a great king with a shining court at Camelot, otherwise known as Winchester; in truth he may have been a military commander whose headquarters were within the hill fort of Cadbury. 18 acres (7.2 hectares) of that hill fort were enclosed in the period of Arthur’s supposed lifetime.

The English had survived but, as part of the spoils of war, the Saxons retained their control over Norfolk, East Kent and East Sussex. There was a division in the country, perhaps marked by the construction of the Wansdyke designed to keep the Germanic people from crossing into central southern England. On one side of that barrier were small English kingdoms; on the other, Germanic tribes with their warrior leaders. What had previously been some of the most Romanized parts of the country had become the home of ‘barbarians’. The town and villa life of these regions was, therefore, in abeyance. An English chronicler of the early sixth century, Gildas, laments that ‘the cities of our country are still not inhabited as they were; even today they are squalid deserted ruins’. This was the process of the Saxon ‘invasion’.

Yet some towns and cities were still in active use, as markets and places of authority. It is well known that the Saxons set up their own trading area outside the walls of London, in the district now known as Aldwych, but the old city was still a place of royal residences and public ceremonial. In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity of settlement. It is not to be expected that any change in agricultural practice took place. The same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals respected the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups that honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date, follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past.

The Germanic settlers were kept within their boundaries by the English for two or three generations. It should not be forgotten that, in this period, the average life expectancy was thirty-five years. It was a country of young men and women, with all the energy and thoughtlessness of the young. The leaders of the country were brash, vibrant and energetic.

By the middle of the sixth century the Germanic people wished to move further west, and to exploit the productive lands that had previously been beyond their grasp. There are many reasons for this sudden efflorescence of activity, but one of the most convincing lies in the onset of deadly plague in the 540s. Bubonic, and perhaps pneumonic, plague spread from Egypt all over the previously Romanized world. It seems that it struck down the native English rather than the settlers, with a force and scope that rival the great plagues of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some actuarial experts suggest that a population of 3 or 4 million now dropped to 1 million. The land was left vacant, and fewer men were available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.

One of the leaders of the Saxons, Ceawlin, had reached as far as Cirencester, Gloucester and Bath by 577; seven years later his forces had penetrated the midlands. The native kings were thereby deposed. This was the pattern throughout the country. The pressure was growing on the Durotriges of Somerset and Dorset and as a result there was an exodus of native people to Armorica, on the Atlantic coast of northwestern France, where their leaders took control of large tracts of land. They may have been welcomed. They were perhaps part of the same tribe. So the region of Brittany emerged. The Bretons in fact retained their old tribal allegiances, and never really thought of themselves as part of the French state. Some of them came back. A Breton contingent was among the forces of William the Conqueror, which chose to settle in southwest England. They had come home at last.

In the end the natives would be so mixed and mingled with the new settlers that the term Saxon or Angle ceased to have any meaning. All would become English. Yet it was a slow process. Much of western England was still under the rule of native kings 200 years after the first Saxons arrived; the native kingdom of Elmet, now known as the West Riding of Yorkshire, survived until the early seventh century and the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ only came to an end with the capture of Gwynedd by Edward I in 1282. Celtic speakers were to be found in Cornwall at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the language did not wholly die until the eighteenth century.

The settlements of the Germanic tribes took the form of small folk territories, made up of groups of warriors and marked off by river boundaries. So the followers of Haesta created Hastings and the followers of Gilla established Ealing. The people of the Peak district, the people of the Chilterns, and the people of the Wrekin, were all given distinct topographical names. Jarrow means ‘among the Jyrwe’, a small tribe found in the fen district as well as in Northumberland. The immense number of small tribes was gradually aligned for the purposes of defence or warfare. Over-kings emerged as the leaders and protectors of tribal chiefs, and by 600 the recognizable kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England begin to enter recorded history. The kingdom of the East Angles was formed together with those of the East Saxons and the Mercians.

These were societies of rank, based upon a structure of burdens and obligations imposed by the warlords and their entourage. There were slaves, there were landless workers, there were ceorls or free heads of households, and there were thegns or noblemen, with all possible divisions and distinctions within each rank. The financial penalties for murder, for example, were graded according to the ‘worth’ of the victim. It was a harsh and divisive society, only made possible by the continuous exploitation of the unfree. In that respect, it may not have differed very much from any previous English polity. There never was any Rousseau-esque state of equality in nature. There always was a system of lordship and vassalage.

And what of the native English? They endured the change of leadership. Most of them worked the soil, as before, and paid tax or tribute to the local lord. The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience. The artisans and merchants were still here. It was in the interest of the Angles and the Saxons to utilize what remained of Romanized English civilization. They did not exterminate the native population because they needed it. They had no aversion to the practices of the open field and could quickly accustom themselves to working the land according to the traditional methods of the English.

In the first years, however, there may have been a form of separation or apartheid between settlers and natives. The Germanic walh means Celtic speaker or Latin speaker; it also came to mean a serf or a slave. The name of Wales derives from this. So we have Cornwall, and places known as Walton, Walsall and Walcot. We can also deduce the presence of native English in what is now north-east London in Walthamstow and elsewhere. The reader will be able to identify many other examples. The native population survived.

Christianity was not driven out of England by the invaders. Early churches have been found in London, embedded within Roman edifices, as well as in York, Leicester and Exeter. Churches were located in other towns, and of course in western England – beyond the reach of the Germanic tribes – the religion flourished with the appearance of small monastic communities. One was situated on top of Glastonbury Tor.

The eventual shape of England itself was becoming clear as the Germanic tribes continued their expansion. In the north the settlers were first confined to East and South Yorkshire; these areas may already have harboured Germanic troops, and may therefore have welcomed their arrival. They formed the kingdom of Deira, roughly comprising what is now Yorkshire from the Humber to the Tees. An Anglian community was established at Bamburgh, where the castle still stands. A great Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery is to be found by the village of Sancton, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and as late as the nineteenth century the villagers used pots and urns taken from the site. The native tribes, the Parisii and the Brigantes, tried to contain these powerful Germanic settlers, but they proved unsuccessful.

Under the leadership of their king, Aethelfrith, according to the history of the Venerable Bede, the settlers conquered many territories and many peoples by the end of the sixth century; they ‘either drove out their inhabitants and planted them afresh with their own people, or subdued them and made them tributary’. That was the familiar process of colonization. Aethelfrith became king of both Deira and Bernicia, the kingdom to the north of Deira that stretched from Durham to Edinburgh and from Derwentwater to Ayrshire. He can thus be truly considered the first king of Northumberland.

The native tribes and kingdoms were divided among themselves, and could not arrest the momentum of the invaders. The old kingdoms – Rheged (northwestern England), Strathclyde (southwestern Scotland), Gododdin (north-eastern England and south-eastern Scotland) – fell. The warbands slowly moved northward and westward. The Germanic settlers may have been few in number, but they eventually controlled a huge territory of moorland and hill with scattered farmsteads and cottages. Yet the old traditions survived in the fastness; that is why Yorkshire and Northumberland retained much of their ancient organization and custom.

Out of these battles between invaders and native tribes emerged the pure poetry of war. Aneirin’s poem Gododdin has made him the Homer of the north. Written in the language of the Britons, it records the defiance of the natives in stern cadences:

Swift horses and stained armour with shields,

Spear shafts raised and spear points honed,

Sparkling chain mail and radiant swords.

It records a world of warriors, wearing beads and collars of amber, and of councils of war; it is a world of battles, with banners held high by the opposing forces; of crows and ravens waiting for the slaughter, climbing like clouds in the sky; of feasting with cups of mead and sweet wine; of hounds and hawks; of drinking horns passed round in candlelight; of a landscape of wolves and seaeagles; of a lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance and internal rhyme. It is avowedly and unrepentantly aristocratic. It is not as fearful or as mournful as Anglo-Saxon poetry, with the latter’s longing for a haven and the safety of the hall against the forces of a wild world.

On the death of Aethelfrith his rival, Edwin, became the king of Northumberland. Towards the end of his reign he was powerful enough to conquer the Isle of Man, to invade North Wales and to occupy Anglesey. He aspired to over-kingship of the entire country, and according to Bede ‘in the days of Edwin a woman with a baby at her breast might have travelled over the island without suffering an insult’. Along the principal highways of the country he also instituted a system of stone cisterns, designed to collect water from the nearest fountains, together with cups of brass. The drinking fountain has a long history.

Two memorials of his reign survive. Edwin’s fortress, Edwin’s burgh, is now known as Edinburgh. And, in recent years, evidence of Edwin’s palace has been recovered. At Yeavering, in Northumberland, have been found the traces of a great hall with other buildings clustered around it; this suggests the presence of a king with his warriors and councillors. A temple was later converted into a Christian church. Since the palace was built upon a Bronze Age cemetery, it must always have been considered a sacred site. An open-air wooden theatre or meetingplace, with concentric rows of seats before a raised platform, has also been recognized; this was used for regional assemblies where the over-king could address 300 of his followers. It was the place of public pronouncement and public judgment. There was a large enclosure, where animals were herded before being killed and eaten in elaborate feasts. Other such palaces, with the complex of attendant buildings, have been found in other parts of the country.

They represent a life of feud and warfare, of lordship and dynastic marriage. Young warriors would congregate around the king and enter his service; the good lord would distribute land and gifts. It was a rich and intense culture based upon violence and covered with a sheen of gold. The clothes worn by the noblemen were opulent in the extreme, and the men as well as the women were lavishly bedecked with jewels. The men wore linen tunics, fastened at the wrists and waist with shining clasps; their cloaks were ornamented with brooches. Gold was the key. In the early Christian Church statues of the saints, larger than life-size, were covered in gold. There were thrones of gold, and great crucifixes of gold. It was in no sense a barbaric culture, but one based upon formal ostentation.

The territory of the East Angles also had great kings. Their land was large, taking within its compass what are now Norfolk, Suffolk and the Isle of Ely. It was all of a piece, the invaders having overlain the kingdom of the Iceni from which Boadicea had come. There are no annals of this people, but Bede records that one of their early kings claimed dominion over the whole of southern England. Redwald reigned in the early seventh century, and at a burial site in Sutton Hoo have been found relics of his magnificence. It is presumed to be Redwald’s tomb, based upon the elaborate funereal rites of the Germanic tribes of Sweden.

This was a boat burial. The boat itself was 90 feet in length (27.4 metres) and within its central space were found a helmet of Scandinavian style, a coat of mail, a battleaxe, a sword with gold fittings, several spears and a shield ornamented with the shapes of birds and dragons; there seems to have been a sceptre crowned with a bronze stag, as well as a great gold buckle. Relics were also found of a tunic with gold clasps in the Roman fashion, as well as silver bowls, coins, cauldrons and a lyre. This was the resting place of a king. We have the words of Beowulf as an epitaph. ‘There they laid the dear lord, the giver of rings, in the bosom of the ship, a marvellous prince by the mast. Men brought from distant lands a trove of treasure and ornament.’ In another mound upon the site (there are seventeen of them) were uncovered the skeletons of a warrior and his horse. They are the tokens of a society of force and conquest.

Yet no body was found within the boat. It may have been a cenotaph, an empty tomb erected as a memorial. But it is more likely that a wooden coffin and its occupant have been eaten by the acid sand all around. There is one memory of Redwald, however. It resides in the helmet; it is silver plate on a base of iron, with ornamentation of bronze. It is monstrous, savage, a thing out of nightmare.

The life of the people under his rule was harsh and unremitting. It was, for the poor, one of incessant labour; their food was coarse and their clothes were made out of rough woollen fabrics. They lived in earth-floored cottages of wicker or wattle. They knew only the rake and the sickle, the plough and the pick and the spade. The rich engaged in a life of hunting and of warfare. They ate voluminous quantities of pork and venison. They drank to excess and were celebrated for doing so. Their faces were often painted or tattooed. Men as well as women dyed their hair; blue, green and orange were the colours favoured by the male. Both sexes were heavily adorned with gold bracelets. Young boys were trained in bravery by being placed on steep sloping roofs; if they held fast, without screaming out in fear, they were deemed to be fit for purpose. The sports were those of leaping, running and wrestling; at the age of fourteen a boy had the right to bear arms.

The kingdom of Mercia occupied what is now known as the midlands; the East Saxons gave their name to Essex, the Middle Saxons to Middlesex and the South Saxons to Sussex. The West Saxons created Wessex, of course, but that territory has not survived as an administrative entity. Mercia was until the time of Alfred always a mixture of kingdoms, and the tribal name of the West Saxons was Gewissae, meaning ‘confederates’. These allied tribes moved further westward, conquering Devon and Cornwall. But the Germanic tribes did not move against the native kingdoms alone; they fought among themselves, and there were some ferocious struggles between the tribes of Wessex and the tribes of Kent.

Kent offers an interesting case of continuity. It was the first part of England to be settled by Germanic mercenaries and traders, who may have obtained a permanent presence there as far back as the time of Roman rule. That is why the administrative structures set up by the Romanized English survived intact. The settlers and natives did not need to confront one another. So the native name for the area was maintained even after the Jutes and others had acquired supremacy. The people were known as ‘Cant-ware’, but the origin of ‘Cant’ lies somewhere in prehistory. The names of Canterbury and Dover date back at least to the Iron Age. There is abundant evidence for continuity of use, in settlements and in sacred sites, from the Iron Age to the Jutes; the churches of many Kentish neighbourhoods are linked by prehistoric roads. They are also characteristically associated with holy wells, springs and female saints, all of which point towards prehistoric worship.

Another continuity can be noticed. When the first Germanic settlers came they were planted as freeholders, following the custom of their country. That is why the land of Kent is marked by individual farmsteads and hamlets rather than manorial villages; no tradition of cooperative farming under a lord existed. There was no room in Kent for powerful magnates or great mansions. There are few of the ‘common fields’ found throughout the rest of the country. The county bears all the signs of the ‘free folk’ whom Tacitus recognized among the northern peoples.

That tradition was maintained over the centuries. In The Perambulation of Kent, written in 1570, William Lambarde wrote that ‘the Yeomanrie, or common people is no where more free and jolly than in this shyre … in manner every man is a freeholder, and hath some part of his own to live upon. And in this their estate they please themselves and joy exceedingly.’ In fact the legal custom of Kentish land tenure was not abolished until 1926, the only known example of specifically county law surviving into the twentieth century. That independence has taken other forms. In the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 ‘the men of Kent’ were the first to take up arms behind Wat Tyler. Seventy years later, under the leadership of Jack Cade, they provoked a popular revolt against unfair taxation; their petition was entitled The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent. The men of Kent were the first to rise against Richard III. In the miners’ strike of 1984 the miners of Kent were the most militant and vociferous. The old history still manifests itself. It still matters.

These continuities underlie the changing patterns of lordship. Small kingdoms gave way to greater kingdoms. The earliest fiscal document for the whole of England, dated to the early seventh century, lists nineteen kings and fifteen peoples. Yet even the great kingdoms were based upon English originals. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes; and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. There are many other examples testifying to the fact that the roots of the country go very deep.

The great king of Kent, Aethelbert, who ruled from the end of the sixth century to 616, is prominent in English history as the king who greeted Augustine and supported his Christian mission among the Germanic tribes. Aethelbert was aligned with the Frankish kings of the continent, and it may be that he welcomed Augustine in deference to them. He was in any case what the Venerable Bede called ‘rex potentissimus ’, an over-king of English lands stretching to the Humber. He was also the first English king to become converted to Christianity; he was followed by the king of Essex and, more ambiguously, by the king of East Anglia. But his example was crucial to the success of Augustine’s mission. Augustine converted the king’s household, and thus the area under the control of Aethelbert’s lords. The people came creeping to the cross under the twin pressures of deference and emulation. They flocked to the rivers of Kent, where they were baptized en masse.

It should be remembered that this saint had not come to convert the native English, the large majority of whom were already Christian. He had not come to evangelize the whole island; he had come to baptize the Germanic settlers and their leaders. In 597 he landed at Thanet, and then led a solemn procession singing hymns behind a silver cross. Aethelbert duly obliged with his conversion. He could see the advantage of being associated with the institution that had succeeded Roman imperium. The important part of the Christian contribution to England was in fact the re-imposition of old forms of authority. After Augustine had converted Kent and Essex his fellow missionary, Paulinus, brought the gospel to Northumberland. With the conversion of heathen Sussex and the Isle of Wight, in the late seventh century, all England had entered the Christian communion. Many of the old native churches were extended or rebuilt in Anglo-Saxon style, and many large churches were erected in the walled towns inherited from Rome. The same sacred sites were still in use, with a continuity of worship that goes much deeper than the choice between a native or a Roman affiliation. Many of today’s cathedrals will retain at their core a small Anglo-Saxon church superimposed upon a temple used by the Romanized English.

The leaders of the native Church did not look kindly upon this usurper who had come to convert their Saxon-Jutish-Frisian oppressors. When Augustine summoned the Welsh bishops he did not rise to greet them, and his arrogance struck them as characteristic of the old Roman ways. The native priests had in any case come to despise the Germanic leaders; they did not attempt to convert them. They were monks and missionaries who had been educated in the worship of the Celtic saints (think of all the small churches in Cornwall), and saw no authority or beauty in what was essentially a church of bishops and administrators – administrators, indeed, who were willing and prepared to work for the alien kings. Priests on the other side of the Severn would not eat from the same dishes as the Romanized priests; they would not even let their dogs lick them. Yet they lost the battle of faiths. The Roman Church became England’s Christian Church, and the old faith of the English withered on the vine. It is not the first, or the last, example of cultural amnesia.

For their part the kings were aware of all the advantages of the Roman faith. Christ was a more powerful support in war than Woden, and the Christian God offered more effective lordship than Thor. One hitherto pagan priest went to the trouble of destroying his own temple to prove the point. The Roman Church preferred the rule of strong kings and unified governments; it made the work of religious control much easier. The priests were the literate members of the kingdom and, at a time when legal documents and title deeds and proclamations of every kind were being published, they became the indispensable administrators of the state. Almost as soon as the first missionaries set foot on Thanet, the kings of the vicinity began to issue laws. ‘If anyone kills a man, he is to pay as ordinary wergild 100 shillings. If hair-pulling occurs, 50 sceattas [silver pennies] are to be paid as compensation.’

The kings were also happy to adopt a quasi-liturgical role as the embodiment of the people in public ritual. This was a way of enhancing authority. It was a way of enforcing respect and ensuring obedience. Kings and saints appear, in England, within the same period. And they are often the same thing. King Edwin and King Aethelbert are known to posterity as St Edwin and St Aethelbert. There were occasional reactions. King Sigeberht of Kent was killed by two of his kinsmen for the tiresome practice of forgiving his enemies.

Yet on the whole Christianity helped to bring unity to a kingdom. To adapt the old Catholic motto, a people who pray together stay together. The encouragement of moral discipline, by the priests, had a material effect upon the social discipline of the country. In the graveyard remains of great ladies in the seventh century, from Kent and Wessex, from Mercia and East Anglia, there is a much greater uniformity of ornament. The various regions of the country were slowly coming together. A single English Church seemed to require a single English nation as its stage. It was the time of the Christian conversion that turned all the people of the country, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, into ‘Angelcynn, of English race’. Soon after a list was compiled of ‘the Saints of God who rest in Engla lond’. Bede wrote of ‘the Holy Church of the English nation’, implicitly excluding the Welsh and the Picts. England, as we understand it today, was created by the Christian Church.

So the Church was an essential aspect of government. That is why the boundaries of the dioceses followed the frontiers of the old tribal kingdoms. Worcester followed the same area as the district of the Hwicce, for example, and Hereford of the Magonsaetan. The lines of authority had been passed on. The diocesan synods were like parliaments, where laws were debated and where kinfolk could meet. Bishops were in any case aristocrats, members of the various royal families of the land. When the king called a Church synod in London, secular as well as spiritual lords would attend.

The king’s edicts invariably took an ecclesiastical tone. The archbishops, of York or of Canterbury, drew up the national law codes in consultation with the king. Only after the arrival of the Normans in England was there any formal separation between Church and State. In a similar spirit abbots and bishops were often part of the warbands of the great magnates; one bishop of Sherborne, Heahmund, was killed in a bloody battle against northern invaders. He may have fulfilled the former role of the pagan high priest guiding companies of warriors.

There existed large organizations known as minsters, communities of priests and monks that, as the word suggests, ministered to their surrounding areas. Between the seventh and ninth centuries many hundreds of such foundations were planted so that every district had its minster. They represent the original expression of Christian England, with all the energy and power of first things. They acted as centres of patronage and learning; they maintained trade and agriculture. They organized the surrounding countryside with their constant demand for food rents. They were essentially royal courts, their abbots and abbesses an integral part of the aristocracy, where Christ was overlord. They housed golden treasures, and the relics of the saints. The priests would travel through their areas, preaching; that is why England is still dotted with stone crosses that mark the places of worship.

The religious power of the minsters was gradually lost, as villages and parish churches became the pattern of the land. But the minsters survived. Some of them became great churches and cathedrals. Others took on new life as burgeoning towns. Their names are part of the fabric of the country, in Axminster, Kidderminster, Westminster and a thousand others. Many other towns – Hexham, Barking, Godalming, Oundle, Reading, Woking – are also the direct survivors of these early foundations. England is still filled with minsters.

5

The blood eagle

By the beginning of the ninth century there were in general terms three predominant kingdoms in England; Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria vied for mastery, while around them struggled the smaller kingdoms of East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and Essex. Northumbria was pre-eminent in the seventh century, Mercia in the eighth century, and Wessex in the ninth century. These were sophisticated states with complex systems of administration and taxation, capable of huge communal enterprises such as the building of the 98 miles (158 kilometres) of Offa’s Dyke. In that sense, they resembled their prehistoric forebears. A mass currency was in circulation, with the ubiquitous silver penny or sceat, as a result of voluminous trade.

These three kingdoms were eventually forged together by fire and slaughter, and the growth of a unified kingdom can in part be seen as a desperate response to an external threat. In 790 three boats of Norwegian men landed upon the Dorset coast at Portland; an official rode from Dorchester, believing them to be the familiar merchants of that country, and prepared to escort them into the town. They turned around and killed him. They were warriors, not traders.

Three years later men from Norwegian ships attacked the monastery of St Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne. The attacks were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. The monastery was ransacked and many of the monks were put to the sword. ‘Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘nor was it thought that such an inroad could be made from the sea.’ A year later the monastery at Jarrow was attacked. No one had feared such an invasive force because the people of the north had previously come as peaceful traders. They were masters of commerce, as their later settlements in York and Dublin would testify. Long before the raids commenced, there had been Scandinavian settlers in East Anglia. The location of the eighth-century poem Beowulf is to be found in southern Scandinavia.

The men of Norway were better known at the time as Norsemen or, in the English sources, as Vikings; the name was also applied to the men of Denmark, but at the beginning the Norwegian warriors were the dominant force. The víkingar were ‘the men from the fjords’. They came because their own territories were unsettled by the emergence of new and centralized kingdoms; these kingdoms in turn encouraged the formation of warrior bands ready to kill and pillage. The land of Denmark was also being threatened by Charlemagne, king of the Frankish Empire, further undermining the powers of the ruling elite. It takes only one moment of fear to launch a hundred ships. This was the period, too, when the design of the longboat was perfected. The wind was literally in the sails of the Norsemen.

Another cause can be found for these bloody expeditions. The monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow were not attacked at random; they were chosen as examples of revenge. The onslaught of the Christian Charlemagne on the ‘pagans’ of the north had led to the extirpation of their shrines and sanctuaries. The great king had cut down Jôrmunr, the holy tree of the Norse people. What better form of retaliation than to lay waste the foundations devoted to the Christian God? The Christian missionaries to Norway had in fact set out from Lindisfarne. So its destruction was nicely calculated. It was the beginning of what might be called an antiChristian crusade. In the year the monastery burned, premonitions passed across the tremulous English sky. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 793 ‘terrible omens appeared over the Northumbrians and miserably distressed the people: there were immense lightning flashes, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky’.

Yet these early raids were really only a warning, a seismic shudder before the fire burst forth. The English people were becoming more nervous, and the archaeological evidence suggests that more of them chose the safety of the walled towns. The earliest monastic chronicle was written at this time, to be incorporated later into the first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The hand of the monk may have been guided by a sense that the world was changing for the worse.

In 830 the raids began once more. The forces of ‘heathen men’ had come for land and slaves and women. They fell upon the island of Sheppey, off the coast of North Kent, in 833. As its name implies, it was filled with sheep and good pasture. That was the prize. The Norsemen were well known for their skills in stock-breeding. Over the next thirty years a score of other attacks took place, from the men of Denmark in particular. Kent and East Anglia were an attractive target; the first sea battle in English history took place off Sandwich, in Kent, when the invaders were rebuffed. But the port at Southampton was ravaged by them. London and Rochester were attacked. The army of Northumberland was defeated in battle. The threat came from all sides.

Some of the warriors were known as ‘wolf-coats’ from their mode of dress and from the howls they sent up in battle. They brandished long kite-like shields, and wielded ferocious battleaxes against their prey. Others were known as ‘berserks’ because they wore no armour and charged the enemy in the throes of blood frenzy. The sagas tell of one warrior known as ‘the children’s man’; unlike his companions, he refused to impale children on the tip of his lance. These men were the terror of England.

The raids were simply the prelude to a true invasion. In 865 a great host of Danes descended upon East Anglia. This was the region their ancestors knew best and where many of them already lived. These men had not come to raid; they had come to settle. It is no coincidence that in this period there was a marked increase in the population of Scandinavia, where land was becoming more scarce.

They came in their thousands, aboard hundreds of ships; each ship could carry no more than thirty men. They dwelled in East Anglia for twelve months, taking command of the local resources and in particular marshalling a regiment of good horses. They established fortresses, or defensive encampments, from which they ruled the surrounding land. In 866 they rode against York, and took the city. Their control lasted for almost one hundred years. From York they gained mastery of Northumberland. Then they rode south and captured Nottingham. The king of the Mercians appealed to the king of Wessex for assistance, but eventually he was obliged to buy off the enemy.

The Danes had now acquired the two kingdoms of Northumberland and East Anglia. The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the ‘blood eagle’, whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle’s folded wings. The charters, the ornamented books, the diocesan records, of the two kingdoms disappear. It was a time of devastation for the landed proprietors of the soil.

In 870 the Danes set up a great camp in Reading, and began preparations to invade the kingdom of Wessex. At this stage in the history of England there emerges Alfred. He had encountered the Danes before, when his older brother came to the aid of the Mercians. Now he was king. It cannot be said, however, that his first actions were entirely heroic. After a series of defeats, he bought off the Danish forces with coin and treasure. He incurred the wrath and hatred of the monks at Abingdon for purloining their wealth in the process; in their history he is named as a ‘Judas’. The Danes retired to London which they now also controlled. For a period Alfred was reduced to the role of a tributary king, and was obliged to take silver from the Danes to coin his own currency.

Further attacks and incursions were organized by the invaders, who were still intent upon complete mastery of Wessex; it was the largest surviving English kingdom, and thus the key to supremacy. For the most part Alfred’s army seem to have shadowed the forces of the Danes as they conducted raids or acquired more territory and, after one particularly bloody defeat at Chippenham, Alfred was forced to take refuge in the Somerset marshes. Here at Athelney he built a fortress; from his sojourn in the marshes springs the story of his burning the cakes, once known to generations of English schoolchildren, but it is an eleventh-century fiction designed to emphasize the wretchedness of his plight before his final victory. And a victory came.

In the spring of 878 he rallied the forces of Somerset,Wiltshire and part of Hampshire at a place known as ‘Egbert’s Stone’. He fought a great battle at Edington in Wiltshire against Guthrum, the Danish leader, and the Danes were defeated. Guthrum accepted the outcome, and with several of his commanders was baptized into the Christian communion. Alfred stood as his sponsor in this signal act of conversion, where Guthrum took the Wessex name of Athelstan. In the battle between the pagans and the Christians, Christianity had won. This had become a war about faith as much as land.

Why was it that Alfred and Guthrum could enter such a holy or unholy alliance? They were both of the same blood. Guthrum and the Saxon, Alfred, were great kings in the same sacred tradition. Alfred may have been a Christian leader but he also traced the descent of his royal house from Woden. The Germanic and Scandinavian peopleswere deeply related. They had much more in common than anything they shared with the men of Cornwall or of Devon. They were, in a sense, relatives. So they came to an agreement to divide England between them.

Alfred was not in a position to dictate terms. The negotiations took place in the shadow of the Danish forces that were still within Wessex. Guthrum was already king of the land in the east, from the Thames to the Humber, and had no intention of abandoning England. So he kept what he had conquered by force of arms. No doubt Alfred also gave him money. One phrase of the treaty establishes that ‘all of us estimate Englishman and Dane at the same amount’. Equality reigned between them, in other words.

So was set up the region of the country known by the eleventh century as ‘the Danelaw’. This essentially comprised the largest part of northern and eastern England, with a colony of Norwegians in northwestern England. The process of settlement was made more intense, with successive waves of immigration from the coastline of northwestern Europe being organized by the leaders of the Danish army in England. The chronicles use the phrase of the lands being ‘shared out’, suggesting some high authority. The later settlers were obliged to take up poorer land than that of their predecessors; but land in England was still available. The Danish farmers were situated by fortified towns or ‘burghs’ manned by the Danish army, from which we derive the term for borough. These forts could be used for the purposes of defence or of public assembly.

The most important territorial divisions of the Danelaw were the five boroughs of Nottingham, Leicester, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln. Those boroughs of course still survive, all except Stamford becoming county towns. Yet the evidence of Scandinavian loan-words suggests that the entire region of north and east was assimilated by the new settlers. There are hundreds of place names of Danish and Swedish origin, the most notable being those that end with -by or with -thorpe. Streoneshalch was renamed as Whitby, and Northworthig became Derby. The plethora of Kirbys or Kirkbys in the area of the Danelaw suggests that ‘settlements by the church’ were recognized by the invaders. The survival of English place names, however, sometimes in close proximity to the newly named settlements, suggests that the native people of humble stock were left undisturbed.

The Danes brought trade and prosperity to the areas under their control. It is not at all surprising that in the eleventh century the three most wealthy shires were Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, which had all been part of the Danelaw. York itself was one of the richest and most flourishing cities in the kingdom. It was guarded by strong walls, and excavations have revealed streets of narrow and tightly packed wooden houses complete with workshops and warehouses. Jewellers and metalworkers lived beside workers in wood and in textiles. And everywhere there were merchants, trading with Ireland, with France and, of course, with Scandinavia. They were engaged in the business of pepper, and of vinegar; of fish, and of wine; of salt, and of slaves.

After the treaty was concluded with Guthrum, Alfred had the opportunity to rebuild the defences of his kingdom against any further incursion. Throughout southern and western England he set up a system of fortified towns similar to those established in the Danelaw. An elaborate network of these towns was created to ensure that no one lived more than 20 miles (32 kilometres) from a refuge. It was the beginning of the first true or systematic urbanization within England, springing from the urgent military necessities of the moment, since the Roman epoch. Within a hundred years most of the burghs had become fully ordered towns with courts and markets.

Iron Age hill forts such as those at Hastings and Southampton, and early Romanized settlements like those at Bath and Winchester, were restored with stronger walls. New towns were built, employing a grid system of streets that still survives in towns such as Wallingford and Cricklade that are sited by the Thames. Alfred knew the importance of guarding the major rivers that flowed through his land. Each burgh had a large force of defenders, placed there with their families. In addition Alfred began the formation of a permanent navy to deter any further hostilities from Scandinavian warbands. An early warning system of beacons, set on hilltops, was put in place. His territories, therefore, were militarized in a great programme of public works.

But, for a while, Alfred’s protection did not seem enough. In 896, six years after the death of Guthrum, another Danish king invaded East Kent with a force of 4,000 or 5,000 warriors; they had brought their women and children with them, and their purpose once again was to settle. Alfred led his army into the region and forced them to retreat to their encampments. But he then became aware of a greater threat. The arrival of these new settlers destroyed the uneasy peace between the English and the people of the Danelaw; ships from East Anglia and from Northumbria sailed around the coast and attacked the northern reaches of Devon. Another Danish contingent besieged Exeter. All the parties of the Danes colluded. The plan was to force Alfred to concentrate in the west, while the new invaders took over Kent and Essex.

In the course of the next few months Alfred defeated the Danish forces in the west, while sending reinforcements to the support of southeast England. The chronology of what became known as Alfred’s ‘last war’ is not entirely clear, but the result is not in doubt. The invading Danes gave up their attempt to acquire the territories of the southeast and instead settled among their compatriots in East Anglia and Northumbria. They may have been bribed to leave Essex and elsewhere. They may have bowed to the inevitability of the strong defence set up by the system of burghs. In any event, Alfred had defended his kingdom.

Yet he also defined his kingdom. He generally termed himself ‘the king of the Angles and of the Saxons’, but one of his newly minted pennies uses for the first time the legend ‘Rex Anglo’. With the pagans settled on the very borders of his land, he did his best to assert English identity. He was a Christian king in the face of heathen warlords. The Danes had attempted to extirpate the spiritual civilization of the English; Alfred would do everything within his power to cultivate English learning and the study of English history. Even as he was creating the system of burghs and building a navy, he was fostering a programme of translating major Latin texts into the West Saxon vernacular. He wished to commission books ‘which are most necessary for all men to know’. He is one of the very few kings of England who himself wrote books. He translated Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius and the Soliloquies of St Augustine; he caused to be translated Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Histories against the Pagans by Orosius, thus defining the context for his devoted scholarship. The English, at least according to their sacred historians, were the people of God.

In the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, the English began to conquer the territories of the Danelaw and to absorb its people into the larger society. The Danes were more vulnerable because they had settled; they were no longer the roving warbands that had threatened Alfred, and they had always been more skilled at attack than at defence. In 917 and 918 Edward’s soldiers marched out into the Danelaw, building fortresses as they moved forward. They seized Derby and Nottingham; then the men of Lincoln submitted to King Edward. By 920 all of the country south of the Humber had recognized him as overlord. This was a true conquest, since the rulers of Wessex had never before been lords of the eastern lands. The battles were remembered for many centuries, and it was said that the purple pasqueflower grew in the meadows where Danish blood had been spilled.

The people of the Danelaw were converted to Christianity within two or three generations, and their old burial customs were forgotten. They were in any case so close to the Angles and the Saxons in custom and character that they effortlessly mingled with them. The English language is filled with Scandinavian words such as ‘sky’ and ‘die’, ‘anger’ and ‘skin’ and ‘wing’, ‘law’ and ‘birth’, ‘bread’ and ‘eggs’. There is scarcely a phase of human activity that has not been deeply influenced by Danish nomenclature.

The memory of the Danish occupation survived. The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English. In the middle of the nineteenth century the people of Northamptonshire, according to a local historian, maintained ‘a traditional remembrance of their oppression’. In Cornwall, at the end of the same century, a colony of red-headed people were called ‘Danes’ with whom the local population would not marry. Samuel Pepys was informed that the west door of Rochester Cathedral was covered with ‘Dane-skins’. All this suggests that the viciousness of the early invasions and battles had left a deep and abiding mark.

After the partial unification of England by Edward there followed a line of powerful kings whose names have faded from the collective consciousness of the English; yet the memory of one of them, Athelstan, was revered for many centuries. His name means noble stone, like the throne in Kingston upon which in 924 he was crowned and anointed with holy oil. In the fourteenth century he was still invoked when land was granted:

This land and twig I give to thee,

As free as Athelstan gave it to me,

And I hope a loving brother you will be.

He was the son of Edward the Elder, and became heir to a great dynasty; he was intent, however, upon augmenting the kingdom that he had inherited. He defeated in battle the king of York and his ally, the king of Dublin; Dublin and York were the twin engines of a Norse trading empire that was now coming to an end. Athelstan seized York, and subdued Scotland. The forces of the north then launched a counter-attack, but in 937 were decisively beaten at a place known only as Brunanburgh. ‘From this period,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘there was peace and abundance of all things.’ Many years later the period of Athelstan’s struggle was still known as ‘the great war’, just as the First World War is now remembered.

Alfred had been generally characterized as king of the Angles and of the Saxons, but Athelstan was hailed as king of England. His family became linked by marriage with the kingdom of France and the province of Aquitaine as well as the empire of Germany. Poets and scholars flocked to his court; he established one coinage for the entire realm; he refurbished many of the towns. He called truly national assemblies of bishops and lords. He imposed strict controls over buying and selling; he set out a code of laws. ‘I have learned that our peace is worse kept than I should like it,’ he wrote, ‘and my councillors say I have borne it for too long.’

There is a painting of him in the company of St Cuthbert, the holy man known as ‘the wonder-worker of England’. It is the first English royal portrait, and shows Athelstan wearing an imperial crown. Towards the end of his reign he styled himself monarchus totius Britanniae, and the Annals of Ulster declared him to be ‘the roof-tree of the dignity of the western world’. The tomb of this now forgotten king is to be found in Malmesbury Abbey. In life he wore his hair in ringlets entwined with threads of gold.

By the tenth century the polity of the Anglo-Saxon realm had taken an enduring shape. If the monarch was to guarantee order and stability, it was necessary for him to act in a formal and deliberate manner. He assembled a council of religious men and of wise men. He created structures of authority to supervise the exploitation of royal land and the dispensing of royal justice. A bureaucracy already existed, issuing what became an unbroken succession of charters and writs. (The charters can still be used in unravelling the English landscape.) They came in the first place from the king’s scriptorium, staffed by a handful of priests, but the emergence of a centralized monarchy prompted the growth of new institutions and procedures. So from this foundation there would spring a civil service, a judiciary and a parliament. The nation was becoming conscious of its own identity. That is part of the story of this volume.

It was taken for granted that every man must have a lord. Lordship was no longer dependent upon tribal relations, but on the possession of land. Mastery was assumed by those who owned the most territory. No other test of secular leadership was necessary. Land was everything. It was in a literal sense the ground of being. Land granted you power and wealth; it allowed you to dispense gifts and to bend others to your will. It was inevitable that, under the reign of a strong king, the hierarchy of the country would also be strengthened; the divisions would be sharper, the evidence of status more pronounced. When in 1086, according to the chronicles, ‘all men of property in England’ swore an oath of allegiance to William the Conqueror they were following an established procedure.

The landless man was either a slave or a pauper. He was not to be trusted. This represents the crucial difference between medieval and early modern England. The names of slaves are given for the first time within a document of 880; ‘Almund, Tidulf, Tidheh, Lull, Lull and Gadwulf’ are being transferred to land belonging to the bishop of Winchester. Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines. A penniless farmer might sell his children. It has been estimated that 12 per cent of the English population were slaves. So land created economic subjection. Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as ‘live money’.

By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient.

The shire was originally a military district, but it also served royal purposes as a centre of taxation and a source of justice. Each shire had a court, and a burgh or major town; it could muster its own army, and was ruled on behalf of the king by a shire-reeve whose name became sheriff. The shire was then divided into ‘hundreds’; each hundred was supposed in theory to support one hundred households or to supply one hundred fighting men in times of war. The hundreds were further subdivided into ‘tithings’ made up of ten households. The administration of the entire country could be devolved upon small groups of individuals who led the ‘hue and cry’ against thieves and who were responsible for each other’s conduct. It was the essential basis of local government in England for at least the next thousand years.

The men of the hundred met in the open air at ancient places of assembly, and some of the hundreds are named after a prehistoric tumulus or barrow in the immediate neighbourhood. Hundredsbarrow and Loosebarrow, for example, are to be found in Dorset. The hundred of Doddingtree in Wiltshire is ‘Dudda’s tree’. The hundred of Brixton is derived from ‘Brihtsige’s stone’. This suggests that the roots of the hundreds go very deep, and that they reflect the primeval organization of the country. Since they still survive unaltered, although now rarely used for administrative purposes, they are another indication that we live in a prehistoric landscape. The rural district council is very old indeed.

In the tenth century the lie of the land was being changed. The country had been generally divided into very large estates governed by king, noble, or bishop; these estates of many thousands of acres are likely to have been the original territories of a tribe, their boundaries preserved by the burial mounds of ancient leaders. Yet in the reign of Athelstan they were being fragmented. Parcels of land were being granted to the clients of the king, or noble, in reward for service; an approximate size of the grant was 600 acres (243 hectares), upon which the new proprietor built his residence and organized his agricultural workforce. In the tenth century the new lords were known as thegns; they became the lords of the manor in the fourteenth century, the squires of the eighteenth century, and the country gentlemen of the nineteenth century.

The thegns had a much more direct relation to their land than had the great absentee landlords of the previous epoch. They created villages on their estates, taking the place of scattered farms and hamlets, so that their workers could be more easily housed and controlled. Villages were in existence in the period of Roman dominance, and similar settlements could be found in the Iron Age. Continuity is once more the key. But the village became the defining feature of a large part of the English countryside only in the ninth and tenth centuries. There is no village still in existence (except for those formed during the Industrial Revolution) that was not established by the twelfth century. If you dig deep into the village soil, you will find its ancient roots. Some of them, not the majority, have been in existence for thousands of years. But they are absent from certain territories. Down the middle of England, from Northumberland to Wiltshire, numerous villages are to be found; beyond that great expanse, in the north and in the west, the Iron Age landscape of scattered farms and hamlets survived.

The thegn built his wooden halled residence with smaller outbuildings; this manor was defended with a bank and ditch together with a palisaded fence. He built a small church, also of wood, with a bell tower to call his workers to prayer and to divide their day. Eventually he set up his own court. A well was sunk and before long a mill was built for grinding corn. The country village was not some comfortable and affable idyll; for its poorest residents it was a form of outdoor prison. The agricultural workers lived in buildings that were little more than wooden huts that they shared with their livestock. The ploughman, in a text of the eleventh century, laments his cruel life; he lives in fear of ‘my lord’ and must plough an acre or more in even the coldest weather. The boy who drives the oxen with his goad is hoarse from shouting.

The labourers were slowly reduced in status; for two days each week they performed services for the lord in return for a house and for a smallholding of land from which they could feed their families. Their duties included harvesting and ploughing, carting and haymaking, shearing sheep and constructing the stalls for oxen. Somebody would be ordered to uproot the weeds or to dig a ditch, to run an errand or mend a hedge. Independent farmers still existed, of course, but a large section of the peasantry was ground down by need, misfortune, or misjudgment. Taxes had to be paid. The threat of murrain, to the crops and to the oxen, was constant. Life, for small farmers, was very uncertain. Undoubtedly many of their farms were bought up by the larger landowners. It would be impossible to convey the sheer complexity of the grades and divisions among the working population. It is enough to understand that this was a society of intricate divisions with nice variations in degrees of freedom and unfreedom, where every single person was susceptible to certain claims from superiors.

The history of the village is so entwined with the history of the fields that they cannot be separated. As villages replaced hamlets, so in many shires large fields divided into strips supplanted the older rectangular fields. The lord of the manor had the most land, of course, but the rest was assigned by lot to the individual villagers. This was the most just and methodical way of sharing out the territory. It was also the only way that the land could be efficiently ploughed, by being made available to large plough-teams. The interest of the community, and of the lord, came before that of the individual. The procedure was also accompanied by a form of crop rotation, so that land left fallow for one year was sown the next. This system of common fields lasted until the passing of the Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth century, maintained by the force of custom and communal arrangement.

Other aspects of English life were also being more sharply defined. Towns, small and large, were acquiring unique identities. Some of them grew out of the Romanized towns, and some of them emerged from the burghs established by Alfred; others occupied the sites of large trading settlements on the coast or along the routes of the rivers, while yet more were simply part of the expansion of the large Christian minsters. By the last three decades of the tenth century they were bursting into life, taking advantage of a general rise in population and prosperity throughout the country.

The towns were crammed with buildings and with workshops. In Canterbury the houses stood 2 feet (0.6 metres) apart, enough room for the rain to drip freely from the eaves. The evidence of glassware and pottery, of metalworking and leatherworking, suggests a true urban community. The populations of Norwich and Lincoln were approximately 6,000, while those of London and York were appreciably higher. The people of other towns may be numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. Yet they were living together without agricultural or proprietary ties; this is nowhere more evident than in the fact that the inhabitants of the towns were deemed to be free. They had no lord except the king. The hand of the monarch is in fact evident everywhere, since most towns were royal creations with their streets and defences laid out by royal command. They became engines for making money from taxes and trade. Where there is money, there is power and hierarchy. The towns became self-governing, with the administration of their courts and markets in the hands of ‘elders’ or ‘seniors’ who formed themselves into guilds. It was a new form of kinship in a country that was redefining its tribal nature.

It is no accident that the English parish emerges in this period. It is part of the same appetite for definition and control – for discipline – that accompanied the growth of a united kingdom under a powerful king. You cannot separate religion from social restraint. The chapel of the thegn became the parish church, and the parish system itself arose directly out of the manors and villages that had spread across the country. By the twelfth century, the organization was complete. The parish became the centre of communal action. It survived unchanged until the last decades of the nineteenth century. The great minsters and monasteries decayed, or changed their function, and by the ninth century little churches had begun to fill the countryside. They were generally built of timber, unplastered, and enclosed a rectangular space divided into one or two ‘cells’. In the eleventh century the wood was replaced with a fabric of stone, and the interiors of the small churches began to be ornamented and painted.

The church was not always used for sacred purposes. The contemporary literature suggests that it might be used as a meetingplace, a covered market, or even as an alehouse. The parish priests themselves were often illiterate, and many complaints were made about their drunkenness and violence. They were often married. They might be slaves employed by the lord of the manor. They were in any case little better than the lord’s servants, who worked in the fields when they were not in their churches. They carried knives. They exercised control over the villagers in every sense. These ‘Mass priests’, as they were known, were supposed to catechize children, administer the sacraments and repeat the rudimentary truths of the Christian faith. But in many parishes they also were treated as ‘cunning men’ who practised rural magic. They were as experienced in pagan customs as in Christian practice. It is hard to realize the sheer earthiness of life in these centuries, where people and cattle slept beneath the same roof and where the priest might be an unshaven scoundrel.

The men of the ninth and tenth centuries wore their hair long. If you pulled it you merited a fine, and forcible cutting of the hair was considered to be as criminal as cutting off a nose or ear. The clothes were simple, consisting principally of cloaks and tunics made of woollen cloth; yet the wealthy were heavily adorned with rings and brooches. When some Englishmen were imprisoned in Syria, during the eighth century, the native inhabitants came to see them and to wonder at the beauty of their clothes. The arms and faces of both men and women were tattooed. The richer women wore long flowing tunics, ornamented with gold, and their heads were covered with silk or linen that was wrapped around the neck. Both sexes loved bright colours such as scarlet and green and pink. And both sexes delighted in perfume. Heavy drinking was commonplace, as it has been in all stages of English history. 50 per cent of the people died before the age of thirty, and 90 per cent before the age of fifty. Death was always close at hand.

6

The measure of the king

At the beginning of the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry I, it was declared that the measurement of the yard (0.9 metres) should be ‘the distance from the tip of the king’s nose to the end of his outstretched thumb’. Yet what gave the kings of England such significance and control? They represented the country in a physical, as well as a spiritual, manner. They embodied the country, in its coinage and in its judicial process, in its land tenure and in its religious life. The history of England cannot be written without a careful account of its sovereigns. For many centuries it was impossible to imagine a country without a king. It was believed that a king’s health would affect the health of the kingdom as a whole, and that the private vices of the king could provoke a public calamity. The image of England might be that of the king outstretched.

The origins of kingship cannot be found. We may deduce from the evidence of the Neolithic monuments that there was power in the land from the fourth millennium bc. Who once lay in the great works of Sutton Hoo or Avebury? The kings of the dead have also gone down into the earth.

And then we begin to see flashes of regal pre-eminence. The early Saxon kings claimed that they were descended from the gods, in particular from Woden, and it was believed that they possessed magical powers. Even the supposedly saintly Edward the Confessor traced his descent from pagan Woden. In some more remote age of the world the king might also have been the high priest of the tribe. It is likely that, his true wife being a goddess, he was allowed to have intercourse with whomever he chose. This may help to account for the excessive promiscuity of later English kings; even until recent times they were always permitted and even expected to keep mistresses.

The Saxon kings were violent men, warlords in all but name, but they clothed themselves in the panoply of divine power. Their banners were carried before them wherever they walked. From the tenth century the kings took on classical and imperial titles such as caesar, imperator, basileus and Augustus. In their magnificence we may see traces of ancient British kings, combining wrathfulness and vengeance with spells and rituals. In essence it was the same authority wielded by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

The continuity is there. The promises made by King Edgar at his coronation in 973 were repeated in the coronation charter of Henry I, beginning with the words ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity! I promise three things to the Christian people subject to me! First, that God’s Church and all Christian people of my dominions shall keep true peace!’ The ceremony, devised by Archbishop Dunstan to crown Edgar at Bath, has been at the centre of every subsequent coronation. Much of it was employed, for example, at that of Elizabeth II in 1953. In his writings, particularly in his preface to the soliloquies of St Augustine, King Alfred reflects upon the divine power of the king, who is closer to God than anyone else in the realm; indeed, God Himself can be seen as ‘an exceedingly powerful king’. The damned souls of doomsday are compared to men ‘condemned before some king’.

From generation to generation the same message has been passed. The monarch has been anointed with holy oil, and is invested with divine power; he or she has been elected by God, rather than the people, and has been blessed by the Holy Spirit. That is why, from the tenth century, the king organized and controlled both the monasteries and the bishoprics; the strength and unity of the nation were materially assisted by the union of secular and ecclesiastical authority. The leading clergy were the king’s servants, assisting him in times of peace and war. He was a Christus.

The main task of the king was indeed to lead his people into battle. By the aggrandizement of land and wealth he rendered the country more powerful and more worthy of God’s grace. All the land was his. He owned all highways and bridges, all monasteries and churches, all towns and rivers, all markets and fairs. That is why from the earliest times England was controlled by a minute and complex system of taxation. The coin itself was minted in the king’s name. The voice of the king was the voice of law; it could be said that he held the laws of the land in his breast. This was also the claim of Richard II, many centuries after his Saxon ancestors.

William the Conqueror did not need to create the role of a powerful and centralizing king, therefore; he simply had to take up the part acquired by him. He adopted his crown three times a year at a ceremony known as the festal crown-wearing; we may imagine a tableau in which the king, in silent possession of his majesty, receives the homage of his great lords. There had been such crown-wearings in the eighth century but the practice may lie further back. These three days of the year – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – were also the days when the pagan kings of the north used to perform a ritual sacrifice for the sake of the people. So kingship had very ancient roots. It has been said that William borrowed from the customs of the Frankish or Roman or Byzantine civilizations; yet it may be that his true ancestors are to be found in those who ordered the building of Stonehenge.

The Angevin kings, the line of Henry II, Richard I and John I, chose instinctively to espouse and even to exaggerate the sense of divine kingship. They were all wilful and ruthless sovereigns who systematically exploited the resources of the country to bolster their own sense of significance. Richard was the first king to use the plural ‘we’ in the composition of royal charters. John was the first to call himself the king of the land rather than the king of the people. The premise of absolute power was of course challenged by the barons in the course of John’s reign, but it did not disappear with his death. It lay beneath the confused inheritance and dynastic struggles of the later generations; royal power was still a question of what was possible rather than what was just or right. In the thirteenth century the principle of primogeniture or the hereditary right of the eldest son was first advanced. The power of the Crown was secure in the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Edward IV. Richard II was the monarch most inclined to emphasize the divine rights of kingship.

There was no progress towards a more liberal or benevolent concept of monarchy working in partnership with the great magnates of the land. As soon as the conditions were right, at the beginning of what has become known as the Tudor period, the king reasserts all of his authority and power with as much forcefulness as any Norman monarch.

The belief that the king’s touch could cure the skin disease of scrofula emerged at some point in the twelfth century, although Edward the Confessor was accredited with miraculous powers at an earlier date. It is possible that Henry II was the first king to make a ritual out of healing those afflicted by the disease, and one of his courtiers wrote that the ‘royal unction’ was manifest ‘by the diminution of groin disease and the cure of scrofula’. The tradition continued until at least 1712, when Queen Anne touched the three-year-old Samuel Johnson for the latter disease. Johnson remained a staunch royalist for the rest of his life.

7

The coming of the conquerors

By the end of the tenth century England was a rich and prosperous country. So the men of Denmark still came in search of treasure and of slaves; they fought against naturalized Danes as well as Englishmen. Sporadic raiding took place in the 980s, and in the course of one attack London was put to the torch. It was one of the many great fires of London. In 991 a Danish army overwhelmed a native force in Essex, giving rise to a great English poem of lament entitled ‘The Battle of Maldon’:

Our thoughts must be the braver, our hearts the steadier,

Our courage the greater, as our strength grows less.

It is a poem containing all the stoicism and valour of the tenth-century warrior. He rode to the battlefield and then dismounted in order to fight on foot; he killed, rather than captured, the enemy. The English monarch Ethelred II was obliged to sue for peace after the signal defeat at Maldon. The Vikings wanted money, and Ethelred agreed to buy them off with £22,000 of silver and gold. The negotiations were helped by the fact that the English king could understand Old Norse. The taxation system of the nascent state was put into operation to provide what has become known as Danegeld or ‘the Danish tax’.

This had been precisely the method used by Alfred when faced with victorious foes, but Ethelred was not so fortunate or perhaps as sagacious as his ancestor. He was given the nickname ‘unready’ or more precisely ‘ill-advised’, and it may be that his real fault lay in taking bad counsel. The leaders of the realm, the earls who controlled the shires, were divided among themselves on the best way of confronting the Danish threat. In legal and administrative affairs he was better served, however, and his reign is notable for its law-codes and charters. His was also a court of poetry and music as well as of war. We might call him Ethelred the Unlucky, with the proviso that kings are obliged to make their own luck.

The king of Denmark was in that fortunate position. When he laid siege to London in 994, Ethelred again poured money into his purse. This was getting to be a habit. And the Danes now knew that England was as craven as it was wealthy. That is why all their attacks were now aimed against it. The raids continued over succeeding years, until the time came when a Danish king gained the throne. Ethelred materially affected the history of England in another sense, when in 1002 he married the daughter of the count of Normandy. It was a way of securing the protection of the southeast coast but, by that union, the fate of the English became inseparable from the fate of the Normans.

In the early years of the eleventh century a storm of blood fell across England. The chroniclers write of nothing except the savagery and violence of the Viking raiders, of monasteries ransacked and towns put to the torch. In the same year as his marriage Ethelred ordered a general massacre of the Danes in England in retaliation for the attacks; it was said at the time of the slaughter that ‘every parish can kill its own fleas’. Ten years later the archbishop of Canterbury was murdered by a Danish force, and became one of the first martyrs of the English Church.

In 1013 the king of Denmark, Swein Forkbeard, deemed that England was on the point of chaos and collapse. The various shires were in disarray, with their leaders unable to agree on a coherent strategy. Ethelred himself seemed to waver between paying and killing the enemy. One English bishop, Wulfstan, who called himself ‘Lupus’ or the Wolf, delivered a sermon to the nation in which he declared that ‘soldiers, famine, flames, and effusion of blood, abound on every side. Theft and murder, pestilence, disease, calumny, hatred, and rapine, dreadfully afflict us.’ It was the punishment of God on a sinful people. The nobles had squandered their strength in luxury.

So Swein Forkbeard sailed with his son, Canute, in a great fleet. They came in splendour, their ships ornamented with gold and silver, their shields brightly burnished; when the sun shone on them, the eyes of the spectators were dazzled. Admiration, and dread, were mingled. All the people of the Danelaw submitted to him, and Ethelred fled to the protection of the walls of London before taking refuge in Normandy. He came back to England, on the death of Swein, but the young Canute proved too much for him and his sons. On their prone bodies Canute climbed to the throne in 1016. With the death of Ethelred and of the son who succeeded him, Edmund Ironside, the long lineage of the early English kings came to an end. The descendants of Alfred, the sons of Woden, had ruled the country for 145 years. Not one of them was ever proclaimed to be a tyrant.

The first acts of King Canute were bloody indeed. He slaughtered the leading nobles of England, together with their children, so that his own sons could retain their dominion. When he took hostages, he often mutilated them before releasing them. He was as cunning as he was cruel; power often uses piety for its own deep purposes and, after his conversion to Christianity, he gave unstintingly to churches. When he entered the great monasteries, according to a chronicler, his eyes were fixed on the ground and he overflowed with ‘a true river of tears’. The tears were not idle ones. He needed the English Church as a way of maintaining his spiritual authority as a legitimate king. He also strengthened an already strong position by marrying Ethelred’s widow, Emma from Normandy. But he had acquired a country that had suffered almost continual warfare and raiding for more than thirty years, and the universal call was for peace at any price. The price was vast. Canute exacted more than £82,000 from the shires of England in order to pay off his army.

Then he began to set his kingdom in order. He divided the country into four military districts, and scattered his chosen men – his housecarls – over the shires in place of the English thegns. The English were once more a subject race. Canute was now a great emperor in his own right. He claimed to be the overlord of Scotland, of Ireland and of Wales. One of the Scottish nobles who paid homage to him was Maelbeath, better known to posterity as Macbeth. Canute was also lord of Denmark and of Norway, thus forming a Scandinavian empire of which England was a part. He married his daughter to the German emperor, whose coronation he had attended in Rome. He was known as Canute the Great, but he knew where his greatness ended. The setting for the story of the king failing to command the waves was the bank of the tidal Thames at Westminster, where his palace was situated. He died in the winter of 1035, and it is believed that his bones still lie buried somewhere within Winchester Cathedral.

The reigns of Canute’s two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacanute, were short and inglorious, reinforcing the perception that the sons of a powerful father are often weak and insecure. Harthacanute was half a Canute. He and his brother serve only as a prelude to the longer rule of Edward, known as ‘the Confessor’. The new sovereign was the son of Ethelred and Emma; he was therefore part English and part Norman. He was related to King Egbert of Wessex, grandfather of Alfred, but he was also a Viking; the Normans had once been Viking settlers.

In any case his real sympathies lay with the duchy of Normandy, in which he had lived for twenty-eight years. He arrived in London with a Norman escort, thus marking the true beginning of the Norman invasion. Within a few years of his coronation on Easter Day 1043, three Norman clerics were given English bishoprics, and Edward also planted a number of foreign magnates on English soil; they followed their native tradition and built castles rather than halls. The new king granted the Sussex ports to Fe´camp Abbey, situated on the coast of Normandy, and gave the merchants of Rouen their own London port at Dowgate. The first act of the eleventh-century drama had begun. The invasion of 1066 was the end of a long process.

The earls of England, however, the powerful magnates who controlled the shires, were instinctively hostile to the Norman interlopers. Among their number were Godwin, earl of Wessex, and Leofric, earl of Mercia; Godwin was married to a Danish noblewoman, while Leofric had been connected by marriage to the wife of Canute. The Danes and the English were close to becoming one people. It is a pertinent fact that the Danes fought alongside the English at the battle of Hastings.

The two earls have long passed from memory but, curiously enough, the wife of Leofric survives in legend. Lady Godgifu is better known as Lady Godiva; her ride through the marketplace of Coventry, naked but with her long hair covering her honour, has become one of the most famous of English stories. She essayed the journey on condition that her husband alleviated the taxes of the citizens. It was also said that she commanded all windows to be closed and covered, so that she would be heard but not seen; one person disobeyed the rule, and he became known ever afterwards as ‘peeping Tom’. So another phrase has entered the vocabulary. There is no truth in the legend, of course, except for the fact that Godiva was indeed ‘lady of Coventry’ in the eleventh century. Almost a thousand years later, the ‘black eagle’ of Leofric is still part of the city’s coat of arms.

If the earls of England were hostile to the Normans in their midst, they were also averse to war and disorder. When Godwin of Wessex led an insurgency against Edward, the other magnates joined forces with the king and obliged Godwin to flee to Bruges. The leaders of the nation feared open civil war, and they also feared another Viking invasion. That is why they would not fight one another. This bond of shared loyalty helped to stabilize the realm, and to ensure Edward’s survival. When Godwin died his son, Harold, took the earldom of Wessex; he would become one of England’s most short-lived kings.

As a monarch Edward the Confessor made singularly little impression on the English chroniclers. He also made hardly any impression at all upon the course of English life. Of his character and nature, very little is known. The fact that he survived at all in such a ruthless and violent society suggests that he possessed shrewdness as well as resilience. He was called ‘the Confessor’ because he was deemed to have borne witness to the efficacy of the Christian faith, but in life he was not a particularly pious king. In one eulogistic poem he is described as ‘claene and milde’: he was ‘claene’ because he was not licentious, and he had no child; he was ‘milde’ because he was merciful. But he was not devout. His grants to the abbeys and monasteries were no more than what was expected. He showed no particular talent for diplomacy or administration. He had no grand plan; he worked by hazard and necessity, responding to each crisis in a measured manner. He had no principles other than those of self-interest and survival. Chance, and fortune, were his mentors. In this he was not unlike any other English king. It is perhaps the most important lesson of the nation’s history.

With his death the life of England passes to a new stage. In the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, the identity of the nation was formed. Edward the Confessor had been rex Anglorum, ‘king of the English’, and his people were the anglica gens; he controlled Anglorum exercitus, ‘the army of the English’, and anglicanum regnum, ‘the kingdom of the English’. In this period, too, the fundamental components of the English state – the shire, the hundred and the tithing – were complete. England was unique and distinctive in its possession of a strong state. English law was propounded and drawn up in elaborate codes, with laws on property and inheritance that remained fundamentally unaltered for many hundreds of years. The art and literature of the period, including Beowulf (tentatively dated to the eighth century) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (early eighth century), have become part of the English heritage. Most importantly, the customs of the land were maintained and its traditions were preserved. The essential continuities of the English nation were passed on.

To whom did Edward leave his crown? The question has never been satisfactorily resolved. It is reported that on his deathbed he pronounced Harold, son of Godwin, as his successor. Harold was not in fact the rightful heir; that honour was held by the king’s great-nephew, Edgar Atheling, who was only fourteen years old. In turn William, duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had offered him the crown and that Harold had sworn on the relics of the saints to submit to William. Since history is written by the victor, that account became generally accepted. It is likely to be completely untrue.

In any case Harold believed himself to have the greater claim, even though he was not part of any royal dynasty. He was the senior earl in the country, earl of East Anglia and earl of Wessex, possessed of vast estates and a great fortune. He was brother-in-law to the dead monarch and in Edward’s lifetime he was deemed to be a sub-regulus or ‘under-king’. The chroniclers report that he was of a free and open nature, and his own acts prove that he was skilful and brave in matters of war. With his brother, Tostig, he subdued Wales in 1063. So on 6 January 1066, the day of Edward’s burial, Harold was crowned as king of the English; it was the first coronation in the newly consecrated Westminster Abbey. Yet this happy precedent did not necessarily augur well. His reign, lasting nine months and nine days, was one of the shortest in English history.

Two threats were raised against his kingdom. One came from the Scandinavian kings of northern Europe, eager to restore Canute’s empire, and the other now came from Normandy, where Duke William seems to have felt himself slighted or humiliated by the choice of Harold as king. It is alleged that, on hearing the news, he was much agitated. He could not sit still. He raged. He was driven by greed and desire for power.

William was a child of violence and of adversity. In his earlier years he was known as William the Bastard, being the illegitimate child of his father’s relationship with the daughter of a tanner. He himself said that ‘I was schooled in war since childhood’, when he succeeded to the duchy at the age of seven or eight. He came to power in a region that was noted for private feud and vendetta with ensuing public disorder. But by force of character he subdued his enemies. He won his first victory on the battlefield at the age of nineteen, and reduced the neighbouring regions of Maine and Brittany to feudal dependency. He was a man of formidable power and ruthlessness, greedy for lands and for money. But he had one great gift; he had the power of command and was able to bend men to his will. If they refused to be persuaded, he broke them.

That is why he was able to recreate the Norman state in his own image. It was still essentially a Norse state, fashioned from the early tenth century when Norwegian invaders forced their way into the territory and were allowed to settle there. The Normans were indeed the North men. They were part of a warrior aristocracy, their culture and society far less sophisticated than those of England. But they were learned in the new arts of war, which the English armies had not yet mastered. Duke William took the disparate regions of his duchy and, through a potent mixture of bellicosity and cunning, forged them into a centralized state under his leadership. He is a pre-eminent example of the ‘strong man’, the maker of the state, who emerges in all periods of the world’s history. He was 5 feet and 10 inches in height (1.7 metres), corpulent by middle age, with a harsh and rough voice. He had enormous strength and physical stamina. It was said that he could bend on horseback the bow that other men could not even bend on foot.

This was the enemy that King Harold most feared. William had no possible claim to the English throne except by right of conquest. And that is what he set out to achieve. It was in many respects a hazardous enterprise. The Normans had no fleet; the ships for the invasion, more than 500, would have to be built. William was also confronting a formidable adversary; the English state was wealthier and more powerful, with the potential of raising far more soldiers for the fight. The fortunes of battle were in any case uncertain, which was why the pitched conflicts of armies were avoided at all costs; it was better to harass, and to ravage, than to rely upon the outcome of one event.

Yet the force of the duke’s will was insurmountable; he persuaded the lords of Normandy, and certain French allies, to follow him across the sea. He promised in return innumerable riches from a country as prosperous as it was fruitful. William also enlisted the help of a higher power. He persuaded the pope to give his blessing to the enterprise, on the dubious grounds that Harold had violated a sacred oath taken in his submission to the duke. The pontiff sent William a ring containing one of the hairs of St Peter. In the same period William placed his daughter, Cecilia, into a nunnery at Caen. He had in effect sacrificed his daughter to God in the hope of a victory, just as Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia before sailing to Troy.

William made preparations for the great fleet to be collected on the Channel coast at Dives-sur-Mer by the middle of June 1066. 14,000 men were summoned for the onslaught. Harold, knowing of the naval threat, stationed his fleet at the Isle of Wight and posted land forces along the Channel coast. Yet the French army was kept in port by contrary winds. On eventually taking sail for England it was blown off course and was obliged to take shelter in the port of Saint Valéry-sur-Somme. There it remained until the last week of September. Never has an invasion been so bedevilled by bad luck, and it must have seemed to William’s commanders that divine help would not necessarily be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Harold waited. For four months he kept his forces prepared for imminent attack. Then on 8 September, he disbanded them. Provisions were running out, and the men needed urgently to return to their farms. He may have been informed of the abortive sailing of William’s fleet and calculated that, with the season of storms approaching, there would be no invasion this year. Soon after his return to London, he learned of a more immediate danger. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, ‘Harald, king of Norway, came by surprise north into the Tyne.’ On 20 September, Harald Hardrada descended upon York. On hearing this unwelcome news Harold mustered his retainers; he marched north very swiftly, riding night and day, picking up local forces as he went forward. The first that the Danish army knew of his arrival was the sight of the dust thrown up by the horses. On 25 September he engaged the enemy at Stamford Bridge where he obtained a complete victory. It was a measure of his competence as a military commander. Harald Hardrada was killed in the course of the battle, marking the end of the Viking interest in England. ‘A great man,’ Harold said of Hardrada, ‘and of stately appearance. But I think his luck has left him.’

Harold’s own luck was soon dissipated. He was, in effect, the last of the English kings. As soon as he had celebrated the victory over the Norwegians, he received news that William had launched his invasion force. The duke had put a lantern on the mast of his ship, leading the way across the Channel. The Norman force landed in Pevensey Bay at nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday, 28 September 1066. It was the most fateful arrival in England’s history. From Pevensey Bay the Normans rowed around the coast to Hastings, which they considered to be more favourable terrain. William built a makeshift castle here, and proceeded to ransack the adjacent villages. But he did not march along the road to London; his position was essentially defensive, close to his ships.

Harold received word of William’s invasion two or three days after the event and immediately marched southward with the core of his army to meet the enemy in Sussex. He acted very promptly, but his troops had just fought an arduous battle in the course of which their numbers had been reduced. Haste may have precipitated defeat. He was hoping, perhaps, to catch the Normans by surprise just as he had surprised Harald Hardrada; he was undoubtedly trying to confine them on the little peninsula of which Hastings was a part. He knew the territory well; Sussex was his native country, and he possessed large estates there. By 13 October he had attained this objective. He had told the local Sussex militia to meet him at ‘the hoary apple-tree’ on Caldbec Hill, but William received word of the forthcoming assault. He was able to lead his forces against an English army that was not properly assembled.

The Norman troops were marched in sight of the English force waiting on Caldbec Hill, the highest ground available; the Normans took up battle order on the southern slope of the hill, in what was theoretically an inferior position. The location of the English, on the summit, was later marked by the high altar of Battle Abbey; they were pressed tightly together, whereas the Normans were in more military formation. The English had some 6,000 or 7,000 men, but they were outnumbered by the Normans. The English were on foot, according to their normal practice, whereas the Normans had a large force of cavalry waiting in the rear.

So battle was joined. The Normans cried out ‘God is our help’ as they ran against the enemy, while the English called upon ‘Christ’s rood, the holy rood!’ William wore sacred relics around his neck. As the Normans advanced upon them, the English put up their shields in order to form a ‘wall’. They were essentially in a defensive formation, and it seemed that they were rooted to the spot. But the Normans had another tactic. On two occasions they pretended to flee from the enemy, only to wheel around and cut off their pursuers. The core of the English army, however, held its ground and fought all day. Then Harold was killed, at dusk, by a stray arrow. With their leader gone, the soldiers weakened. They fled into the night. If Harold had not fallen, his forces might have prevailed. But ‘if ’ is not a word to use in history.

William and his army rested for five days, and then advanced on London by way of Dover and Canterbury. He was now in a foreign country still governed by men who were unwilling to submit to him; he was surrounded by foes. The earls of the northern shires were implacably opposed to him, as were the people of London itself. So he trusted his violent instincts; he took the offensive and began a campaign of terror. He was beaten back at London Bridge, and in revenge he burned Southwark to the ground. He then lit a circle of fire around London, ravaging the countryside all around; he left a trail of destruction and rapine through Hampshire, Surrey and Berkshire. The entries for ‘waste lands’ in Domesday Book tell the story of his progress. The leaders of the English, trapped in London, now agreed to submit. A delegation came to Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire, and formally yielded to his power. The English were accustomed to foreign kings, after all, and the transition from Canute and the half-Norman Edward the Confessor to William was not considered unacceptable. Surrender was preferable to resistance and further bloodshed. With the death of Harold, too, they lacked an effective war leader.

William then led his troops into the capital. There may have been some local resistance among the Londoners, but his victory was complete. He was crowned king of England on Christmas Day in Westminster Abbey. As duke of Normandy, however, he was still in theory a vassal of the king of France. This dual status would bear bitter fruit in the years, and centuries, to come. From this time forward England would be involved in the affairs of France, and of western Europe, with many bloody battles and sieges that did not really come to an end until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

8

The house

The British roundhouse, the Roman villa and the Anglo-Saxon hall – many of them built in the same place through successive centuries – have gone into the earth. A few ruined villas remain as evidence of ancient civilization, but most of them are now part of the land on which they once rested.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the standard house consisted of one square room on the ground floor, with another square room built above it; access to the latter was generally granted by means of an external staircase. The furniture was simple, and scarcely varied at all from that of the Anglo-Saxons. A board laid on trestles acted as a dining table, and a wooden bench was the primary form of seating. In the houses built of stone, alcoves or recesses in the wall could be used for the same purpose. There were very few chairs or stools, except for the chair of state in noble households. Some of the richer families might own chests, coffers and cupboards; the bed was essentially a bag of straw laid upon a carved frame.

Only the wealthy possessed houses of stone with a ‘hall’ on the ground floor. A larger proportion of families owned houses built of wood and thatched with straw or reeds or heather; the windows boasted no glass, but wooden shutters could be barred at night for safety and comfort. Nevertheless the wooden house was always draughty and smoky. It was generally on two floors, like its stone counterpart, with a living room and kitchen on the ground floor; on the upper storey was a bedroom for the master of the house and his family. In the poorer dwellings the inhabitants would sleep on the floor, with heather or straw as their bedding. There might be a wooden booth in front of the house, where goods and produce could be sold; behind the house might be located a warehouse or small factory where those goods were manufactured.

The poorer sort had no such resources, most of them living in huts of wattle and daub that were little different from those of the early Britons. At the level of absolute need, there are no variations. Peasant buildings, in the countryside, had a limited rate of survival; they either crumbled, or were pulled down, within two generations. They rise from the land and return to it. A form of tenure in Hampshire was known as ‘keyhold tenure’; if a person could build a hut or house in one night, and have his fire lit before morning, then his residency was assured.

The style and method of peasant construction survived for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, Thomas Hardy recalled the method of building used in his childhood. ‘What was called mudwall’, he wrote, ‘was really a composition of chalk, clay and straw – essentially unbaked brick. This was mixed up into a sort of dough-pudding close to where the cottage was to be built. The mixing was performed by treading and shovelling – women sometimes being called in to tread – and the straw was added to bind the mass together … It was then thrown by pitchforks on to the wall, where … it was left to settle for a day or two.’ When the fabric had dried and hardened in the sun, the roof was built of thatch. This was the method used by the Britons before the coming of Rome. It was used by the English during the reign of Victoria.

The dimensions of a modest thirteenth-century house are given in a Worcestershire court roll of 1281; it was of one storey, 30 feet long (9 metres) and 14 feet broad (4.25 metres), with three doors and two windows. The windows were on each side, to be left open when a cool breeze blew, but stuffed with straw or fern in inclement weather. The family would have eaten and slept together within the same room. This was not a period in which the private self can be said to exist. A thirteenth-century cottage excavated in Berkshire consisted of one room, 10 by 12 feet (3 by 3.6 metres), and another in Yorkshire had dimensions of 10 by 20 feet (3 by 6 metres). The room was generally open to the roof, with a central hearth. In the longhouses of the same period the rooms were used for livestock as well as people, together with a store of grain. The inhabitants were living and sleeping side by side with their animals.

Houses were lengthened, or rebuilt, or extended, as time and occasion demanded. Certain improvements, from human industry and human ingenuity, were possible. The houses of the eleventh century were made of clay without timber frames; by the thirteenth century most houses were constructed with timber frames and, less than a century later, the walls were being erected on stone bases to curb damp and decay. The beaten-earth floors were generally strewn with rushes that became so moist and dirty that they were known as ‘the marsh’. The first evidence of chimney pots comes from Whitefriars, just south of Fleet Street, in London; in 1278 Ralph de Crockerlane was selling clay chimney pots in that quarter.

Yet the essential structure of the dwelling remained identical for many hundreds of years. The furniture was scanty, household items rudimentary; the spoons and dishes were generally made of wood by members of the family. There might have been a few brass pots and cups. A bed acted in the daytime as a seat. These were bare rooms for bare living. It is surprising, perhaps, that richer and poorer agricultural workers of England tended to live in the same kind of dwelling; whatever their economic circumstances, they reverted to the ancient model. It is another indication of the customary traditions of the countryside. In the larger houses the same identity of purpose can be found, with a central hall flanked by smaller rooms. One gradual change did occur: towards the end of the thirteenth century more provision was made, at least in the larger towns, for adequate drainage and cesspit systems.

Houses from the fourteenth century have survived in far greater numbers than those of any earlier period. They are generally more solid and substantial than their predecessors, and in London they often attained three storeys with a height between 30 and 40 feet (9 and 12 metres). A visitor from the country would have been surprised by these urban ‘skyscrapers’, quite a new thing in England. From the middle of fourteenth-century London, too, come fragments of small yellow bricks. The townhouse of a wealthy merchant from that century was highly decorated, with interiors of colour and of costliness; tapestries, curtains and hangings draped the walls. Tiles, rather than rushes, were laid upon the floors; finely glazed pottery was imported from France and Spain, sparkling glass from Venice and silks from Persia. This was still in great contrast to the rudimentary furnishings of the ordinary English house, but the appetite for luxury and colour slowly spread among the wealthier families. In the fifteenth century inventories of the richer households include such items as cushions and tapestries, painted cloths and carpets, basins and screens, wainscoting and coverings for benches and chairs. The colours would by modern standards of taste be considered inharmonious, with strident yellows and purples and greens placed beside each other. The intended effect was one of brilliancy and vivacity. That is why an image of the sun was sometimes embroidered on cloths and tapestries and articles of dress. In a similar spirit men often wore shoes of different colours. Brick and glass became more common. Open hearths were being replaced by fireplaces.

The objects of medieval life are still recovered from the ground. Traces of wooden stools and of other pieces of furniture, undisturbed for many hundreds of years, have been found at Winchester and Beverley. Two locks were smashed with an axe before being discarded; another lock was repaired by its owner. The vast quantity of medieval locks and padlocks, found within the excavated spaces, suggests a life of threat or at least of suspicion and caution. Medieval life was dominated by the key.

Candlesticks, of lead and copper alloy, have been taken from the earth by archaeological teams. By the fifteenth century these candlesticks have become larger, an indication that candles had increased in thickness. This in turn suggests greater wealth. So from small material details we may be able to reach larger conclusions. Hanging lamps of glass began to take the place of hanging lamps of stone or ceramic by the end of the thirteenth century; oil lamps, in which a wick floated upon a small pool of oil, were being replaced by candles at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Vessels of wood (generally of ash) are to be found everywhere, but glass was becoming popular among the wealthier families by the fourteenth century. There are glass flasks, jugs, and of course glasses. Glass urinals, in which urine was examined for the signs of health or disease, are relatively common.

Other archaeological relics of the dead have been found. A balance to weigh coin had been adjusted to give false readings, but at a later date it was deliberately destroyed; perhaps its owner had then been placed in the pillory. Vessels of copper alloy or of ceramic were often patched up, suggesting how in the domestic economy the cheapest items were valued; cracks in the ceramic surface were sealed with lead. An iron helmet was inverted, supplied with a handle, and turned into a cooking vessel. Spindles are found everywhere. So are needles and thimbles, from an age when both men and women were skilled in sewing cloth and leather. It was a common and necessary household occupation. Many spoons and spoon-handles survive, some of them inscribed with a pattern or mark to indicate ownership; this gives a picture of communal dining. Some vessels have been found bearing the legend CUM SIS IN MENSA PRIMO DI PAVPERE PENSO – ‘When you are at the table, first think of the poor’. A brooch of the thirteenth century has, as its inscription, ‘I am a brooch to guard the breast, that no rascal may put his hand thereon.’ A ring of the fourteenth century has the legend ‘He who spends more than belongs to him, kills himself without a blow.’ Whistles, book clasps, writing implements, hooks, hinges, chests, caskets, leather shoes, are all mute testimony of a forgotten life.

The most commonly found location is naturally that of the ‘undercroft’ or basement. Many of them are lined with chalk or flint, and in some of them the tiles still cover the floor. There is evidence of steps leading from the street, and of small windows on a level with the ground. The life of the past leaves other marks on the earth. A worn floor will trace the path of a door once swinging to and fro. Go in.

9

Devils and wicked men

To the victor came the spoils. William set about ordering his new kingdom. He confiscated the estates of his English opponents, particularly of those who had fought against him at Hastings. Some of the English thegns had fled, and others had gone into exile. Just as Canute had done before him, he raised a large sum with a sudden tax. He was greedy, with the appetite of a conqueror. Another sign of his strength rose upon his new lands. Wherever he went, he planted a castle. One was soon built in London itself, on the site of the present Tower.

He was helped in his enterprise by many survivors of the old regime. William realized, as other foreign conquerors before him, that he needed the experience and knowledge of English administrators. In the first years of his rule he retained the English sheriffs. The monasteries were still being governed by English abbots, despite the fact that two of their number had fought at Hastings. Regenbald, head of the writing office under Edward the Confessor, became William’s chancellor.

Yet others among the English decided to fight. William’s power did not really prevail beyond the southeast of the country, and Harold’s own immediate family established a base in the southwest at Exeter. They took advantage of William’s absence in Normandy to raise the banner of revolt in 1068. The senior protagonist in this affair was Harold’s mother, Gytha, with the assistance of the Irish and perhaps even of the Danes. Gytha was the aunt of the king of Denmark. William realized the gravity of a rebellion that might embroil the whole of northern and western England and, immediately on his return, he took his army to the walls of Exeter. He laid siege to the city for eighteen days, and in the end Gytha made her escape down the river Exe; the citizens then surrendered.

This was only a prelude to a much more significant revolt in the northern counties, when in 1069 the English of that region enlisted the help of the Danes to take York. Memories of the Danelaw were still strong. William marched up the country, planting castles wherever he halted. He did not immediately attack York, but employed the tactics he had used against London three years before; he left a trail of destruction across the surrounding lands. This became known as ‘the harrowing of the north’ and consisted of nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the people and the territory in William’s path. He fell upon them as if in a lightning storm. The men and the animals were killed, the crops destroyed, the towns and villages wasted. All the reserves of food were put to the torch, creating widespread famine; 100,000 people were reported to have died. No cultivated land was left between York and Durham, and a century later the ruins of the destruction were still be to be found. The villages of the region were described in the Domesday Book as ‘waste’. Yet the north would rise against William no more. He had created a desert, and called it peace. William is supposed to have confessed on his deathbed that ‘I fell on the English of the northern shires like a ravening lion.’

In the harrowing of the north William had not behaved as an English king. He had behaved like a tyrant. That is why other local insurrections emerged, and many of the English formed what would now be called guerrilla forces to harass the invaders. 10,000 Normans were attempting to control a country of 3 or 4 million natives, and the only weapons they had at their disposal were those of brute power and terror. Spies and collaborators, punishment beatings and secret murders – the whole panoply of occupation and insurgency – were indispensable. An English chronicler of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the English ‘were groaning under the yoke of the Normans, and suffering from the oppressions of proud lords who did not obey the king’s injunctions’. The Norman lords, in other words, were pushing their power to extremes. So, in the first four or five years of Norman rule, there was talk everywhere of revolt. The English rose against William every year between 1067 and 1070.

One force of rebels has remained notorious because of its association with Hereward. He took refuge in the watery fenland around Ely, from where he launched sporadic but murderous raids against the Normans despatched to capture him. He joined with some Danish forces, who had landed on the coast, to attack Peterborough Abbey ostensibly to save its treasures from the Normans. He and his band were known as silvatici, men of the woods. He was joined on Ely by other leaders of the English revolt, who thus posed a distinct and recognizable threat to William’s regime. For over a year the Norman forces tried, and failed, to dislodge Hereward from the fastness. Some people say that he was compromised by the treachery of the monks of Ely, who pointed to a secret path. It is certainly true that it was only after a prolonged assault, by forces on land and water, that the stronghold was taken and Hereward chased into exile. From this time forward, William appointed only Norman lords and abbots.

The confiscation of land hitherto held by the English was accelerated. It was an accepted principle that, ultimately, the king possessed the entire land of England. It was his realm. William put this principle into practice. By 1086 only two English barons, Coleswain of Lincoln and Thurkill of Arden, survived; they had retained their position only by enthusiastic collaboration with the new regime. The rest of the great estates went to a small number of Norman magnates, who promised in return to provide knights for the king’s service. England had become a militarized state, supporting an army of occupation.

The smaller English landowners may have had a better chance of holding theirestates, but only at a high price. Many of them became tenants on land they had previously owned. Some of them were roughly treated. Aelric had been a free tenant in Marsh Gibbon, Buckinghamshire, but by 1086 he paid rent to a new Norman lord ‘harshly and wretchedly’. It was said by one chronicler in the early twelfth century, Simeon of Durham, that ‘many men sold themselves into perpetual servitude, provided that they could maintain a certain miserable life’. Other Norman families emigrated to this newfound land of opportunity, and the pattern of colonization persisted well into the twelfth century.

Other changes can be documented. Novel forms of building were brought into the English landscape, most notably with the castles and the churches. By 1100 all the English cathedrals were either being rebuilt or newly constructed. They were larger, and more massive, than their predecessors; the nave was longer, and the side chapels proliferated. The Normans built well; they gloried in the strength and power of stone. The great round arches, borrowed from Roman pomp, were a sign of their triumphalism. The massive walls, and the ranges of pillars and arcades, tell the same story. The immensity of Durham Cathedral engulfs the wanderer within a great wilderness of towering stone.

The Norman castles are square masses of masonry, with extraordinarily thick walls and tiny windows. They crush the land beneath them. They are indomitable. They exude an air of gloom and even despair; according to the English chronicler of 1137, they were ‘filled with devils and wicked men’. They were at the same time prisons and fortresses, courthouses and barracks. The English hated them as the strongholds of their oppressors. Yet they are in their own fashion magnificent creations, born out of the will to power and control that the Normans possessed in full measure. It was said in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that William had provided such security in the land that ‘any honest man could travel over his kingdom without injury with his bosom full of gold; and no man dared kill another …’.

The English landscape was changed in other ways. Hundreds of monasteries were planted across the country. Deer parks and rabbit warrens were created. Great swathes of land came under the jurisdiction of ‘forest law’, a Norman invention, whereby all the fruit and the animals of the field became the property of the king. Anyone who hunted a hart, or a hind, was to be blinded; no one was to chase a wild boar or even a hare; no trees were to be felled, and no firewood was to be gathered. The law covered more than forest and eventually one-third of the country became the preserve of the monarch; the whole of Essex, for example, was enclosed. The New Forest, Epping Forest, Windsor Great Park, and the ‘forests’ of Dartmoor and Exmoor are part of that legacy.

Kings have always loved to hunt. It is an aspect of their power. Alfred hunted wild beasts in the same spirit that he hunted the Danes. Hunting was a way of exercising military skills in a peaceful environment. It created a miniature battleground, where every nerve and sinew was tested. It was, for William, also a form of commerce; venison was expensive meat, and a ready supply from his own lands was highly desirable. Hunting was, and is still in the twenty-first century, a royal duty as well as pastime. Yet ‘forest law’ was another hated imposition upon the English, who had treated the produce of the woods and fields as their own. As always, the poor suffered most from the indulgence of princes.

A great division was introduced by language. The tongue of the new ruling elite was Norman French, while that of its subjects was of course still English. It used to be believed that for official purposes French entirely displaced the native language; in fact English continued largely to be used as the language of administrative record, together with Latin. But the use of vernacular French by the leaders of the nation did have other consequences. The problems of pronouncing certain English words, for example, turned Snotingham into Nottingham and Dunholm into Durham; Shipton became Skipton and Yarrow became Jarrow.

By 1110 the number of native names in Winchester had fallen from 70 to 40 per cent; the presence of foreign merchants, attracted by the flourishing English economy, may have played a part here. William even attempted to learn English in order to dispense justice, but it proved too difficult for him. In fact, over the centuries, the language of the law was imbued with words derived from the French – among them ‘contract’, ‘agreement’ and ‘covenant’. The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as ‘Law French’. ‘Master’ and ‘servant’ come from the French. ‘Crime’ and ‘treason’ and ‘felony’ are French, as are ‘money’ and ‘payment’. The language of courtiers was the language of business and of punishment. There was also a difference of appearance between the invaders and the natives; the English wore their hair long, whereas the Normans were short-shaven. But in this, as in so many other ways, the English custom eventually prevailed.

That is why there are so many continuities throughout the eleventh century, untouched by the events on the surface of the time. English law and administration survived intact. William declared that the laws of Edward the Confessor were to be respected, although he effectively reissued the laws of Canute. The Normans had little, or no, written law. They had everything to learn from the English.

The thegns were now to be called knights, but their essential purpose as masters and judges of the land remained the same. The names changed, but the institutions did not. The hundred, and the shire, and the tithing, were intact. The sheriffs remained, too, although the later Norman incumbents may have been more exacting upon their shires. The county courts were conducted in the familiar way. The various privileges and customs of the towns and cities were maintained. Taxes or ‘gelds’ were raised in the same way. The system of military service, for general conscripts, was the same. The makers of the coin of the realm were still English; the Normans did not have the skill or expertise. Writs were issued and composed in the familiar manner. The witenagemot, or parliament of principal landholders, retained its ancient form. Wherever we look, we see signs of continuity. That is the essential feature of England. The deep structure of the country remained intact. William was undoubtedly a strong king who imposed his own strength upon the country, but so were Canute and Athelstan.

Many of the developments that have been described as Norman in fact represented only the acceleration of English custom. Much has been written about Norman feudalism, whereby the nation was bound in a military compact, but most of the constituents of that system were present in England before William’s arrival. The defining principle of feudalism was the act of homage; a man knelt before his lord with his hands outstretched, and the lord took those hands within his. The supplicant, with bowed head and raised hands, resembled a penitent in the act of prayer. He promised to become ‘your man for the tenement I hold of you’ and to ‘bear faith to you of life and members and earthly honour against all other men’ except the king himself. But in England land had always been held in return for military service; the oath may have been different, but the social obligation was unchanged. We know from the English poetry of the eighth century that the lord and his men had always been inseparable. One significant change, however, took place. It had previously been the tradition that, on death, property was inherited by many kinsmen; by the twelfth century, property was bequeathed to a single male heir. All of these things worked together to create the social structure of the country.

An essential part of that structure was the English Church. William introduced a number of Norman reforms, as well as Norman clergy, in order to bring rigour and order to the religious communities of the country. By 1087 only three of twenty-one abbots were English. Not all of the new abbots were sympathetic to their English inferiors. The abbot of Abingdon refused to keep the feasts of certain English saints on the principle that the English were ‘rustics’. At Glastonbury the new abbot used an armed retinue of Norman archers to shoot down his own monks, protesting against the imposition of a new liturgy. Others were more conciliatory. The abbot of Selby helped to build the first stone church for his community. He dressed in a workman’s cowl, and carried on his shoulders the stone and chalk used for the construction; he received his pay at the end of the week, like the other labourers, and then gave it away to the poor.

William also appointed an Italian, Lanfranc, as archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc had resided at the Norman abbey of Bec, and was already well known to the king. He was one of those learned and pious men, like Anselm and Becket after him, who had a deep and lasting influence upon English life. Lanfranc drew up the first principles of canon law, and William conceded that all spiritual matters should be addressed in ecclesiastical courts. It was under the leadership of Lanfranc that the great cathedrals arose. He was also instrumental in bringing monastic discipline to often recalcitrant English monks. In 1076 he decreed that none of the English clergy would be allowed to marry.

The pope had blessed William’s invasion, but the new king was not to be in thrall to the pontiff. He was determined to be the master of all his subjects. Was his office not sacred, too? In a divided papal election no victor was to be recognized in England without the king’s permission. No papal letter could be sent to any of the king’s subjects without his knowledge. No papal legate could enter the country without his approval. It was the king who would sanction the appointment of bishops and abbots. The battles between king and pope, or between king and archbishop, would continue for many centuries with an uncertain outcome; they came to a defining crisis only at the time of the Reformation.

If there is one signal reminder of William’s reign, it is that document originally called ‘The King’s Book’ but more popularly known as Domesday Book because its evidence could no more be evaded than the day of doom. It was a survey of the resources of the realm, unique in Europe but not unusual in England where various national and regional accounts had already been compiled. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle William had ‘deep speech’ with the men of his council and sent officials into every shire to find out ‘what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock, and what it was worth’. The subsequent work was in fact so copious and so detailed, in single columns and double columns of Latin, that it must have made use of earlier records. It comprises two books, one of 475 pages and the other of 413 pages, with some of the capital letters touched with red ink. It describes over 13,000 locations, the vast majority of which survive still. The authors of the Chronicle state that there was not ‘an ox nor a cow nor a pig that was overlooked and not included in the record’. The level of detail is evident in one entry. In Oakley, Buckinghamshire, it was reported that ‘Aelfgyth the maid had half a hide which Godric the sheriff granted her as long as he was sheriff, on condition of her teaching his daughter gold embroidery work. This land Robert FitzWalter holds now.’

The Domesday Book was commissioned by William at Christmas 1085, and was completed a year later; such speed was only possible within an existing administrative system. It was not a Norman, but an English, device. William could not have transferred English land to French magnates, after his invasion, without some existing record of English holdings that has long since been lost. It was in part compiled as documentation and evidence of that transfer, but it was also used as an instrument both for the more efficient raising of taxes and for the more accurate imposition of military service. It seems also to have been instrumental in a fairer distribution of the financial burdens William was placing on the country. He summoned his chief landholders to Salisbury where they swore loyalty to him once more; but now he knew both the extent of their possessions and their annual income. They were reminded that they held their lands directly or indirectly from the sovereign. He was their master. Domesday Book can now be seen in a glass case at the National Archives in Kew.

We learn from its pages that England consisted of arable land (35 per cent), woodland (15 per cent), pasture (30 per cent), and meadow (1 per cent); the rest was mountain and fen and heath and waste and wild. We learn also that the manor, inherited from the Danes and the Saxons, was the foundation of agrarian and economic life. In its essence it meant a dwelling, and in Domesday several manors are often listed in one village; but by this period it had generally come to mean an estate of land or lands in which the tenants were bound by fealty to one lord. The lord’s land was known as ‘demesne’ land; it might be adjacent to the manor house, or it might be scattered in strips among the fields.

The free tenants paid him rent for their acreage, and were obliged to help him at the busy times of harvest; the unfree tenants or villeins performed weekly labour service in work such as threshing and winnowing. The terms of this labour were maintained by tradition. Approximately 10 per cent of the population were deemed to be held in slavery, while 14 per cent were described as ‘free men’; the rest of the population were part of a variable range between the two.

The manor was itself established upon the ancient customs and obligations that bound together a small community. A manor might consist of a village with scattered hamlets, all the inhabitants of which did service to the lord. It might consist of several villages. Whatever its form, it was the linchpin of the social order of England. The local court of justice was the manor court, where every aspect of life was ordered and scrutinized. The paths and hedges had to be maintained, and the rights of cultivation or inheritance supported.

The origins of the manor are still a matter of debate. Was a manorial system imposed upon what was once a freer communal system of agriculture? It is more likely that there were always lords, and that their control over the centuries became more rigorous. Yet no certainty is possible. We must accustom our eyes to the twilight.

Domesday did not of course describe the conditions of actual life in late eleventh-century England. The summer of 1086 was the worst in living memory; the harvest failed and some malignant fever affected half of the English population. ‘The wretched victims had nearly perished by the fever,’ the Chronicle wrote of that year, ‘then came the sharp hunger, and destroyed them outright.’

William himself died in the autumn of 1087. He had been campaigning on the borders of Normandy, during one of his frequent visits to his duchy, where he became gravely ill from heat and exhaustion; when his horse jumped a ditch, his internal organs were in some way ruptured. He was carried to a priory at Rouen, where he lingered for three weeks. When his body was taken to the monastery of St Stephen at Caen for burial the body burst, exuding a foul stench that sent the mourners running from the building. It was, perhaps, a fitting end for one who was already swollen with greed and cruelty. He had a cold heart and a bloody hand.

He bestowed the duchy of Normandy upon his eldest son, Robert; Robert had asked him for it before, but William had replied that it was not his custom to take off his clothes until he went to bed. The dying king left England to God’s mercy and to the care of his second son, William Rufus. To his youngest son, Henry, William left £5,000 of silver as a consolation; Henry carefully weighed it before taking it away. The threefold disposition was a source of much strife and disquiet in subsequent years; the three brothers quarrelled over Normandy, in particular, like children fighting over a piece of pie.

William Rufus held England. William the Red, of red face, of red beard and of red temper, was almost a comic-book version of his father. He was short and thickset, with a protruding stomach; he was very strong but, unlike his father, he was not of forceful address. A medieval proverb might suit some of William’s characteristics. Who ever knew a tall man who was clever, a red-head who was faithful, or a short man who was humble?

When in a passion or in a rage, he stammered or spoke in short sentences. But he possessed more attractive characteristics. He soothed difficult situations with a joke, and liked to outrage the more serious-minded of his clerical advisers with a scandalous or blasphemous remark. This amused his courtiers. His most famous oath was ‘by the face of Lucca’; this was the face of a wooden image of Christ in the church of St Martin in Lucca. He was boastful and ebullient, extravagant and bold; he always appeared to be greater than he was.

In his youth William had been devoted to the interests of his father, believing that this was where his own advantage lay. He stayed in Normandy until he was in his twenties, and so it is very unlikely that he was fluent in English. We may prefer to call him Guillaume le Rouge. He had left his dying father’s side at Rouen, and crossed the Channel in order to claim his kingdom. At the age of thirty-one he was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Lanfranc as William II, apparently on Lanfranc’s own initiative; the archbishop was the most powerful man in England and, as it were, was standing in for God. The coronation liturgy was Anglo-Saxon, but the languages of the service were French and Latin.

The king’s skills were soon tested. He put down a rebellion by some of the Norman magnates of England in favour of his older brother, Robert, by using what was essentially an English army; one chronicler suggests that 30,000 men flocked to his standard, but that may just be a device to convey a large number. Nevertheless Englishmen fought against the rebellious Norman magnates on behalf of their king. National feeling was coming forward once more, and this resurgence of national consciousness is plain in the soldiers’ call on William to win the whole ‘Empire of Albion’.

He answered this call by marching north. In the spring of 1091 Malcolm of Scotland had invaded northern England, hoping to advance his claims to a large part of that territory. As the leader of the southern part of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore, or Malcolm Big Head, had already provoked William I with raids and alarms; eventually he had submitted to the stronger power. Now he was testing his son.

William Rufus moved against him by taking Cumbria, then under the overlordship of Scotland. He captured and refounded Carlisle, settling it with English farming families, and effectively redrew the northwestern frontier of England. It remains the frontier to this day. He found the English settlers among the workers on the royal lands in the south and, unfree as they undoubtedly were, they could only obey the summons. Yet they represent the beginning of English colonialism. In pursuit of the ‘Empire of Albion’, William Rufus had invoked the spirit of English imperialism. He also began the work of conquering Wales that until this time was comprised of warring principalities. That land was planted with castles, as the English moved slowly forward. But they were beset by Welsh rebellion, and in the end William held only Glamorgan and one castle in Pembroke. On the battlefield he never completely failed and never wholly succeeded; but his bravado kept him going.

The king always needed more money, too. He was constantly battling against his enemies – in Scotland, in Wales, in Northumberland and in Normandy. He was most alive in the preparation and prosecution of wars. That was what a king did. When he was about to set sail for Normandy, for another assault upon Duke Robert, a great tempest threatened. But he jumped upon his boat. ‘I never heard of a king being drowned,’ he cried. ‘Make haste. Loose your cables. You will see the elements join to obey me.’

He fell dangerously ill in the early months of 1093 and, in peril of his life, his thoughts turned to God. His religious advisers urged him to repent of, and amend, his sins; it must have been difficult for him to know where to start. He could at least rectify one grave fault at once. After the death of Lanfranc, three years before, he had left vacant the archbishopric of Canterbury so that he himself could enjoy its revenues. With the prospect of hellfire before him, he acted. One outstanding candidate was, fortunately, close to hand. The abbot of Bec, Anselm, was in England on a fraternal visit. He was known throughout Normandy for his piety and learning, albeit disguised by genuine humility.

William summoned him to his bed of illness, and offered Canterbury to him. Anselm refused, on the very good grounds that he did not trust the king and foresaw great difficulties in working with him. William then cried out, according to a monk in the surrounding company, ‘Oh Anselm what are you doing? Why are you delivering me to crucifixion and eternal punishment?’ More was said in that vein. Anselm was still unmoved, and so the king ordered everyone in the chamber to prostrate themselves before the holy man. Anselm in turn fell upon his knees, and begged them to find another candidate for the office.

It was time to resort to force, in a thoroughly medieval way. The courtiers pulled him to the bedside, and gave the king the pastoral staff that was the symbol of office. When Anselm refused to take it, they tried to prise open his fingers. They managed to bend the forefinger, at which he cried out in pain. They placed the staff against his clenched hand, and the office of investiture was read out in haste. Then they all cried out, ‘Long live the bishop!’ Anselm was carried protesting to the nearest church, where what the monk called the ‘appropriate ceremonies’ were performed. It was an unedifying start to what proved to be an unpleasant relationship between the king and the archbishop. As Anselm said at the time, an old sheep was being yoked to an unbroken bull. The king recovered from his illness, and promptly reneged on all the sacred pledges he had made on what he had believed to be his deathbed. What man, he asked, can keep all of his promises?

Anselm had a deep respect for the office of archbishop, which he deemed to be equal in authority to that of the sovereign. Where Lanfranc had believed it to be prudent to avoid antagonizing the king, Anselm had a more delicate conscience. He was also a trained logician, with the habit of rigour and persistence. He lectured the king on his duties, to which William replied in his usual forceful and impetuous manner. ‘I will see to this matter when I think good,’ the king once said to him. ‘I will act, not after your pleasure, but my own.’ On being told that he must rid the nation of sin the king asked him, with a sneer, ‘And what may come of this matter for you?’

‘For me, nothing,’ Anselm replied. ‘For you and for God I hope much.’

‘That’s enough of that.’ The king had spoken.

When the archbishop implored him to fill the vacancies among the abbots, he became very angry. ‘Are not the abbeys mine? You do as you choose with your manors. Shall I not do as I choose with my abbeys?’ When the final parting came, and Anselm was about to leave England as a virtual exile and retire to Rome, the king was still vengeful. ‘Tell the archbishop,’ he said, ‘that I hated him yesterday and that I hate him even more today. Tell him that I will hate him more and more tomorrow and every day. As for his prayers and benedictions, I spit them back in his face.’

The problem was that William would have no rival authority in his kingdom. He spoke disparagingly of the pope as well as the archbishop. It was the endless dilemma of church and state. Clerical rights and royal authority were on occasion opposed one to another. The decrees of the pope were sometimes at variance with the customs of the realm. Did the king have the right to nominate bishops and abbots? Could he dispose of church property if he so wished? Could he refuse a papal legate entry into the country? A further difficulty arose. The archbishop, technically, was a vassal of the king to whom he pledged loyalty; but he was also a servant of the pope. It is sometimes impossible to serve two masters, as the later career of Thomas Becket will reveal.

William Rufus was continually on the move, taking his court with him. The equipment of the larder, the pantry and the buttery was packed into carts and transported wherever the king wished; the hounds were leashed and led forward; the members of the court rode on horseback, followed by ‘parasites’ and prostitutes. It resembled a small army on the march, and was as much feared as an army. The courtiers took, or stole, whatever they needed. They devastated small towns and villages with their exactions. This was the real nature of power in England at this time. It was based on violence and greed.

That court itself was an object of scandal in another sense since it was rumoured that the king’s closest companions were sodomites. It is a practice not altogether unknown among warrior elites; the Spartans are a prime example. So it was not wholly against the Norman ethos. William never married, and had no illegitimate children; it seems likely, in fact, that he was a practising homosexual. He was surrounded by what the chroniclers called ‘effeminates’ with mincing step and extravagant costume; they wore their hair long like women, letting it tumble down in ringlets that had been curled by crisping-irons; the lamps of the court were put out at night so that unnatural sins might be committed under cover of darkness.

William II died in 1100, in as swift and sudden a fashion as he had lived. The story goes that, on the night before his death, he had a dream in which he was being bled by his leeches; his blood surged upwards and covered the sky, turning day into night. He woke up in great fear, and called out to the Virgin Mary; then he ordered lights to be brought into his chamber. There is another story of his last night on earth. The account of a dream or vision, granted to a monk from the abbey at Gloucester, was brought to him. In the monk’s dream the king was seen to attack the crucifix, and gnaw at the arm of Christ; but Christ kicked out at him, and left him sprawling on the ground. It is a vivid image, but not so vivid as to overawe William Rufus. He is reported to have laughed, and ordered that the monk be given 100 shillings.

Another source records that it was the abbot of Gloucester who sent news of the monk’s vision in a letter to the king. William’s response is interesting. ‘Does he think that I act like the English,’ the king is supposed to have asked, ‘postponing their travels and business because of the snores and dreams of little old women?’ The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety; William might very well have made a remark of that kind, with its implicit contempt for his subjects.

He had decided to spend the day of 2 August 1100 hunting in the New Forest, one of the large stretches of land devoted to the king’s sport. As he prepared himself for the hunt, a blacksmith presented him with six arrows; the king kept two for himself and gave four to a companion, by the name of Walter Tirel. He sat down to eat before riding out, and drank more than was good for him. Then he and Tirel set off, separating from the others so that they could shoot at the deer that were being driven towards them. The king shot first, and wounded a stag. Walter Tirel then aimed at a second stag, but by accident hit the king in the chest. William staggered forward, and then fell on the arrow. Tirel, in panic fear, fled from the scene of the king’s death.

That is the accepted version of William’s end. In truth there is no reason to question it. None of the chroniclers seems to doubt that the death was accidental. Hunting accidents happen. Many of the great events of history are simply accidents. But the death of a king arouses suspicions. His younger brother, Henry, was a member of the hunting party. Could he have hoped to succeed to the throne? Or could a foreign court have been at work, using a Norman accomplice? Or was there perhaps some private enemy, taking advantage of the king’s presence in the forest? The ancient philosophers have said that truth lies at the bottom of a well.

There is another, kinder, story about his death. It has been reported that in his final agony he called out for the Eucharist to be administered to him. No cleric, or communion bread, could be found in the forest. So one of the hunting party put flowers and herbs into his mouth, as a form of natural communion.

William’s end forcibly impressed his contemporaries. It made such a deep impression, in fact, that his death is the only event of his reign that has stayed in the consciousness of the English. He had come and gone like the lightning flash. He had behaved as a king. He had exploited the realm entirely for his own benefit, and had attempted to extend it as a measure of his own power. He pushed the boundaries further back. He had achieved very little else but, in a period of factional violence, it was perhaps enough that he had kept the country united – even if it was only united in suffering.

His body, bleeding profusely, was taken in a horse-drawn wagon to Winchester, where the canons of the Old Minster took charge of the proceedings. It was said that his corpse resembled that of a wild boar pierced by a hunter. William Rufus was buried, without much ostentation or show of grief, under the tower. The tower crumbled and collapsed a few years later. A black pillar, known as the Rufus Stone, marked the place in the New Forest where he fell. It still stands.

Some of William’s own monuments also survive him. He completed the White Tower and built Westminster Hall, largely with gangs of pressed labour groaning under the exaction. He rebuilt London Bridge, but a flood washed away much of its structure. Westminster Hall survives, albeit in altered form, as the most appropriate token of William’s might. This dark and solemn building, of thick walls and huge pillars, was unimaginably large to the people of the time. But it was not vast enough for William. When it was finished, he declared that it was not half as great as he had intended. ‘It is’, he said, ‘big enough to be one of my bedchambers.’ Listen to the indomitable arrogance of the Norman kings of England.

The last of them, Henry, came down quickly like a wolf on the fold. As soon as he heard the news of his elder brother’s death, he rode to Winchester and seized the treasury there. Three days later, on 5 August 1100 at the age of thirty-two, he was crowned as Henry I at Westminster. He had been alternately bribed and bullied by his two elder brothers, as they all fought over lordship of Normandy, but the possession of England was a greater benefit. He was more reserved and cautious than William Rufus, and proceeded to handle his prize with circumspection. He was called ‘Beauclerc’ or ‘the good scholar’; he was literate, and spoke Latin. But he also had other accomplishments; he fathered over twenty bastards.

In his coronation charter he promised to undo the wrongs committed by his predecessor. He invited Anselm to return to Canterbury, a polite request that the cleric accepted. He gained the loyalty of the principal magnates by the judicious use of patronage. He extinguished private wars between barons. And he married Edith, the niece of the new king of Scotland; more importantly, perhaps, she was linked by blood with the line of Anglo-Saxon kings and was a direct descendant of Alfred the Great. The Norman dynasty was thereby sanctified in the eyes of the English. She did, however, abandon her English name and was known as Matilda; this was the name of Henry’s mother.

Henry was intent upon consolidating his dominion. Forty years after the Norman invasion and conquest of England, the English invaded and conquered Normandy. Henry led his troops into the duchy and, at the battle of Tinchebray, captured his elder brother; Duke Robert was taken to England, and spent the rest of his life in prison. It was a signal victory for the new king, having reunited the lands of his father. For all but the first two of his thirty-five years as monarch, the country was at peace. He set up a ferry service between Southampton and Dieppe. One other innovation of the realm deserves to be mentioned. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the rabbit was introduced to England.

Henry maintained the borders with Scotland, but did not choose to enlarge them. He built upon his brother’s conquests in Wales by a policy of encouraging Anglo-Norman settlement and of conciliating various Welsh princes; a Welsh chronicler declared that Henry ‘had subdued under his authority all the island of Britain and its mighty ones’. That was not entirely true. The eastern and southern parts of Wales had come under the control of Norman lords, with their panoply of castles and of courts and of burgeoning towns, but the central and northern areas of the country were still governed by the native princes. When many Flemings migrated to the east coast of England, on account of the floods in their own region, the king settled them in Pembrokeshire, where they maintained their own language and culture until the end of the eighteenth century.

He was a strong sovereign, then, but not necessarily a benevolent one. He was concerned only with his own immediate interest, and the government of England became a form of estate management in which all of the available assets of the land were exploited. That was the Norman way. Throughout his reign the monks from Peterborough Abbey lamented ‘manifold oppressions and taxations’. An extraordinary series of bad harvests also undermined the ability of the people to withstand his exactions. ‘God knows’, an Anglo-Saxon chronicler wrote, ‘how unjustly this miserable people is dealt with. First they are deprived of their property, and then they are put to death. If a man possesses anything, it is taken from him. If he has nothing, he is left to perish by famine.’ The king did take care to protect his supporters. When the coinage was debased with tin, Henry’s soldiers complained that their pay was nearly worthless; he ordered that all of the coiners should be castrated and lose their right hands. He cultivated the interests of the magnates, too, by royal gifts and allowances; eulogists duly celebrated the harmony and loyalty of England. The aristocracy, in other words, could always be bribed and bought.

He of course also fostered the interests of his immediate family. He strengthened his authority by an intricate series of marital arrangements whereby his illegitimate daughters became aligned with the various ruling families of Europe. He married his legitimate daughter, Matilda, to the prince of Anjou; from this union a new race of kings would spring.

It was said that he was endlessly inquisitive about the lives of his magnates, and knew of the existence of plots against him before the plotters themselves. He was a man of great natural curiosity, too, and was nicknamed by one of his kinsmen ‘stag foot’; he could determine, from the track of a stag, how many antlers the creature had.

There was one significant event, however, that he could not foresee. It occurred on the evening of 25 November 1120. His sixteen-year-old son and heir, William Adelin, was about to sail from Normandy to England. His party went aboard the White Ship in a festive atmosphere; the presence of an heir apparent always gives rise to gaiety. The crew, as well as the passengers, were drunk. The rowers kept up a frantic pace, but the helmsman was inattentive. The ship rushed on to its fate, and crashed against a large rock hidden just below the waterline. The heir to the throne was drowned, as well as many younger members of the nobility. Only one person, a butcher from Rouen, survived.

A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king’s nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he would be crowned as king of England fifteen years later, it can plausibly be maintained that an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation. Statesmen may plot and plan. Learned men may calculate and conclude. Diplomats may debate and prevaricate. But chance rules the immediate affairs of humankind.

It was said that, after the disaster, Henry never smiled again. But that is a line from a fairy tale. More realistic consequences ensued. The problem of succession, for example, soon became acute. Henry had only one legitimate child, Matilda, and he fathered no other children in the latter years of his reign. No woman had ever sat on the throne of England before, but Henry was not deterred. He gathered the principal barons of the land in Westminster Hall, and ordered them to swear an oath that they would uphold the succession of his daughter. Henry had a voice like thunder, and they quailed before the blast. They duly swore. Yet what was unintended and unforeseen once more came to pass. The perilous consequence of the succession was a long civil war.

While hunting in one of the royal forests of Normandy, the king contracted a violent fever. It was reported that his death was hastened by ‘a surfeit of lampreys’, and indeed he had always liked marine delicacies. In one charter he allowed the bishop of London to take porpoises from the Thames ‘except the tongue which I reserve for myself’. He lay for some days in weakness and confusion; but he confessed his sins, in front of many witnesses, and was given absolution. His body was embalmed but the unfortunate and unskilful embalmer died from the infectious stench that rose from the cadaver; one chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, remarked that ‘he was the last of many whom King Henry had put to death’. The corpse, leaking what was described as black fluid, was eventually taken to Reading Abbey. This was the abbey that Henry had established as a memorial to his son. Its ruins can still be seen.

It is hard to speak of his achievement in any very positive way. He kept the peace in England. He was a good manager of business, and helped to maintain the administration of the country by appointing what were called ‘new men’. These were Norman or Breton clerks ‘of base stock’, according to Orderic Vitalis, whom the king had raised ‘from the dust’ and ‘stationed above earls and owners of castles’. He worked them hard but rewarded them accordingly. They represented a new class of professional administrators or curiales who stayed in one place and who were not part of the itinerant royal household. They were a sign of central administration.

The king always needed to make money, and the intensification of the royal government was essentially another way of increasing his income. Goods, and land, were forfeited to the king. Plaintiffs of every kind could negotiate a fine, by which they purchased royal favour. This is sometimes described by historians as legal reform. One judge from Henry’s own court was very stern with his contemporaries. ‘From the desire of money we become tyrants’, he wrote. ‘Legal process is involved in so many anxieties and deceits that men avoid these exactions and the uncertain outcome of pleas.’ So much for the description of Henry as ‘the Lion of Justice’. The lion’s law was the law of the jungle.

Other means could be found of making money. The exchequer, with abacus beads for calculation and a court for the audit of accounts, became more prominent during Henry’s reign. The money came from taxes and tolls. A rich orphan could be sold to the highest bidder, who then became his or her guardian; a wealthy heiress could be purchased as a bride. It was just a question of seizing the opportunity. ‘The king enquired into everything,’ Orderic Vitalis wrote, ‘and what he learned he held in his tenacious memory.’

As the king, so the age. In the early twelfth century there was a steady increase in what would now be known as bureaucracy, the word coming from the writing desk or bureau. Written documentation now became an essential element in the calculation of revenue and expenditure. The laws, and other formal rules, were written down. The essential movement of the age was towards systematization and centralization. In this period the two central departments of the court, the chancery and the exchequer, emerged in recognizable form. The chancery, staffed by clerics, dealt with manifold aspects of government business from the writing of treaties to the granting of charters. The exchequer was the department in which all of the king’s revenue and expenditure were controlled. So by slow and almost imperceptible means the English ‘state’ was created. No one was interested in creating a ‘state’. No one would have known what it meant. Yet it was the direct consequence of all these disparate activities.

Henry had never really liked or trusted the English. He did not appoint any of them to high office, but relied instead upon his French clerics and courtiers. ‘No virtue or merit could advance an Englishman’, one contemporary wrote. Henry’s son, William, had said that if he ever ruled England he would yoke the English to the plough like oxen. It was perhaps better that he drowned in the Channel. Yet the English had survived, and the slow process of assimilation had already begun. The Norman settlers had indeed settled, and were beginning to refer to England as their true home. A whole world of English song existed. The English monks wrote histories of their foundations and the lives of their local saints.

Another force for the cultivation of England can also be traced. In the early decades of the twelfth century a new order of monks came from France into England. These were the white monks, originally from the abbey of Cîteaux, who were known as the Cistercians. It was part of their unique mission to live far apart from the ordinary habitations of men, and to survive by tilling the soil; the land was supposed to be their sole source of income, and they eschewed all forms of luxury. They were soon established over vast swathes of northern England, where they employed lay brothers as their farm workers. So large tracts of undeveloped country came under the plough. The fens were drained and the forests were cleared; more controversially, however, villages were sometimes destroyed to make way for fruitful fields. The Cistercians soon proved themselves to be excellent sheep farmers, too, and the local economy flourished under their supervision. They became the most significant group of woolgrowers in the country and, despite their profession, they grew rich. That is the story of the Church itself.

10

The road

The ancient roads, the witnesses of prehistoric life and travel, still persisted in the medieval landscape. But they were joined by other highways in the historical period. Many winding lanes between farmstead and farmstead, many sunken hollow-ways leading to the village, deep-set and drowsy on a summer afternoon, were constructed in the twelfth century. It was a great age of building stone bridges that needed roads on either bank, and the growth of towns required the more intensive use of the cart and the packhorse as a means of trade and transport. The ‘Gough’ map, dating approximately from 1360, reveals a network of major roads linking London with the other regions of the country. More small roads and tracks could be found in the thirteenth than in the twenty-first century.

The width for the king’s highways was fixed in the early part of the twelfth century as that which would allow two wagons to pass each other, or for sixteen knights to ride abreast. We might calculate this to be 30 feet (9 metres). They were not all necessarily in good condition, however, and there is evidence of ditches, potholes and even wells dug into the surface. The people were urged as a religious duty to give funds for the mending of ‘wikked wayes’; townspeople and landowners en route were obliged to maintain and preserve the roads of their immediate neighbourhood.

The travellers made use of the inns that had been established along the high roads since the time of the Saxons; the word ‘inn’ is itself of Saxon origin and takes its place beside ‘gest-hus’ and ‘cumena-hus’ as a lodging for tired and dusty patrons. Alehouses were to be recognized by a long projecting pole beside the door, from which a bush was hung. That tradition has continued into the twenty-first century, with hanging baskets of flowers commonly suspended outside public houses.

The most common form of travel was by horse, although the native breeds were not considered to be as sturdy as those from the continent; a white horse was the most prized, followed by a dapple-grey and a chestnut. The roads were not safe from thieves and outlaws, so the travellers would form groups or ‘caravans’ for mutual protection. Even the knights and landowners of the neighbourhood might engage in highway robbery, and it was not uncommon for travellers to be obliged to pay exorbitant rates to cross a bridge or a ford. The members of the group would carry with them flint and steel, in order to prepare a fire, and also the rudiments of bedding in case they could not find accommodation; they also brought with them bread, meat and beer.

A long tradition of hospitality made it shameful to turn a wayfarer from the door. It was the custom that a traveller might stay two nights with a household, sharing its food and its beds, before taking his or her leave. After that time the host became responsible for the stranger’s conduct. It was also customary, on first arrival, for the traveller’s hands and feet to be washed. But there were benefits for the host in the arrangement. Where are you from? What news? What have you seen? In a nation where communication was often slow or nonexistent, the arrival of a stranger was a matter of consequence.

Sometimes only slow progress could be made. The Canterbury pilgrims rode for three or four days before they could cover the 54½ miles (88 kilometres) from London. But there were also ‘pilgrim roads’. One route, from Winchester to Canterbury, has even become known as the Pilgrims Way or what Hilaire Belloc called the Old Road. Pilgrims were the largest and most recognizable of all bodies of wayfarers. They walked or rode to Durham in order to visit the tomb of St Cuthbert; they came to the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster; they travelled to Glastonbury to marvel at the thorn tree miraculously planted there by Joseph of Arimathea; they went to worship the vial of holy blood, a relic of the crucifixion, at Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire; they visited Winchester to pray at the shrine of St Swithin. The woods beside the road to St Albans had to be cleared to accommodate the throng of pilgrims making their way to the shrine of the martyred saint.

The two most prominent sites of pilgrimage were those of Our Lady at Walsingham and of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The road from Newmarket to Walsingham is still known as ‘the Palmers Way’, palmer being another term for pilgrim. It was often crowded with worshippers, and its route was lined with inns and chapels; the town itself was filled to bursting with wayfarers. Many cases of healing were recorded at Canterbury. The diseased limb of a sufferer would be measured with a piece of thread, and a wax replica made of it; this was then brought to the tomb. Many invalids were carried in carts to pray before Becket’s remains, but the saint was also known to cure hawks and horses. The noise in the cathedral was deafening.

The pilgrims of England are long gone, but something of that world persists. Buxton Water is still bottled and purchased in large quantities; those who drink it are part of the same tradition as those pilgrims who in the medieval period bathed in the waters of the holy well of St Anne in Buxton that were deemed to be a sovereign curative.

11

The law is lost

On the death of a king, law was lost. When the king died, the peace died with him. Only on the accession of a new sovereign did law return. Knights fled back to their castles in fear of losing them. It was a question of saving what you could at a time when order was suspended. On receiving the news of King Henry’s death his nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, left France and sailed to England quickly. He rode to London with his knightly followers, and the citizens acclaimed him as their king according to ancient custom. Whereupon he rode to Winchester and claimed the treasury.

As the son of Henry’s sister, Stephen had for a long time been associated with the royal court. He was, after all, the grandson of William the Conqueror. Clearly he considered himself to be Henry’s protégé and, in the absence of any legitimate royal sons, perhaps his natural heir. He persuaded many of the leaders of the kingdom that this was so. One person needed no persuasion. His brother, Henry, was bishop of Winchester. It may even have been he who prompted Stephen’s decision to claim the throne. He entrusted his brother with the keys of the treasury and, three weeks after the death of the king, on 22 December 1135, Stephen was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

The magnates had sworn fealty to the king’s daughter, Matilda, but in truth many of them had no wish to be governed by a woman. No queen had ever ruled in England, and in any case Matilda was known to be of imperious temperament. It was reported with much relief that, on his deathbed, Henry had disinherited his daughter in favour of his nephew. The report may not have been true, but it was highly convenient.

So Stephen was set for a fair start. He was not treated as a usurper, but as an anointed king. He also had the immense advantage of a well-stocked treasury, amassed through Henry I’s prudence in years of peace. The money allowed him to recruit large numbers of mercenary troops with which to defend his lands in France and the northern frontier with Scotland. The king of Scotland, David, claimed the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland as part of his sovereign territory; he was inclined to demonstrate the fact by marching south. At the battle of the Standard in 1138, named after the fact that the banners of three English saints were carried to the scene of combat, Stephen’s army under the leadership of northern lords defeated the Scots. A chronicler, John of Worcester, rejoiced that ‘we were victorious’; the use of the first person plural here is significant. The English were coming together.

But the money began to run out. Stephen had been too generous for his own good. A poor king is a luckless king. He debased the currency, to pay for his troops, but of course the price of goods rose ever higher as a result. Then, in the autumn of 1139, Matilda arrived to claim her country. In her company was her bastard half-brother, Robert, whom the late king had ennobled as earl of Gloucester. This was a war between cousins that became also a civil war. Matilda was strong in the west, particularly around Gloucester and Bristol, while Stephen was dominant in the southeast. In the midlands and in the north, neither party was pre-eminent. In those regions the local magnates were the natural rulers.

The instinct of the Anglo-Norman lords was for battle; like the salamander, they lived in fire. William I had realized that, and had ruled them like a tyrant. He had said that his lords were ‘eager for rebellion, ready for tumults and for every kind of crime’. They needed to be yoked and held down. Norman kings had to be strong in order to survive. But Stephen was not strong. By all accounts he was affable and amiable, easy to approach and easier to persuade. More damning still, he was lenient towards his enemies. There could be no greater contrast with the kings who had preceded him. He surrendered to the pope the power of appointing abbots and bishops; he also agreed that the bishops should wield power ‘over ecclesiastical persons’. At a stroke the prerogative of kings was diminished. He struck bargains with his great lords that rendered him merely the first among equals.

The barons knew well enough that loyalty and discipline had been undermined by the arrival of Matilda. Here was a welcome opportunity to extend their power. Their castles were further strengthened, and became the centres of marauding soldiers. For the next sixteen years, neither peace nor justice was enjoyed. Private wars were conducted between magnates under the pretence of attachment to Stephen or Matilda. Skirmishes and sieges, raids and ambushes, were perpetrated by the armies of the two rivals. Churches were ransacked, and farms were pillaged. Battles between towns, as well as between barons, took place. The men of Gloucester, supporting Matilda, marched upon Worcester and attempted to put the town to the torch. They also took prisoners, leashing them together like dogs, while most of the people of Worcester took refuge with their belongings in the cathedral.

A brief chronology of warfare can be given. The arrival of Matilda in England had not created any overwhelming enthusiasm for her rule; the barons of the west largely supported her, but her principal ally was still her bastard half-brother. Robert of Gloucester became the leader of her army of mercenaries. Her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, was detained by wars of his own.

After her landing at Arundel in 1139 numerous small battles erupted in the western counties, such as Somerset and Cornwall, with castles being taken and recaptured. Sporadic fighting continued in the following year, with incidents occurring in regions as various as Bristol and the Isle of Ely, but without any definite victory or defeat. The great lords of England were confronted with a situation of insidious civil war without precedent in English history; some took advantage of the chaos, while others were no doubt anxious and dispirited. Stephen was widely regarded as the consecrated king, and there seems to have been no great popular support for Matilda’s title; even her supporters were instructed to style her by the essentially feudal name of domina, or ‘lady’, rather than queen. Stephen himself was possessed of remarkable stamina, moving across the country almost continually, but his progress was abruptly curtailed when he was captured at Lincoln in the beginning of February 1141.

He was taken prisoner and confined to a dungeon in Bristol; a few weeks later, Matilda was hailed as ‘lady of England’. She was never crowned. Nevertheless this was a disturbing moment for those who believed in the sacral role of kingship. No king of England had ever before been imprisoned in his own country. Matilda herself became more vociferous and imperious in her triumph, demanding money and tribute from those whom she believed to be her defeated adversaries. She was admitted into London reluctantly, its citizens having been enthusiastic supporters of Stephen, but she proceeded to alienate the Londoners still further by angrily asking for money. A few days after her arrival in the city, the bells of the churches were rung and a mob descended on a banquet at Westminster where she was about to dine. She took horse and rode precipitately to Oxford. It was one of her many fortunate escapes. On one occasion she retreated from the castle at Devizes in the guise of a corpse; she was wrapped in linen cerecloth, and tied by ropes to a bier. Subsequently she was besieged in the castle at Oxford on a winter’s night; she dressed in white, and was thus camouflaged against the snow as she made her way down the frozen Thames to Wallingford.

Despite Stephen’s capture his army, under the nominal command of his wife, took the field. Matilda retreated further and further west. Many of her supporters fled for their lives. But Robert of Gloucester was captured in the same year as Stephen. He was the unofficial leader of Matilda’s forces, and it seemed only natural that he should be freed in exchange for the king. So Stephen was released and reunited with his kingdom. There resumed the deadly game of chess, with knights and castles being lost or regained. War continued for twelve more years.

Some parts of the country suffered more than others. A monk of Winchester describes the effects of famine, with villagers eating the flesh of dogs and horses. Another monk, from the abbey at Peterborough, reports in some detail the depredations of the lords of the castles; they taxed the villages in their domains to such an extent that the villagers all fled leaving their fields and cottages behind. Yet the actual incidents of violence were local and specific.

This short period has been called ‘the Anarchy’, when Christ and his saints slept, but that is to underestimate or altogether ignore the underlying strength of the country. The administrative order of the nation, built over many hundreds of years, remained broadly intact. The walls of most of the towns were fortified in this period, but urban activity continued as before. It is even more surprising, perhaps, that in the years of Stephen’s rule more abbeys were built and founded than at any other period in English history. The Cistercians continued to flourish. The tower of Tewkesbury Abbey and the choir of Peterborough Cathedral were completed in the years of warfare.

War itself was not incessant. All hostilities were suspended in the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent. While Matilda’s mercenaries and the Anglo-Norman barons fought one another, the English people for the most part went about their business. Of course there were casualties and victims of civil war, adumbrated by the monks of Peterborough and Winchester, but there is no need to draw a picture of universal woe and desolation. It is perhaps worth recording that in the years of ‘the Anarchy’, the umbrella was introduced into England. It has outlived cathedrals and palaces.

One singular change was wrought by the intermittent warfare. The king no longer trusted the centralized bureaucracy established by Henry I, and he arrested its leading members in the persons of the bishops of Salisbury, Ely and Lincoln. He may have believed that they had secretly taken the side of Matilda and Robert of Gloucester. He also captured their castles; in this world bishops owned castles, too. Then in difficult and unusual circumstances, by instinct or design, he reversed the policy of the former king and devolved much of his power. He created earls as leaders for most of the counties; they were charged with political and military administration of their territories, and represented the king in all but name. There is in other words nothing inevitable in the growth of the English state; what can be proposed can also be reversed. That is why, on his accession, Henry II determined that he would return to the principles of his grandfather. He was a strong king, and therefore a centralist.

In 1147, at the age of fourteen, he had come to England as Henry of Anjou. He commanded a small army of mercenaries, ready to fight for Matilda’s claim, but he did not materially benefit his mother. He was defeated at Cricklade, by the Thames, and in a characteristic act of generosity Stephen himself helped him to return to Normandy. In the final years of the conflict it was apparent to everyone that Stephen was the victor, but it was also agreed that Henry of Anjou was his natural and inevitable successor. The magnates of the land were now largely supporting his claims.

So with the aid and entreaty of prominent churchmen, an agreement was drawn up at Winchester in 1153; it was settled that Stephen would reign, but that he would recognize Henry as his heir. Henry gave homage to Stephen, and Stephen swore an oath to maintain Henry as son and successor. The custody of the important castles – Wallingford, Oxford, Windsor, Winchester and the Tower – was secured, and the pact was witnessed by the leading barons on both sides of the dispute. Matilda retired to Rouen, where she devoted her remaining years to charitable works. Sixteen years of largely futile struggle had finally been resolved. The fighting was worse than useless. It had solved nothing. It had proved nothing. In that sense, it is emblematic of most medieval conflict. It is hard to resist the suspicion that kings and princes engaged in warfare for its own sake. That was what they were supposed to do.

Stephen had sworn that he would never be a dethroned king, and indeed that fate was averted. Yet he did not enjoy his unchallenged royalty for very long. He began the process of restoring social order but, less than a year after the signing of the treaty at Winchester, he succumbed to some intestinal infection; he died in the Augustinian priory at Dover on 25 October 1154. It is possible that he was carried off by poison. There would have been many longing for his death and the rule of a young king, including the young king himself. The life and death of monarchs can be stark and dangerous.

12

The names

The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William. A feast was held in 1171, celebrated by 110 knights with the name of William; no one with another name was allowed to join them.

When Henry I married Edith of Scotland, she was called ‘Godgiva’ as a joke by his compatriots. It was a parody of an English name, both awkward and archaic. A boy from Whitby, at the beginning of the twelfth century, changed his name from Tostig to William because he was being bullied at school. The serfs and villains kept their ancient names for longer, and a record from 1114 reveals the workers on an estate as Soen, Rainald, Ailwin, Lemar, Godwin, Ordric, Alric, Saroi, Ulviet and Ulfac; the manor was leased by Orm. All these names were soon to be gone. By the first quarter of the thirteenth century the majority of the people of England had new names, many of them taken from the Christian saints of Europe whose cults were spreading through the land. So we have Thomas and Stephen, Elizabeth and Agnes.

The Normans also gave to the English the concept of the inherited surname that came to define a unified family and its property. It generally invoked a place, or piece of territory, owned by that family. Yet there was no very strong tradition of inherited surnames before the fourteenth century. Only very distinguished families had a distinctive name. Instead a person would be given a tag by which he or she would be identified – Roger the Cook, Roger of Derby, Roger son of William. Names were also often used to describe the peculiarities of the individual, such as Roger with the Big Nose or Roger the Effeminate. Mabbs was the daughter of Mabel, and Norris was the female child of a nurse.

Even the occupational names might be changed. In 1455 Matthew Oxe, on gaining his freedom from servile work, changed his name to Matthew Groom. Some ancient names survive still. So we have Cooks and Barbers and Sawyers and Millers and Smiths and Brewers and Carpenters in all of the directories.

13

The turbulent priest

So the son of Matilda, Henry of Anjou, was crowned as Henry II on 19 December 1154. He was the first Angevin king of England. His father, Geoffrey of Anjou, was also known as Geoffrey Plantagenet; this was because he wore a sprig of yellow broom, or planta genesta, when he went riding. From this little sprig grew a great dynasty that endured for more than 300 years; all of the kings of England, from Henry II to Richard III, were Plantagenet until they were supplanted by the Tudors. It was said that the family was the scion of Satan himself, and that one of the early countesses of Anjou was a daughter of the devil who fled shrieking from the sight of the consecrated host. When St Bernard of Clairvaux first saw the young Henry, he is reported to have been filled with dismay and to have said that ‘from the devil they came, and to the devil they will return’. There is much in English history that might confirm the suspicion.

Henry II was twenty-one when he was crowned. His early life had been one of battle and mastery. He became duke of Normandy at the age of sixteen and two years later, on the death of his father, he also became count of Anjou. He then married Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, and thereby became the duke of that province. He now owned a large part of France, even though he was technically subject to its king. When he ascended the throne of England, he boasted mistakenly that he had acquired an empire greater than that of Charlemagne three centuries before.

Yet he had inherited a troubled country, recovering its political balance after sixteen years of intermittent civil warfare. He was only one quarter Norman, but he had a Norman sense of authority. He wished to manifest his will by imposing order. He demanded obedience. He forced many of the great magnates to give up castles and estates that he deemed to be his property; he drove the earl of Nottingham out of the kingdom; he levelled all of the castles that had belonged to Stephen’s brother, the bishop of Winchester. In curtailing or arresting the power of individual barons, he tilted the balance of the country towards a strong central monarchy. He ordered out of the kingdom the mercenaries who had been hired by both parties during the civil wars; if they did not leave by a certain date, they were to be arrested and executed. They disappeared swiftly and suddenly.

In 1157 King Malcolm IV of Scotland came to terms with the resurgent king; he did homage for his southern lands, bordering on England, and he surrendered Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland that he had dominated in the uncertain reign of Stephen. Malcolm was sixteen, and Henry still just twenty-four. This was a world for young men. Henry then proceeded against Wales, and its princes tendered their homage to him. He also devised grand plans for the invasion of Ireland. He managed all this without ever fighting a formal battle. His genius, instead, lay in the siege and capture of castles.

He was restless by temperament, and impatient of any restraint; he never could sit still, and even when attending Mass he fidgeted and conversed with his courtiers. He always had to be in movement or in activity, even if the activity consisted of gambling or disputation. He often ate his food standing up, so that he might be more quickly done with it. He was stocky and strong, with the look of a huntsman or of a soldier. He had a florid complexion that burned brighter when he was vexed. Yet he was readily approachable, and there are accounts of his modest and benign demeanour when surrounded by throngs of his beseeching subjects. Some of them caught him by the sleeve, in their urge to speak to him, but he never lost his good humour. His jester was known as ‘Roland the Farter’, and ‘every Christmas he used to leap, whistle and fart before the king’.

There is one story that illuminates the happier side of his character. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln had been summoned by the king to explain why he had excommunicated a royal forester. Henry was so incensed that he ordered his courtiers not to notice or greet the bishop on his arrival. Hugh of Lincoln was therefore met with silence and indifference. Nevertheless he eased himself into a position close to the king. Hugh watched his sovereign as he took up a needle and thread to stitch a leather bandage on a finger he had injured; Henry was always careless of his person. Then Hugh suddenly remarked, in French, ‘How like your cousins of Falaise you look’. At which remark the king collapsed in laughter, and started rolling on the ground. The ‘cousins of Falaise’ were related to the illegitimate William the Conqueror; they were well known as lowly leather-workers in that Norman town. The king had seen the joke about his bastard great-grandfather.

In matters of state he was always cautious and circumspect; contemporaries relate that he was a very good manager of business, and that he had an excellent memory for facts and for faces. These were now necessary qualities for any sovereign. His principal purpose was to maintain and organize his empire, and for that it was necessary to be a master of calculation. That is also why he took care never to reveal his feelings, except to those most intimate with him; he needed to remain inscrutable to achieve his ends. Yet, in matters of high policy, he often broke his word.

The year after he had reduced the magnates to submission, he sailed to Normandy where in similarly determined spirit he seized control of his dominion. He took with him his young chancellor. Thomas Becket was a close companion, a friend as well as a counsellor. One of the king’s secretaries, Peter de Blois, wrote that ‘if the king once forms an attachment to a man, he seldom gives him up’; yet that admirable fidelity was tested to breaking point with Becket. It would need a muse of fire adequately to describe their relationship.

Becket was a Londoner, of Norman blood, who was quickly singled out for royal service. He was witty and fluent, serious without being scholarly. More importantly, perhaps, he had a very firm sense of his own dignity and importance. He had come to the attention of the king through the agency of the archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, who had already learned to appreciate the young archdeacon’s formidable skills as clerk and adviser. Becket soon found himself in the sun of the king’s favour, and as chancellor quickly became indispensable. He was one of those men, like Wolsey after him, who resolve the cares of the sovereign while never encroaching on his majesty. Henry disliked the formal and ritual panoply of kingship, preferring instead sudden judgment and quick action; so Becket became the orator and the ambassador, gladly embracing all the matters of state that the king found unpalatable.

When Becket travelled, he travelled in procession. On a diplomatic visit to Paris, in 1158, he was preceded by 250 foot soldiers and surrounded by an escort of 200 knights and squires. His private wardrobe contained twenty-four changes of silk robes. When three years later Henry mounted an expedition to take the city and region of Toulouse, close to his lands of Gascony and Aquitaine, Becket led his own force of 700 knights.

Shortly afterward, the king proposed that he become archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Theobald. The king himself was not especially pious. He wanted a compliant churchman, effectively just an extension of his own power, and he considered Becket still to be a royal servant and adviser. In this, however, he was mistaken.

The character of Thomas Becket has always been the subject of controversy. His reputation as saint and martyr has, as it were, preceded him. He was a man always willing to play the part. Like a later English saint and martyr, Thomas More, he was always on stage. He took off the twenty-four changes of silk robes, and put on a shirt of sackcloth filled with lice. He lived on bread and water muddied with dirt. In that respect, opposites yoked violently together within one man, he was profoundly medieval. He was also proud, and stubborn, and excessively self-righteous.

As soon as he became archbishop, in 1162, he confronted the king. He refused to allow the sheriffs of Canterbury to send money to the royal treasury; then he challenged the king’s decision that churchmen, found guilty in the clerical courts, should be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. ‘You do not’, he said, ‘have the power to command bishops.’ But that was precisely what the king wished to do. He was resolved to restore royal authority over the English Church in the style of the Norman kings. They had withstood papal intervention in the affairs of England, and a papal legate could only enter the country at the king’s invitation. The behaviour of Becket, as the agent of the see of Peter, incensed him. Henry did not contest the sacred authority of the Church, but he was determined that it would not encroach upon the rights and duties of the throne.

His anger, once roused, was formidable. Anger was a speciality of the Angevin dynasty, a black and ferocious force that could destroy anything in its path. One courtier recorded an incident when ‘the king, flying into his usual temper, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and sitting as it might be on some dungheap started chewing pieces of straw’. This was the man who became the mortal enemy of Thomas Becket. The king was determined to ruin him.

At the beginning of 1164 the king and his advisers drew up a statement of sixteen clauses, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, in which royal power was asserted against the interests and demands of the pope. Becket first agreed to the proposals, thus seeming ‘to perjure myself’, but then retracted his consent; he refused to sign the document. In the autumn of this year the king called a council at Northampton, with the bishops and great lords of the realm in attendance. Becket was now charged with contempt of court and fined, but the king had prepared furthermeasures. Becket was ordered to account for all the revenue that had passed through his hands as chancellor as well as other sums of money for which he was deemed to be responsible. Henry allowed him no room for manoeuvre. Becket then made an entrance. He rode into the courtyard of the council chamber at Northampton, wearing his robes of office and bearing a large cross in his hands.

The story has become well known, and may have been elaborated in the telling. Some of the bishops came up to him as he dismounted from his horse, and tried to take the cross from him. ‘If the king were to brandish his sword,’ one of them said, ‘as you now brandish the cross, what hope can there be of making peace between you?’ ‘I know what I am doing,’ Becket replied. ‘I bear it for the protection of the peace of God upon my person and the English Church.’ Then he walked into the chamber, where he forbade the bishops to deliver any judgment against him. The king asked the lords alone to pronounce sentence against the archbishop. Becket refused to listen. ‘Such as I am,’ he told them, ‘I am your father, while you are magnates of the household, lay powers, secular persons. I will not hear your judgment.’ He swept out of the chamber, cross in hand, with loud cries of ‘Traitor!’ following him. Soon after, he fled the country in disguise.

He made his way to Sens, where Pope Alexander III held his court in exile, and flung himself at the feet of the pontiff. In the course of a long address, in which he denounced the arrogance and impiety of the king in attempting to destroy the powers of the Church, he adverted to his own role as archbishop. ‘Though I accepted this burden unwillingly nevertheless it was human will and not divine will that induced me to do so.’ He was blaming Henry. ‘What wonder, then, it has brought me into such straits?’ Weeping, he took the ring of office from his finger. ‘I resign into your hands, Father, the archbishopric of Canterbury.’ Some of the cardinals present hoped that the pope would put the ring in his pocket; they did not want to be at odds with the king of England. But Alexander III returned the ring. ‘Receive anew at our hands,’ he told Becket, ‘the cure of the episcopal office.’

Henry, cheated of his prey, reacted with predictable fury. Unable to touch Becket, he reached for his men in Canterbury. Their lands were seized and their relatives were laid ‘under safe pledges’; they were evicted from their houses and made hostage to the royal will. The first act of the drama was over.

Henry II did not speak English, employing only French or Latin. That is perhaps appropriate for a sovereign who spent only one third of his reign in England; the rest of the time was passed in Normandy or in other parts of France. He was born at Le Mans and died at Chinon; both towns were part of his original patrimony, and he was most deeply attached to the land of his father. He wore the short coat of Anjou rather than the long robe of Normandy. The Angevin Empire was in essence a private fief. Henry had no ‘foreign policy’ except the pursuit of his own interest and advantage. In this he was not unlike every other sovereign of the period.

It is a tribute to the skills of his administrators that England remained without turbulence in the long periods of his absence in France; it is yet another manifestation of the deep strength of the governance of the country. The key lay in efficient management or, rather, in efficient exploitation. Various taxes and impositions were variously raised; but these scutages and tallages and carucages are now the domain of the lexicographer rather than the economist. It is sufficient to say that the king’s power was not in doubt. In 1170 he dismissed all of the twenty-three sheriffs of the kingdom, made them submit to an inquest, and reappointed only six of them. That could not have happened in the reign of Stephen.

In fact the prosperity of the country, insofar as it can be estimated, increased during Henry’s reign. By the end of the twelfth century 150 fairs, as well as 350 markets, took place throughout the country. The first windmill was constructed in Yorkshire in 1185. The first church spires, now so familiar a feature of the English landscape, were rising in the limestone belt of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. The use of horses, rather than oxen, quickened the pace of agricultural activity. English wool and tin were much in demand.

The English village was also thriving. It was, as we have seen, a very ancient construct, but it was also susceptible to change. By the eleventh century the essential structure was that of church and manor house, with a row of small dwellings for the dependent population who worked on the manor farm in exchange for land of their own. Around the village lay the open fields. In the twelfth century, however, new villages were planned and laid out by the lords of great estates. New labour was introduced onto the land; markets and trading areas were created. The houses of the labourers were often planned around a small rectangular green, where livestock might graze; each dwelling had its own garden.

The records of the manorial courts of the twelfth century are filled with the daily life of the village. A shoemaker, Philip Noseles, is arrested because of his persistent habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of neighbours; a woman named Matilda is taken to court for breaking down hedges; Andrew Noteman dragged the daughter of Roger the thatcher out of her cottage by her ears; Matilda Crane has the habit of stealing chickens and is to be barred from the village; a couple accused of fornication were told that they must marry if they repeated the offence.

The origins of many villages lie in prehistory, and their life was deeply imbued with custom and the tenacious observance of tradition. In one document a young man is described as being ‘of the blood of the village’, emphasizing the presence of distinct kinship ties. Collective rituals also persisted for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Until quite recent times, in the village of Polperro in Cornwall, it was customary to wheel a ‘mock mayor’ down to the sea and there dip him into the water. At the village of Holne, in Devonshire, a ram was tied to a great stone pillar in the middle of a field where its throat was cut by a band of young men.

The villagers sowed wheat and rye, barley and oats; they reared horses and pigs and cattle; they brewed ale. Some of the freeholders fell into debt, and were forced to sell land; some of them exchanged lands. Village officials were elected every year, either by the lord or the villagers themselves, to take care of such duties as the collection of fines. A common shepherd was employed for the flocks of all the families. It was a stratified but highly cohesive society that depended upon communal agreement in all the principal areas of agricultural life. It was also a society partly established upon mutual help. Yet how much of the material wealth of the nation reached the lowest classes of farmers and labourers cannot be known. History has always ignored the poor.

The number of new towns was growing very rapidly, in the same period, as the economic life of the country quickened; in the forty years between 1191 and 1230 some forty-nine new towns were planted. These were generally planned by a great lord who wished to create a market for the surrounding countryside. He then collected rents and taxes, making money far in excess of the amount to be gained from land devoted to agriculture. The bishop of Lincoln, for example, laid out a street of shops and houses beside a small village; he then diverted the principal road towards it. So was created the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire. Leeds was conjured into being in 1207 when the lord of the manor of Leeds, comprising a small village, planned thirty building plots on either side of a new street just beside a crossing of the river Aire. These were profitable investments, and a measure of their success can be found in the fact that after 900 years they still flourish. Somewhere beneath the modern foundations lie the bake-houses, the latrines, the taverns and the prisons of the early thirteenth century.

Many of these new towns were built by the command or recommendation of the king, and were known as royal boroughs. The same imperative of profit applied. Thus in 1155 the king decreed that at Scarborough ‘they shall pay me yearly for each house whose gable is turned towards the street fourpence, and for those houses whose sides are turned towards the street, sixpence’.

The older towns, with their foundations in the first century and perhaps even before, continued to expand. They were becoming more self-aware. Their walls were strengthened and dignified; Hull, for example, built the first surrounding wall made entirely out of brick. The association of the leading townspeople, with the mayor as their chief officer, became known as communia or communa. In 1191 the system of mayor and aldermen was established in London. The leaders of the towns began to resent external interference; the aldermen of London, for example, were quite capable of defying the royal court at Westminster.

The leaders of the towns built walls and gates, with main streets leading directly to the market area. The same trades, such as shoemaking and bread-baking, had a tendency to congregate together. Certain towns were already identified by their principal commodity, so that we hear of the russet cloths of Colchester and the soap of Coventry. The Knights Templar established a town in Buckinghamshire which they named as Baghdad, hoping to create in imitation a great market there; it is now known more prosaically as Baldock. ‘Fairs’ were instituted at Boston and Bishop’s Lynn, Winchester and St Ives. In the larger towns, an entire street might be devoted to a single trade. The population was growing along with everything else. By the late twelfth century London numbered 80,000, while Norwich and Coventry each harboured 20,000 inhabitants.

The original outline of Stratford-upon-Avon, planned by the bishop of Worcester in 1196, is still visible in the modern streets; houses still stand on the plots where they were sited by the bishop; many of the names of the streets have also survived. A female huckster of the thirteenth century would still be able to navigate the roads of the town. Even a great city such as London still bears the traces of its origin.

The traders of these towns, old or new, helped to develop guilds that enforced standards; these guilds merchant, as they were called, prospered to such an extent that eventually they took over the administration of most of the towns. The guilds had a long existence, dating back to the ninth and tenth centuries, but in their original incarnation they were ‘friendly societies’ of a pious nature; they prayed for the souls of their dead brethren, and supported their members in case of dire need.

Members of the same trade naturally tended to join the same guild; so economic, as well as spiritual, interests played a part. They became organized. They laid down standards of business and manufacture. They refused to allow outsiders to participate in their ‘mysteries’ and instead set up a rigid system of apprenticeship. They had once met in the churchyard or in the town hall, but by the end of the twelfth century many of them had acquired imposing premises of their own commonly known as the guildhall.

Yet they retained their pious endeavours, collecting for charity and for the expenses of death; many of them maintained a chapel, or at least an altar light, at their nearest church. They built bridges and roads, although the improvement of transport was perhaps a matter of self-interest. The craft guilds were also responsible for the sequences known as miracle or mystery plays that were the most important aspect of English drama in the age before Shakespeare. This concatenation of religious, social and economic power is thoroughly medieval.

So the long period in which towns prospered, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was also one in which the sense of urban community was most highly developed. In some respects the notion of a community is specious, however, since the richer townspeople known as ‘the better sort’ created an oligarchy of power concentrated in a small network of families. In Norwich 60 per cent of the wealth had devolved into the hands of 6 per cent of the population. These were the men who would serve as jurors in the town court and who took up the offices of the local administration. Nevertheless a feeling of common interest was aroused in the maintenance of newly acquired privileges and traditions. In the Commune of London, forged at a time when mutual antagonism between merchants and craftsmen was intense, the voices of the citizens could still be heard shouting ‘Ya Ya!’ or ‘Nay Nay!’ in their assemblies.

This sense of corporate identity was strengthened by the belief that towns were areas of relative freedom. The people who gathered there were drawn together in a commercial pact, and were not subject to the rules of labour service that obtained in the countryside. By the early twelfth century it was established that if a villein resided in a town for a year and a day, he acquired his freedom. The air of the town was different.

We may envisage wooden houses and wooden shops, with vacant plots between them where the hens scratched and where the small horses of the period were tethered. Many of the wooden houses were of two storeys, with the shop on the ground floor and the living quarters above it. Permanent shops were erected, but stalls could be set up and taken down from day to day. In any town perhaps two or three stone houses were owned by the richer merchants.

In Chester a wooden footway was raised above the street of beaten earth so that it became a ‘first floor’ sheltered by the houses above; from there, the pedestrians could ‘window-shop’. In the towns of England dirt and refuse were scattered everywhere, partly scavenged by pigs and kites. The streams running above ground were often filthy with industrial waste and excrement. The noise of bargaining, and of argument, was intense. It was busy, always busy, with the particular stridency and excitability of the medieval period in England.

How much the king’s advisers revised the administration of justice, and how much was Henry II’s own contribution, is a nice question. It is reported that he spent many sleepless nights debating with his advisers over points of law, but that may be a pious fiction. It is undoubtedly true that in the course of his reign the rule of law was amplified in England; one of his contemporaries, Walter Map, noted that the king was ‘a subtle deviser of novel judicial processes’. He decreed, for example, that royal justices should make regular visits to the shires and take over legal business previously reserved for the sheriff or the county justice. Six groups of three judges each toured between four and eight counties so that the whole country came under their purview. They were based at Westminster, but the central administration was reaching out.

Their activities were of course designed principally for the king’s own profit, as he gathered up fines and other payments; it was well known that the royal courts loved money more than justice, and the king expected ‘presents’ at every stage of the judicial proceedings. A wealthy man, accused of a crime, would offer a large sum ‘for having the king’s love’. In a rough and violent society, it was considered to be perfectly natural. You paid money to see a doctor. You paid money to see a judge. Law was another form of power. It was just becoming swifter and more efficient.

But acts of expediency sometimes have unintended consequences. The imposition of uniform royal justice over the country laid the conditions for the development of common law. National law took precedence over local custom. When law became uniform, it could indeed eventually become ‘common’ to all. Phrases were employed that emphasized this theory of ius commune; ‘as the custom is in England’ or ‘according to the custom of the land’ became standard formulas. Men could reduce it to order, and to the claims of precedent; it could be codified and standardized. One of the most important legal works in English history, Ranulph de Glanville’s On the Laws and Customs of England, was composed in the reign of Henry II. It is no accident that ‘legal memory’ was deemed to have begun at the time of the accession of Richard I, the king’s oldest surviving son, in 1189. Henry was acting out of self-interest but his measures, more than any other, promoted obedience to the law and assured the coherent administration of justice. He had no interest in reform, and no scheme for it. He acted out of private and selfish interests only, and was motivated solely by the force of circumstances. He did not have any idea where his actions might lead, except to the extent that they afforded him more and more money. These are the foundations of the mighty edifice of English law. Henry had stumbled upon a system that has endured ever since.

One other unanticipated result issued from the new legal procedures. One of the functions of the judges was to rule on disputes over property. Had anyone been violently dispossessed of his or her land? This was a common problem of the twelfth century where lords, great or small, were always trying to increase their dominion. The judges were inclined to call together twelve local men who would be able to tender advice on the matter. The origin of the English jury is still in dispute, with some authorities placing it within the Anglo-Saxon period, but in the twelfth century we witness at least its systematic use. Within fifty years juries were also employed in criminal cases. Trial by jury replaced trial by battle and the ordeal. The parties involved in these disputes were summoned to the court by writs, which from this period took on a standard form. Writs cost sixpence. The legal system of the country was being created by haphazard and unpredictable means.

Yet all things move together. The creation of royal law, otherwise known as national law, called for a group of skilled adherents to interpret and amend the principles of legislation. There had been no professional lawyers in the eleventh century, and the judges were simply the servants of the king. In the reign of Henry II that happy vacancy ended forever. By the end of the twelfth century the ‘learned laws’ were being taught at Oxford. Around the law courts of Westminster there clustered ad hoc ‘schools’ of law. A group known as ‘men of law’ soon emerged. They organized themselves into a profession of various roles and grades. They ate and drank together, in the various hostels or inns that were at a later date transformed into Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and the others.

One of the paradoxes of medieval society lies in the presence of extreme violence and disorder alongside an appetite for great formality and hierarchy; England was in many respects a lawless society, but it was also a litigious one. The people loved law, just as they disregarded it; they could not get enough of it. It was consoling. It represented authority and tradition, even as they were being flouted. It was like listening to the king’s voice even though, if you had come to Westminster Hall on a law day, you would have found yourself amid a babble of voices.

‘Furthermore I marvel that you have not come to the point.’

‘The point, sir, is like a quintain. Hard to hit.’

‘Do not argue with me about the statute. I was the one who made it.’

‘It is lex talionis! Like for like!’

‘A great friend is Aristotle. But a greater friend is truth.’

The floor of the hall was covered with rushes containing sweet herbs, to curb the odours of the people and of the prisoners. The judges carried with them a ball of linen soaked in aniseed and camomile.

The King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of the Exchequer had their own panels of judges; the special pleaders were known as sergeants and can be seen as the ancestors of the barrister. It is only to be expected that, in time, the sergeants would be promoted to judges. The professionalization of the law thereby became complete. Pleadings became more technical, and tended to rely upon precedent. We may talk of legalism rather than law. The judges wore scarlet robes and caps of gold silk. The sergeants wore gowns with vertical stripes of mulberry and blue, together with round caps of white silk.

The clarification and standardization of the law meant also that society itself took on a more defined shape. One of the new procedures was known as mort d’ancestor, allowing freemen to claim by right their inheritance. Free tenants, in particular, could not be ejected from their land by their lord. But some men were not allowed to plead in the royal courts. The men who were not free, the villeins who held land in exchange for labour services to their lord, were excluded. They had to rely on the smaller local courts for their rights. They were, in other words, still at the mercy of their masters.

It was stated that ‘earls, barons and free tenants may lawfully … sell their serfs [rusticos] like oxen or cows’. Unfree men were defined as those who ‘do not know in the evening what service they will do in the morning. The lords may put them in fetters and in the stocks, may imprison, beat, and chastise them at will, saving their life and limbs.’ This is a presentation of the extreme case and, in practice, traditional custom would have preserved many of the rights of these rusticos. The lord also had to prove that his man was unfree; as a legal writer said at the time, ‘you must catch the deer before you can skin it’.

The contrast between the free man and the villein had become the single most important social division in the country, underlying the elaborate and intricate hierarchy of roles and functions that already existed. It became the theme of the chivalric romances, with the distinction between vilain and courtois. The status of the knight was also changed, with the emphasis now on ownership of property rather than military skill or availability for service. In the process the knights adopted a different role. They took up a position in local rather than national society. They became in time the ‘gentry’, a word first used by the Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales. ‘Gentlewoman’ had appeared by 1230. ‘Gentleman’ emerged forty-five years later. So we have John Ball’s rhyme:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then a gentleman?

By slow degrees the class system of England, based on property, was being erected.

Those who lived in towns were by definition free, and so the difference between free town life and unfree country life became ever more marked. The myth of the uncultivated rustic as opposed to the urbane townsman, so much a feature of Elizabethan pamphleteers and Restoration dramatists, can fairly be said to have begun at this time.

Thomas Becket and Henry II were in conflict for six years, with the pope and various other interested parties acting as intermediaries. The antagonists met in France on two occasions, but their meetings became futile confrontations. The dignity and honour of both men seemed to be too great, too sensitive, for any compromise. But in the late spring of 1170 Henry watched the coronation of his son, Henry the Younger, at the hands of the archbishop of York in Westminster Abbey. He was crowned as ‘joint king’ in his father’s lifetime as a token of dynastic security.

This was a serious blow against Becket. The two sees of England, York and Canterbury, had always been at odds over their respective powers and dominions. It was the established right of Canterbury to crown monarchs and princes, but that privilege had been snatched from Becket by the king. In this age the importance of status, and of precedent, cannot be overrated; they were the pattern of the world. Henry insinuated that the prince might be recrowned by Canterbury, if and when the archbishop returned to England. Becket was so concerned to defend the pre-eminence of his see that the offer was persuasive. A third meeting took place on French soil between Henry and Becket where the terms of a settlement were agreed. On 1 December 1170 the archbishop returned to England.

It was said that he received a hostile reception when he landed at Sandwich. It was also reported that he was soon riding across England at the head of a body of knights. Neither story can be substantiated. One event, however, is certain. On the eve of crossing the Channel he excommunicated the archbishop of York and other bishops who had been present at the coronation in Westminster Abbey eight months before.

There was a Latin proverb, ‘ira principis mors est’, to the effect that the anger of the king means death. Becket was to prove the truth of this. When the news of the excommunications reached Henry, he was told that there would be neither peace nor quiet in England while the archbishop lived. The dramatic and vindictive way in which he had dealt with the archbishop of York seemed to be proof of that. Becket was a man who bristled with pride and self-righteousness.

The king may never have used the words attributed to him: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ The phrase, however, is sufficiently close to something Henry did say. He himself admitted this at a later date. Four of his knights took him at his word. They left Henry’s court in northern France and, riding along separate routes, made their way to the Channel. They met by prearranged agreement at Saltwood Castle in Kent, not far from Canterbury. From there they rode to the cathedral.

Becket was conducting business in an inner chamber and, when they entered, he greeted them calmly enough. Their intentions were not clear, however, perhaps not even to themselves. There are some indications that they planned to arrest him, or to oblige him to leave the country once again. But then the red mist descended. They began to insult and threaten the archbishop; he argued with them and refused to be cowed by their hostile demeanour. He proceeded into the cathedral to hear vespers. The monks wished to bar the doors, but he would not permit it. One of the monks with him at the time, William Fitzstephen, reports that he could have escaped at any moment. Dark passages and winding stairs of stone were all around him; he might have concealed himself in the crypt. But he stayed in the church, and prepared himself for the service.

The four knights burst open the doors and went after him with their weapons. One of them struck Becket on the shoulder with the flat of his sword, saying, ‘Fly! You are a dead man.’ They tried to drag him out of the cathedral, but he forcibly resisted them. He was wounded in the head, and fell to his knees. Another stroke cut off the upper part of his skull. They butchered him where he lay.

In death, Becket was triumphant. The leaders of Christendom were genuinely appalled by the slaughter of an archbishop in his own cathedral; only the murder of the pope would have been comparable. The king knew that the obloquy of the world would now be turned upon him. He retired to his chamber for three days, refusing food and drink. His enemies were, in turn, contemplating a very satisfying revenge. The king of France, Louis VII, declared that ‘the man who commits violence against his mother [the Church] revolts against humanity … Such unprecedented cruelty demands unprecedented retribution. Let the sword of St Peter be unleashed to avenge the martyr of Canterbury’. Becket was already wearing the martyr’s crown, although he was not canonized for three years.

Very quickly there grew up a cult around the site of the killing. Immediately after the death certain members of his household, and perhaps also some of the people of Canterbury, rushed into the cathedral and cut off pieces of their clothes before dipping them in the archbishop’s blood; they anointed their eyes with the precious fluid. It is reported that others also brought vessels to capture the blood as it flowed from the prone body. This was the tactile and instinctive aspect of medieval piety. At a later date the monks of Canterbury developed a thriving trade in the miraculous properties of ‘Becket water’ that contained a tincture of the blood. Small vessels of tin alloy were manufactured on a large scale, each one bearing the inscription (in Latin), ‘All weakness and pain is removed, the healed man eats and drinks, and evil and death pass away’. If this miraculous healing did not take place, it was agreed that the afflicted man or woman lacked sufficient piety. After Becket’s tomb was constructed, and a shrine erected, the pilgrims began to arrive in multitudes. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is devoted to them.

One of those pilgrims was the king himself. In the summer of 1174 Henry, beset by enemies invading from Scotland and from Flanders, made a formal and ritual penance for the death of Becket. He dismounted from his horse a mile (1.6 kilometres) from Canterbury and took off his silken robes; then he walked barefoot to the cathedral, badly lacerating his feet on the way. As soon as he entered the church he prostrated himself, weeping, before the shrine. The bells of the cathedral had been ringing to summon as many spectators as possible for this act of piety. The king was led into the crypt where he stripped off his shirt. The assembled bishops inflicted ‘correction’ on his body with a whip of several lashes; they were no doubt gentle with their royal lord. The king then spent the whole of the next day and night in fervent prayer, taking no nourishment, and finished his pilgrimage by drinking some of the water blessed by Becket’s blood. He had been cleansed. The effect was immediate, and almost miraculous. His Scottish enemies were defeated.

Yet his return to papal favour came at a price. He was forced to concede that churchmen would only be tried in church courts. So was established the practice known as ‘benefit of clergy’, which was slowly extended to cover literacy as well; anyone who could read a short passage from the Bible, generally the beginning of the fifty-first psalm, known as the ‘neck verse’, was spared the death penalty. ‘Benefit of clergy’ was in fact not removed from the provisions of the criminal law until the 1820s.

God may have blessed him against his enemies, but He cursed him with his children. The remaining years of Henry’s reign were dominated by the struggles with his four sons who, like their Angevin forebears, were violent and rapacious. Henry had, in theory, divided his empire. His eldest son, Henry, was destined to inherit the kingdom of England together with Anjou and Normandy; the second son, Richard, was granted the dukedom of Aquitaine. The third son, Geoffrey, became by marriage duke or count of Brittany. The youngest son, John, had nothing at all; hence arose his nickname ‘John Lackland’.

It was a most quarrelsome family from the vicissitudes of which Shakespeare could have profited greatly. The play of these warring parties would have out-Leared Lear. The brothers were united only by self-interest; selfishness was in their blood. They were concerned only with their honour and with their power; they fought one another over the extent of their respective territories; they built castles in each other’s lands, and they refused to allow the king to mediate between them.

In some spasm of dynastic madness, the two eldest sons rose in rebellion against their father. In this act of subversion they were aided and abetted by their mother who had, for all practical purposes, severed herself from her husband. When the king marched up to Limoges, the headquarters of the young Henry, he encountered a storm of arrows. Yet the king’s army prevailed and, in fear of his liberty, the prince escaped from the city. He wandered through his dominion, picking up very little support, and in the process succumbed to dysentery. The young Henry had lacked the resolution and competence of his father; he was at the time considered to be a perfect prince, courteous and debonair, but he would have made a wholly disappointing king. He seemed to be capable of rule, but only as long as he never ruled. He died in the summer of 1183, unreconciled to the father who had become his enemy.

And then there were three. It was supposed that Richard, now the eldest son, would come into Henry’s patrimony. In return the king demanded that he transfer the sovereignty of Aquitaine to Prince John; Richard, standing on the principle of natural right, refused to do this. He fled from the court and returned to Aquitaine. The king advised John to recruit an army and march against his elder brother. But John had no army of his own and instead allied himself with his other brother, Geoffrey, who had command of a large army of mercenaries in Brittany. Together the two younger sons marched against their elder brother. They achieved very little, apart from some vainglorious victories in skirmishes, and in retaliation Richard invaded Brittany itself.

It seemed to Henry II that his empire was in an advanced state of upheaval, and that it might fall apart under the combined strains of these internecine wars. He summoned his three sons to England. Here it was agreed that John should become king of Ireland, effectively cancelling his claim to Aquitaine. Richard returned to his dukedom. But he was not to rest easy in this apparent success. It seems likely that the king had now decided to reverse the order of inheritance and to bequeath England and Normandy to Geoffrey; these Anglo-Norman territories fitted well with Geoffrey’s fiefdom of Brittany. It was a neat territorial redaction, but it was soon undone. Geoffrey was killed while jousting at a tournament in Paris.

And then there were two, Richard and John, known to the more romantic nineteenth-century historians as Richard the Lionheart and Evil King John. In truth very little separated them, both of them rapacious and arrogant with no interest in their English kingdom except for the purpose of enrichment. Henry kept his sons at bay for five years, principally by refusing to name his successor, but as he grew older the issue became more and more important. In 1188 Richard agreed to submit his duchy to French jurisdiction, much to the displeasure of his father.

At a subsequent conference of the interested parties – Richard together with the king of England and the king of France – the matter of succession was explicitly raised. Richard demanded his father’s assurance that he would be named as his heir. Henry refused to comply. ‘Then,’ Richard said, ‘I can only take as true what previously seemed incredible.’ He unbuckled his sword and, kneeling before the king of France, did homage for Normandy and Aquitaine. He was, in other words, denying his father’s claims over a large part of the Angevin Empire. Father and son walked off in different directions.

It seems unlikely, in retrospect, that Henry would have disinherited the elder son; it would have struck at the very heart of the medieval principle of rightful inheritance. But of course Richard could not be sure. He pressed the matter into open warfare against his father, fought among the towns and castles of northern France. The summer of 1189 was hot, and the English king was ailing. The tide of war turned against him. Who would wish to defend the old king of England against a young prince and the king of France?

Henry was forced to come to terms with the enemy. He made a promise that Richard would succeed him. When he gave the ritual kiss of peace to his son, according to Richard himself, he whispered in his ear, ‘May the Lord spare me until I have taken vengeance on you.’ But he was already dying. He was carried in a litter to Chinon, in the valley of the Loire, where he asked for a list of those men who had already pledged allegiance to his son. The first name was that of John. He turned his face to the wall, and would listen no more. His last words, apparently, were ‘Shame, shame on a conquered king’. But last words are often invented by moralists. Henry II lies buried in the abbey church of Fontevrault.

Henry is remembered, if at all, because of his association with Thomas Becket. Yet he has a more significant claim to our attention in his imposition of a system of national justice and of common law. He may have engineered these changes for reasons of profit rather than policy, but the origin of the most worthy institutions can hardly bear examination. All is muddled and uncertain. The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

14

The lost village

The deserted village of Wharram Percy lies on the side of a valley, by the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds. Its church, of St Martin, lies in ruins; earthworks mark the lines of habitation, rectangular mounds where the small houses once stood and sunken hollows in the grass where lanes and roads once ran. Remains of the manor house, and of a longhouse, survive together with the outlines of smaller houses of chalk. Most of the stonework has gone under the earth, however, covered by grass and weed. The life of the village has departed, but it has left traces of its existence that have survived for hundreds of years.

There are more than 3,000 deserted villages in England, mute testimony of a communal past. An old market cross stands alone among the trees of Stapleford Park in Leicestershire; the market, and the village, are long gone. A line of buttercups, springing from the moist soil beside a wall, will outline a forgotten boundary. The inhabitants of these villages left for a variety of reasons. Fire, famine and disease did their work through the centuries; successive stages of depopulation also crept over the countryside. Some villages were razed to make way for sheep pasture, and the villagers forcibly evicted by the lord of the land. Thus in the village of Thorpe, Norfolk, 100 people ‘left their houses weeping and became unemployed and finally, as we suppose, died in poverty and so ended their days’. The Cistercian monks were known for their practice of eviction.

The excavation of Wharram Percy, over a period of fifty years, has discovered evidence of successive rebuilding of walls and parts of walls. The pattern of settlement seems to have been formalized in the tenth century, with the individual houses erected in rows along the two principal streets. A manor house was built at this time, with a second manor house following three centuries later. This second manor is known to have contained a hall-house, a dovecote and a barn. Throughout the entire period the surrounding land was being farmed for wheat and for barley; sheep and cattle were being raised; flax and hemp were grown.

Some of the original houses were long, approximately 15 by 50 feet (4.5 by 15 metres), with animals living at one end and people at the other. These longhouses were inhabited in the same period as simple two-room cottages that were of variable size according to the resources of the particular owner. The cottages were originally made of timber, but the wood was replaced with stone in the late thirteenth century. A continuous process of building and rebuilding took place, so that the village seems to breathe and move. The cottages had ‘back gardens’ that led down to a ‘back-lane’, which divided the village from the adjacent farmland. There were two millponds, and a triangular green. On the green were two stock pounds. One of these circular pounds, however, might have been used as an arena for cock-fighting or for bull-baiting.

Yet this utterly medieval landscape is deceptive. Since the site of the village is determined by the presence of six springs in the immediate neighbourhood, it is clear that the territory would have invited earlier English settlers. The archaeology of field-walking has found a Mesolithic site in the immediate vicinity of the village, as well as evidence of wood clearance in the Neolithic and Bronze ages. The presence of stone axes and flints suggests continuous human occupation of the area. In a hollow, just to the south of the church, successive levels of earth or ‘hill-slip’ were found that can be dated continuously from the Neolithic to the late medieval period. Beside the church of St Martin, on a natural terrace, were found the remains of a grand burial of the Iron Age. It must always have been a sacred place. Under the first manor house was found evidence of a Romano-British building. Under the village itself have been uncovered traces of three Romano-British farms with trackways running beside them. There are also the remains of two buildings from the sixth century in the Saxon style.

The continuity of human life at Wharram Percy can still be seen, therefore, persisting for many thousands of years from the time when the first scattered settlers made a camp in this place. Indeed it is likely that the shape of the village itself was determined by the layout of the prehistoric fields. Its life persisted until the need for pasture declined or disease intervened. The population of Wharram Percy began to fall in the fifteenth century, and the village was finally deserted at the very beginning of the sixteenth century.

Wharram Percy is not an isolated example. It just happens to be the only village in England that has been so exhaustively documented. This suggests, although it does not prove, that there are many other English villages with prehistoric origins. No one can dig to find them because the ground is still inhabited. The history of the oldest settlements in the country lies buried in the silent earth. It is possible to conclude, however, that the sites of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements still flourish.

15

The great charter

It was said of King Richard I that he cared only for the success he carved out with his own sword, and that he was happy only when that royal sword was covered with the blood of his enemies. He had the ferocity, rather than the heart, of a lion. As a whelp, too, he had his fair share of fighting; as we have seen, his adversaries were often the members of his own family.

Although he was born in Oxford, in the autumn of 1157, his ancestry was thoroughly French. As duke of Aquitaine he ruled over a vast dominion that may be compared to England in terms of wealth and prestige; it was in no sense an appendage of the Angevin Empire but, rather, at the centre of it. Yet in France he was only a duke; in England, he was king. That made all the difference. He had no interest in, or care for, the country itself; he just wanted to be known as sovereign by divine right. At his coronation in the autumn of 1189, he was stripped down to his breeches with his chest bare; the archbishop of Canterbury anointed him with chrism or holy oil on the breast, head and hands. This was the sign or token of sacral kingship. He then donned the ceremonial robes, and was crowned. It was usual for the archbishop to take the crown and lay it on the king’s head. Richard pre-empted the gesture by handing the crown to the cleric. It was a characteristic act of self-sufficiency. Certainly he looked the part. He was tall, at an estimated height of 6 feet and 5 inches (1.9 metres); in the twelfth century, that made him a giant; he had strong limbs, a good figure and piercing blue eyes.

It would be anachronistic, at best, to condemn Richard’s passion for warfare. Kings were supposed to fight, and a warlike ruler was considered to be a good ruler. If God looked kindly upon a monarch, he would bequeath him success in battle. It was one of the essential prerogatives, or duties, of sovereignty reflecting a period in which warfare was endemic. The two least militant kings of medieval England, Richard II and Henry VI, were widely considered to be failures; both of them were deposed and murdered. So military valour was crucially important.

One of the clues to understanding Richard’s not necessarily complex character lies in the code of chivalry with its accompanying concern for ‘courtly love’. Chivalry can on one level be understood as the practice whereby the laws of honour supersede those of right or justice. Thus in warfare knights would spare the lives and privileges of other knights, while happily massacring the women and children among the local population. Elaborate laws of warfare also governed the conduct of sieges. The cult of chivalry had as little connection with real warfare as scholastic theology had to do with daily worship in the parish church.

Richard liked to participate in tournaments. These were not the stage-managed jousts of the fifteenth century; these were real conflicts, staged over a large area of ground, between trained bands of knights. They closely resembled actual battle, with the provision that a dismounted knight had to retire from the field and give horse and armour to his opponent. Nevertheless fatalities and serious injuries were not uncommon. Tournaments were in fact so dangerous, and so disruptive, that Henry II forbade them in England. But they remained very popular in Aquitaine.

In that French region, too, the cult of courtly love flourished. It was an impulse celebrated by the troubadours of Provence and Aquitaine who in song and story celebrated the love of the female as the source of all virtue and pleasure. A knight fought for his lady; his love for her rendered him stronger and more courageous. Love was appreciative rather than covetous. Like the Platonic love of an earlier civilization – then generally between male and male – it was a shadow or echo of heavenly harmony. A knight, in theory, was meant to be chaste and pious; the model of knighthood then became Sir Galahad. The two creeds of chivalry and courtly love are alike in being quite remote from the experience of life, but they did represent a pietistic attempt to place warfare and adultery in the context of a sacred world. All this directly impinged upon Richard I’s sense of himself and of his kingship. It was believed at the time that he possessed Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. And it ought to be remembered that Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur was translated from a French romance.

The crown was no sooner warm upon the young king’s head than he began to prepare himself for a crusade against Saladin and for the recapture of Jerusalem. Crusades were very much part of the spirit of chivalry, for they had of course an ostensibly religious purpose. The crusading knight would be expected to prepare himself with vigils, fasts and prayers. The forces of Christ were meant to be pilgrims as much as soldiers. There grew up cults of military saints, such as St George and St Martin, and the roles of knight and monk were combined in the religious orders of Templars and the Hospitallers. For Richard, the third crusade could not have come at a more convenient time. The holy city had fallen two years before his coronation, and Richard had immediately ‘taken the Cross’. His opportunity had now come to bear it into combat. He is in fact the only English king ever to become a crusader.

For this purpose he needed money. He was in England for three months after the coronation, and in that short period he tried to sell everything he possessed – lands, lordships, bishoprics, castles, towns and court offices. He said that he would sell London itself if he could find a purchaser for it. The country was for him only an engine for the making of money. He seized all of his father’s treasure; he exacted loans; he increased the burden of taxes. The imposition he placed upon the kingdom in fact played a large part in the rebellion that led to the Magna Carta. The great lords were not rebelling against the rule of King John alone; they were fighting against the very idea of exacting Angevin kingship, made all the worse by the growth of a strong central administration.

The course of Richard I’s crusade does not directly impinge upon the history of England, except the extent to which the finances of the country suffered for it. Richard proved himself to be an excellent soldier, and a competent administrator, in the difficult terrain of the Holy Land. He was able to take a fleet and an army to the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the process capturing the valuable prize of the island of Cyprus; he had promised the leader of the island that he would not be put in irons. He kept his word, as any true knight would, and had silver shackles made for the restraint of the unfortunate man. More importantly he managed to stand his ground against Saladin, the most resourceful and capable military leader of the age. His angry will may be measured by the fact that he ordered 3,000 prisoners, whom he had captured at Acre, to be beheaded. He maintained the discipline, if not the affection, of his men. Usamah ibn Munqidh, a Syrian nobleman and soldier of the twelfth century, described the European crusaders as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else. That might be a description of the English king.

One of the chroniclers of this crusade remarks that Richard became known as ‘the Lion’ because he never pardoned an offence. He was quick to anger and he could be ferocious. If monarchs are judged on the criterion of military prowess alone, however, Richard I would qualify as one of the greatest kings of England. He did not manage to recapture Jerusalem, but the legend of Richard in the Holy Land endured for long after his death. It was said that, for hundreds of years, Turkish mothers would quieten recalcitrant children by threatening them with ‘Malik Ric’ or ‘King Richard’.

When he was not in front of an army, however, he was not so fortunate. On his way back from the crusade, at the beginning of winter, he found the seaways blocked. So he decided to return by land, disguised as a pilgrim, through the territories of his enemies and rivals. It is clear that he was being watched, or that his presence was eagerly awaited. At the end of 1192 he was arrested by officers working for Duke Leopold of Austria.

The English king was a prize to be savoured. He was despatched to a castle on a rocky slope overlooking the Danube; he languished here while the important parties of Europe haggled over his fate. The duke of Austria sold him on to his overlord, Henry VI, the king of Germany, while Philip of France proceeded to derive as much advantage from the situation as he could. He summoned Richard’s brother, John, to the French court. The two men came to an agreement. John would swear fealty to the French king, and in exchange Philip would support John’s usurpation of the throne. John came back to England and declared that his brother was dead. No one believed him.

John was thrown back on the defensive. The clerics whom Richard had left in authority, principally the bishop of Salisbury, raised an army and confined him to the area of two of his largest castles. The bishops were the true lords of government. Then there came news that the king of Germany was ready to release the English king for the sum of 70,000 marks. The amount was later raised to 150,000 marks. He was not dead; he had arisen to demand a large sum from his subjects. In order to pay for his ransom the authorities imposed a tax of 25 per cent on all income and moveable property; gold and plate were taken from the churches, and the annual income of the Cistercian wool crop was appropriated. The country was indeed being fleeced.

The king of France and John offered a larger sum to Henry VI, simply to keep Richard in custody, but after much negotiation the offer was finally rejected. That does not, however, minimize the perfidy of John in seeking to prolong his brother’s imprisonment. In February 1194, after the ransom had been paid to the king of Germany, Richard was released. The king of France sent a message to John. ‘Look to yourself. The devil is loose.’ The devil landed at Sandwich, a month after his liberation. It is said that a local lord, holding a castle in favour of John, died in fright at the news. It is an indication of the period itself that a handful of people, most of whom were related, controlled the destinies of many countries. A family feud could cost thousands of lives.

Richard had not been unduly alarmed by his brother’s rebellion. He is reported to have said, while still held in captivity, that ‘John is not the man to conquer a country if there is a single person prepared to resist his attempt’. In this he was proved to be right. And, on his return, he showed himself to be remarkably magnanimous to his sibling. John had remained in Normandy, fearful of returning to England, and when the king himself sailed across the Channel John paid obeisance to him in tears. ‘You are a child,’ Richard told him. ‘You have had bad companions.’ He knew well enough that John might himself one day assume the throne, and did not wish to alienate him entirely. He had in any case taken the precaution of proclaiming his nephew, Arthur of Brittany (son of his brother, Geoffrey, killed at the Parisian tournament), as his heir; but who knew better than he the vicissitudes of fortune? Richard himself had married while on his way to the Holy Land, but had no children. It has often been assumed, on no evidence at all, that like other martial heroes he was homosexual.

The king performed a solemn ritual of ‘crown-wearing’ in Winchester Cathedral after his return from imprisonment. It was a way of impressing his subjects with the undiminished majesty of his sovereignty. He did not stay in England for very long. Less than two months later he crossed the Channel in order to reclaim the territories of Normandy that had been conquered by the king of France and to reduce to obedience some rebellious lords of Aquitaine. His sojourn in prison, from which it was always possible that he would not escape alive, had encouraged revolt. He stayed in France for the next five years, burning towns and besieging castles, subduing the surrounding country with sword and flame. His demands upon his English subjects, for money and for men, were prodigious; the country, according to a contemporary writer, was reduced to poverty from sea to sea.

In the last summer of his life the king was visited by Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, who had come to the grand castle of Château-Gaillard in Normandy to seek an audience; he wished to plead for the return of the confiscated estates of his see. He found Richard in the chapel, attending Mass, seated on his royal throne with the bishops of Durham and Ely standing on each side. Hugh greeted the king, but Richard turned his face away. ‘Lord king, kiss me,’ Hugh said. Richard still looked away. Then the bishop took hold of the king’s tunic. ‘You owe me a kiss,’ he said, ‘because I have come a long way to see you.’ ‘You deserve no kiss from me,’ the king replied. The bishop shook the king’s cloak. ‘I have every right to one. Kiss me.’ Then Richard, with a smile, concurred. He said later that ‘if the other bishops were like him, no king or ruler would dare raise his hand against them’.

Another sign of restlessness and upheaval became evident as a result of the king’s exactions. The citizens of London believed that they were being unfairly and even perniciously taxed, and their complaints were taken up by William Fitz-Osbert or William the Beard. He grew his hair and beard long in token of his Saxon ancestry. He was styled the ‘advocate of the people’, and at St Paul’s Cross argued that the rich should bear the burden of war finance. 52,000 Londoners were said to have supported him, but the authorities in the city hunted him down. He killed the officer sent to arrest him and fled to sanctuary in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, where after four days a providential fire forced him out. He was stabbed by the son of the officer whom he had killed but, while wounded, he was arrested and dragged at the tail of a horse to the gallows at Tyburn. His associates then proclaimed him to be a martyr and the chain that bound him to the gallows was the source of miraculous cures. The gallows itself was venerated, and so great was the press of people taking the bloody earth from the spot where he had died that a large pit was created.

Richard I never did come back to the land he ruled but did not love. He died from a gangrenous wound while fighting in Limousin, and on his deathbed he decreed that his heart should be interred in the cathedral at Rouen and that his body should be lowered into the tomb of his father within the abbey church of Fontevrault. So much for England.

And then there was one. John, the youngest of the sons of Henry II, had survived. He is one of the most interesting kings in English history, primarily because of his infamous reputation. He rivals Richard III in being considered the most ‘evil’ of the nation’s kings. In truth John and Richard were no more vicious or cunning than many other more lauded sovereigns; they were perhaps unfortunate, however, in the chroniclers who chose to write about them. The two monastic chroniclers of John’s reign, successively Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, were uniformly hostile. Shakespeare of course, more than any other, defined the image of John to posterity; his were wholly dramatic, but wildly exaggerated, versions of the events to be related here. Enter King John, breathing stage fire.

The early life of John has already been glimpsed, disloyal to his father and to his brothers. Yet he was still a Plantagenet, and the sacred blood of the family mattered. Henry II appointed him to be ‘Lord of Ireland’, but he proved himself to be unequal to the task; his youthful pride and folly alienated him from the native leaders of that country. He was given manors and castles all over the Angevin Empire, and he was in charge of the administration of six English counties that paid their taxes directly to his own exchequer. In Richard I’s absence he created a court of his own, in England and in Normandy, which the more devious or ambitious magnates attended. He was the rising son.

Yet he was not the only claimant to the throne. Richard I had nominated Arthur of Brittany as his successor, as we have seen, and the twelve-year-old nephew was a real threat to John’s inheritance. The barons of Anjou, one element of the Angevin Empire, already supported the boy. Aquitaine was in the balance. The English and Norman magnates, cautiously and suspiciously, supported John. Although he could not be considered English, he was at least more English than the Breton Arthur. On hearing of his brother’s death John hurried to Normandy, therefore, where he was consecrated duke in the cathedral of Rouen; then he sailed to England where he was crowned king at Westminster in the spring of 1199. It had taken him just a month to assert his power.

He was some 12 inches (30 centimetres) shorter than Richard, and he may have suffered in implicit comparison with his brother and with his father. Certainly he grew up in a court filled with rivalries and suspicions of a more than usually bitter nature, with brother pitted against brother and brothers rising against their father. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gives the impression of being a wary and distrustful king. He went about armed and with a bodyguard.

He was not without humour, albeit often of a perverse kind. When he and his horse floundered in a marsh near Alnwick in Northumberland, he devised a suitable punishment for the men of that town who had not maintained the highway; he ordered that every newly created townsman should, on St Mark’s Day, pass through that slough on foot. The custom was still being observed in the early nineteenth century. When the pope placed the country under excommunication, the king ordered that the mistresses of all the priests should be held in captivity until their clerical lovers ransomed them. It was an interesting punishment. There is another intriguing memorial of his reign. Among the legal rolls, then being composed in unprecedented numbers, is one stating that ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville gives the lord king two hundred chickens that she may lie one night with her husband’. The import of this is unclear, but it may mean that the lady was one of the king’s paramours and that she was asking to return briefly to her marital bed. The three incidents reveal that side of medieval life where jocosity and cruelty are allied.

King John was capable of violent anger, like his Plantagenet antecedents. When some monks at Faversham occupied their church, to prevent him from installing the superior he had chosen for them, he ordered the entire monastery to be burned down; nobody obeyed him, and he relented. Monarchs, male and female, have always had bad tempers; it is an aspect of their power.

An element of cruelty, or of ruthlessness, is evident in the first years of his reign. Arthur of Brittany had fled to the court of the king of France in order to shield himself from his uncle’s far from avuncular intentions. In 1202, however, John found him. Both of them were on military campaign in France, fighting over the Angevin lands. The king of France had allotted them to Arthur, whereas John considered them to be his proper inheritance. Arthur, now fifteen, had been besieging his grandmother – Eleanor of Aquitaine – in the ancient castle of Mirebeau, near Poitiers in west-central France. The spectacle of grandson threatening grandmother throws further light on the behaviour of the Plantagenet family.

John, on receiving the news of the siege, marched with part of his army day and night; they covered 80 miles (130 kilometres) in forty-eight hours. Taken by surprise, Arthur and his forces were surrounded. The boy was delivered into the custody of John, and taken to a dungeon in Normandy; in an interview with his uncle, he was defiant. He demanded England, and all the lands bequeathed to him by Richard, apparently adding that he would not give him a moment’s peace until the end of his life. This was, perhaps, unwise. He was moved to a dungeon in Rouen, the capital of the duchy, and was never seen again.

The more picturesque accounts suggest that John, in a fit of Plantagenet fury, ran a sword through his nephew’s body and then dumped him into the river Seine. Or perhaps he hired an assassin. No one is quite clear. The evident fact, however, is that Arthur was dead within a few months. By the spring of 1203 it was widely believed that the king was instrumental in the murder of his nephew. This event has often been interpreted in the same light as the murder in the Tower of the two princes by their uncle, Richard III; but there is really no comparison. Pope Innocent III, for example, is reported as saying that Arthur was ‘captured at Mirebeau, a traitor to his lord and uncle to whom he had sworn homage and allegiance, and he could rightly be condemned without judgment to die even the most shameful of deaths’. A fifteen-year-old was considered to be an adult.

Although the death may have been a necessary and inevitable response by John, it helped to alienate his natural supporters in Normandy and elsewhere. Even more serious charges were levelled against him. He was severely criticized for his indolence or inactivity in the pursuit of war against the king of France. He was not acting like a king. One chronicler declared that he was sluggish, where his elder brother had proved himself to be vigorous and powerful. He became known as ‘John Softsword’. It was said that he had been enchanted by the sorcery of his wife, Isabella of Angoulême. It is more likely that he was infatuated by the power and majesty of kingship and refused to believe the worst. But the worst was happening. King Philip advanced further and further into Normandy, and the majority of John’s barons in that duchy defected to him. They no longer trusted the English king enough to remain loyal to him. There was soon very little left in France for John to defend. As the Angevin Empire collapsed around him, John sailed back to England. By June 1204 Philip had taken Normandy; all that remained of the duchy, in the possession of John, were the Channel Islands. Of the empire itself, only Gascony was preserved. It was the largest single blow to John during the whole of his reign.

The severance of England from Normandy, after 150 years of union, was at a later date deemed to be a natural and inevitable development by which France steadily became aware of its national identity. It heralded the rise of a national consciousness exploited by the Capetian kings. At the time, however, it was considered to be nothing less than a calamity for the king of England. He lost much of his income, from the taxation of Normandy and Anjou and Maine, and of course he forfeited a great deal of his prestige. Yet other consequences followed. The Anglo-Norman lords lost half of their identity. Once they had lost their lands in Normandy, it became clear that they would have to concentrate on those closer to what was now ‘home’. They steadily became more English. The Channel had become the border, as it had been in the tenth century, and King John began the construction of a proper navy to defend the English shores. The king no longer possessed Normandy, and as a result he paid more considered attention to England.

He kept the administrators from the last reign, knowing very well that the machinery of government depended upon them. It is from the beginning of the thirteenth century, for example, that we can trace the widespread use of written records as an instrument of state. Licences for imports and exports had to be drawn up; the regulations of trade had to be furnished in writing; a system of taxation had to be standardized; currency and credit had to be maintained in strict order. All this relied upon ink rather than upon custom or oral tradition. The various departments of the king’s court began the habit of creating archives. Letters began to be sent over the country, where before written communication had been confined to writs. Diaries of daily expenditure were kept and preserved. New and faster forms of handwriting developed, as monastic calligraphy gave way to what is known as ‘cursive’ script; the word comes from cursivus, the Latin for ‘flowing’. The world was going faster.

Wars, and preparations for wars, took their toll upon the nation’s wealth in the same period. King John still entertained hopes of winning back his Angevin Empire, but for that he needed money. He was perhaps no more exacting than his brother and his father, but he was more ingenious. He discovered new ways of extracting revenue, and in 1207 levied a thirteenth part on incomes and moveable property to be paid by all classes of people; it was the first move towards general taxation. The clamour of complaint, however, was so loud that he never repeated the exercise.

For ten years he travelled throughout his kingdom in search of money; he was restless; he was always in a hurry, generally staying in any one place for no more than two or three days. In 1205 he spent only twenty-four days in London and in Westminster. For the rest of the time he was on the road. He penetrated the far north at the end of a bitter winter; he fined York and Newcastle for not affording him an appropriately grand reception. He was looking for money everywhere. He was told, during a visit to Hexham in Northumberland, that Roman treasure was buried at Corbridge nearby; he ordered his men to dig for it, but nothing was unearthed.

During the course of his rapid journeys, sometimes covering 30 miles (48 kilometres) a day, he evinced a particular interest in imposing justice upon his subjects. This again was largely because of his desire for revenue, but as a boy his tutor had been Ranulph de Glanville whose legal treatise has already been mentioned. There may be some connection. John declared once that ‘our peace should be inviolably preserved, even if it were only granted to a dog’.

So John paid much attention to the details of administration and of justice, with a diligence quite different from the insouciance of his elder brother. If he was suspicious, he was also vigilant and curious. Most of the people had never seen their king before. Yet here he was, in the robes of state, questioning and charging and judging. His own voice was the voice of law. He loved fine gems and he glittered with jewellery. He bathed regularly and often, a practice almost without precedent in the thirteenth century. The body of the king – the flesh and blood – was sacred. Here is the essence of medieval governance.

This was also a time of rising prices; a rapidly increasing population meant that the common resources of life became scarcer and more expensive. Financial, as well as demographic, explanations can be found. The importation of silver from the mines of eastern Germany increased the amount of money in circulation; as a result, prices rose between 100 and 200 per cent in the last two decades of the twelfth century. This is the proper context in which to see baronial rebellion and the sealing of the Magna Carta. The consequent ‘inflation’, to use a contemporary term, affected the king as much as the lords and the commons. War, in particular, had become much more expensive. The problem was then compounded by recession as the king took more and more money out of circulation in order to pay for his military ambitions. So the king was constrained at every hand; it might seem that the forces of nature were against him.

After the collapse of the Angevin Empire in 1204 King John began to assert himself on the island of Britain. He waged campaigns in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In Ireland he managed to impose royal government upon the feuding Anglo-Norman barons who had divided the rule of southern and eastern Ireland among themselves; John also gained the fealty of the native Gaelic kings who recognized his power. In 1209 he launched an expedition against Scotland, and forced its king to recognize him as overlord. He subdued, temporarily, the Welsh principalities; he cowed them by violence, in other words, and before the start of hostilities he hanged at Nottingham some twenty-eight Welsh boys, the sons of chieftains who had been surrendered as hostages. It was not the least, or the last, of his acts of cruelty. But the cruelty of kings worked. At the end of these campaigns a contemporary chronicler stated that ‘there is now no one in Ireland, Scotland and Wales who does not obey the command of the King of England; that, as is well known, is more than any of his ancestors had achieved’.

Yet he struggled to control his magnates. They were not eager to fight for the restoration of the Angevin Empire, and they resented the manifold exactions he imposed upon them. He demanded huge fees for the granting of inheritances, or for the selling of wealthy heiresses in marriage. On occasions he raised his own claims to estates that had long been the property of wealthy families. A tax called ‘scutage’ was paid to avoid military service; John levied it eleven times in sixteen years. Payments in kind were also exacted. One magnate, William de Braose, paid the sum of 300 cows, 30 bulls and 10 horses for the approval of a plea. A further twist can be added to what seems to have been the king’s unremitting hatred of the Braose family. William’s failure to pay further debts led to his being driven into exile. But another fate remained for his wife and son. Matilda de Braose was one of the few people who knew what had happened to Prince Arthur nine years before, and it seems that she was talking too much; John ordered her to be arrested with her son. Mother and son were starved to death in prison.

It was said that the king was as rapacious of wives and daughters as he was of money. They were not safe in their castles when John paid a visit. Yet, on a larger scale, the whole force of Angevin monarchy was opposed to the feudal privileges of the mighty lords. The growth of a bureaucracy, and of a central administration, curtailed their own powers to make money out of the resident population. Business was being diverted from the local honorial courts, for example, to the royal courts. They were losing money as a result. Historians look back in admiration at the increasing growth and complexity of ‘royal government’; all it meant at the time was royal exploitation. The emergence of an army of mercenaries also restricted the role of the magnates as the martial leaders of the country. Many of them still had an image of their role derived from chivalric romance. They were the knights of the Round Table gathered beside their king who acted as primus inter pares. King John was not King Arthur, however, and the only Holy Grail for which he cared was gold.

To sacred affairs, in general, he was indifferent. When the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant in 1205, the king refused to fill it. He wanted the money from the wealthy see to be diverted to his own treasury. This was a device he had used in the past with other bishoprics. Pope Innocent III prevaricated, understanding royal sensibilities, but his patience was not inexhaustible. In 1207 he appointed Stephen Langton to the vacant archbishopric. Langton could not have been a better choice; he was an Englishman, out of Lincolnshire, but had been a superb professor of theology at the University of Paris. He was also cardinal priest of the basilica church of St Chrysogonus in Rome, and a canon of York Minster.

John characteristically fell into a carefully staged fury. What had the pope to do with the affairs of his kingdom? He would, like his predecessors, appoint the bishops and archbishops whom he believed to be loyal. He refused to allow the pope any right to appoint an archbishop of Canterbury without royal assent. He banished from England the monks of Canterbury whohad acceded to the pope’s request. He seized all the English offices held by Italian bishops. He refused to allow any papal legates to enter the country. In the spring of 1208 the pope placed the country under an interdict, forbidding any church services to be held; no sacraments, except those of baptism for the newborn and absolution for the dying, were to be performed. Matthew Paris, in his account of the interdict, illustrated the scene with a drawing of bell-ropes tied up. Sacred time was suspended.

The king retaliated by confiscating all churches and church lands, on the principle that a non-functioning Church does not need property. John was then formally excommunicated, in 1209, which in theory meant that his clerical administrators could no longer serve or obey him. Some clerics fled the king’s court and travelled overseas, but there were more than enough ecclesiastical lawyers and administrators to make sure that the machinery of Church and government remained stable; it has been estimated that the majority of the bishops stayed in England during the interdict. The country itself remained relatively unmoved by papal displeasure. It had never paid much attention to the decrees of the see of Peter. The deep continuity of the country, and the secular customs of the nation, remained unbroken. Long negotiations, between the English court and the see of Peter, of course ensued. The king eventually seemed willing to accept Stephen Langton into his kingdom, on the clear and stated agreement that this was not to be seen as a precedent. No future pope would be allowed to appoint the archbishop of Canterbury without royal approval. The pope held out for better terms. This was war.

It is said that the cares of kings come in flocks, and that the sight of dark skies brings further storms. The first signs of internal rebellion emerged in 1209, when some of the northern barons were in communication with the king of France over the possibility of an invasion. It is no coincidence that in this year John went on military expedition to the north in order to cow King William of Scotland. He also took care to assert his authority over his own northern lands. The conspiracy faded away. Three years later the king felt obliged to refortify his castles, particularly in the border regions, where the magnates had always been more independent. Rumour spread that the barons were planning to depose the king. In turn John demanded hostages from the more recalcitrant of them. In 1213 he razed the castles of one who was believed to be planning to lead the revolt, Robert Fitzwalter, until a fragile peace was restored between them.

The king was surrounded by too many enemies, and it became necessary to placate the most important of them. It was widely rumoured, in the early months of 1213, that Pope Innocent III had sent an open letter deposing John and urging King Philip of France to invade England. Yet in spring John surrendered. On 15 May he agreed to accept all of the pope’s claims and demands. He went further. He agreed to yield his country to the pope and receive it back as a fief; he was, in effect, about to become the pope’s feudal vassal. Several sound reasons could be advanced for what seems on the face of it abject surrender. King Philip, even as he was organizing a force to sail across the Channel, was forced to cancel his invasion. He could not attack the pope’s new realm. The king’s status as the pope’s vassal might also deter his rebellious barons. Pope Innocent III himself, as subsequent events would testify, became a formidable ally and defender of royal power against insurgent subjects. King John was also a newly blessed representative of God. As the papal legate in England put it, ‘the lord king is another man by God’s grace’.

So the lord king decided to press home his advantage and make one more attempt to recover his Angevin Empire from the French king. In the following year he created a coalition of princes – among them the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV, and the count of Flanders – who were intent upon acquiring French land. The count and the emperor would proceed against the French army from the north-east, while King John would advance from Poitou in the west. The strategy was excellent, but its execution was misjudged. Many confused skirmishes and sieges took place, and on 27 July 1214 the forces of John and Otto were decisively defeated by King Philip outside the village of Bouvines. It was the final battle for the Angevin Empire. John had lost everything for which he most cared.

The failure at the battle of Bouvines was in effect the harbinger of baronial rebellion. The magnates may not have been greatly exercised by the loss of empire, but they were enraged at the amount of money wasted on a failed cause. It was the crowning point of their belief in the king’s misjudgment and military ineptitude. In the aftermath of the defeat there emerged what has since become known as a ‘baronial party’, brought together by the manifold causes and complaints that have already been outlined. The imposition of fines and taxes, the predominant advice of ‘evil counsellors’, the decay in their social and military pre-eminence, were all part of baronial rebellion against authoritarian and ruthless Angevin rule.

The principal centres of revolt were the north, the west and East Anglia; but the barons did not necessarily form distinct or coherent groups. Family was divided against family; district was opposed to district. A group of 39 barons, out of a total baronage of 197, were in open revolt against the Crown; approximately the same number were its faithful supporters. The remainder were uncertain, and probably fearful of the future.

The rebels did find an unexpected champion in the new archbishop, however; on his return to England Stephen Langton restated the old principles enshrined in the document known as Leges Henrici Primi that nothing can be taken or demanded by the king except ‘by right and reason, by law of the land and justice and by a court’s judgment’. That, clearly, had not been King John’s manner of proceeding.

The king and the rebellious barons met on various occasions, making little if any progress. The pope was persuaded to write to the rebels, forbidding the use of force or violence against their anointed king. He also wrote to Stephen Langton, accusing the archbishop of taking the side of the barons. The king then engineered what he must have considered a master stroke. On 4 March 1215, he assumed the cross of the crusader. Who could ride against a knight of Christ?

The manoeuvre did not succeed. On 5 May the barons renounced their fealty to the king and, under the leadership of Robert Fitzwalter, opened hostilities. They besieged Northampton Castle, a royal stronghold, and on 17 May occupied London. This was in itself a notable achievement, and tilted the balance of military power clearly in favour of the barons. More of them declared against the king.

John decided to procrastinate in the well-known form of conducting negotiations. He asked Stephen Langton to arrange a truce, so that some form of settlement might be reached. It is clear enough, however, that he never had any intention of honouring any such agreement. He believed himself to be upholding the rights of a sovereign king against rebellious subjects. In this belief, he was joined by the pope. The barons, however, accepted his invitation. Let the day be the fifteenth of June, they replied. Let the place be Runnemead. Runnemede, or Runnymede, is a meadow on the Surrey side of the river Thames near Windsor; there is a small island or eyot in the middle of the river, where the bargain was supposed to be sealed. A yew tree that was growing there in 1215 still stands.

Some informal notes survive that appear to have been taken down at the time of preliminary negotiations; they may reflect the words the king actually used. Early on it is declared that ‘King John concedes that he will not take a man without judgment nor accept anything for justice, nor do injustice’. The barons wished to readjust the balance of power in their favour. They wanted to be secure in their lands and castles, unmolested by the king or the king’s men. They also wished to be freed from the financial exactions imposed by John.

Various meetings were held between the opposing parties, with Stephen Langton acting as mediator. A preliminary document was then drawn up, by a chancery clerk, known as the ‘Articles of the Barons’. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, emerged from the baronial articles. It was called great because of its length, not because of its importance. Yet it was the work of highly intelligent and experienced administrators who in an almost literal sense stood at the king’s side to urge compromise and restraint. They were also instrumental in persuading the barons to come to terms wider than their own private interests. By 19 June the agreement had been reached. The barons gave their king the kiss of peace, and then he granted the charter.

Over the next five days several copies were made and sent over the kingdom; four of them can still be seen. One of those, preserved in the Cottonian Library of the British Library, contains some eighty-six lines (with additions) written on a skin of parchment, measuring 14½ inches (36.8 centimetres) in breadth by 20½ inches (52 centimetres) in length. It is much shrivelled and mutilated, and has survived at least one fire that reduced the seal to pulp. It is said to have been purchased by Sir Robert Cotton at the beginning of the seventeenth century, for the sum of fourpence, from a tailor who was about to cut it up for his own purposes. Once the copies had been completed by the clerks, they were proclaimed by the sheriffs in their various county courts.

But this was not a new code of law. It was not even a summary of the great principles of legislation. It was essentially an attempt by the barons to return to the state of affairs before the dominance of the Angevin kings. It did not represent some spirit of ‘progress’ or ‘development’ in human affairs. None of the participants would have known what those words meant. It was in part a reactionary document. Villeins and slaves, the most numerous portion of the kingdom, were never mentioned. The unfree were of no consequence. Their ‘progress’ over the centuries was slow and uncertain. This was a charter for the liber homo or free man.

Many specific measures were adopted within its sixty-three clauses. The old liberties of the Church were to be respected. Taxes, known as scutages or aids, should not be levied on the nation without the approval of the common council; some have seen this as the emergence of the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’, but the common council consisted only of archbishops, bishops, earls, barons and tenants-in-chief. They were not ‘the people’ of a self-governing kingdom.

The charter also stipulated that no man should be made a judge or sheriff without adequate knowledge of the law. The courts of law should be convened in one place, rather than follow the king. The towns and cities of the kingdom were to be granted their ancient liberties. Free men were to be allowed to travel freely. Forest law was to be alleviated, and all the forests created in the king’s reign were to be opened. The thirty-ninth clause states that ‘no free man shall be taken or imprisoned, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land’. The fortieth clause declares that ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’ Three declarations of the Magna Carta still remain on the statute book of England.

Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice at the beginning of the seventeenth century, wrote that ‘as the gold refiner will not out of the dust or shreds of gold, let pass the least crumb, in respect to the excellence of the metal; so ought not the reader to pass any syllable of this law, in respect of the excellency of the matter’. Since Coke forced the Petition of Right upon a reluctant Charles I, later enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1689, and since his writings were instrumental in the drawing-up of the American Constitution, we may take seriously his alleged claim that ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign’.

Yet he was writing 400 years after the event. The thirty-ninth and fortieth clauses of the charter may have been the most pertinent and significant, but at the time they were simply part of a miscellaneous and haphazard collection of principles taken from canon law and common law and custom equally. It is not at all clear that the negotiators knew precisely what they were doing. They were more concerned with correcting manifest wrongs than proclaiming evident rights. They made a heap of all they found. Not for the first time have great events and doctrines emerged from ambiguous and adventitious circumstances. The charter had no central doctrine. It was piecemeal. Therefore it was adaptable. Its meaning or meanings could be reinterpreted. Its underlying consequences were understood only gradually and slowly. It was reissued three times, with various amendments, and only the final version of 1225 became law. It was ratified thirty-eight times by various kings, the last of them being Henry VI.

Yet even before the moment he sealed it, King John had determined to ignore it. The sixty-three clauses meant nothing to him. He had hoped that by apparently coming to agreement with the barons, he would be able to divide his opponents and purchase a breathing space in which he could reassert his sovereignty. No sooner had he affixed his seal to the document than he sent an emissary to the pope, claiming that every concession won from him was an insult to the pontiff himself whose unworthy vassal he was. He ordered that all of his castles should be provisioned and fortified. He sent commanders to Flanders, Poitou and elsewhere to hire mercenary soldiers. War against his barons could be renewed. On 24 August 1215, Pope Innocent III sent letters annulling the provisions of the Magna Carta as an insult to his authority over England. ‘With the advice of our brethren,’ he wrote, ‘we altogether reprove and condemn this charter, prohibiting the king under pain of anathema from observing it, the barons from exacting its obligations.’

It came too late. The king and the barons were already at war. The Cornish lands of Robert Fitzwalter, the leading rebel, were seized. At this juncture the military advantage lay decidedly with the king; he possessed by far the largest number of fortified castles and he had at his command a professional mercenary army. A party of rebels took refuge in the castle at Rochester; John besieged it, and helped to undermine it by strapping burning torches to a number of pigs. The animals were herded into wooden galleries built beneath the stronghold and set it ablaze. This was one of the less formal techniques of medieval warfare.

Many of the rebel barons took refuge in London. It might have been possible for the king to lay siege to the capital, but London was not Rochester. The undertaking was filled with risk. Instead John decided to destroy the castles of the rebels one by one. He marched to the north, from where many of the barons came, and laid waste the land from Nottingham to Berwick; he left a trail of blood and ruins wherever he ventured. Only one rebel castle, that of Helmsley in Yorkshire, was left standing.

From their stronghold of London the barons called upon the aid of King Philip of France. They resolved to offer the crown to his son, Louis, whose wife was connected in blood to the Plantagenets. In the spring of 1216 Louis landed at Dover and marched unopposed to Rochester. His success was followed by his capture of Guildford, of Farnham, and, most importantly, of Winchester. It must have seemed that God, or good fortune, was on his side. The great earls of the kingdom, many of them hitherto supporters of the king, submitted to him. John retreated to the west, and spent the summer months of 1216 in various sorties throughout Dorset and Devon. In the early days of September he broke out and led his army to the east; he went into Norfolk and Lincolnshire, without achieving any great success. From this last expedition comes the now accepted legend that he lost his treasure in the Wash, when the tide rose too rapidly. It was reported that the crown itself was engulfed by the swirling waters. It was a very convenient story for those of his immediate entourage, who would have been happy to enrich themselves on the principle of sauve qui peut. The truth is also lost in the shifting tide.

He must in any case have known that he was reaching the end of his days. Kings die when they feel that their power is fading. He became ill of a fever, and of dysentery; he died in the fortress of the bishop of Lincoln at the age of forty-nine. ‘Hell’, wrote one chronicler, ‘felt herself defiled by his admission.’ John had another destination in mind. He was interred in the cathedral at Worcester and at his own request his tomb lay in the shadow of the shrine of the eleventh-century English saint, Bishop Wulfstan. In 1797 the king’s sepulchre was opened by curious antiquaries. It was reported that ‘the remains of the Illustrious Personage appear entire’. His height was 5 feet and 5 inches (1.65 metres). On one side of him lay his sword, in knightly fashion, with ‘the bones of his left arm lying on his breast, his teeth quite perfect’. He was the first king, since the time of the Normans, both to be born and to die in England.

What can be said of a king whose memory has been universally execrated by the chroniclers of his own time and of subsequent centuries? In his rapacity and greed he did not materially differ from his predecessors. He was characterized by the harshness and inflexibility of all previous Norman and Angevin rulers. Yet it was his misfortune to aspire to royal domination in singularly unhappy circumstances – his loss of the Angevin Empire at the hands of a wealthier and mightier king, the havoc of steeply rising prices, and the alienation of his barons, all darkened the picture of his reign. It needed only a few vignettes of his rapacity or cruelty to complete the chroniclers’ description of an utterly unfit king.

Yet out of his rule emerged a new or at least an intensified sense of the nation. That is the meaning of the Magna Carta. The English people of the early thirteenth century were already familiar with the notion of ius commune or common law; they were accustomed to the role of guilds and fraternities. John himself, in pursuit of the throne, had in 1191 accepted the right of London to form its own commune as a self-governing and self-elected body of the richer citizens. From this time forward communal archives and records were placed in the guildhall. The momentum of the age was behind this new form of identity. Many other towns asserted their own communitas during the reign of John, with the election of mayors and the creation of municipal seals. The members of the commune swore an oath to preserve the town and its liberties.

So it was perhaps inevitable that the barons, in rebellion against the king, would assert the values of the communa of England and would introduce the concept of the communa totius terra with its attendant liberties. It became known, in the thirteenth century, as ‘the community of the realm’. There even grew, at the end of that century, a recognition of ‘the community of the vill’ or village. These were all stages in the growing selfconsciousness of England. This is the meaning of the ‘field full of folk’ that William Langland invokes at the beginning of Piers Plowman. He saw, in vision, a community.

16

Crime and punishment

A ‘scotale’ or drinking party took place at Ashley, near Cirencester, on 7 September 1208; it was in honour of the birthday of Our Lady, and the local officer of the forest sold drinks at his alehouse to celebrate the occasion. It was essentially a form of local tax, because the inhabitants felt obliged to attend in fear of incurring his displeasure. John Scot was riding back from the alehouse when he invited Richard of Crudwell to sit behind him on his horse. Richard thought that he was offering him a lift, but John took up a knife and stabbed him in the shoulder; the wound was 4½ inches (10.12 centimetres) deep. Richard fell from the horse, and John dismounted. He stabbed Richard once more, and proceeded to rob his purse of forty-three shillings. Somehow Richard crawled home, on all fours, and on the next day informed the king’s sergeant. This seems to have provoked John Scot who, five nights later, broke into the house of Richard’s mother and beat her so badly that it was believed she would not live.

At a convent, near Watton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in the 1160s, one nun had lost her virginity to a young priest; when her condition became obvious, the nuns interrogated her about the offending man. When she revealed his identity, the nuns captured him. They took him to the cell of the pregnant nun. She was given a knife and forced to castrate her lover; whereupon the nuns stuffed his genitals into her mouth. She was then flogged, and bound with chains in a prison cell. In an age when the call of heaven was direct and unequivocal – and when the spiritual world was pre-eminent – a general indifference was maintained to the fate or the sufferings of the physical body. When one English king was asked if he regretted the thousands of soldiers he sent into slaughter, he remarked that they would thank him when they were in heaven. The chronicler, after telling the story of the savage nuns, exclaimed, ‘What zeal was burning in these champions of chastity, these persecutors of uncleanness, who loved Christ above all things!’

These stories of physical cruelty would have been familiar to all the people of England in a period when violence was tolerated to a surprising degree. Village justice could be savage and peremptory, largely going unreported. The violence of lord against villein does not often appear in the historical record. In this society men and women took weapons with them; even small children possessed knives. William Palfrey, aged eleven, stabbed and killed the nine-year-old William Geyser outside the village of Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire. There was in any case what would now be called a culture of violence. Children were educated with severe physical discipline. Corporal punishment was familiar and usual in all elements of society. Public whipping, for a variety of offences from adultery to slander, was commonplace.

A genuine pleasure was also derived from bitter disputation, denunciation and vilification. This was a culture of rhetoric and the spoken word. A wide vocabulary of scatological abuse could be employed, while sexual misdemeanours were commonly and loudly publicized. In a society of intense hierarchy, a preoccupation with good name and standing is only to be expected. Disputes were sometimes settled by ritualized fights in the churchyard. Slights and insults were the occasion of bloody disputes. The smallest incident could provoke a violent fracas. One man came into a hostelry, where strangers were drinking. ‘Who are these people?’ he enquired, for which question he was stabbed to death. An element of gratuitous cruelty could also be introduced, as in the case of one man who was dragged to a local tavern and there obliged to drink a cocktail of beer and his own blood.

So the incidence of criminality was great. The justices who travelled to Lincoln in 1202 were confronted with 114 cases of murder and 49 of rape; this is not to mention the scores of incidents of theft and assault. When the body of a murdered man was found the men of the neighbourhood were summoned, while the corpse was raised upon a wooden hurdle and exhibited for seven days with logs burning around it to provide recognition at night. All males over the age of twelve, from the four nearest villages, were summoned to an inquest.

There was a popular phrase for a felon – ‘to become a wolf’s head that anyone may cut down’. He could be killed on sight by anyone who encountered him. Real wolves did in fact still inhabit thirteenth-century England. They were not exterminated until 1290. In that year Richard de Loveraz was noted as holding land by the service of hunting the wolf in Hampshire ‘if one can be found’. The wolf was deemed to be vermin, fit for nothing except death. So his fate was transferred to the unfortunate offender.

If the life of the nation was harsh, so was the system of punishment and death. The stocks, and the gibbet, were the common properties of English life. ‘Let him see a priest’ were the last words of the judge in a hanging matter. If you were convicted in Wakefield, you would be hanged; if you were found guilty in Halifax, your head would be cut off. Thieves, apprehended in Dover, were thrown over the cliffs. At Sandwich they were buried alive, in a place known as Thiefdown at Sandown. At Winchelsea they were hanged in the salt marsh there. At Halifax the axe would be drawn up on a pulley, and then fastened with a pin to the side of the scaffold. If the prisoner had been caught in false possession of a horse or an ox, the animal was led to the scaffold with him; the beast was then tied to a cord that held the pin and, at the moment of judgment, the beast was whipped and the pin came out. The proceedings were accompanied by the plaint of a bagpipe. It was a very ancient practice, perhaps predating even the time of the Saxons. The ancient privilege of the private gallows was also in demand; by the old law of infangtheof, a lord had the right to string up a thief caught on his property. In the early thirteenth century sixty-five private gallows were set up in Devon alone.

But thieves were not always put to death. A young offender was often blinded and castrated instead. When in 1221 Thomas of Eldersfield, of Worcester, was accused of malicious wounding he was sentenced to the same punishment; the judges decreed that the relatives of the victim could perform the blinding and castration. They threw the eyeballs to the ground, and used the testicles as little footballs. The apparent severity of the penalties was necessary in a violent society where relatively few offenders were caught. In the absence of a police force or a standing army, condign punishment was one of the few ways of upholding social obligations. That is why the local people were generally compelled to witness the performance of the sentence. The objective was to maintain order.

The trial by water and the trial by ordeal were also considered to be acceptable punishments in criminal cases. Trial by ordeal was conducted under the auspices of the Church. The accused spent three days in fasting and in prayer. On the third day, in a secluded part of the church, a cauldron of water was brought to boiling point by fire; a stone or piece of iron was then placed in the water. The accuser and the accused, each one accompanied by twelve friends, were arranged in two lines opposite one other, with the cauldron in the middle. The participants were sprinkled with holy water by the priest. Some litanies were recited, and the water was once more checked to see that it was at boiling point; the accused then plunged his hand and arm into the water, and took out the weight. The scalded flesh was then wrapped in a linen cloth; if the flesh had healed after the third day the accused was pronounced to be innocent. If the flesh was burned or ulcerous, the prisoner suffered the penalty for his offence.

Another form of divination by water was practised. A man or woman was bound and then lowered into a pit of cold water; the pit was 20 feet (6 metres) wide, and 12 feet (3.6 metres) deep. The priest blessed the water and then called upon God ‘to judge what is just and your right judgment’. If the man began to sink, he was deemed to be innocent; if he was guilty, he floated. The blessed water had rejected him.

The trial by fire was slightly more ingenious. The ceremony once more took place in a church. At the beginning of Mass a fire was made, and a bar of iron placed upon it. At the end of the Mass, the red-hot metal was taken to a small stone pillar. The accused then had to pick up the glowing metal and walk with it for three steps before throwing it down. The treatment was then the same as that of the trial by boiling water.

A strange mode of punishment, known as the ordeal of the morsel, was reserved for priests. A piece of cheese, 1 ounce (28 grams) in weight, was placed on a consecrated host; it was then given to the accused cleric on the solemn understanding that it would stick in his throat if he were guilty. The angel Gabriel was supposed to come down and stop the man’s throat. It is not clear how this worked in practice.

The concept of sanctuary was clearer. A felon who fled to one of a number of specified churches might remain inviolate for forty days; no person might hinder anyone bringing food and drink to him. The church was watched closely during this period, in case the man tried secretly to escape. After forty days the thief or murderer could formally be expelled by the archdeacon, but he could be permitted to stay. He could choose to abjure the realm, however, in which case he was taken to the church porch and assigned a port from which to sail. He was obliged to walk along the king’s highway, deviating neither to the left nor the right, carrying a cross in his hand. When he reached the port he would seek passage within the time of one tide and one ebb; if that were not possible he was to walk every day into the sea, up to his knees, until he found a ship.

Violent crime was of course closely associated with the incidence of drunkenness. The English were well known throughout Europe for their addiction to ale and wine and cider. The French were proud, the Germans were obscene, and the English were drunkards. In English monasteries the daily allowance was a gallon (4.5 litres) of strong ale and a gallon (4.5 litres) of weak ale. Every village had its alehouse. Twelfth-century London was castigated by the chronicler William Fitzstephen for ‘the immoderate drinking of fools’. There was private, as well as public, drinking. The most flourishing trade among the women of an English village was that of brewing. It is one of the essential continuities of national life. ‘The whole land’, Roger of Hoveden wrote, ‘is filled with drink and drinkers.’

The court rolls contain many stories of people who fell out of windows, slipped into cauldrons, tumbled from horses, or plunged into rivers, as a consequence of drink. In 1250 Benedict Lithere had been drinking in a tavern in Henstead in Suffolk, and by the end of the session ‘he could neither walk nor ride, nor barely even stand up’. His brother, Roger, put him on his horse; he fell off. Roger hauled him up a second time, and again Benedict fell off. Then Roger decided on a more drastic measure. He put him back on the horse, and tied him onto the animal. Benedict slipped and fell off once more, killing himself in the process.

John de Markeby, goldsmith, ‘was drunk and leaping about’ in the house of a friend when he wounded himself fatally with his own knife. Alice Quernbetere, extremely drunk, called two workmen by the insulting name of ‘tredekeiles’; she was then murdered by them. Richard le Brewer, carrying a bag of malt home while drunk, stumbled and ruptured himself. William Bonefaunte, skinner, stood ‘drunk, naked and alone at the top of a stair … for the purpose of relieving nature, when by accident he fell head-down to the ground and died’.

The records of madness evince some of the general qualities of the medieval mind. Robert de Bramwyk took his sister, deformed and hunchbacked from the time of her birth, and plunged her into a cauldron of hot water; then he took her out and began stamping on her limbs in order to straighten them. When Agnes Fuller refused to have sex with Geoffrey Riche, he cut off her head with a sword; he informed his neighbours that he was a pig, and hid beneath a trough. Eventually he went home, found a needle and thread, and tried to sew Agnes’s severed head back to the body.

17

A simple king

With the death of King John, the civil war was suspended. Prince Louis was still in England, pursuing his claim to the throne, but his progress met an impediment. John’s nine-year-old son, Henry, was in the southwest. The young boy’s supporters quickly declared him to be king, and he was crowned as Henry III at Gloucester Abbey in the autumn of 1216; Westminster Abbey was not available, because Louis was in control of London. Another unfortunate circumstance was reported. Since the royal crown had been ‘lost’ in the Wash, the young king wore a circlet of gold borrowed from his mother. Henry swore an oath of allegiance to the papacy, and the pope duly extended his blessing. Prince Louis and the rebel barons were no longer opposed to a ruthless and violent king; they were the enemies of a young boy in the protection of the see of Peter. They were not liberators, but irreligious usurpers. Even the prince’s father urged him to desist. He fought on, for a time, since the instinct for power is a strong one. He held London and much of the southeast, but the sentiment of the realm was against him; he also had a fair share of misfortune, his supporters being overwhelmed at Lincoln and a French fleet sending reinforcements beaten back at Sandwich. Finally he agreed to a truce, and was given £7,000 to leave England.

The young king had been asked by his barons to confirm ‘the liberties and free customs’ enshrined in the Magna Carta, so that even those who had remained loyal to King John realized the value of that document as a curb on sovereign power. It had already become an outline of shared principles that could unite the feuding barons. A council was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, where the Great Charter was published in slightly modified form. It had become in essence a new coronation charter. Henry III’s reign had effectively begun. It endured for fifty-six years. There was hardly a moment when he could recall not being a king. This gave him, perhaps, a certain laxity or lack of wariness. He never had to fight for his rule, or fight for land.

There had not been a boy king since the reign of Ethelred the Unready. So in this difficult situation Henry’s most prominent supporters established a regency council. Henry came under the tutelage of three men – the bishop of Winchester, the papal legate and the earl of Pembroke known as the earl marshal. As regents they effectively controlled the administration of the country. They acted quickly and effectively; within a matter of months the exchequer was open for business and the judges had been despatched on their legal peregrinations.

But the consequences of the civil war were plain. Would the barons loyal to John be allowed to retain the castles or lands they had captured from the rebels? Would the various factions within the baronage once more oppose each other? The death of the earl marshal, in 1219, proved the instability of the realm under the boy king. Certain mighty lords declined to hand over royal castles. They were also refusing to pay the taxes levied on them. Small-scale wars sprang up over disputed territory.

A new regency council had been established under the leadership of the papal legate, Pandulf. The head of the judicial system, the judiciar, was Hubert de Burgh. The king’s tutor and guardian, the bishop of Winchester, was Peter des Roches. These three men would play a major role in the vicissitudes of the early reign. They fought among themselves for primacy, and of course provoked hostility in all quarters. It cannot be said that they had any real conception of national well-being; with the possible exception of Pandulf, they were concerned to promote the interests of themselves and their families. That was what rule was all about. De Burgh and des Roches, for example, were engaged in a violent feud. At one meeting the two men broke out in argument against one another; de Burgh accused des Roches of being the instigator of all the troubles in the realm, whereupon des Roches said that he would bring his opponent ‘to his knees’. Then he stormed out of the meeting. These were the men who were supposed to tutor the king in good government.

It is evident enough that, in the period of the king’s minority, the rule was given to the strongest party or parties; by threat or violence, for example, Hubert de Burgh eventually gained control of the administration and began to deal with recalcitrant barons as well as over-mighty subjects. An approximation to order was maintained, but on de Burgh’s terms. Henry does not seem to have been particularly restive or uneasy during de Burgh’s ascendancy, but the time came when he was obliged to assert himself. At the beginning of 1227, at the age of nineteen, he declared himself to be of the age when he should assume all the duties of sovereignty.

This is the occasion, perhaps, to take a closer look at the young king. He was of modest height, and seems to have had no remarkable physical characteristic – except perhaps for his left eyelid, which was inclined to droop. He was amiable, but not perhaps docile. He tried to evict his younger brother, known as Richard of Cornwall, from some lands; the combined fury of the other barons prevented him from doing so. It was an early lesson in the limitations of power.

His personality has been variously described, no doubt because it was compounded of various parts. Some people considered him to be a simpleton, while others believed him to be a fool. He was described as vir simplex, an adjective that might mean without guile or without sense. He was criticized as weak and credulous, submissive and impulsive. He was very impressionable, and tended to favour the opinions of the last person to whom he had spoken. His resentments, and his affections, did not last for very long. It can safely be argued then, that he was not a strong and ruthless king in the manner of his father and grandfather. Unlike them, he had never been schooled in adversity. He had a temper and he could be sharp-tongued, but was not wantonly cruel.

He was pious, perhaps excessively so for a king who must sometimes assert his own rights over the Church. Every day he used to hear three masses. When he journeyed to Paris he could not pass a church where Mass was being said, without participating in the sacred ceremony. When the priest raised the eucharist at the solemn moment of elevation, Henry would hold the priest’s hand and kiss it. King Louis of France once told him that he preferred to hear sermons than to attend Mass. Henry replied that he would rather see his friend than hear one speak of him.

God was his immediate lord. No one on earth was closer to Him than the king. Henry revived the cult of Edward the Confessor, and considered the old king to be his spiritual protector. He rebuilt Westminster Abbey in veneration of his memory, and he now lies buried close to the shrine of the saint. In one sense he was English. He was born in England, at least, and his nickname was ‘Henry of Winchester’; he gave his sons the names of Anglo-Saxon saints.

When a relic of the holy blood of Jesus was sent to him by the patriarch of Jerusalem and the master of the Templars, it was kept in closely guarded secrecy at the church of the Holy Sepulchre in London. The young king carried the phial in solemn procession from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Abbey, his gaze fixed upon the relic at all times. He wore a simple robe of humility, but this ceremony was in part designed to re-emphasize the theory of sacred kingship. When after the service in Westminster Abbey he put on his crown and cloth of gold, he became an icon with his finger pointing upward to the heavens. Henry’s concept of kingship was one of ritual and spectacle. He crossed himself in the manner of ecclesiastics, and ensured that the words of ‘Christus Vincit’ were chanted before him on holy days. His father had spent his days on the road but Henry, less driven by his furies, preferred to settle down in comfort and splendour.

Above all he desired, and wished to be remembered for, a reign of peace. He did not like wars. He was no soldier, in any case. In one declaration he commended his reign for the absence of ‘hostility and general war’ and stated that he had never ceased to labour ‘for the peace and tranquillity of one and all’. He might even be considered a ‘good’ man, but good men rarely make good kings. No quality of greatness could be found in him. Two other shafts of light may help to illuminate him. He liked fresh air and insisted that the windows opposite his bed should be made to open. And he liked images of smiling faces. He ordered a row of smiling angels to be sculpted on either side of a rood screen for the church of St Martin le Grand.

He was in fact the most lavish patron of religious art in the history of England. He built chapels and churches; he was the patron of monkish historians and monkish illuminators; the great development of Gothic art occurred in the course of his long reign when the stones themselves cried out ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ Under the gaze of the king the High Gothic of Westminster Abbey emerged, to be seen at its grandest in the octagonal chapter house. Irresolute as he may sometimes have been, he was responsible for the creation of many of the architectural glories of England. In his reign 157 abbeys, priories and other religious houses were established; there was an efflorescence of Lady chapels.

It so happened that, at the beginning of his reign, the first friars came to England; the Dominicans arrived in 1221, and the Franciscans three years later. Their significance has long since been eroded, but at the time of their first presence in the country they materially affected the cultural and spiritual life of the people. They established themselves in the major towns, where they found favour with the leading merchants who had long fallen out of love with the parochial clergy; they preached, literally, in the marketplace.

They did not live in the cloister in the manner of Benedictine monks; they were in the world. They were mendicants, beggars, who roamed the streets seeking clothes and food. They were not, at least in the beginning, supposed to ask for money. Some of the first Franciscans in London lodged in a street known as Stinking Lane. They preached as poor men, therefore, and as a result helped to change the sentiments and perceptions of the townspeople. They told stories and jokes; they described miracles and marvels. They turned English preaching into a folk art. Before their arrival, there had been few sermons in England. It was a new experience for most of their auditors. The first pulpits were in fact not erected until the middle of the fourteenth century.

Of course the friars went the way of all flesh; they became successful and popular; they attracted patrons who endowed them richly; they built friaries and priories that rivalled the monasteries in comfort and prosperity. They became confessors to the great. Anyone who has read the Canterbury Tales will know that, 150 years after their arrival, they had become a byword for worldliness and even licentiousness. Their decline is a measure of the decay of all human institutions, sacred and secular.

On 29 July 1232, Hubert de Burgh was dismissed from the court and the king’s presence. He was accused of stirring up attacks on Italian clergy and expropriating their property. The pope had been making enquiries into the baron’s third marriage, and de Burgh wanted revenge. He miscalculated the depth of the young king’s devotion to the papacy. So the king, on the advice of ‘certain men of good faith’, dismissed him. One of those men of good faith was of course, Peter des Roches; as de Burgh fell, des Roches rose. Within a short time the bishop of Winchester brought in his nephew – or perhaps it was his son, no one was quite sure – as treasurer and head of the royal household. Peter des Rivaux was, like Peter des Roches, from Poitou. This was the king’s maternal homeland. Other Poitevins joined them. A strong affinity existed between them all and it was generally believed at the time that the king preferred their company – and their abilities – over his compatriots.

Yet England was an intrinsic part of a larger European order. Henry’s sister Isabella had married Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, known as stupor mundi, or the astonishment of the world. Henry himself married Eleanor of Provence in 1236, and her relatives played a large role in the king’s court. Eleanor’s sister had married King Louis IX of France. Those happy few who had inherited royal blood married one another, so that a network of relatives controlled the fates of kingdoms. But this extended family was not necessarily a happy one, and almost by default Henry became engaged in the endless broils of France and Italy. Europe was a nest of warring principalities, none of which had the internal coherence of England. The king of France, the pope and the emperor were ever vigilant and ever suspicious, ready to take advantage of one another at any opportunity.

Henry’s relationship with France was in any case strained and uncertain. His father had effectively lost the Angevin Empire and, despite his preference for peace, he was determined to retrieve it. But he had a formidable enemy. King Louis had taken over the whole of Poitou. Another part of the erstwhile empire, Gascony, was threatened by Louis and the kings of Castile, Navarre and Avignon. An expedition under the command of the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, saved the duchy – if ‘saved’ is the word for precarious Angevin authority over self-assertive local lords. Very little else was achieved. Henry sailed to Normandy, hoping that it would rise in his favour. This did not happen. The king marched about a bit, but there were no battles. Then Henry sailed back. It had been a most ineffectual invasion. It was said that the commanders of the king’s forces had behaved as if they were taking part in a Christmas game.

The king returned to France twelve years later, but his army was routed; Henry was forced to retreat into Bordeaux, the administrative centre of Gascony, and arrange a truce. This second expedition is remarkable for one reason, apart from its failure. The English barons were most unwilling to trust their money, or their men, to Henry’s campaign. They considered that an English king should no longer fight for supposed ancestral lands in France. Normandy or Poitou or Gascony were no longer to be viewed as an extension of England. The island was pre-eminently an island. That is why Henry’s son, Edward I, was more intent upon the conquest of Scotland and of Wales

It was also clear that the Angevin Empire, once broken, could not be put back together again. Only Gascony remained, to provide England with much of its wine. The vintages of Bordeaux are still very popular, and so the Angevin Empire can be said to remain in the wine racks of England. But Gascony provided more forbidding fruit: as the price of his title to the duchy Henry pledged fealty to the king of France. But how can one king be the vassal of another? The uncertain status of the area, poised between France and England, was to become an occasion for the Hundred Years War.

It is a commonplace of English history that Henry III was an ineffectual king. When the royal seal was changed, in the middle of the reign, he was portrayed as bearing a sceptre rather than the original sword. But in the course of his life the economy of the country improved, with the absence of war playing some part in this general prosperity. The lords and tenants of the land were not removed to fight in foreign territories, and were allowed to concentrate upon the condition of their estates. The surviving documents suggest that there was increased traffic in the sale and purchase of land. A vogue for manuals of estate management soon followed, with advice on matters from dung to dairy production. 14 gallons (63.6 litres) of cow’s milk should produce 14 pounds (6.3 kilos) of cheese and 2 pounds (0.9 kilo) of butter. There had not been such a profitable farming industry since the days of Roman England.

The king exacted fewer taxes from his subjects than any of his predecessors and so encouraged the flow of wealth about the realm. Henry relied upon the exploitation of his royal lands, and on the profits to be gained from justice. Richard and John had open mouths, swallowing England’s silver; Henry, partly under the strictures of the Magna Carta, was obliged to hold back.

Other reasons for prosperity can be found. The uncertain relations of England with both France and Flanders were eased by the late 1230s, allowing a great increase in the export of wool to those countries. A threefold increase in overseas trade took place in the course of the thirteenth century; this was the age of road-building, easing the routes of commerce. The silver poured in, much to the advantage of the merchants in the towns and ports. The ‘marble of Corfe’ and the ‘scarlet of Lincoln’, the ‘iron of Gloucester’ and the ‘cod of Grimsby’, were celebrated in doggerel rhyme. They provide the context in which we may best understand the king’s programme of church-and chapel-building.

Some unknowable bond exists between the economic and physical health of the nation, marked by the fact that in the period of Henry’s rule the population began to rise ever more rapidly. As a result demand at home grew for corn, cheese and wool; the economy expanded together with the number of people who took part in it. There were 5 million inhabitants and 8 million sheep. Yet growth is not always or necessarily benign. Prices were rising as a result of increased demand; the consequence of a larger working population was that wages could be kept low. While the more efficient or prosperous farmers flourished, and enlarged their properties, their poorer neighbours were generally left with smaller and smaller plots of land.

The king once remarked that there were no more than 200 men in England who mattered, and that he was familiar with all of them. Many of them were bound together by ties of marriage or of tenure; many of them were associated in local administration and local justice. They were all in kinship and alliance, one with another. They were bound within regional as well as courtly groupings; and there were times, as Henry soon learned to his cost, when they could act together.

The problem was that the majority of these significant lords were distrustful of a king who surrounded himself with his advisers from Poitou, the greatest of whom were Peter des Roches and Peter des Rivaux. The issue was, in part, their foreignness. The English lords were by the thirteenth century all native-born, and in written documents professed their affection for ‘native ground’ or ‘native soil’. In the sixth year of Henry’s reign the feast of St George had been turned into a national holiday. The monkish chronicler of St Albans recorded that those people who did not speak English were ‘held in contempt’.

The foreignness of the Poitevins was compounded by their greed. They came to the court to receive annual stipends. They were eager for lands and for money, but these could only be granted at the expense of the native lords. In the spring of 1233 these magnates let it be known that they would refuse to attend the king’s council if ‘the aliens’ were present; the king’s representative replied that he had every right to choose foreign counsellors and that he would find the force necessary to quell this baronial mutiny. In June 1233 the lords were summoned to the king’s presence in Oxford; they refused to obey. They also delivered a message to the effect that they would throw Henry and the foreigners out of the country before electing a new king. The barons were declared contumacious; they were exiles and outlaws, their lands nominally granted to the Poitevin courtiers.

In this lay a cause for war. The barons went on the offensive, and within six months the king’s forces were defeated. The lands and properties of ‘aliens’ were despoiled. The bishops of the land enforced a truce, in which the king effectively surrendered. The rebel lords were pardoned, and certain of the Poitevins were banished from court. Yet Henry could not separate himself from his instinctive partiality for his extended family of Frenchmen. He was himself half-French, the son of Isabella of Angoulême.

His marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236 only compounded the problem. According to Matthew Paris, ‘he took a stranger to wife without the advice of his own friends and natural subjects’. The twelve-year-old girl had brought in her entourage her uncle, William of Savoy. He was half-brother to the king himself, sharing a mother in Isabella. He knew that Henry was impressionable and pliable. He had come to stay. The Savoyards were soon everywhere. Peter of Savoy was given the territory in Yorkshire known as the honour of Richmond. It was he who built the Savoy Palace between the Strand and the Thames, now the site of the Savoy hotel. Boniface of Savoy was granted the archbishopric of Canterbury. Henry had not learned the simple lesson. He believed that the country was his alone. Why should he not distribute it to half-brothers or second cousins or great-nephews if he so wished? He was king.

The opposition to Henry, over succeeding years, took various forms and the expressions of grievance were variously couched. The Poitevins and Savoyards were still too much favoured. The queen was playing too dominant a role. The king was being given ill, or indifferent, advice. He was irresolute and inconstant in policy. He was too much in thrall to the pope. When one of his English barons remonstrated with him for ignoring the clauses of the Magna Carta he is said to have replied, ‘Why should I observe this charter, which is neglected by all my grandees, both prelates and nobility?’ The answer came, that he ought as king to set an example. The general impression is of weak or bad government on a sufficiently large scale to merit some intervention.

In 1244 he demanded a large sum from parliament. In return the lords insisted that they be given authority to elect the justiciar and the chancellor, thus taking command of the law and the exchequer. The king agreed only to renew his vow to accept the provisions of the Magna Carta. Four years later, when he asked parliament to grant him more money, the lords refused. They told him the revenue was wasted on wax candles and on useless processions; they also informed him that the food and drink he consumed, even the clothes he wore, were snatched from their lawful owners. Five years later Henry again demanded money, on the ground that he was about to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. No one really believed him. Once more he only exacted the sum by a solemn vow to obey the precepts of the Magna Carta. Once more he reneged on his promises. We see here the unsettled reign of the first king of England struggling in the restraints of law.

Then there came what was called at the time ‘a new and sudden change’. On 7 April 1258 a parliament was called, since the king again needed money. He had promised the pope the vast sum of 135,541 marks, in return for his son Edmund being installed as king of Sicily; the Sicilian adventure was a fiasco, but the debt remained.

The king’s demands were all the more onerous because this was a time of famine. The harvest of 1257 had failed, and by the spring of the following year the price of wheat had increased two and a half times. We may survey the activities of kings and lords, but another life sometimes escapes observation: the life of the wretched. Matthew Paris reports, in this year of dearth, ‘an innumerable multitude of poor people, swollen and rotting, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties, on dunghills, and in the dirt of the streets’. The resources of the country were confined to relatively few people. Approximately 60 per cent of the agricultural population was deemed to be too poor to pay taxes. They were not on anyone’s list to be saved or protected. No ‘state’ was in place to succour them, and so they went to the wall. The king was in any case only concerned with his own financial problems.

The barons of England were not inclined to honour his debts. At the end of April 1258, after much fruitless debate, a party of barons made their way to the court at Westminster. They deliberately put their swords beside the entrance to the king’s hall before saluting Henry in the expected manner. But he was unnerved by the sight of their weapons. An eyewitness report, placed in the Tewkesbury chronicles, describes the scene. ‘What is this, my lords?’ he asked them. ‘Am I, wretched fellow, your captive?’

Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk, replied for them all. ‘No, my lord, no! But let the wretched and intolerable Poitevins and all aliens flee from your face and ours as from the face of a lion, and there will be glory to God in the heavens and in your land peace to men of good will.’

This affords a glimpse of the colourful and spirited speech of the thirteenth century. Bigod then asked the king to accept ‘our counsels’. Henry, naturally enough, asked what they might entail. The barons had already agreed among themselves on their demands. The king was to be guided and advised by a group of twenty-four councillors, twelve to be chosen by the king and twelve chosen by the barons. If the king had refused these terms, he faced a real prospect of civil war. He knew as much himself, and so after deliberation he accepted the terms offered to him. He must also have been swayed by the fact that the barons agreed to grant him ‘aid’ in his financial embarrassments.

A committee of twenty-four was chosen and, in the summer of 1258, published what amounts to a manifesto on domestic and international affairs. The major proposal was a simple one. The king was to be directed by the advice of a council of fifteen men nominated by the barons, and parliament itself would choose the justiciar, chancellor and treasurer. The king’s acceptance of what became known as the Provisions of Oxford was issued in English as well as in Latin and French, testimony to the manifest identity of the realm. In practice the council was soon ruling the country. It took possession of the great seal. It settled all the matters of state without the king’s presence. If he remonstrated with them, they replied that ‘this is how we wish it’. Henry had become a minor again. This was no longer the government of a king.

That was the reason it did not, and could not, work. How could the power of the country, exercised by one man for thirty-one years, now be dispersed between fifteen people? Quarrels broke out between the barons over the nature and purpose of their control of the king, and they found it difficult to deal with international affairs without the direct intervention of the king with his fellow monarchs. The barons themselves had their own local interests – they were, after all, primarily regional magnates – which were not necessarily compatible with national administration. It was said that they were concerned only with self-aggrandizement.

The baronial government collapsed within two years. A papal bull was published, releasing Henry from any promises made under duress to his lords; the bull stated that when a king was distrained by his subjects it was as if a woodman was assaulted by his own axe. Henry also declared that the barons had stripped the king of ‘his power and dignity’. He moved into the Tower, both as a defence against his enemies and as a potent symbol of that power.

Not greatly chastened by events, he resumed the exercise of sovereignty. It lasted for only two years. The ‘aliens’, the Savoyards in particular, were once more blamed for being ‘over-mighty’. Henry had also introduced a body of foreign mercenaries, provoking rumours that the country was about to suffer an invasion. So in 1263 a group of dissident barons found themselves a new leader to press their claims, and in particular their demand that they should be governed only ‘per indigenas’ or by native-born men.

Simon de Montfort, summoned by the barons, sailed to England. It has been said that he was the first ever leader of an English political party. He was perhaps an odd representative of the English cause. He was born in France and was part of a noble French family. Yet he had native connections. He had inherited the earldom of Leicester, by virtue of the fact that his grandfather had married the sister of the previous earl; it was a circuitous route, but it was a proper one. He had also married the king’s sister Eleanor. So, as one chronicler put it, he became ‘the shield and defender of the English, the enemy and expeller of aliens, although he himself was one of them by nation’. The barons summoned the representatives of the shires to an assembly at St Albans, while the king called them to Windsor.

The confrontation between Henry III and Simon de Montfort could not be contained. De Montfort himself was an obstinate and intolerant man, with an obsessive hatred for Jews and heretics. He was something of an isolated figure in England, with a disdain for the compromises and irresolution of his English supporters whom he had once described as ‘fickle and deceitful’. He was impatient of fools, and could be high-handed both in his manner and in his methods. He was, in other words, a bully. He knew what was right. He knew, or thought he knew, what had to be done. He had in the past commanded a crusading army, and Henry himself had once despatched him to Gascony as his seneschal or viceroy. The king was notoriously fearful of storms. It was an aspect of his simplicity. But on one occasion he told de Montfort that ‘by God’s head, I fear you more than all the thunder and lightning in the world’.

A large element of self-righteousness existed in de Montfort’s nature that may have helped to conceal, even from himself, his true purpose. Like the rest of his family he wanted to extend his power and lordship. That was where proper honour lay. He preferred strong rule as a moral and theoretical imperative, but surely it would be all the stronger if it were wielded by him? Further questions arose. If he were able to gain the victory, would he allow the king to resume his rule under baronial restraint? Or would he himself take on the role of sovereign?

The members of both parties engaged in intermittent conflict after his arrival in England. They were also involved in what would now be called a propaganda war, with open letters to the shire courts and sermons in the churchyards. The political ballad also emerges in this period. In the early months of 1264 the struggle turned into open and intensive warfare, on a scale not seen in England since the battles of King John with his barons. The peace that the king craved was snatched from him. He had an uneasy relationship with his elder son, Edward, since Edward had the stronger and more valiant character. At his instigation the king marched on the rebel town of Northampton, bearing the royal standard of a red dragon with fiery tongue; this bloody flag was a sign that no quarter would be given to those who surrendered. The king took the town. Edward then pillaged rebel lands in Staffordshire and Derbyshire. De Montfort himself was using London, where the citizens had turned decidedly against the king, as the centre of operations. Here he was impregnable. But Henry had the larger army.

A decisive confrontation could not be avoided. Otherwise the administration of the country would perish with a thousand cuts. On 11 May Henry and his entourage arrived at the Cluniac priory of Lewes in Sussex. The baronial army took up its position 10 miles (16 kilometres) to the north. Two days passed in inconclusive negotiations, but then de Montfort moved forward to the high downs overlooking Lewes. The armies faced one another and, as battle began, Edward led a furious attack upon the contingent of Londoners; he broke them, and pursued the scattered bands for several hours. That was the mistake. By the time he returned the rebels had won a signal victory, with the king himself immured in the priory. De Montfort had not flown the red dragon on his standard, so an armistice was quickly arranged. The Lord Edward, as he was known, was confined in Dover Castle as a hostage for the king’s good intent.

A Latin poem of 968 lines, entitled The Song of Lewes, was written soon after the event. Its intent was to celebrate what de Montfort had called ‘the common enterprise’, and it justified the armed rebellion of the barons as the only means of ensuring that they played their proper role in the administration of the country. ‘Commonly it is said, as the king wishes, so goes the law; the truth is quite otherwise, for the law stands, though the king falls.’ It would not be wholly fanciful to suggest the presence of something like a communal sentiment of the realm in the face of manifest injustice. Strong evidence also exists that the working population of the countryside took matters into their own hands and sided with the barons. Some Leicestershire villagers, for example, surrounded a captain and his men who were fighting in the king’s army; they attempted to arrest them on the grounds that they were ‘against the welfare of the community of the realm and against the barons’. These were not idle or theoretical concepts; they were part of living reality.

Many hundreds of villagers were also fighting as foot soldiers beside the mounted knights. The poorest of them had knives and scythes, the more prosperous were obliged by law to possess an iron cap and a lance. They were fighting against the king’s exactions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century three pits were uncovered in Lewes; each one contained approximately 500 bodies. They had just been piled one on top of another, the unmourned and unremembered casualties of war. They are described by one chronicle as ordinary people bred ‘de vulgo’, from the masses. Very few knights were killed in the battle.

Henry III was returned to London after his defeat, where he was placed for safekeeping in St Paul’s Cathedral. A small body of nine barons, under the leadership of de Montfort, assumed power while all the departments of state continued to operate in the name of the king. But it was only a name. De Montfort was now the strong man of the state. It is the first instance in English history of a subject seizing rule from an anointed sovereign. He confiscated the lands of eighteen barons who had fought on the wrong side, and took the lion’s share of ransom money. He even turned on his fellow barons, and consigned one of them to prison; another fled the realm. De Montfort was becoming a tyrant. That is what happens within oligarchies; one climbs over the others. As a result his support was soon fatally weakened. Who would not prefer a king to a tyrant?

Yet in the search for support he summoned two parliaments, at one of which the representatives of the towns as well as the knights and lords were present. From a period of authoritarian rule emerged an instrument of liberty; it can be said that the growing identity of the nation itself was shaped in opposition to the king. Out of contrast comes growth; out of opposition emerge principles. The exploitations of Richard and John had helped to foster a sense of communitas in towns and villages; the weakness of Henry now led to a more general recognition of the ‘community of the realm’.

The growth and development of parliament were part of the same process. There had always been parliaments of a kind. The structure itself existed before the moment it reached selfconsciousness, thereby acquiring an identity. We cannot look back into the darkness of prehistory, but we can be sure that the tribal leaders had their own councils of wise or noble men. The Saxon invaders had brought with them the idea of the witan, which means literally ‘the knowing’, or witenagemot (the word itself is not recorded before 1035); this was an assembly, made up of bishops and nobles, that met once or twice a year. They were consulted by the king, and deliberated upon the making of new laws or the raising of new taxes. They may have had the power of electing, and even deposing, a king.

The Norman council, established after the successful invasion of England, was a smaller body of perhaps thirty-five ecclesiastical and secular lords. In 1095 William Rufus called together a larger assembly, comprising all the abbots, bishops and principes or chief men of the land. This became the template for the councils of later reigns; with the absence of the Norman and Angevin kings in France and elsewhere, the assembly of magnates learned how to act collectively to enforce its will. They also assumed a collective identity. In the reign of Henry II the abbot of Battle declared that the king could not change the laws of the country without ‘the counsel and consent’ of the barons. That was still debatable.

The first parliamentary summons came from King John who, in the summer of 1212, demanded that the sheriff of each county should come to him with ‘six of the more lawful and discreet knights who are to do what we shall tell them’. The knights were not present to advise the king. They were there to communicate the royal will to their regions. Yet the provisions of the Magna Carta, three years later, were designed to curtail the powers of the king; in particular it was ordained that no monarch could levy extraordinary taxation without the ‘common counsel’ of the realm. The realm, at this juncture, of course meant only the barons and the bishops.

In 1236 Henry III called a parliament at Westminster. This represents the first official use of the term, but the actual assembly consisted only of lay magnates and bishops. There were no representatives from the shires or the towns. But the king needed money from various and different sources. He could no longer rely on the feudal tax paid by his barons, or on taxes collected from their tenants. So in 1254 the sheriffs were ordered to send two knights from each county chosen by the county court. The lower clergy were also graciously admitted to the parliamentary assembly.

Simon de Montfort, after his victory, summoned two representatives from each town. Knights and the leaders of the towns, known as burgesses, then became as much part of parliament as the bishops and lords. We have here the rudimentary beginnings of the House of Commons. No one seems to have noticed this at the time, however, and there is no extant commentary upon the change. It was not in any case a great exercise in democracy. De Montfort’s immediate purpose was simply to have more supporters in place against the great lords who were antagonistic to him; a large gathering would also help to disguise the enforced absence of his enemies. So he brought in the knights and the townsmen.

Unintended and unforeseen consequences followed the appearance of the parliament. Its growing importance, for example, elevated the role of knights as well as the richer townsmen. A knight can be defined as one who possessed one or several manors and who was generally involved in the government of his local area in such posts as sheriff or forest official. He took on the royal work of his shire, administrative and judicial.

The knights were known as buzones or ‘big men’. They were approximately 1,100 or 1,200 in number. They are the men whose images are seen, in wood and stone, in the old churches of England. They wear body armour, and some of them are about to draw the sword; some carry shields; others are shown with their hands folded in prayer; they are often cross-legged; double images of husband and wife are sometimes preferred. This was the period when coats of arms were recorded, and the science of heraldry emerged in all its fancifulness. Early in the fourteenth century, knights’ burials were commemorated with full-figure brasses.

Their pre-eminence led to a general stratification in the various ranks and classes below them. By the middle of the fourteenth century, at the latest, there had emerged the outlines of what has become known as the gentry, including knights, esquires and gentlemen. An esquire was a prosperous landowner who for various reasons had surrendered the status of knighthood. A gentleman was of lower standing, simply the head of a landed family. By 1400 this difference was stated in monetary terms. An esquire earned between £20 and £40 a year, while a gentleman would earn between £10 and £20. Knights and esquires might serve as sheriffs or as Justices of the Peace, while gentlemen took on such lesser roles as undersheriffs and coroners. Gentlemen were often parish gentry, while knights were always county gentry. It is a matter of some interest that this social structure survived, with modifications, until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It held together the country for more than 500 years.

Wherever we look in the thirteenth century, we see evidence of greater formality and control. In the towns of England an oligarchy of the richer merchants was strictly organized, in consort with royal officialdom; the crafts and merchants were now gathered into guilds and trade associations. The bureaucracy of the king’s court was becoming ever more complex and methodical. Administrative historians have noticed the huge proliferation of documents in the reign of Henry III. Even the crusaders setting out from England to the Holy Land were given written contracts that stipulated certain common terms of service. Every right, or verdict, was defined in writing. A royal bailiff, approaching a small farmer for taxes, tells him that ‘thou art writen yn my writ’. It is a paradox, perhaps, that in the reign of a weakor indecisive king the apparatus of the Crown had never been more efficient or adaptable. But how else are we to explain the fact that, despite the disasters of his government, Henry III continued to rule for so long? By degrees the nation was fixed and rendered stable, despite the manifest tempests upon its surface.

One of the tempests gathered at the end of May 1265. The Lord Edward, still in custody, was allowed to go riding; he was a prince of the royal blood, after all. But on this spring morning he tried one horse after another, going further and further out; then he chose one particular horse and, on the signal of a gentleman rider in the distance, he galloped off. Before long, he reached the safety of Ludlow Castle. Edward was at liberty. He was free to raise his father’s standard against de Montfort and the other rebels.

The threat was immediate, and the result not long in coming. The two armies met on 4 August at Evesham in Worcestershire. When de Montfort saw the royalist forces approaching him in well-ordered array he remarked that ‘they learned how to do that from me’. At their head was the Lord Edward; now, at twenty-six years old, he was de facto leader of the realm. De Montfort had taken Henry with him as hostage and, as the battle grew more fierce, he and his knights fought in a circle around the king; one of the royalists, Roger Leyburn, managed to rescue Henry from the mêlée. Edward had already appointed twelve men in what might be called a death squad, whose only task was to kill de Montfort. They were successful. His head was cut off, and his testicles dangled on each side of his nose; the trophy was then sent to the wife of the man who had beheaded him. A general slaughter ensued, the first of its kind in medieval England where lords and knights were ordinarily spared for ransom or for the sake of honour. Edward would not be the same kind of king as his father.

Simon de Montfort’s body was given to the monks of Evesham, in whose abbey it was buried. His tomb lies now in the ruins, beneath the high altar, marked by a granite cross. In his death he was by some considered to be a martyr and his burial place became an object of pilgrimage. Here was the grave of a rebel in the cause of righteousness, and failure only added lustre to his reputation. Rumours spread of miracles in the abbey.

But they were not enough to save his supporters. Those who were not slaughtered on the field at Evesham were scattered. Some fled to Kenilworth, the castle of the de Montforts, while others took refuge in the Isle of Ely. Some escaped to the wild woods, and it is possible that the saga of Robin Hood emerged from the life of one such wandering lord. They were known as the ‘disinherited’, and they only found their way back into the king’s grace with massive payments.

Henry resumed his reign. The great seal was returned to him, and he sat as before with his council. The imposition of order was swift enough, although in truth the country had not been much affected by the wars between its lords. Local difficulties had occurred in the immediate neighbourhood of the fighting, but the business of the realm continued as before. Henry’s son and heir, Edward, felt able to leave the country and take the part of a crusader in the Holy Land. He prepared himself to ascend the throne in the service of Christ.

The king himself was free to press ahead with the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, where he was impatient to remove the relics of Edward the Confessor to a new shrine. The abbey itself was another example of the community of the realm. For twentyfive years 800 men had worked upon the glorious fabric with its new presbytery, new chapter house, new crossing and a slowly rising north front. It was a work for the generations. The stonemasons of Purbeck, the craftsmen of all England, the sailors and wagoners, had all played their part in this mighty enterprise. The tilemakers, the mosaicists and the workers in metal had collaborated in the service of the king’s passion for curiously crafted things. He lavished so much money on the building that it has become a permanent memorial of his reign. He expired in the fifty-sixth year of that reign, on 16 November 1272; at the age of sixty-five, he is likely to have died simply of old age. The tomb of Henry III, with a gilt-bronze effigy of the king, is still to be seen in the abbey that he built.

18

The seasonal year

Of the ways of marking time in England, the calendar of the years of the king’s reign was the least significant; the sacred calendar and the seasonal calendar were pre-eminent. They represented the habitual and unchanging nature of the world; they expressed a deep sense of belonging to the land and to the everlasting that are the true horizons of the medieval period. Seasonal and sacred time were intermingled.

Winter, lasting from Michaelmas on 29 September to Christmas, was the season for sowing; wheat and rye were known as winter seed. Some of the cattle were removed from their summer pastures to the relative warmth of the stalls, while the rest were slaughtered; the pigs were hustled to their sties. November was known as the blood month. What was not eaten was salted. The twelve days of the Christmas celebration were the only long holiday that the farmers and labourers enjoyed; it was a time of feasts and drinking, and of the mysterious rituals of the mummers’ plays.

In spring, from Epiphany on 6 January to the Holy Week of Easter, the men set the vineyards and made the ditches; they hewed wood for fences and planted the vegetable garden. The world of work had begun again. The first Monday after Epiphany was known by the women as Distaff Monday and by the men as Plough Monday, thus neatly describing their two occupations. One spun and the other delved.

On Plough Monday, a ‘fool plough’ or ‘white plough’ was dragged about the village by young ploughmen covered in ribbons and other gay ornaments; they asked for pennies at every door and, if refused, they ploughed the ground before the cottage. The leader of the ploughmen, or ‘plough-bullocks’, was a young man dressed up as an old woman and known as Bessy. Another participant would wear a foxskin as a hood, with the tail hanging behind his back. This ancient ceremony was still being performed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps testifying to the customary nature of English rural life. It is still practised in certain areas of eastern England, where its origins in the Danelaw are assumed to lie. The feast of Candlemas on 2 February, commemorating the Purification of the Virgin, was the time for tillage to be resumed; it was the moment for the ‘lenten seed’ of oats and barley and beans to be sown. This was also the time for the pruning of trees.

From Hocktide, the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter, to Lammas, on the first day of August, came the summer. That is why the May queen or Flora was known as the summer queen rather than the spring queen. On the day before Hockday the females of the village captured and bound as many men as they could find, and kept them until a fee or ransom had been paid. On Hockday itself the males of the village engaged in the same sport. Days of festival were always celebrated before the resumption of serious agricultural work. This was the time when the husbandman must lay down the manure, cut the wood, shear the sheep, clear the land of weeds, repair fences, rebuild the fish-weirs and the mills. The fallow fields were ploughed. Midsummer occurred on the feast of the nativity of St John the Baptist. On St John’s Eve, 23 June, as a thirteenth-century monk from Winchcombe observed, ‘the boys collect bones and certain other rubbish, and burn them, and therefrom a smoke is produced on the air. They also make brands and go about the fields with the brands. Thirdly, the wheel which they roll.’ The wheel was the wheel of fire, set aflame and sent rolling down the hills of the region. In this way the pagan rituals and the Christian calendar were united in one celebration. On St John’s Day itself the harvest of hay was brought in. When all the hay had been stacked a sheep was let loose in the field; it became the prize of the mower who caught it. Only after St John’s Day were the thistles in the fields cut down; it was said that if they were removed earlier, they would increase threefold.

From Lammas to Michaelmas, at the end of September, came the harvest time of corn known as autumpnus. The name Lammas came from the Anglo-Saxon hlaf-Mass or loaf-Mass; in a good year it was a time of fruitfulness. When the last sheaf had been ceremonially cut, a supper known as harvest home was served. As Thomas Tusser wrote in the sixteenth century,

In harvest time, harvest folk, servants and all

Should make altogether good cheer in the hall.

In their laughter and in their dancing they were keeping time with the seasons and at the same time celebrating the continuities of the earth; they were part of a universal rhythm which they experienced but did not necessarily understand.

After the harvest had been taken in, the cattle would be allowed to graze on the stubble. At the same time rye and wheat would be sown in the fallow fields after they had been ploughed and harrowed. After the sowing was over there was customarily a feast with seed cake, pasties and a dish of milk, wheat, raisins and spices known as furmenty or frumenty. Then came a time when the sheaves of the harvest were threshed, separating the ears from the straw; this was followed by the winnowing, when the grain was divided from the chaff. Also at this period the labourers were obliged to prepare the sheep-pens and the pigsties.

So the agricultural year was embedded in the ritual year. That is why, in the churches and cathedrals of England, the capitals and pillars were decorated with images of the months; the mowers are carved to celebrate the month of July, while a husbandman with sickle is the stone emblem of September. In Southwell Minster the pigs snuffle among the great stone oak leaves for the acorns of November. The natural world is familiar and immutable. The ease of summer and the woe of winter are part of the eternal order in which the humblest labourer participated; in medieval poetry, the ploughman was often considered to be holy. On sacred days the worshippers in the parish church, and the labourers in the field, were participating in complementary rituals. On the three rogation days preceding the Ascension Day, the parishioners would walk around the boundaries and bless the fields.

Murrain, the infectious disease that blighted sheep and cattle, was considered to be susceptible to prayer. A Mass in celebration of the Holy Spirit was sung, each parishioner offering up a penny. The sheep were then gathered in the field, and passages from the gospels were read out to them; then they were sprinkled with holy water while a hymn was chanted. This was followed by the recital of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria. Nevertheless animal mortality remained very high.

The nature of agriculture, month by month, hardly changed over the centuries. Open-field systems were common in the midlands, where large and unfenced fields were divided into strips which were owned by individual families; small enclosed fields were ubiquitous in Kent and in Essex; in the north and west rectangular fields were aligned one with another. From the thirteenth century there emerged the device of enclosure, whereby individual farmers exchanged their strips of land with one another; they could then create a larger portion that could be enclosed by hedges or fences.

Hamlets and small fields were typical of the north of England, while villages and large fields spread across the midlands. Considerable variety, however, existed within the counties. East Somerset was the home of open fields, while the west of that county was enclosed. East Suffolk was enclosed, and West Suffolk was open. The standard tenement of land was known in the south as yard-land, and in the north as oxgang, and its location is ascertained in documents by the position of the sun. The south and the east were considered to be the brighter part of the earth. The lie of the land, the nature of the soil, the patterns of the climate, all played their part in shaping the farming system of each small territory. Parts of Wiltshire were clay land and other parts were chalk; the soil of Hampshire was basin gravel.

An infinite variety of agricultural practice existed in every part of the country, enforced or determined by custom and tradition. The families of each village or hamlet could have been tending the same parcel of land for many centuries, living in intimate relationship with it. They were part of the soil. In an early book of law we find that a hamlet is defined as possessing ‘nine buildings, and one plough, and one kiln, and one churn, and one cat, and one cock, and one bull, and one herdsman’. The different kinds of field and pasture may also reflect the persistent influence of tribal customs that cannot be assigned a definite date. The communal history that allowed the partition into small fields or strips is also now irrecoverable; it is merely present as far back as we can look. Every portion of land had over the centuries acquired its own character of uses, rights and duties; it was a living thing, created out of custom and habit.

It was through land that a man gained honour and prestige as well as wealth; the extent of his lands measured the size of his military obligations. It was a commonplace that if you did not own a parcel of land you could not marry or raise a family. The landless man in the countryside was a nonentity. The law was essentially the will of the majority of those who owned land. Social life was dominated by the sale or purchase of land, in which 90 per cent of the population were involved one way or another. Castles were at the centre of military campaigns, from the eleventh century onwards, precisely because they dominated the surrounding land. The most severe form of punishment was the ravaging of the land. The pattern of landholding, rather than any administrative division, determined the nature and policy of each district and each shire.

Land was in fact the single most important cause of violence and social dissension. When one knight named only as Edward refused to do services to the prior of St Frideswide in exchange for a hide of land at Headington, the matter was resolved by judicial combat. ‘After many blows between the champions, and although the champion of Edward had been blinded in the fight, they both sat down and as neither dared attack the other, peace was established as follows …’ Less forceful means of justice could be tried. A farmer from Evesham claimed land from the abbey there; he took the precaution of filling his shoes with earth from his own estate so that he could swear in front of the monks that he was standing upon his own land.

Ploughing time, and the season for mowing, were earlier in some parts of the country than in others. Yet the rewards of labour were the same. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, were part of the common inheritance. A medieval folk song celebrated the appearance of ‘oats, peas, beans and barley’ that in The Tempest became ‘wheat, rye, barley, fetches, oats and peas’. In the great fields we would see fifty or sixty men working on the land, scattered over the strips, bent over with toil. Many illustrations of them can be found in calendars and books of hours, dressed in tight breeches with a smock or blouse made of cloth and tied at the waist by a belt; in cold weather they wore a hooded mantle of wool that covered the upper part of the body. Sometimes they wore woollen caps.

‘First thing in the morning,’ the peasant recites in a tenth-century treatise, ‘I drive my sheep to pasture and stand over them in heat and cold with dogs lest wolves should devour them, and I lead them back to their sheds and milk them twice a day and move their folds besides, and I make cheese and butter …’ On the common land of the village, the cattle would be watched by a boy.

The farm animals of the medieval period were smaller and weaker than their modern counterparts, and the productivity of the soil was far inferior. It was a continuing and earnest business of survival for the farmer and the labourer, who often lived in conditions of rank squalor. The world was not progressing; it was believed to be in a state of steady deterioration from the age of gold to the age of iron. This portrait of the seasonal year must not be taken as an advertisement for a ‘merry England’. Even the entertainments, those sports and games and rituals that are at the heart of the ritual calendar, were often brutal and violent. It was a life of sweat and dirt, but one that was quickly over.

19

The emperor of Britain

At the time of Henry’s death the Lord Edward was in Sicily, recovering from an attempted assassination. He had been in the Holy Land, where he had achieved nothing. He had been attacked in the city of Acre by a man wielding a dagger dipped in poison and almost died from the wound; the blackened flesh, corroded by the poison, had to be cut away in an operation almost as deadly as the original assault. But he survived, and sailed to safe harbour in Sicily. It was here that he learned of the death of his father.

He did not hurry back for his coronation. He had already been declared king in his absence, but he did not arrive in London for another eighteen months. He lingered in France until the summer of 1274. He had been born at Westminster, but he was by inheritance still essentially French; more pertinently, he was a member of the royal family of Europe. One of the reasons for the delay in his coronation had been his desire to put the affairs of Gascony in order. Gascony was, for him, just as important as England.

In his absence a parliament had been held, suggesting the solid continuity of the country’s administration. But there had been instances of disorder, and of rivalries between magnates, that the new king would be obliged to quell. He was one who in truth demanded submission; unlike his father, he was a good soldier. He came back with his crusading knights who would in large part make up his royal household; they were in effect a private bodyguard for the king, descended from the warrior bands of an earlier period. It is evidence of the militaristic nature of his reign that, at his coronation in the new abbey (not yet entirely built), his retainers rode into the transepts on their horses. The new reign opened with the clatter of hooves upon stone.

Edward I looked the part. He was of ‘great stature’, according to Nicholas Trevet, a Dominican scholar who knew him well. His long legs caused him to be known as ‘Edward Longshanks’; when he hunted, he galloped after the stag with his drawn sword. He was considered to be ‘the best lance in the world’, which meant that he embodied all of the chivalric virtues of pride and honour. He was quick to anger, and quick to forgive. Trevet stated that the king was guided by ‘animo magnifico’, or what might be described as magnanimity, but this may merely be a truism applied to a warrior king. He had a slight lisp, or stammer, and his left eyelid drooped in the same manner as that of his father. He could be very fierce. When the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral approached him in order to complain about the taxation of the clergy, the unfortunate cleric expired on the spot. The archbishop of York, after being rebuked by Edward, died of depression. The aura or presence of the king was very powerful.

As soon as the great golden crown of state had been placed upon Edward’s head at his coronation, he removed it with a dramatic gesture. He then made a statement that deviated from the set procedures of the ceremony. ‘I will never take up this crown again,’ he declared, ‘until I have recovered the lands given away by my father to the earls, barons and knights of England and to the aliens.’ He was as good as his word. Over the next twenty years he established commissions that looked into the supposed rights and claims of the landowners of the country. The phrase used was quo warranto?, ‘by what right or title’ do you hold these lands? Which of course might mean – surely they are mine? The whole process created a nest of lawyers. As a piece of contemporary verse put it:

And the Quo Warranto

Will give us all enough to do.

One old nobleman, when asked by what right, simply brandished his sword. That was the ancient and instinctive response. Come and fight me for it. But no lord, however mighty, could fight Edward. He had learned the lessons of his father’s long and confused rule.

In the first parliament of his reign, convened at Westminster in the spring of 1275, Edward further strengthened his hold upon the kingdom. With some 800 representatives, it was the largest parliament ever assembled. Edward can in fact be considered the first king to use that body in a constructive manner. He invited its members to submit complaints about malfeasance or maladministration, some of them no doubt designed to trim the power of over-mighty lords. These complaints were known as ‘petitions’ and from this time forward parliament was held to be in part a judicial tribunal. Petitions soon arose from all over the kingdom. There were too many of them, and they impeded the work of the parliament, but they had one valuable function. They allowed the king to see what was going on in the various regions of the realm.

At the same time the demand of the king for more taxes turned the knights and burgesses into a definite group; they were the ones, after all, who would have to levy the money from their shires and their towns. So they began to deliberate together, in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, and came to be distinguished from the prelates and barons. They were not a ‘House’ of Commons, but they had common interests. They were essentially a parliamentary committee, duly subservient to the full parliament of their betters. They were not always summoned by the king, but steadily they grew in importance. The bishops and magnates still determined the great matters of state, but the knights and burgesses were the voices of those who were being taxed. There would soon come a time when their assent, and oversight, became vital. It should be stressed, however, that there was no general demand from the towns and the shires for representation. It was the king who called forth the knights and townsmen; he imposed upon his subjects the duty of coming to parliament, where he might command them and tax them. When they had obeyed his will, he dismissed them.

In the parliament of 1275 Edward extracted from the assembled lords and knights and townsmen a tax upon the export of wool; from this time forward the king received 6 shillings and 8 pence upon every sack shipped out of the country. At one stroke, his finances were improved. He handed over their care to the Riccardi bankers of Lucca. In other legislation he bore down heavily upon the Jews, but this is matter for Chapter 20. In the same parliament a long and complicated Act, known as ‘the statute of Westminster the First’, was passed by which the king intended ‘to revive neglected laws that had long been sleeping because of his predecessors’ weakness’; these neglected laws, of course, were those that implied or required strong royal control. In a similar move towards royal dominance he replaced most of the sheriffs of the counties with men whom he knew and trusted.

Edward I, unlike his ancestors, had no great empire. Instead he had a kingdom, which he determined to strengthen and consolidate. He first marched into Wales, where he set up the line of castles that still endures. Edward’s castles are magnificent creations, in part conceived as the edifices of chivalric romance. The king had a very strong attraction to the mythical history of Arthur and the Round Table; by claiming kinship with his fabulous predecessor, he could also claim sovereignty over the whole island. Arthur was known as ‘the last emperor of Britain’. Yet he had been considered by many to have been a Welsh or British king fighting against a Saxon enemy. It was rumoured that he was not dead, only resting, and that he would come again to destroy the enemies of the Welsh. This was not comforting news for Edward’s English soldiers.

So his death, and permanent removal from the arena of combat, had in some way to be confirmed. It was fortunate that the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere had been discovered by miracle, in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey, during the reign of Henry II. Now Edward decreed that the bodies should be dug up, and then reinterred in a magnificent sarcophagus. The corpses of Arthur and Guinevere, if such they were, were wrapped in silk by Edward and his queen before being placed in a tomb of black marble. Their skulls were retained for public display. They were definitely dead. Such was the pious belief in the efficacy of the past, however, that elaborate rituals were considered to be necessary.

The Welsh castles of Edward I, like the stone edifices of imperial Rome and of Norman England, are tokens of brute power. The walls of the castle at Conway are 10 feet (3 metres) thick. Fifteen hundred workmen and craftsmen laboured on its construction for four years. The towers and masonry of Caernarfon Castle are based upon the double line of walls built around Constantinople by the emperor Theodosius in the fifth century; it was written in legend that the father of the emperor Constantine was buried at Caernarfon, so the historical allusions are clear. The new building also retains the motte of the Norman castle, originally built upon the site, as an emblem of previous English sovereignty. The supervisor of the works at Caernarfon, Conway, Criccieth, Harlech and Beaumaris – Master James of St George – was one of the great spirits of the age through whom the genius of a warrior aristocracy was embodied.

Edward believed that, in the conquest of Wales, he was pursuing his own regal rights in the same spirit that inspired the ‘quo warranto?’ investigations. This was his land. Or so he declared. The Atlantic folk, who had lived in the territory for many thousands of years, may not have agreed with him. With a cavalry force of approximately 1,000 men Edward chased the Welsh from mountain to mountain, and from hill to hill, until the native princes finally submitted to his authority. English law, and the English system of shires, were then imposed upon them. In the safety of the shadow of the castle walls, settlements of English colonists were introduced. Towns sprang up from markets. The life of the country was being quickened. Subsequent revolts and rebellions disturbed the peace, but the settlement itself has never since been overturned. When all was complete the king held an Arthurian tournament at Nefyn, a small coastal town from where the Prophecies of Merlin were supposed to emanate.

The costs of this war of conquest had been huge. That is why Edward called so large a parliament early in his reign; the wider the net, the larger the catch. The whole country was soon enmeshed in a general system of taxation that heralded the rise of a fiscal state. It was a necessity of war that became, almost by accident, a principal element of the English administration.

The taxation on wool, also passed by the parliament, materially assisted the king’s treasury. But it had further consequences. Edward set up the system of customs that, for better or worse, has been a feature of English economic life ever since. For the first time the king was seen to be acting in concert with the merchants, to whom he now offered his protection. Foreign traders were granted certain privileges. They were allowed to come and go as they wished, were made free from interference by local officials and were immune from local taxes. The merchants of Gascony and elsewhere were given the status of citizens in all dealings with Londoners.

The king’s connection with the bankers of Lucca meant that he was now involved in questions of international finance; that is why he took great care to preserve the standard of the money supply. Debased coinage would not bolster his prestige with the brokers of Europe. A more elaborate system of credit, borrowed from the financiers of Venice and Genoa, was introduced to England. The necessities of war once more created the context for innovation.

Edward also found ingenious ways of making money. The law stated that those with property worth more than £20 a year were obliged to adopt the status of knights; but knighthood was an expensive business, with the cost of equipment alone, and many landowners were ready to pay a relatively large sum to avoid the honour. By an order known as ‘distraint of knighthood’ Edward ordered that all eligible men should bear arms, and then proceeded to collect the money from those who wished to remain exempt. It was a legal form of extortion.

Edward I was once known as the ‘English Justinian’ on the grounds that he gave shape and purpose to English law. The great jurist of the seventeenth century, Edward Coke, remarked that he enacted ‘more constant, standing, and durable laws than have been made ever since’. The ‘Statute of Westminster the First’, passed in the earliest parliament of his reign, was followed by nine other statutes ranging from matters of law and order to the debts of merchants. They were practical and specific measures to confront immediate problems. In the Statute of Winchester, for example, it was decreed that all hedges and underwood should be cleared from the sides of the highways to a distance of 200 feet (61 metres); they could not then be used to provide shelter for thieves.

The measure was timely and necessary. Parts of the countryside were beset by marauding gangs, many of them drawn from the soldiers who had fought in Edward’s wars. There were no other rewards for old soldiers. Other groups of ruffians were hired by members of the local gentry in order to pursue private feuds or to terrify their tenants. So special courts known as ‘trailbaston’, which meant the act of clenching a club or staff, were set up to deal with acts of felony and trespass. The name originally described the ruffians themselves, and then became applied to the judges who sentenced them.

The king took his share of the proceeds of justice, of course, and the judges themselves grew rich. They were despised as much as they were feared. In some of the popular verses of the period the judges are compared unfavourably to those outlaws who sought refuge in the woods. What difference between the thieves in hiding and the thieves in office? In one song the usher of the court addresses a defendant. ‘Poor man, why do you trouble yourself ? Why do you wait here? Unless you give money to everybody in this court, you labour in vain. If you have brought nothing, you will stand altogether out of doors.’ We have here a medieval paradox. Even as the law was being shaped and refined, the exponents of the law were mocked and vilified. Royal law was being condemned even as it was being extended.

Nevertheless forms and procedures had to be followed; there had developed a legal routine. In the period of Edward’s reign the number of attorneys rose from approximately 10 to 200. They became a new elite. Where there is money to be made, there are people who will wish to create privileged access to it. The phenomenon itself is of a piece with other developments of the early fourteenth century. The households of the great were being run by staffs of trained managers, and farms were organized by estate managers. War itself was being professionalized. The king no longer summoned a national host from the shires; instead he came more and more to rely upon paid troops led by full-time commanders. As the business of the realm became more complex, it became the province of full-time officers whom we might describe as a civil service; the chancery alone employed more than 100 clerks, and had a secure home at Westminster. The first proper parliamentary record, giving an account of proceedings, dates from 1316.

Yet the force of the royal will was still paramount. Two judges were once arguing a case in the king’s presence. Edward was beginning to lose patience with their lengthy deliberations. Eventually he interrupted them, saying, ‘I have nothing to do with your disputations, but God’s blood, you shall give me a good writ before you arise hence!’ He did not mean good in the sense of meritorious; he meant one that worked in his favour. The monkish author of The Song of Lewes had written of Edward, when he was a prince, that ‘whatever he wants he holds to be lawful, and he thinks that there are no legal bounds to his power’.

Edward had remained in Gascony from 1286 to 1289, seeking to control the affairs of the land that mattered as much to him as England. On his return he discovered, according to one chronicler, ‘a very real oppression hanging over the country’. One of his clerical servants, Adam de Stratton, had acquired an unsavoury reputation for various financial malpractices. He was part of a system of bribery and corruption that had flourished more than ever in the king’s absence of three years. The rage of the king was wonderful to behold. He stormed into the chambers of the man, exclaiming, ‘Adam! Adam! Where art thou?’ In Adam’s house, at Smalelane near the Fleet Prison, was found a hoard of £13,000.

Edward could trust only the advisers whom he had taken with him to Gascony, and he ordered them to find out the truth about all accusations. As a result of their enquiries many judges were found to be manifestly corrupt. One of them, the chief justice on the Bench of Common Pleas, fled for sanctuary to a Franciscan friary. From there he was forced to abjure the realm, walking barefoot to Dover with a cross in his hand. The king had returned from abroad, and had become an avenging angel. Once more he had proved his strength.

In November 1290, his queen died. Eleanor of Castile is not well known to history. She is supposed to have been devout, but her principal devotion was to her family’s interests; she speculated in land, for example, and took financial advantage of those who were heavily in debt to the Jews. One contemporary reveals that ‘day by day the said lady continues to acquire plunder and the possessions of others by these means. There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England.’ In this she was not very different from other members of the family who, travelling in the wake of Edward, were inclined to be rapacious and mercenary; it was one of the settled policies of his realm that his kinsmen should be granted the great earldoms of the realm. Four of his daughters were safely married to the richest magnates and were given extensive lands.

The king was much affected by his wife’s death, and along the route of her burial procession from her deathbed in Nottinghamshire to her sepulchre in Westminster he caused to be erected a series of crosses. These are the ‘Eleanor crosses’, three of which still stand at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham Cross. Another of them, at Charing Cross, is a replica and is in the wrong place. After the funeral the king went into a religious retreat for more than a month.

By March 1291, however, he was on the border with Scotland. He had travelled there to arbitrate between the claimants to the Scottish throne, on the assumption that he was somehow overlord of the kingdom. He chose one of them, John Balliol, and then proceeded to treat him as a vassal. The Scots would not endure this situation for long. Four years later Balliol was persuaded by his barons to renounce his homage to the English king, ally himself with the French monarch, and declare for independence. Edward then marched north and, within a matter of weeks, had subdued the Scottish army. Dunbar opened its gates to him; Edinburgh made a token resistance; Perth and St Andrews submitted unconditionally. He destroyed Berwick and butchered the people savagely; according to a chronicler thousands of the inhabitants ‘fell like autumn leaves’. He seemed to have a thirst for blood.

Edward now believed himself in truth to be the proper king of Scotland. Lia Fáil, ‘the speaking stone’ otherwise known as ‘the stone of destiny’, was taken from Scone Palace and removed to Westminster Abbey where it remained until 1996. According to legend it formed the pillow on which Jacob’s head rested when he was vouchsafed the vision of the angels ascending the ladder. It is in truth an oblong rectangular block of limestone, pitted and fretted with age. But it was a token of Scottish destiny. When Edward handed the seal of Scotland to its new English governor, he remarked that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’. One Scottish patriot was determined to cure him of this complacency. William Wallace had fled to the safety of the woods, having been convicted of murder, and there he gathered together a band of disaffected men.

Curiously enough Edward had placed Balliol in an invidious situation similar to his own; as lord of Gascony and duke of Aquitaine, Edward was theoretically the vassal of the king of France. This meant that, in practice, he was continually colliding with the interests of the court at Paris. It took only a small spark to light a modest flame. Some rowdy fights between English and Norman sailors led to reprisals and confrontations; the French king then summoned the English king to his court and, when he refused, he declared Edward’s lands in France to be confiscated.

Edward sailed with his army across the Channel in 1297, although many of the participants were quite unwilling to join this continental endeavour. Why should they fight for Edward’s lands in France when they derived no benefit from them? The earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, Roger Bigod, had refused to take command of the army. ‘Bigod,’ the king said in a rage, ‘you shall go or hang.’ ‘By God, sir,’ the earl replied, ‘I shall neither go nor hang.’ He did not go. In fact Edward never actually engaged his opponents in battle. He sailed to Flanders to attack the French king from the north, but he did no more than bluster. In the end he signed a treaty, by which he retained Gascony, and then he sealed it with a kiss. He married the French king’s sister, Margaret, making sure that European power stayed within the family.

The news nearer home was more disquieting. Reports of a Scottish invasion were widespread and, in the autumn of 1297, William Wallace and his men defeated an English army at Stirling Bridge. More significantly, a domestic rebellion was growing in the face of royal extortions. The taxation for the French expedition had been immense. The king had taken one fifth of the income of the clergy; the clerics had at first refused to grant as much, and the king promptly outlawed them on the grounds that a body which did not support the country did not deserve to be protected by it. The goods of the clergy were seized, and the courts of law were closed to them. Their tenants refused to pay rent, and often physically attacked them. They were in the end compelled to surrender to the force of a powerful and ruthless king.

They were not the only ones to suffer from his depredations. The citizens of London were compelled to part with a sixth of their moveable wealth. Edward had increased the customs on exports of wool, and as a result the merchants had cut payments to their suppliers. The wool tax became known as the ‘bad tax’ or ‘maltote’. The plight of those in the countryside who suffered from excessive taxation is captured in a vernacular poem written in 1300, Song of the Husbandman:

Yet cometh budeles [beadles] with ful muche bost [pride]:

‘Greythe me selver [silver] to the grene wax [official document].

Thou art writen yn my writ, that thou wel wost [know]!’

Every fourth penny went to the king; seed-corn, and immature corn, had to be sold in order to raise money for taxes; the king’s bailiffs seized oxen and cattle; bribes were paid to the royal officials; some people were forced to flee their lands because they could not afford to be taxed. Royal officials had taken grain from the farmers in order to feed the troops in France. Edward also levied fines and taxes on the great magnates, with whom he never enjoyed satisfactory relations.

Whereupon some of the earls – Roger Bigod among them – decided that it was time to confront the king. Another round of warfare between king and barons seemed to be inevitable. The regency council that governed the nation during the king’s absence, under the nominal command of the king’s young son, retreated for safety within the walls of London. A baronial army was assembled at Northampton. At this point the royal party gave in. With the news of the defeat at Stirling Bridge before them, they could not risk a war on two fronts. The earls demanded a reissue of the Magna Carta with important new provisions, such as the removal of the ‘maltote’. This was granted to them. It was now solemnly sworn that there would never be taxation without the consent of those being taxed. The king returned a month later from his inconclusive overseas adventures, and reluctantly agreed. The Magna Carta had, by slow degrees, now become the guardian of English liberty – or at least the English economy – against royal aggression.

The earls then for the most part turned their attention towards the threat from Scotland. Edward convened a parliament in York, a sure sign that he was now intent upon subduing the northern regions. He gathered a great army of more than 28,000 men, including the soldiers previously posted to Flanders and Gascony. Yet a major victory for the English at Falkirk in 1298 over the army of William Wallace did not prove decisive, and the next six years of the Scottish wars consisted of seasonal campaigns in which the English forces were matched by fierce native resistance. The Scots eventually came to terms in 1304, and a year later William Wallace was captured; he was dragged on a pallet from Westminster to Smithfield, where he was ritually hanged, disembowelled while still alive, and quartered. A plaque is still fixed to the wall close to the point where he was killed. Yet all the butchery did not work against a determined people. A year after Wallace’s execution, Robert Bruce was crowned king of Scotland at Scone. The old war continued.

As long as the war was being prosecuted successfully, the magnates took the side of the king; but in periods of failure or indecision the huge sums of taxation that the wars incurred became a matter of considerable concern. The king was, as always, untrustworthy; he tried various means of evading the provisions of the Magna Carta to which he had assented. He was so convinced of his rectitude that any means of attaining his ends was considered acceptable. That is the point – in all his demands and exactions, the king never thought that he was doing anything wrong. He was behaving only as a king ought to behave. He was raising his money from his country in order to wage war against those who threatened him. That was his duty. The magnates were suspicious and resentful, but they did not rebel. They harried him, and chided him, but they did not seek to overthrow him. He was now growing old as well as stubborn and irate. They waited for his death, and the reign of his son. An unfinished war, combined with a rapidly growing debt, were the two stones against which the last ten years of Edward were ground. The king’s finances were in disorder, with all the prudent measures of previous years discarded or ignored. Edward had been made by war, and would be broken by war.

In 1307 Robert Bruce appeared at the head of an army, ready to claim his rights as the crowned king of Scotland, and at Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire defeated an English force that had been ordered to hunt him down. Edward decided to march north, with the settled purpose of destroying Scottish royal ambitions for good, but even the best-laid plans are never perfect. In the summer of 1307, at the age of sixty-eight, Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands on the Solway.

We may grow weary of the life and death of kings but in truth, for an historical account of medieval England, there is no other sure or certain touchstone. The general current of the nation persists beneath the surface of action and event but, as a result, it is not susceptible to chronology. The institutions of the state are similarly outside the historical record. They can be inferred and described, at rough intervals, but there is really no appropriate timescale. Administrative history has no proper narrative. This is also the case with the life and development of the English towns. As for the English people themselves, they can be glimpsed fleetingly in political ballads and in court records. Of their suffering, and of their pleasures, little is known. They are largely absent from the written record simply because they were not considered important; they were not worthy of representation.

They emerge, however, in certain manorial accounts. We may read for example, in the accounts of the manor of Sutton, of Stephen Puttock. He was a nativus who, at the end of the thirteenth century, lived and worked on the prior of Ely’s land in that manor. He owed labour services to his lord and was obliged to pay certain fines or taxes at the ritual moments of his family’s life. He had to pay a fine, for example, when he married each of his two wives; his sister was similarly taxed when she was married. He was also fined when he failed to carry out his labour services; he may have been negligent in planting or harvesting his lord’s crops. Yet he was a significant man in his own village. He had a large holding of his own land, and was appointed both as reeve and as ale-taster in his community; he was also frequently selected as a juryman. He was an acquisitive purchaser of land, buying it in parcels of several acres at a time. Stephen Puttock was a man of his time, taking part in an unconscious life of custom and tradition. He was unfree, but he was prosperous; he was a labourer, but he was also a landowner. He was part of a nexus of duties and obligations, but he was also a prominent part of his community. He has now returned to the soil of England.

Another means of access to the general life of the period comes in the now voluminous court reports. They provide of course a haphazard account, based upon civic or criminal offences, but they are suggestive. The fowler, Robert, spends a great deal of money but no one knows how he earns it; he wanders abroad at night, so he is suspected. John Voxe was fined fourpence for cutting down two ash trees on his land. Another man was fined for fishing in his lord’s pool. Ranulph, the fishmonger, goes out to the oyster boats in order to buy up their catch before it reaches the market. Three men were arrested as ‘common breakers of hedges to the common harm’. The butchers of Sprowston bought infirm pigs cheaply, and then sold sausages unfit for human consumption. John Foxe, a chaplain, was fined one penny for attacking William Pounchon with a knife. Walter of Maidstone, a carpenter, brought together an assembly or parliament of carpenters at Mile End in order to agree on a policy to defy the mayor. The butchers of Peterborough were reminded that they must cleanse the churchyard of all filth and bones that their dogs brought into it. Certain people made ‘a great roistering with unknown minstrels, tabor-players and trumpeters’ to the grave disquiet of the entire neighbourhood.

Here is another vignette of medieval England. John and Agnes Page, from a village in Kent, took John Pistor to the manor court. Agnes Page had purchased John Pistor’s wife in exchange for a pig worth 3 shillings; John Pistor was happy with the arrangement for a while, but eventually he asked that his wife be returned to him on payment of 2 shillings. The bargain was agreed, but Pistor did not pay the sum. The jury found against him.

We may sense here a life more intense and more arduous than our own; it was at once more sensitive and more irritable. The contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurities more palpable. This evidence is all of a piece with a strident and often violent society where the growing number of people provoked collision and unrest.

It has been estimated that by the beginning of the fourteenth century the population had reached in excess of 6 million. The figure, in isolation, means nothing at all. But it is salutary to realize that it was not matched again until the latter part of the eighteenth century. The England of Edward I was more populous than that of Elizabeth I or of George II. So in the relatively crowded conditions of the early fourteenth century, land was at a premium. The woods and underwoods were cleared. Farming land was often divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels, owned by men who also earned their living as carpenters or shoemakers. But many landless men were also available for hire; wages, therefore, were not ordinarily very high. Great pressure, and competition, existed within all sectors of the economy. The first ‘strike fund’, to support workers who refused to do mowing services, was organized in 1300.

The condition of England was made infinitely worse by a series of harvest failures from 1315. The price of bread, and other essential commodities, rose and rose. ‘Alas, poor England!’ one chronicler of the time wrote. ‘You who once helped other lands from your abundance, now poor and needy are forced to beg.’ This was one of the worst periods of English social history, and may act as a suitably troubled context for the last years of the reign of Edward I as well as the unhappy reign of Edward II. It might have been said at the time – the kings of England do nothing but harm.

20

The hammer

Edward was known as ‘the hammer of the Scots’ but he could more pertinently be known as the hammer of the Jews. He exploited them and harassed them; finally he expelled them. Their crime was to become superfluous to his requirements. The history of the Jews in medieval England is an unhappy and even bloody one. They had arrived, from Rouen, in the last decades of the eleventh century; they were first only settled in London across a broad band of nine parishes but in the course of the next few decades they also removed to York, Winchester, Bristol and other market towns. The previous rulers of England, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had not welcomed them; Jewish merchants would have provided too much competition for Anglo-Saxon traders.

William the Conqueror brought them to England because he had found that in Normandy they had been good for business; in particular they provided access to the silver of the Rhineland. The Jews of Rouen may also have helped to finance his invasion of England, in return for the chance to work in a country from which they had previously been barred. Another reason can be given for the favour they found with the king. Since Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest, some other group of merchants had to be created. The Jews became moneylenders by default, as it were, and as a result they were abused and despised in equal measure. But they did not only lend money; they were also moneychangers and goldsmiths. They exchanged plate for coin. They provided ready money, a commodity often in short supply.

The Norman kings of England, therefore, found them to be very useful. They could borrow from them but, more profitably, they could tax them. They could levy what were known as ‘tallages’, and succeeding kings were able to take between a third and a quarter of the Jews’ total wealth at any one time. As a result the Jews, in the twelfth century, were afforded royal protection. No Jew was allowed to become a citizen, or to hold land, but the neighbourhood of the Jewry was like the royal forests exempt from common law; the Jews were simply the king’s chattels, who owed their life and property wholly to him. They were granted the protection of the royal courts, and their bonds were placed in a special chamber of the royal palace at Westminster. A Jewish exchequer was established there, with its own clerks and justices.

In return for royal favour the Jews brought energy and prosperity to the business of the realm; their loans helped to make possible the great feats of Norman architecture, and the unique stone houses of Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds are credited to them. Jacob le Toruk had a grand stone house in Cannon Street, in the London parish of St Nicholas Acon. The Jews also introduced the more advanced forms of medical learning, and were able to serve as doctors even to the native community. Roger Bacon himself studied under rabbis at Oxford.

More dubious legal tactics were also enforced. William Rufus decreed, for example, that Jews could not be converted to Christianity; he did not want their number to fall. That may not have been a very Christian act, but William Rufus was never a very good Christian. He supported the Jews partly because it offended the bishops; he enjoyed causing affront to his churchmen.

That royal protection did not necessarily extend very far. At the time of the coronation of Richard I, in 1189, some Jews were beaten back from the front row of spectators; the crowd turned on them, and a riotous assault began upon the London quarters of Jewry. The incident became the cause of fresh outrages as the news of the attack spread; it emboldened native hostility, and gave an excuse for further carnage. 500 Jews, with their families, took refuge in the castle at York where they were besieged by the citizens; in desperation the men killed their wives and children before killing themselves. Richard was even then making preparations for his crusade to the Holy Land; violence and religious bigotry were in the air. His successor, John, renewed his protection in exchange for large sums of money. In 1201 a formal charter was drawn up, giving the Jews their own court. They were allowed to live ‘freely and honourably’ in England, which meant that they were here to make money for the king. Nine years later John took over all the debts of the Jews, living or dead, and tried to extract the money from the debtors for his own benefit. It was another reason for the barons’ revolt that led to the sealing of the Magna Carta.

Anti-Semitism was part of the Christian condition throughout Europe. The Jewish people were abused for being the ‘killers of Christ’, with convenient forgetfulness of the fact that Jesus himself was a Jew, but other more material reasons accounted for the racial hatred. By the middle of the twelfth century several prominent Jewish moneylenders had extended very large loans to some of the noblest men in the kingdom; men like the famous Aaron of Lincoln were the only ones with resources large enough to meet the obligations of the magnates. If they could be attacked or killed, and their bonds destroyed, then the great ones of the land would benefit. The myth that they were engaged in the ‘ritual murder’ of Christian infants became common at times of financial crisis, when the populace could be incited to take sanguinary vengeance. It is a matter of historical record that England took the lead in the execration of the Jews. The first rumour of a ritual crucifixion emerged in 1144, with the story of the death of William of Norwich, and thereafter the tales of ritual murder spread through Europe. England was also the first country to condemn all Jews as criminal ‘coin-clippers’, and the iconography of anti-Semitism is to be found on the west front of Lincoln Cathedral.

In 1239, during the reign of Henry III, a great census of the Jews and their debts was carried out. The representatives of all the Jews in England were then obliged to convene at Worcester and agree to pay over 20,000 marks to the king’s treasury. This measure effectively bankrupted some of them, which meant that their usefulness had come to an end. Fourteen years later, Henry III ordained a Statute of Jewry that enforced a number of disciplinary measures, including the compulsory badge of identification. This was a token or tabula of yellow felt, 3 inches by 6 inches (7.5 by 15 centimetres), to be worn on an outer garment; it was to be carried by every Jew over the age of seven years. Two years later Henry investigated the death of a boy, Hugh, in Lincoln; he believed or professed to believe that this was a crime of ritual murder and, as a result, 19 Jews from that city were executed and 100 despatched to prison in the castle.

Edward I was even more ferocious. He ordered that certain Jews, who had been acquitted of the charge of ritual murder, be retried. In November 1278, 600 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of tampering with the currency; 269 of them were hanged six months later. In 1290 he expelled all of the remaining Jews from his kingdom; they were now approximately 2,000. He did not take this step out of misplaced religious zeal; it was the measure demanded by the parliament house before they would agree to fresh taxation. In fact the expulsion was seen by many chroniclers as one of the most important and enlightened acts of his reign. The anti-Semitism of the medieval English people is clear enough. Some have argued that, in subtly modified forms, it has continued to this day.

21

The favourites of a king

The new king, Edward II, had been born in 1284 on the site of his father’s new castle at Caernarfon; Eleanor’s labour came to an end in temporary accommodation beside the castle that had only been begun in the previous year. She may have been brought to the spot in a deliberate move by the king to lay claim to this part of the island. In later life the new king was known as ‘Edward of Caernarfon’ and in 1301 he was acclaimed as ‘prince of Wales’, the first heir of the throne to be thus designated.

He did not care much for his principality. In 1305 he sent a letter to his cousin, Louis, count of Evreux, in which he promised to send ‘some misshapen greyhounds of Wales, which can catch a hare well if they find it asleep, and running dogs which can follow at an amble. And, dear cousin, if you would care for anything else from our land of Wales, we will send you some wild men, if you like, who will know well how to give young sprigs of noblemen their education.’ If nothing else, he had a sense of humour.

He was brought up in a military household, and was engaged in his father’s last Scottish wars. After the defeat of the English army by Robert Bruce at Loudoun, he vowed that he would not spend two nights in the same place until he had exacted revenge. He never kept the promise. He was not in any case as bellicose or as overbearing as his father. He always disliked taking part in tournaments. The writer of a contemporary life of the king, Ranulf Higden, remarked that ‘he did not care for the company of lords, but preferred to mingle with harlots, with singers and jesters’. He also was most at ease with ‘carters and delvers and ditchers, with shipmen and boatmen, and with other craftsmen’. It is hard to interpret this last remark, except as a general indication that the young prince was not particularly interested in royal pursuits. This was the rebuke that followed him in succeeding years. He did not behave like a king.

The coronation of 1307 did not go quite according to plan. The crown was carried, much to the scandal of the great lords, by a close companion of the king with the name of Piers or Peter Gaveston. The number of people at the ceremony was so large that a plaster wall collapsed, bringing down the high altar and the royal scaffolding for the service. One knight was killed. The service was then quickly and even summarily completed. There was an indication that the new king was not altogether trusted. A new provision had been added to the coronation oath. The king now declared that he would ‘uphold and defend the laws and righteous customs that the community of the realm shall choose’. The ‘community of the realm’, in this instance, meant the magnates and prelates. It was an ominous beginning.

The royal banquet, after the ceremony, was also badly managed. Piers Gaveston seemed inclined to outshine even the king with a costume of imperial purple and pearls. When Edward preferred the couch of Gaveston to that of his queen, Isabella of France, his wife’s relatives returned indignant to their homeland. We have here the makings of a royal disaster.

Gaveston was the same age as Edward. The old king had placed him in the prince’s household to provide a fitting military example to his heir, but they may have had other interests in common. There quickly grew up an attachment between the two young men that some have considered to be sexual, but which others have believed to be simply fraternal. He has been described as Edward II’s ‘minion’ but that is a courtly and chivalric term which does not imply homosexuality; Henry VIII had his minions. It was considered proper that the king, at court, should lean upon the shoulder of his minion. It was an accepted posture. Modern sexual terms have no meaning in fourteenth-century England, where in any case they would not have been understood. Edward did have a bastard son, Adam, even before he became king. Isabella herself would subsequently give birth to two sons and two daughters.

It is certain only that the young king preferred the company of Gaveston to that of his new bride. He had married the twelve-year-old Isabella, daughter of the king of France, on the orders of his father intent upon creating yet another grand and prosperous territorial alliance. The wedding had taken place in France a month before the coronation and, in his absence, Edward had appointed Gaveston as the keeper of the realm. This in itself was enough to arouse the envy and wrath of the English magnates. One of Edward’s first acts as king was then to honour Gaveston with the earldom of Cornwall, a title generally kept within the royal family. This was a serious blow to courtly protocol, and was more than a problem of etiquette. It was a question of land and money as well as title; if they were not properly distributed by the king, was then anyone safe? It was even believed that Gaveston himself had been given charge of patronage at court, granting goods and benefits without consultation with the barons. There could be no more important office in the fourteenth-century royal court, and it raised immediate problems about the king’s judgment.

Gaveston did not help matters with a waspish wit and a strong sense of his own importance. He was reported to be ‘haughty and arrogant’ with a pride ‘intolerable to the barons’. He invented nicknames for the leading magnates, such as ‘black dog’ for the earl of Warwick and ‘burst belly’ for the earl of Lincoln. He revelled in the king’s grace.

A parliament was held in the spring of 1308, at which the earl of Lincoln invoked the new provision of the coronation oath and demanded that Gaveston be dismissed from court. Edward refused but two months later, cowed by the presence of the magnates with their armed knights, he agreed to exile his favourite to Ireland. He wrote to the pope admitting that there had been ‘disturbance and dissension’ and that he had not yet ‘fully enforced unity’. This was the period, too, when his cousin abruptly left the court. Thomas of Lancaster was another grandson of Henry III, and was perhaps the richest as well as the best-connected noble in the land. He had also become disaffected, with fatal consequences for Piers Gaveston.

A year after his exile in Ireland, the favourite was back. The king had recalled him for assistance in his campaign against Robert Bruce. The Scots refused a set battle, however, and so the king was reduced to a number of sorties and skirmishes that still left the northern part of his kingdom unprotected against attack. Unlike his father, he had not kept the peace.

He had not kept his promises, either. The likely shape of his reign had already become clear. He was considered by the magnates to be weak and ineffectual. He slept late. He prevaricated. None of this would necessarily disqualify a modern monarch but, in fourteenth-century England, it was inexcusable. A king was supposed to embody the prowess and vigour of the country. The failure of the Scottish campaign was a specific sign of the king’s general incapacity. It was further stated that he had so badly managed his resources that his entire household was in decay; as a result he had extorted money unfairly. Numerous complaints were also made concerning specific infringements of Magna Carta, such as the unjust seizure of lands and the misuse of writs.

The parliament of 1311 issued a set of twenty-four ordinances by which the king was supposed to govern. It was declared that the country was on the point of open revolt ‘on account of oppressions, prises and destructions’; ‘prises’ were the confiscations made by royal officials. One contemporary chronicler wrote that the threat of deposition was made against Edward if he failed to comply; if that is correct, then the forces against the king rivalled those against King John a hundred years before. The rebel lords called themselves ‘the community of the realm’ but they were no abstract or objective force; they were not a constitutional ‘party’. It was a world in which the force of individual personality was the cause and spring of action; personal rivalries and affections made up the politics of the period.

The ordinances themselves were designed to produce what might be called baronial rule. The king was not permitted to make war, or leave the kingdom, without the consent of the barons; the king’s justice and the king’s treasury must come under their supervision. A parliament, naturally under their control, would meet once a year. One other stipulation was made. Gaveston, once more, had to go. He was to be banished from the realm before All Saints’ Day, 1 November.

The king refused to countenance these demands and prepared himself for civil war. Gaveston did sail from Dover, two days after the stipulated date, but he returned a month later. Edward and his favourite then moved to the north, and began recruiting an army. It was at this point that the king’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, became his most prominent challenger; Lancaster wrote to the queen, promising to rid the court of Piers Gaveston forever. And this was what he proceeded to do. Gaveston was taken at Scarborough, when the forces of the barons besieged the castle there, and a month later he was beheaded in the presence of Lancaster. Two sayings of the period have survived as an apt accompaniment to these events. ‘There is no one who is sorry for me,’ the king is supposed to have complained, ‘no one fights for my rights against the barons.’ The other is a more generalized statement: ‘The love of magnates is as a game of dice, and the desires of the rich like feathers.’

The execution of Gaveston was according to precedent unlawful, since as earl of Cornwall he should have been judged by his peers, but it had the effect of bringing to a summary end the threat of civil war. The gratuitousness of the deed seems to have surprised everyone. Some of the rebel barons returned to the king. If there were a civil war, only the Scots would benefit. The prospect of further hostilities, and the threat of an enemy on the border, concentrated the minds of the lords. Negotiations, in and out of parliament, took place for the best part of two years. In October 1313 the rebel lords made a public apology in Westminster Hall, and the king resumed his powers very little affected by the ordinances of 1311. He had won a marginal, and provisional, victory that was compounded by the birth of a son that guaranteed the continuation of his dynasty. His hatred, for the murderers of his ‘minion’, smouldered.

But his power soon fell apart once more. He took an army into the north, finally to dispose of Robert Bruce, but at Bannockburn he suffered a mighty defeat. The battle was fought in what was called ‘an evil, deep and wet marsh’ wholly unsuited to the English cavalry but more amenable to the Scottish infantry; the earl of Gloucester led a charge into the Scottish ranks, but was cut down. The army of the Scots then attacked the horsemen, crying out ‘On them! On them! On them! They fail!’ The English were massacred, their bodies lying in the marsh or in the river Bannock. The king fled for his life and, with a few followers, sailed to Berwick where he hoped to find safety. He had lost Scotland. The battle of Bannockburn ensured the independence of that country, and was perhaps the worst military disaster of any medieval English king.

It is difficult for a sovereign to survive the shame of defeat. It implies the forfeiture of his single most important duty, that of protecting his realm. Edward I had been known as ‘the most victorious king’ and ‘the conqueror of lands and the flower of chivalry’. His son bore no such titles. When Edward eventually arrived in York he was in disgrace. Thomas of Lancaster insisted that once again he should be bound to the ordinances of 1311. A contemporary chronicle reports that ‘the king granted their execution, and denied the earls nothing’.

Lancaster at this juncture took effective control of the kingdom, but he proved no more popular or effective than his cousin; he was considered to be arrogant and overbearing. He stayed on his estates, and was loath to attend councils or parliaments. He did not take advice. It was also rumoured that he was in secret contact with Robert Bruce on the principle that the king’s enemies might become his own friends. The king stirred himself out of his weakness or incapacity, and began to gather his supporters. Two centres of power and of patronage existed, with the retainers of the king and the earl vying for mastery. There cannot be two suns in the sky.

A weak king seems always to presage, or to represent, a weak country. In the medieval period there is some strange alchemy between the state of the nation and the state of the monarch. The harvests of three successive years from 1314 failed, as a result of prolonged and torrential rain, and according to one chronicler there ensued misery ‘such as our age has never seen’. It became known as the ‘Great Famine’, and from that period we can date the continual fall in the English population throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the summer of 1315 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that every parish perform solemn processions; the clergy were to walk barefoot, surrounded by the sound of bells and by chanting, in order to implore mercy from God.

But God was not listening. The cost of wheat rose from 5 shillings to 40 shillings a quarter (28 pounds or 12.7 kilograms). Often there was no bread to buy. The prices of the basic commodities rose to a level higher than any previously recorded. The cattle and the sheep were destroyed by outbreaks of murrain. The population itself, laid low by starvation, was attacked by various forms of enteric fever that often proved fatal. Rumours of cannibalism abounded, but they were plausible rather than probable. The situation of the English garrison at Berwick, however, is instructive; as the horses began to die the cavalrymen boiled their carcases in order to eat the meat, and then left the bones to the infantry.

In northern England as a whole the situation was rendered increasingly desperate by the raids of Scottish gangs. The incidence of violent crime also increased, as the hungry and the dispossessed looked for relief. There are records of gangs of ‘vagabonds’ perpetrating robberies and assaults. Reports of ‘corrupted air’, and of strange alterations in the atmosphere, were frequent. Human beings were, as always, powerless in the face of great natural disasters. The bodies of the dead were lying in the streets. According to the Brut chronicle, ‘so miche and so faste folc deiden, that unnethes [scarcely] men might ham bury’. Life for the majority of the English people was nasty, brutish and short.

Yet this was the period when, for two years, direct taxes were levied upon the people to pay for the Scottish wars and the royal household. Twelve thousand quarters (336,000 pounds or 152,480 kilograms) of corn and malt were needed to feed the armies, further depriving the people of their necessary food. The king and the noble lords were not particularly interested in the sufferings of the English, despite their claims to represent ‘the community of the realm’; they were concerned only with their own wealth and power. The citizens of Bristol rose up in their despair and occupied the castle. It was written that ‘to seek silver for the king, I sold my seed’.

By 1318 the worst of the famine was over, the spectre of starvation banished by a bountiful harvest. Prices steadied, and then fell. But signs of overall decline were still in evidence, with the spread of disease among cattle and a general contraction of agricultural production. There would be really no sustained recovery for a hundred years.

The king always relied upon a strong confidant to deal with the business of the realm; he could not of course put his faith in Thomas of Lancaster, because his cousin was implacably opposed to him. So he placed his trust in a new favourite. The successor to Gaveston was Hugh le Despenser who, together with his father of the same name, gained a considerable hold over the irresolute king. Despenser soon acquired lands and castles, particularly in Wales where the family was already strong, and as a result he alienated all the other lords of the principality. Hisofficers assaulted or threatened anyone who stood in their way; they burned down barns, and laid false charges against prominent landowners.

Despenser, as the king’s chamberlain, tried to conceal his thefts and extortions under the guise of constitutional propriety; it was his duty and responsibility to bring order to Wales. But everyone knew that his case was fraudulent. The king’s favourite had once more become arrogant and over-mighty at the expense of the barons. Thomas of Lancaster then stepped forward, and announced that no reliance could be placed in the king or his courtiers. In the spring of 1321 the land and property of the Despensers were attacked by those whom they had disinherited; it was a form of revenge that came perilously close to civil war. One chronicler, Robert of Reading, wrote that now the king’s ‘infamy began to be notorious, his torpor, his cowardice, his indifference to his great inheritance’.

At the beginning of August in the same year the great lords of the north and the west came to London with their armed retinues, and insisted that the Despensers be expelled from the realm. They were accused of ‘encroaching’ upon royal power, and of controlling access to the king’s presence. They had perverted the law and illegally gained custody of lands. Edward, faced with the solid phalanx of their enemies, yielded. The Despensers were banished from England.

Yet this was only the beginning of what turned into a general civil war. The king had decided that it was better to remove his opponents one by one. He besieged Leeds Castle, the home of one malcontent, and executed its garrison. These executions were not part of the chivalric code, and were met with widespread disapproval. They demonstrated, however, that the king was in earnest. He then recalled the Despensers, and began to organize a military campaign to defeat those whom he considered to be rebels against his power. Having mustered his forces at the beginning of March 1322, he defeated Thomas of Lancaster in battle. He had cornered his old enemy at last and, after a summary trial, he executed him. It was the first time that a sentence of death, on the charge of treason, had ever been directed at a member of the royal family. Lancaster had cut off the head of Piers Gaveston; Edward, long meditating his revenge, beheaded Lancaster.

Other members of noble families, who had taken Lancaster’s part, were now at the king’s mercy. ‘Oh calamity,’ the anonymous author of a life of Edward II wrote, ‘to see men recently adorned in purple and fine linen now dressed in rags and imprisoned in chains.’

Many of these lords were hanged on the lands that they had once owned. The king ordered altogether twentyfive executions. No English sovereign had ever punished his enemies among the barons so mercilessly.

A curious sequel to Lancaster’s execution can be recorded. He was conceived by many to be the noble opponent of a vicious enemy. As such, his memory was revered. At the site of his execution, and at his tomb in Pontefract Priory, there grew a sacred cult in which miracles were attested. A drowned child returned to life beside the tomb itself; a blind priest recovered his sight at the place of Lancaster’s death. A servant of Hugh Despenser decided to shit on the same spot, as a gesture of contumely, but a little later his bowels were parted from his body. Another centre of piety was established at St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, when a stone table commemorating Thomas of Lancaster became the site of further miracles. The king issued ordinances to dissuade the people from making pilgrimages to Pontefract or St Paul’s, but he could not thwart the piety of the populace.

In this uncertain and disordered period sporadic outbreaks of violence arose throughout the country. In 1326 the chief baron of the exchequer, Robert Belers, was ambushed outside Melton Mowbray and murdered; the gang, led by Eustace de Folville, was well known. Five sons of a lord of the manor, John de Folville, had turned themselves into a criminal fraternity; they terrorized their home county of Leicestershire, with numerous murders and robberies. They hired themselves out as mercenaries, and kidnapped prominent local people in return for large ransoms. They even fought in foreign wars as part of the retinue of lordly patrons.

One of the brothers, Richard de Folville, had been appointed as rector of Teigh by his eldest brother. It was a convenient cover. When he and his followers were one day pursued by various officers of the peace, they took refuge in his church. From that vantage they shot many arrows, killing at least one of their pursuers. But then the local people took the law, literally, into their own hands; they dragged Richard from the church and beheaded him on the spot. The other brothers managed to escape justice.

Other criminal bands were to be found in the early decades of the fourteenth century. One leader called himself ‘Lionel, king of the rout of raveners’, and he wrote threatening letters from ‘our castle of the wind in the Greenwood Tower’. So violence at the centre rippled through a country already troubled by famine and disease.

Smaller incidents of disorder are recorded. Robert Sutton insulted Roger of Portland, clerk of the sheriff of London, in open court; he put his thumb to his nose and exclaimed, ‘Tprhurt! Tprhurt!’

John Ashburnham rode up to the sheriff ’s court, held in the open air, and so threatened the sheriff that he fled; at which point Ashburnham whistled on his fingers, as a signal that his men should rise up in ambush.

When a writ was served on Agnes Motte, she appealed to her neighbours; with drawn weapons they compelled the servers of the writ to eat it, wax and parchment.

When the mayor of Lynn tried to change the rules of trade, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership of the prior, dragged him from his house, placed him on a stall in the marketplace, and forced him to swear on the host that he would make no changes. It is interesting here that the prior of Lynn led the charge. But other clerics were involved in lawlessness. A gang of six monks from Rufford Priory attacked, and held to ransom, a local gentleman.

The rector of Manchester invited a local couple, with their daughter, to dinner. The rector’s servants seized the daughter, broke two of her ribs, and then deposited her in the rector’s bed; he had sex with her that night, but the unfortunate girl died from her injuries a month later.

The king’s court at Westminster was not immune from lawlessness. An attorney was sitting on a table in the great hall – ‘close to the sellers of jewels’ – when the other party to his suit threatened to kill him if he did not abandon it; he was then dragged off the table and struck on the head. Someone else pulled a knife on him. The attorney extricated himself from his attackers and ran to the bar of the court calling for help; the men followed him, their swords drawn, but the officials of the court somehow managed to bar the doors against them. They were then disarmed and taken to the Tower.

In the summer of 1322 the king called a parliament at York, in the course of which a statute was passed that allowed him complete and independent rule. The ordinances of 1311 were once more abandoned. Contemporaries were in no doubt about the situation. The magnates were now too frightened to thwart the will of the king. Parliaments were of no account. Reason had given way to threats and penalties. Whatever pleased Edward, now had the force of law. He sought out the rebels in every shire, confiscating their lands or fining them heavily. His treasury grew and grew on the proceeds. ‘Serve us in such a way that we will become rich’, he wrote to the officials of his exchequer.

He was not to find riches in conquest. He led a campaign in Scotland against Robert Bruce, but achieved nothing except the detention of six Scottish prisoners; with the absence of provisions severely affecting his troops, he marched southwards across the border. But the Scottish army pursued him, and almost caught him near Bridlington in East Yorkshire; he fled in panic to York, a singularly unfortunate end to a futile expedition. He was forced to sign a treaty with Robert Bruce at the beginning of 1323, the principles of which he broke almost immediately. The king’s bastard son, Adam, was killed in the course of the campaign.

The difficulties with France, over the disputed territory of Gascony, had not been resolved. The French had even planted a bastide or fortified town in the middle of the duchy. So the king sent his wife, Isabella, to negotiate with the French king, Charles IV; since she was that king’s sister, some hope of success could be conjectured. But there was a problem. Edward did not trust Isabella, and Isabella had no affection for Edward. Once they were separated by the Channel, anything might happen. The king made another fateful decision; he sent his eldest son, Edward, to the French court to do fealty for the land of Gascony. Both wife and son were now in France.

The king did not travel there himself because he was too concerned about the stability of his own kingdom. It was said at the time that the Despensers advised him to stay at home, because they feared the wrath of the other barons descending upon them in his absence. There were reasons to be fearful. Edward’s rule had become a form of covert tyranny. He became according to one chronicler ‘as wood [mad] as a lion’. He disinherited many magnates so that the Despensers could have their lands; as a result, no landowner felt secure. When a king of England disregards the rights to property, he cannot long endure. For four years, however, Edward lavished earldoms and other titles on his favourites; he harried and persecuted all those who opposed his will. It was so arranged that revenue went into the king’s own chamber rather than to the general exchequer, and the king demanded absolute secrecy from his officials. He resembled a later king in his counting-house, counting out his money. In truth his opponents could do nothing. After the execution of Lancaster, and the imprisonment of other prominent nobles, he was pre-eminent.

Yet he still had enemies in exile, particularly in France. One of them, Roger Mortimer, had been part of the rising against the Despensers; he had submitted to the king and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. From that place, with a little help from his friends, he managed to escape; it is reported that he drugged his captors and then climbed down from his chamber on a rope. It sounds apocryphal, but it may be accurate. There were very few other paths out of the Tower, except of course by way of the gallows. He sailed to France and offered his services to the French king. It was at Charles IV’s court that he began an intrigue, in every sense, with Queen Isabella. Around the queen there now gathered a cluster of exiled or disaffected barons and bishops. When her son arrived to offer fealty to her brother, she had found the perfect weapon. The king ordered her to return to England, but she refused to do so; she declared that she would come back only if the Despensers were banished. In any case she preferred the more benign atmosphere of the French court.

Throughout 1325 rumours and fears of invasion circulated through the kingdom. It was believed that Isabella would sail with the French king, but she was more immediately concerned to increase her support among the interlinked royal families of northwestern Europe. She travelled north to Hainault (a Flemish province now in southwestern Belgium) where the count of that region was amenable to the proposition that his daughter, Philippa, should marry the lord Edward; this young man of fourteen would, in all likelihood, be the next king of England. With Philippa’s dowry Isabella and Mortimer then raised troops for the coming invasion.

Fifteen hundred men took to their ships from the port of Dordrecht in Holland and, having endured storms at sea, landed at the haven of Orwell in Suffolk on 24 September 1326. There had been no attempt to harry or prevent them, and it is likely that Edward still believed that the invading force was to come from Normandy. The commander of the royal fleet along the eastern coast, in any case, allowed her to land without obstruction. He had in the past been an opponent of the king, and once more turned against him. It is also reported that English sailors refused to fight Isabella because of the hatred they felt for the Despensers.

Her progress was swift. Her supporters flocked to her, and the king’s secret enemies now rose in defiance of his rule. The queen moved on to Dunstable, her troops ransacking the lands of the Despensers on their way, where she learned that the king and the Despensers had in their panic fled from London and marched to the west; it is a measure of their confusion that they left most of their treasure behind. The king’s supporters now changed sides; one who remained loyal, the elder Despenser, the earl of Winchester, was executed in Bristol under the distraint of martial law. His son, Hugh, was captured and awaited trial.

Edward fled into Wales, with only a handful of supporters, and the last surviving record of his reign is an account book found at Caerphilly. He had nowhere to turn. He was pursued by Isabella’s men, and taken somewhere near Neath in the middle of November. From there he was escorted under armed guard to the royal castle of Kenilworth.

Hugh Despenser had refused food and drink since his capture, hoping perhaps to die before he was painfully killed. He was taken to Reading, where he was crowned with a ring of nettles; words of execration were cut into his skin. To the sound of drum and trumpets, and to the shrieks of the crowd, he was hanged from a gallows 50 feet (15 metres) high; while still alive he was hacked down and his intestines were burned before his face. Finally, he was beheaded.

Despenser had been executed in Reading rather than in London because the capital was in a feverish state. The citizens, having long been under the financial constraint of the king, exulted in their liberty and turned on any of the officials of the old regime they could find. Bishop Stapledon, once the royal treasurer, was dragged from his horse and butchered. Merchants and bankers, who had financed the king, were murdered.

Yet how were the victors to depose a lawful king? It was illegal and unprecedented. The king was supposed to be protected by the majesty of God. It would be difficult to lay hands on God’s anointed. At the beginning of 1327 a parliament was held – although, without the requisite presence of the king himself, it should more properly be called an assembly, or convention – in the name of the king’s son, the prince of Wales. He had been appointed as keeper of the realm for the duration of the king’s absence ‘abroad’, although of course Edward had got no further than Kenilworth Castle. Various acclamations and proclamations were made in favour of Isabella and Prince Edward, so that the power of London could be shown to be firmly with them. Two bishops were despatched to Kenilworth, but no record of their interview with the king survives; it is reported that he cursed them, and refused to return with them to London.

A second meeting of the assembly was then convened, under the control of Mortimer, at Westminster. In careful words he declared that the magnates of the land had deposed Edward, on the grounds that he had not followed his coronation oath and had fallen under the control of evil advisers; he had been bent on the destruction of the Church and of the magnates of the realm. Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, then delivered a sermon with the theme that ‘where there is no true ruler, the people will be destroyed’. There seems to have been a general assent.

Another delegation visited the king at Kenilworth, where they gave him an ultimatum. Adam Orleton lectured him once more on the evils of his arrogant and unworthy reign before declaring that ‘his son should be substituted for him if he should give his assent’. The assent was crucial for lending at least a veneer of legality to the proceedings. It is claimed that the king, wearing a black gown, was consumed with tears and sighs; when he saw the delegation, he swooned in fear. On recovering he first refused to surrender his crown but then, after further argument, reluctantly assented. The threat, of course, was that he could be forcibly removed and someone else put in his place. The truth of the proceedings will never be known, but it can be assumed that the whole affair was messy, unpredictable and uncertain. Too many interests were at stake to make it otherwise. Some magnates and bishops, for example, must have doubted the legality of the whole exercise.

Yet it had come to pass. The dethroned king was taken from Kenilworth and consigned to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. He seems to have been treated well at first, but an uncrowned king can never be safe. Two attempts at rescue were made, one of them partially successful, and with the possibility of escape his fate was determined. It has been said that ‘between the prison and the grave of a king there is little space’. His death, in September 1327, has a quality of barbarity that has scarcely been equalled in the annals of England. It was said that he was slain with a poker, red-hot, inserted into his fundament. Or as Ranulf Higden put it in his Polychronicon, ‘he was sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secrete place posterialle’. Yet this may simply be a poetical touch, an allusion to his supposed sodomitical tendencies. His heart was taken from his body and placed in a silver vase, which was put later in Isabella’s own coffin. His body was viewed, at a distance, by the knights and magnates of Gloucestershire. At his funeral, in Gloucester Abbey, large oak barricades were built to hold back the crowds. None of his gaolers were ever convicted of his death; two were found innocent, one entered the service of Edward III, and the fourth was murdered in strange circumstances.

There is a stranger epilogue still. In the archives of the French province of Languedoc was found a letter addressed to Edward III, from an important papal official named Manuel di Fieschi. He repeats the confession of a hermit, whom he calls ‘your father’. In specific and circumstantial detail the hermit gives an account of his flight, arrest and detention in Kenilworth and Berkeley castles. He describes how his guard in Berkeley warned him that two knights, Lord Thomas de Gornay and Lord Simon d’Esberfort [Beresford], were coming to kill him. The specific details, again, are given. The king put on different clothes, and made his way out of the castle. He killed the porter, sleeping, at the last door and then took his keys before escaping into the night.

It is recorded that the two knights, thwarted of their victim and terrified of the wrath of the queen, cut out the heart of the porter and put his corpse into a wooden chest. They then pretended that the organ and the body were those of Edward II. In this account, therefore, the queen was buried with the porter’s heart, and the porter’s body still rests beneath the canopied shrine of Edward II in what is now Gloucester Cathedral.

The hermit goes on to recount a period of concealment in Corfe Castle before he began his wanderings through Ireland and France. He was received by Pope John in Avignon, where he remained for two weeks. In the habit of a hermit he crossed into Germany and then into Lombardy, in which region he wrote down his confession. The letter ends with a sentence from Manuel di Fieschi to the king. ‘In testimony of these things I have appended a seal for your lordship’s consideration.’ This was, perhaps, the privy seal that accompanied the king’s person. It all sounds the merest melodrama, unworthy of serious consideration, but the writer of the letter was a papal official of repute. He would not have written to the king of England on a mere whim. The details of the account, too, are accurate as far as they can be checked in the historical record. So it remains a surmise and a mystery. It is possible, to put it no higher, that Edward II ended his life as a hermit in Italy. It would have been an edifying end to a not very edifying life.

The brief supremacy of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer, lasting from the autumn of 1326 to the autumn of 1330, was not itself a glorious one. The lands and treasures of the deposed king, and of the Despensers, were seized by the victors; the queen and her consort took the greater share, of course, and the rest was distributed among their followers. They also had to reward the mercenaries they had brought with them from Hainault. So the financial reserves of the Crown were severely depleted; the sum of £61,921 left by Edward in 1326 had been reduced by 1330 to £41. Taxation, and loans from Florentine bankers, were the only expedients.

The young king was crowned in 1327, but his power was nominal rather than real. He was governed by a council of barons and bishops, while Roger Mortimer was at the head of affairs. Robert Bruce could not let slip this opportunity of a minority and so invaded the northern territories of England; Mortimer and the young king led armies to oppose him, but achieved nothing. It is said that Edward III wept at the failure of the campaign, which was followed by a treaty in which the title of Bruce to the throne of Scotland was recognized. The capitulation did not bode well for his future reign.

Yet the new king was of a quite different stamp from his father. At the age of eighteen, he was becoming restless and resentful. Like his grandfather, Edward I, he longed for martial glory as the prerogative of sovereignty. He may have blamed Mortimer for the fiasco in Scotland, and have held him responsible for the decline of his revenues. Mortimer had become another ‘over-mighty’ subject at odds with the king.

Isabella was also now carrying Mortimer’s child, and Edward feared a forced change in succession. He was told that it was better to eat the dog than allow the dog to eat him. So an assassination was planned. Mortimer and Isabella had travelled to Nottingham Castle, where a party of knights under the command of Edward had concealed themselves in the undergrowth outside the walls. An official of the castle had revealed to them a secret passage that led directly into the private quarters; there they surprised Mortimer, and arrested him. Isabella ran out of the chamber, shrieking, ‘Good son, have pity on noble Mortimer!’ But, in that period, pity was in short supply. He was tried, and summarily executed, in London. Isabella was sent to one of her private houses. Edward III had obtained his kingdom.

22

Birth and death

The infant mortality rates of the medieval period were high, with over a third of boys and a quarter of girls dying at or soon after birth. That is why baptism was of overwhelming importance to the family of the child; if not baptized, the infant would go into the indeterminate eternal world of limbo and be denied the bliss of heaven. In the event of imminent death the midwife was permitted to sprinkle water over the child and pronounce ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ If the mother died in labour, the midwife was obliged to cut the child from the womb in order to save its soul. In extreme cases the infant was baptized even before birth, given a name such as ‘Vitalis’ or ‘Creature’ or ‘Child of God’.

The room of birth was supposed to be warm and dark, with a scent of rose petals somewhere in the air, but of course not all births could be performed in ideal conditions. That accounts for a large number of the deaths. Men were not allowed to witness the birth. The husband was permitted to mimic a symbolic act of release at that moment, however, by firing an arrow into the air or opening a box.

The infant survivors came into what was for some a world of pain and suffering. There is widespread evidence of anaemia, sinusitis, leprosy and tuberculosis; osteoarthritis and diabetes were common, but essentially for no larger a proportion of the population than in the twenty-first century. Eye complaints such as sore eyes, red eyes, watering eyes, running eyes and ‘boiling eyes’ were ubiquitous.

Doctors or ‘leeches’ could be summoned for a relatively large fee. Their medical skills were not remarkable. One of the more famous of them in the fourteenth century, John of Arderne, wrote in a treatise that a young doctor should learn ‘good proverbs pertaining to his craft in comforting of patients. Also it speedeth that a leech can talk of good and honest tales that may make the patients to laugh, as well as of the Bible and other tragedies.’

Laughter was perhaps, under the circumstances, the best medicine. The cure for toothache was to burn a piece of mutton fat under the affected tooth, so that the ‘worms’ would fall out. A remedy for the stone was a mash made out of the bodies of beetles and crickets applied to the sick part of the body. The cure for tonsillitis was inspired. ‘Take a fat cat, skin it, draw out the guts and take the grease of a hedgehog and the fat of a bear … All this crumble small and stuff the cat, roast it whole and gather the grease and anoint the patient therewith.’ The lice of hogs was a sovereign curative of consumption. If you combed your hair with an ivory comb, your memory would be improved. For a condition known as ‘web in the eye’ the marrow from the great bone of a goose wing was to be mingled with the juice of the red honeysuckle, but the flower had to be plucked ‘with the saying of nine paternosters, nine aves and a creed’.

It is easy to mock what seem to be absurd provisions, but they belonged to a tradition that viewed the human and natural world as part of the same unity. That is why doctors prescribed the flesh of tame beasts rather than of wild ones; a carp from the pond was better than a shrimp from the seashore. It calmed, rather than excited, the patient. Melancholy men must avoid eating venison; the deer is a beast that lives in fear, and fear only augments the melancholy humour. If a man was sick of the jaundice and saw a yellow thrush, the man would be cured and the bird would die. The power of suggestion was also very great, judging by the extraordinary number of miraculous cures that took place at the shrines of the saints. The majority of people never saw a ‘leech’ in the whole course of their lives; they relied upon the herbs and potions of the local wise woman.

Buildings known as hospitals did exist, but they were essentially large chapels in which invalids were lodged; prayer was as good a remedy as medicine. No medical attendants were employed in the hospitals, only monks and chaplains. If illness was a punishment sent by God, then it might be impious to seek to cure it. The soul’s health was in any case more important than that of the body. Yet the hospitals played their part. An interval of rest and care was probably more efficacious than many of the available remedies.

The medical treatment of the period, where available, was based on folklore or the instructions of Galen from the second century ad which were based on the doctrine of the four ‘humours’. Just as the universe was made of four elements – earth, water, air and fire – so the human body was comprised of phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine and melancholy humours in various proportions. The house of melancholy, for example, lay in the spleen. Good health was the result of the balance between them. The doctor would taste the blood of his patient, after one of the frequent bloodlettings considered to be necessary. Healthy blood was slightly sweet.

The inspection of urine, in special glass vessels or urinals, was also an important part of the doctor’s regimen; it bears a resemblance to the modern blood test. Urine is in fact still inspected as part of a general health precaution. Twenty types of urine could be found, with certain broad divisions based upon the humours. If the urine was white and thin, for example, it signified melancholy; melancholy was considered to be cold and dry. The doctor would observe, smell and taste the urine to discover the governing condition of the patient and the part of the body most in danger. A good doctor also had to be an astrologer. When the moon was in Aries, a fiery and moderately dry sign, it was proper to operate upon the head and the neck. The leaves of henbane, good for the gout, could only be picked on Midsummer Eve.

The possibility of saintly intervention was also at hand. St Blaise was the patron saint of throat disease, St Hubert of hydrophobia and St Martin of the itch. The top joint of the second finger of the right hand was dedicated to St Simon Cleophas, while the second joint of the third finger of the left hand was under the protection of St Bartholomew. By various means, sacred and secular, the good doctor was thus able to prepare a diet and a routine of life to suit the particular temperament of each patient; if the body was in tune with the stars and the elements, then it would not suffer.

Bathing was a luxury of the upper classes and those who liked to imitate them; bathhouses were established in the larger towns, and the magnates possessed their own wooden bathtubs which were shaped like vats and bound with hoops. Soap was readily available, as well as instruments for cleaning the teeth and ears. Bathwater was supposed to be tepid, the same temperature as that which ran from the side of Christ at the time of his crucifixion. The prayer ‘Anima Christi’ has the invocation, ‘Water from the side of Christ, cleanse me.’

Only four English kings of the medieval period lived beyond the age of sixty, which can be considered as the gateway to old age. It was once widely supposed that men and women over the age of forty were considered to be old, but that is not the case; only after sixty was that attribute used. In the century and a half after 1350, 30 per cent of the members of the House of Lords were over sixty, and 10 per cent over seventy. It would still be considered a respectable proportion of that parliamentary chamber. Life expectancy was of course a different matter; throughout our period it has been variously estimated at forty or fifty years. In some regions it might have been as low as thirty.

When death arrived, the body was wrapped in a shroud tied at head and neck. Coffins were not used for the ordinary dead. The favoured part of the churchyard was the south, the north part being considered damp and mossy. The corpse was met at the principal gate of the churchyard by the priest, who led the mourners in procession to the site of the grave where the burial service was held. Only the rich dead deserved a stone memorial, which was to be found within the church. So the cemetery itself was free of gravestones, except for a few wooden markers and small carved stones. The churchyard itself was considered to be part of the common space of the parish, used for sports and markets; it could also be used as a pigsty and as pasture for cattle. As the dead multiplied, so did the surface of the churchyard rise.

23

The sense of a nation

The new king, Edward III, was compared to the Israelites taken out of the house of bondage; he was free at last from the schemes and wiles of his mother who had sometimes been known as ‘the she-wolf of France’. After the capture of Mortimer in Nottingham Castle a public proclamation was issued, to be read by the sheriffs in churchyards, courts and marketplaces. It stated in part that ‘the king’s affairs and the affairs of his realm have been directed to the damage and dishonour of him and his realm, and to the impoverishment of his people’; it went on to promise that the new king ‘will henceforth govern his people according to right and reason, as befits his royal dignity’.

He could not have made a stronger contrast with his unfortunate father. He is generally reported to have been convivial and engaging. One of the mottoes woven into his jacket stated simply ‘It is as it is.’ Another, worn by the courtiers as well as the king, read ‘Hey, hey, the white swan, by God’s soul I am thy man.’ He also spoke English much better than his predecessor.

He had personal courage, too, and identified himself with all the chivalric virtues. As a result he inspired loyalty among the magnates. He restored lands that had been rendered forfeit by his father, and actively helped to enlarge the membership of the nobility; four of the senior members of his household, for example, were granted earldoms. He had to rely at first upon the councillors and courtiers he had inherited, but over a few years he gathered together a group of knights and nobles who would remain with him for the rest of his reign.

Yet the token of a righteous sovereign was still success in war. The new king realized that his father’s military incapacity was the single most important reason for his failure, and he strove very hard to reverse the image of weakness. That is why his first enterprise was against Scotland. The tears he had shed, at his earlier humiliation by the Scots, had not been forgotten. An opportunity soon arose for action. The death of Robert Bruce in 1329 put his infant son upon the throne of Scotland, but Edward III espoused the cause of a rival claimant, Edward Balliol; he was eager to undo the damage of the previous campaign, and in 1333 he won a notable victory at Halidon Hill two miles outside Berwick. Balliol then became the client king; Berwick and the surrounding area were returned to English rule. This was only the beginning of further raids and campaigns in the area of the border, but Halidon Hill was in fact the only battle Edward himself fought on English soil. The field of his other military endeavours lay across the Channel.

The kings of France and of England were, at the time, the two most powerful sovereigns in Europe; much of the continent was divided into dukedoms and principalities that fought only against each other. So it was perhaps inevitable that France and England should vie for mastery. That is the law of life.

The particular source of conflict was, once again, the duchy of Gascony that represented the last piece of the Plantagenet Empire still in English hands. In the Treaty of Paris, signed more than eighty-three years before, Henry III had given up his old French empire in exchange for its possession. Yet Gascony was still considered to be part of France, and therefore the new king of England on his succession was obliged to do fealty (or ‘liege homage’ as it was known) as a vassal of the French king. But how could an English sovereign owe loyalty to a foreign sovereign? He would be obliged to supply the French king with arms and soldiers. He was not allowed to enter an alliance with the enemies of France. If he did so, Gascony might be confiscated.

It was unthinkable. It was also an anomaly, a structural imbalance, that could only end in discord. Edward III refused to accept that he was a feudal subject of Philip of Valois and instead declared himself to be the king of France as well as of England. He claimed that through his mother, Isabella, he was in the direct line of royal succession – despite the fact that the French crown could not by law be transmitted through the female line. His declaration was inspired in part by bravado and in part by pride. He declared that he was fighting ‘to recover his rights overseas and to save and defend his realm of England’. He was looking for an excuse to attack the enemy.

In the largest perspective it might be said that he was helping to break down the old European feudal order and to supplant it with the new recognition of the power of nation-states; in this period England and France became more centralized and bureaucratized. Edward III himself, however, is most unlikely to have seen it in those terms. He just wanted to preserve his honour and perhaps win some spoils. Of arms and the man, I sing. His fighting spirit had the unfortunate consequence, however, of beginning a conflict that became known as the Hundred Years War. The controversy lasted for a much longer period. Only in the nineteenth century did the English throne renounce its claim to the French crown.

The war, costing so many lives and so much money, had little permanent consequence. The English gained Calais, but that town became a burden rather than a glory. The real interests of England were not involved in the conflict, except perhaps for the consumption of wines from Gascony. But the appetite of the king for power and glory took precedence over the claims of the nation.

It is true to say that when war was first declared in 1337 some enthusiasm might be found, at least among the magnates, for a campaign against France. The indolence and indignity of the previous reign were supplanted by something approaching martial fervour. War might be said to animate the leaders of the nation, and bring together its disparate and sometimes feuding parts. There would be no need for the magnates to fight each other if they could reap the spoils of battle in an enemy country.

This newly found unity of purpose was dramatized when, in 1348, Edward III instituted the Order of the Garter. The celebrated motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense or ‘Shame on him who thinks ill of it’, refers to Edward’s claim upon the throne of France. Almost all of the original twenty-six knights, divided into two groups for the sake of jousting competitions, had taken part in the French campaigns. It was a military brotherhood.

The king had in any case a strong sense of the dramatic, and loved ceremonial occasions; he engaged in all the panoply of chivalry and, more than a century before Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte Darthur, he tried to restore an Arthurian sense of kingship. The king was therefore popular among the grandees of the realm. They were once more part of a great adventure, and Edward had become their warrior king. The king’s eldest son, Edward – dressed as Lionel, cousin of Lancelot – took part in a grand tournament. The contemporary chronicler, Jean Froissart, wrote that ‘the English will never love or honour a king who is not a victor and a lover of war’. Other kings of Europe might be celebrated for their piety, or for their learning, but in England those criteria did not apply.

The king’s lavish architectural patronage was part of the chivalric programme. He had been born in Windsor Castle, but he proceeded to demolish the existing castle and build an even grander edifice in its place. It was his way of advertising his own glory and of proclaiming his superiority over the French king. It was here, in 1344, that the Round Table was recreated; the king and queen, clothed in red gowns, led a procession of knights and barons into the castle chapel where their quest for valour and virtue was consecrated. In the circular Round Table building, larger than the Pantheon of Rome, lavish feasts and dances were held in which the participants dressed as characters out of Arthurian romance. The foundations of this early theatre, or centre of ritual activity, were uncovered in the summer of 2006.

As the knights sat on a stone bench running around the wall, and watched jousts as well as tournaments, the real conflict of the period was proceeding slowly enough. The first two of the hundred years of war (in fact 116) were spent in posturing; Edward sailed over to the Low Countries for the purpose of launching an invasion from Flanders, and for purchasing new allies. It was said that he was spending his time, and the money of the country, idly. The complaints against heavy taxation were mounting all the time. The poems and chronicles of the period are filled with complaints about oppression and shortages; no farmers or merchants were safe from the king’s depredations. It had become a familiar refrain of the fourteenth century. ‘He who takes money from the needy without just cause’, one versifier wrote, ‘commits sin.’ The wool merchants, in particular, were forced to pay for the king’s armies; the proceeds of 30,000 sacks of wool were to be lent to the king, accompanied by a temporary ban on exports to keep the prices high. Since wool was the single most important aspect of the English economy, the king’s demands led directly to unemployment and consequent poverty. The country had become essentially a cash cow for Edward’s military needs.

Yet his plans for a rapid campaign were frustrated; the scheme for financing the war through wool proved disastrous; problems arose both with the merchants and the collectors of the customs. The king’s financiers were growing restless, and threatened to cut off supplies. With the king out of the country, too, rumours spread of invasions from France and from Scotland. The members of the council that Edward had set up to rule England in his absence were growing fractious; the king accused them of withholding money from him, while they in turn complained that they had many expensive duties to perform including the defence of the realm. It was said that the king was growing as reckless and as extravagant as his father. ‘I counsel that ye begin no war in trust of your riches,’ Dame Prudence declared in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’, ‘for they … suffice not wars to maintain.’

In 1340, three years after the declaration of war with France, a taxpayers’ revolt was organized in the parliament house. It was said that ‘a king ought not to go forth from his kingdom in manner of war unless the commune of his realm agree to it’. The parliament had become the institution that, according to the injunctions of Magna Carta, gave the consent of the realm to fresh taxation. Successive kings, under force of circumstance, had accepted its role. The knights and townsmen had already begun humbly to submit petitions from their various neighbourhoods, to which appropriate royal legislation came in response. It was a system of quid pro quo.

The parliament had already granted heavy taxation for the first three years of the conflict. In the summer of 1339 the king asked for a further grant of £300,000. The Commons, made up of the townsmen and the knights of the shires, prevaricated; they asked leave to return to their own districts, and consult the people. When they assembled again, in the early months of 1340, they offered a grant in return for certain concessions from the king. They had in effect distinguished themselves from the Lords. They were beginning to feel their power.

Their principal submission was that the finances of the nation should be ordered and controlled by a council of magnates answerable to parliament. It was to be directed by John Stratford, the archbishop of Canterbury. The king, in desperate need for the means to wage war, conceded this demand. As long as he was fighting, he was happy. His agreement also marks the moment when the Commons became a coherent political assembly that gradually began to formulate its own rules of procedure. War, and taxation, had brought them together. The parliament itself was now supposed to meet on a regular basis; it was also the assembly in which the council of the nation, and the custodians of taxation, were chosen. Thirty-five years later, it would be strong enough to impeach the king’s principal councillors. The idea of an independent parliament, then, was part of the consequence of the Hundred Years War.

On 22 June 1340, Edward returned to the Low Countries in the full expectation that hostilities would soon be resumed. Stratford would ensure that the money reached him. Yet the fresh exactions of the king provoked hostility and violence throughout the country; the collectors were supposed to take up 20,000 sacks of wool, from the nine most productive sheep-rearing counties, and sell them to the local merchants. But the people successfully resisted this extortion. As a result the king was not receiving the aid he had expected; he could not pay his debts, or his troops, and his active campaign came to an end.

In his fury he turned upon Archbishop Stratford. He sailed back to England and, in the middle of the night of 30 November, he suddenly arrived at the Tower of London. He asked for the constable, but the absence of that official confirmed the king’s sense that his realm was not being properly administered. Edward accused the archbishop of wilfully withholding money; he believed, or professed to believe, that Stratford had wished to sabotage the French campaign of which the cleric disapproved. The senior members of the council were dismissed. Stratford fled back to Canterbury, where he was in theory safe from the king’s wrath.

Then Edward, in defiance of his previous pledge to parliament, took control of the country without consultation. He embarked upon a reassessment of the whole administration, and in particular of its financial resources; he appointed new collectors of the wool supplies; he levied fines on individuals, and communities, that had evaded the tax. On 29 December Stratford entered the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral, and delivered a sermon in English defending his actions. He declared that he was only enforcing the collective will of the parliament and that the king had been swayed by evil councillors. He alluded to the Magna Carta, with the clear implication that the king had broken its provisions. He knew that the nation was supporting him, and he demanded a trial by his peers. He was effectively defying the king to do his worst.

The king then called a parliament, to which he reluctantly admitted Stratford himself. The archbishop was formally reconciled to the king – he was received ‘into the king’s grace’ – and the work of parliamentary negotiation began. In return for an extra 10,000 sacks of wool, Edward agreed that his chief ministers would in future be approved by the magnates and the council. Accommodations and compromises were agreed on every side; the king was reconciled to the Lords on the condition that he would be their good lord, and he eventually reached a settlement with the Commons on the understanding that he would ‘rule them by leniency and gentleness’. He had a more astute understanding of political realities than his father had ever shown. He knew when to turn his cheek. It was only to be expected that, five months later, he reversed his concessions on the grounds that he had granted them unwillingly. Within two years he had regained most of his power. In his duel with parliament he had survived.

The war with France continued like a piece of vast background music. In the summer of 1340 the English fleet surprised and destroyed French ships on the Flanders coast at Sluys. It was the first notable victory of the conflict and after the battle the king issued a gold coin, called the noble, in which he was portrayed standing on board a warship. Here was the image of the master of the seas. His reign had become identified with the pursuit of war. No French minister had dared to inform Philip VI of the English victory, and it was decided that only his Fool could break the news with impunity. So the Fool declared to his master that the English were arrant cowards; when asked the reason he replied that they, unlike the French, had not leapt into the sea.

The defeat of the French fleet meant that the English were at liberty to invade by means of the Channel. Yet Edward’s squabbles with his allies, and with the Flemish in particular, meant that no immediate successes were achieved. The French forces ducked and wove, refusing to be drawn into battle. This was in fact to become the pattern of the French defence. In the autumn of 1340 a truce was agreed. But it could not last. There were inconclusive hostilities in Brittany, and in Gascony, over the succeeding few years and then in 1346 Edward made the decisive move of invading Normandy; he hoped to join his Flemish allies in an assault upon Paris or perhaps a march into Gascony. He kept the French king guessing.

On 11 July 1346, 8,000 men (half of them archers) sailed south from Portsmouth to northern France. They marched through Normandy on their way to Paris, plundering and wasting everything in their path. They advanced as far as the suburbs of the capital, where they turned north towards Calais in order to join forces with the Flemish allies. Philip VI marched rapidly across the great northern plain of the Somme in an effort to divert or destroy them; on the afternoon of 26 August, he attacked them as they assembled near the wood of Crécy-en-Ponthieu. An impetuous army of Genoese crossbowmen and French cavalry were beaten back by the English forces and, in the ensuing mêlée, the French army was effectively crushed.

Gunpowder cannon were for the first time used in battle, causing more panic than death; but the palm of victory must be awarded to Edward’s archers who, wielding longbows, defeated the knights of feudal chivalry. It had been a day of partial eclipse, of thunder and of lightning; at its close the French knights lay on the field, many of them despatched by the use of long and slender daggers known as ‘misericords’ or mercy killers that ripped open the body from the armpit to the heart. One among the 30,000 dead was John, the blind king of Bohemia, whose motto of Ich dien or ‘I serve’ was adopted by subsequent princes of Wales.

The battle of Crécy was a signal victory, of which Edward took immediate opportunity; he marched north and, nine days later, he was waiting beneath the walls of Calais. This town would be an excellent base for further incursions into French territory; it was also a convenient port for raids against French pirates. The townsmen of Calais endured almost a year of famine. The commander of the French garrison wrote to Philip VI that ‘we can find no more food in the town unless we eat men’s flesh … this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for the town will be lost and all of us that are within it’. The letter was intercepted before it reached the French king and was delivered to Edward; he read it, applied his personal seal and sent it on to its destination.

In the eleventh month the women, children and old people of Calais came out from the gates as ‘useless mouths’ to be removed. The English would not allow them to pass through their lines, and they were hounded back to the town ditch where they expired from want. So the town was forced to submit. The story of the six burghers of Calais, coming out with nooses around their necks and submitting to the clemency of a gracious king, may well be authentic. It is a type of political theatre at which Edward excelled.

He had already vanquished another ancient enemy. In the year of Crécy, David Bruce, or David II of Scotland, had invaded England; he had inherited the ‘old alliance’ with France, and hoped that the absence of Edward would demoralize the English forces. But at Neville’s Cross, close to Durham, the Scottish forces were overwhelmed and David Bruce himself was escorted to the Tower of London where he remained for eleven years. The Black Rood of Scotland, a piece of Christ’s cross kept in a black case, was taken in triumph to Durham Cathedral. So Edward III was victorious over all his foes. The knights and lords now clustered around him in amity. He had become their ideal of a monarch.

Whether it meant as much to the English people is open to doubt. The war against the French represented a quarrel between two monarchs, who were members of the same family and who both spoke French as their native language. What had the affairs of princes to do with the condition of England? The people had in any case far more serious matters with which to deal when, in 1348, all the forces of infection and death were unleashed in an epidemic without parallel.

It was named as ‘the pestilence time’. The disease itself was called ‘the plague’ or ‘the Black Death’. It may not have been bubonic plague, however; it has been variously described as anthrax or influenza or a form of haemorrhagic fever. It may have been a disease that no longer exists. Contrary to popular superstition it is unlikely to have been carried by rats.

It came out of Central Asia in the early 1330s and then spread throughout the known world by means of the trade routes. It had reached Italy by 1347 and, in the summer of the following year, touched Bristol and other ports. By the autumn of 1348 it had reached London before travelling north. It manifested itself in buboes, ulcerated swellings in the groin or armpit; a contemporary described a bubo as in ‘the form of an apple, or the head of an onion … it seethes like a burning cinder, and is of the colour of ash’. In some cases the body erupted in abscesses filled with pus. This was accompanied by aching limbs, vomiting and diarrhoea; the victims were generally dead within three days.

They were buried in mass graves, laid side by side in long trenches, the adults carrying their dead children on their shoulders. An old belief still persists that the parts of certain graveyards must never be disturbed for fear of ‘letting out the plague’. It is not completely without justification; the spores of anthrax can survive for hundreds of years. The cemeteries of London were soon filled, and 13 acres (5.2 hectares) of land were purchased on the borders of Smithfield to be converted into a vast graveyard. One third, or even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.

It is likely that, before the plague, the country had been overpopulated; it may even be that malnutrition actively hastened the fatalities. So on some form of Malthusian calculation the distemper freed the energies of the surviving population and increased the availability of resources. It did not seem like this at the time. According to Henry Knighton, a chronicler of the period, ‘many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of people; likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there; and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited’. Men could not be found to work the land, so women and children were obliged to drive the plough. In a school textbook of the next generation there is a set sentence, ‘The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday.’ Ruined buildings were a familiar hazard.

A Franciscan friar, John Clyn, left an account of the period. ‘Lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time’, he wrote,

and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the grasp of the wicked one – myself awaiting death among the dead [inter mortuos mortem expectans] as I have truly heard and examined, so I have reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man may survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence.

He added, some time later, two words – ‘magna karistia’ or ‘great dearth’. Then another hand followed. ‘Here it seems that the author died.’

The plague was generally considered to be an act of God, punishing sinners for their pride and presumption, their vanity and faithlessness. It represented an evil so great that, according to William Langland in Piers Plowman, ‘prayers have no power to prevent this pestilence’. Langland also stated that the southwest wind, blowing in the evening, was a baleful sign. It was the breath of the devil. It was said that all those born after the arrival of the pestilence had two fewer teeth than those born before. In 1361 the pestilence time returned. It was known as ‘the mortality of children’. A third epidemic followed in 1369, and a fourth in 1374. It was noticed at the time that the wealthier classes were not so severely affected as the rest of the population; they were not forced into close or intimate contact with the sick.

Despite these grievous blows the society of England held together. The courts of justice were closed, and the meetings of parliament were repeatedly delayed, but no general collapse of order occurred. The records of Church and state reveal a surprising continuity and coherence of administration. The level of wool exports, for example, remained stable. Yet the pestilence had slow but permanent effects on English society. The shortage of labour had the immediate result of increasing both the level of wages and the chances of employment. The phenomenon of the landless or impoverished peasant wholly disappeared. But the rising demands of the working people who had survived, their worth now doubled by the epidemic, provoked a reaction from the landowners and magnates. The knights of the shires, in particular, perceived a threat to good order.

An Ordinance of Labourers was passed by a parliament in 1349, forbidding employers to pay more for labour than they had before the pestilence. The same Act deemed that it was illegal for an unemployed man to refuse work. The measures were not realistic. Many workers and their families could simply move to another district and to a more generous employer who was willing to ignore the law. Some migrated to the towns, for example, where there was a great demand for manual labourers such as masons and carpenters. A ploughman might become a tiler. More than enough work was available. So from a court roll of the period we have the following entries.

Thomas Tygow of Hale is a freelance roofer and he took at Hale from Hugh Skynner of Little Hale on various occasions in 1370 a daily wage of fourpence and his dinner, contrary to statute; excess 3s. 4d … William Deye is a freelance ploughman and took from Gilbert Deye at Ingoldsby on 2 December 1370 3d and food, and did this for the rest of the week, and received the same from others in the following year; excess: 12d … John Couper, carpenter, refused to work by the day in order to earn excessive money, and he took a lump sum from William Bourton of Sudbrooke; excess estimated to be 2s.

Many younger people now possessed their own holdings of land. And the best land did not remain vacant for very long. There had once been too many farmers and labourers working too little soil, but now they were dispersed over the countryside. Some lords tried to tie down their servile population by enforcing the obligations and duties owed to them, but any success was balanced by the problems of a reluctant and disaffected workforce. As that workforce became more aware of its value, the old tradition of labour service could not hold.

Wealthier peasants were ready to take on more land; they left wills, written in English, to confirm their aspiring position. The relatively low cost of produce, and the incidence of high wages, encouraged many of the larger landlords to give up production and lease their farms to the highest bidder. Or they converted their arable land into pasture; the rearing of sheep required less investment of labour than the growing of crops.

The old manorial and village ties were being dissipated. The pestilence slowly began to dissolve, therefore, the old certainties of status and position; the traditional network of communal relations was being supplanted by the exigencies of private interest. There is evidence that the remaining people, on the land, now worked harder; manor accounts show that output per man increased, and that women often took over jobs previously reserved for men. Their wages increased proportionally higher than those of men.

In this context we can place the various ordinances and measures taken by the Lords and Commons to discipline the thriving peasantry. Legislation was passed to forbid the wearing of costly clothes, and to impose restrictions on the daily diet. Women were to dress according to the social position of their fathers or husbands, and the wives of servants were not allowed to wear veils above 1 shilling in value. The wives of yeoman were not permitted to purchase silk veils, and agricultural labourers were not allowed to wear cloth priced at more than 12 pence a yard (0.91 metre). A worker’s gown and coat must ‘cover his privy members and buttocks’, and the toes of his shoes or boots ‘must not pass the length of two inches’ (5 centimetres). This was in remonstrance against the fashion for tight-fitting and figure-hugging clothing, as well as the taste for elongated shoes. At dinner or supper the lower classes were to enjoy only two courses. Laws were also passed that prohibited peasants from carrying weapons or indulging in disorderly games. Idleness, if proven, could be punished. Despite these maladroit exercises in social control, the feudal England of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was coming to an end. The English poet, John Gower, wrote at the close of the fourteenth century that:

The world is changed and overthrown

That it is well-nigh upside down

Compared with days of long ago.

There is no known response of Edward III to the pestilence time. He no doubt regarded it simply as a threat to the supply of soldiers for his army. All his thoughts were of war. An armistice was agreed after the fall of Calais that endured for six years before foundering on claims of bad faith. The king combined in warfare against the French with his eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, prince of Wales. The young man would also become known as the Black Prince, on account of his armour rather than his morals or disposition. Edward of Woodstock embarked upon what was effectively a reign of terror by which contingents of his army were despatched to ravage selected bands of French territory; ordered to pillage, burn or destroy whatever lay in their path, they were dedicated to wiping out the lives and the livelihoods of the people of France. They had not been summoned in a feudal call to arms; they were either forcibly conscripted or they were mercenaries paid by the day. Many of them were common thieves or murderers attracted to the prospects of spoil. In this pursuit they were eminently successful. The folk memory of English raids lived in the French national consciousness for many hundreds of years. Edward of Woodstock boasted that, in the space of seven weeks, he had laid waste 500 cities, towns and villages in the region of Bordeaux that had never known warfare in its history. It was a policy that had already been successfully deployed in Scotland.

The strategy of the French seems to have been to refrain from open confrontation but, in the autumn of 1356, the two armies came into contact; a French reconnaissance party stumbled upon the forces of the English. Battle could not be honourably delayed. The new king of France, John II, held a vast superiority in numbers with an army of 35,000 against the Black Prince’s 7,000; but his position, at Poitiers, was on rising ground covered with hedges and vineyards.

The location itself was not the principal difficulty. The English could always now claim the mastery of the field by the use of the longbow, and the Black Prince followed his father’s tactics at Crécy by using the archers as the main fighting force. The French cavalry were flung against the English line, only to be cut to pieces by a hail of arrows; the rest of the French knights then followed on foot, but they were also repulsed by the bows of yew. The average length of the bow was 6 feet (1.9 metres), and the arrows were 3 feet (0.91 metre) in length. The archer drew it to the ear, rather than to the chest, and with that momentum he could send it 250 yards (228 metres); he fired ten volleys each minute. This was a new age of warfare.

The French lines broke and dissolved; a retreat, and a general panic, ensued. In the confusion the French king and his son were captured by the English forces. It was a fresh calamity for the native army. King John was escorted to England by the Black Prince, and a truce of two years was agreed. When John was taken through the streets of London, it became a festive occasion for the citizens as the captive king was led in triumph to Westminster Hall where Edward III was waiting to greet him. It was a thoroughly medieval form of captivity. He was released on the surety of his son but, when his son escaped from England, he voluntarily returned to resume his life as a prisoner. He could not endure the dishonour of violating the terms of the agreement. Four months after his return to London, he died of an unknown disease. The king’s body was then sent back to France.

Edward resumed hostilities after the time of truce, but a campaign in the winter of 1359 did not supply the overwhelming victory for which he had prayed. He was, however, still in the ascendant. So in 1360 a treaty was reached in which Edward agreed to renounce his claim to the French throne in return for full sovereignty over Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu in northern France.

The Black Prince set up his own court at Bordeaux, the capital of the duchy of Guienne. All seemed to be set fair for English power across the Channel but in 1369 the new French king, Charles V, known as Charles the Wise, reasserted his feudal rights over all the territories of France. The Black Prince defied him, but all of his martial vaunts proved useless in the end. The English prince contracted dropsy and grew too weak to lead his forces into the field; there were in any case no set battles, the French king proceeding by raid, sortie and ambush. This reconquest of French land by stealth was eminently successful, and five years later Charles had taken back almost all of the duchies and provinces once claimed by the English. A truce was then formulated that continued until the time of Edward III’s death. All of Edward’s spoils, acquired at the expense of so much blood and suffering and cost, were one by one stripped from him. Only Calais and parts of Gascony were left. His quest for the French crown was ineffective and ineffectual. This continual see-saw, this claim and counter-claim, demonstrates the futility of the entire conflict. Its major consequences, as we have seen, were wholly domestic in the fashioning of an independent parliament and the formation of a national system of taxation.

Edward of Woodstock came back to England, where he lingered in ever declining health for six years. The morbidity of his symptoms served only to emphasize the sickness at the court itself, where the absence of any military success infected the atmosphere with rancour and suspicion. The ageing king no longer seemed to be wholly in command of affairs and was widely rumoured to be in thrall to his mistress, Alice Perrers; much of the government of the realm, therefore, devolved upon one of his younger sons, the duke of Lancaster known as John of Gaunt. Unlike his older brother, however, John was not widely popular. It was believed that a group of councillors around the king were exploiting the resources of the exchequer for their own ends. When a parliament was called in the spring of 1376, for the purpose of raising fresh taxation, the Commons refused to continue their deliberations until certain ‘evil counsellors’ had been removed from the king’s side.

The Good Parliament, as it became known, wished ‘to make correction of the errors and faults of the realm if such are found to exist’. It proclaimed itself to be assembled ‘on behalf of the community of the realm’, and then moved against corrupt courtiers and merchants who had conspired to defraud the country. They were impeached, and sent to trial before the Lords. One or two of them fled the country; others were dismissed, imprisoned, or forfeited their property. It was an early test for the efficacy of the Commons, which had shown itself to be capable of determined action. It was not representative of some supposed popular freedom, however, since it proved to be equally capable of rebuffing the demands of the peasants and labourers. In the following year it introduced the ‘poll tax’ which was feared and hated in equal measure. The members of the parliament house were concerned only with the interests of their own particular ‘community’ of the realm.

The Black Prince died during the sessions of the Good Parliament, and his father followed a year later in 1377. It is said that Alice Perrers took the rings from his fingers as he lay upon his deathbed in the palace of Sheen, but this may be no more than a morality tale. The baubles of glory had already been stripped from him in France. He had achieved nothing much of his own volition, but during his reign of fifty years England itself had acquired a more coherent or at least more organized national life.

Another consequence of his reign is of equal importance. Edward III’s early victories at Sluys and Crécy, and his capture of Calais, had augmented the sense of national identity. The people may not have cared a whit about Edward’s claim to the throne of France but they understood the force of arms against ‘strangers’. The news of battles was issued from market crosses and church pulpits, spreading quickly throughout the entire country. English merchants, rather than Italian or German traders, were now in charge of the country’s business. In the port of Hull, for example, English exporters of wool had made up only 4 per cent of the total in 1275. By 1330, it was almost 90 per cent.

‘I kan noght construe all this,’ a character remarks in Piers Plowman, ‘ye most kenne me this on Englissh.’ It is worth remarking that Chaucer began his poetic career at the court of Edward III. His first verses were written in courtly French but the power of the vernacular overcame his literary conventionality; it is a measure of the strength of spoken and written English that Chaucer now celebrated it as worthy of comparison with the classical tongues. In Troilus and Criseyde, and more especially in Canterbury Tales, he created or adapted a language that was capable of the highest lyric flights and the most vulgar comic effects. It is already the language of Shakespeare. Within Chaucer’s lifetime English replaced French as the language of schoolteaching, and in the reign of the next sovereign it became the language of the court.

Human ingenuity is unceasing. The first mechanical clock was introduced to England in the reign of Edward III. It marks the demise of the feudal and seasonal world no less plainly than the advent of the longbow and the decline of the serf. The first reference to a crane, working in a harbour, comes from 1347.

24

The night schools

In the reign of Edward III there arose the greatest disturbance within the Church since the time that Augustine imposed the primacy of Rome upon the English at the end of the sixth century. In the succeeding 800 years the Church had become part of the governance of England, with all the obligations and dangers that implies. It had become rich. It had remained powerful, with its principal servants becoming the chief administrators of the king. The bishops were effectively the king’s clerks, chosen and promoted in a complex hierarchy of service; they had their own small armies of knights and retainers, sometimes leading them into battle.

The Church was by far the greatest landowner in the country, and therefore the largest employer. Many saintly and devout clerics could still be found, but the majority of the clergy had gone the way of the world. The bishops and abbots, for the most part, lived in great state and luxury. The lowlier monks also lived in conditions of comfort, with the obligations of prayer and study offset by the more familiar pursuits of hunting or hawking. They gambled and they drank; they often pursued women where they did not lust after boys.

The secular clergy, better known as the parish priests, were often unlearned. They may have had to till the land and gather the harvest together with their parishioners. They were of the earth. Many no doubt offered spiritual consolation, and administered the sacraments with due care, but others set no such good example. They lived openly with their mistresses, and neglected their duties. They were in the marketplace and the alehouse more often than they were in the church. The people of Saltash in Cornwall, for example, complained about their priest to the dean of Windsor. ‘He is deaf,’ they wrote, ‘and cannot hear confessions except to the scandal of those confessing; he is a discloser of confessions, because he gets drunk and reveals the confessions of parishioners … he sells the sacramentals to his parishioners, and refused to minister the last rites to those labouring in the final stages when he was asked.’

In times of famine and plague, of course, the piety of the people in such matters as individual prayer and mortification was all the more plaintive and fervent. At a slightly later date, manuals of devotion became more popular among the literate. This did not amount to a rejection of the authority of the Church. The institution was taken for granted, but fresh avenues of access to the divine were required by the pious. Some, however, questioned the wealth of the Church; some knights and London merchants, in particular, were opposed to clerical pretensions in every sphere of social and economic life. In the parliament of 1371 they argued that the lands of the clergy should be taken over for the sake of the public purse.

The life and career of John Wycliffe must be placed in this context. He was himself in holy orders, a Fellow of Merton College in Oxford before becoming Master of Balliol College at the same university. He was a doctorof divinity, and in that profession he had acquired a great reputation both as a teacher and a writer. He became known as ‘the flower of Oxford’, and was held by many contemporaries to be ‘the greatest clerk that they knew then living’. He held two ‘benefices’, two rural parishes that he did not visit but from which he collected the revenue. He had also come to the attention of the king’s court, and was granted a retainer for his services to the Crown.

He was useful to certain members of that court, among them John of Gaunt, because of his avowed disdain for clerical wealth and privilege. He represented a genuine distaste, shared by some of the nobility and many of the gentry, for the temporal possessions of the Church. But he was a scholar who pressed ahead his arguments with a blithe disregard for the consequences in the world around him; he followed the light, or will-o’-the-wisp, of reason wherever it led him. He wrote in university Latin, and in books whose titles may be translated as On the Eucharist and On the Power of the Pope he denounced the claims and corruptions of the Church. No printing presses were of course then available to disseminate his message, so it was laboriously copied by hand.

In these manuscripts he espoused the power of scripture, and suggested that the holy word of God was more important than the sacramental hierarchy of the Church. He believed in a version of predestinarianism, by which the elect were already known to God. There was no need for an elaborate machinery of Church power, which simply interfered between the individual soul and its maker. He taught that the king, rather than the pope or the bishops, was the fountain of grace in the land. He denounced the pope as the Antichrist. Friars and monks were repellent and superfluous. Wycliffe also condemned the worship of the saints as idolatry.

More significantly, perhaps, he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation by means of which the substance of the bread and wine of the Mass was changed by miracle to the body and blood of Christ. His animus against the clergy was one of the commonplaces of the period, but his argument against the eucharist laid him open to the charge of heresy. It was said that he was a ‘wicked worm’ sowing the seeds of schism.

It is not clear that one word of the supposed ‘Wycliffite Bible’, the first English translation of the entire body of Scriptures, was actually composed by Wycliffe himself; it seems to have been the work of his followers at Oxford, but they were undoubtedly moved by the same spirit of change. Wycliffe wanted the word of God to be made known directly to the people without priestly mediation. In particular he wished to deliver the Bible to the labourers in the field. The ploughman should be able to hear the word of God. The ploughman should also be able to interpret it in his own way and for his own purposes. This was where the Church drew the line. St Peter himself had stated that ‘no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation’ (2 Peter 1:20).

Wycliffe was never charged or tried, and was allowed to retire to the parsonage of Lutterworth where he continued his studies in peace. But he was effectively silenced. In the following century, on the orders of the pope, his bones were dug up and burned. But in the 1370s no formal apparatus existed for the suppression of heresy. It was so little known, in fact, that no defence against it was considered necessary. Heretics were believed to be strange enthusiasts from overseas, like the Cathars of Languedoc or the Waldensians of Lyon and elsewhere. They were not, and never could be, English.

Yet this university doctrine, promulgated by Wycliffe, was soon taken up by popular preachers and sectarians who rejoiced in his attack upon the pope and his stripping the altars of sacredness. His doctrines were discussed in small assemblies or ‘night schools’. These enthusiasts came to be known as Lollards, derived from the Low Dutch lollen or lallen meaning ‘to sing’. An informal network of Oxford scholars, grouped around Wycliffe, may have taught their lessons to receptive audiences. The connections can no longer be followed. ‘They have nothing more’, wrote one hostile contemporary, ‘than a certain appearance of humility of posture, in lowering of the head, abandonment of clothing and pretence of fasting; they pretend simplicity in words, affirming themselves to be burning with love of God and neighbour.’

Burning or not, there did emerge a broad Lollard movement that espoused Wycliffe’s arguments as well as adding some of its own. The sacraments were dead signs. There was no purgatory, other than life on this earth, so Masses for the dead have no value. Bread could not be made holier by being muttered over by priests. Confession could only be effective if the priest was full of grace, but no such priest has ever been found. Prayers cannot help the dead any more than a man’s breath can cause a great ship to sail. Pilgrimages served no heavenly or earthly purpose. What is a bishop without wealth? Episcopus Nullatensis: Bishop of Nowhere. St Thomas of Canterbury had already been consigned to hell for endowing the church with material possessions. The pope is an old whore, sitting on many waters, with a cup of poison in his hands. Greater benefit could be derived from a cask of ale than from the four Evangelists. More eccentric propositions were sometimes entertained. One Lollard, William of Wakeham, believed that the land was above the sky.

The Lollards seem to have flourished in the towns, and along the trading routes between towns. It was the faith of the merchant and the artisan rather than the farmer or the agricultural worker. It was strong, therefore, in London and Bristol, Coventry and Leicester. We are talking of hundreds, rather than thousands, of adherents. Yet it was persistent, and provoked royal vengeance in a later reign.

William Smith of Leicester was a ‘deformed’ man who became one of the new sectarians and set up a school in the chapel of St John the Baptist next to the leper-house in Leicester. He gave up the eating of flesh or fish; he avoided wine and beer; he walked about barefoot. He also taught himself to read and to write. One evening he and some of his disciples, sitting in a local inn close to the chapel, grew hungry. They had a supply of vegetables, taken from the fields, but they had no fuel with which to cook them. Then William Smith remembered a wooden image of St Katherine that lay in a corner of the chapel. ‘Look, my friends,’ he said, ‘God has provided us fuel; this image will be holy fuel. By hatchet and fire she will suffer a new martyrdom and perhaps, by cruel pains, arrive some time in the kingdom of heaven.’ He took up the hatchet. ‘Let us see if she be a true saint,’ he added, ‘for, if so, she will bleed; if not she will be good for fire to cook with.’ This reflects the true spirit of Lollardism, rejecting the images of saints as nothing but senseless idols. The incident was inconceivably shocking to the ordinary people, however, and Smith’s words were reported to the authorities of the town. He was ordered to walk, barefoot and bare-headed, in a procession from the church of St Mary’s in Leicester; he was to hold an image of St Katherine in his right hand, and kneel at the beginning, middle and end of the procession. The ceremony was to be repeated during the Saturday market of the town.

Yet not all of the new faith were poor or disadvantaged. Sir Laurence of St Martin, Justice of the Peace, sheriff and MP for Wiltshire, attended Easter Mass in the spring of 1381 and received communion; he did not swallow the host, however, but spat it into his hand. He took it home and divided it into three parts; he ate the first part with some oysters, the second part with onions, and swallowed the remaining piece with his wine. His sin was observed and denounced. He was ordered to do public penance on every Friday for the rest of his life; he was to kneel before a stone cross that was carved with the images of his sin. He was also dismissed as sheriff. There had of course always been a strain of unbelief and as early as 1200 the prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, suggested that ‘there are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they believe that a human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now, and is ruled by chance rather than by providence.’

Others did not travel so far in heresy. Certain knights and grandees favoured only elements of the new teaching. Some of them attended the preachings of the Lollards, armed with sword and buckler to protect the preacher from the insults of bystanders. These men were not necessarily heretics in any real sense; they were more interested in Wycliffe’s attack upon the clergy and the general wealth of the Church. Some were genuinely devout, however, and took part in that broad movement of lay piety known as devotio moderna which emphasized the inner life of the spirit and the individual’s humble love of God.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the convocation, or general assembly, of the Church asked the parliament to announce some action against the Lollards. They were still a small sect, but they appeared to be growing. They were finding an audience among the disaffected, and the spiritual authorities were worried about any possible consequences. So in 1401 an Act was passed against ‘a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the sacraments and usurping the office of preaching’. They were spreading sedition and insurrection. The bishops were granted the power to arrest and imprison any offenders. If they did not renounce their pernicious beliefs, they could in the end be burned ‘in an high place’ before the populace. This is the first time that the stake was appointed as the ultimate penalty for heresy. In the next century the fire would become one of the notable judicial sights of England.

The first to die was a London chaplain, William Sawtré, who had declared that the bread of the Mass remained merely bread. On 26 February 1401, he was stuffed inside a wooden barrel at Smithfield and placed upon the flames.

In what sense did Wycliffe and the Lollards presage the general religious reformation of the sixteenth century? An affinity in certain doctrines, later promulgated both by the Lutherans and the Calvinists, no doubt exists. The detestation of the pope and the spiritual hierarchy, the denial of transubstantiation, the rejection of any worship of images and the increasing reliance on a vernacular Bible, are all part of the same general repudiation of the Catholic Church. Yet in the fourteenth century these attitudes were held only by a small minority. They did not spread very far, and were detested by a large proportion of the population. ‘I smell a Loller in the wind’, is the line given to one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. It needed another set of accidental circumstances, and another cast of characters, before the Christian faith of England could be reformulated.

In the fourteenth century, however, the religion of the vast majority of the English people remained utterly orthodox and familiar. There was no appetite for change, and no sense of an ending. The Church was part of the texture of life, as enveloping and as inescapable as the weather. England was in any case an island of saints, with the cult of English sainthood being encouraged from the twelfth century; seventeen Englishmen and Englishwomen of that century were beatified.

This was the land of the ecclesiastical style known as the Perpendicular, a peculiarly English form of architecture that flourished in the reign of Edward III. Just as Chaucer abandoned French for English, so the great masons of the latter half of the fourteenth century renounced the Rayonnant and Flamboyant styles of France. The greatest of all these English masons, Henry Yevele, died in the same year as Chaucer himself; his early patron, John of Gaunt, was also the poet’s patron. So there is a correspondence. Yevele worked at Windsor, Westminster, Canterbury, Durham and St Paul’s as well as superintending the building of many castles, chapels and collegiate churches throughout the country.

Perpendicular was a wholly and uniquely national style, first adumbrated in Gloucester Cathedral. The king introduced it in his rebuilding works at Windsor. It became the pattern for a myriad of parish churches, and is the dominant style for the rest of the medieval period in England. Perpendicular is plain and ordered, with soaring shafts of stone; on slender piers and high arcades there rests a vast and stately vault. The emphasis is always upon the vertical line. The effect is simultaneously one of simplicity and magnificence. It is an austere style, perhaps hastened by the more sombre mood of the country in the years succeeding the Black Death. Carving of too elaborate a nature was no longer fashionable; as the nave of Canterbury Cathedral will testify, the emphasis rested upon total effect rather than on curious detail. There was an instinct for unity.

The 9,000 parish churches of England were the centres of all communal activity, where the living were organized and the dead were commemorated. This was the place where the parishioners were baptized, married and buried. Royal proclamations were issued from the church; local elections were held, and local accounts audited, in the nave. The prized possessions of the community were held there in chests, under lock and key. Disputes were settled and negotiations undertaken, within the walls painted with images of the saints and the apostles. The sculpted forms of angels and saints looked down on the throng from the hammerbeam roof. Assignations, and trysts, were kept by the church porch. Each church had its own brewhouse, to make ‘church ale’. Many of the parishioners joined religious guilds, by means of which an altar or a side chapel was maintained with voluntary contributions. On the days of procession the members of the parish would walk in harmony around the church, sometimes showered with flowers and unconsecrated hosts known as singing cakes. The churchyard was used for Sunday markets, and for games such as wrestling and football. But it was also a sacred and even fearful place. The key to the church door was prized as a sovereign remedy against mad dogs, and the ringing of church bells exorcized demons riding in thunder and lightning. Church liturgy itself was deemed to be a form of magical incantation, and sometimes the eucharist was preserved by those who had taken communion; the holy bread could be used to cure ailments or to ward off witches.

The Mass was part of village life; as it was performed before the altar in the chancel, behind the rood screen, the people would gossip and yawn and whisper. The chancel was maintained by the priest, while the nave was the responsibility of the parishioners. The rood screen itself, between the nave and the chancel, was a highly decorated wooden panel on which were painted or sculpted images of the Crucifixion or of the Day of Doom. The service was accompanied by a continual murmur of voices, except at the holy time of the consecration of the eucharist, and by occasional laughter. There was little, if any, preaching and very few pulpits.

Dogs and chickens wandered among the people, who stood or kneeled on the rushes or straw strewn over the earth floor. Sometimes the churchgoers just walked around, staring at the statues of the Virgin or the saints. Some attempt was made at seating in the thirteenth century, but pews did not become a familiar aspect of the church interior until the fifteenth century. Disputes over status were frequent. Who should first go forward for communion? Some of the congregation played chess, or even gambled with dice. Women brought in their needlework. Arguments might erupt, and fights might break out, in the course of the Mass. A bargain might be sealed with a handshake. Thus proceeded the vigorous and ebullient religious life of the fourteenth century, in which earth and heaven were inseparable.

25

The commotion

Richard of Bordeaux was ten years old at the time of his coronation as Richard II. He was the son of the Black Prince and thus closest in blood to the dead king. In the summer of 1377 he was led to Westminster Abbey under a canopy of blue silk borne on spears of silver, and he lay prostrate before the altar as the choir sang the litany. By the end of the long ceremony the boy was exhausted, and was taken to a private apartment in Westminster where he might rest. On the following morning the prelates and the magnates met in a great assembly to choose twenty-four of their number to form a minority council. It might have been thought that the young king’s eldest surviving uncle, John of Gaunt, would have taken precedence; but, having ensured that some of his supporters were part of the council, he withdrew with his followers to Kenilworth Castle. He may have been awaiting events.

The boy king assumed the crown at a time of murmuring and dissatisfaction. The shortage of labour, as a result of the pestilence, meant that the great landlords were trying to exact as much work as they could from their unfree tenants; the legislation prohibiting any rise in wages, although only intermittently effective, was still the cause of much complaint. General discontent had also been aroused at the heavy burden of taxation; war supplies were always needed as a result of unsettled business with the French. Only a few days before the coronation, the forces of King Charles V had plundered Rye and burnt down Hastings.

Yet the king’s first real test came four years later, when he was confronted by the greatest rebellion in English history. At a meeting of parliament in Northampton, in November and December of 1380, ‘a great and notorious rumour’ spread among the Commons about a ‘dreadful thing’ that had taken place in York; a group of rebels, armed with swords and axes, had broken their way into the guildhall of that city and driven out the mayor. They were protesting about the level of taxes imposed upon them by the royal court.

Nevertheless, the Northampton parliament decreed a poll tax three times more exacting than the last. It was the third such tax in four years. A poll tax, literally a tax on every ‘poll’ or head, was a wholly inequitable mode of taxation; rich and poor paid the same alike, with the proviso that the richer people had the means and opportunity of evasion. So the greater burden fell upon the poor. Widespread unrest followed, naturally enough, and judicial officials were sent to the more disobliging areas in order to ensure collection. The commissioners in London declined to carry on their unwelcome work, for the good reason that it had become too dangerous.

The men of Essex were the first who refused to pay; on 30 May 1381, at Brentwood, a royal official was attacked and driven off. The revolt quickly spread to Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk and Hertfordshire, encompassing some 340 villages. It is pertinent that these were the counties most affected by the pestilence; they were the areas most likely to feel the effects of economic instability and insecurity in the wake of the vast mortality. Change, in medieval society, was always unsettling. In Essex and Kent, also, the labour laws were most strictly imposed. Here, if anywhere, are the causes of rebellion.

The Kentish rioters occupied Canterbury and released all the prisoners held in the archbishop’s prison, among them a cleric known as John Ball. The rebels went on to burn the rolls of the county on which the estimates for taxation were written. On the following day the crowd broke open Maidstone Prison and freed its inmates. They already had a clarion call. ‘John Ball greets you all and gives you to understand, that he has rung your bell.’

The movement grew much more dangerous when, on 11 June, the rebels of the various regions agreed to march or ride upon London. That was the centre of their woes, the home of the lawyers and the royal officials. It has been estimated that some 30,000 men were now on the road. The men of Kent, always the most fierce, went northwards, while the men of Essex came from the east and the rebels of Hertfordshire from the north. The Hertfordshire men made a camp at Highbury, while the men of Essex rested and waited at Mile End. It was at this point that they were informed of risings all over England. Riots erupted in Norwich and in St Albans, in Winchester and in York, in Ipswich and in Scarborough.

The Kentish men, under the leadership of Wat Tyler or Wat the tiler, gathered on Blackheath on 12 June. The king had retreated to the Tower of London for safety, but on 13 June he and his most trusted councillors agreed to meet the main body of protesters on the heath. The royal party sailed in four barges down the Thames in order to land at Rotherhithe, but too many rebels were clustered on the south bank to allow a safe landing. The young king could now quite clearly hear the terrible shrieks and cries that would soon echo through the streets of London. A chronicler reported that the rebels ‘made such a great clamour that it really seemed as if the devil himself had joined their company’. The barge returned to the Tower.

The royal retreat inflamed the rebels. Tyler now led his people to the city itself. They stormed the Marshalsea, in Southwark, and freed its prisoners. Another party burned the tax records held at Lambeth Palace. Then they made their way across London Bridge. The people of London refused to allow the city gates to be closed against them; they sympathized with the cause. They, too, were oppressed by royal exactions on behalf of an unpopular war. The crowd surged along Fleet Street, opening the Fleet Prison and pillaging the lawyers’ quarter of New Temple. The Londoners, now invigorated by their example, burned down the residence of John of Gaunt, the Savoy Palace, and killed many of his officials. As the leading nobleman of England, during the minority of the king, Gaunt was the most hated.

The young king surveyed the scene of looting and burning from a window of the Tower, and asked what should be done. No one knew. But at fourteen he was old enough to think for himself; he would ride out to Mile End and address all of the rebels. He hoped that this would draw them from the city into the eastern suburb, and thus allow his court and household to escape from the Tower. In this, he was only partially successful.

On Friday, 14 June, he made the short journey to Mile End on his horse. He was accompanied by the mayor of London, William Walworth, and some of the household knights. He was already showing signs of personal courage worthy of a king. When the royal party approached the rebels knelt upon the ground, and some of their number shouted, ‘Welcome, King Richard. We wish for no other king but you.’ Richard then asked them what else they wanted. They wanted ‘the traitors’, by which they meant the officials who had taxed them and harassed them beyond measure. They wanted to remove a government of scoundrels. The king replied that he would surrender to them any men who were convicted of treachery according to the law. It was a convenient answer to turn away wrath. One of their other demands was that all serfs should be given their freedom, and that land should be rented at fourpence per acre (0.4 hectares). Richard agreed to these proposals. Certain ‘traitors’, however, were already being summarily despatched. A group of rebels had entered the Tower, in the king’s absence, and had dragged out the archbishop of Canterbury and other officials who were sheltering there. All of them were beheaded on Tower Hill, the site of public execution.

More blood was to be shed in this fortnight’s storm. The people of London and the suburbs were confronted by groups of rebels and asked ‘With whom holdest thou?’ If they did not reply, ‘With King Richard and the commons’, they were beaten up or even beheaded. The rebels declared that they would have no king with the name of John, a clear reference to John of Gaunt. All over England the manors of lords were now being pillaged, and their inhabitants killed. Lawyers and justices were seized, and tax records burned. The proceedings of one manorial court are typical; the heading of one page reads curia prima post rumorem et combustionem rotulorum: ‘this is the first court after the revolt and the burning of the rolls’.

War and plague had done their work. At approximately the same moment of the fourteenth century, popular rebellions emerged in neighbouring nations. In Flanders the commons had rebelled against their count, Louis, and swept him out of the country; the Jacquerie, in France, unleashed a wave of riot and bloodshed in Paris, Rouen and the surrounding countryside. In Florence a popular revolt of the wool carders and other workers, the ciompi, destroyed the political structure of the city.

The morning after the young king’s ride to Mile End, on 15 June, Richard came to parley with the rebels at Smithfield. Wat Tyler waited for him there at the head of 20,000 insurgents. As soon as Tyler saw Richard, he rode up to him and began to converse with him. There is a hint that at this point he seemed to be threatening the king, or at least treating him disrespectfully. He began to play with his dagger, and then laid his hand on the bridle of the king’s horse. At this point, fearing treason, the mayor of London stabbed a short sword into Tyler’s throat. Tyler rode a little way, fearfully wounded, and was taken to the hospital of St Bartholomew beside Smithfield.

The rebels were shocked and angered at the event; some of them drew their bows. The young king galloped up to the front line of archers. ‘What are you doing?’ he called out to them. ‘Tyler was a traitor. Come with me, and I will be your leader.’ He did literally lead them a little way north into Islington, where 1,000 armed men had been summoned by the mayor. It seems likely that the rebels had walked into a hastily improvised trap. The leaders fell to their knees, and begged for pardon. Some of the court wished to punish them on the spot, but the king wisely desisted. He ordered the rebels to return to their homes, and forbade any stranger from spending the night in the city. Soon afterwards Tyler was taken from the hospital of St Bartholomew and beheaded in Smithfield itself.

A few days later Richard revoked the charter of emancipation he had granted to the crowd at Mile End, on the ground that it had been extorted from him by violence. He travelled to Essex in order to observe the aftermath of the now extinguished revolt. A group of villagers there asked him to remain faithful to the pledges he had made to them a few days before. His retort, as described by one contemporary chronicler, is worth recording for the insight it shows into the temperament of the king. ‘You wretches’, he said, ‘are detestable both on land and on sea. You seek equality with the lords, but you are unworthy to live. Give this message to your fellows: rustics you are, and rustics you will always be. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example to posterity.’ A parliament was called later in the year, where it was proposed that the state of bondage known as villeinage should be abolished. The Lords and the Commons, their vital interests as landlords at stake, unanimously voted against any such action. This marked the essential conclusion of the rebellion.

In some areas, such as the recalcitrant county of Essex, the punishments were harsh. The leaders of the rebels were beheaded. John Ball was arrested in St Albans, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. Wat Tyler had gone before him. After their deaths, they were enshrined as heroes in folk memory. Yet in other regions the reaction of the authorities was more moderate than might have been expected. It is clear that they did not wish to inflame a still dangerous situation.

The unsuccessful rebellion has been called in retrospect ‘the peasants’ revolt’, suggesting that the rebels came from the lowest agricultural class. But the court records show that the participants were generally the leaders of village life, and acted as bailiffs, constables and jurors in their neighbourhoods. It can be argued that these men, far from being accidental or opportunistic rebels, were in fact enunciating real and important grievances. They were of course protesting against the judicial commissions set up to claim the poll tax, but they were also objecting to the corruption of justice by the local magnates. The ordinances and statutes concerning labour, after the Black Death, had materially changed the role of law. It was no longer an instrument of communal justice; it had instead become the machinery of exaction designed to control and discipline the lower classes. The rebels were also protesting against an increasingly futile war, for which they had to pay. They were denouncing greedy landlords. They were violently opposed to a noble class that had shown little interest in the condition of the countryside.

And, as their claims and demands came together, a more general sense of protest was being enunciated against the conditions of life in the fourteenth century. ‘Ah, good people,’ John Ball declared in a sermon to the rebels on Blackheath, ‘matters will not go well in England until everything is held in common and there are neither villeins nor gentlemen. These gentlemen dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and labour, the rain and wind in the fields. Let us go to the king. He is young. Let us show him in what servitude we live.’

Other wandering preachers dwelled on the age-long theme of equality and justice, going from parish to parish and calling to the villagers just as they were leaving church; their theme was that all things under heaven should be held ‘in common’. The day of 13 June – the day when the king’s barge turned back to the Tower in the face of the rebels – was Corpus Christi, the feast of the body of Christ in which the whole community was deemed to be a token of that holy body. It was a day of village celebrations and processions, in which the eucharist was carried in triumph around the streets and lanes of each community. So the rebels had, in a sense, pronounced themselves to be holy by marching or riding in a host. They were pronouncing the sacredness of fellowship. The holy bread is made up of many grains. Christ is the miller.

It was claimed at the time that Ball was a follower of Wycliffe, and that Lollardy itself was one of the causes of sedition. Since the Lollards were in no sense a popular movement, the connection is in many respects implausible. But ideas of change and renovation were in the air. Wycliffe had taught that the right of property was founded in grace and that no sinful man was entitled to the services of others; the theories of the scholar could easily be translated into the slogans of the people. So Ball, in his sermon at Blackheath, taught that all men were created equal, and that the ranks and stations of the social hierarchy were the inventions of their oppressors. God wished them to recover their original liberty.

Songs and sayings flew out of the rebellion like sparks from a fire. ‘Jack Trueman would have you know that falseness and guile have reigned too long. Truth has been put under a lock. Falseness reigns in every flock … Sin spreads like the wild flood, true love, that was good, is fled, and the clergy work us woe for gain … Whoever does wrong, in whatever place it fall, does a wrong to us all … With right and with might, with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before might, so goes our mill aright … The commons is the fairest flower that ever God set on an earthly crown.’

The consequence of the revolt was unease and even dread. A chronicler, recording troubles eleven years after the events here related, remarked that ‘men all over England were sure that another general insurrection was at hand’. For more than two centuries the fear most expressed by the authorities was that of local rebellion. A revolt of the masses could trigger disaster for the state. Sporadic revolts after 1381 did indeed take place, often in the form of ‘rent strikes’ against oppressive landlords. In the face of unbearable tensions, however, attempts were made to appease and accommodate the demands of the peasants. No further poll tax was ever exacted, not at least in the medieval period. The slow abolition of serfdom, and the rising prosperity of those in work, created a sense of freedom that had found one manifestation in the revolt. It also encouraged a greater relaxation of the old feudal order.

The living standards of the agricultural workers improved perceptibly over a generation. Real wages grew, despite the attempts at legislation prohibiting any such rise, and a poem such as ‘How the Ploughman learned the Paternoster’ reveals the profusion of meat, fish and dairy products in the households of the labourers:

November: At Martinmas I kill my swine

December: And at Christmas I drink red wine.

Life expectancy also rose. The historians of dress have noted that clothing became brighter, and more luxurious, and jewellery more evident, in the latter years of the fourteenth century.

The king himself had passed a test of fire. He had confronted, and defeated, the first and last popular rebellion in English history. His later behaviour suggests that his belief in himself, and in the essential divinity of kingship, was thereby redoubled. At the age of fifteen he was truly a king whose presence alone was enough to command large crowds of people into obeying his will. He was 6 feet (1.8 metres) in height, with blond hair and a round, somewhat feminine face; he had flared nostrils, prominent cheekbones and heavy eyelids. John Gower, at the beginning of the king’s reign, described him as ‘the most beautiful of kings’ and the ‘flower of boys’. He may have been indulging in a little flattery, but the chroniclers of the period were at one in emphasizing Richard’s beauty. He looked the part.

His manner, however, was considered to be abrupt. He was inclined to stammer, when he was excited, and he flushed easily. His temper was somewhat uncertain, and he was always quick to assert his royal dignity. His words to the rebels of Essex, whether he actually uttered them or not, are in that sense characteristic. Other accounts of his speech and behaviour tend to corroborate them. ‘I am a king,’ he said to one earl, ‘and your lord. I will continue to be king. I will be a greater lord than ever I was before, in spite of all my enemies.’ His anger was terrible, just like that of his Plantagenet ancestors. He once drew his sword on the archbishop of Canterbury, and would have killed him had he not been restrained. One chronicler, known only as ‘the monk of Evesham’, described him as being extravagant in dress and imperious in temper; he was frightened of war and preferred to spend the night ‘carousing with friends’ and indulging himself in ‘unmentionable’ ways. This has often been taken as an allusion to Richard’s possible homosexuality, but to a monk many things may be unmentionable.

The emphasis on his royalty meant that he cared deeply for ceremony and for spectacle. He enjoyed dressing up. On one occasion he wore a costume of white satin on which were hung cockle-shells and mussel-shells plated in silver; his doublet was adorned with orange trees embroidered in gold thread. He loved to preside at tournaments, but he was not so enthusiastic about true battles. One of his relatives, Thomas of Lancaster, declared at a later date that ‘he is too heavy in the arse, he only asks for drinking and eating, sleeping, dancing and leaping about’. The medieval texts often refer to ‘leaping about’ without explaining what is meant by it. Thomas of Lancaster went on to say, according to the chronicler Froissart, that ‘this is no life for men-at-arms who ought to win honour through deeds of arms and put their bodies to work’.

In 1383 the young king declared that he was now prepared to rule in person, having taken the precaution of marrying Anne, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, at the beginning of the previous year. Both parties were fifteen years old, and Anne was described by a chronicler as ‘a tiny scrap of humanity’. Now bolstered by formidable marital relatives, and by his own assumption of power, Richard felt able to choose his advisers beyond the charmed circle of the hereditary lords. This was not to the taste of his uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock – dukes of Lancaster and Gloucester respectively – who withdrew from the court in protest against what they called ‘evil advisers’. Richard feared Gaunt and Woodstock, as possible claimants for the throne, and he filled his household with favourites. The new king was lavish in the grants of lands, castles and titles; he borrowed heavily, and was obliged to give the crown of England as security. The old lords, out of favour and denied gifts, were growing restless. It is the familiar story of jealousy and suspicion, compounded by the king’s own secretive and sensitive temperament. The court had become a dangerous place once more.

In the spring of 1383 there had been a botched campaign to relieve Flanders of French control; it had been led by Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, but the bishop did not prove to be a good commander. In full martial gear he led his troops into battle against the Flemish towns, but his victims were ordinary Flemish citizens. ‘Men, women and children’, according to one report, ‘were hewed together in one vast massacre.’ The bishop may have believed that he was saving their souls. His army was eventually surrounded, and terms were agreed without Despenser ever having attacked the French enemy. It seems likely that the king himself planned an invasion of France in this year, but the prospect of heavy taxation and another popular insurrection deterred him.

Another military failure followed two years later. France and Scotland, old friends in arms, were eager to pursue a joint campaign from the north of England. So in the summer of 1385 Richard II gathered an army to forestall them. He called a feudal summons, the last such summons in English history, and the larger magnates were obliged to respond to the call. The English army met at Newcastle and marched northwards, burning Melrose Abbey and other religious houses on their way to Edinburgh. Once the king arrived in the capital, however, he realized that the Scots had gone; the Scottish soldiers were moving towards the Highlands. Some of his commanders urged him to pursue them, but he declined to do so. Why march into barren countryside without the chance of finding supplies? So he went home. This was an eminently wise decision. Doing nothing is sometimes the best course. But it did not improve the king’s reputation for valour. He had been given the opportunity of displaying himself as a sovereign of war, the indisputable qualification for a king, but success eluded him.

The debacle only served to increase the young king’s antipathy to war. In the course of his reign he would never again lead his armies against the French or the Scots. There would be no memorable battles, no sieges, no towns or castles conquered. In any case the English treasury could no longer afford the cost of further military adventure.

Further rumours of war were being whispered in the spring and summer of 1386. A French army of 30,000 men was being gathered on the coast of Flanders, and was compared to the Greek army that had overcome ancient Troy. The people of Rye, Sandwich and Dover were commanded to remain within the walls of their towns, and the castles close to the southern coast were strengthened and refurbished. The citizens of London were ordered to stock food supplies that might last for three months. It was reported that some Londoners were leaving the city. Richard himself planned yet another attack upon France, but the Commons refused to supply his coffers. The threat of invasion faded away by the end of the year. The French court, like that of the English, did not have the funds to maintain so large an army for so long. Autumn gave way to winter. The fierce weather of that season was another deterrent. The business of the country could go on unimpeded, in theory, and the English people could enjoy the pleasures of peace.

In October 1386 the parliament met in Westminster Hall, as had become the custom, but Richard had prepared a surprise for its members. The statues of previous monarchs, larger than life-size, adorned the hall; the thirteen kings, from Edward the Confessor to Richard himself, looked down upon the proceedings. It was a signal vision of Richard’s concept of kingship. The power of sovereignty was meant to overawe the lowlier subjects of the realm.

It did not work out like that in practice. The Lords sent several petitions to the king, all designed to curb his use or abuse of power. He was accused of flouting the law, and ignoring the advice of his proper councillors. He was condemned for appointing and rewarding unsuitable advisers; he gave out land and offices without advice, and made free use of pardons for rape and murder in order to raise revenue. It was clear, at least, that he was now strong enough to resist the counsels of the senior members of the realm.

A deputation from the parliament visited the king at the palace of Eltham, since Richard himself had refused to travel to Westminster. They demanded the removal of his chancellor, Michael de la Pole, one of the ‘new men’ whom Richard favoured at the expense of the old nobility. The king raged against the assembled Lords and Commons, accusing them of disloyalty and even of treachery. He told them, in his abrupt and angry manner, that he would not dismiss a servant from his kitchen at the behest of parliament. Rumours of plots and counter-plots were everywhere. Richard was behaving in secret and arbitrary ways, and it was whispered that he wished to behead the most notable of his enemies.

It was time for a more powerful intervention. Thomas of Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester, sought a further interview with Richard at Eltham; he was accompanied by Richard FitzAlan, eleventh earl of Arundel, a powerful and skilful nobleman. These two magnates informed the king that he had been ruling England unwisely and unlawfully. They said that the country had always been governed by the concord between the king and the noble lords; only a sliver of truth can be found in this argument, but they enforced their claim with a barely disguised threat that the king could be deposed. The example of his great-grandfather, Edward II, was laid before him. That unfortunate monarch had been forced to resign in favour of his son before being cruelly murdered. Thomas of Woodstock, one of Richard’s uncles, may even have desired the throne for himself.

Richard took the example of Edward II to heart. Nine years later he would plead with the pope to canonize his predecessor as one of the great royal saints of England. There is no doubt that he always felt a strong sense of identification with his unhappy ancestor. But in the winter of 1386 he was obliged to temporize with his enemies. He was still only twenty-one years old, and could not have been entirely sure of himself. He could not yet afford to antagonize them. So he yielded to their demands. The king would come to Westminster. He agreed that his household could be investigated and administered by a commission of nobles and bishops. Michael de la Pole was dismissed, and later imprisoned. Thomas Arundel, bishop of Ely and brother of Richard FitzAlan, took his place as chancellor.

The parliament house had never been so powerful as it was in the last months of 1386, but it would be unwise to praise its members too highly. They were not necessarily good patriots fighting against a tyrant. They were just as preoccupied with their own interests as were the king and his household; a poem of the period describes their conduct as confused and uncertain. Some members sat there ‘like a nought in arithmetic that marks a place but has no value in itself’. Some were taking bribes from royal officials or other interested parties, and some were paid dependants who would not say anything without orders. Some stumbled and mumbled; others slept or stammered their way through their speeches, not knowing what they meant to say.

The king chafed under the restrictions imposed upon him by what soon became known as the ‘Wonderful Parliament’. The commission was given its powers for a year; Richard decided to wait and watch, while at the same time mustering his resources. He consulted with the aldermen of London and the sheriffs of the counties, but received only ambiguous encouragement. His exactions had hardened their hearts. Then he called upon the judges. The most senior of them met in the summer of 1387, and determined that the king could change or dismiss the ordinances of parliament at his will. This effectively annulled the power of both Lords and Commons. The judges also declared that those who had attempted to curb the power of the king could be punished as traitors even if they were not technically guilty of treason.

This was most serious for the king’s opponents. The earls could be beheaded, for example, and their lands held forfeit. Throughout the autumn a tense confrontation was continued, the lords refusing to meet the king after he had summoned them. The earl of Northumberland tried to act as a mediator between the two parties, but it became clear that there was no room for compromise or negotiation. So in November the lords rose up in arms. They called upon their household forces and, at a battle beside the Thames near Radcot on 20 December 1387, they defeated an army sent against them. Then they marched upon London, where Richard was sheltering in the Tower.

It seems likely that the king was deposed for two or three days, effectively stripped of his power, but no clear agreement about the name of his successor could be found. Faced with rival claims, the only real choice was to reinstate the young king suitably chastened and obedient. To be deprived of his throne, even for a few days, was a severe blow to his own regal sense of selfhood. He had in effect been stripped of his identity.

Richard did indeed submit to their demands. The lords took over his household, and dismissed some of the royal servants. Other household officials were arrested. The lords then summoned a parliament to meet on 3 February, where they wished to deal with their other enemies. There is an account of the opening session in which the lords, dressed in gold robes, linked hands and slowly advanced upon the king as he sat upon the throne; then they bowed to him, and filed into their places. It became known as the ‘Merciless Parliament’.

Their first victims were the judges who had pronounced them to be traitors. The Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Robert Tresilian, was tried and condemned to death while his judicial colleagues were sentenced to exile in Ireland. Tresilian fled for sanctuary to a chapel of Westminster Abbey, but he was dragged out and carried off to Tyburn. The mob carved images of the devil, and of the zodiac, upon his body before his throat was cut and his corpse hung upon the gallows. Seven of the king’s followers were also executed.

Yet the new regime of the lords was not marked by any great success. The Commons had hoped that the removing of the ‘evil’ counsellors from the king’s side would benefit the realm by financial and judicial reform. But the Lords were divided; they pursued their own interests to the detriment of the Commons. The finances of the country did not improve, and factional violence became increasingly common. They also failed in the pursuit of military glory; a planned invasion of France degenerated into a series of coastal skirmishes. The kingdom could only properly be guided by a king. A gathering of notables was not sufficient.

So Richard struck back. In the winter of 1388 the king offered to act as a mediator between the Lords and the Commons. The great lords were effectively lawless, and were able to escape justice with impunity. They were, to use Langland’s word, ‘wolveskynnes’. With their bands of followers they were acting like local tyrants oppressing the common people. Richard offered to restrain his own use of retainers, and sweetly asked the lords to follow his example. His was a policy of divide and rule. He represented strength and compromise.

In the spring of 1389 the king declared, to his council at Westminster, that he had decided once more to assume full responsibility for the affairs of the nation. There was little disagreement. He said that for twelve years he and his kingdom had been ruled or overruled by others. What had been the result? The people had been burdened by excessive taxation that had benefited no one. He was now twenty-two, and would rule alone.

Richard’s sense of kingship had been threatened and almost destroyed in the last days of 1388; now he projected it more fiercely and defiantly. His nomenclature changed. The petitions of the Commons were addressed to ‘your highness and royal majesty’ rather than, as before, to ‘your rightful and gracious lord’. The royal servants began to describe him as ‘highness’, ‘majesty’ and ‘your high royal presence’. He told one knight out of Warwickshire, Sir William Bagot, that he wished to be remembered as one who had ‘recovered his dignity, regality and honourable estate’ and who had ensured that his prerogative was ‘humbly obeyed … as it had been in any other king’s time’.

He believed himself to be the source of all justice and order, the pattern of authority; that is why he was gracious to the Commons as well as to the Lords. They were all equally his subjects. It is a measure of his sense of greatness that his household was three times as large as that of Henry I. In the autumn of 1390 he also began to gather around him a body of followers, known as an ‘affinity’, who adopted as a badge the image of the white hart. He derived it from the coat of arms of his mother. All is of a piece with his love of pageantry and his taste for magnificent robes. The court became the stage for his splendour. At some banquets, and at the three festal crown-wearings of the year, he would sit in state upon his throne watching everyone but conversing with nobody; he would remain very still, crowned and in full regalia, as if he had become a living statue. ‘And if his eye fell upon anyone,’ a chronicler reveals, ‘that person had to bend his knee to the king.’

His sense of royalty was also an aspect of his piety. God was his only overlord. He frequently visited the shrines of saints, and instituted new cults; he was fascinated by reports and rumours of miracles; he was the patron of the Carthusians, and lavished treasure for the rebuilding of churches and abbeys. There is a panel painting, known as ‘the Wilton Diptych’. On the left panel Richard is depicted kneeling, dressed in a red mantle embroidered in gold, with Edward the Confessor (saint), John the Baptist (saint) and King Edmund (saint and martyr) standing around him. On the right-hand panel is painted an image of the Virgin and Child surrounded by eleven angels. One of the angels holds aloft the flag of St George. So here Richard celebrates the continuity of his reign with his saintly Anglo-Saxon forebears, united in the veneration of peace and national renewal. He compounded his attachment to the memory of Edward the Confessor by impaling his own arms with the arms of the dead king. It might almost seem that Richard even considered himself to be worthy of canonization.

Yet triumphalism can turn into tyranny. In the summer of 1397 Richard invited the earl of Warwick to dinner and then, when the meal was over, ordered his arrest. On hearing the news of this, the earl of Arundel was persuaded to surrender himself. The king then rode out to Pleshey Castle in Essex, the home of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, with a party of armed retainers. Woodstock was roused from sleep, and was then personally arrested by his nephew. Richard ordered the immediate arrest of these three great lords on the grounds that they were conspiring against him. He may also have been brooding on old offences, since these were the three men who had led the rebellion against him and had briefly deposed him in the Tower. He now believed himself strong enough to destroy them. He was asserting his manhood by avenging past affronts.

The chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, wrote that the kingdom was ‘suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into confusion’. Richard then called a parliament that, in the general atmosphere of suspicion and terror, was notably submissive. It had every reason to be cooperative. Westminster itself was filled with troops, and the king was protected by a bodyguard of 300 archers from his favourite county of Cheshire. The building in which the parliament assembled was surrounded by archers. Richard was relying upon force, and the threat of force, to make his way.

At the beginning of the session he declared, through the mouth of his chancellor, that the king demanded the full plenitude of his power. He had been aware of many illegalities committed in previous years but now, out of his affection for his people, he extended a general pardon – except to fifty individuals, whom he would not explicitly name. This was of course a policy to keep everyone in subjection. He might include anyone he pleased within the category of the unknown fifty. The king was also gracious enough to accept, at the urging of the Commons, the duties levied on leather and wool in perpetuity.

Thomas of Woodstock, after his arrest, was despatched to the English bastion at Calais where on the king’s direct orders he was quietly killed. Reports suggest that he was either strangled with a towel or suffocated beneath a featherbed. The result was in any case the same.

Arundel was subjected to what would now be called a show trial, of which a partial transcript survives. John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, presided.

Lancaster: Your pardon is revoked, traitor.

Arundel: Truly you lie. Never was I a traitor.

Lancaster: Why in that case did you seek a pardon?

Arundel: To silence the tongues of my enemies, of whom you are one.

Richard: Answer the appeal.

Arundel: I see it all now. You, who accuse me, are all liars. I claim the benefit of pardon, which you granted when you were of full age.

Richard: I granted it provided it were not to my prejudice.

Lancaster: The pardon is worthless.

It was indeed worthless. On the same day Arundel was led to Tower Hill where he was beheaded. The earl of Warwick suffered a more lenient fate. He was banished for life to the Isle of Man. The extensive lands of the three lords were confiscated, and given to the king’s friends and supporters. His enemies appeared to have been scattered.

Yet Richard was despondent. His wife, Anne of Bohemia, had died in 1394 from an outbreak of the plague; they had been married for twelve years, but had produced no children. That was another mark against him. He was, after all, already twenty-seven years old and should have sired a family. In his extravagant grief he ordered that the palace of Sheen should be razed to the ground; this is the place where he and Anne had once been happy. It seems likely that his health was also deteriorating, since the royal accounts show very large sums of money being paid to his physicians. He may have been becoming dangerous.

Many of the lords testified later that they had in fact become frightened of the king. With the invisible list of fifty traitors he could confiscate lands and property as he wished. He could consign anyone to prison. According to a later deposition the king had declared that the law of England resided in his own breast, and that he could make or break laws at his discretion. He levied large fines on the towns and shires that had sided with the rebel lords. He demanded loans from the richer abbeys and monasteries. He was, like most kings, avaricious and acquisitive; but his greed was compounded by violence and disregard of law. ‘He is a child of death,’ he wrote to the count of Holland, ‘who offends the king.’ Yet like all tyrants he was fearful. He was defended at all times by the 300 Cheshire archers. ‘Sleep securely while we wake, Dick,’ the captain of his guard was heard to say to him, ‘and dread naught while we live.’

Richard’s pre-eminent will became manifest in a quarrel between two lords at the end of 1397. Thomas Mowbray, the duke of Norfolk, and the king’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the duke of Hereford, had only recently been ennobled to the highest rank of the peerage. They were rewarded for their support of the king. Mowbray, for example, had been captain of Calais when the unfortunate Thomas of Woodstock was despatched to that garrison town; there is no doubt that he played some role in his suffocation. In the climate of fear and suspicion in which they now lived, however, even the king’s friends began to fear for their lives.

They had a conversation. ‘We are on the point of being undone,’ Mowbray told Bolingbroke. ‘That cannot be,’ Bolingbroke replied. ‘The king has granted us pardon and has declared in parliament that we behaved as good and loyal servants’. Mowbray went on to remark that ‘it is a marvellous and false world that we live in’, suggesting that Bolingbroke and his father, John of Gaunt, narrowly escaped being murdered by the king’s men; he also suggested that Richard, with the connivance of other lords, was planning to disinherit both of them and give their lands to others. ‘God forbid’, Bolingbroke exclaimed. ‘It will be a wonder if the king assents to such designs. He appears to make me good cheer, and has promised to be my good lord. Indeed he has sworn by St Edward [the Confessor] to be a good lord to me and others.’ Mowbray was dismissive. ‘So has he often sworn to me by God’s body; but I do not trust him the more for that.’ In a world of whispers and of clandestine plotting, of lies and of secrecy, this was equivalent to treason.

Rumours spread. Bolingbroke informed his father, John of Gaunt, of the conversation. Word got back to the king. It seems likely that he confronted Bolingbroke, and demanded a full account of what had been said. Having heard his report the king demanded that he repeat it to the parliament. Mowbray then gave himself up into the king’s custody, and denied everything that Bolingbroke had revealed. The two dukes were told to appear before a parliamentary committee set up to resolve the dispute. Still the controversy could not be concluded and, in the old judicial fashion, it was decreed that Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke should fight a duel in which God would confer victory upon the true man. Yet who was the true man? It is possible that their roles should be reversed, and that Bolingbroke had been the one who had first expressed misgivings about the king; when they failed to work upon Mowbray, he decided to accuse him of treason to cover up his own guilt. That is one possibility. It is also possible that Mowbray had whispered treason as a plot to snare Bolingbroke; Bolingbroke, suspecting this, decided to end the conspiracy by denouncing him. The truth cannot now be recovered.

The battle was set for Coventry on 16 September 1398. The tournament was to be held at Gosford, and the field survives still as Gosford Green. Bolingbroke commissioned armour from Milan, and Mowbray from Bohemia. The lords of the kingdom were consumed with excitement; this would be the most famous duel of their lifetimes. The days of Arthur and the Round Table might be said to have returned. The two dukes came forward on the appointed day. The archbishop of Canterbury was among the many thousands of spectators. Henry Bolingbroke arrived at nine in the morning, with six mounted retainers. Challenged about his business he proclaimed in a loud voice, ‘I am Henry, duke of Hereford, come to do my duty against the false traitor Thomas, duke of Norfolk’. He crossed himself and rode to his pavilion at one end of the lists. The king entered, surrounded by the Cheshire archers, and proceeded to his chair of state where he might survey the proceedings. Mowbray then appeared and, giving the same challenge as his antagonist, cried out, ‘God save the right!’

The two knights were about to proceed against one other. Bolingbroke spurred his horse forward, while Mowbray remained still. But the king rose and called out, ‘Hold!’ The dukes retired to their respective pavilions, and the king withdrew. Two hours passed, inciting intense speculation among the crowds of spectators. Then the Speaker of the Commons appeared and announced to the multitude the king’s decision. Bolingbroke was to be banished from the realm for ten years, and Mowbray would be exiled for life. The sentence on Bolingbroke provoked loud calls of dismay, but the king’s will was law.

The king really had little choice in the matter. Victory for either man would cause him considerable difficulty. If Mowbray was triumphant, the king’s role in the murder of Gloucester might be subject to scrutiny. If Bolingbroke were the winner, his chance of succeeding or even supplanting the king might be increased. The king had no heir, and he had only recently married a child of seven – Isabella, the daughter of the king of France – from whom no issue could yet be foreseen. It was a most disappointing end to what might have been a great tale of chivalry. But the king prevailed. The two men sailed into exile. Thomas Mowbray died in Venice in the following year, but for Henry Bolingbroke the story was only beginning.

He had sailed to France with a manifest sense of injustice at the hands of the king, and waited there in the hope that favourable events might follow. The king of France, Charles VI, granted him a residence in the centre of Paris. Then, five months after his departure from England, his father died. John of Gaunt, as the first duke of Lancaster, was the progenitor of what became known as the house of Lancaster; he owned vast territories in the north of England, and possessed more than thirty castles throughout the realm. He had been a prominent, but not a notable, commander and administrator. He had in particular earned the hatred of Londoners, and of those who had taken part in the rebellion of 1381, as de facto leader of the realm during the king’s minority. He was a man who combined familial greatness with personal mediocrity.

Henry Bolingbroke might in the normal course of events be expected to inherit his father’s lands and castles. But he was in exile. And the king was greedy. Richard then took a course that alienated much of the support he had acquired over the years of his rule. He extended Bolingbroke’s banishment in perpetuity, and confiscated his father’s estates. Such an interference in the laws of inheritance was immensely shocking to a society that relied deeply upon custom and precedent. No landowner, or landowner’s family, could feel safe under such a king. Any monarch who unlawfully deprived his subjects of their property, in defiance of the injunctions of the Magna Carta, was at once considered to be a tyrant.

At the beginning of May 1399, in a spectacular act of folly, Richard sailed to Ireland with an expeditionary force. It is difficult to understand why he chose to absent himself from his kingdom at such a difficult time; the only explanation must be that he had lulled himself, or been lulled, into a false sense of security. Certainly he believed that he was under divine guidance, and that no earthly enemy could defeat an anointed king. With God as his guard, what did he have to fear?

Henry took advantage of the king’s absence and, in the early summer, sailed from Boulogne; on 4 July he landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire with no more than 300 soldiers. His courage, and earnestness, cannot be in doubt. From his own old territories in the north, he began his campaign to destroy the tyrant of England. Richard had left the kingdom to the guidance of Edmund, duke of York, his uncle and Henry’s. York was neither principled nor courageous. He had no intelligence of Henry’s movements, and at first marched west rather than north-east. In the confusion Henry strengthened the castles on his lands, and in the process several thousand men flocked to his service. At Doncaster he met the senior family of the north, the Percys; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, was accompanied by his son known as Hotspur.

In their presence Henry swore an oath that he had returned to England only to claim his lands; he had no designs upon the king himself. He may have been lying, but it is more likely that he was not yet sure of his ultimate goal. He would proceed with caution, taking advantage of events as they unfolded. The combined army of the rebel lords and retainers then began the march south, taking control of central and eastern England with only pockets of resistance. It may now have occurred to Henry that the king was too unpopular to be saved.

Richard himself was still in Ireland. He received news of the invasion by 10 July, but did not set sail for England for another two weeks. He could not muster enough ships. In that period his cause was lost. When the Welsh gentry were summoned to support him, they replied that they believed Richard to be already dead. Henry had decided to move west in order to confront the king, if and when he should return, and at a parish church in Gloucester the duke of York surrendered to the invader. York realized that Richard’s hopes of retaining the crown were diminishing day by day. He joined Henry’s army and went on to Bristol, where three of the king’s most prominent officials were executed. It had become a triumphal progress.

Richard landed on the Welsh coast on 24 July. He lingered here for five days, by which time he had received news of both the surrender of his uncle and the events at Bristol. It is reported that he was alternately despondent and defiant. Eventually he decided to attempt to reach one of his supporters, the earl of Salisbury, who was at Conway Castle in North Wales. He put on the garb of a poor priest and, with fifteen supporters, fled in the dead of night. It took him nine days to reach his destination. A contemporary observer reports that he was now utterly downcast and dejected. He frequently broke into tears.

Henry shadowed him along a parallel course. He, too, went north from Bristol towards Chester. So the two cousins were ready for the final encounter. The king and the earl of Salisbury agreed that they would send representatives to Henry, demanding to know his intentions. In return Henry sent his negotiator, the earl of Northumberland, to converse with the king at Conway. Northumberland, prudently, concealed his army before entering the king’s presence. It is reported that Northumberland swore to the king that Henry wished only for the return of his own lands and would protect the king’s right to rule. It is impossible to judge whether Henry was deceiving the king. After a delay of a few days Richard agreed to leave the castle in the company of Northumberland. Yet his was only a tactical surrender. He told his supporters secretly that Henry ‘would be put to bitter death for this outrage that he has done to us’. That prospect must also have occurred to Henry himself.

Richard and Northumberland had only travelled a few miles when the king, on ascending a hill, saw the army that his companion had previously concealed. He fell into a panic, and demanded to be taken back to Conway Castle. Once more Northumberland swore, on the precious host, that Henry had no thought of deposing him. If this was a bluff, it was a sacrilegious bluff. So the party travelled onwards to Flint Castle in north-eastern Wales where, alerted by swift messengers, Henry had agreed to meet Richard. It must have occurred to the king that he had now effectively been taken prisoner. He reached the castle before Henry and, on the morning after his arrival, he climbed up to the battlements; from that vantage he saw Henry’s army approaching, and is reported to have said that ‘now I can see the end of my days coming’.

He kept Henry waiting, at the great door, while he ate his last meal of freedom in the keep of the castle. Then at Northumberland’s request he came down to speak with his enemy. In the play Richard II by William Shakespeare, he uttered at this point the words, ‘Down, down, I come like glistering Phaeton’. Henry took off his cap and bowed low to the sovereign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I have come sooner than you sent for me, and I shall tell you why. It is said that you have governed your people too harshly, and they are discontented. If it is pleasing to the Lord, I shall help you to govern them better.’ This report has the ring of truth. Henry would have made sure that his words were exactly recorded. It is significant, too, that he spoke in English rather than in French. Now he represented the nation. ‘If it pleases you, fair cousin,’ Richard replied, ‘then it pleases us well.’

On that same day the two men, and the army, rode on to Chester. The king was consigned to a small room in the castle; he was under the control of the sons of Gloucester and Arundel, two men whom he had put to death. Henry now set his mind to the future. He issued a summons, in the king’s name, for the assembly of a new parliament at Westminster. On 20 August he and his captive rode to London. Henry took up residence in the bishop of London’s palace, while the king was despatched to the Tower.

It may have been only at this point that Henry decided to strike and claim the throne. He had been waiting on events, but now saw his path clear ahead of him. The king was at his mercy, and no body of royal supporters was able to liberate him. There may have been a show of force by the Cheshire archers upon whom the king had relied, but it came to nothing. Henry now decided to consult the histories of the realm for precedents. Two weeks later a committee of dignitaries was established to consider ‘the matter of setting aside King Richard, and of choosing the duke of Lancaster in his stead, and how it should be done’ (Henry had become duke of Lancaster on the death of his father). The committee came to the conclusion that Richard should be deposed ‘by the authority of the clergy and people’.

On 29 September a deputation had gone to the king lodged or imprisoned in the Tower. The official parliamentary report suggests that the members of this deputation ‘reminded’ the king that at Conway he had volunteered to give up his throne; the king, recalling this promise, agreed that he should abdicate. This is most unlikely and, in any case, a contemporary chronicler provides a wholly different picture of the occasion. The author of the Chronique de la Trahison et Mort de Richard II states that the king raged at the nobles who had come to interview him and declared that he would ‘flay some of these men alive’. Another chronicler had visited the king eight days before, and described him as bitterly angry at the country that had betrayed him. It seems fair to say that he did not go quietly into the night.

On 30 September a parliament met at Westminster. There are reports that it was packed with Henry’s supporters, ‘many sorts of folk who were neither noble nor gentle … in such great heaps that the officers could scarcely enter the hall’. The king’s renunciation of the throne was read out to those assembled. Although the official report asserts that he had agreed to its terms, and that he had signed it in the presence of witnesses, there is still a possibility that the document was faked. It was, at the very least, extorted with threats. Richard may have agreed to it as the only way of saving his life.

Yet by acclamation of all those present, it was accepted. They were asked if Henry had the right to be king. ‘Yes!’ they cried out. ‘Yes! Yes!’ Even though parliament had no formal right to deposition, the king was removed in what was essentially a coup d’état. Henry then declared that by virtue of ‘the right line of blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’ he had come to ‘recover’ a realm on the point of being undone by bad laws. There is no reason to question his sincerity in this. He had a very good claim to the crown. By the complicated processes of genealogy only a boy of eight, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, had a stronger; but England did not want, or need, another juvenile monarch.

Henry was led towards the throne; he stood for a moment, and then knelt down to pray. Then he rose, made the sign of the cross on the back and the front of the throne, and sat down upon it to general acclamation. He was anointed with the chrism that had come from a miraculous phial given by the Virgin Mary to Thomas Becket; or so it was believed. Richard II had discovered it, two years before, while searching in the Tower for a necklace once worn by King John. It is also reported that, as a result of the anointing, the new king’s hair was soon full of lice.

From his earliest youth Henry had been acquainted with the uses and abuses of power; he was only three months older than Richard, and had carried the sword before him at the coronation in the summer of 1377. Henry had also been with him in the Tower when Richard and his entourage sheltered from the peasants’ rebellion. There had never been peace between the two men, however, and Richard also chose to view Henry as a personal enemy. He gave him none of the great offices of state and had chosen his uncle,Edmund of York, to succeed him in a direct rebuff to Henry. Now the whirligig of the world had turned. Lancaster had triumphed over York, but the forcible removal of the king would bring much mischief and bloodshed to the realm.

On the day after the parliament Richard was informed of his deposition. He replied that he ‘hoped that his cousin would be a good lord to him’. He was soon disabused. The new king asked the lords for their advice on the deposed monarch; he was told that Richard should be placed in a stronghold under the care of trusted gaolers and that no one else be allowed to see him. So Richard was removed, in disguise, to Leeds Castle. From there he was taken, at the beginning of December, to the more heavily fortified castle at Pontefract in Yorkshire.

Some of Richard’s courtiers and supporters rose in rebellion two or three weeks later, but Henry thwarted and defeated them. The rebellion, however, made it clear that the deposed king was still dangerous. At the beginning of February 1400, the king and council met to debate Richard’s future. If he was alive, they concluded, he should be heavily guarded; if he was dead, his body should be shown to the people. Death had entered the room. A week or two later the body of Richard lay in his prison cell. The manner of his going is not known. Some say that he was starved by his gaolers; others believe that, in his grief, he refused all food and so killed himself.

His body was taken south, in procession or in pageant; it was displayed at several convenient sites, so that the people of England could be assured that he was truly dead. An illustration of the scene can be found in an illuminated manual of the period. It shows the king lying in a litter covered in black cloth with a black canopy above him; his head is uncovered, lying on a black cushion. Two black horses, and four knights dressed in mourning, complete the picture. On its arrival in London the bier was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral where a requiem Mass was held. The coffin was then taken to a Dominican monastery at King’s Langley, 21 miles (33.8 kilometres) outside London. A later king, Henry V, ensured that Richard II was reburied in Westminster Abbey; he may have done so in order to expiate the impiety of his father, Henry Bolingbroke, in overthrowing a lawful king.

In the reign of Richard II, a splendid and dangerous sovereign, the handkerchief was introduced to England.

26

Into the woods

Robin Hood is an English native. He and his ‘merry men’ inhabit the forest, where they live by means of various laudable crimes such as robbing the rich and poaching the king’s deer. They always manage to elude the law, generally represented by the sheriff of Nottingham; they dwell in Sherwood Forest, which lies under the sheriff’s jurisdiction.

The story was current in the thirteenth century, and may have been fashioned in its early decades from attested events. In 1216 Robin Hood, a servant of the abbot of Cirencester, was accused of murder; but this may be coincidental. In 1225 the sheriff of Yorkshire seized the goods of Robert Hood or Hod, who had fled from the city of York heavily in debt to the church courts. The same sheriff was asked in that year to pursue a notorious outlaw, known as Robert of Wetherby; the fugitive was eventually hanged in chains. Were Robert of Wetherby and Robin Hood the same person? The names of Robert and Robin were more or less interchangeable. The sheriff of Yorkshire had previously been the sheriff of Nottinghamshire. So facts are conflated and reinterpreted until the point when a legend of outlawry and liberty can appear.

Robin Hood is first mentioned as the generic name for an outlaw in the justice rolls of the late thirteenth century, where he appears as ‘Robehod’ or ‘Robinhood’. He was so well known a hundred years later that the idle priest Sloth, in Piers Plowman, admits that he does not know his ‘pater noster’ but he ‘kan rymes of Robyn Hood’. Among those rhymes was one still being sung at the beginning of the fifteenth century, ‘Robyn hode in scherewode stod’. In this period the outlaw also appears as part of the chronicle of England. One chronicler asserts that he was a follower of Simon de Montfort in his insurrection against the rule of Henry III in 1263; a real outlaw, who supported de Montfort at this time, did indeed live in Sherwood Forest. But his name was Roger Godberd. Nevertheless a monkish hand, in the margins of a copy of Polychronicon, refers in 1460 to ‘a certain outlaw named Robin Hood’ who in Sherwood Forest commits innumerable robberies. Andrew of Wynton, compiling his chronicle a few years earlier, places him in Inglewood near Carlisle and then in Barnsdale.

Soon enough Robin Hood begins to appear everywhere as the epitome of the brave and self-reliant Englishman who rejects oppressive authority; he emerges in songs and ballads, in plays and in mummings. In these works he is eventually joined by the most renowned of his forest companions, Little John and Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, who between them comprise a veritable pageant play. These characters did in fact become an integral part of the May Games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prompting speculation that they may be essentially of pagan origin. They are more interesting, however, as representative of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The early ballads identify Robin as a sturdy ‘yeoman’, a man somewhere between small farmer and gentleman; his enemies are the sheriffs, the bishops and the archbishops. He does not wish to harm other yeomen, or even knights and squires; he will ‘beat and bind’ only the members of the secular and clerical nobility, who can be classed as rapacious landlords. It is the dream of the oppressed. Certainly Robin was not a member of the aristocracy fallen on hard times, as some of his later and more romantic chroniclers insisted. He was always a representative of the ordinary folk of the land, and in that respect the ballads might have been sung in the local tavern as often as in the knight’s hall. A roughly hewn justice or sense of morality lay behind the fights and the pursuits, the themes of disguise and revenge; the motifs of lawlessness and greenwood liberty were also part of the English dream in a land that was continually and closely administered, in particular by the strictures of royal ‘forest law’.

The woods and forests of England are a token of its ancient life, and as such have been feared and protected in equal measure. The charters of the Anglo-Saxons reveal the presence of woods that still exist. ‘Westgraf’, mentioned in 703 as part of the topography of Shottery in Warwickshire, is now Westgrove Wood in the parish of Haselor. Wanelund, a word the Vikings used when they came to Norfolk, has become Wayland Wood a little south of Watton. A charter of 682 refers to ‘the famous wood known as Cantocwudu’; it is now known as Quantockwood in Somerset. There are many other examples of an ancient presence.

Sire-wode, later known as Sherwood, stretched from Nottingham to the centre of Yorkshire. The present Birklands contains the last remnant of the medieval oak forest that covered this region; the trees are now gnarled and dry. The other forest connected to Robin, Inglewood, was also of great extent and lay between Penrith and Carlisle. These had become the natural refuge of outlaws from the king’s justice, those who were deemed to wear ‘the wolf’s head’ and could thus be instantly cut down. Yet the English have always made heroes out of robbers and cutpurses; as a result the outlaws of the forest became representative of national freedom and equality. Robin Hood is supposed in legend to have died at Kirklees in Yorkshire. But in truth he did not die. He became part of England’s mythography.

27

The suffering king

Henry Bolingbroke, now distinguished by the title of Henry IV, had obtained the throne by violence and perhaps by fraudulence. The crown on such a head will not sit easily or securely. He himself had proved that kings can be removed at will, and gain legitimacy by popular acclamation. Henry therefore courted the Lords and Commons. He promised that he would not levy taxes, and repealed some of the previous king’s more oppressive legislation. He resumed the mantle of the warrior, pledging to lead armies into Scotland and into France, and thus adopted the style of previous martial kings. He also attempted to bring God on his side, by promising the bishops that he would be the hammer of heretics.

Yet many still believed Henry to be a usurper. From the beginning of the reign rumour spread that Richard II still lived – that he was in Scotland, that he was in Wales, that he was everywhere. Dominican and Franciscan friars preached open sedition in marketplaces and taverns, with the news that the deposed king had survived. One Franciscan friar was brought before the king.

Henry: You have heard that King Richard is alive, and you are glad?

Friar: I am glad as a man is glad of the life of his friend, for I am in his debt, as are all my kin, for he was our patron and promoter.

Henry: You have said openly that he lives, and so you have excited and stirred the people against me.

Friar: No.

Henry: Tell the truth as it is in your heart. If you saw King Richard and me fighting on the battlefield together, with whom would you fight?

Friar: In truth with him. For I am more beholden to him.

Henry: Do you wish that I and all the lords of the realm were dead?

Friar: No.

Henry: What would you do if you had the victory over me?

Friar: I would make you duke of Lancaster.

Henry: Then you are not my friend.

Another interesting exchange took place with a friar.

Henry: Do you say that King Richard is alive?

Friar: I do not say that he is alive, but I say that if he is alive he is the true king of England.

Henry: He resigned.

Friar: He resigned against his will, in prison, which is against the law.

Henry: He was deposed.

Friar: When he was king, he was taken by force and put into prison, and despoiled of his realm, and you have usurped the crown.

At the conclusion of this spirited interview the king lost his temper and cried out, ‘By my head I shall have your head!’ So it proved.

The fact that Henry felt it necessary and expedient to confront these friars in person suggests how seriously he considered any such rumour or rumours to be. He could not be safe – he could not be an anointed king – if Richard were believed to be alive.

In the early months of 1400 some Ricardian loyalists attempted an insurrection by riding on Windsor. They were dispersed and fled westwards, where eventually they were surrounded and despatched by the citizens of Cirencester and Bristol. The king’s punishment was no more merciful. One of the accused, Sir Thomas Blount, was hanged at Smithfield for a minute or so before being cut down; he was then ordered to sit in front of a great fire while the executioner came to him with a razor in his hand. After begging the prisoner’s pardon he knelt down, opened up his stomach with his razor, and took out the bowels. Blount was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘for I do not know where I should put it.’ The executioner tied the bowels with a string so that, in the words of a contemporary, ‘the wind of the heart should not escape’; then he threw them into the fire. One of the bystanders shouted out in derision, ‘Go seek a master that can save you’. Blount cried that ‘I shall die in the service of my sovereign lord, the noble king Richard!’ The executioner cut off his head.

Yet the severity of the punishment did not deter other rebels. In the autumn of 1401 an attempt was made to assassinate Henry, by means of an ‘infernal machine’ with poisoned spikes placed in his bed. The plan fared no better than the attempt by another assassin to smear his saddle with a deadly poison. Yet Henry was aware that dangerous forces were working against him.

Protests grew of a different kind. Despite the king’s early promise to avoid taxation, he was soon obliged to break his word. In the parliament of 1401 the chief justice revealed that the deposed king’s ‘treasure’, if such it was, had disappeared into thin air. The real costs of defending and administering the realm were increasing to such an extent that the king was already heavily in debt. The Commons eventually granted his request for aid by taxation, but in return they submitted various petitions and complaints; only when these appeals were granted was their consent to taxation obtained. This would be the pattern for all of Henry’s parliaments. He would receive money only when he satisfied the demands of the Commons. In that sense he was not a strong king. The parliament of 1399, however illegally assembled and constituted, had in effect sanctioned the coronation of a new sovereign. Why should it not now attempt to curb that monarch’s power?

In the summer of 1403 his erstwhile allies, the Percy family, rebelled against his rule. They joined a Welsh prince, Owen Glendower, who had formally defied the English king. Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, and his son, Hotspur, had been charged with the defence of the north against Scottish raiders. They had hoped by their early support of Henry’s invasion to enjoy the spoils of victory. To their surprise and alarm, however, they found themselves obliged to maintain the defences of their northern lands without any proportionate help from Henry. It had been rumoured in the parliament house that the Percy family had been granted £60,000 from the king. They denied this, claiming that they had received only £20,000. Where had the money gone?

Hotspur had come to Westminster, at the end of 1402, and demanded more money in the presence of the king. The result was a bitter confrontation. One chronicler asserts that the king punched Hotspur in the face, while another reports that he drew a dagger upon him. Whatever the truth of the matter, their alliance was broken. The Percys had another grievance against the king, in theory more serious but in practice a convenient excuse for their rebellion. They accused the king of betraying his oath. He had promised them, on first landing in Yorkshire, that he had no designs on the throne. This was in later weeks found to be a palpable fiction. But from the beginning they must have been at least aware of the possibility of Richard’s overthrow.

In the summer of 1403 Hotspur gathered an army at Chester, and proclaimed that King Richard was still alive. This was the familiar rallying cry for all those who opposed the king. Owen Glendower was poised to move from Wales, and Henry Percy was mustering his forces in the north. The king moved rapidly and expeditiously. He sent an army to Shrewsbury, the town where the rebels were supposed to muster. When Hotspur arrived there, he found the gates shut against him. While he paused outside the town, the king’s army advanced. The opposing forces met at Berwick Field, 2 miles (3 kilometres) outside Shrewsbury. Hotspur had with him 1,000 archers, and he placed them on top of a ridge from which they would be able to see the king’s men approaching. Henry had taken the precaution of asking two of his prominent supporters to wear his livery, since he knew well enough that he was the real target of Hotspur; if three Henries were on the field, it might prove confusing.

The king’s men advanced up the slope, and were met by thousands of arrows shot from the longbows of the Cheshire men. The sky grew dark, and the carnage began. The king’s men fell, according to one chronicler, ‘as fast as autumn leaves fall in autumn after the hoar frost’. On the death of one of the king’s commanders, the earl of Stafford, the vanguard of the royal army gave way and began to flee. Henry now had to act promptly to prevent a rout and bloody defeat. So he gave orders for the main body of the army to advance, and he threw himself into the action.

‘There was such slaughter’, one chronicler wrote, ‘that the like had not been seen in England for a long time.’ The royal soldiers seemed to prevail, and Hotspur staked everything on a charge against the king. Henry fell back, so that Hotspur and his followers were lost in the general mêlée. When they faltered, they were cut down. Hotspur was among the dead. The king’s son, Henry, received a wound to his skull. Yet he lived. He was one of the victors to celebrate the king’s triumph. It seemed that Henry IV had truly been anointed by God.

Two years after the battle of Berwick Field, however, another insurrection emerged in the north. The archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, rose up against royal government and issued a manifesto or list of grievances to the effect that Henry was demanding too much taxation; the burden upon his subjects, secular and clerical, had become insupportable.

It was not a successful rebellion, and within a few days the forces of the archbishop forsook him or were taken into custody. The earl of Northumberland, having survived his son’s defeat outside Shrewsbury, was again implicated in the uprising and fled to Scotland. Scrope himself was captured and beheaded, part of Henry’s crude and brutal attempt to beat off all opposition. Yet the murder of an archbishop was, in the context of the time, an act of blasphemy; it invited comparisons with the murder of Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century. Henry IV avoided much of the public obloquy that fell upon Henry II, but his private character was more severely affected. To the insecurity of his throne was added the impurity of sacrilege.

The death of the archbishop weighed on his conscience. He was riding his horse on the afternoon of 8 June 1405 – the day of Richard Scrope’s execution – when he was struck by some force so powerful that ‘it seemed to him that he had felt an actual blow’. That night he suffered a nightmare in which he cried out ‘Traitors! Traitors! You have thrown fire over me!’ When his attendants reached him, he complained that his skin was burning. This was the time when he became afflicted with a mysterious illness that was rumoured to be leprosy; since the sickness came and went over the next few years, that is unlikely to be the true diagnosis. It is more probable that Henry had contracted syphilis. As a young man he had gone on crusade to the Holy Land, and the crusaders were notorious for carrying back the venereal disease.

Yet he had passed through the fire, and from 1406 onwards there were no serious attempts to take the throne. He remained cautious; he remained stubborn; he was ever vigilant. He realized, unlike his predecessor, that he did not have the power or the resources to confront the great magnates of the land; so he equivocated, and he compromised. He permitted his nobles to enjoy a measure of independence and influence that had been denied to them in Richard’s reign. He allowed himself to be in part ruled by a council of notables. He was a good manager of men. The Crown was poor, and the treasury all but exhausted; local law was not kept, and the districts of the country were ruled by local faction. The possibility of riot and robbery was always close. Yet the king did not fall. It might be said that he muddled through, were it not for the fact that his abiding aim was to preserve his own authority and to maintain a new national dynasty. In these respects, he was successful.

His hopes devolved upon his eldest son. Henry of Monmouth, prince of Wales, had been wounded in the skull at the battle of Berwick Field, but this wound did nothing to dampen his martial fervour. He loved battle, and lived for warfare. From the age of fourteen he had served, and succeeded, in various battles and skirmishes against the Welsh insurgents. He joined the king’s council in 1406, on his return from Wales, and at once took a leading part in affairs. He was nineteen years old, and of course gathered about him the younger members of the nobility. One chronicler noted ‘the great recourse of the people unto him, of whom his court was at all times more abundant than the King his father’s’. As such he was seen as the unofficial ‘opposition’ to the already ageing king and his advisers, inclined to more purposeful and energetic activity both at home and abroad. It was the dynamic of youth against age, hope and optimism against experience and fatigue.

The king himself, beset by illness, steadily withdrew from public affairs. He left his palace at Westminster and retired to the archbishop of Canterbury’s residence at Lambeth; then he moved further out to Windsor. In this period, from the beginning of 1410 to the end of 1411, the prince of Wales successfully administered the kingdom on his father’s behalf. An expeditionary force was sent to assist the duchy of Burgundy against the depredations of the French. At the same time a determined effort was made to resolve the finances of the king. In September 1411 it is reported that the prince approached his father and advised him to abdicate ‘because he could no longer apply himself to the honour and profit of the realm’.

But then Henry IV struck back. He could not permit his royal identity to be put at risk. What else did he have left, after a decade of weary power? While breath lasted in him, he would rule. At the end of the year some of the prince’s supporters were arrested. A parliament was called, in the course of which a motion was proposed that the king should abdicate in favour of his son. It was debated, with all due decorum, but then rejected. It seemed that the prince had been outwitted. The rumour then spread that the prince was contemplating open revolt, thus reawakening fears of civil war. The rumour was quashed. It was then whispered that the prince had confiscated money due to the English garrison at Calais. In the summer of 1412, he came to London to deny this and to defy his enemies; but he brought with him an army or what was called ‘a huge people’.

The prince was also accompanied by his favourite young lords. He was wearing a peculiar costume of blue satin which, according to the translator of his first biography into English, was punctuated by ‘eyelets’ or round holes from each of which a needle was hanging upon a thread of silk. The significance of this dress is not immediately clear.

He strode into Westminster Hall, and told his supporters to remain there while he sought the king. He found him in a chamber and asked for a private interview; in the presence of four courtiers Henry asked his son ‘to show the effect of his mind’. Whereupon the prince made a long and impassioned speech, at the end of which he went down on his knees and produced a dagger. ‘Father,’ he is reported to have said, ‘I desire you in your honour of God, and for the easing of your heart, here before your knees to slay me with this dagger. My lord and father, my life is not so desirous to me that I would live one day that I should be to your displeasure.’ There was more to the same effect, a peroration that reduced the sick king to tears. Father and son were thus reconciled.

This scene is rendered in the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, a play that with its successor Henry V has more than any other preserved the image of this age. Whether it is a faithful image is another matter. Nevertheless the pictures of the young Henry carousing with Falstaff and Bardolf, of Justice Shallow and Mistress Quickly, of Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, are now effectively part of English history. It was said that the prince worshipped at the altars both of Venus and of Mars. Since his youth and early maturity were spent in fighting wars in Scotland and in Wales, Mars must have been in the ascendant.

The mutual respect between father and son was not destined to survive for long. Six months after this affecting interview Henry IV, worn out by guilt and illness, died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. In his will, drawn up two years before, he had described himself in English as a ‘sinful wretch’, a ‘sinful soul’ and ‘never worthy to be a man’ whose life had been ‘misspent’. These are not the traditional testamentary words and reveal a human being who was suffering a severe sense of spiritual unworthiness. Henry IV was, after all, unique among English kings in having killed one monarch and one archbishop. Yet he had survived, albeit only to the age of forty-six. He had faced down rebellions and conspiracies; there had been attempts made on his life, and efforts to force him to abdicate. But in the end he confounded his enemies. He had instituted a royal dynasty – the house of Lancaster, part of the Plantagenet legacy – that would endure for three generations.

The king’s body was washed, his brain and his bowels were removed; he was then embalmed in a mixture of myrrh, aloes, laurel flower and saffron. He was wound in strips of waxed linen before being dressed in a long robe. His brown beard was smoothed over the throat, and the crown placed upon his head. The right hand clutched his golden orb, while the left hand touched his sceptre. In this state he was taken down to the cathedral at Canterbury where he was buried and where his tomb can still be seen.

28

Old habits

The world was in a condition of decline and decay; there was no ‘progress’, no ‘evolution’ and no ‘development’. If you needed an image of medieval thought, it would be that of the slow movement of a descending spiral. Everywhere you looked, suffering and violence and corruption held the mastery. That was the state of the earth. The most that could be hoped for was stability and steadiness; the degeneration might therefore be arrested for a moment. The four humours of man must be held in balance; the universe itself was established upon the harmonious union of the four elements, the cold earth for example having an affinity with the cold water. The manifest uncertainties of life, and the anxiety aroused by them, compounded the need for stability.

Order was the first principle, sustaining the great chain of being. That is why so much concern was attested for hierarchy and degree, with all the ‘estates’ of society carefully designated and maintained. Nothing must get out of balance. The past was revered beyond measure. Historical writing was recognized as a set of lessons or moral illustrations. The great writers were those who most closely imitated previous masters. The philosophers of the past were more acute, the architects more subtle and the rulers more eloquent. The medieval delight in ritual and ceremony was in itself a veneration of custom.

Just as medieval law was based upon precedent, so medieval society was governed by habit. Custom was the great law of life. The earliest written records show its importance. In the sixth century Aethelbert, the king of Kent, described his laws as those which had been long accepted and established; this would mean in practice that a large body of oral tradition was passed from generation to generation by the men of Kent. The witan or Anglo-Saxon assembly was to be made up of the wisest men, namely those who ‘knew how all things stood in the land in their forefathers’ days’. An eleventh-century treatise in Anglo-Saxon affirms that the landowner should ‘always know what the ancient tradition of the land is, and what the custom of the people is’. Surely ‘custom’ would go back into prehistoric times? This atavism was the expression of a deeply communal society, whereby the ties binding people together were almost unbreakable.

In the feudal society of the Normans the serf or villein was also known as consuetudinarius or custumarius, meaning ‘a man of custom’. His rights and duties were upheld by a body of customary law that would not allow outright oppression or enslavement. It would perhaps be better to say that the people of England lived by custom and not by law. Rights and duties were perpetual. No lord, however great, would willingly violate such a tradition. It would be against nature. At an important trial in 1072 the bishop of Chichester, Aethelric, was brought in a cart to expound and explain ‘the old customs of the laws’. So a continuity was maintained even after William the Conqueror’s invasion. It could not be otherwise. It was the essential life of the country. The unanswerable complaint of the labourer or the villager was that ‘we have never been accustomed to do this!’

Another aspect of this historical piety may be mentioned. Any institutional or administrative change, introduced by the king and council, had to be explained as a return to some long-lost tradition. Any innovation that had endured for twenty or thirty years then in turn became part of ancient custom. Nothing was good because it was new. It was good because it was old. It was closer to the golden age of the world. So the existing structure of things had at all costs to be protected. Any piece of legislation was said to be a ‘declaration’ of the existing law, the revelation of something previously hidden. In the reign of Henry III the barons of the realm announced ‘Nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – ‘we do not wish the laws of England to be changed’. Government itself was established upon habitual forms and institutions. The Black Book or royal household manual of 1478, in the reign of Edward IV, urged the treasurer to seek out ‘good, old, sad [serious], worshipful and profitable rules of the court used before time’.

Custom was therefore immemorial. In the words of the period it was ‘from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist’. It was expected that the same practice and habitual activity would go on forever until the day of doom. There was no reason to envisage anything else. That final day might in effect be the day when the customary round grew ragged and creaked to a halt. Who could tell?

Customs could be of inexplicable mystery. If the king passed over Shrivenham Bridge, then in Wiltshire, the owner of the land was supposed to bring to him two white domestic cocks with the words ‘Behold, my lord, these two white capons which you shall have another time but not now’. If a whale was stranded on the coast near Chichester, it belonged to the bishop except for the tongue, which was taken to the king; if a whale landed anywhere else along the shores of his diocese, the bishop was permitted to have only the right flipper. There were urban, as well as country, customs. At Kidderminster in Worcestershire, on the day of the election of the bailiff, the town was controlled for one hour by the populace; they spent the time throwing cabbage stalks at one another before pelting the bailiff and his procession with apples. The porters of Billingsgate decreed that any stranger entering their market was obliged to salute a wooden post set up there and pay them sixpence; the man was then adopted by two ‘godparents’ among the porters. If an unmarried man was condemned to death in London, he was pardoned if a woman applied for his release on condition that he married her.

The nation itself represented the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the shibboleth of some fated or providential movement forward.

29

The warrior

Henry of Monmouth came to the throne, as Henry V, with the determination to restore the foundations of the royal finances and to deal with the old enemy of France. He was set to renew ‘bone governaunce’ or good government, with an especial intention to redress injustice and corruption. He had youth and vigour. A French visitor to the court remarked that he resembled a priest rather than a soldier; he was lean, and fair complexioned, with an oval face and short cropped brown hair. Certainly he had the look of an ascetic. On the night of his father’s death he consulted a recluse at Westminster Abbey, to whom he confessed all his sins.

He was crowned on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, a day of hail and snow. The weather was said to presage a reign of cold severity. There can be no doubt that Henry V was driven by a sense of divine right as well as of duty. All was changed. He abandoned his youthful pursuits and almost overnight, according to the chroniclers, became a grave and serious king. He acquired a reputation for piety and for the solemn observance of ceremonies; until his marriage, seven years later, he remained chaste. He established several monastic foundations of an ascetic nature, where the daily exhalation of prayer was meant to support the Lancastrian dynasty. His devotion also had an aesthetic cast. The annalist, John Stowe, recorded that ‘he delighted in songs, metres and musical instruments; insomuch that in his chapel, among his private prayers, he used our Lord’s prayer, certain psalms of David, with diverse hymns and canticles’. When he went to war in France, he took with him organists and singers.

He spoke English naturally, unlike his father, and in that respect set the standard for the written records of the country. He was something of a martinet, peremptory and commanding. One of his letters to an ambassador, Sir John Tiptoft, opens succinctly with ‘Tiptoft, I charge you by the faith that you owe me …’ ‘Tiptoft’, that brief salutation, is of the essence. ‘A king’, Thomas Hoccleve wrote, ‘from mochil speche him refreyne.’ He was clipped and precise. He was also an efficient administrator, who looked to the details of his policies; he demanded much in taxation from his kingdom, but he never squandered money unwisely. He maintained cordial relations with the most important nobles, and worked well with the parliament house. He proved that, with firm oversight, medieval governance was not inherently unstable or incoherent.

The test of his religious commitment came a few months after his coronation, when he was obliged to confront the forces of heresy. The activity of the Lollards has been examined in earlier pages, but it reached a point of crisis in the early months of 1413. During the king’s first parliament a proclamation was pinned to the doors of the London churches stating that, if the brethren were to face persecution and outlawry, 100,000 men would rise up to protect them. In the consequent state of alarm and insecurity one of the king’s own friends, Sir John Oldcastle, was accused of harbouring and promoting heretics. It is a matter of some irony, therefore, that the original name of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s play of Henry V, written almost 200 years after the events related, was Oldcastle. Shakespeare had portrayed him as Henry’s boon companion in the years of the alehouse and the brothel.

The proclamations fixed to the church doors were traced back to this now earnest man. One of his chaplains was preaching Lollardy, and Oldcastle himself had been caught in possession of certain heretical tracts. The king tried to argue with him, and to persuade him to recant, but he refused to do so. He was taken to the Tower in the autumn of 1413 and, at his subsequent trial, repeated the Lollard disregard for confession and the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was judged to be a heretic and passed over to the secular arm for burning. The king intervened once more and granted him forty days for the further searching of his conscience, but in this period Oldcastle managed to escape from his confinement.

He spent two months in hiding, somewhere in the purlieus of London, during which period he conceived a plot to kill the king and his brothers before leading a general insurrection of Lollards. Messages were secretly conveyed to the brethren, asking them to meet at St Giles’s Fields just outside the city. But the secret was revealed to someone in authority. On the evening of 9 January 1414, the king moved with his forces to the fields. As the Lollards marched towards the city, they were dispersed and consigned to Newgate Prison. Thirty-eight of them were drawn on hurdles from Newgate and hanged in the fields, on gallows newly built for that purpose.

It had not in any case been a popular insurrection, with perhaps no more than a few hundred participants. Yet it did effectively destroy any sympathy with the Lollard movement among the general population; heresy itself was now considered to be equivalent to rebellion.

Oldcastle himself evaded capture for almost four years; he was eventually seized in the neighbourhood of Welshpool and taken to London where he was hanged above a burning fire that consumed the gallows as well as the victim. In his last words before this painful death he declared that he would rise again after three days. In truth his resurrection took a little longer. In the sixteenth century he became celebrated as a proto-martyr of Protestantism; that is one of the reasons why Shakespeare felt obliged to change his name to Falstaff.

In a sense, however, the insurrection was a distraction. The young king’s reign was primarily defined by war. He gathered around him a group of young men who saw in battle and victory the foundations of glory. Principal among them were his three brothers, wholly committed to the success of the dynasty. War was considered to be the highest duty, and greatest achievement, of any king. It was this fervour, or lust, that effectively reopened the Hundred Years War after the interval of the previous two reigns. Almost at once the new king moved against France. He had been made duke of Aquitaine in 1399, as part of his patrimony; now he wished to reclaim the lands of Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu that had been granted to the English Crown in the treaty of 1360.

By the summer of 1415 all was ready for the French endeavour. The parliament house had furnished the necessary funds without any of the usual misgivings; the troops and the ships were requisitioned efficiently, and it seems that the nation supported this show of strength and determination by the young king. Yet not all of his subjects were ready to pay fealty to him. Some still questioned the legitimacy of the house of Lancaster and, in the days before the launching of the military expedition, certain nobles tried to organize a rebellion. They were forestalled, and swiftly executed. No one else would ever again threaten the reign of Henry V.

He sailed to France with an army of 8,000 men. There were archers, both mounted and on foot; there were ‘men-at-arms’, knights and esquires in full body armour complete with lance, sword and dagger. There were foot soldiers, fletchers, bowyers, carpenters, priests, surgeons, gunners and engineers. The two latter were needed for the prosecution of siege warfare, a technique for which Henry had trained himself in Wales. A royal officer, known as ‘the grand sergeanty’, was also on board; his sole job was to hold the king’s head in case of seasickness. It has been calculated that approximately 15,000 horses were transported to France. No female followers of the camp were allowed to sail. The punishment for any prostitute found among the soldiers was for all her money to be taken and for one of her arms to be broken before her being driven off with staves.

The expedition left Southampton on 11 August, accompanied by a flock of swans, and set sail for the coast of Normandy; the duchy belonged to Henry’s family, or so he claimed, and to land there was itself an act of proprietorship. He laid siege to the town of Harfleur, at the mouth of the river Seine, but it did not prove to be an easy victory; the town held out for five weeks, in which period Henry’s men suffered dysentery from the eating of unripe fruit. Yet he prevailed; the leaders of the town surrendered, and Henry promptly laid plans to turn it into an English colony. Since Harfleur was connected to Rouen and to Paris by the river, it was in a desirable position.

In his campaigns he was a rigid and severe disciplinarian; that is why he was successful. He planned meticulously, while retaining his command over the court administration at Westminster. Above all else he was possessed of great energy; whether in a tournament, or at a hunt, or in the field of battle, he was swift and unrelenting. He gave the impression of always being in a hurry, as if he had some strange presentiment of his early death.

From Harfleur he led his men north-east towards Calais, a distance of some 120 miles (75 kilometres); but then he received the unwelcome news that the French army was waiting for him on the right bank of the Somme. He was obliged to make a detour, marching along the left bank of the Somme until he could find a place of safe passage. The trek to Calais was supposed to have taken eight days, but only two weeks later did the English army cross the river. The king’s men were exhausted and hungry but, despite the presence of a French army shadowing them closely, he ordered them to march on to Calais. Everyone knew that he would have to confront the enemy before reaching the town.

On 24 October, he saw them; they were gathered, according to the author of The Deeds of Henry V, like a swarm of locusts near the village of Agincourt. One of the English commanders prayed aloud for 10,000 more archers, but the king told him that they had the more certain protection of God. He rested his men that night, and ordained a strict silence; the songs and music of the French could clearly be heard. At dawn he attended three Masses before mounting his horse; he wore a gold crown upon his helmet. Then he ordered his army into position. He had approximately 8,000 men against a French army of 20,000. Another crucial difference was in place; the English combatants included 6,000 archers or longbowmen, while the French had very few. They were relying upon the force of their armour. So the English were placed in a thin line across the field of battle, in the same posture as the shield wall of the Anglo-Saxons or ‘the thin red line’ at the battle of Balaclava in 1854. The heavy rain of the previous night had rendered the terrain muddy and treacherous. For three hours, from nine in the morning to midday, the two armies faced each other without moving.

Henry then took the initiative, fearing that the enemy were waiting for reinforcements. ‘Now is good time, for all England prays for us,’ he shouted, ‘and therefore be of good cheer, and let us go to our journey!’ He continued with an invocation. ‘In the name of Almighty God and St George, advance bannerer! And St George, this day your help!’ His soldiers prostrated themselves upon the ground, each of them putting a small piece of earth into his mouth to remind him that he was mortal and must one day return to dust; it was a different form of holy communion. The English archers advanced some 700 yards (640 metres), stopped, and rammed sharp pointed stakes into the soft earth as a form of protection from horses and armed knights alike. Then they took aim and fired at the massed French host with a great storm of arrows, causing immediate carnage in its ranks. The French cavalry charged, but the men and horses were wounded or impaled upon the stakes.

The body of the French army moved forward, but their great numbers made them unwieldy and confused. The arrows of the English archers continued to do their deadly work, and the riderless horses created further alarm among the men. The bodies of the dead already lay in piles upon the muddy ground, and the more nimble English soldiers were able to turn in upon the groaning mass of the enemy. Two-thirds of the remaining French army now fled. Henry was not yet certain of the victory; a third part of the army still remained on the field, and many unarmed French prisoners were held in the rear of the action. He ordered these men to be put to death, to avoid any threatening movement on their part. This was in defiance of the rules of chivalry, which forbade the execution of unarmed prisoners, and was also to the detriment of the English who could have been expected to earn sizeable ransoms from their captives. Yet Henry ordered 200 archers to carry out the work of killing. It can only be said that in the blood and heat of battle some pressing reason must have suggested itself to him. What that was, we do not know. His command was not wholly carried out, however, and many hundreds of noble prisoners survived the ordeal of the battle of Agincourt.

The king now marched unimpeded to Calais from where, after a few days’ respite, he sailed back to England. His reception in London on 23 November was a great occasion of state. 20,000 citizens met him at Blackheath, where he was hailed as ‘lord of England, flower of the world, soldier of Christ’. Two giant figures, of a man and a woman, were erected on London Bridge to welcome him; effigies of the lion and the antelope wearing the royal arms, with a choir of angels singing ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord’, greeted his progress. Other giant figures, and pageant wagons, and fanciful castles, decorated the route to St Paul’s Cathedral; the king, in a simple gown of purple, was greeted by groups of singers holding garlands. In this year, also, Henry began to wear an arched or imperial crown modelled upon that worn by the Holy Roman Emperor; it was an ‘imperial diadem of gold and precious stones’, adverting to the fact that he had regained an imperial kingship.

The victory was not immediately followed by an advantageous truce. No overwhelming victory has ever had such tenuous result. The sinews that had been stiffened were now relaxed again, and the blood summoned was permitted to subside. Yet the reputation of the king was greatly strengthened; he did now seem to be one favoured and protected by God, and the right of his dynasty to rule was manifestly confirmed. At a stroke he had become the leading figure in the royal politics of Europe. On a more practical level the parliament house bestowed on him a new grant of taxation, and guaranteed him for life the excise on exports of wool and leather.

The French attempted to recapture Harfleur both by land and by sea, but a decisive naval battle in the summer of 1416 proved their undoing. Henry prided himself on his navy; he was the first king since Alfred to create a national force at sea, and by the end of 1416 he possessed six great ships, eight barges and ten single-masted sailing vessels known as balingers.

With these he launched his second invasion of France in February 1417. He had come to claim the throne of France ‘de facto et realiter’; it was his by right. He undertook a sequence of sieges, beginning with the town of Caen, slowly moving southwards until he arrived at Falaise, best known as the birthplace of William the Conqueror. He was returning to the land of his now remote predecessor, and in the process had effectively seized Normandy. Then he moved on to the capital of the duchy, Rouen; the siege lasted for almost six months, creating intense misery for the citizens. According to a popular verse of the period:

They ate dogs, they ate cats,

They ate mice, horses and rats

For thirty pence went a rat …

Rouen surrendered on 19 January 1419. The way to Paris now lay open. Some inconclusive negotiations took place between the two sides; facing Henry was the king of France, Charles VI, together with his son and successor known as the ‘dauphin’. These two men were joined by the duke of Burgundy, who had formed an unlikely pact with the dauphin in an effort to repel the English. But the allies fell out; at a meeting arranged upon a bridge, one of the dauphin’s retinue killed the duke. It may have been a plot or, as was claimed, an accident; the result was the same. With his enemies in disarray Henry came up to the gates of Paris and demanded the French crown. Who could now deny it to him? The new duke of Burgundy was inexperienced, the dauphin was in disgrace, and the king of France was intermittently insane.

After much debate a treaty was agreed in the spring of 1420 in which it was confirmed that Charles VI would disinherit his son and declare the English king to be his successor. Henry V would marry the king’s daughter Katherine, so that any male child would then automatically become king of France as well as of England. It was on the face of it a great victory; Henry had won more than any of his predecessors. Subsequent events, however, would prove that the concord was ultimately unstable. Why should the French agree to be ruled by a king at Westminster? Serious misgivings also existed, in some quarters of the English parliament, about the wisdom of the English domination of France; the costs of war were very large. The price of maintaining power would also be high. It was unwise to tangle with the affairs of the French.

At the early date of 1417 the clergy had ceased to pray for the king’s success in foreign warfare; the parliaments of 1420 and 1421 reverted to their former ways and refused to grant money for the enterprise. The chronicler of the period, Adam of Usk, finished his narrative with the exclamation, ‘but, woe is me! Mighty men and treasure of the realm will be most miserable foredone about this business.’ Some compensations were available, most notably for the great knights and the soldiers of fortune who brought back treasure and booty. Thomas Montague, the earl of Salisbury, wrote to the king that ‘we broughten home the fairest and greatest prey of beasts as all those saiden that saw them that ever they saw’. He returned with riches, in other words. Whether this heartened the clergy and the yeomen of England is another matter.

Fears existed about English sovereignty itself. What if one treasurer, for example, were to superintend the revenues of both countries bound in an intricate embrace? What if the king, or his successor, appointed a French noble to that task? These may have been groundless fears, but nonetheless they existed. It had become obvious that the king was already spending more time in France than in England, to the detriment of national interests.

The proof is to be found in the fact that Henry was obliged to consolidate his gains in France with further military campaigns. He possessed, or occupied, the duchy of Normandy together with the area known as Vexin – the region of northwest France on the right bank of the Seine. But there were still provinces ruled by the duke of Burgundy, and others governed by the dauphin. There could be no peace in a divided land.

Henry married Katherine of France, or Katherine of Valois, soon after the treaty with her father; they entered Paris in state and moved into the Louvre Palace. The king of course wished to crown his wife in Westminster, and on 23 February 1421 she was led to the abbey. The Valois and Plantagenet dynasties were united.

Four months later Henry was in France once more, to counter French resistance and insurrection. He was obliged to fight for his gains, but during the siege of the town of Meaux he became ill; he relapsed into a fever and grew steadily weaker. He sensed that death was approaching, and he made a codicil to his will. He now had a son, only eight months old, and the child was given into the protection of one of his brothers. The duke of Gloucester would guide and support the infant Henry. On the last day of August 1422 the king died. The corpse was brought to London, and was buried with due solemnity in the abbey.

No king won such plaudits from his contemporaries as Henry V. The misgivings about his wars in France were forgotten for the sake of celebrating his martial valour. He was devout as well as magnificent, chaste as well as earnest. He was as generous to his friends as he was stern to his enemies; he was prudent and magnanimous, modest and temperate. He was the very model of a medieval king. Yet there are some who have doubted that verdict. Shakespeare’s play Henry V can be interpreted in quite a different spirit as an account of a military tyrant who staked all on vainglorious conquest in France. What did he finally achieve? Once his French conquests were dissipated, and the dream of a dual monarchy dissolved, very little was left to celebrate. All was done for the pride of princes.

One more elusive and unintended consequence, of the revival of the Hundred Years War by Henry V, can be recorded. The language of England was now spoken by all the king’s subjects. The letters of the king were always written in English, and the writer of The Deeds of Henry V invoked Anglia nostra or ‘our England’. The first document of royal administration written in English is dated in 1410. The London Guild of Brewers began to record its proceedings in English from the early 1420s, citing the fact that ‘the greater part of the Lords and the trusty Commons have begun to make their matters be noted down in our mother tongue’.

The archbishops of Canterbury now spoke routinely of ‘the Church of England’ as an identifiable element of the Universal Church, and at a Church council in 1414 it was declared that ‘whether a nation be understood as a people marked off from others by blood relationship and habit of unity, or by peculiarities of language … England is a real nation’. The fact that the matter had to be asserted suggests that in previous periods this nationhood had not been self-evident. In the fifteenth century, too, there were persistent attempts to contrast the prosperous kingdom of England with the parlous state of France. It was a way of escaping from the inheritance of the French-speaking royalty and a French-speaking court that had shaped the governance of the three previous centuries.

The first surviving letter written in English dates from the winter of 1392. A slightly later epistle, also written in English, is of more human interest. It was ‘written at Calais on this side the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote noon and all our household cried after me and bade me come down. Come down to dinner at once! And what answer I gave them ye know it of old.’ You can hear the voices. Come down! Come down!

30

How others saw us

The English were pronounced by other nations to be guilty of the sin of pride; that was their most prominent characteristic. The fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart described ‘the great haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than their own’. A German knight, Nicholas von Poppelau, visited the country in 1484 and complained that ‘the English think they are the wisest people in the world’ and that ‘the world does not exist apart from England’. Fifteen years later a Venetian traveller stated that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them’. Whenever they see a handsome stranger, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.

Other nations were sure that the English had tails. The Greeks of Sicily, who were obliged to entertain the presence of English crusaders in 1190, referred to them as ‘the tailed Englishmen’. At the end of the thirteenth century the Scottish forces, besieged in Dunbar Castle, shouted from the battlements, ‘You English dogs with long tails! We will kill you all and cut off your tails!’ It is possible that the offence was originally that of long hair, worn down the back like a tail, and gradually became a term of general opprobrium.

The French accused the English of being drunken and perfidious; the notion of la perfide Albion, current in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, has a long history. They were aloof; they were phlegmatic; they were insensitive to their own suffering, and to the sufferings of others. They were not afraid of death. That is why they quarrelled with so much ferocity; they robbed and murdered one another quite openly. Sometimes they even killed their king. So they were known for their violence.

The English themselves admitted many faults. The author of Vita Edwardi Secundi, writing early in the fourteenth century, maintained that his countrymen excelled ‘in pride, in craft and in perjury’. Ranulf Higden of Chester, in the same period, described his compatriots as drunken, greedy and dishonest. Their drunkenness was a common cause of complaint, so often described and condemned that it became almost a caricature. A papal envoy to England wrote in 1473 that ‘in the morning they are as devout as angels, but after dinner they are like devils’. Certain national characteristics may never change.

31

A simple man

If Henry’s son had been declared king immediately on the death of his father, he would have been crowned in his swaddling clothes. It was deemed prudent, therefore, to wait until he had reached the age of understanding before he was anointed. Nothing spells disaster so much as a child king, however, surrounded by magnates who consult no interest but their own. Indeed in the course of his long reign, lasting for almost forty years, the fortunes of the ruling houses of England went through so many bewildering vicissitudes – so many reversals and surprises, so many victories and defeats – that the nineteenth-century critic, William Hazlitt, described the country as a ‘perfect beargarden’. This was the era in which were fought the series of battles that have become known as the Wars of the Roses.

Three brothers supervised the minority of the infant king. They can be introduced as the dramatis personae. The first of them, the duke of Gloucester, was his younger uncle; it was he to whom Henry V had entrusted the life and safety of his son. His older uncle, the duke of Bedford, had been chosen by the dying king to protect and enlarge the conquered territories of France; the war continued as before. Henry Beaufort, the child of John of Gaunt and therefore the king’s great-uncle, was bishop of Winchester; he became chancellor of England and therefore its principal officer. He had been born illegitimate but the subsequent marriage of John of Gaunt to his mother, Katherine Swynford, rendered him legitimate.

Brothers, legitimate or illegitimate, may fall out. Gloucester wished to be given the title of ‘regent’, effectively assuming control of the country. Instead at Bedford’s request he was only named as ‘protector’, obliged to yield precedence whenever his elder brother returned from France to England. Gloucester also quarrelled with Beaufort over the direction of the kingdom, and their rivalry reached such a pitch that in 1425 it precipitated them almost into internecine war. Beaufort gathered his army of retainers in Southwark, where his palace lay, and Gloucester ordered the mayor of London to close London Bridge against them. Bedford had to come over from France in order to arrange a compromise between them. They were dogs fighting over the bone of power.

The new king, Henry VI, was formally crowned in the winter of 1429. The eight-year-old boy was carried into the abbey in the arms of his tutor; this suggests that he was a little frail, but he managed to survive the strain of the lengthy ceremony and walked down the aisle unaided at its conclusion. It has been said that he remained a child all his life. At the end of 1431 he was taken to France, according to the treaty agreed by his father, where he was crowned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. On the head of this young boy the lines of Valois and Plantagenet royalty had come together. At barely the age of ten he was the only male monarch ever to be king both of England and of France.

It is significant however that, in the year before he came to France, the figure of Joan of Arc emerged as the inspiration and hope of the French army. That is one of the reasons why Henry was so prominently displayed in Paris. In May 1429, in a series of brilliantly executed skirmishes, she had lifted the English siege of Orleans and proceeded to recapture other French towns that had submitted to the enemy. Orleans had been the key to the English strategy, its fall meant to anticipate the general defeat of the French army. That victory had been snatched away. In a letter Joan wrote at the end of June to the citizens of Tournai, she declared that ‘the Maiden lets you know that here, in eight days, she has chased the English out of all the places they held on the river Loire by attack or other means; they are dead or prisoners or discouraged in battle’. She had begun a process that would end in the complete unravelling of the victories of the previous reign. At Joan’s urgent instigation the dauphin rode in triumph to the cathedral in Rheims, where he was crowned as Charles VII. Two kings, Henry VI and Charles VII, were now claiming supremacy over the French people. It would take another twenty years to assign victory to one of them.

The affairs of France, ever since the death of Henry V, had not been well managed. Without the presence of this inspiring king, the enthusiasm for conquest seems slowly to have been dissipated. Disputes over strategy, between Bedford and Gloucester, did not augur well; Bedford was also denied the finances that he needed. It was said in the parliament house and elsewhere that French actions should be subsidized by the taxpayers of France. Among the English themselves the virtues and advantages of a dual monarchy were openly questioned. What was the point of owning or seizing territories in France when there was so much amiss in England? The king of England should reside in England, not in Paris or in Normandy.

Yet the war continued, the French and English possessing neither the will nor the resources effectively to decide the matter. Charles VII entered an alliance with the new duke of Burgundy, formally apologizing for the assassination of the duke’s predecessor and promising to punish the guilty parties. Those areas of France under the influence of Burgundy now reverted to their allegiance to the Valois king, and Charles could truly claim to be the king of most if not all of the French. In the process Burgundy had deserted his English allies, in a move that profoundly shocked the infant king; Henry had burst into tears when he read the letter from the duke renouncing fealty. More than twenty years later he still recalled the event. ‘He abandoned me in my boyhood,’ he said, ‘despite all his oaths to me, when I had never done him any wrong.’ We might notice here the innate simplicity of the remark.

The story of Joan of Arc is well known. Bedford led the war of words against her, denouncing her as a witch and an unnatural hag in the service of the devil. She had declared that the purpose of her mission was to recapture Orleans and expedite the coronation of the French monarch; after she had completed the latter object she seems to have faltered. She was wounded during a military skirmish in Paris, and was then captured by a force of soldiers led by John of Luxemburg. He sold her to Bedford, claiming a large ransom, and the Maid of Orleans was put on trial for witchcraft. The French king made no attempt to save her, and seems to have regarded her as no more than a casualty of war. In the spring of 1431 she was dragged to the stake in the marketplace of Rouen.

The council of nobles held together for the duration of the young king’s minority; they were all men who had served under Henry V, and the shared memory of that king was at least as strong as their individual self-interest. The uneasy triumvirate of the three brothers survived until the death of Bedford in 1435. In 1437, in his sixteenth year, Henry declared that his minority had come to an end and that he would now begin to govern for himself. It is more likely, however, that someone made the decision for him. He relied on the judgment and advice of others, and it was said that he always agreed with the last person who had spoken to him. For two years he had been coached in the rights and duties of a king. It was time now to take the centre of the stage. Beaufort and Gloucester, the pre-eminent nobles after the death of Bedford, would in theory be obliged to incline to his wishes. Beaufort had been raised from bishop to cardinal eleven years before, but his elevation still left him below the rank and power of his sovereign. In the summer of 1437 Henry VI embarked upon a grand tour of his kingdom.

So we may now survey the young king. The extant portraits, albeit somewhat idealized, display a man with a prominent jaw and a faintly pious or innocent expression. Concerning his character and judgment, no general agreement exists. He was of an honest and simple nature, but the virtues of ordinary life may not sit well upon a monarch. For some chroniclers he became the model of the saintly king, ‘without any crook of craft or untruth’; he was ‘pure and clean’, modest in success and patient in adversity. Yet to others he seemed to be a simpleton, an idiot, half-witted, a veritable ‘sheep’. Pope Pius II said of this devoted son of the Church that he was ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit’. The English churchmen had been gossiping to him. In truth a fifteenthcentury king had to be aggressive and brutal; he had to possess innate authority; he had to be shrewd and courageous. Henry VI seems to have possessed none of these qualities. Those who condemned him as an imbecile and a natural fool were simply registering their disappointment. In any other sphere he would no doubt have passed as a devout and kindly man.

Of his piety itself there can be no doubt. He would never conduct business, or move his court, on a Sunday. He rebuked any of his lords who swore, and his only declamatory language was ‘Forsooth, forsooth!’ His eminent contemporary, William Caxton, wrote that he ‘made a rule that a certain dish, which represented the five wounds of Christ as it were red with blood, should be set on his table by his almoner before any other course, when he was to take refreshment; and contemplating these images with great fervour he thanked God marvellous devoutly’.

After the adhesion of the duke of Burgundy to the French cause, the endless war did not go well for the English. They still held on to Normandy, as well as parts of Gascony and Maine, but their aspirations to French supremacy were now at an end. Bedford, the commanding presence on the English side, proved impossible to replace. All the spirit had gone out of the enterprise of France. Step by step Normandy was being reclaimed by the French. It was perhaps unfortunate that Henry VI himself had no military experience or aptitude. His only visit to France was at the time of his coronation, and never once did he lead his forces into the field. He was emphatically a man of peace, more at home with his studies or his devotions; he was more intent upon his foundations, at Eton and elsewhere, or with his building works at Cambridge. In this he may not have been wholly misguided. Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, remain the most enduring manifestations of his reign.

When Paris fell to Charles VII in the spring of 1436, and the state of Normandy grew more disordered, Henry was inclined ever more favourably towards peace. Negotiations between the two sides accomplished precisely nothing, however, while the French continued their slow conquest of the disputed territories. The English did not have the men or the materials successfully to defend both Gascony and Normandy, while the central market town and garrison of Calais was always under threat from the forces of the duke of Burgundy. The French king offered a truce, and the possibility of England maintaining its control of Gascony and Normandy, on the condition that Henry VI renounced his claim to the French crown. The king and his council prevaricated, and sent out a series of confused responses. Henry’s council in Normandy said that they were dismayed and apprehensive like ‘a ship tossed about on the sea by many winds, without captain, without steersman, without rudder, without sail’. The king could be construed as the substitute for captain and steersman, rudder and sail.

Plenty of interested parties were of course ready to throw in their opinions. Beaufort and Gloucester were joined by a third such party. Richard, duke of York, had taken the place of Bedford as commander of the English forces; he was in fact Bedford’s nephew, and would continue the factional strife that already undermined English policy. In the complicated tangle of primogeniture he was now one of the likely and immediate heirs to the throne, being directly related to the fifth son of Edward III; Henry himself was descended from the fourth son. It may seem excessively obscure to a modern reader, but at the time all the protagonists knew exactly where they stood in relation to sovereignty; it was in their blood, literally, and guided their actions. Henry never trusted York.

There is a further complication. John Beaufort, the nephew of Cardinal Beaufort and already made duke of Somerset, was despatched to France in order to relieve Gascony – much to the fury of York who was already facing great disturbances in Normandy and was desperately in need of fresh resources. It is easy to see how English policy was in disarray. York and Gloucester were part of the council that favoured fresh aggression and determination in the face of French attacks; Cardinal Beaufort preferred a policy of compromise and negotiation. The king, although temperamentally in favour of peace, demurred between the two factions. Somerset set sail for France in the summer of 1443, but achieved nothing in the field; finally he had the humiliation of taking refuge with York in Rouen. His army was disbanded and he sailed home. He died in the spring of the following year, and it was widely rumoured that he had committed suicide. The last great English enterprise had been a fiasco. The members of the ‘peace party’ at Westminster felt themselves to have been vindicated.

In these unpromising circumstances Henry VI sent a personal envoy to negotiate directly with the French king.William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, had already served in the French wars and had become one of the king’s most favoured councillors. He travelled to the French court at Tours in the spring of 1444 where both sides, exhausted by war and attrition, came to a relatively easy truce for the space of ten months. The treaty was sealed with a kiss. As part of the pact Henry VI was to marry the daughter of the Duke of Anjou, one of the most powerful families at the French court; she was also the niece of the French king. Margaret of Anjou, in the company of Suffolk, sailed to England in the following year.

So there came to England one of its most forceful queens. It was not long before it was widely reported that she ruled her husband; one London chronicler, John Blocking, declared that she was cleverer than Henry and of a more powerful character. She was ‘a great and strong and active woman who spares no effort in pursuing her affairs’. She found her favourite in Suffolk, who had arranged her marriage, and together they controlled the general policy of the council. It was Margaret, for example, who played a leading role in the negotiations with the French; she was trying to bring the members of her extended family into happy unison. So it was that her husband secretly agreed to cede the province of Maine to the Valois king, in exchange for the security of a general peace. Maine had been an English possession since it had passed to Henry II in 1154 as part of his Angevin inheritance; that older Henry had been born in its capital, Le Mans. The news of its forfeiture provoked discontent and dismay among many of the king’s councillors; even the king’s envoys in France were opposed to the surrender they had come to negotiate, and insisted on a signed declaration that they had come only in the higher purpose of peace. The treaty, after much confusion and suspicion as a result of Henry’s vacillation, was finally sealed.

Gloucester, the leading figure among those who had once favoured war with France, was now in eclipse. His power and authority had been notably undermined, not least in the prosecution of his wife for witchcraft on the grounds that she had sought the king’s death by means of the black arts. It is possible that he now planned to move against Suffolk, or in some way to gain control of the king. In 1447 a parliament was summoned to Bury St Edmunds, an unusual setting for that assembly. Gloucester arrived for the opening of the proceedings but, on the day following his arrival, he was arrested in his lodgings on the charge of high treason. A few days later, he was found dead in his bed. It was widely believed he fell ill immediately after his arrest; he had been struck down by anxiety and dismay. He may have died of natural causes, in a most unnatural world. It may of course have been a case of judicial murder, at a time when such events were not uncommon.

The death of Gloucester did not enhance the king’s authority. Henry had not proved himself during his personal rule; he was as negligent in his conduct of English affairs as he had been vacillating in his prosecution of the war. He had given away to his favourites more royal lands than any of his predecessors; his debts rose higher and higher, while it was an open secret that the members of his household were purloining money from the royal income. All the perquisites of royal favour – offices, pensions and wardships among them – were being drained. On certain occasions Henry granted the same office twice to different people.

He was generous, too, in the bestowal of new honours; in the eight years between 1441 and 1449 he created ten barons, five earls, two marquises and five dukes. Even the most impartial observer must have concluded that he was unduly diluting the reserves of patronage. Existing barons and dukes might also have surmisedthat their rank, at the very least, was not necessarily being exalted. Henry had never known any other position than that of monarch; he took his wealth and power for granted. He did not understand the value or importance of what he bestowed. He was always ready, and even eager, to pardon people; he was following the model of his Saviour. But this generosity did not endear itself to those who believed themselves to have been wronged.

He was too weak to arbitrate between the more powerful nobles of the reign; this encouraged them to take matters into their own hands, and to solve by force or threat the disputes that should have been resolved by a strong king. As a result armed feuds between the powerful families presaged the greater civil conflict of the Wars of the Roses. The king was supposed to guide and to lead his nobles; that was part of their compact with the court. They were the natural supporters of the anointed monarch. They did not wish for a weak king, and they were more secure if a king was strong. But, if they were masterless, then all order was destroyed.

The consequences were obvious to all. With the death of the duke of Gloucester, the duke of York became the direct heir to the throne. Yet Henry still did not trust him and, to lessen his capacity for influence at court, he was despatched to Ireland as lord lieutenant. For two years York refused to take up the appointment, but in the summer of 1449 he sailed across the Irish Sea. The command of the English armies in France was then given to the new duke of Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, brother of the supposed suicide. Suffolk and Somerset were now aligned against York. York and Somerset would soon enough become rivals almost to the death. These were the fruits of Henry’s ‘personal rule’ that would end in the bloodiest dynastic dispute in English history.

A more general sense prevailed that the rule of the law had been left in abeyance. ‘The law serves of nothing else in these days,’ the men of Kent said in a declaration of 1450, ‘but to do wrong.’ All was accomplished by ‘bribery, dread or favour’. The extant letters of the period, particularly those of the Paston family, are filled with accounts of wrongdoing that went unpunished and of nobles who exercised justice (if that is what it can be called) for their own advantage. Endless stories were told of armed gangs threatening tenants, besieging manors and invading courts of justice.

John Paston wrote of one hired gang that ‘no poor man dare displease them, for whatsoever they do with their swords they make it law’. He had direct experience of such violent behaviour. In a petition to the archbishop of York he wrote of ‘a great multitude of riotous people, to the number of a thousand persons or more’ who ‘broke, despoiled, and drew down’ his manor house at Gresham; they ‘drove out my wife and servants there being, and rifled, took, and bore away all the goods and chattels’. The gang then fortified the manor, and kept out Paston himself as well as the king’s Justice of the Peace.

Another gang, commanded by William Tailboys, was under the protection of Suffolk; it will be remembered that Suffolk, with the queen, helped to control the council of the realm. Tailboys and his ‘slaughterladdes’ were accused of three murders as well as charges of trespass and assault; but Suffolk helped him to escape justice. ‘On lordship and friendship’, it was said, ‘depends all law and profit.’ The spirit of misrule prevailed over the land, and the king could do nothing about it.

When Paston’s manor house was plundered and taken, his adversary procured a royal letter asking the sheriff of Norfolk to show ‘favour’. Paston was powerless in these circumstances, and he was advised to place himself under the protection of the duke of York. In 1454 one of Henry’s knights who had done well out of the French wars, Sir John Falstolf, laid aside money to bribe a sheriff; he wanted a jury that would favour his suit in a legal case. It is clear enough that the juries of the period were, on a routine basis, bribed or intimidated.

In an interpolation to his version of The Game and the Playe of the Chesse William Caxton castigated ‘the advocates, the men of law and the attorneys of the court’, describing ‘how they turn the laws and statutes at their pleasure, how they eat the people, how they impoverish the community’. We may read for instruction a great juridical text of the period, Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae – ‘In Praise of the Laws of England’ – and even applaud the development or ‘evolution’ of justice; but in practice the law was rotten and worm-eaten. We may say the same of the parliament house and of the court. It is not to be expected that any human institution will be other than rackety and only partially competent; only in histories do they proceed with ease to their ordained end.

All these forces of disorder and injustice came to a head in 1449. In that year Henry’s authority had suffered a mortal blow when Charles VII, on the pretext that the English had broken the terms of a formal truce agreed two years earlier, marched into Normandy with the ambition of expelling the English altogether from his territories; his success was evident and immediate. The towns, hitherto occupied by the English, surrendered without a fight to the three French armies who advanced upon them from various directions.

In November 1449 the parliament house met in the face of the grave news from France and at its second session, in early 1450, the duke of Suffolk was accused of treason. It was alleged that he had planned to assist the invasion of England by Charles VII, and that he was willing to place his castle in Wallingford at the French king’s disposal. The charge may seem unrealistic, but at a time of failure and suspicion it was believed. Those responsible for the fiasco in France had to be made to pay in one form or another. At the same time the chancellor of England, Archbishop Stafford, resigned his post. Suffolk was placed in the Tower, where a bill of impeachment was drawn up against him; the king now intervened and brought these proceedings to an end. Henry could not countenance the spectacle of his chief minister and adviser being humiliated.

The Commons were not to be diverted, however, from their display of public anger and revenge. They put forward a second set of charges, among them the evident fact that Suffolk had protected William Tailboys from arrest and imprisonment. The king now called the lords to his inner chamber in the palace at Westminster, where he repudiated the jurisdiction of parliament by placing Suffolk under his own ‘rule and governance’. It was a peculiarly maladroit manner of proceeding, but there seemed at the time to be no alternative. A few weeks later Henry announced that Suffolk would be banished from the realm for a period of five years. Suffolk set sail from Ipswich at the end of April, bound for the Low Countries; but he did not reach his destination. The ship in which he sailed was detained, and he was taken on board another vessel where he was quickly tried by the sailors. He was decapitated with a rusty sword, and his body dumped on a beach near Dover.

The French king’s recapture of Normandy took only a year and six days. By the summer of 1450 the English forces had been expelled from most of the towns and cities of France; only Calais and parts of Gascony remained. In a portrait of the time Charles VII was described as Le Très victorieux Roi de France. A French chronicler remarked that ‘never had so great a country been conquered in so short a space of time, with such small loss to the populace and to the soldiery’. Henry’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou had done less than nothing to consolidate English rule in France, and indeed Margaret was blamed by many for having engineered or expedited the final disaster. A rhyme went around at the time, ‘The king’s son lost all his father won’. The war of a hundred years was almost over.

It is hard to exaggerate the damage to the king. Not only had he failed in his bid for military conquest, he had actually been forced to surrender territories which the English monarchy had previously held by right. From this time forward Henry effectively lost control of his realm, and in the absence of leadership the confusion turned into chaos. It was also reported, in the parliament of 1450, that the king’s debts had more than doubled in sixteen years; at this point the merchants of London, individuals and corporations, withdrew their financial support. That is another reason for the dynastic struggle of the Wars of the Roses; the king did not have the money to administer the country. There were fears that this was becoming what was known as a ‘wild world’. A man who called himself ‘Queen of the Faery’ preached in the towns and villages of Kent. In Canterbury a fuller by the name of ‘Blue Beard’ tried to muster a force or fellowship of men about him. Kent here is the key.

The fact that the head of Suffolk had been found near Dover, and that the shipmen involved in the execution were men of Kent, inevitably placed that independent and sometimes recalcitrant shire under suspicion. The king’s representative there threatened that the whole county would be laid to waste and turned into a deer park; but the men of Kent already had cause for complaint. The unsuccessful war against France had severely affected the maritime trade on which their prosperity relied. The coast was attacked with impunity by corsairs from France and Brittany. Agnes Paston wrote that a friend of the family ‘had been taken with enemies, walking by the sea side’. She went on to pray that ‘God give grace that the sea be better kept than it is now, or else it shall be perilous dwelling by the sea-coast’.

The beleaguered men of Kent rallied at Calehill Heath in the neighbourhood of Ashford at the end of May 1450; they gathered at a meeting place that had been employed for many hundreds of years. The old spirit of place asserted itself in times of uncertainty and danger. On this heath they elected as their leader and representative Jack Cade, and under his guidance they marched towards London; by 11 June they were encamped on Blackheath within sight of the capital. In their declaration they averred that ‘they call us risers and traitors and the king’s enemies, but we shall be found to be his true liege men’. Instead they attacked his advisers or, as they were commonly known, the ‘evil counsellors’; as a result of their machinations, ‘his lordship is lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he cannot afford his meat or drink’. They knew, by whispers or by rumours, the parlous state of his finances. The rebels also denounced the manifest perversions of local justice and the oppressions of local magnates, exposing indirectly the confused state of the entire realm.

Some among them, however, directed more personal criticism at Henry. William Merfield declared, at the market in the ancient hamlet of Brightling in East Sussex, that the king was ‘a natural fool and would often hold a staff in his hands with a bird on the end, playing therewith as a fool’. This must refer to some children’s toy; how Merfield came to know the fact is unclear. Harry Mase, a weaver from Ely, said that the king ‘looked more like a child than a man’ and that within a short time the ship imprinted on the coinage would be replaced by a sheep.

One of the words on the lips of Cade’s men was ‘common weal’ or ‘commonwealth’, being the grand polity of king and kingdom, lords and commons; the subject owes obedience to the king, but the king must also strive for the welfare of the subject. All the estates of the realm were, or should be, united in an association of duty and responsibility. It was this association, by implication, that was being undermined by Henry and his advisers.

The forces of the king reacted quickly enough to the threat; while Cade’s followers were encamped on Blackheath, emissaries from the king arrived on 13 June and ordered them to disperse. They also carried pardons with them. The king had wanted to go to them in person, emulating the bravery of the young Richard II seventy years before, but his advisers at first demurred. Several thousand men were gathered; 3,000 pardons, at least, were eventually issued. On the morning of 18 June Henry did advance upon Blackheath, with a large contingent of soldiers and guns, but the rebels had already dispersed under cover of the darkness of the previous night; they had been warned about the arrival of the royal army. It was a precautionary measure in another sense; to have fought against the king’s banner was manifest treason. Some of the king’s men, under the command of Sir Humphrey and Sir William Stafford, then pursued them; the rebels trapped them with an ambush, in which the Staffords were killed. The first blood had gone to the men of Kent.

The blood was soon avenged. Several lords rode into Kent where they exacted retribution, a measure of force that only provoked the rebels still further. A period of confusion followed in which the lords, faced with mounting reaction, quarrelled with one another and in which some soldiers deserted to the rebel cause. The king and his companions, together with the justices of the realm, then fled London and retreated as fast as they could to the safety of the midlands; the mayor of London had begged the king to remain in the capital, but he refused. It was another example of the king’s lack of valour.

When they heard reports of the king’s retreat, Cade and his followers reassembled on Blackheath at the end of June; on the following day they entered Southwark, and commandeered the inns and hostelries of that district. Cade himself – who had become known as ‘the Captain’ and as ‘John Amend-All’ – stayed at the White Hart Inn, along the high street, that became the headquarters for the rebellion. The white hart had of course been the emblem of Richard II.

On 3 July Cade and his men crossed London Bridge, cutting the ropes of the drawbridge so that it could not be later raised against them, and proceeded to occupy the guildhall. In that place of justice several royal servants were convicted of high crimes against the country, and summarily executed at the fountain opposite Honey Lane known as the Cheapside Standard. The sheriff of Kent, one of the most hated, was dragged to Mile End where he was beheaded. Cade retired to the White Hart, in order to formulate his plans.

The Londoners, alarmed at the scale of the riot and damage along the streets of their city, now determined to prevent Cade from entering London once more across the bridge. A force of citizens confronted the rebels and a pitched battle, or series of battles, ensued. Cade, thwarted, determined to burn down the drawbridge; the Londoners, joined also by the remainder of the king’s servants who had escaped immediate justice, managed to close the entry-gate. Many perished in the flames of Cade’s fire.

A truce among the parties, now on opposite sides of the Thames, was mediated by a group of churchmen led by the archbishops of York and Canterbury; they had remained in the Tower during the riots. It was also concluded that the rebels, having submitted their demands, would receive a royal pardon under the great seal on condition that they dispersed to their homes. The majority of them did so, gratefully enough, but Cade refused or repented his previous submission. He raised the standard of revolt once more, but he commanded too few followers to be a serious threat. He fled south, where he was pursued and cornered; he was arrested in a garden at Heathfield in Sussex and died of his wounds soon afterwards. The revolt had been put down, but not as a result of any of the king’s actions.

At this juncture the duke of York returned from his unwelcome post in Ireland. It is of some interest that Jack Cade had called himself John Mortimer, thus aligning himself with the York family name; York had inherited the Mortimer lands and title twentyfive years before, when his mother, Anne Mortimer, had died while giving birth to him. Some of Cade’s followers spread the report that he was the duke’s cousin. This relationship is most unlikely, but it was suspected at the time that York had in some indirect way helped to foment the rebellion against the king’s authority. He returned to England without the king’s permission and was immediately seen as a potential threat to Henry’s rule; it was at this time that the king appointed York’s enemy, Somerset, as the Constable of England. In a series of formal public declarations, passing between the king and York, the duke averred that he had returned in order to clear his name of any unwarranted suspicions concerning the late rebellion; he announced that he had come in order to help to reform the king’s household. Henry duly invited him to join a ‘sad [wise or serious] and substantial council’.

This did not address the real problem concerning the enmity between York and Somerset after the debacle in Normandy. They blamed each other for the misconduct of the war, when in fact it was the king himself who should have incurred much of the responsibility for its failure. While Henry VI was still childless, York was the heir presumptive; but Somerset’s supremacy in the council of the king provoked York into the fear that he was about to be disinherited.

In September 1450, York came to Westminster with 5,000 men; he called for the dismissal of Somerset as well as others whom he believed to threaten him. But he moved a step too close to anarchy and civil war; his supporters led a noisy demonstration in Westminster Hall, and an attempt was made to assassinate Somerset. The Lords and Commons then intervened by promulgating a programme of reform in the king’s household; a bill to recognize York as the heir apparent was defeated. York retired to his ancestral estates, discomfited, and Somerset was still pre-eminent.

There followed a sequence of skirmishes and confrontations in which neither side could claim victory for its cause; York exercised his power against other magnates without consulting the king, and at the beginning of 1452 denounced Somerset for the fall of Normandy and declared that his rival was about to surrender Calais to the French. York marched south with his supporters, but was forced to withdraw his challenge in the face of overwhelming numbers raised by the rest of the nobility. No large Yorkist ‘party’ was ready to fight for his cause, and the majority of the other magnates disapproved of what looked very much like armed rebellion. He was forced to submit and sue for pardon, protesting all the while that he had acted ‘for the good of England’.

It seemed that Henry VI had prevailed but then, as has always happened in the history of England, an arbitrary and unforeseen circumstance turned the course of events. In the summer of 1453 the king fell into a stupor or, in the phrase of the period, his wit and reason were withdrawn. The origin of this malady is uncertain, and may lie in the series of humiliations and misfortunes that had beset the king since the beginning of his reign. But there was one precipitate and immediate cause. The last battle of the Hundred Years War had just been lost by the English. The citizens of Bordeaux had asked to be returned to English sovereignty, and an army was duly sent to assist them under the command of the earl of Shrewsbury; in the subsequent battle the English were routed and Shrewsbury, trapped beneath his fallen horse which had been killed by a cannon ball, was despatched with a hand-axe. This was also the battle in which the region of Gascony was finally surrendered to the French.

So Henry declined into a state of catatonic silence and despondency that was to endure for the next eighteen months. He could not walk or even rise from a chair without help; he had no awareness of time, and lost the power of speech. A child was born to him and Margaret of Anjou, in the autumn of this year, but even the arrival of a son and heir did not enliven him. The duke of Buckingham brought the infant to the king at Windsor Palace and, according to a contemporary,

presented him to the king in goodly wise, beseeching the king to bless him; and the king gave no manner answer. Nevertheless the duke abode still with the prince by the king, and when he could no manner answer have, the queen came in and took the prince in her arms and presented him in like form as the duke had done, desiring that he should bless it; but all their labour was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance, saving only that once he looked on the prince and cast down his eyes again, without any more.

If he could have known or guessed the fate of the young prince of Wales, he would have had reason for his sorrow. Two months later the senior members of the council came to him, but ‘they could get no answer nor sign’.

In the absence of effective leadership the king’s council were obliged to turn to York; he was no longer heir apparent, according to the parliament house, but he was the senior nobleman in the kingdom. York had forgotten and forgiven nothing; he returned to London in the full heat of his anger. His great enemy, Somerset, was consigned to the Tower on the charge of betraying English possessions in France. York also declared that Somerset as well as the king and queen had effectively tried to isolate and to silence him. Margaret of Anjou had always opposed York, but her antipathy became all the more marked when it seemed possible that York might try to supplant her young son. Here were the seeds of the subsequent bloodshed. She turned York into an enemy by regarding him as one. She presented a Bill in which she was to be granted the power to govern the country and appoint the great officers of state but, in March 1454, York was declared to be Protector of the kingdom.

Five doctors had been appointed to watch over the ailing king. It was believed that the dung of doves, applied to the soles of the feet, induced healing sleep. Milk was very good for melancholy. But the eating of hazelnuts discomforted the brain. Green ginger, on the other hand, quickened the memory. Awareness returned to Henry slowly and by degrees. It was reported that ‘the king is well amended, and has been so since Christmas day … On Monday afternoon the queen came to him and brought the lord prince with her; then he asked what the prince’s name was, and the queen told him Edward; then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof. And he said he never knew him till that time, nor knew what was being said to him, nor knew where he had been whilst he was sick … He said that he was now in charity with all the world …’

It is not clear that he ever fully recovered from his affliction; the reports of his behaviour in succeeding years suggest that to some extent he had become feeble-minded. Yet the protectorate of York had now come to an end. He gave his resignation to the king at the palace in Greenwich; Somerset was duly released from the Tower and returned to the side of the monarch. Henry now also welcomed back to his councils the perceived enemies of York; he was behaving like the leader of a faction rather than as the ruler of the country. Naturally enough York deemed himself to be under threat. He felt obliged to make a preliminary strike but, in the process, he began the conflict that came to be known as the Wars of the Roses.

32

Meet the family

In the absence of her husband Margaret Paston decided to attack those who had turned her out of the manor house at Gresham; the violent affair was mentioned in the previous chapter. She called on her husband to send handguns, crossbows, longbows and poll-axes; her servants wore body armour. In the same letter she asked for a pound (450 grammes) of almonds, a pound of sugar and some cloth to make gowns for the children. The ordinary life of the world continued even in the face of extreme violence. Or it could be claimed that violence was as ordinary, and as unremarkable, as almonds and sugar.

It is sometimes surmised that in the fifteenth century the expression of emotion is different from that of our own time. But where, if anywhere, does that difference lie? A delicacy of emphasis, not generally found in the register of contemporary speech, can perhaps be found in the Paston letters. Of the Paston servants we learn that ‘they are sad [serious] and well advised men, saving one of them who is bald, called William Penny, who is as good a man as goes upon the earth, saving he will be a little, as I understand, a little cupshotten [drunk]; but he is no brawler, but full of courtesy …’ Immense shrewdness is also evident. ‘John Osborne flattered me,’ John Paston wrote, ‘because he would have borrowed money from me. In retailing of wood there it will be hard to trust him. He is needy.’ Again, in another letter, we learn that one man ‘had but few words but I felt by him he was right evil disposed to the parson and you; but covered language he had’.

In many respects it was a hard world, filled with threat. ‘I pray you beware how you walk if he be there, for he is full cursed-hearted and lumish.’ The meaning of ‘lumish’ is uncertain; it is a word that has gone forever. One husband believed that his wife’s child was not his. ‘I heard say that he said, if she comes in his presence to make her excuse, that he should cut off her nose to make her be known what she is, and if her child comes in his presence he said he would kill it.’ That may of course have been an idle threat. A tendency to extravagance is found in the period. Of the earl of Arran, John Paston writes that ‘he is the most courteous, gentlest, wisest, kindest, most companionable, freest, largest and most bounteous knight’.

Humour and irony are also to be found. When one son of Paston contracted a cold in damp Norwich he wrote that ‘I was never so well armed for the war as I have now armed myself for the cold.’ Resignation was a familiar theme. ‘If it thus continue I am not all undone, nor none of us; and if otherwise then & …’ Which is as much to say – well if we are undone, then so be it. There were striking phrases such as ‘I know you have a great heart’ and, sarcastically, ‘this is a marvellous disposed country’. ‘And so I am with the jailor, with a shackle on my heel.’ ‘This is a right queasy world.’ Of an indiscreet man it was said that ‘he is not secure in the bite’. Flattering an enemy was sometimes necessary because ‘a man must some time set a candle before the Devil’. ‘Towards me’ is written as ‘to me-wards’.

The syntax is often complicated with ‘wherefore’ and ‘insomuch’ and ‘therein’; the sentences are often long and convoluted, but throughout there is an energy or earnestness of expression that drives the narrative forward. The intricate constructions, replete with double negatives at every turn, suggest a world of great formality; but one animated by the sheer struggle for survival. That is what lends the correspondence its pace and urgency.

The status of the Paston family itself indicates social movement and change. Clement Paston was married to a bondwoman (albeit she became, by a medieval paradox, heiress to her brother who was an attorney) and owned only a small farm in Norfolk; by dint of saving and borrowing he managed to send his son, William, to Eton College. In turn William Paston became a lawyer and was eventually appointed to be Justice of the Common Pleas; although his mother had been technically a villein he married into a gentry family. The next generation of the Paston family were themselves members of the gentry, and the male Pastons became knights of the shire. Within three generations the family had been transformed. This was a characteristic feature of English society.

Details in the Paston correspondence, assembled together, open up the world. ‘I pray you that Pitt may truss up in a chest which I left in your chamber at London my tawny gown furred with black and the doublet of purple satin and the doublet of black satin, and my writing box of cypress, and my book of the meeting of the Duke and the Emperor …’

You can also hear the people speak. ‘Forsooth when I came into the chamber there the first word I heard was this that you said to my Master, John Paston, “Who that ever says so, I say he lies falsely in his head.” ’

‘Ya. You should have told what moved me to say so to him.’

‘I could not tell that which I had not heard.’

‘You should have examined the matter.’

‘Sir it did not belong to me to examine the matter, since I knew full well that I should not be a judge of the matter for it belongs only to a judge to study illam Sacre Scripture clausam where Holy Job says “Causam quam nesciebam diligentissime investigabam”.’ So men were inclined, and able, to break into Latin when addressing one another.

Latin was also used for the ruder moments. Of two men in close alliance it was written that singuli caccant uno ano or ‘they shit out of the same arse’. There is much talk of ‘worship’, meaning personal honour, and ‘disworship’. Those in authority suggest that they will ‘prove a good lord’ or otherwise to their supplicants. It was a world of gossip, with many ‘flyting words’ passing around London. It was also a world of plots and machinations, of convenient alliances and accidental events, of endless litigation and pleas for patronage.

Domestic aspects of the Paston correspondence suggest that the nature of human life is not greatly changed. Margaret Paston wrote to her husband while pregnant that ‘I pray that you will send me dates and cinnamon as hastily as you may … From your groaning wife.’ In a previous letter she wrote, ‘I pray you be not strange [slow] of writing letters to me between this time and when you come home; if I could, I would have one from you every day.’ ‘Forgive me,’ one man writes, ‘I write to make you laugh.’

Letters often begin with ‘I greet you well’. They generally end with a religious salutation, ‘the Blessed Trinity have you in his holy governance’ or ‘may God keep you and deliver you’.

One of the pleasures of the Paston correspondence, however, lies in the extent to which the life of the day is revealed. The actions of recorded history may be stirring or dispiriting, according to taste, but the busy concourse of human existence can be heard beneath the events recorded by the annalists and the chroniclers. The real life and spirit of the time are held in the innumerable remarks and encounters among the people going about their business in market and in town, in hamlet and in field. Those who pursue the process of living are those who create the history and traditions of the country in a million unacknowledged ways; they form the language of expression, and they preserve the stability of the land.

So in a period of war and domestic turmoil the general economy of the country was growing at a rapid pace. The diminution of population at the time of the Black Death in 1348 meant that there was more land, and more work, for fewer people; this in itself was the context for the relatively new experience of prosperity. It was a commonplace of observation that the English agricultural worker was better fed and housed than the French peasant. A Venetian diplomat remarked in 1497 that England was an underpopulated country but that ‘the riches of England are greater than those of any other country in Europe, as I have been told by the oldest and most experienced merchants, and also as I myself can vouch from what I have seen. This is owing in the first place to the great fertility of the soil which is such that, with the exception of wine, they import nothing from abroad for their subsistence … everyone who makes a tour in this island will soon become aware of this great wealth.’

The parish churches of the period are one of the most visible signs of affluence still to be observed in the English landscape, parish rivalling parish with the extent of its patronage; the screen-work and roof carvings are of the finest quality. It was the great age of the church tower, from Fulham in London to Mawgan-in-Pyder at St Mawgan in Cornwall. The majority of the stone bridges of the country were improved in the fifteenth century; London Bridge itself was rebuilt and widened. In the first half of that century a vogue for building libraries in the cathedrals, and in the colleges of the two universities, can be identified; fine examples can be found at Merton College and at New College in Oxford as well as in the cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Wells, Canterbury and All Saints, Bristol. The divinity school at Oxford began to rise in 1424 and was roofed in 1466.

Schools, almshouses and hospitals were constructed throughout the realm. It was the age of the large and unfortified country residences, where increasingly brick rather than stone was considered the suitable medium. The wall around the town of Hull, constructed in the second half of the fourteenth century, was the first public edifice built entirely of brick. The public institutions of town and city were improved or built anew; between 1411 and 1440, for example, the present Guildhall of London was erected. The Guildhall at York was built in the 1450s. We have already mentioned Henry’s meticulous concern for the building of Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge; the foundation stone of the extraordinary King’s College Chapel was laid by the king in the summer of 1446. Architecture was in the fullest possible sense the expression of the country, as it clothed itself in vestments of stone. It acts as a balance to the historical accounts which almost of necessity chronicle the violence and insecurity of the age. Most of what is now regarded as ‘medieval’ dates from the fifteenth century, and we can say with confidence that it remains physically close to us. The churches and libraries, the guildhalls and bridges, are still in use.

Periods of great economic activity succeeded periods of slump, so that the familiar cycle of overconfidence and anxiety was always in motion; yet what we now call the gross domestic product of the country materially increased. When a ship coming from Dieppe landed at Winchelsea harbour in 1490, it contained satin and pipes of wine, razors and damask, needles and mantles of leopards’ skins, five gross of playing cards and eight gross of plaques stamped with the image of the Lamb of God. A trade in monkeys from Venice, described as ‘apes and japes and marmosets tailed’, flourished. An inventory of the household goods of Sir John Fastolf reveals that he purchased cloth from Zeeland (now part of the Netherlands), silver cups from Paris, coats of mail from Milan, treacle pots from Genoa, cloth from Arras and girdles from Germany. An old rhyme tells the story:

Hops and turkies, carps and beer,

Came into England all in a year.

In fact by the end of the fifteenth century, beer itself was coming out of England. It had once been imported from Prussia, but English merchants were soon carrying beer from London to Flanders.

Economic activity quickened in a variety of different spheres. A small native industry of glass-painting emerged, and carpet manufactories were established at Romsey in Hampshire. Great merchants now rivalled their competitors in Genoa or in Venice. William Cannynges of Bristol possessed, in 1461, ten ships and employed 800 sailors as well as 100 craftsmen. The ships of the merchants were in fact employed as a volunteer force working with the royal navy to patrol the seas and to defend the shores. The cities and towns that engaged in maritime trade, such as Bristol and Southampton, naturally flourished. John Cabot sailed out of Bristol for the New World in 1497, looking for new markets and new trade. The mercantile interest was successful in another sense; the more affluent merchants of the towns were now attending the parliament house, and pressing their demands for the exclusive management of what was not necessarily fair trade.

Iron from the Weald in Kent and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire was much in demand; other wooded areas, where timber was available to create the charcoal for smelting the ore, were fully exploited. In the Forest of Dean alone there were seventy-two forges. All Saints Church in the village of Newland, on the western edge of the forest, has a brass engraving of a miner. His leather breeches are tied below his knee, and he sports a wooden mine-hod over his shoulder in which to carry the iron ore; he holds a mattock or small pickaxe in his right hand, and between his teeth he carries a candle-holder or ‘Nellie’. He would, of course, work and dress as a small farmer when he was not mining. The silver mines of Cornwall and Devon, Dorset and Somerset, were expanded. It was said at the time that ‘the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above’. Productivity increased in the shipyards, the gunsmitheries and the bell foundries.

The reign of wool reached new heights during the rule of Henry VI and of his successor. The annual export of raw wool had declined a little from its peak in the fourteenth century but this was offset by a proportionate increase in the export of woollen cloth. Together they accounted for approximately 80 per cent of the country’s exports. English cloths were taken to the shores of the Black Sea, and were traded at the fair of Novgorod as well as the Rialto in Venice; they went to Denmark and to Prussia. The merchant adventurers, in control of the cloth trade, were exporting approximately 60,000 rolls of cloth each year by the end of the century.

It was a business that engaged a significant part of the nation; the wool was given to village women to comb and to spin before being sent to the weaver; to this day, an unmarried woman is known as a spinster. Once the wool had been woven into cloth it was given to the fuller for dyeing and then passed on to the shearman for finishing. The dominance of wool is the reason why the Lord Chancellor of England, until 2005, always sat upon a woolsack in the House of Lords. The towns that were involved in the cloth trade – notably Colchester – became larger and stronger. The fulling mills of the West Riding and the west of England turned ever faster. Broadcloth came from the Cotswolds and the Stroud Valley. As York and Coventry decayed, so villages like Lavenham in Suffolk with its famous ‘wool church’ thrived.

Wool raw and finished was indeed the motor of the fifteenthcentury English economy, and as a result more and more land was preserved for the breeding of sheep. This in turn led to the enclosing of land for that purpose. Villages were moved or even destroyed to make way for the sheep-runs; the cultivation of grain gave way to rearing. The shepherds lived in wheeled huts that followed the flocks. In the late fifteenth century one Warwickshire antiquary, John Rous, complained in his Historia Regum Angliae of ‘the modern destruction of villages which brings dearth to the commonwealth. The root of this evil is greed … As Christ wept over Jerusalem so do we weep over the destruction of our own times.’ In his own county there are more than a hundred deserted villages, the vast majority of them cleared in the fifteenth century. The rights of freeholders and copyholders were in principle protected, but those who had dwelled on the land by custom could be evicted with impunity. Much of the population moved a few miles, perhaps, and continued working the land. A few were not so fortunate. That rootless phenomenon known then as ‘the sturdy beggar’ is first mentioned in the 1470s.

All things move in restless combination. There is a law of contrast at work in human history, whereby one development provokes a counter-development. Many people suffered from the pace of economic change, but others benefited from it. The successful small farmer was now paying rent for his land as a tenant, rather than performing labour duties; the small freeholder, known as the yeoman, is also more in evidence. The class of villein or serf gave way to the labourer working for a wage. The feudal economy had to a large extent been succeeded by a money economy.

Yet the prosperity of England was by no means evenly shared, and it is important to bear in mind the unimaginable extremes of poverty beside the perceived affluence of certain county towns and regions. The fact that the contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurity of existence more palpable, rendered the people more passionate and more excitable. Theirs was a life more intense, more sensitive, more arduous and more irritable than our own.

33

The divided realm

Signs and portents of civil unrest, according to the native chroniclers, darkened the air of the mid-fifteenth century. A rain of blood fell in different regions, and the holy waters of healing wells overflowed. A huge cock was observed in the waters off Weymouth, ‘coming out of the sea, having a great crest upon his head and a great red beard and legs half a yard [45 centimetres] long’. Many people heard a strange voice rising in the air, between Leicester and Banbury, calling out ‘Bows! Bows!’ A woman in the county of Huntingdon ‘felt the embryo in her womb weeping as it were, and uttering a kind of sobbing noise’ as if it dreaded being born into a time of calamity.

The houses of York and Lancaster were in fact two sides of the same ruling family. The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. They are sometimes described as the third and fourth sons respectively, but this omits one male child who lived for six months. Their closeness, however, bred only enmity and ferocity. Blue blood was often bad blood. It was like a fight breaking out among a small assembly; slowly it spreads, bringing in more and more people. But there is still a vast crowd standing outside the arena of combat, watching silently and incuriously or going about their familiar business.

York and his followers retired to their estates after the recovery of the king from mental incapacity and the return of Somerset to power, but in the spring of 1455 they were summoned to attend a great council at Leicester. York feared that this would be the occasion for his arrest or arraignment, and so he forestalled events by gathering his supporters and marching down towards London. He was joined by the representatives of one of the great families of northern England; York’s brother-in-law was Richard Neville, the earl of Salisbury, and the earl’s son was another Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick. Their inveterate enemies in the north, the family of the Percys, had taken the side of Somerset. So local enmities exacerbated the general conflict. Salisbury and Warwick, who came to be known as ‘Warwick the kingmaker’, proclaimed that they had taken up arms to remove ‘our enemies of approved experience, such as abide and keep themselves under the wing of your Majesty Royal’.

They had at all costs to maintain the fiction that they were not marching against the king but against the king’s councillors; otherwise they would have incurred the charge of high treason. Nevertheless York’s army now faced the king’s army in open battle at St Albans. There had been some attempt at preliminary negotiations, but York feared that Henry was wholly in Somerset’s control and was therefore not to be trusted. So his forces entered the town at ten o’clock in the morning on 22 May 1455, and began a series of rapid raids in its main street and public spaces. They were looking for their enemies. Somerset and Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, had been marked for slaughter. They were tracked down and killed on the spot in a notable if not unique act of savagery. The king himself was wounded in the neck, as he sat beneath his banner in the market square, but he was not seriously injured. Sixty men were killed in the fighting, which lasted for only a couple of hours.

Once their victory was assured, York and the Nevilles submitted to the king. It was reported that they ‘besought him of his Highness to take them as his true liegemen, saying that they never intended to hurt his person’. Henry then ‘took them to grace, and so desired them to cease their people, and that there should no more harm be done’. York then escorted the king back to London, if escort is the appropriate word for an armed entourage, and four days later presented Henry with his crown in St Paul’s Cathedral. It might legitimately have been asked who was in charge. A friend wrote to John Paston, on that day, ‘as for what rule we shall have, yet I know never’. The king’s forces had been defied, and the king himself wounded; the order of the world had been turned upside down, and the governance of the realm placed in utmost peril. Yet who could have known or guessed that the combat of St Albans was the prelude to an internecine war that would continue for thirty years, provoke seven or eight major battles on English soil, and lead to the killing of some eighty nobles of royal blood? It has all the ingredients of a revenge tragedy. ‘By God’s blood,’ one Lancastrian noble screamed at the son of York on a later battlefield, ‘your father killed mine, and so will I do to you and to all your kin!’ We might be back in the days of the Anglo-Saxons, as if the years between had been a dream.

Within a short time after the battle the king had fallen prey to some malady, the nature of which remains unknown. It is easy to conjecture that he had relapsed into the same state of confusion as before, perhaps traumatized by his defeat, but he does not seem to have withdrawn completely from the world. He even managed to open the parliament in the summer of 1455. After a delay of some months York resumed the protectorate but the king, or his wife working in his name, let it be known to his councillors that he wished to be kept informed ‘in all matters as touching his honour, worship and safety’. The royal family were now more wary and defensive; they feared that York aspired to being king in all but name.

York’s most significant task was to defend the southern coast against French incursions and the northern frontier against the Scots; he was also obliged to protect the last remaining English settlement at Calais. So he named his ally, Warwick, as captain of that town. For all these preparations he needed money to be granted by the parliament house. That proved a complicated and arduous task, made infinitely more difficult when in February 1456 the king was brought by the lords to Westminster in order to abrogate the proceedings and effectively to overrule the protector. At that point York, resentful and weary, resigned or was made to resign from his post.

The king was now nominally in command, but the real power lay with his wife. Margaret of Anjou was according to a contemporary ‘a great and strong laboured [strong-minded] woman’ who arranged everything ‘to an intent and conclusion to her power’. She was certainly more masterful than her husband. Her essential purpose was now to safeguard the interests of her infant son and to make sure that he succeeded his ailing father. In this respect, York was still the principal enemy made all the more dangerous by the death of Somerset.

She moved the king and court to the middle of her landed estates around Coventry, with the castle of Kenilworth as her stronghold, thereby setting up a base of power as an alternative to York who remained in London. The citizens had taken up his cause, and the queen did not feel safe among them. The councils of the realm were literally divided, and the course of affairs seemed likely to drift. One contemporary observed that ‘the great princes of the land [pre-eminently York and Warwick] were not called to Council but set apart’.

For the next three or four years there is little mention of the king; he spent much of his time travelling through the midlands, staying at various favoured abbeys or priories. It is said that above all else he enjoyed sleeping. No speeches by the king are reported. He was ‘simple’; he upheld no household, and he prosecuted no war. Little or no attempt was made at governance, apart from the routine business of finance and patronage. Even in these spheres, however, the queen’s wishes and decisions were paramount. The Lancastrian court, and the Yorkist lords, watched each other eagerly and suspiciously; the air was filled with threat.

The court returned to Westminster, in the winter of 1457, accompanied by a force of 13,000 archers; it was widely believed that the king and queen had returned in order to overcome York and to overawe the city. Political life had always been a form of gang warfare, in a scramble for lands and riches. Now it showed its true face. The streets of the city were filled with supporters of the Lancastrians and the Yorkists; the younger relatives of the Lancastrians who had been killed at St Albans had come for vengeance.

Another source of unrest arose in that winter. In the summer of the year a French fleet had landed at Sandwich and devastated the town, a signal example both of the failure of English policy and of English weakness. The merchants of London, in particular, were horrified and outraged at the threat to maritime trade. In such an environment no one could feel safe.

Confronted with the possibility of civil war breaking out in the capital between the supporters of both sides, the principal figures reached a form of compromise in which the relatives of the dead were offered financial compensation for their loss. Money, in England, is always the best policy. This agreement was followed by what was known as a ‘love day’, in which sworn enemies literally joined hands and proceeded to a solemn service in St Paul’s Cathedral. But the love did not last. The royal court showed no favour to York or to the Nevilles, and in the spring of 1459 Henry ordered his loyal nobles to gather at Leicester with ‘as many persons defensibly arrayed as they might according to their degree’. The king was, in other words, calling for the armed retainers of the lords to be put at his disposal. A great council was held in June at Coventry, to which York and his supporters were not invited. At this assembly the renegade lords were denounced for their disloyalty.

York and Warwick now gathered their forces, and marched towards Worcester where they held their own council. Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, was intent upon joining them with 5,000 men. The queen’s army intercepted him, however, on the road from Newcastle-under-Lyme; Salisbury beat off the attack, killing the queen’s commander and scattering what must now be called the enemy. The battle, lasting for more than four hours, claimed the lives of 2,000 men; the battlefield itself became known as ‘Deadmen’s Den’. So it had come to this. The English were fighting and killing the English, the men of Yorkshire against the men of Shropshire, the men of Wiltshire against the men of Cheshire.

Despite Salisbury’s victory, York and his allies were now confronted by a large royal army bearing down upon them. They retreated from Worcester to Ludlow, where they established an armed camp. Yet it was clear enough that York was uneasy about confronting the king in open battle where he could be accused of high treason. A contingent of Warwick’s forces from Calais then deserted and, knowing themselves to be vulnerable, York and the Nevilles fled under cover of darkness; York returned to his old fiefdom, Ireland, while Warwick and Salisbury sailed to Calais. Their lands were seized by the king and they were declared to be traitors. Their cause seemed to have ended ingloriously.

The coastal defences of the country were now strengthened, with the possibility of an attack both from Calais and from Dublin; meanwhile, in the spring of 1460, Warwick sailed to Ireland in order to consult York on the next move. It came in the form of invasion. In the early summer of 1460 Warwick and Salisbury landed at Kent and began a march to the friendly territory of London. The leaders of the capital welcomed them and even offered them money. The Nevilles said that they had come to ‘rescue’ the king from his evil councillors; they professed nothing but goodwill towards Henry himself; they were not rebels, but reformers of the body politic; they wished to lighten taxation and to reduce the king’s debts; they pledged to reform the workings of the law and to lift the manifold oppressions of the king’s courtiers. It was the standard rhetoric of the period, but it was received warmly by the citizens and by the people of south-eastern England. It seems likely, however, that York and Warwick had brooded on the possibility of killing the king together with his wife and son. It should be remembered that these were all vicious and ruthless men.

Warwick remained in the city for only three days before marching north in search of the king’s army. He found it outside Northampton and, before sending his forces into battle, he ordered them to hunt down and kill the king’s entourage; the senior nobility and the knights were not to be spared. The fighting lasted less than an hour, and the victory went to Warwick after the slaughter of the king’s closest companions. Henry himself was taken into custody and once more escorted to London, where he was king only in name. ‘I follow after the lords,’ he is described as saying in a poem of the time. ‘I never know why.’ He was a puppet monarch. Nevertheless the queen and her son, the young Prince Edward, were still at large.

York returned from Ireland ten weeks after the battle, and bore about him all the appurtenances of royalty. He no longer dated his letters according to the years of Henry’s reign, as was the custom, and he bore the arms of England on his banners. He arrived as the parliament in Westminster, summoned by Warwick, was beginning its proceedings; his trumpets sounded as he made his entrance, and a drawn sword was carried before him. He then made his way towards the vacant throne and put his hand upon it as if to claim possession; this unexpected and unlawful act was greeted with surprise and dismay by the lords assembled. It looked as if York had miscalculated his popularity, and underestimated their residual loyalty to their rightful king.

He demanded to be installed as the monarch. When asked to make a courteous visit to Henry he replied that ‘I know of no person in the realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him.’ The king himself was too frightened to encounter York. The lords demurred at York’s demand, and passed the question to the judges; the judges in turn refused to meddle in such ‘high matters’ and passed the problem back to the lords. The question was ‘above the law and past their learning’. In any case no man wished to perjure his oath of loyalty to the anointed sovereign. In his incapacity Henry had become the emblem of his age; the senior members of the realm were struck by indecision. Emptiness ruled at the heart of government.

Eventually the lords, in English fashion, proposed a compromise. Henry would retain the crown but, on his death or at the time of his willing abdication, York and his heirs should succeed him. Since York was ten years older than Henry, the lords were playing a game of wait and see. When the king accepted this proposal he was effectively disinheriting his son, and stripping him of his rightful inheritance. But he was in no position, and perhaps in no condition, to remonstrate on the matter. The feelings of Queen Margaret on the issue of succession are hardly in doubt; but for the moment she was on the run. She retreated with her son to Wales, but then fled to Scotland; she left her forces under the command of the earl of Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, half-brother to the king. So the Tudors properly enter English history. Jasper Tudor was the fruit of an unlikely marriage when Katherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, became the wife of a junior courtier by the name of Owen Tudor. The older Tudor had joined his son on behalf of the queen. No one, however, could possibly have imagined the ultimate success of his family line.

By the end of 1460 the queen reappeared in the north of England, having persuaded the great lords of that region to support her against the Londoners and the south-easterners. She mustered some 10,000 armed retainers, as York and Salisbury marched north to meet them. Battle was joined outside Wakefield, in the course of which both York and Salisbury were despatched; it was for the Lancastrians some recompense for the slaughter at St Albans and Northampton. The head of York was wreathed in a paper crown, and placed on the southern gate of the city of York known as Micklegate Bar. It bore a sign saying ‘Let York overlook the town of York.’

So it seemed thatMargaret of Anjou had won, with the benefits flowing to her son as well as to a weak and feeble king; but Henry himself remained in London, in the control and at the mercy of Warwick. That magnate had not marched north with his allies, but had remained behind to protect what was now a Yorkist administration at Westminster. According to the agreement reached by the lords between the king and York, the heir to the throne had now become York’s son, Edward of March. Two young Edwards, Prince Edward at the age of seven and Edward of March at the age of eighteen, were now pitted against one another.

Edward of March had in fact already taken to the field in defence of the Yorkist inheritance. He marched at the head of his army, with the aim of preventing the Welsh forces led by Jasper Tudor from aligning with the main body of Lancastrian troops in the north. At the beginning of February 1461 he encountered the Tudors in Herefordshire, at a place known as Mortimer’s Cross. Before battle was joined the unusual appearance of a parhelion or sun dog became visible in the air, where by means of small ice crystals a second sun seems to appear beside the first. The soldiers on the earth knew nothing of ice crystals, of course, but the manifestation of two suns suggested some great change in the direction of the world. Two sons were, after all, in conflict. And there were about to be two kings of England.

The victory was won by Edward of March; Jasper Tudor fled, but his father was not so fortunate. Owen Tudor was taken to the block where he was heard to murmur that ‘the head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on the lap of Queen Katherine’, the widow of Henry V whom he had married. His head was carried from the scaffold and placed on the market cross of the local town. It was here that a madwoman combed his hair and washed the blood from his face.

Margaret was already marching towards London, emboldened by the death of York; the Tudors were unable to join her, of course, but still she moved steadily to the south. All the while she allowed her troops to pillage and plunder the lands of her Yorkist enemies through which they passed. Warwick mustered his army in London to prevent her from entering the capital, where most of his power and resources lay; he took the king with him, as a form of insurance. He must also have hoped that Margaret would not attack an army that effectively held her husband hostage.

His hopes were misjudged, however. On 17 February 1461, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met once more at St Albans, but on this occasion the Lancastrians were successful. The king was rescued; he had been placed for safekeeping a mile away, where it was said that he laughed and sang beneath a tree. Many of the leading Yorkist nobles were slaughtered. Warwick fled the scene with a handful of companions.

It is reported that Henry was overjoyed to see his immediate family once more and, in his excitement, he knighted his young son. The seven-year-old boy in turn knighted some thirty of his followers. Margaret, with the king in her possession, now stood close to the gates of London. It was reported in the chronicles that ‘the shops keep closed, and nothing is done either by the tradesmen or by the merchants. Men do not stand in the streets or venture far from home’. They had heard the news of the devastation wreaked by Margaret’s troops in the north of England. John Paston wrote to his father that they ‘are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief’.

On hearing the news of Margaret’s advance, Edward of March – who was now after his father’s death the duke of York – left the site of his victory by the Welsh border and took his forces east to intercept her; he met Warwick in Oxfordshire, close to the Cotswolds, and together they moved towards London. Their purpose now was to occupy the city and to declare Edward to be the lawful king. The citizens were disposed to accept them, and the gates were shut against Margaret of Anjou.

When Edward arrived, he was greeted by the Londoners; the streets were crowded with his supporters and he took the crown almost by acclamation. His right to the title was proclaimed, at St Paul’s Cross and elsewhere, while Henry VI was declared to have forfeited the throne by reneging on his agreement to make York his heir. On 4 March Edward entered St Paul’s Cathedral, and then proceeded in state towards Westminster where he was crowned as Edward IV. All those present did homage to him, as he held the sceptre of Edward the Confessor. They chanted the refrain:

Verus Vox, Rex Edwardus

Rectus Rex, Rex Edwardus.

He was the true voice and the rightful king. He was nineteen years old and, at a height of 6 feet and 4 inches (1.9 metres), a commanding figure. He was every inch a proper king. The ambassador from Burgundy said that ‘I cannot remember ever having seen a finer looking man’.

Yet Henry VI could still be construed to be the anointed sovereign; he was not dead, and he had not abdicated. So effectively two kings of England reigned. Two suns were visible in the sky. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, put it perhaps more vividly in The Holy State and The Profane State where he remarked that ‘they lived in a troublesome world, wherein the cards were so shuffled that two kings were turned up trumps at once, which amazed men how to play their games’.

Edward took steps to resolve this unsatisfactory situation by going in pursuit of Margaret and of Henry. On 29 March the two armies met at Towton in Yorkshire, the royal family having taken the precaution of returning to York to await developments. They were right to do so. Edward won a signal victory on the battlefield; the conflict, held in a snowstorm, is thought to have involved some 50,000 soldiers of whom approximately a quarter perished. Much of the Lancastrian nobility were destroyed. Henry and Margaret, together with their son, escaped into Scotland. The old king, if we may call him that, was to remain at liberty for another four years as an emblem of the surviving Lancastrian claim to the throne. Only the first part of the Wars of the Roses was over.

34

The world at play

Many miniature jugs have been found in the soil of medieval dwellings; they have been interpreted as toys for children. The son of Edward I was given a miniature cart as well as the little model of a plough. From an excavation in London was removed a toy bird, made out of lead and tin; in its original state it would have rocked on a horizontal rod, at the same time as its tongue would appear and reappear from an open beak. Miniature faces were made out of tin, with large ears and eyes and spiked hair. For the very young, rattles were made. Glove puppets were common. Dolls of wood or of cloth were known as ‘poppets’. Tops were called ‘scopperils’ or things that jump about. Hobby-horses were small wooden horses. So the children played as they have always done. But the call of the world was not far distant. The boys were trained in wrestling and in shooting with bow and arrow. They were taught how to imitate the calls of birds, and how to tell the time from the shadows cast by the sun. The girls were trained in weaving, in sewing and in laundering.

Childhood did not last for very long. In the time of the Saxons the age of adult responsibility was twelve at which point the boy or girl could be set to proper full-time work, in the fields of the country or in the streets and markets of the town. In later centuries a boy was criminally liable from the age of seven and could make his will at the age of fourteen.

The more fortunate were granted an education. Some children were given to the monks at a very young age, and were never seen again in secular clothing. The child’s hair was shaved from the round area of the scalp, so that he already resembled a monk. His cloak was taken from him at a special Mass as the abbot declared ‘May the Lord strip you of the old man.’ The boy was then given a monk’s cowl with the words ‘May the Lord clothe you with the new man.’ One elderly monk recalled how in 1080, at the age of five, he began school in the town of Shrewsbury where ‘Siward, an illustrious priest, taught me my letters for five years, and instructed me in psalms and hymns and other necessary knowledge’. A long tradition of clerkly learning already existed.

From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, in fact, the cloister schools of the monasteries provided the principal means of education; the lessons included those of grammar, rhetoric and natural science. The art of singing was also taught. They are not dead institutions. The school of St Albans, established in the tenth century, is still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The grammar school of Ely, now known as the King’s School, also has an Anglo-Saxon origin; one of its boarding houses is reputed to be the oldest residential building in Europe. The present grammar school of Norwich was instituted in the eleventh century. Many other examples can be found.

It was widely believed that priests should also be schoolmasters, and a church decree of 1200 declared that ‘priests shall keep schools in the towns and teach the little boys free of charge. Priests ought to hold schools in their houses … They ought not to expect anything from the relatives of the boys except what they are willing to give’. Such schools remained in use throughout the period of this book.

In the twelfth century a number of larger schools also emerged, as part of what has been called the ‘renaissance’ of that century in humane learning; they grew up beside the cathedrals, or beside the houses of canons, or in the towns reliant upon great monasteries. Their influence and reputation spread, and between 1363 and 1400 twenty-four new schools were founded. They became known as the grammar schools, despite the fact that grammar was not the only subject; the art of letter-writing was the subject of study, as well as the disciplines of record-keeping and commercial accounting. ‘Business studies’ began in the medieval period.

A fortunate male child received his education at the court of the king or the nobles. If a superior spoke to him, he was trained to take off his hat and to look steadfastly in that person’s face without moving his hands or feet. He was taught to put his hand in front of his mouth before spitting. He was not to scratch his head and was to ensure that his hands and nails were always clean.

Other forms of education were also available. An apprentice was chosen between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and entered a formal bond by which he agreed to spend between seven and ten years with his master while learning the ‘secrets’ of his chosen trade. It was by far the most common way of fully entering the adult world, although of course it had its risks. It was not unknown for masters to treat apprentices very roughly, or for apprentices to absent themselves without leave. Apprentices also had a reputation for being unruly and even violent; one of their favourite games, when they found themselves in a group, was known as ‘breaking doors with our heads’.

By the middle of the twelfth century Oxford had become well known as a seat of learning and of scholarship. At the very beginning of that century Theobald of Etampes was calling himself ‘magister Oxenefordiae’. It was the one place in England ‘where the clergy had flourished most’, according to Gerald of Wales who in 1187 gave a public dissertation there on the topography of Ireland. By that date more than twenty teachers of arts, and ten teachers of canon law and theology, are listed; it was reported in 1192 that the town was so filled with clerks that the authorities of Oxford did not know how to support them. A deed for the transference of property in Cat Street, around 1200, attests the presence of a bookbinder, a scrivener, three illuminators and two parchment-makers; so the ancillary trades of learning were already in large supply.

Yet it was crime, rather than scholarship, that effectively formed the university. In 1209 a student killed a woman of the town and then fled. In retaliation the authorities of Oxford arrested the student’s room companions and hanged them. All the teachers and students of Oxford left the schools, in disgust, and dispersed to other places of learning. A substantial number of them migrated to Cambridge, where the second English university was then established.

When the teachers of Oxford were persuaded to return in 1214 they insisted upon an official document to regulate the relationships between what at a later date would be called town and gown. That document, expressing the intention of electing a chancellor, became the source of the university’s corporate authority. Cambridge followed the same principle as Oxford and its first chancellor is recorded in 1225. Scholastic communities also existed at Northampton and Salisbury, but eventually they withered on the vine; otherwise those two old towns might also have hosted great universities.

The universities had no public buildings, and the lectures were delivered in churches or in rooms hired for the purpose. The students lived in lodgings and inns. A Master of Arts could hire a large tenement, and advertise for scholars; he had created a ‘hall’ in which his pupils would live and learn. Tackley Inn, Ing Hall, Lyon Hall, White Hall and Cuthbert Hall were premises in which grammar was taught. Each of the halls specialized in a particular discipline or set of disciplines, but they were essentially unregulated. They could be riotous.

The colleges of Oxford were first erected for the poorer students. Balliol College, for example, was endowed as a home for poor scholars by 1266. The founders of the colleges were the most prominent ecclesiastics and nobles, particularly of royal blood; it was considered to be a religious duty, and the members of the college were pledged to sing innumerable Masses for the souls of their patrons. The fundamental intent of the college was to create learned clergy, and it was thus an adjunct of the Church in every sense. The fellows of Queen’s College in Oxford wore purple robes as a memorial to the spilled blood of Christ. Teachers very gradually moved to the more regularized life of these institutions, which by the fifteenth century had become individual houses of learning.

The students themselves were classified as ‘northern’ or ‘southern’, with the river Nene (it rises in Northamptonshire, and runs for 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk) being nominated as the boundary; the northern and southern contingents were often fiercely tribal, and the most trivial incident in a tavern or lodging house could provoke mass attacks one upon the other. Even the masters participated. A serious confrontation between southern and northern masters at Cambridge, in 1290, led to a general migration to the school of Northampton. The country was still in a sense divided into ancient kingdoms.

In 1389 some Oxford scholars from northern England fell upon their Welsh counterparts, shooting at them in the lanes and streets of the town; they called out ‘War, war, slay, slay, slay the Welsh dogs and their whelps.’ They killed some, and wounded others; then they dragged the rest to the gates. Before they ejected them they pissed on them and forced them ‘to kiss the place on which they had pissed’. The chronicler adds that ‘while the said Welshmen stooped to kiss it, they would knock their heads against the gates in an inhuman manner’.

Violent struggles also took place between the students and the townspeople. A skirmish at Swyndlestock Tavern, in the centre of Oxford, led to a bloody affray in 1354. The landlord’s friends rang the bell of the church of St Martin, the signal to alert the people of the town. A crowd gathered and assaulted the scholars with various weapons, whereupon the chancellor of the university rang the rival bell of the university church of St Mary. The scholars, alerted, seized their bows and arrows; a pitched battle between the two factions lasted until night fell. On the following day the townspeople sent eighty armed men into the parish of St Giles, where many of the scholars lodged; they shot and killed some of them, when once again the university bell was rung and a large assembly of Oxford pupils set upon the townspeople with their bows and arrows. But they were outnumbered. 2,000 people of the town advanced behind a black flag, crying out ‘Slay! Slay!’or ‘Havoc! Havoc!’ or ‘Smite hard, give good knocks!’ These were the war cries of the medieval period. A general carnage ensued, with many deaths. All the scholars of Oxford seem to have fled, leaving the university empty for a while.

Less violent diversions can also be cited. An inspection of the pupils of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the very early years of the sixteenth century, revealed that ‘Stokes was unchaste with the wife of a tailor … Stokysley baptised a cat and practised witchcraft … Gregory climbed the great gate by the tower and brought a Stranger into College … Pots and cups are very seldom washed but are kept in such a dirty state that one shudders to drink out of them … Kyftyll played cards with the butler at Christmas time for money.’ Other students were accused of keeping as pets a ferret, a sparrow-hawk and a weasel.

It is perhaps not surprising that, in a society of very young men, casual and sporadic violence was common. The students entered the university at an age between fourteen and seventeen, where they embarked upon a course of study that lasted for seven years. Grammar, rhetoric and dialectic were taught in the first three years; these disciplines were followed by arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry. The students attended lectures and tutorials, but they also disputed among themselves in formal debates. Disputation was an important aspect of medieval life in every sphere. The examinations themselves were entirely oral and were prolonged for four days. The successful candidate would then be given the title of Master of Arts. The more learned moved on to the study of theology; that pursuit took another sixteen or seventeen years, more or less consigning its devotees to an academic life.

The learning promulgated in Oxford and Cambridge was not all of a scholastic kind. More informal schools, established in the two towns to take advantage of their general reputation, taught lessons in conveyancing, accountancy and commercial law; these were frequented by the sons of the greater farmers and landowners, and by the administrators of such estates, to keep abreast of the ever more complex world of property ownership and property speculation. A great enthusiasm for knowledge of a practical nature can be observed in this period.

The appetite for education was in any case instinctive, the natural child of emulation and ambition in an expanding world. By the beginning of the thirteenth century every town had its own school.

I would my master were an hare,

And all his books were hounds,

And I myself a jolly hunter:

To blow my horn I would not spare!

If he were dead, I would not care.

So wrote the author of a fifteenthcentury poem, ‘The Birched Schoolboy’. The schoolmaster sat on a large chair, often with a book in his lap, while the boys were grouped on simple benches around him. He would dictate the rules of Latin grammar, for example, while the boys would scribble them on wax tablets or chant them in unison. Schooling began at six in the morning and, with appropriate breaks, concluded at six in the evening. Another verse describes the life of the boy out of the schoolroom. When he was young, John Lydgate

Ran into gardens, apples there I stole,

To gather fruits I spared not hedge nor wall,

To pluck grapes from other men’s vines

I was more ready than to say my matins,

My lust was to scorn folk and jape,

To scoff and mock like a wanton ape.

In a world of much casual and spontaneous violence the beating of children was customary and familiar. Agnes Paston beat her daughter, Elizabeth, ‘once in a week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places’. Elizabeth herself was twenty years old at the time. Agnes Paston also ordered her son’s schoolmaster to ‘truly belash him’ if he was disobedient. The sentiment would be expected from a loving mother. It was advised that a child should be beaten until he or she admitted guilt and cried for mercy. But childhood was not simply a world of whips and blows. Many educational manuals espoused the cause of gentleness mixed with firmness; excessive punishment was generally denounced.

Thomas More, who was born in 1478, believed that three out of every five of the English people could read; that might be an overestimate, and he might only have been considering the men and women of London, but it is testimony to the growing literacy of the country. The development of the unfamiliar medium of printing, in the latter decades of the fifteenth century, created a new audience with new skills. This was the age in which the poster and the handbill came into use and in which some of the larger towns had libraries. The Guildhall Library, established in 1423, exists still. Four new grammar schools were established in London in the space of one year. In the last decades of the fifteenth century free schools were endowed at Hull, Rotherham, Stockport, Macclesfield and Manchester.

Schoolboys were not allowed to dice or to use bows and arrows on the premises; they were, however, given time and opportunity to engage in the more suitable sport of cock-fighting. ‘Wehee!’ was the cry of liberation from the schoolroom. It was an age of ‘leaping about’, of running and of wrestling. Birds were snared or brought down with sling and stone. Bede recalls that in his youth he had engaged in a primitive form of horse-racing.

The medieval schoolboy played croquet, football, skittles, marbles. Tennis was played against a wall rather than across a net, with the palm of the hand rather than a racket; rackets were not introduced until the end of the fifteenth century. ‘Cambuc’ was a form of golf, with a curved stick known as a ‘bandy’. Skating, with skates made out of bone, was popular. A game known as ‘tables’ resembled backgammon. Chess was common and there were circular chessboards; stray chess pieces have been excavated from medieval dwellings. Card games were not introduced until the middle of the fifteenth century. Bowmanship was important; in ‘penny-prick’ an arrow was fired at a hanging penny coin. Dice were very frequent. ‘You shall have a throw,’ one schoolboy tells another in a schoolbook of the 1420s, ‘for a button of your wristlet.’ Play is as old, and as ever renewed, as the world.

35

The lion and the lamb

The new king, Edward IV, was according to Thomas More ‘a goodly personage, and very princely to behold … of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and cleanly made’. A contemporary chronicler, Dominic Mancini, writing just after Edward’s death, gave a more ambiguous account. ‘Edward was of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect; nevertheless should he assume an angry countenance he could appear very terrible to beholders.’ Of course it was one of the duties of a king to appear very terrible, especially one who had succeeded Henry VI; the previous king had been more lamb than lion. Mancini went on to report that ‘he was easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable. Frequently he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought that they had come with the intent of addressing or beholding him more closely.’ Come, he might have said. Look at me. Yes. I am your king. ‘He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity … of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers.’ He had a voracious appetite and, like many gourmands, he often vomited in order that he might eat again. In time this affected his girth; More commented that in his later years he became ‘somewhat corpulent and boorly, and nevertheless not uncomely’.

In his youth his pride was touched with vanity, and like many previous monarchs he indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspects of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6. He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and in green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance. They were talismans as well as jewels. The amethyst gave hardiness and manhood; the sapphire kept the limbs of the body whole; if poison or venom were brought into the presence of the ruby it became moist and began to sweat. Edward possessed a toothpick made of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl.

It was not just a matter of personal aggrandizement, although of course that played a large part in the acquisition of wealth. One of the purposes of becoming king was to become the richest person in the land. But it was also a way of asserting the wealth and status of the kingdom; it was a display of national power. So self-love, and self-aggrandizement, can be construed as devotion to duty.

Of course that kingdom was still divided or, at the least, unstable. The survival of Henry and his son was a serious embarrassment to the new monarchy, especially since the Lancastrian dynasty had many loyal followers in the west as well as the midlands of the country. Edward had no power at all in the far north, where the old king was just over the border in Scotland. The largest part of Wales supported Henry, who also commanded more supporters among the magnates of the country. Thirty-seven noble families had fought for him and with him; only three of those went over to Edward’s side.

So the new king had to shore up his defences, as far as that was possible, partly in order to prevent the French from taking advantage of any internal confusion. He brought many previous Lancastrian supporters under the cover of his good lordship, principally by granting them territory; he was forced to trust, and to favour, those who had offended against him. Where the Lancastrians could not be reconciled, they were arrested or eliminated. The earl of Oxford and his son, for example, were beheaded at Tower Hill on charges of treason.

A commission of judges proceeded through twentyfive shires and eight cities in order to pursue political malcontents. No great set-piece battles were being fought but, in the first two years of his reign, there was probably more fighting than in any other period of the war; in 1461 he took under his control the estates of 113 enemies. This was the territory granted to his supporters. In that year he also created seven new barons.

The king then found it convenient to create a foreign crisis; it helped him to raise money for his own purposes and to unite his subjects in common enmity. In the spring of 1462 he claimed that the new king of France, Louis XI, was set to destroy ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English of this our said realm’. Edward can be considered the first English king who eschewed France altogether; he had no French possessions to defend, other than the garrison town of Calais, and was truly king of England only.

In the following year the exchequer was asked to provide the requisite funds to raise an army and a fleet against his manifold enemies at home and abroad. It was supposed that the king would march against the Lancastrian supporters in Northumberland and elsewhere, or that he would invade Scotland; in the event, none of this came to pass. He did not lead his troops into battle. ‘What a wretched outcome,’ one fifteenthcentury chronicler reported, ‘shame and confusion!’ Yet it would be wrong to consider Edward as an inactive king. He arranged truces both with France and with Scotland. He took his court to York, and from there he supervised the slow domination of the northern shires.

From the beginning Edward proved himself to be a strong king; he was an expert administrator and had concluded that the survival of his throne depended upon financial and political stability. In an age of personal kingship this was necessarily a very heavy burden on the monarch, whose presence was required everywhere and whose authority had to be imposed directly. He kept a close scrutiny on commerce and on his customs revenues; he summoned members of the London guilds in order to guide or harangue them. Thousands of petitions were delivered to him every year. It was said that he knew ‘the names and estates’ of nearly all the people ‘dispersed throughout the shires of this kingdom’, even those of mere gentlemen. A king who had won his throne by force could not be aloof or detached; he had to remain at the centre of human affairs. He needed goodwill as well as obedience. That is why Dominic Mancini described him as being ‘easy of access’. It has been said that Edward began the movement towards the ‘centralized monarchy’ that characterized the Tudor period; but in truth he had little choice in the matter. It was not a bureaucratic or administrative decision; it was personal instinct.

He had an interest in the administration of justice, too, and in the first fifteen years of his reign he travelled all over the kingdom for his judicial visitations. In the first five months of 1464, for example, he attended the courts at Coventry and Worcester, Gloucester and Cambridge and Maidstone. Several reasons can be adduced for this activity. Pre-eminent among them was his effort to check or punish violence between the noble families; he had a personal interest in preventing riot or disorder that might threaten the security of the various counties. He intervened in a struggle between the Greys and the Vernons of Derbyshire, for example, and closely interviewed the retainers of both sides. He made much use of the commission known as ‘oyer et terminer’, designed to hear and determine felonies or misdemeanours in an expeditious manner. It was composed of his own men, from the household or from the court, and of local magnates who could not be easily coerced.

The commissioners were not always successful, however, in summoning witnesses. The senior knights of Herefordshire confessed to them that ‘they dare not present nor say the truth of the defaults before rehearsed, for dread of murdering, and to be mischieved in their own houses, considering the great number of the said misdoers …’. In the early years of Edward’s reign, when the final outcome of the struggle between the Yorkists and Lancastrians was still in doubt, private violence had by no means abated.

The king’s own legal practice, however, was far from perfect. He regularly interfered with the process of the courts to ensure favourable judgments in the interests of his most powerful supporters. He never prosecuted the retainers of those men upon whose loyalty he relied. This was of course not an unusual procedure for any king, whose rule relied more upon realpolitik than any judicial principle. Edward also had a vested interest in efficient or at least swift justice, since the revenues of the courts greatly augmented his income.

Another aspect of his character can be noted. One contemporary chronicler remarked that he had a liking for ‘convivial company, vanity, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyment’. These do not seem to be mortal offences in any king but, rather, the proper setting for the projection of authority and sovereignty. In the next sentence, after all, the chronicler goes on to praise the king’s acute memory and attention to detail. Yet Edward made one decision in his private affairs that had more serious consequences. In the spring of 1464 he secretly united himself with a commoner in a marriage that emphasized his passion rather than his judgment. Elizabeth Woodville was a widow with two children; and, unlike most royal brides, she was English. She was not altogether common, however, since her father was a knight and her mother a widowed duchess. It was reported that, having decided that she would be a queen rather than a royal mistress, she had resisted the king’s advances. Edward was known to be libidinous and to have had many sexual liaisons, but it seems that Elizabeth was the first to have refused him. A rumour spread through the courts of Europe that in desperation he had even put a knife against her throat. Yet she held out, to her ultimate satisfaction.

The king’s choice was a cause of some dismay to those who believed that a king should only marry someone of royal blood. The fact that he married her in secret, slipping away from his courtiers on the first day of May 1464 with the pretence of going hunting, suggests that he himself knew that he had married beneath his rank. It was also believed preferable to marry a virgin. A newsletter from Bruges in the autumn of 1464 observed that ‘the greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied at this and, for the sake of finding means to annul it, all the nobles are holding great consultations in the town of Reading where the king is’. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, had already begun negotiations with the French king on the matter of Edward’s marriage to Louis XI’s sister-in-law. Those plans were now in disarray. The ‘consultations’ of the lords, however, were meaningless. As a friend of Warwick remarked, ‘we must be patient despite ourselves’. On 29 September 1464, Warwick and the duke of Clarence, the king’s younger brother, escorted Elizabeth Woodville into the chapel of Reading Abbey where she was honoured by the assembled company as their lawful queen.

In the following summer Henry VI was captured; since the defeat at Towton he had retreated to Scotland and to the various loyalist castles of northern England. He was effectively a king in hiding, and such was his invisibility that Edward was not sure in which county he was being concealed. Margaret, in the meantime, had taken refuge on her father’s lands in Anjou. The old king was seen at a dinner given by his supporters in Ribblesdale; he fled the area, but was betrayed by a monk. He was eventually caught in a wood known as Clitherwood, just on the border of Lancashire, and taken back to London on horseback with his legs tied to the stirrups; it is reported that he wore a straw hat, and was pelted with rubbish by some abusive citizens. He remained in the Tower for the next five years, with a small party of courtiers enlisted to serve the prisoner known only as Henry of Windsor.

The new queen’s family, the Woodvilles, were in the ascendant at court and might be seen to threaten the position of Warwick and the other Nevilles. The king also arranged a series of marriages between Elizabeth’s immediate relatives and various available aristocrats; since she had five brothers and seven sisters, this diminished the prospect of further patronage for many more distinguished families. Her younger brother, for example, was married off at the age of twenty to the sixty-five-year-old duchess of Norfolk; the duchess was a wealthy widow who had already buried three husbands, but she also happened to be the aunt of Warwick himself. Warwick’s feelings at what was described at the time as a ‘maritagium diabolicum’ are not recorded. He would have been justified in thinking, in the language of the time, that the honour of his family had been disparaged and that his elderly relative had been made to look ridiculous. In fact the old lady outlived her young spouse, who ended on the scaffold. Louis XI disclosed the fact that he had received a letter expressing Warwick’s dismay at Edward’s behaviour; he hinted that Warwick might even try to supplant his sovereign, but all is lost in a mist of diplomatic surmise and posturing. The French king was not known for nothing as ‘the spider king’.

A more tangible source of discord can be found in the foreign affairs of the nation. Warwick wished above all else for an alliance with France, while Edward favoured an accommodation with Burgundy and Brittany. Various strands of policy were involved. Warwick was receiving many favours from Louis XI, while the Woodvilles were related to the noble families of Burgundy. Burgundy was also the largest market for English cloth, and thus the principal trade partner of the English merchants. In any case the French were the ancient enemy who at this time were harbouring ambassadors from Margaret of Anjou.

In 1467 a commercial treaty was signed between England and Burgundy, swiftly followed by a peace accord and by the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to the duke of Burgundy. In his defeat and disappointment Warwick retired to his estates in Yorkshire, where it was rumoured that he had begun conspiring against his sovereign; it was said that he had been able to suborn the duke of Clarence in a plot against the throne. A French chronicler, Jean de Waurin, reported that Warwick promised Clarence that he would give him his brother’s crown. The old allies had fallen out.

Other rumours were circulating in the spring and autumn of 1467. The most astonishing of them was that the two inveterate enemies, Warwick and Margaret of Anjou, would enter an alliance and would invade England with the purpose of destroying Edward IV. It is not clear who proposed the bargain, but many observers suspected that the French king would do anything to stir up unrest and riot in the enemy country. Warwick and his kinsmen still attended the English court, however, and appeared to be on amicable terms with the king himself.

The break came in the summer of 1469. In June a rebellion in the northern shires was fomented by ‘Robin of Redesdale’ alias ‘Robin Mend-All’ alias Sir John Conyers who was a cousin of Warwick himself; it was in part a popular rebellion, inspired by those who were discontented with Edward’s rule. The king was on pilgrimage to Walsingham, but on hearing news of the gathering insurrection he broke off his pious journey and marched with his retainers to Nottingham. He was hearing rumours from all sides of the treacherous designs both of Warwick and of his own younger brother; it was also reported that Warwick’s brother, George Neville, the archbishop of York, was part of the insurrection. In a defiant spirit he wrote to the three of them, demanding their unconditional loyalty to confirm the fact they were not ‘of any such disposition towards us, as the rumour here runneth’.

No such news reached the king. He was informed instead that the duke of Clarence was about to marry Warwick’s daughter, despite the fact that he had already forbidden the union, and that the parties concerned were sailing to Calais for the ceremony. It was a clear act of defiance and disobedience.

From Calais, Warwick and his associates then issued a proclamation in which they took the part of the northern rebels against a king who was being governed by ‘the deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seducious persons’; the last adjective suggests a modern mingling of seductive and seditious. These suspect persons were of course the Woodvilles, who had already been asked by the king to return to their home territories for safekeeping. Warwick invited his supporters to meet him at Canterbury on 16 July. It is possible that he intended to declare Edward illegitimate and to replace him with Clarence. This was not a struggle between Yorkists and Lancastrians, but between two factions of Yorkists.

Warwick and his newly aggrandized forces crossed the Channel and marched upon London, where Warwick himself was very popular; then they made their way towards Coventry, where they determined to join the men in league with Robin Mend-All. The king’s army came up to challenge them, but a sudden attack by the rebels forced them to disperse. Some of the commanders of the king’s army were taken on Warwick’s orders, and in a gratuitous act of injustice he beheaded them on the following day.

Edward himself was by this time on the road to meet his army, and did not learn of its defeat until it was too late to turn back. His men promptly deserted him. This is the best to be made out of a confused narrative. He decided to turn back to London, accompanied by a small retinue, when he was surprised by the forces of the archbishop of York. The king was taken, with all due courtesies, and promptly confined to Warwick Castle. Two of the most prominent members of the Woodville family, the father and younger brother of the queen, were captured and beheaded on Warwick’s order. He now controlled both the country and the king.

He could do nothing with either of them. The earl was in practice the ruler of the country, but he lacked legitimacy and moral authority. He could hardly rule on the king’s behalf if he kept the king confined to a castle. Edward’s council seems grudgingly to have accepted Warwick’s direction, but the hiatus in national affairs provoked outbreaks of local violence and rebellion. Once more the great families of the realm could attack one another with impunity. Only one remedy offered itself. The king had to be released from custody and allowed to resume his sovereignty. So Edward IV returned to be met by a contrite earl, archbishop and younger brother who pleaded that they had acted only in the interests of the realm. Edward and his supporters then processed towards London, where they were met by the mayor and aldermen in their scarlet regalia. ‘The king himself’, John Paston wrote, ‘has good language of the Lords of Clarence, of Warwick, and of my Lords of York and Oxford, saying they be his best friends.’ But he added that ‘his household men have other language’. His household, in other words, were inclined towards revenge.

Yet the king realized that the stability of the realm had to be regained at all costs. According to the chronicler Polydore Vergil ‘he regarded nothing more than to win again the friendship of such noblemen as were now alienated from him …’. He invited Clarence and Warwick to join the sessions of a great council that was called to arrange ‘peace and entire oblivion of all grievances upon both sides’. He also allowed his four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, to be betrothed to Warwick’s nephew. Warwick had of course only recently murdered the young girl’s maternal grandfather and uncle. The politics of power are always realistic.

Nevertheless the earl had been dealt a grievous blow; it had been proved that he could not wield authority without the presence of the king. In the spring of 1470 he was once again implicated in armed rebellion. The revolt came from Lincolnshire where certain families, afraid of the king’s justice or offended by the king’s depredations, rose up with the intention of giving the crown to Clarence. When Edward took the field against them they cried out ‘A Clarence! A Clarence!’ and ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ It was all the evidence the king required. His army defeated the Lincolnshire men with ease, and the site of the battle became known as ‘Lose Coat Field’ for the number of clothes bearing the livery of Warwick or of Clarence that the soldiers discarded in their flight. After his overwhelming victory, his two opponents fled to the safety of the court of Louis XI in France. Some of their collaborators were not so fortunate. One of Warwick’s ships was seized at Southampton, where the gentlemen and yeomen on board were beheaded. A sharp stake was then driven through their posteriors, and their heads were impaled on top.

Warwick and Clarence were now joined by Margaret of Anjou. She, too, had left her familial lands and arrived at the court of the French king. Louis had three birds in his hand, but Margaret and Warwick had been fierce enemies for a long time. The king now entered into protracted negotiations in order to reconcile her to the man who had been ‘the greatest causer of the fall of Henry, of her, and of her son’. He spent every day in long discussions with her until eventually she deferred to him. Margaret now agreed to conspire with her once inveterate enemies and to overthrow Edward IV. Her husband, still in the Tower, would regain the throne; her son Edward, prince of Wales, would marry another of Warwick’s daughters and thus become brother-in-law to Clarence. The families of York and Lancaster would therefore be finally united. The young couple were betrothed in Angers Cathedral.

Warwick and his new ally now began preparations for the great invasion of England. Edward kept his eyes upon the coasts but, in the summer of 1470, he was distracted by news of further rebellions in the north inspired by Warwick’s cause; he was obliged to march to York and Ripon. He could not be sure where Warwick’s fleet might land – anywhere from Wales to Northumberland – and he took a calculated risk in going northward. While he lingered in York, having successfully overcome the incipient rebellion, the news came in the middle of September that Warwick and Clarence had landed at Exmouth in Devon from where at once they began their march towards him. The king was in hostile country in any case, and it became increasingly clear that Warwick was acquiring supporters as he moved forward.

The public records of Coventry reveal that Clarence and Warwick ‘drew to them much people’ and that ‘they were thirty thousand’ by the time they reached the city. Edward had left York for Nottingham, but he was still in desperate circumstances. He had ‘sent for lords and all other men’, but to his dismay ‘there came so little people to him that he was not able to make a field against them’. In the words of the public record Edward ‘went to Lynn’. In fact he made a rapid retreat to what is now King’s Lynn where he took ship and sailed towards the Low Countries. He had few men, and little money; such was his penury that he had to pay for his transport with the furred gown he was wearing.

Eventually he landed in Holland, where the governor of the province was known to him; he was in Burgundian territory, and the duke of Burgundy was an ally. The duke, having married Margaret of York two years before, was also the king’s brother-in-law. So Edward was, for the time being, safe from his enemies. Elizabeth Woodville and her mother had already taken sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. The sanctuary stood at the bottom of the churchyard to the west of the abbey. It was described as ‘a gloomy building, of sufficient strength to withstand a siege’. It was here that the queen was delivered of a son.

Warwick returned to London in order to confirm his supremacy. Margaret and her son remained in France, waiting for Henry VI to be given back his throne. So the once abandoned king was led from the Tower after an imprisonment of five years; he was wearing a long gown of blue velvet, but he was ‘not so cleanly kept as should be such a prince’. In his captivity he sometimes quoted words from the seventh psalm to the effect that ‘My help cometh of God, who preserveth them that are true of heart’. Now God had worked an unlooked-for wonder. Truly He moved in mysterious ways. At the opening of Henry’s parliament the archbishop of York preached upon the text ‘Turn, O backsliding children’.

But if Henry was once more king in name, Warwick was the puppet master. Henry was according to a contemporary chronicler no more than ‘a crowned calf, a shadow on the wall’. Warwick now had to balance a variety of interests in order to preserve his rule; he had to satisfy his Lancastrian supporters as well as the Yorkists who had favoured Edward IV. He also had to manage the ambitions of Clarence, who might have wished the crown for himself. These various tensions and divisions did not augur for good rule. The noblemen of England had in any case become increasingly disenchanted with the protagonists on both sides, and were inclined merely to give their support to the strongest at any given moment. ‘Trust not much upon promises of lords nowadays,’ Margaret Paston told her son, ‘that you should be the surer of the favour of such men. A man’s death is little set by nowadays. Therefore beware of simulation, for they will speak right fair to you that would you fared right evil.’

Soon enough another reversal of fortune complicated a story already filled with strange turns and accidents. In the early spring of 1471 the duke of Burgundy agreed to finance an invasion of England by Edward, and on 14 March the exiled monarch landed at Ravenspur on the coast of Yorkshire; his reception was not at first encouraging. ‘There came right few of the country [Yorkshire] to him,’ according to a contemporary history, ‘or almost none.’ The men of Holderness turned him away, and he was only permitted to enter York on the declaration that he had come to claim his father’s dukedom rather than the English crown.

Nevertheless he kept on moving towards London. He marched towards Doncaster and, learning that Warwick was gathering his forces in Coventry, turned towards that city. The duke of Clarence now deserted the earl in favour of his brother; with Henry VI back on the throne, and with Margaret of Anjou poised to return to England with her son, he may have realized that his chance of gaining the crown was now remote. He was also suspected by his erstwhile enemies; he was held, as a contemporary wrote, ‘in great suspicion, despite, disdain and hatred with all the lords … that were adherents and full partakers with Henry’. But his actions may have had no logic to them at all; he was young, impressionable and impulsive with little control over his tongue or over his actions. He was a shuttlecock flying in all directions.

Edward, leaving Warwick embattled in Coventry, decided to move swiftly upon the capital and to announce himself once more to be king. The archbishop of York, brother of Warwick, tried to rally support by parading Henry VI through London; the king was still wearing the blue velvet gown in which he had been dressed when he left the Tower. Edward entered the city and urgently sought an interview with the old king. ‘My cousin of York,’ Henry told him, ‘you are very welcome. I know that in your hands my life will not be in danger.’ In this he proved to be mistaken. The unhappy monarch was once more consigned to the cold walls of the Tower, while Edward was united with his wife and his newborn son fresh out of sanctuary. Very little time could be spent in celebration, however, and on the following morning the king ‘took advice of the great lords of his blood, and other of his council, for the adventures that were likely to come’. The adventures reached a climax on 14 April at Barnet, a small town north of London, where the Yorkists won the victory with a confused set of skirmishes in thick fog; in the subsequent rout Warwick himself was killed. The ‘kingmaker’ was slain by the forces of the king.

The earl of Warwick is not a happy figure. Lands and wealth had been heaped upon him by an over-generous monarch, and as a result he became fractious and over-mighty; he proclaimed himself to be the representative of the rights of England, and yet he was merely the tool of faction and of family; he aspired to glory, but in victory he was cruel and vindictive; he was a politician without any grasp of political strategy, and a statesman who had a habit of opposing the national interest at every juncture. His vanity, and his ambition, destroyed him. In these respects, he was not so different from his eminent contemporaries.

Margaret of Anjou and her seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward, had sailed from France without knowing of Edward’s victory over Warwick. The news greeted her soon after her landing at Weymouth, in Dorset, with her followers. It was too late to flee; she could only fight. She made her way north towards Bristol, picking up supporting forces on the way, but Edward’s army was approaching from the east. At this moment John Paston wrote to his mother, Margaret, that ‘the world, I assure you, is right queasy’. On 4 May 1471, in a meadow just to the south of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians were overtaken by the Yorkists; in the subsequent mêlée Prince Edward was killed and Margaret was taken prisoner.

Edward IV returned in triumph to London less than three weeks later. On that same day, Henry VI was killed in the Tower of London. It was said that he had expired from melancholy, but the truth is no doubt more prosaic. He had been murdered on the orders of the victorious king, who wished to hold no hostages to fortune. It was claimed later that his assassin was Edward’s youngest brother, the duke of Gloucester, but this inference may entirely be due to Gloucester’s later fame as the inglorious Richard III. It seems appropriate, at any rate, that he should now enter this history of England as a man of shadows.

In any event the Lancastrian royal family, descended directly from Henry IV, was now extinguished. Henry’s body was taken from the Tower to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was laid out ‘open vysagid’ so that all might recognize him. Margaret of Anjou was incarcerated in the Tower, where she remained for four years before being ransomed by Louis XI; she spent the rest of her days, impoverished, in France. Her life had been lived in a storm that had claimed her husband and her son.

A vignette of Henry VI may be included here. On one occasion, in the 1450s, he visited Westminster Abbey in order to mark out the site of his tomb. He ordered a stonemason to scratch with a crowbar the position and dimensions of the vault that he wished to be built in the floor of the abbey. He did not require a monumental tomb; he wanted to rest beneath the quiet stone. As he conferred with the abbot, he leaned on the shoulder of his chamberlain; the king was then only in his thirties, but he was already tired with the demands of the world. There has rarely been a wise king in England, let alone a good one. But it is still possible to concede a certain amount of sympathy to a man who seems to have been wholly unsuitable for the duties of kingship.

It is often said that the opposing sides in the Wars of the Roses were engaged in an act of mutual destruction, and that the noble families of England were noticeably thinned as a result of the fighting. In fact the pressure of time and circumstance always worked against the survival of any noble house, and it has been calculated that in any period of twentyfive years a quarter of the nobility left no sons to inherit their titles and so lapsed into inconsequence. There must always be a steady flow of ‘new blood’ to keep the governance of the land in good health. The Wars of the Roses did not interrupt what was essentially a continuing process.

In a larger sense, too, the world went on its own way despite the immediate disturbance of the wars. The fact of conflict of course weakened the body politic, and loosened the ties between the realm and the nobility, but there is no evidence of general desolation or dislocation. Few towns or cities were affected by the disturbances, and only those in the immediate vicinity of the battles would have suffered from the factional struggle. The vast resources of the Church were not touched, and in general the clergy remained as distant observers of the conflict. The law courts at Westminster were still in session and the judges rode on circuit throughout the country. The French chronicler and historian Philippe de Commynes remarked at the time that ‘there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fell only upon the soldiers, and especially on the nobility’.

There is also no sign of economic decline as a result of the wars. By the 1470s there was a resurgence of trade, a trend in which the king himself took an active interest. The author of the Crowland Chronicle states that Edward ‘in person, having equipped ships of burden, laded them with the very finest wools, cloths, tin and other products of his realm, and like a man living by merchandise, exchanged goods for goods …’. The appearance of a merchant king helps to disperse any notion of economic degeneracy. ‘There is no small innkeeper, however poor and humble he may be,’ an Italian observer wrote, ‘who does not serve his table with silver dishes and drinking cups …’

In any case the life of a nation is perhaps better compared to a sea than to a pond. Exhaustion and renewal, decay and growth, occur simultaneously. So it was that in 1476 William Caxton established in the almonry of Westminster Abbey the first printing press in England. Ten years later the first water-powered pump was introduced to a coalmine at Finchale near Durham. In 1496 the first blast furnace in England was operating at Buxted in Sussex. This industrial revolution was already provoking complaint. A parliamentary Bill of 1482 declared that hats, bonnets and caps made ‘by men’s strength, that is to say with hands and feet’ were infinitely superior to those ‘fulled and thicked in fulling mills’. At the same time very many humble people were still living on the land in the same conditions as their Saxon ancestors.

36

The staple of life

Among the bare fields and deserted gardens of the derelict Roman villas grew wild garlic and onions. ‘I grow very erect, tall in a bed,’ runs one Anglo-Saxon riddle on the onion, ‘and bring a tear to a maiden’s eye. What am I?’ The essential ingredient on the poorer tables, however, was that derisory ‘mess of pottage’ for which birthrights could be sold. The richer Anglo-Saxons ate wheaten bread, but bread of rye or barley was more common. They also consumed vast quantities of pork, the pigs grown fat on the inexhaustible supplies of acorns and beech-nuts to be found in the woods and forests of the country. The smallholder might also have a few razor-backed pigs on the common land. Venison and poultry were popular among the more wealthy Englishmen. Supplies of fish, among them salmon and herring, were plentiful. Horse-flesh was sometimes eaten. For many centuries large knives and coarse wooden spoons were the extent of the cutlery, the meals often eaten out of communal bowls. Then ‘after the dinner they went to their cups,’ according to one chronicler, ‘to which the English were very much accustomed’. A weak ale, compounded with various spices, was the drink of choice. But the Anglo-Saxons also consumed a drink known as ‘morat’, essentially mulberry juice mingled with honey.

The diet of the Normans was not very different, since the agriculture of the country was not materially changed by the invasion. The status of the lord, however, was such that he could eat only wheaten bread. When land was granted to him, it had to be capable of growing wheat; soil that could not bear that crop was of little value to him. That is why few Norman settlements were established in the higher and colder grounds of the Pennines, of Cumbria and other northern regions. The Normans were found among the wheat. They made their bread in the form of buns or cakes, often marked with a cross. They particularly enjoyed a form of gingerbread that was known as ‘peppered bread’.

One difference was evident. They preferred wine to the native ale or mead, and much of it was transported from France. A twelfth-century philosopher, Alexander Neckam, stated that wine should be as clear as the tears of a penitent. He also declared that a good wine should be as sweet-tasting as an almond, as surreptitious as a squirrel, as high-spirited as a roebuck, as strong as a Cistercian monastery, as glittering as a spark of fire, as subtle as the logic of the schools of Paris, as delicate as fine silk, and as cold as crystal. The language of the wine connoisseur has not notably diminished in fancifulness over the centuries.

Through the medieval period little interest was evinced in what were once known as ‘white meats’, namely cheese and butter and milk. They were associated with the diets of common people, and were therefore to be avoided. Milk, however, was mixed in sweet confections. Olive oil, rather than butter, was used in cooking. Fresh fruit was considered to be unhealthy, and the most common vegetables were scorned except by the poor who considered them to be a kind of free food. The land was so fruitful that, in a good season, it may have been possible for a poor man or a wanderer to survive from the fields and hedges alone. Peas and beans, leeks and cabbages, could also be stolen from the small garden adjoining every cottage. ‘I have no money,’ Piers Plowman complains in the month before harvest. ‘I have a couple of fresh cheeses, a little curds and cream, an oatcake and two loaves of beans and bran baked for the children. I have some parsley and shallots, and plenty of cabbages …’ It is possible, therefore, that the diet of the poor was healthier than that of the rich.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meat had become highly flavoured with spices such as aniseed and liquorice. The richer families preferred strong and even coarse flavours. It is otherwise difficult to account for the attraction of the grampus and the porpoise even to royal appetites. The ‘sea-calf ’, known in more recent times as the seal, was also a delicacy. The tongue of the whale, another royal dish, was either boiled with peas or roasted. Strongly flavoured birds, such as the peacock or the heron or the bittern, were also on the menu. ‘Powdered salmon’ was salmon sprinkled with salt. The smell of the conger eel was said by one enthusiast to be so wonderful that it would make a dead man sniff.

The first English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, was written in the late fourteenth century by Richard II’s master cooks – ‘cury’ meaning the dressing of food. A dish of shelled oysters and hare’s flesh must be flavoured with honey. Pork is to be fried and then mixed with saffron and raisins. Pheasant could be mingled with cinnamon and ginger. Spices were not used to disguise the taste of less than healthy meat; they were used for their own sake, and were part of the predilection for strong flavours. They were also used to colour the meats and other dishes; indigo turned the food blue, and saffron converted it to yellow; blood and burnt toast crusts provided the red and the black.

It is instructive that in The Forme of Cury, and in other compilations of recipes, there is seldom any mention of the quantities of the necessary ingredients. Medieval units of measurement are in fact always vague and imprecise. There was no need, or desire, for exactness. It was not a ‘scientific’ age. So gross underestimates and overestimates, at least by the standards of modern accuracy, were likely to be made. The monks of Ely believed that their isle measured 7 miles by 4 miles (11.2 by 6.4 kilometres), whereas in fact it had the dimensions of 12 miles by 10 miles (19.3 by 16 kilometres). It was declared, in the reign of Edward III, that there were 40,000 parishes in England; there were in fact fewer than 9,000, a huge error in one of the most basic measurements of the country. When we read in the sources that ‘innumerable miracles’ were attested at a site of pilgrimage, or that the king led an army of ‘fifty thousand men’, we may be given leave to doubt the claims.

Space and time were fluctuating and essentially indefinable. An acre of land (0.4 hectares) could be measured in three different ways. Various time systems, such as the regnal year or the papal year or the liturgical year, could be chosen. The charters and memoranda of the period were, before the thirteenth century, largely undated; a bond might give the year of transaction as ‘after the espousal of the king of England’s son and the king’s daughter’ or ‘after Gilbert Foliot was received into the bishopric of London’ which we know to have been 1163. Many people were unsure of their exact age; one old warrior, John de Sully, claimed to be 105 and to have fought at the battle of Najera in 1367. If that is correct, then he had carried arms at the age of eighty-seven. The father of another old soldier, John de Thirwell, was reported to have died at the age of 145. The hour of the day was measured by the shadows cast by the sun; clocks were not introduced until the fifteenth century, but they were heavy, cumbersome and not necessarily precise. The time measured by the church bell was that of the canonical day from prime to vespers. And everyone knew that a yard was the length of the king’s arm. What else could it be?

37

The king of spring

Edward IV was at last king without rival; the birth of a son to the queen in sanctuary at Westminster, followed soon after by that of another infant boy, suggested that the line of York might stretch onward indefinitely. But he had two brothers – George, duke of Clarence and Richard, duke of Gloucester – who at some later date might make their own claims for supremacy.

The younger brother, Gloucester, was rewarded for his loyalty during the commotions of the previous years. From the autumn of 1469 he was constable of England, and led his own supporters in the king’s battles against the rebels; he had also sailed with Edward in flight from King’s Lynn to Holland and, at the climactic battle of Tewkesbury, he had led the vanguard of Edward’s army. For services rendered, therefore, in the spring of 1471 he was made Great Chamberlain of England; this was the position once held by Warwick. Gloucester was also granted much of Warwick’s territory in the north of England and, from this time forward, he became the champion and warlord of the northern territories with his base in the great castle of Middleham in North Yorkshire. He was given the hand of Lady Anne Neville, Warwick’s younger daughter, who had been married to the unhappy Prince Edward; the fifteen-year-old girl was now in alliance with the man who had helped to destroy her family, but it was of course more prudent to marry one of the victors. Romance was rarely to be found in the royal estate.

The older of the two brothers, Clarence, was the greater threat or perhaps just the greater nuisance. He had already proved himself to be disloyal to the king, in his temporary alliance with Warwick and Margaret, and now he turned furiously against his younger brother. He wanted to be Great Chamberlain; he wanted the Warwick lands of the north; he also wanted the lands owned by Lady Anne Neville herself. The brothers challenged one another in a set debate before the royal council, and both were applauded for their eloquence. Clarence, however, emerged as the temporary victor; he was given Warwick’s estates in the midlands, as well as the title of Great Chamberlain. Yet Gloucester still retained his hold over the north.

In the period after his victory Edward prosecuted his erstwhile enemies with great dispatch. It was said that the rich were hanged by their purses and the poor were hanged by their necks, but in truth the king was interested in taking money rather than lives. The cities that had opposed him, such as Hull and Coventry, were deprived of their liberties and then fined for their restoration; individual magnates who had supported Margaret or Warwick were also penalized. The records of the parliament house are filled with reports of taxes, acts of settlement, attainders and forced contributions to the king’s purse which were known without a trace of irony as ‘benevolences’. Yet he could be generous as well as severe; many former foes were taken back ‘into the king’s pardon’ and prominent Lancastrian clerics such as John Morton entered his service. Morton later became bishop of Ely and archbishop of Canterbury.

The great continental problem remained with Louis XI of France. The French king had aided Warwick and abetted Margaret of Anjou, in their claims to the control of the English throne, and he was still encouraging the rebel Lancastrians who sheltered in his dominion. He represented a threat that had to be rebuffed. But if Edward had the will, he did not necessarily have the means. He entered negotiations with the neighbours of France, the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, on a proposal for a triple invasion. These two duchies were subjected by feudal ties to France, but were in practice independent. Edward succeeded, at least, with Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

On 4 July 1475 a large force of English troops sailed for Calais from Dover, prepared to meet up with the Burgundian forces. Edward was accompanied by the majority of the nobility, together with 15,000 men. He carried with him 779 stone cannon balls and more than 10,000 sheaves of arrows; he also transported cloth of gold, for sumptuous display, and ordered the building of a small house made of wood and covered with leather which he could use on the battlefield. It was a portable royal chamber.

Charles the Bold did not live up to his name, however, and arrived at the garrison town with only a few supporters. He had left most of his men engaged in the siege of a town in Flanders. Edward, apparently moved to great fury, almost immediately began talks with Louis XI in order to broker some kind of peace. The French king was eager to oblige, not wishing for the distraction of foreign soldiers on his soil, and a month later the two kings met on a bridge at Picquigny near Amiens.

A wooden barrier had been placed in the middle of the bridge, to ensure against any surprise attack, and the soldiers of both sovereigns were massed on either side. An impersonator, wearing the clothes of the French king, walked beside Louis. Three of Edward’s retinue were dressed in the same cloth of gold as their sovereign. It was a precaution. Edward approached the barrier, raised his hat and bowed low to the ground; Louis reciprocated with an equally elaborate gesture. ‘My lord, my cousin,’ Louis said, ‘you are very welcome. There is nobody in the world whom I would want to meet more than you’. Edward replied in very good French.

A solemn treaty was signed in which Louis agreed to pay the English king the large sum of 75,000 crowns as well as an annual pension of 50,000 gold coins on condition that English troops left the country. Satisfied by what amounted to a bribe, Edward returned to England. It was also agreed that his eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, should marry the French king’s eldest son. In the usual manner of these arranged royal marriages, the proposal came to nothing.

Edward returned richer if not exactly more glorious. He had said in advance of the expedition that he wished to regain English possessions in France and even to advance himself upon the French throne. This was the rhetoric of the period, and was not necessarily believed. In any case the ambitions were misplaced. But if Edward had sailed with every intention of extorting a bribe from the French king, his mission had been admirably successful. Some evidence for this comes from a French historian who was with the court of Louis XI at the time. Philippe de Commynes states that Edward had begun to negotiate with Louis even before he left Dover. Commynes then goes on to speculate that Edward wanted to keep for himself all the money he had raised in England for the royal expedition.

In that event he had been engaged in an act of dissimulation on a very large scale; in the months before the planned invasion, the patent rolls reveal the combined efforts of ‘carpenters, joiners, stonecutters, smiths, plumbers, shipwrights, coopers, sawyers, fletchers, chariot-men, horse-harness men and other workmen’ in preparation for war. The truth may be that the English king was ready for a range of different results. He was simply waiting on events, to see what chance or fortune would throw in his way on the principle that when nothing is ventured nothing is gained. The historical record is made up of unintended consequences and unexpected turns of fate.

Edward did not publish all of the principles of the treaty made at Picquigny; but it soon became clear to the parliament house and the people of England that, as a result of the abortive French expedition, the king had been made richer and they had been rendered poorer. Yet Edward now was too strong to withstand.

He soon deployed that strength against his own brother. Clarence had effectively become ungovernable. According to the Crowland Chronicle, the most reliable source of information for the period, he ‘now seemed more and more to be withdrawing from the king’s presence, hardly uttering a word in council, not eating and drinking in the king’s residence’. He had some cause for disaffection. On the death of his wife, after childbirth, it was suggested that he should marry the daughter of Charles of Burgundy; Edward refused to countenance such a union, because with the support of Burgundy, Clarence would become too powerful. For similar reasons Edward would not permit Clarence to marry the sister of the king of Scotland.

In April 1477 Clarence accused one of his wife’s attendants, Ankarette Twynyho, of having murdered her mistress with ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’; an armed gang of his men seized the unfortunate woman and took her to Clarence’s town of Warwick where she was hanged. It was a form of judicial murder. Three months later one of the squires of his household was charged with necromancy in pursuit of the king’s death and, on being pronounced guilty, was drawn to the gallows at Tyburn. On the following day Clarence came to the royal council and caused to be read a proclamation of the man’s innocence; Clarence then withdrew. He had effectively challenged the king’s honesty as well as his system of justice. Edward therefore summoned Clarence to appear before him and, in the presence of the mayor and aldermen of London, declared that he had acted ‘as if he were in contempt of the law of the land and a great threat to the judges and jurors of the kingdom’.

At the beginning of 1478 a session of the parliament house was summoned where, in front of the lords, the king accused his brother of various crimes against the throne; some witnesses were called, but it was clear that they had been instructed in advance. The duke defended himself as best he could, even pledging to endure trial by combat, but the assembled lords declared him to be guilty of treason. The lords of the parliament were no doubt bound to support the king’s wishes in the matter, and did not need to be duped into delivering their verdict. Yet the evidence was weak and perhaps concocted. Clarence was taken to the Tower where, a few days later, he was murdered by surreptitious means. It has often been stated that he was drowned in a butt of malmsey wine; this curious detail may, oddly enough, reflect its accuracy. It might indicate, however, that he was drowned in his bath; bathtubs were often made out of sawn-down wine barrels.

The king had killed the elder of his two brothers by dubious means. It was an act of ruthlessness that sealed the supremacy of the king. A soothsayer had prophesied that the reign of Edward would be followed by one whose name began with ‘G’. So George, duke of Clarence, was despatched. The name of the younger brother, Gloucester, obviously did not occur to him. It was said at the time that the queen, and her Woodville relations, had also been eager to destroy Clarence; his eloquence and fair looks posed a challenge to her young sons in the event of Edward’s death. Rumour was piled upon rumour; the murderous court was filled with shadows and suspicions. The path to glory for Edward IV had once been carved through the corpses of his enemies; now it mounted over the body of his brother. The king, according to the Crowland Chronicle, ‘performed the duties of his office with such a high hand, that he appeared to be dreaded by all his subjects, while he himself stood in fear of no one’.

Apart from consolidating his rule, and maintaining his royal profits, Edward spent a great deal of time in arranging as many advantageous marriages as possible for his immediate kin. His investments in wool and cloth, as a working merchant, were small in comparison with the investment in his family. In all he had three sons and seven daughters; two of them died in infancy, leaving two sons and six daughters. The merry-go-round began, with daughters being betrothed to the heirs of Scotland, France and Burgundy. The prince of Wales, Edward, was played as a bargaining chip with Brittany. The king wanted hard money in exchange; he did not wish to pay the dowries for his daughters, in particular, and so engaged in prolonged negotiation to avoid that necessity. In fact none of his children were married by the time of his death, for the principal reason that they were still too young. All his plans, intentions and schemes came to nothing. The thousands of words spent in speeches and diplomacy vanished into the air.

His younger brother was more secure than ever. Richard of Gloucester remained the paramount lord of northern England. The Percy family were supreme in Northumberland, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, but the rest of the north came under the direct control of Gloucester. Edward had no reason to doubt his loyalty, however, and he seemed by far the best choice to be named ‘Protector’ of England and of the king’s eldest son.

The moment came sooner than expected. In the spring of 1483 Edward IV became mysteriously and dangerously ill. It is reported that he caught cold on a fishing trip. Commynes says that he died of ‘quaterre’ or apoplexy. The Crowland Chronicle states that he lay down ‘neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady’. There is a suggestion of death by poison. In truth the only malady may have been that of self-indulgence; he ate and drank copious amounts; he had grown fat and debauched. Only a very pious king could avoid such a fate. Edward IV expired in his fortieth year.

Edward died without debts, the first king to remain solvent for 200 years. It was, perhaps, his greatest achievement. He had made no great legislative or judicial advantages, but he had at least consolidated the role and power of royal government. He had learned to make it work after the intermittently weak reign of Henry VI. That was the sum of it. The fact that England emerged from his reign more prosperous than before has everything to do with the underlying strength and purposefulness of a growing nation.

Edward was not strong enough, in any case, to ensure that his eldest son would be safely crowned as his successor. The warden of Tattershall College in Lincolnshire wrote to the bishop of Winchester that ‘for now our sovereign lord the king is dead, whose soul Jesu take to his great mercy, we know not who shall be our lord nor shall have the rule about us’. Yet the transition appeared to have been immediate and graceful. Edward, prince of Wales, was acclaimed as Edward V.

The young heir apparent was at Ludlow, near the border of Wales, at the time of his father’s death; he was in the company of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, when he was summoned back to London by his mother. A council had been called in the capital, of which the principal member was Lord Hastings. Hastings, like Gloucester, was loyal to the Yorkist monarchy rather than to the Woodville family; when he learned that the queen had asked her brother to guard her son’s return to London with as large a force as he could assemble, he sensed the possibility of an unwelcome show of strength. He threatened to retire to Calais if the Woodvilles attempted to overawe the city, and at the same time he wrote to Gloucester with the troubling news.

Elizabeth Woodville then agreed to a compromise in which the young king would have an escort of no more than 2,000 men. Gloucester had been alerted to the possibility that the Woodvilles would control the king in more than name, however, and that they would supplant his role as the rightful Protector of the realm. He marched from his northern lands and joined his supporter, the duke of Buckingham, in Northampton at the end of April. This was just ten miles north of the place where the royal party had halted on their march to London; Stony Stratford was at the junction of Watling Street and the Northampton Road.

The two sides hailed each other with expressions of friendship. Rivers and his companions greeted the two dukes and entertained them at a house close to Northampton itself; they spent a convivial evening, but on the following morning Rivers was arrested and on charges of treason sent to a northern prison. Gloucester and Buckingham then rode out to Stony Stratford, and informed the young king that his uncle and others of his affinity had been engaged in a deep conspiracy against him. Edward objected, and protested that ‘he had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil’. But the force of a fourteen-year-old will was no match for that of Gloucester. Gloucester also informed the king that Rivers had played some part in the dead king’s debaucheries, thus fatally weakening him; this was in keeping with the strong moralism of his character. The young king remarked that he had full confidence in his mother, to which Buckingham replied that he should put no faith in women.

When the news of the arrest reached London the Woodville family and its supporters were in alarm. They tried to raise an army, but London was barren soil for them. So the queen took her other son and her daughters into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. This was the second occasion when she had sought the protection of the holy place, but the circumstances were now infinitely more dangerous. Two families were vying for control; no council was strong enough, and no group of nobles powerful enough, to come between them. The dead king should have foreseen the consequences of his actions, in building up two centres of over-mighty subjects, but he had made no effort to forestall them. So now the queen sat down among the rushes strewn on the floor of the sanctuary, surrounded by ‘much heaviness, rumble, haste and business, carriage and conveyaunce of stuffe into Sanctuarie, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the nearest way …’.

Gloucester had taken immediate action to secure the person of the monarch in order to underline his authority in any struggle with the Woodvilles. He wrote to the council, and to the mayor of London, insisting that he had acted to preserve the life of the king and that he had no designs upon the crown. On 4 May he brought Edward V to London and, as a sign of his good faith, he insisted that all the lords and aldermen should swear an oath of fealty to their new monarch. Edward was taken first to Ely Place, but then was removed to the Tower of London as the appropriate place to prepare for his coronation.

Six days later Gloucester was appointed as Protector, although the length and extent of his protection was not made clear. The coronation itself was to be held on 22 June, and at that point the young king could declare himself ready to rule on his own account. That might be the wish of his mother. Henry VI had been fit to rule at the age of fifteen; Richard II assumed the duties of kingship at the age of seventeen. So in theory Gloucester had precious little time to enforce his authority. He may also have feared that the Woodvilles were set upon his destruction.

The fact that the queen herself remained in sanctuary demonstrated the uncertainty and danger of the situation. One of Gloucester’s first actions as Protector was to remove the kin and allies of the Woodvilles from positions of influence. In that decision he seems to have had the support of the majority of the royal council, who did not see the dismissals as part of any plot to seize the crown. Gloucester also rewarded his allies. The duke of Buckingham, for example, was granted control of Wales and its border lands; it was a happy coincidence, perhaps, that he also usurped the power of the Woodvilles in that region.

The chroniclers of the period concur that by the end of May Gloucester had prepared himself to seize the crown; hindsight may be the real judge here. It is possible that Gloucester himself did not know, or was not sure, what to do; he recognized as well as anyone, from the history of his own family, the power of chance and the unexpected.

The first real sign of his intentions came in a letter to his northern allies on 10 June, in which he asked them to come to his aid ‘and assist us against the queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doeth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin, the duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of this realm …’. His words suggest fear and insecurity in equal measure. He did not mention Hastings as possible victim of these intrigues, because he now had cause to suspect him as well. It seems likely that Hastings had become aware of Gloucester’s decision to supplant the young king, and had decided to resist the attempt; all of the chroniclers report his loyalty to Edward.

On 13 June, at nine in the morning, Gloucester joined the council at the White Tower of the Tower of London in a good humour. There is a lively account of the meeting by Thomas More, in his life of Richard III; the record has often been treated with scepticism, but More’s principal source was undoubtedly John Morton who as bishop of Ely was present on the occasion. ‘My lord,’ the duke of Gloucester said to the bishop, ‘you have very good strawberries in your garden in Holborn. I request you let us have a mess of them.’

‘Gladly, my lord,’ the bishop replied. ‘Would to God I had some better things as ready to your pleasure as all that.’ The bishop despatched his servant, and Gloucester retired to his chamber. He returned to the council, an hour later, in a much altered state. He was now in a sour and angry mood; he had a habit, when perplexed or enraged, of chewing his lower lip. ‘What do those persons deserve,’ he asked the councillors, ‘who have compassed and imagined my destruction?’

Hastings was the first to answer. ‘They deserve death, my lord, whoever they are.’

‘I will tell you who they are. They are that sorceress, my brother’s wife [Elizabeth Woodville] and others with her.’ He then named Elizabeth ‘Jane’ Shore, who had been Edward IV’s mistress, a most unlikely associate of the queen. At this point he pulled up the sleeve of his doublet, and showed to the council his withered left arm. This deformity was not a new one – More says that the arm ‘was never other’ – but it served the purpose of proving witchcraft against his opponents. Then Gloucester turned on Hastings himself and furiously accused him of treason. Hastings was bundled away and summarily executed, beheaded on a log of wood that lay close to the door of the Tower chapel.

The Great Chronicle of London, compiled towards the end of the century, concluded that thus ‘was this noble man murdered for the troth and fidelity which he bore unto his master’, the ‘master’ being the young king held in the Tower. By swiftness and surprise Gloucester had managed to destroy the man whom he suspected of barring his path to the throne. It seems likely, too, that Gloucester had been given information that Hastings had decided to attempt a rescue of the young king from confinement; this may help to explain his impassioned letter to his northern allies on 10 June.

On 16 June Gloucester’s personal troops surrounded the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where the king’s younger brother was still being kept. The queen herself was persuaded to yield up her son by the persuasions of the archbishop of Canterbury, who argued that the heir apparent needed the company of his younger brother. The prelate declared that, on his ‘wit and trouth’, he would preserve the safety of the boy and that he would return him to her after the coronation. ‘As far as you think I fear too much,’ the queen replied, ‘be you wel ware that you fear not too little.’ She may have come to her decision in the knowledge that Gloucester’s troops might force themselves into the sanctuary and remove her son by violent means.

She surrendered Duke Richard with the words ‘Farewell my own sweet son, God send you safe keeping, let me kiss you once again before you go, for God knows when we shall kiss together again.’ He was then escorted to the Tower to join his brother for the coming coronation. Nine days later the queen’s brother, Earl Rivers, was beheaded in Pontefract Castle. ‘I hold you are happy to be out of the press [of London]’, an adviser wrote to the Lord Chancellor, ‘for with us is much trouble and every man doubts other.’

The news of the death of Hastings had already provoked consternation in London, only quelled by the gentle ministrations of the mayor who claimed that there had indeed been a plot against the Protector’s life. Now the time had come for Gloucester to justify himself to the citizens and prepare them for his seizure of the crown. On 22 June a tame doctor of theology, Ralph Shaw, delivered a sermon at St Paul’s Cross – the main centre for government proclamations in the period – in which he stated that Gloucester was the only legitimate son of Richard, duke of York, and thus the only true candidate for the throne. Another report, duly circulated at the time, declared that the two young princes in the Tower were also bastards. It is most unlikely that either claim had much substance, but it is possible that Gloucester believed one or both of them. Wherever a moral high ground was to be taken, he seized it with alacrity.

He could easily have convinced himself, for example, that Edward IV had what was called a ‘pre-contract’ with another woman and that his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was thereby fraudulent. He had also seen at first hand the debauchery of Edward’s court, and may have surmised that the occupant of the throne was in truth not king at all. Ambition might breed in him a false sense of duty. Fear also was anelement in his calculation. Edward V, if he were crowned king, would have no compunction in destroying the man who had killed his uncle. Gloucester was obliged to move quickly.

Two days after Shaw’s sermon the duke of Buckingham, Gloucester’s paramount ally, made a speech to similar effect before the mayor and aldermen of London in the Guildhall. Once more the dubious claim to the throne was delivered with much earnestness and piety – and, as the Great Chronicle of London puts it, ‘without the impediment of spitting’. The response of the Londoners was, by all accounts, lukewarm to the point of tepidity; the few calls of ‘yeah, yeah’ at the end were uttered ‘more for fear than for love’. The servants of Buckingham roused one or two apprentices to cry out ‘God save King Richard!’ and as a result the event was deemed to have been a great success.

On the next day the parliament assembled at Westminster, and a roll of parchment announcing Richard’s title to the throne was presented to the Lords and Commons. It was given unanimous consent by these various worthies from towns and shires, and on 26 June a large concourse proceeded with Buckingham to Gloucester’s mansion in London, Baynard’s Castle, where the roll was read out to him; he was then exhorted to take up the crown and, after a period of modest reflection, he decided so to do. He was therefore proclaimed as Richard III.

King Richard rode in state to Westminster Hall where he was seated in majesty upon the marble chair of King’s Bench; this was the seat in which the monarch reposed when he was dispensing justice. Richard had immediately taken on the role of the wise and just king. He delivered a speech to the Lords and Commons, in which he pleaded for fairness and equity in the proceedings of justice. No man was outside the law. All parties should be treated equally. This may be considered a reproof to Edward IV, whose family interests often led him to break or bend the law for immediate profit.

Some in fact welcomed the advent of Richard’s reign. He was known to be a good administrator, and a fine soldier. Surely his reign would prove superior to that of a fourteen-year-old boy under the thrall of his mother and his remaining Woodville relations? Edward V was king for eighty-eight days, a king for spring and early summer; he thus earns the unhappy distinction of enjoying the shortest reign of any English sovereign but in death his influence, as we shall see, was profound.

38

Come to town

In the fifteenth century England was still predominantly a rural society, with only a fifth of the population living in approximately 800 towns. Only one city, London, could be compared with the cities of the European continent; the other urban centres were essentially large towns, with populations well under 10,000. York and Norwich were the exceptions, with populations of 30,000 and 25,000 respectively. The more important of them, such as York and Chester, were walled; so were the port towns such as Southampton. At the other end of this demographic range, the majority of towns contained populations of hundreds rather than thousands. Many of these smaller towns were simply ringed with a ditch.

A Venetian traveller, at the end of the fifteenth century, noted that the country was ‘very thinly inhabited’ with ‘scarcely any towns of importance’. We may imagine a land with an uneven distribution of relatively small settlements, in utter contrast to the territories of the city-states in northern Italy. The small towns had not yet reached maturity; they were part of the great unconscious of England.

The most significant public buildings were constructed of stone; the churches were of stone, as were the bridges. But only the richest merchants built their houses of that material. The rest were constructed as before with timber or wattle-and-daub; the streets between them were narrow, dirty and malodorous, combining the less desirable aspects of the farm with the detritus of town life. Pigs and chickens roamed the streets and houses; there is a case from Girton in Cambridgeshire where, in 1353, a hen caused a fatal fire by scratching glowing ashes onto a child’s bed of straw. Cattle were kept in the gardens of some town houses, and the back gardens resembled the ‘strips’ of the common farmland producing fruit and vegetables. Orchards and streams lent for a moment the illusion of open country. In many towns you would never be very far from the sound of running water.

The clamour was great, rising in a crescendo on market day, but a few minutes’ walk would take the visitor into the relative silence of the fields or woods. The town gradually faded into the country, with dwellings and yards becoming fewer and fewer until pasture or field or wood became the landscape. The wind was fresher here, less contaminated by foul smells and the fear of infection, and the earth softer beneath the feet. Yet it would be ill-advised to create a picture of pastoral bliss; many trades were pursued in the cottages and hamlets of the countryside, among them clothmaking and leatherworking. Fewer clothmakers resided in the town than in the country, where labour was cheaper and less regulated.

The towns were nevertheless the centre of commerce and of administration; they were the sites of assembly and of public entertainment. The market cross was the place where proclamations were made concerning the affairs of the town and the kingdom; this was the cross to which royal heralds would come with news of battle. Here, too, were the town stocks and the ‘pound’ or cage for offenders. Some towns were built in the shade of a castle or abbey, in which they found their most reliable and prosperous customers. Relations were not always harmonious, however, and the monks and citizenry of Bury St Edmunds were engaged in several violent confrontations; abbots did not make good landlords.

Other towns were built at the confluence of rivers, where trade was assured. A number of towns had a whole range of purposes. They grew organically without any plan or coordination; a new street would be laid out when traders multiplied; huts and houses were built outside the walls according to demand. They persisted and became hallowed by time. In towns as diverse as Winchester and Saffron Walden the building plots, the width of the streets, the topography of the market, still persist and are still visible.

The inhabitants of any town were deemed to be free after the residence of a year and a day, as we have observed, but the towns themselves were not centres of freedom. Many of them were subject to lords and bishops who took the proceeds of rents and taxes. Their internal administration was controlled by a hierarchy as rigid and as severe as any to be found in the nominally feudal areas of the countryside; the mayor and councillors were taken from the class of the richest merchants, and they effectively dominated all aspects of the town’s life. They ran the guilds; they organized the courts; they regulated the markets. The merchants, owning property, were the ‘freemen’ or citizens. They lived in the same quarter of the town, often side by side, and their families intermarried as a matter of habit.

Specifically or predominantly urban crafts were in demand. The potter worked beside the mason and the tiler; the glover and the draper may have been found in the same small street; the skinner and the tanner were closely allied; the carpenter and the cooper frequented the same timber-yard. In the market at Salisbury were Oatmeal Row, Butchers’ Row and Ox Row. In Newcastle there were Skinnergate, Spurriergate and Saddlergate. These men formed their own craft guilds, in part to defend themselves from the claims of the merchant guilds, but they were far inferior in status to the richer merchants who supervised and generally organized their working practices. Resentment, and even open confrontation, often arose between various members of the two groups; but the ties of commerce guaranteed that no general or permanent collapse of order could occur.

Beneath the craftsmen and the traders were the apprentices, the labourers and the household servants. There were always potentes and inferiores. Nothing in medieval England existed outside a formal social discipline of high and low. That was the nature of the world. At the lowest level of all were the poor or diseased people, attracted to the town by the possibility of begging or charitable relief. The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represented the great age of the almshouses and the hospitals. The larger towns had acquired schools by the fourteenth century, and in the following century one or two of them even possessed lending libraries. That is one pertinent difference between town and country; the level of literacy was higher in one than in the other. These public buildings in themselves expressed the civic pride of the town, exemplified also in the growing emphasis on civic ritual and procession. The mayor had become ‘my lord mayor’, preceded in ceremonial array by the sergeant carrying the sword and mace of the city. Spectacle and squalor resided, as always, on the same streets.

The Angelus or Gabriel bell rang at dawn to awaken the townspeople. Scores of bells pealed in each town, their particular sound alerting the people to begin or to end various tasks. After the Angelus had sounded, business began almost at once; the water-carriers congregated at the wells, and the butchers prepared the meat for their first purchasers. No traders were allowed to open their shops until six o’clock, however, and no goods could be sold before that time. In London no fish could be sold in the streets before Mass had been celebrated at certain stated churches. In the larger towns other bells rang out at nine or ten o’clock to signify that ‘foreigners’, or outsiders, could now begin to bargain in the markets. This was the hour when the first meal of the day was taken. The bells rang at midday for the consumption of the ‘noonschenche’ or noon-drink. This was also the time when builders and other labourers were allowed to sleep for an hour.

The afternoon was a less animated period than the morning; those who had travelled to the towns with their country produce now began to make their way back. Most shops closed at the dying of the light, but cooks and butchers could work until nine in the evening. That was the hour when the curfew bell was rung, ordering the men and women of the town to return to their dwellings. The workers in the fields now had to hasten home before the gate was closed against them. The bell tolled until the gate was shut. The town slept before beginning once more its customary round.

39

The zealot king

Richard III was formally crowned on 6 July 1483, after a great procession that took him from Westminster Hall to the abbey. For a moment the uncertain events of the world changed into the order of ritual and spectacle. To the sound of trumpets heralds came out carrying the king’s armorial insignia; they were followed by the bishops and abbots with their mitres and croziers, the bishop of Rochester bearing the cross before the archbishop of Canterbury. The earl of Northumberland followed the prelates, with the Curtana sword of mercy in his hands; Lord Stanley came after, bearing the mace, and then Lord Suffolk with the sceptre; the earl of Lincoln followed them with the cross and orb, while the earls of Kent and Surrey carried other swords of state. The Earl Marshal of England, the duke of Norfolk, now stepped forward carrying the crown. He was followed by the king himself, wearing a robe of purple velvet furred with ermine and clad in a surcoat of crimson satin. Four lords held a canopy above his head as he walked towards the great west door of the abbey. This was the prize he had wished for. Anne Neville, his wife and now queen of England, followed him with her own noble procession.

Soon after the coronation, Richard set out on a wide circuit of his kingdom both to parade his majesty and to reconcile himself with perhaps recalcitrant subjects. He travelled from Oxford on to Gloucester and Worcester. In York he decided that he should be crowned for a second time, as if the ceremony in London had obtained the homage of only half his subjects. He was in many respects considered to be primarily a northern lord.

The image of Richard III has been outlined in letters of fire by William Shakespeare, who in turn derived much of his account from the history of Thomas More. More may have been a saint but he was also in part a fantasist, who had good partisan reasons for wishing to excoriate the memory of the last Yorkist king before the rise of the Tudor dynasty. Thus for More, and for Shakespeare, Richard was the smiling and scheming villain, the hunchback of dubious purpose, an abortive thing snatched violently from his mother’s womb. There may be some truth in this caricature, but caricature it remains.

The king, for example, was not a hunchback. As a result of strenuous martial training one arm and shoulder were overdeveloped, thus leading to a slight imbalance, but nothing more. Shakespeare suggests that he was ‘not made to court an amorous looking glass’ but two early portraits reveal a face not devoid of handsomeness. He is relatively small and slight, at least in comparison with his elder brothers; he looks preoccupied, if not exactly anxious. A German observer noticed that he had delicate arms and legs, but possessed ‘also a great heart’ by which he meant magnanimity. The archbishop of St Andrews remarked that ‘nature never enclosed within a smaller frame so great a mind or such remarkable powers’.

That ‘great heart’ was soon being called into question. Soon after the coronation had been celebrated, rumours and suspicions were whispered about the fate of the princes in the Tower. In the earlier months of the year the two boys had been seen shooting and playing in its garden. But then they disappeared from view. As the summer of 1483 turned to autumn the doubts grew louder and more persistent. Polydore Vergil, an historian as strongly biased against Richard as Thomas More himself, reports that the king decided upon the deaths while conducting his northern tour. In his account the king wrote to the constable of the Tower, Sir Robert Brackenbury, demanding that the boys be killed. When Brackenbury refused the king turned to a more compliant servant, Sir James Tyrell, who arranged their deaths with the help of two accomplices. They ‘suddenly lapped them up among their clothes, so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the feather bed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls …’. Other accounts of their fate included death by poison and death by drowning.

The most authentic commentary comes from another chronicler, Dominic Mancini, who reports that the two boys were drawn more and more into the inner chambers of the Tower and that their personal attendants were gradually dismissed. At the mention of the name of Edward V many men burst into tears but ‘whether, however, he has been done away with, and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all discovered’. It was a mystery at the time, and has remained so ever since.

The fact is that the two boys themselves were never seen again beyond the walls of the Tower of London. There has been much speculation about their fate, but the only reliable conclusion must be that they were killed while they were in captivity. The occasion and nature of their death cannot now be known. Other candidates for the role of murderer in chief have also been suggested, including the duke of Buckingham and Henry Tudor who succeeded Richard to the throne. In the latter account Henry ordered their murder after his victory at the battle of Bosworth. But this is essentially a fancy. There can be little doubt that the two boys were murdered on the express or implicit order of Richard III. He may have persuaded himself that the two boys were indeed illegitimate, but that their baleful presence was a continuing threat to his regime.

The house of the Plantagenets, from Henry II to Richard III himself, was brimming with blood. In their lust for power the members of the family turned upon one another. King John murdered, or caused to be murdered, his nephew Arthur; Richard II despatched his uncle, Thomas of Gloucester; Richard II was in turn killed on the orders of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke; Henry VI was killed in the Tower on the orders of his cousin, Edward IV; Edward IV murdered his brother, Clarence, just as his own two sons were murdered by their uncle. It is hard to imagine a family more steeped in slaughter and revenge, of which the Wars of the Roses were only one effusion. It might be thought that some curse had been laid upon the house of the Plantagenets, except of course that in the world of kings the palm of victory always goes to the most violent and the most ruthless. It could be said that the royal family was the begetter of organized crime.

There had been usurpers before, wading through gore, but Richard III was the first usurper who had not taken the precaution of winning a military victory; he claimed the crown through the clandestine killing of two boys rather than through might on the battlefield. This was noticed by his contemporaries. The god of battle was not on his side. The first example of his uncertain status came in an uprising of some southern nobles in the autumn of 1483. They were the prominent magnates of the shires south of the Thames and the Severn, many of them having served in the household of Edward IV. They were led by the duke of Buckingham, who had previously been one of Richard’s most loyal and assiduous supporters. It has been presumed that Buckingham, believing Edward V to be still alive, had decided that the better course lay in supporting the young king’s cause. He may, however, have wanted the crown for himself. Or it may be that horror at the news of the princes’ deaths led him into precipitate action. Richard’s reaction was one of fury towards ‘the malice of him that had best cause to be true’, as he wrote, ‘the most untrue creature living’. In any event the rebellion was unsuccessful. Richard and his commanders rode down the rebels and Buckingham, captured at Salisbury, was summarily executed.

Another eminent figure was involved in this first rebellion. Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, was a descendant of Edward III through the illegitimate (but later legitimated) issue of John of Gaunt. When Henry VI died in the Tower, Henry Tudor became de facto head of the Lancastrian household. As a result he found it necessary to flee to France, where he could escape the attentions of Edward IV and protect himself against the rise of the house of York.

At the time of the succession of Richard III Henry Tudor had become the most significant opponent of the new regime, therefore, made even more commanding by the troubled circumstances of Richard’s accession. He was also aided by his mother. Lady Margaret Beaufort came into contact with Elizabeth Woodville, still claiming sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, through the agency of a Welsh doctor who ministered to both great ladies. It was agreed between them that Henry Tudor should marry Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. This is also the best possible indication that Elizabeth the queen knew her two sons to be dead. Why else would she support another man’s claim to the throne?

With this guarantee Henry sailed to England at the time of Buckingham’s rebellion; all but two of his fifteen ships were scattered by a tempest and, when he hovered close by the coast of Dorset, he discovered that the revolt had ended ignominiously. So he returned to Brittany, followed by the rebels who had managed to evade the king’s wrath. Henry Tudor set up what was in effect an alternative court.

Yet Richard was for the moment safe. He tried to make his position even more secure by promoting northerners into the positions previously held by the magnates of the south, although of course this proved less than popular with the southerners themselves. They did not want ‘strange men’ in their shires, where rule was generally maintained by a closely knit group of relatives. Each shire was essentially a family business. The king was now stripping its assets.

The nature of his subsequent rule, however, has perhaps been judged unfairly because of its inauspicious beginnings. He had all the makings of a firm and even ruthless administrator. He set up a ‘council of the north’ to consolidate his power in that region, and it proved to be such a necessary tool of administration that it continued into the middle of the seventeenth century. Such was his zeal for public business that more than 2,000 official documents passed through his hands in the course of two years. Everything came to his attention, from the preparations for battle to the mowing of hay at Warwick. The high dignitaries of the Church, in convocation at the beginning of 1484, addressed his ‘most noble and blessed disposition’. This may be the standard language of the supplicant, but differs so notably from the usual accounts of Richard III that it deserves to be mentioned. The more benevolent view of the king is strengthened by the words of a popular ballad, ‘Scottish Field’, in which is described:

Richard that rich lord: in his bright armour.

He held himself no coward: for he was a noble king.

The king also gained the reputation of being a good lawmaker. When at a later date an alderman of London disagreed with Cardinal Wolsey over a proposed exaction, he reminded the prelate that such forced taxation had been forbidden by a statute of Richard III. ‘Sir,’ Wolsey said in his usual high-handed manner, ‘I marvel that you speak of Richard III which was a usurper and a murderer of his own nephews, then of so evil a man how can the acts be good?’ The alderman replied that ‘although he did evil yet in his time were many good acts made not by him only but by consent of the whole body of the realm which is in parliament’. So, contrary to the Tudor myth of the evil hunchback, memories of Richard III’s good governance remained in London fifty years after his death. Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor in a different reign, commented upon ‘the politic and wholesome laws’ passed in Richard’s first and only parliament.

Piety, verging on moralism, seems to have been the most abiding aspect of his character. In the Act claiming his title to the throne the king denounced the rule of Edward IV as that of one who, determined by ‘adulation and flattery and led by sensuality and excess, followed the counsel of persons insolent vicious and of inordinate avarice despising good virtuous and prudent persons …’. It seems likely that he did believe the Woodvilles to be of ‘sensual’ stock, and therefore justified to himself the murder of the two princes as a means of cleansing the body politic.

Two months after publishing this attack upon the Woodvilles he sent a circular letter to the bishops of England in which he declared that his fervent wish was ‘to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced’. This might just be an act of public piety but, after the death of his wife and only son, he composed a prayer of more private intent in which he asked God ‘to free me thy servant King Richard from all the tribulation, grief and anguish in which I am held’. His son, Edward, had died at the age of eleven in the spring of 1484; the insecurity of the York lineage was clear to all. His wife followed her child to the grave early in the following year. Richard was effectively alone in the world, prey to the ‘grief and anguish’ he lamented in his prayer.

Another intriguing aspect of his religious faith can be found. He owned a copy of the Wycliffite translation of the New Testament, as well as William Langland’s Piers Plowman; both of these books had been condemned by a synod of the Church in 1408. They smacked of Lollardy and a more austere version of Catholicism. It can be safely concluded that Richard was interested in an unorthodox and more rigorous piety, wholly in keeping with what can be surmised of his stern character. He need have no scruples if he was doing the work of the Lord.

The death of his wife freed him for a further matrimonial alliance, and serious reports emerged at the time that he planned to marry Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest daughter, thus pre-empting her betrothal to Henry Tudor. It was even rumoured that he had poisoned his wife in order to hasten the new marriage. It never seemed likely, however, that he would be able to marry the girl whose brothers he had destroyed. Even by the standards of this harsh and cruel age, it would not be considered to be a blessed union. In any case his disdain for the Woodvilles was well known.

Yet the rumours persisted, to the point where Richard was obliged to summon a council in which he denied ever having wished to marry Elizabeth of York. Even his closest supporters had been horrified at the prospect and, according to one of the chronicles, declared to his face that the people ‘would rise in rebellion against him, and impute to him the death of his queen’. There was widespread mistrust of him, especially of his harsh and unyielding temper. We have the paradox of a man of faith who was also a man of blood. But is it such a paradox, after all? Those of an austere faith may be the most ruthless and relentless, especially if they believe that they are acting in God’s best interests. Richard III has often been accused of hypocrisy, but his real vice might have been that of zealotry burning all the brighter with his belief that he was surrounded by enemies.

Elizabeth of York was of course engaged elsewhere. In the cathedral of Rouen, on Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor pledged that he would marry her on being crowned the king of England. His supporters, all the time swelling in numbers, then swore loyalty to him and to his claim. Polydore Vergil states that Richard III was now ‘vexed, wrested and tormented in mind with fear almost perpetually’. He travelled around his kingdom, never staying in one castle or monastery for very long. He arranged for a force of soldiers to seize Henry Tudor from the duchy of Brittany but Henry, warned in advance, fled across the border into France.

It was from this country that he launched his invasion of England in the summer of 1485. An exile of twenty-two years was about to come to an end. Richard could not of course predict the point of invasion, despite the presence of his spies in Henry’s entourage; so he settled on Nottingham as a convenient site for a court that was now essentially a war camp. Nottingham was in the middle of the kingdom and in any case close to his northern territories, from which most of his support would undoubtedly come. In that early summer, the king issued a general proclamation in which he denounced Henry Tudor as a bastard on both sides of the family and as a minion of the king of France; if he seized the throne he would ‘do the most cruel murders, slaughters and robberies and disherisons that ever were seen in any Christian realm’.

On 7 August Henry landed at Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire, with seven ships and 1,000 men. The French were happy to finance the venture as a way of distracting Richard from his designs to aid the old enemy of Brittany. Henry began moving northwards through Haverfordwest to Cardigan, where his forces were joined by some of his Welsh allies; Henry was the nephew of Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, and was thus considered by Welshmen to be Welsh. A bardic song rang in the valleys:

Jasper will breed for us a dragon –

Of the fortunate blood of Brutus is he

A Bull of Anglesey to achieve;

He is the hope of our race.

Henry needed a myth to bolster his uncertain claim to the throne. In any case the Welsh affinity was of vital importance to him. As he led his troops through Wales he flew the red dragon of Cadwallader, from whom he claimed ancestry, on the white and green colours of the Tudors. He advanced into England through Shrewsbury and at Newport, in Staffordshire, he was greeted by his first English adherents. His was still a vulnerable army, made up of men from France and Brittany as well as Wales and England, and might not have been considered powerful enough to confront the king of England. Even by the time he reached Shrewsbury, however, it was clear to the king that a rebel army had come into England without meeting any serious resistance.

Richard himself could not necessarily rely on the loyal support of the magnates; he had alienated the great families of the south, and of the midlands, by imposing upon their shires the members of his northern affinity. He had a feudal, rather than a national, sense of his kingdom, and his past actions made it impossible for him to knit the nation into unity. From Nottingham Richard marched to Leicester where he issued a call to arms, urging his subjects on their utmost peril to join him. He had refused to advance to Leicester until after the feast day of the Assumption, another example of his overweening piety. He told his retainers to ‘come with such number as you have promised, sufficiently horsed and harnessed’.

The duke of Norfolk and the earl of Northumberland were among those who obeyed his summons. The men of the north also responded quickly, with the city of York sending eighty men ‘in all haste’. The duke of Suffolk made no move. Another great nobleman, Lord Stanley, held back on the excuse or pretext that he was suffering from the sweating sickness; whereupon Richard seized his son and told Stanley that, if he did not arrive with his forces, the young man’s head would be cut off. In the event Lord Stanley and his brother arrived with sufficient men, but their loyalty was ever in doubt. The king did not know whether they would enter battle as his friends or as his foes.

When the armies met on Bosworth Field, on 22 August, the advantage lay with the king. He had mustered 10,000 men, while Henry commanded half that number. There are no authentic descriptions of the battle itself, except that it began with the sound of gunfire; both sides had artillery, including cannon and the recently fashioned handguns. The bursts of fire solved nothing, and a bout of hand-to-hand fighting followed. At some point Richard decided to move up and attack Henry Tudor himself, in a deliberate decision to terminate the conflict as soon as practicable. It was a rule of war that an army would disperse or retreat as soon as its commander was killed. He may also have believed that some of his men were about to desert him.

Taking only his most loyal supporters with him he galloped hard into the mass of men around Henry Tudor, wounding and killing as many as he could reach with his sword. He is said to have cried out ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’ He had made the mistake of separating himself from the main body of his army, but his sortie was effective for a while; then Sir William Stanley, who had stayed apart, now entered the battle on the side of Henry Tudor. In the ensuing chaos Henry’s men surrounded the king and attacked him; he was engulfed, and his horse was killed beneath him. His blood ran into a small brook, and it was still being reported in the nineteenth century that no local person would drink from it. The dead king’s prayer book was later found in his tent on the field of battle.

An hour’s fighting had sufficed. After the battle was over, the crown that he had worn upon his helmet was found lying on the field. It was taken up and placed on the head of Henry Tudor. Richard’s body was stripped of its armour and carried on a horse to the Franciscan house in Leicester where it was buried without ceremony in a stone coffin. The coffin was later used as a horse trough, and the bones of Richard III scattered. He is the only English king, after the time of the Normans, who has never been placed within a royal tomb. He had ruled for a little over two years, and was still a young man of thirty-two. The great dynastic war was over. The roses, white and red, were laid in the dust.

40

The king of suspicions

The life of Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, had been one of poverty and exile. On the triumph of Edward IV he had been hurried from Wales to Brittany by his uncle, Jasper Tudor. He would have remained an isolated and obscure scion of the Lancastrian affinity, an offspring of the bastard (but later legitimated) line of John of Gaunt, if the perverse actions of Richard III had not raised him up as a claimant to the English throne. The alienation of support suffered by the king, principally through the removal of the two princes, gave Henry the opportunity of stepping forward. It was his time.

After the victory at Bosworth Henry VII made a slow progress south. According to one who knew him, Polydore Vergil, he was ‘slender but well built and strong’ and his height was above the average; his appearance was ‘remarkably attractive, and his face was cheerful especially when speaking’; his eyes were ‘small and blue’. He had high cheekbones, hooded eyelids, a high-bridged pointed nose and thin lips. A picture of the king in majesty begins to develop. Vergil also notes, however, that in later years his hair grew white, his teeth were few and blackened with decay, and his complexion sallow.

The coronation was fixed for 30 October, and a parliament summoned for 7 November. It was proclaimed before the Lords and Commons that the reign of Henry had begun on 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth; by this sleight of hand Richard could be accused of high treason for opposing his sovereign lord even though he had at the time been the lawful king. The statute book has rarely contained any greater absurdity. Henry also desired to be crowned before the parliament convened because he did not wish it to be believed that his regal authority had been conferred by the assembly; what parliament could make, it might also unmake.

But by what right did Henry claim and hold the crown? It was not from the fact of birth. He derived all right of birth from his mother and, since she was still alive, the throne ought to have been hers. His promise to marry Elizabeth of York, thus finally uniting both principal families, was by no means sufficient or even appropriate; it might mean that he was crowned only because of his association with the house of York. If Elizabeth of York had died before him without issue, he might theoretically have to leave the throne and give place to the next in succession. It was not to be considered. That is the reason he postponed the wedding until after the coronation. He had to be king before he became husband.

The essential justification for his assumption of rule was simply that he had won on the field of Bosworth; the god of battles had blown Richard away. Victory was always seen to be a sign of divine favour, although the bewildering number of surprises and reversals in the feuds of the Wars of the Roses had led some to question that belief. The crown had changed by force five times in the preceding thirty years, and so its bestowal might be seen as a question of luck rather than of grace. The passing of the defeated king was not mourned; but the new king was a usurper whose rule might be endured rather than enjoyed. The power and significance of the crown itself might be considered to be a little tarnished. There was no sense of a glorious dawn. Eventually the king felt obliged to ask for a bull from the pope to guarantee his authority.

As king, therefore, Henry was not secure. Only in the last ten years of his reign did he achieve that happy state. He had spent his life in exile, and had little if any acquaintance with England and the English. He had never been involved in government, and had owned no great territories of English land. He was happier speaking French. The great families of the country could hardly have considered him to be one of their own, and had for the most part stayed out of his struggle with Richard. They were in effect neutral observers of his ultimate victory. Only two nobles fought with him at Bosworth and they, like him, were exiles. So at the age of twenty-eight he took up the burden of kingship without preparation or instruction.

He had to build up his support piece by piece. He was always cautious and circumspect, characterized equally by reserve and by suspicion. At the time of his coronation he established a royal bodyguard of 200 men, known as the yeomen of the guard; they wore jackets of white and green and carried weapons, part spear and part battleaxe, known as halberds. These men were the origin of the standing army of a later generation. Henry was emulating the French king, who had his own personal bodyguard; in this, as in other matters, he took the French court as his model. It was the one he knew best. He also extended his defences by other means, and sent garrisons to Plymouth and to Berwick in case of possible invasion.

He clothed himself in the mantle of pomp and power as a way of disarming any opposition to his rule. He claimed that he was descended from Brutus, the Trojan founder of London, and he identified himself with the supposedly saintly Henry VI. He spent much time and effort in an attempt to have the dead king canonized. He was the first king of England to put a stamp of his true image on the coinage of the country; the silver shilling showed him in profile, while the gold sovereign bore an image of him seated in majesty on a Gothic throne with the crown imperial upon his head. It was one of the many images of his ‘majesty’ popular during his reign. Despite his alleged parsimony he spent profusely on the magnificence of a court that became notable for its ceremonies and displays. He also refurbished the royal image by introducing the motif of the white and red roses intertwined as a symbol of regal unity. The red rose had never been a very important emblem for the Lancastrians, but it was of use to Henry as a device. So began the myth of Tudor renovation that was celebrated by Holinshed and Shakespeare.

He had every motive to justify and expand his royalty; a usurper is always in danger, and almost at once the Yorkist faction began to conspire against him. Some of the former king’s supporters rose against Henry, at Worcester and in Wales, but they were easily dispelled. The throne was further strengthened by the birth of a son and heir at Winchester in 1486; this was the city in which the ‘Round Table’ was to be seen, and the infant was given the name of Arthur. Henry was eager to employ or to exploit any royal connection he could find.

Another attack upon his throne was launched at the end of this year by Yorkists who claimed that they had rescued the young earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence and therefore a proper heir to the throne, from long imprisonment. This was enough to arouse all the hopes of the defeated. The fact that the real Warwick was even then immured in the Tower of London did not in any way diminish their enthusiasm. The boy had emerged in Dublin, and in that city on 24 May 1487 he was proclaimed as Edward VI. A crown had been taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary and placed in ceremony upon his head.

The real name of the supposed king was in fact Lambert Simnel. Of his earlier life, little enough is known. It seems that he was characterized by a pleasing appearance and an uncommon manner, leading some bold spirits to believe that he could indeed impersonate an earl. He also caught the attention of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of Burgundy, who would in future years do everything in her power to restore the Yorkist dynasty. Other Yorkist sympathizers, the earl of Lincoln and Lord Lovel among them, were eager to participate in the conspiracy. Its most surprising member, however, must be Henry’s mother-in-law. Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV, might have been considered to be above suspicion. Her daughter, Elizabeth of York, was the reigning queen. What had she to gain in supplanting her son-in-law and effectively dispossessing her daughter?

It seems likely that she felt herself and her kin to have been humiliated by Henry’s seizure of the crown. There were rumours that Henry was not treating his wife with due respect or kindness. He had delayed the wedding, and was still delaying the queen’s coronation. He did not like the Yorkist connection; he had been fighting against it all of his adult life. He had married Elizabeth for reasons of state. So the mother turned against him, and supported the pretensions of Lambert Simnel.

Henry, alarmed at this threat to his rule, extracted the real earl of Warwick from the Tower and had him paraded through the streets of London. The young man also attended High Mass at St Paul’s, where he was allowed to converse with those who were familiar to him. Simnel’s supporters in Dublin of course denounced him as an imposter. From her palace in Flanders Margaret of Burgundy proceeded to hire 2,000 German mercenaries under the command of the earl of Lincoln. It was said by the Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall, that she was a ‘diabolical duchess’ and ‘a dog reverting to her old vomit’; the vomit was directed against Henry Tudor.

The German mercenaries landed in Dublin as the army of the proclaimed Edward VI where they enlisted more soldiers and mercenaries. They sailed to England with the counterfeit king, and Henry rode out with his army against them. They met at East Stoke on 16 June, where the 12,000 men of Henry defeated the 8,000 men under the command of the earl of Lincoln. Lincoln himself was killed in the mêlée, and Simnel was captured. Lovel had fled the scene of battle. Francis Bacon, in his life of Henry VII, remarks that Lovel lived long afterwards ‘in a cellar or vault’. It has been said that, during building work at Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, an underground chamber was discovered; here was found the skeleton of a man, sitting in a chair with his head reclining on a table. Fortune had not favoured him.

Yet the battle of Stoke had been finely balanced. It is significant that some of the gentry had held back from supporting Henry with one excuse or another, and that many rumours or ‘skryes’ – commotions – were spread concerning the king’s fate. The fortunes of battle are always uncertain, and the fragility of his rule was emphasized by the fact that he had been forced to fight for his crown only two years after Bosworth. The battle of Stoke may be considered to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Yet the victor was relatively merciful. Lambert Simnel was employed by him as a turnspit in the royal kitchens, and later became the king’s falconer. Elizabeth Woodville was removed to a nunnery in Bermondsey, where she spent the rest of her life. At a later feast with the lords of Ireland Henry remarked that ‘My masters of Ireland, you will crown apes at last’.

It was important for the king to stabilize and to strengthen his power. He preferred to govern through intimates rather than through the great men of the land; he did not exclude the aristocracy from his council, but he did not place his whole trust in them. Instead he surrounded himself with a retinue of self-made men who owed all their loyalty to the king. He preferred lawyers to magnates, and listened to the advice of great merchants rather than great lords. Of course he needed the nobility and the lords to control the counties in which they resided; in the absence of a police force and a standing army, he relied upon their support. But he was careful not to increase their number, and created only three earls and five peers in the whole course of his reign.

The king also worked through tribunals and courts which were under his control, principal among them the Star Chamber which was used to awe certain over-mighty subjects into submission. If they were guilty of perverting the course of justice, or of acquiring a small army of retainers, or of inciting disorder, they were quickly punished. Justice Shallow exclaims, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that ‘I shall make a Star Chamber matter of it … the Council shall hear it: it is a riot … Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.’ The councillors were gathered in a chamber of which the roof was painted with stars. There was no jury, and no appeal. The camera stellata or chambre de éstoiles is first mentioned in the reign of Edward III, but Henry VII widened its powers for his own benefit.

Henry also involved himself in the close administration of royal finance, and the details of expenditure in the account books bear his initials; he went through them line by line. Throughout his reign he was determined to exact every possible claim and right he possessed; in that, however, he was not very different from his predecessors. He strengthened his personal hold over his cash when he diverted much of his earnings away from the exchequer, an official body, to his own private treasury. The revenue from the crown lands, the fees for the drawing-up of writs, the fines levied on prisoners, the old feudal payments, all flowed directly into his hands.

The foreign adventures of Henry were by no means over. He had consistently supported Brittany in its struggle against the power of France; it was to Brittany, after all, that he owed his earlier freedom. He had placed troops in the duchy armed and prepared for war against the French king, Charles VIII. Henry gathered a fleet and persuaded the parliament to raise a tax in order to subsidize the venture. He knew that the threat or promise of war could always fill his treasury. Charles VIII was of course eager to distract and destabilize the English king, and entered into negotiations both with Scotland and with Ireland to plan a campaign. The enemies of England only needed a cause.

So it was that in the late autumn of 1491 a young man of seventeen emerged in Cork claiming to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London. As Richard IV, he was the true Yorkist king of England. He was fluent and convincing about life at the court of his father; he recalled the details of his imprisonment in the Tower. He even remembered what he had said to the murderers of his brother. ‘Why are you killing my brother? Kill me and let him live!’ He was personable, and dressed in fine style.

He declared that he had been taken from the Tower and delivered to a certain lord for execution; but this lord, pitying his innocence and revering his royalty, sent him abroad after extracting an oath from him that he would not reveal his true identity until a number of years had passed. The time had now come for the rightful king to emerge into the light. Some were convinced of his identity on first observing him. He had the natural grace and dignity of the royal blood. His real name was Perkin Warbeck, and he was believed to be the son of a Flemish boatman.

The Irish deputy, the earl of Kildare, was not wholly enthusiastic about the young man’s presence in the country; Kildare had supported the pretensions of Lambert Simnel four years before, and was understandably reluctant to commit himself again to a Yorkist revenant. But the great pretender had friends elsewhere. Warbeck readily accepted an invitation to travel to the court of Charles VIII, where he was received with acclaim as the one and only king of England. He was known as ‘Richard Plantagenet’, and his retinue grew larger.

Henry was growing sick, perhaps with frustration and fear. The bills of his various apothecaries were seven times larger than before. He made a treaty with Charles VIII, who was himself eager to avoid war over the matter of Brittany; one of the clauses of the treaty stipulated that Charles would not harbour any of Henry’s enemies. Warbeck then promptly crossed the border and made his way to the court of Margaret of Burgundy at Malines. ‘I recognized him,’ she wrote, ‘as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday.’ Others from the old court of Edward IV also claimed to know him, almost by instinct. He was now being called by Margaret of Burgundy the White Rose, the pure and fragrant emblem of the Yorkists.

The duchess also ensured that he acquired wealthy and influential allies. He was sent to the funeral of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, in Vienna where he met the great and the good; among them was Frederick’s son, Maximilian, who now had command of the entire Habsburg Empire. Maximilian and the White Rose became fast friends. The pretender was soon coining silver groats in his own name; his armed guard was dressed in red and blue.

But Henry had not been idle. The danger was too acute for that. He applied trade sanctions against the Burgundian territories, where Warbeck was being sheltered. English goods, and in particular English cloth, were in turn barred from the Netherlands and elsewhere. The financial consequences were severe for merchants and workers on both sides, but the dynastic struggle took priority over economic affairs. Henry had also spent much money in trying to learn of Perkin Warbeck’s real origins, and his envoys in Europe were now busily retailing the facts of his supposedly baseborn family.

The king feared that an invasion was imminent; he sent as many ships as he could find to patrol the seas along the Suffolk coast and ordered troops to guard the principal ports of the realm. He asked his supporters to supply men-at-arms who would be ready to fight at a day’s notice.

He had spies in Warbeck’s entourage also, listening to every conversation. It was said of the king that he handled every case ‘circumspectly and with convenient diligence for inveigling, and yet not disclose it to the party … but keep it to himself and always grope further’. It was discovered that small clusters of Yorkist supporters, in Calais and Suffolk and elsewhere, were ready to rise on behalf of the claims of ‘Richard Plantagenet’. Some of them were still working at Henry’s court and in Henry’s household. This was the moment to arrest and imprison them.

The most senior conspirator turned out to be in fact Henry’s chamberlain, Sir William Stanley, the man who had engineered the king’s victory at Bosworth. At his subsequent trial he was alleged to have said that ‘if he knew for sure that the young man were King Edward’s son, he would never bear arms against him’. Under other circumstances these would be unexceptionable sentiments but, in Henry’s reign, the words meant a traitor’s death.

On 3 July 1495, the White Rose and his mercenary army landed at Deal in Kent; but the invasion proved abortive. The forces of the pretender were overwhelmed, and Warbeck retreated to the relative safety of the seas. His captured soldiers were marched to Newgate or the Tower. Henry could draw even more comfort from the fact that the English had not rallied to Warbeck’s banner; they had remained unexcited by his landing and unwilling to support him.

Warbeck had been rebuffed, but he sailed on to the old Yorkist haven of Ireland. He made the unlucky choice of Waterford as his point of entry, where the citizens actively resisted any attempt to enlist them into his war. For a few months he wandered through Ireland, a putative king without a kingdom, living in secrecy and fear. His fortune changed once again, however, when he was invited or invited himself to the court of James IV in Edinburgh. The young king of Scotland – approximately Warbeck’s own age – was happy to take up any opportunity of embarrassing and weakening the old enemy of England. Warbeck provided the occasion. He arrived in the winter of 1495 and was greeted by the Scots as a conquering hero. He received more than promises, however; he obtained a bride. A close relative of the Scottish king, Katherine Gordon, was betrothed to him. She was not exactly a princess, but she was the next best thing.

So the White Rose and the Scottish king, now cousins by marriage, set about the invasion of England. James IV may have had in mind one of the border wars by which Anglo-Scottish hostilities were conducted, with the assumption that the English would then rise up in support of young Richard IV. Henry himself could not be sure of the outcome. He prepared to muster a force of 20,000 men, and launch a navy of seventy ships against the Scots; to widespread and furious resentment, he levied taxes and forced loans to pay for the proposed expedition. In the event the invasion proved to be a fiasco, and the White Rose professed himself to be horrified by the bloody depredations of the Scottish troops before they fled back over the border. Once again he was seen to be an unlucky prince.

He lingered in Scotland for a few more months, feeling increasingly unwelcome at the court of James IV, before venturing everything on another English assault. With his wife and a few supporters he sailed to Cornwall by way of Ireland. He had been informed that an army of Cornish rebels was waiting to greet him in the southwest of England, the men of Cornwall having marched a few months before towards London in protest against what they considered to be unjust taxation. They had been joined by men from the other western counties, all of them refusing to pay for the war against the Scots. Why should they finance a distant struggle in which they had no part? Like many such rebels, however, they marched as far as Blackheath before their leaders were cut down. Another opportunity now presented itself. They believed that they had found a leader of royal blood.

Once more Warbeck was singularly unsuccessful; some men from Devon and Somerset joined him, but the town of Exeter refused him entry. His followers, tired and hungry, began to desert his army; the king sent messengers among them, promising them pardons if they laid down their arms. Warbeck, sensing defeat, fled for sanctuary to the abbey at Beaulieu. Henry surrounded the church, and the pretender was persuaded to surrender. He came out of sanctuary dressed in cloth of gold, but his pride was soon extinguished. He was taken back to London, a trumpeter riding before him to blow mock flourishes into the air, where his confession was published. It is likely to have been written by the king’s councillors, and to have borne as little relation to the truth as his original claim. Several versions of his life were soon circulating in England and in Europe. No one really knew the facts of his origin or his upbringing; it is possible that he was chosen for his role at an early age, and then brought up in the court of Margaret of Burgundy herself. It was said at the time that he was in fact an illegitimate son of Edward IV. Henry himself professed to believe that he was the illegitimate child of Margaret and a local bishop. Perkin is still wrapped in mist.

His end was in plain sight, however. He escaped from his guards at the palace of Westminster, where he seems to have been living as the king’s confined guest, but was recaptured. He was then consigned to the Tower, the guest of the king in a more oppressive sense, where he lingered for more than a year. Yet the fears and the suspicions of the king still surrounded him. He was accused of plotting treason with another prisoner, none other than the young earl of Warwick who had been impersonated by Lambert Simnel. The king now took the convenient opportunity of killing the two young men who threatened his throne. Warbeck was hanged, and Warwick beheaded.

The earl of Warwick had been imprisoned, and killed, for the sole offence of being the Yorkist heir. He was an innocent and, in detention for fifteen years, it was said that he ‘could not discern a goose from a capon’. He had to die all the same. A happier postscript may be found in the welcome provided to Perkin’s young wife; Katherine Gordon settled down in the English court, and eventually remarried.

Henry was now believed to be securely placed upon the throne. ‘This present state,’ the Milanese ambassador reported, ‘is most stable even for the king’s descendants, since there is no one who aspires to the crown … His Majesty can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on what is passing in the plain.’ The view from the tower is, of course, different from the view on the plain where there may be discordance and resentment. Two Spanish envoys suggested as much when they concluded that the king ‘has established good order in England, and keeps the people in such subjection as has never been the case before’.

Yet Henry fell sick in the month after the executions; he recovered, but his health was now gravely damaged. He was as devout as he was superstitious. He attended Mass each day but he also consulted astrologers and soothsayers. He listened eagerly to prophecies concerning the crown and the kingdom, at a time when he was pursued by private misfortunes. In the spring of 1502 his eldest son and heir, Arthur, died from disease or illness. On his death his strong and intelligent younger brother, Henry, became the heir. Six months before Arthur had married Catherine of Aragon, thus binding together the English and Spanish thrones, but Henry was now in turn betrothed to her. The king continually postponed any marriage, however, in the hope that a better prospect for his son might emerge. The young Spanish lady was caught in the middle of international events, starved of money and of affection.

In the year after the death of her eldest son, Elizabeth of York, the queen of England, suffered a miscarriage and succumbed to a post-partum infection. Henry was severely affected by this fresh sorrow, and it was said that he ‘privily departed to a solitary place and would no man should resort unto him’. Elizabeth lay in state in the Tower, and was then given a ceremonial funeral in Westminster Abbey. Two years later the king sought another bride. He pursued the queen of Naples for her dowry as well as for her presumed attractions. He despatched envoys to Italy with the following questions. ‘Whether she be painted, and whether her visage be fat or lean; whether there appeared to be any hair about her lips; whether she wore high slippers to increase her stature; whether her breath was sweet; whether she be a great feeder or drinker?’ He then pursued Joanna of Castile, in the hope of governing that country as regent, even though the lady herself was known to be insane. The courtships came to nothing, and Henry never married again.

He did enjoy some success, the most prominent being the marriage of his eldest daughter to the king of Scotland. The wedding of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1502 was the balm upon the wound inflicted by the advocacy of Warbeck. By his engineering of dynastic marriages, in fact, Henry did manage to consolidate the position of England among the ruling families of Europe. In so doing he abandoned the aggressive and expansionist policies of the Plantagenet kings. We may interpret that as a victory of his ‘foreign policy’. In any case war was expensive; it also required taxation that stirred up the people.

Despite the brief interruption in the commerce between England and the Low Countries, as a result of Margaret’s welcome for Warbeck, Henry did his best to foster the market in unfinished wool and finished cloth; they were now the principal exports, and the king wished to expedite the trade. He promoted English commerce in other areas, also, and there was scarcely a country in Europe with which he did not enter trade relations; Iceland, and Portugal, and the Baltic states, all came within his purview.

He was by no means a statesman striving for the common good; he was eager only to enjoy the fruits of the increase in customs revenue that went straight into his coffers. He traded on his own account, too, and in one year earned £15,000 from the import of alum used in the manufacture of soap. This was in theory a papal monopoly, but he considered the risk of excommunication less important than the making of profit. The figure of the king in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ – in the counting house counting out his money – is likely to have been based on Henry VII.

The possibility of profit also promoted him to support the expedition of Bristol merchants over the seas to the ‘isle of Brazil’, better known as Newfoundland, where they found immense fishing grounds. He also gave John Cabot and his three sons a licence for a voyage of discovery in the western oceans, thus beginning the story of English exploration. Cabot touched down on the coast of North America, while all the time believing that he had reached Asia, and the colonial flag was raised. Hakluyt relates that the Bristol merchants brought back three native Americans from Newfoundland to Henry’s court; they were ‘clothed in beasts’ skins and ate raw flesh, and were in their demeanour like to brute beasts’. Henry made sure that they were furnished with suitable lodgings in Westminster and, within two years, they were ‘clothed like Englishmen and could not be discerned from Englishmen’. Hakluyt adds that ‘as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word’. By the time that Sebastian Cabot reached Hudson Bay, on a subsequent voyage, the king was dead.

In his last years his suspiciousness intensified, to the extent that at the time of his death he was considered by many to be the tyrant of England. He had withdrawn further into the private world of majesty. Disturbed by the knowledge that senior members of his household had colluded with Perkin Warbeck, in an attempt to restore the Yorkist dynasty, the king decided to set himself apart from those who had customarily surrounded him. He created a Privy Chamber to which only his intimates had access. He lived and worked in a private set of chambers, secluded from the more open reception rooms of the Great Chamber and the Presence Chamber; now he could truly maintain his distance and, of course, keep his secrets. The royal household of the medieval period, established largely upon the retinue of men-at-arms surrounding the king and sharing his activities, was finally supplanted by the idea of a private court administered by servants and royal officials. In the last thirteen years of his reign he summoned only one parliament, in 1504.

Yet he maintained the magnificence of his court; as befitted a great king, jousts and processions and tournaments were organized on a grand scale. Tumblers and dancers were brought before him; he purchased or was given animals for the royal menagerie, and he liked to parade ‘freaks’ for the benefit of the courtiers. The king enjoyed gambling, too, and played card games such as Torment, Condemnation and Who Wins Loses. He liked to hawk and to hunt every day, and five falconers were enrolled in his entourage. He seems particularly to have enjoyed the company of ‘fools’ or jesters; at least five of them could be found in court at any one time, including Scot and Dick ‘the master fools’ and Ringeley ‘the abbot of misrule’.

Medieval humour is now perhaps an arcane subject. One phrase became a catchword in the fourteenth century. ‘As Hendyng says’ or ‘quoth Hendyng’ was a way of encapsulating a piece of wit or wisdom. ‘Friendless are the dead, quoth Hendyng’ or ‘never tell your foe that your foot aches, quod Hendyng’ or ‘Hendyng says, better to give an apple than to eat an apple’ were repeated in street and field.

Many jokes or puzzles were posed, and a game of question-and-answer was called ‘Puzzled Balthasar’. What is the broadest water and the least danger to walk over? The dew. What is the cleanest leaf among all other leaves? The holly leaf, for nobody will wipe his arse with it. How many calves’ tails can reach from the earth to the sky? No more than one, if it is long enough. What is the best thing and the worst thing among men? Word is both best and worst. What thing is it that some love and some hate? It is judgment.

A thousand proverbs and sayings rose into the air:

Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell?

A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow’s nose.

Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You.

The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill.

He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin.

An hour’s cold will suck out seven years of heat.

The last sentence is redolent of the entire medieval period.

In the quieter times the king worked with his advisers undisturbed. Two of the most prominent of them, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, were set to harry and to prosecute the great ones of the realm. They dominated a small committee, called the Council Learned in the Law, specifically established to enforce the king’s rights and to collect the king’s debts. But they also had more informal ways of proceeding. If the eminent families spent little, and made no outward show, then they could spare a present of money to the king; if they spent lavishly, and lived in style, then they could afford to share their magnificence with the king. This was the ‘fork’ upon which the king impaled his victims.

Empson and Dudley also imposed fines or bonds upon the members of the nobility who had in any way breached the law. The earl of Northumberland was fined £5,000 for unlawful retaining. Lord Abergavenny was fined £70,000 for the same offence; Henry collected only £5,000 of that enormous sum, with the threat of seizing the rest if the lord did not behave satisfactorily. Anyone could be accused before a judge and, if he did not answer the summons, his goods could be confiscated and the presumed guilty party imprisoned at the king’s pleasure. Thus did the king buy the obedience of those mightier subjects whom he did not trust. But he could not purchase their loyalty. He was feared by all, but he was not loved or admired by many. ‘All things’, wrote Thomas More of the king’s reign, ‘were so covertly demeaned, one thing pretended and another meant.’

As Dudley said at a later date, from the hindsight provided by a prison cell, ‘the pleasure and mind of the king’s grace was much set to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure, wherefore diverse and many persons were bound to his grace in great sums of money’. Dudley also confessed that he had illegally extorted money on the king’s behalf from eighty victims. The king had in effect established a financial autocracy, an absolutism all the more feared because of exorbitant fines and the threat of endless imprisonment. This was the legacy that he left to his son and heir, who became Henry VIII. He kept notebooks in which he jotted down his caustic or suspicious thoughts and observations about those around him; when a pet monkey tore up one of these books, the courtiers were according to Francis Bacon ‘almost tickled with sport’.

It could be said that, like Scrooge, Henry VII feared the world too much. Certainly, like Scrooge, he tried to protect himself with a wall of money. Yet he was avaricious with a purpose; he told one of his councillors that ‘the kings my predecessors, weakening their treasure, have made themselves servants to their subjects’. He did not intend to beg or borrow, only to extort with menaces. In the process the annual royal income increased by approximately 45 per cent, and he was one of the few monarchs in English history to clear his debts and to die solvent. He was also the first king since Henry V to pass on his throne without dispute.

Money was power. It enabled the king to protect his throne and his dynasty; Henry told the Spanish ambassador that it was his intention to keep his subjects poor because riches would only make them haughty. He may have become more harsh, and more rapacious, in his last years; but it is equally likely that his natural tendencies were reinforced by age. He was in declining health, and in the final three years of his reign he was more or less an invalid. In his will he declared that 2,000 Masses should be said for the sake of his soul, within the space of one month, at sixpence a Mass. He died at his palace of Richmond on 21 April 1509, to general relief if not open rejoicing. ‘Avarice’, one noble wrote, ‘has fled the country.’ Yet the days of royal avarice were just beginning.

A conclusion

When we look over the course of human affairs we are more likely than not to find only error and confusion. I have already explained, in the course of this narrative, that the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.

So the great movements of the period, as described in the present narrative, may seem to be without direction and without explanation except in terms of day-to-day expediency; in that sense they are without historical meaning. What seem to be, in retrospect, the greatest and most important changes tend to go unnoticed at the time. We may take the slow progress of the English parliament as an example. The government of king with parliament was not framed after a model; the various parts and powers of the national assembly emerged from occasional acts, the significance of which was not understood, or from decisions reached by practical considerations and private interests. The entry of knights and townsmen, later to become known as ‘the Commons’, provoked no interest or surprise. It was a matter of indifference.

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress or evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the ‘development’ of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition. It should be noticed, in a similar spirit, that most of the battles fought in medieval England were governed by chance – a surprise charge, or a sudden storm, might decisively change the outcome. This should come as no surprise. Turmoil and accident and coincidence are the stuff of all human lives. They are also the abiding themes of fiction, of poetry and of drama.

One result of historical enquiry is the recognition of transience; the most fervent beliefs will one day be discredited, and the most certain certainties will be abandoned. Opinions are as unstable and as evanescent as the wind. We may invoke, with George Meredith, ‘Change, the strongest son of Life’.

The history of England is therefore one of continual movement and of constant variation; the historian, propelled onward by these forces, has scarcely time or inclination to glimpse the patterns of this ceaseless activity. Thomas Babington Macaulay once wrote, when surveying the passage of English history, that in the course of seven centuries a ‘wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most civilized people that ever the world saw’; at the beginning of the twenty-first century it would perhaps be difficult to pay the same compliment. We cannot find what he called ‘progress’ in the morals or in the culture of the English nation.

Yet we find something else of much greater interest and importance. From the beginning we find evidence of a deep continuity that is the legacy of an unimaginably distant past; there seems always to have been an hierarchical society with a division of labour and of responsibility. Yet there is a different kind of continuity, largely unseen and impalpable. The nation itself represents the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the myth of some fated or providential movement forward. Below the surface of events lies a deep, and almost geological, calm.

Many examples are to be found in this volume. The polity of England, for example, seems always to have been highly centralized; the political system was integrated; the legal and administrative systems were uniform. We have seen that, from at least the time of the building of Stonehenge, England has been a heavily organized and administered country. Unlike the provinces and sub-kingdoms of France or of Spain, or the fissiparous states and duchies of northern Europe, or the city-states of Italy, England was all of a piece.

Other forms of continuity are also evident. Modern roads follow the line of old paths and trackways. The boundaries of many contemporary parishes follow previous patterns of settlement, along which ancient burials are still to be found. Our distant ancestors are still around us. There is a history of sacred space almost as old as the history of the country itself. Churches and monastic communities were placed close beside the sites of megalithic monuments, as well as sacred springs and early Bronze Age ritual spaces. I have already noticed that the churchyard of the parish church of Rudston, in East Yorkshire, harbours the tallest Neolithic standing stone in England. The pilgrim routes of medieval Kent trace the same pattern as the prehistoric tracks to holy wells and shrines. We still live deep in the past.

Continuity, rather than change, is the measure of the country. It has been suggested that the cities and towns of England decayed at the end of the Roman occupation. But this is pure speculation. They may simply have changed their function while preserving their role as the centres of administration. The urban population remained, thus continuing a tradition of town living that can be glimpsed within a Neolithic settlement in Cornwall; in 3000 BC the enclosure, surrounded by astrong stone wall, accommodated 200 people. Can this be understood as an early English town? A village or small town at Thatcham, in Berkshire, has been in place for 10,000 years.

In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity. The Anglo-Saxon ‘invasion’, for example, was once deemed to mark a decisive break with the past. Yet in fact there is no discernible change in agricultural practice. In historical terms there are no ‘breaks’. We have seen that the same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals preserved the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups which honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes, and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date, follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the roots of the country go very deep. Even now they have not been severed.

In this volume there have been endless variations upon the same principal theme or themes – the uneasy balance between the sovereign and the more powerful nobles, the desire for war pitted against the overwhelming costs of conflict, the battle for mastery between Church and sovereign, the precarious unity of monarch and parliament, are all part of this narrative. There are also enduring fault lines that create discord and crisis. We may mention here the barren attempts to regulate social life, the slow decay of the feudal order, the antipathy to central government in the shires, the rivalry of noble families in local affairs, the blundering efforts to regulate foreign and domestic trade. Identical political and constitutional problems recur again and again; it could even be said that change occurs only when the same factors combine in different ways.

Another salient fact arises from the history of England. All the monarchs from the time of the Norman invasion were, on the male side, of foreign origin. Only the last of them in this volume, Henry VII, was of island ancestry with progenitors from an ancient Welsh noble family. This does not consort well with the notion of English independence, but it fits more closely with the facts of the matter. The Normans were succeeded by the Angevins, who were in turn supplanted by the Welsh; the Welsh were followed by the Scots, who were removed by the Hanoverians. The English were a colonized people. I have written elsewhere about the heterogeneity of English culture, in Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, but it is perhaps worth recalling that the great literary enterprises of the country derive largely from European originals.

A further point may be made. I had thought of including the histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within this volume but there was too great a risk of their seeming to become merely extensions of England in the process. Wales joined in a political and legal union with England in 1536, and Scotland entered a political union in 1707; but their cultures and their identities, like those of Ireland, are too dissimilar to warrant inclusion in this study. This may in turn lead to what has been called an ‘anglo-centric’ version of the past but, in a history of England, such a bias is hard to avoid. Only a history of the world could cope with the difficulty.

No philosopher, ancient or modern, has yet been able to divine the springs of human conduct or human character; so, on a more general scale, we can have little trust in historians who confidently describe the causes or consequences of such events as the Hundred Years War or the sealing of Magna Carta. In their vain attempt to follow the ignis fatuus or will-o’-the-wisp of certainty, their efforts will be at best uncertain and at worst contradictory. The wisest historians admit that their speculations may be misplaced and their interpretations incorrect.

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognize that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire. A drama, or a poem, is of course subject to manifold interpretations according to the judgment and imagination of the reader. Yet in that sense it resembles the events related within this volume. We might quote the words of Milton in Paradise Lost:

So shall the world go on

To good malignant, to bad men benign,

Under her own weight groaning …

Now we look ahead to the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, encompassing the great reformation of religion in the sixteenth century. We may in the process be able to glimpse, and perhaps restore, the poetry of history.

THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books I found most useful in the composition of this volume.

1: HYMNS OF STONE

Bradley, Richard: The Passage of Arms (Cambridge, 1990).

—— An Archaeology of Natural Places (London, 2000).

Collis, John: The Celts (Stroud, 2003).

Cunliffe, Barry: Iron Age Communities in Britain (London, 1991).

—— Facing the Ocean (Oxford, 2001).

Darvill, Timothy: Prehistoric Britain (London, 1987).

Harper, M. J.: The History of Britain Revealed (London, 2002).

Hawkes, Christopher and Jacquetta: Prehistoric Britain (London, 1943).

Hills, Catherine: Origins of the English (London, 2003).

James, Simon: The Atlantic Celts (London, 1999).

Mercer, Roger: Farming Practice in British Prehistory (Edinburgh, 1981).

Oppenheimer, Steven: The Origins of the British (London, 2006).

Pryor, Francis: Britain BC (London, 2003).

Slack, Paul and Ward, Ryk (eds): The Peopling of Britain (Oxford, 2002).

Stringer, Chris: Homo Britannicus (London, 2006).

2: THE ROMAN WAY

Arnold, C. J.: Roman Britain to Saxon England (London, 1984).

Burnham, B. C., and Johnson, H. B., (eds): Invasion and Response (Oxford, 1979).

Dark, Ken: Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Stroud, 2002).

Faulkner, Neil: The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2004).

Frere, Sheppard: Britannia: A History of Roman Britain (London, 1967).

Millett, Martin: The Romanization of Britain (Cambridge, 1990).

Reece, Richard: My Roman Britain (Cirencester, 1988).

Salway, Peter: Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981).

—— The Roman Era (Oxford, 2002).

Todd, Malcolm (ed.): A Companion to Roman Britain (Oxford, 2004).

Webster, G.: The Roman Invasion of Britain (London, 1980).

3: CLIMATE CHANGE

Fox, Cyril: The Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1938).

Jones, Martin and Dimbleby, Geoffrey (eds): The Environment of Man (Oxford, 1981).

Mackinder, H. J.: Britain and the British Seas (London, 1902).

Parry, M. L.: Climactic Change, Agriculture and Settlement (Folkestone, 1978).

Rackham, Oliver: The History of the Countryside (London, 1986).

4: SPEAR POINTS

Abels, R. P.: Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1988).

Arnold, C. J.: An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdom (London, 1988).

Blair, John: The Anglo-Saxon Age (Oxford, 1984).

—— The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005).

Campbell, James (ed.): The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982).

Chadwick, H. M.: The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge, 1924).

Charles-Edwards, Thomas (ed.): After Rome (Oxford, 2003).

Higham, N. J.: Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1992).

—— An English Empire (Manchester, 1995).

Hill, Paul: The Age of Athelstan (Stroud, 2004).

Hodges, Richard: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (London, 1989).

Jackson, Kenneth: Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953).

Jolliffe, J. E. A.: Pre-Feudal England (Oxford, 1933).

Kirby, D. P.: The Making of Early England (London, 1967).

Loyn, H. R.: The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1984).

Morris, John: The Age of Arthur (London, 1973).

Myres, J. N. L.: The English Settlements (Oxford, 1986).

Pryor, Francis: Britain AD (London, 2005).

Randers-Pehrson, Justine Davis: Barbarians and Romans (London, 1983).

Reynolds, Andrew: Later Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999).

Stenton, F. M.: Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1971).

Tatlock, J. S. P.: The Legendary History of Britain (New York, 1974).

Thomas, Charles: Celtic Britain (London, 1986).

Wood, Michael: In Search of the Dark Ages (London, 1994).

5: THE BLOOD EAGLE

Cavill, Paul: Vikings (London, 2001).

Dark, K. R.: Civitas to Kingdom (London, 1994).

Davies, Wendy: From the Vikings to the Normans (Oxford, 2003).

Faith, Rosamond: The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997).

Foot, P. G., and Wilson, D. M.: The Viking Achievement (London, 1970).

Hadley D. M. and Richards, J. D. (eds): Cultures in Contact (Turnhout, 2000).

Loyn, H. R.: The Vikings in Britain (London, 1977).

Sawyer, P. H.: The Age of the Vikings (London, 1971).

Smyth A. P.: King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995).

Stafford, Pauline: Unification and Conquest (London, 1989).

Whitelock, Dorothy: The Beginnings of English Society (London 1952).

6: THE MEASURE OF THE KING

Poole, A. L.: From Domesday Book to Magna Carta (Oxford, 1955).

Harvey, Barbara: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001).

Wormald, Patrick: The Making of English Law (Oxford, 1999).

7: THE COMING OF THE CONQUERORS

Barlow, Frank: Edward the Confessor (London, 1979).

—— The English Church, 1000–1066 (London, 1979).

Brown, R. A.: The Normans and the Norman Conquest (London, 1969).

Clarke, P. A.: The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford, 1994).

Fleming, Robin: Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991).

Garmonsway, G. M.: Canute and his Empire (London, 1964).

Lawson, M. K.: Cnut (Stroud, 2004).

—— The Battle of Hastings (Stroud, 2007).

Loyn, H. R.: Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (London, 1962).

McLynn, Frank: 1066 (London, 1998).

Walker, I. W.: Harold (Stroud, 1997).

Williams, Ann: Ethelred the Unready (London, 2003).

9: DEVILS AND WICKED MEN

Barlow, Frank: William Rufus (London, 1983).

Douglas, D. C.: The Norman Achievement (London, 1969).

—— William the Conqueror (London, 1964).

Freeman, E. A.: A History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford, 1870–79).

—— The Reign of William Rufus (Oxford, 1882).

—— William the Conqueror (London, 1898).

Green, Judith: The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge, 1986).

—— The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997).

—— Henry I (Cambridge, 2006).

Hicks, Carola (ed.): England in the Eleventh Century (Stamford, 1992).

Hollister, C. W.: Henry I (London, 2001).

Maitland, F. W.: Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897).

Mason, Emma: William II (Stroud, 2005).

Rex, Peter: Hereward (Stroud, 2005).

—— The English Resistance (Stroud, 2006).

Rowley, Trevor: The Norman Heritage (London, 1983).

Strickland, Matthew (ed.): Anglo-Norman Warfare (Woodbridge, 1992).

10: THE ROAD

Cox, R. H.: The Green Roads of England (London, 1914).

Gelling, Margaret: Signposts to the Past (London, 1978).

Hoskins, W. G.: The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955).

Jusserand, J. J.: English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1889).

11: THE LAW IS LOST

Appleby, J. T.: The Troubled Reign of King Stephen (London, 1969).

Brooke, Z. N.: The English Church and the Papacy (Cambridge, 1931).

Chibnall, Marjorie: The Empress Matilda (Oxford, 1991).

Cronne, H. A.: The Reign of Stephen (London, 1970).

Crouch, David: The Reign of King Stephen (London, 2000).

Holt, J. C.: Colonial England (London, 1997).

Matthew, Donald: King Stephen (London, 2002).

13: THE TURBULENT PRIEST

Amt, Emilie: The Accession of Henry II in England (Woodbridge, 1993).

Barber, Richard: Henry Plantagenet (Ipswich, 1964).

Barlow, Frank: Thomas Becket (London, 1986).

Bloch, Marc: Feudal Society (London, 1961–62).

Dark, Sidney: St Thomas of Canterbury (London, 1927).

Grary, H. L.: English Field Systems (London, 1959).

Hall, Hubert: Court Life under the Plantagenets (London, 1899).

Norgate, Kate: England under the Angevin Kings (London, 1887).

Pain, Nesta: The King and Becket (New York, 1964).

Roberts, B. K.:The Making of the English Village (London, 1987).

Salzman, L. F.: Henry II (London, 1917).

Vinogradoff, Paul: The Growth of the Manor (London, 1904).

—— Villainage in England (Oxford, 1927).

Warren, W. L.: Henry II (London, 1973).

14: THE LOST VILLAGE

Beresford, Maurice: The Lost Villages of England (London, 1969).

Oswald, Alastair: Wharram Percy (York, 2004).

15: THE GREAT CHARTER

Appleby, J. T.: England without Richard (Ithaca, 1965).

Brundage, J. A.: Richard Lionheart (New York, 1974).

Church, S. D. (ed.): King John (Woodbridge, 1999).

Gillingham, John: Richard the Lionheart (London, 1978).

Holt, J. C.: The Northerners (Oxford, 1961).

—— Magna Carta (Cambridge, 1992).

Jolliffe, J. E. A.: Angevin Kingship (London, 1956).

Turner, R. V.: King John (Stroud, 2005).

Warren, W. L.: The Governance of Norman and Angevin England (London, 1987).

—— King John (Berkeley, 1961).

Wilkinson, Bertie: The High Middle Ages in England (Cambridge, 1978).

16: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Harding, Alan: The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1973).

Musson, Anthony: Medieval Law in Context (Manchester, 2001).

Musson, Anthony, and Ormrod, W. M.: The Evolution of English Justice (London, 1999).

Salzman, L. F.: English Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1926).

17: A SIMPLE KING

Burton, Janet: Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300 (Cambridge, 1994).

Carpenter, D. A.: The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990).

—— The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996).

—— The Struggle for Mastery (London, 2003).

Clanchy, M. T.: From Memory to Written Record (Oxford, 1993).

Harding, Alan: England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993).

Harvey, Barbara: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001).

Hennings, M. A.: England under Henry III (London, 1924).

Lloyd, Simon: English Society and the Crusade (Oxford, 1988).

Maddicott, J. R.: Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1994).

Powicke, F. M.: King Henry and the Lord Edward (Oxford, 1947).

—— The Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1962).

Stacey, Robert: Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III (Oxford, 1987).

18: THE SEASONAL YEAR

Hutton, Ronald: The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994).

Postan, M. M.: The Medieval Economy and Society (London, 1972).

Powicke, J. M.: Medieval England (London, 1931).

19: THE EMPEROR OF BRITAIN

Jenks, Edward: Edward Plantagenet (London, 1902).

Knowles, David: The Religious Orders in England, Volume One (Cambridge, 1948).

Morris, J. E.: The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford, 1901).

Morris, Marc: A Great and Terrible King (London, 2008).

Ormrod, W. M., (ed.): England in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1986).

Pasquet, D.: An Essay on the Origins of the House of Commons (Cambridge, 1925).

Plucknett, T. F. T.: Legislation of Edward I (Oxford, 1949).

Prestwich, Michael: Politics and Finance under Edward I (London, 1972).

—— The Three Edwards (London, 1980).

Salzman, L. F.: Edward I (London, 1968).

Stones, E. L. G.: Edward I (Oxford, 1968).

Wilkinson, B.: Studies in the Constitutional History of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Manchester, 1937).

20: THE HAMMER

Julius, Anthony: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010).

Mundill, R. R.: England’s Jewish Solution (Cambridge, 1998).

21: THE FAVOURITES OF A KING

Davies, J. C.: The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (Cambridge, 1918).

Fryde, Natalie: The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II (Cambridge, 1979).

Haines, R. M.: King Edward II (London, 2003).

Hamilton, J. S.: Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall (London, 1988).

Howell, Margaret: Eleanor of Provence (Oxford, 1998).

Johnstone, H.: Edward of Carnarvon (Manchester, 1946).

Maddicott, J. R.: Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1994).

Raban, Sandra: England under Edward I and Edward II (Oxford, 2000).

Tout, T. F.: The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (Manchester, 1936).

22: BIRTH AND DEATH

Carey, H. M.: Courting Disaster, Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1992).

Clay, R. M.: The Medieval Hospitals of England (London, 1909).

Finucane, R. C.: Miracles and Pilgrims (London, 1977).

Getz, Faye: Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton, 1998).

Hunt, Tony: Popular Medicine in Thirteenth Century England (Woodbridge, 1990).

Rawcliffe, Carole: Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, 1995).

23: THE SENSE OF A NATION

Carpenter, D. A.: The Reign of Edward III (London, 1996).

Edwards, G.: The Second Century of the English Parliament (Oxford, 1979)

Given-Wilson, C. J.: The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1987).

Haines, R. M.: The Church and Politics in Fourteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1978).

Hewitt, H. J.: The Organisation of War under Edward III (Manchester, 1966).

Horrox, Rosemary (ed.): The Black Death (Manchester, 1994).

Keen, M. H.: England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973).

McFarlane, K. B.: The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973).

McKisack, May: The Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1959).

Mortimer, Ian: The Perfect King (London, 2006).

Ormrod, W. G.: The Reign of Edward III (Stroud, 2000).

Prestwich, Michael: Plantagenet England (Oxford, 2005).

Rubin, Miri: The Hollow Crown (London, 2005).

Stubbs, William: The Constitutional History of England (Oxford, 1874).

Waugh, S. L.: England in the Reign of Edward III (Cambridge, 1991).

24: THE NIGHT SCHOOLS

Aston, Margaret: Lollards and Reformers (London, 1984).

Dahmus, J. H.: The Prosecution of John Wycliffe (New Haven, 1970).

Lambert, M. D.: Medieval Heresy (London, 1977).

McFarlane, K. B.: John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London, 1952).

—— Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972).

Robson, J. A.: Wycliffe and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge, 1961).

Thomson, J. A. F.: The Later Lollards (Oxford, 1965).

Workman, H. B.: John Wycliffe (Oxford, 1926).

25: THE COMMOTION

Allmand, C. T. (ed.): War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages (Liverpool, 1976).

Bevan, Bryan: King Richard II (London 1990).

Bird, Ruth: The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949).

Du Boulay, F. R. H. and Barron, C. M. (eds): The Reign of Richard II (London, 1971).

Fletcher, Christopher: Richard II (Oxford, 2008).

Fryde, E. B.: The Great Revolt of 1381 (London, 1981).

Gillespie, J. L. (ed.): The Age of Richard II (Stroud, 1997).

Jones, R. H.: The Royal Policy of Richard II (Oxford, 1968).

Mathew, Gervase: The Court of Richard II (London, 1968).

Oman, Charles: The Great Revolt of 1381 (Oxford, 1969).

Ormrod, W. G. (ed.): England in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1986).

Saul, Nigel: Richard II (London, 1997).

Scattergood, V. J. and Sherborne J. W. (eds): English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1983).

Tuck, Anthony: Richard II and the English Nobility (London, 1973).

26: INTO THE WOODS

Keen, M. H.: The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London, 1961).

Westwood, Jennifer and Simpson, Jaqueline: The Lore of the Land (London, 2005).

27: THE SUFFERING KING

Bennett, Michael: Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud, 1999).

Dodd, Gwilym and Biggs, Douglas: Henry IV (Woodbridge, 2003).

Kirby, J. L.: Henry IV of England (London, 1970).

McNiven, Peter: Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV (Woodbridge, 1987).

Mortimer, Ian: The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-made King (London, 2007).

Williams, Daniel (ed.): England in the Fifteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1987).

Wylie, J. H.: History of England under Henry IV (London, 1884–98).

29: THE WARRIOR

Allmand, Christopher: Henry V (London, 1992).

Byrne, A. H.: The Agincourt War (London, 1956).

Earle, Peter: The Life and Times of Henry V (London, 1972).

Harriss, G. L. (ed.): Henry V (London, 1985).

Hutchinson, H. F.: Henry V (London, 1967).

Keen, M. H.: England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973).

Labarge, M. W.: Henry V: The Cautious Conqueror (London, 1975).

Lindsay, Philip: King Henry V: A Chronicle (London, 1934).

Myers, A. R.: England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1952).

Perroy, Edouard: The Hundred Years War (New York, 1965).

Seward, Desmond: Henry V (New York, 1987).

Sumption, Jonathan: The Hundred Years War (London, 1990–2009).

Wylie, J. H. and Waugh, W. T.: The Reign of Henry V (Cambridge, 1914–29).

31: A SIMPLE MAN

Bagley, J. J.: Margaret of Anjou (London, 1948).

Gasquet, F. A.: The Religious Life of Henry VI (London, 1923).

Griffiths, R. A.: The Reign of Henry VI (London, 1981).

—— The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2003).

Harriss, Gerald: Shaping the Nation (Oxford, 2005).

Jacob, E. F.: The Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1961).

Macfarlane, K. B.: The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1963).

—— England in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1981).

Wolffe, Bertram: Henry VI (London, 1981).

32: MEET THE FAMILY

Davis, Norman (ed.): Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971–76).

Richmond, Colin: The Paston Family (Cambridge, 1990–6).

33 AND 35: THE DIVIDED REALM AND THE LION AND THE LAMB

Carpenter, M. C.: The Wars of the Roses (Cambridge, 1997).

Gillingham, John: The Wars of the Roses (London, 1981).

Goodman, Anthony: The Wars of the Roses (Stroud, 2005).

Hicks, Michael: The Wars of the Roses (New Haven, 2010).

Lander, J. R.: Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth Century England (London, 1969).

—— The Wars of the Roses (London, 1965).

Pollard, A. J. (ed.): The Wars of the Roses (London, 1995).

Seward, Desmond: The Wars of the Roses (London, 1995).

Storey, R. L.: The End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1966).

34: THE WORLD AT PLAY

Egan, Geoff (ed.): The Medieval Household (London, 1998).

Fleming, Peter: Family and Household in Medieval England (London, 2001).

Hanawalt, B. A.: Growing Up in Medieval London (Oxford, 1993).

Herlihy, David: Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

Leach, A. F.: The Schools of Medieval England (London, 1915).

Orme, Nicholas: Medieval Schools (London, 2006).

Salusbury, G. T.: Street Life in Medieval England (Oxford, 1939).

Shahar, Shulamith: Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990).

36: THE STAPLE OF LIFE

Abram, Annie: English Life and Manners in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1913).

Dyer, Christopher: Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989).

Henisch, B. A.: Fast and Feast (Pittsburgh, 1976).

37: THE KING OF SPRING

Baldwin, David: Elizabeth Woodville (Stroud, 2002).

Brown, A. L.: The Governance of Late Medieval England (Stanford, 1989).

Chrimes, S. B., Ross, C. D. and Griffiths, R. A. (eds): Fifteenthcentury England (London, 1972).

Dockray, Keith: Edward IV (Stroud, 1999).

Goodman, Anthony: The New Monarchy (Oxford, 1988).

Myers, A. R.: The Household of Edward IV (Manchester, 1959).

Ross, Charles: Edward IV (London, 1974).

Thomson, John: The Transformation of Medieval England (London, 1983).

Thornley, I. D. (ed.): England under the Yorkists (London, 1920).

38: COME TO TOWN

Beresford, Maurice: New Towns of the Middle Ages (London, 1967).

Britnell, R. H.: The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993).

Dyer, Christopher: Making a Living in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 2002).

Green, Alice: Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1894).

Nicholas, David: The Later Medieval City (London, 1997).

Palliser, D. M. (ed.): The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 600–1540 (Cambridge, 2000).

Platt, Colin: The English Medieval Town (London, 1976).

Reynolds, Susan: An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford, 1977).

39: THE ZEALOT KING

Dockray, Keith: Richard III (Stroud, 1997).

Hammond, P. W. (ed.): Richard III (London, 1986).

Hanham, Alison: Richard III and his Early Historians (Oxford, 1975).

Hicks, Michael: Richard III (London, 1991).

Hughes, Jonathan: The Religious Life of Richard III (Stroud, 1997).

Kendall, P. M.: Richard III (New York, 1956).

Pollard, A. J.: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (Stroud, 1991).

Ross, Charles: Richard III (London, 1981).

40: THE KING OF SUSPICIONS

Bevan, Bryan: Henry VII (London, 2000).

Chrimes, S. B.: Henry VII (London, 1972).

Grant, Alexander: Henry VII (London, 1985).

Hunt, Jocelyn and Towle, Carolyn: Henry VII (London, 1998).

Loades, D. M.: Politics and the Nation (London, 1973).

Lockyer, Roger: Henry VII (London, 1968).

Rogers, Caroline: Henry VII (London, 1991).

Temperley, Gladys: Henry VII (Boston, 1914).

Wroe, Anne: Perkin Warbeck (London, 2003).

A CONCLUSION

Andrews, J. P.: The History of Great Britain (London, 1794).

Buckle, H. T.: History of Civilisation in England (London, 1908).

Churchill, W. S.: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (London, 1956).

Clark, Jonathan (ed.): A World By Itself (London 2010).

Davies, Norman: The Isles (London, 1999).

Fraser, Rebecca: A People’s History of Britain (London 2003).

Green, J. R.: History of the English People (London, 1878–80).

Hibbert, Christopher: The English (London, 1987).

Keightley, Thomas: The History of England (London, 1837).

Lingard, John and Belloc, Hilaire: The History of England (New York, 1912).

Mackintosh, James, Scott, Walter and Moore, Thomas: The Cabinet History of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1831).

Smollett, Tobias and Hume, David: The History of England (London, 2008).

Trevelyan, G. M.: History of England (London, 1945).

Wood, Michael: In Search of England (London, 1999).

Index

Aaron of Lincoln, ref 1

abbeys: built in Stephen’s reign, ref 1

Abergavenny, George Neville, 3rd Baron, ref 1

Ackroyd, Peter: Albion, ref 1

Adam (bastard son of Edward II), ref 1, ref 2

Adam of Usk, ref 1

Aelric (of Marsh Gibbon), ref 1

Aethelbert, King of Kent, ref 1, ref 2

Aethelfrith, King of Northumberland, ref 1

Aethelric, Bishop of Chichester, ref 1

Agincourt, battle of (1415), ref 1

Agricola, Julius, ref 1

agriculture see farming

ale, ref 1

Alexander III, Pope, ref 1

Alfred the Great, King of West Saxons, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

almshouses, ref 1

Alnwick, Northumberland, ref 1

‘Amesbury archer, the’ (‘king of Stonehenge’), ref 1

‘Anarchy, the’ (under Stephen), ref 1

Andrew of Winton, ref 1

Aneirin: Gododdin (poem), ref 1

Angevin Empire: and divine kingship, ref 1

beginnings, ref 1

fiefdom, ref 1

collapses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

John attempts to recover, ref 1

Henry III attempts to recover, ref 1

Henry II inherits territories, ref 1

Angles: colonize England, ref 1, ref 2

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Anne of Bohemia, first Queen of Richard II, ref 1, ref 2

Anne (Neville), Queen of Richard III: marriage to Prince Edward, ref 1, ref 2

marriage to Richard, ref 1

Clarence covets lands, ref 1

at Richard’s coronation, ref 1

death, ref 1

Anne, Queen: touches Samuel Johnson for scrofula, ref 1

Anselm, St, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1, ref 2

anti-Semitism, ref 1

Apollo (god), ref 1

apprenticeship, ref 1

Aquitaine (France), ref 1

archers see longbow

architecture: Perpendicular, ref 1

fifteenthcentury, ref 1

aristocracy: prehistoric beginnings, ref 1, ref 2

early poetry, ref 1

see also hierarchies (social)

Arthur of Brittany, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Arthur, King, ref 1, ref 2

Arthur, Prince (Henry VII’s son): birth, ref 1

death, ref 1

Arundel, Richard FitzAlan, 11th Earl of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Arundel, Thomas, Bishop of Ely, ref 1

Ashburnham, John, ref 1

Ashley, near Cirencester, ref 1

Athelney, Somerset, ref 1

Athelstan, King of West Saxons and Mercians, ref 1

Atrebates (tribe), ref 1

Augustine, St, Archbishop of Canterbury: mission to England, ref 1, ref 2

Augustine, St (of Hippo): Soliloquies, ref 1

Augustus, Roman Emperor, ref 1

Aurelianus, Ambrosius, ref 1

Avebury, Wiltshire, ref 1

Bacon, Francis: on Richard III’s laws, ref 1

on Lovel, ref 1

Bacon, Roger, ref 1

Bagot, Sir William, ref 1

Baldock, ref 1

Ball, John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Balliol, Edward de, King of Scotland, ref 1

Balliol, John de, King of Scotland, ref 1

Bannockburn, battle of (1314), ref 1

baptism, ref 1

Barnet, battle of (1471), ref 1

barrows see burial

bathing and bathhouses, ref 1

‘Battle of Malden, The’ (poem), ref 1

Beaufort, Cardinal Henry, Bishop of Winchester: as chancellor, ref 1, ref 2

advises Henry VI, ref 1, ref 2

Beaufort, Lady Margaret, ref 1

Becket, St Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury: and church–state conflict, ref 1, ref 2

shrine and pilgrims, ref 1, ref 2

background and character, ref 1

relations and conflicts with Henry II, ref 1, ref 2

and crowning of Henry the Younger, ref 1

excommunicates Archbishop of York, ref 1

murdered in Canterbury Cathedral, ref 1

condemned by Lollards, ref 1

Bede, Venerable, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Bedford, John of Lancaster, Duke of: in regency of Henry VI, ref 1, ref 2

and Joan of Arc, ref 1

death, ref 1

beer: trade, ref 1

Belers, Robert, ref 1

Belgae (tribe), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Belloc, Hilaire, ref 1

‘benefit of clergy’, ref 1

Beowulf, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Beresford (Esberfort), Lord Simon de, ref 1

Bernard of Clairvaux, St, ref 1

Berwick Field, battle of (1403), ref 1

Bible, Holy: English translations, ref 1

Bill of Rights (1689), ref 1

birth: conditions, ref 1

Black Death: outbreak in England (1348), ref 1

effects and mortality, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Blackheath: in Peasants’ Revolt, ref 1, ref 2

Jack Cade’s rebel camp at, ref 1

Blocking, John, ref 1

Blore Heath, battle of (1459), ref 1

Blount, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Bluestonehenge, ref 1

Bolingbroke see Henry IV, King

Bonefaunte, William, ref 1

Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Bordeaux, ref 1

Borzeas (god), ref 1

Bosworth Field, battle of (1485), ref 1

Boudicca (or Boadicea), Queen of Iceni, ref 1, ref 2

Bouvines, battle of (1214), ref 1

Brackenbury, Sir Robert, ref 1

Bramwyk, Robert de, ref 1

Braose, Matilda de, ref 1

Braose, William de, ref 1

brigands and highwaymen, ref 1

Brigantes (tribe), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Bristol: merchants travel overseas, ref 1

Britain: origin of name, ref 1

Britons: defined, ref 1

Brittany and Bretons (France), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

bronze: manufacture, ref 1

Bronze Age, ref 1

customs, ref 1

Browne, Sir Thomas: Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, ref 1

Bruce, David II, King of Scotland, ref 1

Bruce, Robert VIII, King of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

death, ref 1

Brunanburgh, battle of (937), ref 1

Buckingham, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Buckingham, Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of, ref 1 bureaucracy: increase under Henry I, ref 1, ref 2

and Henry III, ref 1

Burgh, Hubert de, ref 1, ref 2

Burgundy: Charles the Bold, Duke of, Edward IV forms alliance with, ref 1, ref 2

marriage to Margaret of York, ref 1, ref 2

Burgundy, John II (the Fearless), Duke of, ref 1

Burgundy, Margaret of York, Duchess of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

Burgundy, Philip the Good, Duke of, ref 1, ref 2

burial: prehistoric, ref 1, ref 2

East Angles, ref 1

procedure, ref 1

Bury St Edmunds: parliament in (1447), ref 1

conflict between monks and citizenry, ref 1

Buxton: holy well of St Anne, ref 1

Byrhtferth (Benedictine monk), ref 1

Cabot, John, ref 1, ref 2

Cabot, Sebastian, ref 1

Cadbury (hill fort), ref 1

Cade, Jack, ref 1, ref 2

Caernarfon Castle, Wales, ref 1, ref 2

Caesar, Julius: invades England, ref 1, ref 2

on Druids, ref 1

Comentarii de Bello Gallico, ref 1

Calais: English capture, ref 1

Edward III in, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Thomas of Woodstock murdered at, ref 1, ref 2

Henry V marches on, ref 1, ref 2

Duke of Burgundy threatens, ref 1

remains in English hands, ref 1, ref 2

Duke of York protects, ref 1

Warwick in, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Calehill Heath, Kent, ref 1

calendar: and festivals, ref 1

see also space and time

Calvinists, ref 1

Cambridge University: founding and early development, ref 1

Cannynges, William, ref 1

canon law: Lanfranc introduces, ref 1

Canterbury: name, ref 1

archbishopric, ref 1

house density, ref 1

pilgrims, ref 1

Cathedral, ref 1

see also Becket, St Thomas

Cantii (tribe), ref 1

Canute, King of the English, Danes and Norwegians, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Caratacus, ref 1

Cartimandua, Queen of Brigantes, ref 1

Cassivellaunus, ref 1

Castillon, battle of (1453), ref 1

castles: Norman, ref 1, ref 2

in Wales, ref 1

Castor, Cambridgeshire, ref 1

cathedrals: built, ref 1

Catherine of Aragon, Queen of Henry VIII, ref 1

Catterick, ref 1

cattle: domesticated, ref 1

Caxton, William, ref 1, ref 2

The Game and the Playe of the Chesse, ref 1

Ceawlin (Saxon leader), ref 1

Cecilia (William the Conqueror’s daughter), ref 1

Celtic church, ref 1

Celtic languages, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Celts: origins, ref 1

cemeteries and churchyards, ref 1

Cernunnos (god), ref 1

chancery: developed under Henry I, ref 1

under Edward I, ref 1

Channel, English: formed, ref 1

Channel Islands: retained by King John, ref 1

Charlemagne, King of Frankish Empire, ref 1

Charles I, King: and Petition of Right, ref 1

Charles IV, King of France, ref 1

Charles V (the Wise), King of France, ref 1, ref 2

Charles VI, King of France, ref 1

Charles VII, King of France: crowned, ref 1

captures Paris, ref 1

reoccupies Normandy, ref 1

Charles VIII, King of France, ref 1

Chaucer, Geoffrey: writes in English, ref 1

Canterbury Tales, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

‘The Miller’s Tale’, ref 1

‘Tale of Melibee’, ref 1

Troilus and Criseyde, ref 1

Cheddar Gorge, ref 1

Chester: footways, ref 1

childhood, ref 1, ref 2

see also education; schools

chivalry, ref 1

Christianity: introduced in Roman England, ref 1

under Anglo-Saxons, ref 1, ref 2

rich statues, ref 1

conversions under Augustine and Paulinus, ref 1

Roman Church prevails, ref 1

Church organization, ref 1

as unifying force, ref 1

Viking assault on, ref 1

prevails over Danish invaders, ref 1

Church reforms under Normans, ref 1

Church material wealth and landowning, ref 1

secular clergy, ref 1

practices and beliefs challenged by Lollards, ref 1

heretics burned at stake, ref 1

English saints, ref 1

tensions with sovereign, ref 1

Chronique de la Trahison et Mort de Richard II, ref 1

Church of England: in Henry V’s reign, ref 1

Church, the see Christianity

churches: design, ref 1

Perpendicular style, ref 1

see also cathedrals

churchyards see cemeteries

Cicero, ref 1

Cistercians, Order: settle in England, ref 1, ref 2

practise eviction, ref 1

Clarence, George, Duke of: and recognition of Elizabeth Woodville as queen, ref 1

Warwick promises crown to, ref 1, ref 2

proposed marriage to Warwick’s daughter, ref 1

Edward IV seeks friendship, ref 1

in Warwick’s rebellion, ref 1

deserts Warwick for Henry VI, ref 1

rivalry with Edward IV, ref 1, ref 2

murdered in Tower, ref 1, ref 2

Clarendon, Constitutions of (1164), ref 1

class (social): system develops, ref 1

see also hierarchies

Claudius, Roman Emperor, ref 1, ref 2

climate: variability, ref 1

human effect, ref 1

clocks, ref 1, ref 2

Clyn, John, ref 1

coal: Romans and, ref 1

Coelius (Coel Hen; ‘Old King Cole’), ref 1

coins and coinage: under Normans, ref 1

debased under Henry I, ref 1

Coke, Sir Edward, ref 1

Colchester (Camulodunum), ref 1

cloth manufacture, ref 1

Coleswain of Lincoln, ref 1

commerce see trade

common people: lives and conditions, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

effect of Black Death on, ref 1

dress and behaviour regulated by law, ref 1

Commons, House of see parliament

communitas (local self-rule), ref 1, ref 2

Commynes, Philippe de, ref 1, ref 2

Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent, ref 1

Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor, ref 1

Conway Castle, Wales, ref 1, ref 2

Conyers, Sir John (‘Robin of Redesdale’; ‘Robin Mend-All’), ref 1

cooking see food and drink

Cornwall: Pytheas visits, ref 1

Celtic language, ref 1

coronations (royal), ref 1

see also individual monarchs

Cotton, Sir Robert, ref 1

Council Learned in the Law, ref 1

courtly love, ref 1

courts of law, ref 1

Coventry, ref 1

Crane, Matilda, ref 1

cranes (lifting), ref 1

Crécy, battle of (1346), ref 1, ref 2

crime: rises at times of harvest failure, ref 1

violent, ref 1, ref 2

and punishment, ref 1

prevalence under Henry VI, ref 1

Crowland Chronicle, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Crusade, Third, ref 1

Cunobelinus, ref 1

cursus monuments, ref 1

customs: prehistoric origins, ref 1

and continuity, ref 1, ref 2

customs duties: under Edward I, ref 1, ref 2

Cuthbert, St, ref 1

Danegeld (tax), ref 1

Danelaw, the, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Danes see Denmark

David I, King of Scotland, ref 1

‘Deadmen’s Den’ (Blore Heath battlefield), ref 1

death see burial; mortality

Deeds of Henry V, The, ref 1, ref 2

Deira, kingdom of, ref 1

Denmark: Viking raiders from, ref 1, ref 2

invasions and settlement in England, ref 1

subjects fight on English side at Hastings, ref 1

Despenser, Henry, Bishop of Norwich, ref 1

Despenser, Hugh le (father and son), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

diet see food and drink

doctors, ref 1

Domesday Book (‘The King’s Book’), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

domestic life: in Paston letters, ref 1

Dominican Order, ref 1

Dover: name, ref 1

dress: in Bronze Age, ref 1

under Romans, ref 1

Anglo-Saxon, ref 1, ref 2

legislation on, ref 1

drink see food and drink

Druids, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

drunkenness, ref 1

Dublin: as Norse trading centre, ref 1

Dudley, Edmund, ref 1

Dumnonii (tribe), ref 1

Dunstan, St, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Durham: Cathedral, ref 1

pilgrimages to, ref 1

Germanic structures, ref 1

Durotriges (tribe), ref 1, ref 2

East Anglia: settled, ref 1

Danes in, ref 1

East Saxons, ref 1, ref 2

East Stoke, battle of (1487), ref 1

economic activity: fifteenth century improvement, ref 1

see also trade; wool

Edgar Atheling, ref 1

Edgar, King of the English, ref 1

Edinburgh, ref 1

Edington, battle of (878), ref 1

Edith, Queen of Henry I, ref 1, ref 2

Edmund Ironside, King of the English, ref 1

education: children’s, ref 1

university, ref 1

see also schools

Edward I, King: captures Gwynedd, ref 1

wars against Scotland and Wales, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

and de Montfort’s war with Henry III, ref 1

imprisoned as hostage, ref 1

escapes and defeats de Montfort at Evesham, ref 1

on crusade, ref 1

accession and coronation, ref 1

attempted assassination, ref 1

interest in Gascony, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

soldierly qualities, ref 1

appearance and personality, ref 1

reclaims father’s lost lands, ref 1

taxes and customs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

authority, ref 1, ref 2

and international finance, ref 1, ref 2

represses and expels Jews, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

law and administration reforms, ref 1

raises paid troops, ref 1

and death of first wife (Eleanor), ref 1

remarries (Margaret), ref 1

death, ref 1

Edward II, King: acclaimed Prince of Wales, ref 1

birth and upbringing, ref 1

character and tastes, ref 1

coronation, ref 1

marriage and children, ref 1

relations with Piers Gaveston, ref 1

baronial opposition to, ref 1

conflict with Scots, ref 1, ref 2

and execution of Gaveston, ref 1

disgraced by Bannockburn defeat, ref 1

appoints Despenser chamberlain, ref 1

provokes civil war and violence, ref 1

authority and tyrannical rule, ref 1, ref 2

calls parliament at York (1322), ref 1

dispute over Gascony, ref 1

Isabella rebels against, ref 1

deposed and killed, ref 1

supposed survival and peregrinations, ref 1

military ineptness, ref 1

Richard II and, ref 1

Edward III, King: father sends to France to do fealty for Gascony, ref 1

and rebellion against father, ref 1

character, ref 1, ref 2

crowned, ref 1

has Mortimer killed, ref 1

reign and administration, ref 1

wars with Scotland, ref 1, ref 2

claims throne of France, ref 1, ref 2

restores knightly virtues, ref 1

and conduct of Hundred Years War, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

as warrior, ref 1

taxation, ref 1

relations with parliament, ref 1

asserts authority, ref 1

invades Normandy, ref 1

and Black Death, ref 1

and capture of King John II of France, ref 1

accepts treaties and truces in France, ref 1

achievements, ref 1

death, ref 1

Edward IV, King (earlier Earl of March and Duke of York): Black Book, ref 1

in Wars of the Roses, ref 1

appearance and character, ref 1, ref 2

crowned, ref 1

extravagance and display, ref 1, ref 2

treatment of Lancastrians, ref 1

foreign policy, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

strong rule, ref 1

view of French, ref 1

marriage to commoner (Elizabeth Woodville), ref 1, ref 2

sociability, ref 1

and Robin of Redesdale rebellion, ref 1

captured, confined in Warwick Castle and released, ref 1

defeats Lincolnshire rebels (1470), ref 1

and Warwick’s 1470 invasion, ref 1

flees to Holland, ref 1

returns to England to counter Warwick, ref 1

defeats Warwick at Barnet, ref 1

participates in trade, ref 1

and succession, ref 1, ref 2

purges enemies, ref 1

treaty with Louis XI (1475), ref 1

has Clarence killed, ref 1, ref 2

arranges family marriages, ref 1

illness and death, ref 1

solvency, ref 1

Edward V, King (earlier Prince of Wales): marriage prospects, ref 1

accession and reign, ref 1, ref 2

confined in Tower and killed, ref 1, ref 2

and Richard III’s seizure of crown, ref 1

Edward the Confessor, King of the English, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7

Edward the Elder, King of the Angles and Saxons, ref 1

Edward, Prince (Richard III’s son): death, ref 1

Edward, Prince of Wales (Henry VI’s son): birth, ref 1

mother protects, ref 1

as claimant to throne, ref 1, ref 2

and Wars of the Roses, ref 1

betrothal and marriage to Warwick’s daughter, ref 1, ref 2

killed at Tewkesbury, ref 1

Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales (‘the Black Prince’): military activities, ref 1

health decline and death, ref 1

sets up court at Bordeaux, ref 1

Edwin, King of Northumberland, ref 1, ref 2

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of Henry II, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Eleanor of Castile, Queen of Edward I: death, ref 1

Crosses, ref 1

and birth of Edward II, ref 1

Eleanor of Provence, Queen of Henry III, ref 1, ref 2

Elizabeth I, Queen: authority, ref 1

Elizabeth II, Queen: coronation, ref 1

Elizabeth (Woodville), Queen of Edward IV: marriage, ref 1

twice takes sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

children, ref 1

hostility to Clarence, ref 1

and son’s succession to throne, ref 1

surrenders son Richard to Richard III, ref 1

and Lady Margaret Beaufort, ref 1

supports Lambert Simnel, ref 1

sent to nunnery, ref 1

Elizabeth of York, Queen of Henry VII: marriage to Henry, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Richard III’s supposed plan to marry, ref 1

death, ref 1

Elmet (kingdom), ref 1

Eltham palace, ref 1

Ely: as centre of Hereward’s resistance, ref 1

school, ref 1

Emma, Queen of Ethelred and of Canute, ref 1

Empson, Richard, ref 1

enclosures: in Bronze Age, ref 1

eighteenth-century Enclosure Acts, ref 1

and sheep breeding, ref 1

Engels, Friedrich, ref 1

England: early settlement, ref 1, ref 2

formed, ref 1

regional divisions, ref 1, ref 2

Romans invade and colonize, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

tribes, ref 1

government and social development under Romans, ref 1

early Christianity in, ref 1

incursion by northern tribes, ref 1

Roman rule ends, ref 1

post-Roman division and administration, ref 1

name, ref 1

under Anglo-Saxons, ref 1

converted to Christianity, ref 1

urbanization under Alfred the Great, ref 1

as Anglo-Saxon realm, ref 1

administrative units, ref 1

land ownership, ref 1

national identity formed, ref 1

involvement with France, ref 1

resistance to William the Conqueror, ref 1

under Norman rule, ref 1

frontier with Scotland defined, ref 1

development of bureaucracy, ref 1

Normans assimilated, ref 1

increased prosperity under Henry II, ref 1

archives and records develop, ref 1, ref 2

civil disorder under Edward II, ref 1

rivalry with France, ref 1

in Hundred Years War against France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

popular discontent (1377), ref 1

established as nation under Henry V, ref 1

foreigners’ views of, ref 1

loses possessions in France, ref 1, ref 2

economic fortunes in fifteenth century, ref 1, ref 2

prosperity under Edward IV, ref 1

historical change, ref 1

political and legal systems, ref 1

foreign-born monarchs, ref 1

English language: under Normans, ref 1

literary and official development, ref 1

prevalence under Henry V, ref 1

Epona (horse goddess), ref 1

Ermine Street, ref 1

esquires, ref 1

Essex: rebels in Peasants’ Revolt, ref 1, ref 2

estates (landed), ref 1

Ethelred II (‘the unready’), King of the English, ref 1, ref 2

Eton College, ref 1

Evesham, battle of (1265), ref 1

Evesham, monk of (chronicler), ref 1

Evreux, Louis, Count of, ref 1

exchequer: developed under Henry I, ref 1

fairs and markets, ref 1, ref 2

Falkirk, battle of (1298), ref 1

famines: (1086), ref 1

(1257), ref 1

(1314), ref 1

farming: beginnings, ref 1

Bronze Age, ref 1, ref 2

Iron Age, ref 1, ref 2

under Romans, ref 1

and climate change, ref 1

under Anglo-Saxons, ref 1

under Henry III, ref 1

and seasons, ref 1

regional diversity, ref 1

routines, ref 1

and a money economy, ref 1

see also harvest failures

Fastolf, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2

Faversham monastery, ref 1

fens: drained under Romans, ref 1

festivals and pastimes: seasonal, ref 1

feudalism, ref 1, ref 2

fields: formed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

regional diversity and patterns, ref 1

Fieschi, Manuel di, ref 1

Fishbourne, Sussex, ref 1

Fitz-Osbert, William (or William the Beard), ref 1

Fitzstephen, William, ref 1, ref 2

fitz Walter, Robert, ref 1, ref 2

Flanders: rebellion (fourteenth century), ref 1

English campaign in (1383), ref 1

French hold, ref 1

Flemings: settle in Pembrokeshire, ref 1

flint: artefacts, ref 1

tools, ref 1, ref 2

mining, ref 1

Flint Castle, Wales, ref 1

Florence: revolt (fourteenth century), ref 1

Foliot, Gilbert, ref 1

Folville, Eustace de, ref 1

Folville, John de, ref 1

Folville, Richard de, ref 1

food and drink: Bronze Age, ref 1

medieval, ref 1

Forest of Dean, ref 1

forest law, ref 1

forests see woods and forests

Formby Point, ref 1

Forme of Cury, The (cookery book), ref 1

Fortescue, Sir John: De Laudibus Legum Angliae, ref 1

Foxe, John, ref 1

France: English involvement with, ref 1

King John loses empire in, ref 1

Henry III in, ref 1

in Hundred Years War against England, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8

power struggle with England, ref 1

Edward III claims throne, ref 1, ref 2

English depredations in, ref 1

Charles V’s forces raid south coast, ref 1

Jacquerie riots, ref 1

alliance with Scotland against England, ref 1

threatens England from Flanders, ref 1

Henry V’s campaigns in, ref 1, ref 2

Henry VI crowned king, ref 1

fleet sacks Sandwich (1457), ref 1

Edward IV’s view of, ref 1

treaty with Edward IV (1475), ref 1

finances Henry Tudor’s invasion against Richard III, ref 1

Franciscan Order, ref 1

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, ref 1

Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, ref 1

free men: in towns, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

legal rights, ref 1

French language: introduced by Normans, ref 1

Frisians: settle in England, ref 1

Froissart, Jean, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Fuller, Agnes, ref 1

Fuller, Thomas: The Holy State and the Profane State, ref 1

Galen, ref 1

games and sports, ref 1

Garter, Order of the: instituted (1348), ref 1

Gascony: Henry III in, ref 1

Edward I values and controls, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

status of merchants, ref 1

Edward III does fealty to French king for, ref 1, ref 2

in Hundred Years War, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

remains in English hands, ref 1

surrendered to French, ref 1

Gaul, Gauls, ref 1, ref 2

Gaveston, Piers, Earl of Cornwall, ref 1

gentlemen, ref 1

gentry, formed, ref 1, ref 2

Geoffrey of Anjou, ref 1, ref 2

Geoffrey, Prince (Henry II’s son), ref 1

George, St, ref 1, ref 2

Germanic languages, ref 1

Germanic settlers: in England, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, ref 1

Geyser, William, ref 1

Gildas, ref 1, ref 2

Girton, Cambridgeshire, ref 1

Glanville, Ranulph de: tutors King John, ref 1

On the Laws and Customs of England, ref 1

Glastonbury, ref 1, ref 2

Glendower, Owen, ref 1

Gloucester Cathedral: Perpendicular style, ref 1

Gloucester, Gilbert de Clare, 10th Earl of, ref 1

Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of: as protector in Henry VI’s minority, ref 1

advises Henry VI on war with France, ref 1

arrest and death, ref 1

Gloucester, Richard, Duke of see Richard III, King

Gloucester, Thomas, Duke of (Thomas of Woodstock), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

Godiva (or Godgifu) Lady, ref 1

Gododdin (kingdom), ref 1, ref 2

Godwin, Earl of Wessex, ref 1

Gordon, Katherine, ref 1, ref 2

Gornay, Lord Thomas de, ref 1

Gothic art, ref 1

‘Gough’ map, ref 1

Gower, John, ref 1, ref 2

Gower Peninsula, ref 1

Great Chronicle of London, ref 1

Gregory the Great, Pope, ref 1

Guildhall Library, London, ref 1

guilds, ref 1, ref 2

Guinevere, Queen, ref 1

Guthrum (Danish leader), ref 1

Gwynedd, ref 1

Gytha (Harold’s mother), ref 1

Hadrian, Roman Emperor, ref 1

Hadrian’s Wall, ref 1, ref 2

Hailes Abbey, Gloucestershire, ref 1

Hakluyt, Richard, ref 1

Halidon Hill, battle of (1333), ref 1

Hall, Edward, ref 1

hamlets, ref 1

handwriting: development of cursive script, ref 1

Happisburgh, Norfolk, ref 1

Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, ref 1

Hardy, Thomas, ref 1

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ref 1

Harfleur: Henry V besieges and captures, ref 1, ref 2

Harold Godwinson, King of the English, ref 1

Harold Harefoot, King of the English, ref 1

‘harrowing of the north, the’, ref 1

Harthacanute, King of Denmark, ref 1

harvest failures: early fourteenth century, ref 1, ref 2

see also famines

Hastings: burnt by French, ref 1

Hastings, battle of (1066), ref 1

Hastings, William, Baron, ref 1, ref 2

Hazlitt, William, ref 1

Heahmund, Bishop of Sherborne, ref 1

Helmsley, Yorkshire, ref 1

henge monuments, ref 1

Hengist and Horsa, ref 1

Henry I, King: and yard (measurement), ref 1

inheritance, ref 1

reign, ref 1, ref 2

and succession, ref 1, ref 2

death, ref 1

marriage, ref 1

Henry II, King: and king’s touch, ref 1

administrative and judicial changes, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

succeeds Stephen, ref 1, ref 2

background and character, ref 1, ref 2

territorial victories, ref 1

expedition to Normandy, ref 1

relations and conflicts with Becket, ref 1, ref 2

assertion of authority, ref 1

temper, ref 1

speaks no English, ref 1

increases national prosperity, ref 1

and murder of Becket, ref 1

does penance for Becket’s death, ref 1

disputes with sons, ref 1

succession question, ref 1

death and burial, ref 1

forbids tournaments in England, ref 1

Henry III, King: crowned, ref 1

regency council as minor, ref 1

reign, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

character and appearance, ref 1

piety, ref 1

and European affairs, ref 1

marriage, ref 1, ref 2

and increase in national prosperity, ref 1

court and advisers, ref 1, ref 2

opposed by native barons, ref 1

financial difficulties, ref 1

resumes sovereignty, ref 1

Simon de Montfort confronts, ref 1

defeat at battle of Lewes, ref 1

summons parliament (1236), ref 1

administrative complexity, ref 1

as hostage at battle of Evesham, ref 1

death and burial, ref 1, ref 2

and continuity in law, ref 1

Henry IV (Bolingbroke), King (earlier 1st Duke of Hereford): conflicts with Richard II, ref 1

exiled, ref 1

returns to England to oppose Richard II, ref 1

claims throne, ref 1

negotiates with Richard, ref 1

accession, ref 1, ref 2

and rumoured survival of Richard II, ref 1

seen as usurper, ref 1

assassination attempts on, ref 1

Percy family rebels against, ref 1

revenue raising, ref 1

defeats Hotspur at Berwick Field, ref 1

illness, ref 1

Scrope rebels against, ref 1

rule and administration, ref 1

and son Henry’s ambitions for throne, ref 1

death and burial, ref 1

has Richard II killed, ref 1

Henry V (of Monmouth), King (earlier Prince of Wales): reburies Richard II at Westminster Abbey, ref 1

wounded at Berwick Field, ref 1

martial prowess, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

as successor to father, ref 1

appearance and character, ref 1, ref 2

coronation, ref 1

piety, ref 1

campaigns in France, ref 1, ref 2

Agincourt victory, ref 1

acclaimed in England, ref 1, ref 2

builds up navy, ref 1

marriage, ref 1

death, ref 1

treaty with Charles VI of France (1420), ref 1

Henry VI, King: peaceful nature, ref 1, ref 2

ratifies Magna Carta, ref 1

infancy at father’s death, ref 1, ref 2

minority, ref 1, ref 2

crowned as king of England and of France while boy, ref 1

character and appearance, ref 1, ref 2

piety, ref 1

seeks peace in war with France, ref 1

French demand renunciation of claim to crown, ref 1

marriage, ref 1, ref 2

bestows honours, ref 1

weak rule, ref 1, ref 2

loses Normandy to Charles VII, ref 1

debts, ref 1

and Jack Cade rebellion, ref 1

suffers stroke, ref 1

and York–Somerset enmity, ref 1

treatment and partial recovery, ref 1

wounded at St Albans, ref 1

suffers further malady, ref 1

in Wars of the Roses, ref 1, ref 2

captured at Northampton, ref 1

position challenged by York, ref 1

rescued at second battle of StAlbans, ref 1

and crowning of Edward IV, ref 1

flees to Scotland, ref 1, ref 2

imprisoned in Tower, ref 1

released and reinstated, ref 1

Edward IV reconfines to Tower, ref 1

killed in Tower, ref 1, ref 2

marks out site of tomb, ref 1

Henry VII idealizes, ref 1

Henry VI, King of Germany, ref 1

Henry VII (Tudor), King (earlier Earl of Richmond): and murder of Princes in the Tower, ref 1

background, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

rebels against Richard III, ref 1, ref 2

in Brittany, ref 1

marriage to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

claim to throne, ref 1, ref 2

invades (1485), ref 1

defeats Richard at Bosworth Field, ref 1

appearance and character, ref 1, ref 2

coronation, ref 1

royal bodyguard (yeomen), ref 1

rule, ref 1, ref 2

Yorkist opposition to, ref 1

and Lambert Simnel conspiracy, ref 1

son Arthur born, ref 1

victory at East Stoke (1487), ref 1

financial stringency, ref 1, ref 2

supports Brittany against France, ref 1

and Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, ref 1, ref 2

health decline, ref 1, ref 2

piety and superstiousness, ref 1

remains unmarried after death of Elizabeth, ref 1

death, ref 1, ref 2

encourages overseas trade, ref 1

court, ref 1

isolation, ref 1, ref 2

reputation, ref 1, ref 2

Henry VIII, King: authority, ref 1

marriage to Catherine of Aragon, ref 1

legacy from father, ref 1

Henry, Bishop of Winchester, ref 1

Henry of Huntingdon, ref 1

Henry the Younger (Henry II’s son): crowned as ‘joint king’, ref 1, ref 2

death, ref 1

heraldry, ref 1

herbs: medicinal, ref 1

Hereford, Henry Bolingbroke, 1st Duke of see Henry IV, King

heresy, ref 1, ref 2

Hereward the Wake, ref 1

hierarchies (social): prehistoric, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

under Romans, ref 1

Anglo-Saxon, ref 1

medieval, ref 1

development, ref 1

survival, ref 1

in towns, ref 1

see also class (social)

Higden, Ranulf, ref 1, ref 2

Polychronicon, ref 1, ref 2

highway robbery, ref 1

hill forts, ref 1, ref 2

history: nature of, ref 1

Hoccleve, Thomas, ref 1

Holinshed, Raphael, ref 1

Homer: Iliad, ref 1

Honorius, Roman Emperor, ref 1

horse: as means of travel, ref 1

Hospitallers, Order of, ref 1

hospitals, ref 1, ref 2

houses: medieval design and construction, ref 1

Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, ref 1, ref 2

Hugh de Neville, ref 1

Hull: brick wall, ref 1

wool exporters, ref 1

human sacrifice: in Iron Age, ref 1

humour: medieval, ref 1

humours, four, ref 1

Hundred Years War (1337): conduct and campaigns, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

origins, ref 1

and English claim to French sovereignty, ref 1

resumes under Henry V, ref 1, ref 2

continues, ref 1, ref 2

ends, ref 1

hundreds (administrative units), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

hunting: by kings, ref 1

Iceni (tribe), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Icknield Way (track), ref 1, ref 2

illness and ailments, ref 1

imports: luxury goods in fifteenth century, ref 1

industry: in fifteenth century, ref 1

Inglewood, Cumbria, ref 1

Innocent III, Pope, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

inns: roadside, ref 1

inns of court, ref 1

Ireland: raiders against Vortigern, ref 1

Richard II in, ref 1

Warbeck in, ref 1

iron: as new technology, ref 1

under Romans, ref 1

demand in fifteenth century, ref 1

Iron Age: development, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

religion, ref 1, ref 2

art, ref 1

Isabella of Angoulême, Queen of King John, ref 1, ref 2

Isabella of France, Queen of Edward II, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Isabella of France, second Queen of Richard II, ref 1

Isabella, wife of Emperor Frederick II, ref 1

Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead Heath, ref 1

Jacquerie (France), ref 1

James IV, King of Scotland: shelters Perkin Warbeck, ref 1

marries Margaret Tudor, ref 1

James of St George, Master, ref 1

Jarrow, ref 1

jewellery: Bronze Age, ref 1

Jews: Edward I represses and expels, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

early settlement and legal status in England, ref 1

as moneylenders and moneychangers, ref 1

popular hostility to, ref 1

accused of ritual murder of Christian children, ref 1

census (1239), ref 1

Joan of Arc, ref 1

Joanna of Castile: Henry VII courts, ref 1

John II, King of France, ref 1

John of Arderne, ref 1

John, King: kingship, ref 1

as ‘Lackland’, ref 1

nominated as king of Ireland, ref 1, ref 2

and succession to Henry II, ref 1

barons’ rebellion against, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Richard pardons on return, ref 1

swears fealty to Philip II of France and usurps Richard’s throne, ref 1

reputation and character, ref 1, ref 2

succeeds Richard, ref 1

and death of Arthur of Brittany, ref 1

loses empire in France, ref 1, ref 2

raises revenues, ref 1

travels throughout England, ref 1

and administration of justice, ref 1

campaigning in Britain, ref 1, ref 2

dispute with pope over appointment of archbishops and bishops, ref 1

womanizing, ref 1

excommunicated, ref 1

accepts pope’s demands, ref 1

assumes cross of crusader, ref 1

seals Magna Carta, ref 1

defies Magna Carta, ref 1

death and burial, ref 1, ref 2

loses treasure in Wash, ref 1

calls parliament (1212), ref 1

protects Jews, ref 1

killings, ref 1

John, King of Bohemia, ref 1

John of Luxemburg, ref 1

John of Worcester, ref 1

Johnson, Samuel, ref 1

Joseph of Arimathea, ref 1

judges, ref 1

Julian, Roman Emperor, ref 1

Jurassic Way, ref 1

juries: origins, ref 1

Jutes: settle in England, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Katherine of Valois, Queen of Henry V: marriage to Henry, ref 1

remarries (Owen Tudor), ref 1

Kenilworth Castle: Edward II at, ref 1

John of Gaunt at, ref 1

Margaret of Anjou at, ref 1

Kent: settlers and administration, ref 1

popular revolts, ref 1

Danish invasion (1896), ref 1

condemns law under Henry VI, ref 1

coast attacked from France and Brittany, ref 1

and rebellion under Jack Cade, ref 1

Keston, Kent, ref 1

keyhold tenure, ref 1

King’s College, Cambridge, ref 1

king’s touch: as cure for scrofula, ref 1

kingship: origins and authority, ref 1

and divine right, ref 1

and hunting, ref 1

and lawlessness following death of, ref 1

Richard II and, ref 1, ref 2

tensions with nobility and Church, ref 1

Knighton, Henry, ref 1

knights: under Normans, ref 1

status, ref 1, ref 2

and chivalry, ref 1

and summoning of parliament, ref 1

‘distraint of’ (order), ref 1

labour: value following Black Death, ref 1, ref 2

Lambarde, William: The Perambulation of Kent, ref 1

Lancaster family: in Wars of Roses, ref 1, ref 2

extinguished, ref 1

Lancaster, John of Gaunt, Duke of: house burned by Tyler’s rebels, ref 1

governs during Edward III’s illness, ref 1

unpopularity, ref 1, ref 2

and John Wycliffe, ref 1

as Chaucer’s patron, ref 1

Richard II fears as rival, ref 1

presides at Arundel’s trial, ref 1

and son Bolingbroke’s conflict with Richard II, ref 1

death, ref 1

marriage to Katherine Swynford, ref 1

and house of Lancaster, ref 1

Lancaster, Thomas of see Thomas, Earl of Lancaster

land ownership: and lordship, ref 1

as cause of disputes, ref 1

and social standing, ref 1

and land shortage, ref 1

in Black Death, ref 1

landscape: formed by farming and field system, ref 1, ref 2

Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1, ref 2

Langland, William: Piers Plowman, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7

Langton, Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

languages: prehistoric, ref 1

see also English language

Laurence of St Martin, Sir, ref 1

law: under Normans, ref 1

reforms under Henry II, ref 1

under Edward I, ref 1

custom and precedent in, ref 1

ineffectiveness under Henry VI, ref 1

Edward IV intervenes in, ref 1

lawyers: origins, ref 1

lead mines, ref 1

Leeds: founded, ref 1

Leeds Castle, Kent, ref 1

legal rights of free men, ref 1

Leges Henrici Primi, ref 1

Leofric, Earl of Mercia, ref 1

Leopold, Duke of Austria, ref 1

le Toruk, Jacob, ref 1

Lewes, battle of (1264), ref 1

Leyburn, Roger, ref 1

life expectancy, ref 1, ref 2

Lincoln: population, ref 1

Lincoln, John de la, Earl of, ref 1

Lincolnshire: revolt (1470), ref 1

Lindisfarne, ref 1

Lindisfarne Gospels, ref 1

Lindley Hall Farm, Leicestershire, ref 1

literacy, ref 1, ref 2

Lithere, Benedict, ref 1

livestock: in medieval period, ref 1

living standards: improve in fifteenth century, ref 1

Lollards, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

London: Boudicca attacks, ref 1

as Roman capital of Britannia Superior, ref 1

population, ref 1, ref 2

burned by Danish raiders, ref 1

medieval house design, ref 1

road links, ref 1

mayor and aldermen established, ref 1

plan, ref 1

communal government, ref 1, ref 2

citizens rebel against Richard I’s taxes, ref 1

rebel barons occupy (1215), ref 1, ref 2

Prince Louis of France in, ref 1

supports de Montfort against Henry III, ref 1

Edward I imposes taxes on, ref 1

and rebellion against Edward II, ref 1

in Peasants’ Revolt (1381), ref 1

Jack Cade rebels in, ref 1

improvements and rebuilding, ref 1

longbow: English mastery of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Lords, House of see parliament

lordship: and land ownership, ref 1

and feudalism, ref 1

see also aristocracy Loudun Hill, battle of (1306), ref 1, ref 2

Louis VII, King of France, ref 1

Louis VIII (the Lion), King of France (earlier Prince), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Louis IX, King of France, ref 1 Louis XI, King of France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Lovel, Francis, 1st Viscount, ref 1

Loveraz, Richard de, ref 1

Lud (or Nud; god), ref 1

Ludlow, Shropshire: in Wars of Roses, ref 1

Lutherans, ref 1

luxury goods: imported, ref 1

Lydgate, John, ref 1

Lynn (King’s Lynn), Norfolk, ref 1, ref 2

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron, ref 1

Maelbeath (or Macbeth), ref 1

Magna Carta (1215), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9

Maiden Castle, Dorset, ref 1

Maidstone Prison: prisoners freed, ref 1

Maine, France, ref 1

Malcolm III (Canmore), King of Scotland, ref 1

Malcolm IV, King of Scotland, ref 1

Maldon, battle of (991), ref 1

Malory, Thomas: Le Morte Darthur, ref 1, ref 2

Manchester: name, ref 1

Mancini, Dominic, ref 1, ref 2

manor: as centre of agrarian life, ref 1

court records, ref 1

at Wharram Percy, ref 1

accounts, ref 1, ref 2

Map, Walter, ref 1

March, Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of, ref 1

March, Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of see Mortimer, Roger

Margaret of Anjou, Queen of Henry VI: marriage to Henry, ref 1, ref 2

birth of son, ref 1

opposes Richard of York, ref 1

and threat to son’s succession, ref 1, ref 2

in Wars of the Roses, ref 1, ref 2

shut out of London, ref 1

flees to Scotland, ref 1

takes refuge in Anjou, ref 1

forms alliance with Warwick against Edward IV, ref 1, ref 2

taken prisoner at Tewkesbury, ref 1

incarcerated in Tower and ransomed by Louis XI, ref 1

Louis XI supports, ref 1

Margaret, Queen of Edward I, ref 1

Margaret Tudor, Queen of James IV of Scotland, ref 1

Margaret of York see Burgundy, Margaret of York, Duchess of

Markeby, John de, ref 1

Martin, St, ref 1

Mase, Harry, ref 1

Mass, the, ref 1

Matilda (earlier Edith), Queen of Henry I, ref 1

Matilda (Maud), Empress (Henry I’s daughter): and succession to Henry, ref 1

conflict with Stephen over crown, ref 1

hailed as ‘lady of England’, ref 1

unpopularity, ref 1

retires to Rouen, ref 1

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, ref 1

measurement: inexactness, ref 1

see also yard

Meaux, siege of (1421), ref 1

medicine: practice of, ref 1

megaliths, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

see also Stonehenge

melancholy (humour), ref 1

merchant adventurers, ref 1

Mercia, kingdom of, ref 1, ref 2

Meredith, George, ref 1

Merfield, William, ref 1

Meriden, Warwickshire, ref 1

Mesolithic people, ref 1, ref 2

Middle Saxons, ref 1

Middleham, north Yorkshire, ref 1

Milton, John: Paradise Lost, ref 1

minsters (communities of priests and monks), ref 1

miracle and mystery plays, ref 1

monasteries: established by Normans, ref 1

children recruited to, ref 1

Mons Badonicus, battle of (490), ref 1

Montfort, Eleanor de, Countess of Leicester, ref 1

Montfort, Simon de, Earl of Leicester: opposes Henry III, ref 1

and summoning of parliament, ref 1

defeated at Evesham (1265), ref 1

death and burial, ref 1

Morast (fruit drink), ref 1

More, Sir Thomas: personal display, ref 1

on literacy in England, ref 1

on Edward IV, ref 1

on Richard III, ref 1, ref 2

on Henry VII, ref 1

mort d’ancestor (legal procedure), ref 1 mortality: age of, ref 1

infant, ref 1 Mortimer, Anne, ref 1 Mortimer, Roger, 1st Earl of March, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Mortimer’s Cross, battle of (1461), ref 1

Morton, John, Archbishop of Canterbury (earlier Bishop of Ely), ref 1, ref 2

Motte, Agnes, ref 1

Mowbray, Thomas see Norfolk, 1st Duke of

murrain (disease), ref 1, ref 2

names: changes under Normans, ref 1

navy: King John constructs, ref 1

Henry V builds up, ref 1

Neckam, Alexander, ref 1

Nefyn, Wales, ref 1

Neolithic: as term, ref 1, ref 2

Neolithic period, ref 1, ref 2

Neville family: support Yorkists in Wars of Roses, ref 1, ref 2

Neville, George, Archbishop of York, ref 1, ref 2

Neville’s Cross, battle of (1346), ref 1

Newfoundland, ref 1

Norfolk, John Howard, 1st Duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Norfolk, Roger Bigod, 4th Earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of, ref 1

Normandy: Henry I invades and conquers, ref 1

Henry II’s expedition to, ref 1

King John loses to Philip Augustus, ref 1

Edward III invades, ref 1

Henry V in, ref 1, ref 2

France reclaims, ref 1, ref 2

Normans: and separation of Church and state, ref 1

Ethelred marries into, ref 1

Edward the Comfessor’s loyalty to, ref 1

under William, ref 1

invade and conquer England, ref 1

oppressive rule and occupation of England, ref 1

buildings, ref 1

introduce French language, ref 1

assimilated, ref 1, ref 2

names, ref 1

council, ref 1

wheat-growing and eating, ref 1

dynasty, ref 1

Norsemen see Vikings

North America: English exploration and settlement, ref 1

North Sea: formed, ref 1

Northampton: parliament (1380), ref 1

scholastic community, ref 1

Northampton, battle of (1460), ref 1

Northumberland, Henry Percy, 1st Earl of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Northumberland, Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of (Hotspur), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Northumberland, Henry Percy, 4th Earl of, ref 1

Northumberland, Henry Percy, 5th Earl of, ref 1

Northumberland, kingdom of: power, ref 1

Vikings conquer, ref 1

Malcolm IV surrenders to Henry II, ref 1

Norway: Viking raiders from, ref 1

Norwich: population, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

social divisions, ref 1

grammar school, ref 1

Noseles, Philip, ref 1

Noteman, Andrew, ref 1

Offa’s Dyke, ref 1

Oldcastle, Sir John, ref 1

Orderic Vitalis, ref 1, ref 2

Ordinance of Labourers (1349), ref 1

Orkney: surrendered to Scotland, ref 1

Orleans: Joan of Arc lifts siege, ref 1

Orleton, Adam, Bishop of Hereford, ref 1

Osborne, John, ref 1

Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, ref 1

Oxford, John de Vere, 12th Earl of, ref 1

Oxford, Provisions of (1258), ref 1

Oxford University: teaching of law, ref 1

origins, ref 1

student violence and misbehaviour, ref 1

learning, ref 1

‘oyer et terminer’ commission, ref 1

Page, John and Agnes, ref 1

Palaeolithic: as term, ref 1

Palfrey, William, ref 1

Pandulf (papal legate), ref 1

papacy: and appointment of archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

see also Christianity

Paris: Treaty of (1259), ref 1

in Hundred Years War, ref 1

falls to Charles VII, ref 1

Paris, Matthew, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

parish: development, ref 1

numbers, ref 1

parish churches: as communal centres, ref 1

show evidence of affluence, ref 1

parish priests, ref 1, ref 2

Parisii (tribe), ref 1, ref 2

parliament: origins and development, ref 1, ref 2

Edward I summons, ref 1, ref 2

first records (1316), ref 1

Edward II summons, ref 1

and consent to taxation, ref 1

growing power during Hundred Years War, ref 1

relations with Edward III, ref 1, ref 2

‘Good’ (1376), ref 1

in Westminster Hall, ref 1

conflict with Richard II, ref 1, ref 2

‘Wonderful’ (1386), ref 1

‘Merciless’ (1389), ref 1

relations with Henry IV, ref 1

meets in Bury St Edmunds (1447), ref 1

Henry VII ignores, ref 1

pastimes see festivals and pastimes

Paston family: life and letters, ref 1, ref 2

Paston, Agnes, ref 1, ref 2

Paston, Clement, ref 1

Paston, Elizabeth, ref 1

Paston, John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

Paston, Margaret, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Paston, William, ref 1

Patrick, St: Confessions, ref 1

Paulinus (missionary), ref 1

peasantry: and village life, ref 1

houses, ref 1

condition improves in Black Death, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

see also serfs

Peasants’ Revolt (1381), ref 1, ref 2

Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, Earl of: commands Queen Margaret’s forces, ref 1

and Henry Tudor’s invasion, ref 1

sends Henry to Brittany, ref 1

Pembroke, William Marshal, 1st Earl of, ref 1

Pembrokeshire: Flemings in, ref 1

Penny, William, ref 1

Pepys, Samuel, ref 1

Percy family: rebels against Henry IV, ref 1

power in north, ref 1

Percy, Henry (Hotspur) see Northumberland, 2nd Earl of

Perpendicular style (architecture), ref 1

Perrers, Alice, ref 1

Peter de Blois, ref 1

Peter des Rivaux, ref 1, ref 2

Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Peter of Savoy, Earl of Richmond, ref 1

Peter, St, ref 1

Peterborough: Bronze Age remains, ref 1

Peterborough Abbey: suffers under Henry I, ref 1

and warfare between Stephen and Matilda, ref 1

Petition of Right (seventeenth century), ref 1

Philip II (Philip Augustus), King of France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Philip VI of Valois, King of France, ref 1, ref 2

Philippa of Hainault, Queen of Edward III, ref 1

Pickering, Vale of, Yorkshire, ref 1

Picquigny, treaty of (1475), ref 1

Picts: land of (Prydyn), ref 1

harass Romans and English, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

pilgrims, ref 1

Pilgrims Way, The, ref 1, ref 2

Pistor, John, ref 1

Pius II, Pope, ref 1

plague: in 540s, ref 1

see also Black Death

Plantagenet dynasty: succession, ref 1

killings, ref 1

Plautius, Aulus, ref 1

Pliny the Elder, ref 1

poems, songs and tales: heroic, ref 1, ref 2

Poitiers, battle of (1356), ref 1

Poitou, ref 1

poll tax: introduced (1377), ref 1

(1380), ref 1

Poppelau, Nicholas von, ref 1

population: in Neolithic period, ref 1

increase in Bronze Age, ref 1

in Iron Age, ref 1, ref 2

reduced by plague (1540s), ref 1

towns, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

increase in Henry III’s reign, ref 1

falls in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ref 1

reduced by Black Death, ref 1, ref 2

portents: and civil unrest, ref 1

of two kings, ref 1, ref 2

Pounchon, William, ref 1

Poundbury, Dorset, ref 1

Prasutagus, King of Iceni, ref 1

Preseli Hills, southwest Wales, ref 1

prices: rise under King John, ref 1

increase under Henry III, ref 1

rise during harvest failures, ref 1, ref 2

priests see parish priests

Princes in the Tower see Tower of London

printing, ref 1, ref 2

Procopius of Caesarea, ref 1

property: inheritance under Normans, ref 1

legal disputes over, ref 1

Prophecies of Merlin, ref 1

proverbs, ref 1

public houses, ref 1

punishment: for crimes, ref 1

Puttock, Stephen, ref 1

Pytheas, ref 1

Quernbetere, Alice, ref 1

rabbit: introduced to England, ref 1

Radcot, battle of (1388), ref 1

Ralph de Crockerlane, ref 1

Ravenspur, Yorkshire, ref 1

Redwald, King of the East Angles, ref 1

Reformation, the, ref 1

Regenbald, chancellor, ref 1

Regnenses (tribe), ref 1

religion: Iron Age, ref 1

see also Christianity; Druids

Restitutus, Bishop of London, ref 1

Rheged (kingdom), ref 1

Riccardi bankers (of Lucca), ref 1, ref 2

Richard I (Lionheart), King: kingship, ref 1

and ‘legal memory’, ref 1

disputes with father and brothers, ref 1

background and character, ref 1

coronation, ref 1

on Third Crusade to Holy Land, ref 1

captured and ransomed, ref 1

returns to England and pardons John, ref 1

and succession, ref 1

troubled reign, ref 1

and Jews, ref 1

Richard II, King: authority, ref 1, ref 2

peaceful nature, ref 1, ref 2

crowned aged ten, ref 1

confronts Peasants’ Revolt, ref 1, ref 2

appearance and manner, ref 1, ref 2

first marriage (to Anne of Bohemia), ref 1

campaign against Scots, ref 1

court and favourites, ref 1

conflict with parliament, ref 1, ref 2

deposed and reinstated, ref 1

mediates between Lords and Commons, ref 1

piety, ref 1

purges lords, ref 1

exiles Bolingbroke, ref 1

halts Bolingbroke–Mowbray duel, ref 1

second marriage (to Isabella), ref 1

sails to Ireland, ref 1

returns to England to oppose Bolingbroke, ref 1

Bolingbroke negotiates with, ref 1

renounces throne in favour of Bolingbroke, ref 1

death and burial, ref 1, ref 2

rumoured survival, ref 1, ref 2

posthumous support for, ref 1

kills Thomas of Gloucester, ref 1

Richard III, King (earlier Duke of Gloucester): reputation, ref 1

and Princes in the Tower, ref 1, ref 2

as rumoured murderer of Henry VI, ref 1

background and service to Edward IV, ref 1

and succession to throne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

power in north, ref 1

and Edward V’s accession, ref 1

seizes and confines Edward V, ref 1

appointed Protector, ref 1

deformed arm, ref 1

has Hastings executed, ref 1

claims crown, ref 1, ref 2

crowned, ref 1

makes circuit of kingdom, ref 1

appearance and character, ref 1

rebellions against, ref 1

rule, ref 1

piety, ref 1, ref 2

and threat of Henry Tudor, ref 1

and Henry Tudor’s invasion and campaign, ref 1

killed at Bosworth Field and bones scattered, ref 1

Richard of Crudwell, ref 1

Richard, Duke of York: confined in Tower and murdered, ref 1, ref 2

Perkin Warbeck impersonates, ref 1

Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans (Henry III’s brother), ref 1, ref 2

Richard le Brewer, ref 1

Riche, Geoffrey, ref 1

Rivers, Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl, ref 1, ref 2

roads and trackways: prehistoric, ref 1

pilgrim routes, ref 1, ref 2

development and maintenance, ref 1

continuity, ref 1

Robert, Duke of Normandy, ref 1, ref 2

Robert, Earl of Gloucester, ref 1

Robert of Reading, ref 1

Robert of Wetherby, ref 1

Robin Hood, ref 1, ref 2

Robin of Redesdale see Conyers, Sir John, ref 1

Rochester castle, ref 1

Roger of Hoveden, ref 1

Roger of Portland, ref 1

Roger of Wendover, ref 1

Roland the Farter (jester), ref 1

Roman Catholicism: Church prevails in England, ref 1

Rome (ancient): invades and occupies England, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

imperial frontiers, ref 1, ref 2

social and cultural influence in England, ref 1, ref 2

taxation, ref 1

Christianity in, ref 1

disputes over imperial power, ref 1

rule in England ends, ref 1

Rouen: Henry V besieges, ref 1

Rous, John: Historia Regum Angliae, ref 1

Rudton, East Yorkshire, ref 1, ref 2

Runnymede, Surrey: Magna Carta signed at, ref 1

Rye: plundered by French, ref 1

Saffron Walden, ref 1

St Albans: first battle of (1455), ref 1

second battle of (1461), ref 1

cloister school, ref 1

saints: and medical cures, ref 1

English, ref 1

Saladin, Sultan, ref 1

Salisbury: scholastic community, ref 1

Salisbury, John Montague, 3rd Earl of, ref 1

Salisbury Plain: prehistoric, ref 1, ref 2

under Romans, ref 1

Salisbury, Richard Neville, 1st Earl of: killed at Wakefield, ref 1

supports Richard of York in Wars of the Roses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

invades England with Warwick, ref 1

Salisbury, Thomas Montague, 4th Earl of, ref 1

salt: trade in, ref 1

Samain (festival), ref 1

sanctuary, ref 1

Sandwich, Kent: raided by French (1457), ref 1

Savoy Palace, London: burned in Peasants’ Revolt, ref 1

Savoyards: at Henry III’s court, ref 1, ref 2

Sawtré, William, ref 1

Saxon Shore, ref 1, ref 2

Saxons: early settlers, ref 1

recruited as mercenaries, ref 1

spread and colonization, ref 1

Scarborough, ref 1

schools, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Scone Palace, Scotland, ref 1

Scot, John, ref 1

Scotland: Romans reach, ref 1

Athelstan subdues, ref 1

border with England, ref 1, ref 2

Stephen defeats (1138), ref 1

war with Henry II, ref 1

Edward I’s wars with, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

conflict with Edward II, ref 1, ref 2

Edward III’s wars with, ref 1, ref 2

alliance with France against England, ref 1

Edward IV negotiates peace with, ref 1

Perkin Warbeck in, ref 1

union with England (1707), ref 1

Scots: harass Romans, ref 1

Scrope, Richard, Archbishop of York, ref 1

seasons, ref 1

serfs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

see also peasantry

Shakespeare, William: depicts King John, ref 1

on Tudors, ref 1

Henry IV, Pt.2, ref 1

Henry V, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

The Merry Wives of Windsor, ref 1

Richard II, ref 1

Richard III, ref 1

The Tempest, ref 1

Shaw, Ralph, ref 1

sheep: domesticated, ref 1, ref 2

introduced, ref 1

numbers in Bronze Age, ref 1

numbers in Henry III’s reign, ref 1

and enclosures, ref 1

see also wool

Sheppey, isle of, ref 1

sheriffs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Sherwood forest, ref 1

Shetland: surrendered to Scotland, ref 1

shires, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Shore, Elizabeth (‘Jane’), ref 1

Shrewsbury, John Talbot, 1st Earl of, ref 1

Sigeberht, King of Kent, ref 1

Silbury Hill, ref 1

Silchester, ref 1, ref 2

Silures (tribe), ref 1

silver: imported, ref 1, ref 2

mines in west country, ref 1

Simeon of Durham, ref 1

Simnel, Lambert (‘Edward VI’), ref 1

slaves: in Iron Age, ref 1

under Anglo-Saxons, ref 1, ref 2

in Domesday Book, ref 1

Sluys: English naval victory over French (1340), ref 1, ref 2

Smith, William (of Leicester), ref 1

Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Somerset, John Beaufort, 1st Duke of, ref 1

Song of the Husbandman, ref 1

Song of Lewes, The (poem), ref 1, ref 2

South Saxons, ref 1, ref 2

space and time: loosely defined, ref 1

sports see games and sports

Stafford, Edmund, 3rd Earl of, ref 1

Stafford, Sir Humphrey, ref 1

Stafford, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Stafford, Sir William, ref 1

Stamford Bridge, battle of (1066), ref 1

Standard, battle of the (1138), ref 1

standing stones see megaliths

Stanley, Thomas, Baron (later 1st Earl of Derby, ref 1

Stanley, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2

Stapledon, Walter le, Bishop of Exeter, ref 1

Stapleford Park, Leicestershire, ref 1

Star Carr, Yorkshire, ref 1

Star Chamber, ref 1

Statute of Jewry (1253), ref 1

‘Statute of Westminster the First’ (1275), ref 1, ref 2

Statute of Winchester, ref 1

Stephen, King: succeeds to throne, ref 1, ref 2

conflict with Matilda, ref 1

financial problems, ref 1

captured and imprisoned, ref 1

mistrusts centralized bureaucracy and devolves power, ref 1

succeeded by Henry II, ref 1

Stirling Bridge, battle of (1297), ref 1

stone of destiny (Lia Fáil; stone of Scone), ref 1

Stonehenge, ref 1, ref 2

Stony Stratford, ref 1

Stowe, John, ref 1

Strabo, ref 1

Stratford, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Stratford-upon-Avon: plan, ref 1

Strathclyde (kingdom), ref 1

Stratton, Adam de, ref 1

Suetonius, ref 1, ref 2

Suffolk, John de la Pole, 2nd Duke of, ref 1

Suffolk, Michael de la Pole, 1st Earl of, ref 1

Suffolk, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Sully, John de, ref 1

surnames: introduced by Normans, ref 1

Sutton Hoo, ref 1

Sutton, Robert, ref 1

Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark, ref 1

Swynford, Katherine, ref 1

Tacitus, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Tailboys, William, ref 1, ref 2

taxation: Roman, ref 1

and kingship, ref 1

under William the Conqueror, ref 1, ref 2

under Henry I, ref 1

under King John, ref 1

in Magna Carta, ref 1

under Edward I, ref 1, ref 2

raised during Great Famine (1313), ref 1

Edward III’s, ref 1

and Peasants’ Revolt (1381), ref 1, ref 2

Templars, Order of, ref 1

Tewkesbury Abbey, ref 1

Tewkesbury, battle of (1471), ref 1

Thame, Oxfordshire, ref 1

Thames, river: Bronze Age weapons and artefacts in, ref 1

prehistoric skulls in, ref 1

freezes (1309), ref 1

Thanet, Kent, ref 1

Thatcham, Berkshire, ref 1, ref 2 thegns, ref 1, ref 2

Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Theobald of Etampes, ref 1

Thirwell, John de, ref 1

Thomas, Earl of Lancaster: as rival to Edward II, ref 1, ref 2

executed, ref 1, ref 2

posthumous miracles, ref 1

on Richard II, ref 1

Thomas of Eldersfield, ref 1

Thomas of Woodstock see Gloucester, Thomas, Duke of

Thorpe, Norfolk, ref 1

Thurkill of Arden, ref 1

time see space and time

tin, ref 1

Tinchebray, battle of (1106), ref 1

Tiptoft, Sir John, ref 1

Tirel, Walter, ref 1

tithings, ref 1, ref 2

tombs: prehistoric, ref 1

see also burial

Tostig, Earl of the Northumbrians, ref 1

tournaments, ref 1

Tower of London: in Peasants’ Revolt, ref 1

Edward V and Richard of York confined and murdered in (‘Princes in the Tower’), ref 1, ref 2

towns: Anglo-Saxon development, ref 1

populations, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

free men in, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

fortified, ref 1, ref 2

grow under Plantagenets, ref 1

trade and manufacture, ref 1

communal government, ref 1, ref 2

character and conditions, ref 1

crafts and businesses, ref 1

civic rituals and routines, ref 1

literacy levels, ref 1

origins, ref 1

post-Roman, ref 1

see also villages

Towton, battle of (1461), ref 1

toys (children’s), ref 1

trade: Bronze Age, ref 1

in iron, ref 1, ref 2

with Vikings, ref 1, ref 2

wool, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

fifteenth century, ref 1, ref 2

trailbaston (courts), ref 1

travel: in medieval period, ref 1

Tresilian, Robert, ref 1

Trevelyan, George Macaulay, ref 1

Trevet, Nicholas, ref 1

trial by ordeal, ref 1

Trinovantes (tribe), ref 1, ref 2

troubadours, ref 1

Tudor family, ref 1

Tudor, Jasper see Pembroke, Earl of

Tudor, Owen, ref 1

Tusser, Thomas, ref 1

Twynyho, Ankarette, ref 1

Tyler, Wat, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

umbrella: introduced, ref 1

universities, ref 1

urn fields, ref 1

Usamah ibn Munqidh, ref 1

Varausius, ref 1

Vergil, Polydore, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Verulamium, ref 1

Vespasian, Roman Emperor, ref 1

Vikings (Norsemen): raids, ref 1, ref 2

villages: beginnings, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Iron Age, ref 1

regional variations, ref 1

Anglo-Saxon, ref 1

thrive under Henry II, ref 1

customs and traditions, ref 1

deserted, ref 1, ref 2

see also towns

villeins, ref 1, ref 2

violence: prevalence in medieval times, ref 1

Visigoths, ref 1

Vita Edwardi Secundi, ref 1

Vortigern (or Wyrtgeorn), ref 1

Voxe, John, ref 1

Wakefield, battle of (1460), ref 1

Wales: Agricola conquers, ref 1

name, ref 1

subdued by Harold and Tostig, ref 1

William Rufus moves against, ref 1

Henry I’s settlements in, ref 1

King John subdues, ref 1

Edward I campaigns against, ref 1, ref 2

castles, ref 1

Edward II born in, ref 1

supports Henry VI, ref 1

and Henry Tudor’s bid for throne, ref 1

and English monarchy, ref 1

union with England (1536), ref 1

Wallace, William, ref 1, ref 2

Walsingham, ref 1

Walsingham, Thomas, ref 1

Walter of Maidstone, ref 1

Walworth, William, ref 1

Wansdyke, ref 1

Warbeck, Perkin (‘Richard IV’), ref 1, ref 2

warrior aristocracy: in Bronze Age, ref 1

Wars of the Roses: origins, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

outbreak, ref 1, ref 2

conduct of, ref 1, ref 2

effect on English noble families, ref 1

end, ref 1

and claims to throne, ref 1

Warwick, Edward, Earl of (Clarence’s son), ref 1, ref 2

Warwick, Richard Neville, Earl of (‘the kingmaker’): supports Richard of York in Wars of the Roses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

commands forces in Calais, ref 1, ref 2

invades England with Salisbury, ref 1

and Edward IV’s marriage, ref 1

alliance with Margaret of Anjou, ref 1

seeks alliance with France, ref 1

instigates rebellion of Robin of Redesdale, ref 1

as effective ruler after capture of Edward IV, ref 1

and Lincolnshire rebellion (1470), ref 1

lands at Exmouth with Clarence (1470), ref 1

rules after release of Henry VI, ref 1

and Edward IV’s return from continent, ref 1

killed at Barnet (1471), ref 1

character and achievements, ref 1

Louis XI supports, ref 1

Warwick, Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of, ref 1, ref 2

water: significance in Bronze Age, ref 1

Watling Street, ref 1

Watton, Yorkshire, ref 1

Waurin, Jean de, ref 1

Wessex (and West Saxons): settled, ref 1

power, ref 1

threatened by Vikings, ref 1

Westminster Abbey: Henry III rebuilds, ref 1, ref 2

Richard II reburied in, ref 1

Elizabeth Woodville takes sanctuary in, ref 1, ref 2

Westminster Hall: parliament in, ref 1

Wharram Percy, Yorkshire, ref 1

wheat: cultivation, ref 1

White Ship: sunk (1120), ref 1

Whittlesford, Cambridgeshire, ref 1

William I (the Conqueror), King: relations with pope, ref 1

employs Breton forces, ref 1

oath of loyalty to, ref 1

kingship, ref 1

claims English crown, ref 1

background and character, ref 1, ref 2

invades and conquers England, ref 1

rule in England, ref 1, ref 2

and English rebellions, ref 1

hunting, ref 1

commissions Domesday Book, ref 1

death, ref 1

brings Jews to England, ref 1

William I (the Lion), King of Scotland (1209), ref 1

William II (Rufus), King of England: reign, ref 1

death, ref 1

achievements, ref 1

calls assembly, ref 1

policy on Jews, ref 1

William Adeline, Prince (son of Henry I), ref 1, ref 2

William of Norwich, ref 1

William of Savoy, ref 1

William of Wakeham, ref 1

Wilton Diptych, ref 1

Winchester: Roman name (Venta Belgarum), ref 1

as Camelot, ref 1

pilgrimages to, ref 1

street plan, ref 1

windmills: first constructed, ref 1

Windsor Castle: Edward III rebuilds, ref 1

wine: imported by Normans, ref 1

witenagemot, ref 1, ref 2

Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas: relations with monarch, ref 1

on Richard III as usurper, ref 1

wolves: in England, ref 1

women: dress legislation, ref 1

woods and forests, ref 1

Woodville family, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

wool: products under Romans, ref 1

exports under Henry III, ref 1

taxed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

exports maintained during Black Death, ref 1

English exporters exceed foreign, ref 1

cloth exports increase in fifteenth century, ref 1

economic importance, ref 1

Wroxeter, ref 1

Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester (and Archbishop of York), ref 1, ref 2

Wycliffe, John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

yard: as unit of measurement, ref 1

Yeavering, Northumberland, ref 1

yeomen of the guard, ref 1

Yevele, Henry, ref 1

York (city): as Roman capital of Britannia Inferior, ref 1

Constantine appointed emperor at (306), ref 1

archbishopric, ref 1

Athelstan conquers, ref 1

Danish Vikings capture, ref 1

wealth and power under Danes, ref 1, ref 2

population, ref 1, ref 2

William the Conqueror attacks, ref 1

self-immolation of Jews, ref 1

guildhall rebuilt, ref 1

York family: in Wars of Roses, ref 1, ref 2

York, Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of, ref 1, ref 2

York, Richard, Duke of: commands English forces, ref 1, ref 2

as heir to throne, ref 1

protects John Paston, ref 1

return from Ireland and conflict with Somerset, ref 1

claim on throne, ref 1, ref 2

in Wars of Roses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

and protection of Calais, ref 1

reigns, ref 1

killed at Wakefield, ref 1

Zosimus, ref 1

By the same author

Non-Fiction

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River

Venice: Pure City

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor

Chatterton

First Light

English Music

The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Milton in America

The Plato Papers

The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London

The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World

T.S. Eliot

Dickens

Blake

The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography

Brief Lives

Chaucer

J.M.W. Turner

Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

List of Illustrations

1. The building of Stonehenge, from an illuminated manuscript. It was the largest programme of public works in English history.

2. A silver relief of Cernunnos, the horned god of Iron Age worship. It may have been a god of fertility.

3. A mosaic from the Roman villa at Bignor in West Sussex; the residence itself dates from the third century AD.

4. A stylized depiction of some protagonists in the Roman conquest of Britain, from a late eighteenth-century history.

5. The helmet of a great Germanic overlord, presumed to be Redwald, buried at Sutton Hoo in the early seventh century.

6. A nineteenth-century print of a Saxon manor. In reality it was a wooden halled residence with several outbuildings, forming a small community.

7. Saxon soldiers about to engage in battle. A Roman chronicler of the fifth century declared that ‘the Saxon surpasses all others in brutality’.

8. ‘Alfred in the Danish Camp.’ In legend, the king infiltrated the Danish camp in the disguise of a minstrel, where he sang to Guthrum.

9. Aethelbert, the great king of Kent, is here depicted at his baptism by Saint Augustine in AD 597. It was the beginning of the saint’s mission to convert the Germanic settlers.

10. The Venerable Bede in his scriptorium. His most famous work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, earned him the title of ‘The Father of English History’.

11. The incipit of the Gospel of Saint Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels. The richly illuminated manuscript was fashioned at Lindisfarne, in Northumbria, in the late seventh or early eighth century.

12. A Viking ship, suitably stylized as an engine of the invasion that began in AD 790. ‘Never before’, one chronicler wrote, ‘has such a terror appeared in Britain.’

13. An image of Ethelred, commonly known as ‘the unready’ or ‘the ill-advised’, who was king of England in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The great sword is no doubt intended to emphasize his prowess or masculinity.

14. Edward the Confessor, king of England from 1042 to 1066. He was known as ‘the Confessor’ because he was deemed to have borne witness to the Christian faith, but in truth he was not especially pious.

15. The Normans crossing the Channel for the invasion of 1066. Fourteen thousand men were summoned by William for the onslaught against England.

16. The death of Harold in battle, from the Bayeux Tapestry. Once the king had been slain, all was lost.

17. A man wielding an axe, taken from Topographia Hibernica. The work was written by Gerald of Wales in 1188, and includes the remark that the native Irish allow ‘their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner’.

18. An image of man and dogs from the Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated manuscript that was written and illustrated at Lincoln at some point in the decade after 1325.

19. A nineteenth-century woodcut of a medieval manor, with the lord’s demesne, the village and the church all neatly outlined. Note the areas of ‘waste’ just beyond the fields.

20. An image of Matilda, de facto queen of England from March to November 1141, holding a charter. The illumination comes from The Golden Book of Saint Albans by Thomas Walsingham, circa 1380.

21. Henry II confronting Thomas Becket. The soldiers beside them are an apt reminder of those who killed the archbishop on 29 December 1170.

22. Richard I, more commonly known as ‘Richard the Lionheart’, watching the execution of the 3,000 prisoners, whom he had captured at the siege of Acre in the Gulf of Haifa during the Third Crusade.

23. ‘John Lackland’ (otherwise known as King John) on horseback. He is here seen riding out against a castle with sword in hand. He was also known as ‘John Softsword’.

24. The season of March as seen in The Bedford Book of Hours, an exquisite and lavish manuscript dating from the early fifteenth century. The farm animals of the medieval period were smaller, and the productivity of the soil inferior, to their modern counterparts.

25. The varied labours of the agricultural year. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, are to be seen in many medieval illuminations.

26. The abbots, and monks, of a medieval monastery. The monks of England were the historians and illuminators who helped to preserve the continuities of the country.

27. The building of a monastery, taken from a miniature of the fourteenth century.

28. Edward I addressing one of his parliaments. The first parliament of his reign, assembled in 1275, had some 800 representatives. Once they had obeyed his will, he dismissed them.

29. A view of Harlech Castle, one of the Welsh castles created for Edward I by Master James of St George; he was the master-builder of the age. The castle itself might seem to have been fashioned out of the rock on which it sits.

30. Queen Isabella, errant wife of Edward II, being received by her brother Charles le Bel in France.

31. The Black Death, reaching England in the autumn of 1348, killed approximately 2 million people. There had never been mortality on such a scale, nor has there been since.

32. A woman who has contracted leprosy. The leper would carry a clapper and bell to warn of her approach.

33. A bloodletting. The doctor would taste the blood of his patient. Healthy blood was slightly sweet.

34. The Battle of Crécy, which took place on 26 August 1346, was one of the most important engagements of the Hundred Years War, when the army of Edward III effectively crushed the French. This was the battle in which gunpowder cannon were first employed.

35. The tomb of the Black Prince behind the quire of Canterbury Cathedral. Its epitaph begins, ‘Such as thou art, sometime was I. Such as I am, such shalt thou be.’

36. The image of Richard II from the ‘Wilton Diptych’. Standing around him are King Edmund (saint and martyr), Edward the Confessor (saint), and John the Baptist (saint). He considered these to be his forebears and protectors.

37. A page from Wycliffe’s Bible. This translation into Middle English is not the work of Wycliffe himself, but of several authors inspired by Wycliffe’s example.

38. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, with the earliest and perhaps the best fan-vaulted roof in England, were built in the latter half of the fourteenth century. The cathedral itself is of Norman origin based on an Anglo-Saxon original. In this, it does not differ from many other English cathedrals.

39. A scene from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It marked the greatest rebellion of the people against their masters in English history.

40. The coronation of Henry IV in Westminster Abbey, October 1399. Since he had gained the crown by conquest, it always lay uneasily upon his head.

41. The Battle of Agincourt, fought in the autumn of 1415, was an overwhelming victory for Henry V against the French. On his return from the field he was hailed by the English as ‘lord of England, flower of the world, soldier of Christ’.

42. The wedding of Henry V and Katherine of Valois, daughter of the King of France, in the summer of 1420 at Troyes Cathedral. Henry died a little over two years later, but Katherine had given birth to a male heir.

43. An image of Joan of Arc, or ‘the Maid of Orleans’, whose victories in 1429 anticipated the English expulsion from the towns and cities of France two decades later.

44. Henry VI in full martial array. In truth he was not a very good soldier, and not a very able king.

45. The Warwick family tree, from John Rous of Warwick’s De Regius Angliae, showing Richard Neville, 16th Earl, his wife Anne Beauchamp, their daughter Isabel Spencer and her husband George, Duke of Clarence.

46. An image of Edward IV, whose greatest achievement was to consolidate royal authority after the weak and vacillating rule of Henry VI.

47. Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. Unlike most royal brides she was English and, at the time of her marriage, already a widow with two children.

48. Edward V, the unfortunate boy-king who reigned for just two months before being murdered in the Tower of London. He was never crowned.

49. Richard III standing on a white boar; the white boar was his personal badge or ‘livery badge’. It may derive from the Latin name of York, Eboracum, since he was known as Richard of York.

50. Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, from a nineteenth-century illustration. From their union the rest of the Tudor dynasty sprang.

51. An allegory of the Tudor dynasty. The red dragon on the left represents the Welsh ancestry of Henry VII, for example, while the white greyhound on the right is taken from his father’s coat of arms as first earl of Richmond. Surmounting all is the Rose of Tudor, incorporating the white rose of Yorkshire within the red rose of Lancashire.

First published 2011 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2011 by Macmillan

an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Copyright © Peter Ackroyd 2011

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The list of illustrations constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

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Contents

List of illustrations

1. Hallelujah

2. All in scarlet

3. Heretic!

4. The woes of marriage

5. Into court

6. Old authentic histories

7. The king’s pleasure

8. A little neck

9. The great revolt

10. The confiscation

11. The old fashion

12. The body of Christ

13. The fall

14. War games

15. A family portrait

16. The last days

17. The breaking of the altars

18. Have at all papists!

19. The barns of Crediton

20. The lord of misrule

21. The nine-day queen

22. In the ascendant

23. Faith of our fathers

24. An age of anxiety

25. Nunc Dimittis

26. A virgin queen

27. Two queens

28. The thirty-nine steps

29. The rivals

30. The rites of spring

31. Plots and factions

32. The revels now are ended

33. The frog

34. The great plot

35. The dead cannot bite

36. Armada

37. Repent! Repent!

38. The setting sun

39. A disobedient servant

40. The end of days

41. Reformation

Further reading

Index

List of illustrations

1 Portrait of Henry VIII, c.1509 (© The Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library)

2 Portrait of Katherine of Aragon, sixteenth century (© Philip Mould Ltd, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

3 A woodcut showing King Henry’s knights after the English victory over the Scots at Flodden Field, 1513 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

4 Detail from a depiction of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, c.1545 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

5 Letter from King Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey (‘Mine own good cardinal’), thanking him for his hard work and urging him to take some ‘pastime and comfort’, c.1518 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

6 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, c.1520 (© Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

7 Chalk drawing of Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger, c.1527 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

8 Engraving of the pope being suppressed by King Henry VIII, 1534 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

9 Portrait of Anne Boleyn, 1534 (© Hever Castle, Kent / The Bridgeman Art Library)

10 Sixteenth-century portrait of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, by Hans Holbein the Younger (© Arundel Castle / The Bridgeman Art Library)

11 Detail from a contemporary engraving depicting the martyrdom of the Carthusians (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

12 Engraving showing the Pilgrimage of Grace, nineteenth century (© The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

13 Portrait of Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536 (© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / The Bridgeman Art Library)

14 Bishop Latimer’s arguments against the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, with marginal notes by Henry, c.1538 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

15 Sixteenth-century portrait of Lord Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger (© The Trustees of the Weston Park Foundation / The Bridgeman Art Library)

16 Portrait of Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger (© Hever Castle, Kent / The Bridgeman Art Library)

17 The title page of the Great Bible, 1539 (© Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

18 Engraving after Holbein portrait of Katherine Howard, 1796 (© The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

19 Contemporary portrait of Katherine Parr (© National Portrait Gallery, London Roger-Viollet, Paris The Bridgeman Art Library)

20 Allegory of the Tudor succession by Lucas de Heere, c.1570–75 (© Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire / The Bridgeman Art Library)

21 Portrait of Edward VI at the time of his accession (© Boltin Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library)

22 Portrait of Lady Jane Grey, c.1547 (© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library)

23 Queen Mary I, 1554 (© Society of Antiquaries of London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

24 Sixteenth-century portrait of Philip II of Spain (© Philip Mould Ltd, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

25 Anti-Catholic allegory depicting Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, 1556 (© Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library)

26 Woodcut illustration of the burning of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, taken from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, pub. 1563 (© Lambeth Palace Library, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

27 Elizabeth I as a young princess, c.1546 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

28 Page of a manuscript showing the signature of Queen Elizabeth I (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

29 Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in coronation robes (© National Portrait Gallery, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

30 Robert Dudley, first earl of Leicester, c.1560s (© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library)

31 Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, 1562 (© His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle / The Bridgeman Art Library)

32 Contemporary engraving of Queen Elizabeth I and Parliament (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

33 Mary Queen of Scots in white mourning (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh / The Bridgeman Art Library)

34 The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, painted after her death c.1613 (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh / The Bridgeman Art Library)

35 Engraving depicting the pope’s bull against the Queen in 1570 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

36 Hand-coloured copper engraving of the arrival of Queen Elizabeth I at Nonesuch Palace, 1582 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

37 Map showing the route of the Armada fleet, 1588 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

38 Portrait of Sir Francis Drake by Nicholas Hilliard, 1581 (© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / The Bridgeman Art Library)

39 Illustration of the Ark Royal, the English fleet’s flagship against the Spanish Armada (© Mansell / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)

40 Sixteenth-century portrait of William Cecil, first baron Burghley (© Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire / The Bridgeman Art Library)

41 Engraving of Sir Francis Walsingham (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

42 Contemporary portrait of Sir Robert Cecil (© Bonhams, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

43 Portrait of James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, 1586 (© Falkland Palace, Fife Mark Fiennes The Bridgeman Art Library)

1

Hallelujah

The land was flowing with milk and honey. On 21 April 1509 the old king, having grown ever more harsh and rapacious, died in his palace at Richmond on the south bank of the Thames. The fact was kept secret for two days, so that the realm would not tremble. Yet the new Henry had already been proclaimed king.

On 9 May the body of Henry VII was taken in a black chariot from Richmond Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral; the funeral car was attended by 1,400 formal mourners and 700 torch-bearers. But few, if any, grieved; the courtiers and household servants were already awaiting the son and heir. When the body, having been taken to the abbey of Westminster, after the funeral service was over, was lowered into its vault the heralds announced ‘le noble roy, Henri le Septième, est mort’. Then at once they cried out with one voice, ‘Vive le noble roy, Henri le Huitième’. His title was undisputed, the first such easy succession in a century. The new king was in his seventeenth year.

Midsummer Day, 24 June, was chosen as the day of coronation. The sun in its splendour would herald the rising of another sun. It was just four days before his eighteenth birthday. The ceremony of the coronation was considered to be the eighth sacrament of the Church, in which Henry was anointed with chrism or holy oil as a token of sacred kingship. His robes were stiff with jewels, diamonds and rubies and emeralds and pearls, so that a glow or lighthovered about him. He now radiated the power and the glory. He may have acted and dressed under advice, but he soon came to understand the theatre of magnificence.

Henry had taken the precaution, thirteen days before the coronation, of marrying his intended bride so that a king would be accompanied by a queen; it was thereby to be understood that he was an adult rather than a minor. Katherine of Aragon was the child of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, in whose reign Spain was united. She had come from that country in order to marry Prince Arthur, Henry’s older brother, but events conspired against her. Arthur died less than six months after their wedding, of consumption or the sweating sickness, and Katherine was left at the English court in the unenviable position of a widow whose usefulness had gone. It was said that the king himself, Henry VII, might wish to marry her. But this was unthinkable. Instead she was betrothed to Prince Henry, and was consigned to some years of relative penury and privation at the hands of a difficult father-in-law who was in any case pursuing a better match for his son and heir. Yet, after seven years of waiting, her moment of apotheosis had come. On the day before the coronation she was taken in a litter from the Tower of London to Westminster, passing through streets draped in rich tapestry and cloth of gold. A contemporary woodcut depicts Henry and Katherine being crowned at the same time, surrounded by rank upon rank of bishops and senior clergy.

Henry’s early years had been spent in the shadow of an anxious and overprotective father, intent before anything else on securing the dynasty. The young prince never spoke in public, except in reply to questions from the king. He could leave the palace at Greenwich or at Eltham only under careful supervision, and then venture into the palace’s park through a private door. Much care was bestowed on his early education, so that he acquired the reputation of being the most learned of princes. Throughout his life he considered himself to be a great debater in matters of theology, fully steeped in the scholarship of Thomas Aquinas. He took an early delight in music, and composed Masses as well as songs and motets; he sang, and played both lute and keyboard. He had his own company of musicians who followed him wherever he walked, and by the time of his death he owned seventy-two flutes. He was the harmonious prince. Thomas More, in a poem celebrating the coronation, described him as the glory of the era. Surely he would inaugurate a new golden age in which all men of goodwill would flourish?

Henry was himself a golden youth, robust and good-looking. He was a little over 6 feet in height and, literally, towered over most of his subjects. It was written that ‘when he moves the ground shakes under him’. He excelled in wrestling and archery, hawking and jousting. Nine months after the coronation, he organized a tournament in which the feats of chivalry could be celebrated. He rode out in disguise, but his identity was soon discovered. He had read Malory as well as Aquinas, and knew well enough that a good king was a brave and aggressive king. You had to strike down your opponent with a lance or sword. You must not hesitate or draw back. It was a question of honour. The joust offered a taste of warfare, also, and the new king surrounded himself with young lords who enjoyed a good fight. The noblemen of England were eager to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood.

When he was not master of the joust, he was leader of the hunt. He spoke of his hunting expeditions for days afterwards, and he would eventually own a stable of 200 horses. Hunting was, and still is, the sport of kings. It was a form of war against an enemy, a battleground upon which speed and accuracy were essential. Henry would call out ‘Holla! Holla! So boy! There boy!’ When the stag was down, he would slit its throat and cut open its belly before thrusting his hands into its entrails; he would then daub his companions with its blood.

Older and more sedate men were also by his side. These were the royal councillors, the majority of whom had served under the previous king. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, remained as chancellor. The bishop of Winchester, Richard Foxe, continued to serve as lord privy seal. The other senior bishops – of Durham, of Rochester and of Norwich – were also in place. The young king had to be advised and guided if the kingdom were to continue on its settled course. Whether he would accept that advice, and follow that guidance, was another matter.

The surviving members of the House of York were restored to favour, after they had endured the indifference and even hostility of the previous king. Henry VII had identified himself as the Lancastrian claimant to the throne. Even though he had married Elizabeth of York after his coronation, he was suspicious and resentful of the rival royal family. The essential unity of the realm was now being proclaimed after the dynastic struggles of the previous century.

The older councillors now took the opportunity of destroying some of the ‘new men’ whom Henry VII had promoted. His two most trusted advisers, or confidential clerks, were arrested and imprisoned. Sir Richard Empson and Sir Edmund Dudley had been associated with the previous king’s financial exactions, but they were in general resented and distrusted by the bishops and older nobility. They were charged with the unlikely crime of ‘constructive treason’ against the young king, and were duly executed. It is not at all clear that Henry played any part in what was essentially judicial murder, but his formal approval was still necessary. He would employ the same methods, for removing his enemies, in another period of his reign.

Henry was in any case of uncertain temper. He had the disposition of a king. He could be generous and magnanimous, but he was also self-willed and capricious. The Spanish ambassador had intimated to his master that ‘speaking frankly, the prince is not considered to be a genial person’. The French ambassador, at a later date, revealed that he could not enter the king’s presence without fear of personal violence.

An early outbreak of royal temper is suggestive. In the summer of 1509 a letter arrived from the French king, Louis XII, in reply to one purportedly sent by Henry in which the new king had requested peace and friendship. But Henry had not written it. It had been sent by the king’s council in his name. The youthful monarch then grew furious. ‘Who wrote this letter?’ he demanded. ‘I ask peace of the king of France, who dare not look me in the face, still less make war on me!’ His pride had been touched. He looked upon France as an ancient enemy. Only Calais remained of the dominion that the English kings had once enjoyed across the Channel. Henry was eager to claim back his ancient rights and, from the time of his coronation, he looked upon France as a prize to be taken. War was not only a pleasure; it was a dynastic duty.

Yet the pleasures of peace were still to be tasted. He had inherited a tranquil kingdom, as well as the store of treasure that his father had amassed. Henry VII bequeathed to him something in excess of £1,250,000, which may plausibly be translated to a contemporary fortune of approximately £380,000,000. It would soon all be dissipated, if not exactly squandered. It was rumoured that the young king was spending too much time on sports and entertainments, and was as a result neglecting the business of the realm. This need not be taken at face value. As the letter to the French king demonstrated, the learned bishops preferred their master to stay away from their serious deliberations.

There were in any case more immediate concerns. Katherine of Aragon had at the end of January 1510 gone into painful labour. The result was a girl, stillborn. Yet Katherine remained evidently pregnant with another child, and the preparations for a royal birth were continued. They were unnecessary. The swelling of her belly subsided, caused by infection rather than fruitfulness. It was announced that the queen had suffered a miscarriage, but it was rumoured that she was perhaps infertile. No greater doom could be delivered upon an English queen. She disproved the rumours when she gave birth to a son on the first day of 1511, but the infant died two months later. Katherine may have been deemed to be unlucky, but the king would eventually suspect something much worse than misfortune.

Henry had already strayed from the marriage bed. While Katherine was enduring the strains of her phantom pregnancy in the early months of 1510, he took comfort from the attentions of Anne Stafford. She was one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and was already married. She was also a sister of the duke of Buckingham, and this great lord was sensitive of his family’s honour. Anne Stafford was sent to a nunnery, and Buckingham removed himself from court after an angry confrontation with the king. Katherine of Aragon was apprised of the affair and, naturally enough, took Buckingham’s part. She had been shamed by her husband’s infidelity with one of her own servants. The household was already full of deception and division. Other royal liaisons may have gone unrecorded. Mistress Amadas, the wife of the court goldsmith, later announced the fact that the king had come secretly to her in a Thames Street house owned by one of his principal courtiers.

Yet all sins of lust could be absolved. In the early days of 1511 Henry went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk. It was reported that he trod, barefoot and in secret, along the pilgrims’ road in order to pray for the life of his struggling infant boy. In the summer of the same year he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Master John Schorne at North Marston in Buckinghamshire. Master Schorne was the rector of that village who had acquired a reputation for saintliness and whose shrine became a centre of miraculous healing. He was said to have conjured the devil into a boot.

In all matters of faith, therefore, Henry was a loyal son of the Church. In that respect, at least, he resembled the overwhelming majority of his subjects. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘they all attend Mass every day and say many paternosters in public – the women carrying long rosaries in their hands’. At the beginning of Henry’s reign the Catholic Church in England was flourishing. It had recovered its vigour and purpose. In the southwest, for example, there was a rapid increase in church building and reconstruction. More attention was paid to the standards of preaching. Where before the congregation knelt on rush-covered floors, benches were now being set up in front of the pulpits.

It was the Church of ancient custom and of traditional ceremony. On Good Friday, for example, the ‘creeping to the cross’ took place. The crucifix was veiled and held up behind the high altar by two priests while the responses to the versicles were chanted; it was then uncovered and placed on the third step in front of the altar, to which the clergy now would crawl on their hands and knees before kissing it. Hymns were sung as the crucifix was then carried down to the congregation, who would genuflect before it and kiss it. The crucifix was then wreathed in linen and placed in a ‘sepulchre’ until it re-emerged in triumph on the morning of Easter Sunday. This was an age of carols and of holy days, of relics and pilgrimages and miracles.

The old faith was established upon communal ritual as much as theology. The defining moment of devotion was the miracle of transubstantiation at the Mass, when the bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The religious life was nourished by the sacraments, which were in turn administered by a duly ordained body of priests who owed their primary allegiance to the pope. The faithful were obliged to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days, to fast on appointed days, to make confession and receive communion at least once a year. The most powerful of all beliefs was that in purgatory, whereby the living made intercession for the souls of the dead to bring a quicker end to their suffering; the old Church itself represented the communion of the living and the dead.

The saints were powerful intercessors, too, and were venerated as guardians and benefactors. St Barbara protected her votaries against thunder and lightning, and St Gertrude kept away the mice and the rats; St Dorothy protected herbs, while St Apolline healed the toothache; St Nicholas saved the faithful from drowning, while St Anthony guarded the swine. The supreme intercessor was the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, whose image was to be found everywhere surrounded by candles and incense.

The churches were therefore filled with images and lights. Those of London, for example, were treasure-chests of silver candlesticks and censers, silver crucifixes and chalices and patens. The high altar and the rood screen, separating the priest from the congregation, were miracles of art and workmanship. Images of Jesus and of the Holy Virgin, of patron saints and local saints, adorned every available space. They wore coronets and necklaces of precious stones; rings were set upon their fingers and they were clothed in garments of gold. Some churches even exhibited the horns of unicorns or the eggs of ostriches in order to elicit admiration.

The human representatives of the Church were perhaps more frail. Yet the condition of the clergy was sound, as far as the laws of human nature allowed. Incompetent and foolish priests could be found, of course, but there was no general debasement or corruption of the clerical office. More men and women were now in religious orders than at any time in the previous century, and after the invention of printing came a great flood of devotional literature. In the years between 1490 and 1530, some twenty-eight editions of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin were issued. The religious guilds, set up to collect money for charity and to pray for the souls of the dead, had never been so popular; they were the institutional aspect of the religious community.

There were eager reformers, of course, who wished for a revival of the Christian spirit buried beneath the golden carapace of ritual and traditional devotion. It is in fact a measure of the health of the Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century that such fervent voices were heard everywhere. In the winter of 1511 John Colet stepped into the pulpit, at his own cathedral church of St Paul’s in London, and preached of religious reform to the senior clergy of the realm. He repeated his theme to a convocation of clergy in the chapter-house of Canterbury. ‘Never’, he said, ‘did the state of the Church more need your endeavours.’ It was time for ‘the reformation of ecclesiastical affairs’. The word had been spoken, but the deed was unthinkable. What Colet meant by ‘reformation’ was a rise in the quality and therefore the renown of the priesthood.

He despised some of the more primitive superstitions of the Catholic people, such as the veneration of relics and the use of prayer as a magical charm, but he had no doubt on the principles of faith and the tenets of theology. On these matters the Church was resolute. In May 1511 six men and four women, from Tenterden in Kent, were denounced as heretics for claiming among other things that the sacrament of the altar was not the body of Christ but merely material bread. They were forced to abjure their doctrines, and were condemned to wear the badge of a faggot in flames for the rest of their lives. Two men were burned, however, for the crime of being ‘relapsed’ heretics; they had repented, but then had taken up their old opinions once more. The Latin secretary to Henry, an Italian cleric known as Ammonius, wrote with some exaggeration that ‘I do not wonder that the price of faggots has gone up, for many heretics furnish a daily holocaust, and yet more spring up to take their place’.

The career of Ammonius himself is testimony to the fact that the Church was still the avenue for royal preferment. This was a truth of which Thomas Wolsey was the supreme embodiment. Wolsey arrived at court through the agency of Bishop Foxe, the lord privy seal, and seems almost at once to have impressed the young king with his stamina and mastery of detail. By the spring of 1511 he was issuing letters and bills directly under the king’s command, thus effectively circumventing the usual elaborate procedures. He was still only dean of Lincoln, but he was already advising Henry in affairs international and ecclesiastical.

He had the gift of affability as well as of industry, and was infinitely resourceful; he did what the king wanted, and did it quickly. The king’s opinions were his own. Wolsey was, according to his gentleman usher, George Cavendish, ‘most earnest and readiest in all the council to advance the king’s only will and pleasure, having no respect to the case’. He was thirty-eight years old, and a generation younger than the old bishops of the council. Here was a man whom the young king could take into his confidence, and upon whom he could rely. Wolsey rose at four in the morning, and could work for twelve hours at a stretch without intermission. Cavendish relates that ‘my lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat’. When he had finished his labours he heard Mass and then ate a light supper before retiring.

Wolsey therefore became the instrument of the king’s will, and no more forcefully than in the prosecution of Henry’s ambitions against France. In November 1511 Henry joined a Holy League with the pope and with his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Spain, so that they might with papal approval attack France. Henry longed for war, and of course an excuse for combat could always be found. In this instance the incursion of French troops into Italian territories was cited as the reason for hostilities. In the following month a Christmas pageant was devised for the king at the house of the black friars in Ludgate, in which were displayed an artificial lion and an antelope. Four knight challengers rode out against men in the apparel of ‘woodwoos’, or wild men of the forest. It was a spectacle in praise of battle. A few months later it was decreed by parliament that all male children were obliged to practise the skills of archery.

Contrary advice was being given to the king at this juncture. The bishops and statesmen of the royal council advised peace against the hazard and cost of war with the French. Many of the reformist clergy were temperamentally opposed to warfare, and regretted that a golden prince of peace should so soon become a ravening lion of war. Colet declared from the pulpit of St Paul’s that ‘an unjust peace is better than the justest war’. Erasmus, the Dutch humanist then resident at Cambridge, wrote that ‘it is the people who build cities, while the madness of princes destroys them’.

Yet the old nobility, and the young lords about the king, pressed for combat and glory in an alliance with Spain against the old enemy. Katherine of Aragon, who had assumed the role of Spanish ambassador to the English court of her husband, was also in favour of war against France. In this she was fulfilling the desire of her father. It was an unequal balance of forces, especially when it was tilted by Henry’s desire for martial honour. He desired above all else to be a ‘valiant knight’ in the Arthurian tradition. That was the destiny of a true king. What did it matter if this were, in England, the beginning of a run of bad harvests when bread was dear and life more precarious? The will of the king was absolute. Had he not been proclaimed king of France at the time of his coronation? He wished to recover his birthright.

In April 1512 war was declared against France; a fleet of eighteen warships was prepared to take 15,000 men to Spain, from where they were to invade the enemy. In the early summer the English forces landed in Spain. No tents, or provisions, had been prepared for them. They lay in fields and under hedges, without protection from the torrential rain. The season was oppressive and pestilential, a menace augmented by the hot wine of Spain. The men wanted beer, but there was none to be found.

It also soon became apparent that they had been duped by Ferdinand, who had no intention of invading France, but merely wanted his border to be guarded by the English troops while he waged an independent war against the kingdom of Navarre. His words were fair, one English commander wrote back to the king, but his deeds were slack. Dysentery caused many casualties and, as a result of disease and poor rations, rumours and threats of mutiny began to multiply. In October 1512 the English sailed back home. ‘Englishmen have so long abstained from war,’ the daughter of the emperor Maximilian said, ‘they lack experience from disuse.’ The young king had been dishonoured as well as betrayed. Henry was furious at the hypocrisy and duplicity of his father-in-law, and seems in part to have blamed Katherine for the fiasco. A report soon emerged in Rome that he wished to ‘repudiate’ his wife, largely because she had proved incapable of bearing him a living heir, and to marry elsewhere.

Yet he refused to accept the humiliation in Spain, and at once began planning for a military expedition under his own leadership. He would lead a giant campaign, and emulate Henry V in the scale of his victories. Henry summoned his nobles, and their armed retainers, as their feudal master. The days of Agincourt were revived. He soon restored Thomas Howard to his father’s title of duke of Norfolk and created Charles Brandon, his partner in the jousts, duke of Suffolk; the two warlords were thereby afforded sufficient dignity. If he were to imitate the exploits of the medieval king, however, he would need men and materials. Wolsey in effect became the minister of war. It was he who organized the fleet, and made provisions for 25,000 men to sail to France under the banner of the king. Henry now found him indispensable. He was made dean of York, another stage in his irrepressible rise.

The main body of the army set sail in the spring of 1513, followed a few weeks later by the king. He landed in Calais with a bodyguard of 300 men and a retinue of 115 priests and singers of the chapel. His great and ornate bed was transported along the route eastward, and was set up each night within a pavilion made from cloth of gold. The king had eleven tents, connected one with another; one was for his cook, and one for his kitchen. He was escorted, wherever he walked or rode, by fourteen young boys in coats of gold. The bells on his horse were made of gold. The most elaborate of the royal tents was decorated with golden ducats and golden florins. He was intent on displaying his magnificence as well as his valour. Henry had allied himself with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, whose nominal empire comprised most of central Europe, but he also wished to claim imperial sovereignty for himself. He had already caused to be fashioned a ‘rich crown of gold set with full many rich precious stones’ that became known as the Imperial Crown; it would in time signify his dominion over the whole of Britain, but also over the Church within his domain.

The fighting in France itself was to a large extent inconsequential. In the summer of 1513 the English forces laid siege to the small town of Thérouanne in the county of Flanders; a body of French cavalry came upon them, exchanged fire, and then retreated. They rode away so hard that the encounter became known as the battle of the Spurs. Henry himself had remained in the rear, and had taken no part in the action. It was not a very glorious victory, but it was still a victory. When Thérouanne itself eventually submitted, the king’s choristers sang the Te Deum.

The English infantry and cavalry moved on to besiege Tournai, a much bigger prize that Edward III had failed to capture in the summer of 1340. It fell within a week of the English arrival. Henry established a garrison in Tournai and strengthened its citadel; he also demanded that Thomas Wolsey be appointed as bishop of the city. Three weeks of tournaments, dances and revels marked the victory in which the courts of Maximilian and Henry freely mingled. The king then sailed back to England in triumph.

Yet the cost of the brief wars was enormous, comprising most of the treasure that Henry VII had bequeathed to his son. Wolsey persuaded parliament to grant a subsidy, in effect a tax upon every adult male, but this proved of course unpopular and difficult to collect. It became clear enough that England could not afford to wage war on equal terms with the larger powers of Europe. The French king had three times as many subjects, and also triple the resources; the Spanish king possessed six times as many subjects, and five times the revenue. Henry’s ambition and appetite for glory outstripped his strength.

The true palm of victory, in 1513, was in any case to be found elsewhere. The Scots were restive, and ready once more to confirm their old alliance with the French. It was feared that James IV was prepared to invade England while its king was absent on other duties. And so it proved. Katherine herself played a role in the preparations for battle. She wrote to her husband that she was ‘horribly busy with making standards, banners and badges’, and she herself led an army north. Yet the victory came before she arrived. James IV led his soldiers over the border but, under the command of the elderly earl of Surrey, the English forces withstood and defeated them. James himself was left dead upon the field, and John Skelton wrote that ‘at Flodden hills our bows and bills slew all the flower of their honour’; 10,000 Scots were killed. The torn surcoat of the Scottish king, stained with blood, was sent to Henry at Tournai. Katherine wrote to her husband with news of the victory, and declared that the battle of Flodden Field ‘has been to your grace and all your realm the greatest honour that could be, more than if you should win the crown of France’. Henry was truly the master of his kingdom.

2

All in scarlet

Richard Hunne was a wealthy merchant whose infant son Stephen died in the spring of 1511. The rector of his parish church in Whitechapel, Thomas Dryffield, asked for the dead baby’s christening robe as a ‘mortuary gift’; this was a traditional offering to the priest at the time of burial. Hunne declined to follow the custom. A year later he was summoned to Lambeth Palace, where he was judged to be contumacious; he still refused to pay what he considered to be an iniquitous fee. When he entered his parish church for vespers, at the end of the year, Dryffield formally excommunicated him. ‘Hunne,’ he shouted, ‘you are accursed, and you stand accursed.’

This was a serious matter. No one was permitted to engage in business with Hunne. He would be without company, because no one would wish to be seen with an excommunicate. He would also of course be assigned to the fires of damnation for eternity. Yet Hunne struck back, and accused the rector of slander. He also challenged the legality of the Church court that had previously deemed him guilty. The case then entered the world of law, where it remained suspended for twenty-two months. In the autumn of 1514 the Church authorities raided Hunne’s house, and found a number of heretical books written in English. He was taken to the Lollards’ Tower in the west churchyard of St Paul’s where in the winter of that year he was found hanged. The bishop of London declared that the heretic had, in a mood of contrition and guilt, committed suicide. Hunne’s sympathizers accused the Church of murder. In the words of John Foxe, the martyrologist, ‘his neck was broken with an iron chain, and he was wounded in other parts of his body, and then knit up in his own girdle’.

Even before Hunne’s corpse was being burned at Smithfield, as a convicted and ‘abominable’ heretic, a coroner’s inquest was convened to judge the manner of his death. In February 1515 the jury decided that three clerics – among them the bishop of London’s chancellor, William Horsey – were guilty of murder. The bishop wrote immediately to Thomas Wolsey and called for an inquiry by men without bias; he told Wolsey that Londoners were so ‘maliciously set in favour’ of heresy that his man was bound to be condemned even if he were ‘as innocent as Abel’.

The king then ordered an inquiry, to take place at Baynard’s Castle on the north bank of the Thames by Blackfriars, where the bishop of London took the opportunity of condemning the members of the jury as ‘false perjured caitiffs’. Henry then intervened with a decision to pardon Horsey and the others; he instructed his attorney to declare them to be not guilty of the alleged crime. Horsey then left London, and travelled quickly to Exeter. This might have seemed to be the end of the matter.

Yet there were important consequences. Three years before, in the parliament of 1512, a bill had been passed requiring that ‘benefit of clergy’ be removed from those in minor orders convicted of murder; the ‘benefit’ had meant that clerics would be tried in Church courts and spared the penalty of death. Minor orders represented the lower ranks of the clergy, such as lector or acolyte. In the charged circumstances of the Hunne affair, this measure acquired new significance. The abbot of Winchester now declared to the Lords that the Act of 1512 stood against the laws of God and the freedoms of the Church. The text upon which he preached came from the First Book of Chronicles, ‘Touch not mine anointed’.

Henry Standish, warden of the mendicant friars of London and one of the king’s spiritual advisers, disagreed. He asserted that no act of the king could be prejudicial to the Church, and that the Church effectively came under the king’s jurisdiction. A fundamental issue was raised. Could a secular court call the clergy to account? Could a temporal leader restrain a bishop ordained by God? Standish was summoned to appear before a convocation of the senior clergy, to answer for his opinions, and he appealed to the king for protection.

A great conference of learned men, including all the judges of the land, met at Blackfriars in the winter of 1515 and after much deliberation took the part of Henry Standish; they accused the senior clergy of praemunire, by which was meant the appeal to a foreign court or authority. The foreign authority, in this case, was the pope and the papal court. Thomas Wolsey – made a cardinal only three months before – offered a formal submission to the king, and asked him to submit the case to Rome. This might seem an oddly inappropriate response, but it is likely that Wolsey and the king were working together. All now waited for the king’s verdict. It was time for Henry to give judgment in the affair of Henry Standish.

He addressed an assembly of lawyers and clergy at Baynard’s Castle in November and made the following declaration. ‘By the ordinance and sufferance of God we are king of England, and the kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God alone. Wherefore know you well that we shall maintain the right of our crown and of our temporal jurisdiction as well in this point as in all others.’ The opinions of Standish were upheld.

This could perhaps be seen as the first movement of the great reformation of the sixteenth century, but the king was saying nothing new. The Statute of Provisors, in 1351, spoke of the ‘Holy Church of England’ in the reign of Edward III as distinct from ‘the pope of Rome’. Richard II, at the end of the fourteenth century, was declared to be absolute emperor within his dominion. In 1485 Chief Justice Hussey declared that the king of England was answerable only to God and was superior to the pope within his realm. In fact Henry VII had repeatedly challenged the status of the Church by citing senior clergy for praemunire; he made it clear that he did not want another sovereign power within his kingdom, and in the appointment of bishops he preferred lawyers to theologians. The pope did not intervene.

It was perhaps odd that in his letter to Wolsey the bishop of London should accuse his flock of being altogether heretical, but under the circumstances it was a pardonable exaggeration. The bishop was simply adverting to the fact that among Londoners there was a long and persistent tradition of anti-clericalism. There had always been calls for the Church to be reformed or to come under the command of the king, and the clergy had been under attack from at least the fourteenth century. The parliaments of the 1370s and 1380s wished to remove clerics from high office, and in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 the archbishop of Canterbury was beheaded by the mob. The clergy, high and low, were accused of fornication and adultery; they spent their time hawking and hunting; they wore their hair long, and they lounged in taverns; they carried swords and daggers. It was a familiar litany of complaint, taken up in an earlier century by Chaucer and by Langland. Yet such abuse, such strident denunciations, were natural and inevitable in the case of an ancient institution. The Church of Rome was always in need of renovation and renewal.

The king had spoken, on a winter’s day in Baynard’s Castle, and Wolsey knelt before him. Yet the prelate had already become mighty. In the autumn of 1515, at the king’s urgent request, Pope Leo X had conferred the red hat of a cardinal upon him. From this time forward he dressed in scarlet. He was the king’s cardinal rather than the pope’s cardinal, however, and thus could only assist the cause of royal supremacy. At the end of this year Wolsey was also appointed by Henry to be his new lord chancellor, the leading minister of the realm and holder of the Great Seal. He dominated the council of the king. All dispatches, to local justices or to ambassadors, now passed through his hands. No act of policy could be formulated without his active engagement. No senior post could be filled without his intervention. ‘Were I to offer to resign,’ he said, ‘I am sure neither the king nor his nobles would permit it.’

In his command of domestic and international affairs, he needed much subtlety and dexterity. The death of Ferdinand of Spain in February 1516, and the succession of his grandson Charles at the age of sixteen, posed delicate problems of balance and influence. Charles’s own titles bear evidence of the complexities of continental politics. He had been nominal ruler of Burgundy for ten years, and assumed the crown of Spain as Charles I; three years later, he became ruler of the Holy Roman Empire as Charles V. His lands, in the south and centre of Europe, comprised the Habsburg inheritance that would dominate English foreign policy for the next hundred years. Another young monarch also claimed the ascendancy. Francis I had assumed the crown of France in 1515, at the age of twenty, and within nine months he had taken an army into northern Italy and captured Milan. This was a feat that Henry could only dream of accomplishing.

On May Day 1515, Henry asked for details about Francis from a Venetian envoy. ‘Talk with me awhile,’ he said. ‘The King of France, is he as tall as I?’ There was very little difference. ‘Is he as stout?’ No, he was not. ‘What sort of legs has he?’ They were thin or ‘spare’. At this point the king of England opened his doublet, and placed his hand on his thigh. ‘Look here. And I also have a good calf to my leg.’ He said later that Francis was a Frenchman, and therefore could not be trusted.

Until the death of Henry these three young monarchs would vie for mastery, or at least temporary supremacy, and the international history of the time consists of their moves and countermoves. There were treaties and secret agreements, skirmishes and wars, invasions and sieges. Europe became their playing field. In their respective courts, hunts and jousts and tournaments became the theatrical expression of power. But when three young men fight, the results are always likely to be bloody.

The emergence of these three powerful sovereigns also altered the whole balance of European power and, in particular, led inevitably to the relative decline in the authority of the pope. The power of kings was considered to be supreme, dominating Church and nobility. Charles and Francis were always to be engaged in contention, since their territories were adjacent one to another, and it was Henry’s part to derive maximum benefit from their rivalry. They were not always engaged in open hostility, however, but tried to benefit from convenient betrothals and dynastic marriages. The birth of a daughter to Henry, on 18 February 1516, at last gave him a pawn in the great game. Nevertheless, Princess Mary was a severe disappointment to her father; he had hoped and prayed for a son and heir, but he disguised his dismay. ‘We are both young,’ he said, ‘if it be a girl this time, by the grace of God, boys will follow.’ In this he was mistaken.

In the spring of 1517 a bill was posted upon one of the doors of St Paul’s, complaining that ‘the foreigners’ were given too much favour by the king and council and they ‘bought wools to the undoing of Englishmen’. This helped to inspire the riots of ‘Evil May Day’ in which the radicalism or insubordination of the London crowd became manifest. At the end of April a preacher had called upon Englishmen to defend their livings against ‘aliens’, by whom he meant the merchants from Florence and Venice, from Genoa and Paris. Wolsey had sent for the mayor on hearing news that, as he put it, ‘your young and riotous people will rise and distress the strangers’. A disturbance of this kind was deeply troubling for an administration that had no police force or standing army to enforce its will.

The mayor denied any rumours of sedition but on the evening of 30 April 2,000 Londoners – with apprentices, watermen and serving men at their head – sacked the houses of the French and Flemish merchants. They also stormed the house of the king’s secretary and threatened the residents of the Italian quarter. Wolsey, wary of trouble despite the assurances of the mayor, called in the armed retainers of the nobility as well as the ordnance of the Tower. More than 400 prisoners were taken, tried and found guilty of treason. Thirteen of them suffered the penalty of being hanged, drawn and quartered; their butchered remains were suspended upon eleven gallows set up within the city.

In a suitably elaborate ceremony the other rioters, with halters around their necks, were brought to Westminster Hall in the presence of the king. He was sitting on a lofty dais, from which eminence he condemned them all to death. Then Wolsey fell on his knees and begged the king to show compassion while the prisoners themselves called out ‘Mercy, Mercy!’ Eventually the king relented and granted them pardon. At which point they cast off their halters and, as a London chronicler put it, ‘jumped for joy’.

It had been a close-run thing, but there is no disguising the real scorn and even hatred between the court and the citizens. The nobility distrusted and despised the commonalty, a feeling returned in equal measure. It was believed, with some reason, that the bishops and the clergy took the nobles’ part; the city’s animus against them would play some role in the religious changes of later years. London itself had the capacity to stir riot and breed dissension, and was a constant source of disquiet to the king and his council.

Two or three weeks after the riots, a distemper fell upon the city and the country. In the early summer of 1517 a fever, accompanied by a profuse and foul-smelling sweat, began its progress. It was accompanied by sharp pains in the back and shoulders before moving to the liver; lethargy and drowsiness ensued, with a sleep that often led to death. Swift and merciless, it became known as the sweat or the sweating sickness; because it seems only to have attacked the English, in cities such as Calais and Antwerp, it was called ‘sudor Anglicus’ or ‘the English sweat’. It was also called ‘Know Thy Master’ or ‘The Lord’s Visitation’. Tens of thousands died. A physician of the time, Dr Caius, described how it ‘immediately killed some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors; some in one hour, many in two, it destroyed; and at the longest to them that merrily dined, it gave a sorrowful supper’. A chance encounter in the street, a beggar knocking at the door, a kiss upon the cheek, could spell death.

The houses themselves might harbour the pestilence. Erasmus complained that the floors of English dwellings were covered with rushes that harboured ‘expectorations, vomitings, the leakage of dogs and men, ale-droppings, scraps of fish and other abominations not to be mentioned’. Whenever there was a change in the weather, vapours of foul air were exhaled. In the streets the open sewers rolled their stagnant and turbid discharge down to the Thames.

In the summer of that year Thomas Wolsey himself fell sick of the sweat, with many of his household dying. Yet he was robust and determined. He could shake off any sickness without permanent injury to his strong constitution. On his recovery he made a pilgrimage to Walsingham; when he had faced death, he had made a vow to pray at the shrine of Our Lady there, a replica of the house in Nazareth where Gabriel had appeared to Mary. After he had meditated and fasted, he continued with the business of the realm.

In the spring of the previous year he had spoken at length, to Henry and to the council, of the inefficiencies and enormities in the administration of justice. He was not a lawyer and had no training in the law, but his intelligence and self-reliance easily surmounted any doubts about his ability. He had decided, with the king, to reinforce the procedures of the law by means of a body known as the Star Chamber; in its judicial capacity, the king’s council met in a chamber the roof of which was studded with stars.

Under the stars the lord chancellor could question and punish, in particular, the great ones of the realm. ‘I trust,’ he wrote, ‘to learn them next term the law of the Star Chamber.’ He punished lords for maintaining too many retainers, and knights for ‘bearing’ (bearing down on) their poorer tenants; he investigated cases of perjury and forgery; he regulated prices and food supplies, on the understandable assumption that scarcity might provoke riot. One of the principal functions of the chamber was to suppress or punish public disorder. He investigated the behaviour of the sheriffs. In the previous reign the Star Chamber had heard approximately twelve cases a year; under the direction of Wolsey it heard 120 in the same period.

Wolsey had his own court, too, known as the court of Chancery. This was a civil rather than a criminal court, where disputes over such matters as inheritance and contract were resolved. The plaintiffs could state their case in the vernacular, and defendants were obliged to appear by means of a ‘subpoena writ’. It was an efficient way of hearing appeals against judgments in common law. It also provided a method by which the cardinal could keep a tight grip upon the business of the land. Wolsey went in procession to Westminster Hall each day, with two great crosses of silver carried before him together with his Great Seal and cardinal’s hat; he dressed in crimson silk with a tippet or shoulder cape of sable. In his hand he carried an orange, hollowed out and filled with vinegar, pressed to his nose when he walked through the crowd of suitors awaiting him. ‘On [sic] my lords and masters,’ his attendants called out, ‘make way for my Lord’s Grace!’ John Skelton described his behaviour in the court of Chancery itself:

And openly in that place

He rages and he raves

And calls them cankered knaves …

In the Star Chamber he nods and becks …

Duke, earl, baron or lord

To his sentence must accord.

He was resented by those whom he punished, but his ministrations seem to have been effective. In the late summer of 1517 he wrote to Henry with a certain amount of self-congratulation on the blessed state of the realm. ‘Our Lord be thanked,’ he said, ‘it was never in such peace nor tranquillity.’

In this year, too, Wolsey established an inquiry into the causes of depopulation in the counties of England. The countryside had been changing for many generations, so slowly that the alteration had not been discernible until it was too late to do anything about it. By the time that the enclosure of land by the richer or more efficient farmers was recognized as a manifest injustice, it had become a simple fact that could not be reversed. A society of smallholders gave way to one of large tenant farmers with a class of landless labourers. So it is with all historical change. It proceeds over many decades, and many centuries, before becoming irrevocable.

Many tracts and pamphlets were written in the sixteenth century concerning the evils of enclosure. Thomas More’s Utopia is in part directed against it. The enclosed land was used for the rearing of sheep rather than for the production of crops. More wrote that the sheep were now eating the people rather than the reverse. One shepherd took the place of a score of agricultural workers in the process, thus leading to the depopulation of large parts of the countryside. A bishop wrote to Wolsey that ‘your heart would mourn to see the towns, villages, hamlets, manor places in ruin and decay, the people gone, the ploughs laid down’. When labourers were not needed, they moved on. The simple houses of the rural tenantry, once abandoned, were dissolved by wind and rain; the walls crumbled, and the roofs fell, leaving only hillocks of earth to show where they had once stood. The village church might become a shelter for cattle. Yet it was hard, then and now, to identify the causes of this decay. The distress of the early sixteenth century may have been caused by a series of bad harvests and a steadily growing population, for example, rather than a suddenly accelerated rate of enclosure. A population of approximately three million was below the peak of the early fourteenth century, but it was increasing all the time.

Enclosure itself had been a fact of farming ever since the fourteenth century, when the ‘pestilence’ or ‘black death’ took a large toll upon the population. With the lowered demand for corn, the land had to be put to different uses. Fields lying idle were cheap, also, and a steady process of purchase began that continued well into the eighteenth century. There were barters and exchanges between farmers, with the wealthiest or the most resourceful getting the best of the bargain. Many of the once open fields were enclosed with hedges of hawthorn. It was estimated that the value of enclosed land was one and a half times that of the rest. The process could not be prevented or halted. It came to a crisis, as we shall see, a generation later.

The state of the realm was still very largely the state of an agricultural society. It was comprised of freeholders and leaseholders, customary tenants and labourers, all owing allegiance to their lord. Their houses were grouped closely together, with the fields stretching around them. It was a society immensely susceptible to the vagaries of the weather, where one bad harvest could spell disaster.

In what had always been a world of tradition and of custom, the previous ties of the manor system were now giving way to the new laws of the market. Custom was being replaced by law and contract. Communal effort was slowly supplanted by competition. ‘Now the world is so altered for the poor tenant,’ one contemporary wrote, ‘that he stands in bodily fear of his greedy neighbour – so that, two or three years before his lease ends, he must bow to his lord for a new lease.’ The larger farmers wished to sell their produce to the rising populations of the towns and the cities; the smaller farmers were reduced to subsistence agriculture, by which they ate what they grew. Land was no longer the common ground of society, the management of which entailed social responsibilities. It had become a simple investment. So the customary rent for a tenant was replaced by what was known as the ‘rack rent’ or market rent. The process was very slow and very long, not really coming to an end until the eighteenth century. Yet the communal farming of the past, with its own cooperative rituals and customs, was not destined to endure. In this respect the movement of agriculture may be compared with the movement of religion.

There is indeed an affinity. The common fields along the coastal plains of Westmorland and Northumberland, for example, harboured an attachment to the old religion. The corn-growing villages of East Anglia and eastern Kent, engaged in the commercial production of food, were committed to the reform of faith. It seems clear enough that religious radicalism prospered in the eastern counties, and was held back in the north and in the west. Yet there are so many exceptions and special cases that even these generalizations are susceptible to doubt. The eastern part of Sussex espoused the new faith, for example, while the western part supported the old. It can only be said with some degree of certainty that the time of the ‘new men’ was approaching.

3

Heretic!

In 1517 or 1518 some Cambridge scholars began to meet at the White Horse tavern in that city where, like undergraduates before and since, they debated the intellectual issues of the time. The pressing matters of this time, however, were all concerned with religion; it was at the heart of sixteenth-century debate. Some of these scholars, with all the ardour of youth, were attracted to new and potentially subversive doctrines. Reform was in the air. Some of them wished to return to the simple piety of the movements known as the Poor Catholics or the Humiliati; they wished to eschew the pomp and ceremony of the medieval Church, and to cultivate what was called devotio moderna, ‘modern devotion’. Others wished to return to the word of the Scriptures, and in particular of the New Testament.

The published work of Desiderius Erasmus had already brought a purer spirit into theological enquiry. While Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he completed a Greek and Latin translation of the New Testament which seemed destined to supersede the old ‘Vulgate’ that had been in use for a thousand years. Erasmus, by an act of historical scholarship, brought back something of the air of early Christian revelation.

He believed that the rituals and the formal theology of the Church were less important than the spiritual reception of the message of the Scriptures; an inward faith, both in God’s grace and in the redemptive power of His Son, was of more efficacy than conformity to external worship. ‘If you approach the Scriptures in all humility,’ he wrote, ‘you will perceive that you have been breathed upon by the Holy Will.’ By means of satire he also attacked the excessive devotion to relics, the too frequent resort to pilgrimages, and the degeneration of the monastic orders. He rarely mentions the sacraments that were part of the divine machinery of the orthodox faith.

He never advanced into heretical doctrine, but he was as much a dissolvent of conventional piety as Luther or Wycliffe. Without Erasmus, neither Luther nor Tyndale could have translated the Greek testament. He also entertained the hope that the Scriptures would be freely available to everyone, an aspiration that, at a later date, would be deemed almost heretical. One of the scholars who attended the meetings in the White Horse tavern, Thomas Bilney, declared that on reading Erasmus ‘at last I heard of Jesus’. Bilney was later to be burned at the stake.

Erasmus has conventionally been described as a ‘humanist’, although the word itself did not appear in this sense until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In general terms humanism, or the ‘new learning’ at the beginning of the sixteenth century, concerned itself with a renovation of education and scholarship by the pursuit of newly found or newly translated classical models. It brought with it a profound scepticism of medieval authority, and of the scholastic theology that supported it. The new learning opened the windows of the Church in search of light and fresh air. The somewhat commonplace anti-clericalism of the Lollards had become outmoded in an age of constructive criticism and renovation, and it seemed likely that the universal Church would be able to renew itself.

In the autumn of 1517 Martin Luther spoke out, lending a more fiery and dogmatic charge to the general calls for reform. He was close to Erasmus in many respects, but he quickly moved beyond him in his assertion of justification by faith alone. Faith comes as a gift from God to the individual without the interference of rituals and priests. The Church cannot, and should not, come between Christ and the aspiring soul. A person saved by the sacrifice of Christ will be granted eternal life. Grace will lift the soul to heaven. For those not saved by faith, the only destination is the everlasting fire.

In a series of pamphlets Luther attacked the beliefs and hierarchies of the orthodox faith. The pope in Rome was the Antichrist. There were only two sacraments, those of baptism and holy communion, rather than the seven adumbrated by the Church. Every good Christian man was already a priest. Grace and faith were enough for salvation. The words of Scripture should stand alone. ‘I will talk no more with this animal,’ Cardinal Cajetan wrote after conferring with him in 1518, ‘for he has deep eyes, and wonderful speculations in his head.’

Luther had been read and discussed in Cambridge ever since the monk had nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. The White Horse tavern was nicknamed ‘Germany’ as the Lutheran creed was discussed within its walls, and the participants were known as ‘Germans’. They were, however, an eclectic group; among them were Thomas Cranmer and William Tyndale, Nicholas Ridley and Matthew Parker. Two of them became archbishops, seven became bishops, and eight became martyrs burned at the stake. This was an exhilarating, and also a dangerous, time.

The reading of Luther deepened the instinctive beliefs of some who debated in the White Horse. The doctrine of justification by faith alone has no parallel in Wycliffe, but many of the other anti-clerical doctrines had been expressed for the previous two centuries. Never before, however, had they been shaped with such cogency and coherence. The pulpit of the little Cambridge church of St Edward, King and Martyr, became the platform from which preachers such as Thomas Bilney, Robert Barnes and Hugh Latimer proclaimed the new truths. Faith only did justify, and works did not profit. If you can only once believe that Jesus Christ shed His precious blood, and died on the cross for your sins, the same belief will be sufficient for your salvation. There was no need for priests, or bishops, or even cardinals.

In the spring of 1518, at the urgent instigation of the king, Wolsey was appointed as papal legate; he became the representative of Rome at the court of which he was already chief minister. He embodied everything that the reformers abhorred; he was the whore in scarlet. Whenever he made a submission as the pope’s envoy he left the court and then ceremonially reappeared in his fresh role. Yet there was no disguising the fact that the Church and the royal council were now being guided by the same hand. The truth of the matter was not lost upon the king, who would at a later date assert his royal sovereignty over both. Wolsey taught Henry that it was possible to administer and effectively run the Church without the interference of any external power. The king would at a later date, therefore, take over the cardinal’s role and in the process greatly enlarge it.

Wolsey’s status as papal legate gave him additional power to reform the English Church. He began in the spring of 1519 by sending ‘visitors’ to various monasteries in order to record the conditions and habits of the monks, where of course they found various levels of disorder and abuse. The abbot brought his hounds into the church; the monks found solace in the tavern; the prior had been seen with the miller’s wife. This had always been the small change of monastic life, and had largely become accepted as the way of the world. But Wolsey punished the principal offenders and sent out strict regulations or statutes to guide future conduct.

His severity did not of course prevent him from growing rich in his own manner with a collection of ecclesiastical posts. He was in succession bishop of Bath and Wells, bishop of Durham and bishop of Winchester; these were held in tandem with the archbishopric of York, and in 1521 he obtained the richest abbey of the land in St Albans. His tables groaned with gold and silver plate and the walls of his palaces were hung with the richest tapestries. Wolsey was without doubt the richest man in England – richer even than the king, whose income was curtailed by large responsibilities – but he always argued that his own magnificence helped to sustain the power of the Church.

At a slightly later date he suppressed some twenty-nine monastic houses and used their revenues to finance a school in Ipswich and a college, Cardinal’s College, which he intended to build at Oxford. The obscure devotions of a few monks and nuns should not stand in the way of a great educational enterprise. He was interested in good learning as well as good governance; indeed they could not properly be distinguished. So the work of the Church continued even as it was being denounced and threatened by the ‘new men’, otherwise called ‘gospellers’ and ‘known men’.

At the end of 1520 the doctrines of Luther were deemed to be heretical and his books were banned. They ‘smelled of the frying pan’, resting on the fires of Smithfield and of hell itself. In the spring of the following year, Wolsey in a great ceremony burned Luther’s texts on a pyre set up in St Paul’s Churchyard. Yet it was already too late to staunch the flow of the new doctrines. The known men were, according to Thomas More, ‘busily walking’ in every alehouse and tavern, where they expounded their doctrines. More was already a privy councillor and servant of the court. The supposed heretics were present at the Inns of Court where fraternal bonds could be converted to spiritual bonds. They were ‘wont to resort to their readings in a chamber at midnight’. They began to congregate in the Thames Valley and in parts of Essex as well as London. In the parish church of Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire, certain people flung the statues and the rood screen upon a fire. It was a portent of later iconoclasm in England.

Luther’s books came into the country, from the ports of the Low Countries and from the cities of the Rhineland, as contraband smuggled in sacks of cloth. Yet the tracts did not only reach the disaffected. They also reached the king. On 21 April 1521 Henry was seen to be reading Luther’s De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae (‘On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church’) and in the following month he wrote to Pope Leo X of his determination to suppress the heresies contained in that tract. Wolsey suggested to the king that he might care to be distinguished from other European princes by showing himself to be erudite as well as orthodox. So with the help of royal servants such as More the king composed a reply to Luther entitled Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, ‘In Defence of the Seven Sacraments’.

It was not a brilliant or enthralling work, but it served its purpose. The pope professed to be delighted by it, and conferred on Henry the title of Fidei Defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith’. It was not supposed to be inherited, but the royal family have used it ever since. Luther composed a reply to the reply, in the course of which he denounced Henry as ‘the king of lies’ and a ‘damnable and rotten worm’. As a result Henry was never warmly disposed towards Lutheranism and, in most respects, remained an orthodox Catholic.

The pope died two months after conferring the title upon the king, and there were some who believed that Wolsey himself might ascend to the pontificate. Yet the conclave of cardinals was never likely to elect an Englishman, and in any case Wolsey had pressing business with the Church in England alone. His visitations of the monasteries were only one aspect of his programme for clerical reform. He devised new constitutions for the secular or non-monastic clergy and imposed new statutes on the Benedictine and Augustinian monks. He guided twenty monastic elections to gain favourable results for his candidates, and dismissed four monastic heads.

In the spring of 1523 he dissolved a convocation of senior clergy at Canterbury and summoned them to Westminster, where he imposed a new system of taxation on their wealth. Bishops and archbishops would in the future be obliged to pay him a ‘tribute’ before they could exercise their jurisdictions. He proposed reforms in the ecclesiastical courts, too, and asserted that all matters involving wills and inheritances should be handled by him. The Church had never been so strictly administered since the days of Henry II. The fact that, in pursuit of his aims, Wolsey issued papal bulls, letters or charters sanctioned by the Vatican, served further to inflame the English bishops against him.

Yet he was protected by the shadow of the king. Wolsey was doing Henry’s bidding, so that his ascendancy virtually guaranteed royal supremacy. There was no longer any antagonism between what later became known as ‘Church’ and ‘State’; they were united in the same person. At this stage, however, the question of doctrinal reform did not arise, and Wolsey paid only nominal attention to the spread of heresy in the kingdom. He was concerned with the discipline and efficiency of the Church, and in particular with the exploitation of its wealth.

Wolsey’s role as papal legate involved other duties. It was his responsibility as the pope’s representative to bring peace to the Christian princes of Europe, as a preliminary to a united crusade against the Turks. In matters of diplomacy the cardinal was a master and through 1518 he continued negotiations with Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis of France and Charles of Spain. Their representatives came to London in the autumn of that year and swore a treaty of universal peace that became known as the Treaty of London. The cardinal had engineered it, and the cardinal took the credit. There was a passing allusion to the possibility of a crusade and the pope was named only as comes or ‘associate’ in the negotiations. ‘We can see,’ one cardinal wrote, ‘what the Holy See and the pope have to expect from the English chancellor.’

The English chancellor was in the ascendant. In the fourteen years of his authority as lord chancellor he called only one parliament. When the Venetian ambassador first arrived in the kingdom, Wolsey used to declare to him that ‘His Majesty will do so and so’. The phrase then changed to ‘We shall do so and so’ until it finally became ‘I will do so and so’. Yet he was always aware of where the real power and authority lay; he remained in charge of affairs as long as he obeyed the king’s will. The achievement of the cardinal, with the Treaty of London, was also the triumph of his sovereign. The king’s honour was always the most important element in foreign calculations. Henry himself seemed pleased with the accomplishment. ‘We want all potentates to content themselves with their own territories,’ he told the Venetian ambassador, ‘and we are satisfied with this island of ours.’ He wrote some verses in this period that testify to his contentment.

The best ensue; the worst eschew;

My mind shall be

Virtue to use, vice refuse,

Thus shall I use me.

Yet he was considerably less contented when, in February 1519, the Holy Roman Emperor died and was succeeded in that title by his grandson Charles of Spain. At the age of nineteen Charles was now the nominal master of Austria, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries as well as Spain itself; he thus decided the fate of half of Europe.

The three young kings now engaged in elaborate ceremonies of peace that could also be construed as games of war. In the summer of 1520 Henry set sail for France in the Great Harry, with a retinue of 4,000, on his way to meet the king of France. He sailed in splendour, and the place of their encounter became known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. The Vale of Ardres, close to the English enclave of Calais, had been decorated with pavilions and palaces, towers and gateways, artificial lakes and bridges, statues and fountains that gushed forth beer and wine. Henry was arrayed in what was called ‘fine gold in bullion’, while Francis in turn was too dazzling to be looked upon. Masses were combined with jousts and feats and wrestling matches, with the celebrations lasting for seventeen days. The event was described as the eighth wonder of the world. A rich tapestry had come to life. The importance of treaties lay not in their content but in the manner of their making. They were expressions of power rather than of amity.

Yet there were secret dealings behind the arras. Even before Henry sailed to France, Charles of Spain had arrived at Dover, to be greeted by Henry himself. Charles was escorted with great ceremony to Canterbury, where he met his aunt Katherine of Aragon for the first time. Three days of dancing and feasting also included hours of negotiation. After meeting the French king at the Field of Cloth of Gold, Henry moved on to Calais, where he colluded once more with Charles. All their plans were against France. Henry himself wished once more to claim the French crown as part of his inalienable birthright.

On these same summer nights, when sovereigns slept in their pavilions of gold, the London watch was searching for ‘suspected persons’. They reported that a tailor and two servants played cards and dice until four in the morning, when the game was forcibly suspended and the players mentioned to the constable. In Southwark and Stepney, in pursuit of ‘vagabond and misdemeanoured persons’, the watch found many ‘masterless men’ living in ragged tenements. Ten Germans were taken up in Southwark. An ‘old drab and a young wench’ were found lying upon a dirty sheet in a cellar; on the upstairs floor Hugh Lewis and Alice Ball were ‘taken in bed together, not being man and wife’. Anne Southwick was questioned in the Rose tavern at Westminster on suspicion of being a whore. Carters were found sleeping against the walls of a tavern. Mowers and haymakers, makers of tile and brick, were duly noted as dwelling peaceably in the inns of the suburbs. Men and women went about their business, legal or otherwise. And so the summer passed.

4

The woes of marriage

Rumours of the king’s infidelities were always in the air. His liaison with Anne Stafford was followed by others, and in the autumn of 1514 he had begun an affair of five years with Elizabeth or Bessie Blount; their trysting place was a house called Jericho in Essex. His entourage was commanded to maintain a strict silence concerning his visits, and the grooms of the privy chamber were obliged ‘not to hearken or enquire where the king is or goeth’; they were forbidden to discuss ‘the king’s pastime’ or ‘his late or early going to bed’. The fruit of the union was born in 1519, and was named Henry FitzRoy or ‘Henry son of the king’; he would eventually become the duke of Richmond. Elizabeth Blount was then duly rewarded with a prestigious marriage, and retained a secure place in Henry’s affections.

Other young women were no doubt installed in Jericho for the king’s delectation, but the next one to be named by history is Mary Boleyn. She had been conveniently married to a gentleman of the king’s household, and under the cover of the court she became the king’s mistress in 1520. Now she is best known as the sister of the other Boleyn girl, but her relationship with Henry lasted for approximately five years. In 1523 he named one of the new royal ships the Mary Boleyn, and two years later he promoted her father to the peerage as Viscount Rochford.

By this time, however, the king had become enamoured of the younger daughter. The date of his first encounter with Anne Boleyn is not known precisely, but by 1523 she had already come to the attention of Thomas Wolsey. Her attachment to Henry Percy, heir to the earldom of Northumberland, was considered to be a step too far; Percy went back to the north, and Anne was expelled from court. Wolsey’s usher, George Cavendish, reports that she was so angry that ‘she smoked’ red-hot with rage. Only after this date, therefore, is it likely that she caught the eye of the king.

Yet he was soon enthralled by her. Her complexion was considered to be ‘rather dark’ but she had fine eyes and lustrous hair; her narrow oval face, high cheekbones and small breasts would be inherited by her eminent daughter. In the early portraits she appears to be pert and vivacious, but at a slightly later date there is evidence of wariness or watchfulness. So many disparate reports exist of her character that it is impossible to form a true judgement. There can be no doubt, however, that she was resourceful and quick-witted; she could not otherwise have survived the life of the court. She loved music and danced very well. It has often been suggested that by charm and persuasion she managed to avoid intercourse with the king until she was certain of becoming his wife, but it is equally likely that Henry himself wished to make sure of a formal union that would render any children legitimate.

All this was known or suspected by Katherine of Aragon, who asked Erasmus to write a treatise entitled De Servando Conjugio – ‘On Preserving Marriage’. She was aware of Henry FitzRoy, and was deeply offended when he was brought to court at precisely the time when it was clear that she could no longer bear children. Henry had in any case turned away from her. She was approaching the age of forty; all her early grace had faded, and the young king of France described her as ‘ugly and deformed’. As a consequence, perhaps, Henry no longer frequented her bed. Most importantly she had failed in her primary duty to bear a son and heir.

Certain doubts had already entered Henry’s mind. He had read the text in Leviticus that prohibited any man from marrying the widow of a dead brother. It declares that ‘thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife; it is thy brother’s nakedness’, for which the penalty will be that of bearing no children. He had quoted Leviticus in his treatise against Luther, in which text he had also adverted to ‘the severe and inflexible justice of God’. What if his marriage flouted divine decree? In Leviticus itself God speaks: ‘I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague … and ye shall sow your seed in vain.’ God had perhaps denied him a royal heir as a punishment for his sin.

In matters of succession Henry could be savage. He had already demonstrated that the wrath of the king meant death. In the event of the king’s own demise Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham, was considered the favourite to succeed him; he was after all descended from Thomas Woodstock, one of the sons of Edward III. He was, therefore, an object of suspicion. In the spring of 1521 the king himself had interrogated the duke’s servants in order to find evidence of treason. It was alleged as the principal charge that the duke had consulted with a monkish necromancer who had told him that Henry would have no male issue and that ‘he should have all’. Buckingham had bought inordinate amounts of cloth of gold and cloth of silver. It was even stated by one of his servants that he had planned to come into the royal presence ‘having upon him secretly a knife’. He was of course found guilty by seventeen of his peers and beheaded on Tower Green. It was widely believed at the time that Wolsey – who was known to Londoners as ‘the butcher’ – had engineered Buckingham’s fall but Henry’s overwhelming need to preserve his dynasty was the root cause of all.

He may have now rested all his hopes on his bastard son, Henry, but there was no precedent for an illegitimate heir to the throne except for the improbably distant Harold Harefoot in 1037. There was always Princess Mary, already given her own court, but there had been only one queen regnant in English history; and Matilda had in fact been known as ‘lady of England’. So a proper male heir would have to be found. Already, then, Henry was contemplating the possibility of a new bride.

Mary could, in the interim, be put to other uses. At the age of two she had been promised to the son of Francis I but then, only four years later, she was formally betrothed to Charles V. What could be more fitting than to be the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor and sovereign of Spain? These were games of war, however, rather than of betrothal.

In the summer of 1521 Henry entered into a treaty with Charles against Francis I, and promised to send a great army of 30,000 foot and 10,000 horse into the French dominion. Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money. That is why Wolsey was soon demanding, and obtaining, new revenues from the Church. In March 1522 heset in motion a great national inquiry to assess the wealth of each individual and the military capacity of every male; it was characteristic of his direct and inclusive style of government. The taxes raised were nominated as ‘loans’, but in fact they were never repaid. Two months later the earl of Surrey, with a large force of men, invaded northern France to no obvious effect. Charles sailed to England and was formally affianced to Princess Mary. On the journey upriver from Gravesend to Greenwich, the emperor’s barges were perfumed with ‘sweet herbs’ to conceal the offensive odours of the Thames.

In the spring of the following year parliament was convened to treat of what Wolsey called ‘the grand invasion of France’ or, rather, to provide the funds for it. ‘There has been,’ a contemporary reported, ‘the greatest and sorest hold in the Lower House for payment of two shillings of the pound that ever was seen, I think, in any parliament. This matter has been debated and beaten fifteen or sixteen days together …’ The tax on the value of land was a precedent never ‘seen before this time’. The Speaker of the House, Thomas More, was able by his powers of calm persuasion to pass the measure.

This was the meeting of parliament in which Thomas Cromwell first came to notice. He was already a merchant and a scrivener, a dyer of cloth and a moneylender, his various employments testifying to his skill and facility in the affairs of the world. He would soon also enter Gray’s Inn as a lawyer. In his speech to his colleagues he volunteered ‘to utter my poor mind’. He urged the king to stay in England and not to risk himself by campaigning in France; he also argued for caution and vigilance in maintaining the supply lines or ‘victualling’. In conclusion he recommended that Scotland should be the principal target of the king’s army. He used an old maxim, ‘who that intendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin’.

Cromwell was not enthusiastic about the parliamentary debates. He wrote to a friend that ‘for sixteen whole weeks wherein we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force … as well as we might, and left where we began’. He did admit, however, that the Commons had granted the king ‘a right large subsidy, the like whereof was never granted in this realm’.

So, in the summer of 1523, the great enterprise was undertaken. Under the command of Suffolk, Henry’s jousting partner, 10,000 men sailed to Calais. In girth as well as in splendour, he was a good substitute for the king. He had intended to lay siege to Boulogne and thus gain another port for England. But the king and the cardinal urged him to march upon Paris and, with the help of Charles V and other allies, destroy the heart of France. Yet war is fickle. The allies were captured, or surrounded, or fled from battle. Rain, mud and disease reduced the English forces outside Paris, and eventually they were forced to retreat.

In the vortex of this war strange mischances and collisions were destined to occur. The city states of Renaissance Italy, the true cause of the confrontation between Francis and Charles, were put at great peril; Scotland, as part of its old alliance with France, was threatening invasion with the assistance of French troops; and, with the princes of Europe fighting one another, the Turks came much closer to their goal of conquering the eastern parts of that continent. No one could see a path through the wood because, in truth, there was no path. It was a wearisome story of battles and sieges, of invasions and retreats, which left all the participants in approximately the same position as before.

Yet there was to be one more tremor of martial fervour. At the beginning of 1525 the Spanish imperial army won an overwhelming victory at the battle of Pavia, taking the French king prisoner and destroying much of his nobility. In his excitement Henry projected another grand coalition with Spain for the purpose, as he put it, ‘of getting full satisfaction from France’. Charles V was disinclined to share the proceeds of victory; he was now the master of Europe, and felt less need for the support of Henry. Yet the English king continued to dream and to conspire.

He and Wolsey intended to raise money for the further campaign by a forced loan that he called an ‘amicable grant’. There was nothing amicable about it. By virtue of the royal prerogative a tax of a sixth on wealth was demanded from the laity, and a fourth from the clergy. The people of England, however, were tired of a war that was driven only by the desire of the king for honour and glory. War put at risk commerce between the nations of Europe and, by artificially raising prices on basic commodities such as meat and drink, it disturbed the patterns of national trade and industry. Since the soldiers of England were largely taken from the land, their deployment severely affected agricultural prosperity. War may have been in the interest of the king, but it was not waged to the benefit of the country. What was the point, in any case, of invading and conquering France? A ballad-writer wrote against Wolsey:

By thee out of service many are constrained

And course of merchandise thou hast restrained

Wherefor men sigh and sob.

War was bad for business. Much foreign trade was directed through Antwerp, where the major English export was that of manufactured woollen cloth. The Flemish used to say that ‘if Englishmen’s fathers were hanged at the gates of Antwerp, their children would creep between their legs to come into the town’. The trade in manufactured cloth doubled in the course of Henry’s reign, thus lending power and authority to the guild of the cloth exporters known as the Merchant Adventurers. From this period, therefore, we can date the rise of the English merchant. Anything that endangered or disrupted trade was deplored.

So the resistance to the tax was open and sometimes violent: 4,000 men took up arms in Suffolk, and the tax commissioners were beaten off in Kent. The citizens of London refused to pay on the ground that the exactions were unlawful. In Cambridge and in Lincolnshire the people were ‘looking out for a stir’. When the duke of Norfolk asked to consult with the ‘captain’ of the rebels in his own shire, he was told that ‘his name is Poverty; for he and his cousin Necessity have brought us to this doing’.

The risk of another general revolt, like that of 1381, was too great to be contemplated. Such an uprising was about to break out in Germany, where a hell of violence and anarchy descended upon the land; 300,000 rebels took up arms, and 100,000 peasants died. So the king retreated. He issued a proclamation in which he denied knowing anything at all about the tax demands; he then graciously remitted them and issued pardons to the rebels. He had learned a lesson in the limitations of regal power. Yet the cardinal was considered to be more greatly at fault. There was no end, one chronicler wrote, to the ‘inward grudge and hatred that the commons bore to the cardinal’. Henry knew that Wolsey had failed. This was no longer the quiet and joyful country at the time of his accession. And the cardinal, well, he was only one man.

The false stridency of the war policy was further exposed when in 1525 the cardinal began to explore the possibilities of an accord with France against the erstwhile ally of Spain. Charles was now so powerful as to become a menace. A treaty ‘of perpetual peace’ with France was signed in the summer, just six months after the cardinal had proposed a great war against her. Charles V demanded that he be released from his betrothal to the young Princess Mary. All was undone. All must be done again.

Henry was engaged in affairs of the heart as well as those of the battlefield. He had, in his own phrase, been ‘struck with the dart of love’. A new ship was commissioned in 1526, to be named the Anne Boleyn. In the spring of that year the royal goldsmiths fashioned four brooches for him to bestow upon a certain lady. One was formed in the image of Venus, while another was of a lady and a heart; the third was of a man lying in a woman’s lap, while the fourth showed the same woman with a crown. It was noted that in this period he was more than usually boisterous and energetic. The newfound friendship with France was the excuse for any number of revels and banquets and jousts and pageants. In the summer of 1526 Henry hunted with ferocity and passion. He wanted to win the prize.

He had begun to write letters to Anne Boleyn in French, the language of courtly romance. One eighteenth-century historian has described them as ‘very ill writ, the hand is scarce legible and the French seems faulty’. Nevertheless they served their purpose. The first of them was presented with the gift of a buck that the king had killed the evening before, and soon enough another followed in which he thanked her ‘right heartily, for that it pleaseth you to still hold me in some remembrance’. This was not the conventional letter of a king to a royal mistress.

In a subsequent letter he professes himself confused about her feelings, ‘praying you with all my heart that you will expressly tell me your whole mind concerning the love between us’. He then proposes that he will take her ‘as his only mistress, rejecting from thought and affection all others save yourself, to serve you only’. Yet Anne Boleyn had already retreated to her parents’ house, at Hever in Kent, and refused to come to court. ‘I could do none other than lament me of my ill fortune,’ he wrote to her, ‘abating by little and little my so great folly.’ There is no doubt that he had conceived an overpowering passion for her, and she in her turn was doing her best to retain his affection without alienating him. It was a difficult task, and must have brought her close to nervous prostration.

In another letter Henry longed for their meeting which ‘is on my part the more desired than any earthly thing; for what joy in this world can be greater than to have the company of her who is the most dearly loved’. How do you gently refuse a great and powerful king? She sent him a diamond, which was decorated with an image of a lady in her ship. The lady was tossed about on the waves, but the diamond is a symbol of an imperishable and steadfast heart.

Katherine herself was being cast aside. After the treaty with France it was no longer necessary to appease her nephew, Charles V. When three of her Spanish ladies complained of the dukedom given to Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, they were dismissed from court. Katherine’s letters were being opened and read by Wolsey. The cardinal, or the king, placed spies among her entourage. Wolsey insisted that he should be present at any interview between her and Charles’s representatives. Yet the king’s displeasure was not visited upon the child, who might still become queen of England. Mary now had her own household of more than 300 servants; at dinner she could choose between thirty-five courses. She hawked and hunted; she played cards and gambled with dice.

There was, of course, always the possibility of a son. It seems fair to assume that Henry had at first wanted Anne as a mistress but, after the first infatuation, decided that she should be his wife. With Anne Boleyn as the prospective bride, the future of the dynasty might soon be secured. Without a son, as Henry claimed soon after, the kingdom would be overwhelmed by ‘mischief and trouble’. His doubts about the union with Katherine of Aragon were undoubtedly genuine. He was not acting out of lust for Anne Boleyn alone. If he had married Katherine despite the injunction of Leviticus, to refrain from the widow of a dead brother, he might truly have been cursed. Twenty-four years before, a papal dispensation had been obtained for the union. It was his duty now to have that original dispensation declared null and void so that he could be properly married for the first time. The pope could not, and should not, waive divine law as expressed in the Bible itself. The conscience of the king was the important matter; the word appears in many of his letters as a way of justifying himself to heaven. He once declared that conscience ‘is the highest and supreme court for judgement or justice’. He knew that he was right.

So, in the spring of 1527, Henry began his first attempt to have his marriage to Katherine annulled by Pope Clement VII. He told his wife that he was only exploring the questions raised by certain lawyers and theologians, at which point she wept and swore that her union with Prince Arthur had never been consummated. She knew which way the wind was blowing. In May 1527, Wolsey called the king to appear before him and the archbishop of Canterbury in order to discuss the status of the marriage. It was a piece of stage management, the king himself having already determined that the cardinal would declare the marriage null and void. Yet as papal legate Wolsey could not decide the matter without putting the case to the pope. He adjourned the proceedings and declared that he would consult more widely. This was the beginning of all the troubles that led eventually to the break with Rome.

Wolsey was not sure of the identity of the king’s intended bride. He assumed that it would be a diplomatic marriage, perhaps to a female of the French royal house. Anne Boleyn seemed to him to be another court mistress. Yet now Henry went behind his back; taking advantage of Wolsey’s absence on a diplomatic mission in France, he sent one of his secretaries to Rome with the draft of a papal bull allowing the king to marry another and unnamed woman with the blessing and authority of the Church. The king told his secretary that the matter would remain secret ‘for any craft the cardinal or any other can find’. This is a significant reference to his chief minister, suggesting that their early intimate relations had come to an end. Henry now also began to employ scholars and divines to research all precedents, and to press his case in print. At some point in 1527 work began on collecting and collating a set of arguments for the king’s divorce; Henry called it ‘liber noster’ or ‘our book’.

There now ensued a process of endless false starts, vain hopes, obfuscations and delays that left the king confused and demoralized. Katherine of Aragon managed to alert her nephew, Charles V, to the dangers of her situation. Charles’s troops had sacked Rome in May with every form of barbarity, and the pope had become a virtual prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo. If the pontiff was at the mercy of Charles, what hope was there of successfully dealing with the marriage of the emperor’s aunt? The matter of the divorce was now becoming part of a much larger action.

In May 1527 the young Princess Mary danced before her father at a banquet. The movement of the formal dance was always construed as an allegory, with the final curtsy seen as a gesture of ‘fear, love and reverence’. In the following month, the king formally separated himself from Katherine’s bed; the Spanish ambassador, no doubt informed by Katherine herself, revealed that the king ‘had told her they had been living in mortal sin all the years they had been together’. She burst into tears, and Henry tried to comfort her by remarking that all would turn out for the best. He also begged her to keep the matter secret, but it was already too late. The reports of the separation soon reached the people. It was, the ambassador said, ‘as notorious as if it had been proclaimed by the town crier’. The people took the side of the wronged wife, of course, and refused to believe that the king would persist in such a ‘wicked’ project. The queen, meanwhile, kept her place at court and sat by her husband’s side on public occasions, when she smiled and seemed cheerful. ‘It is wonderful to see her courage,’ the duke of Norfolk said, ‘nothing seems to frighten her.’

The matter of the king’s marriage was being endlessly debated at Rome. Pope Clement had pleaded ignorance of the canon law to one of Wolsey’s ambassadors, only to be told that the whole of canon law was locked in the bosom of his Holiness. ‘It may be so,’ the pope replied, ‘but, alas, God has forgotten to give me the key to open it.’ By the end of 1527, however, after much prevarication, he agreed that cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio would examine the facts and pass a verdict without possibility of appeal; Campeggio had been chosen because he was the second and inferior papal legate for English affairs. Wolsey at once wrote to him and asked him to hasten from Rome. ‘I hope,’ he told him, ‘all things shall be done according to the will of God, the desire of the king, the quiet of the kingdom, and to our honour, with a good conscience.’ He then crossed out the last four words. The cardinals of the Church always had a good conscience. The pope, still in thrall to Charles, had already commanded Campeggio to weave infinite delays so that no verdict on the king’s marriage would ever be given. The cardinal assented, and began to make plans for a very slow progress towards England.

At the beginning of 1528 Anne Boleyn wrote to Wolsey to thank him for ‘the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me both day and night’. In a second letter she stated that ‘I am most bound of all creatures, next the king’s grace, to love and serve your grace’. It is clear that she and Henry now intended her to be queen. Yet not all was what it seemed. Three months after his arrival in England Campeggio wrote to Rome that the cardinal ‘is actually not in favour of the affair’; he ‘dare not admit this openly, nor can he help to prevent it; on the contrary he has to hide his feelings and pretend to be eagerly pursuing what the king desires’.

In private conversations with Campeggio, Wolsey simply shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have to satisfy the king,’ he told him, ‘whatever the consequences. In time a remedy will be found.’ It may be that Henry was beginning to suspect Wolsey. In this period he began to show his chief minister’s letters to other members of his council, among them the father of Anne Boleyn. Wolsey was falling into a trap from which he would never be able to extricate himself. There was one occasion, in 1528, when it was recorded that the king ‘used terrible language’ to the cardinal, leaving Wolsey unhappy and uncertain. When the cardinal named a new abbess for a certain convent, despite the protests of the king at the choice of candidate, Henry wrote him a bitter letter in reply to his excuses. ‘Ah, my lord, it is a double offence both to do ill and colour it too … wherefore, good my lord, use no more that way with me, for there is no man living who more hates it.’ The words might also be construed as a more general warning.

In the spring of 1528 the royal family spent some time together at Wolsey’s house, Tyttenhanger, near St Albans. Princess Mary described it as a happy occasion. Yet in this year it was reported that the marriage between Henry and Anne Boleyn was ‘certain’ and that the preparations for the wedding were already being made. Wolsey wrote at this time that, if the pope did not comply with the wishes and desires of the king, ‘I see ruin, infamy, and subversion of the whole dignity and estimation of the see apostolic’. In this, at least, he was proved to be right.

5

Into court

The threat to the papacy also came from other quarters. Luther’s tracts, smuggled into England after he was denounced as a heretic, were followed by William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. Tyndale was a young cleric who had become disillusioned with the pomp and power of the Church; he was ascetic and scholarly by nature, and was instinctively attracted to the purer faith associated with the Lollards and the ‘new men’ who were even then in small conventicles proclaiming Lutheran doctrine.

He had found no employment in London, after he migrated there from Cambridge, and had travelled to Germany in quest of a more tolerant atmosphere. It was here that he translated the Scriptures from the Greek and Hebrew originals. It was said that his passage was assisted by German merchants who were already imbued with Lutheran learning.

Once he had arrived in Wittenberg, he began his task of translating the Greek into plain and dignified English, in a language that the ploughman as well as the scholar could understand. The more orthodox clerics, however, believed that the Scriptures were too sacred to be left in the hands of the laity and that any interpretation of them should only be under clerical supervision. They also believed that the key words of the Greek were in themselves holy, and would be profaned by translation.

It was here that Tyndale most transgressed, by altering the meaning of certain important concepts. ‘Congregation’ was employed instead of ‘church’, and ‘senior’ instead of ‘priest’; ‘penance’, ‘charity’, ‘grace’ and ‘confession’ were also silently removed. Tyndale later remarked that ‘I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience’, but it was clear enough to the authorities that his conscience was heavily influenced by the writings of Martin Luther. In effect Tyndale was exorcizing the role of the Church in spiritual matters and placing his faith in an invisible body of the faithful known only to God. He also included a translation of Luther’s ‘Preface to the Epistle to the Romans’, and one young man, Robert Plumpton, wrote to his mother that ‘if it will please you to read the introducement, you shall see marvellous things hid in it’. The English Bible came as a sensation and a revelation; its translation was an achievement beyond all the works of ‘new’ theology and pamphlets of anti-clerical disquisition. It hit home, as if God’s truth had finally been revealed. The Bible was no longer a secret and mysterious text, from which short phrases would be muttered by priests; it was now literally an open book.

The book had been published in the free city of Worms, on the Rhine, and soon after found its way to England where it was secretly distributed. Copies were being sold for 3s 2d. This was the book that the bishop of London described as ‘pestiferous and pernicious poison’ and, in the winter of 1526, it was solemnly burnt in St Paul’s Churchyard. For the first time in London the Scriptures were consigned to the fire. The prelates would have burnt Tyndale, too, if they could have caught him. The bishop of London bought and burned the entire edition on sale in Antwerp, the principal source of supply, only to discover that he had merely put money in the pockets of the printers and stimulated them to publish another edition.

There were little groups in Coleman Street, Hosier Lane and Honey Lane of London who eagerly took up the new translation, some among them bold enough to proclaim their beliefs. The reformers, known sometimes as ‘gospellers’, took advantage of the printing press to issue texts, pamphlets and treatises on religious reform. In his role as a royal councillor Thomas More led a raid against the Hanseatic merchants who were lodged in a building known as the Steelyard. ‘There is no need to be alarmed at our coming here,’ he told the merchants as they were just sitting down for dinner. ‘We have been sent by the council and by his grace the lord cardinal.’ He went on to say that ‘we have received reliable news that many of your number possess books by Martin Luther’. He even accused some of importing those books. Three merchants were immediately arrested, and eight others brought before Wolsey.

In the early weeks of 1526 Robert Barnes had been accused of preaching heresy after he had openly denounced the pomp and wealth of the Church from the pulpit of St Edward’s Church in Cambridge. He was brought before the cardinal.

Wolsey: Were it better for me, being in the honour and dignity that I am, to coin my pillars and pole axes and to give the money to five or six beggars, than for to maintain the commonwealth for them as I do? Do you not reckon the commonwealth better than five or six beggars?

Barnes: The coining might be for the salvation of your grace’s soul and as for the commonwealth, as your grace knew, the commonwealth was before your grace and must be when your grace is gone. I only damned in my sermon the gorgeous pomp and pride of all exterior ornaments.

Wolsey: Well, you say very well.

When he was told that the man was ‘reformable’, the cardinal promised ‘to be good unto him’. In a subsequent letter to the king, Barnes characterized himself as a ‘poor simple worm and not able to kill a cat’. Yet he also declared that ‘there are certain men like conditioned to dogs; if there be any man that is not their countryman, or that they love not, or know not, say anything against them, then cry they: an heretic, an heretic, to the fire, to the fire. These be the dogs that fear true preachers.’ Barnes did not go to the fire. He was brought to St Paul’s on 11 February, and forced to kneel in the aisle. On a platform in front of him sat the cardinal, on a throne of gold, flanked by eighteen bishops and eighteen abbots and priors. Faggots had been tied to his back, the wood as a symbol of the flames around the stake. In the autumn of that year, provoked by the wide circulation of Tyndale’s New Testament, the bishop of London issued another formal warning against the reading of heretical books.

There is an interesting sequel to the interrogation of Barnes. He was placed under a form of ‘house arrest’ in a monastery in Northampton, where a friend devised a plan for his escape. Barnes wrote a letter to the cardinal in which he declared that he was so desperate that he was going to drown himself; he named the place, and then deposited a pile of clothes by the river bank. He also left another letter to the mayor of Northampton, asking him to search the river; he said that he had written a private letter to the cardinal that was tied with wax around his neck. The search was duly undertaken and, despite the absence of a body, the welcome news that a heretic had killed himself out of despair was published abroad. Yet Barnes had disguised himself as a ‘poor man’, travelled secretly to London, and then taken ship to the Low Countries where he composed two tracts under the name of Antonius Anglus.

The ‘known men’ were becoming of serious concern to those, like Thomas More, who were certain of the perils of their teaching. In the autumn of 1527 a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Bilney, preached against the cults surrounding certain images of the Virgin and of the saints; they were nothing but stocks and stones. Twice he was pulled from his pulpit by an irate congregation. Yet he persisted in his attacks upon what he called idolatry and ‘vain worship’. ‘Saints in heaven need no light,’ he said, ‘and the images have no eyes to see.’ He was brought before the bishop of London, and made a formal recantation. Yet that was not the end of the matter. He reverted to his earlier unorthodox beliefs, and was eventually burned in the Lollards’ Pit outside Norwich. ‘Little Bilney’, as he was called, became an early Protestant martyr.

Another presumed heretic from Cambridge, George Joye, was called before Wolsey. He was asked to attend ‘the chamber of presence’ for questioning, but he had never before heard the phrase. ‘I was half ashamed to ask after it, and went into a long entry on the left hand, and at last happened upon a door, and knocked, and opened it; and when I looked in, it was the kitchen. Then I went back into the hall and asked for the chamber of presence: and one pointed me up a pair of stairs.’ It is trifling, perhaps, but it suggests the fear and trembling that would descend upon one not used to court or to interrogation.

Within three months of Bilney’s trial the Church began a concerted effort to discover and apprehend the heretics. The houses of suspected merchants were searched. Close inquiries were made among leather-sellers and tailors, shoemakers and printers. An Oxford scholar, Thomas Garrett, was taken for questioning by the university authorities. He told a friend that he was now ‘undone’. His principal interrogator, Dr London, was described as ‘puffing, blustering and blowing, like an hungry and greedy lion seeking his prey’. Garrett managed to escape, no one knew whither. So Dr London consulted an astrologer who told him that he had ‘fled in a tawny coat south-eastward’. In fact, when he was finally captured at Bedminster on the south bank of the Avon, he was dressed ‘in a courtier’s coat and buttoned cap’.

As a result of Garrett’s evidence the rooms of other scholars were searched and over 100 banned books discovered. Six Oxford men were imprisoned for some months in the fish cellar of Cardinal College, Wolsey’s own creation, where it is reported that three of them died. It is significant that all of these ‘new named brethren’, as More called them, came from the universities; they were a small elite fraternity, but the authorities were afraid that their questions and their opinions might filter through the general population. They were nevertheless a minority, and their beliefs might not have strayed very far beyond the walls of their colleges. It would take the catalyst of the king’s divorce, the ‘great matter’, to quicken the process of religious reform.

Cardinal Campeggio, appointed by the pope to consider the case, made his weary and painful journey to England in the summer of 1528; he suffered from gout, and needed many halts along the way. He was awaited with impatience and, as soon as he was lodged at Bath House in London, Wolsey came to importune him. ‘They will endure no procrastination,’ Campeggio told Rome, ‘alleging that the affairs of the kingdom are at a standstill, and that if the cause remains undetermined it will give rise to infinite and imminent perils.’ Unfortunately he was under instruction to delay at all costs.

Soon enough he was granted an audience with the king at the palace of Blackfriars, where the cardinal advised him ‘against attempting this matter’; if necessary the pope would grant Henry a fresh dispensation to unite himself with Katherine. The king listened patiently and then gave what Campeggio described as a ‘premeditated’ answer on the total invalidity of the marriage. It was clear that he was not about to be moved. Then Campeggio offered the suggestion that Katherine should enter a religious house; if she were wedded to God, then Henry would be free to remarry.

So Campeggio and Wolsey visited the queen who, after much reflection, rejected the idea. ‘I intend,’ she told them, ‘to live and die in the state of matrimony, to which God has called me. I will always remain of this opinion, and will never change it.’ Her dignity and self-possession, in the face of intolerable pressure, were remarkable. In this impasse Rome repeated its instructions that nothing should be said or done ‘without a new and express commission from this place’.

The threat to Katherine took a more definite form. It was alleged in the king’s council that a plot, to poison the king and the cardinal, had been discovered; a letter was sent to her on the subject ‘in which if she had any hand, she must not expect to be spared’. It was a crude attempt to subdue her, but it did not succeed. The council also complained that ‘she showed herself much abroad, and by civilities, and by gracious bowing her head, which had not been her custom formerly, did study to work upon the people’. But the crowds of London were already supporting her. Wolsey ordered a search to be made for hackbuts and crossbows, the material of insurrection. The situation had reached a point of crisis, not at all helped by the sudden discovery of what became known as ‘the Spanish brief’; this was another papal dispensation, permitting the marriage of Katherine and Henry.

As the weeks of autumn and winter passed without any progress, Anne Boleyn and Henry became increasingly angry and impatient. The king was besotted by her; he lodged her in the palace at Greenwich and lavished jewels and other presents on her. ‘He sees nothing,’ Campeggio told Rome, ‘he thinks of nothing but Anne.’ In their irritation and anxiety they turned their fire upon the cardinal. In turn Wolsey berated Campeggio with the threat that, if nothing were done, such a storm would burst that ‘it were better to die than to live’. One of the king’s envoys, Stephen Gardiner, knelt before the pope. ‘You who should be as simple as doves,’ he said in a remarkable act of impropriety, ‘are full of all deceits, and craft, and dissembling.’ The pope had informed Henry that he could not act without hearing the arguments of both sides, and in the spring of 1529 Sir Francis Bryan, a cousin of Anne Boleyn, wrote from Rome that ‘who so ever hath made your grace believe that he would do for you in this cause hath not, I think, done your grace the best service’. He was clearly alluding to the cardinal. Wolsey himself was saying to his confidential servants that he would pursue the matter as far as he could, and then retire voluntarily in order to devote himself to spiritual affairs. He knew well enough, in any case, that his end might be approaching.

On the last day of May 1529, the legatine court under the direction of Wolsey and Campeggio was convened in the parliament chamber at Blackfriars; the king and queen were staying at the palace of Bridewell, close by, and crossed a wooden bridge over the Fleet river to attend the court. They were both summoned to appear on Friday 18 June, but two days before that date Katherine asked to meet the archbishop of Canterbury and eight bishops; she protested against the whole notion of a trial and told them that she wished to refer the matter to Rome. This would ensure an endless process of debate and questioning. She also delivered a formal protest to the two cardinals at Blackfriars, declaring that they were incompetent judges.

On the day appointed the king and queen came to the legatine court, where Henry took his seat under a cloth of state. Campeggio then delivered an oration on the ‘intolerable’ matter of ‘adultery, or rather incest’ that they must now adjudicate.

‘King Harry of England, come into the court!’

‘Here,’ he replied.

‘Katherine queen of England, come into the court!’

She rose without replying and, leaving her small circle of advisers and lawyers, she went over to the king; she knelt at his feet and spoke to him so that all could hear her. ‘I am a poor woman, and a stranger in your dominions, where I cannot expect good counsel or indifferent judges. I have been long your wife, and I desire to know wherein I have offended you.’ She then pleaded her virginity when she met him, and the fact that she had borne him several children (only one of which, of course, had lived). ‘If I have done anything amiss, I am willing to be put away in shame.’ She spoke a little more, saying that no lawyer in England would, or could, speak freely for her. ‘I desire to be excused until I hear from Spain.’ With that she rose, and made a low curtsy to the king before leaving the court. The cardinals called after her but she made no answer.

The king then spoke to those assembled, stating that she had always been a true and obedient wife. Wolsey rose and denied the reports that he had been the first mover in the matter of the divorce. The king vindicated him and declared that his own scruples of conscience had prompted him. If his marriage were found to be lawful, he would be happy to continue living with the queen. Few in the court believed him.

In succeeding days a number of witnesses were called, the principal among them testifying that Katherine and Prince Arthur had consummated the marriage after their wedding. On leaving the bedroom on the following morning, Arthur had been heard to say that ‘I have been in Spain all night’. One of Katherine’s supporters, John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, protested against ‘things detestable to be heard’; Wolsey rebuked him and sharp words were exchanged between them.

Charles V sent an envoy to Rome, saying that a verdict against his aunt would be a great dishonour to his family. He insisted that the matter be ‘avocated’ or recalled to Rome, where a more fair investigation would be held; he had also given an undertaking that the pope’s immediate family would be established as the rulers of Florence. An agent for Wolsey, Dr Bennet, threw himself at the feet of the pope and declared, in tears, that then ‘the king and kingdom of England will be certainly lost’. It was unthinkable that his master would appear at a Roman court as a suppliant. Pope Clement wept, and begged for death. On 9 July he called the English ambassadors and told them that the hearing had been recalled to Rome. ‘I am between the hammer and forge,’ he said. ‘It is impossible to refuse what the emperor now demands, whose forces so surround me.’

Meanwhile Campeggio had been drawing out the process of judgment with a series of delays and procedural questions. By Friday 23 July, it seemed that the end was in sight. But on that day Campeggio adjourned the proceedings until October, on the pretence that he must follow the Roman system of justice. He hoped that a favourable verdict might then be announced. The duke of Suffolk was among those who loudly announced their discontent. ‘By the Mass,’ he said, ‘I see now the truth of what is commonly said, that never cardinal yet did good in England!’ A few days later the letter from the pope, declaring that the court had been recalled to Rome, arrived for the king. The failure of the legatine court to deliver a favourable verdict to Henry was the decisive moment in Wolsey’s career. It is clear enough that he was no longer conducting the affairs of the realm; his last warrant for a royal payment was signed on 18 July, and his last letter to any English envoys was sent on 27 July. He had not yet been dismissed, but the shadow had fallen upon him. Anne Boleyn wrote to him an angry letter, in which she accused him of secretly supporting Katherine’s cause; she now relied only on heaven and the king ‘to set right again those plans which you have broken and spoiled’. One of the attendants at a royal banquet heard a conversation between Anne and the king which he later reported to the cardinal’s usher. ‘There is never a nobleman within this realm,’ she said, ‘that if he had done but half so much as he has done, but he were well worthy to lose his head.’

A book was prepared in which the failures of the cardinal’s administration were outlined; this account of pride and waste and folly was signed by thirty-four of the royal council. The French ambassador was sure of their real intentions. ‘These lords’, he wrote, ‘intend after Wolsey is dead or ruined, to impeach the state of the Church, and take all their goods.’

Henry was not sure how to proceed after the failure of his attempt to procure a favourable court verdict, and so he gathered together a team of scholars and clerics in pursuit of his ‘great matter’. Among these was Thomas Cranmer. The young reader of divinity at Cambridge suggested that the king could avoid long and fruitless negotiations at Rome by appealing directly to the scholars and universities of Europe; if they declared in his favour, the pope would be obliged to act. As soon as he was informed of Cranmer’s plan the king declared that the cleric ‘had the sow by the right ear’. In time Cranmer became the man to guide the English Reformation.

The king’s envoys visited the universities of Europe in order to gain the opinions of eminent canonists on the prohibitions of Leviticus against marrying a brother’s widow. Some of them could be persuaded by the liberal use of bribes to declare in his favour, but others proved recalcitrant. It was not a wholly successful enterprise. Paris and Bologna, together with six other universities, supported his position. But the divines of Padua, Ferrara and Venice were against him. Poitiers and Salamanca also favoured Katherine. When it was rumoured that even the doctors and proctors of Oxford were opposed, the king wrote a harsh letter to them from Windsor that ended with the words ‘non est bonum irritare crabrones’, ‘It is not good to stir a hornets’ nest’. The king also arranged for a sympathetic letter, signed by all the peers and prelates of England, to be dispatched to the pontiff. He had not yet decided to defy the pope and was still willing to persuade him.

By the early autumn of 1529 it was clear to all observers that the time of Wolsey had come to an end. He was no longer one of the king’s confidential councillors, and Henry had been alerted to secret correspondence between Wolsey and the pope. Wolsey’s usher reported that, on one of the last occasions the cardinal was at court, the king took out a letter and was overheard asking him ‘how can that be: is not this in your own hand?’ The nature of the letter is not known, yet it must have contained something to the cardinal’s disadvantage.

On 9 October the first formal charges were laid against Wolsey. He was accused of praemunire, or of placing the interests of the pope before those of the king. Since he had become papal legate at Henry’s urgent instigation, this was not the principal issue. The king was attacking the pretensions of the pope as well as the supposed malfeasance of the cardinal. When the writ was issued against Wolsey, it was decreed that all of his lands and goods were also forfeited to the Crown. His days of glory had come to an end. The cardinal then wrote to Henry pleading for ‘grace, mercy, remission and pardon’. The French ambassador visited him and found him scarcely able to speak. His countenance ‘has lost half of its life’.

Two weeks after Wolsey’s dismissal the king was pleased to invite Thomas More to become the new chancellor. Since More was known to be an avid hunter of heretics, it was evident proof that Henry did not wish to disavow the orthodox Church. In fact More started his pursuit within a month of taking his position; he arrested a citizen of London, Thomas Phillips, on suspicion of heresy. Phillips was interrogated many times and yet refused to admit any guilt; More consigned him to prison, where he remained for three years. It was the beginning of the new chancellor’s campaign of terror against the ‘known men’.

Yet ambiguous words were still coming from the king himself. Even as he was working to obtain papal consent for his separation from Katherine, he was reflecting upon the alternatives. In a heated argument with the queen he had declared that if the pope did not judge the marriage to be null and void, he ‘would denounce the pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’. He told the imperial ambassador that Luther had been right to attack the pomp and circumstance of the Church. Yet he saw no certain way forward, and had no grand strategy for religious reformation. He was in any case perplexed and anxious after the uncertain ending of the legatine court. It was reported that he was suffering from insomnia, and was ill in bed ‘in consequence of the grief and anger he had lately gone through’. He spent four hours closeted with the French ambassador, talking over the options and perils that faced him.

Nevertheless Henry now took over the direction and administration of the country. He would never again allow any one minister to determine policy in the manner of Wolsey. Eleven days after the cardinal’s dismissal the king applied the Great Seal, the sign and symbol of royal power, to certain documents in an inner chamber at Windsor; it was a ceremonial occasion, and was duly recorded as such. He gathered a new inner group around him, among them the dukes of Norfolk and of Suffolk. Even the lord chancellor was a layman, thus breaking an ancient precedent.

One other member of the administration was recruited. Thomas Cromwell had been previously in the service of Wolsey, particularly in the work of dissolving smaller monasteries and nunneries. On his master’s fall he was seen weeping, with a book of prayers to the Virgin in his hand; yet he inveigled himself into the king’s good grace and was nominated for a place in parliament. Soon enough his talent and self-assurance helped him to rise, in a career that has been compared to that of a grand vizier in an eastern despotism, and he became successively royal councillor, master of the king’s jewels, chancellor of the exchequer for life, master of the rolls and secretary of state. Yet he never repudiated his old patron and when granted his own coat-of-arms he adopted Wolsey’s device of the Cornish chough.

It had been intimated to the cardinal that he should retire to a small episcopal palace in Esher and, as he rode there on his mule, a messenger came from the king bearing with him a ring and a letter. Henry had written to tell him that he need not despair and that he could at any time be raised higher than before. The cardinal alighted from his mule and knelt down on the earth in prayer. The motives of the king are not immediately apparent. It was said at the time that there was a mystery or secrecy about royalty that no observer should attempt to penetrate. Yet it may be that Henry wished to test the success of his new council before irrevocably destroying the cardinal.

A parliament was summoned at the beginning of November as a way of informing the nation of the king’s will. The members of the Commons, in large part lawyers and country gentlemen, were quite at ease with the royal prerogative; their role was to register the king’s decrees and to shield him from blame for unpopular measures. When Thomas Cromwell was first nominated as a member of parliament he was told to consult with the duke of Norfolk ‘to know the king’s pleasure how you shall order yourself in the parliament house’. The Speaker was a royal official whose salary was paid by the king and, as Edward Hall states in his Chronicle, ‘the most part of the Commons were the king’s servants’.

The parliament of 1529 was no different from its predecessors. The king sat upon his throne while the lord chancellor, Thomas More, standing at his right hand, delivered an oration on the causes for its summons. He adverted to Wolsey as ‘the great wether [a castrated ram] which is of late fallen’. The members of the Commons soon showed their loyalty with an Act ‘to release the king from repayment of the loans he borrowed’. When one member opposed the measure the king wondered aloud whether he was ‘on my side’. The parliament passed bills on the rearing of calves and the price of woollen hats beyond the sea, but its attention was largely trained on the economic exactions of the Church. It was riding in the wake of the anti-clerical anger released at the fall of Wolsey. A general petition was drawn up in which the vices and corruptions of the clergy were denounced in strident terms as the fruit of the seven deadly sins; the ‘ordinaries’ or secular clergy were vicious and ravenous and insatiable and idle and cruel.

The clamour was then given the shape of formal bills against the payments demanded by clerics for proving wills and for funerals; the clergy were also to be prohibited from holding any land on lease and from engaging in trade. It is quite clear that the royal council had inspired, if not exactly orchestrated, these complaints. It was another way of striking at the pope by reminding him that parliament would always uphold the wishes of the king. He had his people behind him. It is characteristic of the early reform of religion in England, however, that it should begin with pragmatic and financial concerns. The English instinct has always been towards practice rather than theory.

When their bills were sent to the upper house John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, complained that the Commons were trying to destroy the Church and that they acted ‘for lack of faith’; when the Commons complained to the king, Fisher was obliged to withdraw his remarks. It was generally believed, however, that the bishops of England were too eager to defend the financial abuses that had been condemned. When they claimed that their practices were based on prescription and custom, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn remarked: ‘The usage hath ever been of thieves to rob on Shooter’s Hill, ergo, is it lawful?’ The hunt had begun.

In the autumn of this year Anne Boleyn gave to her royal master a copy of a pamphlet that had recently been issued. It has been argued that Anne was a Lutheran in all but name, but it may be that she simply wished to advise Henry on a possible extension of his powers and of his income. Simon Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars was an anti-clerical manifesto in which the author directly addresses the king on the scandalous practices of the ‘ravenous wolves’ of the clergy who are devouring his kingdom. From the bishop to the summoner, this ‘idle ravenous sort … have gotten into their hands more than the third part of all your realm’. They had also debauched 100,000 women. What was the remedy? Make laws against them. Fish added that ‘this is the great scab, why they will not let the New Testament go abroad in your mother tongue’. It is reported that Henry ‘kept the book in his bosom three or four days’, and he is likely to have agreed with much of its contents. The bishop of Norwich wrote in alarm to the archbishop of Canterbury that ‘wheresoever they go, they hear say that the king’s pleasure is, the New Testament in English should go forth, and men should have it and read it’. Did not Anne Boleyn have a French translation of the New Testament?

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1529 the king’s team of scholars were busily investigating volumes of forgotten lore in order to find precedents for Henry’s separation from Katherine. But in the course of their work Cranmer and others came upon, or were invited to consider, material that might entirely change the relations between king and pope. In an ancient book entitled Leges Anglorum they discovered that in ad 187 a certain Lucius I became the first Christian king of England; Lucius had asked the pope to entrust him with Roman law, whereupon the pope had replied that the king did not need any Roman intervention because ‘you are vicar of God in your realm’. This of course was highly significant in the charged atmosphere of the time. By invoking ancient precedent Henry might be able to claim spiritual supremacy as well as secular power. The canons of various Church councils were scrutinized to elicit the opinions that no bishop could assume the title of ‘universal bishop’ and that no see need defer to the authority of Rome. The papers were eventually given the title of Collectanea satis copiosa, or a ‘large enough collection’.

The document was given to Henry in the summer of 1530 and he examined it very carefully; he made notes on forty-six separate points. In a conversation with an envoy from the king of France he declared that the pope was an ignorant man and not fit to be any kind of universal pastor. Henry was also well informed about the anti-clerical works coming out of Antwerp and Hamburg. After he had read William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, in which it is argued that the king’s authority should be extended over ecclesiastic affairs, he is reported to have said that ‘this is the book for me and all kings to read’.

In that summer the king’s ambassadors in Rome declared to the pope that no Englishman could be cited in a foreign court. When Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, came as an envoy before the pontiff he refused to kiss the pope’s foot even though it was graciously stretched out to him. In this year Henry himself wrote to the pope expostulating with him for using ignorant counsellors. ‘This truly is a default, and verily a great fault, worthy to be alienate and abhorred of Christ’s vicar, in that you have dealt so variably, yes rather so inconstantly and deceivably.’ He went on to declare that ‘never was there any prince so handled by a pope as your holiness has treated us’. The question at the English court now concerned the best path by which to advance.

The last days of Wolsey were at hand. He was harried north, to his archbishopric of York. The duke of Norfolk advised Thomas Cromwell to ‘tell him if he go not away shortly, but shall tarry, I shall tear him with my teeth’. When he was informed that his proposed school at Ipswich was being deferred, and that the construction of Cardinal College in Oxford had been diverted for the king’s purposes, the cardinal told Cromwell that ‘I cannot write more for weeping and for sorrow’. Yet he still asserted his own power. He set the date for his enthronement as archbishop of York and wrote to the king asking for his mitre and pall. Henry then spoke aloud of his ‘brazen insolence’. ‘Is there still arrogance in this fellow,’ he asked, ‘who is so obviously ruined?’ On 4 November, three days before the planned enthronement, Wolsey was arrested. It was alleged that he had engaged in secret correspondence with the pope and with the French and Spanish sovereigns. There may have been some truth in this, since in his extremity he had sought assistance wherever he could find it, but it is most unlikely that he had committed treason. It is also possible that he was trying to promote the cause of Katherine and to hinder that of the woman whom he called ‘the night crow’.

After his arrest he was taken south at a slow pace, stopping at the abbeys and monastic houses along his route. His once sturdy constitution was by now fatally undermined, and on his journey he was attacked by a violent case of dysentery. It was said to have been brought on by a surfeit of Warden pears, but there were other reasons for his dissolution. The keeper of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, was ordered to meet Wolsey at Sheffield; his destination was now in sight. When Wolsey heard of Kingston’s arrival, he clapped his hand on his thigh and gave a great sigh. His gentleman usher tried to put the best interpretation on the events, saying that Kingston had come to conduct the cardinal into the presence of the king. The cardinal was not convinced. ‘I perceive,’ he said, ‘more than you can imagine or can know. Experience of old has taught me.’

Kingston was then introduced to the prelate and knelt before him. ‘I pray you, stand up,’ Wolsey said, ‘kneel not unto a very wretch, replete with misery, not worthy to be esteemed, as a vile object, utterly cast away.’ Kingston also tried to reassure him, but the cardinal was not to be comforted. ‘I know’, he said, ‘what is provided for me.’ He knew that it would be a traitor’s death, with beheading as the best fate he could expect. His dysentery became more violent still, and by the time he reached Leicester Abbey most of his strength had gone. ‘Father Abbot,’ he said on his arrival, ‘I am come hither to leave my bones among you.’ He was laid in a bed, where he waited for his end. He spoke of the king. ‘He is a prince of royal courage, and has a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want part of his appetite he will hazard the loss of one half of his kingdom.’ At the stroke of eight in the evening, Wolsey lost consciousness and died. He still lies buried somewhere within the ruins of Leicester Abbey, and a monument stands on the supposed site of his grave. Yet this was more than the passing of an individual life. The fall of Wolsey was intimately associated with the demise of the Church.

6

Old authentic histories

Henry had determined to act on behalf of what he called ‘entire Englishmen’ against ‘Englishmen papisticate’. In the early autumn of 1530 he claimed that fourteen senior clerics, among them eight bishops and three abbots, were guilty of praemunire; they were accused of colluding with Wolsey in his role as papal legate. Only days after the death of the cardinal, the same ‘information’ was filed against all of the clergy of England; they were charged with the offence because they had administered canon law or Roman law in the ecclesiastical courts, a crime which of course they had been committing for many centuries. The Spanish ambassador reported that the bishops and abbots were ‘terrified’. No one understood the workings of this newfound principle, and its interpretation was widely believed to reside only in the king’s head. Parliament was recalled at the beginning of 1531, and at the same time the convocation of the clergy was transferred from St Paul’s to Westminster. Both bodies would be under the king’s thumb.

In this atmosphere of fear and threat it was learned that the king would graciously accept a large sum of money to allay the offences of the clergy. In effect they were being forced to pay a subsidy. The province of Canterbury duly obliged by offering £100,000 but the offer was accompanied by a series of conditions. The bishops and abbots asked for a clear definition of praemunire, in case of future difficulties, and demanded that the Church itself be confirmed in all its ancient privileges as stated in Magna Carta. These proposals seem to have infuriated the king, who did not wish to bargain with his subjects. The invocation of Magna Carta also posed a threat to any unilateral action he might wish to take on religious matters.

So he attacked. In February 1531 he sent five articles to be added to the proposal on the clerical subsidy. In the first of them he called upon convocation to recognize him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy’. This was the fruit of his reading the ancient sources, suggested to him by Cranmer and others, where the supreme leadership of the Church in England was first bestowed upon King Lucius. In the second article the king proposed the theory that it was he who truly had the ‘cura animarum’ or ‘cure of the souls’ of his subjects. No king had ever proposed such sweeping powers; no king had ever presumed so much.

Consternation ensued among the leaders of the clergy. They may not have had the opportunity of reading Leges Anglorum, as well as the other sources made available to the king, and so Henry’s assumption of sovereignty over the Church was an extraordinary and almost unthinkable innovation. He wished to replace the papacy that had governed the Church for more than a thousand years. And what did he mean by the ‘cure’ or ‘care’ of souls? That was the office of a priest duly ordained.

They were also aware that there would be some intimate connection with the king’s wish to separate himself from Katherine. Of this, too, they could know nothing certain. They could only look on with trepidation. The country, and the capital, were deeply divided on the ‘great matter’. When a minister of the church of Austin Friars in London asked for prayers to be said on behalf of Anne Boleyn, ‘queen’, most of the congregation rose from their seats and walked out. It was said that the women of the country took the queen’s part – all of them, that is, except for Anne Boleyn. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘the Lady Anne is braver than a lion … She said to one of the queen’s ladies that she wished all Spaniards were in the sea. The lady told her such language was disrespectful to her mistress. She said she cared nothing for the queen, and would rather see her hang than acknowledge her as her mistress.’

Agonized debate now took place among the members of the convocation, torn between their duties to the pope and their loyalty to the king. They also knew that it would be dangerous, and even fatal, to incur the wrath of the sovereign. Yet under the nominal leadership of John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, who had already spoken out on behalf of the queen, they tried to withstand the pressure of the king. In this period Fisher was under severe threat from person or persons unknown. A gun was fired at his episcopal palace beside the Thames, and the shot seemed to have come from the house of the earl of Wiltshire on the other side of the water; the earl of Wiltshire was of course the father of Anne Boleyn. One of Fisher’s early biographers says that the bishop decided to return to Rochester at the earliest opportunity.

Another odd event increased his alarm. A porridge had been prepared for the bishop’s household, of which several of his servants had partaken. Fisher himself had not been hungry and had not tasted it. In the event one servant, and a poor woman fed out of charity, died; many others became ill. The porridge had been poisoned by the cook, who confessed that he had added laxatives to the food; but he insisted that it was simply a joke, or prank, that had misfired. The king’s reaction was ferocious. He determined that an Act should be passed through parliament rendering murder by poisoning an act of treason, for which the penalty was to be boiled alive. The cook was duly placed in a boiling cauldron at Smithfield. Some at court whispered that Anne Boleyn, or one of her supporters, had persuaded him to commit the crime. Henry may have acted with sudden ferocity in order to remove any such suspicions.

The king’s own advisers were uncertain about the full consequences of his demands upon the convocation, and they were divided into what might be called radical and conservative factions. The Boleyns wished to press forward very quickly. If the king were head of the Church, the pope’s opinion on the matter of the separation would be of no consequence; the marriage with Anne could be duly solemnized. Others feared that a papal interdict, or excommunication of the nation, might bring war with Spain and a general disruption of trade with the Catholic powers of Europe. The king himself was not clear about his future strategy; he was proceeding by degrees, testing his ground with every step.

That is why he came to an agreement with the convocation that seemed to take away the spirit of their submission. After much debate, and much consultation between the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, it was agreed that Henry would be the supreme head of the Church in England ‘quantum per Christi legem licet’ – ‘so far as the law of Christ allows’. Some sources render it as ‘Dei legem’, ‘the law of God’, but the purport is the same. When this proposal was put to the convocation, a general silence followed. ‘Whoever is silent,’ the archbishop told them, ‘seems to consent.’ A voice called out that ‘then we are all silent’. So the proposal was agreed. It was one of the defining moments in the reformation of the Church and opened a schism that has lasted ever since. It also threw into doubt the concept of a united Christendom. The Turks, then pressing down upon the eastern borders of Europe, might have taken comfort from that fact.

Yet the phrase invoking Christ’s law was open to manifold interpretations, and in extreme form might be thought to cancel any spiritual sovereignty that the king claimed. It was not at all clear whether Henry had decided finally to supplant the papacy; he had, as it were, issued a warning to Rome. In any future confrontation, the clergy of England would be bound to him. As everyone knew, no one would in practice be able to defy his authority. Now that he had been granted the money from the clergy, however, he seemed disinclined to pursue the matter – for the time being, at least.

Henry had withdrawn further into a private set of rooms that were known as the ‘privy chamber’, the ‘privy lodgings’ and the ‘secret lodgings’ at his palace in Whitehall, and in Hampton Court. He had now also withdrawn himself from Katherine. She wrote to her nephew that her life was ‘now so shattered by misfortune that no human creature among Christians ever suffered so intense an agony’. Her agony materially affected her daughter, Princess Mary, who in the spring of 1531 fell ill for three weeks with some kind of stomach disorder; her physicians diagnosed it as ‘hysteria’, by which they meant a fault within the womb. When Katherine asked permission to visit her, the king suggested that she should stay with her permanently. At the end of May a delegation from the privy council was dispatched to her, imploring her to be ‘sensible’ in the matter of the separation. She turned upon them with all the fervour of an unjustly maligned woman. ‘I am his true wife,’ she told them. ‘Go to Rome and argue with others than a lone woman!’

Two months later he formally renounced her. In midsummer she accompanied Henry to Windsor, but then without warning he rode to Woodstock after ordering her to stay where she was. Having received an indignant letter from her, he replied in somewhat abusive terms. She had subjected him to the indignity of a citation to Rome. She had turned down the advice of his counsellors. He wanted no more letters. She was removed to the More, a large house in Hertfordshire that had previously belonged to the cardinal; then she was dispatched to Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire. Her large court remained with her, and she was inevitably seen as the central figure for those opposed to the Boleyns and to the radical religious strategy they pursued. The queen herself became more strict in her observances. She rose at midnight to attend Mass; she confessed and fasted twice a week; she read only works of devotion and beneath her court dress she wore the habit of the third order of St Francis.

A marked signal of the popular mood emerged in the winter of this year. On 24 November Anne had gone with a few others to dine at a friend’s house beside the Thames. The word of her arrival soon spread through the city, and a mob of 7,000 or 8,000 women (or, perhaps, men dressed as women) descended upon the location with the intention of frightening her or seizing her. Fortunately she heard the rumour of their approach and left quickly by means of the river. The king ordered that the whole incident should remain unreported, but the Venetian ambassador had already recorded the event.

The animus against Anne grew. She was commonly known as the ‘goggle-eyed whore’, and the abbot of Whitby was arrested and prosecuted for calling her ‘a common stewed whore’. General excitement and contention arose in the parishes of the kingdom, as the people debated every aspect of the king’s ‘great matter’ in respect of the separation from Katherine and the supremacy of the pope. It is reported that the air was filled with wild rumour and speculation, with talk of witches and devils and stories of saints and apparitions. Thomas Cranmer himself saw a portent in the sky. He observed a blue cross above the moon, together with a horse’s head and a flaming sword. ‘What strange things do signify to come hereafter,’ he wrote, ‘God alone knows.’

In the winter of 1531 a young woman appeared in the role of an inspired prophet forecasting doom. Elizabeth Barton was a young serving girl from Kent who worked in the household of a steward for the archbishop of Canterbury. She had previously been invaded by an unknown ailment and, after some months of suffering, began to fall into clairvoyant trances in which ‘she spoke words of marvellous holiness’. Her reputation began to spread until it was magnified beyond measure; she announced that she had been visited by the Virgin, who had promised her release from suffering on a certain day. On that day she was conducted in a procession of 2,000 people to a chapel of the Virgin, where she fell into a trance; a voice issued from her belly speaking ‘so sweetly and so heavenly’ of religious joy but ‘horribly and terribly’ of sin.

A book of her oracles was sent to the king, who did not take it seriously. An angel commanded her to seek an audience with him, and it seems that she was granted an interview on three separate occasions. In 1528 she had also held a private interview with Thomas Wolsey. For the time being, at least, the king left her alone. But she proved to be more dangerous than he thought. By 1531 her prophecies touched Henry himself. If he divorced his wife he should not ‘reign a month, but die a villain’s death’. He must address himself to three matters, the first ‘that he take none of the pope’s right, nor patrimony from him, the second that he destroy all those new folks of opinion and the works of their new learning [religious reform], the third that if he married and took Anne to wife the vengeance of God should plague him’.

She made other declarations of a similar nature, all of which served only to inflame the people who believed implicitly in divine revelation. A network of priests and friars was now gathered around her, carrying her message in the pulpit and beside the market cross. She began to converse with the courtiers around Katherine; John Fisher wept as he listened to her, believing that he heard the words of God. The young woman was becoming dangerous. As Thomas Cranmer confessed at a later date, ‘Truly, I think, she did marvellously stop the going forward of the king’s marriage by the reasons of her visions.’

More unwelcome words came from the pulpit. On Easter Sunday 1532 a Franciscan friar preached before Henry and Anne Boleyn at Greenwich; Father Peto bravely denounced the king for his behaviour and prophesied that if he should marry Anne he would be punished as God had punished Ahab: ‘The dogs would lick up your blood – yes yours!’ It was fortunate that the friar did not lose his life for imagining the king’s death; instead he was eventually banished from the realm.

Against this background of unrest parliament was once more convened, in which the king determined to continue his campaign against Pope Clement VII. An Act was introduced effectively to cancel what were known as ‘annates’, the payments made to Rome by newly elected bishops and archbishops. The measure was delayed for a year, to be introduced at the king’s discretion; it was in other words a bribe for the pope’s good behaviour. The Act met very strong resistance in the Lords, particularly among the spiritual peers who were deeply concerned about Henry’s ultimate intentions. Yet they were in the minority.

Then the Commons, more compliant to the court’s wishes, presented to the king a long petition containing its grievances against the Church; in particular it questioned the right of the clergy to pass legislation in convocation. The Commons also complained about such matters as the ecclesiastical courts, the trial of heretics and the size of ecclesiastical fees. These were familiar complaints, but they were given added force in the light of the king’s new role as supreme head of the Church.

In the early days of April the king dispatched the petition to the archbishop of Canterbury, already sitting in convocation, and demanded a swift reply. He received it a week later. The clergy denied all the charges raised against them and asserted that their power of legislation was based upon the Scriptures; their activities were in no way detrimental to the royal prerogative. The king then summoned the representatives of the Commons into his presence, and gave them the clerical response. ‘We think this answer will smally please you,’ he told them, ‘for it seemeth to us very slender. You be a great sort of wise men; I doubt not but you will look circumspectly in the matter, and we will be indifferent between you.’ The king had therefore implicitly pitted the Commons against the Church.

The bishops knew that their answer had failed to satisfy the king or the parliament, and so they immediately offered one concession. They pledged that in the king’s lifetime they would never introduce legislation in matters unconnected with faith; the qualification was a very slender one, and did not resolve anything. On 11 May the king once more invited a delegation for a formal interview. ‘I have discovered,’ he said, ‘that the clergy owe me only one half of an allegiance. All the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us so that they seem his subjects and not ours.’ This was disingenuous, but the king’s intention was becoming clear. He was intent upon fundamentally destroying the power and the authority of the pope.

He sent another memorial to the convocation or, rather, he issued a series of demands. No new canons, or legislative orders, were to be proposed or enacted without royal licence. All existing ecclesiastical laws were to be reviewed by a panel of ecclesiastics and parliamentarians, sixteen on either side, and a majority verdict would suffice for abolition. Any such majority verdict would then be upheld by the king, whose authority was supreme.

The convocation debated the matter for five days, but by that time the king had grown impatient. He demanded an answer. With one exception, the bishop of Bath, all the clergy then replied that they accepted the proposals in full knowledge of the king’s ‘excellent wisdom, princely goodness and fervent zeal to the promotion of God’s honour’. Their answer, or surrender, became known as the ‘Submission of the Clergy’. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘churchmen will now be of less account than shoemakers, who at least have the power of assembling and making their own statutes’. At a later date the great historian Lord Acton would describe the ‘Submission’ as representing ‘the advent of a new polity’. The independent nation state of England could not truly have emerged without this radical separation from the authority of Rome. Yet the change can be put in more immediate terms. An absolute monarch needed absolute rule over all his subjects, lay and clerical.

On the day after the‘Submission’ Thomas More resigned, or was forced to resign, as chancellor. He had become too prominent a supporter of the pope, and of the old rights of the Church. ‘If a lion knew his own strength,’ he had once said of the king, ‘hard were it for any man to rule him.’ There was one other who still resisted the wishes of the king. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, was in secret communication with the Spanish ambassador; they agreed that, if they accidentally met in public, they would ignore one another. Yet within months Fisher was suggesting that a Spanish invasion force should sail to England and overthrow the king. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, dictated to his scribes a testament in which he denounced the legislation against the Church. ‘By these writings,’ he said, ‘we do dissent from, refuse, and contradict them.’ Then he lay down and died, beyond the reach of the king at last. Out of the habit of obedience, and of loyalty to the throne, all the other bishops acquiesced. It is probable, also, that they feared the wrath of the king.

Henry sought the support of parliament at every stage in these proceedings largely for the sake of safety. The king himself went to parliament on three separate occasions in order to sway the vote. He could not be sure how the country would receive the great changes he was preparing. So he tried to make it seem that the Commons, in particular, were instigating or seeking the measures against the Church. Although he was in effect the sole mover of the anti-clerical legislation, he deemed it best to appear above the fray.

In the process the Commons itself acquired additional authority and came to be regarded as a partner to the king. In a later address the king told parliament that ‘we be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic’. This was effectively a new doctrine of state whereby ‘the king in parliament’ wielded supreme authority in a newly united nation.

In the early autumn of 1532 the king placed a mantle of crimson velvet, and a golden coronet, upon Anne Boleyn. She had been given a hereditary peerage, as marquess of Pembroke, the first woman to be so honoured in England. It was clear that she was soon to be further exalted. A number of the queen’s jewels were now transferred to her, despite Katherine’s vehement protests. Yet all was not well. When the king took her on progress through the southern counties the response of the people was at best sullen when not overtly hostile. Henry scrutinized the faces of all the members of the court, when they were in her presence, to ensure that they paid her the right measure of respect. It was reported that the king ‘begged the lords to go and visit and make their court to the new queen’.

A number of tracts were published around this time by the king’s printer, Thomas Berthelet, supporting the king’s ‘great matter’. One of them, A Glass of the Truth, may have in part been written by the king himself. It defended Henry’s decision to separate from Katherine by reason of biblical injunction, but also included some private details about her supposed wedding night with Prince Arthur.

He took Anne with him on a journey to France; now that he had come close to an open breach with Charles V, the nephew of the queen, he was obliged to maintain his alliance with Francis I. But the sister of the French king, and other ladies of the court at Paris, declined to meet her; Henry’s own sister, Mary, had also refused to accompany them across the Channel. Anne was obliged to remain in Calais, while Henry proceeded to Boulogne for his interview with the French sovereign. Their visit lasted far longer than they intended, when severe gales and storms prevented them from embarking in the Swallow for a fortnight. When they did eventually return to England they were confronted at Canterbury by Elizabeth Barton, ‘the mad nun of Kent’, who once more lectured them on their transgressions and prophesied calamity.

Yet the mind and intention of the king could not now be changed. It seems that, a few days later, he slept with Anne Boleyn. Certainly, by the beginning of December, she was pregnant. The birth of Elizabeth occurred nine months later. The only possible reason for the decision to begin sexual relations was the certainty that the two had now agreed upon an immediate marriage. There are reports that a secret ceremony took place two days after their return from France, with only Anne’s close family as witnesses, but they cannot be proven. It is likely, however, that the king would have taken the precaution of some official ritual before inseminating his lover. The risk of an illegitimate child was too great.

A formal marriage did take place in the following month when, just before dawn on 25 January 1533, they were united by the king’s chaplain in the ‘high chamber’ above the newly built Holbein Gate at Whitehall Palace. The other circumstances of the marriage are not known, but it is believed that two or three of the king’s privy chamber were present. Soon afterwards the preachers of the court began to pray for ‘Anne, the queen’, and Katherine was ordered to omit the title. By the following month the condition of Anne Boleyn was widely known, and the lady herself began to joke about her newfound craving for apples; her laughter rang around the hallways. She told the Venetian ambassador that ‘God had inspired his Majesty to marry her’.

Their union took place in the full anticipation of a final break with Rome. A parliament had been called at the beginning of February. Its first measures were concerned with the quality of shoe leather and the fair price of goods; crows and ravens were to be destroyed, and the road from the Strand to Charing Cross should be paved. Only then did the members direct their attention to more spiritual matters. The Act in Restraint of Appeals declared that all ecclesiastical cases should be determined within England itself with no reference to any supposed higher authority; this meant that the matter of the king’s separation would be adjudicated in London and Canterbury rather than in Rome. It has been described as the most important statute of the sixteenth century, for it was the one that effectively destroyed the polity of the Middle Ages.

The prologue to the Act itself sufficiently emphasized the king’s imperial longings. It declared that ‘whereas, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King … unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and owe to bear, next to god, a natural and humble obedience’. So the reformation of religion was to be conceived as a welcome return to the past. All the changes and novelties claimed the authority of ancient law and practice. There is no mention of ‘the pope’s holiness’, as there had been in previous statutes, only of ‘the see of Rome’. Henry had recovered his imperial dignity as absolute ruler, with the expectation that he would acquire control over the entire British Isles. Twenty years earlier he had named two new ships the Henry Imperial and the Mary Imperial. Seals and medals were issued showing him sitting in state.

It is often suggested that Thomas Cromwell was the minister who oversaw or even devised these constitutional changes, but many hands were behind the proposals. Cranmer was naturally among them, but lawyers in parliament were also willing to help with drafts of the legislation. Many of them had been opposed to the powers of the ecclesiastical courts and had consistently favoured common law over canon law. It was, after all, their profession. A further consequence ensued. If canon law was subordinate to common law, it was also subordinate to the king. So by degrees the concept of imperium was formed. That concept is more properly known as ‘caesaro-papism’; the king was now both Caesar and pope. Henry was described as a king with a pope in his belly. Material consequences also arose from this dual authority. The imperial ambassador reported in the spring of this year that the king ‘was determined to reunite to the Crown the goods which the churchmen held of it’.

Thomas Cranmer had been chosen by Henry for the archbishopric of Canterbury, on the death of William Warham, but it was still deemed necessary that he receive his authority from the pope. The old dispensation had to be observed for a little longer, if only to guarantee Cranmer’s legitimacy. So Henry withheld royal consent to the Act in Restraint of Appeals, just as he had resisted seizing the annates destined for Rome. To Pope Clement VII he still posed as the defender of the faith against a disobedient and anti-ecclesiastical Commons. He even asked the papal nuncio to accompany him on a visit to parliament.

The pope obliged with a bull confirming Cranmer but, before the new archbishop swore his formal oath to Rome as legate of the Holy See, Cranmer declared that he was determined to fulfil only his obligations to God and to the king. At the end of March he was duly consecrated. It was time now for the next steps. The clergy, assembled at their convocation, declared the marriage between Henry and Katherine of Aragon to have been invalid. Only 19, out of 216, dissented. The rout of the Church was complete. John Fisher was placed under house arrest and was not released until the status of Anne Boleyn was finally confirmed.

At an ecclesiastical court meeting in Dunstable, on 23 May, Cranmer issued a decree stating that the marriage with Anne Boleyn was fully lawful. The archbishop had previously written to Thomas Cromwell, pleading that the meeting of the court be kept a close secret; he did not want to run the risk of Katherine’s attendance. When Pope Clement VII heard of the verdict delivered by ‘my lord of Canterbury’ he declared that ‘such doings are too sore for me to stand still and do nothing. It is against my duty to God and the world to tolerate them.’ The bishop of London, present for the occasion, remonstrated with the pontiff. Whereupon Clement threatened to burn him alive or boil him in a cauldron of lead. The bishop told the king that the pope was ‘continually folding up and unwinding of his handkerchief, which he never does except when he is tickled to the very heart with great anger’.

On the morning of 31 May Anne Boleyn was carried from the Tower to Westminster in a white chariot drawn by two palfreys in trappings of white damask; above her head was a golden canopy stringed with silver bells. The citizens and their wives had dressed the fronts of their houses with scarlet arras and crimson tapestries, so that the streets seemed to have become clouds of colour. The mystery plays were performed on special stages, and the fountains of London poured forth wine. On the following day she was taken from Westminster Hall to the abbey, where she was crowned as queen of England. ‘I did set the Crown on her head,’ Cranmer wrote, ‘and then was sung Te Deum.’

Despite the grandeur of the ceremony, the feelings of the population might not be so adulatory. During her procession into the city the constables of each parish had stood on guard with their staves at the ready ‘for to cause the people to keep good room and order’. The monogram of the king and his new queen, ‘HA’, was interpreted by some as a ribald ‘Ha! Ha!’ Yet the Venetian envoy witnessed ‘the utmost order and tranquillity’ of the large crowds, even if part of that tranquillity might be better interpreted as silent hostility. The people had come out of curiosity, perhaps, rather than respect. It is reported that Anne herself counted only ten people who shouted out the customary greeting of ‘God save your Grace’. A contemporary writer, commenting on the intricate patterns of her coronation garments, suggested that ‘her dress was covered with tongues pierced with nails, to show the treatment which those who spoke against her might expect’. Power may be glorious but it can quickly become fierce; three years later the radiant new queen would experience this herself.

A deputation of councillors came to Katherine, now officially titled as princess dowager rather than queen. They informed her of the decision of the court at Dunstable and of the king’s marriage. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘we know the authority by which it has been done, by power rather than justice.’ She asked to see a copy of the proposals they had brought to her and, when she saw the phrase ‘princess dowager’, she took a pen and struck it out. In retaliation Henry reduced the size of her household. In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that ‘queen Katherine is the true queen of England’.

The king and his councillors now moved against Elizabeth Barton. In the summer of 1533 Henry asked Cranmer and Cromwell to investigate the claims and the behaviour of the nun, who is then said to have confessed ‘many mad follies’ to the archbishop. She was accused of high treason, by reason of her prophecies of the doom of the Tudors, and was taken to the Tower of London for questioning. It may be that she was put on the rack. In any case it was declared that she had confessed that all her visions and revelations had been impostures, and in a subsequent meeting of the Star Chamber ‘some of them began to murmur, and cry that she merited the fire’. It was then determined that the nun should be taken throughout the kingdom, and that she should in various places confess her fraudulence. At the beginning of 1534 she was ‘attainted’ in parliament of treason, and was later dragged through the streets from the Tower to Tyburn where she was beheaded. It was sufficiently clear that anyone who opposed the king was in mortal danger. The traditional pieties of the faithful, which had once blessed and sustained the nun, were not enough to save her.

At the time of Elizabeth Barton’s arrest and confession the king was reported to be ‘very merry’. He had come through. He was pope and Caesar. He was compared to Solomon and to Samson. ‘I dare not cast my eyes but sidewise,’ a contemporary wrote, ‘upon the flaming beams of the king’s bright sun.’ He was building a new cockpit for his palace at Whitehall, and his new queen was pregnant with what was hoped to be a male heir. The dynasty was at last secure.

During the queen’s pregnancy, however, he was unfaithful. The identity of the woman is not known, but she was described by the imperial ambassador as ‘very beautiful’; he also said that ‘many nobles are assisting him in this affair’, perhaps as a way of humiliating Anne Boleyn. On discovering the relationship Anne confronted Henry and used ‘certain words which the king very much disliked’. His royal temper flared up and he is reported to have told her to ‘shut her eyes and endure as her betters have done’; he also declared that he could lower her as well as raise her.

The storm passed, and Anne Boleyn still held the future within her. The astrologers and physicians of the court prognosticated the birth of a son, and Henry was hesitating between the names of Henry and Edward for his heir. Yet on 7 September, in a room known as the Chamber of the Virgins, Anne was delivered of a girl. ‘God has forgotten him entirely,’ the imperial ambassador wrote to his master. The infant was named Elizabeth after the king’s mother, Elizabeth of York. Henry was disappointed, but he professed to be hopeful that a son would soon follow. A week after the birth, Princess Mary, now seventeen, was stripped of her title; she was to be known now as ‘the Lady Mary, the king’s daughter’. She wrote a letter of gentle complaint, declaring that she was ‘his lawful daughter, born in true matrimony’. In his reply the king accused her of ‘forgetting her filial duty and allegiance’ and forbade her ‘arrogantly to usurp’ the title of princess. Three months later Elizabeth was taken in state to Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire, where her court was established. On the following day Mary was ordered to Hatfield, also, but only to enter ‘the service of the princess’. It was said that the king wished her to die of grief.

Yet all was not well within the royal palace. The unanticipated birth of a daughter, and the emergence of a royal mistress, made it plain to Anne Boleyn that her position was not as secure as it once had been. At a banquet she told a French envoy that she dared not speak as freely as she wished ‘for fear of where she was, and of eyes that were watching her countenance’. The royal court was a fearful and suspicious place, full of whispers and devices. She knew also that she was far from popular with the people. Her time of lamentation would soon come.

7

The king’s pleasure

The pace of religious change was quickened by the king’s statutes against the pope. Henry wanted no innovations in belief or in worship, but his first measures would surely lead to others. The papacy was the keystone of the arch of the old faith; once it was removed, the entire structure was likely to weaken and to fall. The emergence of a national Church would in the end result in a national religion. A radical preacher, Hugh Latimer, had been intoning in Bristol against ‘pilgrimages, the worshipping of saints, the worshipping of images, of purgatory’; but he had also been a prominent supporter of the separation from Katherine, and in 1533 Cromwell enlisted him in the court’s service. Latimer was soon dispatching preachers of his persuasion to several parts of the country. It was enough for Henry’s purposes that they were opposed to the pope, but they advocated more radical measures in other aspects of devotion. So the causes of religious reform and of the royal supremacy were associated.

Some occasions of iconoclasm were also reported. John Foxe, the author of Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, more commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, records that in 1531 and 1532 religious images were ‘cast down and destroyed in many places’. The rood – the image of Christ on the cross that hung between the nave and the chancel – was seized from the little church of Dovercourt, a village in Essex. It was then carried for a quarter of a mile before being burned ‘without any resistance of said idol’. Since the rood was reported to have the miraculous power of keeping the door of the church open, this was a signal defeat for those who venerated it. Three of the perpetrators were apprehended and hanged.

In the autumn of 1533 it was reported that statues were being thrown out of churches as mere ‘stocks and stones’; the citizens and their wives pierced them with their bodkins ‘to see whether they will bleed or no’. These were not simply incidents of random destruction. It was said that if you take off the paint of Rome, you will undo her. There must have been some who saw religious imagery as one of the instruments of their slavery, but many people also regarded the gilded statues and paintings as an affront to the poor. ‘This year,’ an Augustinian canon wrote in 1534, ‘many dreadful gales, much rain, lightning, especially in summertime, and at odd times throughout the year; also divers sudden mortal fevers and the charity of many people grows cold; no love, not the least devotion remains in the people, but rather many false opinions and schisms.’ The times were out of joint. Henry was denounced by some as the Mouldwarp of English legend who would be ‘cursed with God’s own mouth’.

Parliamentary work had still to be done in matters of religion. At the end of 1533 the royal council was meeting daily in order to prepare policy, and summoned several learned canonists for their advice. Parliament was called and assembled at the beginning of the new year. It sat for the first three months of 1534, during the course of which it confirmed and ratified all of the measures proposed by the king and his council. The Submission of Clergy Act recognized the previous submission of the clergy; the Absolute Restraint of Annates Act prohibited the sending of moneys to the pope and concurred with the election of bishops; the Dispensation and Peter’s Pence Act confirmed that the archbishop of Canterbury was now in charge of dispensations from canon law.

In March 1534 Pope Clement VII decreed that the king’s first marriage to Katherine was still valid, thus consigning Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth to oblivion. It is reported that Henry took no account of it. Yet in retaliation the pope’s name was removed from all prayer books and litanies; it was further ordered that it should be ‘never more (except in contumely and reproach) remembered, but perpetually suppressed and obscured’. If the pope was ever mentioned at all, it was only as the bishop of Rome. This is the period when the word ‘papist’ became a term of contempt. In the winter of that year a priest, supporting the royal supremacy, fashioned an image of the pope out of snow; 4,000 people came to watch as it slowly melted away.

Just days after the papal decision an Act of Succession was passed by parliament, by which the royal inheritance was settled on the children of Anne Boleyn. Yet the Act was also enforced by an oath, whereby every person of full age was sworn to defend its provisions. It was in effect an oath of loyalty, so that any refusal to swear was deemed to be an act of treason. It passed through parliament after some debate, and the removal of certain ambiguous words, but there is no doubt that it was generally supported. Such was the measure of cooperation with the king, in fact, that a new subsidy Act guaranteed him revenue from taxation in times of peace as well as war. So the Commons supported him; the nobility supported him, or at least did not speak out publicly against him; the bishops supported him, albeit with secret doubts and reservations. A popular phrase of the time was that ‘these be no causes to die for’. Two men, in particular, refused to follow this advice.

Yet there was genuine fear, with some people denounced for speaking ill of the king and his new marriage. They could now be condemned as traitors. One villager complained that if three or four people were seen walking together ‘the constable come to them and will know what communication they have, or else they shall be stocked’. A fragment of a conversation is recorded in a court document: ‘Be content, for if you report me I will say that I never said it.’ Erasmus wrote that ‘friends who used to write and send me presents now send neither letters nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear’. He went on to say that the people of England now acted and reacted ‘as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone’. Between 1534 and 1540 over 300 executions were ordered on the charge of treason. A large number of people fled the realm.

Thomas Cromwell himself took up the investigation of those who were accused. A letter from him to a priest in Leicestershire stated: ‘The king’s pleasure and commandment is that, all excuses and delays set apart, you shall incontinently upon the sight hereof repair unto me …’ It was one of many unwelcome invitations. To speak of a surveillance state would be anachronistic and wrong, but it is apparent that Cromwell and his agents had created an effective, if informal, system of control. ‘I hear it is your pleasure,’ one lord wrote, ‘that I should go into the country to hearken if there be any ill-disposed people in those parts that would talk or be busy any way.’ There was in any case no sense of privacy in the sixteenth-century world; men commonly shared beds, and princes dined in public. The individuals of every community were under endless scrutiny from their neighbours, and were subject to ridicule or even punishment if they breached generally accepted standards. There was no notion of liberty. If it was asked, ‘May I not do as I wish with what belongs to me?’, the answer came that no man may do what is wrong. In every schoolroom, and from every pulpit, the virtue of obedience was emphasized. It was God’s law, against which there could be no appeal.

The clergy were asked to supervise their parishioners, and the local justices were supposed to watch the bishops to see if they ‘do truly, sincerely, and without all manner of cloak, colour or dissimulation execute and accomplish our will and commandment’. ‘Taletellers’ and ‘counterfeiters of news’ were to be apprehended. The Act of Succession was nailed to the door of every parish church in the country, and the clergy were ordered to preach against the pretensions of the pope; they were forbidden to speak of disputed matters such as purgatory and the veneration of the saints. The royal supremacy was to be proclaimed from every pulpit in the land. Henry demanded no more and no less than total obedience by methods which no king before him had presumed to use. He made it clear that, in obeying their sovereign, the people were in effect obeying God. In the same period the king and Cromwell were reforming local government by placing their trusted men in the provincial councils. In Ireland and Wales and northern England, the old guard was replaced by new and supposedly more loyal men. The country was given order by a strong central authority supervised by Thomas Cromwell, who sent out a series of circular letters to sheriffs and bishops and judges.

The oath attendant upon the Act of Succession was rapidly imposed. The whole of London swore. In Yorkshire the people were ‘most willing to take the oath’. The sheriff of Norwich reported that ‘never were people more willing or diligent’. In the small village of Little Waldingfield in Suffolk, ninety-eight signed with their name, and thirty-five with a mark.

A few refused to sign, however, believing that it was contrary to the will of the pope and of the whole Church. Among these brave, or stubborn, spirits were the Carthusian friars of Charterhouse. It is reported on good authority that the king himself went in disguise to the monastery, in order to debate with them on the matter. Those who stood firm were soon imprisoned. On 15 June 1534 one of the king’s men reported to Thomas Cromwell that the Observant Friars of Richmond were also refusing to conform; ‘their conclusion was,’ he wrote, ‘they had professed St Francis’s religion, and in the observance thereof they would live and die’. And, yes, they would die. Two days later, two carts full of friars were driven through the city on their way to the Tower.

The recalcitrant bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, refused to take the oath and was also consigned to the Tower; from his prison he wrote to Cromwell beseeching him to take pity and ‘let me have such things as are necessary for me in mine age’. A visitor reported that he looked like a skeleton, scarcely able to bear the clothes on his back.

Thomas More was also summoned before Cranmer and Cromwell at Lambeth Palace, where the oath was given to him for his perusal; but he also refused to subscribe. He was happy to swear that the children of Anne Boleyn could succeed to the throne, but he could not declare on oath that all the previous Acts of Parliament had been valid. He could not deny the authority of the pope ‘without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation’. He too was consigned to the Tower, where he would remain until his execution. Another notable refusal came from the king’s first daughter, Mary, who could not be persuaded to renounce her mother. She was not yet put to the test of formal signature, but her position was clear enough. When Anne Boleyn heard the news she declared that the ‘cursed bastard’ should be given ‘a good banging’. Mary was in fact confined to her room, and one of her servants was dispatched to prison. She soon became ill once more and the king’s physician, after visiting her, declared that the sickness came in part from ‘sorrow and trouble’.

Some last steps had to be taken in the long separation from the pope. The final Act of the parliament, assembled at a second session in November, was to bring to a conclusion and a culmination all of its previous work. The oath of succession was refined, in the light of experience with More and others, and a new Treasons Act was passed that prohibited on pain of death malicious speech against the king and the royal family. It would be treason, for example, to call the king a heretic or a schismatic or a tyrant. Now it was a question of loyalty rather than theology.

A Supremacy Act was also passed that gave legal and coherent form to all of the powers that the king had assumed, with the statement that ‘the king our sovereign lord, and his heirs and successors, shall be taken, accepted and reputed as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia’. He could reform all errors and correct all heresies; his spiritual authority could not be challenged. He lacked only potestas ordinis; because he was not a priest, he had no right to administer the sacraments or to preach. He was the Catholic head of a Catholic Church. Thus, in the words of John Foxe, the pope was ‘abolished, eradicated and exploded out of this land’. The king was effectively acting upon a principle of English thought and practice that had first manifested itself in the twelfth century. The opposition between William Rufus and Anselm of Canterbury was similar to that between Henry and Archbishop Warham. One of the servants of the king’s father, Edmund Dudley, had stated twenty years before that ‘the root of the love of God, which is to know Him with good works, within this realm must chiefly grow by our sovereign lord the king’. This veneration of the Crown was one of the abiding aspects of English history.

The frontispiece to Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible, published in 1535, displayed an image of the king sitting on his throne beneath the Almighty. Henry holds in each hand a book on which is written ‘The Word of God’; he is giving copies to Cranmer and to another bishop, saying ‘Take this and preach’. In the lower part of the frontispiece the people are shouting ‘Vivat Rex! Vivat Rex!’ while children who know no Latin are saying ‘God save the King!’

In retaliation for the Act of Supremacy the pope issued a bull of interdict and deposition against the king. Henry was now a thing accursed; on his death his body should be denied burial, while his soul could be cast into hell for ever. The people of England would be declared contumacious unless they rose in instant rebellion; their marriages would be deemed illegal and their wills invalid. No true son of the Church should now trade, or communicate, with the island. On the urgent wish of the French king, however, the pope did not publish this general excommunication for three years. At this juncture, foreign politics came to the assistance of Henry.

The more conservative of the bishops believed that Henry would now be the bulwark against German heresy, while Cranmer hoped that the king would be the instrument of reform. In this expectation he was joined by Thomas Cromwell, who knew that his master could now grow rich as well as powerful. A document had been prepared entitled ‘Things to be moved for the king’s highness for an increase and augmentation to be had for the maintenance of his most royal estate’. It was proposed that the lands and incomes of the Church should in large part be diverted to the king’s treasury.

At the beginning of 1535, therefore, a survey of the Church’s worth was undertaken. It was the largest such report since the Domesday Book of the eleventh century. The officials from every cathedral and every parish church, every monastery and every hospital, every convent and every collegiate church, were obliged to open their estate books and their accounts; they were questioned on oath about their income from tithes and from lands. They were asked to give an account of their gold chalices and their silver candlesticks. Within a short time the king knew exactly how much he could expect from church revenue, having already laid down that a tenth of its income should be his. In the process he took much more than the pope ever did.

In the same period Thomas Cromwell had been appointed ‘vicegerent’, or administrative deputy in spiritual matters, precisely in order to supervise the collection of revenue. He was accustomed to questions of church money; it had been he who, under Wolsey, had appropriated the incomes of certain monasteries for the sake of the cardinal’s new college at Oxford. In the summer of the year the ‘visitations’ of the smaller monasteries began in the west of England, seeking out instances of venality and immorality among the monks and abbots; the visitors were given power to discipline or remove recalcitrant clergy, and encouraged the brothers to denounce one another for various sins. It was said of one prior that he ‘hath but six children and but one daughter … he thanks God he never meddled with married women, but all with maidens the fairest that could be got … the pope, considering his fragility, gave him licence to keep an whore’. It was decreed that no abbot or monk should be permitted to walk outside the walls of the monastery. It was also determined that all religious under the age of twenty-four were to be dismissed. Some novices had appeared at service in top-boots and hats with satin rosettes.

The visitors then turned their attention to the universities, where it was decided that the learning of the scholastics and the medieval doctors should be abandoned in favour of the humanist learning approved by Erasmus and other reformers. Daily lectures in Latin and in Greek, central to the principles of Renaissance learning, were instituted. The study of canon law was discontinued. If the visitations were primarily concerned with the raising of revenue, they also engaged themselves with matters of religious and educational renovation.

This was also the dying time. The monks of the Charterhouse were the first to be executed, having been arraigned under the Treasons Act just passed by parliament. The jury were not eager to sentence to death such holy men, but Cromwell told them that they would themselves suffer death if they refused. When their prior, John Haughton, heard the verdict he simply said, ‘This is the judgment of the world.’ On 4 May 1535, they were brought in their habits to the scaffold, the first time in English history that clergy have suffered in their ecclesiastical dress. Haughton was the first to die. He was partially hanged before his heart was ripped out and rubbed in his face; his bowels were then pulled from his stomach, while he still lived, and burned before him. He was beheaded and his body cut into quarters. Two more followed, and then three in the next month. Many lords and courtiers were part of the crowd, including two dukes and an earl, and it was reported that ‘the king himself would have liked to see the butchery’. It was an image of his power over the Church and the people.

The citizens of London were less sanguine about the punishment and many were horrified that monks should suffer in their habits. It was observed that, since the day of their death, it had never ceased to rain. The corn harvest was a failure, yielding only a third of the usual crop. All this was conceived to be a sign of divine displeasure. Yet who now would dare to speak out against the king? Certain noblemen, however, sent secret messages to Spain in an effort to spur an invasion; it was said that the king had lost the hearts of all his subjects.

In a memorandum book belonging to Thomas Cromwell are the following notes:

Item – to advertise with the king of the ordering of Master Fisher.

Item – to know his pleasure touching Master More.

Master Fisher was indeed put on trial in the middle of June, accused of high treason for having said that ‘the king our sovereign lord is not supreme head in earth of the Church of England’. His fate was not averted by the decision of the pope to grant him the red hat of a cardinal. To Henry this seemed to be mere meddling in the affairs of England, and he promised that his head would be off before the hat was on. The hat got as far as Calais.

A jury of twelve freeholders condemned the aged cleric to a traitor’s death, in the manner of the Carthusians, but true to his word Henry commuted the punishment to a simple beheading. Five days later, on 22 June 1535, Fisher was taken to the scaffold; emaciated and ill, he was too weak to walk to the site of execution on Tower Hill, and so he was carried in a chair where before his execution he besought those present to pray for him. ‘I beseech Almighty God,’ he said, ‘of His infinite goodness to save the king and this realm …’ His head was taken off at the first stroke, and the observers were astonished that so much blood should gush from so skeletal a body.

The day after the execution the king attended an anti-papal pageant, based upon the Book of Revelation. Such spectacles and dramas were becoming more frequent. The imperial ambassador observed that the king sat retired ‘but was so pleased to see himself represented as cutting off the heads of the clergy that, in order to laugh at his ease and encourage the people, he discovered himself’.

Thomas More followed John Fisher to the scaffold. Four days after Fisher’s death a special commission was established to consider his case. Ever since his imprisonment in the Tower he had been cajoled and bullied by Cromwell, in the hope that he might relent. Cromwell even insinuated that More’s obstinacy, by providing a bad example, had helped to bring the Carthusians to destruction. This proved too much for even his patience to bear. ‘I do nobody harm,’ he replied, ‘I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.’

The trial was held in Westminster Hall, where he conducted himself with acuity and dignity. But the verdict was never for a moment in doubt. He was convicted of treason and five days later was led to Tower Hill where the axe awaited him. His last words were a jest to the executioner. ‘You will give me this day,’ he told him, ‘a greater benefit than ever any mortal man can be able to give me. Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry for saving of thine honesty.’

Katherine of Aragon, witnessing the destruction of those whom she considered saints, sent an urgent letter to the pope with the message that ‘if a remedy be not applied shortly, there will be no end to ruined souls and martyred saints. The good will be firm and suffer. The lukewarm will fail if they find none to help them.’ But no help was at hand. The execution of More and Fisher, together with that of the Carthusian monks, was considered by the Catholic countries of Europe to be an act of barbarism, the Christian princes conveniently forgetting their own savage measures against supposed heretics. There was no Inquisition in England.

In the search for allies, therefore, it became advisable to reach some accord with the Protestant leaders of Germany. In a message to the elector of Saxony, for example, Henry congratulated him for his ‘most virtuous mind’ and declared that the two countries ‘standing together would be so much stronger to withstand their adversaries’. It was hoped that a league of the reforming nations of Europe might then be formed. It was also hoped that the king might be persuaded to sign the Lutheran confession of faith, known as the Confession of Augsburg, that had been drawn up five years before by the German princes. The proposals came to nothing.

The scope of the ‘visitations’ of the smaller monasteries was extended in the autumn of 1535. The visitors had previously confined their attentions to the west of England; when their work was completed there, they moved on to the east and to the southeast before travelling to the north at the beginning of 1536. The speed of their researches did not augur well for their reliability. Yet the visitors continually questioned and investigated the priors, the abbots, the monks and their servants: ‘Whether the divine service was kept up, day and night, in the right hours? And how many were commonly present, and who were frequently absent?’ ‘Whether they kept company with women, within or without the monastery? Or if there were any back-doors, by which women came within the precinct?’ ‘Whether they had any boys lying by them?’ ‘Whether any of the brethren were incorrigible?’ ‘Whether you do wear your religious habit continually, and never leave it off but when you go to bed?’

There were in all eighty-six questions. One prior was accused of preaching treason and was forced to his knees before he confessed. The abbot of Fountains kept six whores. The abbot of Battle was described to Cromwell as ‘the veriest hayne, beetle and buserde, and the arrentest chorle that ever I see’. A hayne was a wretch; a beetle was a blockhead; and a buserde was a stupid person. An arrentest chorle may be described as a thoroughly boorish wretch. The canons of Leicester Abbey were accused of buggery. The prior of Crutched Friars was found in bed with a woman at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. The abbot of West Langdon was described as the ‘drunkenest knave living’. The visitor, Richard Leyton, described to Cromwell how he had entered the abbot’s lodging. ‘I was a good space knocking at the abbot’s door; no voice answered, saving the abbot’s little dog that within his door fast locked bayed and barked. I found a short poleaxe standing behind the door, and with it I dashed the abbot’s door in pieces … and about the house I go, with that poleaxe in my hand, for this abbot is a dangerous desperate knave, and a hardy.’

The visitors also noted the number of shrines and relics that they observed in the course of their labours; they marked them under the heading of ‘superstitio’, a sign of the direction in which Cromwell and his servants were moving. At the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, for example, they found one of the stones with which St Stephen was killed and one of the coals with which St Lawrence was roasted. In the same establishment they came across the skull of St Petronilla that people sick of the fever placed on their heads. The monasteries were therefore considered to be beds of papistry, and it was said that the monks were in a sense the reserve army of Rome. Thomas Cromwell described them as ‘the pope’s spies’. If there was no evidence of wrongdoing, the visitors merely concluded that the monks were engaged in a conspiracy of silence. When sins are being actively looked for, they can always be found.

A parliament was called in February 1536, the last session of a body that had been assembled seven years before. It has since become known as the Reformation Parliament, and can perhaps be called the most important in all of English history. The king came into the House of Lords with a ‘declaration’ about the state of the monasteries, no doubt based upon the various reports of the visitors. Hugh Latimer, appointed bishop of Worcester in the previous year, was present on the occasion and records that ‘when their enormities were first read in the parliament house, they were so great and abominable that there was nothing but down with them’. Some dissent may have been expressed. According to one report the king summoned members of the Commons to the royal gallery. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads.’

An Act for the Dissolution of Monasteries was indeed passed, by which all religious houses with an annual income of less than £200 were to be ‘suppressed’. This was a large sum of money, and in theory 419 monastic houses were obliged to close; yet the abbots made petitions for exemptions, and 176 of the monasteries were granted a stay of execution. It is also clear Cromwell and his servants were bribed in money or in goods. Yet this was not a general dissolution. The larger monasteries had not been touched, and the monks of the smaller establishments were given leave to transfer to them. All was still well in the ‘great and solemn monasteries wherein (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed’. It is hard to believe, however, that piety only began at £200 per year.

As a consequence the protests were few and uncoordinated. It might be thought that Cromwell’s strategy was to proceed slowly and cautiously, removing one obstacle at a time. It is more likely, however, that the king and his chief minister were trying to find their way in unfamiliar territory; they were not yet clear about their final objective and fashioned their policy as they went along. The senior clergy in convocation were in the meantime formulating the principles of the new faith under the royal supremacy. The imperial ambassador noted that ‘they do not admit of purgatory nor of the observance of Lent and other fasts, nor of the festivals of saints, and worship of images which is the shortest way to arrive at the plundering of the church of St Thomas of Canterbury and other places of resort for pilgrims in this country’. In this conclusion, the ambassador was correct. It was a practical and financial, rather than a dogmatic and doctrinal, decision.

Parliament, in its last session, also established a Court of Augmentations through which all the revenues from the dissolution of the monasteries – all the rents and tithes – were to be adjudicated and passed to the Crown. Other parties were also interested in the spoils. One lord wrote to Cromwell ‘beseeching you to help me to some old abbey in mine old days’. The court was duly set up in the spring of 1536. This was, in a word Thomas Cranmer now used for the first time, the ‘world of reformation’.

8

A little neck

On 7 January 1536 Katherine of Aragon died. Rejected and humiliated by her husband, deprived of the company of her daughter, her last years had not been happy ones. She had been alternately abused and threatened, but she could not be moved from the fact that Henry was her lawful husband. She clung to this certainty as the world around her shifted. It was even rumoured that the king was ready to behead her, but it is unlikely that he would have made so egregious a mistake. She had written to her daughter, Mary, that ‘he will not suffer you to perish, if you beware to offend him’; it is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his clemency. She also advised her daughter that ‘in whatsoever company you shall come, obey the king’s commandments, speak few words and meddle nothing’. She had not meddled; she had simply endured. The Spanish were always associated, in this period, with formality and self-control; she had those qualities to the highest degree. In a letter written to her husband, hours before her death, she implored him to preserve his soul from the peril of sins ‘for which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares’. She signed it as ‘Katherine the Queen’. It was suspected by some that she had been poisoned, but in fact a cancerous tumour was found around her heart.

On hearing the news of her death the king rejoiced. ‘God be praised,’ he said, ‘we are free from all suspicion of war!’ He had been concerned that her nephew, Charles V, might form a Catholic league with France and the pope against the infidel of England. On the following day he and Anne Boleyn appeared at a ball, both of them dressed in brilliant yellow.

It is not known how Mary learned of the death of her mother, but the news provoked another bout of illness. She was once more threatened by Anne Boleyn. ‘If I have a son, as I hope shortly,’ Anne wrote, ‘I know what will happen to her.’ ‘She is my death,’ Anne had once said, ‘and I am hers.’ Mary was now alone in the world, and her thoughts turned to the prospect of escape to her mother’s imperial family in Brussels. She spoke to the imperial ambassador about the possibility of fleeing across the Channel, but he advised caution and circumspection. In the meantime, he said ‘she is daily preparing herself for death’. She was in a most invidious position. In certain circumstances she might be considered a pretender to the throne. Those who wished to rebel against the new order of religion, for example, would welcome her at their head. She was surrounded by perils.

On the day of Katherine’s burial in the abbey church of Peterborough, 29 January, Anne Boleyn miscarried a male child; it was one more link in the chain of fate that bound together the two women. Anne blamed the accident on the shock she had received, five days before, on hearing the news that the king had fallen from his horse during a jousting match at the tiltyard in Greenwich; he had lain unconscious on the ground for two hours. Yet the king believed, or chose to believe, that the hand of divine providence lay behind the event. ‘I see,’ he is reported to have said, ‘that God will not give me male children.’

The king’s attentions were already wandering once more. Thomas Cromwell had told the imperial ambassador that ‘in future he was to lead a more moral life than hitherto – a chaste and marital one with his present queen’. Yet the minister had put a hand to his mouth in order to hide his smile, so the ambassador concluded that he was not necessarily telling the truth. Henry was in fact pursuing Jane Seymour, a young lady in the household of Anne Boleyn herself, whose rather sharp features were later bequeathed to her son. It was reported that Anne Boleyn found the girl on her husband’s knee and flew into a rage, but this may just be later gossip.

The ambassador also tells another story that hints at the complications of the court. While speaking to ‘the brother of the damsel the king is now courting’, he witnessed an argument when ‘angry words seemed to be passing between the king and Cromwell for, after a considerable interval of time, the latter came out of the embrasure of the window where the king was standing, on the excuse that he was so thirsty he could go on no longer, and this he really was, from sheer annoyance, for he went to sit on a chest, out of the king’s sight, and asked for something to drink’. Eventually Henry came looking for him.

A courtier once described how ‘the king beknaveth him [Cromwell] twice a week, and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head and shaken up as it were a dog, he will come out of the Great Chamber … with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost’. This is the human aspect of court life, rarely observed, where we are able to glimpse the constant personal tensions that fashioned the decisions we now call history.

Great and malign changes, indeed, were soon to occur at the court. It was reported that the king had expressed his horror of Anne Boleyn to an intimate in the privy chamber, and accused her of luring him into marriage through the use of witchcraft. That is why he had been abandoned by God. So the story goes. Yet in practice he still behaved to her with every courtesy and attention, and the records show that she was spending a great deal of money on fine garments for herself and her daughter. There was every reason to suppose, despite the fears of the king, that she might bear another child. Anne Boleyn herself professed to believe so.

But then the calamity struck. On 24 April two separate commissions, under the conditions of utmost secrecy, were established to search into occasions and suspicions of treason. On one of them sat Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, Anne Boleyn’s uncle but no longer her friend. Three days later it was suggested that the king might wish for a divorce. What had happened? One of the ladies at the court had spoken unwisely about the queen’s affairs and had mentioned a certain ‘Mark’. Once it had been spoken, it could not be unsaid. To conceal or to attempt to suppress information about the queen’s alleged infidelity would be equivalent to treason – or, in the phrase of the time, misprision or concealment of treason. The rumour or report had immediately taken on a life of its own.

On 30 April Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a groom of the privy chamber, was taken from Greenwich to the Tower where he confessed to having been Anne’s lover; that confession may have smelled of the rack, but it might have been a true account prompted by terror. He never retracted it and repeated it at the foot of the gallows. On the following day at the May Day jousts Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, rode against Sir Henry Norris; Norris was the intimate friend of the sovereign and the chief gentleman of the privy chamber. They were both soon to die for the suspicion of having lain with Anne Boleyn.

After the joust was over the king rode from Greenwich to Whitehall, taking Norris with him as one of a small company. During the journey he turned on Norris and accused him of pursuing an affair with his wife. To meddle with the queen of England was treason. The king promised him a pardon if he confessed the truth, but Norris vehemently denied the charge. He was taken to the Tower at dawn on the following day. George Boleyn had already been arrested, and charged with having sexual relations with his own sister. The evidence for the incest came from his wife, Lady Rochford, who may have spoken out of malice towards her promiscuous husband. The ladies of the queen’s household had also been interrogated and may have revealed interesting information. Some five men were accused of having slept with her – Mark Smeaton, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston – and were executed. Three others, including Thomas Wyatt the poet, were acquitted. These commissions of inquiry were not necessarily show trials.

The queen herself was interrogated by the king’s council. At one point Anne Boleyn was seen entreating the king in Greenwich Palace, with her baby daughter in her arms; but this was not enough. The cannon was soon fired, as a token that a noble or a royal had been taken to the Tower. When she arrived at that place she fell on her knees and prayed ‘God to help her, as she was not guilty of the thing for which she was accused’. When she was told that Smeaton and Norris were among those incarcerated she cried out: ‘Oh Norris have you accused me? You are in the Tower with me, and you and I will die together; and Mark, so will you.’

She had spoken with her gaoler in the Tower, Sir William Kingston, about certain earlier conversations:

Anne Boleyn: Why don’t you get on with your marriage?

Henry Norris: I will wait a while.

Anne Boleyn: You look for dead man’s shoes; for if anything happens to the king, you would look to have me.

Henry Norris: If I had any such thought, let my head be cut off.

A dialogue with Mark Smeaton was also remembered:

Anne Boleyn: Why are you so sad?

Mark Smeaton: It does not matter.

Anne Boleyn: You must not expect me to speak to you as if you were a nobleman, since you are an inferior person.

Mark Smeaton: No, no, madam. A look suffices me.

The remarks were not proof of guilt, by any means, but they do not appear to be entirely innocent. ‘Imagining the king’s death’, as Anne had done, was in itself an act of treason. It would not be difficult for a jury to convict her. The royal court had now turned against her, sensing in which direction the wind was blowing. Only Cranmer had doubts. ‘I am in such perplexity,’ he told the king, that ‘my mind is clean amazed; for I never had better opinion in woman than I had in her.’

Four of the accused were brought to trial in the middle of May, in Westminster Hall, while George Boleyn was to be arraigned before his peers in the Tower. Only Smeaton acknowledged his crime by repeating his confession that he had known the queen carnally on three occasions. The others pleaded not guilty. It is reported that Norris had also confessed, on first being questioned, but then withdrew the confession. They were all sentenced to death.

On her first arrival the queen had asked the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, if she would die without being shown justice. ‘The poorest subject the king has,’ he replied, ‘has justice.’ And, at that, she laughed. She knew well enough that she would not survive the anger and suspicion of the king. She and her brother were taken to the Great Hall of the Tower before twenty-seven peers of the realm, as a mark of respect to their rank, and were questioned. ‘I can say no more but “nay”,’ the queen said ‘without I should open my body. If any man accuse me, I can say but “nay”, and they can bring no witnesses.’ The pair were duly convicted of high treason, for which the penalty in the queen’s case was death by burning. Yet a beheading was penalty enough. The lieutenant of the Tower told her that ‘it will be no pain, it was so subtle’.

‘I have heard say,’ she replied, ‘that the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.’ Then she put her hands about her neck, and laughed. On 19 May, just before noon, she was brought to the scaffold within the walls of the Tower. In her nervousness she continually glanced behind her, as if she might be taken unawares. She was the first queen of England ever to be beheaded. Her exact age at the time is unknown, but it is estimated that she was in her early thirties. When the executioner held up the head, its eyes and lips moved. Her body was then thrown into a common chest of elm-tree, made to hold arrows.

Henry had also taken the precaution of having his marriage to Anne annulled, on the grounds that she had been involved in a liaison nine years before, without seeming to realize that if she had not been his wife she could not have committed adultery. But he wished to expunge her, to blot her out. Whether he was right to do so has been a matter of controversy ever since the events themselves. It has been supposed, for example, that Anne Boleyn was the victim of a conspiracy managed by Cromwell or by the ‘conservative’ faction at the court.

Yet common sense would suggest that this would be a perilous undertaking indeed. All of the men accused were well known at court; George Boleyn was her brother, in high estate, and Henry Norris was the intimate of the king. It would have been madness to implicate such men in a scheme that had no foundation. At the trial all the details of the times and places were read out, as, for example, in the first indictment that ‘the queen [on the] 6th October 25 Hen. VIII [1533] at Westminster, by words etc., procured and incited one Henry Norris, Esq., one of the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, to have illicit intercourse with her; and that the act was committed at Westminster, 12th October 25 Hen. VIII’. The details may not have been entirely accurate, but the fact that they were given suggests a strong and definitive case was being made. This was not some nebulous charge built upon rumour and false report. Why accuse five men, four of them known and respected, when one would have been sufficient?

And the charges were believed. It is true enough that no one would willingly defy the wishes of the king, but it is still the case that twenty-seven peers unanimously decided that the queen had indeed committed incest with her brother. Two grand juries and a petty jury had concluded the cases of the other men.

It is at least possible that Anne Boleyn was not as innocent as she claimed. It may be that she pursued other men in desperate search for a male child who could be hailed as the heir to the throne, thereby saving herself and her family for the foreseeable future. Another aspect of the trial was suppressed. It was alleged against her that she had spoken to George Boleyn’s wife about the king’s impotence. A piece of paper detailing the matter was handed to George Boleyn, during the course of the trial, that he was supposed to read in silence. ‘The king was not skilful in copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power.’ In scorn, and bravado, he read it out aloud. That is not necessarily the action of an honest man. It is the action of a defendant daring the court to do its worst. Boleyn also did not deny that he had spread rumours about the princess Elizabeth’s true paternity. It was in fact rumoured that the real father was Sir Henry Norris. No one can at this late date be certain of anything. The truth, as always, lies at the bottom of the well. The best epigraph of the events in the spring of 1536 comes from one of those briefly accused, Thomas Wyatt:

These bloody days have broke my heart,

My lust, my youth, did then depart …

The king dressed in white on the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution, and on the following morning he married again. He must have been thoroughly convinced of her guilt, or had come upon another offence that he never disclosed, or both. When his illegitimate son, Henry of Richmond, visited him the king greeted him with tears saying that he and Mary ‘ought to thank God for having escaped from the hands of that woman, who had planned their deaths by poison’. He was said to have behaved with an almost defiant gaiety, and to have composed a verse tragedy in which Anne Boleyn had 100 different amours.

The king had a further reason to remarry. He was now forty years old and he was desperate for a male heir. He had in effect already bastardized Mary and Elizabeth. The duke of Richmond was illegitimate and therefore ineligible.

The death of Anne Boleyn was not greeted with any great dismay by the people of England. Anne had been in large part disparaged by the populace, at least in private, and a contemporary described the joy evinced ‘at the ruin of the concubine’. Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour, was not herself universally popular. ‘There is a ballad made lately of great derision against us,’ Henry told her ‘which if it go abroad and is seen by you, I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found, he shall be straitly punished for it.’ The man was in fact never found.

The joy of the people was also part of a general belief that Lady Mary would now be restored to royal favour. Yet this was too optimistic an interpretation of events at court. Thomas Cromwell now moved against Mary’s supporters on the grounds that they had been trying to engineer the succession on her behalf. It seems that Jane Seymour herself urged her new husband to reconcile himself with his oldest daughter, but instead Henry subjected Mary to even more pressure.

He sent a delegation to her, under the leadership of the duke of Norfolk, urging her to take the oath of allegiance; this would entail repudiating the marriage of her mother and her own legitimacy. It would also require her to accept the king as supreme head of the Church. On all these matters, she declined to swear. The duke of Norfolk then declared that she was guilty of treason. It was clear enough that Henry was willing to prosecute her, with all the unhappy and perhaps even unbearable consequences. Thomas Cromwell wrote to her that ‘I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman … that ever was’; he urged her to repent ‘your ingratitude and miserable unkindness’. He warned that otherwise she would reach ‘the point of utter undoing’ which might include a traitor’s death. She was now twenty-one years of age.

A short while after, she surrendered. The imperial ambassador had remonstrated with her, telling her that it was her duty to survive the chaos and the terror. He persuaded her that her destiny might lie in rescuing the nation for the true faith, and that nothing in the world should prevent this. Martyrdom would be a failure of responsibility. She did not read the declaration of submission, but simply signed it. She had declared ‘the King’s Highness to be the supreme head in earth under Christ of the Church of England’ and that the marriage between her mother and the king ‘was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.

She could go no further. In her abject state she wrote to her father declaring that ‘my body I do wholly commit to your mercy and fatherly pity, desiring no state, no condition nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint unto me’. She was at once welcomed back into royal favour, but the damage to her conscience and sense of self had been done. She would never bend, or weaken her will, again. The guilt of repudiating her mother would remain with her, perhaps to be in part allayed by the fires of Smithfield. It is reported that she was overcome with sorrow and remorse, immediately after signing the document, and asked the imperial ambassador to obtain for her a special dispensation from Rome. Yet she seems to have adjusted to her return to court very well, purchasing jewellery and fine clothes; she gambled, modestly but continuously, and had her own group of minstrels. She also had her own ‘fool’, a lady called Jane, with a shaven head.

After the beheading of Anne Boleyn it was clear that the party of religious change, which had profited by her intervention in the affairs of the realm, might be destined for an eclipse. In Rome dislike of the king was replaced by something like sympathetic pity, in the pious hope that Henry might now return to the embrace of the Church after his experiences with the ‘witch’. That was of course entirely to misunderstand the nature of Henry’s reform. He had never been opposed to the doctrines of the Church, only to its leadership. His understanding of the power, and profits, he had thereby gained was enough to prohibit any return to Rome. He believed also that religious unity was the prerequisite of political unity.

He saw himself in the role of the Old Testament kings who were determined to enforce the law of God upon their kingdoms in the fear that they might be consumed by divine wrath. Had not Jehoash, king of Israel, stripped the priests of their gold? Had not Josiah renovated the Temple of the Lord? Had not Solomon sat in judgment? The bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tunstall, declared that Henry acted ‘as the chief and best of the kings of Israel did, and as all good Christian kings ought to do’.

His assertion of royal supremacy, however, was aligned with a desire for reform of the monasteries and the colleges. The king attended several Masses each day and never proclaimed or believed himself to be a Lutheran. He was also attached to various forms of popular piety, including the ritual of ‘creeping to the cross’. All his life he fingered a personal rosary, now in the possession of the duke of Devonshire, and ordained many requiem Masses at the time of his death. He was in most respects an orthodox Catholic.

A meeting of parliament was called at the beginning of June in order to discuss the circumstances of the realm after the recent execution of Anne Boleyn. It cancelled the two Acts favourable to Anne Boleyn and her offspring, thus reducing Elizabeth to the same status as Mary. The lord chancellor extolled the third marriage of the king, who, ‘at the humble entreaty of his nobility, has consented once more to accept that condition and has taken to himself a wife who in age and form is deemed to be meet and apt for the procreation of children’.

The key was the begetting of a male heir and, if the king should die (which God forbid!) or the new queen prove infertile ‘he desires you therefore to nominate some person as his heir apparent’. Their answer may already have been agreed and rehearsed. In the absence of a legitimate male heir, parliament granted the king the power to bequeath his crown at his will. The way, therefore, was open to the illegitimate duke of Richmond. He was the least bad alternative. Yet the frailty of the dynasty was confirmed when, in the summer of 1536, Richmond died of tuberculosis or some other undiagnosed lung complaint; Henry ordered that the body should be buried secretly, to prevent public disquiet, but nothing could conceal the fact that the succession now rested on two daughters who had been declared illegitimate. The young man’s ornate tomb is still to be seen at the church of St Michael the Archangel in Framlingham, Suffolk.

The evidence of the king’s anxiety at this time emerged when in the summer Lord Thomas Howard, the younger brother of the duke of Norfolk, was accused of treason; his crime was to contract himself to Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the queen of Scots. Since the queen was Henry’s sister, Henry suspected that Howard was aiming at the succession. Howard was confined to the Tower where he died in the following year.

In June 1536 the convocation of the senior clergy had been assembled at St Paul’s. Hugh Latimer, the recently consecrated bishop of Worcester and principal reformer, had been chosen to preach to them. His text came from the sixteenth chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, namely ‘the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light’. He asked them to examine their hearts and enquire what they had achieved in convocation after convocation. The odious fictions of Rome survived even still, including ‘the canonizations and beatifications, the totquots and dispensations, the pardons of marvellous variety’ as well as ‘the ancient purgatory pickpurse’. You know the proverb, he told them. An evil crow, an evil egg. At the end of his sermon he warned them that ‘God will visit you. He will come. He will not tarry long.’

The reaction of the 500 clerical delegates is not known, but two weeks later they presented the king with a petition of complaint against the numerous blasphemies and heresies that were now circulating through the kingdom. It was a barely disguised attack on Latimer and other radicals. They were aggrieved that the sacrament of the altar was being described as a ‘little pretty piece Round Robin’. The hallowed oil of extreme unction was ‘the bishop of Rome’s grease and butter’. Our Lady was only a woman ‘like a bag of saffron or pepper when the spice was out’. Mass and matins were ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring and juggling’. It was an implicit invitation to the king to bring to a halt the process of reform. There was no question of ‘toleration’. The concept was only rarely mentioned. Matters of religion were too powerful and too important to be treated with circumspection. Falsehood was to be prosecuted by every means available.

In response Henry, with the help of Cranmer and others, drew up a summary of the articles of faith that the people of England were required to believe. The preface to the Ten Articles declared that their purpose was to bring ‘unity and concord in opinion’. In truth the king wished to assert the royal supremacy, and the general renovation of the Church, without embracing Lutheran doctrine. He seems to have concurred with the reformers’ emphasis upon only three of the sacraments – those of baptism, penance and the Eucharist – without denying the efficacy of the other four. Purgatory was denounced as a pernicious invention of the bishop of Rome, but it was also declared that ‘custom of long continuance approving the same, we agree that it is meet and expedient to pray for the souls departed’. It was a question of balance. A manuscript draft of one page survives; it shows the rival scribblings of the reformer Cranmer and the conservative Tunstall vying for authority.

There are other examples of compromise or mediation. The habit of kneeling and worshipping images of the saints was considered to be unnecessarily superstitious. But other customs and ceremonies of the Church, such as the giving of ashes on Ash Wednesday and the carrying of palms on Palm Sunday, were deemed to be ‘good and laudable’. Even as the Articles were being drawn up the king and his new queen, Jane Seymour, took part in a Corpus Christi procession celebrating the Eucharist consecrated in the Mass. The question of reform was raised but by no means answered, and the English Church was still in almost all respects a Catholic Church. You may go so far, but you can go no further. The process of religious change was fitful, improvised and still uncertain. The Ten Articles were therefore described by the German reformer Melanchthon as ‘confusissime compositi’.

There was no confusion, however, in the prosecution of Henry’s immediate purpose. In the late spring and early summer of 1536, the smaller monasteries came under the hand of Thomas Cromwell. Parliament had already passed the Act for the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the early months of the year, and now the royal commissioners began their work of suppression. It took a period of six or more weeks to dissolve a small monastery. The bells were taken from the towers and the lead was stripped from the roofs; all the plate and jewellery were carried off, and the disposable corn sold. In the work of despoliation, 2,000 monks and nuns were dispossessed and sent back into the world. How they lived, on their return, is unknown.

The process, however, was not always a swift or quiet one. When the visitors determined that the rood loft in the priory of St Nicholas in Exeter should be pulleddown, a crowd of angry women entered the church to seize the workman ‘and hurled stones at him, insomuch that for his safety he was driven to take to the tower for refuge’. Yet they pursued him so eagerly that he was forced to leap out of a window and ‘very hardly he escaped the breaking of his neck, but yet he brake one of his ribs’.

At the end of September the monks of Hexham in Northumberland also resisted the encroachments. When the commissioners came into the town they saw ‘many people assembled with bills, halberds and other defenceable weapons, ready standing in the street, like men ready to defend a town of war’. As the commissioners rode towards the monastery the common bell of the town and the great bell of the monastery were rung; the doors were shut against them and several monks were gathered on the roof and steeple with swords, bows and arrows. ‘We be twenty brethren in this house,’ one canon shouted, ‘and we shall die all before you shall have the house!’

They also had another weapon besides swords and bows. The archbishop of York had begged the king to spare the monks of Hexham and had indeed received a grant to that effect under the Great Seal. When the commissioners saw this grant, they withdrew. On the following day the monks came out of their house, two by two, and with their weapons joined the people of Hexham in ‘a place called the green’. From there they watched until the commissioners ‘were past out of sight of the monastery’. Yet they were punished at a later date. The king mentioned Hexham by name in a letter to the duke of Norfolk in which he states that the monks ‘are to be tied up [executed] without further delay or ceremony’.

Popular anger or frustration was further created by the publication of certain ‘injunctions’. These were issued as a result of the rulings of the Ten Articles and, among other matters, forbade the mention of purgatory and abolished many saints’ days that had hitherto been celebrated as holidays. In this year Thomas Cromwell also ordered the destruction of the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. It was another attack upon the ‘superstitions’ maintained and exploited by the monks. To many people, and perhaps especially to the citizens of London, these were matters of indifference. But the more orthodox, and the more devout, were angry. Their resentment soon turned to open rebellion.

9

The great revolt

By the spring and summer of 1536 rumours and whispers were circulating through the kingdom. A priest from Penrith in Cumberland had travelled as far south as Tewkesbury, where he said in an alehouse that ‘we be kept bare and smit under, yet we shall rise once again, and 40,000 will rise upon a day’. He may have been in his cups but the people of the north, in particular, were aggrieved at the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. They had been providing food and comfort, in somewhat bleak circumstances, for many generations.

An Essex priest went with a labourer, by the name of Lambeles Redoon, to gather the sheaves of corn. ‘There shall be business in the north,’ the priest said before adding that he, and 10,000 others, would flock there.

‘Little said,’ the labourer wisely replied, ‘is soon amended.’

‘Remember you not what I said unto you right now, care you not for that, for before Easter comes, the king shall not reign long.’

Rumours abounded that all the jewels and vessels of the parish churches were to be removed and replaced by tin or brass. The sack of the shrines lent a certain credit to the reports. It was whispered that parish churches were to be situated at least five miles apart, and that any in closer proximity were to be pulled down. It was said that all christenings, burials and marriages were to be taxed and that no poor man was to be allowed to eat white bread or goose without paying tribute to the king. Edward Brocke, ‘an aged wretched person’, had said that there would be no end to bad weather while the king still reigned.

The fall of Anne Boleyn was believed to have been prophesied by Merlin. Other signs and portents were scrutinized. The word passed among the monasteries that ‘the decorate rose shall be slain in his mother’s belly’, which was said to mean that Henry would be killed by the priests since the Church he oppressed was his mother. The language of prophecy was the language of the people pitched against the language of royal proclamations.

Intimations of revolt emerged in the summer. When a priest in Windsor had preached rebellion, he was hanged on the spot. When fifty or sixty men and women in Taunton rose up in riot, twelve were sentenced to death and dispatched in different places for their executions to act as a warning. No priest or friar, between the age of sixteen and sixty, was permitted to carry any weapon save for his meat knife.

The first large revolt erupted at the beginning of October 1536, after three groups of royal councillors had descended upon Lincolnshire with a variety of purposes; one was set upon the suppression of the smaller monasteries, while the two others were concerned with gathering taxes and interrogating the clergy. This interference from London was considered to be too grievous to bear. In the market town of Louth a procession had gathered behind three silver crosses when a singing-man, Thomas Foster, cried out ‘Masters, step forth and let us follow the crosses this day: God knows whether ever we shall follow them again.’ The fear was of confiscation, and that evening a group of armed villagers arrived at the parish church in order to guard its treasures.

The news of these ‘rufflings’ in Louth soon spread, and bands of armed men under the leadership of one who called himself Captain Cobbler began to ride through the county to impede or stop the work of the royal commissioners; the common bells of the various parishes were rung in order to raise the people. The rebels were demanding that the king ‘must take no more money of the commons during his life and suppress no more abbeys’; they also wanted Thomas Cromwell and various ‘heretic’ bishops to be surrendered to them for condign punishment. The vicar of Louth added that the people were dismayed at ‘the putting down of holy days … and putting down of monasteries’ as well as ‘the new erroneous opinions touching Our Lady and purgatory’. Religion was at the heart of their protest.

They co-opted the support and leadership of the ‘gentlemen’, willing or unwilling, so that their revolt could have a more legitimate air. Yet when the chancellor of Lincoln was pulled from his horse and murdered by a mob, with the priests calling out ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, the affair became much more serious. The signal came for a general arming of the people, and beacons were lit along the south shore of the Humber. The people of Yorkshire saw the fires and understood the message. A large army of 10,000 men, made up of bands from different parts of Lincolnshire, met at Hambleton Hill. They gathered strength, and it was reported that 20,000 of them were advancing upon Lincoln itself.

The court had of course been informed of these events, and Henry called upon the duke of Norfolk to lead a force against the rebels. Such was his uncertainty that he brought his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, to Whitehall, and ordered the Tower of London to be reinforced. It was possible that the whole country might rise against him. Had he miscalculated the effects of his religious policy? Stephen Gardiner, then bishop of Winchester, recalled at a later date that ‘when the tumult was in the north, in the time of King Henry VIII, I am sure the king was determined to have given over the supremacy again to the pope, but the hour was not then come’. Various reports now reached Cromwell and the king. The apprentices were leaving their masters. The towns were defenceless. The tenants were rising against their lords. There were 40,000 men on the march. The king gathered a group of fifteen councillors around him.

When the rebels arrived in Lincoln, the gentlemen were lodged in the cathedral close; the chapter-house became their meeting place. By now the king’s men had mustered many horsemen, and royal forces had gathered at Nottingham, Huntingdon and Stamford. The rebels were also intent upon battle and demanded that the gentlemen should lead them forward. It would mark the beginning of a civil war, a religious war that might destroy the country. It was reported that ‘all the gentlemen and honest yeomen of the county were weary of this matter, and sorry for it, but durst not disclose their opinion to the commons for fear of their lives’. They were in a sense now being held hostage by the ‘churls’.

They sent a message to the king seeking pardon, and then walked from the cathedral to the fields beyond the town where the commons were gathered; they told them that they would not go forward with them but would wait for the king’s reply. The news bewildered the rebels, who now began to fear that all was in crisis. A large party of them slipped back to their villages, and it was reported that half of their number left Lincoln. A royal herald now arrived at the town, demanding surrender, and in the face of the king’s power the insurgents dispersed. In answer to a petition from the commons Henry had sent a defiant message. ‘How presumptuous then are you, the rude commons of one shire,’ he wrote with more vehemence than tact, ‘and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm … to find fault with your Prince?’ Clemency was offered to the largest number of them, and only a few local leaders were hanged. The abbots of Kirkstead and of Barlings were also executed for their part in fomenting the troubles. The rebellion had lasted a fortnight.

But if the rebellion in Lincolnshire was over, it was merely a prelude to a much larger and more dangerous movement elsewhere. ‘This matter hangeth yet like a fever,’ an official wrote to Cromwell ‘one day good, one day bad.’ The men of Yorkshire had seen the beacons beside the Humber and eagerly took up the standard of revolt. If they had not risen in Lincolnshire, a royal commissioner told Cromwell later, they would not have risen in the north. The revolt in the East Riding was essentially a northern drift of the original rebellion, but it took a more organized form. The monasteries had played an important part in the life of Yorkshire, and the suppression of the smaller of them had been widely denounced.

The rebellion under the nominal leadership of Robert Aske, a gentleman, was begun by the bells of Beverley; a proclamation was made to the effect that all should swear an oath to maintain God, the king, the commons and the holy Church. The bishops and the nobles were of course omitted, because it was widely believed that their ‘wicked counsels’ had misled the sovereign. The king, and the common people, and the Church, were deemed to be the bedrock of England. In any case nothing could touch Henry adversely; that would be treason.

It was known as ‘the Pilgrimage of Grace’. Its token was a badge or banner depicting the five wounds of Christ, the holy wounds inflicted at the time of the crucifixion. It is perhaps sufficient indication that the rebels were in large part engaged in a religious protest. Their demands included the return of the ‘old faith’ and the restoration of the monasteries; another condition, interestingly enough, was that ‘the Lady Mary may be made legitimate and the former statute [of her illegitimacy] therein annulled’. So Mary was seen as the unofficial representative of the orthodox Catholic cause.

When the bells rang backwards at Beverley the people flocked into the fields and under Aske’s direction they agreed to meet fully armed at West Wood Green; the whole county was stirred and Aske published a declaration obliging ‘every man to be true to the king’s issue, and the noble blood, and preserve the Church of God from spoiling’. Lord Darcy, the king’s steward in Yorkshire, was informed of certain ‘light heads’ stirring up rebellion in Northumberland, Dent, Sedbergh and Wensleydale; he rode at once to Pontefract Castle and dispatched his son to the court at Whitehall. The rebellions in the North Riding and County Durham were guided by Captain Poverty, a principle rather than a person; it seems likely that the men of these areas, as well as Cumberland and Westmorland, were animated by agrarian and economic concerns as much as matters of religion. In Cumberland the four ‘captains’ – Faith, Poverty, Pity and Charity – marched in solemn procession around the church at Burgh before hearing Mass there.

Robert Aske’s pilgrims were by the middle of October intent upon marching to York. Others had been drawn off to besiege Hull, a trade rival to Beverley, which quickly fell without a fight. Darcy wrote to the king asking for money and weapons to save the king’s treasure in York, where the citizens were ‘lightly disposed’. On 15 October Aske led 20,000 men to the gates of the city and issued a proclamation in which he stated that ‘evil disposed persons’ about the king had been responsible for innovations ‘contrary to the faith of God’; they also intended to ‘spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. This was a reference to the suppression of the smaller monasteries and to fears about the parish churches; but it also bears some relation to the burden of taxation levied on the people.

The lord mayor of York opened the gates, and Aske entered with his men; the great requirement was order, and it was decreed that the rebels or ‘pilgrims’ should pay twopence for any meal they consumed. Aske brought with him a petition to be sent to the king. This repeated all the earlier complaints and discontents, of which ‘the suppression of so many religious houses’ came first. It also denounced Thomas Cromwell and many bishops ‘who have subverted the faith of Christ’. On the door of York Minster Aske set up an order for ‘the religious persons to enter into their houses again’. Many small monasteries had been established in and around the city. The people escorted the monks by torchlight back to their old homes with much cheering and rejoicing. Wherever they were restored ‘though it were never so late they sang matins the same night’.

The Yorkshire rebels had been sadly disappointed by the failure of the Lincolnshire men, but they were now acting in a far more disciplined and determined manner. They had also gathered the willing or unwilling support of the gentry of the county, to whom they administered an oath stating that ‘you shall not enter into this our pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth but only for the love you bear unto Almighty God his faith and to the Holy Church militant and the maintenance thereof, to the preservation of the king’s person and his issue, to the purifying of the nobility, and to expel all villein blood and evil counsellors’. The dispersal of all those of ‘villein blood’ was another sign of anxiety; it was believed that the traditional social order, and the respect for social degree, were being fatally undermined. The gentry and commons alike were deeply conservative. Aske and his followers seem to have genuinely believed that they were acting on behalf of the king, and that he would in the end thank them for their endeavours.

Aske now marched to Pontefract Castle with only 300 men. He sent in a letter to the lords gathered there that they must surrender or be threatened with an assault; he knew well enough that thousands of his men were not far behind. Darcy decided to treat with him and invited Aske to enter the state chamber where he might debate the grievances of the pilgrims with the archbishop of York and others. Aske stood in front of these great lords and explained to them that ‘first, the lords spiritual had not done their duty’. Two days later Darcy surrendered the castle. It was believed by Henry, and by others, that he had failed in his responsibilities.

The revolt had already spread beyond the bounds of Yorkshire into Cumberland and Westmorland, Durham and Northumberland; or rather it would be more exact to say that existing turmoil and suspicion were exacerbated by the events in the East Riding. Berwick and Newcastle held out for the king, as did the royal castles at Skipton and Scarborough. There was no general campaign, and only a few skirmishes; a large number of people had been mobilized with uncertain consequences.

A royal herald had arrived at Pontefract Castle and was taken to Robert Aske; the herald described him as ‘keeping his port and countenance as though he had been a great prince’. The king’s proclamation was given to him, but it seems to have contained nothing but high words. Then the report came that a royal army, under the earl of Shrewsbury, had gathered just 12 miles south of Doncaster; the soldiers were 25 miles from Pontefract Castle. It was agreed that Aske and his men should move down to the Don and oppose their crossing. It was also proposed that the commons should bear with them into any battle the sacred banner of St Cuthbert, the patron saint of the north. Other bands of armed men now joined Aske in Pontefract and the whole area was in arms.

As the rebels approached Doncaster, the royal herald arrived with a message from the earl of Shrewsbury. He said that the blood of a civil war must be averted, and suggested that ‘four of the discreetest men of the north parts’ should come to Doncaster and explain to the lords assembled there the reasons for their rising. There ensued much debate between Aske and his colleagues. If they failed in battle with the king’s men, their cause would be lost irrevocably. If they won the fight a religious war would ensue, fought largely in the south. Yet this was their best opportunity. The royal army was small and might easily be defeated, leaving the road open to London. The rebels did not know that the king’s men were in disarray and were not sure of the strength or the position of their enemy. But Aske was no Napoleon or Cromwell; he hesitated, and chose the safer option. The lords and the rebels would meet in a chosen place.

The men of Yorkshire and Durham marched towards Doncaster, the priests and monks moving along the lines with words and prayers of encouragement; they proceeded behind the banner of Cuthbert and sang a marching song:

God that rights all

Redress now shall

And what is thrall

Again make free …

They chose four delegates, who proceeded to the royal camp, where Shrewsbury had been joined by the duke of Norfolk and other grandees. The delegates had memorized their articles of complaint, about maintaining the old faith and preserving the ancient liberties of the Church, which Norfolk wrote down. It was then agreed that a conference of approximately thirty on each side would meet on Doncaster bridge, where they would discuss all of these matters. The details of their debate are not known, but it is possible that Norfolk intimated that he took their part in religious matters; he was known to be orthodox in his attachment to the old faith.

A truce was then agreed, whereby the pilgrims agreed to disperse on condition that all their complaints were put before the king. Henry himself was furious that Norfolk had come to terms with what he considered to be pernicious rebels; he had wanted them to be destroyed by the royal army. Yet the advantage now lay on his side. The pilgrims were hardly likely to rise again. He now had the indisputable benefit of time to wear down any opposition. Aske and his men continued to believe that the king would gratefully accept their proposals; once the evil counsels of Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer were removed he would see the light once more.

On 2 November general pardons were issued for all rebels dwelling north of Doncaster, with the exception of Robert Aske and nine other instigators of the revolt. In a sermon at St Paul’s Cross, on the previous Sunday, Hugh Latimer had preached about those who wore ‘the Cross and the Wounds before and behind’ in order to ‘deceive the poor ignorant people and bring them to fight against both the King, the Church and the Commonwealth’.

When Norfolk and the other negotiators came into the king’s presence at Windsor he was at first in a furious rage against them for sparing the blood of traitors; eventually he had calmed himself enough to write down his responses to the complaints of the pilgrims. ‘First,’ he wrote, ‘as touching the maintenance of the Faith, the terms be so general, that hard they be to be answered.’ Yet he took advantage of their generality to protest that he, more than any other king, had preserved the purity of the true faith. He defied them and offered no hint of retreat. ‘Wherefore,’ he warned them, ‘henceforth remember better the duties of subjects to your king and sovereign lord, and meddle no more of those nor such like things as you have nothing to do in.’ Yet a day’s reflection convinced him that it was better to temporize with, rather than to confront, the men of Yorkshire. They were still in arms, and the ‘wild men’ of the far north were ready to join them.

The king sent a message to Lord Darcy, suggesting that by some stratagem he should kidnap or kill Aske; Darcy refused on the grounds that it was against his honour to ‘betray or disserve any living man’. It was a bold reply, but a foolish one. His loyalties were already highly suspect and he was believed to side with those of the old faith. It was alleged that he had surrendered Pontefract Castle too easily. The king suspected that many of the northern gentry were covertly engaged in rebellion, and he reacted accordingly. It was reported by two witnesses that Darcy, on hearing the news of the Lincolnshire rebellion, had said: ‘Ah, they are up in Lincolnshire. God speed them well. I would they had done this three years past, for the world should have been better than it is.’ His reckoning would soon come.

Rumours of disturbances and meetings were still coming from the northern counties; more alarming, from the court’s perspective, was the news that copies of the pilgrims’ petition were circulating in London. Aske and his men met at York and at Pontefract. Henry ordered Norfolk to return to the north where he was to demand the outright submission of the rebels; when the duke informed him that such a favourable resolution was impossible, the king grew very angry. His wrath was directed at Norfolk as much as the rebels themselves; he believed the duke to be weak and vacillating, and even half suspected him of siding with the men of the north. Yet he knew that their threat remained. He promised a free pardon, and even a meeting of parliament at York to consider their demands; he was playing for time, secretly preparing an army to defeat them in the field.

Norfolk met Aske and his colleagues once more. He agreed that the king had been misled by Cromwell and the witch, Boleyn; the ‘pilgrimage’ had shown him the right path after their crooked dealings; but the monarch could not be seen to grant petitions that were exerted by force. If the pilgrims dispersed peacefully, he would consider all their requests sympathetically. On the question of the suppressed monasteries, Norfolk stated that they would be restored until the meeting of the next parliament, where their fate would be decided. This was in fact a lie, but Henry had already made it clear that he could promise anything. The rebels were also offered a free pardon. This was enough. Aske rode to Pontefract and convinced the assembled commons that they had achieved their aims. He tore off the badge of the Five Wounds he was wearing and declared that he was no longer a captain of rebels. The revolt was at an end.

Yet deceit and dissembling were still the customs of the day. On Friday 15 December the king sent a message to Robert Aske by means of one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber. He wrote that he had a great desire to meet Aske, to whom he had just offered a free pardon, and to speak frankly about the cause and course of the rebellion. Aske welcomed the opportunity of exonerating himself. As soon as Aske entered the royal presence the king rose up and threw his arms around him. ‘Be you welcome, my good Aske; it is my wish that here, before my council, you ask what you desire and I will grant it.’

‘Sir, your majesty allows yourself to be governed by a tyrant named Cromwell. Everyone knows that if it had not been for him the 7,000 poor priests I have in my company would not be ruined wanderers as they are now.’

The king then gave the rebel a jacket of crimson satin and asked him to prepare a history of the previous few months. It must have seemed to Aske that the king was in implicit agreement with him on the important matters of religion. But Henry was deceiving him. He had no intention of halting or reversing the suppression of the monasteries; he had no intention of repealing any of the religious statutes in force; and he would never hold a parliament in York. Yet Aske could still prove useful. Rumours of more disturbances in the north had reached the council; the king asked Aske to confirm his newfound loyalty by helping to suppress them. Henry had indeed cause for alarm. Reports of new risings in Northumberland had been received. Bills had been set up on the doors of churches. ‘Commons, keep well your harness. Trust you no gentleman. Rise all at once. God shall be your governor and I shall be your captain.’

One of these captains now rode out. Sir Francis Bigod came from a great northern family, whose castle was 3 miles north of Whitby. But he was also a debt-ridden scholar who protested that he was ‘held in great suspect and jealousy because of his learning’. He had witnessed the events of the ‘pilgrimage’ and did not trust the promises of the king. He is perhaps best considered as an old-fashioned Lollard, and in particular he detested the monastic system; yet he feared for the northern lands and wished to protect them. He may also have had rebellion in his blood; his ancestors had formerly fought Henry I and Edward III.

Bigod addressed a crowd on the grievances of the north, and many of them called back to him: ‘Forward now or else never!’ It was determined that Hull and Scarborough should he held by the rebels until a parliament was assembled at York, but Bigod’s followers were repulsed in both places. Thomas Cromwell sent an observer to the north who wrote back to him: ‘I assure your lordship the people be very fickle, and methinks in a marvellous strange case and perplexity; for they stare and look for things, and fain would have what they cannot tell what.’

So this belated wave of rebellions failed in its purpose. The local gentry, keen to display their loyalty to the king, mustered their troops of followers. The duke of Norfolk raised an army of 4,000 men, most of whom had previously ridden with Robert Aske; they were eager now to atone for their previous faults. The rebels were hunted down, ambushed and slain. A group of them attempted an assault on Carlisle, but they were beaten back and captured. Norfolk also issued a proclamation that commanded all rebels to come to Carlisle where they must submit to the royal mercy. So the ‘poor caitiffs’, as they were called, duly made their pleas. ‘I came out for fear of my life.’ ‘I came forth for fear of loss of all my goods.’ ‘I came forth for fear of burning of my house and destroying of my wife and children.’

Yet there was no way of mitigating the wrath of the king. He ordered the duke of Norfolk to ‘cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of the inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet … as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter; which we require you to do, without any pity or respect’. In a further twist of malign fate it was decreed that certain prisoners should be tried by juries made up of their own relations; the uncle might agree to a sentence of death upon a nephew and then see his head impaled upon a stake. Many of the rebels were hanged in their home villages, from the trees in their own gardens, as a memorial of their treason. Others were hanged in chains. The king had demanded the most severe retribution as a warning to future generations.

The brutality, and the subsequent terror, worked. There were no more rumours and whispers of revolt. There were no more complaints about the suppression of the monasteries. The people had fallen silent. The leaders of the revolt had already been dispatched to London and were lodged in the Tower. Lord Darcy was brought to trial in Westminster Hall for treason, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. Robert Aske, despite the king’s previous hospitality, was tried and found guilty. He was hanged at York.

If the rebels had held together more tightly, and seized the initiative, they might have reached London and the court. They had failed to do so but, in the process, they had revealed a strong current of popular protest against the religious policies of the king and Cromwell. The majority of the people wished to maintain their parish churches in good order and were opposed to any innovation. They argued, for example, that the cura animarum or ‘care of souls’ should be returned to the pope. They denounced Luther and others whom they called heretics. Yet Henry had faced them down; by duplicity and cunning he had defeated their leaders. He had broken the promises made on his behalf by the duke of Norfolk. But he might have said with some justification – what other way to deal with traitors? And he had won. Cranmer wrote that the enemies of reform ‘now look humbled to the ground and oppose us less’. Henry could move forward with impunity.

10

The confiscation

Any monks or abbots complicit in the late rebellion were seized and executed, their houses surrendered to the king. The abbots of Kirkstead and Barlings, of Fountains and Jervaulx and Whalley, were all hanged; they were followed a year later by the abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester and Reading. This was merely the prelude to a more general confiscation. The fact that the king had prevailed over the Pilgrimage of Grace meant that he and Cromwell felt emboldened to continue, and to widen, their policy of suppression. Within three years the monasteries, the friaries, the priories and the nunneries would be gone.

Yet Henry still feared popular discontent. He described his method to the rulers of Scotland as they began their own policy of dissolution. He advised them to keep their intentions ‘very close and secret’ in order to thwart any delays from the clergy. He then suggested that commissioners be dispatched ‘as it were to put good order in the same’ but really ‘to get knowledge of all their abominations’. The Scottish leaders should consult among themselves on the distribution of the monastic lands ‘to their great profit and honour’. The monks and abbots should then be offered some financial settlement. This was indeed the policy he followed.

Some of the great abbots were first obliged to surrender their houses, signing a declaration that ‘they did profoundly consider that the manner and trade of living, which they and others of their pretended religion, had for a long time followed, consisted in some dumb ceremonies … by which they were blindly led, having no true knowledge of God’s laws’. This might charitably be called a voluntary surrender, although the threat of death or imprisonment lay behind it. These submissions were then followed by induced surrenders as one by one the greater monasteries fell. In the first eight months of 1538, for example, thirty-eight of them were appropriated by the Crown.

Cromwell’s agent at the priory of Lewes described ‘how we had to pull the whole down to the ground’. The vault on the right side of the high altar was the first to be destroyed, followed by the groined roof, walls and pillars of the church. ‘We brought from London,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen persons, three carpenters, two smiths, two plumbers, and one that keepeth the furnace.’ The furnace was used to melt down the lead stripped from the roof. Nothing went to waste. The pages of the books from the monastic libraries, once one of the glories of England, were employed to scour candlesticks or clean shoes; they also had another use since the pages could become ‘a common servant to every man, fast nailed up upon posts in all common houses of easement’. A house of easement was a latrine.

A young man who lived in the neighbourhood of Roche Abbey, in south Yorkshire, spoke to one of the workmen who were destroying the abbey church.

‘Did you,’ he asked, ‘think well of the religious persons and of the religion then used?’

‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘for I saw no cause to the contrary.’

‘Well, then how comes it to pass that you are so ready to destroy and spoil what you thought so well of?’

‘Might I not as well as others have some profit from the spoil of the abbey? For I saw all would away, and therefore I did as others did.’

There speaks the representative voice of the Englishman at a time of reformation.

The Carthusians were the most roughly handled, and in the summer of 1537 a list was drawn up detailing their fates under the headings of ‘there are departed’, ‘there are even at the point of death’ and ‘there are sick’. The Charterhouse at Smithfield was turned into a venue for wrestling matches, and the church became a warehouse for the king’s tents; the altars were turned into gaming tables.

As the certainty of suppression became more evident, the monasteries were eager to sell or to lease whatever property they possessed. At Bisham the monks sold their vestments in the chapter house while at a market set up in the cloister they brought their own cowls to sell.

Yet some provision was made for the lives of the monks themselves. At the priory of Castle Acre, for example, the religious were given a payment of £2 together with a small quarterly pension; this became general practice. As a result some monks were willing and even eager to go. ‘Thank God,’ said the former abbot of Beaulieu, ‘I am rid of my lewd monks.’ The former abbot of Sawtry revealed that ‘I was never out of debt when I was abbot’. Certain abbots became diocesan bishops and were more prosperous than ever; the prior of Sempringham became bishop of Lincoln, for example, and the abbot of Peterborough became the see’s bishop. The monks themselves often became the canons or prebendaries of the cathedrals.

Resistance was maintained by the brave or the foolish. When one monk at the Carthusian house of Hinton denied the royal supremacy, the others explained that he was a lunatic. The royal commissioners sometimes moved on from recalcitrant houses, leaving them isolated and unprotected until the commissioners returned on a future occasion. Yet sometimes the seizures were sudden and immediate. The monks at Evesham were at evensong in the choir when they were told to ‘make an end’.

Where did the spoils go? It had previously been proposed that the dissolution of the monasteries was for the higher good of the nation. The incomes of the various priories would be spent on colleges and hospitals and schools ‘whereby God’s work might the better be set forth, children brought up in learning, clerks nourished in the universities, old servants decayed to have livings, almshouses for poor folk to be sustained in, readers of Greek, Hebrew and Latin to have good stipends, daily alms to be ministered, mending of highways …’ It never happened. The only deity worshipped was that of Mammon.

It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory. This was of immense benefit to the Crown, and represents the largest transfer of land ownership since the time of the Norman conquest.

The greater parts of the monastic lands were sold to the highest bidder or the highest briber; many went to the local gentry or to newly rich merchants who were eager to secure their status in a society based solidly on land ownership. It was a way of binding the rising families both to the cause of the reformation and to the Tudor dynasty. City corporations sometimes made purchases, as did syndicates of investors that included doctors and lawyers. The parlours of successful men were hung with altar-cloths, their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets. The once sacred chalices and patens were now in secular use. It is reported that, in Berwick, a baptismal font was used as a basin ‘in which they did steep their beef and salt fish’.

Many of the monasteries and priories fell into the pockets of the courtiers. Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, for example, shared between them the lands and revenues of the wealthy Cluniac priories at Lewes in Sussex and at Castle Acre in Norfolk. Cromwell eventually appropriated the land and revenue of six religious houses, and was widely reputed to be (after the king) the richest man in England. The duke of Northumberland secured eighteen monastic properties, while the duke of Suffolk became master of thirty foundations. Cartloads of plate and jewels were taken to the royal treasury.

From the ruins of the plundered monasteries and abbeys arose new buildings. Sir William Paulet purchased Netley Abbey and built a fine residence from the remains of the church and cloisters; Sir Thomas Wriothesley fashioned a gatehouse in the nave of Titchfield Abbey, and Sir Edward Sharington turned a nunnery into a family house. It was reported at the time that a Lancashire gentleman, having purchased an abbey, ‘made a parlour of the chancel, a hall of the church and a kitchen of the steeple’. The steeple of Austin Friars, in London, was used to store coal. The Minories, an abbey of nuns of the order of St Clare, was turned into an armoury and St Mary Graces became a naval depot where great ovens were introduced for baking bread. The house of the Crutched Friars, in the street near Tower Hill which still bears the name, was changed into a glass manufactory. Other churches were converted into stables, cookhouses and taverns. The abbeys of Malmesbury and Osney became clothing factories.

Some of the great men of the realm openly asked for the spoils. Sir Richard Grenville, the marshal of Calais, wrote to Cromwell that ‘if I have not some piece of this suppressed land by purchase or gift of the king’s majesty I should stand out of the case of few men of worship of this realm’. He was, in other words, following the example of everyone else.

Much haggling and bargaining took place with the monks themselves. The abbot of Athelney was offered 100 marks, and another ecclesiastical post. He threw up his hands and declared that ‘I will fast three days on bread and water than take so little’. One monk tried to sell his cell door for two shillings, and said that it had cost more than five shillings. So within three years the life of ten centuries was utterly destroyed.

It was perhaps a saving grace that eight cathedral churches, once staffed by monks and nuns, were now turned into secular cathedrals; the most important cathedrals in England became Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, Ely, Norwich, Worcester, Durham and Carlisle. Only the monastic cathedral of Coventry was torn down. The others remained as centres of music and sung liturgy in a reformed world that became increasingly wary of their power.

It is difficult to calculate the effect of the dissolution on the educational life of the country. Some effort was made to replace religious with secular training. There had been a rise in the number of educational foundations in the decades around 1500, but the appetite for formal education was by no means diverted or diminished. Henry and his ministers, for example, endowed twelve permanent grammar schools in the cathedral cities, and it can be said with some certainty that the sixteenth century remained the age of the grammar school. The richer tradesmen endowed schools in their own towns, and borough institutions took the place of monastic institutions. Christ’s Hospital was established, for example, within the former Greyfriars Convent in London.

The leading reformer, Hugh Latimer, urged upon the clergy of Winchester their duty to educate children in the learning of English, while Cranmer proposed a collegiate foundation at Canterbury to take the place of the monastic cathedral school. At a later date, the archbishop of York declared the foundation of schools to be ‘so good and godly a purpose’. Yet the old faith could still prove useful: some monks began life again as schoolmasters in village or town; chapels became schoolrooms.

Some of the last monasteries to be dissolved were those of Colchester, Glastonbury and Reading, where the abbots were denounced as seditious. The abbot of Glastonbury was accused of concealing or taking away the treasures of his house and is reported to have said that ‘the king shall never have my house but against my will and against my heart’. More seriously, perhaps, he is reported to have previously expressed support for the northern rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He declared them to be ‘good men’ and ‘great crackers’. It was also discovered that he, together with the abbot of Reading, had supplied the pilgrims with money. When the abbey itself was searched, gold and silver, vessels and ornaments, were found in walls, vaults and other ‘secret places’. The commissioners searched the abbot’s rooms and found there such suspicious items as papal bulls and arguments against the king’s divorce. He was questioned and his answers were deemed to be ‘cankered and traitorous’.

The abbot was charged and sentenced; he was dragged through the streets of Glastonbury before being taken to the conical hill known as Glastonbury Tor where he was hanged. His head was then placed on the abbey gate, and his quarters distributed through Somerset. So was dissolved one of the greatest of English shrines, supposedly the home of the Holy Grail and the last resting place of King Arthur. The abbots of Reading and Colchester suffered the same fate in their own towns.

The convents and friaries were the next to fall. Some 140 nunneries had been established in England, with perhaps 1,600 women, the majority of them belonging to the Benedictine order. It was much harder for a nun than a monk to make her way in the secular world; she could earn no obvious living, and as an unmarried woman would endure many more hardships in a society that considered marriage to be the only proper fate of the female. Nuns and monks were in any case still bound to their vows of chastity.

The nuns of Langley were according to the commissioners ‘all desirous to continue in religion’. The prioress ‘is of great age and impotent’ while ‘one other is in regard a fool’. Yet they were not spared. The nunneries were genuinely missed in their immediate neighbourhoods. They had become guest houses for the more important gentry. At the nunnery in Langley, for example, Lady Audeley used to attend church accompanied by twelve dogs. The convents had also offered a simple education for the daughters of the gentry, where they learned surgery, needlework, confectionery, writing and drawing. The great ages of female spirituality, evinced by such women as Dame Julian of Norwich, now also came to an end.

In the autumn of 1538 the friaries were destroyed. They were all situated within or close to towns, the friars themselves devoted to an active ministry of preaching in the world; 200 of them were in existence, and the number of friars can be estimated at 1,800. They had very little wealth or treasure, but it was considered fitting that they should also submit to the king’s authority. In many cases their surrender took the form of a confession to unnamed ‘crimes and vices’. Particular charges were sometimes raised against them. They were accused of dabbling in necromancy. The community of Austin Friars in London was compared to a herd of wild beasts in Sherwood Forest, and it was reported that they sat in the beer-house from six in the morning until ten at night ‘like drunken Flemings’. But in truth the principal offence of the friars was their resistance to reform. The Observant friars, in particular, had been vociferous in the cause of Katherine of Aragon. Some of the friars changed their clothes and became secular priests, while others went back into the world. Thomas Cromwell came across one friar, however, who was still wearing his old habit. ‘If I hear by one o’clock that this apparel be not changed,’ he warned him, ‘you will be hanged immediately for example to all others.’

While the monasteries were suppressed, their shrines and relics were destroyed. The ‘rood of grace’ at Boxley Abbey, in Kent, was one such holy image, which was also known, to the men of the new faith, as the Dagon of Ashdod or the Babylonish Bel. It was a wooden crucifix upon which the eyes and the head of Jesus sometimes moved; on some occasions the whole body on the cross trembled to express the reception of prayers. Many offerings were of course made to such a miraculous figure. A man named Partridge suspected a fraud and, laying hands on the rood, exposed a number of springs that had made the motions. It was brought to London, and pieces of it were tossed to the crowd outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

In the summer of 1537 the cult statue of Our Lady of Worcester was stripped of its clothes and jewels, to reveal that it was a doll-like effigy of an early medieval bishop. The images of the Virgin were taken down from shrines in Ipswich, Walsingham and Caversham; they were carried in carts to Smithfield and burned. The blood of Hailes, popularly believed to be the blood of Christ, was revealed to be a mixture of honey and saffron. The bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Shaxton, urged the destruction of all ‘stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochets [vestments], rotten girdles, pyld [threadbare] purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbets of wood under the name of parcels of the holy cross …’ It was soon decreed that there must be no more ‘kissing or licking’ of supposed holy images.

These were only preliminaries to the greatest act of destruction, or desecration, in English history. The shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury was probably the richest in the world. The least costly of its materials was pure gold, and Erasmus once described how ‘every part glistened, shone and sparkled with rare and very large jewels, some of them exceeding the size of a goose’s egg’. It was a treasure house of devotion, a bright worker of wonders and miracles. This was now dismantled, with the jewels and gold packed into wooden chests before being transported to London in twenty-six ox-wagons. One great ruby donated to the saint by a king of France, Louis VII, was fashioned into a ring that Henry wore on his thumb.

The saint himself was demoted and was only to be known as Bishop Becket; all of his images were removed from the churches and his festival day was no longer observed. He was tried in his absence, as it were, and was attainted of treason. He had not been a martyr but a traitor to his prince. It was in the king’s gift, therefore, to make and unmake saints. The bones of Becket were disinterred and burned on a fire lit in the middle of the city; the ashes were then discharged into the air from a cannon. It was at this moment that the pope decided to publish his Bill of Deposition against the English king, deeming him to be excommunicate and releasing his people from the duty of obeying him. It was of no practical consequence.

This demolition of holy sites did encourage, in the more profane sort, a tendency to ridicule and scoff at all the old certainties. It was said that ‘if our lady were here on earth, I would no more fear to meddle with her than with a common whore’. When a priest raised the sacred host, during the Mass, one of the parishioners held up a small dog. Some townspeople of Rye were reported as saying that ‘the mass was of a juggler’s making and a juggling cast it was’ and that ‘they would rather have a dog to sing to them than a priest’.

The dissolution of the friaries was followed by the burning of a friar. John Forrest, an Observant friar, had been imprisoned four years before on the charge of denying royal supremacy. On 22 May 1538, a cradle of chains was placed above a pile of wood in Smithfield. Upon the pyre would soon be placed the desecrated image of a saint, known as Darvel Gadarn, that had been esteemed by the people of North Wales. The image was that of a military saint, with a sword and spear. It was said that those who made offerings of money or animals to the wooden statue would be snatched from hell itself by the saint. It was also said that the image could set alight a forest. Now Darvel himself would erupt in flames.

The ceremony of execution itself was typical. Forrest was dragged on a hurdle from Newgate to Smithfield, where a crowd of 10,000 were in attendance. The bishop chosen to read the sermon was Hugh Latimer, who had written to Thomas Cromwell in high spirits that ‘if it be your pleasure that I shall play the fool after my customary manner when Forrest shall suffer, I would wish that my stage stood near to Forrest’. So his pulpit was placed next to the scaffold, from which height he preached for three hours. When he exhorted the friar to repent Forrest replied in a loud voice that ‘if an angel should come down from heaven and show me any other thing than that I had believed all my lifetime, I would not believe him’.

‘Oh,’ Latimer replied, ‘what errors has the pope introduced into the Church! And in order that you may the better understand this, you shall presently see one of his idolatrous images, by which the people of Wales have long since been deceived.’ On a signal from Cromwell eight men carried the image of Darvel Gadarn into the open space, eliciting a great yell from the citizens, and then the three executioners continued the comedy by tying it with ropes and chains to prevent its escape.

‘My lord bishop,’ Cromwell called out, pointing to Forrest, ‘I think you strive in vain with this stubborn one. It would be better to burn him.’ He turned to the soldiers. ‘Take him off at once.’

He was led to the cradle of chains and hoisted into the air. The wooden image, and other piles of wood, were placed beneath him and lit with torches.

The friar was suspended above the fire, and when he began to feel the flames he beat his breast and called out ‘Domine miserere me’ – ‘Lord have mercy on me’. He took two hours to die. In his mortal agony he clutched at a ladder to swing himself out of the blaze, but he did not succeed. The chronicler Edward Hall, remarked without pity that ‘so impatiently he took his death as never any man that puts his trust in God’. A ballad was soon circulating through the streets of London:

But now may we see,

What gods they be

Even puppets, maumets and elves;

Throw them down thrice

They cannot rise

Not once, to help themselves.

A few hours later the holy rood or crucifix close to the church of St Margaret Pattens, in Rood Lane, was attacked and demolished. It would not be so easy to remove or destroy the tenets of the old faith.

11

The old fashion

At the beginning of 1537 the bishops were ordered to draw up a statement of belief that would broadly fit Henry’s scheme for a middle way between orthodoxy and reform; the bishops themselves were divided on almost every matter under discussion, with the result that they produced what the bishop of Winchester called ‘a common storehouse, where every man laid up in store such ware as he liked’. Some said that there were three sacraments, others insisted that there were seven, and yet others believed that there were one hundred. They sat at a table covered with a carpet, while their priestly advisers stood behind them. Once they had agreed tentatively on a closing statement, they dispersed with alacrity; the plague had struck London, and the dead were lying close to the doors of Lambeth Palace.

The king went through the document and made copious emendations to the text. Thomas Cranmer then supervised the king’s work and was bold enough to correct his sense and his grammar. He told his sovereign that one word ‘obscureth the sentence and is superfluous’ and reminded him that ‘the preter tense may not conveniently be joined with the present tense’. It seems that Henry did not take offence at the archbishop’s presumption.

It was entitled The Institution of a Christian Man but it became better known as The Bishops’ Book. It was essentially a series of popular homilies to be preached from the pulpit, and was close enough to the injunctions of the old faith to be accepted and acceptable. The major difference of belief lay in the controversy between faith and works; those of a Lutheran persuasion believed that the only hope of human redemption reposed in the faith of Christ; all mankind was utterly corrupt, but Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross was sufficient to save the erring soul. If the individual placed all his or her faith and hope in Christ he or she would be saved. No work or act made any difference. It was a question of being reborn by God’s act of grace as if by a lightning flash, with the sinner then becoming utterly reliant upon divine mercy. Those who followed the tenets of the old Church profoundly disagreed with this doctrine, believing that acts of charity and good works were essential for salvation; they also reinforced the fervent belief that the administration of the seven sacraments by the Church was part of the process of redemption.

In The Bishops’ Book the issue was avoided in what may be called an act of creative ambiguity. In particular the king’s revision deleted and amended passages that Cranmer had written on justification by faith alone. Where Cranmer had stated that the believer became God’s ‘own son through adoption and faith’ Henry added the words ‘as long as I persevere in His precepts and laws’. The final text emphasized faith without endorsing Lutheran doctrine while at the same time reducing the role of good works without repudiating Catholic beliefs. But the book also supported such ancient practices as the bearing of candles at Candlemas and the hallowing of the font. Henry also demanded that the section on the three sacraments should be altered to include the missing four. It seems likely that, for most people, there was no reason to doubt that the ‘old ways’ would continue indefinitely.

It was said by a magistrate from Rainham in Kent that the new book ‘alloweth all the old fashion and putteth all the knaves of the New Learning to silence so that they dare not say a word’. Cranmer rebuked the magistrate by saying that ‘if men will indifferently read those late declarations, they shall well perceive that purgatory, pilgrimages, praying to saints, images, holy bread, holy water, holy days, merits, works, ceremony, and such other be not restored to their late accustomed abuses’. The Bishops’ Book, therefore, was open to interpretation.

In a set of injunctions, published in the following year, an English Bible was introduced to the people. Thomas Cromwell decreed that within a period of two years every church must possess and display a copy of the Bible in the native tongue; it was to be chained in an open place, where anyone could consult it. The edition used was that of Miles Coverdale, published in 1535 and essentially a reworking of Tyndale’s original. Thus the man who had been denounced as a heretic, and whose translation had been burned by royal decree eleven years before, was now the unheralded and unsung scribe of the new English faith. It was also ordered that one book comprising the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Creed and the Ten Commandments was to be set upon a table in the church where all might read it; this also was to be in the English tongue.

The translation has been described as one of the most significant moments in the history of reformation. It immediately identified the English Bible with the movement of religious change, and thus helped to associate what would become the Protestant faith with the English identity. In the seventeenth century, in particular, cultural history also became religious history. The career of Oliver Cromwell, for example, cannot be understood without a proper apprehension of the English translation of the Scriptures; it is perhaps worth remarking that Oliver Cromwell was a distant relation, through the marriage of his great-grandfather, to Thomas Cromwell. The translated Bible also introduced into England a biblical culture of the word, as opposed to the predominantly visual culture of the later medieval world; this refashioned culture was then to find its fruits in Milton and in Bunyan, in Blake and in Tennyson.

The English Bible also helped to fashion a language of devotion. Coverdale was the first to introduce such phrases as ‘loving kindness’ and ‘tender mercy’. A tract of the time declared that ‘Englishmen have now in hand, in every church and place, the Holy Bible in their mother tongue’. It was said that the voice of God was English. A seventeenth-century historian, William Strype, wrote that ‘everybody that could bought the book, or busily read it, or got others to read it to them’. It was read aloud, in St Paul’s Cathedral, to crowds who had gathered to listen. The king’s men also hoped that the reading of the Bible would inculcate obedience to the lawful authorities, except that obedience was now to the king rather than to the pope.

In the same set of injunctions Thomas Cromwell decreed that every parson or vicar ‘should keep one book or register, wherein he shall write the day and year of every wedding, christening and burying’. The parish register has been kept ever since, and must mark one of the most notable innovations of the reformed faith. It was also decreed that the images of the saints were no longer to be regarded as holy, and that the lights and candles placed before them should be removed. The Catholic Church of England was to be cleansed and renovated, but not overturned.

Cromwell also ordered the clergy to keep silent on matters of biblical interpretation, not to be ‘babblers nor praters, arguers nor disputers thereof; nor to presume that they know therein that they know not’. It was of the utmost importance to be quiet on matters of doctrine for fear of provoking more discord and discontent in a country that had narrowly avoided a damaging religious war.

The deliberate ambiguity of the religious reforms was itself enough to reduce the possibility of any endorsement of Lutheranism. In the summer of 1538 some Lutherans arrived from Germany to explore the possibility of a union on matters of faith; they had been lured to London by the king in the belief that it might be possible to reach an agreement with German leaders, such as the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse, in opposition to the pope and the emperor. One problem, however, could not be removed. One of Henry’s own negotiators, Robert Barnes, had once told Luther himself that ‘my king does not care about religion’. And so it seemed.

The German embassy of three got precisely nowhere. They were lodged in poor accommodation and complained that ‘multitudes of rats were running in their chambers day and night, which is no small disquietness, and their kitchen was so near the parlour that the smell was offensive to all that came to them’; one of them fell seriously ill. On matters of faith the king was polite but unmoving; they wished to extirpate such abuses as private Masses and the enforced celibacy of the clergy, but Henry could not be persuaded. They stayed for almost five months before returning with relief to Germany. The Lutheran reformer Melanchthon sent a private letter to Cranmer deploring the maintenance of popish superstition.

From Germany, too, arrived the first Anabaptists; they believed that infant baptism is not New Testament baptism, and that they were the true elect of God who did not require any external authority. All goods (including wives) should be held in common, in preparation for an imminent Second Coming. In a proclamation of November 1538, they were ordered by the king to leave the realm; those who remained were persecuted and burned.

The king’s distaste for anyone tainted with unorthodox doctrine became amply evident during proceedings in the same month against a schoolmaster, John Lambert, who was prosecuted for denying Christ’s presence in the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass. Henry himself presided at the heresy trial, dressed entirely in white silk as a token of purity; his guards also wore white. Cromwell wrote that ‘it was a wonder to see how princely … and how benignly his grace assayed to convert the miserable man, how strong and manifest reasons his highness alleged against him’.

The trial took place in the banqueting house of the palace at Westminster. ‘Ho, good fellow,’ the king began, ‘what is your name?’ He sat beneath a canopy with his lords on the left side and with his bishops on the right. Lambert had in fact used an alias to avoid official detection, and tried to explain this to the king. Henry stopped him with a voice of thunder. ‘I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.’ The trial, from Lambert’s point of view, was of course already lost:

‘Tell me plainly whether you say it is the body of Christ.’

‘It is not his body. I deny it.’

‘Mark well – for now you shall be condemned even by Christ’s own words. “Hoc est enim corpus meum.” This is my body.’

The interrogation lasted for five hours. ‘Will you live or die?’ the king asked the prisoner at the conclusion. ‘You have yet a free choice.’

‘I commit my soul to God and my body to the king’s mercy.’

‘That being the case, you must die. I will not be a patron to heretics.’

Six days later Lambert was executed at Smithfield. The flames took off his thighs and legs, but the guards lifted up his still living body with their halberds and thrust it into the fire. ‘None but Christ!’ he called out. ‘None but Christ!’ Then he expired.

A religious envoy also came from another quarter. An English cardinal, Reginald Pole, had been sent from Rome as a papal legate but, hearing of his mission, the king naturally refused him entry to the country; he also surrounded him with spies and assassins. Henry himself sent a letter to Charles V, in which he warned that the cardinal was eager to promote discord among nations; his disposition is ‘so cankered that from it can no good thing proceed, but weeping crocodile tears he will, if it be possible, pour forth the venom of his serpent nature’.

When the cardinal arrived in France Henry wrote to his ambassador there that ‘we would be very glad to have the said Pole trussed up and conveyed to Calais’; Pole himself was informed that 100,000 pieces of English gold would be given to the man who brought him to England dead or alive. He was not killed, but he returned to Rome with his mission thwarted.

The king also proceeded against the members of Pole’s family. ‘Pity it is,’ Cromwell wrote, ‘that the folly of one brainsick Pole, or to say better of one witless fool, should be the ruin of so great a family.’ Pole was one of a distinguished line that issued directly from the Plantagenet dynasty; his mother, Margaret Pole, the countess of Salisbury, was the daughter of the duke of Clarence who was popularly supposed to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower on the orders of Edward IV. Their lineage alone would have been enough to place the cardinal and his relatives under grave suspicion. The fact that they were of the old faith only increased the risks against them. They themselves were aware of their peril and made some effort to avoid one another in public for fear of supposed conspiracy. But they were undone by the open sedition of Reginald Pole.

The cardinal’s younger brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, was arrested and interrogated; he was of unstable temper and at the first sign of pressure he conceded. He revealed all that he knew of his family’s activities and perhaps embellished certain details. As a result another of his brothers, Henry, Lord Montague, was arrested together with his cousin, the marquis of Exeter. Geoffrey Pole then tried to suffocate himself with a cushion while incarcerated in the Tower. Margaret Pole herself was questioned and fiercely denied any imputations against her. ‘We have dealed with such an one,’ her interrogator said, ‘as men have not dealed with tofore; we may rather call her a strong and constant man than a woman.’ She was eventually imprisoned and taken to her death.

On coming to the scaffold she told the executioner that she would not lay her head upon the block, saying that she had received no trial. When she was forcibly held down the man, apparently not very experienced in his task, hacked away at her head and neck for several minutes. It was weary work but ultimately the head was off. On hearing the news of his mother’s death, Cardinal Pole declared that ‘I am now the son of a martyr’. He continued in a similar vein. ‘Let us be of good cheer,’ he said. ‘We have now one more patron in heaven.’

Geoffrey Pole testified that Lord Montague had said that the king ‘will one day die suddenly – his leg will kill him – and then we shall have jolly stirring’. Montague had also feared that, when the world ‘came to stripes’, there would be ‘a lack of honest men’. He said that ‘I trust to have a fair day upon those knaves that rule about the king; and I trust to see a merry world one day’. A ‘merry world’ was a truism of the period, meaning whatever the speaker wished it to mean. There was much more to the same effect. It was also revealed that the Poles had stayed in contact with their brother overseas, and had even warned him that his life was in danger. It was professed at the time that this was a serious Catholic conspiracy to depose the king, but it looks like the isolated murmurings of a disaffected, if distinguished, family. Yet the king was not likely to overlook any sign of dissent to his religious policy. If the sovereign does not feel secure, then no one is secure. Montague and Exeter were duly condemned to death and hanged as traitors. Against their names in the register of the Order of the Garter was written ‘Vah, proditor!’ – ‘Oh, traitor!’ Exeter’s son, Edward Courtenay, was consigned to the Tower, where he remained for the next fifteen years. He was freed only when Mary became sovereign. This was the way to deal with potential claimants to the throne.

Yet Henry’s dynastic ambitions were already secure. By the spring of 1537 Henry’s new wife was pregnant, and on 12 October gave birth to a healthy boy. The child was named Edward, since he had been born on the day dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. The line of kings would continue. Jane Seymour herself, however, became sick with puerperal fever, perhaps from an injury at the time of delivery, and died twelve days after giving birth. She was twenty-nine years old.

The period of court mourning lasted for almost three weeks, and on 12 November her body was laid in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The king ordered that 12,000 Masses should be said in the churches of London in order to intercede for her soul, a striking instance of Henry’s attachment to the beliefs and rituals of the old faith. The king wore purple, the colour of royal mourning; Lady Mary wore black with a white headdress, as a token of the fact that the queen had died in childbed. A man was arrested for repeating a prophecy, in the Bell Inn on Tower Hill, that the prince ‘should be as great a murderer as his father’ since he had already murdered his mother at his birth.

A macabre scene was enacted a few months later when some idlers were watching the funeral of a child in a London churchyard. A priest in their company found the demeanour of the mourners to be peculiar and, hastening over to them, he opened the shroud; there was no baby in the folds, but the image of a child made out of wax with two pins stuck through it. The death anticipated was said to be that of the infant prince, and the news of the magical funeral spread through the kingdom.

Elaborate precautions and regulations were in any case established within the royal nursery. No one could approach the cradle of the infant prince without a royal warrant in the king’s own hand. The baby’s food was to be tested in case of poison. His clothes were to be washed by his own servants, and no one else was allowed to touch them. All the rooms of the prince’s quarters had to be swept and scrubbed with soap three times a day. The fear of disease was always present for infants and small children. A charming cameo can be found, in the Royal Collection, of Henry with his arm around the infant boy; it is one of the few images that show the king as a natural human being. In the spring of the following year the king spent much time with his son ‘dallying with him in his arms … and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people’. For the next six years Lord Edward would be brought up, as he himself put it in his diary, ‘among the women’. This had also been the fate of his father.

Henry was soon in active pursuit of another wife. He told his ambassadors at the imperial court in Brussels that ‘we be daily instanted by our nobles and Council to use short expedition in the determination of our wife, for to get more increase of issue to the assurance of succession, and upon their admonitions of age coming fast on, and that the time slippeth and flyeth marvellously away, we be minded utterly to be within short space at a full resolution, one way or other, and no longer to lose time’. ‘Marvellously’ is an appropriately sixteenth-century word. ‘I marvel’ may mean ‘I wonder’ or ‘I am amazed’. So a short dialogue might be: ‘I marvel that …’; ‘I marvel that you marvel … ’

Although he was preparing himself for a fourth marriage, Henry never wholly forgot Jane Seymour. He made two subsequent journeys to her familial home, Wolf Hall, and in his will he ordained that ‘the bones and body of our true and loving wife Queen Jane’ be placed with his in the tomb. He himself might have been placed in it sooner than he intended. In the spring of 1538 the ulcers on his swollen legs became blocked, and it was said that ‘the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him’. It seems possible that a blood clot entered his lungs; for twelve days he lay immobile and scarcely able to breathe, his eyes and veins standing out with the protracted effort. Rumours spread that the king of England was dead, and arguments arose over the relative claims of Edward and Mary to the throne. Yet the fury of the fit eventually passed. Soon enough, he was recovered.

He began another phase of his royal building. He enlarged the palace at Hampton Court so that it eventually encompassed more than a thousand rooms and was the largest structure in England since the time of the Romans. In the autumn of 1538, too, he began work in Surrey on an architectural conceit or fantasy known as Nonsuch Palace, so named because there was none such like it in the entire kingdom. It was made up of turrets and towers, cupolas and battlements; the upper part was framed in timber and decorated with stucco panels and carved slates. The gardens were filled with statues and waterfalls, with images of birds and pyramids and cupids from which gushed water. It was fit for an extravagant and conceited king, but it was not completed in his lifetime. Henry would reign for only nine more years.

12

The body of Christ

At the beginning of 1539 fears emerged over the threat of invasion, encouraged by the papal edict against the king; the French king and the Spanish emperor were rumoured to be in alliance with the pope, while the king of Scotland, James V, promised to support them. ‘We will be’, one courtier wrote, ‘a morsel among choppers.’ It was said that 8,000 mercenaries were gathering in the Low Countries. A fleet of sixty-eight ships was sighted off Margate. This would be the first concerted attack since the time of the Norman invasion. Henry had been excommunicated but his enemies declared that the people were still in slavish obedience to a heretic king; one merchant wrote from London that they would all be taken ‘for Jews or infidels’ and could lawfully be enslaved by the enemy.

Henry reviewed his fleet, consisting of 150 ships, and ordered military musters to be summoned throughout the country; he then toured the more vulnerable areas along the south coast and ordered new fortifications. The fortresses along the border with Scotland were strengthened. The king’s ships left the Thames for Portsmouth. The building stone from the abandoned monasteries was employed to build defences. The privy council met daily in preparation for war. The bodyguard of the king were known as ‘gentlemen pensioners’; they wore velvetdoublets and coats complete with gold chains, and each gripped a large poleaxe in his right hand.

At the beginning of May thousands of men, from the age of sixteen to sixty, mustered whatever armour and weapons they possessed before marching from Mile End, the traditional meeting point of armed bands, into the city; the fields of Stepney and Bethnal Green ‘were covered with men and weapons’, with the battalions of pikes ‘like a great forest’. In the following month Thomas Cromwell staged a battle between two barges on the Thames; one was commanded by men dressed as the pope and his cardinals, while in the other stood figures representing the king and the court. The Vatican was of course overpowered and ditched into the river.

Henry himself was in a state of high anxiety. It was the one eventuality he had most feared. The French ambassador in London wrote in alarm to his court, begging to be relieved of his duties on the grounds that he feared the wrath of the king; he was ‘the most dangerous and cruel man in the world’, and seemed to be in such a state of fury that he had ‘neither reason nor understanding’. The ambassador professed to believe that the king might attack or even kill him in the course of an audience.

Yet the enterprise against England was prevented by quarrels between France and Spain. It is also likely that the spies of those nations had reported to their masters that there was little evidence of internal disaffection; the people would not rise up in arms against their king. No invading navy arrived, and the general alarm soon subsided. But the king knew very well that it would be unwise to stir up domestic discontent any further; he had pushed the people to the edge of their religious tolerance. He deemed it wise, therefore, to placate the conservative or orthodox faithful who comprised the majority of the population. In that spirit, too, he was following his own instincts.

Henry was clearly moving away from the path of religious reform. In a declaration for ‘unity of religion’, devised in the spring of 1539, the king blamed the indiscriminate reading of the English Bible for the incidence of ‘murmur, malice and malignity’ within the realm. He had hoped that the Scriptures would be read ‘with meekness’ but instead they had provoked rivalry and dissension. The people disputed ‘arrogantly’ in taverns and even in churches, angrily denouncing rival interpretations as heretical or papistical. The Bible should, in future, only be read in silence. The declaration was in fact never issued, and was replaced by a more formal proclamation.

Evidence of religious disputes can be found in the records of the church courts. Mrs Cicely Marshall of St Albans parish was accused of ‘despising holy bread and holy water’, while a fellow parishioner was blamed for ‘despising our Lady’. John Humfrey of St Giles, Cripplegate, was summoned for ‘speaking against the sacraments and ceremonies of the church’. A woman from the parish of St Nicholas in the Flesh Shambles was presented ‘for busy reasoning on the new learning, and not keeping the church’. Margaret Ambsworth of St Botolph without Aldgate was summoned ‘for instructing of maids, and being a great doctress’. Robert Plat and his wife ‘were great reasoners in scripture, saying they had it of the Spirit’. All of these people, and many more, were given the common name of ‘meddlers’.

A parliament was also summoned in the spring of 1539 to consider matters of religion. A contemporary reported that it was assembled to negotiate ‘a thorough unity and uniformity established for the reformation of the church of this realm’. Unity was not easily to be won.

Various opinions, for example, were maintained over the bread and the wine offered in the Mass. The orthodox Catholic faithful upheld the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the bread and wine became in actual fact the body and blood of Christ. This is a mystery of the faith. It is believed because it is impossible, and proof of the overwhelming power of God. Luther also believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, but denied that He was there ‘in substance’; his belief was in something that became known as consubstantiation or sacramental union, whereby the integrity of the bread and wine remain even while being transformed by the body and blood of Christ.

The more radical reformers, intent upon destroying priestly power and what were for them superstitious rituals, declared that the Eucharist was only a commemoration or remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice that had been performed once and for ever; it could not be endlessly rehearsed at the altar. ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ should therefore be translated as ‘This signifies my body’. Christ was in heaven; He was not on the earth, even at Mass.

Endless permutations could of course be devised between these three statements of belief. Thus one reformer declined to believe that the bread and wine are miraculously changed, but conceded that ‘the Body and Blood of Christ are truly received by faith’ when the worshipper partakes of them in perfect piety. This was known as ‘virtualism’. In an age when religion was the single most important aspect of social life, these debates were also matters of state. At the beginning of the parliamentary session a small committee was set up to examine all of the issues, the most tendentious being the question of the Blessed Sacrament.

The committee comprised four conservative and four reforming bishops, with Cromwell presiding as vicegerent in religious matters. Of course they could come to no shared conclusions, and Henry stepped forward. He allowed the conservative duke of Norfolk to present six simple questions to the House of Lords that were so framed as to yield only one possible answer. The result of their deliberations emerged in the document known as the Act of the Six Articles that clearly restated the orthodox position on such matters as confession and clerical celibacy. It was essentially a device to quell religious controversy and forge unity in matters of doctrine. It became known to those who detested it as ‘the whip with six strings’ or ‘the bloody act’.

The Six Articles were a strong rebuff to reformers such as Cranmer and Cromwell, and were a clear victory for the conservative faction. Transubstantiation was upheld in all but name, although Cranmer had finally managed to remove the term itself. But Henry had the last word; in his own hand he amended the draft of the Act so that the bread and wine were now ordained to be ‘none other substances but the substance of his foresaid natural body’. After Henry’s death Cranmer declared that ‘Christ is eaten with the heart. Eating with the mouth cannot give life. The righteous alone can eat the Body of Christ.’ But for the moment he was forced to remain silent.

At a later date he also recorded his opinion that the Act of the Six Articles ‘was so much against the truth, and common judgements both of divines and lawyers, that if the king’s majesty himself had not come personally into the parliament house, those laws had never passed’. Yet they seem to have been welcomed by the populace. The French ambassador wrote to his court that ‘the people show great joy at the king’s declaration touching the sacrament, being much more inclined to the old religion than to the new opinions’. The people were not even prepared to read their prayers in English. ‘How loath be our priests to teach the commandments,’ one reformer lamented, ‘the articles of faith and the pater noster, in English! Again how unwilling be the people to learn it! Yea, they jest at it calling it the new pater noster …’

The denial of transubstantiation was now to be punished by death in the fire, while the refusal to subscribe to the other five articles led to the forfeiture of all goods and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. It was the most severe religious law in English history. The articles were essentially the king’s declaration of faith. It was a faith shaped by the will of the ruler and by the power of punishment. It is reported that some 200 were arrested and held in prison; they had, in the phrase of the period, been ‘brought into trouble’. Some free spirits were not hindered. John Harridaunce, known as the inspired bricklayer of Whitechapel, was still preaching out of his window between nine and twelve at night, where he referred to the religious reformers as ‘setters forth of light’. When a neighbouring baker warned him that he was breaking the tenets of the Six Articles he replied that ‘it is fit for me to be burnt as for thee to bake a loaf’.

The duke of Norfolk remarked to his chaplain, ‘You see, we have hindered priests from having wives.’

‘And can your grace’, the chaplain replied, ‘prevent also men’s wives from having priests?’

Two bishops were forced to resign their sees as a result of the new measures; Hugh Latimer left Worcester and Nicholas Shaxton left Salisbury. Archbishop Cranmer was obliged to send his wife and children into exile. In the early summer the archbishop summoned a Scottish evangelical, Alexander Alesius, to Lambeth palace. ‘Happy man that you are,’ he said, ‘you can escape! Would that I were at liberty to do the same; truly my see would not hold me back.’ He then admitted that he had signed the decree when ‘compelled by fear’. The Lutherans of Germany were horrified by the Act, which they regarded as the end of religious reform in England. The king had shown his true colours. He was not in the least evangelical. He only wished to augment his revenues, with the treasures of the old Church, and to increase his power.

There was a significant epilogue to the passing of the Act. Thomas Cranmer, wrestling with his highly developed conscience, made a series of scholarly notes on the mistakes and misjudgements contained in the articles. His secretary, Ralph Morice, took a wherry from Lambeth to deliver the notebook to the king himself. On the south side of the river, at this moment, a bearbaiting was being held. The bear broke loose from its tormentors and plunged into the Thames, hotly pursued by the dogs.

All the passengers in the wherry, with the exception of Cranmer’s secretary, leaped into the water. The bear then clambered into the boat, at which point Morice lost his nerve and jumped overboard. All thought of the notebook left him in his desire to be rescued. When he finally reached land, however, he saw the book floating on the water. He called out to the bear-ward to retrieve it. But when the man took up the book, he handed it to a priest. The cleric saw immediately that these were notes against the Six Articles and accused Morice of treason. In the ensuing argument Morice foolishly confessed that the notes had been written by the archbishop of Canterbury himself. The priest refused to hand them back.

Morice now fell into a panic and in his distress called upon Thomas Cromwell. On the following morning Cromwell summoned the priest, who was about to hand the book to one of Cranmer’s enemies. Cromwell ‘took the book out of his hands, and threatened him severely for his presumption in meddling with a privy councillor’s book’. The story is an indication, if nothing else, of the fears and tensions within the court itself. Reports circulated at the time that Cranmer had been sent to the Tower and even that he had been executed. In the same period Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk had a furious quarrel at Cromwell’s house; the subject of the dispute is not known. Could it be that Cromwell himself was now no longer safe?

13

The fall

Henry had been seeking another wife ever since the death of Jane Seymour; another son was likely to guarantee the future of his dynasty. The wives of kings were generally considered to be little more than brood mares. Charles V had proposed the duchess of Milan to him, and the French court had suggested various other ladies for the dubious honour of obtaining his hand. He asked the French ambassador to convey eight of them to Calais, where he could inspect them all at once; the invitation was declined.

Yet Cromwell, favouring a union with the Protestant princes of northern Europe, took the part of Anne of Cleves. Her father, only recently dead, had been a reformer if not precisely a Lutheran; Anne’s older sister was already married to the elector of Saxony. They would be invaluable allies. Henry also feared the collaboration between the French king and the emperor, together with the pope, in any future enterprise against England. At that very moment Charles V was travelling from Spain into France. Henry needed friends.

It was whispered that Anne of Cleves was as modest as she was beautiful; a portrait of her, executed by Hans Holbein, was brought to England. The king gazed upon it and pronounced her to be eminently worthy of marriage. It was reported at the time that she spoke no language but German and that she had no ear for music. Yet in matters of state these are trifles. After the conclusion of some months of negotiation, the lady was shipped to England at the end of 1539. Henry was so eager to see her that he rode incognito to Rochester, where he looked upon her secretly. He did not like what he saw, comparing her to a Flanders mare. He berated the earl of Southampton for having written, from Calais, about her beauty. The earl excused himself on the grounds that he believed matters had gone too far to be reversed. The king’s anger then fell upon Cromwell. He told him that the proposed bride was ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’. He then asserted that ‘if I had known what I know now, she should not have come into this realm’. At a later meeting he asked him, ‘Is there none other remedy but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’

There was no remedy. He did not dare to renounce her at the cost of alienating his new allies in northern Europe and, as he put it, ‘for fear of making a ruffle in the world’. ‘I am not well handled,’ he told Cromwell. Cromwell would pay the price at a later date. The marriage was duly solemnized on 6 January 1540, even as the king was making it clear to his court that he had taken a great dislike to his bride. He was always scrupulously polite to her and, knowing no English, she may have been unaware of his aversion. The morning after the marriage Cromwell asked him if he now liked her more. No. He suspected that she was not a virgin, and she had such ‘displeasant smells’ about her that he loathed her more than ever. He doubted if the marriage would ever be consummated. In that speculation he proved to be right. The royal couple were married for a little over six months and, although on occasions they lay in the same bed, there was no progeny. Instead the king told one of his doctors that he had ‘duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno’ or, in common parlance, two wet dreams.

A courtier had come up to Cromwell as he stood alone in a gallery, leaning against a window. ‘For God’s sake,’ he told Cromwell, ‘devise how his grace may be relieved by one way or another.’

‘Yes, but what and how?’ Cromwell broke away saying, ‘Well, well, it is a great matter.’

Eventually it was proposed that there should be an amicable separation; Anne of Cleves would not follow the same path as Anne Boleyn or even Katherine of Aragon. The convocation of the clergy were persuaded to declare the marriage null and invalid, on the grounds that there had been no issue, and parliament confirmed the verdict. Anne of Cleves herself did not seem particularly discomfited by the dissolution of her marriage, and was in any case given a generous pension. She learned English quickly enough, and settled down in the country for the next seventeen years with very few regrets. One of the many properties she owned is still to be seen in Lewes.

Henry was all the time attending carefully to the security and education of his only son. Edward was the key to the future. His first portrait, by Hans Holbein, was probably executed in 1540. It shows the infant dressed in rich robes, like a miniature version of his father. Like his father, too, he stares directly and calmly out of the canvas; his right hand is raised, as if he were about to make a declaration, and the rattle in his left hand closely resembles a tiny sceptre.

In this year a tutor, Richard Cox, was appointed to guide the three-year-old boy in all the lessons a virtuous prince must learn; another tutor, John Cheke, was appointed four years later. The two men were humanist scholars in the tradition of Erasmus, and seem to have trodden the same middle path in religion as Henry himself. The teachers of the heir to the throne could never have been Lutherans. Yet the truth remains that Edward endorsed a more radical Protestantism almost as soon as he gained the throne. He was to be called ‘the godly imp’.

He was instructed also in Greek and in Latin, of which he soon had a fair command. He would be introduced to the arts of horseriding and of archery, both fit for a king. As he acquired more learning the prince was given his own study, with a writing desk covered in black velvet; various mathematical and astronomical instruments were at his disposal, including a compass and a metal rule. A chess set lay on a shelf, while an hourglass hung from the wall. He had slates on which to write, as well as a variety of pens. In another room beside his bedchamber he kept miscellaneous papers concerning his mother, Jane Seymour, as well as his books; he also owned a puppet, and two pairs of spectacles. Diverse carved and painted objects, such as a spear and a staff ‘of unicorns’ horns garnished with silver gilt’, were also to be found.

In the spring of 1540 Thomas Cromwell was created earl of Essex; his bright particular star was still in the ascendant. He was conducting the primary affairs of the nation; soon after his elevation he committed the bishop of Chichester to the Tower of London on the charge of favouring those who refused the oath of supremacy. He had also threatened the bishops of Durham, Winchester and Bath with the consequences of royal displeasure.

Yet there were always mutterings against him. He treated the nobles with a high hand, so that the duke of Norfolk in particular became his implacable opponent. He was accused of being over-mighty and over-wealthy, and of recklessly squandering the king’s treasure.

On the morning of 10 June 1540, he took his place in the Lords, as usual; at three in the afternoon of the same day he proceeded to his chair at the head of the council table. Norfolk shouted out, ‘Cromwell! Do not sit there! That is no place for you! Traitors do not sit among gentlemen.’ ‘I am not a traitor,’ Cromwell replied. Whereupon the captain of the guard, and six other officers, came to him.

‘I arrest you.’

‘What for?’

‘That, you will learn elsewhere.’

In his fury Cromwell threw his cap down on the stone floor of the chamber. ‘This, then,’ he said ‘is the reward for all my services.’ The members of the council then erupted in a fury of antagonism, screaming abuse and thumping their fists on the table.

It is impossible to unravel all the private suspicions and antagonisms that led to his fall. He was hated by many of the nobility who resented the fact that the son of a blacksmith should have risen above them. Those of the old faith detested him for his destruction of their shrines and monasteries. The public accusations against him were manifold. He was accused of taking bribes and of encroaching on royal authority in matters like pardoning convicted men and issuing commissions. He was indeed guilty of all these, if guilty is the right word. They were really activities that came with the job, and had previously been tolerated by the king. Bribery was the only way, for example, that the system of administration could work.

Another set of charges concerned Cromwell’s beliefs; he was accused of holding heretical opinions and of supporting heretics in court and country. It was claimed that he was a Lutheran who had all the while been conspiring to change the religion of the nation; as the king’s ambassador to the emperor put it, he had allowed the impression that ‘all piety and religion, having no place, was banished out of England’. Letters between him and the Lutheran lords of Germany were discovered, although it is possible that they were forgeries. It was reported to the German princes that he had indirectly threatened to kill the king if Henry should attempt to reverse the process of religious reform; he had said that he would strike a dagger into the heart of the man who should oppose reformation. If such a threat had been made, then Cromwell was guilty of treason. It was of course the principal charge against him.

He was allowed to confront his accusers, but he was not permitted a public trial before his peers. He was instead subject to an Act of attainder for treason, a device that he himself had invented. The bill of attainder passed through both Lords and Commons without a single dissenting vote. Only Cranmer endeavoured to find a good word for him, and wrote to the king remarking on Cromwell’s past services. ‘I loved him as a friend,’ he said, ‘for so I took him to be.’

It is sometimes asserted that Cromwell’s fate was largely the consequence of the fatal alignment between religion and politics, but the bungled marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves also played some part in the matter. The French king and the emperor had failed to forge an alliance, so Henry no longer needed the princes of Germany for allies; the marriage had proved to be without purpose. Although Cromwell had expedited the union at Henry’s request and with Henry’s approval, he could not wholly shield himself from the king’s frustration and anger.

Of course the force of the conservative reaction to Cromwell’s statutes of religion, for which the Pilgrimage of Grace is evidence, had shaken Henry; the king had colluded with them, but in the popular mind Cromwell was the prime mover of reform. He was the ‘evil counsellor’ who had given wicked advice to his sovereign. It was politic, therefore, that Cromwell should be given up.

Yet there were darker and deeper reasons for his removal. Cromwell had been arrested and tried as part of a diplomatic dance. The French king, Francis I, had always detested Cromwell as a heretic and as a supporter of the Spanish cause; when the duke of Norfolk came to the French court as a special ambassador, Francis suggested to him that an agreement might be reached if Cromwell were removed from office. Norfolk duly repeated this observation to the king. Henry himself was now happy to be characterized as a religious conservative, to ingratiate himself further with the French, and so it suited him to portray Cromwell as a covert Lutheran heretic who had misled his master. The fact that these charges were largely untrue was not important. In effect Cromwell had served his purpose, having enriched the king with the dissolution of the monasteries, and could now be dispatched from the scene.

Cromwell was removed to the Tower to await his execution by the axe. His house was searched and a hoard of ‘crosses, chalices, mitres, vases and other things from the spoils of the Church’ were discovered. Henry stripped him of all his titles, and declared that his former servant was to be known only as ‘Thomas Cromwell, cloth-carder’ in recognition of a former lowly occupation before his royal service. The church bells pealed in rejoicing, and impromptu parties were held in the streets of London.

From his last lodging he wrote a contrite letter to the king in which ‘your highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner, and poor slave’ begged for ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’. Mercy was not a commodity, however, in which the king traded. On the morning of 28 July Cromwell proclaimed on the scaffold that he was dying in the old faith, and then he bowed his head for the axe. The two executioners were ‘ragged and butcherly’, and another contemporary account describes how they were ‘chopping the Lord Cromwell’s neck and head for nearly half-an-hour’.

The fall of Cromwell was the harbinger of a more severe prosecution of those whom Henry and the conservative faction deemed to be heretics. Robert Barnes, once an Augustinian friar at Cambridge, was one of the reformers whom Cromwell had protected; it was he whom Cromwell had used in the past as an envoy to the German Lutherans. In February 1540, Barnes preached against the leading conservative Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and accused him of setting ‘evil herbs’ in the ‘garden of scripture’. At the end of his sermon he had flung down his glove as a token of defiance against the bishop. Barnes was taken up, but recanted. Three months later, in the spring of 1540, he once again preached what was considered to be heretical doctrine at St Mary Spital; on this occasion he was sent to the Tower. It may be that, at this stage, he was used as part of the case against Cromwell; one of the vicegerent’s closest supporters, after all, was an arrant heretic. Two days after Cromwell’s execution, Barnes was burned at Smithfield.

He did not die alone. In a triumphant reassertion of his ‘middle way’ the king burned two other reformers, who were believed to be part of Cromwell’s supposed conspiracy, and hanged three ‘papist’ priests who had denied the royal supremacy. Henry was proclaiming that he was not a sovereign of one faction or another; he dispensed justice equally to all. There was one difference; it was said that those who supported the papacy were hanged, while those who opposed it were burned.

From this time forward, in fact, he no longer employed one pre-eminent minister. The years of Wolsey and of Cromwell were over. Now the king decided to supervise the affairs of the realm. He described himself as ‘old’ but he was not too old to control the business of the council or to read the dispatches of his ambassadors. The king’s council was established upon a more formal basis; it had a membership of approximately nineteen peers or prelates, and met each day at court. A minute book was to be kept. The privy council now fashioned policy in partnership with the king; it supervised the workings of the law and the operations of the exchequer. Some counsellors were superior to others, of course, and the most prominent among them were now Stephen Gardiner, Thomas Cranmer and the duke of Norfolk.

Norfolk had another advantage. At the end of the previous year he had brought his pretty niece to court, as one of the maids-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves. Katherine Howard was perhaps sixteen, perhaps twenty-two – her date of birth is not known for certain – and not at all demure. It was one of her family’s mottoes that marriage must provide more than ‘four bare legs in a bed’. A marriage, in other words, must bring with it other advantages. Katherine Howard was schooled in all the arts and tricks that might appeal to the king, and it seems that she was not averse to using them. On 28 July, just nineteen days after his union with Anne of Cleves was formally annulled, Henry married her. It proved to be her day of doom.

She soon became acquainted with her husband’s formidable temper. The ulcer on his leg once more became infected, and the pus was drained from it in a sometimes painful operation. He became morose and depressed. He began to regret the execution of Cromwell, and complained that he had been deceived about him by some of his councillors who ‘by false accusations had made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’. He often blamed others for the faults of his own actions. It was reported that he had ‘formed a sinister opinion of some of his chief men’, and dispatched so many people from court that it ‘resembled more a private family than a king’s train’. He fell into foul fits of temper, and refused even to listen to music. He would not allow the new queen into his presence for ten days.

A respite was at hand. By the spring of 1541 his ulcer had healed and on 10 April the French ambassador reported that ‘the Queen is thought to be with child’. The rumour proved to be false, however, and it is possible that Katherine Howard miscarried. It was the old curse that seemed to hang over the king. It was reported, by the same ambassador, that Henry was displeased with his wife and was ‘avoiding as much as possible her company’.

On 30 June, however, the king and queen led a great progress to the north. He had never travelled to those regions before, and had really known them only in the context of riot and rebellion. This was his opportunity to impress the northern people with his might and magnificence. He led 5,000 horse and 1,000 foot-soldiers so that it seemed an armed camp was on the march from Grafton to Northampton, Lincoln to Boston, Doncaster and Pontefract and York. He dressed in cloth of gold, and graciously accepted the submission of erstwhile rebels. His was the theatre of power.

Yet behind the scenes of this theatre another drama was being performed. Katherine Howard, perhaps vexed and unsatisfied by her ageing lover, was proving to be unfaithful. Even as the progress went further northward she began a liaison with a gentleman, Thomas Culpeper, and with the connivance of her ladies-in-waiting arranged to meet him at secret venues; she sought the back doors and the back stairs to expedite her passion. He became her ‘sweet little fool’.

At the same time it was rumoured that, five years before, Katherine had been intimate with her instructor on the virginal. Henry Manox had boasted that she had promised him ‘her maidenhead though it be painful to her’. This fault was compounded when another former lover from the same period, Francis Dereham, now came forward. It was believed, at a later date, that he was in fact her common-law husband. It is possible that he threatened her with some disclosure. At all events she appointed him as her private secretary and usher of her chamber. It was a woeful mistake.

Cranmer was approached by an informant who knew all about Katherine Howard’s previous indiscretions. The archbishop summoned certain members of her former household, who only confirmed the stories. It was imperative that the king be told, but no one wished to be the messenger of such tidings. If the news proved to be false, the result would be fatal. On 1 November, in the royal chapel, the king gave public thanks to God for having been ‘pleased to give me a wife so entirely conformable to my inclinations’. While the service continued the archbishop left a sealed letter for the king with the details of the queen’s previous indiscretions.

Henry refused to believe them. He insisted that the reports were the work of a faction determined to bring down the duke of Norfolk as well as the queen. He demanded that Cranmer investigate this plot and ‘not to desist until you have got to the bottom of the pot’. Whereupon the king’s guards interrupted Katherine and her ladies while they were dancing together, insisting that this was ‘no more the time to dance’. The young queen was then confined to her apartments, where she remained in fear and trembling. She must have suspected that certain inconvenient facts were about to emerge.

When Cranmer and the council questioned more deeply into the affair, it was clear that the queen was in fact deeply compromised. Manox and Dereham were interrogated, in the course of which interview Manox confessed how he ‘had commonly used to feel the secrets and other parts of the queen’s body’. Dereham also confirmed that he ‘had known her carnally many times, both in doublet and hose between the sheets and in naked bed’.

Cranmer interviewed Katherine on at least two occasions but found her ‘in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature’. She screamed with panic at her likely fate. There were times when she seemed about to fall ‘into some dangerous ecstasy, or else into a very frenzy’. She lied to Cranmer about her previous lovers, alleging that Dereham had raped her ‘with importunate force’. She admitted a few days later that he had indeed given her tokens. He knew ‘a little woman in London with a crooked back, who was very cunning in making all manner of flowers’ out of silk. She also admitted that he called her ‘wife’. On their nights of love-making he would bring with him wine, apples and strawberries. But ‘as for these words, I promise you, I do love you with all my heart, I do not remember that ever I spake them’. She wrote out a full confession to the king, which seems to have cheered him a little. She had, at the very least, never been unfaithful to him in the course of their marriage.

Yet rumour has a thousand tongues, and the royal court is its proper home. Once the queen’s former frailties were known, it was hard to conceal more recent examples. The name of Thomas Culpeper was mentioned. The gossip about the young courtier soon reached the ears of the privy council which, in the words of its proceedings, ‘weighed the matter and deeply pondered the gravity thereof’. They called some of the queen’s ladies and interrogated them about her behaviour. One of them, Margaret Morton, said that there passed a look between the queen and Culpeper ‘of such sort that I thought there was love between them’. She also alleged that the two had been alone in the queen’s closet for five or six hours, and ‘for certain they had passed out’ – the sixteenth-century phrase for orgasm. Another lady-in-waiting confirmed that there was much ‘puffing and blowing’ between them. The queen’s principal lady, Lady Rochford, the perfidious sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, had already been ‘seized with raving madness’; she had eased the passage of Culpeper into her mistress’s chamber. She would be brought, insane, to the scaffold.

The privy council next interrogated Culpeper. His was the crucial case, since the queen’s adultery would be considered to be high treason. He denied any actual intercourse but agreed that ‘he intended and meant to do ill with the queen and that in like wise the queen so minded to do with him’. The privy council did not believe him. He and the queen must have passed out. ‘You may see what was done before marriage,’ Cranmer told them. ‘God knows what has been done since!’ It was suggested that Katherine had also been dallying with Dereham on the progress to the north.

Henry attended a secret night session of the council at the London residence of the bishop of Winchester. When the full account was put to him, he raged so violently that it was feared he would go mad. He called for his sword, with the intention of killing his young wife. He swore that she would never ‘have such delight in her lechery as she should have pain and torture in her death’. Then he broke down and wept, which was considered ‘strange’ for one of his ‘courage’. The news of the queen’s disgrace was soon known everywhere. The duke of Norfolk, her uncle, declared to the French ambassador that she ‘had prostituted herself to seven or eight persons’ and that she ought to be burned.

On 1 December Culpeper and Dereham were both brought to Westminster Hall on the charge of treason. In the course of the charges Katherine herself was described as a ‘common harlot’. The two men were found guilty and sentenced to the traitor’s death of hanging and disembowelling. Henry Manox, having offended long before Katherine had become queen, was reprieved. Culpeper, a gentleman, had his punishment commuted to a simple beheading.

On 13 February 1542 Katherine Howard followed him to the scaffold. She had been married to the king for less than two years. She panicked when she embarked on the Thames for her final journey, and had to be manhandled onto the boat. A flotilla of vessels then carried her from Syon to the Tower, where she was received with all the honours due to a queen. She was beheaded three days later, on Tower Green, and was said to have been meek and repentant at the end. She had in fact rehearsed her death and had asked for the block to be brought to her prison chamber so that she could learn how to put her neck upon it gracefully. Her body was buried close to that of Anne Boleyn in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. Many of her family were sent to the Tower but were eventually released. The duke of Norfolk stayed on his estates and avoided the court. But from this day forward Henry never really trusted him.

On the day of his wife’s execution the king held a great banquet, with twenty-six ladies at his own table, and over the succeeding days gave many such feasts. He was eating so much that his vast bulk grew ever heavier, and his bed was enlarged to a width of 7 feet. Yet in private he was cast down. In the margin of a translation of Proverbs, the king made a double mark beside the following passage: ‘For the lips of a harlot are a dropping honeycomb, and her throat is softer than oil. But at the last she is as bitter as wormwood, and as sharp as a two-edged sword.’

14

War games

In the summer of 1542, Pope Paul III established the Holy Office of the Inquisition, with six cardinals as inquisitors-general. ‘Even if my own father were a heretic,’ the pope declared, ‘I would gather the wood to burn him.’ The paths of religious faith were perilous. Henry, now that he had broken with the papacy, was eager to see Charles V follow his example; it was the English king’s wish to see a great general council held in which the differences of religion could be debated and perhaps resolved.

The diplomatic situation seemed to be working in his favour. He was contemplating an alliance with Charles V against France, a joint invasion that would not in fact take place until the summer of 1544. Yet in the meantime it was important to secure his northern territories. He had agreed to meet the king of Scotland, James V, at York towards the end of his northern progress in the summer of 1541; but James, perhaps fearing kidnap or assassination, did not arrive. The king’s father, James IV, had been killed by Henry’s army at Flodden Field less than thirty years before. This rebuff served only to augment Henry’s anger at the increasing number of border raids by the Scots, who still considered parts of northern England as their proper home. When a Scottish raiding party seized one of the king’s representatives, in the summer of 1542, the matter came to open war.

The French king and his court were delighted. Francis I told the English ambassador that ‘your majesty [Henry] had begun with the Scots, and the Scots had given you your hands full’. He had nothing to fear from the English while they were distracted by the ancient enemy. The Scots were also now in full cry. ‘All is ours,’ they said. ‘The English are but heretics.’ In the autumn of 1542 the duke of Norfolk, partly returned to favour, led 20,000 men into the Lothians where he laid waste to the harvest; he also left towns and villages in ruins. The army then retired to Berwick.

In reprisal, a Scottish army of some 15,000 men advanced into Cumberland in the last week of November. They were not met by English forces, whose commanders were taken wholly by surprise by the Scottish movement, but rather by the farmers and farm labourers of the county who promptly took up their arms and mounted their horses; in this part of England, it was always wise to be prepared for combat. Then they launched a series of attacks upon the Scots, dividing their forces and killing any stragglers. When an unexpected company of horsemen suddenly appeared on the horizon, the cry went up that the duke of Norfolk had come with his men.

Norfolk was not in the vicinity at all; nevertheless the Scots fled towards the border pursued by a few thousand English soldiers hurriedly assembled by a northern magnate, Sir Thomas Wharton. Yet the Scottish forces lost their way and began to flounder in the Solway and its reaches just as the tide began to flow. They drowned, or were killed; most of them met their end in Solway Moss, a quagmire between Gretna and the Esk where they were surrounded and dispatched. Many of the greatest nobles of the land were seized and taken to London. ‘Worldly men say that all this came by misorder and fortune,’ John Knox said, ‘but who has the least spunk of the knowledge of God may as evidently see the work of His hand …’

James V, on hearing the news, became disconsolate and pined to death. In a literal sense he suffered from loss of power. On 8 December he heard the news that his wife had given birth to a child, Mary, who became the woeful queen of Scots. ‘The devil go with it,’ he said. ‘It will end as it began. It came from a lass and it will end with a lass.’ By this he meant that the Stuart dynasty had been established by the daughter of Robert the Bruce, and would end with his own newborn daughter. But Mary, queen of Scots, was not destined to be the last of the line. It only came to an end with the demise of Queen Anne 172 years later. Ten days after making this semi-accurate prophecy, he was dead. The English king was jubilant. This was what sovereigns were put on earth to achieve. To win glory. To conquer their enemies. All the heaviness that had fallen upon him after the disgrace of Katherine Howard seemed to have left him.

A parliament was called at the beginning of 1543. Its first task was to grant a subsidy to the king to pay for the war in Scotland and ‘for his other great and urgent occasions’, by which was meant the coming invasion of France. An Act was also passed ‘for the advancement of true religion, and abolishment of the contrary’; one more attempt to quell the religious dissension of the country. No plays or interludes could mention the Scriptures; no one could read from the Bible in an open assembly. Merchants and gentlemen might study it in the quietness of their homes ‘but no women, nor artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving-men under the degree of yeomen; nor no husbandmen, or labourers, might read it’.

In the late spring of the year, yet another formulation of the English faith was issued from the press. It was entitled A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man; set forth by the King’s Majesty of England. It became known simply as the King’s Book. Although it is in essence a conservative document, it promulgated once more the middle way between Catholicism and Lutheranism. The power of the pope was denied, but the sacrifice of the Mass was upheld. Purgatory was not quite abolished, but it was growing ever dimmer. The miracle of transubstantiation was affirmed. Faith and works were equally urgent for salvation; shrines and pilgrimages were not.

The king’s council was busy with matters of heresy in this period. In a space of some five days, from 15 to 19 March, seven suspects were brought before it or committed to several prisons. On 17 March, for example, one cleric was dispatched to the Fleet for ‘evil opinions touching the Sacrament of the Altar’. It was said that the principal member of the conservative faction, Stephen Gardiner, ‘had bent his bow to shoot at some of the head deer’. In his Easter Day sermon Gardiner grouped together Anabaptists and those who questioned the cult of Mary, crying out from the pulpit ‘Heretics! Faggots! Fire!’ When one chaplain of Canterbury was buried in the cathedral, the bell-ringer took the censer from the thurifer and poured its burning coals over the new grave; the dead cleric was suspected of heresy.

Yet one man of Canterbury escaped. Archbishop Cranmer, the chief supporter of the cause of reform, was also suspected. At a sermon in the cathedral he was supposed to have preached that the sacrament of the altar was ‘but a similitude’; it was not Christ’s body but a token or remembrance. If he had thus spoken, then he was going much further than any other English dignitary dared. Some of the canons at his own cathedral began to whisper against him. The more orthodox members of the king’s council were heard to suggest that it was invidious to burn poor men but to allow the principal instigator of heresy to stay in favour. By the spring of 1543 they sent a declaration to the king in which a commission of inquiry into Cranmer’s teaching was suggested.

Some evenings later the royal barge was moored at Lambeth, and the king invited the archbishop for a river journey. When they were comfortably seated the king turned to Cranmer. ‘Ah, my chaplain, I have news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent.’ He pulled out the document of accusations, collected from Canterbury by the council. Cranmer read it, and then knelt before the king. He wished the matter to be brought to a trial. He acknowledged that he still opposed the spirit of the Six Articles, but declared that he had done nothing against them. The king had always trusted, and confided in, the archbishop. He also wished to avoid further disunity and controversy in an already troubled Church.

So he asked Cranmer himself to be the judge in the whole matter. The archbishop demurred, but the king insisted. The cleric thereupon appointed his chancellor and his registrar to examine those who had accused him of heresy. The homes of the principals were searched, and papers were found that suggested a conspiracy among them; certain letters from Stephen Gardiner were recovered. Cranmer also learned that some of his apparent allies had been implicated. But he was not a man of vengeance. Quietly he allowed the matter to rest. When the king requested that he call one of his secret enemies a ‘knave’ to his face, he replied that this was not the language of a bishop.

A further attempt upon Cranmer was made at the end of November. The king now played a game of hazard. He authorized his council to summon the archbishop on the charge of heresy and ‘as they saw cause, to commit him to the Tower’. Yet that night he summoned the archbishop into his presence. When Cranmer arrived in haste, Henry told him precisely what the council planned to do.

Cranmer seemed to receive the news meekly enough and said something to the effect that he expected a fair hearing. The king rebuked him. ‘Do you not think that if they have you once in prison, three or four false knaves will soon be procured to witness against you and to condemn you, which else now being at your liberty dare not once open their lips or appear before your face?’ Henry was acquainted with the nature of trials for heresy.

Henry then gave Cranmer his personal ring, which was a sure token of royal support; it was a sign that he had determined to take the matter into his own hands. With this, Cranmer returned to his palace at Lambeth. On the following morning he was duly summoned to come before the council, but he suffered the indignity of being kept waiting for three-quarters of an hour ‘among serving men and lackeys’. The king was informed of this very quickly, and thundered in his rage. ‘Have they served me so?’ he asked. ‘It is well enough. I shall talk with them by and by.’ It has all the making of a stage play which, from the pen of Shakespeare, it eventually became.

Cranmer stood before the council, where he was informed by his erstwhile colleagues that he was under arrest on suspicion of heretical teachings. He then showed them the king’s ring, at which they were astounded. ‘Did I not tell you, my lords?’ one of them cried out. The errant councillors were led before the king, who lectured them on the need for amity and unity. ‘Ah, my lords,’ he told them. ‘I had thought that I had had a discreet and wise council, but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have you handled here my lord of Canterbury?’

The duke of Norfolk, one of the leaders of the plot against Cranmer, said that ‘we meant no manner of hurt unto my lord of Canterbury in that we requested to have him in durance; that we only did because he might after his trial be set at liberty to his more glory’. It was, at the best, a very weak excuse. ‘Well,’ the king replied, ‘I pray you, use not my friends so. I perceive now well enough how the world goes with you. There remains malice among you one to another. Let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.’ Cranmer was safe for the rest of the king’s reign.

Henry had protected his archbishop out of genuine affection but also out of policy. He did not want his nation, or indeed his religion, to be further divided. It seemed, however, that in essential matters of doctrine the reformers had lost their cause. One of them wrote that a man might journey the length and breadth of the kingdom without finding one preacher who ‘out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned is seeking the glory of our God. He [the king] has taken them all away.’ The action was of a piece with Henry’s new alliance with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the most Catholic king of the Spanish empire.

Yet there was a chance that reform might find a new champion. In the summer of 1543 Henry married his sixth and last wife. In the immediate court environment, to which Katherine Parr belonged, the king had, according to the Spanish ambassador, become ‘sad, pensive and sighing’. He pined for female companionship and affection. Katherine Parr – twice widowed and one of Lady Mary’s entourage – was in love with one of the king’s courtiers, Thomas Seymour. The king, however, dispatched him to Brussels as an ambassador and decided to marry Katherine Parr himself. There was no question of refusal. He may have been fat and infirm but he was the sovereign; it was her duty to accept. ‘A fine burden,’ Anne of Cleves is reported to have remarked, ‘Madam Katharine has taken on herself!’

Katherine Parr was learned, by the standards of the day, and she was also pious; she even wrote two devotional manuals, one of them entitled The Lamentations of a Sinner. So she had become interested, to put it no higher, in the case of religious reform. ‘Every day in the afternoon for the space of one hour,’ it was reported, ‘one of her chaplains, in her privy chamber, made some collation to her and to her ladies and gentlewomen …’ Among these ladies were a number of tacit Lutherans – Lady Elizabeth Hoby, Lady Lisle, Lady Butts and the duchess of Suffolk among them. One of the more interesting features of the late Henrician court lies in this recrudescence of female piety. One contemporary noted that the ‘young damsels … have continually in their hands either psalms, homilies, or other devout meditations’. Katherine Parr was among them and, according to John Foxe, was ‘very zealous towards the Gospel’. In good time this would bring her trouble.

Throughout this year, and the beginning of 1544, preparations were made for the great invasion of France under the combined leadership of Henry of England and Charles of Spain. The cost of the undertaking was so vast, however, that the general coinage of the realm was debased by introducing a larger amount of alloy into its gold and silver coins. By these means the king’s mint acquired large sums of money, since the face value of the currency was the same despite the smaller amount of precious metal. Prices naturally rose, at a rate of approximately 10 per cent each year, and the economy took twenty years to recover. These were the results of the king’s passion for war.

Other ways of making money were also found. It was decided to exact a ‘benevolence’ from the nation. Those who owned lands worth more than an annual value of 40 shillings were to be requested to contribute to the king’s coffers; it was their duty to the sovereign. Those who refused were punished. One alderman of London was sent as a common soldier to the Scottish border, where his commander was told to subject him to the harshest and most dangerous duties. Another alderman was simply sent to the Tower, where he remained for three months.

The preparation for the invasion had already cost much blood. Scotland had renounced all its promises and agreements with the king, concluded after the disaster at Solway Moss, and once more established the old alliance with France. Henry could not contemplate the prospect of an enemy at his back door, and so he resolved to punish the Scots for what he regarded as their duplicity and faithlessness. At the beginning of May an English fleet sailed up the Firth of Forth and their commander, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was ordered to ‘burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God’. He was commanded to overthrow the castle and beat down Holyrood House, while at the same time putting to the flame all the towns and villages in the immediate vicinity. The campaign of terror was then to continue to Leith and St Andrews ‘putting man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, where any resistance shall be made against you’. Once more the wrath of the king meant death.

Hertford duly obeyed the orders of his sovereign and reported on 9 May that he had made ‘a jolly fire and smoke upon the town’ of Edinburgh. Nine days later he wrote that his mission was accomplished to the effect that ‘we trust your Majesty shall hear that the like devastation hath not been made in Scotland these many years’. A French fleet came to the aid of their allies and landed a considerable force which, with the Scottish army, marched to the border country; their campaign of fire and fury was duly challenged by another invasion by the earl of Hertford who in the autumn of the year destroyed 243 villages, five market towns and seven monasteries. This dance of death between the two nations would continue, at intervals, until the time of Oliver Cromwell.

The army of the English set out for France itself in the summer of 1544. The largest invasion force ever was dispatched abroad: 48,000 men took to the Channel. It needed the combined strength of 6,500 horses to drag the guns and carts of ammunition. The bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, had been appointed somewhat quixotically as Purveyor General; he said that he had been a ‘continual purveyor of cheese, butter, herrings and stockfish’. His enemies now referred to him as ‘Stephen Stockfish’.

The first scheme of war provided that the armies of the king and the emperor should march upon Paris, but Henry detected flaws in the proposal; it would leave his forces dangerously unprotected in the rear. It was first necessary for him to subdue the towns of Boulogne and Montreuil before passing the Somme on his way to the capital. By the end of June the English army had gathered about Boulogne, and on 14 July Henry crossed the Channel. A few days later he rode out from the gates of Calais, then an English garrison town, and came upon the territories of France; across his saddle he placed a great musket with a long iron barrel. He was travelling 25 miles south to join his army at Boulogne. The siege guns were soon blasting at the castle on the eastern side of the hilltop town.

Diplomatic, as well as military, activities were under way. In the summer of 1544 Francis wrote to the two kings, privately urging each of them to come to terms with him and thus hoping to divide their counsels: Henry sent the letter on to his ally, Charles, and replied to the French king that he was suggesting a policy ‘wherein you greatly touch our honour, the which, as you are aware, having always guarded inviolably to this present, I will never consent in my old age that it shall be any way distained’. In the following month he wrote – or rather dictated – a letter to Katherine Parr even as he sustained the siege of Boulogne. He told her that ‘we be so occupied, and have so much to do in foreseeing and caring for everything ourself, as we have almost no manner of rest or leisure to do any other thing’. This is the king at war, energetic and ever busy. He was delighted to be once more in arms, and one of his commanders reported that he was ‘merry and in as good health as I have seen his grace at any time this seven year’. He was in pursuit of glory, which was really the only reason for warfare.

Charles V was detained at the town of Dizier or St Didier for seven weeks, thus losing half the time that had been calculated for the march upon Paris itself. But the emperor then pressed forward, even though in the process his communications were broken and his supplies cut off. The advance surprised Henry, but the king could not have foreseen the duplicity of his ally. Francis and Charles had settled the terms of a separate peace, leaving out Henry, and needed only an excuse to enact it. With Charles’s army in perilous circumstance, the emperor declared himself obliged to make a treaty. The Spaniards and the French once more joined hands in the diplomatic dance.

The siege of Boulogne had been protracted beyond anticipation. The valour of the defenders of the town provoked even the king’s admiration. ‘They fought hand to hand,’ he wrote to the queen, ‘much manfuller than either Burgundians or Flemings would have done …’ Yet finally he prevailed, and the people of the town marched out in surrender. Montreuil still held out, however, and it was clear to all that the English army would never reach the gates of Paris. At this juncture Charles sealed the treaty with Francis, leaving Henry the only belligerent. The king’s anger and incredulity at the treachery of his ally are understandable, but the relative failure of the invasion is not in doubt. He had taken Boulogne, but not Paris, at an estimated cost of some £2 million; that was roughly equivalent to ten years of normal spending. The bulk of the crown lands, acquired from the Church, were sold off. This led directly to the frailty of the royal finances in subsequent years, and was one of the contributing factors to the Civil War. Yet this is to move too far forward. In the immediate context of 1544 the treasury was exhausted and Stephen Gardiner was moved to write, in emulation of Colet thirty-three years before, that ‘the worst peace is better than the best war’. On the last day of September Henry sailed back to England.

The threat from France remained, more dangerous than ever after the peace with Spain. It became clear by the spring of the following year that Francis was planning an invasion and was gathering a large fleet of ships for the purpose; galleys were even being brought overland from the Mediterranean to join the flotilla. The fortifications along England’s shores were strengthened further and the trained bands of local fighters were put on alert. In the event the French force got precisely nowhere; inclement winds propelled the ships back to their own coastline, and the supplies of food began to run low. So the French commanders ordered a retreat. An attempt was made at battle near Portsmouth, when some French galleys fired at the English ships, but once more an unfavourable wind forced them back. A French fleet was sighted off Shoreham, but again it turned around; an outbreak of disease had felled the sailors. In the course of this flurry of maritime activity one ship, the Mary Rose, managed to sink itself in Portsmouth harbour. This can be taken as a symbol of the armed struggle between England and France.

15

A family portrait

In 1545 a family portrait had been commissioned by the king from an unknown artist. It displays Henry in full might, sitting on his throne between his heir and the long-dead Jane Seymour; on the right stands Lady Elizabeth, and on the left Lady Mary. Henry’s hand rests upon his son’s neck. The setting is the king’s lodging on the ground floor of the royal palace at Whitehall. Katherine Parr is not a part of this dramatic tableau, but she was now very much part of the family. During the king’s absence in France, she had become the regent of England. She stayed generally at Hampton Court, where Mary and then Elizabeth resided with her. They were educated in the broadly based humanism associated with the name of Erasmus that soon became an aspect of early Protestantism.

Katherine also helped to guide the studies of the young Prince Edward. He called her ‘his most dear mother’, and told her that ‘I received so many benefits from you that my mind can hardly grasp them’. She herself was receiving instruction and Edward wrote that ‘I hear too that your highness is progressing in the Latin tongue … wherefore I feel no little joy, for letters are lasting’. This is a conventional expression, and need not necessarily reflect Edward’s real sentiments. Yet he did persevere with his classical studies. He had read and memorized, for example, four books of Cato. He read Cicero in Latin and Herodotus in Greek. Soon enough he began the study of French; he was, at least in theory, one day to become the king of France. He also became immersed in geography and history as a way of preparing himself for sovereign rule. He informed his tutor, John Cheke, that ‘I have only done my duty’. In such a position of eminence, and with such an overweening father, his sense of his role and responsibilities was already immense. It was remarked that, even as a young boy, he had the mannerisms of an adult.

His caps were decorated with diamonds and sapphires, his garments woven from cloth of gold; he possessed a dagger of gold that hung from a rope of pearls, its sheath covered in diamonds, rubies and emeralds. He shone as he walked or rode. A painting of him, from 1546, survives. He stands between a pillar and a window, dressed in all the robes of state. He holds the golden dagger in his right hand while his left hand significantly touches his codpiece as a symbol that the dynasty would continue.

Yet he also had time for the sports of kings. Among his possessions were gloves for hawking, rods for fishing, and swords for fencing. He owned greyhounds and horses. He loved to hunt and draw the longbow; he played rackets and engaged in the noble art of tilting. He also performed upon the lute, like his father.

He had an especial affection for his half-sister Mary, but his love was not unmixed with the same sense of duty. He asked Katherine Parr to ensure that Mary no longer attended ‘foreign dances and merriments which do not become a most Christian princess’. He was eight at the time he issued this warning. At a later date the siblings would disagree about the purport of being a ‘Christian’. Yet his anxiety suggests a picture of Mary quite different from that of the sour and zealous burner of heretics; she loved dancing; she had a taste for finery and liked to gamble at cards. She had a passion for music, just like her father and her siblings. Music is a key to the Tudor age. An image of Elizabeth survives, dining to the sound of twelve trumpets and two kettledrums together with fifes, cornets and side drums. Everybody sang in the streets or at their work, ‘the mason at his wall, the shipboy at his oar, and the tiler on the housetop’. A lute was placed in many barber shops, for customers to while away the time.

But Mary also had a reputation for her studies, and another royal, Mary of Portugal, praised ‘the fame of her virtue and learning’. In the last months of 1545, under the supervision of Katherine Parr, she was translating a paraphrase by Erasmus of the Gospel according to St John that was published in the following year.

Edward was matched in his zeal for learning by his other half-sister, who was a precocious student of languages. Elizabeth mastered Greek and Latin with ease, studying Greek in the morning and Latin in the afternoon; late in her realm, when she was by the standards of the time an old woman, she managed an extempore oration in Latin that delighted her court. She also learned Spanish, Italian, Flemish and a little Welsh. At the age of eleven she presented her stepmother with her translation from the French of Margaret of Navarre’s long poem, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul; her English prose covers twenty-seven pages. Her principal tutor, Roger Ascham, reported that at the age of sixteen ‘the constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endowed with a masculine power of application. No apprehension can be quicker than hers, no memory more retentive …’ A childhood companion of Edward, Jane Dormer, took a less sanguine view of the girl; at the age of twelve or thirteen Elizabeth was ‘proud and disdainful’. So we have a fine example of two young women granted a humanist education that rivalled any being offered at the schools or universities. It was not unique – Thomas More had provided the same tuition for his own daughters – but it was unusual.

The happy family, however, was about to be disturbed by tensions concerning religion. Henry himself was still much exercised over matters of faith. When he appeared in parliament, at the end of 1545, he burst into tears when he began to address the divisions in the kingdom. ‘I hear’, he said, ‘that the special foundation of our religion being charity between man and man is so refrigerate as there was never more dissension and lack of love between man and man … some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Anabaptists; names devised of the devil …’ He went on to declare that ‘I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel the Word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’.

Cranmer himself was in the process of modifying his most sacred beliefs. In this transition, by a slow and gradual process of meditation and study, the archbishop repudiated the idea of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. Eventually he would come to believe that the miracle took place in the heart of the communicant, whereby he or she is spiritually changed on reception of the host. Everything was in flux.

Argument and debate, therefore, exercised the more acerbic or inquisitive spirits. Henry had wanted a purified Catholic Church, cleansed of its more egregious superstitions; he had also wanted a national Church under his sovereignty. What he had created, however, was a fragile and in some ways inconsistent alternative. The fact that it changed utterly after his death is a measure of its instability. A new English litany was published in the summer of 1545, but the Mass and the other services of the Church were still performed in Latin. In the same year a bill against heretics, more severe than any before, was thrown out by the Commons in parliament; this is another sign of division. The ceremony of ‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday was abolished at the beginning of 1546; when Cranmer sought to remove all ceremonies involving bells and crucifixes the king first agreed, but then changed his mind. He still wanted to preserve the image, to the king of France and to the emperor, of an orthodox sovereign. He was even then in the process of negotiating with them.

After the abortive end of hostilities it became clear that France and England would have to treat with one another before squandering any more resources on useless threats and counter-threats. So there began a process of diplomatic conversations that Henry caustically described as ‘interpretations’; he told his envoy that ‘you must stick earnestly with them, and in no wise descend to the second degree, but upon a manifest appearance that they would rather break up than assert to the first degree’. It was a matter of subtleties and feints and manoeuvres in a situation of mutual suspicion and distrust. The result was the Treaty of Ardres, signed in the summer of 1546, by which Henry was allowed to occupy Boulogne for eight years before returning it for the sum of 2 million écus. It was the last treaty he would ever sign.

That ‘charity between man and man’, upheld by the king in parliament, was notably lacking among some of Henry’s councillors. The more conservative of them held considerable doubts about the nature of Katherine Parr’s influence upon the household. The fact that Mary was translating Erasmus is itself significant, and the scholar’s paraphrase of the Gospel according to St John played some part in the later reformation under Edward’s rule. So Katherine was encouraging the kind of reformed spirituality that humanism inspired.

The king had complained, in the early months of 1546, about the way in which his wife brought up the subject of faith. John Foxe, whose evidence is generally reliable, quotes him as saying sarcastically to Stephen Gardiner that it is ‘a thing much to my comfort to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife’. At a later opportunity Gardiner whispered to the king that the queen’s opinions were, according to the law, heretical and that ‘he would easily perceive how perilous a matter it is to cherish a serpent within his own bosom’. These words also come from Foxe. Henry then allowed Gardiner to interview the ladies closest to the queen.

Such matters emerged at a time when the prosecution of heretics was increased, and in particular the persecution of a woman close to the queen and the queen’s ladies. Anne Askew had friends at court, and her brother was gentleman pensioner and cup-bearer; but she was being watched. One spy who had lodgings opposite her own reported that ‘at midnight she beginneth to pray, and ceaseth not in many hours after …’ In March 1546 she was summoned before the commissioners of heresy at Saddlers’ Hall in Gutter Lane; here she confessed to having said that ‘God was not in temples made with hands’. She was asked whether a mouse, eating a consecrated host, received God. She made no answer, but merely smiled.

She was consigned to a London prison before being brought before the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who later earned the nickname of ‘Bloody Bonner’. On this occasion he was a mild persecutor and, being approached by her ‘good friends’, released her on the understanding that she had submitted. Yet then she relapsed into heresy, and in the summer of the year was brought before the council at the palace in Greenwich. She was of ‘worshipful stock’ but her recalcitrance was therefore all the more notable; it was also hoped by the conservatives on the council that the prospect of torture or of burning might prompt her to implicate some ladies of the court. She was asked to confirm that the Holy Sacrament was ‘flesh, blood and bone’ to which she replied that ‘it was a great shame for them to counsel contrary to their knowledge’. When pressed for her views on the Eucharist she responded that ‘she would not sing the lord’s song in a strange land’. When Stephen Gardiner charged her with speaking in parables she borrowed some words from Christ and replied, ‘if I tell you the truth, you will not believe me.’ Gardiner declared that she was a parrot. By now, weary of imprisonment, she was ‘sore sick, thinking no less than to die’. When in prison she composed a ballad, of which one verse runs:

I saw a ryall trone

Where Justyce shuld have sitt

But in her stede was one

Of modye [angry] cruell wytt.

In the Tower she was charged to reveal the others of her sect; when she maintained her silence, she was put on the rack and tortured. Still she did not name her secret allies. She wrote her own account, published in the following year in Germany. ‘Then they did put me on the rack because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time; and because I lay still and did not cry my Lord Chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.’ On 15 July she was brought to Smithfield for burning, but she had been so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to the stake, and the faggots were lit. Rain and thunder marked these proceedings, whereupon one spectator called out ‘A vengeance on you all that thus doth burn Christ’s member.’ At which remark a Catholic carter struck him down. The differences of faith among the people were clear enough.

A month later, Katherine Parr was marked out for investigation. This is the story John Foxe tells, twenty years later, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It is likely that he heard of it from those who were part of the court at the time; he is hardly likely to have invented it, since it does not serve any essential purpose in his Protestant ‘book of martyrs’ except to blacken the reputation of Stephen Gardiner. For that purpose, however, he may have embellished the facts of the matter. He reports correctly that, in this period, Henry kept largely to his privy quarters where he saw only his closest advisers. This was the atmosphere in which the king allowed Gardiner secretly to investigate his wife’s religious opinions for any taint of heresy. He even permitted certain articles of accusation to be drawn up against her. This is inherently plausible; given the facts of his own mortality, so obvious to him now, he may have been concerned about those in the immediate vicinity of his son after his death.

The articles of accusation were fortunately dropped on the floor of the court, where they were recovered by some ‘godly person’ who took them at once to Katherine Parr. It is more likely that a ‘godly’ friend, knowing of the machinations against the queen, privately warned her. Whereupon she fell ‘into a great melancholy and agony’; given her husband’s treatment of some of his earlier consorts, this is hardly surprising. Her terror was such, however, that one of the king’s own doctors was sent to minister to her; this man was also privy to Henry’s designs, and gave her further information about the enemies set todestroy her.

Yet the king called her to him one evening, and began to discourse on matters of religion. She took the opportunity of apologizing for her previous ‘boldness’ which was not done to ‘maintain opinion’ but to afford him diversion ‘over this painful time of your infirmity’. She is reported to have said, in order to assuage him still further, that she had also hoped that ‘I, hearing your majesty’s learned discourse, might receive to myself some profit thereby’. His vanity appeased, the king graciously condescended to pardon her. ‘And is it even so, sweetheart!’

The king and queen, together with some of their retinue, were in the privy garden a day or two later. The lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, then came forward with a guard of forty soldiers to arrest Katherine Parr and some of her ladies on the charge of heresy. But the king interposed. He took the chancellor aside and asked him for an explanation. He was then heard to shout, ‘Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! And fool!’ before dismissing him and the soldiers.

It is a story from one source, and no other, but authentic touches can be found in it. The life of the court was indeed full of enmity and suspicion concerning the highest in the land, and there can be no doubt that differences over the pace and nature of religious reform were at the centre of the controversies. The rather serpentine conduct of the king, setting one group of courtiers against another, is also in character. It was a means of keeping control and of asserting mastery, even over his wife. It was further reported by Foxe that Henry never afterwards trusted the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who had first started the investigation of Katherine. This mistrust is confirmed by the king’s subsequent treatment of the bishop. The queen was back in favour, and dabbled no more in pious discussions. She would very soon be devoted to nursing her husband in his last illness.

16

The last days

The king, in his mid-fifties, wanted no mention of death. He spent most of his time in his privy chamber at Whitehall or at Greenwich; the walls were covered with tapestries, and the furnishings included two or three tables, a cupboard for plate and goblets, and some chairs. Musical instruments were also to be found there for solace and recreation. Outside, in the presence chamber, the courtiers paid their reverences to an empty throne. This was still the site of the king’s majesty and must be so honoured.

He was by now ill and ailing. The royal accounts show that large sums were being spent for the purchase of rhubarb, a sovereign specific against the infirmities of a choleric disposition; he had always harboured powerful forces of anger but his fury was compounded by the fact that he was now in almost constant pain. He was obese and had to be transported in chairs called ‘trams’ through his galleries and chambers. A tram was an early form of wheelchair to ease the burden of his ulcerated legs. The chronicler Edward Hall reports that he ‘could not go up or down stairs unless he was raised up or let down by an engine’, no doubt some form of pulley or hoist. He was also obliged to wear spectacles, which were then known as ‘gazings’; they were clipped to the nose.

Yet he was able to strike out again. He excluded Stephen Gardiner from court for failing to exchange some diocesan lands with the king; that was the explanation proffered at the time, but it may also be that the bishop’s disgrace was the result of his intrigue against Katherine Parr. It is reported that although the bishop was banished from the king’s presence he would go with the other councillors to the door of the king’s bedchamber and wait there until these more honoured councillors returned, only to give the world the impression that he was still in favour. It is in fact easy to conclude that there was a general purge of the ‘conservative faction’ in this period. The greatest of them, the duke of Norfolk, was soon to be consigned to the Tower.

Norfolk had been a pre-eminent councillor for much of the king’s reign but in November 1546 he and his son, the earl of Surrey, fell victim to Henry’s fear and suspicion. Surrey had quartered the royal arms with his own, and had advised his sister to become the king’s mistress in order to advance the family fortunes; he had been heard to suggest that in the event of the king’s death his father should become protector of the realm. They were in double peril because the Howard family, as collateral descendants of the Plantagenets, had some pretension to the throne. In a sheet of charges the king added certain words in his own hand, marked here by capitals. ‘HOW THIS MAN’S INTENT IS TO BE JUDGED; AND WHETHER THIS import any danger, peril or slander to the title of the Prince or very Heir Apparent …’ The succession of Edward had to be protected at all costs.

In the early days of December Norfolk and Surrey were imprisoned. It was now reported that the duke had known about a secret scheme, concocted by Stephen Gardiner, to restore the papacy. It was revealed also that Surrey had said that the ‘new men’, the religious reformers, would after the king’s death ‘smart for it’. The earl was brought before a special commission at the Guildhall, on 13 January 1547, and duly sentenced to death. Norfolk escaped a trial, for the time being, but was consigned to the Tower. He was saved from the executioner only because of the king’s own demise.

The reports of the various ambassadors tell the same story of decline and decay; the king looks ‘greatly fallen away’ and is ‘so unwell given his age and corpulence that he may not survive’. His physicians were reported to be in despair, and rumours circulated that he was already dead. ‘Whatever his health,’ one ambassador wrote, ‘it can only be bad and will not last long.’

Yet who was to tell the king that he was dying? Even to ‘imagine’ the death of the sovereign was to incur the charge of treason. It was also unwise to snuff out the last gleam of hope. The doctors gave the charge to Sir Anthony Denny, who had for some time been the principal gentleman of the bedchamber. He approached his master and whispered to him that ‘in man’s judgement, you are not like to live’. He then encouraged him to prepare for death in a pious Christian manner. The king was advised to call for Thomas Cranmer but replied that he ‘would take a little sleep’ first. When the archbishop did arrive, he was too late; if Henry was not already dead, he was at least speechless. The king died at two in the morning of 28 January 1547. He had reigned for thirty-seven years and nine months.

It is difficult to assess the king’s private religion at the end of his life. He was said to have entertained the idea, according to Foxe, of substituting the Mass with a communion service; but this Lutheran impulse cannot be substantiated. The evidence suggests that he died, as he had lived, a Catholic. His will invoked ‘the name of God and of the glorious and blessed virgin our Lady Saint Mary’; he also ordered that daily Masses be said, as long as the world endured, for the salvation of his soul. That is not the language of a Lutheran. It suggests, although it does not prove, that the king still believed in the existence of purgatory despite the denial of it in his own religious articles.

As for the religion of the country, opinions differed at the time and still differ. Was it a predominantly and practically Catholic kingdom, with a king instead of a pope at its head? Or was it in the throes of a singular change to a plainer and simpler worship? It is perhaps best seen as a confused and confusing process of acquiescence in the king’s wishes. The habit of obedience was instinctive, especially when it was compounded by fear and threat of force. A French observer said at the time that if Henry were to declare Mahomet God, the English people would accept it. Certain devout people would not be moved from the dictates of their conscience – Thomas More and Anne Askew come to mind – but, for most, the practice of religion was determined by custom and regulated by authority. The rituals of public worship were the same as those practised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the evidence of wills suggests that the reformed religion had not made great progress with the majority of the people. By establishing the principle of royal supremacy, however, Henry had created an instrument that could be used for the purposes of religious reform.

The chain of stern necessity now bound all the participants in the drama. The death of a king was a momentous event, a rupture in the natural order that had swiftly to be repaired before the forces of chaos spilled out. In the last months of his life access to the king had been granted by Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Paget, private secretary. Denny and Paget were a powerful influence upon the ailing king, and in this crucial period it is likely that they aligned themselves with the reformers in the king’s council.

In the autumn of 1546 the imperial ambassador, in a dispatch to his master, described the unexpected rise in the influence of these reformers. ‘The Protestants’, he told him, ‘have their openly declared champions … I had even heard that some of them had gained great favour with the king; and I could only wish that they were as far away from court as they were last year.’ He then named the two most prominent among them as ‘the earl of Hertford and the lord admiral’. These two men, Edward Seymour and John Dudley, would indeed set the tone of the next reign.

Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was Edward’s uncle; he was Jane Seymour’s elder brother who on his sister’s marriage to the king had become a gentleman of the privy chamber. He had been raised to his earldom at the time of the young prince’s christening, and steadily climbed in royal favour; he had become warden of the Scottish Marches, or the northern borderlands, where his military skills were evident. He had taken part in the king’s campaigns in Scotland and France, and had therefore become part of the king’s inner martial band. John Dudley was the son of a royal councillor who had been beheaded at the beginning of Henry’s rule; he had quickly proved himself to be a master of the sea, and had progressed from vice-admiral to lord high admiral; he had also participated in the expeditions against Scotland and France, winning Henry’s admiration and friendship. Seymour and Dudley were, in effect, warlords.

The pair were deeply concerned, therefore, with the question of the king’s last will and testament. It is dated 30 December 1546, a little less than a month before his death. An original had been revised on 26 December by Henry in the presence of some of his councillors. We may see among them Denny and Paget, Seymour and Dudley. Henry bequeathed the crown to his son and to his son’s issue; if that failed he named any children born of his own queen, but in that regard he was perhaps overconfident. The throne would then pass to Lady Mary, and then to Lady Elizabeth. All this came to pass. The right to the throne then jumped to the issue of the king’s youngest sister, the duchess of Suffolk, thus excluding the claims of the Scottish family of Stuarts into which his older sister had married. This would cause much controversy during the reign of Elizabeth.

Henry then designated sixteen men as members of the regency council that would superintend the early years of the reign of Edward VI. Yet the fact is that he never signed the will. He left it too late, perhaps reserving to himself the possibility of changing its details and thus maintaining discipline in the court. It was subsequently signed with a ‘dry stamp’ or facsimile on the day before his death, 27 January, a delay that might have allowed for the exercise of creative editing; the signature, which was stamped upon the will and then inked in, was also contrived at a stage when he was no longer capable of reacting to any changes.

All the members of the regency council were ‘new men’, or what might be called professional men who had gained their ascendancy in the last years of Henry’s rule. Those of the nobility had only attained that rank in recent years. Some of them inclined towards the reformed faith, among them Denny and Seymour, but the majority were no doubt happy with the religious settlement that Henry had ordained. The king was actively seeking balance and moderation in the council of the young heir.

That is perhaps why Stephen Gardiner, the leading conservative, was excluded from the council. The king may have suspected Gardiner of papal sympathies, and such a stance would be doubly dangerous during a minority. This was a deliberate decision by the king himself. It is reported that he omitted Gardiner’s name with the remark that ‘he was a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’. Paget records that he and others tried to persuade the king otherwise but Henry retorted that ‘he marvelled what we meant and that we all knew him to be a wilful man’. He is also reported to have said that ‘I remembered him well enough, and of good purpose have left him out; for surely if he were in my testament, and one of you [the council], he would cumber you all, and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature. I myself could use him, and rule him to all manner of purposes, as seemed good unto me; but so shall you never do.’ Temperamental, rather than doctrinal, considerations may have ensured his dismissal. It seems likely that the king wished for the continuance of his ‘middle’ policy of reformed Catholicism. In this, he was to be disappointed.

The heir to the throne, in his own chronicle, reported the events in the immediate aftermath of the king’s death. Edward had been staying in Seymour’s castle at Hertford, but was then taken to Enfield Palace where he was told of his father’s death. ‘The next day … he [Edward himself] was brought to the Tower of London where he tarried the space of three weeks; and in the mean season the council sat every day for the performance of the will.’ He then states that ‘they thought best to choose the duke of Somerset to be Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King’s Person’. The new duke was none other than Edward Seymour himself, promoted to this title after becoming the protector.

Paget and Seymour had been colluding even as the king approached his death. ‘Remember what you promised to me in the gallery at Westminster,’ Paget wrote to Seymour later, ‘before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised me immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy.’ Twenty-four hours after Henry’s death Seymour wrote to Paget from Hertford. The letter was sent between three and four in the morning, carried by a messenger who was ordered to ‘haste, post haste, haste with all diligence for thy life, for thy life’. Among other matters Seymour told Paget that ‘for divers respects, I think it not convenient to satisfy the world’ about the contents of Henry’s will until they had met and so arranged affairs ‘as there may be no controversy hereafter’.

So the two men had been scheming about their seizure of power. It is also possible, to put it no higher, that Paget, with the connivance of Denny, had added material to the will itself. There was, for example, a clause known as ‘unfulfilled gifts’, decreeing that any promise of Henry to reward his courtiers should be implemented after his death; by these means lands and honours were liberally distributed to the ‘new men’.

In a contest of high stakes, amid all the fear and ambition released by the king’s death, any trick or forgery was acceptable. The members of the court were grasping and unscrupulous, having to act and react in a climate of anxiety and suspicion. It was an atmosphere that Henry had created, perhaps, but in this respect he was not very different from his predecessors and successors.

On 4 February the new council ignored the basic sentiment of the king’s will. Henry had ordained a system of majority rule, to preserve the balance of the government, that could only be overturned if the ‘most part’ agreed to do so in writing. It was overturned immediately when the council decided that ‘some special man’ should guide the proceedings of the realm; Seymour, as a man of proven ability and a blood relative of the new king, was chosen as protector of the kingdom and governor of the king’s person. The imperial ambassador was not so sanguine; he reported to the emperor’s sister that Seymour, or Somerset as we must now call him, was ‘a dry, sour, opinionated man’. In the scramble for power, however, he had won.

The body of the dead king was disembowelled and cleansed, but the surgeons discovered that the arteries were so blocked that there was ‘hardly half a pint of pure blood in his whole body’. It was then encased in lead, with a coffin that was carried by sixteen men at the time of his burial. An army of 1,000 accompanied the funeral march from Westminster to Windsor, with 250 mourners as well as all the other dignitaries of Church and State; the procession stretched for 4 miles. When the procession stopped for the night at Syon, it is reported that part of the leaden coffin had come apart and that a dog was seen to be licking the spilled blood. It is a striking illustration of a macabre prophecy delivered to Henry by Father Peto fifteen years before – ‘The dogs would lick up your blood – yes yours’. It is perhaps too dramatically appropriate to be true.

The hearse itself was nine storeys high, and the road to Windsor had to be repaved to accommodate it, while on top of the hearse a great wax effigy of the king was displayed to the crowds of spectators. It was dressed in cloth of crimson velvet, and adorned with jewels. The real body, already decomposing, was lowered into the choir vault of St George’s Chapel.

17

The breaking of the altars

On 20 February 1547 a solemn little boy proceeded down the aisle of Westminster Abbey; the great lords of the realm held up the crown, the orb and the sceptre. ‘Yea, yea, yea,’ the congregation called out, ‘King Edward! King Edward! King Edward!’ On the previous day they boy had been greeted by a London pageant, with images of a phoenix and a lion, of crowns and of flowers. A chant emerged from the crowd, ‘Sing up heart, sing up heart, sing no more down, but joy in King Edward that weareth the crown.’ He had stopped to watch the acrobatics of a tightrope dancer.

Edward, coming to the throne of England at the age of nine, was hailed by some as the new Josiah. Josiah, son of Amon, assumed the rule of his country at the age of eight and proceeded to do ‘that which was right in the sight of the Lord’. He tore down the graven images of the Assyrian cults and broke the altars into dust. In his reign, the true law of God was providentially found and became the law of Judah. The parallels were clear to those who wished to eradicate the traces of the Romish faith. Edward was seen as a godly king with a fundamental biblical power.

Continuity was assured, also, with the council previously around Henry now preserved around his son. In Foxe’s Book of Martyrs John Foxe concluded, however, that ‘a new face of things began now to appear, as it were in a stage new players coming in, the old being thrust out’. Among the discarded players were the conservatives Stephen Gardiner and the duke of Norfolk, thus tilting the balance in favour of further religious reform. Stephen Gardiner had in fact played a role at the coronation ceremony, but that was his only public duty in the course of the new king’s reign. The duke of Somerset, the protector, now dominated the proceedings of the council and had become king in all but name; two gilt maces were always borne in procession before him and he asked Katherine Parr to hand her royal jewels to his wife. He went so far as to call the French king ‘brother’, in a diplomatic letter; the English ambassador in Paris was advised that this was not good form from one who was not the Lord’s anointed.

Somerset’s relations with his real brother were tense and difficult. Thomas Seymour had been appointed lord high admiral for life. One early biographer described him as ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately and in voice magnificent’, but had made one other observation; he was, perhaps, ‘somewhat empty in matter’. He was one of the hollow men who triumph at court. He now demanded to be made governor to the young king who was, after all, also his nephew. Instead he was given a place on the privy council and promised some of the spoils of office. His ambitions were not so easily satisfied, however, and he began to plot against the rule of his brother Edward.

He also took the precaution of uniting himself with the royal widow. Katherine Parr had wished to marry him in the days when she was being courted by the king and, now that Henry was dead, she and Seymour acted swiftly to secure their alliance. In their quick courtship she wrote to him from her house in Chelsea asking him to come to her early in the morning so that ‘you may come without suspect’. The haste was considered by many to be unseemly; if Katherine were soon to prove to be pregnant, it was conceivable that Henry was the father. Any child would be a remarkable dynastic conundrum. The young princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, shared their outrage at ‘seeing the ashes, or rather the scarcely cold body of the king our father so shamefully dishonoured by the queen our stepmother’; these were the words of Elizabeth who also urged caution and dissimulation on her older sister. They were dealing with ‘too powerful a party, who have got all authority into their own hands’. She herself was obliged to use ‘tact’ toward Katherine Parr; silence and cunning were always to be her weapons.

Thomas Seymour, snubbed in the matter of the royal governorship, nevertheless connived to win his young nephew’s favour. He began to visit him in private, and surreptitiously gave him money while denouncing his brother’s meanness. ‘You are a beggarly king,’ he told the boy. ‘You have no money to play or give.’ He even elicited from him a letter to Katherine Parr in which it seemed that Edward was asking his stepmother to marry Seymour. ‘Wherefore,’ he wrote, ‘ye shall not need to fear any grief to come, or to suspect lack of aid in need; seeing that he, being mine uncle [the protector], is so good in nature that he will not be troublesome.’ He was offering, in other words, to protect Katherine against the obvious wrath of Somerset at any clandestine marriage. The protector was indeed greatly offended.

It seems more than likely that Seymour himself dictated the letter to the young king, which throws into doubt the image of the boy as grave and devout beyond his years. A few weeks after his accession it was noted that Edward began to swear and blaspheme, using such phrases as ‘by God’s blood’. He told his tutor that one of his classmates, chosen from the sons of the nobility, had advised him that ‘kings always swore’. He was made to watch as the schoolfriend was soundly whipped.

The protector was by instinct a religious reformer and his closest associates were also of that persuasion; his personal doctor, William Turner, had published works banned during the previous reign. It was reported that his six daughters had been educated in ‘good literature and in the knowledge of God’s most holy laws’, which was an indirect way of saying that they had been evangelized. In one of his proclamations he warned ‘parents to keep their children’ from such ‘evil and pernicious games’ as bowling and tennis, an order which at a slightly later date might have been described as puritanical.

John Bradford, a radical sectary, was questioned by the bishop of Durham at the end of the reign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘the doctrine taught in King Edward’s days was God’s pure religion.’ The reply was swift and revealing. ‘What religion mean you in King Edward’s days? What year of his reign?’ The first attempts at change came soon enough. Ten days before the new king’s coronation the wardens and curates of St Martin’s in London tore down all the images of the saints and whitewashed the paintings on the walls. They were acting too quickly, in fact, and were taken to the Tower for a period.

Yet an alteration in feeling was quickly becoming manifest. In a contemporary diary, for 1547, is the entry that ‘this year the archbishop of Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent, in the hall of Lambeth, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian country’. Thomas Cranmer had already outlined the nature of the English Church; he said that it was necessary that he and the other bishops should renew their commissions as functionaries of the new king. They were no longer to be seen as the successors of the apostles but as government officials. This was now a state Church in which the pulpits would be used to publish the decrees and desires of the council. It is perhaps well to remember that Edward was the first anointed English king to enjoy the title of supreme head of the English Church.

At the beginning of the new reign Thomas Cranmer grew a beard. This may be seen as a token of mourning for his old master, but in fact the clergy of the reformed Church favoured beards; it may be seen as a decisive rejection of the tonsure and of the clean-shaven popish priests. After long meditation the archbishop, as we have seen, rejected the doctrine of real presence in the Eucharist. He now invited several Protestant reformers to England, where he gave them some of the most important professorial chairs at the two universities.

In the next six years some seventy European divines made their way to England – preachers, scholars, humanists and pastors who maintained a strong and enthusiastic correspondence with their colleagues still overseas. It seemed for a while that the young king Edward might eventually come to be head of a great movement of European Protestantism. Protestant refugees, fleeing from the persecution of Charles V, also came over. A group of Flemish settlers were granted the church of Austin Friars in London for their communion, and a colony of Walloon weavers was established in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. The breadth of toleration under Somerset’s protectorate was such that not one person was executed, or tortured, for his or her religious opinions; this must be considered a unique period in sixteenth-century English history.

Many of these European refugees and scholars had already come under the influence of Jean Calvin who had now established a reforming movement of great sternness and discipline. He was a French scholar who discovered within himself a gift for systematic thought and a huge capacity for government; in 1536, at the age of twenty-six, he published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in which he established the principles of what was essentially a new city of God. Working in relative isolation, and in a short period of time, he created an entire system of theology at once authoritarian and impersonal. There was nothing private about Calvin; he was always a public force. That was the source of his greatness.

He travelled to Basle, and to Strasburg, in order to escape persecution from the French king and church. At Geneva, through the power of an unyielding will yoked with moral fervour, he created a new republic founded upon faith. He regulated worship and created a liturgy; by means of a council he watched over the morals of the city. It can be said that single-handedly he revived the spirit and the progress of the European reformation, at a time when it seemed to be in retreat from the forces of the Catholic powers.

At the heart of Calvinism was the doctrine of predestination, derived ultimately from the texts of Paul and Augustine. Before the foundations of the earth had been created God had decreed that some should be saved for everlasting life and that others should be damned eternally. If God was Almighty, then of course he already knew the identity of the elect and the reprobate. The divine potter had created some vessels of honour and of mercy, and other vessels of wrath and dishonour. Some, on embracing this doctrine, might fear for the fate of their souls and fall into despair. But for most believers the doctrine of foreknowledge and predestination was a sovereign cure for anxiety and apathy; it was an inspiring and animating doctrine that encouraged self-sacrifice and moral courage. What joy was to be found in the knowledge that you are saved? It was the power behind Oliver Cromwell’s exultant sense of ‘providence’. The true Church consisted of the elect, known only to God; once you had been saved by God’s grace you could not relapse into sinfulness. It lent status to those who might have felt themselves to be otherwise deprived.

This was the faith now being promulgated in England, particularly in the churches established by European reformers taking refuge from the depredations of Charles V. It was a doctrine that naturally attracted enthusiasts and idealists; since they are the people who work wonderful changes in the world, Calvinism rapidly spread. It became the dominant theme for the ‘hotter’ breed of reformers, and soon established itself in Poland and in Bohemia, in the Palatinate and in the Dutch Netherlands.

Now, after the accession of the young king Edward, some of the more ardent radical spirits emerged from the shadow imposed upon them by Henry’s religious policy; Thomas Underhill, for example, proclaimed himself to be a ‘hoote gospeller’ in the parish of Stratford-on-the-Bow. Hugh Latimer, the most influential radical preacher of the age, had been released at the beginning of the reign and had gone to live with Archbishop Cranmer at Lambeth Palace. From the pulpit he denounced those prelates who refused to preach the reformed faith as ‘couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions, burdened with ambassages, pampering of their paunches, like a monk that maketh his jubilee, munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions’. He ended his sermon with the two words, ‘well, well’.

Dissatisfaction with the old priests sometimes erupted in the streets. The royal council commanded that the serving men and apprentices of London should no longer use ‘such insolence and evil demeanour towards priests, as reviling, tossing of them, taking violently their caps and tippets from them’. A vivid picture of these malcontents is given in The Displaying of the Protestants, published some years later; of the London apprentices it is said, ‘no regard they have at all to repair to the church upon the holy days, but flock in clusters upon stalls, either scorning the passers-by, or with their testaments utter some wise stuff of their own device’. Such is the disaffection or moroseness to be found at times of change.

The more committed or devout Catholics now migrated to France or to Italy, taking with them their threatened relics; among them were the monks who had been ejected from the Charterhouse of London. One woodcut showed the exodus of the faithful, with the legend ‘Ship over your trinkets and be packing you Papistes’. One priest threw himself from the steeple of St Magnus the Martyr, on Lower Thames Street, into the river below.

In the spring of 1547, three months after the coronation, a set of injunctions was issued for the general purification of the churches. Every picture was to be removed from the walls, and every image of saint or apostle was to be put away ‘so that there should remain no memory of the same’. Rosaries were no longer to be used. The ‘lighting of candles, kissing, kneeling, decking of images’ were denounced as superstitious; processions to shrines were no longer permitted, and in the more radical parishes of London stained-glass windows were smashed or removed. Other godly parishes were filled with equal enthusiasm. In Much Wenlock, Shropshire, the bones of a local saint were thrown onto a bonfire. In Norwich ‘divers curates and other idle persons’ visited the churches in the search for idolatrous images. In Durham the royal commissioners jumped up and down on the monstrance paraded at the festival of Corpus Christi. It was decreed that elaborate polyphonal music was no longer appropriate in a house of worship. The organs also fell silent. It had been said by reformers that the music of the old Church was ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring and juggling; and the playing at the organs a foolish vanity’.

The injunctions had also ordered the use of the English litany, and the reading of the lessons in English. The churchwardens were required to purchase one copy of the Paraphrase of the New Testament of Erasmus, a key text for the reformers. They were also obliged to keep within the church an edition of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Homilies, a collection of twelve sermons on the principal doctrines of the English Church; the sermons were to be read from the pulpit on successive Sundays, and were largely Cranmer’s own work in which he was able to set out his vision of the reformed faith. That is why there was no mention of the Mass, and only the most cursory reference to baptism. The sovereign source of strength and power lay in a proper reading of the Bible for ‘the Scripture is full, as well of low valleys, plain ways, and easy for every man to walk in, as also of high hills and mountains, which few men can ascend unto’. The graceful cadences and euphonies of Cranmer’s style did much to ease the introduction of the new faith.

In May 1547, a general ‘visitation’ of the churches was announced. The country was divided into six circuits, and the royal commissioners interrogated the parish clergy on their compliance with the injunctions. Was the English litany in proper use? Did any priest still preach the primacy of the pope? Are there still any ‘misused images … clothes, stones, shoes, offerings, kissings, candlesticks, trindles of wax and such like’? The visitors commanded all parishes to give up their ancient festivals or ‘church ales’ in which money was raised for the maintenance of the church fabric; festivals in commemoration of the local saint were also forbidden.

One by one the great seasonal festivities of the old Church were silenced. The processions on Corpus Christi in celebration of the holy Eucharist, the May games of Robin Hood, the Hocktide ‘bindings’ of Easter where the members of one sex tied up the other, only to release them on the promise of a kiss or a small payment – all of these were denounced as relics of popery. There were to be no more rituals involving the ‘boy bishops’, whereby a young boy was dressed up to parody a divine, and the churches were no longer to be decorated with flowers. The religious guilds were abolished, too, and with them vanished the pageant plays of previous generations. One contemporary wrote that the country, ‘once renowned throughout Christendom as merry England, has lost its joy and merriment, and must be called sad and sorrowful England’.

So the interiors of the churches were now whitewashed with lime and chalk; the crucifix was supplanted by the royal arms, and the written commandments took the place of the frescoes. They had been, as one fervent homilist put it, ‘scoured of such gay gazing sights’. The conservative faithful compared them to barns rather than to chapels but, for the godly, they were the appropriate setting for psalms, Bible readings and sermons. These more radical and reformed churches were now fundamentally different from any that had come before, and were the harbingers of wholly new forms of worship. In the winter of 1547 the great rood of St Paul’s Cathedral, together with all the other images, was taken down in the course of one night. Subsequently the charnel house and chapel were turned into dwelling houses and shops. A decline in lay piety was already sufficiently obvious. When John Leland had toured the southwest of England five years previously, to prepare material for his Itinerary, he could find no signs of any church-building; the churches he praised were all the work of earlier generations.

Two bishops spoke out against the changes. Stephen Gardiner, excluded from the councils of the king, denounced the excessive zeal for innovation. ‘If you cut the old canal,’ he said, ‘the water is apt to run further than you have a mind to.’ When he was warned that his opposition to the council might put him in danger he replied that ‘I am already by nature condemned to death’. Gardiner wrote to the protector asking him not to continue with his work of reform during the minority of the king; he believed that it would endanger public peace. The bishop also wrote to Thomas Cranmer, disputing some of the doctrines upheld in the Book of Homilies. Gardiner was summoned to the council and required to obey the new injunctions; when he prevaricated he was sent to the Fleet prison, accompanied by his cook and two servants.

Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had already preceded him to that place. ‘Ah bishop,’ the reforming duchess of Suffolk exclaimed as she passed beneath the window of Gardiner’s cell, ‘it is merry with the lambs when the wolves are shut up!’ But the bishops were not the only protesters. The French ambassador reported murmurings of grief and anger ‘in the northern parts on account of the novelties which are attempted every day by these new governors against the ancient approved religion’. The murmurings grew louder and louder until eventually a rebellion arose in the land.

18

Have at all papists!

Protector Somerset was, above all else, a soldier; his sphere was war. From the earliest days of the protectorate he was concerned with national defences, along the south coast and in the northern lands where the threat from Scotland was still very strong. He had proved his military capacities in that country, by mounting a successful invasion and an effective border raid in two successive years, and his eyes were turned to Scotland again. In 1543 Prince Edward had been betrothed to Mary, infant queen of Scots, but nothing had transpired. It was most unlikely that anything would. Yet Somerset still publicly expressed hopes of a union between the two countries, a kingdom of ‘Great Britain’ united in the strength of the reformed religion.

Like many successful military commanders he was rough in speech and inclined to deliver orders rather than to consult; he came to rely upon proclamations, for example, as the method of ordering the nation and issued seventy-seven of them in a little under three years. They varied from decrees against the hoarding of grain to the regulation of the price of meat. These proclamations did not have to be approved by the council, and in almost every case they were accompanied by the threat of severe punishment. It may be that he was uneasy about the source and nature of his power and therefore required the blunt force of the proclamation. Whatever the reason, he acquired a reputation for arrogance and froideur; it was widely reported that he did not truly consult with his colleagues of the council and preferred to rule all from a lonely eminence. ‘Of late,’ one old courtier wrote to him, ‘your Grace is grown into great choleric fashions, whensoever you are contraried in that which you have conceived in your head.’ Yet he did possess what might be called a paternalistic concern for the country, as long as its interests coincided with his own.

He was in many respects an avaricious man and acquired an unknown number of church properties and estates. His reformed religion came at a price. Three months after Edward’s coronation he began building the palace at the top of the Strand that became known to posterity as Somerset House. Three palaces of bishops, and the parish church of St Mary-le-Strand, were pulled down to make room for it; a chapel, part of the church of St John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell, was blown up with gunpowder so that it could furnish him with stone and other materials. He also looted St Paul’s Cathedral. The French ambassador wrote that ‘in a building he is raising in this town they stop work neither Sundays nor feast days; and indeed they worked on it even upon last Ascension Day’. His essential point was not the speed of the erection but the fact that the protector was willing to ignore the ancient holy days. It was said at the time that, on observing this spectacular appropriation of church properties, men’s hearts hardened against him. At a later date John Stow, in his Survey of London, wrote that ‘these actions were in a high degree impious, so did they draw with them both open dislike from men and much secret revenge from God’.

Yet it seemed at the time that the protector was in divine favour. In the late summer of 1547, after much inconclusive negotiation with the Scots, Somerset invaded his northern neighbour. The move had as much to do with France as with Scotland; the new French king, Henry II, was determined to reclaim Boulogne, which had been ceded to Henry VIII the year before at the Treaty of Ardres. The young king of France had come to the throne in the spring, at the age of twenty-eight, and of course aspired to martial glory. Even as he prepared for struggle within the borders of his own kingdom against England he strengthened his ties with the old ally, Scotland; it was reported that the navies of both countries were harassing English vessels. Somerset also wished to punish the Scots for formally repudiating the marriage treaty between the young queen, Mary, and Edward VI. He, too, dreamed of glory.

By the late spring troops and mariners had been assembled on the very slender grounds that the Scots had organized one or two border raids. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, was ordered back to his diocese in order to prepare for war. On 31 August Somerset crossed the border with a proclamation that he had come ‘only to defend and maintain the honour of both the princes and realms’, and at a place beside Musselburgh known as Pinkie Cleugh he gained a decisive victory over the Scottish forces. The defending army also faced cannon fire from the English ships offshore.

It is estimated that some 10,000 Scots were killed. A contemporary chronicler notes that ‘the dead bodies lay as thick as a man may note cattle grazing’. Some of the survivors fled to Edinburgh, flinging away their weapons as they ran; others tried to hide under the willow pollards in the neighbouring bogs, with their mouths above the water like otters. After his victory Somerset promptly returned to England, leaving a force of occupation in what was essentially a defeated nation. It was decided that a number of forts, with appropriate garrisons, should be established to cow and to subdue the people. It was the beginning of a further financial crisis, with the growing realization that the costs of occupation were far greater than any rewards. The Scots were not about to submit.

Somerset had come back in haste because he feared that the French might attempt an invasion on the southern coast; the Scottish nobility had already asked Henry II for assistance against the common enemy. He may also have feared further scheming by his younger brother. The young king later recalled that ‘in the month of September 1547 the Lord Admiral told me that mine uncle, being gone into Scotland, should not pass the peace without the loss of a great number of men or of himself, and that he did spend much money in vain’. In that respect, Thomas Seymour was proved to be correct. Edward then went on to write that ‘after the return of mine uncle he [Thomas] said that I was too bashful in my matters, and that I would not speak for my right. I said I was well enough.’

But Somerset’s return was also the necessary prelude to the first parliament of the new reign. It assembled on 4 November, and was inaugurated with a Mass in which the Gloria, the Creed and the Agnus Dei were sung in English, a sure sign of the way in which matters of faith were to be resolved. One of the first measures was in fact an Act that abolished all chantries, endowments made in wills for the procuring of Masses for the sake of the souls of the dead. They were deemed to be forlorn superstitions connected with the discredited belief in purgatory; they encouraged the people in their ignorance of ‘their very true and perfect salvation through the death of Jesus Christ’.

It was piously stated that the funds and lands released from enthralment to vain piety were now to be directed towards schools and other foundations; in fact most of the revenue went straight into the pockets of the treasury for use in the Scottish wars. The number of schools created by Edward VI has been miscalculated. The majority of schools that claim him as their founder did in fact exist long before his reign; he simply continued their foundation by making a fixed payment to the schoolmaster in place of the fees the master had received from the now dissolved chantries. In the course of Edward’s rule, however, free schools were established at St Albans, Berkhamsted and Stamford. The same process of secular change affected the universities; the old monastic foundations were dissolved and new colleges took their place. Trinity College in Cambridge, for example, was established in 1546; Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was founded in 1584 on the site of a dissolved Dominican friary that had been purchased for the purpose.

Some of the revenue from the chantries was evidently put to more familiar uses, and the imperial ambassador reported that ‘all the gentry, large and small, are … on the look out to receive rewards and benefits from the king’. A small group of peers at the centre of power shared the major part of the remaining spoils; the corruption of rulers made up what Thomas More called in his Utopia ‘a conspiracy of rich men seeking their own commodity under the name of the commonwealth’. It was said that it was better to be in hell than in the court of augmentation, where the monastic revenues were administered. The proverb ‘The law is ended as a man is befriended’ was on everyone’s lips. ‘Who passeth on [refrains from] offending and breaking the laws when he hath plenty of money to stop the execution of them?’ It is the story of the government of England.

It has been calculated that more than 2,500 chantry foundations were thus removed from the land. The English were no longer permitted to pray for their dead. At the beginning of 1548 it was also proclaimed that no candles should be carried on Candlemas Day, nor ashes be applied on Ash Wednesday, nor palms be borne on Palm Sunday.

In accordance with its reformist inclinations parliament also passed legislation that allowed communion to be taken in both kinds, the bread and the wine; with this change a vernacular Order of Communion was introduced, inserted into the Latin Mass. Muscatel or malmsey wine was given to the ‘better sort’ while the rest had to make do with claret. It was further resolved that there should be no restrictions on printing, teaching or reading the Scriptures. It was therefore hoped that England would become the land of the Bible. From this time forward bishops were to be made by king’s letters patent, making sure that the newly evangelized nation had a staff of permanent officials. Piece by piece, step by step, the religion of the people was changed.

Parliament also issued a new Treason Act that repealed the draconian legislation imposed by the old king on his sometimes fractious realm. It was now no longer considered treason merely to speak against the king; any more heinous acts now needed two witnesses rather than one before matters were taken further. This particular clause on the need for two witnesses has been described by a great administrative historian, Henry Hallam, as ‘one of the most important constitutional provisions which the annals of the Tudor family afford’.

In a similar spirit of toleration the Act for the Burning of Heretics, dated 1414, was also removed from the statute book. More importantly, perhaps, the Act of Six Articles was abolished; this had been described, at its inception in 1539, as ‘an Act abolishing diversity in Opinions’. It was imposed essentially to uphold orthodox Catholicism and silence active reformers; it was no longer necessary or expedient in the new atmosphere of Edward’s reign, and its repeal could of course also be construed as a measure of religious toleration. So parliament had thrown out all the old precautions over treason and heresy, and thus had tacitly dismantled much of the oppressive legislation of the old reign.

One much less liberal measure was introduced. A new Vagrancy Act was passed that ordered into slavery those who were unwilling to work. Two justices of the peace, on hearing about the ‘idle living’ of any person from two witnesses, could ordain that the guilty party should be branded on the chest with a ‘V’ and sentenced to two years of slavery; the culprit could be chained or driven with whips. Anyone who tried to flee from this exacted labour would be punished with perpetual slavery for the first offence and with death for the second. The severity of the measure is a token of the anxiety that the vagrants caused in sixteenth-century England. They roved the country in bands, begging or stealing at pleasure; the ‘sturdy beggars’ were an old order with their own traditions and their own language in ‘the canting tongue’. ‘The cull has rum rigging, let’s ding him, and mill him, and pike’ was as much to say that ‘the man has very good clothes, let us knock him down, rob him and run’.

The masterless man was also believed to be the sign of a dissolving or deteriorating social order, thus provoking fresh fears of the future. In 1577 William Harrison wrote that ‘it is not yet full three score years since this trade began, but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed of one sex and another to amount unto about 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported’. Yet the legislation is also evidence of the social discipline that was maintained over the nation by means of church ‘visitations’ and injunctions and proclamations. Anyone walking free had to be detained or restrained. The fear of disorder was very strong.

A tumult of legislation had indeed been passed in the first months of Somerset’s rule. In the spring of 1548 William Paget, once the colluder or conspirator with Somerset, wrote a letter to the protector in which he declared that the country had become restless. ‘The use of the old religion is forbidden, the use of the new is not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of the realm.’ He warned the protector to be cautious and to move carefully. ‘Commissions out for this matter, new laws for this, proclamations for another, one in another’s neck, so thick that they be not set among the people … You must take pity upon the poor men’s children, and of the conservation and stay of the realm, and put no more so many irons in the fire at once.’ But Somerset objected to him as a Cassandra, prophesying woe.

Yet there had never been so much dissension over matters of religion. Some said that Somerset had gone too far, and others complained that he had not gone far enough. An indication of religious controversy can be found among the members of the royal family. Edward professed his ‘comfort and quiet of mind’ at the changes in religion, and even began writing a treatise in French on the subject of papal supremacy; at the same time his older sister, Mary, was hearing four Masses a week. Fights broke out in churches between the various factions, conservative and reformed. One church favoured the rite of Rome while another practised that of Geneva; neighbouring churches might worship according to the rules of Zurich or Wittenberg. Verse satires, ridiculing conservatives and reformers, were widely circulated; one of them was entitled Have at all Papists! By me, Hans Hatprick and another was printed as A Ballet, declaring the Fall of the Whore of Babylon, intituled ‘Tie this Mare, Tom-boy’.

In the churchwardens’ accounts at Stanford in the Vale, then in Berkshire, the date was given as ‘the time of Schism, when this realm was divided from the Catholic church’ when ‘all godly ceremonies & good uses were taken out of the Church’. The parish priest of Adwick le Street, in Doncaster, wrote that at Rogationtide ‘no procession was made about the fields, but cruel tyrants did cast down all crosses standing in open ways despitefully’. At a school in Bodmin the boys set up rival factions of ‘the old religion’ and ‘the new religion’ in a series of elaborate battles. When they managed to blow up a calf with gunpowder, the master intervened with a whip. The social and religious order had to be maintained at all costs. A boy of thirteen was whipped naked at the church of St Mary Woolnoth; his offence was to throw his cap at the Blessed Sacrament raised during a Mass.

In the spring of 1548, therefore, all preaching was prohibited except by those especially licensed to do so; this was meant to silence ‘rash, contentious, hot and undiscreet’ men who were forever stirring the pot of religious dissension. Yet even this was not enough and, later in the year, all preaching came to an end. An exception was made for the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. He had been released from the Fleet prison on his promise that he would conform to the new religious polity, and had scarcely returned to his palace in Southwark when he was informed by the council that he was to preach before the king. He was asked to read out, and subscribe to, certain articles concerning the recent changes in religion. He was being ordered, in other words, publicly to assent to such matters as the destruction of images and the administration of communion in both kinds.

He refused, saying that this was ‘like a lesson made for a child to learn’. Whereupon he was summoned to court and the protector warned him that he could be deprived of his bishopric for disobedience to the king’s highness. Gardiner then relented a little and agreed to compose a sermon touching upon such matters. He consented to preach on St Peter’s Day, or 29 June, but the afternoon before he received a message from the protector forbidding him to make any mention of the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was about to send his chaplain with a verbal response, when he broke off. ‘You shall not go,’ he told him. ‘I will do well enough, I warrant.’

On the following afternoon he stepped up to the new ‘preaching place’, the open pulpit set in the privy garden at Whitehall; the young king sat at a window in the gallery, overlooking the preacher, where assembled in the garden was ‘such an audience as the like whereof hath not lightly been seen’. Everyone wished to hear the bishop make his peace with the religious changes. He proceeded to say that ‘I will plainly declare what I think of the state of the Church of England at this day, how I like it and what I think of it’. It was in some respects an ambiguous message. He grudgingly agreed to the dissolution of the chantries, but still believed it right to pray for the dead; he accepted that rituals and ceremonies were essentially ‘things indifferent’ and so did not object to the reforms, but he did believe that priests should retain their vow of chastity; despite the protector’s warning to avoid the subject of transubstantiation, the bishop did affirm the power of the sacrament with the phrase ‘This is my body’.

After the sermon was over Gardiner was ‘merry and quiet’ on his way back to Southwark in his barge. When his chaplain heard a rumour that he would be committed to the Tower the bishop replied that ‘it was but tales for he thought that he never pleased the Council better in all his life’. On the following day he was arrested and, on the charge of ‘wilful disobedience’, was sent to the Tower of London where he was kept in close confinement for the next five years.

Somerset, even in the midst of these controversies, was preoccupied with Scotland. Early in 1548 he issued ‘an epistle or exhortation’ to the Scottish people in which he pleaded for a bond of common interests ‘united together in one language, in one island’ which should be given ‘the indifferent old name of Britaines again’; the names of England and Scotland would therefore be abolished. Once more he insisted on the marriage of Edward and Mary as the ground for this unity but, once more, the Scots were not listening. It came as a deep shock, therefore, when it was confirmed that Mary, queen of Scots, was in fact to be betrothed to the dauphin, the French king’s eldest son. So began the public career of the young princess whose troubled life cast its shadow over English affairs for the next thirty-nine years; even at the age of ten it was said that ‘her spirit is already so high and noble that she would make great demonstration of displeasure at seeing herself degradingly treated’. Mary of Guise from Lorraine, the widow of James V, became effectively the dowager queen of Scotland in her daughter’s absence in France, where the young girl was to be raised with her future husband. France now brooded on the northern borders of England.

The French king was still eager to regain Boulogne, but the overwhelming victory of the protector’s forces at Pinkie Cleugh gave him pause. It was also in the interest of England to avoid war with France; any military campaign would prove ruinously expensive. In February 1548 the French ambassador was gracefully received by the young king at Greenwich, where they witnessed a mock siege; they spoke together in Latin, for mutual ease of intercourse. Four months later a French force landed at Leith in order to aid their Scottish allies; sallies and counter-sallies were launched about the town of Haddington in East Lothian, but large-scale fighting was avoided. Nevertheless the presence of French troops on Scottish soil was an irritant, and emphasized the flaws in Somerset’s policy of subjugation by means of garrisons.

The younger brother of the protector, Thomas Seymour, had not abandoned his schemes of advancement. Further evidence of his incapacity emerged at the time when the young Lady Elizabeth entered the household of Katherine Parr; she was at the time fourteen but her young age did not deter the man who delighted to be called her ‘stepfather’. He would appear in her bedchamber dressed only in his nightgown and slippers; he would engage in playful romps with her, smacking her on the back or buttocks. It was evident, too, that the princess had become infatuated with the handsome lord high admiral. It is said that eventually Katherine Parr found them in each other’s arms. Elizabeth left the household. When it was rumoured that the princess was indeed pregnant with Seymour’s child, the privy council was obliged to question members of her entourage; there was no truth to the reports, but the foreign ambassadors were happy to pass on any titillating news of Anne Boleyn’s daughter. The episode also served to materially increase Elizabeth’s natural wariness and secretiveness.

When Katherine Parr died in the early autumn of 1548, six days after giving birth to an infant girl, Seymour found himself with another opportunity of bolstering his state. It soon became clear that he still had designs upon Lady Elizabeth. He asked one of her household servants, Thomas Parry, ‘whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no’? More pertinently, perhaps, he began to make enquiries about ‘the state of her grace’s houses, and how many people she kept’. What houses she had and what lands? Were they good lands or not, and did she hold them for life?

A courtier was out riding with him one day, en route to parliament. ‘My lord admiral,’ he said, ‘there are certain rumours of you that I am very sorry to hear.’

‘What are they?’

‘I am informed you make means to marry either with my Lady Mary or my Lady Elizabeth. And touching that, my lord, if you go about any such thing, you seek the means to undo yourself, and all those that shall come of you.’ When Seymour denied any such intention, the courtier replied that ‘I am glad to hear you say so – do not attempt the matter’. He warned Seymour that the two previous kings had been highly suspicious of over-mighty subjects; might not the new king have the same infirmity? Seymour’s own brother, Protector Somerset, might also be moved to act against him.

Yet Seymour shook off any such warnings, and decided that it was time to act upon Edward himself. ‘Since I saw you last,’ he told him, ‘you are grown to be a goodly gentleman. I trust that within three or four years, you shall be ruler of your own things.’ When the king reached sixteen, he might be able and willing to rule of his own accord and thereby dismiss the protector; Seymour might then rise high in royal favour. Yet at this juncture the king simply said ‘no’.

Seymour still plotted. He fortified his dwelling, Holt Castle in Worcestershire, and brought in a great store of beer, beef and wheat; by some means or other he obtained the ‘double key’ that would grant him access to the privy garden and the king’s lodging. He made the journey from Holt Castle to Whitehall many times with a company of his followers. He said that ‘a man might steal away the king now for there came more with me than is in all the house besides’. Then, on the night of 16 January 1549, he was surprised by Edward’s dog just outside the royal bedchamber; he shot the dog and, as cries of ‘Help! Murder!’ rang out, he was apprehended by the king’s guard. It seems likely that he intended to kidnap the king and raise a civil war in his name. It was alleged later that he had made provision to recruit a private army and that he had planned to take over the royal mint at Bristol; these were also clear tokens of treasonable attempts.

He was arrested on the day after his discovery in the king’s quarters and taken to the Tower; soon enough he came to trial for his life on the charge of treason. The protector was now in the unenviable position of prosecuting his younger brother to the death. ‘They cannot kill me,’ Seymour said, ‘except they do me wrong.’ But then, a little later, he complained of his ‘friends’ on the royal council that ‘I think they have forgotten me’. The young king himself also turned against him. His recorded words were that ‘it were better for him to die before’. It was better for him to be dead.

In the inquiry against him, his designs on Elizabeth were also formally investigated. The young princess herself was questioned together with the more prominent members of her household. ‘They all sing one song,’ their interrogator wrote to the protector, ‘and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the note before.’ It seems likely, therefore, that Seymour’s advances had gone further than was considered permissible and may have verged on treason. ‘There goeth rumours abroad’, Elizabeth complained, ‘that I am in the Tower, and with child by my lord admiral.’ The rumours were false, but three of her entourage were dismissed. There had been smoke, and perhaps there had also been fire.

Even while he remained in the Tower Seymour engaged in more schemes. He made a pen from the point of an aiglet plucked from his hose and, according to Hugh Latimer, fabricated an ink ‘with such workmanship as the like has not been seen’; with pen and ink he then wrote two letters, to the princesses Mary and Elizabeth, ‘tending to this end, that they should conspire against my lord protector’s grace’. He concealed these letters within his shoe but, on his prison lodging being searched, they were discovered.

The king, the fount of justice, was obliged to speak. ‘We do perceive’, the king said to his council, ‘that there is great things objected and laid to my lord admiral mine uncle – and they tend to treason – and we perceive that you require but justice to be done. We think it reasonable, and we will well that you proceed according to your request.’ On the following day, 25 February, a bill of attainder for treason was sent to parliament. One of the articles against Seymour charged him to have attempted ‘to get into your hands the government of the king’s majesty, to the great danger of his highness’ person, and the subversion of the state of the realm’.

On 20 March he was taken to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded. The protector had signed the death warrant, with a shaking hand, but had taken no part in the parliamentary proceedings against his younger brother. It has been surmised that some among the council were happy to pit brother against brother, hoping thereby to accomplish the ruin of both of them. Sure enough some denounced Somerset for fratricide. A ‘godly and honourable’ woman reproached him with the words, ‘Where is thy brother? Lo, his blood crieth against thee unto God from the ground.’ He was condemned as ‘a blood-sucker and a ravenous wolf’ and it was predicted that ‘the fall of the one brother, would be the overthrow of the other’.

19

The barns of Crediton

In the first years of the young king’s reign social, as well as religious, divisions became apparent. ‘In times past,’ Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, said in a sermon, ‘men were full of compassion; but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold; he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock – I cannot tell what to call it – and then perish for hunger.’ The coinage had been debased by the authorities, thus unleashing further waves of inflation on a country already impoverished. In the seven years between 1540 and 1547 prices rose by 46 per cent; in 1549 they had risen by another 11 per cent. The trend of an ever-growing population meant that the plight of the poor, and of the agricultural labourer, increased. Food was dear; wages were low. It has become known as the ‘price revolution’, accompanied by dearth and distress on a national scale. In addition the administration itself could scarcely pay its debts.

Latimer knew where most of the blame might be laid. ‘You landlords,’ he said, ‘you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you have for your possessions too much … thus is caused such dearth that poor men which live of their labour cannot with the sweat of their faces have a living.’ The principal complaint of the people was raised against the system of enclosure, a term that in fact covered a multitude of practices, which embodied a wholly different concept of land use. One of these movements was ‘engrossing’ whereby many smallholdings were concentrated in the hands of one person; a second amounted to the enclosure of previous common grounds by a landlord who claimed ownership; a third was the conversion of arable into pasture land. So it was that Latimer intoned against ‘these graziers, enclosers, rent-raisers … whereas have been a great many householders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog’. It has been suggested that the bulk of enclosures actually took place at an earlier date, but the fast rise in prices and the fall in wages created a climate in which all economic woes were magnified.

Hugh Latimer also addressed the problem of debasement. ‘We now have a pretty little shilling [12d.],’ he said, ‘the last day, I had put it away almost for a groat [4d.].’ A shilling was in other words worth only a third of its previous value. John Heywood phrased it differently:

These testons look red: how like you the same?

’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame.

The copper, in other words, was showing through the thin surface application of silver. When money is not taken seriously, the economy begins to crumble. A reformer, John Hooper, wrote to William Cecil, even then beginning his career at court, that ‘the prices of things be here as I tell you, the number of people be great; their little cottages and poor livings decay daily; except God by sickness take them out of the world, they must needs lack. You know what a grievous extreme, yea, in a manner unruly evil hunger is.’

In the summer of 1549 a number of riots were specifically aimed at enclosures, in which the irate crowd pulled down the hedges that had been planted to separate the land. The hedge itself became a symbol of all the ills assailing the people, among them the encroachment upon waste and common land as well as the loss of tenants’ rights against landlords who persistently raised their rents. Custom was giving way to contract and competition. In response the government of the protector sent out a number of commissioners to investigate why it was that ‘many have been driven to extreme poverty and compelled to leave the places where they were born’; an inquiry would be instituted to ensure that the relevant statutes, from the two previous reigns, were still being obeyed.

It was a measure of the protector’s concern that the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ‘disparked’ or made open and that the common right to land was restored in many parishes. The imperial ambassador observed to his court that ‘I have heard in deep secret that the protector declared to the Council, as his opinion, that the peasants’ demands were fair and just; for the poor people who had no land to graze their cattle ought to retain the commons and the lands that had always been public property, and the nobles and rich ought not to seize and add them to their parks and possessions’. A further thought may have occurred to him. If the new faith did not help to promote social justice and to uphold the rights of the poor, surely it had failed in some of its first duties?

Yet dissent and discontent continued. In the previous reign ‘all things were too strait,’ Sir William Paget told Somerset at the end of 1548, but ‘now they are too loose’. In the old days ‘was it dangerous to do or speak though the meaning were not evil; and now every man hath liberty to do and speak at liberty without danger’. In the reign of a child king, there was disorder.

General discontent was rising. ‘All things in manner going backward and unfortunate,’ Paget also wrote, ‘and every man almost out of heart and courage, and our lacks so well known as our enemies despise us and our friends pity us.’ In the spring of 1549 rumours were circulating through the kingdom, and a proclamation was issued against ‘lewd, idle, seditious and disordered persons … posting from place to place … to stir up rumours or raise up tales’.

It was reported that the king was dead. ‘In the mean season,’ Edward wrote in his journal, ‘because there was a rumour that I was dead, I passed through London.’ It was said that the war in Scotland was a complete failure. Indeed it had not prospered. It was rumoured that a charge would be levied for weddings, christenings and funerals. It was whispered that the protector and the council were corrupt. The bad harvest of 1549 exacerbated these protests. As a precaution all wrestling matches were forbidden, and all plays or interludes were suspended; it was unwise to allow any large congregation of people. The poor were being accused of sedition, but the reason for discontent might be found elsewhere. Robert Crowley, in a volume entitled The Way to Wealth, accused ‘the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I cannot tell who’ for provoking popular revolt.

In May a rebellion was fostered in Wiltshire, but the forces of a local magnate scattered or slew the protesters. In Oxfordshire the rebels were defeated by an army of 1,500 men led by Lord Gray; some were taken and hanged, befitting a state of war, while others ran back to their homes. Similar abortive risings took place in Sussex and Hampshire, Kent and Gloucestershire, Suffolk and Essex, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire and Worcestershire. Something was gravely amiss in the entire kingdom, even if these pockets of resistance were quickly stifled.

Yet nothing could withstand the force of popular protest that emerged in the early days of June. It has become known as the Western Rising or the Prayer Book Rebellion, attesting to the fact that religious and social ills were not easily to be distinguished. At the beginning of 1549 the second session of Edward’s parliament had approved the publication of the Book of Common Prayer. It was authorized as part of the Act of Uniformity ‘for the uniformity of service and administration of the sacraments throughout the realm’; it was one of the most important and permanent of parliamentary Acts, effectively prescribing the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for future generations.

The Act was largely the work of Thomas Cranmer in consultation with the bishops, and the freedom of debate among the senior clergy in the House of Lords meant that it did not pass without strenuous opposition. One contemporary wrote that there was ‘great sticking touching the blessed body and blood of Jesus Christ. I trust they will conclude well in it, by the help of the Holy Ghost.’ The Holy Ghost did not intervene and, although the Act was passed, eight out of the eighteen bishops present voted against it.

Cranmer insisted in the course of the great debate that ‘our faith is not to believe Him to be in the bread and wine, but that He is in heaven’. He denied the doctrine oftransubstantiation, therefore, and insisted that Christ had only a spiritual presence determined by the faith of the recipient. Neither the Bible nor the holy fathers ever mention the doctrine; Cranmer believed it to be the invention of the Antichrist and his heir, Pope Gregory VII, in whose reign at the end of the eleventh century it had been introduced. Yet the more conservative bishops denounced this in turn as heresy. One reformer, Peter Martyr, wrote at the time that ‘there is so much contention about the Eucharist that every corner is full of it; every day the question is discussed among the Lords, with such disputing of bishops as was never heard; the commons thronging the lords’ galleries to hear the arguments’. These were days when the principles of religion were debated with the same eagerness as the tenets of politics and economics are now discussed.

The Book of Common Prayer, in revised form, is still in use. It is a breviary, a missal and a ritual liturgy. In time it lent strength and unity to the English Church but, like all great agents of revolution, it was fiercely controversial at the moment of its publication. It was a book of worship, written in solemn and subtle English, of which we may take one example. In the medieval marriage service the wife had pledged to be ‘bonner and buxom in bed and in board’. This has the nice alliteration of an older language. Now both partners were asked to ‘love and to cherish’ ‘for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health’.

Another fundamental alteration became evident in the newly anglicized text. ‘Wherefore O Lord and heavenly Father, according to the institution of Thy dearly beloved Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, we Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make here before Thy divine Majesty with these Thy holy gifts the memorial which Thy Son wished us to make: having in remembrance His blessed passion, mighty resurrection and glorious ascension.’ What had previously been deemed a ‘holy sacrifice’ was now a ‘memorial’. The sacrifice of Christ upon the cross was remembered but not repeated or reproduced.

As a result all the more arcane rites of the Mass were removed. There was to be no more ‘shifting of the book from one place to another; laying down and licking of the chalice … holding up his fingers, hands, or thumbs joined towards his temples; breathing upon the bread or chalice’; no more secret whisperings and sudden turnings of the body. The theatre of piety was being deconstructed. The host and the chalice were not to be elevated at the climax of the drama; the adoration of the sacrament was curtailed as a symptom of idolatry. There were to be no more intimations of sacrifice and the minister, no longer called priest, was ordered simply to place the bread and wine upon the altar. The Mass was therefore stripped of its mystery.

In the old service the priest had at the moment of the elevation of the host turned symbolically to the east as the site of Golgotha, with his back turned towards the congregation as if he were communing with sacred rites; it was from the east that Christ would come on the Day of Judgment. It was now stipulated that the minister should stand at the north side of the communion table and face the people. The rich vestments of the past were forbidden, and he could don only a white surplice. The traditional calendar of the saints’ days was also omitted from the Prayer Book as arrant superstition.

Most importantly, however, the sacred service would now be performed in English rather than in Latin. One layman repeated what would become a familiar complaint that the English language could not comprehend the mystery of the Mass; it was better for it to be rendered in a language that the congregation did not understand. It was thereby filled with magic, like the ritual pronunciation of a spell. The old service had been chanted and memorized for ten centuries. The words of the hymns and psalms, the very order of the Mass itself, were part of folk memory. Now, in one parliamentary Act, they were all swept away. All these changes represented the decisive rupture with the world of medieval Catholicism.

Any minister who refused to use the new book would be imprisoned for six months and deprived of his position; on any third offence he would be consigned to life imprisonment. This was indeed an Act for ‘uniformity’. Yet if Somerset and Cranmer therefore hoped to stifle dissent, they were soon disabused. A storm of protest arose in the western counties at this break with traditional practice. The new prayer book and service were to be introduced on Whit Sunday 9 June 1549. So they were in the parish of Sampford Courtenay in Devon, where they were greeted with dismay. On the following day the parishioners approached their priest, and asked him what service he intended to use, the new or the old. The new one, he told them. But they informed him that they would have nothing but ‘the old and ancient religion’.

The priest himself was not unwilling to accede to their request. He went with them to the church, where he put on his traditional vestments and proceeded to say the Mass, in Latin, with all the now forbidden rites. The news of this development spread from Sampford Courtenay to all parts of Devon and Cornwall. The bells were rung to spread the good news. It was demanded that the old sacrament be ‘hung over the altar and worshipped and those who would not consent thereto, to die like heretics’. It was added that ‘we will not have the new service, nor the Bible, in English’. This marked the beginning of the Prayer Book Rebellion. The religious discontent turned into social discontent, exacerbated by the general climate of economic hardship. The world was being turned upside down:

When wrens wear woodknives, cranes for to kill

And sparrows build churches on a green hill

And cats unto mice do swear obedience …

The rebellion was perhaps only to be expected; one reformer had told a continental colleague that ‘a great part of the country is popish’. Another reformer, Martin Bucer, wrote to his home town of Strasburg that ‘things are for the most part carried on by means of ordinances, which the majority obey very grudgingly’. This was indeed a major cause of the rebellion; the changes were imposed on the people by parliament in London. At a slightly later date Bucer wrote that ‘of those devoted to the service of religion only a small number have as yet addicted themselves entirely to the kingdom of Christ’.

When a local gentleman tried to quell the uprising at Sampford Courtenay and was hacked to death on the steps of the parish church, his body was buried in the alignment of north to south; this testified to the fact that he was considered to be a heretic. The uprising, now touched with blood, soon spread. An historian of Exeter, John Hooker, wrote at the time that the news ‘as a cloud carried with a violent wind and as a thunder clap sounding at one instant through the whole country … they clapped their hands for joy and agreed in one mind to have the same in every of their several parishes’. The rebels from Devon were joined with those from Cornwall, and the combined force captured Crediton; it was retaken by loyalist troops but only at the expense of burning all the barns in which the rebels had been hiding. ‘The barns of Crediton!’ became a popular war cry.

A story had just come out of Clyst St Mary, a village 3 miles east of Exeter. Walter Raleigh, the father of the famous mariner, was riding towards the town when he observed an old woman on her way to Mass praying with a set of rosary beads in her hand. He stopped to rebuke her, ‘saying further that there was a punishment by the law appointed against her’. The woman hurried on to the church where she denounced the gentleman for his ‘very hard and unseemly speeches concerning religion’. She also told her fellow parishioners that he had made the threat that ‘except she would leave her beads and give over holy bread and water the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil therein’. This was a general and impolitic menace to the whole community; Raleigh was found and beaten, while a local mill was burned down. The events became part of the rebellion itself.

At the beginning of July 2,000 rebels marched in procession towards Exeter; they were guided by priests, robed and chanting, and at their head was the sacred pyx, or jewelled container, holding the Blessed Sacrament. They had come to besiege the town as an emblem of detestable heresy. The townsmen of Exeter resisted the siege with valour, despite the restrictions of food and water; one of them said that ‘he would eat one arm and fight with the other before he would agree to a surrender’.

The protesters had drawn up a set of articles in which it was stated that ‘we will have the holy decrees of our forefathers observed, kept and performed and the sacrament restored to its ancient honour’. They denounced the Book of Common Prayer itself as ‘a Christmas play’ or ‘a Christmas game’; this observation came from the fact that at the time of receiving communion the men and women were supposed to form separate groups. This was uncannily similar to the first movement of a festive dance, and so invited ridicule.

The rebellion could not, or would not, be quelled by the local magnates; as a result, Somerset was obliged to call in his own soldiers, most of whom were mercenaries from Germany and Italy. Never before had an English ruler called in foreign troops against his own people. Six battles were fought against the rebels, the most bloody of which was at the village of Clyst St Mary itself, where on 25 July Lord Russell launched an attack on approximately 2,000 of what must now be termed the enemy; 1,000 rebels died in the action, and 900 were taken only to be massacred on Clyst Heath. It was said that all their throats were slit within ten minutes. The village was put to the torch and many of the villagers were murdered. It may be true that no heretics were burned during the regime of Protector Somerset, but this general carnage must count as one of the horrors of religious warfare. When they heard of the killings another force of rebels marched to Clyst Heath, where 2,000 of them were dispatched.

Russell then moved on to relieve Exeter but, by the time he arrived, the rebels had broken off their siege and departed. Yet retribution could still be exacted. A ‘mass priest’ was hanged from the steeple of the church of St Thomas, in the south of the city, wearing his vestments and draped with the bell, beads and holy-water-bucket of the old faith. The mayor of Bodmin was summoned to dinner, after which he was invited to inspect the gallows. ‘Think you,’ he was asked, ‘think you it is strong enough?’

‘Yes, sir, it is.’

‘Well then, get you up, for it is for you.’

The mayor had in fact been forced to participate in the rising by the rebels. But revenge always includes rough justice. A final battle at Sampford Courtenay, where the riots had begun, was enough to dissolve the Prayer Book Rebellion.

Just as one fire was slowly being extinguished another flared up. In the second week of July a group of Norfolk inhabitants threw down the pales and hedges of the enclosed fields and then, under the leadership of Robert Kett, made a camp on Mousehold Heath just outside the walls of Norwich. Other people from the surrounding countryside flocked to them, to protest against what they considered to be the iniquitous oppressive regime of the gentry, and it was estimated that some 16,000 gathered beyond the city walls. One group of villagers from Heydon marched behind their parish banner, thus testifying to their allegiance to the old faith. Somerset and his councillors purported to believe that the revolt was being spread by ‘some naughtie papist priests’.

Kett and the other leaders of the revolt sent a series of articles to the protector in which they outlined their complaints; they prayed his grace ‘that no lord of no manor shall common upon the commons’ and that ‘copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII’. No lord of the manor should be able to exploit common land. Private jurisdictions should be abolished. Their demands in general are clear evidence of a belief in the ancient and traditional ways of the countryside; the rebels were not innovators but conservators, protesting against the encroachments of a free market, the rapacity of newly rich landlords, and the steady depreciation in the value of money. They wished to return to what can be called feudalism. That is why they also wished to retain the old faith. It is significant that the rebels in Norfolk had first come together at a play concerning the translation of Thomas Becket to the shrine of Canterbury.

A phrase passed around that they would leave as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there were white bulls – none at all, in other words. ‘All power is in the hands of the gentry,’ it was reported in the first history of the rising, ‘and they so use it as to make it unbearable; while nothing is left for us but the extreme of misery … What is our food? Herbs and roots. Since we too have souls and bodies, is this all we are to expect from life?’ A verse was left on the carcass of a slain sheep:

Mr Pratt, your sheep are very fat,

And we thank you for that;

We have left you the skins to pay for your wife’s pins,

And you must thank us for that.

The protector had told the imperial ambassador that ‘all hath conceived a wonderful hate against gentlemen and taketh them all as their enemies … In Norfolk gentlemen, and all serving men for their sakes, are as evil-handled as may be.’ As a precaution a bodyguard of 2,000 horse and 4,000 soldiers was established around the young king. The gates of London were strengthened, and a drawbridge placed upon London Bridge. On 18 July martial law was declared, and even to mention rebellion was to draw down death at the end of the rope. It is a measure of how local revolt could threaten the whole harmony of Tudor administration, based as it was upon an informal pact between the centre and the regions. Untune that string, and hark what discord follows.

The rebels on Mousehold Heath declared themselves to be ‘the king’s friends and deputies’, emphasizing once more their role as traditional loyalists, and brought a semblance of order into their confused ranks. Spokesmen for each hundred were appointed, and Kett ordained that justice would be dispensed beneath a great oak that became known as the Tree of Reformation. Certain gentlemen and landowners were paraded beneath the tree, charged with robbing the poor, and then imprisoned within the camp.

Local camps were set up in other neighbourhoods in Suffolk and elsewhere, creating a network of protest in East Anglia. Some 3,000 Yorkshire men had gathered under the proclamation that ‘there should no king reign in England; the noblemen and gentlemen to be destroyed’. This was considerably more radical than any demands made by Kett and his men; but now all were denounced indiscriminately as agents of chaos.

On 31 July the marquis of Northampton brought 1,500 men to the walls of Norwich, where he attempted to break the supply lines between the town and the rebels; his forces made their way through the lanes and alleys of the town, but the decayed and dilapidated walls offered them no protection. The rebels came down from Mousehold Heath, with what one chronicler describes as ‘confused cries and beastly howlings’, and cut them apart; Northampton fled, leaving Norwich to the mercy of the insurgents. Kett set up an armed camp in the grounds of the cathedral and took command. He and his men were now guilty of treason, having assaulted and slaughtered the king’s army.

Somerset and the council met each day for a week, but could come to no decision. The protector first envisaged that he would lead an army against Kett and his men but then, for reasons that are unclear, changed his mind. Instead he sent out John Dudley, earl of Warwick, at the head of a force of 6,000 foot together with 1,500 horse. On 23 August, 3 miles from Norwich, Dudley sent Kett a final summons to surrender or else face certain defeat at the hands of overwhelming strength. When a royal herald approached the rebels with news of the offer a boy pulled down his breeches and did ‘a filthy act’; in response Dudley’s soldiers shot him.

Uproar now arose in the rebel camp and, when Kett offered to meet Dudley, his followers would not allow him to leave them. Whereupon Dudley now fired Norwich; his forces broke down the portcullis gate and began to roam through the city with their swords in their hands. The knights and gentlemen within the army had drawn their swords and kissed one another’s blades, which was according to Holinshed ‘an ancient custom used among men of war in times of great danger’. Dudley made for the marketplace, where many of the rebels were encamped, and promptly hanged forty-nine of Kett’s men; such was the congestion that the gallows broke apart. The rebels formed themselves into three separate companies and dispersed, launching various sallies and incursions against the army.

With much of the city on fire, and with supplies running low, Kett decided that it was better to evacuate Mousehold Heath and move to the more defensible terrain of Dussindale to the east of Norwich. He took with him the gentlemen, or hostages, who might prove useful in any negotiations. On the following morning Dudley and his army moved onto Dussindale, where a pardon was offered. It was rejected. After a confused preliminary skirmish the guns were trained upon the rebels and, as they wavered, Dudley’s horse rode into them; the prominent rebels in the front line, with Kett among them, fled the scene. The remnant of the rebel force formed a barricade out of the carts and carriages closest to hand; they faced almost certain death, on the field of battle or on the gallows at a later date, but Dudley held out to them once more the promise of pardon. It seems that he came in front of them to pledge his word that, if they submitted and surrendered, they would be spared. Most of them took this last opportunity, crying out ‘God save King Edward! God save King Edward!’ The fighting was over by mid-afternoon, with 2,000 of the rebels lying dead.

Kett had taken refuge in a barn some 8 miles away, but here he was found and taken prisoner. He was returned under armed guard on the following day to Norwich, where 300 of the recalcitrant rebels were hanged. Kett himself, after a trial in London, was eventually hanged in chains from the wall of Norwich Castle. A plaque was set up by that place in 1949 which read: ‘in reparation and honour to a notable and courageous leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape from a servile life into the freedom of just conditions’.

At the time, however, the verdict upon him was more ambiguous. Kett had been Dudley’s tenant, and rumours have survived of an intrigue between the men to bring down the protector. The treasurer of the army, in particular, had been sending money to Kett. It has been rumoured that Lady Mary had also been party to the plot. But the principal participants, if such they were, have successfully covered any tracks they might have made. All is dark and uncertain. We may chronicle the larger movements of the time but the private deeds remain invisible. We may see dark shapes and outlines – the smiler with the knife under the cloak, the intriguer with the open purse – but we can conclude nothing.

The rebellions may have been crushed, but their ubiquity demoralized the government of the protector. He had acted in an inconsistent manner, at one moment trying to ease their discontents while at another relying upon naked force to suppress them; he had attempted both conciliation and violence, so gaining a reputation for both weakness and brutality. But if it was clear that the response of Somerset and his colleagues was confused, it is also evident that the local administrations of both Devon and Norfolk were weak and uncertain. It did not help that the great magnate of East Anglia, the duke of Norfolk, had been confined in the Tower since 1546 on the charge of high treason. It is perhaps significant that Lady Mary, the largest landowner in Norfolk, seems to have done nothing to arrest the disorder.

At this juncture John Dudley, earl of Warwick, stepped forward; he was reputedly a friend and colleague of Somerset but, in matters of politics, the winner takes all. In the reign of Henry he had fought successfully both in Scotland and in France; his reputation as a military commander was now further attested by his victory over the Norfolk rebels where, unlike Somerset, he had taken to the field. He was circumspect and politic; not domineering, he adopted a conciliatory style.

When he returned to London at the head of the conquering army, he was virtually in control of the city. Power was now the spur to action. It was clear enough that the policies of Somerset were failing. It was claimed that he had gone too far in his early appeasement of the rebels; that, in a sequence of letters he had written in the summer, he had come close to a policy of collaboration with them against the ‘sheep-owners’. This may have been a negotiating tactic, like that which Henry VIII employed at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, but it was cause enough to earn the suspicion and dislike of the landed class. His ‘levity’ and ‘softness’ were denounced.

Other evidence of failure could be found. English authority in Scotland, imposed by means of garrisons, was failing. In the summer the resurgent French king, Henry II, declared war against England and began to lay siege to the English colony of Boulogne. He also had in his possession the young queen of Scotland, as his future daughter-in-law, and he seemed likely to claim her country as his own. From rebellion at home to failure abroad, evidence of Somerset’s misgovernment was everywhere to be seen.

So, on his arrival in London, Dudley at once began to consult and scheme with the principal councillors of the realm. Lady Mary was soon acquainted with the proposals to depose Somerset, and it seems very likely that she was asked to take part; it was even possible that she might be declared ‘regent’ in these early years of her brother’s rule. While consorting with the conservatives, however, Dudley was also ingratiating himself with the reformers. The council were united against the protector.

The leading members of that council addressed a letter to Charles V in which they stated their reasons for deposing Somerset. He had become ‘haught and arrogant’; he had been used ‘to taunt such of us as frankly spake their opinions’; he had shown ‘wilfulness and insolency’; he had by his proclamations and devices brought the people ‘to such a liberty and boldness that they sticked not to rebel and rise in sundry places’; and, in the middle of these disorders, he still built for himself ‘in four or five places most sumptuously’.

As soon as he became aware of these stirrings against him, which had first become manifest in late spring or early summer, Somerset tried to mobilize support on his own behalf. He sent out letters and proclamations that were in turn answered by letters and proclamations from the council. On 5 October the young king summoned ‘all his loving subjects’ to Hampton Court, where he then resided, and to come ‘with harness and weapon’; the protector was clearly speaking through him. The young king was even brought before some of Somerset’s followers, where he requested that ‘I pray you be good to us and to our uncle’. Yet it is unlikely that Edward had any real affection for him, or even resented the turn of events. When he eventually returned to London the imperial ambassador said that the young king ‘certainly looked as if he had had a surprise’.

Two days later the protector removed Edward from Hampton Court to the castle at Windsor, where a group of his own men-at-arms were set to guard him. He issued a summons to the lords and to the people asking for their assistance; but no one rose in his defence. Even Cranmer, with whom he had planned the reforms of religion, seems now to have turned against him.

Dudley and the council informed the people by means of proclamation; they wrote to the ambassadors, and to the two princesses. They also took the precaution of sending a letter to the young king himself, professing their loyalty and condemning Somerset for ignoring their advice and exceeding his authority. The protector, seeing the forces now ranged against him, capitulated; any alternative strategy could only lead to civil war. A struggle between the nobles would be an unwelcome reprise of the Wars of the Roses. He surrendered on the understanding that he would be treated leniently. He was, however, together with his partisans, immediately sent to the Tower, where he ‘confessed’ to twenty-nine articles declared against him.

Although Dudley may have been the guiding hand behind these events, it is not at all clear that he was the immediate beneficiary. It seemed for a time that the conservative faction in the council now held the ascendancy. A proclamation was therefore issued on Christmas Day condemning certain ‘evil disposed’ persons and denying that ‘they should have again their old Latin service, their conjured bread and water, with such like vain and superstitious ceremonies …’ Somerset had been so closely associated with such innovations as the Book of Common Prayer that his fall was always likely to arouse the hopes of his religious adversaries. Rumours spread that the conservative faction was about to strike at Dudley by accusing him of being complicit in all of Somerset’s actions; reports followed that Cranmer had to persuade the king to nominate reformers to the council in order to gain a majority. In the event, through a series of manoeuvres as obscure as they are intricate, Dudley defeated the conservative faction and expelled their principal members from the council. Somerset was released from the Tower in February 1550 and was given a free pardon. Yet the politics of state had changed for ever.

20

The lord of misrule

Dudley did not take the title of protector; he was too cautious to proclaim his primacy in that manner. Instead he determined to act and to govern through his colleagues on the council. The title Dudley assumed was, therefore, that of lord president of the council. The young king was now brought more firmly into the leading role; he attended certain meetings of the council, although it is likely that these were stage-managed for his benefit.

Yet even though Dudley did not take the name of protector he did assume another title. In due course, more confident in his power, he was ennobled as duke of Northumberland. Northumberland’s chaplain, John Hooper, hailed him as a ‘faithful and intrepid soldier of Christ’ and ‘a most holy and faithful instrument of the word of God’, thus announcing to the world the duke’s reformist credentials. It is difficult to search the heart and conscience of any man. At the time of his death Northumberland confessed that he had always in secret believed the old faith of Catholic England, which in turn would suggest that he had used the banner of reform simply to maintain and consolidate his power.

He also favoured the reforms of religion in the hope and expectation that he could profit from the spoils; a new bishop chosen for the see of Winchester was obliged to surrender his lands in exchange for an annual salary and Northumberland then took these large territories for himself and his followers. The bishopric of Durham was dissolved and its revenues were directed to sustain Northumberland’s new dukedom. The lands of the bishops were described as the last course of the feast provided by the Church. A preacher at St Paul’s lamented that ‘covetous officers have so used this matter that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the commonwealth be turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition’. Charity had given way to bribery. In the reign of a boy king the adults in power were free to gorge themselves upon the kingdom.

Edward remained oddly pliant and passive in his dealings with the duke. A French observer noted that ‘whenever there was something of importance that he [Northumberland] wanted done or spoken by the king without anyone knowing that it came from him, he would come secretly at night into the prince’s chamber after everybody was in bed, unnoticed by anyone. The next morning the young prince would come to his council and, as if they came from himself, advocate certain matters – at which everyone marvelled, thinking they were his own ideas.’ It was noticed by another foreign observer that the king always kept his eyes upon the duke, and would leave a meeting or conversation ‘because of signs the duke of Northumberland had made to him’. Slowly he was being educated in the ways of the world, and in the ways of government, but in no sense did he possess independent authority. Northumberland controlled the grant of offices and lands. It was said that he encouraged the young king in all martial pursuits, including those of archery and hunting, thus keeping him out of the way.

In the matter of religion, however, Edward may have already formed his own opinions. At the time of the fall of Somerset he was twelve years old. That is age enough to be enamoured of faith and piety, and his condemnation of Mary’s religious practices suggest that he was already something of a martinet in this sphere. In the previous year he had completed a treatise on papal pretensions, in which he concluded that the pontiff was ‘the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and abominable tyrant’. He may have been instructed by his tutors in this regard, but the tone is surely his own. When he went through the service of consecration for a new bishop he came upon an invocation of the saints; with a stroke of his pen he cancelled it as a blasphemous addition. It was he who decided that there should be weekly sermons in his country’s churches. ‘Believe me,’ one reformer wrote, ‘you have never seen in the world for these thousand years so much erudition united with piety and sweetness of disposition.’

He was known as the ‘godly imp’, as we have observed, and there may have been a strong element of youthful idealism in his character. Had he not been hailed as ‘the young Josiah’? It was a title that he may have wished to fulfil. Thus he was asked to provide judgement, early in his reign, on the curious case of the bishop’s vestments.

John Hooper, Northumberland’s chaplain, had been promoted to the see of Gloucester. But the putative bishop saw an obstacle in his path. For the ceremony he would be obliged to wear the ecclesiastical habits, the white rochet and black chimere, that he had in the past denounced as the dress of the harlot of Babylon. He said that he would not become a magpie in white and black. The surplice was the magic robe of the conjuror. He was also supposed to swear obedience to the archbishop of Canterbury, where before he had promised to defer to no authority other than the Scriptures. His opposition threatened to split the new church discipline, and as a result he was confined for a period to the Fleet prison. Cranmer asked for the king’s judgement on the matter and, at the behest of Edward, a compromise was agreed. Hooper would don the vestments at the service of consecration, but he would not be obliged to wear them for his diocesan affairs. The bishop has since that time become known as ‘the father of nonconformity’. We may say, in the words of St James, ‘how great a matter a little fire kindleth’.

A parliament had been summoned towards the end of 1549 that confirmed the movement of religious change. The eight orders of the medieval church were abolished to make way for the less complex order of bishops, priests and deacons. This was now largely to be a simplified preaching ministry. The priest was no longer expected ‘to offer sacrifice and celebrate Mass both for the living and the dead’, as desired in the past, but to preach the plain gospel and administer the sacraments. Yet many clandestine papists were still to be found among the clergy; they recited the communion office with the same cadences and whisperings as the old Latin Mass; they bent down over the communion table; they genuflected and lifted up their hands; they struck their breasts and made the sign of the cross in the air. These were the vile rags of popery, infinitely comforting to many in the congregation.

An Act was passed prohibiting any statues or figures in the parish church except ‘the monumental figures of kings or nobles who had never been taken for saints’; since the Book of Common Prayer provided all necessary instruction, other prayer books, manuals or missals were to be destroyed. If they were not burnt, they could be sold to bookbinders as convenient material; they could of course also be used in the jakes. In the spring of the following year it was decreed that stone altars should be removed and replaced by wooden communion tables. ‘A goodly receiving, I promise you,’ one conservative bishop declared, ‘to set an oyster table instead of an altar …’

The altar of St Paul’s Cathedral was taken down in the dead of night, in case of popular protest, and a table set up at the foot of the steps before a curtain. Yet a chronicle of the time reports that, three days later, ‘a man was slain in Paul’s church and two frays within the church that same time afterwards’; these ‘frays’, or disturbances, became so frequent that a royal proclamation was issued against them, lamenting that ‘many quarrels, riots, frays and bloodshed have been made in some of the said churches, besides shooting of handguns to doves’. Churches had now become the centre of bitter controversy.

The parish church was now a plain, bare room; no decoration was to be seen except, perhaps, for a memorial text or two and a painted wooden board bearing the royal arms. Where once the altar had stood was now a table and bench for communicants. William Harrison, at a slightly later date, wrote that ‘dead cold is our age … there is blue ice in our churches’. Yet in these bare churches the laity participated much more openly in the service; Bible reading was given primacy, and the fundamentals of the Christian faith – the creeds, the confession of faith and prayer – were properly and fully emphasized. In the royal court itself biblical and prophetic poetry took the place of sonnets and ballads. Edwardian drama, too, concerned itself with scriptural themes.

It was still possible to go too far. In the spring of 1550 Joan Bocher, known as Joan of Kent, was arrested for preaching the doctrine that Christ was not incarnate of the Virgin Mary; he had passed through her by miracle like a ray of light through a glass. At her interrogation she ably pointed out the changes of doctrine already accommodated by the religious authorities. ‘Not long since,’ she said, ‘you burned Anne Askew for a piece of bread [the denial of transubstantiation] and yet came yourselves to believe and propose the same doctrine for which you burned her …’ That was true enough. Yet she was sentenced to death by burning and when a preacher intoned against her as she stood at the stake in Smithfield she called out that ‘he lied like a knave’. And so she died. She was condemned as an ‘Anabaptist’, a catch-all title of opprobrium that was attached to anyone with beliefs that might lead to subversion or anarchy within the body politic.

These were nervous times. Fears of another popular rebellion could not be allayed, and the dearth of resources rendered the government weak. Since the treasury was empty, it was necessary to make peace with France; Northumberland promptly managed this by returning Boulogne to the French king, receiving only half of the promised compensation. Henry VIII’s one conquest had been a costly mistake. The decision was fiercely criticized at the time, as a sign that England was no longer pre-eminent in the affairs of Europe, but it did bring an end to an expensive policy of aggression. As Paget put it in a letter to Northumberland, ‘then was then and now is now’. Calais was the last vestige of what had once been great English possessions in France; that, too, would soon be lost. Northumberland also brought back the English forces from Scotland, thus reversing another of Somerset’s favourite policies. The mercenaries who had helped to put down the rebellions, in west and east, were paid off. The period may perhaps be viewed as one in which for the first time English insularity came to the fore.

The impact of the rebellions can also be recognized in a further parliamentary Act ‘for the punishment of unlawful assemblies and raising of the king’s subjects’. Northumberland also started work on removing other causes of discontent. He began the complex and difficult task of reversing the debasement of the coinage that had occurred in the previous reign and in the protectorate. In this respect he and his fellow councillors achieved only a small measure of success. Under his leadership the privy council was re-established as the governing forum of the realm.

Lady Mary had once described Northumberland as ‘the most unstable man in England’. He returned the compliment in his belief that she was a serious threat both to him and to the new religious settlement. She was next in line to the throne and, if Edward were to die, Northumberland would be cast into the wilderness or worse. She was also the single most prominent supporter of the old faith. It would perhaps be convenient to kill her, yet the popular outcry would threaten the unity of the kingdom itself. She was also the cousin of the most powerful monarch in Europe, the emperor Charles V, and Northumberland knew that it would be unwise and dangerous to incur his wrath; the emperor had just subdued the rebellious provinces of Germany, and knew precisely how ill-prepared England was for war. In the spring of 1550, however, her privilege of observing the rites of the old religion was denied to her, and she was asked to submit to the Act of Uniformity. The imperial ambassador at once objected to this privation.

From this time forward Mary felt that she was in danger; she told the ambassador that the councillors were ‘wicked and wily in their actions and particularly malevolent towards me’. She believed that they were indeed now planning to murder her. By the summer, therefore, she had drawn up plans to flee by boat to the European mainland, where she might retreat to her cousin’s court in Flanders. At the end of June four imperial warships and four smaller ships approached the English coast near Maldon on the coast of Essex but, at this point, it seems that Mary’s nerve failed her. She repeated, over and over again, ‘What shall I do? What shall become of me?’ The ships retreated, and the princess became ever more closely watched by the council. Her chaplains were ordered to refrain from saying Mass, to which she replied that they were covered by her own immunity.

Edward himself then sent her a letter, partly written in his own hand, in which he condemned her misplaced piety and warned her that ‘in our state it shall miscontent us to permit you, so great a subject, not to keep our laws. Your nearness to us in blood, your greatness in estate and the condition of this time, maketh your fault the greater.’ An implied threat of discipline, or punishment, may be discerned here. In her reply Mary told her brother that his letter had caused her ‘more suffering than any illness, even unto death’. The bad blood between them was a source of much grief and suspicion.

When she was summoned to London to account for herself, she was accompanied by fifty knights wearing velvet coats and chains of gold; an entourage of eighty retainers followed her, each of them displaying a set of rosary beads. The message could not be clearer. But apart from proclaiming her attachment to the old faith, the display was also designed to manifest Mary’s power. If it should come to a fight, there was every chance that she would be the victor. She had the strength of the old faith with her. Two days later she went in procession to Westminster, where thousands of people came out to greet her. Omens and portents were in the air. It was reported that the earth shook as ‘men in harness came down to the ground and faded away’. It was also recorded that ‘three suns appeared, so that men could not discern which was the true sun’.

Edward had just begun keeping a journal, and in his entry for March 1551 he notes that ‘the lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster’. She was called into a meeting with him and his council where it was made plain that he ‘could not bear’ her attendance at Mass.

‘My soul is God’s,’ she replied. ‘I will not change my faith nor dissemble my opinions with contrary doings.’

‘I do not constrain your faith,’ the young king replied. ‘You cannot rule as a king. You must obey as a subject. Your example may breed too much inconvenience.’

A further exchange is reported:

‘Riper age and experience,’ she said, ‘will teach Your Majesty much more yet.’

‘You also may have somewhat to learn. None are too old for that.’

Soon after this a message came from the emperor, Charles V, threatening war if Edward did not allow his sister to hear Mass. He noted that ‘to this no answer was given at this time’. Eventually the reply came that Mary was the king’s subject and was obliged to obey his laws.

Yet much of Northumberland’s time and attention was given to internal dissension and resistance to his own rule. The paramount threat once more was Somerset himself, who, on his return to the council after a brief spell of imprisonment, was devoted to undermining his successor. Somerset had survived the Tower but he had lost most of his authority and significance. For a proud man, this was too much to bear. He began a whispering campaign, or ‘popular murmuring’, against the lord president’s policy.

He established a faction against Northumberland, primarily among his supporters in London, and it is certainly possible that in the last resort he planned some kind of coup against him in parliament; it was said that he had hired an assassin to cut off Northumberland’s head, and that he had incited the citizens of London with drums and trumpets and cries of ‘Liberty!’ The lord president did not wait for him to strike, however, but ordered his arrest in the autumn of 1551. At his subsequent trial he was accused of spreading sedition, by stating, for example, that ‘the covetousness of the gentlemen had given the people reason to rise’. The charge of attempted assassination, however, seems to have been fabricated by Northumberland himself. He in fact admitted the manufacture of evidence on the eve of his own execution, and asked pardon from Somerset’s son.

Great crowds attended Somerset’s execution on Tower Hill. He addressed them from the scaffold, beginning with the words ‘Masters and good fellows …’ As he spoke there was a noise ‘as of gunpowder set on fire in a close house bursting out’ and at the same time a sound of galloping horses as of ‘a great number of great horses running on the people to overrun them’. Panic seized the spectators who fled in bewilderment, crying out ‘Jesus save us, Jesus save us’ or ‘This way they come, that way they come, away, away’. There were no horses, and no gunpowder. One lone horse and rider did approach the scaffold, at which point the people cried out ‘Pardon, pardon, pardon. God save the king. God save the king.’ Somerset, with his cap in his hand, waited for the cries to subside. ‘There is no such thing, good people,’ he said, ‘there is no such thing. It is the ordinance of God thus for to die.’ After a few more words he composed himself and, murmuring ‘Lord Jesus save me’ three times, he gave his rings to the executioner and laid his head on the block for the axe. After the event many rushed to the scaffold to dip their handkerchiefs in the dead man’s blood.

It is reported that the court provided many sports and entertainments for the young king during this period, to ward off any ‘dampy thoughts’. Yet Edward himself seems to have been largely indifferent to his uncle’s fate. He records, in his entry for 22 January 1552, ‘the duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Towerhill, between eight and nine o’clock in the morning’. Nineteen months later Northumberland would stand on the same spot.

The affairs of the realm, too, were in a state of disarray. The debasement of the currency in the protector’s regime had had the natural consequence of inflating the prices of the basic and most necessary foodstuffs. The harvest of 1551 was poor, the third such harvest in a row; and the European market for English woollens had diminished, with a glut of cloth reported at Antwerp. Money had lost half of its value since the last days of Henry. The cost of flour had doubled, for example, so that the standard halfpenny loaf was half the size; the governors of St Bartholomew’s were obliged to increase the rations to those in their care. There was very little Northumberland and his colleagues could do about these matters; they were effectively helpless in the face of overwhelming misery.

In the summer of that year, compounding all the distress and woe, an epidemic illness known as ‘the great sweat’ or ‘the sweating sickness’ spread through the country. It was also known as ‘Stop, gallant’ on account of the fact that some people who were dancing at court at nine o’clock were dead by eleven. It came at night accompanied by chills and tremors; these were followed by a fever and vomiting. The sweat was manifest soon after the onset of the attack; stupor, and death, followed. In the course of the first few days 1,000 Londoners died, and it claimed 2–3,000 in subsequent weeks. It was said in one London chronicle that ‘if they were suffered to sleep but half a quarter of an hour, they never spake after, nor had any knowledge, but when they wakened fell into pangs of death’. It was a year of horrors.

Parliament assembled for its fourth session on 23 January 1552, the day after the execution of the quondam protector, with the urgent task of once more considering religion. Its most notable achievement was the second, and revised, Book of Common Prayer in which further measures of reform were introduced. The Virgin Mary and the saints were not to be invoked. The Mass was not mentioned, since it had been replaced by a service known as the ‘Lord’s supper’. Vestments were reduced and simplified. Any prayer or act that did not have the warrant of the Scriptures was to be abandoned. Thus was the reformed faith firmly revealed to the English, in a liturgy that has remained essentially unchanged to the present day.

The question of kneeling, while receiving communion, was a matter of strenuous and fierce debate. Did it imply adoration of the bread and the wine? Or was it a simple gesture of piety? The bishops could not agree on the matter, and eventually an addition was made to the text which explained that the act of kneeling had no traces of superstition. Prayers for the dead were not to be said during the funeral service, and the corpse was no longer to be addressed by the priest; the dead were sealed off from the living. In a more general sense it might be said that the past no longer had any claim upon the present, a condition of liberation or forgetfulness that had enormous consequences for the direction of English life.

The new liturgy, established in the Book of Common Prayer, was then protected by a second Act of Uniformity. This was the Act that enforced the general expropriation of church plate and other valuable movables; now that the Mass had been abolished, the instruments of worship were no longer needed. The chalices and candlesticks, the monstrances and chrismatories, the pyxes and the cruets, were swept away. The chasubles and the copes, the carpets and tapestries and cushions, were all removed. Cloth of gold and cloth of silver, anything wrought in iron or embossed in copper, were confiscated. This was the furthest point reached by the English reformation. It can in fact be argued that most of the defining elements of Protestant creed and practice were formulated during the reign of Edward VI; Elizabeth I merely tinkered with them.

Compulsory attendance at church, on Sunday, was also decreed; the first offence merited six months’ imprisonment, while the third relegated the offender to perpetual confinement. Yet some were disenchanted with the new service and disobeyed the order; it is likely that most received only a ministerial rebuke. Others were simply bored by the preachings and exhortations, the homilies and sermons. ‘Surely it is an ill misorder,’ Hugh Latimer wrote, ‘that folk should be walking up and down in the sermon-time … and there shall be such huzzing and buzzing in the preacher’s ear that it maketh him oftentimes to forget his matter.’

A new Treason Act was passed specifically to protect the changes in religion; it was now considered a serious offence to question the royal supremacy or to dissent from the articles of faith that the English Church now enjoined. The conservative bishops, who had preached against the new dispensation, were already in the Tower or under house arrest.

Cranmer had just completed two works that consolidated the cause of reform, A Collection of the Articles of Religion and A Code of Ecclesiastical Constitutions. The forty-two articles which he compiled were in fact never ratified by parliament or convocation but, as they became the model for the Thirty-Nine Articles promulgated by Elizabeth in 1563, they are still the foundation of the English Church; they reflected Cranmer’s mature theology, and were of a strongly Calvinist temper. Justification by faith alone, and ‘predestination unto life’, were affirmed. The twenty-ninth article denounced transubstantiation as ‘repugnant to the plain words of Scripture’ which ‘has given occasion to many superstitions’, and the rites of the Mass were described as ‘fables and dangerous deceits’.

The code of ecclesiastical laws was drawn up by Cranmer and his colleagues as a substitute for the canon law of Rome. To deny the Christian faith is to merit death. Adultery is to be punished with imprisonment or transportation for life. The seducer of a single woman will be compelled to marry her or, if he is already married, to give her one third of his worldly goods. The code was never in fact given the force of law, and the ecclesiastical courts continued their confused course without a compass.

Yet the Edwardian reformers had completed their work. Henry’s accomplishment in politics was now repeated in religion; the pope had been removed for ever. Justification by faith alone removed the intercessionary role of the Church, just as the demotion of the sacraments reduced the power of the priesthood. The denial of transubstantiation effectively destroyed the Mass. The rituals of Rome had been discarded.

In the autumn of the year Northumberland once more contemplated the menace of rebellion. In December he ‘instantly and earnestly required the Lords of the Council to be vigilant for the preventing of these treasons so far as in them was possible to be foreseen’. Three months later martial law was declared in some regions of the country. The murmurings came to nothing but the danger of rebellion posed an acute threat to Edward’s councillors who were never much liked by the general populace.

One of those councillors was of especial significance. William Cecil, who was to play a pre-eminent role in the reign of Elizabeth, became, at the age of thirty, a privy councillor and secretary to the king; his outstanding gifts as an administrator and ‘confidential clerk’ had already been recognized. He had served Somerset and, after a brief spell in the Tower in the wake of his patron’s fall, he had been plucked into government by Northumberland. He wrote a state paper in the winter of 1550 in which he outlined in stark terms the prospects for the country. ‘The emperor’, he wrote, ‘is aiming at the sovereignty of Europe, which he cannot obtain without the suppression of the reformed religion; and unless he crushes the English nation, he cannot crush the reformation. Besides religion, he has a further quarrel with England, and the Catholic party will leave no stone unturned to bring about our overthrow. We are not agreed among ourselves. The majority of our people will be with our adversaries …’

The last sentence is a significant admission that the acts of the reformers had not been appreciated by the larger part of the population. Cecil said that in the event of war between England and Charles V, the majority would obey the pope rather than the king. The greater body of the peers, most of the bishops, almost all of the judges and lawyers, as well as the priests and the justices of the peace, would follow the same guide. For those who consider the Edwardian reformation to be in large part popular, this is a corrective. The people may have acquiesced in the changes, but, according to Cecil’s testimony, they by no means approved of them. The habit of deference, and obedience, was combined with impotence and fear.

21

The nine-day queen

In the first days of 1552 the young king drafted ‘certain points of weighty matters to be immediately concluded on by my council’. It was no longer the council, but my council. He was now in his fourteenth year, and he began to exercise the reality of power. At the age of fourteen Richard II had been obliged to deal with the effects of the Peasants’ Revolt.

At the beginning of April, Edward fell ill of a disease that has been variously described as smallpox and the measles; yet he recovered easily enough. He told a childhood friend that ‘we have a little been troubled with the smallpox, which hath letted [prevented] us to write thereto; but now we have shaken that quite away’. He had not been well enough to attend parliament but he noted in his journal for 15 April that ‘I signed a bill containing the names of the acts which I would have pass, which bill was read in the House’.

After his recovery he began to sign royal warrants in his own hand rather than relying upon the signatures of his councillors. He engaged himself in foreign affairs, and in such subtle matters as the debasement of the currency. There survives a document, written in his own hand, concerning the method of proceedings in the council. Whether this was suggested to him, or was of his own devising, is not apparent. Yet he seems to have had all the makings of a good administrator. He wrote some of his notes in Greek, so that his attendants could not read them. And in the summer of the year he went on a progress, with 4,000 horse in attendance. It was the best way of displaying his power and authority to his subjects; the vast train visited Portsmouth and Southampton, among other places, before moving on through Wiltshire and Dorset.

Yet the disease and mortality of the age soon swirled around its principal figure. By the autumn of the year he seemed weaker than before, and he consulted an Italian physician who, like most doctors, also practised astrology. Hieronymus Cardano recorded that the king was ‘of a stature somewhat below the middle height, pale-faced with grey eyes’; he was rather ‘of a bad habit of body than a sufferer from fixed diseases. He had a somewhat projecting shoulder-blade.’ Cardano also reported that he ‘carried himself like an old man’.

In February 1553 Edward contracted a cold or chill that was accompanied by a fever; in the following month he was still looking ‘very weak and thin’. In the spring he moved to the palace at Greenwich, and in this period the imperial ambassador reported that the young king was ‘becoming weaker as time passes and wasting away’. His sputum was sometimes green and sometimes black. He was still capable of a Tudor outburst. When his will was obstructed in one matter he exclaimed to his councillors, ‘You pluck out my feathers as I were but a tame falcon – the day will come when I shall pluck out yours!’

On 12 May the imperial ambassador wrote that Edward ‘is suffering from a suppurating tumour on the lung’. He added that ‘he is beginning to break out in ulcers; he is vexed by a harsh, continuous cough, his body is dry and burning, his belly is swollen, he has a slow fever upon him that never leaves him’. Two weeks later it was reported that ‘he does not sleep except when he be stuffed with drugs, which doctors call opiates … The sputum which he brings up is black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure.’ On 12 June he signed the Forty-Two Articles; but it was too late. They were never enforced. By the summer ‘the king himself has given up hope and says he feels so weak that he can resist no longer’. He was in his sixteenth year, a dangerous period for the Tudor male. Prince Arthur, his uncle, had expired at the age of fifteen; his half-brother, the duke of Richmond, had died at seventeen.

The nature of his illness has been variously described, but it is likely to have been a pulmonary infection that led to pneumonia. Rumours at the time that he had been the victim of a poisoner are most unlikely to have been true. Cui bono? In the face of the growing weakness of the king, Northumberland was thrown into panic fear. The next person in line to the throne, according to Henry VIII’s will, was Lady Mary, who reviled and hated him as the destroyer of the old faith. If she succeeded to the throne all the work of the reformation would be undone. It was unthinkable.

So in the early summer of the year a change in the order of succession was planned by Northumberland and the king. It has been suggested that the plot was devised by the duke alone, but there is no reason to suppose that the ‘godly imp’ would have calmly anticipated the reversal of religious reform. The salvation of the country depended on its survival. Northumberland himself seems to have grown tired and weary of governance. ‘I have’, he wrote, ‘entered into the bottom of my care.’

In the early stages of the king’s disease Mary was informed of his condition by Northumberland himself. In February, when her brother was kept in bed by the feverish chill, she was invited to court where she was ‘more honourably received and entertained with greater magnificence’ than ever before; Northumberland and a hundred horsemen welcomed her on the outskirts of the city and, when she arrived at Whitehall, the assembled council bowed their heads as if she were already on the throne of England. Yet as the death of Edward seemed to draw ever closer it became desperately important to remove Mary from the succession. There was no possibility of a Catholic queen. But who should be the beneficiary?

Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII by his younger daughter, Mary, and stood third in line to the throne after Mary and Elizabeth; for Northumberland, she also had the inestimable benefit of being his daughter-in-law. She was of impeccable religious credentials, as an ardent reformer. She had asked one of Mary’s ladies why she curtsied to the sacrament. ‘ “I curtsy to Him that made me.” “Nay, but did not the baker make him?” ’ She told her tutor that it ‘were a shame to follow my lady Mary against God’s word’. So she was stridently of the new faith. She was also learned. When Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, visited her he found her reading Plato’s Phaedo. He asked her why she was not with her family hunting stag in the park. ‘I think,’ she replied, ‘all their sport in the park is but a shade to the pleasure I find in Plato.’ She would be the ideal queen, especially under the paternal eye of the duke himself.

So Edward and Northumberland, presumably working in concert, now devised a new will. Mary and Elizabeth were once more declared illegitimate, thus barring them from the throne of England. At the end of May the young king prepared what he called ‘his device for the succession’. He had at first written that his crown should pass to the ‘Lady Jane’s heirs male’ in the hope that he would live long enough to see the fruits of her marriage; he could at this stage not envisage the rule of a queen. Then, approximately three weeks later, he erased those words and inserted ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. He may have suffered a relapse. In any case it must have been made clear to him that he might not live.

Many of the councillors were opposed to this device, considering it illegal for an underage king to set aside an Act of Parliament. The judges were summoned to the palace at Greenwich where, on listening to Edward’s proposal, they unanimously declared that it was contrary to the law. The king was defiant and dismissive. The judges asked for more time. They returned to meet the council two days later, when they declared that to permit the alteration of the succession would incur the charge of treason.

Northumberland was absent on their arrival but, on hearing their verdict, ‘he came into the council chamber, being in great rage and fury, trembling for anger … and said that he would fight in his shirt with any man in the quarrel’. The judges left the room. They came back on the following day, after an urgent summons, and were taken to the king’s bedside. He met them ‘with sharp words and angry countenance’. ‘Why is my will disobeyed? There must be no delay!’ The royal councillors remained silent. The judges were cowed. They asked only that their instructions should be put in writing, and that they should be pardoned if their consent was later deemed to be criminal. They argued to each other that there could be no treason in obeying the commands of their sovereign. And so it passed. The great ones of the realm eventually subscribed to the document dethroning Lady Mary.

These were the last days of the young king. On 1 July he was shown at a window of the palace, presumably to counter a rumour that he was already dead; yet he looked ‘so thin and wasted’ that few of the spectators were reassured. A crowd gathered on the following day, in the belief that he would appear again, but a courtier came out to declare that ‘the air was too chill’.

A professor of medicine from Oxford was summoned to the palace, together with a ‘wise woman’ who recommended the healing powers of a mysterious liquid. Both of them were admitted to the sickroom on the strict understanding that they would reveal the king’s true condition to nobody. The guard at the Tower was doubled, and wild rumours flew around the city of imminent perils. The imperial ambassador had been told that a force of 500 men had been sent to surround Lady Mary’s manor house, Hunsdon, in Hertfordshire, in order to seize her person; he reported further that the princess was to be taken to the Tower, ostensibly to prepare herself for her coronation, but would then be detained indefinitely. Northumberland and his friends were purchasing all the available arms in London, and the ships upon the Thames were being prepared for the sea. It was proposed that the evangelical preachers, under the supervision of Northumberland, would declare the illegitimacy of Mary from their pulpits. It was whispered that the duke was willing to surrender England into French hands for the support of the French king. That was, perhaps, a rumour too far. He may have come to an understanding, however, about the use of French troops in case of an English revolt. Henry II, the French king, would not in any case wish the cousin of his rival, Charles V, to become the queen of England.

On 6 July the end of Edward came. Between eight and nine in the evening, according to one popular newssheet or ‘broadside’, he whispered his last prayer. ‘Lord God, deliver me out of this miserable and wretched life, and take me among thy chosen …’ This is no doubt a pious fantasy of the writer purporting to witness Edward’s death as a Calvinist. Another account must also be treated warily. In this version the dying king sensed, rather than saw, his attendant doctors and gentlemen of the privy chamber. ‘Are you so near?’ he asked them. ‘I thought you had been further off.’

‘We heard you speak to yourself, but what you said we know not.’

‘I was praying to God.’

One of his attendants took him in his arms. ‘I am faint,’ he said. ‘Lord, have mercy upon me and take my spirit.’ The day of his death was, according to the Grey Friars’ Chronicle, greeted by signs and wonders in the heavens. A storm broke over London and the summer afternoon became dark; great trees were uprooted, the streets turned into rivers, and the hail lay in the city’s gardens as red as blood. It was said that the grave of Henry VIII had opened and that the old king had risen in protest at the defiance of his will.

Mary, alerted to all possible dangers, had fled from her manor house two days before to the relative safety of her estate at Kenninghall in Norfolk, where she was among friends and allies. The death of Edward was kept secret for three days, in order that all Northumberland’s preparations could be completed. Northumberland spoke of him as if he were still alive.

Lady Jane Grey was brought to London, and on 9 July was told that the king wished to speak to her. She was taken to Northumberland’s manor, Sion House, where she was greeted by the duke and certain other lords. ‘The king’, Northumberland told her, ‘is no more.’ He then explained the conditions of the new will, making Lady Jane the sovereign. Having spoken, he and the other lords fell to their knees in front of her. She received the news with alarm. The Crown could not be for her. She was unfit. But then she recovered. She raised her hands in prayer and asked God for grace to govern well.

On the same day Mary learned the fate of her younger brother. She sat down and wrote a letter to the most prominent noblemen of the kingdom. ‘My lords,’ she wrote, ‘we greet you well and have received sure advertisement that our deceased brother the king, our late sovereign lord, is departed to God’s mercy.’ She went on to say that ‘it seemeth strange that the dying of our said brother upon Thursday at night last past, we hitherto had no knowledge from you thereof’ before demanding that ‘our right and title to the crown and government of this realm to be proclaimed in our city of London’. It is reported that the lords looked into one another’s faces uneasily, and that their wives sobbed. A reply was sent ordering Mary not to ‘vex and molest’ the people of England with her false claim.

On 10 July the heralds-at arms announced the accession of Queen Jane in Cheapside, Paul’s Cross and Fleet. There is no evidence of rejoicing, or even of general acceptance. The crowds responded with silence, if not with open discontent, their faces ‘sorrowful and averted’. One chronicler reports that a vintner’s boy, Gilbert Potter, cried out that ‘the Lady Mary has the better title’; he was seized and led away. His ears were severed at the root on the following morning.

It might have been thought that Northumberland was in a pre-eminent position. He had control of the fleet as well as the treasury; he commanded the fortresses and garrisons of the land. Mary had as yet no army at her disposal; she had only the members of her household. But all Northumberland’s power was not enough in the face of her determined opposition and the evident fury of her supporters. The lawful succession to the throne of England could not be compromised by double-dealing. The crisis, of Northumberland’s own making, had broken over them all. Some of the councillors secretly doubted him. Others were confused and uncertain. William Cecil armed himself and made plans to flee the realm.

Northumberland had decided to detain Mary, by force, and bring her to London. If he had acted sooner, even before Edward’s death, he might have succeeded in destroying her. It was first believed that the armed party against her would be led by Jane Grey’s father, the duke of Suffolk, but the new queen’s protestations prevented the move. Instead Northumberland himself would march from London, by way of Shoreditch, with a retinue of 600 armed men. The citizens watched them leave. ‘The people press to see us,’ he remarked, ‘but not one sayeth God speed us.’ He had asked his colleagues to remain faithful to him, but he could not be entirely sure of their loyalty.

Mary stood her ground. She was resolute and defiant on the model of her father; she had a stern Tudor sense of majesty, allied with an awareness of her religious mission to save England from heresy. It had been thought that she might flee to the emperor in Brussels, but why should a queen abandon her realm? Supporters flocked to her, with the earl of Sussex and the earl of Bath among the first of them. The people from the towns and villages of the region took up their weapons. It seemed that the whole of East Anglia had risen for her. The city of Norwich proclaimed her as rightful sovereign. A small navy of six ships, sent out by Northumberland to guard the seaways off the Norfolk coast, defected to Mary’s camp. When she went out to review her new troops the cry went up ‘Long live our good Queen Mary!’ She removed from Kenninghall to Framlingham Castle, in Suffolk, where she might repel any armed force. Yet she was still in the utmost danger. If she had been defeated and come to trial, she would have been declared guilty of treason. The fate of the nation, and of her religion, was now at stake.

Northumberland had taken his men to Cambridgeshire, where Newmarket had been chosen as the rendezvous for the army made up of tenants from various noble estates. But when the report of the navy’s defection to Mary reached that place, the men began to mutiny; they declared that they refused to serve their lords against Queen Mary. Northumberland sent an express message to the council demanding reinforcements and was given ‘but a slender answer’. The members of the council, in the absence of their presiding genius, began to entertain doubts about the wisdom of the entire enterprise. As a contemporary chronicler put it, ‘each man then begun to pluck in his horns’.

As the radical preachers continued their pulpit campaign against Mary, William Cecil and others began to organize a coup d’état. They had been gathered in the Tower, close to Queen Jane herself, where they remained under the observation of a garrison loyal to Northumberland. On Wednesday 19 July, with Northumberland’s forces in open rebellion, the councillors managed to leave the Tower and gather at Baynard’s Castle on the north shore of the Thames about three-quarters of a mile above London Bridge.

They were joined here by the Lord Mayor, the aldermen and other prominent citizens. The earl of Arundel spoke first. If they continued to support the claims of Lady Jane Grey, civil war was unavoidable, with the distinct possibility that foreign powers would also intervene. No fate would be more unhappy for England and its people. The earl of Pembroke then rose and, taking his sword out of his scabbard, announced that ‘this blade shall make Mary queen, or I will lose my life’. Not one voice was heard on behalf of Northumberland or of Jane. A body of 150 men were then marched to the gates of the Tower, where the keys were demanded in the name of Queen Mary. Lady Jane’s father realized that the end had come; he rushed to his daughter’s chamber and tore down the canopy of state under which she sat. Her reign had lasted for just nine days.

The lords of the council then proceeded to the cross at Cheapside, where in due state they declared Mary to be the queen of England. The crowd of spectators cried out ‘God save the queen’, and Pembroke tossed his purse and embroidered cap into the throng. The bells of St Paul’s rang out, to be joined by all the other bells in the city. The lords then went in procession to the cathedral where, for the first time in almost seven years, the hymn of praise known as the Te Deum was sung by the choir. The apprentices gathered wood to light bonfires at the major crossroads. That evening the council wrote to Northumberland, asking him to lay down his arms.

The duke himself, now all but trapped in Cambridge, hurried to the market cross. He informed the crowds of angry spectators that he had followed the council’s orders in proclaiming Jane and proceeding against Mary; now that the council had changed its opinion, he would also change his. He threw up his cap and called out ‘God save Queen Mary’. He told a colleague that Mary was a merciful woman and would declare a general pardon. To which came the reply that ‘you can hope nothing from those that now rule’.

Arundel came to Cambridge with orders to arrest him. ‘I obey, my lord,’ Northumberland said, ‘yet show me mercy, knowing the case as it is.’

‘My lord, you should have sought for mercy sooner. I must do according to my commandment.’

At seven in the evening of 3 August Queen Mary entered her capital in triumph accompanied by a retinue of 500 attendants;her horse was trapped with cloth of gold, and her gown of purple velvet was embroidered with gold. She wore a chain of gold, and jewels, about her neck and her headdress was similarly covered in precious stones. She was greeted by the civic dignitaries at Aldgate and then through cheering crowds rode in procession to the Tower of London. Here, the prisoners of the old regime were waiting to greet her, among them the duke of Norfolk and the conservative bishops. She raised them from their knees, and kissed each one upon the cheek. ‘You are my prisoners!’ she exclaimed before returning to them their liberty. The cannons sounded ‘like great thunder, so that it had been like to an earthquake’.

Less than three weeks later Northumberland was led to the scaffold at Tower Hill. He confessed to the crowds around him that he had ‘been an evil liver and have done wickedly all the days of my life’. Then, perhaps to the surprise of those who watched him, he denounced radical preachers for turning him away from the true religion. ‘I beseech you all,’ he declared, ‘to believe that I die in the Catholic faith.’ The day before he had heard Mass in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. It was said that he had made his conversion in a desperate attempt to avert death or, perhaps, to save his family from further punishment. Yet his return to Catholicism may have been entirely genuine.

As the end came he recited a prayer and the psalm De Profundis. The executioner, according to custom, now begged his pardon; the man wore a white apron, like a butcher. ‘I have deserved a thousand deaths,’ Northumberland told him. He made the sign of the cross in the sawdust around him and laid his head upon the block. One stroke of the axe was enough. Some little children mopped up the blood that had fallen through the slits of the scaffold.

22

In the ascendant

The imperial ambassador declared that Mary’s triumphant reclamation of the crown had been a miracle of God and a token of the divine will. The new queen herself saw her accession as part of a sacred dispensation. It was her destiny, and duty, to bring her country back to the old faith. On the secular level it could also be said that a popular rebellion had overthrown an established regime. She had, in addition, gained the throne largely as a result of the loyalty of the Catholic nobility; no overtly Protestant lord had supported her. As soon as she heard that she had been proclaimed queen in London, she ordered that the crucifix be once more set up in her chapel at Framlingham.

When Mary first rode into the capital, after her triumph, many households placed images of the Virgin and of the saints in their windows as a token of the change. News of her accession reached the congregation gathered in Exeter Cathedral to hear a sermon by the reformer Miles Coverdale; the report was whispered around the assembly and, one by one, the people stood up and walked out. Only a few of the ‘godly’ remained. All over the country the Mass was once more chanted in Latin. Without any statutes or proclamations, the images and altars of the old faith were quickly restored. The crucifixes were set up, and the statues of the Virgin and the saints were put in their familiar places. When a justice tried to prosecute some priests in Kent for saying Mass, he himself was imprisoned. Six or seven Masses were, in any case, now being sung every day in the royal chapel at Whitehall. It had once again become the centrepiece of true faith.

On the matter of her brother’s funeral Mary was hesitant. She did not want to use the reformed burial service. ‘She could not’, she said, ‘have her brother committed to the ground like a dog.’ She was advised that it were best for a heretic king to have a heretic funeral, thus avoiding public controversy. So she compromised. Reluctantly she agreed that he could be buried according to the rite that he had favoured during his reign, but she tried to safeguard his soul and her principles by having a Latin Mass for the dead sung the night before his funeral and a solemn requiem a few days later.

On 18 August 1553 Mary issued a Proclamation Concerning Religion in which she forbade the use of opprobrious terms such as ‘papist’; she also commanded that no one ‘shall henceforth under pretext of sermons or lessons either in Church, publicly or privately, interpret the Scriptures, or teach anything pertaining to religion, except it be in the Schools of the university’. She had, in other words, banned all radical or reformed preachers. She had asserted that she had no thought of religious compulsion, but with the ominous proviso ‘until such time as further order by common consent may be taken’.

Yet, in certain quarters, resistance to the reintroduction of the old faith could be fierce. Some preachers, righteous in their generation, proclaimed the true doctrine of King Edward’s reign. London was as ever the centre of religious radicalism. When one Catholic chaplain preached at Paul’s Cross, a large crowd cried out ‘Thou liest!’ and ‘Pull him out! Pull him out!’ A dagger was thrown at the pulpit, and he had to be hurried away through the schoolhouse close by. Nevertheless, the European reformers, who had made the capital their home, now quickly made their way back to Zurich or Geneva or Strasburg. The colony of Walloon weavers, settled in Glastonbury, was happy to go home.

Other incidents of insurrection took place. A church in Suffolk was set on fire as Mass was being said. One radical, Thomas Flower, pulled out a wooden knife from his belt at the time of communion and repeatedly stabbed at the officiating priest. The reformers were soon obliged to meet in secret; they went into fields, or ships moored on the Thames, under cover of darkness. The bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, was determined to root out the heretics. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said to one of them, ‘there is a brotherhood of you, but I will break it, I warrant you.’ He had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the Marshalsea by Northumberland’s council; soon enough he became known as ‘Bloody Bonner’ for his determined persecution of reformers.

Another restored bishop, Stephen Gardiner, was fresh from the Tower when he confronted another heretic. ‘My lord,’ the man said, ‘I am none heretic, for that way that you count heresy, so worship we the living God.’

‘God’s Passion!’ bellowed the bishop. ‘Did I not tell you, my lord deputy, how you should know an heretic? He is up with the “living God” as though there were a dead God. They have nothing in their mouths, these heretics, but “the Lord liveth, the living God ruleth, the Lord Lord” and nothing but “the Lord” ’. At this point he took off his cap, and rubbed to and fro, and up and down, ‘the fore part of his head, where a lock of hair was always standing up’. His final words were ‘Away with him! It is the stubbornest knave that ever I talked with.’ He dispatched another radical preacher with the words ‘carry away this frenzy-fool to prison’. His archdeacon at Westminster was equally vehement; when disputing with a disciple of Arianism, whereby the Son of God is inferior to God the Father, he spat in the man’s face. Just as ‘Catholic’ now became used as a term of triumph, so ‘Protestant’ entered the language in the course of this reign as a mark of opprobrium.

To gauge the true faith of the English is impossible. It is clear enough that only a minority of the people were committed to the new faith, and that a slightly larger number now espoused full Catholicism. The changes in direction of religious policy, the attack upon the rituals of the old faith, the stripping of the churches, must have had devastating consequences for the piety of the people. The bonds of the sacred had been loosened. It is possible, then, that there was no drift from Catholicism to Protestantism (or vice versa) but rather a movement from the fervent or instinctive piety of the medieval period to bland conformism and even indifference. This would be entirely consistent with a reformation that was less about the assertion of faith and principle than about the redistribution of power and wealth. Habit and custom, rather than faith or piety, were the determinants of English religion.

Mary was the first woman, apart from the ill-starred Jane Grey, to be proclaimed queen regnant of England. Her one possible predecessor, Matilda, had never been crowned and was known only as domina, or lady. But Mary had one precedent; her grandmother, Isabella, had ruled as queen of Castile and had maintained all the panoply of a royal court. No doubt Katherine of Aragon had discoursed with her daughter on the rituals and splendours of a reigning queen. Mary’s great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had been the power behind the throne of her son Henry VII. And her cousin, Margaret, had been ruling as queen-regent of Flanders for the last twenty years. As a child she had been brought up to be a queen; no subject could kiss her, except on the hand, and in formal rituals those about her knelt. There was a tradition of female power upon which she could draw.

She employed the members of her own household as her first advisers, but she could not wholly dispense with the councillors of the previous reign; only they had the knowledge, and skill, to maintain the system of government. Two days before her coronation she had summoned them; when they assembled she sank to her knees before them and spoke to them of the duties that, as a sovereign, God had imposed upon her. ‘I have entrusted my affairs and person to you, and wish to adjure you to do your duty as you are bound to your oaths.’ According to the Spanish ambassador, who became her principal confidant, they were deeply moved and did not know how to reply. But hers was a politic move. She knew that many of them had been hostile to her in the past, having signed the device barring her from the succession, and she distrusted them. She declared to the ambassador that ‘she would use their dissimulation for a great end, and would make their consent prevent them from plotting against her’.

It was a large and in some ways unwieldy council, composed of some fifty members. Mary herself was infuriated by the divisions among them; they were continually ‘chopping and changing’, blaming one another and exculpating themselves. Some had always been loyal to her, while others had been disloyal to the last possible minute; some were conservative bishops, newly released from prison, while others were great magnates who had done well out of the confiscation of monastic lands. She said, on a later occasion, that she spent most of her time shouting at them. Yet from this council a small inner circle of six or seven men was soon formed. Most notable among them was the old bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner; the bishop, previously confined to the Tower, was appointed to be lord chancellor. Most of the others were professional administrators who had served under the old regime.

Mary set about the business of governing with a will. She rose at dawn, when she prayed and heard a private Mass; she then went to her desk where she stayed until one or two in the afternoon. She took a light meal and then returned to her desk where she worked until midnight. She wrote letters; she granted audiences to her subjects; she conferred with her council. Yet it was still commonly believed that she needed a husband. A female monarch was considered to be unnatural, an aberration that could be countered only by a male figure of authority at her side.

When parliament assembled on 5 October, in the first year of her reign, the question of her marriage was a pressing issue. The vast majority, of both Lords and Commons, wished her to take an Englishman as her consort. At her formal coronation, four days before, she had worn her hair loose as a symbol that she was a virgin.

Matters of a more general purport were also debated. Parliament passed a bill affirming the validity of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, legitimizing Mary’s claim to the throne. An Act was also passed to enforce the religious settlement as it had stood in the last year of Henry VIII, thus abolishing all the Edwardian innovations; the matter caused protracted deliberation, over a period of four days, and was eventually agreed by 270 over 80 votes. A significant minority, therefore, still supported the Edwardian reforms. The members of parliament, however, let it be known that there were two topics on which they were united. There was to be no restitution of Church property, and no restoration of papal authority.

In the following month the Speaker of the House of Commons came before the queen and her council. He presented her with a petition on the question of her marriage and then, in a long and prolix speech, he urged the queen to choose one of her own subjects as her spouse. It would not be fitting to choose someone from abroad, since a foreign prince would have other interests and other priorities. She started to her feet and in the course of a hasty and improvised reply she stated that ‘if you, our Commons, force upon us a husband whom we dislike, it may occasion the inconvenience of our death; if we marry where we do not love, we shall be in our grave in three months …’

Yet others were already involved in the matter of marriage. Just nine days after her proclamation as queen the Spanish ambassador raised the question with her. Mary replied that she would willingly follow the advice of her cousin, Charles V, which meant that in practice she would have no hesitation in marrying a member of the Spanish royal family of which she was already a part. She was, indeed, half-Spanish. The most suitable of the male candidates was inevitably Philip, the eldest son of the king. This is what the Lords and Commons feared.

Mary summoned the ambassador to her private chapel in the autumn of 1553, just as parliament was meeting; this was the sanctuary where she kept the Holy Sacrament and where she told the ambassador that ‘she had continually wept and prayed God to inspire her with an answer to the question of marriage’. She went down upon her knees and began to recite ‘Veni Creator’, a hymn from the Gregorian chant. It seems to have been at this point that she resolved to marry Philip. He was, in a sense, the natural choice. How could the queen marry an English subject?

One possible English candidate had emerged. Edward Courtenay, great-grandson of Edward IV and heir to the House of York, had been imprisoned for the last fifteen years on trumped-up charges of treason; his Plantagenet blood was always a threat to the Tudor dynasty. Mary had released him, as a matter of honour, but had no intention of marrying him. ‘I will never, never marry him,’ she had told her council, ‘that I promise you, and I am a woman of my word. What I say, I do.’ He was not to her taste. Long imprisonment had rendered him feeble and supine. She had irrevocably turned to Spain.

One evening the Spanish ambassador was received at court and, as he bowed to her, he whispered in her ear that he had credentials from the emperor to deliver to her. At the same time he passed her a letter that she quickly concealed. On the following evening he was brought in state by barge to the palace, bearing the official proposal for Mary to wed Philip. Some days later, as the queen was being led towards the royal chapel for Vespers, someone in the court shouted out ‘Treason!’ to general alarm. Mary was unperturbed but her younger sister was seized with fear and trembling.

Princess Elizabeth had largely been a spectator in these marital proceedings. She had followed Mary in her sister’s triumphant entry into London, as a way of advertising their accord in rebutting the claims of a rival family, but the two were not united in any other way. Elizabeth was seen tacitly to represent the Protestant influence, and as such she soon came under suspicion. The French ambassador reported that ‘Elizabeth will not hear Mass, nor accompany her sister to the chapel’. She was considered to be of a proud and fiery spirit, like the other members of her family. The imperial ambassador, another conduit of news and rumour, decided that ‘the princess Elizabeth is greatly to be feared; she has a spirit full of incantation’.

But she knew when to bend. On hearing that her refusal to hear Mass was being treated as insurrection, she fell upon her knees before the queen and begged to be given instruction in the Catholic faith. Yet her sincerity was doubted; it was said that she was too ready to consort with heretics. When she attended her first Mass, in the autumn of the year, she complained all the way to the chapel that she was tormented by a stomach ache, ‘wearing a suffering air’. She never wore the gorgeous rosary that her sister had given her. Mary let it be known that she did not want Elizabeth to succeed to the throne, but her only remedy was of course to bear her own children. The queen was now thirty-seven years old, spare and lean, with a thin mouth and commanding gaze; Elizabeth was twenty, with youth and beauty on her side. She might be a threat.

That threat seemed to emerge in a rebellion at the beginning of 1554. When the envoys from Spain had arrived in January to seal the terms of the marriage treaty with Philip, the Londoners ‘nothing rejoicing, held their heads down sorrowfully’. Schoolboys pelted the Spanish delegation with snowballs. The terms of the treaty were announced on 14 January and, although they restricted Philip’s role in the determination of policy, a chronicler reported that ‘almost each man was abashed, looking daily for worse matters to grow shortly after’. Religious, as well as political, discontent was in the air. By the end of 1553 the Mass and the Latin offices were decreed to be the only legal forms of worship. In December, at the close of parliamentary proceedings, a dead dog was thrown through the window of a royal chamber; it had been shaved with a tonsure like a monk. On another occasion a dead cat was found hanging in Friday Street, wearing Romish vestments; it had between its paws a piece of bread like a ‘singing cake’ or sacramental host.

The leaders of the Protestant cause now began to act in concert; among them was Sir Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, and the duke of Suffolk together with his three brothers. Suffolk himself was of course the father of Jane Grey, the queen of nine days. Edward Courtenay, perhaps angry at his rejection by Mary, joined them. They were in league with the French ambassador, whose country was much affronted by the queen’s decision to marry the heir of the Spanish crown. Some insurgents were simply opposed to the Spanish presence, while others were convinced reformers who were dismayed at the return to Catholicism. A party of the rebels had in fact been members of the military establishment under Northumberland and Edward VI. Cornwall and Devonshire were supposed to be the first regions to rise; Wyatt would carry his native county of Kent, and Suffolk would stir the Midlands. All of the armies would then converge upon London, where they hoped for a happy welcome.

The conspirators remained in London for the first two weeks of the year, but in that period Edward Courtenay gave signs of indecision. He professed to believe that the queen was about to marry him, after all, and he lingered in the purlieus of the court; then he ordered a lavish costume of state, and spoke unwisely about what he knew. The chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, interviewed him and discovered much about the plot. Gardiner summoned one of the insurgents, Sir Peter Carew, to London. Carew fell into a panic and tried to incite his native city of Exeter; Exeter did not rise, and Carew fled to France.

Wyatt, thrown into confusion by this unanticipated and unwelcome news, called the people of Kent to rebellion. On 25 January the church bells of the county rang with the signal for alarm, and a proclamation was issued to the effect that the Spanish army was crossing the seas to conquer England. Wyatt seized the cannon from the ships moored in the Medway and brought them into his stronghold at Rochester. The queen had professed no unease in the first days of the revolt. ‘Let the prince come,’ she said, ‘and all will be well.’ But her position was not safe. She had no army, and she feared that many of her council were secretly eager that the rebellion might succeed. The city agreed to give her 500 men from their trained bands, as much to preserve the capital as to safeguard the queen.

The king of France had promised to send eighty vessels to assist the insurgents, and the news somehow reached the English court. The French ambassador was closely watched and one of his couriers was arrested. He was carrying some coded messages from the ambassador himself, and a copy of a letter from Lady Elizabeth to her sister. There was no treason here, but it was nonetheless suspicious. Why should the French king be interested in one of the princess’s letters?

The duke of Norfolk led the trained bands of London against Rochester but, as he approached the bridge, he saw to his horror that his men were deserting to Wyatt’s side. They cried out ‘A Wyatt! A Wyatt!’ This was the familiar phrase of acclamation. ‘We are all Englishmen!’ Norfolk and a few commanders galloped off in fear of their lives. Wyatt then appeared on the bridge. ‘As many as will tarry with us,’ he said, ‘shall be welcome. As many as will depart, let them go.’ So he gained 300–400 men, together with their weapons. The rebellion seemed set to succeed. If Wyatt had marched to London immediately, the gates might have been opened to him.

The queen, in her defenceless position, remained resolute and defiant. She rode through the streets of the city to the Guildhall, where she met an assembly of citizens. She had a deep voice, often compared with that of a man, and piercing eyes that could command respect as well as fear. She spoke to them from the steps of the hall. She was the lawful queen of England. She appealed to the love and loyalty of Londoners against a presumptuous rebel who intended ‘to subdue the laws to his will and to give scope to rascals and forlorn persons to make general havoc and spoil’. She also promised to call a parliament that would consider the suitability of Philip as her consort; if the Lords and Commons rejected him, then she would think of him no more.

Her courage and her bearing impressed the Londoners. On the following day 25,000 armed citizens came to her defence against the encroachments of Wyatt and his men. He had come up to Greenwich from Rochester but, on arriving on the south bank by London Bridge, he found the gates closed against him. He was declared to be a traitor and a ransom of £100 was placed on his head. In response he wore his name, in large letters, upon his cap.

He could derive no comfort from the position of his confederate, the duke of Suffolk, whose attempt to raise the Midlands had ended in failure; he had fled to one of his estates, but his hiding-place was betrayed by his gamekeeper. His ally in the Midlands rebellion had been Lord John Grey, uncle of the unfortunate Jane Grey; he had concealed himself for two days, without food or drink, in the hollowed trunk of an ancient tree. He, too, was discovered. The Greys were undone.

Wyatt stood irresolute before London Bridge, now barred, while the guns on the Tower were trained against him. There was no way to cross the river. After much hesitation and diversity of counsel Wyatt determined to ride with his host to Kingston Bridge, from where he could then march back on London; his friends in the city had promised him a welcome. So on the following morning he rode out with 1,500 men, together with some cannon from the Medway ships, and at four in the afternoon he reached Kingston. He found the bridge to be in part broken down, with a small guard on the opposite bank; the guard fled, and Wyatt caused the bridge to be repaired with moored barges. Then he marched once more upon London.

The queen was woken at two or three in the morning, and told that her barge was waiting to take her to the safety of Windsor Castle. ‘Shall I go or stay?’ she asked those closest to her. The Spanish ambassador offered the best advice. ‘If you go,’ he told her, ‘your flight will be known, the city will rise, seize the Tower and release the prisoners. The heretics will massacre the priests, and Elizabeth be proclaimed queen.’ Mary saw the force of his argument.

At nine in the morning Wyatt led his now exhausted men up the hill at Knightsbridge, but a force of the queen’s cavalry divided them near Hyde Park Corner. Wyatt had lost his rearguard but he pushed forward along the road that is now Pall Mall; some citizens were gathered to watch him, and made no sign. They parted to let the insurgents through their midst. Some of the courtiers were alarmed at this acquiescence, and cries of ‘Treason!’ were soon ringing through the palace at Whitehall. ‘Lost! Lost! All is lost!’ The queen replied that, if some would not fight for her, she would go out and fight for herself. She would be happy to die with those who served her.

It did not come to that. Wyatt and the remnant of his forces made their slow way along the Strand and Fleet Street towards the old city. Yet the gates of Ludgate had been closed against him. ‘I have kept touch,’ he said in his despair. He sat down upon a bench outside Belle Sauvage Yard (now known simply as Bell Yard) while his companions scattered in the side streets and alleys off Ludgate Hill. When a part of the queen’s cavalry galloped towards him, he surrendered his sword and was taken into custody.

In the days after the rebellion, gallows were erected in all the principal sites of London from Smithfield to Tower Hill. Some of the rebellious soldiers were hanged outside their doors. ‘There has never been such hanging,’ the French ambassador wrote, ‘as has been going on here every day.’ Yet mercy sometimes prevailed amid the slaughter. On 22 February some 400 men were brought before the queen with halters around their necks, whereupon she pardoned them all.

Lady Jane Grey had remained in the Tower ever since the accession of Mary and in other circumstances could no doubt also have been spared. The treachery of her father changed her situation with dramatic effect. The queen had hardened her heart against her and all her family. The old abbot of Westminster tried to convert the young woman to the Roman communion, but she withstood all of his appeals. She was taken to Tower Green, quietly praying until she reached the scaffold; she calmly ascended the steps and told the spectators that she had broken the law by accepting the crown but that she was innocent of any evil intention. She recited the Miserere psalm, ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’, and then let down her hair, while making sure that her neck was uncovered. ‘I pray you, dispatch me quickly,’ she said to the executioner. And as she knelt she asked him, ‘Will you take it off before I lay me down?’

‘No, madam.’

She tied a handkerchief about her eyes, and then began feeling for the block. ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ One of the bystanders guided her to it, and she laid down her head. Her husband, her father and her uncles were also beheaded.

There was one who had invited suspicion but had as yet escaped punishment. Princess Elizabeth had remained out of harm’s way at Ashridge House, in Hertfordshire, where she awaited events. It had become clear that Wyatt’s rebellion had been intended to set her upon the throne in the place of her sister, but there was no clear evidence of her involvement in the plot. Her confidential servants were interrogated in the Tower with the threat of the rack hanging over them. She herself was summoned to London, after pleading illness, and on 18 February she was carried in a litter to the capital. She passed through the streets of London dressed entirely in white, as a token of her innocence, and her pale face was described by the Spanish ambassador as ‘proud, lofty and superbly disdainful’. He, as well as his master, was pressing for her execution. Sensational news spread of a miraculous voice in a London wall. When anyone called ‘God save the queen’ there came no response; but if the cry of ‘God save the Lady Elizabeth’ was made, a voice replied ‘So be it’. The credulity of crowds is never-ending. Of course it was a hoax concocted by a serving girl.

The queen refused to see her sister, and Elizabeth was given a suite of closely guarded rooms in the palace at Whitehall. She remained in this state of confinement for some weeks, but at the beginning of April she was interviewed by the royal council. The councillors accused her of complicity in the rebellion, to which charge she made an indignant denial; in this defiance she never once wavered. It was finally agreed that she should be removed from Whitehall to the Tower and, when the news was broached to her, she fell ‘in heavy mood’. It is not hard to understand the reasons for her desolation. Her mother had been taken to the Tower as a prelude to execution, and it seemed more than likely that Elizabeth would share her fate. She begged time to compose a letter to the queen in which she lamented that she should be ‘condemned without answer and due proof, which it seems that I now am: for that without cause proved, I am by your council from you commanded to go unto the Tower, a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject’. She went on to declare that ‘I never practised, counselled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person any way’.

Mary did not reply. ‘Very well then,’ Elizabeth is reported to have said. ‘If there be no remedy I must be contented.’ She was taken by barge to the Tower and came ashore by the drawbridge. ‘Here landeth as true a subject,’ she declared to her guards and her gaolers, ‘as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.’ It was a day of heavy rain and in her dejection she sat down upon a stone.

‘Madame,’ the lieutenant of the Tower said, ‘you were best to come out of the rain; for you sit unwholesomely.’

‘It is better sitting here than in a worse place, for God knoweth, I know not whither you will bring me.’

She was escorted within the fortress, as all the doors were locked and barred behind her. She could not be sure that she would ever see the outer world again. At a later date she told the French ambassador that she was in such despair that she considered writing to her sister with the request that she should be beheaded with a sword, like her mother, rather than an axe. The rigours of her confinement were soon relaxed a little; by the middle of April she was allowed to walk on the ‘leads’ of her prison house and enjoy the Tower garden. Two guards always walked behind her, and two before her. The other prisoners were enjoined ‘not so much as to look in that direction while her grace remained therein’.

She was interrogated five days after her confinement. What was her connection with Wyatt and the other rebels? Had she received letters or messages from them? She denied all knowledge of them and of their activities. She proclaimed her innocence and demanded to see proof of her treason. There was none. ‘My lords,’ she said, ‘you do sift me very narrowly.’ She preserved her calm and authoritative demeanour; danger had taught her to dissemble and prevaricate.

On 18 May she was released from the Tower and removed to Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where she came under the custody of Sir Henry Bedingfield. She is reputed to have carved, with one of her diamonds, some lines on a glass window pane of the mansion:

Much suspected by me,

Nothing proved can be.

Quod Elizabeth the prisoner.

And she was still a prisoner. A force of soldiers was encamped on a hill overlooking the house, and no one could enter without Bedingfield’s permission.

On 20 July Philip landed at Southampton. When he set foot on English ground he drew his sword and carried it in his hand; this was not considered to be a good omen. He was accustomed to the sunshine of his native land, and was greeted in England by thunderous rain that lasted several days; many of his entourage caught colds. Three days after his arrival he was received at the door of Winchester Cathedral and in the bishop’s palace, after supper, he was first received by the queen, ‘each of them merrily smiling on other, to the great comfort and rejoicing of the beholders’. She could understand Spanish, but could not speak it; the first and last time Philip ever used English was on that same evening to the assembled courtiers. He was supposed to say ‘Good night, my lords all’, but he only managed ‘God ni hit’. It is most likely that they spoke French with each other. The Spanish were not necessarily impressed by the queen, who was described by one of them as ‘rather older than we were led to believe’; she was of relatively modest height, and slender to the point of thinness. At the age of twenty-seven Philip was eleven years younger than Mary.

On 25 July they were married in Winchester Cathedral, where the heralds proclaimed them to be king and queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland. Philip had been given the crown of Naples by his father the night before, so that the English queen could be sure of marrying an equal. During the Mass of celebration it was noticed that the queen entirely fixed her gaze upon the jewelled crucifix. At the wedding feast, to the dismay of the Spanish entourage, Mary was served on gold plates while Philip deserved only silver. In the various royal palaces Mary used the chambers reserved for a king, while Philip stayed in those of a queen consort. He was in a most ambiguous position. He was never crowned and could not be a source of patronage in England; he was not permitted to fill English offices with his own men, and the queen never delegated authority to him.

On 18 August the royal couple made their way through London, to respectful if muted rejoicing. In a sermon at Paul’s Cross Stephen Gardiner exhorted the citizens ‘to behave themselves’ so that Philip ‘might tarry still with us’. Soon after this, twenty cartloads of Spanish gold were drawn through the streets of the city.

Yet all the treasure in the world would not allay the fears and suspicions of the citizens. It was rumoured that a great Spanish army would invade the country and that Spanish friars would take over the churches. It was feared that England would no longer be an independent country. One chronicler reported that ‘the English are so bad, and fear God so little that they handle the friars shamefully, and the poor men do not dare to leave their quarters … the crowd tried to tear the cloaks off the backs of Don Pedro and Don Antonio his nephew asking what they meant by wearing crosses and jeering at them’. Religion and xenophobia were a potent mixture.

The Spanish in turn treated the English with disdain. It will be profitable here to examine the general reputation of the nation, described by the French ambassador as ‘this nasty island’. The women were deemed to be beautiful, while the men were handsome and of ruddy complexion. The language was considered to be uncouth, but what could you expect from people living at the extremity of the world? They were, essentially, barbarians. Englishmen swore with a vehemence that shocked foreigners; even the children swore great oaths. All the people drank too much with the favoured ‘double beer’, as strong as whisky, leaving them ‘stark staring mad like March Hares’. It may have been the beer that encouraged the belching, in which sport all the English participated; every meal ended with a belching contest. Dinner was eaten at any time between ten and twelve, with supper at six in the evening.

And what did these barbarians eat? The Spanish noblemen with Philip were astonished by the variety of the food. ‘These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king.’ They feasted on great shins of beef, on mutton and veal, on lamb and pork; they ate brawn, bacon, fruit pies, fowls of every sort. This could not have been a universal diet, however, and the poorer sort would have eaten the ‘white meats’ of the dairy, such as butter and cheese, as well as beans, peas, onions and garlic.

The Spanish courtiers described their hosts as ‘white, pink and quarrelsome’. It was a violent world, where every man went armed. The English were quick to take offence. They were fit for nothing except eating and drinking; their dances were all ‘strutting or trotting about’; their women were ‘of evil conversation’; they were all thieves. The courtiers moved among the local people ‘as if they were animals, trying not to notice them’. Fights and brawls erupted in the streets, and even broke out in the halls of the palace at Whitehall. In one battle 500 Englishmen were involved; it ended with six dead and three dozen badly wounded. More innocent misunderstandings also took place. When the duchess of Alva visited the queen neither lady would allow the other to take a lower seat; the elaborate courtesies ended with both of them sitting on the floor.

In the autumn of the year it seemed possible, even likely, that the fruit of the royal marriage would soon be ripe. The queen believed that she had conceived, and in this belief she was supported by her doctors. If that were indeed the case then her immediate problems, among them the popular reception of her husband, would be resolved. The Te Deum was sung in the churches of the realm, where prayers were also offered for the safe birth of an heir to the throne. Some of course were horrified at the prospect of a Catholic succession. A sheet of writing was nailed to the gate of the palace at Whitehall. ‘Will you be such fools, oh noble Englishmen, as to believe that our queen is pregnant? And of what should she be, but of a monkey or a dog?’ The nation waited.

23

Faith of our fathers

The failure of Wyatt’s rebellion, and the subsequent arrival of Philip, lent confidence to the queen. The pace of religious reform, or perhaps of religious reversal, now intensified. The Mass was celebrated throughout the kingdom. On Palm Sunday of 1554 palms were once more held aloft in procession, and the ceremony of ‘creeping to the cross’ was renewed on Good Friday; the old rite of resurrection was performed on Easter Sunday. The quotations from Scripture, which had taken the place of images and pictures, were wiped away or whitewashed. At St Paul’s Cathedral the choir went up to the steeple to sing the anthems, reviving a custom that had long been in disuse. Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, decreed that every church in the city must have among other instruments of devotion ‘a cross for procession with candlesticks, a cross for the dead, an incenser, a ship or vessel for frankincense, a little sanctus bell …’ There must be a high altar, with all its cloths and hangings. He asked if, at the time the host was raised, any of the congregation hung their heads or hid behind the pillars or even left the church. Church music was in due course restored.

Certain individuals suffered from these changes. Married priests were deprived of their livings. The vicar of Whenby, in Yorkshire, proceeded in front of his congregation wearing a surplice and carrying a lighted candle. ‘Masters,’ he began, ‘I have been seduced and deceived, thinking that I might lawfully marry …’ He then proceeded to beg pardon. Of the twenty-two bishops in the Edwardian regime, only seven retained their sees. The old reformers – Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer – were sent to Oxford where they were to be interrogated by the bishops and clergy of the convocation. They were taken from the Tower, where they had been detained, to the Bocardo; this was Oxford’s prison, in a watchtower by the north gate of the town. The queen had a particular dislike for Archbishop Cranmer, who had been instrumental in the degradation of her mother. Bonner used to call him in derision ‘Mr Canterbury’.

They were given what might be called a show trial before a committee of the convocation. On being questioned about transubstantiation Cranmer was often hissed down, so that he could not be heard at all; he was described as ‘unlearned’, ‘unskilful’ and ‘impudent’.

Ridley was called on the following day for his interrogation. ‘You see the obstinate, vainglorious, crafty and inconstant mind of this man,’ his inquisitor concluded, ‘but you see also the force of truth cannot be shaken. Therefore cry out with me, truth has the victory!’ The clergy responded as if with one voice. Throughout his appearance ‘there was great disorder, perpetual shoutings, tauntings and reproaches’ so that the school of divines resembled a beargarden.

When Latimer came in, old and frail, he was permitted to sit; a pair of spectacles was hanging by a string at his breast, and he carried a staff. He was finally judged to be a heretic and accepted his fate as a means of glorifying God. ‘If you go to heaven with this faith,’ one of his interrogators told him, ‘then I will never come thither.’

Some 800 reformers fled to the Protestant centres of Europe, among them many clerics and scholars from the universities. The dowager duchess of Suffolk departed with many servants, among them her laundress and her fool. Eight English communities were established, in cities such as Frankfurt and Zurich, from where a stream of pamphlets was issued in general condemnation of Mary and the Marian settlement. The exiles were hoping, naturally enough, for the assassination of the idolatress. She was the queen of all evil. In the meantime they thought of themselves as an embattled minority, a little flock of the faithful under the perpetual shadow of persecution. This image had a long life and helped to shape the discourse of the stricter sort of Calvinism. The anonymous author of Humble Supplication unto God blamed England’s ‘unthankfulness and wicked living’ for the return of popery. The religious refugees left a more enduring legacy with their Geneva Bible, the text for which Shakespeare had an abiding affection. A bishop in the more accommodating reign of Elizabeth remembered with fondness his years of exile. ‘Oh Zurich, Zurich, I think more of Zurich in England than ever I thought of England when I was in Zurich.’

A cleric of quite another stamp was coming to England in the winter of 1554. Reginald Pole, cardinal and papal legate, was returning home after an exile of twenty-two years. He came back eagerly, with the pious intention of bringing his country once more into the fold of Rome. England was still under papal interdict, perhaps consigning all its inhabitants to the peril of damnation. It was he whose family had been executed on the orders of Henry VIII; his mother, Margaret Pole, had been beheaded in a botched and painful death. He considered himself to be the son of a martyr. He was a solemn and pious man, grave and earnest.

On a day in late November his barge, with a great silver cross upon its bow, passed under London Bridge on its way to Whitehall. On his arrival at the palace Philip embraced him, while the queen waited at the head of the grand staircase. When Cardinal Pole came up to her she threw herself upon his breast. ‘Your coming’, she said, ‘causes me as much joy as the possession of my kingdom.’ He replied in Latin with the words that Gabriel had uttered to the Virgin. ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus’ – ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women.’ At this point the queen felt her baby leap in her womb. It was a moment of benediction.

Four days later the Lords and Commons assembled in the Great Chamber at Whitehall where the cardinal, at the right hand of the queen, addressed them. It was noted that the queen tried to make her supposed pregnancy very clear. Pole told parliament that he had come to return the keys to the kingdom of heaven, on condition that all acts directed against the papacy were repealed. ‘I come to reconcile,’ he said, ‘not to condemn. I come not to compel but to call again.’ Some of the members were observed to weep. When the Lords and Commons met at Westminster on the following day they all agreed – with only two dissentient voices – to make their submission. The schism of two reigns was thereby ended.

On 30 November, St Andrew’s Day, the cardinal sat on a raised platform at the upper end of Westminster Hall. As he rose to his feet Mary and Philip fell to their knees, as did the whole of the assembly. With the authority of Jesus Christ and the most holy lord Pope Julius III, he then proceeded to absolve ‘this whole realm and the dominions thereof from all heresy and schism, and from all and every judgement, censure and pain for that cause incurred; and we do restore you again into the unity of our Mother the Holy Church, in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost’.

The queen could be heard to sob; the most solemn and sacred intention of her life had been fulfilled. Many in the hall called out ‘amen, amen’ before also breaking into tears. Some members threw themselves weeping into one another’s arms. Slowly they processed into the chapel where the choir sang the Te Deum. When the news reached Rome the cannon of Castel Sant’Angelo were fired. In a portrait of the queen, painted in this year, she is wearing a large Tau cross upon a choker of pearls around her neck; from her waist hangs an enamel reliquary adorned with the emblems of the four evangelists. She loved jewellery, but it was jewellery with a message.

Pole’s central purpose was to restore order and direction to a battered faith. He tried to refurbish the finances of the Church; he appointed twenty bishops; he established seminaries where young priests could be trained. He had long been a resident in Rome and was therefore eager to embrace papal supremacy; but the Lords and Commons had gone beyond that point. It was not practical. He had also wanted to take back the monastic lands that had been expropriated in Henry’s reign, but there were too many vested interests to make that course feasible. What lord or gentleman would surrender what they had owned for thirty years? The imperial ambassador remarked that in any case ‘the Catholics hold more church property than the heretics’.

After the solemn ceremony of absolution, parliament then proceeded to deal with the matter of church lands. A bill declared such land had always been subject to statute law, and that no other authority could meddle with the matter. A supplication was addressed to the pope, requesting that church property should be allowed to remain in lay hands. In the same parliament Stephen Gardiner fought successfully to pass his Revival of the Heresy Acts; the medieval statute de heretico comburendo, on the burning of heretics, was thereby restored.

Other elements of Catholic practice also returned to life. The Carthusian monks were sent to Sheen and the Benedictines were returned to Westminster; the Dominicans were reunited at St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield and the Franciscans at Greenwich. The Bridgettine nuns, many of whom had crossed the Channel in Henry’s time, flocked back to Syon.

Yet the revived Catholicism of Mary’s reign did not restore the old faith in its entirety. The sacrifice of the Mass was for the queen the single most important element of the faith to which all else was subject. The only shrine to be restored was that of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, and in her reign Mary never went on pilgrimage. St Thomas of Canterbury and Our Lady of Walsingham remained unhonoured. Some of the familiar customs were also quietly ignored. There was scant interest in saints or in the Virgin. Little was said of purgatory. Mary remained the supreme head of the Church in England, and only lip service was paid to the doctrine of papal supremacy. It was pointed out at the time that almost half of the population was under the age of twenty and thus had never experienced papal domination. It simply could not be imposed once more.

The importance of Scripture was also reaffirmed in a marked departure from the practice of medieval Catholicism; the cardinal, for example, ordered an English translation of the New Testament. The power of preaching was also recognized, and an array of preachers were brought out to refute the errors of the reformed faith. A crowd of 20,000 gathered to hear the Spital sermons, held at the pulpit cross in Spitalfields during Easter week. Bishop Bonner aided the preachers in their task by supervising a set of instructions entitled A Profitable and Necessary Doctrine as well as a collection of thirteen model sermons. Everything was done to reacquaint the English people with their old religion, shorn now of its more superstitious features. It may be said in general that Mary tried to recreate the Catholic faith that had existed at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, and that in a real sense she was continuing her father’s work.

In a similar spirit the festivities and ceremonies associated with his rule were also revived. Church-ales, Plough Monday collections and Hocktide gatherings once more became popular; lavish church processions made their way through London on many sacred occasions. On the feast of Corpus Christi 1555, Bishop Bonner raised the sacrament in his hands at the head of a procession along Whitehall with many people ‘kneeling on their knees, weeping, and giving thanks to God’. The May games of the same year in Westminster were devoted to ‘giants, morris pikes, guns and drums and devils, and three morris dances, and bagpipes and viols, and many disguised, and the lady of the May rode gorgeously with minstrels’. The Lord of Misrule also returned ‘with his councillors and divers other officers, and there was a devil shouting of fire, and one was like Death, with a dart in hand’. So a Londoner, Henry Machyn, recorded in his diary.

Yet not all were merry. Two weeks after the Heresy Act was passed by parliament in the early days of 1555, a secret assembly of men and women was broken up; they were gathered, in a house in Bow Churchyard, for a service in English with prayers such as ‘God turn the heart of Queen Mary from idolatry, or else shorten her days’. The hunt was on.

The first to die in the course of the Marian campaign was John Rogers, a canon of St Paul’s who had preached against the Catholic reaction at the cross in the churchyard. It was he who was chosen, as it was put, to ‘break the ice’. He was taken the short distance from Newgate to Smithfield, and on his last journey was met by his wife and ten children, who welcomed him with cries of happiness as if he were on his way to a banquet. The spectators along his route also cheered him. As he was being tied to the stake he was offered a pardon if he recanted, but he refused. The fire was lit. He did not seem to suffer but bathed his hands in the flame ‘as if it was cold water’. The burning time had come.

The bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper, was an early sacrifice. He was led from Newgate, his face muffled in a hood, and taken by his guards to his diocese where on 9 February he was tied to the stake. He suffered very badly since the green faggots were slow to burn; the fire reached only his legs and the lower part of his body; when it expired, the bishop called out ‘For God’s love, good people, let me have more fire!’, so a fiercer flame was kindled. A bystander wrote that ‘he smote his breast with his hands till one of his arms fell off; he continued knocking with the other, while the fat, water and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends …’ He suffered torment for another three-quarters of an hour, eventually ‘dying as quietly as a child in his bed’.

On the same day a weaver, a butcher, a barber, a priest, a gentleman and an apprentice were condemned to the fire by Bishop Bonner on the charge of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Soon enough the prisons of London were filled with other candidates for martyrdom. The legs of the priest had been crushed by irons after his conviction for heresy and so he was placed at the stake in a chair. It is reported by Foxe, in his account of the Marian fires, that ‘at his burning, he sitting in the fire, the young children came about and cried, as well as young children could speak, Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise – Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise’.

A young farmer was burned outside the north gate of Chester. A jar of tar and pitch was put on top of his head and, as the flames reached it, the combustible material poured down his face. At Stratford-le-Bow eleven men and two women died together in a single blaze; at Lewes ten were burned at the same time. Thomas Haukes, about to die, told his friends that if the flames were endurable he would show it by lifting up his hands. He clapped his hands three times in the fire before he expired. When a fire was lit on Jesus Green, Cambridge, books were thrown in to bolster the flames. One of them happened to be a communion book in English, and the suffering man picked it up and began to read from it until the smoke and flame obscured the page. Another victim was said to ‘sleep sweetly’ in the fire. When a doctor of divinity proceeded on his walk to the stake he began to dance.

‘Why, master doctor,’ the sheriff asked him, ‘how do you now?’

‘Well, master sheriff, never better for I am now almost home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and am even now at my Father’s house.’

The manner of the execution may be described. A large stake or post was fixed in the ground with a step or ledge leading up to it. The victim was placed upon that ledge so that he or she might be visible to the crowd; the men were stripped to their shirts, and the women to their smocks. The victim was fastened to the stake with chains, but the arms were left free. Faggots of wood, and bundles of reed, were then piled about the stake. It was sometimes difficult to kindle or to control the fire. The wood might be too green, or the winds contrary. The friends of the victims sometimes tied little bags of gunpowder around the necks of those about to die, but on occasions they made too small an explosion and only increased the suffering.

It was customary for the victims to pray or sing before their execution. They knelt and prostrated themselves before the stake. Many of them then kissed the post or the wood piled about it. The spectators were not always or necessarily sympathetic to those who were about to die. On many occasions the victim was pelted with pieces of wood or rocks. When one dying man began to sing a psalm he was silenced by a blow to his head. ‘Truly,’ a religious commissioner amiably told the assailant, ‘you have marred a good old song.’ Street-sellers abounded and at a burning in Dartford ‘came diverse fruiterers with horse-loads of cherries, and sold them’. Anyone who brought a faggot to the fire was granted forty days’ ‘indulgence’ from the pains of purgatory; as a result parents instructed their children to bring wood for the flames.

Stephen Gardiner had believed that a few early burnings would suffice and that the terrible example would warn other heretics to be wary and remain silent. But his optimism was premature. The steadfast reaction of the martyrs, and the open sympathy of many who came to watch the proceedings, were enough to alarm him. It was said that one burning was worth more than a hundred sermons against popery. He seems to have made some effort to call a halt, but it was already too late. In truth the campaign of terror may have worked; it is sometimes supposed that it was gradually curtailed because of mounting public opposition. It is more likely that there were in the end fewer heretics to burn.

The queen and Cardinal Pole, in particular, did not see any need to reverse their policy. Heretics were the breath of hell, a noxious danger to the health of the body politic. Anyone whom they corrupted would be damned eternally. In a pastoral letter to London, Pole wrote that ‘there is no kind of men so pernicious to the commonwealth as they be’. The queen herself considered them to be guilty of treason and of sedition, two of the greatest crimes imaginable to her. The tainted wether may infect the whole flock. She was, with this belief, in good company. The great reformer, Calvin, had declared that it was a Christian duty to destroy the preachers of false gods; he did indeed burn the Spanish theologian Servetus for his views concerning the Trinity. Cranmer had celebrated the burning of the Anabaptist Joan Bocher. Nobody really doubted the merit of burning, therefore, only its convenience in an already unsettled society.

In the four years of the stake almost 300 men and women perished, the preponderance coming from the southeast of England where religious reform had been most welcome. Under the auspices of Bishop Bonner 112 Londoners were killed, but only one man was burned in Yorkshire. This may be a sign of the incidence of the new faith in the north of England, but it may also reflect the unwillingness of the authorities there to persecute unto death. The majority of those who suffered were artisans and tradesmen, the independent workers of the community.

The great question put to them by their interrogators was ‘How say you to the sacrament of the altar?’ If they did not believe that Christ’s body and blood were physically as well as spiritually present in the bread and the wine, they were condemned for heresy. Bishop Bonner came to a judgment with the phrase, ‘for thou must needs be one of them’. To which the prisoner replied, ‘Yea, my lord, I am one of them.’ Another man spoke out with defiance: ‘Thought is free, my lord,’ he said. It was ordained that the more recalcitrant of them could be put to the torture. Three months before her death the queen sent a letter of complaint to the sheriff of Hampshire; his offence was to cancel the burning of a man who had recanted at the first lick of the flame. It was thus that she earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’.

John Foxe, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, created a narrative of suffering that for centuries acted as a Protestant folk legend after its publication in 1563; he evoked a series of tableaux in which wicked priests and dissemblers destroyed the practitioners of the true religion. Yet these martyrs were not all of the same faith; among them were those who denied the divinity of Christ or who condemned the practice of infant baptism or who questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. When they were incarcerated in the same prison they often refused to pray together. It should be noted, in passing, that in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth some 200 Catholics were strangled or disembowelled. Many of those who died would also have been burned under the religious policy of Henry VIII.

Yet Foxe’s book effectively demonized Catholicism in England in the latter part of the sixteenth century; it would always after that date be fringed with fire.

24

An age of anxiety

Mary had not at the moment of the cardinal’s benediction. There was to be no blessed fruit. In April 1555, Elizabeth had been summoned under close guard from Woodstock to Whitehall, so that the heir presumptive might be present at the birth of the heir apparent. It was also a sensible precaution if the queen should die in the course of childbirth. Philip visited the princess two or three days after her arrival, and it was reported that subsequently he asked his wife to show forgiveness to her sister. The king also gave Elizabeth a diamond valued at 4,000 ducats. She claimed in later life that Philip had fallen in love with her, but it is more probable that he feared for his own safety in the event of his wife’s death. The people might rise up in revolt against him.

Mary was not in good health. The Venetian envoy reported that ‘she is not of strong constitution, and of late she suffers from headache and serious affection of the heart, so that she is often obliged to take medicine and also to be blooded. She is of very spare diet.’ He also reported that a young man had proclaimed himself to be the true Edward VI and thus ‘raised a tumult among the populace’; he was whipped through the streets and his ears cropped, but the incident could have done little for the queen’s serenity. Unrest was in the air. Any crowd that gathered in the streets of London was dispersed. The summer of the year was bleak and wet; the crops failed and the fields were turned to mud. In the sixteenth century this was a natural disaster. The prices of staple commodities doubled and even tripled. There was the genuine prospect of death by starvation.

The happy moment of royal birth was supposed to arrive at the end of April. Mary retired to the relative peace of Hampton Court. The bells rang, and the Te Deum was sung in St Paul’s Cathedral; nothing transpired. Mary still professed herself to be confident, however, and said that she felt the motions of the child. The priests and choirboys continued to process through the streets of London, at the head of the poor men and women from the almshouses who were telling their beads on behalf of their sovereign. The Holy Sacrament was paraded along Cheapside in a blaze of candlelight. Yet all the prayers were in vain. There was to be no child. She remained in seclusion throughout the month of May; she sat upon the floor, her knees drawn up to her face, in an agony of despair.

She wept and prayed. She believed that God had punished her. And her sin? She had failed in her duty to extirpate all the heretics in the realm; the beast of schism still endured. She came to believe that she would not safely be delivered of a child until all the heretics in prison were burned. On 24 May she directed a circular to her bishops urging them to show more speed and diligence in their pursuit of ‘disordered persons’. A holocaust of burnt offerings might bring fertility to her.

The affairs of the realm were in suspense. The imperial ambassador wrote to his emperor that ‘I foresee convulsions and disturbances such as no pen can describe’. He also repeated the rumours that Mary had never been pregnant or, more damagingly, that a convenient newborn male child would be conveyed to her bed. There were also fears that the queen was in fact barren, and would never produce an heir. It was possible that a cyst or tumour had provoked this phantom pregnancy, in which case her condition might prove fatal.

Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court from Woodstock, where much to the displeasure of the queen the courtiers knelt and kissed her hand. She was pressed to ask for pardon from her sister, but she acknowledged no offence. A week later the two women met for the first time in almost two years. Two chroniclers, Foxe and Holinshed, have left reports of this encounter. ‘You will not confess,’ the queen told her, ‘you stand to your truth. I pray God it may so fall out.’

‘If it does not,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘I desire neither favour nor pardon at your hands.’

The queen asked her if she would spread reports that she had been wrongfully punished by her imprisonment at the Tower and at Woodstock. Elizabeth denied any intention of so doing. ‘I have borne the burden,’ she said, ‘and I must bear it.’

The queen merely muttered, in Spanish, ‘Dios sabe ’ – ‘God knows’. Her sister then withdrew from her presence. Yet Elizabeth now remained at liberty.

Philip could not endure a longer stay in England; his anxious and disheartened wife was for him a dead failure. No son of his would now ascend to the throne. ‘Let me know,’ he wrote to an adviser, ‘what line I am to take with the queen about leaving her and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me!’ His departure was made all the more urgent by the decision of his father, Charles V, to abdicate and to seek solace in a monastery. Philip informed his wife that he would leave her for only two or three weeks, but he was dissembling. At the end of August they parted at Greenwich, since the long journey to Dover would trouble the queen’s health.

The Venetian ambassador was, as always, in attendance. The queen was entirely composed as she accompanied her husband through all the halls and chambers of the palace just before his departure; she stood at the head of the staircase clothed ‘in royal state and dignity’ as he went out of the door towards the water. She then retired to her private chambers overlooking the Thames where ‘thinking she was not observed, she gave scope to her grief in floods of tears’. She watched as the barge slowly disappeared from sight, Philip raising his hat in farewell.

The weeks passed. The queen spent her evenings, after the work of government was done, writing long epistles to her absent husband. He tended to reply with short letters on matters of business. She even went to the trouble of writing to the emperor himself, expressing her ‘unspeakable sadness which I experience because of the absence of the king’. She may also have been receiving news of his dissipations at the imperial court of Brussels; he was feasting and dancing with a joy he had never shown in London. He was also visiting Madame d’Aler, a beautiful woman of whom he was much enamoured. He had other companions. He relished eating lumps of bacon fat, and it was said that his taste in courtesans was not much higher.

In the autumn of 1555 he assumed the leadership of the Spanish territory of the Netherlands and, when Mary wrote asking him to return to her, he replied that he could only come back to England if he were given some role in its governance. It was essentially a polite refusal. England had become for him an expensive distraction. Mary is reported to have told her ladies that she would now revert to the life she had led before her marriage. According to reports she looked ten years older.

The parlous situation of the queen of course encouraged the ambitions of others. Parliament was divided and obstinate, with the queen herself complaining of ‘many violent opposition members’; her advice, in the election of the autumn of 1555, for the return ‘of the wise, grave and Catholic sort’ had not necessarily been followed. No parliamentary parties or groups existed in the modern sense, only a shifting aggregate of discontented individuals. Mary’s administration suffered another blow with the death in November of the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, from ‘suppression of urine’. The archdeacon of Winchester wrote, from his prison cell, that ‘although the cockatrice be dead, yet his pestilent chickens, with the whore of Babylon, still live’.

An armed conspiracy against the queen was detected at the end of 1555. ‘I am sure you hear,’ Sir Henry Dudley told a friend in confidence, ‘they go about a coronation.’ He was referring to the rumour that Mary was about to crown Philip as king, which would be an intolerable threat to the safety and independence of England. It was enough to stir the ‘western gentlemen’ who now, in secret conspiracy, proposed to march on London and give the crown to Elizabeth; Mary would be sent packing to Brussels and the arms of her husband.

A further refinement came from Sir Henry Dudley himself, who intended to bring in the French. The French king had promised to supply ships and money, with the crews made up of western privateers. The captain of the Isle of Wight was prepared to surrender his island and Dudley undertook to attack Portsmouth, where he would find the cannon out of action. At a midnight audience the French king, Henry II, handed a large sum of money to Dudley and advised him to reconnoitre the coast of Normandy in preparation for an invasion.

The walls of a royal court have ears and eyes. The English ambassador in Paris had been informed of the interview immediately after it had taken place, and he passed on the information to Mary in the form of a cipher. One of the conspirators, in panic fear, betrayed the names of his colleagues to the council. They were arrested and imprisoned; some of them were tortured.

Yet even after their execution Mary could not rest. The French ambassador, recalled at this time of tension, described her ‘dreading every moment that her life might be attempted by her own attendants’. She was ‘deeply troubled’ and saw conspiracies in every corner. The palaces at Whitehall and Greenwich were filled with armed men. She did not appear in public, and slept no more than three hours each night.

The name of Elizabeth had been invoked by the Dudley conspirators, but there was no clear evidence that she was involved in the rebellion; nevertheless, the suspicion was there. The constable of France had written to the French ambassador ordering him to ‘restrain Madame Elizabeth from stirring at all in the affair of which you have written to me, for that would be to ruin everything’. Five of her household servants were arrested, and one of them was found guilty of treason; he was later pardoned. The princess was now heir apparent, and had to be treated with circumspection. Mary tried to dissemble her real feelings but in private she was said always to talk of Elizabeth with scorn and hatred. The atmosphere was further clouded by the persistent rumours that Philip was about to invade the country with an imperial army.

At the beginning of May 1556, a blazing comet appeared in the London sky; it was half the size of the moon and was ‘shooting out fire to great wonder and marvel to the people’. It could be seen flaring for the next seven days and seven nights, thus signifying great changes in the affairs in the world. A gang of twelve men went about the streets predicting the end of the world, but the tumult they caused was a screen for their robberies. More generally the rumours of riot and rebellion grew ever more numerous.

In this age of anxiety Mary now relied primarily upon the counsels of Reginald Pole. At his behest the most celebrated burnings of Mary’s reign were performed at Oxford. The three great bishops of reform – Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer – had been stripped of their rank and solemnly degraded. The worst disgrace was reserved for the archbishop of Canterbury. He had been clothed in his full pontifical robes – except that they were made of rough canvas. As each strip of clothing was pulled from him Bishop Bonner made a speech. ‘This is the man’, he said, ‘that despised the pope, and is now judged by him. This is the man that pulled down churches, and is now judged in a church. This is the man that condemned the sacrament, and is now condemned before it.’ One of those presiding pulled Bonner by the sleeve several times, begging him to stop the abuse of this grave old man. Bonner paid no heed. A barber clipped the hair around the old man’s head and then Cranmer was forced to kneel before Bonner, who began to scrape the tips of the archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand that had administered extreme unction. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘are you lord no longer.’ Cranmer was then given a threadbare gown and a townsman’s greasy cap before being surrendered to the secular authorities.

The stake was raised in a ditch outside Balliol College. Ridley and Latimer were the first to die. ‘Oh, be ye there?’ Ridley called out on seeing his colleague.

‘Yea, have after as fast as I can follow.’

When they reached the stake they both knelt down and kissed it. To his friends Ridley gave the small gifts in his possession – some pieces of ginger and nutmeg, his watch. Latimer had nothing to give, but stood meekly as he was stripped to the shroud he wore as a mark of his fate. Ridley was given a small bag of gunpowder to tie around his neck. ‘Have you any for my brother?’

‘Yes, sir, that I have.’

‘Then give it unto him betime, lest you come too late.’

They were tied on opposite sides and, when the lighted faggot was placed at Ridley’s feet, Latimer called out to him: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ These words have become perhaps the most celebrated in the entire history of Reformation but they may be the invention of John Foxe in the second edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The truth of the matter cannot be determined.

As the flames leapt up Ridley cried: ‘In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum’ – ‘Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.’ Latimer cried: ‘Oh Father of heaven receive my soul!’ Latimer seemed to embrace the fire and ‘after that he had stroked his face with his hands, and as it were bathed them a little in the fire, he soon died …’ Ridley was less fortunate. The fire stalled and proceeded only slowly. In his agony he cried out ‘I cannot burn! I cannot burn! Lord have mercy upon me! Let the fire come unto me! I cannot burn!’ The flames were stoked and as they rose higher the bag of gunpowder around his neck exploded. His time had come.

Thomas Cranmer, quondam archbishop of Canterbury, had witnessed the burning of his colleagues from the tower of Bocardo and was of course much moved by the sight. It is reported that he fell to his knees in tears. Some of the tears may have been for himself. He had always given his allegiance to the established state; for him it represented the divine rule. Should he not now obeythe monarch and the supreme head of the Church even if she wished to bring back the jurisdiction of Rome? In his conscience he denied papal supremacy. In his conscience, too, he was obliged to obey his sovereign.

Soon after the burning of his colleagues he was removed from Bocardo to the house of the dean of Christ Church, where he was more at ease. He was visited there by a Spanish friar who tried to persuade him of the merits of the Catholic faith. He did indeed issue a series of recantations; whether out of deference to the arguments of the friar, or from fear of a painful death, was soon to be ascertained. He wrote a declaration in which he acknowledged the pope to be supreme head of the Church in England; this was his duty to queen and parliament. In another submission he stated that he believed in all the articles of faith promulgated by the Catholic Church; in particular he accepted the power of the sacraments. On 18 March 1556, in a sixth submission, he confessed himself to be an unworthy sinner who had persecuted the holy Church and stripped the realm of true faith. His was the most significant religious statement in the realm. It was said that one salmon was worth a thousand frogs.

These six statements of belief might have been considered enough to earn him a pardon, or at least a respite from the fire. Yet Cranmer had been the father of schism in England, the most energetic promoter of reform. Mary could not forgive him as the master of heresy any more than she could forget his role in the persecution of her mother. On 20 March he was told that he would be tied to the stake on the following day.

On that last morning he was brought to St Mary’s Church, where he stood on a platform as a sermon was directed against him. He looked ‘the very image of sorrow’. He sometimes raised his face to heaven, and sometimes stared at the ground; he was in tears. He was then expected to deliver a short address in which he would repeat his acceptance of the truths of the Catholic Church. He began by declaring himself to be a miserable penitent who had set forth many sinful writings. It was now believed that he would repeat his belief in the sacraments. But instead he proceeded to recant his recantations and deny the six statements he had previously made. The audience murmured and called out. He had written them, he said, ‘for fear of death’. The university church was now in commotion, and Cranmer had to shout to be heard. ‘And as for the pope. I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.’

An attendant lord called out to him ‘Remember yourself, and play the Christian.’

But Cranmer could not be restrained: ‘And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the bishop of Winchester!’ He did not, in other words, accept the Catholic doctrine on transubstantiation.

The officials pulled him down from the platform and, amid the noise and confusion, hustled him into the rain; he was led towards the stake as the Spanish friar repeated over and over again ‘Non fecisti?’ – ‘You didn’t do it? You didn’t do it?’

He knelt before the stake where he prayed; after he was bound the flames came up quickly, and he put his right hand into the middle of them, saying ‘my unworthy right hand’ for composing the recantations. In the heat he wiped his forehead with his unburnt hand. He died quietly enough, praying ‘Lord Jesus receive my spirit’ as the fire rose around him. On that day Cardinal Pole became archbishop of Canterbury.

25

Nunc Dimittis

On 20 March 1557 Philip returned to England. He was met at Greenwich with a thirty-two-gun salute; the fire of arms was a suitable greeting for a man who had come to talk of war. He had already declared war against Henry II, in defence of imperial interests in France and the Low Countries. Now he wanted the support of his adopted nation. He claimed only that he had come to discuss fresh supplies of grain, but he was in fact looking for arms and men. The queen’s council was not disposed to help him. The country was impoverished, and the people of England were not directly involved in maintaining the interests of the Habsburgs.

Yet the queen was naturally eager to support her husband and actively promoted the cause of war against the larger part of the council who did not wish to intervene in the affairs of Europe. In the presence of Philip she told her councillors that it was her duty to obey her husband in the prosecution of war against a country ‘which was already menacing the whole world’. She summoned the councillors individually to her, and threatened them with deprivation or even death if they did not consent. As the French ambassador commented at the time, Mary would oblige ‘not only men, but also the elements themselves, to consent to her will’. She was as wilful and as imperious as her father or her sister.

Her case was in fact made for her by an attack on Scarborough by two French ships towards the end of April; under the command of an errant nobleman, Sir Thomas Stafford, a small force of men landed and seized the garrison of the castle there. Stafford then declared that the defences of the country were about to be ‘delivered to 12,000 Spaniards before the king’s coronation’.

The invasion was not a success. Stafford and his men were surrounded and captured within three days, but the damage to French interests had been done. It has since been speculated that Stafford had in fact been lured to the English shore by a ‘double agent’ who desired a confrontation with France. Certainly it was a highly convenient attack for those who favoured conflict. War was thereupon declared in June: 7,000 men were to be transported across the Channel to fight the French in the Low Countries. Philip left England in the following month to assume command of his forces.

All seemed to be set fair. The Spanish achieved a remarkable victory outside St Quentin and the English forces arrived two days later to assist in the storming of the city itself; they had not been victorious in battle but at least they had been on the winning side. Bonfires were lit in London and the churches rang with hymns of celebration.

Yet soon enough the fortunes of war changed. A Scottish army came down to the border in a campaign of fire and destruction in support of their traditional ally, and an English force had to be dispatched against them. By the middle of December, the French were also gathering about the neighbourhood of Calais, the last English garrison town in their country. A council of war in the town sent an urgent letter to London for reinforcements; they had few supplies and could not withstand a siege. The queen commanded men to be raised but two days later, on 31 December, countermanded the order on the grounds that ‘she had intelligence that no enterprise was intended against Calais or the Pale’. The Pale was the immediate neighbourhood under English control, covering 120 square miles of territory.

The intelligence given to the queen had been wrong. A French army under the duke of Guise gradually broke down the defences of the English territory and proceeded to besiege Calais itself. Its governor sent a message that he was ‘clean cut off from all relief and aid which he looked to have’. In the first week of the new year, 1558, the town was taken. Its 5,000 inhabitants were shipped back to England. Calais had once been called ‘the brightest jewel in the English crown’. It had been a centre of commerce between England and Europe; a reminder of the Plantagenet empire, it had been held for 211 years. The catastrophe was complete.

It can be argued in hindsight that the French recapture of Calais was in fact a benefit. It had required constant finance for its garrison. At a later date the English historian Thomas Fuller wrote that ‘now it is gone, let it go. It was a beggarly town, which cost England ten times yearly more than it was worth.’ Its loss deterred the English from any further needless meddling in French affairs, and national attention was slowly turned towards the west and the New World. Only a year before, Sebastian Cabot became the director of a new company formally sanctioned by Philip and Mary under the title of ‘Merchant Adventurers of England for the Discoveries of Lands, Territories, Isles and Signories unknown’.

Yet at the time the surrender of Calais was considered to be a calamity. The queen was prostrate with grief and anger. She was used to finding divine providence at work in her affairs and, after this dishonour, it seemed that God had deserted her. One of her household reported later to John Foxe that he had found her sighing. ‘When I am dead and opened,’ she told him, ‘you shall find Calais lying in my heart.’

It was widely believed that the French, now emboldened, would launch an invasion. Parliament voted that a large subsidy should be imposed upon an impoverished and unwilling nation for the purpose of improving the defences. Philip himself proposed to lead a joint army of English and Spanish forces to recapture the town. The council declined the offer on the grounds that there was only ‘a wan hope of recovering Calais’ and that ‘inconveniences might follow’ if the campaign failed. The Spanish connection had in any case proved to be a disaster.

Could it still bear fruit by other means? At the time of the loss of Calais, the queen had persuaded herself that she was pregnant at last. She delayed telling her husband until she was absolutely certain. At the end of March she made her will, ‘foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordinance remain to all women in their travail of children’. Yet once more it was a delusion born out of hope and fear. By the beginning of May it was clear enough that there was no child. The last hope had gone. Indeed the false signs of an impending birth may have been a symptom of the illness that soon enough would destroy her. From this time forward reports and rumours of her ‘malady’ became ever more common.

Illness was one of the defining features of her reign. In the early months of 1558 an epidemic disease, called the ‘new ague’, descended upon the people; it seems to have been a virulent form of influenza and combined with the prevailing incidence of plague and sweating sickness it cut a vast swathe through the people. The year witnessed the highest mortality rates of the century. This is the vast setting of suffering, from what were called ‘hot burning fevers’, behind the last troubled period of Mary’s rule.

It was still a time for burning in more than one sense. Fewer were left to bring to the stake but the queen still clamoured for their deaths. A congregation of radicals was discovered at a prayer meeting in a field outside London, and thirteen were promptly detained. Seven of them were burned together at Smithfield, on 28 June, while the other six were burned on Bishop Bonner’s orders at dead of night in Brentford. Mary had sent out a proclamation forbidding anyone to approach, touch, comfort, or speak to a heretic on the path to the stake; the penalty for doing so was death.

In the summer of the year Mary removed from Hampton Court to Whitehall, where she was reported to be in a state of profound depression. ‘The truth is,’ one ambassador related, ‘that her malady is evidently incurable, and will end her life sooner or later, according to the increase or decrease of her mental anxieties, which harass her more than the disease, however dangerous it may be.’ Those anxieties must have been exacerbated by her realization that she was slowly losing the love and trust of her subjects. The loss of Calais had emphasized the fact that she was an unlucky queen; in the sixteenth century fortune, or providence, was seen as the evidence of divine judgment. Philip was told that, after Calais, only a third of the previous number of worshippers went to Mass. The religious exiles vented their anger and malice from the cities of Europe, none more vituperative than John Knox in The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. ‘I fear not to say,’ he stated, ‘that the day of vengeance which shall apprehend that horrible monster Jezebel of England, and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty, is already appointed in the council of the eternal.’

By the beginning of September it was clear that she was mortally ill. There were times when she lay in a state of torpor. She contracted a fever, perhaps part of the epidemic that was passing across the country. In the following month Philip was informed that his wife was about to die.

The attention of the realm and its councillors now turned towards Elizabeth. She knew that the crown would soon be hers. When an envoy from Philip called upon her, to remind her of the favour shown to her by his master, she was noticeably cool. She would inherit the kingdom without any help from him, and went on to inform the ambassador that her sister had lost the loyalty of the country when she married a foreigner. In that supposition, she may have been correct. In any event she did not intend to make the same mistake. The envoy concluded that ‘she is a very vain and clever woman’.

On 5 November Parliament had sent an urgent request to the council that its members should persuade the queen to ‘accept Madam Elizabeth as her sister and heiress, and to inform her of this in loving terms’. The queen assented to the statement and asked only that her successor should pay her debts and make no changes in the national religion. Elizabeth of course chose to ignore this, just as she ignored all the provisions of Mary’s formal will. By the time the message was conveyed to her at Hatfield House she was already assembling her court. She had also taken the precaution of soliciting military help, if and when it should prove necessary.

When a Spanish envoy arrived on 9 November, it was clear that Mary could not recover. According to her closest household servant, Jane Dormer, she comforted those who attended her; she told them that she had dreamed of ‘seeing little children like angels play before her singing pleasing notes, giving her more than earthly comfort’. She must have hoped, too, that she would soon be received by angels. She died at six o’clock on the morning of 17 November during the celebration of Mass.

Cardinal Pole received the news at Lambeth; he himself was close to death, as a consequence of the epidemic of fever, and it must be assumed that this further blow was enough to destroy him. He died twelve hours later, at seven o’clock in the evening. When the message of her sister’s death reached Elizabeth she sank to her knees and called out ‘O domino factum est istud, et est mirabile in oculis nostris ’ – ‘It is the work of the Lord, and it is marvellous in our eyes’.

At eight o’clock, two hours after Mary’s death, parliament was summoned with an announcement that Elizabeth was now ‘queen of this realm’. The Commons answered with ‘God save Queen Elizabeth, long may she reign over us’. The bells rang out and the bonfires blazed; tables were set outside the houses of the richer citizens, where ale and wine were distributed.

Yet some mourned Mary’s passing. In his funeral sermon the bishop of Winchester praised the dead queen for her many virtues and her piety, mentioning the fact that her knees had hardened with her incessant kneeling. Yet the new queen was ‘a lady of great virtue whom we are bound to obey, for you know, “a living dog is better than a dead lion” ’. For that injudicious remark he was deprived of his see. Meanwhile the English court was buying up all the cloths of silk at Antwerp in readiness for the coronation.

26

A virgin queen

Elizabeth began her progress to London in the last week of November, attended by a grand concourse of lords and ladies and gentlemen. A procession of bishops met her at Highgate and knelt in homage; she gave each one of them her hand to kiss, with the notable exception of Bishop Bonner. The reputation of ‘Bloody Bonner’ had preceded him. The queen had given an early sign of her true religious allegiances.

She remained at the Charterhouse for five days before taking formal possession of the Tower as the preliminary to her coronation. She rode in state along the streets of the city, where she was greeted by choirs of children and the salutations of scholars. As she entered the Tower itself she remarked to those standing about her that ‘some have fallen from princes of this land to be prisoners in this place. I am raised from being prisoner in this place to be prince of this land.’ It is reported that she went immediately to the apartment in which she had been confined, and fell to her knees in prayer.

The great scholar and magus John Dee was asked to cast a horoscope for the most propitious day of coronation. He hit upon Sunday 15 January 1559, and so the preceding day was chosen for her grand procession through the streets of London from the Tower towards Westminster. Accompanied by 1,000 horsemen she was carried in an open litter covered with gold brocade; she wore a rich robe of state, made out of cloth of gold and lined with ermine.

It was a day of high ceremony in which the queen performed her part with great skill and relish. She waved at the spectators and called out greetings to them. ‘God bless you, my people!’ She raised her hands in surprise and delight; she listened with great seriousness as a child prattled a short oration, ‘with a perpetual attentiveness in her face and a marvellous change of look, as if the child’s words touched her person’. She accepted with grace the little nosegays and branches of rosemary that the poor women of London pressed upon her. Her expressions of joy and amusement were marked by everyone. ‘God save you all!’ ‘I thank you with all my heart!’ When passing through Cheapside she was observed to smile broadly. ‘I have just overheard one say in the crowd,’ she confided to an attendant, ‘I remember old King Harry the eighth.’ She had retained her father’s ability to embody the national spirit. When an English Bible was lowered into her chariot on a silken string she received it with both her hands, kissed it and clasped it to her chest. ‘I thank the city for this present, and esteem it above all others.’ When prayers were said for the return of true religion she raised her eyes to heaven and cried ‘Amen!’

Many pageants were set up on stages along her path. The allegory of Time and Truth had been erected at the Little Conduit in Cheapside. She asked for the identity of an old man holding a scythe and an hourglass, but of course she already knew the answer. ‘Time,’ she was told. ‘Time!’ she declared. ‘And time has brought me here!’ As she passed through Temple Bar, she called out to the populace ‘Be ye well assured, I will stand your good queen.’

There was, however, a problem concerning the coronation. The archbishop of Canterbury was dead. The archbishop of York refused to crown her as supreme head of the Church, and the surviving Catholic bishops followed his example. The bishop of Carlisle was eventually persuaded to play the part at the abbey, however, on the understanding that the queen would take the ancient oath used by her Catholic predecessors. The controversies in matters of faith were only just beginning.

Another obstacle could have been found. According to canon law Elizabeth was illegitimate and therefore barred from the throne. The most considerable candidate for the throne therefore became Mary Stuart, the queen of the Scots, who was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII and who conveniently enough happened to be a Catholic. Mary was married to the dauphin of France, soon to become crowned as Francis II; it was at this time that the young couple began to quarter the English arms with those of France as a token of proprietorship. Elizabeth and Mary would ever after be engaged in a duel that would end in death.

On the day of Elizabeth’s coronation she made the journey from Westminster Hall to the abbey on foot. She trod upon a rich crimson carpet and, as soon as she had passed, it was cut away by the spectators. Her hair hung loose as a token of her virginity. As she arrived at the portals of the church all the bells of London rang out in unison. When the members of the congregation were asked if they wished Elizabeth to be their queen, they cried out ‘Yes!’ Then the organs and the fifes, the drums and the trumpets, resounded. The coronation banquet in Westminster Hall began at three o’clock in the afternoon and ended at one o’clock of the following morning.

She had met her privy council at Hatfield even before her entry into London. Twenty-nine of Mary’s appointed men soon withdrew or were asked to resign; only six powerful nobles remained at the table, among them the earls of Arundel and Bedford, together with certain bureaucrats whose experience was invaluable. The clerics and the Catholics had gone. The members of the council represented a lay body, drawn from the nobility and from the elite trained at Cambridge and the Inns of Court; they were also largely interrelated and, at a slightly later date, eighteen out of twentyfive were related to each other and to Elizabeth herself.

One of her most important appointments was that of Robert Dudley, later earl of Leicester, as her master of the horse. He came from a great, if tainted, family. He was the son of the duke of Northumberland, who had tried to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and became a childhood friend of Elizabeth at the age of seven or eight; they may subsequently have met in the Tower, where both were for a while incarcerated. ‘I only show him favour,’ she is reported to have said, ‘because of his goodness to me when I was in trouble during the reign of my sister.’ In any event they established an enduring and affectionate relationship that subsequently became the source of much scandal.

The women about the queen were her distant relatives from suitably noble families. She was always accompanied by seven ladies of the bedchamber and by six maids of honour, all of them dressed in black or white or a medley of the two. She did not wish any of her attendants to mar the effect of her brightly coloured gowns. Strict rules were imposed upon them. They were never to speak to her about affairs of state and they were never, ever, to be betrothed or to marry without her permission. Some of them were consigned to prison for their disobedience in the matter. She herself naturally stood out. She had a somewhat swarthy complexion, like that of her mother, but she plastered her face with egg-white, alum and other agents so that it attained in time a luminous whiteness; she had a face considered too long to be entirely beautiful, but her eyes were large and expressive. She had the reddish-golden hair of her father, and the high cheekbones of her mother. Her nose was slightly hooked, lending her an eagle-like appearance.

She had appointed Sir William Cecil as her principal secretary of state, telling him that ‘without respect to my private will, you will give me that council which you think best’. On that account she was not to be disappointed. Cecil remained by her side until the end of his life. She called him her ‘spirit’ and addressed him as ‘Sir Spirit’. He had first served in the reign of Edward VI and had managed to retain the favour even of Mary as the most able and industrious administrator of the day. It was his habit to draw up elaborate analyses of a particular problem, with the arguments for and against a policy summarized in two columns. He favoured a middle course in affairs of state and religion, and in this respect he was closely attuned to the wishes of his mistress. The Elizabethan historian William Camden wrote that ‘of all men of genius he was most a drudge; of all men of business the most a genius’. He was also, in every sense, a survivor.

He knew well enough that the problems and dangers facing the queen were severe. A former clerk of the council under Edward VI sent an address to the new council with his own summary of the nation’s affairs. ‘The queen poor; the realm exhausted; the nobility poor and decayed; good captains and soldiers wanting; the people out of order; justice not executed; all things dear; excesses in meat, diet and apparel; divisions among ourselves; war with France; the French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland; steadfast enemies, but no steadfast friends.’

That is why the new ministers about her urged for caution above all else – caution in religious policy and caution in foreign affairs. One of Cecil’s aphorisms was to the effect that the realm gains more from one year of peace than from ten years of war. Elizabeth shared his belief, knowing well that war was an expense she could not afford; the treasury was bare. It was necessary to accept the loss of Calais, therefore, and come to peace with France. It was also wise to reach some agreement with Scotland for the safety of the northern border. Some said that there was not a wall in England strong enough to stand a cannon shot.

Yet in some matters she was quick. When the Fellows of King’s College Cambridge wrote to her asking for advice on the election of a new provost, she replied with a name by return of post.

In the winter of 1558, even before Elizabeth’s coronation, a paper was drawn up with the title ‘Device for the Alteration of Religion’. It is likely to have been the work of William Cecil; he was himself a supporter of the reformed faith. In the document he urges a full restoration of the ‘true religion’ as it existed in the reign of Edward VI, with all the risks this ‘alteration’ implied. The pope would excommunicate the queen, and the French would be able to attack the English as heretics as well as enemies. The Catholic power of Scotland might also be levied against the realm. Internal rebels would be no less dangerous than external foes; the bishops, and many of the judges, would be against the change. A majority of the people might also become discontented and rebellious. Yet the cause of God had to be maintained. Only then would Elizabeth and her nation be secured and glorified. At the end of the year, in this spirit, it was proclaimed that the litany and the Lord’s Prayer might be recited in English.

In practice the ‘alteration’ would prove difficult to implement. Parliament met eleven days after her coronation. When the royal procession entered Westminster Abbey, for the customary Mass before the parliamentary session, the queen was met by a group of monks bearing lighted candles. ‘Away with these torches,’ she called out, ‘we see very well.’ In the succeeding sermon the preacher denounced monks in particular for their part in the Marian persecution of heretics, and he urged the queen not to countenance ‘idolatry’ in her country. It was also well understood that the service in the royal chapel was predominantly Protestant in spirit, doing away with the elevation of the host. She would never countenance the demands of Rome. How could Elizabeth have embraced a faith that had denounced her mother as a prostitute and herself as a bastard? And she abhorred the smell of incense.

She had no affection for theological niceties. Although she once stated that she had studied divinity from childhood, she believed that controversies over religion were ‘as ropes of sand or sea-slime leading to the moon’. ‘There is only one Jesus Christ,’ she told the French ambassador, ‘the rest is a dispute over trifles.’ Her own religious opinions are difficult to discern; she had a liking for elaborate choral music and appreciated much of the ritual of the Roman communion; she called herself a Protestant, but kept a small crucifix in the royal chapel which the more radical members of the new faith deemed to be idolatry. She also had a strong dislike for married priests.

A succession of bills was passed in the early months of 1559. The religious laws of the time of Edward VI were reintroduced and the English service was resumed. Private bills were passed returning to lay owners certain lands that had been seized by the Marian bishops. The second Edwardian prayer book was once more deemed to be the key to public worship, but it was subtly altered to avoid offending Catholic sensibilities. A reference to the ‘detestable enormities’ of the pope was removed, for example, and the real presence of Christ in the sacrament was tacitly allowed. In practice the priest would be allowed to wear the same vestments, and stand in the same position, as he had in the previous reign. Elizabeth was content to style herself ‘supreme governor’ rather than ‘supreme head’ of the Church in England. Christ was the head.

The Elizabethan ‘settlement’, as it later became known, was designed to pursue a middle course. Yet it was by no means wholly popular. The Catholic bishops in the Lords were opposed to the measures and eventually the Act of Uniformity, designed to reinforce the Book of Common Prayer, was passed by only three votes. A debate between Catholics and Protestants in Westminster Hall settled nothing. One of the disputants was described as ‘turning himself towards all quarters, and into every possible attitude, stamping with his feet, throwing his arms, bending his sides, snapping his fingers, alternately elevating and depressing his eyebrows’. After the debate Elizabeth was obliged to imprison two Catholic bishops, in order to prevent them from excommunicating her in public. This was also a means of diminishing the opposition to her proposals in the Lords. The Commons were committed to the measures, but many of the Lords were defiantly hostile. In the end it was a close-run thing.

The queen wished to calm any form of disputation; she set herself the task of creating a broad consensus with which both the reformers and the orthodox could live in peace. The settlement, if such it was, did not in fact please either party. The Catholics lamented the reversal of Mary’s policies, while the reformers were inclined to believe that the English Church was still papistical. A Puritan broadside described the Book of Common Prayer as ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the Mass book full of all abominations’. This was in fact a mixed religious polity that relied upon compromise and accommodation. The constitution of the Church remained largely unchanged while the liturgy contained ancient, medieval, Lutheran and Calvinist aspects; it was Protestant in regard to preaching but Catholic in its attention to ritual. It was perhaps the least reformed of all the reformed faiths and promulgated no uniform theology. This ramshackle contraption was designed to hold as many passengers as before. So Elizabeth had remained cautious. Towards the end of her reign Francis Bacon, the philosopher and statesman, declared that she had no wish to peer into any subject’s soul. She required only outward conformity to the English Church for the sake of order. All the English were obliged to attend their parish churches every Sunday and holy day; the fine for absence was one shilling. The nation had changed its faith four times in twenty years, and the time had come for an end to innovation.

She never allowed anyone to meddle with the order she had established and, with a brief period of interregnum in the seventeenth century, it has remained largely unchanged ever since. One of her advisers remarked that she had ‘placed her Reformation as upon a sure stone to remain constant’. It was a very English settlement; it was practical rather than speculative; it brought together materials that might otherwise have been considered incompatible; it introduced compromise and toleration as well as a fair amount of ambiguity. Its very lack of clarity saved it. In London the reformers preached predestination and justification by faith alone while in York the faithful prayed still on their strings of beads. ‘The difference between Catholics and Lutherans’, the queen told the Spanish ambassador, ‘is not of much importance in substance.’ She required only a settlement that would maintain order and would bring unity to her subjects. More politic reasons for her caution can also be found. She did not wish to lose the support of the Lutheran princes in Germany, nor did she wish to antagonize the Catholic kings of Europe. The religion of the people had a significant foreign context.

Just before the end of the parliamentary session the Speaker of the House of Commons asked permission to present a petition to the queen that was of vital importance to the realm; it contained the wish, or entreaty, that she should marry and bear an heir to the throne. Only then could the peace and stability of the realm be maintained, and the throne itself protected from foreign enemies. She paused before making a long reply in which she expressed her wish to remain in ‘this virgin’s estate wherein you see me’. She alluded mysteriously to the danger that any issue might ‘grow out of kind and become ungracious’. A male heir, in other words, might try to supplant her; this was always the danger for a female sovereign.

She then drew from her finger the coronation ring. She said that she had received the ring on the solemn condition that she was bound in marriage to the realm and would take no other as a partner. It would be quite sufficient if, on her tomb, were inscribed the words ‘Here lieth Elizabeth, which reigned a virgin, and died a virgin’. In that supposition she was to prove correct. The experiences of her mother and of her sister would have warned her of the dangers of the married state, and it was suggested by one of her doctors that her body might not be able to withstand the strain of childbirth. And of course, as she said, she may have feared a male heir. The Spanish king, Philip, her brother-in-law, had in fact proposed marriage to her already; the offer was for a while graciously evaded rather than denied. The direct refusal came later, when she declared that she could not marry him because she was a Protestant.

When parliament finally rose in the second week of May a Spanish bishop summarized the nature of the change. ‘The Holy Sacrament was taken away yesterday from the royal chapel, and Mass was said in English. The bishops who will not swear [the oath of supremacy] will lose their sees; and when they have been deprived the queen will go on progress and institute their successors.’ All except one were indeed deprived of their bishoprics and replaced with more convenient men. The monks and nuns had been scattered to the winds, and the statues of the Virgin and the saints were once more removed from their niches just as the crucifix was banished from the rood loft. The new liturgy was slowly, if grudgingly, accepted; yet within a generation it became the heart of English religion. The heretics of Mary’s realm had been long since freed from their prison cells. Yet not all was peace and light. The people of the north did not care for the new Book of Common Prayer, and whispers of rebellion could once more be heard.

The queen herself had managed her parliament well. With the help of Cecil and other councillors she had successfully manoeuvred between the papists and the more radical clergy newly returned from exile under Mary. In a sense she had already become a symbol of the emerging nation. Her private experiences had directly reflected the travails of the nation. She had been in peril during the reign of Mary and Philip; she had suffered privation and had lived among manifest dangers. She had been a prisoner. Now she had triumphed.

She had gained her ascendancy despite her sex. At court she presided over a largely masculine community of some 1,500 persons, and she had to learn how to dominate her wholly male council. She was a natural diplomat, in turn serpentine and obstinate. She had no need for an army of translators since she herself spoke Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and German. Her intelligence and her quick wit were invaluable; her wilfulness and imperiousness also assisted her in the never-ending battle with the world. The Spanish envoy remarked that she was infinitely more feared than her sister, and gave her orders with as much authority as her father. She once said that she had a great desire ‘to do some act that would make her fame spread abroad in her lifetime and, after, occasion memorial for ever’. No specific act was necessary. It was enough, and more than enough, to be herself.

We may trace from this date, in fact, the beginning of the cult of Elizabeth. She would eventually be hailed as Deborah of fiery spirit from the book of Judges; she was Judith and she was Hester. She was Gloriana and Pandora. She was Astraea, the Greek virgin-goddess of justice who had in the age of gold dwelt among mortals upon the earth; Astraea retired into the sky as the constellation Virgo. The days of the queen’s birthday and accession were treated as national celebrations marked by parades and banquets and music.

Many signs of providence could be found in her destiny. Her birthday, 7 September, was also the feast day of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. On that day her champion at the tilt, Henry Lee, erected a pavilion ‘like unto a church, wherein were many lamps burning’. The paintings and miniatures and woodcuts portrayed her as an allegorical figure in circumstances of glory. Whether the people of England were wholly dazzled and deceived by these fabrications is another matter. Deep reserves of apathy, and even of cynicism, must have resisted many of the blandishments. It is impossible to gauge the sensibilities and opinions of the English people in the middle of the sixteenth century, but no doubt they were as unruly and as disaffected as every other generation.

Yet Elizabeth came to be defined as the virgin queen (with connotations of another Virgin), whose motto was ‘semper eadem’ or ‘always the same’. That would in time become the truism, and perhaps the tragedy, of her reign.

27

Two queens

In the summer of 1559 Elizabeth issued a series of injunctions in matters concerning religion. The liturgy was to be recited in English, and an English translation of the Bible be placed in every church. Images and monuments ‘of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition’ were to be removed from walls and windows, but the fabric of the church was to be repaired or restored. No more wholesale iconoclasm was permitted. The cult of the saints, and prayers for the dead, were abolished.

The processions of Rogationtide, when the people beat the bounds of their parish and invoked blessings on the fields and the folk, were still to be performed. The congregation was ordered to uncover and bow on the pronunciation of the name of Jesus, and to kneel during the reading of the litany. Clergy were to continue to wear their traditional habits, complete with square hats. Wafers, rather than portions of ordinary bread, were to be provided for the time of communion. ‘Modest and distinct’ songs were permitted. All opprobrious names, such as ‘heretic’ or ‘papist’, were forbidden. The injunctions were, in other words, an attempt to compose differences and to soften the acrimony and recrimination attendant on the further change in religion.

Yet the differences were evident at the consecration of the archbishop of Canterbury. Matthew Parker had not wanted to become archbishop. He considered the burden to be too great to bear, and he wrote to inform Cecil that he wished to remain in a private station ‘more meet for my decayed voice, and small quality, than in theatrical and great audience’; he wished to be ‘quite forgotten’. Yet the queen insisted; he had, after all, been her mother’s chaplain. He was told that ‘her pleasure is, that you should repair up hither [to London] with such speed, as you conveniently may’. At the consecration itself only one bishop wore the legally stipulated vestment of the cope; two bishops refused to put on the Romish attire and wore surplices; a fourth believed the surplice to be going too far and wore only the black gown of Geneva. The disagreement did not augur well. All of the fourteen surviving bishops of Mary’s reign had, in the interim, been deprived; some of them spent the rest of their lives in prison for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. Bishop Bonner, for example, was taken to the Marshalsea. He tried to befriend some of the criminals incarcerated there, calling them ‘friends’ and ‘neighbours’. But one of them answered, ‘Go, you beast, into hell, and find your friends there.’

And then there was the matter of the queen’s silver crucifix. For those of reformed faith the crucifix was a papistical idol, in which reverence for an object had been substituted in place of reverence for God. Yet one stood in the queen’s private chapel, with candles burning before it. It was, in the words of one reformer, ‘a foul idol’ placed on ‘the altar of abomination’. Such was the dismay among the clergy that a debate among four bishops was held before the council but, despite their best endeavours, it remained. When the dean of St Paul’s preached to her on the iniquity of crosses, she became very angry. ‘Do not talk about that,’ she called to him. When he returned to the theme she remonstrated with him. ‘Leave that! Leave that! It has nothing to do with your subject and the matter is threadbare.’ He brought his sermon to an abrupt close, and she walked out of the chapel.

On two later occasions the crucifix was attacked and broken up, much to the delight of the bishop of Norwich. ‘A good riddance of such a cross as that! It has continued there too long already, to the great grief of the godly.’ On both occasions a crucifix was restored to the same position. For Elizabeth it was a token of her belief in ritual and order, as well as a way of maintaining her relations with Spain and the Vatican. She told the Spanish ambassador that ‘many people think we are Moors or Turks here, whereas we only differ from the Catholics in things of small importance’. It was also of course a benevolent gesture towards her more orthodox subjects. Soon enough the Catholic requiem for the dead came back in altered guise, with ‘the celebration of the Lord’s supper at funerals’.

In the same spirit of religious conciliation the queen went in the spring of this year on procession to St Mary Spital, in the east of the city, to hear a sermon. She was attended by 1,000 men in full armour, but she was also accompanied by morris dancers and two white bears in a cart. Religion was no longer to be removed from festival. The animals were baited to death after the sermon. Elsewhere in London psalms were being sung in English for the first time since the reign of Edward VI; it was reported that, at Paul’s Cross, some 6,000 people sang together.

He shall be like the tree that groweth fast by the river side:

Which bringeth forth most pleasant fruit in her due time and tide.

The new injunctions were followed by a series of visitations in the late summer to make sure that they had been given practical effect. Some 125 inspectors were chosen, to travel on six separate ‘circuits’ of the country, but the peers and gentry nominated for this task were unable or unwilling to perform it. So the more eager lawyers and clerics were given the job; naturally enough they were keen reformers who anticipated a general cleansing of the churches. All the evidence suggests that in most regions the arrival of the visitors was quickly followed by the removal of altars and images. The bonfires of the Catholic vanities could be seen in London, Exeter, York and other cities. Vestments, statues, banners and ornaments were thrown into the flames. The archbishop of York hailed the destruction of the ‘vessels that were made for Baal’ and the ‘polluted and defiled altars’. It seems that the visitors were more rigorous in the pursuit of superstition than the queen herself would have liked. That is why Elizabeth soon issued a proclamation denouncing the ‘negligence and lack of convenient reverence’ in the maintenance of the churches, citing ‘unmeet and unseemly tables with foul cloths for the communion of the sacraments, and generally leaving the place of prayers desolate of all cleanliness and of meet ornaments for such a place’. It was no doubt left to the clergy to decide of what a ‘meet ornament’ might consist.

In some parts of the country resistance to the changes was still strong, albeit in disguised form. Pictures and images were sometimes merely covered, and the other vestiges of the old faith concealed. Various reasons, apart from piety, can be adduced for this. The most pressing and practical of them concerned the succession. If Elizabeth died without an heir, the Catholic Mary Stuart might become queen and reverse all the previous changes.

The presence of Mary Stuart in the French court emphasized the larger diplomatic problem with which Elizabeth and her council had to deal. Mary was now queen of France, her husband having ascended to the throne as Francis II in 1559, and she also styled herself queen of England. In her absence Scotland was ruled by her mother, Mary of Guise, who had asked for more troops from her home country to defy the Protestant lords of Scotland. French troops had been assembled in Normandy, while the French forts on the north bank of the Tweed were in offensive or defensive array. Invasion was to be feared.

The French court was supposed to be alive with plots to assassinate the English queen. It was claimed that Mary’s uncles, the brothers Guise, had devised a scheme ‘to poison her by means of an Italian named Stephano, a burly man with a black beard, about forty-five years of age, who will offer his services to the queen as an engineer’. Stephano did not arrive. She was in any case surrounded by precautions. No dish arrived at her table untasted, no glove or handkerchief could be presented to her without being carefully examined. She was dosed every week with antidotes against poison.

Another Scottish complication presented itself. The Protestant lords had sent an envoy to the court of Elizabeth, asking for an army to help them remove the French from their country. Elizabeth did not like war. Since the rebellion would effectively injure the status of Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, it was not necessarily to be assisted or even welcomed. Elizabeth, naturally enough, supported very strongly the claims of a rightful queen. It was not proper to renounce an anointed sovereign. She also had no real affection for the Protestantism of the Scots. The people of that faith were led by John Knox, the reformer who had aimed a cannon of vituperation and malice against the idea of a female sovereign.

William Cecil was a more ardent Protestant and a bolder statesman. He set out a policy that included the invasion of Scotland by an English army and, if necessary, the removal of Mary Stuart from the throne. ‘Anywise kindle the fire,’ he wrote, ‘for, if quenched, the opportunity will not come in our lives.’ It was clear to him that the forces of European Catholicism might now be confronted and defied. He feared a French conspiracy to subvert the English state and the English religion.

The queen hesitated and resisted. She told her council that ‘it was a dangerous matter to enter into war’. Cecil, declaring that the faint hearts and the flatterers were supporting her policy of prevarication, threatened to resign. The leading faint heart, Sir Nicholas Bacon, had asserted ‘safety in moderation’. Secretly she sent money; then she sent a fleet into the Firth of Forth. Eventually, by the end of the year, she was persuaded to send a force of troops into the territory of her northern neighbour; much to the fury and resentment of the queen it failed in its attack upon the French fortress of Leith. The scaling ladders had been too short. The English settled down to a siege, a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. ‘I have had herein such a torment with the Queen’s Majesty,’ Cecil wrote, ‘as an ague hath not in five fits so much abated.’

It was Cecil who had supported the war; it was Cecil who would be obliged to conclude it. The queen ordered him to arrange a peace with the Scots and the French. Much to his dismay he was obliged to obey. The eventual Treaty of Edinburgh, signed in the summer of 1560, was an honourable truce. Both sides agreed to withdraw their troops from the country, with the additional promise that Mary and Francis would surrender their claim to the English throne. England had confronted France and survived the ordeal. This was the lesson which all parties adduced from the affair. Such was the rivalry between Spain and France, also, that Philip was in a certain sense obliged to support the heretic Elizabeth in any rivalry with her neighbour. It could be said that his benign inaction helped to ensure the triumph of the Protestant cause in England.

The treaty was perhaps more than Cecil and Elizabeth had expected, but it had one serious imperfection; Mary herself never signed the document. Mary of Guise had died in that same summer and, with the removal of the French troops, the parliament of Scotland professed the Protestant faith; again the decision was not ratified by the queen, and the dispute between doctrines continued as before. Mary Stuart might have been forgiven for thinking that the rival queen, by means of the treaty, had tried to rob her of the allegiance and loyalty of her subjects. Yet her ushers at the court in Paris still called out, as she passed, ‘Make way for the queen of England!’ Her claim to the throne of England would become the single source of the calamities that would one day descend upon her.

The question of Elizabeth’s marriage remained the most important matter of the realm. The pursuit of Philip II for her hand was copied by other great men of Europe. It was always an advantage to marry a queen. By the autumn of the year ten or twelve eminent suitors were in contention. Two kings, two archdukes, five dukes and two earls vied for mastery. Principal among them were archdukes Charles and Ferdinand of Austria; gambolling up in the rear was Eric of Sweden, the Swedish king’s eldest son. Elizabeth did not disguise the fact that she enjoyed the attention, but she always fell back upon coquetry and dissembling. She had never said that she would never marry but, still, she proposed to remain a virgin. What she said she wanted, she did not want; her stated intentions were always at odds with her real designs. Her settled policy was that of delay and prevarication. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘you will see what a pretty business it is to have to treat with this woman, who I think must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is forever telling me that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time in a cell praying’. It was of course always useful, in an uncertain and dangerous world, to have the grandees of several nations competing for her charms.

In the autumn of the year a Scottish theologian sent to her an account of the fall of her mother, including the scene where Anne Boleyn held up the infant Elizabeth in supplication to her irate husband: a timely reminder of the perils of matrimony. It is likely that it was always her desire to remain single. Had she not already said that she was married to her parliament and to her nation? This was the mystical marriage of state, in which she was made whole by incorporating the male world. It might be termed the body politic. Yet in the circumstances of the age it was a brave and even astonishing decision. It was inconceivable that a woman, let alone a queen, would not choose to marry. Great social prejudice was directed against unmarried females. It flouted the divine, as well as the human, order. An unmarried queen would be subject to ‘dolours and infirmities’ attendant upon the celibate condition. At a later date the archbishop of Canterbury, together with the bishops of London and York, sent her a pastoral letter in which they feared ‘this continued sterility in your Highness’s person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’. It imperilled the safety and even the existence of the nation.

There was another player in the pack. Robert Dudley, master of the horse, was part of her close entourage. He was handsome and flamboyant; it was clear that the queen had a great liking and affection for him. In the spring of 1560 it was rumoured that she was visiting his chamber both by day and by night, and the rumours were soon fashioned into a scandal that was even being reported by the foreign envoys at the court. It was whispered that if Dudley’s wife were to die, Elizabeth would marry him. A woman from Brentford was arraigned for claiming that the queen was pregnant with his child. On a progress in the summer of that year, just after the success in Scotland, she travelled along the southern bank of the Thames. Dudley was her constant companion, riding and hunting with her every day. Cecil, seeing that his influence had declined, was considering his position. He told the Spanish ambassador that ‘the queen was conducting herself in such a way that he was about to withdraw from her service. It was a bad sailor who did not make for a port when he saw the storm coming …’

Then, on 8 September 1560, Amy Dudley died in a mysterious manner. She had broken her neck after falling down a staircase. The convenient death of Dudley’s wife provoked ‘grievous and dangerous suspicion and muttering’. Had she been pushed? Had she, perhaps, committed suicide? The queen sent Dudley to his house in Kew, where he seems to have lingered in a state of shock and anxiety. He told one of his servants, Sir Thomas Blount, that ‘the greatness and suddenness of the misfortune doth so perplex me … as I can take no rest’. He knew well enough what ‘the malicious world’ would make of the affair.

When a coroner’s jury was convened to consider the evidence, the verdict was one of death by misadventure. The judgment did not of course silence the rumours of conspiracy, and even of the queen’s participation in a plot to murder Amy Dudley. The rumours were most unlikely. It would have been politically impossible for the queen to have married Dudley after such an event. Those who favour conspiracies might even speculate that Cecil arranged for Amy Dudley to be killed, thus wrecking any chance of marriage and damaging the reputation of Dudley himself.

The nature of the relationship between the favourite and the queen is unknown. Elizabeth had been formed by experience and adversity; she was always cautious and ever watchful. Would she have courted disaster by engaging in a love affair with one of her subjects? The queen was rarely, if ever, alone. She was surrounded by the ladies of her bedchamber and her maids of honour even as she slept; any departure from the rigid ceremonial of her life would have been instantly observed. ‘My life is in the open and I have so many witnesses,’ she said, ‘I cannot understand how so bad a judgement can have been formed of me.’

At this juncture Cecil drew up a memorandum for his own use, in which he summarized the relative attractions of Archduke Charles of Austria, still the favourite candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, and Robert Dudley, master of the horse. The balance sheet is all on the archduke’s side. He reports that ‘in wealth’ Charles had ‘by report three thousand ducats by the year’ whereas Dudley has ‘all of the queen, and in debt’. In ‘friendship’ the archduke had the emperor and the king of Spain as well as various dukes; Dudley had ‘none but such as shall have of the queen’. In reputation Charles was ‘honoured of all men’ whereas Dudley was ‘hated of many. His wife’s death.’ As far as Cecil was concerned, the case was closed. But, as he said, ‘what the queen will determine to do, God only knows’.

At the beginning of 1561 a close companion of Dudley approached the Spanish ambassador with a proposal. He suggested that if Philip II were to approve and assist the marriage of Dudley and the queen, Elizabeth herself might look more favourably on reunion with Rome. On hearing of this manoeuvre Cecil reacted swiftly by discovering a popish conspiracy; he arrested and imprisoned several Catholic priests and gentry on suspicion of attending Mass. The public enthusiasm for his measures was so great that it sent an unmistakable message to Dudley that any proposals for a papal reconciliation would be rejected. ‘I thought it necessary,’ Cecil wrote, ‘to dull the papists’ expectations by discovering of certain Mass-mongers and punishing them.’ A projected visit from the papal nuncio was refused.

It seems most unlikely that Elizabeth herself was party to Dudley’s plan; she had more than enough wit and common sense to know that such a course would be foolish in the extreme. It was in fact in this period that she expressed her most vehement comments about the married state. The archbishop of Canterbury told Cecil that the queen had spoken with such ‘bitterness of the holy estate of matrimony that I was in a horror to hear her’. The context may have been a proposal for the possibility of married clergy, but her wider purport is clear enough. ‘I will have here but one mistress,’ she declared, ‘and no master!’ In her married state she would be a queen; unmarried, she was both king and queen. When an ambassador from one of the German states referred to marriage as a ‘desirable evil’, she laughed. ‘Desirable?’ she asked him. She would rather be a beggar-woman and single than a queen and married.

A further complication had arisen over the succession. Lady Katherine Grey was a younger sister of the unfortunate Jane Grey; as such she could be considered a legitimate heir to the throne if her cousin, Mary Stuart, was denied any claim. But in November 1560 she entered a clandestine marriage with Edward Seymour, son of the late Lord Protector Somerset. As possible heiress and lady of the privy chamber, she had a double duty to ask permission from the queen before any wedding could take place. In fact she had concealed her affair with Seymour, no doubt fearing that Elizabeth would prohibit any further contact. The queen was harsh in matters of the heart, let alone of the succession.

Her reaction, when the news inevitably reached her, was predictably furious. She consigned the young husband and wife to the Tower, to be detained indefinitely. When Katherine Grey gave birth to a son while in confinement, her anxieties increased; the possibility of a male heir materially weakened Elizabeth’s position. She was determined to declare the infant as illegitimate, thus debarring him from the crown. In a display of alarming incompetence, Katherine Grey had in fact lost the marriage documents and had forgotten the name of the cleric who had married them; the one witness to the ceremony had recently died. Fate, or providence, was against her. The child was declared to be a bastard, and Katherine was taken from the Tower and placed under house arrest until her death seven years later. The queen herself believed that ‘there had been great practices and purposes’ behind this dynastic marriage, and it was rumoured by some that Katherine Grey and Edward Seymour were being set up as a possible alternative to her rule.

When Katherine Grey’s younger sister, Mary, also married without official permission she was placed under house arrest; her husband was incarcerated for some years in the Fleet. The marriage was at the time a subject of ribaldry as well as consternation. Mary Grey was a dwarf who was ‘crookbacked and very ugly’ while her husband was 6 feet 8 inches in height and a commoner. They posed no true threat to the queen. Yet it was said at the time that she resented those natural pleasures of others which she denied to herself.

The Crown was indeed surrounded by cares, for once more Mary Stuart came back as a cause of alarm and anxiety. The death of Francis II in December 1560 left her a childless widow in a country which might not welcome her presence among rival factions at the court; her formidable mother-in-law Catherine de Medici, who had become regent of France during the minority of the ten-year-old Charles IX, had ‘a great misliking’ for Mary. Mary Stuart in turn dismissed the lady as no more than the daughter of a merchant. Yet the death of her husband had left the Scottish queen with little status and less authority. It was time to consider a return to her own realm where her position would be more assured.

The Catholic and Protestant parties of Scotland sent envoys to her, asking her to come again into her inheritance. The Catholics urged her to land on the north-east coast of the country where the house of Gordon, a family of ardent Catholics, would welcome her and accompany her to Edinburgh in triumph; the Protestants also wished her to return and come to some accommodation with their religion as a safeguard for the throne. It was clear, in any event, that she would receive an enthusiastic reception.

She sent her own envoy to the court of Elizabeth, asking her cousin for permission to land at an English port on her way to Scotland. The queen of England addressed him in a loud voice in a crowded assembly. She refused the request, adding that Mary should ask for no favours until she had signed the Treaty of Edinburgh in which her claim to the English throne was removed. ‘Let your queen ratify the treaty,’ she said, ‘and she shall experience on my part, either by sea or by land, whatever can be expected from a queen, a relation and a neighbour.’

The English ambassador at Paris was then summoned for an audience with Mary. ‘It will be thought strange,’ she said, ‘among all princes and countries, that she should first animate my subjects against me; and now that I am a widow, hinder my return to my own country.’ She then made an indirect threat. ‘I do not trouble her state or practise with her subjects; yet I know there be in her realm [some] that be inclined enough to hear offers.’ The threat was followed by an insult. ‘Your queen says I am young, and lack experience. I confess I am younger than she is.’ Mary was then only nineteen, but already a practised exponent of sarcasm and innuendo. It was clear that there would be two queens in Albion. John Knox had occasion to meet Mary Stuart. ‘If there be not in her’, he said afterwards, ‘a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’

She began her journey to Scotland on 15 August 1561. As her ship left the harbour at Calais, another vessel had fallen foul of the soundings and currents of the sea; it began to sink, with the loss of its passengers and crew. ‘Good God!’ Mary cried. ‘What an omen for a voyage!’ What an omen for a reign. On landing at Leith she and her party were dismayed by the poor state of the horses on which they were obliged to ride. Already she lamented the passing of the pomp and splendour of the French court. When she rested that night at the palace of Holyrood a crowd of some 500 Calvinists sang psalms outside her window. On the following morning they threatened her Catholic chaplain, whom they regarded as little more than a priest of Baal. ‘Such’, said the queen, ‘is the beginning of welcome and allegiance from my subjects: what may be the end I know not, but I venture to foretell that it will be very bad.’ These are the words, at least, that she is supposed to have used. There may be an element of hindsight, however, in even the best-conducted histories.

In the summer of 1561, just before Mary returned home, a great prodigy startled London. The medieval spire of St Paul’s Cathedral stood 520 feet from the ground, and 260 feet from the tower; it was constructed out of wood and cased with lead, rising, as it might seem at the time, into the empyrean. On 4 June a thunder cloud descended over the city, rendering it as dark as night. At about two in the afternoon a lightning flash broke out from the depths of the cloud, and a streak of light touched the highest point of the cathedral. It seemed to pass but, early in the evening, a blue mist or smoke was seen to be curling around the ball. Within a minute the cross and the eagle at the summit of the spire crashed down through the roof and onto the floor of the south transept; the lead casing melted and ran down the tower, and soon enough the whole structure was in flames.

It was said that ‘all London rushed to the churchyard’ in consternation. The queen had seen the fire from the windows of her palace at Greenwich. Some sailors moored on the Thames and set up an impromptu line of water-buckets from the river; they then climbed onto the roof with damp hides to suppress the flames. By midnight the fire was extinguished, leaving the cathedral as a blackened and roofless ruin. It was widely considered to be an omen, portending great changes in the affairs of men, but as ever it remained unclear. As for the cathedral itself, the tower was repaired but the spire was never rebuilt.

Some believed that conflagration was caused by papists, using gunpowder or employing the more elusive methods of magic. A commission of inquiry had already been set up in the spring of the year to investigate ‘Mass-mongers and conjurors’, and certain Catholic gentry were arrested for necromancy; various conjurors confessed to using black arts against the queen before they were paraded through the streets of London and placed in the pillory. So the isle was full of rumours. The prophecies of Nostradamus were invoked, and in 1562 twenty booksellers were fined for selling one of his prognostications. In that year, too, various other marvels were announced. The body of a child born with a ruff around its neck, and with hands ‘like a toad’s foot’, was carried to the court. Pigs were born with the noses of men:

The calves and pigs so strange

With other more of such misshape,

Declareth this world’s change.

It was an unfortunate time, perhaps, for Elizabeth to fall sick. In the autumn of 1562, at the end of a letter, she added a postscript. ‘My hot fever prevents me writing more.’ She was at the time resting at the palace of Hampton Court. She took a bath to alleviate the effects of the fever, but instead she caught a chill and quickly succumbed to illness. She was in fact afflicted by the smallpox, from which it was likely that she might die. At a later date she recalled that ‘death possessed almost every joint of me, so as I wished then that the feeble thread of life, which lasted (methought) too long, all too long, might by Clotho’s hand have quietly been cut off ’. (Clotho was one of the Fates who presided over human destiny.) Elizabeth lapsed into unconsciousness, ‘without speech’.

Cecil had been summoned as soon as the queen fell ill, and was told that she might have only a few days to live. The members of the council were called down from London and met at all times of night and day to consider the calamity that was facing them. All the doubts and divisions of the nation now came to a head as they debated the matter of the succession. Mary Stuart was not to be thought of. There could be no second Catholic queen. Of all the candidates Lady Katherine Grey, still in disgrace after her clandestine marriage, was the most favoured. She was, at least, of the reformed faith.

When the fever had cooled sufficiently, the queen returned to consciousness. She believed that she was dying and, as the council crowded around her bed, she asked them to make Dudley the protector of the realm. She told them that she loved him dearly but, invoking God as her witness, declared that ‘nothing unseemly’ had ever taken place between them. Yet the crisis had passed; her native good health reasserted itself, and she remained among the living. The fact of her mortality, however, was now evident to all the nation and to the lady herself. In later years the queen never wished to be reminded of her illness.

28

The thirty-nine steps

The religion of England had always possessed a vital European aspect. At the beginning of the 1560s, for example, it bore a part in the wars of religion that divided France. In matters of faith no nation was an island. In the regency of Catherine de Medici the Catholics and the Huguenots vied for mastery, with the Guise family supporting the Catholics and the house of Bourbon allied with the Protestants. Catherine herself was obliged to maintain some kind of balance between them to preserve the unity of the kingdom. Into this uneasy struggle were in turn drawn the rulers of the other European states, Catholic and Protestant alike; among the former were the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, and Philip II of Spain. Elizabeth could not stand apart. To have done so would look like weakness. The balance of the members of her council, who favoured the reformed religion, were also likely to support the Protestant cause.

Elizabeth, as always, vacillated. She never made a decision when one could be avoided. Procrastination was her policy in all the affairs of state. She was no friend to the Calvinist Huguenots, having hated the doctrines of Calvin in the shape of John Knox and The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; she had an aversion to spending her much needed money in European wars; she had far more cause to watch the affairs of Mary Stuart in Scotland. In any case the prospect of a general religious war in Europe promised manifold perils. It could draw England itself into senseless slaughter. Rich prizes, on the other hand, might be won. One of her advisers wrote to her that ‘it may chance in these garboyls [broils] some occasion may be offered as that again you may be brought into possession of Calais’. Still she remained irresolute. She sent an envoy to Catherine de Medici, promising her help in any mediation.

At the same time Mary Stuart was pressing for a meeting with her English cousin, in which she hoped that Elizabeth would recognize her claim to the throne. Elizabeth herself welcomed the opportunity of seeing her close relative and neighbouring queen. It might also help to pacify the House of Guise, to which Mary was allied through her marriage to the former French king, and promote a truce in France. Yet here, too, infinite dangers threatened. The council voted, without one dissenting voice, against any such interview between the two queens. They believed Mary to be a secret enemy, still pursuing the interests of the Catholic cause on behalf of France. The prospect of another Catholic queen of England was in any case too dreadful to consider.

Elizabeth persisted in her wish to meet the queen of Scots, and promised that she would receive her in Nottingham at the beginning of September 1562. Letters were sent to the authorities of that city, ordering them to prepare for the retinues of two sovereigns amounting to some 4,000 people. News now came, however, that Spanish troops were advancing towards the French border in order to assist the pretensions of the House of Guise. The Protestants might be overwhelmed; Elizabeth’s offers of mediation were now worthless, and any meeting tactless in the extreme. So she cancelled the proposed encounter with Mary. On receiving this news the queen of Scots took to her bed for the whole day.

In desperation the leader of the Huguenot cause, the prince of Condé, appealed to Elizabeth for men and for money. He still controlled Normandy and, in return for her assistance, he promised her Le Havre and Dieppe as securities for the eventual restoration of Calais into English hands. She could no longer hesitate; her reluctance to help the Protestants was ruining her credit on the bourse at Antwerp. On 22 September a treaty was concluded with Condé’s legation at Hampton Court. The queen agreed to send 6,000 troops into France, while also granting a large loan. She wrote to Mary arguing that it was necessary ‘to protect our own houses from destruction when those of our neighbours are on fire’. Need knows no law.

On 2 October an English force left Portsmouth for France and, two days later, had taken possession of Le Havre. This was to be the first step in the repossession of Calais. It is likely that the queen was more interested in that town than in the Protestant cause. Against her express orders a smaller force of English troops had also joined the Protestants in defence of Rouen. The affairs of war are, as she knew well enough, uncertain. Rouen was taken by the Catholic forces of the Guises, and its defenders put to the sword. A bloody battle at Dreux in northwest France, in which thousands were slain on either side, led to an uneasy interval. Catherine de Medici then arranged a truce between Catholics and Protestants, in which the prince of Condé was offered a moderate form of religious toleration. It seemed likely then that, in the saying of the time, the English interest was ‘to be left out at the cart’s tail’.

The English forces in Le Havre were defiant. They wanted ‘to make the French cock cry cuck’, and they promised the queen that ‘the least molehill should not be lost without many bloody blows’. Condé and Guise now marched together against the ancient enemy, while Elizabeth railed against the prince as ‘a treacherous inconstant perjured villain’. She insisted that Calais was given over to her before she would think of leaving Le Havre. She ordered her ships to sea, and a force was raised from the prisons of London; the thieves and highwaymen were enrolled as soldiers as a means of escaping the gallows.

Yet death came in other forms. A ‘strange disease’ broke out among the English garrison at Le Havre. In the heat of June it was soonknown to be the plague. By the end of the month sixty men fell each day. The French besiegers had cut off water from the town; no fresh meat, or vegetables, could be obtained. By the beginning of July only 1,500 men were left, and French cannon were devastating the streets. The queen and council sent more and more men across the water, but they were wasted; the polluted and pestilential air was more lethal than the weaponry of the French. The commander of the garrison, the earl of Warwick, came to terms with the enemy. Effectively he surrendered. Le Havre was returned to the French, and the remainder of the English were allowed to embark upon their ships.

It had been a disaster, but it was prelude to another calamity. The returning soldiers brought the plague to England with them. Throughout the rest of the summer ‘the death’ raged in the towns and villages through which they passed. The symptoms were those of fever; fits of shivering were followed by violent headaches, which in turn were succeeded by a great desire to sleep. The languor commonly resulted in death. In August the mortalities in London rose from 700 to 2,000 a week. Only when the heavy rains of November and December cleansed the streets was the epidemic eventually stilled.

The queen had learnt two harsh lessons from the disaster of Le Havre. It was not wise to rely upon the promises of princes. It was dangerous to meddle in wars not of her own choosing. In a subsequent treaty Elizabeth gave up all claim to Calais.

A parliament had been summoned at the beginning of 1563 to consider these great matters of state and, in particular, to finance what was then the ongoing French war. But the members of both Lords and Commons were more exercised over the problem of the succession; the recent illness of the queen only emphasized the precarious state of the nation in the event of her death. The debate was considered to be so important that Mary Stuart sent her own ambassador to observe the proceedings and to press her interests.

The Commons dilated on the perils of the single life. If no marriage was contemplated, or if no heir was chosen, the entire country was in a sense barren; this increased the risk of infinite mischiefs, among them civic conflict and foreign invasion. The queen answered their petition in a direct but not unambiguous speech in which she declared that she understood the dangers as well as, if not better than, they did. She had read of a philosopher whose custom was to recite the alphabet before applying his mind to a delicate problem (the same story was told of the emperor Augustus); in similar fashion she would wait and pray before making her deliberation. Yet ‘I assure you all that though after my death you may have many step-dames, yet you shall never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all’. This might be interpreted as the reply courteous.

To the petition sent by the Lords a few days later, she was more blunt. She had hoped that they would show more foresight than their colleagues in the Commons, where there were ‘restless heads in whose brains the needless hammers beat with vain judgment’. She asserted that to declare a successor would lead to civil unrest and bloodshed. The marks on her face were not the wrinkles of old age but the scars of smallpox. In any case, like the mother of the Baptist, she might bear fruit in her advanced years. She was in fact only twenty-nine years old.

In a final address to both the Lords and Commons, read out by the lord chancellor, she admitted that she had not resolved not to marry. ‘And if I can bend my liking to your need, I will not resist such a mind.’ ‘If’ might prove only a very slender undertaking. She promised to consult the learned of the land, ‘so shall I more gladly procure your good after my days than with my prayers whilst I live be mean to linger my living thread’. As a masterwork of obfuscation, this could mean anything or nothing.

She had also been asserting herself on another front. It is likely that William Cecil, and certain other members of the council, had been helping to promote the petitions of parliament. They could not be seen directly to intervene in its argument with the queen, but indirectly they could bring pressure to bear upon her. ‘The matter is so deep,’ Cecil wrote, ‘I cannot reach into it. God send it a good issue!’ Yet it was clearly his belief that parliament should consider and advise on the matter of the succession, even at the cost of diminishing the queen’s prerogative.

It was also his belief that she should be guided, if not ruled, by the members of her council. She required wise, male advice in order to forward the godly rule of the nation. One of her councillors, Sir Francis Knollys, explained to her that she should set aside ‘such affections and passions of your mind as happen to have dominion over you. So yet the resolutions digested by the deliberate consultations of your most faithful counsellors ought ever to be had in most price.’ The council were the ‘watchmen’ or ‘the fathers of the country’. Elizabeth could not have become a tyrant.

Yet she remained the mistress of her parliament. Her immediate predecessor had called five parliaments in four years, but in the first thirty years of her reign she summoned it only seven times. ‘It is in me and my power,’ she once told the Speaker, ‘to call parliaments: it is my power to end and determine the same: it is in my power to assent or dissent to anything done in parliaments.’ The legislation came from the council, or was introduced into parliament at the express wish or with the connivance of the council. Her ministers, such as Knollys and Hatton, sat among the Commons. The Speaker himself was chosen by the sovereign as an instrument of her rule. Occasions of restlessness and discontent of course emerged in the course of the long reign, but in general she managed to curb them with gracious speeches, politic negotiations, or the selective imprisonment of recalcitrant members. In the battle of wits she was never defeated.

The question of ‘free speech’ was raised but never resolved, and the confusions attendant upon it were resurrected in the next reign. In general parliament was considered to be an extension of royal government, on the supposition that the source of all law, according to one political philosopher, ‘standeth in diverse statutes made by the king, the Lords and the Commons’.

In 1563 Cecil also drafted a succession bill in which he advised that, in the event of the queen’s death without an heir, the authority of government would pass for the immediate future to the privy council. For a time England would become an oligarchy or aristocratic republic not unlike that of Venice. Cecil proposed that it would then become the responsibility of parliament to elect a new monarch. The idea of an hereditary elected monarchy was new and startling; it was a denial of the whole structure and spirit of the Tudor dynasty. It was of course a measure of Cecil’s anxiety and frustration that he was forced to this expedient. Yet the bill itself was never put forward for discussion. If Elizabeth had seen it she would undoubtedly have quashed it; Cecil may have realized that he had overreached himself.

Parliament passed two bills of more than usual significance. Among the measures proposed by the Statute of Artificers was the concept of a minimum wage to be assessed by the local justices of the peace. Workmen were to be hired on a yearly contract. Apprentices were to follow the custom of London and serve for seven years. All able-bodied men could be compelled to work in the fields at the time of harvest. It may have been a provisional device, designed to meet the needs of the moment, but this adventitious and only loosely coherent statute remained in force for the next 250 years.

Another Act considered the problem of ‘sturdy beggars’ and of the unemployed. It was further decreed that each parish must support the ‘impotent, aged and needy’ out of communal funds. The relief of the poor was no longer the preserve of the Church, as had been the custom of many centuries, but had become a local and secular matter. Gifts to the poor had been called ‘donations’ and the food spared from the rich man’s table had been known as ‘Our Lady’s bread’; they had of course disappeared. The dissolution of the religious houses, in the reign of Henry VIII, may also have prompted the search for fresh remedies.

We might say in general that the Reformation created a wider space in which the lay authorities could regulate and control the nation at large. The first workhouse in England, Bridewell, was established in 1553; a workhouse was set up in Exeter in 1579. The authorities of London had already established five ‘hospitals’ that took over from their medieval spiritual equivalents. The hospitals of St Thomas and St Bartholomew were designed for the sick and for the old; they exist still. Christ’s Hospital sheltered orphan children, while Bedlam served the insane. An Act of 1572 instituted the first local Poor Law tax. Other Acts and statutes followed. Not until the close of the sixteenth century, however, did the term ‘state’ emerge with its modern connotations.

It can be said with some confidence, therefore, that these two Acts were signal measures in the social and economic construction of English society. Yet the measures of parliament were not meant to be benevolent but were, rather, strict and authoritarian. The penalties for vagabondage, for example, were increased. The ordinary vagrants were to be whipped and then imprisoned until a master could be found for them; the dangerous among them were to be banished from the realm and, if ever they returned, consigned to the gallows or the galleys.

In 1563 the convocation of the bishops and senior clergy met, as usual, in conjunction with parliament. Since this was the first convocation called since the re-establishment of the reformed faith, it was considered important to frame suitable legislation on behalf of the Church. A document entitled ‘General Notes of Matters to be Moved by the Clergy in the Next Parliament and Synod’ expressed the desire for a ‘certain form of doctrine to be conceived in articles’. The grounds of the English faith were to be defined.

So, by a process of consultation and debate, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were compiled. Some of them were not drawn up in time for parliament to pass the necessary legislation, and had to wait for the assembly called three years later; the document itself only became the official doctrine of faith in 1571. But the essential work had now been done. The convocation of 1563 established the most important doctrinal statement in the history of the Church of England and, in its essential form, it remains in force to this day. The language of the liturgy must be in the vernacular; the Mass is not to be allowed, and adoration of the Eucharist is blasphemy; the papist doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory are denied; there is to be no invocation of the saints. The monarch’s role, as the supreme head of the Church, is emphasized.

The full measure of the Thirty-Nine Articles has been deemed to be moderately Calvinist in tone, but there is not one article that is incompatible either with Lutheranism or with Calvinism. The articles represent as wide a definition of the reformed faith as was possible in the sixteenth century. They were believed to be the thirty-nine steps towards broad domestic agreement. The more precise reformers were not necessarily happy with the outcome, and in the course of time they would become identified as the ‘Puritan’ tendency. ‘I confess,’ the bishop of Durham wrote, ‘we suffer many things against our hearts; but we cannot take them away, though we were ever so much set upon it. We are under authority; and we can innovate nothing without the queen; nor can we alter the laws; the only thing left to our choice is whether we will bear these things, or break the peace of the Church.’ These words can be seen as a harbinger of later divisions.

The religion of the vast majority of people must have been mixed and variable, neither wholly old nor completely new. The reformed faith was a recent development, while the Catholic religion was a long time dying. It was estimated by two contemporaries that at the time of the queen’s accession only 1 per cent of the population was actively and determinedly Protestant in inclination. In 1561 a professor of divinity at Oxford, Nicholas Sander, drew up a document entitled ‘How the Common People of England are disposed, with regard to the Catholic faith’ in which he declared that ‘the farmers and shepherds are Catholic’; they of course represented a large proportion of the people. He said that the artisans did not accept the reformed faith ‘except those engaged in sedentary tasks, weavers, for example, and cobblers’. Of the overwhelmingly Catholic areas he named Wales, Devon, Cumberland, Northumberland and Westmorland. In time, over the next few decades, the doctrines of Protestantism were better received in Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Sussex and of course London.

In the summer of 1561 the bishop of Carlisle reported that in many of the churches of his diocese the Mass was still being said with the connivance of the local lord. In the same summer the justices of Hereford commanded the observance of St Lawrence’s Day as a holy day or holiday; no butcher sold meat, and no trader dared open his shop, on that day. A party of recusant priests was welcomed in Devonshire and they were so ‘feasted and magnified, as Christ himself could not have been more reverentially entertained’. The bishop of Winchester complained that his people were ‘obstinately grovelled in superstition and popery, lacking not priests to inculcate the same daily in their heads’. Among the city council of Hereford there was ‘not one favourable to this [reformed] religion’. Only six practised it in Ludlow. As late as 1567, seventeen churches in East Yorkshire still possessed Catholic fittings, while seven years later more than a dozen churches in Northamptonshire contained the rood lofts that had been forbidden. In the course of this reign seventy-five recusant priests were active in Lancashire, and one hundred more in Yorkshire.

Yet if the majority of the population were still inclined to the old faith, few of them were willing to disobey the authorities by openly practising it, at least in London and the southeast of England. Some averred that if by going to Protestant worship they sinned, then the sin would redound upon the queen. As long as they attended church once a week and followed the newly proclaimed rites of the reformed faith, they were free to believe what they wished. They may have believed anything or nothing. It was easier, and safer, to serve and obey rather than to rebel.

That is why the reformed services were rendered elastic, if not ambiguous, by openly proposing only what all Christians agreed in believing; the rubric and ceremonial could be subtly changed to match the inclinations of the congregation. Thus Cecil was informed of the multiplicity of worship in 1564 so that ‘some perform divine service and prayers in the chancel; others in the body of the church … some keep precisely to the order of the book, some intermix psalms in metre … some receive the communion kneeling, others standing; some baptize in a font, some in a basin; some sign with the sign of the cross, others not’.

Confusion also reigned in the wardrobe, with ‘some ministers in a surplice, some without; some with a square cap, some with a round cap, some in a button cap, and some in a round hat; some in scholar’s clothes, and some in others’. Many complaints were made about inattention, and token worship, in the churches. With the interiors stripped bare of their former ornamentation, there was nothing to look at. The alehouses were reported to be full on Sundays, and the people would prefer to go to a bearbaiting than to attend divine service. With the great rituals gone there were many who, in the words of one cleric, ‘love a pot of ale better than a pulpit and a corn-rick better than a church door; who, coming to divine service more for fashion than devotion, are contented after a little capping and kneeling, coughing and spitting’ to sing a psalm or slumber during the sermon. There was also a shortage of reformed ministers, with only 7,000 ordained clergy for 9,000 livings.

It would be unwise, however, to exaggerate the fervency of the Catholic cause. The Venetian ambassador, some eighteen months even before the accession of Elizabeth, had suspected that very few of those under the age of thirty-five were truly Catholic. They did not espouse the new faith but they had lost interest in the old. They had become what one Benedictine called ‘neutrals in religion’. We must suspect, therefore, a very high level of indifference. A man or woman of that age would hardly remember a time when the monarch was not head of the Church, yet such a fact was not likely to inspire devotion.

To indifference might be added uncertainty and confusion. The bishop of Salisbury, preaching before the queen herself, lamented that ‘the poor people lieth forsaken, and left as it were sheep without a guide … they are commanded to change their religion, and for lack of instruction they know not whither to turn them: they know not neither what they leave nor what they should receive’. Many were simply ignorant. When an old man was told that he would be saved through Christ he replied, ‘I think I heard of that man you spake of once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.’

Some, however, knew precisely what they were supposed to believe. As late as 1572 an anonymous chronicler stated that, outside London, fewer than one in forty were ‘good and devout gospellers’. This small and fervent minority, however, was greatly encouraged by the publication of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the spring of 1563. It offered a vivid and in many respects horrifying account of those who had burned for their new faith in the previous reign of Mary. Foxe described the plight of a woman, for example, who gave birth while being consumed by flame in Guernsey; the newborn babe was tossed into the fire with its mother. This was once widely dismissed as a fabrication, but other contemporary documents suggest that it did take place as Foxe described. The book’s woodcuts were in themselves a tour de force of hagiography. The work furnished a new litany of saints for a nation that was bereft of them.

Foxe also created a new history of the Reformation in which the English Church had restored the ‘old ancient church of Christ’ that had been all the time concealed within the Roman communion. ‘The time of Antichrist’, beginning in approximately ad 1100, had at last been purged. He declared that ‘because God hath so placed us Englishmen here in one commonwealth, also in one church, as in one ship together, let us not mangle or divide the ship’. In this period the commonwealth had connotations of the body politic and the general good; it was the vision of a community that transcended self-interest and the bitterness of faction, with an idealized and productive union between all of the estates of the realm. The aim was a ‘godly commonwealth’.

The English were once more an elect nation. By creating a Protestant historiography Fox had effectively given form and meaning to the newly established religion. The book went through five editions in the reign of Elizabeth and became, after the Bible, the most popular and indispensable of all books of faith. Eventually the order came that it should be placed in every parish church alongside the Paraphrases of Erasmus.

Many of the more avid reformers were dissatisfied with the settlement of religion and waited for a day when further reforms were implemented. One of them, the dean of Wells Cathedral, trained his dog to snatch off the papistical square caps from any conforming clerics who chose to wear them. In the 1560s these radicals still formed part of the restless and dissatisfied Elizabethan Church, but they were already beginning to assert their identity. It was in this period, for example, that the Puritan movement began to be distinguished from the broader Church. One hundred London clergymen had been convoked at Lambeth where a clergyman was paraded before them in the orthodox dress of four-cornered cap, tippet and scholar’s gown. When asked if they would wear the same dress, they were dismayed. ‘Great’, says one observer, ‘was the anguish and distress of those ministers.’ They exclaimed: ‘We shall be killed in our souls for this pollution!’ Eventually sixty-one agreed to don the vestments, and the other thirty-nine were suspended from their duties and given three months to conform.

Other measures were now taken, at the queen’s command, against the stricter Protestants. No licence to perform divine service would be given to anyone who refused to sign a declaration of conformity. As a result many godly preachers retired into private life as lawyers or even doctors; some migrated to the more welcoming air of Scotland, or travelled once more overseas to Zurich or to Geneva. A number of pamphlets and books of sermons espousing the Puritan cause prompted an injunction from the Star Chamber forbidding, on pain of three months’ imprisonment, the publication of any treatise ‘against the queen’s injunctions’.

The radical sectarians, believing themselves to be persecuted, clung more tightly together. They adopted the book of service used by the Calvinists at Geneva as their model, discarding the conventional English liturgy used by what they called ‘the traditioners’. They were especially active in London. John Stow wrote, in 1567, that ‘a group who called themselves puritans or unspotted lambs of the lord … kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’. At various times the godly met on a lighter in St Katherine’s Pool, in Pudding Lane, and in a goldsmith’s house along the Strand.

They entertained various opinions on such matters as baptism and predestination but they were united in their fervour for preaching and for the propagation of the Word; they stressed the paramount importance of Scripture; they detested the relics of popery still present within the established religion, and pressed hard for the sanctity of the Sabbath while denouncing the general licentiousness of the age. The essence lay in individual faith mediated by grace and not by any priest. It might be said that the godly emphasized a spiritual, while the traditionalists preferred a visible, Church.

In June 1567 a group of the godly hired Plumbers’ Hall in Chequer Yard, London, ostensibly to celebrate a wedding; in reality they wished to enjoy a day of sermons and of prayers. Word of their plans had reached the city authorities; they were surrounded and some of them were arrested by the sheriffs and taken before the bishop of London. Twenty-four were committed to prison, where they remained for some time. Here perhaps we may glimpse the origin of those religious quarrels that were eventually to divide the nation.

The godly had supporters among the highest in the land. Many of the bishops were naturally sympathetic to their cause. The earl of Leicester was only the most prominent among the nobles who supported the radical reformers; William Cecil was believed to be of the same party, together with other of the queen’s councillors. At the university of Cambridge, too, a prominent group of Puritans began to gather. The queen herself was unmoved. She did not intend to impose orthodoxy, but she demanded conformity. In this, she believed, the peace of the realm consisted. She would not be pushed into doctrinal reform. She did not relish religious change of any kind.

Others were equally sanguine. In The Apology of the Church of England John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, declared in 1562 that ‘we are come as near as we possibly could to the ancient apostolic faith’. He rested this trust upon the fact that ‘we have searched out of the Holy Bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, our sure form of religion’. These modest reformers believed that they had recovered an ancient truth long lost in the quagmire of popery. Slowly, in the course of this reign, Protestantism became the acquired faith of the majority of the people; they may have conformed out of fear or indifference, but that conformity became by degrees the traditional religion of England. Within a few years none had known any other form of worship. This uniquely monarchical Church was at the turn of the century given the name of Anglican, the product of England.

There was a further reformation for which the queen and her council can claim a certain credit, the reformation of money. Elizabeth called in the debased coin and reduced the quantity of cheap metal used in minting it; for the first time in many years the worth of the coin was now equivalent to its face value. The queen had reversed the decline that had begun in her father’s reign, and such was the achievement that it was commemorated on her tomb. In her epitaph it is listed as her third greatest success after the religious settlement and the maintenance of peace. Piety, peace and prosperity were not to be separated.

29

The rivals

The queens of Scotland and of England were still single, and that unusual state presented complications to both women. Mary Stuart was now actively seeking a French or Spanish match; it was rumoured that she might marry Don Carlos, the son of the Spanish king, or even her brother-in-law, Charles IX of France. The power of her country would thereby be redoubled and the threat to her neighbour increased. In an extraordinary act of audacity Elizabeth suggested to the Scottish commissioners at her court that their queen might consider marriage to her own earlier suitor, Robert Dudley; it was even proposed that the two queens might then share a household, with Elizabeth providing the funds. Mary considered the offer for a moment, as another way to the English throne, but she was never really prepared to take up that which Elizabeth had cast off. She was happy to appease her rival with vague promises, but in reality she was looking for a foreign prince.

This led Elizabeth in turn to revisit the question of her own marriage. Once more the prospects of Archduke Charles of Austria were revived, and at the beginning of 1564 she wrote to the Habsburg court that ‘she was ever in courtesy bound to make that choice so as should be for the best of her state and subjects’. She had taken the words of parliament to heart. The great difficulty lay, however, with the archduke’s religion; he was a devout Roman Catholic who would brook no impediment to the practice of his faith. Robert Dudley was created earl of Leicester in the autumn of 1564 but his new status did not materially assist his suit. He was still the great favourite of the queen, her true knight ‘without fear and without reproach’. At the ceremony itself, in which Dudley received the honour, it was noted by the Scottish ambassador that ‘she could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck to tickle him’. If the queen should take a husband, however, this intimacy would of course be severely curtailed.

So he seems to have determined to thwart the queen’s possible alliance with the archduke. He intrigued with the French to put forward the young Charles IX, but the disparity in age between the fourteen-year-old boy and the thirty-one-year-old woman would have caused only ridicule and disquiet. She said that it would take only a few years for him to desert her, leaving her a discontented old woman. When the Spanish ambassador asked her if she was about to marry the French king, she ‘half hid her face and laughed’.

On the failure of this plan Leicester objected to the archduke on the grounds of his religion, and it is perhaps no coincidence that in this period he emerged as the protector of the true Protestant faith; he supported ‘godly’ ministers, for example, in their remonstrance against the papistical elements of the Book of Common Prayer. In his stance against the marriage he was opposed by Cecil as well as the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Sussex; Sussex himself had travelled to Vienna in order to expedite the union. So there was a division at the heart of the court and of the queen’s council. The retainers of Sussex and of Leicester carried arms ‘as if to try their utmost’; the Sussex party wore yellow ribbons while the supporters of Leicester sported purple. The queen ordered them ‘not to meddle with’ one another and to lay down their weapons. Nevertheless, Leicester continued to gather ‘great bands of men with swords and bucklers’. There came a point when the two great nobles exchanged ‘hard words and challenges to fight’, at which point the queen ordered them to ride together through the streets of London in a show of amity. Sussex was eventually created lord president of the council of the north, thus removing him to York. The fracas is a reminder, however, of the tensions between the great nobles that had been so prominent in previous centuries. The court was still in part a medieval institution. It is probable, too, that the presence of a female queen encouraged the greater nobles around her to assert their masculine power; they were still warlords but they were also in a sense putative lovers competing for her favour.

The negotiations between the courts of London and Vienna continued at a painfully slow pace; but the delays and disputes over religion were acceptable to Elizabeth if they deferred any final decision. It meant also that she was still on conciliatory terms with both branches of the Habsburg empire, represented by Philip II of Spain and the new emperor Maximilian II. Philip himself was assured of her suitability as a bride to his cousin; his ambassador bought information from the queen’s laundresses about her menstrual cycle.

At this time, too, attempts were made to standardize her painted image. At the end of 1563 William Cecil had drafted a proclamation which criticized the depiction of the queen ‘in painting, graving and printing’; these unflattering or unsophisticated portraits provoked ‘complaints among her loving subjects’. It had been decided that ‘some cunning [skilful] person’ would create a great original on which all other portraits might be modelled. Since portraits were also often used in marriage negotiations, the queen might have desired a more perfect image. In this decade, too, she began to entertain hopes of an alchemical elixir of life that would maintain her youth and beauty; William Cecil noted in his diary that Cornelius Lanoy, a Dutchman, ‘was committed to the Tower for abusing the queen’s majesty, in promising to make the elixir’.

Yet her negotiations with the Habsburgs were overshadowed by the devices of Mary Stuart. The Scottish queen’s attention had turned to a young man, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; he had been born in Leeds, but his father was the fourth earl of Lennox, a prominent Scottish nobleman who had been forced into exile by a rival faction. Yet more pertinently Darnley was the grandson of Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, and cousin to Mary Stuart herself. On the Scottish side, he was directly descended from James II. Any alliance with him would immensely strengthen Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne after the death of Elizabeth. Darnley was also a Catholic, and the clergy of the Scottish kirk feared above all else the renewed prospect of Catholic supremacy. The young man was given a passport to visit Scotland, where of course he paid his respects to his cousin the queen. She saw him ‘running at the ring’, a chivalric game for horsemen, and soon enough they became inseparable. Mary had become genuinely infatuated with him, almost at first sight. She was in many respects quixotic and impulsive, relying upon her instinct rather than her judgement; she did not have her rival’s gift of calculation.

In the course of these marital games the Scottish ambassador, Sir James Melville, was obliged to haunt the court of Elizabeth in search of information or gossip. In his memoirs, written in the early years of the seventeenth century, he left certain vignettes concerning the conversation and behaviour of the queen that throw an interesting light upon her character. She discussed with him the female costume of different countries, and told him that she possessed the ‘weeds’ of every civilized country. She proved the point by wearing a fresh set of clothes every day.

She asked him ‘what coloured hair was reputed best, and whether my queen’s hair or hers was the best, and which of the two was the fairest’? He replied, in the manner of the Sibylline oracle, that ‘the fairness of both was not their worst fault’. She pressed for a more direct response. ‘You are the fairest queen in England and ours the fairest queen in Scotland.’ Still she was not satisfied with his answer. He was obliged to make a judgement. ‘You are both the fairest ladies in your courts; you are the whitest, but our queen is very lovely.’

‘Which of us,’ she now asked him, ‘is of the highest stature?’

‘Our queen.’

‘Then she is over high, for I am neither too high nor too low.’

When Elizabeth asked him about Mary’s pastimes, he told her that his mistress liked sometimes to play on the lute or virginals. She then asked him whether the Scottish queen played well.

‘Reasonably well,’ he replied, ‘for a queen.’

There then followed a contrived piece of showmanship. After dinner the queen’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, invited Melville to a retired gallery where he promised him some enchanting music. He whispered, as if imparting a secret, that it was ‘the queen playing on her virginals’. The ambassador listened for a moment and then very boldly put aside a tapestry that hung before the doorway of a recess, to see the great queen at her virginals. Her back was to him but she turned her head and seemed surprised to find him there; she rose from her instrument, affecting embarrassment and alleging that ‘she used not to play before men, but when she was solitary, to eschew melancholy, and asked “How I came there?” ’

Melville replied that he had been drawn by the sweetest melody, which gracious answer pleased the queen. She sat down upon a cushion, while he knelt. She then provided him with a cushion to place beneath his knee. It was a breach of etiquette but the queen insisted. She demanded to know ‘whether she or the Queen of Scots played best?’ Melville gave the palm to her. She then spoke to him in French, Italian and Dutch as a sign of her proficiency.

Two days later she decided that the ambassador must see her dance. At the end of the performance she once again wished to know which queen danced best. He replied that ‘my queen danced not so high or disposedly as she did’. By this he meant that Elizabeth’s dancing was more mannered and deliberate than that of Mary.

It is not at all clear that Melville’s recollections are always accurate. Yet he is surely right to have emphasized the implicit rivalry or jealousy between the two queens. When he returned to his native country, Mary asked him if he believed that Elizabeth’s words of affection for her were genuine. He replied that ‘in my judgement there was neither plain dealing nor upright meaning, but great dissimulation, emulation and fear that [Mary’s] princely qualities should over soon chase her out and displace her from the kingdom’.

In the early spring of 1565 Mary was so enamoured of Darnley that she helped to nurse him through an attack of measles that may in fact have been a manifestation of syphilis. An English envoy wrote to Elizabeth that ‘The matter is irrevocable. I do find this Queen so captivate either by love or cunning – or rather to say truly by boasting and folly – that she is not able to keep promise with herself, and therefore not able to keep promise with your Majesty in these matters.’ Her desire and wilfulness had outrun her discretion. Darnley was twenty, and she three years his senior.

By May they had made a secret engagement and, in July, they were married without waiting for the papal dispensation from Rome allowing the first cousins to unite. She then proclaimed him king of Scotland without asking the advice of her parliament. She had married in haste, but she would soon repent it. Darnley was as vain as he was unbalanced; he was arrogant and dissolute; he was weak-willed; within a short time he had managed to offend most of the Scottish nobility. ‘The bruits here are wonderful,’ the English envoy wrote at the time, ‘men’s talk very strange, the hatred towards Lord Darnley and his house marvellous great, his pride intolerable, his words not to be borne …’ He added that in token of his ‘manhood’ Darnley is eager to ‘let blows fly where he knows they will be taken’. He was, in other words, an egregious bully.

The young queen was herself no stranger to conflict. Her illegitimate half-brother, James Stuart, first earl of Moray, espoused the Protestant cause and sought to lead a group of rebels against her. Mary summoned 5,000 of her supporters, and from summer to autumn of 1565 mercilessly harried her enemies in a series of skirmishes that became known as the Chaseabout Raid. ‘I defy them,’ she said, ‘what can they do, and what dare they do?’ She rode fast and furiously; she wore a steel helmet and carried a brace of pistols at her side. Eventually she chased her half-brother over the border into England, and in her triumph declared that she could lead her troops to the walls of London. She was a formidable opponent.

The marriage of the two Catholics posed an immediate problem for the English queen and her council. It seemed that their union was a plain hint of their right to the succession of the English throne. The Catholics of England would consider them to be their natural and proper leaders. If the young couple also produced a son and heir, which seemed most likely, an already complicated situation would become infinitely worse. In the face of Elizabeth’s refusal to marry, many other of her subjects were also prepared to countenance Mary and Darnley as the least bad alternative to a virgin queen. One day in the spring of this year the French ambassador had come upon Elizabeth playing chess.

‘Madam, you have before you the game of life. You lose a pawn; it seems a small matter; but with the pawn you lose the game.’

‘I see your meaning. Lord Darnley is but a pawn, but unless I look to it I shall be check-mated.’

Another reported conversation can be added to this account. Mary Stuart was discussing with some courtiers a portrait of the queen of England and debating whether it resembled the great original. ‘No,’ said Mary, ‘it is not like her. For I am queen of England.’

The members of the council discussed the matter endlessly. They even prepared for war, but in the end nothing was done. Elizabeth declared that Mary ‘doth look for my death’. In this period the queen of England became seriously ill with a fever commonly known as ‘the flux’. The strain of her perilous situation, perhaps, was beginning to affect her.

Yet by the end of the year it was apparent that all was not well with the marriage of Mary and Darnley. She had expected him to be pliant and tractable; instead he revealed himself to be foolish and obstinate. He carried himself like a king in role as well as name, and therefore became intolerable. Mary would not allow anyone to usurp her place, and by degrees began to demote him. He was now known as ‘the queen’s husband’ rather than king, and he was forbidden the use of the royal arms. He was drinking excessively and, when she once tried to remonstrate with him, he ‘gave her such words as she left the place in tears’. His demand for the matrimonial crown was refused. ‘I know for certain’, an English agent at the Scottish court wrote, ‘that this queen repents her marriage – that she hates him and all his kin.’

A further complication arose in the shape of Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio or Riccio, a gentleman of charming and persuasive manners. He was an accomplished musician who enchanted her with love-songs; he soon became her closest adviser and confidant. It was he, perhaps, who counselled the queen to maintain a distance from Darnley. He had also offended many Scottish nobles, perhaps on the sole grounds that he was a foreigner who had more influence with the queen than did they. As a Catholic, too, he was cause of offence to the Protestant nobility. Those who had been chased out of Scotland by Mary, with the earl of Moray at their head, were seeking revenge.

They decided to enlist the help of Darnley; he was, at least, of Scottish stock. They informed him that Rizzio was the sole cause of his decline in influence, and that the secretary had ‘done him the most dishonour that can be to any man’. He entered a bond of association with them where, in exchange for his support and assistance in the murder of Rizzio, they would assert his claim to the throne. In particular Moray and his followers were to be pardoned for their rebellion of the previous year. After the murder Mary was to be consigned to Stirling Castle; the queen was in fact already six months pregnant, but the noblemen seem to have convinced Darnley that the child was fathered by Rizzio.

On the evening of Saturday 9 March 1566 Mary was entertaining Rizzio and some other friends in a small room next to her bedchamber in the royal palace of Holyrood; just after they had assembled Darnley led his fellow conspirators into the presence of the shocked company by means of his private staircase. When they thrust the queen aside and laid hands on Rizzio he cried out ‘Justice! Justice! Save me, my lady!’ He tried to cling to Mary’s skirts but the men dragged him away and hustled him into an adjoining room, where he was dispatched with fifty-six dagger wounds. His body was then dragged down a staircase and left at its foot.

When Mary asked her husband why he had committed this crime he repeated the slander that Rizzio ‘had more company of her body’ than he did. She stayed in her private chambers for the next few hours but, within a short time, had managed to convince Darnley that he would be the next victim of the nobles. She had divined their malevolent intent very well. They had planned all along to lay the blame for Rizzio’s murder on Darnley alone, and to inform the queen that her husband had decided to commit the murder in front of her; he wished to disable her and perhaps the unborn child.

Darnley was by now thoroughly alarmed, and at midnight on 11 March he and Mary left the palace by means of the servants’ quarters and fled on horseback to Dunbar. The other nobles, deserted by Darnley, dispersed; many of them took shelter across the border in Berwick. Mary returned in triumph to Edinburgh where she meditated vengeance on her feckless and unstable husband. But revenge would have to wait upon the birth of her child. That child was itself the subject of whispered report; it was claimed by some that Rizzio was the real father. The somewhat unattractive features of James VI of Scotland, who was to become James I of England, were enough to guarantee the longevity of such rumours.

Elizabeth was shocked at the outrage of murder committed in the presence of a reigning queen. ‘Had I been in Queen Mary’s place,’ she told the Spanish ambassador, ‘I would have taken my husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it.’ As she was at the same time negotiating a marriage with the archduke Charles with the connivance of the Spanish, she hastened to add that she would not take any such action against him.

In the early summer of the year Mary Stuart gave birth to a son. A messenger arrived at the palace of Greenwich in the course of a grand party; he went up to Cecil and whispered in his ear. Then Cecil went over to his mistress. She is reported to have slumped into a chair and told those around her that ‘The queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.’ The party came to an end. This at least is the story of Melville’s Memoirs. As Thomas Fuller once observed, ‘when men’s memories do arise, it is time for History to haste abed’. But if the queen’s words have been improved in the telling, they perfectly suit the situation.

Only two months earlier Elizabeth had fallen sick of a strange disease and had grown so thin that ‘her bones may be counted’. It was whispered that she might be consumptive. ‘Her Majesty’, Cecil wrote to the English envoy in France, ‘suddenly sick in the stomach and suddenly relieved by a vomit. You must think such a matter would drive men to the end of their wits, but God is the stay of all that put their trust in Him.’ Despite the confident and indeed imperious demeanour of the queen, her first years of rule were undermined by a constant note of insecurity and danger.

Yet she recovered and in the late summer of 1566 went on a progress to Oxford, stopping off at Woodstock, where she had been held prisoner during the reign of her sister. The dons came to meet her before she came into the town, calling out ‘Vivat regina! ’ She gave them thanks in Latin. Then she listened to a loyal address in Greek before replying to that oration in the same ancient tongue. She was as learned as any Oxford scholar.

Her arrival at the university was the occasion for further orations and sermons, public lectures and public disputations, plays and debates. While she watched one drama, Palamon and Arcite, the stage collapsed; three people were killed and five were injured. She sent her own barber-surgeon to care for the afflicted, but then laughed heartily when the performance was resumed. She also expressed her instinctive dislike for the more doctrinaire reformers. On meeting one noted sectarian, of Puritan persuasion, she remarked ‘Mr Doctor, that loose gown becomes you mighty well. I marvel that you are so strait-laced in this point [of religion] but I come not now to chide.’ He had made the mistake of praying, in public, that the queen would allow further change within the Church. This was a subject on which her mind was closed. At the end of her visit she made another speech in Latin, on the dignity and worth of learning, and her litter was accompanied for 2 miles by a body of scholars and local worthies.

The birth of James Stuart had alarmed Elizabeth, since the prospect of an heir materially increased Mary’s following in England. The Scottish ambassador in England told his mistress that many shires were ready to rebel and that the nobility had named the captains of the enterprise. Elizabeth’s envoy wrote to Cecil from the French court that ‘both the pope’s and the king of Spain’s hands be in that dish further and deeper than I think you know … I have cause to say to you vigilate!’ The ambassador was acute. Six months later Philip II wrote to the Vatican that the time would soon come ‘to throw off the mask and bestir ourselves’. He and the pope must consider the way in which they could assist Mary Stuart and promote the cause of God; the queen of Scots was the ‘gate by which religion must enter the realm of England’.

It is probable, then, that Cecil helped to orchestrate the pressure placed upon Elizabeth by the parliament of 1566. He left a paper, or memorial to himself, in which he wrote that ‘to require both marriage and the stabilizing of the succession is the uttermost that can be desired’. Parliament assembled in the autumn of that year, unaltered since the last meeting of 1563; it had then been prorogued rather than dissolved. The clamour for the queen’s marriage had become more intense during the interval, and it was rumoured that the Commons would refuse to vote her ‘supplies’, or finances, unless she revealed her commitment to matrimony or at least named her successor. The debate went on for two mornings, in the course of which several members traded blows. The Lords then agreed to join the Commons in a petition to her.

Elizabeth was furious with her councillors, who were suspected of collusion. She vented her anger first on the duke of Norfolk and, when another councillor tried to defend him, she said that he spoke like a swaggering soldier. Then she turned upon Leicester, her favourite. She accused him of abandoning her. He swore that he was ready to die at her feet. What, she asked him, has that to do with the matter? Before venting some further insults on those present, she left the room. Of the Commons she was disdainful. She told the Spanish ambassador that she did not know what those ‘devils’ wanted.

She summoned a delegation of fifty-seven members of the Lords and Commons to Whitehall, and forbade the presence of the Speaker. It was only the queen who would talk. They presented her with a petition in which they expressed their wish that she marry ‘where it should please her, with whom it should please her, and as soon as it should please her’. She opened her harangue by accusing ‘unbridled persons in the Commons’ of contriving a ‘traitorous trick’. Then she accused the Lords of supporting them. ‘Whom have I oppressed?’ she asked them. ‘Whom have I enriched to other’s harm?’ But then she turned to the subject. ‘I have sent word that I will marry, and I will never break the word of a prince said in a public place, for my honour’s sake.’ A prince’s honour is of course a flexible commodity. There then followed what might be called an Elizabethan moment. ‘I am your anointed queen,’ she told them. ‘I will never be constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoats I were able to live in any place in Christendom.’

Cecil read an edited version of her speech to the Commons in their chamber, and he was greeted with silence. The members were not impressed, and almost at once further calls for a petition on the marriage were being heard. The queen demanded to see the Speaker and commanded him to instruct parliament that ‘there should be no further talk of the matter’. When they remonstrated with her on the infringement of their ‘lawful liberties’ she wisely yielded. But it was in no sense a triumph. At the end of the session, in January 1567, Elizabeth rose from the throne and made her concluding speech. It was already dusk. ‘I have in this assembly’, she said, ‘found such dissimulation where I always professed plainness that I marvel thereat; yea, two faces under one hood, and the body rotten.’ She finished her peroration with ‘beware how you prove your prince’s patience as you have now done mine … My Lord Keeper you will do as I bid you.’

The lord keeper rose in the fading light. ‘The Queen’s Majesty doth dissolve this parliament. Let every man depart at his pleasure.’ The queen proceeded to the royal barge and returned to the palace. Parliament would not meet again for another four years. Cecil noted ‘the succession not answered, the marriage not followed, dangers ensuing, general disorientations’.

It may be noted, in parenthesis, that in this period the coach was introduced to England. John Taylor, the popular ‘water poet’, believed that it had been brought to England by the queen’s coachman, a Dutchman named William Booner. ‘A coach’, he wrote, ‘was a strange monster in those days, and the sight of it put both horse and foot in amazement. Some said it was a great crab-shell brought out of China; and some thought it one of the pagan temples in which the cannibals adored the devil. Soon an outcry was raised about the scarcity of leather, from the quantity used in coach building.’ So in the 1560s the monstrous carriage, as well as the queen’s marriage, was the talk of London.

30

The rites of spring

Having alienated both his wife and the Scottish nobility, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, had every reason to leave Scotland; he spoke of escaping into England, although he would hardly have been welcomed at the court of Elizabeth. She would not even recognize him as king of Scotland, and he was deluded enough to believe that he had some claim upon the English throne. After the safe birth of her son Mary turned her face against him, believing him to be responsible for the murder of her Italian secretary. Mary neither ate nor slept with him and on one occasion, according to the English ambassador in Scotland, ‘used words that cannot for modesty nor with the honour of a queen be reported’.

At the beginning of 1567 Mary was reliably informed that Darnley was proposing to kidnap their son and rule as regent in his name; the queen herself was to be confined in a secure castle. It was important that all his movements and meetings should be watched. When he fell ill, perhaps from a recurrent bout of syphilis, she visited his sickroom and remained with him for the next two or three days. At the end of January she brought him to Edinburgh in a horse litter.

James, the fourth earl of Bothwell, now enters the plot. At the age of twenty-one he had become Lieutenant of the Border, and had served Mary’s mother during her regency of Scotland. He had been one of the lords who had accompanied the newly widowed Mary on her journey from Paris; soon enough he had caught the young queen’s attention. He had already become one of her principal counsellors, and one of those whose antipathy to Darnley was as great as that of the queen.

He was part of a small group who now planned permanently to remove Darnley, and a bond or deed was drawn up between its members. It was later reproduced in Robert Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833). The conspirators stated that ‘such a young fool and proud tyrant [as the king] should not bear rule of them – for diverse causes therefore they had all concluded that he should be put forth [dispatched] by one way or the other’; they pledged to be true to one another, and all would take on the guilt of murder. It is uncertain what the Scottish queen knew of this, even though her own half-brother was aware of the plot. At a later date she asserted that she had told them to do nothing ‘to touch her honour and conscience’. Yet even if she had refused her consent to these proposals, by her own confession she had listened to them without reacting violently to the putative murderers of her husband. She could have accused them of treason, but she remained silent.

As Mary and Darnley moved towards Edinburgh, Bothwell met them on the road. Their intended destination had been Craigmillar Castle, but now the earl directed them to new lodgings at the house of the provost of St Mary’s known as the ‘Kirk of Field’ or ‘Kirk o’ Field’. Darnley’s chambers had been properly furnished for a king in the west wing of the house, and it was here that Mary watched over her husband’s convalescence; she did not sleep in the house but in the evening retired to the more palatial surroundings of Holyrood. An apartment was in fact made ready for her after a few days, directly beneath that of her husband, and she took particular care to have the bed situated. ‘Move it yonder,’ she said to her attendant, ‘to the other side.’ She spent the nights of Wednesday 5 and Friday 7 February there. It was later rumoured that this was part of her design, so that people might suspect the target of the conspirators was herself.

At approximately ten o’clock on Sunday night two or three men brought some sacks of gunpowder into Mary’s chamber at Kirk o’ Field. Mary herself was with her husband in the chamber above, and at this juncture remembered that she was supposed to attend a masque and dance at Holyrood. As she left the room she said, as if as an afterthought, ‘It was just this time last year that Rizzio was slain.’ Darnley turned to an attendant and asked, ‘Why did she speak of Davie’s slaughter?’

At two o’clock on the Monday morning a ‘crack’ was heard throughout Edinburgh. The old provost’s house of Kirk o’ Field was in ruins. Darnley had not perished in the explosion. His corpse and that of his page were found 40 yards away beneath a tree, on the other side of the town wall, with ‘no sign of fire on them’. Close by them was a chair, a rope and Darnley’s furred cloak. A dagger was also found, but neither victim had been stabbed.

The mystery of their last moments persists. They may have been smothered in their sleep; they may have been pursued and taken in the garden. Or they may have lowered themselves from the first-floor window, after discovering that the doors to their chamber were locked, only to be dispatched near the scene of the crime. Within hours of the explosion placards had been fixed to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh accusing Bothwell and his associates of the crime. Bothwell’s antipathy to Darnley was notorious. Two days later Mary issued a proclamation in which she offered £2,000 for information against her husband’s murderers. But she knew well enough that the name of Bothwell was on everyone’s lips. His portraits were posted on the gates and walls of the city with the legend ‘Here is the murderer of the king’.

On hearing the news of Darnley’s death, and of Bothwell’s involvement in it, Elizabeth sent an urgent letter to Mary. ‘Madame,’ she began, ‘my ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely have the wits to write about it …’ She professed to be more grieved for Mary than for her husband but she added that ‘I will not dissemble what most people are talking about; which is that you will look through your fingers at [dispense with] the revenging of this deed’. Mary, in other words, was already rumoured to be complicit or at least acquiescent in the deed. The queen of England exhorted her to lay these reports to rest by taking action; she urged her ‘to touch even him whom you have nearest to you if the thing touches him’. Mary was so angered by this message that she refused to reply to it.

The courts of Europe were now alive with speculation about Mary’s role in the murder of her husband. Some were already denouncing her, while her Catholic supporters were divided on the matter. ‘Should it turn out she is guilty,’ an envoy at her court wrote, ‘her party in England is gone, and by her means there is no more chance of a restoration of religion.’

The day after the explosion Mary attended the wedding feast of one of her female attendants; she should have put the court in mourning immediately, but delayed that decision for five days. Her husband was buried without any solemnity in the chapel of Holyrood. It was clear enough that she was relieved by his sudden removal from her life. Mary and Bothwell were now being seen together. The queen gave him her husband’s horses and fine clothes, a gesture which further alienated popular opinion. It was rumoured that, although already married, Bothwell was now actively seeking the queen’s hand.

The father of Darnley, the earl of Lennox, had brought charges against Bothwell that had to be heard in open court. The trial was to take place on 12 April, at the Tolbooth, but the presiding officers were supporters of Bothwell; at the same time the palace bodyguard was increased by 300 cavalry. Bothwell himself rode to the courtroom with an entourage of 4,000 retainers. The earl of Lennox was too apprehensive to risk any appearance in Edinburgh. It was only to be expected that, after more than eight hours of deliberation, Bothwell was acquitted.

Yet the course of events was now so precipitate that no one could feel safe. Mary had ridden to Stirling Castle nine days after the trial to collect her infant son, but the boy’s guardian, the earl of Mar, refused to give him up. He had a horror of yielding him to Bothwell, the murderer of the infant’s father. Three days later, on 24 April, the queen was riding from her birthplace at Linlithgow to Holyrood when Bothwell abducted her and took her to Dunbar. It was here that she was ‘ravished’. Yet she remained in his castle for twelve days, and made no serious effort to escape or resist him. On 26 April Bothwell rode to Edinburgh in order to expedite the divorce from his first wife. On the following day the queen formally asked for an annulment of that marriage from the archbishop of St Andrews.

Some great nobles of the realm had by now become so incensed and alarmed that they bound themselves in a confederacy against Bothwell, whom they described as ‘that barbarous tyrant’ and ‘cruel murderer’. When he and Mary returned in procession to Edinburgh they were met by silent and sullen crowds. Nevertheless the queen raised her champion as duke of Orkney and lord of Shetland. The confederate lords now assembled in Stirling Castle, where they created an alternative royal court around the infant James. On 14 May 1567 Mary Stuart and James Bothwell were married in the great hall of Holyrood Palace. On hearing the news Elizabeth remonstrated with her cousin. ‘How’, she asked, ‘could a worse choice be made for your honour?’ On the gates of Holyrood a placard was nailed with the verse:

As the common people say,

Only harlots marry in May.

William Cecil wrote that Scotland was ‘in a quagmire; nobody seemeth to stand still; the most honest desire to go away; the worst tremble with the shaking of their conscience’.

The result of these bewildering events was civil war. The Scottish earls marched against Bothwell under a banner that portrayed Darnley lying dead beneath the tree, with the infant prince kneeling beside him. In the middle of June Mary rode with her new husband to the security of Dunbar Castle, but then led her forces to Carberry Hill outside Edinburgh. Inconclusive negotiations were undertaken between the two sides, but it became clear that Mary’s soldiers did not wish to fight their compatriots in a civil war. As the day wore on they joined the army of the confederate lords or simply went their own way. Delaying only long enough to allow Bothwell to ride back to the castle, she gave herself up to the forces of her lords.

She had been wearing male attire for her entry into battle but now she put on a borrowed dress and was led downhill on horseback. She was noticeably pregnant, which suggested to all observers that she had consorted with Bothwell before her abduction and marriage. When she rode among the soldiers some of them cried out, ‘Burn the whore!’ She was smuggled out of Edinburgh at night, but the mob was waiting for her with words of fury. ‘Burn her, burn her, she is not worthy to live, kill her, drown her!’ She had never known the openly expressed anger of her subjects before. She was taken 20 miles to the north, and was then rowed across to the island prison upon Loch Leven, where she remained for the better part of a year.

Elizabeth had been shocked by her cousin’s behaviour, but she was even more dismayed by her treatment at the hands of her lords and people. It was against all laws of heaven and earth to treat with disrespect a sovereign queen. To expose her to the infamous jeers of the populace, and then to imprison her, were unforgivable offences. She wrote that ‘we assure you that whatsoever we can imagine meet for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour …’ She sent an ambassador to Edinburgh, but the lords prevented him from visiting Mary. He did learn, however, that her loyalty to Bothwell was undiminished. He wrote to Elizabeth that she ‘avows constantly to live and die with him’.

It is unlikely that the English queen was sympathetic to such passionate statements. For her, love and loyalty were all matters of statecraft. The disgrace of Mary meant that her chances of the English throne were severely reduced; thus the whole weary problem of succession once more raised itself. There was a further difficulty. If the French royal family were able to adopt the infant prince James, the power of Scotland might be used against England. Thus in the summer of this year Elizabeth resumed negotiations for the hand of the archduke Charles of Austria. It would be wise to have the Habsburgs as allies, or at least not to rule out the possibility of such an alliance.

So in the summer of the year, as Mary was being held prisoner on the island, Elizabeth’s envoy, the earl of Sussex, set out for Vienna. As the archduke espoused the Catholic faith, religious difficulties could be anticipated. It would be preferable, and advisable, for him to accept the English liturgy. The Spanish ambassador had already indicated that the first Mass said publicly in England would be the signal for a general rebellion. These were delicate matters.

It seemed better, therefore, that the archduke should come to England for a personal interview with the queen. Charles considered the idea to be beneath his dignity; what if he should arrive and then be rejected on the ostensible grounds of religion? He demanded that all hindrances should be cleared in advance, and in turn agreed that as the spouse of the queen he would hear Mass only in private. Sussex urged Cecil to entreat the queen to accept the compromise since, without it, ‘I foresee discontent, disunion, bloodshed of her people’.

The queen prevaricated, and seemed set upon delay. It was perhaps her duty to the nation to accept him, but her innate aversion to matrimony and her affection for Leicester caused her to hesitate. ‘The hatred that this queen has of marriage’, the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip, ‘is most strange.’ Eventually she sent her suitor a letter in which she affirmed the unity of religion in her kingdom but permitted him the free exercise of his religion, on the proposed visit to England, ‘so far as should be found possible’. The clause could be variously interpreted, and the archduke replied that it was too vague. The negotiations were once more allowed to falter and finally to fade.

The international situation became more difficult when, in August 1567, Philip II sent the duke of Alva into the Netherlands with a force of 10,000 Spanish troops. The presence of a great army in the middle of Europe, with the western reaches of the Netherlands only 100 miles away from the mouth of the Thames, was a matter of great concern to Elizabeth and her advisers. The Netherlands comprised many states, provinces and duchies that had come by inheritance to the Habsburg dynasty; they included most of modern Belgium, part of northern France, Holland and Zeeland. It was not likely that these predominantly merchant states would acquiesce for ever in the rule of a Spanish Catholic king. The Spanish army had been sent to quell large-scale rioting that had broken out in Antwerp and other cities, where a combination of economic grievances and religious discontents stirred a mixed population of Calvinists, Lutherans and Anabaptists. The Calvinist weavers of Ypres, for example, attacked the Catholic churches of that region and smashed the religious statuary.

It was rumoured that Philip II had already set sail for the Low Countries and might divert to Portsmouth on his way. This set the court into an alarm. Should the king be treated as a welcome guest or as a potential enemy? In the event he did not arrive, but the problems of religion remained. The coincidence of the failure of the negotiations for marriage and the suppression of the Protestant revolt further emphasized the rift between England and Spain. The two countries were already on course for the collision that would occur twenty years later.

The situation of Europe was further vexed by a revival of civil and religious wars within France, where the Huguenots under the prince of Condé were contesting the Catholic regime of Charles IX; 3,000 French Protestants then joined the cause of their fellow reformers in the Netherlands. Elizabeth and her councillors were inclined to favour their co-religionists across the sea, and did indeed offer them clandestine support; English agents contrived to raise Protestant forces and English money helped to finance them. The seamen of the West Country joined forces with a Huguenot fleet in a Calvinist offensive against Spanish shipping. One sceptical naval chaplain wrote that ‘we could not do God better service than to spoil the Spaniard both of life and goods, but indeed under colour of religion all their shot is at men’s money’. The importance of English sea power was becoming manifest.

Towards the end of 1568 five Spanish frigates, carrying money for the duke of Alva’s forces, took temporary refuge in Falmouth and in Plymouth; Elizabeth ordered the ships to be impounded and seized the money on the grounds that it belonged not to Philip but to Genoese bankers. She would pay the requisite interest and use the money for her own purposes. The duke of Alva promptly took control of the English warehouse or ‘factory’ in Antwerp and confiscated its goods. In retaliation the property of all Spanish subjects in England was taken. Elizabeth, and her councillors, wished to prove that they could confront the great power of Europe. Yet it was a war without battles. Negotiations and conferences, meetings and audiences, continued over the next four years.

The confrontation did represent, however, a change in English policy. Cecil was trying to advance the cause of Protestantism by confronting Spain, but only at the cost of turning rivals into enemies. The sovereigns of Spain and of France distrusted the English queen to the extent that Cecil feared a grand Catholic alliance was about to be formed against her. If Spanish forces could be dispatched to the Netherlands, they could also be sent to England.

Mary remained incarcerated in her prison of Loch Leven, where she miscarried of twins in the early summer of 1567. The Protestant lords of Scotland presented her with a letter of abdication which, in her weakened state, she duly signed. It was said that she had been threatened with death. Her son was proclaimed James VI of Scotland. She had few attendants, and was allowed even fewer visitors. Her powers of persuasion were believed to be marvellous, and charm might succeed where guile failed. She must not be allowed to escape.

Her captivity lasted for a little over ten months. On the evening of 2 May 1568 a young page, in a predetermined plan, smuggled out the keys of her chambers in the round tower of the castle; she was waiting, dressed in the simple garb of a maidservant. The two of them, together with a young girl designed to waylay suspicion, sprang into a waiting skiff and within a few minutes they were on shore. She was met there by a group of horsemen and taken to her supporters gathered at Hamilton Castle; they were a band of Catholic loyalists in a predominantly Protestant country. She dispatched envoys as well as letters to Paris and to London, pleading for assistance. Elizabeth characteristically chose a middle course, offering to mediate between the Scottish queen and her subjects. William Cecil in turn wrote to the regent ruling Scotland in the young king’s name, the earl of Moray, urging ‘expedition in quieting these troubles’ by defeating the queen. So England spoke with two voices. Two heads, in a phrase of the period, were under one hood. Cecil could therefore countenance policies that Elizabeth could later disown. He was more avowedly Protestant than the queen and could fight her battles for her without any express command to do so.

On 13 May Mary’s small army was defeated at Langside Hill, outside Glasgow; Mary had watched the fortunes of the battle from a hillside, half a mile distant, and had now determined to flee. She was in continual danger of detention and even death; in desperation, she crossed the Solway into England and made her way to the safety of the castle at Carlisle. She was now in Elizabeth’s kingdom. If Elizabeth refused to receive her, she would at least give Mary free passage to France. ‘I fear’, the archbishop of Canterbury wrote, ‘that our good queen has the wolf by the ears.’ There was an additional connotation; an outlaw was known as a ‘wolf’s head that anyone might cut down’.

In a letter to Elizabeth, Mary vented her fury against the rebels who, as she implied, had been tacitly supported by English policy. She also hinted that she had friends and allies elsewhere who would come to her aid; it is clear enough that she meant the Catholic sovereigns of France and Spain. The intervention of those nations in Scottish affairs was not to be endured. Elizabeth had already written to Mary that ‘those who have two strings to their bow may shoot stronger, but they rarely shoot straight’.

What was to be done with her? Elizabeth had at first considered inviting her to the English court, but was quickly persuaded otherwise. It would afford her too much prominence, and her presence at Whitehall or Greenwich would greatly boost her claim to the throne. Already the northern Catholic lords were paying court to her, and it seemed likely that a Catholic party would congregate around her. The Scottish lords themselves would not look favourably on the support that Elizabeth would give her; it might drive them in the direction of France, with the infant king as the prize. Mary herself must not be allowed to travel to France, where she could provoke infinite troubles.

So the Scottish queen continued in what might be described as honourable captivity. From Carlisle she was transferred to Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. She had said defiantly thatshe would have to be carried there but, after many scenes of passion and demonstration, she eventually consented to her removal. Thereupon it was decreed that an inquiry should be established into the events surrounding the murder of Darnley. Elizabeth herself determined to be the ultimate judge and mediator in the matter. If Mary was proven to be innocent, she should in theory be instantly restored to her throne. If she were found to be guilty, it would be impossible for Elizabeth to receive her. ‘Oh Madam!’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘there is not a creature living who more longs to hear your justification than myself; not one who would lend more willing ear to any answer which will clear your honour.’ She added an important proviso, however. ‘But I cannot sacrifice my own reputation to your account.’ Elizabeth sent her councillors to York, where they were instructed to arrange a settlement between Mary, Elizabeth and King James’s supporters that would precede Mary’s return. Elizabeth could then be seen as the benign healer of Scotland’s ill. It did not quite go to plan.

The queen, meanwhile, went on a progress in the summer of the year. A ‘progress’ was a long peregrination through the more accessible counties of England, in the course of which the queen would graciously consent to accept the hospitality of the greater nobles whose large houses lay along her route. For them, it was an expensive business; for her, it was an opportunity to live more cheaply while at the same time showing herself to selected groups of people. It was a complex and cumbersome undertaking, the queen’s belongings alone requiring 400 wagons. She was also accompanied by approximately 500 courtiers and servants.

Sometimes she travelled in the newly fashionable royal coach, although two years before she had been a little shaken and bruised when it was driven too fast. But more often she was carried in an open litter or rode on horseback, her route lined with her welcoming subjects calling out ‘God save your grace!’ while she replied with ‘God save my people!’ Sometimes she called a halt to the process so that a suitor might present a petition or even speak to her. ‘Stay thy cart,’ Serjeant Bendlowes of Huntingdonshire called out to her coachman, ‘stay thy cart, that I may speak to the queen!’ Elizabeth laughed and listened to what he had to say; then she offered him her hand to kiss.

And so it went on. The Spanish ambassador reported that, on this summer progress, ‘she was received everywhere with great acclamations and signs of joy’. She pointed out to him the love and affection in which she was held by her subjects while her neighbours (naming no names) ‘are in such trouble’. If she was in danger of assassination she showed no signs of apprehension; she even took up food and drink without waiting for the precaution of a taster in case of poison.

The towns along her route were cleansed and freshly painted, with the vagabonds and other unsightly persons removed from sight. It was customary to present her with a silver cup, preferably filled with coin, that she gladly accepted. Her remarks were recorded for the sake of posterity. ‘Come hither, little recorder,’ she said to the recorder of Warwick, ‘it was told me that you would be afraid to look upon me or to speak boldly; but you were not so afraid of me as I was of you.’ A schoolmaster of Norwich seemed nervous before addressing her in Latin. ‘Be not afraid,’ she said. At the conclusion of his speech she told him that ‘it is the best that ever I heard, you shall have my hand’. As she left Norwich she declared that ‘I shall never forget Norwich’ and, as she rode away, she called out ‘Farewell, Norwich!’

An orator at Cambridge was enumerating her virtues, at which she modestly shook her head, bit her lip, and expressed a brief disclaimer. Then he began to praise virginity. ‘God’s blessing of thine heart,’ she called out, ‘there continue.’ During her reign of forty-four years she organized more than twenty such ritual journeys and when, at the age of sixty-seven, she embarked on yet another some of the more elderly courtiers were heard to grumble, at which she commanded ‘the old stay behind and the young and able to go with me’. Yet she never ventured too far, confining her perambulations largely to what became known in the nineteenth century as the home counties; she never travelled to the north or to the southwest.

The inquiry into Mary’s behaviour opened at York in the beginning of October 1568. Elizabeth had sent Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, to be the principal English commissioner; since he was suspected of having Catholic sympathies, it was believed that he had been dispatched in order to assist Mary’s cause. Yet she had found more than an ally in the duke of Norfolk; she had found a possible husband. Norfolk, three times a widower at the early age of thirty-two, was now available for marriage once more; as the foremost nobleman in England he was a most suitable match. If the queen of Scots were to marry him her succession to the English throne would become easy and almost inevitable. It seems likely that Norfolk himself, together with a number of his allies, had contemplated this arrangement even before his journey to York; it can safely be said, however, that Elizabeth herself was quite unaware of any such plan.

The regent of Scotland and Mary’s half-brother, the earl of Moray, threw the proceedings into disorder by bringing with him eight letters and twelve ‘adulterous’ sonnets allegedly written by Mary to Bothwell; they had been discovered in the possession of one of Bothwell’s servants after the decisive battle of Carberry Hill. They became known as the ‘casket letters’ and did more to damage Mary’s reputation than even the killing of Darnley. ‘I do here a work that I hate much,’ she had written to Bothwell, ‘but I had begun it this morning … You make me dissemble so much that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor … Think also if you will not find some invention more secret by physick, for he is to take physick at Craigmillar and the baths also.’ The inference must be that she was meditating with her lover the means of killing her husband.

The authenticity of the letters has been a cause of controversy ever since. The originals have long since disappeared, perhaps destroyed, and the material can only be read in translation or transcription; some of the transcripts have Cecil’s annotations in the margin, testifying to the care with which he pored over them. The general assumption must be that genuine passages have been interpolated with fabricated words and phrases, no doubt planted by Moray to incriminate his half-sister, but no certainty in the matter is possible. It can only be said that they achieved their purpose at the time.

The duke of Norfolk confessed himself horrified by their content. He wrote to Elizabeth that the letters contained ‘foul matter and abominable, to be either thought of or to be written by a prince’. Yet his disgust did not alter his intention of marrying the lady. The complication of the case was such that the tribunal was moved from York to Westminster, where, towards the end of the year, the commissioners entered what one observer called ‘the bowels of the odious accusation’. The letters were produced in court and read in the privy council. Mary was herself defiant, stating that ‘the charges against her were false because she, on the word of a princess, did say that they were false’.

There followed days and weeks of meetings and conferences between the various interested parties, rendered even more uncertain by the hesitancy and vacillation of Elizabeth. She had promised to support Mary in her distress but had in fact started proceedings that placed the Scottish queen in an undesirable light. Mary still protested her innocence but there was no one at court who believed her; Mary herself refused to discuss the letters, except in an audience with the English queen. Yet Elizabeth could not receive Mary while she was under suspicion of murder. It was a tangled web.

Elizabeth did not wish to condone the behaviour of the earl of Moray in overthrowing his lawful sovereign, but it was he who could bring peace and stability to Scotland. So she informed the regent that he could depart with his delegation ‘in the same estate in which they were before their coming into the realm’. Nothing had been resolved. These affairs of state were in any case too sensitive to bear much further examination. Elizabeth demanded absolute secrecy in the matters discussed. The whole imbroglio had ended inconsequentially, yet had still managed severely to damage the reputation of the queen of Scots. Mary herself was soon removed to Tutbury Castle, in Staffordshire, where she endured conditions of genteel confinement; her imprisonment lasted for another eighteen years.

Cecil was reduced to despair by Elizabeth’s hesitation and indecision. He wrote in a private memorandum that ‘her majesty shall never be able to raise her decayed credit, nor pluck up the hearts of her good subjects, nor prevent and escape the perils that are intended towards her, unless she do utterly give over the government of her most weighty affairs unto the most faithful councillors …’ It was the central dilemma of her reign, with the strength and solitariness of one woman pitched against a phalanx of men.

The movements of the larger world went largely unremarked and unreported in the accounts of the struggles and rivalries at court. In the reign of Elizabeth the commerce of England was greatly increased with spices and perfumes from India, ermine and steel from Russia. England sent woollen cloths and calf-skins to Turkey, and in return purchased silks, camblets, rhubarb, oil, cotton, carpets, galls and spices. From the New World came gold and silver. They were part of the great exfoliation of life that slowly covered the globe, as the power of European finance and trade pushed its way forward. This was the age of the great commercial companies of merchants that planned their ventures from Muscovy and Persia to Cathay. By the end of the queen’s reign English traders had reached the Gulf of Guinea and the Indian Ocean. One of the first travellers upon that ocean, Thomas Stevens, remarked that ‘there waited on our ship fishes as long as a man, which they call Tuberones. They come to eat such things as from the ship fall into the sea, not refusing men themselves if they light upon them.’ In February 1583 Elizabeth wrote letters to the kings of Cambaia (now Gujarat) and of China, asking leave for her representatives to trade. As a result of all these activities London was fast overtaking Antwerp as the European capital of trade and finance. When the shah of Persia asked a merchant, Arthur Edwards, the name of the place from which he had come the answer puzzled him. ‘England,’ the man said. No one had ever heard of that land. Edwards then ventured on ‘Inghlittera’. ‘Ah,’ one courtier said, ‘Londro.’ So London was better known than the nation.

The Turkey merchants brought their wares from the Levant while the mariners of England sailed down the western coast of Africa and the eastern coastline of the New World. In the 1560s Sir John Hawkins made three successful voyages to the African continent, where he opened the unhappy trade in slaves, and crossed the Atlantic to Hispaniola and the Spanish colonies in America. At the beginning of the next decade Sir Francis Drake made three journeys to the West Indies. On his last expedition, from a summit of a mountain on the Isthmus of Darien, he caught sight of the great Pacific. So the map of the world was slowly being unrolled.

A Company of the Mines Royal was created in 1568 in order to promote the mining and distribution of copper, and in the same decade the industries for window and crystal glass were successfully established. England was growing more luxurious, at least for those with full purses. Some lamented ‘the over quantity of unnecessary wares brought into the port of London’ and Cecil himself complained about ‘the excess of silks’ as well as ‘the excess of wine and spices’.

In this context we may view the miracles of Tudor architecture, many of which survive still. It is marked by wreathed chimneys and oak-panelled rooms, by mullioned bay-windows and vertiginous gable roofs. The ornamental plaster ceiling also became characteristic. The size and complexity of the windows prompted a comment upon one great Elizabethan house, ‘Hardwick House, more glass than wall’. Eltham Palace and Hampton Court furnish evidence for the Tudor halls with open timbered roofs at a great height. The private chambers of the richer sort were furnished with tapestries, hangings and curtains; high stools, covered chairs, cabinets, chests and cupboards were everywhere apparent. Cushions could be found in most rooms.

The appetite for luxuries materially increased over the course of Elizabeth’s reign; sugar and pearls came from the New World, while lemons and pomegranates and scented soap came from the Old. In previous times no flesh had ever been eaten on fish days; now the people of London scorned fish as a relic of papistry. William Camden noted that ‘our apish nation’ had grown so rich that its citizens engaged in a ‘riot of banqueting’ and ‘bravery in building’. Even the ploughman, according to Thomas Lodge, ‘must nowadays have his doublet of the fashion with wide cuts, his garters of fine silk of Granada’. Fine lace became a new ‘craze’ among both sexes, with its application to cuffs and ruffs, aprons and handkerchiefs. The style of male and female costume, at least in London, was as changeable as the wind. One woodcut shows a semi-naked Englishman with a pair of tailors’ shears in his hand, saying ‘I will wear I cannot tell what’. Samuel Rowlands, the sixteenth-century pamphleteer, made out an inventory of

… the French doublet and the German hose;

The Muff’s cloak, Spanish hat, Toledo blade,

Italian ruff, a shoe right Flemish made.

The latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, in particular, witnessed the greatest extravagance of fashion. New silks and velvets were introduced; great ruffs and farthingales became common. The queen herself left, at the time of her death, approximately 3,000 dresses.

The industry of England advanced as strongly as its commerce. The investment in looms, furnaces and forges increased, while parliamentary Acts were passed to promote the trade in leather. More coal was needed for the manufacture of glass and for soap-boiling. The production of pig iron rose threefold in the space of thirty years.

William Harrison, in his Description of England of 1577, amplified the changes with some local detail. One was ‘the multitude of chimneys lately erected’, while another was ‘the exchange of vessel, as of treen [wooden] platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin’. Timber and clay had given way to stone and plaster; pallets of straw had been replaced by feather beds, and logs of wood by pillows. The rise of the stricter forms of Protestantism had not yet inhibited the lavish materialism that seems to characterize Elizabethan society. This might be described as the first secular age.

31

Plots and factions

The confinement of Mary, queen of Scots, rendered her even more desperate and dangerous. She began a correspondence with the duke of Norfolk that might seem to suggest collusion against Elizabeth. Elizabeth herself had by now heard the rumours about a possible alliance and berated Norfolk for even considering the notion. ‘Should I seek to marry her,’ he responded, ‘being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress and murderer?’ He added that Mary still pretended a title to the English throne; any marriage with her ‘might justly charge me with seeking your crown from your head’. Elizabeth did not need to be reminded of that fact. In January 1569 Elizabeth sent a confidential letter to Mary in which she wrote that ‘those do not all love you who would persuade your servants that they love you. Be not over confident in what you do. Be not blind nor think me blind. If you are wise, I have said enough.’

An alliance of the more conservative councillors was ready to support the project of uniting Mary and Norfolk; it would provide the neatest possible dynastic solution to the problem of the succession. The marriage between Mary and Bothwell could easily be annulled, with Bothwell himself soon to be imprisoned in a Danish dungeon from which he would never escape. In their happy vision Mary would be pronounced to be the heir, and all help would be withdrawn from the Protestant rebels of Europe. This policy would be the exact opposite of that pursued by Cecil, who distrusted Mary as much as he despised European papistry. The councillors found an unlikely ally in the earl of Leicester, who had long hated Cecil for his role in wrecking his hopes of marriage with the queen.

So a concerted attack was mounted against the queen’s principal councillor. Leicester told the queen that Cecil was so badly managing the affairs of the nation that he ought to lose his head; it was he who had managed to alienate both the French and the Spanish, thus endangering the realm. Elizabeth in turn berated Leicester for questioning Cecil’s judgement and by extension her own.

Norfolk also lent his voice against Cecil, knowing that he was the principal obstacle in the pursuit of marriage with Mary. In the queen’s presence he turned to the earl of Northampton. ‘See, my lord,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘how when the earl of Leicester follows the secretary he is favoured and well regarded by the queen, but when he wants to make reasonable remonstrances against the policy of Cecil, he is frowned on and she wants to send him to the Tower. No, no, he will not go there alone.’ Elizabeth made no comment.

It was rumoured that a plan was formed to arrest Cecil, but like many such schemes it came to nothing. The loyalty of the queen to her faithful servant was adamantine. Cecil himself, aware of the threat, tried to mend relations with Norfolk. He deferred to his judgement and offered to consult the other councillors more widely and openly. He bent to the storm.

The duke himself was already stepping further and further into the sea of Mary’s troubles. Letters of an affectionate nature passed between them. The earl of Leicester was also pressing the suit in the belief that he might gain from it. At worst he would earn the gratitude of a future queen and, at best, Elizabeth might decide to marry him as a counterpoise to Norfolk. Elizabeth herself was aware of the rumours from a hundred mouths. She asked the duke one day what news was abroad. He was aware of none. ‘No?’ she replied. ‘You come from London and can tell me no news of a marriage?’

It is likely that he was too much afraid of her wrath to venture upon the subject, and as a result his silence deepened. But if it had become a secret matter, then it might come close to treachery. Some of his supporters deserted him. The earl of Leicester, thoroughly discomfited by the queen’s growing displeasure, retired to his sickbed from where he told Elizabeth all he knew. The queen then summoned Norfolk, who was forced to confess to the marital arrangement; whereupon she commanded him to give it up.

Norfolk left the court, whilst in the middle of a summer progress at Titchfield in Hampshire, without formally taking leave of the queen before returning to his house in London. In Howard House he met an envoy from Mary. The Scottish queen was complaining about all the delays in the negotiations for their marriage. When the envoy asked him about the intentions of the queen, he replied that ‘he would have friends enough to assist him’. This was dangerous talk. Some of these friends were the Catholic lords of the north who were prepared to rise in arms for the Scottish queen.

Elizabeth, fearing something very much like an uprising, ordered that the guard on Mary be strengthened. She then sent a message to Norfolk ordering him to return to the court, now at Windsor. The duke was already beset by rumours that he was in fact about to be sent to the Tower. He pleaded illness in response to the queen’s command, but then promptly retired to his estate at Kenninghall in Norfolk. This was the centre of his power with land, wealth and a loyal tenantry. The name of Kenninghall itself is derived from the Anglo-Saxon words for king and palace. If he married Mary, could he perhaps then become king in reality?

Elizabeth later told Leicester that, if the two had married, she feared that she would once again be dispatched to the Tower. When some of her council were of the opinion that Norfolk’s intentions were not necessarily treacherous, it is reported that the queen fainted. These were not the wiles of court. Elizabeth knew the situation intimately for, in the reign of Mary Tudor, she had been in the same state of hapless imprisonment that she had now imposed upon Mary, queen of Scots. In a panel Mary was then embroidering she wove the image of a tabby cat in orange wool with a crown upon its head; Elizabeth was red-headed. Then Mary placed a little mouse beside the cat.

Norfolk wavered between defiance and despair. He wrote to the queen protesting his loyalty and declaring his fear that he might be unjustly imprisoned. At the same time he wrote to his principal supporters in the north – among them Thomas Percy, earl of Northumberland and Charles Neville, earl of Westmorland – urging them not to stir and thereby risk his head. Another royal summons followed with a peremptory command. The duke decided to obey the command but he was diverted into the place he most feared; the doors of the Tower were locked behind him. The ports were closed for fear of foreign intervention.

The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland were now summoned to court by Elizabeth. ‘We and our country were shamed for ever,’ Westmorland’s wife lamented, ‘that now in the end we should seek holes to creep into.’ Her advice, therefore, was to stand firm and to confront the queen in what would be a ‘hurly-burly’. At Topcliffe, the estate of Northumberland, the bells were rung in reverse order as the well-known call to arms. The earls rose in November 1569, in the name of the old religion. They rode to Durham Cathedral with their men, where they pulled down the communion table; then they ripped to pieces the English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer before demanding that the Latin Mass be once more performed. It was the most serious test that Elizabeth had yet faced, with the prospect of civil war dividing the realm made infinitely more dangerous with the introduction of the religious question. The Spanish ambassador played a double part, promising much to the conservative cause but delivering very little. The French ambassador in turn was delighted at the prospect of England’s collapsing into the same religious turmoil as his own country.

Two days later the rebellious earls rode through Ripon in the traditional armour of the Crusaders, wearing a red cross; they were in procession behind the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, another emblem of the old faith. This was how the Pilgrims of Grace had ridden against Henry VIII thirty-three years before. It was the sign of the north, which had remained predominantly Catholic; in fact many of the northern rebels were the sons of those who had participated in the earlier movement. The father of Northumberland himself, Sir Thomas Percy, had been attainted and executed after the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace. After the earls had arrived in Ripon, Mass was celebrated in the collegiate church, where a proclamation was addressed to those of ‘the old, Catholic religion’. The queen’s evil councillors had attempted to destroy ‘the true and Catholic religion towards God’ and had thus thrown the realm into confusion. The candles were lit and the organ pealed out.

Yet on 28 November 1569 the earls sent forth another address in which the issue of the succession took the place of religion. It was a way of rallying more support, but it was only partly successful in its purpose. Many of the great northern lords refused to join them in insurrection. The earl of Cumberland, for example, could not be moved. In contrast most of the English nobility rallied about the queen, prominent among them the earl of Sussex. Lord Hunsdon was sent north, while the earl of Bedford was dispatched to the west of England in case of danger there. Mary herself was taken to Coventry, where she was securely placed behind the red sandstone city wall. If Mary had been able to reach the rebels, a general insurrection might have ensued. It was said that the Spanish had a fleet, with guns and powder, waiting at Zeeland in the Netherlands. But ‘if’ is not a word to be used by historians. As a result of the Catholic threat, the Act of Uniformity was more strictly enforced, including the compulsory swearing of the oath of supremacy.

Elizabeth said at the beginning of the troubles that ‘the earls were old in blood, but poor in force’, and in that respect her judgement proved to be correct. They had expected popular support, but none was evident. They remained at Tadcaster in the north of Yorkshire for three days, and then retraced their steps. Their armies were demoralized and began to break up even as they were being pursued by the queen’s soldiers. The only battle of the campaign was fought at Naworth, in February 1570, where Hunsdon defeated a rebel force under the command of Lord Dacre.

The northern rebellion, known as ‘the Rising of the North’, was in effect already at an end. The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland had fled across the border into Scotland, and the remaining insurgents were quickly arrested. The lowlier of them were hanged, and almost 300 suffered death in Durham alone. Scarcely a local town or village did not boast a gibbet. It is estimated that approximately 900 were executed for treason, making it the single most fatal act of reprisal in Tudor history. It was a measure of the queen’s fury, but also of her fear. She had already made it clear that ‘you may not execute any that hath freeholds or noted wealthy’. She wanted their money rather than their lives; the lands and estates of the mightier or most prosperous were therefore confiscated. Northumberland was sold to England by the Scots for £2,000 and subsequently executed, while Westmorland sought sanctuary in the Spanish Netherlands.

This was the last of what may be called the traditional rebellions led by the feudal warlords of the old faith. The great lords, the Percys and the Nevilles, had once been considered to be the de facto rulers of their territories where they exercised more power and authority than the monarch. Yet now they had failed to ignite the northern lands in open revolt. Many of the Catholics of the region had no wish to challenge the political and social order of the country. Even the tenantry of the great families were reluctant to rise. The crisis that Cecil had most feared had been overcome, with the old faith now associated with treason and force. It was described as ‘a cold pie for the papists’. The loyalty of the majority of the realm had been reaffirmed. The northern rebellion represented one of the great and silent transitions in the nation’s history.

Just after the revolt was suppressed a further challenge to the queen’s authority was mounted in Rome. In early 1570, Pope Pius V issued a bull in which he excommunicated Elizabeth as a paramount heretic and tyrant. It stated that ‘the pretended queen of England’ could no longer command allegiance, and that she was ‘the servant of iniquity’. Its denunciation covered any person who obeyed her laws and commands. The queen herself was now a legitimate object of attack by any assassin of the old faith; her death would speed his way to heaven. It was the last stand of medieval religion, the final occasion when a pope would try to depose a reigning monarch.

Yet it might be considered a blow against English Catholics more than against the English queen. They were now being urged to depose their sovereign just after the signal failure of the northern earls to do so. It was, to say the least, bad timing. If the bull had been released at the time of the northern rising it might have persuaded some of the fainter hearts. But it was now possible to claim that the Catholics of England could no longer be good and loyal subjects.

A copy of the papal bull was nailed to the gates of the palace of the bishop of London. The offender, John Felton, was put on the rack to determine the names of his accomplices or associates; he said nothing, but he suffered the gruesome death of the traitor. Just as he mounted the scaffold, however, he drew out a diamond ring and sent it to Elizabeth – ‘the pretender’ – as a last gift. He was beatified by a later pope as Blessed John Felton. Yet his militant cause was already lost at the time he was quartered and disembowelled. It is no accident that in this year the great book of Protestant faith, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, was reissued in a much more elaborate second edition. A memorandum from the privy council to the two archbishops declared that this was a ‘work of very great importance and necessary knowledge both touching religion and other good offices, the matter whereof being very profitable to bring Her Majesty’s subjects to good opinion, understanding and dear liking of the present government’. Rarely have religion and politics been so closely aligned.

It is also significant this was the first year in which Elizabeth’s accession day, 17 November, became the object of celebration. It was named as ‘the queen’s holy day’, and became an annual event that had no precedent in earlier reigns. The church bells rang in every parish; there were bonfires, and candles, and bread, and beer. It became a Protestant equivalent to the sacred festivals of the medieval Church, conflating Elizabeth with the Virgin Mary. On ‘Crownation Day’, as it came to be known, there was scarcely a spot in England where bells could not be heard.

It was now possible that England would be invaded by the great Catholic powers, in solemn unity with Rome, and it was said that the English were beginning to fear their own shadows. The English fleet was mobilized, and the sheriffs were obliged to enrol local men in the service of home defence; shooting practice was organized on the village greens of southern and eastern England. In the summer of the year much anxiety, therefore, was aroused at the sight of a great Spanish fleet; yet it was sailing to Antwerp in order to escort the new bride of Philip II. The Spanish had in any case no desire to fight a war against England, and Philip remonstrated with the pope for not consulting him before issuing the bull. The French king, Charles IX, made a similar protest. The papal bull had the indirect consequence of facilitating trade between England and Turkey; the infidel queen was happy to come to terms with the infidel Ottomans.

The rebellious earls were still colluding with their Scottish hosts in plotting against Elizabeth, and as a result the border was troubled by alarms or incursions. In the spring of 1570 an English force was sent into southern Scotland both as a punishment and a warning; in the course of this venture ninety strong castles, houses and dwelling places, as well as towns and villages, were utterly destroyed. The position of the queen of Scotland was still in doubt. She was effectively under house arrest but many of the nobility of England wished to see her restored to her throne; Cecil, and some other councillors, did not. Elizabeth herself was hesitant and indecisive.

In this febrile atmosphere talk of marriage was revived, with Prince Henry, the duke of Anjou, raised as a possible favourite. He was seventeen years younger than Elizabeth but, as the brother of the king of France, he was a most acceptable offering. It had been rumoured that his family wished to marry him to the queen of Scots and it is possible that Elizabeth stepped forward to prevent that union. She would now need all of her arts of guile and deceit infinitely to prolong the negotiations. It is unlikely that she ever really considered marrying him, but matters of state might still have overturned her personal predilections. A union between France and England would have thwarted the power of Spain.

Anjou’s mother, Catherine de Medici, was enthusiastic for the match. ‘Such a kingdom for one of my children!’ she explained to the French ambassador in England. But the young prince himself proved refractory. He was, according to one of the English negotiators sent to Paris, ‘obstinate, papistical and restive like a mule’. The fact that he was ‘papistical’, at least in theory, did not bode well for the peace of England; Elizabeth, having only recently been threatened by the earls of the old faith, was reluctant to make any concessions on the matter of private Masses or Catholic confessors.

Another and more private impediment was discovered. In this period the queen suffered from an ulcer on the shin of her leg, a painful condition difficult to cure. Her father had also contracted ulcers. The young prince came to hear of this, and referred to her publicly as ‘an old creature with a sore leg’. He also called her a ‘putain publique’ or common whore. This was not promising. Yet still the discussions continued, growing warmer or becoming chillier according to the general temperature of European affairs. Elizabeth ordered her principal negotiators to delay and defer decisions; they were asked to tell Catherine de Medici ‘not to be over-anxious as desiring so precise an answer until the matter may be further treated of’. In circumlocution, and prevarication, Elizabeth was pre-eminent. The affair was drawn out for some months on a very fine line, and in desperation the queen was eventually offered the hand of Anjou’s younger brother, Francis, duke of Alençon. Yet the duke of Alençon was disfigured by pockmarks. It was believed that the price of accepting the pockmarks would be the return of Calais to England, but once more the proposals got precisely nowhere. The queen delayed and hesitated, seeming not to know her own mind from one day to the next. In truth there was never any real likelihood that she would marry.

The duke of Norfolk was released from the Tower in the summer of 1570, humiliated but not necessarily humbled. He sent Elizabeth a document vowing ‘never to deal in that cause of marriage of the Queen of Scots’, but soon enough he was drawn into another conspiracy against the throne. The plot was engineered by a banker from Florence, Roberto di Ridolfi, who had lived in London for some years and who had the full confidence of the Spanish ambassador. Ridolfi communicated with Norfolk and the Scottish queen, on the understanding that certain lords would rise up and set Mary free; at this point Mary’s supporters would come over the border in force.

It was the merest fantasy, and it is hard to credit the serious involvement of any of the alleged conspirators. The duke of Alva, Philip’s representative in the Spanish Netherlands, dismissed it as foolish nonsense. Yet there were some in England who favoured the scheme, among them the duke of Norfolk. He shrank from signing any incriminating documents but gave his verbal support. The duke’s ‘instructions’ to Ridolfi were read over to him, and he assented to their contents. ‘We commission you to go with all expedition, first to Rome and then to the Catholic king, that you may lay before his Holiness and his Majesty the wretched state of this island, our own particular wrongs … and an assured mode by which our country and ourselves can obtain relief.’ It was his dearest wish ‘to advance the title of the queen of Scots, to restore the Catholic religion’. Eight peers and four knights were then named, who together would command an army of 45,000 men. Their purpose would be to depose Elizabeth and proclaim Mary as queen. Spain was to send an army of 6,000 men and, after landing at Harwich or Portsmouth, they would join themselves with the insurgent English forces. It is very likely that Ridolfi himself wrote the letter but by listening to these details, and not rejecting them, Norfolk had committed high treason. It seems that he had uttered only one word when he heard them: ‘Well.’ It would be enough to condemn him.

The queen of Scotland added to the thickness of the mist by announcing that she had a secret that she could impart only to Elizabeth in person. ‘You have caused a rebellion in my realm,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘and you have aimed at my own life. You will say you did not mean these things. Madam, I would I could think so poorly of your understanding.’ She then declared that ‘those who would work on me through my fears know little of my character. You tell me you have some mystery which you wish to make known to me. If it be so, you must write it. You are aware that I do not think it well that you and I should meet.’

Just as the plot was reaching its climax, in the spring of 1571, a parliament was summoned. Elizabeth had already reigned for thirteen years, and in that period only three sessions were held. She had no affection for its members, despite her protestations, because they dealt in grievances rather than remedies. She was still unmarried and, without a named heir or successor, the kingdom was in peril. The religious differences within the realm had also been emphasized by the late rebellion. Yet she needed the money that only parliament could authorize. So at the opening of the session she appeared in the robes of state with the golden coronal on her head. At her right hand sat the dignitaries of the Church and on her left hand were the lords of the realm; the privy councillors sat in the centre while the knights and burgesses of the lower house crowded at the back.

The Commons were more interested in religion than in finance. This was the first parliament, after all, from which all Catholics were excluded. A bill was introduced that would compel Sunday attendance and twice-yearly communion. The queen hated religious debate and sent a message to the Commons forbidding them to discuss matters that did not concern them and ‘to avoid long speeches’. This was an order they chose to ignore. A bill was introduced, for example, proposing the reformation of the Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth would not be permitted to behave like a tyrant or, in the phrase of the period, ‘like the Great Turk’.

Some notice had to be taken of the papal bull, and it was agreed that it would be high treason ‘to affirm, by word or writing, that the queen was not queen’ or ‘that the queen was a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the crown’. Any Catholic priests travelling in disguise or posing as serving men in noble households were to be whipped or set in the stocks as ‘vagrants or Egyptians’. It also became treason to import any writings from ‘the bishop of Rome’, as the pope was called, or to introduce any crosses, pictures, or beads blessed by that bishop. With their righteous wrath appeased, parliament voted £100,000 for the queen’s treasury.

The plot against Elizabeth was now beginning to unwind. Its leader, Ridolfi, was a great talker who did not always guard his words; he was also an inept conspirator. He confided messages in cipher to a courier who was arrested and searched when he arrived at Dover. Other secrets were obtained from the unfortunate man as he lay helpless upon a rack in the Tower. As a result the details of the conspiracy soon became known to Cecil. ‘I am thrown into a maze at this time,’ he wrote, ‘that I know not how to walk from dangers.’ The Spanish ambassador reported that Cecil was so alarmed that he had made preparations to flee the kingdom; he had urged his wife to pack her jewels and to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. This report, however, may simply be the ambassador’s wishful thinking. Cecil himself was secure enough in council that, at the beginning of 1571, he was ennobled as Lord Burghley. Soon enough he was also appointed to be lord high treasurer.

Mary denied any involvement in the conspiracy but she was at least complicit in the proposals, with a letter of agreement to the invasion ratified by her signature. Whether she knew all the details is uncertain. But she was described by one member of parliament as ‘the monstrous and huge dragon, and mass of the earth’. Elizabeth, on the revelation of the plot, no longer concerned herself with Mary’s restoration to the Scottish throne; from this time forward she seems to have concluded that the queen of Scots could never regain her liberty. The duke of Norfolk was in an even more pitiable state. The chance discovery of another coded letter led to his ruin, when searchers found the key to the code hidden between two tiles on the roof of Howard House. They also came upon a letter from Mary Stuart in the duke’s possession. In the early autumn of 1571 he was once more consigned to the Tower. Burghley also sent a letter to the earl of Shrewsbury, Mary Stuart’s custodian, that was marked as ‘sent from the court, the 5th of September, 1571, at 9 in the night’; it also had the familiar superscription for urgency, ‘haste, post haste, haste, haste, for life, life, life’. Mary was planning to escape and flee to Spain. The guard around her was redoubled.

Under interrogation Norfolk denied knowing Ridolfi, but then conceded that he had indeed met the man; he then stated that the Florentine banker had suggested treason to him but that he had refused to listen. One by one his falsehoods were exposed. The earls of Southampton and Arundel were also arrested, together with the lords Cobham and Lumley and associated gentry. Burghley had flushed out the Catholics at court.

On 16 January 1572 the duke of Norfolk was put on trial. He was charged with the crime of ‘imagining and compassing the death of the queen’. He denied the charge but, in the sixteenth century, it was very difficult to withstand the prosecution of the Crown. He was denied counsel and deprived of all books and papers. From his chamber in the Tower he wrote that he was as crushed ‘as a dead fly’ or ‘a dead dog in this world’.

He was duly convicted but the queen prevaricated over the sentence. Twice she signed the warrant for execution but then at the last moment revoked it. Norfolk was the premier nobleman in England, after all, and closely related to her. She told Burghley that ‘the hinder part’ of her brain did not trust ‘the forward sides of the same’; her passion, in other words, overruled her judgement. She was in such distress of mind that she collapsed in pain; Burghley and Leicester sat by her bedside for three nights. The same indecision and nervous perplexity had ruined the negotiations for her marriage to the duke of Anjou.

Eventually she signed the third warrant in the early summer and, after much earnest persuasion by her councillors, she did not rescind it. Norfolk went to the scaffold. It was the first execution of a nobleman, by beheading, in the whole course of Elizabeth’s reign; the scaffold on Tower Hill was derelict, and another had to be raised in its place. When told of the news Mary, queen of Scots, burst into tears; she was said to be inconsolable for days. But she was still plotting, ever plotting. Burghley would now direct his attentions towards the lady. It was his opinion that the axe should strike at the root.

The whole plot had been so clumsily handled that some historians have concluded that Ridolfi himself was a double agent in Burghley’s employment chosen to entrap Mary, Norfolk and the other Catholic conspirators. It is an unlikely, but not wholly implausible, scenario. Ridolfi himself had already fled to Paris, after the arrest of his messenger at Dover, and never returned to England; he died in his native city more than forty years later.

A new parliament assembled in May 1572, just after the Ridolfi plot had been uncovered. The Commons were indignant at the likely role of Mary in the affair. The advice of one speaker was ‘to cut off her head and make no more ado about her’, an opinion to which the majority assented. Another member, Thomas Digges, urged ‘the shunning of that sugared poison bearing in outward show the countenance of mild pity’. Beware of pity. It was not her ‘private case’ but one that affected the safety of the entire realm. It was then agreed with the Lords, in committee, that Mary should be attainted with treason. The convocation of the senior clergy reached the same decision, arguing that the ‘late Scottish queen hath heaped up together all the sins of the licentious sons of David – adulteries, murders, conspiracies, treasons and blasphemies against God’. Yet Elizabeth, in an unrecorded speech, managed to turn away their murderous wrath.

The Lords and Commons then proposed a bill that took away Mary’s title to the throne and made it a treasonable offence to advocate the same. The queen refused to sanction it, employing the ancient formula ‘La royne s’advisera’ – the queen will consider the matter, the queen will think of it, the queen will advise upon it. It meant that the queen was likely to do nothing at all. She may have felt some remaining sympathy with her relative; Elizabeth had once been in confinement, too. So she took counsel, and all was lost in a mist of words.

Just before the parliament of 1572 was prorogued a pamphlet was addressed to its members that dared to question the constitution of the church. An Admonition to the Parliament declared that ‘we in England are so far off being rightly reformed, according to the prescript of God’s word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same’. The authors, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, wished to found all church teaching and organization on the basis of Scripture. The Book of Common Prayer was ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of the popish dunghill, the Mass-book of all abominations’. There should be no archbishops and no bishops; an ‘equality’ of ministers should govern the Church with ‘a lawful and godly seignory’ in every congregation. Field and Wilcox were promptly sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for violating the Act of Uniformity, but their words reached more attentive ears; in the early 1570s we can trace the rise of the Presbyterian movement.

Just as parliament was becoming more radical, with the entire absence of Catholic members from the Commons, so also were others in authority. At Cambridge, two years before, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity had given a set of lectures in which he propounded the same measures as those laid out in the Admonition; he had been deprived of his chair and had gone into exile at Geneva, but his followers still remained in the universities. ‘I am no parson,’ a Cambridge graduate exclaimed after his ordination. ‘No, I am no vicar. I abhor these names as Antichristian. I am pastor of the congregation there.’ The Puritan clergy of England were largely created at the universities.

In London and elsewhere, individual congregations also set up a cycle of preaching and catechizing on the Puritan model; certain popular preachers were immune to the wrath of the bishops and continued to pronounce ‘God’s truth’, often with the support of noblemen and gentry. The earl of Leicester was known to favour the Puritan cause. Lord Burghley himself, at a slightly later date, said of the Puritan clerics that ‘the bishops, in these dangerous times, take a very ill and unadvised course in driving them from their cures’.

The rudiments of a system known as the ‘classis’ soon began to emerge, with the ministers and lay elders of the churches in assembly. A republican union of ministers was established south of London, in the neighbourhood of Wandsworth, and called itself a ‘presbytery’; Wandsworth then became known as a haven for religious refugees, from the Protestant Dutch of the 1570s to the Huguenots who fled there in the early seventeenth century. The example had already been set by the ‘refugee churches’ established in the capital where Protestant exiles were also accustomed to worship. Yet it was not always safe to be one of the ‘stricter’ sort. In this year a young carpenter from Sussex, Noah by name, walked 6 miles from his village of Hailsham to Warbleton, where he intended to remove the maypole on the village green as a symbol of idolatry; one of the locals then killed him by shooting him through the neck.

Burghley was soon joined in the queen’s counsels by Francis Walsingham, a subtle and resourceful finder of secrets; it was said of him that he heard, at his house in Seething Lane, what was whispered in the ear at Rome. He became one of the first in a long line of ‘spymasters’ in the world of European diplomacy. He had begun his career as Elizabeth’s envoy at the French court, but in 1573 she appointed him to be one of her secretaries of state.

A group of men had now emerged about the throne who were firmly allied to the Protestant cause and, with their business managers in parliament, were opposed to the pretensions of Mary Stuart and to the Catholic powers of Europe; it may be supposed that they had guided the anti-papist measures of the last parliament. The most illustrious of them were Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester and Francis Walsingham. They had the full confidence of the queen but they were not afraid to question her judgement and, if necessary, to nudge parliament in their direction. It was said that they listened to the queen’s commands, but then quietly proceeded as before. Elizabeth herself seems to have been genuinely fond of them; she called Walsingham ‘Moor’, perhaps because of the darkness of his clothes, and Burghley was her ‘Spirit’. Leicester was her ‘Eyes’.

Another favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, emerged in this period. He was primarily a courtier of handsome address, with a genius for dancing. In that capacity he attracted the attention of the queen. He became a gentleman pensioner and then captain of her bodyguard before rising ever higher until he was appointed chancellor of Oxford and lord chancellor of England. It was said that he had danced his way into office. His nickname was ‘Lids’ or ‘Sheep’ that soon became ‘Mutton’.

A measure of the queen’s attentiveness can be found in a peremptory letter that she wrote to the bishop of Ely. Hatton was covetous of some garden-land owned by the bishop, on Holborn Hill and Ely Place, but the divine was not willing to give way to the courtier. The queen insisted, however, and sent the following message to him. ‘PROUD PRELATE, You know what you were before I made you what you are now. If you do not immediately comply with my request, I will unfrock you, by God. ELIZABETH.’ The bishop then of course surrendered his lands, with the proviso that he and his successors could have free access to the gardens and leave to gather 20 bushels of roses every year.

A much stranger transfer of land is noticed by the chroniclers of the period. A piece of ground in Hertfordshire, 26 acres about an eminence known as Marlech Hill, ‘burst from its station, and moved with a groaning noise, carrying with it cattle, sheepcotes, trees etcetera full forty paces the first day’. After four days it ceased to move, forming a hill of 72 feet in height. It had overturned a local chapel in its progress and left a hollow 30 feet in depth, 160 yards wide and 400 yards in length.

Another marvel was reported. At the beginning of 1572 the earl of Leicester presented Elizabeth with a jewelled bracelet in which was set a miniature timepiece. The queen of England wore the first-ever wristwatch.

32

The revels now are ended

As part of her summer progress Elizabeth often visited the home of the earl of Leicester, Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. It was here that in succeeding years she was entertained with pageants and with plays. On her procession through the park gates one summer, the porter came attired in the robes of Hercules and delivered to her a speech of welcome. A large pool acted as a moat for one side of the castle, where the queen was greeted by nymphs who seemed to walk on the water. The greatest pageant of welcome was conducted in the base court of the castle, where seven pairs of pillars had been constructed from which the gods and goddesses of Greece offered her various gifts. When she entered the inner court and alighted from her horse, all the clocks of the castle were stopped; no one was to be aware of the time while the queen stayed at Kenilworth.

On the following day, Sunday, she went to church; but the afternoon was filled with music and dancing. The queen was not of the stricter sort.

In particular she loved dancing. One painting shows her engaged with a courtier, thought to be Leicester, in La Volta. In this dance the male partner takes the female and twirls her around in the air, as her feet swing out. She also danced the galliard. She took five steps, leapt as high into the air as she might, and then beat her feet together on returning to the floor. Elizabeth insisted that the dance should become more intricate and challenging, in which pursuit her older or more staid councillors did not follow her.

Other diversions were followed at the castle over successive summers. A ‘wild man’ from the Indies sang her praises while the goddess Echo redoubled them. Italian allegories, Roman myths and chivalric romances were heaped one upon another. She was shown the local prodigies, such as a giant boy and a monstrous sheep. She enjoyed the hunt and rode with the men in pursuit of the hart. She was delighted by bearbaitings, where twelve or thirteen bears would be set upon by a pack of dogs. Tumblers and fireworks were mingled. In the hot weather she drank wine mixed in equal parts with water. While on progress she also touched for ‘the king’s evil’ by laying her hands on the throat or jaw of the person afflicted with scrofula.

So it was that, in the summer of 1572, she was diverted by an entire world of Tudor entertainment in which the pastoral and the classical were mixed with all the prodigality of an English romance. Peace was in the air. A treaty between France and England had been agreed only five months before. The Treaty of Blois was the indirect result of the long process of unsuccessful negotiations over a French marriage for the queen. It was essentially a defensive treaty against the power of Spain but it had the additional merit of putting an obstacle to further French meddling on behalf of Mary. A painting attributed to Lucas de Heere, The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, is most likely to be a celebration of the treaty. It was presented by Elizabeth to the man who more than any other had fashioned the agreement, Francis Walsingham, and on a panel at the bottom edge of the work was the inscription:

THE QUENE TO WALSINGHAM THIS TABLET SENTE MARK OF HER PEOPLES AND HER OWNE CONTENTE

The painting shows in allegorical form the Tudor line, from Henry to Elizabeth herself, but it also shows the queen leading forward the figure of Peace who is carrying an olive branch in her left hand while trampling underfoot the weapons of war.

Yet the tidings of war were never far away. In the earlier part of this year the people of the Netherlands rose up against their Spanish overlords and the forces of the duke of Alva; they were led by William, prince of Orange, whose admiral had previously taken refuge in England among his co-religionists. In the spring of 1572 the admiral had sailed from Dover with a small fleet and had overpowered the town of Brielle at the mouth of the Meuse. The other ports of Zeeland, Holland and Utrecht all rose up and expelled the Spanish garrisons. Their sailors became known as the ‘sea beggars’, at a time when piracy and patriotism were often conflated. The prince of Orange himself raised an army in Germany while the forces of the French, animated by hostility to Spain, seized Hainault.

The fervour in London grew as the European Protestants and their French allies began to win victory after victory over the Catholic forces of Philip of Spain. This was the conflict that the English reformers had been waiting for; collections of money in the churches were soon turned into guns and powder while many volunteers crossed the North Sea to join the offensive. Parliament, and many of the bishops, urged Elizabeth herself to participate and to declare war upon the Spaniards in the United Provinces. A blow would be struck for England but also for God.

Yet Elizabeth was not so sure. She disliked the fact that the people of the United Provinces had risen against their lawful sovereign, and she had no reason to welcome the substitution of Spanish forces by French ones. Her policy, as always, was one of caution touched by compromise. If the duke of Alva seemed likely to prevail, or at least to avoid defeat, then she should allow the protagonists to fight on; it suited her policy to have her neighbours at each other’s throats. As Lord Burghley put it in a paper of advice to her, ‘let both sides alone for a time’. But if the French began to take over the entire coast and the frontiers, under cover of their alliance with the Netherlanders, then Elizabeth would assist Philip ‘in the defence of his inheritance’ and even join with him on condition that he restore religious liberty to his subjects and ‘deliver them from the fear of the Inquisition’. To this policy she adhered. The Spanish ambassador at the English court even reported that the queen was ready to take possession of Flushing, in apparent support of the Orange cause, and then surrender it back to the Spanish.

Her deliberate ambiguity was not to the taste of those who espoused the cause of radical Protestantism but it reflected the pragmatism which she brought to all the affairs of state. It was not necessarily with displeasure, therefore, that she heard news of victories by the duke of Alva against the rebels; the French had fallen back in disorder, and Charles IX faced the unwelcome prospect of war against Spain without the help of any ally.

In these difficult circumstances the providential alliance between the French Catholics and the Protestants of the United Provinces could not endure. When the French leader of the Huguenots, Gaspard de Coligny, became the victim of an attempt at assassination, the queen regent, Catherine de Medici, took fright at the possible retaliation of his supporters. So she ordered the pre-emptive destruction of the Huguenot leaders, among them Coligny himself, whose body was thrown out of the window of his lodgings. Unfortunately the bloodshed was contagious and on that same St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, the mobs of Paris began their murderous work on any Huguenots they could find. They believed that they were attacking the enemies of God; neighbour turned upon neighbour in an atmosphere of frenzy as the Huguenots were stabbed, hanged or beaten to death. It was said that some of the boys of Paris strangled babies in their cradles. The bodies were piled into carts and taken down to the Seine; it was in flood that day and by the grace of God, as the Catholics said, it was better able to wash away the traces of heresy. The emblem of St Bartholomew was the knife as a symbol of his murder by flaying; the knife now ruled.

Cardinal Orsini had told the French king that not one Huguenot should be left alive in France and, although the advice could not be followed in practice, thousands died in Paris and in the provinces. The country was now divided by a religious hatred far outweighing that within England. The occasion itself became known as the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and did more than any other event in sixteenth-century history to discredit the Catholic cause. It showed the people of England, for example, their possible fate if a Catholic queen once more reigned over them. In Rome the bells rang in celebration, however, and Pope Gregory walked with his cardinals from shrine to shrine in grateful procession.

The queen was still at Kenilworth, enjoying the festivities that Leicester had displayed in her honour, when news of the massacre came to her. She had been discussing with the French ambassador the never-ending question of her marriage to a French prince. Then, on 3 September, a messenger arrived from Paris while she was out hunting. His report broke off any negotiations with the ambassador. A Spanish agent in London informed the duke of Alva that the queen has ‘sent all her musicians and minstrels home, and there are no more of the dancers, farces and entertainments …’ The pageants were suddenly ended, leaving not a rack behind.

The earl of Leicester, eager to support the Protestant cause in Europe, wrote that ‘I think no Christian since the heathen time has heard of the like …’ It was partly his urgent persuasions that moved Elizabeth to come to the aid of William of Orange; privately she sent him £30,000, and permitted 6,000 men to be raised in his cause. She now feared that the massacre was only a prelude to a general assault by the Catholic powers against herself and the other Protestant princes. The people feared this also. The bishops sent her a message requesting that any Catholic priests held in prison should immediately be put to death. The bishop of London urged Burghley to rid the court of all Catholics and to send Mary Stuart to the block.

In the middle of September the French ambassador was allowed to return to court, by now resident at Woodstock. The queen was dressed in mourning, as were all the members of her council and her principal ladies; they were standing in a semicircle and they received the envoy in silence. Elizabeth took him over to a window and asked him if the deplorable reports happened to be true. He replied that there had been a conspiracy against the French king, orchestrated by Coligny himself. So the king had in effect sanctioned the massacre in retaliation for a plot against his life? The envoy could only bluster. After a few more words, she left him.

Nevertheless she maintained her policy of careful neutrality in public. She dispatched the earl of Worcester, a notably Catholic nobleman, to Paris for the baptism of the French king’s daughter; Elizabeth herself had agreed to be the infant’s godmother, much to the dismay of her Protestant councillors. How could an English earl go in an official capacity to the city that had been the scene of the most appalling massacre in sixteenth-century Europe? The queen also claimed that she could take no part against her dear brother, the king of Spain, despite the fact that she had sent troops and money to his enemies. One Spanish courtier, in a letter to the duchess of Feria at the beginning of 1573, established the facts very well when he informed her that ‘the queen has promised to supply funds for six thousand men in the coming spring. If it be so, you can force his Majesty to see the profound cunning with which she is acting. She pretends to be unresolved upon her answer, when she had already consented to what the States [the United Provinces] ask of her …’

So Elizabeth was playing a double part, dexterously trying to contrive to keep in balance with all of her neighbours. Yet genuine hesitation also held her hand. This hesitation, close to procrastination, emerges in small as well as in great matters. She was urged to give a small royal manor, Newhall, to the earl of Sussex. She listened kindly to the proposal, said that she would like to give it to him, but then changed her mind. All things considered, it was proper to let him possess it but then, on the other hand, her father had built it at such expense. Burghley asked her if she had a final reply but ‘she would give no resolved answer, yea or nay’. She was in any case rarely in the giving mood. When Mary Stuart sent her a present of nightcaps she remarked that ‘when people arrive at my age, they take all they can get with both hands, and only give with their little finger’.

A courtier complained to Cecil, on another matter in the same period, that ‘it maketh me weary of my life … I can neither get the other letter signed nor the letter already signed permitted to be sent away, but day by day and hour by hour deferred, till “anon, soon, and tomorrow” ’. Her godson, Sir John Harrington, wrote that ‘when the business did turn to better advantage she did most cunningly commit the good issue to her own honour and understanding; but when aught fell out contrary to her own will and intent, the council were in great strait to defend their own acting and not blemish the queen’s good judgement’. She was happy to accept the praise, in other words, and refused to shoulder the blame.

In most of the affairs of state, her preferred stance was one of inaction. And who was to say that this was not the wisest policy? Doing nothing is better than acting foolishly. When chance or fortune largely determined the ways of the world, what point was there in moving forward too quickly? Despite the blandishments of Cecil and Leicester, therefore, she refused to place herself at the head of a Protestant League in Europe. It would expose her to too many risks. In any case she was in sympathy with established monarchs and with the prevailing regimen of law and order; she saw no reason to endanger it.

It may also be that she did not comprehend the fierce religious enthusiasms of the Calvinists in the Netherlands or of the Catholics in France; as far as she was concerned, all such matters could be resolved by calculation or compromise. She could profit from the pious zeal of others, however. With the Spanish engaged in protracted hostilities against the Netherlanders, and with the French close to civil war, England could be regarded as a place of safeguard and stability. It might even be able to act as an arbiter in the fortunes of Europe. Elizabeth decided to remove the English volunteers from the Netherlands, in a gesture of goodwill towards Philip, and in the spring of 1573 a treaty with Spain was agreed. Commercial benefits were bound to follow. By the middle of April the ports of Spain and of the Low Countries were formally open to English merchants who were no longer obliged to fear the attentions of the Inquisition.

More distant events were to play a part in larger and longer conflicts. In the previous year Sir Francis Drake had landed on Panama, the strategic bridge between the silver mines of Peru and the ports of the Caribbean from where the Spanish ships set sail. It was feared by Spain that Drake and his men would form an alliance with the runaway slaves of Panama, and thus control all of the traffic of the isthmus. If Madrid were to be deprived of its gold and silver, it could not afford to fight in the Netherlands or anywhere else.

In 1578 John Hawkins, the quondam slave-runner, was enrolled as treasurer of the navy, in which capacity he laboured hard to prepare an ocean-going fleet; the ships were no longer to resemble floating fortresses but to be slimmer and faster, with the emphasis upon guns and cannon for long-range battle. Within fifteen years of his appointment the country possessed twentyfive fighting ships and eighteen ocean-going pinnaces.

At the end of 1577 Drake set sail once more with a fleet of five ships led by the Golden Hind, then known as the Pelican; he sailed down the coast of Africa, taking such foreign vessels that came in his way, and then sailed across the Atlantic to the New World before passing through the Strait of Magellan and entering the Pacific. He became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. In that same year John Dee, Elizabeth’s favourite astrologer, published General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation; its title page displayed an English fleet embarking from a well-defended shore under the benediction of the queen. Dee advocated the formation of a British empire founded on sea power, and his work heralded all of England’s imperialist aspirations among the merchants and the more adventurous courtiers. Martin Frobisher, for example, was the English seaman who joined forces with Sir Christopher Hatton and John Dee in a deeply laid scheme to discover the NorthWest Passage that he believed would lead him to Cathay.

It has been said of Richard Hakluyt, the great memorialist of English sea voyages, that the span of his life from 1552 to 1616 matched the rise of a greater England – ‘an England stretching fingers of empire to East and West’. Hakluyt himself wrote that ‘in this famous and peerless government of her Majesty, her subjects, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth’. The first English colony in America, Roanoke, was established in modern North Carolina by 1585. This is not the ‘empire’ that Henry had envisioned when he wore the imperial crown, but it derived ineluctably from the same ambition, drive for power and pursuit of profit. Yet so far the struggles between Spain and England on the seas were confined to the New World rather than the Old.

A religious complication now further embarrassed relations between Spain and England. At the beginning of 1574 the first seminarians arrived. A seminary of English Catholic priests had been established at Douai, in the Spanish Netherlands, and from here three priests sailed secretly to England to begin work among the faithful. The Catholics of England had by this date organized a network of connections, with their own priests to provide them with the sacraments, all the time hoping for assistance from the Catholic exiles abroad. Some Catholic priests had become private chaplains; others had compromised by accepting the introduction of the new faith while at the same time celebrating the Mass in secret with the chosen few.

After the arrival of the three priests, more followed across the sea; over the next twentyfive years some 600 were sent to England. They were not missionaries. They came only to sustain the adherents of the old faith rather than to convert those who had embraced Protestantism. Nevertheless they were a potent source of unrest in the kingdom, largely because they opposed the claims of one whom they considered to be an unlawful monarch. The leader of the community at Douai, William Allen, told his superiors in Rome that the priests were commanded ‘to preach and teach (though not openly but in private houses, after the old example of the Apostles in their days) the Catholic faith, and administer the sacraments to such as had need …’ The seminarians were to hear confessions, absolve schismatics and strengthen the faith of those tempted to conform. In previous years the authorities had treated the Catholics with a certain amount of caution, maintaining Elizabeth’s wish to preserve peace and order at all costs, but the presence of the priests was considered to be an unwarrantable intrusion into domestic affairs. A harsher policy soon prevailed.

The pious of another persuasion were also provoking trouble. In the spring of 1575 a congregation of Anabaptists was discovered in Aldgate. This was the sect most despised and most feared. Although they were of Dutch nationality they were tried before the bishop of London in St Paul’s Cathedral for the most horrible offences of heresy and blasphemy; five recanted and were saved. They paraded with lighted faggots in their hands and abjured the doctrines that Christ had not ‘taken flesh’ of the Virgin Mary, that infants ought not to be baptized, that a Christian ought neither to be a magistrate nor bear a sword, and that no Christian should take an oath. Fifteen of their companions were shipped overseas, and five were condemned to death by burning. Only two of them were in fact consigned to the fire, John Weelmaker and Henry Toorwoort, and at Smithfield they died ‘in great horror with roaring and crying’ as the concourse of people applauded their punishment. It was the first blood spilt for religion in the reign of Elizabeth.

No burnings had taken place for seventeen years and John Foxe, the historian of the martyrs under Mary, remonstrated with the queen in a letter about their unhappy return. Elizabeth called him ‘my father Foxe’ and so he had some licence to preach to her. ‘I have no favour for heretics,’ he wrote, ‘but I am a man and would spare the life of man. To roast the living bodies of unhappy men, erring rather from blindness of judgement than from the impulse of will, in fire and flames, of which the fierceness is fed by the pitch and brimstone poured over them, is a Romish abomination … for the love of God spare their lives.’ The call was not heeded.

The death of Archbishop Parker in May 1575 led to a change in the general direction of the Church. Parker had left behind great wealth, and it was believed that he had been generally corrupt in the duties of his office. His successor, Edmund Grindal, was known for his piety as much as for his learning; he had been favoured by Lord Burghley and was indeed of a stricter sort. An anonymous admirer wrote to persuade him that ‘there may be consultation had with some of your brethren how some part of those Romish dregs remaining, offensive to the godly, may be removed. I know it will be hard for you to do that good that you and your brethren desire. Yet (things discreetly ordered) somewhat there may be done.’ The task was ‘hard’ because Elizabeth herself much disliked any further change or meddling. She was a religious conservative, and soon enough Grindal would earn her displeasure.

Elizabeth was alarmed, for example, by the rise in events that became known as ‘prophesyings’ or exercises. These were meetings, attended by the lesser as well as the moresenior clergy, in which passages of Scripture were discussed and the lesser clergy were instructed in the art of the sermon and other matters. The laity were sometimes allowed to attend the sessions, and the day usually ended with a supper at a local inn when points of doctrine were pronounced and debated. The term ‘prophesyings’ derived from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in which he urged that ‘the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge … for ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn and all may be comforted’.

These events were welcomed by those of an evangelical persuasion. The attendance of all ranks of clergy did much to erase the hierarchical degrees of the established Church, and the emphasis on preaching and debate also offered ample opportunity for the more open and informal discussion of doctrine beyond the confines of the Sunday service. The prophesyings in fact became popular among the general population and were soon being attended in the Midlands, East Anglia, London, Devon, Kent and Surrey.

The queen came to hear of the matter as a result of some local quarrels between conformists and nonconformists. She had also been told that certain priests, suspended from their duties for their more radical opinions, had participated in the events. So she asked Archbishop Grindal to bring them to an end; with an inveterate dislike for any form of religious zeal, she also ordered him to restrict the number of preachers in each shire to three or four. In response the archbishop proposed a code of practice, an offer of compromise that she rejected. He then wrote her a letter, in which he quoted the example of the biblical prophets who had not scrupled to offend or rebuke the kings.

It was his solemn duty to speak plainly to her. Without the preaching of the Word of God, the people would perish. The prophesyings had been introduced for ‘the edification, exhortation and comfort of the clergy’, and he went on to say that ‘I cannot with a safe conscience and without the offence of the majesty of God give my consent to the suppressing of the said exercises’. He was willing to disobey the queen who was also the governor of his Church. ‘Remember Madam,’ he wrote, ‘that you are a mortal creature.’ The somewhat impertinent letter was met with royal silence. Five months later a decree was issued from the court forbidding ‘inordinate preachings, readings, and ministerings of the sacrament’; the people had left their parishes in order to attend ‘disputations and new devised opinions upon points of divinity, far unmeet for vulgar people’. The prophesyings thereby came to an end.

Archbishop Grindal himself had incurred the severe displeasure of the queen. She had wanted to chase him from office, but Cecil and Walsingham persuaded her that this would create an unhappy precedent. Any open scandal would also bring comfort to the Catholics. So she excluded him from any real authority and confined him to his palace at Lambeth, where he was allowed to perform only the most routine duties. A time came when he was ready to resign, by mutual agreement, but his death prevented that further compromise.

Parliament was summoned in February 1576, and almost at once a supporter of the Puritan cause, Peter Wentworth, delivered what was considered to be a most indelicate address. He demanded freedom of speech in parliament, especially in matters of religion, even at the risk of incurring the queen’s displeasure. He argued that parliament was the guardian of the laws, and that it ought to be able to discharge the trust with impunity; even the monarch was constituted as such by the law. It was intolerable that religious debate was curtailed because of a rumour that ‘the queen’s majesty liketh not of such a matter; whosoever preferreth it, she will be much offended with him’. It was equally intolerable that ‘messages’ could be sent from the court inhibiting debate. ‘I would to God, Mr Speaker, that these two were buried in hell: I mean rumours and messages.’ And he went on to say that ‘none is without fault; no, not our noble queen … It is a dangerous thing in a prince unkindly to entreat and abuse his or her nobility and people, as Her Majesty did the last Parliament. And it is a dangerous thing in a Prince to oppose or bend herself against her nobility and people.’

His colleagues in the Commons immediately denounced him for promoting licence rather than liberty, and in particular condemned him for introducing a question about the prerogatives of the sovereign. He was sequestered from the chamber and committed as a prisoner to the sergeant-at-arms. He was then brought before a committee of the council, and excused his references to liberty of speech on the grounds that the queen’s ‘messages’ to parliament explicitly forbade debate on the vital matters of religion. This was not a tolerable position. Wentworth was confined for a month before the queen, by special ‘grace and favour’, restored him to his liberty. There was as yet no presumption of free speech in parliament.

Once more the business of the queen’s marriage was introduced, in this parliament, and once more she demurred with an ambiguous reply. In her speech at the end of the session she declared that ‘if I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake that poor and single state to match with a monarch … yet for your behalf, there is no way so difficult that may touch my private person, which I will not content myself to take’. She preferred to remain unmarried, in other words, but would bow to the consideration of the great matters of state.

The queen thought so much of this speech that she sent a copy of it to her godson, John Harrington, with a covering letter. ‘Boy Jack,’ she wrote, ‘I have made a clerk write fair my poor words for thine use, as it cannot be such striplings have entrance into the Parliament House as yet … so shalt thou hereafter, perchance, find some good fruits thereof, when thy godmother is out of remembrance.’ Her undertaking, to respect the greater matters of state, would soon enough be put to the test.

33

The frog

Towards the close of 1576 the Netherlands were exposed to what became known as ‘the Spanish fury’, when many of the unpaid Spanish forces mutinied against their officers; a massacre of the civilian population was the consequence, with 8,000 murdered in Antwerp alone. That city never regained its former prominence. The outrage deeply disturbed the people of the Netherlands, then comprising what is now Holland and Belgium, and even the Catholic provinces joined forces with the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zeeland in their determination to curtail the powers of their Spanish overlords. Hence arose the Pacification of Ghent signed just four days after the massacre; this was a proposal grudgingly accepted by the new governor, Don John of Austria, younger half-brother of Philip II, among the terms of which was the demand that all of the Spanish troops should be removed. There was now a common front among the provinces of the Netherlands, ratified by the Union of Brussels at the beginning of 1577.

Elizabeth was once more enmired in caution and hesitation. Sir Walter Raleigh is reported to have said of her that she ‘does everything by halves’. Yet this was for England a time of peace. It lasted for twenty-six years, from 1559 to 1585, and, as the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, told the Commons, ‘we be in quietness at home and safe enough from troubles abroad’. There was no room for complacency, however, and he warned that ‘we ought in time to make provision to prevent any storm that may arise either here or abroad’. So why then should the queen risk raising any ‘storm’ by meddling directly or militarily in the affairs of the Spanish Netherlands?

She sent £20,000 to the Netherlands and arranged for the later dispatch of a similar sum, on condition that she was repaid in full within eight months; she justified this action to the Spanish on the grounds that she was merely providing funds to pay for the arrears of the Spanish army. By the summer of the year the occupying army was on its way home. Then, at the beginning of 1578, all was changed. The army of the Low Countries was destroyed in an engagement at Gembloux, when Don John’s forces poured back over the frontier. The United Provinces looked to Elizabeth at this juncture for much-needed aid, but they looked in vain. The queen did nothing.

‘If Her Majesty do nothing now,’ her envoy wrote a week after the defeat, ‘it will in the judgement of the wisest bring forth some dangerous alteration.’ A month passed without any sign of action from Elizabeth. It was rumoured that she was about to send an army under the earl of Leicester to fight the Spanish, but this was wishful thinking on the part of the Protestants. The envoy wrote once more that ‘hesitation is cruel and dishonourable. If she say no, she will not escape the hatred of the papists. If she say yes, she still has great advantages for the prosecution of the war; but it must be one or the other and swiftly.’ Elizabeth was the last person on earth to whom such advice would be profitable or welcome. Instead she sent a further £20,000, with terms for prompt repayment. William Camden, a contemporary, wrote that ‘thus sate she as an heroical princess and umpire betwixt the Spaniards, the French and the States; so as she might well have used that saying of her father, cui adhaereo praeest, that is, the party to which I adhere getteth the upper hand. And true it was which one hath written, that France and Spain are as it were the scales in the balance of Europe, and England the tongue or the holder of the balance.’

Her influence upon France was further strengthened by another bout of matrimonial politics, when once more she invited the attentions of Francis, duke of Anjou. He was the unfortunate youth, then duke of Alençon, the reports of whose personal attractions were the object of many jokes at the English court; his face was pitted with the scars of smallpox, and he had a slight deformity of the spine which belied his nickname of ‘Hercules’. He was also twenty-one years younger than the English queen, which might leave Elizabeth herself open to ridicule. In these unpromising circumstances the negotiations began once more. Her resolve might have been further strengthened by her discovery that her favourite, the earl of Leicester, had remarried. In the spring of 1578, at a secret ceremony in Kenilworth, he had joined himself with the countess of Essex; it was said that ‘he doted extremely on marriage’, and he purchased for her a manor house at Wanstead, in Essex, where he might see her away from the eyes of the world.

Leicester then came to London but declared himself too ill to attend the court. But the queen was informed of his arrival soon enough. The Spanish ambassador reported that, on 28 April, while she was taking the air in the royal garden, she found a letter that had been left in the doorway. After reading it she went at once to Leicester House, and remained there until ten in the evening. It is possible that Leicester had written the letter, hoping to turn away the royal wrath. Or it may have been an anonymous denunciation of his marriage. Whatever the cause, the effect was the same. It was said that she had wished to commit Leicester to the Tower of London, but then relented. In the following month, however, she opened negotiations for her marriage to the young duke.

The French were suspicious of her motives. It may be that she wished only to draw Anjou away from a possible alliance with the rebels of the Low Countries; the duke was possessed by an appetite for greatness in military affairs, and the prospect of the English crown was the only means of diverting him. Together the French and the English might then be powerful enough to bring Spain and the rebels to peace. So the French court was cautious. The king of France believed that there was more artifice than desire in the proposal. Anjou himself entertained her offer but urged speed and expedition. To the French ambassadors she was benign if not exactly coquettish; she even professed to be unconcerned about the difference in age between herself and the young duke. She would treat him as a son as well as a husband. No one knew if she was sincere in these blandishments; perhaps even she was not sure of her own intentions.

It is characteristic that her progress in the summer of 1578 was beset by confusion. In May it was reported that ‘Her Majesty will go in progress to Norfolk this year, but there is no certain determination thereof as yet’. Leicester was concerned that his good friend, Lord North, would have no time ‘to furnish his house according to his duty and honourable good will’; yet Kirtling Tower, near Newmarket, was refurbished for the occasion. A new inn had to be hastily constructed to cope with the unanticipated numbers of her entourage.

The man chosen to oversee the pageants and revels to take place at Norwich, on the occasion of the queen’s visit to the city, believed that the local magnates had received ‘but small warning’ of the events. In mid-July, even as the progress unrolled, the lord keeper was not sure that Elizabeth would venture into Suffolk, while another courtier reported that it was not clear that the queen would even go to Norwich ‘if the bird sing truly that I heard this day’. On the following day the earl of Northumberland was asking Burghley for confirmation of ‘the certainty of her Majesty’s progress’.

These confusions reflect the divisions within the council, as the various aims and ambitions of the most prominent members clashed. In the pageants themselves carefully coded political messages were introduced into the entertainments, some of them advising against the marriage with the duke of Anjou. It was no accident that, in the pageants of Norwich, the image of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen was first presented to the people. In the course of the tableau Chastity presented the queen with Cupid’s bow as her own special possession since ‘none could wound her highness’s heart’:

Then since O Queen chaste life is thus thy choice

And that thy heart is free from bondage yoke …

It is believed that Leicester was the moving spirit of these designs, opposed as he was to the Anjou marriage. All was not sweetness and light; behind the veneer of entertainment and spectacle can be glimpsed fierce conflicts and partisan hostilities.

The queen was also travelling into a most disordered diocese, where Catholics and Protestants – or, as it might be expressed, recusants and reformers – vied for mastery. On the journey to Norwich the queen stopped at Bury St Edmunds where two radical preachers were associated with the practice of prophesying. One of them was interrogated by the council that accompanied the queen; he was left unmolested, and some of the Puritan gentry of the town were knighted.

The queen then went on to stay with a prominent Catholic, Edward Rokewood, at Euston Hall. She granted her favour to this recusant household but, at the end of the visit, an image of the Virgin Mary was found in the hay-house. Elizabeth ordered that the image be burned ‘which in her sight by the country folks was quickly done, to her content, and unspeakable joy of everyone but some one or two who had sucked of the idol’s poison milk’. It is an odd episode. Had the image been planted by those who wished to harm Rokewood? Or was it all part of a planned theatre to emphasize the queen’s distaste for papal superstitions? Rokewood himself was arrested and consigned indefinitely to prison.

While touring the cathedral at Norwich she was informed that the duke of Anjou had invaded the Netherlands and had devised a treaty with the Protestant states in which he was declared to be ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries against Spanish Tyranny’. She was incensed by this unwelcome alliance and exploded with rage against her councillors, although it was her neglect and prevarication that had persuaded the Netherlanders to court the French duke. She sent a letter of support to Philip of Spain while at the same time continuing the marriage proposal to Anjou himself. Soon enough the northern provinces joined in an association or contract. It was only a matter of time before they formally renounced Philip of Spain, with Anjou likely to be their next sovereign.

So the affairs of the court, like the progress, continued by means of inconstant resolutions, turns and half-turns. It is no wonder that some were discontented. Sir Philip Sidney, poet as much as courtier, told friends that, weary of a jaded and servile court, he was ‘meditating some Indian project’; he was considering the voyage to the New World. Walsingham wrote that he wished ‘if I may conveniently, I mean, with the leave of God, to convey myself off the stage and to become a looker on’. Another courtier, Sir Thomas Heneage, complained that ‘neither counsel nor forecast can prevail; if we prosper it must be, as our custom is, by miracle’.

These men lived at the full pitch of responsibility and anxiety, rendered infinitely worse by the unreliability of the queen. The perils of ambition and high position were sometimes dreadful. On 4 April 1578 the earl of Bothwell, Mary Stuart’s tempestuous husband, died; he ended his days raving, while tied to a pillar in the dungeons of Dragsholm Castle in Denmark. His mummified body could until 1976 be seen in a church close to the castle.

The queen was prone to ailments in this period. At the age of forty-five she was once more subject to the leg ulcer that had afflicted her eight years before. In the autumn of the year she suffered from what John Dee called a ‘fit’ that lasted for four hours; on the following day a ‘sore fit’ lasted for three hours. The nature of these fits is unknown but they were described as ‘grievous pangs and pains by reason of the ache and the rheum’. In December she was beset by toothache that was so painful that it kept her without sleep for forty-eight hours. A meeting of the privy council was called to consider the matter, and a tooth-drawer named Fenatus outlined the safest method of removing the offending tooth.

The councillors waited on the queen, together with a surgeon who would perform the operation. Elizabeth herself was fearful and drew back from the ordeal. The bishop of London then stepped forward and volunteered to calm her nerves by losing one of his own few remaining teeth. The surgeon extracted it without the least sign of distress on the bishop’s part and, following his example, the queen submitted with good grace.

The negotiations with Anjou were conducted with even more fervour. Despite the fits and the ulcer her doctors ‘foresaw no difficulty’ in her successfully bearing a child. At the beginning of 1579 the duke’s envoy, Jean de Simier, arrived at court with an entourage of sixty gentlemen; he was perhaps not himself the model of a courtier, having recently murdered his brother for an affair with his wife, but Elizabeth was charmed by him. She called him ‘Monkey’ and ‘the most beautiful of my beasts’. She gave a court ball in his honour and lingered in his company until it might have seemed that Simier himself was the proper suitor. He was even admitted into the royal bedchamber, where he claimed her nightcap as a love token for his master.

The earl of Leicester was violently opposed to the proposed marriage and accused Simier of practising the black arts of enchantment upon the queen. Even the sermons at court were directed against the French connection, and on the first Sunday of Lent a preacher invoked the evil example of the queen’s half-sister, Mary, and proclaimed that ‘marriages with foreigners would only result in ruin to the country’; Elizabeth stormed out of the royal chapel.

In this year John Stubbs composed a violently anti-Gallican tract, The discovery of a gaping gulf, which accused certain evil ‘flatterers’ and ‘politics’ of espousing the interests of the French court ‘where Machiavelli is their new testament and atheism their religion’. He described the proposed union as a ‘contrary coupling’ and an ‘immoral union’ like that of a cleanly ox with an uncleanly ass; the danger of a papist heir was too great to be endured. Elizabeth was in any case too old to bear children, so the marriage was without purpose. The pamphlet was formally burned in the kitchen stove of Stationers’ Hall, but Stubbs was destined for further punishment. He was tried at Westminster and was found guilty of ‘seditious writing’. The queen had wished for the death penalty, but was persuaded that the punishment was too extreme. Instead it was decreed that the offender should lose his right hand. Just before the sentence was carried out he cried ‘My calamity is at hand’, one of the few occasions when a pun has accompanied a violent assault. When the right hand was severed Stubbs took off his hat with his left hand and called out ‘God save the queen!’ before fainting.

Another incident more closely touched Elizabeth. When she and Simier were sailing upon the Thames in the royal barge, one of her bargemen was wounded by a shot from another boat in the river; immediate hysteria followed, with fears of an assassination plot directed against Simier or even against the sovereign herself. Yet it proved to be an accident, and Elizabeth pardoned the innocent perpetrator with the words that ‘she would believe nothing of her people which parents would not believe of their children’.

The young Anjou himself arrived in the middle of August, so early in the day that he roused Simier from his bed. The duke was eager to begin his courtship at once, but Simier persuaded him to rest. The envoy wrote a letter to the queen, however, in which he explained how he soon ‘got him between the sheets, and I wish to God you were with him there as he could then with greater ease convey his thoughts to you’. Anjou was not yet officially in the country and at a court ball in the following week he was concealed behind an arras; the queen danced and made a number of gestures towards him that the courtiers pretended not to notice. He was gone four days later, on hearing of the death of a close friend, but he had made an impression. She called him her grenouille or ‘frog’.

A parliament was due to meet in October, but the queen prorogued it in order to avoid unseemly debate on the matter of her marriage; she was accustomed to the meddling of Lords and Commons, but on this occasion declined to encourage it. Instead she assembled her council in solemn session for the purpose of giving advice; in fact the councillors sat for several days, and on one occasion remained in the council chamber from eight in the morning until seven in the evening without stirring from the room. They were deeply divided, with seven of them against the marriage and five for it; so they attended the queen, and asked for her real opinion on the matter. Only then could they resolve the issue.

Elizabeth burst into tears. She had wanted them to arrive at a definite decision in favour of the marriage, but now she was once more lost in uncertainty. She defended the idea of her union with Anjou and later that day argued cogently on its merits. But she knew well enough that it divided the country just as surely as it divided the council; without the full support of her councillors, moreover, it would be very difficult to gain the acquiescence of a more stridently Protestant parliament. That parliament itself was prorogued for a further three months, but not without much hesitation and indecision. She even signed the articles of marriage, with a proviso that she had two months in which to win over her subjects or give up the attempt.

It seems likely that her tears in front of her councillors were genuine, and that they were evidence of her frustration and unhappiness; her last chance of a married life had been snatched from her. In this period a portrait of her, commissioned by Christopher Hatton and attributed to Quentin Metsys, depicts her beside a pillar that is decorated with medallions of Dido and Aeneas from Virgil’s Aeneid. On her other side stands a globe, displaying the maritime ventures of the English. The moral is clear enough. Just as Aeneas must desert Dido in order to fulfil his imperial destiny, so the queen must forfeit the love of Anjou to establish her own empire. This was the time when complex allegorical portraits of the queen, in which virginity and empire stood in equipoise, began to appear. Between 1579 and 1583 no fewer than eleven ‘sieve’ paintings of the queen were finished; the sieve was a symbol of virginity. The perpetually youthful and unassailable queen was thus the emblem of a vigorous and invincible body politic.

Her natural frustrations, however, may have taken a peculiar form. She was incensed that certain of her subjects dared to match the height and dimensions of the royal ruff, at the neck of a shirt or chemise; so an Act of Parliament was passed that permitted certain officers of the court to stand at street corners and, brandishing a pair of shears, to clip all ruffs above the permitted size. She also forbade the rapiers of gentlemen to exceed a certain length. Her own tastes could still be exotic. She purchased six Hungarian horses, to draw the royal coach, before dyeing their manes and tails bright orange.

The English chronicler Raphael Holinshed has another story about the ruffs of 1580 that throws a curious light on the period. A Sussex boy, of eleven years, lay in a trance for ten days; when he awoke he had acquired the character of a divine or moralist. He rebuked a serving man for wearing ‘great and monstrous’ ruffs about his neck, saying that ‘it were better for him to put on sackcloth and ashes than to prank himself up like the devil’s darling’; whereupon the servant wept, took out a knife and tore the ruff from his neck before cutting it into pieces.

In the first week of April 1580, a powerful earthquake shook the whole of south-eastern England; the citizens of London ran from their houses into the streets, in panic fear, while some of the cliffs at Dover were dislodged and fell into the sea. A pinnacle tumbled from Westminster Abbey, and two children were killed by stones dislodged from the roof of Christ’s Hospital. Thomas Churchyard wrote, in a contemporaneous pamphlet, that ‘wonderful motion and trembling of the earth shook London and Churches, Pallaces, houses, and other buildings did so quiver and shake, that such as were then present in the same were tossed too and fro as they stoode, and others, as they sate on seates, driven off their places’. It was supposed to be a sign of divine retribution on a luxurious and wasteful people.

This was the period, in the spring and early summer of the year, when the first Jesuits arrived in England on their mission to maintain, if not to restore, the old faith. They came six years after the first Catholic priests had re-entered the country, but the Jesuits were perhaps more determined. An order, after all, established precisely to combat the Reformation, they were as disciplined as they were devout, with an overpowering desire to proselytize their faith; they became known as ‘the black horsemen of the pope’.

Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons, together with seven other colleagues, were among the first to return. Campion had studied at the English College in Douai, but his earlier education had been more impressive. He had been a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and such were his gifts of scholarship and oratory that he was chosen to welcome the queen on her visit to that university in 1569. He gained the patronage of both Leicester and Lord Burghley, and seemed likely to gain preferment in the established Church; he was considered likely to be one day archbishop of Canterbury.

Yet he suffered from what he called ‘remorse of conscience and detestation of mind’, as a result of which he returned to his own old faith; he fled to Douai where he received the Eucharist and was reconciled to the Catholic communion. He was, therefore, an able and worthy representative of the cause. He had friends, and acquaintances, at Westminster; he may even have had secret friends in the queen’s council.

He was of course in danger, since he was mixing with those who detested Elizabeth as a heretic and favoured the cause of Mary Stuart. Yet the peril was part of the enterprise; it had occurred to his superior, William Allen, that the Catholics of England might be stirred out of their complacence by the spectacle of burnings or worse. Campion was ordered to refrain from any discussion of politics and to say nothing injurious to the queen. He was to concentrate solely on religious matters so that, if he died for the faith, he would die as a martyr rather than a traitor.

It was not so easy, however, to contain the doubts and desires of the English Catholics. Some papers were scattered in the streets of London, declaring Elizabeth to be a schismatic and unlawful queen. The council thereupon reissued the statutes against Catholics. A gentleman caught hearing Mass would be imprisoned. Any English family found to be harbouring Jesuit priests would be prosecuted for maintaining rebels. The problem was compounded when a detachment of Catholic soldiers from Italy, under a Spanish general, landed in Ireland; it was considered to be the likely preparation for an invasion commanded by the king of Spain. It was also widely reported that the pope had acquiesced in plans for the assassination of the queen.

Walsingham, the catcher of spies, now became the hunter of Jesuits. By the end of the year, six or seven young Jesuits had been arrested and taken to the Tower. It is said that, to this day, no dog will enter the Salt Tower where they were imprisoned. On the walls of that tower were engraved a pierced heart, hand and foot as a symbol of the wounds of Jesus together with a cross and an ‘H’ that are the emblem of the Jesuits. After a time the prisoners were led to the rack which was housed in a vaulted dungeon beneath the armoury. Which gentlemen had welcomed them? Where were their leaders concealed? Every turning of the winch increased their agony.

Yet Parsons and Campion were still at large, and more Jesuits were returning to England. They landed secretly at night, avoiding any dwellings and even barking dogs; they spent the first night in the woods, whatever the weather, and at daybreak they separated and made their own way. They avoided the high roads, where strangers might question them. They might be disguised as gentlemen, or as military captains, or as journeymen. One of them, Father Gerard, cut across the fields and asked anyone he met if they had seen his escaped falcon.

A secret printing press was established in Stonor Park, at Henley-on-Thames, where the printers dressed up as gentlemen – complete with swords and ruffs – to disguise their occupation. It is from the Jesuits that the word ‘propaganda’ comes. Campion and Parsons went on a tour of the country, visiting most of the shires where they preached and administered the sacraments; they were welcomed by gentlemen and noblemen in every place to which they travelled. They generally stayed only one night, for fear of discovery.

In the summer of 1581 Parsons described the danger to a fellow priest. ‘Sometimes,’ he wrote, ‘when we are sitting merrily at table, talking familiarly about points of religion (for our talk is mostly of matters of this sort), there comes the insistent rapping at the door we associate with the constables; all start up and listen, hearts beating, like deer who hear the hunters’ halloo; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God in a brief moment of prayer; not a word is spoken, not a sound is heard, until the servant comes in to say what it is. If it is nothing, we laugh – all the more merrily because of our fright.’

‘The enemy sleeps not,’ Sir Walter Mildmay told the Commons on behalf of the council. ‘A sort of hypocrites, Jesuits and vagrant friars, have come into the realm to stir sedition, and many of those who used to come to church have fallen back and refused to attend … it is time to look more strictly to them.’ Campion was for a time concealed in London. He often visited a friend who lived along the road to Harrow and on his walk there he would pass the gallows at Tyburn; whenever he passed by, he touched his hat to the machine that might one day destroy him.

In the summer of 1581 he was discovered within a secret ‘priest’s hole’ in a manor house at Lyford, near Abingdon. He was taken to London, still wearing his lay disguise of a buff jerkin and velvet hose; his feathered cap was put on his head, and his legs were tied beneath the belly of a horse. On his head a sign was fastened, ‘Campion, the seditious Jesuit’, and he rode through crowds of jeering spectators to find his place in the dungeon of Little Ease in the Tower; with dimensions of just 4 square feet this chamber was itself a form of torture.

On the following day the earl of Leicester sent for him, and on being taken into a private chamber Campion found himself in the presence of the queen. She remembered the learned young man whom she had met and was determined, if possible, to save his life. She asked him whether he regarded her as his lawful sovereign; to which proposition he assented. The pope had permitted this. She then asked him if the bishop of Rome could lawfully excommunicate her. He replied more equivocally, saying that such matters were beyond his judgement. He was sent back to the Tower and, on refusing to answer his interrogators, he was put on the rack for two successive days.

Torture had in previous centuries been applied only to those who refused to plead and were then slowly ‘pressed to death’, but in the reign of the Tudors it became a royal prerogative in cases of national safety or security. In 1580 Burghley himself wrote a short narrative in praise of the practice. The most notorious of the interrogators was Richard Topcliffe, a lawyer from Yorkshire who came to specialize in the refinements of torture upon priests. One Jesuit wrote from his prison cell that ‘the morrow after Simon and Jude’s day I was hanged at the wall from the ground, my manacles fast locked into a staple as high as I could reach upon a stool: the stool taken away where I hanged from a little after 8 o’clock in the morning till after 4 in the afternoon, without any ease or comfort at all, saving that Topcliffe came in and told me that the Spaniards were come into Southwark by our means: “For lo, do you not hear the drums” (for then the drums played in honour of the lord mayor). The next day after also I was hanged up an hour or two: such is the malicious minds of our adversaries.’ Any form of barbarity became known as a ‘topcliffian custom’ and ‘topcliffizare’ was the verb for hounding to ruin or death. It was said that there were men in the world who would drink blood as easily as beasts drank water.

Weak though Edmund Campion was from his treatment, he was not demoralized. He called for a public debate on matters of religion, and the chapel of the Tower was used as the chamber for a contest between him and two Protestant divines. They argued on three separate occasions but inevitably there was no settled conclusion. The matter was one concerning the stability of the realm rather than the truths of religion. He was tortured once more but, remaining defiant, he was sent for trial. He was brought to Westminster Hall, his limbs dislocated from the rack. He could not raise his arm to proclaim his response of ‘not guilty’; two of his fellow defendants held it up, and kissed the broken joint as they did so. There could only be one outcome. ‘We are charged with treason,’ Campion declared. ‘We are no traitors.’ He went on to say that ‘we are men dead to the world, and we travailed for the salvation of souls’.

Campion, and fourteen other Jesuits, were condemned to death by the conventional punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering. On the first day of December he and two others were led from the Tower for their journey to Tyburn. It was noticed that Campion’s fingernails had been torn off by his torturers. When he came up to the gallows he declared that ‘we come here to die, but we are not traitors’. The ropes with which he met his death are preserved at Stonyhurst College. As the butchery commenced a drop of his blood spurted upon a spectator, Henry Walpole; Walpole was converted on the spot, and himself became a Jesuit. He, too, would meet the same fate at Tyburn.

It has been calculated that some 200 Catholics suffered death in the course of Elizabeth’s reign, among them 123 priests, compared with the 300 Protestant martyrs who perished during Mary’s much briefer rule. In the reign of Henry VIII 308 people were executed as a result of the Treason Act of 1534. The historian here often pauses to deliver a lament on human bigotry, but the temptation should be resisted. It is not possible to judge the behaviour of one century by the values of another. It was in any case a high crime to refuse to conform to the religious imperatives of the state.

An alternative to execution was found in incarceration, and a special prison was established for priests and Catholic laymen at Wisbech Castle on the Isle of Ely. It would in more recent times be described as an internment camp for approximately thirty-five prisoners. The conditions were not harsh, however; scholars were among the number, and Wisbech became a form of seminary. The ancient castle of Beaumaris, on the island of Anglesey, was another such centre. More conventional detention was also in place and it was said that ‘the prisons are so full of Catholics that there is no room for thieves’. When parliament assembled at the beginning of 1581 further measures were taken against them; the fine for recusancy was raised from 1 shilling each Sunday to £20 per month, two hundred times higher. Anyone attempting to absolve a subject from his or her allegiance to the queen was guilty of treason.

In this spirit the Cheapside Cross was assaulted, to ‘a great shout of people with joy’. It was considered to be a pagan idol from the dark days of superstition. On the night of 21 June 1581, certain young men ‘did then fasten ropes about the lowest images’ of the Cross but they could not dislodge them; they did take the picture of Christ, however, and struck off the arms of the Virgin Mary. The cross itself, on the top of the monument, was also pulled down.

The image of the cross could also be put to secular use. When builders were repairing or restoring parts of the palace at Whitehall, they painted red crosses on the new plaster. This was to prevent the common practice of pissing anywhere. It was believed that no one would dishonour the cross by urinating upon it.

The Jesuit missionaries claimed that they had made 140,000 converts; the figure may be slightly exaggerated, but in any case they were not converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. They represent those who were now ready to confess their adherence to the old faith, and of course they were considerably outnumbered by the ‘church papists’ whose Catholicism was disguised by their attendance at the orthodox services. It has been estimated, however ingeniously, that the country harboured some 200,000 Catholics; if that figure is correct, they made up some 5 per cent of the population.

It was not necessary to be a Catholic, however, to be named as a recusant. There were heretics of quite another colour. In 1581 Robert Browne established in Norwich the first religious organization that considered itself to be independent of the Elizabethan settlement. Its members became known indiscriminately as Brownists, Independents or Separatists; they rejected the established Church of England as unscriptural and were attached to the more severe forms of Puritan doctrine. Their churches became known as ‘gathered’ churches because they relied upon a gathering of people. The Brownists were as a result harried and persecuted by the authorities. They retreated from Norwich to Bury St Edmunds, and then fled overseas to Holland; those caught in England were likely to be imprisoned or hanged.

The proponents of another sectarian faith, the Familists or the Family of God, believed that a man or woman might be ‘godded with God’ and thus be responsible for a fresh incarnation. They rejected the notion of the Trinity and repudiated infant baptism; they refused to carry arms or to take oaths. Henry Barrowe, in 1581, left Gray’s Inn and retired to the country, in which retreat he formulated the creed known as Barrowism; he believed that the Elizabethan Church was polluted by the relics of popery, and that only complete separation from it could guarantee a true faith. These men and women were of truly heroic fortitude; they challenged all the principles of the society in which they lived, and were willing to endure the scorn and punishment of those whom they offended. No account of sixteenth-century England would be complete without them.

34

The great plot

The duke of Anjou had returned to England at the time of Campion’s arrest and trial. It might have been unfortunate timing for a Roman Catholic duke to be seeking the queen’s hand once more, but he was immune from such embarrassments. Anjou was on the tennis court, about to begin a game, when a French abbé approached him and asked him to intercede with the queen on Campion’s behalf. He hesitated for a moment and stroked his face; then he turned away and called out ‘Play!’

This was his last chance to win the game. He had already been appointed as sovereign of the Netherlands, as a result of his intervention against Spanish rule, but now he was after a larger prize. If he could also gain the crown of England his power might be a match for that of his brother, the French king, and even for Philip. Yet the queen was as irresolute as ever. He stayed for three months, after his arrival in the autumn of 1581, and there was much closeting and whispering. The French court painter arrived to execute a full-length portrait of the queen. ‘You must’, she said, ‘paint me with a veil over my face.’ Veils were, in these negotiations, in plentiful supply.

Anjou required money to pursue his campaign against Spain in the Netherlands; she promised him £60,000 but paid him £10,000. She wanted at all costs to stay clear of any explicit involvement whereby she might provoke war with Philip. Yet at the same time she wanted to alarm the Spanish king with the threat of an Anglo-French alliance, so that he might cease his meddling in Ireland. It was an infinitely difficult balancing act.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked the archbishop of York. ‘I am between Scylla and Charybdis. Anjou grants all that I ask. If I do not marry him he will be my enemy and if I do, I am no longer mistress within my own realm.’ She would eloquently announce her intention to marry, but it was believed that her sincerity could only be judged by the tone of her voice; if she spoke in a low and unimpassioned way, she was being serious. By this standard she was not being serious about Anjou. She was practising what the Spanish ambassador, Bernadino de Mendoza, called her ‘gypsy tricks’.

On one occasion the queen kissed the duke on the lips and promised in public to marry him, but many considered her to be acting a part. She may have made the espousal before witnesses as a way of conciliating the French court before making it clear that the opposition to the marriage, in the council and in the nation, was too powerful for her to withstand. The duke’s frustration was immense. At the end of 1581 he declared that, sooner than leave England without her, he would prefer that they both perished. The queen was alarmed and entreated him not to threaten ‘a poor old woman in her own kingdom’. This is reported by the Spanish ambassador.

‘No, no, Madame, you mistake; I meant no hurt to your blessed person. I meant only that I would sooner be cut in pieces than not marry you and so be laughed at by the world.’ With these words he broke down in tears, and Elizabeth was obliged to lend him her handkerchief. ‘Try to think of me,’ she said, ‘as a sister.’ Philip of Spain, to whom this drama was narrated, wrote ‘Ojo’ in the margin of the letter. This meant ‘Pay attention’ or ‘Look out!’

It was clear enough to all that Anjou had become something of an embarrassment in the English court. Elizabeth would not marry him. ‘I am an old woman,’ she told her courtiers, ‘to whom paternosters will suffice in place of nuptials.’ She was forty-nine years old. When in February 1582 he eventually parted from her at Canterbury, tears were plentiful. But it was said that she danced for joy in her private chamber.

The European imbroglio was further complicated by the ascension of Philip to the throne of Portugal; his navy was thus at a stroke greatly enlarged. Philip was already displeased with Elizabeth for the assaults of Sir Francis Drake upon Spanish ships, and for the plunder of Spanish treasure, in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. It was likely that the booty would eventually arrive in England and Philip ordered his ambassador to ‘advise me instantly when you hear the pirate has arrived’.

The merchants of London were anxious that their trade with Spain would be curtailed, but they were told by the privy council that Drake was a single adventurer and could not bring the wrath of Spain upon England. The queen invited the ambassador to a bearbaiting where, in the intervals, she discussed with him the affairs of Europe. Was it true that Philip had taken up 6,000 more seamen? ‘Ut quid tot sumptus?’ – ‘What can such an expense be for?’ Mendoza had a ready reply. ‘Nemo novit nisi cui Pater revelavit’ – ‘No man knows except he to whom the Father has revealed it.’ ‘Ah,’ the queen said, impressed by his Latin, ‘I see you have been something more than a light dragoon.’ Mendoza was Philip’s master of the horse.

The rumours of invasion and war were still circulating, and the fleet was being prepared at Chatham. Mendoza once more was received by the queen. ‘I found her in such alarm of his Majesty’s fleet, and so conscience-stricken by her own complicity [in the seizure of plunder], that when I entered her cabinet she bounded half a dozen paces from her sofa to receive me. Before I could say a word she enquired if I was come as a king-at-arms to declare war.’ He believed her to be ‘timid and pusillanimous’ in private, whatever her bravura in public.

Just as Philip helped to promote rebellion in Ireland, so Elizabeth decided to match him by fomenting dissent in his newly acquired kingdom of Portugal. ‘We think it good,’ she wrote, ‘for the king of Spain to be impeached both in Portugal and also in the Low Countries; whereto we shall be ready to give such indirect assistance as shall not be a cause of war.’ Covert hostilities, accompanied by effusive diplomatic gestures, were the order of the day.

Mary Stuart was of course still waiting in the wings, engaged in clandestine intercourse both with Madrid and with Rome; she was the likely successor to Elizabeth, and it was only natural for her to press her suit. But there was no great appetite for her rule, even among the Catholics. The Spanish ambassador told his master that ‘on no account should any declaration be made to them, and they should not even be sounded, as they are quite paralysed with fear, and no good end would be gained by doing so’. Only on the death of Elizabeth might an attempt be made. Even the faithful and favoured courtier Sir Christopher Hatton sent word that on the instant of his mistress’s demise he would ride to Sheffield, where Mary was imprisoned, and declare her to be queen.

In the summer of 1583 John Whitgift was appointed archbishop of Canterbury; unlike his predecessor, Edmund Grindal, he had set his face against the Puritan tendency that had been manifested at its extreme end by the Brownists and Barrowists. Walsingham’s secretary, Nicholas Faunt, himself of a Puritan persuasion, wrote that ‘the choice of that man at this time to be archbishop maketh me to think that the Lord is even determined to scourge his Church for their unthankfulness’. In his inaugural sermon, preached at Paul’s Cross in the centre of London, he inveighed against the three kinds of disobedience manifested by papists, Anabaptists and ‘our wayward and conceited persons’; in the latter class he would have placed the stricter type of Puritan. Faunt reported that Whitgift had launched all his bitterness and vehemence against ‘such as loved reformation’.

The archbishop promulgated six articles to which all of the clergy were obliged to assent, among them strict adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles and to the Book of Common Prayer; as a result of his order 200 ministers were suspended or obliged to resign. New laws were also set in place against Catholic recusants. He relied for his investigation and his discipline on the High Commission, an ecclesiastical court that worked swiftly and secretly in pursuit of heresy and schism, error and vice. It demanded an oath that obliged anyone brought before the court to answer all questions, in defiance of the principle that no one is obliged to accuse himself or herself. ‘This corporal oath’, wrote one Puritan, ‘is to inquire of our private speeches and conferences with our dearest and nearest friends …’

Those ‘conferences’ had a more precise meaning. The parish church in the village of Dedham, in Essex, was already known as a place for ‘schismatic sermons and preachings’. In the autumn of 1582 approximately twenty ministers of the neighbourhood organized an assembly or ‘conference’ in which a time was devoted to preaching and a time to scriptural exposition; parochial business was also discussed. Should the child of an unmarried couple be baptized? Should one of the ministers accept a chaplaincy in a great house?

The ‘members’ gathered for three hours on the first Monday of each month; they met in secret, moving from house to house in order to avoid discovery. They sometimes consulted their learned brethren at Cambridge, but they were in general completely separate from other churches. They became, however, an inspiration for other such conferences. ‘Let’s go to Dedham,’ the people of Ipswich said, ‘to get a little fire!’ This early assembly, therefore, can have some claim to shaping the Presbyterian movement that was to bear such unexpected fruit in the next century of English history. Neither Whitgift nor the High Commission proved an impediment.

Henry Barrow, the founder of the sect that bore his name, was himself summoned before the commission.

Lord Chancellor [pointing to Whitgift]: Who is that man?

Barrow: He is a monster, a miserable compound, I know not what to make [call] him; he is neither ecclesiastical nor civil, even that second beast spoken of in the Revelation.

Lord Treasurer: Where is that place, show it.

Ten years later Barrow would be executed for publishing seditious literature. Whitgift himself was implacable. When a Kentish delegation of ministers came to remonstrate with him on the severity of his measures he impugned them as ‘boys, babes, princocks, unlearned sots’. He shouted down one more assertive complainant with ‘thou boy, beardless boy, yesterday bird, new out of shell’.

Burghley, quietly sympathetic to the Puritan cause, remonstrated with Whitgift about his articles of examination which were ‘so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstances, as he thought the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their preys’. At a time when there was such a lack of learned clergy, and with the threat of resurgent Catholicism, he believed that the bishops ‘take a very ill and unadvised course in driving them from their cures’.

Whitgift’s methods, however, were entirely congenial to the queen; she called the archbishop ‘my little black husband’. She had been alarmed by the spread of preachers calling for more reform, and appreciated all of Whitgift’s efforts to curb nonconformity. The archbishop himself declared that she had given ‘straight charge’ for his policy. Whitgift, the first of what might be called the truly Elizabethan bishops, was eventually obliged to curb his attacks upon the more moderate of the Puritans; but he did succeed in imposing order and uniformity upon the Church, largely by removing the Catholics and the stricter Puritans from the embrace of the state religion.

Some of the clerics of a more severe persuasion often continued their ministry, for fear that their flock might otherwise be lost or scattered. We must, as one said, labour on ‘bearing so much as with a good conscience we may’. A text from Revelation was set up beside the royal arms in the parish church of Bury St Edmunds, with the words ‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold not hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ So much for Elizabeth.

When on Sunday 12 January 1583 a stand of the bear-pit in Paris Garden collapsed, killing many spectators, it was deemed to be a judgement of God on the profanity of London. In the summer of that year a comet appeared above the city and was supposed to be the portent of the death of a great person. Many pointed to the queen. She was in her palace at Richmond at the time. She ordered the windows to be thrown open so that she might more clearly see the ominous light. She called out ‘Jacta est alea’ – ‘The dice are thrown’.

In the following month an attempt was made upon her life. John Somerville resided with an old Catholic family, the Ardens of Park Hall in Warwickshire; he seems to have been of an excitable disposition and fervently supported the cause of Mary Stuart. There had been more than one plot devised against the queen on behalf of that lady, but Walsingham had managed to foil them all. Somerville began to speak of the queen as a witch and a spawn of the devil, and he told friends that he was riding to London to assassinate her; he hoped ‘to see her head set upon a pole, for she was a serpent and a viper’. He wore the emblem of the lamb of God as an amulet, and then set out for the capital. Touched by insanity, perhaps, he bragged to people on the road concerning his divine mission and word of his conduct reached London before he did; he was intercepted and taken to the Tower. He confessed to his intent upon the rack and at the same time incriminated his father-in-law, John Arden, and their house-priest. Arden was hanged at Tyburn, while Somerville managed to strangle himself in his cell; the priest agreed to act as a spy in other Catholic families.

At the same time another conspiracy had been formed against Elizabeth. Francis Throgmorton, of an old Cheshire family, owned a house in London at Paul’s Wharf; here he acted as an intermediary between Mary Stuart and the Spanish ambassador. He was often seen leaving the ambassador’s house by the secret agents of the Crown, and Walsingham waited for the right moment to arrest him and search his house. In the middle of writing a ciphered letter to Mary when the officers arrived, he managed to destroy the incriminating document. But other papers were found, among them a list of prominent English Catholics and the sketched plans of harbours suitable for the landing of a foreign force. A treatise in defence of the title of the queen of Scots was also seized together with ‘six or seven infamous libels against Her Majesty, printed beyond seas’.

Throgmorton had the opportunity to write a few words to the Spanish ambassador, in which he said that he had denied all knowledge of the writings and claimed that they had been planted in his house by one who wished to destroy him. He declared that he would be faithful and silent to the death, but he was sent to the Tower and to the persuasions of the rack. Elizabeth, faced with a serious conspiracy, agreed that he should be subject to ‘the pains’.

On his first racking he confessed nothing but, when he was tied to the frame for a second time, he broke down and confessed all the details of the plot. The founder of the Catholic League, Henry I, duke of Guise, had intended to land with an invasion force on the Sussex coast near Arundel; at which time the Catholic gentlemen and noblemen would rise up on behalf of Mary, queen of Scots. Philip of Spain ‘would bear half the charge of the enterprise’. Throgmorton also declared that Mary herself had known every detail of the plan. After he had made his confession, according to the official account, he collapsed in tears. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I have disclosed the secrets of her who was the dearest queen to me in the world …’ He was hanged a few months later, when his testimony was no longer of any use.

On the news of his arrest and confession many prominent Catholics fled the country; others were suspected and placed under arrest. It has been estimated that 11,000 were confined to prison cells or, at best, to their own houses. The Inns of Court, long considered to be a haven of papists, were visited; conformity of religion now became essential for all lawyers. The queen at once realized the extent of Spanish hostility against her. At any minute the duke of Guise might reach English shores with the forces of the Catholic League; the navy was sent to guard the coast in the Downs, the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Islands. Most of the fleet would be sent to the west, which faced the greatest danger of a Spanish invasion, but in the event of an attack from the Channel the enemy would be followed and confronted. Money was urgently needed to restore forts and garrisons; trenches would have to be dug ‘to impeach landing’. Burghley also wrote a note to himself, ‘to have regard to Sheffield’, by which he meant Sheffield Castle. That was now the home, or prison, of Mary.

It was here she remained, plotting and planning in her relatively comfortable confinement. Her principal purpose was to regain her freedom and to ascend to the thrones of Scotland and of England. In this, she was tenacious and resourceful. There were many, Walsingham and Burghley among them, who were waiting for the opportunity to destroy her. Elizabeth was not yet of their mind. It was suggested that she might now recognize Mary’s son, James, as the lawful king of Scotland. Walsingham also proposed an alliance with the Protestants of the Low Countries, in a situation where England needed all the allies it could find.

Some commissioners were sent to the queen of Scots. They found her in a fury, eager to tell once more the story of her wrongs ‘using bitter speeches of her misery’. One of the English delegation remarked, respectfully, that foreign observers believed her treatment to be one of ‘singular mercy’. The queen’s reply (here paraphrased) was royal: ‘Mercy? What had mercy to do with it? I am as much an absolute prince as her Majesty. I am not, and have never been, her inferior. I have been a queen from my cradle. I have been proclaimed queen of France, the greatest realm in Christendom. Mercy is for subjects. I am not a subject.’ The delegation reported that ‘all this was said with extreme choler’.

She calmed herself and went on to describe ‘her grief and her woeful estate’. She was younger than Elizabeth, she said, but suffering had made her look older. The leader of the delegation, Sir William Wade, then asked her about the plots and intrigues and conspiracies of which she was a part. ‘May I not ask my friends to help me? I have meant innocently and, if they have done wrong, they alone are to be blamed.’ Wade mentioned the proofs of her involvement. At which she flared out with ‘you are not of calling [rank] to reason with me’. Eventually peace was restored, and Mary sang to the English delegation. Yet she remained stubborn and defiant, convinced both of the justice of her cause and of her ultimate success. Any traveller in the neighbourhood of the castle was questioned, and no one could enter the stronghold without especial permission from the council. Whenever she rode out for the air, she was accompanied by an armed guard.

The prognostications became ever more gloomy on the news of the assassination, in the summer of 1584, of the leader of the Dutch Protestants. William of Nassau, prince of Orange, had been killed on the orders of Philip II. Who could doubt that Elizabeth would be next? The duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic League, had also become more dangerous. Elizabeth’s once determined suitor, the duke of Anjou, had died of a fever after a miserable failure in the Netherlands; when the queen heard news of his death, she cried for many days afterwards. She wore black for six months and put the court into mourning. ‘I am a widow woman,’ she told the French ambassador, ‘who has lost her husband.’ His comment was that she was ‘a princess who knows how to transform herself as suits her best’. It was more significant that Anjou’s demise left the royal succession to a Protestant, Henry of Navarre, and Guise concluded a treaty with Philip to prevent that possibility. They had also entered an alliance against Elizabeth.

In the autumn of the year the queen posed two questions to her council. Should she protect and defend the Low Countries from the tyranny of Spanish rule? And, if she decided so to do, ‘what shall she do to provide for her own surety against the king of Spain’s malice and forces?’ The majority of her councillors were in favour of intervention, but still she hesitated. She wanted the support and cooperation of the French king. Otherwise England would be utterly alone.

This was the moment when Burghley and Walsingham drew up a document that became known as the Bond of Association; those who subscribed to it gave a solemn oath that they would defend Elizabeth’s life and guarantee a Protestant succession. The signatories promised that they ‘would pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge’ anyone who threatened the queen. It was also declared that no ‘pretended successor by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed’ was to be spared. If Elizabeth were assassinated, Mary would be executed. It was a direct appeal to force. This was the time when portrait cameos of the queen were manufactured in quantity, creating a sacred image of majesty that would challenge those of the Virgin Mary on the continent.

Burghley went to further lengths to ensure that a Protestant would inherit the throne. He drew up a document proposing that, in the event of the queen’s death, a Grand Council would be called. This council would act as the governing body while at the same time summoning a parliament to consider the succession; since parliament was wholly Protestant, Catholics being excluded, their choice was not in doubt. ‘The government of the realm shall still continue in all respects,’ Burghley wrote in a memorandum. ‘This cannot be without an interreyne [interregnum] for some reasonable time.’ The queen was not happy with her principal minister. It was unpardonable of him to meddle in such matters and to question the principle of hereditary rule. To imagine the queen’s death was, in any case, itself an act of treason. It may have seemed to her that a group of males, with shared religious and ideological convictions, was springing up around her. That is why she preferred to see her councillors individually, or in twos and threes. It may also be the reason she often seemed to listen more attentively to foreign ambassadors than to her own men. The novel situation may serve to elucidate the latter part of her reign.

The parliament of November 1584 met in a state of some excitement. The members confirmed the details of the Bond of Association by passing an Act for the Queen’s Safety. The arrangements for the ‘interreyne’ were never discussed, and it is likely that Elizabeth’s severe displeasure prevented their being taken any further. The importance of the Bond of Association, however, was immediately emphasized at the beginning of 1585 in a further conspiracy against the queen’s life that was engineered by a curious double agent, William Parry, who was supposed to act as a spy against English Catholics. Instead he turned against his mistress and lay in wait in her garden at Richmond; eventually, when she appeared, he was so daunted by her majesty that he gave up the attempt. That is one story. Another records that he had gained an audience with the queen and came into her presence with a knife concealed in his shirt. Once more his nerve failed him.

Nevertheless he was seized before being questioned by Walsingham. He was dispatched to the Tower and afterwards sent to the gallows. ‘It makes all my joints to tremble,’ one member of parliament wrote after his arrest, ‘when I consider the loss of such a jewel [Elizabeth].’ Parry himself wrote a confession to the queen that ended on a tender note. ‘And so farewell, most gracious and the best natured and qualified Queen that ever lived in England. Remember your unfortunate Parry, overthrown by your hard hand. Amend that in the rest of your servants, for it is past with me if your grace be not greater than I look for. And last and ever, good madam, be good to your obedient Catholic servants. For the bad I speak not.’

Parliament had made one significant change to the Bond of Association; on the orders of Elizabeth herself, they had expressly exempted Mary’s son, James, from the threat of reprisals. At the same time the queen opened negotiations with the young man, with the prospect of her recognizing him as James VI of Scotland. This also implied that he might have some claim to the English throne in the event of her death. Of course James had already inherited the crown of Scotland, since at the age of thirteen months he had ascended the throne after the forced abdication of his mother. Yet the formal acceptance of his position by Elizabeth would immensely strengthen his rule. The queen herself would appreciate the support of the Protestant monarch in the event of Spanish intrigue or invasion.

James now wrote to his mother, assuring her that she would always be honoured with the title of ‘queen mother’. She fell into a rage. ‘I pray you to note,’ she wrote in reply, ‘I am your true and only queen. Do not insult me further with this title of queen mother … there is neither king nor queen in Scotland except me.’ She threatened to disinherit and to curse him if he signed any separate agreement with England, but that was precisely the decision he took. Mary herself was removed to the stricter confinement of Tutbury, where she might be able to reflect upon her diminished sovereignty. Soon after this a young Catholic priest was also confined in the castle, where after three weeks he managed to hang himself in his cell. The next morning Mary found him suspended in front of her own windows. She believed this to be a presage of her own death, and wrote once more to Elizabeth with a desperate plea for her life and liberty.

Her Catholic allies were meanwhile in retreat. Philip Howard, the earl of Arundel, had for a long time been suspected of recusancy; when finally he was privately reconciled to the Catholic Church he wrote a long letter to the queen in which he enumerated his woes and his failure to gain friends at court. He knew well enough the fate of his father, the fourth duke of Norfolk, who had been executed as a traitor. He had now come to that point where he must ‘consent either to the certain destruction of my body or the manifest endangering of my soul’. He had therefore decided to leave the realm without royal licence.

He gave the letter to a messenger and then proceeded to embark on a boat off the coast of Sussex. He did not know that his servants had been in the pay of the privy council, or that the master of the ship in which he travelled was also a spy of the government. He was followed by two ships and was obliged to surrender after a short fight. He was then taken to the Tower, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The arrest of Howard was followed by the death of Henry Percy, eighth earl of Northumberland; he had been consigned to the Tower after being implicated in the plot of Francis Throgmorton against the queen, and had remained for a year in his cell without trial. On the evening of 20 June 1585 he was found dead in his bed with three pellets in his heart. It was concluded that, in fear of the shame of public execution, he had determined to kill himself. If he did not suffer the death of a traitor, then at least his inheritance would be preserved. He was supposed to have cried out that ‘the bitch shall not have my estate’. Others believed, however, that he had been assassinated for want of evidence against him.

In the summer of 1585 Elizabeth finally signed a treaty with the Netherlands, pledging her support for their cause against the Spanish. She agreed to send 4,000 men, their wages paid for three months, on the understanding that she would eventually be recompensed. In return she had been given possession of the sea towns of Ostend and Sluys, Brielle and Flushing. A long declaration announced that ‘our next neighbours, the natural people of the Low Countries, being by long wars, and persecution of strange [foreign] nations there, lamentably afflicted, and in present danger to be brought into a perpetual servitude’ had to be assisted.

The agreement came too late, however, to save Antwerp; the city had fallen to the duke of Parma three days before. In the previous months the duke had occupied Flanders and much of Brabant, while Bruges and Ghent had surrendered to him. The queen had finally come out into the open, however, after years of covert negotiation and secret alliances. Yet she did not wish to become queen of the Low Countries; that would open her to fresh dangers and fresh expense. She merely wished to uphold their liberties under Spanish rule. She would be their protector rather than their sovereign.

In the early autumn of the same year she also helped to finance Sir Francis Drake in a voyage to the West Indies, with the purpose of rifling Spanish vessels and Spanish-held towns of the region. His force numbered twenty-nine ships and 2,300 men. He captured St Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, with the pillage from that town filling the holds of his vessels. He then went on to Cartagena, on the Spanish Main, and held it to ransom for 107,000 ducats. He was about to set sail for Panama, when an epidemic of yellow fever among his men prevented him.

The conflicts of the Old World had therefore been transferred to the New and, although it would be anachronistic to speak of a global strategy, there is no doubt that Drake and his fellow adventurers knew that Philip might be seriously weakened in the Netherlands by the capture of his shipments of gold. It was said by Philip’s secretary, at the time of the Armada, that the object of the invasion was ‘no less the security of the Indies than the recovery of the Netherlands’. Open warfare with Spain, therefore, could not now be indefinitely delayed. The new pope, Sixtus V, declared that Elizabeth ‘is certainly a great queen, and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the empire, by all.’ In this year Burghley commissioned a painting of the queen, known as the ‘Ermine’ portrait, which displays a sword placed beside her on a table. As lord treasurer, he was in charge of the finances of war.

On 17 November 1585, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the proclamation of her sovereignty, the queen rode in a gold coach through London; it was an open coach but it carried a canopy embroidered with gold and pearls. She was dressed entirely in white, and at frequent intervals she would call out ‘God save my people!’ The people knelt as she passed and replied ‘God save your Grace’. Behind the coach rode the earl of Leicester, while it was preceded by Burghley and Walsingham. Leicester and Burghley had been with Elizabeth from the beginning of her reign, while Walsingham had joined them eleven years later. She exemplified her motto ‘semper eadem’ – ‘always the same’.

In the following month the earl of Leicester was sent to the Low Countries as her lieutenant general. He was eagerly awaited as the ‘new messiah’, one of the leaders of the international Protestant cause, and so great were the expectations that he was offered the post of governor-general; much to the queen’s fury and consternation, he accepted the title. When at the beginning of 1586 he was confirmed as ‘absolute governor’ she became incandescent with rage. It would seem to the world that she was indeed queen and that Leicester was her viceroy; her ‘storms’ and ‘great oaths’ alarmed her councillors, some of whom she accused of being part of the plot to undermine her purposes. She threatened to make peace with the duke of Parma, thus emasculating Leicester in turn.

When her choler had subsided she left Leicester in command of the English forces, in alliance with those of the Netherlands; but his campaign did not prosper. He found it hard to coordinate the counsels of the allies, and was obliged to request more money and more men. One commander wrote to Burghley that ‘the havoc which has been made of the soldiers is lamentable, which must be suppliedand enlarged presently before my Lord can do anything’. He could not contain the quarrels between the various states, such as Holland and Zeeland, nor could he satisfy their suspicions of his actions. Although he had been warned by Walsingham to beware ‘charges’, he increased the pay of his officers (including his own) and overlooked the problems of bribery and general corruption. The war had led also to a marked diminution of English exports, with the consequent loss of employment; the situation was exacerbated by a disastrous harvest in 1586 that led directly to malnutrition, disease and death. When we turn from the affairs of the great to the smaller lives of England, we often find misery and discontent.

It was no wonder, in any case, that the queen had grown alarmed at the costs of conflict. She was fundamentally averse to war; she had no skill or interest in it. It was rumoured now that she would make peace with Spain, and recall Leicester from the ill-starred enterprise; it was also reported that one of the conditions of that peace was her surrender of the sea-towns to Philip II. Religion was not to be a difficulty. If Spain could guarantee the Low Countries their ‘ancient liberties’, it would be enough. Burghley believed that any peace granted on these terms would be a lasting dishonour. He told her that he wished to resign his office and retire into private life; she was for the moment moved by him, but then continued on the course which he described as ‘very absurd and perilous’. Walsingham agreed with him, fearing that everyone would say that ‘there is no court in the world so odious and uncertain in its dealings as ours’. So with the council at variance, and Elizabeth herself uncertain, the war in the Low Countries continued. The whole ill-starred enterprise was rendered more dramatic by the death of Sir Philip Sidney after a skirmish at the siege of Zutphen. He had taken off his leg armour, in heroic emulation of a fellow soldier, but then received the arrow wound that killed him; it was an example of the romance and bravado that characterized him. ‘I am weary,’ Leicester wrote to Walsingham, ‘indeed I am weary, Mr Secretary.’

By the summer of 1586, however, the queen was once more on intimate terms with her favourite. In one letter she reveals her affection for him with ‘Rob: I am afraid you will suppose from my wandering writings that midsummer moon hath taken possession of my brains this month.’ She concluded with ‘now I will end that do imagine I talk still with you and therefore loathly say ô ô [her symbol for Eyes, his nickname] though ever I pray God bless you from all harm and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and cares. As you know, ever the same, E.R.’ Her moods were as always mercurial and mysterious.

With Elizabeth braving the wrath of Spain, however, this was a time of maximum peril. She feared the machinations of Mary, and in February 1586 it was reported in the French court that she had fainted; it was said that she had remained unconscious for two hours. In the early summer of that year she had been walking to the royal chapel in stately progress when suddenly she was ‘overcome by a shock of fear’; she went back to her apartments, according to a Spanish agent, ‘greatly to the wonder of those present’.

She was perhaps wiser than they knew. A conspiracy was even then being formed against her, guided by a Jesuit priest, John Ballard, and by Mary’s agent in Paris. They had courted a rich young Catholic, Anthony Babington, and he had in turn recruited six courtiers who at the appropriate moment would rise up and assassinate Elizabeth. Walsingham was, meanwhile, closely watching Mary. The queen of Scots was moved to another house, Chartley Manor. It can be said with some certainty that Cecil was happy to allow the conspiracy to develop, disorganized and chaotic as it was. It was to be hoped that Mary would enter a traitorous correspondence that would end her life. And so it proved. On 12 July Babington wrote to Mary Stuart outlining the plan for her liberation and for her ascension to the throne. They must choose a landing place for the invading Spanish troops. The ‘usurping competitor’ would then have to be ‘dispatched’, and he had nominated the men to undertake ‘that tragical execution’.

The letter had of course been diverted to Walsingham before it was sent on to Mary; he employed a code-breaker to help him decipher the clandestine correspondence. An elaborate scheme had been set up by the spymaster, by means of which a double agent had persuaded Mary to smuggle out letters concealed at the bottom of beer barrels. Mary pondered on her response to Babington. Her guard, Sir Amyas Paulet, wrote to Walsingham that ‘she could see plainly that her destruction was sought, and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness’. What, then, had she left to lose?

A few days later Mary replied to Babington’s message. She went through his plan in detail and wrote that ‘when all is ready, the six gentlemen must be set to work, and you will provide that on their design being accomplished, I may be myself rescued from this place’. Walsingham received this epistle, also, but before sending it on to its intended recipients his code-breaker forged a postscript in Mary’s hand asking for the names of the six assassins.

And then they waited, wanting to test the Scottish queen to destruction. Elizabeth now knew of the plot and had been told that ‘the beast was to be removed that troubled the world’. It is said that Babington was so sanguine of his chances that he commissioned a portrait of himself in the company of the six courtiers. They and their supporters were seen drinking and eating in taverns, quite unaware that they were being followed. In August 1586, Walsingham ordered that John Ballard be arrested on the charge of being a covert priest. The others, taking fright, fled London; yet fourteen were arrested. Babington, his face ‘sullied with the rind of green walnuts’, was found concealed in St John’s Wood; 300 of the most prominent recusants in the north of England were then taken to London under guard.

One more significant conspirator remained. Mary Stuart was arrested and detained while her rooms at Chartley were searched. A key to sixty different ciphers was discovered, together with the lists of her supporters in England; there was, for example, a record of all the nobles who had pledged allegiance to her. This list was shown to Elizabeth who, after reading it, burned it. ‘Video taceoque,’ she said. ‘I see and I am silent.’

The conspirators were slaughtered in the usual manner of traitors, Babington being one of the first. But one notable plotter had not yet been brought to the scaffold. It was clear enough now that Mary had been involved in schemes against the queen’s throne, and therefore the queen’s life, for the past eighteen years. In the summer of this year, by the Treaty of Berwick, Elizabeth and James VI of Scotland were bound in a permanent embrace; the two monarchs agreed to maintain the Protestant religion in their separate realms, and to help each other in the event of an invasion. James also received a pension of £4,000 per year and it was clear enough that he was the favourite to succeed to the English throne. His mother was no longer considered. What was to be her fate now?

35

The dead cannot bite

When Mary Stuart was led back to Chartley Manor, after her most secret documents had been taken from her apartment, she was greeted by a crowd of beggars. ‘I have nothing for you,’ she cried out to them, ‘I am a beggar as well as you. All is taken from me.’ She turned to her escort and, weeping, said to them ‘Good gentlemen, I am not witting or privy to anything intended against the queen.’ Many had good reason to doubt that. Her gaoler, Paulet, was asked to keep her in as much isolation as possible. The privy council met each day at Windsor to ponder the situation, but it seemed inevitable that the queen of Scots would be obliged to stand trial for her intrigue against Elizabeth. In the autumn of 1586, in her forty-third year, she was taken from Chartley to Fotheringhay Castle.

Mary had at first protested against her removal. Since she was not an English subject, she could not be brought before the jurisdiction of an English court. To her protest Elizabeth sent a firm reply that ‘you have in various ways and manners attempted to take my life and to bring my kingdom to destruction by bloodshed. These treasons will be proved to you and all made manifest. It is my will that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I myself were present … Act plainly without reserve and you will then sooner be able to obtain favour of me.’

Burghley made a rough sketch of the chamber of presence at Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary was tried on 14 and 15 October. The earls, barons and privy councillors – those who would act as judges in the matter – were seated around the walls. Mary was given a chair in the middle of the hall, immediately opposite a throne beneath a cloth of estate; the empty throne represented the absent queen. It was of course a trial for her life, the parliamentary Act for the Queen’s Safety having declared that any attempt to injure the queen was to be ‘pursued to the death by all the Queen’s subjects’. Mary knew this well enough, and declared to the duke of Guise that she was ready to die in the cause of her religion. She would not be a murderer, but a martyr. In that respect her death would be sanctified.

She may in any case have secretly relied upon Elizabeth’s reluctance to impose upon her the extreme penalty; that was why the English queen held out the possibility of ‘favour’ to her. The lawyers had no precedent for her case; she was an anointed queen who did not recognize the court to which she had been taken. She was also a rightful claimant to the English crown. So she had some cause for confidence. She relied, too, upon her personal presence before her judges. She had a sharp wit and a ready tongue; she also had the aura of majesty. She would not easily be put out of countenance. Burghley and a small party of the commissioners went to her privy chamber at Fotheringhay. ‘I am an absolute queen,’ she told them. She would not bargain with them. ‘My mind is not yet dejected, neither will I sink under my calamity.’ Then she warned them to ‘remember that the theatre of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of England’. She was reminding them that the Catholic princes of Europe might revenge her death.

She entered the chamber of presence, on the morning of 14 October, in a gown of black velvet and sat down upon the seat offered to her: the commissioners took off their hats as a mark of respect to her rank. She was described as a ‘big-made’ woman with a face ‘full and fat, double-chinned and hazel-eyed’; after years of imprisonment, her plumpness was only to be expected. The charges against her were read out, in which she was accused of conspiring for the destruction of the queen and her country. She replied that she had come to England as a suppliant, but had been held in confinement ever since. She was an anointed queen and could be judged by no earthly tribunal. She was, however, ready to refute any falsehoods made against her. Babington’s letters to her were then read aloud. ‘It may be that Babington wrote these letters,’ she replied, ‘but let it be proved that I received them.’ The confessions of her two private secretaries were also recited, in which they confirmed her complicity in the writing of ciphered letters. Once more Mary simply repeated her denials of any involvement in a conspiracy against the queen. She also claimed that the word of a prince could not be challenged. She was entirely calm and self-possessed; Paulet wrote to Walsingham that ‘she was utterly void of all fear of harm’.

It was clear to all others that she could not be allowed to evade the charge. On the second and final day of the trial, Burghley told her that she should not complain of her imprisonment. Only her own mistakes had kept her in confinement. ‘Ah,’ she told him, ‘I see that you are my adversary.’ ‘Yes, I am adversary to Queen Elizabeth’s adversaries.’ Burghley then prorogued the commission for ten days, on the express command of the queen. She did not wish to be seen to rush to judgment.

The commissioners met in the Star Chamber at Westminster on 25 October, where, in the absence of Mary, they reviewed the evidence. The queen of Scots was then found guilty. When she received the news, Elizabeth knelt down in prayer for fifteen minutes. She demurred at any public declaration. She was not yet certain of her next move. When Mary heard the verdict she lifted up her eyes to heaven and thanked God for it. The stage was set for her final scene.

When parliament assembled four days later, the Lords and the Commons bayed for Mary’s blood. Burghley had so arranged matters that it rang with accusations against her. On 3 November one of the queen’s favourites, Sir Christopher Hatton, denounced the practices of Mary as ‘most filthy and detestable’. A commission of the Lords and Commons was appointed, while at the same time a petition for her execution was drawn up. After the queen had heard it, in her chamber of presence, she responded very carefully. She warned those assembled that ‘we princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed’. Just as Mary had warned the commissioners about the possibility of the vengeance of Catholic princes, so now Elizabeth warned her parliament that there were large matters at stake. If she and Mary had been only milkmaids, ‘with pails on our arms’, she would not consent to her death in the same circumstances. But the queen of Scots had her ‘favourers’ in a pattern of alliances and interests that were ready to act against England; it was not the person of Mary, but what she represented, that threatened the country.

On 24 November Elizabeth once more prevaricated with them. ‘I have strived more this day, than ever in my life,’ she told them, ‘whether I should speak or use silence.’ As for their petition ‘I shall pray you for this present, to content yourselves to an answer without answer; your judgement I condemn not, neither do I mistake your reasons, but pray you to accept my thankfulness, excuse my doubtfulness, and take in good part my answer answerless …’ She allowed her speech to be published, in a copy approved by her.

The queen had indeed fallen into agonies over the decision. It was whispered to her that ‘the dead cannot bite’, but did she have the right to execute an anointed queen? Could she execute her cousin? The kings of France and Scotland, near to Mary in blood, were eager to rescue her from death; she had, after all, once worn the crown of France and was the mother of the Scottish sovereign. Philip of Spain had the highest interest in her as a Catholic princess and, however remote the chance, still a potential successor to Elizabeth. It was also possible that her execution would dissolve the bonds that held together the Protestants and Catholics of England in a frail unity. Might her death precipitate the civil war that was always to be feared? So Elizabeth told the Lords and Commons that ‘I am not so void of judgement as not to see mine own peril, nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat’. Her dilemma could not have been better expressed. William Camden, Elizabeth’s first historian, relates that she sat many times ‘melancholic and mute’. Two phrases occurred to her: Aut fer, aut feri – ‘Bear with her or smite her’ – and Ne feriare, feri – ‘Strike lest thou be stricken’.

In the first week of December the news of Mary’s guilt was finally proclaimed in London to the sound of trumpets. Bonfires were lit in the streets and the church bells tolled for twenty-four hours. After the delivery of the verdict the chair of state, and the canopy above it, was removed from her. Writing to Scotland, she said that the act was ‘to signify that I was a dead woman, deprived of the honours and dignity of a queen’. She feared that, according to the articles of the Bond of Association, any loyal Englishman had the duty to kill her. This may also have been the private wish of the queen, who would thereby be relieved of the responsibility of ordering her execution. So in these final weeks Mary went in constant fear of assassination. In a last letter to Elizabeth she requested that her corpse be taken to France, where she might lie beside her mother, Mary of Guise, at the convent of Saint-Pierre at Rheims.

Parliament had reassembled on 2 December, two days before the reading of the proclamation, but now Elizabeth prorogued it until the middle of February. She wanted ten weeks to steady her nerve for the final decision. Rumours and counter-rumours flew around London in January 1587; it was whispered that Mary had escaped confinement, and that the Spaniards had launched an invasion. The council may have encouraged such false reports, however, in order to force Elizabeth’s hand. A ‘plot’ was revealed to Walsingham, involving a poisoned saddle to be given to Elizabeth; the enterprise is likely to have been concocted further to frighten the queen. She could afford no more delay; the feelings of the country could not with impunity be ignored. All of her councillors declared that Mary must be executed.

At the beginning of February the queen was at Greenwich. She asked her secretary, Sir William Davison, to carry to her the warrant for Mary’s execution. He brought it to her chamber, mixed with other papers. She commented to him on the brightness of the morning, and signed the papers given to her without paying any particular attention to the warrant. But then she mentioned it to him. She had delayed for so long in the matter to demonstrate her unwillingness to act against Mary. Was he not sorry to see such a paper signed? He replied that it was best that the guilty should suffer before the innocent.

Elizabeth then told him to get the warrant sealed by the chancellor as quickly and as quietly as possible; it was then to be sent, without proclamation of any kind, to the commissioners. She asked him to inform Walsingham, who was then lying sick; the grief, she said sarcastically, would probably kill him. Davison was about to leave her presence when she called him back. What if a loyal subject, a member of the Bond of Association, would commit the deed? She mentioned two such subjects, one of whom was Mary’s gaoler, Amyas Paulet. By these means she might be able to avoid censure and the unfavourable attention of rival powers. She did not wish to incur the guilt of regicide. She asked Davison to raise the matter with Walsingham; he agreed reluctantly to do so but told her that it was a labour lost. No official would contemplate such an act without the queen’s express commandment.

Burghley summoned the council and informed his colleagues that Elizabeth had at last signed the warrant. It was now necessary to act secretly and swiftly. The warrant was quickly on its way to Fotheringhay, and the necessary letters were sent to the principal commissioners. Elizabeth did not mention the matter. She asked no questions. When she read Paulet’s response to her letter, refusing her request to kill Mary without a warrant, she exploded in rage; she called him a ‘precise’ fellow who pledged himself to her but would do nothing to protect her safety.

Her caution and her patience, two days later, had worn thin. Had Davison expedited the matter? Was the warrant sealed? Davison, in his own narrative, described her as ‘swearing a great oath, it was a shame for them all that it was not already done’. Mary’s self-confidence had returned. She had sent another letter to Elizabeth protesting her innocence and asking for a private interview; she received no reply but Leicester said that her letter ‘hath wrought tears’. On 4 February the principal executioner travelled to Fotheringhay Castle dressed as a serving man; the axe was concealed in his trunk. On Tuesday 7 February, the commissioners arrived at Fotheringhay and, when they were admitted into Mary’s presence, they informed her that they had received an instruction under the Great Seal; she was to be executed on the following morning.

She refused to believe them at first; then she became agitated. She called for her physician and began to discuss money owed to her in France. At that point she broke down. She asked to see her Catholic chaplain, but the commissioners did not want to turn her execution into the martyrdom she so much wished for; instead they offered her the presence of a Protestant dean. She sent a note to her confessor and asked him to pray for her that night; in the morning, when she was led to her death, he might see her and bless her.

At eight o’clock, on the morning of 8 February, the provost-marshal of Fotheringhay Castle knocked on the door of her apartments; there was no response at first, prompting fears that the queen of Scots had taken her own life. Suicide was a mortal sin, however, and Mary did not wish to stain her personal glory. The door was opened. She stood on the threshold, wearing a robe and jacket of black satin trimmed with velvet. Her hair was arranged in a coif; over her head, and falling over her back, was a white silk veil. A crucifix of gold hung from her neck. In her hand she held another crucifix of ivory.

As she passed into the chamber of presence, where she had been tried, the master of her household knelt and wept. ‘Melville,’ she told him, ‘you should rejoice rather than weep that the end of my troubles is come. Tell my friends I die a true Catholic.’ She asked for her chaplain; he had been forbidden to attend, for fear of some religious demonstration. Then she looked around for her women. They also had been kept back as a precaution against unseemly scenes; they might scream, or faint. Yet Mary needed her courtiers to send an authentic account of her death to her admirers, at home and abroad; in the end it was agreed that she could choose six of her closest followers to attend her. ‘Allons donc,’ she told them when they were assembled. ‘Let us go then.’ She descended the staircase to the great hall.

The hall had been cleared of its furniture, and at the upper end stood the scaffold, 12 feet square and 2½ feet in height; it was covered with a black cloth, and railed. A black cushion had been placed before it, together with a black chair. The axe had been put against the rail. A wood fire blazed in the chimney. Present in the hall were 300 knights and gentlemen of the neighbourhood, to witness the memorable occasion, and thousands had gathered outside the castle. The news of her imminent execution had soon spread.

Quite calm and giving no sign of fear, she sat down in the chair made ready for her, in front of the block, and listened to the reading of the warrant against her. The earl of Shrewsbury approached her. ‘Madam, you hear what we are commanded to do.’

‘You will do your duty.’ She then prepared herself to kneel and to pray, when the dean of Peterborough tried to forestall her; but he stuttered his words. ‘Mr Dean, I am a Catholic, and must die a Catholic. It is useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers will avail me but little.’ There was a slight altercation. When she knelt down he began to call out an English prayer in which the assembly joined. So she recited in a loud voice the penitential psalms in Latin, striking the crucifix against her bosom.

The executioners, dressed in black, stepped forward to ask her forgiveness for the duties they were obliged to perform. ‘I forgive you,’ she told them, ‘for now I hope you shall end all my troubles.’ They began to arrange her dress for the final scene, and she looked at the earls close to her. ‘Truly, my lords, I never had such grooms waiting on me before.’ She laid her crucifix on the chair; the principal executioner took it up, as a prize of his office, but was commanded to leave it. Her silk veil was then removed, together with the black robe and the black jacket. Beneath them she was wearing underclothes of crimson velvet and crimson satin. She was now blood-red, the colour of the martyr.

She knelt upon the cushion as her ladies sobbed around her. ‘Adieu,’ she said, ‘au revoir.’ One of her entourage then bound her eyes with a handkerchief. She recited the psalm In te, Domine, confido, before feeling for the block, ‘I trust in you, my Lord God.’ She whispered, ‘In manus tuas, Domine, commendo animam meam’ – ‘Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’ As she stretched forward one of the executioners held her while the other raised the axe. But his aim was awry and the blade fell on the knot of the handkerchief. He raised the axe again and, this time, he was successful; he severed the head, with the exception of a small shred of skin. The coif and the false hair fell off, and when he picked up the head to show to the spectators it was that of a withered and nearly bald grey-haired old woman.

The dean stepped forward. ‘So perish all enemies of the queen.’ The assembly called out ‘Amen’. It was over. Then a lapdog was found concealed in her clothes and, yelping, it slid in her blood. It was taken away and carefully washed. Anything touched by Mary – the scaffold, the handkerchief, even the beads of her rosary – was now burned in the great hall. No relics were allowed to survive. Yet she had played her final part to perfection, and the story of Mary, queen of Scots, has remained in the public imagination ever since.

On the morning of 9 February Elizabeth went out riding and, when she returned to the palace at Greenwich, she heard the bells of London ringing. She asked for the reason. ‘I never saw her fetch a sigh,’ Elizabeth’s young cousin, Robert Carey recalled, ‘but when the queen of Scots was beheaded.’ It was more than a sigh. It was a rant, an explosion of guilt and rage. She became almost hysterical, accusing those closest to her of deceit and duplicity. She had never intended that her dear cousin should die. She commanded Burghley from her presence, and refused to allow him back to the court for two months. She admitted to signing the warrant but claimed that she had asked Davison to keep hold of it. Now she wanted Sir William Davison’s life in revenge. She was persuaded out of this impolitic course, and instead Davison was tried in the court of the Star Chamber for abusing the confidence of the queen; he was committed to the Tower, but was released a year later. He, too, had played his part.

Within four days of Mary’s execution Elizabeth had written to James VI, denying any involvement in the act. ‘My dear brother,’ she wrote, ‘I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen …’ It is true that she had been placed under intolerable pressure by her councillors, principal among them Walsingham and Burghley, and she may have persuaded herself that she had acted against her will. Her ministers had conspired behind her back to hasten Mary’s death. But her distress may also have been caused by the pangs of an awakened conscience.

The threat to her reign now grew stronger. By the spring of 1587 reports reached the court of Spanish preparations at Cadiz and at Lisbon; a squadron of ships was then assembled at Plymouth under Sir Francis Drake’s command with orders to sail to Spain. Knowing the inconstancy of his mistress, Drake made haste to leave the shores of England before she could countermand her previous orders. Sure enough the order to cease and desist came through but, by then, Drake was far away. He sank many store-ships and transports at Cadiz before moving on to Cape St Vincent, where he might confront any Spanish invasion force.

Thwarted of this goal he sailed to Corunna, where he cleared the harbour of the store-ships assembled there; he destroyed half of the stores accumulated for the Armada against England. It had been said previously that there was enough bread and wine to feed 40,000 men for a year, but those preparations were now wasted. Drake then completed a triumphant campaign by seizing a carrack loaded with booty from the East Indies. The Spanish had reason to feel themselves humiliated, while the confidence of the English was thereby increased.

The debacle delayed Philip’s plans for an invasion of England a further year. Elizabeth had been granted more time for what was now the inevitable struggle with Spain.

36

Armada

The depredations of Sir Francis Drake had been swiftly repaired and by the winter of 1587 a great Spanish fleet, the greatest ever seen in Europe, was floating out to sea by the mouth of the Tagus. At the same time the Spanish army in the Netherlands, under the command of the duke of Parma, had been further strengthened. It was planned that the navy, under the command of the marquis of Santa Cruz as lord high admiral, would make for the Thames estuary and anchor by Margate; the Spanish ships would then command the Strait of Dover, giving the duke of Parma time and opportunity to land his forces at Thanet. Their path to London would then lie clear. Yet the naval forces were not adequately prepared and the autumn winds began to blow. Philip of Spain had reluctantly to postpone the expedition for more clement weather.

The duke of Parma had not been informed of the delay, and his troops suffered in the rain and freezing conditions upon the hills above Dunkirk. When a letter arrived from the king, remonstrating with him for not launching an invasion, he was naturally irate. He had been told to wait for the arrival of the Spanish fleet. ‘To write to me as if I should have acted already in direct contradiction to your instructions is naturally distressing to me. Do me the signal kindness to tell me what to do, and no difficulty shall stop me, though you bid me cross alone in a barge.’ The disagreement did not bode well for the enterprise. The finances of Spain were ailing. The troops were on short rations. To compound an already difficult situation, Santa Cruz died. His successor, the duke of Medina Sidonia, knew next to nothing about service at sea. Delays and frustrations once more bedevilled the proposed Armada.

News reached England in the spring, however, that the vast preparations were almost complete; the Spanish authorities let it be known that the fleet was destined for the West Indies, but no one was deceived.

On 18 May 1588 the Spanish fleet finally sailed out of the Tagus; but it was scattered by a heavy storm. Medina Sidonia recommended that the expedition be once more postponed. Philip replied that ‘I have dedicated this enterprise to God … Get on then, and do your part.’ So on 12 July the Spaniards set sail again. The church bells of Spain rang out. On board were printed copies of the papal bull confirming Elizabeth’s excommunication and calling on all faithful Catholics to rise up against her. The Armada consisted of approximately 130 large ships of war, carrying 19,000 soldiers and 8,000 sailors. The Spanish, the Italians and the Portuguese made up the various contingents, with the Spanish themselves divided into squadrons of Gallicians, Andalusians, Catalans and Castilians. There were also 600 monks on board, to maintain religious devotion and to care for the wounded. Gambling and swearing were forbidden. All of the Spanish forces were confessed and then received holy communion, in this religious crusade against the heretics. The royal standard of the Armada had, as its motto, ‘Exsurge, Domine, et judicia causam tuam!’ – ‘Rise up, oh Lord, and avenge Thy cause!’ As the fleet sailed for England Philip remained kneeling before the Holy Sacrament, without a cushion, for four hours each day.

The English were now fully aware of the imminent danger. A division of the fleet was watching the harbours under the control of Parma while the principal body made itself ready at Plymouth. The Elizabethan navy consisted of twentyfive fighting galleons, but at this time of peril it was enlarged by other vessels furnished by the city of London and by private individuals. Some other ships and coasters had to be hired. The queen had relied upon Sir Francis Drake and other privateers. It has been estimated that the English fleet consisted of 197 various vessels (not all of which were suitable for combat).

The trained bands and the county militia of England were as prepared as their somewhat rickety organization allowed; they would be joined by the surviving retinues of the nobles, drawn from their major tenants. It was said that 100,000 men were ready to fall to arms, but that may be an overestimate. If they had encountered the duke of Parma and his men, in any case, they would have met the finest military force in Europe. The coastal companies were told to fall back where the enemy landed, removing the corn and the cattle; they were to wait until reinforcements from other companies had arrived. The musters of the Midland armies, 10,000 strong, were to form a separate force in defence of the queen herself.

On 19 July the Spanish fleet was sighted off the Lizard in the Channel. ‘The Spanish Armada,’ Camden wrote, ‘built high like towers and castles, rallied into the form of a crescent whose horn was at least seven miles distant, sailing very slowly though under full sail, as the winds laboured and the ocean sighed under the burden of it.’ When it was sighted from the topmast of the Ark Royal, the crew shouted for joy. The moment of battle between Spain and England had arrived.

The story goes that Drake received the news while playing bowls at Plymouth, only remarking that ‘we have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too’. The words are probably apocryphal but he may have said something quite like it; he would have to wait for the tide to turn before he made his way out of the harbour. A contemporary observer noted that ‘the country people, forthwith, ran down to the seaside, some with clubs, some with picked staves and pitchforks …’ It is perhaps fortunate that their fighting skills were not tested.

The rest of the world remained neutral, looking on with interest. The Venetians believed that the English would win, and the French merely suggested that they would be able to hold off their enemies at sea. ‘For the love of God,’ the vice-admiral wrote to Whitehall, ‘and our country, let us have with speed some great shot sent us of all bigness.’ On 21 July William Hawkins, mayor of Plymouth, wrote that ‘the Spanish fleet was in view of this town yesterday night and my lord admiral [Lord Howard] passed to the sea before our said view and was out of sight’. The English fleet had the wind on their side and on that Sunday morning a skirmish ensued between the two parties that lasted two hours. Philip’s treasure ship was badly damaged, and was taken by its captors into Dartmouth.

On 23 July the two fleets were off Portland Bill and were engaged in a general struggle; the English had the advantage, with their smaller ships and larger guns. The Spanish vessels wished to close up and grapple with their adversaries, allowing their soldiers to take over the fight. But they were not allowed to come too close. The English relied largely upon seaworthiness and speed. Eventually Medina Sidonia broke off and resumed course to his supposed meeting with the duke of Parma. In the fighting of that day Howard had almost run out of ammunition; there was only store enough for one more large engagement. The Spanish were in worse case; they too were running low on bullets, and their vessels had been more severely damaged. A galleon and a flagship drifted as wrecks to the French coast. For three days, sailing towards Calais, Medina Sidonia sent increasingly urgent messages to the duke of Parma. Meanwhile the English forces were receiving reinforcements from the coastal ports and castles. ‘The enemy pursue me,’ Sidonia told Parma. ‘They fire upon me most days from morning till nightfall; but they will not close and grapple. I have given them every opportunity. I have purposely left ships exposed to tempt them to board; but they decline to do it, and there is no remedy, for they are swift and we are slow.’ So the English were able to drive the Spanish forward ‘like sheep’ until Medina Sidonia reached the haven of Calais.

Yet it was not a haven for long. At midnight on Sunday 28 July, Howard directed eight fire-ships upon the Spanish fleet at anchor; the vessels frantically cut loose their cables before drifting into the sea and the night. On the following morning the Spanish commander collected his fleet together, just off Dunkirk; the English, now seizing their good fortune, went on the attack. The battle of Gravelines was decisive. The English went in among the Spanish, and wrought havoc with their guns and cannon. Three galleons were sunk or captured, along with a host of smaller ships. ‘I will not write unto her majesty before more be done,’ Howard wrote to Walsingham. ‘Their force is wonderful great and strong; and yet we pluck their feathers by little and little.’

The feathers were indeed plucked. The Spanish had already lost eight galleons in the course of the conflict, and many men were dead or dying. No English vessel had suffered any serious harm. The duke of Parma could not move; he was marooned in Nieuport, and the Armada was in no condition to make a rendezvous. The Dutch navy, hostile to Parma, also kept him enclosed. The wind then changed to west-south-west, sending the Spanish fleet away from the shoals into the North Sea. The English had no ammunition left to hinder them but instead ‘put on a brag countenance’ by pursuing them up the coast. On 31 July Sir Francis Drake wrote that ‘we have the army of Spain before us and mind … to wrestle a pull with him … I doubt it not but ere it be long so to handle the matter with the duke of Sidonia as he shall wish himself at St Mary Port among his orange trees.’

It was at this moment that the queen came down from London for the review of the army at Tilbury. She arrived by barge and, as she landed at the blockhouse, the cannon were sounded in her honour. She was met by an escort of 1,000 horse and 2,000 foot, and on the following day she took part in the formal review when she passed among the men ‘like some Amazonian empress’. In her speech she told them that she had been advised to take care of her person, but she scorned any such protection; she could rely on the trust and devotion of her people. She is then supposed to have said that she was resolved ‘to live and die among you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ It is a matter of debate whether she used these precise words but the gist of the speech, recounted later, is no doubt accurate. There was a great shout from her soldiers at the end of the oration. She then retired to Leicester’s tent at noon for her dinner.

The Spanish fleet, battered and defeated, was even then making its way along the Scottish coast. It was noted at the time that the Scottish king had kept his word to the queen and had not even covertly supported Spain; James had told the English ambassador at his court that ‘all the favour he expected from the Spaniards was the courtesy of Polyphemus to Ulysses, that he should be devoured the last’.

When they reached the north coast of Scotland the commanders were ordered to make the best way they could to Spain. Four or five men died each day from starvation, and all the horses were thrown overboard to save water. When the Spanish ships reached the Irish Sea a great storm blew up and threw them against the coast of Ireland. The loss of life by shipwreck was enormous but it was compounded by the loss of life on shore. One Irishman, Melaghin McCabb, boasted that he had dispatched eighty Spaniards with his gallowglass axe. The English ambassador in Paris told his Venetian counterpart that nineteen vessels had been wrecked, with the loss of 7,000 men; other reports put the fatalities higher. Only half of the Armada returned to Spain, less than half of the men. Philip himself remained calm, or impassive. It was, he said, the Lord’s will. Secretly he raged, and vowed on his knees that one day he would subdue England even if he reduced Spain to a desert by the effort.

The celebrations attendant on victory had a more sombre note. In the streets of the Channel ports thousands of sailors were dying of typhus or the scurvy; they had conquered the enemy but they could not vanquish disease. The lord admiral wrote to Burghley, after the destruction of the Armada, that ‘sickness and mortality begins wonderfully to grow among us’ and asked for the resources to purchase food and clothing. But, after the expense of warfare, Elizabeth’s purse was now closed. She left her men to their fate.

Another casualty of the war touched her more deeply. The earl of Leicester, worn out by his campaign in the Netherlands, was ‘troubled with an ague’ that became ‘a continual burning fever’. His death was not greatly mourned by anyone except the queen herself. He was considered incompetent and vainglorious; a contemporary historian, John Stow, wrote that ‘all men, so far as they durst, rejoiced no less outwardly at his death than for the victory lately obtained against the Spaniard’.

Elizabeth kept the last letter he had written to her in a little wooden casket; it was found by her bed after her death. Yet distress at his death did not mitigate her practical temper. He had died indebted to her exchequer and so she ordered his goods to be sold at public auction to reimburse her for loss. There were other rewards. When she sat for her famous ‘Armada’ portrait by George Gower, where she exults in the victory with an imperial crown beside her, she is wearing the pearls that Leicester had bequeathed to her.

On 26 November she was drawn by two white horses in a richly decorated chariot to St Paul’s Cathedral for the final celebration; there had not been such a spectacular procession since her coronation almost thirty years before. In the following year Edmund Spenser completed the first three books of his verse epic The Faerie Queene, in which Elizabeth herself is transmuted into Gloriana.

Towards the end of 1588 a young man ran down the Strand calling out to the people, ‘If you will see the queen, you must come quickly.’ It was said that she was about to appear in the courtyard of Somerset House. So the crowd rushed to the area. It was five in the evening, and already dark, but then in a blaze of torchlight Elizabeth suddenly appeared.

‘God bless you all, my good people!’

‘God save your Majesty!’

‘You may well have a greater Prince, but you shall never have a more loving Prince!’

The queen had been raised to new heights of glory and prestige, but the defeat of the Armada wrought other wonderful consequences. The myth of English sea power now became a more striking aspect of national consciousness, linked as it was to the defeat of Catholicism and the defence of true religion. Drake and Hawkins were new types of Protestant hero, fighting on behalf of national liberty. The papal curse had been lifted in the most striking possible manner. Elizabeth herself wrote to the duke of Florence that ‘it is as clear as daylight that God’s blessing rests upon us, upon our people and our realm, with all the plainest signs of prosperity, peace, obedience, riches, power and increase of our subjects’.

The pope tried to excuse himself by saying that he always knew the Spaniards would be defeated. The Spanish ambassador then congratulated him on his gift of prophecy. The pope merely ‘turned up the whites of his eyes and looked piously towards heaven’. Spain could no longer be considered to be the resolute champion of Catholicism in the world, and the papacy mitigated its own pretensions. The Catholics of England now accommodated themselves to the established Church or were the object of more determined persecution.

The death of Leicester helped to forward the career of another court favourite. Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, was twenty-two years old at the time of the Armada. He had been the ward of Burghley ever since the untimely death of his father in Ireland; Sir Walter Devereux had died of dysentery in 1576. Two years later Leicester had married the widow, the countess of Essex. Leicester was then the stepfather, as well as the godfather, of the young man. So the young Essex was doubly blessed.

He was always restless and ambitious, striving for power as well as for glory. It was said that ‘he was entirely given over to arms and war’; yet he was also eloquent and highly intelligent. He believed, or professed to believe, in the importance of ‘virtue’ in both a martial and an ethical sense; manliness was to be joined with piety, valour with clemency and justice. He pursued what he later called ‘the public use for which we are all born’. He supported the Protestant cause, naturally enough, and was known to favour the more godly sort. He was impulsive and energetic, too, making a contrast with the older and more staid councillors of Elizabeth’s realm. He was ‘soft to take offence and hard to lay it down’; he could ‘conceal nothing’ and ‘carried his love and hatred on his forehead’, and was sometimes the victim of nervous prostration. It has been said that the court was now so changed that it seemed to herald a new reign. In truth it was simply entering a darker and more sequestered phase, of which Essex himself would eventually become the victim.

37

Repent! Repent!

It had not gone unnoticed that a large proportion of the forces that fought the Armada were of a Puritan persuasion. The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote that ‘the puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other, that is to say, most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side, a point of no small moment’.

The Puritans could now muster a considerable following in the country, especially after the defeat of the papists at sea, and it is certain that they commanded the loyalty of many members of the Commons. Their strength had already emerged two years previously, in the parliament of 1586; the Commons introduced several bills to curb the power and authority of the bishops, at which point the archbishop of Canterbury wrote in alarm to the queen. She had many times in the past warned parliament not to meddle in religious affairs. She now sent a message to the Commons reprimanding them for disobeying her and for venturing upon her supremacy. She commanded the Speaker ‘to see that no bills concerning reform in ecclesiastical causes be exhibited and, if they were exhibited, not to read them’. ‘Specifically,’ the Speaker told the Commons, ‘you are commanded by Her Majesty to take heed that none care be given or time afforded the wearisome solicitations of those that commonly be called Puritans …’

But the Commons refused to be cowed and introduced a petition to abolish all existing laws that concerned ecclesiastical government. A ‘new directory for prayer’ was also proposed as a replacement for the familiar liturgy. No more sweeping measure had ever been put forward by a parliament, and it suggested that the Puritan cause was now being asserted in a more forceful and methodical manner. Yet it had reached its apogee and would now recede.

On a motion for the reading of the new directory the Speaker declared that the sovereign had already commanded the members to keep silence on religion. He predicted her severe displeasure and, sure enough, another message from the palace reached him. She ordered him to send her the petition and the book, but she also dispatched several of the more zealous MPs to prison. ‘I fear me,’ one of the members complained, ‘we shall come shortly to this, that to do God and her Majesty good service shall be accounted Puritanism.’ It was another phase in the relationship between sovereign and parliament.

The Puritan cause was further advertised in a series of tracts. The Martin Marprelate tracts, as they came to be known, were written anonymously; ‘Martin’ launched a series of attacks, in seven separate works, upon ‘petty antichrists, proud prelates, intolerable withstanders of reformation, enemies of the gospel and covetous wretched priests’. Yet ‘Martin’ was witty and animated as well as being pugnacious; he addressed the ecclesiastical hierarchy as ‘right poisoned, persecuting, and terrible priests. My horned masters, your government is antichristian; your cause is desperate; your grounds are ridiculous.’ He wished to undermine the bishops by portraying them as simply absurd. ‘I will spare [bishop] John of London for this time, for it may be he is at bowls and it is pity to trouble my good brother, lest he should swear too bad …’

In response the supporters of the established Church published tracts with titles such as ‘A Sound Box on the Ear for the Idiot Martin to hold his Peace’ and ‘A Whip for the Ape. Martin Displayed’. One of them was reported to be ‘printed between the sky and the ground, within a mile of an oak, and not many fields off from the unprivileged press of the ass-signees of Martin junior’. Richard Bancroft, treasurer of St Paul’s who was later to become archbishop of Canterbury, accused the Puritan party of promoting schism and dissension within the Church. ‘Her majesty is depraved [abused]. Her authority is impugned and great dangers are threatened. Civil government is called into question. Princes’ prerogatives are curiously scanned.’ The Puritan party was close to becoming a Church within the Church, with all the rivalries that implied.

The Martin and anti-Martin texts represented the high point of acrimony in Protestant debate, and we may date from this time the portrayal of Puritans on the Elizabethan stage as figures of fun; in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Malvolio, a ‘sort of Puritan’ according to Maria, anticipates by twelve years Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. ‘Down with Dagon, down with Dagon … I will no longer endure your profanations … that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam, nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam; an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morris-dancers …’

The Marprelate texts in particular soon became the talk of London, while enormous efforts were made to hunt down the writer and the printer. One secret press was discovered in Northamptonshire, but others escaped detection. Some of those involved were found before being fined or imprisoned, but the identity of ‘Martin Marprelate’ is still not certainly known. His high spirits and inventiveness, however, may have been a mark of desperation. There now seemed to be little chance that the principles of Puritanism would have any effect upon the Elizabethan polity. Marprelate’s levity may have been a sign that there was little left to lose.

The godly found in Archbishop Whitgift a profound and determined enemy. ‘The name Puritan’, he wrote, ‘is very aptly given to these men not because they be pure … but because they think themselves to be mundiores ceteris, more pure than others.’ Throughout 1589 and 1590 the leaders of the Puritan cause were arrested and silenced. Some were even imprisoned for refusing to take the ex-officio oath; they refused to swear that, in a court of religion, they would answer all questions truthfully. It was a form of self-entrapment. In the spring of 1589 the members of the High Commission, the authorities on religious matters, delivered an injunction that no London parish should allow the preaching of the stricter sort. One of the leading Puritans, Thomas Cartwright, was imprisoned in the Fleet and eventually came before the Star Chamber. As a contemporary noted in the following year, ‘these sharp proceedings make that sect greatly diminish’.

So it had come to this. The Puritans in parliament had proved unable to advance their cause and to secure further reformation. The Puritan presses were one by one closed down, and the hunt for the Marprelate presses had become a general pursuit of the Puritan movement. There followed a decade which has been called one of stabilization or normalization, in which orthodox pieties came to the fore, but it may be more accurately seen as a time of secret and silent antagonism played out in various churches and meeting places. Puritanism ceased to be a public movement or campaign, but instead retreated to the confines of the household or the soul of the individual in the hope that better times might follow. The cause of the godly was indeed revived at the beginning of the next reign.

Yet the religious aspirations of the minority must be set against the neutrality or indifference of the population. A report was sent from Lancashire to the privy council in which it was asserted that the churches were still largely empty and that the county contained ‘multitudes of bastards and drunkards’. This could be the condition of England at any time. The preachers were few, and the parsons unlearned, but in any case the preachers were not needed for lack of auditors. The churches ‘generally lie ruinous, unrepaired, and unfurnished’ while the chapels of ease, built for those who could not easily attend the parish church, ‘are many of them utterly destitute of any curates, and thereby grow into utter ruine and desolation’. The people ‘swarm in the streets and alehouses during service-time’. Many of these people were in fact unreformed Catholics who delighted in ‘wakes, ales, greenes, May games, rushbearings, bearbaits, doveales etcetera’. Those who did attend the services were often prompted by convention rather than devotion; they talked, made jokes, or slept during the ceremonies.

Others were simply weary of religious dissension and doctrinal debate; they were secularists in the sense that they wished for stability and security above all else. Immune from enthusiasm of any kind, they were not particularly interested in any new form of Protestant spirituality. If they conformed to the current religion it was simply because they were obliged so to do. Thus the Anglican Church, as it would become known, was slowly being established.

‘Repent! Repent!’ The call went up in the streets of London. A yeoman named Hackett had proclaimed himself to be king of Europe and the New Messiah. ‘Tell them in the City that Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the earth. And if any man ask you where he is, tell them he is at Walker’s house by Broken Wharf!’ He also said that Elizabeth had forfeited her crown. He soon reached the gallows where he cried out with his dying breath for God to deliver him from his enemies. ‘If not,’ he said, ‘I will fire the heavens and tear Thee from Thy Throne with my hands.’ The spectators, horrified, called out for his disembowelment to be protracted. It is a vignette of the Elizabethan world.

Philip II, despite the destruction of the Armada, was still a most powerful enemy. He controlled an empire that must count as one of the most splendid in human history; he ruled Spain, Portugal and much of the Netherlands; he commanded Milan and Sicily while many of the states of Italy were wholly dependent upon him. He was the sovereign of the Philippines as well as the coastal settlements of Malabar and Coromandel. He was lord of the spice islands of Indonesia. And of course he was the master of the New World on both sides of the equator. The gold of the Americas meant that his revenue was ten times as large as that of Elizabeth. He had a standing army of 50,000 men, where Elizabeth had none. The emperor of Germany was a member of Philip’s House of Habsburg. France was divided by religious schism.

Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper, addressed both Houses of Parliament on the naval power of the Spanish king five years after the Armada; he warned the members that ‘how great soever he was before, he is now thereby manifestly more great … He keepeth a navy armed to impeach all trade of merchandise from England to Gascoigne and Guinea.’

Yet this was the power that England now dared to provoke and abuse. In the spring of 1589 Drake conceived a scheme to strike at Portugal. Elizabeth became a shareholder in what was essentially a joint-stock company; she had neither the money nor the men to equip an armada of her own. The fleet was supposed to sail against Santander but instead made its way to Corunna, where it delayed for a fortnight. Its commanders also failed to provide adequate supplies.

In May they set sail for Lisbon, against orders, and were joined on the way by the young earl of Essex; the English were hoping that the Portuguese would rise against their new Spanish masters. But the attack on Lisbon proved to be a failure, and the anticipated insurrection never took place. It was reported at the time that 6,000 men had perished on ‘this miserable action’, as one captain called it; of the 1,100 gentlemen on board, only 350 returned. Elizabeth was by now thoroughly displeased and ordered the recall of Essex.

The expedition, promising so much and achieving so little, made its way back to Plymouth. Drake remained in disgrace for some years. He had alarmed Philip of Spain without causing him much damage, thus achieving the worst of both worlds. The maritime future for the rest of the queen’s reign was confined to private raids for the capture of booty; privateering thereby became a business, with syndicates of shareholders and freely available capital resources.

Sir Richard Hawkins has left a very interesting set of notes on the campaign against the Spanish navy; his Observations recall a journey into the South Sea in 1593. Of the scurvy, for example, he reports that the disease can be deduced ‘by the swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man’s finger … others show it with their laziness, others complain of the crick of the back etcetera’. He records ‘the seething of the meat in salt water’ and the corruption of victuals by ‘the vapours of the sea’.

By means of his observations we get closer to the real nature of sea warfare in the sixteenth century. He notes, for example, the obstinacy of the English sailors who ‘apprehending a conceit in their imaginations, neither experiment, knowledge, examples, reasons nor authority can alter or remove them from their conceited opinions’. When he labours to convince them they were wrong in wishing to attack two Spanish ships, they ‘break out, some into vaunting and bragging, some into reproaches of want of courage, others into wishings that they had never come out of their country’.

Hawkins warns other commanders not to trust their men in the extremities of battle. Too much wine, for example, ‘infused desperate and foolish hardiness in many who blinded with the fume of liquor, considered not of any danger, but thus and thus would stand at hazard; some in vainglory vaunting themselves; some others railing upon the Spaniards; another inviting a companion to come and stand by him, and not to budge a foot from him; which indiscreetly they put in execution, and cost the lives of many a good man’.

It is the folly of the English sailor to prefer to fight without armour. The Spaniard, being of more temperate and sober disposition, was happy to don armour in order to protect himself. But the English cast it off, ‘choosing rather to be shot through with a bullet, or lanced through with a pike, or thrust through with a sword, than to endure a little travail and suffering’. In some sea battles, Hawkins reports, ‘I have seen the splinters kill and hurt many at once, and yet the shot to have passed through without touching any person’.

He condemns those who denounce the English sailors as pirates, since ‘the English have neither peace nor truce with Spain; but war; and therefore not to be accounted pirates. Besides Spain broke the peace with England, and not England with Spain; and that by Embargo, which of all kinds of defiances is most reproved and of least reputation …’

The temporary disgrace of Essex did little to calm the fevered atmosphere at court, and in the summer of 1589 one observer remarked that ‘there was never in court such emulation, such envy, such back-biting as is now at this time’. Still in the ascendant was Burghley. As a clerk of the signet put it to a suitor, ‘Old Saturnus is a melancholy and wayward planet, but yet predominant here, and if you have turn thus to do, it must be done that way; and whatsoever hope you have of any other, believe it or not.’ Burghley was also actively and assiduously promoting the prospects of his son, Robert Cecil, who at the times of his father’s incapacity through illness took on much of the business of government. He was of uncommon appearance. One contemporary described him as ‘a slight, crooked, hump-back young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard and large, pathetic greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinet’. The queen called him ‘my elf ’ or ‘my pigmy’.

Cecil and Essex had both been brought up in the household of Lord Burghley, one as son and one as ward, but they continually quarrelled with each other. Their rivalry became all the more strenuous after the death of Elizabeth’s trusted servant Walsingham, in the spring of 1590. Essex favoured an aggressive foreign policy that supported the cause of international Protestantism; Cecil and his father preferred to pursue a more defensive strategy, with the aim of keeping Spain at arm’s length. Essex represented noble and martial valour; Cecil was essentially a career courtier. War for Essex was a form of sport or game; for Cecil it was a source of expense and danger.

So they were rivals for power and for the queen’s favour. It was not a competition that the impulsive Essex could ever win. One of his retainers wrote that ‘Sir Robert Cecil goeth and cometh very often between London and the Court, so that he comes out with his hands full of papers and head full of matter, and so occupied passeth through the presence [chamber] like a blind man, not looking upon any’. This was a courtier upon whom the queen could rely. Soon enough he was knighted and appointed as a member of the privy council. More than any other man he would control the last years of her reign.

38

The setting sun

The queen asked her carver, at dinner, what was in a certain covered dish. ‘Madame,’ he replied, ‘it is a coffin.’ A ‘coffin’ was then the word for a certain type of pie.

‘Are you such a fool,’ she shouted at him, ‘to give a pie such a name?’ She was now approaching her sixtieth year, and becoming fearful of her mortality. Her eyes had sunk a little, and she had lost teeth on the left side of her mouth that sometimes made her diction blurred and indistinct; her skin was plastered white and her wigs were a deep red. In 1593 she began to translate from sixth-century Latin The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, perhaps as an antidote to the signs of weariness and age all around her.

Over the years she had acquired more expertise than anyone around her. When one of her servants ventured to speak to her about the affairs of the Netherlands, she rebuked him: ‘Tush, Brown! I know more than thou doest.’ And when he made a remark about France she again interrupted him: ‘Tush, Brown! Do not I know?’

The earl of Essex had at last been called to her privy council. He had recruited two very brilliant brothers, Francis and Anthony Bacon, to advise him on matters of state. Anthony Bacon had previously been in the employ of Walsingham, and had established a network of agents across the continent working in the Protestant cause. So Essex could supply the queen with useful information. He believed that astute patronage materially increased his power. Yet he found it impossible to break into the inward circle of influence represented by Burghley and his son. In time this would breed resentment and suspicion.

Elizabeth had governed for the last four years without a parliament, but her depleted treasury needed the supply of fresh revenue. So she summoned an assembly for the middle of February 1593, when she told them through the mouth of her chancellor ‘that they were not called together to make new laws, or lose good hours in idle speeches, but to vote a supply to enable her Majesty to defend her realm against the hostile attempts of the king of Spain’.

The Commons then made their customary request for freedom of speech as well as liberty from arrest. She granted the request with the significant comment that ‘wit and speech were calculated to do harm, and their liberty of speech extended no further than “ay” or “no” ’. The Commons then proceeded to defy her attempt to silence discussion by framing a petition that she should settle the question of royal succession. She sent the two members responsible to the Fleet prison. As she grew older, she became more despotic.

Parliament now bowed to the inevitable, and voted the subsidies to her exchequer as well as passing a bill ‘for keeping her Majesty’s subjects in better obedience’. Having demonstrated the power of her will, she dismissed them on 10 April with a speech in which she mentioned the proposed invasion by the king of Spain. ‘I am informed, when he attempted this last measure, some upon the sea-coast forsook their towns, leaving all naked and exposed to his entrance. But I swear unto you, by God, if I knew those persons, or may know them hereafter, I will make them know what it is to be fearful in so urgent a cause.’ In her contempt, she could be magnificent.

She also made an important statement about her purpose in the management of foreign affairs: ‘It may be thought simplicity in me that all this time of my reign I have not sought to advance my territories and enlarge my dominions; for opportunity hath served me to do it … And I must say, my mind was never to invade my neighbours, or to usurp over any; I am contented to reign over mine own and to rule as a just prince.’ She was making an implicit contrast between herself and the Spanish king. Her central aim was simply peace at home and security from foreign threat.

The bill that parliament had passed for ‘better obedience’ was designed to curb the activities of papists and sectaries. Attendance at conventicles and unlawful assemblies was now considered to be the equivalent of hearing Mass, so that Catholic recusants and the more fervent Protestants were equally liable to imprisonment. It was also enacted that anyone over the age of sixteen who refused to attend public worship over the space of a month should be imprisoned; a second offence would result in banishment from the realm; a refusal, or a return from banishment, would be punished by death. It was further enacted that no Catholic should stray more than 5 miles from his or her residence. For papists England had become a kind of open prison.

This assault upon Catholics and Puritans alike is the appropriate context for the most important religious treatise of the period. Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity – the first four books of which were published in 1594 – is an eloquent and magisterial account of what may be described as the middle way of England’s settlement.

He declared that much religious controversy was over things of no account. He rebuked the Puritans for their excessive reliance on Scripture, which was a standard for doctrine but not a rule for discipline. It was not necessary to follow the practice of the apostles as an invariable model. The English Church, like other forms of human society, may make the laws for its own government as long as they are not contrary to Scripture, and human authority may intervene where Scripture is silent. The Puritan belief in sola scriptura – that the Bible contains all that is needed for salvation – was unwarranted. The Church may therefore institute its own ceremonies. All those born within the domain or district of an established Church should conform to it. It was the mother of all.

The visible Church was not perfect – it must of necessity contain sinners as well as saints – but it existed in an imperfect world. The pursuit of certainty on matters that could not be adequately understood in this life was not fruitful; debates on predestination were unnecessary and harmful, since the truth could never be revealed on earth. The congregation of worshippers must depend upon prayer, and the sacraments, as the fortifications of their faith. These were the foundations of the community.

As to the Calvinism of Geneva, Hooker remarked that ‘our persuasion is, that no age ever had knowledge of it but only ours; that they which defend it devised it; that neither Christ nor his Apostles at any time taught it, but the contrary’. He granted that the Church of Rome was still part of the family of Jesus Christ but one defiled ‘by gross and grievous abominations’; the English Church was the true Church purged of this dross.

He stated further that Church and State make up the fundamentals of the Commonwealth, and that both must accord with the natural law of God as understood by the general reason of humankind. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is not explicitly announced in the Bible, and must be deduced from the act of reasoning. These interacting societies, of Church and State, may thereby both be ruled by the Christian prince. The community of Christians is a visible Church, held together by prayer and sacramental worship. Hooker, then, provides the foundation for the Church of England. Anglicanism really did not exist before the advent of his work.

Thomas Fuller, in his Church History of Britain, written two generations later, remarked that ‘Mr Hooker’s voice was low, stature little, gesture none at all; standing stone-still in the pulpit, as if the posture of his body were the emblem of his mind, immovable in his opinions’.

Essex, with the assistance of the brothers Bacon, was now in command of all intelligence. He was in fact instrumental in uncovering another plot against the queen. António, the claimant to the Portugese throne, had taken refuge in England. When it was discovered that some of his supporters were selling secrets to the Spaniards, Essex was asked to investigate. In the course of his enquiries he discovered, or professed to discover, that Rodrigo Lopez, the queen’s Portuguese physician, was seeking to poison her. Although Lopez outwardly conformed as a Protestant, he was in fact a Jew; the suspicion of him was therefore part of that anti-Semitic atmosphere in which Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta thrived.

Robert Cecil, who in important matters was not inclined to support Essex, informed the queen that there was no evidence against her doctor. Whereupon Elizabeth called Essex ‘a rash and temerarious youth’. In the face of this reproof Essex redoubled his efforts in the determination to justify himself. That is when he uncovered the plot. Lopez was taken to the Tower where, under torture, he confessed his guilt. He was sentenced to death. Essex had therefore acquired the additional glory of saving the life of his mistress; in the words of a contemporary, he had ‘won the spurs and saddle also’.

Yet all the glory in the world could not conceal a rising sense of disquiet at Elizabeth’s councillors. In the last five years of the sixteenth century a disastrous series of harvests was responsible for an extraordinary rise in the price of essential commodities. The four successive years from 1594 witnessed the worst living conditions of the Elizabethan era, and the price of flour tripled from 1594 to 1597. In the latter year real wages plunged lower than at any time since 1260. The proportion of families without sufficient land to feed themselves was growing all the time; the number of vagrants, forced to wander in order to find work, also increased. Many people did not have enough money to buy food; the dearth caused famine, and created the conditions for diseases such as typhus and dysentery on a wider scale than had previously been seen in the country. The records for the city of Newcastle, in the autumn of 1597, record the burial at municipal expense of twentyfive ‘poor folks who died for want in the streets’. This is the context for Titania’s complaint to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed at some point in 1595 or 1596:

The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock.

It was therefore a time of general unrest and disaffection. The mayor of Norwich received an anonymous letter in 1595 warning him that 60,000 London craftsmen were waiting for the call to rise in revolt. In thesummer of that year Sir Thomas Wilford was appointed as provost-marshal of London with orders to seize any riotous people and, according to the justice of martial law, to execute them openly and speedily on the gallows. This was a case of the royal prerogative overturning the principles of common law.

An Essex labourer was arrested for complaining that corn was being taken on ships and sold to the enemy. ‘I will be one of them that shall rise and gather a company of eight or nine score and will go to fetch it out … and if we were such a company gathered together, who can withstand us?’ A Kentish man said that ‘he hoped to see such a war in this realm to afflict the rich men of this country to requite their hardness of heart towards the poor’. In the autumn of 1596 the earl of Bath wrote to the privy councillors that they should order the gentry of Devon to return to their estates ‘to be at hand to stay the fury of the inferior multitude, if they should happen to break out in a sudden outcry for want of relief, as without good circumspection they may and will do’. A rising in Oxfordshire, in 1596, was led by an instigator who declared ‘it will never be well until the gentry are knocked down’.

With the genuine fear of insurrection in the air, a steady increase in criminal indictments is evident in the 1590s. The ‘inferior multitude’ was regularly being castigated now for being feckless and idle, with the threat from below adding to a general mood of pessimism that is evident in the last years of the queen’s reign. By the end of the decade a body of Poor Law legislation had been enacted that placed the burden of responsibility for the poor upon the parish, with the costs of maintaining the distressed and the unemployed to be provided by a parish poor rate. The justices of the peace were to nominate ‘overseers’ of the poor who were also to run the parish workhouse. This framework of social legislation became an important aspect of national life for 250 years, remaining in place until the new Poor Law of 1834. It may have been one of the principal reasons for the absence of a social or political revolution; it represented a bedrock of stability.

The queen and her council were nevertheless at the time blamed for indecision and misgovernment. Thomas Wilson, in a collection of papers entitled The State of England Anno Dom. 1600, complained that the privy councillors ‘suffer very few to be acquainted with matters of state for fear of divulging it, whereby their practices are subject to be revealed, and therefore they will suffer few to rise to places of reputation’. And in truth the queen was growing old. In this year, 1596, she reached the feared climacteric of sixty-three years. Bishop Rudd, of St Davids, preached the Lenten sermon before her, in which he congratulated her for her good fortune in living so long. He delivered some reflections on sacred arithmetic, with seven times nine leading to sixty-three. He also quoted the passage describing old age in Scripture ‘when the grinders cease because they are few and those that look out of the windows be darkened’.

Elizabeth was not amused. She opened the window in her private oratory when the sermon was over and told him that ‘he should have kept his arithmetic to himself ’. But then, she added, ‘I see that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.’ A few days later, at court, ‘she thanked God that neither her stomach, nor strength, nor her voice for singing, nor fingering for instruments, nor, lastly, her sight was any whit decayed’. She refused to allow court painters to use shade in any portraits of her since shade ‘was an accident and not naturally existent in the face’. The privy council now forbade the circulation of any unauthorized portraits. Any paintings that depicted her as in any sense old, ‘to her great offence’, were cast into ovens. Nicholas Hilliard was commissioned to produce a formalized or mask-like visage that could be copied by those less skilful. English art was still essentially conservative. The mood is caught in Francis Davison’s poetical rhapsody:

Time’s young hours attend her still,

And her eyes and cheeks do fill,

With fresh youth and beauty …

Still the shadows were growing longer. Her long-serving courtiers were dying around her; in this year, for example, Puckering, the lord keeper, Sir Francis Knollys, and Lord Hunsdon, were taken from her service to the grave. It was against this background that Essex helped to plan a great expedition against Cadiz, in order to singe the beard of the king of Spain once more. It was said that he had grown tired of life at court, surrounded by old men. His sister described him as ‘the Weary Knight’, since he was ‘always weary and longing for the change’. It was within his power to renew the energy, and revive the honour, of the court.

At the beginning of June 1596, a large English armada left England for Spanish waters; a total of eighty-two ships was under the command of three men, one of whom was Essex. The French king, Henry IV, joked that Elizabeth would not want Essex to be very far from her petticoats. There was some truth in that. She was never very convinced by his assertion of martial prowess. But in fact the expedition to Cadiz was a great success; the Spaniards were taken entirely by surprise, and the city was seized in a swift assault. Essex had intended to remain there indefinitely but the problem of supplies obliged him to return with his forces to England.

Another prize was won. The authorities of Cadiz were forced to sink the Spanish fleet in their harbour, for fear of its falling into the hands of the enemy; the cost to Philip of Spain amounted to 12 million ducats. It had been a great victory, reinforcing England’s claim to mastery of the sea. Essex became the hero of the hour to everyone except the queen, who remarked that the expedition had been more of an ‘action of honour and victory against the enemy and particular spoil to the army than any profitable to ourself ’. She was not at all interested in martial glory; she wanted the Spanish gold that had been distributed among the successful English troops, and she was furious that Essex had not reserved it for her. She was heard to remark that previously she had done his pleasure, but now she would teach him to do hers.

So Essex was still sensitive to the point of distraction. When Lord Howard of Effingham was created earl of Nottingham, with a citation of his services in Cadiz, Essex perceived a slight to himself. He raged furiously at the honour and asked the queen to rescind it. His protégé, Francis Bacon, counselled him to mitigate his temper. The queen would otherwise regard him as ‘a man of nature not to be ruled, that hath the advantage of my affection and knoweth it’. That is why she continued to favour his great rival. At the very time of the Cadiz operation, Robert Cecil was appointed to be her secretary of state.

It became clear that Essex was no longer her pre-eminent favourite, but just one among her councillors in a court that was described as ‘dangerously poisoned with the secret stings of smiling enemies’. Her principal councillor was still Lord Burghley, but he was growing old. He was reported by the French ambassador to be ‘very proud and presuming in his words’; he possessed ‘a kind of crossing or wayward manner’ with ‘a tone of choler’.

Elizabeth herself seems naturally to have become more irate. In the spring of 1597 one courtier, William Fenton, reported that the queen ‘seemeth more forward than commonly she used to bear herself towards her women, nor doth she hold them in discourse with such familiar matter, but often chides for small neglects, in such wise as to make these fair maids often cry and bewail in piteous sort’.

One of these ‘fair maids’, Lady Mary Howard, had a gown that threatened to rival those of the queen in its finery. Elizabeth sent for the dress and secretly put it on. It was too short for her. She went into one of the household chambers and asked the ladies ‘how they liked her new-fancied suit’. She was met by an embarrassed silence, and she went up to Lady Mary herself and asked her ‘if it was not made too short and unbecoming’. The lady agreed. ‘Why then,’ she said, ‘if it become not me, by being too short, I am minded it shall never become thee, as being too fine; so it fitteth neither well.’ The gown was never worn again.

She showed her anger, too, against the ambassador from Poland at an audience in 1597. In an address to her he seems to have been more bombastic than suited the company, and as a result she stormed at him. Cecil reported to Essex that ‘her Majesty made one of the best answers ex tempore in Latin that ever I heard’. She began with ‘Expectavi orationem, mihi vero querelam adduxisti!’ – ‘I expected an oration. But you have brought a complaint against me!’ ‘Surely,’ she went on to say, ‘I can hardly believe that if the king himself were present, he would use such language!’ And so she harangued him. At the end she paused and then turned to her court. ‘God’s death, my lords, I have been enforced this day to scour up my old Latin, that hath long lain rusting.’ ‘God’s death’ was an oath she used frequently in these days.

A French envoy from Henry IV was given an audience with her, and he reported that ‘all the time she spoke she would often rise from her chair and appear to be very impatient with what I was saying; she would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away, yet did she give orders to have it extinguished’. Yet still she maintained her regimen of daily exercise. She would ride or walk every day, even in the rain or frost. Her ladies, careful of their own health as well as that of their mistress, asked Whitgift to intervene. The archbishop implored the queen to stay within doors during inclement weather, but she paid no regard to his advice.

The Spanish danger had not passed with the success of the mission against Cadiz. Philip of Spain dispatched a new armada a month or two after that city’s fall; it was supposed to sail to Ireland where it would assist the rebels there. But the storms of Cape Finisterre ended the expedition. Elizabeth was now thoroughly discomfited and in 1597 ordered a new attack, led by Essex and the newly ennobled Nottingham, designed to scatter the Spanish fleet and to intercept the treasure ships in the Azores. The expedition did not altogether go as planned, however, and the English never came near the Spanish gold that escaped them with impunity. They returned in October, but were able before reaching shore to turn back another armada against England that Philip had launched in a last gamble. Her relief that the threat of invasion had been lifted was matched only by her anger with Essex for failing to take the treasure. He was caught in a cycle of defeat and dismay that would soon have disastrous consequences.

39

A disobedient servant

One day in the summer of 1598 a few close courtiers were closeted with the queen, discussing who should be the next lord lieutenant of Ireland; that country was in a state of revolt, and needed careful handling. In the royal closet that day were Essex, Howard, Cecil and one or two others. Elizabeth named Sir William Knollys for the post. Essex, knowing that the choice had been suggested by Cecil, opposed it with great bluster and vehemence. The queen made a sarcastic comment of some kind and Essex, offended and with a contemptuous expression upon his face, gave mortal offence by turning his back upon her. The queen, telling him to ‘go and be hanged’, boxed his ears.

Essex then grasped his sword-hilt. Howard rushed between them, and thereby prevented the earl from drawing his sword against his sovereign; it would have been a capital offence. Essex swore an oath, however, ‘that he would not have taken that blow from King Henry, her father, and that it was an indignity that he could nor would endure from anyone’. He muttered some words about ‘a king in petticoats’ before rushing from the royal presence and withdrawing from the court.

The chancellor, Egerton, implored him to write a letter of submission to the queen. But he demurred, stating that ‘if the vilest of indignities is done to me, does religion enforce me to sue for pardon? Cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Let Solomon’s fool laugh when he is stricken …’ He now raged even more furiously against Robert Cecil, demanding of Lord Cobham, for example, ‘to declare myself either his only or friendly to Mr Secretary, and his enemy; protesting that there could be no neutrality’. To create factions, however, was to risk the dangers of isolation.

This was the period in which Lord Burghley was dying. Elizabeth sent one of her ladies for news of him every day, bearing with her a cordial. She said that ‘she did entreat heaven daily for his longer life, else would her people, nay herself, stand in need of cordials too’. Her ‘saucy godson’, John Harrington, observed that ‘the lord treasurer’s distemper doth marvellously trouble the queen’. He died, at the age of seventy-seven, on 4 August. Harrington also reports that ‘the queen’s highness doth often speak of him in tears, and turn aside when he is discoursed of, nay, even forbiddeth his name to be mentioned in the council’.

In the following month Philip II, king of Spain, died covered with putrefying sores. So in quick succession the two men who helped to define Elizabeth’s reign were gone. Elizabeth, however, did not necessarily replace her deceased councillors. They had now been reduced to ten, only half the number who had surrounded her at the beginning of her rule. Essex himself did not appear at court for five months after his precipitate withdrawal; he returned, in the autumn of the year, when he wished once more to display his martial skills. Ireland was in the balance. A native revolt, led by Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, had ambushed an English army sent out to defeat him; as a result the territory held by the English was left undefended. No English estate was safe and most of the settlers fled. Only Leinster remained to the English Crown. It was considered to be ‘the greatest loss and dishonour the queen hath in her time’.

Essex now saw his opportunity of redeeming himself in her eyes, and he sent her a letter offering his services. Before he received a reply he had hurried to London, but the queen refused to see him. ‘I stay in this place,’ he said, ‘for no other purpose but to attend your commandments.’ ‘Tell the earl,’ she replied, ‘that I value myself as at great a price as he values himself.’ A period of silence was followed by tense negotiations in which Essex finally received the post he had requested, that of lord deputy of Ireland. One courtier wrote that ‘if the Lord Deputy performs in the field what he hath promised in the council, all will be well …’

The relations between the sovereign and the earl were still strained, however, and the easy affection of earlier years did not return. They argued over the size of the army to be sent to Ireland. At one moment of low spirits he wrote that ‘how much so ever Her Majesty despiseth me, she shall know she hath lost him who, for her sake, would have thought danger a sport and death a feast’. True to his mercurial temper, he even thought of abandoning the idea of Ireland altogether. Yet he knew well enough that ‘his honour could not stand without undertaking it’.

At the end of March 1599, he set off with an army of 16,000 men, the largest ever to be dispatched to Ireland. He had decided to attack Tyrone in the north, both by sea and by land; unfortunately both ships and horses were in short supply and so, while awaiting reinforcements, he launched an expedition against Munster and Limerick. He occupied two months in this pursuit but achieved very little. Elizabeth was now growing impatient; time, for her, meant money. She was also angry at Essex for appointing the earl of Southampton to be the general of his horse, against the queen’s express order; he had also exercised his right of making knights, which she deemed to be a privilege reserved for herself. Was he trying to become a king? Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter to him, ordering him to seek out the principal enemy. Why was Tyrone, ‘a base bush kern’, now accounted to be ‘so famous a rebel’?

So at her instigation he marched north with 4,000 men to confront Tyrone. The Irish leader countered with a much larger force and, at a ford on the River Lagan, Essex agreed to meet him for a private conference without the presence of witnesses. It is therefore not known what was discussed or agreed but, when the reports of the meeting reached London, the enemies of Essex were only happy to spread rumours of treachery. Tyrone and Essex had indeed agreed a truce, but the rest is silence. He now persisted in disobeying her commands. He had been ordered to remain with his men, but on 24 September he left Dublin and sailed back to England.

As he had feared and anticipated, his ill-omened expedition had been beset by rumour and suspicion at court. His enemies had taken advantage of his absence to spread malicious reports about his conduct. Even before he left Ireland he wrote a querulous letter to his mistress. ‘But why do I talk of victory or success? Is it not known that from England I have received nothing but discomfort and soul’s wounds? Is it not spoken in the army that Your Majesty’s favour is diverted from me and that already you do bode ill both to me and to it?’

It was said that he planned to stay in Ireland at the head of his troops until the queen’s death; he could then return as the conquering hero. The queen herself believed that he had colluded with Tyrone. She told Francis Bacon that ‘his proceedings were not without some private end of his own’. Some of the rivals of Essex had also prospered in his absence. The queen promoted Robert Cecil to be master of the Court of Wards, a lucrative post that Essex himself had hoped to occupy. Cecil’s older brother became president of the council in the north, another enviable position.

Essex was anxious to reach the court, now at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, as quickly as possible. Four days after his departure from Dublin he arrived at the palace and ran to the privy chamber, where Elizabeth was ‘newly up, her hair about her face’. Essex knelt before her while they conducted a conversation that seemed to comfort him. Yet her mood changed to anger after his departure. When her godson, John Harrington, knelt before her she complained ‘By God’s Son, I am no queen! That man is above me! Who gave him command to come here so soon? I did send him on other business.’

Essex was summoned before the privy council and questioned by Robert Cecil about his conduct in Ireland. The councillors accused him of disobeying the queen’s direct orders and deserting his command in Ireland; he was berated for making too many ‘idle’ knights, and for intruding without permission into the queen’s bedchamber. His responses were then relayed to the queen, who said that she ‘would pause and consider of his answers’. He was meanwhile committed to the charge of the lord keeper at York House while the queen herself removed to Richmond. A contemporary, Rowland Whyte, wrote that the servants of Essex ‘are afraid to meet in any place, to make merry, lest it might be ill taken’. Meanwhile the enemies of Essex dined happily together.

A courtier wrote, in the autumn of 1599, that ‘it is a very dangerous time here, for the heads of both factions being here a man cannot tell how to govern himself towards them. For here is such observation and prying into men’s actions that I hold them happy and blessed that live away.’ It was Whyte again who named the members of the factions. With Sir Robert Cecil were the earls of Shrewsbury and Nottingham and the lords Howard and Cobham, together with Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir George Carew. With the earl of Essex were the earls of Southampton, Worcester and Rutland, together with the lords Mountjoy and Rich. It might be surmised, therefore, that the queen’s grasp upon the life of her court was not as firm as it once had been. The courtiers were no longer a coherent body following her will.

By the beginning of 1600 the temperature of the court was rising. Somebody had scrawled on Cecil’s door ‘here lieth the Toad’. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a letter to Cecil in which he warned him not to be ‘mild’ with Essex. ‘The less you make him, the less he shall be able to harm you and yours; and if her Majesty’s favour fail him, he will again decline to a common person …’ Essex in turn wrote to Elizabeth that ‘as if I were thrown into a corner like a dead carcass, I am gnawed on and torn by the basest creatures upon the earth’. When in February Mountjoy was sent to Ireland in place of Essex, Francis Bacon argued to the queen that his master was still the person most fitted for the service. ‘Essex!’ she replied. ‘When I send Essex back into Ireland, I will marry you. Claim it of me.’

In June 1600, a special court met at York House to examine the case of the earl of Essex. He was asked to kneel at the lower end of the council table; after a while he was allowed a cushion; he was then permitted to lean against a cupboard and eventually he was granted leave to sit upon a stool with his hat lying beside him on the floor. One courtier wrote that ‘it was a most pitiful and lamentable sight to see him that was the minion of fortune, now unworthy of the least honour he had of so many. Many that were present burst out into tears at his fall to such misery.’

He was charged with ‘great and high contempts and points of misgovernance’ in Ireland; he was acquitted of disloyalty but found guilty of ‘contempts’. Whereupon he was suspended from his offices and ordered to remain a prisoner in his own house at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He now seemed destined to remain in private life for the rest of the queen’s reign. On an ally’s pleading with him to seek her pardon he replied that his enemies would ‘never suffer me to have interest in her favour’. When at a dance in the summer of the year one of the ladies took on the role of ‘Affection’, Elizabeth said to her ‘Affection! Affection’s false.’ In that summer, by order of the privy council, all engravings of Essex and of other noblemen were called in. A further command ordered ‘that hereafter no personage of any nobleman or other person shall be ingraven and printed to be put to sale publicly’.

On Michaelmas, at the end of September, the licence that Essex held for the customs revenue from imported sweet wine fell due; it was not renewed, thus depriving him of a substantial income. Elizabeth is reported to have said that ‘an unruly horse must be abated of his provender, that he may the more easily and better be managed’. He was already deeply in debt, with his creditors waiting to claim the money from any of his servants. He fell into a fury in which, according to Harrington, he ‘shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason …’

The word ‘rebellion’ was a dangerous one. Essex wrote to James VI of Scotland proposing that they act together to remove from England Robert Cecil and Walter Raleigh; he told the Scottish king that ‘now am I summoned on all sides to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country that groans under their burden’. James seems to have responded with caution. It is likely that Elizabeth and Cecil had some warning of these manoeuvres, but they did nothing; they were waiting, perhaps, for more open treason. Essex heard, for example, that the council was already interrogating certain prisoners in the Tower who had been allied with him. Elizabeth danced the coranto at court that Christmas.

At the beginning of 1601 Essex began to draw up further plans with the more vainglorious of his supporters whom he met at Drury House, the London residence of the earl of Southampton. He had conceived a plan whereby he and his followers would seize the guard of the palace at Whitehall in order to allow him to enter the queen’s presence; Essex would then, with the threat of force behind him, ask her to remove his enemies from the court. If this were not successful he would demand the recall of parliament to give him justice.

Elizabeth and her councillors watched events with some trepidation. Would Essex strike more quickly than they anticipated? Harrington reported that ‘the madcaps are all in riot, and much evil threatened … she is quite disfavoured and unattired, and these troubles waste her much. She disregards every costly cover that comes to the table, and takes little but manchet [fine wheat bread] and savoury pottage. Every new message from the city disturbs her, and she frowns on all her ladies.’ He reported on a later occasion that ‘she walks much in her privy-chamber, and stamps with her foot at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword, at times, into the arras, in great rage’. The last touch is worthy of Shakespeare.

On 7 February Essex was summoned to appear before the privy council, but he declined the invitation. On the following morning, a Sunday, he gathered 300 of his supporters at Essex House; his plan was to proceed with them to Paul’s Cross, where the Londoners were accustomed to hear sermons on this day. He hoped to persuade the citizens and apprentices to join his forces, no doubt on the cry that he would ‘save the queen from her evil councillors’. To his intimates he had said that ‘the old woman was grown crooked in her mind as well as in her body’. There was a spy in his camp, one Ferdinando Gorges, who betrayed the scheme to Cecil. The lord mayor of London was ordered to keep the people of London within their houses, and the palace of Whitehall was given a double guard.

At approximately ten o’clock in the morning the lord chancellor and other royal officers arrived at Essex House and demanded admittance; after a delay, they were allowed to enter. Essex was asked why his supporters were gathered in arms, and he replied with an account of the wrongs to which he had been subject. ‘You lose time,’ his supporters urged him. ‘Away with them! They betray you.’ Essex then took the unfortunate step of imprisoning them within his house and, with his allies, of riding out into the streets. They wielded pistols and rapiers, calling out ‘England is sold to Spain by Cecil and Raleigh! Citizens of London, arm for England and the queen!’

The citizens of London did not respond. The streets were quiet. Essex rode to Ludgate Hill, where he ordered a charge. Yet now his supporters, realizing their desperate plight, began to desert him. The queen had been given news of the tumult, and reacted calmly. While her attendants were in some disarray she proposed that she should go into the city and confront her opponents and that ‘not one of them would dare to meet a single glance of her eye’.

The confrontation was not necessary. Discomfited by his failure to raise the citizens, Essex rode on to Queenhithe, where he took a boat to Essex House; he then discovered that Ferdinando Gorges had released his prisoners. The house was soon surrounded by the royal forces and, after some tense negotiations from the leads of the mansion, he surrendered himself to the lord admiral. He and his principal supporters were taken to Lambeth Palace and on the following day were removed downriver to the Tower. Elizabeth told the French ambassador that ‘a senseless ingrate had at last revealed what had long been in his mind’. She issued a proclamation on the day after the failed rebellion, thanking the people of London for their loyalty.

Some residual support for Essex still existed in the purlieus of the court. Thomas Leigh, who had served under him in Ireland, proposed that four or five resolute men should force themselves into the queen’s presence and obtain from her a warrant for the release of Essex and Southampton. Leigh was denounced and arrested that night outside the queen’s supper room. On the following day he was tried, convicted and executed. In the middle of February the queen issued another proclamation in which she ordered all vagabonds, idlers, newsmongers and tavern frequenters to leave London on pain of death.

On 19 February Essex and Southampton were tried by their peers in Westminster Hall. Both men denied the charge of treason, but their guilt was taken for granted. They argued with their prosecutors, but to no avail. Essex, dressed all in black, declared ‘I have done nothing but that which by the law of nature and the necessity of my case I was enforced into.’ These were not concepts recognized by common law, and seem to be borrowed from what might be called the chivalric code. They could not save him. After sentence of execution was passed against him, he remained calm enough. ‘Although you have condemned me in a court of judgment,’ he told his judges, ‘yet in the court of conscience you would absolve me.’ Two days later Cecil and some other councillors were asked to visit Essex in the Tower. They found him much changed, declaring himself to be ‘the greatest, most vilest and most unthankful traitor that has ever been in the land’. He admitted that, while he lived, the queen would not be safe.

It was the last of the aristocratic risings of England, like that of the Percys in the early fifteenth century; Essex did not have the same level of regional or territorial support, but the complex motives of honour and of valour were the same. It was almost a medieval event. As the earl of Southampton had said to Sir Robert Sidney in the final siege of Essex House, ‘You are a man of arms, you know we are bound by nature to defend ourselves against our equals, still more against our inferiors.’ A band of brothers, many of them related by blood, Essex and his supporters were aroused by the old and noble code of honour but, in the court of Elizabeth, it was no longer enough.

The admission of Essex that he had committed treason came too late. Elizabeth graciously consented to his private execution by beheading, and at the same time she commuted Southampton’s sentence to that of life imprisonment. On 25 February Essex was brought to a scaffold that had been erected in the courtyard of the Tower. He was wearing doublet and breeches of black satin, covered by a black velvet gown; he also wore a black felt hat. He always played his part. At the last moment he turned his neck sideways and called out, ‘Executioner, strike home!’ It took three strokes to sever his head from his body. ‘Those who touch the sceptres of princes,’ the queen observed, ‘deserve no pity.’

40

The end of days

After the execution of the earl of Essex, some criticized the queen for her hardness of heart. It was said that the people were weary of an old woman’s rule and that her public appearances were not greeted with the old jubilation. One Kentish man was summonsed for saying that it ‘would never be a merry world until Her Majesty was dead’. When a constable told a yeoman to obey the queen’s laws, the man replied, ‘Why dost thou tell me of the queen? A turd for the queen!’

When she summoned her last parliament in the autumn of 1601, it became notable for its fractiousness and confusion. The customary calls of ‘God save your majesty’ were subdued. When passing a group of irritable members of parliament, she moved her hand to indicate that she needed more room.

‘Back, masters,’ the gentleman usher called out.

‘If you will hang us, we can make no more room,’ one member replied. Elizabeth looked up at him, but said nothing.

The matter of taxation was the cause of much turmoil. The cost of Mountjoy’s campaign against Tyrone in Ireland was high, compounded by the dispatch of Spanish troops to that country in the rebel cause. The subsequent financial burden on the English was considered onerous, with the poor having to sell their ‘pots and pans’ to meet the price of the subsidy. When one member remarked that the queen ‘hath as much right to all our lands and goods as to any revenue of her crown’ the commons proceeded to ‘hem, laugh and talk’. Bad temper was in the air. Speakers were ‘cried or coughed down’ and the voting provoked pulling and brawling. In the end, however, Elizabeth received the subsidy she had asked for.

The other contentious issue was that of monopolies. These were patents granted to individuals which allowed them to manufacture or distribute certain named articles for their private profit. It was a device by which Elizabeth could confer benefits on favoured courtiers without putting her to any personal expense. ‘I cannot utter with my tongue,’ one member said, ‘or conceive with my heart the great grievances that the town and country which I serve suffereth by some of these monopolies.’ Another member began to list the articles so protected, from currants to vinegar, from lead to pilchards, from cloth to ashes:

‘Is bread not there?’

‘Bread?’

‘Bread?’

‘This voice seems strange.’

‘No, if order be not taken for these, bread will be there before the next parliament.’

The queen had heard of these complaints and summoned the Speaker. She told him that she would reform the procedure on monopolies; some would be repealed and some suspended. None would be put into execution ‘but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of the people’. She had anticipated a crisis and had resolved it.

Parliament sent a deputation to thank her, and at the end of November she addressed her grateful Commons in the council chamber at Whitehall. She told them that ‘I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good’. She added that ‘it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good’. It was not the last of her public speeches but it was one of the most memorable.

There was little, if any, mention of the succession during this parliament. It is likely, to put it no higher, that she had come to believe that James, the son of Mary, queen of Scots, should ascend the throne after her. She may not have known that Robert Cecil, now her most prominent councillor, had been engaged in secret negotiations with him; she must have suspected, however, that he was now the favoured heir. But she kept her silence. Although she was often accused of indecision or prevarication, there were occasions when she simply wished to conceal her intentions.

In April 1602, at the age of sixty-eight, the queen took part in the energetic dance known as the galliard. At the beginning of the following month she rode out to Lewisham for ‘a-Maying’. She told the French ambassador that ‘I think not to die so soon, and am not as old as they think’. She continued to ride as often as the opportunity occurred. When one of her relations, the second Lord Hunsdon, suggested that she should no longer ride between Hampton Court and Nonsuch, she dismissed him from her presence and refused to speak to him for two days.

Yet the signs of ageing were unmistakable. Her eyesight was becoming weaker and she was growing more forgetful. She could remember faces, but sometimes not names. After she had gone riding her legs were often ‘benumbed’. Sometimes she needed help to mount her horse or to climb stairs. She told one of her ladies, Lady Scroope, that one night she had seen a vision of ‘her own body, exceedingly lean and fearful in a light of fire’. ‘I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck,’ she told the earl of Nottingham. ‘I am tied, I am tied, and the case is altered with me.’

When in the early spring of 1603 another of her relations, Sir Robert Carey, came to greet her he found her in chastened state. ‘No, Robin,’ she told him, ‘I am not well.’ She described her indisposition to him, a narrative that was punctuated with many sighs. On 19 March the French envoy told his master that for the last fourteen days she had eaten very little and slept very badly. Another contemporary reported that she ‘had fallen into a state of moping, sighing, and weeping melancholy’. She was asked by one of her attendants whether she had any secret cause for her grief. She replied that ‘I know of nothing in this world worthy of troubling me’.

For four days she sat upon cushions in her privy chamber, gazing down at the floor and rarely speaking. She was by now unclean and emaciated. ‘I meditate,’ she said. Robert Cecil remonstrated with her.

‘Madam, madam, to content the people you must go to bed.’

‘Little man, little man, the word must is not to be used to princes.’

On the third day she put her finger in her mouth and rarely removed it. Eventually she grew so weak that her doctors were able to take her uncomplaining to her bed. When an abscess burst in her throat she recovered a little and sipped some broth. But then she declined once again and lay without seeming to see or notice anything. Knowing that the end was coming, the councillors asked her if she accepted James VI of Scotland as her successor. She had lost the power of speech and merely made a gesture towards her head which they interpreted as one of consent.

At six o’clock on the evening of 23 March the archbishop of Canterbury was summoned to her deathbed. He prayed for half an hour beside her and then rose to depart; but she gestured for him to continue. He continued his prayers for another hour and, whenever he mentioned the joys of heaven, she would clasp his hand. She lost consciousness soon after, and died in the early hours of the following morning. Her coronation ring, deeply sunk into the flesh of her finger, had to be sawn off.

As soon as he heard the sounds of her women weeping, Sir Robert Carey took horse and galloped towards the Great North Road. He was on his way to Edinburgh, where he would break the news to James VI that he was now king of England. Thomas Dekker, in The Wonderful Year, wrote that ‘upon Thursday it was treason to cry God save king James of England and upon Friday high treason not to cry so. In the morning no voices heard but murmurs and lamentation, at noon, nothing but shouts of gladness and triumph.’ The long rule of the Tudors had come to an end.

41

Reformation

We return to the great theme of this volume. The reformation of the English Church was, from the beginning, a political and dynastic matter; it had no roots in popular protest or the principles of humanist reform. No Calvin or Luther would have been permitted to flourish in England. Reformation was entirely under the direction of the king. The English Reformation had other unique aspects. In the countries of continental Europe that espoused Protestantism, all the rituals and customs of Catholicism were abolished; there was to be no Mass, no Virgin Mary and no cult of the saints. Yet Henry, in all matters save that of papal sovereignty, was an orthodox Catholic. The monasteries may have been destroyed, and the pope replaced, but the Mass survived. Nicholas Harpsfield, the historian and Catholic apologist, described Henry as ‘one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half way down’. Yet somehow the king managed this miracle of levitation. He carried out the work of change piece by piece so that no one could contemplate or guess the finished design; that was the reason it worked. Henry himself may not have known where he was going.

Those who supported the king’s cause were, in large part, of a practical persuasion; they wanted the lands and revenues of the Church for themselves. They were lawyers and courtiers. They were members of parliament, which voted in accordance with the king’s will throughout this period. Only for a few scholars and divines was the theology of the Reformation important. The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was a man of piety rather than of principle; he was as much an ecclesiastical lawyer as a divine who saw his way forward through compromise and conciliation. The refining of Church doctrine under Edward, and the reversal of practice under Mary, serve only to emphasize the slightly incoherent framework of the religious polity.

The Elizabethan settlement created what Lord Burghley called a ‘midge-madge’ of contradictory elements that was soon to pass under the name of Anglicanism. It was as alien to the pure spirit of Protestantism, adumbrated in Zurich or Geneva, as it was to the doctrines of Rome. The English liturgy contained elements old and new, and the perils of religious speculation were avoided with a studied vagueness or ambiguity. The Book of Common Prayer is also animated by a spirit of piety rather than dogmatic certainty.

England therefore became Protestant by degrees, and by a process of accommodation and subtle adjustment. The people acquiesced in the new dispensation. Time and forgetfulness, aided by apathy and indifference, slowly weakened the influence of the old religion beyond repair. If, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, England had become a Protestant nation, therefore, the nature of that Protestantism was mixed and divided; we may only say, perhaps, that England was no longer Catholic. The passage of time had accomplished what the will of men could not work.

We may see the enduring effects of the Reformation in the emphasis upon the individual rather than upon the community. Private prayer took the place of public ritual. Manuals addressed to the personal devotional life abounded. Justification by faith alone, one of the cardinal tenets of the new religion, was wholly private in character. The struggles of individual consciences, with the constant awareness of sin, now became the material of the religious pamphlets of the period. We may suspect the influence of the reformed religion, too, on the conditions that made possible the birth of the modern state; the word itself emerged towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth. The Protestant calendar was devoted to the celebration of a new national culture, with such holy days as the queen’s birthday and the defeat of the Armada. It became a civic and courtly, rather than a religious, timetable.

The separation from Rome and from continental Catholicism also encouraged the belief that England was in some sense an ‘elect’ nation; this in turn led to a redefinition of Englishness that excluded, for example, the Catholics of the nation. Bishop Gardiner, in De Vera Obedientia, composed immediately after the executions of John Fisher and Thomas More, declared that ‘in England all are agreed that those whom England has borne and bred shall have nothing whatever to do with Rome’. Popular preachers such as Hugh Latimer apostrophized the entire nation. Oh England! England! Latimer wrote also that ‘verily God hath showed himself God of England, or rather the English God’.

The belief in divine providence, one of the blessings of the Protestant spirit, led to submission and obedience to the secular authorities. Where once the monks had taken responsibility for the indigent, their place had been taken by parish officers; the overseers of the poor, and the workhouses, became the solutions to what was now regarded as a social problem rather than an ordinance of God. When the House of Commons took over the former royal chapel of St Stephen’s in 1549, it was the mark of a larger transition; the law of God ultimately gave way to the statutes of parliament. The idea of good governance emerges most fully in the sixteenth century, and the state itself was deemed to have a formative role in social and economic policy.

The cultural effects of the Reformation were no less profound. New forms of history were composed after the demise of the monkish historians; Hall’s Chronicle, devoted to the Tudor cause and in spirit anti-clerical, replaced Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon. In a more general sense the destruction of church buildings, and the stripping of church art, led to an indifference towards the past among many people. The sense of continuity and kinship was broken just as the old ties of the community were severed. In a society that had previously been heavily dependent upon custom and tradition, the effects must have been profound. It might be said that the memory of history was erased in order to take the next leap forward.

The demise of the mystery plays and the whole panoply of religious drama, which had possessed so strong a hold over England for many centuries, led ineluctably to the secularization of the drama and the rise of the London playhouses. The great efflorescence of the English drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be regarded as one of the consequences of the Reformation. In literature, too, the translation of the Bible into English inspired writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan. In a more general sense the new place of the English language encouraged the growth of literacy among the population. This may in turn help to account for the great increase in educational provision through the period; in the 1550s forty-seven new school foundations were made, and in the following decade a further forty-two.

The abolition of the rituals of the Catholic faith may have had more profound, although less easily observed, consequences. The Rogationtide processions, in which the boundaries of the parish were delineated with bells and crosses, had been an important element in the English sense of sacred place; the land was, in a sense, now secularized. The holy wells and springs of the landscape were largely forgotten, and land itself became a commodity rather than a communal possession. Just as the communion of the living and dead enshrined in the old Church was being dissolved, so the common fields of the realm became the property of private individuals. When Christopher Saxton produced his series of maps in the 1570s the old shrines and paths of pilgrimage were omitted; his maps were primarily designed as surveys for the new landowners. Yet the commercial spirit claimed its own victims, and William Cobbett once wrote that the wretchedness of the landless labourer was the work of Reformation.

The abandonment of public rituals in the streets and open places of the towns led in the course of time to social fragmentation. When popular pastimes were curtailed and despised, the richer sort tended to think of themselves as a class apart. Seats were soon supplied in churches for families of local stature. We may see the change from another perspective. It has been estimated that the number of alehouses doubled in the fifty years after 1580; with the demise of the guild fraternities, the pageants and the church-ales, there had to be an alternative source of refreshment.

Yet arguably all of these matters – the growing emphasis upon the individual, the dissolution of communal life, the abrogation of custom and tradition – were the necessary conditions for the great changes in the spirit and condition of the nation that were still to come.

THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this second volume.

THE REFORM OF RELIGION

Aston, Margaret: England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988).

—— Faith and Fire (London, 1993).

Baskerville, Geoffrey: English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (London, 1937).

Beard, Charles: TheReformation of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1883).

Bernard, G. W.: The King’s Reformation(London, 2005).

Betteridge, Tom: Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (Manchester, 2004).

Bossy, John: The English Catholic Community(London, 1975).

Brigden, Susan: London and the Reformation(Oxford, 1989).

Burnet, Gilbert: The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, three volumes (Oxford, 1829).

Carlson, Eric Josef (ed.): Religion and the English People (Kirksville, Miss., 1998).

Chadwick, Owen: The Reformation (London, 1964).

Collinson, Patrick: The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982).

—— Godly People (London, 1983).

—— The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988).

Constant, G.: The Reformation in England (London, 1934).

Davies, Horton: Worship and Theology in England (Princeton, 1996).

Dickens, A. G.: The English Reformation (London, 1964).

Doran, Susan and Durston, Christopher: Princes, Pastors and People (London, 1991).

Duffy, Eamon: The Stripping of the Altars (London, 1992).

—— The Voices of Morebath (London, 2001).

—— Marking the Hours (London, 2006).

Elton, Geoffrey (ed.): The Reformation (Cambridge, 1958).

—— Reform and Reformation (London, 1977).

Gairdner, James: A History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1902).

—— Lollardy and the Reformation in England, two volumes (London, 1908).

Gasquet, F. A.: Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London, 1906).

Haigh, Christopher (ed.): The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987).

—— English Reformations (Oxford, 1993).

Heal, Felicity: Reformation in Britain and Ireland(Oxford, 2003).

Heath, Peter: English Parish Clergy (London, 1969).

Hughes, Philip: The Reformation in England, three volumes (London, 1956).

Hurstfield, Joel (ed.): The Reformation Crisis (London, 1965).

Hutton, Ronald: The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994).

King, John N.: English Reformation Literature (Princeton, 1982).

Knappen, M. M.: Tudor Puritanism (London, 1939).

Knowles, David: The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge, 1959).

Lake, Peter and Dowling, Maria (eds): Protestantism and the National Church (Beckenham, 1987).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid: Thomas Cranmer (London, 1996).

—— The Later Reformation in England (London, 2001).

—— The Reformation (London, 2003).

Maitland, S. R.: Essays on the Reformation in England (London, 1849).

Marshall, Peter: The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994).

—— (ed.): The Impact of the English Reformation (London, 1997).

McConica, James Kelsey: English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965).

Morgan, John: Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986).

O’Day, Rosemary: The Debate on the English Reformation (London, 1986).

Pollard, A. E.: Thomas Cranmer (London, 1905).

Powicke, Maurice: The Reformation in England (Oxford, 1941).

Randell, Keith: Henry VIII and the Reformation in England (London, 1993).

Read, Conyers: Social and Political Forces in the English Reformation (Houston, 1953).

Rex, Richard: HenryVIII and the English Reformation (London, 1993).

Rosman, Doreen: From Catholic to Protestant (London, 1996).

Rupp, E. G.: The Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge, 1966).

Scarisbrick, J. J.: The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984).

Shagan, Ethan H.: Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003).

Smith, H. Maynard: Pre-Reformation England (London, 1938).

—— Henry VIII and the Reformation (London, 1948).

Walker, Greg: Persuasive Fictions (Aldershot, 1996).

Whiting, Robert: The Blind Devotion of the People (Cambridge, 1989).

Wooding, Lucy: Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000).

Youings, Joyce: The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1971).

THE REIGN OF HENRY

Anglo, Sydney: Images of Tudor Kingship (London, 1992).

Bernard, G. W.: Power and Politics in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2000).

—— Anne Boleyn (London, 2010).

Brewer, J. S.: The Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1884).

Brigden, Susan: New Worlds, Lost Worlds (London, 2001).

Brown, Andrew D.: Popular Piety in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1995).

Byrne, M. St Clare (ed.): The Letters of Henry VIII(London, 1936).

Coby, J. Patrick: Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament (London, 2006).

Coleman, Christopher and Starkey, David (eds): Revolution Reassessed (Oxford, 1986).

Davies, C. S. L.: Peace, Printand Protestantism(London, 1977).

Dodds, Madeleine Hope and Dodds, Ruth: The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracy, two volumes (Cambridge, 1915).

Elton, Geoffrey: Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972).

Erickson, Carolly: Great Harry (London, 1980).

Fox, Alistair and Guy, John: Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986).

Froude, James Anthony: History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, twelve volumes (London, 1862–70).

Galton, Arthur: The Character and Times of Thomas Cromwell (Birmingham, 1887).

Graves, Michael A. R.: Henry VIII (London, 2003).

Guy, John: The Cardinal’s Court (Hassocks, 1977).

—— The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997).

Gwyn, Peter: The King’s Cardinal (London, 1990).

Hoak, Dale (ed.): Tudor Political Culture(Cambridge, 1995).

Hoyle, R. W.: The Pilgrimage of Grace (Oxford, 2001).

Hutchinson, Robert: Thomas Cromwell (London, 2007).

Ives, E. W.: Anne Boleyn (London, 1986).

Jones, Whitney R. D.: The Tudor Commonwealth(London, 1970).

Lingard, John and Belloc, Hilaire: The History of England, eleven volumes (New York, 1912).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (ed.): The Reign of Henry VIII (Basingstoke, 1995).

Pickthorn, Kenneth: Early Tudor Government (Cambridge, 1951).

Pollard, A. F.: Wolsey (London, 1929).

—— Henry VIII (London, 1934).

Randell, Keith: Henry VIII and the Government of England (London, 1991).

Rosenthal, Joel and Richmond, Colin (eds): People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester, 1987).

Scarisbrick, J. J.: Henry VIII (London, 1968).

Smith, Lacey Baldwin: Henry VIII (London, 1971).

Starkey, David (ed.): Henry VIII: A European Court in England (London, 1991).

—— The Reign of Henry VIII (London, 2002).

—— Henry, Virtuous Prince (London, 2008).

Watts, John L. (ed.): The End of the Middle Ages?(London, 1998).

Weir, Alison: The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London, 1991).

—— Henry VIII (London, 2001).

Williams, C. H.: England under the Early Tudors (London, 1925).

—— The Tudor Despotism (London, 1928).

Williams, Penry: The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979).

Wooding, Lucy: Henry VIII (London, 2009).

Zeeveld, W. Gordon: Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948).

THE REIGN OF EDWARD

Alford, Stephen: Kinship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002).

Aston, Margaret: The King’s Bedpost (Cambridge, 1993).

Beer, Barrett L.: Rebellion and Riot, Popular Disorder in England during the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, Ohio, 2005).

Bush, M. L.: The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (London, 1975).

Constant, G.: Introduction of the Reformation into England, Edward VI (London, 1942).

Gasquet, Francis Aidan and Bishop, Edmund: Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1890).

Heard, Nigel: Edward VI and Mary (London, 1990).

Hoak, D. E.: The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 1976).

Jones, Whitney R. D.: The Mid-Tudor Crisis(London, 1973).

Jordan, W. K.: Edward VI, the Young King (London, 1968).

—— EdwardVI: The Threshold of Power (London, 1970).

Loach, Jennifer: Edward VI (London, 1999).

Loach, Jennifer and Tittler, Robert (eds): The Mid-Tudor Polity (London, 1980).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid: Tudor Church Militant, Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999).

Mackie, J. D.: The Earlier Tudors (Oxford, 1952).

Pollard, A. F.: England under Protector Somerset(London, 1900).

Skidmore, Chris: Edward VI (London, 2007).

THE REIGN OF MARY

Duffy, Eamon: Fires of Faith (London, 2009).

Duffy, Eamon and Loades, David (eds): The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006).

Edwards, John and Truman, Ronald (eds): Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: the achievement of Friar Bartolome Carranza (Aldershot, 2005).

Erickson, Carolly: Bloody Mary (London, 1978).

Loach, Jennifer: Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford, 1986).

Loades, David: Mary Tudor (Oxford, 1989).

Miller, James Arthur: Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London, 1926).

Porter, Linda: Mary Tudor: the First Queen (London, 2007).

Prescott, H. F. M.: Mary Tudor (London, 1940).

Richards, Judith M.: Mary Tudor (London, 2008).

Schenk, W.: Reginald Pole (London, 1950).

White, Beatrice: MaryTudor (London, 1935).

Whitelock, Anna: Mary Tudor (London, 2009).

THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH

Adams, Simon: Leicester and the Court (Manchester, 2002).

Alford, Stephen: The Early Elizabethan Polity (Cambridge, 1998).

—— Burghley (London, 2008).

Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Goldring, Elizabeth and Knight, Sarah: The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2007).

Black, J. B.: The Reign of Elizabeth (Oxford, 1936).

Collinson, Patrick: Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994).

—— The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967).

Doran, Susan: Monarchy and Matrimony (London, 1996).

—— Queen Elizabeth I (London, 2003).

Doran, Susan and Freeman, Thomas S. (eds): The Myth of Elizabeth (London, 2003).

Dunn, Jane: Elizabeth and Mary (London, 2003).

Elton, G. R.: The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge, 1986).

Graves, Michael A. R.: Burghley (London, 1998).

Greaves, Richard L. (ed.): Elizabeth I, Queen of England (London, 1974).

Guy, John (ed.): The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1995).

—— My Heart is My Own (London, 2004).

Haigh, Christopher (ed.): The Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1984).

—— Elizabeth I (London, 1988).

Hammer, Paul E. J.: The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics (Cambridge, 1999).

Haugaard, William P.: Elizabeth and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1968).

Hibbert, Christopher: The Virgin Queen (London, 1990).

Hurstfield, Joel: Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London, 1973).

Jenkins, Elizabeth: Elizabeth the Great (London, 1958).

Jones, Norman: The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (Oxford, 1993).

Levin, Carole: The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 2002).

Levine, Joseph M. (ed.): Elizabeth I (London, 1969).

MacCaffrey, Wallace: The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (London, 1969).

—— Elizabeth I (London, 1993).

McClaren, A. N.: Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1999).

Mears, Natalie: Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005).

Meyer, Arnold Oskar: England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth (London, 1967).

Neale, J. E.: Queen Elizabeth I (London, 1934).

—— Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958).

Palliser, D. A.: The Age of Elizabeth (London, 1983).

Rex, Richard: Elizabeth I (Stroud, 2003).

Strickland, Agnes: The Life of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1906).

Strong, Roy: Gloriana (London, 1987).

Weir, Alison: Elizabeth the Queen (London, 1998).

Williams, Penry: The Later Tudors (Oxford, 1995).

SOCIETY

Bindoff, S. T.: Tudor England (London, 1950).

Bindoff, S. T., Hurstfield, J. and Williams, C. H. (eds): Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961).

Byrne, M. St Clare: Elizabethan Life in Town and Country (London, 1925).

Chambers, J. D.: Population, Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial England (Oxford, 1972).

Cheyney, Edward P.: Social Changes in England in the Sixteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 1895).

Clark, Peter (ed.): The Early Modern Town(London, 1976).

—— The Cambridge Urban History of England, Volume Two, 1540 –1840 (Cambridge, 2000).

Clay, C. G. A.: Economic Expansion and Social Change, England 1500–1700, two volumes (Cambridge, 1984).

Collinson, Patrick (ed.): The Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2002).

Coward, Barry: Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England (London, 1988).

Cressy, David: Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford, 1997).

Dodd, A. H.: Life in Elizabethan England (London, 1961).

Ellis, Steven G.: Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power (Oxford, 1995).

Elton, G. R.: England Under the Tudors (London, 1955).

Guy, John: Tudor England (Oxford, 1988).

Jack, Sybil M.: Trade and Industry in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1977).

James, Mervyn: Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1986).

Polito, Mary: Governmental Arts in Early Tudor England (Aldershot, 2005).

Ramsey, Peter H. (ed.): The Price Revolution in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1971).

Robertson, H. M.: Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (Cambridge, 1933).

Rowse, A. L.: The England of Elizabeth (London, 1950).

—— The Expansion of Elizabethan England (London, 1955).

Sharpe, Kevin: Selling the Tudor Monarchy (London, 2009).

Simon, Joan: Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1967).

Sommerville, C. John: The Secularisation of Early Modern England (Oxford, 1992).

Tawney, R. H.: The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912).

Thurley, Simon: The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (London, 1993).

Walsham, Alexandra: The Reformation of the Landscape (Oxford, 2011).

Wernham, R. B.: Before the Armada (London, 1966).

Williams, Penry: Life in Tudor England (London, 1964).

Index

abbots: and dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; translated to diocesan bishoprics, ref 1; executed, ref 2

Absolute Restraint of Annates Act (1534), ref 1

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st baron, ref 1

agriculture: changes, ref 1

alehouses: numbers increase, ref 1

Alençon, Francis, duke of see Anjou, Francis, duke of

Aler, Madame d’, ref 1

Alesius, Alexander, ref 1

Allen, Cardinal William, ref 1, ref 2

Alva, Ferdinand de Toledo, duke of: command in Netherlands, ref 1; seizes English warehouse in Antwerp, ref 1; on Ridolfi plot, ref 1; and Netherlands revolt, ref 2; and Elizabeth’s reaction to St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1

Alva, Maria, duchess of, ref 1

Amadas, Mrs, ref 1

Ambsworth, Margaret, ref 1

Ammonius (Andrea Ammonio), ref 1

Anabaptists, ref 1, ref 2

Anglican Church see Church of England

Anjou, Francis, duke of (earlier duke of Alençon): as Elizabeth’s suitor, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; invades Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2; visits England, ref 1, ref 2; death, ref 1

Anjou, Henry, duke of see Henry III, king of France

Anne Boleyn, queen of Henry VIII: Henry meets and courts, ref 1, ref 2; and Henry’s divorce, ref 1, ref 2; gives Simon Fish pamphlet to Henry, ref 1; religious liberalism, ref 1; popular hostility to, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; made marquess of Pembroke, ref 1; pregnancy and birth of Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; marriage to Henry, ref 1, ref 2; crowned queen, ref 1; and Henry’s infidelity, ref 1, ref 2; succession settled on children, ref 1; on Mary’s refusing oath of Succession, ref 1; miscarries male child, ref 1; threatens Mary, ref 1; accused of infidelity, ref 1; deteriorating relations with Henry, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Anne Boleyn (ship), ref 1

Anne of Cleves, queen of Henry VIII: marriage and divorce from Henry, ref 1; separation from Henry, ref 1; and Cromwell’s fall, ref 1; on Henry’s marriage to Katherine Parr, ref 1

Anne, Queen, ref 1

Anselm, St, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

anti-Semitism, ref 1

António, Don (pretender to Portuguese throne), ref 1

Antwerp: trade, ref 1; unrest, ref 2; Spanish massacre in, ref 1; falls to Parma, ref 2

Aquinas, St Thomas, ref 1

architecture, ref 1

Arden family, of Park Hall, ref 1

Arden, John, ref 1

Ardres, treaty of (1546), ref 1

Arthur, prince (Henry VIII’s brother), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, 12th earl of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Arundel, Philip Howard, 13th earl of, ref 1

Ascham, Roger, ref 1, ref 2

Aske, Robert: leads Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; Henry meets, ref 1; tried and hanged, ref 1

Askew, Anne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Athelney, abbot of, ref 1

Audeley, Lady, ref 1

Augmentation, Court of, ref 1, ref 2

Austin Friars, London, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Babington, Anthony, ref 1, ref 2

Bacon, Anthony, ref 1

Bacon, Francis: on Elizabeth’s religious discretion, ref 1; recruited by Essex, ref 1; counsels Essex, ref 1; and Essex’s conduct in Ireland, ref 1; argues for Essex’s appointment to Ireland, ref 1

Bacon, Sir Nicholas, ref 1

Ball, Alice, ref 1

Ballard, John, SJ, ref 1

Bancroft, Richard, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Barnes, Robert, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Barrowe, Henry (and Barrowists), ref 1, ref 2

Barton, Elizabeth (Nun of Kent): prophecies, ref 1, ref 2; investigated and beheaded, ref 1

Bath, John Bourchier, 2nd earl of, ref 1

Bath, William Bourchier, 3rd earl of, ref 1

Beaufort, Margaret, countess of Richmond and Derby, ref 1

Beaumaris, Anglesey, ref 1

Becket, St Thomas: shrine desecrated and demoted, ref 1, ref 2

Bedford, Francis Russell, 2nd earl of: in Elizabeth’s privy council, ref 1; supports Elizabeth in 1569 rebellion, ref 1

Bedingfield, Sir Henry, ref 1

Bendlowes, Serjeant, ref 1

benefit of clergy, ref 1

Bennet, Dr, ref 1

Berthelet, Thomas, ref 1

Berwick, treaty of (1586), ref 1

Bible, Holy: translated, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; English version distributed, ref 1; public reading forbidden, ref 1; Geneva version, ref 1; Puritan idealization of, ref 1

Bigod, Sir Francis, ref 1

Bill of Deposition against Henry, ref 1

Bilney, Thomas, ref 1, ref 2

Bisham abbey, ref 1

bishops: draw up statement of belief for Henry, ref 1; appointed by king’s letters patent, ref 1

Bishops’ Book, The see Institution of a Christian Man, The

Blois, treaty of (1572), ref 1

Blount, Elizabeth (Bessie), ref 1

Blount, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Bocher, Joan see Joan of Kent

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy, ref 1

Boleyn, Mary: liaison with Henry VIII, ref 1

Bolton Castle, ref 1

Bond of Association, ref 1, ref 2

Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London (‘Bloody Bonner’): interrogates Anne Askew, ref 1; protests at religious reforms, ref 1; abuses Cranmer, ref 1, ref 2; persecutes reformers, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; decrees Church forms and services, ref 1, ref 2; absent from Elizabeth’s arrival in London, ref 1; imprisoned, ref 1

Book of Common Prayer: provokes Western Rising, ref 1, ref 2; publication (1549), ref 1; overrides other prayer books, ref 1; revised (1552), ref 1, ref 2; in Elizabeth’s reign, ref 1; unpopularity in North, ref 1; proposed reform, ref 1; criticised, ref 1; clergy required to assent to, ref 1; piety, ref 1

Booner, William, ref 1

Bothwell, James Hepburn, 4th earl of: in plot to murder Darnley, ref 1; relations with Mary Stuart, ref 1; tried and acquitted, ref 1; made duke of Orkney, ref 1; marriage to Mary, ref 1; and inquiry into Darnley’s murder, ref 1; Mary’s ‘casket letters’ to, ref 1; imprisoned in Denmark, ref 1; death, ref 1

Boulogne: siege of (1544), ref 1; Henry occupies for eight years, ref 1; Somerset plans to reclaim, ref 1; Henry II of France besieges, ref 1; returned to French, ref 1

Boxley Abbey, Kent, ref 1

boy bishops, ref 1

Bradford, John, ref 1

Brereton, William, ref 1

Brocke, Edward, ref 1

Browne, Robert (and Brownists), ref 1, ref 2

Brussels, Union of (1577), ref 1

Bryan, Sir Francis, ref 1

Bucer, Martin, ref 1

Buckingham, Edward Stafford, 3rd duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Bunyan, John, ref 1

Burghley, Sir William Cecil, baron: on popular unrest, ref 1; as privy councillor under Edward VI, ref 1; and accession of Mary Tudor, ref 1; as Elizabeth’s principal secretary of state, ref 1; supports reformed faith, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; and Parker’s reluctance to accept archbishopric, ref 1; negotiates treaty of Edinburgh, ref 1; threatened by Elizabeth’s relations with Dudley, ref 1; on Elizabeth’s suitors and marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; on Elizabeth’s ill health, ref 1, ref 2; promotes parliament’s petitions to Elizabeth, ref 1; drafts succession bill (1563), ref 1; and multiplicity of religious practices, ref 1; informs Elizabeth of birth of Mary Stuart’s son, ref 1; and threat of Mary Stuart’s succession, ref 1; on state of Scotland at marriage of Mary and Bothwell, ref 1; confronts Spain, ref 1; writes to Moray on escape of Mary Stuart, ref 1; annotates Mary Stuart’s casket letters, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s vacillations over Mary Stuart, ref 1; complains of excess of luxury goods, ref 1; distrusts Mary Stuart, ref 1; opposition to, ref 1; and end of Rising of the North, ref 1; learns of Ridolfi plot, ref 1; and arrest of Catholic plotters, ref 1; ennobled, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s nervous collapse, ref 1; on war in Netherlands, ref 1; and popular reaction to St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s procrastinations, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s refusal to head Protestant League, ref 1; favours Edmund Grindal as archbishop, ref 1; dissuades Elizabeth from dismissing Grindal, ref 1; as patron of Campion, ref 1; praises torture, ref 1;rebukes Whitgift, ref 1; hopes to destroy Mary Stuart, ref 1; and threat of invasion, ref 1; drafts Bond of Association and ensures Protestant succession, ref 1; accompanies Elizabeth on 27th anniversary of accession celebrations, ref 1; commissions portrait of Elizabeth, ref 1; and financing of force in Netherlands, ref 1; opposes peace proposals for Netherlands, ref 1; and trial of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s signing Mary’s death warrant, ref 1; Elizabeth ostracizes after death of Mary, ref 1; dominance at court, ref 1, ref 2; ageing, ref 1; death, ref 1; on religious changes, ref 1

Burning of Heretics, Act for (1414): revoked, ref 1

burnings at the stake: described, ref 1; revived under Elizabeth, ref 1

Bury St Edmunds, ref 1

Butts, Margaret, Lady (née Bacon), ref 1

Cabot, Sebastian, ref 1

Cadiz, ref 1, ref 2

Caius, Dr John, ref 1

Calais: in English hands, ref 1; and English invasion of France (1544), ref 1; French besiege and capture (1557–8), ref 1, ref 2; English attempt to repossess, ref 1; Elizabeth gives up claim, ref 1; Spanish Armada reaches, ref 1

Calvin, Jean: doctrines and practice, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Calvinism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Cambridge: colleges founded, ref 1

Camden, William, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Campeggio, Cardinal Lorenzo, bishop of Salisbury, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Campion, Edmund, ref 1, ref 2

canon law: subordination to common law, ref 1

Canterbury: Becket’s shrine dismantled and plundered, ref 1, ref 2

Carberry Hill, battle of (1567), ref 1, ref 2

Cardano, Hieronymus, ref 1

Carew, Sir George, ref 1

Carew, Sir Peter, ref 1

Carey, Sir Robert, ref 1, ref 2

Carlisle: Mary Stuart flees to, ref 1

Carlos, Don, prince of Asturias, ref 1

Carthusian friars: refuse oath upon Act of Succession, ref 1; executed, ref 1, ref 2; properties destroyed, ref 1; emigrate to continent during Edward VI’s reign, ref 1

Cartwright, Thomas, ref 1

‘casket letters’, ref 1

Castle Acre priory, Norfolk, ref 1, ref 2

cathedrals: survive after dissolution of monasteries, ref 1

Catherine de Medici, regent of France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Catholic Church: flourishes in England, ref 1; calls for reform, ref 1, ref 2; and heretics, ref 1, ref 2; and king’s jurisdiction, ref 1; and anti-clericalism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; reforms, ref 1, ref 2; Wolsey controls in England, ref 1; attacked in parliament, ref 1; and Henry’s claims to supremacy, ref 1; Commons petition against, ref 1; offers concession to Henry, ref 1; and transubstantiation, ref 1; Henry wishes for reform, ref 1; members emigrate during Edward VI’s reign, ref 1; seasonal festivities silenced under Edward VI, ref 1; revival under Mary Tudor, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and persecution of Protestants, ref 1; followers persecuted under Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; subordinated under Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; popular following, ref 1; and excommunication of Elizabeth, ref 1; discredited by St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; extremism in France, ref 1; seminarians in England, ref 1; English statutes against, ref 1; members restricted in movement, ref 1; Hooker on, ref 1; and Protestant reformation, ref 1; rituals abolished, ref 1; see also religion

Catholic League, ref 1

Cavendish, George, ref 1, ref 2

Cecil, Sir Robert (later earl of Salisbury): career and appearance, ref 1; rivalry with Essex, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; supports Lopez, ref 1; appointed secretary of state, ref 1; Essex abuses, ref 1; as master of Court of Wards, ref 1; questions Essex on conduct in Ireland, ref 1; heads court faction, ref 1; imprisoned by Essex, ref 1; informed of Essex’s rebellion plan, ref 1; in negotiations with James VI of Scotland over succession, ref 1; Elizabeth rebukes for personal advice, ref 1

Cecil, William see Burghley, Sir William Cecil, baron

Chancery, court of, ref 1

chantry foundations, ref 1

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: succeeds Ferdinand as king of Spain, ref 1; conflicts with Francis I, ref 1; succeeds as emperor, ref 1; Wolsey negotiates with, ref 1; meets Henry in England, ref 1; Pavia victory, ref 1; Mary Tudor betrothed to, ref 1; Henry makes treaty against Francis I, ref 1; released from betrothal to Mary, ref 1; and Henry’s seeking divorce from Katherine of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2; sacks Rome and imprisons pope, ref 1; Henry’s breach with, ref 1; as potential threat to Henry, ref 1; Henry warns of Cardinal Pole, ref 1; invasion threat to England, ref 1; proposes duchess of Milan as wife for Henry, ref 1; fails to form alliance with France, ref 1; Henry forms alliance against France, ref 1, ref 2; relations with papacy, ref 1; treaty with France (1544), ref 1; persecutes Protestants, ref 1, ref 2; and plot to depose Somerset, ref 1; supports Mary Tudor, ref 1, ref 2; prospective war with, ref 1; and Mary Tudor’s prospective marriage, ref 1; intends to abdicate, ref 1

Charles IX, king of France: minority, ref 1; as prospective husband for Mary Stuart and Elizabeth, ref 1; and religious wars, ref 1; protests at bull excommunicating Elizabeth, ref 1; and prospective war against Spain, ref 1

Charles, archduke of Austria, prospective marriage to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Charterhouse see Carthusians

Chartley Manor, ref 1

Chaseabout Raid (Scotland, 1565), ref 1

Chaucer, Geoffrey, ref 1

Cheapside Cross: destroyed, ref 1

Cheke, John, ref 1, ref 2

Christ’s Hospital (school and orphanage), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Church of England: Henry declared supreme head of, ref 1; survey of worth (1535), ref 1; Ten Articles (of faith), ref 1, ref 2; bishops’ statement of faith, ref 1; and Act of Uniformity (1549), ref 1; liturgy and practices, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; use of English language, ref 1; orders of clergy, ref 1; statues and images limited, ref 1; plate and possessions expropriated, ref 1; compulsory attendance, ref 1; ecclesiastical laws, ref 1; and Thirty-Nine Articles, ref 1, ref 2; Mary heads, ref 1; convocation (1563), ref 1; doctrine of faith established, ref 1; named Anglican, ref 1; rules under Whitgift, ref 1; and Puritan criticism, ref 1; conformity to, ref 1; and Hooker’s policies, ref 1; reformation, ref 1; see also Book of Common Prayer

Churchyard, Thomas, ref 1

Clement VII, pope: and annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, ref 1, ref 2; Henry’s campaign against, ref 1; and Henry’s pose as defender of the faith, ref 1; confirms Cranmer as archbishop, ref 1; threatens bishop of London, ref 1; declares Henry’s marriage to Katherine still valid, ref 1; bull of interdict and deposition against Henry, ref 1

clergy: character of, ref 1; and heretics, ref 1; under law, ref 1; hostility to, ref 1, ref 2; attacked in parliament, ref 1; charged with praemunire, ref 1; repudiate Commons petition against grievances, ref 1; submit to Henry, ref 1, ref 2; self-indulgent and immoral behaviour, ref 1, ref 2; executed after rebellion, ref 1; move on dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; punished and executed after dissolution, ref 1, ref 2; in Church of England, ref 1; shortage of reformed, ref 1; obliged by Whitgift to assent to articles, ref 1; see also benefit of clergy

Clyst St Mary, Devon, ref 1

coach: introduced to England, ref 1

Cobbett, William, ref 1

Cobbler, Captain, ref 1

Cobham, Henry Brooke, 11th baron, ref 1

Cobham, William Brooke, 10th baron, ref 1

coinage: debased, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; debasement reversed, ref 1

Colchester abbey, ref 1

Colet, John, ref 1, ref 2

Coligny, Gaspard de, ref 1

Collectanea satis copiosa, ref 1

Commons, House of see parliament

Company of the Mines Royal, ref 1

Condé, Louis, prince of, ref 1, ref 2

Confession of Augsburg, ref 1

consubstantiation, ref 1

convents: dissolved, ref 1

Corunna, ref 1

countryside: changes and decay, ref 1

Courtenay, Lord Edward (later earl of Devonshire), ref 1, ref 2

Coventry cathedral, ref 1

Coverdale, Miles, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Cox, Richard, ref 1

Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury: meets at White Horse tavern, ref 1; supports Henry in divorce negotiations, ref 1; and relations between king and pope, ref 1, ref 2; sees portent in sky, ref 1; on Elizabeth Barton, ref 1, ref 2; appointed archbishop, ref 1; and constitutional changes, ref 1; crowns Anne Boleyn, ref 1; and More’s refusal to take oath, ref 1; on reformation, ref 1, ref 2; doubts over Anne Boleyn’s guilt, ref 1; draws up articles of faith, ref 1; and Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; on Henry’s triumph over enemies of reform, ref 1; proposes collegiate school at Canterbury, ref 1; supervises Henry’s corrected statement of belief, ref 1; letter from Melanchthon, ref 1; and religious reforms, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; sends family into exile, ref 1; on Six Articles, ref 1; supports Cromwell, ref 1; as senior counsellor, ref 1; investigates Katherine Howard’s infidelities, ref 1; supports reform and accused of heresy, ref 1; modifies beliefs, ref 1; and death of Henry, ref 1; grows beard, ref 1; Latimer lives with, ref 1; frames Act of Uniformity, ref 1, ref 2; turns against Somerset, ref 1; advises Edward VI to appoint reformers to council, ref 1, ref 2; detained and tried, ref 1; celebrates burning of Joan Bocher, ref 1; degraded, ref 1; recantations, ref 1; burnt and denies recantations, ref 1; Book of Homilies, ref 1, ref 2; A Code of Ecclesiastical Constitutions, ref 1; A Collection of the Articles of Religion, ref 1

crime: increase in 1590s, ref 1

Cromwell, Oliver, ref 1

Cromwell, Thomas: on affairs of parliament, ref 1; background and career, ref 1; opposes invasion of France, ref 1; devotion to Wolsey, ref 1; rise to power, ref 1, ref 2; and Norfolk’s threat to Wolsey, ref 1; and constitutional changes, ref 1; and secrecy of Dunstable ecclesiastical court, ref 1; investigates Elizabeth Barton, ref 1; recruits Latimer, ref 1; system of supervision and control, ref 1; and More’s refusal to take oath, ref 1; appointed viceregent, ref 1; supervises collection of Church revenues, ref 1; and fate of Fisher and More, ref 1; on visitation of monasteries, ref 1; religious reforms, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; and Henry’s infidelities, ref 1; on commission into treason, ref 1; disagreements with Henry, ref 1; and Anne Boleyn’s downfall, ref 1; warns Mary Tudor, ref 1; orders dissolution of monasteries, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and rebellions in North, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; Aske attacks, ref 1; appropriates monastic lands and possessions, ref 1; threatens defiant friar, ref 1; and burning of John Forrest, ref 1; decrees possession of English Bible in every church, ref 1; introduces parish registers, ref 1; military preparations against papal threat, ref 1; supports Anne of Cleves as wife for Henry, ref 1, ref 2; arrested and charged with treason, ref 1; created earl of Essex, ref 1; beheaded, ref 1

Crowley, Robert: The Way to Wealth, ref 1

Culpeper, Thomas, ref 1

custom: replaced by law, ref 1

Dacre, Gregory Fiennes, 10th baron, ref 1

Darcy, Thomas, baron: opposes Pilgrim of Grace, ref 1, ref 2; tried and beheaded, ref 1

Darnley, Henry Stuart, earl of: Mary Stuart’s infatuation with, ref 1; character, ref 1; marriage to Mary, ref 1; marriage difficulties, ref 1; plot against Mary, ref 1; murdered, ref 1; inquiry into murder, ref 1

Darvel Gadarn, St, ref 1

Davison, Francis, ref 1

Davison, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2

Dedham, Essex, ref 1

Dee, John, ref 1; General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, ref 1

Dekker, Thomas: The Wonderful Year, ref 1

Denny, Sir Anthony, ref 1, ref 2

Dereham, Francis, ref 1

‘Device for the Alteration of Religion’, ref 1

Digges, Thomas, ref 1

diseases, ref 1

Dispensation and Peter’s Pence Act (1534), ref 1

Displaying of the Protestants, The, ref 1

Dissolution of Monasteries, Act for (1536), ref 1, ref 2

Doncaster: and Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; Adwick le Street parish, ref 1

Dormer, Jane see Feria, duchess of

Douai, ref 1, ref 2

Douglas, Lady Margaret, ref 1

Drake, Sir Francis: voyages to West Indies, ref 1; in Panama, ref 1; circumnavigates globe, ref 1; attacks Spanish ships, ref 1; given command of squadron against Spain, ref 1, ref 2; opposes Spanish Armada, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; sails against Portugal, ref 1

drama: development, ref 1

dress and costumes, ref 1

Dreux, ref 1

Dryffield, Revd Thomas, ref 1

Dudley, Amy: death, ref 1

Dudley, Sir Edmund, ref 1, ref 2

Dudley, Sir Henry, ref 1

Dudley, John see Northumberland, John Dudley, duke of

Dudley, Robert see Leicester, earl of

earthquake (1580), ref 1

Edinburgh, treaty of (1560), ref 1, ref 2

education: after dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; and English language, ref 1

Edward III, king, ref 1

Edward VI, king: birth, ref 1; upbringing and education, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; portrait, ref 1; in family portrait, ref 1; appearance and manner, ref 1; religious reformism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8; Henry bequeaths crown to, ref 1; regency, ref 1; told of father’s death, ref 1; coronation, ref 1; betrothal to infant Mary Stuart, ref 1; and Protector Somerset’s invasion of Scotland, ref 1; founds schools, ref 1; Thomas Seymour attempts to influence, ref 1; and social divisions and unrest, ref 1, ref 2; rumoured death, ref 1; and Somerset’s downfall, ref 1; attends council meetings, ref 1; relations with Dudley (Northumberland), ref 1; differences with Mary Tudor, ref 1; and Somerset’s execution, ref 1; administration, ref 1; ill with smallpox, ref 1; health decline, ref 1; succession to, ref 1; death, ref 1; funeral, ref 1

Edwards, Arthur, ref 1

Egerton, Sir Thomas (later Viscount Brackley), ref 1

Elizabeth I, queen: birth, ref 1, ref 2; paternity questioned, ref 1; education and learning, ref 1, ref 2; in family portrait, ref 1; love of music, ref 1; in succession to Henry, ref 1; on Katherine Parr’s marriage to Seymour, ref 1; relations with Thomas Seymour, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; enters household of Katherine Parr, ref 1; declared illegitimate, ref 1; and Mary Tudor’s accession, ref 1; Protestantism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; and Wyatt’s rebellion, ref 1; confined in Tower, ref 1; moved from Tower to Woodstock, ref 1; Catholics persecuted under, ref 1; relations with Mary Tudor, ref 1; and Dudley conspiracy, ref 1; as heir apparent to Mary, ref 1; succeeds at Mary’s death, ref 1; progress to London on accession, ref 1; coronation, ref 1; and privy council, ref 1; condition of England on accession, ref 1; relations with Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, ref 1, ref 2; women courtiers, ref 1; religious opinions and policy, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; remains unmarried and childless, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; ascendancy and exercise of power, ref 1; relations with parliament, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; cult of, ref 1; keeps crucifix, ref 1; assassination plots against, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; dislikes war, ref 1, ref 2; suitors and marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; smallpox, ref 1; hopes to meet Mary Stuart, ref 1; supports Protestant cause in France, ref 1; succession debated in parliament, ref 1; guided by council, ref 1; scarred by smallpox, ref 1; summons parliament infrequently, ref 1; portraits, ref 1; questions Melville about Mary Stuart, ref 1; fluency in languages, ref 1, ref 2; plays virginals, ref 1; ill with flux, ref 1; on Darnley’s murder of Rizzio, ref 1; illness (1566), ref 1; writes to Mary on murder of Darnley, ref 1; deprecates Mary’s marriage to Bothwell, ref 1; supports Mary on imprisonment, ref 1; on Mary’s escape and flight to England, ref 1; and inquiry into Darnley murder, ref 1, ref 2; undertakes progresses, ref 1, ref 2; vacillations over Mary Stuart, ref 1; defends Cecil, ref 1; and proposed marriage of Mary Stuart and Norfolk, ref 1; northern earls rise against (1569), ref 1; excommunicated by Pius V, ref 1; accession date celebrated, ref 1; marriage negotiations with dukes of Anjou, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; Norfolk supports Ridolfi plot to depose, ref 1; ulcerous leg, ref 1, ref 2; on Mary and Ridolfi plot, ref 1; nervous collapse on condemnation of Norfolk, ref 1; resists parliament’s condemnation of Mary Stuart, ref 1; favours counsellors, ref 1; entertained at Kenilworth, ref 1; love of dancing, ref 1, ref 2; touches for ‘king’s evil’, ref 1; reluctance to support war in Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; sends aid to William of Orange, ref 1; told of St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; procrastination, ref 1; ungenerosity, ref 1; declines to head Protestant League in Europe, ref 1; alarmed at ‘prophesyings’, ref 1; peace under, ref 1; image as Virgin Queen, ref 1, ref 1; suffers fits and toothache, ref 1; orders restrictions on ruffs and rapiers, ref 1; portrait by Metsys, ref 1; meets Campion, ref 1; relationship with Anjou ends, ref 1; favours Whitgift, ref 1; moves to recognize James VI as king of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2; mourns death of duke of Anjou, ref 1; dislikes Burghley’s plans to ensure Protestant succession, ref 1; portrait cameos manufactured, ref 1; selects small number of counsellors, ref 1; signs treaty with Netherlands (1585), ref 1; celebrates twenty-seventh anniversary of accession (1585), ref 1; ‘Ermine’ portrait, ref 1; anger at Leicester’s appointment as governor of Netherlands, ref 1; fainting fit, ref 1; Babington’s conspiracy against, ref 1; and trial of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1; uncertainties over decision about Mary’s fate, ref 1; signs Mary’s death warrant, ref 1; reaction to Mary’s execution, ref 1; Tilbury speech (1588), ref 1; Gower’s ‘Armada’ portrait, ref 1; forbids parliament to engage in religious affairs, ref 1; ageing, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; on foreign affairs, ref 1; translates Boethius, ref 1; late portraits, ref 1; deprecates Essex’s Cadiz expedition, ref 1; growing irascibility, ref 1; daily exercises, ref 1; assaults Essex, ref 1; and Essex’s campaign in Ireland, ref 1; court factions, ref 1; and humbling of Essex, ref 1; and Essex’s rebellion, ref 1; reforms procedure on monopolies, ref 1; succession to, ref 1; riding in later years, ref 1; decline and death, ref 1

Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII, ref 1

Eltham Palace, ref 1, ref 2

Ely, bishop of, ref 1

Empson, Sir Richard, ref 1

enclosure (of land), ref 1, ref 2

England: Catholic religious practices, ref 1; war with France (1513), ref 1; depopulation in counties, ref 1; taxation, ref 1; war against France (1523), ref 1; threat of rebellion, ref 1; treaties with France: (1525), ref 1; (1546), ref 1; (1572), ref 1; (1573), ref 1; trading development, ref 1; executions for treason (1534–40), ref 1; under supervision and control, ref 1; prophecies and portents, ref 1, ref 2; Franco–Spanish invasion threat against Henry, ref 1; war with Scotland (1542), ref 1; invades France (1544), ref 1; religion at time of Henry’s death, ref 1; European Protestant divines visit, ref 1; religious reforms under Edward VI, ref 1; legislation under Edward VI, ref 1; social divisions and unrest under Edward VI and Somerset, ref 1, ref 2; Henry II of France declares war on, ref 1; food and eating, ref 1; described by French and Spanish, ref 1; Protestant exiles flee to Europe, ref 1; declares war on France (1557), ref 1; coach introduced, ref 1; naval development and sea power, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; rift with Spain, ref 1; development of world trade, ref 1; material improvements, ref 1; industrial development, ref 1; Catholic invasion threat, ref 1; voyages and colonies, ref 1; period of peace (1559–85), ref 1; trade with Spain, ref 1; Spanish Armada and invasion threat, ref 1; strength of fleet against Armada, ref 1; seamen’s behaviour, ref 1; unrest (1596), ref 1; see also North of England

English language: Bible translated into, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; litany under Edward VI, ref 1; in Church of England, ref 1; used for psalms under Elizabeth, ref 1

Erasmus, Desiderius: opposes war, ref 1; on unhygienic conditions, ref 1; translates New Testament, ref 1; religious reforms, ref 1; on fear in England, ref 1; humanist learning, ref 1; on Becket shrine at Canterbury, ref 1; Mary Tudor translates, ref 1, ref 2; De Servando Conjugio (‘On Preserving Marriage’), ref 1; Paraphrase of the New Testament, ref 1

Erik, prince of Sweden, ref 1

Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of: character and career, ref 1; as Elizabeth’s favourite, ref 1; on expedition against Portugal, ref 1; belligerence, ref 1; rivalry with Robert Cecil, ref 1, ref 2; as ward of Burghley, ref 1; in privy council, ref 1; controls intelligence, ref 1; uncovers Lopez plot against Elizabeth, ref 1; leads expedition against Cadiz, ref 1; leads second attack on Spain (1597), ref 1; offends Elizabeth, ref 1; sent to Ireland as lord deputy, ref 1; withdraws from court, ref 1; returns to England from Ireland, ref 1; examined by special court and found guilty of contempt, ref 1; disgraced, ref 1; plans rebellion, ref 1; imprisons Cecil, ref 1; armed revolt and surrender, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Essex, Sir Walter Devereux, 1st earl of, ref 1

Eucharist, ref 1, ref 2; see also transubstantiation

Europe: religious wars and troubles, ref 1

Evil May Day (1517), ref 1

excommunication, ref 1

Exeter: in Western Rising, ref 1; workhouse established (1553), ref 1

Exeter, Henry Courtenay, marquess of, ref 1

faith, ref 1

Familists (Family of God), ref 1

famine, ref 1

fashion, ref 1

Faunt, Nicholas, ref 1

Felton, John, ref 1

Fenatus (tooth drawer), ref 1

Fenton, William, ref 1

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, ref 1

Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, ref 1

Ferdinand, king of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Feria, Jane Dormer, duchess of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Field of Cloth of Gold (1520), ref 1

Field, John and Thomas Wilcox: An Admonition to the Parliament, ref 1

Fish, Simon: A Supplication for the Beggars, ref 1

Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester: resists Henry’s demands, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; proposes Spanish invasion of England, ref 1; arrested, ref 1; refuses oath on Act of Succession and consigned to Tower, ref 1; trial and execution, ref 1, ref 2

Flodden Field, battle of (1513), ref 1, ref 2

Flower, Thomas, ref 1

food and diet: changes, ref 1

Forrest, Fra John, ref 1

Foster, Thomas, ref 1

Fotheringhay Castle, ref 1, ref 2

Foxe, John: on killing of Hunne, ref 1; reports incidents of iconoclasm, ref 1; on Supremacy Act (1534), ref 1; on Katherine Parr, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; on Henry’s mistrust of Gardiner, ref 1; on accession of Edward VI, ref 1; on Marian persecutions, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s meeting with Mary Tudor, ref 1; and martyrdom of Latimer, ref 1; recounts history of Reformation, ref 1; protests to Elizabeth at resumption of burnings, ref 1; Book of Martyrs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

Foxe, Richard, bishop of Winchester: as lord privy seal, ref 1; promotes Wolsey, ref 1

France: Henry’s hostility to, ref 1, ref 2; Holy League formed against, ref 1; war declared against (1512), ref 1; Henry’s expedition against (1513), ref 1; Henry invades (1523), ref 1; treaties with England: (1525), ref 1; (1546), ref 1; (1572), ref 1; (1573), ref 1; Henry visits with Anne Boleyn, ref 1; Henry allies against with Charles V, ref 1, ref 2; alliance with Scotland, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; invasion (1544), ref 1; renewed invasion threat from, ref 1; force lands at Leith (1548), ref 1; peace with England, ref 1; supports Dudley conspiracy, ref 1; ships attack Scarborough, ref 1; England declares war on (1557), ref 1; threatens invasion of England (1558), ref 1; Elizabeth seeks peace with, ref 1; and plots to kill Elizabeth, ref 1; garrison at Leith resists English, ref 1; rivalry with Spain, ref 1; troops leave Scotland, ref 1; wars of religion, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; support for Mary Stuart, ref 1; seizes Hainault, ref 1; war against Spain in Netherlands, ref 1; Catholic extremism, ref 1; disunity, ref 1

Francis I, king of France: accession, ref 1; conflicts with Charles V, ref 1; Wolsey negotiates with, ref 1; at Field of Cloth of Gold, ref 1; Mary Tudor betrothed to, ref 1; Henry and Charles V’s (1521) treaty against, ref 1; Henry’s alliance with, ref 1; delays publication of pope’s bull against Henry, ref 1; invasion threat to England, ref 1; fails to form alliance with Charles V, ref 1; detests Cromwell, ref 1; welcomes Scots’ war with England, ref 1; seeks peace with Henry and Charles V (1544), ref 1

Francis II, king of France: marriage to Mary Stuart, ref 1; accession, ref 1; renounces claim to English throne, ref 1; death, ref 1

friaries: destroyed, ref 1, ref 2

Frobisher, Sir Martin, ref 1

Fuller, Thomas, ref 1, ref 2; The Church History of Britain, ref 1

Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester: chides pope, ref 1; on revolt in North, ref 1; Barnes preaches against, ref 1; campaign against heretics, ref 1; and accusations against Cranmer, ref 1; as Purveyor General to army in France, ref 1; favours peace over war, ref 1; Henry complains to of Katherine Parr’s religious reformism, ref 1; in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ref 1; investigates Katherine Parr, ref 1; Henry mistrusts, ref 1, ref 2; excluded from court and regency council, ref 1, ref 1; religious conservatism, ref 1; discounted by Edward VI, ref 1; protests at Edward VI’s religious reforms, ref 1; preaches after release from prison, ref 1; rearrested and confined in Tower, ref 1; restored under Mary Tudor, ref 1; as adviser to Mary Tudor, ref 1; interrogates Courtenay over plot, ref 1; urges acceptance of Philip of Spain, ref 1; restores Act on burning of heretics, ref 1; death, ref 1; De Vera Obedientia, ref 1

Garrett, Thomas, ref 1

‘gathered’ churches, ref 1

Gembloux, battle of (1578), ref 1

Gerard, Father, SJ, ref 1

Germany: uprising (1525), ref 1; Henry seeks Protestant support from, ref 1, ref 2

Ghent, Pacification of, ref 1

Glass of the Truth, A (tract), ref 1

Glastonbury abbey, ref 1, ref 2

Golden Hind (earlier Pelican; ship), ref 1

Gorges, Ferdinando, ref 1

‘gospellers’, ref 1

Gower, George, ref 1

Gravelines, battle of (1588), ref 1

Great Harry (ship), ref 1

Greenwich Palace, ref 1

Gregory VII, pope: reforms, ref 1

Grenville, Sir Richard, ref 1

Grey, Lady Jane: background, ref 1; and death of Edward, ref 1; proclaimed queen, ref 1, ref 2; beheaded, ref 1

Grey, Lord John, ref 1

Grey, Lady Katherine (Countess of Hertford), ref 1, ref 2

Grey, Lady Mary, ref 1

Grindal, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1, ref 2

Guise, Francis, duke of, ref 1

Guise, Henry I, duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Guise, house of, ref 1; see also Mary of Guise

Habsburg dynasty: dominance, ref 1

Hackett (yeoman pretender), ref 1

Hakluyt, Richard, ref 1

Hall, Edward, ref 1, ref 2; Chronicle, ref 1, ref 2

Hallam, Henry, ref 1

Hambleton Hill, ref 1

Hampton Court, ref 1, ref 2

Hardwick House, ref 1

Harold Harefoot, ref 1

Harpsfield, Nicholas, ref 1

Harridaunce, John, ref 1

Harrington, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Harrison, William, ref 1, ref 2; Description of England, ref 1

harvest failures: (1549), ref 1; (1551), ref 1; (1555), ref 1; (1586), ref 1; (1594–7), ref 1

Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, ref 1

Hatton, Sir Christopher: in Commons, ref 1; as favourite of Elizabeth, ref 1; scheme to discover North–West Passage, ref 1; commissions portrait of Elizabeth, ref 1; on prospect of Mary Stuart succeeding to English throne, ref 1; denounces Mary Stuart, ref 1

Haughton, John, Carthusian prior, ref 1

Haukes, Thomas, ref 1

Hawkins, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Hawkins, Sir Richard: Observations, ref 1

Hawkins, William, ref 1

Heere, Lucas de: The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory (painting), ref 1

Heneage, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Henry II, king of France: aims to recover Boulogne, ref 1, ref 2; alliance with Scotland, ref 1; declares war against England (1549), ref 1; and succession of Mary Tudor, ref 1; promises help to English insurgents, ref 1, ref 2; Philip declares war on, ref 1

Henry III, king of France (earlier duke of Anjou): marriage negotiations with Elizabeth, ref 1

Henry IV (of Navarre), king of France, ref 1, ref 2

Henry VII, king: death and funeral, ref 1; supposed wish to marry Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; claim to throne, ref 1; bequest to Henry VIII, ref 1; challenges Church, ref 1; and Wolsey’s downfall, ref 1

Henry VIII, king: accession and coronation, ref 1; marriage to Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; musicianship, ref 1; upbringing and education, ref 1; appearance, ref 1; sporting activities, ref 1; character and temperament, ref 1; hostility to France, ref 1, ref 2; infidelities and mistresses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; inheritance, ref 1; pilgrimages to holy places, ref 1; religious faith and observance, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; joins Holy League, ref 1; expedition against France (1513), ref 1; intervenes in Hunne heresy case, ref 1; and Henry Standish case, ref 1; birth of daughter Mary, ref 1; rivalry with French king and emperor Charles V, ref 1; pardons London rioters, ref 1; and religious controversy, ref 1, ref 2; designated Defender of the Faith (Fidei Defensor), ref 1; reads and counters Luther, ref 1; protects Wolsey, ref 1; in France for Field of Cloth of Gold, ref 1; renews claims to French crown, ref 1; meets and courts Anne Boleyn, ref 1, ref 2; and Wolsey’s failure, ref 1; desire for legitimate son, ref 1; seeks divorce from Katherine of Aragon, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; takes over administration of country, ref 1; claim to spiritual supremacy, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; reads Fish’s Supplication, ref 1; acts against clergy, ref 1; recognized as supreme head of Church in England, ref 1; renounces Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; accepts submission of clergy, ref 1; seeks support of parliament, ref 1; honours and elevates Anne Boleyn, ref 1; visits France with Anne Boleyn, ref 1; as absolute ruler, ref 2, ref 3; marriage to Anne Boleyn, ref 1, ref 2; marriage to Katherine declared invalid, ref 1; declared supreme head of Church of England, ref 1; Clement VII issues bull against, ref 1; attends Reformation Parliament (1536), ref 1; on death of Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; stunned in fall from horse, ref 1; and Anne Boleyn’s infidelity and execution, ref 1; marries Jane Seymour, ref 1, ref 2; daughter Mary submits to, ref 1; succession question, ref 1, ref 2; draws up articles of faith, ref 1; and settlement of Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion, ref 1; meets Aske, ref 1; suppresses rebellion in North, ref 1; and dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; pope publishes Bill of Deposition against, ref 1; revises bishops’ statement of belief, ref 1; opposes unorthodox religious doctrine, ref 1; and son Edward, ref 1; ulcerous legs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and invasion threat from continent, ref 1; moves from religious reform, ref 1, ref 2; marriage to and separation from Anne of Cleves, ref 1; and Cromwell’s downfall, ref 1, ref 2; supervises public affairs, ref 1; marriage to Katherine Howard, ref 1; progress to north, ref 1; informed of Katherine Howard’s infidelities, ref 1, ref 2; obesity, ref 1, ref 2; protects Cranmer against accusations of heresy, ref 1; final marriage to Katherine Parr, ref 1; and invasion of France (1544), ref 1; withdraws from France, ref 1; in family portrait, ref 1; deplores differences in religion, ref 1; and Church reform, ref 1; deprecates Katherine Parr’s religious reformism, ref 1; signs treaty of Ardres (1546), ref 1; pardons Katherine Parr for religious views, ref 1; health decline and death, ref 1; rages, ref 1; will, ref 1, ref 2; funeral, ref 1; in allegorical de Heere painting, ref 1; executions under, ref 1; Harpsfield on, ref 1; Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, ref 1

Henry Imperial (ship), ref 1

Heresy Act (1555), ref 1

heretics: condemned and executed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; growing numbers, ref 1; suppressed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Hertford, Edward Seymour, 1st earl of

see Somerset, 1st duke of

Hertford, Edward Seymour, earl of (son of above), ref 1

Hever (house), Kent, ref 1

Hexham abbey, Northumberland, ref 1

Heywood, John, ref 1

Higden, Ranulph: Polychronicon, ref 1

Hilliard, Nicholas, ref 1

history: effect of Reformation on, ref 1

Hoby, Lady Elizabeth, ref 1

Holbein, Hans, ref 1, ref 2

Holinshed, Raphael, ref 1, ref 2

Holt Castle, Worcestershire, ref 1

Holy League: formed against France, ref 1

Hooker, John, ref 1

Hooker, Richard: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ref 1

Hooper, John, bishop of Gloucester, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Horsey, William, ref 1

hospitals, ref 1

Hours of the Blessed Virgin, ref 1

Howard de Walden, Thomas Howard, 1st baron (later 1st earl of Suffolk), ref 1

Howard of Effingham, 2nd baron see Nottingham, 1st earl of

Howard, Lady Mary, ref 1

Howard, Lord Thomas, ref 1

Huguenots, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

humanism, ref 1, ref 2

Humble Supplication unto God, ref 1

Humfrey, John, ref 1

Hunne, Richard, ref 1

Hunsdon, George Carey, 2nd baron, ref 1

Hunsdon, Henry Carey, 1st baron, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

iconoclasm: early incidents, ref 1; at dissolution of monasteries, ref 1

imperium, ref 1

Inquisition, Holy, ref 1, ref 2

Institution of a Christian Man, The (The Bishops’ Book), ref 1

Ireland: Catholic soldiers land in, ref 1; Philip promotes rebellion in, ref 1; lord lieutenancy, ref 1, ref 2; Tyrone’s revolt (1598), ref 1, ref 2; Essex leads army in, ref 1; Mountjoy’s campaign in, ref 1

Isabella, queen of Castile, ref 1, ref 2

James IV, king of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2

James V, king of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2

James VI, king of Scotland (James I of England): birth and appearance, ref 1; at Stirling Castle as infant, ref 1; as prospective successor to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; proclaimed king of Scotland, ref 1; Elizabeth moves to recognize, ref 1, ref 2; exempted from reprisals in Bond of Association, ref 1; and Treaty of Berwick, ref 1; Elizabeth writes to denying involvement in Mary’s death, ref 1; inaction during Spanish Armada engagement, ref 1; Essex appeals to, ref 1; succeeds on death of Elizabeth, ref 1

Jane Seymour, Queen of Henry VIII: Henry courts, ref 1; marriage, ref 1; traduced in ballad, ref 1; in Corpus Christi procession, ref 1; death following birth of son, ref 1, ref 2; son Edward keeps mementoes, ref 1; in royal family portrait, ref 1

Jericho (house), Essex, ref 1

Jesuits: missionaries in England, ref 1, ref 2; captured and tortured, ref 1; put to death, ref 1

Jesus Christ: and real presence in Eucharist, ref 1

Jewel, John, bishop of Salisbury: The Apology of the Church of England, ref 1

Joan of Kent (Joan Bocher), ref 1, ref 2

John of Austria, Don, ref 1

Jonson, Ben: Bartholomew Fair, ref 1

Joye, George, ref 1

Julian of Norwich, Dame, ref 1

Julius III, pope, ref 1

Katherine of Aragon, queen of Henry VIII: marriage to Henry and coronation, ref 1; and Henry’s infidelity, ref 1; stillbirths and false pregnancies, ref 1; favours war against France, ref 1; Henry blames for failure of Spanish expedition, ref 1; and defeat of Scots (1513), ref 1; Henry’s disenchantment with, ref 1, ref 2; Henry seeks divorce from, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; popular support for, ref 1; Henry withdraws from and renounces, ref 1; marriage to Henry declared invalid, ref 1; status reduced, ref 1; Clement VII declares marriage to Henry still valid, ref 1; on execution of Fisher and More, ref 1; death, ref 1; Mary repudiates, ref 1; supported by Observant friars, ref 1; Edward VI requests to hand royal jewels to Somerset’s wife, ref 1; discusses rituals with daughter Mary, ref 1; marriage ruled legitimate, ref 1

Katherine Howard, queen of Henry VIII: marriage to Henry, ref 1; infidelity and lovers, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Katherine Parr, queen of Henry VIII: favours religious reform, ref 1, ref 1; marriage to Henry, ref 1; as regent in Henry’s absence, ref 1; and upbringing of prince and princesses, ref 1; influence suspected, ref 1; under suspicion for religious views, ref 1; Gardiner intrigues against, ref 1, ref 2; Henry prevents arrest, ref 1; nurses Henry, ref 1; marriage to Thomas Seymour, ref 1; death, ref 1; Elizabeth enters and leaves household, ref 1; The Lamentations of a Sinner, ref 1

Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, ref 1, ref 2

Kenninghall, Norfolk, ref 1

Kent, Nun of see Barton, Elizabeth

Kett, Robert, ref 1

King’s Book, the see Necessary Doctrine, A

Kingston, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2

Kirk o’Field (house), ref 1

Knollys, Sir Francis, ref 1, ref 2

Knollys, Sir William, ref 1

Knox, John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, ref 1, ref 2

Lambert, John, ref 1

land: change of use and ownership, ref 1, ref 2; in Church hands, ref 1

Langland, William, ref 1

Langley priory, ref 1

Langside Hill, battle of (1568), ref 1

Lanoy, Cornelius, ref 1

Latimer, Hugh: preaching, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; joins court, ref 1; appointed bishop of Worcester, ref 1; attends Reformation Parliament, ref 1; attacked by clergy, ref 1; disparages rebels, ref 1; encourages education of children, ref 1; reads sermon at John Forrest’s execution, ref 1; resigns from Worcester, ref 1; released under Edward VI, ref 1; on Thomas Seymour in Tower, ref 1; on social and economic unrest, ref 1; on behaviour in church, ref 1; detained and interrogated, ref 1; degraded and burnt at stake, ref 1; on religion in England, ref 1

law: changes, ref 1; and canon law, ref 1

Lee, Henry, ref 1

Leges Anglorum, ref 1, ref 2

Le Havre, ref 1

Leicester, Lettice, countess of (earlier countess of Essex), marriage to Leicester, ref 1, ref 2

Leicester, Robert Dudley, earl of: appointed Master of the Horse, ref 1; relations with Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; as prospective husband for Elizabeth, ref 1; wife Amy’s death, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s illness, ref 1; supports radical religious reformers, ref 1; Elizabeth proposes as husband for Mary Stuart, ref 1; earldom, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1; as protector of Protestant faith, ref 1, ref 2; on imprisonment of Lanoy, ref 1; Elizabeth attacks, ref 1; hostility to Cecil, ref 1; supports Norfolk–Mary Stuart union, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s nervous collapse, ref 1; favours Puritan cause, ref 1; presents wristwatch to Elizabeth, ref 1; Elizabeth visits at Kenilworth, ref 1; on St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s refusal to head Protestant League, ref 1; dissuades Elizabeth from dismissing Grindal, ref 1; as prospective commander in Netherlands, ref 1; remarries (Lettice), ref 1, ref 2; opposes Elizabeth’s Anjou marriage, ref 1, ref 2; as patron of Campion, ref 1, ref 2; accompanies Elizabeth on 27th anniversary of accession celebrations, ref 1; commands in Netherlands, ref 1; on Mary Stuart’s letter to Elizabeth protesting innocence, ref 1; ague and death, ref 1

Leigh, Thomas, ref 1

Leith, Scotland: French force at, ref 1

Leland, John: Itinerary, ref 1

Lennox, Matthew Stuart, 4th earl of, ref 1

Leo X, pope, ref 1, ref 2

Lewes: priory destroyed, ref 1, ref 2; Marian martyrs, ref 1

Lewis, Hugh, ref 1

Leyton, Richard, ref 1

Lincolnshire: rebellion (1536), ref 1

Lisbon, ref 1, ref 2

Lisle, Honor, viscountess, ref 1

Little Waldingfield, Suffolk, ref 1

Lodge, Thomas, ref 1

Lollards, ref 1, ref 2

London: anti-clericalism, ref 1; radicalism and unrest, ref 1, ref 2; low life and conditions, ref 1; plagues, ref 1, ref 2; Marian martyrs, ref 1; as financial and trade centre, ref 1; damaged by earthquake (1580), ref 1; unrest (1595), ref 1

London, Dr John, ref 1

London, treaty of (1518), ref 1

Lopez, Rodrigo, ref 1

Lord of Misrule: restored under Mary, 677

Louis XII, king of France, ref 1

Louth, Lincolnshire, ref 1

Low Countries see Netherlands

Lucius I, ‘king’ (legendary hero), ref 1, ref 2

Lumley, John, 1st baron, ref 1

Luther, Martin: reform doctrines and teachings, ref 1, ref 2; declared heretical and books burned, ref 1; Henry reads and writes treatise against, ref 1, ref 2; tracts smuggled into England, ref 1, ref 2; influence on Tyndale, ref 1; denounced by English rebels, ref 1; told of Henry’s indifference to religion, ref 1; believes in real presence, ref 1

Lutheranism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

luxuries: increase in, ref 1

McCabb, Melaghin, ref 1

Machyn, Henry, ref 1

Malory, Thomas, ref 1

manorial system, ref 1

Manox, Henry, ref 1

Mar, James Stuart, earl of, ref 1

Margaret of Navarre: The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, ref 1

Margaret Tudor, queen of James IV of Scotland, ref 1

Marlech Hill, Hertfordshire, ref 1

Marlowe, Christopher: The Jew of Malta, ref 1

Marprelate, Martin: tracts, ref 1

Marshall, Cicely, ref 1

Martyr, Peter, ref 1

Mary I (Tudor), queen: birth, ref 1; childhood betrothals, ref 1; as prospective successor to Henry, ref 1; released from betrothal to Charles V, ref 1; household, ref 1; dances before father, ref 1; illnesses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; stripped of princess title on birth of Elizabeth, ref 1; refuses oath of Succession, ref 1; mother reassures, ref 1; Anne Boleyn threatens, ref 1; learns of mother’s death, ref 1; and death of Anne Boleyn, ref 1; signs declaration of submission, ref 1; Pilgrimage of Grace demands legitimacy of, ref 1; frees Edward Courtenay, ref 1; education and learning, ref 1, ref 2; in family portrait, ref 1; Edward’s regard for, ref 1; interests and activities, ref 1; translates Erasmus, ref 1, ref 2; in succession to Henry, ref 1; on Katherine Parr’s marriage to Seymour, ref 1; hears Masses, ref 1; Thomas Seymour writes to from Tower, ref 1; rumoured involvement in Kett rebellion, ref 1; in plot against Somerset, ref 1; asked to submit to Act of Uniformity, ref 1; calls off flight abroad, ref 1; differences with Northumberland, ref 1; differences with Edward, ref 1; and Edward’s health decline, ref 1; declared illegitimate, ref 1; and Edward’s death, ref 1; accession, ref 1; promotes and restores Catholicism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; government and advisers, ref 1; as queen regnant, ref 1; marriage prospects, ref 1; relations with parliament, ref 1; betrothal to Philip of Spain, ref 1; piety and devotions, ref 1; and Wyatt’s rebellion (1554), ref 1; voice and manner, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s confinement in Tower, ref 1; marriage to Philip, ref 1; childlessness, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; pregnancy, ref 1; welcomes Pole on return to England, ref 1; as head of Church of England, ref 1; religious persecutions under, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; relations with Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; and Philip’s departure from England, ref 1; armed conspiracy against (1555), ref 1; and burning of Cranmer, ref 1; supports Philip in war against France, ref 1; and fall of Calais, ref 1; makes will, ref 1; Knox attacks, ref 1; death, ref 1; embroiders image of cat, ref 1; reverses religious reforms, ref 1

Mary Boleyn (ship), ref 1

Mary of Guise, queen of James V of Scotland: as dowager queen of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2; death, ref 1; grave, ref 1

Mary Imperial (ship), ref 1

Mary of Portugal, ref 1

Mary Rose (ship), ref 1

Mary (Stuart), queen of Scots: birth, ref 1; betrothal to Edward as infant, ref 1; betrothal to French dauphin, ref 1; in hands of Henry II of France, ref 1; as successor to English throne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; as queen of France, ref 1; and renunciation of claim to English throne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; as threat in Scotland, ref 1; and death of Francis II, ref 1; character, ref 1; declines to sign treaty of Edinburgh, ref 1; returns to Scotland, ref 1; seeks meeting with Elizabeth, ref 1; and parliamentary debate of succession to Elizabeth, ref 1; marriage prospects, ref 1; infatuation with Darnley, ref 1; questions Melville about Elizabeth, ref 1; harries Moray in Chaseabout Raid, ref 1; marriage to Darnley, ref 1; denies Elizabeth’s title as queen, ref 1; marriage difficulties with Darnley, ref 1; and murder of Rizzio, ref 1; pregnancy and birth of son, ref 1; ostracizes Darnley, ref 1; and plot to murder Darnley, ref 1; Bothwell abducts and ravishes, ref 1; marriage to Bothwell, ref 1; pregnant by Bothwell, ref 1; imprisoned on Loch Leven, ref 1, ref 2; escapes, ref 1; miscarriage, ref 1; detained in England, ref 1; flees to England after Langside Hill defeat, ref 1; and inquiry into Darnley’s murder, ref 1; and ‘casket letters’, ref 1; prospective marriage to duke of Norfolk, ref 1, ref 2; confined in Tutbury Castle, ref 1; corresponds with Norfolk, ref 1; moved to Coventry in 1569 northern rebellion, ref 1; remains under house arrest, ref 1; and Ridolfi plot, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; condemned by parliament, ref 1; on execution of Norfolk, ref 1; sends gift of nightcaps to Elizabeth, ref 1; in collusion with Spain and Italy, ref 1; plots and intrigues, ref 1; and Throgmorton, ref 1; in Sheffield Castle, ref 1; commissioners visit, ref 1; plan to execute in event of Elizabeth’s assassination, ref 1; pleads for life with Elizabeth, ref 1; rebukes son James, ref 1; returns to Tutbury Castle, ref 1; in Babington plot, ref 1; taken to Fotheringhay Castle, ref 1; appearance, ref 1; tried and found guilty, ref 1; Elizabeth signs death warrant, ref 1; told of execution plans, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Mary Tudor, duchess of Suffolk (formerly queen of Louis XII; Henry VIII’s sister), ref 1

Mary, Virgin: as intercessor, ref 1

Matilda, queen of Henry I, ref 1, ref 2

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor: Henry allies with (1513), ref 1; death, ref 1; Wolsey negotiates with, ref 1

Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor: relations with Elizabeth, ref 1

Medina Sidonia, Don Alonso, 7th duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Melanchthon, Philip, ref 1, ref 2

Melville, Sir James, ref 1; Memoirs, ref 1

Melville, Robert (later 1st baron), ref 1

Mendoza, Bernadino de, ref 1

Merchant Adventurers, ref 1, ref 2

Merlin the magician, ref 1

Metsys, Quentin (attrib.): portrait of Elizabeth, ref 1

Milan: Francis I captures, ref 1

Milan, Christina, Duchess of, ref 1

Mildmay, Sir Walter, ref 1, ref 2

Milton, John, ref 1

monasteries: life at, ref 1; visitations on, ref 1; shrines and relics, ref 1; dissolution, ref 1, ref 2; Cromwell controls, ref 1; despoiled and suppressed, ref 1, ref 2; lands and possessions appropriated and sold, ref 1; effect of dissolution on education, ref 1; images and relics destroyed, ref 1; revenues appropriated, ref 1

monks: and dissolution of monasteries, ref 1

monopolies, ref 1

Montague, Henry Pole, baron, ref 1

Moray, James Stuart, 1st earl of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

More, Sir Thomas: praises Henry VIII, ref 1; persecutes religious heretics, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; as Speaker of Lower House, ref 1; raids Hanseatic merchants in Steelyard, ref 1; succeeds Wolsey as chancellor, ref 1, ref 2; resigns as chancellor, ref 1; consigned to Tower and executed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; refuses oath upon Act of Succession, ref 1; education of daughters, ref 1; religious steadfastness, ref 1; on corruption, ref 1; Utopia, ref 1, ref 2

Morice, Ralph, ref 1

Morton, Margaret, ref 1

Mountjoy, Charles Blount, 8th baron (later earl of Devonshire), ref 1, ref 2

Mousehold Heath, Norwich, ref 1

Naworth, battle of (1570), ref 1

Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, A (the King’s Book), ref 1

Netherlands: Spanish force in, ref 1; Elizabeth’s reluctance to engage in, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; revolt against Spain, ref 1, ref 2; ‘Spanish fury’ in, ref 1; Anjou invades, ref 1; Walsingham proposes alliance with Protestants, ref 1; Elizabeth signs treaty with (1585), ref 1; Leicester commands in, ref 1; peace proposals, ref 1

Netley Abbey, ref 1

‘new ague’ (epidemic disease), ref 1

New Testament: Erasmus translates, ref 1

Newhall (manor), ref 1

nobility: distrusts commonalty, ref 1

Nonsuch Palace, Surrey, ref 1, ref 1

Norfolk: popular rebellion (1549), ref 1; Elizabeth visits on progress, ref 1

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 2nd duke of (and earl of Surrey): granted ducal title, ref 1; victory at Flodden Field, ref 1; invades France (1522), ref 1

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 3rd duke of (and earl of Surrey): treats with rebels in Norfolk, ref 1; on Katherine of Aragon’s bearing, ref 1; in Henry’s service, ref 1; threatens Wolsey, ref 1; on commission into treason, ref 1; requests Mary agree to Henry’s conditions, ref 1; and resistance of monks of Hexham, ref 1; opposes rebellions in North, ref 1, ref 2; appropriates monastic possessions, ref 1; in religious controversies, ref 1; quarrel with Cromwell, ref 1; and Cromwell’s downfall, ref 1, ref 1; as senior counsellor, ref 1; and Katherine Howard’s marriage to Henry, ref 1; on Katherine Howard’s infidelities, ref 1; loses Henry’s favour, ref 1; in war against Scotland (1542), ref 1; plots against Cranmer, ref 1; downfall, ref 1; discounted by Edward VI, ref 1; in Tower during East Anglian rebellion, ref 1; greets Mary Tudor as queen, ref 1; leads forces against Wyatt rebellion, ref 1

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 4th duke of: and Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2; attends inquiry into Darnley’s murder, ref 1; on casket letters, ref 1; as prospective husband for Mary Stuart, ref 1, ref 2; correspondence with Mary Stuart, ref 1, ref 2; opposes Cecil, ref 1; confined in Tower, ref 1; released from Tower, ref 1; supports Ridolfi plot, ref 1, ref 2; returned to Tower, ref 1; tried, convicted and executed, ref 1, ref 2

Norris, Sir Henry, ref 1

North, Edward, 1st baron, ref 1

North of England: rebellions, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; Henry visits (1541), ref 1; rising against Elizabeth (1569–70), ref 1; see also Pilgrimage of Grace

NorthWest Passage, ref 1

Northampton, William Parr, 1st marquis of, ref 1, ref 2

Northumberland, Henry Percy, 8th earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Northumberland, John Dudley, duke of (earlier earl of Warwick): acquires monastic lands, ref 1; at Henry’s death, ref 1; suppresses Kett’s rebellion, ref 1; plots downfall of Somerset, ref 1; dukedom, ref 1; as lord president of council, ref 1; religious convictions, ref 1; encourages Edward VI, ref 1; administration and rule, ref 1; returns Boulogne to French, ref 1; differences with Mary Tudor, ref 1; Somerset opposes, ref 1; and disarray in kingdom, ref 1; and threat of rebellion, ref 1; and succession to Edward VI, ref 1; and Edward’s death, ref 1; attempts to prevent Mary from succeeding, ref 1; arrested and executed, ref 1

Northumberland, Thomas Percy, 7th earl of, ref 1

Norwich: in Kett’s rebellion, ref 1

Nostradamus, ref 1

Nottingham, Charles Howard, 1st earl of (earlier 2nd baron Howard of Effingham): commands English fleet against Spanish Armada, ref 1; on sickness of seamen, ref 1; earldom, ref 1; leads attack on Spain (1597), ref 1; calms Essex in outburst against Elizabeth, ref 1; in Cecil’s court faction, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s ageing, ref 1

Nun of Kent see Barton, Elizabeth

nuns: and dissolution of convents, ref 1

oath: Whitgift makes compulsory, ref 1

Orsini, Cardinal Flavio, ref 1

Oxford: religious dissidents, ref 1; Elizabeth visits, ref 1

Paget, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

papist: as term of contempt, ref 1

parish churches: design, ref 1

parish registers: introduced, ref 1

Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury: meets at White Horse tavern, ref 1; consecrated as archbishop, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s distaste for marriage, ref 1; on Elizabeth’s treatment of Mary Stuart, ref 1; death, ref 1

parliament: called for 1529, ref 2; petition against Church, ref 1, ref 2; Henry seeks support, ref 1; religious opinions and discussions, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8; supports Henry over succession, ref 1; Reformation (1536), ref 1; discusses status of Mary and Elizabeth after Anne of Boleyn’s death, ref 1; called (1543), ref 1; inaugurated with Mass sung in English (1547), ref 1; assembles (January 1552), ref 1; under Mary Tudor, ref 1; Pole addresses, ref 1; demands free speech, ref 1, ref 2; meets after Elizabeth’s coronation, ref 1; Elizabeth’s relations with, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; debates succession to Elizabeth, ref 1; legislation under Elizabeth, ref 1; discusses Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2; condemns Mary for role in Ridolfi plot, ref 1; legislates for Queen’s Safety, ref 1; votes moneys to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2

Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke of: commands Spanish forces in Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2; awaits Spanish Armada for invasion of England, ref 1

Parry, Thomas, ref 1

Parry, William, ref 1

Parsons, Robert, SJ, ref 1, ref 2

Paul III, pope: establishes Inquisition, ref 1

Paulet, Sir Amyas, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Paulet, Sir William, ref 1

Pavia, battle of (1525), ref 1

Peasants’ Revolt (1381), ref 1

Pembroke, William Herbert, 1st earl of, ref 1

Percy, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Peto, Father William, ref 1, ref 2

Philip II, king of Spain: betrothal to Mary Tudor, ref 1; marriage to Mary in England, ref 1, ref 2; welcomes Pole to England, ref 1; visits Elizabeth, ref 1; leaves England, ref 1; leadership in Spanish Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2; as invasion threat against England, ref 1; declares war against Henry II, ref 1; returns to England, ref 1; proposes recapturing Calais, ref 1; proposes marriage to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; supports Elizabeth against France, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s prospective marriage to Dudley, ref 1; and French wars of religion, ref 1; Elizabeth’s relations with, ref 1; proposes assisting Mary Stuart to English throne, ref 1; sends army to Netherlands, ref 1; marriage (to Isabella of France), ref 1; defeats in Netherlands, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s neutrality in Netherlands war, ref 1; Elizabeth supports over Anjou’s invasion of Netherlands, ref 1; Elizabeth’s diplomatic dealings with, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s relations with Anjou, ref 1; promotes rebellion in Ireland, ref 1; on throne of Portugal, ref 1; finances pro-Mary plot, ref 1; orders assassination of William of Orange, ref 1; treaty with Guise against Henry of Navarre and Elizabeth, ref 1; ships captured by British adventurers, ref 1; and settlement in Netherlands, ref 1; and fate of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1; plans invasion of England, ref 1; and despatch of Spanish Armada, ref 1; and defeat and return of Armada, ref 1; power, ref 1; England provokes, ref 1; and Essex’s expedition against Cadiz, ref 1; sends further armadas (1596–7), ref 1; death, ref 1

Phillips, Thomas, ref 1

Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Pinkie Cleugh, battle of (1547), ref 1, ref 2

Pitcairn, Robert: Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, ref 1

Pius V, pope: excommunicates Elizabeth, ref 1

plague: (1537), ref 1; (1562), ref 1

Plat, Robert, ref 1

Plumpton, Robert, ref 1

Pole, Sir Geoffrey, ref 1

Pole, Margaret, ref 1

Pole, Cardinal Reginald: as papal legate, ref 1; and mother’s beheading, ref 1; returns to England, ref 1; persecutions, ref 1; Mary Tudor’s reliance on, ref 1; made archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1; death, ref 1; learns of Mary’s death, ref 1

Pontefract Castle: Aske threatens and occupies, ref 1, ref 2

Poor Catholics of the Humiliati, ref 1

poor laws, ref 1, ref 2

population: rural decline, ref 1; increase, ref 1

portents, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Portugal: Philip annexes, ref 1; Elizabeth provokes unrest in, ref 1; Drake sails against, ref 1

Potter, Gilbert, ref 1

Poverty, Captain, ref 1

praemunire, ref 1, ref 2

Prayer Book see Book of Common Prayer

predestination, ref 1

Presbyterianism: beginnings, ref 1, ref 2

prices: rise, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

priests: in Church of England, ref 1

privateering: against Spain, ref 1

privy council: restored under Northumberland, ref 1; Elizabeth meets on accession, ref 1; as authority on death of Elizabeth, ref 1

Profitable and Necessary Doctrine, A, ref 1

‘prophesyings’ (exercises), ref 1, ref 2

Protestant faith: and English Bible, ref 1; creed and practices, ref 1; persecuted under Mary Tudor, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; opposition to Mary’s Catholicism, ref 1; under Elizabeth, ref 1; professed in Scotland, ref 1; persecuted in France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; radical activists, ref 1; spread in England, ref 1; influential supporters under Elizabeth, ref 1; and war against Spanish in Netherlands, ref 1; in continental Europe, ref 1; and submission to secular authority, ref 1

Provisors, Statute of (1351), ref 1

Puckering, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2

Puritanism: beginnings, ref 1, ref 2; strength in universities, ref 1; Whitgift opposes, ref 1; members fight against Armada, ref 1; strength and influence, ref 1; opposition to, ref 1; portrayed on stage, ref 1; parliament legislates against, ref 1

Queen’s Safety, Act for (1584), ref 1, ref 2

Raleigh, Walter, Senior, ref 1

Raleigh, Sir Walter, ref 1, ref 2

Reading abbey, ref 1

rebellions and riots: (1549), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; Wyatt’s (1554), ref 1; northern (1569–70), ref 1; see also Pilgrimage of Grace

recusant priests, ref 1

Reformation: beginnings, ref 1; effect on government, ref 1; as political and dynastic movement, ref 1; effect on individual and nation, ref 1; theology, ref 1; cultural effects, ref 1; see also Protestant faith

religion: affinity with agricultural changes, ref 1; disputes and controversies over, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; imagery attacked, ref 1; Henry deplores differences, ref 1; in England at Henry’s death, ref 1; restrictions under Edward VI, ref 1; reforms restored under Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; visitations under Elizabeth, ref 1; active practitioners, ref 1; and rise of extreme Puritans, ref 1; sects established, ref 1; popular indifference to, ref 1; see also Book of Common Prayer; Catholic Church; Protestant faith

Restraint of Appeals, Act of (1533), ref 1

Rich, Robert, 3rd baron (later earl of Warwick), ref 1

Richard II, king, ref 1

Richmond, Henry FitzRoy, Duke of (Henry VIII’s illegitimate son): birth, ref 1; Katherine of Aragon and, ref 1; as prospective successor to Henry, ref 1, ref 2; and death of Anne Boleyn, ref 1; death, ref 1, ref 2

Ridley, Nicholas: meets at White Horse tavern, ref 1; detained and interrogated, ref 1; degraded and burnt at stake, ref 1

Ridolfi, Roberto di, ref 1, ref 2

Ripon, ref 1

Rising of the North (1569–70), ref 1

Rizzio (or Riccio), David, ref 1, ref 2

Roanoke colony, North Carolina, ref 1

Roche Abbey, Yorkshire, ref 1

Rochford, George Boleyn, viscount (Anne Boleyn’s brother): executed, ref 1

Rochford, Jane, viscountess, ref 1

Rochford, Thomas Boleyn, 1st viscount (Anne’s father) see Wiltshire, earl of, 1763

Rogers, John, canon of St Paul’s, ref 1

Rokewood, Edward, ref 1

Rouen, ref 1

Rowlands, Samuel, ref 1

Rudd, Anthony, bishop of St David’s, ref 1

Russell, John, baron (later 1st earl of Bedford), ref 1

Rutland, John Manners, 6th earl of, ref 1

St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (14 August 1572), ref 1

St Bartholomew’s hospital, London, ref 1

St Margaret Pattens church, London, ref 1

St Nicholas priory, Exeter, ref 1

St Paul’s Cathedral, London: rood removed, ref 1; altar replaced, ref 1; damaged by lightning, ref 1

St Thomas’s hospital, London, ref 1

saints: as intercessors, ref 1

Salisbury, Margaret Pole, countess of, ref 1

Sampford Courtenay, Devon, ref 1, ref 2

Sander, Nicholas, ref 1

Santa Cruz, Don Alvaro de Bazan, marquis of, ref 1

Saxton, Christopher, ref 1

Scarborough: attacked by French ships, ref 1

schools: founded and endowed, ref 1, ref 2

Schorne, Master John, ref 1

Scotland: war with England (1513), ref 1; Cromwell proposes war on (1522), ref 1; allies with France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; border raids into England, ref 1; war with England (1542), ref 1; Hertford invades and ravages, ref 1; Protector Somerset hopes for union with England, ref 1, ref 2; Somerset invades (1547), ref 1; attack on England (1557), ref 1; Elizabeth seeks agreement with, ref 1; request to Elizabeth to remove French, ref 1; professes Protestant faith, ref 1; treaty of Edinburgh settles peace with England (1560), ref 1; James VI proclaimed king, ref 1; rebel northern earls flee to, ref 1, ref 2

Scroope, Philadelphia, Lady, ref 1

seminarians (Catholic): in England, ref 1

Servetus, Michael, ref 1

Seymour, Edward see Hertford, earl of; Somerset, 1st duke of

Seymour of Sudeley, Thomas, baron, ref 1; marriage to Katherine Parr, ref 1; relations with brother, ref 1; counsels Edward VI, ref 1; interest in Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; on Protector Somerset’s invasion of Scotland, ref 1; ambitions, ref 1; arrested, charged and beheaded, ref 1

Shakespeare, William: use of English, ref 1; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ref 1; Twelfth Night, ref 1

Sharington, Sir Edward, ref 1

Shaxton, Nicholas, bishop of Salisbury, ref 1, ref 2

sheep: and change of land use, ref 1

Sheffield Castle, ref 1

Shrewsbury, George Talbot, 4th earl of, ref 1

Shrewsbury, George Talbot, 6th earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Sidney, Sir Philip, ref 1, ref 2

Simier, Jean de, ref 1

Six Articles, Act of (1539), ref 1; abolished, ref 1

Sixtus V, pope, ref 1, ref 2

Skelton, John, ref 1, ref 2

slave trade: beginnings, ref 1

Smeaton, Mark, ref 1

Solway Moss, battle of (1543), ref 1, ref 2

Somerset, Edward Seymour, 1st duke of (earlier earl of Hertford): burns Edinburgh, ref 1; at Henry’s death, ref 1; as religious reformer, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; as Protector in Edward’s regency, ref 1, ref 2; tolerance, ref 1; hopes for union with Scotland, ref 1, ref 2; and national defence, ref 1; proclamations, ref 1; builds London palace, ref 1; invades Scotland (1547), ref 1, ref 2; warned of unrest in kingdom, ref 1; and arrest and execution of brother Thomas, ref 1; restores common land, ref 1; and Act of Uniformity, ref 1; and suppression of popular risings, ref 1, ref 2; deposed, ref 1; executed, ref 1; opposes Northumberland, ref 1

Somerville, John, ref 1

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 2nd earl of, ref 1

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of: in Ireland, ref 1; in Essex’s court faction, ref 1; and Essex’s rebellion, ref 1, ref 2; sentenced to life imprisonment, ref 1

Southampton, William Fitzwilliam, earl of, ref 1

Southwick, Anne, ref 1

Spain: in Holy League against France, ref 1; English troops in, ref 1; Pavia victory (1525), ref 1; invited to invade England, ref 1; invasion threat against Henry, ref 1; allies with France, ref 1; victory at St Quentin (1557), ref 1; rivalry with France, ref 1; force in Netherlands, ref 1; rift with England, ref 1; ships impounded in Falmouth and Plymouth, ref 1; support for Mary Stuart, ref 1; Netherlands revolt against, ref 1, ref 2; bullion from Latin America, ref 1; treaty with England (1573), ref 1; troops mutiny and massacre in Netherlands, ref 1; ships and treasure attacked by English, ref 1; trade with England, ref 1; and settlement in Netherlands, ref 1; prepares expedition against England, ref 1; Elizabeth orders attack on fleet (1597), ref 1; sends further armadas against England (1596–7), ref 1; supports Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland, ref 1; Essex’s 1596 expedition against, 551

Spanish Armada: prepared, ref 1; sails, ref 2; engagement, ref 1; losses, ref 1; retreat and return to Spain, ref 1

Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, ref 1

Spurs, battle of the (1513), ref 1

Stafford, Anne: as Henry’s lover, ref 1, ref 2

Stafford, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Standish, Henry, ref 1

Stanford in the Vale, Berkshire, ref 1

Star Chamber: instituted, ref 1; forbids treatises against queen’s injunctions, ref 1; tries Puritan, ref 1

Statute of Artificers (1563), ref 1

Stephano (assassin), ref 1

Stevens, Thomas, ref 1

Stonor Park, Oxfordshire, ref 1

Stow, John, ref 1, ref 2; Survey of London, ref 1

Strype, William, ref 1

Stuart dynasty, ref 1, ref 2

Stubbs, John: The discovery of a gaping gulf, ref 1

Submission of the Clergy, ref 1, ref 2

Succession, Act of (1534), ref 1

Suffolk, Henry Grey, duke of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Suffolk, Katherine, duchess of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Suffolk, Thomas Brandon, 1st duke of: dukedom, ref 1; commands force against France (1523), ref 1; protests at delay to Henry–Katherine divorce, ref 1; in Henry’s service, ref 1; appropriates monastic possessions, ref 1

Supremacy Act (1534), ref 1

Surrey, Henry Howard, earl of: imprisoned, ref 1

Surrey, Thomas Howard, earl of see Norfolk, dukes of

Sussex, Henry Radcliffe, 2nd earl of, ref 1

Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, 3rd earl of: differences with Leicester, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1; travels to Vienna to negotiate Elizabeth’s marriage with archduke Charles, ref 1; supports Elizabeth against northern earls, ref 1; Elizabeth considers giving Newhall manor to, ref 1

sweating sickness: Prince Arthur dies from, ref 1; in London (1517), ref 1; in England (1551), ref 1

taxes: under Henry, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; under Elizabeth, ref 1

Taylor, John (the ‘water poet’), ref 1

theatre see drama

Thérouanne, Flanders, ref 1

Thirty-Nine Articles (Church of England), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Throgmorton, Francis, ref 1, ref 2

Tilbury: Elizabeth visits, ref 1

Titchfield Abbey, ref 1

Toorwoort, Henry, ref 1

Topcliffe, Richard, ref 1

torture: practice of, ref 1

Tournai, ref 1

transubstantiation, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; see also Eucharist

Treason Acts: (1534), ref 1; (1547), ref 1; (1552), ref 1

Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of Durham, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Turkey: as threat, ref 1, ref 2; trade with England, ref 1

Turner, William, ref 1

Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, ref 1, ref 2

Tyndale, William: influenced by Luther, ref 1; New Testament translation, ref 1, ref 2; The Obedience of a Christian Man, ref 1

Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Tyttenhanger (house), near St Albans, ref 1

class="book">Underhill, Thomas, ref 1

Uniformity, Acts of: (1549), ref 1; (1552), ref 1; (1559), ref 1, ref 2

United Provinces see Netherlands

universities (English): reforms, ref 1

universities (European): involvement in Henry’s divorce proceedings, ref 1

Vagrancy Act (1547), ref 1

vagrants and vagabondage, ref 1, ref 2

Wade, Sir William, ref 1

Walpole, Henry, ref 1

Walsingham, Norfolk: Henry’s pilgrimage to, ref 1; Wolsey’s pilgrimage to, ref 1

Walsingham, Sir Francis: joins queen’s counsels, ref 1; as spymaster, ref 1; Protestantism, ref 1; Elizabeth presents painting to, ref 1; restlessness, ref 1; campaign against Jesuits, ref 1; foils pro–Mary Stuart plots, ref 1; proposes alliance with Protestants of Low Countries, ref 1; drafts Bond of Association, ref 1; questions Parry, ref 1; accompanies Elizabeth on 27th anniversary of accession celebrations, ref 1; and cost of war in Netherlands, ref 1; opposes peace proposals for Netherlands, ref 1; uncovers Babington plot, ref 1; and trial of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1, ref 2; informed of plot against Elizabeth, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s signing Mary’s death warrant, ref 1; death, ref 1

Wandsworth, ref 1

Warham, William, archbishop of Canterbury: as chancellor, ref 1; grand manner, ref 1; death, ref 1, ref 2; denounces legislation against Church, ref 1, ref 2

Warwick, Ambrose Dudley, earl of, ref 1

Weelmaker, John, ref 1

Wentworth, Peter, ref 1

West Indies: Drake voyages to, ref 1, ref 2

Western Rising (Prayer Book Rebellion, 1549), ref 1, ref 2

Westminster Abbey: shrine of Edward the Confessor destroyed, ref 1

Westmorland, Charles Neville, 6th earl of, ref 1

Westmorland, Jane, countess of (née Howard), ref 1

Weston, Francis, ref 1

Wharton, Sir Thomas, ref 1

White Horse tavern, Cambridge, ref 1, ref 2

Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Whyte, Rowland, ref 1

Wilford, Sir Thomas, ref 1

William II (Rufus), king of England, ref 1

William of Nassau, prince of Orange, ref 1, ref 2; assassinated, ref 1

Wilson, Thomas: The State of England Anno Domino 1600, ref 1

Wiltshire, Thomas Boleyn, earl of (earlier 1st viscount Rochford; Anne’s father): peerage, ref 1; Henry confides in, ref 1; mission to pope, ref 1; supposed attack on John Fisher, ref 1

Wisbech Castle, Isle of Ely, ref 1

Wolf Hall, ref 1

Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas: early career, ref 1; and Henry’s expedition against France, ref 1; and inquiry into heresy case, ref 1, ref 2; and Standish case, ref 1; rise to power, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and London unrest, ref 1; contracts sweating sickness, ref 1; reforms judicial system, ref 1; appointed papal legate, ref 1, ref 2; religious reforms, ref 1; burns Luther’s writings, ref 1; diplomacy, ref 1; and Anne Boleyn, ref 1; and execution of Buckingham, ref 1; and invasion of France (1523), ref 1, ref 2; raises taxes, ref 1, ref 2; reads Katherine of Aragon’s letters, ref 1; negotiates divorce of Henry from Katherine of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; Henry suspects, ref 1; and suppression of religious dissidents, ref 1; fall from favour and dismissal, ref 1; driven north, ref 1; arrest and death, ref 1; interviews Elizabeth Barton, ref 1

Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Elizabeth in custody at, ref 1; Elizabeth revisits, ref 1

Woodstock, Thomas, ref 1

Worcester, Edward Somerset, 4th earl of, ref 1

Worcester, William Somerset, 3rd earl of, ref 1

workhouses, ref 1

Wriothesley, Sir Thomas, ref 1, ref 2

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, ref 1, ref 2

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, the younger: rebellion, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Wycliffe, John, ref 1

York: and Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; Mary Stuart in, ref 1

Yorkshire: rebellion (1536), ref 1

1. Henry VIII at the time of his accession: a golden youth in his prime.

2. Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. She was Henry’s first unhappy wife.

3. A woodcut showing the English knights at Flodden Field, who fought in the absence of their king.

4. The Field of the Cloth of Gold – diplomacy at its height.

5. A letter from Henry to his ‘good cardinal’, Thomas Wolsey, when they were still close collaborators.

6. Wolsey in all his glory before his fall.

7. Thomas More, England’s conscience, who incurred the enmity of the king.

8. The king trampling on the pope, an allegorical depiction typical of the times.

9. Unlucky Anne Boleyn, who incurred the wrath of her husband.

10. Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, a courtier eventually charged with high treason.

11. The martyrdom of the Carthusian friars of Charterhouse. Their bowels were ripped open before their eyes.

12. The Pilgrimage of Grace, a northern rebellion for the sake of the ‘old faith’.

13. Jane Seymour, mother of Edward VI, the only consort of the king who produced a male heir.

14. Bishop Latimer’s arguments against Purgatory, a fiction of the papists. Henry’s own thoughts on the matter are annotated in the margin.

15 Thomas Cromwell in his finery before he, too, was disgraced and killed.

16 Anne of Cleves, the king’s unsuitable bride who survived her husband.

17. Title page of the Great Bible of 1539, the first authorized edition in the English language.

18 Katherine Howard, wedded and beheaded in quick succession.

19 Katherine Parr, the last and most fortunate of Henry’s queens.

20. An allegory of the Tudor family, an example of royal propaganda.

21. Edward VI, pale and sickly.

22. Lady Jane Grey, the queen of nine days before the accession of Mary.

23. Mary I, stubborn and imperious.

24. Philip of Spain, Mary’s unwilling husband who deserted her at the first opportunity.

25. An allegory of Stephen Gardiner, the papist Bishop of Winchester. This was painted during Edward’s reign when papists were considered to be the spawn of the devil.

26. Cranmer burning in Oxford – one of Mary’s many victims.

27. Elizabeth I as a young princess. Her early life was fraught with danger.

28. Elizabeth’s glorious signature in which she reveals her forceful and magisterial character.

29. Elizabeth in coronation robes, the image of splendour.

30 Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. He was always Elizabeth’s favourite and their affectionate relationship caused much scandal.

31. Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, executed for plotting against Elizabeth.

32. Elizabeth in Parliament, a body which she alternately appeased and bullied.

33. Mary Queen of Scots, the perpetual conspirator.

34. The execution of the Scottish queen, who believed that she died a martyr.

35. The pope’s bull against Elizabeth in 1570, in which he excommunicated her as a heretic.

36. The arrival of Elizabeth at Nonesuch Palace, ‘none such like it’ in the kingdom.

37. The unhappy route of the Armada, trapped by the sea no less than by English ships.

38 Sir Francis Drake, captain victorious and navigator extraordinaire.

39. Ark Royal, the English fleet’s flagship against the Armada.

40. William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal councillor, known to her as ‘Sir Spirit’.

41. Francis Walsingham, spymaster general and confidential councillor.

42. Robert Cecil, the great survivor, known to the queen as ‘my pigmy’.

43. James VI of Scotland, who would eventually become James I of England.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T.S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography

Brief Lives

Chaucer J.M.W. Turner Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2012 by Macmillan

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an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Copyright © Peter Ackroyd 2012

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

List of illustrations

1. A new Solomon

2. The plot

3. The beacons

4. The god of money

5. The angel

6. The vapours

7. What news?

8. A Bohemian tragedy

9. The Spanish travellers

10. An interlude

11. Vivat rex

12. A fall from grace

13. Take that slime away

14. I am the man

15. The crack of doom

16. The shrimp

17. Sudden flashings

18. Venture all

19. A great and dangerous treason

20. Madness and fury

21. A world of change

22. Worse and worse news

23. A world of mischief

24. Neither hot nor cold

25. The gates of hell

26. The women of war

27. The face of God

28. The mansion house of liberty

29. A game to play

30. To kill a king

31. This house to be let

32. Fear and trembling

33. Healing and settling

34. Is it possible?

35. The young gentleman

36. Oh, prodigious change!

37. On the road

38. To rise and piss

39. And not dead yet?

40. The true force

41. Hot news

42. New infirmities

43. Or at the Cock?

44. Noise rhymes to noise

45. The Protestant wind

Photographs

Further reading

Index

Also by Peter Ackroyd

Copyright

List of illustrations

1. James I of England and James VI of Scotland (John de Critz the Elder / Mary Evans Picture Library)

2. Anne of Denmark, James’s spouse (c.1605–10, Gheeraerts, Marcus (c.1561–1635) (attr. to)) / Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

3. James in front of his lords, temporal and spiritual (Mary Evans Picture Library / Everett Collection)

4. The title page of the King James Bible (© Photo Researchers / Mary Evans Picture Library)

5. The title page of John Milton’s Areopagitica (Mary Evans Picture Library)

6. George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham (Mary Evans / Iberfoto)

7. Henry, prince of Wales (Oliver, Isaac (c.1565–1617) Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK Bridgeman Images)

8. The future Charles I, as prince of Wales (Royal Armouries, Leeds, UK / Bridgeman Images)

9. Elizabeth, daughter of James I (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

10. Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria (Alinari Archives, Florence – Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per I Beni e le Attivit … Cu)

11. Three out of seven of Charles I’s children, painted by Anthony Van Dyck (Alinari Archives, Florence – Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per I Beni e le Attivit … Cu)

12. A disapproving illustration of the Rump Parliament (Interfoto Sammlung Rauch Mary Evans Picture Library)

13. What the Cavaliers are supposed to have done with the Puritans (Mary Evans Picture Library)

14. Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Private Collection Bridgeman Images)

15. A plan of the Battle of Naseby (Mary Evans Picture Library)

16. Prince Rupert of the Rhine (© Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

17. The trial of Charles I in Westminster Hall (Mary Evans Picture Library)

18. Charles I’s death warrant (Interfoto Sammlung Rauch Mary Evans Picture Library)

19. Oliver Cromwell (Robert Walker / Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) U.K. / Bridgeman Images)

20. A contemporary tapestry celebrating the restoration of Charles II (© The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, UK)

21. Charles II (Sir Peter Lely / © Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

22. Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II (Mary Evans / BeBa / Iberfoto)

23. Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland (after Sir Peter Lely / © Geffrye Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

24. Nell Gwynne (studio of Sir Peter Lely / Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, UK National Trust Photographic Library John Hammond / Bridgeman Images)

25. Louise de Kérouaille, Charles’s French mistress (Mary Evans / Epic / Tallandier)

26. The earl of Rochester (Sir Peter Lely Private Collection The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images)

27. Samuel Pepys (Sir Godfrey Kneller Royal Society of Arts, London, UK Bridgeman Images)

28. Sir Christopher Wren (Interfoto Friedrich Mary Evans)

29. Sir Isaac Newton (Mary Evans Picture Library / Imagno)

30. Charles II in his role as patron of the Royal Society (Private Collection The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images)

31. The members of the ‘Cabal’ (Sir John Baptist de Medina Private Collection De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images)

32. The duke of Monmouth (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

33. The duke of York, soon to become James II, with his wife and daughters (Pierre Mignard Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014 Bridgeman Images)

34. The covert arrival of an infant, to be passed off as James II’s son (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

35. James Francis Edward Stuart as a baby with his mother, Mary of Modena (Benedetto Gennari the Younger Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images)

36. James II throwing the great seal into the Thames (Mary Evans Picture Library)

1

A new Solomon

Sir Robert Carey rode furiously from London to Edinburgh along the Great North Road, spending one night in Yorkshire and another in Northumberland; he arrived at Holyrood Palace, ‘be-bloodied with great falls and bruises’ after a journey of more than 330 miles. It was late at night on Saturday 26 March 1603. He was ushered into the presence of King James VI of Scotland and, falling to his knees, proclaimed him to be ‘King of England, France and Ireland’. He gave him as testimony a sapphire ring that his sister, Lady Scrope, had thrown to him from a window at Richmond Palace immediately after the death of Elizabeth I. ‘I have’, he told his new sovereign, ‘a blue ring from a fair lady.’

‘It is enough,’ James said. ‘I know by this you are a true messenger.’ The king had previously entrusted this ring to Lady Scrope in the event of the queen’s death.

A body of prelates and peers had already met Sir Robert Cecil, the principal councillor of the old queen, at Whitehall Gate before they proceeded with him to the cross at Cheapside where Cecil proclaimed James as king; bonfires and bells greeted the news of the swift and easy succession. Cecil himself declared that he had ‘steered King James’s ship into the right harbour, without cross of wave or tide that could have overturned a cock-boat’. The councillor had entered a secret correspondence with James before Elizabeth’s death; he had urged the Scottish king to nourish ‘a heart of adamant in a world of feathers’.

On 5 April James left Edinburgh to travel to his new realm. He had been the king of Scotland for thirty-six years, ever since he had assumed the throne at the age of thirteen months after the forced abdication of his mother Mary Queen of Scots. He had been a successful if not a glorious monarch, managing to curb the pretensions of an argumentative clergy and of a fractious nobility. From his earliest years the restive and combative spirit of the Scottish lords ensured that, in the words of the French ambassador, he had been nourished in fear. Yet he had by guile and compromise held on to his crown. Now, as he told his followers, he was about to enter the Land of Promise. He had already written to the council at Westminster, asking for money; he did not have the funds to finance his journey south.

The king did not perhaps expect so effusive and jubilant a welcome from his new subjects. He recalled later how ‘the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet me’. They came to gaze at him, since none of them had experienced the rule of a male monarch. He himself was impressed by the prosperity of the land and by the evident wealth of its rulers. He said later that the first three years of his reign were ‘as a Christmas’. It took him a month to reach London, largely because he wished to avoid the funeral of his predecessor. He had no great fondness for Elizabeth; she had prevaricated over his right to the succession and, perhaps more significantly, had ordered the execution of his mother.

He reached York by the middle of April, where Cecil came to greet him. ‘Though you be but a little man,’ the king told him, ‘we shall surely load your shoulders with business.’ At Newark-on-Trent he gave orders that a cutpurse, preying upon his retinue, should summarily be hanged; he had not properly been informed on the provisions of English common law. It is an indication that he was still, in many important respects, a foreigner. At Burghley-by-Stamford he fell from his horse and broke his collar bone. Slowly he made his way to London. For three or four days he rested in Hertfordshire at Robert Cecil’s country home, Theobalds House, at which seat he took pleasure in creating many knights.

He was so generous with titles that he was accused of improvidence. The reign of Elizabeth witnessed the creation of 878 knights; in the first four months of the king’s rule, some 906 new men were awarded that honour. The queen had knighted those whom she considered to be of genuine merit or importance; James merely considered knighthood to be a mark of status. He was said to have knighted a piece of beef with the words ‘Arise, Sir Loin’. On another occasion he did not catch the name of the recipient and said, ‘Prithee, rise up, and call thyself Sir What Thou Wilt.’ Other titles could be purchased with cash. The diminution in the importance of honour marks one of the first changes to the old Tudor system.

Those who were permitted into the king’s presence may not have been entirely impressed. He was awkward and hesitant in manner; his legs were slightly bowed and his gait erratic, perhaps the consequence of rickets acquired in childhood. One admittedly hostile witness, Sir Anthony Weldon, also described him as forever ‘fiddling about his codpiece’.

He was a robust and fluent conversationalist, who rather liked to hear the sound of his own voice, but the effect upon his English audience was perhaps impaired by the fact that he retained a broad Scots accent. If he was eager to talk, he was also quick to laugh. He could be witty, but delivered his droll remarks in a grave and serious voice. His manners were not impeccable, and he was said to have slobbered over his food and drink. He paid little attention to his dress, but favoured thickly padded doublets that might impede an assassin’s dagger; ever since his childhood he had lived in fear of assault or murder. He was said to have a horror of naked steel. He had a restless, roving eye; he paid particular notice to those at court who were not known to him.

On 7 May he rode towards London, but was greeted 4 miles outside the city by the lord mayor and innumerable citizens. He lodged at the Charterhouse for four nights, and then made his way to the Tower, where he remained for a few days. While staying in the royal apartments he began an excited tour of his capital, ‘secretly in his coach and by water’, as one contemporary put it; he was particularly struck by the sight of the crown jewels, held at the palace in Whitehall. Here was the glittering and unmistakable evidence of his newfound wealth.

Yet London was not a pleasure-dome. Even as he approached it, the plague began its secret ministry in the streets and alleys; by the end of the summer it had claimed the lives of 30,000 citizens. A grand state entry had been planned for 25 July, the day of the coronation, but the fear of infected crowds curtailed the ceremony; there would be a crowning, but no state procession.

Even in these early months of the reign conspiracies began to mount against his throne. A group of gentlemen, among them Sir Walter Raleigh and Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, were suspected of a scheme to depose James and to replace him with his cousin Arabella Stuart; like most conspiracies it was plagued by rumour, indecision and premature disclosure. Raleigh was arrested and consigned to the Tower, where two weeks later he attempted suicide; at his subsequent trial he was denounced by the attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, as ‘a spider of hell’.

Raleigh: You speak indiscreetly, barbarously and uncivilly.

Coke: I want words sufficient to express thy viperous treasons.

Raleigh: You want words, indeed, for you have spoken the one thing half a dozen times.

This was the end of what was called ‘the Main Plot’. A ‘Bye Plot’ was also discovered, whereby the king was to be kidnapped by priests and forced to suspend the laws against Roman Catholics. It came to nothing, of course, except for the deaths of the principals engaged in it.

The time had come for the formal, if subdued, coronation of the king; the archbishop of Canterbury performed the ceremony expeditiously in the sight of an invited audience. James’s consort, Anne of Denmark, agreed to receive her crown from the archbishop; as a Catholic, however, she refused to partake of Protestant communion. Being of a complaisant and gregarious disposition she caused very little trouble for the rest of her husband’s reign. Her chaplain once remarked that ‘the king himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together’. After the ceremony the royal family left pestilential London for the healthier air of the country. James and Anne made their first ‘progress’ in the August of the year, making their way to Winchester and Southampton before turning north into Oxfordshire; in this, they were following the fashion of the king’s illustrious predecessor.

James had already established, however, the foundations of his court and council. In particular he took care to reward his Scottish nobles with the most prominent positions in his personal retinue. The centre of his rule lay in the royal bedchamber, which was almost wholly staffed by the entourage that had followed him from his native land. This was a source of much discontent and disquiet among the English courtiers; it was said that the Scottish lords stood like mountains between the beams of the king’s grace and themselves. Yet a new privy chamber was also established, half of Scots and half of English; the king revelled in his role as ‘the pacifier’, and this equal pairing evinced his moderation.

Among the English councillors the palm was awarded to Sir Robert Cecil and to the Howards. Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, was appointed as lord warden of the cinque ports at the beginning of 1604 and, a year later, lord privy seal; in the previous reign he had sent what James called ‘Asiatic and endless volumes’ of advice to Edinburgh. Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, was lord chamberlain. Cecil, soon to become Viscount Cranborne and then earl of Salisbury, was in fact pre-eminent; he was very small, with a hunched back, but he stood above the others. The king had told him that ‘before God I count you the best servant that ever I had, albeit you be but a beagle’. He often addressed him as ‘my little beagle’. Cecil managed parliament, and the revenues; he supervised Ireland and all foreign affairs. He was forever industrious, highly efficient and always courteous; he had borne with patience all the humiliating remarks about his appearance and physique. He was the ultimate civil servant and his cousin, Francis Bacon, once said of him that he might prevent public affairs getting worse but could not make them any better. That is perhaps too harsh; Cecil had so great a political intelligence that he may qualify as a statesman. Snapping at his heels, however, was Henry Howard.

Elizabeth’s council had comprised some thirteen members; James soon doubled its size, but took great pleasure in avoiding its meetings. He favoured private deliberations, in the seclusion of his bedchamber, where he could then delegate responsibility. He preferred intimate meetings where his wit and common sense could compensate for his lack of dignity. He did not particularly like London in any case, and always preferred to go hunting in the countryside beyond; from this vantage James once wrote a complacent letter to his councillors, imagining them to be ‘frying in the pains of purgatory’ upon royal business. Yet he made quick and sudden visits to the capital, when his presence was deemed to be indispensable; he said that he came ‘like a flash of lightning, both in going, staying there, and returning’.

The palace of Whitehall was a straggling complex of some 1,400 rooms, closets and galleries and chambers huddled together. It was a place of secrets and of clandestine meetings, of staged encounters and sudden quarrels. This is the proper setting for John Donne’s satires as well as for Ben Jonson’s two Roman plays on the nature of ambition and corruption. It is also the setting for the great age of the masque. A ball, or a comedy, was staged every other day.

Yet the court is also the most significant context for the collection of Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, which came to include the architectural drawings of Palladio as well as the work of Holbein, Raphael and Dürer. The great lords and courtiers also built elaborate houses at Audley End, Hatfield and elsewhere. The earl of Northampton furnished his house in the Strand with Turkish carpets, Brussels tapestries and Chinese porcelain; he also owned globes, and maps of all the principal nations. This is the burgeoning world of Jacobeanism.

*

On his progress to London from Edinburgh, at the beginning of his reign, the king was given a petition; it was an appeal from his puritan subjects that became known as the ‘millenary petition’, bearing the signatures of 1,000 ministers of religion. In moderate terms it suggested to the king that the sign of the cross should be removed from the baptismal ceremony and that the marriage ring was unnecessary. The words ‘priest’ and ‘absolution’ should be ‘corrected’, and the rite of confirmation abolished. The cap and the surplice, the vestments of conformity, were not to be ‘urged’.

The king himself liked nothing so much as doctrinal discussion, in which he could display his learning. The first important act of his reign, therefore, was to bring together a small number of clerics at his palace of Hampton Court where they might debate matters of religious policy and religious principle. Five distinguished and learned puritan ministers were matched against the leading ecclesiastics of the realm, among them the archbishop of Canterbury and eight bishops.

This was an age of religious polemic, perhaps prophesying the civil wars of the succeeding reign. On the side of the bishops were those generally satisfied with the doctrines and ceremonies of the established Church; they were moderate; they espoused the union of Church and state. They put more trust in communal worship than in private prayer; they acknowledged the role of custom, experience and reason in spiritual matters. It may not have been a fully formed faith, but it served to bind together those of unclear or flexible belief. It also suited those who simply wished to conform with their neighbours.

On the side of the puritans were those more concerned with the exigencies of the private conscience. They believed in the natural depravity of man, unless the sinner be redeemed by grace. They abhorred the practice of confession and encouraged intensive self-examination as well as self-discipline. They did not wish for a sacramental priesthood but a preaching ministry; they accepted the word of Scripture as the source of all divine truth. They took their compass from the stirrings of providence. Men and women of a puritan tradition were utterly obedient to God’s absolute will from which no ritual or sacrament could avert them. This lent them zeal and energy in their attempt to purify the world or, as one puritan theologian put it, ‘a holy violence in the performing of all duties’. Sometimes they spoke out as the spirit moved them. It was said, unfairly, that they loved God with all their soul and hated their neighbour with all their heart.

They were not at this stage, however, rival creeds; they are perhaps better regarded as opposing tendencies within the same Church, and their first formal confrontation took place at Hampton Court in the middle of winter. The proceedings of the first day, 14 January 1604, were confined to the king and his ecclesiastics. James debated with his bishops the changes suggested in the ‘millenary petition’. On the second day the puritan divines were invited to attend. John Reynolds, the first to be called, argued that the English Church should embrace Calvinist doctrine. The bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, quickly intervened. He knelt down before the king and demanded that ‘the ancient canon might be remembered’, by which he meant that ‘schismatici’ should not be permitted to speak against the bishops. James allowed the discussion on specific matters to continue.

In the subsequent debate the king seems to have been shrewd and judicious. He did not accede to the puritans’ demand for Calvinism, but he did accept their proposal for an improved translation of the Bible. This request bore magnificent fruit in the King James translation published later in the reign. The delegates then discussed the problem of providing a learned ministry, and the difficulties of dealing with issues of private conscience. The king was willing to concede certain matters to the puritans, in the evident belief that a middle way would encourage unity within the Church. In the bitter weather the fires of Hampton Court roared, while the king sat in his furs; the bishops, and even the puritan delegates, were also clad in fur cloaks.

All seemed to be proceeding without much incident until Reynolds recommended that the bishops of the realm should consult with the ‘presbyters’. At this, the king bridled. ‘Presbyter’, the term for the elder or minister of a Christian church, had for him unfortunate connotations. He had previously been outraged by the Presbyterian divines of Scotland, who did not always treat His Majesty with appropriate respect; they inclined towards republicanism and even egalitarianism. One of them, Andrew Melville, had called him to his face ‘God’s silly vassal’.

James now told Reynolds and his colleagues that they seemed to be aiming ‘at a Scottish Presbytery which agreeth with monarchy as well as God and the devil’. He added that it would mean ‘Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings’. He concluded with advice to Reynolds that ‘until you find that I grow lazy, leave it alone’. His motto from this time forward would be ‘no bishop, no king’. He observed, as the puritan delegates left his presence, that ‘if this be all they have to say, I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse’.

Two days later the king summoned the bishops for a further conference. He then called back the puritans, and ordered them to conform to the whole of the orthodox Book of Common Prayer reissued forty-five years before. The conference was over. The impending translation was the greatest benefit of the proceedings but, altogether, the conference cannot be counted a great success. It had now emerged that there was perhaps not one national Church, after all, but at least two Churches with different meanings and purposes.

The king was, as ever, delighted with his performance at Hampton Court. ‘I peppered them soundly,’ he said. The bishops had told him that he had spoken with the power of inspiration. ‘I know not what they mean,’ Sir John Harington wrote to his wife, ‘but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed.’ The king had said, at one point, ‘A turd for this argument. I would rather my child were baptized by an ape as by a woman.’ He also chastised the puritans by remonstrating ‘Away with your snivelling!’

He was, however, in many respects a learned man. All his life he had argued, and debated, with his Scottish clergy. He delighted in theological controversy, and according to an early observer ‘he apprehends clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory’. The king also believed himself to be a master of the written word and composed volumes on demonology, monarchy, witchcraft and smoking. On his accession medal he is crowned with a laurel wreath, a sure sign of his literary pretensions. He even replied to ‘rayling rhymes’ published against him with his own doggerel verse. In 1616 he collected all of his prose writings into a folio volume, the first English monarch ever to do so. So he became known, sometimes sarcastically, as ‘the British Solomon’.

John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, now close to death, realized that the conclusion of the Hampton Court conference was by no means the end of religious controversy. He knew well enough that parliament, about to meet, contained many lords and gentlemen of a puritan persuasion. The king had decided to ride in state through the capital four days before the opening of parliament on 19 March 1604. Now that the threat of plague had lifted it was declared that people from every ‘county, borough, precinct, city, hamlet’ had flocked to give praise to the new monarch. Seven triumphal arches, in the style of imperial Rome, were erected along the processional route from the Tower to Whitehall. Yet magnificence did not necessarily command assent.

It was a large parliament, eager to take the measure of James I. In his opening speech the king made some remarks upon the state of religion and admonished the puritans for ‘being ever discontented with the present government’. When it became clear that the Commons were more concerned with various matters of privilege and grievance, James rebuked them ‘as a father to his children’. Further causes of contention soon emerged.

A dispute had arisen over the election of a member for Buckinghamshire and the ensuing argument pitched king against parliament. On 5 April the Speaker delivered a message from James that he desired ‘as an absolute king’ that there might be a conference between the Commons and the judges. No monarch had spoken to parliament in that manner for years. Silence and amazement followed this peremptory request, whereupon one member stood up and said that ‘the prince’s command is like a thunderbolt; his command upon our allegiance like the roaring of a lion; to his command there is no contradiction’.

That was not necessarily the case. In the middle of April it was proposed that James should assume the title of king of Great Britain, with the union of his kingdoms; it might have been deemed a mere formality under the circumstances. But the Commons were not so easily to be persuaded. What kind of union was being proposed? Economic? Constitutional? By what laws will this ‘Britain’ be governed? There might be a flood of Scots taking up all posts and honours. How could the common law of England be consistent with the legal traditions of Scotland or even with the customs of Ireland?

The king himself was adamant. ‘I am the husband,’ he said, ‘and all the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body.’ Did they wish him to be a polygamist with two separate wives? The debate lingered into the succeeding year with what the king called ‘many crossings, long disputations, strange questions, and nothing done’. He had a vision of a united kingdom with one law, one language and one faith; yet the practicalities of the period rendered the ambition useless. The English demanded, for example, that the Scots be taxed at the same rate as themselves; the Scots demurred, pleading poverty. The Commons had already agreed that since ‘we cannot make any laws to bind Britannia … let us proceed with a leaden foot’. The king’s enthusiasm for the project was as great as his anger against the opponents of union.

Parliament then turned its attention to matters of religion, and in particular to the work of the Hampton Court conference. It was here, as we have seen, that Archbishop Whitgift sensed trouble from the great puritan gentry who had already taken their seats. By the end of May the Commons had brought in two bills, one of which was directed against pluralists and non-residents; these men, who held more than one clerical living or were keen to relegate their duties, included some of the most prominent members of the established Church. The bias of the Commons was clear enough. The second bill expressed the desire for ‘a learned and godly ministry’, a request tantamount to a demand for puritanism.

The king was vexed, and by way of justification a parliamentary committee drew up a ‘form of apology and satisfaction’, read to the Commons on 20 June, in which were defended such rights as freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. It was declared that ‘our privileges and liberties are our true right and due inheritance, no less than our lands and goods’. It was a parliamentary way, perhaps, of introducing a Scottish king to the peculiar constitution of England. Another section stated that ‘your majesty should be misinformed if any man should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either to alter religion … or to make any laws covering the same’. The ‘form of apology’ was never presented to the king; it may have been rejected by a majority as too extreme.

Without doubt, however, James came to hear of it; he resented its implication and was angered at its impudence. He came down to prorogue parliament on 7 July, where in the course of his speech he berated some of its members for being ‘idle heads, some rash, some busy informers’. He said that in Scotland he was heard with respect whereas here there was ‘nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with my propositions’. In Scotland ‘all things warranted that came from me. Here all things suspected.’ He added that ‘you have done many things rashly, I say not you meant disloyally’. Then, at the conclusion, he advised that ‘only I wish you had kept a better form. I like form as much as matter.’

He was perhaps waiting for the assistance of Richard Bancroft, newly installed as archbishop of Canterbury, who was a firm upholder of the royal prerogative and no lover of puritans. Even then Bancroft was steering the convocation of senior clergy towards a statement of general religious conformity; the canons of 1604 gave nothing to the puritans but demanded that they submit to the Book of Common Prayer and to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The sectarian ministers must conform or be deprived. The more draconian penalties were in truth rarely applied, but the measures marked the first schism in the history of the reformed English Church.

So the king had prorogued parliament with a very bad grace, little or nothing having been achieved by it. He stated at a later date that it was a body without a head. ‘At their meetings,’ he is reported to have said, ‘nothing is heard but cries, shouts and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have allowed such an institution to come into existence.’ His opinion may have been shared by others. In the winter of 1604 Thomas Percy sub-leased a house beside the Palace of Westminster and, with the assistance of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators, began to excavate a tunnel.

2

The plot

In these early years the king was proclaimed as a Caesar, a David, a Noah, a Joash and even a Homer. He was a second Augustus, a true Josiah, a wise and religious sovereign. It is difficult to know what this bewildering wealth of parallels might signify, but one virtue soon became predominant. He was ‘rex pacificus’ or ‘Jacobus pacificus’. Blessed was the peacemaker. His was the reign of the fig tree and the vine.

Others were not so satisfied by the pleasures of peace. ‘Na, na,’ James is supposed to have said after his coronation, ‘we’ll not need papists now.’ He had wooed them in case of trouble, but could now afford to discard them. In February 1604, the Jesuit priests who owed all their obedience to Rome were banished from the realm. It was a sensible precaution, perhaps, but for fervent Catholics it was an ominous sign.

Among these was Thomas Winter, or Wintour, who had unsuccessfully appealed to Philip III of Spain for aid on behalf of the faithful. In the same month of February 1604, he visited his cousin, Robert Catesby, at Lambeth. Catesby was possibly a convert from Protestantism and therefore one in whom the Roman fire burned ever more brightly. It was he, rather than Guy Fawkes, who led what became known as the ‘powder plot’. Catesby informed his cousin of his grand plan to blow up parliament with gunpowder, but of course he needed allies in the work. In April Winter travelled to Flanders from which place he brought back Fawkes himself. We may now refer to them as conspirators. ‘Shall we always, gentlemen, talk,’ Thomas Percy said, ‘and never do anything?’ In the following month an oath of secrecy was sworn before they made their way to a house behind the church of St Clement Eastcheap, where they met a Jesuit by the name of Gerard who administered to them the Holy Sacrament.

It was now agreed that a dwelling conveniently close to parliament must be found, but it was not until the beginning of December that a suitable property became available. On the 11th of the month they entered the house, carrying with them a stock of hard-boiled eggs and baked meats. By Christmas Eve the conspirators had dug their way down and, in the words of Thomas Winter, ‘wrought under a little entry to the wall of the parliament house and underpropped it as we went with wood’. They believed that the next session would begin in February 1605, but now they learned that it was prorogued until the following October. They had more time. The gunpowder was being stored at Catesby’s lodgings in Lambeth but, under conditions of great secrecy and security, it was brought to the house at Westminster. They had already made some progress in penetrating the 9-foot wall, but their work was impeded by the influx of water.

One day, soon after the gunpowder had been acquired, they heard a rustling sound above their heads. Fawkes went out of doors and cautiously investigated. He was met by Ellen Bright, coal merchant, who informed him that she was leaving the premises; it so happened that her cellar or vault ran under the parliament house itself. The deal was quickly settled; Thomas Percy, another conspirator, secured the lease of the space. An iron gate between the basement of the conspirators’ house and Mrs Bright’s cellar was opened, and Fawkes was able to smuggle some thirty-six barrels of gunpowder into the neighbouring vault. There was enough powder to destroy many thousands of people.

By September fresh barrels of gunpowder were acquired in order to replace those affected by damp. Funds were running low, however, and it was deemed advisable to bring in three other conspirators with money or property. Thirteen men were by this time apprised of the secret, leaving thirteen ways for the secret to be betrayed. One of the newly recruited conspirators, Francis Tresham, pleaded strongly that his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, should be spared the general conflagration. Monteagle was a staunch Catholic who had already defended his Church in the House of Lords. The others demurred at the exception, however well meant. Monteagle was sitting down for dinner on 26 October, at his house in Hoxton, when a letter was brought to him by a messenger. He glanced at it and then requested one of his gentlemen to read it aloud.

‘My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this parliament…’ So it began. The correspondent then went on to warn that ‘they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them’. Monteagle immediately set out for Whitehall with the letter in his hand. He came upon Robert Cecil, now the newly created earl of Salisbury, sitting down to supper with some other members of the privy council.

Monteagle took Salisbury into an adjoining room, and showed him the document. Salisbury was at first inclined to dismiss the matter as a false alarm but, on his consulting his colleagues, the possibility of gunpowder as a ‘terrible blow’ was discussed. The lord chamberlain, the earl of Suffolk, knew intimately the interior of parliament; in particular he was aware of the damp and capacious cellars beneath the building. He, and other privy councillors, agreed that they should be searched before the beginning of the session that had been further postponed to 5 November; but they did not wish to act too precipitately for fear of scaring away the plotters.

The king had been hunting at Royston and, on his return to London at the beginning of November, the letter was shown to him. Instantly he agreed that it suggested ‘some stratagem of fire and powder’. On the afternoon of Monday 4 November, Suffolk and Monteagle began their search on the excuse that they were looking for some property belonging to the king. Guy Fawkes opened the door of the cellar.

Suffolk: To whom do these coals and faggots belong?

Fawkes: They belong to Mr Thomas Percy, one of his majesty’s gentlemen pensioners.

Thomas Percy was of course a known Catholic, at a time when there was some fear of Catholic disaffection. The king now ordered a further and more thorough search. At eleven o’clock that night a Westminster magistrate, Sir Thomas Knyvett, went down to the cellar with certain soldiers. The door was once more opened by Guy Fawkes. Knyvett then began to brush aside the coals and the bundles of wood only to discover the barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes made no attempt at flight or combat. He admitted that he intended to blow up the king and the two houses of parliament on the following morning. It seems that he was prepared to light a slow match and then to make his way to Wapping where he would take boat to Gravelines in France. When he was asked later, in formal questioning by the council, the reason for procuring so much gunpowder he replied that he wanted ‘to blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains’. The king was informed of Fawkes’s capture, and gave thanks for his miraculous deliverance.

It was, perhaps, not a miracle at all. Francis Tresham and Lord Monteagle may have conspired in the production of the letter, as a device to gain the favour of the king. It has also been suggested that Salisbury himself was aware of the conspiracy but allowed it to proceed as a way of catching out the Catholics; this is highly unlikely, but not wholly impossible.

News of the arrest, and the intended treason, soon spread. Robert Catesby and the other conspirators fled from London, hoping to create the conditions for a Catholic rising; but the Catholic gentlemen were not about to commit suicide. The principal fugitives then took refuge in Holbeche House, on the borders of Staffordshire, where a lighted coal or stray spark ignited the gunpowder they were carrying with them. Two or three were injured, and were inclined to see in the accident a sign of divine displeasure. One of them cried out, ‘Woe worth the time that we have seen this day!’ They then knelt in prayer before a picture of the Virgin. The sheriff of Worcester was on their track; his men surrounded the house and fired on its occupants. Some were killed, while the wounded were taken back to London; Catesby was among those shot dead.

Other conspirators were found in hiding over the next few days. On 27 January 1606, Guy Fawkes and seven others were brought for trial to Westminster Hall where all but one of them pleaded innocence. They were executed a few days later. The Jesuits, who had condoned if not connived in the plot, were soon enough taken to the scaffold. So ended ‘the powder plot’. Seven years later the study of Robert Cotton, librarian and antiquarian, was found to contain certain sainted relics of the plotters, including a finger, a toe and a piece of a rib.

The king himself, despite his miraculous survival, was not comforted. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘the king is in terror, he does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms with only Scotsmen about him.’ James seemed subdued and melancholy, occasionally giving vent to his anger against the Catholics. ‘I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood,’ he said, ‘though sorely against my will.’ It did not come to that.

The members of the Commons had continued their ordinary business on the day they were meant to be destroyed; a committee on Spanish trade was established, and a petition was discussed from a member asking to be excused on account of gout. Yet by the end of May 1606, they had passed an Act ‘for the better discovering and repressing of popish recusants’; one of its provisions was an oath of allegiance, drawn up by Archbishop Bancroft, which acknowledged James to be the lawful king beyond any power of the pope to depose him. Catholics were obliged to attend the services of the established Church and to receive holy communion at least once a year; the penalties included fines or the impropriation of property. No recusant was to come within 10 miles of London, and a statute of the previous reign was revived prohibiting any recusant from travelling further than 5 miles from his or her home. No recusant could practise as an attorney or as a doctor.

These measures did not bring about the demise of the old faith. The Catholics merely withdrew from political activity during the reign of James and largely remained quiet or quiescent. Most of them were willing to accept the oath of allegiance in order to secure both peace and property; only the Jesuitically inclined were still eager to support the pretensions of the pope. James himself said of the oath that he wished to make a distinction between the doctrinaire Catholics and those ‘who although they were otherwise popishly affected, yet retained in their hearts the print of their natural duty to their sovereign’. The previous sanctions against the puritans had been only hesitantly or partially imposed; the same policy of caution was now pursued against the Catholics. James had no wish to make martyrs out of his subjects. It was in any case far easier, in the early seventeenth century, to make laws than to enforce them.

The court of James I, its excesses having already become public knowledge, was now notorious for its laxity; drunkenness and dissimulation, venality and promiscuity, were its most significant characteristics. Freedom of manners was the only rule. The earl of Pembroke was believed to have a horror of frogs, so the king put one down his neck. The king himself had an aversion to pigs, and so Pembroke led one into the royal bedchamber. One courtier took into the palace at Whitehall ‘four brawny pigs, piping hot, bitted and harnessed with ropes of sausages, all tied to a monstrous pudding’. The sausages were hurled about the room while the fools and dwarves of the court began leaping on one another’s shoulders.

In Sejanus, His Fall, a play performed in the first year of the king’s reign, Ben Jonson alluded to courtiers when he wrote that:

We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,

No soft and glutinous bodies that can stick

Like snails on painted walls …

‘If I were to imitate the conduct of your republic,’ the king told the Venetian ambassador, ‘and begin to punish those who take bribes, I should soon not have a single subject left.’

When the king of Denmark arrived in the summer of 1606 the courtiers of Whitehall were said by Sir John Harington ‘to wallow in beastly delights’ while the ladies ‘abandon their sobriety and are seen to roll about in intoxication’. A great feast was held for the two sovereigns, in the course of which was shown a representation of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The lady who played the queen carried various gifts to the two kings ‘but forgetting the steps arising to the canopy overset her caskets into his Danish majesty’s lap and fell at his feet … His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba, but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state.’ Other actors in the pageant, such as Hope and Faith, ‘were both sick and spewing in the lower hall’. Harington concluded that ‘the gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads’ and ‘I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety, as I have now done’. He yearned for the days of his godmother, the Virgin Queen, when a certain stateliness and severity touched the atmosphere of the court.

There could be no doubt that the new court differed markedly from its predecessor. The king was known to be devoted to his pleasures rather than what were considered to be his duties. He attended the fights of the Cockpit in Whitehall Palace twice a week, and, like his predecessor, loved to ride or hunt every day. When James rode up to the dead hart he dismounted and cut its throat with dispatch; he then sated the dogs with its blood before wiping his bloodied hands across the faces of his fellow horsemen.

It soon became clear that he did not enjoy the company of spectators at his sports. Quite unlike his predecessor he disliked and even detested crowds. When the people flocked about him he would swear at them and cry out, ‘What would they have?’ On one occasion he was told that they had come in love and reverence. To which he replied, in a broad Scots accent, ‘God’s wounds, I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse.’ He would bid ‘A pox on you!’ or ‘A plague on you!’ As a result of outbursts of anger such as this he became, in the words of the Venetian ambassador, ‘despised and almost hated’.

He justified his exertions at the hunt on the grounds that his vigour was ‘the health and welfare of them all’, no doubt meaning both the court and the nation. Let his officers waste away in closets or at the council table. He must be strong and virile. In any case, he said, he could do more business in an hour than his councillors could manage in a day; he spent less time in hunting than other monarchs did in whoring. One day a favourite dog, Jowler, disappeared from the pack. On the following morning it reappeared with a note tied around its neck. ‘Good Mr Jowler we pray you speak to the king (for he hears you every day and so doth he not us) that it will please his majesty to go back to London, for else the country will be undone.’ When eventually James did return to Whitehall he feasted and played cards, at which sport he lost large sums of money.

James was continually and heavily in debt. He had thought to come into a realm of gold, but soon found his purse to be bare. Or, rather, he emptied it too readily. He bought boots and silk stockings and beaver hats in profusion. Court ceremonial was more lavish with the arrival of ever more ‘gentlemen extraordinary’. There was a vogue at court for ‘golden play’ or gambling. The king loved masques and feasts, which were for him a true sign of regality. He wished to have a masque on the night of Christmas, whereupon he was told that it was not the fashion. ‘What do you tell me of the fashion?’ he enquired. ‘I will make it a fashion.’

The king also purchased plate and jewels, which he then proceeded to distribute among his followers. It was said that he had given to one or two men more than his predecessor had given to all of her courtiers during the whole of her reign. The earl of Shrewsbury remarked that Elizabeth ‘valued every molehill that she gave … a mountain, which our sovereign now does not’. His generosity to favourites and to courtiers was by the standard of any age in English history exceptional.

One particular favourite emerged in the spring of 1607. Robert Carr, twenty-one, was a model of affability and deportment; he was also exceptionally handsome. He took part in a tournament in the king’s presence, but he was thrown from his horse and broke his leg. The king was much affected and ordered his own doctor to take charge of the young man; Carr was carried to the hospital at Charing Cross, where the king visited him every day. The patient was placed on a choice diet and, at the insistence of James, was surrounded by surgeons. It was clear to the courtiers that here was a man worth flattering. ‘Lord!’ one contemporary, Sir Anthony Weldon, wrote, ‘how the great men flocked to see him, and to offer to his shrine in such abundance…’ James had become infatuated with him and, by the end of the year, Carr had been knighted and appointed as a gentleman of the bedchamber. The king decided to educate as well as to promote him. He himself gave Carr lessons in Latin grammar and in the politics of Europe. And of course he lavished gold and jewels upon him. It was observed that the king ‘leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheek, smoothes his ruffled garments…’

Sir John Harington was still seeking preferment at court after a lifetime of service to Elizabeth. Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, took him aside and offered some advice. He was told that the king ‘doth wonderfully covet learned discourse’ and ‘doth admire good fashion in cloaths’. He was instructed to ‘get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the king saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it be not all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and bushy’. Eighteen courtiers had already been dismissed for not conforming to the king’s taste in male attire.

Suffolk suggested to Harington that in his conversation he should not dwell too long on any one subject, and touch only lightly on the topic of religion. Never say that ‘this is good or bad’ but modestly state that ‘if it were your majesty’s good opinion, I myself should think so and so’. Do not ask questions. Do not speak about the character or temperament of anyone else at court. Remember to praise the king’s horse, a roan jennet. You must say that the stars are bright jewels fit for Robert Carr’s ears, and that the roan jennet surpasses Bucephalus and is worthy to be ridden by Alexander.

Suffolk also advised Harington that ‘silence and discretion should be linked together, like dog and bitch’. The previous sovereign had always spoken of her subjects’ ‘love and good affections’, but James preferred to talk of their ‘fear and subjection’. Why did Harington wish to come to court in the first place? ‘You are not young, you are not handsome, you are not finely.’ So he must rely upon his learning, which the king would admire.

Soon enough James took Harington aside, and questioned him in his private closet. He quizzed him on Aristotle and other philosophers; he asked him to read out a passage from Ariosto, and praised his elocution. He then posed a series of questions to him. What do you think pure wit is made of? Should a king not be the best clerk [the most learned] in his own country? Do you truly understand why the devil works more with ancient women than with others? He told Harington that the death of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been foretold and that at the time of her execution a bloody head was seen dancing in the air; he dilated on the powers of prophecy and recommended several books on the matter. The king concluded by discussing ‘the new weed’, tobacco, and declared that ‘it would, by its use, infuse ill qualities on the brain’. So ended the audience. Harington passed through the court ‘amidst the many varlets and lordly servants who stood around’. Yet he had passed the test, and was appointed as tutor to the young Prince Henry.

Reasons other than favouritism can be adduced for the king’s indebtedness. The steady rise in prices, and the reluctance of landowners to pay further taxation, all contributed to the rise in the expenditure of the court above its income. The cost of an extended royal household, complete with wife and three children, was also very high. Queen Anne was extravagant and devoted to the delights of fashionable London; her husband had proposed that she might confine herself to the 3,000 dresses in the previous queen’s wardrobe, but she did not care for some of the old fashions. She would appear at court in the guise of a goddess or a nymph, an Eastern sultana or an Arab princess.

James was perpetually surprised by his debts, and continually promised to be more economical; yet it was not in his nature to be thrifty. ‘My only hope that upholds me,’ he told Salisbury, ‘is my good servants, that will sweat and labour for my relief.’ But where was the money to be found? Certain taxes had been levied ‘time out of mind’, or at least since the latter years of the fourteenth century. ‘Tonnage’ was the duty levied on each ‘tun’ or cask of wine; ‘poundage’ was the tax raised on every pound sterling of exported or imported goods. James decided to revise the book of rates, however, and to impose new levies that came to be known as ‘impositions’.

A merchant by the name of John Bate refused to pay. He drove a cartload of currants from the waterside before the customs officials had the opportunity to tax them; he was brought before the council, where he declared that the ‘imposition’ was illegal. His became a test case before the court of the exchequer which ruled that the king had absolute power in the matter; in all aspects of foreign trade, his prerogative was assured.

Nevertheless opposition arose in parliament, where there was talk of money being poured into bottomless coffers. In October 1607 James addressed his council on the pressing problems concerning ‘this eating canker of want’. He promised to abide by any ‘cure’ they prescribed and to accept ‘such remedies and antidotes as you are to apply unto my disease’. The case was not an easy one. Salisbury tried various expedients for raising money, by fining for long-forgotten transgressions or by extorting as many feudal ‘aids’ to the king as he could find.

Yet the Commons were not impressed by the measures. It was an ancient principle that the sovereign of England should ‘live of his own’; he should maintain his estate, and bear the cost of government, out of his own resources. It was also universally believed that taxation was an extraordinary measure only to be raised in time of war. The first parliament of James I was summoned for five sessions from March 1604 to February 1611, and in that long period it acquired the beginning of a corporate identity largely lacking during the reign of Elizabeth. More business was enacted, and parliament sat for longer. In 1607, for example, the Commons instituted a ‘committee of the whole house’. This committee could elect its own chairman, as opposed to the Speaker chosen by the sovereign, and could debate freely for as long as it wished. It was at the time seen as a remarkable innovation, and might be considered the harbinger of strife between court and parliament.

A group of disparate and variously inclined parliamentarians was not necessarily on the king’s side. Francis Bacon wrote to the king that ‘that opposition which was, the last parliament, to your majesty’s business, as much as was not ex puris naturalibus but out of party, I conceive to be now much weaker than it was’. This did not yet embody the partisanship of later struggles, or the creation of ‘parties’ in the modern sense, but it suggests a change in national affairs. Some of the disputatious details have been recorded. Sir Edward Herbert ‘plops’ with his mouth at Mr Speaker. John Tey complains that Mr Speaker is ‘clipping him off’ and proceeds to threaten him.

The king had another doughty opponent. A legal dispute had arisen. Was there a distinction between those Scots born before James’s accession to the English throne and those born after it? The king argued that those born after his accession were naturalized by common law and, therefore, could hold office in England. James turned to the judges whom he assumed to take his part. One of them refused to do so. Sir Edward Coke had been chief justice of the common pleas since 1605, and was an impassioned exponent of English common law. James had no real conception of common law, having been educated in the very different jurisprudence of Scotland. Coke believed, for example, that both sovereign and subject were accountable to a body of ancient law that had been conceived in practice and clarified by usage; it represented immemorial general custom, but it was also a law of reason. This was not, however, the king’s opinion. He had already firmly stated that ‘the king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto’. From this it could be construed that the king possessed an arbitrary authority. James alleged, for example, that he could decide cases in person. Coke demurred: a case could only be judged in a lawcourt. Coke’s own report tells the story of bad blood.

James: I thought the law was founded on reason. I and others have reason as well as the judges.

Coke: Although, sir, you have great endowments of nature, yet you are not learned in the laws of England. Causes are not to be decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law.

More debate followed.

James: So then I am under the law? It is treason to affirm that!

Coke: Bracton has said that the king should not be under man but under God and the law.

An observer noted that ‘his majesty fell in that high indignation as the like was never known in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike him, which the Lord Coke perceiving fell flat on all fours…’ Coke might yield and beg for mercy, but over succeeding years the debate between the Crown and the law continued with ever greater volume and seriousness.

The manoeuvres of the court were never still. The favourite, now Sir Robert Carr, needed land to complement his title. By Carr’s great good fortune Sir Walter Raleigh, still incarcerated, had forfeited his interest in the manor of Sherborne; he thought that he had conveyed it to his son, but the king’s council believed otherwise. It was given to the favourite. Lady Raleigh, accompanied by her two sons, was admitted into the king’s presence where she threw herself at his feet. ‘I maun have the land’ was his only reply. ‘I maun have it for Carr.’ This is the true voice of the king.

3

The beacons

In 1605 one of the king’s ‘learned counsel’ presented him with a treatise that summoned up the spirit of a new age. Francis Bacon’s ‘Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human’ is better known to posterity as The Advancement of Learning; it can justifiably be said to have changed the terms of human understanding and the nature of knowledge. Bacon had been a royal servant for some years under the patronage of his uncle, Lord Burghley, and had been first enlisted in the court of Elizabeth. But the advent of a new king promised more tangible rewards and, soon after the accession, Bacon provided James with texts of advice on such matters as the union of Scotland with England and ecclesiastical polity.

Yet The Advancement of Learning was a work in quite another key, and one that helped to create the climate of scientific rationalism that characterized the entire seventeenth century. Bacon had first to clear away the clutter of inherited knowledge. In the early pages of the treatise ‘the first distemper of learning’ is denounced as that by which ‘men study words and not matter’. Yet words, and not matter, had been the foundation of traditional learning for innumerable centuries, whether in the rhetorical humanism of the Renaissance or in the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages. Bacon declared, however, that ‘men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits’. It was time to look at the world.

He further observed that:

this kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, andsmall variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or of time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books … cobwebs of learning admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.

The clarity and cogency of his prose are the perfect instruments for his attack upon the ornateness and excessive ingenuity of the old learning. That is why Shelley cited Plato and Bacon as the two most influential of all the poet-philosophers.

Bacon was assaulting the methods and principles of previous human learning in favour of experiment and observation, which he believed to be central to true natural science. He was suggesting that the scholars and experimenters of the time should confine themselves ‘to use and not to ostentation’ and to ‘matters of common sense and experience’. He warned that ‘the more you remove yourselves from particulars, the greater peril of error you do incur’. At a later date this would be described as the ‘scientific’ disposition.

The purpose of all learning was, for Bacon, to promote the benefit and prosperity of humankind. The material world is to be understood and mastered by means of ‘the laborious and sober inquiry of truth’ which can be pursued only by ‘ascending from experiments to the invention of causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments’. This was a revolutionary statement of intent that places Bacon, and the Jacobean period, at the opening of the modern age.

Bacon desired an institutional, as well as an epistemological, change; he suggested that universities, colleges and schools be directed ‘by amplitude of reward, by soundness of direction, and by the conjunction of labours’. We may see here the origin of the attitude that was to guide the Royal Society and to inform the inventive energies that emerged in the first years of the Industrial Revolution. Bacon himself was of a puritan disposition. He believed in the power of individual agency above the manifold allures of tradition and authority; he believed in observation rather than contemplation as the true instrument of practical reason. The beacons of utility and progress were always before him.

Bacon hoped that by their bright light ‘this third period of time will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning’. It would be fair to say that he helped to change the pace and the direction of that new learning. He entitled a later work Instauratio Magna, ‘the great innovation’ or foundation; the frontispiece of that book shows a ship sailing through the two Pillars of Hercules that traditionally signified the limits of knowledge as well as of exploration. It is an emblem of a journey of discovery in defiance of the motto ‘nec plus ultra’, nothing further beyond. The reign of James I, therefore, can be said to mark the beginning of a voyage through strange seas of thought.

4

The god of money

The treasury was bare; the officers of the Crown were demanding their salaries, but there was no money to be found. Parliament was reluctant to vote taxes, and local officials in the counties were not zealous in collecting the proper revenues from their neighbours; much of the money raised on custom duties was diverted into the pockets of those who collected it.

When parliament reassembled in February 1610, it was in a fractious mood. Salisbury outlined the financial woes of the nation, but the members were more concerned to arrest the prodigal spending of the court rather than to vote new taxes. One of them, Thomas Wentworth, argued that it would be worse than useless to grant new moneys to the king if he refused to reduce his expenditure. He asked, ‘To what purpose is it to draw a silver stream into the royal cistern, if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks?’ Salisbury was not impressed. It was his understanding that the Commons had a duty to supply the needs of the king, after which their grievances might be addressed. The members, on the other hand, demanded that their complaints be answered before turning to the demands of the king.

A conference was called in which Salisbury put forward a long-meditated plan that became known as the ‘great contract’. The king would give up his feudal dues and tenures in exchange for a guaranteed annual sum; the Commons offered £100,000, only half of the amount James required. Parliament still seemed to believe that he should and could be as economical, or as parsimonious, as his predecessor. The negotiations were suspended.

On 21 May the king summoned both houses of parliament into his presence and upbraided them for sitting fourteen weeks without relieving his necessities. He would listen to what they had to say about increased taxation, but he would not be bound by their opinions. They must not question the royal prerogative in such matters. The members answered that, if this were the case, then the king might lawfully claim all that they owned. A deputation, armed with a petition of right, met James at his palace in Greenwich. Realizing that he had perhaps gone too far, he welcomed them and explained that he had been misunderstood. He always knew when to draw back from confrontation, a lesson never learned by his two more earnest sons.

The debate on the great contract resumed on 11 June, with the concomitant issues of supplies, revenues, grievances and impositions. When the grievances were presented to the king on a long roll of parchment, he remarked that it might make a pretty piece of tapestry. Concessions were yielded on both sides, but there was no end in sight. On 23 July James prorogued the parliament, and the members dispersed to their constituencies where the details of the great contract would further be discussed. Naturally enough the towns and counties were more concerned with their injuries than with the poverty of the king. The whole debate had served only to demonstrate the gulf between king and country, between court and realm.

The king was irate at the lack of progress. He resolved that he would never again endure ‘such taunts and disgraces as have been uttered of him’. If they came back and offered him all he wished, he would not listen to them. James had in any case already made a speech which rendered the political situation infinitely worse. In March 1610 he had assembled at Whitehall the Lords and the Commons. ‘The estate of monarchy’, he proclaimed, ‘is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods.’ He went on to claim that kings ‘exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth’. The sovereigns of the world can ‘make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down; of life and death; judges over all their subjects and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only’. He admonished them that ‘you cannot so clip the wing of greatness. If a king be resolute to be a tyrant, all you can do will not hinder him.’ Did they really want him to be a mere doge of Venice?

James’s sentiments were not necessarily very welcome to the members of parliament. A contemporary news-writer, John Chamberlain, noted that they were ‘so little to their satisfaction that I hear it bred generally much discomfort’. If the parliament acquiesced in this bravura statement of kingship, ‘we are not like to leave to our successors the freedom we received from our forefathers’.

James did not understand common law, as his confrontations with Coke had suggested, and seemed to be unaware that the principle of absolute sovereignty was not one the English would even remotely entertain. It was noted that ‘the king speaks of France and Spain what they may do’. He did not realize, or pretended not to realize, that the sovereigns of those two countries were in a position very different from his own. He maintained the theory of divine right without any clear understanding of how it would operate in the context of parliamentary authority and the common law.

He may have adopted his position for less theoretical reasons. His hatred of the Presbyterian elders of Scotland derived from the fact that they directly challenged his authority. The nobility of that country, also, had been inclined to treat him as if he were one among equals. So his statements about his own powers are likely to have been in part a response to his difficult and sometimes dangerous position as king of Scotland. He had once observed that ‘the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon’.

He might also have been acutely aware that his temperament and behaviour were not always impeccably regal; he slobbered and walked at an odd angle; he kissed and slavered over his handsome favourites. In compensation for his apparent weaknesses, therefore, he may have been all the more eager to maintain the doctrine of divine right.

Yet in truth his theoretical understanding was very different from his practical grasp of political realities. He never did behave like an absolute prince, and with rare exceptions took care to remain within the fabric of the laws; he was neither arbitrary nor erratic in his exercise of power. In return no serious attempt was made by the parliament to undermine his authority or to question his sovereignty.

The fate of kings was also an immediate concern. On 14 May 1610, Henri IV of France was assassinated in Paris by a Catholic zealot who believed regicide to be his religious duty. Ever fearful for his own life, James responded with a kind of panic. On hearing the news, according to the French ambassador, James ‘turned whiter than his shirt’.

In the following month Prince Henry, the king’s oldest son, was formally invested as prince of Wales. He was of an heroic or militant character, and a fierce proponent of Protestantism. Francis Bacon remarked that his face was long ‘and inclining to leanness … his look grave, and the motion of his eyes rather composed than spirited, in his countenance were some marks of severity’. Henry’s court eschewed the prodigality and drunkenness condoned by his father; it was a model of formality and propriety, where the sentence for swearing was a fine. At a time when the morals and manners of the king’s court were known to be in decline, many believed that he was a true Christian prince who might save the nation for righteousness.

Henry was surrounded by men of a military bent, men of action; he had a keen interest in maritime affairs, and in the progress of colonial exploration. He immensely admired Sir Walter Raleigh, still incarcerated in the Tower, and remarked aloud that ‘none but my father would keep such a bird in a cage’. He had an equally keen dislike of his father’s bosom companions. Of Carr himself he is supposed to have stated that ‘if ever he were king, he would not leave one of that family to piss against the wall’. If ever he were king … that was the overwhelming question for the country. Henry IX would no doubt have followed the martial example of Henry V. James, noting the popularity of his son’s court, is supposed to have asked, ‘Will he bury me alive?’ When the king’s fool, Archie, remarked that James looked upon Henry as a terror rather than as a comfort the king burst into tears.

Another royal imbroglio, albeit of a minor kind, emerged in the weeks after Henry’s investiture. Arabella Stuart was the cousin of the king, and for the first six years of his reign she had enjoyed all the comforts and considerations of the court. She had even been considered as a replacement for James himself, by Raleigh and others, but she had taken no part in the plot. It was still of the utmost importance that she married wisely and well. At the beginning of 1610, however, she came to a pre-contractual arrangement with William Seymour, who by indirect and circuitous route had some small claim to the throne. This always aroused the horror of princes.

The couple agreed to renounce their plans but, in June, they took part in a secret ceremony of marriage at Greenwich. On hearing the news, the king raged. Seymour was instantly confined to the Tower while Arabella was taken to Lambeth before it was decided to send her further north to Durham. En route, at Barnet, she planned her escape. She disguised herself, according to a contemporary chronicler, John More, ‘by drawing a pair of great French-fashioned hose over her petticoats, putting on a man’s doublet, a manlike peruke, with long locks over her hair, a black hat, black cloak, russet boots, with red tops, and a rapier by her side’. She took ship for France at Leigh, but was overtaken by a vessel sent from Dover to arrest her. She was escorted to the Tower, where her reason gave way under the oppression of her trials, and she died insane four years later. It is a sad story of the perils and perfidies that attended anyone of high estate.

*

When a new session of parliament opened in the autumn of the year it was clear to everyone that Salisbury’s idea of a ‘great contract’ between the king’s necessities and the country’s generosity was not to be obtained by any means. The Commons abandoned discussions on the matter by 8 November, with repeated animadversions against ‘favourites’ and ‘wanton courtiers’. The Scots were also attacked as men with open mouths. The king was in a fury, and told the privy council that ‘no house save the house of hell’ could match the House of Commons. He went on to say that ‘our fame and actions have been daily tossed like tennis balls amongst them’. He was inclined to blame Salisbury for putting too much trust in a parliament which he dubbed ‘this rotten reed of Egypt’; he continued in biblical mode when he told him that ‘your greatest error hath been that you ever expected to draw honey out of gall’. He adjourned and then dissolved parliament within a matter of weeks.

The economic woes of the king were not all of his own making. The fiscal system of England had to a large extent been formulated in the fourteenth century, and it could not deal with the problems attendant upon the seventeenth century. It simply did not work, especially in times of warfare, and all manner of fiscal expedients had to be found. Thus in the spring of the following year James offered to sell hereditary titles to any knights or esquires who desired them. The title of baronet could be purchased for £1,080 in three annual payments, but the overall gain to the exchequer of approximately £90,000 was not enough to balance the profusion of the king’s expenditure. Peerages were put on the market four years later. When in 1616 Sir John Roper made over the sum of £10,000 to become Lord Teynham, he was given the nickname of Lord 10m. A seventeenth-century historian, Arthur Wilson, remarked that the multiplicity of titles ‘made them cheap and invalid in the vulgar opinion; for nothing is more destructive to monarchy than lessening the nobility; upon their decline the commons rise and anarchy increases’.

The king had another scheme to raise money. It was proposed to him that his oldest son might be pleased to accept the hand of the Infanta Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III of Spain; at once James sent one of his envoys to Madrid. Robin Goodfellow in Ben Jonson’s Love Restored, performed at court on Twelfth Night 1612, complained ‘’tis that impostor, PLUTUS, the god of money, who has stolen love’s ensigns; and in his belied figure, reigns in the world, making friendships, contracts, marriages and almost religion’.

In the spring of that year James joined the Protestant Union that had been established four years earlier with the coalition of German states such as Brandenburg, Ulm, Strasbourg and the Palatinate; in this matter he was following the sympathies of his people. At the same time he agreed formally that his daughter, Elizabeth, should be engaged to Frederick V of the Palatinate. This was a large territory in the valley of the Rhine, and included cities such as Heidelberg and Düsseldorf; it had been a centre of Protestantism since the middle of the sixteenth century, and Frederick himself was the leading Calvinist in all of Europe. It seemed, therefore, to be an expedient union for a king of England who believed that he himself might become the champion of Protestantism.

He had the appropriate credentials. The King James version of the Bible had emerged in the previous year; it was the fruit of the Hampton Court conference of 1604, and quickly supplanted the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible. Indeed it still remains for many the key translation of the Scriptures and the model of seventeenth-century English prose. It also became a touchstone for English literary culture: in ‘On Translating Homer’, Matthew Arnold remarked that there is ‘an English book, and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible’. Its influence can be traced in the work of Milton and Bunyan, of Tennyson and Byron, of Johnson and Gibbon and Thackeray; the power of its cadence is to be found everywhere. The King James Bible invigorated the consciousness of the nation and inspired some of its most eloquent manifestations.

It also prompted a great wave of religious publications in English and, as Robert Burton said in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, of books of divinity there was no end. ‘There be so many books in that kind, so many commentaries, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons, that whole teams of oxen cannot draw them.’ There was also a glut of cheap religious pamphlets that espoused the wonders of God’s providence and the evil fate of His enemies.

James consolidated his Protestantism with another measure. In the spring of 1611 George Abbot had been appointed archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Richard Bancroft. His principal qualification for the post, after the assassination of Henri IV, was his persistent and rigorous opposition to Roman Catholicism; he had already taken a leading role in the prosecution of two priests who were subsequently executed at Tyburn.

So it was that in the early spring of 1612 the last two persons convicted for heresy were condemned to death. Edward Wightman published his belief that Christ was ‘a mere creature, and not both God and man in one person’, and that he himself was the Messiah of the Old Testament. Bartholomew Legate had preached against the rituals and beliefs of the established Church, and had admitted to the king that he had not prayed for seven years. The king kicked out at him. ‘Away, base fellow! It shall never be said that one stayed in my presence that hath never prayed to our Saviour for seven whole years together.’ Legate was taken to the stake in Smithfield in March 1612, while Wightman followed him to the fire at Lichfield one month later. Wightman had the distinction, if it can be so called, of being the last heretic burned in England.

Another enemy of the state, or at least of convention, may be mentioned here. John Chamberlain relates that in February 1612, Moll Cutpurse, ‘a notorious baggage that used to go in man’s apparel’, was brought to Paul’s Cross ‘where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent; but it is since doubted that she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled three quarts of sack before she came to her penance’. It is an apt vignette of Jacobean London.

5

The angel

In the summer of 1612 King James went on a ‘progress’ of a month’s duration, taking in Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham and Newark. All around him he could see evidence of a prosperous and tranquil nation. A peace with Spain, and a commercial treaty with France, had encouraged trade while a series of good harvests maintained that happy condition. Dairy produce flowed into London from Essex, Wiltshire and Yorkshire; wool for export arrived at the ports from Wiltshire and Northamptonshire; cattle from North Wales and Scotland, sheep from the Cotswolds, were herded to the great market of Smithfield.

Other trades were also rising. ‘Correct your maps,’ the poet John Cleveland wrote, ‘Newcastle is Peru.’ Coal, in other words, was as plentiful and valuable as silver; its production was rising rapidly each year, and the coal traders bargained noisily at the Exchange in Billingsgate. In the hundred years from 1540, the production of iron also increased fivefold. From the port at Bristol sailed cutlery from Sheffield and tin from Cornwall in exchange for sugar and cereals from America and the Indies. Norwich was a safe haven for exiled weavers from France or Germany, while Chester dominated trade with Ireland.

The struggle against monopolies, begun late in the reign of Elizabeth, played its part in the economy of the country. A declaration of the House of Commons, in 1604, stated that ‘merchandise being the chief and richest of all others, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few’. Yet patents were still given for such activities as the draining of the fens, the manufacture of paper, the making of salt from sea water, the production of sword blades, and the production of iron without charcoal. The wealth of the monopolies testifies, if nothing else, to the variety of new products and techniques.

The yeomen were constructing bigger and better dwellings, while the poor left their huts of reed or wood and built cottages of brick or stone. Kitchens and separate bedrooms were introduced, while stairs replaced ladders and chairs took the place of benches; the vogue for more comfortable living continued after the reign of Elizabeth with the taste for crockery rather than wooden platters, and eventually for knives and forks rather than daggers and spoons. It is unwise to exaggerate the general prosperity of the country; areas of the direst poverty still existed, especially among the class of landless agricultural labourers and the wandering workmen of the cities. But the conditions of social and commercial life continued to improve.

One minister had no part in the king’s progress of 1612. Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, died towards the end of May from an illness of unknown cause; his infirmity might perhaps have been compounded with his knowledge of the king’s displeasure at his failure to improve the royal finances. He had preserved among his papers a letter, written in Italian, which compared those who loved the great and the powerful to the heliotrope ‘which while the sun shines looks towards it with flowers alive and open, but when the sun sets closes them and looks another way’. In the end he longed for his life, ‘full of cares and miseries’, to be dissolved. In any case he was not mourned for long. The London news was that, even if he had lived, he had already lost all authority and credit. He had no friends left. Ben Jonson dismissed Salisbury by saying that he ‘never cared for any man longer than he could make use of him’.

With the death of any great administrator, there was always a scramble for place and office. Francis Bacon was one who hoped that the demise of Salisbury would prove a blessing. The king himself was not unhappy to have been freed from the yoke of his councillor; he could now, as it were, rule for himself. He could be his own principal secretary. In the following year he discovered, much to his disgust, that Salisbury had for a long time been in the paid employment of Spain. Whom could James ever trust?

Robert Carr, now created Viscount Rochester, was the king’s confidant while Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton, had become the principal minister of the new administration. Howard gathered about him a group of peers and other noblemen, some of whom were secret Catholics and almost all of whom favoured the Spaniards. Against them, in the counsels of the king, was a Protestant and anti-Spanish party under the nominal leadership of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. With the balance of these divided counsels James might be able to steer the nation forward. Different men were given different responsibilities. John Chamberlain wrote, in the summer of 1612, that the king ‘hath found the art of frustrating men’s expectations, and holding them in suspense’.

Another death occurred at court. All had seemed well with the heir to the throne. Prince Henry was an assertive and athletic young man who excelled in masques as well as martial sports. But at the end of October 1612, he fell sick. He was playing cards with his younger brother, Charles, and a bystander, Sir Charles Cornwallis, noticed that ‘his highness for all this looked ill and pale, spake hollow, and somewhat strangely with dead sunk eyes’. A doctor was called but over the next eleven days could do nothing to curb the slow invasion of a disease that has since been tentatively diagnosed as porphyria or, perhaps, typhoid fever.

A dead pigeon was put on the prince’s head, and a dead cock at his feet, both freshly killed and still warm, to draw out the noisome humours. He died raving, to the authentic dismay and dejection of the court. He had been the emblem of England’s future destiny and had promised an age of heroic adventure in the Protestant cause. Queen Anne wept alone, and a year later it was still not safe to mention her son to her; James mourned aloud with ‘Henry is dead! Henry is dead!’ The crown was now destined for Charles, a silent, shy and reserved prince quite unlike his brother.

A strange incident occurred soon after when, in the words of John Chamberlain, ‘a very handsome young fellow, much about his age, and not altogether unlike him, came stark naked to St James’s, while they were at supper, saying he was the prince’s ghost, come from heaven with a message to the king’. He was questioned, to no effect, and was deemed to be either mad or simple. After two or three lashes of the whip, he was dismissed.

The king was temperamentally averse to protracted mourning, and had a natural distaste for a gloomy court. In February 1613, he celebrated with great splendour and spectacle the marriage of his only surviving daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick V of the Palatinate. No one beneath the rank of baron was admitted to the ceremony, and the members of the royal family were stiff with the jewels embroidered onto their clothing. Twentyfive diamonds glittered from the king’s velvet hatband. The crown jewels were also on display, among them a pendant of rubies and pearls known as the ‘Three Brothers’ and a ‘great and rich jewel of gold’ called ‘the Mirror of Great Britain’. The princess herself seemed to mar the solemnity of the occasion by indulging in a low titter that eventually became a loud laugh. She was, perhaps, overwhelmed. On the following day the king visited the newly wedded couple and asked them what had happened in their ornate bed. It is believed that Shakespeare introduced the masque into the fourth act of The Tempest in order to celebrate their union.

A more sinister marriage was about to take place. In the middle of April 1613, Sir Thomas Overbury was committed to the Tower of London. This was on the face of it surprising since Overbury had been the close companion and confidant of the king’s favourite, Viscount Rochester. It was reported, however, that Overbury had been confined on the king’s realization that it was ‘a dishonour to him that the world should have an opinion that Rochester ruled him and Overbury ruled Rochester’.

Yet there was more to it than that. Rochester had become enamoured of the young countess of Essex, Frances Howard, but was thwarted by the inconvenient fact that the lady had been married for seven years to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. She had been a child bride who now regretted her early union. They had in any case always been a reluctant and resentful pair; with the prospect of Rochester before her, she grasped at the chance of freedom. She asked that her marriage be declared null and void on the grounds that Essex was physically incapable of siring a son. Her father, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk, enthusiastically took her part; his daughter’s marriage to the king’s favourite could only raise his already high standing at court.

Essex was naturally aggrieved that his manhood had been questioned, especially since it might affect his chances of finding another wife. So it was intimated that, although Essex had not been successful with his first partner, he suffered from no disability that might prevent him from marrying again. A solemn commission was established to test the case and, like most solemn commissions, it took the easiest way out.

The king was in favour of the divorce, not least because it would delight and satisfy Viscount Rochester. When Frances Howard declared that her husband’s impotence might have been a bewitchment, James was altogether on her side; had he himself not written a tract on witchcraft? The archbishop of Canterbury objected. But James had packed the commission. One churchman asked Essex ‘whether he had affection, erection, application, penetration, ejaculation’ to prove the consummation of the marriage; the hearings were filled with what one contemporary called ‘indecent words and deeds’. A jury of twelve matrons examined Lady Frances herself for evidence of her virginity; the lady wore a veil throughout the proceedings, and it was suspected that a true virgin had taken her place. The divorce was of course granted according to the wishes of the sovereign. It was considered to be a notable instance of court corruption, and one that was widely noted and condemned.

Sir Thomas Overbury now enters the plot. As Rochester’s close companion he despised the idea of this marriage, no doubt in part because he might lose his friend to the Howard cause at court. When it was believed that Overbury might know some infamous secret about Frances Howard, the king intervened. He asked Overbury to become one of his envoys in Russia, effectively banishing him from England. Overbury refused to take up the appointment, and was committed to the Tower; although in poor health, he was to be kept in close confinement until the marriage itself had been celebrated. That, at least, seems to have been the plan.

Frances Howard was of a different mind, however, and had determined to murder Overbury even before he stepped out of the Tower. She had an accomplice, Mrs Turner, who was skilled in the management of poisons; Mrs Turner had a servant, Richard Weston, who by means of influence or bribery was appointed to be the keeper of the prisoner. Rochester was in the habit of sending wine, tarts and jellies to Overbury; it has been suggested, but not proved, that a poison was included in the sweet provisions. It is more likely that, with the connivance of Weston, the unfortunate man was slowly fed quantities of sulphuric acid or ‘oil of vitriol’. Whatever the method of dispatch Overbury died at the beginning of autumn 1613, and was buried in the Tower. John Chamberlain wrote that ‘he was a very unfortunate man, for nobody almost pities him, and his own friends speak that indifferently of him’. It was reported that all was calm and quiet at court; the talk was of masques and feasts and coming noble marriages.

On 26 December Frances Howard and Robert Carr, created earl of Somerset in the previous month, were united in marriage. This was four months after the death of Overbury, and no suspicion of malfeasance had emerged to trouble their marital bliss. At the ceremony the new countess of Somerset appeared with her long hair flowing down her shoulders as a token of virginity; she was, in the phrase of the time, ‘married in her hair’. The king and the archbishop of Canterbury were among the congregation in the Chapel Royal, and rich gifts were showered upon the newly married couple. Soon enough, however, the revelation of their conduct would excite the greatest scandal of the king’s reign.

*

It was time to summon a new parliament. The parlous state of the king’s finances demanded it. All the departments of government were in urgent need of money; the ambassadors had not been paid their salaries, and the sailors of the fleet pleaded in vain; even the fortifications of the nation were in a state of disrepair. The councillors were voluble with suggestions and recommendations, but they were irresolute and uncertain. The nobles and lords around the king determined to ensure that court candidates were returned to parliament; they became known as the ‘undertakers’ but suspicion about their activities meant that few constituencies were willing to take their advice. They sent missives to the various towns and regions, but the practice became known as ‘packing’. The constituencies wanted new men, untainted by connection to the court, and in fact two-thirds of the Commons were elected for the first time. This did not bode well for the king.

James opened the proceedings on 5 April 1614, with a conciliatory speech that promised reform while requesting more revenue. The Commons chose to ignore the message and instead complained that the ‘undertakers’ had violated freedom of election and the privileges of parliament. They did not wish to vote supplies to the king but preferred instead to challenge the king’s right to levy ‘impositions’ or special taxes on imports and exports. In a second speech three days later James asked for a parliament of love; he wished to demonstrate his affection for his subjects, while the Commons must manifest their devotion to their sovereign. Yet the Commons were in restless and unyielding mood, full of hissing and jeering. One member, Christopher Neville, declared that the courtiers were ‘spaniels to the king and wolves to the people’. There had never been a more disorderly house. It was compared to a cockpit and a beargarden; the members were called ‘roaring boys’, street hooligans.

When the members refused James’s order to debate supplies alone, he quickly dissolved parliament and committed five members to the Tower of London. The session had lasted less than three months and not one bill had received the royal assent. Thus it became known as the Addle or Addled Parliament. No assembly met again for seven years.

Supplies had not been granted to the king and, in his need for revenue, he redoubled his matrimonial negotiations with both Spain and France; the prize on offer to both parties was Charles, prince of Wales. Yet business of that nature takes time and, in the interim, he approached the City for a large loan; the City refused, on the indisputable grounds that the Crown was not worthy of credit. Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, was now appointed lord treasurer and immediately began to raise money by whatever means available; he levied fines, for example, on any new buildings erected within 7 miles of London.

At the time of the dissolution of parliament some of the bishops and great lords brought to the Jewel House of the Tower their best pieces of plate, for the purposes of sale, and the king determined that their example should be followed by the whole nation. So he requested a ‘benevolence’ from every county and borough in the land. The results, however, were not encouraging. Oliver St John, a gentleman of Marlborough, refused to send the king money on the grounds that the ‘benevolence’ was contrary to Magna Carta. He was brought before the Star Chamber and committed to the Tower. Eventually he was sentenced to a fine of £5,000 and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure.

In the absence of parliament all eyes turned towards the court as the proper centre of affairs. The earl of Somerset, the favourite, was still the cynosure. He had been appointed lord chamberlain in 1614 and was in constant attendance upon the king; correspondence with the ambassadors and other worthies passed through his hands, and he controlled the vast machinery of patronage that acted as the engine of the court. Yet his association with the Howards through his marriage earned him the enmity of many courtiers, and it was widely rumoured that the rule of one man over the king was improper and undesirable.

It was time to introduce to the king another fair-faced minion. In the summer of 1614 a young man of twenty-two was presented to James. George Villiers, the son of a knight, had already been trained as a courtier; he had become practised in the arts of dancing and of fencing. He had also spent three years in France, where he had acquired a good manner further to adorn what was called ‘the handsomest-bodied man in all of England’. He also had powerful allies, among them Archbishop Abbot and the queen. Abbot supported him in the hope of diminishing the influence of Somerset and the Howards, who favoured Catholic Spain. The queen, influenced by Abbot, pressed her husband to show favour to the young man. Villiers was accordingly appointed to be the royal cup-bearer, in constant attendance upon his sovereign, and in the spring of 1615 was knighted as a gentleman of the bedchamber.

Somerset, sensing a rival, protested. He alienated the king still more by constant complaint and insolent argument, leading James to remonstrate with him. ‘Let me never apprehend that you disdain my person’, the king wrote, ‘and undervalue my qualities (nor let it not appear that your former affection is cold towards me).’ He rebuked him for his ‘strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride’ as well as his ‘long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary’. It is a strange letter for a sovereign to write to a subject, reflecting as it does the once extraordinary intimacy between them.

Villiers may already have interposed himself between the two men. In the summer of 1615 James travelled to Farnham Castle, home of the bishop of Winchester, where he was joined by his new gentleman of the bedchamber. At a later date Villiers questioned the king ‘whether you loved me now … better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’. It is an ambiguous reference, but it is at least open to an interesting interpretation.

Sir Francis Bacon, observing the workings of the Jacobean court, once wrote that ‘all rising to great place is by a winding stair: and if there be factions, it is good, to side a man’s self, whilst he is in the rising’. Bacon therefore attached himself to Villiers. He told him that, as the king’s favourite, he should ‘remember well the great trust you have undertaken. You are as a continual sentinel, always to stand upon your watch to give him true intelligence.’

In the summer of this year Somerset, sensing numerous plots rising against him, drew up a general pardon for himself for offences which he may or may not have committed. It was said by his enemies, for example, that he had purloined some of the crown jewels. At a meeting of the council, held on 20 July, the king ordered the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon himself, to seal the pardon ‘at once, for such is my pleasure’. Bacon fell to his knees and begged him to reconsider. ‘I have ordered you to pass the pardon,’ James said as he walked out of the council chamber, ‘and pass it you shall.’ But as always he was hesitant and irresolute; the queen and other councillors argued against the decision which would allow Somerset to keep any of the jewels or other goods he might have taken from the king. It would set an unfortunate precedent. Eventually James left Whitehall without forming any certain decision.

This was only the beginning of Somerset’s woes. In the early autumn of 1615 reports began to emerge that Sir Thomas Overbury had been poisoned in the Tower. One of the minor accomplices, an apothecary’s boy, had fallen gravely ill and confessed to his part in the affair. It did not take long before the secret plot began to unravel. The lieutenant of the Tower was questioned. It was discovered that Richard Weston had been procured as the keeper of the prisoner. It was then revealed that he had been a servant of Mrs Turner. The trail now led in turn to Frances Carr, countess of Somerset, and to her husband.

The king, now thoroughly alarmed at a turn of events that might even touch the throne, asked his lord chief justice, Edward Coke, to make out a warrant against Somerset. Somerset remonstrated with James about this insult to his name and family. ‘Nay, man,’ the king exclaimed, ‘if Coke sends for me, I must go.’ He was supposed to have added, as the quondam favourite left his presence, ‘The devil take thee, I will never see thee mair.’

Coke conducted a thorough investigation, and eventually reported to the king that Frances Carr had in the past used sorcery both to estrange her previous husband, the earl of Essex, and to inveigle her new lover. He further revealed that she had procured three different types of poison to be administered to Overbury.

On 24 May 1616, the countess of Somerset stood in front of the grand jury at Westminster; she was dressed all in black, except for ruff and cuffs of white lawn. Some of her letters were read out in court, apparently of an obscene character; when the crowd of spectators pressed forward to gaze at the magic scrolls and images she had employed in the course of her secret work, a large ‘crack’ was heard from the wooden stage. The crowd now believed that the devil himself had come into the court and that the noise signalled his anger at the disclosure of his wiles. Panic and confusion followed that could not be quelled for a quarter of an hour. Witches and demons were still in the Jacobean air.

The countess pleaded guilty to the charge of murder, perhaps on the understanding that the king always favoured clemency to the members of the nobility. Her husband appeared on the following day and declared himself to be not guilty of the crime, but his judges did not believe him. Man and wife were sentenced to death. They were spared the final penalty on the orders of the king, and instead were taken to the Tower where they remained for almost six years. The exposure of their fraud and betrayal, their profligacy and hypocrisy, served only further to undermine the court and the status of the king whose intimate associates they once had been. Mrs Turner, condemned to death for her part in the poison plot, said of the king’s courtiers that ‘there is no religion in the most of them but malice, pride, whoredom, swearing and rejoicing in the fall of others. It is so wicked a place as I wonder the earth did not open and swallow it up.’

At the beginning of the spring of this year the heir apparent, Charles, in the garden of Greenwich Palace, turned a water-spout ‘in jest’ upon Villiers. The favourite was much offended. Whereupon in an unusual show of anger the king boxed his son’s ears, exclaiming that he had ‘a malicious and dogged disposition’. Villiers was now known to his sovereign as ‘Steenie’, a babyish rendition of St Stephen; the reference was to the fact that those who looked upon the face of the saint declared it to be the countenance of an angel. The angel would soon be in charge.

6

The vapours

The most colourful and compelling account of early Jacobean London can be found in The Seven Deadly Sins of London, published in 1607. It is a work, little more than a pamphlet, written by Thomas Dekker in a period of seven days with all the vivacity and immediacy of swift composition. Dekker himself was a playwright and pamphleteer of obscure life and uncertain reputation, but in these respects he does not differ from most writers of the time.

He announces, to the city, that ‘from thy womb received I my being, from thy breasts my nourishment’; in which case London must be judged a harsh nurse or mother. He complains that of all cities it is ‘the wealthiest, but the most wanton. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest.’ At the time of James’s accession it had been the ‘only gallant and minion of the world’ but ‘hadst in a short time more diseases (than a common harlot hath) hanging upon thee’.

He paints the scene of the capital at midday where

in every street, carts and coaches make such a thundering as if the world ran on wheels: at every corner, men, women and children meet in such shoals, that posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another they should shoulder them down. Besides, hammers are beating in one place, tubs hooping in another, pots clinking in a third, water tankards running at tilt in a fourth: here are porters sweating under burdens, there merchants’ men bearing bags of money, chapmen (as if they were at leap-frog) skip out of one shop into another, tradesmen (as if they were dancing galliards) are lusty at legs and never stand still: all are as busy as country attorneys at an assizes.

Yet the city takes on a different aspect at night. Dekker has a vision of London by candlelight, the companion ‘for drunkards, for lechers, and for prodigals’. This was the time when ‘mercers rolled up their silks and velvets: the goldsmiths drew back their plate, and all the city looked like a private playhouse when the windows are clapped down, as if some nocturnal or dismal tragedy were presently to be acted before all the tradesmen’. The bankrupt and felon had kept indoors for fear of arrest but, at night, ‘began now to creep out of their shells, and to stalk up and down the streets as uprightly, and with as proud a gait, as if they meant to knock against the stars with the crowns of their heads’.

The prosperous citizen who in the day ‘looked more sourly on his poor neighbours than he had drunk a quart of vinegar at a draught’ now sneaks out of doors and ‘slips into a tavern where either alone, or with some other that battles their money together, they so ply themselves with penny pots [of ale] … that at length they have not an eye to see withall, not a good leg to stand upon’. They reel into the night, have an altercation with a post on the way and end up in the gutter. Their apprentices, despite the oath of their indentures, ‘make their desperate sallies out and quick retires in’ with their pints. The three nocturnal pursuits of the city are drinking, dancing and dicing.

The prose of Thomas Dekker is crisp, strenuous and elliptical. He observes the Londoners at a bookstall in St Paul’s Churchyard ‘looking scurvily (like mules chomping upon thistles) on the face of a new book, be it never so worthy: and go (as ill favouredly) mewing away’. He notices the fact that the brothels of London have painted posts before them, and that their keepers always serve stewed prunes to their customers. He reports that the lattices for the windows of the alehouses are painted red. He observes the hackney men of Coleman Street, the butchers of Aldgate and the brokers of Houndsditch.

The dress of the Londoner ‘is like a traitor’s body that hath been hanged, drawn and quartered, and is set up in several places: his codpiece is in Denmark, the colour of his doublet and the belly in France: the wing and narrow sleeve in Italy: the short waist hangs over a Dutch butcher’s stall in Utrecht; his huge slops [hose for the legs] speaks Spanish: Polonia gives him the boots’. It is a typical complaint concerning London’s variegated fashions.

Dekker observes the disagreeable habits of other citizens. He alludes to the various ‘tobacconists, shuttlecock makers, feather-makers, cobweb lawn weavers, perfumers’ as manifesting the qualities of ‘apishness’; each one is ‘a fierce, dapper fellow, more light-headed than a musician: as fantastically attired as a court jester: wanton in discourse: lascivious in behaviour; jocund in good company: nice in his trencher, and yet he feeds very hungrily on scraps of songs’.

Dekker abhors the common practice of marrying a young bride to a rich old man, ‘though his breath be ranker than a muck-hill, and his body more dry than a mummy, and his mind more lame than Ignorance itself’. He complains about London landlords ‘who for the building up of a chimney, which stands them not above thirty shillings, and for whiting the walls of a tenement, which is scarce worth the daubing, raise the rent presently (as if it were new put into the subsidy books) assessing it at three pounds a year more than ever it went for before’. This has all the bitterness of personal experience. Welcome to the world of Jacobean London.

Greed and avarice were also much on the mind of another Londoner. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair was first performed in the Hope Playhouse at the end of October 1614; it was a long play, of some three hours, and began at two in the afternoon. On that stage the essence of London was quiddified. The Hope was also used for bearbaiting, on which occasions the stage was removed, and in the induction Jonson compares the theatre to the venue of the fair itself, ‘the place being as dirty as Smithfield and as stinking every whit’. The stench of the dead or dying animals still lingered. The hazel nutshells and apple-cores might not have been swept away. Bartholomew Fair has the soul and substance of the Jacobean city somewhere within it. Its characters are the flesh and bone of London, in which all the people are merely players.

Canvas booths have been erected on the stage to give a simulacrum of the fair. A character comes on, and is soon joined by another, and then another, until a concourse of citizens is visible. They jeer, they swear, they laugh. They fight. They are obscene. They piss. They vomit. They cheat one another. A couple of them burst into song. Various plots and stories emerge only to fall back into the swelling tumult of the fair. Prostitutes and cutpurses rub against ballad-singers and tapsters.

Some of the characters adopt disguise, but in the end their true identities are revealed and their pretensions crossed or crushed. All authority is reviled. That is the way of the city. There is no real power except that of money, and no real considerations other than those of aggression and appetite. ‘Bless me!’ someone calls out. ‘Deliver me, help, hold me! The Fair!’ Mousetraps and ginger bread, purses and pouches, dolls and puppies, all are for sale. ‘What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you buy?’ All the world’s a fair. ‘Buy any new ballads? New ballads?’ A puppet show brings a conclusion to the play that has revealed London to be a panoply and a pageant, a prison and a carnival.

One of the guardian spirits of the fair is Ursla, the fat seller of ale and roast pig who is also a part-time bawd.

Ursla: I am all fire and fat, Nightingale, I shall e’en melt away to the first woman, a rib, again, I am afraid. I do water the ground in knots as I go, like a great garden-pot, you may follow me by the Ss I make.

She has also a firm line in abuse.

Ursla: You look as you were begotten atop of a cart in harvest-time, when the whelp was hot and eager. Go snuff after your brother’s bitch, Mistress Commodity.

In the words of the play, she has a hot coal in her mouth.

The other great character of the fair is Jonson’s parody of the puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy.

Busy: Look not towards them, hearken not. The place is Smithfield, or the field of smiths, the grove of hobby horses and trinkets … They are hooks and baits, very baits, that are hung out on every side to catch you, and to hold you, as it were, by the gills, and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth …

He turns out to be, of course, an arrant voluptuary and hypocrite, amply confirming the suspicions that some people conceived of the godly in this period.

Jonson had said that he wished to present ‘deeds and language, such as men do use’. He knew of what he wrote. By his own report he was ‘brought up poorly’ in London and when his mother took a second husband, a master bricklayer, the small family moved to a house in a lane off the Strand. He attended an elementary school in the neighbourhood before Westminster School and may have been about to attend a college at Cambridge; shortage of funds, however, did not permit the move. Instead he took up his stepfather’s business of bricklaying, in which trade he laboured intermittently for some years. He later saw service in the Low Countries and, on his return to London, entered the world of theatre. So he was a child of the city, and Bartholomew Fair is his tribute to its teeming life.

Here are your ‘pretenders to wit! Your Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid men.’ These three taverns were the haunt of poetasters and men of supposed good taste. ‘Moorfields, Pimlico Path or the Exchange’ are mentioned a few moments later as places of resort for tired Londoners. In the puppet play at the close of the proceedings, the myth of Hero and Leander is set in the city.

Littlewit: As, for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer’s son, about Puddle Wharf; and Hero a wench o’ the Bankside, who going over one morning to Old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs.

It is remarkable that ordinary Londoners were supposed to be wholly familiar with the old story, perhaps from Marlowe’s poem published sixteen years earlier.

Many of the play’s allusions are lost to us, and many of the words are now strange or unfamiliar. A ‘hobby-horse’ was a prostitute. An ‘undermeal’ was a light snack. To ‘stale’ was to urinate. When one character discloses that ‘we were all a little stained last night’, he means that they were drunk. ‘Whimsies’ were the female genitalia. A ‘diet-drink’ was a medicine. A Catholic recusant was derided as ‘a seminary’.

The visitors to the fair often refer to ‘vapour’ or ‘vapours’ that can mean anything or nothing. To vapour is to talk nonsense or to brag; a vapour is a frenzy or a passing mood or a mad conceit of the town. In the popular ‘game of vapours’ each participant had to deny that which the previous speaker had just said. London seethed with vapours.

Quarlous: Faith, and to any man that vapours me the lie, I do vapour that. [Strikes him].

It is in a sense like watching a foreign world, except that there are still flashes of recognition and understanding. And then once more we are part of the Jacobean city.

7

What news?

The trial of Somerset and his wife marked the beginning of a deterioration at court, where it was believed that the king had become both more cunning and more cowardly; his learning had once been praised but now behind his back he was called a pedant. His new fancy for Villiers provoked scorn, jealousy and even disgust. His own health also showed signs of decline. His doctor wrote subsequently that ‘in 1616 pain and weakness spread to knees, shoulders and hands, and for four months he had to stay in a bed or in a chair’. He became impatient and morose and bad-tempered. The doctor went on to say that ‘he is extremely sensitive, most impatient of pain; and while it tortures him with violent movements, his mind is tossed as well, thus augmenting the evil’.

James drank frequently and immoderately. He perspired heavily, and caught frequent colds; he was always sneezing. His face had become red; he was growing fat, and his hair was turning white. At the age of fifty, he was rapidly ageing. He was still averse to business and preferred to hunt, but now he rode more slowly and allowed his horse to be guided by grooms.

So the eyes of aspirants turned more often to the heir. Charles, at the age of fifteen, had acquired many of the virtues of a prince. He was a champion at tennis and at tilting; he delighted in horses and in masques; he was already a connoisseur of art and music. Yet he was also pious and reserved; he was silent and even secretive; he blushed at an indelicate word. He was 5 feet 4 inches in height, and had a pronounced stutter.

The Venetian ambassador reported that his chief endeavour ‘is to have no other aim than to second his father, to follow him and do his pleasure and not to move except as his father does. Before his father he always aims at suppressing his own feelings.’ So Charles grew to be uncertain and hesitant, apt to cling to the few maxims that he had already imbibed. He was too modest for his own good, perhaps stunned by the loquacity of his father and the beauty of Villiers. When he did try to act forcefully, in later life, he often descended into rash action without any thought of the consequences. His piety, and sense of divine mission, also rendered him humourless and strict.

In the summer of the year the king turned upon his judges. Edward Coke, the chief justice of the king’s bench, had often angered James by his continual assertion of common law over the claims of royal power. The king called the judges before him in June 1616, and accused them of insubordination; they fell on their knees, pledging their loyalty and obedience. The king then asked each of them in turn whether they would consult with him before pronouncing on matters of the prerogative. All assented, with the notable exception of Coke himself, who simply answered that he would behave in a manner fitting for a high judge. The king turned upon him, calling him a knave and a sophist. James proceeded to the Star Chamber a few days later, where he delivered a long speech on his zeal for justice. ‘Kings are properly judges,’ he told his councillors, ‘and judgement properly belongs to them from God … I remember Christ’s saying, “My sheep hear my voice”, and so I assure myself, my people will most willingly hear the voice of me, their own shepherd and king.’ It was not the most modest of his pronouncements.

Coke was not destined to remain in the king’s service for much longer. He was removed from the privy council and ordered to desist from his summer circuit of the kingdom; he was told to revise his law reports ‘wherein (as his Majesty was informed) there were many exorbitant and extravagant opinions’. Five months later, in November 1616, he was dismissed from office. He was, in a phrase of the time, ‘quite off the books’. The king had rid himself of a turbulent judge but, in the process, he had turned Coke into a martyr for the rule of law and the liberties of the people.

The nature and the character of the ‘people’, however, could be understood in a multitude of ways. The population itself was growing rapidly until 1620, with the consequence that the number of the poor also began to rise. As late as 1688 it was reported that over half of the population, both rural and urban, were below the level of subsistence. The purchasing power of the wages of agricultural labourers or minor craftsmen was in relative terms at its lowest point for generations. In 1616 it was recorded that in Sheffield, out of a population of little over 2,000, 725 persons were ‘not able to live without the charity of their neighbours’; they were all ‘begging poor’. There were 160 others who ‘are not able to abide the storm of one fortnight’s sickness but would thereby be driven to beggary’. Their children ‘are constrained to work sore to provide them necessaries’.

The inequalities of society were such that, in this same period of want, the prosperity of the rural gentry and the wealthier citizens increased dramatically; this in itself may help to account for the great period of building and rebuilding that culminated in the Jacobean country house with its elaborate ornamentation and astonishing skyline.

It also became plain that, as the gentry increased in wealth and status, so the members of the old aristocracy lost some of their authority. The rise of the country gentleman in turn materially affected the power and prestige of the Commons, of which they were the most considerable element; it was said that they could buy out the Lords three times over. In a later treatise, Oceana, James Harrington stated that the work of government was ‘peculiar unto the genius of a gentleman’. The decline in the fortunes of the old lords, in favour of the rising gentry, has been variously explained. It had to do with the loss of wealth and territory; but it was also the natural consequence of diminished military power. The king in any case had been selling peerages and the new baronetcies for cash, thus diminishing the honourable worth of any title.

As the gentry rose in influence, so there was a corresponding increase in what might be called the professional classes. The number of lawyers rose by 40 per cent between 1590 and 1630, in a period when doctors and surgeons also multiplied. The merchant class, too, was now thriving and was no longer considered to be a demeaning connection; the younger sons of squires were happy to become apprentices with the hope of an eventual rise to partnership. The division between rich and poor had been sharpened while, at the same time, the wealthier elements of society were drawing together.

The gentry now also controlled the machinery of local government. The lords-lieutenant and deputies, the sheriffs and justices of the peace, were indispensable for the order and safety of the country; the king and his council wholly relied upon them for such matters as the collection of taxes, the regulation of trade and the raising of troops for any foreign war. In turn a form of local government grew up at the quarter sessions, where the most important men of the county or borough met to discuss the business of the community. They were collectively known as the commission of the peace, and their clerk was called the clerk of the peace. Their authority filtered down to the high constables in the hundred and to the petty constables, the churchwardens and overseers of the poor in the parish.

The country gentry had also in large part taken against the court. In a local election of 1614 both candidates claimed to represent ‘the country’ and denied charges of ‘turning courtier’. Soon enough ‘court’ and ‘country’ factions would manifest themselves. The ways of Whitehall were already deeply suspect. The king’s extravagance required higher taxation. The practice of purveyance, by which the court could effectively seize goods and services for royal use, had become iniquitous. Rumours of the king’s homosexual passions also circulated through the nation. At the beginning of 1617 George Villiers, now Viscount Villiers, was created earl of Buckingham and appointed Master of the Horse. His lands were extensive, his income immense, but he had also acquired a monopoly of patronage. Any aspirant for office had to transact his business with the earl, and Buckingham insisted that all his clients acknowledged him as their only patron. Lucy Hutchinson, a memoirist of puritan persuasion, wrote that he had risen ‘upon no merit but that of his beauty and prostitution’.

An office was considered to be a family property. The great officials were permitted, and expected, to appoint their successors; of course they made their choice after an appropriate fee was exacted. Negotiations took place between the incumbent of the office, the favourite for the post and the various aspiring candidates. Some officials were the private employees of other officials. All that mattered was who you knew and how rich you were. When the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster fell vacant in 1618, forty-three competitors vied for the post which was being sold for approximately £8,000. The administrators of the navy were particularly corrupt, taking bribes, appointing private servants as public officials, diverting supplies, paying themselves double allowances, ordering inferior material and pocketing the difference in cost, employing ships for merchant journeys and charging accordingly.

All transactions under the aegis of the Crown – gratuities and perquisites, annuities and pensions – came at a price. Samuel Doves wrote that ‘on the 2nd of February last past, I had a hearing in the Court of Chancery and for that hearing, there stood one in the crier’s place; to whom being demanded, I gave him eight shillings … and two men more which kept the door would have eight shillings more, which I paid. And when I was without the door, two men stayed me and would have two shillings more, which I paid.’ You paid to have a stall in the marketplace; you paid for the right to sell or manufacture cloth. When a group of monopolists was granted the maintenance of the lighthouse at Dungeness, being rewarded with the tolls on all shipping that passed by, they provided only a single candle.

*

What’s the news abroad? Quid novi? ‘It were a long story to tell all the passages of this business,’ John Chamberlain wrote, ‘which hath furnished Paul’s and this town very plentifully the whole week.’ ‘Paul’s’ was the middle aisle of the cathedral where gossips and men known as ‘newsmongers’ met to discuss all the latest rumours. It was customary for the lords and the gentry, the courtiers and the merchants, as well as men of all professions, to meet in the abbey at eleven and walk in the middle aisle till twelve; they met again after dinner, from three to six, when they discoursed on politics and business or passed on in low voices all the rumours and secrets of the town. A purveyor of court secrets was called ‘one of our new principal verbs in Paul’s, and well acquainted with all occurrents’. So the busy aisle became known as the ‘ears’ brothel’ and its interior was filled with what a contemporary observer, John Earle, called ‘a strange humming or buzz mixed of walking, tongues and feet’.

It was said that one of the vices of England was the prattling of the ‘busie-body’, otherwise known as an ‘intelligencer’. Joseph Hall, in Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608), describes one such creature. ‘What every man ventures in Guiana voyage, and what they gained, he knows to a hair. Whether Holland will have peace he knows and on what conditions … If he see but two men talk and read a letter in the street he runs to them and asks if he may not be partner of that secret relation.’

So we might read that ‘the world is full of casting and touching Fabritio’s great affair’ or ‘at the worst, the world is of opinion, that if they should come to jostle, both of them are made of as brittle metal, the one as the other’. The world says this; the world thinks that. ‘Now-a-days what seems most improbable mostly comes soonest to pass.’ ‘There is a speech, of the king’s going to Royston.’ ‘It is current in every man’s mouth.’ ‘We were never at so low an ebb for matter of news, especially public, so that we are fain to set ourselves at work with the poorest entertainment…’ ‘There is some muttering of the change of officers … by which you may smell who looks and hopes to be lord chancellor.’ The watermen regaled their customers with the news; the humble citizen sitting in the barber’s chair heard the news. Some men made their living by sending manuscript newsletters into the country. Rumour could travel at a speed of 50 miles per night.

And so what news of court? The king travelled north in March 1617. He told his privy council in Scotland that ‘we have had these many years a great and natural longing to see our native soil and place of our birth and breeding’; he called it, charmingly, a ‘salmon-like instinct’. On his slow journey he was attended by many hundreds of courtiers who ate their way through the land like locusts before their arrival at Edinburgh in the middle of May. No one was sure how the visit was to be financed, and those on his route feared the worst. No English king had come this way for hundreds of years. When James reached the border he dismounted and lay on the ground between the two countries, proclaiming that in his own person he symbolized the union between Scotland and England.

Many of his councillors and nobles had not wanted to accompany James to his erstwhile home. They took no interest in, and had no happy expectations of, Scotland. For them it was an uncouth and even savage land. The queen herself declined to go with her husband, pleading sickness. One English courtier, Sir Anthony Weldon, wrote that this foreign country ‘is too good for those that possess it, and too bad for others … there is a great store of fowl – as foul houses … foul linen, foul dishes and pots … The country, although it be mountainous, affords no monsters but women.’

The king brought with him candles and choristers as well as a pair of organs; he was intent upon making the Scottish Kirk conform to the worship of the Church of England, but he had only limited success. The Scottish ministers were wary of these ‘rags of popery’. ‘The organs are come before,’ said one Calvinist divine, ‘and after comes the Mass.’ James also alienated many members of the Scottish parliament. In his speech at the opening of the session James expatiated on the virtues of his English kingdom; he told his compatriots that he had nothing ‘more at heart than to reduce your barbarity to the sweet civility of your neighbours’. The Scots had already learned from them how to drive in gay coaches, to drink healths and to take tobacco. This could not have been received warmly.

And what other news? In the summer of 1617 Sir Walter Raleigh, newly released from the Tower for the purpose, sailed to Guiana in search of gold. The king had expressly ordered him not to injure the Spanish in any way; he was still seeking the hand of the infanta for his son. When Raleigh eventually reached the mouth of the Orinoco he sent a lieutenant, Lawrence Keymis, up the river to determine the location of a fabled mine of gold. On his way, however, Keymis attacked the Spaniards who held San Thome and, after an inconsequential combat in which Raleigh’s son was killed, he was eventually forced to return to the main fleet. There was now no possibility of reaching the mine and Raleigh made an ignominious return to England. Keymis killed himself on board ship. The wrath of the king was immense and, sometimes, the wrath of the king meant death. James believed that he had been deliberately deceived by Raleigh on the presence of gold and that the unlucky explorer had unjustifiably and unnecessarily earned for him the enmity of Spain.

The Spanish king of course made angry complaints, through the agency of his notorious ambassador, the count of Gondomar. As a measure of conciliation or recompense, James sent Raleigh to the scaffold in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. It was commonly believed that he had sacrificed him for the honour of the king of Spain. ‘Let us dispatch,’ Raleigh told his executioner. ‘At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear.’ On viewing the axe that was about to destroy him he is supposed to have said that ‘this is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries’. As the executioner was poised to deliver the blow he called out, ‘Strike, man, strike!’ He never did have time to finish his History of the World which he had begun to compose in 1607 while held in the Tower. He had started at the Creation but at the time of his death had only reached the end of the second Macedonian War in 188 BC.

What is the new news, smoking hot from London? In November 1617, the king issued a declaration to the people of Lancashire on the matter of Sunday sports and recreations; in the following year the Book of Sports was directed to the whole country. Archery and dancing were to be permitted, together with ‘leaping, vaulting or any other such harmless recreation’; the king also graciously allowed ‘May-games, Whitsun-ales and Morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles’. Bearbaiting, bull-baiting and bowls, however, were forbidden. Clergy of the stricter sort were not favourably impressed by the pronouncement, which soon became known as ‘The Dancing Book’. It came close to ungodliness and idolatry. One clergyman, William Clough of Bramham, told his congregation that ‘the king of heaven doth bid you to keep his Sabbath and reverence his sanctuary. Now the king of England is a mortal man and he bids you break it. Choose whether [which] of them you will follow.’ Soon enough those of a puritan persuasion would become the principal opponents of royal policy.

Ben Jonson’s masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue was performed before the court at the beginning of 1618. It did not please everyone, and it was suggested that the playwright might like to return to his old trade of bricklaying. At the close of the performance, in the scene of dancing, the players began to lag. ‘Why don’t they dance?’ the king called out. ‘What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!’ Whereupon Buckingham sprang up and, in the words of the chaplain of the Venetian embassy, ‘danced a number of high and very tiny capers with such grace and lightness that he made everyone love him’. James himself demonstrated ‘extraordinary signs of affection, touching his face’.

Yet Buckingham’s enemies, most notably the Howard family, were determined to supplant him. They introduced another handsome youth to court by the name of Monson. They groomed him for the role, dressed him up and washed his face every day with curdled milk to improve its smoothness. But the king did not take to this new suitor. The lordchamberlain took Monson to one side and informed him that James was not pleased with his importunacy and continual presence; he ordered him to stay away from the king and, if he knew what was best for him, to avoid the royal court.

Buckingham began to use one of the first sedan chairs ever to be seen in the country; the people were indignant, complaining that he was employing men to take the place of beasts. Yet he was still in the ascendant, at which high point he would remain for the rest of the reign.

8

A Bohemian tragedy

In April 1618 a little book, bearing the royal arms, was published. It was entitled The Peacemaker, and it extolled the virtues of James as a pacifier of all troubles and contentions. The ‘happy sanctuary’ of England had enjoyed fifteen years of peace since the time of the king’s accession, and so now ‘let it be celebrated with all joy and cheerfulness, and all sing – Beati Pacifici’.

Contention, however, was about to manifest itself in the distant land of Bohemia (now roughly equivalent to the Czech Republic) which was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. In the month after the book’s publication certain Protestant nobles of Bohemia stormed the imperial palace in Prague and threw the emperor’s deputies out of the windows; Matthias had tried to impose upon them the rule of Archduke Ferdinand, a fierce Catholic and a member of the Habsburg family. The Bohemian rebels were soon in charge of their country, posing a challenge to the Catholic dynasty of the Habsburgs, which included Philip III of Spain.

The German Calvinists of course took up their cause, thus posing a problem for the king of England. The head of the Calvinist interest was none other than James’s son-in-law, Frederick of the Palatinate. Yet James was also seeking the daughter of Philip III for his son. What was to be done? Was James to side with the Spanish Habsburgs against the Protestant party? Or was he to encourage his son-in-law to maintain the Bohemian cause? He prevaricated by sending an arbiter, but none of the combatants was really willing to entertain his envoy. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, remarked that ‘the vanity of the present king of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be made by his means, so that his authority will be increased’. It did not quite work out like that.

In March 1619 Matthias died, and Archduke Ferdinand was elected as the new Holy Roman Emperor. The Bohemians took the opportunity of formally deposing him as their sovereign and invited Frederick to take his place. Frederick hesitated only for a moment. James complained that ‘he wrote to me, to know my mind if he should take that crown; but within three days after, and before I could return answer, he put it on’.

After Frederick had accepted their offer, he travelled to Prague in October in order to assume the throne. The Protestants of England were delighted. Here at last was the European champion they had needed. A great comet passed across the skies of Europe in the late autumn of 1618; its reddish hue and long tail were visible for seven weeks, and it became known as ‘the angry star’. It was of course considered to be providential, a token or warning of great change. Could it portend the final defeat of the Habsburgs and even the Antichrist of Rome?

James’s opinion was not entirely in keeping with that of his Protestant subjects. He was angered by what he considered to be Frederick’s rashness in accepting the crown of Bohemia; his son-in-law was in that sense an aggressor flouting the divine right of kings. ‘You are come in good time to England,’ he told Frederick’s envoy, ‘to spread these principles among my people, that my subjects may drive me away, and place another in my room.’ More significantly, he did not wish to drop the Spanish connection he had so carefully fashioned. And yet his daughter was now queen of Bohemia. Surely there was glory in that? It was the greatest dilemma of his reign, combining in deadly fashion his amity with Spain and his relationship with his fellow Protestants in Europe; he had tried to conciliate both forces, but now they threatened to tear him apart. So he prevaricated. The French ambassador reported that ‘his mind uses its powers only for a short time, but in the long run he is cowardly’.

Relations with the Spanish were in a difficult and delicate balance. The business of the marriage of Prince Charles to the infanta was infinitely protracted, and popular opinion in England was one of dismay at a possible liaison with a Catholic power. In the event of marriage, therefore, the king was likely to be estranged from his subjects; but James was too eager for a vast Spanish dowry to heed any warnings. The Spanish in turn required that English Catholics be allowed to practise their religion freely, but the change in law would need the consent of parliament. Parliament would never concede any such request. All was in suspense. When a gentleman from the Spanish embassy rode down a child in Chancery Lane, a crowd developed and tried to seize him; he spurred his horse but the crowd of citizens, now swelled to the number of 4,000 or 5,000, followed him to the ambassador’s house. They besieged it, breaking the windows and threatening to force the doors, until the lord chief justice arrived and took away the offender.

It was possible, to put it no higher, that Spain was planning to invade the Palatinate. James was in an agony of indecision, at one moment promising to send a large army to help his son-in-law and at another claiming that he was in no position to aid anyone. He did not wish to meddle in the matter. He could not afford a war, and the country was not ready for military action. Was the election of Frederick, in any case, legally valid? If not, any war on Frederick’s behalf might then be unjust as well as unnecessary.

Politics, and diplomacy, could not be separated from the issues of religion; all were intimately related in a continent where the division between Catholic and Protestant was the single most important fact of the age. There were of course divisions within the ranks of Protestants themselves. At the end of 1618 a national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church was held in the city of Dordrecht, known colloquially as Dort, to which came six representatives from England. The debate was of vital interest to the king. It was concerned with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which was denied by a Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius, and his followers. Arminius also condemned religious zealotry of the kind practised by his opponents. He declared that religion was about to suffer the same fate as the young lady mentioned by Plutarch; she was pursued by several lovers who, unable to agree among themselves, became violent and cut the woman to pieces so that each could have a portion of her. The Calvinists, holding the dominant faith of Holland, called Arminius and his supporters to account. The arguments, impassioned and even bitter, lasted for seven months.

An English puritan, Thomas Goodwin, noted that the reports of the synod ‘began to be every man’s talk and enquiry’ and another English theologian, Peter Heylyn, stated that the debates ‘wakened Englishmen out of “a dead sleep”’. Theologians were then of the utmost consequence in political as well as spiritual affairs; religion was, in this century, the principal issue by which all other matters were judged and interpreted. At the conclusion of the synod the Calvinists emerged triumphant and their opponents were either imprisoned or deprived of their ministry; 700 families of Arminians were driven into exile. For James it seemed to be a victory for the purity of religion, and one English divine, Francis Rous, excoriated Arminianism as ‘the spawn of the papists’. The battle lines of Protestantism were set ever more firmly in stone. Arminianism would emerge in England at a slightly later date, with fatal consequences for the next king.

James was growing sick with the strain and tensions induced by Spain and the Palatinate. He was suffering from an unhappy combination of arthritis and gout together with what was called ‘a shrewd fit of the stone’. The death of his wife, Anne of Denmark, in the early spring of 1619 caused a further decline in his health. The king’s doctor noted ‘continued fever, bilious diarrhoea … ulceration of his lips and chin. Fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness, intermittent pulse.’ The king voided three stones and the pain was so great that he vomited. He seemed likely to die. Charles, Buckingham and the leading councillors were summoned from London to Royston, where he was staying, and he delivered what was considered to be a deathbed speech. Yet this was premature. Within a few days he began to recover, although he was still too weak to attend his wife’s funeral in the middle of May. He had been informed that the best remedy for weak legs was the blood of a newly slaughtered deer; so for some weeks he was to be found, after the hunt, with his feet buried in the body of an animal that had just been brought down.

He returned to London at the beginning of June, dressed so luxuriously that he was said to resemble a suitor rather than a mourner. He had some cause for celebration. The new Banqueting House was about to be completed, one of the few physical memorials of his reign that survive intact. It had been designed by Inigo Jones in the novel and controversial neoclassical style, conceived in the spirit of Palladio and of the Italian Renaissance; it was devised to represent the twin concepts of ‘magnificence’ and ‘decorum’, with the king presiding in its ornate and mathematically correct interior as both judge and peacemaker. The Banqueting House was the seat of majesty. It was also considered to be a suitable setting for the eventual reception of Charles and the infanta. Sixteen years later Rubens completed the canvases for the great ceiling; James here is depicted as a British Solomon, uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland, while on the oval canvas that acts as centrepiece he is raised into heaven by the figures of Justice, Faith and Religion.

The cost was very high, approximately £15,000, at a time when the royal treasury was almost bare. The country itself was also suffering a financial crisis. The growing preference on the continent for cheaper local cloth, as opposed to the more expensive English woollens, and the competitive power of Dutch traders meant that there was a significant fall in economic activity. ‘All grievances in the kingdom are trifles,’ Sir Edwin Sandys told the Commons, ‘compared with the decay in trade.’ Lionel Cranfield, who became lord high treasurer in 1621, explained that ‘trade is as great as ever, but not so good. It increases inwards and decreases outwards.’ The balance of trade, in other words, was not in England’s favour. This was one of those spasms of economic distress that have always hit the English economy, but in the early seventeenth century no one really understood what was happening.

Cranfield added that ‘the want of money is because trade is sick, and as long as trade is sick, we shall be in want of money’. Too many manufactured goods were entering the country, among them the import of what were widely regarded as vain and unnecessary items such as wine and tobacco. The luxurious world was one of velvets and satins, of pearls and cloth of gold. Yet elsewhere economic failure had become endemic. The export of London broadcloths, in 1622, had fallen by 40 per cent from the figures of 1618; the hardship was compounded by the failure of the harvest in 1623. ‘There are many thousands in these parts,’ one Lincolnshire gentleman, Sir William Pelham, wrote, ‘who have sold all they have even to their bed-straw, and cannot get work to earn any money. Dog’s flesh is a dainty dish, and found upon search in many houses.’ This is the context for the unrest and disturbance of the last years of James’s reign.

It is also one of the principal causes for the number of English colonists seeking a new life in America. In the autumn of 1620 the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth; some of its passengers were religious separatists who had come from Leiden, in Holland, but the majority were English families looking for land and for material improvement. It has been estimated that over the next two or three decades some 60,000 left English shores, one third of them bound for New England. When they cross the Atlantic, they are lost from the purview of this history.

*

It was becoming increasingly likely that the Spanish would invade the Palatinate in revenge for Frederick’s assumption of the Bohemian throne. A successful attack would have serious consequences for Protestantism in Europe and might well lead once more to Habsburg domination; an ambassador was sent to England, therefore, from the princes and free cities of the Protestant Union in Germany. The envoy did not receive a warm welcome from the king. James, divided in his loyalties, decided to do nothing. The archbishop of Canterbury, horrified at this desertion of the Protestant cause, pleaded with him to allow voluntary contributions from the clergy for the sake of their co-religionists. To this the king reluctantly assented.

He was of course still pursuing Spain for the hand of the infanta. He called the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, to him. ‘I give you my word,’ he said, ‘as a king, as a gentleman, as a Christian, and as an honest man, I have no wish to marry my son to anyone except your master’s daughter, and I desire no alliance but that of Spain.’ He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had made an implicit admission, to the effect that he desired no alliance with Frederick or the German princes. What did Bohemia mean to him? It was a distant land of which he knew nothing, remarkable only for the scene of shipwreck in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, performed nine years before, in which it was miraculously granted a sea coast.

Gondomar quickly sent a message to Philip III that he could invade Frederick’s territories without risk of a war with England. Thus began the struggle which eventually became known as the Thirty Years War, one of the most destructive conflicts in early modern European history that ravaged much of the Holy Roman Empire and spread to Italy, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

At the end of July 1620, the king set out on a progress. The Venetian ambassador reported that he seemed glad to leave London behind. He added that ‘the king seems utterly weary of the affairs that are taking place all over the world at this time, and he hates being obliged every day to spend time over unpleasant matters and listen to nothing but requests and incitements to move in every direction and to meddle with everything’. James had remarked, ‘I am not God Almighty.’

A few days later news reached him that a Spanish army of 24,000 soldiers was moving against the Palatinate; at the same time the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, whose throne had been usurped, was marching upon Prague. ‘What do you know,’ James asked an adviser who had questioned him on the perilous situation. ‘You are ignorant. I know quite well what I am about. All these troubles will settle themselves, you will see that very soon. I know what I am talking about.’

Yet he was troubled by what he now realized was Spanish duplicity. Gondomar had talked of conciliation while all the time Philip III had been planning for war. James summoned the ambassador to Hampton Court, where he raved about his double-dealing. Gondomar politely replied that he had never said that Spain would not invade the Palatinate, whereupon the king burst into tears. Could he not be allowed to defend his own children? His policy of compromise, bred out of vacillation and indecision, was in ruins.

The Spanish were victorious in November 1620, at the battle of White Mountain just outside Prague. The Protestant army was devastated, and Frederick was removed from his temporary kingdom of Bohemia. On the following day he fled for his life into the neighbouring region of Silesia; he could not even return to his homeland, since in the following summer the Spanish occupied half of the Palatinate. He and his wife, Elizabeth, were effectively exiles. In turn the Bohemian leaders of the Protestant rebellion were led to the scaffold and a new imperial aristocracy rose in triumph. The news alarmed and enraged the English public in equal measure, and it was not long before all the blame was being laid upon James.

The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘tears, sighs and loud expressions of wrath are seen and heard in every direction’. Letters against the king were scattered in the streets threatening that if he did not do what was expected of him, the people would soon display their anger. All sympathies lay with his daughter Elizabeth, who had been forced to flee without the assistance or protection of her father. Prince Charles, in agony over the unhappy situation of his sister, shut himself in his chambers for two days. The king himself was said to be in great distress but, having recovered from the initial shock, was heard to murmur that ‘I have long expected this’.

He very soon took on his favourite role as arbitrator or peacemaker. He devised a plan that might prove acceptable to all sides. Frederick would submit to the emperor and renounce any claim to Bohemia on condition that his Palatinate was returned to him untouched. There ensued a process of elaborate diplomatic negotiations that achieved nothing. A parody of the time noted that James would present his son-in-law with an army of 100,000 ambassadors.

It was time to call a parliament; it assembled in the middle of January 1621. It did not augur well that the king had to be carried to its opening in a chair. His legs and his feet were so weak that it was believed he would soon lose the use of them. He did not in any case desire to consult with the Commons on matters of policy. He was there to deliver his demands. He ordered them not to ‘meddle with complaints against the king, the church or state matters’. He himself would ensure that the proposed Spanish match between his son and the infanta did not endanger the Protestant religion of England; he also stated that he would not allow his son-in-law’s Palatinate to be broken up. And for that he needed money. It was the only reason he had summoned them. He had once said that he was obliged ‘to live like a shellfish upon his own moisture, without any public supply’. It was one of James’s arresting similes.

A committee of enquiry had already estimated that a force for the protection of the Palatinate would cost approximately £900,000 each year; James, sensing the outrage such a sum would cause, asked for £500,000; parliament granted him £160,000 before turning its attention to such domestic grievances as the abuse of patents and monopolies by unscrupulous agents. It was the first meeting of parliament for almost seven years and, as such, became a clearing house for all the complaints and problems that had accrued in the interim. In the course of this first session some fifty-two bills were given a second reading.

The weather outside the chamber was bitter. John Chamberlain wrote at the beginning of February that ‘the Thames is now quite frozen over, so that people have passed over, to and fro, these four or five days … the winds and high tides have so driven the ice in heaps in some places, that it lies like rocks and mountains, and hath a strange and hideous aspect’.

The depression of trade was the single most important theme for the assembly beside the frozen river. The gathering of members of parliament at Westminster gave the opportunity for the exporters, landlords and graziers among them to vent their complaints about falling prices and unsold wool. It was declared that poverty and want were rife. One member told his colleagues that ‘I had rather be a ploughman than a merchant’. Disorderly interventions did not quell the embittered speeches. No parties had as yet emerged, in the modern sense, only individuals expressing vested interests or local grievances. It was becoming clear, however, that the political initiative was being grasped by parliament rather than by the king and council.

In the same session parliament drew up a petition against ‘Jesuits, papists and recusants’. It was the only way they knew of unravelling the Spanish connection that the king favoured. The member for Bath, Sir Robert Phelips, raised the temperature by saying that if the papists were not checked they would soon comprise half of the king’s subjects. So parliament acted. All recusants to be banished from London. All recusants to be disarmed by the justices of the peace. No subject of the king should hear Mass. James was in a quandary, suspended between his parliament and the king of Spain; it was reported that he would accept the principal recommendations but would reserve the particulars for further consideration. This was widely believed to be an evasion.

The feeling of the people against the Spaniards was now palpable. A caricature had been circulated at the beginning of 1621 that depicted the king of Spain, the pope and the devil as conspirators in another ‘powder-plot’. The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, was proceeding down Fenchurch Street when an apprentice called out, ‘There goes the devil in a dung-cart.’

One of Gondomar’s servants responded. ‘Sir, you shall see Bridewell ere long for your mirth.’

‘What! Shall we go to Bridewell for such a dog as thou!’

Eventually the apprentice and his companions were whipped through the streets, much to the indignation of the citizens.

Parliament itself was enthusiastic for Frederick’s cause. When one member made a speech advocating war against the imperial forces the Commons responded with a unanimous vote, lifting their hats high in acclamation, and vowed to recover the Palatinate. James seemed for the moment to share their enthusiasm, but he was too shrewd or too wary to commit himself to a European war against the Catholic powers. He had in any case grown impatient with parliament. It had sat for four months, and spent most of its time in delivering to him requests and grievances. It had not addressed the necessities of the king, or his request for a further grant of money. So at the beginning of June 1621, he adjourned it.

At a later date a notable parliamentarian, Sir John Eliot, reflected upon the failure of this assembly. The king believed that the liberties of parliament encroached upon his prerogative, while in turn parliament feared he ‘sought to retrench and block up the ancient privileges and liberties of the house’. So both sides became more intransigent, the king maintaining his royal power and the parliament standing upon its privileges. Eliot believed that there was a middle ground, but at the time it was overlooked.

This was the rock upon which the constitution would founder. An eminent nineteenth-century jurist, John, Baron Campbell, wrote that ‘the meeting of parliament on 30 January, 1621, may be considered the commencement of that great movement, which, exactly twenty eight years afterwards, led to the decapitation of an English sovereign, under a judicial sentence pronounced by his subjects’. A portrait of the king, completed in this year by Daniel Mytens, shows James in his robes of state; he has a preoccupied, or perhaps a perplexed, expression.

When parliament met once more on 20 November, it was clear that its zeal and anger had not noticeably diminished. Its members were in a sense liberated by the absence of the sovereign; James had decided to leave London and, with Buckingham, travelled to Royston and Newmarket. The chamber was united in its horror of recent policies. Sir Robert Phelips was once again on the attack. The Catholic states of Europe were England’s enemies, while in England the Catholics had grown so bold that they dared to talk of the Protestants as a ‘faction’. Let no supply be granted to the king until the dangers, home and abroad, had been resolved. Edward Coke, now a leader of the malcontents, then rose to remind his colleagues that Spain had sent the Armada, that the sheep scab which destroyed many flocks came from the same country, and that the most disgusting disease to strike humankind – namely, syphilis – had spread from Naples, a city controlled by Spain. That country was the source and spring of all foulness.

The Spaniards were also attacked in violent terms when John Pym, soon to become the fiercest opponent to the pretensions of the Crown, rose to speak against the Catholic threat in England itself, where ‘the seeds of sedition’ were buried beneath ‘the pretences of religion’. The Venetian ambassador reported that the members ‘have complained bitterly because his majesty shows them [the Catholics] so much indulgence’. The sovereign was indeed the problem; he had asked for a supply, but had not properly disclosed his policy. What could his supporters say on his behalf? The parliament had also raised the matter of the prince’s marriage. If the infanta of Spain eventually became the queen of England, one of her offspring would at a future date assume the throne; this would mean the return to the rule of a Catholic king. The members of the Commons drew up a petition in which they asked James to declare war on the Catholic powers of Europe and to marry his son to a Protestant.

When the king received word of this petition he is supposed to have cried out, ‘God give me patience!’ He wrote to the Speaker of the Commons complaining that ‘some fiery and popular spirits’ were considering issues that were beyond their competence to resolve; he demanded that no member should in the future dare to touch upon issues ‘concerning our government or matters of state’. The Spanish match was not open for discussion. He then issued a threat that he felt himself ‘very free and able to punish any man’s misdemeanours in parliament as well during their sitting as after’. He had effectively denied them any rights at all. Phelips described it as ‘a soul-killing letter’.

The Commons then drew up a petition in which they asked the king not to believe ill-founded reports on their conduct; they also requested him to guarantee their privileges. When they came with the document to Newmarket, he called out, ‘Stools for the ambassadors!’ He realized now that they did indeed represent a separate power in the land. In response to the petition, however, he warned them not to touch his sovereign power. One member, Sir Nathaniel Rich, objected to these commands. He took offence at such royal demands as ‘Meddle not with this business’ or ‘Go to this business first’. ‘When I speak of freedom of speech,’ he declared, ‘I mean not licentiousness and exorbitancy, but speech without servile fear or, as it were, under the rod.’

On 18 December 1621, by candlelight in the evening, the Commons issued a ‘protestation’ in which they asserted that their privileges, and indeed their lives, ‘are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England’. They had every right to discuss foreign affairs. Any matter that concerned the defence of the realm, or the state of religion, came within the scope of their counsel and debate. They demanded freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. James, now thoroughly exasperated, adjourned and then dissolved parliament. He called for the journal of the Commons and with his own hand ripped out the ‘protestation’; it now had no status. ‘I will govern’, he said, ‘according to the commonweal, but not according to the common will.’ The ‘commonweal’ was the term for the general interests of the nation. He then consigned Coke and Phelips to prison and confined Pym to his house. ‘It is certain,’ Gondomar wrote, ‘that the king will never summon another parliament as long as he lives.’

The dissolution marked the beginning of the end of James’s authority in England. His policy had been a dead failure, and he had alienated all the citizens and gentry who took the side of the Commons. He had no money to fight any war on behalf of the Palatinate, and he was obliged to continue negotiations with Spain. It was also widely believed that Buckingham’s advice lay behind the king’s intransigence; the favourite was even more distrusted than before. The times were dangerous and uncertain.

The reputation of the king was now constantly under attack. He was accused of being lazy and improvident; his will was weaker than water. He was no more than the king of Spain’s viceroy. In January 1622, a man was put upon the rack ‘for saying that there would be a rebellion’. A manuscript libel by ‘Tom-Tell-Truth’ passed among the people, saying that James may be ‘defender of the faith’, according to his title, but the faith was that of the Catholics; he was head of the Church dormant, not the Church militant or triumphant. ‘Tom’ added that Gondomar had the golden key to the king’s cabinet of secrets and that James himself had committed the most hideous depravities of which a human being was capable. This was a reference to the king’s relationship with Buckingham. A preacher at Oxford, a young man named Knight, declared that it was ‘lawful for subjects when harassed on the score of religion to take arms against their Prince in their own defence’. Soon enough James issued ‘directions concerning preaching’ in which the clergy were forbidden to make ‘bitter invectives and indecent railing speeches’ against the Catholics and were told to avoid ‘all matters of state’. ‘No man can now mutter a word in the pulpit’, Buckingham boasted to the Spanish ambassador, ‘but he is presently catched and set in straight prison.’

With the same wish to silence dissent the king proclaimed that ‘noblemen, knights and gentlemen of quality’ should return to their rural estates. It was claimed that this was a measure to promote hospitality in the countryside but it was widely believed that it was aimed at the gentry who, while residing in London, compounded their discontent by sharing their grievances.

The lawyers of Gray’s Inn had decided to take some small cannon from the Tower in order to celebrate Twelfth Night. They shot them off in the dead of night, but the report was so loud that it awoke the king at Whitehall. He started out of his bed crying, ‘Treason! Treason!’ The whole court was in alarm, and the earl of Arundel ran to the royal bedchamber with his drawn sword in his hand. The false alarm had arisen from the king’s own fears. He seemed to lack both moral and physical courage. The Venetian ambassador reported that he was ‘too agitated by constant mistrust of everyone, tyrannized over by perpetual fear for his life, tenacious of his authority as against the parliament and jealous of his son’s obedience, all accidents and causes of his fatal and almost desperate infirmity of mind, so harmful to the general welfare’.

On the day on which the dissolution of parliament was announced James was riding in the park at his palace of Theobalds when his horse stumbled and threw him into the New River that flowed through the grounds; the ice of January broke beneath him and he sank into the water until only his boots could be seen. He was rescued, and was none the worse after the incident, but it is an apt image of a hapless sovereign.

9

The Spanish travellers

Prince Charles was becoming impatient with the slow progress of the negotiations concerning his betrothal to the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. The marriage itself had been contemplated twelve years before. Yet there had been endless wrangles about the status of Catholics in England, a sensitive affair that became embroiled with the disputes over the Palatinate and the general state of religious warfare in Europe. There was still some doubt whether the Spanish were in earnest about the match, and disputes arose over the size of the dowry; these doubts were not assuaged by the accession of Philip IV in 1621. It was not at all clear, to put it no higher, that parliament or people would support their sovereign’s wishes in the matter. When in 1622 the king ordered that Catholic recusants should be released from prison, after they had given security for any subsequent appearance in court, the fear and anger of the Protestant majority were evident.

It was proposed that Buckingham, now lord high admiral, would himself sail to Madrid; it was also whispered that ‘he intended to take his friend with him in secret, to bring back that beautiful angel’. The friend in question was Charles himself. The plan was dropped only to be replaced by another.

In February 1623, Charles and Buckingham approached the king with a scheme of their own devising. It would take too long for a fleet to be prepared for the voyage to Madrid. The effort of obtaining travel warrants for France would be immense. Their plan was to travel to Spain in disguise, with the intention of wooing and winning the most eligible woman in the world. For them it was a great adventure, a grand European romance. The king, sick and weary, seems to have assented; he rarely withstood the blandishments of his favourite or the urgent entreaties of his son.

On the morning after this interview, however, the king was not so sure. Cautious and wary as he was, he anticipated the perils with which the two young men would be surrounded. The heir to the throne would be in foreign hands. Animated by Charles’s presence among them, the Spanish ministers might make further demands. An attempt might even be made to convert him. So he remonstrated with them both, and outlined the dangers that they might incur. In response Buckingham merely said that, if he broke his promise of the day before, no one would ever believe him again.

Whereupon James called for one of his principal foreign advisers, Sir Francis Cottington, who was himself a supporter of Spain and the Spanish marriage. ‘Here are Baby Charles and Steenie,’ the king told him, ‘who have a great mind to go by post into Spain to fetch home the Infanta, who will have but two more in their company, and have chosen you for one, what think you of the journey?’ Cottington replied that such an expedition was dangerous and unwise; the Spanish were certain to impose new conditions upon the marriage. At this James threw himself upon the bed. ‘I told you this before,’ he shouted. ‘I am undone. I shall lose Baby Charles!’

Buckingham remonstrated angrily with Cottington until he was interrupted by the king. ‘Nay, by God, Steenie, you are much to blame to use him so. He answered me directly to the question I asked him, and very honestly and wisely: and yet he says no more than I told you before he was called in.’ Reluctantly, however, he renewed his assent to the perilous journey. It was also agreed that the three travellers should be joined by Endymion Porter, a courtier who had been brought up in Spain and might act as translator.

On the morning of 18 February, Charles and Buckingham set off from Buckingham’s mansion in Essex; they were wearing false beards and travelled under the names of Tom and John Smith. It was all wildly improbable. They gave a boatman at Gravesend a gold piece and rode away without asking for change; the man convinced himself that they were duellists about to fight each other on a foreign field, and advised the magistrates of the town. An officer was dispatched to intercept them, but he failed to find them. As suspected assassins they were stopped at Canterbury. Buckingham had to take off his false beard in order to assure the mayor that he was the lord high admiral going secretly to inspect the fleet. Eventually they reached Dover, where Porter and Cottington had secured a boat. Soon after their departure the sighing king wrote to them. ‘My sweet boys and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance, I thank you for your comfortable letters, but think it not possible that you can be many hours undiscovered, for your parting was so blown abroad.’ In Buckingham’s absence the king had made him a duke, so that he was now pre-eminent even among the eminent.

The two incogniti sailed from Dover to Boulogne and, after two days in the saddle, they reached Paris. Two weeks later, after hard and weary riding, they eventually arrived in Madrid and knocked on the door of the English ambassador to Spain. John Digby, newly created earl of Bristol, was described by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, as a man ‘of a grave aspect, of a presence which drew respect…’ He kept his countenance at the unexpected arrival of these two great men, and treated them with all deference and courtesy. But the news of Charles’s arrival soon reached the ears of Gondomar, the erstwhile Spanish ambassador who had returned home the year before. He went to the Spanish prime minister, Olivares, with a brilliant smile. Olivares told him that ‘one might think you had the king of England in Madrid’.

‘If I have not got the king, at least I have got the prince.’

Olivares and Gondomar now approached Philip IV with the astounding news that the prince of Wales had come in person to claim the hand of his sister. But what did Charles mean by travelling all this way to Spain? The grandees came to the conclusion that he was now ready to change his religion. Philip and Charles then agreed that they should meet in the open air, thus avoiding all the pomp and circumstance of a formal audience. The prince did not have a large enough retinue to appear with dignity. So he was invited into the king’s carriage, and a few days later he was conducted to the apartments reserved for him in the royal palace.

It was now widely believed that Charles was ready to convert, and indeed he gave no sign to the contrary. He continued to temporize on the matter, eager at all costs not to offend the Spaniards before he had obtained his wife. ‘We think it not amiss’, he and Buckingham wrote to James, ‘to assure you that, neither in spiritual nor in temporal things, there is anything pressed upon us more than is already agreed upon.’ They could not have been more wrong. The infanta herself declared that she would never agree to marry a Protestant. She had been told that she would be sleeping with a heretic who would one day burn in the fires of hell.

The foreign policy of England was now also entangled with Dutch affairs. On 27 February 1623, the principal merchant of the East India Company was tortured and then beheaded in Amboyna, now the Maluku islands of Indonesia; he was executed by order of the local Dutch governor, on the grounds that he was planning to attack the Dutch garrison. Nine other English merchants suffered the same fate, and the report of the incident provoked outrage in the nation on an unprecedented scale. It was the subject of plays and ballads, chapbooks and woodcuts, inflaming public opinion against the country across the North Sea.

In the following month some Dutch men-of-war chased privateers into the harbour of Leith and began firing at the town itself; this was considered by James to be an unwarrantable infringement of sovereign territory. A second incident of a similar kind occurred at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. For the king the actions of the Dutch were intolerable. In retaliation he sent a letter to his son in Madrid, asking him to open negotiations with the Spanish for a joint attack upon the Netherlands which the two countries would then partition. On few occasions has so small a pretext been used for so great a war. Yet it came to nothing. James’s anger cooled, and a compromise with the Netherlands was reached. His initial proposals, however, demonstrate how implicitly he still relied upon Spanish support; the whole episode also displays his impulsiveness and unpredictability.

*

Charles had not yet been given any opportunity of greeting his proposed bride, and so at the beginning of April he was invited to an audience with the queen of Spain and the infanta. The conversation was supposed to be limited to a few formal words of address, but the prince went so far as to speak of his affection for her. This was a grave breach of protocol in a court that maintained the strictest rules of behaviour. Charles realized that he had offended, and fell silent. The infanta herself was not impressed. The prince, however, had been profoundly affected by the sight of her; he wrote to England that she was even more beautiful than he had expected.

It was urged by his hosts that Charles might at least receive some instruction in the precepts of Catholicism. So he agreed to participate in a religious discussion with four Carmelite friars. Their meeting began in silence and, when one of the friars asked if he had any matter to propose for debate, he replied, ‘Nothing at all. I have no doubts whatsoever.’ Charles even went so far as to ask that the reformed English service might be conducted for him in the palace, whereupon Olivares sent for Cottington and told him that the entry of English chaplains would be resisted by force. This did not bode well for any settlement.

By May it had become clear to Buckingham and the prince that they had made a grave error in travelling to Madrid. If they had remained in England, all the conditions and qualifications could have been discussed by experienced diplomats; they themselves were simply confused and angered by all the demands now being made upon them.

Towards the end of that month a Spanish ‘junta of theologians’ decreed that the infanta must remain in her native land for twelve months after the marriage had been solemnized. In that period the king of England must prove his good intentions by allowing his Catholic subjects the free exercise of their religion; all penal laws against them were to be suspended. It was further suggested that the prince might also prefer to spend the following year in Spain. He would then enjoy to the utmost the fruits of the marriage.

Sir Francis Cottington returned to England with the news. ‘My sweet boys,’ James wrote, ‘your letter by Cottington hath stricken me dead. I fear it shall very much shorten my days; and I am the more perplexed that I know not how to satisfy the people’s expectation here, neither know I what to say in the council … Alas I now repent me sore, that ever I suffered you to go away.’ He was in fact more concerned about his son than the changes of policy that the ‘junta’ had demanded. One observer noted that ‘the king is now quite stupefied’. ‘Do you think’, he asked a courtier, ‘that I shall ever see the prince again?’ He burst into tears.

The prince himself was mired in indecision. He was told that the delay between the marriage and the infanta’s departure for England could be shortened by six months. In an audience with Philip IV on 7 July, Charles assented to the terms. ‘I have resolved’, he said, ‘to accept with my whole heart what has been proposed to me, both as to the articles touching religion, and as to the security required.’ A few days before, he had made statements of precisely the opposite intent.

James knew well enough that parliament would never allow English Catholics permanent immunity from prosecution; and yet he feared that, if he did not sign the agreement demanded by the ‘junta’, his son would never be permitted to leave Madrid. He summoned the members of his privy council and pleaded with them to take an oath to uphold the Spanish terms. Faced with the importance of maintaining the king’s authority, and alarmed by the prospect of the heir apparent being detained in the Spanish capital, the council reluctantly agreed to take the oath.

The decision of the king, taken in confusion and anxiety, was perhaps not a wise one. It taught the English Catholics that they must rely for their safety on a foreign power, and it told the English people that James was willing to make a bargain with Spain against the obvious wishes of parliament. The Roman Catholic Church, for many years after, was identified with contempt for the rule of law. It was believed by many that, while the prince was detained in Spain, Philip could extort any terms he wished. John Chamberlain wrote that ‘alas our hands are bound by the absence of our most precious jewel’. It was widely noted that the crucifix, once the symbol of papistry, had been reinstalled in the royal chapel. Another chapel was even then being erected in St James’s Palace for the imminent coming of the infanta. Buckingham’s mother converted to Rome. When the archbishop of Canterbury told the king that the toleration of Catholics could not be permitted ‘by the laws and privileges of the kingdom’, it was related that the king ‘swore bitterly and asked how he should get his son home again’.

Two weeks after this reported conversation, on 25 July 1623, Charles and Philip signed the marriage contract. James dispatched jewels of great price to his son as gifts for the expected bride. When the prince asked for horses to be also sent to him, the king answered that his coffers were now empty.

Yet, after all this intrigue and resentment, the marriage never took place. The prince had changed his mind once more. His affection for the infanta had been gradually displaced by his resentment at his treatment in Spain; the king and his courtiers were endlessly prevaricating on the departure of Maria Anna. His companion, Buckingham, had been regarded with ill-concealed distaste. On 28 August he took an oath committing himself to the marriage, but he had already decided to leave Madrid without her. Three weeks later he and Buckingham set sail from Santander to England. The news of their landing at Portsmouth, on 5 October, was the cause of general rejoicing; the blessed prince had been rescued from the jaws of the dragon. He had escaped the wiles of the harlot of Rome. Spain would no longer be able to command the councils of the king. When Charles crossed the Thames he was greeted with carillons of bells; the wealthy laid out tables of food and wine in the streets; debtors were released from prison and felons rescued from death. It was a day of rain and storm yet one contemporary counted 335 bonfires between Whitehall and Temple Bar; 108 bonfires were lit between St Paul’s and London Bridge alone. A contemporary ballad set the tone:

The Catholic king hath a little young thing

Called Donna Maria his sister,

Our prince went to Spain her love to obtain,

But yet by good luck he hath missed her.

A shorter rhyme was also carried from street to street:

On the fifth day of October,

It will be treason to be sober.

The two men rode straight from London to the royal hunting lodge at Royston where king, son and favourite all wept. Yet not all was well with the happy family. Buckingham, an erstwhile supporter of Spain, fell into a fury at all things Spanish; the contempt for him in Madrid was now common knowledge. One Spanish courtier, speaking of Buckingham, had said that ‘we would rather put the infanta headlong into a well than into his hands’. Charles was equally dissatisfied with his treatment at the hands of the Spanish court; they had denied him his bride and treated him like a fool. ‘I am ready’, he told his father, ‘to conquer Spain, if you will allow me to do it.’ At a stroke James’s well-considered, if not always well-executed, policy of twenty years would be destroyed.

Yet Charles had learned some useful lessons in Madrid. He had been impressed by Spanish formality and protocol that emphasized the divinity hedged about a king; he had also become an admirer of the art collected by the Spanish royal family and took back with him, to England, a Titian and a Correggio among other notable paintings. In his own reign the taste of the court would be generally elevated even if some of these ‘gay gazings’, as the paintings were called, smacked of the old religion.

The popular prejudice against the Catholic cause was strikingly demonstrated when a garret attached to the French embassy in Blackfriars collapsed on 26 October 1623. A Catholic priest was preaching to a congregation of some 400 people when the floor gave way, pitching the people into the ‘confession room’ beneath. Over ninety were killed, among them eight priests and fifteen ‘of note and rank’. It was widely believed that the accident was the direct result of God’s particular judgement against the papists, and the bishop of London refused to allow any of the dead to be buried in the city’s churchyards. A mob had also gathered outside the residence of the French ambassador, shrieking execrations against the old faith. Some of the survivors were assailed with insults or assaulted with mud and stones.

The press for war against Spain was growing ever stronger. The situation of the Protestants in Europe was worse than it had been for many decades. The imperial troops were undertaking the forced conversion of the people of Bohemia, while Frederick’s erstwhile subjects in the Palatinate were suffering from religious persecution. The defeat of the forces of Christian of Brunswick, one of the last Protestant leaders still standing, heralded the supremacy of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, and his fellow Habsburg Philip IV of Spain. Thomas Gataker, an English Protestant theologian, declared that ‘the last hour is now running. And we are those on whom the end of the world is fallen.’

The king himself was growing weaker. A memoir on the king’s health drawn up at the end of 1623 reported that he was ‘easily affected by cold and suffers in cold and damp weather’; he used to enjoy hunting but ‘now he is quieter and lies or sits more, but that is due to the weakness of his knee-joints … His mind is easily moved suddenly. He is very wrathful, but the fit soon passes off.’ He was now opposed by his son and by his favourite; Charles and Buckingham, as impetuous in their hatred of Spain as they had once been recklessly in favour of a Spanish match, were now directing the pressure for war.

For Buckingham the chance of fighting a pious crusade against the heretic promised great rewards for his domestic reputation as well as for his private fortune; his post as lord high admiral guaranteed him a tenth of all prizes won upon the seas. The policy of ‘the sharp edge’, as it became known, might also allow the young prince to acquire some sort of military glory without which, as the example of his father showed, kingship lost half of its lustre. It was Charles, therefore, who began to assume command of state affairs. He took the chair of the privy council while his father preferred to remain in the country, where Buckingham was able to insulate the king from any Spanish overtures. The Venetian ambassador told his doge and senate that ‘the balance of affairs leans to the side of the prince, while Buckingham remains at Newmarket to prevent any harm…’

A parliament assembled in February 1624, when the king’s opening speech was tentative and hesitant. He could neither disown his son-in-law and the freedom of the Palatinate nor press for war against Spain and the imperialists. He did not know where to turn. In private he had ranted and sworn, pretending illness to avoid difficult decisions, demanding repose and even death to end his sufferings. In his public speech to parliament, he asked for help. He said that as a result of his son’s fruitless journey to Madrid ‘I awaked as a man out of a dream … the business is nothing advanced neither of the match nor of the palatinate, for all the long treaties and great promises’. In the past James had earnestly upheld his sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs as part of his royal prerogative. But now ‘I shall entreat your good and sound advice for the glory of God, the peace of the kingdom, and weal of my children’. Five days later Buckingham met the Lords and Commons in the Banqueting House where he whipped up their anger against the duplicitous Spaniards.

A peace party still existed at the court and council. The lord treasurer, the earl of Middlesex, was adamantly opposed to any war with Spain. There was no money left. It would be folly to embark on a foreign enterprise when there was not coin enough to pay the servants of the Crown in England. Charles and Buckingham, therefore, found it necessary to destroy him. At the beginning of April the earl was charged with various counts of financial corruption; he had no chance. ‘Remove this strange and prodigious comet,’ Sir John Eliot declared of him, ‘which so fatally hangs over us.’ He was impeached by the Commons and judged to be guilty by the Lords. James himself was much more aware of the dangers of such a proceeding than his son. He declared that Charles had set a dangerous precedent that would in time weaken the power of the throne. The prince, in other words, had invited parliament to collaborate with him in the destruction of one of the king’s own ministers. Would it not be tempted to exploit some of its newfound power? James’s prophecy would soon enough have the ring of truth.

For the time being, however, Charles and Buckingham could effectively lead the common cause described by one of their supporters as that of the ‘patriots’; it was defined by its anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish animus abroad, together with its supposed fight against court corruption at home. For the first, and perhaps the last, time in his life Charles was in broad agreement with the gentlemen of the Commons and the country. At the end of February 1624, the Lords asked that any negotiations with Spain should be broken off. A deputation to the king in the following month requested the fitting of a fleet and the repair of maritime fortifications; the occupation of the Palatinate by Spanish and Bavarian troops should be ended.

For these measures James needed money and, at his urgent request, he was granted £300,000. But how was any war to be fought, and against whom was it to be directed? Against the Holy Roman Emperor or against the king of Spain? Or against Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, who now controlled the Palatinate? The king prevaricated in his usual manner. ‘But whether I shall send twenty thousand or ten thousand, whether by sea or land, east or west, by diversion or otherwise, by invasion upon the Bavarian [Maximilian I] or the Emperor, you must leave that to the king.’ The parliament might wish for war with Spain, but it might be in the interests of the English king only to threaten war; the Spaniards might then agree to restore Frederick to his throne. Many in the court and council were themselves wary of a direct war against the Spanish; battles on sea or on land cost money, and money could only be raised by imposing fresh taxes.

The Spanish envoys had meanwhile found their way to the king through the connivance of certain courtiers. It soon reached the king’s ear that they accused Buckingham of ‘affecting popularity’, and charged him with drawing up a plan that would effectively imprison James in a convenient country house so that the prince might rule in his name. They suggested that the favourite believed the king to be a poor old man unfit to govern. There may or may not have been truth to these claims but the king took the unexpected step of interrogating his councillors on the matter. All of them swore that they had never heard a whisper of treason from Buckingham. The favourite was saved.

James had signalled his willingness to prepare himself for the possibility of war ‘if he could be seconded’. The only possible ally was Louis XIII of France; the French king, at least, had the power to stand against the Spanish or the imperialists in Germany. Soon after parliament had assembled, two envoys were sent from London to Paris with the instruction to seek the hand of the French king’s sister, Henrietta Maria, for Charles. Their proposals were indeed welcomed; it was in the interests of France permanently to separate England from Spain. Louis was a better Frenchman than he was a Catholic, and had no reason to shrink from conflict with his co-religionists. Yet the French court insisted, at the beginning of the negotiations, that English Catholics be given the same liberties as the Spanish had demanded for them in the previous marriage treaty.

This was of course a perilous matter. It would test once more the king’s good faith. By marrying a Catholic princess, also, Charles might alienate the very ‘patriots’ whom he had previously courted. The king therefore decided to prorogue parliament before news of the French demands became known. It had not been an unproductive assembly; it had passed thirty-five public Acts and thirty-eight private. The private Acts alone are evidence that the members were representing local demands and grievances on a significantly increased scale. But parliament had achieved more than that. With its impeachment of the lord treasurer, and its active collaboration with Charles and Buckingham, it had proved itself to be an indispensable limb of the body politic.

Preparations for war with Spain were begun. The Spanish ambassador noted ‘the great joy and exultation of all the cobblers and zealous bigots of the town’. Cobblers were well known for their radical Protestant sympathies. The English ‘mice’, as they were called, were ready to take on the Habsburg ‘cats’. On the departure of the Spanish legation from London the citizens cried out: ‘All the devils in hell go with you, and for those that stay behind let Tyburn take them!’ London and the suburbs were now the venue for newly recruited soldiers, all of them waiting for the happy beat of the drums.

A defensive league was formed with the seven United Provinces; envoys were sent to the kings of Sweden and Denmark with proposals for a holy crusade against the Catholic powers. This served further to excite the martial enthusiasm of the populace. The more realistic of the king’s councillors doubted that the Palatinate could be fully recovered, or Spain defeated, but they hoped at least to assert English power and subdue Spanish pretensions. In the summer of 1624 a play by Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, was staged at the Globe where its satire of Gondomar and the Spanish clique at the English court was an unprecedented success; crowds besieged the theatre for nine days, while the laughter and general hubbub could be heard on the other side of the Thames. ‘Sir, your plot’s discovered!’ one of Gondomar’s aides bursts in to tell him. The ambassador asks him which of the 20,958 plots he means. He explains his methods.

With pleasant subtlety and bewitching courtship …

To many a soul I have let in mortal poison

Whose cheeks have cracked with laughter to receive it;

I could so roll my pills in sugared syllables

And strew such kindly mirth o’er all my mischiefs,

They took their bane in way of recreation.

Thus spoke the erstwhile Spanish ambassador on the stage.

An Anglo-French league was now likely but by no means certain. The French still insisted in principle that penal measures against English Catholics be lifted, and that they should be allowed to practise their religion in peace. Both the king and his son, however, had promised the last parliament that no articles in favour of the Catholics would ever be entertained. It was considered that, in the last resort, it would be better to go to war without the aid of the French than to force a crisis between Crown and parliament.

All the flexible skills of diplomacy had now to be deployed. An English envoy at the court of Louis XIII suggested to James that the French demands were made for ‘their own honour’ only, and that ‘it will always be in your majesty’s power to put the same in execution according to your own pleasure’. It was a policy of hypocrisy and prevarication but none the worse for that. Buckingham was equally sanguine. He was so intent upon martial glory in any Protestant crusade that he urged the king to accept the French terms. James was not willing to concede so much, but he was prepared to write a private letter to Louis in which he promised that his Catholic subjects ‘shall enjoy all the liberty and freedom which concerns the secret exercise of their religion which was granted by the treaty of marriage made with Spain’. It was not quite enough. The French insisted upon their original demands, with the enthusiastic support of Buckingham. The king finally yielded, with the proviso that he should sign a letter and not a contractual engagement. It was vital now that parliament should not intervene; a promised summons in the late autumn was therefore postponed until the following year.

On 12 December 1624, the marriage articles were signed; the king’s hands were so crippled with gout that he was obliged to apply a stamp rather than a signature. To this document Charles appended a secret engagement to the effect that ‘I will promise to all the Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown of Great Britain the utmost of liberty and franchise in everything regarding their religion…’ Twelve days later the courts were forbidden to prosecute recusants under the penal laws; all Catholics in confinement for their faith were then released from the prisons of England.

In this month the king wrote a plaintive letter to Buckingham.

I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow life without you, and so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that you may ever be a comfort to your dad and husband

James R.

It was the last letter that Buckingham would ever receive from the king.

*

The time of war was approaching. Ernest, count of Mansfeld, the principal German ally of Frederick, came to England in search of troops; the soldiers of the previous summer, in their gay feathers and buff jerkins, had been volunteers. Now the county officials had to conscript local men for service and, naturally enough, they preferred to choose those for whom they had the least use. Some of the conscripts preferred radical action to avoid being pressed for service. One hanged himself for fear, while another ran into the Thames and drowned; one cut off all the fingers of his right hand, while another put out one of his eyes with salt. An observer wrote that ‘such a rabble of raw and poor rascals have not lightly been seen, and they go so unwillingly that they must rather be driven than led’.

It had been said that an Englishman could not fight without his ‘three Bs’, namely bed, beef and beer. All three were, on this occasion, in pitifully short supply. Dover had no such commodities in large quantity, and only a few vessels had arrived to transport the men. Their eventual destination was, in any event, not at all clear. James had wished the men to land in France, thus implicating Louis XIII in the war against Spain and the empire; Louis refused them the possibility. So Mansfeld, at the end of January, was obliged to sail for Flushing and begin a march through Holland; his men were to go to the aid of the Dutch fortress city of Breda, then under siege by the Spanish.

Yet the English troops were ill-trained and ill-equipped; they had few provisions, and soon enough a hard frost descended on them, provoking contagious sickness. ‘All day long,’ one of their commanders, Lord Cromwell, wrote, ‘we go about for victuals and bury our dead.’ By the end of March a force of 12,000 was reduced to 3,000 armed men. Yet the folly was not blamed so much upon Mansfeld as upon Buckingham, whose military enthusiasm did not include attention to the details of policy or planning. The disaster did not bode well for the conduct of a more general war that the king would not live to see.

James had recovered from the gout that had afflicted him at the beginning of the year. Yet on 5 March 1625 he was attacked by what was known as a tertian ague, of which the symptoms were chills, fever and profuse sweating. He feared the worst but refused to accept the advice of his physicians. Instead he relied upon a posset drink recommended by Buckingham’s mother, which seemed to do no good. It was whispered that, at the urging of her son, she had in fact poisoned him; she fell on her knees at the king’s bedside and asked for justice against these accusations. ‘Poisoned me?’ the king asked fearfully. At which point, he swooned.

The end was now very near. On 25 March he suffered a stroke that affected his face and jaw. It was reported that his tongue had become so enlarged that he could not make himself understood. He was also beset by bouts of dysentery that left him drenched in his own filth. Two days later he left this life. With the great lords and prelates of the realm about him, according to a later memorial, ‘without pangs or convulsions at all, dormivit Salomon, Solomon slept’. Unlike his mother and his son, James I died lying in his bed rather than kneeling on the scaffold. The surgeons, on opening the body, found no evidence of poison. In a letter of the time, by the Reverend Joseph Meade, it was reported that all of his vital organs were sound ‘as also his head which was very full of brains; but his blood was wonderfully tainted with melancholy’.

His death was not greeted with much dismay or sorrow among the people. His foreign policy had been an utter failure, and his relations with parliament were at best acrimonious. His finances were in disrepair, and the sexual scandals of his reign were common knowledge. The day of his funeral was marred by foul weather so that any bystanders were greeted with muffled coaches and flaming torches. His passing was greeted, perhaps, with relief. The new king might prosecute the Protestant cause with more vigour and determination. Sir John Eliot wrote that ‘a new spirit of life possessed all men’.

There was an alternative vision of the late king’s rule. At his funeral service in Westminster Abbey, on 7 May, the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, preached a sermon in which he praised James’s direction of religion. The King James Bible is lasting evidence of his achievement. The bishop also remarked upon the fact that ‘manufactures at home are daily invented, trading abroad exceedingly multiplied, the borders of Scotland peaceably governed…’ In the reign of James, too, the English people had reached out to Virginia and New England; the merchants had visited the ports of Africa, Asia and America. Certainly, the central achievement had been that of peace, the one condition that the king sedulously strove to maintain. A courtier, Sir Anthony Weldon, left a less than flattering account of the king as indecisive, hesitant and cowardly; it was he who reported the opinion that James was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. Yet he appended to his description the more favourable comment that ‘he lived in peace, died in peace, and left all his kingdoms in a peaceable condition’. This would not be the epitaph of his son.

10

An interlude

At the beginning of 1625, while his father was still incapacitated by gout, Charles had organized what the Venetian ambassador called ‘a splendid masque, with much machinery, and most beautiful scenery’; the prince and his companions danced for four hours after midnight, perhaps in anticipation of the regal splendours to come.

The masque was the great ceremonial occasion of the court, performed once or twice each year, that came to define Stuart kingship. A group of the nobility advanced upon an especially designed stage, their ornate and artificial dress perfectly consonant with the elaborate scenery all around them. Gold was a token of perfection, white was the colour of faith and blue represented the infinite heavens; shame was crimson while lust was scarlet. The colours which took most wonderfully to candlelight were white, carnation and sea-water green. Oil lamps and candles of white wax were used to impart brilliance to the scene. The old Banqueting House had in fact been destroyed by fire in 1619 when ‘oiled paper’ and other combustibles used in the entertainment were ignited.

Inigo Jones was the sole deviser and designer of the court masques, and he brought to his practice all the refinements of his art. The discipline and formality of his architecture prevailed in his stagecraft; he was particularly adept at contriving the mechanical devices or ‘machines’ that were the wonder of the age. ‘If mathematicians had lost proportion,’ it was said of one of his productions, ‘there they might have found it.’ He wished to create harmonies in spectacle just as in his architecture he evoked the harmonies of stone.

The texts of the masques were generally composed by Ben Jonson who chose to deploy moral statements and sentiments within euphonious and carefully crafted verse. The two men were not natural collaborators, however, and Jonson soon wearied of a form in which visual display took precedence over sense. He wrote in one poem, ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’:

O shows! Shows! Mighty shows!

The eloquence of masques! What need of prose

Or verse, or sense t’express immortal you?

You are the spectacles of State!

Inigo Jones himself admitted that the masques were ‘nothing else but pictures with light and motion’.

The stage itself was designed to create the illusion of an infinite perspective, moving from the reality of the king and assembled court into an idealized world where everything had its place and proportion. These perspective stages were a wholly new thing in England, introducing novel principles of symmetry and order. The power of art represented the art of power. The masque was conducted in a formal space in which the laws of nature could be chastened and subdued by the king himself, who sat on the line of perspective from which everything could be perfectly seen. Only in his presence could the seasons miraculously change, or trees walk, or flowers be transformed into human beings.

It was the perfect complement to the doctrine of the divine right of kings that James had professed early in his reign. He sat in the centre of the especially constructed auditorium so that the eyes of the audience were as much upon his regality as upon the performance itself. James had already written in his instruction manual to his elder son, Basilikon Doron, that a king ‘is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people do gazingly behold’. Inigo Jones himself wrote that ‘in heroic virtue is figured the king’s majesty, who therein transcends as far common men as they are above beasts’.

The stage had three habitations. At the highest level was a metaphysical world populated by divine or allegorical figures; below this was the world of the court, in which the monarch was the emblem of order and authority; beneath these two worlds lay ordinary reality which, with its emblems of Vice and Disorder as well as various ‘low’ figures, provided the material for the ‘anti-masque’. The anti-masques represented mutability and inconstancy; they embodied the threat of chaos that was wonderfully removed from the world of the idealized court. The king defeated all those who threatened or abused him. As Sir William Davenant wrote in his masque Salmacida Spolia:

All that are harsh, all that are rude,

Are by your harmony subdu’d;

Yet so into obedience wrought,

As if not forc’d to it, but taught.

The scene might suddenly change. A palace might become a bower, where fairy spirits tread upon trolls and other wicked things; Oberon may appear in a chariot, drawn by two white bears, before ascending into the air; a statue might breathe and walk; a feather of silk may become a cloud of smoke, surrounded by several circles of light in continual motion. A scene might be set in a courtyard or in a dungeon, in a bedchamber or in a desert. All was framed by a proscenium arch, the direct forebear of the modern theatrical space. That is why the English drama favoured interiors.

A courtier and diplomat, Dudley Carleton, noted of an early production in 1605 that ‘there was a great engine at the lower end of the room, which had motion, and in it were the images of sea-horses with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by Moors … at the further end was a great shell in the form of a scallop, wherein were four seats; on the lowest sat the queen with my lady Bedford; on the rest were placed the ladies … their apparel was rich, but too light and courtesan-like for such great ones’. James never took part in the masques, but his wife and children delighted in them; they rehearsed their parts for as long as two months, emphasizing the importance that they placed upon them.

The speaking roles were performed by professional players while the music and song were provided by court musicians; the dancers and masquers, among them members of the royal family itself, remained mute. At the end of the proceedings they advanced into the dancing space, before the king, and invited members of the especially invited audience to dance with them. The concord of music therefore concluded a display in which the virtues of reason, order and good governance are all conjoined.

The dancers of the masquethus celebrate the restoration of an ideal order, a magical ritual designed to emphasize the Stuart vision of kingship and continuity. The masques therefore became known as ‘court hieroglyphics’. It is not unimportant that foreign ambassadors were an integral part of the audience, since the masque was also a form of mystical diplomacy. It was meant to convey, by the expense of the production, the wealth and liberality of the sovereign; the more money spent, the more the glory and the more the praise. In 1618 James spent the unparalleled sum of £4,000 on one production. The fourteen ladies of another masque needed, for their costumes, 780 yards of silk. Yet the masques appealed to appetites other than sight. A lavish banquet, complete with orchestra, often preceded or accompanied the performance.

It was an age of music. In the years between 1587 and 1630 over ninety collections of madrigals, airs and songs were published. Madrigals were compositions for several voices without music, and airs were solo songs accompanied by instruments; the madrigal was the most artificial, and therefore considered the most delightful. Catches were sung by gentlemen in their taverns, by weavers at their looms and by tinkers in their workshops. A man who could not take part in a madrigal, or play the lute, was considered to be unfinished. Lutes and citherns were available in barbers’ shops for the diversion of waiting customers. Music books were customarily brought to the table after supper was ended.

No epoch in the history of English music can excel the diversity of genius that flourished in this period. It was the age of Dowland and of Morley, of Campion and of Byrd, of Bull and of Gibbons. It was also the age of songs such as ‘Lady, Lie Near Me’, ‘If All The World Were Paper’, ‘New, New Nothing’ and ‘Punk’s Delight’. In the time of James, the island was filled with sounds and sweet airs.

In the closing months of 1611, the private theatre at Blackfriars echoed to such harmonies. Shakespeare’s The Tempest was a work of musical theatre with professional singers and a consort of instruments. The stage directions tell their own story, requesting ‘solemn and strange music’, ‘soft music’, ‘a strange hollow and confused noise’. ‘Enter Ferdinand, and Ariel, invisible, playing and singing.’ Ferdinand asks, ‘Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?’ It was everywhere, being ‘dispersed’ music that came from various parts of the stage. In this play Stephano sings sea shanties, while Caliban croons drunken catches. Music was played in the intervals between the acts, and at the close a ritual dance was performed by all of the actors. Music was also played as an accompaniment to scenes of wonder and of pathos, on Prospero’s grounds that ‘a solemn air’ is ‘the best comforter to an unsettled fancy’.

The music of the instruments was diverse. The soft and mournful notes of the recorder were accompanied by a consort of strings including viols, lutes and citherns. An organ was suitable for the solemn music of supernatural change and awakening. Ariel often enters with pipe and tabor. Thus Caliban reveals that

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices …

The last song of the play is sung by Ariel. The words are those of Shakespeare and at a slightly later date they were given a setting by Robert Johnson, a musician attached to the court of the king. It is clear, however, that the melodic inspiration came to Shakespeare from folk tunes or ballads that were in the air at the time.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

This is a song of freedom, chanted just before Prospero releases Ariel from his service; perhaps the spirit danced at the close. The part was performed by a boy, or a light-voiced singer, and the role may have been taken by the seventeen-year-old ‘Jackie Wilson’ who later handed down the settings for the song. Blackfriars was known as a ‘private’ theatre because it was enclosed by roof and walls; in such a setting, the music would have a more powerful and intimate effect.

The Tempest was also performed before the king at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and owes some of its ritual and sweet melody to the masques of the court; actors from Shakespeare’s company also took part in those masques. There was a marked cultural or courtly style in the early years of the seventeenth century.

The great plays of Shakespeare’s maturity were written during the reign of James, Othello and King Lear, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale among them. The witches of Macbeth were in part inspired by James’s own interest in the phenomenon. The king was a more enthusiastic patron of the drama than Elizabeth had ever been. Six days after his arrival in London, from Scotland, he called together Shakespeare and the other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company and issued to them letters patent that allowed them to perform as the King’s Men. The actors were appointed to be grooms of the chamber a few months later.

The era of James I also encouraged other forms of drama. A cardinal, dressed in crimson silk, with a tippet or shoulder cape of sable, comes upon the stage. He is meditating upon a book.

Cardinal: I am puzzled in a question about hell:

He says, in hell there’s one material fire,

And yet it shall not burn all men alike.

Lay him by. How tedious is a guilty conscience!

When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden

Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake

That seems to strike at me.

It does not occur to the cardinal that it may be his own reflection.

The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, is a defining drama of the period, and is one of a number of plays that subsequently have been brought together under the collective title of ‘Jacobean tragedy’. Since it is the only literary genre that carries the name of the age, it may be of some importance for any understanding of it. It signifies melancholy, morbidity, restlessness, brooding anger, impatience, disdain and resentment; it represents the horror of life. The exuberance and optimistic inventiveness of the Elizabethan years have disappeared. The joy has gone. The vitality has become extremity and the rhetoric has turned rancid.

The duchess herself asks, ‘Who am I?’ To which comes the reply: ‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little curded milk, fantastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in – more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage?’ This is perhaps the quintessence of Jacobean dramatic style and can be compared to John Donne’s contemporaneous verse on:

This curdled milk, this poor unlitter’d whelp,

My body …

The Duchess of Malfi was written for Shakespeare’s company and was first performed towards the close of 1614 at the theatre in Blackfriars before a fashionable audience that would catch most of the allusions to the plays and poems of the day. In a theatrical world of death and murder, of graves and shrines, music was once again an essential element for conveying suspense and intensity.

The plot itself is a poor thing. The duchess, a widow, wishes to marry the steward of her household in a union which might be perceived to dishonour her. Her two brothers – Ferdinand, duke of Calabria, and one known only as the cardinal – conspire to be revenged upon her. By means of a spy and secret agent, Bosola, the duchess is captured and subjected to a range of mental tortures designed to induce insanity; she is presented with the severed hand of her husband, and a gaggle of mad people is brought into her presence. A curtain is drawn to show a tableau comprising the dead bodies of her husband and children. It is revealed in an aside to the audience that they are waxworks, but not until the frisson of their discovery has subsided. The duchess is in the end strangled, but not before being shown the cord that will dispatch her.

Duchess: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut

With diamonds, or to be smothered

With cassia, or to be shot to death with pearls?

On sight of her body Ferdinand utters what are the most famous words of the play:

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

Out of guilt and despair he then descends into murderous madness.

One met the Duke ’bout midnight in a lane

Behind St Mark’s church, with the leg of a man

Upon his shoulder; and he howled fearfully;

Said he was a wolf …

The final scene concludes with a bloody conflict in which both Bosola and the cardinal are killed, bringing the sum total of fatalities in the play to ten. Enough has been quoted, perhaps, to convey the sensibility of the time as well as the taste of the Jacobean audience.

It is a world of secrecy and madness, where characters hide and wait. The duchess sees a trespasser in the mirror and trembles. The broken phrases are forced out. ‘What is it?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh fearful!’ ‘Why do you do this?’ ‘What’s he?’ A common exclamation is ‘Ha!’ Some of Webster’s favourite words are ‘foul’, ‘mist’ and ‘dunghill’. The dialogue, when not fabulously ornamental, is direct and rapid, almost a whisper. ‘Can you guess?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do not ask then.’

The play might be described as morbid or as grotesque, the English version of Grand Guignol, were it not for the fact that it is possessed by a wild and almost frantic energy. That energy is part of the characters’ desperation, their vitality and misery mingling in frightful images of fever and of death. They seem to be possessed by will and desire rather than belief; they are united only in the quest for survival in an unstable world. They run towards darkness. This is in fact a most significant image of the age and one to which, as we shall see, Hobbes’s Leviathan is addressed. Indeed, this is a world from which God seems to have departed, leaving it in ‘a mist’. There seems to be no meaning in the abyss of darkness that opens beneath their feet. It was also a time when, in the work of Francis Bacon, the natural world was being stripped of its association with the divine presence.

Where some like Bacon were possessed by the possibilities of progress in the natural sciences, others believed that the world was in the process of fatal decline. When in 1612 Galileo discovered the presence of spots upon the face of the sun, it was considered to be proof that even the heavens were in a state of dissolution.

Yet proof of decay also lay closer to home, and much of the atmosphere of The Duchess of Malfi is conveyed by the image of a corrupt court.

A Prince’s court

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

Pure silver-drops in general. But if’t chance

Some cursed example poison’t near the head

Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

This is likely to be an indirect allusion to the court of James I, already rendered suspect by whispers of corruption and malfeasance. The loss or abdication of authority is a context for the disorientation and instability that afflict all of the characters. That is why it is a play of scepticism, disillusion and disgust united in an overwhelming pessimism.

Pleasure of life, what is’t? Only the good hours

Of an ague …

The figure of melancholy, therefore, might be used as the frontispiece to the play. Melancholy was the time’s delight, its presiding deity. It had its own dark dress and its own music in the compositions of John Dowland such as ‘In darkness let me dwell’ and ‘Flow my tears’. That pensive, fearful and tearful mood also had its greatest celebration and exposition in the reign of James with the publication of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton was the master of melancholy in all its moods and phases. His great volume – more than 1,200 pages in its modern form – was first published in 1621 and went through six editions in his own lifetime.

Burton professed that ‘all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and every member of it’. We sense here the curiosity of his prose, at once precise and unsettled; it is a characteristically Jacobean touch. Melancholy is a disease both grievous and common, which he describes as ‘a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion’.

So Burton follows it through all its declensions and divisions, its intervals and digressions; he creates three ‘partitions’ with a variety of sections and subsections into which the various types and forms of melancholy are arranged. There are sections entitled ‘Miseries of Scholars’, ‘The Force of Imagination’, ‘Poverty and Want’, ‘Unfortunate Marriage’ and ‘Old Age’. He devotes a passage to ‘Symptoms of Maids’, Nuns’ and Widows’ Melancholy’. Hundreds of pages are consumed by ‘Love Melancholy’ and ‘Religious Melancholy’. The madness, if such it is, can be caused by stars or spirits, by the quality of meat or wine, by catarrh or constipation, by bad air or immoderate exercise, by idleness or solitariness, by anger or discontent, by poverty or servitude or shame.

All was grist to his capacious mill, and he striates his narrative with stories, anecdotes, digressions, quotations, aphorisms and the most colourful detail. ‘A young merchant going to Nordeling Fair in Germany, for ten days’ space never went to stool; at his return he was grievously melancholy, thinking that he was robbed, and would not be persuaded but that all his money was gone … a Jew in France (saith Lodovicus Vives) came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank that lay over a brook, in the dark, without harm; the next day, perceiving what danger he was in, he fell down dead.’

He describes the inner working of obsessive temperaments who are ‘to your thinking very intent and busy, still that toy runs in their minds, that fear, that suspicion, that abuse, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whimsy, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatsoever it is’. He piles up heaps of words and throws himself into them; he has different voices, and different tones; he elaborates, and then qualifies his elaborations; he can be inconsistent and even contradictory. No opinion is stable, no judgement is certain. On eventually finishing the volume, you may feel that you know everything or that you know nothing.

He anatomized himself. He professed that ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’. He was a student of Christ Church, Oxford, until the time of his death, and he confessed that ‘I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi et musis [for myself and the muses] in the university, as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens…’ He was a cormorant of books whose library of 1,700 volumes of forgotten lore was both his refuge and his inspiration. Burton was the magpie scholar, curator of the world’s learning, a lord of books who hoped that by quilting together references and allusions and quotations he could stitch so strong a cloth that he would be able to cover himself with it. He makes reference to more than 1,250 authors. His is a book in praise of books and a literary fancy in praise of reading. He wished to fashion an incantation to exorcize melancholy. The book concludes with an aphorism, ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’, and an epigraph:

SPERATE MISERI

CAVETE FELICES

You that are unhappy, hope. You that are happy, fear.

We are close, perhaps, to the religious spirit of the age. Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester, had on many occasions preached before James in the royal chapel and was well known to the court as he mounted the pulpit at Whitehall. He was tall and slim, with a long narrow face and expressive hands; he had a neatly trimmed beard and high forehead. In the winter of 1622 he had preached from the words of the text taken from St Matthew, ‘vidimus enim stellam Ejus’, ‘For we have seen his star’:

Vidimus stellam. We can well conceive that: any that will but look up, may see a star. But how could they see the Ejus of it, that it was His? Either that it belonged to any, or that He it was it belonged to. This passeth all perspective: no astronomy could show them this. What by course of nature the stars can produce, that they by course of art or observation may discover. But this birth was above nature. No trigon, triplicity, exaltation could bring it forth. They are but idle that set figures for it. The star should not have been His, but He the star’s, if it had gone that way. Some other light, then, they saw this Ejus by.

The style is hard and elliptical, almost tortuous in its slow unwinding of the sense. It relies upon repetition and alliteration, parallel and antithesis. It is knotty and difficult, almost impossible for the hearers fully to understand. Yet it is the devotional style of the Jacobean period, fully mastered by a king who prided himself on his scholarship and erudition. Andrewes hovers over a word, even a syllable, eliciting its meaning by minute degrees; he is constantly questioning, refining and rephrasing. He does not express a thought but, rather, the process of thought itself; he dramatizes the act, or art, of creative reasoning. This is the luxuriant etymology of Jacobean scholarship, similar in its strenuous tone to the prose of Francis Bacon.

‘Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, O the very dead of winter.’ The prose is disciplined and pure, evincing clarity of thought and expression as well as a great power of ordered analysis. It may not possess the inspired eloquence or impassioned fervour of the great Elizabethan preachers, but it is marked by what T. S. Eliot described as ‘ordonnance, precision, and relevant intensity’. Andrewes moves forward in pulses of light; he stops and repeats a phrase for more lucidity; he is always reaching out for the full revelation of the interior sense. An association of words can lead him further forward, caressing or coaxing their intention; he professed that such meanings can ‘strike any man into an ecstacy’.

The soaring cadence and expressive emotionalism evident in the sermons of John Donne may seem a world away from the concerted pressure of Andrewes’s words; the articulations of any one culture, however, will not be very far apart. On 13 November 1622, the month before the bishop of Winchester gave his sermon to the king on the journey of the Magi, John Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, entered the pulpit of the cathedral.

The first word of the text is the cardinal word, the word, the hinge, upon which the whole text turns. The first word, But, is the But, that all the rest shoots at. First it is an exclusive word: something the Apostles had required, which might not be had; not that; and it is an inclusive word; something Christ was pleased to afford to the apostles, which they thought not of; not that, not that which you beat upon, But, but yet, something else, something better than that, you shall have.

The rapid associations are like a sudden peal of bells.

For Donne the sermon was a species of erudite oratory, a performance that like the plays of the Jacobean tragic stage would surprise and delight the audience. He must remind his auditors of the damnation of being ‘secluded eternally, eternally, eternally, from the sight of God’. He must move and direct their emotions or else he had failed. That is why he exerts all the power of the macabre that John Webster had employed. So in one sermon Donne reminds his hearers that ‘between that excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature’.

The settled truths of the old medieval faith had utterly gone. It was now necessary to argue and to convince. In this endeavour Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne were united. Yet this meant that they were sometimes engaged in tortuous and self-involved trials of the spirit; this was in many respects a sceptical, ambiguous and ambivalent age, at least in direct comparison with its predecessors, and against that unstable background both preachers protested and declaimed.

The syntactic parallels and paradoxes of both churchmen are attempts to riddle out individual truths and certainties from ambiguous matter. They needed to convince as much as to inspire their hearers. Yet the sermons are characterized by the caustic rhetoric that is so much part of the period. Donne preached that ‘sects are not bodies, they are but rotten boughs, gangrened limbs, fragmentary chips, blown off by their own spirit of turbulency, fallen off by the weight of their own pride…’ The immediacy and urgency of the language, with its rough cadence, are also part of Donne’s secular poetry. We may note the pessimism and melancholy, anatomized in an earlier part of this chapter, that also underlie his being in the world. In one of his meditations he enquires about the source of his disease. ‘They tell me that it is my melancholy. Did I infuse, did I drink in melancholy into my self? It is my thoughtfulness; was I not made to think? It is my study; doth not my calling call for that?’ This is the true music of the Jacobean period, now come to a close.

11

Vivat rex

Charles Stuart had become king of England at the age of twenty-four. He was proclaimed on the same day as his father’s death, 27 March 1625, and a contemporary at Cambridge wrote that ‘we had thunder the same day, presently on the proclamation, and ’twas a cold season, but all fears and sorrows are swallowed up in joy of so hopeful a successor’. Had the new king not put himself at the head of the anti-Spanish alliance in England?

He was more severe and reserved than his father, with a strong sense of formality and order, and the change of tone at court was soon evident. Charles announced that during the reign of his ‘most dear and royal father’ idle and unnecessary people had thronged the court, bringing ‘much dishonour to our house’. There were to be no more bawds or catamites. The new king had been impressed by the decorum of the Spanish court, where he had spent many months; he appreciated the privacy by which the royal family was protected, and the gravitas with which courtly affairs were conducted. The moral tone appealed to a young man who had become dismayed by the laxness and libertinism of his father’s court. He began to dress in black. In the preface to his orders for the royal household he remarked that his purpose was ‘to establish government and order in our court which from thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdom’. This art of control, however, might be more congenial in theory than in practice.

The Venetian ambassador noted that within days of his accession ‘the king observes a rule of great decorum. The nobles do not enter his apartments in confusion as heretofore, but each rank has its appointed place.’ The ambassador also reported that the king had drawn up rules and regulations that divided his day, from first rising, into separate compartments; there was a time for praying and a time for exercising, a time for business and a time for audiences, a time for eating and a time for sleeping. He did not wish his subjects to be introduced to him without warning; they were only to be sent for. Servants proffered meals to him on their bended knees, and such was the protocol around royal dining that he seldom if ever ate a hot meal; food took too long to serve. Whenever he washed his hands, those parts of the towel he touched were raised above the head of the gentleman usher who removed it from the royal presence.

Charles set to work in earnest at the beginning of April when he asked Buckingham and other grandees to review all aspects of foreign policy; the fraught relationship with Spain, and a possible alliance with France, were to be considered in the light of Charles’s desire to recover the Palatinate for his brother-in-law. A committee was established, a few days later, in order to supervise the nation’s defences in case of war. The new king then set up two further commissions to investigate financial fraud by the collectors of the customs and to examine the trade of the East India Company with Russia. It was a businesslike start but, as is generally the case with the work of committees and commissions, it achieved very little.

Buckingham was still the principal councillor, as he had been in the reign of James; he stayed in the company of the king all day, and slept in a room next to the royal bedchamber. He possessed the golden key that allowed him entrance to all the apartments of the palace. It seemed that nothing could be done without him. He had an almost viceregal status and was in part able to compensate for the king’s unskilfulness in persuasion and management.

Charles had a stutter which, together with his want of natural fluency in conversation, led him to confess once that ‘I know I am not good to speak much’. When he was a child his doctors had tried to cure the problem by putting small stones in his mouth, but this had provided no benefit. He tried to form complete sentences in his mind before uttering them, but the impediment remained. He was always shy and hesitant in speech. So he communicated with his household servants by means of gestures as much as words.

One of his principal advisers at a later date, the earl of Clarendon, noted that his insecurity led him to adopt the suggestions, or yield to the influence, of men who were in fact less capable than himself. He never really discerned the true merits or vices of those around him; he tended to confide in those who were merely boasters and adventurers while ignoring those of real, if silent, merit. The council about him consisted of professional courtiers, many of whom had been close to his father, while the others were friends or trusted servants. The principal decisions, however, were diverted from the full council to selective small groups or committees; suspicion and jealousy were therefore rife.

His first public appearance, in April, was at the port of Blackwall, on the north bank of the Thames, where he visited the royal fleet. He was small, just a little over 5 feet in height, and might be described as rather delicate than otherwise. Yet he had disciplined and trained himself in healthy exercise, so that his slight exterior was deceptive. He was of a pale complexion, set off in his youth by curly chestnut hair; he had a long face with grey eyes and full lips. He was of temperate habits, preferring plain beer to spiced wines, and of an apparently cool and dispassionate nature. He always blushed if he overheard indecent talk. If he could command his own passions, however, he might be able to control those of his kingdom. He collected aphorisms from the Stoics and neo-Stoics on the importance of cultivating detachment from the pressing issues of the moment. ‘We have learnt to own ourself by retiring into ourself,’ he once said. Yet acute observers, among them portrait painters, were able to sense that he concealed secret or hidden tension. His pace was rapid and hurried.

The potentially dangerous matter of his marriage to the French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, soon became the principal topic of London gossip. Many in the court, and in the country, deplored the alliance with a devotee of Rome and conjured up old fears of papal domination. Yet Charles was not inclined to heed any warnings. He had a Scottish father, a Danish mother, and a half-French grandmother in the person of Mary Queen of Scots; he was the perfect representative of the fact that the royal families of Europe were not necessarily nationalist or religious partisans.

The marriage was celebrated by proxy, on 1 May 1625, in front of the west door of Notre Dame; on the same day the king issued a declaration that ‘all manner of prosecution’ against Roman Catholics should ‘be stayed and forborne, provided always that they behave themselves modestly therein’. This had been one of the stumbling blocks in the Spanish negotiations of previous years and a contemporary, John Chamberlain, now complained that ‘we are out of the frying-pan into the fire’. In the middle of the month Buckingham himself travelled to Paris in order to accompany Henrietta Maria across the Channel and to expedite the proposed alliance between England and France; he hoped to persuade the French king to treat his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots, with the same tact as Charles was now displaying to the Catholics. He also wished to draw the French into open warfare against the Spanish. In both respects he was unsuccessful, and in any case his flair or arrogance was not to the taste of Louis XIII. He is reported to have worn a white satin suit sewn all over with diamonds, and to have flirted with the wife of the French king; he also danced a saraband in front of her dressed as a Pantaloon.

Henrietta Maria eventually arrived at Dover on 12 June and was taken to the castle where Charles rode to meet her. She seemed to be taller than he anticipated, and she noticed him glancing at her feet in case she were wearing shoes like stepladders. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I stand upon mine own feet; I have no helps by art. Thus high I am, and am neither higher nor lower.’ She had spirit, therefore, and was described by an English observer, Joseph Mead, as ‘nimble and quick … in a word, a brave lady’. She was fifteen years old. Soon after her arrival she was discomfited by too much company in an overheated room. Mead reported that ‘with one frown … she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a queen could have cast such a scowl.’

*

A new parliament for the new reign was of paramount importance. Charles would have been happy to recall the old one, since it had favoured his anti-Spanish cause, but he was informed that the death of James had brought it to an end. He should have known this element of constitutional practice. A parliament had been called for May, but the onset of the plague in thirteen parishes of the city led to its postponement for a month. Charles opened the assembly with a speech in which he pressed for money to finance the recovery of the Palatinate. It is not at all clear, however, that the members wished to be drawn into a continental war and instead they seemed intent on domestic matters. After they had observed a day of fasting, they delivered to the king a ‘pious petition’ in which was demanded the immediate execution of ‘all the existing laws against Catholic recusants and missionaries’. The king had married a Catholic princess and, against the opinion of the country, had granted toleration to her co-religionists. The wrath of the Commons was then turned against one of the king’s chaplains, Richard Montagu, who in a theological tract effectively denied the Calvinist notion of predestination; the book was declared to be in contempt of the house, and the unfortunate divine was taken into custody.

Only now were the king’s finances given consideration. His plea for wartime expenditure was not taken very seriously, on the good grounds that no proper plans or policies had been brought forward. The incompetence of Buckingham, in the ill-timed and ill-executed march towards Breda at the end of the previous reign, was also borne in mind; why give money to inept commanders? ‘We know yet of no war,’ Sir Robert Phelips said, ‘nor of any enemy.’ Parliament proposed to give to the king only one tenth of the sum which he had anticipated and, to compound the offence, the customs duties of tonnage and poundage were granted for only one year. All of his predecessors, ever since the time of Henry VI (1421–71), had been awarded them for the duration of their reigns. It is likely that the duties of one year were in fact only a temporary measure, until parliament had the opportunity to debate a permanent settlement. Yet this session had set a precedent. The resistance to increased taxation, and opposition to the king’s religious policy, would be the prime movers of later discontent.

Charles was indignant at his lack of success, but he had no strategy to deal with any parliamentary opposition; he had simply expected that his orders would be followed. Before any remonstrance could be entertained, in any case, the plague intervened. One courtier told his son that ‘I … in earnest do marvel that anyone who may be called reasonable would be now in London’. The tolling of the neighbourhood bells could clearly be heard in the chamber of the Commons. Joseph Mead wrote, on 2 July, to one of his correspondents that ‘my Lord Russell being to go to parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence’. On 11 July parliament was adjourned, to be convened once more in Oxford at the beginning of August.

The change of location did nothing to curb the rising hostility of the members to king and court. On a motion of Sir Edward Coke at the beginning of the session, the subsidies to the king were set to be thoroughly investigated, thus implying that parliament had the power to regulate the king’s income at will. Another member rose brandishing a pardon the king had issued to a Jesuit, just the day after he had promised to uphold the ‘pious petition’ against Roman Catholics. A general silence followed. This affected the integrity and honour of the sovereign. It was agreed that they should wait to hear Charles’s response. Charles had made contradictory promises to the French king and to parliament. Which would be the first to be broken?

Charles arrived from Woodstock three days later, and summoned the members to meet him in the hall of Christ Church. His mind was on matters of finance rather than of religion. He needed money for the fleet that Buckingham had collected, but the exchequer was bare. He found that his ‘credit’ was as yet too slim ‘to set forth that navy now preparing’. He was, as usual, spare of words. He said that he would answer the religious petitions in two days’ time.

It was still not at all clear how much money was required and to what purpose it would be put. Was a naval war against Spain contemplated? Or would an army be transported to aid the Palatinate? No one in the administration spoke with a certain voice. Why should the members of the Commons support a policy that they did not understand and upon which they had not been consulted? One declared that it would be better if parliament concentrated upon domestic and financial affairs, of which it did have cognizance, rather than concern itself with foreign imbroglios.

Buckingham now came under attack. It could be inferred from the speeches against him that he was incapable of controlling the government or of organizing any credible war effort. So now he bent with the wind. The information was conveyed that he and his master had never really believed in religious toleration for its own sake; it was merely a device to woo the Spanish and then the French. Buckingham was supposed to believe that the religious treaty drawn up with Louis XIII was merely for the sake of form, a piece of paper to appease the pope. The king, with his connivance, was ready to cultivate the Commons by turning on the Catholics.

‘If you mean to put the laws into execution,’ an envoy from the French court, Father Berulle, told him, ‘I neither can nor will endure it, whatever sauce you may be pleased to add.’

‘Begone,’ Buckingham is supposed to have replied. ‘I know that you are only at home in your breviary and your Mass.’

But the duke’s evident lack of principle or consistency did not necessarily endear him to parliament. He had gathered together a fleet to boost his standing in the popular cause of war against Spain, but there was no money fully to prepare it. He was deemed to be too young, too rash and too inexperienced. In the ensuing debate, Sir Francis Seymour called out, ‘Let us lay the fault where it is.’ He then named the duke of Buckingham. Sir Edward Coke, sensing misgovernment and self-serving administrators, declared that ‘the ship hath a great leak’. This was coming too close to the king. On 11 August he and his council decided that it was not fit for this parliament to continue. The excuse of the plague, steadily encroaching upon Oxford, was used to save Buckingham from possible impeachment. Where Charles believed that he was defending an honest and faithful minister, the parliamentarians were of the opinion that they were protecting the nation against a selfish and incapable favourite. The Oxford parliament had lasted eleven days. Charles blamed a few troublemakers and ‘seditious men’ for the turmoil, a miscalculation he would also make in later years.

It is already possible to gauge something of the king’s character. He truly believed that his regal authority was paramount and that parliament was merely a compliant instrument to finance his requirements in war and peace. The simple declaration of his wishes was sufficient to command obedience. On state papers he would scrawl, ‘Let it be done. C.R.’ He had certain firm convictions that could not be altered by arguments or by events; if you agreed with him, you were a friend, but any who questioned his judgement were enemies from that moment forward. Once he had formulated a policy, he maintained it to the end. He could never see the point of view of anyone but himself, and this lack of imagination would one day cost him the throne.

He was so convinced of the rightness of his cause that he never acquired the easiness and bonhomie of either his father or his son. He remained to most of his subjects cold and reserved. The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘this king is so constituted by nature that he never obliges anyone, either by word or deed’. In succeeding years he would become enmeshed in the problems caused by his inability to use tact or craft in the affairs of the world. He once told a churchman that he could never have become a lawyer because ‘I cannot defend a bad, nor yield in a good, cause’. He was in other words too righteous for his own good, or for the good of his kingdom.

The official war against Spain was declared in the early autumn of 1625, and in the same period a treaty was established between England and the Dutch republic. Yet the perennial problem of finance had not been solved and, as a desperate remedy, it was proposed that the crown jewels should be sold. The soldiers had been pressed into service but they remained unpaid; they roamed about Plymouth, where the people of south Devon would not or could not supply them with food. So the hungry men killed the available sheep and oxen in front of them. Three of their captains were named Bag, Cook and Love; the joke soon spread that they were Bag without money, Cook without Meat and Love without charity. This was a period when rumours spread throughout the country that the king had been touched by the plague; the report was untrue, but it represented the uncertain atmosphere of the time.

The English fleet under the command of Sir Edward Cecil, who had first seen service in the reign of Elizabeth, finally left harbour on 8 October after much abortive sailing through wind and rain. Its principal purpose was as yet undecided, except that it should in some way strike a blow against the Spanish coast. A council of war was called while the ships were at sea, when it was decided that an assault should be attempted upon Cadiz. The spirits of the men were raised when, at the advance of the English, the Spanish vessels fled the scene. The fort of Puntal, guarding the entrance to Cadiz harbour, was taken; but the attack had alerted the Spanish authorities to the dangers faced by the town.

While a blockade of Cadiz was attempted, news reached Cecil and his commanders that a large Spanish force was on its way to save the town; the English soldiers were disembarked and hurried to meet the threat, but the report was false. No enemy was in sight. Their forced march under a hot Spanish sun, however, had left them without provisions. Casks of wine were taken from neighbouring villages and dwellings; the men gorged themselves on the drink until they were senseless. It was said that every man became his own vintner. The Spanish defenders of Cadiz fell upon them and engaged in a general frenzy of slaughter. The siege of Cadiz, and the occupation of Puntal, were therefore abandoned in embarrassing failure.

The English vessels had also been charged to intercept the Spanish silver sailing from Mexico, but they were in no condition to confront anything. Their hulks were rotten, and their tackle frail. Whether through corruption or neglect, their supplies had been insufficient from the beginning. The drink, possibly a medley of wine and water, was foul; the food was evil-smelling ‘so as no dog in Paris Garden would eat it’. Paris Garden was part of the noisome suburb of Southwark. In the middle of November Cecil ordered his ships to return to England. It was a complete, and humiliating, fiasco. An enquiry was held, but such was the conflicting evidence and prejudiced testimony that it was considered best to bury the matter in a public silence.

An attempt was then made to avert the wrath of the country. At the beginning of November the execution of the penal laws against the Catholics was instituted once more; the fines and confiscations were to be used for the defence of the realm. It was reported that at Whitehall ‘they look strange on a papist’. Yet there was no stronger papist than the queen. Charles’s disillusion with Louis XIII for failing to assist him now seems to have extended to his sister, and especially to her entourage of Capuchin friars. Their rituals and orisons were not welcome at the English court, in which Buckingham was still hoping to lead a Protestant league against Spanish and imperial pretensions.

The king and queen were dining together when her Catholic confessor tried to anticipate the grace being said by a Protestant cleric. He began praying in Latin, in a loud voice, according to Joseph Mead, ‘with such a confusion, that the king, in a great passion, instantly rose from the table, and, taking the queen by the hand, retired into the bedchamber. Was this not a priestly discretion?’ Charles was heard to state that a man must be master in his own house. But he had also to prove himself master of his own kingdom.

12

A fall from grace

The day of Charles’s formal coronation came on Candlemas, 2 February 1626, a little under a year since his accession to the throne. Henrietta Maria refused to accompany her husband to what she considered to be an heretical service, and so he proceeded alone; the queen watched some of the events from an apartment in the gatehouse of the palace yard. Charles did not go on the customary procession through the streets of London, however, and there was neither banquet nor masque after the ceremony; the plague was still leaving its mark. There was little rejoicing at the service itself. When the newly crowned king was presented to the people, they remained largely silent. The earl of Arundel, the lord marshal, then ordered them to cry out ‘God save King Charles’ at which juncture a few shouts of homage were heard.

Charles wore a cloak of white rather than a robe of regal scarlet; this was considered by many to be an unfortunate innovation in an ancient ceremony. The coronation oath was also carefully changed by William Laud, the bishop of St David’s, with a prayer that the king might have ‘Peter’s key of discipline, Paul’s doctrine’. This was not at the time considered to be ominous but, at a later date, Laud was accused of conferring absolute power upon the king to the injury of the people. Any ill will or resentment was at this time, however, largely directed against Buckingham rather than his sovereign.

Parliament met four days later in a state of seething discontent at Buckingham’s mismanagement of the expedition to Cadiz. He may have tried to waive blame by pleading that he had been conducting diplomatic negotiations at the time in The Hague, but this did not satisfy the angry members. Sir John Eliot, member for St Germans in Cornwall, had witnessed the return of the fleet to Plymouth after the debacle; he had seen the men, diseased and half-starved, staggering off their ships. He had also seen some of them die in the streets, mortally infecting the people of the town. He did not forget these scenes of suffering, and he placed all the blame for them on the folly and pride of the king’s favourite.

The king opened proceedings with a customary short and blunt speech. ‘I mean to show what I should speak’, he said, ‘in actions.’ He offered no apologies or explanations for what had transpired; he simply asked for more money. When Eliot rose to speak he demanded that no further supply should be granted until an account had been given of previous sums. He called for the inspection of the admiralty ledgers which, as vice-admiral of Devon, he was uniquely well placed to examine.

But he made a wider plea to the king. ‘Sir, I beseech you cast your eyes about! View the state we are in! Consider the loss we have received! Weigh the wrecked and ruined honour of our nation!’ Eliot might be described as one of the first great parliamentarians in English history, ready to curb the abuses of the royal prerogative. He went on to say that ‘our honour is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men perished; not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance, but, as the strongest predictions had discerned and made it apparent beforehand, by those we trust’. The aspects of international affairs were not promising. The Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor were advancing through Bohemia and Germany; the Protestants of France were being threatened, and even destroyed, by the French king.

A committee was established in order to enquire into the problems of the state finances, but it came to no settled conclusions. On 10 March, therefore, Charles let it be known that he wished for an immediate supply for the necessities of the state without any further questions of his past or future conduct being raised. The statement raised the temperature of the debates. The member for Boroughbridge, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax, wrote to his father that ‘if we give nothing, we not only incense the king, who is in his own nature extremely stiff, but endanger a ruin of the commonweal, as things now stand; and if we do give, it may perhaps not be employed in the right way, and the more we part with, the more we shall want another time to bestow’.

It was now generally believed that the cause of all grievances was the duke of Buckingham. He had appointed incompetent officers and was responsible for the calamity at Cadiz. He had taken Crown lands for his friends and family. He had sold many of the offices of state and acquired others for his own aggrandizement. His mother and his father-in-law were both recusants, and might be considered enemies of the state. He was the man to be named.

The king replied to the parliamentarians at Whitehall five days later in a speech in which he declared that ‘I would not have the House to question my servants, much less one that is so near me’. He added that ‘I would you would hasten for my supply, or else it will be worse for yourselves, for if any ill happen, I think I shall be the last that shall feel it’. Sir John Eliot, addressing his colleagues two days later, counselled steadfastness. ‘We have had a representation of great fear,’ he said, ‘but I hope that shall not darken our understandings.’ The king once more ordered them to desist. ‘Remember’, Charles told them, ‘that parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting, and dissolution; therefore, as I find their fruits good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.’

The Commons, in no mood now for retreat, still pursued the duke; they were hounds slipped off the leash, all the more confident because they knew that the Lords were supporting them; the nobility, too, had had enough of the overweening favourite. The old peerage were incensed by his control of patronage and by his domination of the king. The earl of Bristol, who as ambassador at the court of Spain had witnessed the conduct of Buckingham in Madrid, brought his own testimony against the favourite. He charged him with the attempt to change the prince’s religion; he accused him of kneeling to the sacrament ‘to give the Spaniards a hope of the prince’s conversion’. He was in effect denouncing Buckingham for treason.

The king was irate at what he considered to be the vainglory of the houses. Yet they were not to be diverted. On 10 May a deputation was drawn up to prepare the articles of impeachment against Buckingham; one of its members, Sir Dudley Digges, stated in perhaps unprecedented terms that ‘the laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things. And whatsoever ill events succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.’ Digges also compared Buckingham to a comet, exhaled ‘out of base and putrid matter’. When the members of the deputation presented themselves to Buckingham, however, it was reported that he laughed in their faces. The duke knew the loyalty, or rigidity, of the king. Charles would never abandon him.

The day of the impeachment debate was an occasion for passion and theatrical confrontation. When one member, John Glanville, delivered an exordium in favour of parliament Buckingham ‘jeered and fleered’ him. ‘My lord,’ Glanville replied, ‘do you jeer me? Are these things to be jeered at? My lord, I can show you a man of greater blood than your lordship, as high in place and power, and as deep in the favour of the king as you, who hath been hanged for as small a crime as the least of these articles contain.’

Sir John Eliot rose to launch a general invective against the favourite. ‘What vast treasures he has gotten! What infinite sums of money, and what a mass of lands!’ The banquets, the buildings, the costumes, the gold and the silver were the visible tokens of his greed; his wealth was keeping the sovereign, and the nation, poor. Eliot then hinted at the prevailing rumour that Buckingham and his mother had poisoned James I. He compared the duke to a legendary beast, known to the ancients as Stellionatus, that was ‘so blurred, so spotted’ that it was filled with foulness. By this extraordinary speech, the king was of course much offended.

On the following day, 11 May, the king visited the Lords where he tried to exonerate Buckingham from all the charges attached to him by the Commons. ‘I can bear witness,’ he said, ‘to clear him in every one of them.’ On the same day the lower house broke up in turmoil when it was discovered that Sir John Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges had been taken to the Tower. When the Speaker rose on 12 May to commence business he was told to ‘sit down’. There was to be ‘no business until we are righted in our liberties’. The French ambassador warned the king that if his power did not prevail, he would be as impotent as the doge of Venice, who could do nothing without the approval of his senate.

Parliament stood firm and finally prevailed. Within a week both Digges and Eliot were set at liberty. It was not a good precedent for the king, who appeared to be resolute but in truth prevaricated. He then compounded the offence by appointing Buckingham to be chancellor of the university at Cambridge; such was the displeasure of the Commons that they drew up a general remonstrance for Buckingham’s dismissal from public life.

The war of words now intensified. Charles responded with the demand that parliament should proceed immediately to pass a Subsidy Bill, furnishing him with more funds, or he would be obliged ‘to use other resolutions’. The Commons debated the matter and decided that the remonstrance should come before any bill for subsidies. They had not in fact proved the charges of venality and corruption laid against Buckingham, but they now pressed for his forced resignation on the sole grounds that the Commons did not trust him. If they succeeded in their purpose, their authority would then outweigh that of the sovereign himself.

If parliament on the other hand were forced to yield, and to grant Charles supply without the redress of grievances, it would set an unfortunate precedent in which the king might be the permanent victor; the members did not, in a current phrase, wish to give posterity a cause to curse them. Court and parliament, at cross-purposes one with another, had reached an impasse. A conversation between the king and Buckingham was overheard and widely reported. ‘I have in a manner lost the love of my subjects,’ Charles is supposed to have told him. ‘What wouldst thou have me do?’ On 14 June the king determined to dissolve parliament. The Lords begged for two days more to resolve the situation. The king replied quickly enough. ‘Not a minute.’

The day before the dissolution of what was called ‘this great, warm, ruffling parliament’ a storm of thunder, lightning and hail fell upon the Thames at Westminster and created the phenomenon of a ‘whirlwater’ or ‘water-pillar’. The water was dissolved into a mist and formed a great revolving funnel some 30 yards across and 10 feet in height; the interior was hollow and white with froth. This prodigy of nature crossed the Thames and then began to beat against the walls of the garden of York House, the residence of the duke of Buckingham; as it struck against the bricks it broke into a thick smoke, as if it came from a chimney, and rose high into the air. It then vanished out of sight with two or three peals of thunder. It was considered to be an omen, and perhaps a warning to the duke himself.

Handbills were printed on clandestine presses and distributed through the streets of London.

Who rules the kingdom? The king.

Who rules the king? The duke.

Who rules the duke? The devil.

Three days after the dissolution the king ordered that all copies of the parliamentary remonstrance against Buckingham should be destroyed. By continuing to favour the duke, Charles had provoked a determined and vocal opposition in parliament; the antagonism did not as yet directly touch the person of the king himself, but there were some who looked ahead to possible changes in public affairs. A great constitutional historian, Leopold von Ranke, once suggested that the coming conflict between king and parliament was the product of ‘historical necessity’; whether we accept the phrase or not, it is at least evident that there were forces at work that could not easily be contained or averted.

*

In the course of this parliament, amid the turmoil of domestic affairs, the bishops had also been considering the issues of religion. In particular they had debated the controversy between the puritan members of the Church and those who were already known as ‘Arminians’. These latter were the clergy who believed in the primacy of order and ritual in the customary ceremonies; they preached against predestination and in favour of the sacraments, and had already earned the condemnation of the Calvinists at the Synod of Dort seven years earlier. Some of them were dismissed as mere papists under another name, but in fact they were as much estranged from the Catholic communion as they were from the puritan congregation; they wished for a purified national Church, and their most significant supporter was already William Laud, a prominent bishop now in royal favour. The English Arminians in turn became known as ‘Laudians’, with one of their central precepts concerning ‘the beauty of holiness’ by which they meant genuflections and bowings as well as painted images. There was even room to be made for an incense pot.

The Arminians had been in an equivocal position during the previous reign because of James’s residual Calvinist sympathies and his unwillingness to countenance doctrinal controversy. His son was made of sterner, or more unbending, material. In the weeks after James’s death, Bishop Laud prepared for the new king a list of senior churchmen, with the letters ‘O’ or ‘P’ appended to their names; ‘O’ meant orthodox and ‘P’ signalled a puritan. So the lines were drawn.

The powerful bias towards ‘adoration’, with all the ritual and formality it implied, was deeply congenial to the young king who had already brought order and ceremony to his court; just as he delighted in masques, so he wished for a religion of splendour and mystery. Charles had in any case a deep aversion to puritanism in all of its forms, which he associated with disobedience and the dreadful notion of ‘popularity’; he thought of cobblers and tailors and sharp-tongued dogmatists. Above all else he wanted a well-ordered and disciplined Church, maintaining undeviating policies as well as uniform customs, with the bishops as its principal representatives. It was to be a bulwark in his defence of national stability. Laud himself used to quote the phrase ‘stare super antiquas vias’ – it was important to stand upon ancient roads.

With a sermon delivered in the summer of 1626, Laud aimed a direct hit against the puritans by claiming that the Calvinists were essentially antiauthoritarian and therefore anti-monarchical. In the following year George Abbot was deprived of his powers as archbishop of Canterbury and replaced by a commission of anti-Calvinist bishops. When one Calvinist bishop, Davenant of Salisbury, delivered a sermon in which he defended the doctrine of predestination, he was summoned before the privy council; after the prelate had kissed the king’s hand, Charles informed him that ‘he would not have this high point meddled withal or debated, either the one way or the other, because it was too high for the people’s understanding’. After 1628 no Calvinist preachers were allowed to stand at Paul’s Cross, the centre for London sermons. A joke soon followed, asking a question about the Arminians’ beliefs.

‘What do the Arminians hold?’

‘All the best livings in England.’

Yet the Calvinists, and the puritans, did not go gently into the dark. The victory of the Laudian cause in the king’s counsels, more than anything else, stirred the enmity between opposing religious camps that defined the last years of his reign. It should be added, however, that these doctrinal discontents wafted over the heads of most parish clergy and their congregations who attended church as a matter of habit and took a simple attitude towards the gospels and the commandments.

Within a few weeks of the dissolution of parliament Charles finally determined to banish his wife’s priests and ladies-in-waiting from his court. While parliament had still been in session the queen’s religious counsellors advised her to go on a pilgrimage to Tyburn, in bare feet, in order to pray for the souls of those Catholics who had been executed there. It was soon murmured she had offered up her prayers for the cause of dead traitors rather than of martyrs.

Resentment, and even anger, had already risen between husband and wife. She was merry enough with her French followers but in the presence of the king she was sullen and morose; she apparently took no delight in his company. They quarrelled over her wish to distribute some of her lands and houses among her entourage. ‘Take your lands to yourself,’ Charles himself reports her as saying. ‘If I have no power to put whom I will into these places, I will have neither lands nor houses of you. Give me what you think fit by way of pension.’

‘Remember to whom you speak,’ the king replied. ‘You ought not to use me so.’

They continued to argue and, in the king’s own recollection of the scene, ‘then I made her both hear me and end that discourse’. The court, too, had ears.

At the beginning of August, after a meeting of the privy council, Charles called for the queen. She declined the invitation on the grounds that she had a toothache. So with his council in attendance he proceeded to the queen’s private chambers where he found her French attendants, according to a contemporary letter-writer, Mr Pory, ‘unreverently dancing and curvetting in her presence’. He summarily brought the party to a close, and took Henrietta Maria to his own chambers where he told her that he was sending the French attendants back to Paris ‘for the good of herself and the nation’. The queen was momentarily bewildered but then, in a fit of temper or frustration, broke the windows in the chamber with her bare hands in order to speak to her people in the courtyard below. Whereupon the women ‘howled and lamented as if they were going to an execution’.

The loudest protests could not prevail against the king’s angry will. For some days the French refused to leave the queen’s court. At that point Charles lost all patience. He commanded Buckingham ‘to send all the French away tomorrow out of the town; if you can, by fair means – but stick not long in disputing – otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts until you have shipped them, and so the devil go with them! Let me hear of no answer but the performance of my command.’ He could use a peremptory tone even with his favourite.

Eventually, under the escort of the Yeomen of the Guard, the French boarded the vessels for their return. As they went down to the Thames by the river stairs of Denmark House, a crowd of Londoners hooted and jeered at them; one of them threw a stone that knocked off the hat of Mme de Saint-Georges. The whole episode incensed the French king, who told the English envoy that his sister had been cruelly treated. It was not a propitious moment to alienate Louis XIII.

The dissolution of the parliament, for example, led ineluctably to urgent attempts to raise money for the king’s war against Spain. A loan of £100,000 was requested from the merchants of London, with the crown jewels as security. The appeal was denied. In the following month it was proposed that the freeholders of the various counties would provide a ‘free gift’ to the Crown; the clergy were ordered ‘to stir up all sorts of people to express their zeal to God and their duty to the king’. Charles also decided that he must continue to levy the customs revenues of ‘tonnage and poundage’ even though parliament had not given its consent. When contributions to the ‘free gift’ were about to be collected in Westminster Hall, the cry was raised of ‘A parliament! A parliament!’ Throughout August and September the refusal to contribute to the king’s coffers became widespread. It was then decreed that the king’s plate should be sold.

In the middle of August 200 pressed soldiers and sailors made their weary way from Portsmouth to London in order to demand the money still owed to them. By chance or design they came upon the duke of Buckingham’s coach; they stopped it and pleaded for redress. Buckingham promised to deal with their demands later in the day, but he escaped by way of the Thames and returned to the security of York House. This was in any case a time of deep distress among the general populace. The great nineteenth-century historian of prices, Thorold Rogers, stated that ‘I am convinced, from the comparison I have been able to make between wages, rents and prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence’. The condition of England now looked to some to be beyond repair. One contemporary asked, ‘Is it not time to pray?’

13

Take that slime away

The king’s war against Spain and the imperial forces was not going well. Christian of Denmark had depended upon subsidies from his nephew, Charles, but of course no money was forthcoming; on 27 August 1626, his demoralized forces were defeated by the armies of the Catholic League at Lutter in Lower Saxony. As a result the Protestants of northwest Europe could become the prey of the imperialist armies. On hearing the news of the battle Charles abandoned his summer progress and returned to London where he told the Danish ambassador that he would defend King Christian ‘even at the risk of his own crown and hazarding his life’. The king’s council wished to send four regiments, each comprising 1,000 men, to Denmark, but how were they to be paid?

After the failure of the ‘free gift’ proposed for the king, and the small sums of money raised by the sale of his plate, the time had come for more severe and aggressive measures. In the autumn of 1626 the king imposed what was essentially a forced loan, and demanded from the counties the equivalent of five parliamentary subsidies. His decision was in part prompted by his deep reluctance to call another parliament. He would manage his finances without the meddling of certain malicious members. He wrote to the various lords-lieutenant of the counties ordering them to put forward the names of their local dignitaries, with details of the amounts they could afford; he also wrote to the peers, asking them to be generous in their financial support. He condemned those who cried out against the loans as ‘certain evil-disposed persons’; he declared that he must have the money to subsidize himself and his armed forces and that the duty of all true subjects, in the absence of parliamentary agreement, was ‘to be a law unto themselves’. He might have added, in a phrase of the period, that ‘need knows no law’.

The general response of the country seems for once to have been favourable. The exigencies of the country, and the possible defeat of the Protestant cause, prompted most communities into payment. It was granted that, in an emergency, the king had the right to call upon special aid. The people of Thetford in Norfolk, for example, ‘were all very willing to yield’. By November the forced tax had raised something close to £250,000, sufficient for the king’s immediate requirements. Charles himself admitted that the money had been ‘more readily furnished than I could have expected in these needy times’.

The judiciary was uncertain about the legality of any forced loan, however, and refused to sign a paper of consent to its imposition. The king called in the chief justice and dismissed him from his office as a warning and encouragement to others. He threatened to sweep all recalcitrant magistrates from their benches, but in so doing he damaged the authority of the judges as well as his own. It was reported that from this time forward they were no longer considered to be impartial or disinterested, and it was long remembered that the king had demanded the resignations of those who refused to accede to his requests. If they possessed opinions of their own, they were to be treated with contempt.

Some were still unwilling to pay the forced loan. The wealthier of these recalcitrants were summoned before the privy council, where they were either dispatched to prison or confined in private houses away from their homes and families; the poorer of them were pressed into the army or navy, where their bodies might serve instead of their money. Among those who refused payment were five knights, who decided to challenge the legality of the loan in the courts and were subsequently placed in their county prisons. They would become the cause of much discontent against the king.

Another opponent acquired great popularity in later years. John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire and former member of parliament, was summoned at the end of January 1627 to explain his refusal to pay the forced loan. ‘I could be content to lend,’ he replied, ‘but fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Carta which should be read twice a year against those who infringe it.’ He was claiming, in other words, that the king had challenged the fundamental rights and liberties of the people. He was consigned to the Gatehouse prison at Westminster for a year and was so strictly held that, according to a contemporary account, ‘he never did afterwards look like the same man he was before’. Fifteen years later, in the same prison, Richard Lovelace wrote that:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage …

Hampden’s mind remained at liberty. He became a celebrated parliamentary commander in the eventual civil war.

Charles’s angry will may have begun to cloud his judgement. On the urgent submissions of the duke of Buckingham, it was now proposed to send a naval expedition against France in order to help the rebellion of the Huguenots against Louis XIII. For some months an unofficial maritime war had been taking place between the two countries, leading to the seizure of goods and ships in mutually escalating fashion. At the beginning of December 1626, an order was issued for the capture of all French vessels found in English waters. Three weeks later it was discovered that six or eight ships purchased by Louis from the Low Countries were now at Le Havre ready to sail against England; they had to be either taken or destroyed.

The king was at this time contemplating a war against both France and Spain. To fight against one power was serious enough, but to fight against two at the same time might have been considered akin to folly. In the spring of 1627 new levies of men were dispatched to Portsmouth. It was the old story. Many of them were described as ‘base rogues’; there was no clothing for them, and the surgeons had not been paid. Their lordships in the council were happy to issue general orders without caring to follow them up; they were incapable of estimating military costs, and were often ignorant of local geography. They sent regiments to be billeted without informing the relevant county authorities. They were preparing to send wheat to the proposed army in France, but provided no means to grind it. The absence of any working bureaucracy proved fatal. The confusion could have been prevented only if local self-government had been somehow rendered compatible with national conscription. How could a war in Europe be maintained by the men and administrative machinery of the parishes and counties? A national army raised to fight overseas could be managed only by some form of central administration. The conditions of Stuart England made that impossible. So chaos ensued. The pressed men appeared at Portsmouth:

With an old motley coat and a malmsey nose,

With an old jerkin that’s out at the elbows,

And with an old pair of boots drawn on without hose,

Stuffed with rags instead of toes.

The talk of a further expedition against France meant that London, according to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, ‘was full of soldiers, and of young gentlemen who intended to be soldiers, or as like them as they could; great licence used of all kinds, in clothes, in diet, in gaming’. It was a city of dice and whores.

On 11 June the king himself reviewed the fleet at Portsmouth and dined aboard the admiral’s vessel, where all were merry. The jokes and antics of the king’s fool, Archie, were said to have been memorable. The notion of English superiority at sea, despite the failure at Cadiz, persisted. The fleet sailed on 27 June 1627, with two principal purposes. The first was to contest the ambition of Richelieu, the pre-eminent minister of Louis XIII, to make his sovereign the master of the sea. That role was reserved for England. The second aim of the enterprise was to transport certain regiments to the port of La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France; the Huguenots of that town had taken over its administration and were engaged in a struggle for their religious liberty with the French king. The neighbouring island of Rhé was already under royal control. Buckingham’s strategy was to occupy that part of it which managed the approaches to La Rochelle.

So on the afternoon of 12 July the men leapt into the landing craft, covered by the fire from their ships. Buckingham was everywhere among them, encouraging them and urging them on. Yet his bravado was not enough. The men themselves were ill-disciplined, and not all of them were inclined to fight; some lingered on board and others did not take up the positions assigned to them. Those who reached the shore were in no hurry to move against the enemy. Buckingham went among them with his cudgel to drive them forward. All this was to no avail.

The French seized the opportunity and rode down upon the English bands, threatening to drive them into the sea. Yet somehow a line of defence was established and the French forces, indifficult and swampy terrain, decided to retreat to the safe fortifications of the citadel of St Martin. Buckingham then ordered that the fort should be placed under siege.

The siege turned into a blockade, but the suffering multiplied on both sides. The women and children within the fort cried out for mercy and for pity, where none were available, while Buckingham’s men were worn down by disease and lack of rations. He sent urgent messages to London for more troops and more supplies but the exchequer was, as always, empty. As winter came closer, the English forces grew weaker; they were now practically without food, money, or ammunition. It was reported in the middle of October that the English officers on Rhé were ‘looking themselves blind’ by scanning the seas with their telescopes for the sight of English ships.

A last desperate assault was made upon the fort, but it was discovered that the scaling ladders were too short. There was nothing for it but to retreat. Yet even this was bungled. On 30 October the English were about to cross by wooden bridge to a smaller island from which they hoped to embark upon their ships; but it was not properly defended. Under prolonged fire the infantry and cavalry were lost in confusion. Many of them were shot down, while others drowned. It was estimated that 4,000 Englishmen had been killed, while the rest eventually made their weary way back to Portsmouth or to Plymouth. La Rochelle had not been relieved. A contemporary, Denzil Holles, observed that ‘every man knows that, since England was England, it received not so dishonourable a blow’. It was written of Buckingham himself:

And now, just God, I humbly pray

That thou wilt take that slime away.

It was the second signal disaster, in the space of two years, under the duke’s command. His flags were now hanging in the cathedral of Notre Dame as a token of the nation’s shame. The people were soon calling him ‘the duke of Fuckingham’. Yet the king greeted his favourite with a cheerful face and effectively placed all the blame upon his own shoulders. ‘In this action you have had honour,’ Charles told him, ‘all the shame must light upon us here remaining at home.’ In truth Buckingham was not entirely culpable. He was a brave man but he was no strategist, a failure compounded by his scant attention to detail. Much of the fault, however, must lie with the administration at home that signally failed to provide the requisite money and supplies to its army overseas.

The king called a council of war in which he pressed for money to finance another expedition to La Rochelle which he had bound himself in honour to defend. His advisers counselled him once more to call parliament. It was the only way to raise money without a thousand complaints and legal challenges. Despite the fact that he expected only remonstrance and debate and petition from its members, he suffered himself to be persuaded.

The atmosphere of parliament in 1628 was not promising. At the beginning of February, a month before the members met, letters had been sent out by the king explaining the necessity for ‘ship-money’ to furnish another fleet. ‘Ship-money’ had been a medieval device by which at times of crisis the navy was supplied with boats from the maritime towns; Charles now wished to extend ship-money over the entire country, and to raise it in terms of coin rather than craft. He ordered that the relevant county officials should ‘proceed according to the true worth of men’s lands and estates’. The fresh attempt to levy taxes, on a dubious legal principle, provoked furious discontent. Many of the towns and counties refused to pay. Lincolnshire rejected ‘the unusual and unexpected charge’; Somerset excused itself on the grounds that it ‘will be a precedent of a charge which neither they nor their predecessors did ever bear’. Charles, realizing that his will would be openly flouted and his orders disobeyed, conceded the matter a few days later. He had decided ‘wholly to rely on the love of our people in parliament’.

He was deluding himself. Love was in short supply at Westminster. The king and favourite had not prepared the ground adequately for further demands upon the nation’s resources, and the court had made little effort to pack the Commons with its natural supporters at a time of crisis. A large number of those who met on 17 March 1628 were local men with local grievances; those who had refused to support the forced loan, for example, were almost sure of seats. A dependant of the duke of Buckingham, Sir Robert Pye, was named for one of the constituencies. The rallying cry went up for ‘A Pye! A Pye! A Pye!’ To which his adversaries called out ‘A pudding! A pudding! A pudding!’ and others joined in with ‘A lie! A lie! A lie!’ It was believed that the ‘patriots’ might trump the ‘court party’, and that parliament would not last eight days. It was even suspected by some that Charles and Buckingham had engineered such a result. If the parliament did not vote funds to the king, he would dismiss it and blame it for weakness and incapacity at a time of national danger.

When the king opened proceedings he declared that ‘these are times for action’; he wanted money, and was not interested in ‘tedious consultations’. He then piled insult upon insult by claiming that he did not intend to threaten them ‘for I scorn to threaten any but my equals’. It was becoming clear that the major confrontation would not be with Buckingham, the object of the previous parliament, but with the king himself.

The mood of the Commons was not helped by the captivity of the five knights who, in the previous year, had been imprisoned for declining to pay the forced loan to the king. It was pleaded on their behalf that to refuse an illegal loan was no crime; if there was no crime, they could not remain in prison. The knights brought forward writs of habeas corpus to free themselves from illegal detention and declared that, according to Magna Carta, ‘no man should be imprisoned except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’.

The king’s defenders stated in return that the knights were imprisoned at the especial command of their sovereign, and that no other cause was necessary. There followed suitable obfuscation from the judges of the case. They decreed that they would not give the prisoners bail, but that the crown prosecution should at some stage show cause for their further detention. It was an ambiguous judgment but contemporary observers interpreted it as a victory for the king. He would now be able to commit his subjects to prison without due cause. No redress against his sovereign will was permitted.

Sir Edward Coke therefore brought in a bill that prohibited anyone from being detained in prison without trial for more than two months; but this was not enough to avert the growing anger of the Commons. If the king could imprison his subjects for not providing him with money, as he had done in the case of the dissenting knights, where would his dominion end? ‘Upon this dispute,’ Eliot declared, ‘not alone our lands and goods are engaged, but all that we call ours. These rights, these privileges, which made our fathers free men, are in question.’ Thomas Wentworth, soon to become one of the most prominent men of the age, stood up to argue that there should be no more illegal imprisonment, no more pressing of men for foreign service, no forced loans and no billeting of soldiers on unwilling households.

At the beginning of April a committee of the Commons agreed three resolutions to be put to the king. No free man might be consigned to prison without cause; everyone had the right to a writ of habeas corpus; every prisoner was to be freed or bailed if no cause could be shown for his detention. The king was growing impatient. He wished the members to vote him financial supply without any delay. He did not understand why they were so insistent upon their so-called liberties. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘why should any hinder them of their liberties?’ Parliament was not to be moved. The members decided to draw up a bill on the liberty of persons and property before even considering any matters of money.

Charles seemed to believe that this was no longer a simple matter of grievances to be redressed in the ancient fashion, but an attempt to limit royal sovereignty. A message came to the Commons that the king had taken note that ‘this House pressed not upon the abuses of power but upon power itself’. ‘Power’ was a grand word, but what was its meaning? The debate continued, with the king suggesting that all would be well if only the monetary supply was granted. It was a question of relying upon ‘his royal word and promise’. On 5 May a parliamentary remonstrance was presented to him on the matters under dispute. The king, in reply, was willing to pledge that he would not act in the manner he had done in the past; but he refused to allow that any of his future actions could be determined by parliament. The uses of ‘power’ could be curtailed, in other words, but ‘power’ itself remained his to wield as he saw fit.

This was not a satisfactory conclusion. The royal promises were too vague. No fundamental principles had been agreed. It was still not clear whether the king was above the law or the law above the king. A committee was drawn up to prepare a ‘petition of right’ which itself became an important statement of constitutional principle; the notable historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay described it as ‘the second great charter of the liberties of England’. It cited the statutes passed in the reigns of Edward I and Edward III; it deplored the fact that ‘your people have been in diverse places assembled and required to lend certain sums of money unto your majesty’, and demanded that ‘no freeman be taken or imprisoned’ without due process of law. It also complained that ‘great companies of soldiers and mariners have been dispersed into diverse counties of the realm’. The petition really contained nothing novel or radical, despite the king’s autocratic sensitivities, and can most profitably be interpreted as a conservative document essentially restating what many considered to be the ancient constitution of the country. It can be concluded, however, that the king was not trusted in the same way as some of his predecessors.

By the end of May, after much debate, the petition had been adopted by both the Commons and the Lords; to sweeten what might be for Charles a bitter pill it was also agreed to offer the king five subsidies. In other circumstances he would no doubt have rejected the petition as a sheer abrogation of his rights and duties, but his foreign policy was in disarray. La Rochelle had still received no aid from England, despite the promises the king had made, and the fall of key German towns to the imperialist forces meant that English intervention in northwestern Europe had for all practical purposes come to an inglorious end.

So the king was in urgent need of the money from parliament if he was to retain any shred of honour in foreign policy. Yet he prevaricated. He asked the judges certain leading questions concerning the petition, to which they gave cautious replies. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told the assembled parliamentarians before granting them his answer, ‘I am come here to perform my duty. I think no man can think it long, since I have not taken so many days in answering the petition as you spent weeks in framing it…’ His impatience was clear. With his finances in parlous state, and his foreign devices wrecked, all these men could do was debate and debate about the ‘rights’ of the people. The king then announced his reply to the petition. He declared merely that ‘right should be done according to the laws and customs of the realm’. His words gave no comfort at all, since it was still the privilege of the king to judge what those ‘laws’ and ‘customs’ actually were.

The men of parliament were neither impressed nor reassured. When they met to consider their answer they remained seated for a while in a profound and melancholy silence; when certain members did eventually rise to their feet, their speeches were often interrupted by their tears. Sir John Eliot summoned up their spirits with the stern declaration that at home and abroad all was confused and uncertain. Our friends overseas had been defeated, and our enemies had prospered. The cause of Protestantism in Germany, and the recapture of the Palatinate, had been sacrificed as a result of the king’s obsessions with a war against the French king. One member, Humphrey May, was about to interrupt him; but the rest of the house called out to Eliot, ‘Go on! Go on!’

‘If he goes on,’ May said, ‘I hope that I may myself go out.’

‘Begone! Begone!’

But May stayed to listen to Eliot’s oratory. ‘Witness [the journey] to Cadiz! Witness the next! Witness that to Rhé! Witness the last! And I pray to God we shall never have more such witnesses!… Witness all! What losses we have sustained! How we are impaired in munition, in ships, in men!’ At the close of his impassioned peroration he demanded a statement of grievances, or ‘remonstrance’, to be addressed to the king.

It seems that he was about to name Buckingham as the source of all regal problems, but he was stopped from doing so by the Speaker. The king then sent a message, absolutely forbidding the members further to discuss matters of state on pain of instant dismissal. In the face of this command, touching the liberties of parliament, one member after another rose to speak; others sat on the benches and wept. Joseph Mead, the contemporary writer of newsletters, reported that ‘there appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly, some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom … I have been told by a Parliament man that there were above an hundred weeping eyes; many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions.’ It was a sensitive and tearful age, in which political and religious controversy were not to be distinguished from personal passion. Eventually Sir Edward Coke rose to ask, ‘Why may we not name those that are the cause of all our evils? The duke of Buckingham – that man is the grievance of grievances.’ At that remark the Commons erupted in acclamations. It was said that, when one good hound recovers the scent, the rest come in with a full cry.

On 7 June Charles, now aware of the danger to his favourite and acutely conscious that his financial needs must be satisfied, took his seat upon the throne in the Lords. In front of the peers, and the members of the Commons who crowded to the bar, he ordered that his previous inconclusive answer to the ‘petition of right’ should be removed and that new words take its place. ‘Soit droit fait comme il est désiré.’ This was the usual formula of assent that conferred legality on parliamentary measures: ‘Let right be done as is desired.’ He then added that ‘now I have performed my part. If this parliament have not a happy conclusion, the sin is yours. I am free from it.’ The result was delight in parliament itself, and celebration in the streets beyond; the bells were rung and the bonfires were kindled.

Yet the general satisfaction did not prevent parliament from pressing still further against the king. The remonstrance against Buckingham was presented to Charles on 17 June, to which he responded with a few words. He would consider their grievances ‘as they should deserve’. Buckingham himself was not disturbed by the charges against him and is reported to have said that ‘it makes no matter what the Commons or parliament do, for without my leave and authority they shall not be able to touch the hair of a dog’.

The Commons, not happy with the royal reception of their remonstrance, then went into committee on the question of the king’s finances. The king ordained that the parliament should end in the next week. Whereupon a second remonstrance was prepared declaring that the king’s collection of customs duties and other taxes without parliamentary assent was ‘a breach of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom’. Before the debate could commence the king prorogued the assembly.

So ended the parliamentary session. It has sometimes been seen as one of the most significant in the history of that institution. The members had reminded the king that he was not permitted to violate the liberties of his subjects, and they had obtained from him the recognition of those rights they believed to be most important. Yet the celebrations on the street were perhaps premature. Three days after the conclusion of the proceedings, the king ordered a recall of the second answer he had given ‘to be made waste paper’. He also ordered the reprinting of his first unsatisfactory answer, together with a series of qualifications to his second answer. In his closing speech to parliament, he had said that ‘my meaning … was not to grant any new privileges but to re-edify your old’, which could mean anything or nothing.

He prevaricated in his usual fashion, therefore, and as a result diminished the respect in which he was held. It was difficult to believe now in his good faith. One contemporary diarist, John Rous, noted that ‘our king’s proceedings have caused men’s minds to be incensed, to rave and project [scheme]’. It could of course be claimed, on his behalf, that he was merely protecting the power and authority of the sovereign. It is worth noting that the young Oliver Cromwell, member for the town of Huntingdon, was also part of this parliament.

On the evening of 13 June, thirteen days before the prorogation, Buckingham’s physician and astrologer was noticed leaving the Fortune Theatre in the northern suburbs of the city; his name was Doctor Lambe. A crowd of apprentices recognized him and began to cry out, ‘The duke’s devil! The duke’s devil!’; they pursued him towards a cookhouse in Moorgate Street where he paid a group of sailors to guard him. By the time he left the cookhouse the mob had grown in size; he told them that he ‘would make them dance naked’, no doubt at the end of a rope. Still the people followed him, but at Old Jewry his guard beat them off. The crowd was now intent upon violence and, forcing him towards the Windmill Tavern in Lothbury, they beat him senseless with sticks and stones. One of his eyes was kicked out as he lay upon the cobbles. He was taken to a compter or small prison in Poultry where he died on the following morning.

A couplet was soon being repeated everywhere:

Let Charles and George [Buckingham] do what they can

Yet George shall die like Dr Lambe.

When the rhyme was discovered among a scrivener’s papers he confessed that he had heard it from one Daniel Watkins, who had in turn heard it recited by an illiterate baker’s boy. A Suffolk cleric recalled that ‘about September 3 I had related to me this foolish and dangerous rhyme, fruit of an after-wit’. So poems and ballads, commonly known as ‘libels’, circulated throughout the kingdom; they were often left on stairs or nailed to doors or pinned to gates. Some were even put in the open hands of conveniently placed statues. When the attorney general prosecuted a group of minstrels for singing scurrilous ballads about Buckingham, he referred to these ‘libels’ as ‘the epidemical disease of these days’. They are evidence of the political consciousness of the nation and of the ‘lower sort’, otherwise largely unheard. Even the baker’s boy had opinions about the king and ‘George’.

The temperature of the nation was also being raised by the publication of printed ‘courants’ or ‘corantos’ in ever-increasing quantity; these were regular newsletters or news pamphlets that were circulated in taverns and in marketplaces together with the ‘libels’ that accompanied any great movement in the affairs of state. While many were printed, others were written by hand. The written varieties were considered more reliable, perhaps because they seemed to be more immediate or perhaps because of the authority of the correspondent. One of the writers of these papers called himself ‘your faithful Novellante’ or newsmonger; this is of course the derivation of the ‘novel’.

In a similar movement of information any great stir in the county towns also reached the capital. The newsletters often deliberately helped to provoke controversy or division, so that, for example, the growing polarization between ‘court’ and ‘country’ – between ‘courtiers’ and ‘patriots’ – can only have been assisted by their partisan accounts. Ben Jonson’s masque, News from the New World, portrayed a writer of newsletters declaring that ‘I have friends of all ranks and of all religions, for which I keep an answering catalogue of dispatch wherein I have my Puritan news, my Protestant news and my Pontifical news’.

Manuscript copies of the proceedings and debates of parliament of 1628, known as ‘separates’, were also issued at this time in perhaps the first example of parliamentary reporting. The great speeches of Sir John Eliot and others were thus available to the public, reinforcing the conclusion that parliament had indeed come to represent the will and voice of the people. It is perhaps significant that these papers were often to be found in the libraries of the gentry.

After parliament had been prorogued, the king gave orders that all the gunpowder in London should be taken under royal control. The impression of overweening authority, close to arbitrariness, was further strengthened by the investiture of William Laud as the bishop of London in the following month. His exaltation of the king’s authority, and his demand for exact conformity, did not endear him to the ‘patriots’ of the kingdom who were eager to curb the royal prerogative.

The king also elevated Sir Thomas Wentworth to the peerage. Wentworth had previously taken the part of parliament but, after the publication of the ‘petition of right’, he came to accept the king’s position on matters of sovereign control; he had arrived at the conclusion that the Commons were not fit to manage the affairs of the nation. He was condemned for abandoning his principles but he believed that parliament, not he himself, had changed. He was soon to say in a speech that ‘the authority of a king is the keystone which closes up the arch of order and government’. With men such as Laud and Wentworth around him, what might the sovereign not dare to undertake? The atmosphere of the city was uneasy. It was reported that the citizens were filled with alarm, and were taking up arms for their own defence. It was rumoured that the duke and the king were ready to confront their enemies. No one knew what might happen next.

14

I am the man

The plight of La Rochelle, still besieged by the forces of Louis XIII after the forced withdrawal of the English army, was extreme. Its inhabitants were reduced to eating grass and boiled cow-hides. It was reported that they cut off the buttocks of the dead, lying in the churchyard, for sustenance. The honour of the king, and of Buckingham, determined that they must once more come to the aid of the city. So in the spring and summer of 1628 a fleet was fitted out at Plymouth. The normal delays ensued. ‘I find nothing’, Buckingham wrote, ‘of more difficulty and uncertainty than the preparations here for this service of Rochelle.’ He was so despised at home that he had been asked to wear protection in order to ward off any attempt at assassination. He replied that ‘a shirt of mail would be but a silly defence against any popular fury. As for a single man’s assault, I take myself to be in no danger. There are no Roman spirits left.’

On the morning of 23 August, the duke was staying at the house of Captain Mason on Portsmouth High Street; Mason was a naval administrator as well as an officer. Buckingham was at breakfast with his colleagues and some representatives from La Rochelle; after the meal was over, he came down into the hall of the house. He stopped to converse with one of his officers when a man, who had been standing in the passage, stepped forward and plunged a knife into his chest with the words ‘God have mercy upon thy soul!’ Buckingham staggered back but, crying out ‘Villain!’ managed to draw the knife from the wound. He tried to pursue his assailant but fell against a table before dropping to the floor.

A great outcry went up among those assembled. The foreigners were suspected, and men cried out, ‘A Frenchman! A Frenchman!’ Others shouted, ‘Where is the villain? Where is the butcher?’

‘I am the man. Here I am.’ John Felton, with his sword in his hand, came forward. He might have been killed where he stood, but some of Buckingham’s officers surrounded him. The wife and sister-in-law of the dead man rushed to the corpse. ‘Ah, poor ladies,’ Dudley Carleton informed the queen, ‘such was their screechings, tears and distractions that I never in my life heard the like before, and hope never to hear the like again.’

The news reached the king while he was at prayer in the royal chapel. When it was whispered in his ear his face betrayed little emotion and he stayed in his place until the service was over. Then he hurried to his private apartments, closed the doors and wept. It was reported that the king used to refer to him as ‘my martyr’. Charles believed, in other words, that his favourite had been murdered for carrying out his orders.

Under examination it was revealed that John Felton had served in the disastrous expedition to Rhé, and that Buckingham had denied him promotion. The insult was compounded by the fact that Felton’s wages had not arrived. When he asked the duke how he was supposed to live, Buckingham is supposed to have replied that he could hang himself if he had not the means to survive. Felton returned to London, where he brooded on his misfortunes; he read the latest pamphlets, which accused Buckingham of poisoning the former king and of being the source of all the grievances of the realm. Four days before the assassination he purchased a tenpenny knife at a cutler’s shop on Tower Hill; he then visited a church in Fleet Street and asked the cleric for prayers as ‘a man much discontented in mind’. He made his way to Portsmouth, largely on foot, where he performed the deed. He had sewn certain messages in the crown of his hat, among them one in which he announced himself to be an executioner rather than an assassin: ‘He is unworthy of the name of a gentleman or a soldier, in my opinion, that is afraid to sacrifice his life for the honour of God, his king, and country.’ He had been the righteous killer of a reprobate who had brought Charles and England into jeopardy.

In that opinion, he was almost universally sustained by the response of the people. The joy at Buckingham’s death was widespread and prolonged. Celebratory healths to Felton were drunk in the taverns of London, and congratulatory verses passed from hand to hand. When he was taken through Kingston on his way to the Tower, an old woman cried out, ‘God bless thee, little David.’ When he arrived at the Tower itself, a large crowd had gathered to greet him, calling, ‘The Lord comfort thee! The Lord be merciful to thee!’ Charles was much offended by these manifestations of popular sentiment, and he wrapped himself more deeply in the mantle of cold authority.

The day before Felton’s arrival at the Tower, Buckingham’s funeral had taken place at Westminster Abbey in a hurried and apparently graceless manner with approximately one hundred mourners. But even this ceremony was mere theatre. The body had been privately interred the night before, to avoid any demonstrations against it by the London crowds. The poet and dramatist James Shirley wrote an appropriate epitaph:

Here lies the best and worst of fate,

Two kings’ delight, the people’s hate.

Felton himself, after due trial, was executed at Tyburn; his body was then displayed in chains at Portsmouth dressed in the same clothes he wore when he killed the duke.

The king now took sole charge of the administration. It was reported by his secretaries that he dispatched more business in two weeks than Buckingham had managed in three months. He told his privy council that he would postpone the opening of parliament until the following year. He retained the same ministers as before, but of course he did not trust them as much as he had trusted the duke. There would be no more royal favourites except, perhaps, for Henrietta Maria, who, after the death of Buckingham entered a much more intimate relationship with her husband; it soon became apparent that, after the initial discord, the royal family was at last a happy one. The poet and courtier Thomas Carew claimed that Charles had ‘so wholly made over all his affections to his wife that he dare say that they are out of danger of any other favourite’. Carew’s friend, William Davenant, composed some dialogue at the time for a play entitled The Tragedy of Albovine, King of Lombardy:

‘The king is now in love.’

‘With whom?’

‘With the queen.’

‘In love with his own wife! That’s held incest in court.’

Six children followed this reconciliation.

Buckingham had not sailed for La Rochelle, after all. Yet in the early autumn of the year a third expedition was sent to the besieged town; it was no more successful than its predecessors. The fleet dared not take the initiative, and its fire-ships were sunk by French ordnance. When the English did eventually land, they were repelled with firmness by the French besiegers. The king’s promises of assistance had come to nothing. So in October 1628, the authorities of the town signed a treaty of surrender to the French king; their great walls were demolished. Whereupon Louis XIII announced a policy of toleration to his Protestant subjects, who were to enjoy freedom of worship throughout his kingdom. The fears of the Protestants had been based upon the mistaken belief that their religion was in danger of being extirpated, and it could be said that the foreign policy of Charles I represented a thorough misunderstanding of the policy of Louis XIII.

In the absence of Buckingham the king was more uncertain and irresolute than ever. Should he make a treaty with France against Spain, or a treaty with Spain against France? There was no question of waging outright war against either nation. The king did not have the resources to do so, or any realistic prospect of raising money by other means. In any case the zeal for war was rapidly ebbing in the country. There might be some delay in signing the relevant treaties, but a period of peace had become inevitable.

A day after the assassination of Buckingham a prominent courtier, Sir Francis Nethersole, remarked that ‘the stone of offence being removed by the hand of God, it is to be hoped that the king and people will now come to a perfect unity’. Yet the opening of the parliament in January 1629 did not bode well for national harmony. The abiding issue was still that of religion. A royal declaration had been issued in the parliamentary recess that ‘the Church has the right to decree ceremonies, and authority to decide controversies of religion’. But what Church? William Laud, now bishop of London, had helped to draw up the proclamation and in the same period a number of his supporters had been promoted to vacant sees. These were the Arminians or ‘high churchmen’ who rejected the precepts and practices of Calvinism.

For parliament this was a direct challenge to the old and familiar creed of the Church. Sir John Eliot told his parliamentary colleagues that the prelates, with the king’s authority, might ‘order it which way they please and so, for aught I know, to bring in Popery and Arminianism, to which we are told we must submit’. Another member, Christopher Sherland, said of the Arminians that ‘they creep into the ears of his Majesty, and suggest, that those that oppose them, do oppose his Majesty…’

It had become a confrontation, therefore, between the Calvinists of the old Church and the Arminian bishops of the new. The recently appointed prelates declared that theirs was the true creed of the Church of England and condemned their opponents as puritan, synonymous with zealotry and nonconformity. It was claimed, for example, that the Calvinists were ready to take up the cause of individual conscience against the precepts of the established faith and the prerogative of the sovereign. The Arminian bishops were in turn accused by their opponents of preaching passive obedience and the divine right of kings. The Calvinists believed in predestination, grace and the gospel; the Arminians put their faith in free will, the sacraments and deference to ceremonial order. It was not conceived by any contemporary that these were controversies that could stir a civil war, but this was the moment when members of parliament and members of the court party began to take sides.

The Commons, animated by the speeches of Eliot and others, affirmed that they alone had the right to determine the religion of the country. John Pym, who had already earned the king’s wrath, stated that ‘it belongs to the duty of parliament to establish true religion and to punish false’. The members resolved that the faith they espoused was that agreed in the reign of Elizabeth ‘and we do reject the sense of the Jesuits and Arminians’. The king, perhaps justifiably, considered this to be a breach of his prerogative in spiritual matters; he was, after all, ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. The Commons had also laid aside matters of ‘tonnage and poundage’, the customs duties destined for the king’s purse, thus depriving him of his traditional revenue. Charles adjourned parliament on 25 February for a week. Both sides were in fact vying for mastery.

This was the point when Eliot decided to appeal to the country in the face of an obvious threat. If the king took the further step of dissolving parliament, its future would be uncertain. If he could obtain his revenues elsewhere, there was no reason at all why he should ever summon it again. He had had, in any case, enough of parliament; he called it ‘that noise’. The Arminians were eager to avoid parliaments, also, for the simple reason that they believed they would be persecuted by them; they were of course wholly justified in their suspicion. Eliot had already said of them that ‘they go about to break parliaments, lest parliaments should break them’.

So all things were leading to a final quarrel. On 2 March the Speaker, Sir John Finch, announced to the Commons that it was the king’s wish that they should adjourn for a further eight days. Such a request had in the past always been accepted. Now the members stood up shouting, ‘No! No!’ Finch moved to rise from his chair, thus abruptly ending the session, but some of the members barred his way and thrust him back to his seat. ‘God’s wounds,’ Denzil Holles told him, ‘you shall sit till we please to rise.’ Eliot then announced that the members would have the privilege of adjourning themselves after he had read out a declaration of their intentions.

‘What would any of you do,’ Finch asked, ‘if you were in my place? Let not my desire to serve you faithfully lead to my ruin.’ He was in an impossible situation, with incompatible loyalties to parliament and to the king. Some members, realizing the gravity of the approaching confrontation, rose to leave. But the serjeant-at-arms was ordered to close the doors; when he hesitated, another member locked the doors and put away the key.

Eliot once more demanded that the declaration he had prepared should be read. ‘I am not less the king’s servant for being yours,’ the Speaker replied. ‘I will not say that I will not put the reading of the paper to the question, but I must say, I dare not.’ Eliot then spoke out in a ferocious attack upon the evil councillors that surrounded the king; he also assaulted Arminianism as an open door to popery.

Knocks were heard on the outer door. The king had ordered the serjeant-at-arms to bring away the mace, thus depriving the proceedings of any authority. Sir Peter Heyman then turned upon the Speaker. ‘I am sorry’, he told him, ‘that you must be made an instrument to cut up the liberties of the subject by the roots … The Speaker of the House of Commons is our mouth, and if our mouth will be sullen and will not speak when we have it, it should be bitten by the teeth and ought to be made an example; and for my part I think it not fit you should escape without some mark of punishment to be set upon you by the House.’ This was one of the first indications of the arbitrary and authoritarian impulses of some parliamentarians.

Talk of punishment was vain, however. It was whispered that the king had sent a guard to force its way into the chamber and end the proceedings. So Denzil Holles swiftly proposed three resolutions. Anyone who tried to introduce popery or Arminianism into the kingdom would be considered a capital enemy. Anyone who should advise the levying of customs duties, without the authority of parliament, would similarly be considered as an enemy. If any merchant should voluntarily agree to pay the duties of ‘tonnage and poundage’, he would be ‘reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England and an enemy to the same’. The resolutions were thereupon adopted. Having delivered his message to the nation, Holles asked that the house now adjourn itself, to which there were immediate calls of ‘Ay! Ay!’ The doors were thrown open and the triumphant parliamentarians streamed out to announce the news. They would not meet again for another eleven years.

Two days later the king announced the dissolution of parliament, and at the same time nine of its members were arrested. Sir John Eliot was the particular object of the king’s wrath; Charles blamed his angry tirades against Buckingham for the favourite’s death. In his speech to the Lords Charles did not censure the majority of the Commons, but reserved his anger for ‘some few vipers amongst them that did cast this mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes’. It was reported that he was afterwards in very good spirits.

A few days later was published His majesties declaration of the causes which moved him to dissolve the last parliament, in which he declared that the men whom he imprisoned had ‘more secret designs which were only to cast our affairs into a desperate condition, to abate the powers of our crown and to bring our government into obloquy that in the end all things may be overwhelmed with anarchy and confusion’. He was not alone in this belief. Many considered that the members had gone too far in their opposition to the king. Even a fervently Protestant MP, Simonds D’Ewes, considered that the events of 2 March represented ‘the most gloomy, sad and most dismal day for England that happened in five hundred years last past’; he also blamed the turmoil on ‘diverse fiery spirits in the House of Commons’.

The immediate aftermath of the dissolution was one of dismay and bewilderment. The majority of the merchants refused to pay the customs duties demanded of them, on the grounds that a future parliament would condemn them as betrayers of the kingdom; so they simply declined to trade. Their recalcitrance lasted for two months until the prospect of financial ruin weakened their resolution.

The nine members of parliament arrested after the scenes in the chamber remained in prison. They could no longer appeal to the Lords or the Commons but they could take their case to the courts; they could appeal to the rule of law in a fundamental attempt to question the powers of the king. They claimed parliamentary privilege, and in particular ‘freedom of speech in debate’ that had been asserted by the Speaker since the late sixteenth century; four of them, including Eliot, refused to answer questions on anything pertaining to parliamentary business. The king wished them to be tried for conspiracy and treason, but the judges were reluctant to do so. The question of privilege was vexatious, and Charles eventually asked them to cease speaking in riddles.

At the beginning of May the imprisoned men sought to obtain their release on the grounds of habeas corpus, according to the precepts of the ‘petition of right’. After much argument and debate the judges decided that the prisoners had indeed the right to bail; the king then demanded that they reach no verdict until they had consulted their colleagues on the judiciary. This was essentially an appeal for delay, so that the long legal vacation could intervene; the men would therefore languish in gaol for the duration of the summer. At the beginning of October the prisoners were taken from the Tower to Serjeants’ Inn, where they were promised their release as long as they signed a bond of good behaviour; most of them refused to do so, on the grounds that this would implicitly justify their arbitrary imprisonment for the last eight months. They were intent upon inflicting the maximum embarrassment on the king and his officers.

The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘affairs grow more bitter every day, and by these disputes the king has made his people see that he can do much more than they may have imagined’. The imprisoned members were testing, piece by piece, the lengths to which Charles would go. When the chief judge of the exchequer made it clear that he was inclined to support parliamentary privilege, the king suspended him from office. It was clear that the guilt of the prisoners was simply to be assumed. The king’s action seems to have clarified the opinion of the remaining judges, who declared that the defendants were indeed punishable by law.

The members of parliament had reached the end of the legal process. Three of them, including Eliot, were once more imprisoned at the king’s pleasure; the others were detained for shorter periods before being released. It had been a victory for the king, in theory, but it had gravely impaired his authority and reputation. He had revealed himself to be inclined to arbitrary and perhaps illegal measures in order to sustain his sovereignty; he saw treachery and conspiracy in what others considered to be justifiable dissent; he was wilful, and even implacable. Yet those who supported him put a different interpretation upon his actions. Charles had conducted himself in the manner of a true sovereign; he was determined to rule the country without the intervention of enemies or malcontents. He was guided by God. This may be considered to be the tone or principle of the next period of his reign.

15

The crack of doom

After the dissolution of parliament in March 1629, the king entered upon a period of personal government that lasted for eleven years. To all intents and purposes he had begun an experiment in absolute monarchy, with the prospect of an acquiescent nation obeying his commands. He was not ill-equipped for that role. One prominent lawyer, Sir Robert Holborne, observed that ‘the king could drive a matter into a head with more sharpness than any of his privy council’. Yet in practice he delegated much of his work to various officials, preferring the pleasures of the hunt to the world of practical affairs.

It was in certain respects a time of silence. There were no debates in parliament, and no elaborate declarations or proclamations from the throne. As in a masque, the king had no need to speak; his presence itself ensured majesty and harmony. As in a masque, also, he could command the workings of the great stage of the world. Charles had a high enough opinion of his supreme office, not unmixed with moral self-righteousness, to believe this.

In the absence of parliament, and with a relatively tame judiciary, the freedoms of the subject were to a certain extent reliant upon the judgement and goodwill of the sovereign. The people of England were simply asked to trust his benevolent intentions. It is true that in many respects he was a gentle monarch, in the course of whose reign no political executions took place. Yet some still considered him to be a tyrant riding over the liberties of the nation and parliament. The continued detention of Sir John Eliot and two colleagues was cited as an example.

Unparliamentary government was not in itself fruitless. It was a time of improvements in transport, with roads repaired and new canals dug; the national postal service was improved, with a regular post on the principal roads taking the place of an irregular system of carriers; in the absence of any national emergency, the administration of local government was strengthened and extended. That domestic peace, however, depended upon external tranquillity. The king could not afford war. And, as long as he could raise sufficient money for his own government by fines and taxation, there was no need to call parliament.

The foreign policy of the nation therefore, in a sense, made itself. Peace was concluded with France in the spring of 1629 and, nineteen months later, a truce was arranged with Spain. By the treaty with France Charles was obliged to abandon the cause of the Protestant Huguenots on the understanding that the principles of his marriage treaty with Louis XIII need not be strictly applied; he need not, for example, grant freedom of worship to Roman Catholics.

The peace with Spain made no mention of the restoration of the Palatinate to Charles’s sister and brother-in-law; the fate of the region was now the subject of promises and expressions of goodwill. In another clause of the treaty it was agreed that Spanish silver could be minted in England before being shipped to Antwerp, where the Spanish were engaged in fighting the Protestant Dutch. It was an open question whether these alliances with the Catholic powers would become a cause of dissent in England. Some believed the people to be cheerful and acquiescent; others suggested that the anger or antagonism against the king had simply been driven below the surface.

The public reaction to both pacts, however, was subdued. Little interest was taken in the matter. Charles had no European policy as such, except for the wish that his sister might be returned to the Palatinate with her husband; but with no army or money to enforce his desires he was reduced to inaction. Money was the key. It was said that Henrietta Maria herself had been obliged to close the shutters of her private apartments in case visitors saw the ragged coverlets of her bed. There were times when, roused by Protestant appeals in Europe for assistance, the king asked his council what he might do. He was told that a new parliament would need to be called to raise the money. This was unthinkable. So nothing was done. The French ambassador remarked that lack of revenue made the English government one ‘from which its friends can hope for no assistance, and its enemies need fear no harm’.

The king’s discomfort was compounded when a new Protestant champion arose in Europe to counter the imperialist triumphs in Poland and Bohemia, Austria and Bavaria, Flanders and the Rhineland. In 1629 the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, marched into Germany and embarked upon a military conquest as unexpected as it was unprecedented. His chancellor wrote that ‘all the harbours of the Baltic, from Kalmar to Danzig, throughout Livonia and Prussia, are in his majesty’s hands’. Gustavus Adolphus had created a new Swedish empire and thereby took on the mantle of a Protestant Messiah, the Lion of the North.

How was the English king to treat with such a man? Gustavus Adolphus demanded men and materials from a fellow Protestant king. But if Charles entered into an alliance with the Swedish king, his important friendship with Spain would come to an end; and the trade with Spain was very important. If he refused an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, he would lose honour and influence if the Swede was eventually victorious.

So Charles prevaricated and tried half-measures to maintain his credit on both sides. He agreed that a private force of 6,000 Scottish soldiers, under the command of the marquis of Hamilton, could join the Swedish army; but the expedition was a disaster, made worse by epidemic disease and insubordination. The king then sent a delegation to the Swedish king ‘to enter into a league … upon emergent occasions’. This could mean anything or nothing. In practice it meant nothing. At one point Charles banned the news gazettes from reporting on the Swedish victories because they cast such an unhappy light on his own ineffectiveness.

The fortunes of the Swedish king came to an end in a battle outside Leipzig, where his body was found among a heap of naked corpses. The king of England had done nothing to counsel or to assist him. English inaction, or inertia, had created what one anonymous pamphleteer, in ‘The Practice of Princes’, described as ‘a Hispanolized, Frenchified, Romanized or Neutralized’ policy. Yet there may have been virtue in that. One week of war can undo a decade of peace. England escaped the devastation that was inflicted upon central Europe.

Funds still had to be raised by one means or another. The fines against the illegal enclosure of common land were more strenuously exacted. The king also raised much money from a great scheme to drain the fens of eastern England. Many articles of ordinary consumption were granted for a fee to monopolists, who could then set their own prices; the articles included iron and salt, pens and playing cards, starch and tobacco, seaweed and spectacles, combs and gunpowder, hats and hops. Patents could also be purchased for such projects as the manufacture of turf or the weighing of hay and straw, for ‘the gauging of red herring’ and the gathering of rags. In a contemporary anti-masque an actor came on stage with a bunch of carrots on his head, representing a ‘projector’ or speculator ‘who begged a patent of monopoly as the first inventor of the art to feed capons fat with carrots’. The king demanded from the Vintners’ Company a payment of £4 on every tun of wine; when they refused to pay the new tax, the Star Chamber forbade them to cook and serve meat for their customers. The loss of trade meant that they came to an ‘understanding’ with the court, amounting to £30,000 a year.

There was also the curious case of soap. The Company of Soapmakers was in 1631 granted a monopoly to manufacture soap made out of domestic ingredients, such as vegetable oil, rather than out of imported whale oil or fish oil. The company agreed in turn to pay the king an annual tax of £20,000.

The previous soap manufacturers were prosecuted in the Star Chamber for selling the old product; many of them were fined and some of them were imprisoned, while their pans and vats were destroyed. They were of course incensed at their loss of livelihood, but many housewives also complained that the new soap did not wash as well as the old. In seventeenth-century England even the most domestic disputes had a religious dimension. It was believed that the Company of Soapmakers was in fact controlled by the Catholic friends of Henrietta Maria; some of the new monopolists were rumoured to be financed by the Jesuits. Many Protestant households, therefore, objected to the new soap on theological grounds. It became known as the Popish Soap.

So the authorities put on a public demonstration of the efficacy of the new soap. In the Guildhall, under the gaze of the lord mayor, the aldermen and the lieutenant of the Tower, two washerwomen used the rival products in tubs placed beside each other. It was meant to prove that the new soap cleaned and lathered better, but the demonstration does not seem to have persuaded the London public. Eighty great ladies signed a testimonial to the effect that their maids preferred the new soap. This also had no noticeable effect. The old soap was still being sold under the counter. Another demonstration by washerwomen in Bristol was meant to prove that the new product washed ‘as white … and as sweet, or rather sweeter’ than the old. This may be considered a harbinger of modern advertising campaigns. It also made little impression. The old soap was still being manufactured and, as a result of its scarcity, sold at a much higher price.

More personal exactions were made by the king. Individuals were summoned for taxes they had not thought to pay. In 1630, for example, a royal commission was set up to fine those gentlemen who had not taken up knighthoods at the time of the king’s coronation. It was a legal requirement that had faded out of memory through disuse. Those who were summoned were aggrieved at this unexpected imposition, and most tried to excuse themselves. Yet they were not successful. By these means the king raised the money he wished for, but at the expense of the affection and loyalty of some of his subjects.

Other expedients were also practised. Royal rights over forest lands were resurrected; those who had encroached upon forest boundaries were charged large sums. Those who had built houses in London ‘upon new foundations’ were also fined. Mr Moor had erected forty-two new houses in the neighbourhood of St Martin-in-the-Fields, for example, and was fined £1,000 and ordered to demolish the houses; when he refused, the sheriffs took them down and sold the materials to pay the fine.

What, then, was the king’s general attitude to the property of his subjects? Could he take it away at will? If he could impose new taxes on his people without recourse to the courts or to parliament, might he not be able to emancipate the Crown from its traditional obligations? Many suggested that the king could indeed tax without consent, and that public good took precedence over private right. Others in turn argued that the Englishman’s right to the property of his goods and estates was absolute, and could not be removed from him by any court or sovereign. Domestic peace was also unsettled by the disastrous harvest of 1630, which pushed up the price of grain from 4 shillings to 14 shillings a bushel; the prospect of starvation alarmed many communities, and food riots occurred in Kent, Hampshire and elsewhere.

The fractious atmosphere of the time was also evident in the court’s actions against the notable antiquary Robert Cotton. His library had been sealed up, in the belief that it contained ancient tracts and pamphlets that took the side of parliament against the king. History had to be cleansed. One tract was found, according to the archbishop of York, ‘containing a project how a prince may make himself an absolute tyrant’. Cotton was taken into custody, and interrogated by the Star Chamber before being released. Yet his life of study was effectively over. He was no longer allowed to enter his library and learned men were advised to cease their visits to him. He told one friend that ‘my heart is broken’. He was so worn by anguish and grief that, according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘his face, which had been formerly ruddy and well-coloured, such as the picture I have of him shows, was wholly changed into a grim, blackish paleness near to the resemblance and hue of a dead visage’. He expired soon after, the victim of a nervous and turbulent time.

At the end of 1629 William Laud had, with the assent of the king, composed a ‘Declaration on the Articles of Religion’. It was designed to impose order and uniformity upon the English Church by prescribing the forms of worship, the words of the prayers and even the gestures of the clergy. It was ordained that all clerics must accept to the letter the Thirty-Nine Articles, a demand which would in effect prohibit any discussion by Calvinists on such matters as predestination; these were condemned by the bishop of Chichester as ‘deep and dark points which of late have so distracted and engarboyled the world’. The declaration was conceived thoroughly in the spirit of the monarch, who believed in order above all things. Certain observers thereby concluded that Church and nation were to be reduced to uniformity.

Laud was, in the capital, considered to be little more than a papist in love with ritual and with ceremony. A paper was scattered about the streets of London declaring ‘Laud, look to thyself, be assured thy life is sought. As thou art the fountain of all wickedness, repent thee of thy monstrous sins, before thou be taken out of the earth.’ Laud was not discomfited. ‘Lord,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I am a grievous sinner; but I beseech thee, deliver my soul from them that hate me without cause.’ An opponent of Laud by the name of Alexander Leighton, having written an appeal to parliament entitled ‘Sion’s Plea against the Prelacy’, was condemned to the Fleet Prison for life; he was also to be taken to the pillory at Westminster and whipped before one of his ears was cut off, one side of his nose slit, and his face branded with the mark of ‘S.S.’ for ‘Sower of Sedition’. He was then to be returned to prison for a period of recuperation before being whipped again and his other ear removed. He was afterwards ‘to be shut up in close prison, for the remainder of his life’. Part of this sentence was remitted, for the sake of decency, but he was not released from prison until 1641 by which time he could not see, hear, or walk.

His wife was also briefly committed ‘for her disordered tongue’, according to a news-writer of March 1630, ‘and a button maker for putting his mouth to the keyhole of the prison door where he lay, and crying aloud “Stand to it, doctor, and shrink not” and such like words’. In the following month an oatmeal-maker was brought before a religious commission for his unorthodox opinions. He was condemned by the bishop of Winchester, another ally of Laud, as a ‘frantic, foolish fellow’. The maker of oatmeal replied, ‘Hold thy peace, thou tail of the beast that sittest at the lower end of the table.’

The king expressed his appreciation of Laud’s work, however, by appointing him as chancellor of Oxford University in the spring of 1630. Laud worked at once to re-establish order and decorum in the ancient university. The students had previously venerated Bacchus and Venus who were, as Laud wrote, ‘the cause of all our ills in church and state’. Discipline was to be restored, thus promoting order and harmony; extravagant dress and long hair were not to be permitted, and alehouses were to be regulated. In the course of Laud’s chancellorship, new buildings were erected and new studies were placed upon the curriculum with learned clerics to expound them. The city was refurbished, as it were, in glowing vestments.

The glory of Charles I was also celebrated. In 1630 the lord treasurer, Richard Weston, commissioned a statue of the king on horseback; it was a noble decoration for the garden of his country house in Roehampton. It soon became the abiding image of Charles’s rule. In 1633 Van Dyck portrayed the king riding through a triumphal arch in the classical style; the king becomes a Roman conqueror. Two years later the same artist composed Charles I on Horseback, in which the king calmly and effortlessly directs the steed on which he rides. Images of chivalry, and of the Christian knight, are conflated with the representation of order.

It is also an image of the sovereign controlling animal nature, bringing the strength and energy of the horse into harness with his own will and desire. The Spanish ambassador, in the same spirit, had once flattered Charles by noting that the horses upon which he was mounted ‘laid down all their natural and brutish fierceness in his presence’. The equestrian portraits are thereby a depiction of the manner in which reason must be able to control passion. This is of a piece with Charles’s own conception of his rule and of his evident belief that he must control his own nature, by restraint and formality, before he could properly govern the entire kingdom. Art was for the king one of the great emblems of power. Yet it was more than that.

Lucy Hutchinson observed that ‘men of learning and ingenuity in all the arts were in esteem and received encouragement from the king, who was a most excellent judge and great lover of paintings, carvings, gravings and many other ingenuities…’ Charles had seen the artistic wealth of the royal court in Madrid and wished to cultivate a similar state of magnificence. He was in addition an adept and instinctive judge of painting and sculpture; if he had not been a king, he would have been a connoisseur. He was able to recognize the identity of an artist at first glance; this was known as a ‘knowledge of hands’. He knew where ‘gusto’, passion or taste, was to be found. He commissioned Rubens, Mytens, Inigo Jones and Van Dyck; by the end of his reign he had collected some 500 paintings and tapestries, among them nine Correggios, thirteen Raphaels and forty-five Titians. The Dutch once sent him five paintings to persuade him to resolve a dispute about herring fisheries; the city of Nuremberg gave him two Dürers. He also collected coins and medals; he enjoyed composing music. His love of order was everywhere apparent. When a collection of the busts of senators and emperors of ancient Rome reached Whitehall, he himself took pains to arrange them in chronological order.

A papal emissary to England recalled the occasion when the king, in the company of Inigo Jones, was informed that a consignment of paintings had arrived from the Vatican; he ‘rushed to see them, calling to him Jones … the very moment Jones saw the pictures he greatly approved of them, and in order to study them better threw off his coat, put on his eyeglasses, took a candle, and together with the king, began to examine them very closely, admiring them very much…’ The gift included works by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto. This excitement reveals a sovereign very different from the conventional image of his coldness and reserve. Rubens was to say of Charles’s court that it was remarkable ‘not only for the splendour of the outward culture’ but for ‘the incredible quality of excellent pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this court … I confess I have never seen anything in the world more rare.’

The authority of the king’s image was amplified by the evidence of his fertility. In the spring of 1630 Henrietta Maria presented him with a son and heir, also to be named Charles. She wrote to a friend in France that her child was ‘so serious in all that he does that I cannot help deeming him far wiser than myself’. The baby never clenched his fists, and so it was predicted that he would be a king of great liberality. He was also healthy and strong, looking at four months as if he were already a year old. So the birth augured well. The infant Charles was also the first in English history to be born as heir to the three kingdoms.

Thomas Carew, gentleman of the bedchamber, told the earl of Carlisle that the king and queen were ‘at such a degree of kindness as he would imagine him a wooer again and her gladder to receive his caresses than he to make them’. Charles wrote to his mother-in-law, Marie de’ Medici, that ‘the only dispute that now exists between us is that of conquering each other by affection’. More importantly, perhaps, the birth of a son seemed to indicate that the Stuart dynasty might continue until the crack of doom.

16

The shrimp

All seemed quiet. The appearance of calm may have been deceptive, but it was peaceful enough in comparison with the violent years yet to come. Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, claimed in his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England that during the personal rule of Charles ‘the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation’. Another historian, Sir Philip Warwick, in his Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I, wrote that ‘from the year 1628 unto the year 1638, I believe England was never master of a profounder peace, nor enjoyed more wealth, or had the power and form of godliness more visible in it’.

On 9 January 1631, Love’s Triumph, a masque devised by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, introduced Henrietta Maria as the Queen of Love in Callipolis or ‘the city of beauty and goodness’. When the scene dissolved the ‘prospect of the sea’ appeared, into which setting the king himself walked in the guise of Neptune with a train of sea-gods and Cupids. He was then apostrophized as ‘the centre of proportion, sweetness, grace!’ At the end of the performance ‘the throne disappears, in place of which there shooteth up a palm tree with an imperial crown on the top’.

In that same month, by royal command, a ‘book of orders’ was published. It decreed that two justices of the peace should meet each month in petty sessions to maintain the operations of local government. The overseers of the poor were to ensure that poor children were placed in apprenticeships; the constables and churchwardens of the parish were ordered to discipline offenders and to chase away vagrants. It was also the responsibility of the two justices to make certain that the roads were in a good state of repair and that, in general, law and order were imposed. They were also obliged to submit reports to London concerning ‘how they found the counties governed’.

Although the king himself may not have drawn up these provisions, they bear all the marks of his paternal authority and of his predilection for good order. Charles was also determined that the local gentry and nobility should play an active part in the government of their neighbourhoods; a proclamation was issued ordering any of them still dwelling in London to return to the countryside where they belonged. At a later date another royal declaration ordered that urban vintners should stop selling tobacco and that innkeepers should not dress or serve game birds; this was believed to be a device to make the city less attractive to the country gentry.

The servants of the Crown were going about their duties. At the beginning of March William Laud preached at Paul’s Cross in celebration of the sixth anniversary of the king’s accession. He remarked that ‘some are so waspishly set to sting that nothing can please their ears unless it sharpen their edge against authority’; he added, in sententious fashion, that ‘I hope I shall offend none by praying for the king’.

The king’s other great councillor, Sir Thomas Wentworth, had been dispatched to York as lord president of the north in order to curb disorder. At the beginning of 1632 he was further promoted to become lord deputy of Ireland, where his cause of promoting ‘good and quiet government’ could be tested. He was a man of strong will and of commanding temper. He believed implicitly in royal authority and in public duty. He told one of his relatives that ‘a life of toil and labour’ was his effective destiny. The portraits of him by Van Dyck show him to be profoundly animated by zeal or, perhaps, by vision.

Laud and Wentworth shared similar precepts and preoccupations that were embraced by them under the name of ‘Thorough’, by which they meant a disciplined and energetic response to the problems of the realm. They would not be diverted from their self-imposed task, and held nothing but contempt for those ministers of the state whom they regarded as lax, cowardly, or concerned only with enrichment. The administration of the king and his councillors – parliament was put to one side – should be enabled to push through those policies that were in the public interest. The vital alliance was that between Church and Crown in the cleansing of the kingdom.

The lord treasurer, the earl of Portland, was described by them as ‘Lady Mora’ or ‘Lady Delay’; Laud also described the chancellor of the exchequer, Lord Cottington, as ‘Lady Mora’s waiting maid’ who ‘would pace a little faster than her mistress did, but the steps would be as foul’. This represented the difference between complaisant councillors and committed reformers.

Wentworth, like Laud, believed that only royal sovereignty could bring order out of disorder and discipline out of anarchy. As lord deputy of Ireland, therefore, he was inclined to drive himself over any opposition, to consolidate the authority of the king, to lead the people – and in particular the recent English settlers – into the pastures of obedience and docility. He was intent upon recovering the powers of the king, as he said, by ‘a little violence and extraordinary means’. By his own light he succeeded, but only at the cost of arousing hostility and even hatred. He brought to his task a less than attractive combination of austerity and obstinacy. It was said, in A Collection of Anecdotes and Remarkable Characters, that ‘his sour and haughty temper’ meant that he expected ‘to have more observance paid to him than he was willing to pay to others’.

Laud was more practical than the inspired Wentworth. The bishop wrote to the lord deputy that ‘for the State, indeed my Lord, I am for thorough … and it is impossible for me to go thorough alone’. ‘Thorough’ and ‘through’, spelt in an identical way in the seventeenth century, were for all intents and purposes the same word. Laud added that ‘besides, private ends are such blocks in the public way, and lie so thick, that you may promise what you will, and I must perform what I can and no more’. Nevertheless Wentworth was relentless, describing himself at his subsequent trial as ‘ever desiring the best things, and never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better’.

In this period, too, the proclamations of the privy council were given legislative authority; the privy councillors could make laws on those matters which the actual courts of law neglected or avoided. The other governors of the realm maintained the emphasis upon law and order. It was reported in London by a news-writer, John Pory, that ‘on Sunday, in the afternoon and after supper, till midnight, my lord mayor visited as many taverns as he could, and gave warning to the vintners not to suffer any drinking in their houses, either that day or night; and the same afternoon also he passed Moorfields and put down the wrestling of the western with the northern men, which was there usual on that afternoon’. The Star Chamber also enjoyed new authority with its enforcement of the proclamations from the council and its pursuit of transgressors.

One of the most prominent of these public offenders, William Prynne, had already aroused controversy with his strongly puritan opinions. He wrote tracts and pamphlets endlessly, his servant bringing him a bread roll and pot of ale every three hours; he was known as a ‘paper-worm’. John Aubrey wrote that he ‘was of a strange saturnine complexion’, and Christopher Wren said that he had the countenance of a witch.

In the late autumn of 1632 Prynne’s Histriomastix: A Scourge of Stage Players launched a general assault upon the plays and players of London, with a particular attack upon the practice of boys playing female roles and of women themselves appearing on the stage. He wrote that the actresses were ‘notorious whores’ and asked if ‘any Christian woman be so more than whorishly impudent as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in man’s apparel and cut hair), in the presence of sundry men and women’.

Unfortunately for Prynne the queen, Henrietta Maria, took part in a theatrical pastoral entitled The Shepherds’ Paradise just a few weeks after the publication of his tract. The play itself was in the best possible taste. It was recorded of its audience that ‘my lord chamberlain saith that no chambermaid shall enter, unless she will sit cross-legged on the top of a bulk’. It was a serious affair, and was of such complexity that the production lasted for seven or eight hours.

Nevertheless Prynne’s attack upon female players was interpreted as an attack upon the queen herself; he had also denounced public dancing as a cause of shame and wickedness, and it was well known that the queen was fond of dancing. Prynne was sent to the Tower, where he faced prosecution by the Star Chamber and by the high commission on religious affairs. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life, fined £5,000 and expelled from Lincoln’s Inn where he had practised law. The severity of the judgment was enhanced by the brutal order that both of his ears should be cut off as he stood in a public pillory. The sentence was duly carried out. One of his ears was cut away at Westminster, and the other in Cheapside.

Another opponent of the court, Sir John Eliot, died in confinement at the end of 1632. The king’s enmity against him was such that, despite pleas for his health, he had never been allowed to leave the Tower in the course of his imprisonment. He had sent a petition to the king in which he declared that ‘by reason of the quality of the air I am fallen into a dangerous disease’; he also stated that ‘I am heartily sorry I have displeased your majesty’. The king replied that the petition was not humble enough. Eliot’s humiliation was continued after his death. His son petitioned the king to allow his father’s body to be carried into Cornwall for burial. Charles scrawled at the bottom of the petition, ‘Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’ He was in other words to be interred in the Tower.

A sequence of letters between the members of the Barrington family, in the early months of 1632, gives the flavour of the time. Thomas Barrington, writing from Holborn,informs his mother that ‘women are cruel this year, Saturn reigns with strong influence: another wife has given her husband a potion of melted lead, but it was because he came home drunk’. His wife, Judith Barrington, wrote to her mother-in-law that ‘I find all my friends sick or dying, the air is so bad … Here is little news stirring, much expected at the latter end of this week … This day was the poor woman burned in Smithfield that poisoned her husband, which is wondered at the cruelty, since there was so much cause of mercy to her.’ A week or so later she reported that ‘the smallpox is so much here that we wish ourselves with you’. In May Thomas Barrington wrote that ‘the current of London runs so contrary and diverse courses as that we know not which way to fasten on certain truths’. London was the city of disease, of cruelty and of false reports.

In the spring of 1633 the king returned to his homeland. He made a leisurely journey northwards, and reached Edinburgh by the middle of June. His relations with Scotland in the past had not been entirely happy; at the beginning of his reign he had asked for the restitution of Church lands in Scotland to the Crown. The measure was not in the end advanced, but it stirred bad blood. When some Scottish lords came to defend the existing landowners, the king made a characteristic remark. ‘My lord,’ he said to the leader of the deputation, ‘it is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.’ Charles himself did not seem especially to like the Scots and, in particular, the Highlanders, whom he described as ‘that race of people which in former times hath bred so many troubles’. Yet his principal feeling was one of indifference rather than hostility.

He was crowned as king of Scotland in Holyrood Abbey on 18 June, and it was remarked that he had been happy to wait eight years for the privilege. The delay showed no overriding desire to endear himself to his people. The coronation itself was marked of course by ritual and formal ceremony that did not impress the natives; for most Scots, brought up in the Presbyterian faith, it smacked of prelacy and popery.

One of the complaints advanced by the Scots concerned the introduction of English ritual into the service. Yet the chief proponent of that ritual was about to be raised to the highest see. When Bishop Laud came into the king’s presence for the first time after the journey to Scotland he was greeted with unfamiliar words. ‘My Lord’s Grace of Canterbury, you are very welcome.’ Charles had just heard of the death of George Abbot, the previous archbishop.

As bishop of London Laud had been the king’s principal religious adviser, but his authority had been ill-defined. Now as archbishop he became the source and spring of English religion, with an energy and purpose that the king himself lacked. Yet, at the beginning of his ministry, he was beset by anxiety. He wrote to Thomas Wentworth that ‘there is more expected from me than the craziness [infirmity] of these times will give me leave to do’. Nevertheless like Sisyphus he was ready to put his shoulder to the stone.

He was a man of quick temper, small in stature, inclined to irritability and impatient of contradiction. His harshness and rigour quickly made him enemies, particularly among the puritans whom he excoriated. He was known as ‘the shrimp’, ‘the little urchin’ and ‘the little meddling hocus-pocus’. The king’s fool, Archie, made a pun before a royal dinner. ‘Give great praise to God, and little laud to the Devil.’ Yet no one could question the new archbishop’s sincerity or personal honesty. One English diplomat, Sir Thomas Roe, told the queen of Bohemia that Laud was ‘very just, incorrupt … a rare counsellor for integrity’.

Thomas Carlyle described him as ‘a vehement, shrill voiced character confident in its own rectitude, as the narrowest character may the soonest be. A man not without affections, though bred as a college monk, with little room to develop them: of shrill, tremulous, partly feminine nature, capable of spasms, of most hysterical obstinacy, as female natures are.’ He was something between an Oxford don and a bureaucrat. A portrait of him by Van Dyck represents him as austere and quizzical. Not that he would have put much faith in the artist. He described his paintings as ‘vanity shadows’.

He was highly superstitious and kept a record of his uneasy dreams. He dreamed that he gave the king a drink in a silver cup; but Charles refused it, and called for a glass. He dreamed that the bishop of Lincoln jumped on a horse and rode away. On one night ‘I dreamed that I had the scurvy; and that forthwith all my teeth became loose. There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help.’

Soon enough his influence was being felt. In October 1633 he and the king caused to be republished King James’s Declaration of Sports, which had granted a degree of entertainment and recreation on the Sabbath. The king’s ‘good people’ were not to be discouraged from dancing or archery, while the sports of leaping and vaulting were also permitted; ‘may-games, whit ale and morris dances, and the setting up of maypoles’ were perfectly acceptable to the authorities. It was almost like a return to the more picturesque religion of earlier centuries. For the Calvinists and the stricter sorts of Protestant, the Declaration of Sports was a poisoned document set to destroy true religion. Certainly it had unforeseen consequences. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, wrote that many of his contemporaries were ‘of opinion that this abuse of the Lord’s Day was a principal procurer of God’s anger, since poured out on this land, in a long and bloody civil war’. The vicar of Enmore in Somerset declared from the pulpit that ‘whatsoever the king is pleased to have done, the king of heaven commands us to keep the Sabbath’.

In the same period it was determined that the plain communion table should be moved from the middle of the church to the eastern end where it was to be railed off; it then more closely resembled the altars of the old faith. The priests now bowed towards it, and some of them employed the sign of the cross to bless it. William Prynne had already satirized the Eucharistic rite when the celebrant …

came near the bread, which was cut and laid in a fine napkin, and then he gently lifted up one of the corners of the said napkin, and peeping into it till he saw the bread (like a boy that peeped after a bird-nest in a bush), and presently clapped it down again, and flew back a step or two, and bowed very low three times towards it … then he laid his hand upon the gilt cup … so soon as he pulled the cup a little nearer to him he let it go, flew back and bowed again three times towards it.

This was a keen burlesque of the services imposed by Laud.

The archbishop was concerned to augment the beauty and holiness of the rites of the Church, thus inducing respect if not awe. He had previously complained that ‘’tis superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his bitch into an alehouse’. It soon became a serious offence for a minister not to bow his head at the name of Jesus. Choirboys came in two by two, and were instructed never to turn their backs upon the altar. Music returned to the cathedrals.

Laudianism, however, was not popery. The archbishop had a distaste for Roman Catholicism that was quite genuine. He was hoping to create a truly national Church devoid of the zealotry and intolerance of the puritans as well as the Mariolatry and superstitions of the papists. He had no appetite or aptitude for theological argument and, on the everlasting debate between free will and predestination, he said only that ‘something about these controversies is unmasterable in this life’. He was indifferent towards Geneva and Rome, and looked only towards the king.

Laud was also attempting to fashion religious developments of a structural kind; he appointed only bishops who were of firmly anti-Calvinist persuasion. Charles himself believed that the episcopacy was the fundamental buttress of his sovereignty; no bishop, as his father had said, implied no king. It was believed essential to augment clerical power. The corporations of cathedral towns were called upon to appoint more clerics as justices of the peace, and were further obliged to attend Sunday service in their ceremonial robes. Within a short time Laud was joined by two bishops in the king’s council; Bishop Juxon of London, who had been only the king’s chaplain two years before, was appointed as lord treasurer of the kingdom. The last cleric to fill the post had been promoted in the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509). England might be considered to have re-entered the world of medieval polity.

A series of ‘visitations’ to the various parishes followed in order to investigate cases of clerical disobedience and nonconformity. In Manchester, for example, twenty-seven clerics were charged with failing to kneel at the time of communion. Richard Mather of Toxteth, near Liverpool, admitted that he had never worn the surplice. ‘What!’ exclaimed the Visitor, ‘Preach fifteen years and never wear a surplice? It had been better for him that he had gotten seven bastards!’

The old processions and festivals also returned. With the republication of Declaration of Sports came a general relaxation of social custom. The ritual of ‘beating the bounds’ was soon followed by the parishes of London; such holy days as All Saints were celebrated once more. The custom of the Lord of Misrule returned with its attendant atmosphere of party games, dancing and drinking of spiced ale. These feasts had never completely died away but, in the new atmosphere of anti-puritanism, they flourished.

*

The king was further to test the loyalty of the nation. In the autumn of 1634 writs of ship-money were issued once again, for the first time in a period of peace. They had previously been sent out in 1626 and 1627, in the face of a threat of war against both France and Spain; payments had been grudging, but they had been made, and so it was deemed plausible to repeat the exercise. The proximate cause for the reintroduction of the tax was the prospect of new combinations in Europe. The French and Dutch had entered an unlikely alliance to dominate the continent, and a secret treaty between England and Spain was believed to be necessary.

There was no hope, however, that the members of the king’s own council would countenance the fact of an English force taking the part of Spain against the Dutch; how could the king ally himself with the pre-eminent Catholic power attacking a Protestant republic? Once again Charles relied upon intrigue with any or every party that seemed likely to favour him. He had to conceal his alliance with Spain and pretend that the ships were being prepared as a defence against attacks from all quarters. It was said that English trade had to be protected from Tunis and Turkey as much as from France or Spain. So the king claimed the right of sovereignty in all of his seas, including the English Channel and the North Sea.

The first writs of ship-money were dispatched only to the ports and to the towns along the coasts; they were ordered to provide a sum sufficient to fit out a certain number of ships as well as to maintain them and their crews for six months. The money was to be given to a collector appointed by the Crown. London alone attempted to oppose the tax, having been required to raise one fifth of the total, but was quickly subdued by threats and talk of treason. The Venetian ambassador commented of ship-money that ‘if it does not altogether violate the laws of the realm, as some think it does, it is certainly repugnant to usage and to the forms hitherto observed’.

Yet for what purpose was the fleet being prepared? What was the king to do with his newly fitted ships? Was it enough that they should enforce his sovereignty of the seas by making sure that passing vessels struck their flags and lowered their topsails? In the spring of 1635 the first fleet raised by ship-money finally took sail. The forty-two vessels, nineteen of them over 50 tons, set forth with orders to curb piracy, protect English traders, prevent the Dutch from fishing in English waters and, according to one news-writer, Edward Rossingham, ‘to preserve the sovereignty of the narrow seas from the French king who hath a design long to take it from us and therefore he hath provided a very great navy’. They were meant, in other words, to do everything and nothing.

So ship-money had indeed been raised, out of fear or loyalty, and the success of the tax ensured its survival; in the following year it was enlarged to take in the whole country. It was argued that, since the counties and urban corporations were interested in their ‘honour, safety and profit’, it was appropriate that ‘they should all put to their helping hands’. The appeal worked, and the tax of 1635 became the model for the next five years in which 80 per cent of the money demanded was actually paid.

In 1634 the first hackney carriages were allowed to stand for hire in the streets of London, a novelty that generated the usual amount of horror and indignation. It was proposed that no hackney could be hired for a journey of less than 3 miles. The suggestion was accepted on the grounds that too many coaches going on brief expeditions would create a ‘lock’ or traffic-jam in the streets, damage the pavements and increase the price of hay. Other contemporaries suggested that no unmarried gentleman should be allowed to ride in a hackney carriage without being accompanied by his parents.

17

Sudden flashings

In the summer of 1636 Charles and Henrietta Maria paid a visit to Oxford; it was now, in essence, Laud’s university. Yet only the academic officials paid homage to the royal couple. As they rode through the streets there were no calls of ‘God save the king’. The scholars and the citizens alike were silent. This did not bode well, and was a salutary reminder that Charles was steadily building up grievances among his people.

Among the aristocracy and the greater gentry, for example, much anger had been aroused by the exactions of the various courts Charles had established to extort money – the court of wards and the court of forest law principal among them. Of the former it was said that even those devoted to the Crown saw that they might be destroyed, rather than protected, by the law. Of the latter, the fines for encroachment upon the royal forests had, according to Clarendon, ‘brought more prejudice upon the court, and more discontent upon the king, from the most considerable part of the nobility and gentry in England, than any one action that had its rise from the king’s will and pleasure’.

Charles was also in the process of alienating his subjects elsewhere. He had unilaterally published a body of ‘canons’ to be adopted by the Scottish Church; the people themselves interpreted these requirements as nothing more than new laws imposed upon them by strangers. No one could receive the sacrament except upon his or her knees. No man should cover his head during the divine service. No person should engage in spontaneous prayer. The clergy should not allow private meetings for the expounding of Scripture. These were all novel commandments, and caused much disquiet that soon enough would break out in riot.

The puritan reaction in England to the Laudian orthodoxy was no less strong if, perhaps, more carefully concealed. In London, for example, a secret network of conventicles and discussion groups had been established; they communicated with each other by means of manuscript tracts and sermon notes as well as by conferences and ‘conversations’ behind closed doors. This was a world of fasts, of prayer meetings and of scriptural discussions in such centres of sectarianism as Coleman Street and Friday Street in the capital.

Lady Eleanor Davies, who had the reputation among the godly of Lichfield as a prophetess, entered Lichfield Cathedral on one communion day at the end of 1636 with a brush and kettle. She announced that she had come to sprinkle her ‘holy water’ on the hangings and newly decorated communion table; the holy water itself was composed of tar, pitch and puddle-water which she then liberally distributed with her brush. She was deemed to be out of her wits and sent to Bethlehem Hospital. By curious chance Charles and Henrietta Maria had visited that institution just a few months before, according to Edward Rossingham, ‘to see the mad folks where they were madly entertained. There was every one in his humour. Two mad women had almost frighted the king and queen, and all their attendants, out of the house, by their foul talk.’

Lady Eleanor Davies was not alone in her disgust at the Laudian innovations. One puritan writer, John Bastwick, complained that ‘the Church is now as full of ceremonies as a dog is full of fleas’. Oliver Cromwell, looking back at the end of his life, remarked in a speech to parliament that Laud and his allies had wished ‘to innovate upon us in matters of religion, and so to innovate as to eat out the core and power and heart and life of all religion, by bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies…’ The conditions were, in a phrase of the day, ‘too hot to last’.

In the summer of 1637 three sectarians were led before the Star Chamber on the charge of maligning the bishops of England. William Prynne was well known to the judges, and four years earlier had lost his ears before being consigned to the Tower; yet somehow he had managed to write pamphlets in his prison cell which were then smuggled away by friendly visitors.

He was joined now in court by Henry Burton and John Bastwick. In The Litany of John Bastwick the latter had written, ‘From plague, pestilence and famine, from bishops, priests and deacons, good Lord, deliver us!’ When the chief justice saw Prynne he asked the officers of the court to hold back his hair so that he might see the scars of the mutilated ears. ‘I had thought Mr Prynne had no ears,’ he said, ‘but methinks he hath ears.’ The executioner had not been as savage in his punishment as he might have been, which left open the possibility that a further assault might finally sever them altogether. The sentences were as brutal as they were predictable. Loss of ears, and life imprisonment, were the verdicts upon the three men.

Many contemporaries were still unsympathetic to the condemned. News-writer John Burgh remarked that ‘they are desperate mad factious fellows, and covet a kind of puritanical martyrdom or at least a fame of punishment for religion’. In that expectation they were successful. The previous sentence upon Prynne had been carried out with no obvious signs of public displeasure. Now the three men were cheered to the foot of the pillory, their path strewn with herbs and flowers. They stood in the pillory for two hours. They were not attacked with dirt or stones. They talked freely and cheerfully to the crowd around them, and their words were greeted by some with applause and shouts of approval. Burton’s wife sent him a message that ‘she was more cheerful of that day than of her wedding day’.

After two hours it was time for the more severe punishment. The hangman began to cut away at the ears of Burton, and as each ear was severed there came a roar of pain from the members of the crowd, so deep was their sympathy with the victims. When the blood came streaming down upon the scaffold, some of the crowd dipped their handkerchiefs in it. The stumps of Prynne’s ears were further mutilated in a very contemptuous and brutal fashion. Bastwick was similarly treated. The fortitude of the men, in not flinching during their ordeal, aroused much admiration.

The prisoners were then taken out of London to their respective dungeons in the castles of Carnarvon, Launceston and Lancaster. When Prynne travelled with his gaolers along the Great Northern Road, he was greeted with shouts of sympathy. When Burton left London by the Western Road, calls of ‘God bless you!’ echoed around him. Bastwick was followed by what seemed very like a triumphal procession. It was not a victory for Archbishop Laud. The rigour of the punishment had not overawed the crowd and Wentworth told the archbishop that ‘a prince that loseth the force and example of his punishments loseth withal the greatest part of his domain’. The fate of the three men only served to alienate still further those who believed that Laud and the king were becoming a weight upon the body politic. The archbishop’s own chaplain, Peter Heylyn, later wrote that the whole occasion ‘was a very great trouble to the spirits of many very moderate and well-meaning men’. A proverb was current: ‘To break an egg with an axe’.

The news from Edinburgh was even more disturbing. In the spring of 1637 a new Service Book for Scotland was published by the king. It applied much of the English Book of Common Prayer and abolished most of John Knox’s Book of Common Order. It was in effect another English imposition, bearing all the marks of the intervention of Archbishop Laud. It was first read in public at St Giles, recently become the cathedral church of Edinburgh. The dean ascended the pulpit, but when he began to recite the words of the new book, shouts of abuse came from the women of the congregation. ‘The Mass is entered among us!’ ‘Baal is in the church!’ The bishop of Edinburgh then stepped forward to calm the angry women and begged them to desist from profaning ‘holy ground’. This was not a phrase to be used in front of a puritan assembly, and further abuse was screamed against him; he was denounced as ‘fox, wolf, belly god’. One of the women hurled her stool at him which, missing its target, sailed perilously close to the head of the dean.

The magistrates were then called to clear the church but the women, once ejected, surrounded the building; its great doors were pummelled and stones were flung at its windows as the unhappy ceremony proceeded to its end. Cries could be heard of ‘a pape, a pape, antiChrist, stone him, pull him down!’ When the bishop came out, the women shouted ‘get the thrapple out of him’ or cut his windpipe; he barely escaped with his life. This was not a spontaneous combination of irate worshippers, however, but a carefully organized assault on the Service Book; certain nonconformist gentry and clergy had been planning the event for approximately three months, even though the scale of the riot was not perhaps anticipated. The incident became known as ‘Stony Sunday’.

On hearing the news of the riots in Edinburgh the king ordered the immediate suppression of the malcontents. In a city where the majority of the populace was on their side, this was not a plausible command. Laud asked the Scottish bishops if they were ready to ‘cast down the milk they have given because a few milkmaids have scolded at them. I hope they will be better advised.’ Yet the archbishop was the one in need of counsel. The Edinburgh magistrates stated that no member of the clergy would be able to read the new service. Most of the ministers abhorred its contents, and all of them feared further riot.

Petitions were now arriving from all parts of Scotland deploring the papistical intentions of the new prayer book, so far from the old form and worship of the Kirk. The Scottish council wrote to the king that ‘the murmur and grudge’ at the innovations were unprecedented. Their remonstrances became all the more urgent after a second riot broke out in Edinburgh; the news had spread that the lord provost had tried to prevent a petition against the Service Book from reaching London. The petitioners, as they became known, were now by far the largest element in the city.

A moderate Presbyterian minister, Robert Baillie, confided to his journal that ‘what shall be the event, God knows … the whole people thinks popery at the doors; the scandalous pamphlets which come daily new from England add oil to this flame; no man may speak anything in public for the king’s part, except he would have himself marked for a sacrifice to be killed one day’.

Charles did not know what to do. He had not anticipated such an unwelcome act of defiance and disobedience. It is reported that his first words were ‘I mean to be obeyed’. Yet how was he to enforce his will? He had no army, and only unwilling support from his representatives in Scotland. A solution to the immediate impasse was then suggested by members of the Scottish privy council. The petitioners would leave Edinburgh and return to their homes, leaving a group of commissioners to speak and act in their name. It was clear that, in effect, these commissioners would become the voice of Scotland.

It is possible to see the incidents in Edinburgh as a prelude to the more fatal antagonisms that led to civil war in England; yet no one at the time could have conceived such an outcome. One event just followed another in apparently random or at least unconnected fashion, and only at a later date could a pattern be discerned. Some time afterwards, for example, Henrietta Maria called the new order of service for Scotland ‘that fatal book’. But who would have believed that a woman throwing a stool would mark the beginning of a great war?

Scotland had set an example of defiance that was regarded with admiration by some in England. Charles ruled over three kingdoms that were as vitally connected as filaments in a web; a disturbance in one part affected the equilibrium of the whole. Another great controversy concerning the king’s authority now emerged in London. In the summer of 1637 the king decided to call John Hampden before the court of the exchequer for refusing to pay his portion of ship-money. Hampden had been imprisoned ten years earlier for declining the king’s forced loan, but the experience does not seem to have curbed his independence.

At the beginning of the year twelve senior judges had declared that, in the face of danger to the nation, the king had a perfect right to order his subjects to finance the preparation of a fleet; in addition they declared that, in the event of refusal, the king was entitled to use compulsion. Leopold von Ranke believed that ‘the judges could not have delivered a more important decision; it is one of the great events of English history’. The royal prerogative had become the foundation and cornerstone of government. Simonds D’Ewes wrote that if indeed it could be exacted lawfully, ‘the king, upon the like pretence, might gather the same sum ten, twelve, or a hundred times redoubled, and so to infinite proportions to any one shire, when and as often as he pleased; and so no man was, in conclusion, worth anything’. It was a powerful argument, to be tested in the trial of John Hampden.

The court case lasted from November 1637 until the following summer and was watched with extreme interest by the political nation. It was a test of power between sovereign and subject, and was considered to be one of the most significant cases ever put to judgement. The prosecution essentially rested upon two points. The Crown contended that all precedents, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons, allowed the king to gather money for his navy; Hampden in turn maintained that previous methods of taxation had in no way resembled the recent writs for ship-money sent to the inland counties. The Crown also defended the reasonableness of its claim for financial assistance in the face of foreign danger; by the time any parliament could be assembled to debate the matter, the country might have been attacked or even invaded. Hampden argued that the writs had been sent out six months before any ships were fitted, and there had been ample time for an assembly at Westminster; the writs were in any case contrary to statutes forbidding any tax without the consent of parliament.

The court was packed with spectators. A squire from Norfolk had come to London simply to attend the trial but when he arrived ‘at peep of day’, the crowd was already so great that he could get only 2 or 3 yards from the door of the court. Those who did obtain entrance seem largely to have taken Hampden’s part. When one of his counsels, Oliver St John, opened the defence he was according to a puritan observer, Robert Woodford, ‘much applauded and hummed by the bystanders, though my lord Finch [the chief justice] signified his displeasure for it’; at the close of St John’s argument, ‘they adventured to hum him again’. The argument continued beyond the walls of the court, where debates between the opposing sides could become very fierce. The vicar of Kilsby, in Northamptonshire, had exhorted his congregation ‘to pay his majesty’s dues’; whereupon the parish constable told him that the king’s taxes were worse than the pharaoh’s impositions upon the Israelites. Conversations of a similar kind took place all over the realm.

The judges deliberated and eventually gave a decision in favour of the court, seven against five. It was the smallest of all possible majorities for the king. Nevertheless the words of the chief justice in his support were repeated throughout the country. Finch declared that ‘acts of parliament to take away his royal power in the defence of the kingdom are void’. Or, as another judge had put it, ‘rex est lex’ – the king is the law. The ancient rights of Englishmen were of no importance, and the declarations of Magna Carta or the ‘petition of right’ were inconsequential. Neither law nor the parliament could bind the king’s power. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, states that ‘undoubtedly my Lord Finch’s speech made ship-money much more abhorred and formidable than all the commandments by the council table and all the distresses taken by the sheriffs of England’.

When a judge at the Maidstone assizes read out the judgment of the court in London the people, according to a contemporary, Sir Roger Twysden, ‘did listen with great diligence and after the declaration made I did, in my conceit, see a kind of dejection in their very looks…’ A justice of the peace in Kent wrote in a memorandum that ‘this was the greatest cause according to the general opinion of the world was ever heard out of parliament in England. And the common sort of people are sensible of no loss of liberty so much as that hath joined with it a parting from money.’ The opposition to ship-money became much more fierce than before; some refusing to pay now cited the arguments made by those judges who had favoured John Hampden.

In the middle of the trial, on 9 February 1638, the king issued a proclamation to Scotland in which he stated that ‘we find our royal authority much impaired’ and declared that all protests against the new prayer book would be deemed treasonable. The king’s response was characteristic. Any attempt to curb his power was of course treachery and he believed that, if he made any compromise or accommodation, he would be fatally weakened; he did not want to become as powerless as the doge of Venice and he informed his representative in Scotland, the marquis of Hamilton, that he was ‘resolved to hazard my life rather than suffer authority to be condemned’. He was not simply referring to his authority but to the concept of ‘authority’ itself. Yet he could be wily and secretive at the same time, and told Hamilton that ‘I give you leave to flatter them with what hopes you please’. Since the leaders of the prayer book rebellion were essentially traitors, they could be deceived and betrayed with impunity.

In response the commissioners in Edinburgh, representing the petitioners, drew up a national covenant in which the precepts of the Kirk were re-established. Among its declarations was one that the innovations of the new prayer book ‘do sensibly tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and tyranny, and to the subversion and ruin of the true reformed religion and of our liberties, laws and estates’. The people were in truth not rebelling against their king per se, but at the alliance of secular and religious authority that he had come to represent. The elect were now bound to God in solemn contract, as the Israelites once had been, with a clear moral obligation to fulfil His commands. ‘If thou walk before me, and serve me, and be perfect … I am willing to enter into covenant with thee’ (Genesis, 17: 1–2). The national covenant was carried in triumph through the streets, accompanied by crowds of women and children who alternately cheered and wept.

The people of Scotland took their lead from the inhabitants of Edinburgh and signed the covenant in their hundreds of thousands, declaring that they would rather die than accept the new liturgy. They raised their right hands to heaven before they took up the pen. Many of the orthodox Scottish bishops fled to England, with the archbishop of St Andrews, John Spottiswoode, lamenting that ‘all we have been doing these thirty years past is now thrown down at once’. This came from the king’s attempt to master his subjects in the same way as he mastered his horse.

The responses of others were mixed. The great minister of France, Richelieu, was inclined to support and even to aid the Scottish rebels on the grounds that trouble for the English king was always welcome. In turn Charles did not wish the world to believe that his authority had been spurned by some of his subjects; all his life he feared to appear weak. The English dissenters, already excited and agitated by the trial of John Hampden, welcomed the defiant actions of the Scots; many of them hoped that the Scottish example might be followed closer to home. The most impassioned denunciations of the king’s policy could be read in the verses and broadsides distributed in the streets of London.

Laud wrote to Wentworth that ‘my misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on’. Wentworth himself was urging the king to stricter measures. He believed that, if the arrogance and bravado of the Scots were not ‘thoroughly corrected’, it would be impossible to know how far the evil of dissension might spread. Some people were already wary of the coming conflict. When in 1638 one of the godly in the Wiltshire village of Holt found a beggar at his door he refused to give him alms on the grounds that ‘shortly you will be pressed for war, and then you will fight against us’.

When the general assembly of the Church of Scotland met in Glasgow Cathedral towards the end of November, the bishops were charged with violating the boundaries of their proper authority. The marquis of Hamilton attended in the name of the king, and he reported to his master that ‘my soul was never sadder than to see such a sight; not one gown amongst the whole company, many swords but many more daggers – most of them having left their guns and pistols in their lodgings’. The voting of course went against the orders and wishes of the king. Hamilton thereupon declared the assembly dissolved but, after he had left the church, the delegates voted to continue their debate. They also passed a resolution declaring that the Kirk was independent of the civil power, in effect stripping Charles of any religious supremacy he had previously claimed.

For the next three weeks the delegates revised the whole form of the Scottish faith that had recently been imposed upon them. The new liturgy was abolished. The bishops were excommunicated. The king’s writ no longer ran in Scotland.

The preparations for war were now intensified. The king ordered a convoy of military supplies to be sent from the Tower to Hull while the marquis of Hamilton advised him to take in hand the further fortification of Berwick, Carlisle and Newcastle. The lords-lieutenant of the counties were ordered to organize and exercise their local militias for readiness in combat. The leaders of the Scots, in turn, divided their country into seven military regions from which recruits would be taken; the commissioners also requested that the Scots mercenaries, fighting for the cause of Protestantism in Germany, should come home for a more significant war. Their lord general, Alexander Leslie, knew that they would bring with them new forms of military training and expertise taught by Dutch and Swedish commanders. It was believed that they would be a far more professional force than their English adversaries.

Omens were noticed and reported. A Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Henry Slingsby, confided to his diary an old prophecy that, after the victories of the Saxons and Normans, England would next be mastered by the Scots. Freak winds and lightning were seen. Henry Hastings reported to his father that, at eight o’clock one evening, the clouds dispersed to reveal apparitions ‘like men with pikes and muskets, but suddenly the scene being changed they appeared in two bodies of armed men set in battalion, and then a noise was heard and sudden flashings of light seen and streaks like smoke issuing out of these clouds’. The forces of war were gathering.

18

Venture all

At the beginning of 1639 Charles sent out a summons for the soldiers of his kingdom to meet him at York. The peers of the realm were ordered to appear in person, together with the retinues that befitted their status. The trained bands – the local militia made up of citizens – of the north were required to attend under the command of the lords-lieutenant of their counties. The rest of the men were conscripted, mainly from the midlands; they were formerly ploughmen or carters or thatchers, and had no stomach for a fight. Neither trained nor organized, they were being sent to unknown regions of the country for a cause about which they knew very little or nothing.

The men raised from Herefordshire attacked and wounded their officers before returning to their towns and villages. Other conscripts proceeded to pillage the hamlets through which they passed. They tore down the hated enclosures that parcelled up previously common land; they fired the gaols and freed the prisoners, many of whom had been detained for refusing to pay royal taxes; they attacked the undergraduates of Oxford; the more precise of them attacked the altars and communion rails of the churches. They were, as one royalist commander, Lord Conway, put it, ‘more fit for Bedlam or Bridewell’ than the king’s service.

The peers and nobles, gathered about the king by old feudal bonds, were equally reluctant to risk their lives in the royal cause. Many of them pleaded sickness, and the majority of them travelled to York against their will. If the king lost, their lands and even their lives might not be spared by the Scottish covenanters; if he won, and became supreme, their liberties would be further at risk. The prospect of another parliament, for example, would recede even further into the distance. The puritan party, in particular, had no reason or desire to fight against their co-religionists in Scotland. It would be an act of faithlessness on an unparalleled scale. Many of them believed that the war was being fought on behalf of the episcopate, and that its principal aim was to restore the bishops to their authority in Scotland. So the war became known as bellum episcopale or the Bishops’ War. It was all the more hated by some because of it.

Yet it was abhorred principally because it was an unfamiliar and unwelcome intrusion into the affairs of the nation. England had avoided foreign wars, and enjoyed domestic peace, for many years; no shots had been fired, and no drums heard, in the land. Yet that quiet was about to be shattered. Sir Henry Slingsby wrote that it was ‘a thing most horrible that we should engage ourself in a war one with another, and with our own venom gnaw and consume ourself’. The long period of peace also meant that the instruments of war had been degraded; the swords and muskets and pikes, laid aside, were now tarnished or broken. Horses were in short supply.

At the end of March 1639, the king rode into York to meet his army. Charles and his principal officers were lodged at the King’s House, the residence of the lord president of the north, while other officers and gentry found room in the various inns of the city such as the Talbot and the Dragon. The king was also graciously pleased to watch his ‘cavaliers’ exercising on their horses in the meadows known as the ‘ings’. The ‘cavaliers’ were now a recognizable body of officers attached to the king’s cause; some of them were already professional soldiers who had seen service in the European wars, while others were the sons of gentlemen in search of martial glory. Many of them, however, earned a reputation as braggarts and as anti-puritan bullies given to drink and gaming. According to a pamphlet of the time, ‘Old News Newly Revived’, anyone with ‘a tilting feather, a flaunting periwig, buff doublet, scarlet hose, and a sword as big as a lath’ could be mistaken for one. They were now ready to fight what one of the king’s men, Sir Francis Windebank, in turn castigated as ‘those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snotty-nosed, loggerheaded, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed, villainous, barbarous, bestial, false, lying, roguish, devilish … damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scottish Covenant’.

The king seems to have presumed, as Clarendon put it in his History of the Rebellion, that his calling together the peers of the realm with their retinues meant that ‘the glory of such a visible appearance of the whole nobility would at once terrify and reduce the Scots’. In that presumption he was quite wrong. He could not even rely upon the nobility itself. Alarmed by talk of collusion with the covenanters, the king demanded that the lords and gentry at York should take an oath of allegiance. Two of them declined, Lord Brooke and Viscount Saye refusing to do so on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to demand any such oath that had not been approved by parliament. Saye added that, since the crowns of England and of Scotland were now unified, he could not take it upon himself to kill a Scot. Charles remonstrated with him angrily: ‘My lord, there be as good men as you that will not refuse to take it, but I find you averse to all my proceedings.’ He ordered that both men be arrested.

It was the talk of the city, and it seems to have been generally agreed that the peers had become martyrs to the king’s will. Charles was soon advised that they had done nothing illegal in refusing the oath; much to his chagrin he was obliged to release them. His authority had suffered another grave blow. It transpired soon enough that Viscount Saye had indeed been in secret discussion with the leaders of the covenant cause. They held the puritan creed in common, and their clandestine collaboration would be significant in the events of later months.

On 1 May Charles advanced to Durham. His envoy to Scotland and now commander of his ships, the marquis of Hamilton, wrote to him that ‘your majesty’s affairs are in desperate condition. The enraged people here run to the height of rebellion, and walk with a blind obedience as by their traitorous leaders they are commanded … You will find it a work of great difficulty and of vast expense to curb them by force, their power being greater, their combination stronger than can be imagined.’ Hamilton, himself a Scot, declared that ‘next to hell I hate this land’. His discomfort was also heightened by his mother’s threat that, if he returned in arms to his native country, she would shoot him.

Charles could not afford ‘expense’ of any kind. By the best estimate he had enough money to support his army to the end of the summer, but no longer. By the end of May, however, the lord treasurer announced that the revenue was exhausted. The knight marshal, Sir Edmund Verney, wrote to his son that ‘our men are very raw, our arms of all sorts naught, our victual scarce, and provision for horses worse’.

The Scots were soon on the move. The drums were beaten, morning and evening, to summon the soldiers for divine service; they listened to two sermons each day in support of their cause. When the men were not engaged in martial exercise, they studied the Scriptures or sang hymns or prayed aloud. It was a formidable force. At the beginning of June they set up an armed camp at Kelso on the Scottish borders. The king ordered the earl of Holland to march 3,000 men to the north and drive them out. So the earl led his cavalry forward to test the purposes of the Scots. The English forces climbed an incline from which they could see the enemy below them. Holland was about to order a charge when a cloud of dust could be seen approaching very quickly; this was taken to be the token of a larger Scottish army. The English retreated in order but in haste; discretion, as on many other occasions, surmounted valour. It was said that they were spared a slaughter by the elders of the covenant who only wished for the strangers to leave their country.

The fiasco was a double blow to the English forces. They had not only been humiliated by the Scots but the Scottish lord general, Alexander Leslie, seemed to know in advance the movement of Holland’s men. It looked very much as if there was a spy or traitor in the camp. Sir Edmund Verney wrote once more to his son that ‘I think the king dares not stir out of his trenches. What counsels he will take, or what he will do, I cannot divine.’ It had become clear to everyone that the enterprise was a huge mistake.

On 5 June Alexander Leslie arrived with an army of 12,000 men, and encamped on a hill about 11 miles from the king’s position. Charles was devoid of fear, or indeed of any other emotion except perhaps curiosity; he took a view of the Scottish forces through his telescope. ‘Come let us go to supper,’ he said, ‘the number is not considerable.’ Yet he could not afford to fight them. The Scots were well-disciplined and ready to fight for ‘Christ’s Crown and Covenant’; he had only an ill-organized and largely apathetic army already painfully aware of its lack of provisions.

The king had to gain time to prepare himself more fully for armed warfare. The Scots, in turn, were reluctant to invade England; the temper of an aroused nation would then be such that victory was by no means certain. Parliament might be called, and all the material wants of the king resolved. It could become a hard fight. So the conditions were right to obtain a truce and agree to a treaty. On 11 June six commissioners from the Scots and six commissioners from the king sat down together at Berwick in the tent of the earl of Arundel; Charles himself then joined them.

The covenanters were described by one Scottish historian as ‘men a little too low for heaven, and much too high for earth’. But on this occasion they were willing at least to treat with the king. In the event the negotiations at Berwick meant nothing. Ambiguities, confusions and caveats were the sum of all talk so that in the end, according to Clarendon, ‘there were not two present who did agree in the same relation of what was said and done…’ Nobody meant what he said, or said what he meant. The treaty was merely a paper peace and within six months the antagonists were preparing for a later and greater conflict. The first Bishops’ War, a war without a set battle, had come to an end.

Charles I had hoped to lead a glittering army to victory but had instead been forced to come to terms with a people that had, to all intents and purposes, become a separate nation beyond his power to command. The Scots gained the reputation that he himself had forfeited. It was more painful for him to lose authority than to part with his lifeblood. He had come to realize the reluctance of many of the peers and gentry to join him in his quarrel. So he disbanded the army without thanking any of its commanders, who had undergone the sacrifice of bringing up their men, and without giving honours to his faithful followers. The earl of Essex, one of the great nobles whom the king distrusted, was dismissed without a word. Soon enough he would become a principal opponent of the king.

Charles was anxious and dissatisfied. When the Scots published a document that purported to contain the matter of the treaty it was burned in London by the common hangman. The covenanters proclaimed, however, that in maintaining their own rights they were also fighting for English liberties; they insinuated that the proscription or exclusion of their religion would infallibly lead to the destruction of the cause of puritanism in England.

There were many of that nation who agreed with them, Pym and Hampden among them; for these Englishmen, the Scottish defiance of a stubborn and authoritarian king was an inspiration. Letters passed between the ‘malcontents’ or ‘malignants’ of both nations, as the king called them, in the hope of planning a common strategy to preserve their religion. The earl of Northumberland wrote that ‘the north is now the scene of all our news’; the theatre of the three kingdoms was now situated in Edinburgh. English politics now became thoroughly mingled with Scottish affairs.

The king had also lost authority on the high seas. In the autumn of 1639 a Spanish fleet had been discovered in the Channel by a Dutch squadron and, after a hot pursuit, took refuge in the Downs off the coast of east Kent; Charles offered, for a large sum, to take the Spaniards under his protection and convey them to the coast of Flanders. Yet the Dutch were unwilling to lose their prey and, with reinforcements, they attacked the Spanish vessels and sank many of them. The English fleet, under the command of Vice-Admiral Pennington, merely looked on as the security of their home waters was violated. The sea road to Dover was known as ‘the king of England’s imperial chamber’, but that king had failed in his first duty of protecting it.

The paralysis of Charles was part of a much wider problem of foreign policy where, in want of money and preoccupied by the problem of Scotland, he was obliged to play off one party against another in the hope of something ‘turning up’. France, Holland and Spain had to be appeased equally.

*

On 27 July, just before he left Berwick, Charles had summoned an emissary sent by Thomas Wentworth from Ireland; they held a long and secret conversation on matters that the king would not confide to paper. Wentworth had already told the king that he should conclude an armistice, and postpone any attack upon the Scots until he was quite certain that he could defeat them. Charles now merely sent a message to the lord deputy, saying, ‘Come when you will, you shall be welcome.’ The king was already scheming.

Wentworth returned from Dublin in the autumn of the year, and at once became the king’s most trusted councillor. He possessed all the self-confidence and energy that the king himself lacked. One courtier, Sir Philip Warwick, recorded that ‘his countenance was cloudy, while he moved or sat thinking; but when he spoke, either seriously or facetiously, he had a lightsome and very pleasant air’.

Wentworth urged Charles to take the affairs of Scotland into his own hands, and in addition to call parliament in order to be supplied with funds. The king of course distrusted and even despised the members at Westminster, but Wentworth believed that he could organize a court party which would be able to outmanoeuvre any opposition from such familiar suspected persons as Pym and Hampden. The king would also be absolved of the charge of absolutism, of wishing to rule without parliament, and might once again earn the approval of the nation. If the members of the Commons did not cheerfully grant his demands, in the face of evident danger from the Scots, then the world would know who to blame. Within a few months Wentworth received the earldom of Strafford.

At the end of 1639, therefore, parliament was summoned. The news was greeted with relief by those who had feared the complete abandonment of conventional government. Others were not so sanguine, however, and the Venetian ambassador reported that ‘the long rusted gates of parliament cannot be opened without difficulty’. The king’s councillors professed to believe that the newly elected parliament, shocked by the insolence of the Scots, would rally around the king.

The general election proceeded apace, with all sides and factions trying to organize support in an informal way. Only sixty-two of the elections were contested, with the other candidates selected by the principal landowners in the country and by the municipal corporations of the towns and cities. Other members of parliament were chosen by individual patrons who owned the right of nomination. A contested election was considered to be a mark of failure by the local elite to resolve matters satisfactorily.

The contested seats were indeed scenes of great division; there had been no such competition for eleven years. The court sent out lists of its favoured candidates as soon as the writs were issued. The local ministers preached to their congregations largely in favour of puritan candidates, while the peers supporting the court often tried to bribe or intimidate the electors of their regions. Newsletters and speeches abounded, as did the more nebulous reports of rumour and gossip. Violence, and threats of violence, were commonplace. A verse was circulated in opposition to the court party:

Choose no ship sheriff, nor court atheist,

No fen drainer, nor church papist.

There were no ‘parties’ in the modern sense, of course, merely individuals with various interests or principles who might or might not form an association with those who largely agreed with them. Some of them described themselves as ‘good commonwealthmen’ or ‘patriots’ who played upon the people’s fears of taxation and popery. Other candidates tried to rally the electors to the cause of king and country. The tide was against them. It was said by a Kentish gentleman, Sir Roger Twysden, that ‘the common people had been so bitten with ship-money that they were very averse from a courtier’; in Leicestershire the freeholders, who made up the constituency, were opposed to one candidate because ‘he is a courtier and has been sheriff and collected the ship-money’.

It has been estimated that, of the sixty or so candidates nominated or supported by the court, only fourteen were successful. It would be fair to say, however, that the majority of those elected were not partisan in any obvious sense; they were individuals who came to Westminster with a lively sense of local complaints and who, when congregated together, might find that they had grievances in common.

Preparations for another war against Scotland were even then being made. It was intended to press into service 30,000 foot-soldiers from the counties south of the Humber, the northern counties having given service in the last war. The covenanters were equally active in Scotland, where a call to arms was about to be issued. It did not seem possible that war could be avoided. A group of covenanters came to London, where it was reported that they held secret consultations with their English allies.

The newly elected parliament opened on 13 April 1640, in great excitement. The wife of the earl of Bridgewater was advised to procure a place at a window by six o’clock in the morning, in order to watch the passing scenes at Westminster; after that time the press of the people in the street would make it impossible for her to reach the house. John Finch, newly appointed as lord keeper of the great seal, made an opening speech on behalf of the king in which he dilated upon the threat that the Scots posed to the country; the king had been obliged to raise an army in its defence and, for the payment of that army, he needed funds. Finch revealed that a bill had already been prepared with all the relevant measures in place; it was only necessary for parliament to pass it. Then, and only then, would the grievances of individual members be discussed. He stated that ‘the king did not require their advice but an immediate vote of supplies’. It was noted that Finch had at no stage mentioned the primary source of discontent, the ship-money which was once again being exacted.

The members soon made their reply to the lord keeper’s speech. On the first day of the session the earl of Northumberland wrote that ‘their jealousies and suspicions appear upon every occasion and I fear they will not readily be persuaded to believe the fair and gracious promises that are made to them by the king’. In this opinion he was correct. The member for Colchester, Harbottle Grimstone, delivered a speech in which he stated that the invasion of individual liberties at home was more threatening than the ambitions of any enemy abroad. On the following day petitions from the various counties, complaining about unjust exactions, were presented to the Commons.

On 17 April John Pym rose to speak on the nature of parliamentary authority. He declared that ‘the powers of parliament are to the body politic as the rational faculties of the soul to man’. He was asserting more than the usual claims of parliamentary privilege; he was outlining what amounted to a new theory of government without any mention of the divine right of kings. He then turned to the matter of religion, and condemned the innovations introduced by Laud and others; they had managed only to raise ‘new occasions of further division’ and to dismay ‘the faithful professors of the truth’. The grievances of his eleven years’ silence now poured forth in an attack upon ship-money, monopolies, forest law and the other measures that the king had imposed. When he sat down he was greeted with cries of ‘A good oration!’

There was one group or faction in this parliament that helped to shape the session. The Providence Island Company had first been established to assist the emigration of ‘godly’ settlers to an island off the coast of what is now Nicaragua; it was hoped that a little republican commonwealth would then emerge that would finance itself with tobacco and cotton. Among the begetters of this scheme were the most prominent puritans in the country, among them Oliver St John, John Pym, John Hampden, Viscount Saye and Lord Brooke; the most eminent of them, however, was the earl of Warwick. All of these men now took their seats in parliament, both in the Commons and in the Lords, where they could plan their strategy in concert. They had familial as well as religious connections, lending them a unity and strength of purpose that were almost without precedent. The court party, in contrast, was riven with conflicts over personality and policy.

On 21 April the king summoned both houses to Whitehall, and demanded that the financial subsidies be granted to him. Two days later the Commons went into committee and requested a conference with the Lords on the grounds that ‘until the liberties of the House and kingdom were cleared, they knew not whether they had anything to give or no’. At this act of defiance Charles was extremely angry. On 1 May the Commons decided by a large majority to call before them a cleric who had stated that the king had the authority to make laws without parliament; this was considered by the court to be another act of insubordination. On the following day the king demanded an immediate answer to his request for money; he was met with prevarication. On 4 May Charles sent another message in which he agreed to give up the collection of ship-money in return for twelve subsidies amounting to approximately £850,000. The committee of the Commons again broke up without reaching any definite conclusions. One of the royal councillors, Sir Henry Vane, told the king that there was now no hope that they ‘would give one penny’.

It had become apparent, at least to the court party, that the Commons had no real desire to support the king’s war against Scotland; it might even be supposed that they were leaning towards the Scottish covenanters. The king had asked for supplies five times, and five times he had been rebuffed. He had twice appeared in person, to no palpable effect. He had tried to negotiate but his offers had been rejected with silence. He had pressed for speed in their decisions, with the possibility of an imminent invasion from the north, but parliament had been dilatory and evasive.

Rumours now reached the king that, under the influence of Pym, a petition was even then being drawn up asking him to come to terms with the Scots. He summoned the Speaker and forbade him take his place on the following day, thus avoiding the possibility of any debate. He then hurried to the Lords and on 5 May summarily dissolved the parliament. Since it had endured for only three weeks, it became commonly known as the ‘stillborn parliament’; posterity christened it the ‘Short Parliament’. It had achieved nothing, but it had changed everything. It had given voice to the frustration and anger of the country at the behaviour of the king; it had become a national forum where none had existed before.

One newly elected MP, Edward Hyde, who would later become better known as Lord Clarendon, was disconsolate. He supported the king but did not know what the future might hold for him. He wrote later that one of the leaders of the parliamentary revolt, Oliver St John, ‘observing a cloudiness in me, bade me “be of good comfort; all would go well; for things must be worse before they could be better”’. St John added that ‘we must not only sweep the house clean below, but must pull down all the cobwebs which hang in the top and corners’. He was hoping for a crisis or disaster, in other words, that would overturn the familiar order.

Another member may be introduced here. Sir Philip Warwick came into the house later in the same year,

and perceived a gentleman whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit that seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain and not very clean and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band which was not much larger than his collar; his hat was without a hatband; his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour.

Such was the young Oliver Cromwell, who had sat unnoticed in the parliamentary sessions of 1628 and 1629. Now he had found his voice.

On the afternoon of the dissolution the king’s council met in which the newly ennobled earl of Strafford, according to notes taken at the time, advised the king to ‘go on with a vigorous war as you first designed, loosed and absolved from all rules of government, being reduced to extreme necessities. Everything is to be done that power must admit.’ He added that ‘you have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’. It was, perhaps, not clear which ‘kingdom’ needed to be reduced; this was an ambiguity that would cost him dear.

The dissolution aroused much discontent. The calling of the first parliament for eleven years had been hailed as a victory and as a deliverance from bondage; yet it had ended in defeat. Clarendon recalled that ‘there could not a greater damp have seized upon the spirits of the whole nation’. The king blamed ‘the cunning of some few seditiously affected men’; he genuinely believed, for example, that the members of the Providence Island Company were in direct contact with his Scottish enemies in an effort to defeat him.

Many in London and elsewhere, however, were ready to condemn the king and his councillors, principal among them the earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud. Strafford now became known as ‘black Tom Tyrant’, the hatred for him compounded by the suspicion that he was indeed planning to bring over an Irish army to subdue English dissent. Yet William Laud was still the principal target. He was, in the judgement of many, the secret power behind the throne.

On 7 May, two days after the dissolution, the lord mayor and his aldermen were summoned before the council and ordered to provide the king with a loan of £200,000. If they refused they were to return three days later with a list of the wealthiest Londoners who could furnish the necessary funds. On 10 May they returned, bearing no list. ‘Sir,’ Strafford said to the king, ‘you will never do good to these citizens of London till you have made examples of some of these aldermen. Unless you hang up some of them, you will do no good upon them.’ The king did not execute them, but he did commit four of them to prison. This added more fuel to the fire that was about to break out in the streets.

Placards had been posted at the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere, calling upon the apprentices to meet at St George’s Fields in Southwark and ‘hunt William the fox, the breaker of the parliament’. A force of 500 attempted, on the night of 11 May, to storm the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth; the protestors were driven off by gunfire from the trained bands. Three days later the prisons that held some of the rioters were broken open, and the men released. The trained bands of Essex, Kent and Hertfordshire were summoned to the capital where they successfully restored a semblance of peace. Yet there were still victims. One captured apprentice was, on the orders of the king, tortured on the rack in the vain hope that he would name his accomplices; his crime had been to beat the drum in the vanguard of the rioters. It was the last example of judicial torture in English history. A sailor was convicted of high treason for attempting to open the gates of Lambeth Palace with a crowbar; he was hanged, drawn and quartered as punishment for his mighty offence.

The anger against the archbishop was augmented by the deliberations of the convocation. This body of the higher clergy always met at the time of parliament but, on this occasion, it was not dissolved after the abrupt conclusion of the recent short session. It continued to meet, granted a subsidy to the king, and announced seventeen new canons that exalted the sovereign’s power. It was ordered that, four times in each year, the clergy should preach to their congregations on the theme of divine right. It was further decreed that all of the clergy must take an oath to maintain both the doctrine and the discipline of the Church and not to allow any alteration in its government by ‘archbishops, bishops, deans and archdeacons etc.’. This became known derisively as ‘the etcetera oath’. How could clerics obey a ruling of which the contents were so uncertain? Without the assent of parliament, in any case, the decree was illegal. When the chancellor of the bishop of London entered one church to exact the oath, with a great mace carried before him, the verger stopped him with the words: ‘I care nothing for you, nor for your artichoke.’ The new canons were similarly derided. A drawing by Wenceslaus Hollar depicted some clergymen standing about a faulty cannon as Laud lights it. A verse beneath it read:

This cannon’s sealed, well forg’d, not made of lead

Give fire. Oh no, ’twill break and strike us dead.

The Scots were greatly heartened by events in England. A parliament met in Edinburgh at the beginning of June, despite an effort by Charles to prorogue it. Its members now believed that the people of England were no longer inclined to support their king; they passed into law, without royal assent, various Acts that removed the bishops from the Kirk and materially diminished the king’s authority. It was a tacit declaration of war.

Yet what could the king do? He had formed no fresh army, and the troops still quartered at Newcastle after the last conflict were untrained and impoverished. Once more the king demanded ship-money from London. The sheriffs went from house to house to exact the tax but only one man, in the entire City of London, agreed to pay it. Schemes for loans from France, and from Genoa, came to nothing.

The labourers and craftsmen of England were again pressed into service, in the king’s army, for a cause about which they knew or cared little. News of disorder came from most of the southern counties, and one of the first open mutinies broke out in Warwickshire. Some men of Devon, stopping at Wellington in Somerset, murdered a Roman Catholic lieutenant who refused to accompany them to church. When all of these unlikely and unwilling recruits arrived at Selby, in North Yorkshire, their commander described them as ‘the arch-knaves of the country’. Thus began the Second Bishops’ War.

19

A great and dangerous treason

In July 1640, the lord general of the Scottish forces, Alexander Leslie, began to create the nucleus of an army to take the fight once more into England. His intention was first to seize Newcastle; with its mineral wealth in his hands, he knew that he could exert pressure upon London that depended upon ‘sea-coal’ for its fuel. He believed that he would meet no resistance from the northern counties; the dissolution of parliament, and the general belief in a ‘popish plot’ led by Laud, had put an end to any appetite for a struggle against Scotland. Leslie’s contacts in England had in fact assured him that the next parliament, when summoned, would demand peace; otherwise, it would give no financial assistance to the king. There may have been a closer connection. It seems probable that the leaders of the ‘godly’ cause in England had effectively invited the Scots to invade as a way of curbing or destroying the power of an authoritarian king. Leslie’s march would be welcomed by some, therefore, and treated with indifference by the rest.

On the morning of 20 August the king set out from London to meet his forces in the north. On that night a Scottish army of 25,000 men crossed the Tweed. As soon as they entered English territory, their ministers formed the vanguard with Bibles in their hands. A declaration was issued to the effect that they were not marching against the English but against the papists, the Arminians and the prelates. They would remain in England until their grievances were heard by a new parliament.

They informed the people of Northumberland, too, that they would not take any food or drink without paying for it; they were well disciplined and respectful. Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, had hoped that the mere sight of an invading army would enrage all good Englishmen, but that proved not to be the case. The English commander in the north, Viscount Conway, noted that ‘the country doth give them all the assistance they can. Many of the country gentlemen do come to them, entertain and feast them.’ In London, after the king’s departure, all was in confusion. A courtier, Sir Nicholas Byron, wrote that ‘we are here, and in every place, in such distraction as if the day of judgment were hourly expected’. The constable of the Tower was ordered to prepare his fortress for a possible siege. Meanwhile the Scots were still marching southward.

Viscount Conway had been ordered to fortify the banks of the Tyne, and to defend Newcastle; he left two-thirds of his troops to protect the city, and took the remainder some 4 miles above Newcastle to a ford in the river at Newburn. The Scots took up a commanding position on the north bank, from where they fired on the enemy; the English soldiers, unaccustomed to gunshot, fled after some of their number were killed. The cavalry also retired in disarray. It was the first major victory of the Scots over the English for 300 years. Charles I had failed in battle, the single most important disgrace that stained the honour of a king. The battle of Newburn might also be considered the first of the civil war, since two rival parties had fought on English soil.

After their egregious defeat the English army retired to the borders of Yorkshire, leaving Durham and Northumberland in the hands of the enemy. The vital city of Newcastle had already surrendered. The earl of Strafford wrote to his friend, Sir George Radcliffe, from Northallerton in North Yorkshire where he had gone to meet the fleeing army:

Pity me, for never came any man to so lost a business. The army altogether necessitous and unprovided of all necessaries … Our horse all cowardly; the country from Berwick to York in the power of the Scots; an universal affright in all; a general disaffection to the king’s service, none sensible of his dishonor. In one word, here alone to fight with all these evils, without anyone to help. God of his goodness deliver me out of this, the greatest evil of my life.

The news of the royal defeat at Newburn was greeted with celebrations in London. Twelve peers of puritan persuasion, among them the earls of Warwick and Bedford, now issued in the traditional manner a ‘petition’ to the monarch in which they called for a parliament to resolve the grievances and evils of the nation; they stated that ‘your whole kingdom [has] become full of fears and discontents’. They were following a carefully prepared strategy. If the king declined to act on their advice, they themselves were prepared to summon parliament, just as the barons of Henry III had threatened almost 400 years before.

The king reacted in a thoroughly medieval way. He received the petition while at York, and summoned a great council of the peers. He may have hoped that they might raise large sums of money, without the assistance of parliament, but in this hope he was destined to be disappointed. Archbishop Laud was more realistic, and believed that the great council would lead inevitably to the calling of another parliamentthat might bode no good.

So the peers of England met in the hall of the deanery at York on 24 September. They represented a vast social power; they exercised local authority over tenants and dependants but they also wielded political power by means of their influence in county and borough elections. In his opening speech to them the king announced that he would indeed summon parliament to meet at the beginning of November; it was hoped that, on the basis of this undertaking, the City would be ready to lend him money. He said further that an ‘army of rebels’ was lodged within the kingdom and he wished for the peers’ advice so that ‘we might justly proceed to the chastisement of these insolencies’.

In the debate that followed it was eventually decided that commissioners should be sent to negotiate with the invaders. The Scots had already demanded money from the northern counties where they were lodged; they now insisted that the payments be maintained by the leading gentry, and that Charles should call parliament, where a peace treaty could be agreed. They trusted parliament, in other words, rather than the king. On these conditions they would remain where they were, and not proceed any further into an unhappy and divided kingdom.

Negotiators from both sides met at Ripon, where it was concluded that the king would pay the Scots £25,000 a month until a peace treaty had been reached. It seemed likely that only parliament could supply such a sum. The peers at York were asked to advise the acceptance or rejection of the agreement. It was of course no contest. The king had no choice but to submit to the claims of the invaders and to call parliament. The experiment of absolute monarchy had come to an end.

In his diary entry for 30 October John Evelyn noted that ‘I saw his majesty (coming from his northern expedition) ride in pomp and a kind of ovation, with all the marks of a happy peace, restored to the affections of his people, being conducted through London with a most splendid cavalcade’. Edward Rossingham wrote to Viscount Conway that ‘we are all mad with joy here that his majesty does call his parliament, and that he puts his Scotch business into the hands of his peers who, the hope is here, will make peace upon any conditions’. The earl of Northampton considered ‘one word of four syllables’, namely parliament, was ‘like the dew of heaven’.

Others were not so sanguine. A few days before the king’s arrival into the city Archbishop Laud had entered his study, in search of certain manuscripts, only to find his portrait by Van Dyck lying face down upon the floor. He was a superstitious man. ‘I am almost every day threated with my ruin in Parliament,’ he confided to his diary. ‘God grant this be no omen.’

The ‘godly’ parliamentarians were well prepared. They met at the house of John Pym, close to Gray’s Inn, where their plans were discussed in detail. They became known as ‘the Junto’, with Pym their leader in the Commons and the earl of Bedford their representative in the Lords. They knew the disposition of the Scots and in turn the covenanters relied upon the help of their English friends in parliament to engineer the necessary changes in religion. This was the ‘Protestant Cause’.

The voting in the parliamentary elections was unusually combative, with eighty-six contests outside the charmed circle of seats where only one uncontested member stood. The king’s party was again at a disadvantage, with local as well as religious interests matched against the courtiers and their acolytes. Of twelve lawyers chosen by the king to be selected, for example, only three were appointed. On 3 November the king travelled to the new parliament by water in order to avoid the public gaze. The Venetian ambassador noted that the lack of ceremony ‘shows more clearly than ever to his people that he consents to the summons merely from compulsion … and not of his own free will to please the people’. Who could have guessed that this parliament would last, with intervals, for almost twenty years?

As soon as they were assembled in debate, the members of the Commons issued a catalogue of grievances against the conduct of the king’s councillors, Strafford and Laud chief among them. The dissolution of the ‘Short Parliament’, before any measures of reform could be agreed, had not improved the temper of the members; 60 per cent of them had sat in the previous assembly and they were now more belligerent than ever. Yet the largest group in the Commons was still that of the landed gentry, who were essentially conservative and not inclined to innovation. They did not want to destroy the king or the orthodox constitution. They wanted government to be restored upon the old model. Yet they, too, had been grievously disappointed. They had watched the king lose a war. They had seen him alienate his natural supporters. They had observed him in the company of the popish courtiers around his wife. They had witnessed the disruption of law and order in their regions.

All of the parliamentarians now understood their strength. They knew that the king relied upon them to salvage him from his distress; if parliament did not supply him with funds, he would not be able to pay the Scottish army as he had agreed to do. Alexander Leslie might then order a march upon Whitehall, with no English army to prevent his progress. As long as the Scots remained in England, therefore, parliament was supreme.

In the debate that followed the opening, one member remarked that it was common knowledge that the judges had overthrown the law and that the bishops had overthrown the gospel. Another intimated that a popish plot was being hatched by some about the king. Yet another rose to complain that the government was the weakest for generations and had produced nothing but national disgrace; it was surmised that those who had most loudly proclaimed the king’s authority had also been those who had wasted the king’s money.

When John Pym rose to speak the members were already much agitated. Pym began by saying that ‘the distempers of the time are well known’. Much of his bitterness was reserved for Strafford himself, whom he believed to be the author of ‘a design to alter law and religion’. Many contemporaries and colleagues were taking Pym’s side. The Scots believed that Strafford was the cause of the war between the two nations. The puritans hated him. The City, now more powerful than ever, remembered how he had threatened its aldermen with hanging. He had created an absolute rule during his period of government in Ireland, and it was believed that he wished to repeat the experiment in England.

Strafford was aware of the perils of his position. He could have stayed in York, safe from the depredations of parliament, but the king urged him to join him in Whitehall; he assured him that ‘he should not suffer in his person, honour or fortune’. The king’s promises were, in the event, worth nothing at all. Strafford wrote that ‘I am tomorrow in London with more dangers beset, I believe, than ever any man went with out of Yorkshire…’.

John Pym in turn had some reason to fear Strafford. When the earl arrived in London on 9 November he advised the king to provide the evidence that would implicate Pym and his colleagues in a treasonable association with the Scots. That evidence, perhaps of intercepted letters, has never since emerged. News reached Westminster that Strafford was ready to ‘prefer an accusation of high treason against diverse members of both houses of parliament’; they would no doubt include Warwick, Saye and Brooke from the Lords with Pym, Hampden and others from the Commons.

It was agreed by the king and his councillors that the defences of the Tower should immediately be strengthened; the fortification was meant as a warning to the City. The Tower was also the likely destination for those about to be arrested. Strafford was quoted as saying that ‘he hoped the City would be subdued in a short time’. On 11 November the king was expected to travel to the Tower and inspect its garrison.

On that day rumours of an attempted coup reached Westminster. The Commons ordered that all strangers should be cleared from the lobby. Strafford took his seat in the House of Lords, but said nothing; he was biding his time. Yet Pym knew of the accusations against himself and his colleagues. He had to remove Strafford before Strafford could destroy him. In a phrase of the time, ‘my head or thy head’.

In a speech delivered to the Commons Pym attacked one of Strafford’s most notable allies, Sir Francis Windebank, for concealing a popish plot. It might or might not be interpreted as an attack upon Strafford himself, but it was a method by which Pym could test the readiness of his colleagues to take action against his enemies. Another member, John Clotworthy, now suggested or insinuated that Strafford planned to use the Irish army ‘ready to march where I know not’ in order to curb dissent in England.

It was moved that a committee be established to consult with the Lords on the accusations; this committee was packed with Strafford’s enemies, and a ‘charge’ against the earl was swiftly prepared and presented to the Commons. Some members urged caution and delay in the assault upon Strafford, but Pym replied that any procrastination ‘might probably blast all their hopes’.

With a throng of members around him Pym then went to the Lords in order to accuse Strafford of high treason, and to recommend that he be ‘sequestered from Parliament’. If the Lords wished to know the grounds of this serious charge, ‘particular articles and accusations’ against him would be delivered to them shortly. Strafford had been told of the events then unfolding. ‘I will go,’ he said, ‘and look my accusers in the face.’ It must be said that the Lords themselves had many grievances against the king’s arrogant and difficult adviser and, on his entry, he was commanded by them to withdraw. An order was then passed committing Strafford to the custody of the gentleman usher. He was directed to enter the chamber and to kneel while the order was read to him. He asked permission to speak, but was refused; his sword was taken from him before he was led away.

In his History of the Rebellion Clarendon wrote that the crowd looked upon the earl without pity, ‘no man capping to him, before whom that morning the greatest in England would have stood discovered’. No man had taken off his hat in respect.

‘What is the matter?’ someone asked him.

‘A small matter, I warrant you,’ he replied.

Another called out, ‘Yes indeed, high treason is a small matter.’

Strafford was effectively removed from public life. Charles had lost his principal councillor. It was widely assumed that a great work had been accomplished. The king was obliged to disperse the garrison he had established within the Tower and to dismantle the guns that had recently been mounted. His attempt to coerce or overawe his opponents had failed, in another of those humiliating reversals that had become associated with his rule.

With the threat of dissolution or a coup now removed, parliament could begin its work on what it believed to be wholesale renovation. A public fast was observed on 17 November as a way of enlisting divine assistance in this task. Some sixty-five committees were established to investigate all cases of abuse and corruption. One of them was devoted to seeking out and removing ‘persecuting, innovating or scandalous’ ministers, justices of the peace and other royal officers; when its members requested ‘informations from all parties’ to assist them, hundreds of individuals descended upon Westminster with their own particular grievances.

A committee for petitions was then established to deal with their complaints. Warwick, Brooke, Essex, Bedford and Saye and their colleagues were in command of its actions. It sat in the Painted Chamber at Westminster and became an alternative court of law, investigating all aspects of the government’s work. Parliament had in the past been summoned simply to transact the king’s business; now it busied itself about national affairs without any reference to the king.

The evidence against Strafford was presented on 24 November 1640, and was formulated in the first article of the indictment against him. The Commons was asked to declare that ‘Thomas, earl of Strafford hath traitorously endeavoured to subvert the fundamental laws and government of the realms of England and Ireland, and instead thereof to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government against law’. In his speech to the Commons Pym argued that the accusations amounted to a great and dangerous treason, animated by malice and guided by evil mischief. He accused the earl of attempting to spread discord between the king and the people. It had become clear that Strafford could not be allowed to survive; if he evaded the charge of treason he might become the focus of royalist hopes, and might even herald the resumption of non-parliamentary government.

At the end of November the three dissenters who had been mutilated and imprisoned at the behest of Archbishop Laud – Prynne, Burton and Bastwick – returned in triumph to the capital; they wore rosemary and bay in their hats, and flowers were strewn before them. Rosemary was the herb of remembrance and bay of victory. It was for Henry Burton, a puritan divine, ‘a sweet and glorious day, or time, which the sun of righteousness, arising over England, was now about to procure for us’. That bright dawn still depended on the presence of the covenanters in the north, and in the early days of December parliament voted subsidies for the Scottish army.

Arguments over religion were the soul of this first session of what became known as the ‘Long Parliament’, outweighing any concerns over secular misgovernment. Already the devout were in full pursuit of the Arminians. A London crowd had burst into St Paul’s Cathedral where it destroyed the altar and tore up the book of the new liturgy. At Stourbridge Fair a preacher stirred up a crowd by calling out ‘Pardon! Pardon! Pardon!’ for the superstition and idolatry imposed by those in authority. In Brislington, Somerset, a dissenting minister who had been suspended from office preached to his flock beneath the shade of a tree in the street, whereupon the congregation led him back to the church and gave him the key.

On 11 December the citizens of London presented a petition to parliament for ‘reformation in church government’. It declared that ‘the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deacons and archdeacons etc.… has proved prejudicial and very dangerous both to the church and commonwealth’; it urged that this ecclesiastical government should be destroyed ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Fifteen hundred supporters gathered in Westminster Yard, well-dressed, well-organized and good-tempered, and after delivering their petition they returned quietly to their homes. The ‘root and branch’ petition, as it came to be known, was passed by Pym to a committee where it remained for some months.

More immediate remedies were at hand. On 16 December the canons passed by convocation in the spring of the year, among them ‘the etcetera oath’, were voted by parliament to be illegal. It was now time to attack the archbishop himself. On 18 December Laud was impeached and taken into custody. He was accused of fostering doctrines that lent support to the king’s arbitrary measures, and of using the courts both to impose innovations in worship and to silence the true professors of religion. One member of parliament, Harbottle Grimstone, described him as ‘the root and ground of all our miseries and calamities’. Other bishops soon joined him in the Tower. The bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, was to spend seventeen years in confinement. Parliament could be as vindictive and as authoritarian as the king, perhaps because both parties believed that they were fulfilling the divine will.

Someone had scribbled, on the door of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, an appeal to ‘remember the judges’. Their time was not long in coming. All those who had supported the king in their judgments were questioned or arrested. Many of the king’s courtiers now fled the approaching storm. Sir Francis Windebank, whom Pym had accused of concealing a Catholic conspiracy, was rowed at night across the Channel. Lord Keeper Finch fled the country for Holland on the day he was impeached.

The members of parliament now determined to consolidate their strength. On 24 December it was recommended that ‘the English lord commissioners’, which in effect meant the puritan lords who had launched the petition for parliament in the summer, should be responsible for the disbursement of money to the Scots. Five days later Pym advised that the customs officials, who were the king’s principal financial agents, should ‘forbear to pay anything’ to the exchequer until authorization was ‘settled by Parliament’; his proposal was carried without any division. The king now lacked the resources even to pay his own household expenses.

In this last week of December it was further agreed that parliament should meet at fixed times with or without the cooperation of the king. The ‘Triennial Act’ was passed to compel parliaments to meet every three years. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘if this innovation is introduced, it will hand over the reins of government completely to Parliament, and nothing will be left to the king but mere show and a simulacrum of reality, stripped of credit and destitute of all authority’. It remained to be seen whether Charles would willingly relinquish his powers. The contest had only just begun.

20

Madness and fury

The new year, 1641, was for the godly a time of jubilation. It was the year in which, according to cant phrases of the time, a period of ‘great affliction’ was succeeded by an age of ‘seasonable mercies’. Some writers were dating their letters ‘annus mirabilis’ or ‘anno renovationis’. It was a golden year in which God’s goodness and mercy to the nation were vouchsafed. A pamphleteer, John Bond, exulted in ‘England’s Rejoicing for the Parliament’s Return’ that ‘papists tremble … Arminians tumble … the priests of Baal lament their fortunes’. For those of a royalist persuasion, however, the year marked the culmination of all their woes that had begun at the battle of Newburn.

The king was in desperate straits with his authority and revenue threatened, and with his principal counsellors languishing in the Tower. Henrietta Maria was enraged at the situation of the royal household, and continued to argue for more determined measures against her husband’s opponents. She even wrote to the Vatican asking for a large loan, perhaps with the intention of raising troops.

Charles himself did not surrender to the calamity that faced him. His health was good, and he was not inclined to anxiety; he maintained a daily regimen of prayer and exercise; he enjoyed an excellent appetite. He believed implicitly that the enemies of the Lord’s anointed would of necessity fail, and that all traitors would eventually be brought to the bar of justice.

On 23 January Charles summoned both houses of parliament to the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and delivered a speech in which he complained about the obstructions placed in his path by men who ‘put no difference betwixt reformation and alteration of government’. Yet he seemed willing to compromise, and promised to return the laws of religious polity to the ‘purest times of Queen Elizabeth’s days’. He stated further that ‘whatsoever part of my revenue shall be found illegal, or heavy to my subjects, I shall be willing to lay it down’. He had in effect cancelled the exaction of ship-money, and curbed all other questionable ways of raising revenue.

The status of his most faithful servant was still in doubt. It was already whispered at court that Strafford must rely upon his own protestations of innocence and, if they should fail, upon the mercy of parliament. Charles was unwilling to fight for his quondam counsellor; he seems to have realized that only Strafford’s death could preface the reconciliation he desired with his people. At the end of the month the charges were drawn up against the earl; twenty-eight separate articles, covering the last fourteen years of his career, were outlined over two hundred sheets of paper.

At the beginning of February the Commons voted £300,000 to the Scots under the name of ‘brotherly assistance’; the two nations were not to be divided. They needed one another, for the moment, in their confrontation with the king. They also needed the ‘Triennial Bill’ that guaranteed the meeting of parliament on a regular basis. The bill was a grievous blow to the royal prerogative, and Charles had been most reluctant to give his assent; his power would be limited, and his authority compromised. Yet on 16 February he was persuaded to concede the issue, partly from advice that he would receive no money after any refusal. So he declared in the old Norman fashion that ‘le roi le veut’, ‘the king wishes it’. In private the king raged. In effect the Act made him reliant upon parliament and gave that assembly the permanent existence that it had never known before. The bells of London rang out. The earl of Leicester wrote in his commonplace book that now ‘the parliament which is a corporation never dies, nor ceases at the death of the king, that is, the death of the king is no determination of it, and it is not likely that they will be weary of their immortality’.

It had already been rumoured that a new privy council was about to emerge that would reflect the wishes of the Commons as well as of the king. The earl of Bedford was to become lord treasurer while his lieutenant in the Commons, John Pym, would be chancellor of the exchequer; the earl of Bristol would be made lord privy seal. On 19 February seven other members of the puritan Junto were nominated to be privy councillors, among them Viscount Saye and the earls of Essex and Bedford. Clarendon wrote in his History that they were ‘all persons at that time very gracious to the people or the Scots … had all been in some umbrage at court and most in visible disfavour’.

The king had declared himself indirectly to be a moderate, therefore, equally ready to forgive his erstwhile enemies and to trim or turn his policies in the light of complaints directed against them. Yet at the same time he had also managed to divide the opposition against him. Many in parliament did not share the religious enthusiasm of the Scottish covenanters and had no wish to see the English Church remodelled to satisfy their demands; others were already beginning to resent the amount of money being spent for the maintenance of the Scottish army in the north. If Charles could gain the support of such men, parliamentary assistance would be at hand in his fight against the Junto.

The compromise with the puritans of parliament did not in the end succeed. The king had insisted that, in order to take up the offices of state he had promised to them, they must agree to retain the bishops in the Lords and to save Strafford’s life. They in turn demanded to be granted the offices before doing anything at all. No grand reconciliation was possible.

On 24 February Strafford was brought from the Tower to the chamber of the House of Lords in order to answer the charges laid against him. It was noticed with surprise that the king had taken his place upon the throne, by which he indicated his support for the earl. When the king eventually departed, however, it was resolved that the proceedings would have to begin all over again. Strafford defended himself with eloquence and wit, throwing into serious doubt the result of any trial. Within days it was reported that the parliamentary leaders were unsure how to proceed with their case. It was easy to proclaim Strafford to be a traitor, but a more difficult matter to prove it in open court.

His trial opened on 22 March, when he was taken by barge from the Tower to Westminster Hall. He was dressed entirely in black, as a dramatic token of sorrow, and the hall itself became known to the participants as ‘the theatre’. This was the spectacle that might determine the fate of the nation, as the prisoner fought for his life and for the cause of the king. Negotiations of course continued behind the scene. The puritan grandees were ready to spare Strafford’s life, for example, if the king agreed to grant them the great offices of state.

On the first day the peers of the realm filed into their places on both sides of the hall; tiers of seats had been placed, on either side of the peers, for the Commons. A committee of the Lords had already decided that it was not proper for the king himself to be present; so an empty throne stood at the northern end of the improvised courtroom while the king and queen were in fact sitting in seats behind, like a box in a theatre. Strafford himself was to stand on a dais at the southern end, facing both houses of parliament. The visual impression, in fact devised by Inigo Jones, was of one man against all the representatives of the nation. The hall was packed with spectators who made much clamour and ‘clattering’; it was remarked by one observer, Robert Baillie, that there was ‘much public eating, not only of confections but of flesh and bread, bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups’.

When the twenty-eight articles of impeachment were read out to him, Strafford was seen to smile; he could already see the legal difficulties that beset his accusers. They were attempting to prove treason on the basis of an accumulation of several separate charges. A remark passed around at the time was: you know at first sight whether a man is short or tall, you do not need to measure the inches. With Strafford’s supposed treachery, you would need to count the inches carefully. At one point Strafford said that ‘opinions may make a heretic, but that they make a traitor I never heard till now’. The days passed, with witnesses and questions and arguments, in the course of which Strafford seemed to delight in outwitting the counsels for the prosecution; they in turn were considered to be bombastic and hectoring.

It soon became clear to the members of the Junto that their cause could be lost, and they began to suspect that a majority of the peers was in fact secretly or openly supporting the cause of Strafford. When on 10 April the Lords allowed an adjournment for the prisoner to consult his notes before making a closing speech, the Commons protested in fury. They rose in consternation. Some of them, according to the parliamentary notes of Simonds D’Ewes, called out, ‘Withdraw! Withdraw!’, which was misheard by others as ‘Draw! Draw!’; their hands went to the hilts of their swords in anticipation of battle. The confusion delighted Strafford to the extent that ‘he could not hide his joy’; the king, in his box behind the throne, was seen to laugh. The two houses of parliament were in dispute.

The members of the Commons returned to their chamber in the afternoon, and at this opportune moment certain notes taken at a previous meeting of the privy council were conveniently revealed. This was the council during which Strafford had told the king that ‘you have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom’. The earl’s accusers interpreted this ‘kingdom’ to be England rather than Scotland. This of course was treason. The Commons readily agreed. A Bill of Attainder was drawn up, a medieval device whereby both houses of parliament could try and condemn an enemy of the kingdom without the formality of a trial. It was also a way of persuading the Lords to vote for Strafford’s death without the burden of legal proof.

On 19 April the king ordered all military officers immediately to return to their regiments. When a negotiator from Scotland had an audience with the king two days later, he reported that ‘his mind seems to be on some project here shortly to break out’. It was also rumoured that the French, exhorted by the queen, were about to invade. What the leaders of the Junto most feared was a dissolution of parliament, a device that would result in the immediate cancellation of both the trial and the proposed attainder. They called out their supporters, and a crowd of many thousands gathered at Westminster in the belief that dangerous measures were about to be introduced. On 19 April, too, the Commons passed the Bill of Attainder against the earl of Strafford. Those of the Commons who had not supported the decision were derided as ‘Straffordians or enemies to their country’; their names were listed and placed on posts and other visible locations in the city. The members of the godly party were not above intimidation and violation of parliamentary privilege.

When the Commons passed the attainder the king wrote to Strafford to reassure him once again he had his word that his life, honour, or fortune would not be touched. On the last day of the proceedings in Westminster Hall, 29 April, Strafford seemed merry. Oliver St John then rose to deliver a three-hour tirade against the prisoner which was of such eloquence that it profoundly influenced the intentions of the peers; when he finished, the spectators in the hall broke into applause. Two days later the king addressed both houses of parliament from the throne. In his speech he emphasized that he would never act against his conscience; this was taken to mean that he would veto any attainder against his counsellor. Let them find Strafford guilty only of a misdemeanour, and he would act. The king also refused to disband his Irish army, which in turn raised fears of military action.

He stayed for a while after his oration, looking for supporters, but Simonds D’Ewes reported ‘there was not one man gave him the least hum or colour of plaudit to his speech, which made him, after some time of expectation, depart suddenly’. It was widely believed that he had intruded in a matter still under parliamentary debate, which was considered by the Commons to be ‘the most unparalleled breach of privilege that had ever happened’. It seemed that a confrontation between king and parliament was inevitable.

Rumours of plots and counter-plots were soon everywhere. For some weeks a vessel, chartered by Strafford’s secretary, had been moored in the Thames. The boat could easily take an escaped prisoner to France. Some of the reports proved to be true. On Sunday 2 May, Sir John Suckling, courtier and army commander, poet and gambler, called sixty men to the White Horse Tavern in Bread Street; they wore battledress of buff cloth and carried swords as well as pistols. They were supposed to gain entrance to the Tower of London, in the guise of reinforcements, where they would at once overwhelm the guard and secure Strafford’s liberty. It was a wild scheme, made all the more improbable by the sight of sixty armed men milling about in the middle of London. Their presence was quickly known and interpreted, the news passed immediately to the leaders of parliament. A tumultuous crowd of Londoners gathered about the Tower to defend it against any invasion.

The rumours of a military rebellion, and plans for the flight of Strafford, had thoroughly alarmed the people of London. A fresh crowd gathered on Monday outside the doors of the Lords, bellowing for the execution of Strafford; some of them cried that if they could not have his life, they would take that of the king. The parliamentary journal for that day wrote of the members of the Junto that ‘they caused a multitude of tumultuous persons to come down to Westminster armed with swords and staves, to fill both the palace-yards and all the approaches to both houses with fury and clamour and to require justice, speedy justice, against the earl’. It was clear that Strafford would die. Oliver St John, one of the parliamentary leaders, had said that it was right and proper to knock wolves and foxes on the head. It was also remarked that ‘stone dead hath no fellow’.

When the Commons assembled, Sir John Pennington spoke of Suckling’s unsuccessful gathering. Thomas Tomkins added that ‘many Papists were newly come to London’. The king had been misled by false counsellors and, as John Pym put it, ‘he that hath been most abused doth not yet perceive it’. The parliament must open the eyes of the king.

It was now proposed that a religious manifesto should be published. The ‘Grand Remonstrance’ devised by the Commons was in a sense an English version of the Scottish covenant, binding those who signed it to an oath that they would remain loyal to ‘the true reformed Protestant religion’ against ‘popery and popish innovation’. The remonstrance claimed that during the present session of the parliament its members had ‘wrestled with great dangers and fears, the pressing miseries and calamities, the various distempers and disorders which had not only assaulted, but even overwhelmed and extinguished the liberty, peace and prosperity of this kingdom’. It was printed and circulated throughout the country, addressing and inspiring what might now be called a parliamentary party.

On 5 May the Commons, fearful of a papist uprising, ordered the towns, cities and counties of England to ensure that their arms and ammunition were well prepared. A papist plot amounted, in this context, to a royal plot. On that day a new bill was passed allowing parliament to remain in session until it voted for its own dissolution. It has been said that this was the moment that reform turned into revolution; it deprived the monarch of his right to govern.

The Lords themselves had directed that an armed force should take command of the Tower, thus divesting the king of responsibility for military affairs. It was another blow to his authority. The earl of Stamford proposed a motion ‘to give God thanks for our great deliverance, which is greater than that from the Gunpowder Treason [of 5 November 1605]. For by this time, had not this plot been discovered, the powder had been about our ears here in the parliament house, and we had all been made slaves.’ The threat of military force had alarmed the Lords as much as the Commons; on 8 May, the Bill of Attainder against Strafford was passed by the upper house.

A delegation from both houses of parliament now carried the document of attainder to the Banqueting House for the king’s signature; the members were accompanied by a crowd of approximately 12,000 calling out, ‘Justice! Justice!’ The king, understandably cast down and demoralized, said that he would give his response on Monday morning; this delay did not please the crowd, who had promptly gathered again outside Palace Gate. If the king refused to sign the attainder it was predicted that the palace would be attacked, and that the king and queen would be captured.

Charles conferred with his bishops and his privy councillors, most of whom urged him to sign the bill condemning Strafford to death. The archbishop of York told him that ‘there was a private and a public conscience; that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do, that which was against his private conscience as a man’. Slowly and reluctantly he assented; he had promised to protect the earl’s life and fortune, but now for reasons of state he was obliged to break his word. In the process he had been humiliated and weakened almost beyond repair. Pym, on hearing the news of the king’s capitulation, raised his hands in exaltation and declared, ‘Has he given us the head of Strafford? Then he will refuse us nothing!’

On 12 May Strafford went to his death on Tower Hill in front of what was said to be the largest multitude ever gathered in England. Crowds of 200,000 people watched his progress in an atmosphere of carnival and rejoicing. The lieutenant of the Tower asked him to make the short journey from the prison to the scaffold by coach, thus avoiding public fury; Strafford is supposed to have replied that ‘I dare look death in the face and, I hope, the people too. Have you a care that I do not escape, and I care not how I die, whether by the hand of the executioner or the madness and fury of the people.’ As he walked to his death he looked up at the window of the chamber in which Laud was confined, and saw the archbishop waiting for him there. He asked for ‘your prayers and your blessings’, but the cleric fell into a dead faint.

In his speech from the scaffold the earl declared that ‘I wish that every man would lay his hand on his heart, and consider seriously whether the beginning of the people’s happiness should be written in letters of blood’. He knelt in prayer for half an hour, and then laid himself down on the block. It took one stroke. The spectators rushed through the streets of London waving their hats and shouting, ‘His head is off! His head is off!’ In his prison Archbishop Laud observed, a few days later, that Strafford had served ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or to be made, great’.

21

A world of change

While the trial of Strafford continued, the Commons seemed uncertain about the direction of other public business. Parliament did nothing but, in the phrase of the time, beat the air. On one occasion, after prayers had been said, the members of the Commons lapsed into silence and simply looked at one other; they did not know where to begin. On another occasion, according to a contemporary account, the Speaker stood up and asked what question he should put to them; answer came there none. A loss of initiative in the cause of reform was one of the reasons for a public fast in April.

Yet the death of the earl seems finally to have lent stimulus to the proceedings. The sight of blood quickened the appetite, and in July a series of fresh initiatives was debated and agreed. It seemed that the king himself had become almost an irrelevance in the business of renovating the kingdom. The familiar grant of tonnage and poundage was made to him but on the understanding that his previous exactions had been illegal; no new money was to be given to the royal household without permission of parliament. Of course parliament itself needed revenues both for work at home and for payment to the Scots. A new subsidy was imposed upon the counties and a poll tax introduced to raise additional income. This did not endear parliament to many of the people.

The old centres of royal authority were abolished. The council of the north, the religious court of high commission and the Star Chamber were all swept away. Ship-money was condemned as contrary to the law. The limits of the royal forests were declared to be those that had obtained in the twentieth year of James I. The dissolution of the Star Chamber, in particular, lifted the final impediment to public expression. That body had decreed, four years before, that no book could be published without a licence; the order was now dead. Even before the chamber had been dissolved the appetite for news was fed by pamphlets and tracts eagerly passed from hand to hand, most of them predicting great innovations in Church and state. There were 900 of these publications issued in 1640, 2,000 in 1641 and 4,000 in 1642.

The number of print shops doubled in this decade, but they were joined by what were described in one satirical pamphlet as ‘upstart booksellers, trotting mercuries and bawling hawkers’. Wandering stationers and balladmongers would call out, ‘Come buy a new book, a new book, newly come forth’. Pamphlets with titles such as ‘Appeal to Parliament’, ‘A Dream, or News from Hell’ and ‘Downfall of Temporising Poets’ abounded. It was no longer necessary to go to the bookstalls about St Paul’s or the Exchange to find newssheets. They were sold on the streets of London. Broadsheets cost a penny, eight-page pamphlets a penny or twopence. One commentator derided Pym’s ‘twopenny speeches’. A member of the congregation in Radwinter, Essex, threw a religious pamphlet to his curate, saying, ‘There is reading work for you, read that.’ The mixture of information and opinion was compounded by plays, processions, ballads, playing cards, graffiti, petitions and prints.

The leading members of the Commons published their speeches which, according to the puritan Richard Baxter in his autobiography, were ‘greedily brought up throughout the land, which greatly increased the people’s apprehension of their danger’. The king himself was moved to write against these ‘poisoners of the minds of his weak subjects; amazed by what eyes these things are seen, and by what ears they are heard’. Yet pamphleteering was not confined to the godly men of the parliament. The sermons of the principal preachers were also distributed. From the pulpit came a multitude of declarations and denunciations; but the pulpit also acted as a distributor of news. The cleric might explain the events of the day, or the week, and comment upon them to his excited congregation. The Presbyterian minister Robert Baillie said that ‘many a sore thrust got both men and women thronging into our sermons’. The words from the church were then taken up in discussions at the taverns and the shops, the streets and the markets.

Yet the pamphlets were not simply directed against one or other of the factions then gaining ground. They were part of a vigorous debate on the ideas and ideals of political and religious life. What were the grounds of a just monarchy? Was there in truth an ancient constitution? Were king, parliament and people uniquely joined? The publication and dissemination of these concepts materially helped to extend and to inform the political nation. The radicals used the printing presses to disseminate their own opinions of Church and state, leading John Milton to proclaim that London had become ‘the mansion house of liberty’ with its citizens ‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching reformation’.

Yet the royalists fought back with their own pamphlets. Richard Carter, in ‘The Schismatic Stigmatised’, attacked the dissenting preachers who were even then crowding Westminster and its environs. ‘And instead of orthodox divines, they set up all kinds of mechanics, as shoemakers, cobblers, tailors and glovers … these predicant mechanics and lawless lads do affect an odd kind of gesture in their pulpits, vapouring and throwing heads, hands and shoulders this way, and that way, puffing and blowing, grinning and gurning.’ A doggerel verse circulated through the streets:

When women preach, and cobblers pray,

The fiends in hell make holiday.

The parishes of London were indeed filled with dissenters of any and every kind. A separatist congregation met at a house in Goat Alley, off Whitecross Street; they arrived in twos or threes, and one man stood at the door to warn of any approaching strangers. The man appointed to preach stood in the middle of the room while the others gathered in a circle about him. Among these lay preachers were, according to a political satire sold in the streets, ‘Greene the feltmaker, Spencer the horse-rubber, Quartermine the brewer’s clerk, with some few others, that are mighty sticklers in this new kind of talking trade, which many ignorant coxcombs call preaching’.

The conventional clergy of the Church were derided in the streets and sometimes their surplices were stripped from their backs. The cry went up, ‘There goes a Jesuit, a Baal-priest, an Abbey-lubber, one of Canterbury’s whelps…’ When a bishop went up to the pulpit in St Olave’s, in Old Jewry, some hundred ‘rude rascals’ called out, ‘A Pope! A Pope! A Pope!’

In this fevered atmosphere rumours of every kind circulated like hurricanes. It was said that a papist cavalry was concealed in caves in Surrey; it was reported that a plot had been hatched to blow up the Thames with gunpowder and thus drown the city. One of Pym’s colleagues, Sir Walter Earle, told the Commons that a conspiracy had been discovered to demolish parliament; in their excitement the members leaned forward in their seats better to hear him, and part of the floor of the gallery gave way. One member exclaimed that he smelled gunpowder and another, leaving his seat, shouted that ‘there was hot work and a great fire within’. The news soon spread, and a mob flew to Westminster. It was of course a false alarm, but the sudden panic testifies to the agitated state of the capital.

It was a world of change; as the king had said to parliament earlier in the year, ‘You have taken the government all in pieces.’ ‘The Brothers of the Blade’, a dialogue issued in 1641, considered ‘the vicissitudes and revolutions of the states and conditions of men in these last days of the world’. ‘Revolution’ meant in conventional terms recurrence or periodic return; in these years it became associated with more earthly disorder. It was widely believed that the times were awry; anxiety and even despair were experienced by many. Brilliana Harley, a royalist letter-writer, expressed her belief that ‘things are now in such a condition that if the Lord does not put forth his helping hand his poor children will be brought low’.

In the weeks after Strafford’s death the king seems to have become resigned to his loss of power. He signed the bill for abolishing tonnage and poundage, telling both houses of parliament that ‘I never had other design but to win the affections of my people’. He made a leading puritan, the earl of Essex, his lord chamberlain. Yet he was in fact playing for time.

There were already the makings of a king’s party from those outraged at the pretensions of parliament in assuming executive powers; others were displeased at the idea of a puritan state Church controlled by parliamentary lay commissioners in place of bishops. The ‘root and branch’ party, which favoured such a change, was still in a minority. In this year many petitions reached Westminster from those who wished to preserve the Church and protect the Book of Common Prayer from more change. Some supported the maintenance of the episcopacy on the basis that the office was good even if the man was indifferent. From Oliver Cromwell’s own county of Huntingdon, for example, it was pleaded that ‘the form of divine service expressed and contained in the book of common prayer’ was the best. These petitioners wished to extirpate those immoderate and bitter reformers who fomented nothing but trouble and disorder in the churches of the country.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who were moderate or orthodox in their religion were beginning to take the side of the king and to believe that the political settlement imposed by parliament had gone far enough. Instead of relief and liberty, it had brought anxiety and division. The imposition of taxes had not improved the temper of the nation. One gentlewoman from Yorkshire, Margaret Eure, wrote: ‘I am in such a great rage with parliament as nothing will pacify me, for they promised us all should be well, if my lord Strafford’s head were off, and since then there is nothing better, but I think we shall be undone with taxes.’ It was agreed by many that the king should take wise counsel but few accepted that parliament had the power to choose who those counsellors should be. It was also possible that the king could still divide the Lords from the Commons; in June 1641, the peers threw out a bill excluding the bishops from their number. They were not prepared to consider any ‘further reformation’.

In the same month of June John Pym introduced what were known as the ‘ten propositions’, measures that were designed to increase parliamentary control of the king’s court and council. All priests and Jesuits were to be banished from the court and, in particular, from the queen’s entourage. Henrietta was defiant; she would obey her husband, she said, but not 400 of his subjects. Another proposition demanded that the king remove his ‘evil’ counsellors, and insisted that none in future were to be appointed unless they were such ‘as his people and Parliament may have just cause to confide in’. The armies of Scotland and of England were to be disbanded as quickly as possible. There was no reference to the king. This might be seen as a step towards a republican government, however carefully obscured by the rhetoric of loyalty.

The ‘ten propositions’ had been in part prompted by the king’s recent and carefully resolved decision to travel to Scotland. It was feared that in fact his destination would be York, rather than Edinburgh, where he might take control of his English army garrisoned there; hence the call that the English and Scottish armies should stand down. But if he did indeed journey to Edinburgh, what then? He might, for example, enlist his native subjects in some attack upon Westminster. If he agreed to grant the Scots the ‘pure’ religion they demanded, and allowed them to resume their just liberties, they might return to their old allegiance to the Stuarts; Charles had already written to the earl of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, with the pledge to ‘establish the affections of my people fully to me’. If the Scottish and English armies were joined together, under the command of the king, they would represent an almost irresistible force.

John Pym and his supporters were now seized with anxiety and alarm. They even convened parliament on Sunday morning, at the beginning of August, to debate the nature of the threat. They begged for a delay to the king’s journey, and he consented to a pause of one day. He had in the interim been engaged in talks with the Scottish commissioners and, according to the Venetian ambassador, the Scots were boasting that ‘they would do all in their power to place the king in his authority once again. When he appeared in Scotland, all political differences would be at an end, and they would serve their natural prince as one man in such a cause.’

As the king prepared to go on his journey a crowd gathered in Westminster entreating him not to leave. It may be that his presence in London acted as a form of reassurance, at a time of great disorder, or it may be that some in the crowd suspected his intentions. He went to parliament on the morning of his departure in a mood of ill-concealed hostility and impatience. He named a commission of twenty-two men who would administer affairs in his absence; among them was the earl of Newcastle, a notable enemy to the parliamentary cause.

The Commons immediately retired to their chamber and debated the means ‘of putting the kingdom into a posture of defence’. An ‘ordinance’ was passed, the first of its kind, appointing several key parliamentarians to attend the king in Scotland; they were of course to be spies rather than companions, hoping to supervise his actions. An ordinance had in the medieval period been a device by means of which the king could make a declaration without the consent of parliament; now the two houses were issuing ordinances without the consent of the king. Another confrontation seemed to be inevitable.

Charles was greeted in Edinburgh with every sign of acclamation. He at once proceeded to gain the approval of the Scots. He attended the services of the Scottish Church with an outward display of piety, and agreed to the demand of the covenanters that bishops be excluded from the reformed Church. He attended the sessions of the Scottish parliament, and agreed to the terms of an Anglo-Scottish union whereby his powers over parliament and the army were severely circumscribed. Some at Westminster believed that they might obtain similar benefits, but it occurred to others that Charles had simply managed to neutralize the Scots in any future conflict.

In these months parliament had begun to govern; it paid the army, and it issued orders to royal officials such as the lieutenant of the Tower. It had made decrees about the liturgy and the forms of religious worship. Laud had been impeached and imprisoned, while Strafford had been executed; various of the supposed ‘evil counsellors’, among them Lord Keeper Finch, had fled. The judges and sheriffs who had supported the king’s exactions had been summoned to parliament and asked to explain their conduct. The Star Chamber, the northern council and the high commission, the seats of Charles’s rule, had been abolished. Laud’s judicial victims, such as Prynne and Bastwick, had been liberated and brought back to London in triumph. Most importantly, perhaps, it had been decreed that the present parliament could not be prorogued without its own consent.

It is possible, however, to see these developments in another light. Parliament had acted in an arbitrary and imperious manner. It had misinterpreted the polity or unwritten constitution of the country, and arrogated powers to itself that it had never before possessed. It had illegally hounded Strafford to death. It had colluded with the king’s enemies and an alien army. It had organized mobs to intimidate its opponents. It had proposed a new system of religion to be enforced upon an unwilling people. It had passed a bill ensuring its permanence. In the process the king had been stripped of his royal prerogative and had suffered a severe defeat in all the matters that touched him most closely. He had always said that his enemies wished to relegate him to the status of the doge of Venice. He was not mistaken.

22

Worse and worse news

Parliament reassembled on 20 October 1641, determined to wring from the king the same concessions that the Scottish parliament had already obtained from him. This was the period when the title of ‘King Pym’ came into general use. John Pym had started his career, perhaps surprisingly, as a receiver of Crown lands, and he was in general a good man of business. He was the great orchestrator of parliamentary affairs and had the ability to direct various men and factions towards one end; he was an effective, if not eloquent, debater but his real energy and power lay in his handling of parliamentary committees. By his use of such committees, in fact, he proved that parliament could govern as ably as the king. He sat close to the Speaker in the Commons, together with the other parliamentary leaders, and it was reported that ‘the Speaker diligently watches the Eye of Pym’.

He was shrewd, and tireless, with a fierce hatred of popery and a genuine commitment to what he considered to be the true religion; his maiden speech was an attack upon one of his colleagues who had branded a Sabbath bill as a ‘puritan’ bill, and in another speech he declared that ‘no impositions are so grievous as those that are laid upon the soul’. He possessed a round face, full lips and heavy jowls; he also sported a curling moustache and short pointed beard. Yet he was not necessarily of a severe disposition; he was known for his cheerfulness and conviviality.

At the beginning of this session a letter was delivered to him as he sat in his place in the Commons. A gentleman had hired a messenger on Fish Street Hill, and given him a shilling to deliver the missive. When Pym opened it a rag dropped out that was, in the words of Clarendon, ‘foul with the foulness of a plague sore’; it was a rag that had covered a plague wound. It was accompanied by a letter that denounced Pym for treason and threatened that, if the plague did not kill him, a dagger surely would. It ended with ‘repent, traitor’.

Pym and his colleagues were now intent upon stripping Charles of his prerogative power, namely his ability to appoint his officers and councillors without reference to parliament. Yet they had first to deprive the upper house of its majority in favour of the king, and so they moved to expel the thirteen bishops who sat there. A bill was passed by the Commons to disqualify any cleric from accepting secular office, but naturally enough it was delayed by the Lords themselves.

Pym tried to raise the temperature of the debate with news of fresh army plots and of a furore in Edinburgh, where three covenanter lords had fled the king’s court in fear of their lives; this became known as ‘the incident’. The king then fervently declared before the Scottish parliament that he had played no part in any such plot to assassinate them and asked for ‘fair play’. The fact that the principal conspirator had been Will Murray, the groom of the king’s bedchamber, served to throw doubt upon the king’s protestations of innocence. Whether true or not, the rumours only deepened parliamentary alarm about the king’s intentions; it simply confirmed the fact, known by all, that he could not be trusted. Yet, in turn, why should he trust those who conspired against his throne? It still seemed very likely, in the early days of the parliament, that any attempt at more radical reform would come to nothing. Many members were now of the opinion that the changes in religion, in particular, were coming on too fast. Here were the makings of the king’s party.

Just at that moment, at the very beginning of November, news reached parliament that a rebellion had broken out in Ireland. The information was brought to the Commons by seventeen privy councillors, and Clarendon reported that ‘there was a deep silence … and a kind of consternation’. It aroused all the fears of the Protestants of England, and one courtier who had been asked to remain at Westminster and report on parliament, Edward Nicholas, wrote to the king in Edinburgh that ‘the alarm of popish plots amaze and fright the people here more than anything’. It was reported that papists were storing weapons and stocking gunpowder. A pamphlet circulated with the question ‘Oh ye bloodthirsty papists, what are your intents?’ The rebellion came as a cataclysmic shock, but the conditions for it had been slowly gathering.

There were three defined elements in Irish society. The New English were the Protestant settlers who had established themselves after the Reformation; they controlled the Dublin parliament and were intent upon imposing English ‘standards’ upon the natives. The Old English had arrived before the Reformation, some as early as the twelfth century, and had become so acclimatized that they identified themselves with Ireland rather than with England; many of them were Catholic while some merely conformed in public to the Protestant Church of Ireland. They owned about one third of the best land. The third group, known by their masters as the ‘mere Irish’ or ‘natives’, made up the largest part of the population but, like most of the downtrodden of the earth, have left little record of their loyalties or beliefs.

But the Irish and the Old English had much cause for grievance. The Crown had in previous years confiscated one quarter of the land that had been held by the Anglo-Irish gentry and by the native Irish; it had already been decided, in the reign of James I, that no landowner could have the title to his land unless he could prove that he held proper feudal tenure. If he could not provide these credentials, his lands might be confiscated and planted with new English or Scottish settlers. Thus James had presented the citizens of London with 40,000 acres in County Derry, the territory therefore becoming known as Londonderry. The six counties of Ulster had also largely fallen into the hands of Scottish Presbyterians. The dismal state of the Church of Ireland, and the zealous work of Jesuit missionaries, had in any case emboldened the Catholic cause. The Catholics had good reason for resentment; they were unable to educate their children, and their priests, given no benefices, were forced to rely upon the charity of their parishioners. Fines could also be imposed upon those who did not attend Protestant services.

Many forces were therefore at work in the revolt. The Irish Catholic leaders, who included the Old English, drew up a remonstrance in which they claimed to be rising up for the safety of their religion and for the defence of their lives and estates. They were aware of the proceedings of the English parliament, and of the concessions made by the king to the Scottish Presbyterians, and so felt all the more keenly the injustice to their native religion; they feared also that the reformers or ‘puritan faction of England’ had so deep a detestation of Catholicism that they would impose more restraints upon, and exact new duties from, them. They might even go further and in a statement of Irish grievances it was suggested that the Scots and English, combined, might ‘come into Ireland, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, for to plant their puritan, anarchical religion among us, otherwise utterly to destroy us’. Why should Irishmen not rise up in their own defence before it was too late? This was a grand irony of the period. The negotiations between England and Scotland had the result of forcing Ireland into revolt. Charles had found it impossible in practice to administer three kingdoms, when each one had pledged its loyalty to a separate religion.

On 23 October 1641, they rose up against their English masters. A rebellion in Dublin on the previous day had been partly discovered and quelled, but insurrection spread through the land. Parties of armed men would ravage an English-owned plantation, and then retire to their own territory; others would actively supplant the English owners and replace them with the former proprietors. The English fugitives sought refuge in the nearest army garrison, where they remained in fear and consternation.

The more radical members of the Commons were already preparing a remonstrance to the king with the purpose of appealing for renewed public support, when news of what was called an Irish ‘massacre’ invested their efforts with fresh urgency. The most frightful reports had reached them. It was stated that many thousands of Protestants had been killed, that women had been raped and mutilated, that babies had been burned. A pamphlet, ‘Worse and Worse News from Ireland’, revealed the list of war crimes. A letter read out to the House of Commons alleged that the Irish rebels in Munster were engaged in

exercising all manner of cruelties, and striving who can be most barbarously exquisite in tormenting the poor Protestants, wheresoever they come, cutting off the privy members, ears, fingers and hands, plucking out their eyes, boiling the heads of little children before their mothers’ faces, and then ripping out their mothers’ bowels, stripping women naked, and standing by them being naked, whilst they are in travail [labour], killing the children as soon as they are born, ripping up their mothers’ bellies as they are delivered …

The more sober truth was that approximately 5,000 English Protestants had been killed, and that an equal number of Irish Catholics had fallen in the course of the English counter-attack.

On 5 November Pym rose from his seat to pledge his life and estate to the cause of suppressing the rebellion but added that ‘unless the king would remove his evil counsellors, and take such counsellors as might be approved by Parliament, we should account ourselves absolved from this engagement’. A bill was then passed that ‘supplicated’ the king to employ only men acceptable to parliament. On 8 November Pym told the Lords that, if the king rejected their supplication, he and his fellows would have to ‘resolve some such way of defending Ireland from the rebels as may concur to the securing of ourselves’. Parliament, in other words, would be in charge of organizing and directing its own Protestant army that might in turn be employed to defend its own cause. The king would become merely a figurehead or talisman.

This was the occasion for the debate on a document that later became known as the ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a lengthy tract of some 204 clauses that anatomized the history of abuses perpetrated by the ‘malignant party’ close to the king. These evil counsellors had set out ‘a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established’. It was a catalogue of errors and abuses that was designed to inflame the temper of the nation, and thus to check the resurgence of loyalty towards the king.

Violent objections were raised to what amounted to a manifesto; some believed that it was an act of treachery against the king, while others believed that the Commons had no right to produce such a remonstrance without the agreement of the Lords. Sir Edward Dering, the royalist member for Kent, said that ‘when I first heard of a remonstrance I presently imagine that like faithful councillors we should hold up a glass to his majesty … I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people and talk of the king as a third person’.

Pym sensed that a royalist party was acquiring more support. He agreed that certain clauses of the remonstrance might be amended or deleted but ‘it is time to speak plain English, lest posterity shall say that England was lost and no man durst speak the truth’. The final debate took place on 22 November and went on through that winter afternoon; it continued in candlelight until one o’clock in the morning. When the house finally divided Pym had gained the victory by eleven votes. It was said that the decision was like that of a ‘starved jury’, alluding to the custom of depriving jurors of meat and drink until they had reached a verdict. But the narrowness of the result meant that the king had created a sizeable party.

As soon as the division was announced some of the royalists entered their protestations. One member, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, accused the majority of being ‘a rabble of inconsiderable persons, set on by a juggling Junto’. When a motion was introduced that the remonstrance should be published at once, the tempers of the opposing sides erupted. Some waved their hats in the air while others, according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts and held them by their pommels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground’. Sir Philip Warwick wrote that ‘I thought we had all sat in the valley of the shadow of death; for we, like Joab’s and Abner’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels’. The significance of the occasion is marked by Oliver Cromwell, who said on leaving the chamber that ‘if the remonstrance had been rejected, I would have sold all I had the next morning, and never have seen England more’.

*

Edward Nicholas wrote to the king on the first day of the debate on 8 November, that ‘it relates all the misgovernment and unpleasing things that have been done by ill counsels (as they call it) … if your majesty come not instantly away [from Edinburgh to London] I trouble to think what will be the issue of it’. So Charles returned to London from Edinburgh seventeen days later and, on his entrance into the City, he was met by a cavalcade. He told those assembled to greet him that he would maintain the good old laws and the Protestant religion. He would do this ‘if need be, to the hazard of my life and all that is dear unto me’.

It is likely that the welcome from the City was a genuine one. The ‘former tumults and disorders’, as Charles called them, were no better for commerce than the new taxes that were being imposed by parliament upon the merchants and men of business. A fund of loyalty for the king also existed among the prosperous sort who were averse to the radicalism of his opponents; they disliked the spectacle of apprentices and minor tradesmen quoting Scripture at them, and they feared any uprising of the multitude. The Venetian ambassador had already reported that anonymous placards had been posted in the streets of the city, naming the lords of the puritan Junto as traitors and the authors of sedition.

Charles knighted the lord mayor amid cries of ‘God bless and long live King Charles and Queen Mary’, the name by which Henrietta Maria was often known, after which he rode in procession, accompanied by 1,000 armed men, to the Guildhall for a great banquet. The conduits at Cornhill and Cheapside ran with claret as the bells rang and the bonfires blazed. It was a ceremony of ancient provenance and it emphasized the virtues of the traditional order. No guests from the Commons were invited to the feast at the Guildhall.

The king was encouraged, however, by his greeting in the City and by the fact that the remonstrance had been strongly resisted by so many members of the Commons. Determined to surrender nothing more, the king was resolved to extirpate his enemies under the forms of law. The parliament had destroyed Strafford by ingenious means of attainder, and it was open to him to use the same or similar methods.

Just before the king had left Scotland he, too, had received the news that his Irish subjects had erupted in rebellion. He had appeased one of his kingdoms only to find another in arms. His first reaction was simply the hope that the revolt ‘may hinder some of these follies in England’, by which he may have meant that the desperate news might bring parliament to its senses. Yet it could be lent a more sinister meaning. Could the Irish not be treated as a threat to the puritans?

Pym and his colleagues were inclined to blame Charles for the rebellion in a more direct sense. Some of the Irish rebels claimed that they had a commission from the king under the great seal ‘to arrest and seize the goods, estates and persons of all the English Protestants’. It was a false claim, but at the time it persuaded Pym that the king had deliberately fomented the revolt in order to raise a force against the parliament; that Charles was willing to tolerate Catholicism in Ireland in return for the support of the ‘Old English’ in his fight against parliament. It was said of the Irish rebels that England ‘is that fine sweet bit which they so long for and their cruel teeth so much water at’.

There was bitter controversy over the size and direction of the military campaign in Ireland. The king said that one man, rather than 400 men, was best able to direct a campaign; the Junto naturally disagreed, claiming that Charles could not raise an army without the express approval of parliament. In the last two months of the year the earl of Warwick set about creating what was essentially a parliamentary force. Charles wanted a wholly volunteer force composed of his supporters, while the Junto insisted upon pressing men into service. At every stage in the process the Commons, with a small majority against the king, was opposed by the Lords.

In the event only one regiment was sent to Ireland, at the end of the year, and a further force of 5,000 men arrived five months later. The English garrisons in Ireland were essentially left to fight their own battles. It might be fair to assume that Pym and his fellows wished to muster their resources for a conflict closer to home.

23

A world of mischief

At the end of 1641 a royalist member of parliament, Sir Henry Slingsby, wrote that ‘I cannot say we have had a merry Christmas, but the maddest one that ever I saw’. He added that ‘I never saw the court so full of gentlemen, every one comes thither with his sword … Both factions talk very big and it is a wonder there is no more blood yet spilt, seeing how earnest both sides are.’ The citizens had come to Westminster, their swords by their sides, ready to protect the puritan members. John Venn, one of the London members of parliament, said in a shop off Cheapside that ‘you must go to the parliament with your swords, for that party which is best for the commonwealth is like to be over-voted’. The parliament itself had been warned many times of threats against its activities and even its life.

On 21 December elections were held in London for the common council and the results favoured the puritan cause. On that day the king dismissed the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Balfour, and appointed Thomas Lunsford in his place; Lunsford was known to be a zealous and sometimes violent partisan of the king, and was therefore deeply distrusted. If any of the parliamentary or civic leaders were arrested, he would be sure to hold them fast. Simonds D’Ewes wrote that ‘all things hastened apace to confusion and calamity, from which I scarce saw any possibility in human reason for this poor Church and kingdom to be delivered’.

The lightning flash was reserved for the thirteen bishops who sat in the Lords; they provided the majority for the king which was able to override all the bills and declarations of the Commons. When the Lords gathered in Westminster at the end of December a crowd of apprentices and others began to call out, ‘No bishops! No popish lords!’ The archbishop of York lunged at one of the noisiest of the participants, but he himself was hustled and his gown torn. The Lords then asked the Commons to join with them in a declaration against riotous assemblies, to which Pym answered, ‘God forbid the House of Commons should proceed in any way to dishearten people to obtain their just desires in such a way.’ He was on the side of the mob who had threatened the bishops.

An opposing force, made up of military volunteers and soldiers of fortune, had also gathered in the city; they had come to serve the king in Ireland and elsewhere, but they could also be guaranteed to turn upon the crowds who supported parliament. They might prove useful if theking should ever attempt to mount a coup d’état. One London news-writer, John Dillingham, reported that these soldiers ‘offered their majesties to untie the knot’ before adding ‘what was meant you may judge’.

This was the period in which the terms of ‘roundhead’ and ‘cavalier’ became common currency, deriving from the short hair of the citizens and the long locks of the royalist soldiers. The latter term, deriving from caballeros or Spanish troops, was meant to be one of abuse but it soon became associated with honour and gallantry. It should be remembered that the leaders of the parliamentary cause, in the Commons and in the Lords, also wore their hair long as befitted the members of their social rank.

With the steady formation of two antagonistic powers, there was already talk of a civil war. Argument and dissension sprang up everywhere. Two days after Christmas the crowds once more gathered around Westminster to demand a response from the Lords to another petition against the bishops; a group of soldiers fell upon them but the citizens fought back with ferocity inspired by fear. They attacked the troops with sticks and stones and cudgels; some sailors joined them with truncheons until the soldiers were beaten down or had run away. A number of apprentices had been arrested and detained in the Mermaid Tavern; a group of their fellows stormed the tavern and released them. On the following morning soldiers charged out of Westminster Abbey and fell upon the citizens with their swords and pistols; that afternoon, they hacked at a group of apprentices. In retaliation the citizens threatened to shut up their shops and refrain from trade.

In the Lords the bishops sat huddled in the torchlight, listening to the rage and menace of the crowds. They were forced to leave the chamber by means of subterfuge, some of them under the protection of the great lords and others directed to secret passages out of the building. The earl of Huntingdon reported that ‘ten thousand prentices were betwixt York House and Charing Cross with halberds, staves and some with swords. They stood so thick that we had much ado to pass with our coaches, and though it were a dark night their innumerable number of links [lights] made it as light as day. They cried “no bishops, no papist lords”, looked in our coaches whether there were any bishops therein, that we went in great danger.’

On the following morning the citizens and apprentices returned to Westminster with the stated intention of murdering any bishops who dared to venture forth. Whenever they spied a bishop’s boat coming across the Thames they called out, ‘A bishop! A bishop!’ and prevented him from landing. It is likely, but not proven, that these angry assemblies were in fact planned and organized by the parliamentary party to bring additional pressure upon the king.

On 29 December a group of twelve bishops laid the complaint that they had been ‘violently menaced, affronted, and assaulted, by multitudes of people’ and that in their enforced absence the proceedings of the Lords were void. This was tantamount to asserting that, without the bishops, any parliament was illegal. The members of the Commons were incensed at what they considered to be the arrogance of the claim, and on the following day the bishops were impeached for high treason and sent to the Tower on a bitter night of snow and frost. The senior dignitaries of the Church, including both archbishops, were now behind locked doors. It was possible that, in their absence, the puritan Junto would at last be able to pass its radical measures through the Lords. The king was by no means alone in his policy of coercion and conspiracy.

On the following day a large number of the king’s old military officers, described by Simonds D’Ewes as ‘desperate and loose persons’, were seen milling about the court and the environs of Westminster. John Pym ordered that the doors of the chamber be locked. He then declared that he had discovered a plot to destroy the Commons before nightfall. It was yet another rumour thrown upon the fire.

On the first day of the new year, 1642, matters came to a head. Committees from the Commons and the remaining Lords met at the Guildhall to consider their strategy. It was agreed that the trained bands should be summoned on the authority of parliament; at this meeting plans may also have been drawn up to impeach the queen for communing with the Catholic rebels in Ireland. The threat was, perhaps, designed to provoke the king into violent action. The trained bands were indeed raised for the cause of parliament, effectively placing London under its control; to summon armed troops without the king’s permission was an act of treason, but nobody seemed to care any more.

Charles was in any case already drawing up plans to impeach certain members of parliament; he had said previously that their correspondence with the Scots, at time of war, ‘shall not be forgotten’. On 3 January the charges against Lord Mandeville, John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles and William Strode were read to the Lords. On the following day Pym sent a delegation to the common council of London, newly elected in the puritan interest, to plead for help; on that day the council elected a ‘committee of safety’ for the city.

It was not a moment too soon, since the king was ready to strike later that day. Pym had been alerted to the assault, perhaps by spies at the court, and prepared for a notable act of theatre. The accused men took their seats in the Commons early in the afternoon, knowing full well that the king would be informed of their presence. At three o’clock Charles left Whitehall with an armed guard of 300 men and made his way to Westminster. The news reached the Commons and the indicted members slipped from their seats and hid in the court of the king’s bench before being rowed into the City; even as they made their departure the king’s party could be heard clattering on the stairs into the lobby. The king entered the chamber of the Commons alone but the doors were left open so that the members could see the armed force waiting outside.

‘Gentlemen,’ Charles said, ‘I am sorry to have this occasion of coming unto you.’ He asked for the accused members to be surrendered to him. He then realized that his bluff had been called. He looked about him, and saw that they were gone. ‘I do not see any of them,’ he muttered, ‘I think I should know them.’ He added that ‘I am come to tell you that I must have them, wheresoever I find them. Is Mr Pym here?’ There came no answer. ‘Well, well! ’Tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good as another’s.’ He then asked the Speaker to help him find the offending members.

‘May it please your majesty,’ Speaker Lenthall replied, ‘I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg your majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.’

There followed what contemporaries described as a ‘long pause’ or a ‘dreadful silence’. ‘Well,’ the king eventually said, ‘since I see all the birds are flown, I do expect from you that you will send them unto me as soon as they return hither. If not, I will seek them myself, for their treason is foul, and such a one as you will thank me to discover. But I assure you, on the word of a king, I never did intend any force, but shall proceed against them in a legal and fair way, for I never meant any other.’ He left much discomfited as the cries of ‘Privilege! Privilege’ were raised all around him.

The members of the king’s party in the Commons realized at once that he had committed a major, and perhaps fatal, blunder; his authority was for the moment lost, and in a mood of understandable dismay they meekly submitted to the decision of parliament to adjourn itself to the hall of one of the London guilds as a place of greater safety. On the evening of the failed attempt the city had all the air of an armed camp. Barricades were set up and chains drawn across the principal thoroughfares; the people of the suburbs, as well as the city itself, offered their support to parliament in case Charles’s army should march against them. The women boiled water ready to throw upon any encroaching cavaliers. The members who had absconded were now safely concealed in a house on Coleman Street, a notable centre for radical sectarians. The call went up among some that the king was unworthy to live. Charles had effectively lost the capital.

Yet London was not the only place of disaffection. In the days immediately following, thousands of men from Kent and Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, Essex and Sussex, rode or marched to Westminster with petitions for parliament. They complained in general about the decay of trade provoked by the divisions and distempers in the state. The country was, as a result of the crisis, confronted by sudden economic decline; the loss of confidence restricted trade, and the tradesmen and merchants of London hoarded their money in the hope of better times. The majority of the people yearned for peace. It is important to note, however, that the petitioners from Kent and elsewhere had addressed parliament as the centre of authority in the nation.

On 10 January the king left London for Hampton Court, arriving so quickly and unexpectedly that the beds had not been prepared for him and his family. He told the Dutch ambassador that he had feared for the safety of his wife in the capital; he would not see London again until he returned nine years later as a prisoner. On the following day the members of parliament who had been charged by Charles with high treason came back by water to Westminster where they were greeted by triumphant crowds.

The military arsenal of the nation was placed at Hull, where 20,000 weapons and 7,000 barrels of gunpowder were secured. The king appointed the earl of Newcastle to be the governor of the port and arsenal but he was circumvented by the swift action of a young parliamentarian, John Hotham, who persuaded the mayor of Hull to admit his men. His father, Sir John Hotham, was then appointed as the town’s governor.

The Commons drew up a declaration to the officials of all the counties urging them ‘to put themselves in a position of defence’, and a day or two later asked them to nominate their own lieutenant-generals in the place of those loyal only to the king. The king then sent a letter to Westminster in which he proposed that he would preserve the privileges of its members and protect the interests of true religion in exchange for a commitment to preserve his authority and his revenues. The Lords wished to send a simple reply of thanks but the Commons responded with the demand that the fortresses and militia of the country should be placed in the hands of their supporters.

At the end of January Charles summoned all of his faithful lords to Windsor, to which castle he had now retired; fourteen of the peers joined him there, thus tipping the majority of those remaining in Westminster to the side of the puritan Junto. The lords of the puritan coalition could now rely on a majority in their own house to pass all the necessary legislation. Thus on 5 February the Commons sent up to the Lords a bill concerning the exclusion of the bishops from parliament. The pace quickened. By the middle of that month Charles and Henrietta Maria were at Canterbury, on their way to Dover where the queen would embark for Holland. She was travelling ostensibly to escort her daughter to an arranged marriage with the prince of Orange, but she also had more covert aims; she was attempting to buy men and matériel since, as she told the Venetian ambassador, ‘to settle affairs it was necessary to unsettle them first’.

The bill for the exclusion of the bishops now reached the king. He was advised that, if he did not give royal assent to the document, the queen’s journey might be prevented by parliamentary supporters; the queen herself then added her voice urging him to assent. As far as she was concerned, the bishops were dispensable. So Charles consented, even though he had promised in his coronation oath to maintain the ecclesiastics in all their privileges. He may have calculated, however, that he could rescind his decision at a later time and in more favourable circumstances.

When Charles travelled back to his palace at Greenwich, he sent for his eldest son. He was determined to keep the prince of Wales with him as a guarantee for the preservation of the royal family; father and son would remain together for the next three years through all the vicissitudes of warfare. The members of parliament now asked him to stay in the vicinity of Westminster; his presence elsewhere might provoke conflict and danger. He replied that ‘for my residence near you, I wish it might be so safe and honourable that I had no cause to absent myself from Whitehall; ask yourself whether I have not’. He did not, in other words, feel safe in proximity to parliament and the citizens of London.

On the following day he set out for royalist York rather than the capital. While en route, at Newmarket a parliamentary delegation came to him in order to present their case; they read out a declaration in which all the king’s actions, including his recent attempt to arrest the five members of the Commons, were detailed. The king was very uneasy. ‘That’s false,’ he said at one point. ‘That’s a lie!’ He gave his answer to them the next day. ‘What would you have? Have I violated your laws? Have I denied to pass any bill for the ease and security of my subjects?’ He then added, ‘I do not ask what you have done for me.’

The earl of Pembroke, a member of the puritan Junto, urged the king to return and set out his demands or wishes. ‘I would whip a boy in Westminster School’, Charles replied, ‘that could not tell that by my answer.’ Pembroke then asked him to grant power over the army to parliament. ‘By God,’ the king said, ‘not for an hour!’ He added that ‘you have asked that of me in this, which was never asked of a king’. A king would not surrender his troops to what was effectively the enemy.

On 16 March the members of the Commons issued a proclamation claiming supreme power for parliament within the nation. When Lords and Commons ‘shall declare what the law of the land is, to have this not only questioned and controverted, but contradicted, and a command that it should not be obeyed, is a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. At the same time the members issued an ordinance requiring the leaders of the local militias to be appointed by them; these men would in turn raise forces on behalf of parliament. An Act was then passed to levy new taxes for that cause, much to the horror of the regional communities.

The members of parliament were becoming unpopular. Clarendon wrote that ‘their carriage was so notorious and terrible that spies were set upon, and inquiries were made upon, all private, light, casual discourses which fell from those that were not gracious to them’. It seemed to many that they had become despots rather than representatives, inquisitors rather than champions. As a supporter of the Crown Clarendon may have been a biased witness, but he mentioned the case of one member of the Commons who was expelled from the house and sent to prison for having said that parliament could not provide a guard for itself without the king’s consent.

There was as yet no necessity for war. The local communities of the realm were at peace; the borough sessions, the leet courts and the quarter sessions still met. Bread was weighed and the quality of ale was measured. In the wider world it still seemed possible that a political solution could be reached. Neither side appeared to have the power, or resources, to raise and command an army. No one wanted to be found guilty of having started a civil war. Nobles on both sides were eager for some form of compromise.

The king, in the company of his son, made a slow journey to York. Charles heard an oration at Cambridge as the cry of ‘Vivat rex!’ came from the scholars; the sheriff, however, did not appear to greet him. The prince of Wales reported to his sister that their father was ‘disconsolate and troubled’. The king’s reception in Yorkshire was not designed to reassure him. He had arrived at York with only thirty-nine gentlemen and seventeen guards, but the gentry did not flock to his side; the recorder of York, in his address of welcome, urged him ‘to hearken unto and condescend unto’ his parliamentary opponents. Margaret Eure, the Yorkshire gentlewoman mentioned before, expressed the wish: ‘Oh that the sweet parliament would come with the olive branch in its mouth. We are so many frighted people; for my part if I hear but a door creak I take it to be a drum. Things stand in so ill a condition here as we can make no money of our coal-pits.’ This may be said to summarize the mood of the nation, a compound of fear and dismay. No one could quite believe what was happening. Surely a solution could be found? The participants seemed to be sleepwalking towards disaster.

The king himself still professed a measure of optimism, saying that he could easily assemble an army of 16,000 men. He declared that he would raise a force in Cheshire and descend upon the rebels in Ireland. He wrote to parliament explaining that he had ‘firmly resolved to go with all convenient speed into Ireland, to chastise those wicked and detestable rebels’; he added that, for this purpose, he intended to raise a force of 2,000 foot and 200 horse which should be armed ‘from my magazine at Hull’. He may of course have had a different enemy in mind.

Here lay the problem. Hull was in the hands of parliament represented by its governor, Sir John Hotham. Hotham knew, as well as anyone, that the king may have required arms for ‘wicked and detestable rebels’ closer to home than Ireland. He also knew that the king would soon ride out and demand obedience. The members of parliament had already anticipated this action, and had told him not to open the town gates except by their authority. The members stated later that ‘the king’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared in this high court of law and counsel [themselves], after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal act or resolution of his own’. They could not have declared in a clearer or more unambiguous manner that they were the masters now.

In the last week of April Charles approached Hull with a company of 300 horsemen, preceded by a message that he had come to dine with the governor. Sir John Hotham resolved with the municipal leaders to curtail any triumphant entry; when the king arrived he found the gates shut and the drawbridge raised with a guard upon the ramparts. He demanded entrance as their lawful sovereign, but was told by Hotham that ‘I dare not open the gates, being intrusted by the Parliament with the safety of the town’. Charles replied that ‘I believe you have no order from the Parliament to shut the gates against me or to keep me out of the town’. To which Hotham answered that the king’s force was so great that ‘if it were admitted I should not be able to give a good account of the town’. It seems that Hotham then told him that he might enter with a company of twelve men. He refused the condition as an affront to his person and, to the sound of a trumpet, proclaimed Hotham to be a traitor. His dignity, and his self-respect, had been deeply injured.

When he returned to York he sent a message to parliament acquainting the members with the insult given to him by Hotham ‘who had the impudence to aver that Parliament had directed him to deny His Majesty entrance’. The two houses stated in reply that ‘Sir John Hotham had done nothing but in obedience to the commands of both Houses of Parliament’ and that ‘the declaring of him a traitor, being a member of the House of Commons, was a high breach of the privilege of Parliament’. They also ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to ‘suppress’ any further forces raised by the king. All parties prophesied a world of woe.

24

Neither hot nor cold

In the spring of 1642 the two houses resolved that ‘the king, seduced by wicked counsels, intends to make a war against the Parliament’. So they began to prepare men and arms. In May a levy of 16,000 soldiers was ordered. The trained bands of London were secured for service, and were mustered in Finsbury Fields; the weapons at Hull were transferred to the Tower. A forced loan, to be repaid at an interest of 8 per cent, helped to fill the coffers of the parliamentary treasury with coin or with plate. In the course of this spring parliament nominated the earl of Warwick to be lord high admiral of the English fleet. He worked quickly to gain the loyalty of his men, and ships that supported the cause of the king were promptly boarded and overpowered. Clarendon later observed that ‘this loss of the whole navy was of unspeakable ill consequence to the king’s affairs’. A king of England without sovereignty of the sea could scarcely be considered a king at all.

Men and money were also arriving for the king at York. Members of the nobility and the clergy, together with the gentry and the scholars of both universities, sent him jewellery and plate as well as ready money. Some ventures were less successful. The queen dispatched a vessel from Holland containing ammunition and sixteen pieces of cannon, but it was captured off Yarmouth. Just as parliament had sent out a ‘militia ordinance’ to recruit troops, so the king now sent out ‘commissions of array’ to raise a volunteer army. These commissions were formal documents, written in Latin and impressed with the great seal, sent to every city and county in the nation; they named certain leading men who would secure their territory for the king and at the same time gather men and money for the royal cause. Yet the soldiers on either side had not yet necessarily been raised to fight; they might be used to deter the other side from violence or to provide support in any subsequent negotiations.

The contradictory commands of the militia ordinance and the commissions of array caused much disquiet. While walking in Westminster on a May morning a notable moderate and former soldier, Sir Thomas Knyvett, was approached by two men of parliament who brought with them an order ‘to take upon me, by virtue of ordinance of Parliament, my company and command again’. He told his wife that ‘I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse’; he accepted it, however, since this ‘was no place to dispute’. Then a few hours later ‘I met with a declaration point blank against it by the king’. He consulted with others in the same predicament, and they agreed that they would be obliged to follow their consciences in the matter. Meanwhile, Knyvett wrote, ‘I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times, and stay out of the way of my new masters till these first musterings be over.’ These are the words of a modest and relatively impartial man caught between the two factions. His voice, like that of many others, would soon be muffled by the increasingly rebarbative tones of those urging stronger and stronger action against their opponents. One Londoner who refused to follow the lead of parliament was advised ‘to leave the town lest his brains were beaten out by the boys in the streets’.

Events now had a momentum of their own, each move prompting a countermove and each rumour producing a further reaction. Bulstrode Whitelocke, a parliamentary supporter, remarked later that ‘it is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which have brought us thus far’. Many volumes have been written on the social or religious ‘cause’ or ‘causes’ of the civil war, but one principal motive may simply have been that of fear. Pym and his colleagues knew that, if the king were to prevail, they could all suffer a traitor’s death.

One parliamentarian, Lord Wharton, wrote in June 1642 to the chief justice who was with the king at York. He asked him how it was that the kingdom did not contain one person of prudence and skill ‘to prevent the ruin coming upon us’? His colleagues at Westminster were not disloyal, and he knew that those about the king ‘wish and drive at an accommodation’. So why could not an agreement be reached by both sides? Thomas Knyvett believed, two years later, that ‘the best excuse that can be made for us, must be a fit of lunacy’.

At the beginning of June parliament, guided by Pym’s opportune and careful management, delivered ‘nineteen propositions’ to the king; among them was the wish, or command, that the king dismiss his forces and accept the validity of the militia ordinance. He was to accept the religious reforms outlined by the members of parliament and to exclude popish peers from the Lords. His principal officers should be appointed only with the approval of parliament, and all important matters of state must be debated there. The document became in the words of one parliamentarian, Edmund Ludlow, ‘the principal foundation of the ensuing war’. Ludlow said that the question came to this: ‘whether the king should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent’.

The king of course rejected the demands out of hand with the words ‘nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – we do not wish the laws of England to be changed. He said that acceptance of parliamentary demands would ensure that he became ‘but the outside, but the picture, but the sign, of a king’. The propositions were ‘a mockery’ and ‘a scorn’. Yet some still held back from confrontation. A parliamentarian, Sir Gilbert Pickering, wrote to a friend that ‘there are now some overtures of accommodation … and most men think they smell the air of peace. Yet provide for war.’ Seventeen counties sent forth petitions for such an ‘accommodation’ between the two sides.

At the beginning of July it was reported that the royalists had mustered in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire; it was soon known that the king had placed himself at the head of a force of cavalry. On 11 July parliament declared that the king had already begun the war, thus diverting any blame for beginning the conflict. On the following day the earl of Essex was placed in charge of a parliamentary army, and the king promptly declared him to be a traitor. The first blood was shed three days later, when a townsman of Manchester died from wounds inflicted by a group of royalist troopers. The two sides now competed to seize control of the munitions of the local militias.

A ‘committee of safety’ was set up by parliament which, through the summer and autumn, began to organize soldiers, weaponry and supplies; it was a high command in another sense, since it oversaw military strategy and communicated between parliament and the commanders in the fields.

The two sides were now beginning to acquire a definite shape. The early supporters of the king were prompted by loyalty and by the doctrine of obedience. Sir Edmund Verney expressed it best by saying of the king that ‘I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him’. Verney lost his life, shortly after writing this, in the first great battle of the conflict. His sense of honour overrode all other considerations. It was a question of what was known as ‘the old service’ or ‘the good old cause’.

A majority of the peers and the greater landowners supported the king, since his privileges guaranteed their own. Twice as many families of the gentry also took the king’s part. The puritan gentry, of course, were parliamentarians. A puritan divine, Richard Baxter, anatomized the situation very well. He claimed that ‘on the parliament’s side were the smaller part, as some thought, of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders, and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations [towns] and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures’. An element of popular or lower-class royalism, still to be recognized today, was evident in the zeal of porters and watermen, butchers and labourers, for the king’s cause in the larger towns and cities; the language of the street often condemned ‘parliament dogs’ and ‘parliament whores’. They wore red ribbons in their hats as a sign of their allegiance.

Religious dissenters overwhelmingly took the side of parliament, of course, while the Roman Catholics and those of orthodox faith supported the king or, for fear of reprisals, remained neutral. The universities and cathedral cities were largely for the king, although the clergy were often opposed by the aldermen, while the dockyards and chief ports were for parliament. A great number of towns, however, wished to stay out of the conflict altogether.

In the most general terms the north and west were sympathetic towards the king while the southeast, and London in particular, supported the parliamentary cause. Yet all of the counties were divided. The north of Lincolnshire was largely royalist, for example, while the south remained generally for parliament. It has been recorded of Derbyshire that the belt of iron and coal in the eastern stretch of the county was royalist while the lead areas of the north supported parliament. This may be an aspect of human society rather than of geology; the lead areas contained many independent small masters, while the areas of coal and iron depended upon larger enterprises controlled by a single master or landlord. In other counties the wooded areas containing isolated and self-sufficient parishes harboured the puritan cause, while the communal villages exploiting ‘mixed’ farming took the royalist side.

More subtle calculations have also been made. It has been estimated that the royalists were slightly younger than the parliamentarians, this statistic boosted by the fact that many young men joined the king in a spirit of bravado as well as patriotism; in parliament itself the royalist members had been on average eleven years younger than their puritan colleagues. It is clear that the judges of the land were divided in their allegiance, some of them worried by the constitutional pretensions of the king, while the staff of the various offices of the state were more likely to be active parliamentarians. The lawyers, too, had a long history of hostility towards the courtiers.

The majority of the population were neither hot nor cold; they may have been indifferent to the opinions of either side, but they were alarmed and intimidated by the change that had come over the kingdom. The partisans on both sides had provoked the conflict, and it was they who would end it. The rest stood by and waited. They did not care about the form of government, according to one member of parliament, Arthur Haselrig, as long ‘as they may plough and go to market’. Some said that the affair should be decided by a throw of the dice.

Sir William Waller, the parliamentary general in the west, wrote to his royalist counterpart, Sir Ralph Hopton, that ‘my affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve’. He declared that he hated a war without a true enemy but ‘I look upon it as opus domini [the work of the Lord] … We are both on the stage and we must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.’ This is one of the noblest sentiments uttered in the period.

There was not a town or county that remained undivided by opinion and argument; factional conflict was everywhere apparent from the largest town to the humblest parish. Some sportsmen named their packs of hunting dogs ‘roundheads’ or ‘cavaliers’, and the children in the streets would engage in mock battles under those names.

Many families were also split in their allegiances, although it was sometimes believed that this was a convenient ploy to save family property if one or the other party finally prevailed. First sons were likely to be royalist, while younger sons remained ‘neutral’ or ‘doubtful’. Yet not all family differences were settled amicably. Sir John Oglander, who took no part in the conflict, wrote in his commonplace book that ‘thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends’.

On the afternoon of 22 August Charles rode into Nottingham, where the royal standard was taken from the castle and fixed in the ground beside him. It was a silk flag with the royal arms and a motto, ‘Give Caesar his due’; it was suspended from a long pole that was dyed red at the upper part, and was said to resemble a maypole. The king quickly scanned the proclamation of war, and corrected certain words. The declaration was then read in an uncertain voice by the herald, after the trumpets had sounded, but all threw their hats into the air and called out: ‘God save King Charles and hang up the roundheads.’ The standard was blown down that night in the middle of a storm. Clarendon reported that ‘a general sadness covered the whole town, and the king himself appeared more melancholic than he used to be’. The civil war had begun.

25

The gates of hell

By the late summer of 1642 the king had managed to gather an army, partly comprised of the trained bands of the counties who remained loyal to him and partly of the ready supply of volunteers animated by loyalty or by the desire for pay and plunder. By the time he left Nottingham he was leading seven or eight regiments of infantry, and on his subsequent march he was joined by several regiments of cavalry; altogether he had the command of some 14,000 men.

Others might soon be inclined to join them since, at the beginning of September, parliament declared that those who opposed its intentions were ‘delinquents’ or ‘malignant and disaffected persons’ whose property could be confiscated. Those who had favoured the king without taking any action for him, or those who had remained neutral, now believed themselves to be threatened. The declaration further divided the nation into two parties. Many landowners and grandees who had taken no part in the struggle now decided to raise forces for their king so that their own lives and estates might be defended. Simonds D’Ewes, the parliamentarian diarist, confessed that the declaration ‘made not only particular persons of the nobility and others but some whole counties quite desperate’. The king was greatly hearted by his opponents’ error, and confidently expected many more recruits to his cause. In that hope, he was not mistaken.

On 9 September the earl of Essex rode out to his army at Northampton. He took with him a coffin and a winding sheet as a token of his fidelity to the end. He commanded an army of 20,000 men and it was widely believed that he would defeat the king with ease. Clarendon wrote of him that ‘his pride supplied his want of ambition, and he was angry to see any other man respected more than himself, because he thought he deserved it more, and did better requite it’. He was a man of great wealth and power. He liked to be known as ‘his excellence’, and was considered to have no equal but the king. He had the habits, and the manners, of a great lord like those of the Wars of the Roses. But it was not yet clear that he was a great commander. His reserve and his aloof manner were perhaps mistaken for wisdom. He was not a natural rebel, in any case, and his position at the head of the parliamentary forces rendered him deeply uneasy. It seems that his ultimate purpose was to detach the king from his ‘evil councillors’ and bring him back to London in the role of a constitutional monarch working alongside parliament. That is not what his parliamentary allies required.

In the course of this autumn some 40,000 men were gathered, and by the summer of 1643 the number had risen to 100,000. The armies were in many respects equally matched. They contained many men who believed that the war would be a short one, and that they would return to their fields in time for the next harvest; it was widely considered that one great battle would decide the issue. Many of them were poor and had been pressed into service by their landlords or employers.

From one Shropshire village, in the army of the king, were a farmer in debt, the son of a man who had been hanged for horse-stealing, a decayed weaver, a vagrant tailor and a family of father and three sons who lived in a cave. The soldiers on both sides were sometimes scorned as ‘the off-scourings of the nation’. Men were released from prison and pressed into service. It was said that some of the best trainees were butchers, because they were used to the sight of blood. For some the war came as a welcome relief from more mundane suffering, and such men eagerly sought the opportunity to seize money or goods. One veteran, Colonel Birch, recalled that ‘when I was in the army some said, “Let us not go this way, lest the war be ended too soon”’. They were also given provisions that were more plentiful than their food at home; the normal ration was supposed to be 2 pounds of bread or biscuit and 1 pound of meat or cheese each day. They were allowed one bottle of wine or two bottles of beer.

The royalist troops in particular were accused of drunkenness and lechery, and in the early months of the war it was reported that a group of them had murdered an eight-months pregnant woman in Leicestershire. Nehemiah Wallington, a puritan artisan from Eastcheap, wrote that ‘they swagger, roar, swear, and domineer, plundering, pillaging or doing any other kind of wrong’.

Yet the abuses were not reserved to one side. The royalists may have wrecked the taverns, but the parliamentarians desecrated the churches. The climate of war turns men into animals. It was said that, when troops were quartered in a church or hall, the smell they left behind was frightful. They pissed and defecated in corners. They often brought with them contagious diseases that became known as ‘camp fever’.

Many of the soldiers had of course volunteered out of genuine conviction. The parliamentary soldiers often chanted psalms as they marched, and the ministers preached to them upon such texts as the sixty-eighth psalm, ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered…’ More secular rivalries also animated them; it was reported that the men of Herefordshire fought against the men of Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians against the Northumbrians.

The men carried pikes or muskets, but some were still armed with bows and arrows in the old fashion. The pike itself was supposed to be 18 feet long, with a steel head, but many of the soldiers cut it down as too cumbersome; the pikemen were also armed with a short sword. The muskets were charged with weak gunpowder and the men were advised to shoot only when the weapon was close up against the body of the enemy; since there were no cartridges, the musketeer held two or three bullets in his mouth or in his belt. They had to load and then fire with a lighted cord known as a ‘match’. Others preferred to shoot arrows from their guns. They wore leather doublets and helmets that looked like iron pots.

Not all of the troops, however, were untrained or ill-prepared. There were professional soldiers among them who had fought in France, Spain and the Low Countries. Mercenaries were also used on both sides. Many of the commanders had seen service on the European mainland. These were men who had perused such manuals as Warlike Directions or Instructions for Musters and Arms; they were the leaders who would have to give basic training to their troops. ‘Turn the butt ends of your muskets to the right … Lay your muskets properly on your shoulders … Take forth your match. Blow off your coal. Cock your match … Present. Give fire.’

A first skirmish or encounter took place near Worcester. Essex had moved his army towards the town and, on hearing the news, the king sent Prince Rupert to support the royalist stronghold. Rupert of the Rhine was the king’s nephew and, at the age of twenty-three, had already enjoyed great success as a military commander. His expertise, and his experience, were considered to be invaluable. He was high-spirited and fearless; he was also rash and impatient. Yet on this occasion, in a limited engagement, he routed the parliamentary cavalry and killed most of its officers.

Clarendon wrote that the incident ‘gave his troops great courage and rendered the name of Prince Rupert very terrible, and exceedingly appalled the adversary’; he added that ‘from this time the Parliament began to be apprehensive that the business would not be as easily ended as it was begun’. Oliver Cromwell himself had grave reservations about the conduct of the parliamentary army. He told his cousin, John Hampden, that ‘your troopers are most of them decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and their [royalist] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of quality’. Cromwell believed that if parliament were to prevail, a new and more glorious force should be formed.

There was perhaps still one way to avert the conflict. The parliamentarian grandee of Worcestershire, Lord Brooke, declared that he wished ‘to avoid the profusion of blood’. So he offered his royalist counterpart in the county, the earl of Northampton, to ‘try the quarrel by sword in single combat’. A duel might therefore have decided the course of the civil war. It was a medieval expedient but it emphasizes the extent to which this war was essentially still seen as a baronial combat. Yet the political and social world had changed since the fifteenth century.

The king moved with his army to Shrewsbury, only 50 miles away from the parliamentary forces. For three weeks both sides remained close to one another, but neither made any move. No one was eager for battle. Charles decided to press the issue and advance towards London. Essex was obliged to prevent him. The earl also wished to present a petition to the king, but Charles refused to see him. Why should he parley with a traitor?

The king moved forward slowly towards London, but Essex remained on his trail. The first battle of the civil war took place at Edgehill, in southern Warwickshire, where the royalist forces had rested on the evening of 22 October; the parliamentary army was only a short distance away and Charles had decided to attack from the summit of a range of hills that gave him the advantage. It was an uncertain struggle, with Rupert’s cavalry for a while in the ascendant but the parliamentary infantry holding its own. Both sides claimed the victory, when in truth neither prevailed. The number of the dead amounted to a little over 1,000. A trooper wrote to his mother that ‘there was a great deal of fear and misery about that field that night’.

It was the first experience of battle for most of the participants, and it came as a salutary shock. The soldiers had been badly organized and Rupert’s cavalry, in particular, had run out of control. Many of the men and some of the commanders, weary and disgusted at the slaughter, fled for their homes. The king, never before in a war, was himself horrified by the death of some of his most loyal commanders. He seems also to have been alarmed by the extent of the enemy, and murmured before the battle that he did not expect to see so many arrayed against him. The earl of Essex was equally dismayed. He had hoped that one great battle would resolve the issue, but the result had been bloody and uncertain. Might this be a harbinger of the whole war? He had raised his standard against his sovereign, however, and there was no easy way forward.

The king was urged by Rupert immediately to march upon London, but instead Charles rode with his men 20 miles south to Oxford, where he had determined to establish his headquarters. It was from here, at the beginning of November, that he once more set out for the capital. On the news of his approach the terrified citizens took up whatever weapons they possessed; parliament sent a delegation to the royal camp to open negotiations but the king, while giving gracious words, still pressed forward. Prince Rupert attacked a parliamentary force at Brentford, 8 miles out of London, and then proceeded to fire some of the houses in the town; the word ‘plunder’ now entered the English vocabulary. It was to be the prince’s method throughout the war.

The citizens of London decided, under the direction of their parliamentary masters, to make a stand. The apprentices and trained bands, to the number of 6,000, were assembled in Chelsea Field near the village of Turnham Green in Chiswick. The earl of Essex went into the city and pleaded for more men, until eventually a ragged army of 24,000 Londoners advanced to Turnham Green close to the royalist army. On Sunday 13 November, the two forces stood face to face without giving way. The king, fearing any grievous loss of life, withdrew to Hounslow. Even his most ardent supporters would have hesitated before launching a general assault upon the city itself. Yet he had lost his best, and last, chance to defeat his enemies. He was not given the credit for his mercy, however, and his withdrawal at the last minute was considered to be a public humiliation. Thus it was presented, at least, in the printing presses controlled by parliament.

A pause in hostilities prompted calls from some quarters for peace and accommodation. Parliament raised four proposals for the attention of the king; it already knew that he would reject them. A crowd of Londoners approached the common council calling for ‘Peace and truth!’ whereupon someone shouted out, ‘Hang truth! We want peace at any price!’ Demands for an end to hostilities were frequent throughout the course of the war but, at each stage of the process, the activists won their cause over their more diffident colleagues. The more combative members of parliament, for example, believed that a peace with the king would amount to capitulation. Instead they began to make approaches to Scotland in an attempt to gain military aid.

It was also important that more money should be raised. On 25 November it was agreed that an assessment should be levied upon London, but that was only the beginning. In the next few weeks and months John Pym worked to pass legislation concerning land taxes, general assessments, confiscations, property taxes and rises in excise duty. All men of property were obliged to make contributions to the public funds, on the understanding that the money would eventually be repaid by ‘public faith’, an obscure and possibly meaningless phrase. The levies were excused on the familiar grounds of necessity and imminent danger. In the following year an order went out that those who had not voluntarily contributed would be fined one fifth of their income from land and one twentieth of the value of their personal property.

The king now established his household and himself in Christ Church, Oxford, while Prince Rupert moved into St John’s College. All Souls became an arsenal while the king’s council assembled at Oriel. A strange change came over the face of the university. The main quadrangle of Christ Church was turned into a cattle-pen. It became a substitute court, also, with satires and love poems circulating from hand to hand.

Both sides now considered their strategies for the conflict to come. The royalist plan was slowly to descend on London from the north and the west, with Prince Rupert and his cavalry offering assistance from Oxford. The ports of Plymouth and Bristol in the west, and Hull in the north-east, were to be seized from parliament so that they could not become a menace to the flanks of any advancing armies. Parliament in turn already held London as well as the counties of the southeast and the midlands; it had determined to form them into ‘associations’ so that they could more easily combine and cooperate in the face of the enemy.

Oliver Cromwell held true to his intention, expressed to his cousin, John Hampden, of creating a regiment that would be a match for ‘the gentlemen’ of the other side; he picked industrious and active men from a range of occupations whom Richard Baxter, a leader of the puritans, considered to be ‘of greater understanding than common soldiers’. If any of them swore he was fined a shilling; if he became drunk, he was set in the stocks. They became known, sometimes in praise and sometimes in irony, as ‘godly’ or ‘precious’ men.

The first news was kind to Charles and his forces. One of his commanders, the earl of Newcastle, took York and seemed firmly in command of the northern counties. The king himself stormed Marlborough and seized it from a parliamentary force; he was, according to the French ambassador, ‘prodigal of his exertions … more frequently on his horse than in his coach, from morning till night marching with his infantry’. Parliamentary prisoners were often sent to Coventry under armed guard; hence the familiar expression.

Many still held to the belief that it would soon be over, their confidence strengthened by the opening of negotiations at Oxford between the two sides at the beginning of February 1643. Parliament had drafted some propositions for peace; in particular the king would be obliged to honour the bills already approved by parliament and allow the trial of certain ‘delinquents’. Although these terms were not to the king’s liking he maintained that ‘I shall do my part and take as much honey out of the gall as I can’. In a private communication, however, he wrote that God himself could not ‘draw peace out of these articles’. He replied with a list of conditions, the first of which was the return to him of his forts, revenues and ships. A few days later parliament voted that his answer was no answer at all. The hopes for peace were short-lived.

The pace of the war was quickened with the return of the queen, Henrietta Maria, together with money and fresh arms from her brief exile. A severe and prolonged tempest kept her at sea. ‘Comfort yourselves, my dears,’ she told her attendants, ‘queens of England are never drowned.’ After she had landed at Bridlington in Yorkshire some ships in the service of parliament bombarded with cannon fire the house in which she lodged, forcing her to take refuge under a bank in a field. Parliament then destroyed her chapel in Somerset House, and a painting by Rubens that had been placed over the high altar was thrown into the Thames. Yet ‘Her She Majesty Generalissima’, as she styled herself, was not cowed. She travelled from York to her husband in Oxford with 3,000 infantry, thirty companies of horse and six cannon. In the early spring of 1643 John Evelyn recorded in his diary that the whole of southern England saw an apparition in the air; it was a shining cloud, in the shape of a sword with its point reaching towards the north ‘as bright as the moon’.

The balance of the fighting in subsequent months seemed to be tilting towards the side of the royalists, but nothing was decided. The battles were small and often indecisive, but local victories were won on both sides. The best troops were those who fought for their own territories, naturally enough, but no large-scale engagement changed the fortunes of war.

It was fought, piece by piece, across the nation without much central planning or control. Leeds had to be taken by the royalists, for example, to relieve the earl of Newcastle who might then go on to assist the earl of Derby who was hard-pressed in Lancashire. The king’s forces were besieging Gloucester but an army of Londoners under the command of Essex relieved it. The royalists were making gains in the north, but they lost the key town of Reading. Taunton fell to them, but Plymouth was saved by the parliamentary fleet. Small wars erupted in almost all of the counties. The citizens of one town might furnish a force for parliament while the adjacent manor houses collected troops for the king. Very little of the action was coordinated properly. Opposing armies would come upon one another by chance. No one knew what was really happening.

London was harassed by fears and rumours, its population swollen by refugees from the fighting elsewhere. In the spring of 1643 a great defensive earthwork began to rise around the city, and many houses in the suburbs were demolished to provide clean lines of fire from twenty-eight ‘works’ or forts that were ranged along it. Ramparts were constructed behind a ditch 3 yards wide, and the total height of the fortifications in some places reached 18 feet; the ‘wall’ surrounded the city in a circuit of 11 miles. Much of it was built within three months by the citizens themselves. The Venetian ambassador estimated that 20,000 men, women and children were engaged in the work; the ‘furious and zealous people’, as John Evelyn described them, were so enthusiastic that they even worked on Sundays. No trace of this great wall of London survives.

The city also had to be defended from the enemy within. It was believed that one third of the population still supported the king, and that many royalists had infiltrated the trained bands. At the beginning of June a royalist plot was discovered to take over the city and to arrest the leading parliamentarians; loose talk by some of the conspirators led to their arrest and interrogation. There was another enemy inside the city. It was ordered that the Cheapside Cross should be removed from the site where it had stood for 350 years; all other ‘popish monuments’ were also to be destroyed.

In May 1643 a small skirmish acquired, in retrospect, much significance. Oliver Cromwell was 2 miles outside Grantham with a small force of horsemen when he came across a division of royalists; they were twice the size of his company but at once he gave the signal to charge. Speed and surprise were always his favourite methods of warfare. The royalists broke ranks and fled from the scene or, as Cromwell himself put it, ‘with this handful it pleased God to cast the scale’. A number of ‘godly’ men, inspired by their commander, had defeated an apparently stronger enemy.

At the beginning of July the spiritual world was to be set in order. An assembly of divines met at Westminster to administer a thorough purging of faith and worship, religious discipline and religious government. They were to draw up a ‘directory’ to take the place of the Book of Common Prayer, and to compile a ‘confession of faith’ to which all men must subscribe. This was the true heart and inspiration for the civil struggle that had so lately begun. The commissioners first met in Henry VII’s chapel but, as the weather grew bleaker, they withdrew into the relative comfort of the Jerusalem Chamber. They sat for five years, and engaged in more than 1,000 meetings from nine in the morning until one or two in the afternoon.

They wept, and fasted, and prayed. Robert Baillie, one of the new Scottish commissioners, described that

after Dr Twisse had begun with a brief prayer, Mr Marshal prayed large two hours most divinely. After, Mr Arrowsmith preached one hour, then a psalm, thereafter Mr Vines prayed near two hours, and Mr Palmer preached one hour, and Mr Seaman prayed near two hours, then a psalm. After Mr Henderson brought them to a short, sweet conference of the heart confessed in the assembly, and other seen faults to be remedied, and the convenience to preach against all sects, especially Baptists and antinomians.

The syntax might be faulty, but the fervour is evident.

When they were not at prayer they debated predestination, election, justification and reprobation. They also discussed more political affairs. Ought the state to impose one form of religion, or should the free will of the individual decide the matter? Ought the state to punish those of a faith different from that of the majority? For a month they considered the role of individual congregations within the broad unity of a Presbyterian regime. What did it say in Scripture about these topics? How had the Church of Antioch been related to the Church of Jerusalem? Thus solemnly they debated with one another. The Scottish Presbyterian divines argued with their English puritan counterparts; the English were all in favour of a ‘civil league’ that would keep ‘a door open in England to independency’ while the Scots favoured a ‘religious covenant’. It was never likely, however, that the English would accept the full rigour of the Scottish religion or that parliament would concede predominance to any national Church. Oliver Cromwell himself was a notable Independent who favoured toleration and plurality; many of the leaders of the parliamentary army shared his convictions.

A few days after the formal opening of the Westminster assembly Essex made a startling proposal. He suggested that the terms of truce given to Charles at Oxford should be offered to him again. If the king refused them once more, he should withdraw from the field so that the two armies could settle the matter in one pitched battle. It was a form of duel. This proposition could not be construed as a serious one, but it does emphasize the attachment of Essex to an old chivalric code. This was not, however, an age of chivalry. Pym declared the notion to be ‘full of hazard and full of danger’. It was the first serious indication from Essex of weakness or doubt about the progress of the war, and it was the cause of much apprehension. He was now, according to a newsletter, the Parliament Scout, ‘abused in pictures, censored in pulpits, dishonoured in the table talk of the common people’.

A number of reversals dismayed the parliament. At Roundway Down, in Wiltshire, a parliamentary army was vanquished and those who survived were taken prisoner; among them were the members of a regiment completely clad in armour, known as ‘the Lobsters’. At Chalgrove, in Oxfordshire, the royalists were the victors again and John Hampden died of his wounds. Prince Rupert stormed and overcame Bristol, the second city of the kingdom; this victory was followed by the surrender of Poole and Dorchester, Portland and Weymouth. Gainsborough and Lincoln would soon be lost.

A ‘peace party’ had now grown up in the Lords, thoroughly shaken by news of the defeats, but Pym and his cohorts faced them down with the help of intimidation by the London mobs. But the mobile vulgus could be fickle. In the second week of August 2,000 or 3,000 women descended on Westminster with white ribbons in their hats. Simonds D’Ewes recorded that they ‘came down in great confusion and came to the very door of the House of Commons, and there cried as in diverse other places, Peace, Peace’. He added that they ‘fell upon all that have short hair’ and cried out, ‘A roundhead! A roundhead!’

Parliament was rendered even more unpopular by the imposition of a new tax called ‘excise’, a flat rate charged upon commodities such as meat, salt and beer. The king in turn raised money through voluntary donations and a tax raised on the royalist counties known as ‘the contribution’; nevertheless his funds were very much lower than those of parliament.

Charles had again taken the offensive and was marching towards Gloucester. Cromwell wrote to parliament that ‘you must act lively! Do it without distraction! Neglect no means!’ On 10 August the royalist army had reached the city; Charles invited the officers of Gloucester to submit and, on their refusal, he encircled it and laid siege for three weeks without gaining entry. On 5 September a parliamentary force under the command of the earl of Essex arrived on the scene and, in the face of failure and exhaustion, Charles’s forces withdrew.

It was the first major success of parliament for many months, and was greeted by jubilation in London and Westminster. In his history of the war Clarendon wrote that ‘the Parliament had time to recover their broken forces and more broken spirits, and may acknowledge to this rise the greatness to which they afterwards aspired’. He also wrote that on the royalist side there was ‘nothing but dejection of mind, discontent and secret mutiny’. On the withdrawal from Gloucester the prince of Wales asked his father if they were going home. Charles replied that ‘we have no home’.

The forces of the earl of Essex could not remain in Gloucester indefinitely, since they were needed elsewhere. The royalist army waited in the neighbourhood for their eventual withdrawal, with the purpose of cutting them off from London. For a few days the troops turned and manoeuvred, marched and counter-marched, both sides making for London. The king’s men spent one unhappy night of wind and rain before pursuing the enemy as far as the town of Newbury in west Berkshire. On 20 September a battle ensued that lasted all day with the parliamentary forces pushing slowly against the royalists through winding lanes and hedges; the soldiers of the king held on to their position, keeping the enemy from the road to London, but they eventually withdrew that night. They were thoroughly exhausted, and it seems likely that they had run out of ammunition. It had not been a battle notable for tactics or for strategy but rather a grim and bloodstained stalemate; all had depended, in the phrase of the period, on ‘push of pike’. Both sides of course claimed the victory.

It is easy to recite the names and dates of battles but less simple to describe their nature. In truth they were composed of a hundred desperate struggles between individuals who had no notion of what was going on around them; there would have been waves of panic fear when a group of men was consumed with the horror of dying and fled; it would have been impossible for the commanders to direct the action except by impetuous chance and sudden instinct. It was a flailing, wavering, shuddering mass of men and horses. Victory, or defeat, was largely a matter of chance.

The terror and confusion were such that both sides believed that they had advanced upon the burning gates of hell. A royalist captain, Richard Atkyns, recalled of one conflict that

the air was so darkened by the smoke of the powder that for a quarter of an hour together (I dare say), there was no light seen, but what the fire of volleys shot gave: and ’twas the greatest storm that I ever saw, in which thought I knew not whither to go, nor what to do, my horse had two or three musket bullets in him immediately which made him tremble under me at a rate, and I could hardly with spurs keep him from lying down, but he did me the service to carry me off to a led horse, and then died.

A more prominent royalist commander, William Cavendish, described how ‘the two main bodies joining made such a noise with shot and clamour of shouting, that we lost our ears, and the smoke of powder was so thick that we saw no light, but what proceeded from the mouth of guns’. Chaos descended. The savage shouts, and the screams of the wounded or the dying, resounded through the darkened air.

26

The women of war

The reader may grow tired of the deeds of arms and men. If women were not exactly invisible in the period of civil war, they were still at a notable disadvantage in the affairs of the world. Yet exceptions can be found. In the summer of 1638 Lucy Apsley married John Hutchinson, who at the opening of the war enlisted in the parliamentary army. He was an Independent, like Cromwell, and was therefore acceptable to the army command; in 1643 he was appointed to be governor of Nottingham Castle. He was one of those who eventually signed the king’s death warrant. Some years after the war was over Lucy Hutchinson wrote for her eldest son an account of this unhappy time. It was eventually published under the title of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.

The book is not a history of the war in the style of Clarendon, but rather a vivid and intimate account of its proceedings from the point of view of a committed participant. Although Lucy Hutchinson is ostensibly writing an encomium on the life and career of her husband, her own character and beliefs continually break through. She even provides a brief sketch of her early years that emphasizes how unusual she was among her contemporaries. She disliked plying the obligatory needle and thread, and had a horror of playing with other children. When she was forced to mingle with her young contemporaries she delivered lectures to them and made it quite plain that she detested their company. She abhorred their ‘babies’, better known now as dolls. She infinitely preferred the ‘serious discourses’ of the adults which she memorized and repeated. In the time allowed for play she preferred to apply herself to her books.

So the account of the war itself springs from the pen of a spirited and remarkable character. It is not a record of battles and sieges, but in large part a collection of character portraits and of first-hand accounts of life in the field of conflict. She describes these portraits as ‘digressions’ but in fact they convey the human face of the war, with all its threats and suspicions, hypocrisies and lies. She rejects the name of ‘roundhead’ for her husband, for example, on the grounds that he had a full head of hair. Since it was not cropped short, however, his puritan comrades distrusted him.

Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir is in fact most revealing for its account of the internecine suspicion and conflict between the members of the puritan party; John Hutchinson was at odds with his army council in Nottingham, for example, while the members of parliament and the army were always in conflict. Even the leaders of the various parliamentary contingents were themselves ‘so emulous of one another, and so refractory to commands, and so peeking in all punctilios of superiority’ that it was surprising they could ride together on the same field.

A command came from Westminster for John Hutchinson to gather together all the horse he could spare for the relief of Montgomery Castle; as a consequence, he proceeded to consult with the political committee of the local members of parliament that had oversight of Nottingham. Lucy Hutchinson reports that her husband asked that a number of soldiers be requisitioned, to which request they replied ‘None’. Hutchinson, falling into a rage, reminded the committee that a direct order from parliament had to be obeyed. She describes the members as ‘factious little people’ who fomented squabbles, divisions, delays and scandals. Their behaviour only added to the chaos of war.

She herself was courageous at times of crisis. A few months before her husband took charge of Nottingham he was run to ground in Leicester, where a royal warrant was issued for his arrest. A sudden trumpet alerted her family to the presence of the king’s troops but Hutchinson ‘stayed not to see them, but went out at the other end as they came in’; he may have escaped through one of the city gates, or perhaps through a ‘geat’ or opening. Lucy Hutchinson, then heavily pregnant, remained to confront the officers.

Captain: ‘It is a pity you should have a husband so unworthy of you that he has entered some faction and dare not be seen with you.’

Lucy Hutchinson: ‘You are mistaken sir. My husband would not hide himself from you, or not dare to show his face.’

Then Lucy told a lie. She called down her brother-in-law, George Hutchinson, and announced to the captain that this man was in truth her husband. The subterfuge worked; John Hutchinson got clean away while George eventually obtained his liberty. It was a close-run thing, however, and is testimony to the dreadful risks that Lucy Hutchinson was willing to run.

She recounts in some detail the siege of Nottingham by the king’s army, marked by no great strategic initiative but by endless bickering and argument among those who were besieged. ‘What is the cause to me,’ one doctor asked John Hutchinson, ‘if my goods be lost?’

‘You might prevent that hazard by securing them in the castle.’

‘It pities me to spoil them. I had rather have the enemy have them than that they should be spoiled in the removal.’ The doctor then rebuked Hutchinson ‘for countenancing the godly townsmen’ to whom he referred as ‘puritanical prick-eared rascals’. He infinitely preferred the ‘malignants’ or royalists.

When John Hutchinson was eventually charged with colluding in the execution of the king, after the war was over, Lucy Hutchinson forged a letter in his name to the Speaker of the House of Commons with the request that he should not be taken into custody but called to account when he was needed. Her forgery was accepted. She was a formidable woman. Her husband, however, eventually died in prison for complicity in another plot. He gives the impression of being an impulsive and contentious man who was supported by a strong-minded and strong-principled woman; it is impossible to estimate how many other such relationships flourished in the Civil War. The evidence suggests, however, from the exploits of Lucy Hutchinson to the female crowds who often assembled at Westminster, that there was a tradition of adventurous women who helped to fuel the conflict. In the ballad literature of the time it is suggested that some women dressed as men in order to join the armies of either side.

It should be noted of course that Lucy Hutchinson came from a relatively privileged family and was not in that sense necessarily representative of her sex; but older and deeper traditions of female liberty persisted still. Puritanism itself was uniquely susceptible to the authority of women, and actively promoted a partnership of the sexes in religious duties and devotions; many puritan women became part of an informal network of communication, for example, exchanging manuscripts and treatises between neighbouring families. Some of them also took part in forming congregations and nominating ministers. Letters, manuscripts and commonplace books testify to a distinct religious and intellectual female community.

The wives of certain Baptist, and ‘leveller’, leaders shared their husbands’ faith to the extent that they inhabited the same prison cells. Other women were intent upon defending their homes when they were placed under siege. Lady Elizabeth Dowdall defended Kilfenny Castle, in Limerick, on her own initiative even though her husband was himself on the premises. She wrote that on ‘the ninth of January, the High Sheriff of the county, and all the power of the county, came with three thousand men to besiege me. They brought two sows [cannon] and thirty scaling-ladders against me. They wrote many attempting letters to me to yield to them which I answered with contempt and scorn.’

Other royalist women played their own part in the civil struggle. Ann, Lady Fanshawe, was the daughter of Sir John Harrison, a child of superior birth who was educated in the usual fashion with needle, thread, virginals and lute; but above all else she enjoyed riding and ‘was I wild to that degree … I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girl’. All the clichés and stereotypes of childhood tend to fall apart in the face of direct testimony. Were girls and women really as servile or as domesticated as the courtesy books suggest? Could all the domestic novels, the family portraits and the sentimental poetry have got it wrong? Perhaps only the plays, with their rampant and mischievous women, got it right.

Fanshawe came from a fiercely royalist family and, at the opening of hostilities, her brother joined the king at Nottingham; her father was threatened with transportation to ‘the plantations’ while all of his goods were sequestrated by parliament. He was put under house arrest, but managed to escape and to join the king at Oxford. She fled with him, as she put it, ‘from as good houses as any gentlemen of England … to a baker’s house in an obscure street’. But she coped with the overcrowding, the sickness, the plague, the lack of supplies and the general fear of catastrophe. This was wartime Oxford.

In 1644 she married her second cousin, Sir Richard Fanshawe, who was even then a member of the council attached to the prince of Wales with the title of secretary of war. As such he and his family moved in tandem with the prince’s court. Ann Fanshawe rarely writes of the war itself but reserves her comments for the peripatetic life she was obliged to endure. She was not without resource. She procured a pass for her husband through the good offices of ‘a great Parliament man whose wife had formerly been obliged to our family’. She carried £300 of money from London to Paris without being searched. The household travelled to Cork, perhaps to gain money or support, but at the beginning of October 1649, ‘by a fall of a stumbling horse (being with child), broke my left wrist’.

While she lay in bed that night, her wrist bound, she was roused by the news that the Irish were firing the town after it had been taken by Cromwell. Her husband had gone to Kinsale on business; pregnant and in pain she gathered together her husband’s manuscripts for fear of seizure and managed to pack in wooden crates all of their portable belongings, including clothes and linen; she also managedto conceal £1,000 in gold or silver which, to their puritan assailants, would have been a treasure worth killing for. At three o’clock in the morning, attended only by a man and a maid, she walked by the light of a taper into the crowded marketplace where she was confronted by ‘an unruly tumult with their swords in their hands’.

Bravely enough, she demanded to see the commander-in-chief of the Protestant forces. By great good fortune he had once served with Sir Richard Fanshawe, in different circumstances, and under the weight of her entreaties and in light of her evident plight he granted her a safe conduct. Bearing the pass she walked unmolested ‘through thousands of naked swords’ until she reached Red Abbey, a fourteenth-century Augustinian establishment that acted as a meeting place. Here she took out some loose coin and hired a neighbour’s cart, into which she piled all of her belongings, before making her way to her husband in Kinsale. It is a story of bravery to match any told by the soldiers of either side.

On another stage of her adventure she was aboard a Dutch ship with her husband when a Turkish galley, well manned, advanced towards them. She was ordered by the captain to go below, on the grounds that if the Turks saw a woman they would know the ship to be part of a merchant fleet and therefore attack it. If they spied only men, they might believe it to be a man-of-war. Once she had gone below she called for the cabin boy and, giving him half a crown, purchased his cap and coat. Suitably concealed she returned to her husband’s side on deck.

She seems to have been an expert at disguise. On another occasion she dressed herself as a ‘plain’ or ‘lowly’ woman in order to obtain a pass for a journey to Paris. She made her way to the parliamentary military headquarters at Wallingford House in Whitehall.

‘Woman, what is your husband and your name?’

‘Sir, he is a young merchant, and my name is Anne Harrison.’

‘Well, it will cost you a crown.’

‘That is a great sum for me but, pray, put in a man, my maid, and three children.’

‘A malignant would give me five pounds for such a pass.’

Once she had received it she managed by careful penwork to change the name from ‘Harrison’ to ‘Fanshawe’; there was no need for further concealment because she was already known to the ‘searchers’ at Dover, having passed that way before.

‘Madame,’ one of the ‘searchers’ told her, ‘I little thought that they would give pass to so great a malignant, especially in such a troublesome time as this.’

Even in times of war certain known opponents could still come and go as they pleased.

Ann Fanshawe wrote her memoirs in the 1670s, after the death of her husband, for the benefit and education of her family. They are a notable addition to the literature of the civil conflict, but they also throw an indirect but welcome light upon the otherwise generally hidden women of the war.

27

The face of God

In the middle of November 1643, parliament announced itself to be the supreme power in the land by authorizing the use of a ‘great seal’ to replace that of the king; on one side were the arms of England and Ireland while on the other was engraved an image of the Commons sitting in their chamber. One of their most important members, however, was no longer present. John Pym had been the key strategist of the parliamentary cause; he had been the quiet revolutionary, playing his cards largely behind the scenes, exploiting temporary setbacks or victories, and in some part controlling the mobs of London. Cautiously and slowly he had maintained the direction and impetus of the movement against the king.

His death from cancer of the lower bowel only reinforced the divisions and factions at Westminster, where some wished for an honourable settlement with the king and others demanded total victory. Disagreements were also evident in the royal court at Oxford, where questions of immediate tactics and general strategy were furiously debated; some wanted an attack upon London, for example, while others favoured the capture of the southwest. One of the king’s courtiers, Endymion Porter, remarked that God would have to intervene in order to cure all the divisions between the royal supporters; as is so often the case, the most bitter fights were between those on the same side.

At the end of January 1644, Charles summoned a parliament of his supporters at Oxford to which came the great majority of the Lords and approximately one third of the Commons. There were now two parliaments in the country striving for mastery. The ceremony for the opening of the Oxford parliament took place in Christ Church Hall, and in his customary address the king said that ‘he desired to receive any advice from them which they thought would be suitable to the miserable and distracted condition of the kingdom’. He had also taken the precaution of bringing over from Ireland some of the regiments of the army he had dispatched to extirpate the rebels.

In the following month the Westminster parliament established a ‘committee of both kingdoms’. In one of the most important circumstances of the war 20,000 Scots had already, in the middle of January, crossed the border to support the parliamentary cause; after prolonged negotiations with their English allies, they had come to defend the common Protestant faith in the form of a ‘solemn league and covenant’ between the two nations. It had been voted by parliament at the beginning of February that this covenant should be taken and sworn by every Englishman over the age of eighteen; the names of those who refused to take the oath would be sent to Westminster. A new committee, composed of English and Scottish representatives, would manage the direction of the war; among its members were the earl of Essex and Oliver Cromwell.

The advantage lay now for the first time with parliament. In a battle at Cheriton in Hampshire, the royalist forces were overwhelmingly defeated; the parliamentary cavalry was now more than a match for its royalist counterpart. Oliver Cromwell himself had been promoted to become lieutenant-general of the ‘eastern association’, where he began to form the cavalries of seven counties into a coherent fighting force. With its command of London and many of the significant ports, in any case, the financial resources of parliament were far greater than those of the king. Charles had armies of approximately half the size of those commanded by his enemy. Many people, on both sides, recognized that his cause would suffer the more the war was prolonged.

In the early summer of the year two parliamentary armies, under the command of the earl of Essex and Sir William Waller respectively, advanced upon Oxford in order to hold the king in a vice of their making. The king managed to make his escape with 7,000 men and, on 6 June, fled to Worcester. He had also received news that his forces in York were besieged, and wrote from Worcester to Prince Rupert ‘in extreme necessity’. Charles urged his nephew to ride to the relief of York in order to save the cause.

Prince Rupert arrived outside York, in the last days of June, only to find that the forces of the parliamentary besiegers had made a tactical retreat. Animated by bravado or by faith in his strategy he pursued his enemy to Marston Moor, in the north of the country, for what might have been a final confrontation. The parliamentary soldiers, wearing white handkerchiefs or white pieces of paper in their caps, were the stronger force; they were the first to charge, from the advantage of higher ground, and their sudden onslaught scattered the royalists. An eyewitness, Arthur Trevor, wrote that ‘the runaways on both sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless, so full of fears, that I should not have taken them for men’.

In what was the largest battle ever fought on English soil, 4,000 of the king’s troops had been killed, and his army had disintegrated. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Valentine Walton, Cromwell said of the enemy that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords’. Prince Rupert, in a spirit of mockery rather than admiration, dubbed the victorious commanders as ‘Ironsides’. The cities of York and Newcastle surrendered. It was a notable victory for parliament and, at least in retrospect, it marked a turning point of the civil war.

The victory of Cromwell at Marston Moor lifted him to eminence in parliament no less than on the field of battle. One of his most notable opponents, the earl of Clarendon, admitted that he possessed ‘a great spirit, an admirable circumspection and sagacity, and a most magnanimous resolution’. He was resolute and fearless, and thus a fitting adversary for a king.

He had not distinguished himself in early life and seems happy to have farmed the flat land of the southeast midlands. He once declared that ‘I was by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity’. He was one of what were called the ‘middling sort’. Yet even in that enviable condition he was not free from superstitious terror, and in his first years of married life he consulted a London physician who recorded in his casebook that Cromwell was ‘valde melancholicus’; by this he meant that his patient was nervous or depressed to an abnormal degree. Another doctor had suggested that he suffered from hypochondria and indeed, under stress or nervous excitement, he would sometimes fall ill.

His religion was the most important aspect of his character. His depression of spirits may have been the context or the catalyst for the sudden revelation – we do not know when it was vouchsafed – that he was one of ‘the elect’. The blinding light of God’s grace surrounded him, and he was transformed. He wrote to his cousin, Elizabeth St John, that ‘I live (you know where) in Mesheck, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies blackness; yet the Lord forsaketh me not’. The reference is to the 120th psalm: ‘Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!’ This scriptural allusiveness and simple piety are at the heart of Cromwell’s faith.

He knew that he had been saved by the grace of God, and the certainty of redemption lay behind all of his judgements; he believed implicitly in the power of divine will to guide the actions of men. He waited on providence. He prayed for a sign. He wrote that ‘we follow the Lord that goeth before’. He sought for the divine meaning of the events occurring around him and saw all things in the context of the eternity of God. Since he had a private sense of what he called ‘true knowledge’ or ‘life eternal’, he was impatient of religious debate and doctrinal niceties. What did they matter before the overwhelming power of God? He once said that ‘I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted among us than that one of God’s children should be persecuted’.

His first years in parliament were not particularly auspicious; he was regarded as a forceful and impetuous, rather than elegant, speaker whose manner was sometimes clumsy or unprepossessing. But together with his family connections at Westminster – the puritan party was in some sense a wide circle of relatives – he fought steadily and assiduously for the parliamentary cause. He was adept at committee work, and was blessed with an acute understanding of human character. Yet he professed not to have been ambitious on his own behalf but rather for the cause he had chosen.

Cromwell was of singular appearance. The London doctor whom he had consulted noted that he had pimples upon his face. These seem to have been supplanted by warts on his chin and forehead. His thick brown hair was always worn long over the collar, and he had a slim moustache; a tuft of hair lay just below his lower lip. He had a prominent nose and one of his officers, Arthur Haselrig, once said to him that ‘if you prove false, I will never trust a fellow with a big nose again’; his eyes, in colour somewhere between green and grey, were described by Andrew Marvell as being of ‘piercing sweetness’. He was about 5 feet 10 inches in height and, according to his steward, John Maidstone, ‘his body was well compact and strong’; he had a ‘fiery’ temperament but was very quickly settled, and was ‘compassionate … even to an effeminate measure’. He was often boisterous in company, with a taste for rough country humour; there were times indeed when, according to Richard Baxter, he displayed too much ‘vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much’.

Like his opponents he thoroughly enjoyed hawking and the pursuits of the field; he also liked to play bowls. He had a great love of music and one of his colleagues, Bulstrode Whitelocke, recalled that ‘he would sometimes be very cheerful with us, and laying aside his greatness he would be exceeding familiar with us, and by way of diversion would make verses with us and everyone must try his fancy. He commonly called for tobacco, pipes and a candle, and would now and then take tobacco himself; then he would fall again to his serious and great business.’

That great business was, at the latter end of 1644, to drive the war forward until the king surrendered; in this purpose, however, he was not supported by other parliamentary commanders. The earl of Essex and the earl of Manchester, in particular, were in favour of some accommodation with Charles; it was suspected by some, therefore, that they were less than zealous in their military offensives. Manchester used to say that it was easy to begin a war, but no one could tell where it would end. He was in command of the eastern association, with Cromwell as his lieutenant-general, and the earl’s desire for peace led to a complete breakdown in trust between the two men. Manchester in particular had an impatient dislike of sectarians and what he called ‘fanatics’, among whom he placed Cromwell himself.

At a council of war the following exchange took place.

Manchester: If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once we shall all be hanged and our posterity made slaves.

Cromwell: My lord, if this be so why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it ever so base.

Cromwell had already written to his brother-in-law that ‘we have some among us much slow in action’.

The argument between the two military commanders came to a head after an inconclusive battle with the king at Newbury, where it seemed that Manchester had deliberately held back his army. He is supposed to have said to one of his colleagues, who urged instant action, that ‘thou art a bloody fellow. God send us peace, for God does never prosper us in our victories to make them clear victories.’ It was now believed, by Cromwell and others, that Manchester had become a traitor to the cause.

Towards the end of November Cromwell came into the Commons in order to denounce Manchester; the earl’s ‘backwardness of all action’ and his ‘averseness to engagement’ sprang from his unwillingness to prosecute the war ‘to a full victory’. He was therefore questioning his loyalty. Three days later Manchester returned fire, in the Lords, and charged his opponent with insubordination and slander. Cromwell was accused of saying that he hoped for a day when there would be no peers left in England. The ‘peace party’ on the parliamentary side now considered a move to impeach Cromwell for treason, but was persuaded that it was not wise to do so. A single sheet of print was found in the streets of the city attacking Essex and Manchester with the words ‘Alas poor parliament, how art thou betrayed!’

On 9 December Cromwell pressed home his advantage. He told the Commons that ‘it is now a time to speak, or forever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less than to save a nation out of a bleeding, nay almost dying, condition which the long continuance of war hath already brought it into, so that without a more speedy, effectual and vigorous prosecution of the war … we shall make the kingdom weary of us and hate the name of Parliament’. He realized that only a clear victory over the king would decide the issue.

The eastern association had already informed the ‘committee of both kingdoms’ that local contributions were not enough to maintain an army, and the committee therefore decided ‘to consider of a frame or model of the whole militia’. This was Cromwell’s opportunity. It had become time to reorganize the various armies on a different basis, and for Cromwell the most obvious model was that of his own regiment of ‘godly’ men. He had said that ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’.

Immediately after Cromwell’s speech another member of the Commons, Zouch Tate, rose to suggest a thorough reorganization of the army. It was first necessary to dismiss such fractious and incompetent commanders as Essex and Manchester. So Tate, no doubt in collaboration with Cromwell, proposed what was called ‘a self-denying ordinance’ by means of which no member of either house could take on a military command or an official place in the state. This removed at a stroke the noble earls. In theory it also removed Cromwell but it was widely and correctly believed that an exception would be made for such a successful military leader. The whole business might therefore be seen as an enterprising bid by Cromwell for sole command.

It may be worth remarking that this session of parliament was the one that abolished Christmas. The traditional festival was deemed by the Commons to encourage ‘liberty to carnal and sensual delights’ and instead the day was to become one of fast and penance.

Cromwell had told his colleagues that until ‘the whole army were new modelled and governed under a stricter discipline’ there would be no certain or ultimate victory. So the force became known as the New Model Army, known to its enemies as the ‘New Noddle’. It was effectively a standing army from which all aristocratic commanders had been displaced; no English army had ever before been so constituted. It was to be organized on a national basis, and financed by a new national tax; the morale of the soldiers would therefore be maintained by consistent payment. It was to be professional, disciplined and purposeful. Its commander, known as ‘Black Tom’ for his muddy complexion, was Sir Thomas Fairfax, who had previously been in charge of parliament’s northern army.

It was an amalgamation of older regiments rather than a new army, but it was designed to be a more stable and coherent force drawn up with the sole purpose of defeating the king in battle. That is why Essex and Manchester had been removed from any military command. The commission given to Fairfax made no mention of the old provision that he was bound to preserve the king’s safety on the field of battle. New muskets, swords and pistols were manufactured; the coats of the infantry were of red cloth, becoming the standard uniform for the next 200 years.

Some of its officers believed in a religious mission for themselves and their soldiers; Cromwell’s regiment, for example, considered itself to be a ‘gathered Church’. ‘Go now,’ one preacher declared, ‘and fight the battles of the Lord!’ It is unlikely that the rest of the army shared that godly purpose, but they may have been animated by the zeal of their more pious fellows.

But what was now meant by the godly? Cromwell and his colleagues favoured the Independent cause in religion, effectively espousing toleration in England; the earl of Manchester and his supporters had adopted the Presbyterian cause with no room for other sects or groups. In this endeavour they were supported by their Scottish allies. Even while parliament was debating the arrangements of the new army, the Book of Common Prayer was abolished and a puritan Directory of Worship took its place; this new text was to be delivered to the people by means of a national Presbyterian system. That system was not destined to last for very long.

One of the great expositors of the Book of Common Prayer was now led to the scaffold. On 10 January 1645, Archbishop Laud was taken from the Tower to the place of death on Tower Hill. He told the people assembled there that ‘this is a very uncomfortable place’. As he knelt for the executioner, he prayed aloud for ‘grace of repentance to all bloodthirsty people, but if they will not repent, O Lord, confound all their devices’. Essex lamented the old man’s death. ‘Is this’, he asked, ‘the liberty which we promised to maintain with our blood?’ The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that ‘it was done for the entertainment of the Scots’. It had been a year of much blood.

There was now very little intention of compromise on either side, but some brief negotiations took place at Uxbridge in February 1645. The two parties divided the town, with the parliamentary team in one inn and the royalist delegation in the other. Nothing was achieved, of course, but the king was still sanguine about his chances. Despite the disaster at Marston Moor he had not yet been decisively defeated, and he believed that the divisions in the opposite party between Independents and Presbyterians would work to his advantage. He was calm and indomitable, sustained by his belief that no one could touch the Lord’s anointed. His commanders, and his forces, were still a match for those of parliament.

He had also received welcome news from Scotland where his principal supporter, the earl of Montrose, had already won notable victories over the Scottish covenanters. ‘Give me leave’, Montrose wrote to him, ‘with all humility to assure your majesty that through God’s blessing I am in the fairest hopes of reducing this kingdom to your majesty’s obedience.’ This in turn rendered the covenanting army in the north uneasy, distracted by the argument that they should withdraw from England and return to fight for their home territory. Charles was firmly persuaded that the fortunes of battle might still be with him.

The new campaign opened in the spring of 1645. At the beginning of May the New Model Army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, was about to begin the siege of Oxford. In the course of this action he received another message from Westminster. Charles had summarily taken his army into the east midlands, where he stormed and sacked the parliamentary town of Leicester. Fairfax now decided to follow him, with Oliver Cromwell as his second-in-command.

The great confrontation could no longer be delayed. On 14 June the two armies were in the fields outside the village of Naseby, in Leicestershire, where the parliamentary army had a large advantage in numbers. When the parliamentary forces made a tactical withdrawal to reach higher ground, Prince Rupert mistook the movement for a retreat; so with his cavalry he made for the enemy. Cromwell managed to beat them back, and then charged the royalist infantry. The king’s soldiers resisted for a while but, under the combined assault of Fairfax and Cromwell, they fell apart and fled. They were pursued by the parliamentary troopers for 14 miles before they reached the safety of Leicester.

Naseby was a devastating defeat for the king. His infantry had been destroyed and 5,000 of his men, together with 500 officers, had been captured; his arms and artillery had been taken. The women of the royalist camp were treated with great ferocity; those from Ireland were ‘knocked on the head’ – killed is another word – while those from England had their faces slashed with daggers. Oliver Cromwell, after the battle, declared that ‘this is none other than the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory’. Clarendon concluded that at Naseby ‘the king and the kingdom were lost’.

For the king, indignity was heaped upon dismay. Among the wagons captured after the battle was one that contained all of his private correspondence. When the king’s cabinet was opened, it revealed the extent of his dealings with the Irish Catholics in search of troops; it also disclosed his plans to use French, or Swedish, soldiers for the sake of his cause. It could now be asserted that the New Model Army was truly a national army ready to defend England, and at Naseby it had decisively proved its worth. It had also demonstrated that the Independent cause was now the strongest. Cromwell himself was the man singled out for future glory and, according to Bulstrode Whitelocke, he began ‘to grow great even to the envy of many’. Yet many also believed that God was with him.

Most of the king’s supporters and councillors believed that his case was desperate, and that he must yield to necessity by negotiating with parliament. The king himself on occasions feared the worst and, in a secret letter to his son, wrote that ‘if I should at any time be taken prisoner by the rebels, I command you … never to yield to any conditions that are dishonourable, unsafe to your person, or derogatory to royal authority’. Yet he refused to have ‘melancholy men’ about him; he chose to entertain himself with sports and pastimes. He wandered about the country between Hereford, Oxford and Newark; these were three of his last remaining fortresses in his kingdom.

Prince Rupert, whose rashness may have cost Charles the battle of Naseby, now hurried on to Bristol; he needed to make that city safe against an enemy army that might descend upon it at any moment. From there he wrote to a colleague that ‘his majesty hath now no way left to preserve his posterity, kingdom and nobility, but by a treaty’. When he was shown the letter the king was incensed. In his reply he wrote that in his role as a soldier or statesman ‘I must say there is no probability but of my ruin’; yet as a king and a Christian he knew that ‘God will not suffer rebels and traitors to prosper’.

This was not necessarily so. At Langport to the south of Bristol, on 10 July 1645, the New Model Army, fresh from its victory at Naseby, decisively defeated the royalist army of the southwest; the cavalry of the king had been destroyed, and his last hope of winning the contest seemed to be over. Cromwell exulted. ‘To see this,’ he said, ‘is it not to see the face of God?’

28

The mansion house of liberty

One parliamentary occasion has gone unnoticed in this account of victories and defeats on the field. An ordinance of 14 June 1643 had been passed ‘to prevent and suppress the licence of printing’. It was declared necessary to suppress the ‘great late abuses and frequent disorders in printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books to the great defamation of religion and government’; a committee of censors, therefore, was appointed to license new publications and to seize any that were unlicensed.

One republican deplored what he considered to be this reversion to the evil practices of the past that had no place in the new world for which he so devoutly wished. The Presbyterian members of parliament, who were largely behind the measure, might as well ‘kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image: but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth: but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.’ This is the unmistakable prose of John Milton.

Milton was a Londoner animated by a spirit of enquiry and an awareness of his own genius. From an early age he pored over his books by candlelight in Bread Street, brooding over fables and histories until he had knowledge and time enough to compose the fables and history of his own country. He was a born republican, averse to authority and discipline in any of its forms. There would come a time when he would denounce Charles I in Latin, so that the world might hear. He declared that England was ‘the elect nation’, a prophecy endorsed by other clerics and divines of the period, thus emphasizing the millennial aspirations of the seventeenth century.

In 1637, in his twenty-ninth year, Milton wrote in a letter that ‘my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period in my studies’. He read as if for life; for him, it was life. Yet the storms of the world would soon surround him, obscuring for a time that bright particular star by which he set his course.

He had studied at Cambridge and followed his period at that university with an intensive course of private scholarship that continued for some eight years. Blessed with a fair face, and an even fairer mind, he began a tour among the devoted scholars and learned poets of Europe; his voyage of sweet discovery was curtailed, however, when he was obliged to return to London in 1639 at the time of the Bishops’ War.

He had studied with the overriding ambition to become a poet that the world would not willingly ignore. But the desperation of the age turned him from poetry to prose, to the language of men in debate and conflict. He began writing his pamphlets against the bishops in 1641 and indulged his taste for polemic at a time of delusion and disagreement. In The Reason of Church Government he denounced those prelates who ‘have glutted their ingrateful bodies’ with ‘corrupt and servile doctrines’; they were fed ‘scraggy and thorny lectures … a hackney course of literature’ and were filled with ‘strumpet flatteries … corrupt and putrid ointment’. They were scum and harlots and open sepulchres. The language of the streets, which he heard all around him, came naturally to a Cockney visionary.

Milton wrote his treatise Areopagitica in Aldersgate Street; but the little pamphlet in due course made its way around the world as the most eloquent and inspiring defence of the freedom of expression. For this founding statement upon the liberty of speech he modelled himself upon the Attic orators who had once spoken to the Athenian people; the Areopagus was the rock upon which the final court of appeal held its sessions. Milton was clearly adverting to the republican and even democratic status of the English parliament which he described as ‘that supreme and majestic tribunal’. He wrote copiously and elegantly, constructing sentences that have been described as baroque palaces, but all the time his style was tempered by the urgency and seriousness of the puritan cause.

Areopagitica was ready for the press by the autumn of 1644, two or three months after Cromwell’s victory at Marston Moor; hopes for the Independent cause were high, and Milton himself was touched by the optimism of the moment. All was still possible. On the title page was printed:

AREOPAGITICA

A SPEECH OF MR JOHN MILTON

For the Liberty of UNLICENC’D PRINTING,

To the PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND.

Milton’s passion for free speech, for liberty of thought and conscience in the making of a new world, was a powerful corrective to all the obfuscators and doctrinaires of parliament who had partly triumphed with the signing of the solemn league and covenant with the Scots in the previous year. He railed against those with closed minds, of which the Presbyterians were the largest number. Censorship and licensing would be ‘the stop of truth’. The people of England would suffer from the change, when ‘dull ease and cessation of our knowledge’ would inevitably lead to ‘obedient uniformity’ or to ‘rigid external formality’.

He insisted that ‘we must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and wool packs’. He recalled his travels into Italy where he visited Galileo ‘grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition’. If the silence of conformity were to be imposed upon England, too, it would ‘soon put it out of controversy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing’. What if the Presbyterians were no better than the Laudian Church writ in sterner letters?

What did the censors and opponents of freedom have to fear? ‘He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.’ Milton’s phrases rise like waves before they fall upon the shore, the poetry of his being flooding beneath them. His sentences are grave, sonorous and magniloquent but not untouched by the occasional asperity of irony or wit.

In Areopagitica he addresses the political nation with an encomium that proclaims the fervent seriousness of the time. ‘Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.’ It is an excellent tribute to the intellectual resources of the country in this period of conflict and argument. Milton considered England to be particularly blessed by what he called ‘the favour and love of heaven’. It was this faith that gave strength and optimism to the puritan cause.

He writes, too, of London as a beacon of that cause. ‘Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded by His protection … Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this City.’ He is suggesting that there is nothing to fear in the proliferation of sectarians and schismatics; they are all part of the glory of God.

Of all the writers of the period Milton is the one most able to embody the seriousness and the determination of the religious cause. In the loftiness of his mind, in the dignity and grandeur of his most stately utterances, we may glimpse the essential nobility of the age. ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle muing [renewing] her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance…’

In later years Milton served as Latin secretary for Cromwell and the protectorate, in which capacity he served the puritan cause as faithfully as before. Yet disillusion would set in soon enough, followed by bitterness and despair. Like many of his generation he was, by the end of Cromwell’s rule and the return of the king, beset by misery and isolation, bewilderment and grief.

29

A game to play

The last twelve months of war were confused and uncertain. No one knew when, or how, it would end. The king no longer had the resources to fight any more major battles; he held on to a few cities such as Bristol and Worcester, but his strength was essentially limited to individual fortresses or garrisons. A campaign of siege warfare had begun, with parliamentary forces coming upon one royalist stronghold after another. The rules of siege were well known to all the participants. After the defence had put up as good a fight as they could, they could then demand a ‘parley’ and bargain upon the terms of surrender; if they capitulated, they were spared. If they refused to surrender, they were likely to be stormed and massacred.

In this weary and bloody period groups of men and women emerged ready to defy and fight both parties in order to save their neighbourhoods. The ‘clubmen’ were called after the primitive weapons they often carried. The farmers and yeomen of Wiltshire and Dorset, for example, had already established bands of watchmen to seize any soldiers caught in the act of plunder and to march them back to their respective camps for punishment. They did not know which side was winning or losing. They did not know of Naseby or of Langport. They wished only to preserve their lives and property.

Now some countrymen, armed with sickles or scythes as well as clubs, took the offensive. They gathered to protect their harvests and their granaries with the message that:

If you offer to plunder and take our cattle

You may be sure we’ll give you battle.

If the clubmen had any other message, it was simply that the two sides should come together and that the war should be ended. Clubmen risings took place in several counties, from Sussex to South Wales, but particularly in those regions that, as one of their leaders put it, had ‘more deeply … tasted the misery of this unnatural internecine war’. Money and supplies had been extorted from them; soldiers had been quartered upon them against their will; local authority had often broken down. They wanted a return to order and to the ‘known laws’.

The unsettled mood of the localities may perhaps be traced in the large number of witch trials in the period. Three days after the battle of Naseby thirty-six supposed witches were put on trial at the Essex assizes, and all but one of them were executed on the charge of black art and of conjuring up the devil. It has been estimated that, in this summer, one hundred old and young women were executed. This was a world of anxiety.

The king was now reduced to limited forays to lift a siege here or support a town there, but he lived in fear of any parliamentary army bearing down upon him; he was concerned that, if he were captured, he would suffer at the hands of the puritan troops. He received some comfort from the fact that the Scots seemed prepared to negotiate with him. They were ready to break with parliament, now that it was beginning to incline towards Cromwell and the Independent cause. They had been accused of doing little since their first arrival in England, and their payments were in arrears.

Yet this small hope for the royalist cause was almost overwhelmed by the news that Bristol had fallen; Prince Rupert had signed a treaty of surrender. Sir Thomas Fairfax had surrounded the city towards the end of August and laid siege. By the beginning of September Rupert realized that he could hold out no longer. He did not have enough troops to defend the walls of the city, and the citizens were increasingly desperate. Fairfax was growing impatient and directed an assault against some royalist defenders; when they had been cut down he sent the terms of surrender to his combatant. The prince accepted and, on 11 September, evacuated the town.

The loss of the second city of the kingdom was a grievous blow to the king, who at once suspected a plot to suborn him. He even considered the possibility that Rupert was about to launch a military coup and remove him from the throne before negotiating a truce with parliament. ‘Nephew!’ he wrote in anger, ‘though the loss of Bristol be a great blow to me, yet your surrendering it as you did is of so much affliction to me, that it makes me not only forget the consideration of that place, but is likewise the greatest trial of my constancy that hath yet befallen me; for what is to be done, after one that is so near to me as you are, both in blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action?’ He dismissed him from his service, and advised him to return home. The prince had not been a popular figure and, as he marched out of Bristol, the citizens cried out, ‘Give him no quarter! Give him no quarter!’

Two or three days later the cause of the king was shaken further with the news that the forces of Montrose in Scotland had been defeated, and that the earl had fled back to the Highlands. The king’s best hope had gone. In this period it was ordered by parliament that ‘the boarded masque house at Whitehall’ should be pulled down and its materials sold. The days of the cavalier were coming to an end.

In October Prince Rupert made his way to Newark Castle, where the king was lodged. He strode up to his uncle and told him that he had come to give him an account of his conduct at Bristol; the king would not speak to him and sat down to supper, during which he ignored him. Eventually he allowed his nephew to give evidence before a council of war, the members of which decided that the prince had not been guilty of any want of courage or fidelity. He could have done no other but surrender or face the entire destruction of his troops and of the town. The king reluctantly accepted the verdict, with the proviso that he believed his nephew could have held out longer. Charles left Newark a few days later, and quickly made what had now become a dangerous journey back to Oxford.

In his extremity the king began negotiating with various parties in order to preserve himself. He had already told his son to sail for France and remain under the protection of his mother who had sailed from Falmouth in the summer. Now he sought to divide the two principal groups in parliament by dealing separately with the Independents and the Presbyterians; he seemed willing to grant liberty of conscience to the former while inclining towards the latter on the grounds that the army was too democratic. He told his wife that ‘I had great reason to hope that one of the factions would so address themselves to me that I might without difficulty obtain my so just ends’. He had opened provisional negotiations with the Scots, also, and was still attempting to treat with the Irish.

The fighting in the last few months of the war became sporadic and desultory. Prince Rupert set out from Oxford on cavalry raids, but achieved little. The royalist troops on the border of Wales and England tried desperately to hold on to Chester and its related ports in the hope of welcoming an Irish army. That army never arrived and, in any case, Chester eventually fell. Sir Thomas Fairfax conducted the parliamentary campaign in the west against a divided and demoralized enemy. A royalist army was raised to confront him but, at Torrington, it fell to pieces.

In the last battle of the great civil war, near Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire, the royalist forces were soon overpowered and surrendered en masse. The royalist commander, Sir Jacob Astley, told his captors that ‘you have now done your work and may go play, unless you fall out among yourselves’. And that is what they proceeded to do.

The king, now facing ruin, tried to buy time with various proposals, secret or otherwise. He offered to come to Westminster, but his overture was rejected; it was considered likely that he would try to detach one faction and place himself at its head. Charles himself wrote that ‘nothing will satisfy them but the ruin, not only of us, our posterity and friends, but even monarchy itself’. Eventually he decided that he would go over to the Scots; he was their native king, after all, and they did not share the levelling principles of his principal parliamentary opponents. He would be secure both in conscience and in honour; he would also be under the protection of a large army.

The Scots themselves had to act warily, since they did not wish to antagonize their paymasters at Westminster. They would be obliged to come upon the king, as it were, by accident. On 27 April 1646, the king left Oxford in disguise as a servant, and by a circuitous route made his way to the Scottish army at Newark. The Scottish commanders told their English allies that this was a ‘matter of much astonishment’ to them.

Soon enough Charles realized that he was as much a prisoner as a guest. When he tried to give the word of command to his guard he was interrupted by the lord general, Alexander Leslie, who told him that ‘I am the older soldier, sir; your majesty had better leave that office to me’. It seems likely that the Scots wished to keep their king as a hostage until parliament paid them the money they were owed. They took him to Newcastle, where almost at once he became subject to their demands. He must sign the covenant. He must impose Presbyterianism on all of his people. He must abandon the Book of Common Prayer. When one minister told him that his father, James VI, would welcome such a settlement the king replied that ‘I had the happiness to know him much better than you’. ‘I never knew’, he wrote to his wife, ‘what it was to be barbarously treated before.’ Yet he pretended to compromise while playing for time; he hoped that his opponents would become further divided, and he believed that fresh aid would come from France or Ireland or the Highlands or anywhere.

At the end of July, parliament sent the king a number of propositions to which he should accede if he wished to retain the throne. He should embrace Presbyterianism and extirpate the bishops; he should persecute Independents or Catholics, and give up his army for twenty years. Privately he swore that he would not surrender ‘one jot’ but in his public response he agreed to consider the demands in a mild and obliging spirit. He wrote privately to his wife that he had to deliver ‘a handsome denying answer’, an unenthusiastic response that would not alienate his captors. All of these secret letters were written in code and smuggled out of his quarters.

The flight of the king to the Scottish army had precipitated the final split between the forces of his enemies. The Scottish army and parliament now deeply distrusted one another, and their differences were reflected in the open divisions between the Presbyterians and Independents at Westminster. It is of no importance whether we choose to call them religious sects or political parties; now they were both. They were known as ‘factions’ or ‘juntoes’ or ‘cabals’.

The Presbyterian cause, in its ideal state, proposed that its Church should rule by inherent right as the one divinely ordained form of religious government, and that no other churches or sects should be permitted. The Independent cause rested on the belief that a true Church was a voluntary association of believers and that each congregation had the right to self-government; it was Calvinist in tendency but it favoured toleration. Cromwell had said that ‘he that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience’. A Presbyterian divine stated, however, that ‘to let men serve God according to the persuasion of their own consciences, was to cast out one devil that seven worse might enter’. Another Presbyterian divine, Thomas Edwards, published a book entitled Gangraena in which he listed the heresies of the radical sectarians, each one to be crushed in its egg ‘before it comes to be a flying serpent’. Here, then, was the great divide. In the broadest secular terms the Presbyterians supported parliament, while the Independents favoured the army.

Conflicts and divisions arose frequently in parliamentary debate. On one occasion the Commons spent the day discussing matters of religion until darkness fell upon the assembly; a motion was advanced to bring in candles, but this was disputed. When a division was called it was already too dark to count the members on either side, and it was suggested that candles be introduced to resolve the issue. But could candles be brought in before the house had formally requested them? So the affairs of the nation were determined. This was a new age of political life.

The eventual refusal of the king to take the covenant undermined his value to the Scottish Presbyterians, who now thought it best to make a bargain with parliament. On receipt of the moneys owing to them, they would hand back the sovereign; under these circumstances, perhaps, Charles might negotiate a treaty with their allies at Westminster. So for the sum of £400,000 he was surrendered. The haggling over money damaged their credibility, however, and the earl of Lauderdale predicted that it ‘would make them to be hissed at by all nations; yeah, the dogs in the street would piss upon them’. As the army marched out of Newcastle, leaving the king behind, the fishwives of the city cried out, ‘Judas! Judas!’ The king himself said that they had sold him at too cheap a rate.

Charles set out for parliamentary custody at the beginning of February 1647 almost as a conquering hero, and cheering crowds lined his route. At Ripon he touched for the king’s evil, thus asserting his divine power over the disease of scrofula. At Nottingham the lord general of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, dismounted and kissed his hand. The king arrived at Holmby House, in Northamptonshire, in the middle of February. He remained for five months; he spent much time in his private quarters or ‘closet’, played at bowls or rode in the neighbourhood.

The Presbyterians and their supporters at Westminster now began to plan for the disbandment of the New Model Army and for its replacement by a less sectarian and more reliable force. They also ignored the English army’s demands for payment of arrears in wages, and for an indemnity against prosecution for any actions committed in the late war. It was now becoming a dangerous dispute between army and parliament. In this period Oliver Cromwell collapsed, and almost died, from something known as an ‘impostume in the head’; it was some kind of swelling or abscess, perhaps in part induced by nervous strain.

The sectarians and supporters of the army, or as they called themselves ‘well-affected persons’, sent a ‘Large Petition’ to parliament in which they asserted the supreme authority of the people; they also demanded that the Lords and Commons exempt ‘matters of religion and God’s worship from the compulsive and restrictive power of any authority upon earth’. Among these passionate sectarians emerged a group that were known as ‘the levellers’. Royalist newsletters had given them the name, since ‘they intend to set all straight, and raise a parity and community in the kingdom’. We might perhaps describe them as spiritual egalitarians.

They were essentially a London group who issued several hundred tracts, and could muster perhaps a few hundred sympathizers; their colour was sea-green and they wore sea-green scarves or ribbons. One of their unofficial leaders, John Lilburne, wrote to Cromwell in this year that he and his co-religionists ‘have looked upon you as the most absolute single-hearted great man in England, untainted or unbiased with ends of your own’.

The army itself was in a state of agitation close to mutiny, and sent a petition of complaint to Sir Thomas Fairfax. In turn parliament passed a declaration denouncing ‘enemies of the state and disturbers of the peace’. The army that had saved parliament was therefore branded as an enemy, which in turn was considered to be in effect a declaration of war. ‘The Apology of the Soldiers to their Officers’, published at the beginning of May, complained that their intentions were ‘grossly and foully misconstrued’ and asked ‘Was there ever such things done by a parliament … is it not better to die like men than to be enslaved and hanged like dogs?’

Against this background the people of England suffered. This year, 1646, marked the beginning of six terrible harvests in a period when the price of bread doubled and the cost of meat rose by more than a half. The agriculture of England was its life and staple; its partial collapse therefore shook the already troubled kingdom.

The members of the New Model Army were quartered at Saffron Walden, where some parliamentary commissioners came to recruit soldiers for service in Ireland; they were greeted with complaints and questions. The troops wanted to know when, in particular, their arrears of payment would be met; they received no coherent response. Eight of the ten cavalry regiments then chose representatives who would in time become known as ‘adjutators’ (or, as their opponents called them, ‘agitators’) for the army’s cause. Cromwell pleaded for a compromise, arguing that if parliamentary authority ‘falls to nothing, nothing can follow but confusion’. Yet parliament was in turn determined to crush the army, on the principle that ‘they must sink us, or we sink them’. It was now being whispered that the army sought an accommodation with the king, whereby it might contrive to destroy the Presbyterian cause. Fairfax explained that Charles had become ‘the golden ball cast between the two parties’. Which way would he roll, or be rolled?

The army leaders believed that parliament was about to establish a new army with the king at its head, so they moved to act first. At six in the morning of 4 June 1647, the king emerged from Holmby House to be confronted by a party of 500 horse, drawn up in neat ranks, under the command of Cornet Joyce. Joyce asked permission to escort Charles to some other place. The king demanded to see his commission, but Joyce prevaricated. ‘I pray you, Mr Joyce, deal with me ingenuously and tell me what commission you have.’

‘Here is my commission.’

‘Where?’

Joyce turned around and gestured towards the assembled horsemen. ‘It is behind me.’

‘It is as fair a commission,’ the king replied, ‘and as well written as I have seen a commission written in my life: a company of as handsome, proper gentlemen, as I have seen a great while.’

The New Model Army took him to the village of Childerley outside Cambridge. Charles did not particularly care in whose camp he rested; it was enough for him, as he put it, to set his opponents by the ears. Yet, with the king in its hands, the army had now become a political as well as a military force. The role of Cromwell in the Holmby House plot has never been clear; Joyce visited him five days before the action, however, and it is not likely that they discussed horsemanship. When Cromwell told the king that Joyce had acted entirely on his own initiative Charles retorted that ‘I’ll not believe you unless you hang him’. In fact Joyce received promotion and a generous pension.

On the day after Charles had been taken to Childerley Hall the regiments met near Newmarket in order to draw up a ‘solemn engagement’ in which they pledged to stay together until their legitimate demands were met. ‘Is that the opinion of you all?’ ‘It is, of all, of all.’ There were also cries of ‘Justice, justice, we demand justice!’ A new ‘general council of the army’ was established, with Cromwell among its members. He had ridden to the army headquarters at Newmarket from London, having heard rumours that the Presbyterians were about to consign him to the Tower. He had endeavoured to hold the peace between the opposing factions, but now he formally took the army’s part as its chief representative.

On hearing the news of the king’s seizure, parliament convened and hastily granted all arrears of pay to the New Model Army; the city fathers now demanded that a force of cavalry be raised for the defence of the capital. The army itself was on the move and marched to Triploe Heath, 7 miles nearer London, and began to advance ever closer to the city. Cromwell wrote a letter to the civic authorities, asking for a just settlement of the liberties of the people under the aegis of parliament; he warned, however, that if the army met concerted opposition it would be freed from the blame for ‘all that ruin which may befall that great and populous city’.

When the army reached St Albans, a little over 20 miles from London, The Declaration of the Army was published in which were proposed shorter and more representative parliaments beyond the reach of oligarchy or regal authority; no force in the nation should have ‘unlimited power’. Its author was Sir Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s new son-in-law. The Declaration was accompanied by charges against eleven named Presbyterian members of parliament; they were accused of treasonable dealings with royalists at home and abroad. Parliament seemed willing and able to defend them but, on 26 June 1647, the eleven men thought it prudent to withdraw from Westminster and eventually to flee abroad. This was the period in which ‘purge’ entered the English political vocabulary. The great constitutional historian Henry Hallam wrote that on this day ‘may be said to have fallen the legislative power and civil government of England’.

Throughout the month of June the leaders of the army were in constant and courteous contact with the king. It is clear enough that they still wished to reach a settlement which would allow him to retain his throne with altered powers; he was the only power that might conceivably unite the nation now dangerously divided between army and parliament. Yet he was still beset by accusations of hypocrisy and double-dealing. At one point the king told Henry Ireton that ‘I shall play my game as well as I can’; to which Ireton replied that ‘if your majesty have a game to play, you must give us also liberty to play ours’.

The New Model Army had by now worked its way around to Reading, which provided a more convenient route to London. The more radical of the ‘agitators’ now pressed for a final march upon the city, but Cromwell favoured delay and negotiation. Ireton had drafted a policy document, Heads of the Proposals, that effectively repeated the propositions set out in The Declaration of the Army including a biennial parliament and a new council of state.

Parliament, noticeably more moderate or more fearful after the expulsion of the eleven members, voted to accept the proposals. They agreed in particular that control of the city militia should be returned to the old committee of militia, which meant effectively that the city force would be under the command of the now dominant army. The Lords and Commons, however, had not calculated the ferocious response of the Presbyterians in London itself who feared for their lives and property if the army came to rule. A crowd of citizens and apprentices accompanied a deputation of Londoners and besieged the Lords, shouting that ‘they would never come out’ unless they reversed their decision. Another crowd, or mob, burst into the Commons and demanded that they repeal their earlier judgement. ‘Vote! Vote!’ The members were too terrified to do anything other than comply. Parliament had proved itself to be at the mercy of any powerful group, and was thus unable to legislate for anything; sixty of the Independent members, together with the Speaker, now fled to the army at Reading for safety. They lent added legitimacy to the soldiers’ cause.

The Heads of the Proposals had been submitted for the king’s consideration. Some of the terms were mild enough. The bishops would not be abolished but deprived of the power of coercion; the old liturgy and the new covenant would have equal force in a broad context of religious liberty and toleration. The army and navy would be returned to the king after ten years. Only five royalists would be excluded from pardon. If Charles had accepted these terms, he could have returned to the throne with his honour intact. The king, however, rejected the document without giving it any serious consideration. His stated response was that ‘you cannot be without me. You will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you.’ One of his advisers, Sir John Berkley, whispered to him, ‘Sir, your majesty speaks as if you had some secret strength and power that I do not know of.’ The moderates on both sides now began to lose all hope.

The intimidation of parliament by the London mob, and the failure of negotiations with the king, prompted the New Model Army finally to march upon London. A brigade of horse took Southwark on the night of 3 August, and the civic leaders of the city woke up to find their principal avenue across London Bridge in the hands of what must now be called the enemy. The sudden occupation ‘struck them dead’, according to Clarendon, and ‘put an end to all their consultation for defence’. Their only object now was to conciliate those whom they had previously offended and to prevent the army from firing and plundering their mansions.

The whole army of 18,000 men, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, now entered the city; Cromwell rode at the head of the cavalry, while Fairfax sat in a carriage beside Cromwell’s wife. Fairfax was met at Hyde Park by the mayor and aldermen, who proffered a formal apology and offered him a gold cup; he refused to accept the gift, and sent them on their way. With the Speaker and the members of the Commons with him, he seemed now to represent the legitimate authority of the nation. One puritan Londoner, Thomas Juxon, wrote after watching the soldiers marching through the streets of London, that ‘’tis remarkable that it never was in the minds of the army to carry it so far; but were brought to it, one thing after another, and that by the designs of their enemies’. The army also made sure that the great defensive wall, erected by Londoners at the beginning of the war, was pulled down. Fairfax did not intend a military occupation of the city, however, and established the army headquarters some 6 miles away at Putney.

Charles, now residing at Hampton Court, was willing graciously to listen to the proposals put forward by Cromwell and the other leaders of the army; but he was resolute in defence of his interests, and refused to compromise. Many Independent members were willing, and indeed eager, to dispense altogether with the king. They even accused Cromwell of pursuing his own self-interest in continuing to negotiate with him; it was whispered that he was about to be honoured as the new earl of Essex.

Yet Cromwell was in truth becoming angry and frustrated at the king’s constant prevarications and refusals; he began seriously to doubt his sincerity. At some point, towards the end of October, he refused to travel any more to Hampton Court. Those who attended the monarch now began to notice an alteration in the manners and civility of the soldiers who were stationed about him; the king’s guard was doubled.

30

To kill a king

The army now began to take stock of its power and its situation. The levellers made an early contribution to the debate when in October they published a pamphlet, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Stated’, in which they demanded a more representative parliament; they maintained the then revolutionary doctrine that all power was ‘originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this nation’. No mention, therefore, was made of king or lords. They had support among the more radicalized soldiers who agreed with their call for national renovation. ‘The Case of the Armie’ was swiftly followed by the ‘Agreement of the People’ that argued for a new political order based upon a written constitution. Both sets of proposals seemed to be guiding the army towards the establishment of a republic.

Some of the principal officers, Cromwell among them, did not support the more extreme measures being canvassed; it was proposed, therefore, that the arguments be tested in open debate. The deliberations were held at St Mary’s Church, on the southern side of Putney Bridge, at the end of October and lasted for three weeks; gathered here were the several generals, together with four representatives from each of the thirty-two regiments. The importance of the proceedings was not lost upon any of the participants, and indeed the ‘Putney debates’ of 1647 remain one of the most significant expressions of English political thought.

On the first day Edward Sexby, one of the representatives of the soldiers, complained that ‘we have laboured to please a king, and, I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him’. Cromwell then remarked that the radical ‘Agreement of the People’ was naively formulated in the belief that a new constitution could be created without any consideration of English tradition or precedent. He had been told that faith would make a way through all difficulties but ‘we are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination, and carnal reasonings’. He was suggesting that expediency and self-deception may be at the heart of political revolution. He also made more practical criticisms. All of this change was to be achieved in the name of the people but he questioned, ‘Were the spirits and temper of the people of this nation prepared to receive and to go along with it?’

A defining moment of the debate arrived when Thomas Rainsborough, one of the representatives of the levelling movement, declared that ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he’ and should therefore be allowed the vote. It was a call that was not to be answered until 1918. Henry Ireton rejected the idea of manhood suffrage, however, and argued that the vote should be given to ‘persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies’. Only those with a financial stake in the country, in other words, should be allowed to determine its direction.

At one point in the proceedings Cromwell was moved to declare that ‘the foundation and the supremacy is in the people, radically in them’, but he also argued that the sovereign authority must be that of a parliament however constituted. In this uncertain time the force of power was absolutely required. He compared himself to a drowning man. ‘If it have but the face of authority, if it be but a hare swimming over the Thames, I will take hold of it rather than let it go.’ A more ominous note, for the king, emerged when Captain Bishop claimed that the woes of the nation came from ‘a compliance to preserve that man of blood’ by which he meant Charles. The captain was alluding to a passage from the second Book of Samuel: ‘Thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man.’ The phrase soon became commonplace.

The final set of proposals that emerged from Putney did not reflect the demands of the levellers or the debate about the future of the king; it was designed only to preserve the unity of the army. It recommended an extended franchise but maintained the ancient framework of king, Commons and Lords with the Commons in effective control. The commanders of the army then brought the debates to a summary close by ordering all of the participants to return to their regiments. A partial mutiny by some of the more radical troops was quickly put down. A restructuring of the army, in the following year, allowed its leaders to remove those soldiers of suspect sympathies.

The king now confounded everyone by escaping from Hampton Court. He had gone down some private stairs and, meeting with two associates, fled south. He seemed to have had no certain destination but eventually decided to make for the Isle of Wight where he had the sea at his back. He left behind some papers, one of which was an anonymous letter warning him of the danger of assassination. He also left a letter to parliament in which he asked to ‘be heard with freedom, honour and safety, and I shall instantly break through this cloud of retirement and show myself ready to be pater patriae’.

The governor of the Isle of Wight, Robert Hammond, received this father of the nation with no little apprehension; he was under the command of the army, and had no wish to disobey his superiors. But he was violently opposed to the levellers in the ranks and could guarantee the king’s safety from their attentions. It may also have suited Cromwell to leave the king on the island; he was far from the reach both of the more sanguinary levellers and of the Scots who might wish to negotiate with him. In the best possible circumstances the king might even take to the sea and journey to exile in France.

The king was now in Carisbrooke Castle under guard. He could set himself up as an object for auction, as it were, with many prospective bidders. Cromwell might still wish to come to an accommodation with him. Despite Robert Hammond’s best endeavours, the Scots might somehow be able to find a way of communicating with him. Almost as soon as he was ensconced in the castle he began to practise his subterfuges; he concealed messages in the lining of gloves, he engaged in secret conversations with his servants, he drew up elaborate plans for sending and receiving clandestine letters.

This was the period in which Cromwell openly broke with the king and spoke bitterly against him in the army council. There is a story, never fully substantiated, that Cromwell intercepted a secret letter to the queen in which Charles announced that he would make an arrangement with the Scots rather than with the army. It was soon remarked at Westminster that, in Carisbrooke, Charles had thrown a bone between two spaniels and laughed at their enmity. That alone would have been enough to turn Cromwell against him. He now began to sympathize with the position of the more radical soldiers as resolute anti-monarchists. He observed that ‘if we cannot bring the army to our sense, we must go to theirs’.

Cromwell’s suspicions were soon confirmed. Towards the end of December the king, after secret negotiations with the Scottish commissioners, signed an agreement known as ‘the Engagement’. He promised to introduce Presbyterianism as the state religion for an initial three years; he would confirm the ‘solemn league and covenant’ in the English parliament, but would not oblige his subjects to take its oath. In return the Scots would support Charles’s demand for a personal treaty and the disbandment of all English armies; a Scottish army would then be dispatched to London to expedite ‘a full and fair parliament’. The document was sealed in lead and buried in the garden of the castle. He then refused to deal with a parliamentary deputation, at which point Colonel Hammond dismissed the king’s servants and doubled his guard.

Charles: Shall I have liberty to go about to take the air?

Hammond: No. I cannot grant it.

On 3 January 1648, the Commons passed the ‘Vote of No Addresses’ by a majority of fifty. No more communications, or proposals, would be put to the king. Cromwell fully supported the decision on the grounds that the people should not ‘any longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God has hardened’. The council of the army also pronounced that it would stand by the kingdom and parliament ‘without the king and against him’.

Yet at a subsequent dinner the army was still manifestly divided. The commanders argued amongst themselves about the relative merits of ‘monarchical, aristocratical or democratical government’, but could come to no conclusion. At the end of the discussion Cromwell, in one of those fits of boisterousness or hysteria that punctuated his career, threw a cushion at one of the protagonists, Edmund Ludlow, before running downstairs; Ludlow pursued him, and in turn pummelled him with a cushion.

Colonel Hammond was soon informed that a treaty with the Scots had been signed while the king was in his safekeeping, and he determined to find it. He entered the king’s chamber without warning; the king rose from his bed in alarm and put on his gown; Hammond proceeded to search its pockets, at which point Charles struck him. It was reported that, against all precedent, the colonel returned the blow.

The king’s incarceration incensed those who supported the royalist cause. Riots occurred in Ipswich and in Canterbury. A news-writer in London reported that ‘the counties are full of discontent, many insurrections having been lately made, even near this city’. The majority of the newspapers and pamphlets were strongly royalist and on the anniversary of the king’s accession, 27 March, celebratory bonfires blazed in the capital. Coach travellers, driven through the streets, were compelled to drink the king’s health. The butchers of the city declared that if they could catch Colonel Hammond ‘they would chop him as small as ever they chopped any of their meat’.

At the beginning of April the lord mayor sent some trained bands to disperse a crowd of apprentices in Moorfields; the crowd turned on the bands, captured their weapons and marched off shouting on behalf of ‘King Charles!’ Petitioners, seeking the rule of a king again, flocked to London from Kent, Essex and Surrey. The cavaliers were jubilant, and the Presbyterians once more gained a hold over parliament. In April the Commons passed a motion calling for a treaty with the king.

The signs of civil war were once more apparent. The first acts came from Wales where, in April, a royalist commander occupied Tenby Castle; soon enough the whole of South Wales had declared in the sovereign’s favour. The leaders of the army spent a day in tears and prayers. How could it be that blood and battle had returned to the nation? Had the previous war been fought for no purpose? At a meeting of the New Model Army in Windsor it was concluded that ‘it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace,to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed’.

The army council then ordered Cromwell to enter South Wales with two regiments of horse and three of foot; it took him six weeks to defeat the rebels. Other anti-parliamentary forces had emerged throughout the country, guided not so much by zeal for the king as dismay at the taxes and county committees imposed by parliament. Berwick and Carlisle were taken by the disaffected; Pontefract was also seized in a surprise attack, and Scarborough declared for the king. The men of Essex marched under a banner raised by a royalist commander, General Goring. A section of the fleet off the Downs also declared themselves for the king, and joined with the men of Kent in their revolt. It had also become clear that the Scottish army was being assembled on the border in order to fight for the king.

This represented a serious challenge to the authority of parliament but this second civil war, as it became known, ended once more in victory for the New Model Army. The Scottish army did not cross the border until July, by which time most of the risings in England and Wales had been put down by the army’s superior military force; Cromwell dealt with the north, and Fairfax with the south. It had not been a war, but a series of scattered risings and outbreaks of fighting with no serious attempt to coordinate what might have been a successful rebellion. Without a coherent strategy the rebels were no match for the New Model. They had waited vainly for the Scots until it became too late to fashion serious resistance.

The second civil war had a bloody ending on its two principal fronts. The Scottish army, under the command of the duke of Hamilton, had made a slow progress southward through the rain and wind of an unseasonably cold summer; ill-trained, and much smaller than expected, it was sustained by no great cause, and as a consequence its morale was low. The New Model was at least bolstered by the knowledge that it was fighting an invasion force.

The two sides encountered each other at a pitched battle near the walls of Preston, on 17 August, in which the infantry of both armies pressed hard upon each other. The Scots were eventually pushed back, with the loss of 1,000 men. Cromwell pursued the remainder of the Scottish army which, battered and broken, laid down its arms. It was the first battle in which he enjoyed overall command, and it was his most signal victory.

All the remaining royalists from the southeast had fled behind the walls of Colchester where, in the middle of June, Sir Thomas Fairfax prepared for a long siege against them. It was the most distasteful and inglorious event of the entire civil war. Fairfax had decided to starve the city into submission until there came a time when the inhabitants, having exhausted the provisions of cats and dogs, were forced to devour soap and candles; it was reported that the royalist soldiers had told the inhabitants to eat their children. The royalist commander, the earl of Norwich, then sent 500 women and children out of the town; Fairfax refused to receive them and with threats they were driven back behind the walls. By the end of August, reduced, as it was said, ‘by Captain Storm without and by Captain Hunger within’, the royalists surrendered; two of their commanders were then put in front of a firing squad. This second phase of the civil war was more harsh and intense than the first; there was no longer time for mercy.

After his victory at Preston Cromwell believed that he had seen once more the hand of God. He trusted that he was doing the work of the Lord; that is why he waited upon divine providence to guide his actions and to direct his way forward. He was a blind mole in search of grace, sometimes surrounded by darkness, yet his faith in providence was his rock and his refuge. He wrote to a friend and colleague, Philip Wharton: ‘I can laugh and sing in my heart when I speak of these things.’

The battle at Preston effectively marked the end of the second civil war, and of the turmoil that had mangled the kingdom since the king had first raised his banner six years before. It has been calculated that 100,000 soldiers and civilians died in the course of the conflict, and that a larger portion of the population perished than in the Great War of 1914–18. It has therefore justly been described as the bloodiest war in English history. One hundred and fifty towns, and fifty villages, suffered significant damage; 10,000 houses were destroyed.

In the course of the second civil war Charles made several attempts to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. He had never ceased to conspire, and to devise stratagems against his captors and his enemies; he would, for example, conceal coded messages in the heels of his servants’ boots. Some supporters managed to smuggle to him a cutting tool and a supply of nitric acid, then known as aqua fortis, to dismantle the iron bars of his window; but the design was forestalled and came to nothing. On another occasion he tried to squeeze through the bars but became trapped, stuck between his chest and shoulders, and could only extricate himself with difficulty.

Yet after the final victory parliament still wished to treat with him, against the wishes of the army whose leaders had denounced him as ‘a man of blood’ who had effectively instigated the second civil war. The majority of the members of the Lords and Commons, together with the large part of the population, now wished for peace at any price. The king was therefore taken out of confinement in the castle and lodged with his friends and servants in Newport, to which town the parliamentary commissioners came. He sat under a canopy of state with his advisers behind him; the parliamentary delegation sat before him.

He was in a more tractable mood, no doubt because the victory of the New Model Army brought an effective end to his resistance. He wished to come to an agreement with parliament on the very good grounds that he feared the army much more. So within a few days he had conceded thirty-eight of their propositions and in return was granted four of his own. He submitted in large part to the religious demands of the commissioners, and agreed to give up control of the militia for a period of twenty years. The parliamentary negotiators were no doubt aware that he might renege on these promises if ever he returned to full power.

The king himself wrote to an adviser, Sir William Hopkins, that ‘the great concession I made this day – the Church, militia and Ireland – was made merely in order to my escape … my only hope is that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less careful of their guards’. Yet at the same time he was ever mindful that a different fate might await him. He might be a king who had emasculated his sovereignty. He might be condemned to perpetual imprisonment. He might die upon the scaffold. He also feared assassination by friends of the army, and while at the castle had lived in terror of being poisoned by Hammond or one of his gaoler’s associates.

One of the king’s secretaries, Sir Philip Warwick, saw his master standing at a window with the parliamentary legation behind him and noticed that he was crying ‘the biggest drops that ever I saw fall from an eye’. From the moment his servants had been withdrawn by order, he had neglected his personal appearance; his beard remained untrimmed while his clothes were worn and faded. His once luxurious hair had turned almost entirely grey, thus imparting a new shade of melancholy to his face.

The army was growing increasingly impatient with the negotiations at Newport and, in November, drew up a ‘remonstrance’ calling for ‘exemplary justice’ for the notorious man of blood. The leaders of the army were calling for his death. They had also begun the march back to London after completing their business against the Scots in the north.

On the first day of December the king was removed from the Isle of Wight and taken to Hurst Castle on the coast of Hampshire. Cromwell and his colleagues feared, rightly, that parliament had drawn up plans to invite him back to Westminster. They were also apprehensive of any kind of formal agreement between the two parties. Cromwell declared that any Newport treaty would be only a ‘little bit of paper’. He wrote to Hammond that the king was ‘an accursed thing’ with whom there could be no agreement.

On 5 December parliament resolved to settle with the king on the basis of the terms concluded at Newport. On the following day Colonel Thomas Pride stood outside the chamber of the Commons with a list of names; he checked them off, one by one, as each member tried to enter. Some were allowed to go forward while others were detained or arrested by soldiers who stood behind him. The Presbyterian members, who favoured the Newport treaty, and other of the king’s supporters, were summarily removed. It was the first, and last, military coup d’état in English history. It seems to have been engineered by Henry Ireton rather than by Oliver Cromwell, but when Cromwell returned to London that night from Yorkshire he declared that ‘I was not acquainted with this design, yet, since it is done, I am glad of it’. As far as he was concerned, all the providences of God were coming together without his claiming responsibility for them.

In a dreary castle, on the edge of a stretch of shingle spit, the king was immured for two weeks; it was a place of mist and fog where the air was damp and heavy from the marshes that lay all around it. His room was small and dark, lit with candles even at noon, and from the slit of a window he could look out across the Solent. The soldiers brought in his meals ‘uncovered’, not wearing their hats. ‘Is there anything more contemptible’, he is supposed to have asked, ‘than a despised prince?’

He must have known, or guessed, that all hope was at an end; the army was the master of the kingdom, and must now surely seek his death. Yet, like Cromwell, he was seized with a sense of destiny and of religious purpose; he believed that he might enjoy the fate of a martyr to a holy cause. He had meditated on all the sufferings and ignominies that were likely to befall him, and had hardened his resolve against the rebuffs of the world. Like Cromwell, too, he valued his own life less than the principles for which he fought. So even in this extremity he remained apparently calm and even cheerful.

After ‘Pride’s Purge’, as it became known, approximately 200 members were left of the previous assembly; yet they now constituted the House of Commons and eventually became known as ‘the Rump Parliament’ or, as Clarendon interpreted it, ‘the fag-end of a carcass long since expired’. Some of them had not stayed necessarily to support the army but to avert the prospect of direct military rule without any parliament at all.

On 19 December the king began the journey from Hurst Castle to Windsor where, by the order of the army officers, he was to be ‘secured in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice’. Yet the nature of that ‘justice’ was unclear. Many in the army did not wish for a sentence of death. Despite his fierce words about the man of blood, Cromwell seems to have been among those who did not favour condign punishment. Charles might now be so chastened and so desperate that he would yield. The army, and perhaps a newly elected parliament, would thereby acquire legitimacy and authority if they held power with the assent of the king. In the event that he was tried and found guilty, he might be deposed rather than executed. Charles’s death was as yet by no means a necessity.

Another consideration moved Cromwell. An envoy had been sent to Ireland by the king intent upon raising an army; if Charles could be dissuaded from following the project, another great threat would be lifted. The prospect of a royalist Ireland was enough to persuade Cromwell to make one last attempt at a settlement.

The army leaders then sent an envoy to Windsor in order to discuss the terms of a possible agreement, but the king refused to see him on the grounds that he had already ‘conceded too much, and even so had failed to give satisfaction, and he was resolved to die rather than lay any further burden on his conscience’. So the prospect of death came ever nearer. The refusal of the king to make any further compromise seems to have persuaded Cromwell that he must indeed be tried and executed. He told the Commons that ‘since the providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to providence’.

On New Year’s Day 1649, the Rump Parliament passed without any opposition an ordinance for the king’s trial on the grounds that he had contrived ‘a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation’; he had wished to make himself a tyrant and had prosecuted a cruel and bloody war for that purpose. The Lords rejected the ordinance, whereupon the Commons passed a resolution that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and that they themselves represented the people. The Commons therefore declared themselves to be the supreme power in the state. They also passed an ordinance to establish a new high court of justice with 135 commissioners. In the event only 52 arrived on the appointed day of the king’s trial. The army council was also divided. One of its members asserted that the king of England could be tried by no English court. Cromwell responded: ‘I tell you, we will cut off his head with the crown upon it!’

Charles was to be brought from Windsor to St James’s Palace on 19 January. When the king was told of the coming journey, he replied that ‘God is everywhere’. The trial began on the following day. The soldiers brought him from the palace to Whitehall in a closed sedan chair, and then to Westminster in a curtained barge. The roll of judges was called and, when the name of Sir Thomas Fairfax was announced, a woman cried out that ‘he has more wit than to be here’; it was the voice of his wife.

The king was conducted into Westminster Hall and sat down in the place provided without the least sign of unease; all the judges, according to Clarendon, were ‘fixing their eyes upon him, without the least show of respect’. The solicitor general, John Cook, then read out the charges against him. ‘Hold a little,’ the king said. He tapped Cook on the shoulder with a silver-tipped cane but the official paid no attention. He tapped him twice more, when the silver tip came off and rolled across the floor. No one picked it up for him. A few days later he confessed that ‘it really made a great impression on me’. It might also be seen as an omen of his beheading. When Cook called him ‘a tyrant and a traitor’, he laughed aloud. How could a sovereign be accused of treason when the meaning of treason was a crime against the sovereign? He did not understand that the word now denoted a trespass against the sovereign power of people and parliament. The king’s state, formerly preserved in all honour and authority, had been turned into ‘the state’.

After the recital the president of the court, John Bradshaw, asked him for an answer to the impeachment against him. Bradshaw sat in a crimson velvet chair before the king, with the judges arrayed behind him; the guard was ranged to the left and right of the prisoner as well as behind him. The spectators sat in galleries on either side, or stood at the lower end of the hall.

‘I would know’, the king asked, ‘by what power I am called hither?’ This was the supreme question. He added that ‘there are many unlawful authorities in the world, there are robbers and highwaymen’. He had managed to overcome his habitual stammer.

He was informed that he had been brought to trial ‘in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king, to answer them’.

‘England was never an elective kingdom, but a hereditary kingdom for near these thousand years.’

The dialogue continued a little longer until Bradshaw adjourned the proceedings. As the king passed the great sword of justice on the clerk’s table he was heard to say, ‘I have no fear of that.’

On the second day of the trial the king once more refused to plead. He did not recognize the authority of the court. Bradshaw ordered him to be taken away.

‘I do require that I give in my reasons—’

‘Sir, ’tis not for prisoners to require.’

‘Prisoners! Sir, I am not an ordinary prisoner.’

On the third day he again refused to plead, declaring that ‘it is the liberty of the people of England that I stand for’. He was asked to plead forty-three times, altogether, but he would not accept the authority of parliament over him. On 27 January the judges, sitting in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, declared the king to be ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public enemy’ who deserved death ‘by the severing his head from his body’. Before sentence was passed upon him in the court Charles argued that the case was so serious that it should be put before a joint session of parliament. Some of the judges, anxious to be relieved of the responsibility of regicide, favoured the idea. ‘Art thou mad?’ Cromwell hissed at one of them. ‘Canst thou not sit still and be quiet?’ The king’s proposal was not accepted.

After Bradshaw had read out the sentence of death Charles asked permission to speak.

‘No, sir, by your favour, sir. Guard, withdraw your prisoner.’

‘I may speak after the sentence. By your favour, sir, I may speak after the sentence ever.’ He was roughly led away by his guard as he continued to cry out. ‘By your favour, hold! The sentence, sir – I say, sir, I do – I am not suffered for to speak. Expect what justice other people will have.’ All around him the soldiers and the spectators screamed, ‘Justice! Justice! Justice!’

In truth the trial and death of the king were contrived by a small, if committed, minority who in no way represented the wishes of the nation. Two Dutch ambassadors pleaded for his life. Sir Thomas Fairfax made a similar supplication to the council of the army. The prince of Wales sent a blank sheet of paper, signed and sealed, so that parliament might write down any conditions it wished. These pleas were not enough. Cromwell and Ireton, in particular, were obdurate. The king must die. Otherwise there would be no safety for themselves or for the new commonwealth.

The last days of the king were for those around him a sorrowful mystery. On 29 January he burnt his papers and his ciphered correspondence. Two of his young children, Elizabeth and Henry, still in the hands of his enemies, were permitted to visit him. When they caught sight of their father, they both burst into tears. He told his thirteen-year-old daughter that he was about to die a glorious death for the liberty of the land and for the maintenance of the true religion. He told his ten-year-old son that the boy must not permit the army to place a crown on his head while his older brothers were still alive. The boy replied: ‘I will sooner be torn in pieces first!’ The king’s guards wept. This was an age of tears.

On the last night of his life, 29 January 1649, the king slept soundly for approximately four hours. When he awoke he told his personal servant that ‘this is my second marriage day’. He asked for two shirts since ‘were I to shake through cold, my enemies would attribute it to fear’. When he left St James’s Palace several companies of infantry were waiting to escort him to Whitehall Palace; the noise of their drums was so loud that the king could not be heard. He was taken to his bedchamber where he waited until parliament had passed a resolution prohibiting the announcement of any successor to the throne. He refused dinner but instead took a piece of bread and a glass of wine. At the appointed time he was escorted to the great Banqueting House.

It was so cold that the Thames had frozen. When he stepped out, from a window on the first floor, the low scaffold was before him; it was draped in black, and the two executioners were heavily disguised. Their identities have never been discovered. The cavalry were at either end of the street and armed guards kept back the people; spectators were on the rooftops, in the houses and in the street itself. The king tried to speak to them but they were too far off. So he dictated his last words to a shorthand writer and two attendants, among which was his declaration that ‘a subject and sovereign are clear different things’. He then claimed that ‘I die a martyr to the people’ before lying down with his head upon the scaffold. The bishop of London was with him.

Bishop: There is but one stage more; it is turbulent and troublesome, but a short one. It will carry you from earth to heaven, and there you will find joy and comfort.

King: I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.

Bishop: You exchange an earthly for an eternal crown – a good exchange.

One blow dispatched him. The principal executioner then took up the head and announced, in traditional fashion, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ At that moment, according to an eyewitness, Philip Henry, ‘there was such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’.

31

This house to be let

The death of the king had delivered a mortal shock to the body politic but as a pamphleteer, Marchamont Nedham, put it, ‘the old allegiance is cancelled and we are bound to admit a new’. There was work to be done. The Rump Parliament passed an Act for the ‘sale of the goods and personal estates of the late king’. The image of Charles was removed from all public buildings, and his statue at the Exchange was smashed into pieces; on its now empty pedestal were inscribed the words ‘exit tyrannus, regum ultimus’ (the tyrant is gone, the last of the kings).

At the beginning of February the House of Lords, and the office of king, were formally abolished; kingship was declared to be ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty and safety and public interest of the nation’. In theory the Rump Parliament now had unlimited authority, yet it was hardly representative of the people. It contained approximately ninety members, since the rest of them had been purged or had voluntarily withdrawn. Other members returned to parliament later, when they could not be charged with collaboration in the king’s death, but of course all of them were divided in their principles and their allegiances. Under the pressure of immediate events, however, they remained a relatively coherent body; only later would it become clear that no consistent ideology could be expected from them. They were reformers rather than revolutionaries, driven by the force of events and circumstances. The Rump was essentially improvised rather than organized; it was born out of necessity and expediency.

Yet the army was also an indispensable power in the new state; Cromwell was a member of parliament as well as a leading army officer. Where did supremacy really lie? If the sword truly ruled, then the answer was obvious. But the main participants professed to believe that they had engineered a constitutional settlement under the aegis of parliament. The politics of ambiguity prevailed, in a situation where no single or fundamental authority was ever named.

A council of state, comprising some forty-one members with thirty-one of them coming from parliament itself, was established to determine policy. Cromwell was the presiding officer. Standing committees were set up for the army, for the navy, for Ireland and for foreign affairs in general. The most pressing concern was that of money; with an army of 70,000 soldiers to maintain and pay, funds were desperately needed. The councillors resorted to fresh taxation, pleas of loans from the City, and the confiscation of royalist estates. It did not help that this was a year of disastrous harvest, in which many inhabitants of Lancashire and Westmorland perished through starvation. Bulstrode Whitelocke reported that the magistrates of Cumberland certified that 30,000 people ‘had neither bread nor seed corn, nor the means of procuring either’. Yet the council had other great tasks; it was expected to unify the three kingdoms, to assert the nation’s ascendancy at sea and to protect commerce.

The councillors, faced with these burdens and charges, seem to have been largely enthusiastic and efficient. A French envoy, sent by Cardinal Mazarin to spy out the land, wrote that ‘not only are they powerful by sea and land, but they live without ostentation, without pomp and without mutual rivalry. They are economical in their private affairs, and prodigal in their devotion to public affairs, for which each man toils as if for his private interest. They handle large sums of money, which they administer honestly, observing a strict discipline. They reward well and punish severely.’ It was reported that in this period Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton were ‘extremely well pleased’ at the pace of affairs. Every revolution has its early heroic days.

In the middle of March Cromwell was chosen by the council to become commander-in-chief of the army with the central purpose of subduing royalist Ireland. Scotland also posed a problem. Its government, on hearing of the king’s execution, immediately proclaimed his eighteen-year-old son Charles II as king. The most serious threat came from Ireland, however, where the royalist lieutenant-general, the duke of Ormonde, was dominant. He had aligned himself with the confederate Catholics, rulers of two-thirds of the country after the rebellion of 1641, in support of the new king. Cromwell would soon go back to war.

In May the Rump passed a final Act that proclaimed England to be a free commonwealth; a kingdom had become a republic. All things must now be directed towards what was called the public good; and of course all things might be justified by invoking it. As Milton put it, ‘more just is it, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty’ than that a greater number compel the rest to be their fellow slaves. From this time, for example, we may date the emergence of the fiscal state with national taxation and public spending as its principal activities.

Yet this was also, according to the inscription on the new great seal, ‘the first year of freedom, by God’s blessing restored’. The revolution in public affairs now lent additional energy and purpose to religious enthusiasts and radicals of every kind. It was time for a new heaven and a new earth. A woman rose up among the congregation in Whitehall Chapel and stripped naked with the cry ‘Welcome the Resurrection!’

The Ranters believed that to the pure all things were pure; Laurence Clarkson, ‘the captain of the Rant’, professed that ‘sin had its conception only in imagination’. They might swear, drink, smoke and have sex with impunity. No earthly magistrate could touch them.

The Fifth Monarchy men and women were actively preparing for the reign of Christ and His saints that was destined to supersede the four monarchies of the ancient world; the reign of Jesus would begin in 1694. They would clap hands and jump around, calling out, ‘Appear! Appear! Appear!’; they would be joined by travelling fiddlers and ballad-singers until they were in an emotional heat.

The Muggletonians also had apocalyptic and millenarian tendencies. They believed that the soul died with the body and would be raised with it at the time of judgment, and that God paid no attention to any earthly activities. They also asserted that heaven was 6 miles above the earth and that God was between 5 and 6 feet in height.

On 16 April some Diggers came to St George’s Hill, near Weybridge in Surrey, where they proceeded to dig and sow seed in the common land. One of them, William Everard, proclaimed that he had been commanded in a vision to dig and plough the land. They believed in a form of agrarian communism by which the English were exhorted finally to free themselves from ‘the Norman yoke’ of landlords and owners of estates before ‘making the earth a common treasury for all’.

The Quakers believed that no visible Church was necessary and that divine revelation was permitted to every human being; Christ might enter the soul and kindle an inner light. They also called for the abolition of lawyers and universities; they refused to pay tithes or to take off their hats in the presence of their ‘superiors’. They were also known to disrupt the orthodox church services. They called each other ‘saints’ or ‘friends of the truth’ but, because of their tremblings and quiverings in worship, they became popularly known by the name now attached to them.

At the beginning of May a translation of the Koran was issued from the press. Religious liberty was contagious. Two months before, John Evelyn had attended an Anglican service in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel.

Political, as well as religious, radicals were in the ascendant. John Lilburne, one of the levellers who had helped to promote agitation in the New Model Army, had turned against the new administration. In ‘England’s New Chains Discovered’ he lambasted Cromwell and the army grandees for dishonesty and hypocrisy; he accused them of being ‘mere politicians’ who wished to aggrandize themselves while they pretended ‘a waiting upon providence, that under the colour of religion they might deceive the more securely’. A pamphlet, ‘The Hunting of the Foxes’, complained that ‘you shall scarce speak to Cromwell but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl and repent, even while he does smite you under the fifth rib.’

Cromwell was incensed at the pamphlet and was overheard saying at a meeting of the council of state, ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces … if you do not break them, they will break you.’ By the end of March Lilburne and his senior colleagues had been placed in the Tower on the charge of treason. The levellers, however, were popular among Londoners for speaking home truths about the condition of the country. When thousands of women flocked to Westminster Hall to protest against Lilburne’s imprisonment the soldiers told them to ‘go home and wash your dishes’; whereupon they replied that ‘we have neither dishes nor meat left’. When in May a group of soldiers rose in mutiny for the cause of Lilburne, Cromwell and Fairfax suppressed them; three of their officers were shot. As Cromwell said on another occasion, ‘Be not offended at the manner of God’s working; perhaps no other way was left.’

Assaults also came from the opposite side with royalist pamphlets and newsletters mourning ‘the bloody murder and heavy loss of our gracious king’ and proclaiming that ‘the king-choppers are as active in mischief as such thieves and murderers need to be’. The authorities were now awake to the mischief of free speech, and in the summer of the year the Rump Parliament passed a Treason Act that declared it high treason to state that the ‘government is tyrannical, usurped or unlawful, or that the Commons in parliament assembled are not the supreme authority of this nation’. There was to be no egalitarian or libertarian revolution. At the same time the council of state prepared ‘An Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets’ that was designed to prohibit any pamphlets, papers or books issued by ‘the malignant party’. A resolution was also passed by the Rump that any preacher who mentioned Charles Stuart or his son would be deemed a ‘delinquent’.

On Tuesday 10 July, Cromwell left London and travelled west in a coach drawn by six horses. He was on his way to Ireland. He had hesitated at first, not wishing to leave the country in turmoil and confusion. But once he reached his decision, or professed to believe that providence had directed him, he was very firm. ‘It matters not who is our commander-in-chief,’ he once said, ‘if God be so.’ The army leaders had feared a royalist invasion from Ireland, although in truth there was very little chance of one. Nevertheless they could not endure an enemy close to England’s shores; it presented a clear and dangerous menace to the new republic.

Cromwell arrived, in the middle of August, at a favourable moment; the royalist navy had been swept from the seas by the ships of the commonwealth, and the duke of Ormonde’s army had been all but annihilated outside Dublin after a surprise attack by parliamentary forces. Cromwell wrote from his ship that ‘this is an astonishing mercy’. He believed that he was indeed the Lord’s chosen servant and, when he landed at the port of Dublin after a stormy crossing, he promised a crusade against ‘the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish’. They were for Cromwell vastly inferior both in race and in religion; he treated them as if they were less than human.

Cromwell wished to do his work rapidly and effectively but, despite his command of 20,000 men, no set battles were fought. Instead he proceeded to conquer the enemy in a series of sieges. He went first to the city of Drogheda, a little over 30 miles north of Dublin, where he summoned the royalist governor to surrender. On the following day, 11 September, having received no formal submission, he attacked; in a series of bloody battles and skirmishes the defenders were overwhelmed. According to Cromwell’s express orders all those who were carrying weapons were put to the sword. That was the rule of war: 3,000 of the garrison, as well as all priests and friars, were killed. ‘I am persuaded’, Cromwell wrote, ‘that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches.’ The slaughter has remained in the folk memory of Ireland to this day.

From Drogheda Cromwell and his men marched down to Wexford, a little over 70 miles south of Dublin, where there was yet more killing in the name of God. The city did not need to be stormed since the gate had been opened in the face of imminent attack; yet when the soldiers entered the town they began a fierce onslaught upon the inhabitants, many of whom begged for mercy in vain. It is reported that 200 women were killed beside what is now the Bull Ring; a memorial plaque is on the site of the massacre.

Cromwell stayed in Ireland for another nine months. Any hope that the Irish would capitulate after the spectacle of bloodshed in Drogheda and Wexford was soon dispelled, and he found himself engaged in a series of struggles against stubborn resistance. At the beginning of December he abandoned the siege of Waterford under a storm of rain, ‘it being as terrible a day as ever I marched in all my life’. As soon as the army moved inland, away from the coast, the climate and geography of the country reduced them more quickly than did the enemy; fog and rain and mist descended upon them, while dysentery and malarial fever also did their work. Problems of supply were added to those of morale.

The war itself continued for another two years; it had acquired the character of what might be termed guerrilla warfare with the native forces attacking the invading army in a series of raids and skirmishes. Yet by his swift and punitive response Cromwell had achieved the task of destroying any potential for a royalist attack upon England.

The remaining enemy now lay in the north. The Scots had already invited King Charles II to travel to his kingdom, and negotiations between the two sides began in March at Breda, a city in the south of the Netherlands where the young king and his court resided. Parliament and the council of state were thoroughly alarmed at the conjunction, and Cromwell was soon made aware that his presence was needed at home. At the end of May 1650, he sailed for England, leaving behind him Henry Ireton as lord deputy of Ireland; when he landed at Bristol, he was given the welcome for a returning hero.

Charles II needed to find support wherever he could, and the chance of a Scottish army was not one to be missed. So aboard ship on 23 June, just before landing in Scotland, he signed a solemn oath to uphold the national covenant and to ensure that Presbyterianism became the official religion of England as well as of Scotland. He swore this in bad faith, having no regard for the Presbyterian cause or its proponents, but his immediate interests were of more importance. One Scottish negotiator, Alexander Jaffray, later concluded that ‘he sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him’. The king had learned, like his father, the arts of disguise and dissimulation. Yet his signature meant that war was now certain.

Sir Thomas Fairfax refused to lead the English army into Scotland on the grounds that the invasion would violate the ‘solemn league and covenant’ that had been signed between the two nations seven years before and never repealed. Cromwell countered with the question ‘whether it is better to have this war in the bowels of another country or of our own’; his argument was persuasive and it was he who led the army once more. Fairfax, uncertain about the direction of the commonwealth and unwilling wholly to depose the king, now resigned as lord general. Cromwell was appointed to be his successor.

Cromwell crossed the border on 23 July with 11,000 horse and foot, but the enemy was not to be seen. The commander of the Scottish forces, David Leslie, had determined upon a strategy of harassment rather than open battle in order to cut off Cromwell’s communication with England; he was successful in that regard, and Cromwell was forced to draw back to the coastal town of Dunbar 30 miles to the east of Edinburgh. Leslie then swept forward to ensure that Cromwell could have no contact with England. The commanders of both armies believed in divine providence and the sacredness of their cause; both sides fasted and prayed, their respective ministers exhorting them in long sermons. In the phrase of the time, only the harder nail would be able to drive out the other.

At Dunbar Leslie believed that the English were trapped between his army and the sea; he waited on high ground but the Scottish ministers in the camp persuaded him to move down towards the enemy. Cromwell saw the manoeuvre and exclaimed that ‘God is delivering them into our hands; they are coming down to us’. And so it proved. The English called out, ‘The Lord of Hosts!’ while the battle cry of the Scots was ‘The Covenant!’ The Scots were routed after a brief resistance; 3,000 were killed and 10,000 captured. Very few English casualties were reported. A witness informed John Aubrey that, after the battle, Cromwell ‘did laugh so excessively as if he had been drunk; his eyes sparkled with spirits’. The whole of southern Scotland now fell to the English. Other consequences followed. With the apparent judgement of God against them, the Presbyterian ministers lost much prestige and authority; never again would the covenanting movement maintain its previous power over Scotland.

The young king was now in desperate circumstances. After his submission to the presbyters in the early summer of 1650 he was now at Perth in the power of the ‘committee of estates’, who governed Scotland when parliament was not in session. He hated Scotland and despised the Presbyterian ministers who exhorted him and preached at him; he detested their hypocrisy, as he saw it, and was nostalgic for the simple pieties of the Church of England. After he heard of Leslie’s defeat he tried to escape from his oppressors, but some troops from the ‘committee of estates’ managed to intercept him and to persuade him to return on the promise that he would be granted more powers. On the first day of 1651 Charles was crowned king of Scotland in Scone; the medieval village was the traditional and hallowed site of kingship.

Cromwell remained in Edinburgh for almost a year after his victory at Dunbar, while Leslie strengthened the remains of his army less than 40 miles northwest at Stirling. But there was no possibility of the two armies clashing in the vicinity; the nature of the terrain, and the wild weather of winter, made any campaign unlikely. In any case Cromwell fell dangerously sick in February 1651. He suffered from a ‘feverish ague’, perhaps contracted in Ireland and exacerbated by the campaign in Scotland; he had told his wife, the day after Dunbar, ‘I grow an old man, and feel the infirmities of age marvellously stealing upon me.’ He was on the brink of death on three separate occasions and, in alarm, parliament dispatched two physicians to his bedside. He himself was convinced that God had sent him sickness in order to test his faith.

By the early summer, however, he was fully recovered; he believed that he had been saved for a purpose, and almost at once took advantage of the more favourable weather to renew his campaign. In a series of manoeuvres he so arranged matters that the roads south to England remained open to the royalist forces. It might have seemed like an unpardonable blunder, but in fact Cromwell had wanted to remove the Scottish troops from Scotland where they could not otherwise be dislodged. He had set a trap that Charles now entered. Cromwell warned the Speaker of the Rump Parliament that ‘I do apprehend that if the enemy goes for England, being some few days march before us, it will trouble some men’s thoughts and may occasion some inconveniences’. Yet he believed that all would be well, and all manner of things would be well.

The king, hopeful that the royalists of England would flock to his banner, came across the border by way of Carlisle. Certain ‘scares’ and conspiracies had been reported in these early days; disaffected royalists met at racecourses or in taverns to plot their schemes but, without any organized direction, they remained inchoate. The government also sent agents provocateurs among them, known as ‘decoy ducks’. In the spring of this year a royalist conspiracy was discovered in the City of London that involved several Presbyterian ministers; one of their number, Christopher Love, died on the scaffold. This was considered by some to be an affront to religion while others, such as John Milton, celebrated it as a blow against disobedience and treason.

Yet few supporters joined the king on his journey south, principally because the Scots were not popular among the English people; they could not support an ancient enemy, even if a lawful monarch led them forward. David Leslie himself was doleful and, when the king asked why he was so sad in the presence of such a spirited army, he replied quietly that ‘he was melancholic indeed, for he knew that army, how well soever it looked, would not fight’. Nevertheless the king made his way down the northwestern counties, through Cumberland and Cheshire and Staffordshire; he could not think of changing course towards London, since the regiments of the enemy were now pursing him. Cromwell’s strategy had been entirely successful.

Charles took refuge at last in the perennially royal city of Worcester. ‘For me,’ the king said, ‘it is a crown or a coffin.’ Cromwell had not the patience to try a siege on this occasion but decided instead upon an immediate attack, on both sides of the town, by means of the Severn. With the royalist army at half the strength of its antagonist, the result was not really in doubt. Charles, watching the action from the tower of the cathedral, made one last effort to consolidate his forces in a battle that lasted for three hours. When he rallied some of his men for another fresh sally, they threw down their arms. ‘Then shoot me dead,’ he said, ‘rather than let me live to see the sad consequences of this day.’ Brave words were not enough, however, and by the early afternoon of 3 September 1651, the royalist army had been scattered to the winds. The young king disappeared into the greenwood, among the birds and foxes, where he could not be found. It was Oliver Cromwell’s last battle and it was for him, as he wrote, ‘a crowning mercy’.

The wanderings of the young king have become the stuff of legend; he made his secret way through England for forty-two days, and was concealed in eighty-two different hiding places; forty-five people, by the smallest count, knew who he was and where he was. Yet not one of them betrayed him. The image of the king still burned brightly in some loyal hearts. It was noted that many of those who preserved him were Roman Catholic.

In the course of his peregrinations he was disguised as a labourer; he hid in a barn, in a wood and on a farm. He adopted the disguise of the son of a tenant farmer, and was recognized in silence by the butler of the manor where he rested. He stayed in a ‘priest hole’, devised to protect visiting Jesuits, and lay concealed among the boughs of an oak tree in the grounds of Boscobel House. He dressed as a country man, in a worn leather doublet, and as a servant in a grey cloak. Posters were pasted in villages and market towns asking for the capture of ‘a tall, black man, over two yards high’; the ‘black’ referred to his somewhat swarthy complexion. On one occasion he was surprised by the sound of bells and sight of bonfires, arranged after a false report of his death.

In Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, a blacksmith told him that the king should be hanged for bringing in the Scots. At Bridport, disguised as a servant, he entered a street that was filled with troops searching for him; he dismounted and led his horse as if he were taking it to a stable. At Brighton an innkeeper knelt down and kissed his hand, saying ‘that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going’. One attempt at escape by sea was abandoned, but on 14 October he sailed from Shoreham to the relative safety of Normandy. On his return to France the young king was asked if he would ever return to Scotland, to which he replied that he would rather be hanged first. When he arrived at the French court he was still ragged and dirty after his adventures.

Cromwell returned in triumph to London bearing with him, like a Roman emperor, the prisoners whom he had taken. He was granted an income of £4,000 per year, and the palace at Hampton Court was bestowed upon him. There could be no doubt that he was the first man of the state.

Yet he came back to a city very different from that which he had left at the beginning of the Irish campaign. The first ‘year of freedom’, after the heady days of the council of state, had been less than glorious. The Rump Parliament had been almost overwhelmed with the pressure of business; it set up committees for legal or ecclesiastical reform, but then did nothing to carry their conclusions into effect. Accusations of favouritism, and even of corruption, were often heard. It was widely believed that its principal concern was for its own survival.

Parliament did pass a few bills, however, designed for the supposed good of the commonwealth; one of them was an Act making adultery a capital offence. It was not a great success. Four women, and no men, were executed. In many other respects the members of parliament seemed to have lapsed into a state close to inertia. It was reported that the present government was reduced to a ‘languishing condition’ in the provinces.

Yet Cromwell’s triumphs were evident. Scotland was seized and strengthened by one of Cromwell’s key generals, George Monck, and was governed by a military regime for the next eleven years; Cromwell remarked that ‘I do think truly they are a very ruined nation’. No king of England had ever conquered Scotland. Ireland was in no better case; after Cromwell’s withdrawal another general, Edmund Ludlow, practically completed the conquest of that country. The Act of Settlement, passed in the summer of 1652, condemned Catholic landowners to the wholesale or partial forfeiture of their estates while those who had actively supported the Irish rebellion were in theory condemned to death. Cromwell had achieved the unparalleled feat of ascendancy over the three kingdoms.

When he returned from his victory at Worcester he was told that great things were expected of him in peace no less than in war; it was his task, according to a letter sent to him, to ‘ease the oppressed of their burdens, to release the prisoners out of bonds, and to relieve poor families with bread’. Yet he could only achieve these laudable aims through the agency of the Rump Parliament that seemed in no way inclined to obey his orders with the same promptness as the soldiers of the New Model Army. Those parliamentarians who were members of the council of state were in most respects still conscientious and diligent, yet others were not so easily inspired by Cromwell’s zeal or vision.

Cromwell had argued for an immediate dissolution of parliament, making way for a fresh legislature that might deal with the problems attendant upon victory. Yet the members prevaricated and debated, finally agreeing to dissolve their assembly at a date not later than November 1654. They gave themselves another three years of procrastination. The army was by now thoroughly disillusioned with those members who seemed intent upon thwarting or delaying necessary legislation. The more committed soldiers believed them to be time-servers or worse, uninterested in the cause of ‘the people of God’.

In truth the Rump was essentially a conservative body, while the army inherently favoured radical solutions; there was bound to be conflict between them. Yet Cromwell himself was not so certain of his course; he wished for godly reformation of the commonwealth but he also felt obliged, at this stage, to proceed by constitutional methods. He did not want to impose what was known as a ‘sword government’. Another possibility was also full of peril. In the current state of opinion it was possible that, unless fresh elections were carefully managed, a royalist majority might be returned; this could not be permitted.

The condition of England was enough to cause dismay. The late wars had badly injured trade, with a consequent steep increase in unemployment; bands of beggars roamed the land in numbers not seen since the last century. The country gentry and other landlords were devastated by the various taxes imposed upon them; those who favoured the royalist cause found their lands in danger of confiscation or sale. The prisons were filled with debtors. The Church was in confusion, with radical sectaries and orthodox believers still engaged in recrimination and complaint. Episcopacy had been abolished but no other form of national Church government had taken its place; it was said that the mass of the people could not find ministers to serve them. Many called, without success, for legislation to abolish burdensome taxes, to simplify and improve the judicial process, to ease the public debt and to lower the cost of living.

One evening in the autumn of 1652, Cromwell was walking in St James’s Park with a member of the council of state, Bulstrode Whitelocke. Cromwell asked his companion for his counsel on the present condition of affairs, remarking of the Rump Parliament that ‘there is little hope of a good settlement to be made by them, really there is not’. Whitelocke then replied that ‘we ourselves have acknowledged them the supreme power’.

Cromwell: What if a man should take upon him to be king?

Whitelocke: I think that remedy would be worse than the disease.

Cromwell: Why do you think so?

Whitelocke: As to your own person the title of king would be of no advantage, because you have the full kingly power in you already, concerning the militia, and you are general.

Cromwell went on to reflect, at least according to Whitelocke’s diary, that ‘the power of a king is so great and so high’, that ‘the title of it might indemnify in a great measure those that act under it’; it would in particular be useful in curbing ‘the insolences and extravagances of those whom the present powers cannot control’. It is possible that the conversation sprang from hindsight on the part of Whitelocke but its purport is confirmed by Cromwell’s remark in an earlier meeting of officers and parliamentarians that ‘somewhat of a monarchical government would be most effectual, if it could be established with safety to the liberties of the people’. Certainly he believed that his military victories had been delivered to him by God. Why should his destiny now be in the hands of a Rump? He could have waited patiently for a sign but ambition and a sense of mission (they are not to be distinguished) soon drove him forward.

The army had already presented a petition of complaint to parliament in which it was recommended that miscreants in positions of authority should be replaced by ‘men of truth, fearing God and hating covetousness’. This was a standard preamble based on Exodus 18:21. They listed many necessary reforms that needed ‘speedy and effectual’ redress. The members of the Rump promised to take such matters ‘under consideration’.

Cromwell attempted to mediate between the officers and parliamentarians, although he believed that the Rump was in general guided by pride and self-seeking. He told a colleague that he was being pushed to action, the consideration of which ‘makes my hair stand on end’. His practice was always to withdraw into himself, in a process of self-communing, before taking swift and decisive action.

The officers of the New Model Army had devoted the first week of 1653 to prayer and fasting, seeking for God’s counsel. From this time forward the members of the Rump feared some form of military intervention. It was rumoured that parliament was preparing a bill for new elections, vetted by its own members, that would destroy the army’s expectations of godly reformation; it was also claimed that parliament was about to remove Cromwell from the leadership of the army.

On 20 April Cromwell came into the chamber of the House of Commons, dressed in plain black, and took his seat; he had left a file of musketeers at the door of the chamber and in the lobby. He took off his hat and rose to his feet. He first commended the Commons for their early efforts at reform but then reproached them for their subsequent delays and obfuscations; he roamed down the middle of the chamber and signalled various individual members as ‘whoremaster’ and ‘drunkard’ and ‘juggler’. He declared more than once that ‘it is you that have forced me to do this, for I have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work’. He spoke, according to one observer, ‘with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted’; he shouted, and kicked the floor with his foot.

In conclusion he called out, ‘You are no parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.’ He then called for the musketeers and pointed to the parliamentary mace lying on the table. ‘What shall be done with this bauble? Here. Take it away.’ He said later that he had not planned or premeditated his intervention and that ‘the spirit was so upon him, that he was overruled by it; and he consulted not with flesh and blood at all’. This is perhaps too convenient an explanation to be altogether true. He had dissolved a parliament that, in one form or another, had endured for almost thirteen years. The Long Parliament, of which the Rump was the final appendage, had witnessed Charles I’s attempt to seize five of its members and then the whole course of the civil wars; it had seen some of its members purged and driven away. It was not a ruin, but a ruin of that ruin. It ended in ignominy, unwanted and unlamented. Cromwell remarked later that, at its dissolution, not even a dog barked. On the following day a large placard was placed upon the door of the chamber. ‘This House to be let, unfurnished.’

32

Fear and trembling

The most powerful image of the age, after the demise of the Tudor line, was that of a society without divine sanction. In the early decades of the seventeenth century Jacobean tragedy, as we have seen, assumed a world without God where men and women struggle for survival. The civic broils of the 1640s had rendered the prospect of chaos only more acute. Out of that fear and insecurity came a book that has been described as the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language.

Thomas Hobbes had shown no signs of greatness. After a conventional humanist education at Oxford he became tutor and companion to William Cavendish, second son of the 1st earl of Devonshire; with that gentleman he undertook the almost obligatory European tour. On a subsequent journey, to Geneva, he experienced his moment of awakening. He happened to open a copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry and was immediately impressed by the Greek mathematician’s reliance on deduction through definitions and axioms; it was the method, not the matter, that inspired him. In that spirit he began to brood on the nature of human society.

He began work on Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil in the late 1640s, the volume eventually being published in 1651. It was begun at a time, therefore, of chaotic civil war; its writing continued through the trial and execution of a king; it was completed in a period when the political experiment of the Rump Parliament was being challenged by various sects and interests. Where was certainty, or safety, to be found? Hobbes was in any case of a timorous and fearful nature. He wrote, at the age of eighty-four, that ‘fear and I were born twins’.

So Leviathan emerged from the very conditions of the time, or what he called ‘the seditious roaring of a troubled nation’. He did not read other political or philosophical accounts; he believed ‘that there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of philosophers’. He followed his own bright line of thought through all of its logical consequences. He would ponder and ruminate, then jot down the phrases and conclusions that came to him. One axiom would lead to another, and then to the next, so that he was inexorably guided towards his own vision of the world.

His clarity of purpose, and his rigorous method, allowed him to cut through all the political cant of the period; his was a thorough scepticism that pierced the pious platitudes and false generalizations, the truisms and solecisms, that always attend political discourse. He would proceed only upon first principles maintained by firm definition and vigorous argument. He stated that ‘words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools’.

So his argument opened. Stripped of order and security, men are at enmity one with another in ‘a perpetual contention for honour, riches and authority’. The goad for action and conflict is pre-eminently ‘a perpetual and restless desire for power’. The strength of one man is more or less equal to that of another, leading to an eternal war of all against all. Once the dire predicament is understood, a solution may be found amid the discord. The fear of death encourages prudence and the desire for self-preservation; the principles of reason might therefore be applied to the quest for peace, and for life rather than death. A form of contract might be agreed whereby each man is ‘contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself’. Each man agrees that he will not do to another what he would not have done to himself.

This instinct for self-preservation then becomes the key element in what might be described as Hobbes’s metaphysic whereby ‘man which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, has his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity, and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep’. This is the foundation of his theory of the state.

The contract between men is the beginning of wisdom. How is it to be maintained? It cannot be entrusted to the individuals themselves. It must be transferred to ‘a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance’. There must be an authority that can enforce the contract in perpetuity; supreme authority demands supreme power and, as Hobbes puts it, ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words’. To escape from fear and trembling, therefore, men must agree among themselves to create a system of such powerful control that no deviation or dissension, no unrest or cause of unrest, will be tolerated. They transfer their own prudence and reason to this other thing, this living absolutism that he names as ‘great Leviathan’. This act of authorization is the mutual surrender of the natural rights of each man in order to create the sovereign power which will guide and protect them.

Leviathan will impose the religion of the state, thus avoiding the divisions that Hobbes saw all around. There will be no such thing as liberty of conscience, which simply created confusion and, in the case of England, bloodshed. Justice and truth are to be determined by civil authority rather than individual choice. Justice is simply what the law demands.

It did not matter whether this omnipotent authority was king, or conquering invader, or magistrate; it was only important that it existed, and that it was authorized to act and to will in place of individual action and private will. Only thus could true order be maintained. That is why some critics accused him of complying with the doctrine of the divine right of kings, while others attacked him for compounding with Cromwell’s commonwealth.

In his preface to the Latin translation of his treatise he wrote that ‘this great Leviathan, which is called the State, is a work of art; it is an artificial man made for the protection and salvation of the natural man, to whom it is superior in grandeur and power’. By the rigorous argument from first principles, Hobbes believed that he had uncovered the true imperatives of civil society. He was also convinced that he had written for the benefit of mankind, and in the last sentence of the work he concludes ironically that ‘such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome’.

Leviathan created a sensation at the time, and it has been said that it inspired universal horror. The Commons proposed to burn the book, and one bishop suggested that Hobbes himself should be tied to the stake. It was so exact, so convincing in its logic, so simple in its argument, that it was difficult to repudiate without relying upon the political pieties and the cant that Hobbes had already attacked.

Nevertheless he was denounced as an atheist and as a materialist. Clearly he had no very great confidence in human nature, and described the character of any man’s heart as ‘blotted and confounded … with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting and erroneous doctrines’. He stated that ‘the value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power’. He added that ‘to obey, is to honour, because no man obeys them whom they think have no power to help or hurt them’. His clarity of judgement is sometimes terrible; he has the savagery of the true moral philosopher, and Leviathan must rank as one of the central statements of the seventeenth century.

33

Healing and settling

Cromwell had engineered what was in effect a second revolution. He was now, by virtue of the sword, the indisputable head of state and sole source of power. The officers of the army concluded a dispatch with the encomium that ‘we humbly lay ourselves with these thoughts, in this emergency, at your excellency’s feet’. The ministers of Newcastle upon Tyne made ‘their humble addresses to his godly wisdom’. Yet Cromwell did not intend or wish to be a dictator; he was still concerned with the constitutional niceties of his unique position.

He appointed a reformed council of state, with himself a prominent participant, but its thirteen members were in something of a quandary. They were in a situation without precedent, faced with the obligation of creating a constitution out of nothing. Some in the army wished for government by the council itself, perhaps with the assistance of a carefully selected parliament; others pressed for near universal male suffrage; yet others demanded a council of godly men on the model of the Jewish Sanhedrin.

Cromwell spent eight days locked in conversation with his councillors, and from their deliberations emerged a wholly original form of parliament. It was eventually agreed that members of the new assembly should be either nominated by the various Independent congregations or favoured by the army and by prominent individuals; those chosen were to be ‘known persons, men fearing God, and of approved integrity’. One of the godly men chosen to serve was Isaac Praise-God Barebone, a leather merchant and preacher from London who, at his warehouse in Fleet Street, proclaimed the imminent coming of Jesus Christ. His colourful name and nature led to this nominated parliament becoming known as ‘Barebone’s Parliament’. There were 144 men who were nominees, and thus it was also called the ‘Little Parliament’; it was indeed the smallest parliament to date ever to sit at Westminster.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that all of its members were zealots; the preponderance of them held the rank of gentleman, and their number included a viscount and a baron as well as several baronets and knights. The provost of Eton and the high master of St Paul’s School were among them. Yet, unsurprisingly, the radical element prevailed in their deliberations; those who burn hottest inflame the rest. No one wishes to be known as tepid or lukewarm. In his opening address to them, Cromwell remarked that ‘we are at the threshold’ and that ‘you are at the edge of promises and prophecies’. It was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era.

The members of the new assembly were zealous and busy, but they were perhaps not worldly enough to judge the consequences of their decisions. They determined to abolish the court of chancery, for example, and drastically to simplify the law; some in fact demanded the abolition of the common law, to be substituted by the code of Moses. They voted to abolish tithes, a proposal that might have eventually led to the disestablishment of the Church and the violation of all rights of property.

The alarm and horror of the nation soon became manifest, and Cromwell realized that it was time to end an experiment that had lasted for just five months. He is reported to have said that he was more troubled now by fools than by knaves. A parliament of saints had gone to excess. He had learned that it was not possible to create instruments of power in an arbitrary manner; they had no stable foundation, and therefore veered wildly from side to side. In December the more conservative or moderate of the members were persuaded to launch a pre-emptive coup by voting in an early morning session that they should abdicate their powers; the radicals were in a prayer meeting at the time. The Speaker then took up the mace and led them in procession to Whitehall Palace where Cromwell was waiting to greet them. He professed later to being surprised by their arrival, but this is hard to credit.

A few of the godly remained in the chamber. An army officer entered and asked them, ‘What do you here?’

‘We are seeking the Lord.’

‘Then you may go elsewhere for, to my certain knowledge, he has not been here these twelve years.’

The abrogation of this ‘Little Parliament’ was greeted with considerable relief by those whose livings had been threatened by it. The lawyers celebrated and, according to an Independent lay preacher, ‘most men upon this dissolution take occasion to cry Aha, Aha’.

And then there was one. It was said that, in bringing an end to ‘Barebone’s Parliament’, Cromwell took the crown from Christ and put it on his own head. One of his military associates, General John Lambert, had drawn up what was called an ‘Instrument of Government’ in which Cromwell would be granted power as Lord Protector of the British Republic. This ‘Instrument’ has the distinction of being the first, and the last, written constitution of England. Yet its system of checks and balances, including a council, did not dispel the impression that Cromwell was now an autocrat in all but name. Clarendon noted that ‘this extraordinary man, without any other reason than because he had a mind to it … mounted himself into the throne of three kingdoms, without the name of king, but with a greater power and authority than had ever been exercised or claimed by any king’.

On 16 December 1653, Oliver Cromwell stood before a chair of state in Westminster Hall. He was dressed in a suit and cloak of black velvet, with long boots; a band of gold ran around his hat. He looked up and raised his right hand to heaven as he swore to observe all the articles of the new constitution; John Lambert then knelt and offered him a civic sword sheathed in its scabbard as a token of peaceful rule. In the proclamation of public acts he was now styled ‘Olivarius Protector’ in the same manner as ‘Carolus Rex’. His passage through the streets was guarded by soldiers. He insisted that the series of nine paintings by Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar, should not be sold off but remain at his apartments in Hampton Court Palace. The proceedings of his court, in such matters as the reception of ambassadors, resembled those of Charles I. His son, Henry Cromwell, was greeted in the entertainment grounds of Spring Gardens with cries of ‘Room for the prince’. Lucy Hutchinson wrote that for Cromwell’s family to emulate regal state was as ridiculous as to dress apes in scarlet.

Many of his former supporters now railed at him for betraying the cause of godly reformation. He was accused of sacrificing the public good to ambition and was denounced as a ‘dissembling perjured villain’. Biblical insults were hurled at him as the ‘Old Dragon’, the ‘Little Horn’, the ‘Man of Sin’, and the ‘Vile Person’ of Daniel 11: 21. At the pulpit set up by Blackfriars one preacher, Christopher Feake, proclaimed that ‘he has deceived the Lord’s people’; he added that ‘he will not reign long, he will end worse than the last Protector did, that crooked tyrant Richard. Tell him I said it.’ Feake was brought before the council and placed in custody. The governor of Chester Castle, Colonel Robert Duckenfield, put it a little more delicately when he wrote to Cromwell that ‘I believe the root and tree of piety is alive in your lordship, though the leaves thereof, through abundance of temptations and flatteries, seem to me to be withered much of late’.

In a sense the revolution was now over, with all attempts at radical reform at an end. Cromwell instituted a reign of quiet in which men of property might feel safe; in effect he inaugurated a gentry republic. It cannot be said that the new dispensation was received with any great enthusiasm, yet for many it must have been a relief after the disordered governance of recent years. For others, of course, it made no difference at all.

In the first eight months of their power the Lord Protector and the council, in the absence of parliament, passed more than eighty ordinances. Scotland and Ireland were to be incorporated within the commonwealth. The court of chancery was to be reformed. Duels were forbidden, and cock-fighting suppressed; horse racing was suspended for a period. Public drunkenness, and profanity, were punished with a fine or with a whipping. No more than 200 hackney carriages were allowed in London. The postal service was reformed, while the prisons and the public highways were improved. The treasury was reorganized. This was a practical administration.

Cromwell and the council were no less pragmatic in foreign affairs. The European powers were docile, perhaps in fear of a resurgent English navy that had recently challenged and defeated the Dutch. Peace was made with the Protestant nations, among them Sweden and Denmark. France and Spain vied with each other for the favour of the protectorate, in which equation Cromwell tended to incline towards the French side; he wanted to remove the influence of Charles II on the French court.

He also favoured balance in religious matters. An ordinance in the spring of 1654 established a commission of ‘triers’ who would check the qualities and qualifications of proposed clergymen. In the summer of the year commissioners were appointed to every county as ‘ejectors’ who would remove ministers guilty of ignorance, insufficiency, or scandalous behaviour. Cromwell supported religious liberty except for those who espoused pope or bishops. Anglicans were in theory no more tolerated than Roman Catholics, but in practice they were given tacit acceptance.

From a policy of benign neglect, Cromwell created a variegated Church made up of Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists. Doctrine was less important to him than spirit; dogma did not concern him as long as he could create a community that had what he called ‘the root of the matter’ within it. It has been described as not so much a national Church as a confederation of Christian sects. Some of the more committed Anglicans went into exile ‘waiting for a day’, asthey put it, when Charles II might claim his throne. Yet many were not exercised by religion at all. In his diary entry for 11 May 1654, Evelyn noted that ‘I now observed how the women began to paint themselves, formerly a most ignominious thing, and used only by prostitutes’.

Small groups of royalists frequented certain taverns of London, and of the provincial towns, where they engaged in plots against the protectorate. Where there are conspiracies, however, there are apt to be informers and suborners. In February 1654, eleven men were arrested at the Ship Tavern by the Old Bailey. It became clear, in the course of investigations, that a powerful group of royalists had been formed to incite a popular rebellion; it was known as the Sealed Knot. The exiled king was in constant and secret correspondence with his supporters, and seemed particularly interested in a scheme to assassinate Cromwell himself. He was to be shot after he had left Whitehall for Hampton Court on a Saturday morning.

Yet Cromwell had created a very efficient secret service under the command of John Thurloe, secretary to the council of state, and the details of the plot were known almost as soon as they were formulated. Alerted by his spymaster Cromwell took to the water on that morning and avoided an attack. Soon after the failure of the conspiracy the authorities mounted raids in London taverns and houses, in the course of which 500 people were arrested. Two of the leaders were executed, while others were transported to Barbados. An old Catholic priest was also seized and executed.

Yet the punishments did not deter other plotters, who would soon attempt to rise again. Cromwell was given a copy of a letter written by the new king in which Charles advised his supporters to ‘consult with those you dare trust, and, if you are ready, agree upon a time…’ Cromwell now always carried a gun. In a riding accident, later in the year, the pistol fired in his pocket and the wound kept him in bed for three weeks.

The occasion for a parliament, according to the ‘Instrument of Government’, had now come. On 4 September 1654, Cromwell addressed the new assembly in the Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace; he sat in the chair of state while the members were seated on benches ranged against the walls. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘you are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw.’ He then proceeded to speak for three hours on the various manifestations of God’s providence in an oration that veered from messianic enthusiasm to scriptural exposition. He had called parliament, but ‘my calling be from God’. He was thus reiterating, in his own fashion, the divine right of kings. He was above parliament. Yet he came to them not as a master but as a fellow servant. Now was a time for ‘healing and settling’.

Yet the new parliament was by no means a compliant body. For some days its members had debated, without reaching any conclusion, whether they should give the protectorate their support. On 12 September they found the doors of their chamber closed against them, and they were asked once more to assemble in the Painted Chamber where the Protector wished to address them. He chided them for neglecting the interest of the state, ‘so little valued and so much slighted’, and he would not allow them to proceed any further unless and until they had signed an oath to agree to ‘the form of government now settled’. All members had to accept the condition that ‘the persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is hereby settled in one single person and a Parliament’. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I am sorry, and I could be sorry to the death that there is cause for this. But there is cause…’

Some members protested and refused to sign, but the majority of them either agreed or at least submitted. Cromwell still did not attempt to guide the debates, but he became increasingly alarmed at their nature. He is reported to have said in this period that he ‘would rather keep sheep under a hedge than have to do with the government of men’. Sheep were at least obedient. The members voted to restrict the power of the Protector to veto legislation; they also decided that their decisions were more authoritative than those of the council of state. They believed, in other words, that parliament should still be paramount in the nation. That was not necessarily Cromwell’s view. From day to day they debated every clause of the ‘Instrument of Government’, with the evident wish to replace it with a constitution of their own. On 3 January 1655 they voted to reaffirm the limits to religious toleration; two days later they decided to reduce army pay, thus striking at Cromwell’s natural constituency. On 20 January they began to discuss the formation of a militia under parliamentary control.

Two days later, Cromwell called a halt. He lambasted them for wasting time in frivolous and unnecessary discourse when they should have been considering practical measures for the general reformation of the nation. He told them that ‘I do not know what you have been doing. I do not know whether you have been alive or dead.’ He considered that it was not fit for the common welfare and the public good to allow them to continue; and so, farewell. The first protectorate parliament was dissolved. The larger problem, however, was not addressed. Could a representative parliament ever coexist with what was essentially a military dictatorship?

Cromwell and the council once more reigned without challenge, but the price of power was eternal vigilance. In his speech of dissolution Cromwell had warned that ‘the cavalier party have been designing and preparing to put this nation in blood again’ together with ‘that party of men called levellers’. The royalist supporters of the Sealed Knot had indeed survived, despite deportations and executions, and seem to have entered an unlikely association with the radical republicans who shared an interest in removing Cromwell from power. For those of a levelling tendency Cromwell was infinitely worse than Charles; he had used them, betrayed them and set himself up as a despot. Yet the royalists could not even agree among themselves. They had planned six different regional conspiracies in 1654, but the only rebellion was a short and ill-organized affair in the West Country. The spymaster, Thurloe, had done his work.

*

Cromwell had been considering a possible friendship or alliance with Spain, despite the fact that as a Catholic state it was one of the horns of the beast. He had said to a Spanish envoy that an alliance was possible on the conditions that the English were granted liberty of conscience within the Spanish dominions and that free trade be allowed between England and the West Indies. The envoy replied that this was ‘to ask my master’s two eyes’.

Without any agreement, therefore, Cromwell felt emboldened to test Spanish power in the sensitive area of the West Indies. He convinced himself that the action was part of a religious crusade against popery, and he trusted that the warfare would not spread to Europe; he was mistaken, or misguided, in both aspirations. At the end of 1654 Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables set sail for Barbados with the order ‘to gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in possession of the Spaniards’. They arrived safely enough, in the spring of the following year, but their expedition thereafter was not a success.

The English forces sailed to the island of Hispaniola with the purpose of subduing the city of Santo Domingo and taking its treasure. The men marched for four days through rough country in the burning sun with little fresh water; they were apparently untested soldiers who had no idea of the conditions they would confront. Exhausted and demoralized, they were an easy prey for a group of horsemen and cattle-herders who surprised them in ambush. The remaining members of the expedition, still under the command of Venables, managed to sail on to Jamaica where they were able to take and occupy the island. But at the time it seemed like a poor reward, with the additional risk that Spain might now declare a general war against the old enemy.

The news of the failure to rout Santo Domingo reached Cromwell towards the end of July. He locked himself in his room for an entire day. He had hoped to control the trade and treasure routes of the Spaniards, but he had been thwarted. The new republic had never suffered a military defeat before. He had seen himself as the protector and champion of Protestant interests, but the hand of God seems to have been against him. Cromwell had said, in reply to those who had originally questioned the wisdom of the expedition, that ‘God had not brought us hither where we are but to consider the work that we may do in the world as well as at home’. Yet the Lord had not blessed this work in the world. This caused Cromwell the most painful reflections of his rule, and presaged the fears and doubts that would attend the last years of his protectorate. Wherein had he offended? Or was it the nation itself that had provoked God’s anger?

It may not be coincidental, therefore, that soon after the disaster in the Indies a network of godly rule was established in England. The country was divided into eleven districts, or groups of counties; at the head of each was imposed a major-general of decidedly puritan inclinations. These army commanders were instructed to raise taxes and revive the local militia, to enquire into the conduct of clergy and teachers, to arrest any suspect persons and to prevent further royalist uprisings. Their costs were met by charges imposed on royalists alone. This became known as the ‘decimation tax’, taking one tenth of the ‘malignants’’ profits from the land, an injustice to which they were forced to submit without complaint. The newspapers and periodicals were suppressed, and no item of news could be printed without the permission of John Thurloe.

Cromwell was attempting that reformation of manners which the last parliament had signally failed to achieve. The major-generals were instructed ‘to encourage and promote godliness and virtue’ and, as a result, the pastimes of the people were largely suppressed. Colonel Pride, who had led the purge of parliament seven years before, raided the beargarden at Bankside; he himself killed the bears, and then ordered his troops to wring the necks of the game-cocks in other parts of London. Alehouses were shut all over the country; stage plays as well as ‘mirths and jollities’ were forbidden.

One major-general, William Boteler, informed Thurloe that he had imprisoned ‘drunken fellows’ and others ‘suspected to live only on the highway’; those accused of illegal brewing or of keeping a ‘lewd house’ were also arrested. Those who travelled on the Lord’s day could be set in the stocks or placed in a cage; unmarried men and women who had ‘carnal knowledge’ of each other could be sent to a house of correction; those who swore or uttered profanities were heavily fined.

Public morals may have been improved by these measures, but public sympathy for Cromwell’s regime was lost. The people did not wish to be governed, or corrected, by military officials with an attendant crew of spies and informers. Some of the major-generals were considered by the gentry to be low-born interlopers, and the natural leaders of the counties did not relish their loss of authority. A nation cannot be made virtuous by diktat or by government inspectors. The experience of the major-generals, with their troops of horse behind them, also helped to augment the national hatred for standing armies.

The experiment did not last for very long; the major-generals were sent to their counties in the autumn of 1655 and were summoned back to Westminster in the spring of the following year for consultation. With a great war against Spain growing ever more likely, fresh revenues were urgently needed; the major-generals seem to have persuaded a reluctant Cromwell to call another parliament rather than impose further taxation by decree. Thus they contrived their own fall. It was not likely that the representatives of the nation, however they were chosen, would tolerate a continuation of godly rule.

*

After the attack by Penn and Venables on the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, Spain declared war on England as a natural and almost inevitable consequence. The West Indian adventure had become a European imbroglio with infinitely more dangerous possibilities. Spain and France were old enemies, however, and Cromwell now inclined towards the court of the young Louis XIV. A commercial treaty was signed in the autumn of 1655, containing certain secret clauses about the expulsion of Charles II from French territory; the English king had in fact already left for Spa and Aachen. Charles then promptly fashioned an agreement with Spain that would allow him to live in the Spanish Netherlands (what is now Belgium and part of northern France); he promised that, on his accession, he would return Jamaica to the Spanish. He was disheartened, always in need of money; he was surrounded by squabbling courtiers. With no realistic prospect of regaining his throne, nothing could ease his distress of mind.

Cromwell was himself in no easy condition. The failure of the expedition to the West Indies, and the onset of war with Spain, had precipitated a sickness described by the French ambassador as ‘a bilious colic, which occasionally flies to the brain’. He added that ‘grief often persecutes him more than either of these, as his mind is not yet accustomed to endure disgrace’. Cromwell survived, but became even more aware of the extent to which the commonwealth relied upon his presence. Who else could preserve the unity and constancy of the state? He was showing signs of his age and of his cares; his hand trembled when he held his hat. ‘Study still to be innocent,’ he told his son, Henry. ‘Cry to the Lord to give you a plain single heart.’

With the plans for a new parliament, and with the preparations for war, Cromwell and his councillors were hard pressed. The Venetian envoy observed that ‘they are so fully occupied that they do not know which way to turn, and the Protector has not a moment to call his own’. Cromwell had no very sanguine expectations about parliament. He may have realized that, far from ‘healing and settling’, the rule of the major-generals had provoked fresh dissension; he must have feared in any case that the combined opposition of republicans and silent royalist supporters might produce a majority against him. He explained later, ‘that it was against my judgement but I could have no quietness till it was done.’

The course of the election campaign was strenuous, and Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell that ‘here is the greatest striving to get into Parliament that ever was known’. The call went out against the representatives of the military regime. ‘No swordsmen! No decimators!’ It was a further sign that the country was restless and discomposed. The council of state took measures of its own, however, and excluded approximately one hundred of the elected members for ‘immorality’ or ‘delinquency’; it was another example of brute military power, and provoked much outrage in the country. How could this be called a free parliament?

Cromwell opened its proceedings on 17 September 1656, with a warning of the forces ranged against the country. England was at war with Spain, and the Spanish king was even then preparing to assist Charles Stuart in an invasion launched from Flanders. ‘Why, truly,’ he said employing his usual nervous syntax, ‘your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is. He is a natural enemy, he is naturally so.’ As for the enemy within, the levellers and the cavaliers were plotting to seize a seaport to welcome the king’s forces.

In the course of a long and rambling speech Cromwell defended the major-generals for suppressing vice and for espousing the cause of true religion. And what of the forced taxation to pay for them? ‘If nothing should be done but what is according to law, the throat of the nation may be cut while we send for some to make a law.’ The tenor of this comment is similar to one he had made before, that government should be judged by what is good for the people and not by what pleases them. He was by instinct an authoritarian.

On the day of his speech, three conspirators met to take his life as he entered parliament; they hired a house that stood beside the east door of Westminster Abbey, and planned to shoot him as he left there on his way to the Painted Chamber. They were levellers who wished to return to the old form of a puritan republic. Yet, in the face of a crowd, they lost their nerve and dispersed; it was only the first attempt that the leader of the group, Miles Sindercombe, would undertake. Cromwell, meanwhile, dismissed all such threats as ‘little fiddling things’. News soon came that might yet please the parliament and the nation. At the beginning of October Thurloe announced to parliament that Admiral Blake had seized several Spanish treasure ships on their way back to Cadiz; it was perhaps a sign that God was still with them. Parliament set aside a day for national thanksgiving.

A new Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Sagredo, came to England at this time and wrote that he found ‘not elegant cavaliers but cavalry and infantry; instead of music and ballets they have trumpets and drums; they do not speak of love but of Mars … no patches on their faces but muskets on their shoulders; they do not neglect sleep for the sake of amusements, but severe ministers keep their adversaries in incessant wakefulness. In a word, everything here is full of disdain, suspicion and rough menacing faces…’

Parliament was variously and continually employed with private petitions and private bills as well as matters of state. A member complained that ‘one business jostled out another’. It seemed likely that, just as its predecessor, it would achieve nothing of any consequence. Yet the religious zeal of its members was not in doubt when the case of James Naylor was put before them. He was a Quaker whose preachings aroused apocalyptic yearnings among his disciples; he was ‘the hope of Israel’ and ‘the Lamb of God’. In the summer of the year he had entered Bristol as Christ had once gone into Jerusalem; two women led his horse while others cried out ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel’. He was arrested and brought before the bar of parliament where he was questioned. ‘I was set up,’ he said, ‘as a sign to summon this nation.’

A debate of nine days followed his appearance in which it was agreed that this horrid blasphemy was more dangerous to the nation than any Spanish warship; it struck at the heart of its relationship with God, than which nothing was more precious. ‘Let us all stop our ears,’ one member said, ‘and stone him.’ It was not clear whether parliament had the judicial power to punish him, yet the members voted that Naylor should be placed in the pillory and whipped through the streets; his tongue was to be bored through with a hot iron and the letter ‘B’ for blasphemer branded on his forehead. He would then be sentenced to an indefinite imprisonment.

The ordeal of the tongue and forehead took place at the end of the year. A diarist, Thomas Burton, noted that ‘Rich, the mad merchant, sat bare-headed at Naylor’s feet all the time. Sometimes he sang, and cried, and stroked his hair and face, and kissed his hand, and sucked the fire out of his forehead.’ Naylor was patient, and the spectators were sympathetic to the plight of one who had endured the wrath of this parliament. Cromwell himself wished to know ‘the grounds and reason’ for its assumption of judicial power, but no response was ever made for the very good reason that the sentence was both arbitrary and unjustified. Some contemporaries warned that, if parliament felt itself able to condemn and punish one misguided man, who could feel safe?

At the beginning of 1657 a debate was held on a bill for maintaining the ‘decimation tax’ to subsidize the major-generals. To the surprise of many Cromwell’s son-in-law, John Claypole, opposed the measure; this was generally believed to mean that the Protector had withdrawn his support from the godly commanders in the field. Parliament itself was in large measure composed of people from the communities who had been subject to the strict measures of the major-generals, and the bill was rejected by thirty-six votes. The pietistic experiment was ended.

Another question of governance was raised. Should not Cromwell now become king and the House of Stuart be replaced by the House of Cromwell? This would satisfy the yearning of many people for a return to a traditional form of government. If Cromwell were sovereign, he might be able to curb the pretensions of parliament that had already gone beyond its powers. The newsletters anticipated a sudden ‘alteration of government’. On 19 January 1657, one member, John Ashe of Freshford, moved that Cromwell ‘take upon him the government according to the ancient constitution’.

On 23 February Sir Christopher Packe brought forward a remonstrance, under the title of the ‘humble petition and advice’, to the effect that Cromwell should assume ‘the name, style, title and dignity of king’ and that the House of Lords should be restored. The fury of the opponents of monarchy, most particularly the military element, was unrestrained. General John Lambert declared that any such reversal would be contrary to the principles for which he and his fellow soldiers had fought. Kingship had been so bathed in blood that it could not be restored. This was not a theoretical point. Cromwell was informed that a group of soldiers had bound themselves on oath to kill him as soon as he accepted the title.

Four days after the ‘humble petition’ had been advanced, one hundred representatives of the army visited Cromwell at Whitehall where they pleaded with him to resist the offer of advancement. He told them that he liked the title of king as little as they did; it was nothing but a bauble or a feather in the hat. He then reviewed the history of the last few years, in which he stated that he had faithfully followed the advice of the army; he said that ‘they had made him their drudge upon all occasions’, yet they had not met with success. None of the parliaments, none of the constitutional proposals, had worked. He told them that ‘it is time to come to a settlement’. A House of Lords, for example, was needed to check the pretensions of the Commons; they left him with their fury ‘much abated’, and a few days later another army delegation assured him that they would acquiesce in whatever he decided ‘for the good of these nations’.

The debate in parliament lasted for more than a month and occupied twenty-four sittings, some of them lasting all day. Eventually, at the end of March, Cromwell was formally requested to assume the crown. He replied that he had lived for the last part of his life ‘in the fire, in the midst of trouble’, and he requested more time for reflection. It was thought that he would accept the role of king, if only to unite a predominantly conservative nation, but in truth he was in conflict with himself. He knew that his senior military colleagues were passionately opposed to the change, but he knew also that this might prove his last and best chance to return the country to its traditional ways. It was in his means to provide the conditions for a regular and stable government.

It was not a question of private ambition; as he had said many times, the crown and sceptre meant very little to him. He already had more power than any English king. So he struggled. Thurloe said that Cromwell had ‘great difficulties in his own mind’ and that ‘he keeps himself reserved from everybody that I know of’; when a parliamentary delegation came to him, in the middle of April, ‘he came out of his chamber half unready in his gown, with a black scarf around his neck’. No doubt he prayed incessantly for divine guidance, hoping that as in the past a resolve or a decision would be presented to him as if by an act of grace.

He heard vital news of God’s providence in England’s affairs when he was told that Admiral Blake had successfully maintained a siege of the Spanish coast and had destroyed another treasure fleet, thus disabling Spain as a maritime power. England now effectively controlled the high seas, an ascendancy that was unprecedented in its history. With colonies in Jamaica and Barbados, as well as those such as Virginia on the American mainland, Cromwell was the first statesman since the days of Walsingham to contemplate a global empire. As Edmund Waller put it,

Others may use the ocean as their road

Only the English make it their abode.

Pepys noted, in the pusillanimous years of Charles II, that ‘it is strange how everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him’.

Yet on the most pressing matter of monarchy he could not, or dare not, come to a decision. On 3 April he declared to a parliamentary delegation that he could not discharge his duties ‘under that title’; five days later parliament urged him to reconsider, on which occasion it is reported that he delivered ‘a speech so dark, that none knows whether he will accept it or not’. He may still have been waiting for divine guidance. He knew that it was proper and expedient that he should take the crown but, as he said, ‘I would not seek to set up that which providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.’ In the first week of May it is reported that he told a group of members of parliament that he had decided to accept the title; yet once more he changed his mind.

On 8 May he told parliament that he could not and would not become King Oliver I. ‘At the best,’ he said, ‘I should do it doubtingly. And certainly what is so [done] is not of faith.’ The protests of the army officers had in the end proved to be persuasive; two of them, Fleetwood and Desborough, had in fact married into Cromwell’s family. They had told him that, if he accepted the crown, they would resign from all their offices and retire into private life. Other officers, who had been with him from the beginning and had fought with him through fire, also registered their strong disapproval. This was decisive. He could not at this late stage abandon his comrades and colleagues; he could not betray their trust or spoil their hopes. So his final answer to parliament was that ‘I cannot undertake this government with the title of king’.

The only way forward was by means of compromise. Even if Cromwell would not be king, he could accept the other constitutional measures recommended by parliament; in particular it seemed just, and necessary, to re-establish the House of Lords as a check upon the legislature. On 25 May the ‘humble petition’ was presented again with Cromwell named as chief magistrate and Lord Protector, an appointment which he accepted as ‘one of the greatest tasks that ever was laid upon the back of a human creature’. On 26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was draped in purple and in ermine for the ceremony of installation in Westminster Hall; upon the table before his throne rested the sword of state and a sceptre of solid gold. The blast of trumpets announced his reign. His office was not declared to be hereditary but he had been given the power to name his successor; it was generally believed that this would be one of his sons. So began the second protectorate, which was now a restored monarchy in all but name.

34

Is it possible?

There was a time for celebration. At the end of 1657 one of Cromwell’s daughters, Frances, married Robert Rich, the grandson of the earl of Warwick, and the ceremonial matched the status of the pair. Music and song echoed through the corridors of Whitehall in honour of the occasion; the orchestra comprised forty-eight violins and fifty trumpets. Guns were fired from the Tower in the manner of previous royal weddings. There was even ‘mixt dancing’, men and women together, that continued until five o’clock the following morning. In the spirit of the festivity Cromwell was moved to spill sack-posset, a rich and creamy drink, over the dresses of the women and to daub the stools where they were to sit with sugar and spice. He had an almost rustic sense of fun. At the subsequent wedding of another daughter, Mary, the ceremony at Hampton Court included a masque in which Cromwell played the non-speaking role of Jove. It was an astonishing return to the customs of the Stuart kings.

The French envoy reported that ‘another spirit’ was abroad and that ‘the preachers of old time are retiring because they are found too melancholic’. When Cromwell gave banquets for foreign envoys ‘rare music’ was always part of the occasion and, in the great hall of Hampton Court, two organs were placed for the use of a resident organist. It is to the credit of Cromwell, too, that under his rule the opera was introduced into England. The Protector was known to be a great lover of harmony, both of instruments and of voices.

Immediately after his installation Cromwell had adjourned parliament until the new year; when it reappeared, it would be in its old constitutional form of two houses. He had named his new council; it was the same as its predecessor, with the solitary exception of John Lambert who had resigned all of his offices and retired with a large pension. He had once believed that he would be the Protector’s successor but he now realized that he would be pre-empted by another, and younger, Cromwell.

One of the principal tasks of the re-established council was to decide upon the nature of the new upper chamber, but some of their proceedings took place in the absence of the Protector. Cromwell was now being called, even by his intimates, ‘the old man’; his signature was no longer bold and striking but tremulous. He spent much of the summer in the healthful air of Hampton Court, but he was suffering from painful catarrh.

The second session of the second protectorate parliament reassembled on 20 January 1658, but immediately it began to confront the military regime. The members of the new House of Lords were largely chosen from Cromwell’s most loyal supporters and, as a result, the Commons became antagonistic; some of the most inveterate of Cromwell’s opponents, who had been excluded from the previous session on the grounds of ‘immorality’ or ‘delinquency’, were returned to Westminster where at once they began to question the authority of the ‘other house’.

Cromwell summoned both houses to the Banqueting House, five days after they had first met, and urged them to be faithful to the cause. But his intervention had no material effect, and the Commons remained as hostile as before. One of its most formidable members, Sir Arthur Haselrig, made a speech in which he scorned the actions of the House of Lords in the past. ‘And shall we now rake them up,’ he asked, ‘after they have so long laid in the grave?’ An observer at Cromwell’s court noted that the assertions of the Commons, and the divisions between the two houses, threw the Protector ‘into a rage and passion like unto madness’. His anger was augmented by the fact that elements of the army in fact supported the Commons in its affirmation of supremacy.

On a cold morning, 4 February, Cromwell rose early and announced his determination to go to Westminster. He could not journey down the frozen Thames, and so impulsively he took the first coach for hire he could find. When he arrived in the retiring room of the Lords, his son-in-law and close military colleague, Charles Fleetwood, remonstrated with him on learning his intention. ‘You are a milksop,’ Cromwell said to him, ‘by the living God I will dissolve the house.’ And that was what he proceeded to do.

He told the Commons that ‘you have not only disquieted yourselves, but the whole nation is disquieted’. With the prospect of invasion from abroad, and rebellion from within, they had done nothing. ‘And I do declare to you here that I do dissolve this parliament. And let God be judge between you and me.’ To which pious aspiration some of the members cried out, ‘Amen!’ Cromwell’s latest, and last, constitutional experiment had come to an end. It was a sign of the radical anomaly of military rule that none of his parliaments had succeeded. He was now being openly criticized. The envoy from Venice reported that the people were ‘nauseated’ by the present government; the Dutch ambassador similarly noted that Cromwell’s affairs were ‘in troubled and dangerous condition’ while a visitor from Massachusetts remarked that many men ‘exclaim against him with open mouths’.

A royalist agent in London, Allan Broderick, reported to Edward Hyde that the army ‘is infected with sedition’ and that the treasury was exhausted; he added that the countries of Europe were ‘cold friends or close enemies’ and that the people of England were labouring under ‘an unwearied restless spirit of innovation’. Yet Broderick said of Cromwell himself that ‘the man is seemingly desperate, any other in his condition would be deemed irrecoverable, but as the dice of the gods never throw out, so is there something in the fortune of this villain that often renders ten to one no odds’.

This message was designed to encourage Charles Stuart. It was reported that the exiled king was waiting in Flanders with an army of 8,000 men, ready to strike at the first favourable opportunity. Another royalist insurrection was planned for the spring, but once more the plotters were betrayed and taken; four of them were found by Colonel Barkstead, the lieutenant of the Tower, in what he called ‘a desperate malignant alehouse’. Other royalists were beheaded or hanged, drawn and quartered, but the majority were consigned to gaol.

Another fortunate throw of the dice also favoured Cromwell. In the early summer of the year the forces of the French and English scattered the Spanish just outside Dunkirk in the ‘battle of the dunes’; Dunkirk, hitherto held by Spain, was then surrendered to England. It was the first piece of continental territory to fall into English hands since the time of Calais. Since there was a royalist contingent in the Spanish army, victory for Cromwell was all the sweeter. The French king now hailed him as ‘the most invincible of sovereigns’. Yet this praise concealed the truth that the Protector’s expenditure far outran his income; the exchequer was often bare and the pay of his soldiers was in arrears. It was said that his ministers had to go ‘a-begging’ to the merchants of the City.

Sickness was also in the air. A malignant fever, called ‘the new disease’, had arisen. In the spring of 1658 the new epidemic spread, in the words of a contemporary, Dr Willis, ‘as if sent by some blast of the stars’. Cromwell himself laboured under the burden of personal rule to the extent that, as one of his servants, John Maidstone, said, ‘it drank up his spirits’. His private suffering was then increased by the death of his most loved daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, at the beginning of August from an obscure or undiagnosed disease; the event, though long expected, had a violent effect upon him. Thurloe reported that ‘he lay very ill of the gout and other distempers, contracted by the long sickness of my lady Elizabeth, which made great impressions on him’; he became dangerously ill, but then recovered sufficiently to ride in Hampton Court Park.

When one of the leaders of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Cromwell, however, he reported that ‘I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dying man’. In the last week of August Cromwell fell sick again with a condition then known as ‘tertian ague’, a form of malaria with fits every three days. It began with chills and sensations of coldness which were followed by a stage of dry heat that ended in a drenching sweat.

He was taken back to Whitehall where, as Thurloe put it, ‘our fears are more than our hopes’. Prayer meetings assembled throughout the capital. His condition varied from rally to relapse, as all the time he grew weaker, but he was said to have prayed for ‘God’s cause’ and ‘God’s people’. He asked one of his doctors why he looked so sad.

‘How can I look otherwise, when I have the responsibility of your life upon me?’

‘You doctors think I shall die.’ His wife was sitting by his bedside and he took her hand. ‘I tell thee I shall not die of this bout; I am sure I shall not. Do not think I am mad. I tell you the truth.’ He then told the astonished doctor that this was the answer God had given to his prayers. He also questioned one of his chaplains.

‘Tell me. Is it possible to fall from grace?’

‘It is not possible.’

‘Then I am safe; for I know that I was once in grace.’

He had always been sustained by the notion that he was one of the elect; his pride and his piety were thereby combined, giving him that irresistible power to remove all obstacles in his path. Yet there were many times when he did not know what to do, when he waited for a sign. He once said that no man rises so high as one that does not know where he is going. He had reached the height of his command through a mixture of guile, zeal and adventitious circumstance; no one could have predicted the series of measures and counter-measures that had led to his ascendancy. It did not matter that he was inconsistent, in turns pragmatic and authoritarian, as long as the force of righteousness was with him. That is why he believed above all else in ‘providence’ as both the cause and justification of his actions.

On Thursday 2 September it became clear that he was dying. One of his physicians offered him a sleeping draught but he replied that ‘it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone’. Five officers, called to the deathbed, testified that he had declared that his son, Richard Cromwell, should succeed him. He died on the afternoon of 3 September which had been called by him his ‘fortunate day’ as the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and at Worcester. His battles were all now over.

*

When in 1650 Oliver Cromwell came back to England, after his successful campaign in Ireland, he was greeted by ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’. It has been described as the greatest political poem in the English language, but it is not the most transparent. Andrew Marvell was at this time a poet of no great account. He had been educated well, and had made the obligatory tour of Europe. He might have become a clergyman or secretary to some great man; instead he lived off the sale of some lands in the north, and revolved in the circles of London literature.

He seems to have first been attached to some royalist poets or poetasters but the crucial victories of Cromwell, and the execution of the king, gave him pause. It might be time to find patronage among the new rulers of the land, and it may be that he composed his ‘Ode’ with some such purpose in sight. Yet his words, distilled as if in an alembic, testify to his creative ambiguity and equivocation. His mind is so finely tempered that he can become both royalist and republican at the same time; he is open to all possible opinions, and thus finds it impossible to choose between them. He is in the position of one who, on coming to a judgement, realizes at the same time that the opposite is also true. We may therefore discuss Marvell here as representative of the confusion that must have been experienced by many others in this period of change and conflict. The poem itself was composed in the interval between Cromwell’s return from Ireland and his subsequent campaign in Scotland.

In the opening lines of the ‘Ode’ Cromwell is one who finds fulfilment not in ‘the inglorious Arts of Peace’ but in ‘advent’rous War’ through which he takes his ‘fiery way’. This might not necessarily be construed as a compliment but Marvell is withholding judgement as well as praise. He goes on to declare that:

’Tis Madness to resist or blame

The force of angry Heavens flame:

And, if we would speak true,

Much to the Man is due.

This is as much as to say that Cromwell cannot be resisted and should not in any case be censored or condemned. He may have emerged into the light as part of the inexorable movement of time, or of historical necessity, but in that respect his personal failings are of no consequence. It was his destiny (providential or otherwise) to

… cast the Kingdom old

Into another Mold.

Though Justice against Fate complain,

And plead the antient Rights in vain:

But those do hold or break

As Men are strong or weak.

Cromwell is in other words a strong man whose strength is its own reward. If justice has been sacrificed in the process, it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of change. Cromwell is in any case a creature of ‘Fate’ rather than of ‘Justice’, decisive and undeflectable. A leader may be both redeemer and despot. It had often happened in the history of the world, and Marvell’s contemporaries were thoroughly acquainted with the career of Julius Caesar.

So this is a poetry of doubt and ambiguity rather than of praise and affirmation, which may thus reflect a more general distrust and uncertainty concerning Cromwell’s motives in these crucial years. It can only be confirmed that he has:

Nor yet grown stiffer with Command,

But still in the Republick’s hand:

How fit he is to sway

That can so well obey.

It can at least be said that Cromwell has not become a tyrant. Marvell does not take sides because there are no sides to take, and we may recall T. S. Eliot’s remark upon Henry James that ‘he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. Marvell’s almost impenetrable reserve and self-effacement are also evident. He utters no real opinion of his own, and seems ready to retreat at almost any moment into silence. This, too, may have been the stance of many contemporaries in the face of Cromwell’s supremacy.

Four years later Marvell applied himself once more to the phenomenon of Oliver Cromwell with ‘THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the Government under O.C.’. This is a much more positive account of Cromwell’s rule, but it would be fair to say that it is a panegyric on the nature of protectorate government rather than on the Protector himself. Cromwell is compared to Amphion who with his brother raised the city of Thebes by means of music. So:

No Note he struck, but a new Story lay’d

And the great Work ascended while he play’d.

Cromwell is here praised for creating a structure of government that will, like Thebes, endure. He has also been able to create a unique form of leadership that was an appropriate substitute for royal government:

For to be Cromwell was a greater thing,

Then ought below, or yet above a King:

Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress,

Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less.

This polity has created a system of government that avoids the extremes of liberty or oppression:

’Tis not a Freedome, that where All command;

Nor Tyranny, where One does them withstand:

But who of both the Bounders knows to lay

Him as their Father must the State obey.

As a result England was respected and feared by all of its neighbouring nations:

He seems a King by long Succession born,

And yet the same to be a King does scorn.

Abroad a King he seems, and something more,

At Home a Subject on the equal Floor.

This might be described as the ‘party line’ for Cromwell’s adherents, and may or may not reflect Marvell’s private thoughts on the matter. The difficulties of Cromwell’s position as Protector, and the emergence of many agents of opposition to his rule, are not mentioned. Marvell is giving expression to the opinions of many people, however, who seem to have believed that the government of a Protector was more effective than the government of parliament. The poetry here is of great fluency and sophistication; it is precise but not pointed, hard but not wooden, eloquent but not facile.

The last poem by Marvell on Cromwell is also the most intimate. He had become by this time well known to the Protector’s household; he had been asked to compose songs for the marriage of Mary Cromwell to Lord Fauconberg, and had been commissioned by Cromwell to write poems for Christina of Sweden. In 1657 he had been given employment as assistant to John Milton in Milton’s position as Secretary of Foreign and Latin Tongues. So ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’, written in 1658, was his last gift to an employer whom he may have come to love as well as admire. It seems more than likely that he was allowed to enter the death chamber and to view Cromwell’s corpse:

I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes,

And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes:

Those gentle Rays under the lids were fled,

Which through his looks that piercing sweetnesse shed;

That port which so Majestique was and strong,

Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along:

All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan,

How much another thing, no more that man?

35

The young gentleman

It was believed by some that after the death of Oliver Cromwell the fabric of the commonwealth would be torn apart; the centre would not hold. Yet the succession of his oldest son, Richard Cromwell, passed off without any commotion. No great public mourning was aroused by his father’s death, and very little debate was instituted about his role or his legacy. John Evelyn witnessed the Protector’s funeral where ‘there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went’.

Richard Cromwell was a modest and selfeffacing man with none of the natural authority or commanding presence of his father. He was, according to an appendix to James Mackintosh’s Eminent British Statesmen, ‘a person well skilled in hawking, hunting, horse-racing, with other sports and pastimes’. Allusions were made to ‘Queen Dick’. He admitted soon after his accession that ‘it might have pleased God, and the nation too, to have chosen out a person more fit and able for this work than I am’.

Yet almost at once he was engaged in the defining question of the moment. Should the army, or parliament, control this new gentry republic? Some of the army officers had already been demanding that they should have a commander-in-chief separate from the Protector, which meant in practice that they rejected the authority of the civil state. These officers were accustomed to meet at Wallingford House, the residence of Major-General Charles Fleetwood, who was their natural leader. Richard Cromwell, or ‘the young gentleman’ as he was known to some of them, did not concede their demand.

His position was strengthened in the election of a new parliament at the beginning of 1659, when a majority of the members seem to have been moderate or conservative men who supported the government of the protectorate and disliked the pretensions of the army; some of them were secret royalists, sustained by the impression or belief that the nation was with them. They demanded that all political activity in the army should come to an end, which at once aroused Fleetwood and his supporters. The soldiers refused to obey the order, and the few colonels who supported it found themselves abandoned by their men. Fleetwood, the regiments of the army with him at St James’s, demanded that parliament be dismissed forthwith.

The impasse might have signalled the beginning of another war, but Richard Cromwell took fright at the prospect. He is reported to have said that ‘for the preservation of my greatness (which is a burthen to me) I will not have one drop of blood spilt’. So he dissolved parliament and then, towards the end of May, abdicated his post as Protector. John Evelyn wrote in his diary that ‘several pretenders and parties strive for the government: all anarchy and confusion; Lord have mercy on us!’

The leaders of the army decided against all precedent to revive the Rump Parliament that had been dissolved by Oliver Cromwell in the spring of 1653. In the beginning it had comprised some 200 members but the number had now fallen to 50. On their reappearance, however, they refused to be cowed by the authorities of the army and set about to reassert their power by granting the commission of officers to their Speaker rather than to Fleetwood. An open division between the two competing powers could not long be delayed.

A rebellion against the army, organized by a coalition of royalists and disaffected Presbyterians, was effectively put down in the summer by General John Lambert, who had returned from his retirement to play once more a leading role in military affairs, yet within two months he and eight other officers were dismissed by parliament for promoting a petition deemed to be seditious. Lambert then in turn expelled the Rump and instituted a very short reign of the army. A ‘committee of safety’ was formed consisting of twenty-three officers and committed to govern without the rule of ‘a single person’ and without a House of Lords.

The army itself was divided. One of its most senior officers, General George Monck, had been given the task by Oliver Cromwell of governing Scotland; from this vantage he looked upon the bewildering events in England with a wary and suspicious eye. He had thought of supporting Richard Cromwell but had then drawn back. He was considered by some to be a secret royalist. Now he refused to support Lambert and Fleetwood, but instead demanded the recall of the parliament so recently expelled.

It might seem that anarchy had been loosed upon the world, but the world went its own way. A contemporary, quoted in the Clarendon State Papers, observed that in London ‘in all the hurly burly the streets were full, every one going about their business as if not at all concerned, and when the parliament sent unto the city to relieve them, they answered that they would not meddle with the dispute’. John Milton was not so sanguine and wrote that it was ‘most illegal and scandalous, I fear me barbarous, or rather scarce to be exampled among any barbarians, that a paid army should … thus subdue the supreme power that set them up’.

Lambert was also forced to confront divisions among his own soldiers; they declared that they themselves would not fight Monck or anyone else, but would form a ring in which their officers could contest one against another in some form of prize fight; the troops stationed at Plymouth, and the entire fleet, then declared the Rump as the least worst alternative to unconstitutional military rule. They desired a justly established government as well as freedom of worship. On 24 December Fleetwood, declaring that ‘God had spit in his face’, delivered the keys of parliament to its Speaker, William Lenthall.

On that day the troopers now loyal to parliament marched to Lenthall’s house in Chancery Lane, where they pledged to live and die with the assembly at Westminster. Lenthall, thus encouraged, decided to reconvene parliament on 26 December; the leading officers no longer had the will, or the support, to discourage him. On 4 January 1660, Lambert, who had made an unsuccessful attempt to march north and confront Monck, was now obliged to submit himself to the restored parliament; the members ordered him ‘to one of his dwelling houses most remote from the City of London, in order to the quiet and peace of this commonwealth’. The confusion and uncertainty were the direct effect of Oliver Cromwell’s inability to create a stable governance. Hartgill Baron, a royalist supporter, wrote that ‘all things here at present are in so great a cloud that the most quick-sighted or wisest man living is not able to make a judgment of what may be the issue’. There were many, like him, who now looked to the king beyond the sea for deliverance from the chaos around them.

General Monck, at the end of 1659, began marching south from Edinburgh with 8,000 men. His intentions were not clear, perhaps not even to himself; he said only that he had come into England in order to maintain the commonwealth. He may have believed that the army’s seizure of power had been misguided, but he was so taciturn and secretive that it is hard to be sure even of this. Pepys described him as ‘a dull heavy man’.

When he arrived in London at the beginning of February many citizens called for ‘a free parliament’; that meant the removal of the Rump and a return to the duly elected authority that had been purged by Colonel Pride eleven years before. Parliament responded by ordering Monck to enter the city in order to restore public order and to arrest its leading opponents. On 9 February Monck obeyed by removing all the gates, portcullises, posts and chains that were the symbols of the city’s strength. The citizens believed that they had been betrayed and seem to have been beset with fear and dismay. It may have been that Monck deliberately set out to demonstrate the lengths to which parliament would go to protect its authority, and thus bring the people over to his side. No certainty is possible in the matter.

Two days later, however, the unfathomable Monck wrote a letter to the Rump with the order to dissolve itself and to call for fresh elections. The effect was immediate and profound; according to one pamphleteer, Roger L’Estrange, the people ‘made bonfires very thick in every street and bells ringing in every church and the greatest acclamations of joy that could possibly be expressed’. Rumps of beef were roasted on every street-corner; rumps were tied on sticks and carried about; a great rump was turned on a spit on Ludgate Hill. Pepys reported that boys ‘do now cry “kiss my parliament” instead of “kiss my arse”, so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to…’ Ten days later Monck made a short cut by readmitting all the members of the Long Parliament who had before been excluded. These had been largely Presbyterian in temper and had been removed precisely because of their willingness to negotiate a settlement with Charles I.

The newly restored parliament promptly decided to erase all the proceedings in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge, which meant that it now resumed supreme authority in obtaining a settlement with the king. Lambert was sent to the Tower along with other members of the previous regime. On 6 March Pepys noted that ‘everybody now drinks the king’s health without fear, whereas before it was very private that a man dare do it’.

Charles II was still uncertain. He was not sure what Monck intended, and feared that the general might still set himself up as Lord Protector; there was even talk that Richard Cromwell might be asked to return to the post. Other supporters of the king did not trust Monck but believed that he would, in the old phrase, ‘play fast and loose’. The king had experienced so many false hopes that now he could do nothing but wait. If he took any premature action, it might ruin everything. Monck himself was obliged to proceed very carefully. He may have surmised that the restoration of the king would be the best possible outcome for the nation but he could not yet fully support the popular mood; he had to maintain the unity of his army, and could not afford to alienate those who were still called ‘commonwealth men’. He did not want to be suspected at this stage, as it was said, of ‘carrying the king in his belly’. A month or two later it was reported that Monck was determined either to restore the king by his own actions, and thus reap the subsequent rewards, or to prevent Charles’s return.

In the middle of March 1660, parliament dissolved itself and prepared the nation for a new assembly in the following month. The Long Parliament had finally come to an end, after a haphazard and interrupted rule of a little over nineteen years. In this month a known royalist supporter, Sir John Grenville, was smuggled into St James’s Palace for a clandestine interview with Monck; Monck did not wish to write anything down but he intimated to Grenville, through an intermediary, that it might be fit and proper for the king to send him a letter setting out the intentions of the royal party. The general would then keep the letter in trust and reveal its contents at an appropriate time. By this happy subterfuge he might be able to ease the king’s path to England. In another account of this secret affair Grenville had brought a letter from Charles to the general, offering Monck high office in a royal administration; the general replied that he had always intended to restore Charles. Whatever the exact circumstances it is clear that the king and the general were coming to an understanding.

At the beginning of April the king issued a ‘declaration’ from his temporary home at Breda in the Protestant Netherlands; no doubt he had consulted Monck’s wishes or suggestions in their clandestine consultations. The king offered a free pardon and amnesty to anyone who swore allegiance to the Crown, with the exception of those who had voted for the late king’s death; this was the only way of closing the chapter on the legacy of the civil war. Among other provisions was the promise of religious toleration to all peaceful Christians. Only thus could the struggles between Anglicans, Presbyterians and sectarians be resolved. Yet the king left all these measures to the final decision of parliament; this was seen by many to be a conciliatory gesture, but it also meant that parliament rather than king now incurred the responsibility of what might befall.

So all was set fair for the first elected parliament in almost two decades. It was known as the Convention Parliament since, in theory, no parliament could be called without a writ from the king to that effect. It soon became clear that many of a royalist persuasion had been elected; the king’s friends had returned to Westminster. Charles’s declaration was read to both Houses of Parliament and was received with enthusiasm. On the morning of 1 May the Lords, now with many royalist peers readmitted on the orders of General Monck, declared that ‘according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords and Commons’; the Commons assented that afternoon. It was now generally believed that a stable parliamentary government could only be established upon royal power. The republic had come to an end, and the aspirations of the army had been defeated.

On May Day, the once prohibited maypoles were set up all over the country. When the vice-chancellor and beadles of Oxford university tried to saw down a pole set up outside the Bear Inn, they were attacked by a crowd and beaten off. Pepys reported ‘great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking of the king’s health upon their knees in the streets, which methinks is a little too much’.

Charles II had removed to The Hague, where six members of the Lords and twelve members of the Commons were ushered into his presence; they presented the humble invitation and supplication of the parliament that his majesty should return and take the government of the kingdom into his hands. They also presented him with the sum of £50,000 to expedite his journey. Fourteen London citizens then came forward and offered the king a further £10,000. The city had not in previous years been wholly favourable to the royalist cause, and so its penitence was doubly appreciated. The king told them that he entertained a particular affection for London, as it was his place of birth, and knighted all of the citizens.

He set sail for England on 24 May, having embarked on a vessel newly christened The Prince; early on the morning of 26 May he arrived at Dover, where he knelt on the shore to give thanks. Monck was waiting for him, kneeling on the pier. The mayor of Dover presented him with a Bible; the king accepted it, saying ‘it was the thing that he loved above all things in the world’. We may excuse him on this occasion of any attempt at irony.

Monck and the king travelled together to Canterbury where Charles listened to the Anglican service, according to the Book of Common Prayer, in the cathedral. Wherever he went he was surrounded by crowds. He had time to write to his youngest sister, Henrietta Anne, that ‘my head is so dreadfully stunned with the acclamations of the people that I know not whether I am writing sense or nonsense’. From here the king progressed towards London to confirm and celebrate the fact of the Restoration.

36

Oh, prodigious change!

The return of Charles II was greeted with jubilation that was for the most part sincere. At Blackheath, just before entering the capital, he was met by what one newsletter described as ‘a kind of rural triumph, expressed by the country swains, in a morris dance with the old music of the tabor and pipe’. It was believed that the restoration of the king would be accompanied by the revival of the old customs and traditions of the nation.

He rode in a dark suit through all the pomp of the procession, from the Strand to Westminster, raising his hat with its crimson plume time and time again. The streets were covered in flowers, and the houses hung with ornate tapestries; the sound of bells and trumpets mingled with the greetings of the crowd. John Evelyn noted in his entry for 29 May 1660, that ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history, ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.’

As he passed under the gateway of the Banqueting House he glanced upwards to the site of his father’s execution and at this point he came close to tears. When he was placed beneath the canopy of state such was the disorder and confusion that the king himself seemed to be in a daze. Yet he soon recovered himself. He had been greeted with such delight and enthusiasm that he remarked, with a smile, that he should have come back sooner. It was the wit of a man who had no illusions about human nature.

It was the king’s thirtieth birthday, but he seemed older. His hair was already streaked with grey; men did not yet, in this period, wear wigs. The years of exile had made him lean, accentuating his height of 6 feet 2 inches. One contemporary, Sir Samuel Tuke, observed that ‘his face is rather grave than severe, which is very much softened whensoever he speaks; his complexion is somewhat dark but much enlightened by his eyes, which are quick and sparkling’. With his large nose and heavy jaw, he was not handsome. He looked sad, and rather lugubrious, with a hint of dissipation and a trace of cruelty. ‘Oddsfish,’ he used to say, ‘I am ugly.’ ‘Oddsfish’ was a corruption of ‘God’s flesh’.

In this heady period he was affable to all he met, even to those whom he suspected of being his secret enemies. Yet behind this assumption of good humour he was calculating and even cunning. He had been brought up in the hard school of exile and, as he used to say, at all costs he wished to avoid ‘going on my travels’ once again. So his first decisions were made out of policy towards his erstwhile opponents rather than of gratitude to his friends. He believed that all men were governed by self-interest and therefore was not reluctant to consult his own.

When the king returned to his palace at Whitehall, it was much as he had remembered it from his childhood; it survived as a maze of a place with closets, cubby-holes, back staircases, corridors, corners and courtyards; it had grown piece by piece out of a variety of different dwellings and encompassed chapels, tennis courts and bowling greens. It covered 23 acres and contained approximately 2,000 rooms, some of which flooded when the Thames rose too high. The king loved the place, however, and rarely left it during the first full year of his reign. The great court as well as some of the terraces and galleries were in effect open to the public, and these areas were thronged with suitors hoping to gain the king’s favour; others came simply to watch the splendour of majesty.

The king dined in public at midday, but he managed his business in the privacy of his bedchamber. There was also a secret closet beyond the chamber, to which few were ever admitted; soon enough this would testify to the king’s penchant for secrecy and intrigue. The marquis of Halifax noted that ‘he had backstairs to convey informations to him, as well as for other uses’; we may surmise what those other ‘uses’ were.

There was space enough at the palace for all of the king’s principal councillors. Chief among them was a man who had been at his side for the years of exile. Edward Hyde, later to become the 1st earl of Clarendon and author of the monumental History of the Rebellion, was austere and assiduous even if, as he wrote himself, he was ‘in his nature inclined to pride and passion’; he had a high opinion of his own judgement and rectitude, even to the point of lecturing his master on his shortcomings. His status was soon enhanced when his daughter, Mary Hyde, was married to the king’s brother James, duke of York. It had been discovered that she was pregnant by him, prompting Samuel Pepys to recall how a wit once observed that ‘he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.

Hyde, as lord chancellor, was one of a group of six confidants who formed what was called a ‘secret committee’ that, in the words of Hyde himself, was appointed by the king ‘to consult all his affairs before they came to the public debate’. They were assisted by a privy council of some thirty to forty members, twelve of whom had carried arms against the king’s father. Charles had decided to accommodate the recent past.

The king was at first diligent in his duties but he soon tired of the details of his administration. He grew easily bored at the meetings of his council and disliked the paperwork of office; it was reported by the marquis of Halifax that his ministers ‘had to administer business to him as doctors do physic, wrap it up in something to make it less unpleasant’. It was also a convenient way for him to disown responsibility for certain policies. As he once said, ‘My words are my own but my acts are my ministers’.

The sale and ownership of land were pressing issues. Many of the royalists had been forced to sell their estates in order to pay fines or to meet the ‘decimation tax’. They now petitioned for their lands to be returned to them, but parliament decided that it was not in its power to reverse what had been in theory voluntary sales. The decision caused much resentment, and contributed to the feeling that the king had turned his back on his former supporters.

That feeling was compounded by one of the measures of the Convention Parliament in this year. An Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was passed, by means of which any crime or treason committed ‘by virtue or colour’ of parliamentary or regal authority over the last twenty-two years was to be ‘pardoned … and put in utter oblivion’. All the rage of the past was therefore to be redeemed or, at least, forgotten. The measure incensed those royalists who believed themselves to have been injured by the actions of the military regime, and it was remarked that the king was consenting to an indemnity for his enemies and to oblivion for his friends.

The regicides, those who had signed the death warrant of the late king, were excepted from the indemnity. In the autumn of the year, in one of the few acts of vengeance perpetrated by the new administration, ten of these malefactors were hanged, drawn and quartered; they met their deaths with defiance and one of them had the strength, as his naked body was sliced open before disembowelling, to strike the executioner. Richard Cromwell had already fled from England to lead a life of decent obscurity in Europe. Charles was inclined to clemency, however, and when nineteen other regicides were about to be brought to trial for their lives he wrote to Clarendon that ‘I must confess that I am weary of hanging except upon new offenses; let it sleep’.

It was a nice matter also to deal with the army. Under the command of Monck it had helped to place the king on his throne, but it might equally well be used to eject him from it. A poll tax was reintroduced to fund the payments of the soldiers’ arrears and, by the autumn, they were retired; they returned, where possible, to their old homes and occupations. They were allowed to keep their swords, however, and the more radical of them still maintained ‘the good old cause’ of the republic. At the end of the year a declaration banned them from assembling in London, but in truth they posed no serious threat. Most of them melted away causing the preacher, Richard Baxter, to observe that ‘thus did God do a more wonderful work in the dissolving of this army than any of their greatest victories’.

Yet as always the cause of religion was pre-eminent, with a division of the clergy between those who avowed the Anglican persuasion and those who adopted the puritan or Presbyterian case. There was no particular example from the ‘defender of the faith’. It is still difficult to write with any clarity of the king’s religion. He died after being received into the Catholic Church, and it is possible that he had become a secret member of that faith even while in exile. Yet perhaps he did not have the conviction to espouse any particular creed; it was not his business to be pious but to be politic. The various forms of religion held no real interest for him and he used to tease his rigidly Catholic brother, James, about the scandalous lives of the popes. He was apt to say, of his own sexual escapades, that God would not damn a man for seeking a little pleasure. He had a light heart and an easy conscience.

Within a month of his return to England, however, Charles was busily engaged in the ceremony of ‘the king’s touch’ whereby through the agency of God he could heal those afflicted with scrofula or ‘the king’s evil’. It was a signal instance of the divine dispensation that had made him the Lord’s anointed and, as a spectacle of majesty, he deployed it frequently. Once a month, until the end of his reign, hundreds of scrofulous people flocked to the Banqueting House where with patience and dignity he laid his hands upon them.

The old order had been reasserted, but it had been subtly changed by the recent broils. The French ambassador, for example, wrote to Louis XIV that ‘this government has a monarchical appearance because there is a king, but at bottom it is very far from being a monarchy’. The power of parliament had increased immeasurably after its success in the civil war; it was impossible for the king to raise money from his subjects, or to arrest any person, without its consent. Charles also now depended for his finances on the annual sum assigned to him by the members at Westminster.

The king’s power had also diminished in other ways. The Star Chamber would not be revived. Any attempt at a large standing army would be treated with grave suspicion. The influence of the City had also grown, and from the events of these years we may date the true beginning of a commercial and mercantile state.

The rule that had once radiated from one person, whether Stuart or Cromwell, had become more balanced and diffused. The departments of the two secretaries of state, devoted to the administration of domestic as well as foreign affairs, were established; permanent boards were also created for such business as the assignment and collection of taxation. The treasury broke away from royal control and became responsible for approving all payments. Thirty committees were soon in session and, later in 1660, a council of trade and a council of foreign plantations were at work.

Yet this was not a bureaucracy in the modern sense, since it was based upon patronage and the lavish giving or taking of ‘fees’ for services rendered. Many of the officials were not technically the servants of the state but were paid by more senior officials. The more important posts were considered to be private property, to be kept for life and subsequently sold to a close relative or to the highest bidder. It was not necessarily acorrupt system, since it represented the only way in which government could be made to work.

The central differences between the two epochs of republic and restored monarchy were less palpable. The people put no faith in paper constitutions, such as Cromwell had imposed; the religious dimension of public affairs was no longer as relevant as once it was, and piety eventually became a matter of private conscience. There would be no more zealotry at Westminster. Political theory more frequently became the preserve of philosophers, such as Locke and Hobbes, rather than of theologians. This may be the reason for the suggestion of many contemporaries that religious belief itself was in decline. Thomas Sprat, the chronicler of the Royal Society, noted that ‘the influence which Christianity once obtained on men’s minds is now prodigiously decayed’.

The certainties of the religious wars, if we may call them that, had begun to dissolve within a new public discourse that favoured reason and civility. A man might now gather his opinions from the coffee-house rather than from the church or conventicle (in the year of the king’s restoration the drinks of tea, coffee and chocolate are first mentioned). The king was obliged by parliament to impose Anglicanism upon the nation, as we shall see, but the puritans and dissenters could not in the end be silenced. Compulsion was eventually to be replaced by persuasion.

*

The formal coronation of Charles II was delayed until St George’s Day, 23 April 1661, just two weeks before the opening of his first parliament. Charles II was the last monarch ever to ride in state through the streets of London on the day preceding the event, since he knew well enough that ceremony was at the centre of kingship. He ordered that all the ancient records should be studied so that the traditional solemnity of the occasion should be maintained; the crown jewels had been broken up and sold after his father’s execution, but he ordered that a new set should replicate the old in every minute particular. He wore robes of gold and silver, together with a crimson cap of velvet lined with ermine. The first coronation mugs, sold as souvenirs, are a measure of the popularity of the occasion. The day itself was serene and fair but Pepys observed in his diary that, immediately after the ceremony, ‘it fell a-raining and thundering and lightning as I have not seen it do for some years’. Some obvious prognostications were made.

Parliament met on 8 May; the proximity of the two occasions was a tribute to the notion of ‘the crown in parliament’, the title of supreme power in England. Since half of the new members came from families that had suffered in the royalist cause, it became known as ‘the Cavalier Parliament’. They were for the most part young men but the king remarked that ‘he would keep them till they got beards’; he fulfilled the promise by maintaining this parliament for a further eighteen years.

They of course supported his cause, and that of the bishops, but they were most intent on maintaining the privileges of the gentry from which they had largely come. The Presbyterians were in a small minority, and were in no position to check or obstruct what might be described as the conservative tide. In a series of Acts, over a period of five years, parliament enforced Anglican supremacy upon the nation. Two weeks after it met the ‘solemn league and covenant’, which had pledged the nation to a Presbyterian settlement with Scotland, was summarily burned by the common hangman at Westminster and other places in the city. John Evelyn remarked, ‘Oh, prodigious change!’

By the Corporation Act of 1661, the municipal leaders of town or city were confined to those who received communion by the rites of the Church of England; the mayors and aldermen were also obliged to take an oath of allegiance and affirm that it was not lawful to take up arms against the king. The Act was designed to remove those of a nonconformist persuasion whose loyalty might be suspect.

An Act of Uniformity was passed in the following year which restricted the ministry to those who had been ordained by a bishop and who accepted the provisions of the Book of Common Prayer. These conditions effectively disqualified 1,700 puritan clergy, who were therefore ejected from their livings. It was the most sudden alteration in the religious history of the nation. Some said that it was an act of revenge by the Anglicans after their persecution during the days of the commonwealth, but it may also have been a means whereby the royalist gentry regained control of their parishes.

Some of the ejected clergy were reduced to poverty and the utmost distress. One of their number, Richard Baxter, recalled that ‘their congregations had enough to do … to help them out of prisons, or to maintain them there’. John Bunyan, for example, was imprisoned in Bedford Prison for nonconformist preaching. He wrote that ‘the parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from the bones’; yet in his prison cell he dreamed of eternity.

Much popular derision was directed at the godly ministers. The dissenting preachers were mocked and hooted at in the street. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in which puritans were roundly scorned, was revived with great popular success. The Quakers in particular were badly treated and, during the reign of Charles, 4,000 were consigned to prison; Clarendon had said that they were ‘a sort of people upon whom tenderness and lenity do not at all prevail’.

Yet the rigour of the new law was averted in some areas. Many Presbyterians or ‘church puritans’ were more flexible in obeying the law; the clergy of these congregations might well retain their livings in acts of subtle compromise. Some authorities were in any case reluctant to enforce the law, and the ecclesiastical courts were not always efficient.

In two further Acts of subsequent years the attendance at religious assemblies, other than those of the official Church, was punished by imprisonment; no puritan clergyman or schoolmaster could come within 5 miles of a town or city. These measures did not reflect the king’s promise of toleration for all honest Christians, as he had announced in the ‘declaration’ of Breda before sailing to England, but it is likely that he was being pressed by the young men of parliament; he acceded to their demands because he did not wish to lose their support in the funding of his revenues.

It would in the end prove impossible to subdue the whole body of nonconformist worshippers, now bound together by the pressure of shared persecution; but, by attempting to impose Anglican worship, the members of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ opened up the great fissure between Anglicanism and dissenting faiths that would never be resolved. An informal network of meetings brought together Independents, Baptists and Presbyterians in sharp distinction to the established Church. No national religious settlement had been achieved. The days of the disputes between church and chapel would soon come.

Other measures followed in what was a series of busy parliamentary sessions. A new ‘hearth tax’ was passed in the spring of 1662, with a charge of 1 shilling for each hearth to be paid twice a year; the response was clamant and immediate. A saying passed through the streets of London to the effect that ‘the bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the king neglects all and the devil takes all’. A Licensing Act was approved, by which it was ordered that no book might be published without the approval of an official censor; this was largely directed against nonconformist writings that would now come under the gaze of the bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury. The atmosphere of free debate that had pertained for much of Cromwell’s rule came to an end.

These measures against ‘toleration’ came at a price. Pepys reported that all of the ‘fanatics’ were discontented and ‘that the king do take away their liberty of conscience’; he deplored ‘the height of the bishops who I fear will ruin all again’. The puritan clergy were ordered to abandon their livings on 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day, and in many places the congregations came in great numbers to hear and lament their ‘farewell sermons’. More spirited protest was also expected. Ever since the king’s arrival in England minor uprisings by ‘fanatics’ had disturbed the peace, and through the spring and summer of 1662 fears rose of some concerted puritan resistance. A general rising was supposed to be planned for August, and from all over the country came reports of seditious meetings and treasonable speeches. Lord Fauconberg, lord-lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire, claimed that in Lancashire ‘not one man in the whole county intends to conform’; reports of the same nature came from his own county of Yorkshire and the West Country, while London was known to be the spiritual home of zealotry and sectarianism. The lords-lieutenant of the various counties were told to watch ‘all those known to be of the Republic party’.

Yet these apprehensions were generally without foundation. The Anglican Church was now supreme under the leadership of the cleric who in 1663 was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury; Gilbert Burnet wrote of Archbishop Sheldon that ‘he seemed not to have a deep sense of religion, if any at all, and spoke of it most commonly as of an engine of government and a matter of policy’. The bishops, for example, had been returned to their seats in the House of Lords where they could exert a strong influence upon national legislation; yet it was also true that parliament, and not the Church, had taken control of the nature and direction of the national religion.

The actual faith of the people was no doubt as inchoate and confused as ever. One Lancastrian apprentice, Roger Lowe, recorded in 1663 that ‘I was pensive and sad and went into the town field and prayed to the Lord, and I hope the Lord heard’.

*

At a meeting of the council, just after parliament had been summoned, Charles told his advisers that he had decided to marry the infanta of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza; he had already announced his preferences when he said that ‘I hate Germans, or princesses of cold countries’. The mother of the intended bride, the queen regent of Portugal, had also offered £800,000 together with her colonial territories of Bombay and Tangier in order to sweeten the arrangement. English merchants were also to be permitted to trade freely throughout the Portuguese Empire, thus assisting England in its rivalry with the Dutch. In return Portugal wished to recruit English soldiers in its war with the neighbouring power of Spain, which was eager to take back its rebellious province. A marriage could accomplish a great deal.

Another matrimonial alliance completed what may be called the ‘foreign policy’ of Charles. His sister Henrietta was married off to the homosexual brother of Louis XIV and helped to inaugurate closer relations between France and England that came in the end to be too close. Louis XIV was feared and distrusted for his attempt to raise himself up as ‘universal monarch’ in the face of Spanish decline; nevertheless Charles admired his absolutist and centralized rule that he had some obscure hope of emulating.

The king travelled down to Portsmouth to meet his bride, and reported to Clarendon that ‘her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty though her eyes are excellent good, and not anything in her face that in the least degree can shock one’. This may not amount to a ringing endorsement but, for a royal union, it was fairly satisfactory. Her teeth stuck out a little, and her hair was swept to the side in the Portuguese fashion. The king is said privately to have remarked, ‘Gentlemen, you have brought me a bat.’ One of Catherine’s first requests was for a cup of tea, then a novelty. Instead she was offered a glass of ale.

She had arrived with what one contemporary, the comte de Gramont, described as ‘six frights, who called themselves maids-of-honour and a duenna, another monster, who took the title of governess to those extraordinary beauties’. Much fun was also made of their great fardingales, or hooped skirts of whalebone beneath their dresses.

Catherine had some formidable competition. The king was known to be an insatiable and compulsive philanderer, and Pepys calculated that he had had seventeen mistresses even before the Restoration. John Dryden, in Absalom and Achitophel, characterized him thus:

Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.

Or, as the earl of Rochester put it more bluntly,

Restless he rolls from whore to whore,

A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

By a previous lover, Lucy Walter, he had a son who would in 1663 become duke of Monmouth. His present mistress was Barbara Palmer, whose husband had been ennobled as the earl of Castlemaine; Lady Castlemaine soon became indispensable to his pleasure, and it was reported by Pepys that she ruled the king by employing ‘all the tricks of Aretino [a poet of obscenity] … in which he is too able having a large—’ The rest is silence. The lady was already heavily pregnant by the time that Catherine arrived in England.

The king’s appetite for Lady Castlemaine was such that he appointed her to be his wife’s lady-of-the-bedchamber. Catherine objected to the convenient arrangement, and her anger led to an estrangement between the royal couple. The new queen of England was receiving company at Hampton Court when her husband led Lady Castlemaine into the room; she may not have correctly heard her name since she received her calmly enough but, on being made aware of the lady’s identity, she burst into tears before fainting. Clarendon was used by the king as a mediator and, in the end, the queen gave way and welcomed her rival.

In truth she had become devoted to her husband, and in no way wished to alienate his affections. She could do nothing, however, to fulfil her primary role; she seemed to be incapable of bearing children. It was not for want of trying. An Italian visitor at the court, Lorenzo Magalotti, heard that the queen was ‘unusually sensitive to pleasure’ and that after intercourse ‘blood comes from her genital parts in such great abundance that it does not stop for several days’.

In time the king would become enamoured of another mistress, Frances Stewart, of whom the comte de Gramont said that it would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty. She was the model, complete with helmet and trident, for the figure of Britannia on British coins. Charles was always in love with someone or other. By seventeen of his known mistresses he had thirteen illegitimate children, some of whom became dukes or earls. The story of Nell Gwynn has often been told.

The royal court itself had become the object of much scandal and remark. Macaulay, in an essay for the Edinburgh Review, remarked of a no doubt exaggerated example that ‘a dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of pandars and buffoons pounces upon it and carries it to the royal laboratory, where his majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among the rest.’

The rule of the saints had been replaced by the rule of the sinners who seemed to compete with each other in drunkenness and debauchery. When a bishop preached in the royal chapel against ‘mistaken jollity’ the congregation laughed at him. When the court visited Oxford a scholar, Anthony Wood, observed that ‘they were nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses, cellars. Rude, rough, whore-mongers; vain, empty, careless.’ And of course they took their morals and manners from their royal leader. Other royal courts were no doubt characterized by profligacy and sexual licence – the court of William II comes to mind – but never had they been so widely observed and criticized.

A circle of ‘wits’ emerged around the king; among them were George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and Charles, Sir Sedley. They were accustomed to meet in the apartments of the king’s latest lover or in the lodgings of the notorious William Chiffinch who became ‘keeper of the king’s private closet’, where their most notable contribution to court life was a number of highly obscene poems and stories. Their wit was manifested in verbal extravagance and dexterity, in puns and allusions, or, as Robert Boyle put it, ‘a subtlety in conceiving things … a quickness and neatness in expressing them’.

There was much to ridicule. In the summer of 1663 Lord Sedley appeared naked on the balcony of the Cock Inn in Bow Street where, according to Samuel Pepys, he proceeded to enact ‘all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture’. He delivered a mock sermon in which he declared that ‘he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’. After the recital ‘he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another, and drank the king’s health’. He then took down his breeches and proceeded to ‘excrementize’.

On the following day he was brought before the chief justice, who asked him if he had ever read Henry Peacham’s The Complete Gentleman. He was then bound over to keep the king’s peace on a bond of £500, whereupon he said that ‘he thought he was the first man that paid for shitting’. The bond was paid with money borrowed from the king himself.

37

On the road

On the course of their journey Faithful and Christian came upon Talkative, a gentleman who ‘was something more comely at a distance than at hand’. Then he conversed with his fellow travellers.

Talkative: I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things profane; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial; provided that all be done to our profit.

He walked out of their way for a little, whereupon Christian and Faithful began to discuss their new companion.

Faithful: Do you know him, then?

Christian: Know him! Yes, better than he knows himself.

Faithful: Pray what is he?

Christian: His name is Talkative; he dwelleth in our town. I wonder that you should be a stranger to him, only I consider that our town is large.

Faithful: Whose son is he? And whereabout doth he dwell?

Christian: He is the son of one Say-well; he dwelt in Prating Row; and is known of all that are acquainted with him, by the name of Talkative in Prating Row; and notwithstanding his fine tongue, he is but a sorry fellow.

Faithful: Well, he seems to be a very pretty man.

Christian: That is, to them who have not thorough acquaintance with him, for he is best abroad, near home he is ugly enough.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has often been characterized as the first English novel; it is as if he had the actual characters before him, in imagination, and simply wrote down what he heard; he also employed the plain speech of the time, to the extent that we can hear the ordinary people of the late seventeenth century talking to one another. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress is more than a novel.

John Bunyan, born in Bedfordshire in 1628, gathered the rudiments of learning while young but may have been largely self-educated; he was thoroughly acquainted with the vernacular Bible and with Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but in his youth he read the ballads and romances of the time. He joined the New Model Army at the age of fifteen, but it is not clear whether he saw any active service before his disbandment three years later.

After his marriage to a poor woman he entered a period of spiritual struggle, documented by Grace Abounding, in which he fell into despair and fearfulness before being tempted by false hope. He was still afflicted by anxiety and depression when in 1655 he joined a separatist church in Bedford; he began his preaching before that congregation where slowly he found strength and confidence. His ministry widened, therefore, and he came into conflict with the authorities. In 1661 he was consigned to Bedford Prison where, refusing to renounce his right to preach, he remained for the next eleven years. He wrote many books and treatises during this period, but none more popular and significant than The Pilgrim’s Progress.

In part it might be read as an account of any seventeenth-century journey, over rough roads, encumbered by mud and puddles, endangered by mires and ditches, pits and deep holes. The travellers must sometimes reconnoitre steep hills where they may catch ‘a slip or two’. Sometimes they go ‘out of the way’ and among ‘turnings’ and ‘windings’ lose themselves; ‘wherefore, at last, lighting under a little shelter, they sat down there till the day brake; but being weary they fell asleep’. We hear the dogs barking at their presence. If they are unfortunate they may be taken for vagrants, and placed in the stocks or in the ‘cage’. If they are fortunate they will find lodgings on the course of their journey, where they will be asked, ‘What will you have?’

They must also face the dangers of robbers waiting for them along the road.

So they came up all to him, and with threatening language bid him stand. At this Little-Faith looked as white as a clout, and had neither power to fight nor fly. Then said Faint-Heart, Deliver thy purse … Then he cried out, Thieves, thieves!

In the face of such dangers some travellers formed a company for the sake of friendship and security.

‘Then I hope we may have your good company.’

‘With a very good will, will I be your companion.’

‘Come on, then, let us go together…’

Such snatches of conversation are often heard on the road. They are eager to meet one another and, leaning upon their staves, they talk. ‘Is this the way?’ ‘You are just in your way.’ ‘How far is it thither?’ ‘Whence came you?’ ‘Have you got into the way?’ One will greet another with ‘What have you met with?’ or ‘What have you seen?’ ‘Whither are you going?’ ‘Back, back.’ Some travellers want ‘to make a short cut of it, and to climb over the wall’. What does it matter how they reach their destination? ‘If we are in, we are in.’

The vividness of the prose is derived from its immediacy and contemporaneity. ‘I met him once in the streets,’ Faithful says of Pliable, ‘but he leered away on the other side, as one ashamed of what he had done; so I spake not to him.’ Christian says to a man, ‘What art thou?’ and is told, ‘I am what I was not once.’ He tells Hope, ‘I would, as the saying is, have given my life for a penny … this man was one of the weak, and therefore he went to the wall … And when a man is down, you know, what can he do?’ The simplicity and vigour have been tested on the anvil of suffering experience but they also derive from Bunyan’s reading of the vernacular Bible. The words seem to come to him instinctively but they have absorbed the cadence and imagery of the Scriptures.

They come also from Bunyan’s identity as a Calvinist. To read The Pilgrim’s Progress is to return to that world of fierce struggle and debate in which deeply held religious faith was the only stay against the dark. Bunyan is nothing like the caricatures of Tribulation Wholesome, Snarl, or Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, in seventeenth-century drama. He is too desperate and determined to be that. Christian decides to embark upon his journey alone ‘because none of my neighbours saw their danger as I saw mine’. This is the heart of it, this awareness of imminent destruction. It is the source of what he calls his ‘dumps’ that might also be expressed as despair and distraction, of melancholy close to madness, afflicting those who believed themselves to be in danger of spiritual destruction. This fear animates the life of the seventeenth century. It is the fear of what Bunyan calls ‘the bottomless pit … out of the mouth of which there came in an abundant manner smoke, and coals of fire, with hideous noises’. To be saved by the infinite and unlooked-for grace of God, unworthy though you be, is to experience the transformation of the spirit. It is a glimpse into the heart of the fervent spirituality of the seventeenth-century world.

38

To rise and piss

The prosperous citizen of London would wear a cloth doublet, open at the front to display his shirt and lawn scarf; breeches, stockings and buckled shoes completed the ensemble. For the outdoors he donned his wig and sugarloaf hat, together with a short cloak, and a sword at his side. His wife would naturally wear a brocaded silk dress, looped to display her quilted petticoat; her neck and shoulders were covered with a kerchief and she wore the fashionable French hood of the day.

The house in which they lived, in the period of Charles I and Cromwell, would have been perhaps too dull and plain for modern taste; the floors were of polished wood, some of the walls wainscoted and the ceilings panelled with oak. The rooms were solid and well-proportioned, but a little gloomy and confined; the floors creaked under foot. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century was there a general movement towards lighter and more gracious interiors.

The houses of those who were known as ‘the middle rank’ contained between three and seven rooms; the household would characteristically contain between four and seven people, including servants. In the more prosperous of these dwellings the hall, parlour and kitchen took up the ground floor while above them were one or two bedrooms. Of ornament there was very little. The windows rarely boasted curtains; carpets and armchairs were not widely used. Clocks, looking glasses and pictures were still relatively scarce but they were more in evidence towards the close of the period; this was also the time when the cabinetmaker, working in walnut and mahogany, became more popular. The richer households, however, might place hangings against some of the walls.

Their furniture was not comfortable, being comprised of high-backed chairs, stools, chests and benches with perhaps a few cushions to soften the hard wood. The dining table would have no ornament, and cutlery of the modern type was not in use; the crockery was of pewter rather than of earthenware. A display of plate might be set on the sideboard, but otherwise ostentation was still slight. The rooms were heated with coals. Sanitation was of the most rudimentary, with only the occasional mention of a pewter chamber pot or a ‘close-stool’. There is no evidence of any utensils for washing.

The good citizen might engage in trade as a merchant or in commerce as a shopkeeper, but there was no firm distinction between the various avocations of the city. In the reign of Charles II 3,000 merchants could be found in the Royal Exchange, and in this period foreign trade, domestic industry and shipping all enjoyed rapid growth in advance of that period that became known to twentiethcentury historians as the ‘commercial revolution’. In A Discourse of Trade, published in 1670, Roger Coke stated that ‘trade is now become the lady which in this present age is more courted and celebrated than in any former by all princes and potentates of the world’. The list of imported commodities included tobacco, sugar, indigo and ginger from the colonies as well as Indian calicoes and chintzes; a large proportion of these goods was then re-exported in English ships to continental Europe.

The gentry and the local administrators of the counties must not be forgotten since in this period they exercised full control of their neighbourhoods. It was a time when the old principles of the social hierarchy were reinforced. The ‘Cavalier Parliament’ had extended the authority of the local aristocracy in such matters as the control of the militia and the administration of the Poor Law. The justices of the peace had almost complete possession of local affairs, from imprisoning vagabonds to fining parish officials for breach of their duties.

The gentry had resumed their role as the leaders of local society, after the unfortunate experiment of republicanism, but they seemed not to have returned to their old complacency. Many of them, for example, paid very close attention to the new methods of agricultural practice. The farmers themselves were engaged in what were known as ‘improvements’ that increased the profitability of the land; in this period the country was able to export grain to mainland Europe.

A large class of ‘professional men’ had also emerged in this period; the lawyers and the doctors were principal among them, but accountants and professional administrators of estates were also to be found. Samuel Pepys has become for posterity the master of this world, and his diary does in some degree provide a mirror for his age. He is twenty-six at the time of his first entry; living with his wife in Axe Yard, near Downing Street, he is about to be appointed as secretary to Edward Mountagu, the lord admiral. This was the period when the Rump Parliament had reassembled and General Monck was beginning his march from Scotland.

And so we read that on 3 January 1660, ‘Mr Sheply, Hawley and Moore dined with me on a piece of beef and cabbage, and a collar of brawn’. Meat was the principal item in the diets of the period, and it is characteristic that Pepys should have two types; dinner was eaten at noon. On another occasion Pepys sat down to a dish of marrow bones and a leg of mutton, a loin of veal and a dish of fowl together with two dozen larks. He also had dinners of fish but, on being offered a dish of sturgeon, ‘I saw very many little worms creeping, which I suppose was through the staleness of the pickle’.

He drank ale and ‘strong water’ that was most probably gin. After dinner there was often a ‘mad stir’ with games and forfeits. Sports were of all kinds including one that Pepys called ‘the flinging at cocks’, in which sticks were hurled at a bird that was tethered by its leg or held down by some other means; whoever rendered it unconscious was allowed to cook and eat it. He also visited a cock-fight in a new pit by Shoe Lane. Other vignettes of the period emerge from his notations. A new disease sprang up in the autumn of 1661, consisting of ‘an ague and fever’.

The cleanliness of the age is perhaps in doubt. He had ‘like to have shit in a skimmer that lay over the house of office’. He made a cloth suit out of a cloak ‘that had like to have been beshit behind a year ago’. ‘This night I had a strange dream of bepissing myself, which I really did.’ He was en route to the Guildhall, ‘by the way calling to shit at Mr Rawlinson’s’. He had forgotten his chamber pot one night, ‘so was forced to rise and piss in the chimney’. In the theatre, ‘a lady spat backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me’. He sometimes washed himself with warm water, and sometimes washed his feet, but the occurrences were rare enough to merit mention. His wife, Elizabeth, visited a ‘hot-house’ and ‘pretends to a resolution of hereafter being very clean – how long it will hold, I can guess’. Sure enough, on a later occasion, ‘she spent the whole day making herself clean, after four or five weeks being in continued dirt’. Two months later, however, ‘she finds that I am lousy, having found in my head and body above twenty lice, little and great’.

He was particular about his clothes. He ordered a coat of velvet, what he called a ‘close-kneed coloured suit’ with stockings of the same colour together with belt and a new gilt-handled sword, as well as a black cloth suit with white lining. In the autumn of 1663 he bought a new shag-gown, trimmed with gold buttons, and two periwigs. He then decided that the wig-maker should cut off his hair and make another periwig with it, and ‘after I had caused all my maids to look upon it and they conclude it to become me’. Soon after he also purchased a black cloth suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon as well as a cloak lined with velvet. ‘Clothes’, he wrote, ‘is a great matter.’ He went into the street ‘a little to show forsooth my new suit’. A poor fellow was one ‘that goes without gloves for his hands’.

It was a society of spectacle and display, in which all the leading characters were also actors. In his bright costume and new wig he might promenade with his wife in certain select neighbourhoods, such as Gray’s Inn, followed by ‘a woman carrying our things’. It was quite usual to stop and enquire of a ‘common’ person if he or she were ready to fetch this or to deliver that for a small fee. Servants could be severely treated, even in the relatively peaceful household of the Pepyses; Pepys sometimes beat his boy until his wrist hurt and Elizabeth was obliged ‘to beat our little girl; and then we shut her down into the cellar, and there she lay all night’.

His adventures with women are well enough known. When he was observed kissing a woman in the window of a winehouse, someone in the street called out, ‘Sir, why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?’ and threw a stone towards the window. He decided to join the congregation of St Dionis Backchurch after he had noticed that a ‘very great store of fine women there is in this church’. He was always ogling and touching. One young lady, in the congregation of another church, took some pins out of her pocket to prick him if he molested her. He wrote in code about his sexual encounters; ‘mi cosa naked’, for example, was ‘my bare penis’. He ‘had his way’ and ‘got it’, as he said, on many occasions. Yet he could be less demanding. ‘I got into the coach where Mrs Knipp was, and got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung.’

Violence in the streets was not uncommon. During one altercation ‘I did give him a good cuff or two on the chops; and seeing him not oppose me, I did give him another’. The constable and his watch were there to prevent mischief or riot; they once found Pepys’s backyard door open ‘and so came in to see what the matter was’.

Pepys often ‘fell to cards’. Cards, and gaming in general, were the delight of the age; gambling was endemic in all classes of the society, and lotteries were used as a method of public finance. On one afternoon he paid 18 pence to join a ‘coffee club’ of the Rota that met in the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street; coffee-houses had come to London eight years before, and had immediately become a success among the merchants and lawyers of London. Yet the merchants and lawyers were not alone. Roger L’Estrange complained that ‘every carman and porter is now a statesman, and indeed the coffee-houses are good for nothing else’. No regard was given to ‘degrees or order’ but in the coffee-house, according to Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, ‘gentleman, mechanic, lord and scoundrel mix’.

In a city dominated by conversation and speculation, by news and gossip, they were the single most important venue of public recreation and of public information. London was characterized by its coffee-houses, and it became common to address letters to a citizen ‘at the Grecian’ or ‘at the Rainbow’. Macaulay said that they almost became a political institution. Yet they were not wholly concerned with ‘news piping hot’. On one visit Pepys ‘sat long in good discourse with some gentlemen concerning the Roman empire’. At the end of 1664 he stepped into a coffee-house to taste the new drink of ‘Jocolatte’, ‘very good’.

And then ‘after dinner we had a pretty good singing and one, Hazard, sung alone after the old fashion’; music and song were everywhere. There were ‘song rounds’. While he waited for a lawyer, ‘I sat in his study singing’. Before he retired to his bed, he often played the lute. In one of the rooms of a coffee-house he heard a variety of Italian and Spanish songs as well as a canon for two voices on the words ‘domine salvum fac regem’. When he came for recreation to Epsom Wells he observed some townsmen, met by chance, singing together in company. Pepys and his young male servant were accustomed to sing psalms and motets together. During the time of the plague he hired a boat that already had a passenger, so that ‘he and I sung together the way down’.

Like many of his contemporaries he seemed to have an open mind about the vagaries of faith and devotion. On one Sunday, ‘I went out and looked into several churches’; if he liked the sermon he might stay until the end, but there were times when he slept through the oration. When the inventor Sir Samuel Morland and his wife entered a church with two footmen in livery the congregation took ‘much notice of them’, especially on ‘going into their coach after sermon with great gazeing’. He observed also ‘that I see religion, be it what it will, is but a humour … and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do’. There was always room for superstition, however. He carried a hare’s foot as a charm against illness, but a companion noticed that it did not have the proper ‘join’ in it. No sooner did he touch his friend’s charm than ‘my belly begin to be loose and to break wind’.

In pursuit of his duties at the Navy Office it was a matter of routine to accept gifts from various claimants to office or privileges. On one occasion he was offered in turn a rapier, a vessel of wine, a gown, and a silver hatband, in return for ‘a courtesy’. His master, Mountagu, told him that ‘in the meantime I will do you all the good jobs I can’ for making money. He was eager to make a profit from the hiring of some ships for service in Tangiers; he received a share of the proceeds ‘which I did not demand but did silently consent to it’. When he was handed a packet containing money, he emptied out a piece of gold and some pieces of silver, all the time averting his eyes so ‘that I might say I saw no money in the paper if ever I should be questioned about it’. Commerce of every kind was the essence of the state, and Pepys was keen to acquire a good wife for his brother ‘worth two hundred pounds in ready money’. He noted that at court all was ‘lust and gain’.

He had some interesting encounters. He recorded how one gentleman had served eight different governments in one year, 1659, ‘and he did name them all, and then failed unhappily in the ninth, viz that of the king’s coming in’. He was beside the king when a Quaker woman delivered a petition to him; Charles argued with her, ‘she replying still with these words, “O King!” and “thou’d” him all along’. He conversed with an experimenter, John Spong, who told him ‘that by his microscope of his own making he doth discover that the wings of a moth is made just as the feathers of the wing of a bird’. While he and Spong were talking, several sectarians were arrested for attending a service at a conventicle. Pepys added that ‘they go like lambs, without any resistance’. It was common for men and women to weep in this period, whether out of joy or sorrow.

This was an age of much observation and experiment. An acquaintance brought to his house one evening a 12-foot glass, through which they endeavoured to see the moon, Saturn and Jupiter. He met Robert Hooke in the street by chance, and the experimenter told him that he could estimate the number of strokes a fly made with its wings ‘by the note that it answers to in music during their flying’. Pepys had previously attended a lecture by Hooke on the art of feltmaking. While travelling by boat from Rotherhithe to Gravesend, he read Robert Boyle’s Hydrostatical Paradoxes.

He noticed ‘a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water’. When he purchased a watch he found it so marvellous that he kept it in his hand ‘seeing what a-clock it is 100 times’. He visited the country house of a goldsmith, Sir Robert Viner, where ‘he showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’. Black servants, slaves brought back from West Africa, had become very fashionable.

On Thanksgiving Day, 14 August 1666, in celebration of a recent sea victory over the Dutch, family and friends were very merry ‘flinging our fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way’. They then began ‘smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, till most of us were like devils’. They drank, and danced, and dressed up. One man put on the clothes of the serving boy and danced a jig; Elizabeth Pepys and her female friends put on periwigs. Pepys sometimes observed that, where there was no company, there was little pleasure.

Some phrases are redolent of the period. ‘He talked hog-high.’ ‘I am with child that…’ or ‘I am in pain for…’ meant I am anxious and impatient to be told something or for an imminent event. Someone’s antics ‘would make a dog laugh’. ‘I did laugh till I was ready to burst.’ ‘As she brews, let her bake.’

As he was writing, one winter night, a watchman came by with his bell under the window and cried out, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.’ And so to bed.

39

And not dead yet?

The early hopes for Charles’s reign had now faded. It had become clear enough that he was a very poor match for Oliver Cromwell, and the erstwhile cavaliers were bitterly hostile to a corrupt court and a mismanaged government; the revenues were misused while the king himself was at the gambling table with what John Evelyn described as ‘vast heaps of gold squandered away in a vain and profuse manner’. The great questions of state and of religion were left unsettled in an atmosphere of squabbling, cynicism, corruption and faction-fighting; the only thing that the king’s ministers shared was mutual hatred. The king did not have the patience or the intellect to formulate clear lines of policy or enunciate the ideas that might sustain them. He was reticent and secretive, ever intent upon concealing his opinions on men or on measures. Clarendon wrote to the duke of Ormonde in 1662 that ‘the worst is, the king is as discomposed as ever, and looks as little after his business, which breaks my heart, and makes me and other of your friends weary of our lives’.

Yet Clarendon himself, the most loyal and substantial figure of the regime, was also under attack. In the autumn of 1662 it emerged that he had been the prime agent in the sale of Dunkirk to the French; it had been captured by Cromwell’s men from the Spanish, but the one continental possession in English hands was now to be delivered to the nation’s old enemy. There were good reasons for the sale; the port was costly to maintain and was in no way essential to the national interest, but its surrender (so it was called) was considered to be an act of betrayal. Clarendon was accused of accepting French bribes, and the great mansion he was then building in London was dubbed ‘Dunkirk House’. The merchants in particular feared that Dunkirk would be used as a base for privateers intent upon seizing their ships; when the mobs of London grew restless at the news of the sale, the gates of the city were shut and double guards posted in various sensitive locations.

At the close of the year the king attempted to heal the religious divisions of the nation by making a ‘declaration of indulgence’ in which he expressed his regret at his failure to introduce ‘a liberty for tender consciences’; he proposed to ask parliament to give him the power to dispense some of his subjects from the Act of Uniformity and to begin removing penal legislation directed at those Roman Catholics ‘as shall live peaceably, modestly and without scandal’. It is the clearest possible evidence that he believed parliament had gone too far in imposing Anglican orthodoxy upon the realm. For this, he may also have blamed Clarendon. The lord chancellor was at the time crippled with gout and forced to keep to his house; he was in no position to object.

Yet the king’s appeal was ignored. When the fourth session of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ assembled in February 1663, the Commons refused to ratify the declaration. The king therefore was obliged to drop the matter and retire from a possible confrontation. It was in truth a significant failure, since he had proved himself unable to sustain the power of his royal prerogative in religious issues. In the spring of 1663 a new Militia Act was passed that reformed the local militia and placed them under the control of the lords-lieutenant of each county; they were given adequate funds, and were thus able to recruit more men for their service. It was reported that the measure was necessary to combat the continual threat of conspiracy and sedition, but it was feared by some that the king might use the troops for other purposes.

The navy rather than the army, however, was the priority. When parliament resumed once more in the spring of 1664 one of its first measures was a declaration or ‘trade resolution’ against the Dutch, complaining that ‘the subjects of the United Provinces’ had invaded the king’s rights in India, Africa and elsewhere by attacking English merchants and had committed ‘damages, affronts and injuries’ closer to home. It was believed that the Dutch wished to establish a trade monopoly throughout the known world, which was as dangerous as the ‘universal monarchy’ sought by Louis XIV.

The republic was therefore seen as a threat to English ships and to English commerce, but of course its very existence as a republic could be interpreted as an essential menace to the kingdom of England. The religion of the enemy was Calvinist in temper, and it was feared that the Dutch would support the cause of their co-religionists in England; they could thereby sow dissension against the king and the national faith. The ‘trade resolution’ was an aspect of the Anglican royalism asserted both by Lords and Commons. The fervour of the Commons, in particular, was matched by their actions. They agreed to raise the unprecedented sum of £2.5 million to assist the king in his prosecution of hostilities.

The formal declaration of war came, in February 1665, after months of preparation. The cause seems to have been largely popular, as far as such matters can be ascertained, particular among those merchants and speculators who would benefit from the embarrassment of Dutch trade; one of these was the king’s brother, James, duke of York. He led the Royal Africa Company that specialized in the business of slavery, and he invested in other commercial ventures. The conflict has therefore been described as the first purely commercial war in English history. As one hemp merchant, Captain Cocke, put it, ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must go down’.

A great victory was won at Lowestoft in the beginning of June under the leadership of the duke of York, when twenty-six Dutch vessels were seized or sunk. Each fleet would sail past the other firing its guns into the enemy’s hull and rigging until one or more ships ‘broke the line’, in which case the disabled vessels would be boarded or sunk with fire-ships. The two sides ‘knocked it out’, in the phrase of the time, for several hours.

The sound of the guns was heard even in London, and in an essay John Dryden recalled that ‘the noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense about the event which we knew was then deciding, everyone went following the sound as his fancy led him…’ The success would have been even greater if a courtier, while the duke of York was asleep in his cabin, had not called off the pursuit of the remaining ships, whether for fear of waking him, or of engaging once more with the enemy, is not known. In any case the momentum of the victory was not maintained in the wider war.

In August a squadron of English ships attacked a merchant convoy, but was beaten back. In the same month the fleet under the command of the earl of Sandwich was held off the Suffolk coast as a result of poor victualling, and then spent the next few weeks chasing Dutch ships through storm and rain. Some were captured but, when the prizes were dispersed among the flag officers, charges of fraud and theft were made against Sandwich; he never really managed to refute them, and the navy itself seemed complicit in corruption. The earl was deprived of his command and sent as an ambassador to Spain. Later in the year, when the English ships were laid up for repair, some Dutch vessels appeared at the mouth of the Thames and commenced a blockade; it was dispersed only when disease, and lack of supplies, forced them to return home. The blockade, however, had compounded the problems of high taxes and uncertain business that already beset the merchants. Overseas trade had been seriously set back by the war on the high seas, and the Baltic trade shrank away almost to nothing; woollen manufacture, the staple of England’s exports, was similarly depressed. A war fought for trade had become a war fatal to trade.

Yet already a greater threat had emerged in the streets of London. In his diary entry for 7 June 1665, ‘the hottest day that ever I felt in my life’, Samuel Pepys noted that

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to and chew – which took away the apprehension.

The plague had come back to London; houses infected with the distemper were shut up, the victims still often within, and a red cross 1 foot in height was painted on the doors. Pepys had purchased tobacco as a medical precaution.

So began a time of peril and great fear. The first signs of the disease were ‘tokens’ of discoloured skin; after three or four days ‘buboes’ or carbuncles erupted over the body and, if they did not suppurate, death was certain. Many victims were tied to the bed in the event of frenzy.

The ‘dead carts’ or ‘pest carts’ trundled through the lanes and alleys with their burden of corpses to be discharged in one of the many pits dug for the purpose; it is reported that in their misery some of the living flung themselves among the piles of the dead. Some lay dead, or dying, in the streets. Others fled wailing to the fields around London. Some people locked themselves away, and those that ventured outside looked on one another fearfully. ‘And not dead yet?’ ‘And still alive?’ Some, desperate beyond fear, sang and danced and drank in promiscuous gatherings. Others fell into a stupor of despair. It was whispered that demons in human shape wandered abroad; they were known as ‘hollow men’, and those that they struck soon died.

Prophets and fanatics roamed the streets bawling out threats and warnings. One of them, walking naked with a pan of burning coals on his head, invoked the judgement of God on the sinful city. Through the searingly hot months of July and August the fury of the plague rose ever higher. The principal thoroughfares were all but overgrown with grass. In September fires of sea-coal, one fire for every twelve houses, were kept burning in the streets for three days and nights. Yet they had no effect. As many as 10,000 fatalities were listed each week in the bills of mortality. It seemed that soon enough the city would be empty. But by the beginning of December the sickness abated, and the new year witnessed a return of many London families who had fled in panic. It was estimated that 100,000 had died.

The new year, 1666, was one of ill omen. The number had long been considered significant, heralding perhaps the coming of the Antichrist; for some it signified fire and apocalypse. In its Latin form, ‘MDCLXVI’, it is unique for including every Roman numeral once and in reverse sequence. The solar eclipse at the beginning of July, in this year, convinced many that the end of days was coming.

The prognostications elsewhere were not good. The king of France had signed a defensive treaty with the Dutch and, at the beginning of the year, he declared war upon England. In truth he did not do much for the benefit of his new ally, but his intervention increased public anxiety about the conduct of hostilities. There was no money and the lord high treasurer, the 4th earl of Southampton, asked Samuel Pepys, clerk of the naval board, ‘What would you have me do? I have given all I can for my life. Why will people not lend their money? Why will they not trust the king as well as Oliver?’ The reference to Cromwell’s success is interesting. The nation had received no benefit, and acquired no material gains, from these inconclusive and inglorious battles against the Dutch.

They were in any case still a formidable enemy. A battle at the beginning of June off the Flemish and English coasts lasted for four days, and at the end of it the English had lost twice as many ships and men as their rivals; the two sides had fought each other to exhaustion and, as one English commander put it, ‘they were as glad to be quit of us as we of them’. It was a desperate and bloody fight, leaving 6,000 Englishmen dead. Many of them were found floating in the seas wearing their dark ‘Sunday clothes’; they had previously been taken by the press-gangs on leaving church.

News then came, a week later, that the French had taken over the colonial possession of St Kitts. Louis XIV had decided to take a more active part in the maritime struggle and ordered his fleet to sea. The melancholy aspect of affairs convinced many that the government and the king were about to fall. A battle in late July was the occasion for some celebration, however, after the English fleet had pursued the fleeing Dutch over the North Sea for some thirty-six hours. The cry that had gone up before the engagement was: ‘If we do not beat them now, we shall never do it!’ But all of the participants were growing weary of a war that would last for another year.

London was not spared further horror. After the disaster of the plague, a small chimney fire at a bakery in Pudding Lane began a conflagration that would envelop most of the city. It was the very beginning of September 1666, after an unusually hot August had left the thatch and timber of the city bone dry; the fire was carried by strong southeast winds towards London Bridge and Fish Street.

It burned steadily towards the west, and John Evelyn noted that ‘the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it’. The molten lead from the roof of St Paul’s ran through the streets, according to John Evelyn, ‘glowing with fiery redness’. The Guildhall stood immured in flame like a burning coal. The people took to the water or fled to the fields in the north of the city, seeking safety from the burning drops that rained down upon them. The smoke now stretched for 50 miles. Yet not everyone ran in terror. The royal brothers, Charles and James, took an active part in exhorting, and even joining, those who were trying to contain the engulfing fires.

The fire abated after three days, having consumed five-sixths of the city and leaving a trail of destruction and desolation a mile and a half in length and half a mile in breadth. When John Evelyn clambered among the ruins, the ground still hot beneath his feet, he often did not know where he was. Yet the vitality of the city was not seriously harmed. The usual round of trade and commerce was established again within a year, and the work of rebuilding in brick and stone began; within two years of the Great Fire 1,200 houses had been constructed, and in the following year another 1,600. By 1677 most of the city was once again in place. It was said that it rose almost as quickly as it fell.

The year of ill omen, however, seemed to have fulfilled its destiny. In the month after the fire parliament reassembled in a state of gloom and anxiety. Rumours of conspiracy, by the French and Dutch, were everywhere. The Catholics, and the Quakers, were also blamed. One of those returned to parliament, Roger Pepys, cousin to Samuel, predicted that ‘we shall all be ruined very speedily’. A general fast was imposed upon the nation as a penance for what John Evelyn described as ‘our prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’. In the same period the king ordained that all French fashions should be banished from the court and that in their place a simple ‘Persian’ coat and tunic were to be worn; it was supposed to be a gesture towards thrift but it was essentially a token of his flippancy. The style was in any case soon abandoned.

After much debate, and intense scrutiny of the accounts provided by the Navy Board, the king was voted sufficient funds to fight another year of war; yet there was intense wrangling about the means of furnishing them. Should it be a hearth tax or a poll tax? Nobody seemed to know. As they talked and debated it was rumoured that the French were preparing an invasion, but this was discounted as a government ploy to hasten a decision.

The assessment was finally passed in the middle of January 1667, but of course the revenues were not collected. In the following month the Navy Board declared to the duke of York that ‘we are conscious of an utter incapacity to perform what his majesty and your royal highness seem to look for from us’. The shipyards were laid up without supplies or repairs. The seamen, deprived of pay and even of the necessities of life, were provoked to riot on several occasions. The City refused to lend money, and the treasury was exhausted.

It was time for peace. The king and his council had tentatively begun the process of negotiation with the Dutch, and Charles himself was at the same time engaged in private negotiations with the French king; they had no reason to fight against each other, and it was eventually agreed that they should abstain from mutual hostilities. Charles also trusted that his fellow sovereign would be able to persuade or bully his Dutch allies into signing a similar agreement. Charles and Louis had sent their letters through Henrietta Maria, respectively mother and paternal aunt of the two men; the English king kept the matter secret from even his most intimate councillors, thus emphasizing his propensity for clandestine dealings.

In the meantime, to save expenditure, the privy council had no choice but to reduce the scale of naval operations; only a ‘summer guard’ of ships would be sent to sea in order to protect the merchant vessels. It was also believed that, given the increasingly futile nature of the war, hostilities were about to be suspended. This incapacity led directly to one of the most humiliating episodes in English naval history.

At the beginning of May 1667, a great conference between the warring parties was called at Breda; it soon became clear to the Dutch, however, that the English were not prepared to be over-generous in the negotiations. So they decided to try force for the final time to extort concessions and to hasten the progress of the discussions. In the following month, therefore, they launched a raid into the Thames estuary; they broke the defences of the harbour at Chatham and proceeded to burn four ships before towing away the largest ship of the fleet, the Royal Charles, and returning with it undamaged.

Panic ran through the streets of London. It was said that the Dutch were coming, and the trained bands were called out for the city’s defence. In truth the enemy fleet could have found its way to London Bridge without much difficulty. It was reported that Harwich, Colchester and Dover were already burned. The reports were false but the events at Chatham were a symbolic, as well as a naval, disaster. One parliamentarian, John Rushworth, wrote that ‘the people are ready to tear their hairs off their heads’. Sir William Batten, surveyor of the navy, exclaimed, ‘By God! I think the devil shits Dutchmen!’

The Dutch now pressed their advantage and the king, humiliated at home and abroad, conceded some of their demands. The principle of negotiation was that of ‘uti possidetis’, by means of which the parties retained possession of that which they had taken by force in the course of conflict. As a result, England lost much of the West Indies to France and the invaluable island of nutmeg, Run, part of Indonesia, to the Dutch. In return, however, it retained New Netherland; this was the colonial province of the Netherlands that included the future states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut. Yet at the time the gains did not match the loss of national prestige.

After the disaster at Chatham talk of corruption and conspiracy was once more in the air; some blamed the papists, and others even blamed the bishops. It was said that, at the time of the Dutch raid, the king was chasing a moth in the apartments of Lady Castlemaine. It was supposed by many that the nation was so mismanaged by the king that it would once more turn against the Stuarts and become a republic. Charles was the subject of distrust as well as dislike, and it was feared that he was colluding with Louis XIV in some popish plot to impose absolute rule. At times of peril and disaster, fear is contagious.

Yet opinion turned in particular against Clarendon who was, quite unfairly, accused of mismanaging the war; he had in fact opposed it from the start, but he was a convenient scapegoat. He had always been disliked by the men and women about the king – whom John Evelyn described as ‘the buffoons and the misses’ – while an attempt to impeach him had already been made by the earl of Bristol in the Lords. But the chancellor was now in infinitely greater danger. It was being said that the king had turned against him. Charles disliked being lectured or patronized; serious men in any case made him feel uncomfortable. It was not that Clarendon annoyed the king; he bored him. He was disliked by parliament for his fervent support of the prerogative power of the king, and by dissenters for his equally vehement espousal of the established Church. Gilbert Burnet, the historian of his own time, wrote that ‘he took too much upon him and meddled in everything, which was his greatest error’.

The enemies of Clarendon now gathered for the kill. His wife had died early in August, and his obvious grief incapacitated him from robustly defending himself. His absence from the privy council encouraged other councillors to speak against him; the king was told that Clarendon prevented the advice of others from reaching him and that he had denied any freedom of debate within the council chamber itself. Thus all the ills of the kingdom could, in one form or another, be blamed upon him. If he was removed, the hostility towards the administration might abate. Certainly his departure would gratify the Commons that had long despised him; it might help to lighten the mood of the next session.

In the middle of August the king sent the duke of York to the lord chancellor with the request that he resign his office. Clarendon unwisely refused and a week later, on 25 August, a more peremptory demand came that he should surrender the seals of office forthwith. Again, Clarendon refused. The affair was the sole news of the court, and it had become necessary for Charles to assert his authority against this overweening councillor. The king demanded the seals, in redoubled fury, and they were at last returned.

The king told one of Clarendon’s allies, the duke of Ormonde, that ‘his behaviour and humour was grown so unsupportable to myself, and to all the world else, that I could no longer endure it, and it was impossible for me to live with it, and do those things with the parliament that must be done or the government will be lost’. Yet the affair may not be as straightforward as that. Pepys was told that there were many explanations ‘not fit to mention’. The king may genuinely have believed that the lord chancellor was no longer capable of service, but there are suggestions that in some way Clarendon had interfered with his love-life; he seems to have been instrumental, for example, in the sudden marriage of one of the king’s mistresses. It is impossible now to untangle the myriad webs of court intrigue.

The pack was in full pursuit of Clarendon, now that royal favour had fallen away, and it was believed that the king had become very interested in his former confidant’s prosecution. The charges brought against Clarendon by the Commons included illegal imprisonment of various suspects, the intention of imposing military rule, and the sale of Dunkirk to the French. Since the lord chancellor had always been an advocate of arbitrary government, the charges may have been in large measure true. The Lords, however, resolved that Clarendon could not be committed; they seem to have concluded that one of their own members should not be impeached on a whim of the lower house. The king wondered aloud why his once chief minister was still in the country, and by the end of November it was rumoured that he would pick a tribunal of peers prepared to try Clarendon and execute him. The earl now heeded the advice of those closest to him and secretly took ship for France where he began an exile in the course of which he would write perhaps the most interesting history of his times.

It is now pertinent to note that after the forced abdication of the lord chancellor the administration of the king’s affairs became ever more murky and corrupt. In the absence of Clarendon the senior councillors were now Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale, whose initials spelled out ‘cabal’; for ever afterwards, the word was employed to designate secretive and self-interested administration. They were an alphabetical coalition, and in truth they can now be seen as mere ciphers in the game of politics; their policies brought nothing about, and their principal object was to make as much money as they could from their period of office before the wheel turned. Clifford, in particular, was known as ‘the Bribe Master General’.

They suited the king, however, because he could manipulate them. George Savile, the 1st marquess of Halifax, wrote that ‘he lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them’. The king was now in charge of all affairs and, without the interference of Clarendon, he could bend and twist in whichever way he wished. So arose one of the most devious and inconsistent periods of English history.

In the beginning the acknowledged first minister was George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, described by Gilbert Burnet as one who was ‘never true either to things or persons, but forsakes every man and departs from every maxim, sometimes out of levity and unsettledness of fancy and sometimes out of downright falsehood’. This was a fit companion for a king. He had already emerged as one of the circle of wits at court, but now he had ambitions to be a statesman as well as a satirist.

He was the son of the ill-fated 1st duke, assassinated by John Felton at the beginning of the reign of Charles I. He was thereafter brought up in the royal household in the company of Charles II, and had shared many exploits with the young king; he had fought beside him at Worcester. His rise after the fall of Clarendon was still remarkable, however, he having previously only obtained the rank of Master of the Horse. The king consulted him on all matters of importance, and the foreign ambassadors generally applied to him for advice before being admitted to the king’s presence.

If Buckingham had one abiding principle, it was that of religious toleration; he had so many religious whims and fancies of his own that he was happy to allow freedom of thought to others. The nonconformists were in any case now in a more secure position than before. Fears of a papist court and of a papist queen, and a prevailing belief that the ‘Great Fire of London’ had been concocted by Roman Catholics in the service of France, gave sectarians and dissenters a novel air of loyalty and trustworthiness.

Quakers began to meet in London, and soon enough monthly assemblies were in place all over the country; they were safer now than at any previous time. The Baptists of Bristol regathered. The Conventicle Act of 1664 was effectively dead, and was formally abolished in 1668. Certain Presbyterian ministers prepared the ground for a separate Church if they could not be assimilated within the established one. At the sessions and assizes of the realm Catholic recusants, rather than nonconformists, were presented for judgement.

The bishop of Norwich preached a sermon in 1666 in which he declared that ‘it is an honour which learned men owe to one another to allow liberty of dissent in matters of mere opinion’. That liberty was already apparent in the survival of Brownists, Fifth Monarchy men, Sabbatarians, Muggletonians, Ranters, Anabaptists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists and Familists. We may invoke the words of John Bunyan, ‘I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel.’ They were perhaps not a force to challenge the popular Anglicanism of the high-church party, but the once stringent laws against them were now unenforced or only hesitantly invoked. A contemporary tract, Discourse of the Religion of England, 1667, observed that nonconformists were ‘spread through city and country; they make no small part of all ranks and all sorts of men. They are not excluded from the nobility, among the gentry they are not a few; but none are more important than they in the trading part of the people.’ That is why London was a city of dissent.

From this period, then, we can trace the emergence of the doctrine known as Latitudinarianism that propounded comprehension and tolerance in all matters of doctrine and practice. The ‘Latitude men’, as they were known, emphasized the power of reason as ‘the candle of the Lord’ and believed that such matters as liturgy and ritual were ‘things indifferent’. This might be said to be the unwritten principle of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. God, and Christianity, were no longer mysterious.

40

The true force

In the early autumn of 1664 a young scholar visited Stourbridge Fair, just outside Cambridge, where he purchased a prism; he took the instrument back to his lodging at Trinity College where ‘having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s light, I placed my prism at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall’. By these means did Isaac Newton experiment with ‘the celebrated phenomena of colours’.

In this year, too, he also experimented upon himself. He inserted a bodkin or large needle ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could’; at the risk of blinding himself, he wished to alter the curve of his retina and observe the results. These were the preliminary steps to his theory of colour that would revolutionize the discipline of optics; it was he who made the discovery that white light was not some primary or basic hue but a mixture of all the other colours in the spectrum. The conclusion was so contrary to the principles of common sense that no one had ever considered it before.

So began the career of the most remarkable mathematicians of the seventeenth century and one who, more than anyone else, has shaped the perceptions of the modern world. The scientists of NASA, in the United States, still use the calculations of Isaac Newton. The two years after he purchased the prism at Stourbridge Fair were his years of glory, during which he penetrated the mysteries of light and gravitation. The story of the falling apple may or may not be accurate but it is true enough that, at the age of twenty-three, he began his exploration of the enigma of that force which held the world and universe together. John Maynard Keynes was to call him ‘the last of the magicians’.

The time came when he was obliged to enter the public world of seventeenth-century science and, at the end of 1671, he allowed his 6-inch reflecting telescope to be displayed to the Fellows of the Royal Society. Newton had made the instrument himself, fashioning his own tools for the purpose, and it was taken in triumph to Charles II, who marvelled at it. Newton was duly elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to which institution he was attached for the rest of hislife.

The Royal Society may be deemed to be the jewel of Charles II’s reign. At the end of November 1660, a group of physicians and natural scientists announced the formation of a ‘college for the promoting of physic-mathematical experimental learning’; they were in part inspired by Francis Bacon’s vision of ‘Solomon’s House’ in The New Atlantis, and they shared Bacon’s passion for experimental and inductive science. They were men of a practical and pragmatic temper, with a concomitant interest in agriculture as well as navigation, manufactures as well as medicine. All questions of politics or religion were excluded from the deliberations of the Fellows, and indeed their pursuit of practical enquiry was in part designed to quell the ‘enthusiasm’ and to quieten the spiritual debates that had helped to foment the late civil wars. They met each week, at Gresham College in Bishopsgate, where papers were read on the latest invention or experiment. It was in their company that Sir Isaac Newton first propounded his revolutionary theories of light.

The last four decades of the seventeenth century in fact witnessed an extraordinary growth in scientific experiment to the extent that, in 1667, the historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, could already celebrate the fact that ‘an universal zeal towards the advancements of such designs has not only overspread our court and universities, but the shops of our mechanicks, the fields of our gentlemen, the cottages of our farmers, and the ships of our merchants’.

An enquiring and inventive temper was now more widely shared, whereby the whole field of human knowledge became the subject of speculation. The Fellows of the Royal Society debated a method of producing wind by means of falling water; they explored the sting of a bee and the feet of flies; they were shown a baroscope that measured changes in the pressure of the air and a hygroscope for detecting water in the atmosphere; they set up an enquiry into the state of English agriculture and surveyed the methods of tin-mining in Cornwall. They conducted experiments on steam, on ventilation, on gases and on magnetism; thermometers, pumps and perpetual motion machines were brought before them. The origins of the industrial and agricultural ‘revolutions’, conventionally located in the eighteenth century, are to be found in the previous age. In the seventeenth century, providentially blessed by the genius of Francis Bacon at its beginning, we find a general desire for what Sprat described as ‘the true knowledge of things’.

At a meeting of the society in the early months of 1684 Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were discussing the dynamics of planetary motion. Halley put a question to them. Could the force that keeps the planets moving around the sun decrease as an inverse square of its distance? Wren and Hooke agreed that this was very likely, but no one had as yet been able to prove the point. So Halley travelled to Cambridge, where he consulted Newton on the problem of the sun and the revolving planets. Newton readily concurred in Halley’s hypothesis.

‘How do you know this?’

‘Why, I have calculated it.’

This was a reply that, as in Halley’s words, struck him ‘with joy and amazement’. No one had ever done it before. By the end of the year Newton had revisited his calculations and had produced a short treatise, De motu corporum in gyrum, that deciphered and proved mathematically the motion of bodies in orbit. He pressed on with his deliberations and, within the space of eighteen months, had completed the treatise that would confer upon him the acclamation of the world. He formulated the three laws of motion that are the foundation of his theory of universal gravitation, a revolutionary principle that proclaims the universe to be bound together by one force that can be mathematically promulgated and understood. It was the great revelation of the seventeenth century. Newton had understood the cosmos, and made it amenable to human laws. There was indeed a force that bound the sun and all the stars. ‘It is now established’, he wrote, ‘that this force is gravity, and therefore we shall call it gravity from now on.’

Newton was eventually chosen to become president of the Royal Society and for the last twenty years of his life governed its meetings with a somewhat forbidding dignity. He ruled that there should be no ‘whispering, talking nor loud laughters. If dissensions rose in any sort … they tended to find out truth, but ought not to arise to any personality.’ These were to be the new truths of science, objective and impersonal, as adumbrated in seventeenth-century London. One Fellow, William Stukeley, recalled that ‘everything was transacted with great attention and solemnity and decency’ for in truth this was the century in which science became a new form of religion with its laws and principles treated as matters of unassailable dogma. Newton himself declared that natural philosophy now ‘consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature and reducing them, as far as may be, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things’. This is our inheritance from the seventeenth century.

41

Hot news

The casual deviousness of the king soon became apparent when at the beginning of 1668 he negotiated a ‘Triple Alliance’ with the Dutch republic and Sweden to oppose the French armies that had already occupied part of the Spanish Netherlands; it was a general defensive league against the encroaching power of the French and, at the time, it was regarded as a great stroke of policy. It was considered to be better to be allied with two Protestant powers against a common Catholic enemy. It was, more pertinently, meant to prove to Louis XIV that England still possessed significant influence in the game between the states.

Yet the king wrote to his sister residing at the French court, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, that ‘I have done nothing to prejudice France in the agreement’. Even as he allied himself with the Dutch, in fact, he was preparing to move ever closer to France in a secret plan to destroy their republic. He had the ability to pursue two different, and indeed opposing, policies at the same time. Feeling great admiration for his cousin, Louis XIV, he also needed the French king’s money and perhaps, in some future contingency, his men. Louis ruled the most powerful state in Europe, and it was much better to be his ally than his enemy; he was also part of the family and, in dynastic terms, family was more important than country.

Suspicion was in the air. Pepys reported that in London ‘people do cry out in the streets … that we are betrayed by people about the king and shall be delivered up to the French’. In the ‘bawdy-house riots’ of the spring, the apprentices of London revised the ancient custom of attacking brothels on Shrove Tuesday. But this was no ritual performance; fifteen of their leaders would be tried for high treason, and four of them were hanged. The demonstrations involved thousands of people, and lasted for five days.

The riots began on Easter Monday when some brothels in Poplar were attacked and demolished; the insurrection spread on the following day to Moorfields, East Smithfield and Holborn. On Wednesday the apprentices, swelled by an appreciable force from Southwark, attacked the bawdy-houses of Moorfields. They did not form an inchoate crowd: they were mustered into regiments and marched behind flags; they carried iron bars and axes. Some of the more notorious prisons were also besieged.

The king himself professed not to understand the motive of the apprentices in attacking the brothels. ‘Why, why, do they go to them, then?’ he is reported to have asked. But in fact the brothels were a sign, or token, of what was for many a larger problem. In attacking the brothels the Londoners were attacking the perceived morals of the court and, in opposing its morals, they were disowning its principles. One of their cries was that ‘ere long they would come and pull Whitehall down’.

The king’s favourite mistress, Lady Castlemaine, had converted to Roman Catholicism at the end of 1663. She was a sign, therefore, of the court’s leaning towards papistry and was a target of much virulent comment as a ‘whore’ and worse. That is another reason why the brothels were attacked. The bishops were also condemned for keeping mistresses, and the archbishop of Canterbury was rumoured to retain a prostitute; other prelates were ‘given to boys’. When the apprentices called out for ‘reformation’ they were giving voice to the pleas of the dissenters who distrusted or hated the established Church.

So sexual laxity was associated with papistry, and papistry with treason, and treason with the king of France. It was an unstable compound of rumour and fear, but all the more potent for that. The rioters could not have discerned the king’s secret purposes but, in their distrust, they were in fact close to the truth. Soon after the formation of the ‘Triple Alliance’ Buckingham entered negotiations with the duchess of Orléans in France. Charles meanwhile apologized to the French envoy for having entered the treaty with Holland and Sweden insinuating that he would like to establish a much closer union with Louis. In the spring of 1668 the king decided to prorogue parliament for what turned out to be the unprecedented period of seventeen months; in its absence he might more easily plot and plan.

At the beginning of 1669 he sprang a surprise. He called his brother, James, and three of his most important councillors to his private chamber where with tears in his eyes he announced his desire for conversion to the Catholic faith. His brother was soon to be received into that communion, and would remain a staunch and indeed almost hysterical Catholic for the rest of his life. The honesty and fidelity of the king are more doubtful. If Charles was preparing himself for negotiations with the devout French king, what could be better than to declare his espousal of the same religion?

A secret emissary was sent to the French court in March with the offer of an offensive and defensive alliance together with a request for men, money and ships in the event of a war with the Dutch. Charles also promised to declare himself a Catholic if, in return, Louis XIV would give him the sum of £200,000 to secure himself against public wrath. He never did make any such announcement, and it seems that he was converted only on his deathbed; he was adept at the arts of dissimulation and hypocrisy even in the great affairs of state.

Throughout this year, and the first half of the next, negotiations between the two kings continued in absolute secrecy. The English ambassador in Paris, and the French ambassador in London, were not informed. Charles’s anti-Catholic ministers were not told. The king continued negotiations with the Dutch as if nothing in the world had changed. By late summer or early autumn 1669, Charles and Louis reached agreement. Louis would come to Charles’s aid whenever the English king announced his Catholicism, and the two would join together in an assault upon the Dutch.

Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, arrived at Dover in the middle of May 1670, with diverse documents from the French court that she gave to her brother. Among these was a secret paragraph which read that ‘the king of England, being convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion, is resolved to declare it, and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the state of his country’s affairs permit’. Charles hoped and believed that the majority of his subjects had such affection for him that they would not protest ‘but as there are unquiet spirits who mask their designs under the guise of religion, the king of England, for the peace of his kingdom, will avail himself of the assistance of the king of France’. The king was still engaged in subterfuge against his most intimate councillors. He allowed Buckingham, for example, to negotiate a version of the treaty that did not contain this important paragraph concerning the king’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Instead he was asked to press on with a treaty of alliance that made no mention of the secret. He was not aware of the collusion. It is unlikely that Charles ever had any intention of announcing his conversion, however, and the commitment was in large part a ploy to bind the French king more tightly to him.

The financial reward granted to the king was not large. He was to be paid £140,000 – half in advance – as a token of the French king’s favour. He was also to be paid approximately £210,000 during each year of the proposed war with the Dutch, with the first instalment to be sent to him three months before the actual declaration of hostilities. The king of England had become a pensionary of the king of France, and had in effect sold his sovereignty. Another difficulty was apparent. If the French king should ever release into the world the secret paragraph, Charles’s hold over his subjects might be destroyed; so Louis had a potent weapon in any confrontation with his fellow sovereign.

The counterfeit treaty was signed towards the close of the year, while the secret agreement reached earlier in the spring was not revealed even to the king’s confidants. The alliance with Louis against the Dutch, however, could not be concealed for ever. The popular sentiment against France was already very strong, and the Venetian ambassador commented that ‘although the king may join France, his subjects will not follow him’. A rumour was spread that French agents were kidnapping English children to take their blood as a cure for Louis’s supposed leprosy. It was clear to the king’s men that, if there was to be a war with the Dutch, it would have to be very short and very successful before public anger turned against them.

Yet how was any proposed war to be financed? In the intervals between various recesses and prorogations, parliament voted only modest supplies. The French pension itself was not over-generous. The king’s own hereditary revenues were all pledged to repay old debts but, as a sign of boldness or desperation, it was determined to postpone the repayment of all those loans. This became known as ‘the stop’, imposed on 2 January 1672. All payments due from the exchequer were cancelled, so that incoming revenues could be spent upon the preparations for war.

The principal victims were the goldsmiths operating as bankers, who in turn passed on the loss and refused to discharge to their clients the cash they held on deposit. It seemed that ‘the stop’ might also soon be put to trade itself. Yet another casualty, however, was the king, who at a stroke lost credibility; the financial probity of the government was severely undermined and it was not at all clear that anyone would lend to it again. One contemporary confided to his diary that the decision ‘will amaze all men and ruin thousands’.

In the spring of 1672, the French declared war on the Dutch; Charles immediately followed their example, and justified hostilities by citing the attempts of the republic to supplant English trade and to harass English traders. He also mentioned the fact that he was personally insulted by Dutch caricatures and publications. Two days before the call to war, Charles had honoured another undertaking to Louis by issuing a ‘declaration of indulgence’ that included his Catholic subjects. The nonconformists were granted complete freedom of worship while the Roman Catholic ‘recusants’ were permitted to worship in their private houses. It was a signal use of the royal prerogative at a time when parliament was not in session. Licences to hold public meetings were now generously and variously distributed to the nonconformists. John Bunyan was one of those released from prison. It may also have occurred to dissenters and Catholics that their new religious liberties now depended upon royal favour.

The measure could also have been designed to assist the king’s brother, who had recently been received into the Catholic communion. James, duke of York, by his own account, had been converted after reading certain tracts for and against the Roman faith; he also perused church histories and came to the conclusion that none of the English reformers ‘had power to do what they did’. His faith was a matter of conviction and principle; for his brother it was a question of expediency.

It was said by the earl of Arlington that the ‘declaration of indulgence’ was so intended ‘that we might keep all quiet at home while we are busy abroad’. Yet hostilities had already begun. In the middle of March an English squadron attempted to detain and board a rich Dutch fleet of merchant vessels on its way home from Smyrna and Malaga. Its commander had been warned in advance, however, and was accompanied by a convoy that allowed him to elude the English enemy. It was a humiliation for Charles, who had also been deprived of the treasure he had hoped to capture. The affair did not bode well for the greater war.

The duke of York had been appointed as lord high admiral, but Charles played a large part in preparing and arming the fleet. In the early summer of 1672 an inconclusive battle took place near Sole Bay, off the coast of Suffolk, in which both sides claimed success. Since the original plan of the English was to sail across the North Sea and blockade the Dutch in their home ports, they could hardly be described as the victors. It was clear enough that this would be no easy fight for the seas. The French fleet, ostensibly present to aid their allies, had played no part in the battle and thus earned the angry rebukes of the English; soon enough, in popular opinion, the French would be far more hated than the Dutch. John Evelyn observed in his diary entry for 27 June that the inconclusive battle ‘showed the folly of hazarding so brave a fleet, and losing so many good men, for no provocation but that the Hollanders exceeded us in industry, and in all things but envy’.

The armies of Louis XIV had more success. They poured across the Rhine in the first two weeks of June and attacked the territories of the United Provinces; there seemed no possibility of withstanding their advance, and some of the principal cities were obliged to open their gates to the invaders. The fires from the French camps could be seen from Amsterdam. Of the seven republics of the United Provinces, only Holland and Zealand remained unconquered. At this perilous juncture the Dutch opened their dykes and flooded the country to prevent any further French advance. The land war came to a peremptory halt.

Charles had asked for a further £1 million from the French king, for the maintenance of the war, but Louis had refused. So Charles had no choice but to recall parliament in the hope of obtaining funds. Parliament returned in February 1673. In its absence a war had been declared and a declaration of religious indulgence had been issued. It might have seemed superfluous to requirements, except that it knew its power over the raising of money. The king had hoped to meet its members after a successful campaign against the Dutch, but that possibility had been removed.

A new lord chancellor had become the king’s official spokesman in the lords. The earl of Shaftesbury would soon become the most controversial man in the kingdom but, in these years, he was one of the most vigorous supporters of the royal prerogative; Charles would eventually describe him as ‘the weakest and wickedest man of the age’ but at this time he relied upon his judgement as an administrator and adviser. Shaftesbury had been an enthusiastic supporter of Oliver Cromwell, and even a member of the Barebone’s Parliament, but by dint of eloquence and industry he had managed to exorcize his interesting past. He would in turn inspire one of the most powerful pieces of satirical verse when he was denounced by John Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel:

For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfixt in principles and place;

In pow’r unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace.

A fiery soul which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy-body to decay.

Parliament met in an unsettled and fractious mood. It was angry in particular that the king had seen fit to issue a declaration of religious indulgence without obtaining its consent; his action was deemed to be unconstitutional. Parliament was not necessarily opposed to the Dutch war but, if it was to vote supplies for the continuation of hostilities, its authority must be reasserted. The Commons then passed a resolution that parliamentary statutes concerning religion could not be suspended or cancelled except by Act of Parliament, thus denying the king’s power in matters of ‘indulgence’.

Charles tried to resist with the help of the Lords but, in desperate need of money, eventually he submitted. After a number of rancorous exchanges he cancelled the declaration of indulgence and said that ‘what had been done with respect to the suspension of the penal laws should never be drawn into consequence’. The king broke the seal of the original declaration with his own hands. Bonfires were lit in the streets of London and, by the end of the month, Charles had received the supply of funds he so badly needed.

Parliament had taken aim at papists rather than dissenters, since the Catholic recusants were still believed to pose a threat to the state. Abednego Seller, in The History of Passive Obedience, suggested that ‘treason in papists is like original sin to mankind; they all have it in their natures, though many of them may deny it, or not know it’. Some members believed that the ‘declaration’ had in fact been part of a papist plot concocted by Charles and Louis to impose that religion upon England.

So in March 1673, the Commons passed a measure that became known as the Test Act. All aspirants to office or to a place of trust were to swear the oath of royal supremacy as well as the oath of allegiance, thus placing king before pope; they were also obliged to take the sacrament according to the rite of the Church of England and to swear that ‘I declare that I believe there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’. This struck at the heart of Catholic belief. When the king gave his assent to the Test Act a ‘great hum’ of approval arose in parliament. Charles was heard to say that he would now purge his court of all Catholics except his barber, ‘whom he mean[s] to keep in despite of all their bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand’. The remark had a point; the king trusted the Catholic who put a razor to his throat.

The first casualty was James, duke of York, who was obliged to retire from public life. He resigned as lord high admiral and command of the fleet was entrusted to Prince Rupert, who last appeared in these pages as the leader of the royalist cavalry during the Civil War. It was therefore advertised to the world that the king’s brother and heir apparent was a Roman Catholic; immediately rumour and innuendo began to surround him. It was widely believed, for example, that the lord chancellor himself, the earl of Shaftesbury, was plotting against him in an effort to exclude him from the throne. When James did not receive communion with his brother in the royal chapel John Evelyn wrote in his diary that it ‘gave exceeding grief and scandal to the whole nation, that the heir of it, and the son of a martyr for the Protestant religion, should apostatize. What the consequence of this will be, God only knows, and wise men dread.’

One of the king’s principal councillors and one of the original ‘cabal’, Thomas Clifford, also resigned all of his posts. He was a secret Catholic, and it had been suggested that the Test Act was in part formulated by his rivals precisely in order to remove him from office. He died soon after. Confidence now flowed to yet another of Charles’s ministers. Thomas Osborne, soon to become the earl of Danby, was a staunch Anglican who had opposed the Dutch war; he had also been a signal success as an administrator and, on Clifford’s resignation, he was appointed to be lord treasurer.

The preparation for another year of hostilities with the Dutch was not undertaken with any great enthusiasm; the discovery of James’s Catholicism called into further question the alliance with papist France and the attack upon a fellow Protestant state. The king himself is reported to have been vacillating and inconsistent, ready to prosecute war on one day and ready to retire from conflict on the next. Shaftesbury said of his master that ‘there is not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence in his word or friendship’.

In July Charles ordered Rupert to avoid any naval confrontation unless he could be sure to win it decisively. He had already returned to negotiations with the Dutch, and simply wished to apply pressure upon them. No such clear outcome emerged from the last sea battle of the war, the battle of the Texel, when the Dutch and English vessels fought a long and inconclusive struggle that left the waters filled with wreckage and floating bodies. It was notable, also, for the inactivity of the French fleet that simply stood apart and watched. Prince Rupert wrote later of the French admiral’s reluctance to become involved that ‘it wanted neither signal nor instruction to tell him what he should then have done; the case was so plain to every man’s eye in the whole fleet’. It was now believed by many that Louis XIV was happy to watch the two maritime nations destroy one another’s navies, thus adding more fire to the anger of the English against their nominal allies.

James increased the anti-Catholic bias of the nation by taking advantage of the parliamentary recess to betroth himself to a papist princess. His previous wife, Anne Hyde, had died two years earlier, leaving him with two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. The new bride was of quite another nature. Mary of Modena was fifteen but already a devout Catholic, and it was reported that the French king highly approved of the match and might even provide a dowry for the occasion. The imminent prospect of a royal Catholic dynasty was not one that the English favoured. When Mary eventually arrived in England she was generally greeted with sullen silence by the populace. When she was allowed to sit in the queen’s presence, the English ladies ‘humped’ and walked out.

When parliament reconvened towards the end of October 1673, the outcry against the marriage was immediate. Sir William Temple declared that the effort to defeat papistry with the Test Act would come to nothing ‘if it got footing so near the throne’ and he begged the king to forbid the proposed match. A resolution to that effect was almost unanimously approved.

A broader assault upon the administration now began. Some of the members had already stated that they would not vote a penny more for the war unless and until they had a voice in its management. A resolution to that effect was amended with the proviso that no money should be granted until the previous supply of war funds had been collected. It was also found necessary to give room for a debate on ‘grievances’, principal among them the French alliance and the war against the Dutch. At the beginning of November it was declared that the standing army was also a ‘grievance’, perhaps not the most appropriate note to be struck during a war. On 5 November the old sport of pope-burning returned to the streets, when the effigy of Pope Clement X was set on fire by the London apprentices. A figure of a Frenchman was also used for target practice.

Charles was aware that his lord chancellor, the earl of Shaftesbury, had helped to foment opposition against his brother and that he was steadily becoming the leading spokesman for the Protestant interest. So he dismissed him from his councils, and appointed Heneage Finch as lord chancellor; it was reported that the king changed his mind six times, in as many hours, over the appointment. The Venetian envoy reported to the doge and senate that ‘the king calls a cabinet council for the purpose of not listening to it, and the ministers hold forth in it so as not to be understood’.

Shaftesbury did not go quietly, however, and against the king’s direct order remained in London to recruit allies for his anti-Catholic cause; for the rest of his political life he would organize the opposition to the king. When parliament met again at the beginning of 1674, after a brief prorogation, the attack moved on to the king’s principal ministers who were ‘popishly affected, or otherwise obnoxious and dangerous’. Lauderdale had ruled on the king’s behalf in Scotland, and was accused of favouring absolutism; it was resolved therefore that the king should remove him from ‘all his employments and from the royal presence and councils for ever’.

The duke of Buckingham was next to be arraigned and agreed to speak before the Commons; he tried to excuse himself by shifting the blame onto the ineptitude of others, and declared that ‘I can hunt the hare with a pack of hounds but not with a pack of lobsters’. It was widely believed that the lobsters in question were the king and his brother. His wit did not impress the Commons, however, and it was determined that he should also be removed from all of his employments. Buckingham later complained that ‘men ruined by their princes and in disgrace are like places struck with thunder; it is accounted unlawful to approach them’.

Arlington was then in turn impeached for treason and crimes of high misdemeanour, but his case was ceded to a special committee. The ‘cabal’ had in any case now been dissolved. It was obvious to everyone that the king was ready to sacrifice ministers when he had no further use for them.

He was also engaged in extreme and unwise deception. Shaftesbury had opposed the king’s measures in part because he had become acquainted, by one means or another, with the secret treaty whereby Charles became the pensionary of the king of France in exchange for his conversion to Catholicism. At the opening of parliament in January 1674, however, Charles stated that rumours of ‘secret articles of dangerous consequence’ were completely untrue and he declared, ‘I assure you, there is no other treaty with France, either before or since, not already printed, which shall not be made known.’ He was perceived to fumble with his notes at this point.

It had now become clear that the war against the Dutch could not be continued; the Spanish had now entered an alliance with the enemy and it was unthinkable that England would also declare war against Spain. Too much trade was at stake. So the Dutch now appointed the Spanish envoy in London as an arbitrator for peace. It could not come soon enough for all the participants. The Dutch agreed to pay an indemnity and consented to salute the English flag at sea; this was really a question of saving face, on the English side, and the outcome was hardly enough to justify a costly and bloody war of two years’ duration. The king announced the peace to parliament on 24 February, and then unexpectedly prorogued the session until November. The members of the Commons looked upon one another in amazement in light of the fact that, in the words of Lord Conway, ‘they had sat so long upon eggs and could hatch nothing’. Conway also observed that ‘now there will be a new game played at court, and the designs and interests of all men will be different from what they were’.

*

Thomas Osborne, who had emerged as the king’s principal minister, was created earl of Danby in the summer of the year. He was a determined and pugnacious Yorkshireman who firmly believed that the Anglican faith was of paramount importance in unifying the nation and who had as a result favoured alliances with the Protestant states of Europe. He was determined to reform royal finances, and to maintain control over parliament by any and every means possible; those methods included clandestine payments to members from secret service funds and the select distribution of various titles or offices. Danby did his best to demonstrate that the king was wholly in favour of the Anglican cause, and that Charles was determined to maintain an anti-French and an anti-Catholic stance.

As a pronounced royalist and courtier he was of course opposed by the earl of Shaftesbury and by the duke of Buckingham who, abandoned by the king, now joined together in the campaign against the court. It has been often observed that in the creation of these factions and interests we may see the modest beginnings of ‘party’ in the contemporary sense. From 1674 forward an ‘opposition’ to the royal cause began to emerge in the Commons, with the aim of imposing restrictions upon the king’s power and of upholding the supremacy of parliament.

Its members did not consider or call themselves a party, because the term implied disruption or disloyalty, yet in 1673 a member of parliament, Sir Thomas Meres, could speak of ‘this side of the house and that side’. The term was considered to be unparliamentary but it was observed, for example, that a cluster of members sat together in the ‘southeast corner’ of the chamber. The ‘court’ and ‘country’ parties were also distinguished. The former were intent upon maintaining all the rights and privileges of the throne while the latter wished, according to the parliamentarian Sir John Reresby, ‘to protect the country from being overburdened in their estates, in their privileges and liberties’.

In the spring of 1675 parliament reassembled. Here was another opportunity for Danby to reassert the primacy of orthodox Anglicanism at the court of Charles II. He had recently engaged in what Andrew Marvell called ‘window-dressing’ by taking in hand the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire; the first stone of Christopher Wren’s design was laid in the early summer. A brass statue of Charles I was also raised on its pedestal at Charing Cross.

Now in parliament, Danby wished to reintroduce a bill that compelled members of parliament and holders of public office to declare that resistance to the king was unlawful; they were also to be obliged to disown any alteration in Church or government. It was a measure designed to please what was still a ‘Cavalier Parliament’ in its fourteenth year. In a ‘Letter from a Person of Quality’ Shaftesbury denounced the proposal as a plot by ‘high episcopal men and cavaliers’ to establish an absolute government. In a speech to the Lords he had questioned that ‘if a king would make us a province, and tributary to France, and subdue the nation by a French army, or to the papal authority, must we be bound in that case tamely to submit’? The question was never answered. A formal battle between the Lords and the Commons, over the extent of their respective rights, meant that no business could be introduced. Danby’s measure failed, therefore, and the king prorogued parliament until October.

The summer of 1675 was spent in preparation and calculation. Some of the votes in the last session of parliament had been very close; there were occasions when frustration and anger erupted in mild violence as periwigs were pulled off and swords were drawn. On one occasion the Speaker had to bring the mace crashing down upon the table in order to restore order. Danby himself had been obliged to fight off charges of impeachment made against him by some of the Commons. So he was determined to create a majority for the court by what was called ‘high bribing’. Some thirty members were given pensions on the excise while others were granted minor offices.

In this same summer Charles also received another subsidy from the French king on condition that he further prorogued parliament or, in the event of a difficult session in October, dissolved the assembly altogether. Louis did not wish his cousin to be forced into measures against the French, while at the same time envoys from Spain, the United Provinces and elsewhere were busily bribing individual members of the parliament. Everyone was bribing everyone else.

The parliament of the autumn was not a success; the Commons voted £300,000 for the navy, but then vetoed the introduction of any new money bills. In the Lords the supporters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham argued for a dissolution, on the grounds that the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ was now old and corrupt. So on 22 November the king, without attempting to make a speech, prorogued parliament once more for a further fourteen months.

A report compiled for Danby, after the session was over, reveals the calculations of one of his managers.

Sir Nicholas Slanning. He was absent most part if not all last session. Lord Arundel should be sure to take care of him. Mr Josiah Child. I am loath to speak plain English, but if he were well observed he might be proved to be a capital offender. Mr Joseph Maynard. He seldom or never goes right. Mr John Grubham Howe. Your lordship knows who can influence him … Sir Thomas Bide is past cure. Sir John Cotton. He is a very good man, and rarely misses his vote, and then by mistake only. Some person (trusty) should always sit near him. Sir John Newton. I suspect he has been corrupted by Sir Robert Carr … Mr Henry Monson. Mr Cheney must take care of this gentleman, and that most particularly, for he is very uncertain unless one be at his elbow.

In the parliamentary recess Charles was angered into taking a clumsy and ill-considered measure to silence idle tongues. It was a winter of discontent at the failure of parliament and the maladministration of the king. So he agreed to issue a proclamation that closed all the coffee-houses of the city, in the knowledge that these were the places where his opponents gathered to plot and to plan. Those who followed Shaftesbury, for example, were accustomed to meet at Kid’s Coffee House otherwise known as the Amsterdam. The government employed at least one ‘coffee-house spy’ to keep an account of their proceedings.

Some observers blamed the appetite for news and scandal on the consumption of coffee. In the days of the tavern, sack and claret created an atmosphere of gaiety; but the city chamberlain, Sir Thomas Player, complained that ‘these sober clubs produce nothing but scandalous and censorious discourses, and at these nobody is spared’.

The king might also have taken the opportunity to close down the bookshops attended by the opposition which, in a memorandum, Danby described as devoted to spreading false news through city and country. The temperature of public debate and interest in the politics of the day was such that young law students flocked to the shops and stalls every afternoon, together with those citizens and gentry who were eager for the latest reports. The agents of every faction circulated among them, ready to lend their interpretation to any turn of events. The bookshops remained open, however, and such was the outcry over the closing of the coffee-houses that the proclamation was withdrawn. They had been shut down in January 1676, but were reopened ten days later. The volte-face was characteristic of the hesitation and confusion that beset all aspects of public policy.

At a later date, however, an attempt was made to exclude satires and newsletters that were composed, according to the king, by ‘sordid mechanic wretches who, to gain a little money, had the impudence and folly to prostitute affairs of state’. Yet the appetite for news could not be curbed or diminished. There was only one newspaper that was granted official authorization, the London Gazette, but this consisted mainly of proclamations, official pronouncements and advertisements.

Everybody needed news. Everybody wanted news. News was known as ‘hot’. It was a society of conversation so that rumour and gossip passed quickly through the streets. At times of more than usual excitement papers and pamphlets were dropped in the street and were eagerly snatched up and passed from hand to hand. Anonymous publications, without a printer’s imprint, were also widely circulated. One owner of a coffee-house trained his parrot to squawk ‘What’s the news?’ at his customers.

42

New infirmities

And what was the news? After the Commons had declined to pass any new money bills, Charles was once more compelled to turn to his French cousin for financial aid. It was agreed in the early months of 1676 that Louis would pay him a yearly pension, and that both kings would refrain from agreements with other powers without mutual consent. Charles told his brother about the arrangement and was congratulated for his fidelity to the Catholic sovereign. He also informed Danby, who was wholly opposed to any transactions with the French; he disapproved, and asked his master to take the advice of the privy council. Charles was in no mood to consult anyone, however; he wrote out the secret treaty in his own hand, and delivered it to the French ambassador. The king then retired to Windsor, where he supervised certain ‘improvements’ to the castle and went fishing.

When parliament reassembled in February 1677, after a prorogation of fifteen months, it was claimed by Shaftesbury and others that such a long suspension of proceedings was illegal; Buckingham proposed a motion to that effect and cited two statutes of Edward III, which ordained that parliament should meet ‘once a year, or oftener, if need be’. This was considered to be an affront to the royal prerogative. Shaftesbury and Buckingham were ordered to retract their ‘ill-advised’ action and to ask pardon of king and Lords. Both men refused and were promptly dispatched to the Tower for an indefinite period together with two other dissenting lords. Buckingham confessed his fault soon afterwards, and was released, while Shaftesbury preferred to remain in prison. ‘What, my lord,’ he called down to Buckingham as he departed the Tower, ‘are you leaving us so soon?’

‘Ay, my lord, you know that we giddy-pated fellows never stay long in one place at a time.’

France was still continuing its land war against the United Provinces, despite English withdrawal from the conflict, and in the spring of this year the French enjoyed a series of victories. The Commons reacted by reaffirming its animus against the French. The king was in any case suspect. He had in recent years acquired a French mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, made duchess of Portsmouth, thus binding his ties to the French court of which she was a prominent member as duchess of Aubigny. There is a famous story of the crowd threatening the coach of Nell Gwynn under the misapprehension that it contained the duchess; she called out, ‘Be silent, good people! I am the Protestant whore!’

Charles was in every sense a Frenchified king. An address was issued by both Houses of Parliament calling upon him to allay the anxieties of the nation by entering appropriate alliances with the opponents of Louis. At an audience with one of the ambassadors from the United Provinces, he threw his handkerchief into the air with the exclamation, ‘I care just that for parliament.’

On 23 May, however, the king invited the Commons to the Banqueting House in which he declared that ‘I do assure you on the word of a king that you shall not repent any trust you repose in me’; he then proceeded to ask for a further supply of money, ‘both to defend my subjects and offend my enemies’. They did not place very much faith in the king’s word, however, and two days later they found themselves ‘obliged (at present) to decline the granting your majesty the supply your majesty is pleased to demand’. They also called for the king to unite himself with the Dutch against the power of France.

An angry king then adjourned parliament on 28 May with a speech in which he said that ‘could I have been silent, I would rather have chosen to be so, than to call to mind things so unfit for you to meddle with’. He had told the French ambassador, the month before, that ‘I put myself in trouble with my subjects for love of the French king’. Soon enough he was negotiating for further supplies from his much loved cousin that would more than match the money withheld from him by parliament. He had adjourned that assembly to the summer, but in fact it did not meet again until the beginning of the following year.

In the meantime the earl of Danby endeavoured to burnish the Protestant credentials of the regime by furthering the scheme of marrying Mary, elder daughter of the duke of York and therefore niece of the king, to William of Orange. William was the leader of the United Provinces even then threatened by the French; since he was a Protestant champion, the union might have seemed unwise to a king who relied upon French money. Yet Charles assented to the match in part to placate the public clamouring for an alliance with the United Provinces, and in part with the hope that he might be able to negotiate some treaty of peace between William and Louis. He could then emerge as the saviour of Europe. He was, in short, looking both ways at once. The belief of Louis XIV that the English king was quite unreliable was amply confirmed. He suspended his financial subsidy, and rejected Charles’s proposal for an extended truce between France and the United Provinces. The marriage between William and Mary was solemnized at the beginning of November, to much public rejoicing. The Protestant powers were matched.

Parliament met finally in the last week of January 1678, in a more amenable atmosphere. In his opening speech the king confirmed that he ‘had made such alliances with Holland as are for the preservation of Flanders’, and that he now required ‘a plentiful supply’. The Commons resolved that all trade between England and France should be curtailed and that no peace could be made until France had withdrawn to its previous frontiers. In February the members proceeded to vote him £1 million for prosecuting the war against France. The money would not in fact be enough to wage a successful campaign, but Charles had in any case no intention of declaring war on Louis.

He was in a trap or, rather, by his double-dealing he had trapped himself. A period followed in which parliament was adjourned or reconvened on almost a monthly basis; the shortest session was 6 days and the longest 172 days while the recesses lasted from 10 days to 15 months. This aberrant pattern is a measure of the confusion into which public policy had fallen. Charles did not know where to turn. He wanted the French subsidy from Louis but he had also been promised by parliament £1 million to furnish the means to attack him. He was making active preparations for war against France, while at the same time assuring the French ambassador of his devotion to Louis.

Parliament was also thrown into doubt. It had voted funds to raise an army of 30,000 men, but what if the king should use that army for his own ends? Charles and Danby were consequently feared and distrusted. The French king was liberally distributing bribes to various parties, and all men complained that darkness and deep mist covered the affairs of state. Sir William Temple explained in his Memoirs that ‘from these humours arose those uncertainties in our counsels that no man, who was not behind the curtain, could tell what to make of’ the confused rumours and reports.

Towards the end of March 1678 the king instructed Danby to write to the English ambassador in Paris, Ralph Montagu, with an outline of possible peace proposals; Charles then demanded the payment of 6 million livres a year (more than £4,000 of gold) for three years, in return for using his influence with the Dutch to negotiate a treaty. The whole arrangement was to be hidden in the most complete secrecy and Montagu ‘must not mention a syllable of the money’. In his own hand the king added that ‘I approve of this letter’. It was perhaps the only way that he could have persuaded Danby to write it. Louis promptly refused the request, but Charles had left another hostage to fortune that would in time severely damage Danby himself.

Then Louis caught Charles unawares by making a separate peace with the United Provinces, leaving no room for the English king to manoeuvre himself into the good graces of one party or the other. He had in a sense been abandoned by his French cousin. This gave him pause for thought. He was walking through St James’s Park on a summer morning, in the middle of August, when he was approached by a chemist who worked in the royal laboratory. Charles, ever affable and courteous, greeted Christopher Kirkby with a salutation.

Kirkby then informed him that a Jesuit plot had been detected against his life; the sovereign was to be stabbed or poisoned so that the Catholic James, duke of York, could be raised to the throne. Charles, always inclined to dismiss such conspiracies as little more than hot air, advised Kirkby to consult his confidential secretary. Some desultory enquiries followed, in the course of which a long indictment against certain Jesuits was discovered. The supposed author of this indictment, Titus Oates, was then brought before a committee of the privy council to justify his accusations. Thus began the episode that became known as the ‘Popish Plot’.

Roger North described Oates as ‘a low man, of an ill cut, very short neck; and his visage and features were most particular. His mouth was the centre of his face…’ He had a low forehead, long nose, and huge chin; his voice was high, and his manner dramatic. Yet he was very plausible. He outlined the meetings and consultations of the Jesuits in confident detail, and went on to name two prominent men as the authors of the plot. He accused Sir George Wakeman, physician to the queen, of planning to poison Charles; he also cited Edward Coleman, her secretary and previously secretary to the duke of York. The Catholic heir apparent was therefore touched. One of the councillors who listened to this damning testimony, Sir Henry Coventry, observed that ‘if he be a liar, he is the greatest and adroitest I ever saw’.

Then a sudden death seemed to confirm Oates’s testimony. He had previously sworn an affidavit to the truth of these matters before a London magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey; he had told Godfrey that he had attended a clandestine meeting of Jesuits at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand, where the various methods of assassinating the king were discussed. It seems that Godfrey was alarmed to see the name of an acquaintance, Edward Coleman, on the list of suspects. On 12 October Godfrey did not return to his home. Five days later his body was found in a ditch on Primrose Hill, run through with his own sword. A coroner’s inquest then concluded that the body had been taken to Primrose Hill on the day it was discovered, and that multiple bruising about the upper part of it and, in particular, the neck was indication that he had been strangled. Had he been murdered by the Catholics in fear of their discovery? Had he been killed by the supporters of Oates, who feared that his lying would be proven? Had he committed suicide? The truth of the matter will never be known.

Alarms and prophecies were already circulating. In the previous year a blazing comet had hurtled through the sky, and in 1678 occurred three eclipses of the sun and two of the moon. William Dade’s Prognostication divined ‘frenzies, inflammations and new infirmities proceeding from cholerick humours’ while John Partridge’s Calendarium Judaicum predicted ‘troubles from great men and nobles’. In this atmosphere of anxiety, the discovery of Godfrey’s body prompted mass panic and hysteria about a possible Catholic rising. The lords-lieutenant of the counties were ordered to search the homes of Catholics for hidden weapons, and of course the more general fear of a French invasion in favour of an uprising was never far from the surface. It was also widely believed that many thousands of apparently orthodox Protestants were in fact Catholics in disguise, waiting for a sign. One contemporary observer, Sir John Reresby, wrote that ‘it seemed as if the very cabinet of hell had been laid open’.

When the papers of Edward Coleman were taken it was revealed that he had written certain suspect letters to Jesuit priests, close to Louis XIV, asking for money on the grounds that he and his colleagues ‘had a mighty work on their hands, no less than the conversion of three kingdoms’. It may have been a piece of bravura, and seemed to have no connection with the plot outlined by Oates, but in the present circumstances it was explosive.

The publication of this plot, together with the possible collusion of James, admirably suited the intentions of Shaftesbury who could come forward as the champion of Protestantism. He had left the Tower for his Dorset estates a few months before, after making a formal apology to the king, but he could now take up the cause of ‘No Popery!’ with fresh justification and enthusiasm. It had become his abiding purpose to exclude James from the throne of England. He commented later that ‘I will not say who started the game, but I am sure I had the full hunting of it’.

When parliament reassembled on 21 October 1678, he and his supporters were in charge of the pack. Committees were established to secure the king’s safety and to investigate the plot. Both Houses of Parliament unanimously carried a resolution that ‘there has been, and still is, a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on by popish recusants, for the assassinating and murdering the king, and for subverting the government and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion’. Oates appeared before the Commons on three consecutive days and, as a result of his testimony, five Catholic peers were arrested. A bill was passed that excluded Catholics from both houses. Shaftesbury proposed that the king should be asked to dismiss James, duke of York, from his council.

At the end of November Titus Oates further raised the temperature when he appeared at the bar of the House of Commons. ‘I, Titus Oates, accuse Catherine, queen of England, of high treason.’ This alarmed the members who voted that the queen and her household should be removed from Whitehall. The Lords were not so hasty, however, and examined the witnesses who had testified against her; they were not convinced of their veracity and suppressed the charges brought by Oates. The king had previously held a private interview with Oates during which the informer had laid the charges against his wife; he kept his temper but ordered that all of Oates’s papers should be seized and that his consultations with other people should be supervised.

The king does not seem to have believed a word that Oates uttered, but he could not openly withstand the full force of Protestant rage. As one of his ministers, the marquis of Halifax, put it, ‘it must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no’. Measures against papists were made more severe, therefore, and the five Catholic lords held in the Tower were impeached of high treason. A second Test Act was passed obliging all Catholics in the Lords or Commons to repeat the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. In the course of the debate one peer declared that ‘I would not have so much as a popish man or a popish woman to remain here; not so much as a popish dog or a popish bitch; not so much as a popish cat to purr or mew about the king’. At the beginning of December Edward Coleman was dragged to Tyburn where he was hanged, drawn and quartered; in 1929 he was beatified as a Catholic martyr.

Another act of this political drama now opened with the decision of Ralph Montagu to attack the earl of Danby. It was he who, as ambassador in Paris, had received the earl’s letter concerning a secret subsidy from the French king to Charles. He had lost his office in the summer of this year, for the crime of corrupting the daughter of the king’s former mistress, Lady Castlemaine, and now sought revenge. Another party may also have been involved. Louis XIV, knowing of Danby’s antipathy to the French cause, had reasons enough to want him removed.

On being elected to the Commons for the borough of Northampton, Montagu arranged that his ‘secret letters’ from Danby should be disclosed to parliament. It became apparent that Danby, with the approval of the king, had asked for a bribe from Louis at the same time as he had solicited funds from the Commons to raise an army against France. As Lord Cavendish put it, ‘it will appear by those papers that the war with France was pretended, for the sake of an army, and that a great man carried on the interest of an army and popery’. In the Commons the member for Shaftesbury, Thomas Bennet, said that ‘I wonder the House sits so silent when they see themselves sold for six million livres to the French’. The situation was rendered infinitely worse for Danby by the fact that the army itself was still in existence; the king had no money either to deploy it or disband it.

The earl could not survive. Seven articles of impeachment were passed against him, amongst them the charge of keeping up an army to subvert the government and of being ‘popishly affected’. In the Lords Danby defended himself with vigour. He poured scorn upon his accuser, Montagu, for perfidy and duplicity against his royal master; he denied the charges and demanded a speedy trial.

Charles then decided to suspend the proceedings against his chief minister by proroguing parliament. At a meeting of the privy council in the first weeks of 1679 the king told his councillors that he would not seek their advice because they were more afraid of parliament than they were of him. He dissolved the assembly on 24 January. So ended the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ that had first met in 1661, just after the restoration of the king; it had lasted seventeen years and in that period had turned from an assembly of the king’s supporters into a fractious and suspicious body ready to turn upon the king’s ministers and even upon the king himself.

*

Yet Charles and his ministers influenced the country in ways of which they were wholly unaware. The ending of the naval war with the Dutch in 1674, for example, materially increased the volume of the country’s export trade. The excise returns after that year rose markedly in such staple items as beer, ale, tea and coffee, which in turn indicates a sharp rise in consumption. The increase in revenue had a significant effect upon royal income, too, which began to rise. Contemporary reports also suggest that the ‘middling classes’ were now indulging their taste for imported ‘luxuries’ and that the labouring poor were purchasing such items as knitted stockings, earthenware dishes and brass pots. The ‘commercial revolution’ of the eighteenth century had its origins three or four decades earlier. The successful colonization of portions of North America and of the West Indies, undertaken in the realms of the early Stuart kings and under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, now found its fruit in the ever-increasing rate of trade. By 1685 the English had the largest merchant fleet in the world, and their vessels were filled with the merchandise of sugar, tobacco and cotton on their way to the great emporium of London.

Other evidence supports this picture of material advantage. By 1672, for example, stagecoaches ran between London and all the principal towns of the kingdom; it was reported that ‘every little town within twenty miles of London swarms with them’. The ubiquity of the stagecoach is the harbinger of the reforms of transport in the next century, with the further development of turnpike roads and canals; the country was slowly quickening its pace while at the same time finding its unity.

It is now a commonplace of economic history that the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the eighteenth century in fact began in the middle of the seventeenth century. The introduction of new crops, and the steady spread of ‘enclosures’ designed to achieve cohesion and efficiency of farming land, were already changing the landscape of England. The abundance of grain, for example, was such that in 1670 cereal farmers were allowed to export their crop without any regard to its price in the domestic market.

John Houghton, in Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, wrote in 1682 that ‘since his majesty’s most happy restoration the whole land hath been fermented and stirred up by the profitable hints it hath received from the Royal Society by which means parks have been disparked, commons enclosed, woods turned into arable, and pasture land improved by clover, St. Foine [a grass], turnips, coleseed [rape], parsley, and many other good husbandries, so that the food of the cattle is increased as fast, if not faster, than the consumption…’ It is a sign that practical experiment and innovation were already proving fruitful.

Another revolution began during the reigns of the later Stuarts. The exact conditions for the whirlwind of invention, commerce and trade that comprised the industrial revolution may not yet have been present; but the atmosphere was changing. English shipbuilding reached an unprecedented and unrepeated ‘peak’ in the seventeenth century. From the mines of England issued more coal, tin and iron ore than ever before; the coal production of the north-east of England, for example, more than doubled between 1600 and 1685. The old trade of heavy cloths was now being replaced by that of lighter cloths made in what were known as ‘woollen manufactories’. Sugar refineries, iron foundries and glass works were ubiquitous by the close of the seventeenth century. The industries of brewing and soap-boiling had already been created. The rapid growth of towns such as Manchester and Birmingham, Halifax and Sheffield, testified to the interdependence between industrialization and urbanization. Birmingham had under the Tudors been little more than a village but, by the turn of the century, it would have at least 8,000 inhabitants. The population of the whole country may have stabilized, but a larger proportion of it was now migrating from the country to the town.

*

The election in the early weeks of 1679, after the dissolution of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, was necessarily fought on the choice between king and parliament. Since the mood of the country had turned against the king, after the revelation of the ‘Popish Plot’ and the disgrace of Danby, the new parliament was even more hostile to the court than its predecessor. The king himself remarked that a dog would be elected if it stood against a figure from court. Shaftesbury, the principal benefactor of this change of mood, calculated that 158 ‘courtiers’ had been elected against 302 of the ‘opposition’.

The king had to deal with two pressing matters in advance of negotiating with the new parliament. He met the earl of Danby and requested him to resign his office; in exchange he would be granted the title of marquis, and receive a large annual pension. Since most of his dependants had been voted out of parliament, his ministry was effectively already at an end. A new politics, of agitation and campaign, had emerged.

The archbishop of Canterbury had been asked to discuss with James, duke of York, the prospect of his returning to the Anglican communion; the duke refused. The king then summoned his brother and ordered him to retire beyond the seas as the only way of averting the displeasure of parliament. James fought hard against this sentence of exile but, at the beginning of March, made a lachrymose departure for the Spanish Netherlands on the pretext that he was visiting his daughter and new son-in-law, William of Orange.

Yet the new parliament would not be diverted from its pursuit of the ‘Popish Plot’ or the impeachment of Danby, especially after it was revealed that the earl had received a pardon from the king. A week after its assembly he resigned and in the following month he was sent to the Tower by the Lords. When Lord Halifax condemned the decision to confer a marquisate upon ‘a traitor to his country’ he fixed his eyes upon the king who was watching the proceedings. ‘My God!’ the king was said later to have exclaimed, ‘how I am ill-treated; and I must bear it, and keep silence!’

In the spring of the year, just after the parliament had met, the king announced a change in the administration. He dissolved the privy council and established in its place a smaller council of thirty-three members comprising office-holders and independents. In what at the time seemed a surprising and even shocking move he appointed Shaftesbury as its lord president together with four members of parliament who had always been resolute in opposing him. His purpose may have been to tame or to corrupt these men, but the nominations may simply have afforded a screen to conceal his real intentions. Some of the new counsellors lost their former influence, in any case, and were widely regarded as having sold themselves to the king. The members of the council were soon divided among themselves, and proved to be singularly ineffective. That may also have been the king’s intention. Charles distrusted all of them and confided to the earl of Aylesbury that ‘they shall know nothing’. He was isolated, after Danby had been removed from office, and he told Sir William Temple that ‘he had none left with whom he could so much as speak of them in confidence’. In his fight against vigorous and well-organized parliamentary opponents, he was on his own.

Towards the end of April 1679, an address was introduced that was designed to exclude the duke of York from the crown of England; it was said that the ‘Popish Plot’ had been encouraged by his likely succession to the throne. It marked the formal beginning of what became known as the ‘exclusion crisis’, and was the cause of much partisan rancour. Pamphlets and verse satires came from the presses; the votes of parliament were published and widely disseminated. The ‘exclusionists’ in large part controlled the Commons, but legislation could not pass without the consent of the king and the Lords.

Nevertheless an Exclusion Bill quickly received its first and second readings; it pronounced that the duke of York had been seduced by papal agents into entering the Roman communion, and that it was the duty of parliament to exclude him from the throne. One member, Sir John Trevor, stated that ‘the king’s eyes are closed; he knows nothing of the danger that we are in…’ The mood of hysteria was translated beyond the walls of parliament. It was said that the citizens slept with pistols beside them, and that their wives carried knives into the street. At the beginning of July Charles, exasperated by the proceedings, prorogued parliament. The unpopularity of his decision was such that he doubled the guards at Whitehall. Shaftesbury declared that the royal advisers should pay for the decision with their heads.

The session left only one permanent memorial in the form of a Habeas Corpus Act which decreed that no person could be unlawfully detained and that all those charged with felony or treason should be granted a speedy trial or discharge from prison. This was designed as a means of public safety in the event of James’s ascending the throne. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England Sir William Blackstone wrote that ‘the point of time at which I would choose to fix this theoretical perfection of our public law is the year 1679; after the habeas corpus act was passed, and that for licensing the press had expired…’ The sudden prorogation had indeed meant that the laws inhibiting the press had not been renewed, so that the rage of party could now be fully conveyed in the public prints.

In the latter half of 1679, the terms of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ became common currency. The Presbyterian rebels of Scotland, ever zealous for a stricter covenant, had been given the name of Whiggamores after the Scottish word for corrupt or sour whey; the Irish royalist Catholics, who had been reduced to banditry, had the Gaelic name of toraihde. Soon enough Shaftesbury’s Whigs, who supported the Protestant Church and favoured the exclusion of James, would oppose Danby’s Tories, who were prepared to countenance a Catholic king as part of the divine order of natural succession. The Whigs were the enemies of popery and arbitrary government, and thus wished to limit royal power; the Tories were determined to defend the monarch and the constitution against the onslaught of those whom they considered to be republicans or rebels. Various factions could of course be observed on both sides and a third group of ‘trimmers’, who pursued a middle course, was also evident. A sympathetic witness, the duke of Ormonde, described the ‘trimmers’ as using the language of ‘moderation, unity and peace’ combining the Whig concern for the maintenance of property and the true religion with the Tory desire for a secure monarchy and an untouched royal prerogative.

Moderation and unity were not readily apparent in a political nation violently divided. The Green Ribbon Club, perhaps the first ever political club, consisted of a variety of groups of Whigs including dissenters, lawyers and merchants; it met at the King’s Head Tavern on the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, where it was accustomed to plan its strategy and to coordinate its tactics. As avowed supporters of Shaftesbury, its members wore green ribbons and thus identified themselves as a ‘party’. They paid customary obeisance to the royal prerogative but more often than not they talked of their responsibilities to ‘the people’; one phrase, ‘salus populi suprema lex’, was often repeated: ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’. This would in effect have created a political revolution, albeit without the bloodshed of another civil war.

Charles believed that if his opponents managed to get rid of James he himself would surely follow. He was engaged in a battle for his survival. His opponents believed that, under increasing pressure, he would eventually submit and bar his brother from the throne; many now looked to the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, a Protestant, as the next heir. Shaftesbury even argued that the king was pretending to oppose exclusion while all the time hoping to be ‘forced’ to agree to his natural son’s accession. It is true that he had a low opinion of his brother. When James cautioned him from walking in St James’s Park without a guard he replied, ‘I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you king.’ It was unlikely, however, that Charles would deny James his lawful right to succeed.

The French ambassador observed that the king’s ‘conduct is so secret and impenetrable that even the most skilful observers are misled. The king has secret dealings and contacts with all the factions and those who are most opposed to his interests flatter themselves that they will win him over to their side.’ The ambassador may have credited the king with too much cunning; it is possible that Charles simply moved from one expedient to the next.

The duke of Monmouth, the Protestant candidate for the succession, now covered himself with glory or at least with blood. A band of covenanters dragged the primate of Scotland, Archbishop Sharp, from his coach outside the town of St Andrews and stabbed him to death in front of his daughter; they then went on to defeat a royalist squadron sent after them. Monmouth was now dispatched to the north with a large army where, at Bothwell Bridge, he routed the covenanters. The subsequent repression of these enthusiasts became known as ‘the killing time’. Monmouth became the hero of the hour, his ambitions for the throne significantly increased; as a Protestant he was Shaftesbury’s preferred candidate, and James looked on in alarm from his exile in Brussels as the king’s favour towards his natural son increased.

Charles had, a few months earlier, signed a document in which he explained that ‘for the voiding of any dispute which may happen in time concerning the succession of the Crown, I do hereby declare in the presence of Almighty God that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catharine now living’. He had declared to the world that Monmouth was illegitimate, therefore, but the king was not inexpert at lying.

When Monmouth returned to London, the people assembled in the streets where bonfires were lit and toasts were drunk. He was considered by many to be the champion of the Protestant faith and, as the first illegitimate son of Charles II, the true heir to the throne. Despite the king’s denial it was claimed that a ‘black box’, carefully concealed, contained a contract of marriage between Charles and Lucy Walters; Lucy Walters had been one of his first mistresses, while in continental exile, and had borne this particular son. Monmouth was handsome and affable, in every respect a royal boy, and on his journeys through the kingdom he was treated with as much ceremony as his father. Wherever he went he was escorted by columns of gentlemen and admirers. He was, in the words of Macaulay, ‘the most popular man in the kingdom’. It is perhaps no wonder that his thoughts turned towards the crown. The shield that bore his coat of arms quartered the lions of England and the lilies of France as a symbol of his aspirations. Hehad even begun to ‘touch’ for the king’s evil.

In July 1679, the king decided to turn the prorogation of parliament into a dissolution, pending a new general election; he was gambling that public sentiment had turned towards him. And indeed there were many now who questioned the wisdom and loyalty of Shaftesbury in his relentless pursuit of the duke of York. Yet at the hustings in the summer of the year the Whig Party, as we may now term it, was in full cry against the Catholic heir. When the clergy of Essex were believed to incline to the court interest, they were called ‘dumb dogs … Jesuitical dogs … dark lanterns … Baal’s priests … jacks and villains … the black guard … the black regiment of hell!’ The Whigs were in turn dismissed by the Tories as a ‘rabble’ of disloyal and rebellious traitors. Lists were drawn up by both sides, noting down the names of ‘the vile’ and ‘the worthy’. Sir Ralph Verney, soon to become a member of parliament, remarked that ‘there are vast feuds in our Chilterns as well as in our Vale, occasioned by elections, and so ’tis, I suppose, all over England’.

But then all the problems of succession became more acute. Towards the end of August the king fell seriously ill, and was for two or three days in danger of death. James was summoned from Brussels to be by his brother’s side, and perhaps to take the crown; he came to England disguised in a black wig. Meanwhile Monmouth’s supporters began to intrigue on his behalf. The political nation was in confusion.

43

Or at the Cock?

On 12 January 1675, a conversation took place in London. It was ostensibly about china, that commodity then being the rage of the town. Lady Fidget desires some from a dear male acquaintance ‘for he knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some’. The gentleman’s name is Horner, whose welcome for Lady Fidget alarms her husband.

Sir Jaspar: Wife! My Lady Fidget! He is coming into you the back way!

Lady Fidget: Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.

Sir Jaspar: He’ll catch you, and use you roughly, and be too strong for you.

Lady Fidget: Don’t you trouble yourself, let him if he can.

Horner, having been detained in his chamber with Lady Fidget, is asked a few minutes later if he has any china left.

Horner: Upon my honour I have none left now.

Mrs Squeamish: Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come.

Horner: This lady had the last there.

Lady Fidget: Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

Mrs Squeamish: Oh, but it may be he may have some you could not find.

Lady Fidget: What, d’ye think if he had any left, I would not have had it too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough.

The conversation took place on the stage of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. ‘China’ is course a euphemism for male sperm, as all the members of the audience knew, and The Country Wife by William Wycherley soon gained a reputation for indecency. Yet, in the 1670s, this was not considered to be a great offence. It was, perhaps, a quality to be praised.

Two companies of players were re-established immediately after the restoration of the king, the King’s Players under the management of Thomas Killigrew and the Duke of York’s Servants under Sir William Davenant. They played at first in makeshift venues until such time as suitable playhouses were erected. They did in any case cater for a considerably diminished audience since the great days of the Globe and the Fortune; the new theatrical public was largely made up of ‘the quality’ or ‘the fashion’ as well as those members of the middling classes who wished to emulate them.

The ‘sparks’ and ‘wits’ of the court were also in attendance and would, in the words of Etherege from She Wou’d if She Cou’d, roam ‘from one playhouse to the other playhouse, and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their periwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend; and then they cock their caps, and out they strut again’. The play began at half past three in the afternoon, and lasted for approximately two hours. The gentlemen brought their own wine with them and often made more noise than the players on the stage, hectoring or exchanging badinage with the actors.

In The Country Wife Horner feigns impotence in order to deceive husbands and enter into clandestine amours with their wives; among these is Margery Pinchwife, an innocent young bride from the country who is fiercely guarded by her husband. The usual complications of sexual farce ensue amid innuendo and double meaning, with the principal women desperate to enjoy Horner’s favours by clandestine means. Lady Fidget herself does not deplore the hypocrisy of seeming virtuous. ‘Our reputation! Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of our reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion?’ As Leigh Hunt once remarked of these seventeenth-century dramas, ‘we see nothing but a set of heartless fine ladies and gentlemen, coming in and going out, saying witty things at each other, and buzzing in some maze of intrigue’.

But this is the heart of the comedies of the Restoration period. They reflect a hard, if brittle, society where the prize goes to the most devious or hypocritical; they represent a world in which all moral values are provisional or uncertain; they convey a general sense of instability in which no one knows quite what to believe or how to behave. It is the perfect complement to Restoration tragedy in which fantastic notions of love or valour are pitched past the reality of life or true feeling; they are contrived and sentimental vehicles for rant and rhetoric.

The comedies, unlike the tragedies, of the period are at least set in real time and real place. The time is always the present moment, and the place is always London.

Sparkish: Come, but where do we dine?

Horner: Even where you will.

Sparkish: At Chateline’s?

Dorilant: Yes, if you will.

Sparkish: Or at the Cock?

Dorilant: Yes, if you please.

Sparkish: Or at the Dog and Partridge?

This was a world in which the participants must ‘stay, until the chairs come’, in which the prostitutes always wore vizards, and in which the women ‘all fell a-laughing, till they bepissed themselves’. The protagonists are always those of the gentry or nobility, or at least those who aspire to be such; the playwrights were of the same mould, as were the members of the audience. Everyone knew everyone else but, in this multiple game of mirrors, we may glimpse the shape of the age.

The characters of course express themselves in prose; good conversation was considered be the medium of truth as well as of manners. Nothing was so delightfully true as that which was perfectly expressed. The notion of ‘wit’ is crucial here since, as Horner expresses it, ‘methinks wit is more necessary than beauty, and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it’. Wit was not simply the effect of an epigram but, rather, the product of a fertile mind and keen observation. Wit was the currency of the court of Charles II.

The obscenity was also as much part of the court as of the stage. Horner apologizes to Lady Horner for bringing to her from France ‘not so much as a bawdy picture, new postures, nor the second part of the École des Filles’. Pepys described the latter publication as ‘the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw … so that I was shamed of reading it’. So the comic stage was used to strong meat. Yet not, perhaps, as strong as this:

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done ’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

The author, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, was an indispensable element of the court of Charles II. At the age of seventeen, on Christmas Day 1664, he arrived at Whitehall bearing a letter to the king from the duchess of Orléans in France. Soon enough he was enrolled in the circle of wits that surrounded the king and by the spring of 1666 he had been appointed as one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber. He had all the qualities that the king admired. He was witty and he was fluent; he had a lightness of manner, and indeed of conscience, that were of paramount importance in such surroundings:

That pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,

Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;

But by rubbing and scrubbing so large it does grow,

It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.

He was sent to the Tower after attempting to abduct a lady; on his release, at the king’s orders, he played a valiant or perhaps foolhardy role in one of the conflicts with the Dutch. His subsequent life at court principally consisted of liberal doses of drink and sex, interlarded with fashionable atheism or, as it was sometimes known, ‘Hobbeism’. He recalled that at an atheistical meeting at the house of a ‘man of quality’ ‘I undertook to manage the cause, and was the principal disputant against God and piety, and … received the applause of the whole company’. This conveys sufficiently the presiding atmosphere of Whitehall.

For five years he was, by his own account, continually drunk and was so little master of himself that he forgot many of his ‘wild and unaccountable’ actions. Like most of his contemporaries at court he was deeply engaged in the theatre of the time; in fact the drama can perhaps best be seen as an extension of the court itself. Rochester patronized playwrights such as Dryden and Otway; he wrote a comedy and a tragedy as well as various prologues. Yet he is still remembered principally for his satirical invectives and for his mastery of obscenity:

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse,

Of who fucks who, and who does worse …

A character in The Country Wife asks, ‘Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person.’ The ‘frankness’ might have consisted principally of blasphemy and obscenity, but it was also part of a novel dispensation represented by the cogent social analysis of Thomas Hobbes and the decision of the experimenters of the Royal Society to deal in things and not in words. It was an attempt to see the world anew, after the realization that religious obscurantism and doctrinaire prejudices had previously brought England into confusion. Horace Walpole wrote that ‘because the presbyterians and religionists had affected to call every thing by a scripture-name, the new court affected to call every thing by its own name’. It was time to clear away the rubble of untested assumptions, false rhetoric and standard appeals to authority or to tradition. This was the context for the ironical, cynical and materialist atmosphere of the Restoration court.

44

Noise rhymes to noise

When James arrived at his brother’s sickroom in Windsor Castle he fell to his knees, and it is reported that the two men burst into tears. The king had recovered some of his strength and was already out of danger. Yet the two claimants to the throne, the dukes of York and Monmouth, were now in confrontation; each had his own band of supporters, but James for the moment had the upper hand. His sudden return to England had not caused an insurrection, as some had feared, and he had indeed been received with deference; the lord mayor and the aldermen of London, for example, had come to kiss his hand. He did not wish to return to exile in Brussels, and seems to have made it clear that he would leave England only if the duke of Monmouth also made his exit. It was agreed therefore that Monmouth would retire into Holland, out of harm’s way, while James would be dispatched to Edinburgh as a kind of viceroy. He remained there for almost three years.

It had already become clear that, in the election of the summer, the Whigs had won the majority and that those who had voted against the ‘exclusion’ of James were generally turned out of office. Charles refused to allow this parliament to sit, however, and prorogued it to the beginning of the following year, 1680. He told his nephew, William of Orange, that he had no choice in the matter and that otherwise ‘they would have his crown’; he also feared that the Commons would proceed to the impeachment of his brother and his wife for their Catholic beliefs. Few expected parliament to meet again.

Shaftesbury was discharged from his office as lord president of the new council, and at once entered his true role as leader of the opposition to the court and Crown. Yet he knew well enough that he had no real power unless or until parliament was assembled. The Commons was his praetorian guard. Almost at once, therefore, he planned to launch petitions from all parts of the country for its return. His organization was such that his agents, together with notable local men, went from parish to parish collecting marks and signatures. No one, not even the poorest, was overlooked.

On 17 November the Green Ribbon Club, opposed to Catholics and to the court, organized a great pageant in London in which it was claimed that 200,000 people took part. A variety of Catholic personages were in representation dragged through the streets, and the procession eventually halted in Fleet Street just by the King’s Arms, the headquarters of the club; here effigies of the pope and of the devil, as well as sundry monks, nuns and Jesuits, were hurled into the flames of a fire accompanied by a great shout that, according to a pamphlet, ‘London’s Defiance to Rome’, reached France and Rome ‘damping them all with a dreadful astonishment’. Macaulay remarks in his History of England that two words became current at this time, ‘mob’ and ‘sham’.

When the duke of Monmouth arrived in London unexpectedly from exile, he was greeted with bonfires and jubilant crowds as the natural Protestant successor to the throne; he was not so warmly received by his father, however, who told him to be gone from court. His son disobeyed on the grounds that he must stay in order to preserve the life of his father from the designs of the papists.

At the beginning of December 1679, with a party of fifteen other peers, Shaftesbury stopped Charles on his way to the royal chapel and presented him with a petition for the sitting of parliament. The king was so irate that he prorogued the assembly for a further eleven months and issued a proclamation against petitioning itself. His supporters were said to ‘abhor’ the conduct of those who were trying to force the king’s hand; for a while grew up the factions of ‘the Abhorrers’ and ‘the Petitioners’.

After some months of impasse Shaftesbury once more raised the temperature when in the early summer of 1680 he tried to present, to a Middlesex grand jury, the duke of York as a papist and the duchess of Portsmouth, Charles’s mistress, as a prostitute. The latter had already attracted the dislike and suspicion of many, and it had often been suggested that she should be sent packing to France as soon as possible. Shaftesbury’s action was of course an open affront to the king, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion. The king hastened to London from Windsor where he instructed the chief justice, William Scroggs, to dismiss the grand jury before it heard any evidence for the charges. The damage had been done, however, compounded by the fact that Shaftesbury received no rebuke.

When parliament finally met, towards the end of October, the Commons was full from the very first session. The king’s ministers, known as ‘the chits’ because of their relative youth, had formulated what they hoped was a consistent policy; they intended to defuse the threat of exclusion by imposing limitations on the power of a future King James, and to seek an alliance with the United Provinces against the French. It was still important to signal hostility to Louis XIV, even though Charles had been engaged in constant negotiations to obtain money from him.

The Whigs were not to be averted from their purpose, however, and at the beginning of November a second Exclusion Bill against the duke of York was introduced. It received its third reading within nine days and was then sent up to the Lords. The duke of Monmouth came back to London from a triumphal tour of the West Country in order to participate in the discussions.

The king also attended this long session of the peers, from eleven in the morning to nine at night, and listened to them with eager attention. It had been believed that he would abandon his brother, however reluctantly, for the sake of public peace; he was known to fear, more than anything else, the outbreak of another civil war. But in fact he remained firm and made his feelings known during the course of the Lords’ debate. When Monmouth expressed his concern for his father, Charles called out, ‘It is a Judas kiss that he gives me!’ The sentiments of the king may have helped to concentrate the minds of the Lords. They voted, sixty-three to thirty, against the Exclusion Bill. Shaftesbury’s measure had failed.

It was hoped that the Commons might now suggest a compromise upon which both sides might agree, but no possibility of a middle way existed. The Commons passed a series of resolutions aimed at the exclusion of the duke of York; they stated that no supply of money could be voted under the circumstances, that the councillors of the king should be removed from public employment, and that any man who lent money to the king should be called to the bar of parliament. The king was advised to prorogue parliament once again and the Commons, speedily warned of this threat, met early on the morning of 10 January 1681, to vote that anyone who offered such advice was a traitor to the king and to the realm. The king therefore issued a proclamation dissolving parliament, and ordering that a new assembly should meet in Oxford within two months.

This aroused anger, resentment and no little anxiety among Shaftesbury and his followers. Oxford was known to be the most royalist of all English cities. They would have been even more concerned if they had learned that Louis XIV had proffered another bribe to the king. Louis offered to grant him an annual pension, larger than anything parliament would provide, as long as he refrained from joining in any attack upon France by Spain or others. A ban on French imports was also allowed to expire. Nothing was put in writing, and no signatures were required; it was simply a verbal agreement, mediated by envoys, between the two kings.

The new parliament, meeting on 21 March 1681, was no more willing than its predecessor to come to any agreement. Charles appeared before the two houses with a compromise. If James ever became king, his powers would be transferred to a regent. In the first instance that regent would be James’s older daughter, Mary, princess of Orange, a Protestant; and, in the event of her decease, the regency would devolve upon his other Protestant daughter, Anne. This seemed on the face of it an eminently sensible arrangement, but the Commons refused to accept it. Instead it debated a third Exclusion Bill. Charles in fact seems genuinely to have wished for an agreement in the calmer atmosphere of Oxford, no less for the fact that he feared another civil war. That was another reason for his secret alliance with the French king; he might need men as well as money.

On 28 March, Charles, with his full regalia concealed in a covered sedan chair, proceeded to the Lords, who were sitting in the Geometry School of Oxford. He was about to spring a surprise. He appeared before the Lords in his ordinary clothes, but then he ordered his attendants to dress him in robe and crown. Thus attired he summoned the Commons. ‘My lords and gentlemen,’ he said to the two houses, ‘all the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end, when the divisions at the beginning are such: therefore, my lord chancellor, do as I have commanded you.’ He now told his opponents, to their faces, that they had been dissolved and must disperse. He left Oxford immediately, and they had no choice but to follow. It was reported that ‘the king’s breath scattered them like leaves in autumn’.

Charles now believed that he could survive without any parliamentary funds. His pension from France, and the raising of customs revenue from luxury French imports now freely admitted, would grant him room to manoeuvre; his household expenditure had in any case been considerably reduced. He had decided to embark upon a period of personal rule without an opposition to divert or trouble him. In this respect the king was greatly assisted by what seemed to be a resurgence of loyalty towards the Stuart monarchy. The intransigence of Shaftesbury and his followers, in rejecting what seemed to be a just and sensible offer on the matter of the regency, could be contrasted with the moderation of the king. They had wanted to bully him into submission, but he had remained firm. He had resisted any attempt to alter the natural succession because it was repugnant to his conscience and to the laws of England. That is how the abortive Oxford parliament could be represented.

In his declaration ‘to all his loving subjects, touching the causes and reasons that moved him to dissolve the last two parliaments’ he stated that ‘we assure ourself that we shall be assisted by the loyalty’ of those ‘who consider the rise and progress of the late troubles’. The ‘late troubles’ were the divisions that had led to the civil wars. ‘And we cannot but remember that religion, liberty and property were all lost and gone when monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that was restored.’ He appealed, therefore, to the instincts of loyalty and stability that maintained the traditions of the nation.

He now turned his fury upon Shaftesbury and his allies who, with no likelihood of a parliament, began to lose strength as well as purpose. Charles was determined to exclude them from all public offices; he decided to remove them from the judicial bench and from the administration of the towns. Sixty members of parliament who had voted for exclusion were removed from nomination as justices of the peace. Some of the lords-lieutenant of the counties were dismissed, together with the lowlier recorders and town clerks. Since the nonconformists had played a large role in the opposition, the laws against dissenters were executed with more rigour; they, rather than Roman Catholics, were increasingly consigned to prison. One contemporary said that it was a form of civil war, with the law replacing the sword.

At the beginning of July 1681 Shaftesbury was taken into custody and brought before the king and council where he was accused of treason; the earl denied the charge but was in any case committed to the Tower. Yet there was a flaw in the royal project. Shaftesbury had a residence at Aldersgate, and so his case came within the jurisdiction of the City. London was still in the hands of those who opposed the court; it was still, for the king, enemy territory.

When the earl’s case was heard in the Old Bailey, therefore, the grand jury was packed with prominent Whigs; the foreman had in fact been an exclusionist member of parliament. It was perhaps inevitable that a verdict of ignoramus – ‘we do not know’ – was given and Shaftesbury acquitted. Four days later he applied for bail and the king’s son, the duke of Monmouth, offered to act as his surety. He was released and, that night, the streets rang out with the cries ‘A Monmouth! A Shaftesbury!’ In many places, however, a Whig demonstration was countermanded by a Tory manifestation; or, as Sir Roger L’Estrange put it in his Observator, ‘Noise rhymes to Noise, and Noise must be opposed to Noise’.

Two days after the verdict had been given the king launched an investigation into London’s charter, asking ‘quo warranto’ or by what warrant did the City enjoy the corporate privileges that it claimed; it was a protracted and expensive procedure, replete with formal and legal niceties, which could easily be turned against the City corporation. Any pretext could be found or concocted by the court lawyers to justify a forfeiture. It was easier and less expensive to ask for a new charter, but this in turn might give the king power to remove ‘disaffected’ members of the corporation. It was a device that Charles had already been using to great effect.

Even before the quo warranto proceedings had ended, the court party was exercising all its influence to elect Tory sheriffs and a Tory mayor. Various subterfuges were employed. The keepers of the alehouses and coffee-houses were told that their licences would be revoked if they did not vote for the Tory candidates; most of the Whig candidates were removed from the poll on the grounds that they were Quakers, or were non-residents, or had refused to take the oaths, or were in some other way ineligible. The campaign of trickery and intimidation was successful, and the Tory candidates were elected. On the following day Shaftesbury left his house in Aldersgate and went into hiding before taking ship to Holland. He knew now that, in any new trial for high treason, his opponents would be able to control the juries. The king would finally claim his head. He died in Amsterdam at the beginning of the next year. It was his belief that the souls of men and women entered the stars at the moment of death; the spirit of Shaftesbury would kindle, perhaps, a very fiery comet.

Some London radicals were now convinced that Charles intended to create an absolute monarchy, and began to plot among themselves to resist any such attempt. It was reported by government informers that preparations had been made for an uprising by city dissenters, who were apparently resolved to capture the king and force him to act against his brother. In November 1682, hundreds of ‘brisk boys’ in the East End rioted with the call ‘A Monmouth! A Monmouth!’ Before he left for the continent Shaftesbury had joined with the duke in discussing an armed uprising in the event of the king’s death.

All this plotting and planning concluded in what became known as the ‘Rye House Plot’. Certain discontented Whigs – among them William, Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney and the earl of Essex – seem to have laid plans to ambush and kill the king and his brother on their way back from the races at Newmarket. The assassins would assemble at a lonely farmstead known as Rye House in Hertfordshire, for the purpose of ‘lopping the two sparks’. The plot was betrayed by one of the minor conspirators, and in the early summer of 1683 the principal agents were arrested. Even as the trial of Russell proceeded, the news came that Essex had been found dead in the Tower with wounds about his throat. It was supposed that he had committed suicide, thus presuming guilt, but it is possible that he had been murdered to prove the reality of the plot against the royal brothers. It would provide a convenient opportunity for the king to destroy all of the prominent Whigs.

When Lord Russell’s family pleaded for him the king replied that ‘if I do not take his life he will soon have mine’. His beheading, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was badly managed by the public hangman, Jack Ketch, who later issued an apology. When Algernon Sidney was also sentenced to death by the axe, he made a passionate statement of his innocence. The chief justice, Judge Jeffreys, rose and rebuked him. ‘I pray God work in you a temper fit to go into the other world, for I see you are not fit for this.’

‘My lord, feel my pulse and see if I am disordered. I bless God, I never was in better temper than I am now.’

Russell, Essex and Sidney became known as the first Whig martyrs.

The duke of Monmouth had also been implicated in the plot, and an indictment been drawn up against him. Yet he submitted to his father and signed a confession that ‘he owned the late conspiracy’ but was innocent of any design against the life of his father. On the following day he withdrew the statement, for fear that he had betrayed his erstwhile associates; whereupon he was banished from the court. John Evelyn reported in his diary, the entry of 15 July 1683, that ‘the public was now in great consternation on the late plot and conspiracy; his Majesty very melancholy, and not stirring without double guards; all the avenues and private doors about Whitehall and the Park shut up, few admitted to walk in it’.

The news of the conspiracy helped to rouse further anger against Whigs and dissenters, and the king published a declaration against ‘the factious party’ that was read out from every pulpit. This provoked the publication of innumerable ‘loyal addresses’ that underlined the supremacy of the king. Charles had in effect won his battle against parliament. He was also about to conquer London. The quo warranto proceedings had come to a conclusion, and in the summer of 1683 the king’s bench decided that the liberties of the city had been rendered forfeit and returned into the hands of the king.

Charles could now govern in any manner that he pleased. The earl of Danby, once pursued by the Commons, was promptly released from the Tower. The duke of York was granted extensive powers, and it seemed to many that he was already ruling in place of the king who more and more consulted only his pleasures. In the spring of 1684, in fact, the duke was reappointed to the privy council after an absence of eleven years. In this period Titus Oates, the instigator of the ‘Popish Plot’, was arrested for calling James a traitor; he was convicted and fined £100,000. This ensured that he remained in confinement for the foreseeable future.

An entry from Evelyn’s diaries conveys the mood and atmosphere of the triumphant court with its ‘inexpressable luxury, and prophanesse, gaming and all dissolution, and as if it were total forgetfulness of God’. The king was ‘sitting and toying with his concubines’, among them the duchess of Portsmouth, with a ‘French boy singing love-songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least two thousand in gold before them’.

Yet the games of Charles II were about to end. In the early weeks of 1685 he suffered from prolonged attacks of gout which left him debilitated. On the morning of Monday 2 February, he arose early after a restless and fevered night; to his attendants he seemed lethargic and almost torpid. He was also confused in speech and action. Then he fell into convulsions, or as one of his doctors put it ‘convulsivi motus’, that left him speechless for two hours; cantharides, or Spanish fly, was applied to his skin to promote blisters. The letting of his blood lent him some relief, and the king recovered his power of speech. The duke of York had been summoned, and arrived so rapidly that he was wearing one shoe and one slipper. The doctors now prepared powders to promote sneezing so that the pressure of ‘the humours’ upon the king’s brain might be relieved; he was also given a solution of cowslip flowers and spirit of sal ammoniac.

The king gradually seemed to grow better but by Wednesday afternoon he was covered in a profuse cold sweat that was a stage in the progress of dissolution. A preparation known as ‘spirit of human skull’ was then applied. By noon on Thursday there was little hope; he suffered several fits but was conscious in the intervals between them.

On that Thursday evening he ended the vacillations of a lifetime and formally entered the Roman Catholic communion by the ministrations of a Benedictine monk, John Hudleston. When the bishops and other attendants had withdrawn, the monk was conducted to the death chamber by the duke of York through a secret door. There seems little reason to doubt this account. James wrote, and spoke, of it. Hudleston himself left a brief description of the event. The observers had indeed been excluded from the chamber for a period, and afterwards the king refused to receive Anglican communion.

After that rite his mind was clear and his speech composed. On the following morning he asked to be taken to a window where he might see the rising sun. By ten o’clock he was unconscious. He died, quietly and without pain, shortly before noon.

45

The Protestant wind

So on 6 February 1685, the new king, James II, ascended the throne in the face of sustained and organized opposition from Shaftesbury and the Whigs. He was fifty-two years of age, and in vigorous heath. He had already proved himself to be determined and decisive; he had remained faithful to his Catholic beliefs despite every attempt to persuade him otherwise. He was more resolute and more trustworthy than his brother, but he lacked Charles’s geniality and perceptiveness. He seemed to have no great capacity for compromise and viewed the world about him in the simple terms of light and darkness; there was the monarchy and authority on one side, with republicanism and disorder on the other. His manner was stiff and restrained, his temper short.

The prospect of such a monarch, however, was not necessarily disagreeable. He was known to be more diligent and more scrupulous than his late brother, with a greater concern for economy in financial matters. He was the very model of a retired naval officer of moderate abilities. The court itself acquired quite a different tone. Where before there had been music and mirth and gambling there was now, according to Sir John Lauder, ‘little to be but seriousness and business’.

James’s first statement maintained his support for the Church of England as the truest friend to the monarchy. Yet a little more than a week after the old king’s death, according to John Evelyn, James ‘to the great grief of his subjects, did now, for the first time, go to mass publicly in the little Oratory at the duke’s lodgings, the doors being wide set open’. When the host was elevated, the Catholics fell upon their knees while the Protestants hurried out of the chapel. The new king was proclaiming his faith to the nation. He built his church upon the rock of Peter, but on that rock he would eventually founder.

Louis XIV had already sent a large sum of money to James as a reserve fund, held by the French ambassador, in case any insurrection or opposition should rise against him; Louis knew well enough that the English king would now favour Catholicism as far as lay in his power. James’s councillors were also aware, however, that parliament would have to pass any order for new taxation. James called in the French ambassador to explain the position. ‘Assure your master’, he told him according to the ambassador’s own account, ‘of my gratitude and attachment. I know that without his protection I can do nothing … I will take good care not to let the Houses meddle with foreign affairs. If I see in them any disposition to make mischief, I will send them about their business.’

He need not have concerned himself. Parliament met in the spring of 1685 and was overwhelmingly Tory or royalist in composition; in his speech he gave ‘assurance, concerning the care I will have of your religion and property’ and in return requested revenues for life. The members proceeded to vote him the funds; given the extraordinary increase in his excise revenue as a result of growing trade, they furnished him with more money than he actually required. They may have been given pause, however, by the king’s reference to ‘your religion’.

The only possible threat came from his late brother’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, who still harboured ambitions for the throne. Sure enough the duke left his exile in Amsterdam and, on 11 June, appeared with a small force off the coast at Lyme; he had believed that after his landing a multitude of supporters would flock to his flag, and so arrived with no more than 150 followers. Monmouth planted his blue standard on the soil of England and pronounced James to be a usurper; he also declared that the traitorous king had poisoned his brother, set light to London in the Great Fire, and encouraged the ‘Popish Plot’ as part of ‘one continued conspiracy against the reformed religion and the rights of the nation’. He then took upon himself the title of King James II.

Some of the natives of Dorset and Somerset joined his small army as he marched towards Taunton and Bridgwater, but there were far fewer recruits than he had originally expected. He had no coherent strategy of campaign, and he was quickly overwhelmed by James’s better-trained and better-armed soldiers. The battle of Sedgemoor was the last one to be fought upon English soil. Monmouth escaped from the field and was found lying under a bush, half-asleep from exhaustion, and covered with fern and nettles for camouflage.

No mercy was shown to the defeated. Monmouth himself was taken before the king; he knelt down and pleaded for his life. ‘Is there no hope?’ he finally asked. The king turned away in silence. The duke was beheaded upon Tower Hill, and became the victim of another botched execution by Jack Ketch.

The consequences for the people of the West Country were severe. Judge Jeffreys was sent among them to deal out punishment. The ‘Bloody Assizes’ became part of the folklore of the region. Many died in prison, 800 were transported to be slaves, while some 250 were sentenced to death. Twenty-nine were sentenced to die at Dorchester but the two executioners protested that they could not hang, draw and quarter so many men on a single day. A woman was beheaded for offering food and water to an escaping ‘rebel’. ‘Gentlemen,’ Jeffreys said to the jury, ‘in your place I would find her guilty, were she my own mother.’ Jeffreys laughed aloud, joked and exulted at the plight of the prisoners who came before him. He used to say that he gave the defendants ‘a lick with the rough side of my tongue’. ‘I see thee, villain, I see thee with the halter already around thy neck.’ When he was told that one prisoner relied upon parish alms he replied, ‘I will ease the parish of the burden.’

The defeat of the rebellion confirmed the king’s authority; he had triumphed over his enemies, and now set about the process of building a new state based upon his absolute power. He determined to abolish the Test Act, thereby allowing Catholics to assume control of various offices; he wished to repeal the Habeas Corpus Act, thereby granting him more control over his opponents, and to maintain his standing army of approximately 20,000 men. He needed an army to safeguard himself from any ‘disturbances’, without or within.

In the summer of the year, after the defeat of Monmouth, some 15,000 men were encamped on Hounslow Heath; a lawyer of the time, Sir John Lowther, recollected that the standing army came ‘to the astonishment of the people of England’ who had never heard of such a force in times of peace. The troops were soon billeted throughout the country where, under the guise of pursuing ‘rebels’, they might act as James’s security force. Some of their time was spent in disrupting the gatherings of Baptists and Presbyterians who, in this period, were once again some of the most persecuted of the dissenting sects. With the close assistance of Samuel Pepys, also, the king was intent upon establishing a formidable navy; this was part of his determination to consolidate and exploit the colonial territories within India, North America and the West Indies. He can be considered, therefore, as one of the founders of the commercial and imperial state that emerged in the eighteenth century.

The twin bonds of royal autocracy and the Catholic religion ensured the amity of James II and Louis XIV, and there was naturally much alarm in England when, in the autumn of 1685, the French king cancelled the Edict of Nantes that guaranteed freedom of worship to his Protestant subjects. Could James follow the same path? It was of course unlikely that James would dare to take measures against the English national Church but he might attempt to check its powers. His attitude towards the Protestant Huguenots who fled to England was not encouraging; he believed them to be anti-monarchical and was not anxious that they remain in his kingdom. They stayed, however, settling in Spitalfields and elsewhere, and were essentially to create the silk industry of the country.

When parliament reassembled on the appointed day, 9 November, much apprehension was naturally felt by the king’s supporters, the Tories, who also upheld the Anglican faith. ‘Never was there a more devoted Parliament,’ one contemporary observed, ‘but you know the point of religion is a tender point.’ The members of both houses were most alarmed by the fact that, in defiance of the Test Act, the king had already appointed Roman Catholic officers to the army and navy. The king declared, in his speech from the throne, that ‘having had the benefit of their services in such a time of need and danger [Monmouth’s invasion], I will neither expose them to disgrace, nor myself to the want of them, if there should be a second rebellion to make them necessary to me’. It was soon made clear to him that the members of both houses, but particularly those of the Lords, were dismayed by his illegal and unparliamentary appointments. One brave peer, Viscount Mordaunt, stated that ‘the evil which we are considering is neither future nor uncertain. A standing army exists. It is officered by papists. We have no foreign enemy. There is no rebellion in the land. For what, then, is this force maintained, except for the purpose of subverting our laws, and establishing that arbitrary power which is so justly abhorred by Englishmen?’

Eleven days after parliament had been summoned, James prorogued it until the following year; it was characteristic of his rule that he suppressed the assembly before it had the chance formally to challenge his authority. It was the first sign of the growing tension between the king and the political nation. Parliament never met again in the course of his short reign.

On the strength of his prerogative alone he now began to assist his co-religionists. He issued orders forbidding the celebration of ‘gunpowder treason day’, in which it was customary to burn an effigy of the pope; the edict was only partly successful. Various of the religious orders were once again settled in London; the Benedictines were ensconced at St James’s, the Carmelite friars in the City, the Franciscans in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Jesuits in the Savoy. A Catholic school was established by the Jesuits in that neighbourhood. One of James’s most intimate advisers was a Jesuit priest, Edward Petre, who was placed in charge of the royal chapel and who lodged in the king’s old apartments in Whitehall. By the end of the year five Roman Catholics were part of the privy council.

The king’s morals, however, were not governed by strictly Catholic standards. His principal mistress, Catherine Sedley, was given a large mansion in St James’s Square and soon acquired the title of countess of Dorchester. She seemed not to know the reason for his affection. ‘It cannot be my beauty,’ she said, ‘for he must see that I have none; and it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.’

The king often said that his purpose was to ‘establish’ or ‘re-establish’ Roman Catholicism. He may have realized that he would not be able to impose his faith upon the nation and he knew well enough that his likely successor, Mary, was a fervent Protestant; he hoped only to put Catholicism on terms of equality with Anglicanism in the belief that the virtues of his religion would in time elicit many converts. He had hoped to persuade his Anglican and Tory supporters to accede to his wishes but instead he only managed further to antagonize them. When a Catholic chapel was established in Lime Street, a crowd of Londoners gathered to attack ‘the mass house’; the trained bands were called out to disperse the crowd but demurred on the grounds that ‘we cannot in conscience fight for popery’. The king’s own stubborn and imperious temper did not help his cause. ‘I will make no concession’, he was accustomed to say. ‘My father made concessions, and he was beheaded.’

His purpose was to purge the judicial bench of all those who might be disaffected from his policies or his powers. It has been estimated that in the course of his reign he replaced up to nine-tenths of the serving justices of the peace in each county; the replacements were Roman Catholics who, in the absence of a police force, became the principal agents of law and royal authority. The corporations of the towns and the lords-lieutenant of the counties were also purged. When the king subsequently relieved the archbishop of Canterbury of his duties at the privy council, the French ambassador observed that James had resolved to favour only those who supported his interests.

The case of Gooden v. Hales was brought forward, in the summer of 1686, as a test of power. At issue was the right of the king to dispense with the penalties of the law and to suspend their execution, with particular reference to the Test Act against Catholics. When four judges declared that any such decision would ‘overturn the English constitution’, he simply dismissed them from the bench. Even those once most loyal to the king were now dismayed. ‘Everyone was astonished’, John Evelyn wrote in his diary entry for 27 June. ‘Great jealousies as to what would be the end of these proceedings.’

In this summer, too, the king established a commission for ecclesiastical causes for ‘the prevention of indiscreet preaching’; it was in effect an institution designed to assert the rights of Roman Catholics. The commissioners had the power to deprive any cleric of his living or to excommunicate any layman, and, perhaps more importantly, they were given the authority to regulate the schools and universities of the kingdom.

It is not at all clear that the Catholics of England, who made up some 2 to 3 per cent of the population, welcomed the efforts of their Catholic king. He was stirring up resentment, and worse, against them. Riots against ‘papists’ had broken out in certain parts of the country. They were too few, in any case, to fill up all the offices that were becoming vacant. How could they become judges when they had previously been denied entrance to the Inns of Court?

James also began the scrutiny of all those in power. In the royal closet he interviewed those who held public office as well as the members of both houses of parliament; these individual encounters became known as ‘closetings’ whereby he demanded the acquiescence of each man in his religious policies. Those who demurred were dismissed. Lord Chesterfield reported that ‘we do hear every post of so many persons being out of their employments that it seems like the account one has after a battle of those who miscarried in the engagement’. The king’s proceedings created much anger and disaffection among those who, in other circumstances, would have been faithful to him.

At the same time James also decided to gain the loyalty, or at least the acquiescence, of the nation by granting religious liberty to all of his subjects. In a declaration of indulgence, issued in the spring of 1687, he suspended ‘the execution of all penal laws for religious offences’ and lifted ‘the imposition of religious oaths or tests as qualifications for office’. Thus he materially assisted the case of his co-religionists while at the same time hoping to gain the gratitude of nonconformists. He may have believed that he could still rely upon the tacit support of the royalists and the Anglicans, even though they had been sorely stretched. In this judgement he may have been unwise. From this time forward, however, the dissenters flocked to their chapels and assemblies without the least hindrance; Macaulay observed that ‘an observant traveller will still remark the date of 1687 on some of the oldest meeting houses’.

One sign of Anglican unease emerged in the king’s decision to impose his will upon Oxford University. When the president of Magdalen College died, letters mandatory were sent by the king to the Fellows of that college for the election of Anthony Farmer; Farmer was in fact ineligible for the office, and was notable only for his Catholic sympathies. The Fellows proceeded to elect a Doctor Hough, in defiance of royal instructions. When the king visited Oxford in the course of his summer progress, he berated the recalcitrant Fellows and ordered them to leave his presence. ‘Go home,’ he said, ‘and show yourselves good members of the Church of England. Get you gone, know I am your king. I will be obeyed and I command you to be gone.’

The recently appointed ecclesiastical commission then annulled the election of Hough, whereupon twentyfive of the Fellows of Magdalen resigned or were dismissed. The college now became essentially a Catholic stronghold, and Mass was performed daily in its chapel. It was a hollow victory for the king, however, who thereby managed to alienate a great number of the clergy and to lose any reputation he hoped to gain for religious tolerance. The Magdalen affair was widely reported, adding to the anger and dismay at the king’s indifference to Anglican sensibilities.

It was widely reported, also, that in the course of the summer he made a pilgrimage to the ‘holy well’ in North Wales dedicated to St Winifred where he prayed for an heir. It was also noted that the king had knelt to the papal nuncio, Archbishop Adda, and implored his blessing. No English king had ever knelt before another man since the time of King John, and the posture was treated with embarrassment and even disgust. This was Catholicism with a vengeance. The envoy from Modena reported that ‘such of the nobility as have any credit, standing, or power in the kingdom are rarely to be seen at court’. William of Orange, staunch defender of the Protestant cause, had sent an ambassador to London who held meetings with disaffected noblemen; the prince of Orange watched and waited.

William had been appointed captain general for life of the forces of the Dutch republic and, by right of his territory of Orange, he was also a sovereign prince. His mother was Mary, eldest daughter of Charles I, and his wife, Mary, was the daughter of the present king; no doubt he considered himself to be a rightful heir to the throne, on the supposition that James had no legitimate son. He was a staunch Calvinist, like the rest of his family, and the doctrine of predestination weighed heavily upon him. If he had one duty beyond all others it was to curb the power of France; he had seen Louis XIV invade his adopted country, only to be halted by the opening of the dykes. The imperial pretensions of the House of Bourbon had not been tamed, however, and William dedicated himself to the defence of the Protestant states of Europe from the forces of the French king.

By the end of 1687 James had decided to call parliament in order formally to repeal the Test Act and the other penal laws against the exercise of religious liberty. For that purpose he decided to renew the ‘closeting’ on a local and regional level by asking all office-holders and justices of the peace whether, if elected, they would vote for repeal; if they were not standing as members of the Commons, would they at least vote for candidates who were committed to doing so? If they answered in the negative, or were equivocal, they were to be dismissed from their posts. Over 1,000 men, for example, were expelled from the borough corporations. This was another action designed to infuriate the local gentry, as well as the corporations of the towns and cities; it also served further to alienate the Anglican Church, now confirmed in its belief that Catholicism served only to reinforce arbitrary government.

At the beginning of April 1688, government agents set out with 20 shillings a day in expenses in order to prepare the ground for the coming general election; they were to liaise with the leader of the ‘court party’ in each locality, arrange for the proper distribution of court literature and counter the work of the opposition. The king’s aim was, in other words, to ‘pack’ his new parliament with his own supporters and thus clear the way for complete and uninterrupted rule. Subsequent events, however, ensured that no such parliament would ever meet.

It had already become clear that the queen, Mary of Modena, was with child. The prospect of a Catholic heir then became palpable, with all the anguish and anxiety that ensued among the Anglican and dissenting populations. The Stuart imperium might stretch on perpetually. On 7 May 1688, James reissued his declaration of indulgence, together with a promise to call parliament by the end of the year. An order followed that the declaration was to be read from the pulpits of every church on two successive Sundays. His Jesuit adviser, Father Petre, had told him that the Anglican clergy ‘should be made to eat their own dung’.

The order incited only rage and disobedience from the clergy. The archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops printed a petition for its withdrawal, on the grounds that the dispensing power assumed by the king was in fact illegal. When the petition was presented to him the king was irate. ‘This is a great surprise to me,’ he told the bishops. ‘I did not expect this from your Church, especially from some of you. This is a standard of rebellion!’ The declaration of indulgence was in fact largely ignored. Of the 9,000 churches of England, it is estimated that it was read in 200. It was read in only seven, out of one hundred, in London. When its first words were pronounced in the church of St Gregory’s by St Paul’s, the whole congregation rose and withdrew. The angry will of the king now superseded any kind of caution or circumspection. He demanded that the seven bishops be consigned to the Tower and prosecuted for publishing a seditious libel.

William was watching events as they unfolded. A swift sailing boat was continually passing over the North Sea from London to The Hague, with messages and reports designed for the sole attention of the prince of Orange.

On 10 June 1688, a son was born to James and Mary of Modena. Many disbelieved the report. It was just too convenient that a Stuart heir should emerge at this particular moment. It was rumoured that a warming pan had been used to smuggle a newborn infant into the royal chamber. Five days after the birth of the prince of Wales the seven offending bishops were brought by barge from the Tower to Westminster Hall, where they were greeted with repeated cries of ‘God bless the bishops!’ The jury, after a night’s deliberation, acquitted the bishops of publishing a seditious libel; on publication of the verdict, Westminster Hall rang with cheers and acclamations for half an hour. The news spread rapidly throughout the city, where bonfires were lit and church bells rang. Effigies of the pope were burned in the streets; in Somerset an effigy of the newborn prince was also set on fire. Most ominously for the king, perhaps, his soldiers encamped on Hounslow Heath cheered on receiving the news. When the king heard that the bishops had been acquitted, he said merely, ‘So much the worse for them.’

Yet the decision had shaken the earth beneath his feet. On the day of the acquittal seven prominent men of state – among them the earls of Devonshire, Danby and Shrewsbury – sent a secret letter to William of Orange and informed him that the vast majority of the people were ‘dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government’ and were eager for a change. If William were to invade England, he would find the nation behind him. They told him that ‘much the greatest part of the nobility and gentry’ was opposed to the king and to his policies, and that on his landing they would ‘draw great numbers’ to his side.

Even in this extremity it is unlikely that they wished to remove James from the throne. They wanted William to act in the role of a Protestant saviour who would force the king to call a free parliament, which would then settle the religious affairs of the nation and extirpate all bias towards popery. Speed, and decision, were of the essence before the king could call a ‘packed’ parliament. William was in fact already making active preparations to assemble a field army and a fleet.

By the beginning of August the news of his intentions reached England. In his diary entry for 10 August 1688, John Evelyn noted that ‘Dr Tenison now told me there would suddenly be some great thing discovered. This was the Prince of Orange intending to come over.’ An envoy from the court of Louis XIV reached James a few days later, warning him of an imminent invasion and offering him French assistance. James refused to believe the message. Could his daughter Mary conspire with her husband to depose her father? It was not possible. Would William lead his forces on a perilous expedition abroad at a moment when his country was threatened by French power? No. It was more likely that the French were trying to frighten him into an alliance with Louis XIV, an alliance that would not be to the liking of the coming parliament.

The decision was not long delayed. On 28 September William of Orange announced the forthcoming invasion of England to the States General. On the same day James proclaimed to the nation that its object was ‘an absolute conquest of these our kingdoms and the utter subduing and subjecting us and all our people to a foreign power’ and that it had been promoted ‘by certain wicked subjects for their own selfish ends’; the king also declared that he had ‘declined any foreign succours’. He was on his own.

William then issued his own declaration in which he stated that he had been invited to come over the water by ‘a great many lords both spiritual and temporal’ and that he would come simply ‘to have a free and lawful Parliament assembled as soon as is possible’. He did not mention any pretensions to the throne but stated only that ‘we for our part will concur in everything that may procure the peace and happiness of the nation’. James wished to know who these ‘many lords’, inviting William to England, might be. He questioned the bishops and asked them to sign a paper declaring their ‘abhorrence’ of the invasion but, to his surprise and dismay, they refused to do so.

He now realized the full gravity of his position, and began to make desperate efforts to reverse the policies that had alienated his kingdom. He dismissed Father Petre from his councils. He issued a declaration promising that he would ‘inviolably … preserve the Church of England’ and bar Catholics from parliament. He pledged to restore to office those justices of the peace and other local leaders whom he had summarily dismissed in the spring of the year. He stated that he would readmit the Fellows of Magdalen College whom he had banished for disobedience, and agreed that he would terminate the ecclesiastical commission that had been responsible for their punishment. The charter of the City of London, rendered forfeit six years before, was now returned to the mayor and aldermen. Yet all these palliative measures came too late, and he was now despised for weakness and vacillation.

He was resolute enough, however, in organizing his defences. He fitted out more ships to join the squadrons already at sea; they now consisted of thirty-three large ships and sixteen fire-ships. Royal commissions were sent out for the creation of new regiments and additional men were appointed to existing ones; the militia of London and the counties were called up, and ordered to stand in readiness for the defence of their country. Battalions of infantry, and regiments of cavalry, were brought back from Ireland and Scotland to serve closer to home. Sir John Lowther, a baronet who supported the cause of William, recalled that ‘nothing was left undone that might put the king in a posture to defend himself’. It was clearly within James’s power to confront and defeat the invader.

William, prince of Orange, set sail in the middle of October; it was dangerously late in the season, and a gale drove his ships back. Now that he had made his decision, however, he was determined to go on. At the beginning of November he embarked for England once more with an east wind filling his sails; it became known as ‘the Protestant wind’.

He did not come to ‘save’ Protestantism, however, except in a particular sense. His principal purpose was to find the means to contain and, if possible, curtail French power that was directed towards the United Provinces and elsewhere. He needed an English army, and English ships, for that endeavour. He could by no means be certain of the outcome. While preparing for the invasion he wrote to his principal councillor, Willem Bentinck, that ‘my sufferings, my disquiet, are dreadful. I hardly see my way. Never in my life did I so much feel the need of God’s guidance.’ Yet he was a firm believer in predestination, and now chanced all. He could not be certain that he would be welcomed; he had been advised that the majority of the English would come to his side once he arrived, but he could not be sure of this.

It was believed that he would land in the north or in the east, and James’s defences were accordingly clustered there; William himself was apprised of the decision, and determined that he would go to the relatively unprepared southwest. By the time he reached the coast of Devon, strong winds hampered the English fleet in pursuit and, at a subsequent council of war, it was determined that no attack should be made against what was considered to be a far stronger Dutch fleet. James subsequently averred that a conspiracy had been hatched among the captains, but it is far more likely that they were influenced by caution rather than treason.

The prince of Orange set foot on English soil at Brixham, at the southern end of Tor Bay, on 5 November. It was an auspicious day, the anniversary of the overthrow of the gunpowder plot and the dissolution of a papist conspiracy. The movements of William’s troops, once they had disembarked, were hampered by rain and foul roads. By 9 November William had reached Exeter, where his men were able to rest, but he was not met with any enthusiasm; the citizens treated him coldly, and at a service of thanksgiving in the cathedral the canons and most of the congregation fled. William remained in the city for nine days but no one of renown or distinction came to him; he began to believe that he had been deceived about the situation in England and seemed willing to re-embark with his men. When some local gentry did enrol under his standard he declared that ‘we expected you that dwelled so near the place of our landing would have joined us sooner’. The simple answer to his bafflement may have been that he had landed in a region where no one expected him. Supporters did now begin to march towards him.

Yet James II had not been able to take advantage of this interval in the conflict. He called back his troops who had been originally sent to the north but, when he joined them at their camp in Salisbury, he found both the officers and the men demoralized and divided. A strong king would have immediately launched an attack upon his enemy but James hesitated. Some of his commanders wished to press forward quickly, while others advised a retreat to London.

In this crisis the king himself broke down; he suffered from a catastrophic series of nosebleeds, tokens of his rising panic, that deprived him of rest. Some of his officers began to desert him and make their way to the prince of Orange, among them Lord Colchester, Lord Abingdon and Lord Cornbury; they trusted William’s declaration that he had come to save the Protestant religion and to install a free parliament. A series of local risings, in favour of parliament and Protestantism, now increased the king’s isolation; Nottingham and York, Leicester and Carlisle and Gloucester were some of the towns that declared for ‘the Protestant religion and liberty’.

In an atmosphere of confusion and intense distrust the king, seized with apprehension at the news of the desertions, decided to retreat to London. He had in effect capitulated to William without a fight. Other senior officers, among them John Churchill and the earl of Berkeley, now decided to leave him and go over to William. When the king arrived at Whitehall, and an almost empty court, he was greeted with the news that his younger daughter, Anne, had also defected to the enemy. She was a staunch Anglican who had been horrified by her father’s open espousal and encouragement of Catholicism. Under the protection of the bishop of London, she had escaped by hackney carriage to Nottingham.

The king did not know whom to trust or whom to believe any more. A courtier reported that ‘the king is much out of order, looks yellow, and takes no natural rest’. He could sleep only with the assistance of opiates. He summoned to a council all the nobles and bishops who remained in the city; they advised him that he had no recourse except to call a free parliament. On 30 November he issued a proclamation to that effect, and combined with it a pardon to all those who had risen against him. But it was too late. He had already forfeited the trust and loyalty of many of those who had been closest to him.

William was on a slow march towards London, and the king had the choice of flight or resistance. Yet where would he find the arms and the men to withstand the invader? He sent some commissioners to treat with William at Hungerford, but this was a feint to disguise his true purpose. He had already provided for the safety of his wife and son; on the night of 9 December Mary of Modena, disguised as a laundress, escaped with her child to Calais. On 11 December the king himself fled and, with two Roman Catholic companions, he crossed the Thames to Vauxhall and there took horse. It is assumed that he threw the great seal of England into the waters, so that public order could not legally be maintained by his successor. He did not think of himself as abandoning his kingdom but, rather, finding temporary security before regaining his throne. Yet he had effectively surrendered the initiative to William, who could already regard himself as the next king of England.

On the news that the king had fled, the lords spiritual and temporal formed a temporary administration in order to negotiate with the prince of Orange for the return of a free parliament designed to restore ‘our laws, our liberties and properties’. James’s departure also provoked open fury against the papist enemy; the Catholic chapels of London were fired, while the residences of the Catholic ambassadors of Spain and Florence were ransacked.

Wild rumours now spread through the country that Irish troops under the command of the king had massacred the people of London and were marching to the north. It was reported that Birmingham had been fired by the papists; Nottingham and Stafford were then said to have been sacked, with Doncaster and Huddersfield following in the line of fire. When the rumours reached Leeds that the child-eating Irish were in the suburbs, Ralph Thoresby wrote in his diary that ‘the drums beat, the bells rang backwards, the women shrieked and such dreadful consternation seized upon all persons’. The false alarm is a token of the hysterical anxiety into which the people had sunk. A doggerel song against the Irish came out of the consternation. ‘Lillibulero’ is a parody of papist sentiment and it became so popular that its composer, Thomas Wharton, declared that it had whistled a king out of three kingdoms:

Now the heretics all go down

Lillibulero bullen a la

By Christ and St Patrick’s the nation’s our own

Lillibulero bullen a la.

The music is still used as a signature tune by BBC Radio.

The king’s departure from England was now interrupted when he was discovered on a customs boat about to sail from the Isle of Sheppey; he was disguised in a short black wig and was at first mistaken for a Jesuit. When he was brought to the port of Faversham he was soon recognized and taken to the mayor’s house where he was guarded by the seamen who had found him; they wanted to claim their prize. He was by now thoroughly frightened and bewildered, at one moment pleading for a boat and at the next weeping over his misfortunes. An eyewitness, John Knatchbull, ‘observed a smile in his face of an extraordinary size and sort; so forced, awkward and unpleasant to look upon that I can truly say I never saw anything like it’.

When informed of James’s enforced sojourn in Faversham, no one in authority really knew what to do with him. He could not stay where he was. James himself then seems to have determined to return to London, where he might hold an interview with William; his messenger, bearing this news to the invader, was promptly arrested and consigned to the Tower. Who was the master now?

James, unaware of his envoy’s fate, proceeded towards the capital; as he approached Blackheath on 16 December he was greeted by cheering crowds who were no doubt hoping for an accommodation between the two parties. They were largely comprised of the ‘king and country’ stalwarts among the people, but they represented a more general sense of relief. A royalist supporter noted after the event that in the streets between Southwark and Whitehall ‘there was scarce room for coaches to pass through, and the balconies and windows besides were thronged’. The king himself was to write that it was ‘liker a day of triumph than humiliation’.

A less enthusiastic welcome also awaited him. While resting at Whitehall that evening, he was advised that all the posts were to be taken up by the Dutch guards of the prince of Orange; he would in effect be a prisoner in his own palace. In the early hours of the next day he was woken by an order from the prince commanding him to leave London by nine in the morning and travel on to Ham House. He was to depart at that time because William himself was to enter London at midday and did not wish the people to be diverted by the sight of their king. The king obeyed the order, with the exception that he wished to remove to Rochester rather than to Ham. The wish was granted but it was still clear that the monarch was a helpless captive in his own kingdom.

William himself entered the capital on 18 December to be in turn greeted by cheering crowds, bells and bonfires. He was heralded as one who had come to redeem ‘our religion, laws, liberties and lives’, but a large element of the jubilation must have come from the fact that the Protestant religion had been restored without war or revolution. They had cheered the king two days before as one who had abandoned his Catholic policies; they could equally well cheer their Protestant saviour.

The king stayed at the house of a local baronet in Rochester for a few days, but every moment he was looking for a means of escape. He feared assassination or, at best, straight imprisonment. Yet he noted that the guards about him were not strict in the performance of their duties. In truth William wanted his rival to escape as the least worst outcome of their conflict. James’s presence in the country caused difficulties of its own but, if it could be said that he had departed by his own wish, then he might be considered to have abdicated. On the night of 22 December he rose from his bed and departed through a conveniently opened back door; he walked through the garden to the shore of the Medway where a skiff was waiting for him.

Thus was accomplished what was variously called the great or prodigious ‘Revolution’ and what was eventually known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. A supporter of William, Bishop Burnet, wrote of the king that ‘his whole strength, like a spider’s web, was so irrevocably broken with a touch, that he was never able to retrieve what for want of judgement and heart, he threw up in a day’. It was not a matter of a day, however, but of years. In his obstinacy and fervent piety he had miscalculated the nature of the country; he had advanced where he should have called a halt. He had pitted the power of central government against local government to the ultimate disservice of the nation. By assaulting the sensibilities of both Anglicans and Tories he had alienated his natural supporters, and by advancing the claims of Catholics he had touched upon a very sensitive prejudice. He may not have wanted to become an absolute king, but he acted as if that were his intention. The birth of an heir stretched that prospect indefinitely.

James II spent the rest of his life in France. It was said, in his court at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, that ‘when you listen to him, you realize why he is here’. Thus ended the public life of the last Stuart king of England. We may leave the scene with the words of John Dryden from The Secular Masque:

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

class="book">’Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

1. James I of England and James VI of Scotland, in the characteristically regal pose of hand on hip.

2. Anne of Denmark, James’s spouse, who became a key artistic patron in the ‘Jacobean’ age.

3. James in front of his lords, temporal and spiritual.

4. The title page of the King James Bible, one of the lasting memorials of his reign.

5. The title page of John Milton’s Areopagitica, an eloquent plea against censorship.

6. George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, loved by two sovereigns and hated by the people.

7. Henry, prince of Wales, the supposed saviour of Protestant Europe, who did not live long enough to fulfil his destiny.

8. Charles, the future Charles I, as the prince of Wales in armour.

9. Elizabeth, daughter of James I, who was briefly queen of Bohemia, otherwise known as the Winter Queen.

10. A double portrait of the unhappy Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria.

11. Three out of seven of Charles I’s children, painted by Anthony Van Dyck.

12. A disapproving illustration of the Rump Parliament, after the purge of the Long Parliament in December 1648.

13. What the Cavaliers are supposed to have done with the Puritans.

14. Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford, the dour supporter of absolute monarchy.

15. A plan of the Battle of Naseby, the outcome of which wrecked the king’s chances in the summer of 1645.

16. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles I’s senior commander, brave, but also foolhardy.

17. The trial of Charles I in Westminster Hall.

18. The result of the trial: a death warrant.

19. Cromwell, the chief of men until his death in 1658.

20. A contemporary tapestry celebrating the restoration of Charles II.

21. Charles II, the supposedly ‘merry monarch’.

22. Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II, who was reputed to have introduced tea-drinking to England.

23. Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s many mistresses, who was described by John Evelyn as ‘the curse of the nation’.

24. Nell Gwynne, the orange-seller who became a royal courtesan.

25. Louise de Kérouaille, Charles’s French mistress who became duchess of Portsmouth and who was known by Nell Gwynne as ‘Squintabella’.

26. The earl of Rochester, rake and poet who did not mince his words.

27. Samuel Pepys, who turned the diary into an art form.

28. Sir Christopher Wren, the polymath who transformed London.

29. Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest experimenter in English history.

30. Charles II in his role as patron of the Royal Society.

31. The members of the ‘Cabal’, a group of five self-interested councillors who ran a corrupt coalition around Charles II.

32. The duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son who yearned to be king.

33. The duke of York, soon to become James II, with his wife and daughters.

34. A confused scene supposedly depicting the covert arrival of an infant, ‘the warming-pan baby’, to be passed off as James II’s son.

35. The baby grows into James Francis Edward Stuart, better known to posterity as the ‘Old Pretender’ or the ‘King Over the Water’.

36. James II throwing the great seal into the Thames as he escapes from England into France.

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this third volume.

GENERAL STUDIES

G. E. Aylmer: The Struggle for the Constitution (London, 1963).

J. C. D. Clark: Revolution and Rebellion (Cambridge, 1986).

Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds): Politics, Religion and Popularity (Cambridge, 2002).

Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds): Conflict in Early Stuart England (London, 1989).

Godfrey Davies: The Early Stuarts (Oxford, 1959).

Kenneth Fincham (ed.): The Early Stuart Church (London, 1993).

S. R. Gardiner: History of England, 1603–1642. In ten volumes (London, 1899).

William Haller: The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938).

Christopher Hill: Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958).

Derek Hirst: Authority and Conflict (London, 1986).

Ronald Hutton: Debates in Stuart History (London, 2004).

J. P. Kenyon: The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966).

Peter Lake: Anglicans and Puritans? (London, 1988).

Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds): The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007).

John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc: The History of England. Volumes seven to ten (New York, 1912).

Judith Maltby: Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998).

Brian Manning: The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1976).

John Morgan: Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986).

John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds): Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1993).

J. F. H. New: Anglican and Puritan (London, 1964).

Linda Levy Peck: Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London, 1990).

H. S. Reinmuth Jnr. (ed.): Early Stuart Studies (Minneapolis, 1970).

Conrad Russell: Parliament and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979).

——— Unrevolutionary England (London, 1990).

Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London, 1989).

——— Image Wars (New Haven, 2010).

——— (ed.): Faction and Parliament (London, 1978).

Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake: Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994).

Alan Smith: The Emergence of a Nation State (London, 1984).

J. P. Sommerville: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1986).

David Starkey (ed.): The English Court (London, 1987).

Margot Todd (ed.): Reformation to Revolution (London, 1995).

Howard Tomlinson (ed.): Before the English Civil War (London, 1983).

Hugh Trevor-Roper: Historical Essays (London, 1957).

——— Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1987).

Nicholas Tyacke: Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987).

——— (ed.) The English Revolution (Manchester, 2007).

David Underdown: Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985).

J. Dover Wilson (ed.): Seventeenth Century Studies (Oxford, 1938).

Andy Wood: Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London, 2002).

JAMES VI AND I

Robert Ashton: James by his Contemporaries (London, 1969).

Bryan Bevan: King James (London, 1990).

Caroline Bingham: James of England (London, 1981).

Thomas Birch: The Court and Times of James. In two volumes (London, 1848).

Glenn Burgess: Absolute Monarchy (London, 1996).

Irene Carrier: James (Cambridge, 1998).

Thomas Cogswell: The Blessed Revolution (Cambridge, 1989).

James Doelman: King James and the Religious Culture of England (Cambridge, 2000).

Kenneth Fincham: Prelate as Pastor (Oxford, 1990).

Antonia Fraser: King James (London, 1974).

S. J. Houston: James (London, 1972).

Robert Lockyer: James (London, 1998).

David Matthew: The Jacobean Age (London, 1938).

——— James (London, 1967).

W. M. Mitchell: The Rise of the Revolutionary Party (New York, 1957).

W. B. Patterson: King James and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997).

Linda Levy Peck (ed.): The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991).

Menna Prestwich: Cranfield (Oxford, 1966).

Walter Scott: Secret History of the Court of James. In two volumes (London, 1811).

Alan G. R. Smith (ed.): The Reign of James (London, 1973).

Alan Stewart: The Cradle King (London, 2003).

Roy Strong: Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 2000).

Roland Usher: The Reconstruction of the English Church. In two volumes (New York, 1910).

D. H. Willson: King James (London, 1956).

CHARLES I

G. E. Aylmer: The King’s Servants (London, 1961).

Thomas Birch and Cyprien de Gamache: The Court and Times of Charles I. In two volumes (London, 1848).

Charles Carlton: Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London, 1983).

Hester Chapman: Great Villiers (London, 1949).

H. P. Cooke: Charles I and his Earlier Parliaments (London, 1939).

E. S. Cope: Politics without Parliaments (London, 1987).

Richard Cust: Charles I: A Political Life (London, 2005).

C. W. Daniels and John Morrill: Charles I (Cambridge, 1988).

Isaac Disraeli: Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I. In five volumes (London, 1828–1831).

Christopher Durston: Charles I (London, 1998).

J. H. Hexter: The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

Christopher Hibbert: Charles I (London, 2007).

F. M. G. Higham: Charles I (London,1932).

Clive Holmes: Why Was Charles I Executed? (London, 2006).

David Matthew: The Social Structure in Caroline England (Oxford, 1948).

——— The Age of Charles I (London, 1951).

Brian Quintrell: Charles I (London, 1993).

L. J. Reeve: Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989).

Conrad Russell: The Fall of the British Monarchies (Oxford, 1991).

Kevin Sharpe: The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992).

Hugh Trevor-Roper: Archbishop Laud (London, 1940).

C. V. Wedgwood: The King’s Peace (London, 1955).

——— Thomas Wentworth (New York, 1962).

G. M. Young: Charles I and Cromwell (London, 1935).

OLIVER CROMWELL

Maurice Ashley: The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1957).

Hilaire Belloc: Cromwell (London, 1934).

John Buchan: Cromwell (London, 1934).

Barry Coward: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1991).

J. C. Davis: Oliver Cromwell (London, 2001).

C. H. Firth: Cromwell (London, 1901).

Antonia Fraser: Cromwell (London, 1973).

S. R. Gardiner: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1901).

Peter Gaunt: Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1996).

François Guizot: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1879).

Christopher Hill: God’s Englishman (London, 1971).

Roger Howell: Cromwell (London, 1977).

Frank Kitson: Old Ironsides (London, 2004).

John Morley: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1904).

John Morrill (ed.): Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2007).

Micheál Ó Siochrú: God’s Executioner (London, 2008).

C. V. Wedgwood: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1973).

CIVIL WAR

John Adamson: The Noble Revolt (London, 2007).

Michael Braddick: God’s Fury, England’s Fire (London, 2008).

Charles Carlton: Going to the Wars (London, 1992).

Edward, earl of Clarendon: The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. In six volumes (Oxford, 1888).

David Cressy: England on Edge (Oxford, 2007).

Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds): The English Civil War (London, 1997).

Barbara Donagan: War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008).

Anthony Fletcher: The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981).

S. R. Gardiner: History of the Great Civil War. In four volumes (London, 1888).

Peter Gaunt (ed.): The English Civil War (Oxford, 2000).

Ian Gentles: The English Revolution (London, 2007).

Christopher Hill: The English Revolution (London, 1940).

Ann Hughes: The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1991).

Ronald Hutton: The Royalist War Effort (London, 1982).

D. E. Kennedy: The English Revolution (London, 2000).

John Kenyon: The Civil Wars of England (London, 1988).

Mark Kishlansky: The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979).

Jason McElligott and David Smith (eds): Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007).

Allan Macinnes: The British Revolution (London, 2005).

Brian Manning (ed.): Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973).

Michael Mendle (ed.): The Putney Debates (Cambridge, 2001).

John Morrill: The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976).

——— The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).

——— (ed.) Reactions to the English Civil War (London, 1982).

Jason Peacey (ed.): The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (London, 2001).

R. C. Richardson: The Debate on the English Revolution (London, 1977).

Ivan Roots: The Great Rebellion (London, 1966).

Conrad Russell (ed.): The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973).

David Scott: Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (London, 2004).

Lawrence Stone: The Causes of the English Revolution (London, 1972).

John Stubbs: Reprobates (London, 2011).

David Underdown: Pride’s Purge (Oxford, 1971).

Malcolm Wanklyn: The Warrior Generals (London, 2010).

C. V. Wedgwood: The King’s War (London, 1958).

Austin Woolrych: Britain in Revolution (Oxford, 2002).

Blair Worden: The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974).

——— The English Civil Wars (London, 2009).

COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE

G. E. Aylmer (ed.): The Interregnum (London, 1972).

Toby Barnard: The English Republic (London, 1982).

Jakob Bowman: The Protestant Interest in Cromwell’s Foreign Relations (Heidelberg, 1900).

Barry Coward: The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester, 2002).

C. H. Firth: The Last Years of the Protectorate. In two volumes (London, 1909).

S. R. Gardiner: History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In four volumes (London, 1903).

William Haller: Liberty and Information in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955).

Ronald Hutton: The British Republic (London, 1990).

William Lamont: Godly Rule (London, 1969).

Jason McElligott: Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007).

John Morrill (ed.): Revolution and Restoration (London, 1992).

Robert Paul: The Lord Protector (London, 1955).

David Smith (ed.): Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003).

Michael Walzer: The Revolution of the Saints (New York, 1974).

Austin Woolrych: Commonwealth to Protectorate (London, 1980).

——— England without a King (London, 1983).

CHARLES II

Maurice Ashley: Charles II (London, 1973).

Robert Bosher: The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London, 1951).

Hester Chapman: The Tragedy of Charles II (London, 1964).

Raymond Crawfurd: The Last Days of Charles II (Oxford, 1909).

Godfrey Davies: The Restoration of Charles II (London, 1955).

Antonia Fraser: King Charles II (London, 1979).

Tim Harris: Restoration (London, 2005).

Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds): The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990).

Cyril Hartmann: Clifford of the Cabal (London, 1937).

Ronald Hutton: The Restoration (Oxford, 1985).

———: Charles II (Oxford, 1989).

Matthew Jenkinson: Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II (Woodbridge, 2010).

J. R. Jones: The First Whigs (Oxford, 1961).

——— Charles II (London, 1987).

——— (ed.) The Restored Monarchy (London, 1979).

J. P. Kenyon: Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, 1641–1702 (London, 1958).

Anna Keay: The Magnificent Monarch (London, 2008).

Maurice Lee Jnr: The Cabal (Urbana, 1965).

John Miller: Charles II (London, 1991).

——— After the Civil Wars (London, 2000).

Annabel Patterson: The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven, 2008).

Stephen Pincus: Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1996).

Paul Seaward: The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime (Cambridge, 1988).

Thomas Slaughter: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia, 1984).

Jenny Uglow: A Gambling Man (London, 2009).

Brian Weiser: Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge, 2003).

JAMES II

John Callow: The Making of King James II (Stroud, 2000).

Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.): By Force or By Default? (Edinburgh, 1989).

Lionel Glassey (ed.): The Reigns of Charles II and James II (London, 1997).

Tim Harris: Revolution (London, 2006).

J. R. Jones: The Revolution of 1688 in England (London, 1972).

T. B. Macaulay: The History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1848).

John Miller: Popery and Politics in England (Cambridge, 1973).

——— James II (London, 1978).

W. A. Speck: Reluctant Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1988).

——— James II (London, 2002).

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

I have not included studies of individual authors mentioned in the text.

Maurice Ashley: Life in Stuart England (London, 1964).

David Cressy: Bonfires and Bells (London, 1989).

Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.): The Stuart Courts (Stroud, 2000).

Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds): Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994).

Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden (eds): Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998).

Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann: The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Woman (London, 2011).

Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds): A Nation Transformed (Cambridge, 2001).

Ronald Hutton: The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994).

N. H. Keeble: The Restoration. England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002).

W. K. Jordan: The Development of Religious Toleration in England (London, 1936).

Gerald MacLean: Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge 1995).

Allardyce Nicoll: Stuart Masques (New York, 1968).

Rosemary O’Day: The English Clergy (Leicester, 1979).

David Ogg: England in the Reign of Charles II. In two volumes (Oxford, 1934).

Stephen Orgel: The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong: Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court. In two volumes (London, 1973).

Graham Parry: The Golden Age Restor’d (Manchester, 1981).

R. Malcolm Smuts: Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987).

——— (ed.) The Stuart Court and Europe (Cambridge 1996).

John Spurr: England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000).

Roy Strong: Art and Power (Woodbridge, 1984).

Blair Worden: Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007).

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abbot, George, archbishop of Canterbury: supports Villiers; hostility to Catholics; succeeds Bancroft as archbishop; objects to Frances Howard’s divorce from Essex; attends Frances’s wedding to Somerset; replaced as archbishop; death; and war in Palatinate

‘Abhorrers, the’

Abingdon, James Bertie, earl of

Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets (1650)

Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660)

Act of Settlement (1652)

Act of Uniformity (1662)

Adda, Ferdinando d’, archbishop of Amasia (papal nuncio)

‘Addle Parliament’, see under Parliament

‘Agreement of the People’ (pamphlet)

agriculture: revolution

Amboyna: massacre (1623)

America: English colonists in

Andrewes, Lancelot, bishop of Winchester

Anne, Princess (Charles II’s daughter)

Anne, Princess (James II’s daughter)

Anne of Denmark, wife of James I: coronation; extravagance; mourns death of Prince Henry; supports George Villiers; declines to visit Scotland; death

apprentices: demonstrate

Archie (court fool)

Arlington, Henry Bennet, 1st earl of

Arminians

Arminius, Jacobus

army (English): conditions; James II maintains; see also New Model Army

Arnold, Matthew

Arundel, Thomas Howard, 2nd earl of

Ashe, John

Astley, Sir Jacob

Atkyns, Richard

Aubrey, John

Audley End

Aylesbury, Robert Bruce, 1st earl of

Bacon, Sir Francis: on Salisbury (Cecil); on Commons opposition to James I; on Prince Henry; ambitions on death of Salisbury; and Villiers’ rise as favourite; on natural sciences; prose style; The Advancement of Learning; The New Atlantis

Baillie, Robert

Balfour, Sir William

Bancroft, Richard: bishop of London; archbishop of Canterbury

Baptists

Barbados

Barebone, Isaac Praise-God

‘Barebone’s Parliament’, see under Parliament

Barkstead, Colonel John

baron, Hartgill

Barrington, Thomas and Judith

Bastwick, John; The Litany of John Bastwick

Bate, John

Batten, Sir William

Baxter, Richard

Bedford, Francis Russell, 4th earl of

Bennet, Thomas

Bentinck, Willem (later 1st earl of Portland)

Berkeley, George, 1st earl of

Berkley, Sir John

Berulle, Father

Berwick: peace treaty negotiated (1639)

Bethlehem Hospital

Bible, Holy: King James version

Bide, Sir Thomas

Birch, Colonel John

Bishop, Captain

bishops: in Lords; threatened; bill of exclusion from parliament

Bishops’ War: First (1639); Second (1640)

Blackstone, Sir William: Commentaries on the Laws of England

Blackwall, Essex

Blake, Admiral Robert

Bloody Assizes (1685)

Bohemia

Bombay: as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry

Bond, John

Book of Common Prayer: puritans ordered to conform to; replaced by Directory of Worship; and Act of Uniformity (1661)

books: publication and control

Boteler, Major-General William

Bothwell Bridge, battle of (1679)

Boyle, Robert; Hydrostatical Paradoxes

Bradshaw, John

Breda, Netherlands; declaration of (1660)

Brentford, Middlesex

Bright, Ellen

Brislington, Somerset

Bristol: Prince Rupert captures and secures; falls to parliamentarians

Bristol, John Digby, 1st earl of

Broderick, Allan

Brooke, Robert Greville, 2nd baron

‘Brothers of the Blade, The’ (dialogue)

Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st duke of: as James I’s favourite; titles; dancing; uses sedan chair; supposed influence on James I; trip to Spain to make marriage arrangements for Prince Charles; mother converts to Catholicism; hatred of Spain; Spanish envoys accuse of conspiring against James; and power of parliament; urges alliance with France against Spain; final letter from James; as principal councillor for Charles I; escorts Henrietta Maria from Paris; incompetence at Breda; parliament criticizes; Protestantism; unpopularity; mismanages Cadiz expedition; impeachment; residence struck by ‘water-pillar’; Charles orders to expel Queen’s French attendants; sends naval expedition against France; military failures; parliamentary remonstrance against; and death of Dr Lambe; plans relief of La Rochelle; stabbed to death; funeral

Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd duke of: in Charles II’s entourage; as Charles II’s first minister; secret negotiations with France; arraigned and removed from office; opposes Danby; on suspension of parliament; imprisoned in Tower and released

Bunyan, John; Grace Abounding; The Pilgrim’s Progress

Burgh, John

Burghley, William Cecil, 1st baron

Burnet, Gilbert, bishop of Salisbury

Burton, Henry

Burton, Robert: The Anatomy of Melancholy

Burton, Thomas

Byron, Sir Nicholas

cabal: formed under Charles II; disbanded

Cadiz

Calvinists: in Germany; and Arminians; Laud attacks; doctrines suppressed

Campbell, John, baron

Carew, Thomas

Carey, Sir Robert

Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight

Carleton, Dudley

Carlisle, James Hay, 1st earl of

Carlyle, Thomas

Carr, Sir Robert

Carter, Richard: ‘The Schismatic Stigmatised’

‘Case of the Armie Truly Stated, The’ (pamphlet)

Castlemaine, Barbara, countess of

Catesby, Robert

Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II: marriage; and Charles’s mistresses; Titus Oates accuses of high treason

Catholic League

Catholics: and banishment of Jesuits; and Gunpowder Plot; and oath of allegiance; James I’s hostility to; and Bohemian crisis; parliament’s petitions against (1621); Spanish and French demand toleration and rights in England; and collapse of French embassy with fatalities; popular hostility to; granted liberties under James I; Charles I declares free of persecution; penal laws reinstituted (1625); Charles I banishes from court; and Charles I’s agreement with French to grant freedom of worship; Laud’s distaste for; and Irish rebellion; as royalists; land forfeited in Ireland; and Charles II’s declaration of indulgence; and Test Act; and Popish Plot; James II practises as and favours

‘Cavalier Parliament’, see under Parliament

cavaliers: as term; army strength; behaviour; see also royalists

Cavendish, William (later 1st duke of Newcastle)

Cavendish, William, Lord see Devonshire, 4th earl of

Cecil, Sir Edward

Chalgrave, battle of (1643)

Chamberlain, John

Charles I, King: and death of brother Henry; prospective marriage to infanta of Spain; douses Villiers in water; character and qualities; and sister Elizabeth’s exile; trip to Spain to visit prospective bride; signs marriage contract but withdraws; assumes authority during father’s decline; urges war with Spain; betrothal to Henrietta Maria; organizes masque; accession; manner and style; stutter; appearance; marriage; calls first parliament; finances and funding; on royal authority; and Catholicism; marriage relations; coronation; addresses to parliament; defends Buckingham against parliamentary impeachment; conflict with parliament over sovereignty; dissolves parliament (1626); religious practices; banishes Catholics from court; demands loans from counties and peers; antagonizes judiciary; and summary imprisonment; relations to law; and death of Buckingham; takes control of administration after Buckingham’s death; irresolution over foreign wars; and religious authority; attacks Eliot; dissolves 1629 parliament; and nine imprisoned members of parliament; personal rule (1629–40); foreign policy; imposition of taxes and rights; art collection and patronage; statues and paintings of; birth of son Charles; peaceful years; interest in local government; claims sovereignty in all seas; crowned king of Scotland; visits Edinburgh; unpopularity; religious rules for Scottish Church defied; prerogative challenged in trial of John Hampden; insistence on royal power; sends military supplies north against Scots; raises forces at York against Scots (1639); in Bishops’ War against Scots; parliament defies (1640); orders judicial torture of rioting apprentice; moves to counter Scots in Second Bishops’ War; defeated at Newburn; summons great council of peers (1640); negotiates with Scots; and fall of Strafford; challenged by parliament; confidence; cancels exaction of ship-money; summons parliament to Banqueting House (January 1641); divides opposition; and Strafford’s trial; signs Bill of Attainder against Strafford; loyal supporters; plans visit to Scotland (1641); returns to London from Edinburgh; and Irish rebellion; seeks impeachment of members of parliament; leaves London (1642); writes to parliament requesting authority and revenues be preserved; denies parliamentary declaration; travels to York (1642); refused entry to Hull; raises volunteer army; rejects parliament’s nineteen propositions; prepares for war; raises standard in Nottingham (1642); army strength; at Edgehill; establishes headquarters in Oxford; withdraws from Turham Green; captures Marlborough; advances on Gloucester; disagreements at court of; summons parliament of supporters in Oxford (1644); flees Oxford for Worcester; defeated at Naseby; Milton denounces; and Scots’ readiness to negotiate; and loss of Bristol; negotiates with Presbyterians and Independents; surrenders to Scots; refuses to take covenant; Scots surrender to parliament for cash; touches for king’s evil; travels to London; New Model Army’s dealings with; and army’s Heads of Proposals; at Hampton Court; discussed at Putney debates; in Isle of Wight; agrees ‘Engagement’ with Scots; attempts escape from Carisbrooke Castle; treats with parliamentary commissioners; seeks to raise army in Ireland; trial and death sentence; execution; images removed

Charles II, King: birth; joins father at Greenwich (1642); accompanies father to York; in civil war; letter of resolution from father; exile abroad; proclaimed king by Scots; invited to Scotland (1650); crosses into England; crowned king of Scotland; escapes to France; correspondence with supporters in England; moves from France to Spanish Netherlands; Spain supports; waits in Flanders to invade England; and Monck’s position in London; issues declaration from Breda; returns to England and restored to throne; appearance and character; bored by administrative business; diminished royal power; practises king’s touch; religious faith; coronation; marriage to Catherine; mistresses and illegitimate children; court libertinage and cynicism; petitioned by Quaker woman; declarations of indulgence (on religious toleration); direct help in Great Fire of London; arouses popular distrust; dismisses Clarendon; forms cabal; negotiates Triple Alliance; relations with Louis XIV; expresses desire to convert to Catholicism; receives subsidies from France; declares war on Dutch (1672); suspends repayment of loans (‘the stop’); cancels declaration of indulgence; prorogues parliament (1674 & 1675); closes coffee-houses; secret treaty with Louis XIV; differences with parliament; parliament grants money for war against France; ‘Popish Plot’ against life; dissolves Cavalier Parliament (January 1679); dissolves privy council and forms new council; prorogues parliament (1679); fears for survival; and James as successor; proclaims Monmouth’s illegitimacy; serious illness (1679); prorogues parliament (1680); and exclusion crisis; orders new assembly in Oxford (1681); decides on personal rule; Rye House Plot against; final illness and death; received into Roman Catholic communion

Chatham: Dutch penetrate defences (1667)

Cheriton, battle of (1644)

Chester: falls in civil war

Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of

chocolate

Christian, duke of Brunswick

Christian IV, king of Denmark

Christina, queen of Sweden

Christmas: abolished (1644)

Church of England (Anglicanism): and authority; Laud’s ‘Declaration’ on; alliance with Crown in cleansing kingdom; practices and rituals; clergy required to take oath; convocation supports Charles I; reforms (1640); imposed on nation; in eighteenth century; Danby champions

Church of Scotland: Charles I’s canons and Service Book for; and national covenant; general assembly meets (1636); bishops removed; see also Presbyterians

Churchill, John (later 1st duke of Marlborough)

civil war (1642–6): beginnings and causes; divided loyalties; soldiers; financing; peace calls; conduct of and engagements; siege warfare; second (1648); casualties

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of: on Digby; on Charles I’s insecurity; on Charles I’s unpopularity; on Hampden trial; on Charles I raising forces at York; on Berwick peace negotiations; serves in 1640 parliament; on accusations against Strafford; on Irish rebellion; on parliament’s unpopularity; on loss of navy to Charles I; on beginning of civil war; disparages Essex; on Prince Rupert; praises Cromwell as commander; on Charles I’s trial; on Cromwell’s assumption of power; Broderick reports on disaffection to; as Lord Chancellor under Charles II; disparages Quakers; mediates for Charles II; on Charles II’s discomposure; and sale of Dunkirk to French; fall from favour and dismissal; exile; History of the Rebellion

Clarkson, Laurence

Claypole, Elizabeth (née Cromwell; Oliver’s daughter)

Claypole, John

Clement X, Pope: burnt in effigy

Cleveland, John

Clifford, Thomas, 1st baron

Clotworthy, John

Clough, William

clubmen

Cobham, Henry Brooke, 8th baron

coffee

coffee-houses; closed by Charles II and reopened

Coke, Sir Edward: dispute with James I over law; and Overbury murder; James I rebukes and dismisses; hostility to Spain; imprisoned; on Charles I’s finances; criticizes Buckingham; bill prohibiting detention without trial

Coke, Roger: A Discourse of Trade

Colchester, Lord (1688)

Colchester, siege of (1648)

Coleman, Edward

Collection of Anecdotes and Remarkable Characters, A

committee of safety: formed (1659)

Commons, House of: on established church; business under James I; and taxation under James I; and financing of James I; opposes Buckingham; claims authority to determine country’s religion; ‘Grand Remonstrance’ (religious manifesto); inactivity; and Charles I’s visit to Scotland; sends declaration to counties; Vote of No Addresses on Charles I; call for treaty with Charles I; differences with Lords; in exclusion crisis; see also parliament

Conventicle Act (1664)

‘Convention Parliament’, see under Parliament

Conway, Edward, 2nd viscount

Cook, John

Cornbury, Edward Hyde, viscount (later 3rd earl of Clarendon)

Cornwallis, Sir Charles

Corporation Act (1661)

Cottington, Sir Francis, baron

Cotton, Sir John

Cotton, Robert

council of the north: abolished

council of state: Cromwell forms

counties: government and administration

court of highs commission (religious): abolished

Coventry, Sir Henry

Coventry: parliamentary prisoners in

Cranfield, Lionel

Cromwell, General Lord

Cromwell, Henry (Oliver’s son)

Cromwell, Oliver: as member of 1628 parliament; criticizes Laud; Philip Warwick describes; on ‘Grand Remonstrance’; low estimate of parliamentary army; forms elite regiment; engages royalist force at Grantham; favours religious toleration and plurality; as Independent; and Charles’s advance on Gloucester; in committee of two kingdoms; promoted lieutenant-general of eastern association; background, character and religious faith; victory at Marston Moor; appearance; differences with Manchester; forms New Model Army; as second-in-command of New Model Army at Naseby; on victory over royalists; collapse and near-death; Lilburne writes to and praises; and army discontent; in new general council of army; and removal of Charles I from Holmby House to London; in New Model Army’s march on London; negotiates with captured Charles I; at Putney debates; openly breaks with Charles I; throws cushion at Ludlow; subdues rebels in Wales; commands at battle of Preston; considers fate of Charles I; at Charles I’s trial; heads council of state; made commander-in-chief of army; optimism; Lilburne attacks; travels to Ireland and suppresses rebellion; campaign in Scotland (1650); illness in Scotland; final battle at Worcester; returns to London and rewarded; aims and reforms; dissolves parliament (1653); dominance and authority; reconstitutes parliament; as Lord Protector; abused; administration and ordinances; assassination attempts on; calls parliament (1654); venture in West Indies; orders reform of manners; depression; proposed as king but declines; posthumous reputation; enjoys festivities and pleasures; health decline and death; dissolves parliament (1658); openly criticized; Marvell’s poems on; funeral

Cromwell, Richard (Oliver’s son): succeeds father; abdicates; declines army request for commanding officer; rumoured return to office; flees to exile in Europe

customs and festivals

Cutpurse, Moll

Dade, William: Prognostications

Danby, Thomas Osborne, 1st earl of (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds); released from Tower; invites William of Orange to invade

Davenant, John, bishop of Salisbury

Davenant, Sir William; Salmacida Spolia (masque); The Tragedy of Albovine (play)

Davies, Lady Eleanor

decimation tax

Declaration of the Army (1646)

Declaration of Sports

Dekker, Thomas: The Seven Deadly Sins of London

Denmark: England proposes holy crusade against Catholic powers

Derby, James Stanley, 7th earl of

Dering, Sir Edward

Desborough, John

Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th earl (later 1st duke) of

D’Ewes, Simonds: criticizes Commons’ behaviour; on Cotton’s decline; on Charles I’s demand for ship-money; on Strafford’s trial; on ‘Grand Remonstrance’; on 1641 election; on Charles I’s military officers; on effect of parliamentary declaration on opponents in civil war; on women’s peace demonstration

Diggers

Digges, Sir Dudley

Dillingham, John

Discourse of the Religion of England

dissenters (nonconformists): proliferation; under Charles II; granted freedom of worship (1672); under James II

Donne, John

Dorchester, Catherine Sedley, countess of

Dort, synod of (1618)

Doves, Samuel

Dowdall, Lady Elizabeth

Dowland, John

drama see theatre

dress and fashion: under Charles II

Drogheda, Ireland

Dryden, John: on battle of Lowestoft; as dramatist; Absalom and Achitophel; The Secular Masque

Dublin: rebellion (1641)

Duckenfield, Colonel Robert

Duke of York’s Servants (theatre company)

Dunbar, battle of (1650)

Dunkirk: sold to French; Anglo-French alliance against

Dutch Republic: in Triple Alliance (1668); provokes near war with England (1623); defensive league with England; treaty with England (1625); alliance with France; attacks Spanish fleet (1639); as trade rival; war with England (1665–7); defensive treaty with France (1666); peace negotiations; raid into England (1667); Anglo-French secret treaty against; French and English war with (1672–4); merchant vessels elude English navy; French successes against; and marriage of Princess Mary and William; Louis XIV makes peace with

Earle, John

Earle, Sir Walter

East India Company: rivalry with Dutch; trade with Russia

eastern association

Edgehill, battle of (1642)

Edinburgh: Charles I visits (1633); (1641); James I visits (1617); Charles I’s religious orders defied; draws up national covenant; parliament meets (1640); supposed conspiracy (’the incident’); see also Scotland

Edward III, King

Edwards, Thomas: Gangraena

elections (parliamentary): (1639); (1640); (1659); (1679); (1688); see also Commons, House of; Parliament

Eliot, Sir John: on failure of 1621 parliament; on impeachment of earl of Middlesex; on death of James I; criticizes Charles I in parliament; criticizes Buckingham; taken to Tower and released; speechmaking and oratory; on power of bishops; imprisoned; death

Eliot, T. S.

Elizabeth, Princess (Charles I’s daughter)

Elizabeth, Princess (later queen of Bohemia)

Elizabeth I, Queen: death and succession

Ellesmere, Sir Thomas Egerton, baron

England: economic problems; prosperity and trade; population increases; social divisions; Dutch trade rivalry; troops conscripted for European service; war with Spain (1625); peace with France (1629); harvest failure (1630) and food riots; secret treaty with Spain (1634); and beginnings of war against Scots; labourers and craftsmen pressed into Charles I’s military service; harvest failures (1646–51); commonwealth proclaimed; post-civil-war condition; foreign relations under commonwealth; Cromwell divides into eleven districts; Spain declares war on (1655); power and administration under Charles II; war with Dutch (1665–7); war with France (1666–7); proliferation of Christian sects; war with Dutch (1672); peace with Dutch (1674); economic and social improvements following second Dutch war; industrial development; standing army under James II

Essex, Arthur Capel, 1st earl of

Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of: marriage to and divorce from Frances Howard; dismissed by Charles I; as member of committee for petitions; as privy councillor; as lord chamberlain; commands parliamentary army; proposes truce offer to Charles I and deciding battle; relieves Gloucester; advances on Oxford; in committee of both kingdoms; favours accommodation with Charles I; criticized; laments Laud’s death; removed from military command

‘etcetera oath, the’

Etherege, Sir George: She Wou’d if She Cou’d

Eure, Margaret

Evelyn, John: on Charles I’s return from negotiations with Scots; on apparition; attends Anglican service; on women’s behaviour; on Cromwell’s funeral; on Richard Cromwell’s dissolving parliament; witnesses return of Charles II; on changes under Charles II; on Charles II’s gambling; on Great Fire of London; disparages Charles II’s entourage; on battle of Sole Bay; on duke of York’s Catholicism; on Rye House plot; on dissoluteness of Charles II’s court; on James II’s summary acts; on impending invasion by William of Orange

Everard, William

excise (tax): introduced

Exclusion Bills (1679); (1681)

Fairfax, Sir Ferdinando

Fairfax, Sir Thomas: commands New Model Army; besieges and captures Bristol; greets Charles I; petition of complaint from army; in army’s march on London; in second civil war; besieges Colchester; and trial of Charles I; opposes Lilburne; refuses to invade Scotland

Fanshawe, Anne, Lady (née Harrison)

Fanshawe, Sir Richard

Farmer, Anthony

farming see agriculture

Farnham Castle

Fauconberg, Mary, countess (née Cromwell; Oliver’s daughter)

Fauconberg, Thomas, earl

Fawkes, Guy

Feake, Christopher

Felton, John

fens: drained

Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor (earlier archduke)

Fifth Monarchy men

Finch, Heneage

Finch, Sir John

five knights case

fleet (English): failed attack on Cadiz; sails against France (1627); rebuilt and sails (1635); supports parliament; dominance; strengthened under Charles II; parliament money to (1675); Pepys develops for James II

Fleetwood, Major-General Charles

food and drink: under Charles II

Fox, George

Foxe, John: Acts and Monuments

France: demands liberties for English Catholics; as prospective ally against Spain; Protestants under threat; expedition against (1627); peace with England (1629); alliance with Dutch; rumoured potential invasion by; payments to Charles II; Cromwell makes treaty with (1655); relations with England under Charles II; Dunkirk sold to; occupies St Kitts; war with England (1666–7); Triple Alliance against; Charles II forms anti-Dutch alliance with; war on Dutch (1672); fleet inactive at battle of the Texel; successes against United Provinces; see also Louis XIV, king of France

Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate (later king of Bohemia)

Fuller, Thomas

furniture

Galileo Galilei

Gataker, Thomas

gentry: rise under James I; authority

Gerard, Father John, SJ

Glanville, John

Glorious Revolution (1688)

Gloucester: in civil war

Goaden v. Hales (lawsuit)

Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry

Gondomar, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of

Goodwin, Thomas

Gramont, comte de

‘Grand Remonstrance’

Great Britain: as title; see also England

Green Ribbon Club

Grenville, Sir John

Gresham College, London

Grimstone, Harbottle

Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln

Gunpowder Plot (1605)

Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden

Gwyn, Nell

Habeas Corpus Act (1679); James II wishes to repeal

Habsburg family: and Bohemia

hackney carriages

Halifax, George Savile, 1st marquess of

Hall, Joseph: Characters of Virtues and Vices

Hallam, Henry

Halley, Edmund

Hamilton, James, 1st duke of

Hamilton, James, 2nd marquess of

Hammond, Colonel Robert

Hampden, John: imprisoned; tried before court of exchequer; supports Scots against Charles I; supports Providence Island Company; Strafford threatens; impeachment charges against; and Cromwell’s low estimate of parliamentary army; dies of wounds

Hampton Court: conference (1604); Charles I at

Harington, Sir John: on Hampton Court debate; on court behaviour; Suffolk advises on gaining favour at court; appointed tutor to Prince Henry

Harley, Lady Brilliana

Harrington, James: Oceana

Harrison, Sir John

Haselrig, Sir Arthur

Hastings, Henry

Hatfield House, Hertfordshire

Heads of the Proposals

hearth tax (1662)

Henri IV, king of France: assassinated

Henrietta Anne, Princess, duchess of Orléans

Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I: betrothal; marriage; Catholicism; marriage relations; declines to attend coronation; French attendants sent home; poverty; birth of son Charles; in masques and theatrical pieces; offended by Prynne; on Scottish service book; supports husband; defies parliamentary control of court and council; threatened with impeachment; leaves for Holland (1642); sends arms from Holland; returns from exile in war; exile abroad; mediates between Charles II and Louis XIV

Henry, Philip

Henry, Prince (Charles I’s son)

Henry, prince of Wales: tutored by Harington; character; betrothal to Maria Anna; death

Herbert, Sir Edward

Heylyn, Peter

Heyman, Sir Peter

Hobbes, Thomas: on death of Laud; career; and political theory; Leviathan

Holborne, Sir Robert

Holland, Henry Rich, 1st earl of

Holland: Henrietta Maria travels to; see also Dutch Republic

Hollar, Wenceslaus

Holles, Denzil; impeachment charges against

Holmby House, Northamptonshire

Holt, Wiltshire

Holy Roman Empire: in Thirty Years War

honours: sale under James I

Hooke, Robert

Hopkins, Sir William

Hopton, Sir Ralph

Hotham, Sir John, as governor of Hull

Hough, John, bishop of Worcester

Houghton, John: Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade

Hounslow Heath

Howard family: oppose Buckingham

Howe, John Grubham

Hudlestone, John

Huguenots; see also Protestantism

Hull: military arsenal; Charles I denied entry

Hunt, Leigh

Huntingdon, Henry Hastings, 5th earl of

Hurst Castle, Hampshire

Hutchinson, George

Hutchinson, Colonel John

Hutchinson, Lucy (née Apsley); Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson

hygiene: Pepys and

‘incident, the’

Independents (sect)

‘Instrument of Government’ (Lambert’s)

intelligencers (busy-bodies)

Ireland: Strafford (Wentworth) in; rebellion (1641); social structure and land ownership; English forces sent to; New Model Army destined for; Charles I seeks to raise army in; Cromwell deputed to subdue; Cromwell travels to and suppresses; Act of Settlement (1652); ordinance incorporating into commonwealth

Ireton, Sir Henry

Ironsides

Jaffray, Alexander

Jamaica

James, Henry

James I, king of England (James VI of Scotland): accession to English throne; journey from Edinburgh to London; appearance and manner; creates new knights; coronation; plot against; personal retinue and court; clerical and religious discussions; learning; relations with Parliament; honoured and praised; hunting; informed of Gunpowder Plot; court laxity and excesses; behaviour; favourites; extravagance and debts; view of law; financial situation; and royal power; joins Protestant Union; sells honours and titles; progress to Newark (1612); and Somerset’s self-pardon; health declines; rebukes judges; progress to Edinburgh (1617); and Bohemian crisis; progress (1620); and parliament’s petitions against Catholics and Spain; Mytens portrait; loses popular support; fears treason; thrown from horse and falls through ice; and son Charles’s visit to Spain with Buckingham; near-war with Dutch (1623); and prospective war with Spain; final letter to Buckingham; death; called ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’; attends and finances masques; religious views; distributes land in Ireland; Basilikon Doron; Declaration of Sports

James II, king (earlier James, duke of York): marriage to Anne Hyde; Catholicism; sea victory over Dutch; assists in Great Fire of London; retires from public life; marriage to Mary of Modena; Charles II tells of French subsidies; and rumoured plot against Charles II; Shaftesbury opposes as successor to Charles II; refuses to return to Anglicanism and takes exile in Spanish Netherlands; in exclusion crisis; Charles II’s low opinion of; contends for throne; regains powers; character and qualities; succeeds to throne; maintains standing army; appoints Catholic officers to army and navy; relations with Louis XIV; tensions with parliament; declaration of indulgence order; and William of Orange’s invasion; opposes William of Orange; flees, apprehended and returned to London; allowed to escape abroad; exile in France

Jeffreys, George, 1st baron (Judge)

Jesuits: banished (1604); and Gunpowder Plot; parliament denounces; rumoured Popish Plot against Charles II

Johnson, Robert

Jones, Inigo

Jonson, Ben: writes plays on ambition and corruption; on Salisbury; masques; Bartholomew Fair; Love Restored; News from the New World; Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue; Sejanus

Joyce, Cornet

judges: loyalties in civil war

Junto, the (puritan)

justices of the peace

Juxon, Thomas

Juxon, William, bishop of London

Ketch, Jack

Keymis, Lawrence

Keynes, John Maynard

Kid’s Coffee House (the Amsterdam)

Kilfenny Castle, Limerick

Killigrew, Thomas

King’s Players, the (theatre company)

Kirk see Church of Scotland

Kirkby, Christopher

Knatchbull, John

Knight (Oxford preacher)

Knox, John

Knyvett, Sir Thomas

La Rochelle, France

Lambe, Dr John

Lambert, General John

land: ownership under Charles II

Langport (near Bristol), battle of (1645)

Latitudinarianism (‘Latitude men’)

Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury (earlier bishop of St David’s): administers coronation oath to Charles I; supports Arminians; supports Charles I; on Church’s authority; ‘Declaration on the Articles of Religion’; appointed chancellor of Oxford University; opposition to; preaches on sixth anniversary of Charles I’s accession; and ‘Thorough’ (regime); character and appearance; in Edinburgh; Van Dyck portrait; reforms Church rites and doctrines; puritan reaction to; on Scottish defiance; Pym criticizes; and Charles I’s calling great council of peers; impeached and imprisoned; at Strafford’s execution; executed

Lauder, Sir John

Lauderdale, John Maitland, 1st duke (earlier 2nd earl) of

learning: Bacon on

Leeds: captured by royalists

Legate, Matthew

Leicester, Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of

Leicester: Charles I storms

Leighton, Alexander

Lenthall, William

Leslie, Alexander (later 1st earl of Leven)

Leslie, David (later baron Newark)

L’Estrange, Roger

levellers

Licensing Act (1662)

Lilburne, John

‘Lillibulero’ (song)

‘Little Parliament’, see under Parliament

local government: under Charles I; gentry and

Locke, John

London: plague (1603); James I rides in state through (1604); Tower’s defences strengthened; described by contemporary writers; hackney carriages; City ordered to lend £200,000 to Charles I; petitions parliament for church reformation; Suckling’s party attempts to breach; Charles I’s procession in (1641); common court elections (1641); civil disorder; Charles loses loyalty; stands against royalist forces; defences erected in civil war; royalist supports in; merchants; mob intimidates parliament; New Model Army marches on; dress and fashion; houses and furniture; Pepys on life in; Great Plague (1665); Great Fire (1666); ‘bawdy house riots’ (1668); Charles II investigates City Charter and privileges; James II returns Charter; see also Whitehall

London Gazette

Londonderry

‘London’s Defiance to Rome’ (pamphlet)

‘Long Parliament’, see under Parliament

Lord of Misrule (custom)

Lords, House of: Charles I defends Buckingham in; bishops in; differences with Commons; see also Parliament

Louis XIII, king of France: as possible ally against Spain; dislikes Buckingham; and expulsion of Henrietta Maria’s attendants from England; persecutes Huguenots; promises toleration of Protestants

Louis XIV, king of France: Cromwell makes treaty with (1655); praises Cromwell; and monarchy under Charles II; ambitions and absolutism; declares war on England (1666); defensive treaty with Dutch; Charles II’s relations with; and England in Triple Alliance; subsidies to Charles II; inactivity at battle of the Texel; makes peace with United Provinces; pays out bribes; hostility to Danby; sends money to James II; amity with James II; warns James II of prospective invasion by William of Orange

Love, Christopher

Lovelace, Richard

Love’s Triumph (masque by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson)

Lowe, Roger

Lowestoft, battle of (1665)

Lowther, Sir John

Ludlow, Edmund

Lunsford, Thomas

Lutter, battle of (1626)

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, baron; History of England

Mackintosh, James: Eminent British Statesmen

Magalotti, Lorenzo

Magdalen College, Oxford

Maidstone, John

Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of (earlier viscount Mandeville)

Manchester: first death in civil war

Mandeville, viscount see Manchester, 2nd earl of

Mansfeld, Ernest, count of

Mantegna, Andrea: The Triumph of Caesar (painting)

Maria Anna, infanta of Spain

Marie de’ Medici, queen of France

Marlborough, Wiltshire: falls to Charles

Marlowe, Christopher

Marston Moor, battle of (1644)

Marvell, Andrew; ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.’; ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’; ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’

Mary, princess: marriage to William of Orange; designated as regent; Protestantism

Mary of Modena, wife of James II: marriage; pregnancy and birth of son; William of Orange opposes; escapes to Calais

Mary Queen of Scots

Mason, Captain

masques

Mather, Richard

Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor

Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria

May, Humphrey

Mayflower (ship)

Maynard, Joseph

maypoles: reintroduced (1660)

Mazarin, Cardinal Jules

Mead, Joseph

Meade, Revd Joseph

melancholy

Meres, Sir Thomas

Middlesex, Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of

Middleton, Thomas: A Game at Chess (play)

Militia Act (1663)

millenary petition (1603)

Milton, John; Areopagitica; The Reason of Church Government

Monck, George (later 1st duke of Albemarle): in Scotland; and dispute between army and parliament; marches into England and intervenes in parliament; and Charles II’s restoration; meets Charles II on return to England

Monmouth, James Scott, duke of: birth; claim to throne; illegitimacy; victory at Bothwell Bridge; returns to England from exile; tour of West Country; offers to act as surety to Shaftesbury; implicated in Rye House Plot; rebellion (1685); beheaded

monopolies

Monson, Henry

Monson, William

Montagu, Ralph

Montagu, Richard

Monteagle, William Parker, 4th baron

Montrose, James Graham, 5th earl (later 1st marquess) of

More, John

Morland, Sir Samuel

Muggletonians (sect)

Murray, Will

music: in James I’s reign; Pepys on

Mytens, Daniel

Nantes, Edict of: revoked (1685)

Naseby, battle of (1645)

navy see fleet (English)

Naylor, James

Nedham, Marchamont

Netherlands see Dutch Republic

Nethersole, Sir Francis

Neville, Christopher

‘new disease’ (fever)

New Model Army: Cromwell forms; Fairfax commands; character; disbandment planned; petition of complaint to Fairfax; escorts Charles I from Holmby House; recruited for service in Ireland; arrears of pay granted by parliament; dealings with Charles I; proposals to Parliament; marches on London; demands representative parliament; divided over fate of Charles I; victory in second civil war; demands death of Charles I; status after king’s death; disillusion with parliament; petition of complaint to parliament; requests commanding officer; conflict with parliament (1659); dispersed under Charles II; see also army (English)

Newburn, battle of (1640)

Newbury: first battle of (1643); second battle of (1644)

Newcastle, William Cavendish, 1st earl (later duke) of

Newcastle: surrenders to Scots (1640)

news: demand for under Charles II

newsletters

Newton, Sir Isaac; De motu corporum in gyrum

Newton, Sir John

Nicholas, Edward

nonconformists see dissenters

North, Roger

Northampton, Henry Howard, 1st earl of

Northumberland, Algernon Percy, 10th earl of

Norwich, George Goring, 1st earl of

Nottingham: Charles I raises standard in; Hutchinsons at

Oates, Titus

offices of state: holders

Oglander, Sir John

Olivares, Gaspar de Guzman, count-duke of

opera: introduced into England

optics

Ormonde, James Butler, 1st duke of

Otway, Thomas

Overbury, Sir Thomas

Oxford: parliament convened in (1626); Charles I and Henrietta Maria visit (1636); Charles I makes headquarters in; peace negotiations (February 1643); Charles I summons parliament of supporters (1644); Charles I escapes from to Worcester; Fairfax besieges; Charles II orders assembly in (1681)

Oxford University: Laud reforms; James II interferes in

Packe, Sir Christopher

Palatinate

Palmer, Sir Geoffrey

pamphleteering

Paris Garden (Southwark)

Parliament: James I opens (1604); relations with James I; and Gunpowder Plot; business under James I; reconvened and dissolved (‘Addle Parliament’, 1614); meets (1621); assembles (February 1624); powers; ‘Long’ (1640–60); Charles I first calls; debates Charles I’s finances; reconvened in Oxford (1626); criticizes Buckingham; Charles I addresses; Charles I dissolves (1626); conflict with Charles I over sovereignty; opposes unlawful imprisonment; prorogued (1628); proceedings reported; opened (1629); adjourns for eleven years (1629); nine members arrested and imprisoned; summoned and meets (‘stillborn parliament’, 1639–40); called (‘Short Parliament’, 1640); work on renovation; and Triennial Act; challenges Charles I; votes money to Scots; bill allowing staying in session until dissolution voted; rule; reassembles (October 1641); and ‘Grand Remonstrance’; popular petitions to; prepares for war against Charles I; nineteen propositions to Charles I; sets up committee of safety for military preparations; army strength in civil war; wartime strategy; assumes supreme power (1643); committee of two kingdoms (with Scots); self-denying ordinance; sends propositions to Charles I; receives Large Petition from army supporters; and army discontent; grants arrears of pay to army; accepts army’s proposals; expels eleven Presbyterian members; treats with imprisoned Charles I; ‘Rump’; decides on trial of Charles I; constitution after Charles I’s death; dissolution (1653); army’s petition of complaint to; Cromwell reforms; ‘Little’ (‘Barebone’s’); Cromwell calls and dissolves (1654–5); business under Cromwell; second protectorate; conflict with army (1659); Rump expelled; Monck orders Rump to dissolve; and Charles II’s 1660 declaration from Breda; elected 1660 (‘Convention’); meets (1661; ‘Cavalier’); anger at Charles II’s declaration of indulgence; and Charles II’s expenses; reluctance to finance second Dutch War; Charles II prorogues (1674 & 1675); opposition to royal cause; reassembles (February 1677); differences with Charles II; grants £1 million to Charles II for war against France; Charles II dissolves ‘Cavalier’ (January 1679); Charles II prorogues (1679); beginnings of party politics; dissolved (1679); and exclusion crisis; relations with James II; see also Commons, House of; elections (parliamentary); Lords, House of

Parliament Scout

Partridge, John: Calendarium Judaicum

party politics: beginnings

Peacemaker, The

Peacham, Henry: The Complete Gentleman

Pelham, Sir William

Pembroke, Philip Herbert, 4th earl of

Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd earl of

Penn, Admiral William

Pennington, Vice-Admiral Sir John

Pepys, Elizabeth

Pepys, Roger

Pepys, Samuel: on posthumous praise for Cromwell; describes Monck; on popular oath; on reintroduction of maypole; on folly of marrying pregnant women; on rainstorm after Charles II’s coronation; deplores power of bishops; on Charles II’s mistresses; on Sedley’s outrageous behaviour; diary descriptions; on Great Plague; and national shortage of money; on fall of Clarendon; on popular mistrust of Charles II; on École des Filles; develops navy

Percy, Thomas

‘Petitioners, the’

Petre, Edward, SJ

Phelips, Sir Robert

Philip III, king of Spain

Philip IV, king of Spain

Pickering, Sir Gilbert

plague: (1603); (1626); London (1685)

Player, Sir Thomas

poll tax: introduced

poor, the: increase in numbers; welfare under Charles I

Popish Plot (1678)

portents and prognostications

Porter, Endymion

Portland, Richard Weston, 1st earl of

Portsmouth, Louise de Kérouaille, duchess of

Portugal: and marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II

Pory, John

preaching: style; as distributor of news

predestination: as doctrine

Presbyterians: James I’s hostility to; Charles I’s concessions to; at Westminster Assembly; differences with Independents; earl of Manchester embraces; suppress printing; Charles I negotiates with; on Church rule; plan disbandment of New Model Army; eleven members charged; hostility to army; excluded from parliament by Pride; Charles II promises support to; in Cavalier Parliament; adapt to Charles II’s regime; prepare for separate church; see also Church of Scotland

press: controlled; see also books; printing

Preston, battle of (1648)

Pride, Colonel Thomas: ‘purge’; raids beargarden

print shops and booksellers

printing: suppressed (1643)

Privy Council: legislative powers; reformed

professions

prostitution: in London

Protestant Union

Protestantism: James I embraces; and Bohemian crisis; divisions; persecuted in Europe; under threat in France; in Thirty Years War; Louis XIII grants freedom of worship; and Popish Plot; see also Huguenots

Providence Island Company

Prynne, William: puritanism; charged, sentenced and ears cut off; satirizes Eucharistic rites; prosecuted and punished with Bastwick; released and returns to London; Histriomastix

purge: as word

puritans: present millenary petition to James I; religious beliefs and practices; ordered to conform to Book of Common Prayer; under Charles I; anti-Laudian reaction; women and; clergy removed from livings (1662)

Putney: Fairfax sets up HQ at; debates (1647)

Pye, Sir Robert

Pym, John: speaks against Catholic threat; on parliamentary authority in religion; supports Scots against Charles; supports Providence Island Company; petitions Charles to make peace with Scots; leads ‘Protestant Cause’; speaks in parliament; Strafford threatens; accusations against Strafford; passes ‘root and branch’ petition; reforms; as chancellor of exchequer; speeches published; ten propositions; alarmed at Charles’ proposed visit to Scotland; as ‘King Pym’ and mastery in parliament; pledges to suppress Irish rebellion; and ‘Grand Remonstrance’; blames Charles for Irish rebellion;prepares for war at home; supports mob against bishops; character and appearance; impeachment charges against; locks doors of Commons chamber; fear of traitor’s death; raises money in civil war; rejects Essex’s proposed truce offer to Charles I; death

Quakers

Radcliffe, Sir George

Rainsborough, Thomas

Raleigh, Lady

Raleigh, Sir Walter: suspected of conspiracy; forfeits Sherborne; Prince Henry admires; sails for Guiana; executed

Ranke, Leopold von

Ranters (religious)

religion: divisions and controversies; Westminster Assembly proposes reform; enthusiasts and radicals; under Cromwell and commonwealth; under Charles II; Charles II’s declaration of indulgence on; proliferation of sects under Charles II; see also Catholics; Protestantism

Reresby, Sir John

Reynolds, John

Rhé (island, France)

Rich, Frances (née Cromwell; Oliver’s daughter)

Rich, Sir Nathaniel

Rich, Robert

Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean Duplessis, duc de

Ripon

Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd earl of

Roe, Sir Thomas

Rogers, Thorold

‘root and branch’ party

Rossingham, Edward

roundheads: as term; army strength; desecrate churches; weapons and equipment

Roundway Down, battle of (1643)

Rous, Francis

Rous, John

Royal Africa Company

Royal Charles (ship)

royal forests: limited

Royal Society: Bacon’s influence on; formed; Newton and; and economic improvements

royalists: pamphlets; forces muster (1642); supporters; wartime strategy; final defeats; protest at Charles I’s execution; conspiracies in London; in Cavalier Parliament (1661); see also cavaliers

Rubens, Peter Paul

‘Rump Parliament’, see under Parliament

Rupert, Prince, Count Palatine of the Rhine: commands cavalry in civil war; plunder in war; in Oxford; moves to Bristol; defeated at Marston Moor; at Naseby; surrenders Bristol; Charles I dismisses; cavalry raids from Oxford; commands fleet under Charles II

Rushworth, John

Russell, William, Lord

Rye House Plot (1683)

Sagredo, Giovanni

St John, Elizabeth

St John, Oliver

St Kitts: French occupy

St Martin (citadel, France)

St Paul’s Cathedral (old): as meeting centre; crowd destroys altar

St Winifred: shrine

Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of (earlier viscount Cranborne): and accession of James I; office under James I; informed of Gunpowder Plot; and taxation measures; and ‘great contract’; on national financial difficulties; death

Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury

Sandwich, Edward Mountague, 1st earl of

Sandys, Sir Edwin

Saye, William Fiennes, 1st viscount

science: and Royal Society

Scotland: James I visits (1617); Charles I’s relations with; opposes Charles I’s religious orders; national covenant; prepares for war against Charles I (1639); preparations for second war and advance into England (1640); negotiates with Charles I; English parliament votes £300,000 to; Charles I visits (1641); solemn league and covenant with England; volunteers support parliamentary cause in England; readiness to negotiate with Charles I; Charles I surrenders to; returns Charles I to parliament for cash; and Charles I in Isle of Wight; ‘Engagement’ with Charles; in second civil war; proclaims Charles II king; invites Charles II to visit; Cromwell’s campaign in (1650); Monck in; ordinance incorporating into commonwealth; see also Edinburgh

Scottish Church see Church of Scotland

Scroggs, William

Scrope, Philadelphia, Lady (née Carey)

Sealed Knot (royalist conspiratorial group)

Sedgemoor, battle of (1685)

Sedley, Sir Charles

self-denying ordinance

Seller, Abednego: The History of Passive Obedience

sermons; published

seven bishops: consigned to Tower and acquitted

Sexby, Edward

Seymour, Sir Francis

Seymour, William

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of: Charles II attacks; as senior councillor; as controversial figure; supports royal prerogative; on duke of York’s undependability; dismissed by Charles II; opposes Danby; urges dissolution of Cavalier Parliament; followers; objects to long suspension of parliament; sent to Tower; as champion of Protestantism; proposes dismissal of duke of York from king’s council; on election of ‘courtiers’ to parliament; appointed lord president; on Charles II’s proroguing parliament (1679); opposes James II’s accession, 4435; presents Charles II with petition for sitting of parliament; attempts prosecution of duke of York and Duchess of Portsmouth; takes refuge and dies in Holland; ‘Letter from a Person of Quality’

Shakespeare, William; The Tempest; The Winter’s Tale

Sharp, James, archbishop of St Andrews

Sheffield: poverty

Sheldon, Gilbert, archbishop of Canterbury

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Sherland, Anthony

ship-money (tax)

Shirley, James

‘Short Parliament’, see under Parliament

Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of

Shrewsbury, Gilbert Talbot, 7th earl of

Sidney, Algernon

silver: minted in England for Antwerp

Sindercombe, Miles

slaves: in Pepys’s London

Slingsby, Sir Henry

soap: manufacturing monopoly

Sole Bay, battle of (1672)

solemn league and covenant; burned

Somerset, Frances Howard, countess of (earlier countess of Essex)

Somerset, Robert Carr, 1st earl of (earlier viscount Rochester): as James I’s favourite; Prince Henry disparages; infatuation with and marriage to Frances Howard; and Overbury murder; breach with James I; as lord chamberlain; draws up self-pardon; trial

Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of

Spain: peace with England; marriage arrangements for Charles I; Raleigh attacks on Orinoco; and Bohemian crisis; popular hostility to; Prince Charles visits with Buckingham; prospective war with; war with England (1625); secret treaty with England (1634); fleet in English Channel (1639); Cromwell considers alliance with; declares war on England (1655); defeated at battle of the dunes (1658)

sports: controlled under James I

Spottiswoode, John, archbishop of St Andrews

Sprat, Thomas

stagecoaches

Stamford, Henry Grey, 1st earl of

Star Chamber; abolished

Stewart, Frances

‘stillborn parliament’, see under Parliament

‘stop, the’

Stourbridge Fair

Strafford, Sir Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of: opposes illegal imprisonment; titles; as lord president of north and lord deputy of Ireland; and ‘Thorough’ (regime); letters from Laud; and Scottish defiance; returns from Ireland to advise Charles I; unpopularity; and invading Scots army (1640); Commons issue grievances against; joins Charles in London; threatens Pym and Hampden; accused of high treason; trial; Bill of Attainder against; demands for death; executed

Strode, William

Stuart, Lady Arabella

Stuart dynasty: ends (1688)

Stukeley, William

Suckling, Sir John

Suffolk, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of

Sweden: England proposes holy crusade against Catholic powers; under Gustavus Adolphus; in Triple Alliance (1668)

syphilis: spread from Naples

Tate, Zouch

taxation: under James I; under Charles I; after Charles I’s death; under Cromwell; under Charles II; see also excise; ship-money; tonnage and poundage

tea

Temple, Sir William; Memoirs

‘ten propositions’

Tenby Castle

Tenison, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury

Test Acts: (1673); (1678); James II seeks to repeal

Texel, battle of the (1673)

Tey, John

Teynham, Sir John Roper, baron

Thames, river: ‘water-pillar’ (1626)

theatre: in James I’s reign; in Restoration

Thirty Years War (1618–48): beginnings; Catholic advances; Gustavus Adolphus enters

Thirty-Nine Articles (Church of England)

Thoresby, Ralph

‘Thorough’ (principles)

Thurloe, John

‘Tom-Tell-Truth’ (writer)

Tomkins, Thomas

tonnage and poundage (tax)

Tory: as term

trained bands: raised (1642)

Tresham, Francis

Trevor, Sir John

Triennial Act (1640)

Triple Alliance (England–Dutch Republic–Sweden, 1668)

Tuke, Sir Samuel

Turner, Anne (née Norton)

Turnham Green

Twysden, Sir Roger

United Provinces see Dutch Republic

Uxbridge: peace negotiations (1645)

Van Dyck, Sir Anthony: portrays Charles I; portrays Wentworth (Strafford); portrait of Laud

Vane, Sir Henry

Venables, General Robert

Venn, John

Verney, Sir Edmund

Verney, Sir Ralph

Villiers, George see Buckingham, 1st duke of; Buckingham, 2nd duke of

Viner, Sir Robert

Wakeman, Sir George

Wales: revival of civil war

Waller, Edmund

Waller, Sir William

Wallington, Nehemiah

Walpole, Horace

Walters, Lucy

Walton, Valentine

Warton, Philip, 4th baron

Warwick, Sir Philip; Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I

Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of

Waterford, Ireland

Watkins, Daniel

Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi

Weldon, Sir Anthony

Wentworth, Thomas

West Indies: Cromwell’s venture in; parts conceded to France (1667)

Westminster Assembly

Weston, Richard see Portland, 1st earl of

Wexford, Ireland

Wharton, Philip

Wharton, Thomas

Whigs: as term; oppose James II’s rights to succession; support Shaftesbury; and Rye House Plot

White Mountain, battle of (1620)

Whitehall, Palace of; Banqueting House; Charles II occupies

Whitelocke, Bulstrode: on beginnings of civil war; on Cromwell; on starvation in Cumberland; advises Cromwell against becoming king

Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury

Wight, Isle of: Charles I in

Wightman, Edward

William, Prince of Orange (later King William III): marriage to Princess Mary; and Charles II’s proroguing of parliament (1680); Calvinism; observes situation in England during James II’s reign; invited to invade England; lands in England and advances on London; guards take up London posts

Williams, John, bishop of Lincoln

Willis, Dr Thomas

Wilson, Arthur

Wilson, Jackie (singer)

Windebank, Sir Francis

Windsor Castle: Charles I in

Winter (or Wintour), Thomas

witch trials

women: delegation demands peace in civil war; role in civil war; maltreated at Naseby; use of cosmetics under commonwealth

Wood, Anthony

Woodford, Robert

Worcester: battle of (1642); Charles I escapes to from Oxford

Wren, Sir Christopher: on Prynne; in Royal Society

Wren, Matthew, bishop of Ely

Wycherley, William: The Country Wife

York: Charles I raises forces at (1639); great council of peers meet at (1640); Charles I travels to (1642); support for Charles I; royalists capture; besieged and surrenders (1644)

York, Anne, duchess of (née Hyde)

York, James, duke of see James II, king

Also by Peter Ackroyd

Fiction

The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Chatterton

First Light

English Music

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Milton in America

The Plato Papers

The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London

The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

The Death of King Arthur

Nonfiction

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures

(edited by Thomas Wright)

London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets

Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

Thames: Sacred River

Venice: Pure City

T. S. Eliot

Dickens

Blake

The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare

Chaucer

J. M. W. Turner

Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors

Tudors: The History of England from

Henry VIII to Elizabeth I

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

REBELLION. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Ackroyd. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

First published in Great Britain under the title Civil War by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

First U.S. Edition: October 2014

eISBN 9781466855991

First eBook edition: September 2014

Peter Ackroyd

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

VOLUME IV

REVOLUTION

PAN BOOKS

Contents

List of illustrations

1. What do you think of predestination now?

2. A bull or a bear?

3. The idol of the age

4. Hay day

5. The prose of gold

6. Waiting for the day

7. The great Scriblerus

8. The Germans are coming!

9. Bubbles in the air

10. The invisible hand

11. Consuming passions

12. The What D’Ye Call It?

13. The dead ear

14. Mother Geneva

15. The pack of cards

16. What shall I do?

17. Do or die

18. The violists

19. A call for liberty

20. Here we are again!

21. The broad bottom

22. The magical machines

23. Having a tea party

24. The schoolboy

25. The steam machines

26. On a darkling plain

27. Fire and moonlight

28. The red bonnet

29. The mad kings

30. The beast and the whore

31. A Romantic tale

32. Pleasures of peace

Further reading

Index

List of illustrations

1. Ceiling of the Painted Hall, detail of King William III and Queen Mary II enthroned, c.1707–14 (© Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, UK Photo © James Brittain Bridgeman Images)

2. Portrait of Queen Anne, eighteenth century (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

3. Portrait of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, by Godfrey Kneller, seventeenth century © Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

4. The Battle of Blenheim on the 13th August 1704, c.1743 (© National Army Museum, London / acquired with assistance of National Art Collections Fund / Bridgeman Images)

5. Portrait of George I of England from the studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, c.1754 (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)

6. Portrait of George II, eighteenth century (© The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images)

7. Interior of a London coffee-house, c.1650–1750 (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

8. Portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, eighteenth century (© Philip Mould Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images)

9. Portrait of William Pitt the ‘Elder’, later 1st Earl of Chatham (Private Collection / Photo © Bonhams, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

10. Portrait of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart the ‘Old Pretender’, c.1754 (Photo by Print Collector / Getty Images)

11. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and the ‘Young Pretender’, c.1740 (Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

12. Emblematical print of the South Sea, illustration from Hogarth Restored: The Whole Works of the Celebrated William Hogarth, c.1812 (© Private Collection The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images)

13. The Spinning Jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, d.1870 (© Private Collection / Ken Welsh / Bridgeman Images)

14. A caricature of Gin Lane by William Hogarth, c.1750 (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

15. A portrait of John Dryden by John Michael Wright, c.1668 (© Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

16. A portrait of Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas, c.1718 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

17. A portrait of Alexander Pope from the studio of Godfrey Kneller, eighteenth century (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

18. A portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds, eighteenth century (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

19. King George III by Allan Ramsay, c.1762–64 (National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

20. Portrait of the Prince of Wales, late King George IV, c.1790 (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

21. The Iron Forge, c.1772 (© Broadlands Trust, Hampshire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

22. The Ball, from ‘Scenes at Bath’ by Thomas Rowlandson (© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / Bridgeman Images)

23. A teapot from the Wedgwood Factory, Staffordshire, c.1775 (© Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images)

24. An engraving of the Boston Tea Party, 16th December 1773 (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

25. A canvas of George Washington at Princeton, 1779 (© Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA / Bridgeman Images)

26. William Pitt the Younger by Thomas Gainsborough, c.1788 (© The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London, UK © Historic England Bridgeman Images)

27. The Impeachment, or ‘The Father of the Gang turned King’s Evidence’, published by S. W. Fores in 1791 (© Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / Bridgeman Images)

28. A portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, c.1804 (© Wordsworth Trust / Bridgeman Images)

29. A portrait of poet William Wordsworth, eighteenth century (© Wordsworth Trust / Bridgeman Images)

30. An etching of The Ancient of Days by William Blake, c.1794 (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

31. A watercolour of people taking the waters at the pump room, Bath, c.1784 (© Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and North East Somerset Council / Bridgeman Images)

32. The Promenade at Carlisle House, c.1781 (Private Collection / © Look and Learn Peter Jackson Collection Bridgeman Images)

33. A Modern Belle going to the Rooms at Bath, published by Hannah Humphrey in 1796 (© Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / Bridgeman Images)

34. The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball on 15 June 1815 (© The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images)

35. The Battle of Trafalgar, c.1805 (© Musée de la Marine, Paris, France J. P. Zenobel Bridgeman Images)

36. An equestrian portrait of Napoleon c.1810 (Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images)

37. The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, nineteenth century (© Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images)

1

What do you think of predestination now?

The king had fled, in the face of an invading army. Even though James II had reached the safety of France and William, prince of Orange, was ensconced in Whitehall, it was not at all clear who was the true sovereign of Britain. So a ‘Convention’, half way between an assembly of notables and a parliament, was called at the beginning of 1689.1 Since no recognized king was readily available to call an election it was a somewhat hasty and improvised affair; but it was not without the most important consequences. It marked a revolution in the affairs of state.

The Convention met towards the end of January 1689 to consider the respective positions of James and William; there was at once a conference on the meanings of a throne ‘deserted’ or ‘vacant’, a learned debate but one driven by the need to exclude for ever the absent king. The Commons finally declared that James II had ‘abdicated’, but there was no such term in law so this was essentially a legislative fiction. Yet there was no plausible alternative to the usurper’s rule. As an authoritarian Catholic, James had been the worst possible monarch for a strongly Protestant nation. The fact that a group of notables had asked William of Orange to intervene in an increasingly fraught situation had granted a measure of legitimacy to the prince’s easy conquest. Yet he could not be seen as a king by conquest; that would bring back horrid memories of William I, whom good republicans loved to hate. So he had somehow to be proclaimed as king by right, a conveniently loose description that might cover almost any set of circumstances.

By the beginning of February a ‘declaration of rights’ had been composed by the members of the Convention. One of its clauses forbade the establishment of a standing army in times of peace, regarded as one of the most obvious tokens of arbitrary royal power. Other clauses tended in the same direction. Laws could not be executed or suspended without the consent of parliament; taxes could not be raised for the benefit of the Crown without parliamentary agreement; freedom of speech in parliament was paramount and, in the final clause of the declaration, ‘parliaments ought to be held frequently’.

The Declaration, later the Bill, of Rights was formally recited to William and to his consort, Mary, daughter of the deposed king; they sat in state in the Banqueting House and, after William had affirmed that ‘we thankfully accept what you have offered us’, they were proclaimed to be conjoint sovereigns. It was a delicate juggle. It could only be assumed that William had understood and accepted the Declaration as a prelude to his crowning, as William III, but he had not been pressed to any formal oath of assent. Many now believed, however, that he had been granted sovereignty by way of parliament. The divine right of kings had come to an end. Daniel Defoe declared later that parliament had ‘an Unbounded Unlimited Reach, a kind of Infinite attends their Power’.

William’s reticence on the substance of the declaration did not necessarily imply consent. He was by no means enamoured of its principles; it was a very English production, being almost entirely non-theoretical, but he knew well enough that it circumscribed his power. He said that he had no wish to confirm some of its clauses but that ‘the condition of his affairs overruled his inclinations’; later he complained that ‘the worst of all governments was that of a king without treasure and without power’. On the day after the marquis of Halifax tendered the crown to him in the Banqueting House he told the marquis that ‘he fancied, he was like a king in a play’. But he had to maintain his part at all costs.

A combination of gentry and aristocracy had in effect formulated a settlement that eliminated the threat of royal absolutism and protected property from arbitrary seizure. They were not interested in the idea of remedial legislation by parliament for the sake of social good or some benign notion of order. They wanted the rewards for themselves only. So was crafted what became known as the ‘glorious revolution’ promoted in theory by divine providence but supervised in effect by an organized elite, an aristocracy and oligarchy bolstered by the support of the landed gentry; the members of this elite would retain their power for the next 200 years.

The new order was bitterly opposed by those who believed that former oaths of loyalty to the deposed king could not and should not be broken; if the most solemn pact could be overturned, where could proper order and authority be found? The objectors, who refused to swear a new oath of allegiance to William and Mary, became known as ‘non-jurors’. Some of the most senior clerics in the country were of their number, among them William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury. Eight bishops, and 400 clergy, adopted his stance. At the coronation of William and his consort in Westminster Abbey on 11 April, the archbishop was absent; the bishop of London raised the crown. Sancroft himself was forced into retirement in the following year.

The non-jurors were the measure of a divided kingdom; many of them became Jacobites, or supporters of the exiled James, in spirit if not in practice. It cannot be doubted that loyalty to William was distinctly muted in many parts of the country, and that he was conceived by some to be a foreign king imposed in the first place by force. Yet what could be done? The crown was on his head. Indifference, or resignation, was the inevitable response.

The Convention was converted into a parliament by the new king, with the simple expedient of delivering a speech from the throne to both houses. In his coronation oath he had consented to govern according to ‘the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same’; it was a sign of the new balance in the constitution. Yet the relationship between Crown and parliament was not necessarily happy; in a further indication of their new power the members refused to grant William a revenue for life, and failed fully to fund his approaching campaign against France. They had learnt the unhappy lesson of the former king who had been able to support himself without their aid. William was as a result wholly reliant upon frequent parliaments to service his debts. Parliament now met every year, with sessions lasting for several months; general elections were held, on average, every two years. This quickened activity of course raised the temperature of the political atmosphere, encouraging what came to be known as ‘the rage of party’.

This was not to the liking of the new king who detested fractious politicians. He did not speak good English, and was in any case reserved in nature to the point of being sullen or morose. He always longed to be back in his native land, away from the hypocrisy and importunity of the English court. He hated pomp. His manner and appearance did not necessarily recommend themselves to his new subjects. He spoke slowly and briefly. He was by nature calculating, cool and methodical. Though he was of slight frame he managed to carry himself with authority; he was an asthmatic, however, and his conversation was interrupted by a continual deep cough. He soon removed himself from the fog and damp air of Westminster to the relatively healthy ambience of Kensington. He was generally severe, or even solemn, and was rarely cheerful; only with his inner circle of Dutch advisers did he relax.

It was rumoured at the time that members of his court were homosexual and that, in particular, two of William’s ‘favourites’, the first earl of Portland and the earl of Albemarle, had been granted half a million acres of land. The wife of Philippe, duke of Orléans and the French king’s younger brother, Princess Palatine Elisabeth Charlotte, asked if the court of William had become a ‘château de derrière’. Her husband, known as ‘Monsieur’, was a notorious homosexual; so she may have acquired her information at first hand. A verse was circulated that included the lines:

Let’s pray for the good of our State and his soul

That he’s put his Roger in the right Hole.

Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury and a firm supporter of the new dispensation, remarked somewhat mysteriously that the king ‘had no vice, but of one sort, in which he was very cautious and secret’. This might have been alcohol, but it is unlikely. It is also true that intimations of homosexuality can be found in any male-dominated militaristic court, like that of William III. As in most stories of royal homosexuality, however, there is no actual evidence to support the claim.

William was, in any case, a sincere Calvinist who upheld the strictest possible interpretation of preordination. That is why he possessed a sense of destiny. He had said to Burnet, after he had landed at Torbay ready to confront James II, ‘Well, doctor, what do you think of predestination now?’ He believed himself to be fated, in particular, to lead a war against the Catholic French king. It was the great cause of his life. His faith may also have provided the context for his bravery and fearlessness in battle. Certainly it influenced his explicit toleration for those dissenters outside the Anglican fold.

One of the first measures of the new parliament was a bill to introduce and to encourage religious moderation. The Toleration Act granted freedom of public worship, and legal protection, to dissenters. Over the next twenty years more than 2,500 chapels or conventicles were licensed for worship. It seemed just and right that William should indulge the inclinations of those believers who were, after all, fellow Protestants if not fellow Calvinists. This is the setting for the Methodist revival of the 1740s, but many in the larger body of Anglicans believed that the rights of the national faith were being overlooked; certainly, by the mid-eighteenth century, the orthodox Church was beset by apathy or indifference in the face of more enthusiastic creeds.

William had declared war on France in the spring of 1689. The principal reasons for the invasion of the previous year had been his intention and desire to recruit the wealth and resources of England in his long campaign against French domination of Europe and, in particular, against French threats to the independence of the Dutch republic of which he was ‘stadtholder’ or head of state. This had been his guiding purpose for the last sixteen years. In 1672, in the face of French invasion, he had stated that he would die defending his country ‘in the last ditch’; in turn Louis XIV had described William as ‘my mortal enemy’. The French king wished to create a grandiose Bourbon empire, with himself at its head. He wanted to rule from Versailles. The sun king, or le Roi-Soleil, might rise all over Europe. If he conquered Holland, too, he would have defeated the strongest Protestant power on the continent. English ambitions were more simple. They agreed to William’s war in order to preserve themselves from the return of James II under French auspices; they did not wish to become, as it was said, ‘papists or slaves’. It was hoped that the war would be a brief one.

That hope was not fulfilled. William in effect now guided what became known as the ‘Nine Years War’ against the traditional foe; he became his own foreign minister and put together a coalition of other powers, including Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, for the attack. That ‘empire’ was in large part a loose confederation of independent princes who ruled the states of central Europe and who also feared French domination. Yet William’s war was only the prelude to a much larger and longer conflict. The war of England against France lasted for fifty-eight years and the long hostility only found its quietus at Waterloo in 1815. This prolonged culture of war changed the social, fiscal and political aspects of English life. Larger and larger armies were brought into operation. Taxes increased exponentially. This will be one of the stories of the volume.

William had already become disenchanted with his English parliament. In the spring and summer of 1689 he complained variously that ‘the Commons used him like a dog’ and that ‘he could not bear them’. The lines between the two largest parties, Whigs and Tories, had been carved in stone during the reign of James II. The Whigs were the enemies of popery and arbitrary government, and thus had attempted to limit royal power; the Tories had determined to defend the monarchy against the onslaught of those whom they considered to be republicans or rebels. Yet with the advent of William III, all had changed.

Of the ‘immortal seven’ who had invited William to land with his army in England and supplant James, five were Whigs and two were Tories. The Whigs, then, felt that they had the advantage over their opponents. In the first months of William’s rule they demanded vengeance for the indignities imposed upon them during the last king’s reign; they were also determined to guide William’s counsels. But the new king knew well enough that he could not rule with the support of only one party; he had to strive for parity and balance in national affairs, favouring neither Whigs nor Tories but governing with the assistance of both. He wished to construct a ‘court party’ from the two sides.

The Whigs were not interested. They were particularly incensed against those Tory parliamentarians who had expressed their allegiance to the court of James II. Certain noblemen were accused of treason for joining the Church of Rome. The mayors and aldermen of all the towns and cities who had surrendered their charters to the previous king were to be deprived of any office for seven years. It was even proposed that a retrospective penal law should be applied to the entire Tory party. William, however, expressed his desire for an amnesty, a bill of ‘general pardon and oblivion’ for any who had engaged in arbitrary or illegal acts in the previous reign; in the summer of 1689 an ‘Indemnity Bill’ was presented to the Commons but it got no further than a second reading and was left on the table of the house. It was effectively dead.

So as far as William was concerned, parliament had failed. It had achieved nothing to his purpose and, in addition, had not granted him the easy supplies of revenue that he desired. One further imposition antagonized him even more. He proposed to sail with an army to Ireland in order to subdue the Catholics, and the remaining followers of James II, who posed a serious threat to the security of England. But the Whigs did not want him to go. They feared for his health in a land of rain and fog. They disliked the idea of a large army of recruits and mercenaries, many of them from northern Europe, standing on British soil. Before they could act with any decision, however, William dissolved the parliament and called for fresh elections.

The campaign of March 1690 was fiercely fought. ‘Never’, Diana Paget wrote to her relative, Lord Paget, ‘was greater animosities and divisions than there is at this day, Whig and Tory more than ever.’ It was, according to Macaulay, a struggle for life or death. Sermons and pamphlets and street ballads raised the temperature; lists of parliamentary divisions were published for the first time, with the purpose of ‘informing’ the constituents about the competing members. The result in fact favoured the Tories with ‘the Church of England men’, as they were sometimes called, winning the majority. In this more amenable climate the king returned the compliment by issuing ‘an act of grace’, for the pardon of all offences committed by the followers of James II; it required only one courteous reading by Lords and Commons in May to pass into law. In the following month William sailed for Ireland with his army.

The case against Ireland was similar to that against France. In both countries the pretensions of the Stuart monarchy were upheld. In the spring of 1689 James II had landed at Kinsale, on the southwest coast of Ireland, with a body of French troops. The parliament at Dublin proclaimed him to be the lawful king and passed a bill of attainder against his rebellious enemies. So in June 1690, William was poised to strike back with artillery and a larger army. The English regiments, from Cheshire, Cumberland and elsewhere, were strengthened with German and Scandinavian mercenaries.

The state of Ireland was for the new English king vexatious. He had already sent an army, under the command of the duke of Schomberg, to subdue the hostile population and its leaders; the duke had remained on the defensive and did not risk open battle, on the good grounds that his troops were untrained and that the opposing troops of James II were at that stage the stronger. William himself was obliged to take command. He sailed from Chester with a further 16,000, carried over the Irish Sea in 280 transports.

When he landed at Carrickfergus on the north-eastern coast of Ireland, he joined with Schomberg’s forces and began the march south to Dublin; when he reached Drogheda, 35 miles north of the capital, he received the news that the enemy army was close by on the south side of the River Boyne. The Jacobite force, consisting largely of Irish Catholics, was the first line of defence for Dublin. William had feared that his Irish campaign might be hindered by a wet autumn and a frozen winter, but the opportunity for a decisive victory had come. ‘I am glad to see you, gentlemen,’ he is supposed to have remarked as he surveyed the Irish forces. ‘If you escape me now, the fault will be mine.’

On the day before the battle, 30 June, he was fired upon by two field guns, and the second ball grazed his shoulder. He bent forward over his horse’s neck for a moment, and the Irish gave out a great shout of exaltation. But he steadied himself. ‘There is no harm done,’ he said, ‘but the bullet came quite near enough.’ His wound was dressed and he prepared himself for the coming battle.

It was important quickly to force the passage over the Boyne. William led his left wing, consisting of the cavalry, while Schomberg was entrusted with the command of those on foot. The watchword was ‘Westminster’. Every soldier wore a small green bough in his hat while, on the Irish side, the men wore slivers of white paper. It was hard work for Schomberg’s men to cross the river but they pressed forward; they were resolute but they were repeatedly forced back by James’s cavalry. They resisted and regrouped, however, and the Jacobite forces were ordered to retreat. James himself had watched the battle from a distance, and at its inglorious close galloped off to the fishing village of Duncannon where he would set sail for the safety of France. He would never return to Ireland and his last, best, hope of regaining his throne had gone. The Irish, effectively abandoned by their king, called him ‘Seamus a’ chaca’ or James the Shit.

The battle of the Boyne effectively ended any chance of Catholic ascendancy in Ireland. The treaty of Limerick, signed in the following year, promised relatively generous terms to the Irish forces and to the Catholic population. But the Irish Protestants were not ready to concede so much to the religious enemy and, in the Dublin parliament, they set out their own conditions for the end of the Anglo-Irish war. These became known as ‘the penal laws’. Those who had fought for James II lost all their property. No Catholic landowner could pass on his estates intact to a single heir. Catholics could not hold office, bear arms, or openly practise their religion. They were also debarred from any legal or military profession. This became known as ‘the Protestant ascendancy’ but was called by the Irish Catholics the ‘long briseadh’ or the ‘long breaking’.

Yet English triumph in Ireland was not matched by success in the campaign against the French. The war had suffered a disastrous beginning when, in the summer of 1690, a combined Dutch and English fleet was defeated by the French navy off Beachy Head with the loss of eleven ships. The news created panic fear in London and elsewhere, since it seemed possible and even likely that the enemy might now mount a full invasion of English soil. The local militias were called up, and men armed with swords or pitchforks descended onto the Devonshire coast ready to fight any Frenchman. The silver sea, serving ‘as a moat defensive to a house’, was in the command of an ancient enemy. What if its fleet sailed up the Thames?

In the event there was no French invasion or, at least, not a serious one. A thousand Frenchmen landed at Teignmouth, where they proceeded to ransack and burn down the fishing village; but then they went back to their ships and sailed away. It was a signal warning, however, of their policy of spoliation. The lord admiral of the fleet, Arthur Herbert, first earl of Torrington, was arrested and taken to the Tower for failures of duty; at a later court martial he was acquitted, but he was shunned at William’s court and never taken into service again.

William sailed across the Irish Sea to Bristol in early September 1690, having asked John Churchill, earl of Marlborough, to share command of the continuing Irish campaign with two foreign generals; the king began a slow journey, in part a march of triumph, to his palace at Kensington. In the following month parliament voted him more than £4 million for the army and the navy in their continuing conflict with France; the money itself was to be raised by means of a newly conceived land tax and by the doubling of customs and excise, an increase in revenues that heralded the emergence of what has become known as a financial or ‘fiscal’ state. It was a gesture born out of fear as well as gratitude; the members of parliament were still alarmed at the prospect of invasion.

The king now travelled to The Hague for a congress in which he would try to organize the military strategies of his allies. With the exception of the Dutch, naturally, they proved to be fractious and unwilling. Denmark and Sweden, for example, considered themselves to be so distant from the scene of conflict that they held back; William suspected them of conniving at a peace with France which would be tantamount to surrender. The elector of Brandenburg would not go to the aid of the Spanish Netherlands. The elector of Saxony recalled his troops from what he considered to be unsatisfactory winter quarters. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, was more concerned with Turkey than with France. Yet William’s great strength lay in the arts of diplomacy; by means of bribes, promises and entreaties he managed to preserve the coalition.

These resources were never more necessary than in April 1691, when the city of Mons in the southern Netherlands, close to the border with France, fell to Louis XIV. The rejoicing at William’s discomfiture was not confined to Versailles; the Jacobites in London celebrated his defeat in the taverns and coffee-houses which they openly frequented. He had also another, and more secret, enemy. The first earl of Marlborough was not happy with his position; he had scored a notable victory in Ireland, with a campaign of five weeks in which he had taken Cork and Kinsale, thus blocking the seaways to France. Yet he resented the fact that foreign generals were preferred by the king, and that the dukes and counts of the various principalities of Europe could claim precedence over him.

Marlborough had all the makings of a modern patriot; he was handsome, clever and resourceful, an excellent general, and a politician of persuasive manner. He had distinguished himself twenty years before in the service of the duke of York, and had never since been out of favour. He had deserted his first patron, who had become James II, and had gone over to William’s party at the time of the invasion, doing so on the grounds of Protestant piety. But he seemed quite happy to reverse his allegiance once again, if the circumstances were propitious. He was inclined to support whatever and whoever indulged his interests, whether for power, money, or further honours, while all the time remaining tactful, modest and obliging.

Soon after his return from Ireland he seems to have organized or joined a plot to restore James II to the throne. He believed that he had the English army behind him. The evidence also suggests that other English grandees had made their own approaches to James, living as an exile in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the hope of insuring themselves for any possible future. Marlborough’s plot was discovered, however, and at the beginning of 1692 he was stripped of his offices and dismissed from the court. Then, in May, he was arrested for high treason and dispatched to the Tower. It was alleged, falsely, that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate William. The affair became known as ‘the flower pot plot’; a forged document, implicating Marlborough, had been placed under a flower pot in the house of the bishop of Rochester.

He was released from confinement after six weeks and, in a state of partial rehabilitation, eventually returned to the court. William seems to have taken a relatively forgiving view of those grandees who still dabbled in the intrigues of the Stuart dynasty. He had a low opinion of human nature.

The king’s principal concern was with the course of the continental war which in this period manifested neither great victories nor stunning defeats. But in May 1692, a French invasion fleet of forty-four ships was sighted off the coast of northwestern France in the vicinity of Barfleur and La Hougue; its purpose was to restore James II to the throne of England. After a fierce encounter the French force scattered but the English and Dutch navies, in the course of their pursuit, managed to destroy fifteen enemy vessels. The threat of French attack was lifted.

The Dutch and English were now the masters of the sea while the French were obliged to concentrate upon the strategies of a land war. In the summer of the year, for example, the French army won a victory at Steenkerque in the southern Netherlands, when in the course of vicious fighting five English regiments were wholly destroyed. It is easy enough to list these events in simple chronology but it would need a pen of fire to draw a true portrait of the carnage. In ‘A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’ (1723), the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift notes laconically the state of contemporary warfare with ‘twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flying in the air: smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet: flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs, and wolves, and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying’. Another sea of red then covered the field. At a much later date Macaulay reports in his History of England (1848) that, after the battle of Steenkerque, ‘the next summer the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies’.

The war was no longer popular, if indeed it had ever been. It was simply ‘William’s war’ and on the king’s return, after his spring and summer campaigns on the continent, he found unrest and opposition. He had turned variously to the Whigs and to the Tories in the effort to establish a ‘court party’ wholly committed to the prosecution of the conflict; yet he began to favour the Whigs in the evident belief that the Tories were not necessarily reliable. He was right. The Tories made up a large portion of the ‘country party’ that turned its face against court and administration. It was distrustful of government, ever suspicious of a standing army and of those members of parliament who were dependent upon court favours.

Recognizable parties in a modern sense, however, did not exist. The permutations of individual members were endless. The Tories were in principle wholly in favour of the royal prerogative, now enjoyed by William III, but among them were many Jacobites who waited for the return of James II; the Whigs were supportive of William, but in theory they were always willing and eager to limit royal power. Where did the balance lie? The king preferred ‘mixed’ ministries, composed of various political elements, but in practice he was slowly drawn towards the Whigs because of their willingness to maintain the war against France; they were much more firmly opposed to the Catholicism and to the arbitrary despotism, as they saw it, of Louis XIV. Their contacts with the financiers of the City also gave them the ability to raise funds for the prosecution of the conflict, with the attendant promise of profit and interest repayments. They were William’s friends. They were led by a group of five peers who by 1695 were being called ‘the Junto’, after the Spanish word, junta, for council.

The exiled king, ensconced in his court at Saint-Germain, was still busily scheming for his restoration; he watched eagerly for any mis-step by William, and acquired supporters or spies wherever he could. The secret Jacobites of England had adopted a key sentence: ‘Box it about: it will come to my father.’ By which was meant that it was necessary to throw the country into confusion so that James might return. The partisans also adopted a limp when they entered their taverns. ‘Limp’ was made up from the initials of four names – Louis, James, Mary of Modena, and the young Prince. James, in the spring of 1693, issued a ‘declaration’ offering a free pardon to those who would not oppose his return and promising that he would abide by parliamentary government.

The position of James’s younger daughter, Anne, was a very difficult one; her problems were compounded after the death of her sister, Mary II, in 1694, when she became the only direct Stuart heir who was a staunch Protestant. It was noted that she had a better claim to the throne than her brother-in-law, William, who now made attempts to be conciliatory. In previous years William and Mary had ignored or rebuffed Anne, for a while excluding her from court altogether. In turn Anne, encouraged by Marlborough’s wife, the formidable Sarah, had ridiculed the king; in their correspondence they called him ‘Mr Caliban’ or the ‘Dutch abortion’.

Anne was suspected of Jacobite principles on the reasonable ground that she still supported the claims of her father. It was said that, on the death of her brother-in-law, she would invite James to return to his kingdom. This was not very likely; she was wholly averse to Roman Catholicism, and remembered how much damage James had wreaked upon the body politic by his insistence on Catholic emancipation. It is more probable that she herself wished to ascend the throne in order to maintain the order and stability of the Anglican cause, to which she was utterly devoted.

William had more immediate matters to consider. By the sixth year of the war he was again in urgent need of new funds, and he turned once more to the Whigs for assistance. One of the younger members of ‘the Junto’, Charles Montagu, had the requisite skills. It was he who, more than any other, changed the nature of English finance.

2

A bull or a bear?

How would it be possible to fund the hugely expensive continental war against Louis without impoverishing the country? A solution could be found. Charles Montagu, one of the lords of the treasury, still only in his early thirties, came upon a proposal advanced three years before but never implemented. It was for the establishment of a central bank, the Bank of England, that would lend money to the government on the condition that the repayment of the annual interest would be guaranteed by parliament from funds supplied by new duties on beer and other alcoholic drinks. The subscribers to the bank would thereby have the guarantee of repayment, even if this meant that the government would raise money by making further demands upon the people. This, in essence, was the beginning of what became known as ‘the national debt’.

Montagu piloted the Bank of England Act through parliament in 1694, on the understanding that he would become chancellor of the exchequer. He even pledged the considerable sum of £2,000 as his own subscription to the bank. The money for the new venture came in quickly enough. It was proposed to raise £1.2 million from wealthy subscribers, at an annual interest of 8 per cent. Such terms were tempting enough to fill the list within ten days. The king and queen were among the investors who included merchants, financiers and businessmen. It was seen to be a largely Whig enterprise, therefore, with that party closely associated with the City of London. The Tories, who represented the landed classes, considered it to be nothing more than a ‘front’ to maintain the war. Certainly it had military and political consequences. France had no such financial scheme in operation, and so was placed at a disadvantage in funding hostilities.

This has been considered to represent a financial revolution that laid the ground for steady, if not always competent, government. Parliament, in the first place, was now in supreme command of the nation’s funding; it raised the taxes that paid for the interest on the large loans. Within twenty years an annual ‘budget’ would be presented to its members. In the late seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries emerged a number of smaller banks, London ‘private’ banks and ‘country’ banks, which specialized in short-term credit and the forwarding of remittances. Their advances to business and public authorities helped to ease the passage of finance and of trade.

The City had been the home of credit ever since the time of the Roman occupation, but the extraordinary growth of business in the latter years of the seventeenth century convinced many contemporaries that it was a wholly new phenomenon. A Fellow of the Royal Society, John Houghton, wrote in 1694 that ‘a great many stocks have arisen since this war with France’; he added that ‘few that had money were willing it should lie idle’, and suggested that greater profits were to be recovered from sources other than those of ‘lands, houses or commodities’. The new methods became known very quickly as stock-jobbing; money might be made in the buying and selling of shares like those, for example, in the Bank of England itself. It was described by Defoe in 1724 as ‘a trade, which once bewitched the nation almost to its ruin’.

Exchange Alley, near the Royal Exchange, became the centre for these transactions. Two coffee-houses in particular, Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, were the principal resorts of financial business. An advertisement of 1695 informed the public that at Jonathan’s ‘may be bought and sold … all stocks and shares’. A broker, John Castaing, published lists of stock prices and exchange rates together with the state of the markets in Genoa, Dublin, Rotterdam and elsewhere. It was also the place where wagers were taken, on matters public or private. What will you pay me if I do not drink wine, ale or brandy before Michaelmas 1696? What are the bets that war will be declared against France before Christmas Day? A contemporary print shows several bewigged gentlemen, with tricorne hats, standing and conversing in a large room; they are wearing formal waistcoats and coats. They invested, or represented investors, in government contracts, industrial enterprises, and the stocks of the great companies even then being formed. On the wall behind them are images of a bull and a bear, and one of a lame duck. A bull was supposed to be a financial optimist, and a bear was the opposite; they no doubt represented a mixture of both parties.

Their conversations are reproduced in a play of the period. Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1717) sets a scene in Jonathan’s:

First broker: Who does any thing in the civil list lottery? Or caco [coffee beans]? Zounds, where are all the Jews this afternoon? Are you a bull or a bear today, Abraham?

Second broker: A bull, faith – but I have a good putt for next week.

The call goes out from the waiter for ‘Fresh coffee, gentlemen, fresh coffee?’ or for ‘Bohea-tea, gentlemen?’

This was a new, and for some an alarming, practice. The Tories in particular disliked the idea of a rising ‘moneyed interest’; they believed that wealth lay in the land of England, and not in financial manipulation. It was argued that those who possessed the soil were the best judges of the country’s strengths. The moneyed men were also largely established in London, a Whig stronghold, and the assorted ranks of merchants, financiers, office holders and professionals contained a large number of dissenters and nonconformists. As a rule of thumb, it was said that dissent went with money and Anglicanism with land. As long as the war lasted, and the government was in need of funds, the new rich were assured of large profits from the institutions of public credit. The land suffered in contrast, and there were fears that the market was about to collapse. In The Conduct of the Allies (1711) Jonathan Swift returned to the attack upon the Whigs by declaring that the war was being continued unnecessarily ‘to enrich usurers and stock-jobbers, and to cultivate the pernicious designs of a faction by destroying the landed interest’.

A further, but related, division arose between Whigs and Tories. Some of the latter group favoured the return of the exiled king or of his son; but if the Stuarts came back they might easily repudiate the national debt worked out by William III and his Whig supporters. The consequence would be financial chaos and ruin for the rich subscribers. It could not be allowed to happen.

The intimations of doom, on both sides, were of course misplaced. In a short period of time, beyond the hot circles of war, the common interests between the moneyed and the landed became obvious to all concerned. As Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, in the autumn of 1711, ‘the trader is fed by the product of the land, and the landed man cannot be clothed but by the skill of the trader’. The representatives of the landed and financial interests came soon enough to entertain certain common ideals of ‘the gentleman’ and of ‘gentle society’ that animated social conventions for the next 150 years; the presence of an aristocratic elite, tantalizingly within grasp, wonderfully concentrated the minds of those who aspired to it.

The stability of the financial state was enhanced by a further measure introduced by Charles Montagu. In the year after the establishment of the Bank of England he decided to restore the true worth of the silver shilling, the value of which had been undermined by clipping and adulteration. Something like 95 per cent of the currency was counterfeit or underweight. Silver had never been more base.

Montagu had enlisted the assistance of Isaac Newton; they had both been Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, but Newton had subsequently astounded the world with his explanation of the force of gravity in Principia Mathematica. In the spring of 1696 Montagu had appointed his celebrated colleague as warden of the Mint, on Tower Hill, since in the previous year Newton had composed a short treatise ‘On the Amendment of English Coins’. The new warden was in the doubly fortunate position of being both a superb theorist and a determined experimenter.

A total recoinage was to be effected, and the old impure coins were to be removed from circulation. Montagu had initiated the proposal but had left Newton to administer and organize its implementation. The exercise was in large measure a success, and within months of Newton’s appointment the Mint was issuing some £150,000 worth of silver coinage each week. The monetary standard of the country was assured. The pillars of the state were in place.

The essential nature of that state, as a result of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, was now clearly recognizable. At its apex remained the monarch, of course. William III was on the throne by the agency of ‘the divine right of Providence’, however that phrase might be interpreted. It was an ambiguous formulation for an ambiguous position. Was he king by right of conquest or by consent of parliament? And what form of ‘divine right’ could he possibly claim? He never touched for the king’s evil, for example, although his successor Anne would do so, exercising her supposedly supernatural power.

His somewhat indefinite or at least unformulated authority was maintained by the patrician class, which is to say the aristocrats who had steered the new state ever since its foundation. The upper ranks of the aristocracy numbered perhaps 200, among them the dukes, earls and other lords; they had always represented a small but confident and coherent landed elite. Wealth was essential but was not necessarily enough. Blood lineage was equally, if not more, important. A landed estate, which conferred the right to hunt, was a prerequisite. The striving members of the upper gentry would rather join them than beat them and in truth the aristocratic code, and the aristocratic ideal, would pervade the social and political life of the century. Continuity, rather than change, was the key. It was established by habitual patterns of perception and by traditional patterns of activity, as self-evident as they were unexceptionable.

This does not represent some antiquated vision of ‘old England’ but the living reality of politics and of power. Much has been written about the supposed permeability of the upper class, open to the rich and even to arrivistes, but the reality was less promising. It was a fixed principle, even as late as the reign of George III (1760–1820), that no individual engaged in trade could become a peer of the realm.

The lords were also an effective power in the Commons. The head of the family would sit in the upper chamber, while his relations and dependants would sit in the lower; Pitt the elder once described the Commons as ‘a parcel of younger brothers’. The various families in turn set up marriage alliances, thus strengthening the power of the few. They stood above perhaps 15,000 of the lower gentry who were not of noble status but who did not have to till their own soil.

For most of the members of the gentry their Church was the state Church, their Anglicanism part of their birthright. Others of course were dissenters, and a few were atheistical, but the preponderance followed the familiar path to the village church or the town church. The Anglican authorities were in the early part of the eighteenth century wholly at the service of the administration. The archbishop of Canterbury had an official seat at the privy council, while of course the bishops were an intrinsic part of the House of Lords. When Bishop Hare once mildly threatened Lord Carteret, a Whig grandee, with the possible retraction of his vote, Carteret replied, ‘If I want you, I know how to have you.’ The bishops themselves were often of noble blood, and it was considered to be a matter of congratulation that after the rule of Cromwell the grandees were back in their palaces. The Church was viewed as one of the three great professions, alongside law and the emerging science or art of medicine, so it remained an integral part of the social hierarchy.

Orthodox Anglicanism, and it is hard to envisage any other, was primarily a religion of responsibilities and duties. It was reasonable, and not dogmatic. Morality, rather than Christ the Saviour, was the guiding presence. Its liturgy and canons had remained largely unchanged since their inception in the mid-sixteenth century. Habit and indifference completed the picture. Where the parson and the landowner are in agreement, the religious and secular state reflect one another. We may perhaps agree with that enemy of all things English, Napoleon Buonaparte, who remarked that ‘I don’t see in religion the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of the social order. It ties up to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being massacred by the poor.’ If this perhaps sounds too cynical then we may turn to that most English of observers, William Hogarth, who in The Sleeping Congregation shows the effect of a universal dullness covering all. In his etching the service is dominated by royal, rather than divine, images. Spirituality has been converted into sleep.

Others were more busy. The opportunities of wealth made possible by the ‘financial revolution’ helped to augment the number and power of what were known as ‘the middling orders’ comfortably ensconced between the landed gentry and the great army of manual workers and shopkeepers. They would include tenant farmers and factory-owners, government officers and city merchants, small businessmen and clergymen, doctors and lawyers; the rise of the salaried professions was one of the striking features of the early years of the century. If the manuals of conduct are anything to go by, the principal themes of this variously constituted class were those of enterprise, respectability, sobriety and hard work.

Daniel Defoe, himself an exceptional if sometimes erring exponent of the ‘middling’ virtues, reminded himself in the first chapter of Robinson Crusoe (1719) that ‘the middle state … was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind’.

The numbers of these fortunate citizens were necessarily increased as the economy improved. In the early eighteenth century one in seven was deemed to be of the middle state; a hundred years later, the proportion had become one in four or five. Some of them, however, were uneasily aware of their middle status and tried to insulate themselves from the abyss below them by striving to imitate the manners and customs of their immediate superiors. Appearances must be kept up; it was important to seem, and to be, credit-worthy so as not to ‘break’. The ultimate aim was the acquisition of gentility in one or two generations.

The middling ranks included many Anglicans but, proportionately, they contained more dissenters or nonconformists. Theirs was the faith of hard work and enterprise, after all, of ambition and of striving. But already religious dissent had become in part a matter of state compliance. The Presbyterians, the Congregationalists and the General Baptists, for example, had achieved a measure of acceptance with the Toleration Act of 1689 even if they were still excluded from public office. Their chapels and meeting houses were part of the urban and rural landscape. The Quakers who had once stripped naked ‘for a sign’, in accordance with the twentieth chapter of Isaiah, did, according to an antiquary, Abraham de la Pryme, ‘modestly and devoutly behave themselves’. This is the trajectory of all radical faiths. Its adherents become more complacent and more respectable; in particular they become older. It would take the Methodist revival of a later generation to excite the original fire in a bout of evangelical fervour that had not been seen in England since the middle of the seventeenth century.

Of course many of the population were without any religion at all, except for the residue of paganism and natural spirituality that had been inherited from previous centuries. The lower ‘classes’ of the early eighteenth century could be defined, as was done at the time, as ‘the mechanic part of mankind’. They lived by manual labour of a variety of kinds. They were in a literal sense the ‘hands’ of the country; those who served meals, those who drew water, those who hewed wood, those who stitched and those who spun. They comprised by far the greatest part of the working population, from colliers to mantua-makers, from watchmakers to shopkeepers, from footmen to cooks. Defoe described them as ‘the working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want’ and ‘the country people, farmers etcetera, who fare indifferently’. Some of those who worked on the land could not enjoy its fruits for themselves. If their sows bred piglets, or their hens chicks, these were taken to the market rather than to the table. The workers sold their apples and pears, and lived on skimmed milk and whey curds while their customers purchased milk and cheese. Their perpetual and useful toil reached its quietus in an obscure destiny.

Social historians, as historical fashions change, have concentrated upon those in even more difficult circumstances. It has been estimated that, at any time before the Industrial Revolution, approximately one quarter of the population was in a state of abject poverty. These are the people who in Defoe’s phrase ‘fare hard’. They can also be called the ‘labouring poor’. One such was Jeremy in William Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) who states that ‘my mother sold oysters in winter and cucumbers in summer, and I came upstairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar’. He had since come up even higher in the world, since he was now a gentleman’s servant. And that was the worth of the labouring poor. They could be made useful; their very plenitude was God’s blessing to the affluent. These were the ranks that helped to make up the industrial population of the factories and the humble skivvies of the kitchen. Discipline, deprivation and hard labour were supposed to be the sovereign curatives for idleness even if, as Sir William Petty put it, they only dragged the stones from Stonehenge to Tower Hill.

Lying beneath all were the miserable, the abject, the worthless. They would include the beggars, the vagrants, the severely crippled, the mad as well as the mass of ragged outcasts who lived in holes in the walls, in subterranean pits, in outhouses, and in bulkheads. One anonymous pamphlet of 1701, Reflexions Upon the Moral State of the Nation, reported that ‘they live more like rats and weasels and such like noxious vermin, than creatures of human race’. The helpless and incurable poor were generally disregarded except as elements in riot, dissipation or epidemic disease. They were objects of fear and loathing on the streets, and even the most charitable impulses of the reformers could scarcely make room for them. The poor were unavoidable, elemental, but not to be touched.

The death of his wife, Mary, in Kensington Palace at the end of 1694 had provoked in William a grief that was as deep as it was unexpected. The smallpox had taken her during a bitterly cold winter. When her husband had been absent with his army on the continent, she had always been something of a reluctant replacement. She felt herself to be ‘deprived of all that was dear to me in the person of my husband, left among those that were perfect strangers to me: my sister of a humour so reserved that I couldhave little comfort from her’. Mary and her sister, Anne, were in fact hardly on speaking terms. When her husband was by her side, Mary deferred without thinking to the king’s wishes but her compliant temper was accompanied by a cheerfulness and vivacity not readily apparent in her husband. When she ruled in his absence, however, she was resolute and not without dignity. She was widely, and perhaps sincerely, mourned.

Her death of course left her sister Anne in a singularly difficult position; she was now heir apparent who had in fact a better claim to the throne than its present occupant. It was incumbent upon William to pay his respects to her after a decade of neglect. Anne herself had come wholly to rely upon her principal lady-in-waiting, Sarah, countess of Marlborough, and upon Sarah’s husband, the first earl of Marlborough. Here were the makings of a court in waiting and, soon enough, the fortunate pair became duke and duchess.

Even while the abbey was covered in drapes of black for the late queen parliament acted, or rather failed to act, on a measure that would have incalculable consequences for the future state of the nation. In the spring of 1695 a resolution for ‘regulations of printing and printing presses’ was allowed to lapse, almost by oversight, and that chance led ineluctably to the emergence of what became known as ‘the fourth estate’. It was, in retrospect at least, a momentous change that emancipated English letters for ever from government control.

The public had previously been forced to be content with the official London Gazette. It was established in February 1665, and continues to this day as the official newspaper of record, although Captain Bluffe in Congreve’s The Old Bachelor (1693) claims, ‘Why, sir, there are not three words of truth, the year round, put into the Gazette.’ But, as a result of the lifting of prohibitions, the public prints were quickly in demand in a party-dominated and war-oppressed age.

Within a fortnight of the end of censorship, a paper entitled Intelligence, Domestic and Foreign began to circulate; this was followed by The English Courant, The Post Man, The Post Boy, The Weekly NewsLetter and others. Some of them left blank spaces so that the reader might fill in more current news before passing on the publication to friends or neighbours; many of the printed items were accompanied by the phrase ‘this wants confirmation’ or ‘this occasions many speculations’ or ‘time will discover the event’. The affairs of the world were very uncertain.

In the succeeding reign of Queen Anne more than forty newssheets were distributed on the streets and in the coffee-houses of London, many of them also finding their way to the provincial towns and cities. It took a full day to read only the most important of them. We may speak for the first time, therefore, of a politically aware nation, with the concomitant rise of the ‘journalist’ and the ‘essayist’. The power of the new press quickly became apparent and, in a letter from Lemuel Gulliver that opens his Travels, the celebrated if fictional surgeon recalls the remark of his cousin that ‘people in power were very watchful over the press’.

The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was issued on Wednesday 11 March 1702; it is printed on one side of a single sheet with news from Naples, Rome, Vienna, Frankfurt and elsewhere; the majority of its news paragraphs concerned the progress of the war and, in a postscript, its editor disparaged ‘the impertinences of ordinary newspapers’. It opened in a characteristically dry style with a report from Naples that ‘on Wednesday last, our new viceroy, the duke of Escalona, arrived here with a squadron of the galleys of Sicily’. The sheet was sold next door to the King’s Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge, and in the vicinity, very close to the neighbourhood that had already earned the soubriquet of ‘Grub Street’.

From the beginning these newspapers were largely business ventures, although some of them were in part subsidized by the political managers of the time who wished to create a discernible volume of ‘public opinion’ on any particular matter. The public prints relied largely upon advertisements and upon circulation, and so became part of that commercial society that was even then taking shape.

A few weeks after the death of his wife the king wrote to a colleague in 1695 that ‘I feel myself to be no longer fit for military command’; yet he added characteristically that ‘I will try to do my duty’. His duty compelled him to attempt the recapture of Namur, the most important fortress in the Spanish Netherlands; the citadel looked over a fruitful plain and two rivers, the Sambre and the Meuse, and it had never before opened its gates to an enemy. Three years earlier, however, the French besiegers under the command of Louis himself had broken the spirit of the town after eight days; it was the lowest point for England and its allies in the campaign against the French.

William knew well enough that it would be a signal victory to retrieve Namur after its occupation. After a series of feints and skirmishes he marched straight upon the town at the beginning of July 1695, and there began a series of bloody assaults and battles that endured until the total surrender of the citadel two months later. This is the conflict in which Uncle Toby, of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), injured his groin; he modelled the outworks of the citadel in his garden. The excitement and anxiety aroused by the campaign animated the London crowds, who flocked for news to the booksellers and coffee-houses. The king’s success was one of the most important victories of the Nine Years War, all the more significant because it had been conducted on land; it was the first major victory of that kind since Cromwell’s ‘battle of the dunes’ in 1658. On his return William engaged in a summer tour, ostensibly in triumph, but his reserved and suspicious nature was in evidence. He did not frequent the well-travelled roads and, in Oxford, refused a dinner for fear that it had been poisoned.

3

The idol of the age

The jubilation of victory was in any case short-lived. Despite the success in the Spanish Netherlands the war itself was becoming too lengthy and too costly to be easily endured. It had procured very little benefit for England itself. At the end of 1695 the exiled king, James II, issued a proclamation from his French court that did ‘fully authorize, strictly require and expressly command our loving subjects to rise in arms and make war upon the prince of Orange, the usurper of our throne …’. He did have supporters in England who were ready to obey the command, but they could not or would not move without the aid of a French invasion. Such an invasion, however, was a step too far for Louis XIV who already had continental entanglements to deter him.

Some conspirators were willing to act alone. Anne, a proper Stuart, would of course reign in the event of the king’s death; this prospect seems to have been the spur for a plot engineered at the beginning of 1696. As the king drove home to Kensington Palace after his weekly hunt in Richmond Park, he was obliged to pass through a narrow lane by the river at Turnham Green. Here he was to be surrounded by armed men and killed. Like most such plots it foundered on whispers and betrayals; William cancelled the hunt, but not before making use of it as an instrument of state. His disclosure of the conspiracy to parliament, in February 1696, caused a sensation and prompted members to form an association in the king’s defence not unlike that established to protect Elizabeth I against Spanish plotters.

The general mood, however, was still one of war-weariness. After the victory at Namur, the land war continued with no great victories and no signal defeats. It had become a war of attrition in which both parties were in danger of fighting one another to an expensive impasse. Yet a detached observer, if such existed, might have arrived at certain conclusions. William III had proved to be more than a match for Louis XIV; the energy and perseverance of England’s king, together with the support of his allies, had been able to check the progress of the Bourbon empire. The newfound financial strength of England could also prove formidable in future conflicts.

A treaty between the parties was drawn up and signed after five months of negotiation. The Peace of Ryswick, concluded in the autumn of 1697, seems to have favoured William; Louis surrendered much of the territory he had gained and, perhaps more importantly, recognized William III as the rightful king of England. This might seem to have been a significant blow to James II and the Stuart cause, but the promises of a king were not always to be trusted.

After nine years of a bloody and costly war, however, the bells of London rang in celebration on news of the treaty. William himself declared that ‘it is impossible to conceive what joy the peace causes here’. The seas would once more be safe, and the merchants might trade with impunity. The burden of taxation, or so it was hoped, would be immeasurably lightened; 75 per cent of the revenue had, after all, been devoted to the costs of war.

As soon as parliament opened, at the beginning of December, a debate commenced on the necessity of preserving a standing army. The king favoured the measure as a way of keeping check upon the French, but the preponderant opinion of the members was for an unarmed government. That was part of the old polity of England. It was now agreed that all the land forces enrolled since September 1680 should be forthwith disbanded and that there should be no bigger force on English soil than that which had obtained in the reign of Charles II. This would amount to some 7,000 men. The country gentlemen were not willing to pay taxes for an imposed army and, in particular, for foreign recruits. It was agreed, therefore, that the army of 7,000 should be comprised only of the king’s English subjects; as a result his Dutch bodyguards and his regiments of French Protestants were disbanded. William, hardly dissembling his anger, remarked that parliament had achieved a feat that the French had failed to accomplish in nine years. A victorious monarch could scarcely be more ignobly treated. It is no wonder, perhaps, that he was always pining for his homeland.

Parliament pressed home its supremacy when, at the beginning of 1701, an Act of Settlement was passed utterly debarring the Stuart dynasty from the throne. In the summer of the previous year Prince William, the last surviving son of the seventeen pregnancies of Princess Anne and her husband Prince George of Denmark, had died from fluid on the brain. When Anne assumed the throne, she would have no heir absolute. Although William had died at the age of eleven, he had already been hailed as the new Protestant champion. The king wrote to Marlborough that ‘it is so great a loss to me as well as to all England that it pierces my heart’.

The Jacobites had naturally been delighted at the news, hoping that James or his son would be rightfully reinstalled as rulers of the kingdom. But parliament had other ideas. It turned to Germany and, in particular, the only surviving granddaughter of James I. Sophia electress of Hanover was the daughter of the ill-starred ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth, whose rule as queen of Bohemia had lasted for a year before she and her husband were ousted by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. So by the strange serendipity of dynasty and fortune Sophia was set to become the next queen of England; if she was unwilling or unable to take the throne, she had a healthy Protestant son by the name of George Ludwig (George Louis) of Hanover.

The clauses of the Act of Settlement, dictated by parliament, made other demands. Every sovereign must be part of the communion of the Church of England. If a king was born beyond the shores of England, no English force would be obliged to defend his native soil. No king was to leave England, or Scotland, or Ireland, without the consent of parliament. These were all measures designed to obstruct any pretensions that the house of Hanover might claim. They might be German, but they would be obliged to rule as English sovereigns.

William knew that the Peace of Ryswick was by no means the end of hostilities, and that the French king’s overweening appetite for glory would encourage him in fresh fields of action. Spain proved to be the spur. The Spanish emperor, Charles II, better known as Charles the Sufferer, had endured a life of long disease. He was incapacitated and mentally incapable; his tongue was too large for his mouth, and he drooled continually. He had a huge and misshapen jaw, so that the rest of his face seemed to be in a kind of pit. His body was crooked and his mind more or less unhinged; he believed himself to have been bewitched since childhood, in which opinion most of his court and country concurred. He even allowed himself to be exorcized. He was the last of the Habsburg rulers of Spain, and the overwhelming evidence of inbreeding may have been the occasion for his manifold mental and physical weaknesses. He was an embarrassment in life, yet in death he would become a problem. He ruled Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, now largely consisting of Belgium, and he controlled the empire from the Americas to the Spanish East Indies. It looked more powerful on paper than it did in reality, but still it was grand enough to lure rivals.

In the spring of 1700, when he was months from death, there had been attempts to divide his legacy between the principal claimants. The greed of men, and the mischance of events, left any proposed arrangement in disarray. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I of Austria, claimed the inheritance on behalf of his son in a series of elaborate genealogical calculations; they depended upon the particular clause of a particular marriage contract. No box that Pandora ever opened could contain so much dissension. Louis XIV looked with horror upon an alliance between Madrid and Vienna; it would mark an arrow through French domains. Charles the Sufferer had in fact named as his successor Philip, duke of Anjou, who happened to be the grandson of Louis XIV. William III could not contemplate a union between Paris and Madrid: this could not be allowed. So great a Bourbon empire had never yet been seen.

Yet Louis was not to be diverted. Towards the end of November 1700, three weeks after the death of Charles, the French king proclaimed his grandson to be Philip V of Spain and true successor to the throne; he also took the precaution of interdicting trade between England and the Spanish Netherlands. Such a commercial and political offensive was followed by what might be considered a more private insult. In the middle of September 1701, James II died in the odour of sanctity, having been seized with paralysis while attending Mass in his chapel at Saint-Germain. His perpetual companions had been the austere monks of La Trappe, and he pleaded with his son and heir to follow the precepts and practices of the Roman Church. The French king, who had made vows at the deathbed of the dying king, now kept his promise to his cousin by recognizing the ‘Old Pretender’, the ‘King over the Water’, the ‘Old Chevalier’ – as he was variously known in England – to be James III.

This was a provocation too far. It violated the Peace of Ryswick, when Louis had solemnly agreed to recognize William III as the rightful king of England. It threw into doubt all the French king’s promises and avowals, and aroused all the old fears that Louis was about to impose by force popery, tyranny and universal monarchy.

At the beginning of June 1701 William had appointed Marlborough to be commander-in-chief and plenipotentiary in all negotiations concerning the security of England and its allies. The king recognized that Marlborough, already the ensconced favourite of Anne, would be by far the single most important figure and commander of the new regime; he wished above all else for continuity in his struggle against the French. By the end of the year a ‘treaty of grand alliance’ had been sealed between Holland, England and Austria. So began ‘the War of the Spanish Succession’.

William made his decision only just in time. He had for some months been afflicted by shiverings, headaches and nausea, but his quietus was delivered by a humble mole. In February 1702 he was riding through the park of Hampton Court when his horse stumbled on a molehill; the king fell and broke his collar bone, the complications leading to his death. For many years afterwards the Jacobites toasted ‘the little gentleman dressed in velvet’ who had supplied the coup de grâce in the park.

William was not greatly mourned, for he had not been greatly loved. He had been, for many, the least bad alternative. He had kept out the Stuart monarchs and their papist pretensions. Yet his legacy was in fact far more substantial than might at first appear. He had defied French power and limited its continental ambitions; he had successfully removed all the memories of the weakness and pusillanimity of the Stuart kings in thrall to money from Versailles. He and his advisers had also been able to place England on a far more advantageous financial footing, with the prospect of public credit stretching onwards. A new dynasty, a new foreign policy and a new economic dispensation, were not negligible achievements.

On 8 March Anne, at the moment of William’s death, became queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. She was perhaps not the most prepossessing of monarchs, but she had endured many calamities. She was thirty-seven years of age, and in the last sixteen of them she had suffered twelve miscarriages; of her five other children, four died in very early life. The oldest survivor, as we have seen, expired at the age of eleven. The years of mourning and frustrated pregnancy had affected both her appearance and her character. Her gout was so extreme that she was often to be found swathed in bandages. One Scottish commissioner, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, came to Kensington Palace in order to pay his respects and was alarmed to discover her ‘laboring under a fit of the gout, and in extreme pain and agony’; he added that her face was ‘red and spotty’, her dress ‘negligent’ and her foot ‘tied up with a poultice and some nasty bandages’. This was not an image of majesty.

Her discomfort, and the disorder about her, were not helped by her evident reticence and shyness in company. At court receptions the foreign ministers and ambassadors would often sit around her in total silence. Her principal lady-in-waiting, Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, recorded that she never really cared for visitors; she was reluctant to ask questions, and even more unwilling to answer them. She confined her conversation to pleasantries of the lightest sort. How long have you been in town? How do you find our weather? She was neither clever nor witty, and upon matters of state ‘she never spoke but in a road’ or in a leaden, laborious and carefully rehearsed way.

There were reasons for her reticence. She was cautious by temperament, never wholly trusting her own judgement or that of others. Jonathan Swift, who observed her at court, remarked that ‘there was not, perhaps in all England, a person who understood more artificially to disguise her passions’. But there were matters for which no disguise was necessary. She was a fervent supporter of the high Anglican Church and, as one devoted to ritual, she was also addicted to protocol. She would remonstrate with a courtier or lady who wore a ruffle or a periwig or a coat out of place.

She began her day with prayers in the royal chapel before immersing herself in public business; on two days of each week she attended long sessions of the inner cabinet (known at the time as the ‘secret council’), a practice that had generally exhausted the patience of her predecessors, and attended to the steady business of receiving ambassadors, replying to petitions, signing warrants and letters, giving counsel to, and soliciting advice from, various peers and notables. She told the archbishop of York that she scarcely found time for her prayers. It may be that she felt at a disadvantage as a woman, and a woman without an heir. All the time she heard the steps of the Hanoverians behind her, and indeed refused to allow the heiress elect, Sophia of Hanover, to travel to England. She did not wish to seem expendable.

Her first address to the House of Lords, therefore, three days after the death of the king, may have been something of an ordeal for a woman as shy as she was cautious. From the throne in the Lords she declared that ‘as I know my own heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you, that there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England’.

Her reference to her Englishness was no doubt a hit against William, whom she always despised, and his predilection for Holland. It was feared that she would be too lame from the gout to walk into the Lords but she processed with crown and heavy gown of red velvet with the order of the Garter emblazoned upon it. An eyewitness of the ceremony, Sir Robert Southwell, wrote that ‘never any woman spoke more audibly or with better grace’. She blushed, and seemed at times uneasy, but she had demonstrated her regality.

The election of that year had favoured the Tories with a large majority and, within a few weeks of their victory, they introduced ‘the Occasional Conformity Bill’ which was designed to penalize dissenters and nonconformists in the practice of their religion and in their pursuit of civic office. Ever since the Act of Toleration of 1689 it had been perfectly proper for dissenters to take Anglican communion two or three times a year in order to qualify for public employment; the eucharist became their certificate of health. One of the most famous cases was that of the lord mayor of London, Sir Humphrey Edwin, a Presbyterian, who on one occasion worshipped at the Anglican service in the morning and in the evening attended his meeting house or conventicle at Pinners’ Hall on Old Broad Street. This double standard, known as ‘playing bo-peep with the Almighty’, was in the bill to be prohibited by use of fines or imprisonment.

Anne was herself temperamentally of the ‘high church’ party, and favoured the measure as proof of Anglican piety, but the Whig majority in the Lords seem to have realized that a nation separated on religious matters might well divide on other issues. Marlborough himself did not see the point of antagonizing a large part of the population at time of war. So, despite the enthusiasm of the Tories in the newly elected Commons, the bill was allowed to drop. The queen herself sweetened the pill by establishing a fund known as ‘Queen Anne’s Bounty’, by which she agreed to surrender her additional revenues from tax on clerical incomes in order to supplement the salaries of those clerks who served in the poorest parishes.

The most significant problem in these early days of her reign, however, was that of war with France. Marlborough was confirmed in office as captain general of the armed forces, although in theory he was inferior in rank to the queen’s husband, Prince George of Denmark. George himself was a royal nonentity of whom Charles II had remarked that ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober, but there is nothing in him.’ He died in 1708, so for the latter years of her reign Anne was a widow. Marlborough was of course in practical charge of the allied forces. He was the only possible candidate for the post. In fact the first year of the campaign was very much like the final year of the last, with precious little movement on either side; Marlborough, in addition, felt himself hampered by the caution or indecision of his Dutch field deputies. His consolation came in the dukedom awarded to him by the queen in 1702.

Over the next months, despite the dilatoriness of the allies, the new duke was able to capture a number of significant towns along the Meuse, the great river that runs from north-east France into the northern sea beside ports such as Liège, Maastricht and Namur; the victories prompted John Evelyn to write that ‘such an concurrence of blessings and hope of God’s future favour has not been known in a hundred years’. This may have been something of an overstatement, but a great victory was indeed at hand.

Marlborough’s line of fire along the Meuse had prevented Holland from falling wholly to Louis XIV but, together with his ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the duke now prepared a greater strategy. In a move as hazardous as it was unpredictable he marched his army away from the Low Countries and across the various German principalities towards Bavaria, the elector of which state was a close ally of the French, and through which a strategically important stretch of the River Danube flowed. His main purpose was to save the Habsburg capital, Vienna, from the enemy. In a feat that has sometimes been compared with those of Napoleon, Marlborough marched 20,000 men across 250 miles of Europe in six weeks while absorbing 20,000 more troops along his route. He had to move in conditions of speed and secrecy in order to camouflage his intentions not only from the French but also from his more pusillanimous Dutch colleagues, who believed that any forces taken from the Spanish Netherlands were thereby wasted.

Marlborough prevailed. At the beginning of August 1704, the two forces faced each other close to the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which lay in a plain of stubble close to the Danube itself. The French and Bavarians were in defensive position, with the river and woods behind them, but Marlborough’s keen and continual attacks eventually broke them. The English cavalry, fighting in lines three deep, moved forward at a brisk trot with their swords ready; the infantry, three or four deep, were armed with muskets and ring bayonets. Towards the close of the fighting the French were compelled to retreat into the village of Blenheim itself, where in the face of overwhelming casualties the remnant was forced to lay down its arms.

The victory was complete; the French lost some 34,000 men, with 14,000 injured or taken prisoner, while the English and their allies lost about 14,000. On the following day the duke wrote to his wife that ‘I can’t end my letter without being so vain as to tell my dearest soul that within the memory of man there had been no victory so great as this’. The greater the carnage, perhaps, the greater the victory.

Bavaria was knocked from the war, and Vienna was saved. The German principalities were spared the danger of French invasion, and the hopes of Louis for a quick and decisive war were thoroughly overturned. It was perhaps the most decisive battle of the entire War of the Spanish Succession, whereby the military power of England was affirmed and the spectre of Louis XIV was seen to be nothing but a shadow. It took eight days for the news of the victory to reach England, where it was met with jubilation. When Anne was given the news by a courier, she told him: ‘You have given me more joy than ever I have received in my life.’ But the joy was not unconfined, and it was noticeably lacking among those Tories who were opposed to Marlborough’s war policies as an expensive extravagance. What, in their judgement, did such European conflicts actually achieve?

Party rivalry was characteristically intense and bitter during the reign of Queen Anne. She was herself an interim figure, neither Hanoverian nor Jacobite, so the rival ideologies of the realm had an open arena for their fury and resentment. The queen herself was determined to stand above parties, and it was her instinctive and pragmatic inclination to maintain a balance between them so that none should rule her; she wrote that ‘if I should be so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of either, I shall look upon myself, though I have the name of queen, to be in reality but their slave’. She disliked and distrusted the violent partisans on both sides; they were ‘merciless men’ whom she regarded with dread. But would it prove possible to steer an even course between them? The Tories were her church party of redoubtable Anglicans but they opposed Marlborough’s wars; the Whigs supported Marlborough and all his works, but they were eager to diminish the royal prerogative in favour of parliamentary rule. To whom could she flee?

The political parties were not yet formally constituted, but they were becoming so. They were, in other words, in the process of turning into caricatures of themselves. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the two factions of Lilliput, known as ‘Tramecksan’ and ‘Slamecksan’, are divided over the respective heights of the heels of their shoes; the former wear their heels high, as ‘high Tories’, and the latter low. The animosities between them are so great that, as Swift puts it, ‘they will neither eat nor drink, nor talk with each other’.

In the real world of early eighteenth-century London the Whigs and Tories frequented their own clubs, coffee-houses and taverns. The Whigs of aristocratic temper met at the Kit-Kat Club, while their Tory counterparts assembled at the Society of Brothers. The Tories patronized Ozinda’s Chocolate House in St James’s or progressed round the corner to the Smyrna or the Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall. The Whigs collected at St James’s Coffee House, perilously close to Ozinda’s, or drove further east to Buttons by Covent Garden. Pontack’s in Lombard Street, and the Old Man’s in the Tilt Yard, were also Whig favourites.

Addison once described London as ‘an aggregate of nations’, with the customs and manners of St James’s as different from those of Cheapside as those of Tunisia or Moscow. Yet each region was united by means of its principal coffee-house that ‘has some particular statesman belonging to it, who is the mouth of the street where he lives’. It was a city of coffee-houses. They had begun life in the 1660s, when the burgeoning social intercourse after the godly rule of Cromwell demanded some comfortable venue. They could not have come at a better time for London society, and before long they were considered to be the most essential component of city life. A roaring fire guaranteed warmth and hot water; a penny on the counter brought you a dish of coffee or chocolate; the newspapers, hanging on the wall, were all that were needed for entertainment and conversation. It was a world of news.

The illustrations of the time show that the coffee-houses were simple enough, with a few stools, chairs and plain deal tables. Smoking was the rule, and pipes were in almost every hand. Anderton’s in Fleet Street was the meeting place of Freemasons; Child’s, in St Paul’s Churchyard, was for book-worms and scholars; the Grecian was similarly the venue for learned men; Jonathan’s in Exchange Alley was the haunt of stock-jobbers; Batson’s in Cornhill was the place of physicians. If an invalid needed an immediate diagnosis, he or she would send a boy to Batson’s.

Even the medical profession, however, was not free from the rage of party. When Doctor Oliphant began to associate himself with the Tories, his Whig patients deserted him. When a prominent Tory, Lord Oxford, found the coach of an equally prominent Whig waiting beside a house door, he refused to enter the premises. London also had its own Whig and Tory hospitals – St Thomas’s for the former and Bart’s for the latter. Who would wish to be treated by a member of the wrong party? Eton College was divided between the two factions, which resulted in frequent fights and quarrels. When Swift passed through Leicester in 1707 he observed that ‘there is not a chambermaid, prentice or schoolboy in this whole town but what is warmly engaged on one side or the other’. The Spectator of 3 January 1712 noticed that ‘the Whig and Tory ladies begin already to hang out different colours, and to show their principles in their headdress’. Four years later the Freeholder observed that ‘Whig and Tory are the words first learned by children’.

So there was more to it than the difference between low heels and high heels. Even Swift, who made the analogy, became a lifelong Tory. The animus was such that the dominance of one faction over the other was enough to lead to imprisonment, exile, proscription, confiscation of estates, loss of office and even loss of life. The points of principle were manifold, concerning the role of monarchy itself, the structure of the Church of England, the basis of the Hanoverian succession, the nature of religious toleration, and the conduct of the war. When the conflict between money and land is thrown into the argument, the antagonisms could become fierce indeed. With the fundamental values and beliefs of the nation diverging so strongly, the queen and her ministers had to tread softly. This was by no means an ‘age of stability’, as it is sometimes described; in some respects it resembled the previous century without the imminent threat of armed conflict.

In the early years of the queen’s reign the Whigs tended to be in the ascendant largely because they more eagerly supported Marlborough’s war against the French; but there was no basic equipoise, since the parties moved incrementally up or down according to the atmosphere or debate of the day. One of these periodic changes occurred in the general election of the spring of 1705; neither side secured an outright victory, but the Whigs seemed to have overcome the more virulent Tories; as a result the Whigs and more moderate Tories held the balance, with the latter under the leadership of Robert Harley.

Harley may now have been consigned to the dust of history but he can be exhumed as representative of the eighteenth-century politician, the politician tout court, the naked politician. He began his climb as a member of the Commons in 1689 and soon acquainted himself so thoroughly with all the ploys of parliament that he became known as ‘Robin the Trickster’. Such was his success that he was elected Speaker in 1701, and soon became the inevitable candidate for higher office. As an orator he was neither fluent nor enlightening, but he made up for the lack of a wide view with a propensity for detail. He was a lover of intrigue and secrecy, relying for the most part on camouflage and dissimulation. He said nothing simple and nothing true. It was observed that he spoke so closely and unintelligibly that even he did not understand what he meant. Alexander Pope remarked that he ‘talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about; and every thing he went to tell you was in the epic way; for he always began in the middle’. This was an allusion to Horace’s advice to the epic poet always to begin ‘in medias res’ – in the middle of things.

Yet Harley’s design was to obfuscate and confuse his hearers. He was secretive to the point of being mysterious, dilatory to the point of immobility. Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor, remarked that ‘if any man was ever born under a necessity of being a knave, he was’. He was odd and awkward in appearance, always ready to bow and smile, but with what the duchess of Marlborough described as ‘a constant awkward motion or other agitation of his head and body’.

Yet he was also a politician of apparent good humour, treating every colleague as a potential ally and friend; he was fond of good company, but he had no friends. He was convivial with a purpose; his bonhomie was such that he had a reputation as a conciliator who was able to make the most diverse men and ambitions meet. He knew the secret spring of any man, and was so keen a judge of character that he knew the surest means of touching it. He had no principles beyond those of self-advertisement and self-advancement, although loyalty to the throne may be counted as one of his virtues even if it might be construed as loyalty to his own prospects. He was made for the politics of conspiracy: a perennial contriver and intriguer who tied himself in knots with his specious promises. One year he was a Whig, and the next a Tory. As long as he supported Queen Anne, it made little practical difference. Behold the politician of the age in all his infirmity, and the long line that followed him. We may repeat William Blake’s perception that ‘nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay’.

4

Hay day

The early years of Queen Anne’s reign were blessed, like some miracle of the gods, by bountiful harvests. Between 1702 and 1708 the price of wheat was below the crucial figure of 30 shillings a quarter that generally provoked distress or riot. This naturally lowered the political and social pressures in the regions, as well as in London, where the market cost of bread was the single most important factor in public content. In the autumn of 1708 Squire Molesworth of Yorkshire wrote that ‘we buy nothing but sugar and spice in the market, having all eatables and drinkables at home’. The superfluity of money, among the middling classes, accounts for the increasing purchase of clocks and mirrors, porcelain, carpets and curtains.

Yet not all was of the gods’ making. Much can be attributed to aspirations reported in Gulliver’s Travels that ‘whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together’. The names of these indispensable experimenters – Jethro Tull, Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend, Arthur Young and his Annals of Agriculture, Robert Bakewell and his New Leicester sheep – are well enough known in the annals of agricultural progress.

But the specific innovations of a few highly intelligent and observant men could not in themselves have created the ‘agricultural revolution’ that has been dated from the mid-seventeenth century. If ‘revolution’ is too strong in its implications, we may at least refer to a long age of improvement. The obstacles were very real. The forces of conservatism ruled the countryside, with the tillage of land and the raising of animals changing little over many thousands of years; the old habits and prejudices of the farmers were as deep as the soil, and anyone who questioned their efficacy was doubting the very nature of providence. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, according to John Aubrey, ‘even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, though it succeeded with profit, was looked upon with an ill eye’.

It would be hazardous to identify any specific reason for what became a period of significant innovation, in the later years of the seventeenth century, but some of the impetus may have been the result of the efforts of the Royal Society to investigate questions of drainage and crop rotation. When the level of prices fell in the early years of the eighteenth century there was even more reason to gather profit wherever it could be found.

The extent of further ‘enclosure’ was also one of the key agents of change. The ‘enclosure’ of land, making larger estates out of open fields and communal pasture, had been characteristic of English agriculture since the fourteenth century; it helped to arouse the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450. It became a matter of prominent public debate as a result of Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, in which More had condemned the conversion of arable land into pastoral. It was a case, he said, of the sheep eating the people.

The rise of population, the finite nature of resources, and the price of foodstuffs combined to make land the most desirable of all goods. When feudal ties were broken, when the laws and customs of manorial society ceased to operate, the demand from the prosperous was for land and more land. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was an instinctive law of being. The more land you owned, the greater you became. The more powerful you were, the easier it was to take away the customary but unwritten rights of the peasantry to gather the gleanings of the crop or to collect firewood; control of land was thereby extended.

A new race of landowners sprang up, and soon enough the landed gentry were a large component of parliament. They were protected, therefore, but the small freeholders and the cottagers were not. Those with the benefit of property purchased small parcels of further land in various locations, planning one day to join them together; they gained the manorial rights of parliamentary boroughs; they bought up ‘advowsons’ or land granted to the parson. The landowners wished to see their own territory from horizon to horizon, where the fruits of the field would be plentiful. To him who possessed much, more would surely follow.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century these enclosure agreements were organized by private treaty, in which no doubt bribery and blackmail played their part but in which common sense and mutual benefit played the larger role. The owners of the greatest number of strips in the old communal system might decide to join together and exchange land, for example, in order to provide soil for crops and pasture for husbandry. Another method was that organized by private Acts of Parliament. The first of these Acts was introduced in 1604 but the golden age of parliamentary enclosure, if that is the appropriate phrase, took place after the middle of the eighteenth century. It is more than likely that the parliamentary commissioners, employed to survey or to mediate land under dispute, tacitly supported the cause of agricultural reform; that was the spirit of the age. As a result, however, the balance was tipped against the independent voices of rural protest or the grievances of the ‘little people’. It required the owners of approximately 75 per cent of the land to initiate proceedings, ignoring the large majority of smaller owners.

Once the farmer owned the land, however he had acquired it, he could do what he liked and had no need to consult his neighbours. The advent of better drainage, and the introduction of rotating crops, increased the yield; the hedging and fencing of private land, and the new building necessary for storage, helped to create a wholly new agricultural landscape. The larger farmers were in addition much more open to new methods that encouraged efficiency and productivity. This has been called the economy of scale, or the birth of an agricultural industry based upon market forces.

So the land of England was slowly changed. The distinctive ‘checker-board’ aspect of the domestic countryside, with hedges or drystone walls enclosing the fields, is a direct consequence of the developments of the mid-eighteenth century. At the beginning of the following century Thomas Batchelor, in ‘The Progress of Agriculture’ (1804), remarks upon the new landscape:

And hawthorn fences, stretch’d from side to side,

Contiguous pastures, meadows, fields divide.

The mellifluous balance of Batchelor’s verse can be contrasted with the enclosure riots, the counter-petitions against proposed enclosure, and the anger against the withdrawal of common rights in the immediate countryside. Many of the small farmers, and the cottagers, were relegated to the status of labourers hired for money according to seasonal rates. The landed gentry, the richer owner-occupiers, and the larger tenants were in effective control. The peasants and the yeomen (best understood as smaller owner-occupiers), once the staple of the agricultural hierarchy, were diminished and ultimately disappeared. It represented a social revolution in the countryside.

When parliamentary commissioners were sent to a district in order to judge the merits of enclosure they were often met with threats, absence of cooperation, procrastination and wild rumours of local devastation; these hostile and often embittered responses embodied the last stand of custom, habit and tradition under threat from the forces of commerce and efficiency.

Yet the process of enclosure did materially affect the fertility and profitability of the land. It is unlikely, for example, that the farmers could have fed an ever-growing – and indeed rapidly accelerating – population without the benefits of large-scale production. The advantage of newly introduced crops – from sainfoin (or ‘healthy hay’) to lucerne (or alfalfa), from clover to the ubiquitous turnip – was evident in the fertility of the land that enriched the farmers and fattened the cattle. It soon became obvious and practicable to engage in regional specialization. The hops came from Kent, and the honey from Hampshire; Aylesbury ducks became as well known as Norfolk turkeys. In 1770 Arthur Young remarked that in the previous ten years there had been ‘more experiments, more discoveries, and more general good sense displayed in the walks of agriculture than in an hundred preceding ones’.

It has been estimated that by the middle of the eighteenth century the labours of one-third of the population in the field were now able to furnish sustenance for the remaining two-thirds. This was in a period when the economy was still primarily one of agriculture, where the abundance of foodstuff was the most accurate measurement of health, vitality and standard of living. So it was that in 1797 the Encyclopaedia Britannica could claim that ‘without any improper partiality to our own country, we are fully justified in asserting that Britain alone exceeds all modern nations in husbandry’, even though no mention is made of the poverty, distress, dispossession and injustice that accompanied the change in agricultural conditions.

In this age of improvement, however, myriad societies grew up for the betterment of agriculture. It became one of the great preoccupations of the period. Tenants’ dinners and farming clubs became the venue for discussions on agronomy; local societies fulfilled a similar purpose and shows, such as the Bath and West, encouraged experiment and innovation among their participants. There was nothing more potent than competition from a neighbour. At a later date periodicals such as the Farmer’s Magazine and the Farmers’ Journal, were issued and, in 1754, the Royal Society of Arts instituted a prize for agricultural improvement. As a crowning glory, a voluntary society was established in 1793 known as the Board of Agriculture, which was in a later century transmogrified into the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The same board went on to distribute many packages of Swedish turnips to all the regions of the country, and to organize Humphry Davy’s lectures on ‘vegetable chemistry’. The changes in agriculture were all part of the inventive and experimental spirit that had been evident since the middle years of the seventeenth century.

Talk of ‘improvement’, therefore, was in the air. The new discoveries in metals, mines and minerals were considered to be the harbinger of larger progress while the contemporary dispute between ‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’ was in part designed to correct the prevalence of ancient errors. Improvement trusts were soon to be established for roads, rivers and canals.

The spirit of enquiry was not always manifest in the higher echelons of the land. When a national census of population was proposed in 1753 it was condemned in parliament by the member for York as ‘subversive of the last remains of English liberty’ and ‘the most effective engine of rapacity and oppression’. When at last the population of Newcastle upon Tyne was counted, the result excited ‘universal surprise’ at the smallness of the total. The surprise derived from the belief that the population of the nation was fast outstripping its supply. The panic, like so many others, was without foundation.

Yet it is true that the trend of population was, from the early eighteenth century, only in one direction. It can be surmised that a population of some 6 million in 1714 rose to more than 6.5 million fifty years later; by 1781 it had reached 7.5 million and, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, 9 million. It was a history of continual, almost inexorable, development. It may be of some ancillary interest that by the middle of the eighteenth century the rapidly rising population was in the process of moving towards the north as well as to magnetic London.

The reasons for the rise in population have been variously stated. A decline in mortality, and an increase in fertility, are generally adduced as the principal causes; the absence of famine and the dearth of epidemic disease, the prevailing trends towards cleanliness, the increasing demand for labour, the abundance of food, the inclination towards early marriage and the growing success in the battle against sickness have all been cited. With such a wealth of circumstance the great work of fertilizing the soil, and feeding the population, could only go forward.

It was not a question of claiming domination over nature. This would have been considered blasphemous. But the results were clear. If you put the fleecy and fatty ‘New Leicester’ sheep of Robert Bakewell before the scrawny and ragged specimens of other farmers, the differences were obvious. Within the course of the eighteenth century the average weight of a sheep at Smithfield rose from 28 lb to 80 lb.

That power of change was not exclusively reserved for the beasts of the field. Beneath the soil lay the potential for transformations just as great. The first stage of industrial growth was marked by the transition from wood to coal, from organic to mineral, from a local and perishable source to a substance that seemed to be as old and as imperishable as time. Coal was the foundation. Yet first it had to be reached from the bowels of the earth.

The old fashion of excavating coal had been laborious and dangerous. The miners were lowered by rope many fathoms beneath the surface, where they took their place at the end of the track that they had already worked. They knelt, stooped or lay on one side in order to hack the coal from the main seam by means of pick, wedge or hammer; illustrations show them lying beneath immense layers of coal, as if they were likely at any moment to be crushed and obliterated. Their coal was taken away by pit ponies or by women and children who dragged large baskets from chains fastened to their waists. The hazards were everywhere, from gushing water to falling rocks and escaping steam, from asphyxiation by ‘choke-damp’ to suffocation in thick clouds of smoke and dust. Miners have always been associated with the dark and with subterranean depths; that is why they have generally been regarded with superstitious awe or irrational fear. They lived in darkness.

The inevitable cost to life was believed to be an economic, rather than a social, calamity. The loss of time, and men, meant loss of money. When the interests of the landowners and the mine-owners were at risk, of course, there was at least an incentive for remedial action. One of the most persistent and damaging problems was that of water gathering in the bases and hollows of the mines. ‘Horse-gins’, by which a wooden gear mechanism was driven by a horse trudging in a circle, bringing up buckets of water, was a first and not particularly efficient response; the contraption was also used to bring up coal.

The credit for the first ‘steam engine’, momentous though it may seem, is not certainly known. The palm is generally given to Thomas Savery who in 1698 patented his version of an atmospheric pump. An advertisement in the Postman of March 1702 recommended ‘Captain Savery’s Engines which raise Water by the force of Fire in any reasonable quantities and to any height … these are to give notice to all proprietors of mines and collieries which are encumbered with water, that they may be furnished with engines to drain the same’. The ‘fire’ was a furnace and boiler that provided the steam; the steam created the atmospheric pressure that moved the piston; the piston itself set in motion a pump. The menacing water was thus drawn off.

Savery’s engine was refined by a Dartmouth ironmonger, Thomas Newcomen, who by the first decade of the eighteenth century had devised an engine that could reach much greater depths. The first Newcomen engine was in use by 1712 and, at the time of Savery’s death in 1715, seven or eight were already in operation. Fifty more were erected over the succeeding twenty years; by the end of the century more than 350 had been installed. The success of the engine is testimony to its efficacy as well as its necessity, only eventually outperformed by the inventive works of James Watt.

It was not necessarily elegant, however, and Samuel Smiles records that

the working of a Newcomen engine is a clumsy and apparently a very painful process, accompanied by an extraordinary amount of wheezing, sighing, creaking and bumping. When the pump descends there is heard a plunge, a heavy sigh, and a loud bump; then as it rises, and the sucker begins to act, there is heard a creak, a wheeze, another bump, and then a strong rush of water as it is lifted and poured out.

The bulk and complexity of the first engines may have surprised contemporaries in the same manner as the early computers of the 1950s baffled the public. As with the computer, too, the most radical developments were not properly recognized or understood. The steam engine, for the first time, was able to convert thermal energy into kinetic energy. It turned heat into work. This was the source of power that would completely outstrip all previous resources, human or hydraulic, and would lead ineluctably to the enormous increase in industrial productivity that would one day earn the name of revolution. The wheezing and sighing engine changed the world.

5

The prose of gold

The late king had always nourished hopes of a union between Scotland and England, largely for defensive and military reasons; he did not want a Jacobite enemy at his back door, and over the centuries the Scots had notoriously been seen to favour the French. There had already been attempts at dynastic union between the two nations, but they had come to nothing. As dual monarch James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 also became James I of England, joined two crowns but not two realms; still, it was a precedent. Cromwell gathered Scotland in his embrace during the short-lived Commonwealth, but again the union fell apart.

Soon after the accession of Anne, however, a commission was established in 1702 to examine the long-standing dilemma. There was at first a signal lack of enthusiasm on both sides for the proposed arrangement. The leader of the Tories in the Commons suggested that union with Scotland was akin to marrying a vagrant ‘and whoever married a beggar could only expect a louse for her portion’. Yet reasons of state, and of defence, were more powerful than petty insults. In 1703 the Scottish parliament passed two Acts, of Security and of Peace and War, that threatened the governance of England. The Scots refused to confer their crown on the Protestant house of Hanover. They still yearned after the Scottish Stuart succession. The second Act declared that, on the death of the queen, the Scots would reserve to themselves any right of peace or war with both France and her allies. They might even withdraw their troops from Marlborough’s armies.

The prospect of an unfriendly power on the northern border concentrated the minds of the English politicians. The Whigs needed no persuasion of the need for union; their unequivocal support of the war, and their undeviating loyalty to the Hanoverians, made the choice inevitable. The Tories may in turn not have wished to seem openly disloyal to the queen or the administration, but in any case Anne took the precaution of nominating only one of them to the English commission. So the negotiations took place in an atmosphere of relative good grace amply mollified by bribes and other less overt forms of chicanery.

The commissioners convened at the Cockpit, a suite of offices in Whitehall, during the spring and summer of 1706. The two sides did not meet but instead preferred to exchange written suggestions and proposals, liberally larded with cash and promises to sweeten the Scottish lairds. The Scots contingent also hoped for a large portion of what was known as ‘The Equivalent’, the sum paid by England to satisfy the creditors of the previous Scottish administration. The ‘treaty of Union’ can be considered as a deal brokered under the table, therefore, but many of the Scottish commissioners were already in favour of a union with England.

The Scottish economy had been severely damaged by the continuing and apparently endless war with France. With foreign ports closed to its exports, the country more than ever required free trade with England in such commodities as cattle and linen. There seemed to be no doubt that the economic consequences of union would be beneficial. Adam Smith, the high priest of the Scottish economy, later wrote that

The union opened the market of England to the Highland cattle … Of all the commercial advantages, however, which Scotland has derived from the union with England, this rise in the price of cattle is, perhaps, the greatest. It has not only raised the value of all highland estates, but it has, perhaps, been the principal cause of the improvement of the low country.

In fact the treaty of Union was able to establish the largest free trade area in the world, and the manifest disadvantages of Scottish industry and agriculture were gradually removed.

Many of the Scottish people, however, were not so happy at the prospect of this arranged marriage. They had no wish to tie themselves to a richer and more powerful state, with all the dangers of being swallowed alive and becoming a Celtic appanage of the English Crown like Cornwall. Why should they turn their backs upon the old Stuart dynasty?

Nevertheless the various Acts of the ‘treaty of Union’ were passed by the beginning of May 1707, thus incorporating two nations or what Jonathan Swift called ‘our crazy double-bottomed realm’. In effect the treaty created a single sovereignty between the two nations and a single parliament, including Scottish representatives, but it also preserved the Kirk, Scottish law and Scottish local administration. From this time forward England, Scotland and Wales were united under the title of Great Britain.

The new flag, incorporating the red cross of St George and the white saltire of St Andrew, was popularly known as ‘The Union’ but it would of course make little difference to the war now being fought under its auspices. The success of Blenheim had been succeeded by little but disappointment and division among the allies, with neither Italy nor the Netherlands rescued from the French. The duke of Marlborough wished to invade France, and thus cut off the bull at the neck, but his fellow combatants gave him little, if any, support. They were too faint-hearted, and in any case too eager to defend their own territories.

Marlborough returned to the grim warfare in the Spanish Netherlands and, with the assistance of his Dutch and Danish allies, did manage to command a great victory at Ramillies in the spring of 1706. The French commander, Marshal Villars, described it as ‘the most shameful, humiliating and disastrous of routs’. As a result of the total defeat of their army the French withdrew from the Spanish Netherlands and abandoned a number of key towns; they retreated from Antwerp and Ostend, Bruges and Ghent and Lille.

The Bourbons were now in general disarray throughout their European possessions; an exception, perhaps, could be made for the Bourbon dynasty in Madrid that still held power through Louis’s grandson, Philip V, who remained the king of Spain for virtually forty years after a brief abdication in favour of his son. But now all seemed to be going well for the English and their allies. The capture of Lille in particular promised the key to Paris, and as a result Louis sent an envoy to The Hague for clandestine negotiations.

But the atmosphere in the English camp was not conducive to a treaty. Marlborough wrote to a Dutch general that ‘I am one of those who believe that France is not yet reduced to her just bounds, and that nothing can be more hurtful to us on this occasion than seeming overforward to clap up a hasty peace’. So the terms of any treaty were to be formidable. The least of them included the formal recognition of Queen Anne as legitimate sovereign in contrast to the spurious authority of the ‘Old Pretender’ who in the spring of 1708 added disaster to misfortune with a botched landing at the Firth of Forth; the proposed terms also included the demolition of the port at Dunkirk and the recall of Philip V from Madrid.

Louis XIV seemed prepared to yield all, or almost all. France and England had just suffered the coldest winters in living memory; the Thames became a Frost Fair and Lady Wentworth wrote to her brother of ‘post-boys being brought in by their horses to their stages froze to their horses stone dead’. Yet the bitter cold had more severely affected France, already afflicted as it was by famine, shortages and a general sense of failure.

Louis would go so far and no further. He could never sign the thirty-seventh article of the proposed peace which demanded that he remove his grandson from Madrid, by force if necessary, and replace him with the Habsburg Charles. It was an insult. To eject a member of his Bourbon house by arms, in favour of a Habsburg? It could never be. It is possible, even plausible, that Marlborough and his English negotiators made these demands precisely in order that Louis would refuse them and thus continue the conflict. The spoils of war were still very great, especially for a noble leader such as Marlborough. The duke had even asked the queen to confer upon him the title of captain-general for life, but Anne wisely rejected this as unconstitutional. Still, he had done sufficiently well. Blenheim Palace and Marlborough House were only two of the stone baubles he had collected.

The wealth and eminence of Marlborough were of course resented by those who opposed both him and the war itself; anger and frustration were also directed at the dominant Whig administration that held the purse-strings of the revenue. The Whig financiers were in any case growing rich on the loans they made to the administration, while the Tory squires were paying for government borrowing with heavy land taxes. The equation was not as simple as this, but this was how it appeared at the time. Nothing could be more onerous or more unfair. The Tories opposed the war on grounds of strategy as well as expense. Why fight on behalf of the Dutch who had for centuries been the great trade rivals of England? Why fight obscure battles on the continental mainland when nothing seemed to be gained from them?

The crisis in fact came with the battle of Malplaquet, southwest of Mons, in the early autumn of 1709. The English army and its allies won a paper victory at enormous cost, suffering double the enemy’s number of fatalities. The French withdrew in good order, while the English left more than 20,000 corpses on a battlefield that quickly became known as ‘the bloodiest in Europe’. Queen Anne sent no letter of congratulation to the duke. If the French could still fight in so spirited and determined a fashion, despite imminent projections of their collapse, who could foresee the end of war? The Tories called out against the carnage incurred, if not devised, by the Whig administration. Marshal de Villars, the commander of the French forces, wrote to the king that ‘if it please God to give your majesty’s enemies another such victory, they are ruined’. The original quote came from Pyrrhus, who was of course the father of the Pyrrhic victory.

The Whigs had now another enemy of quite a different type. Dr Henry Sacheverell, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, had already alienated the Whigs by his fervent high church tendencies. With the assistance of a high Tory lord mayor, however, and some fellow travellers he was chosen to preach before the City corporation at St Paul’s Cathedral on the signal occasion of 5 November 1709. He was known to be an orator with few rivals on the religious stage. ‘He came into the pulpit,’ William Bissett wrote in The Modern Fanatic (1710), ‘like a Sybil to the mouth of her cave, or a pythoness upon her tripod, with such an air of fierceness and rage, as is not possible to express.’ With pursed lips and keen ferocious glare, he had all the appearance of a martinet. He was not learned but he was authoritative; he was not clever but he was persuasive. He was one of those clerics who can repeat the clichés of the age as if they were written in letters of fire.

His sermon was entitled ‘The Perils of False Brethren, in Church and State’. The ‘false brethren’ were not difficult to identify; in fact they were displayed by Sacheverell like so many puppets on poles. His attack was upon religious nonconformists, in particular the dissenting brethren whom the Whigs sought to protect and who had been granted freedom of worship by the Act of Toleration twenty years before. They had been chosen, according to the preacher, to rule a land of ungodliness and licence. In a previous sermon, delivered in 1702, he had declared that ‘presbytery and republicanism go hand in hand’, by which he meant that the levelling principle of nonconformity could be applied to politics as well as to religion. It was the old argument, adumbrated by James I in his remark of ‘no bishop, no king’.

But Sacheverell now proclaimed it with unparalleled ferocity. He launched into a tirade against religious toleration. He practically accused the dissenters of being regicides. He advocated to the utmost the principle of ‘passive obedience’ by which the sovereign must be implicitly obeyed; any dissent should be treated as sinful and as unlawful. This could of course be considered to be an implied criticism of the Glorious Revolution that had removed James II from the throne, but more immediately it could be construed by some as a momentous attack upon the Whig cause and its advocates.

The Whigs were at this moment in an unenviable position, beset by the enemies of the continental war and by their opponents whispering in the queen’s ear that all was not well in the state. In these circumstances, the best mode of defence was considered to be attack. It was decided, against the advice of Anne herself, that the doctor should be brought before the Commons to explain himself. In the middle of December the Commons condemned his statements as ‘malicious, scandalous and seditious libels’; he was placed in custody and impeached for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’, for which he could be sentenced to life imprisonment.

The threat of the sledgehammer, raised against a relatively small nut, confirmed all the public suspicions concerning an over-mighty Whig administration intent upon preserving its own interests. What had Henry Sacheverell done but proclaim his loyalty to the established Church and to cry out that its privileges were being violated? What was the high crime in being a staunch Anglican? Those who attacked him, indeed, might themselves fall under the suspicion of subversion.

It is a matter of some interest that the ‘mob’, or the ‘rabble’, or whatever other word covered the ordinarily unremarked inhabitants of London, was traditionalist; the people were by instinct loyal to the established authorities of monarchy and religion, and any cry of ‘the Church in danger’ could bring them out onto the streets. They might never have attended an Anglican service in their lives but the threat against the Church was enough to rouse them.

As the time for the trial of Sacheverell approached, the London crowds gathered with the aim of sacking the meeting houses of dissenters; the dwelling houses of certain nonconformist ministers were also ransacked, the books and furniture destroyed. The pulpits and pews, even the wainscot, of several conventicles were brought to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where they were burned on a pile to the shouts of ‘High Church and Sacheverell!’ The carriage of the queen herself was stopped while the people cried out ‘God save your Majesty and the Church! We hope your Majesty is for Doctor Sacheverell!’ Daniel Defoe wrote that ‘the women lay aside their tea and chocolate, leave off visiting after dinner, and forming themselves into cabals, turn privy councillors and settle the affairs of state … mobs, rabbles and tumults possess the streets … even the little boys and girls talk politics’.

The trial before the House of Lords began in Westminster Hall towards the end of February, to the excitement of a packed audience of spectators who had paid heavily for the privilege; a box had been constructed so that the queen might view the proceedings without being seen. Sacheverell himself arrived every morning in a glass coach, surrounded by a multitude of people with weapons and drawn swords. The defence rose to plead that the doctor had done nothing more than to defend the Church in a sermon that had been ‘made criminal by a laboured construction of doubtful words’.

Four days later Henry Sacheverell rose to defend himself, in a speech that had been written for him by the much more learned and eloquent bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury; Sacheverell claimed that he was only an ordinary priest who had dared to speak out of love for his country and for his religion against blasphemers and infidels. He had won the argument even before he began to speak, and the Whig leaders had cause to regret their ill-timed attack upon a popular favourite. He was deemed to be guilty by a narrow majority, and the sentence was a light one; instead of being consigned to the Tower for life, as he was threatened, his sermons were to be burned and he was suspended from preaching for three years.

In the eyes of the country this was tantamount to acquittal and a severe reprimand for the Whig authorities who had prosecuted him. The crowds of London became wild with excitement; bonfires were lit in the streets and windows illuminated by candles or torches in the old fashion for celebrating a great foreign victory. When Sacheverell read prayers at St Saviour’s, Southwark, the press of worshippers was almost too great. The country towns also rang with the bells of victory, and it seemed to many that the national mood was the harbinger of a new Tory era of Church and State.

The election of the following autumn seemed to burnish those hopes ever brighter. The Tories took the lead over the Whigs by a majority of two to one. The newly established government was led by a statesman who has been mentioned before, the political convolvulus Robert Harley, whose genuine fidelity to the queen was matched by a desire to create a ‘moderate’ ministry. Yet he had not anticipated the extreme Tory members who were deposited in the Commons by the high tide of their party’s success in the election; they formed an association, the October Club, in memory of their famous victory. They may have discharged more spittle than sense, and were described by Defoe as ‘moon-blind high-flyers’. Some opponents explicitly attacked them for an attachment to the Stuart cause but this was only barely justifiable; it might more fairly be said that they were Jacobean when drunk and Hanoverian when sober. In that, they embodied a large number of Tories who may have dreamed of a return to the old order but knew well enough that their welfare, their finances and their safety depended upon the house of Hanover.

The October Club, however, represented a powerful combination of those who were weary of war, even more weary of Whigs, and suspicious of the financial cabal that controlled military expenditure and domestic taxation. They were suspicious of Harley, too, who seemed to be willing to admit some of the Whigs into the new administration. Some believed that the spoils of the electoral war should go to the victors rather than to the defeated.

The political debates and divisions have to a certain extent been preserved in aspic by an age that includes the names of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as well as Defoe, Swift, Congreve and Pope. It can fairly be claimed, in fact, that the reign of Anne represented the golden age of political journalism. By the time the election of autumn 1710 was called, the war between the pamphlets and the periodicals had begun in earnest. Harley in particular had a keen eye for what at a different date might be called ‘public relations’. He scooped Defoe out of prison, where the writer had been banished for a contentious pamphlet, and placed him on the payroll both as a tame journalist and as a travelling spy. Defoe had already begun the publication of the Review, more formally known as A Review of the Affairs of France, in which he employed the events of the day as a force for moral and political satire; it came out in quarto form on three days a week, with digests of domestic and foreign politics, art, commerce, science and trade. It lasted for nine years, and Defoe wrote almost every word of it, steering English journalism in an opinionated direction from which it has never since veered.

Yet Harley also employed Swift. He had a good eye for argument and invective in the most promising of his contemporaries. Harley may have paid Defoe, but he flattered Swift whose status as a gentleman and a scholar was a little higher than that of Defoe as hack and a quondam tilemaker. Harley took Swift with him toWindsor, and the writer was one of the first to attend Harley’s Saturday Club dinners in York Buildings. So Swift’s Examiner was conducted on very different lines from those of Defoe’s Review; it had more style and scholarship, but less power and pugnacity. Defoe’s readership was largely made up of urban merchants and shopkeepers or, as one contemporary unkindly put it, the periodical was ‘read by cobblers and porters’; it was essentially appealing to urban loyalists. Swift addressed himself in principle to the rural gentry and the landed gentlemen. Harley needed both constituencies; so he had Swift in one pocket and Defoe in the other.

Swift was, however, in an ambiguous position. The earl of Orrery wrote that Swift ‘was elated with the appearance of enjoying ministerial confidence. He enjoyed the shadow; the substance was detained from him. He was employed, not trusted.’ Swift believed himself to be a deep-sea diver in politics but Orrery claimed that ‘he was suffered only to sound the shallows nearest the shore … perhaps the deeper bottoms were too muddy for his inspection’.

His boredom, hurt and disgust at the lies and false promises made to him by the prominent English politicians may have materially added to the weight of his misanthropy in his later and more celebrated writings. In Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, he seems to be one thoroughly disabused by human deception and disguise; his principal responses are those of mockery and disdain at all the claptrap of the world; he feels disgust but not pity, a disgust combined with the horror of life.

In the spring of 1709 a small folio half-sheet of four columns began to appear three days a week at the price of a penny; it contained an essay on the manners or morals of the day, together with notes and sketches from the various coffee-houses of the City. It was of a moderate Whiggish persuasion, but preserved its chaste and neutral demeanour. The Tatler was a London periodical, and in the capital the Whigs were the voice of refinement and discrimination. It professed to teach ‘public persons what to think’ but promised to contain material ‘which may be of entertainment to the fair sex’. It would also provide ‘accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainments’ under the names of the various coffee-houses and chocolate-houses where its reporters took their refreshment.

Its editor, Richard Steele, assumed the name of Isaac Bickerstaff and adopted the persona of a man of sense and tolerance, not at all willing to subject other parties to superlative praise or to excessive blame. He was a Whig who knew how to keep his temper, especially when the climate grew colder. He supported Marlborough while professing impartiality, and conveyed the essential values of Whig policy as somehow identical with common sense and good taste.

Within two years the Tatler had transmogrified into the Spectator under the editorship of Steele himself and Joseph Addison. It maintained the Whiggish tone of its predecessor even as the Tory administration of Robert Harley took over the machinery of government, and thus preserved its neutral urbanity. It covered disparate subjects deemed to be of interest to its audience, from the nature of whoredom to the metrics of Paradise Lost; it described a night at the theatre and chronicled immediate fashions, like a sudden efflorescence of coloured hoods at the beginning of 1712, everything pushed forward by the stream of forgetfulness that is human life.

The Spectator had disavowed any partisan affiliations, with Addison declaring that ‘my paper has not in it a single word of news, a reflection in politics nor a stroke of party’. His purpose was to teach manners and not measures, and he added that ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.’

This represents the refining tendency of the eighteenth century. The Spectator would civilize the Jacobites, the enthusiasts, the high church Tories and the ferocious partisans, out of existence. The great medium of truth would be sociable discourse and, of all the humours in the casebook of Hippocrates, only good sense would remain. The moral did not need to be emblazoned on the masthead of the periodical since it represented the temperate and tolerant society, the virtuous commonwealth, that was considered to be the proper and appropriate consequence of the revolution of 1688.

Of course the absence of enthusiasm, and the decline in earnestness of all kinds, might in turn arouse cynicism and fatalism. The plays of Congreve, written just before the accession of Queen Anne, are populated by characters who are naturally and instinctively deceitful; the world is a great theatre of folly, in which truth and virtue are nowhere to be found. It is a sphere of wit and foolery, animated only by sexual greed and the pursuit of money; the men lie, wheedle and betray; the women are lustful, silly and untrustworthy. The plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at a slightly later date, are preoccupied with hypocrisy and fraudulence in the service of money; metaphors of banking and finance, so central to the period, hold together the dramatic narratives in bands of gold. Sheridan had nothing but contempt for the vogue of sentiment that came to be so fashionable in the mid-eighteenth century, regarded by many as a trite and naïve refusal to countenance the real truths of the age. ‘If you have any regard for me,’ Sir Peter Teazle says in The School for Scandal (1777), ‘never let me hear you utter anything like a sentiment.’

We also have two more voices, from Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1693), to add to the cacophony of the period after the Glorious Revolution.

Brisk: I have a violent passion for your ladyship, seriously.

Lady Froth: Seriously? Ha ha ha!

Brisk: Seriously, ha ha ha. Gad I have, for all I laugh.

Lady Froth: Ha ha ha! What d’ye think I laugh at? Ha ha ha.

6

Waiting for the day

The desire now was for peace. After ten years of war against the French the nation was weary. The new Tory government, elected overwhelmingly in the autumn of 1710, was all too willing to bow to the public demand. When the new parliament assembled, and the duke of Marlborough had taken his accustomed seat in the House of Lords, the queen commenced her speech by announcing: ‘I am glad that I can now tell you that notwithstanding the arts of those who delight in war, both place and time are appointed for opening the treaty of a general peace.’ This was a Tory kick against the previous Whig administration but in the subsequent debate Marlborough took exception to the insinuation that he had prolonged the war artificially for reasons of private convenience or profit. When he made his appearance at court in the last week of the year Swift noted in a letter to his close friend, Esther Johnson, that ‘nobody hardly took notice of him’.

The duke’s principal political opponent had meanwhile become the hero of the hour when, in the spring of 1711, he had been the victim of an unsuccessful assassination by a French spy. Robert Harley had been stabbed twice in the chest but an elaborately ornate and padded waistcoat saved him from serious injury. His wonderful escape was a cause of much triumphalism, and in honour of his safe recovery the queen ennobled him as the earl of Oxford and earl Mortimer as well as promoting him to be lord high treasurer. In this superior capacity he lost no time in prosecuting his opponents still further and, the evening after the queen had denounced ‘those who delight in war’, he instigated proceedings against Marlborough for bribery and corruption.

The terms for a peace between France and England, so long looked for, were already being discussed in the course of secret negotiations at the beginning of 1711. The principal tenet, if it can be so called, was that the two countries would enter a secret understanding even at the expense of their allies. A Franco-British treaty would be enough to cow them into agreement. The second article would allow Philip V to remain on the throne of Spain in exchange for certain commercial concessions to the British in Europe and on the American continent. There was even some discussion of the ‘Old Pretender’ returning to England if he espoused the cause of Anglicanism but, in the unlikely event of James Edward becoming an apostate, it remained mere talk. It is a measure, however, of the crucial significance that the Stuart succession still held in English politics.

In November 1711 Jonathan Swift issued one of his most incendiary and effective pamphlets, ‘The Conduct of the Allies’, in which he declared that ‘no reasonable man … can be of the opinion for continuing the war’. He accused the Whig oligarchs of placing ‘a sort of artificial wealth of funds and stocks in the hands of those who for ten years before had been plundering the public’; he believed that ‘we are thus become the dupes and bubbles of Europe’. He accused Marlborough of ‘that unmeasurable love of wealth, which his best friends allow to be his predominant passion’. Towards the conclusion of his polemic he states that ‘we have been fighting for the ruin of the public interest, and the advancement of a private. We have been fighting to raise the wealth and grandeur of a particular family; to enrich usurers and stock-jobbers; and to cultivate the pernicious designs of a faction, by destroying the landed interest.’ It was a comprehensive catalogue of ills.

In the following month the duke of Marlborough was dismissed by the queen from all offices of state. His carriage was chased by angry members of the populace, crying out ‘Stop thief!’ The victor of Blenheim, and the saviour of Europe from Louis, had good reason to contemplate the turning of Fortune’s wheel. ‘Ah,’ Boethius had written in The Consolation of Philosophy, ‘dull-witted mortal. If Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune.’ Marlborough and his wife soon decamped to the continent where they hoped to find more enduring allies. Many of the Whig lords were still supporting the duke, and the further prosecution of the war, but Queen Anne managed to dilute their partisanship by creating twelve new peers on the first day of 1712. Now the House of Lords was in agreement with the Commons.

Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, had already fallen far out of favour. She was an earnest and argumentative Whig who had eventually exasperated and alienated the queen. Her supplanter in the position of royal confidante was Abigail Masham, who became ‘keeper of the queen’s purse’; Masham was also cousin to Robert Harley and was believed to have maintained the interests of that sinuous survivor. There were further rumours of over-familiarity between Masham and the queen, with what a ballad called ‘some dark deeds at night’ between the elderly sovereign and her servant. The queen’s gout and general ill-health would not have encouraged physical passion, but she may have needed familiar female companionship to withstand the ills of a predominantly male world. The more extreme sexual gossip seems on the face of it unfounded, therefore, but it was still assiduously promoted by the duchess of Marlborough in revenge for her usurpation.

When the eventual peace conference between France and England opened in Utrecht at the end of January 1712, much had already been agreed in clandestine negotiations. When the treaty was eventually signed in the spring of 1713, it had become clear that Great Britain was a world power fit to challenge France, and that in addition it was now the dominant naval power with bases at Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean. The British took firmer control of North America, with the possession of Newfoundland and Hudson’s Bay. And they had been granted the additional bonus of the asiento, a treaty that allowed English vessels to ship African slaves to the Spanish colonies of the Americas. The cup of maritime supremacy flowed over, and the articles signed at Utrecht were able to keep the peace between France and England for the next fifteen years.

The rejoicing was by no means universal. The war had continued during the course of the negotiations, and the duke of Ormonde had been sent out to replace Marlborough in command of the English forces. But it was not intended that he should compromise any quiet diplomacy with rough action; he was sent what was called a ‘restraining order’ that prevented him from taking part in any battle or participating in any siege. All was to be quiet on the various fronts. It did not take long for the allies to become acquainted with the position of their erstwhile colleagues who had suddenly become non-combatants; they reacted as much with disbelief as with fury. They had effectively been deserted on the field of battle.

One of those allies was George, prince-elector of Hanover, who like the other princes and commanders felt that he had been betrayed by the Tory administration desperate for peace. His interests had been sold behind his back. It was clear enough that England would get rid of her supposed friends as soon as they were unnecessary to her. So grew the myth of ‘perfidious Albion’. Unhappily for the Tories, however, George, heir to the house of Hanover, was more than likely to become the next king of England. How were Harley and others to shield themselves from his wrath?

In the last year of the queen’s reign, party loyalties, therefore, were screwed to the highest pitch. To vote with the Tories for peace was tantamount to disowning the coming prince. To vote with the Whigs for war was to ignore the fervent wishes of the nation. The volatile state of the nation’s politics was compounded by the problem of the ‘Old Pretender’. It was widely assumed that the queen secretly favoured her half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, in the place of the Hanoverians; this may have been true of some of her ministers, but there is no reason to believe that she harboured any such desire. She was fervently Protestant, and could not in conscience have endured the return of a committed Catholic. Since James soon publicly refused to renounce the old faith, the possibility of his succeeding Anne became ever more remote.

Some ministers and councilors still faced both ways, sending messages of assurance to the Stuart court while continuing to deal with the house of Hanover. The duke of Marlborough, now on enforced leave on the continent, was actively preparing his committed forces at Bruges, Ghent and elsewhere for action on behalf of the house of Hanover if it were threatened; yet at the same time he was maintaining contact with the Pretender. This vertiginous ambiguity, performed on a tightrope between two eminences, is an extreme form of the ambivalence felt by the nation between the candidates for the throne.

It is difficult to know, amongst all the bitterness and controversy, where the balance lay. It was said that the first claimant who arrived in England after the death of the queen, James or George, would be welcomed as sovereign. This was silly. The matter of succession had become a poisoned well of suspicion, rumour and intrigue. In a pamphlet of 1713, ‘Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover’, Daniel Defoe records that ‘the poor despicable scullions learn to cry “High Church; no Dutch kings; no Hanover!” that they may do it dexterously when they come into the next mob’ while their Whig antagonists ‘clamour “No French peace, no Pretender, no Popery!”’ In the spring of the following year Richard Steele wrote that ‘according to the situation of affairs, nothing but divine providence can prevent a civil war within a few years’. These were the gloomy prognostications of those who understood public affairs best. The age of Anne was not an age of stability.

The Tories themselves were at odds one with another. Some of them even crossed the Channel to attend the court of the Pretender while others remained quiet and in a phrase of the era ‘waited for the day’. Still others were more moderate or more realistic in their expectations, calmly awaiting the arrival of a Hanoverian king, while others actively supported the Hanoverian cause; they were known as the ‘Whimsicals’. The Whigs also remained in a state of confusion, indecision and alarm. Some of them, fearing a coup d’état arranged by the ‘Old Pretender’ and his allies, seem to have arranged themselves in military associations with arms and troops at the ready; but these may have been paper brigades born out of fear and rumour.

The confusion and anxiety of course grew worse as the queen’s health began to fail. She had said herself earlier in the year that she had suffered from ‘an aguish disposition, succeeded by a fit of the gout’, which could mean anything or nothing. Yet her perilous condition did not affect her frantic councillors who, in her own words, ‘neither regarded her health, her life, nor her peace’. The future of the country was for them too important to wait for an old woman. Their arguments continued over her deathbed, with the voices of the warring parties echoing through the corridors of state.

It was all too much. She was becoming feverish and bewildered. Her lord chancellor, Lord Harcourt, whispered to her the name of the duke of Shrewsbury; the duke had recently seen service in France and Ireland and, more importantly, he had never professed himself to be wholly Whig or wholly Tory. The white staff of the lord high treasurer would be in safe hands. It was the last appointment she ever made. On the following morning she was dead, with the doctor recording that ‘the immediate occasion of the queen’s death proved to be the transition of the gouty humour’ from knees and feet to nerves and brain. It had flown upwards and taken the sovereign with it.

7

The great Scriblerus

The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus was composed privately in 1714 by the Scriblerus Club. The society itself was a parody of the multifarious clubs, literary and artistic and philosophical, that became most prominent at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was itself composed of two clubs or groups of men with shared affinities. One was a Tory assembly that included Swift and Bolingbroke. The other comprised younger and more facetious men, among them Pope and Gay. They were joined together as the Society of Brothers which began to meet in 1711. Their principal opponents were the Whig authors, such as Addison and Steele, who circulated about the Spectator.

It was Pope who in the autumn of 1713 helped to form the Scriblerus Club out of the ‘Brothers’ with the proposal for a monthly satire that would parody the age. They met on Saturdays in the rooms of John Arbuthnot at St James’s Palace; Arbuthnot was personal physician to Queen Anne as well as an author. He is still the least well known of the company. He was born in north-east Scotland but he migrated to London in his twenties, when his first book was published. It was entitled Of the Laws of Chance and was addressed to the prevalent taste for gambling, including backgammon, dice and the lottery. Gamblers, after all, were at the political forefront of the age. Arbuthnot discovered, or his colleagues discovered for him, a vein of wit and satire that made him the perfect companion and co-worker.

Swift said that the Scriblerus Club represented ‘a friendship among men of genius’, and Pope returned the compliment by remarking that it comprised ‘some of the greatest wits of the age’. In the early summer of 1714 Pope wrote to Swift that ‘Dr Arbuthnot is singular in his opinion, and imagines your only design is to attend at full leisure to the life and adventures of Scriblerus … The top of my own ambition is to contribute to that great work, and I shall translate Homer by the by.’ Swift himself remarked, some years after, that ‘I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done. There are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and if they could be united would drive the world before them.’ One of its members, Robert Harley, had of course been first lord of the treasury, and the queen’s principal minister, since 1711, and so its significance became ever greater.

The Memoirs was at first designed to become part of the satirical periodical that Pope had proposed. Instead it became a single treatise, a mock biography of a foolish and gullible hero who has all the makings of a learned simpleton. The text was revised and enlarged from time to time, culminating in its publication in the second volume of Pope’s prose works in 1741.

Satire had become the single most important response to public events in an age that eschewed polemic and serious argument. You were not a gentleman if you took life too seriously. It was also a question of common sense; a word that, with its meaning of ‘good sound practical sense’, is first noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in a text of 1726. But that common sense must be combined with moderation or, as Pope had put it in An Essay on Criticism (1711), ‘not dully prepossest, nor blindly right’. Amiability was also a key term of the time, but it had its limits. Balance was the key. It was part of the movement of the time with the disquisitions of the Royal Society on the one side and the essays of the Spectator on the other; it represented an easy plainness, a modest and sensible attempt at truth. The historian of the Royal Society, William Sprat, characterized the prose of scientific discourse as ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness, as they can’. The men of letters, poets and dramatists as well as essayists, were intent upon using to best advantage the language that men do use. It was said by a contemporary critic, Colley Cibber, that the plays of John Vanbrugh seemed ‘no more than his common conversation committed to paper’.

The rhetoric of speculation, and of enthusiasm, was now being displaced by the prose of fact and opinion; satire was taking the place of dogmatism and, although the age of theological disquisition was by no means dead, there was an emphasis now upon ‘characters’ and ‘observations’ in the public prints. This helped to reanimate the discourse of the political news-writers and pamphleteers. The essay was the true sermon of the period and, as the Spectator noted in a dramatic context, ‘the town has an opportunity of doing itself justice in supporting the representations of passion, sorrow, indignation, even despair itself, within the rules of decency, honour and good breeding’.

The growing class of readers, or what soon became known as ‘the reading public’, fastened upon what was contemporary and what was immediate; it took an unusual and even perhaps unprecedented interest in the affairs and interests of polite society. It was the immediate bed from which rose the novel in all of its forms, and of which the journalists Swift and Defoe were two of the most accomplished practitioners. And what might else explain the rise of what could be called the conversational, rather than rhetorical, drama at the command of Congreve, Vanbrugh and John Gay?

If we are to hear, or overhear, the voice of the age of Anne, therefore, it is perhaps in the pages of its literature. The tone is at once learned and comic, inspired and facetious; it is quite unpretentious and is designed in fact to deflate pomposity of every description. It represents a reaction against revolutions, glorious or otherwise, against warfare that seemed both endless and unproductive, against political and religious animosities that were now regarded as outdated and unnecessary.

Satire of course had existed as long as fools or hypocrites could be found but, after the bitter controversies and proclaimed certainties of the seventeenth century, its themes became enlarged with irony and condescension. It was not enough to defeat an opponent in argument. It was necessary to ridicule him. Pope and Swift, in particular, were masters of acerbic derision. It was the temper of the time. All the members of the Scriblerus Club had already constructed several satirical personae.

Pope himself had much to be acerbic about. As a Catholic he was debarred from university or government employment; he suffered from tuberculosis of the spine that rendered him a cripple of low and bent stature. It was he who complained about ‘this long disease, my life’. His poetry, composed largely in heroic couplets, became first the fashion and then the expression of the period. His couplets evinced the formal and artificial style, at a time when formality and artificiality were in any case the marks of good breeding.

Yet the safety of the clipped couplet did not, in the case of Pope, preclude eloquence and genuine feeling. The early decades of the eighteenth century are depicted as those of restraint, but there was much wild feeling and enthusiasm to be restrained. It was no longer considered proper to wear your heart upon your sleeve. All was to be achieved by allusion and indirection. If it were indeed an ‘age of reason’, as the older textbooks allege, it was reason that gave the point to passionate analysis. What could be a more passionate pursuit than to reason oneself out of the darkness of the recent past?

The Memoirs was from the start a collaborative enterprise designed, in the words of Pope, ‘to have ridiculed all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough that he had dipped in every art and science, but injudiciously in each’. So the little book became an assault against fashionable taste and the purveyors of contemporary wisdom, conceived in the spirit of what Swift described on his funerary monument as ‘saeva Indignatio’ or savage indignation. In particular the Scriblerians, if the term may be allowed, were the absolute opponents of contemporary science – known as ‘mechanical philosophy’ or ‘corpuscular philosophy’ – that reduced everything to its material constituents; they abhorred the technical language of the experimentalists as so much nonsense, as well as the assumption that there was no spiritual component to be discovered in the world.

There was no shortage of other targets. One of the intellectual controversies of the time was that between the ‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’, those who revered classical learning against those who followed the new philosophy of science and experiment. Both schools, or tendencies, are satirized in the Memoirs for their avowal of fixed positions and of unfruitful speculation. The book ridicules the coffee-house bores, the clubbable bores and the pedantic bores who took advantage of what was a relatively new social freedom. Everyone seemed entitled to his or her own opinion.

Martin Scriblerus is born in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials, well known for its astrologers and doctors who, in the absence of proper medical attention, were the resort of both rich and poor. The allusion here is to the credulity and superstition that swept through the eighteenth century, led from the front by those who put their faith in book learning rather than experience. Martin’s father, Cornelius Scriblerus, had previously consulted the works of Aristotle to discover the best moment for conception.

Martin himself is first seen frequenting ‘the outside of the palace of St James’s’ in the reign of Queen Anne ‘which, notwithstanding those happy times which succeeded, every Englishman has not forgotten’. He was later to be glimpsed ‘under the piazza by the dancing room in St James’s’, and it is not wholly impossible that this neighbourhood contained his simple lodging ‘in a small chamber up four pairs of stairs’. It may even have resembled Arbuthnot’s own lodgings in the palace.

The author is wary of astonishing the reader with too much low detail, however, since ‘I dare promise the reader that, whenever he thinks any one chapter dull, the style will be immediately changed in the next’. The remark is in the same tone as that of a later passage in which it is revealed that ‘the style of this chapter in the original memoirs is so singularly different from the rest that it is hard to conceive by whom it was penned’. It is impossible to think of a seventeenth-century author who would write in such a manner. It is, however, very close to the style of Tristram Shandy, the first two volumes of which were published in 1759. The combination of cleverness and facetiousness can be considered as a true token of eighteenth-century sensibility.

One habit of the time was ‘the recovery of manuscripts, the effossion [digging up] of coins, the procuring of mummies’. In this period, too, much attention was paid to physiognomists, phrenologists and chirographists who analysed the faces, heads and palms of their clients in the belief that inward qualities could be deciphered from outward signs. The Scriblerus Club satirizes all of these pseudo-sciences that, together with quack remedies like hartshorn and Hungary water, dominated the world of eighteenth-century medicine. ‘What makes the English phlegmatic and melancholy but beef? What renders the Welsh so hot and choleric but cheese and leeks? The French derive their levity from their soups, frogs and mushrooms.’

Medical practice, as well as theory, was investigated. Martin Scriblerus, in search of enlightenment, ‘purchased the body of a malefactor’, freshly hanged, and ‘hired a room for its dissection, near the Pest-fields in St Giles’s, at a little distance from the Tyburn Road’. The ‘pest-fields’ were those open spaces where the victims of the plague had been buried in the previous century. His manservant carried the corpse back in a hackney coach at midnight, for fear of provoking attention, but when the corpse farts (a very eighteenth-century touch) the household is plunged into confusion. In the ensuing commotion the manservant is brought before a local justice, but his plea in his own defence is composed entirely of puns. This was another hit against the tastes of contemporaries. In 1719 was published The Art of Punning; or, The Flower of Languages; it was composed by Tom Hood, one of the notable ‘punsters’ of the time.

The narrators also satirize the modern practices of logic and philosophy that turn antique syllogisms and propositions into absurdity. This was the prolonged curse of scholasticism that had dominated the medieval period. How do angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? Much of this was aimed at the universities where the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas were still considered to be holy writ. Classicism was the only curriculum.

The young Scriblerus also evinces an interest in the literatures of Persia and Araby. He takes pleasure in the exhibitions of wild animals and other ‘wonders’ that delighted the people. They included a dwarf and conjoined twins, the horn of a unicorn, the foot of an elk and the thigh bone of a giant. The curious came to the freak shows, like that ‘at Mr John Pratt’s, at the Angel in Cornhill’ or that ‘over against the Mews Gate at Charing Cross’, and had to pay sixpence for entrance. Foreign lands were also the object of wonder and enquiry rather than of possession and domination. This was still the world of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and other exotic fantasies.

The Scriblerus Club itself seems to have dissolved, or gone into a decline, soon after the death of Queen Anne in the summer of 1714. Yet the close connection of wit and satire anticipated the greatest works of its members, among them Gulliver’s Travels, The Dunciad and The Beggar’s Opera. It was part of a unique period in English literature as well as English history.

8

The Germans are coming!

Queen Anne died on the morning of 1 August 1714, and on the same day the high officers of state congregated at the gateway of St James’s Palace where they proclaimed ‘that the high and mighty Prince George, Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign, of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege Lord, George, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etcetera … ’. George had won the race over James Edward. It has been estimated that fifty-seven other people had a better hereditary claim; nevertheless the elector of Hanover, as he was also informally called, was the only Protestant among them and had therefore been acclaimed as monarch.

The cry went up after the proclamation that the Germans were coming in droves, eager to adorn themselves with the treasures of England, but in the event only ninety staff or entourage made the journey with the new king. Among them were the usual courtiers and officials, together with apothecaries and tailors as well as a complete kitchen staff (the culinary expertise of the new and unknown country could not be taken for granted); on the ship also were George’s two Turkish body servants, Mehmet and Mustafa, and two court mistresses who caused almost equal astonishment.

Fräulein von Schulenberg was a lover of long standing, and one of her two ‘nieces’ betrayed a close resemblance to the new king; she had first refused to travel to England with George, according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘fearing that the people of England who, she thought, were accustomed to use their kings barbarously, might chop off his head in the first fortnight’. She changed her mind only when she learned that her rival was also on the way. At a later date Horace Walpole, the man of letters and connoisseur, recalled Frau von Kielmannsegge sporting ‘two fierce black eyes, large and rolling … two acres of cheek spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed’.

The London mob was highly delighted by the fact that one was very thin, and the other very fat. It was like a nursery rhyme. The new sovereign’s unhappy wife, Sophia, was not to be seen. She had been imprisoned for almost twenty years in the castle of Ahlden after being found in an illicit liaison with a German count; the count himself disappeared in mysterious circumstances, thus giving the Hanoverian court something of the atmosphere of the castle of Otranto. George’s wife never left confinement, but her son did eventually become king of England.

‘George Ludwig’ landed at Greenwich on 18 September and in the following month was crowned in Westminster Hall. He was not exactly a golden prince. Sophia, before their doomed marriage, had shouted that ‘I will not marry the pig snout’ and thrown his miniature against a wall. She was perhaps a little unfair. He was rather short but his physiognomy was not out of the ordinary; he had a somewhat heavy countenance, with a high broad forehead, which showed little sign of liveliness or animation. He had a large nose and what were described as ‘vacant’ eyes. He was reserved to the point of woodenness, a natural hesitation that made him slow in speech and in thought. As a result he was considered to be stiff and cold in manner, but this may only have been a defensive stance in an alien environment. As Lord Chesterfield said, England was too big for him.

It is not clear whether or not he could speak English, but surviving documents suggest that he understood a lot and wrote a little. In any case he had French, the international language of diplomacy, to support him. He had certain characteristics that he shared with the preceding Stuart dynasty, among them ruthlessness and stubbornness. Perhaps these are the traits of any successful monarchy. He had embarked on his first military campaign at the age of fifteen so he could not be accused of faint-heartedness, and he had ruled Hanover for sixteen years. He was no neophyte. Thackeray wrote of him that ‘he was more than fifty years of age when he came among us; we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him. He took our loyalty for what it was; laid hands on what money he could; kept us assuredly from Popery and wooden shoes. I, for one, would have been on his side in those days.’ Wooden shoes were a token of French servitude.

Since he was by nature reserved and informal he did not keep a majestic court. He maintained an inner German retinue that carried out the necessary duties, and as a result he seemed to his subjects to be essentially remote. He rose early but did not emerge from his chamber until noon to consult his ministers; after these meetings and conferences, which could last as long as three hours, he retired once more to his bedchamber. He walked in the gardens of St James’s in the late afternoon, and spent the evening playing cards with one of his mistresses. Visits to the opera or theatre were occasional, and they were not accompanied by any ritual or fanfare; the king avoided the royal box. The courtiers themselves were not vainglorious; they did not dazzle; there was no attempt to maintain the cult of monarchy. With the exception of Mustafa and Mehmet, and of course the thin and the fat mistresses, there was nothing exceptional about them.

The new king came to England with an instinctive dislike of Tories. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that many of them still supported the Stuart cause. And he could not forgive the Tory politicians who engineered the treaty of Utrecht by leaving their allies deserted on the field, of whose number he was of course one. Nevertheless it was widely believed that, like Anne, he would attempt a moderate administration combined of both parties; but in practice this even-handedness lasted for a moment only.

On his accession, for example, the new king stripped the duke of Ormonde of his military command; Ormonde had succeeded Marlborough, and had given the order for his troops to stand down. In the following year the duke was impeached for high treason on suspicion of supporting the Jacobite cause. The Tories in general were cast into outer darkness accompanied by menaces of impeachment, dismissal or permanent exclusion from office. The great earl of Oxford, once mere Robert Harley until the dagger went through his waistcoat, was sent to the Tower where he remained for two years. Others, like Ormonde himself, fled to France and to the embrace of the ‘Old Pretender’. These self-imposed exiles flocking to the court of Saint-Germain did more harm to the Tory Party than a thousand vicious pamphlets. To be a Tory was now reckoned, in some quarters, to be a Jacobite. The established Anglicans, who were associated with the Tories, also lost some of their lustre; the king conformed to the national liturgy, but at heart he remained a fervent Lutheran.

The new Whig administration, now sheltering under the aegis of the king, was no longer a radical force in politics; it had quite naturally lost the anti-monarchical fervour, for example, it had adopted during the ‘exclusion crisis’ of 1679 when James II was the target. It had now become the ruling party; it represented the merchants, the tradesmen, the professional classes and the urban gentry who controlled the financial institutions of the country. Yet any ruling class, faced with no coherent opposition, will become an arena for ambition, envy and private antagonism; there is always someone who wishes to be pre-eminent.

There were indeed many splits and schisms between the dominant Whigs, leading the French ambassador to remark that the English would crucify Christ again if he returned to govern England. Young Whigs fought against old Whigs, the ‘court’ Whigs were opposed to the ‘country’ Whigs, the parliamentary Whigs were hostile to the royalist Whigs. Without an interesting or interested Tory party, parliament seemed to be of no earthly use. One Tory member, Sir Charles Sedley, was rebuked for walking along the Mall during a particularly important debate. He replied that he knew exactly what was going to happen, ‘and an honest man signifies no more in that house to rectify it, than a drop of essence to perfume a pail full of stale piss’.

Yet the Whigs themselves were not entirely approved or accepted. The majority of the population, most of whom did not have a vote, were equally indifferent to the German dynasty; it was estimated in 1715 by the Austrian Resident in England, Johann Philipp Hoffmann, that two-thirds of the nation were in fact actively hostile to the Hanoverians. This was an exaggeration. Riots in the streets of London were commonplace, however, and attacks upon the meeting places of dissenters continued as if the Sacheverell ‘High Church’ riots had never ceased. On the anniversary of the Restoration of 1660 a crowd assembled before the statue of Queen Anne, in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, and called out ‘Down with the house of Hanover!’ and ‘God bless King James III!’ The health of the ‘Old Pretender’ was drunk in inns and taverns all over the country. On the evening of King George’s birthday, May 28, a mob gathered at the Stock Exchange, armed with sticks and clubs, calling out for ‘High Church and Ormonde!’ At Cheapside the people cried out ‘No Hanoverian! No Presbyterian Government!’ The London Record Office reported the arrest of one citizen who laid ‘fifty guineas that the king did not reign twelve months’.

The protests were not on a revolutionary scale but they shook the new Whig ministry and questioned its administration of the rule of law. This was the burning context for the drawing-up of a statute known as the ‘Riot Act’ by means of which a crowd of twelve or more was guilty of a capital felony if it failed to disperse within a hour of a proclamation ordering it so to do. Any officers, under the instructions of the magistrates, were granted indemnity for their actions in dispersing the new breed of rioters. The Act was of great benefit to the authorities in periods of civil unrest, such as disruption in time of famine or unemployment, and was in fact so useful that it remained on the statute book until 1967.

Some of the native frenzy was dispelled, however, when the real Jacobites gathered upon British soil. The incident became known as ‘the Fifteen’. At the beginning of September 1715, the earl of Mar set up the Jacobite banner at Braemar in Aberdeenshire; it was reported that 10,000 men had taken their place about it. The Jacobite court had heard of the disaffection among the populace, and hoped to take advantage of it. But the population was never so warm as the active, and probably drunken, minority who had acclaimed James Edward Stuart.

The report of the insurgency created something like panic in London where the Hanoverian king was not wholly secure upon his new throne. The newly created Riot Act was deployed with full force; Tory hawkers selling ballads or pamphlets were dispatched to the nearest house of correction, and anyone suspected of uttering treasonable sentiments was likely to be scourged or pilloried.

Small forces from Lancashire and Northumberland, still Catholic in sympathy, joined the rebellion but these luckless few were defeated in a battle at Preston in November. Some were executed for treason while others were transported as convicts to America. When the bulk of them were marched to London, according to the diary of Countess Cowper, ‘the mob insulted them terribly, carrying a warming pan before them, and saying a thousand barbarous things, which some of the prisoners returned with spirit’. The warming pan was a symbol of the supposed illegitimacy of the ‘Old Pretender’ who was said to have been smuggled into the royal bedchamber in just such a vessel. The earl of Mar, at the head of the larger Jacobite army in Scotland, had also been defeated at Sheriffmuir in the same month; he waited anxiously for his Stuart master to arrive and take command of the perilous situation.

The coronation of James Francis Edward, James III of England and James VIII of Scotland, had been supposed to take place on 23 January 1716, at the palace of Scone but, unfortunately, none of the participants arrived in time. James landed at Peterhead towards the end of December and started to make his way to the palace. Yet his steps were of course being followed by spies, and his army shadowed; aware of his dangerous position he took ship at Montrose on 5 February, together with the earl of Mar, and arrived in northern France five days later.

In truth the rebellion had had little chance of success. The French, under the leadership of a regent after the death of Louis XIV only a month before, was in no position to raise an army for the ‘Old Pretender’; more importantly, they had no will to do so. Without foreign assistance any domestic rebellion was unlikely to succeed. Those Tories who supported the Jacobite cause (which may be confidently considered to be a minority) had no plan, no leader and no arms. They might as well have supported the king of Brobdingnag. The dislike of the Whig government did not translate into active opposition, and the fear of a Catholic king was enough to dispel any affectionate loyalty to the old cause.

The Whig administration, however, was taking no chances with the volatile electorate. As a direct result of the Jacobite scare, parliament passed a Septennial Bill that extended its life from three years to seven years. What might have been a dangerous election in 1718, therefore, was postponed until 1722. It made it much harder for Tories to exploit Whig divisions if there was no possibility of an imminent election. It lent an air of security and authority to the administration and, as an additional advantage, it granted a further element of constitutional power to parliament itself.

In the summer of 1716, two months after the Septennial Bill had been enacted, the king returned to Hanover. It was always where he longed to be. The territory had been granted to George’s family by the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, after some timely assistance against the Turks; it was small, comfortable, peaceable, and in all respects unlike England. It was the king’s intention to return there frequently, to hunt and to take the waters, but the problems of England restricted him to only five visits in thirteen years. Even these were too many for his English ministers who did not relish the administration of the kingdom at one remove. Wind and weather sometimes delayed his return, on which occasions parliament itself had to be prorogued. A minister of state always travelled with him, and any determined minister could create trouble for his colleagues a few hundred miles distant. It did not help matters that on this visit the king decided to remain in Hanover for six months; six months, even then, was a long time in politics both foreign and domestic.

It was possible, after all, that the king might favour the interests of Hanover over those of England. He was intimately associated with the affairs of the Baltic region, with which England had very little to do, and the ministers in London were not eager to be drawn into what were for them provincial quarrels.

Splits of a more personal nature soon became evident within the royal family. The truth was that the father, George Ludwig, hated the son, George Augustus, prince of Wales, and the son repaid that hostility in equal measure. It was in part the old problem of a living heir, waiting impatiently behind the arras for the fall of his predecessor; it has been a conundrum as old as monarchy itself. There were also certain ministers and courtiers who, feeling deprived of what they considered to be a proper measure of respect or reward, waited in expectation for the light of the rising son to restore them to health. In the fractious climate of early eighteenth-century politics, these factions became all the more vicious.

When the king left for Hanover, for example, he appointed his son as ‘guardian of the realm and lieutenant’, an office not exercised since the time of the Black Prince in the fourteenth century. It was considered by the prince and his cohorts to be an insult, rendered more odious by the restraints that the king imposed upon his son’s supposed regency. The prince was to take no decisions on foreign policy without the approval of the king; he could not fill any of the more important positions of state, and should postpone any royal assent to parliamentary bills. Foreign dispatches were to be kept from him. Yet certain other dispatches, concerning his own behaviour, were to be sent onward to Hanover.

The prince was of course flattered by the king’s adversaries; now that he considered himself free of political responsibility, having been allowed none of his own, he came to realize that he might become an independent force in the formulation of policy. He might be able to create a faction or party in parliament itself that worked against the king.

An unfortunate quarrel at the baptism of the prince’s first son, when the king’s choice of godfather was angrily opposed, led to a further division in November 1717. The king ordered his son to leave St James’s Palace, whereupon the wife of the heir, Caroline of Ansbach, decided to follow him. It was decreed that anyone who visited the renegade couple would be formally barred from any converse with the king. This would be war. Nothing like it had been seen since the days of the struggle between Mary I and Elizabeth I. Lord Hervey wrote of the prince that ‘he always spoke of his father as a weak man rather than a bad or dishonest one; and said … his father had always hated him and used him ill’.

The prince of Wales and his consort removed themselves to Leicester House, north of Leicester Square, where they established what was to all intents and purposes a rival court. The prince no longer attended cabinet meetings as a sign of his status as an internal exile. When any minister fell out with the king, he had a natural welcome from his son. In Leicester House congregated disaffected Whigs and disgruntled Tories, disappointed place-seekers and divisive troublemakers entertained by music, dancing, feasting and fashionable conversation. The king, thoroughly discomfited by his son’s social success, broke the habit of a lifetime and also began to hold assemblies and public dinners. The drawing room at St James’s Palace was open three days a week; music, dancing and fireworks were enjoyed at Kensington Palace.

Father and son were not reconciled for three years, and even then it was a half-hearted affair. The prince told his wife that when he entered the royal closet, formal but contrite, the king could only mutter ‘Votre conduite … votre conduite’, meaning ‘Your behaviour … your behaviour’. When they were seen in public on the following day they did not speak.

In the interim a shadow, no thicker than a bubble, had passed over the court, the city and the country.

9

Bubbles in the air

The bubble first arose from an attempt by the Tories to set up an institution that might rival the Bank of England in providing public credit. In the spring of 1711 the South Sea Company was established. It comprised in the first instance all those who were owed money by the government for war loans approaching £10 million; they were persuaded to give up their annuities for stock in this new and enterprising company. They were guaranteed 4 per cent interest, funded by indirect taxes, but they were also to be partners in the projected profit from all trade with the Americas in a period when the proceeds of Spanish commerce were conceived to be enormous. It was a convenient way for the administration to handle existing debts, at a relatively low rate of interest, while shareholders might dream of another Eldorado. During the years of the War of the Spanish Succession, trade and industry were naturally subdued. But when Philip V of Spain entered a quadruple alliance with Great Britain, France and the Dutch republic early in 1720, in the treaty of The Hague, it was believed that the mineral wealth of the Americas would come to London as Zeus had come to Danaë in the form of golden rain.

The fever hit when at the beginning of 1720 the St James’s Weekly Journal reported that ‘we hear that the South-Sea Company have in a manner agreed with the Treasury for taking into their capital the annuities of ninety-nine years’. The company had become so formidable and so confident that it had swallowed up a large part of the national debt. Its power and profit now depended upon the rise of the price of its stock. And what could stop an irresistible force? The value of its stock kept on increasing in the early months of the year, and by 24 June £100 of government stock was worth £1,050 of South Sea stock. The more shares were sought and prized, the higher their value rose; the higher their value, the more desirable they seemed.

The first subscription was immediately filled. Sir John Evelyn sold some of his land to gain a share. Everyone pursued a quick profit, and everyone was chasing everyone else. You could buy the stock at one rate, selling at another rate for an enormous profit a few days later. It was reported that shares were purchased on the Stock Exchange ‘ten per cent higher at one end of the alley than at the other’. The men went to find their brokers in the taverns and coffee-shops; the women flocked for the same purpose to the milliners and haberdashers. Ministers and members of parliament were bribed by the company with free distributions of stock that could then be resold at the going rate. It quickly became known as ‘the bubble age’. ‘Bubble’ became the synonym for any kind of deception or deceit. Schemes and contrivances and projects were all ‘bubbles’.

Tobias Smollett in his history of the period wrote that ‘Exchange Alley was filled with a strange concourse of statesmen and clergymen, churchmen and dissenters, whigs and tories, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and even with multitudes of females.’ Various other schemes for quick rewards were advertised at the time, taking advantage of the fatuity and gullibility of the moment. A scheme was proposed for making quicksilver malleable. A plan was suggested for importing jackasses from Spain. Projects were advanced for making salt water fresh. In this period eighty-six different schemes were advertised to potential investors, among them ‘for improving of gardens’, ‘for insuring and increasing children’s fortunes’, ‘for furnishing funerals to any part of Great Britain’ and for ‘a wheel of perpetual motion’. Projection was gambling under another name. Projection was speculation. Projection was a lottery.

When Robinson Crusoe profited from his merchandise, before setting off on his famous voyage, ‘my head began to be full of projects and undertakings beyond my reach’. Defoe knew of what he wrote. His first published volume was entitled An Essay upon Projects (1697), in which presciently he lamented ‘the general projecting humour of the nation’; every day arose ‘new contrivances, engines and projects to get money, never before thought of’, and from these devices we may ‘trace the original of banks, stocks, stock-jobbing, assurances, friendly societies, lotteries, and the like’, not forgetting ‘those Exchange mountebanks we very properly call brokers’.

It was part of a culture in which the gambler was king. Sometimes the habit was confined to the card tables that could be found in palace and tavern, whorehouse and drawing room. A character in Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband, composed in 1705, laments the fact that ‘women can imagine all household care, regard to posterity and fear of poverty, must be sacrificed to a game at cards’. Gaming houses for men were everywhere. This mania for speculation and quick profit was materially responsible for the new interest in fire, marine and life insurance; insurances were made out for marriages and births, as well as deaths. Private gambling therefore became an intrinsic part of the public economy. It also had a more arcane consequence when the complex calculations encouraged Pascal and Fermat to devise mathematical probability theory.

Gaming affected all classes. Horace Walpole reported that at Brooks’s club ‘a thousand meadows and cornfields are staked at every throw’. Politicians would win or lose thousands at Almack’s before returning to the debates at parliament; the more accomplished the politician, the more imperturbable his countenance. A particular costume was worn at Almack’s, consisting of a great-coat, pieces of leather to protect the ruffles, and a high-crowned hat with a broad brim to keep out the light; the hats were festooned with flowers and ribbons. On one occasion a Whig politician, Charles James Fox, sat for twenty-two hours playing at Hazard. Gentlemen bet on the life expectations of their fathers. Thomas Whaley, an Irish gambler and parliamentarian, bet that ‘he could jump from his drawing room window into the first barouche that passed and kiss the occupant’. When a man fell to the ground in a stupor opposite Brooks’s, the members of that club laid bets whether he was alive or dead. Others with fewer resources would bet on skittles or on dominoes in the local taverns, on the result of an election or the sex of an unborn child; the throwing of dice was not unusual during church services.

Lotteries were instituted by the government in 1709, and for every year until 1824 a lottery bill was passed. The popularity of these gigantic confidence tricks was manifest from the very beginning. On 21 January 1710, it was reported that ‘yesterday books were opened at Mercers’ Chapel for receiving subscriptions for the lottery and, ’tis said, above a million is already subscribed’. Lotteries were sometimes known as ‘sales’ to lend them an air of respectability. If you bought a ticket for twopence, and thereby won a set of ‘new fashionable plate’, it could be regarded as a bargain. It was announced that six houses in Limehouse ‘are to be disposed of by tickets, and the numbers are to be drawn by two parish boys out of two wheels, at the Three Sun tavern in Wood Street’.

Gambling and lotteries were considered by many to be the natural manifestation of a city based largely upon fraud and avarice, and of a society established upon wanton violence and corruption, where the vast disparities of wealth encouraged wicked or unscrupulous behaviour. The London Journal of 1720 excoriated the avarice and love of luxury of the age, while a few months later the Weekly Journal believed that the South Sea Bubble was ‘but the natural effect of those vices which have reigned for so many years’. In truth there have always been bubbles, and the measure of fraud and corruption in the city has not noticeably grown or diminished over the centuries. The regularity of panics became a matter of observation; they were often called ‘convulsions’, as if the financial body had succumbed to a fever. There does come a time, however, when one of the bubbles bursts with a more than usually resounding pop.

This particular crisis came, as most financial crises do, suddenly and unexpectedly. A ballad was quickly doing the rounds of the fairs and markets:

A bubble is blown up in air;

In which fine prospects do appear;

The Bubble breaks, the prospect’s lost,

Yet must some Bubble pay the cost.

Hubble Bubble; all is smoke,

Hubble Bubble; all is broke,

Farewell your Houses, Lands and Flocks

For all you have is now in Stocks.

It was discovered that the South Sea Company did not have the cash available to pay for any stocks being returned. The projected profits on the Eldorado of Spanish trade were a mirage. When confidence disappeared, the mist of gain and of fortune evaporated. The value of the stock, which had originally been used to replace the annuities on government debt, plunged. By September 1720, it seemed that all was gone. The stockholders had lost their investments.

Tobias Smollett wrote that ‘such an era as this is the most unfavourable for an historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vulgarity and mean degeneracy’. Yet the business of the bubble does much to elucidate, as one book’s title has it, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The craving for riches and the experience of failure, the giddy descent from wealth into poverty, the mania which gripped many thousands of people without good cause, the suicides, the dissolution of family ties, say more about the period than a thousand battles.

It soon became apparent that certain ministers and directors of the company had sold out before the reckoning, and the anger of the public against them was boundless. There were calls for the principal among them to be broken on the wheel. The only stay against civil strife was the feeling that the ruin was so general that ‘something’ would be done; the whole financial order could not be undermined.

At this juncture the rotund and rubicund figure of Robert Walpole may be introduced; for it was he, more than any other politician, who calmed the panic and restored the South Sea Company to something like solvency. He was a Norfolk man who never lost his accent and who seemed to represent the frank and candid image of the born countryman; he chewed his home-grown apples on the front bench and kept his temper. He was said to read the reports from his farm manager before he turned to the newspapers.

He was thickset, short and plump with a noticeable double chin; in the many portraits he looks genial enough, if a little blasé, and in life he was known to be good-humoured and convivial. He was always the first to welcome new members of parliament in what soon became his domain. He dressed well, in particular for the sessions of parliament when he was outfitted like a groom for a bride. He knew how the Commons worked; he knew how its members felt. He believed that the only safety for a minister lies, as he said, ‘in having the approbation of this House’.

He understood people all too well. He was reported as saying that there were ‘few minds which would not be injured by the constant spectacle of meanness and depravity’ and he told a future first minister, Henry Pelham, that ‘when you have the same experience of mankind as myself you will go near to hate the human species’. Yet this black and misanthropic pessimism never affected his apparent affability. He made the most of all human weakness. He liked others to drink in his company so that he could take advantage of their indiscretions. He knew the price of every man, and he did not hesitate to rid himself of those who owed him only dubious loyalty. He was in charge of all appointments, both local and national; he superintended the offices of the Church no less than those of the army or the navy. He created what at a later date might be called an ‘establishment’. No office was too unimportant, no sinecure too small, to escape his attention.

If he had a fault, in society, it was his excessive coarseness. Even for the eighteenth century his ribaldry was considered a little too much. Princess Caroline once had to chide him for lewd language in front of her ladies. The fourth earl of Chesterfield, albeit a doyen of excessive respectability, described him as ‘inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals, he had a coarse strong wit, which he was too free of for a man of his station’. Walpole could laugh off criticism of this kind, however, since for twenty years he held the state in his hands.

He was one of those English politicians who survive on their reputation of bluff common sense. He would stand no nonsense. He professed to believe in common sense and, so he said, in fair play. He wanted moderation at all costs. He wanted balance. He wanted peace at home and abroad so that trade might flourish. Flatter the time-servers. Meet emergencies with expedients. Pay bribes when they were necessary. Give way in the face of public clamour, however misconceived. One of his favourite proverbs was ‘Quieta non movere’, ‘Don’t disturb things that are quiet’. It might be the motto of his legislative career, and that of many subsequent politicians.

He was a pragmatist in the very literal sense that he really had no policy except that of survival. A man of business and an administrator, he was marked by energy and capacity for work. At a later date Chesterfield wrote that George II said of him that he was ‘by so great a superiority the most able man in the kingdom, that he understood the revenue, and knew how to manage that formidable and refractory body, the House of Commons, so much better than any other man, that it was impossible for the business of the crown to be well done without him’. This of course implies that he was nothing of a thinker and, as he said himself, that he was ‘no saint, no Spartan, no reformer’.

He always was a thoroughbred Whig, however, who for a short time had even been imprisoned in the Tower by the Tories during their ascendancy. ‘I heartily despise’, he wrote to his sister, Dolly, ‘what I shall one day revenge.’ Incarceration in fact did him no harm at all. He had accepted various offices of state, and in 1717 became for a period first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer; he made a great deal of money in a mysterious and still unknown fashion before resigning ‘because I could not connive at some things that were carrying on’. It was not a matter of principle, however, but of internal politics. Nevertheless in June 1720, at the height of the Bubble, he became paymaster general of the forces and was thus in a position to help direct the affairs of the treasury.

The Bubble was indeed his opportunity; he had been associated with financial matters for almost as long as he had been in parliament and, as a Whig, he was on the best of terms with the directors of the Bank of England. He had been suspicious of the South Sea Company, as a direct rival to the bank, but nonetheless had invested some of his funds with it. He was not one of those who made a quick or sensational profit, however, and it seems more than likely that he lost a large sum of money on his transactions. This also lent him further credibility in his scheme to salvage the situation. He had shown his acumen in the past, but it was now necessary to demonstrate his equanimity.

By the summer of 1720 he was effectively the chief minister in his attempt to restore confidence in the finances of the country. In this undertaking he was supremely equipped by nature. Chesterfield noted in his Characters that Walpole ‘was so clear in stating the most intricate matters, especially in the finances, that while he was speaking, the most ignorant thought they understood what they really did not’. He had to give the impression that financial stability had been restored and that the national debt was under control. He persuaded the directors of the Bank of England to buy up some of the South Sea Company’s holding of government stock, thus reducing the company’s debt and placing it on a more stable foundation. He confiscated the ill-gained wealth of the company’s directors and distributed it as liberally as he might. He also maintained a ‘sinking fund’, which he had in fact devised three years earlier, revenue set apart for future projects and financed by special or specific taxes; this was also a measure to ensure future confidence in the financial system. For this relief he was given much thanks by king and government. It is difficult to overestimate the calming effect that the right politician can induce. Walpole stilled the storm to a whisper, and the waves of the sea were hushed.

He had performed another service also, for which he earned the further nickname of ‘the Screen’ or ‘the Screen-Master General’. Certain ministers had colluded with the directors of the South Sea Company in the illicit making of profit; the king himself, together with his mistresses, had also been involved in what might be considered to be illegal profiteering. Walpole was concerned above all else to maintain the balance and the apparent integrity of the state. A parliamentary committee was established and the directors of the company were forbidden to leave the country. One or two still fled abroad to general execration and one noble peer, Lord Stanhope, died of apoplexy after being charged with corruption. A death or two might be convenient, since the dead cannot speak or confess, and Walpole was not particularly concerned with the directors of the company; they could be sacrificed to public anger.

But he was concerned to shield his ministerial colleagues from attack, even though some of them had been his personal enemies; by dint of intimidation and the suborning of witnesses, therefore, the principal suspects were cleared of all charges. He had indeed been the screen behind which the great could conceal themselves, and his power was vastly increased. In the spring of 1721 Robert Walpole became once again first lord of the treasury, with immense powers of patronage. All strings led to him. The subsequent period has been variously known as ‘the age of Walpole’ and ‘the age of stability’. He was for twenty-one years the dominant minister in the country, who was able to combine political mastery with economic supremacy in a manner previously unparalleled. He had no party. He had only the support of the king, and was obliged to rely upon the independent members of parliament as well as the natural supporters of the court. That is why he always moved so carefully. He was required to balance the various forces within the nation to sustain his mastery; he had to satisfy the financiers as well as the aristocrats, the dissenting merchants as well as the Anglican gentry.

To call his period one of ‘stability’ is perhaps the merest truism. That, after all, was what mattered to him. But he did not single-handedly create that stability. The durability of the house of Hanover, with the threat of the Stuarts removed, had something to do with it. The happy employment of making money, and the ingenious promotion of trade, also had a large part to play in the quiescence of financiers and merchants. Anglicanism was accepted and acceptable, if not entirely loved. The Septennial Act, which restricted general elections to every seven years, maintained a period of calm. Party fervour and religious enthusiasm were therefore contained; an improving standard of living, together with more employment, worked their own spell upon the body politic.

Yet Walpole had his own fair share of luck, an indispensable requirement for a successful politician. The chaos of the Bubble had revealed a record of government weakness and financial incompetence of which its Stuart enemies could have taken advantage. The Speaker, Arthur Onslow, recalled that, at the time the Bubble was pricked, ‘could the Pretender then have landed at the Tower, he might have rode to St James with very few hands held up against him’. Others also considered the possibility of James Edward Stuart taking advantage of this opportunity and regaining the throne. One of the principal Jacobites, Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, had concealed himself in lamb’s clothing as an unexceptionable Tory. In the spring of 1721, however, he wrote to James that ‘with a very little assistance from your friends abroad, your way to your friends at home is become easy and safe’. Yet Walpole’s quiet was not disturbed.

The first minister was on the watch. It has been said that he saw Jacobites everywhere, even under his bed, but he knew well enough that any Jacobite plot would taint the Tories still further and attach the king more closely to his loyal government. It had been arranged by James’s supporters, for example, that the duke of Ormonde would invade England with a body of Irish troops. It was not perhaps the most sensible plan, and was in any case immediately bedevilled by divisions among the English rebels and by a plethora of spies who were ready to reveal anything and everything for money. All of course came to nothing. The bishop of Rochester was himself arrested and sent into exile.

Walpole was aware that the conspiracy had never really amounted to much, but he would not let the opportunity pass. Onslow remarked that the discovery of the Jacobite plot, ‘was the most fortunate and greatest circumstance of Walpole’s life’. The king was with his first minister forever. The Tories were discomfited, because of their implicit association with the Jacobites, and many of them withdrew from public life; the recovery of their party was, for the foreseeable future, impossible. In the summer of 1723 the ministers of the king ordered that ‘all and every person whatsoever’ over the age of eighteen should submit to an oath of allegiance to the present sovereign.

In the same period Robert Walpole gracefully and gratefully declined a peerage, knowing full well that his real power lay in his command of the Commons. His decision, which seemed surprising to some, was an indication of the fact that parliament had indeed become the sovereign body of the nation with responsibilities and duties far beyond those of the monarch. It was now the final arbiter of English liberties, which could be no longer left to the mercies of even the most benevolent Hanoverian sovereign. Parliament had become the arena in which conflicting political views, or political factions, could be heard with the minimum of controversy. It was the great forum forthe address of grievances. That is why only thirty years later, in 1757, a Lincolnshire crowd protesting against the plan for a reserve of professional soldiers agreed that ‘if parliament was not to be trusted there would be an end of all things’.

Yet no sooner had Walpole mastered all the tricks and balances of administration than a major player in the game of power was suddenly taken away from him. At the beginning of June 1727 George I began a journey to Germany in order to be greeted by all his favourite relatives. Seven days into his travels, he complained of stomach pains arising from too many strawberries and oranges. Many sovereigns suffered from surfeits of food. He grew pale and faint, revived only by a liberal dose of smelling salts. Then he fell into an uneasy and noisy sleep that deteriorated into lethargy and unconsciousness. He had the strength to raise his hand in greeting to his old childhood palace at Osnabrück, but died the following night.

This was a grave and possibly fatal blow to Robert Walpole. He had been close to and influential with the old king. His relations with the son and heir were hardly marked by the same sympathy and understanding; indeed the heir treated the politician with a great deal of suspicion. But the new king had the inconceivable good fortune of a wife, Caroline of Ansbach, who understood the leading players of the nation much more acutely than her husband. When Walpole managed to provide a civil list granting George II far more funds than his father, his happy and influential position was retained.

It is hard to estimate the legacy of George I, on the presumption that you cannot prove a negative. He had maintained the stability of the Hanoverian dynasty, and his own familial ties and alliances had managed to reconcile Britain to the varying leaders and factions of Europe. In this endeavour he was assisted by Wapole who above all else hated war. It was bad for business and wrecked the economy.

A Dutch diplomat at George I’s court reported that ‘he is much concerned with his reputation but is not excessively ambitious; he has a special aptitude for affairs of state, a well-ordered economy, very sound brain and judgement … he bears justice in mind at all times and, withal, he is goodhearted’. These are the familiar marmoreal words used to embalm mediocrity, or at least those sovereigns who avoided catastrophe.

It should be added that the life and energy and progress of the nation were taking place without the first George knowing or caring anything about it.

10

The invisible hand

Between 1724 and 1726, in the last decade of his life, Daniel Defoe published an encomium to his native country in three volumes entitled A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. It is not at all clear whether he made this tour contemporaneously in person or nostalgically in spirit; it is also uncertain whether he used observers on the spot or relied upon a capacious inventory of recollected details. He was blessed with a powerful memory and a gift of almost perfect observation, and so we can forgive the touches of imagination that give the book its life and energy. It has survived because it captures the very spirit of the time.

The spirit was one of energy and of progress, in a constant rehearsal of ‘the improvement in manufactures, in merchandises, in navigation’. The ‘present time’ was his ideal. When the polite world and the not so polite world were in a fever of gambling, the industrious and trading classes were taking advantage of unprecedented conditions for growth in what Defoe describes as ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’, with its improvements in ‘culture’ as well as in ‘commerce’, with its increase in ‘people’ as well as in ‘buildings’. He notes of Devonshire, for example, that ‘the people are all busy, and in full employ upon their manufactures’.

At a time when ‘manufactures’ were not associated with the coming revolution in industry, their improvement and ubiquity were already a matter of astonishment. In the solid houses of the more prosperous citizens were displayed the cloth from Malmesbury, the knives from Sheffield and the glassware from Nottingham. What drove all was trade, the great engine of growth. For Defoe trade is ‘an inexhausted current which not only fills the pond, and keeps it full, but is continually running over and fills all the lower ponds and places about it’.

The temples of trade were the towns. The indigenous trade of a town or city ‘is a kind of nostrum to them, inseparable to the place’ such as the clothing trade of Leeds, the coal trade of Newcastle upon Tyne, the herring trade of Yarmouth and the butter trade of Hull. Defoe rejoices in Norwich, ‘the inhabitants being all busy at their manufactures, dwell in their garrets at their looms, and in their combing shops, so they call them’. Work was available for everyone. Defoe was pleased that in Taunton ‘there was not a child in the town, or in the villages round it, of above five years old, but, if it was not neglected by its parents, and untaught, could earn its own bread’.

The antiquarians of the previous century, such as Elias Ashmole and William Camden, snuffled out the traces of antiquity as if they comprised the perfume of England; but for Defoe the medieval town of Worcester ‘is close and old, the houses standing too thick’. Instead he praises the village of Stratford outside London for the fact that ‘every vacancy [is] filled with new houses’ with ‘the increase of the value and rent of the houses formerly standing’.

This was the century in which trade came to be regarded as the most important activity of the nation, quite opposed to religious and political considerations. New kinds of book multiplied, published in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them Charles Davenant’s Two Discourses on the Public Revenues and Trade of England, Adam Anderson’s An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, David Macpherson’s Annals of Commerce, Charles King’s The British Merchant and William Wood’s Survey of Trade. And of course it would be remiss to ignore Daniel Defoe’s own The Complete English Tradesman.

‘Our trade is our chief support,’ Lord Carteret explained in the Lords, ‘and therefore we must sacrifice every other view to the preservation of our trade.’ Where once the English had congratulated themselves on the purity of their religion or the balance of their unwritten constitution they now prided themselves on the extent of their commerce; it was widely believed, and reported, that it was the most considerable in the world. Which nation, effectively, could rival it? Which country had the navy to do so? In one of the Letters Concerning the English Nation, ‘On Trade’, Voltaire, the French philosopher and historian, noticed opportunely that England had become ‘so powerful by its commerce, as to be able to send in 1723 three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanc’d parts of the Globe’.

Commerce was, essentially, power gained without war. John Gay conveniently expressed it in verse:

Be commerce, then, thy sole design;

Keep that, and all the world is thine.

And of course all this implied great social changes, in which the merchant and the trader were no longer considered to be in the lower half of the social spectrum some way down from clergymen or barristers. In the same letter Voltaire noted that the brother of Lord Townshend, a minister of state, was a merchant in the City and that the son of the earl of Oxford was a tradesman in Aleppo. Robert Walpole married the daughter of a timber merchant. Commerce possessed not only freedom but also prestige. That is why the Whigs, the patrons and masters of commerce, had the advantage over the Tories. Trade now created gentlemen, even if they had not yet permeated the upper ranks of the aristocracy.

The merchants were now accepted as potentially the most useful members of the commonwealth. Thomas Turner, a local shopkeeper from East Hoathly, near Lewes, kept a diary between 1754 and 1765 in one entry of which he notes ‘how pleasant is trade when it runs in its proper channels, and flows with a plentiful stream. It does, as it were, give life and spirit to one’s actions.’ It was as necessary as the blood running through the veins. It had become the national metaphor.

The two great topographical facts of the century, related in necessarily intimate ways, are the growth of London and the growth of the towns. The union of England and Scotland had created the largest free trade area in the world, and therefore within the bounds of this island state the finance of London was combined with the commerce of Liverpool, the coal of the midlands and the industries of the textile north. So everything grew together as if they were under the silent guidance of a fundamental law of being.

The figures tell their own story. In the course of the eighteenth century imports, as well as exports, increased five times; in the same period re-exports increased by a factor of nine. In the years between 1726 and 1728 imports rose 22 per cent, exports rose 27 per cent, and re-exports increased by 57 per cent. Re-exports is the neutral name for colonial produce that by law had to be shipped to Britain before being taken in turn to continental Europe. The English then got the best of the bargains by buying cheap and selling dear. It was also the most effective manner of acquiring, in return, much-needed European goods.

The cloth from the East India Company, the sugar from the West Indies, the tobacco from Virginia and Maryland as well as all the tea and the rum and the spices from various parts of the world transformed the appurtenances of English life; this transformation amounted to great cultural and social as well as commercial change. When the commodities and fashions and luxuries were poured into the country, trade and customs naturally expanded.

In his Tour Defoe notes the sudden and unexpected growth of English towns. Frome, in north-east Somerset, ‘is so prodigiously increased within these last twenty or thirty years that they have built a new church, and so many new streets of houses, and these houses are so full of inhabitants’. The population of Halifax has ‘increased one fourth, at least, within the last forty years, that is to say since the late Revolution’. Of Liverpool he writes that ‘I think I may safely say at this my third seeing it, for I was surprised at the view, it was more than double what it was at the second; and, I am told, that it still visibly increases both in wealth, people, business and buildings: what it may grow to in time, I know not.’

In 1700 Norwich was the only provincial town with more than 25,000 inhabitants; by 1820 fourteen more could be found. The inhabitants of towns such as Hull and Nottingham, Leeds and Leicester, had increased five times in the same period. The populations of Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester had expanded twenty times. In 1700 less than one quarter of the people lived in towns; a century later that figure had risen to an average between one-third and two-fifths. England was slowly but ineluctably becoming a cohesive urban society, quite unlike Germany, France, or Italy.

There was hardly a town, large or small, that had not been in part rebuilt. They arrived as wattle-and-daub, or as oak and other timber, but they were revived in brick. The marble for the assembly rooms and the baths would soon arrive. Brick, however, was the material of choice for the emerging middle class. The prosperous enjoyed the comfort of brick with the additional advantage of large windows; the houses were considered to be ‘classical’, meaning of regular proportions, and they were built into a variety of well-tempered shapes. The square, the circus, the arcade and the crescent were all in the height of architectural taste.

The paradigm for this extensive renovation and refurbishment was London itself. On one of her journeys Celia Fiennes observed of Nottingham that it was ‘the neatest town I have seen, built of stone and delicate, large and long streets, much like London and the houses lofty and well-built. The marketplace is very broad – out of which runs a very large street, much like Holborn, but the buildings fine.’ The emphasis here is upon space and spaciousness; the new town was to be carefully distinguished from the cramped and noisome quarters of the Jacobean and Stuart city. These were increasingly reserved for the poor or for the industrial workers. As population increased throughout the century, and as the need for space grew ever more pressing, the more prosperous citizens tried to create enclaves for themselves like Old Square in Birmingham that has now in its turn been razed.

And so we can date the rise and rise of the country town. It was no longer the small town, no longer the market town, but the prosperous hub of what was quickly becoming a provincial society with its services, its shopkeepers, its entertainments and its meeting places. There was an increasing need for domestic and professional services; lighting and clean streets would soon become required in this newly constructed environment. By the 1730s sixteen provincial towns had introduced oil-burning lamps onto the thoroughfares. Coffee-houses and concerts, balls and literary societies, were also no longer the prerogative of the capital.

The architecture of the period was one characterized by harmony and restraint; Gothic excesses or mannerist convolutions were no longer required. As in the social conduct of the gentlemen and ladies, all was to be governed by restraint and decorum. The proportions of the edifice were to be exact and harmonious, following the golden rule of symmetry in the placing of windows and the subdued use of ornament. This in turn encouraged a balance and proportion of streets, crescents and squares with the stated ambition of promoting social harmony in the newly built or newly extended towns and cities of the country. Nothing should be singular, excessively individual, or idiosyncratic. There was a new lightness in the air, eschewing the heaviness and ponderousness of the recent past. White was the colour of modernity. But were the houses and public buildings, with their Doric columns and pilasters, like unto whited sepulchres? Propriety can itself act as an enervating force, as became obvious in the regimented and restrictive life of Bath or Tunbridge Wells. For turbulent or eccentric spirits, if any by chance happened to find themselves there, these spas might have been the equivalent of open prisons.

In the domestic interiors of the middling sort, in the 1740s or 1750s, the fashion for propriety and harmony also prevailed. To drink tea out of a blue-and-white china cup was the beau idéal. The cup could then be placed upon a tea table, made of walnut or mahogany, highly polished and lacquered. Oak was no longer fashionable, too redolent of the Stuart times. Silver tea sets and linen napkins were part of the setting. The windows would have curtains, if they were to be wholly respectable, and the walls themselves were furnished with a clock, a mirror, a print and an engraving. The floors were no longer made up of plain boards but were covered with deal and ornamented with carpets. The old stone fireplaces had given way to marble. Writing tables and card tables were expected. There might even be a bookcase. The plain and thickset furniture of a previous age was supplanted by chairs and sofas of a greater lightness and curvilinear elegance. The line of beauty was, according to Hogarth, serpentine. In advertisements for the new domestic comforts, praise was lavished upon the ‘neat’ and the ‘neatly done’.

Of the poorer dwellings we know very little. The hovels of the labourers, the rooming houses of the clerks, the small houses of the shopkeepers, the lodgings of the artisans, all have been swept away or so changed as to have become unrecognizable. The small cottages and shacks have been torn down, sometimes by human agency and sometimes by the wind and the rain. They did not contain Wedgwood china or patterned wallpaper; at most they included a bed, a table, and two or three chairs that were so badly made that they would not even now find their way into a provincial museum.

The more affluent dwellings possessed between three and seven rooms, designed for a family of approximately five members with two or three servants. Two female servants and a boy were the standard repertoire of domestic service. The rooms themselves were arranged on a different pattern. In earlier periods an observer would be forgiven for thinking that the whole range of human activity could take place in one or two rooms; but by the eighteenth century, in the wealthier households, there was a noticeable separation of functions. The [with]drawing room came to be used for conversation, the dressing room for female intimacies; the bedrooms and nurseries were always upstairs, and the servants were relegated to the back of the house. In poorer families the parlour took the place of the drawing room, but in even more pinched quarters the life of the household still revolved about the kitchen. These domestic conditions survived well into the twentieth century.

There is no better evidence for the growing wealth of the country than the rising status of the provincial town as a focus for social life. Just as the population began a steady migration towards the towns and other urban centres, so the national culture in turn acquired an urban tone that had previously been confined to London and the largest cities. Much of it derived from the pressure of emulation, the greatest solvent of social change. The weekly stagecoach brought down the newest London goods, and it was the ambition of every relatively prosperous householder to make the annual journey to the capital. London actors trod the boards of the New Theatre in Norwich or the Leeds Theatre in Hunslet Lane; London books made their way onto the shelves of the circulating libraries, by means of which books were rented for a period rather than purchased. The Annual Register of 1761 noted that ‘the same wines are drunk, the same gaming practiced, the same hours kept and the same course of life pursued in the country and in the town … Every male and female wishes to think and speak, to eat and drink, and dress and live after the manner of people of quality in London.’ And so by a miracle of metamorphosis emerged the gardens, the walks, the pleasure gardens, the theatres, the concert venues, the libraries and the booksellers.

The ‘walk’ might be a gravelled path, or a promenade, or a tree-lined avenue, or a terrace, where ladies and gentlemen might perambulate without being accosted by the lower sort or polluted by unnecessary noises or smells. These walks also outlined a form of social discipline and observation where the fashionable or the notable could be greeted with a bow. It was customary for the upper and middling classes to go on parade when the lower classes were still at work, thus avoiding any untoward encounters. It is perhaps worth noting, in this increasingly commercialized culture, that these rural walks were the direct begetters of the shopping parades or ‘window-shopping’.

Those who now considered themselves to be part of what became known as ‘polite society’ patronized these places as much to be seen as to see; there was nothing so snobbish as a country town, even in its new incarnation. There were now certain ways to dress, to greet acquaintances, to sip coffee, to converse, or to dance. The local theatres were schools of manners that replaced the ‘courtesy books’ of an earlier civilization. The concern for ‘improvement’ that played so large a part in the mercantile and mechanical aspects of life could now be applied closer to home. Throughout human history the city has always been the symbol of political and aesthetic life; it is possible to speculate that, in the eighteenth century, Britain began that urban experiment on a national scale.

The professions flourished, creating an entirely new class of middling society. The town gentry made space to accommodate the clergymen, the attorneys of common law courts and the solicitors of Equity and Chancery; the physicians and even the surgeon-apothecaries were also acquiring new status with the emergence of the charity hospitals which provided treatment for the poor at no charge. The number of professional government servants rose, creating a career bureaucracy which became well versed in business of every sort pertaining to the administration of the country. By the beginning of 1714, 113 commissioners were at the head of eighteen different offices, each of them well staffed. By the 1720s some 12,000 public servants had become permanent employees. The eighteenth century marked the emergence of government as we have come to know it.

The public buildings – the town hall, the corn exchange, the guildhall, the court house, the mansion house, the financial exchange – began to be dressed in a new and more imposing fabric in which civility and sociability were the guiding principles. Fashions were followed even in charity: the schools were the first to be granted more imposing premises, succeeded in turn by hospitals and then by prisons. The polite person was also the sociable person that, by definition, meant the charitable person. The great increase in charitable funding happened at precisely the time when polite society found its name and calling. Twenty-four hospitals were established between 1735 and 1783, nine of which were raised in the 1740s and 1750s. The public institutions of the time, from prisons to schools, were the project of voluntary organizations and had nothing whatever to do with any central administration. So we read of the Marine Society, the Philanthropic Society, the Royal Humane Society and many others, all of them memorialized in stone buildings that largely survive. Politeness also meant morality.

If the public institutions of the provincial town represented its spirit of improvement, one other new arrival epitomized the recent fashion for sociability. ‘Assembly rooms’ were precisely that, large rooms in which people might congregate for a variety of functions. They were quite a modern thing, infinitely preferable to the old gatherings at assizes or at horse-fairs; in his Tour Defoe in fact criticized ‘the new mode of forming assemblies, so much, and so fatally now in vogue’. He was possibly commenting upon what might be considered the indiscriminate mingling of the sexes on such occasions, although the codes of conduct were very severe.

The Assembly Rooms at York looked like nothing so much as the gallery of a great palace with individuals, couples, or groups sauntering idly through. A tearoom and a card-room were among the more polite amenities; but the great venue was the ballroom, in which three tiers of seating around the room allowed the spectators to see the dancing, the dresses and the jewels.

Balls, and dances, were often held on a weekly basis; an annual subscription or ticket allowed you access to a supposedly glittering world of wax candles, chandeliers, branched candlesticks and lighted sconces. To the sound of a score of musicians in the gallery the couples would dance the minuet or, later, the more robust country dances of the period. Everyone would be watching everyone else; strangers would be observed and criticized; sudden meetings and pairings would be noticed at once. This was still the country, and not the city.

It was all very artificial and very tiring, the exhaustion of the male participants no doubt alleviated by frequent resort to the bottle. Balls might be described in somewhat impersonal terms as mating displays in which either sex looked for and, if fortunate, found a prospective partner. There was an element of make-believe in it, with a veneer of classical order and harmony coating some more traditional activities, but no more so than in many eighteenth-century social pursuits.

The other great innovation of the age was the ‘pleasure garden’, a direct descendant of the ‘tea garden’ of the seventeenth century which had generally been the rural adjunct to an inn. Yet the pleasure garden was planned on an altogether more brilliant and ambitious scale, with musical performances, balls and promenades along tree-lined walks; even plays were sometimes performed. Statues and ornaments and paintings and frescoes and architectural conceits completed the panoramas of pleasure.

The two most celebrated of these gardens, Vauxhall Gardens south of the River Thames and Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, were soon attracting thousands of visitors who were regaled with tea, liquor and ham sandwiches so exiguous that they became the butt of theatrical jokes. It was claimed that a competent waiter could cover the 11 acres of Vauxhall with the slices from one ham.

The gardens were lit at night by a thousand lamps, thus giving the illusion of Scheherazade and the nights of Arabia, but in a relatively short time they became the venue for more impolite colloquies and engagements in which darkness was favoured. It was almost inevitable, perhaps, that the more high-minded aspirations towards culture should be turned into what were essentially entertainments of a not very inspiring kind. It is said that there were more prostitutes in the gardens than there were waiters. This may also provide an insight into the eighteenth-century city.

Another eighteenth-century attraction, the ‘spa’, was the epitome of healthful and rational pleasure; it was closely followed in popularity by the regimen of exercise and social intercourse to be found in the seaside towns. It was considered good, and even necessary, to escape from the ‘great wen’ of London with its clouds of disease and corruption. The spas were descended from the healthful wells, or holy wells, that had emerged over many hundreds, and even thousands, of years of religious celebration. But the religion was now wholly forgotten. The Roman goddess of the Bath waters, Sulis Minerva, was silent. The Virgin Mary, patron of many medieval establishments, was no longer heard. St Chad, the patron saint of medicinal springs, was entirely forgotten. Instead we encounter the figure of Beau Nash, the presiding master of ceremonies at Bath, complete with slender cane and white beaver hat. He conducted a regime of what might be described as pleasurable or curative servitude, with the attendant delights of plays, concerts, gaming, horse-racing, card-playing, bookshops and all the other paraphernalia of Georgian cultural life.

There were competitors in the great game of health but Bath held the palm. This was the place where ageing or ailing politicians, sick of the pressures of Westminster, would go for what generally turned out to be a temporary or wholly ineffective remedy. Any visitors of distinction would be greeted by a peal of bells from Bath Abbey and a musical serenade at the door of their lodgings. There was no question of anonymity in this world; the whole point was to be recognized as an eminent social being. One of the many rules at Bath prohibited the use of screens in public places lest ‘they divide the company into secluded sets, which is against the fundamental institution of these places’. The pre-eminent concern was for society itself.

The baths were the first engagement of the day, followed by the coffee-shops for the male and shops of dainties for the female; there was time for concerts, lectures, or more spiritual pastimes before noon. The two or three hours before dinner could be filled with outings, promenades and card-playing before another official visit to the pump room in the evening. Large spaces were provided for all these communal activities, once more emphasizing the vitalizing and benevolent flow of social life.

The life of the seaside towns was perhaps a little more boisterous, with the uncertain impact of the wind and the waves on the polite society assembled there. There was as yet no settled view of nature other than as something vaguely picturesque and, in the right hands, ripe for ‘improvement’. Gardens could be manicured or tempted into sinuous rills but the sea was altogether ungovernable except by those sailors who despite their recent triumphs still had a somewhat unsavoury reputation. For those of an iron constitution there were manuals such as Richard Russell’s Dissertation upon the Use of Sea-Bathing, published in 1749, but even by this decade only the most hardy visitors could be lured into the water. It was much better to promenade along a safely covered walk.

Civilization meant civility; this comprised, in the spas and seaside towns, order and sociability. It meant all the gestures of recognition and of greeting, all the gradations of talk, the conventions of formal introduction, the manner of advancing into a room or of a male opening the door for a member of the opposite sex. The sociable man was the man par excellence. It was he who, literate and polite and urbane, embodied the spirit of the age. The flow of social life, as it has been described, softened and modulated the person. As the earl of Shaftesbury put it in Characteristics (1737), ‘we polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision’. Thus both men and women could be described as ‘genteel’ or ‘complaisant’ if they observed the fashions and conventions of the day. It was not done to be jaunty, or enthusiastic, or even in a hurry. We may be tempted to recall the remark of Tacitus upon the manners of the native English under Roman rule: they called it civilization, when in fact it was part of their servitude. These eighteenth-century worldlings were slaves to the false gods of the aspiring middle classes – the minor gentry, the professional classes, the wealthy merchants – who followed the theatrical posturings of the elite.

The unruly man, the impolite man, was one who according to Samuel Johnson in the Adventurer of February 1754 manifested ‘a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgement’; he was, in other words, anti-social. The other extreme, from which all polite men also fled, was the effeminate creature of nods and bows and grimaces. The attendance at Italian opera and the drinking of tea were both signs of male effeminacy, and they signalled a very real fear that the new taste of the age was destroying the older masculine culture of the Stuart and Elizabethan worlds. The new fashion of men kissing, on greeting, was particularly deplored. In Colley Cibber’s Love Makes a Man; or, The Fop’s Fortune (1700), one actor congratulates another. ‘Sir, you kiss pleasingly. I love to kiss a man. In Paris we kiss nothing else.’

The great medium of sociable life was of course the conversation in which public judgement and private taste were finely mingled; it was widely assumed that civilized values and public truth were best acquired through social intercourse and dialogue. Samuel Johnson could not have existed without the conversation with kindred spirits that calmed the overheated excitements of his brain; it made him aware of the larger world in which he had his being, so different from the silence of terror or torpor that he feared. As he said in the Rambler of January 1752, ‘none of the desires dictated by vanity is more general, or less blamable, than that of being distinguished for the arts of conversation’. This may not have been recognized by Isaac Newton or by William Blake, but it was readily apparent to those who lived in the middle years of the eighteenth century. A man was made for conversation.

Certainly it accounts for the notable emergence of clubs as the medium of male exchange, not least the ‘Conversation Societies’ which met weekly in well-regulated venues. ‘Whether the study of natural philosophy, or that of profane history, is more useful to mankind?’ ‘Is it a duty incumbent upon parents to inoculate their children, as a means to preserve life?’ The clubs were intended to foster cheerfulness and conviviality, friendship and mutual understanding, perhaps in unconscious aversion to the political and religious divisions of the last century.

Clubs were now to be found everywhere. Some clubs made their homes in taverns, among them the Essex Head Club, the Ivy Lane Club, the Turk’s Head Club; all of these had some connection with Samuel Johnson. John Macky, in Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne (1732), observed that ‘almost every [London] parish hath its separate club where the citizens, after the fatigue of the day is over in their shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their thoughts before they go to bed’. Joseph Addison, one of the high priests of eighteenth-century civilization, remarked that ‘man is a sociable animal’ but perhaps he did not include women within this truism, since none of the clubs noted at the time catered for female members.

Every male industry, trade, interest, tradition, activity, art, or ambition now had its club. London numbered 3,000, while Bristol had approximately 250. There could scarcely have been a time when an Englishman needed to be alone. It is perhaps no wonder that the pleasures of solitude were among those adumbrated by the coming ‘romantic’ movement of the early nineteenth century. Yet it was also a time of seclusion for those who wished it; partitioned churches and partitioned taverns were as common as more open settings. There is the story of the man who had eaten at the same tavern for twentyfive years. Over those years he and his neighbour in the next cubicle had never spoken. Eventually the man plucked up the courage to call out:

‘Sir, for twentyfive years we have been neighbours at dinner, and yet we have never spoken. May I enquire your name, sir?’

‘Sir, you are impertinent.’

It is a very English exchange.

To ‘club’ was to come together for mutual benefit, to create a common stock or pursue a common end, to become partners or to make up a specified sum. Some clubs were therefore akin to trading organizations and there were clubs for coal-heavers and clubs for silk-weavers, clubs for hackney-cab men and clubs for shoemakers, clubs for clock-makers and clubs for wig-makers, clubs for farriers and clubs for gingerbread-makers.

There were Art Clubs and Music Clubs, Philosophical Clubs and Literary Clubs, Mug House Clubs and Fox Hunters Clubs; at the Terrible Club, which met in the Tower at midnight on the first Monday of the month, its members had to cut their beef with a bayonet and drink a concoction of brandy and gunpowder. Some other clubs sound too arcane to be taken seriously. At the Lazy Club members were supposed to arrive in their nightshirts, and at the Silent Club not a word was allowed to be spoken. The Club of Ugly Faces specialized in just that. The Tall Club, the Surly Club and the Farters’ Club had a similarly specialized membership. Some of the members of the Kit-Kat Club, painted by Godfrey Kneller, still adorn the walls of the National Portrait Gallery. With Addison, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Walpole and Steele among them, the visitor will become acquainted with the faces of early eighteenth-century English society, culture and now history.

11

Consuming passions

It is often suggested that the fairs and markets of medieval or Elizabethan England diminished and died a natural death. That was not strictly true; wherever there was a chance of making money a stall could be put up or a trestle table placed against a house door. Fairs and markets survived to serve the needs of their local area, as markets do still. But they were to be ‘improved’. The old open marketplaces were swept away and the market crosses taken down as nuisances to traffic; in the newly designed markets the various goods were grouped together and given a ration of space.

Yet something else had arrived that would eventually change the nature of retailing all over the country. By the mid-eighteenth century every village had a shop. A shop came to differentiate the village from the hamlet. The impetus had come from London, the source and spring of marketing. There had since Roman times been emporia of many goods and many nations in the capital. So it was at this later date. The Royal Exchange in the City, built in 1567, was, for example, rivalled by the New Exchange on the Strand constructed forty-two years later. They were two quintessentially London institutions. In the earlier years of the seventeenth century shops were usually no more than sheds or stalls or basements, but the Great Fire of 1666 in particular gave them room to expand and to breathe.

Certain houses, or the ground floors of houses, were designed for retailing; it was not long before the virtues of display became paramount. Glass windows were still too expensive for the poorer retailers, but they could open up their fronts and sell there before boarding them again at night. And in a gawking, loitering age of display it was inevitable that the larger shops should take on the characteristics of a theatre of taste. They had assumed the functions of the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange by being at the same time both warehouses and galleries, auction rooms and bazaars; soon enough sash windows gave way to bow windows for the display of even more goods and delicacies.

‘The shops are perfect gilded theatres,’ the Female Tatler observed in 1709, ‘the variety of wrought silks so many changes of fine scenes, and the mercers are the performers in the opera … “This, Madam, is wonderfully charming. This, Madam, is so diverting a silk. This, Madam, my stars! How cool it looks”.’ It was a perpetual puppet play, in which commerce is transformed into an art or into a game. Sophie von la Roche noted in her diary for 1786 that ‘behind the great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy’. It was the beginning of what has been described as leisure shopping. She passes ‘a watchmaking, then a silk or fan store, now a silver-smith’s, a china or glass shop’. These are the harbingers of Heal’s, Swan & Edgar, and Fortnum & Mason, all of which arrived in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

It has been described as a ‘commercial revolution’ but of what, precisely, did this revolution consist? The contents of the more prosperous households may provide a clue to the prevailing or fashionable taste. The inventory of a rich City merchant, Mr Crowley, taken in 1728, revealed ‘two pairs of India blue damask window curtains … damask hangings lined with canvas, six carved and silvered bark stools shifted and covered with silver and gold brocade … a settee and two square stools … a Persian carpet, a carved and silvered frame for a tea-table and one ditto for a tea water kettle … a small ebony cabinet inlaid …’. The list goes on to include other goods of relatively high worth. By the standards of the day this was not necessarily an opulent household although, in earlier periods of English life, it would have been considered lavish in the extreme. A rich grocer’s widow, Mrs Forth, seemed to luxuriate in mahogany with a dressing table, a bed, a chest of drawers, an easy chair and fourteen other chairs of the same wood. The number of households that possessed cups for hot drinks rose 55 per cent in the thirty years before 1725, demonstrating the speed and specificity of fashion.

An inventory of a great manufacturer, Boulton & Fothergill, gives another impression of the time with ‘snuff boxes, instrument cases, toothpick cases – gilt, glass and steel trinkets, silver filigree boxes, needle books etcetera – all manner of plated goods, as tea urns, tankards, cups, coffee pots, cream jugs, candlesticks, sauce boats, terrines …’. By 1702 wallpaper was coming in and, according to an advertisement of the period, ‘at the blue paper warehouse in Aldermanbury (and nowhere else) are sold the true sorts of figured paper hangings, some in pieces of twelve yards long, others after the manner of real tapestry’; in the following year hangings were offered ‘in imitation of gilded leather’. Clocks, pictures, prints, mirrors, all of them could now be seen behind the bay windows of the most select shops.

But if you turned the corner from the Strand into Catherine Street, or from High Holborn into the passages beside Drury Lane, the characteristics of a consumer society would have been much more difficult to recognize. There were no luxuries here, only the necessary aids for survival. There were no names above the shops, only rudimentary signs. There were no windows, only open doors into dimly lit interiors. In Hogarth’s ‘Noon’ a small girl snatches eagerly from the gutter a piece of broken and discarded pie.

It has been estimated that there were 3,000 shops in the neighbourhood of Holborn and more than 2,500 in the area of Southwark. In the City approximately 6,500 shops had a ratio of twenty-two customers to each shop; the proportion of people to shops in Clerkenwell was thirty to one.

The majority of these would be small backstreet shops or ‘petty shops’. Like the village shops which they most closely resembled, they would have a range of essential goods on their shelves including tea, sugar, cheese, salt and butter. Other items were bought occasionally and measured in small quantities, among them yellow soap, spices, dried fruits, nuts, treacle, candles and flour. The customers would buy only on a daily basis, purchasing precisely what they required to survive until the following day. They might often rely on credit. The shopkeepers were frequently as poor as the customers themselves, all of them living off the same plain diet.

In the more prosperous neighbourhoods, however, the nature and quality of demand were hard to foresee with any accuracy; in an age in which taste and fashion had suddenly become important considerations, the patterns of consumption became of absorbing importance. China-ware was unknown in 1675 but had become so familiar as to be the object of satire by 1715. Cabinetmaking became a major trade by the turn of the century, and cane chairs had a brief but spectacular reign in the drawing room. The purchase of books and of clocks, too, suggested a more sensitive awareness among the newly prosperous of what was ‘expected’. Defoe, in his Weekly Review of January 1708, wrote of printed cotton fabrics that they first ‘crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs and, at last, beds themselves were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs’.

Emulation was the key. As the British Magazine put it in 1763, ‘the present rage of imitating the manners of high-life hath spread itself so far among the gentlefolks of lower-life that in a few years we shall probably have no common people at all’. A more considered analysis of English society, given four years later by Nathaniel Forster in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions, noted that

in England the several ranks of men slide into each other almost imperceptibly, and a spirit of equality runs through every part of their constitution. Hence arises a strong emulation in all the several situations and conditions to vie with each other; and the perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above them. In such a state as this fashion must have uncontrolled sway. And a fashionable luxury must spread through it like a contagion.

There were no social ‘classes’ in perpetual enmity – the idea had never occurred to anyone except the Diggers and Levellers of the previous century – but rather a multiplicity of different ranks each eager to outdo one another in the race for prosperity.

The confirmation that this new dispensation also affected the labouring poor can be found in the many surveys that demonstrate the rise of real wages in the first half of the century. In the first book of The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith observed that the increase in wages ensured that ‘the real quantity of the necessaries and conveniences of life which it can procure to the labourer has, during the course of the present century, increased perhaps in a still greater proportion than its money price’. Grain was cheaper. Potatoes were half the price. Turnips and cabbages could be had for a song. Some of this may be explained by wishful thinking, or by faulty observation and calculation, but the general restlessness and busyness of the age suggest that there was a general resurgence in economic activity.

You have only to look at the printed advertisements, almost a new thing in the culture of England. Sixty different advertisements were placed in the public prints for George Packwoods’s razor cleaners and shaving paste; Dr James Graham advertised his ‘celestial, or medico, magnetico, musico, electrical bed’; he added that ‘in the celestial bed no feather is employed … springy hair mattresses are used … in order that I might have for the important purposes, the strongest and most springy hair, I procured at vast expense the tails of English stallions’. Hawkin and Dunn offered ‘COFFEE MADE IN ONE MINUTE’, while Jasper Taylor advertised a range of ready-prepared sauces such as ‘SAUCE EPICURIENNE’. Adverts appeared for ‘POMMADE DIVINE’ or ‘PEARS TRANSPARENT SOAP’. Smaller notices promoted Dixon’s antibilious pills, Butler’s restorative tooth powder, Godbold’s vegetable balsam for asthma and Hackman’s pills for the gravel and the stone. The ‘puffs’, as they were often called, were placarded over walls and windows as well as journals and periodicals. It was truly a society of the spectacle, far removed from the sixteenth century when only playbills were plastered on the posts.

It was perhaps the hyperbole that caused Dr Johnson to confess that ‘the trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement’. Illustrations of jugs, and shoes, and hats, and plates, and tureens, and capes, and glasses, were everywhere. William Blake, the poet of eternity, designed some advertisements for crockery from Josiah Wedgwood with perhaps one of his great phrases on his lips: Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

The notion of the ‘consumer’ in the marketing sense emerged first in the 1720s as the belated recognition of the growing phenomenon. Belinda, in William Congreve’s The Old Bachelor, produced in 1693, explains that ‘the father bought a powder-horn, and an almanac, and a comb-case; the mother, a great fruz-tour [false headpiece], and a fat amber necklace; the daughters only tore two pairs of kid-leather gloves with trying ’em on …’. Belinda is describing the appearance of a country squire and his family in a fashionable London shop.

It was no doubt their first visit. These were the newly prosperous who had enough leisure on their hands to travel up to the city in an equipage or at least a coach. No doubt they went back to houses already furnished with carpets, screens and window curtains. The original meaning of ‘consumer’, in the Oxford English Dictionary, is of one who ‘devours, wastes, or destroys’.

All was done in the name of fashion, the god of the metropolis. Samuel Oldknow, the cotton manufacturer from Lancashire, declared that ‘nothing but new things will please fashionable women’. One of the correspondents of the Spectator, at the beginning of 1712, heard a woman in an adjacent pew of the neighbourhood church whispering to her companion that ‘at the Seven Stars, in King Street, Covent Garden, there was a mademoiselle completely dressed just come from Paris’. A ‘mademoiselle’ was a ‘moppet’ or puppet dressed with the newest fashions in the latest style. A month later another correspondent in the Spectator was complaining that his wife had changed all the goods and furniture in the house three times in seven years. Between 1770 and 1800 some thirty almanacs or annuals were issued for the fashionable woman, with all the panoply of advertisements and prints. No lady in society could afford to be ‘out of the fashion’. The men, too, were encouraged by their tailors ‘to strike a bold stroke’ with their latest attire.

Henry Fielding, the novelist and London magistrate, noticed in one of his many somewhat acidulous asides that the growth of commerce had quite changed the face of the nation, and particularly of the ‘lower sort’; as far as he was concerned, they had become greedy, crafty and vain. Trade also encouraged equality between buyers and sellers; ready money was the only mark of distinction. The old attitudes of deference to authority, orthodoxy and tradition had no place in the thriving market. There was no question of any religious duty to avoid excess profit. There was no sense of a ‘just price’ to be set by the community at large. In matters of vital sustenance, such as bread, the old tradition of prices was maintained for a little longer. But in the larger world the obligations had been sundered. This was becoming a secular and individualistic, no longer a corporate, world. Trade restrictions, and labour controls, gradually gave way. The power of the old guilds in dictating the terms and the nature of employment was severely curtailed.

The new commercial world affected other pursuits. Sir John Hawkins, friend of Samuel Johnson and historian of music, wrote that ‘the spirit of luxury rages here with greater violence than ever … the great articles of trade in the metropolis are superfluities, mock-plate, toys, perfumery, millinery, prints and music’. Johnson himself might not have agreed with his friend’s judgement since, like many other observers in the eighteenth century, he believed that luxuries gave employment and income to the industrious poor. ‘Now the truth is’, he said, ‘that luxury produces much good.’ Unnecessary and superfluous commodities, such as Venetian looking glasses, Turkey carpets, Japan screens, Flanders lace, vases from China and statues from Italy, were the lifeblood of high commerce.

The more humble cup or saucer of tea was considered, on its first arrival in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, to be an intolerable luxury that spread depression and lassitude among its consumers. It was conceived by many to be a dangerous, insidious and powerful concoction. It was not nutritious. It weakened the nerves. It prevented healthy sleep.

By 1717, however, green tea had become the drink of choice; and its use was now common among all classes and any attempt at prohibition, suggested by some, was sure to fail. The average annual import during the 1690s was some 20,000 pounds in weight; by 1760 it had reached 5 million pounds. The amount of sugar consumed, to sweeten the bitter herb, increased fifteen times over the century. The human cost of what was essentially colonial exploitation will be discussed in a later chapter. Behind the spoon of sugar lay the back-breaking labour of the slave. An abolitionist of the late eighteenth century, Elizabeth Heyrick, wrote that ‘the laws of our country may hold the sugar cane to our lips, steeped in the blood of our fellow creatures; but they cannot compel us to accept the loathsome potion’. It is ironic perhaps that the daily diet of sweetened tea helped to sustain the wage-earning slaves of the English cities.

All the roads of luxury and fashion have the signpost ‘To Etruria’ standing beside them. The master of that destination was of course Josiah Wedgwood, the tradesman who more than any other epitomizes the Georgian culture of commerce. He was born in the summer of 1730 at Burslem in Staffordshire, the heart of the pottery country, and the spirit of place animated him soon enough; he was truly a native genius. Little is known about his early years but it is clear that he soon embarked upon an ambitious programme of research and improvement. He began a life of labour and experiment on glazes and colours while at the same time becoming a pioneer of industrial design; he was determined to fashion the best creamware in the world. ‘I saw the field was spacious,’ he wrote, ‘and the soil so good, as to promise an ample recompense to anyone who should labour diligently in its cultivation.’

He realized from the beginning that his trade should be concentrated upon the rising ranks of ‘middling people’, ‘which class’, he wrote in a letter of 1772, to his business partner, Thomas Bentley, ‘we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior in numbers to the Great’. This might be described as the manifesto of the new consumer society. He realized, too, the vast importance of fashion in such an enterprise. ‘Fashion’, he wrote, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects.’ He was reflecting in part on the enormous success of his creamware in the replacement of porcelain. He wrote to Bentley again that ‘it is really amazing how rapidly the use has spread almost over the whole globe, and how universally it is liked’. But then he asked, ‘[H]ow much of this general use, and estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction – and how much to its real utility and beauty?’ It was a most pertinent question but one that did not and does not readily afford an answer.

The ‘mode of its introduction’, however, was of paramount concern to Wedgwood and his associates. His methods included those of elegant display and of widespread advertisement; he pioneered the use of catalogues and of trademarks to distinguish his products. If the name of a patron could be attached to a certain range of ware, so much the better. He opened a London warehouse and other showrooms where the merchandise was treated as if it were part of a gallery or museum; when he opened a new showroom on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and Great Newport Street, he made sure that its address was published in the St James Chronicle perused by ‘people of fashion, and which I suppose is that wherein the plays are advertised’.

He employed travelling salesmen, and took pains to export his ware to the royal and noble families of Europe. He had the ambition of being ‘Vase Maker General to the Universe’ which, in a manner of speaking, he became. If we can name him one of the founders of a commercial society, he can also be called one of the pioneers of a new industrial society. Many visitors made their way to his factory, where his employees were regimented and distributed with the same precision and order as the cups and tureens that came off the production line. The factory was in effect three large blocks running 150 yards alongside the Grand Trunk Canal with several courtyards and towers containing kilns and ovens. It was described by a foreign rival, Louis Victor Gerverot, as ‘an enormous building, practically a small town … a marvel of organisation’. We shall come across similar descriptions of English factories when we descend further into the bowels of the Industrial Revolution. The enterprise was designed for mass production along an assembly line, the first of its kind in the pottery industry.

Wedgwood divided the manufacture of pottery into components such as slip-casting and transfer-printing, each with its own experts working in unison. His purpose was ‘to make such machines of the Men as cannot err’; continued and uninterrupted production could thereby be achieved. It could have been Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four rather than 1769. He did not tolerate faulty goods. He had an artificial leg, as a result of a childhood illness, and it is said that he would smash inferior items of crockery with a blow from his wooden limb. He rang the bell for work at 5.45 a.m., and devised a form of ‘clocking in’ that became the standard practice of the factory system.

In the world of English commerce everything, from the time of ‘clocking in’ to the time of leaving, breathes and has its being through the agency of the market; if we may paraphrase Hermes Trismegistus on the nature of the divine, it had its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The concept of the market, in anything like a contemporary sense, was in fact even then being devised. Two of the earliest references are to be found in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the book that can be said to be the founding text of the modern economy; when Smith alludes to the trade in a particular commodity or product, he calls it ‘the market’.

He believed that trade should be free, altogether liberated from the restrictions that had their origin in the medieval system; there should be no control over wages, hours, rates of interest, or prices of good; the mobility of labour and the flow of capital should not be regulated by any external authority. ‘Protection’, in all its forms, should come to an end. The sphere of traditional and paternalistic values should be destroyed and in its place a system of supply and demand should be instituted.

This of course had wider ramifications. Richard Price, writing on civil liberty in 1776, the same year that Smith completed The Wealth of Nations, wrote that ‘all government even within a State, becomes tyrannical as far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried further than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety of the State’. The duty of government was to promote internal justice and to defend against external aggression. That was all. The natural operation of supply and demand, therefore, would be to the advantage of all parties; and the best possible market was one allowed to regulate itself.

Just as trade was considered pre-eminently good in itself, so the basic principles of trade – to buy cheap and to sell dear – became paramount. What might be called the market nexus covered a whole range of social activities, from marriage to a hackney-carriage licence. Moll Flanders, in Defoe’s novel of that name, remarks that ‘the market is against our sex just now’. The result might be construed as ‘laissez-faire’, a phrase that became popular in the 1750s.

It was believed, for example, that businessmen and private investors should finance the building of bridges and roads, without involving the central administration, while the promotion of technology and science was to be left to aristocratic patrons and learned societies. Surely this would apply with redoubled force in financial and economic matters? The conviction slowly percolated through to the Commons and in 1796 William Pitt lamented the occasions ‘when interference has shackled industry’ and declared that ‘trade, industry and barter will always find their own level and be impeded by regulations which violate their natural operation and derange their proper effect’.

This was the permanent consequence of The Wealth of Nations. Smith himself was an unlikely prophet; at a young age he had been kidnapped for a short time by tinkers from his native Kirkcaldy, and it may be that some of his oddities were a result of that unplanned expedition. He had a habit of smiling and talking to himself, proceeding along the streets of Edinburgh in what was described as a ‘vermicular’ – worm-like – manner; he had a harsh voice and teeth like tombstones. He was once discoursing on the division of labour to certain colleagues, when he fell into a tannery pit of fat and lime; he had to be taken home in a sedan chair, complaining all the while.

He believed that an individual should take his own course in the belief that ‘the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security’, has enough intrinsic power to carry any society towards ‘wealth and prosperity’. When an individual attends to his own gains he is led ‘by an invisible hand’ to promote an end that was far from his intention, which may be described as the general good. It was he rather than Napoleon who described England as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, thus justifiably defining the nation as uniquely dependent upon trade. In the second chapter of The Wealth of Nations he proposes that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest’. From this sentence sprang an insight that controlled social and economic theory for more than a century. It is in fact one of the enduring legacies of the eighteenth century.

12

The What D’Ye Call It?

The old king had died, after waving farewell to his favourite German palace, but the information did not reach the royal apartments at Richmond Lodge until three days later. It was the duty of the pre-eminent minister, Robert Walpole, to broach the report to his new sovereign, George II, who promptly asked the minister to inform Spencer Compton; Compton was the treasurer of the new king’s household, and seemed likely to secure effective power. Yet it was not to be. Those who gleefully anticipated Walpole’s demise had underestimated his effectiveness.

His equable relations with George’s wife, Queen Caroline, have been noticed; it also became clear that Walpole had unrivalled command of the Commons. Walpole was in any case by far the most competent and authoritative man in the country, a fact which even a new king could not easily ignore. The king himself spoke English but with a strong guttural German accent, so he might sometimes need the aid of an emollient translator.

Yet he had lived in England long enough to be acquainted with the most powerful men and women in the country, and seems from the beginning to have decided to rule in a way different from that of his father. This bias obviously gave hope to the Tories who had been systematically excluded from power by George I. They flocked to court, but the best of intentions can sometimes be thwarted by events; as it was, the powerful forces ranged against them effectively barred them as possible Jacobites. The Tories had also been averse to the continental wars, of which Hanover had been a part, and were therefore still suspected.

The king himself was by no means a majestic spectacle. He was very short, and relied upon the effect of wigs and high shoes to accentuate the positive. The flatterers noted that he had bright blue eyes and a noble Roman nose; his enemies saw only feebleness of intellect and of character. He was somewhat stiff in his bearing, with the attendant characteristics of obstinacy and bad temper. It was reported that his ministers were forced ‘to bear … even with such foul language that no one gentleman could take from another’. The pattern of his conversation was one of boastfulness, bullying and bluster. Some of his words to his wife have been recorded by Lord Hervey, vice-chamberlain in the royal household. ‘Before she had uttered half of what she had a mind to say the King interrupted her, and told her she always loved talking of such nonsense and things she knew nothing of … she was always asking some fool or other what she was to do; and that none but a fool would ask another fool’s advice.’

Understandably for a monarch he had a great sense of his own importance, but he did not necessarily impress his peers. A caricature shows him with his leg lifted to kick out; he was well known for kicking his servants, and also for being brusque or even rude to casual visitors. He was more obdurate in appearance than in reality, however, and a courtier, George Bubb Dodington, recorded in his Diary that the king ‘would sputter and make a bustle but when they told him that it must be done from the necessity of his service’ he went ahead and did it. He was by obligation, if not by nature, a pragmatist.

He was aware that a Hanoverian king was not necessarily adored or admired by the English, and took care to manifest his status. He dressed strictly, according to the codes of etiquette, and carried himself with more hauteur than was perhaps necessary; he adored the regal world of pageantry and spectacle. Yet he was also aware of the sensitivities of his subjects; he did not claim any semi-divine status by touching for the king’s evil, and he discouraged any attempt at a cult of majesty with portraits or statues.

In fact he loved his subjects no more than they loved him. Lord Hervey records the king’s running commentary upon the faults and follies of the English. ‘No English or even French cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner could set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, or English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any Englishwoman how to dress herself …’ The palm in all these activities went of course to his German compatriots. This plain favouritism brought problems in a larger sphere, and it was feared by his ministers that he might try to steer England’s foreign policy in a Hanoverian direction without consulting the nation’s best interests. What had Westminster to do with Russia or with Sweden except as a way of obtaining wood? He had never been allowed to visit Hanover during the reign of his father but, after his own accession, he made many and prolonged visits to his electorate. He was a Guelph, one of the most ancient dynasties of all Europe, and it can be claimed with some confidence that he took a wider view of the continent than did his ministers.

Certainly he was meticulous in his duties; he was not one of those sovereigns who lose all cares of state on the hunting field. He read everything that was put before him, and every day was divided into its separate duties. Even the affairs of the heart were regulated. He visited his mistress, Henrietta Howard, at seven in the evening; if he was a little early he paced up and down outside her door with his watch in his hand until the tremendous moment came.

Walpole seems quickly to have got the measure of him, and confided to Hervey that ‘his majesty imagines frequently he shall do many things, which, because he is not at first contradicted, he fancies he shall be let do at last. He thinks he is devilish stout, and never gives up his will or opinion; but never acts in anything material according to either of them but when I have a mind he should.’ He concluded that ‘he is, with all his personal bravery, as great a political coward as ever wore a crown, and as much afraid to lose it’. He advised that ‘the more you can appear to make anything to be his own, the better you will be heard’.

So Walpole had to be an artist of stage management as well as of decorum. The weights and balances of power were still somewhat ambiguous and he had to tread very carefully. In Westminster itself, of course, and in what were later to be called the corridors of power, Walpole was still pre-eminent. Robin ruled the roost. His command of men and management in parliament was paramount; the front bench was composed almost entirely of his nominees, and he knew how to touch the ‘secret springs’ of others’ loyalty by promotion or by the discreet distribution of secret service money. He promised the king a quiet life, than which nothing suited George II better. ‘Consider, Sir Robert,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘what makes me easy in this matter makes for your ease too.’ They were friends for life.

Since the king was not called upon to do very much his reputation seemed to rise, and a French envoy noted in 1728 that ‘the king is much more popular than George I. As much as he can, he tries to make himself popular.’ This was in part the result of the efforts of Queen Caroline, who added a much-needed tone of levity and entertainment to what might otherwise have been a rather stiff court. Clearly his private animadversions against the English did not reach the public ear. The growth in wages and commerce, as outlined in a previous chapter, could have done nothing but increase his status.

Of course Walpole had many and various opponents; anyone with a dislike of the country’s administration could find a ready target in the rotund figure of the first minister. A large number of dissident Whigs regarded him as their enemy; he had not only kept them out of power but he was in the process of creating a despotism in the halls of Westminster. The Hanoverian Tories were by nature and instinct opposed to any Whig autocrat, especially when he held the strings of commerce and of patronage in his hands. And then there were the Jacobites, waiting hopefully for the day when the monarch over the water would return to claim his proper kingdom. These multifarious opponents might agree on ousting Walpole but they could not really concur in a coherent and positive alternative policy.

Many of the public prints were opposed to Walpole, most notably the Craftsman which as its name might imply was dedicated to exposing the men of craft or subterfuge. The first issue, published at the end of 1726, declared that ‘the mystery of StateCraft abounds with such innumerable frauds, prostitutions, and enormities, in all shapes, and under all disguises, that it is an inexhaustible fund, an eternal resource for satire and reprehension’. Thus was launched a sustained invective against Walpole and his allies.

A month later in the Craftsman came a character assassination of the first minister as a ‘man, dressed in a plain habit, with a purse of gold in his hand. He threw himself into the room, in a bluff ruffianly manner. A smile, or rather a sneer sat on his countenance. His face was bronzed over with a glare of confidence. An arch malignity leered in his eye.’ A later number issued a more general denunciation. ‘Corruption is a poison, which will soon spread itself thro’ all ranks and orders of men; especially when it begins at the fountain-head. A spirit of baseness, prostitution and venality will universally prevail.’

There was even a serial publication of a ballad, ‘History of the Norfolk Steward’:

A story concerning one Robin

Who, from not worth one groat

A vast fortune has got

By politics, Bubbles and Jobbing …

Other periodicals and pamphlets joined the hunt, assisted by notable combatants such as Swift and Pope, but nothing was more successful than a London musical.

In a letter of summer 1716, Swift suggested that his friend and fellow Scriblerian, John Gay, should write ‘a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there’. This was the cue, taken up eleven years later, for the most famous and successful musical comedy of the eighteenth century. The Beggar’s Opera was described by many names – comic opera, ballad opera, burlesque, satire, musical – just as victory in war still had many fathers. But no one knew quite what it was. In the course of the century, some of the theatres played it as low farce and others as sentimental tragedy. It was both, and neither. It goes from pathos to pantomime in the space of a line, and from cynicism to lyricism in a moment; there are passages in which the heterogeneous tones and styles cannot be distinguished, leading to bewilderment or exhilaration according to taste.

When we consider Pope’s Dunciad, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we note the resemblances. This was a doubting and ambiguous age that found its quietus in satire and ridicule. To that end The Beggar’s Opera adopted all the popular modes and forms of the time, from street ballad to farce and folk song. All the life of the streets was somewhere within it, in implicit protest against the phalanx which ruled the state.

The eighteenth century is not supposed to have been a felicitous age of drama, with its ‘serious’ tragedies filled with sententious moralizing and sentimental pieties that sank John Dryden, for example, below the waterline. But The Beggar’s Opera did provide surprise and delight to the London stage, written as it was according to the Daily Journal ‘in a Manner wholly new’. It was still new when Bertolt Brecht purloined it for The Threepenny Opera of 1928.

The Beggar’s Opera was first presented on 29 January 1729, at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (not to be confused with the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane) where it ran for sixty-two nights. This marked an overwhelming public response, when most other new plays lasted for only six or seven. It concerns two young women who are in love with, and believe themselves married to, a resourceful highwayman named Macheath (‘son of the heath’). Polly Peachum, the daughter of a receiver of stolen goods, and Lucy Lockit, the daughter of the keeper of Newgate Prison, vie for his love in a setting of taverns and Newgate apartments filled with pimps, thieves, whores and all the other inhabitants of contemporary low life. Nothing but rough words and rough sentiments can be heard, while the lovers’ complaints are ringed with ambiguity and satire. It was unforgettable and was for the period a breath of fresh air (if the term can be allowed for such insalubrious elements) after a period of achingly boring acting on moral stilts.

The fact that Newgate Prison is the setting for much of the plot confirms its central place in the consciousness of the eighteenth century. Everybody knew it, by reputation if not by sight and smell. It had become the common name for any prison, and a ‘Newgate bird’ for any prisoner. It had stood on the same site in various incarnations for 600 years and was once more rebuilt in 1770, by which time it had inspired more poems and plays than any other building in England. All the characters of The Beggar’s Opera revolve around it, as if it were a dark sun, just as some of the most famous personalities of eighteenth-century London wereassociated with it.

The role of Polly’s father, Peachum, for example, was loosely based upon Jonathan Wild; Wild was a receiver of stolen goods and a notorious ‘thief-taker’ who would impeach the unnecessary, incompetent, or injured members of his own gang in return for a payment of £40. He devised the robberies and then advertised the stolen goods in the columns of a newspaper, thus gaining the rewards for his own crimes. It was a common trade of the time, but Wild was its supreme exponent. He was hanged in 1725 but such was his continuing fame that Henry Fielding wrote his supposed biography, The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, eighteen years later. Wild was a cunning and violent man in a profane and ruthless age. His surname was his character. Fielding himself described eighteenth-century London as a wilderness, ‘a vast wood or forest in which the thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Arabia and Africa’.

The hero or anti-hero of the opera, Macheath, is a highwayman, one of the great professions of the eighteenth century. Although Gay portrays him as a poor piece of work, entirely dependent upon the bottle, the highwayman himself was often seen as a cavalier adventurer, a gentleman of the road, a man of honour. His victims were recommended to him by landlords or tapsters of the various inns, where they were called ‘worth seeing’ or ‘worth speaking with’.

In his diary Horace Walpole recalled that ‘a black figure on horseback’ stopped the chaise in which he was riding with a Lady Browne. The highwayman asked for the lady’s purse, saying, ‘Don’t be frightened. I will not hurt you.’ He added, ‘I give you my word that I will do you no hurt.’ When she gave him the item he told her, before riding away, ‘I am much obliged to you. I wish you good night.’ This was perhaps the acceptable face of eighteenth-century crime, although it did not of course prevent the perpetrators from being hanged. Gay may even have helped to burnish the reputation of thieves and prostitutes. One contemporary remarked that ‘highwaymen and women of the town are not romantic figures, but our poet had made highwaymen handsome and lively, and women of the town beautiful and attractive. Over all he has cast such a glamour of romance and sentimentalism that even Newgate comes to resemble a select pleasure resort.’ But the real pleasure came in coins and notes.

This was a world of money, of stocks, of bubbles, of bullion and new paper notes of 1695 from the Bank of England. The language of trade and finance occurred naturally to Gay. He did not have to introduce it, or comment upon it; it came to him effortlessly because it reflected the temper of the time. Such terms as ‘business’, ‘account’, ‘interest’, ‘profit’, ‘debt’ and ‘credit’ are of many applications but they float up into the play with the bubble of money. This is a world of greed and gain. It is a culture in which someone could be bought or sold as easily as a piece of plate. Self-interest is the key as large as that which opened the great doors of Newgate itself. ‘Honour’ itself is false, when even pickpockets can call themselves ‘men of honour’.

Who was, then, the gentleman? Lockit was known as ‘the prime minister of Newgate’, and Fielding wrote that ‘Jonathan Wild had every qualification necessary to form a great man’. These were representative of the men who effectively ruled London and its surrounding countryside much more successfully than the men of Westminster who were nominally the masters.

When Peachum recites the names of the members of his gang, he mentions ‘Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bob Bluff, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty’. From that time forward Walpole was often disparaged as ‘Bob Booty’ or ‘Bluff Bob’. He had actually attended the first night and with characteristic sangfroid had applauded the references to himself, even asking for an encore. Yet the allusions to him may be of a more general application. As Lockit puts it,

Lest the Courtiers offended should be:

If you mention Vice or Bribe,

’Tis so pat to all the Tribe;

Each crys – That was levell’d at me.

The Italian opera was a relatively new fashion, introduced to the London stage in 1705. There had always been musical dramas and ballad operas ever since the Mysteries and Miracle Plays of the medieval period. Shakespeare’s characters break into song at every conceivable opportunity, and The Tempest might be described as an English opera. But the Italian style, with its use of recitativo and aria, its masque-like scenery and improbable plots, its castrato and its prima donna, captured the imagination of the early eighteenth century. In The Beggar’s Opera Gay satirized its happy endings, as well as its more melodramatic moments, but seems to have loved its deliberate excess. Contemporary moralists and critics (there was sometimes little difference between them) condemned the Italian opera for being depraved, enervating and effeminate; Gay shows no signs of agreeing with them, while stealing from the operas themselves the constant strain of excitement and exhilaration.

When two rival sopranos came to blows on the stage of the Opera House, in Haymarket, the admirers of either lady pitched in with what one report described as ‘cat-calls, howlings, hissings and other offensive manifestations’ so that ‘the evening concluded in one general and alarming riot’. It was the scene Gay revisited in the jealous rages between Lucy Lockit and Polly Peachum.

He adapted his music from the airs and ballads sung all around him; some were anonymous folk ballads while others were taken from fashionable operas and popular songs. A washerwoman could have sung them, or a porter whistled them. Tunes and melodies were always in the air.

Gay himself was a Devon boy, born and raised in Barnstaple where he attended the local grammar school. At some point in his seventeenth year he made the familiar journey to London where he was apprenticed as a draper’s assistant; drapers’ assistants were in this period often unfairly characterized as effeminate but Gay himself seems to have been diffident, uncertain, almost invisible. He once wrote that ‘the world, I believe, will take so little notice of me, that I need not take much of it’. He ascended from apprentice to literary hack by producing small prose items for a twice-weekly periodical entitled the British Apollo OR Curious Amusements for the INGENIOUS. He emerged as a public writer, rather than a private hack, with a number of poems and pamphlets which were well received.

Then began the long, cruel search for patrons. Patrons were more invidious and inconstant than Grub Street. Yet impoverished authors still needed them. This was not an age when publication alone brought many rewards. Swift characterized the aspiring authors good-naturedly in A Tale of a Tub. ‘They writ, and rallied, and rhymed, and sung, and said, and said nothing; they drank, and fought, and whored, and slept, and swore, and took snuff; they went to new plays on the first night, haunted the chocolate-houses.’

Gay turned his hand to everything in the fashionable mode – farces, satires, heroic tragedy, mock heroic and the strange mingling of moods and modes that are enshrined in the titles he chose such as Trivia, The Toilette and The What D’Ye Call It? He may justifiably have despaired of literary immortality, but he had been able to secure his immediate future with an appointment as a commissioner of the state lottery with rent-free lodgings in Whitehall. It was not a great deal, but it was something. He still complained of ‘disappointments’ but he remained on the treadmill of the court, kept revolving by gossip and malevolence. He may have consoled himself with the fact that the true poets of the age were the bankers and jobbers who conjured gold out of thin air and raised glittering palaces without any foundations at all. His career, like that of so many others at the time, was one of ambition and dependency, of fawning and favouritism, always in hope of further advancement but frequently overlooked.

All this changed with the first performance on that late January evening of 1729. No one had seen anything quite like it before and, soon enough, fire-screens, fans and playing cards were adorned with scenes from The Beggar’s Opera. The manager of the theatre, John Rich, packed the theatre to bursting. On the evening of 23 March, for example, ninety-eight spectators were accommodated on the stage itself. William Hogarth painted six versions of the climactic prison scene. Pope wrote to Swift that ‘John Gay is at present so employed in the elevated airs of the opera … that I can scarce obtain a categorical answer – to anything.’

The actress who played Polly Peachum, Lavinia Fenton, was surrounded by admirers wherever she went, and had to be escorted home after each performance. One observer remarked that ‘the audience catches her fire and enthusiasm. The curtain drops. A wild burst of applause – “Polly!” “Polly!” – from every side of the house. A pretty bow, a kiss, then off the stage she runs … past the scenery, out of the stage door, into a waiting coach-and-four – and away, away, away over the muddy roads of London.’ The poet Edward Young remarked that she ‘has raised her price from one guinea to 100, tho’ she cannot be a greater whore than she was before, nor, I suppose, a younger’. But she did manage to catch a duke, and became the duchess of Bolton. Thus did the social, theatrical and financial worlds mingle.

The Opera was literally the talk of the town, including endless speculation over the presumed or suggested targets of its satire. In truth it had many and various victims, among them courtiers, tradesmen, thief-takers, politicians and those strange creatures who were hysterically in love with opera and opera divas. But its general complaint was against human corruption. Lockit remarks that ‘Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.’ In the ‘condemned hold’ Macheath sings a lament to the tune of ‘Green Sleeves’:

Since Laws were made for ev’ry Degree

To curb Vice in others, as well as me,

I wonder we han’t better Company

Upon Tyburn Tree!

The Beggar’s Opera was, all in all, very funny – not the elaborate and artificial comedy of Sheridan or Oliver Goldsmith, but the uproarious fun of the ‘low’ theatres. It outshone the sentimental comedies and heroic tragedies that were the staple of the age with its own particular mixture of burlesque and carnival, smut and innuendo. A male actor dressed in drag to play Polly Peachum, in a performance of 1782, whereupon one member of the audience ‘was thrown into hysterics which continued without intermission until Friday morning when she expired’. The episode consorts well with the epitaph John Gay composed for himself.

Life is a jest; and all things show it,

I thought so once; but now I know it.

13

The dead ear

Sir Robert Walpole’s revenge upon Gay came rather late in the day when, in 1737, he introduced a bill to curtail the liberty of the stage. All plays had to be submitted to the lord chamberlain fourteen days before performance, and of course the vicious insinuations on the stage against Bob Booty ceased at once. The Licensing Act was in fact not fully revoked until 1968, and so Walpole’s retribution affected generations of playwrights.

But were the insinuations against Walpole in fact justified? He was always robust in his own defence, accusing his opponents of being ‘mock patriots, who never had either virtue or honour, but in the whole course of their opposition are actuated only by motives of envy and of resentment’. It is true that he kept so tight a grasp on government policy and government patronage that there were some who felt unjustly excluded. Yet of course there was more to it than that. Venality was as intrinsic to the House of Commons as points of order; it is often the case that men and women who make the law also believe themselves to be above the law.

In the time of Walpole direct bribes were not uncommon but corruption might take a more subtle guise. The granting of pensions, the distribution of honours, the placement of offices, the giving of sinecures, were accepted and acceptable means of gaining the support of any particular member. In a period when parliamentarians were not paid, a fine line divided justifiable patronage and bribery. It was not through his public salary alone that Walpole himself could have built the magnificent stately home of Houghton Hall. A reading of Anthony Trollope, however, might persuade detractors that the same tricks and devices were still at work in the 1860s. In more indirect forms they continue to this day. One of the principal rewards of power is money.

Yet Robert Walpole, despite his power and prestige, could not buy the House of Commons. Not every man had his price. A large number of parliamentarians still voted according to their consciences or to their principles. There was no more striking instance of this independence than in 1733, when Walpole wholly misjudged the mood of the members. He had wanted to free the Port of London from its entanglements with customs regulations and customs officers which actively served to deter trade. He proposed that all tobacco be placed in a bonded warehouse for a small fee. The goods destined for re-export could recoup the fee while tobacco destined for the domestic market had to pay the conventional excise of 4 pence per pound. The same methods would be applied to the import of wine. It was a way of expediting the export trade, curtailing the prevailing vice of smuggling and simplifying the customs’ work at the Port of London.

Unfortunately it was not seen in this benevolent light. Excise was believed to be an unnecessary and intrusive tax on the necessities of life. The subtleties of the scheme were ignored or misunderstood, and replaced by a vision of an army of excisemen combing the land in searches for offenders who had not paid the tax. Walpole’s opponents were quick to spread the rumour that he intended to apply excise to food and other necessaries, and that British liberties would be sacrificed; the model would then become the heavily administered and heavily taxed nations of Europe. True-born Englishmen would soon be reduced to the state of French peasants.

A pamphlet, ‘A Letter from a Member of Parliament for a Borough in the West’, noted that ‘little handbills were dispersed by thousands all over the City and country, put into people’s hands in the streets and highways, dropped at their doors and thrown in at their windows; all asserting that excise men were (like a foreign enemy) going to invade and devour them …’. Like most panics it was unjustified; but, like most panics, it was effective in the short term.

Walpole realized soon enough that the cause was hopeless. His effigy was burnt in the public markets, to a fanfare of rockets and bonfires, while cockades were worn with the motto ‘Liberty, property, and no excise’. The Whigs were still associated in the public mind with war taxes and the machinations of the Whig financiers who ruled the City; the people were understandably suspicious of what seemed to be new ways of raising money. After a supper at Downing Street, when the servants had left the room, he declared to his colleagues that ‘this dance it will no farther go, and tomorrow I intend to sound a retreat’. He had not altered his position but ‘the clamour and the spirit’ that had emerged over the excise had persuaded him to retire from the combat ‘for prudential reasons’. After the bill was abandoned he had to face a mob outside parliament; protected by a bodyguard he was obliged to flee in and out of a coffee-house before making his escape.

Walpole had miscalculated. His native optimism had triumphed over his natural caution. The earl of Egmont noted in his diary that ‘it may be foretold that Sir Robert’s influence in the House will never again be so great as it has been’. Even though the king held fast to him, for fear of something worse, the opposition against him was growing ever greater. A general election in the spring of 1734 lengthened the odds against his eventual survival; his party, or what might be called the ministerial Whigs, acquired 347 supporters while the combined opposition of Tories and recalcitrant Whigs numbered 232. It would require great care and management to keep things in order, especially since the opposition Whigs, among them a group known by Walpole as the ‘boy patriots’ or ‘cubs’, were eager for power at any cost. They were sick of the ‘old gang’ or ‘the old corps’ or whatever opprobrious name was thrown at Walpole and his closest colleagues. What George II thought of the situation is unclear; he preferred conversation in the royal closet to correspondence, but his sympathy for Walpole remained.

If there was one constant principle and motive in Walpole’s policies it was the wish to avoid war. He had an aversion to conflict. It was wasteful of men and money. It was uncertain, and provoked divisions within the nation. As early as 1726, the year before the old king’s death, there had been rumours of a war with Spain as retribution for attacks on British ships, but a somewhat half-hearted blockade of Porto Bello, the Spanish fort and naval base off the coast of Panama, came to nothing. Negotiations ensued which were, for Walpole, the next best thing to peace.

Walpole also managed to stay out of the ‘War of the Polish Succession’ which began in 1733, one of those continental imbroglios involving many nations vying for mastery over slices of territory, but this was perhaps at the risk of ignoring international obligations and undermining previous alliances. The war lasted for five years until 1738, while Walpole remained on a neutral course. Many now sought an active war, however, largely on the understanding that France and Spain were denying English vessels access to foreign markets. Nothing more infuriated the English than the loss of trade. It was widely believed that Walpole had treated the Spanish with more leniency than they deserved. Petitions were presented to parliament setting out in animated language the continued Spanish attacks on English vessels, despite the ‘understanding’ Walpole had negotiated. Alderman Wilmot, otherwise unknown to history, lamented that ‘seventy of our brave sailors are now in chains in Spain! Our countrymen in chains, and slaves to Spaniards! Is this not enough to fire the coldest? Is this not enough to arouse all the vengeance of a national resentment!’

A previous incident further inflamed the situation. In 1738 Captain Robert Jenkins displayed to the Commons the severed ear that had been struck from his head by a Spanish officer in the course of an embarkation seven years before in 1731. The ear was too old to be confirmed as his, but it served the purpose of provoking public fury. It is possible that the captain lost his ear in some other disciplinary proceeding. The leathery appendage might have been picked up at a London hospital, or found in the street. Who knew, or cared to know, the truth? You could pick a fight over a dead ear.

The Spanish were not eager for conflict, and Walpole still favoured the slow dance of peace, and so a ‘Convention’ was cobbled together to cover all differences. It was not well received, particularly in the Commons. Walpole spoke for two and half hours in favour of the arrangement, but then a young man rose to speak against the contrived peace. ‘Is this any longer a nation?’ Shall we ‘bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention? It carries fallacy or downright subjection in almost every line.’

William Pitt sat down, having fired one of the first verbal salvoes in what was for a while known as ‘the War of Jenkins’ Ear’. It would have taken a political seer of genius to realize that this young man of thirty would determine the nature of English politics, after Walpole, for forty years. William Pitt – ‘the elder’, as he later became known after the exploits of his equally famous son – came from a family that had grown rich on the spoils of India; his grandfather was called ‘Diamond’ Pitt. The young man followed the familiar course of Eton and Oxford before joining the 1st Dragoon Guards in 1731. He took a parliamentary seat four years later. It was his destiny.

He was known as one of the ‘cub Whigs’ because of his youthful opposition to Walpole’s administration. He had also attached himself to Frederick, prince of Wales, who was implacably opposed to his father, George II, and thus to his father’s principal minister. Queen Caroline said of her eldest son that ‘my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world; and I most heartily wish he was out of it’. Nevertheless Pitt set himself up in the prince’s headquarters at Leicester House and was eventually installed as a ‘Groom of the Bedchamber’. From early on, therefore, Walpole marked him down as his enemy. Pitt’s speeches against peace were simply another token of their hostility.

Yet his rhetoric could sting. Horace Walpole, the first minister’s son, remarked ‘how his eloquence, like a torrent long obstructed, burst forth, with more commanding impetuosity! … haughty, defiant, conscious of injury and supreme abilities’. It was believed that he did not know what he was going to say until he was on his feet but then, extempore, he drove all before him.

It was sometimes difficult, in fact, for his spellbound auditors to recall exactly what he had said. Another parliamentarian, Henry Grattan, remembered that he voiced ‘great subjects, great empires, great characters, effulgent ideas and classical illustrations’. Pitt had a great fondness for Shakespeare and would read out the more tremendous passages to his family; he would quote only from the tragedies, and would pass the comedies to someone else. It is an inkling of his dramatic imagination. When we examine his illustrious contemporaries, in fact, the politicians of the age were on the whole consummate actors. Lord Shelburne, one of his closest allies in later life, described him as a ‘completely artificial character’. ‘He was always acting,’ Shelburne said, ‘always made up, and never natural, in a perpetual state of exertion, incapable of friendship, or of any act which tended to it, and constantly upon the watch, and never unbent …’ This was the man who became known as the great commoner.

Shelburne also described Pitt as ‘tall in his person … with the eye of a hawk, a little head, thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect’. Extant portraits reveal a somewhat haunted face with watchful and weary eyes. He began to suffer physical ill-health at Eton which in the medical manner of the time was diagnosed as ‘gout’. Over succeeding years the ‘gout’ attacked various parts of his body so that he had the appearance of an invalid, spare and lean. When he began to suffer from bouts of mania and depression he was diagnosed with ‘gout on the brain’.

For a man almost constantly in pain, and weary with the importunities of clients and colleagues, it was almost inevitable that he stayed somewhat aloof. He was cold and reserved, except in the company of his few intimates. He could be directed or swayed, but he would not be dictated to. That is also why he earned the reputation for being incorruptible, although in truth he was not without ambition and desire for profit; he also had the gift of changing his principles rapidly when the occasion demanded it. Yet he once spoke of the sense of personal honour ‘which makes ambition virtue’. There is not one public man in whom contraries do not collide. We may say in these early years of Pitt’s political career, however, that he had two principal ambitions; he aimed for English supremacy at sea and England’s supremacy over its neighbours.

Pitt, then, was one of those who hammered Walpole on the necessity for war. He also hailed his political ally, Frederick, the prince of Wales, as the protector of the naval strength of England and the guardian of the trade of the country. Liberty of the Seas! Liberty and Property! Prosperity of the City of London! These were the catchphrases used by Pitt and his youthful allies. Adam Smith described a war against Spain as a ‘colony war’ to safeguard the high seas as well as British possessions overseas. Horace Walpole blamed the martial pressure upon ‘the disaffected and discontented part’ in parliament, and also upon those who belonged to the court of the prince of Wales who wanted to create a warrior prince on the model of a medieval monarch. ‘My God,’ Queen Caroline said, ‘popularity always makes me sick; but Fretz’s popularity makes me vomit.’

Yet it was public opinion itself, animated by these belligerent parties, which pushed Walpole into a war that he did not wish for. To compound the insult many of his former allies now blamed the first minister for acquiescing in the fervour for conflict. When he eventually declared war in October 1739, there was an outburst of popular rejoicing. ‘They now ring the bells,’ he said in one of his more maladroit remarks, ‘they will soon wring their hands.’

All seemed to go well with the first victory of the conflict when Admiral Edward Vernon in November 1739 captured the Spanish base of Porto Bello in South America. It was greeted with jubilation and in the following year, when Vernon was preparing a second fleet, ‘Rule Britannia’ was first sung at the prince of Wales’s country retreat at Cliveden. The towns and cities of England organized festivals to the ‘Immortal Vernon’ and his name was aligned with those of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. The stunning success of the ‘blue water’ policy was also a harsh rebuke to Walpole and those ministers who preferred a less belligerent policy.

But no war goes to plan, as Walpole was uneasily aware. The conquest of Porto Bello lasted for no more than three weeks, and in the following summer Admirals Nicholas Haddock and John Norris failed to stop the Spanish and French fleets from sailing into Caribbean waters. Another truism of war states that one conflict can blend into another without the protagonists being fully aware of the fact. So the war against Spain was changed, as if by a transformation scene at the ballet, into the ‘War of the Austrian Succession’.

This is how it happened. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI, had no son, so it had been agreed that he should be permitted to leave intact his Habsburg dominions (including Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, the Netherlands and parts of Italy) to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa. No sooner was the emperor in his grave, however, than the various interested parties pounced on his legacy. There was no honour among thieves, even if they were sovereigns; they swarmed about the sight of blood. Frederick II of Prussia invaded the Habsburg province of Silesia since, in his own words, ‘ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me, carried the day, and I decided for war’. He was, at least, candid. Spain and France were also two of the principal aggressors and, since they were also two of England’s most prominent enemies, England itself was in 1740 perforce drawn into the European conflict. There were too many monarchs, and too few thrones, to satisfy every combatant. New dancers came on the stage with reverberating clashes of thunder and bolts of lightning.

In September 1741 George II astonished his ministers, and his people, by declaring the electorate of Hanover neutral. It was understandable. His territory was surrounded by the larger powers which already had their mouths open for more. Yet he had withdrawn from a dispute in which England was still an active participant; he had in effect two foreign policies, one of peace and one of war. A nation at war cannot be led by Janus, and it was widely believed that the foreign interests of the country were subordinated to those of Hanover. Pitt in particular was scathing about what he considered to be the parasitical Hanoverians, a stance that incurred the lasting enmity of the king.

Walpole had endured enough, and in the first month of 1742 he resigned his office. ‘This war is yours,’ he told a fellow minister, soon to become the duke of Newcastle, ‘you have had the conduct of it. I wish you joy of it.’ Newcastle himself deserves a reference in this history in his own right since he was quintessentially, inimitably, of the eighteenth century; he could have come from the stage of Congreve or the pages of Smollett. He was a powerful Whig grandee and consummate master of electoral tactics, but he was also something of a buffoon. In an age of tears he was well known for copious weeping; he refused to sleep in beds not previously slept in, had a great aversions to chills and damps, would not travel by sea, and never stopped talking. It was said that he had woken half an hour late in the morning and spent the rest of the day trying to make up for lost time. W. E. H. Lecky, in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, described ‘his confused, tangled, unconnected talk, his fulsome flattery, his promises made at the spur of the moment and almost instantly forgotten, his childish exhibitions of timidity, ignorance, fretfulness, perplexity …’.

His rapid and garbled speech was accompanied by nervous jerking movements so that he was never for a moment at rest. He loved the hustle and agitation of business rather than the formulation of policy; but he went about his affairs in such a gyratory and sporadic way that his colleagues were often openly scornful of him. He did not seem to mind their derision, but any attempt to curtail his power sent him into paroxysms of paranoia; he lived in perpetual fear. Yet he enjoyed large levees, or grand assemblies, where to general amusement he hugged, kissed and embraced everyone in sight. Nevertheless he had within him the secret of longevity; he held major offices of state for almost forty years.

Robert Walpole left for honourable retirement and was created earl of Orford for his labours; he returned to Houghton Hall where he could gaze upon the fruits of his public office. His departure was greeted with great joy and celebrations, as if all the disappointments of war rested upon his shoulders.

But the fortunes of war were not materially improved by his absence. Its wavering course was not followed with any eagerness, and seems to have been prosecuted mainly by subsidies and mercenaries. No one cared much about its victories or its vicissitudes. Who took Juliers or Berg, Brieg or Wohlan, were matters of indifference. The conflict was marked in its last six years by treachery and criminality, double dealing and division, defections and secret treaties, lies and bloodshed on an enormous scale. When peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, not a moment too soon, it could record no single important result. Thomas Carlyle, the great Scottish historian with a style of fire, eventually described it as ‘an unintelligible, huge English-and-Foreign Delirium’.

Everyone had wanted Wapole to retire, including his closest associates, but in truth his retirement made very little difference; the members of the old team were still there, now looking for support from some of the ‘new Whigs’ and the ‘prince’s party’. There was no great millennial change, as some had wanted or suspected. More Whigs of various tendencies did in fact join the ministry, and in time became known with some of their Tory counterparts as ‘broad-bottomed’. They could sit on anything. Whigs now battled against Whigs, Tories against Tories, Tories and Whigs against Whigs and Tories, in a game of internecine struggle that lasted for some sixteen years. Of course everybody became bored in the end. The earl of Stair noted in 1743, a year after Walpole had gone, that ‘London seems entirely employed about whist.’

Some excitement was aroused by the landing of Charles Edward Stuart, the son of the ‘Old Pretender’, in Scotland during the summer of 1745. The Young Pretender, better known to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie, was taking advantage of the continental war to cause a little local difficulty. Some troops fighting in Flanders were recalled to home soil but the prince was able to occupy Edinburgh and to score a notable victory over the ancient enemy at Prestonpans to the east of the city. There ensued something like panic in London. The fear rather than the reality of an invasion necessarily caused consternation. To breach the moat defensive to a house was always a momentous event, especially at a time of general war.

The Young Pretender gathered with him some 5,000 men and marched south into England where he reached as far as Derby. Further panic ensued. He was in fact unlikely to have advanced much further. The Scots did not flock to his banner, and the Tories that were inclined to the Jacobite cause went to no great lengths to support him. In a country generally concerned with national prosperity, no social or political revolution is ever likely; the Bank of England effectively destroyed the Stuart cause. Charles demanded from his French allies an invasion, but the French were too engaged in Flanders to oblige. At Derby the Jacobite generals knew that their game was lost and, over the prince’s strenuous objections, they eventually retreated into the Highlands. It was not the end of their humiliations.

Charles chose with his advisers to fight the enemy on the open moorland of Culloden and, within an hour, his troops were wholly defeated by the British army under the guidance of the duke of Cumberland. Some of the Scots were ready to fight again in more auspicious circumstances, but their resolve was undermined by the Young Pretender’s decision to return to France. So ended the last attempt by Scotland to affirm its independence by violent means. Jacobitism was dead, its exequies marked by the brutal licentiousness of Cumberland’s soldiers who went through the highlands in a systematic campaign of rape, slaughter, theft and execution. In the aftermath of the bloody defeat all Highlanders were obliged to surrender their arms, and any man or boy wearing ‘the Highland clothes’ would be imprisoned for six months without bail. Transportation would follow a second offence. It was a deliberate policy of cultural genocide.

The cheers and applause of the victors may have been enough to drown out the tears and lamentations of the renegade Scots. ‘Rule Britannia’ had been set to music five years before, and ‘God Save the King’ was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine at the time of the Young Pretender’s landing before becoming a popular refrain.

The young prince ventured one further journey to England when, in 1750, he travelled to London in disguise. He seems to have stayed with a staunch Jacobite in Theobald’s Road, and conformed to the Anglican faith in the empty hope of being eventually accepted as sovereign. He must have worn a mask and costume as he walked through the streets of London; but, in that respect, he was very much part of a city that was often no more than a great stage.

14

Mother Geneva

When an eighteenth-century visitor, Matthew Bramble, arrives at London in Tobias Smollett’s novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), he is much astonished by the fact that ‘the different departments of life are jumbled together – the hod-keeper, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican, the shopkeeper, the pettifogger, the citizen and courtier all tread upon the kibes of one another’. Profligacy and licentiousness ‘are seen everywhere, rumbling, riding, rolling, rushing, jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption – all is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest’.

Some years earlier another innocent visitor had arrived, fresh from the coach, in the yard of the Bell by Wood Street. In William Hogarth’s representation of the scene, Moll Hackabout is immediately surrounded by strange sights. Chamber pots are being aired on some railings, while some ragged underclothes are hanging above a balcony. A well-dressed ‘rake’ is looking at her and fondling himself in a doorway. But the strangest sight of all is that of an elderly woman, patched and peeling with old beauty spots, who greets her as her cousin from the country. Her name is Mother Needham, a notorious procuress of the 1720s and early 1730s; she was eventually displayed in the pillory, and died of the injuries inflicted on her by the public.

These two images of London are closer to the truth of the eighteenth-century city than anything found in the Spectator or the Gentleman’s Magazine; they are not caricatures, but intensely realistic. The polite literature of the period adverts to the auction houses and the coffee-houses, the reading societies and the debating clubs, the assembly rooms and the dancing masters, the masquerades and the balls, the theatres and the galleries, the lecture halls and concert halls. These were indeed part of the vesture of eighteenth-century London but beyond them was a deeper and darker life that had not changed for the better. No ‘improvement’ could touch it. The wider streets and the open bridges, the fashionable squares and the shopping arcades, had nothing to do with the shadows that London had always cast. Close by the rooms devoted to this ‘age of pleasure’ were those devoted to an age of privation, an age of poverty, an age of punishment and an age of pain.

The smell of London was noticeable from several miles away, comprised, according to a tract of 1733, George Cheyne’s The English Malady, of ‘the infinite number of fires … the clouds of stinking breaths, and perspiration, not to mention the ordure of so many diseased, both intelligent and unintelligent animals, the crowded churches, churchyards, and burying places …’. Above all else mounted the smell of horse-dung.

The smell of the streets was a great leveller for the ranks of artisans, wits, apprentices, publishers, rakes, clerks, men about town, clergymen, stationers, ladies, serving-girls, actors and singers, politicians and vagrants who walked along them. There was a phrase that ‘one is not smelt where all stink’. The footpaths were not only thronged with pedestrians but by hackney-chair men and porters, dust-carts and post-chaises, dogs and mud-carts, the boys with trays of meat on their shoulders and the begging soldiers, the flower girls and the chair-menders, the second-hand-clothes merchants and the pastry sellers. There was not one culture, but several, in the space of a single street.

It was no good trying to avoid these inconveniences by hiring a coach; the streets were so narrow and circuitous, the obstacles so many, that all the drays and carriages were often brought to a dead halt or ‘lock’. The coachmen would then begin to whip each other’s horses and often jump down from their vehicles to engage in a fist-fight, encouraged by a circle of citizens who liked nothing so much as a free brawl. The air of the city was always blue with oaths and maledictions, blasphemies and curses. The noise of the streets was like that of Bedlam; from a distance it resembled a great shout echoing into the firmament. To some it sounded like a volcano.

This was the old violent London, which never went away and will never go away; the eighteenth-century city, until the improvements of its latter decades, was the arena for public hangings and floggings. The mad people of Bedlam were one of the city’s sights, as were the gibbets along the Edgware Road and the rotting heads on top of Temple Bar. The mendicants bared their ulcers, while the prostitutes tried to cover their sores.

Moll Hackabout became just such a prostitute, and indeed it was a common fate for those who came up from the country or for those who were simply born and bred in the streets. Sex was plentifully available in the eighteenth century, from the most expensive harlot with lodgings in Covent Garden to the small boy or girl who was easy prey for a penny. Cheap and plentiful sex was the undercurrent of London’s energy. The richer citizens or merchants could have more or less whomever they wanted, and it is hard to believe that the religious pieties of the day prevented them. In his Autobiography (1771–1854) Francis Place, a radical campaigner, even at the end of this period when metropolitan ‘improvements’ were meant to be ubiquitous, noted that ‘the breasts of many [prostitutes] hung down in a most disgusting manner, their hair among the generality was straight and hung in rats’ tails over their eyes, and was filled with lice, at least was inhabited by considerable colonies of these insects …’. They would go ‘behind the wall’ for twopence.

Addison left a more tender picture of the trade in his account of being accosted in St James’s Street by a slim and pretty girl of about seventeen. ‘She affected to allure me with a forced wantonness in her look and air; but I saw it checked with hunger and cold: Her eyes were wan and eager, her dress thin and tawdry, her mien gentle and childish.’ The same figures populated the streets more than a century later, provoking the journalist William Thomas Stead into writing The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885). Some aspects of London seem to be eternal.

Crime and violence belonged to its streets as much as its flints and stones. There was of course no organized police surveillance except the decrepit system of watch and ward, its elderly members boiling tea or gin in their little watch-houses. The streets were dark and treacherous, the tenements grim and the slums dangerous. The night was filled with crimes to which no one responded. At times of crisis the press-gangs sought out unwilling recruits for the navy. When James Watt came to London in 1754 he hardly dared stir out of his house for fear of being taken up.

‘One is forced to travel’, Horace Walpole wrote in 1751, ‘even at noon as if one were going to battle.’ The thieves had their own lodging houses, clubs and taverns where they were divided even as an army might be, into housebreakers, pickpockets, footpads and highwaymen. Yet the detestation of a standing army was so great that even the call for more police was resisted by some citizens who did not wish to live in a military camp.

As the city grew through the eighteenth century, its boiling point was lowered. Matthew Bramble, in Humphry Clinker, remarks to an acquaintance that ‘in the space of seven years eleven thousand new houses have been built in one quarter of Westminster, exclusive of what is daily added to other parts of this unwieldy metropolis’; so ‘unwieldy’ that ‘the capital has become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support’. Bricks arrived at the building sites before they were cool enough to be handled, and the bemused traveller might stand amazed at a nasty wilderness of half-finished houses.

There was a driving method behind this madness of speculation. London was power and money. The voracious demand for food in the city helped to revolutionize the agriculture of the country. Tea and hemp and cotton cloth came from all over the earth. Sugar was ‘boiled’ in the capital. It was the largest industrial city in the world. The densely packed factories lined both banks of the Thames at the eastern end. This was the place of scientific equipment, kitchen ranges, gas meters, furniture and hackney carriages. The coal came down the east coast to stoke the fires.

The divines and moralists, listening to the swearing and indecency rising up from the dens and caves of the city, were not slow in predicting an ultimate judgement. The songs of London were considered enough to arouse divine wrath:

I’m sure she’ll go to Hell,

For she makes me fuck her in church time …

It should be remembered that Londoners as a whole were tremendously superstitious, as if they knew that they lived in a doomed city. Phantoms and witches and apparitions were reported in the city, and the king himself was said to believe in vampires – although that may have been part of his Germanic legacy. You should never listen to a cuckoo without money in your pocket. You should return home if a snake crosses your path. You should look down if a raven flies over your head. A screech owl in the morning presages a day of danger. Crowds flocked to a house in Cock Lane when numerous knockings and scratchings were heard. Samuel Johnson was one of a committee established to investigate the phenomenon, which turned out to be no more than the tricks of an older daughter. The reports of a ghost had nevertheless caused a sensation.

A lady from Godalming, Mary Tofts, began to give birth to rabbits, after she had miscarried when trying to catch one. She was brought to London where at a bagnio in Leicester Fields she was visited by the more prominent doctors of the day. A courtier, Lord Hervey, reported that ‘every creature in town, both men and women have been to see and feel her: the perpetual motions, noises and rumblings in her belly, are something prodigious; all the eminent physicians, surgeons and man-midwives in London are there day and night to watch her next production’. This, too, was all an imposture. But it had worked on the superstition and credulity of the London crowd.

On 8 February 1750, the tremor and reverberation of an earthquake were felt beneath London and Westminster; the people ran out of their houses, fearing an apocalypse. On precisely the same day one month later, 8 March, a second and more violent earthquake shivered to dust some of the foundations of the houses and occasioned much damage in the streets. It was now considered certain that a third earthquake, even more terrible and destructive than its two predecessors, would erupt on 8 April. The Gentleman’s Magazine, perhaps best known for its rational bias, reported that ‘earthquakes are placed among those methods by which God punishes a wicked and rebellious people’. The sins of London, mounting ever higher for many years, seemed to have found their apotheosis. The city was too black, too poisonous, too diseased, too venereal, to survive the wrath of the heavens. The bishop of London wrote a pastoral letter in which he denounced ‘the abominations of the public stews’, the ‘histories and romances of the vilest prostitutes’ and books by deists and others who scorned ‘the great truths of religion’.

A week before the expected tremor those who could leave London did so. A performance of Handel’s oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, was cancelled. Horace Walpole counted 750 carriages passing Hyde Park Corner into the relative safety of the country. Many of those who were panic-stricken migrated into the fields of North and South London. The centres, the black centres, the City and Westminster, were to be shunned. In the event all was calm. God rested. But the phenomenon and the panic were enough to turn some, if not all, to thoughts of repentence. Others had already turned to a different source of consolation. The arms of Mother Geneva were open.

William Hogarth’s Gin Lane was issued in 1751, from the Golden Head in Leicester Fields, in the same year that Henry Fielding warned in a pamphlet, ‘An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers’, that ‘a new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us … by this Poison called Gin’. In Hogarth’s print a pawnbroker is engaged in a thriving trade; he inspects a carpenter’s saw while a harassed woman presses upon him a kettle and saucepan. Beneath their feet is to be seen a gin-cellar with the familiar sign of Gin Royal hanging above it. It is no more than a hole in the wall, a dark tunnel leading to the lower depths. Above it are printed the words.

Drunk for a Penny

Dead Drunk for twopence

Clean Straw for Nothing.

It is unlikely that such words were ever inscribed for a gin shop, and Hogarth himself could well have invented them, but nevertheless they have become proverbial.

Gin Lane is unknown to the topographer and gazetteer but Hogarth has situated it in the parish of St Giles, notorious for its beggars, cripples, vagrants and the very poor. The site of the print is now at the northern end of Shaftesbury Avenue. A dazed and drunken woman sits upon some steps. It looks as if time has been suspended around her, except that an infant is falling from her useless arms onto the ground below. An emaciated ballad-singer lies dying on the steps immediately below her. Close by, a man and a dog quarrel over a filthy bone.

But the woman is the centre of this part of the composition. She has the tokens of syphilis upon her legs. She is filthy, and her clothes are in tatters. She must have been on the streets of St Giles to pay for her addiction. A commentary on the print noticed that ‘if a woman accustoms herself to dram-drinking, she becomes the most miserable as well as the most contemptible creature on earth’. A recent case pointed the moral better than words. Judith Defour had taken her two-year-old child to a workhouse where it received better care and a set of new clothes. She returned to the workhouse a few days later and claimed the child; she then took the infant to a nearby field where she strangled it and dumped the body in a ditch before pawning the new clothes for a shilling which she then spent on gin. It was an extreme case, but not so extreme as to be implausible.

Beside Kilman Distillery, on the right of Hogarth’s print, two young girls are quaffing the gin, while some beggars fight for a dram and a young mother is pouring the drink into her baby’s mouth. Signs of death are everywhere, with a suicide hanging in plain sight, a baby accidentally impaled upon a spit, a swinging coffin as a sign of an undertaker’s shop, and a makeshift funeral. The pawnbroker’s sign hangs like a cross over the street scene while in the distance is the steeple of St George’s Bloomsbury with a statue of George I on its pinnacle. He is the only king so to be honoured in London, but on this occasion he seems as cold and remote from his realm as the church itself. Hogarth’s print is composed of minute particulars which, taken together, make up one overwhelming statement. The two girls, for example, wear their parish insignia of ‘GS’ or St Giles. The churchwardens, the vestry and the overseers of the poor are exposed as incompetent or irresponsible.

Hogarth’s print sold for a shilling, together with its companion piece, ‘Beer Street’, and although its cost would have been beyond the reach of the poor, it is reasonable to suppose that it found a place on the walls of the tavern or the alehouse where it might act as a satire or as a corrective. An advertisement in the London Evening Post remarked that ‘as the Subjects of these Prints are calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People, in hopes to render them of more extensive use, the Author has publish’d them in the cheapest Manner possible’.

The craze for gin began, approximately, in 1720 but it had been readily available since the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. William III brought the drink with him from the purlieux of Rotterdam, and soon enough the Dutch spirit had supplanted the taste for French brandies. Anything French was suspect. The soldiers of William’s army were encouraged to imbibe ‘Dutch courage’ before action. Two years after his successful invasion an Act was passed ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’. The farmers and distillers were further rewarded when the duty on their liquor fell from a shilling to a penny a gallon. London had always been a city of hard drinking but in the streets of the capital the current of gin grew stronger and faster. In times of want, and pain, and cold, many ran into it willingly. A nasty steam, or fog, arose from the vats of the distillers.

The gin was sold in the shops of weavers, dyers, barbers, carpenters and shoemakers; the workhouses, prisons and madhouses were awash. There were degrees of nastiness and discomfort. Inns had lodging rooms for guests, while alehouses provided ‘houses of call’ for the various trades of the city; the brandy shops or dram shops were of the lowest grade, where cellars, back rooms and holes in the wall provided shelter for copious consumption. Gin was sold from wheelbarrows, from temporary stalls, from alleys, from back rooms and from cheap lodging houses. It was consumed greedily by beggars and vagrants, by the inmates of prisons or workhouses, by Londoners young and old. It was a particular favourite of women, who also used liberal quantities of the stuff to silence children and to ward off the privations of cold and hunger. It was a way of staving off the world.

The consequences were dire. Children would congregate in a gin shop, and would drink until they could not move. Men and women died in the gutters after too much consumption. Some drinkers dropped dead on the spot. It was not at all unusual to see people staggering blindly at any time of night and day. Fights, and fires started out of neglect, were common. A foreign observer, César de Saussure, noted that ‘the taverns are almost always filled with men and women, and even sometimes children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away’. It kept the poor warm and dazed, at least for an hour or two.

William Maitland, whose The History of London was published in the mid-eighteenth century, reckoned that 8,659 gin shops were operating in the city, with particular clusters around Southwark and Whitechapel. The sale of spirits had doubled in a decade, with 5.5 million gallons purchased in 1735. Women were not only customers but also vendors. It has been estimated that between one quarter and one third of unlicensed sellers of spirits were female. It was one London trade from which they were not excluded, and the influx of girls and young women into the capital provided a ready source for exploitation. In a pamphlet of 1736, ‘Distilled Spirituous Liquors: The Bane of the Nation’, it was recorded that the dram shops were filled with ‘servant maids and laboring men’s wives’, emphasizing the belief that gin was in some sense a female drink. It was known as ‘the ladies’ delight’, and the passage of the Gin Act in 1736 was said to have provoked ‘widows’ tears’ and ‘shreeks of desponding Matrons’.

Several attempts were made to administer or temper the sale of gin, with diverse consequences. The Gin Act introduced a duty of 20 shillings per gallon on spirituous liquors, and retailers of gin were required to purchase an annual licence of £50. This simply served to encourage the illicit selling of spirits that now expanded out of all proportion. Gin was sold as medicinal draughts or under assumed names such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift or King Theodore of Corsica. Subtle means of distribution were invented. An enterprising trader in Blue Anchor Alley bought the sign of a cat with an open mouth; he nailed it by his window and then put a small lead pipe under one of its paws. The other end of the pipe held a funnel through which the gin could be poured. It was soon bruited ‘that gin would be sold by the cat at my window the next day’. He waited for his first customer, and soon enough he heard ‘a comfortable voice say, “Puss, give me twopennyworth of gin”’. The coins were inserted into the mouth of the cat, and the tradesman poured the required amount into the funnel of the pipe. Crowds soon gathered to see ‘the enchanted cat’ and the liquor itself came to be known as ‘Puss’.

The evidence of Westminster interference in the once flourishing gin trade provoked riots in the poorer parts of the city; the turmoil became so violent that it was deemed by some to be a danger to the state. Shoreditch and Spitalfields were practically under siege. Informers, those who swore to the justice that a certain establishment was selling gin unlawfully, were hounded and struck down by the mobs. Some of them were beaten to death, while others were ducked in the Thames, the ponds, or the common sewers. It was a form of street power. A woman in the Strand called out ‘Informers!’ whereupon ‘the Mob secur’d’ the man involved ‘and us’d him so ill that he is since dead of his Bruises’.

The legislation of 1736 proved impossible to enforce. The Act was modified in the light of public complaint and a new Act was drawn up seven years later; it was known as ‘the Tippling Act’, and in 1747 the gin distillers won back the right to sell their product retail. Spirit, raw or mixed with cordial, was once more the drink of choice. It was estimated that, in Holborn, one in five dwellings was used as a gin shop.

The effects were predictable and familiar. In 1751 Corbyn Morris, a customs administrator, noted the fall in births as well as ‘the sickly state of such infants as are born’. He observed also that the hospitals were crowded with ‘increasing multitudes of dropsical and consumptive people arising from spirituous liquors’. The drink was also associated with sexual licence, and it was reported that ‘young creatures, girls of twelve and thirteen years of age, drink Geneva like fishes and make themselves unfit to live in sober families … there is no passing the streets for ’em, so shameless are they grown’. This was the immediate context for Hogarth’s print and Fielding’s pamphlet.

Yet, in one of those ultimately unfathomable changes of taste, the craze for gin subsided. This had nothing to do with the attempt at prohibition, which had become a dead failure. Bad harvests rendered gin more expensive. The influence of Methodism was growing even among the urban poor. And, suddenly, there was the new fashion for tea.

It is fitting that William Hogarth should have become the most celebrated observer of this London craze, as he was of other urban phenomena. This was the Hogarthian moment. He was a Londoner by birth, out of Smithfield, and an urban tradesman who started his career as a goldsmith’s engraver. His first paintings were of a scene from The Beggar’s Opera. He is as intrinsic to the eighteenth century as Samuel Johnson or Henry Fielding. He was a model and an inspiration for the new generation of novelists. ‘It would take the pencil of Hogarth’, Tobias Smollett wrote in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), ‘to express the astonishment and concern of Strap.’ Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1733) wishes that ‘the ingenious Mr Hogarth would finish the portrait’. In The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Henry Fielding interrupts his narrative to exclaim, ‘O Hogarth! Had I thy pencil!’

Hogarth touches upon so many and so various eighteenth-century concerns that he might be called the presiding deity of the period. He understood the randomness of life from the chance encounter to the unexpected event, from the fall of a building to the overturning of a coach; he also understood the extremes of living, rich beside poor, sick and dying beside the healthy, vice beside virtue. He loved the low life of the streets, and spent much of his life in celebrating it. Melodrama and spectacle, as common on the streets of the city as among the players of Bartholomew Fair, were some of the spirits of the age. ‘We will therefore compare subjects for painting’, Hogarth wrote, ‘with those of the stage.’

He was also an astute man of business. He became the professional above all others. He advertised his prints in the newspapers and sold directly to purchasers without going through the medium of dealers or print-sellers; he hung a shop sign outside the door of his house. He also secured the passage of legislation, known as ‘Hogarth’s Act’, that managed to protect the copyright of engravers. Artists had always exploited the market, and manipulated their patrons, but perhaps in never so overtly a commercial fashion. Whether in his robust moralism, or in his evocation of urban fever, or in his financial acuteness, he caught the temper of the times.

15

The pack of cards

William Pitt would be conceived and fashioned in war; from the beginning he had despised Robert Walpole’s policy of peace at any price. He had taken on Walpole and won. Now his time had almost come, when he would be saluted as the war master of the age, the ‘great commoner’ who had become a great warrior. Eight years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, negotiated by Britain, France and the other combatants of the War of the Austrian Succession, his first intimations of blood came in the distant colonies across the ocean. It took once again the form of Anglo-French enmity. The policy of France in North America, as far as the English were concerned, was one of expansion and aggression; it was believed that they aimed for ‘universal commerce’. They had settled on the St Lawrence to the north, and on the Mississippi to the south, and were thus in a position to control with a line of forts all the territory west of the New England colonies. If the British were confined to that narrow strip along the Atlantic shore, they would have no part in the burgeoning and profitable fur trade. It did not help that the French were in alliance with the confederation of Native Indians known as the ‘Six Nations’. In April 1754, a French force from Canada occupied the fort that would one day be the site of Pittsburgh. Offensive expeditions were in turn sent out by the British, but with very little effect. The battlegrounds were not yet important.

America was still a far-off land of which the British knew very little. Snippets of news from ‘the colonies’ appeared in the public prints, under the headings of ‘American Affairs’ or ‘British Plantations’, but there was no genuine bond of sentiment or sympathy between the two communities. America was considered to be a nation of farmers, in a wilderness dotted with small farms and villages. That was far from the case – Harvard and Yale had already been established, Harvard more than a century before. The merchants of England of course also knew better; they traded in fish and lumber products, as well as the great wheat and grain crops that were already pouring out of the ‘bread colonies’. And then there was the tobacco of Virginia and Maryland. In the end these commodities would be the root and cause of war.

The relations between France and England, exacerbated by the tensions in America, were becoming more ominous closer to home. In March 1756, an invasion scare prompted the administration to send for Hanoverian mercenaries to defend the shores. The use of German troops was unparalleled and raised a tempest against the presence of Hanoverians and Hessians. Their strength, however, was never tested; it may be that the French never intended to invade but were making a feint in advance of more serious hostilities. Sure enough, on 18 May, a general war was declared which can be seen as the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession. War was the familiar bed-fellow of politics and trade.

All the old alliances were give a new twist, however, when England and Prussia were joined against Austria and the Bourbon powers of France and Spain. The struggle had many names, according to the theatres of battle: in North America it was known as ‘the French and Indian War’, in India ‘the Third Carnatic War’. On the European mainland it was called ‘the Pomeranian War’ or ‘the Third Silesian War’. In England it eventually came to be known, more directly, as ‘the Seven Years War’. It probably did not occur to any of the participants that the conflict would last so long.

Even before war was declared it was ascertained that a French fleet was being prepared at Toulon for action in the Mediterranean. The French had for a long time threatened Minorca, the island having come under British control in 1708, and so a defence force of ten ships was dispatched from Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Byng. The battle was confused and uncertain, compounded by Byng’s caution and the poor condition of his ships. When it was believed that the English could do no more, Byng sailed back to Gibraltar without assisting the British garrison on Minorca itself. The garrison surrendered in June, just a month after the general war had been declared. It was not a happy beginning.

The Admiralty was eager to shift the blame to an expendable officer, and Admiral Byng was court-martialled before being shot on the deck of HMS Monarch; Voltaire had said of the incident that ‘it is a good idea to kill an admiral from time to time, simply to encourage the others’. But the sacrificial killing of Byng did not appease the English public who considered their nation to be the acknowledged ruler of the high seas. There was a rise in public suspicion and anger with which Newcastle, still the first minister, was singularly unable to deal. Byng may have been burned in effigy by irate crowds, but the images of others were also held up in derision. A ballad of the day declared ‘to the block with Newcastle and the yardarm with Byng’. In the autumn of the year the duke of Newcastle resigned. All eyes were now upon William Pitt who, much to the king’s annoyance and even disgust, seemed likely to be the new leader of the administration. It had been Pitt, after all, who scorned the Hanoverian loyalties of the king. But Pitt was certain of himself. He informed the duke of Devonshire that ‘I am sure I can save the country and nobody else can.’ In the conventional histories of the period one figure exits stage left while another makes a grand entrance. But it was never as simple as that.

All the cards were to be reshuffled. The players crowded around the table and met in corners. The remarks in the political correspondence of the period set the scene.

There are so many wheels within wheels that no eye can see … the patriot of Monday is the courtier of Tuesday, and the courtier of Wednesday is the patriot of Thursday … if he is a good boy in the meantime … the opposition, like schoolboys, don’t know how to settle to their books again after the holidays … more than one has thrown away a very good game … Pitt has lent his paws to draw the chestnuts out of the fire … you know here is no such thing as first minister in England, and therefore you should not seem to be so … he treated it as words and mere amusement … patriots we have none, all is election jobbery.

The discourse concerned demands, deceits, threats, conspiracies, manoeuvres and intrigues. X wished to be chancellor of the exchequer but, if Y vetoed the proposal, he could become minister for the House of Commons with the lucrative post of paymaster. A wanted B to remain lord lieutenant of Ireland, so that B could relinquish the office to A in an emergency. It would not surprise an observer of political life, in any century, to acknowledge that politics took precedence over policies.

Pitt, however, held all the trumps with the support of the public and with the confidence of the Commons; so in the face of the king’s opposition he became secretary of the southern department, the most senior secretary of state, and allowed the duke of Devonshire to become nominal first lord of the treasury. He took office at a time of unease and failure, marked also by Pitt’s dismay at the convenient execution of Admiral Byng. He hardly had time to expedite his own war policy when the king’s younger son, the duke of Cumberland, refused to take up his command in Germany while Pitt remained in charge. It was the opportunity for which George II had waited, and at the beginning of April 1757 Pitt was dismissed.

All was confused and uncertain. For three months a succession of ministers attempted to coordinate policy against France, but none of them had the verve or self-confidence of Pitt. In May a French army invaded Hanover, George’s own electorate, and at the battle of Hastenbeck in July the allies were beaten; the defeated commander, the duke of Cumberland himself, was forced to concede a treaty that gave authority to the French. The king was beside himself with fury, and laid the blame upon his incompetent son. He greeted him with a frigid silence. ‘Here is my son,’ he told his courtiers, ‘who has ruined me and disgraced himself.’ Since Cumberland never again took up a military office, his animus against Pitt would no longer be a consideration. It must have occurred even to the king that a strong hand was required against manifold enemies.

At the end of June, when it was feared that the great wheels of the machine might stop, Pitt had agreed to enter a coalition with that veteran of all veterans, the duke of Newcastle. Pitt would take care of the war while Newcastle would administer all domestic business, including the raising of the revenues that Pitt required. Pitt and Newcastle were by no means natural allies; in fact they despised one another. They were united only in their desire to be ministers. ‘Fewer words, if you please, my lord,’ Pitt told the voluble Newcastle, ‘for your words have long lost all weight with me.’ The unlikely coalition turned out to be one of the most successful in English history.

The circumstances of Pitt’s return were not propitious. The earl of Chesterfield wrote at the time that ‘whoever is in, or whoever is out, I am sure we are undone, both at home and abroad; at home by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill luck and incapacity … We are no longer a nation. I never yet saw so dreadful a prospect.’ In the autumn of 1757 John Wilkes, soon enough to become a vociferous agitator, wrote that there was ‘the most general discontent I ever knew, and every person I converse with, of all parties, seems to be under the dread of something very terrible approaching’.

Pitt was faced with what, in the circumstances of the time, looked very much like a global war. From Quebec to Guadeloupe, from Senegal to East Frisia, from Prague to Louisiana, the two combatants and their allies faced each other in a battle for naval and commercial supremacy. It was the kind of war Pitt was born for. His over-arching policy was to open as many ‘fronts’ against France as possible, in order to tie down its forces, and to promote and support as many of its enemies on the field of battle. For this he needed ships, men and money, the latter of which Newcastle furnished him by imposing additional taxes. Pitt told the Commons that he needed funds ‘for the total stagnation and extirpation of the French trade upon the seas, and the general protection of that of Great Britain’. He demanded sovereignty over the high seas, in other words; he also faced a war of four fronts other than that of the European mainland – against the French on the continent of America, among the islands of the Caribbean, along the African coast, and in India.

Macaulay wrote in an essay in the Edinburgh Review, in 1834, that Pitt had serious weaknesses as war minister. He wrote that ‘we perhaps from ignorance, cannot discern in his arrangements any appearance of profound or dexterous combination’. Pitt was, perhaps, just lucky. He could not of course have by himself conceived and carried out all the manifest events of the war; much of the praise must be ceded to the officials of the Admiralty. But, if any man held together the various strands of the war effort, it was Pitt. His panache and energy were accompanied by hauteur and by sarcasm to his colleagues; he had very little faith in their abilities, and rarely confided in them. He was egotistical with the proud and domineering with the weak. Yet he had a vision of England and of the nation’s destiny, bound not by the narrow frontiers of Europe but by a global trading empire that would ensure the nation’s commercial and naval supremacy.

16

What shall I do?

On a May evening in 1738 John Wesley was walking along Aldersgate Street in order to attend a Church of England religious society; in this period the walls of London were scrawled with messages such as ‘Christ is God’ and ‘Murder Jews’ while rising above him beyond Aldersgate Street was the recently finished dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. He had the proper Anglican credentials for an orthodox religious society; he had been a tutor of Lincoln College, Oxford, where he and his brother Charles set up a small society of fellow believers known as the ‘Holy Club’. In the late autumn of 1735 he had travelled across the ocean to the newly established colony of Georgia, a settlement of yeoman farmers that had turned its back on slavery. He returned, after a legal dispute, at the end of 1737.

He had a companion in spirit. George Whitefield had joined the ‘Holy Club’ with the Wesley brothers and soon became known for his histrionic genius; he could make a congregation swoon in sorrow and David Garrick, the actor, told a friend that he would give £1,000 to utter an ‘Oh!!!!’ in the manner of Whitefield. But Wesley was temporarily bereft of his spiritual comfort. In 1738 Whitefield had also made the journey to Georgia.

Yet by the time Wesley walked out of the little society in Aldersgate Street he was spiritually changed. One of the members of the society wasreading to the assembly Martin Luther’s Preface to the Epistle of the Romans ‘about a quarter before nine’. He was reciting the passage that describes ‘the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ’. As Wesley put it: ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed.’ This was the first stage in what became known as ‘the awakening’, that moment when in Wesley’s words ‘God began His great work in England’ and which gathered its fruit in the Methodist movement.

Wesley had found in Luther’s preface the belief that ‘we are under grace and not under the law’. That grace was the great bounty and blessing he tried to instill in congregations never before touched by the spirit. On his own return from Georgia, in 1739, George Whitefield preached in the open air, itself a rare and almost unknown occurrence, to an assembly of colliers at Kingswood outside Bristol. His words acted as a sword, releasing acts of collective piety and mass emotion. ‘Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ.’ It was this outward call to repentance that galvanized the Methodist cause. Crowds assembled from the local neighbourhoods to listen to what they considered to be the voice of God, and in March 1739, Whitefield wrote to Wesley that ‘you must come and water what God has enabled me to plant’. Four months later he wrote in his journal that ‘a great and visible alteration is seen in the behavior of the colliers. Instead of cursing and swearing, they are heard to sing hymns about the woods …’

It was an unprecedented event in the history of English spirituality. ‘Field preaching’ had in previous centuries been the preserve of a few unorthodox or marginal figures, and the Dominicans had set up their pulpits in the marketplaces of the towns, but now whole communities who had never before been known to attend a church, gathered in the hills and open spaces.

Whitefield said that ‘a preacher, whenever he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear’. He cried aloud; he stamped on the wooden platform; he wept. ‘Oh my hearers, the wrath is to come! The wrath is to come!’ Wesley himself noted of one Methodist congregation that ‘the people [were] half-strangled and gasping for life’; ‘great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead; some with extreme noise and violent agitation. One man hurled himself upon a wall again and again, calling out “Oh what shall I do? What shall I do? Oh for one drop of the blood of Christ!”.’ It was said that Methodist preachers were ‘paid by the groan’.

In previous centuries the Church would have turned on them with all the guile and fury at its command; the Lutherans of the sixteenth century, the Quakers and Anabaptists of the seventeenth century, felt the fist and the fire. But the Church was now not so strong. Anglicanism was, shall we say, slumbering? Many of its members were easy or indifferent; they attended worship every Sunday as a social duty, but nothing more.

The Toleration Act of 1689 achieved exactly what its critics had prophesied; the religious temper was cool where it was not cold. Voltaire wrote in Letters Concerning the English Nation that ‘if one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace’. Various religious sects and groupings came together in public debates where matters of grace and redemption were argued in an atmosphere of civility. There was nothing mean or trivial about that, of course, but it did not provide the best response to the fierce piety of the Methodists and other evangelicals. The established emphasis now rested on a faith that was ‘pure’ and ‘rational’, amiable and undogmatic. The philosopher, David Hume, described it as ‘the most cool indifference’.

‘Old Dissent’ was in no better state. It had in its own fashion become orthodox. It contained no surprises and offended no one’s sensibilities. Once even the most fervent Church becomes established it surrounds itself with rules and regulations, customs and conventions, that weigh it down. The adherents of Old Dissent were the craftsmen and well-known traders; they had become as much part of English society as the squire and the parson. One of their number, Philip Doddridge, explained that they did not accommodate ‘the plain people of low education and vulgar taste’. Concerning the Roman Catholics the same bland latitude obtained. Daniel Defoe, in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, commented upon Durham that the town is ‘old, full of Roman Catholics, who live peaceably and disturb nobody, and nobody them; for we, being there on a holiday, saw them going as publicly to mass as the dissenters did on other days to their meeting houses’. Popular suspicion and resentment of them, however, among the London mobs, would once more emerge in the 1780s.

In 1740 Wesley and Whitefield came to a crossing from which two paths led. Whitefield took the less travelled path and adopted the predestinarianism of the Calvinists, together with the exclusive notion of ‘election’; Wesley remained true to the Church of England, and in particular to the doctrine that redemption was available to all who willingly sought their salvation in Christ. He was a man of great talent for administration and organization and was sometimes called ‘Pope John’. In the course of his ministry he established 356 Methodist chapels, and organized the faithful into ‘classes’ and ‘bands’ with an annual conference at which he would exhort, condemn, praise and rebuke his followers.

Wesley himself was a man whose optimism was matched only by his energy. ‘I do not remember’, he wrote when he was an old man, ‘to have felt lowness of spirit for one quarter of an hour since I was born.’ That enthusiasm lasted for all his eighty-seven years. He rose long before dawn, and preached his first sermon at five in the morning. In his eighty-fifth year he preached eighty sermons in eight weeks, and in the last year of his life travelled 70 miles on horseback in a day. He preached 800 sermons a year and in the course of his life travelled one quarter of a million miles. Such is the effect of burning conviction. More orthodox Anglicans (for Wesley insisted all his life that he remained a firm and committed Anglican) were afraid of his fire. He noted in his journal at the beginning of his ministry that ‘I was roughly attacked in a large company as an enthusiast, a seducer, and a setter forth of new doctrines’. Yet he always remained calm and self-disciplined, turning away wrath with a soft answer.

One of Wesley’s critics denounced his followers as tinkers, barbers, cobblers and chimney sweeps; but in truth his constituency was much wider. It included a large body of artisans as well as those workers who were associated with commerce and manufacture; these might be described as the newly significant trades, among them miners, quarrymen and hand-loom weavers. The association between the Methodist ‘awakening’ and the onset of industrialism, however, is not easy to discern. It may be that Methodism offered its adherents a tight-knit social community, with its own principles of cohesion, at a time when other social ties were being weakened. It is also instructive that approximately half of the Methodist congregation were women, perhaps alienated from the male preserve of Anglicanism.

The faith spread in the manufacturing districts of the north-east, the north midlands and the Potteries; it flourished in the mining areas and in the fishing villages, areas that had tended to protect themselves from official authority. Cornwall and Wales were, for that reason, centres for those of Methodist persuasion. Methodism, more than Anglicanism, was aligned to native sensibilities; Wesley, for example, was happy for his preachers to speak in Welsh. Methodism also appealed to that sense of rapture dear to the Celts and to many other oppressed peoples. Towns were more susceptible than villages. It was perhaps not surprising that Wesley, who professed himself to be a Tory and a devout Anglican, should gather together a motley congregation of whom many were radical and antiauthoritarian in tendency. The message of individual redemption, beyond the orthodoxies of the established Church, was more important than the messenger. As a result, individual Methodists were denounced as levellers, democrats and even atheists.

Methodism was also the spring and fountain of the evangelical enthusiasm that materially affected the climate of English spirituality in the 1780s. The meetings of the Methodists were well known for weeping and hysterical laughter, cries and shouts and confessions; it was returning in spirit to the ‘enthusiasm’ of the previous century that had largely been extinguished at the time of the Restoration. The early eighteenth century had not been a time for God’s elect, but under the leadership of Wesley the elect returned in armies to the Lord. ‘Old Dissent’ was in turn partly replaced by ‘New Dissent’, when the enthusiasm of artisans and other urban workers affected the congregations. The middle decades of the eighteenth century were indeed the time for sects who walked and prayed on wilder and wilder shores. In the streets of mid-eighteenth-century London appeared little clusters of Moravians, Muggletonians, Sandemanians, Hutchinsonians, Thraskites, Salmonists, Swedenborgians and Behmenists. For the young William Blake it was a ‘golden city’.

The evangelical revival seems to have appeared at approximately the same time as the emergence of Methodism; this is not at all unexpected, since they were the roots of the same tree. As the Methodist movement grew in strength and intensity, so did the emphasis on a new awakening infuse Anglicans and dissenters with the same desire for personal spiritual renovation. Yet the evangelicals, as they became known, were averse to open-air meetings and to the wilder manifestations of enthusiasm; some of the more famous of them, like William Wilberforce and Hannah More, worked quietly but actively for social reform and the inculcation of Christian manners. They worked against all the forces of eighteenth-century society that they deemed to be immoral – gambling, drinking and cruelty to animals among them. They were also strict Sabbatarians. They belonged to the world of property and patronage, and can perhaps be best seen as the more established or higher-ranking equivalent of the lowly Methodists. One of Hannah More’s great successes was a little book of 1795 entitled Tales for the Common People.

It was much more likely, therefore, that their missionary activity would take the form of societies and small groups of like-minded supporters such as the Clapham Sect or Clapham Saints which began to meet in 1790. Societies for the ‘reformation of manners’ became familiar, among them the Society of Universal Good Will, the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, the Society for Promoting the Religious Instruction of Youth, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They were complemented by the Society for the Propagation of the Bible in Foreign Parts, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society.

One of the principal effects of the evangelical revival, however, was the steady growth of ‘Sunday schools’ in the later years of the eighteenth century. The Sunday School Society was established in 1785, and within half a century some 17,000 schools had been instituted for the benefit of poor children who might acquire the elements of reading and writing. But the first purpose of these institutions was to promote religious and moral instruction, and in particular to indoctrinate the children with the rules of discipline and obedience. Many of the pupils in fact became part of the child labour force that was a significant aspect of the Industrial Revolution.

17

Do or die

William Pitt’s vision, of global supremacy, seemed within reach. The early course of the Seven Years War was wholly changed by the victories of Frederick of Prussia, the ally of England, who soon acquired a reputation as the Protestant hero of Europe. In November 1757, at Rossbach in Saxony, he defeated the combined armies of France and Austria. A month later, at Leuthen in Bavaria, Frederick defeated a much greater Austrian army and seized Silesia. As if emboldened by these victories another allied commander, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, chased the French out of Hanover and pushed them back across the Rhine. Chesterfield, so doleful before, conceded that ‘the face of affairs is astonishingly mended’.

Pitt was now free to pursue a continental strategy, with his enemy in retreat, but already he had more extensive ambitions. In the spring of 1758 an allied force captured the French fort of St Louis in Senegal; its principal commodity of slaves was now secure for the British Crown. At the end of the year an English force took Gorée, an island off the coast of Dakar, which thirty years later would contain the notorious ‘House of Slaves’. So from the boiling and fever-stricken coastlines of West Africa came slaves and ivory, gum and gold dust, that were packed for the Caribbean or for England and then stored in factories with armed guards supplied by the local chieftains.

News came in this year, also, that Robert Clive had emerged victorious from the battle of Plassey and had taken control of Bengal, with its 30 million inhabitants, in a campaign Clive himself described as a medley of ‘fighting, tricks, chicanery, intrigues, politics and the Lord knows what’. The victory led directly to British domination of South Asia and to the subsequent extension of imperial power. Yet not all welcomed these developments. There was a sense of unease over this meddling with exotic and alien foreign lands. There seemed to be no sure foundations on which to build. Only in the nineteenth century were these doubts resolved.

Within three years the French had been compelled to leave India. Without effective sea power they were destined for disappointment. The East India Company soon had all the trappings of an oriental state, with its own police force and native army. It was the tiger in the jungle, dripping with blood and jewels. India became the cockpit in which it was shown that trade was war carried on under another name. In the poetry of the period, in fact, allusions to Africa and India became commonplace; they had become part of the imagination. Yet there was still no talk of empire.

The West Indies had become the most profitable possession, even if the prize had to be shared with the French, the Spanish and the Dutch. An expedition sailed in the winter of the year and took Guadeloupe, the home of cotton, sugar and molasses; for Pitt the island of sugar was a greater prize than Canada, so much stronger were commercial than territorial ties. It sent forth each year 10,000 tons of sugar and in return required 5,000 slaves. It was considered to be a fair bargain. In the hundred years after 1680 some 2 million slaves were forcibly removed from their homes to the work camps of the West Indies.

The conditions of the enslaved workers were notorious. Another sugar island of the Indies, Jamaica, was described by Edward Ward in Five Travel Scripts (1702) ‘as sickly as an hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot at hell, and as wicked as the devil’. The slaves could not breed in these torrid conditions, so even more had to be transported. These were the least of the slaves’ torments. Many of England’s overseas possessions were no more than penal colonies rivalling any of those in Stalinist Russia.

Slaves were simply beasts of burden. They were already suspended on a cross of three points, known as ‘triangular’ trade: they were purchased on the west coast of Africa with the proceeds of cloth or spirits before being transported across the ocean where they were sold to the plantation owner; the merchant seamen then returned with their holds filled with sugar, rum and tobacco. It was simplicity itself. A few local difficulties sometimes marred the smooth running of the enterprise. The slaves were manacled to the inner decks with no space to move, with women and children forced promiscuously among the male prisoners. When a ship was in danger of foundering, many of them were unchained and thrown into the sea; when some of them hit the water they were heard to cry out ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ The putrid and malignant diseases from which they suffered, in close proximity to one another, spread all over the vessel. The ‘middle passage’ across the ocean often created the conditions of a death ship.

Yet the church bells were ringing all over England. Even as the stinking and putrescent slaves were marched onto Jamaican or Bajan soil the new year in England, 1759, was being hailed as an ‘annus mirabilis’. The early capture of Guadeloupe was only the harbinger of overseas victories that guaranteed England’s global supremacy. Horace Walpole remarked that the church bells had been worn thin by ringing in victories, and wrote to Pitt ‘to congratulate you on the lustre you have thrown on this country … Sir, do not take this for flattery: there is nothing in your power to give what I would accept; nay there is nothing I could envy, but what you would scarce offer me – your glory.’ That had always been considered the French virtue above all others; gloire and le jour de gloire were later to be immortalized in the second line of ‘La Marseillaise’. But in 1759 they had been snatched away.

After the capture of Guadeloupe, Dominica signed a pact of neutrality with the victors. Canada, or New France as it was then known, was to come. In June General Amherst captured Fort Niagara and, in the following month, Crown Point. These victories were followed by the fall of Quebec in the autumn, when Major-General James Wolfe stole up the Heights of Abraham like a thief in the night. The capital of the French province lay on a precipitous rock at the confluence of the St Lawrence and St Charles rivers. Early assaults had come to nothing against what seemed to be an impregnable position. Wolfe wrote in his dispatches that ‘we have almost the whole force of Canada to oppose’.

Do or die. He planned to land his force on the bank of the St Charles, to scale what seemed to be the insuperable heights, and then to attack Quebec from the relatively undefended rear of the town. Recovering from their surprise at the success of the enterprise the French attacked but were beaten back. The French commander, Montcalm, was shot as he stood; Wolfe received a wound in the head, followed by two other bullets in his breast and his body. Yet in death his was the victory. The beaten and demoralized French army evacuated much of Canada and retired to Montreal; a year later the garrison at Montreal also surrendered, and Canada joined the list of England’s overseas territorial possessions.

The consequences of human actions are incalculable. With the threat of the French removed from the British settlers over the ocean, they began to resent the presence of English soldiers. Who needed the protection of the redcoats now that the enemy was gone? And so from small events great consequences may arise. An action that Voltaire derided as a conflict ‘about a few acres of snow’ gave rise in time to the United States of America.

The events in the European theatre were no less promising. The threat of French invasion was diverted. The reports of an invasion force, complete with flat-bottomed boats for landing, provoked Pitt into calling out the militia to guard the shores. At Quiberon Bay in November 1759, off the coast of southern Brittany, the French navy was caught and for all purposes destroyed. There would be no further threat of a French invasion.

And that, it might seem, was that. England had achieved maritime supremacy and gathered up more territorial possessions than ever before. The economic strain at home was beginning to show, however, with multifarious taxes imposed to bolster the revenues for the war. Yet if there was a sense of war weariness, it was not evident to the first minister. Pitt had been successful in Canada, the East Indies and the West Indies but he was determined to guide the destiny of Europe and confirm the strength of his country’s global trade. The duke of Newcastle wrote to a colleague that ‘Mr Pitt flew into a violent passion at my saying we could not carry on the war another year; [he said] that that was the way to make peace impracticable and to encourage our enemy; that we might have difficulties but he knew we could carry on the war and were one hundred times better able to do it than the French … in short, there was no talking to him’. Pitt knew that his colleagues were now in favour of a negotiated peace; negotiation meant, for him, compromise with the French. He would not rest until their most important possessions were in his hands. But the most carefully laid plans do not always come to fruition.

Suddenly all was changed. On 15 October 1760, George II rose early to drink his chocolate; he then felt the need to visit the water closet from which the valet-de-chambre, according to Horace Walpole, who seems to have known the most arcane secrets of the royal family, ‘heard a noise, louder than royal wind, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in’ and found the king on the floor with a gash on his forehead. The king expired shortly afterwards, bequeathing a new king to a not necessarily grateful nation.

18

The violists

In January 1759, the year of victories, the British Museum was formally opened at Montague House; it was largely designed to accommodate the extensive collection of Sir Hans Sloane who, in the manner of an antiquary of the old school, had collected books, manuscripts, works of art and objects of natural history. It represented prize specimens from all over the world, and what better home might it have than London? The collection included a pointed flint hand-axe, one of the first evidences of primordial antiquity; the mirror of Doctor Dee, the conjuror who had held out a vision of the English Empire to Elizabeth I; some birds-of-paradise from Papua New Guinea as a reminder of the exotic world just over the horizon; some ritual wooden artefacts from Jamaica that had now become an island of blood; an ivory figure of Xiwangmu, a Chinese goddess known as ‘the queen mother of the west’; and a brass astrolabe from Isfahan for calculating the position of the sun and other stars.

In 1768 the Royal Academy had been established, of which Sir Joshua Reynolds became the first president. It was pre-eminent in a city that had, in the previous decade, harboured no art galleries or exhibitions of any kind. The first public exhibition was held in April 1760, at the Society of Arts in the Strand; the crush was so great that several windows were broken. But it inaugurated, if nothing else, a new relation of art with the public. There was a new market. There was a new commodity. It was perhaps no coincidence that the first recorded reference to the phrase ‘fine arts’ comes from 1767 when Dr James Fordyce stated of young women that ‘they … wanted instruction in the principles of the Fine Arts’.

There had been in the earlier part of the century associations for young artists, most notably among them a new academy in St Martin’s Lane where William Hogarth was a member. The members were, or had been, apprentices to one of the decorative arts; but now they sought other opportunities based on European models, and were particularly interested in ‘life drawing’. The aspiring painters among them would previously have been confined to ceilings, stages and portraits, but their ambitions were also lifted. They had become interested in the style of the light and agitated line, or what Hogarth called ‘the serpentine line of beauty’.

Soon enough the novels and plays of the age would be full of a new and interesting figure, the young artist. The young artist who is hired to superintend the lessons in drawing for young ladies. The young artist who is invited to paint a country house and its occupants. The young artist who has recently removed himself to Rome where he might study the classical masters and perhaps act as a cicerone for Englishmen and Englishwomen on the grand tour. The young artist who earned a precarious living in London, loitering around the Royal Academy or the auction houses in the hope of inviting stray custom. The virtuosi of course considered only works in oil by the Italian masters, or canvases that at least resembled them, to be worth examination. But watercolours and line drawings were coming to seem respectable on the walls of the aspiring middle class. It was no longer considered pretentious or laughable to style yourself an ‘artist’. This was one of the new professions.

So the Royal Academy became a notable centre for aspiring artists who were bolstered by their membership of what was already a grand national institution. Art had arrived in the public arena. William Blake entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1779; James Gillray had entered in the previous year, and Thomas Rowlandson in 1772. In 1789 James Mallord William Turner made the journey to Somerset House as a student. In the following year the Royal Academy opened its doors to the public. An entirely new national enterprise had begun under the most favourable circumstances.

A new London concert society, the Concert of Ancient Music, began giving performances in 1776 at what became its regular venue, the Crown & Anchor in the Strand. Its name suggests an association with ale and spirits but in fact it was a ‘great assembly room’ with staircases and lobbies. This was the meeting place of a respectable and indeed formal group of musicians devoted to the English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It soon became common for them to treat as ‘ancient’ any music composed twenty years before, which is perhaps an indication of how the grip of ‘modernity’ – what was recent, what was new – imbued the nature of the fine arts in the period.

There was a suggestion of lightness, or what in another era was known as ‘pleasaunce’, about English fine art. In Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) Archibald Alison remarked that ‘The fine arts are considered as the arts which are addressed to the imagination, and the pleasures they afford …’ They might include an essay, a print, a watercolour, an epigram, a light air, a Chinese bowl, all of which comprise elegant pleasures that, in the words of the philosopher Lord Kames, furnish ‘love of order’ and ‘delicacy of feeling’.

The members of the Concert of Ancient Music were independent professionals, no longer necessarily tied to a court or a church. The feudal ties had been severed, with sometimes unintended consequences. Haydn was overwhelmed by the liberality of his fees in London after the rigours of the Esterhazy court; he earned extravagant sums for concerts and for individual commissions; after receiving £800 for a concert in 1794 he remarked that ‘this one can only make in England’. The sum is equivalent to £45,000. It was the true mark of a new musical culture.

The first professional concert series took place in the 1760s, in the same period as the first public exhibitions of art were also held in London. A concert room was built in Hanover Square in the subsequent decade, together with the Pantheon in Oxford Street whose manager brought Hadyn to London. There came a time when many large towns and cities had their resident orchestras.

Another sign of that new culture could be found in the unlikely purlieux of Clerkenwell where in Jerusalem Passage a ‘small coals’ man, Thomas Britton, organized a series of weekly concerts where could be heard performances of music, vocal and instrumental, that were acclaimed as ‘the best in town’. A ‘small coals’ man was a coal-merchant, and above his store-room he had created a musical space where some of the most ingenious composers and instrumentalists of the day came to perform in front of an appreciative audience. So the public recognition and reward of music emerged in venues high and low.

Music had of course always been the accompaniment of social life. In the sixteenth century England had been described as a ‘nest of singing birds’. But in the eighteenth century it took on a public and more formal structure. This was no longer the private and improvised music in which Samuel Pepys participated. Music was now expected at pleasure gardens and at tea gardens, by chalybeate wells and in theatres, at masques and polite assemblies. Musical evenings were organized with spinet and harpsichord, and chamber music became a fashionable entertainment. Music clubs and music rooms and concert rooms became the arena for professional musicians; the amateur singers around the drawing-room table were no longer the mode. In the eighteenth century music had become the natural and inevitable accompaniment to all public or semi-public gatherings. It invited pleasure rather than duty or contemplation. You could not go to an assembly hall, a theatre, a ballet, or a pantomime without being surrounded by the sound of violins and violas. Sometimes they even invaded the fashionable shops and the coffee-houses. The players were known to Samuel Johnson as ‘violists’.

19

A call for liberty

The accession of George III in the autumn of 1760 marked a profound change in the English monarchy. He was the first of the Hanoverian kings to be born and educated in England, and the first to avoid the broad German accent of his predecessors. In his draft for the speech from the throne to parliament he declared that ‘I glory in the name of Briton; and the peculiar happiness of my life will ever consist in promoting the welfare of a people whose loyalty and warm affection to me I consider as the greatest and most permanent security of my throne.’ These were unexceptionable sentiments, no doubt written by a secretary. But they would soon be tested.

He had come to the throne at the height of Pitt’s war that had endured for four years, and had already brought signal advantages to the nation. Yet the new king hated the war, and hated Pitt. He associated them both with his grandfather, George II, with whom he had conducted a family feud ever since he could reason. He believed that his grandfather had been a ‘king in chains’, in thrall to greedy and mendacious ministers. He believed that Pitt had used him and his father, Frederick, prince of Wales, to leap into the royal closet; he denounced the minister as possessing ‘the blackest of hearts’ and as having been a ‘snake in the grass’. It was inevitable that he would wish to make his own way. His mother had often repeated to him, ‘George, be a king!’ He did not intend to disappoint her. The image of Duty was always hovering before him.

He seems to have inherited a strain of obstinate self-righteousness from his Hanoverian predecessors; he had the deficiencies of a closed mind, including overweening self-confidence combined with long spells of resentment and sullenness. Lord Waldegrave, his early governor, described him in his Memoirs as ‘scrupulous, dutiful, ignorant of evil and sincerely pious; but neither generous nor frank’. He was in certain respects something of a zealot, or prude, and sincerely regretted the lack of decency or propriety at court. A week after his accession he issued a proclamation ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness and immorality’. He had a high opinion of the royal prerogative and would no doubt have gone to the death in defending the Anglican Church; fortunately he did not live in a period which demanded such self-sacrifice or indeed such strident leadership from any king.

He demanded order and system as the watchwords of the new reign. It may have come as a warning to the courtiers that he kept a collection of clocks and barometers; rigour and precision would be the accompaniments of proper service. He knew all the little things about the Army List and courtly etiquette; he knew what buttons should be worn and on what occasions; he knew the routine of everyone attending court, from the highest ambassador to the lowliest page. He rose at six in the morning, and then shaved and dressed before attending to the correspondence that had arrived in the night. He rode before breakfast, which was his only meal before dinner at four. The day was given to business, formal or informal, but he met selected guests for supper at ten. He was always a frugal eater and a prudent drinker.

Yet it would be wrong to paint too staid a portrait of a king who, after all, was only following the example of his Elizabethan and Stuart predecessors in insisting upon the prerogatives of a king. Nothing he said or did would have shocked Elizabeth I or Charles II, except perhaps for his protestations of piety. He loved the outdoors, revelled in sports such as riding and hunting; later in his reign he picked up the soubriquet of ‘Farmer George’ for his love of all aspects of the land.

In the draft of his first formal proclamation to the privy council he had written of ‘a bloody and expensive war’. Pitt of course could not allow any such judgement on the conflict that he had guided towards victory, and in the published version the sentiment had been transformed into this ‘expensive but just and necessary war’. It was believed, not without reason, that the young king had been bullied or otherwise persuaded by the first minister into changing his declaration; this was a lesson that the king would not forget in all his later dealings with his politicians. He came to believe that he had a right to implicit support, and he refused to make concessions; he was not dismayed by criticism and opposition because he knew that he was right. ‘I know I am doing my duty’, he once said, ‘and therefore can never wish to retract’ to which may be added the remark that ‘I would rather risk my Crown than do what I think personally disgraceful.’ This was the habit of mind that lost America.

At first George III revelled in the name and nature of the ‘patriot king’, and even earned the praise of the acerbic Horace Walpole as ‘handsome, open and honest’. The duchess of Northumberland compounded the praise by describing him as ‘fair and fresh coloured’ with blue eyes and white teeth. What more could a king enjoy? But who could have known or guessed that during his long reign he would face madness, the French Revolution, the glory of Napoleon and the loss of America?

Yet already he had ideas of his own, and such a monarch might turn out to be dangerous. He had conceived a hatred for Whigs and Tories alike; he despised the cynicism and the back-biting, the profiteering and the posturing, the lies and the hypocrisy. So he decided to rule without the aid of any party at all, bringing in a variety of ministers as and when he thought fit. It was hoped and believed that this would introduce a new period of peace and understanding in which the Tories, in particular, hoped for the dismantling of the Whig juggernaut and a return to royal favour. The king would once more assume a central political position. This was more than a policy; it was a moral duty.

He brought in a close confidant to help him; Lord Bute was in his late forties and had been his cherished councillor since childhood, and the equally intimate companion of his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The young king, not trusting any of the councillors and politicians who had clustered around his grandfather, relied upon him for everything. Two days after his accession he told Pitt that ‘the king would have no meetings held at which he [Bute] was not present’. This did not of course impress Pitt, who was accustomed to managing matters in his own way. ‘I know’, he wrote, ‘it is impossible for me to act in a responsible ministerial office with Lord Bute … I can’t bear a touch of command, my sentiments in politics like my religion are my own. I can’t change them … I cannot be dictated, prescribed to …’

The king’s trust and dependence upon Bute, however, do suggest that he was still too modest, or too diffident, or too anxious, to exercise his power with proper self-confidence; he always possessed a strain of melancholy and nervous excitement that may have contributed to his later periods of madness.

Bute repaid the trust with loyalty and gratitude, but in other respects he did not seem altogether suitable for the highest offices. He was by no means popular. Scotland was his birthplace and ever since the Act of Union in 1707 the English had had an ambivalent attitude towards the Scots themselves, born out of pride and prejudice. They condemned the majority for their slatternly habits and yet at the same time denounced the most prominent for rapacity and ambition. The fact that his name chimed in the popular ear as Lord Boot was not helpful.

Lord Waldegrave noted that Bute ‘has a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance … for whether the subject be serious or trifling, he is equally pompous, slow and sententious’. The new king’s father had once remarked that he would make an excellent ambassador in a court where nothing happened. It seems that he was dry and awkward in company, but he compensated for his social incapacity by endless business. Chesterfield noted that ‘he interfered in everything, disposed of everything, and undertook everything’.

The politics of the realm were in confusion, with the principal ministers at loggerheads. The king and Bute wished to discontinue the war as soon as practicable; Pitt and Newcastle were in favour of its full continuance. There was a lack of trust at the highest levels, therefore, and Pitt in particular felt that he was impeded and hindered. The Tories hardly knew who or what they were any more, having found royal favour after almost fifty years in the wilderness, and the Whigs were split and dissipated into so many factions and interests that they scarcely recognized each other. As one member, Henry Conway, put it, ‘parties seem not only to have lost their animosities, but the very line that distinguished them is effaced’.

Encouraged by the presence of the king and of Bute, with their known animosity towards Pitt’s war policy, there was a general movement towards peace among the political classes. It was well known that the country was tiring of war but, more particularly, it was tiring of taxes to pay for it. The first move came from the French king, Louis XV, who believed or hoped that the financial resources of the enemy were close to exhaustion. At the end of March 1761 he issued a declaration that talks between the parties should be held on the basis of territorial possessions now held. The technical term for this arrangement, uti possidetis, was a diplomatic nicety that could be interpreted in any number of fashions.

In this period, perhaps fortuitously, a general election was held that engrossed the attention of political spectators. It was a hard and expensive campaign with Horace Walpole describing ‘West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals’ descending on every borough. ‘West Indians’ were the owners of plantations and ‘nabobs’ were the English who had picked up the riches of India. Bribery and corruption increased proportionately and one parliamentary borough, Sudbury, even advertised itself for sale. Given the confused and heterogeneous mixture of alliances, groups, loyalties, factions and coteries – all of them floating above the divisions between Whigs and Tories – it was of course difficult to decide who, if anyone, had ‘won’. The inevitable result was insecurity, and instability, at a time when the challenges to the king’s administration had never been greater.

Pitt, however, was still the dominant minister until the parliament assembled in October 1761. One member, Richard Rigby, described him as ‘the Dictator’ and the French ambassador, François de Bussy, remarked that ‘he has few friends in the Council, but there is no one there strong or bold enough to try to replace him’. He was of course all for continuing the war against the French, on the principle that it is better to knock out your enemy when he is already down.

Pitt also called for a pre-emptive war against Spain so that the two Bourbon powers might not have the time or opportunity to ally against the common foe. He called together his colleagues to reveal to them the information that France and Spain had indeed concluded a family pact. It was doubly important to intercept the annual plate fleet from the Americas that filled its treasury. ‘France is Spain,’ he told them, ‘and Spain is France.’ His colleagues were not inclined to draw the same conclusions. The City declared that there was not enough money for further warfare; Admiral Anson complained that the fleet was not ready. A thousand plausible reasons could be given for caution or inaction.

Pitt reacted in the only way he knew. He would, he said, ‘be responsible for nothing but what he directed’. He resigned on 5 October, to the great relief of Spain, France, the earl of Bute and the new king. ‘I would say,’ George wrote, ‘let that mad Pitt be dismissed.’ But Pitt, to the dismay of his supporters and the incredulity of his opponents, then decided to accept a government pension of £3,000 per year. The cynical response, although brief, was overwhelming. The great patriot could be bought after all, and his selfless direction of his country could now be seen by cynics in a different light. As Horace Walpole put it, ‘Alack! Alack! Mr Pitt loves an estate as well as my Lord Bath.’ Pitt’s resentment was such that his supposed retirement from politics turned out to be temporary. He burned for revenge on his calumniators.

It was now the turn of the earl of Newcastle, the old warhorse of the administration for thirty-eight years, to bow to the force of the ‘new men’ and resign his office as first lord of the treasury. He had already complained that ‘my advice or opinion, are scarce ever asked, but never taken. I am kept in, without confidence, and indeed without communication.’ His lament emphasizes the extent to which public policy was determined by a small handful of councillors. In the early years of George’s reign a group of principal men, generally seven or eight in number but reaching up to thirteen, now took on the name and nature of an inner cabinet as opposed to a larger outer cabinet of assorted worthies. The earl of Bute himself took command of policy with a profound sense of self-importance. Lord Shelburne had remarked that he was ‘always on stilts’.

By the new year Pitt’s prognostications had in fact proved to be correct. The treasure ships sailed into Spanish harbours and the Spanish authorities, so provided, rejected complaints concerning their provocations against English vessels. A war upon Spain was declared in January 1762, and the superiority of English sea power was manifest in the conquest of Havana and Manila. From the West Indies to the Philippines the Royal Navy seemed to be invincible. Yet even as the smoke cleared Bute was pursuing the path of peace; through various intermediaries he was in contact with the courts of Madrid and Versailles. He was perhaps in concert with the popular mood, since in this year there occurred a sharp economic depression which was the harbinger of a decade of droughts and poor harvests.

The preliminary articles of peace were signed at Fontainebleau at the beginning of November, and in the welter of complex negotiations it became clear that England was the gainer of most spoils. Minorca, Nova Scotia, Canada, Senegal, St Vincent, Grenada and other territories now became her property by conquest. The French also ceded British supremacy in India. But Pitt, the man who had fought the war, was not content. He came to parliament with his legs and feet wrapped in flannel; he suffered so badly from gout that he was allowed occasionally to sit as he spoke. Nevertheless his speech against the preliminaries of peace lasted three and a half hours, in which time he described France as a powerful and dangerous rival who should not be rescued at the last minute. Yet the war was over.

The treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, set the seal on the general peace that followed. The countries of Europe were exhausted after seven years of conflict, and the majority of them had gained little if anything from the bloodshed and the destruction. Nobody could keep a list of the homes pillaged, the fields devastated and the inhabitants destroyed by invading armies. Nobody kept a list because nobody cared. The mood, in England at least, was sanguine to the point of smugness. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend that ‘you would not know your country again. You left it a private little island, living upon its means. You would find it the capital of the world … St James’s Street crowded with nabobs and American chiefs, and Mr Pitt attended in his Sabine farm by Eastern monarchs and Borealian electors, waiting till the gout has gone out of his foot for an audience.’

It would seem, then, that by the early 1760s England took its place at the centre of what was rapidly becoming a vast trading network from Canada to Bengal. It was still not seen in imperial terms, and the concept of empire was usually reserved for the vast Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Mughal Empire; it was not a European pursuit as Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published thirteen years later, helped to demonstrate. Nevertheless the gains acquired during the Seven Years War seemed to some to have political as well as mercantile associations, and allusions to empire became more frequent in the 1770s. But there was no planning, no strategy, no coherent policy for the vast agglomerate of colonies, territories, provinces and states that were now under English rule. The response was one of caution and indecision. The prevailing mood was one of unease and uncertainty, with an upsurge in prophetic dissent and apocalyptic moralism that tried to counter what many contemporaries denounced as laxness and irresponsibility. England had a relatively small population on a small island. It was predicted that within a few years more people would inhabit North America.

Trade was the key. Trade promoted wealth and independence; trade nurtured strength. The standard theory of mercantilism held that there was only a finite amount of bullion in the world, and that England should control the largest share. Commerce could, according to Edmund Burke, be ‘united with and made to flourish by war’. Slaves, sugar and tobacco were the principal commodities that expanded in the new climate. The war had repercussions at home, with the gunsmiths, sword-smiths, and dock-workers in eternal demand; the foundries, forges and mills were red-hot. It was not yet clear to contemporaries that this was the prelude to something on an altogether larger scale.

The effort of funding a world war for seven years, of furnishing ships, of paying mercenaries, of collecting taxes and of begging for loans from companies, also ensured that the nation itself would be changed inexorably. It was no longer a private little island that could, theoretically, keep to itself. It had become a giant enterprise with all the demands and appurtenances of state power. It relied upon an expanding treasury and the support of high finance; it depended upon an ever-increasing number of bureaucrats and administrators – let alone the teeming excise men and customs men – to maintain its authority. By the 1720s it had enrolled 12,000 government servants.

A foreign observer noted that ‘the English are taxed in the morning for the soap that washes their hands, at nine for coffee, the tea and the sugar they use at breakfast; at noon for the starch that powders their hair; at dinner for the salt that savours their meat, and for the beer they drink’. The bricks that built their houses, and the coals that kept them warm, the candles and even the windows that gave them light, were also the subject of tax. It is perhaps ironic that the people who complained most loudly about taxation, on the grounds of liberty, were in the end the most willing to pay it. It was part of a generally equivocal attitude towards authority that encouraged revolts but not revolution.

By these means, and others, the English administration consumed the largest proportion of national income of any European state. A substantial 83 per cent of this public money was spent for military purposes. Between the reigns of James II and George IV, at the beginning and end of this volume, taxes had multiplied sixteen times; in the same period England had declared war against foreign enemies on eight separate occasions. The administration had become in effect a war machine directed principally against the Bourbons. It was the most egregious fiscal and military country in the world. Whether many people understood the implications of that fact is another matter. Their awareness is more likely to have expressed itself in the popular patriotic songs that rang out in the halls and tea gardens where it was taken for granted that:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, ever, ever shall be slaves.

Bute had said of the treaty of Paris that ‘he wished no other epitaph to be inscribed on his tomb than that he was the adviser of it’. Yet two months later he resigned from office; his pride was of the brittle kind that is shattered by criticism. There were some who complained like Pitt, for example, that Spain and France had been let off too lightly. It was Bute who had defended the peace and his thin skin does not seem to have been capable of withstanding assault. He had already been badly rocked by the imposition of a cider tax that provoked riots in the West Country and elsewhere. And so, on 8 April 1763, he went. He did not disappear altogether. It was believed that he simply slipped ‘behind the curtain’ to lend the king clandestine advice for the next three years. From that position, therefore, he was about to watch two of the most incendiary events in eighteenth-century English and American history.

20

Here we are again!

He was called ‘Dictionary Johnson’ and ‘the old elephant’, the former term both more eloquent and more accurate after the publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language in the spring of 1755. It was an age of prescription as well as of enquiry; what was loose was confined; what was energetic or exuberant was chastened by rules of good order. The language had been in Johnson’s own words characterized by ‘perplexity’, ‘confusion’ and ‘boundless variety’. He himself was a great shambling devourer of words, a bibliophile and an antiquarian all at once.

The Dictionary was not in one sense unique or unusual. Many dictionaries had already been written, the first of them being Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall published in 1604. The eighteenth century itself was the epoch of dictionaries, with John Kersey’s A New English Dictionary in 1702 and Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological Dictionary published nineteen years later.

The first Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1768. A rage for order permeated public consciousness, with a new interest in sources and beginnings, derivations and definitions.

But Johnson’s work was different. He was not an etymologist or a lexicographer, but a writer. He poured all his eloquence, and his learning, into the anatomy of words with abundant examples of their use from a multiplicity of authors. In the definitions of ‘brim’ and ‘brimful’ he enlists Bacon and Crashaw, Swift and Dryden, Milton and Sidney, and others, but he is more than a hunter-gatherer of allusions. He called it ‘my Book’ and it was for him the book of books, a distillation of the language which was a history and an encyclopaedia, a treatise and a moral tract. It was the expressive world of the English.

He spent his youth in his father’s bookshop on Breadmarket Street in Lichfield, from which he was dispatched to a dame school and then to the local grammar school where he first encountered the sacred mysteries of Greek and Latin. In the Dictionary ‘school’ is defined as ‘a house of discipline and instruction’. He attended Pembroke College, Oxford, for a while until a shortage of funds drove him home to Lichfield. A spell of schoolmastering there did not endear him to the life of a pedagogue and, with David Garrick as his companion, he moved to London where a world of hackery awaited him. This was his proper home, and he embraced it like a lover. The Dictionary was his first major work.

He has become a representative eighteenth-century personage and in truth he could not have flourished in any other century. His melancholy was nothing new, but his melancholy madness smacks of the age of Christopher Smart, William Cowper and George III. Like Cowper he believed himself to be in imminent danger of perpetual damnation; he took large quantities of opium and desired to be confined and whipped. One of his diversions was the new taste for travel literature; his first published work in 1735 was a translation of Father Jerome Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia, and he never lost that contemporaneous taste for the exotic and the unknown.

He is also deemed to characterize the eighteenth century as a result of his enormous eccentricity. The engravings of Hogarth and the fictions of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne afford ample evidence of the same preoccupation with extraordinary characters. In the work of artists and novelists London becomes a pantomime and a masquerade populated by grotesques. Johnson’s most famous biographer, James Boswell, noted that ‘while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand’. In the intervals between talk ‘he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen …’.

When he walked ‘it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon’. He wandered in his walk, swerving from one side of the path to the other in a zig-zag, and he had the obsessive habit of touching every post he passed in the London streets; if accidentally he missed one, he hastened back to tap it. He might stop in the middle of a thoroughfare and raise his arms above his head; before he crossed any threshold he would whirl around in order to make the sudden leap. He enjoyed rolling down hills and climbing trees. He was deeply marked by the scars of scrofula, contracted in his childhood; he was slovenly, often dirty and dressed absent-mindedly. He may be seen as the epitome of the way in which the eighteenth century developed an interest in, and relish for, human character.

The century also marked the true beginning of a taste for reading among the newly literate that included a section of the labouring population; a French observer, César de Saussure, noted in the 1750s that ‘workmen habitually begin the day by going to the coffee-house in order to read the latest news’. Instruction manuals and even novels were scrutinized to learn the principles of good behaviour, of dress and diction; books of practical education, in trade and in agriculture, were greatly in demand. Two years after he had finished his dictionary Johnson persuaded the managers of the London Chronicle to begin reviewing books in its pages. It was an ‘age of authors’, as Johnson had written. Johnson himself was of course one of the most celebrated. That is a prime reason for his emblematic status.

The style of the Dictionary, at once sonorous and peremptory, accounts for some of its power. He himself was sometimes obliged to be ‘Johnsonian’. He once said of a drama that ‘it has not wit enough to keep it sweet’ and then corrected himself with ‘it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction’. When he said of somebody that ‘the woman had a bottom of good sense’ there was general laughter; he bridled at that and continued, in solemn fashion, ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible.’ The registers of eighteenth-century speech could be measured and taught. The purpose of the Dictionary was didactic as well as creative, and was very much in the spirit of the age.

He began his preparations by excessive and intuitive reading. He was an omnivore of books, sometimes literally tearing them apart to get at their contents. When he came upon a word he liked or needed, he would underline it and then mark out the extract in which it was embedded. His small and sometimes ragged retinue of assistants, sometimes four and sometimes six, occupied the upper chamber of his house in Gough Square where they sat at tables like clerks in a counting house. Johnson himself sat on an ancient elbow-chair, with three legs and one arm, propped against a wall.

When he had finished with a book it was passed to one of his companions who would then copy the marked passages onto a quarto sheet; when the sheet was filled with a column of references it was cut into single slips which were then deposited into a number of ‘bins’. In the first edition of the completed work there were 40,000 words and more than 110,000 quotations. It was a wholly practical method of dealing with recalcitrant material, and must compare favourably with the prolonged discussions among the learned scholars of Paris or Florence about their own dictionaries. But it was also the great business of his life, expelling idleness and therefore melancholy. He wrote it, as he said, ‘amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’, but the majesty and importunity of his work sufficiently elevated him.

He wrote a ‘Plan’, a ‘Preface’ and a ‘History of the English Language’ to accompany his work. He believed that the Dictionary itself would uncover ‘the exuberance of signification’ and would in the process comprise ‘principles of science’, ‘remarkable facts’, ‘complete processes’, ‘striking exhortations’ and ‘beautiful descriptions’. Yet these were essentially ‘the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer’. He began his quest in the time of Philip Sidney and ended at the Restoration, because the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries was the one in which ‘the wells of English undefiled’ were to be found and tasted.

He treated his sources with the bravura of a master; sometimes he quoted them whole but, more often than not, he abbreviated them or condensed them. He refused to quote from Thomas Hobbes because he believed his works to be wicked; he quoted much from Milton’s verse but only once from his prose, on the understanding that the prose-writer Milton was a radical and subversive. Johnson considered his Dictionary to bear a moral as well as didactic purpose; he furnished even the simplest words with devotional or ethical associations. ‘Table’ was defined by a sentence from John Locke that ‘children at a table never asked for any thing, but contentedly took what was given them’. It was a work of practical morality. He was a devout and orthodox member of the Anglican communion, for whom words were the building blocks of faith. The first illustration of ‘teach’ comes from the Book of Isaiah with the sentence that the Lord ‘will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths’.

In the course of his survey he came upon words that in a later period would seem hard or strange, but were then part of common discourse. So in succession we find ‘breedbate’, a starter of quarrels, ‘brontology’, the science of thunder, ‘brunion’, a fruit somewhere between a plum and a peach, ‘bub’, strong malt liquor, ‘bubbler’, a cheat, ‘bubby’, a woman’s breast and ‘budget’, a bag. A ‘bedpresser’ was a heavy or lazy man, while ‘pension’ was ‘generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’.

He lists 134 uses for ‘take’, in an account which covers five pages and amounts to 8,000 words. Johnson, however, was not omniscient. He often stated that ‘I know not the meaning’. ‘Tatterdemalion’ is defined as ‘tatter and I know not what’. Of ‘plication’ he merely remarks that it is ‘used somewhere in Clarissa’. Words fade or disappear while new ones emerge; some glimmer for a while before being extinguished while others thrive to become great roots for new systems of thought. In his Plan for the Dictionary Johnson remarked that ‘all change is of itself an evil’ but in the end he was obliged to realize that words are born and die like mortal beings. In that sense it is both a very personal and a very necessary book. To browse through it is to walk through the eighteenth century rendered more vivid by flashes of lightning.

At dawn on the morning of 6 September 1769, a triple discharge of seventeen cannon and twelve mortars on the shores of the Avon at Stratford announced the opening of the Shakespeare Jubilee. It was to be a national festival lasting three days, designed by David Garrick in honour of the nation’s greatest writer; there were to be pageants and plays and processions, attended by all the notables of the time. Dukes, duchesses, actors, politicians, admirals and generals came out in force. Boswell turned up, dressed as a Corsican in order to boost sales of his recent account of that island. He wrote that Garrick ‘observed me. We first made an attitude to each other, and then cordially shook hands.’

The first day passed well enough but on the second the rains of autumn intervened; the cobbles of the town were under water and the waters of the Avon were rising dangerously. Many of the public events were cancelled or abandoned, and the audiences for what remained were wet and miserable. It had not been altogether a triumph but it was in its own terms a succès d’estime; it was the beginning of the festive commemoration of Shakespeare that at a later date would be termed half-ironically as ‘bardolatry’. It also marked the beginning of the national celebration of English drama as an expression of the national spirit. The playwright was a token of growing cultural self-confidence and an emblem of patriotism.

Boswell’s sense of occasion was immaculate since, in the period, drama was the form and substance of the age. Everyone, from the politician to the preacher, took his cue from the stage. The dialogue was noted down and copied. The costumes, of the actresses in particular, were observed. When Boswell ‘made an attitude’ on first seeing Garrick he was copying a gesture from the stage. Snatches of stage dialogue became catchphrases. The most popular performers became the object of burlesque and street theatre. The whole of London was a theatre with even the mendicants ‘dressing up’ for their roles on the streets of the city; there was a costume for the parlour maid, and a costume for the fishwife. When people began to dress ‘above their station’, as was often reported, then social chaos beckoned. The names of Congreve, Sheridan and Aphra Behn are familiar; but every hack writer or journalist, every out-of-work actor or Oxbridge scholar down on his luck, turned to the stage as the most likely means of earning a living.

The two principal licensed London theatres were the Theatres Royal at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, to which the usual variegated London crowd thronged. The gentlemen and those who considered themselves gentlemen were happy to pay 3 shillings to sit on benches in the pit, close to the action, while citizens and their wives paid 2 shillings for the first-floor gallery. The lower sort had the higher seats in the upper gallery, where fruit-sellers and prostitutes wielded their various wares. The most celebrated or wealthy patrons had already hired boxes for their private pleasure. These two theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane were alone licensed to present spoken drama, but of course this did not prevent other venues from providing theatre of a different kind.

Some old relics, used in Elizabethan and Stuart times, were pressed back into service. In 1728 the ‘Old Theatrical Booth’ by the Bowling Green in Southwark, for example, presented operas and ‘an entertainment of dancing in grotesque characters’. The same theatre promised dramatic entertainments on Jack Sheppard, the notorious criminal and escapee, as well as ‘dramatic operas’ and ‘ballad farces’. Other theatrical booths were set up in the courtyard of the George Inn along Borough High Street and by the hospital gate at Smithfield. We read in the Daily Advertiser of 22 October 1776, that ‘the beautiful Patagonian Theatre’ has reopened in ‘the Great Room, over Exeter Change’ with a burletta entitled Midas and a pantomime called The Enchanter. Most of these venues were eventually abandoned, decayed, or burned down. But they are a reminder of London’s teeming theatrical life. By the beginning of 1726 some thirty-six theatrical productions were being advertised.

Everything was of the moment; the jokes and remarks were topical, the allusions immediate, the objects of satire were such modern phenomena as Methodists and ‘bubble’ speculators. People came to hear the latest news or the latest rumours, no doubt from the other members of the audience as much as from the stage. Romances, melodramas and what another age would call variety shows, were also played.

The audience was just as much a matter of attention and speculation as the actors; the chatter of gossip and comment continued through the performance, and there were times when the actors could hardly make themselves heard. The denizens of the pit ate plum cake and blew on tin whistles if they disapproved of any action; the sounds became known as ‘cat-calls’. The theatre was an occasion when the town came to regard itself, as well as to look upon its image on the stage. It was truly a communal experience. The auditorium itself was better lit than the light of day, and the audience had some of the characteristics of the London crowd from which they came – violently so on those occasions when riots took place over the price of seats or the presence of foreign performers. There were times when the interiors of the theatres were wrecked, even, and especially, after the manager had come upon the stage and appealed for calm.

In the world of the eighteenth-century theatre the spectator could often take on the role of the actor. Well-known theatregoers were the talk of the town. One spectator in the upper gallery of the playhouse signalled his approval of the action of the stage by giving loud knocks, with an oaken staff on the benches or on the wainscot, that could be heard all over the house. He was, according to Addison, ‘a large black man whom nobody knows’ and was known as ‘the trunk maker in the upper gallery’ after the noises made by those workers. Another ‘lusty fellow, but withal a sort of beau’, again according to Addison, would leap from one of the side boxes onto the stage before the curtain rose; here he took snuff and made several passes at the curtain with his sword before facing the audience. ‘Here he affected to survey the whole house, bowed and smiled at random, showed his teeth which some of them indeed were very white. After this he retired behind the curtain, and obliged us with several views of his person from every opening.’

The paucity of playhouses in the capital meant that several were built without a formal royal licence; demand prompted supply. Two were opened in the Haymarket, for example, one for the opera in 1705 and one for miscellaneous variety in 1766. A third theatre had been established in Ayliffe Street, Whitechapel, in 1727; there had been an earlier theatre in that vicinity in 1703 where yet another playhouse was created in 1732. So Whitechapel was the second home of drama. The unlicensed playhouses were given tacit permission to open on the understanding that, if their plays gave serious offence, they would be immediately closed.

The Licensing Act of 1737, which obliged plays to be corrected by the lord chamberlain, had an immediate effect upon the stage. There would be no oblique passes at obscenity or blasphemy; there were to be no more political satires. From the defenestration of the eighteenth-century theatre emerged a moral and sentimental drama with appeals to right feeling and right thinking. As Dangle says in Sheridan’s The Critic (1779), ‘Now egad, I think the worst alteration is in the nicety of the audience – no double entendre, no smart innuendo admitted, even Vanbrugh and Congreve obliged to undergo a bungling reformation.’

But the restrictions of the Act not only created a theatre of moral sentiments. They also prompted writers in new directions, thus changing the nature of fiction itself. All the inventiveness and energy, all the wit and drama, were transferred from the stage to the page. The Licensing Act heralded the rise of the serious and successful novel in England. Previously fiction had been considered by Defoe and his contemporaries as simply a digression from journalism, but now it took on a wholly independent life.

Fielding and Smollett, for example, had previously turned their attention towards the stage, Fielding being so successful that he was dubbed ‘the English Molière’. Now their comedy found a new form of expression. What could no longer be seen on stage could still be described in Tom Jones or in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The comedy and the innuendo, the dramatic confrontation and the melodramatic reversal, had become the stuff of fiction.

The six volumes of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones appeared in the early months of 1749 and the four volumes of Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle were published exactly two years later. As a fitting prologue for the immensity of these productions the full seven volumes of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady appeared in 1748. Three incomparable novels had appeared in four years. The eighteenth-century novel had come of age with the implicit declaration that prose fiction could encompass the whole range of human experience in ways that transcended the limitations of the stage.

It became the age of novelists. In the literary history of the mid-to late eighteenth century we hear little of poets or of dramatists; all the attention is drawn to the innovation and invention of the writers of prose fiction. Fielding himself, in the second book of Tom Jones, described prose fiction as ‘a new province of writing’ and declared ‘I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein’. There are no dramatic ‘unities’ to keep and no orders of scansion to follow. The novels of the eighteenth century have very little command of narrative structure; one chapter is very much like the preceding and succeeding ones, but with intricate variations to maintain the reader’s interest.

Smollett, in his preface to The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), describes a novel as ‘a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of a uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient’. Since the presence of ‘a uniform plan’ was the greatest truth of the age, its use here is not necessarily significant. Smollett was in essence remarking that the subject of the novel was human life in all its various detail. There were no rules. So Fielding described Tom Jones as ‘this heroic, historical, prosaic poem’, which might mean anything or nothing. Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle is another case in point in its combination of satire, melodrama, bawdry, theatricality, sentiment, pathos, realism, bathos, suspense and comedy. All that had been banned from the stage, even the characters themselves, poured in crowds onto the page crying out ‘Here we are again!’

Despite the provenance of some of the novelists – Smollett was born in Dunbartonshire and Fielding in Somerset – theirs was a distinctive London vision. The novel was an urban form. It had its origin in satire and in journalism, not necessarily in romance or in allegory. Fielding himself called the novel ‘a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not’. The London roots go very deep. Fielding had a thoroughly urban sensibility which embraced the pantomimic and the scenic, which revelled in energy and adventure, and betrayed little interest in psychological or moral complexity. The outrageous eccentric was his version of the subtle personality. Smollett’s characters in Roderick Random also had to struggle to be heard among ‘the modish diversions of the town, such as plays, operas, masquerades, drums, assemblies and puppet shows’.

Another aspect of the novel’s popularity was concerned precisely with the ‘middling’ classes who now comprised many of its readers. The novel dealt directly with those of ‘quality’, whether foul or fair; in the country they were squires or landowners, and in the city ladies and gentlemen. For those aspiring to gentility,therefore, the novel could become an instruction manual or ‘pattern book’; novels were guides to etiquette and polite society. The characters attain wealth and status through their individual virtue, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) was advertised at the time as written ‘in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes’. Richardson no doubt meant it, but the sentiment may have been taken with a grain of salt by Hogarth and Smollett. The general mood of eighteenth-century fiction is one of high-spirited if ironic gaiety, where the dominant tone of voice is at once comic, inspired and facetious. But the best and truest word is irony.

21

The broad bottom

The earl of Bute, stung and surprised by his general unpopularity, had resigned. After the water covered Bute’s head, up rose George Grenville eight days later. Grenville was from a distinguished family and had enjoyed an equally distinguished political career, partly in association with William Pitt whose animus against France he shared. He was not, however, a favourite of the king who did not relish the replacement of his Scottish confidant with what might be considered a standard Whig politician. He also detested his long-winded and hectoring manner. ‘I had rather see the devil in my closet’, the king said, ‘than George Grenville.’ The king also said of him that ‘when he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch, to see if he may not tire me for an hour more’. But the arch-bore became first minister in the spring of 1763.

The new minister’s first test of fire came before the month was out. In the king’s speech at the opening of parliament on 19 April, he hailed the treaty of Paris signed two months before as ‘honourable to my Crown, and beneficial to my people’. This was still open to question. The year before, John Wilkes had established a newspaper under the name of the North Briton as an ironic allusion to Scottish Bute. He was now set upon vilifying Grenville and the king. Madame de Pompadour, the principal mistress of Louis XV, had asked Wilkes how far press liberty in England reached. ‘That’, he replied, ‘is what I am trying to find out.’

In the forty-fifth number of the North Briton, published on 23 April 1763, he effectively accused the king of lying; there was no peace with honour, but peace born out of corruption and weakness. He wrote that ‘every friend of this country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures, and to the most unjustifiable public declarations, from a throne ever renowned for truth, honour and unsullied virtue’. To accuse a king of lying, even indirectly, was a case of sedition.

The name of Wilkes was in everyone’s mouth. The standard portrait of the man as a grinning malevolent was the creation of William Hogarth; so was the wig curiously reminiscent of the horns of the devil. Wilkes, however, was genuinely cross-eyed. He was in fact a London radical of an old-fashioned sort. The son of a malt distiller from St John’s Square in Clerkenwell, the home of radical groups and meetings since the time of Wat Tyler, he had a somewhat scandalous early life and two or three lacklustre years in parliament before his pen came vividly to life in the pages of the North Briton.

The outcry against his attack on George III was immense. The calls for his arrest were predictable but, perhaps unfortunately, the government issued a ‘general warrant’ that could be used against anyone whom the authorities deemed to be deserving of it. Wilkes himself was placed in the Tower, but in two appearances in Westminster Hall at the beginning of May he denounced general warrants as illegal; as a member of parliament, also, he claimed freedom from arrest. In his second speech to the judge he declared that ‘the liberty of all peers and gentlemen, and what touches me more sensibly, that of the middling and inferior set of people … is in my case this day to be finally decided upon’. Whereupon the chief justice set aside any charges of felony or treason, and ordered Wilkes to be freed. Wilkes had applied the usual practice of the political radical, not by identifying with a popular cause but by creating a popular cause out of his own situation. He proclaimed that he was an honest citizen who had become enmeshed in the toils of the Crown and its servants. In his own person he posed the question whether English liberty ‘be a reality rather than a shadow’. So arose the slogan that echoed through the streets of London, ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ A crowd of thousands escorted Wilkes from Westminster to his house. Soon enough there would be a plethora of handbills, posters and pamphlets proclaiming his cause.

Immediately after his release Wilkes sued the secretary of state, the 2nd earl of Halifax, for signing the general warrant; he was awarded £1,000 in damages by a sympathetic court. Wilkes had effectively taken on the government apparatus and had won. It was a boon for those who felt that something was wrong with the machinery of power.

But power itself could be malicious and devious. Some years before, Wilkes had played a part in the composition of a satiric parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man entitled An Essay on Woman, an obscene elegy ascribed maliciously to the bishop of Worcester. One of the objects of its insinuations was Fanny Murray, erstwhile mistress to the 4th earl of Sandwich. The poem opened, ‘Awake, my Fanny!’ which in some texts appeared as ‘Awake my C …’. She was also compared to the Virgin Mary.

Wilkes had perpetrated a joke but he had also committed a blunder. Parts of the poem were now read aloud in the House of Lords. The noble gentlemen, far from supporting a parliamentarian who had demanded immunity from prosecution, were outraged at one who had the mob and the judges on his side. The leading Whigs held back from expressing their support. In November the Lords condemned An Essay on Woman as ‘a most scandalous, obscene and impious libel’. In the same period the Commons had concluded the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton to be ‘a false, scandalous and seditious libel’ that should be burnt by the common hangman at the Royal Exchange. A large crowd of Londoners assembled on the site, however, and prevented the sheriffs from consigning the paper to the flames.

The Commons now decided that Wilkes himself was not immune from a charge of seditious libel. Although he was detained by a bullet in the groin as a result of a duel with a political opponent, he recovered in time to slip away to France at the end of 1763, avoiding a certain defeat in the courts at the hands of his powerful opponents. He had not lost his sense of humour, however. When asked to play a game of cards he declined on the grounds that ‘I cannot tell a king from a knave’.

In his absence he was tried for seditious libel, found guilty and sentenced to exile. In Paris, according to reports, he was never so happy, preferring the wit and culture of the erstwhile enemy to the more formal and prudish manners of his London contemporaries. Tobias Smollett, in Peregrine Pickle, concedes that ‘France abounds with men of consummate honour, profound sagacity, and the most liberal education.’

Wilkes might have been equally welcome in North America where his impassioned defence of liberty was universally acknowledged; it was said by some that Wilkes and America would stand or fall together. While he had been incarcerated in the Tower, Virginia sent him tobacco and Boston dispatched a consignment of turtles; South Carolina sent him £1,500 to clear his debts and the newly established American colleagues, Sons of Liberty, addressed to him a formal declaration of amity and sympathy. He was fighting their cause against a corrupt administration.

The situation of the American colonies was in any case precarious. Some of them had already been attacked and harassed by a confederation of Native Indian tribes in what became known as ‘Pontiac’s War’ (1763–6) after the name of one of its leaders. The vicious fighting seems to have been confined to the Great Lakes region, to Illinois country and to Ohio country, but the panic fear spread among all the colonists. It was said that the English troops, in retaliation for native atrocities, spread among them blankets infected with the smallpox virus. This was unlikely. It was agreed in London that a large military force should be permanently stationed in North America, not only to discourage the Native tribes but to deter any French incursions on what had once been their territory. France still held the area around New Orleans, in any case, and so controlled the mouth of the Mississippi. Pontiac’s War lasted for a little more than two years.

This conflict of course had to be financed and it seemed to the first minister, George Grenville, only reasonable that the colonists themselves should bear part of the burden of cost. The king had already accused him of having the mind ‘of a clerk in a counting house’. It was entirely in character, therefore, that the minister should devise a ‘stamp tax’ on the grounds that it was not too onerous or too obvious; it was raised on the stamps required to authenticate official documents. He even gave the colonists a year to come up with any proposal of their own to raise the required sums. Yet he failed to anticipate the clamour against what was a wholly new tax imposed without colonial consent. It was worse than a provocation, it was an insult. The Americans were, in a phrase of the time, ‘jealous of their liberties’ and apt to condemn any intervention from England as a form of tyranny.

George Grenville resigned four months after he had introduced the Stamp Act but not as a result of his ill-starred proposal, even though the Act has some pretension to being the most disastrous piece of legislation in English history. He was obliged to leave because he had angered the king once too often. It was over a matter of place involving the king’s mother, but on his dismissal from office the wheels of fortune began to turn. The Butes, the Rockinghams, the Chathams, the Grenvilles, the Shelburnes, the Foxes and the Norths circled around and around on the vast gaming table of state until the golden ball dropped. The marquis of Rockingham was the fortunate recipient of the prize, but he did not last very long; he was in office for a year. When seventeen years later he picked up the golden ball a second time, death mercifully intervened after four months.

This did not encourage steadiness or coherence of policy. Grenville’s Stamp Act had already provoked a furious reaction from the Americans. Virginia was the first to protest with a series of resolutions that were described as ‘the alarm bells to the disaffected’; the officer chosen to administer the Act in Boston was hanged in effigy from a tree and his office was levelled to the ground. The riots spread and became more violent, with the houses of officials ransacked and the records of the courts burned. The merchants of the various colonies agreed that they would order no more goods from England, and cancel all existing contracts; this would have a significant impact upon trade. It may not have been rebellion, but it looked very much like it.

In October 1765, a Stamp Act Congress was convened in New York, when a number of colonies agreed to petition for relief, and also denied that parliament had any power of taxation in their territories. Yet it seems that the Americans were in many respects as confused and as uncertain as the English. Some were enraged at the apparent intention of the mother country to impose a system of colonial oppression, with a standing army. Others supported the king to whom they still believed that they owed allegiance. It has been estimated, but cannot be proved, that between one-third and one-fifth of the colonists were committed loyalists. The fact that each of the thirteen colonies had a different constitution and different precedents only served further to heighten the confusion.

On 1 November 1765, the date on which the Stamp Act came into law, the bells of the American churches were tolled in funereal style and the flags hung at half-mast. The English response to this unhappy and unlooked-for revolt was divided; some ministers argued for compromise, while others wanted to stand fast on a matter of principle. Rockingham, only recently appointed as first minister, realized that it was better to bend in a gale than snap in a storm; he also recognized that the British administration was effectively powerless to mend matters across the wide Atlantic. In March 1766 ministers and members came to an agreement to repeal the Stamp Act with a decisive majority of more than 100 votes. Edmund Burke, Rockingham’s secretary, described it as ‘an event that caused more universal joy throughout the British dominions than perhaps any other that can be remembered’. It was of course a concession to force and to the threat of force, but it was accompanied by a ‘declaratory Act’ that the British legislature had the right ‘to make laws and statutes’ which would ‘bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever’. It was, in other words, a compromise and a muddle which few people noticed at the time. It was enough that the hated Act had been repealed.

Some saw its significance at a later date. Thomas Paine, the champion of American independence, asserted in a pamphlet of 1782 ‘that the “declaratory act”’ left the colonists ‘no rights at all; and contained the full grown seeds of the most despotic government ever exercised in the world’; he added that ‘it went to everything. It took with it the whole life of a man … It is the nature of law to require obedience, but this demanded servitude.’ He sensed that it had been the real cause of war in 1775 and British defeat. Another proximate cause might be in the Stamp Act Congress itself, which brought together various colonies in the face of a common enemy.

Rockingham did not last long enough to savour the consequences of his policy, however, since in the summer of 1766 he was replaced by the ageing Pitt who was still under the impression that he was a man of destiny. He had made what to many had seemed to be the mistake of accepting an earldom; he was no longer the ‘great commoner’ of political legend. As earl of Chatham, however, he was forced to convey his policies from the Lords where he was neither as authoritative nor as eloquent as he had been in the lower house. A ‘squib’ or pasquinade exposed his pretensions. ‘To be disposed of, considerably under prime cost, the stock in trade of a late eminent patriot, consisting of a large assortment of confident assertions, choice metaphors, flowery similes, bold invectives, pathetic lamentations, specious promises all a little worse for wear.’

He chose to become lord privy seal, and the relatively unknown Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd duke of Grafton, was appointed first lord of the treasury, a recipe for unstable administration. The new earl of Chatham had never been known for his attention to administrative detail, but that incapacity now became fatal in a summer when a failed harvest led to bread riots and mob action. He pieced together a cabinet from diverse sources, which Burke described as a ‘tessellated pavement without cement’, so unknown to each other that the first question was often ‘Sir, your name?’ or the first comment ‘Sir, you have the advantage of me’. Frederick of Prussia told the British envoy in Berlin that it was impossible to do business with the British government; it was too unstable. Chatham was a dead failure and perhaps knew as much since, within a matter of months, he had descended into illness. He was first laid low again by gout, that universal ailment, and remained in Bath for October 1766; he then spent the first two months of the new year in the same resort. An absent first minister (even though he did not take the name) is not good for business. By the summer of the year he had grown infinitely worse and one contemporary, Lord Lyttelton, a former chancellor of the exchequer, believed that he now suffered from ‘insane melancholy’. Pitt the former, as he might be known, refused to deal with any administrative matters and an official letter would send him into a fit of trembling; he would sit in a darkened room in silence and suffering.

Grafton became the effective leader of the government while Chatham was out of commission; Charles Townshend was chancellor of the exchequer who in 1767 seemed entirely to have forgotten the lesson of the Stamp Act. He devised what became known as the ‘Townshend Acts’ which imposed duties on certain items imported into America, among them tea, glass and paper, with the precise intention of paying for the expenses of the colonial administration. The money would go into the pockets of the governors and the military, giving them a large degree of independence from what were still called the colonists. ‘Every man in England’, Benjamin Franklin wrote, ‘seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America, seems to jostle himself into the throne with the king and talks of our subjects in the colonies.’ The American reaction to the new Act was one of thorough rejection. Court records were destroyed, and merchants refused to do business with England.

Yet this reaction was less vociferous than that against the Stamp Act. Economic prosperity, and an instinct for moderation or compromise, guided counsels on both sides of the Atlantic and led to three years of relative inactivity. There was in any case now little interest in London concerning American affairs. A much more interesting, and apparently more dangerous, conundrum had emerged in the shape of John Wilkes.

He had returned from his self-imposed exile in France, in February 1768, and if he hoped to cause a scandal he was disappointed. The authorities were not interested in arresting him. It would cause too much trouble. Yet he was determined to make an impression and decided to stand for the City of London in the forthcoming general elections, to be held between March and May, but came last in the voting list; the support of the craftsmen and City masters had not been enough. Not dismayed or deterred he turned his attention to the more radical neighbourhood of Middlesex which, with its market traders and small businessmen, was in a sense an outcrop of London. He managed the election at Brentford Butts, on 28 March, with a consummate sense of theatre: 250 coaches, filled with Wilkes’s supporters sporting blue cockades and brandishing ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ placards, set out for the hustings. He came at the head of the poll, much to the fury of the king and the delight of the populace. The citizens were obliged to light their windows in celebration or watch their glass being shattered, and it was reported that the number ‘45’ was scrawled on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner; the seed of the scandal had appeared in the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton. It was reported in the Annual Register that ‘the rabble was very tumultuous’.

Wilkes had an instinctive understanding of London life ever since his adolescence in Clerkenwell; he could connect himself with the innate radicalism of the crowd in a city where dissident opinion was commonplace. Radical clubs and fellowships met in alehouses and taverns, where they loudly proclaimed their fight against the threats to liberty and freedom by an arbitrary executive. The citizens who followed him were small men of property, urban freeholders, tradesmen, shopkeepers, craftsmen and labourers who were all ostensibly at the mercy of the larger powers of the City and the nation.

‘45’ became a war cry in the streets of the city, therefore, but it was also a symbol of the cause. It was perhaps not coincidence that the last Jacobite rising had occurred in 1745. A candlestick of forty-five branches was manufactured for a publican in Newcastle upon Tyne. The Newcastle Journal reported that a Wilkes dinner in April, just after the election, consisted of forty-five diners who ‘at 45 minutes past one drank 45 gills of wine with 45 new laid eggs in them’. Five courses were served with nine dishes each, making up the magic number, while in the middle of the dining table rested a sirloin of beef weighing precisely 45 pounds. And so it went on. It became a craze – forty-five toasts, forty-five pipes of tobacco, forty-five sky-rockets, wigs of forty-five curls. On the flags his supporters had carried into Brentford were inscribed the words ‘FREEDOM. LIBERTY! BILL OF RIGHTS. MAGNA CHARTA!’ It was the ancient discourse of the English.

The king demanded that this seditious and disruptive scandal-monger should be prevented from taking his seat in parliament and there was much debate whether a convicted criminal, albeit one sentenced in his absence, should be able to disport himself in public. Wilkes himself then took the initiative and announced that he would surrender himself to the judiciary, and waited for the verdict in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark. His partisans crowded the district and the tumult grew so violent in the adjacent St George’s Fields that on 10 May 1769, a regiment of Scottish soldiers was sent in to keep the peace. In the subsequent disturbances a group of soldiers shot an innocent passerby; the Riot Act was read for the second time and as a result some five or six others were killed, among them ‘Mr William Redburn, weaver, shot through the thigh, died in the London Hospital’ and ‘Mary Jeffs, of St Saviour’s, who was selling oranges by the Haymarket, died instantly’.

In June Wilkes was fined and imprisoned for twenty-two months on the old charge of seditious libel; his confinement was relatively comfortable, however, bolstered by gifts of food and money from his more wealthy supporters. The Commons tried to compound his disgrace by depriving him of his new seat in Middlesex. His expulsion provoked some sporadic rioting in London, and the 2,000 freeholders of Middlesex determined to nominate him once more for parliament. There then ensued a political comedy in which Wilkes was returned unopposed before once more being disqualified; he stood again, but his victory was annulled. He was once more chosen by the electors of Middlesex, but then promptly expelled on the grounds of his ‘incapacity to be elected’. He stood for the fifth time and was again victorious in the ballot, but the Commons proceeded to invite one of his opponents to take the seat.

In the spring of the following year he was duly released from the King’s Bench Prison to wild acclaim from the crowd for a popular hero who had shown both bravery and imagination in confronting the forces of authority. He had no political programme as such, and can hardly be claimed as a radical let alone a revolutionary; he appealed to what were considered the traditional liberties of the people, but he did so with an acute awareness of what might be called the power of the press. He orchestrated the political sense of the nation by a mixture of mockery, satire and denunciation. He was a symbol of defiance and independence. When canvassing in Middlesex, in his days of freedom, he was told by one householder that ‘I’d rather vote for the devil’. ‘Naturally,’ Wilkes replied, ‘but if your friend is not standing, may I hope for your support?’ His statue now stands at the bottom of Fetter Lane, the only cross-eyed effigy in London.

The power of the press was not lost upon others. There had been a growing awareness in the middle decades of the eighteenth century of public opinion ‘out of doors’ as evinced in the circulation of the newspapers. The Morning Chronicle was established in 1770 and the Morning Post two years later; by 1777 there were seventeen newspapers published in London, seven of which were printed daily. A year later the Sunday Monitor became the first Sunday newspaper in England.

It was in any case a great age for political excitement. The long decay of the earl of Chatham came to its culmination with his withdrawal from office in the autumn of 1768, confirming Grafton’s supremacy. It was Grafton who weathered the storms over Wilkes and the American tax revolt, but he was not made for leadership at a time of riots, petitions and the ridicule of the press.

One anonymous contributor to the press created a sensation. A correspondent by the name of ‘Junius’ suddenly emerged in the public prints. He had a talent for scurrility and vicious abuse, but it was his anonymity that prompted the greatest excitement. As Samuel Johnson wrote, ‘while he walks like Jack the Giant-Killer in a coat of darkness, he may do much mischief with little strength’. Was this a minister or ex-minister telling secrets from behind the curtain? His essays were printed in the Public Advertiser from 1769 to 1772, at the very height of the Wilkes affair, and he did much to inflame public opinion. The duke of Grafton was ‘a black and cowardly tyrant’, one ‘degraded below the condition of a man’, while the king is described by inference as ‘the basest and meanest fellow in the kingdom’. The king’s mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta, was denominated ‘the demon of discord’ who ‘watches with a kind of providential malignity over the work of her hands’. When the dowager was dying of cancer Junius wrote that ‘nothing keeps her alive but the horrible suction of toads. Such an instance of divine justice would convert an atheist.’ It was lurid and sensational, morbid and maleficent, and acted as a perfect complement to the fashion for political caricatures by Gillray and others in the 1780s.

Their cartoons revealed a world of political horror and degradation, Westminster was consigned to Sisyphus where monstrous growths and wens disfigured all the bodies politic, where huge and pendulous arses squirted shit and where all the participants were crooked or disfigured. The so-called statesmen slavered over their spoils while spectators pissed themselves with excitement or fear. You can almost smell their foul breath. Political opponents blow each other apart with enormous farts, liberally mixed with excrement, or vomit out their greed or venom in vast waterfalls of sick. One politician is crowned with a chamber pot of piss, while another waits for a flagellation. It was a pictorial world of degradation that had no parallel in other centuries, unless we count the ‘babooneries’ sketched in the margins of medieval manuscripts. It was the tradition of salacious and scabrous English humour whipped up into delirium. There was also much horror in the real world. The duke of Grafton offered the lord chancellorship to Charles Yorke; Yorke accepted the office but then, overwhelmed by anxiety, cut his own throat.

It was a time of riot, compounded by the agitation over Wilkes and the example of defiance demonstrated by the American rebels. Insurrection was in the air. Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1769, declared that ‘I have seen, within a year, riots in the country, about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers, riots of weavers, riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which customs house officers and excisemen have been murdered, the king’s armed vessels and troops fired at’. In the previous year merchant seamen mutinied at Deptford, Newcastle upon Tyne and other key ports, while the hatmakers of Southwark struck for higher pay. In the year before that, there had been food riots, looting and general disquiet.

Political clubs and fraternal associations emerged in greater numbers, particularly in the larger cities. Yet we may guess that every inn and tavern had its local Cromwell or Hampden inveighing against the squire or the parson or ‘them at Westminster’. Between May 1769 and January 1770 petitions were addressed to St James’s Palace from thirteen counties and twelve borough towns, all of them asking for or demanding a speedy dissolution of parliament. Public meetings, rather than crowds or riots, became for the first time an aspect of political life. In the summer of 1769, 7,000 people congregated in Westminster Hall to express their grievances against the administration.

The duke of Grafton gave way under the pressure of events, and in his place the king nominated Frederick North, the 2nd earl of Guilford, who had climbed the greasy pole without as yet falling to earth. Lord North, as he was commonly known, has often been viewed by posterity as a dunderhead who managed to lose America in an act of clumsiness; but in fact he was a shrewd political agent not unlike Robert Walpole in his command of parliament. He was of an unfortunate appearance, rather like a caricature of the king himself; his bulging eyes and flabby cheeks gave him, according to Horace Walpole, ‘the air of a blind trumpeter’. But he had a broad bottom, as the phrase went, of sense and good humour that gave him balance and composure in times of crisis. When one member castigated him for running or, rather, ruining the country while he was asleep on the treasury bench, he opened one eye and replied, ‘I wish to God I were.’ He was circumspect, cautious, patient and methodical. ‘He fills a chair’, Johnson remarked.

In England he was by some act of political magic able to induce a mood of somnolence or lethargy upon what had been a heated populace. ‘After a noted fermentation in the nation,’ Burke wrote, ‘as remarkable a deadness and vapidity has succeeded it.’ The violent agitation followed by sullen torpor is not readily explicable, except on some analogy with individual human psychology. Certainly Lord North did not have the same effect on the American colonies, where his efforts to calm the agitation served only to inflame the situation.

On becoming first minister in 1770 he decided to abolish all the taxes Townshend had imposed upon American imports, except that upon tea. The measure was supposed to be a palliative, like the commodity itself, but it acted as a very plausible grievance. The lifting of the duties could be claimed as a moral victory by the Americans but the surviving tax on tea could be used as a call for further action; it was a token of American servitude.

On 5 March 1770, a crowd of Bostonians surrounded the English soldiers who had been ordered to guard the customs house of the port; the Americans insulted, threatened and finally attacked them. The order was given to fire; three Bostonians died immediately and two expired later from their wounds. The English withdrew from the customs house under a persistent hail of stones, but a town meeting demanded that they leave the area altogether; consequently they were ordered to remove to Fort William on an island 3 miles away. The Americans had won another token victory. The event inevitably became known as ‘the Boston Massacre’ and inspired much magniloquent rhetoric. One oration to commemorate the occasion described ‘our houses wrapped in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery; our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion …’. The incident was never entirely forgotten, and it has been considered to be the single most important incitement to the coming war of independence. Yet other Americans at the time were not so stirred, and deplored the passions of the Bostonian crowd; the New York Gazette declared that ‘it’s high time a stop was put to mobbing’.

So the drift of events was unclear and uncertain even to those closest to it. Some on both sides believed that a show of force would make the other party back down. Some Americans cried ‘Tyranny!’ while some English cried ‘Treason!’ Each side had a false impression of the other, and such mutual misunderstanding could be a source of conflict.

Three small incidents are suggestive. In 1770 a customs collector was beaten up in New Jersey. In June 1772 a vessel being used by the British revenue ran aground off the coast of Rhode Island; it was promptly burned by the inhabitants. In March 1773 the assembly of Virginia suggested that all the colonial assemblies engage in correspondence, to which Benjamin Franklin responded that ‘a congress may grow out of that correspondence’. A congress would represent common concerns and ambitions that would greatly alarm the ministers at Westminister. The force of events could now silently do its work.

22

The magical machines

Two brothers, John and Thomas Lombe, erected a manufactory in 1719 on an island in the River Derwent. It housed a silk engine which became the subject of popular curiosity and amazement, ‘a new invention’ combining, according to the original patent, ‘three sorts of engines never before made or used in Great Britain, one to wind the finest raw silk, another to spin, and the other to twist …’. An application for the renewal of the patent, fourteen years later, referred to ‘97,746 wheels, movements and individual parts (which work day and night)’. Malachy Postlethwayt, in his The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, reported ‘this little being, not above five or six feet in height, with two arms, will dispatch as much work as a giant’.

The genteel came in coaches from all over the county to witness the marvel. The manufactory, a stone edifice of five storeys, was powered by a large water-wheel; within the building tall cylindrical machines whirred and rotated. One man was responsible for sixty threads. It was the principal sight of Derby and, with its machinery, its continuous operation and its specialized workforce, can be considered as the prototype for the silk mills and cotton mills of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was said that the Lombes had stolen the idea from Italy, and that as a result John Lombe was poisoned in 1722, but this was no doubt part of the romance of the new age. By the early nineteenth century it sat on the landscape with all the authority of an ancient monument.

Other wonders abounded. Daniel Defoe, writing in the year after the silk mill was constructed, remarked upon the ‘new undertakings in trade, inventions, engines, manufactures, in a nation pushing and improving as we are’. There was yet no concept of the factory as a powerhouse; it was generally used to describe a building inhabited by foreign merchants. But these solid, grim edifices began to enter social and economic calculations. Matthew Boulton completed his Soho manufactory, on Handsworth Heath in north-east Birmingham, in 1769; it was used for the manufacture of various ‘toys’ or small goods such as buckles and buttons. The main warehouse was nineteen bays wide, and three storeys high, with a Palladian front. But it looked more like a prison than a country house. This was the site where in 1776 James Watt began the manufacture of steam engines. Seven years before, Watt’s separate condenser and Richard Arkwright’s water-frame had been granted patents; new engines powered by steam could now be developed, and the water-frame could create miles of inexpensive cotton for cheaper and cheaper clothing.

Again in 1769, at a time when the political world was exercised by ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’, Josiah Wedgwood opened his vast pottery works of some 350 acres beside the Trent and Mersey Canal in Staffordshire and named it Etruria in homage to its classical predecessors; thus the factory could be given the illusion of a picturesque past, even if its principles were thoroughly modern. Wedgwood effectively inaugurated the age of beautiful china in England. It was he who introduced neoclassicism to the English consumer and customer. This was one of the more aesthetic consequences of industrial change, but one which had taken place without any great technological innovation.

Two years after the establishment of Etruria Richard Arkwright built a factory at Cromford in Derbyshire to accommodate his newly invented machinery, and then constructed a village to house his hundreds of workers, men, women and children. The water-frame itself, built in units of 1,000 spindles, created the first pure English cotton cloth. As a result cotton became the paramount product of the textile industry. By the early nineteenth century cotton was king. An anonymous poem, The Temple of Nature, published in 1803, celebrated the mighty change:

So Arkwright taught from cotton-pods to cull,

And stretch in lines the vegetable wool;

With teeth of steel, its fibre knots unfurl’d

And with the silver tissue cloth’d the world.

If the Dutch could erect a statue to the man who taught their nation how to cure herring, it was asked, surely a statue might be raised for the creator of a great national manufacture and manufacturing system?

Some observers, however, tilted at the first factories in the manner of Don Quixote riding at windmills. They were compared to workhouses, which indeed in certain respects they resembled; workhouses themselves were known as ‘houses of industry’, and the first factory for the production of steam engines was known in 1702 as a ‘workhouse’. There was a connection perceptible to contemporaries between the forced regulation of the poor and the treatment of industrial workers. The manufactories were also compared to army barracks, with the same emphasis on strict timing, order and efficiency.

The new industrial system, still in its very early stages of growth, came out of a practice that has become known as ‘proto-industry’ or ‘primitive capitalism’. It centred upon domestic labour, whereby agricultural workers and their families spun and wove as well as worked the land. Daniel Defoe described it well in the course of his tour of Britain when he crossed the Pennines. He visited the premises of a large clothier and found ‘a house full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some dressing the cloth, some in the loom’. In the immediate area were innumerable cottages ‘in which dwell the workmen who are employed, the women and children of whom are always busy carding, spinning etcetera’. Any child over four years old was gainfully employed.

It was in a literal sense a cottage industry with a small merchant, or small capitalist, putting out the raw material for spinning or weaving to the families of agricultural workers before collecting the finished yarn or cloth at a stated time. The farmer’s wife, and the farmer himself, would work the loom at all hours; the carding, spinning and weaving took place at the same time as the harvesting of wheat, peas and beans. The independent cottagers might sell socks and cheese, hogs and cloth. In Lincolnshire cow dung could be used to make fuel, while hog dung was used as a bleaching agent for cloth; hence the saying about Lincolnshire, ‘where the hogs shit soap and the cows shit fire’.

Clothmaking was ill-paid labour, dependent upon seasonal change, and generally took place in cramped and filthy conditions. The cottagers worked through the night, and in darkness, because they were too poor to own a light. They worked through the frost and cold, when the fields yielded nothing. The weavers and tailors called the summer ‘cucumber time’, because that was all they could afford to eat. Industrialism did not seem at the time to be the greater evil.

The origins of industrialism are hard to find precisely because they are ubiquitous. Some say that the small merchants who became ‘putters out’ to the agricultural workers in time became master manufacturers by bringing twenty or thirty looms within one building. Others say that the pressure of an ever-growing population led ineluctably to cities and to mass employment in the industry of cities. Between the years 1760 and 1830 the population grew from 6.1 million to 13.1 million; it had in other words more than doubled in size. The land did not need the people. So they gathered in urban conurbations where employers were happy to use cheap labour on a larger and larger scale. Other consequences inevitably followed; more houses had to be built, and transport improved.

Some say that technical change and innovation were the spark of industrialism, an incremental process sometimes interrupted by giant leaps forward like the introduction of the steam engine or of complex and efficient textile machinery. It was often claimed, in this context, that the British were in any case a thoroughly empirical and practical people, free of the French and German predilection for theory; that is one generalization which has in fact been accepted over time. Louis Pasteur once remarked that ‘chance favours only the mind that is prepared’. It was said that every factory had its own inventor.

Others say that industrialism was fuelled by cheap credit and that its rapid growth was prompted by the abundance of capital combined with an interest rate of approximately 3 per cent. England was a rich country, made evident in the subscriptions to the Bank of England and the myriad ‘bubbles’ on the Stock Exchange. An opportunity had now come to invest in industries that had an illimitable future. The remarkable increase of foreign trade in the last six decades of the eighteenth century has also been invoked as the motive for further industrialization.

Another incentive came from the absence of government intervention; it cleared the ground a little, with low interest rates, but it did not attempt to direct industrial policy. There was no active opposition to technological change or improvement, and what obstruction there was came from irate workers who found their livelihoods being taken away by machines. The government did nothing.

Other causes for the speed of industrialism have been adduced. There were no wars on home soil; the political system remained infinitely adaptable, and there was no revolution like that within France. Politics is only part. The factories encouraged economies of scale but, more importantly, they increased specialization of labour.

The power of science, and rational calculation, mightily impressed the commercial classes; watches, clocks and precision instruments, like lathes and planing machines, were the appurtenances of the age. It was not unusual to see microscopes and telescopes in the grander homes; the barometer became a conversation piece. From 1675 to 1725, the proportion of richer London homes with clocks on display rose from 56 per cent to 88 per cent. By 1800, 8,000 men worked on watches in Clerkenwell, each with his own particular speciality. John Harrison, the man who solved the problem of longitude in 1759, fashioned the chronometer that Captain Cook took with him on his voyages around the world.

One other, perhaps more spiritual, cause may be mentioned for radical industrial change. The ubiquity of dissent among experimentalists and innovators, and the role of the dissenting academies in training young men in practical skills, has led many to conclude that the Protestant spirit of independent thought and practice had been a contributing fact to the rise of industrialism. The Catholics were believed, quite unfairly, to be incapable of facing new frontiers. It would be unwise to pick out any one of these putative causes or themes, however, as the most significant. If we may steal from Romans 8:28, all things worked together for good, at least for those who considered it good.

The nature of the change has also been interpreted in a hundred different ways. It is now described as ‘the Industrial Revolution’, but the phrase was never used at the time. It was coined by a French socialist, Auguste Blanqui, in 1837 and was then taken up seven years later by Friedrich Engels in an essay entitled ‘The Condition of England’. It was then widely publicized by Arnold Toynbee in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England, published posthumously in 1884. If this indeed were a revolution there was nothing sudden or shattering about it. It can best be seen as part of a cycle that lasted for approximately a hundred years. The increase in national growth seems to have started in the 1740s, and then made rapid advances in the 1780s and 1790s, with a further increase in the 1830s and beyond.

If the term did not exist, how was the reality to be interpreted by contemporaries? Were they even aware that something surprising or unfamiliar was happening all around them? Arthur Young in his Political Arithmetic, published in 1774, asked his readers to ‘consider the progress of everything in Britain during the last twenty years’; the sentiments were repeated two years later in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations where he contemplated ‘the natural progress of England towards wealth and improvement’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of the same period noted that ‘the discoveries and improvements’ of the age ‘diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by conquest or dominion’. The solid foundations of the change were also understood. In 1784 it was reported that ‘Britain is the only country hitherto known in which seams of coal … iron ore and limestone … are frequently found in the same fields and in the neighborhood of the sea’. So the observers of the time were aware of a decisive change in the state of the nation.

What became clear was the sheer continuity of change, bolstered by one innovation following another in an almost evolutionary form. Periods of social or technical change had at some stage, in preceding centuries, reached an equilibrium; but in the latter part of the eighteenth century there seemed no end to the process of innovation. E. J. Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire, published as late as 1968, remarked that ‘no change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialization’.

The most profound, and most elusive, manifestations of change can really only be seen in retrospect. Perhaps it did not occur to inventors, engineers, or scientists that they were seeking power over nature. It might have seemed blasphemous. Yet that power was indeed the result. The substitution of coal for wood provided what seemed at the time to be an inexhaustible source of supply. The soil that had previously been devoted to growing timber could now be harnessed for the supply of food. When the forests and woods had been cleared for fuel, there was a biological limit to the period of their renewal; with the source of power under the ground, the problem no longer arose. As a result of the country’s natural resources, the scale of energy available to Britain was for a crucial period greater than that of any other European economy. This is one of the keys to industrialism.

It has been estimated by the celebrated historian of the Industrial Revolution, E. A. Wrigley, that the output of 10 million tons from the coal industry in 1800 provided energy equivalent to that produced by 10 million acres of land. The escape from the limits of an organic economy meant in turn the escape from the constraints upon growth. No more time and tide, no more wind and water. The coal was to all intents and purposes limitless, incalculable, mineral ‘gold’ packed to blackness within caverns measureless to man. England had once been known as a land of woods and forests; now it had become a realm of coal.

The improvement, however, was slow and imbalanced. While some parts of the economy, such as iron-smelting, textiles and mining, experienced rapid change, much of Britain’s work and workforce remained in the traditional economy for a further hundred years. Bakers, millers, blacksmiths and tanners stayed essentially in the mid-eighteenth century well into the reign of Victoria. Many workshops were still in the seventeenth century. Different levels of time, and experience, existed simultaneously.

The increase in the production of coal was gradual but inexorable; in the course of the eighteenth century the output rose from 3 million tons to 10 million tons before rising fivefold between 1800 and 1850. As a result the landscape was changed for ever. The Birmingham Mail recorded that ‘blue skies change to a reeking canopy of black and grey smoke. The earth is one vast unsightly heap of dead ashes and dingy refuse. Canals of diluted coal dust teach how filthy water may be and yet retain fluidity. Tumbledown houses, tumbledown works, tottering black chimneys, fire-belching furnaces, squalid and blackened people.’ The same Sisyphean vision of sublimity or horror is recorded by Charles Dickens in his study of the midlands in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

When Little Nell and her grandfather pass through the region they see ‘paths of coal ash and huts of staring brick … trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour which hung in a dense ill favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom’. The two pilgrims are taken into an ironworks ‘echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingling with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard before’. The wild imagination of the novelist is as powerful as his observation, but he was right in at least one respect; such noises had never been heard on earth before, except, perhaps, during a volcanic eruption.

Dickens describes the iron workers as ‘moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires’. Some slept among the ashes and cinders while others drew out the glowing sheets of metal ‘emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts’.

Yet heat and light represented more, much more, than the conditions of a working life. It was the manifestation of a great change. Coal could not simply be used to fashion metal. It could create iron. The centre of that alteration was the vale of Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire. Nowhere could look less like a vale of pastoral verse.

A Quaker iron-master, Abraham Darby (the first of three), settled in Coalbrookdale where in 1708 he leased an old blast furnace with some attendant forges. Within a year of his arrival in this vale of unhealth he became the first man to produce pig iron of quality smelted with coke. The area had numerous advantages, among them the fact that it harboured coal with fewer sulphuric impurities than elsewhere, thus improving the quality of the iron manufactured by its means. Darby fed his furnaces with coal, and with the coke produced the iron for casting pots. Coke out of coal took the place of charcoal out of wood. The making of iron was no longer dependent upon the life and death of organic things. These were the procedures that would lead in time to the bridges, the railway engines, the pipes, the cylinders, the cannon, the shot, and the machine parts that would create the life of the nineteenth century.

The first iron rails were cast at Coalbrookdale in 1767. The technology of the time was now entering an expansive and self-sustaining phase that would never pause or rest. In the course of this history we will come to remark upon the stunning interdependence of techniques and inventions; all things seem to come together, so that one cannot exist without the other.

The significance of the change was not immediately realized; Abraham Darby himself was of a modest and quiet nature, and his Quaker brethren seem happy to have kept the new technique within the religious family. But to their credit the Darby family never took out a patent, unlike most of their colleagues, on the grounds that it would be wrong ‘to deprive the public of such an acquisition’.

The possibilities of the human sublime are nowhere more evident than in Philip Loutherbourg’s painting Coalbrookdale by Night (1801), where sulphuric flames belch into the night sky only faintly illuminated by a pale moon. It is a landscape of fire in which the only source of light is the inferno; it is apposite that one of the names for this manufactory was ‘Bedlam’. Yet the spiritual connotations of the flame and fire do not impede the recognition that this is also a place of industry and production; in the foreground horses are pulling away a filled wagon while a dog trots beside them.

Turner’s Limekiln at Coalbrookdale (c.1797) is also ravished by light, with a white, blue and orange glare drawing the attention to the left side of the painting; a small line of light travels down the hillside, illuminating two workers with horses, while an arch into the kiln itself reveals fire and shadow as if it were some enchanted cavern. This was the significance of the beginnings of what became known as the Industrial Revolution. It was a time of vast possibility, not unlike that suggested by the alchemical magic of the sixteenth century, whereby the womb of the earth might bring forth new life. In The Old Curiosity Shop one old worker, tending the furnace, remarks to Little Nell that ‘it’s my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life’. The fire would never go out.

The steady progress of industrialism was itself bound by the unwritten laws of mutual interdependence. Examples of simultaneous invention and change are suggestive. It so happened, for example, that in the summer and autumn of 1815 George Stephenson in Newcastle upon Tyne and Humphry Davy in London both hit upon the construction of the safety-lamp for miners; one of Stephenson’s collaborators conceded that the two men ‘were original and separate discoverers of the principle’. Clusters of inventions with similar purposes occurred within a matter of years or even months. The ‘puddling’ of iron, allowing bar iron to be made without charcoal, was developed within months both in South Wales and in Fontley near Plymouth; neither inventor knew of the other. Was this more than a happy accident?

The elements of reciprocity are everywhere apparent. The technique of boring cannon, for example, was used for the making of steam-engine cylinders; the invention of a coke-blast furnace led to cast iron; cast iron led to Newcomen’s first steam engine; the steam engine then permitted the large-scale production of iron. When it was discovered that a steam engine was too powerful for wooden machinery, iron machinery was for the first time employed in its place; this allowed for the construction of heavier machinery which in turn demanded a more powerful engine. Everything worked together, pushing on the rate and nature of technological change. Machines were employed to make larger and better machines. We may be reminded of the development of robots.

The growing demand for steam, at the forge and the factory, helped to create more efficient steam engines. The use of iron rails for the wagons carrying coal, to the furnaces at Coalbrookdale, had a direct influence upon the first railway lines. The mass manufacture of pottery pipes played an important part in the sanitary provisions of the nineteenth century; more importantly, perhaps, it allowed the proper drainage of fields, which in turn increased the yield of the land. The increase in agricultural production in turn supported a larger and larger industrial population. The massive increase in the manufacture of cloth made it vital to devise a new form of rapid bleaching; so the chemists turned their attention to oil of vitriol, or sulphuric acid, rather than the chimerical elixir vitae.

Machine production ensured large-scale manufacturing which in turn encouraged wider and wider markets; so does mass production lead to popular consumption, or consumption encourage production? It is a familiar dichotomy. Other questions arise. How was it possible, for example, that two entirely different industries, cotton manufacture and iron-making, could advance simultaneously? It resembles some of the problems of natural evolution, as if machinery itself had the characteristics of a biological entity. We may even begin to parrot Darwin’s theories of organic evolution to account for the slow, gradual and inexorable process of the ‘Industrial Revolution’.

None of these developments would have been possible without the diffusion of what might be called the scientific attitude, descended directly from the example of Isaac Newton who in the previous century had been an instrument-maker as well as a theoretician; at the age of twenty-six he constructed his own telescope, and made its parabolic mirror from an alloy of tin and copper that he himself had devised. As president of the Royal Society he emphasized the central roles of reason and experiment that would become crucial in the industrial world of the next century. By the early eighteenth century scientific lectures, under the aegis of the Royal Society, were being heard in London and elsewhere complete with ‘barometers, thermometers and such other instruments as are necessary for a course of experiments’. A disciple of Newton, the Reverend John Harris, delivered lectures on mathematics at the Marine Coffee-House in Birchin Lane ‘for the public good’. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a British natural philosopher, lectured on experimental philosophy but included a disquisition on an early steam engine that ‘was of the greatest use for draining mines, supplying towns with water, and gentlemen’s houses’. By the 1730s the magical properties of electricity were being thoroughly examined.

One group of scientists and industrialists formed a club in which to converse and to share their experimental learning. The Lunar Society of Birmingham had first been established in the late 1760s by a group of innovators, radical in politics and religion as well as in science. Among them were botanists, manufacturers, philosophers, industrialists, natural scientists and geologists eager to harness the unrivalled curiosity and experimentation of the period. The members included Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Joseph Priestley; industrialists, iron-masters and men of science exchanged information on matters of practical technology as well as more intellectual concerns. It was a forcing house for change, a collective endeavour in the application of science. Most of the members owned laboratories for their enterprises and Wedgwood, for example, was intent upon mineral analysis and the chemistry of colour.

Matthew Boulton at the age of eighteen created a technique for inlaying steel buckles with enamel, but he also cultivated what he called the ‘philosophic spirit’; in his notebook he jotted down entries on the human pulse and the movement of the planets. This was the spirit of enterprise which drove the scientific culture of the eighteenth century. No human knowledge was alien to the inventors. Joseph Priestley has been awarded the palm for identifying ‘phlogiston’ or oxygen and for discovering photosynthesis; Boulton prompted and assisted Watt in the construction of the steam engine.

The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce had been established in 1754 as a sure token of the advance in national understanding. It was designed, in the words of its charter, ‘to embolden enterprise, to enlarge science, to refine art, to improve manufacture and to extend our commerce’. It established premiums as an award for mechanical invention, as well as artistic enterprise, confirming the general movement of innovation; art and science were not considered to be necessarily separate activities, and in the notebooks of the society are minute investigations into blue cobalt and red madder. Those constituents could also be used in industrial dyeing. So once again everything came together.

It has been described as an aspect of the ‘Enlightenment’, although that essentially European movement of thought did no more than touch English shores. It was clear, however, that in Walpole’s words ‘natural history is in fashion’. The figure of the virtuoso, and assemblies of virtuosi discussing such matters as human anatomy, were noted in the Spectator not without mild irony. Jonathan Swift satirized the tendency in ‘A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan’, the third part of Gulliver’s Travels written between 1706 and 1709, when he describes ‘the grand academy of Lagado’ where its experimenters are engaged in such pursuits as extracting sunbeams from cucumber, transforming ice into gunpowder, and reducing ‘human excrement to its original food’.

Yet the new spirit of scientific change could not be denied in areas such as mechanics, metallurgy and industrial chemistry. An experimental coal-gas system for public lighting was ready by 1782. The emphasis was always upon industry and commerce, and Adam Smith believed that those engaged in industry were ‘the great inventing class’; we may include among them the chemists and the new professions of electricians and engineers. Samuel Smiles wrote at a later date that ‘our engineers may be regarded in some measure as the makers of modern civilisation’.

The level of inventiveness may also be gauged by the rise in the number of patents applied for and granted. Before the middle of the century approximately a dozen patents were issued each year; the number reached 36 in 1769 and 64 in 1783. In 1792 it reached 85. The inventions ranged from newly designed pumps to the process whereby alkalis might be derived from salt; shaving materials, false teeth, fire alarms and washing machines, burglar alarms and water closets were among the items proposed for patenting. The saving of labour and, more importantly, the saving of time were the results intended. Greater efficiency, accuracy and uniformity were also the goals of the patentees; in that sense they reflect the spirit of industrial change itself.

It may be termed the age of improvement but the word of the day was innovation. ‘The age is running mad after innovation’, Samuel Johnson said, ‘and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way …’ Incremental change of a practical kind was the soul of eighteenth-century endeavour. ‘Almost every master and manufacturer’, Dean Tucker wrote of Birmingham operatives in 1757, ‘hath a new invention of his own, and is daily improving on those of others.’

The awareness of progress was nowhere more apparent, perhaps, than in the changes in transport. The state of the old roads was considered to be a national disgrace. Daniel Defoe reported that in Lewes a lady went to church in a coach drawn by six oxen, since no horses could manage the stiff and deep mud. Many of the roads had not been repaired for fourteen centuries, ever since the Romans first built them. The main road of a parish was often a mere horse-track, but the mud was so soft that the horses sank to their bellies. Even the road from Kensington Palace to the centre of London was a treacherous gulf of mud, with ruts and potholes and loose stones. It took a week to travel from York to London, and one Yorkshireman made his will before venturing on the journey. Arthur Young, in his Northern Tour of 1771, said of the roads to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne that ‘I would advise all travellers to consider this country as sea, and as soon think of driving into the ocean as venturing into such detestable roads.’

The remedy lay in private improvements on a local scale, with the profit motive well in evidence. A series of ‘turnpike trusts’ was established, by which the members were charged with the duty to construct and to maintain a certain stretch of road; to recuperate their costs, and any loans they raised, they were permitted to collect tolls at either end of their route. Some said that there was no discernible change and others complained that the tolls were extortionate but, slowly and haphazardly, the roads improved. They were of course helped enormously by engineers such as Telford and McAdam who rivalled the Romans in their genius for road-making.

In Richard Graves’s Columella, a novel of 1779, a character asks, ‘Who would have said that coaches would go daily between London and Bath in about twelve hours, which, twenty years ago, was reckoned three good days’ journey?’ In 1763 six stagecoaches made the journey from London to Exeter; ten years later, there were four times that number. An advertisement promised that ‘however incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in four days and a half after leaving Manchester!!’ Some passengers grew sick with the speed; it was called ‘being coached’. As a result the mail posts became quicker and more frequent, shaping the ambience of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary fiction. Everything went faster, from the carriage of grain or coals to the improvements in agriculture.

Other advances in transportation occurred at the same time. In the early decades of the eighteenth century there was a concerted effort to improve the rivers of the country by widening and deepening their channels and by strengthening their banks. They were joined from the mid-eighteenth century by the network of canals that created one great transport system; between 1755 and 1820 3,000 miles of canal were constructed. In 1755 the first industrial canal, the Sankey, was carved from the River Mersey to St Helens; three years later the duke of Bridgewater created a canal between his coal mines at Worsley to Manchester, a distance of 7 miles; the fact that the price of coal in Manchester was halved as a result concentrated the industrial mind wonderfully. Between 1761 and 1766 another canal was completed from Manchester to the Mersey above Liverpool. By the last decade of the eighteenth century London, Birmingham, Bristol, Hull and Liverpool were all joined together with innumerable smaller destinations. The artificial rivers carried coal, iron, wood, bricks and slate; they transported cotton, cheese, grain and butter.

The economic activity of the country was transformed, and Adam Smith noted that ‘good roads, canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town’. Local and regional centres came together to create a national market, which in turn helped participation in international markets. Another consequence followed. The fact that various regions of the country were now brought in closer communion, one with another, helped to sustain the burgeoning national consciousness of the people in times of war and foreign revolution.

23

Having a tea party

In the spring of 1773 the administration of Lord North was moved to pass a Tea Act which allowed tea to be sold directly to the Americans by the East India Company, but with a duty of threepence per pound that had first been introduced six years before. Tea was still much cheaper in America than in England but for the colonists this was tantamount to a direct tax imposed by parliament, arousing all the old fears of imperial dictation. It was considered by some to be a scheme to erode American liberties. The Boston Gazette of 11 October, serving the port to which most of the tea was shipped, urged that the commodity be sent back as a mark of ‘the yoke of slavery’. The first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth, arrived at Boston Harbor on 27 November, and two days later a mass meeting of Bostonians resolved to take charge of any others that docked. The activists became known as ‘the Body’.

On 16 December a group of Bostonians, disguised as Mohock Indians, approached the door of the local assembly and gave a ‘war whoop’ which was answered by some in the building itself. They then made their way to the wharf where three tea ships now lay and began the systematic destruction of their cargo, with 342 chests of tea thrown overboard.

The question was now one of power, and the challenge to parliament could not be ignored or evaded. Lord North laid the matter before the House of Commons on 7 March 1774, and demanded that the port of Boston be closed. A number of other measures were passed by parliament, principally to teach the rebellious Americans a lesson. They came to be known as the ‘coercive’ or ‘intolerable’ Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the port and customs house; the Massachusetts Charter Act was designed to curb the elected legislature; the Justice and Quartering Acts were introduced to impose order upon the populace. Lord North declared that ‘convince your colonies that you are able, and not afraid to control them, and, depend upon it, obedience will be the result of your deliberations’. It seems that the majority of the population was behind him, and Edmund Burke reported that ‘the popular current, both within doors and without, at present sets strong against America’.

Burke himself will reappear in this history as the exponent of conservatism and tradition in the face of innumerable challenges; he was an Irishman with the gifts of a supreme advocate for the preservation of the principles of the past which emerge from ‘the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property’. Institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. It was a uniquely reasssuring doctrine for those opposed to change or frightened of chance.

The response of the Americans to the ‘intolerable’ Acts was perhaps inevitable. In early September 1774 a congress of the old colonies was held in Philadelphia, and became known as the First Continental Congress; in the following month it proposed a bill or declaration of rights to the effect that American assemblies had the right and duty to determine legislation in all domestic matters without the intervention of the English parliament. The delegates declared that Americans ‘were entitled to their life, liberty and property’. George Washington wrote that ‘the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us’. By the end of the year local associations or revolutionary committees were piling up supplies of arms and gunpowder while at the same time enforcing what were now called ‘the laws of congress’. Imports from Britain and its colonies were prohibited. The prospect of outright war, and of a trade embargo, seemed to paralyse the English merchant class who wavered between the desire for uninterrupted trade and the instinct of national loyalty.

The call to arms gathered strength, and bodies of volunteers became known as ‘minute men’ for the speed with which they could muster with their rifles. Meanwhile 10,000 fresh British troops disembarked on American soil. If they had struck at once they might have done considerable damage; instead under the command of General Gage they rested. It was the Americans who acted first. This was the moment that heralded serious conflict.

In America local committees and hastily called provincial congresses began to plan for military action, and groups of citizens took matters into their own hands. At the beginning of April 1775, the commander of the English forces in Boston received orders from London to suppress what were called the rebels. The main supply of American weaponry was stored in Concord, 16 miles from Boston, and the English advanced upon it. They were stopped by militiamen at Lexington Green, where eight Americans were killed. The English kept on moving towards Concord but the fire of the militiamen, hiding in houses or concealed behind trees and hedges, scattered them. They retreated in haste to Boston but by the time they had reached the relative safety of that city 273 of their number were dead. The god of war had risen once again, calling for more blood.

Some colonists, as they were still called, were alarmed by the violent turn of events, and urged restraint while others distrusted the calls for independence. It might be a step too far. But the more committed and the more passionate of the members of the Second Continental Congress, called at Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, overwhelmed the more moderate voices. It was resolved that an army, representing the ‘united’ and ‘confederated’ colonies, should be established; a Virginian gentleman, George Washington, was granted the command. He was reticent and not a good public speaker but he was resourceful and methodical; he had an innate dignity which, combined with moderation and self-control, could make him a master of men. He took the command itself with extreme reluctance, but a sense of duty and of his own honour persuaded him. Even at this stage he was not at all convinced that he could win the war against the English redcoats or, as they were known, ‘lobsters’.

On the night of 16 June – the night following the first day of the congress – a contingent of Americans silently and stealthily took occupation of Breed’s Hill, a prominence beside Bunker Hill overlooking Boston on a peninsula north of the River Charles. On discovering their presence a battery of six guns opened on the insurgents from an English vessel, and a detachment of redcoats was ferried across the River Charles to reach them. As the English forces climbed Breed’s Hill, they were met with prolonged and accurate firing from the entrenchments; many of them fled back to their boats. At this juncture Gage and a group of other officers crossed the river and rallied or forced them to climb the hill again. The soldiers were confronted by the same onslaught of bullets but bravado or good fortune forced them forward. The Americans then fled towards Bunker Hill, but not before inflicting severe casualties; more than 1,000 soldiers and officers lay dead or wounded, while the American losses were in the low hundreds.

The news of the defeat alarmed and shocked the English who had believed fondly that the colonials would never meet the English army on open ground. It was considered to be a calamity, a national humiliation and a military disgrace. A force ofvolunteers had overcome a trained and disciplined army. Some now speculated that this battle was an omen of eventual American triumph. General Gage was replaced by General Howe, a transfer which turned out to be that of a blockhead succeeding a dunderhead.

The two sides now confronted one another, with no chance of conciliation. The king declared that ‘the die is now cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph’. At the beginning of 1776 a pamphlet was being passed among the colonials. The effect of Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ was immediate and profound; in his history of the American revolution, George Trevelyan remarked that ‘it would be difficult to name any human composition which had an effect so instant, so extended and so lasting’. It was in essence a clarion call for America to declare its independence from a brutal foreign power, with the sentiment that ‘the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind’. How could a tiny island arrogate to itself the control of a great country? America had become a haven for all nations, and should no longer be shackled to England which merely dealt with the colonists for its own benefit and its own interests. To call itself the ‘mother country’ was a gross scandal, for what mother would treat her children so brutally? The king ‘hath shewn himself such an inveterate enemy to liberty and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power’ that he must be resisted. Paine added that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’. His tone and language were sharp and to the point, thus undermining decades of rational or inconsequential political discourse.

His appeal was irresistible to the general populace, and at a later date John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that ‘history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine’. History does not perhaps deal in coincidences but, seven months after the publication of ‘Common Sense’, the continental congress declared its independence with twelve affirmative votes and one abstention from New York. The congress had come to its decision after much hesitation and opposition from delegates who feared that the Declaration was premature and that they needed foreign allies before coming to open confrontation. Yet the final text was passed on 4 July 1776, ever afterwards known to Americans as Independence Day. The Americans absolved themselves from fealty to the Crown, and declared themselves to be free states that had no connection to England, with a ringing endorsement of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Burke said that he had anticipated that the Americans might disturb authority but ‘we never dreamt that they could of themselves supply it’.

It became known as ‘the king’s war’ with the obvious presumption that those who opposed it were disloyal subjects; the people were asked to rally to the cause of Church and Crown against rebels and revolutionaries. George III was in fact the driving force of the war against Americans, believing that his crown and country would not be secure if the colonists were able to secede from English rule. Yet there were some in England who supported the American cause. The principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ found an echo among the disenfranchised of a nation where half the towns had no voice in parliament. In the later riots at Peterloo and Manchester, this was the slogan inscribed upon many banners.

It was believed by many radicals that the attempt to crush the movement for liberty in the thirteen colonies was an experiment that, if successful, could be repeated in England itself. The king and his ministers were supposed to be intent upon invading the rights of the individual, curtailing the liberty of the press, misusing the public funds and engaging in open and widespread corruption of members of parliament. There was even talk of the imposition of military government. Even if these charges were ill-founded they found an audience ready and willing to believe in a conspiracy by the ruling class against the people of England. These were the men and women who supported the Americans.

Those who supported the king’s war, however, were aware of the historical parallel in the fight against king and Church by the Puritan enthusiasts of an earlier age. They believed the Americans to be traitors and seditionaries, ungrateful for the benefits that had accrued to them and unwilling to pay a fair contribution to the expenses of empire. There were still others who just wanted peace, peace at almost any price to maintain trade and good relations.

While Washington began to equip and train a voluntary militia, the administration in London found it hard to make up the numbers of soldiers and sailors. A savage ‘press’ for sailors took place in the streets of London and the port cities in 1776; 800 men were seized in the capital alone. A third part of the army to be employed against the rebels were Hessian soldiers, recruited through George III’s German allies; the others were English recruits or loyalist Americans, but a large number of convicted criminals had been released from prison in order to serve their country.

Despite this show of strength it is not clear that the English administration knew how formidable its difficulties were. The supply lines from England to America were 3,000 miles in length; weapons, ammunition, horses, men and provisions had to be shipped across the Atlantic in a journey that often took two or three months of misery. The men were then faced with an ocean coast many hundreds of miles in length, where the population was distinctly hostile to their presence. The terrain of the interior was also inhospitable both to professional soldiers and to raw recruits. John Hayes, an English combatant, described ‘a country full of marshes and small rivers, woods and insects, and a sun so powerful in heat’ that many men fell sick of a putrescent fever.

In the summer of 1776 General Howe captured New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island. The failure of the Americans thoroughly demoralized Washington, whose letters are filled with complaints about the unruliness and indiscipline of his troops. It would seem that on paper the English held the advantage, and there were real fears among the Americans that their revolution was close to being lost. But Howe did nothing to build on his success, and during the winter months the English remained in their entrenchments. Paine described it as ‘the gloomy campaign of 1776’, and at the end of the year Washington confessed that without a new army ‘the game is pretty near up’. Yet eight days later he organized a swift descent upon the Hessian troops guarding Trenton, New Jersey, and seized the town; it was only a temporary victory but it restored the morale of his soldiers and officers.

The air on the other side of the Atlantic was also filled with gloomy prognostications. General Howe had demanded 20,000 men for the next year’s campaign, but he received only 2,500. Parliament had little money, and the king himself was badly in debt. The difficulties of organizing a war at such a distance were becoming more and more obvious. A quick victory had become necessary, but how was it to be achieved?

The English command sought to regain the initiative by isolating the rebellious New England colonies. An English army under General Burgoyne would sweep downwards from Canada, and an army under Howe would march upward from New York; when they met the colonies would be encircled. But it did not quite go according to plan. By a mixture of bad communications and incompetence the two armies missed each other. Howe had decided to capture Philadelphia instead. Burgoyne and his army, isolated from any possible help, were surrounded by the American forces at Saratoga in what is now New York State. He had no choice but to surrender, in the autumn of 1777, and at the same time gave up any hope of an eventual British victory. It was simply a matter of time.

The defeat of the English forces brought joy to Versailles and in early February 1778, the French, finding the convenient moment, officially joined the United States in its war against Britain. This of course brought a different complexion to the conflict that now assumed a global aspect. It was the outcome that the British had most feared. The ministry was bankrupt of ideas, and one army was still imprisoned in the United States. The British now had to defend their possessions in India and the West Indies against the French while at the same time pursuing a war in the inhospitable territory of North America. The Spanish joined the new alliance in the following year, with the express intention of reclaiming Gibraltar and Minorca. The English had no allies left, and were hard stretched to cover all the possible theatres of war.

They offered concessions, including the repeal of the controversial Tea Act and the promise not to levy more taxes on the colonists. The announcement astonished and alarmed the faithful followers of the ministry, who now saw that they had been fighting for nothing but an illusion. But the Americans, having tasted victory, demanded complete independence. Almost at once they appreciated the value of the French alliance, because the British had to divert troops and ships for the defence of the West Indies; the Americans then advanced into Philadelphia and Rhode Island. It was less than likely that the British would eventually prevail.

Lord North had had enough. His management of the war had been a dead failure. He had made demands only to abandon them under pressure. He had lost an army and a continent. He was forty-six years of age, but he felt tired and much older. In March 1778, at the time France sealed its treaty with the Americans, North wrote to the king that ‘capital punishment itself is, in Lord North’s position, preferable to that constant anguish of mind which he feels from the consideration that his continuance in office is ruining his majesty’s affairs’. Two months later he wrote once more to the king that ‘every hour convinces me more of the necessity your majesty is under of putting some other person than myself at the head of your affairs’. Yet the king did not agree. He needed North. He distrusted and despised most of his political opponents, but knew that he could still rely upon the loyalty of his principal minister; North was, as it were, a bulwark against chaos at Westminster.

It was at Westminster in this period that Pitt the elder, the earl of Chatham, rose to speak for the last time. There was a sentiment abroad that the time had come for Britain to withdraw all its forces from America. To this the earl was implacably opposed. He came into the chamber on crutches, wrapped in flannel to protect his skin, and supported by friends; to some he looked as if he were already dead. His voice was feeble at first but rose in eloquence. ‘My lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed over me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy!’ The mouth of the grave closed a month later.

The course of the war in 1779 was neither warm nor cold for either party. The attention of the British was in any case turned to their adjacent seas rather than to the Americas, since the combined forces of the French and Spanish promised some form of invasion. But the ships and the men were needed across the Atlantic. Sir Charles Hardy, commander-in-chief of the Channel fleet, could muster thirty-seven ships against the combined enemy force of sixty-six; the English fleet was in any case poorly maintained and in bad condition. Many guns were without powder. The situation was so grave that the French and Spanish practically controlled the Channel and one MP, Sir William Meredith, wrote of a ‘fatal torpor which hangs like the nightmare over all the powers of this country’. Yet Hardy was saved by chance or good fortune; the season was one of storms, and the conditions aboard the French and Spanish ships were dominated by sickness. He waited them out, remaining for much of the time in the safe haven of Spithead, until they sailed away. And so the summer passed. Hardy died of a seizure in the following spring. The first speech of Sheridan’s The Critic suggests the atmosphere of the time. Mr Dangle is reading from a newspaper: ‘“It is now confidently asserted that SIR CHARLES HARDY” – Pshaw – Nothing but about the fleet, and the nation! – and I hate all politics but theatrical politics.’

North was once more deep in depression, and he wrote that ‘nothing can be more miserable than I am … all is confusion and each department blaming another’. A colleague, William Eden, perhaps exasperated by his continual self-lacerating complaints, wrote to him that ‘if you cannot rouse the powers of your mind you ought to quit as immediately as is consistent with the urgent circumstances in which we find ourselves’. Yet the king was immovable. North had to stay. The chief minister said that he was kept to his task ‘by force’.

The possibility of a long war without peace or resolution provoked dismay and disquiet among the merchants, the shopkeepers and the taxpayers. Only the iron-masters had some reason to be happy, with the constant demand for ships and munitions. To make matters infinitely worse, Ireland seemed to be going the way of America in the demand for independence. It had occurred to the Irish that the English were in no position to defend them from enemy fleets; so they established Volunteer Associations to protect their shores. Both Catholics and Protestant dissenters joined the cause of national self-defence, and thus created a national army that had more authority than the parliament in Dublin.

The Volunteers now demanded freedom of trade with England and the ministers, in no position to face riot and insurgency on a neighbouring island, promptly gave way. The Irish did not stop here but, in imitation of their cousins across the Atlantic, also demanded legislative independence. In April 1780, Henry Grattan moved a resolution that ‘no power on earth but the kings, lords and commons of Ireland was competent to make laws for Ireland’. The controversy was of course long and vociferous but the independence of the Irish parliament was formally agreed. At the beginning of 1783 the English ministry accepted ‘the right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Parliament of that kingdom’. Grattan rose to his feet in the Parliament House in Dublin and declared that ‘Ireland is now a nation’.

The controversies in Ireland had in turn an effect upon the English. A movement for the cause of ‘National Revival’ emerged in this period, instigated by the prevailing fear that parliament was becoming subservient to the bribes and corruptions of the government. At the end of 1779, from a county meeting in Yorkshire, emerged the Yorkshire Association which had as its aims shorter parliaments, more equal representation of the people, and a reduction in taxes. It was led by Christopher Wyvill, a cleric and landowner, who soon proved himself to be an expert organizer and propagandist. He drew up a petition and persuaded other counties and county committees to participate in it. He represented the landed interests of the country, not the London crowd that had followed Wilkes with slogans and cat-calls, and thus had to be taken more seriously by the masters of the country. The London Courant carried a letter from ‘The Whig’ in November who observed that ‘the people of original right, as a free people, will vindicate their country, correct their parliament, and reform their throne … In England every man is a politician.’ In a similar spirit, in the spring of 1780, the Society for Constitutional Information was established with the express purpose of restoring the ‘lost rights’ of ‘our ancient constitution’ by distributing texts and pamphlets.

This is the appropriate context for a parliamentary debate of 6 April on the motion that ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. It was carried by 233 to 215 votes, but it was what a military observer might call a forlorn hope. The very fact that the motion had passed suggested that the Crown was not as omnipotent as it was proclaimed to be. Nothing came of it, in any case, and in the following month Lord Camden wrote that ‘our popular exertions are dying away and the country returning to its old state of lukewarm indifference’. The radical societies themselves slipped out of view until they were once again aroused by the spectacle of the revolution across the Channel.

Any movement of popular or urban radicalism was in any case fatally tainted in June 1780, with the worst mob riots of the eighteenth century. Lord George Gordon was a born incendiary of extreme, and almost insane, views. Like the salamander he was born to live in fire. He called himself the ‘people’s pilot’, and no more so than in his denunciation of the Roman Catholic menace in the wake of a parliamentary measure known as the Catholic Relief Act. He was part revolutionary, part radical and, if the anachronism may be allowed, part Romantic. He attempted to adopt the status and attributes of all those who had fought through history against tyranny, and became known to his followers as the ‘English Brutus’.

He established an ‘association’, in the style of the time, and the Protestant Association soon came to include men of property, artisans, London apprentices and all those elements of the city that were known as the mobile vulgus or more colloquially ‘the mob’. On 2 June they accompanied Gordon’s petition to parliament with the burning desire to repeal all the late concessions to the Catholics; only six members of the Commons concurred with them, setting off among the petitioners a lightning bolt that came close to blasting London. About midnight, as the cry of ‘No Popery’ rang through the streets of the city, the irate crowds invaded Broad Street and Golden Square; the chapel of the house of the Bavarian ambassador was put to the torch among what William Blake, a willing or unwilling participant in the riots, described as ‘Howlings & hissings, shrieks & groans, & voices of despair’.

Five days later Blake was caught up in the rush of an overpowering mob which was careering down Holborn and towards the Old Bailey with the sole intent of destroying Newgate beside it. The huge gates of the prison, sometimes known as the gates of Hell, were attacked with swords, pickaxes and sledgehammers while the building was itself enveloped in fire begun by arsonists. The prisoners shrieked in terror of being burned alive but the rebels swarmed over the walls and the roof to tear off the very stones and slates. The prisoners were dragged away from the fires, or crawled out by their own volition, the fetters still clinking about their legs. The mob made a path for them shouting ‘A clear way!’, ‘A clear way!’ before leading them to any blacksmith they could find. On the same day houses of wealthy Catholics or Catholic supporters were sacked and burned to the ground.

On Wednesday, 7 June, long to be known as ‘black Wednesday’, the fears of the populace reached fever pitch. The mob sent warning that it would storm the Bank of England and distribute its contents, that the lions of the Tower’s zoo would be set free, that no prison or Catholic chapel would be safe and that they would tear down Bedlam and release its inmates into the streets. One priest, the Reverend O’Donoghue, watched the inmates of Bedlam dancing and shrieking ‘in the glare of writhing flames … in the glass of the hospital window’. This provoked especial fears. A contemporary Londoner, Richard Burke, wrote that ‘the metropolis is possessed by an enraged, furious and numerous enemy … What this night will produce is known only to the Great Dispenser.’ He watched as a boy, no more than fifteen, mounted a house in Queen Street and began to demolish it, throwing down the bricks and wood to two young accomplices. Yet some semblance of order was retained. While a huge fire burned in the churchyard of St Andrew’s in Holborn, where many were later killed by drinking burning spirits, a watchman went by calling the hour with a lantern in his hand.

Eventually the military restored order with some judicious threats and violence. Many of the ringleaders were hanged on the spot where they had committed their crimes. Lord George Gordon was taken into custody, and eventually converted to Judaism. No one believed that such frantic and fanatic violence could still erupt in the streets of the eighteenth century; the scenes of destruction and violence were from a different world. London had become a different city.

But it was not a case of the mob attacking the poor Catholics and their priests; it was an attack of the poor against the rich. The London poor did not attack their own. The Catholics who were pursued were wealthy gentlemen, lawyers and merchants. It came as an unwelcome surprise to those who placed their hopes in popular resistance to a corrupt administration, and confirmed the beliefs of those who believed that savage anger lay just below the surface of the century. Edward Gibbon, the chronicler of the decline of the Roman Empire, noted that he had witnessed ‘a dark and diabolical fanaticism which I had supposed to be extinct’. He referred here to the religious extremism that was supposed to have been rendered obsolete a hundred years before. Many now sought the safety of the established order in the supposedly reassuring shape of Lord North who was even then writhing in his shackles of government.

Despite the victory at Saratoga, the advance into Providence and Rhode Island, and the alliance with the French, George Washington was downcast. He wrote at the beginning of 1781 that ‘I see nothing before us but accumulating distress … we have lived upon expedients till we can live no longer’. There was no food, no money and few reinforcements. The Americans had come to rely almost entirely upon the support of their new allies, but many in the French government were alarmed at the mounting expense. In turn the war weariness of the English was compounded by the fears of radicals that the prospect of American rebels and the Gordon mob would lead ineluctably to an absolute monarchy. The more practical realized that the war against the erstwhile colony was a pointless waste of money.

Such was the mood on both sides before Yorktown. In the late summer and autumn of 1781 an English army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis had been out-marched and outmanoeuvred by Washington, until it was isolated at Yorktown in Virginia. With a French fleet at his back, surrounded by 8,000 French troops and 5,000 Americans, Cornwallis had no choice but to surrender. The English troops marched away from their broken and abandoned positions to the tune of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. With American victory assured, independence could not be far away.

Just before the news of Yorktown had reached London the king had written to Lord North that ‘the dye is now cast whether this shall be a great empire or the least dignified of European states’. The defeat seemed definitively to have answered the question. The surrender of the English army caused outrage and sorrow. The report reached London on 25 November 1781, just days before the opening of parliament. Lord North is reported to have cried out, ‘Oh God, it is all over!’ He knew that the end of his political days was coming.

Yet the king, the architect of the American policy, seemed prepared to fight on. In his speech from the throne at the opening of the session he reaffirmed his belief in the justice of the cause and refused to surrender the rights and interests of the country in the search for a febrile peace. There then rose up Charles James Fox, a leader of the Whig interest and a firm supporter of the American cause. He upheld the supposed fiction that George III’s speech had been composed by a cabinet council only to attack the king more vehemently as ‘an arbitrary and unfeeling monarch, who, having involved the slaves, his subjects, in a ruinous and unnatural war, to glut his enmity or satiate his revenge, was determined to persevere, in spite of calamity and even of fate’.

These were hard words, but they bear the spirit of Fox. He has only made a passing appearance in this history as yet, having been part of a larger chorus of disapproval against the Crown and its ministers. He has been described as a born oppositionist, an aristocrat who moved in the highest Whig circles without being in the least impressed by considerations of rectitude. He was drunken and profligate, paying as much attention to gambling as to politics; but this was not unusual in eighteenth-century politicians. His charm lay in his happy and buoyant personality, often compared to that of a child. Burke confessed that he was ‘of the most artless, candid, open and benevolent disposition’. The duchess of Devonshire, a Whig grandee and devotee, described ‘his amazing quickness in seizing any subject’ and added that ‘his conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards: the strokes follow one another, piff! paff!’

But he was not born to rule a party or lead a faction. He was careless and ill-organized; his speeches in the Commons were impetuous and impromptu, and he was utterly impervious to public opinion. He made no attempt to marshal the ranks of his followers. Politics was for him, as for so many of his contemporaries, a game of Hazard. He was, according to a German observer, Karl Philipp Moritz, ‘dark, small, thickset, generally ill-groomed’, his plump face overset by thick, shaggy eyebrows. His nickname was ‘the Eyebrow’ and his fat, dishevelled appearance became the object of a thousand caricatures. He would come to the chamber from a night of dissipation, perhaps still the worse for wear from drink, and deliver an oration of two hours that enchanted all who heard it. He was one of the greatest politicians of the age.

The war with America, to which Fox had always been opposed, was ‘put down’ rather than concluded. On 27 February 1782, three months after the news of Yorktown had reached London, the House of Commons voted against the pursuit of military actions across the Atlantic. That was the equivalent of surrender. A month later the Commons prepared a vote of no confidence in Lord North and his ministers, a humiliation that North escaped by precipitate resignation. He wrote to the king that ‘the torrent is too strong to be resisted’. He had been first minister for twelve years, but he could no longer bear the perpetual anxious strain of administration at the time of the American war. The king was not impressed. He was of the opinion that North had somehow deserted him at a time of peril. ‘At last,’ he wrote, ‘the fatal day is come.’

He was faced with competing factions and personalities who were avid for the benefits of office. In one period he even entertained the possibility of abdication, and drafted a speech declaring his imminent departure for Hanover. But it was never delivered. With the collapse of the Tory war faction, he was obliged to turn to sundry Whigs who were united only in their desire for peace with America. Even as they took over the administration they were divided, and four ministries emerged in the next two years. One of those who bobbed to the top was William Petty, 2nd earl of Shelburne. He was considered ‘slippery’ and an ‘arch-deceiver’ as well as being excessively ambitious, but that was practically the definition of any politician in the period. He is remembered principally, if at all, for his conduct of the negotiations for peace with the Americans.

The negotiations did not concern the Americans alone; settlements with France, Spain and Holland, who had all taken the offensive against Britain in its time of crisis, involved intricate diplomatic niceties. The preliminary articles of peace with America were signed in Paris in January 1783, with the most important clause that Britain acknowledged the thirteen united states to be free, sovereign and independent. The Americans made no concessions to the loyalists among them who had fought for the British; they were left to the mercy of Congress, a decision that infuriated many at Westminster. What kind of treaty was it that abandoned the allies? Further treaties with France and Spain were signed at Versailles. France surrendered Grenada, St Vincent and other islands in exchange for Senegal in Africa, Pondicherry in India, and several islands. Spain gave up the Bahamas but obtained Minorca and the two Floridas. A cartoon of 1783 was entitled ‘The General Piss of Peace’ in which all the protagonists, including a Native American, urinate into a common pot:

A little time past, sirs, who would have thought this

That they’d so soon come to a general piss?

So ended the American war that had created the first newly independent nation in the world that had full control of its common destiny. In the process of the fighting George Washington had in the face of extreme need managed to create a national army; his was the model followed by revolutionary France that inspired a new form of warfare. Another consequence followed. For the first time a group of people had advanced the cause of a nation without a king, without an aristocracy and without a national Church.

The British truly believed that their empire was now in decline but in fact their commercial and maritime links remained intact and would lead to ever greater prosperity in future years. The French had emerged from the conflict with mixed fortunes, but the truth was that their subvention of the American colonists led to a grave financial crisis that found its culmination in the revolution of 1789. The foreign trade and domestic production of the United States were enlarged by the successful outcome of the war. In England, too, the cessation of hostilities encouraged the development of industry and commerce on a scale not seen for twenty years. The army and navy were cut back, to the great relief of the taxpayers, but the popularity of George III himself increased. He represented the still point in a turning world.

That popularity did not attach itself to his ministers. A resolution concerning the treaty devised by Shelburne was put before the Commons by Lord John Cavendish; it stated that ‘the concessions made to the adversaries of Great Britain … were greater than they were entitled to, either from the actual situation of their respective possessions, or from their comparative strength’. The atmosphere was perhaps not conducive to strenuous debate. Karl Philipp Moritz noted that ‘it is not at all uncommon to see a member lying stretched out on one of the benches, while others are debating. Some crack nuts; others eat oranges.’

The condemnation was passed by seventeen votes, and Shelburne resigned. It is unlikely that any other politician would have negotiated a more favourable peace, but he fell victim to a general mood of dissatisfaction and weariness. At a later date Benjamin Disraeli would acclaim Shelburne as the greatest statesman of the eighteenth century, but in his lifetime the earl was never thanked by a grateful nation for an unpopular but indispensable peace.

The departure of Shelburne left the king in the unenviable position of being surrounded by men whom he either distrusted or hated. One parliamentarian, James Grenville, later recalled that George III exhibited all the signs of his anxiety; he remarked that ‘the feelings which then agitated his mind were strongly pictured in his countenance and gestures’; Grenville observed ‘the quick step and disordered motion of his body, his rapid utterance, his eager and uninterrupted speech, admitting neither of pause nor answer, and shifting perpetually in unconnected digressions’ which were perhaps a harbinger of his later nervous collapse. Yet he had some reason to be angry and alarmed.

To popular amazement, and much disgust, Lord North and Charles James Fox had entered an arrangement; the dissolute Whig and the fatigued lord had in the past traded insults with abandon. Fox, for example, had accused North of ‘unexampled treachery and falsehood’ as well as ‘public perfidy’. But now they found themselves to be the very best of friends, staunch allies ready to form a ministry. James Gillray portrayed the two men on a roundabout, or the ‘new state whirligig’, while robbers plunder the house behind them; the inscription read: ‘Poor John Bull’s house plundered at noon day’. But they had the numbers, Fox with 90 votes and North with 120 against a combined ministerial alliance of 140. They had in the phrase of the time ‘stormed the [royal] closet’. The king had a particular hatred of Fox, whom he despised as a wanton reprobate, and was disgusted by what he considered to be the treachery of Lord North who had deserted him. He could not stop their alliance but he was clear that he would make it very difficult for them to continue; he barred them from using any sources of patronage, which was the lifeblood of a successful government. But even to the end he struggled to find an alternative.

In his extremity the king approached William Pitt, son of the ‘great commoner’, who at the age of twenty-four was already chancellor of the exchequer. He bore a famous name, but in the course of his career he made it more illustrious still. ‘He is not a chip off the old block’, Burke said. ‘He is the old block itself.’ He had been brought up in the purple of the political aristocracy and had been marked out early for high office; it was said that he had never been a boy and knew nothing of men or manners except through the distorting mirror of Westminster. He was characterized by his pale face and his stiff, formal bow; tall and thin, he had all the hauteur of one who knows his destiny. He could be stern, supercilious and supremely uninterested; he had what Lord Holland called ‘an eye in the air’. He entered the chamber of the Commons without looking either to the right or to the left, and he sat in his place without nod or greeting to those around him.

That was the public man. In private, after a few glasses of port, he was good-natured and even humorous. One of his colleagues, Sir William Napier, recalled an occasion when Pitt was playing with some children of his acquaintance; his face had been blackened with cork, and he was throwing cushions with abandon. It was suddenly announced that two great ministers wished to see him on an urgent matter. He called for a basin, washed his face, and hid the cushions under a sofa. Napier recalled the change that came over him. ‘His tall, ungainly, bony figure seemed to grow to the ceiling, his head was thrown back, his eyes were fixed immovably.’ He listened to them, answered with a few curt sentences, ‘and finally, with an abrupt stiff inclination of the body, but without casting his eyes down, dismissed them. Then, turning to us with a laugh, caught up his cushions and renewed our fight.’ His temperament was in that sense unstable. It was said that he was ‘always in the cellar or in the garret’.

When the king approached the young man with the offer of being first minister, Pitt rejected it out of hand. He could not command a majority, and he could not work either with Fox or with North. So he waited. He realized that the new ministry was so unstable, so riven by internal weakness, that it could not hold. He could bide his time. Richard Porson summed up the characters of Fox and Pitt with an observation. ‘Mr Pitt conceives his sentences before he utters them. Mr Fox throws himself into the middle of his, and leaves it to God Almighty to get him out again.’

Balloons were the rage of the early 1780s. For the first time in human history it seemed that men could fly. Excited crowds in Paris and London watched the ascents, and for a moment seemed to be exhilarated by a sense of liberation from the woes of the world. This was freedom, or at least the promise of freedom, for future generations. At the time of the French Revolution a political writer, Etienne Dumont, remarked that ‘the people of Paris were filled with inflammable gas like a balloon’. In the spring of 1785 Horace Walpole wrote, less dramatically, that ‘Mr Windham, the member for Norwich, has made a voyage into the clouds, and was in danger of falling to earth and being shipwrecked. Three more balloons sail today; in short we shall have a prodigious navy in the air, and then what signifies having lost the empire of the ocean?’

24

The schoolboy

The first British Empire, largely consisting of the thirteen American colonies, had gone. Yet many were glad to be rid of it. Its surcease had become inevitable. It was better to trade with the Americans than attempt to rule them, and this salutary lesson became the single most important principle of the second British Empire which was even then being created. It was not in England’s interests to have colonies scattered over the globe; it was more important to have a line of trading posts that could create a worldwide commercial empire along the routes of the oceans. These markets and factories would then be guarded by the navy in the world’s first maritime empire.

Trading posts were set up in Borneo and the Philippines, while Lord Macartney led a commercial mission to the imperial court at Peking [Beijing]. The forts and factories of Britain stretched out to Penang and Malaya, to Trinomali [Tiruvannamalai] and Kandu, to Cape Town and central Africa. And of course the Indian subcontinent beckoned with its riches. It was said that the Tudor spirit of ocean-going adventure had revived, and indeed the idea of the British Empire was first raised in the Elizabethan period. John Dee had prophesied an empire that would unite all the peoples of Britain in its acquisition, a remarkably accurate vision of the future. Where could the ships and sailors not go? To Greece? To Araby? To the dark continent of Africa or to the realms of the Orient?

The memories of the old empire had not entirely faded; Britain held on to Quebec and to Canada. It also established New South Wales as colony and prison compound. But the Pacific and Indian oceans were to become the bearers of merchants with commodities to buy and to sell. In the process the nature of empire changed. The first empire had been essentially an English enterprise with the reminders of the old home in names such as New York and New England. The second empire was truly British in scope with areas such as Bengal, and eventually the whole of the Indian subcontinent, patrolled by native troops strengthened by Scots, Irish and Welsh regulars.

It was in many respects a ramshackle empire, made up of separate constitutions and agreements. One territory was supervised by informal pacts, while another might be guarded by troops or circumscribed by treaties. Different types of colony had different types of constitution. Indian provinces were situated beside the older trading posts. There was really no guiding plan or intention in the acquisition of a second empire. There may have been some general feeling that English authority was ‘good’ for the native peoples, but there was also a great deal of hypocrisy and greed in the arrangements. This was not intended to be a political invasion but a mercantile policy in which British governors would work with the local elites to preserve good administration and flourishing trade.

This sounded to many like the old empire in all but name. The pursuit of trade in India, for example, led ineluctably to a policy of conquest and dominion by the East India Company. Trade could not be separated from power. And power fed upon itself. Ceylon was therefore annexed to protect the trade routes to India. By 1816 Britain possessed forty-three colonies, compared to twenty-six in 1792; the territories comprised 2 million square miles and contained some 25 million people, the majority of them non-white and non-Christian. This was a unique phenomenon that the ministers in London found it hard to grasp or to control. How could the power implicit in empire be reconciled with traditional British liberties? They approached the problem with extreme caution and an innate conservatism.

As early as 1782, when peace negotiations were being pursued between England and America, the king informed the Commons that ‘the regulation of a vast territory in Asia opens a large field for your wisdom, prudence and foresight’. Asia was in fact the major problem for the administration at Westminster. Since wisdom and prudence were too feeble a match for cupidity and cunning, there seemed to be no way to supervise or to control the workings of the East India Company.

Its administrators had grown too rich and too powerful. They needed to preserve their trade by imposing political stability upon the territories with which they negotiated; they required alliances with local princes or rulers, and they needed to master the complex procedures of both Koran and Hindu law; they needed an army, preferably of friendly natives. The government in Westminster was uneasy at this abrogation of its powers, and distressed by the news of exploitation and even of violence that reached it.

The ministers were no doubt also eager to get their hands on the surplus revenues that the company was accruing from its flourishing trade. The ‘nabobs’, the Englishmen who returned rich from Indian service, were treated with considerable disquiet; the combination of ‘new money’ with greed and exploitation was not considered suitable. They had become so familiar, and so despised, that Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) became a great success at the Haymarket Theatre. ‘With the wealth of the East,’ one character laments, ‘we have, too, imported the worst of its vices. What a horrid crew!’ The nabob has ‘grown great from robbing the heathens’. This was also the perceived problem of the East India Company itself.

With his usual mixture of self-assurance and optimism Charles James Fox believed that he could resolve the problems of India. He proposed that the existing Court of Directors that administered the company should be replaced by seven commissioners. It soon became clear that the chosen commissioners were all supporters of the administration, and of Fox in particular; it was widely believed that Fox wished to transfer the patronage and wealth of the East India Company into his own political service. A cartoon was published at the end of 1783 showing him, wearing a turban and riding an elephant, trampling upon India House and its directors with the caption ‘Carlo Khan’s Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street’.

It was a moment of peril for Fox, who could be accused of purloining the king’s bounty, and his opponents were ready to fall upon him. The supporters of Fox and North were able to press the measure through the Commons but, at this juncture, on 11 December, the king let it be known through an intermediary ‘that whoever voted for the India Bill were not only not his friends, but he should consider them as his enemies’. It seems more than likely that William Pitt had a certain responsibility for this intervention since, if the bill fell, it effectively signalled the demise of the coalition. And so it proved. As the debate moved on, Thomas Orde, a Tory member, reported that Fox’s ‘countenance, gesture and expression were in the highest degree ludicrous from the extremity of dejection and rage, going off with an exclamation of despair’. As soon as the Lords objected to Fox’s measure, and voted it down on 17 December, the king asked for the resignation of his two principal ministers. They were gone by the next day. Pitt came forward almost at once. He was still only twenty-four.

The shambles of the coalition, the effrontery of Fox’s proposal to appoint the commissioners, the growing unpopularity of the government, gave Pitt his opportunity to strike where he had not struck before. He gambled that he could survive a combined opposition just long enough to be ready to go to the country. Fox, on the contrary, believed that ‘we shall destroy them almost as soon as they are formed’. It was nicknamed ‘the mince-pie administration’ fit only to last for the festive season. A verse was circulated:

A sight to make surrounding nations stare;

A kingdom trusted to a schoolboy’s care.

Parliament reassembled on 12 January 1784, and Pitt would remain in office for the next eighteen years.

From the beginning he was cool, precise and determined; his aims and methods were clear, his calculations cogent and his command of the Commons exemplary. He had from the beginning the support and loyalty of the king, who opened for him the gates of patronage; some of his supporters were immediately made peers. But he was not above the convenient lie. When Fox charged that his India bill had been rejected by the Lords as a result of ‘secret influence’, Pitt replied that ‘he knew of no secret influence, and his own integrity would be his guardian against that danger’. It would not be the last time that he invoked his ‘integrity’.

He chose to be the only member of his cabinet in the Commons, and soon demonstrated his mastery of that assembly; he believed that innate loyalty to the king, his own new powers of patronage, and his steadiness in the face of fire, would allow him to survive until the next election. Slowly he whittled down the number of his opponents while keeping a grave and composed face.

His principal purposes, apart from the obvious necessity of staying in power, were to reform the national finances and to extend national commerce. These were the two props for safety and peace. In matters of money he was a master, and knew that the first priority must be to pay off or pay down the national debt incurred after years of warfare. It was also vital, as far as he was concerned, to cut expenditure by a process of careful and lengthy clearance of superfluous offices and sinecures. Of what, then, might Fox and his Whig colleagues complain? They had in any case given every sign that they would be profligate with the nation’s revenues. Pitt’s oratory was precise, cogent and irrefutable. As one of his opponents, Dr Parr, put it, ‘the dog talks grammar’; or, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, Pitt manifested ‘a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words’.

The long-anticipated elections took place in the spring of 1784, with a campaign that lasted for five weeks; it soon became clear that the advantage lay with Pitt and the king over Fox and his adherents. ‘We are cut up root and branch,’ one MP, William Eden, confessed, ‘the country is utterly mad for prerogative.’ It was not a battle between Crown and parliament; it was a struggle for or against a parliament sanctioned by the throne. Pitt had on his side the landowners and the manufacturers, the merchants and the clergy. All wanted efficiency, security and, if possible, honesty in the administration. More than a hundred Whig members lost their seats; they became known as ‘Fox’s martyrs’ after Foxe’s Book of Martyrs published 200 years before. Pitt regained office as first minister, more powerful than any of his predecessors. Thomas Paine wrote, at a later date, that ‘Mr Pitt had merited nothing, but he promised much.’

He was not given to visionary plans or solutions; he did not press too far into matters of principle and was loath to question the status quo. He dealt principally with practical, administrative and factual details. It was hard to know whether he was a Whig or a Tory, but the distinction made very little difference. He had been brought up as a Whig but the party he commanded was now essentially Tory in nature. In any case, he was not a ‘party man’. He relished his independence, and confided in very few of his colleagues. On the question of India, he was pragmatic. He set up a Board of Control, composed of six members of the privy council, to oversee the affairs of the East India Company; the new governor general of India, the Earl Cornwallis, was sent out two years later. The idea of imperial trusteeship was in the air. Pitt’s proposals did not differ markedly from those of Fox, but they were regarded as more honest and more open than any projected cabal of Fox’s friends.

In matters of finance Pitt was in his element. His private secretary, the Reverend George Pretyman, gave a sermon before the House of Commons in St Margaret’s, Westminster, where he expatiated on the perils of the national debt and the critical state of the country ‘especially with regard to its revenue’. So the raising of taxes became a national endeavour. Pitt did not invent the window tax, but he made sure that it yielded much greater sums. He taxed horses and carriages; he taxed bricks, hats and perfumes; he increased the cost of postage and the taxes on newspapers; he invented probate and legacy duties. What could be squeezed was hard pressed. For the national debt itself, Pitt had a novel solution; the cutting of expenditure, together with the raising of taxes and customs duties, had led to a surplus in the public funds. Instead of spending that surplus, Pitt decreed that it would become part of a sinking fund to pay off the national debt. The fund could not be used for any other purpose.

For these measures Pitt relied upon tranquillity at home and abroad. He could not afford war, and wished to avoid public protest. He had decided upon a new tax on the cotton industry but a procession of 2,000 marched through Manchester with banners proclaiming ‘Let commerce flourish for ever!’, ‘Freedom restored’, ‘May Industry never be cramped’. To all these sentiments, Pitt was in fact thoroughly sympathetic and after much agitation and parliamentary protest, he gave way. From the mid-1780s there was indeed a recovery in the building trade and elsewhere, and consequently something of a ‘boom’.

Defeats in parliament did not seem to injure him in the least. He had in a sense already risen above party. In matters of Europe he was also a conciliator and negotiator by nature. It was said that he had no interest in, or knowledge of, foreign affairs, but his study in Downing Street was decorated with four sets of maps and his library was stocked with gazetteers and atlases.

He did believe in pursuing diplomacy through commerce, however, and in the autumn of 1786 he concluded a trade treaty with France that allowed the products of both countries to pass with the minimum of interference. Given the scale of English manufacture, the balance of trade would be inevitably favourable to Britain. Over the next few years Pitt also attempted to devise trade treaties with seven other countries. As the Public Advertiser put it, ‘it is no less than a general arrangement of the commerce of the greatest commercial power that ever existed with all the great commercial powers of the world’. As with many grand schemes, however, it came to nothing.

The problems of empire were never far removed and the trial of Warren Hastings, formerly governor general of Bengal, illustrated the deep uncertainty and confusion which still surrounded Britain’s imperial status. Fox had already stated in the Commons that India should be governed ‘by those principles of equity and humanity implanted in our hearts’. If this was the dream of empire, the reality was sometimes very different.

On his return to Britain, having spent most of his life in India, Hastings was charged by Edmund Burke and others with high crimes and misdemeanours: he was accused of accepting, and giving, bribes; he was accused of selling the aid of his troops to a local despot; he was accused of extortion against the begums of Oudh and the nabob of Benares who had been forced to flee his territory. The names were not familiar to the English, and suggested an alien subcontinent of which they understood very little, but all of Hastings’s supposed crimes could be seen to represent the East India Company itself.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a politician as well as a playwright close to Burke, rose in the Commons in February 1787, to appeal to his colleagues ‘to wipe off the disgrace affixed to the British name in India, and to rescue the national character from lasting infamy’. Many were not happy with the country’s imperial role, especially when it was no longer seen as guardian of a white Protestant empire. The accusations could also be used to diminish the standing of George III and Pitt who might be accused of seeking to use the company’s revenue for themselves. Sheridan spoke for five and a half hours and, at the conclusion of his speech, he was greeted by a ‘universal shout’ of approbation.

The impeachment of Hastings had become inevitable and, for a few months, it afforded the spectacle of an empire questioning, and deciding upon, its destiny. Everybody flocked to Westminster Hall for the proceedings which began on 13 February 1788. No one could then have guessed that the process would last for a further seven years. It became the sensation of the season, with the leading orators of the day – Sheridan, Burke, Fox – launching tirades against an old man in a blue French coat. Macaulay wrote that ‘the grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or gratified the emulation of an orator.’ The queen and the court were there; the leaders of fashion and art were there; the ambassadors were there; ‘society’, in all its manifestations, was there. A ticket might be sold for 50 guineas.

The speeches of denunciation would have given credit to the Haymarket or Covent Garden. Burke opened the proceedings with a speech that lasted four days; in the excitement he created, several ladies fainted in the galleries. Sheridan went one further; at the end of his final speech he fell, fainting, into the arms of Edmund Burke. The noted actress, Sarah Siddons, fainted simultaneously. It was a festival of fainting. Gibbon visited Sheridan on the following day. ‘I called this morning, he is perfectly well. A good actor!’ Burke himself seems to have fainted five times in the course of his orations. ‘Your lordships will spare my weakness,’ he said, ‘I have not spared myself … I cannot command strength to proceed further at present.’ It was all very stirring, but nothing came of it in the end.

Hastings was after seven years acquitted on all counts, but national attention had already turned elsewhere. The impeachment can best be construed as a momentary spasm of conscience in a country still ambiguous over its imperial role. It would take the greater self-belief of a later generation to quell all doubt.

Another source of doubt and disquiet, in the face of empire, was the continuing survival and prosperity of the slave trade. Not many people cared about it. It was believed that if the English gave up the selling or bartering of slaves, then the French would take over. The country needed the gold, the elephants’ tusks and the slaves. The merchants of London, Bristol and Liverpool sent out gaily coloured clothes, hats, rum, powder and flint. In return they were given men, women and children often taken in tribal wars. By 1750 the numbers of slaves had reached over 270,000 per decade. By 1793 Liverpool handled three-sevenths of the slave trade of all Europe. Who would willingly let them go? From their slave labour in the West Indies came tobacco, cotton and sugar. They were vital tributes to the great god of commerce that ruled the nation.

Yet a small band of persistent opponents of slavery was active in its efforts and, during the course of the reign of George III, several petitions had been presented to parliament on the total abolition of the trade or on the more humane treatment of slaves in the West Indies. William Wilberforce, one of the founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, stated to the Commons that no more than half of the transported slaves lived to see their destination; some plunged into the sea and were said to hold out their arms in joy for the brief sensation of liberty before they sank beneath the waves.

Conversations and committees ensued but nothing was achieved until 21 May 1788, when Sir William Dolben proposed a bill to monitor the transportation of the captives who were forced to endure irons, putrid fever and scant space to move or breathe. It was the first measure against slavery to be tabled at Westminster and the ensuing legislation – one slave to be carried for each ton of the ship’s burthen – was passed by a considerable majority in both houses. The victory pleased the supporters of the bill, and in particular William Wilberforce. Pitt made brave speeches against the trade, admitting that ‘the perversion of British commerce carried misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe’, but was cautious with legislative action. As first minister he relied upon the immense popularity of a national cause before he committed himself to it. This was not the case for slavery. Its abolition was not given legislative force for another forty-five years. The slaves were part of the engine of trade.

And were there not, some people argued, enough and more than enough slaves at home?

25

The steam machines

In the spring and summer of 1788 George III visited a pin manufactory in Gloucestershire as well as a carpet works and china factory in Worcestershire; he also took in the new Thames–Severn canal southeast of Stroud. In the following year he visited the carpet manufactory at Axminster and, according to its owner, ‘attended to the workers and asked many questions concerning the principles and processes of the manufacture’. It was the first time, perhaps, that the king had given his consideration to the industry and manufactures of the country which in his reign were growing at an accelerated rate. By this date the steam engine and the power loom were in full operation, with the astonishing revelation that a mechanical hammer could strike 150 blows per minute. It seemed to summarize or represent the remarkable change.

Everyone dreamed and spoke of steam. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, eulogized it in his long poem, The Economy of Vegetation (1791):

Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D STEAM! Afar

Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear

The flying chariot through the fields of air.

Matthew Boulton had written in 1781 to his partner, James Watt, the great pioneer of the steam engine, that ‘the people in London, Manchester and Birmingham are steam mill mad’. Charles Babbage, one of the first proponents of the computer, declared at a later date that ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam’. Its uses seemed to be infinite. It blew the furnaces and punched the metal; it drove the lathe and rolled the iron; it raised the water and drained the mines. It lent the power for spinning and weaving. It was used in flour mills, in malt mills and in flint mills. It was of course also used to make more steam engines. The first steam engine for a textile mill was installed in 1792; eight years later, eighty engines were being employed for the same purpose.

In 1803 a steam carriage made its way through the streets of London. A year later the first railway locomotive in history made its maiden journey of 10 miles from the Penydarren Ironworks by Merthyr Tydfil to the Glamorgan Canal. Lord Jeffrey wrote of the steam engine that ‘it can engrave a seal, and crush obdurate masses of metal before it; draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble into the air’. What was once done by wind and water, by human effort and animal strength, could now be accomplished by heat alone.

The Albion Mill had been constructed in 1786, on the south side of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, with the intention of expediting the manufacture of flour by means of steam; it was the great mechanical spectacle of the age, a wonder of modern life, sporting the most powerful machines in the world, and was described by Erasmus Darwin as ‘a grand and successful effort of human life’. It led directly, however, to William Blake’s condemnation of ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ in ‘Jerusalem’ (1804–10). It burned down three years later in what may have been suspicious circumstances. The millers danced and sang on Blackfriars Bridge. Not everyone was enamoured of the age’s mechanical marvels.

All this activity was propagated by a delicate and melancholy mechanic, James Watt, who was described by the historian, William Lecky, as ‘a slow, shy, plodding, self-concentrated boy, with weak health and low spirits, entirely without brilliancy and fire but with an evident natural turn for mechanics’. Watt once said that ‘of all things in life there is nothing more foolish than inventing’. He added, on another occasion, that ‘I find myself out of my sphere when I have anything to do with mankind’. It was this somewhat lugubrious individual who changed the shape of the age, since his sudden intuition that the two stages of the engine’s life, the heating and the cooling, could be disconnected provided the breakthrough. With a separate condenser, the engine was more efficient and more stable. The idea came to him in a flash while walking on College Green in Glasgow, but it is doubtful whether the fully conceived scheme would have come to fruition without the active and energetic assistance of Matthew Boulton; Watt himself extolled the ‘active and sanguine disposition’ of the manufacturer and industrialist who drove him forward.

It was Boulton who had told James Boswell, on a tour of his manufactory, ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – Power.’ Power was the source and origin of what would soon become the full-blown factory system that spread across the midland and northern counties so that the whole aggregation was considered to be one vast factory. Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Denbighshire and Cheshire became the home of the machine. At a later date Andrew Ure, author of The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), compared the factories to ‘the boasted monuments of Asiatic, Egyptian and Roman despotism’. There was therefore a hint of the sublime about their construction, with suggestions of darkness, terror and despair.

They were constructed from solid brick or stone while some of them contained an iron frame; the same care and ingenuity went into their making as that of the great cathedrals, with which they were sometimes compared. Previous industrial buildings had been almost always domestic in scale which lent them a human dimension; the factories with their several storeys, their iron pillars, their windows grouped vertically rather than horizontally, were a new presence in the landscape. They looked as if they were trying to free themselves from the shackles of the land, like the great single-span iron bridges. Early in the new century the factories were some of the first public buildings to be illuminated by gaslight, so that the brilliancy of their achievement could be seen from far off. An historian of Stockport, Henry Heginbotham, wrote that ‘the drivers of London coaches when passing the mill slackened their speed in order to tell of the miraculous operations performed therein’. Others were not impressed. A contemporary diarist, John Byng, after visiting the silk mills in Derby wrote that the mills ‘quite bewildered me; such rattlings and twistings. Such heat, and stinks!’

The change was slow, and not fully completed until the middle of the next century, but gradually in the last decades of the eighteenth century great spreads of industry and manufacture were established that had their centre in the mills and in the factories. Many of them were constructed at a distance from the old cities and guilds, so the industrialist was able to create new communities that could service his creations; rows of cottages, chapels, churches, schools, kitchen gardens and even public houses were built on-site. Benefit schemes and rudimentary health insurance were also established; organized sports were encouraged as well as annual outings to some local beauty spot or another. When some industrial rioters threatened Arkwright’s factory at Cromford, he armed his employees with guns and spears.

The purpose of the new factories was of course readily apparent. By congregating all the workers under one roof it was easier to control and to supervise them; it also led to more efficiency so that a series of ‘shops’ or workrooms could concentrate on one part of the industrial process. Only the factories could house and maintain the great engines that were now being introduced. One external source of power, such as a river, could create the energy for a thousand machines. The forbidding walls could also protect the industrialist from the theft of his trade secrets. But the large number of workers – men, women and children – meant that there was room for experimentation with time and divisions of labour; it was possible now for the working life of factories to be maintained throughout the night as well as the day.

The great advantage was that of speed. Everything was running faster. The workers were obliged to quicken their pace in order to keep up with one another, while the wheels and belts ran faster. The old guild legislation and medieval ordinances disappeared under the onslaught of this new form of production; the relationships between workers and employers, together with the customary rhythms of life, were changed for ever. It is not surprising, therefore, that this revolution provoked enormous hostility among those whose lives and livelihoods were threatened by it. The building of the first steam mill in Bradford, Holme Mill, was plagued by protests and riots. Staverton Mill, near Totnes in Devon, was sabotaged by its own operatives.

The machines were meant to save labour, but the flood of cheaper goods meant that the market grew faster than the available labour force. In turn the relative shortage of labour led to more and more persistent attempts at efficiency and innovation. Robert Owen, the great mill-owner and philanthropist, declared in 1816 that ‘in my establishment at New Lanark … mechanical powers and operations superintended by about two thousand young persons and adults … now completed as much work as sixty years ago would have required the entire working population of Scotland’.

The key lay in the successful division of labour, a concept that Adam Smith had extolled in the first chapter of his Wealth of Nations (1776). He contemplates the nature of pin-making under the industrial system.

One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations …

Eighteen men could perform in a few seconds a task that would absorb the energy of one man for a whole day. This in turn required the presence of specialized workmen who were all the time seeking more and more technical efficiency; their goal was greater accuracy and precision. But this division of labour also needed the efforts of many hundreds of women and children who were put to the most routine and repetitive tasks. So the changes in national industry created new divisions among the working population.

The other great shibboleth of industrial change was the need for standardization. This was the context for mass production, and was part of the drive for accuracy, regularity, efficiency and speed. The elimination of variability was indispensable for the creation of a national market. And for this, of course, mechanization was essential. As the Scottish engineer and inventor James Nasmyth put it:

the irregularity and carelessness of the workmen … gave an increased stimulus to the demand for self-acting machine tools … The machines never got drunk; their hands never shook from excess; they were never absent from work; they did not strike for wages; they were unfailing in their accuracy and regularity, while producing the most delicate or ponderous portions of mechanical structures.

So by default the men and women themselves had to be trained to behave and work in the same way as machines. The Edinburgh Review noted that ‘the human operative, in imitation and by the aid of the machine, acquires a perfection little less than marvellous’. But what of these men and women and even children? The last word had been said more than 2,000 years before by Xenophon, the Greek historian, who in Oeconomicus condemned the arts of manufacture that ‘utterly ruin the bodies of workers and managers alike, compelling men as they do to lead sedentary lives and huddle indoors, or in some cases to spend the day before a fire. Then as men’s bodies become enervated, so their souls grow sicklier.’

It is clear enough that many of those who entered the doors of the factory were being introduced to a more intense or at least more visible form of servitude. Social historians have argued for many years over the relative privation involved in agricultural labour or domestic service, but the factory represented coercion and discipline on a much larger and more organized scale. The personal tie had been broken, and the illusion of independence had disappeared. To enter the new sphere of unfreedom, to be introduced to a world of strict routine and discipline, to work for set hours in a set pattern, marked a profound change in status. The wage labourers were believed by many to have lost their rights as free-born Englishmen. In 1765 Adam Ferguson wrote that ‘we make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens’. The men and women had become ‘hands’ or instruments totally at the disposal of the master industrialist who considered them to be part of his great machine. Once such workers had been known as ‘souls’, and the change in discourse is notable. It was reported to parliament that the operatives expressed ‘the utmost distaste’ for regular hours and regular habits. It was against nature.

William Hutton was placed in the Derby silk mill at the age of seven where, as he reported, ‘I had now to rise at five every morning during seven years, submit to the cane whenever convenient to the master …’ The factory system was known on the continent as the ‘English system’, and a contemporary commented that ‘while the engine runs, the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained fast to the iron machine which knows no suffering and no weariness.’

Their work was continually supervised by overseers, and a strict code of discipline was generally introduced. Anyone found straying from his or her own ‘alley’, or talking to another employee, was fined. Any worker who struck or abused an overseer immediately lost his job. Anyone found smuggling liquor into the factory was fined 2 shillings. A list of misdemeanours, from the mills owned by Jedediah Strutt at Belper in Derbyshire, included ‘Idleness and looking thro’ window … calling thro’ window to some soldiers … riotous behaviour in room … riding on each other’s back … telling lies … throwing bobbins at people … using ill language … quarrelling … rubbing their faces with blood and going about the town to frighten people’. The ebullition of high spirits was not permitted. Other crimes were ‘running away … being off drinking … going to Derby fair … sending word she was ill when in fact she was not’.

It was not difficult to understand the motives of those who ran away. The factories were generally stinking and filthy, filled with the constant clamour of harsh machinery; the workshops on the premises were often dark and narrow, suffocating in summer and too frosty in winter. One report, of a later date, stated that ‘altogether I never saw a [work]shop in more filthy or wretched condition … Mr Wallis objected to my examining the children in his counting house because he stated “it would make the place stink so, that his customers could not stay in it”’.

The precision and regularity of their working hours had all the characteristics of a military drill. At Tyldesley Mill, not far from Wigan and Manchester, the operatives worked fourteen hours a day, including a nominal hour for ‘dinner’; the doors were locked in working hours, except for half an hour at teatime, and the workers were not allowed to ask for water despite the heat of the factory. It was reported that in some instances the managers cheated, and stretched the hours as far as they could go; as a consequence, no workman was allowed to wear a watch on the premises. Working hours gradually improved from thirteen and a half to twelve hours in the course of the century based on a six-day working week. There was no more talk of ‘St Monday’, the day when in an earlier period the operatives were allowed the leisure of the tavern or the green. When at the end of the century coal gas became a source of light, many workers were obliged to work through the night hours. This had become a world of bells, clappers, hooters, horns and clocks.

It seems that a relative rise in wages differentiated this work from the labour of the farmers or the casual slavery of the domestic system, but this was not appreciated by some observers. In 1771 Arthur Young, a writer and traveller, remarked that ‘every body but an idiot knowsthat the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious’. Surplus cash encouraged only idleness and drunkenness. Sir Willam Temple made a similar point fifteen years later when he observed that the only way to make labourers sober and industrious ‘is to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the necessities of life’. The usefulness of poverty was widely accepted; since wealth and power depended upon the combined labour of the vast mass of the population, then those masses must be set to work at the lowest possible cost. It was, as some thought, the law of God as much as the law of man.

For some observers the condition of the mills and factories became a metaphor for society itself, where social relations were bound by laws of obedience and discipline. Was this the way the world was about to go? In many respects it was. It has been observed that in the eighteenth century there emerged a greater interest in punctuality and the constant demand for more rapid and expeditious methods. The wheels of machines and carriages revolved faster. Sir John Barnard, successful London merchant and lord mayor, advised in A Present for an Apprentice in 1740 that ‘above all things learn to put a due value on Time, and husband every moment as if it were to be your last; in Time is comprehended all we possess, enjoy, or wish for; and in losing that we lose them all’.

It was observed that in London and in the larger industrial cities greater hurry was noticeable in the crowds, and Londoners became well known for their punctuality. By the 1730s one third of the inhabitants of Bristol owned a watch, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to state that every respectable citizen of London had a timepiece in his waistcoat pocket. The public buildings of the cities more often than not supported a large clock which broadcast the hours to the teeming thousands who passed beneath them. Benjamin Franklin once more caught the spirit of the age when in 1748 he coined the phrase ‘time is money’.

Of course it must also be true that some of the woes and hardships were exaggerated by those who were opposed to the industrial system, but the direct testimony of the workers themselves suggests that there was more than a modicum of truth to even the harshest allegations. The workers did not rise up, however, because they were being paid more, fed better and clothed better. The theorists invoked the laws of God and man, but the laws of the market were in the end more powerful.

The growth of manufactures and the extension of the transportation system required an increase in labour that could not simply be satisfied with a expansion in population; so general complaints were made about workers leaving the land, and domestic servants abandoning their former employment, to make up the deficiency. Corbyn Morris, a customs administrator and economist, noted in 1750 that farmers throughout the kingdom were complaining ‘of the excessive increasing prices of workmen, and of the impossibility of procuring a sufficient number at any price’.

The increase in wages implied a rise in living standards. The roughest estimates, the only ones possible, suggest that in the 1760s and 1770s, home consumption increased at a faster rate than exports and that between 1784 and 1800 the increase in demand for mass commodities, such as soap and printed fabrics, tobacco and beer, was twice the rate of population growth. It has been calculated that as a result of these changes, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, industrial output was almost twice that of 1770.

Many workers enjoyed the benefit of tied cottages, schools and hospitals provided by the management. But of course conditions were attached to this apparent beneficence. Henry and Edward Ashworth, two mill-owners of Turton in Lancashire, told a government enquiry that ‘we exercise a control or superintendence over them, for their moral and social improvement … at frequent and irregular intervals visits are paid to every workman’. The rooms should be clean; the beds and children lice-free; their joint incomes, and their general habits of life, were recorded in special accounting books.

Josiah Wedgwood described the state of the Potteries after he had, as it were, colonized the neighbourhood. In a small pamphlet, ‘An Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery’, he celebrated the new conditions with ‘the workmen earning nearly double their former wages – their houses mostly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads and every other circumstance bearing the most evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements … Industry has been the parent of this happy change.’ William Radcliffe, the author of the Origin of the New System of Manufacture (1828), described in glowing terms the weavers under the patronage and control of Samuel Oldknow, cotton manufacturer, with ‘their dwellings and small gardens clean and neat – all the family well clad – the men with each a watch in his pocket …’.

We may of course turn to conflicting testimony. A surgeon, asked to recruit working men into the marines, noted that ‘the mechanics are shorter, more puny, and altogether inferior in their physical powers. Many of the men presented for examination are distorted in the spine and chest, which witness attributes to the confined position in which they work.’ The risks of disease and illness were infinite. The supposedly happy potters of Staffordshire, men and boys, often worked continually for twelve hours in temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The fork-grinders of Sheffield worked in an atmosphere of stone and metal particles, where lung disease was endemic; the plumbers, who used lead, were slowly poisoned; the hatters, who employed mercury, suffered from nervous debility; the cotton workers contracted byssinosis. Leather workers died of anthrax and lung disease struck down those who worked with wool. Grinder’s rot and bricklayer’s elbow, potter’s rot and miner’s phthisis were some of the occupational hazards. Tailors and seamstresses often lost their sight. Even as late as 1842 a Manchester labourer had a life expectancy of seventeen years, and a Leeds operative of nineteen.

Industry could not exist without misery. One traveller, William George Maton, observed in the copper manufactories that ‘some of the poor wretches who were ladling the liquid metal from the furnaces to the moulds looked more like walking corpses than living beings’.

Industrial victims of another kind were also evident. The hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and elsewhere lost their occupations, as new weaving technologies made their skills redundant; a report on the textile settlements by Angus Reach concluded that they ‘are a wretched and hopeless set’. They were joined in their suffering by southern agricultural labourers who had been used to increase their incomes with industrial labour in the wintry seasons, until the factories had left the south. They were also threatened by agricultural change that encouraged more enclosures and more scientific land use.

The infants were not far behind. The children at work in the mills were reported as suffering from extreme debility, fatigue and deformations of the body. One famous observer, Friedrich Engels, described various children as manifesting ‘pain in the back, hips and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins and large persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves’. If Engels might be considered a less than reliable witness his testimony is confirmed by a Manchester doctor who wrote that:

I stood in Oxford Road, Manchester, and observed the stream of operatives as they left the mills at twelve o’clock. The children were almost universally ill-looking, small, sickly, barefoot and ill-clad. Many appeared to be no older than seven. The men, generally from sixteen to twenty-four, and none aged, were almost as pallid and thin as the children … it was a mournful spectacle.

The children, then, may become a true test of the industrial system. The life of what became known as ‘the factory child’ was a symbol of the age. One operative, Charles Aberdeen, who had begun work as a boy, told a committee: ‘I have seen the race become diminutive and small: I have myself had seven children, not one of which survived six weeks; my wife is an emaciated person, like myself, a little woman, and she worked during her childhood, younger than myself, in a factory.’

The benefits of child labour, however, were deemed to be considerable. Children had, after all, worked from a very early age in the fields, in the shops and in domestic dwellings. They were no strangers to hard labour. It was considered to be good for them. It inculcated obedience and discipline. It added to the family purse. It was of value to the nation and of infinite advantage to the poor themselves. Defoe had commented, in his travels around the country, that in Norwich ‘hardly any thing above four years old but its hands are sufficient to itself’. The unspoken proverb here is that the devil makes work for idle hands. In Norwich, too, he commented that ‘the very children after four or five years of age, could every one earn their own bread’. As late as 1796 Pitt informed the Commons that ‘experience had already shown how much can be done by the industry of children’. So there was no outcry against the employment of very young children in the mills and factories; there was no outrage. They helped to keep wages down. They supported their families. What was wrong with that?

It was customary in the more populous parishes of London to send their children on poor relief to the proprietors of the cotton mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire; they were sent by the wagon-load as a welcome deduction from the poor rate. Many of the pauper children were collected from the workhouses of London and Westminster and transported north in large groups. One London parish negotiated a bargain with a Lancashire mill-owner that it could send one idiot child with twenty sound children. It is not at all clear who was paying whom. In the beginning the authorities paid a nominal sum to the mill-owners for taking their children off the rates, but there were also many reports of the factory-owners paying the parish for what was essentially slave labour.

The parents had no voice in the matter since they, too, customarily relied upon parish relief. And so the children were dispatched with as little care as if they were being shipped to the West Indies. When one slave-owner from that region heard that the children were worked at the cotton mills from five in the morning to seven at night, he observed that ‘we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human being to be so cruel’. Children were also engaged in night work when the pressure of demand required it.

The conditions in which they worked were uniformly deplorable. They were unprotected from the grind of machinery, and there are many reports of fingers being cut off or limbs crushed in the wheels. One boy who worked in a cotton manufactory for twenty years remarked that ‘I got deformed there; my knees began to bend in when I was fifteen; you see how they are.’ He was part of what Engels called ‘a crowd of cripples’. The ceilings were low, the windows narrow and generally closed. In this unventilated state epidemic disease was rife, with ‘factory fever’ first coming out in 1784. The food was often rancid, with porridge and black bread as staples. Some of the children had to raid dust heaps or fight with the pigs to get into their troughs. Discipline was considered to be essential in such conditions. It was normal for a sleepy or slow child to be hit with a whip, cane, or clenched fist; if any tried to escape they were put in irons. For serious offences the child might be suspended in a ‘cage’ or basket from the ceiling. There is no doubt that some of the overseers were brutish, with a predilection for giving pain to infants. One factory in Manchester was known as ‘Hell’s Gate’.

Nevertheless the children were very useful. They were generally docile and uncomplaining. To whom, in any case, could they complain? They were quick and nimble, small enough to insert themselves into the machinery where required. Some machinery was constructed with child operatives in mind; the spinning jenny had a horizontal wheel best handled by children aged from nine to twelve. One observer, Samuel Schroeder, noted that ‘a small boy makes the blanks red-hot in a small furnace. Another boy puts them under the punch, one by one. The third picks them out of the punch and greases the upper mould between each punching with a greased brush. All this goes quite quickly.’

The children were also very cheap, some of them earning nothing more than their food and lodgings. The age of their labours began at four or five. Pin-makers, for example, began at five, and it was said that going into their workshop was like entering an infants’ school. Jedediah Strutt of Belper explained to a Commons committee that he would take children at the age of seven but preferred those between eleven and twelve. There can be no doubt that these factory children were the least favoured, and least protected, group in eighteenth-century society.

There were occasions when an adult male was given work only if he also sent his children to the mill. Thus there grew up ‘families’ of operatives. Secure work for husbands, wives and children could thereby be gained. The adults were better able to look after their children, at least in theory, and their joint earnings were larger than the average.

Natural exaggeration cannot be discounted in the more appalling accounts, and of course the horrors of the workhouse were not visited upon all the children. The dire conditions afflicted the majority, but some escaped them. The more enlightened employers, such as the Arkwrights and Oldknows, for example, tried to mitigate the hardships of the children’s condition; schools were established, and special ‘apprentice houses’ were built; the boys and girls (specially segregated) were sometimes allowed to play in the fields. But this only put a gloss upon their misery. Robert Owen explained in A New View of Society (1813) that David Dale of the New Lanark mills paid particular attention to the health, cleanliness and diet of the children in his employ; it was reported that ‘the rooms provided for them were spacious, always clean and well ventilated; the food was abundant’. Nevertheless they were employed from six in the morning to seven in the evening, winter and summer; it was observed that ‘many of them became dwarfs in body and mind, and some of them were deformed’. It was concluded that the kind intentions of David Dale were ‘in their ultimate effect almost nugatory’.

Women as well as children provided the human energy of the Industrial Revolution. They too were considered to be docile, nimble and cheap. They also had to be resourceful in a world where they could be employed among the machinery as well as earning their livings as gun-makers, blacksmiths, pin-makers, armourers, or chimney sweeps. William Hutton travelling through the north country in 1741 noticed, with an attempt at irony, that in some of the factories ‘I observed one, or more females, stripped of their upper garment, and not overcharged with their lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of their sex. The beauties of their face were rather eclipsed by the smut of the anvil …’

There is a suggestion of sexual licence here that other observers had already taken up as one of the evils of industrialism. One factory reformer, Michael Sadler, observed: ‘I never did hear it denied that many of the mills, at least those in which night work is pursued, are … little better than brothels.’ A Children’s Employment Commission, established a few years later in 1842, reported that the factories were characterized ‘by the practice of gross immorality, which is prevalent to a great extent, in both sexes, at very early ages’. Some of the female workers complained that their male colleagues often resorted to drink and other stimulants to counter their fatigue, and in a general atmosphere of heat and monotony the results were inevitable. So the industrial age promoted promiscuity.

The women were particularly sought out, however, for delicate repetitive tasks such as painting on pottery or polishing in the japanning trades. It was thought that they would not ‘combine’ in the manner of their male colleagues, and would be more tractable in matters of hours and subsistence wages. In the mills and factories, young women in fact comprised the majority of the employees. Women made up the bulk of the textile trade and were most heavily employed in those industries which favoured technical innovation. This relatively new workforce could be exploited more easily, and could be used to bypass traditional rules and work regulations.

One recognizable group of people has been left out of this survey of early industrialism, and they are the industrialists themselves. In these first years they had to be at the same time adventurers, entrepreneurs, salesmen, managers and, if possible, inventors. Some of them had been drapers or shopkeepers, part of that ‘middling’ class which was even then struggling to find its voice. Others had been apprentices ready to exploit their training. Yet not all of them had to rise entirely by their own efforts; some of the most successful industrialists were of the second generation, with fathers or even grandfathers ahead of them in the trade, But they might also be the sons of farmers, yeomen, gentlemen and physicians. They might acquire their education in dissenting academies, in technical schools, in private schools that specialized in mathematics and geometry, or in the lectures arranged by the learned societies of their neighbourhood. There was also a plethora of technical literature from pamphlets and manuals to encyclopaedias.

Some had been mill-wrights who had constructed and designed machinery. One of the most famous of them, Sir William Fairbairn, recalled that ‘a good mill-wright was a man of large resources; he was generally well educated, and could draw out his own designs and work at the lathe; he had a knowledge of mill machinery, pumps and cranes, and could turn his hand to the bench or the forge with equal adroitness and facility’. Such a man could quite easily turn industrialist.

Others had been merchant-manufacturers who saw the value of expanding their trade. Others were by training scientists or engineers eager to put their expertise to practical account; there were few factory managers who were not interested in scientific and technical change. That was the key to their enterprise. Josiah Wedgwood established an ‘experimental company’ while Matthew Boulton set up a ‘research assay office’.

The history of successful industrialists is instructive. William Radcliffe wrote that

availing myself of the improvements that came out while I was in my teens, by the time I was married [in 1784 at the age of twenty-four] with my little savings and a practical knowledge of every process, from the cotton bag to the piece of cloth, such as carding by hand or by the engine, spinning by the hand-wheel or Jenny, winding, warping, sizing, looming the web, and weaving either by hand or fly-shuttle, I was ready to commence business for myself; and by the year 1789 I was well established and employed many hands both in spinning and weaving, as a master manufacturer.

So a beginner, with the help of a little capital, could progress by degrees to become a master manufacturer. This is the human face of industrial change.

Peter Stubs of Warrington, a master file-maker, was also an innkeeper and brewer when he began his business. There were times when he had difficulty in recruiting youth to his workshops; the mother of Edward Lancelot of Liverpool wrote that ‘I hope you will excuse mee for not sending my son. The reason is I ad no shoes.’ Yet he prospered, and in various stages of his business career he was selling cast-iron bookcases and glass cylinders as well as potatoes and coconuts. His company still survives and remained in private hands until the 1960s.

Jedediah Strutt of Belper invented a stitching machine known as the ‘Derby rib machine’ that manufactured ribbed stockings, with which he gathered fame and prosperity. Part of the epitaph he wrote for himself affords a good if idealized description of the eighteenth-century industrialist who ‘without having wit had a good share of plain common sense – without much genius enjoyed the more substantial blessing of a sound understanding – with but little personal pride despised a mean or base action …’.

Samuel Oldknow of Stockport was the first to manufacture muslin in England. He established an industrial centre, with a steam-powered manufactory, a bleaching plant, finishing factories and warehouses; he also had a zeal for organization, and decided to develop a community of workers on the site. A thousand weavers were employed in the immediate area of the manufactory, while another 1,000 worked in related factories in the same neighbourhood. Another aspect of industrial change can be seen in Oldknow’s enterprise; six of his employees eventually set up in industrial business on their own account.

There was almost a religious zeal in this propensity for progress. One merchant, Samuel Salte, told Oldknow, that ‘you must both have the perseverance of saints and the resolution of martyrs’. Charity, too, could also be found. One mechanic, Laurence Earnshaw, devised a machine that could spin and reel cotton in one operation; but then he destroyed it for fear that it would take bread from the mouths of the poor.

It is a nice question, however, to determine the actual religion of the industrialists or even of those touched by industry. They were in large part dissenters; very few Anglicans, except for some of the nobles and the great landowners, participated in business. It needed the industry, the self-reliance and the determination of the large body of dissenters to promote industrial change. Since they were forbidden to hold civil or military posts, and were excluded from the English universities, their ambitions were concentrated in other areas. The dissenting academies were in any case fertile ground for young inventors and engineers.

Many of the great iron-masters were Quakers, sturdy, self-reliant and highly conscious of kith and kin; they did not care to marry ‘out of the Society’ and as a result Quaker dynasties like that of the Darbys were established; the first Abraham Darby came from a family of Quaker locksmiths near Dudley in the west midlands. Thrift and austerity encouraged the accumulation of capital, while prudence and industry directed that capital back into the business. The Quaker network no doubt also led to price-fixing or what might more respectably be called trading agreements.

Methodism was perhaps a more significant force. In all its forms that faith was an intrinsic aspect of industrial change through its missionary activities among the northern working class; they sought through their hymns and sermons to encourage aspiration rather than despair among those who laboured in factories; the pursuit of success was seen as a Christian obligation, while the quest for innovation and self-improvement was the most honest of causes.

Drunkenness, time-wasting, laziness and all the other pre-industrial vices were to be exorcized; as alternatives to misery and its various opiates, the Methodists set up their own communal activities, which afforded a sense of belonging, and of participation, in an industrial world that still seemed alien to most of its workers. That is why hand-loom weavers, in particular, became indoctrinated with Methodism as a way of life rather than of devotion. In the summer of 1784 John Wesley ‘found a lovely congregation at Stockport much alive to God’. It was stated as a general rule that ‘where there is little trade, there is seldom much increase in religion’. It has been said, therefore, that Methodism was the religious arm of the Industrial Revolution. In the words of one of Charles Wesley’s hymns:

Help us to help each other, Lord,

Each other’s cross to bear,

Let each his friendly aid afford

And feel his brother’s care.

As a caveat it might be added that a significant number of weary workers, of both sexes, might profess no religion at all. God could not have made the mills.

The iron-masters tended to be assertive and aggressive. They were the first identifiable group of industrialists, some of them coming from agriculture and some from the metal trades. Many of them had names taken from the Old Testament – Shadrach Fox, Nehemiah Lloyd, Job Rawlinson, Joab Parsons, Zephaniah Parker – and they seemed to possess the same primal force. ‘The orders I have made’, Ambrose Crowley told his managers, ‘are built upon such a rock that while I have my understanding it shall be out of the power of Satan and all his disciples to destroy them.’ Iron was in their blood. They could be callous and even ruthless but they seemed to take a proprietary interest in what they called ‘our men’.

Their employees were obliged to work in conditions that were compared to those of Hades. The furnace, the flames, the smoke, the heat, the white-hot ingots, the whole intricate network of chains and pulleys, are worthy of the graver of Piranesi or Gustave Doré. The glare of the furnaces and the lights of the hearths lit up the nights of the Black Country just as surely as if they had been raked by searchlights. It is perhaps no wonder that Ambrose Crowley invoked the name of Satan.

The case of iron is instructive in another sense. One great innovation changed the nature of the product. By means of ‘puddling’, a process of melting and stirring invented by Henry Cort in 1783, coke was used to refine pig iron into wrought iron or bar iron. The furnaces became ever larger and the uses of the iron multiplied; it was mined, smelted, refined, rolled into plates and rods. The demand grew for iron chains, iron pipes, iron wheels, iron stoves, iron grates, iron rails, iron mortars, iron nails, iron pots, iron fences, iron pillars, iron buildings, iron ships and iron paving. It was the age of iron. It could be manufactured in apparently unlimited quantities and before long England became the largest iron producer in Europe, providing half of that continent’s supply. The iron bridge that spans the Severn in Shropshire was considered to be one of the wonders of the world and the dramatist Charles Dibdin predicted that ‘it will apparently be uninjured for ages’. Indeed it still stands.

From the development of the steel industry emerges a similar story of innovation and growth. A clock-maker from Doncaster, Benjamin Huntsman, was the pioneer; in testing the methods for producing finer clock-springs he hit upon a method by which he could maintain the steel at an intense heat in a crucible of clay while its impurities were burned away. It became known as ‘Huntsman’s crucible’ by means of which cast steel was produced in greater and greater quantities. He took out no patent but was determined to keep his secret until he was foiled by a rival manufacturer, Samuel Walker, who on a wintry night disguised himself as a homeless beggar and pleaded to be close to the warmth of the furnace where he could spy with more ease.

In textiles, the glory of England, growth was apparent on all fronts, from silk to wool, from cotton to linen. The clue to improvement was of course the plethora of machines for carding, for combing, for winding, for warping, for weaving, for lapping, for slubbing, and a score of other operations. One improvement led to another, one technical idea promoted another idea. The new inventions were at first only readily applicable to cotton but they soon spread to wool and to linen.

It was a process of what might be called incremental change which was not necessarily written down but worked out in practice by the operatives who passed on their skills by demonstration and word of mouth. Men and women, and even children, learned by doing. This is one of the great engines of the industrial change of the late eighteenth century. The knowledge of skilled workers was of indispensable benefit in the spread of inventiveness, with a pool of young mechanics and apprentices who were eager to learn. It was the practical side of the Industrial Revolution which was perhaps most important. Goethe observed that ‘we [Germans] regard discovery and invention as a splendid personally gained possession … but the clever Englishman transforms it by patent into real possession’. This may be less than fair on men such as Arkwright and Darby, but it does contain an important truth. The English artisan was well known for his discipline, concentration and urge for practical perfection.

Thus in the manufacture of cotton there were innumerable minor adjustments, and a stream of suggestions, for the better employment of the operatives. At the accession of George III in 1760 3 million pounds of raw cotton were imported; twenty-nine years later the figure had risen to 32.5 million. Cotton goods became cheaper and much more plentiful; as a result some of the problems of human well-being were reduced. Francis Place, the social reformer, noted that the new cottons worked ‘all but wonders in the health and cleanliness of women’. It took an Indian hand-spinner approximately 50,000 hours to prepare 100 pounds of cotton, whereas the process on Arkwright’s rollers and ‘the mule’ took 300 hours. The production of cotton moved from the East to the West. The plight of the hand-spinners in India and the hand-loom weavers in England was left out of account, leading ineluctably to their suffering in the nineteenth century.

Two other elements of manufacturing, at this time of change and innovation, deserve notice. A manager at Whitbread’s brewery wrote in the spring of 1786 that ‘last summer we set up a steam engine for the purposes of grinding our malt and we also raise our liquor [water] with it’; the improvements ‘are very great indeed’. The London breweries were soon wholly mechanized, among them the Black Eagle Brewery in Brick Lane, Courage’s Brewery by Butler’s Wharf, the Anchor Brewery at Southwark and Whitbread’s Brewery in Finsbury. The brewers themselves became rich and influential citizens. Some became members of parliament, while others became mayors, justices of the peace and aldermen. They were the aristocrats among London businessmen.

The brewers also invented a new refreshment that helped the wheels of industrial change turn with better grace. In 1722 a brewery in Shoreditch prepared the first mug of ‘porter’, a black and bitter beer, with more hops than malt, that pleased the palate of Londoners accustomed to strong and sharp flavours. It was cheaper than pale ale, and was the first beer to be suitable for mass production; by the 1760s, the sale of porter accounted for almost a half of the market in beer. London tastes were also gratified by another marvel of mechanics. Canned soup and canned meat were on sale by 1814.

Yet the textile industry was central. The mechanization of wool processing lagged behind that of cotton, but eventually it displaced the conditions of work at home where women and children managed the sorting, cleaning and spinning while the men concentrated upon the combing and weaving. The flying shuttle and, eventually, the spinning jenny and the combing machine took their place. New urban districts devoted to wool clustered around Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford and Halifax while the old wool towns of the southwest dwindled away. These changes were not of course without consequences of their own, among them the series of events that became known as the ‘Wiltshire Outrages’. Was it just or proper that a whole way of work, or way of life, should be eliminated? The new wool factories were seen as themselves great machines bent upon destroying custom and ancient practice, employing men and women who did not possess any of the traditional skills or, more importantly, traditional values. One Norwich wool-comber told his employers, in the middle of a working dispute: ‘We are social creatures and cannot live without each other; and why should you destroy community?’ There was no satisfactory answer.

It was therefore inevitable that ‘combinations’ of workers should be established to agitate for better terms and conditions in their respective trades. The destruction of custom, and the attempt to repeal apprenticeship, added to the general unrest. The Leicester Sisterhood of Female Handspinners was established by 18,500 women in 1788, but most of the workers who joined in the first ‘trade unions’ were skilled male workers in the metal trades anxious to fight employers who wished to cut their wages or change their working hours. They were also intent upon forming a ‘closed shop’ against the incursion of women, children and other forms of cheap labour. When the makers of muslin in Glasgow tried to cut down piece-rates, they were confronted by boycotts and organized resistance. As early as 1726 a parliamentary committee was informed that the serge weavers had their own club houses ‘where none but weavers are admitted, and that they have their ensigns and flags hung out at the door of their meetings’.

In 1758 a warrant was issued at the Lancaster Assizes for the arrest of nineteen senior weavers who were believed to act as stewards for a combination of several thousand weavers. They had agreed to collect money ‘for supporting such weavers as should by their committee be ordered to leave their masters and made other dangerous and illegal regulations: that they had insulted and abused several weavers who had refused to join in their schemes and continued to work, and had dropped an incendiary letter with threats to masters that had opposed their design’. This activity did not only anticipate the machine-breaking of 1802 and the Luddite riots of 1811, but it also can be seen as a harbinger of the professional and organized trade unionism of the nineteenth century. Even in the last decades of the eighteenth century there were attempts at discipline, organization and cohesion among the ranks of the workers.

Their example prevailed in other trades. The journeyman hatters formed what Francis Place called a ‘perpetual combination’. Weavers combined in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, while wool-combers were organized in Leicestershire and Yorkshire. Plumbers, carpenters, shoemakers and house-painters had joined them by the end of the century. The factory system was no doubt the true parent of protest and unrest; it seemed to be large and growing ever larger, creating a new world of penury and exploitation.

The workers were perhaps following the example of their employers since, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the steel manufacturers of Birmingham, the nail-smiths of Gloucester and pin-makers of Nottingham were among the many manufacturers who formed what might be called self-help organizations or, less kindly, price-and wage-fixing rings.

Outbreaks of riot and machine-breaking were common in the eighteenth century. As early as 1719 the striking keelmen of Newcastle upon Tyne were met by a regiment of soldiers and a man-of-war. In 1726 riots and loom-breaking broke out in the West Country, and in 1749 the silk, cotton and iron trades were disrupted by demonstrators. In 1768 Hargreaves’s spinning jennies were destroyed by irate workers and, a decade later, Arkwright’s machines met a similar fate. The first law to prevent the growth of trade unions, the Combination Act of 1721, banned journeymen tailors from entering into ‘combinations to advance their wages to unreasonable prices and lessen their usual hours of work’. The law and the employers got their way, and created the context for more severe Combination Acts at the end of the century. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels made the observation that ‘the history of the proletariat in England begins with the invention of the steam engine and of machinery for working cotton’.

Engels may have misinterpreted the signs of social change in England, and was clearly mistaken in basing them upon continental models; the British form of industrial protest had none of the proto-socialist shrillness of the agitators in France and Germany. It was more formal, more measured and more pragmatic; it relied to a certain extent upon humour and sarcasm, and was maintained by a deep deference for national institutions.

Yet no doubt something was happening. There was something in the air of the industrial towns and villages that had not been sensed before. An observer, Richard Ayton, going among ‘the people of the lower orders in Lancashire’, noted in Voyage round Great Britain (1813) that they are ‘fully aware of the importance of their labour’. He noted also that they were ‘rude, coarse and insolent … Much vice and profligacy necessarily prevail among them; but while their morals are corrupted the powers of their minds are called forth; they become lawless and unprincipled, but quick, cunning and intelligent.’ Was this the new kind of labour that the factory system, and industrial change itself, had elicited?

26

On a darkling plain

The industrial geography of the later eighteenth century was dominated by ‘the drift’. It was in large part fuelled by the movement from the rural hinterlands to the industrial areas of the north and the midlands where the demand for labour was most intense. Who would work in the fields for a pittance when they could work in the factories for a living wage? The looms called them. There was no sudden or general migration, from the southwest and the southeast to the north; it was a process that was gradual and incremental. It is true, however, that the readily available labour drifted from neighbouring rural areas to the nearest industrial centre. It was essentially an aggregate of small movements over a restricted area. That is why, over the eighteenth century, furnaces and forges quickly came to a halt when the harvest had to be brought in.

Yet there was slow but significant change. Charles Dibdin in his Musical Tour of 1788, noted that ‘manufactories that begin about the centre of the kingdom push on to the north – having taken up their residence in Yorkshire – they expand to the east and west; but particularly the west, in a most astonishing way. Thus, from Leeds to Liverpool – through Bradford, Halifax, Rochdale, Manchester, Warrington and Preston – the population is wonderful’.

The metal industries had found their home in the midlands, rivalled by the growing cotton manufactures of Lancashire or Cheshire and the woollen manufacture in the West Riding of Yorkshire. That was the geography of trade in the broadest possible terms. Lancashire, the West Riding, Staffordshire and Warwickshire (together with Middlesex) were by 1800 the most populous counties in England. The consequence was that the rural areas of Essex, Suffolk, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire became ever more agricultural as all traces of industry vanished.

Special trades flourished in separate small areas. Prescot specialized in watch-parts, Chowbent and Leigh made nails, while Ashton-in-Makerfield manufactured locks and hinges. Staple materials could be found in different regions. Tin and copper were mined in Cornwall; lead was everywhere in the Mendips, but there were large supplies of the same metal in Cumberland and Derbyshire. Salt was the preserve of Cheshire, while slate found its natural home in Cumberland and North Wales. Portland was of course famous for its stone. In the eighteenth century England was a capacious storehouse of natural resources that could be easily exploited, and this in turn promoted industrial progress.

The result was that each region and each town was fundamentally different from its neighbours; some employed more female than male labour, while others were more dependent upon the ‘boom or bust’ cycle of certain industries. Prices rose and fell according to different variables. Craft industries were shaped by artisan production in manufactories or by the ‘putting out’ system of domestic labour. When a banker, Mr Oakes of Bury St Edmunds, made a journey to Lancashire on business in 1803, he believed that the county was ‘like a different country’. Nothing was familiar or recognizable; even the people seemed different. The simple peasant of Cromford, according to a diarist and traveller, John Byng, had turned into ‘an impudent mechanic’. Joseph Healy, a poet who later celebrated the resistance at Peterloo, observed the ‘half-burnt cadaverous looking animals’ to be found at the Stourbridge glass-works in 1777. This was a new nation.

Why had this social revolution happened in England rather than in France or Austria? It may be related to Defoe’s dictum that England had by the early eighteenth century become ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’. In France, for example, raw materials were scarce and the possibilities of investment few; the traditions of the country also favoured small-scale enterprise in a manner which the larger farmers of England soon abandoned. In England, too, there was virtually no state or bureaucratic control to guide the process of change; instead, by a series of statutes, the administration actively assisted those who were willing to break up the customary traditions of industry and manufacture. The decay of ‘custom’, as it was known, really meant the end of the old order. Popular traditions were denounced as immoral and popular beliefs were derided as superstition; the familiar perks of the daily job, such as the odd piece of cloth or metal, were now considered to be theft.

The history of patents, as we have seen, exemplifies a prolonged period of inventiveness and ingenuity in the later part of the eighteenth century which may be related to the natural pragmatism and practicality of the English. Science and manufacture were closely aligned in the period, with institutions such as the Lunar Society bringing together manufacturers and experimentalists. From their collaboration came much of the machinery of change. The individual entrepreneur was also free to assert himself, with the spirit of competition and acquisitiveness all around him. Contemporaries noted in fact that the English, of all people, were possessed by the spirit of gain and were characterized by aggression and ruthlessness in its pursuit. All things worked together.

The industrial towns represented some of the most evident signs of the new order. Some of them, Wigan, Bolton and Preston among them, were known as mill towns. They were anomalies. They had no corporate structure for the most part, and were singularly free of churches and hospitals. They were just planted when industrial conditions were suitable and to a certain extent resembled the towns of the ‘gold rush’ of 1849 in California. The lead mills of Sheffield provoked one visitor to note that the houses were ‘dark and black, occasioned by the continual smoke of the forges’. It was written of Barnsley, known as ‘Black Barnsley’, that ‘the very town looks as black and smoky as they were all smiths that lived in it’. From Rochdale to Wigan, from Bury to Preston, the dark stain grew and grew. In 1753 Bolton was little more than a village with one street of thatched houses and gardens; twenty years later its population had risen to 5,000; within a further sixteen years it had risen to 12,000 and by the beginning of the nineteenth century to 17,000.

The dwellings of the manufacturing towns were largely back-to-backs with one room on each floor; it was common for the houses to be occupied by more than one family, and many residents dwelled in the cellar which consisted of two rooms under the ground with a small window in the ceiling. Since there was no administrative control of the building trades, the houses were generally narrow, dark and unhealthy. Even the once-affluent dwellings had degenerated into slums, and workshops were built over the gardens. This was a world of small courts, alleys and tenements, generally with one outside privy for four families. The new streets, so quickly knocked up, were without drains, pavements, or public lighting. Everything seemed temporary, makeshift, haphazard, testifying to the distress and uncertainty of this new world of work.

A medical report, compiled in 1793 by Doctor Ferriar for a police committee in Manchester, states that ‘in some parts of the town the cellars are so damp that they are unfit for habitation … Fever is the usual effect.’ Large masses of people were streaming towards specific areas of cheap and dangerous housing. In Lancashire many thousands of cottages were built, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to accommodate a labour force of some 170,000 people. This was a measure of the change from what had once been a predominantly agricultural region. Ferriar also reports that ‘a lodger fresh from the country often lies down in a bed filled with infection by its last tenant, or from which the corpse of a victim to fever has only been removed a few hours before’.

Harsh conditions, however, may serve to bring people together. Over time the residents of what were once little more than shanty towns developed a strong sense of community, in some sense equivalent to the ‘combinations’ of the industrial workers and others. People sought out their kin, and also others who had originally come from the same rural neighbourhoods. Neighbours themselves were the first line of defence against sickness and unemployment; there was no benevolent state to assist them.

In 1807 the poet Robert Southey visited Birmingham:

A heavy cloud of smoke hung over the city … the contagions spread far and wide. Everywhere around us … the tower of some manufactory was seen at a distance, vomiting up flames and smoke, and blasting every thing around with its metallic vapours. The vicinity was as thickly peopled as that of London … Such swarms of children I never beheld in any other place, nor such wretched ones.

The city expanded at an enormous rate, year by year, and an observer wrote that ‘the traveller who visits her [Birmingham] once in six months supposes himself well acquainted with her; but he may chance to find a street of houses in the autumn, where he saw his horse eat grass in the spring’.

Mr Pickwick in the course of his perambulations took in this ‘great working town’ with all ‘the sights and sounds of earnest occupation’, where ‘the streets were thronged with working people. The hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attick storeys; and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls.’ This was not the harsh music of London with which Dickens was familiar; this was more intense, and more concentrated. These were streets filled with ‘working people’, not with the motley London citizenry in all its variety. You would not find here the dandies or the actors or the ‘shabby-genteel’ or the madwomen who appear in Dickens’s novels; these had all been elbowed aside in the rush for work and trade.

Birmingham had become the toy shop of the world, when a ‘toy-maker’ was a manufacturer of buckles, trinkets, small arms, locks, buttons, tweezers, snuffboxes and a multitude of other small metal goods. Hundreds of workshops were locked in a cycle of manufacture whereby various small parts of each device were cast eventually to form a whole, a sprocket-wheel here and a strap there. The guns were passed from shop to shop in the course of their construction, and were handled by specialized operatives at every stage of the procedure. This was what was generally perceived to be the real Industrial Revolution. Matthew Boulton’s Soho works were 2 miles from the centre of the town, with his thousand workers providing the fuel that fed the flame of commerce. By 1775 Birmingham was the largest industrial centre outside the capital. The rolling mill and the rotary steam engine were the future.

The people of Birmingham had dirty faces and no names, according to one contemporary, but some of them at least were fired by an enthusiasm for making. William Hutton, the first proper historian of the city, wrote in 1741 that ‘I was surprised at the place but more so at the people. They possessed a vivacity I had never beheld. I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step along the streets showed alacrity. Every man seemed to know and prosecute his own affairs.’ So the disparate reports conjure up images of energy, determination, eagerness, industry. It may have been the air of Birmingham, therefore, that created the conditions for the emergence of dissent and radicalism as the two significant elements of city life. Dissenters played a large part in the corporate life of the town and the Lunar Society, with its fair share of free-thinkers and dissenters, was established in Birmingham. They represented the richer citizens who funded a town hall, a corn exchange, a theatre and a new market hall as well as the ‘improvements’ of New Street. Of course it was unwise to ignore the sheer determination and contrariness of what was known as ‘the bunting, beggarly, brass-making, brazen-faced, brazen-hearted, blackguard, bustling, booby Birmingham mob’. Soon enough they would take their revenge upon some of the dissenting elite in the town.

Manchester also arose in the time of industrial change. Robert Southey again deplored the conditions of the people who were fed into the machine, whose ‘health physical and moral alike is destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms’. A foreign contemporary observed that there was no sun in Manchester; only a dense cloud of smoke that covered the bright orb. The only light came from Vulcan, the god of fire and of metalworking, and from his monstrous furnaces.

Its major trade was in cloth, and, in particular, cotton, but it contained twelve iron foundries as well as numerous tin-plate workers, braziers and lock-makers. It was, in other words, a prodigious industrial town. A rapid increase in new housing occurred in the 1770s, and within ten years more than a third of all new dwellings had been erected. Such was the demand that many of the houses were occupied even before they were finished.

The new streets were narrow and badly lit, if they were lit at all; the land was so valuable that courts and lanes and alleys were crowded together at the expense of light and air. In a city of almost 100,000 people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was not a single public garden. This is what was meant by the truism that England had changed from a rural to an urban civilization. Joseph Kay, a barrister, was at a slightly later date delivering a speech to the Manchester Statistical Society in the course of which he stated that ‘in no former era and under no former phase of national life has anything at all similar been witnessed’. This was true enough. The impact of Manchester upon political and economic life would be immense.

Other cities had other histories. Newcastle upon Tyne was of course dominated by its coal trade, and the deliveries of its ships kept the hearths of London burning with what was known as ‘sea coal’; the cheap fuel encouraged the growth of brewing, dyeing, glass-making and soap-making. It was the fourth largest town in England and as such dominated the economic and social life of the north-east. It was also a centre of printing, and in the eighteenth century published more books than any other city except London. It supported three newspapers, three circulating libraries and seven subscription libraries. The men of business took a keen interest in public affairs, and it has been estimated that there were more than fifty clubs of Whig or radical tendency. This is the other face of the industrial change, when the men of wealth and influence no longer necessarily took the side of established power and authority.

An American businessman, Louis Simond, approached Leeds at night, and saw a quintessential industrial nightscape where ‘from a height, north of the town, we saw a multitude of fires issuing, no doubt, from furnaces, and constellations of illuminated windows (manufactories) spread over the dark plain’. In more placid style John Dyer, in ‘The Fleece’ (1757), noted the growth of ‘busy Leeds’ where:

Some, with even line,

New streets are marking in the neighb’ring fields.

The most evocative literary description of an industrial town comes later in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, where his love of darkness and decay, of stunning contrasts and of reality touched by stage fire, found its true subject. ‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.’ The horrid vista is presumably based upon Preston, which Dickens had just visited, but it could be an emblem of any mill town of the period.

Amid this gloom and blackness and soot and grime, however theatrically elaborated by Dickens into a vision of hell, there was much industrial misery. The factory system often represented a sentence of death. In addition the industrial towns had many paupers, debarred from work by sickness and injury, who huddled together in the poorest districts. Even the labourers still in employ were often in some way deformed with swollen limbs or unsteady legs.

Yet this picture of unrelieved misery, so much emphasized by social historians of the twentieth century, is incomplete. Could a country be racked by manifold suffering on such a scale without visible revolt? Other developments must be cast in the opposite scale. By the early years of the nineteenth century industrial wages were keeping pace with the cost of living, and industrial change itself was providing the necessities of the labouring classes. Cottons and woollens, food and drink, were now more amply distributed, and it was believed that the diet of the workers had greatly improved. Wheat replaced rye, and meat became a staple dish. Cheaper and better-distributed coal provided heat for the hearth. The rise in family earnings and the greater regularity of pay in the industrial districts were also not insignificant benefits. In 1830 Macaulay observed that ‘the laboring classes of this island … are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than the inhabitants of any equally extensive district of the old world … The serving man, the artisan and the husbandman, have a more copious and palatable supply of food, better clothing and better furniture.’ But of course, as a result, examples of comparative suffering and real poverty were ‘more acutely felt and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere’.

The industrial system itself led to manifest improvements. The employment of female workers gradually helped to establish the social and economic independence of women, while the scandal of child labour provoked such outrage that it promoted attempts at some form of primary education by charitable institutions; the ‘ragged schools’ began their long life in 1818, while the charity schools of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster had already created ‘the steam engine of the moral world’. The combinations of the workers led in turn to friendly societies, savings banks, mechanics’ institutes and of course trade unions. The ills of life were to be remedied rather than endured.

Long and complex arguments have been made ever since about the relative rise or fall of the ‘standard of living’. Since the measure or index of such an impalpable entity seems to vary with each debate, it becomes a nice question. It is not practicable, for example, to compare a modest rise in wage rates with the manifestly unhealthy and even mortal conditions of the new cities. Does the spread of cholera balance the lower cost of bread? Cheaper clothing cannot compensate for overcrowding. Yet one statistical measurement may be granted without much objection. The average height of the population deteriorated in the second half of the eighteenth century, and continued to decline through the first half of the next century. This was most obvious of course in the vast difference between the poor and the rest of the population; agricultural distress and industrial decline in certain areas led to a class of people living in what Charles Booth later called ‘chronic want’.

The worst cases of economic failure must be set against evidence of falling mortality. The absence of epidemic plague and the increased attention to sanitation and hygiene may help to explain the improvement, and one influential London physician, Doctor Lettsom, remarked that the people ‘have learnt that most diseases are mitigated by a free admission of air, by cleanliness, and by promoting instead of restraining the indulgence and care of the sick’. Not everyone cared for the new methods. In 1768 a hospital for inoculation was burnt down by a mob in Peterborough.

The number of infants who died shortly after birth in the British Lying-in Hospital, in Holborn, fell from 1 in 15 in the 1750s to 1 in 118 by the turn of the century. In the course of his travels in the 1770s John Wesley observed the crowds of young children that seemed to populate the towns and villages. In 1726 life expectancy was put at a meagre twentyfive years; by the 1820s it had risen to forty-one years. The length of life, however, remained very low in the newly industrialized cities.

It is perhaps impossible, therefore, to gauge the general effects of industrial change in the eighteenth century. It represents a complex of so many particular forces and events that it might best be treated as a natural phenomenon with all the random and inexplicable details that surround such an event. Yet some tentative conclusions may be advanced. The people, according to Thomas Hardy, now served smoke and fire rather than frost and sun. They became accustomed to the machine and to the clock; they worked for a wage rather than for subsistence, and they had no essential stake in the objects they produced. The nature of the family and household was wholly changed.

England was no longer predominantly an agricultural society, a state in which it had remained for approximately 10,000 years. It was no longer plausible to propound a natural hierarchy of power based upon land; the twin imperatives of custom and deference began to disappear. The powers of patronage began subtly to change as the ‘middling classes’ aspired to more political and economic power. The abolition of the laws of apprenticeship, and of the assize of bread where that commodity was granted a ‘fair’ price, marked the onset of an economy that was based upon competition and self-interest.

That was why the labouring masses, the working people, soon became a class apart. It was considered as impossible to mix the higher and lower classes as to mingle oil and water. One employer, quoted by Arnold Toynbee in his lectures on the Industrial Revolution, stated that ‘there can be no union between employer and employed, because it is in the interest of the employer to get as much work as he can, done for the smallest sum possible’.

The professional artisan, too, began to separate himself from manual labour and from too close an involvement with the working men; in the previous dispensation a metal manufacturer might spend the day with his employees, superintending and assisting them, but that collaboration was now coming to an end. Samuel Courtauld was considering a career in engraving at his family’s silk mill but his father told him that ‘you seem to forget that mere manual labour – though of the higher class – is very rarely indeed so valuable as a business – as those modes of trade or manufacture which allow us a profit from the labour of many persons’.

The practitioners of ‘mere manual labour’ were now moving towards the more backward parts of the town where they were segregated from their ‘betters’. The business of trade, which had always been conducted as close as possible to the street – the gloves that Shakespeare’s father made were on show at the front window – were now relegated to a back room while the front quarters were for sleeping and eating.

The same changes were taking place in the world of agriculture. Small farms disappeared, and large enclosed farms became the standard for excellence. The small farmer gave way to the great agriculturalist who was the rural equivalent of the master manufacturer; he was already accruing vast profits from the easy availability of food. The labourer had once been part of the farmer’s household, eating at the same table, but that contiguity had ended. One labourer complained, according to Arnold Toynbee, that ‘the farmers take no more notice of us than if we were dumb beasts; they let us eat our crust by the ditch side’. The farm labourers themselves were now housed in a species of barracks.

This division between the ranks of society might have perilous consequences. By dint of schooling, even of the most elementary kind, the younger workers were becoming more literate and therefore less ignorant of the wider ways of the world. They were less abject and less easily led or cowed. New men might have new ideas. From the period of the ‘combinations’, for example, we may date the early organization of workers in a common cause, a movement that led to the emergence of Chartism in the late 1830s. The ties between the ranks or classes of society had been broken, provoking ambition, restlessness, or confusion.

It has been suggested that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries crime rose at an unanticipated rate, particularly in the newly urbanized and manufacturing regions. It had become necessary to supervise the people in a stricter and more organized fashion. In 1792 the creation of the London Police Magistrates initiated a trend for stipendiary magistrates in other urban regions. For most of the eighteenth century prisons were simply large and verminous dungeons where a variety of criminals was promiscuously held, so that by 1789 the prison reformer, John Howard, was suggesting the innovative model of ‘regular steady discipline in a penitentiary house’; he was advocating the modern form of prison, in other words, which can also be seen as one of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.

The laments came in many forms. Some decried the changes in the landscape, where the mills had risen in the valleys and the great rocks were cut for limestone. The earth, in the striking phrase of John Britton, ‘is covered and loaded with its own entrails’. William Blake saw into the heart of the new dispensation and correctly estimated its consequences.

All the arts of life they chang’d into the arts of death …

And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel,

To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours

Of day & night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file

And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship,

Kept ignorant of the use: that they might spend the days of wisdom

In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread.

The literary complains were taken up by popular songs and street ballads, as in one poem composed by Joseph Mather against master cutler Watkinson who counted thirteen knives as a dozen when he paid his men:

That monster oppression behold how he stalks

Keeps picking the bones of the poor as he walks …

In an anonymous and powerful ballad, ‘The Complaint of a Kidderminster Weaver’s Wife to her Infant’, the master manufacturers are called ‘murderers’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘oppressors’:

Hush thee, my babe! thy feeble cry

Tells me that thou ere long wilt die:

I’m glad thou hast not liv’d to curse

Our cruel masters. That were worse.

The movement of Romanticism might itself be interpreted in one of its aspects as an assault upon, or retreat from, the new industrial age. In the eighth book of ‘The Excursion’ William Wordsworth is astonished by the fact of a ‘huge town’ emerging ‘where not a habitation stood before’. One of his editors cites the case of Middlesbrough, which in 1830 was no more than a farmhouse by the bank of the Tees and which fifty years later was a town of more than 50,000 inhabitants:

O’er which the smoke of unremitting fires

Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths

Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.

As so often in his work Wordsworth is equivocal, refusing to give judgement. In a subliminal way he seems to enjoy the experience of industrialism even as he denounces it.

The 1760s and 1770s became known as ‘the age of sentiment’ guided by ‘the sentimental muse’; it was a time of high feeling and moral sensibility which can be seen as an alternative to the harsh and unremitting world of industry and manufacture. What was natural; what was free; what was spontaneous and governed by the heart. Such were the themes of Robert Blair’s The Grave of 1743 and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts of 1745. These were the precepts of a movement that excluded from view the mills and the chimneys. Since The Grave and Night Thoughts were established upon artifice and false nostalgia, they could not endure as the poems of the ‘Romantic age’ managed to do.

There was as much or more to be said for the art, rather than the poetry, of the Industrial Revolution. If you could surpass nature, as some of the industrialists had done, it should be possible to reach the sublime in another sphere. The industrial landscapes of John Martin are filled with fulminating life as if the energies of the earth had finally been manifested in flame, smoke and fiery blaze. He was in particular inspired by the spectacle of the Black Country than which, as Martin’s son said, ‘he could not imagine anything more terrible, even in the regions of everlasting punishment. All he had done, or attempted in ideal painting, fell far short, fell very far short of the fearful sublimity of effect when the Furnace could be seen in full blaze in the depth of night.’ This was the painting of magnificence and chiaroscuro. His canvases seem to roar, whether in rage or in defiance. He drew upon Egyptian, Oriental and Greek imagery to conjure up visions of sublimity and terror, where the unfamiliar landscape of caves, ruins and pyramids whispered of ancient powers now once more unleashed upon the earth. Another Cyclops might walk among the mills and manufactories. In mezzotint he scraped away blackness to create form.

A more gentle sensibility had also come to life. When a professional architect, John Wood, listed the pleasures of industrial change he mentioned deal floors covered with carpets, marble rather than stone hearths, mirrors and trinkets in the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Oriental’ manner, walnut and mahogany furniture. He was concerned in other words with the material stuff of life that had been improved by the age of the machine. ‘I went to see the beautiful manufacture of silk, carried on by Mr Fulton and Son’, William Cobbett, no avid champion of industrialism, wrote. ‘I never like to see the machines, lest I should be tempted to endeavour to understand them … as in the case of the sun and the moon and the stars, I am quite satisfied with witnessing the effects.’ He wrote these words as late as 1833, at a time when it would have been hard to believe that England was indebted for her success and prosperity to Arkwright and Watt rather than to Nelson and Wellington.

27

Fire and moonlight

Science and industry were the twin horses of the eighteenth-century apocalypse. Even as parts of the landscape were altered by ironworks and manufactories, so itinerant ‘experimentalists’ or ‘natural philosophers’ would tour the larger towns and houses with their compendia of wonders. In taverns, in coffee-shops and in the houses of the wealthy, they would bring out their alembics, their orreries, their lunaria and their electrical machines in order to elucidate the workings of the universe to a largely uninstructed audience. They were the conjurors of the eighteenth century. It was the first public phase of the scientific revolution.

It needed, perhaps, the genius of an artist to see it clearly. Joseph Wright was born in Derby, in 1734, just thirteen years after the first fully mechanized factory was erected in the vicinity. Lombe’s Mill has already entered these pages as one of the wonders of the new age, and it soon became an object of pilgrimage for those who wished to view the new engines of power. Since much of Wright’s subsequent work is devoted to the manifestations of industry, we may fairly guess that he was one of its admirers.

This is the context in which to set one of Wright’s most celebrated paintings, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). A travelling experimenter, with a magus-like flourish, has set up an air pump for the delectation of the members of a wealthy family (perhaps of merchant stock from the midlands); in the glass dome of its receiver a white cockatoo is clearly struggling for life and breath as the air is drawn off. Two small girls can barely look while their father reassures them; another well-dressed man is timing the action with a watch while in the background a young couple are looking into each other’s eyes rather than at the experiment on the beleaguered bird. An older man, sitting in the foreground, contemplates a glass vessel containing what seems to be a pair of human lungs.

The magus or scientist stares out of the painting with a wild look and an expansive gesture of his arms as if to welcome the spectator to a new world. It is not at all clear whether the bird is to live or die, and this dramatic tableau does nothing to resolve the matter. It is a moment of maximum intensity, conveyed by the chiaroscuro that models the human figures. Joseph Priestley, a member of the Lunar Society and well known to Wright, argued in a public lecture at Warrington that ‘real history resembles experiments by the air pump, condensing engine and electrical machine which exhibit the operation of nature and the God of nature himself’. It is not clear, however, whether this is a study in the inevitability of death or, if the stopcock is released, in the blessings of God’s air. Wright himself suffered from severe asthma, perhaps as a result of nervous melancholia, and his condition lends significance to the pair of human lungs under glass. The despair of his desire for air, and the rapture of relief, give the painting its air of intensity and foreboding.

The air pump of the painting is, however, a curious anomaly. Its design is taken from Sir Robert Boyle’s early ‘pneumatic engines’ first used by him in the late 1650s. By the time of the painting’s composition the glass receiver had been replaced by a leather ‘plate’ on which a bell-jar rested. But Wright retained the then anachronistic glass globe. It was for him an emblem more important than the claims of scientific accuracy. The empty globe, the bubble, was in his period a profound symbol of transitoriness and deceit. Glass balls, empty globes and soap bubbles were the familiar language of vanitas painting. That is why Wright felt moved to create a hybrid machine, with the double-barrelled pumping mechanism of the eighteenth century and the glass globe in use a century before. Pictorial, scientific and religious connotations reinforce one another.

We may put as its companion piece another painting, completed two years before, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun, where another travelling lecturer is demonstrating the mechanical contrivance used to mark the movements of the sun and the planets. A concealed light casts illumination on the faces of the principal spectators while leaving the room in darkness; the spherical bands of the scientific instrument are viewed in all their internal geometry, while the intent faces gazing at the experiment are like planets caught in the radiance of a fleeting sun. It is one of the most arresting depictions of the light of knowledge, and the fire of invention, that came from the mid-eighteenth century.

A subsequent series of five paintings from the early 1770s, including A Blacksmith’s Shop and An Iron Forge Viewed from Without, have been classified as ‘night pieces’ largely as a consequence of Wright’s continued employment of chiaroscuro to celebrate the quality of light. But they might easily qualify as industrial pieces because of the intensity of their focus on industrial labour and industriousness itself. Servitude to work is now celebrated as a spark of the divine.

In An Iron Forge Viewed from Without Wright paints the new machinery of the ironworks in the light of the eighteenth-century sublime. The iron worker may be seen as a modern Vulcan, the god of fire who was often portrayed with a smith’s hammer; the white-hot ingot, created in a shed or manger-like structure, can be seen as an image of the Christ Child or Robert Southwell’s ‘The Burning Babe’ in the paintings of the Nativity. The light is holy. We may take as its text some words from William Beckford’sFragments of an English Tour, published in 1779. ‘The hollow wind in the woods mixing with the rushing of waters, whilst the forges thundered in my ear. To the left, a black quaking bridge leading to other wilds. Within, a glowing furnace, machines hammering huge bars of red-hot iron, which at intervals cast a bright light and innumerable sparks through the gloom.’ The tone and sentiment of early nineteenth-century Romanticism are beginning to emerge. It had an early apotheosis in France.

28

The red bonnet

In the summer of 1788 the political order seemed secure. The first minister, William Pitt, had the full confidence of George III, and their congenial partnership promised a long period of stability. In the phrase of the time Pitt was ‘the king’s friend’. He had cause to be. He had helped to mend the finances of the administration by producing budget surpluses and cutting the national debt; he reduced smuggling, and managed to raise the revenues. He repaired the fleet and, by means of a triple alliance with Holland and Prussia, he restored the country’s standing in Europe and elsewhere. When Spain attempted to seize British trading vessels off the western coast of Canada, she was forced to yield and return the ships; her ally, France, had been in no position to help her. So England was known for her domination of the sea.

Yet in the autumn of the year all was changed. There was something wrong with the king. Pitt received a note from the king’s physician that his patient was in a state ‘nearly bordering on delirium’. He had always spoken rapidly and with decision, but now he became chattering and incoherent. It is widely accepted that his were the symptoms of porphyria, which is not a sign of madness or mental disorder but rather a physical condition that affects the toxins of the nervous system and thus the brain. It is believed that he had inherited the condition by indirect means from the Stuart line. It might be called the royal disease. None of this was known at the time, of course, and the king had all the appearance of a howling lunatic.

The dilemma was for Pitt acute. It was not a situation any first minister had ever been forced to confront. The king was completely incapacitated, and his future sanity in doubt; the prince of Wales would be his successor, but the prince was on very bad terms both with the king and with the king’s ministers. The prince was, in addition, close to Fox and to the Whig cause. He was Pitt’s worst enemy. It was in Pitt’s interests therefore, to postpone any regency for as long as he could. He believed that the security and peace of the country would otherwise be jeopardized.

He presented his proposals to Prince George on 30 December. The regent would be granted no powers to create peers or to bestow places for life; the regent would have no share in managing the king’s estate; the queen would be responsible for all household matters. The prince was not impressed. He had in effect been deprived of any powers of patronage, which was the lifeblood of rule.

He was too eager for his own good; he insulted his father and quarrelled with his mother, all the time anticipating with infinite satisfaction his acquisition of the throne. His supporters were no less indiscreet. Fox in particular declared that the prince had an inherent right to become monarch, thus contradicting or disowning his Whig preference for parliamentary privilege. Pitt was heard to say that he would ‘unwhig’ Fox for life. Fox then peremptorily removed himself to Bath, where he was treated for dysentery. His fellow Whig, Edmund Burke, was no more subtle or restrained; he dilated on the problems of insanity, and the possibility of a relapse. When he stated that he ‘had visited the dreadful mansions where the insane are confined’, even some of his party were horrified at his presumption and lack of tact.

Prince George was not himself a model of royal deportment. His life had been guided by pleasure rather than by principle and his politics were fashioned on the basis of convivial companions rather than settled convictions. He was accused, justifiably, of greed and drunkenness, compounded by gambling and sexual profligacy. It was also widely believed that he had contracted a forbidden marriage with Maria Fitzherbert, a Roman Catholic; she was a woman of some charm and authority so that, in the phrase of the time, she was a ‘whapper’. But as a Catholic she was not eligible to be the prince’s wife, and so she became the cause of lies and prevarications and ambiguities that did nothing to recommend the prince to the public. Prince George himself seemed to forget about the clandestine marriage and soon attached himself to Caroline of Brunswick, this time his wife by legal marriage, but with equally disastrous consequences.

Pitt put himself forward as the champion of George III and of constitutional monarchy, a position all the more satisfying as it became evident that the king was beginning slowly to recover his mental powers. Pitt’s decision to delay any sudden intervention by the prince or his supporters now proved eminently successful; by the time a Regency Bill was about to pass, the king’s recovery was declared by his doctors to be complete. The vessel, as contemporaries said, had righted itself. On 23 February 1789 the king, in full possession of his wits, wrote: ‘I am anxious to see Mr Pitt any hour that may suit him tomorrow morning, as his constant attachment to my interest and that of the public, which are inseparable, must ever place him in the most advantageous light.’ The illuminations and bonfires, on the news of the king’s return to health, stretched from Hampstead to Kensington. Pitt himself was also the hero of the hour. The king’s son, however, was now lampooned for his heartlessness and ambition. The opposition Whigs were believed, at the very least, to have wanted judgement. The reign of Prince George was postponed for thirty-one years.

The king’s disorder was prognostic of a great convulsion in the European order. In the early summer of 1789 a commotion troubled France. The country was almost bankrupt as a result of its support for the American insurgents, and a series of bad harvests and freezing weather brought low its population. The English already had the upper hand in commerce as a result of their naval supremacy. There seemed to be no other place for the French to turn, except to some general reformation.

At a meeting of the States General at Versailles the commons, or third estate, prevailed over the nobility and the clergy; in the middle of June the deputies declared themselves to be the National Assembly. Louis XVI announced that their meetings were suspended, whereupon they assembled at an indoor tennis court nearby where they swore a solemn oath that they would remain in permanent session ‘until the constitution of the kingdom is established’. ‘We are here by the power of the people’, the comte de Mirabeau stated, ‘and nothing but the power of bayonets shall drive us away.’ This was the defiance that inspired many of those who would become revolutionaries in the months that followed; the National Assembly represented the people, and the people were supreme. Patriotic societies and revolutionary clubs flourished in Paris and elsewhere.

On 14 July the citizens, with the help of the French guards, stormed and captured the Bastille; the head of its governor was carried in celebration through the streets. The crowd had triumphed, and the old regime could not survive the combined will of a populace intent upon change. Another lamentable harvest created the conditions of famine in the capital, and the people were lean and hungry; they were dangerous. It was said that a fourth of the population had been driven to sell everything they owned in order to buy bread, and so a desperate people sought for revenge as well as sustenance. The tax collectors of the state and the seigneurial courts were the villains of the day who were subject to very rough justice. The conditions in the rest of the country were no better. There were continual outbreaks of violence and insurrection. Several French cities followed the example of Paris, and in the surrounding countryside the peasants armed themselves against their former masters.

The king had sensed the overwhelming necessity of change and, in an attempt to placate his subjects, put on the tricoloured cockade and pledged to help in the formation of a new government. Yet it was rumoured that his protestations were not sincere; it was suspected that all the while he was plotting to overthrow the new order and its ‘liberty’. Liberty was the keyword; it could be uttered in support of violence and of murder. It was born in flames. Yet it also had a more benign aspect. In August the newly composed National Assembly issued a ‘declaration of the rights of man’, the first three provisions of which determined that men ‘are born and remain free and equal in rights’ and that these rights included ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’; the third article confirmed that ‘the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’, and not in any single person.

On 5 October many thousands of men and women armed themselves and assembled with the cry ‘To Versailles!’ The citizen militia joined them in attacking the royal palace, at the conclusion of which Louis and the royal family were taken in triumph to Paris. The heads of many of the king’s supporters, impaled on pikes, decorated the path to the city where the king was once more obliged to accede to a new constitution. The ties of history and tradition had been cut through; the sanctions of custom and time were abandoned. This was an ideology based upon rational principle, the reification of ‘the people’ and a fervent devotion to ‘la patrie’ or the fatherland. The clergy were now aliens, and the nobles beyond help; any aristocrats who wished to survive became leaders of the citizens or the citizen militia. It was a new order governed by a commitment to ideals, no less potent for being wholly vague; a vision of reality became more important than the reality itself, and the twin shibboleths of liberty and equality left power in the hands of those who were most ruthless and most determined. Only the perceived will of the nation now mattered.

The news of the events in France astonished the English, who had not anticipated the virtual collapse of the monarchy and the insurgency of the people. Some viewed the events with suspicion and alarm, but many welcomed the apparent defeat of despotism and the restoration of liberty. It was thought to resemble the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when the Stuart king, James II, was deposed. It was also widely believed that the French would be too distracted by inner turmoil to pose any threat to English interests and English commerce.

William Pitt remained cautious and maintained a policy of cool neutrality; he wanted peace at all costs in order to sustain prosperity and to curb government expenditure. Bishop Porteous recorded in his diary for July 1789 that ‘This day Mr Pitt dined with me in Fulham. He had just received news of the French Revolution and spoke of it as an event highly favourable to us and indicates a long peace with France. It was a very pleasant day.’ Pitt himself remarked that ‘our neighbours in France seem coming to actual extremes’, a situation which rendered ‘that country an object of compassion even to a rival’. So there was an element of self-satisfaction in the face of the tumult across the Channel.

Charles James Fox, ever the libertarian and for the time being bearer of the Whig standard, reacted very differently. He declared: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ He confirmed his joy when he stated in the Commons that the new constitution of France was ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty’. Nothing was to be feared from this newly free country; it would do no more than spread liberty. His enthusiasm was largely shared by the dissenters and nonconformists of England who believed that the king, courtiers and clergy of France were little better than limbs of the devil.

In the New Annual Register for 1789 William Godwin wrote that ‘from hence we are to date a long series of years, in which France and the whole human race are to enter into possession of their liberties’. William Blake composed ‘A Song of Liberty’ to conclude The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–3): ‘Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! … Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying: Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.’ In those days, as Lord Cockburn recalled, ‘everything, not this thing or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event’. The consequences for England itself could not be anticipated in anything but the most general and overoptimistic terms. It was not clear even to the far-sighted, for example, that the revolution would engage the nation in a war that would last a generation, and would fundamentally change the state of domestic politics. France itself passed from monarchy to representative democracy, from arbitrary dictatorship in the name of the people to the basic components of a military state.

The exhilaration survived for a few months yet. On 9 November 1789, a number of politicians met at the London Tavern under the name of ‘The Revolution Society’ where they drew up a congratulatory address to the National Assembly in Paris with the hope that the late events might ‘encourage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind, and thereby introduce a general reformation in the governments of Europe’. There were of course many who did not share these sentiments, and considered them to be pernicious talk of reform for reform’s sake; such sceptics believed that the ancient constitution of England, albeit unwritten, was a greater stay against the dark.

This was the intuitive reaction of Edmund Burke, the Whig statesman who had become more and more alarmed by the revolutionary sentiments of such colleagues as Fox and Sheridan who outbid each other in their fervour for the new order in France. Burke had at first been uncertain. In a letter of 9 August 1789, he described ‘England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or applaud!’ But in February 1790, he disparaged in the chamber of the Commons ‘the spirit of innovation’ as one ‘well calculated to overturn states, but perfectly unfit to amend them’. This was followed in the same year by a treatise, Reflections on the Revolution in France, that was taken up by all those who feared and distrusted the event.

It was a majestic polemic in which Burke excoriated ‘those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent to pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution’. His animus was directed not only against the Jacobins and the radicals, but also some of the members of his own party. He declared that no nation or movement can rely upon the private stock of reason of any one individual, but must trust the ‘general bank and capital of nations and of ages’. He despised the ‘men of theory’, the intellectuals who thought to lead a revolution with their first principles and rational calculations. He put his faith in historical experience, practical utility and the fund of common knowledge transmitted from generation to generation. He put no faith in a ‘sick man’s dream of government’. He remarked that:

because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

George III came up to Burke at a reception and told him that ‘you have been of use to us all, it is a general opinion’.

Thomas Paine, who had already made his mark on behalf of the Americans with Common Sense was now moved to compose a rejoinder to Burke in which he would celebrate the virtues of the revolution. The first part of The Rights of Man was published in pamphlet form in February 1791 with great popular success; it was hailed by the reform societies as an enduring testament to their convictions. Paine himself wrote at a later date that ‘it had the greatest run of any work ever published in the English language. The number of copies circulated in England, Scotland and Ireland, besides translations into foreign languages, was between four and five hundred thousand.’

It had arrived at the opportune time. It provided an explanation and a defence for the great movement of the age. The revolution produced the harsh and strange music, while Paine composed the libretto. He loathed aristocrats and traditional aristocratical government; he characterized Burke’s appeal to custom and history as no more than ‘contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’; Burke had commiserated with the sufferings of the quondam rulers of France, and in so doing ‘he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird’. Had he no notion of the millions of starving workers and peasants for whom there was no room in the world? Government should be conducted for ‘the common interest of society, and the common rights of man’. In England, that boasted land of liberty, it had become clear that ‘taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes’. This was a fundamental hit against William Pitt’s financial and military regime; Paine was asserting that war was part of the system of government. This opened men’s eyes, in a phrase of the period, and immeasurably helped in the popularity of the treatise. At a later date President Andrew Jackson declared that The Rights of Man ‘would be more enduring than all the piles of marble and granite man can erect’.

It soon became clear that most parliamentarians, including the largest number of Whigs, were supporting the arguments of Burke rather than those of Charles James Fox and Thomas Paine. There was a singular confrontation between the two parliamentary protagonists in May 1792; both Burke and Fox were debating the constitutional rights of Canada in the Commons when they began to stray into the dangerous territory of France. Fox was still an ardent supporter of the revolution but Burke now stood up. ‘Fly from the French constitution’, he said.

Fox whispered to him that ‘there is no loss of friends’.

‘Yes,’ Burke replied, ‘there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.’ At this point, according to those in the chamber, Fox broke down and wept. It was a private example of the divisions within the country itself.

The people of England were now taking sides; the dissenters and reformers in favour of the French revolutionaries were largely opposed by those who supported ‘Church and King’. If we may use Burke’s analogy the grasshoppers were largely outnumbered by the cows, but that was not at all clear at the time. A Catholic Relief Bill was passed in 1791, removing certain legal restrictions from those who practised that faith; it was believed that Catholics, after the anti-clerical terror of the revolution, were now firmly on the government side. Panics about popular insurrection were still commonplace, however, and were in large part responses to the growth and development of ‘reform societies’ who took their inspiration from the revolution in France, from the war for independence in America and from the recent popular agitation associated with ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ These men could be shopkeepers or artisans, merchants or schoolteachers, dissenting ministers or dissenting businessmen, booksellers or attorneys. Among these ‘middling classes’ there was a vast desire for change.

Their grievances included a demand for parliamentary reform, at a time when only 17 per cent of constituencies were contested and more than 60 per cent were controlled by the patronage of a neighbouring grandee. As Paine stated in The Rights of Man:

The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million of souls, sends two country members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. The town of old Sarum, which contains not three houses, sends two members; and the town of Manchester, which contains upwards of sixty thousand souls, is not admitted to send any. Is there any principle in these things? Is there anything by which you can trace the marks of freedom, or discover those of wisdom?

He was also directly attacking Edmund Burke’s deference to the traditional order. For many that order was nothing but old corruption writ large.

The first popular reform society, the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, was established in 1791; with a predominant membership of cutlers and metal craftsmen it emphasized the connection between the new industrialism and radical discontent. That is why the Sheffield society reprinted 1,600 copies of The Rights of Man. The London Society for Constitutional Information was instituted at the end of the year.

There had already been a sharp and salutary warning, however, for those who believed that reform was inevitable. On 14 July 1791, a ‘Bastille dinner’ was held in Birmingham, at a hotel in Temple Row, in order to celebrate the achievements of the revolution. A hostile crowd, largely made up of labourers and artisans from Birmingham, gathered outside the tavern in threatening numbers; after the diners had precipitately left, the crowd ransacked the premises. They then moved on to the houses and workshops of the most prominent dissenters in the town, notably the library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley. Priestley was one of the eminent members of the Lunar Society who included among their number nonconformists and free-thinkers whose doctrines were beyond the comprehension of the loyalist supporters of ‘Church and King’. Priestley was forced to flee Birmingham and eventually to take refuge in America; the king himself observed that ‘Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled’.

So in the early months of 1792 the country was in an unsettled state, pursued by vague fears and unknown horrors precipitated by the French Revolution. In February the second part of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man was published, with its radical notions of social welfare; he suggested that £4 a year be granted to every child under the age of fourteen for the purposes of schooling, and that a remission of taxes should be given to the poor. He also proposed a scheme of old age pensions ‘not of the nature of a charity but of a right’. This was too much for the authorities, who could never conceive such a state of affairs, and three months later a royal proclamation against seditious publications was issued with particular attention paid to Paine.

This was no impediment to the growth of popular reform movements that were committed to promoting their aims by peaceful and constitutional means. The London Society for Constitutional Information, animated by the examples of Sheffield, Manchester, Norwich and Middlesex, proposed a motion denouncing Burke and celebrating the doctrines of Paine. These nascent bodies were organized by John Horne Tooke, an early disciple of John Wilkes as well as a philologist and perpetual activist, to give the impression of a nationwide movement; their membership probably ran into thousands rather than tens of thousands. But they were by no means revolutionaries; their members, who were obliged to pay a subscription, were composed of country gentlemen, peers, MPs and merchants who were intent upon constitutional liberty and an extension of the franchise.

In January 1792 a Piccadilly shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, called a meeting of radical colleagues at the Bell Tavern in Exeter Street, off the Strand, where he proposed a society with a wider provenance and a subscription of a penny a week. It was resolved by the members of this London Corresponding Society that their number and composition be ‘unlimited’. It was soon composed of what Hardy called ‘tradesmen, mechanicks and shopkeepers’; these were butchers and bakers, bricklayers and cordwainers, who had played no previous part in any political movement. At the same time it expressed ‘its abhorrence of tumult and violence’ with its emphasis on reform rather than revolution or anarchy. Its members campaigned for manhood suffrage, annual parliaments and cheaper legal costs.

The politicians at Westminster were not about to let this singular method of association go unchallenged and, in March 1792, a group of young Whig members of parliament established an Association of the Friends of the People which would be concerned with the possibilities of parliamentary reform. They in fact provoked embarrassment among their Whig colleagues who believed that the growing agitation for parliamentary reform was misdirected and even dangerous; yet at the same time the young men alienated the more radical reformers by refusing to subscribe to universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. They were marooned in the middle and, having provoked the suspicions and antipathies of both sides, were devoid of influence.

It was a hot spring – the temperature had reached 82 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of March – and in that unseasonable warmth there was a kind of fever or madness in the air. The wheat crop was not successful, and the torrential rains of August and September spelled more trouble for the farmers. The state of the land always had a direct effect upon the state of the nation; in a sense it was the nation in living and visible form. The general prosperity of the previous few years now seemed in jeopardy, and there was fear of economic collapse.

This was exacerbated by news of European turmoil. It was reported in July that the forces of Prussia and Austria were advancing on Paris under the command of the duke of Brunswick; this was meant to be the counter-revolution of the older European artistocracies. The men and youths of France were called out, many of them streaming into the capital, and on 10 August the National Assembly determined on the deposition of the king on the grounds that he had been collaborating with the enemy. When important fortresses on the French frontier were surrendered to the invading armies, the panic and suspicion were redoubled. No one was safe. In the events known as the ‘September massacres’, the priests and aristocrats – many already herded into prisons – were murdered. The Jacobins now ruled Paris and, under the command of rulers such as Robespierre and Marat, thousands of other citizens were thrown into prison before being judicially murdered. The guillotine was the new king.

The invasion of the duke of Brunswick and his forces was not necessarily welcomed by William Pitt and his colleagues. A revolutionary France, albeit one not under immediate control, would be preferable to a country in the grip of Austria and of Prussia. The French were in any case provoked to fury, and the violent republicans of a newly established National Convention now pressed for immediate war.

It was considered that the well-trained forces of the duke of Brunswick would make short work of the ill-disciplined and badly armed citizens of the revolution. But with all the fury of their revolutionary zeal the citoyens resisted; they would not surrender to the enemies of their goddess liberty and, with newfound inspiration, the national defences were prepared and organized. At Valmy in north-eastern France, on 20 September, the armies of the Austrians and Prussians were thwarted. There had been no set battle. In truth the duke of Brunswick had lost his nerve; he was faced with thousands of French soldiers, albeit in not very prosperous condition, chanting the ‘Marseillaise’ and screaming ‘Vive le nation!’ It was not an army he had ever faced before, and he ordered his troops to retire. Valmy was not a very significant encounter in the history of warfare but, in the history of the world, it was one of the most notable. The well-trained and well-equipped forces of the old wars had given way to – what? A rabble? A group of amateur soldiers? Goethe was at the time in the Prussian camp and predicted that ‘from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world’. A Prussian colonel offered similar sentiments. ‘We have lost more than a battle. Our credibility is gone. The 20th of September has given the world a new shape. It is the most important day of the century.’ On the following day the first French republic was proclaimed, and Valmy itself was the harbinger of a war that lasted for a generation.

The enthusiasm and joy of victory were palpable throughout France. Now was the time to press forward in pursuit of the dream of a universal republic in which all the people of Europe would be free. The French said that they had come to remove tyrants and pull down palaces, to extirpate the power of the clergy, to confiscate the property of Church and State in order to reduce the taxes on the poor. By the beginning of November the French army had entered Mons and Brussels; Savoy and Nice had been annexed, Italy and Spain threatened. ‘We must break with all the cabinets of Europe’, said the revolutionary Brissot. ‘We must set fire to the four corners of Europe.’ A new order of things was being born.

Pitt and his colleagues were now thoroughly alarmed by the miraculous resurgence of France. If the French should incorporate the Austrian Netherlands [Belgium] and should stir the United Provinces [the Netherlands] against the house of Orange, they would at once become a mighty sea power threatening the very frontiers of England.

The resurgent calls for liberty after the duke of Brunswick’s retreat excited the political reformers in England to the extent that The Times in October wrote that ‘the police should look to those Revolution mongers who are pasting up bills with a view to incite a mob to rise’. Yet Pitt’s ministry seemed strangely enervated and cautious. It was considered that the military did not have the strength to quell any uprising in the towns and cities. The government seemed also unwilling to declare war against France itself, for fear that the people would not tolerate such a conflict against the new republic. By November warnings were reaching the Home Office from all parts of the country; it was reported that the ‘lower orders’ were in active cabal and that weapons were being furnished and concealed in certain quarters. When the ministry did determine to call out the militia in certain parts of the country, Fox and his colleagues were furious. ‘I fairly own’, Fox wrote, ‘that if they have done this I shall grow savage and not think a French Lanterne too bad for them.’ The lamp-post was used to string up the victims of the Terror. In December Thomas Paine was convicted in his absence of seditious libel for the publication of the second part of The Rights of Man.

Fox had said that the ministry was helping to revive the memories of civil war, and indeed the country ran the risk of serious division. Where there were reformers there were also loyalists, who could be subtly encouraged by magistrates and police to assert themselves. In November 1792, for example, a meeting at the Crown & Anchor Tavern in London established an ‘Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers’. The most arresting incidents were those of ‘Paine burning’ where an effigy of the author was consumed in flames. In November a crowd of loyalists burned his image in Chelmsford, Essex, where a local newspaper reported:

[T]he effigy of that infamous incendiary, Tom Paine, was exhibited in this town, seated in a chair, and borne on four men’s shoulders – in one hand he had ‘The Rights of Man’ and under the other arm he bore a pair of stays [in recognition of his former employment as a corset-maker]; upon his head a mock resemblance of the Cap of Liberty, and a halter round his neck. On a banner carried before him, was written: ‘Behold a Traitor! Who, for the base purposes of Envy, Interest and Ambition, would have deluged this Happy Country in BLOOD!’

It is reported that there were over 400 such conflagrations in all parts of the country.

The temperature was raised in the same month when the National Convention in Paris declared that the French government and people pledged ‘fraternity’ to all ‘subject peoples’ with the declaration that ‘all governments are our enemies, all people our friends’. This was an open invitation to reformers or democrats to rise in all of the European countries, most notably in England and her allies. Pitt began to make cautious preparations. The militia were moved closer to London, and the Tower was more safely secured. Radical clubs were more closely watched, and foreigners supervised under the aegis of an ‘Aliens Office’ staffed by graduates from Christ Church, Oxford. The secret service of Francis Walsingham, in the reign of Elizabeth, and of John Thurloe, under the rule of Cromwell, was becoming more professional.

The harshest news came with the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793; when his head came off, 80,000 armed men erupted in cheers, and curious bystanders closer to the event dipped their fingers or handkerchiefs in his blood. ‘It is well salted!’ one called out. Gouverneur Morris, the American minister in Paris, predicted to Thomas Jefferson that ‘the English will be wound up to a pitch of enthusiastic horror against France which their cool and steady temper seems to be scarcely susceptible of’. The London theatres were closed, and all who could afford black went into mourning. Even Fox, the born Francophile, declared it to be a ‘revolting act of cruelty and injustice’. The escalating accounts of murders and outrages were shouted out on every street corner; when the English king drove out, he was surrounded by cries of ‘War with France!’ It was reported that Paris was ruled by tigers.

The wish was father to the deed. On 1 February 1793 the National Convention declared war on England; war was also to be waged against Holland, and an immediate invasion of that country was ordered. Pitt entered the conflict with strictly limited aims, and he believed that any struggle would be a short one. His purpose was to finance his allies in the European theatre while his own navy could concentrate on stripping France of its colonial possessions; it was widely believed that Pitt’s purpose was to annex the French West Indies. By the summer of 1793 the first minister was sending funds to Russia, Austria, Prussia, Sardinia and other interested parties. It was important that no one country should dominate the continent, so he ringed northern France with a circle of arms and men. This might be called ‘the balance of power’. Hessian mercenaries were recruited into the English forces, but the national dislike of a standing army limited their deployment. Yet the question of national purpose remained. Was Pitt intent upon subjugating France in Europe, or upon stripping that country of its overseas wealth? Nobody seemed to be sure.

The costs of the war, including the subvention of allies, were already provoking consternation, and in the early months of 1793 a sudden collapse of credit was the consequence. There was a run on the banks by those who wished to put their money in safer keeping, and the number of bankruptcies doubled in a year. One industrialist, Stephen Barber of Walsall, asked for a bill to be speedily paid in ready money ‘as we are so circumstanced in this country [county] we have not cash to go on with’. Coincidentally, perhaps, Pitt was believed to be drinking more heavily than usual.

Yet his political situation was now more than ever assured. The more moderate, or less radical, Whigs felt obliged to part company with Charles James Fox and his particularly vociferous support of the French cause. It was deemed to be unpatriotic at time of war. At the beginning of 1793 one of the Whig grandees, William Windham, announced the formation of a ‘third party’ that might find a middle path between Pitt and Fox while supporting the war against France. It was no coincidence that the rise of a ‘political middle’ comprising what the Cambridge Intelligencer called ‘the middle ranks of men cooperating with the declared and active advocates of moderate reform’ should be accompanied by praise of a new ‘middle class’ or ‘middle rank’.

The war seemed to be going well. The Austrian Netherlands were released from threat of French invasion, largely by the strength of the Hessian mercenaries, and the English navy retained its control of the seas and was even then planning to move against the French colonies. In the summer of 1793 a group of counter-revolutionaries based in Toulon captured the port and handed it over to the English. But the sheer stamina and ferocity of the French had been underestimated. Toulon was back in their hands by the end of the year, while Holland and Belgium were still under threat. Even the naval expedition to the French West Indies was crippled by dysentery and epidemic disease. The French technique of levée en masse, when the whole population might be thrown at the enemy, signalled a new form of warfare. The French hurled their men forward, however terrible the casualties, and lived off the land rather than maintaining supply lines; they were more flexible and far more fierce. The English and their allies seemed close to victory on many occasions but then in the face of the enemy began a protracted and sometimes wearying retreat. That could have been their catchphrase: not defeat, but retreat. At the battle of Hondschoote in September 1793 the duke of York attempted the siege of Dunkirk; but he was heavily outnumbered and his men were constantly assailed by a reviving enemy. He was eventually forced to withdraw, but the French were in no position to strike at his demoralized army. It might be an emblem of the continental war itself.

Parliament reassembled on 21 January 1794 and the ministers accentuated the positive. Dunkirk had not been taken by the duke of York but the Austrian Netherlands were still free. The West Indies had not been occupied but Tobago had been captured. Sardinia and Spain were cooperating. The British navy was still in control of the seas, and French trading vessels were constantly under attack. Austria and Prussia were not providing all the military resources expected of them and they were, in any case, in a constant state of mutual suspicion. Still, this was for the future.

The members turned their attention to domestic affairs. On 12 May Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and twelve others were arrested and tried for high treason; Hardy had first organized the London Corresponding Society in the Bell Tavern, while Tooke had helped to organize the radical societies in a national movement. Hardy was taken at his shoemaker’s shop in Piccadilly, while all the papers of the various London reform societies were seized. A report by a new Committee for Secrecy, established by parliament, concluded on 16 May that all such parties ‘must be considered as a Traitorous Conspiracy for the Subversion of the established Laws and Constitution, and the Introduction of that System of Anarchy and Confusion which has fatally prevailed in France’. Two days later the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended so that political prisoners could be held without trial. The measure was excused on the grounds that it would prevent outrages similar to those of Paris.

The trial of Hardy and others for high treason began on 25 September at the Old Bailey, with much technical discussion on the nature of the charge. Hardy was the first to be acquitted for absence of evidence, and was carried in triumph by a cheering throng from the court. The proceedings were followed by great crowds outside in the street, and by excited spectators within. Tooke was the next in the dock, and was acquitted after eight minutes. John Thelwall, one of the most radical orators and lecturers, was the third to be found not guilty. The government then dropped the other cases, to the joy of the multitude who still filled the London streets; the accused had been found innocent of treason simply because there was not enough evidence to support a high crime that merited hanging.

Despite the failure of the prosecution, some of the spirit left the supporters of reform. The war with France, now of course deemed to be the enemy, and the sanguinary events in Paris helped to diminish the enthusiasm for the cause. The threat of treason, although lifted, was still potent. The Society for Constitutional Information no longer met in London, for example, and Horne Tooke withdrew from political activity.

The period has been described as the beginning of Pitt’s ‘reign of terror’, culminating four years later with many more arrests of reformers, and has sometimes been compared with that unleashed on Paris by Marat and Robespierre; yet, if it were so, it was singularly weak in inspiration and execution. It is true that the prolonged series of assaults upon the members of the societies had effectively silenced some of them. But it has been estimated that there were only 200 prosecutions over ten years and some, like those of Tooke and Thelwall, ended in acquittal. This does not sound like a revolutionary situation.

The temper of the nation was better expressed on the occasion of the defeat of the French fleet in the Atlantic by Admiral Howe in the early summer of 1794, which became known as the ‘Glorious First of June’. When news of the victory reached London the performance at the Opera House was suspended, while the auditorium rang with ‘Rule Britannia’ and the national anthem. The city was illuminated and the king travelled to Portsmouth with his consort to greet the returning ships.

In the following month the more conservative and loyalist Whigs, having already abandoned the leadership of Fox and Sheridan, agreed to join the administration of ‘Pitt the patriot’ as he was sometimes known. He never called himself a Tory but always an ‘independent Whig’; nevertheless here were the makings of the nineteenth-century Tory Party. At this stage, however, it might be described as a powerful administration for national unity, its cohesion materially increased by a coup d’état in Paris on 27 July when Robespierre and the instigators of the Jacobin ‘terror’ were summarily dispatched by ‘Madame Guillotine’ or ‘The National Razor’. This by no means implied that the military threat from France was arrested. Brigadier-General Buonaparte was already considered to be indispensable for the disposition of the war.

That conflict had already entered a stage of frustration and indecision when it became clear that England and its allies on land were not so capable as England on the high seas. The English forces were themselves overstretched, and their supposed allies had begun to plot one against another. The Prussians mistrusted the Austrians while the English berated the Dutch even as the French army approached the borders of Holland. While the allies had the habit of dispersing their armies to confront various contingencies, the French forces just grew bigger; it could be said that they were winning through size of numbers rather than revolutionary fervour.

In England itself dearth was causing unprecedented misery. This was the largest cause of unrest. Thomas Fuller had already published his Gnomologia in which he recorded contemporary proverbs. ‘Where bad’s the best, bad must be the choice.’ ‘All’s good in a famine.’ ‘Hunger finds no fault with the cookery.’ ‘Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings.’ Hungry men, women and children will of course eat almost anything. By the end of 1795 prices had risen some 30 per cent from 1790.

An attempt to ameliorate the harshest conditions, and also to divert the rage of the people, was attempted by the magistrates of Speenhamland at a meeting held in the Pelican Inn near Newbury in Berkshire. It was concluded that, if the price of bread rose above a certain level, the poor would receive a special subsidy from the parish funds. It seemed a remarkably efficient system of benefit and was adopted by other counties where it became known as the ‘Speenhamland system’. It was soon, to all intents and purposes, a national system from Dorset to Yorkshire. Yet it had its critics, who believed that it kept wages artificially low; the farmers felt no need to pay their workers more if the parish was about to supplement their incomes. It was deemed by some to be demoralizing, and there were complaints that some labourers threatened the parish overseers for insufficient aid. So began the argument over ‘welfare dependency’ that continues to this day.

Even the most liberal provisions were not enough to stay the rising tide of anger from reform societies that had weathered the storm of Pitt’s ‘terror’. In late June a crowd of many thousand, organized by the London Corresponding Society, met in St George’s Fields south of the Thames where they demanded the end of war and a reduction in the price of food; the old demands of manhood suffrage and annual parliaments were made, but the principal cry was for ‘Bread! Bread!’ Baskets of biscuits were distributed stamped with the legend ‘freedom and plenty, or slavery and want’. This was not the Jacobin activism of the previous year but a more potent domestic combination of rage, frustration and hunger. Bread riots also erupted in Birmingham and Coventry, Nottingham and Sussex. In July some demonstrators broke a window of Pitt’s residence in Downing Street; he described it ironically to his mother as ‘a single pebble’. In the following month the Sheffield Constitutional Society held an open-air meeting on Crooke’s Moor where it was pleaded, in imitation of Luke’s gospel, that ‘when we ask for bread, let not the father of his people give us a stone’.

When the new session of parliament opened on 29 October 1795, the price of bread had reached its highest level. Pitt’s carriage was surrounded by a jeering crowd shouting ‘No Pitt! No War! Bread! Bread! Peace! Peace!’ The king’s own carriage was mobbed by ill-wishers and at one point a stone, or bullet, pierced its window. A ballad-seller, hawking Paine’s The Rights of Man for a penny, was arrested; he was promptly rescued by the crowd and chaired in triumph. Pitt took advantage of the situation by bringing forward a bill for ‘better securing the king’s person’. This was accompanied by the ‘Two Acts’ or ‘Gagging Acts’ that were designed to curtail the right of assembly and to widen the scope of high treason. All public meetings comprising more than fifty people were to be supervised and controlled by local magistrates; prior notice of, and specific details about, any meeting or public lecture had to be given in writing. As for the bill against treason, the death penalty could be applied to people who advised the death or imprisonment of the king and, more significantly, who attempted to change his counsels or opinions. Pitt also summoned more militia to London, and told William Wilberforce that ‘my head would be off in six months were I to resign’. Wilberforce commented, with a hint of understatement, ‘I see that he expects a civil broil.’ A physician whom Pitt consulted, Walter Farquhar, also reported that the functions of ‘his stomach are greatly impaired and the bowels very irregular’ which he attributed to ‘the excess of public business and the unremitting attention upon subjects of anxiety and interest’. So Pitt was in deadly earnest; he feared revolution.

It is an open question whether he was right in his judgement. Despite the apparent severity of the ‘Two Acts’ they were rarely enforced with rigour, and the usual process of muddling through seems to have been paramount. When in November a further protest meeting was held at Copenhagen Fields a contemporary noted that

You may have seen in the papers of prodigious numbers being at the meeting. This is not true in the sense such accounts would be understood. In the course of the day many thousands were doubtless in the field, but never at one time. I was there between two and three and I don’t believe there were five hundred in the field, and I saw it at the fullest time so far as I can understand.

This was nothing like the march on Versailles.

There was undoubtedly a revolutionary fringe hoping to take advantage of the general misery; some of them were from Ireland, some from France, and some of them home-grown revolutionaries. Reports reached the Home Office of secret meetings and plottings, but nothing ever came of them. This poses the larger question of England’s apparent immunity from the revolutionary disorders that had swept France. A number of explanations present themselves, all with a modicum of truth. The fact that England was at war with France did of course much to dampen any enthusiasm for republican ideals; it would have been like sleeping with the enemy. The sceptical attitude hardened what can essentially be viewed as the conservative cast of the English people, accustomed to an established order and to the traditions of historical existence. Edmund Burke himself, as we have observed, appealed in his speeches and pamphlets to the significance of precedent and continuity in the life of the nation, a contract between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

The role of the Churches should not be underestimated. There was a broad and wide church polity that softened religious unrest and division. It was an advantage, of course, that the major religions all took for granted the nature of human inequality; Anglicans and Methodists were united in their assertion of the virtues of loyalty and obedience. It has often been suggested that in England the ‘lower orders’ have never risen without an impulse from above to rouse them; the circumstances of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811 may be exceptions to this argument but certainly, in the 1790s, there was no disaffected aristocracy to lead the charge as there was in Paris.

More subtle explanations for the absence of revolutionary enthusiasm may be adduced. The English had always been known as a practical and pragmatic race. That is why they had taken the lead in the progress of the Industrial Revolution. The French, on the other hand were known to be speculative and enthusiastic; they followed their theories and ideas like ignes fatui wherever they might lead them. This was, at least, the caricature. Whether a stubborn paysan would concur is another matter.

Nevertheless it was believed by many English contemporaries that the revolution had simply got out of hand, that it had been so driven by first principles that it had strayed from its proper path. The more ardent French revolutionaries saw the events that surrounded them as a miracle play in which they took on the most important roles. They identified themselves with the people; they identified themselves with the national will; they identified themselves with la patrie. William Pitt observed that it was ‘a species of tyranny which adds insult to the wretchedness of its subjects, by styling its own arbitrary decrees the voice of the people, and sanctioning its acts of oppression and cruelty under the pretence of the national will’.

One other national myth was at work on the other side of the Channel. Ever since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and perhaps earlier, the English were accustomed to believe themselves to live in a land of liberty. There are traces of this conviction in the thirteenth century, and in the sixteenth century; perhaps it has always been an aspect of national consciousness. The fact that this had never really been the case did not deter its exponents, many of whom would declare the danger to ‘English liberties’ at any opportunity. Such was the profound sense of many of the English people. They were not likely to follow Danton or Robespierre or even Buonaparte. They were still predominantly in support of George III and William Pitt, king and nation in harmony, even though the king was mad and the nation in distress.

29

The mad kings

David Garrick first played the part of King Lear at the Goodman’s Field Theatre in Whitechapel, in the spring of 1742; he was twentyfive years old, a relatively youthful age that suggests both precocity and ambition. Two friends watched his performance from the pit, and suggested alterations. He listened carefully and took notes. He came back in the same part six weeks later and caused a sensation. This was Lear as raw nature, full of fear and trembling, moving from pathos to anger, from despair to grief, keeping ‘the audiences in a tumult of continuous passion … his performance was interrupted by open sobs and weeping’. Tears were an important element of the social world. Thomas Gray was told that readers had wept over every line of his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750). The members of parliament often broke down and had to be led out of the chamber, weeping after a quarrel. It was reported that one parliamentarian, George Tierney, ‘sobbed so, he was unable to talk; I never saw a more affecting scene’.

Horace Walpole recorded how two executioners fought over the rope used to hang a notorious highwayman, ‘and the one who lost it cried’. Anna Seward, a celebrated poet of the period known as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, returned to her childhood haunts and ‘could not restrain the gushing tears, through almost the whole of the five hours I passed in that dear village’. She was a champion weeper.

The words of a contemporary, observing the role of Garrick as Lear, emphasize the new sensibilities of the eighteenth century. The members of the audience ‘seemed to shrink away and cower’ when he cursed his daughters’ ingratitude. When they erupted in vehement applause, as Garrick hit upon a brilliant stroke of art, he whispered to one of the other actors onstage, Tom King, ‘Damn me, Tom, it’ll do.’

It was said that Garrick ‘speaks tragedy truly and natural’. That was the key response: this was nature rather than art. This was the language of real feeling. It was the wholly new art of whisper, and gesture, and unstudied enunciation. It does not matter that it would now seem absurdly stylized. All versions of what is natural or realistic change and decay. When Garrick played Macbeth he turned to the first murderer and said, ‘There’s blood upon thy face.’ The line was not in the play. The actor started back, and put a hand to his cheek. ‘Is there, by God?’ He had heard a fellow actor speak as a human being, and he was surprised to the point of consternation. The neoclassical stage had been established upon decorum, declamation and dignity. Its successor, which may perhaps be called Romantic, relied upon expressiveness, activity and more realistic detail.

Garrick did not really play Lear as conceived by William Shakespeare. The original was deemed, in the eighteenth century, to be too crude and wayward. It did not preserve the unities. It was, in many respects, tasteless. Its ending was unsatisfactory. The play Garrick performed was that rewritten by Nahum Tate in 1681. It was considered to be the proper Lear, the acceptable Lear, purged of all its absurdities and obscenities. Tate himself regarded the scenes of Shakespeare’s ‘old honest play’ to be ‘heaps of jewels unstrung and unpolished’.

In Tate’s play the Fool is removed altogether, since tragedy and farce were not deemed to be compatible. In this version, too, Cordelia falls in love with Edgar to provide a more gentle diversion. There is a less strenuous ending in which Lear, Edgar and Cordelia are reunited to live happily ever after. As one critic of the time suggested, Lear as amended by Tate ‘will always be more agreeable to an audience’. The love affair itself ‘can never fail to produce those gushing tears, which are swelled and ennobled by a virtuous joy’. The prevailing sentiments of the day are here revealed. One critic, Thomas Cooke, preferred Tate ‘because almost every character … is an instance of virtue being rewarded and vice punished’. He added: ‘I have read many sermons, but remember none that contains so fine a lesson of morality as this play.’ This was all that needed to be said. Ethics, and not aesthetics, was the test of true art.

The audience of the time could not have endured the tragedy and horror of Shakespeare’s play. If it was reduced to storms of tears by Garrick’s performance, how could it have coped with Lear’s death? Gloucester’s blinding takes place discreetly offstage. Even Shakespeare’s stern editor, Samuel Johnson, could not bring himself to reread the last scenes of the play until it became his duty to do so. It seems almost as if he and his contemporaries were afraid of madness and deep feeling. In many respects it was not an age of confidence or of stability at all. It was one that needed comforting. It needed consolation.

Garrick played the part of the mad king for the rest of his career. He cut and modified the text for his various performances, sometimes reintroducing more of the Shakespearian original. People stood for hours outside the theatre where he was playing, waiting for tickets. When again he took on the part in 1774 the writer, Hannah More, said: ‘I thought I should have been suffocated with grief: it was not like the superficial sorrow one feels at a well-acted play, but the deep, substantial grief of real trouble.’ Garrick’s Lear concluded with a performance in June 1776 thirty-four years after his first entry in the theatre at Whitechapel and one month before his retirement from the stage. He had begun a farewell tour, screwing up the emotions of the audience to an unprecedented pitch. Sir Joshua Reynolds, after seeing him, was prostrate for three days. Garrick furnished new scenery for this last year of Lear, and provided more resplendent historical costumes. It was agreed that the applause was ‘beyond description’. Whenever he came upon, or retired from, the stage he was wildly applauded.

The centre of all feeling lay in the ‘mad scene’ when the insane old king rages on the heath. It was painted by Benjamin Wilson, a friend of the actor, in 1762 as a study of the magical or the sacred. Garrick stands at full length wearing a shirt, breeches and a robe of scarlet trimmed with ermine. This was the costume of royalty, however dimmed. He raises his right arm towards the storm-tossed sky, from which a shaft of light drenches him in radiance. The gesticulation became part of a repertoire of theatrical images; it was reproduced in prints and on porcelain. It became the token of madness, and was re-employed in many other works.

A more accomplished artist, Benjamin West, painted the same storm scene sixteen years later as a Gothic nightmare in the style of Henry Fuseli or even William Blake. It is in certain aspects close to Wilson’s vision of the king, but the dramatic figures and expressive style suggest a sea-change in sensibility; this is no longer the world of neoclassical restraint but of Romantic wildness. In Wilson’s study Lear is very much an eighteenth-century figure addicted to sentiment; in West’s version, the king is beside himself with sorrow. He points up at the storm as if claiming a place there, and his expression is one of longing as well as of fear. The painting was approximately 12 feet by 9 feet, so that it positively towered above its spectators; it was part of the ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ established in the spring of 1789 by Alderman John Boydell in Pall Mall as a tribute to the national genius and as an example of a new taste for the passionate sublime. It was also naturally related to the passionate intensity with which, a generation before, the Methodist preachers dominated their congregations. Garrick himself was described as introducing ‘a new religion’. The age of reason and satire was also the age of rapture.

We may note the strange coincidence that in the year of West’s composition, 1788, the real king became mad. George III began to talk rapidly and continuously, passing in and out of delirium. Benjamin West, by this time, knew him well. King George had in 1772 appointed him to be historical painter to the court, and West completed two portraits of his royal patron. He had observed him closely for some years, and it is not hard to believe that some elements of George appear in the frenzied figure of King Lear. In the autumn of 1788 West had shown his sovereign his new landscape of Windsor Castle in which a lion, for some reason, had been placed. The king insisted that it looked more like a dog and immediately scored marks over the image before drawing his own. He did it with tremendous energy accompanied by a great flurry of words. All was not well.

It was in any case an age much possessed by madness. Insanity was known as ‘the English disease’ together with its companion, melancholy. It was attributed to the natural sensitivity and imaginative nature of the English confined to an island of ghosts and spirits. Garrick himself is said to have visited Bedlam in order to study the words and postures of the insane. He wished to introduce a touch of nature to the requirements of art. One critic, on seeing his performance, noted that ‘as madness is defined to be right reasoning on wrong principles there is consistency in the words and actions of a madman’. Garrick provided this. Yet also, according to a different observer, ‘Garrick had displayed all the force of quick transition from one passion to another: he had, from the most violent rage, descended to sedate calmness’. On studying West’s painting the critic George Cumberland suggested that the king’s ‘loss of reason has arisen from the tender rather than the inflammatory passions; or there is a majestic sensibility mixed with the wildness of his distraction’.

Controversies arose over the origin of Lear’s madness. Was it the shock of losing his throne? Or was it anger at his daughters’ ingratitude? The polite classes of the eighteenth century were aficionados of insanity.

Henry Fuseli stated that one medical man who visited Bedlam believed that the larger part of its inmates were women unhappy in love, while the second category in terms of numbers were ‘hackney and stage coachmen’, whose constant shaking in their vehicles disturbed the pineal gland. But Garrick did not visit Bedlam only. He had a case study closer to home. A certain gentleman and friend of the actor lived in a house in Leman Street, Goodman’s Fields, where he had been playing with his two-year-old daughter near an open window. Accidentally he dropped her onto the paved area below, whereupon the young girl was instantly killed. The man lost his senses and ‘remained at the window, screaming in agonies of grief’. For the rest of his life he would go over to the window and play with an invisible girl, drop her, and fill the house ‘with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish’. Then he would fall into silent melancholy, and slowly look round at the fateful scene, ‘his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him as if to implore compassion’. Garrick stated that it was there ‘I learned to imitate madness’. According to one who watched his performance, ‘he had no sudden starts, no violent gesticulation; his movements were slow and feeble; misery was depicted in his countenance; he moved his head in the most deliberate manner; his eyes were fixed or, if they turned to any one near him he made a pause, and fixed his look on the person after much delay …’.

Since madness was considered to be curable, many treatments were prescribed. George III was given what was called ‘mad physic’ which caused inflammation, eruptions and violent disorders. The famous Dr Jenner treated his mad patients by ‘keeping them sick with tartar emetic’ and camphor water. Some spas were considered to be healthful. A madwoman, Mrs Jessop, was cured by the waters at Buxton; the 1st earl of Egmont reported that ‘she is now very orderly behaved and has got a lover’.

George III had a naturally hurried and impulsive manner which the pressing affairs of state could only intensify. He also spoke of ‘the anxiety I have for the success of my endeavours to fit my children for the various stations they may fill, and that they may be useful and a credit to their family’. He had broken down completely in the autumn of 1788 and it was reported that ‘his case must be hopeless’.

The king seized his eldest son by the throat and threw him against a wall, demanding who it was that had forbidden him to whisper. Captain Jack Payne, comptroller of the prince of Wales’s household, let it be known that the monarch awoke in his bed ‘with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac’; he howled like a dog and spoke distractedly about matters of religion. Fanny Burney met him by chance in Kew Gardens in February 1789; he had been taken for the air, and she reported that he lost control of his speech repeating the word ‘No!’ a hundred times. He talked about Handel and tried to sing the composer’s oratorios ‘in a voice so dreadfully hoarse that the sound was terrible’. Eventually he was locked in his room and tied to his bed at night. By the end of the year he had become so violent that he was confined to a straitjacket. He was also on occasions beaten with sticks, no doubt according to the much earlier belief that the ‘devils’ within him could be expelled by rods and violence. Yet after this treatment of enforced restraint, he seemed to make a full recovery. He relapsed at the beginning of 1801 but was soon considered to be fit for rule again even though he was on many occasions irritable and agitated.

For George III, as for Lear, much attention was paid to the concept of the king’s ‘two bodies’. One was the ‘body natural’ as opposed to the ‘body politic’. The natural body was susceptible to all the infirmities of the human condition, but the body politic was free from all defects or weakness and could not be affected by the natural body. It was the sovereign will of the nation incarnate. That is why Garrick felt able to project royal dignity into the role even while enacting all the symptoms of mental distress.

Charity asylums were established in the eighteenth century with the purpose of healing the deranged. The rich in particular were happy to consign their mad relations to private care so that those out of mind could also be kept out of sight. The inmates were essentially trapped in a prison where chains, manacles, leg-locks and handcuffs could be employed with impunity. It was believed that the untamed maniac was not susceptible to bodily disease so that Thomas Willis, in his Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, could recommend ‘severe government and discipline’ without considering the physical consequences.

This could of course be the stuff of entertainment, and until 1770 Bedlam, the most famous of all asylums, was open to casual visitors. In the following year the hero of that quintessentially eighteenth-century text, Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling, observed: ‘I think it an inhuman practice to expose the greatest misery with which our nature is afflicted to every idle visitant who can afford a trifling perquisite to the keeper.’

The madness of King George of course brought back a reign of tears. When the lord chancellor, Thurlow, visited the mad monarch ‘the tears rolled down his cheeks, and his feet had difficulty to support him’. The queen was drowned in tears, and the members of the royal household ‘all cried, even bitterly, as they looked on’. It was no better when he recovered. Fanny Burney, on hearing the good news, confided to a friend that ‘I assure you, I cried twenty times in the day’.

In the autumn of 1810, after the death of a favourite daughter, the king once more slid into mania and his condition became irreparable. He had now become at times ‘so violent that correction had been necessary and he is confined’. One of his doctors, Sir Henry Halford, concluded that George III was ‘totally lost as to mind, conversing with imaginary personages’. One member of the court reported that the king ‘was no longer treated as a human being. His body was immediately encased in a machine which left no liberty of motion. He was sometimes chained to a stake. He was frequently beaten and starved, and at best he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language.’ Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king? He had been the great English monarch of the latter part of the eighteenth century. An engraving of him, with long beard and long hair, bears an uncanny resemblance to the images of King Lear by Benjamin Wilson and Benjamin West.

30

The beast and the whore

William Pitt the younger was the minister most concerned with, and identified by, the war against newly revolutionary France. He did not believe in boards and committees; he was the sole agent. One bureaucrat of the Admiralty noted that ‘Mr Pitt does all the material business at his own house, signs the papers, and then two other Lords sign them of course’. Pitt himself claimed that ‘there can be no rivalry or division of power. That power must rest in the person generally called the First Minister’; he added that the first minister ought to be in charge of finances as well as strategy. This management worked well in practice and the tremulous king found few instances of what he called ‘anything unpleasant’ between himself and the administration.

The war of 1795 consisted of stalemate followed by disappointment. The situation on land was muddled and confused by the claims and counter-claims of England and its allies; the Austrians, the Dutch, the Prussians and the others failed to press their advantage home. The Prussians were the first to sign a peace treaty with the French. The Dutch were the first to surrender to the French, ceding the left bank of the Rhine to their erstwhile enemy; Holland followed a month later. In the following year, Spain also changed sides. It was imperative, therefore, that Austria remained in the war on the British side; Russia hardly counted. The prospect before Pitt was of a lonely landlocked war with the maritime power of England unable to sway the balance of Europe. In any case France now had three navies, its own as well as those of Holland and of Spain. The world was turned upside down.

In 1796 Napoleon, perhaps best known at this time for the capture of Toulon from British forces, surprised the world still further with his lightning Italian campaign, urging his troops ever further north and closer to the principal enemy of Austria. ‘Soldiers!’ he told his troops at Nice near the frontier with Piedmont. ‘You are almost naked, half starved; the government owes you much and can give you nothing. Your patience and courage in the midst of these rocks are admirable; but they reflect no splendour on your arms. I am about to conduct you into the most fertile plains on earth; fertile provinces, opulent cities, will soon be in your power; there you will find rich harvests, honour, and glory … Will you fail in courage?’ This is the language of Buonaparte, at once curt and magniloquent.

He conquered Piedmont, setting up the municipal republic of Alba in the process, before crossing the Adda, a tributary of the River Po, and scattering the Austrian army at Lodi in Lombardy. This victory was a singular event in Napoleon’s career and he said it was the moment when he first dreamed of world glory; it came as an annunciation.

Dangers pressed upon England from every direction. At the end of 1796 the French had launched an invasion force upon Bantry Bay in support of the United Irishmen. These were the men who hoped and believed that they could bring under one banner the Irish dissenters and the Catholics, equally oppressed by the members of the Protestant Ascendancy, who might then become a revolutionary force under French leadership. The invaders had even brought French military uniforms for their Irish allies to wear on their anticipated march to Dublin. Great storms and treacherous seas dispelled any hope of success. Yet the fact that the French had sailed so far, and had in the process broken through an English naval blockade, had alerted Pitt and his colleagues to further French adventures. On 25 February 1797, news reached London that some French troops had landed at Fishguard Bay in Pembrokeshire; it was in truth a forlorn hope, the soldiers having surrendered to the local militia.

The incursions bred rumour, and rumour created fear, and fear easily degenerated into panic. Napoleon was on his way! A run on the banks proved fatal, since they did not hold enough bullion to meet their commitments; the Bank of England was obliged to suspend cash payments and issue notes of £1 and £2 as legal tender. A rhyme passed through the streets:

So of Pitt and of England

Men say without vapour

How he found it of gold

And left it of paper.

The possibility of French intervention once more ignited the hopes of the United Irishmen, who began to arm and to drill the peasantry. But there were dangers of insurrectioneven closer to home. A naval mutiny began at Spithead in the middle of April; the sailors’ grievances included low pay and prolonged periods at sea. Within a week their undoubtedly legitimate demands were met, and the admiral of the fleet was rowed from ship to ship with the king’s free pardon in his hand. In the following month the sailors of the north fleet, no doubt emboldened by the actions of their colleagues, mutinied at the Nore. A fighting address was read to the delegates from the different ships, in which it was stated that ‘the Age of Reason has at length revolved. Long have we been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such.’

They were perhaps more determined and more dangerous than the sailors of Spithead, and at one stage managed to blockade the Thames; but their revolt was suppressed and their leader, Richard Parker, hanged on board his ship. Parker blamed his own men for their fickleness and divided opinions, calling them ‘cowardly, selfish and ungrateful’. Reports circulated that they had in fact been instigated by members of the United Irishmen and of other revolutionary groups, but no solid evidence has ever been offered.

Meanwhile Napoleon Buonaparte had advanced onto the soil of Austria. At the beginning of April 1797, he marched his army north until they reached the town of Leoben, just 90 miles from Vienna, where an armistice was quickly followed by a preliminary peace treaty between France and the Holy Roman Empire (now dominated by Austria and Prussia) in which each side agreed not to interfere in the domestic affairs of the other. Certain secret clauses surrendered Austrian possessions in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, as well as the Austrian Netherlands, while Buonaparte magnanimously gave Venice to the Austrian emperor, thus blotting out the watery city’s thousand years of independent existence. ‘La Serenissima’ never recovered from the blow.

It was the peace that the French people had craved. Unfortunately it left England alone on the stage of the world. There were attempts by Pitt and his ministers to reach some form of treaty with Paris, but their efforts were rebuffed. The first coalition against Napoleon had failed.

The personal success of Buonaparte, from his first days as a corporal, had by no means been guaranteed. Yet the combination of skill, luck and fortitude led him forward. He was in particular an inspired strategist and tactician. It is well known that he relied upon artillery rather than infantry and muskets; a massive and deafening bombardment would be followed by rapid sorties, which were in turn succeeded by the assaults of cavalry and infantry. It was not simply the manpower that won the victories, it was the spirit of the French army that under the leadership of Buonaparte became a highly flexible and responsive machine for warfare. The Austrians and Prussians, under different styles of leadership, seemed to be woefully old fashioned.

Buonaparte had a few simple rules. The lines of supply and communication must always be clear. Always attack. Never remain on the defensive. Timing was all important. He had a master plan in his head for each battle that he conceived in precise detail. He tried to leave nothing to chance, but he was able to improvise at dangerous moments. He was a bold man, none bolder, but he was also an opportunist who acted decisively when circumstances were favourable. ‘Accident, hazard, chance, call it what you may,’ he once said, ‘a mystery to ordinary minds, becomes a reality to superior men.’ He knew himself to be one of those ‘superior men’ who can bend the world to their will; he worked tirelessly, and his decisiveness was combined with determination. One conquest or one battle was only a preliminary to the next; he was always advancing in order to extend his dominion. He told his soldiers that ‘our task is not to defend our frontiers, but to invade the territory of our foes’. It was to be war forever.

His large grey eyes were almost expressionless but an old French general confessed: ‘I tremble like a child when I approach him.’ Most significantly he had the ferocious desire to win which he was able to impart to his soldiers. ‘You must speak to the soul’, he said. Hegel glimpsed Napoleon riding through the streets of the city of Jena just before the battle of that region and observed that he had seen ‘the world-soul … astride a horse’.

Away from Buonaparte’s campaigns on land, Britain made gains at sea. In February 1797 the French and Spanish fleets were defeated off Cape St Vincent by Sir John Jervis while nine months later Admiral Duncan defeated the Dutch at the battle of Camperdown. After two peace missions under the leadership of Lord Malmesbury were rejected by the French, serious proposals were made to abandon the land campaign and to extend the mastery of the sea by picking up colonial treasure and colonial possessions wherever they offered themselves. But that smacked of defeatism. There was still a widespread desire to continue the struggle, and when Pitt sat down after a spirited speech to rouse the nation the Commons rose and sang ‘Britons, strike home!’ Pitt also declared, in words that would have cheered Edmund Burke, that neither truces nor treaties could curb France’s ‘unrelenting spirit’ in ‘the subversion of every state into which, either by force or fraud, their arms could penetrate’.

So unabated war continued. This aggressive and uncompromising spirit dismayed those liberal Whigs who still saw some good in the revolution and the revolutionary spirit. They decided simply to secede or, more accurately, to walk away. They got up from their benches and left, with the simple understanding that nothing they could say or do would change the course of the administration. Now that Pitt had acquired the support of the ‘moderate’ Whigs, in return, he was for all practical purposes unassailable. So why should the ‘liberals’ go to the trouble of travelling to Westminster where their voices would not be heard? It was perhaps a sensible solution but it did not endear Fox and his friends to the political world; they were accused of lacking political courage, let alone loyalty, and putting their own interests above the proper working of government. Some of them did not stay away indefinitely and Fox himself spoke three or four times in the next couple of years, but their absence was a great blow to the national cause of reform.

War required money, of course, and all Pitt’s efforts were bent on providing revenue. He had already taxed bricks and sugar, spirits and tea, but now he hit upon the bold solution of dividing all taxpayers into three categories in accordance with their ability to pay; the measure became known as the Triple Assessment, and was based upon what was called ‘consumed property’ such as watches, carriages and windows (an earlier window tax had been introduced in 1696). This was a tax on expenditure but there was another prospect which intrigued him with its possibilities. He hinted at it in the Triple Assessment where it was agreed that a person might choose instead to pay a tax on his income. In the following year he introduced a graduated tax on incomes of over £60 per year and, despite the expected storm of outrage over the threatened liberties of the people, it was accepted. Yet it endured only as long as the war, after which all the records of the tax office were destroyed. Such was the depth of feeling about the action of ‘spying’ into the financial affairs of the people.

The shadow of Buonaparte was never very far away. He was the reason why the taxes were being imposed. In the winter of 1797 his forces took up position along the French coastline with the clear purpose of invasion. In response the administration called upon local officials to question every eligible male about his ability and willingness to take up arms. In the spring of 1798, in what had now become a predictable response, certain members of the English radical societies were taken up and detained. Five men were arrested at Margate just as they were about to embark for France. William Blake wrote in the margin of a book, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control.’ The fear of invasion lasted throughout the spring and summer of the year, until at last it became clear that Buonaparte had another destination in mind.

The atmosphere of extreme peril encouraged the United Irishmen to attempt rebellion once again in the spring of 1798. It acquired the name of ‘the great rebellion’ but in truth it was a badly organized and somewhat incoherent affair that was quickly put down. But the revolutionary inclinations of certain Irishmen, and the deep dissatisfaction of many others, led the English administration to believe that the best solution to the continuing problem was a union between the two countries. Fraught with difficulties though it was, and regarded with deep suspicion both by the king and by the Dublin parliament, it was pushed and pulled through the legislatures of Westminster and Dublin for two years with much argument, threats, rhetoric and money. The act of union with Scotland in 1707 had been purchased by bribes to the Scots, now the union with Ireland was expedited by bribes to the Irish; it could be said that the United Kingdom had been conceived in a pot of gold. The new union was not welcomed by all participants. Henry Grattan, the great Irish moderate, said of his nation: ‘I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead – though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty.’

Buonaparte had meanwhile sailed into another sea of troubles. By the early spring of 1798 he had abandoned his apparent attempt at invasion and sailed towards Egypt. It turned out to be a rash decision but, on the face of it, that province of the Ottoman Empire was tempting; it might provide a land route to India, the reputed home of treasure, and immeasurably increase the amount of French trade. ‘Soldiers!’ Napoleon told his army as it sailed from Toulon. ‘The eyes of Europe are upon you! You have great destinies to fulfil.’

Admiral Nelson, who now enters this history for the first time with a predictable flourish, chased after him. He had a sense of destiny, and a flair for self-projection, equal to that of Napoleon; he crossed and recrossed parts of the Mediterranean looking for his quarry. Buonaparte had taken Malta, but had then gone eastward. Nelson sailed to Alexandria but found no sign of him; he scoured the Levant and then sailed west to Sicily. There was still no sign. Finally, after weeks, of searching, he found Napoleon’s ships at Aboukir Bay beside Alexandria to which the French had secretly returned. The signal was given for battle. ‘Before this time tomorrow,’ Nelson said in his usual vain and magnificent manner, ‘I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’

In the subsequent battle of the Nile, at the beginning of August, the French fleet was overwhelmed; only four ships escaped Nelson’s onslaught. Three and a half thousand French sailors were taken prisoner, and 2,000 were killed. No British ships were destroyed. Napoleon himself was now stranded in Egypt without a fleet, without reinforcements and without supplies. The British navy was once more in charge of the Mediterranean, and the victory at Aboukir prompted Turkey to enter the war against France. The news was greeted in England with predictable jubilation. A British official, George Pretyman, wrote to his wife: ‘Mr Pitt is confident that Buonaparte must be destroyed. Oh my Love, what joy!’

An uneasy peace held for eighteen months until the forces against Buonaparte entered what was called a second coalition, a band of armies that included those of Russia and Austria as well as England. The British under the grand old duke of York arrived in Holland in the late summer of 1799, marched about a bit, and then returned home in November. Their allies did not fare any better. The Austrians and the Russians were embroiled in internal conflicts, and the tsar left the coalition in October. The Austrians were defeated decisively in the following year. Much of the French success may be credited to Napoleon who, abandoning his army in Egypt, made his way back to Paris and named himself First Consul. To the stranded army in Egypt it seemed like an act of betrayal. One of his generals, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, told his colleagues: ‘That bastard has left us with his breeches full of shit. We will go back to Europe and rub them in his face.’ But for Buonaparte matters of private honour and fidelity were of no consequence in his relentless pursuit of victory and glory.

If war was to be sustained by England against him, it required the maintenance of discipline at home. In the summer of 1799 William Pitt introduced the Workmen’s Combination Bill which forbade any working men to come together for the purpose of seeking higher wages or shorter hours, with a minimum penalty of three months’ imprisonment or two months of hard labour. ‘Combination’ was already illegal, but it was believed necessary to suppress anything that resembled political agitation. It might compromise the war effort.

It is significant that these prohibitions were maintained against workmen in general and not against any particular craft or trade; this added to the sense of injustice and oppression experienced primarily in the manufacturing areas. ‘Secret’ unions sprang up, however, among workers in cotton and wool which played some part in the outbreak of the Luddite protests of the next century. As early as 1799 the shearmen of Wiltshire sent threatening letters to those who were intent upon harnessing new machinery. ‘We shall keep some people to watch you about with loaded blunderbuss or pistol.’ Yet as always the practical implementation of the Combination Act was muddled and uncertain, with magistrates of the different regions varying greatly in their response. Like much legislation from Westminster, it probably made very little difference in the end.

The spirit of unrest was stirred further by another season of dearth. In the spring of 1800 an official wrote to the Home Office from Birmingham that ‘many thousands, especially children, are all but starved’. It was recognized that conditions near to famine would gravely destabilize the nation already at war. Pitt wrote in the autumn that ‘the question of peace or war is not in itself half so formidable as the scarcity with which it is necessarily combined, and for the evils and growing dangers of which I see no adequate remedy’. He wrote at a time of riot. In September 1800, the corn exchange in Mark Lane, London, was stormed after some handbills were posted on the Monument, proclaiming that ‘Bread will be sixpence the quarter if the people will assemble at the corn market on Monday.’ On the following day some bakers’ shops in Whitechapel were attacked by a mob; on the day after that, a handbill was addressed to ‘starved fellow creatures’ asking them to meet on St George’s Fields ‘to defend your rights. Never mind the bloodthirsty soldiers. We shall put them to flight …’ Riots erupted in all parts of the country, and Matthew Boulton said that there were so many soldiers in Birmingham that it resembled an armed camp.

The policy of the administration itself was in disarray. The coalition against Napoleon was not holding; Prussia and Russia, Russia and Austria, Austria and Prussia, were all quarrelling over control of various parts of the continent. England itself could not be attacked, but neither could it strike. Some members of the cabinet preferred a return of the Bourbon dynasty in Paris, a policy which seemed to hold out little chance of success; others believed that there was no point in negotiating with Buonaparte, while certain colleagues argued that negotiation was the only way forward. Disagreements arose also about the role of the allies in any peace talks; should they be allowed to participate or should Britain stand on its own?

The general sentiment, however, was in favour of peace. This seems to have been the overwhelming desire of the people who were thoroughly weary of a war that had already endured for more than seven years. This desire was further intensified by the resurgence of the enemy. It was Buonaparte who took his armies over the Alps, in the spring of 1800, and defeated the Austrians at Marengo. At the subsequent treaty of Lunéville on 9 February 1801, he gained the German districts on the left bank of the Rhine, Belgium and Luxemburg as well as large swathes of Italy. Buonaparte had not conquered the enemy, one strategist wrote, but rendered it harmless. Britain was once more on its own.

This was the moment when William Pitt decided to resign his office, just five days before the signing of the treaty. His departure came as a surprise to the political world, however, and was for a while considered as suspicious – as a ‘juggle’ somehow to further Pitt’s interest. It was said that he did not want to be the legislator who would be forced to broker a peace with Napoleon. It was surmised that he was exhausted; he was in bad health; he was unnerved by the scale of famine and of riot; he was tired of holding the balance between opposing interests. But in truth it had nothing to do with the war or famine. It had to do with Ireland.

In his negotiations over the Act of Union – during which Henry Grattan had lamented the sleeping beauty of his country – Pitt suggested, or intimated, or let it be known, that the emancipation of the majority Catholic population would duly follow and that they would be able to hold legal and political office. But he had not reckoned with the king, who regarded any such concession to be against the spirit and letter of his coronation oath in which he had pledged to defend the Church of England. He could not countenance a country in which there was more than one established religion. George III could be stubborn as well as principled, and on this matter he was adamant. He went over to one of Pitt’s allies, Henry Dundas, at a royal levee and questioned him in a voice loud enough to be overheard by many of those present. ‘What is the question you are all about to force on me? What is this Catholic emancipation … I will tell you that I shall look on every man as my personal enemy who proposes that question to me. I hope all my friends will not desert me.’

Pitt was aware of the exchange within a matter of minutes. He, who treasured his reputation more than anything else, then felt obliged to resign. The king, knowing that he had an alternative administration in waiting, accepted the first minister’s wish. Pitt left office and gave way for Henry Addington, who was what might be called a ‘solid’ choice, dependable, hard-working and honest. He also had the advantage, for the king, of being opposed to Catholic emancipation. Unfortunately none of these qualities was enough in itself to guarantee pre-eminence and in a cruel rhyme spread by a young minister, George Canning, it was said that ‘Pitt is to Addington what London is to Paddington’. The new prime minister was also known as ‘the Doctor’, since he had practised for some years as a physician for the wealthier and unhealthier portion of society. His father had also been an eminent physician who in fact had numbered Pitt’s father, the earl of Chatham, among his patients. The Doctor was no great orator and found it difficult to exert his authority over the Commons, let alone the nation.

The king, in a state of excitement close to hysteria, now began to suffer once more from his old malady – or, as some put it, his old madness. He himself blamed Pitt and the Catholic question for his relapse, and Pitt had felt obliged to promise him that he would never raise the matter again. Within a month the king recovered. Pitt had fallen, but no party had gone with him. He was but one man, and many of his ministers agreed to serve under Addington. A few chairs had been arranged in a different fashion, but nothing further. Yet there was one significant change that would affect the political world in succeeding years. Without Pitt’s personal hegemony the various parties that had comprised his administration now began to fall apart. Pitt sat on the treasury benches but at a distance from the members of the new administration; he did nothing, however, to oppose it. He felt it his duty, in fact to support it as the visible representative of the king’s wishes.

It became clear enough that Addington desired peace at almost any price. The nation desired it. The finances of the country required it. It no longer seemed to be a symbolic clash of ideologies but, rather, a more familiar contest over the balance of power on the continent. By the beginning of October the government announced the preliminary terms of a treaty. The depth of public approval became evident when a London crowd dragged the coach of the French envoy through the streets crying out ‘Long live Buonaparte!’

But the governing class was not so happy. It was believed that Addington, weak as he was, had purchased peace at too high a price. All Britain’s wartime conquests in the Mediterranean and outside Europe were to be returned; the acquisitions in the East Indies, the West Indies and South America (with the exception of Ceylon and Trinidad) would all be relinquished. The French would retain control of the Netherlands, Switzerland and parts of northern Italy. The treaty, when it was eventually signed at Amiens in the spring of 1802, confirmed that France had been allowed to expand to what it termed its ‘natural frontiers’ without making any parallel concessions of its own. Addington declared that ‘this is no ordinary peace but a genuine reconciliation between the two first nations of the world’. Others were not so sure. Food was still dear; commerce was in disarray; the dreadful income tax was not abolished.

Some considered it to be the best of bad alternatives. The Morning Chronicle, which spoke for Fox and his liberal Whig allies, stated that ‘the country has been degraded by the peace, though it is necessary’. Some of Pitt’s old ministers, who had left office with him, were less ambiguous. William Windham said that ‘the country has received its death blow’; George Grenville stated that ‘all confidence in the present government is completely and irretrievably destroyed’. Henry Dundas was more circumspect, telling Pitt that ‘the only wise and friendly thing I can do is to impose upon myself silence’. Pitt himself, despite private reservations, continued publicly to support the government. The treaty of Amiens was widely regarded as a truce, a time to recuperate so that the two countries might be able to resume the fight at a later date. Buonaparte was himself already busy with the plans for new wars, eager to gain mastery over the entire continent. In the autumn of 1802 he marched his armies into Switzerland, to which blatant abrogation of the treaty Addington made only the mildest of protests. The era known as that of the ‘Napoleonic wars’ had truly begun.

31

A Romantic tale

On 5 June 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘did not keep to the high road, but leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field, by which he cut off an angle’. So William Wordsworth recalled one of the first meetings between himself and the fellow poet who together with him would help to change the language of expression and inaugurate what would become known as the ‘Romantic movement’ in poetry. They already had much in common. They were both engaged in blank verse tragedies, but Coleridge’s Osorio and Wordsworth’s The Borderers did not find favour with theatrical managers. Each man had written two slim volumes of poetry – Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were published in 1793, while Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects and Poems were presented to the world in 1796 and 1797. But they had already encountered one another at the house of a sugar merchant in Bristol. Coleridge had been impressed by what he called Wordsworth’s ‘novel imagery’ and ‘vivid colouring’, and in turn Wordsworth remarked that Coleridge’s ‘talent appears to me very great’. Wordsworth was twenty-seven, and Coleridge three years his junior.

Eight years before, at a most impressionable age, they had woken up in Year One of the French Revolution. They had celebrated the death of tyranny, the breaking of the idols of Church and King, of tradition and authority. Anything was possible. Everything was possible. Coleridge, still at school, composed a celebratory poem called ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’. Wordsworth had gone to France, tasted some of the excitement, and then retreated, leaving an illegitimate daughter behind. He still mingled with what were known as ‘the friends of liberty’, however, and in the early months of 1793 wrote an open or public letter, never published, in which he refers to himself as ‘a republican’; in the following year he wrote to a friend that ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats’.

Yet the Terror in the late months of 1793 and the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 had a chastening effect upon the erstwhile enthusiasts of revolution. Coleridge had vowed to put down ‘my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition’, and gone back to the springs of Unitarian theology where ‘Truth is Christ’. Wordsworth went on a walking tour before settling with his sister in Dorset. The flame of the revolution was now only flickering as he was vouchsafed glimpses of the pantheistic vision that would support his later poetry.

They already shared an enthusiasm, even reverence, for a poet of Bristol. William Wordsworth had been introduced to Thomas Chatterton’s Miscellanies by his schoolmaster; in 1802, in ‘Resolution and Independence’ he referred to Chatterton as the ‘marvellous Boy’. Coleridge wrote and rewrote a ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ from the age of thirteen to the time of his own death. Thomas Chatterton was the Romantic avatar in an age of false taste, a status which his early demise had only confirmed. It was believed that at the age of seventeen he had committed suicide by arsenic poison in his little garret on Brooke Street in Holborn; it was widely surmised that he had died of poverty and starvation in the unequal stuggle to find an audience for his fervid poetry which had conjured up the spirit of an antique age. His verses were supposed to be the work of a medieval monk, Thomas Rowley, who had chronicled the heroic and martial world of the Middle Ages. The verses opened up a world of wonder and delight. They stirred the two young men like a trumpet. Here was a genuine entry into a lost world of imagination, of supernatural event and superhuman courage. The fact that they were fakes mattered not at all; they were still authentic.

Chatterton’s apparent suicide was then considered to be the sublime death of a genius cast aside by the world; in the words of Keats, another avid devotee, a ‘dear child of sorrow – son of misery!’ In due course his life, and his death as depicted in a painting by Henry Wallis, became the paradigm of the Romantic sensibility. Chattterton’s ‘solemn agony’, in the phrase of Shelley, was the first intimation of Romantic suffering which in the early decades of the nineteenth century became the sensibility of Europe. Chatterton was the solitary genius in excelsis.

But solitariness and genius were not then vital principles for Wordsworth and Coleridge. By 1797 they were unsettled and undecided about their futures, in need of money or of patrons. What is more, they seemed to need one another. They engaged in long walks through the countryside of Somerset in which they had both eventually settled, Coleridge with his wife and son and Wordsworth with his sister. Wordsworth walked in a straight line, while Coleridge was divagatory. They considered an epic poem entitled ‘The Wanderings of Cain’, but it came to nothing. Two weeks after that failure, on a walking tour along the Bristol Channel in November, they devised the plan of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But even as they started work upon the joint project Wordsworth realized that their writing was incompatible and that he could only be a ‘clog’ on Coleridge’s vividly realized narrative. As he said, ‘we pulled different ways’. Dorothy Wordsworth was the catalyst between them. Her watchful interest in, and enthusiasm for, the workings of the natural world helped to recreate the landscape in which they walked together; the intimate simplicity of her journals, begun on 20 January 1798, was a token of the world of feeling in which the young poets flourished.

Coleridge’s fluency and vivacity had in any case an inspiring effect upon his colleague. Wordsworth wrote much between November 1797 and June 1798, with the peak of his powers manifest between March and May. The poems he composed concerned the plight of the poor and the progress of the poet’s mind. In April 1798, he wrote to a prospective publisher that ‘I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry.’ This was to include many of the poems that eventually found their place in Lyrical Ballads (1798). At a later date in Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge explained that in their conversation on the proposed new volume they determined upon poetry of two sorts. In the first ‘the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural’. Thus the inclusion of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But for the second sort ‘subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity’. The egalitarian fury of the revolution had subsided but their feelings for equality and democracy, for shared human experience and shared human values, had found a safer haven.

They had found it, in part, in language. If the intention was to choose incidents and situations ‘from common life’, the instinctive medium had to be ‘a selection of language really used by men’. The tone could be discursive and colloquial but, equally, it could partake of the street ballads and Scottish ballads that were popular; on no account, however, could it seem to be artificial. Poetic diction and periphrasis were the ornaments of sheer habit and custom. They were the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that Blake condemned.

With the chastened language came new meanings. The ‘Advertisement’ of the book promised ‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. This was not necessarily a new experiment or daring innovation; the poetry of the 1790s had sought a ballad-like simplicity in tales of mad mothers or idiot boys. What was new (and understood by some as such) was the vividness of tone and feeling. The key was simplicity, not of a naïve or unconsidered kind but well pondered and conceived so that it became more powerfully evocative of the belief in ‘a motion and a spirit’ which ‘rolls through all things’. There is even a tone of inward uncertainty that deepens the language, rendering it a vehicle for associations and preocccupations that are more powerful than the ostensible subject. The two poets were relocating dignity in the commonplace, restoring grace and simplicity to ordinary lives where saints and sinners walked unannounced and unknown. This was real liberty, equality and fraternity. That is why Francis Jeffrey, in an acerbic notice in the Edinburgh Review, compared Lyrical Ballads with Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man.

So in the autumn of 1798 appeared a volume of 210 pages at the price of 5 shillings. Of the twenty-four poems, nineteen were composed by Wordsworth. But his fellow poet had opened the collection with ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a decision which Wordsworth later deemed to be a mistake. Yet Coleridge considered the poems to be ‘one work, in kind, tho’ not in degree’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ itself could in fact be conceived of as an example of the Wordsworthian sublime, for example, concerned with the intrinsic power of human sympathy in an uncaring world; the old mariner himself was obliged to live for ever as an outcast, the solitary wanderer of the Romantic vision, but the aspiration of the poem is towards benevolence and human community.

Lyrical Ballads concluded with ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’, a powerful meditation in blank verse that opened the way to the great poems of Wordsworth’s maturity such as The Prelude and The Excursion. ‘Tintern Abbey’ in particular helped to change the understanding of landscape and of nature which, for many, took on the sacred vesture of natural religion. They had once been considered picturesque but now they conveyed a spiritual or supernatural force. By means of Wordsworth’s poetry nature was granted religious significance as the nurse of piety and wisdom. It was a moral agent, an agent for good and benevolent change in the human heart. Coleridge and Wordsworth were described as representing ‘the modern school of poets’ and when Wordsworth eventually moved to the Lake District in 1799 they were known as ‘the Lake school’. Pilgrims began to travel to that neighbourhood and Wordsworth wrote a guidebook for these new spiritual travellers.

So even if the little book was not a popular success on its first appearance, it had an abiding significance. Over the course of years it became the source and fountain of what became known as the Romantic sensibility of the early nineteenth century in England, part of a movement of taste which stretched across France and Germany, Russia and Italy and Spain.

Yet a strange light appeared on the fringes of the distant clouds. By the late nineteenth century the imperatives of the Romantic movement had been transformed into an appeal for state ‘benevolence’ and ‘human community’ to oppose the tyranny of laissez-faire. That is material for another volume.

32

Pleasures of peace

In the summer of 1802 Napoleon had been appointed as ‘first consul for life’ after a national referendum that apparently gave him 99 per cent of the vote. The ideals of the revolution were now effectively dead; the tree of liberty had been torn from its roots, and equality was now honoured only in name. Jacobin republicanism of the English variety had lost its purpose. ‘Jacobinism is killed and gone,’ Sheridan said, ‘and by whom? By him who can no longer be called the child and champion of Jacobinism – by Buonaparte … he gave it a true fraternal hug and strangled it.’ The days of the champions of liberty and democracy were over, and in 1801 William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and himself once a fervent Jacobin, noted that ‘even the starving labourer in the alehouse is become a champion of aristocracy’.

The parlous state of Jacobinism was revealed in an inept conspiracy of certain so-called revolutionaries led by Colonel Despard. He and his associates had formed a secret society which migrated from tavern to tavern in London, from The Two Bells in Whitechapel to The Bleeding Heart in Holborn, with the express purpose of ‘an equalization of civic, political and religious rights’; the authorities, alerted by informers and police spies, arrested Despard. Forty of his followers were seized at The Oakley Arms in Lambeth. At the subsequent trial it was alleged that they had conspired in a coup d’état in which the Bank of England and the Tower would be captured, the prisons thrown open, and the king killed or taken prisoner. Despard was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn.

The drift to war continued at an ever-accelerating speed, as soon as it became clear that Napoleon had no intention of abiding by the principles of the treaty of Amiens. Yet Britain was also at fault; it had not evacuated Malta and returned it to the Knights of St John, as it had agreed to do in the treaty. At a reception in the Tuileries on 13 March 1803, Buonaparte admonished the English ambassador, Lord Whitworth, in front of other diplomats. ‘It is you who are determined to make war against us; you want to drive me to it.’ Buonaparte was not the one to shirk any challenge and told Whitworth that ‘you will be the first to draw the sword; I shall be the last to sheathe it. Woe to those who show no respect for treaties!’ The last sword was not put back in its scabbard for thirteen more years.

The first consul had already made preparations for conflict. French ships in the Mediterranean had embarked men, and French troops in Belgium had been moved towards Dunkirk and Le Havre. A message from George III to parliament urged the need for action; more men were to be enlisted in the fleet by means of bounties and, if further persuasion were needed, a ‘hot press’ was to be instituted in the streets and taverns of London.

It soon became clear that Henry Addington was not equal to the task of first minister imposed upon him. His acceptance of what was considered to be an ignominious and ill-considered treaty did not help his reputation, but he was in any case believed to be too weak and indecisive; his preferred policy in the face of Napoleonic threat was inaction. The man about to become home secretary, Charles Yorke, told his brother that Addington ‘is not equal to the crisis in which we stand. In truth I think there is but one man among us who is; I mean Pitt.’ Yet Pitt was not ready to replace his successor; he believed Addington to be ‘a stupider fellow than he had thought him’ but he was not ready to defy the king’s wishes.

The current administration’s position was rendered more precarious by its ill-considered and ill-managed attempt to call up volunteers for the army to confront Napoleon. The response was very encouraging but it soon became clear that there were no instructors to train them and no arms to furnish them; the local officials were obliged to give orders to discourage further recruitment and then to abandon it altogether. Any central authority was thrown into doubt. Where Buonaparte had the will and genius to create a force armée, the English equivalent was in disarray.

On 16 May 1803 George III ordered the seizure of all French shipping and, on 18 May, war between France and England was formally declared. The British fleet under the command of Cornwallis sailed towards Brest, and a force was dispatched against the French in San Domingo. Buonaparte in turn was now making active preparations for the invasion of England. An armed camp was set up at Boulogne, as close to the coast of England as possible, and it had been calculated that a flotilla of small ships would be able to cross the Channel in a single night. An atmosphere close to panic now descended upon England; despite the early discouragement in organizing volunteers, it was estimated that approximately half a million men were now under arms. The south coast was fortified with beacons and the new Martello towers. Yet in fact the French fleet did nothing at all. Its flotilla of boats would not be able to master the English navy and, for the time being, Buonaparte lost all interest in an invasion.

On the day that war was formally declared, Pitt finally took over office from Addington. But he was weaker now, in body and in spirit, and he was forced to patch together an administration from several different elements. He had become more erratic and less businesslike, refusing to write letters or to deal with affairs after dinner; he also had a greater tendency to weep in public, which did not endear him to his less tender colleagues who were already cultivating a mid-nineteenth-century gravitas and sobriety.

At the end of 1804 Buonaparte was graciously pleased to allow himself to be crowned emperor of the French as Napoleon I. As emperor, rather than king, he was outflanking the Bourbon dynasty and claiming for himself the mantle of Charlemagne as absolute ruler of Europe in the west. Pope Pius VII had been invited to Paris in order to preside over the official coronation, but Napoleon took the crown from the pontiff’s hands and placed it on his own head. The Prussians, the Russians and the Austrians looked on with disquiet.

On 2 January 1805, the new emperor addressed an apparently fraternal letter to George III in which he outlined the pleasures of peace. Was there no way of coming to an agreement after seven years of war? ‘Should this moment be lost, what limits can be set to a war that all my efforts could not bring to an end?’ The letter was such a breach of protocol that it could not be answered – George considered it to be ‘much below my attention’ – but the message itself was received with some interest. The perfidy and self-interest of Buonaparte, who believed all treaties and concordats to be so many pieces of paper, may have dictated its content; but it was perhaps also an intimation that the French did not fully believe that they could stand against any future ‘confederacy’ of Europe or the financial and naval power of the British. To the Commons Pitt quoted a speech by Cicero to the Roman senate in condemnation of Mark Antony. ‘Why therefore do I refuse peace? Because it is ignoble, because it is dangerous and because it cannot be.’ He might have added, however, Cicero’s caution that ‘the sinews of war are infinite money’.

The task for Pitt was therefore to confront the emperor on as broad a basis as ever, and he set about constructing a new coalition of allies who were united in their fear of Napoleon rather than upon any overall continental policy. In April 1805, Austria and Russia joined forces; when in the following month Napoleon was crowned king of Italy, with Genoa and Savoy as the immediate spoils, they formed a new alliance with England. The third coalition comprised England, Austria, Russia, Sweden and, finally, Prussia; but like its predecessors it was not destined to endure. Within a year it had been broken apart by the emperor of the French.

While creating the alliance Pitt decided to engage in sudden strikes that would deter Buonaparte from his threatened invasion of England and, in the autumn of the year, the English commander seized the bullion carried by a Spanish convoy and sank the ships. It was an open provocation to Spain to declare war, but Pitt already knew that the Spaniards had taken the side of France; he was only helping himself to a little of their gold.

In the course of these preparations the two great protagonists of sea and land, Admiral Nelson and Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, soon to become Viscount Wellington and, later, duke, met accidentally in an ante-room at the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Wellington later recalled that ‘he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and in, really, a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody.’ Nelson left the room for a moment, to ascertain the identity of his unwilling companion. When he returned ‘all that I thought a charlatan style had vanished and he talked … with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; he talked like an officer and a statesman’.

Here we have a convincing portrait of the mercurial admiral, often vain and silly, but also informed and persuasive. He was ambitious but he was also determined. Wellington shared his determination and decisiveness but he was less flamboyant; he had been trained in the hard school of India, and was reserved to the point of reticence. Yet both of them knew how to outwit Napoleon.

The central purpose of the third coalition was to drive Buonaparte behind the frontiers of France as they had existed in 1791; this meant that its members had to expel France from Hanover, Holland, northern Germany, Switzerland, Naples and northern Italy. This mighty undertaking was not helped by the different purposes and sensibilities of the participants. England was simply opposed to Buonaparte’s aspirations, while Austria deemed him and his ‘empire’ to be a shocking affront to its imperial presence. Tsar Alexander seems to have been motivated by simple jealousy of his rival, but of course private feelings can change in different circumstances.

The war on land did not go well for those opposing the French. Napoleon had decided to destroy the Austrian army before its Russian allies had time to reach it; so he made a rapid advance with almost 200,000 troops from the Rhine to the Danube, where they surrounded the Austrian forces who surrendered at Ulm on 20 October 1805. The speed and efficiency of the grande armée were confirmed when Napoleon led them up the valley of the Danube before capturing Vienna. Its ‘great turn’, when it wheeled right from the Rhine to the Danube, was one of the outstanding military movements of the war.

This French victory was, at least in English eyes, overshadowed by the news at sea. Nelson in the Victory had joined his fleet outside Cadiz at the end of September, where his excitement and enthusiasm reduced some of his officers to tears. He wished to achieve ‘not victory, but annihilation’. He planned to lure the French out of Cadiz towards Gibraltar, with the steep cliffs of Cape Trafalgar to the east. On 21 October, he relayed his final orders with the famous phrase ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’ He gave one other order just as the firing began. ‘Engage more closely!’ The French were in a loose crescent line while the English came up in two columns, Nelson to the left in the Victory and Collingwood to the right in the Royal Sovereign. Thick clouds of smoke drifted across the scene of war, but the English ships sailed straight against the French and broke their line apart.

One by one the French vessels surrendered, but the losses were not all one side. Nelson himself was struck by a stray bullet and fell mortally wounded onto the deck. He is supposed to have said ‘They have done for me at last.’ He lingered for more than two hours, until three in the afternoon, and by five the battle was concluded with the blowing-up of a French ship of the line, the Achille. The superior skills of the British crews, and the superior acumen of the British commanders, had prevailed.

Seventeen of the French and Spanish vessels, out of a total of thirty-three, were captured or destroyed. No British ship had been lost. The victory confirmed the naval supremacy of the British, and from this time forward there was no talk of a French invasion across the Channel. At the Lord Mayor’s banquet in the following month, Pitt was toasted as the ‘saviour of Europe’. He replied, modestly enough, that ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’

The victory of Trafalgar was soon glorified in national memory and naval legend. Napoleon, deep in Europe, did not learn of the outcome for some days; on hearing the result he is said to have leaped up from the table exclaiming, ‘I cannot be everywhere!’ He was in any case about to launch a final and mortal attack upon the Russian and Austrian armies. On 13 November he entered Vienna, where he began to reorganize the affairs of the archduchy, but by the end of the month he was advancing against the combined forces of the enemy. He moved swiftly and at nine in the morning on 2 December confronted them between the towns of Brno and Austerlitz, where in a series of manoeuvres he succeeded in cutting the allied armies in two. ‘One sharp blow,’ he said, ‘and the war is over.’ He had feigned indecision to lure them forwards and, when they counter-attacked, he sent forward reinforcements concealed in fog. Several cavalry charges, in which 10,000 horse were involved, guaranteed French victory.

It has been called ‘The Battle of the Three Emperors’ and on this occasion Tsar Alexander I of Russia and the last Holy Roman emperor, Francis II, left the field in confusion and dismay. Their forces fled. One observer declared that ‘there were no longer regiments or army corps, there were only disorderly bands of marauders’. The Austrians and Russians lost approximately 26,000 men, while the French army forfeited 7,000. Alexander agreed to withdraw his forces behind his frontier, while Francis was obliged to accept humiliating terms of peace. Napoleon was finally the master of Europe.

It was said that the news of Austerlitz effectively killed Pitt. For days and weeks after he wore what was called an ‘Austerlitz face’ of deep sorrow. One Whig peer, Lord Auckland, said that the event involved ‘not only the well-being but the very existence of the British Empire’. The joy over Trafalgar now seemed premature.

Napoleon returned in triumph to Paris after Austerlitz. He made one of his brothers, Joseph, king of Naples; another brother, Louis, was announced as king of Holland. His old adversary, William Pitt, was now facing death. Pitt’s private secretary, Dacre Adams, wrote later that his eyes were ‘almost lifeless’ and his voice was ‘hollow’; he could not eat without vomiting, and survived on raw egg mixed with brandy. He told his doctor, Sir Walter Farquhar, that ‘when in conversation with persons upon important business, I felt suddenly as if I had been cut in two’. It might have been his liver, his kidneys, or his stomach.

When he lay on his deathbed in the first month of 1806 he sometimes muttered ‘Hear! Hear!’, as if he were listening to a debate in the Commons; then on the night of 22 January he called out, according to different reports, ‘How I love my country’ or ‘How I leave my country’. He died early on the following morning at the age of forty-six. For twentyfive years he had been the guiding star of Westminster. Now the star had faded and there was, according to Fox, ‘something missing in the world’.

The group of politicians, known as ‘Mr Pitt’s friends’, had been in a state of some confusion; all were competent but none was pre-eminent, and when the king asked the surviving ministers if they could continue under a new leader they declined the opportunity. They could not agree to raise any one man above the others. When the king realized that they would not be able to form an administration he had turned to William Grenville as a possible successor; Grenville’s father had been first minister, and he himself had been foreign secretary as well as a first cousin of Pitt’s. He was a pillar of the political world but he was by no means, in the jargon of the day, a ‘Pittite’ or anything close to Pitt himself.

He in turn reached out towards Charles James Fox and his Whig supporters. The eventual administration was known, perhaps sarcastically, as ‘The Ministry of All the Talents’, and it included Fox as foreign secretary. What were then known as Grenvillites, Foxites, Windhamites, Lansdownites, Sidmouthites and Addingtonians had also joined the ministry, an indication that Whig policies had largely given way to personalities in the great Westminster game. Grenville himself had decided to adopt the role of chairman of the board, exhorting and guiding various independent managers. It was not the most stable of positions, and the government itself lasted for little more than a year. One ardent Whig, John Cam Hobhouse, wrote that ‘the odium affixed to that coalition survived their short-lived power’. They were accused of nepotism and corruption which came under the all-encompassing description of ‘jobbing’. It was not a good year for the Whigs.

Fox himself had now to expedite negotiations with Buonaparte and his agents. It had been Fox who had celebrated the revolution with fervour and had embraced the French cause long after other devotees had abandoned it. But he was now in the uncomfortable position of realizing that his erstwhile hero, Napoleon Buonaparte, was as perfidious and as dangerous as any ordinary politician. His abortive negotiations with the French minister, Talleyrand, convinced him that peace was not to be achieved at any reasonable cost. The French were still bent upon aggression and territorial conquest. Fox noted to his nephew, Lord Holland, ‘the shuffling, insincere way in which they act, that shows me they are playing a false game’. Yet some believed that Fox, once the ardent francophile, would conclude a peace on whatever terms; the young Palmerston wrote that ‘I cannot see how at present peace can bring us anything but dishonour and defeat’. Fox did not have to bear his own dismay and disillusion for very long, as he died in the autumn of the year.

Napoleon’s recalcitrance had been well founded. At the beginning of August 1806, several principalities and kingdoms of south Germany formally seceded from the Holy Roman Empire, which now came to its long-awaited end, and accepted Buonaparte’s protection as head of their new confederation. In the month after Fox’s death, October 1806, the French army met the Prussian forces at Jena and inflicted a resounding defeat. The Prussian army had once been feared for its military skills and redoubtable leadership but its chain of command had become arthritic and its mobility therefore weakened. The legacy of Frederick the Great had been broken. Hegel considered the battle to mark ‘the end of history’, by which he meant that he foresaw the end of nation-states in the wake of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions.

As if on cue the French armies invaded Prussia, taking Berlin in their path, and the king Frederick William III fled east with his family to enjoy the protection of the tsar. Mirabeau, one of the early revolutionaries, had said that ‘the Prussian monarchy is so constituted that it could not bear up under any calamity’. And so it proved. Napoleon’s thoughts, too, were turning east with territorial longings greater than ever before. The victory over Prussia provoked jubilation in France where one French minister of state, Pasquier, remarked that ‘nothing could have appeared so incredible’. Yet the joy of the French was tempered by the desire for the palpable fruits of victory, the greatest of which was peace.

But Napoleon was not in a peaceful mood. Ensconced in the newly captured city of Berlin, according to Pasquier, he ‘affected the language and attitude of a sovereign who commands his subjects’. The Prussians were no longer the enemy but a band of rebels, and the nobles of that country were no more than petty courtiers to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. His preoccupation now was with Russia, and he began to march further east into Poland which might once have sufficed as a barrier state between France and Russia; he occupied Warsaw and then rested, having driven the Russians 50 miles east of that city. He came in the apparent role of liberator, since that country had been partitioned over the years by Russia, Prussia and Austria. He said that ‘it is a dead body to which life must be restored before anything can be made of it’. So some Poles welcomed him as a deliverer. He even created an independent state, to be known as the duchy of Warsaw, but it did not survive.

While in Berlin his thoughts had turned again to his old enemy. If he could not assault Britain by sea or land, he could attack her by means of commerce. Trade was the key to Britain’s success; if that could be cut off or curtailed then the country would greatly suffer. If she were reduced to commercial isolation, then she might be induced to surrender. That at least was his intention.

The Berlin Decrees, issued from that city in November 1806, declared that the British Isles were subject to total blockade; no country should trade with Britain, and no foreign ports should be open to her. All her foreign markets were forthwith to be closed. It sounds like a draconian decree but in truth the Continental System, as it became known, had no permanent effect. Britain was too rich, and too productive, to be permanently cowed; the continent of Europe could not command enough resources to survive. Even Napoleon’s soldiers were clothed with textiles made in northern England. There was a crisis in trade in 1808, and then again in 1811, and there was for a time the phantom of famine, but the economic order soon stabilized. The regulations were either ignored or thwarted across vast swathes of Napoleon’s empire, and a black market in prohibited goods was established. It became clear that Napoleon had to fight more battles, and plan more campaigns, to ensure that the Continental System was being obeyed.

In retaliation the British issued Orders in Council at the beginning of 1807 which were designed to mount a blockade against France; no neutral ships were permitted to enter French ports, and the greater efficiency of the British navy ensured that this barrier was not one to be crossed with impunity. Coffee, tobacco and other commodities became rare in the French capital.

In the winter of 1806 Napoleon was still on the march. The weather was terrible, the winds sharp and the snow treacherous, but ‘impossible’ was not a word to utter to the emperor. With the hostile forces of Russia, Prussia and Sweden about him, and Austria threatening in the rear, his army moved eastward; it was checked at Eylau, in a particularly bloody and inconclusive battle, but then advanced still further until it crushed the Russian army at the battle of Friedland. By the summer of 1807 the tsar was forced to come to terms with the emperor on a raft in the middle of the River Neman at Tilsit. A separate treaty with Prussia was signed two days later, by the terms of which that country was effectively dismembered. It had now been confirmed to all the protagonists that Napoleon was the undisputed master of Europe and, with Russia by his side, he might hope eventually to destroy an isolated Britain. The Russian commander noted that ‘the two emperors have shaken hands. Europe has cause to tremble.’ George III himself was convinced that some kind of accommodation would have to be made with Napoleon.

What was everyone really talking about in the autumn of 1807? Lady Bessborough, lover of Sheridan and mother to Lady Caroline Lamb, wrote to the British envoy in St Petersburg about the news of the day. ‘War with Russia? Nothing like it. America? Still less. What can occasion such a ferment in every house, in every street, in every shop, in every garret about London? It is the Light and Heat company … That strong light that has lit up Pall Mall for this year past has all at once blaz’d up like a comet.’ The streets of London were now illuminated by gas, and seemed to any stranger to be paved with gold.

The unfortunate Ministry of All the Talents had already resigned, in the spring of the year. William Grenville had fallen not so much as a result of Napoleon’s victories but from the continuing struggle between the king and his ministers over Ireland; the government wished to make concessions to the majority Catholic population, but the king demurred. When George insisted that all the members of the cabinet should sign a pledge to renounce any further attempt at Catholic emancipation, they resigned in protest. Gillray published a cartoon entitled ‘The Pigs Possessed or the Broad bottom’d Litter running headlong into ye Sea of Perdition’. George, portrayed as a farmer, denounces the pigs as they jump over the cliff: ‘Oh you cursed ungrateful brutes!’ ‘Broad bottom’ was the name given to a cross-party administration.

The Ministry of All the Talents had achieved one notable feat, however, in the abolition of the slave trade. Its moment had come. In the spring of 1807 the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed the Commons by a majority of 283 votes to 16 votes, a victory that surprised even William Wilberforce who ascribed it to Providence. Slavery itself, as opposed to the trade, was not abolished until twenty-six years later.

Another pig popped up, in the shape of the duke of Portland, as all the talents sank beneath the waves. When Grenville was obliged to resign, therefore, he was replaced by a sixty-nine-year-old man who was crippled with bad health and with an addiction to laudanum; the duke of Portland could not have controlled a crèche let alone a cabinet. He was soon incapable of political business, unable either to read long dispatches or engage in lengthy conversations. The stone consigned him to long periods of continual pain, and it was said that he was generally asleep or silent. This left him essentially as a figurehead, supposedly controlling a cabinet that contained rival personalities and principles. The conglomeration of them, plotting and planning against each other, became known as ‘The Ins and Outs’.

This was not perhaps the best administration to continue the fight against Napoleon. At the opening of parliament, on 28 January 1808, George III readied the people for the struggle yet to come. In an official ‘Note’ published in the Moniteur twelve days later Buonaparte pledged that peace would come only after England had been stripped of her overseas possessions which were ‘the principal source of her wealth’.

The war had in any case assumed a different aspect when Napoleon was obliged to look to his southern flank. The Iberian peninsula had become dangerous. In the spring of 1808 the emperor had decreed that his older brother, Joseph, should assume the monarchy of Spain as part of the French imperium; the Spanish were not willing to have a foreign ruler imposed upon them and fomented a nationalist rebellion. Six delegates from Asturias sailed to England and, having arrived at Falmouth, beseeched aid from the British government. The response could not have been more enthusiastic. Here was the opportunity to open another front against the French, with a line of command and communication that relied upon the sea. Nothing could have been more promising. Ten thousand men were dispatched to the peninsula under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley.

Portugal was also in rebellion against the French who had occupied Lisbon the year before. Napoleon had decided that his blockade of Britain would have a better chance of success if all the Portuguese ports were closed, a decision in which the Portuguese themselves did not concur. The emperor believed that it would be relatively easy to dominate the Iberian peninsula with an army, but he mistook the nature of the terrain and the spirit of the inhabitants. The people, most notably the peasants and the clergy, rose up against the foreign oppressors and created havoc with guerrilla attacks, shooting and banditry which could be neither anticipated nor controlled. Local forces, in this and other contests, were more than a match for a foreign army.

Wellesley landed in the early summer of 1808 at Oporto, where his army was enlarged by reinforcements and by Portuguese troops. At the battle of Vimeiro, in the middle of August, the French forces were heavily defeated. But the British negotiators, under the command of Sir Hew Dalrymple, conceded too much; the French were obliged to leave the country but they were permitted to take with them all their arms and equipment. When news of the treaty reached London there was disgust and dismay at such an inadequate response. George III was said to be ‘extremely angry’, and a special Gazette reported that ‘the public indignation this day is at its height … the people seem quite wild’. The British had bungled a great opportunity. It was widely believed and asserted that the expedition to Portugal had turned from triumph into disaster. A court of inquiry was held later in the year. Wellesley was exonerated, but Dalrymple never held another command.

The French, however, were no more successful in Spain than in Portugal; after a particularly galling defeat at Bailen, where 20,000 French soldiers were obliged to surrender to a Spanish army, Buonaparte decided that his presence was necessary on the ground. The British had sent Sir John Moore to parry the imperial thrust, and by the winter of 1808 Moore was close to Salamanca, but at this point the emperor burst through Spanish defences and occupied Madrid; Moore could not complete his mission but he was able to divert the attention of Buonaparte by marching northwest through the mountains of Galicia towards the port at Corunna where, with heroic and indeed fatal rearguard action, he managed to embark the majority of his men. He had significantly delayed Napoleon, who lost the opportunity of recapturing Portugal or finally of subduing Spain, and this interruption helped eventually to determine the struggle for the Iberian peninsula. It was to prove a costly adventure, both in men and money, for the emperor who found himself distracted by this second front which he had no realistic possibility of overcoming. It had become an open pit, swallowing up arms and armies. The day after the battle of Corunna – 17 January 1809 – Napoleon left Spain, never to return.

Yet the British came back; if for Napoleon the Iberian peninsula was at first a peripheral issue, in comparison with his great plans for European dominion, it was for his enemy a vital component of the armed struggle which provided a direct link to the European continent through the ports of Lisbon and Oporto. Its dominance in the region also gave Britain a more powerful voice in later negotiations. Wellesley returned to the peninsula in the spring of 1809 and, as commander of the allied forces, defeated the French in two significant battles. As the victor in the battle of Talavera, southwest of Madrid, he was created Viscount Wellington.

Napoleon had finally committed 350,000 troops to Spain, but they were not enough. They were diverted and dispersed by the guerrillas, and slowly worn down by Wellington in his methodical and practical logistics. He would often conceal his troops in suitable terrain before unleashing them on the unsuspecting enemy in a ‘long red wall’. Buonaparte always underestimated him, calling him merely a ‘sepoy general’ as a consequence of his service in India, but Wellington, more than any other general, brought down the French army.

The war news further north was not so good. At the beginning of 1809 a ‘fifth coalition’, that between England and Austria, had been made ready to engage Buonaparte. A victory by Archduke Charles of Austria in the battle of Aspern delivered a fatal blow to the myth of Buonaparte’s invincibility, but the subsequent defeat of the Austrians at Wagram tempered any false optimism.

On 28 July, three weeks after the battle of Wagram, the British sent an expedition to destroy the French naval base at Antwerp. This was the port where Napoleon was assembling a new fleet. It was a welcome opportunity for the British navy to crush an incipient maritime threat. A fleet was assembled off the coast of the South Downs and sailed to Walcheren, an island in the mouth of the Scheldt estuary within reach of the port of Antwerp. Yet here they met an enemy as deadly as it was unexpected. The island was full of malaria, and the English very quickly succumbed; 4,000 died, and 12,000 were unable to fight. By the end of the year ‘Walcheren fever’ had incapacitated half the British troops, and on 23 December the remnant sailed home. The campaign had become a disaster, to a universal chorus of indignation at home. It had resulted in a wanton loss of men and a vast waste of money.

The failure further unsettled an already weak administration. The betrayal at Sintra in the previous summer, when the French were allowed to leave Portugal with their arms intact, had begun the process of breaking an administration where quarrels and dissensions in the cabinet were already wounding its effectiveness. By the spring of 1809 Portland’s health had deteriorated so badly that the chance for a successor looked promising. George Canning, the foreign secretary, aspired to the office but he saw a rival in Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of state for war and the colonies. Canning pressed for his dismissal, citing his supposed incompetence in the management of the war, and reached a secret pact with Portland that Castlereagh would be removed from his post as soon as practicable. Castlereagh, however, became aware of these negotiations, and rightly sensed betrayal. In the autumn of the year he challenged Canning to a duel on Putney Heath. Castlereagh was a good shot, but Canning had never used a pistol before in his life; when Canning was wounded in the thigh, both men felt obliged to resign from the high posts which their juvenile or old-fashioned behaviour had damaged. Lord Portland, with a broken cabinet, left office soon after.

The surviving ministers looked at one another with a wild surmise, and soon proceeded with what Canning called ‘constant meetings and co-jobberations’. Canning himself still held ambitions for the highest office, even though his recent conduct had effectively disqualified him; he wrote that he was ‘still not wholly out, yet not altogether in office’. The other members of the cabinet in any case considered it bad form on his part to enter into a secret pact with Portland against a colleague.

The king chose as the safest option the chancellor of the exchequer, Spencer Perceval; Perceval was a devout evangelical who had gathered an informal network of friends and families advocating moral and social reform. A man of the old stamp, Perceval was solid, reliable and principled. Henry Grattan, the Irish campaigner and parliamentarian, surmised that ‘he is not a ship of the line, but he carries many guns, is tight built, and is out in all weathers’. He was small, spare and energetic. He took office just three weeks before the death of Portland himself.

It was not at first considered to be a viable administration. We may continue with the naval metaphors that were so popular in this era. When the Honourable Frederick Robinson turned down the relative minor post of an undersecretary he wrote that ‘by embarking in a crazy vessel, I may chance to go to the bottom with the rest’. Yet it defied the odds, and sailed on.

There were, however, storm conditions ahead. The British people seem to have become weary of a war against Napoleon that had lasted, with infrequent intervals, for seven years. The discontent was exacerbated by the economic conditions of 1808 and 1809 when wartime privations led to a deterioration in export trade and, eventually, a general ‘slump’. By 1811 many county banks were forced to close, tightening even more the lines of credit that sustained the country. The cotton spinners of Manchester, and the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire, were among the groups who demanded a return to peace and prosperity.

The measure of discontent may be seen in the sporadic but intense rioting that unbalanced the capital. When in 1810 Sir Francis Burdett wrote to his constituents of Westminster – in a letter published by William Cobbett’s radical Political Register – against an alleged breach of privilege by the House of Commons, his letter was deemed to be libellous and worthy of imprisonment in the Tower. When the warrant for his arrest had been issued the crowds of London arose and virtually took control of the city. Burdett refused to leave his house in Piccadilly and the centre of London became a cockpit for the mobs and the militia. Burdett was finally confined, but Wellington wrote that ‘the government and country are going to the Devil as far as possible; and I expect every day to hear that the mob of London are masters of the country’. Burdett himself was celebrated as a national hero standing up against the ‘rats of the nation’.

Such was the hot temper of the capital that another riot had already taken place over the relatively innocuous question of the price of tickets to the Covent Garden Theatre. When in the autumn of 1809 the theatre reopened after a fire, the managers had increased the price of tickets and constructed more private boxes. This was considered as an affront to the ordinary citizens, and a dedicated group of protests disrupted performances nightly and managed to close the theatre for ten days at the end of September.

This was the inflamed atmosphere when in the autumn of 1810 the king succumbed once more to the babbling condition, akin to madness, induced by porphyria. On this occasion there would be no recovery. He held imaginary conversations with dead friends, and reviewed imaginary troops.

At the beginning of the following year the prince of Wales was declared to be prince regent whose powers would be curtailed for one year in case his father suddenly grew well again. But George III was for long periods strapped in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened room. The regent was king in all but name. It had been confidently believed that he would turn to his old Whig friends to form an administration but, as he had grown older, he had grown more conservative. He liked Spencer Perceval, perhaps because the strict sabbatarian was of so opposite a character; we admire those whom we cannot hope to emulate. Perceval was opposed to Catholic emancipation, as was the regent, and he was bold and resolute in matters of war. When confirmed in office, he would have to be equally resolute in matters domestic.

The great comet that streaked across the night sky in 1811 might have been considered to be a harbinger of more woe; the bad winters of 1811 and 1812 contributed to Napoleon’s blockade and resulted in acute shortages of food. Over 45,000 inhabitants of Spitalfields petitioned to be allowed into the workhouses for want of bread. This was the prelude to protest on a much larger scale against what was known as ‘The Thing’ or ‘Old Corruption’, a movement encouraged by radical periodicals such as Pig’s Meat, Black Dwarf and Axe to the Root. The cotton weavers of Bolton declared in February 1811: ‘Oh misery and wretchedness when will ye cease to torment theindustrious artisan?’ A petition for help came from 40,000 Mancunians.

The most serious and sustained threat came from those who became known as ‘Luddites’. In the spring of 1811 the framework knitters of Nottinghamshire were in dispute with their employers over low wages and the use of unskilled workers. The breaking of frames then became part of their industrial tactics, and their example was followed in parts of Derbyshire and Leicestershire. Over a period of eleven months 1,000 frames were destroyed as a result of approximately a hundred incidents. An army captain, Francis Raynes, explained that ‘the Luddites attained a military style of operation, and held their meetings upon commons and moors for the purpose of drilling etcetera’.

When the disturbances spread to Yorkshire with arson and attempted assassination as part of their operation, the militia was called out and the assizes began their work. Seventeen of the operatives were hanged. The employers also fought back, opening fire on any protesters who threatened their factories. Two hundred protesters marched through Bolton with ‘a man of straw’ at their head – the name of Jack Straw, the rebel leader of the late fourteenth century, may not have been forgotten – representing as the Leeds Mercury said ‘the renowned General Ludd’. What had started as industrial action, therefore, had burgeoned into social and political protest. In 1813, 30,000 people in Lancashire and Yorkshire signed a petition for parliamentary reform. Industrial and political unrest could not in this period be cleanly divided.

There never was a ‘Ned Ludd’ or ‘Captain Ludd’ or ‘General Ludd’. The protesters did not need any titular hero. They were led by solid grievances over the price of provisions, over the conditions of employment, over the breaking-up of traditional practices and over the unpopularity of war. The movement could only be countered with state force. A mass trial was held at York in which sixty defendants were sentenced to hanging or to penal transportation, and when a parliamentary bill was passed to render frame-breaking a capital crime, Lord Byron, in his maiden speech, was moved to declare that ‘when a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporize and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences’.

At the height of the disturbances, in May 1812, Spencer Perceval was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by a deranged merchant called Bellingham. His death was seen by the Luddites and strikers as a great victory of liberty against an oppressive administration. A local newspaper reported that in the Potteries ‘a man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat around his head, and shouting with frantic joy: “Perceval is shot, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!”’

Whatever the jubilation outside Westminister, anxiety and consternation reigned within. Once more the question of suitable leadership arose. It was thought that Wellington’s brother, Henry Wellesley, might be the candidate for first minister; but several ministers refused to serve under him. Eventually the chalice, golden or poisoned according to taste, was passed to Lord Liverpool. He was a practical leader, cautiously moving forward when opportunity allowed, and his administration was to last until his death fifteen years later. The final victory over Napoleon, and the success of the European allies, sealed his ascendancy.

The French emperor was now actively and seriously considering the invasion of Russia. The tsar, Alexander I, had withdrawn from Napoleon’s blockade of Britain; Buonaparte’s purpose seems to have been to engage the Russian army in one climactic battle and force the Russians to accede to his demands. He had also hoped for a short campaign, perhaps just within the borders of the invaded country. He probably never imagined a deep penetration of the icy and wintry realm, but the grand duchy of Muscovy led him ineluctably forward. It was his date with doom.

With an army of approximately 600,000 men he crossed the River Neman in the early summer of 1812; it was reported to be the largest army ever assembled but, in the words of the emperor himself, ‘a man like me troubles himself little about the lives of a million men’. All seemed to be going well as the huge force made its way through western Russia, but its supply lines were growing steadily weaker. Buonaparte’s troops were thwarted on their advance to St Petersburg and all their power was now directed upon Moscow. At the battle of Borodino, on 7 September, the two sides fought themselves into deadlock; the French took the battlefield, but the Russian army had not been defeated. The Russians could always muster fresh recruits, but the French were on their own. A week later Napoleon entered Moscow, to find scorched earth and forced evacuation. There was nowhere to go, a hazard enhanced by the possibility of epidemic sickness. The winter was closing in, with the threat of blizzards and swollen rivers impossible to cross. Frost, and ice, and falling snow, became the enemy.

Napoleon ordered his army to retreat to Smolensk on 17 October before crossing the River Berezina towards the end of November. One observer reported that ‘it looked like a caravan, a wandering nation’. The food had all gone. The cold was intense, disease rampant, the horses slipped and died on the ice; the Russian peasantry took their own vengeance on the departing enemy, burning or burying them alive, or beating out their brains with hoes and shovels. Typhus and dysentery helped to complete their work. An army that had numbered many hundreds of thousands was now reduced to less than 30,000. At Smorgoni, on 5 December, the emperor left his army with the plea that he had to be in Paris to fight his other enemies there. He left in disguise with only a small escort. It had been a total, humiliating disaster. When he returned to Paris, he ordered a round of balls and masquerades but everybody knew that his adventure was coming to an end.

Jubilation among the British at the humiliating conclusion of the emperor’s Russian expedition was heightened by the fact that Viscount Wellington had successfully entered Madrid in the summer of 1812 and had ousted the emperor’s brother from the imperial throne. At the subsequent battle of Vittoria, in the summer of the following year, he chased the French out of Spain altogether. It was a signal moment in European history, when the balance of power finally shifted against the French. A Te Deum was sung in the cathedral of St Petersburg, and Beethoven composed Wellington’s Victory in honour of the event.

A temporary truce in the summer of 1813 lasted only from June to August, and it seemed inevitable that there would be one last battle between France and its multiple enemies, including Prussia, Russia, England, Sweden and Austria. That is why it became known as ‘the battle of the nations’ or, perhaps more accurately, the battle of Leipzig. Over the course of four days Napoleon was roundly defeated, and emerged from the mayhem with only 80,000 troops. He had lost the military war. Lord Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, that ‘the deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand’. It seemed that ‘the ogre’ had finally been smashed and the defeat inflicted infinite damage upon Napoleon’s military reputation; he was no longer invincible on the battlefield. The news of Leipzig had thoroughly alarmed the French and the prefect of police in Paris, Étienne-Denis Pasquier, wrote that ‘there was no longer any hope in anything: every illusion had been destroyed’.

In the early days of 1814 Napoleon was on the defensive but once again his audacity, cunning and strategic skills renewed his confidence. In February he launched what became known as the ‘six day campaign’ in which he brilliantly outmanoeuvred the opposing forces and with an army of only 30,000 men achieved a number of small victories. They were not enough, in the face of the overwhelming numbers of his enemies. In a treaty signed at the beginning of March the allies strengthened their purpose by agreeing to a formal alliance. Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain were now recognized to be the four ‘great powers’ of Europe, a political and geographical fact that changed the face of the continent.

Napoleon, in the face of rebellion at home and defeat abroad, saw the end of days coming. At the close of March the armies of Russia and Prussia reached the outskirts of Paris, and on 31 March the French surrendered. No foreign army had entered the capital for 400 years. Napoleon, struggling to reach the beleaguered city, was two days too late. He had no wish to sign a treaty of surrender, but his marshals forced the issue. ‘The army will obey me’, he told them. To which came the answer that ‘the army will obey its chiefs’. The game was up.

On 6 April 1814 the emperor signed the document of abdication in which he stated that ‘the emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy’. Three weeks later he went on board HMS Undaunted and sailed to Elba under escort. A few days later Louis XVIII entered Paris, to no very warm reception. Yet peace was infectious and the capital had become, in the words of Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, ‘a great, vast, beautiful madhouse’. Every sovereign and politician in Europe seemed to be participating in an endless round of balls, assemblies and receptions. It was here, at the end of May, that a further treaty reduced the territory of France to its borders of November 1792, before the newly revolutionized citizen army had poured over Europe.

All was then detailed, finely divided and eventually drawn up, at a congress held in Vienna in September 1814. The globe was carved up by the participants in a series of negotiations that continued from that early autumn to June 1815; it was one of the most significant conferences in modern history, mapping out the nation-states that were to survive for a century while all the time recognizing the authority of the ‘four great powers’. Mistrust, fear, intrigue and suspicion were of course the dominant motifs, as each ‘power’ tried to ensure that it was not being outmanoeuvred by the others. Castlereagh sought what he called a ‘just equilibrium’ between the various parties which, by subtly negotiating the demands of the participants, he eventually achieved. Austria and Prussia agreed to a loose confederation of German states, while the territorial ambitions of Tsar Alexander were reined back. The nations pledged to maintain a general peace and make no attempt, as Buonaparte had done, to dominate the continent. France remained a strong nation, but it had lost its commanding position for ever.

But then all seemed in peril. A telegraph reached Louis XVIII on 4 March 1815; he opened the envelope, read the message and sat with his head in his hands. ‘Do you know what this telegraph contains?’ he asked a minister.

‘No, sir, I do not.’

‘Well, I will tell you. It is revolution once more. Buonaparte has landed on the coast of Provence.’

Napoleon had escaped from the island of Elba to which he had been consigned by the victors. The ogre was back, and at once assumed an air of natural command. He told his small retinue: ‘I will arrive in Paris without firing a shot.’ And so it proved. On his slow trek to the capital by way of the Alpes Basses, any sign of opposition disappeared with cries of ‘Vive l’empereur!’ Louis XVIII fled to the Belgian border and, on 20 March, Napoleon entered Paris to wild acclamation. The great powers at once denounced him as an outlaw and prepared for a necessary and inevitable war to extirpate him. Napoleon was not for a moment daunted.

Yet all was not as it seemed. This was not the same man who had dominated Europe only a short time before. One of his supporters, Paul Thiébault, noted that his visage ‘had lost all expression and all its forcible character … everything about him seemed to have lost its nature and to be broken up; the ordinary pallor of his skin was replaced by a strongly pronounced greenish tinge’. He had not been defeated by any army; he had brought his misfortunes upon himself. He had ceased to be the leader of the forces of liberty, dispatched by the revolution, but another conqueror of independent peoples. His energy and almost manic certainty had begun to desert him; he now craved sleep and often seemed curiously tardy even in the hours before battle.

But his will was indomitable. He started north to Belgium with the intention of confronting the two armies now raised against him; the army under Wellington consisting of British, Dutch and Germans, and the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, must not be allowed to combine into a single fighting force. He must get between them and destroy each one in turn. A series of errors by Napoleon and his commanders, however, permitted the British and Prussian armies to retreat towards Brussels along two parallel roads that led to Waterloo and Wavre. At a distance of one mile from Waterloo, Wellington, sensing the strength of the terrain, turned to confront the enemy. A prominent ridge known as the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment gave cover, while the large farmhouse or château of Hougoumont as well as a hamlet in the area could be fortified and garrisoned.

Napoleon drew up his forces along the Brussels road but he could not see the extent of Wellington’s army concealed by the prominent ridge. The French army attacked Hougoumont without making great advances, and then the cavalry of both sides engaged in charge and counter-charge in a series of attacks which became, for the survivors, the most prominent aspect of the battle. By the evening Blücher’s troops had arrived from Wavre, and began to attack the French troops. Buonaparte thought that he saw a weakness in Wellington’s centre and sent forward his imperial guard to take advantage of the opening; but the guards, repulsed with artillery and with bayonets, wavered, collapsed and began to retreat. The cry went up that ‘La garde recule. Sauve qui peut.’ Wellington then took off his hat and waved it into the air, signalling a general attack upon the French whose lines were now disintegrating. The battle had been won. It was, as Wellington wrote to his brother, ‘a damned nice [finely balanced] thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. The Prussians always believed that they, not Wellington and the British, had won the battle of Waterloo.

Wellington and Blücher now regrouped and began the final march upon Paris. On 22 June Napoleon abdicated for the second time, and on 15 July he surrendered to the British at Rochefort by going aboard HMS Bellerophon. He had thought, before his surrender, that he might make his new home in the United States; but no such haven was permitted to him. He was taken instead to the island of St Helena, and spent the rest of his life on the volcanic rock in the South Atlantic. It had been the most expensive war in English history, and the most protracted since the ‘Hundred Years War’ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Every word was now of peace, a peace guaranteed by the quadruple alliance of the great powers. And indeed there was to be no more serious strife on the continent until the time of Crimea in 1853. ‘It is impossible not to perceive’, Castlereagh wrote, ‘a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation.’ He might have added that Britain now considered itself to be the great moral leader in the struggle for freedom and against tyranny. It was clearly now the foremost power in terms of territory, and its empire included Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Australia and the Caribbean. It ruled, therefore, a large proportion of the earth’s surface.

Yet there was no triumphalism and little sense of success. After the long war, weariness and hardship were as ever part of daily life. The problems of Ireland, the difficulties of empire itself, the clamour for parliamentary reform, the decay in trade, and the rise in industrial violence, were the shadows that victory cast. It was not at all clear, in 1815, that such problems could be resolved.

Footnote

1 A new and an old style of dating, the Gregorian and the Julian, were in use independently on the continent and in England, with a difference of ten days in their computations. The Julian style in England was not superseded until 1751, and I have therefore used it up to this date. In the seventeenth century the new year was celebrated on 25 March but I have followed the more familiar precedent of 1 January.

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this fourth volume.

GENERAL HISTORIES

Ashley, M.: England in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1952)

Aubrey, W. H. S.: The National and Domestic History of England (London, 1878)

Baxter, S. B.: England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763 (London, 1983)

Black, J.: Britain in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke, 1984)

——— British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (Basingstoke, 1990)

Christie, I. R.: Crisis of Empire: Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1754–1783 (London, 1966)

——— Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760–1815 (London, 1982)

Clark, J. C. D.: English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985)

Coward, B.: A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003)

Dickinson, H. T.: A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002)

Harlow, V. T.: The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793 (London, 1952–64)

Harris, B.: Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002)

Harris, R. W.: England in the Eighteenth Century, 1689–1793: A Balanced Constitution and New Horizons (London, 1963)

Harvey, A. D.: Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1978)

Hill, C.: 1530–1780: Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1969)

Holmes, Geoffrey S.: The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 1660–1722 (London, 1993)

Holmes, Geoffrey S. (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1714 (London, 1969)

Holmes, Geoffrey S. and Szechi, D.: The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-industrial Britain 1722–1783 (London, 1993)

Hoppit, J.: A Land of Liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000)

Jensen, M.: The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York & Oxford, 1968)

Jones, J. R.: Country and Court: England, 1658–1714 (London, 1978)

Lecky, W. E. H.: A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1892)

Levack, B. P.: The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987)

Lingard, J. and Belloc, H.: The History of England (London, 1915)

Macaulay, T. B.: History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1906)

Marshall, D.: Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1974)

McLynn, F.: The Jacobites (London, 1985)

Michael, W., MacGregor, A. and MacGregor, G. E.: England under George I (London, 1936–39)

Namier, L. B.: England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1963)

O’Gorman, F.: The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London, 1997)

Owen, J. B.: The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (London, 1974)

Plumb, J. H.: England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1953)

——— The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1968)

Pocock, J. G. A.: Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980)

Prest, W. R.: Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660–1815 (Oxford, 1998)

Ranke, L. von: A History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1875)

Schama, S.: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989)

Smollett, T.: The History of England: From Revolution in 1688, to the Death of George II (London, 1822)

Speck, W. A.: Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (London, 1977)

Stone, L. (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994)

Szechi, D.: The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994)

Trevelyan, G. M.: England under Queen Anne (London, 1965)

——— England under the Stuarts (New York, 1938)

Watson, J. S.: The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (Oxford, 1960)

Williams, B.: The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (Oxford, 1952)

CULTURE, SOCIETY & RELIGION

Allen, R. C.: Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992)

Archer, J. E.: Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 2000)

Ashton, J.: Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (London, 1882)

Beckett, J. V.: The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986)

Beljame, A.: Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744 (London, 1897)

Bennett, G. V.: The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975)

Borsay, P.: The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989)

Brewer, J.: The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997)

Cannon, J.: Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984)

Carter, P.: Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001)

Chadwick, W. The Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (London, 1859)

Chalklin, C. W.: The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process, 1740–1820 (London, 1974)

Christie, I. R.: Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984)

Clark, J. C. D.: Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986)

Cockayne, E.: Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven & London, 2007)

Corfield, P. J.: The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982)

Defoe, D.: A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, By a Gentleman (London, 1742)

Earle, P.: The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989)

Elioseff, L. A.: The Cultural Milieu of Addison’s Literary Criticism (Austin, 1963)

Ford, B. (ed.), The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain, Vol. 5, Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1992)

Foss, M.: The Age of Patronage: The Arts in Society, 1660–1750 (London, 1971)

Gatrell, V.: City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006)

George, M. D.: England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1931)

George, M. D.: London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1925)

Guillery, P., Donald, A. and Kendall, D.: The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2004)

Hay, D. and Rogers, N.: Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997)

Hill, B.: Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989)

Hilton, B.: A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006)

Holmes, Geoffrey S.: Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982)

Jenkins, P.: The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983)

Kirby, P.: Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (London, 2003)

Langford, P.: A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989)

——— Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford 1990 (Oxford, 1991)

Lees, L. H.: The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998)

Linebaugh, P.: The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)

Mackay, C.: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London, 1852)

Malcolmson, R. W.: Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981)

O’Toole, F.: A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1997)

Palliser, D. M., Clark, P. and Daunton, M. J.: The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2000)

Porter, R.: English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)

Rivers, I.: Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982)

Rogers, P.: The Augustan Vision (London, 1974)

Rule, J.: Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992)

Rupp, E.: Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986)

Sambrook, J.: The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700–1789 (London, 1986)

Scull, A.: The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven & London, 1993)

Seed, J.: Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008)

Sharpe, P.: Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914 (London, 1998)

Simmons, J. R. (ed.), Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, Ont. & Plymouth, 2007)

Snell, K. D. M.: Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985)

Sykes, N.: From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660–1768 (Cambridge, 1959)

Uglow, J. S.: Hogarth: A Life and a World (London, 1997)

——— The Lunar Men: The Friends who made the Future, 1730–1810 (London, 2002)

Vicinus, M.: The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British WorkingClass Literature (London, 1974)

Vickery, A.: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2009)

Warburg, J.: The Industrial Muse: The Industrial Revolution in English Poetry (London & New York, 1958)

White, T. H.: The Age of Scandal: An Excursion through a Minor Period (London, 1950)

Williams, D.: The Triumph of Culture: 18th Century Perspectives (Toronto, 1972)

Wilson, K.: The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995)

MILITARY HISTORY

Black, J.: War for America: The Fight for Independence, 1775–1783 (Stroud, 1991)

Blanning, T. C. W.: The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802 (London, 1996)

Brewer, J.: The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989)

Chandler, D. G.: The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 2002)

Conway, S.: The War of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London, 1995)

Esdaile, C. J.: Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803–1815 (London, 2007)

Gash, N. (ed.), Wellington: Studies in the Military and Political Career of the first Duke of Wellington (Manchester, 1990)

Gates, D.: The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815 (London, 2003)

McLynn, F.: 1759: The Year Britain became Master of the World (London, 2004)

——— Napoleon: A Biography (London, 1997)

Muir, R. Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 (New Haven and London, 1996)

Schneid, F. C.: Napoleonic Wars (Washington, 2010)

Southey, R.: The Life of Nelson (London, 1941)

Zamoyski, A. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London, 2007)

MONARCHS AND COURTS

Beattie, J. M.: The English Court in the Reign of George I (London, 1967)

Black, J.: George II: Puppet of the Politicians? (Exeter, 2007)

——— George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, 2006)

Bucholz, R. O.: The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, 1993)

Clark, G. N.: The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1949)

Field, O.: The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London, 2002)

Gregg, E.: Queen Anne (London, 1984)

Hatton, R. M.: George I (New Haven, 2001)

Kenyon, J. P.: The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London, 1977)

Miller, J.: The Stuarts (London, 2004)

Pares, R.: King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1967)

Smith, H.: Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006)

Somerset, A.: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London, 2012)

Thompson, A. C.: George II: King and Elector (New Haven and London, 2011)

ECONOMIC HISTORY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Alexander, D.: Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (London, 1970)

Ashton, T. S.: An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist: Peter Stubs of Warrington, 1756–1806 (Manchester, 1939)

——— An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (London, 1955)

——— Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot, 1993)

Berg, M.: The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain (London, 1994)

Broadberry, S. N. and O’Rourke, K. H.: The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2012)

Brown, R.: Society and Economy in Modern Britain, 1700–1850 (London, 1991)

Chapman, S. J.: The Cotton Industry and Trade (London, 1905)

Cipolla, C. M.: Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (London, 1976)

Coleman, D. C.: Myth, History, and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1992)

Court, W. H. B.: The Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600–1838 (Oxford, 1953)

Crafts, N. F. R.: British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985)

Daunton, M. J.: Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995)

Dickinson, H. W.: James Watt: Craftsman and Engineer (Cambridge, 1935)

Dickson, P. G. M.: The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967)

Fitton, R. S. and Wadsworth, A. P.: The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830 (Matlock, 2012)

Flinn, M. W.: Men of Iron: The Crowleys in the Early Iron Industry (Edinburgh, 1962)

——— The Origins of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1966)

——— The Industrial Revolution, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1984)

Floud, R.: The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2014)

Floud, R. and McCloskey, D. N.: The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 (Cambridge, 1981)

Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, B. B.: The Rise of Modern Industry (London, 1937)

Harris, J. R.: The British Iron Industry, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 1988)

Hartwell, R. M.: The Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1965)

——— The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1967)

——— The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (London, 1971)

Hartwell, R. M. (ed.): The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1970)

Holderness, B. A.: Pre-industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500–1750 (London, 1976)

Hopkins, E.: The Rise of the Manufacturing Town: Birmingham and the Industrial Revolution (Stroud, 1998)

King, S. and Timmins, G.: Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 2001)

Kussmaul, A.: A General View of the Rural Economy of England 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990)

MacLeod, C.: Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 1988)

Mantoux, P.: The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England (Chicago, 1983)

Mathias, P.: The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London, 1969)

——— The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2011)

McKendrick, N. and Plumb, J. H.: The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1983)

Minchinton, W. E.: The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1969)

Moffit, L. W.: England on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: A Study of Economic and Social Conditions from 1740–1760, with Special Reference to Lancashire (London, 1925)

Mokyr, J.: The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York, 1990)

——— The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1850 (London, 2011)

Mui, Hoh-Cheung and Mui, L. H.: Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, Ont., 1989)

O’Brien, P. and Quinault, R. E.: The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge, 1993)

Osborne, J. W.: The Silent Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in England as a Source of Cultural Change (New York, 1970)

Plumb, J. H.: The Commercialisation of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (Reading, 1973)

Quickenden, K., Baggott, S. and Dick, M.: Matthew Boulton: Enterprising Industrialist of the Enlightenment (Farnham, 2013)

Radcliffe, W.: Origin of the New System of Manufacture Commonly Called Power-Loom Weaving (Clifton, 1974)

Randall, A.: Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991)

Reilly, R.: Josiah Wedgwood, 1730–1795 (London, 1992)

Richards, J. M. and De Maré, E. S.: The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings (London, 1958)

Rule, J.: The Vital Century: England’s Developing Economy 1714–1815 (London, 1992)

Toynbee, A.: The Industrial Revolution (Boston, 1956)

Unwin, G. and Hulme, A.: Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: The Industrial Revolution at Stockport and Marple (Manchester, 1924)

Weatherill, L.: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London and New Haven, 1996)

Wilson, R. G.: Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830 (Manchester, 1971)

Wrigley, E. A.: Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988)

——— Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010)

POLITICAL HISTORY

Black, J.: Pitt the Elder (Cambridge, 1992)

——— The Politics of Britain, 1688–1800 (Manchester, 1993)

Brewer, J.: Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976)

Browning, R.: The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, 1975)

Butterfield, H.: George III, Lord North, and the People, 1779–80 (London, 1949)

Cannon, J.: The Fox–North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–4 (Cambridge, 1969)

——— The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London, 1981)

Colley, L.: In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982)

Derry, J. W.: Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool: Continuity and Transformation (Basingstoke, 1990)

Dickinson, H. T.: The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 1994)

Dickinson, H. T.: Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London, 1973)

Ehrman, J.: The Younger Pitt (London, 1969–1996)

Field, O.: The Kit-Cat Club (London, 2009)

Goodwin, A.: The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979)

Gray, D.: Spencer Perceval, the Evangelical Prime Minister, 1762–1812 (Manchester, 1963)

Harris, T.: Politics Under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660–1715 (London, 1993)

Hill, B. W.: British Parliamentary Parties, 1742–1832: From the Fall of Walpole to the First Reform Act (London, 1985)

——— The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689–1742 (London, 1976)

Holmes, Geoffrey S.: British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967)

Jones, C.: Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680–1750: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes (London, 1987)

Kenyon, J. P.: Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977)

Lawson, P.: George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984)

Linklater, A.: Why Spencer Perceval had to Die: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister (London, 2012)

Marshall, A.: The Age of Faction: Court Politics, 1660–1702 (Manchester, 1999)

Middleton, R.: The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War 1757–1762 (Cambridge, 1985)

Namier, L. B.: The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1957)

O’Gorman, F.: The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, 1967)

——— Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London, 1973)

——— The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975)

——— Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989)

Owen, J. B.: The Rise of the Pelhams (London, 1957)

Pearce, E.: The Great Man: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London, 2007)

Perry, K.: British Politics and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, 1990)

Peters, M.: Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1980)

Pincus, S. C. A.: 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009)

Plumb, J. H.: Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London, 1956)

Reilly, R.: William Pitt the Younger (New York, 1979)

Rogers, N.: Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989)

Rudé, G. F. E.: Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (London, 1983)

Tomkins, S.: William Wilberforce: A Biography (Oxford, 2007)

Western, J. R.: Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (London, 1985)

Williams, E. N. (ed.): The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688–1815: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1960)

Index

Aberdeen, Charles ref1

Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th earl of ref1

Aboukir Bay, battle of (1798) ref1

Adams, Dacre ref1

Adams, John ref1

Addington, Henry (1st viscount Sidmouth) ref1, ref2

Addison, Joseph: on trade and traders ref1; on London ref1; political writings ref1; co-edits Spectator ref1, ref2; opposes Scriblerus ref1; club membership ref1; describes prostitute ref1; on theatregoers ref1

Adventurer (journal) ref1

advertisements ref1

agriculture: improvements and social effects ref1, ref2; farm sizes increase ref1

Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (1748) ref1, ref2

Albemarle, Arnold Joosty van, 1st earl of ref1

Albion Mill, London ref1

alehouses ref1

Alexander I, tsar of Russia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Alison, Archibald: Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste ref1

Almack’s club ref1

America see North America

American War of Independence (1775–83) ref1, ref2

Amiens, treaty of (1802) ref1

‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’ dispute ref1, ref2

Anderson, Adam: An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce ref1

Anglican church see Church, the

Anne, queen of England, Scotland and Ireland: claim to throne ref1, ref2, ref3; Protestantism ref1; touches for king’s evil ref1; dependence on duchess of Marlborough ref1; accession ref1; appearance and character ref1; religious convictions ref1; on Marlborough’s Blenheim victory ref1; political impartiality ref1; and union with Scotland ref1; declines Marlborough’s request to be appointed captain-general for life ref1; and battle of Malplaquet ref1; bids for peace ref1; dismisses Marlborough ref1; creates new peers (1712) ref1; succession question ref1; death and succession ref1, ref2

Annual Register ref1, ref2

Anson, Admiral George, baron ref1

Antwerp ref1

Arbuthnot, John ref1, ref2

architecture ref1

aristocracy: numbers under William III ref1

Arkwright, Richard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

army (standing): resisted ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

art and artists ref1, ref2

Ashmole, Elias ref1

Ashworth, Henry and Edward ref1

asiento (slaving treaty) ref1

Aspern, battle of (1809) ref1

assembly rooms ref1

Association of the Friends of the People ref1

Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers ref1

asylums (charity) ref1

Atterbury, Francis, bishop of Rochester ref1, ref2

Aubrey, John ref1

Auckland, William Eden, 1st baron ref1

Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Dowager Princess of Wales (George III’s mother) ref1, ref2

Austerlitz, battle of (1805) ref1

Austria: alliance with England in War of Spanish Succession ref1; in coalitions against France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9; and post-Napoleon settlement ref1

Austrian Succession, War of the (1739–48) ref1, ref2

Ayton, Richard: Voyage round Great Britain ref1

Babbage, Charles ref1

Bailen, battle of (1808) ref1

Bailey, Nathan: An Universal Etymological Dictionary ref1

Bakewell, Robert ref1, ref2

balloons and ballooning ref1

balls (dancing) ref1

Bank of England: established ref1, ref2; issues paper notes ref1, ref2; investments in ref1

banks and banking ref1

Bantry Bay, Ireland ref1

Baptists ref1

Barber, Stephen ref1

Barnard, Sir John: A Present for an Apprentice ref1

Bath (city) ref1

Beachy Head, battle of (1690) ref1

Beckford, William: Fragments of an English Tour ref1

Bedlam ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Beethoven, Ludwig van ref1

Behn, Aphra ref1

Bell, Andrew ref1

Bellingham, John ref1

Bengal ref1

Bentley, Thomas ref1

Berlin Decrees (1806) ref1

Bessborough, Henrietta Frances, countess of ref1

Bickerstaff, Isaac see Steele, Richard

Bill (earlier Declaration) of Rights (1689) ref1

Birmingham ref1, ref2

Birmingham Mail ref1

Bissett, William: The Modern Fanatic ref1

Blair, Robert: The Grave ref1

Blake, William: on change ref1; and conversation ref1; on London ref1; enters Royal Academy Schools ref1; in Gordon riots ref1; on human effect of industrial revolution ref1; welcomes French Revolution ref1; painting style ref1; and French invasion threat ref1; on poetic diction ref1; ‘Jerusalem’ ref1

Blanqui, Auguste ref1

Blenheim, battle of (1704) ref1, ref2

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire ref1

Blücher, Field Marshal Gebbard Leberecht von ref1

Board of Agriculture: established ref1

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy ref1

Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st viscount ref1

Bolton, Lancashire: disaffection ref1

Booth, Charles ref1

Borodino, battle of (1812) ref1

Boston Gazette ref1

Boston, Mass.: reaction to Stamp Act ref1; ‘Massacre’ (1770) ref1; ‘Tea Party’ ref1

Boston Port Act (1774) ref1

Boswell, James ref1, ref2, ref3

Boulton & Fothergill (manufacturers) ref1

Boulton, Matthew ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Boydell, John ref1

Boyle, Sir Robert ref1

Boyne, battle of the (1690) ref1

bread riots ref1, ref2

brewers and breweries ref1

Bridgewater, Francis Egerton, 3rd duke of ref1

Brissot, Jacques Pierre ref1

Britain see England

British Apollo, The (periodical) ref1

British Empire: recreation ref1; and worldwide trading posts ref1; government and control ref1

British Magazine ref1

British Museum: opened (1759) ref1

Britton, John ref1

Britton, Thomas ref1

Brooks’s club, London ref1

Brunswick, Charles William Ferdinand, duke of ref1

Bunker Hill, battle of (1775) ref1

Buonaparte, Joseph (king of Spain and of Naples) ref1, ref2, ref3

Buonaparte, Louis (king of Holland) ref1

Buonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon I (Buonaparte), emperor

Burgoyne, General John ref1

Burke, Edmund: on trade and war ref1; on repeal of Stamp Act ref1; on measures against America ref1; on Charles James Fox ref1; impeaches Warren Hastings ref1; on George III’s illness ref1; on French Revolution ref1; Thomas Paine criticizes ref1, ref2; denounced by constitutional societies ref1; on national continuity ref1; Reflections on the Revolution in France ref1

Burke, Richard ref1

Burnet, Gilbert, bishop of Salisbury ref1

Burney, Fanny (Mme d’Arblay) ref1

Bussy, François de ref1

Bute, John Stuart, 3rd earl of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Byng, Admiral John ref1

Byng, John (diarist) ref1, ref2

Cade, Jack ref1

Calvinism ref1

Cambridge Intelligencer ref1

Camden, Charles Pratt, 1st earl ref1

Camden, William ref1

Camperdown, battle of (1797) ref1

Canada: British war against French in ref1, ref2; France loses ref1; Britain retains ref1

canals ref1, ref2

Canning, George ref1, ref2

Cape St Vincent, battle of (1797) ref1

Carlyle, Thomas ref1

Caroline of Ansbach, queen of George II: supports husband in banishment ref1; rebukes Robert Walpole for coarseness ref1; political astuteness ref1; qualities ref1; distaste for son Frederick ref1

Caroline of Brunswick, wife of George Prince of Wales ref1

Carteret, John, 2nd baron (later earl Granville) ref1, ref2, ref3

cartoons and caricatures ref1

Castaing, John ref1

Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, viscount ref1, ref2, ref3

Catholic Relief Bill (1791) ref1

Catholics: status in Ireland ref1; in Durham ref1; hostility to ref1; attacked in Gordon riots ref1; emancipation proposals ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Cavendish, Lord John ref1

Cawdrey, Robert: A Table Alphabeticall ref1

census (population) ref1

Centlivre, Susanna: A Bold Stroke for a Wife (play) ref1

Ceylon (Sri Lanka) ref1

charities and voluntary societies ref1, ref2

Charles, Archduke of Austria ref1

Charles II, king of Spain ref1

Charles VI, Holy Roman emperor ref1

Chartism ref1

Chatterton, Thomas: suicide ref1; Miscellanies ref1

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of: on accession of George I ref1; on Robert Walpole ref1; on return of Pitt the elder ref1; on Britain’s improving fortunes ref1; on Bute ref1; Characters ref1

Cheyne, George: The English Malady ref1

children: drinking ref1; labour ref1, ref2; mortality rates ref1

china see pottery

chronometer ref1

Church, the (Anglican): and toleration of dissenting churches ref1; and land ref1; ethos ref1; and gentry ref1; and Act of Settlement ref1; and trial of Sacheverell ref1; George I and ref1; and Wesley and rise of Methodism ref1; on war with France ref1

Cibber, Colley: on Vanbrugh’s plays ref1; Love Makes a Man ref1

civil service ref1

civility ref1

Clapham Sect ref1

class (social): hierarchy and divisions ref1, ref2, ref3; and polite society ref1; and emulation ref1; see also gentry; middle class; poor, the

Clerk, Sir John (of Penicuik) ref1

Clive, Robert, 1st baron ref1

clubs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14

coaches ref1

coal: in iron manufacture ref1; mining ref1; production ref1; as source of power ref1

Coalbrookdale, Shropshire ref1

Cobbett, William ref1, ref2

Cock Lane ghost ref1

Cockburn, Henry Thomas, Lord ref1

coffee-houses ref1, ref2

coinage: reformed by Newton ref1

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: and Romanticism ref1, ref2; ‘The Ancient Mariner’ ref1; Biographia Literaria ref1; Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth) ref1

Collingwood, Admiral Cuthbert, 1st baron ref1

Combination Act (1721) ref1

combinations ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

common sense ref1, ref2

communications: improvements ref1

Compton, Spencer, 1st earl of Wilmington ref1

Concert of Ancient Music (society) ref1

Congregationalists ref1

Congreve, William: political writings ref1; plays ref1, ref2; club membership ref1; popularity ref1; The Double Dealer ref1; Love for Love ref1; The Old Bachelor ref1, ref2

consumer society and goods ref1, ref2

Continental System ref1

Convention (1689) ref1

conversation ref1

Conway, Henry Seymour ref1

Cook, Captain James ref1

Cooke, Thomas ref1

Cornwallis, General Charles, 1st marquess (and 2nd earl) ref1, ref2

Cornwallis, Admiral Sir William ref1

Corunna, battle of (1809) ref1

cottage industry ref1

cotton manufacture ref1, ref2, ref3

Courtauld, Samuel ref1

Cowper, Mary, countess (née Clavering) ref1

Cowper, William, 1st earl ref1

Cowper, William (poet) ref1

Craftsman, The (journal) ref1

crime rates ref1

Cromford, Derbyshire ref1

Crowley, Ambrose ref1

Crowley, Mr (City merchant) ref1

Crown (monarchical authority): relations with parliament ref1

Culloden, battle of (1746) ref1

Cumberland, George ref1

Cumberland, Prince William Augustus, duke of ref1, ref2

Daily Advertiser ref1

Dale, David ref1

Dalrymple, Sir Hew ref1

Darby family ref1

Darby, Abraham, the elder ref1, ref2, ref3

Dartmouth (ship) ref1

Darwin, Erasmus: on Albion Mill ref1; The Economy of Vegetation ref1

Davenant, Charles: Two Discourses on the Public Revenues and Trade of England ref1

Davy, Humphry ref1, ref2

Declaration of Independence (USA) ref1

Dee, Dr John ref1, ref2

Defoe, Daniel: on power of parliament ref1; on social class ref1; literary style ref1; on printed cotton fabrics ref1; on Durham Catholics ref1; on manufacturing enterprises ref1; on domestic manufacturing ref1; on poor roads ref1; on working children ref1; on English prosperity ref1; The Complete English Tradesman ref1; An Essay upon Projects ref1; Moll Flanders ref1; Robinson Crusoe ref1, ref2; A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Defour, Judith ref1

Desaguliers, John Theophilus ref1

Devonshire, Georgiana, duchess of ref1

Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th duke of ref1

Dibdin, Charles: on durability of iron bridge, Shropshire ref1; Musical Tour ref1

Dickens, Charles: Hard Times ref1; The Old Curiosity Shop ref1, ref2; The Pickwick Papers ref1

dictionaries ref1

Diggers (sect) ref1

disease ref1

Disraeli, Benjamin ref1

dissenters (nonconformists): and money ref1; and occasional conformity ref1; Sacheverell attacks ref1; ‘Old’ ref1, ref2; sects ref1; and beginnings of industrialism ref1; as industrialists ref1; in Birmingham ref1; see also Methodism

‘Distilled Spirituous Liquors: The Bane of the Nation’ (pamphlet) ref1

divine right of kings ref1, ref2

Doddridge, Philip ref1

Dodington, George Bubb ref1

Dolben, Sir William ref1

domestic interiors and furnishings ref1

Dominica ref1

Dryden, John ref1

Dumont, Etienne ref1

Duncan, Admiral Adam, viscount ref1

Dundas, Henry (1st viscount Melville) ref1, ref2

Dunkirk: proposed demolition ref1; in war with France (1793) ref1

Dyer, John: ‘The Fleece’ (poem) ref1

earthquakes ref1

East India Company: trade ref1; power ref1, ref2; imports tea into America ref1; government control of ref1, ref2

Eden, William ref1, ref2

Edinburgh Review ref1

education ref1

Edwin, Sir Humphrey ref1

Egmont, John Perceval, 1st earl of ref1, ref2

Egypt: Napoleon’s campaign in ref1

Elba (island): Napoleon exiled to ref1

Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine ref1

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (‘the Winter Queen’) ref1

emotionalism ref1

enclosure (land) ref1

Encyclopaedia Britannica ref1, ref2, ref3

Engels, Friedrich: ‘The Condition of England’ ref1; The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 ref1

England (and Britain): party divisions ref1, ref2, ref3; war with France (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3; financial strength ref1, ref2, ref3; peace treaty with France (1697) ref1; union with Scotland ref1, ref2; peace with France (1711–13) ref1; trade and industry ref1, ref2; in War of Austrian Succession ref1; Seven Years War against France (1756–63) ref1, ref2, ref3; war with Spain (1762) ref1; conditions at end of Seven Years War ref1; taxation ref1; disaffection and riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; industrial revolution ref1; and American War of Independence ref1; National Revival movement ref1; urbanization ref1; naval supremacy and domination of sea ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; reaction to French Revolution ref1, ref2; constitutional and parliamentary reform movement ref1, ref2; war with France (1793–8) ref1, ref2, ref3; treason charges fail (1793) ref1; price rises in Napoleonic wars ref1; food shortages ref1, ref2, ref3; popular actions against war ref1; belief in liberty ref1; invasion threat from France ref1, ref2, ref3; war taxes ref1; union with Ireland (1801) ref1, ref2; differences over negotiating with France ref1; peace treaty with France (1802) ref1; army recruitment against Napoleon ref1; resumes war against France (1803) ref1; and Napoleon’s Continental System ref1; and downfall of Napoleon ref1; as great power ref1

Enlightenment, the ref1

enthusiasm (religious) ref1

epidemics ref1

Eton College: party factions ref1

Etruria (pottery) ref1

Evelyn, John (diarist) ref1

Evelyn, Sir John (investor) ref1

Examiner (Swift’s journal) ref1

excise: duties resisted ref1

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds ref1

Eylau, battle of (1807) ref1

factories ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Fairbairn, Sir William ref1

fairs and markets ref1

Farmers’ Journal, The ref1

Farmer’s Magazine, The ref1

farms: size increase ref1

Farquhar, Sir Walter ref1, ref2

fashion ref1

Female Tatler (journal) ref1

Fenton, Lavinia (duchess of Bolton) ref1

Ferdinand, Prince of Brunswick ref1

Ferguson, Adam ref1

Ferriar, Dr (of Manchester) ref1

fiction ref1

Fielding, Henry: on effect of growth of commerce ref1; as playwright ref1; ‘An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers’ ref1, ref2; The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great ref1; Tom Jones ref1

Fiennes, Celia ref1

Firth, Mrs (grocer’s widow) ref1

Fishguard Bay, Pembrokeshire ref1

Fitzherbert, Maria ref1

flower pot plot, the (1692) ref1

Fontainebleau: peace negotiations (1762) ref1

Foote, Samuel: The Nabob ref1

Fordyce, James ref1

Fox, Charles James: gambling ref1; attacks George III over American war ref1; qualities ref1, ref2; arrangement with Lord North ref1; George III’s animosity towards ref1; and control of East India Company ref1; loses 1784 election ref1; opposes Pitt the younger ref1; on governing India ref1; and impeachment of Warren Hastings ref1; supports George Prince of Wales’s right to throne ref1; supports revolutionary France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; condemns execution of Louis XVI ref1; Whigs abandon to support Pitt ref1; withdraws in war with France ref1; and treaty of Amiens (1802) ref1; on death of Pitt the younger ref1; serves as foreign secretary in Ministry of All the Talents ref1

France: war with England (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3; in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2; famine and shortages ref1; peace negotiations and treaty with England (1711–13) ref1; and Jacobite rising (1715) ref1; in War of Austrian Succession ref1; fails to support 1745 Jacobite rising ref1; in Seven Years War with Britain (1756–63) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; invades Hanover (1757) ref1; driven from India ref1; loses Canada ref1; North American territory ref1; revolution (1789) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; supports America in War of Independence ref1, ref2, ref3; and Treaty of Paris (1783) ref1; European wars ref1; urges rising in other European countries ref1; war against England (1793–8) ref1, ref2, ref3; attempts invasion of Ireland and Wales ref1; threatens invasion of England ref1, ref2; peace treaty with England (1802) ref1; resumes war against Britain (1803) ref1; successes in Napoleonic wars ref1, ref2; Britain imposes blockade on ref1; in Peninsular War ref1, ref2; surrenders (1814) ref1; peace settlement (1814) ref1; see also Napoleon I (Buonaparte), emperor

Francis II, Holy Roman emperor ref1

Franklin, Benjamin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Frederick, prince of Wales ref1, ref2

Frederick William III, king of Prussia ref1

Freeholder (journal) ref1

French Revolution (1789) see France: revolution

Friedland, battle of (1807) ref1

Fuller, Thomas: Gnomologia ref1

Fuseli, Henry ref1

Gage, General Thomas ref1

gambling ref1

Garraway’s coffee house, London ref1

Garrick, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

gaslight ref1, ref2, ref3

Gay, John: in Scriblerus Club ref1; on commerce ref1; background ref1; The Beggar’s Opera ref1, ref2

Gentleman’s Magazine ref1

gentry (landed) ref1, ref2

George I, king of Great Britain (George Ludwig of Hanover): as claimant to throne ref1, ref2; anger at British withdrawal from war ref1; succeeds to throne ref1; qualities ref1; and Jacobite rising (1715) ref1; hates son George Augustus ref1; returns to Hanover ref1; hold assemblies and public functions ref1, ref2; achievements ref1; death ref1, ref2; statue ref1

George II, king of Great Britain (earlier prince of Wales): hated and restricted by father ref1; relations with Robert Walpole ref1, ref2, ref3; accession ref1, ref2; civil list ref1; thwarts Tories ref1; appearance and qualities ref1; visits to Hanover ref1; opposed by son Frederick ref1; declares Hanover neutral (1741) ref1; death and succession ref1; feud with grandson George III ref1

George III, king of Great Britain: accession ref1; hatred of war and Pitt the elder ref1, ref2; principles ref1; reliance on Bute ref1; relations with political parties ref1; welcomes Pitt the elder’s resignation ref1; illnesses and madness ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; dislikes Grenville ref1, ref2; Wilkes attacks ref1; and American War of Independence ref1, ref2; and end of war with America ref1; popularity ref1; hatred of Fox ref1; supports Pitt the younger ref1, ref2; visits industrial sites ref1; praises Burke for denouncing French Revolution ref1; carriage mobbed in bread riots ref1; resists union with Ireland ref1; opposes Catholic emancipation ref1, ref2; urges measures against Napoleon ref1; considers accommodation with Napoleon ref1; on continuing struggle against Napoleon ref1; anger at French withdrawal from Portugal ref1

George, Prince of Denmark ref1, ref2

George, prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV): enmity towards Pitt the younger ref1; and father’s illness ref1, ref2; hopes for regency ref1; qualities ref1; made regent ref1

Gerverot, Louis Victor ref1

Gibbon, Edward: on Gordon riots ref1; on Sheridan ref1; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ref1

Gibraltar ref1

Gillray, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

gin ref1

Gin Act (1736) ref1

Glorious First of June (1794) ref1

Glorious Revolution (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Godwin, William ref1, ref2

Goethe, J. W. von ref1

Goldsmith, Oliver ref1

Gordon, Lord George: instigates riots (1780) ref1

Gorée (island), Senegal ref1

Grafton, Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd duke of ref1, ref2

Graham, Dr James ref1

Grattan, Henry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Graves, Richard: Columella ref1

Gray, Thomas: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ ref1

Great Britain: formed ref1; see also England

Grenville, George ref1, ref2, ref3

Grenville, James ref1

Grenville, William ref1, ref2

Guadeloupe ref1

Habeas Corpus Act: suspended (1793) ref1

Habsburg dynasty: and War of Austrian Succession ref1; see also Holy Roman Empire

Haddock, Admiral Nicholas ref1

Hague, The: treaty of (1720) ref1

Halford, Sir Henry ref1

Halifax, Charles Montagu, 1st earl of: financial expertise ref1; establishes Bank of England ref1; currency reform ref1

Halifax, George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd earl of ref1

Halifax, George Savile, marquess of ref1

Handel, George Frideric: Judas Maccabeus ref1

Hanover: George I revisits ref1; George II visits ref1; mercenary troops serve British army ref1; French invade (1757) ref1

Hanoverian succession: effected ref1, ref2, ref3; unpopularity ref1

Harcourt, Simon, 1st viscount ref1

Hardy, Admiral Sir Charles ref1

Hardy, Thomas (shoemaker) ref1, ref2, ref3

Hare, Francis, bishop of Chichester ref1

Hargreaves, James: spinning jenny ref1

Harley, Robert see Oxford, 1st earl of

Harris, Revd John ref1

Harrison, John (chronometer maker) ref1

Harvard university ref1

Hastenbeck, battle of (1757) ref1

Hastings, Warren: impeachment and acquittal ref1

Hawkin and Dunn (coffee merchants) ref1

Hawkins, Sir John ref1

Haydn, Joseph ref1

Hayes, John ref1

Haymarket theatre, London ref1

Healy, Joseph ref1

Hegel, G. W. F. ref1, ref2

Heginbotham, Henry ref1

Hermes Trismegistus ref1

Hervey, John, baron of Ickworth ref1, ref2, ref3

Hess: mercenary troops serve British army ref1, ref2, ref3

Heyrick, Elizabeth ref1

Hobbes, Thomas ref1

Hobhouse, John Cam ref1

Hobsbawm, E. J.: Industry and Empire ref1

Hoffmann, Johann Philipp ref1

Hogarth, William: on line of beauty ref1, ref2; paints scene from The Beggar’s Opera ref1, ref2; depicts London turmoil ref1; background and influence ref1; membership of St Martin’s Lane academy ref1; individuality ref1; caricatures Wilkes ref1; ‘Beer Street’ (print) ref1; Gin Lane (print) ref1, ref2; The Sleeping Congregation (print) ref1

Holland: alliance with England in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2, ref3; French invade (1793) ref1; falls to French (1795) ref1

Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, 3rd baron ref1, ref2

Holme Mill, Bradford ref1

Holy Roman Empire: in William’s coalition against France ref1; Austria and Prussia dominate ref1

Hondschoote, battle of (1793) ref1

Hood, Thomas: The Art of Punning ref1

hospitals ref1

Houghton Hall, Norfolk ref1, ref2

houses and housing ref1, ref2

Howard, Henrietta ref1

Howard, John ref1

Howe, Admiral Sir Richard, earl ref1

Howe, General Sir William, 5th viscount ref1, ref2

Hutton, William ref1, ref2, ref3

‘immortal seven’ ref1

Indemnity Bill (1689) ref1

India: British conquests ref1; and British imperialism ref1; British administration in ref1; cotton manufacture ref1; see also East India Company

industrial revolution: and generation of power ref1, ref2; and domestic manufacture ref1; origins and causes ref1; and art ref1, ref2, ref3; and invention ref1; and increased production ref1; social and labour effects ref1, ref2; and mass production ref1; and Methodism ref1; riots and machine-breaking ref1, ref2, ref3; British lead in ref1; see also factories; steam engines

industrialists ref1

industry: growth ref1; geographical distribution ref1; labour force ref1; minor and specialist ref1; effect on towns ref1

inns ref1

inventions ref1, ref2

Ireland: William III’s campaign in ref1; penal laws ref1; demands independence ref1, ref2; Volunteer Associations ref1; French attempt invasion (1796) ref1; rebellion (1798) ref1; union with England (1801) ref1, ref2; and proposed Catholic emancipation ref1, ref2

iron manufacture ref1, ref2

iron-masters ref1

Italy: Napoleon’s campaign in ref1

Jackson, Andrew ref1

Jacobins (French) ref1, ref2, ref3

Jacobites: celebrate William III’s defeat at Mons ref1; hope for James II’s restoration ref1; and death of Prince William ref1; welcome death of William III ref1; 1715 rising ref1; Walpole’s wariness of ref1, ref2; 1745 rising ref1, ref2

Jamaica ref1

James I, king of England (James VI of Scotland) ref1, ref2

James II, king of England: flight to France and exile ref1, ref2, ref3; Tory support for ref1; campaign in Ireland ref1; followers pardoned by William ref1; plots to restore ref1; orders rising against William ref1; and Peace of Ryswick ref1; death ref1; and exclusion crisis ref1; deposed ref1

Jefferson, Thomas ref1, ref2

Jeffrey, Francis, Lord ref1, ref2

Jena, battle of (1806) ref1

Jenkins, Captain Robert ref1

Jenner, Dr Edward ref1

Jervis, Sir John, earl of St Vincent ref1

Johnson, Samuel: conversation ref1; on impolite man ref1; and clubs ref1; on advertising ref1; investigates Cock Lane ghost ref1; on musicians ref1; background and career ref1; eccentric manner ref1; working method ref1; on Junius ref1; on innovation ref1; edits Shakespeare ref1; A Dictionary of the English Language ref1; The History of Rasselas ref1

Jonathan’s coffee house, London ref1

‘Junius’ (anonymous writer) ref1

‘Junto, the’ ref1

Kames, Henry Home, Lord ref1

Kay, Joseph ref1

Kersey, John: A New English Dictionary ref1

King, Charles: The British Merchant ref1

King, Tom ref1

Kit-Kat Club ref1, ref2

Kléber, General Jean–Baptiste ref1

Kneller, Sir Godfrey ref1

labour: factory conditions ref1, ref2; childrenref1; women’s industrial ref1, ref2, ref3; and trade unions ref1, ref2; unity and power ref1; migration ref1; and development of social institutions ref1; class divisions ref1; farm ref1

Lancaster, Joseph ref1

Lancelot, Edward ref1

land: values and ownership ref1

la Roche, Sophie von ref1

Lecky, W. E. H.: on James Watt ref1; History of England in the Eighteenth Century ref1

Leeds ref1

Leicester Sisterhood of Female Handspinners ref1

Leipzig, battle of (‘battle of the nations’, 1813) ref1

Leopold I, Holy Roman emperor ref1, ref2

Lettsom, Dr John Oakley ref1

Levellers (sect) ref1

Licensing Act (1737) ref1, ref2

life expectancy ref1

lighting (public) ref1, ref2, ref3

Limerick, treaty of (1691) ref1

literature: style in early 18th century ref1

Liverpool: commerce ref1; and slave trade ref1

Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of ref1

living standards ref1, ref2

Lobo, Father Jerome: A Voyage to Abyssinia ref1

Locke, John ref1

Lombe, John and Thomas ref1, ref2

London: coffee-houses ref1, ref2; as cultural centre ref1; conditions ref1; earthquakes ref1; superstitiousness ref1; gin drinking ref1; theatres ref1; in Gordon riots ref1; timekeeping ref1; streetlighting ref1; see also clubs

London Chronicle ref1

London Corresponding Society ref1, ref2, ref3

London Courant ref1

London Evening Post ref1

London Journal ref1

London Police Magistrates ref1

London Society for Constitutional Information ref1, ref2

Lord Chamberlain ref1, ref2

lotteries ref1

Louis XIV, king of France: William III’s war against ref1, ref2, ref3; Whigs oppose ref1; declines to invade England ref1; recognizes William III as king ref1, ref2; and Spanish throne ref1; in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2; death ref1

Louis XV, king of France ref1, ref2

Louis XVI, king of France ref1, ref2

Louis XVIII, king of France ref1

Loutherbourg, Philip: Coalbrookdale by Night (painting) ref1

Luddites ref1, ref2, ref3

Lunar Society of Birmingham ref1, ref2, ref3

Lunéville, treaty of (1801) ref1

Luther, Martin: Preface to the Epistle of the Romans ref1, ref2

Lyttelton, George, 1st baron ref1

McAdam, John ref1

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, baron: on William’s campaign in Ireland ref1; criticizes Pitt the elder as war minister ref1; on impeachment of Warren Hastings ref1; on condition of working classes ref1; History of England ref1

MacKenzie, Henry: The Man of Feeling ref1

Macky, John: Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne ref1

Macpherson, David: Annals of Commerce ref1

madness ref1

Madrid: Wellington occupies ref1

Maitland, William: The History of London ref1

Malmesbury, James Harris, 1st earl of ref1

Malplaquet, battle of (1709) ref1

Manchester ref1, ref2

manufacturing: beginnings ref1

Mar, John Erskine, 6th or 11th earl of ref1

Marat, Jean Paul ref1, ref2

Marengo, battle of (1800) ref1

Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria ref1

Marine Society ref1

markets see fairs and markets

Marlborough House, London ref1

Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st duke of: shares command in Ireland ref1; plots to restore James II ref1; qualities and background ref1; appointed commander-in-chief ref1, ref2; dukedom ref1; military campaign in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2; Whigs support ref1, ref2; requests appointment as captain-general for life ref1; Steele supports ref1; in Lords ref1; accused of bribery and corruption ref1; dismissal and exile abroad ref1; plans defence of Hanover ref1

Marlborough, Sarah, duchess of: ridicules William III ref1; relations with and influence on Queen Anne ref1, ref2; loses favour with Anne ref1

Martin, John ref1

Mary II (Stuart), Queen of England: proclaimed joint sovereign ref1; coronation ref1; death ref1

Maryland: tobacco from ref1

Masham, Abigail ref1

Mather, Joseph ref1

Maton, William George ref1

medicine: satirized by Scriblerus Club ref1

Mehmet (George I’s servant) ref1, ref2

Memoirs of … Martinus Scriblerus, The ref1, ref2

Methodism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Metternich, Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel ref1

Milton, John ref1

Ministry of All the Talents ref1, ref2

Minorca ref1, ref2

Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de ref1, ref2

Molesworth, Squire ref1

Moniteur (journal) ref1

Montagu, Charles see Halifax, 1st earl of

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley ref1

Montcalm, Louis Joseph, marquis de ref1

Moore, Sir John ref1

More, Hannah ref1, ref2

More, Thomas: Utopia ref1

Moritz, Karl Philipp ref1, ref2

Morning Chronicle ref1

Morning Post ref1

Morris, Corbyn ref1, ref2

Morris, Gouverneur ref1

mortality rates ref1

Murray, Fanny ref1

museums and galleries: established ref1

music: concerts ref1

Mustafa (George I’s servant) ref1, ref2

Namur, siege and recapture (1695) ref1, ref2

Napier, Sir William ref1

Napoleon I (Buonaparte), emperor of the French: on religion ref1; and England as ‘nation of shopkeepers’ ref1; rise to command ref1; campaign in Italy ref1; as invasion threat ref1, ref2, ref3; coalitions against ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; as military leader ref1, ref2; expedition to Egypt ref1; territorial gains ref1; ambitions and wars ref1, ref2; appointed first consul for life ref1; resumes belligerency ref1; crowned emperor ref1; proposes peace negotiations to George III ref1; military successes and advance ref1, ref2; told of Trafalgar defeat ref1; aims to conquer Russia ref1, ref2; imposes Continental System (blockade) against Britain ref1, ref2; campaign in Iberian peninsula ref1; threatens to strip Britain of overseas possessions ref1; Leipzig defeat and abdication (1814) ref1; defeat at Waterloo (1815) ref1; escapes from Elba and enters Paris ref1; final exile on St Helena ref1

Nash, Richard (‘Beau’) ref1

Nelson, Admiral Horatio, 1st viscount ref1, ref2, ref3

New Lanark ref1, ref2

New South Wales: as colony and penal settlement ref1

New York Gazette ref1

Newcastle Journal ref1

Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st duke of: qualities ref1; and execution of Byng ref1; coalition with Pitt the elder ref1; and Pitt’s commitment to war ref1, ref2; resigns ref1

Newcastle upon Tyne ref1

Newgate Prison ref1, ref2

newspapers: proliferation ref1

Newton, Sir Isaac ref1, ref2, ref3

Nine Years War (1689–98) ref1

non-jurors ref1

Norris, Admiral John ref1

North America: British war with France in ref1; taxed by British ref1, ref2, ref3; unrest ref1, ref2; Lord North abolishes taxes ref1; tea imports and tax ref1; ‘coercive’ (or ‘intolerable’) acts ref1; independence movement ref1; wins independence (1783) ref1, ref2; see also American War of Independence

North Briton (newspaper) ref1, ref2

North, Frederick, Lord (2nd earl of Guilford): heads government ref1, ref2; qualities ref1; coercive acts against America ref1; pessimism over war with America ref1, ref2; resigns ref1; arrangement with Fox ref1; and control of East India Company ref1

Northumberland, Elizabeth, duchess of (née Seymour) ref1

Nottingham ref1

novels ref1

Oakes (banker of Bury St Edmunds) ref1

Occasional Conformity Bill (1702) ref1

October Club ref1

O’Donoghue, Father ref1

Oldknow, Samuel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Oliphant, Charles ref1

Onslow, Arthur ref1

opera ref1, ref2

Ormonde, James Butler, 2nd duke of ref1, ref2, ref3

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty–Four ref1

Owen, Robert ref1; A New View of Society ref1

Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st earl of: as Tory leader ref1, ref2; assassination attempt on ref1; and George I’s anger at British withdrawal from war ref1; in Scriblerus Club ref1; imprisoned in Tower ref1

Packwood, James ref1

Paget, Diana ref1

Paine, Thomas: on ‘declaratory act’ ref1; on Pitt the younger ref1; accused of seditious publication ref1; effigy burned ref1; ‘Common Sense’ ref1; The Rights of Man ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

painting ref1

Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd viscount ref1

Paris: peace negotiations at end of American war (1783) ref1

Paris, treaty of (1763) ref1, ref2, ref3

Parker, Richard ref1

parliament: relations with William ref1, ref2; and Act of Settlement determining royal succession ref1; and land ownership ref1; condemns Sacheverell ref1; sovereign status ref1; corruption and bribery ref1; ends war with America (1782) ref1

Parr, Dr Samuel ref1

Pasquier, Étienne-Denis ref1, ref2

Pasteur, Louis ref1

patents ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Payne, Captain Jack ref1

Peasants’ Revolt (1381) ref1, ref2

Pelham, Henry ref1

Peninsular War ref1, ref2

Pepys, Samuel ref1

Perceval, Spencer ref1, ref2

Peterloo (1819) ref1, ref2

Petty, Sir William ref1

Philadelphia: congresses (1774) ref1, ref2

Philanthropic Society ref1

Philip V, king of Spain (earlier duke of Anjou) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

pin-making ref1

Pitt, William the elder (1st earl of Chatham): advocates war with Spain ref1, ref2; eloquence ref1; parliamentary career ref1; qualities ref1; George II’s enmity towards ref1; and prosecution of Seven Years War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and capture of Guadeloupe ref1; George III’s animosity to ref1, ref2, ref3; and George II’s reliance on Bute ref1; resignation and pension ref1; relations with Grenville ref1; earldom ref1; incapacity and decline ref1, ref2; replaces Rockingham as head of government (1766) ref1

Pitt, William the younger: on trade ref1; George III offers government to and supports ref1, ref2; qualities ref1; gains and retains office as head of government ref1; wins 1784 election ref1; administration and policies ref1; financial measures ref1; and administration of India ref1; opposes slave trade ref1; on working children ref1; achievements ref1; and George III’s illness ref1; attitude to French Revolution ref1, ref2; Thomas Paine attacks ref1; alarm at French military actions ref1; and outbreak of 1793 war with France ref1; drinking ref1; ‘reign of terror’ ref1, ref2; and conduct of war against France ref1, ref2, ref3; wartime financial measures ref1; food shortages ref1; resigns (1801) ref1; resumes premiership (1803) ref1; rejects French peace proposals ref1; and Trafalgar victory ref1; health decline and death ref1; reaction to Austerlitz news ref1

Pius VII, pope ref1

Place, Francis: Autobiography ref1, ref2, ref3

plagues: absence ref1

Plassey, battle of (1757) ref1

pleasure gardens ref1

Poland: war of succession (1733–8) ref1; Napoleon in ref1

Political Register (Cobbett’s) ref1

Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de (Madame de Pompadour) ref1

Pontiac’s War (1763–66) ref1

poor, the: numbers and conditions ref1; and industrial work ref1, ref2; children ref1; physical condition ref1

Pope, Alexander: on Harley ref1; political writings ref1; and Scriblerus Club ref1, ref2; literary style ref1; satirizes Walpole ref1; The Dunciad ref1, ref2; An Essay on Criticism ref1; An Essay on Man ref1

population: growth ref1, ref2, ref3; urban ref1, ref2; internal migration ref1

Porson, Richard ref1

Port of London ref1

Porteous, Beilby, bishop of London ref1

porter (drink) ref1

Portland, William Bentinck, 1st earl of ref1

Portland, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 1st duke of ref1, ref2

Porto Bello, Panama ref1, ref2

Portugal: rebels against Napoleon ref1, ref2

Postlethwayt, Malachi: The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce ref1

pottery and china ref1

power: generation of ref1, ref2, ref3

Presbyterians ref1

press: freedom ref1, ref2; power ref1

Preston ref1

Prestonpans, battle of (1745) ref1

Pretyman, George ref1

Price, Richard ref1

prices see wages and prices

Priestley, Joseph ref1, ref2, ref3

prison reform ref1

professions ref1

prose: and plain disourse ref1

prostitutes ref1

Protestant Association ref1

Protestantism: and beginnings of industrialism ref1

Prussia: in coalitions against France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; peace treaty with France ref1; dominates Holy Roman Empire ref1; Jena defeat ref1; and post-Napoleon settlement ref1; army at Waterloo ref1

Pryme, Abraham de la ref1

Public Advertiser ref1, ref2

Quakers: modesty ref1; industrialists ref1

Quebec ref1, ref2

Quiberon Bay, battle of (1759) ref1

Radcliffe, William: Origin of the New System of Manufacture ref1, ref2

ragged schools ref1

Rambler (journal) ref1

Ramillies, battle of (1706) ref1

Ranelagh Gardens, Chelsea ref1

Raynes, Francis ref1

Reach, Angus ref1

reading and the reading public ref1, ref2, ref3

Reflexions Upon the Moral State of the Nation (anon.) ref1

religion: and toleration ref1, ref2; and social class ref1; and rise of evangelicalism ref1; of industrialists ref1; see also Methodism

Reynolds, Sir Joshua ref1, ref2

Rich, John ref1

Richardson, Samuel: and mail coaches ref1; Clarissa ref1; Pamela ref1

Rigby, Richard ref1

Riot Act (1715) ref1, ref2

riots and agitation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

rivers: improvements ref1, ref2

roads: improvements ref1, ref2

Robespierre, Maximilien ref1, ref2

Robinson, Frederick ref1

Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd marquess of ref1

Roman Catholics see Catholics

Romanticism ref1, ref2, ref3

Rossbach, battle of (1757) ref1

Rowlandson, Thomas ref1

Royal Academy ref1

Royal Humane Society ref1

Royal Navy: supremacy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; unrest ref1

Royal Society: and agricultural improvement ref1, ref2; and clear discourse ref1; and scientific advancement ref1

Royal Society of Arts ref1

Russell, Richard: Dissertation upon the Use of Sea–Bathing ref1

Russia: in coalitions against Napoleon ref1, ref2, ref3; Napoleon aims to conquer ref1; Napoleon invades ref1; and downfall of Napoleon ref1

Ryswick, Peace of (1697) ref1, ref2

Sacheverell, Henry ref1, ref2

Sadler, Michael ref1

St Helena (island) ref1

St James Chronicle ref1

St James’s Weekly Journal ref1

Salte, Samuel ref1

Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury ref1

Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th earl of ref1

Saratoga: British surrender at (1777) ref1, ref2

satire ref1, ref2, ref3

Saussure, César de ref1, ref2

Savery, Thomas ref1

Schomberg, Frederick Herman, duke of ref1

schools ref1

Schroeder, Samuel ref1

Schulenberg, countess Ehrengard Melusina von der, duchess of Kendal ref1

science: opposition to ref1; advances in ref1; popularization ref1

Scotland: favours Stuart succession ref1; union with England ref1, ref2, ref3; and Jacobite risings (1715) ref1; (1745) ref1

Scriblerus Club ref1, ref2

Scriblerus, Martin (imaginary author) ref1, ref2

seaside towns ref1

Sedley, Sir Charles ref1

sentiment ref1

Septennial Bill (and Act 1716) ref1, ref2

servants ref1

Seven Years War (1756–63) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Seward, Anna ref1

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of: Characteristics ref1

Shakespeare, William: characters sing ref1; Pitt the elder’s love of ref1; Jubilee (1769) ref1; performed ref1; King Lear ref1

sheep ref1, ref2

Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information ref1

Shelburne, William Petty, 2nd earl of (later 1st marquess of Lansdowne) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Shelley, Percy Bysshe ref1

Sheppard, Jack ref1

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: content of plays ref1, ref2; reputation ref1; on impeachment of Warren Hastings ref1; welcomes French Revolution ref1; loses party support ref1; on end of Jacobinism ref1; The Critic ref1, ref2; The School for Scandal ref1

shops and shopping ref1

Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, duke of ref1

Siddons, Sarah ref1

silk mills ref1, ref2, ref3

silver coinage ref1

Simond, Louis ref1

slaves and slavery: and asiento ref1; and sugar consumption ref1; West African ref1; conditions in West Indies ref1; abolition movement ref1; trade ref1; trade abolished (1807) ref1

Sloane, Sir Hans ref1

Smart, Christopher ref1

Smiles, Samuel ref1

Smith, Adam: on union of Scotland and England ref1; on war against Spain ref1; on inventing class ref1; on pin-making ref1; The Wealth of Nations ref1, ref2, ref3

Smollett, Tobias: on South Sea Bubble ref1; plays ref1; The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom ref1; The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle ref1, ref2; The Adventures of Roderick Random ref1, ref2; The Expedition of Humphry Clinker ref1, ref2

societies for the reformation of manners ref1

Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade ref1

Society of Brothers ref1, ref2

Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce ref1

society, polite ref1

Sons of Liberty (North America) ref1

Sophia, electress of Hanover ref1, ref2

Sophia, queen of George I ref1

South Sea Bubble ref1, ref2

South Sea Company: established (1711) ref1; early success ref1; collapse and rescue by Walpole ref1, ref2

Southey, Robert ref1

Southwell, Sir Robert ref1

Southwell, Robert (artist): ‘The Burning Babe’ (painting) ref1

Spain: in William III’s coalition against France ref1; succession question ref1; and War of Austrian Succession (1739–48) ref1, ref2; Pitt the elder calls for war against ref1; Britain declares war on (1762) ref1; joins alliance against Britain (1778) ref1; attempts to seize British ships ref1; changes sides in Napoleonic wars ref1, ref2; in alliance with Napoleon ref1; treasure ships captured ref1; in Peninsular War ref1, ref2

Spanish Netherlands ref1

Spanish Succession, War of (1701–14) ref1, ref2, ref3

spas ref1, ref2, ref3

Spectator, The (journal) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Speenhamland system ref1

Spithead mutiny (1797) ref1

Sprat, William ref1

Stair, John Dalrymple, 2nd earl of ref1

Stamp Act (1765) ref1, ref2

Stamp Act Congress (North America) ref1, ref2

Stanhope, James, 1st earl ref1

Staverton Mill, Totnes ref1

Stead, William Thomas: The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon ref1

steam engines ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

steel manufacture ref1

Steele, Richard (‘Isaac Bickerstaff’): political writings ref1; opposes Scriblerus ref1; in Kit–Kat Club ref1; The Tender Husband ref1

Steenkerque, battle of (1692) ref1

Stephenson, George ref1

Sterne, Laurence: individuality ref1; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ref1, ref2, ref3

Stock-jobbing ref1

Strutt, Jedediah ref1, ref2, ref3

Stuart dynasty: barred from throne under Act of Settlement ref1; continuing hopes of restoration ref1, ref2; see also Jacobites; James II

Stuart, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (‘The Young Pretender’; ‘Bonny Prince Charlie’) ref1

Stuart, Prince James Francis Edward (‘the Old Pretender’): claim to English throne ref1; failed landing in Scotland (1708) ref1; hopes of succession to Anne ref1, ref2; popular support in England ref1; lands in Scotland in 1715 rising ref1; and South Sea Bubble ref1; Atterbury supports ref1

Stubs, Pete ref1

sugar ref1, ref2

Sunday Monitor ref1

superstitions ref1

Sweden: in coalition against Napoleon ref1

Swift, Jonathan: on Queen Anne ref1; on union with Scotland ref1; political writings ref1, ref2; on Marlborough ref1; and Scriblerus Club ref1; literary style ref1; satirizes Walpole ref1; and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera ref1; satirizes scientific societies ref1; The Conduct of the Allies ref1, ref2; Gulliver’s Travels ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; The Tale of a Tub ref1

Talavera, battle of (1809) ref1

Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de ref1

Tate, Nahum ref1

Tatler (magazine) ref1

taxation ref1

Taylor, Jasper ref1

tea ref1

Tea Act (1773) ref1, ref2

technology: development ref1

Teignmouth ref1

Telford, Thomas ref1

Temple of Nature, The (anonymous poem) ref1

Temple, Sir William ref1

textile industry ref1

Thackeray, William Makepeace ref1

Theatre Royal, Covent Garden ref1, ref2

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane ref1

theatres: in provinces ref1; restrictions imposed ref1, ref2; popularity and influence ref1; and acting ref1

Thelwall, John ref1

Thiébault, Paul ref1

‘Thing, The’ (or ‘Old Corruption’) ref1

Thurlow, Edward, 1st baron ref1

Tilsit, treaty of (1807) ref1

Times, The (newspaper) ref1

Tofts, Mary ref1

Toleration Act (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Tooke, John Horne ref1, ref2

Tories: differences with Whigs ref1, ref2, ref3; as ‘country party’ ref1; scorn Bank of England ref1; dislike moneyed interests ref1; favour restoration of Stuarts ref1, ref2; gain majority (1702) ref1; oppose Marlborough’s wars ref1, ref2; election victory and government (1710) ref1, ref2; and succession to Anne ref1; George I dislikes and persecutes ref1; view of Walpole ref1

Torrington, Arthur Herbert, 1st earl of ref1

Toulon ref1, ref2

towns ref1, ref2, ref3

Townshend, Charles, 2nd Viscount (‘Turnip’) ref1

Townshend, Charles (chancellor of exchequer) ref1

Toynbee, Arnold ref1, ref2

trade: importance ref1; and the market ref1; at end of Seven Years War ref1; and British Empire ref1; under Pitt ref1

trade unions ref1

Trafalgar, battle of (1805) ref1

transport: improvements ref1

Triple Assessment (tax) ref1

Tucker, Josiah, dean of Gloucester ref1

Tull, Jethro ref1

Turner, Thomas ref1

Turner, James Mallord William: studies at Royal Academy ref1; Limekiln at Coalbrookdale (painting) ref1

Turnham Green ref1

‘Two Acts’ (‘Gagging Acts’, 1795) ref1

United Irishmen ref1, ref2

Ure, Andrew: The Philosophy of Manufactures ref1

Utrecht, treaty of (1713) ref1, ref2

Valmy, battle of (1792) ref1

Vanbrugh, Sir John ref1, ref2, ref3

Vauxhall Gardens, London ref1

Venice ref1

Vernon, Admiral Edward ref1

Vienna: Napoleon captures ref1

Villars, Marshal Claude Louis Hector, duc de ref1, ref2

Vimeiro, battle of (1808) ref1

Virginia: tobacco from ref1; protests against British rule ref1, ref2

Voltaire, François Marie Arouet: on execution of Admiral Byng ref1; on war in Canada ref1; Letters Concerning the English Nation ref1, ref2

wages and prices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Wagram, battle of (1809) ref1

Walcheren expedition (1809) ref1

Waldegrave, James, 2nd earl ref1, ref2

walks (leisure) ref1

Wallis, Henry ref1

Walpole, Horace: on Frau von Kielmannsegge ref1; on gambling ref1; encounter with highwayman ref1; on elder Pitt’s eloquence ref1; on crime and violence ref1; on earthquake fears ref1; congratulates elder Pitt on victories ref1; on death of George II ref1; praises George III ref1; on general election (1761) ref1; on elder Pitt’s resignation and pension ref1; on Britain at end of Seven Years War ref1; on Lord North ref1; on natural sciences ref1; on ballooning ref1

Walpole, Sir Robert: qualities ref1; rescues South Sea Company ref1, ref2; political career and dominance ref1, ref2, ref3; and death of George I ref1; marriage ref1; club membership ref1; good relations with Caroline ref1; reports George I’s death to George II ref1; opinion of George II ref1; opponents ref1, ref2; satirized in The Beggar’s Opera ref1; imposes restrictions on theatre ref1; and parliamentary corruption ref1; attempts to introduce excise duties ref1; anti-war policy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; resigns (1742) ref1; created earl of Orford ref1

Walsingham, Francis ref1

War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48) ref1

Ward, Edward: Five Travel Scripts ref1

Washington, George ref1, ref2, ref3

Waterloo, battle of (1815) ref1, ref2

Watkinson (master cutler) ref1

Watt, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Wedgwood, Josiah ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Weekly Journal, The ref1

weeping ref1, ref2

Wellesley, Henry, 1st baron Cowley ref1

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Wentworth, Isabella, Lady ref1

Wesley, Charles ref1, ref2

Wesley, John ref1, ref2, ref3

West, Benjamin ref1, ref2

West Indies: trade ref1; British possessions in ref1; slaves ref1; in French revolutionary wars ref1

Whaley, Thomas ref1

wheat: prices ref1

Whigs: differences with Tories ref1, ref2, ref3; William favours ref1; policies ref1; support Marlborough ref1, ref2; attacked by Sacheverell ref1; criticized for financial management ref1; and succession to Anne ref1; favoured by George I ref1; internal divisions ref1; government under George I ref1; encourage trade ref1; hostility to Walpole ref1; and Walpole’s retirement ref1; advocate peace with America ref1; support Burke ref1; and 1793 war with France ref1; join Pitt’s administration (1794) ref1; secessionists in war with France ref1

Whitbread’s brewery ref1

Whitechapel: theatre ref1

Whitefield, George ref1, ref2

Whitworth, Charles, baron ref1

Wilberforce, William ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Wild, Jonathan ref1

Wilkes, John: protests and career ref1, ref2, ref3; An Essay on Woman ref1

William III (of Orange), king of England: installed as king ref1, ref2; coronation ref1; qualities ref1, ref2; relations with parliament ref1, ref2; hostility to Louis XIV ref1; war with France ref1, ref2, ref3; campaign in Ireland ref1; maintains coalition against France ref1; favours Whigs ref1; and Mary’s death ref1; recaptures Namur ref1; conspiracy against ref1; Louis XIV recognizes as king ref1, ref2; army curtailed ref1; and Spanish succession ref1; death and achievements ref1; Queen Anne disdains ref1; introduces gin to England ref1

Willis, Thomas: Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes ref1

Wilmot, Alderman ref1

Wilson, Benjamin ref1, ref2

Wiltshire Outrages ref1

Windham, William ref1, ref2, ref3

Wolfe, Major-General James ref1

women: in industrial labour ref1, ref2, ref3

Wood, John ref1

Wood, William: Survey of Trade ref1

wool industry ref1

Wordsworth, Dorothy ref1

Wordsworth, William: attitude to French Revolution ref1; The Excursion ref1, ref2; ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ ref1; Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge) ref1; The Prelude ref1

Workmen’s Combination Bill (1799) ref1

Wright, Joseph ref1; A Blacksmith’s Shop (painting) ref1; An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (painting) ref1; An Iron Forge Viewed from Without (painting) ref1; A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun (painting) ref1

Wrigley, E. A. ref1

Wyvill, Christopher ref1

Yale university ref1

York: Assembly Rooms ref1

York, Frederick Augustus, duke of ref1, ref2

Yorke, Charles ref1, ref2

Yorktown, Virginia: British surrender at (1781) ref1

Young, Arthur: on working class ref1; Annals of Agriculture ref1, ref2; The Northern Tour ref1; Political Arithmetic ref1

Young, Edward: Night Thoughts ref1

1. An inset from the ceiling of the painted hall of the royal naval college at Greenwich, with William III and Mary II in majesty.

2. Queen Anne. A singularly unhappy and gouty queen.

3. John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. A great general and a great spendthrift – Blenheim was his shining star.

4. A scene from the Battle of Blenheim. ‘I am very sensible that I take a great deal upon me,’ he wrote before the battle, ‘but should I act otherwise the Empire would be undone …’

5. George I of England, who had a very fat mistress, and a very thin mistress. It is almost a limerick.

6. George II was full of bullying, boastfulness and bluster.

7. An animated table at a London coffee house, circa 1700.

8. Robert Walpole. Plump, genial and a master of intrigue. All political strings led to him.

9. William Pitt ‘the Elder’, prime minister twice, with the badly misquoted line ‘unlimited power corrupts the possessor’.

10. The Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed James II who quite improperly considered himself to be James III.

11. The Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart (circa 1740), otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

12. Illustration from Hogarth Restored: The Whole Works of the Celebrated William Hogarth. The artist was the Rowlandson and Rembrandt of the age.

13. The spinning jenny, the latest example of industrial torture.

14. The horrors of gin and, at the time, spirituous frenzy.

15. John Dryden, poet, playwright and the first official Poet Laureate.

16. Jonathan Swift, satirist, pamphleteer and progenitor of the famous Gulliver.

17. Alexander Pope, perhaps contemplating ‘this long disease, my life’.

18. Scrofulous and scruffy, Samuel Johnson was the giant of the age.

19. George III: He lost his reason and the American colonies.

20. The Prince Regent, later George IV, was fat, dissolute and entangled with wives. He was the model of a Hanoverian monarch.

21. Joseph Wright’s The Iron Forge, circa 1773.

22. The Ball from ‘Scenes at Bath’. It looks very respectable.

23. From the sublime to the domestic. A teapot, circa 1775.

24. The Boston Tea Party, 16 December 1773. Do you want tea with your water?

25. George Washington, from slave owner to liberator.

26. William Pitt the Younger. Not a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.

27. A disconsolate and melancholy Edmund Burke at the loss of America.

28. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1804. He had a glow-worm in his head.

29. Wordsworth, in characteristically reflective mind.

30. A mythological depiction of The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

31. Taking the waters at the pump room in Bath.

32. Ladies in coffee-houses: It was a city of coffee-houses. They had begun life in the 1660s, and before long they were considered to be the most essential component of city life. It was important to be noticed.

33. A modern Belle creeping around Bath like a caterpillar in a chrysalis.

34. The Duchess of Richmond organized a ball for the Duke of Wellington and other famous participants two days before the Battle of Waterloo.

35. The great Battle of Trafalgar.

36. Napoleon in excelsis.

37. The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. To the victors go the spoils.

REVOLUTION

PETER ACKROYD is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

The History of England Vol. II: Tudors

The History of England Vol. III: Civil War

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Three Brothers

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T. S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography Charlie Chaplin

Brief Lives

Chaucer J. M. W. Turner Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2016 by Macmillan

First published in paperback 2017 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2017 by Pan Books

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-5098-1148-9

Copyright © Peter Ackroyd 2016

Cover images: King George III, c.1762–64 (oil on canvas) painted by Allan Ramsay, National Portrait Gallery, London & akg-images/Quint & Lox/© Liszt Collection

The right of Peter Ackroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Peter Ackroyd

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

VOLUME V

DOMINION

Contents

List of illustrations

1. Malign spirits

2. The Thing

3. Eternity work

4. A queasy world

5. The door of change

6. False hope

7. The inspector

8. Steam and speed

9. The pig is killed

10. Young hopefulness

11. City lights

12. Charitable government

13. The salamander

14. A most gorgeous sight

15. Blood lust

16. A dark world

17. Quite the fashion

18. The game cock

19. The unexpected revolution

20. She cannot go on

21. The Tichborne affair

22. The angel

23. The empress

24. This depression

25. Frightful news

26. Daddy-long-legs

27. Lost illusions

28. The terrible childbed

Envoi

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

1. A portrait of Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of Liverpool, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, c.1825 (© Ickworth House, Suffolk, UK National Trust Photographic Library Bridgeman Images)

2. A portrait of George IV by Sir Thomas Lawrence (© Private Collection Roy Miles Fine Paintings Bridgeman Images)

3. An engraving depicting the 1815 Bread Riots at the entrance to the House of Commons, Westminster, London, c.1895 (© The Print Collector Print Collector Getty Images)

4. A contemporary cartoon by George Cruikshank of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre at St Peter’s Field, Manchester (© Granger / Bridgeman Images)

5. A portrait of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, twentieth century (© Mount Stewart House & Garden, County Down, Northern Ireland National Trust Photographic Library Bridgeman Images)

6. A portrait of Caroline of Brunswick, consort of George IV, by James Lonsdale, c.1820 (© Guildhall Library & Art Gallery / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

7. The arrest of the Cato Street conspirators, 23 February 1820, taken from V.R.I. Her Life and Empire by the duke of Argyll (© Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

8. A model of an ‘analytical engine’ invented in 1837 by Charles Babbage (© DeAgostini / Getty Images)

9. A painting of Mary Anning, pioneer fossil collector, before 1842 (© Natural History Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

10. A portrait of the Rt Hon. George Canning, MP, by Sir Thomas Lawrence (© Attingham Park, Shropshire, UK National Trust Photographic Library Bridgeman Images)

11. A portrait of Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington, by Sir Thomas Lawrence (Private Collection Photo © Mark Fiennes Bridgeman Images)

12. A portrait of William IV by Martin Archer Shee, c.1834 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

13. A portrait of the Rt Hon. Earl Grey by Henry Hetherington Emmerson, c.1848 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK / © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums / Bridgeman Images)

14. An illustration of Daniel O’Connell by George J. Stodart (Chris Hellier / Corbis via Getty Images)

15. The title page to The Life and History of Swing, The Kent Rick Burner, 1830 (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

16. A portrait of Victoria I, Queen of England, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (© Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

17. A portrait of Prince Albert by John Partridge, 1840 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

18. A portrait of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, by John Partridge, 1844 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

19. A mezzotint of Robert Peel by John Sartain (© Granger / Bridgeman Images)

20. A photograph of Lord John Russell, c.1860s (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

21. A photograph of Lord Palmerston, nineteenth century (Private Collection © Look and Learn Elgar Collection / Bridgeman Images)

22. A photograph of the Rt Hon. W. E. Gladstone, nineteenth century (© Private Collection The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images)

23. A photograph of Benjamin Disraeli, c.1873 (© Private Collection / Avant-Demain / Bridgeman Images)

24. The ‘Rocket’ locomotive designed by George Stephenson in 1829 (© Historica Graphica Collection / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

25. Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1844 (© DeAgostini / Getty Images)

26. A portrait of the royal family in 1846 by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

27. An engraving of the Great Exhibition, 1851, by P. Brannon and T. Picken (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London / Bridgeman Images)

28. The Relief of the Light Brigade, 25 October 1854 (© National Army Museum, London / Bridgeman Images)

29. A painting of Mary Jane Seacole, 1869 (© Stefano Baldini / Bridgeman Images)

30. On Strike by Hubert von Herkomer, c.1891 (© Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

31. An illustration of music-hall performers for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1876 (Private Collection © Look and Learn Illustrated Papers Collection / Bridgeman Images)

32. Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside) by William Powell Frith, nineteenth century (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

33. An illustration depicting Mr Hawkins addressing the jury during the trial of the Tichborne Claimant from the cover of The Illustrated London News, 1874 (Private Collection / © Look and Learn Peter Jackson Collection Bridgeman Images)

34. An image of Annie Besant, from Bibby’s Annual (Private Collection Photo © Hilary Morgan Bridgeman Images)

35. A descriptive map of London poverty by Charles Booth, 1889 (© Museum of London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

36. The key for the London poverty map by Charles Booth, 1889 (© Museum of London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

37. A photograph of Lord Rosebery, nineteenth century (Private Collection © Look and Learn Elgar Collection / Bridgeman Images)

38. A photograph of Boer commandos armed with the German Mauser rifle, 1895 (© Private Collection / Peter Newark Pictures / Bridgeman Images)

39. A photograph of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony (© Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

40. A photograph of Queen Victoria, empress of India, and Abdul Karim (munshi), c.1894 (© The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

1

Malign spirits

At the end of Vanity Fair (1848) William Makepeace Thackeray closes his novel of the mid-nineteenth century with a relevant homily: ‘Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.’

Now the time has come to open the box once more, to dust down the puppets and set them on their feet. These are not the characters of the novel, however, but the characters of the Victorian world who surround it, animate it and give it its characteristic flavour of cunning, greed and good spirits.

The previous volume of this sequence ended with a universal peace and the removal of Napoleon Bonaparte from the stage, but the pleasures of peace were never more fleeting. More than twenty years had passed since the First Coalition of 1793 in which the demands of the army and the navy, the requirements of the men and the importunities of the allies had kept the farmers, the industrialists and the merchants busily engaged in the serious business of making money. For corn and cotton, for wheat and weapons, the demand had seemed limitless. But it was not so. The Annual Register of 1815 noted that the signs of ‘national glory’ had been altogether removed by the evidence of ‘general depression’.

Yet Wellington was still the national hero, and Britain the victor in a race that confirmed its new power in the world. Somehow or other it had acquired seventeen new colonies, with an attendant prestige and influence that would last at least fifty years. But it was no good cheering the departing pipers when they had nowhere to go; the most fortunate veterans found employment in their previous trades, but for many disbanded men only a life of penury and vagrancy beckoned. Some put their military training to good use, however, in organizing Luddite marches and directing the rioters who were soon enraged by hunger and want of work.

The post-war depression lasted for some six years, and with little understanding of the arcane principles of economics the populace had to find something, or someone, to blame. It was deemed to be the fault of the government, therefore, or rather of the laxity and profligacy of those who directed it. There was a call for ‘cheap government’, but nobody really knew how to manage the feat. The fear and loathing that the governing class incurred did not dissipate and had much to do with further riots and calls for political and electoral reform.

There were still many who lived in an earlier time. There were gentlemen who drank a couple of bottles of port before bed, even though drunkenness was growing quite out of fashion. The court and high society were venerated by some in a world where commercial wealth and the merchant were creeping forward. The richer neighbours of the London suburbs still kept a cortège of footmen and of carriages driven by coachmen in wigs. The counting houses and mercantile businesses of the City were conducted with exquisite anonymity, using only a brass plate under the bell-handle for advertisement. The streets in the vicinity were just wide enough for two brewers’ drays to pass without colliding. Every man, and woman, knew his, or her, place according to rank, wealth and age.

Yet by the second and third decades of the nineteenth century a new air of earnestness and energy was visible to observers. This was the era in which the characters of Charles Dickens’s novels belong – Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Philip Pirrip known as Pip, and of course Dickens himself, of quick step and bright eye, who would think nothing of walking 30 miles each day. The characters of the fictional world display moral vigour in a manner entirely consonant with a new age. As the Daily News wrote on the day after Dickens’s death, ‘in his pictures of contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in contemporary records, the characters of nineteenth century life’. We can see clearly among other essayists and novelists, too, the broad outlines of the nineteenth century, in its brooding melancholy and in its ribald humour, in its poetry of loss and in its fearfulness, in its capacity for outrage or pity and its tendency towards irony and diffidence, in its embrace of the material world as well as its yearning (at least among the serious middle classes) towards spirituality and transcendence. But we cannot get too close to our forebears. Their world is not ours. If a twenty-first-century person were to find himself or herself enmired in a tavern or lodging house of the period he would no doubt be sick – sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the breath of others and the general atmosphere all around.

The word of these early years was ‘pluck’, meaning the courage and ability to take on all challenges. It was also known as ‘mettle’ and ‘bottom’, a deep inhalation of breath before the ardour of the Victorian era. They were obliged, in the words of one cleric, ‘to rush through the rapids’. They differed from their predecessors and their successors with their implicit faith in the human will; whatever their various religions might have been, this was the founding principle. They were determined to get to the other side with all the energy they could muster. The cult of independence came with it, immortalized at a later date in the ‘self-help’ preached by Samuel Smiles. It became part of the battle of life, as the phrase was, filled with manifest duty and diligence. Work was the greatest of all disciplines. The qualities needed were determination, hardness, energy, persistency, thoroughness and inflexibility. These were the cardinal virtues of the coming Victorian era.

This was a young society bolstered by the astonishing increase in the birth-rate; a population of 12 million in 1811 had reached 14 million by 1821 and 21 million by 1851; approximately half were under twenty and living in urban or semi-urban conditions. It is impossible fully to explain this significant rise in numbers, unless it be the organic response of a country on the edge of a giant transition, but the decline in infant mortality must have played a part. Where a modern household will tend to comprise three or four members, that of the early nineteenth century contained six or seven; very large families were also common. The religious census of 1851 reported that 7 million people attended a place of religious worship on Sunday, approximately half of them Anglican. Yet the same survey estimated that 5.5 million people did not care to attend a church or chapel at all. England was at a poise or balance which, from the religious point of view, could only go downwards.

The youthfulness may help to account for the vivacity that was everywhere apparent. The creed of earnestness survived for almost a hundred years, at which point it was parodied by Oscar Wilde. Yet the new dance of the day was the waltz, introduced in 1813 and at first considered ‘riotous and indecent’ because of the close proximity of the partners; it swirled and whirled its way through the ballrooms of England, with the barely repressed energy that marked the era.

The victors of 1815 picked over the bones of the world at the congress in Vienna. Europe now consisted of four great powers – Russia, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain – of which three were autocracies and the last scarcely a democracy. A few men held up the globe. One of them, Lord Castlereagh, foreign minister in Whitehall, was intent upon preserving that shibboleth of ages, the balance of power. The might of England itself was not in doubt, and he told the Commons that ‘there was a general disposition to impute to us an overbearing pride, an unwarrantable arrogance and haughty direction in political matters’ which he was not inclined to deny. It was also said of Castlereagh that he was like a top ‘which spins best when it is most whipped’.

The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had shifted from ministerial place to place but had already been the chief minister since the assassination of Spencer Perceval in 1812. He was a Tory of a kind familiar in the period; he disliked reform or change except of the most gradual kind, and was most concerned to sustain the apparent or nominal harmony of existing society. It was said that, on the first day of Creation, he would have implored God to stop the confusion immediately. He may have dreamed, as did many of his colleagues, of Catholic emancipation and free trade, but these were problems for another day. His job was to keep his supremacy warm. Liverpool made no great impact on his contemporaries, but he did not seem to care. Disraeli called him the ‘Arch Mediocrity’, and that might be considered to be his greatest achievement. The usual truisms about chief ministers were applied to him; he was honest and he was tactful. He was diplomatic, cautious and reliable, all of them tickets to oblivion, and sat quite comfortably in the Lords where it was relatively easy to acquire a reputation for wisdom. In 1827 he retired, from ill health, after fifteen years as chief minister, but no sooner had he left than he was forgotten.

Before he is completely embalmed with platitudes, a little spark of interest may be kindled. Liverpool was prone to weep at moments of stress, overwhelmed by what were called ‘the weaks’. He was considered to be too ‘spoony’ for his own good, a word translated by another generation as ‘wet’. He could not observe the Morning Post without trembling, and a wife of one of his colleagues, Charles Arbuthnot, described ‘a deliberately cold manner’ and a ‘most querulous, unstable temper’. So much for the tactful and equable appearance, which may be merely a mask for deep uncertainty and dismay. The early decades of the nineteenth century are sometimes presented as those of Regency flightiness before the little hand of Victoria firmly grasped the sceptre. But a contemporary, Sydney Smith, reported these years to be characterized by ‘the old-fashioned, orthodox, handshaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear’. Liverpool’s predecessor, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated, not without public rejoicing. Nothing about the period was secure, with reports of rioting, rumours of conspiracy and revolution, threats of famine and another European war.

Lord Liverpool was a Tory at a time when the party label meant very little. Without any real discipline the two major formations of Whig and Tory were little more than disparate factions under a succession of temporary leaders. In 1828 the duke of Clarence said that the names ‘meant something a hundred years ago, but are mere nonsense nowadays’. The Whigs had fallen from power in 1784 when they ceased to represent comfortable authority and had become an oligarchic faction opposed to the king. The Tories under William Pitt had taken over power and were reluctant to return it. William Hazlitt compared them to two rival stagecoaches that splashed mud over each other while travelling along the same road.

The Tories complained of the Whigs’ negative attitude to the royal prerogative and their appetite for reforms such as Catholic emancipation; the Whigs in turn believed that the Tories were deaf to popular demands and too indulgent to executive power. There was not much else to separate them. Macaulay tried to dignify their respective positions as ‘the guardian of liberty and the other of order’, testifying to his genius in bringing regularity to the world in words. Lord Melbourne, a future Whig chief minister, said simply that the Whigs were ‘all cousins’. It was this lurking unease at a family affair that suborned their position. Byron said it in Canto XI of Don Juan (1823):

Nought’s permanent among the human race,

Except the Whigs not getting into place.

Policy was formed behind the arras or, as it was known, on the back stairs. Cabinets were often convened without any purpose or agenda, and the ministers would look at one another with a blank surmise. No cabinet minutes were kept, and only the prime minister was allowed to make notes, which were not always reliable. If it was not government by department, since departments were still ramshackle affairs, it was government by private committee. There were no party headquarters until the 1830s. The party leaders of the day were highly reluctant to pronounce on public policy. It could be compromising. The poll books of the unreformed electorate were equally bewildering and haphazard, and votes were influenced by one local grandee or one predominant issue.

Liverpool had many nicknames, among them ‘Old Mouldy’ and ‘the Grand Figitatis’. In his defence, he had much to fidget about. The post-war decline and depression aroused an already resentful nation dazed after years of war. The agricultural interest was at odds with the government, since an influx of cheap foreign corn led to a steep decline in prices. But if corn were raised artificially to a much higher price, popular unrest might ensue. What to do? The farmers feared, and many of the people hoped, that the progress of free trade was inexorable. Lower prices and profits threw many out of employment, however, and their number was increased by the influx of veterans from the war. It happened every time, but no one ever seemed to be prepared for it. Work was scarce and wages were low; the only commodity in abundance was unemployment. The threat of violence was never very far.

Riots had begun in 1815, particularly in North Devon, and in succeeding months they filled the country. They were joined by those agitating for industrial reform, and in particular for the relief of child labour. There was a belief abroad that practical and positive change was at least possible. Hence came the stirrings of political reform. And what was to be done with those many millions of people who had been amassed as part of the newly acquired empire? What of the Irish, for example, who had been part of the Union since 1800? One minister, William Huskisson, observed that all parties were ‘dissatisfied and uneasy’.

In 1815 no one had seen a train on land or a steamboat on water; horse-drawn cabs and omnibuses did not appear on the London streets until thirteen years later. Everybody, except those who were somebodies, walked everywhere. The stagecoach would have been too expensive to use on a daily basis. So the massive crowds made their way forward as best they could. Soon after dawn, among the pedestrians foot-sore and weary, the clerks and office boys were already jostling their way into the City, streaming in from the outlying areas. Apprentices were sweeping their shops and watering the pavements outside, the children and servants were already crowding the bakers’ shops. If you were fortunate you might, in the vicinity of Scotland Yard, see the coal-heavers dancing. Even in the early hours, sex was still the only pleasure of the poor. Alleys and bushes were used as public lavatories as well as for other more intimate purposes, and sexual intercourse with prostitutes was not uncommon for a couple of pennies.

A contemporary Londoner, Henry Chorley, noted that especially in the morning ‘people did their best, or their worst, to show their love of music, and express their gaiety, or possibly their vacancy of mind, by shouting in the streets the songs of the day’. Popular tunes were whistled in the streets or in taprooms or ground out by barrel-organs. Prints were sold in the street, characteristically placed inside upturned umbrellas, and the more enterprising print shops would continually change their displays. Already at work were the coster girls, the oyster-sellers, the baked-potato men and the chestnut vendors. A little later on, just before noon, came the negro serenaders and the glee-singers. The observant walker would know the weavers’ houses of Spitalfields, the carriage makers of Long Acre, the watchmakers of Clerkenwell and the old-clothes stalls of Rosemary Lane. Dog fights, cock fights, public hangings, pleasure gardens and pillories all added to the general air of excitement and display.

The nights became brighter. London at night had been only partly illuminated by oil and candle. But then the twin agencies of gas and steam became visible. Gas introduced into the streets a ‘brilliancy’ which outshone all others. The agitators and advanced political speculators had been right all along. This was an age of progress, after all. The country was in the process of slowly losing its eighteenth-century character. But the bellies of the poor were still empty. Not for the suffering were the taverns and the chop-houses. Even the penny potatoes were out of reach.

In March 1815, a Corn Law was enacted which prohibited the import of foreign corn until the domestic product reached 80 shillings a bushel, and as a result the price soared too high. With no remedy proposed, the poor and the disaffected fell to riot. The members of parliament complained that they were being tossed to and fro like shuttlecocks between battledores. There was in truth little understanding of economic theory, even though in 1807 John Ruskin’s father noted that ‘the one science, the first and greatest of sciences to all men … is the science of political economy’. The farmers themselves might as well have been engaged in high calculus; they relied upon observation and experience, common sense and Old Moore’s Almanack.

The recession gathered pace and Robert Southey remarked in the British Review that it was mournful ‘to contemplate the effects of extreme poverty in the midst of a civilised and flourishing state’. The Corn Law riots in London were ineffective, but Luddism returned to Nottingham. There were riots from Newcastle upon Tyne to Norfolk, in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. In 1816 gangs of the unemployed surged through Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and it was reported that large numbers of people ‘had been parading the streets and assembling in groups, using the most threatening language’. The Liverpool Mercury marked the end of the year ‘with sorrow in our habitations and with famine in our streets, and with more than a fourth part of the population of the country subsisting on alms’. This was the period when the anger of the public press mounted ever higher with prints such as the Black Dwarf and Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. They were supported and circulated by radical societies, none more effectively than the network of Hampden clubs which began in London and soon migrated to the north-east. A penny a week subscription was not considered too dear for spreading the word among spinners, weavers, artisans and labourers about state bribery and corruption. There were fears, however, that radicalism might have in its hands an instrument for a mass movement. It was in this period that ‘radical’ was first coined for any group of supposed malign spirits who, according to the vicar of Harrow, encompassed ‘the rejection of Scripture’ and ‘a contempt for all the institutions of your country’. The home secretary called them ‘the enemy’, and for some time any dissident or opposition force was automatically known as ‘radical’.

A larger dilemma had also been identified. In his Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815) Robert Owen noted that ‘the manufacturing system has already so far extended its influence over the English Empire as to effect an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people’. They were becoming specialized machines designed only to accumulate profit for their employers. Machines themselves served to promote and maintain the division of labour, where each worker had a relatively simple and specialized role. Machinery guaranteed uniformity of work as well as uniformity of product, and acted as a check against inattention or idleness. Machinery promoted a rational and regulated system of labour. It had happened silently and almost invisibly. Now the economists and some of the more advanced agriculturalists were eager to understand what was happening, and were ready to open the book of a new world. Among the first audiences at the new technical lectures on finance were Robert Peel and George Canning, two Tories on the rise.

The monarch was in name George III, but he was now gibbering and deluded. The royal master was the Regent, the Prince of Wales, who was described by the duke of Wellington as ‘the worst man I ever fell in with in my whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality’. It was in this period of hunger and riot that the Prince Regent began to build the Brighton Pavilion. He was forever blowing bubbles of stone.

2

The Thing

Cant was the moral cloud which covered the nineteenth century. It was part of the age of respectability. Byron wrote in 1821 that ‘the truth is, the grand primum mobile of England is Cant; Cant political, Cant poetical, Cant religious, Cant moral, but always Cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life’. He threatened to convert Don Juan into a Methodist as an example, but there were already many Dissenters as well as Anglicans who turned to God for the sake of propriety. Cant was the mirror of self-interest disguised as benevolence, of greed posturing as piety, of a ‘national interest’ that took into account the fortunes of only a few favoured families. Cant encompassed the politician who smiled while remaining a villain; cant was the language of the moral reformer who closed public houses on Sunday; the political vocabulary of the nation, often praised for its classical structure and its resonant periods, was mainly cant. Historians have often been amazed by the prolixity and ardour of the members of the nineteenth-century parliament; but the words were cant. Most people, at least those with any self-awareness, were conscious that their professed beliefs and virtues were hot air, but they conspired with others to maintain the fraud. Never has a period been so concerned to give the right impression.

Cant was for example the basis of the Quadruple Alliance in the autumn of 1815. It had been preceded by a Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria and Prussia. When holiness is credited with the business of nations, it is best to be wary. The foreign policies of the nations were now supposed to be directed by love and charity, but in truth the sovereigns were afraid of each other as well as of their own people. Castlereagh described the Holy Alliance as a ‘piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’ invented by a monarch whose mind was ‘not entirely sound’, but he did nothing to stop the Prince Regent from privately giving it his approval. Some love and charity might become useful, however, since the ‘Quadruple Alliance’ was designed with the express intention of consolidating the unity of monarchs and casting out the dynasty of the Bonapartes. So the ‘Concert of Europe’, as it became known, with Castlereagh its principal conductor, began with a peal of trumpets.

The great temple of cant in Westminster opened its doors in the early days of 1816, and its followers flocked into the Commons and the Lords. Castlereagh controlled the Commons and Lord Liverpool the other house. Why was the army not entirely disbanded? Why did the Prince Regent wear the uniform of a field marshal when opening parliament? What was the significance of the Royal Military Asylum? Of the real ills of the nation nothing much was said. ‘I am concerned to think that the prevailing distress is so severely felt in your county’, the home secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, told one member, ‘but I see no reason for believing that it would or could be alleviated by any proceedings at a public meeting, or by parliament itself.’ When some shearmen asked to be sent to North America, Liverpool replied that ‘machinery could not be stopped in the woollen trade’.

Income, or property tax, had been announced as a wartime contingency to be abolished when hostilities ceased. But in this parliament of 1816 the government withdrew the promise and, to general anger and consternation, wished to continue the imposition of a shilling on the pound. It became, as always, a shouting match, and the government lost the vote. Income tax was repealed. But, like the vampires of the ages, it was asleep and not dead. Castlereagh wrote to his brother, Charles, that ‘you will see how little what you call a strong government can effect against the tide of the day in this country’. Castlereagh, as leader of the House of Commons, was already reviled by many as one of the authors of domestic oppression. Shelley had a rhyme about him in The Mask of Anarchy (1819):

I met Murder on the way –

He had a mask like Castlereagh –

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him …

He was by no means as bad as he was portrayed, but it is easy to disparage virtue as vice concealed. So tranquillity can be mistaken for lack of feeling, and amiability for lack of principle. He was in fact as anxious and as restless as it was possible to be, a state of mind that would eventually lead him to a razor and a quick death. At this juncture his administration was left with a revenue of £9 million to face an expenditure of £30 million. It was forced to resort, in part, to indirect taxes on a variety of products. In one cartoon the chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, appears in a tub and asks the laundress: ‘How are you off for soap?’ But in a subsequent vote of confidence the Tories narrowly avoided defeat; their natural supporters hung on for fear of something worse.

Soap was the least of the problems. All the disappointments of the time erupted in a flood of casual riot and mayhem. From April to the end of May the price of bread, in particular, became the principal grievance of the people. The farmers, the shopkeepers, the butchers, the bakers, were attacked and their premises vandalized. It was one indication for the new century that the ancient violence of the population had never been quelled. The recent war was all but forgotten. Now the crywas for ‘bread or blood’, by which was meant country gentlemen’s blood, aristocratic blood and monopolists’ blood. English blood, in other words. The price of bread steadily rose.

In their alarm the gentlemen and large farmers flocked to the cause of the Tories. A few months before they had been denounced as a cabal of self-seeking rulers intent upon subverting the nation’s liberties. They were now the official face of law and order that were being grievously threatened. The Whigs had wished to denounce them as traitors to the nation; now they had become its guardians. The Tories seemed always best able to profit from general discontent.

William Cobbett, who can better be described as a radical rather than Whig or Tory, had a pen capable of expressing the general discontent. In one sense he wanted to return to an older England without paper money and national debt, the stock jobbers and the factory towns. He pledged his faith in a quiet and more decent nation based upon the traditions of an equal society untainted by money. He believed, as many did not, that general electoral reform was the key to quieten unrest. He was largely supported by weavers and other artisans who were being destroyed by industrialism. But he could not change a society with such allies alone.

He was rough-spoken, dogmatic and intensely satirical, but he got to the heart of the matter. ‘Who will pretend that the country can, without the risk of some great and terrible convulsion, go on, even for twelve months longer, unless there be a great change of some sort in the mode of managing the public affairs.’ He feared that ‘the Thing was biting so very sharply’. For him ‘the Thing’, otherwise known as Old Corruption, was the mass of venality and bribery which sucked out the lifeblood of the nation. His argument, if not his language, was already being extended further than he could have envisaged. Two years before, in 1814, The Times began to be printed by steam power. A new player had entered the scene. Despite the best efforts of the administration to limit or control the circulation of radical newspapers, the appetite for news in a disturbed and uncertain period could not be effectively controlled. Between 1800 and 1830 sales of the public prints had doubled. In 1816 Cobbett began to publish his Political Register as a pamphlet at the price of twopence. It circulated among the industrious classes, but was disparaged by their nominal superiors as ‘Tuppenny Trash’. On 12 October of that year he called for a ‘Reformed Parliament, elected by the people themselves’.

Cobbett was well aware of the enemies he faced, and described them to his mother as ‘wicked and hard-headed wretches who are stimulating indigence to madness and crime’. He had seen the same noble families, the same faces and the same cousins; he had heard ‘hear hear’ brayed from the same voices. He was sick to the soul with it. Were any people ‘so debased, so absolutely slaves as the poor creatures who, in the “enlightened” North, are compelled to work fourteen hours in a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of a factory’. He had seen the vagrants in the road, he had seen wanderers, going they knew not whither, in search of work. He had seen the cottages falling apart from wind and rain. And he asked: what will be the end of it?

The parish poor houses, before the workhouses took hold, were receptacles for ‘the vile, the dissolute and the depraved’ together with a scattering of the infirm and the imbecile. The plight of the poor in early Victorian England has been described so often that it might seem almost superfluous. Cobbett wrote with a fine ear for mixed metaphor that they were ‘as thin as herrings, dragging their feet after them, pale as a ceiling, and sneaking about like a beggar’. If a third of the population are in poverty throughout the nineteenth century, it is only by a trick of style or an aptitude for hypocrisy that it can be called prosperous. Yet so it was called. Their lives did not materially differ from generation to generation. A woman in 1894, after a century of change, asked how she kept a family of five children on 17 shillings a week, replied: ‘I am afraid I cannot tell you very much, because I worked too hard to think about how we lived.’ The labouring poor were in turn surrounded by a superfluity of people. Among them we might see the spirit of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus arguing that the redundant poor were a grievous burden in the competition between the rise of population and the means of subsistence. The unemployed and the unemployable were the enemy.

Cobbett was rivalled in eloquence and power, if not in acumen and intelligence, by Henry Hunt, another orator in the popular cause. In the middle of November 1816 he addressed a large assembly on Spa Fields in Islington; one of his supporters carried a pike with the cap of liberty aloft. It did not need a sage to realize that the spirit of French revolt was abroad. Two weeks later a similar demonstration created more trouble, when a bloodstained loaf was paraded towards the City. The protesters were swiftly cleared from the Royal Exchange by troops, since the authorities were not inclined to treat it as an amateur jape. A few years before, in the previous century, the cry of reform was hardly ever raised. Now it was on the lips of link-boys and chairmen. An inner circle of men plotted violent revolution, while a large number were content to attend tavern meetings, smoke their pipes and drink confusion to their enemies. They were too apathetic for individual action but were happy enough be part of a crowd at a meeting or to lend their voice to the cacophony.

The opposition party of Whigs was in singular disarray, having no coherent proposals of its own. In any case the Whigs had no appetite for the kind of reform for which the radicals were agitating. To their opponents they were nothing but aristocrats and country gentlemen, for the moment a junior branch of ‘the Thing’. Outrage was, in any case, good politics for all sides. The Tory ministers in turn did what they could to provoke treason and rebellion with spies and agents provocateurs, and at the end of 1816 Cobbett wrote in the Political Register that ‘they sigh for a Plot. Oh how they sigh! They are working and slaving and fretting and stewing; they are sweating all over: they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot!’

Then came the next-best thing. At the end of January 1817 the Prince Regent was driving in his carriage after the opening of parliament when something – a stone, a bullet, a falling piece of masonry – cracked his window. No one cared at all about the Regent, dead or alive, but it suited everyone’s habits to pretend to believe so. The Regent himself seemed happy with the attention, and boasted about his sanguine response to the outrage. It seems that he was not a man to be frightened by riff-raff. Castlereagh came into the Commons with a much more serious demeanour. He gave an impression of glacial self-confidence.

A series of hastily arranged committees now provided evidence to parliament that secret societies and a furtive rebel militia were intent upon storming the Bank of England and the Tower. As a result the law of habeas corpus, whereby prisoners could not be kept without charge, was abolished; it was a singular blow against British liberties. A series of repressive measures known as the Coercion Acts or Gagging Acts was also passed, and all meetings were banned on the grounds of sedition. Lectures of medicine and surgery were thereby forbidden and the Cambridge Union was closed down. The domestic furore helped to conceal the dire state of the economy, which was close to collapse. A Whig activist, George Tierney, told his colleagues that the ministers were ‘at the wits’ end’ and that ‘all the lower followers of the government were desperate’. National bankruptcy might in truth be as bad as revolution.

The furore created by the prosecution of the radicals in February 1817 set off another series of domestic fires. ‘All that we want’, the Norwich Union Society said, ‘is the constitution of our country in its original purity, whereby the people may be fairly, fully and annually represented in Parliament, the House of Commons cleared of that numerous swarm of Placemen and Pensioners who fatten upon the vitals of an half famished and oppressed people.’ In military conflict, this would be known as a ‘forlorn hope’. Parliament, before the salutary burning of 1834, was dark, badly lit and badly ventilated. The washing of bodies and the cleaning of clothes were not considered to be a priority. The members put their legs on the backs of the adjacent benches, or were half-sprawled on the floor, coming and going out at will, groaning, laughing, exchanging jokes, bellowing, yawning, talking nonsense, interrupting for the fun of it – all the more flagrant because social and political revolution was on everyone’s lips.

The multiple petitions of the Hampden clubs to the Prince Regent for the amelioration of the severe economic conditions had met with no response. So the weavers and spinners of Manchester embarked on a grand pilgrimage towards London in order to submit their own petition to him; among their demands, propagated in many other quarters, were universal suffrage and annual parliaments.

They were known as the ‘blanketeers’ because they wore shawls and blankets to keep them warm. But they never stood a chance. They were turned back before they reached Derbyshire and dispersed, not without much anguish. But they could not have come through. Cobbett himself had travelled to the United States to avoid prosecution. Their collapse in the face of the yeomanry provoked another rebel ‘conspiracy’ in Ardwick, a district of Manchester. There was talk of ‘a general insurrection’ and a ‘general rising’. Whigs and Tories were whipping themselves into an hysteria. Conspiracies and revolts could now be found under every bush and behind every hedge, but subsequent court hearings were abandoned when it transpired that the only evidence came from informers. It could have happened. It might have happened. In other countries it did happen. And yet the English poor, and the majority of the middle classes, proved remarkably quiescent. They never rose. Castlereagh was on at least one occasion recognized by the London mob. ‘Who is the man who comes here in powder?’ was the cry raised at the sight of his powdered wig. He was forced to run for safety, but the atmosphere of London was not that of Paris. He was not strung up from a lamp-post in Piccadilly.

The furore caused by the prosecutions of radicals quickly died down when it became obvious that juries were not likely to prosecute supposed malefactors who were in effect really malcontents. The leaders of the Spa Fields meetings were released without charge. The radicals were left with the impression that they had not spoken the right words to fire a nation, that something had gone unexpressed. The authorities did nothing further, and the interest in radical propaganda diminished.

The events of the next few months had a similar air of being half-finished, half-done. A good harvest of 1817 and better prospects for trade helped to change the sullen mood. Lord Exmouth noted that ‘the panic among the farmers is wearing off; and, above all that hitherto marketable article, discontent, is everywhere disappearing’. As agriculture improved, so did trade increase. It was believed that the time was right for habeas corpus to be restored, and the breach in liberty mended. The state had been shaken but was stabilized. In 1818 a grant of £1 million was made for the construction of one hundred new churches, which can legitimately be taken as a vote of thanks; the administration was becoming more religious by the day.

Confidence and self-assertion may also have helped to lengthen the whiskers. Where in the Napoleonic Wars the military of England tended to be clean-shaven, little by little the hair grew back. Moustaches had crept in by 1820 but they in turn were replaced by large whiskers, which had conquered the light cavalry and the heavy dragoons by the 1860s. All the men grew their hair long, and it was quite common for a man to wind a long lock around his cap. The fashions in facial hair are persistent. The men who came back from the Crimean campaign were always bearded, and within a decade the male civilians had followed the pattern.

Whether God was swayed by one hundred churches built in His honour is an open question. In the summer of 1818, in more favourable conditions of trade, the Tories decided to go to the country, which meant that body of freeholders whose land brought in 40 shillings a year. The qualification was open to manipulation though, and since there was no register of electors, the claims and counter-claims always threatened to destroy the process. That is why general elections were held over two or three weeks. They consisted of fairs, drunken sprees, settlings of old scores, battles of fists and were a cause of endless parades, marches and taproom sessions. It was believed by those who supported the system that concordia discors, creating harmony out of conflict, was the fruit of the ancient British constitution – which never in fact existed. One Tory politician, Sir Robert Inglish, stated that it grew and flourished as a tree and ‘there is, so far as I know, no evidence that our House was ever selected upon any principle of representation of population, or upon any fixed principle of representation whatever … It has adapted itself, almost like another work of nature, to our growth.’

As it was the Whigs gained thirty-three seats, which made no tangible difference to the diverse and divided House of Commons which met at the beginning of 1819. One member noted that the government ‘is so completely paralysed that they dare do nothing’. The Prince Regent was becoming afflicted with paranoia and hardly went out; his cumbrous size made it difficult, in any case, for him to cut a gracious figure. The Whigs themselves were timid of public attention for fear of the horrid day when they might be asked to form an administration. The early pages of George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), set in 1832, contain a representative scene between mother and son:

‘But I shall not be a Tory candidate.’

Mrs Transome felt something like an electric shock.

‘What then?’ she said, almost sharply. ‘You will not call yourself a Whig?’

‘God forbid! I’m a Radical!’

Mrs Transome’s limbs tottered, she sank into a chair.

In this session of parliament many fine words were spoken about the state of the nation’s finances and proposals were made for cutting expenditure and even for raising taxes. It was clear to almost everyone that economic reform was inevitable. One select committee was ordered to consider the problems of currency, and another those of public finance. The administration had finally summoned up the courage to fight what Castlereagh had once called ‘the ignorant impatience of taxation’.

One government measure is worth mentioning, if only as a harbinger of greater reforms. In 1819 a Factory Act, or more accurately a Cotton Factory Act, was passed after four years of agitation. It forbade the employment of children under nine in the cotton factories and restricted the rest of child labour to twelve hours a day. This seems almost a cruel joke in the face of the general suffering, and only two convictions were obtained under its code, but at the time it was violently opposed for ‘singling out’ cotton. The humanitarian sense, roused by slavery and foreign barbarism, did not yet reach out to the working population of the country. Yet the Factory Act did mean that for the first time the administration had turned its face against unchecked laissez-faire in the workings of the economy. It also meant that the government now had the opportunity, and power, to overrule the wishes of parents. It took a century or more to complete the work.

One man may step forward as a begetter, if not the only begetter, of necessary change. Robert Owen was the son of a shopkeeper who became, at an early age, the manager of a cotton mill in Manchester. When he opened his own factory in New Lanark, in Scotland, he paid attention to his employees as well as his profits. His contention was that circumstances form character, and he set about to undertake the education and recreation of the children in his charge. He opened the first infants’ school in Britain and arranged a ‘support fund’ for the sick and aged. His influence and example had a direct effect upon subsequent factory legislation and earned him the title of the first great industrial reformer.

In the spring and early summer of 1819 there were demonstrations and mass meetings in Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere in favour of a wider franchise. Parliament, noting the distance between the malcontents and Westminster, chose to ignore them. There had been calls for reform before and nothing had ever happened. Why test the water now? But the circumstances had changed. News came that millworkers were forming armed bands. A royal proclamation was issued, denouncing the combative language of the people. A great public meeting in Manchester was announced for 16 August. For the Tories, the fear of revolution once more emerged. On the appointed day Henry Hunt, now popularly known as ‘Orator’ Hunt, made his way through the gathering and mounted the platform. No sooner had he started to speak than a group of yeomanry was seen advancing towards him. The crowd bayed and booed, but the yeomen drew their swords and struck out. The hussars joined them in the general furore, which resulted in eleven deaths and some hundreds of demonstrators wounded. The place was St Peter’s Field, and the bloody event became known as Peterloo.

It was a breaking point. The size of the crowds, and the nature of the events, shocked many of those who did not believe that an autocratic regime should work its will in England. But now ‘the Thing’ had bowed, taken off its hat, and showed its face. When ‘Orator’ Hunt made his way to London, before his trial, he was greeted by some 300,000 people. The figure is perhaps questionable, as all estimates of size are, but there is some testimony from John Keats, who told his brother George that ‘the whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes’. The Crown and Anchor is close to what is now Euston station. There was also a less obvious consequence of the divisions in the nation. In October 1819 it was remarked that ‘the most alarming sign of the times is that separation of the upper and middle classes of the community from the lower, which is now daily and visibly increasing’.

Something would have to be done, even though no one was quite sure what ‘doing’ should entail. Taxes were as always the chief complaint. As Sydney Smith put it in the Edinburgh Review of January 1820, ‘taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot’.

The immediate remedy was not a remedy at all, but a series of bills named the Six Acts. Public meetings of more than fifty people were forbidden, unauthorized military training was prohibited, and the right of the authorities to enter private houses without warrant was confirmed. The measures did not include the suspension of habeas corpus, as before, but they inaugurated one of the most extensive investigations of radicalism in nineteenth-century history. They did not accomplish very much in the end, but the Six Acts were universally derided and condemned. Cobbett declared: ‘I was not born under Six-Acts.’ When the Prince Regent returned from a holiday in Cowes he was ‘hissed at by an immense mob’ outside his front door and Lady Hertford, his mistress, was almost tipped out of her chair before being rescued by the Bow Street Runners.

The home secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, had convinced himself that a conspiracy was waiting around the corner. Many of those in authority in fact feared for their necks in some general insurrection, and in 1820 their anxieties were partly reinforced by a small plot that became known as the Cato Street Conspiracy. Cato Street was a narrow thoroughfare close to Paddington. Secreted in the loft of an unprepossessing building a few conspirators, animated by enthusiasm rather than good sense, planned to seize London and to kill as many members of the cabinet as possible. Sidmouth knew all about it in advance and simply allowed it to go on as a salutary warning to any other political adventurer. The principal conspirators were hanged and their heads cut off. It was the last act of repression for some years, largely because there was no more reason for it. The country had been cowed, or persuaded, or bribed, into quietude.

It seems sometimes that the government had a secret pact with its enemies, but that would be a conspiracy theory to outmanoeuvre any conspiracy which had emerged since the Napoleonic War. More mundane considerations might have been at work. Alcohol may have played a part in the general feeling of overexcitement and perturbation that had afflicted everyone in public life for as long as anyone could remember. Sidmouth was known to drink twenty glasses of wine at dinner before attending parliament. This was not considered to be excessive. He was one of many ministers of the crown who suffered from gout. It may have had its current meaning, as an inflammation of the arteries in the foot, but it could also be associated with depression and with the excessive consumption of alcohol. One can hazard the conjecture that Sidmouth’s bibulousness represented an average quantity at Westminster, and that there were occasions when the proceedings resembled a barroom brawl.

Farce and tragedy had already turned to pantomime on the accession of the Prince Regent as George IV at the end of January 1820. His father, mad and blind, and bearded like a prophet, had been suspended somewhere between the living and the dead. He spoke to the dead as if they were still alive, and of the living as if they had been interred. His death on 29 January 1820 made nothing happen except to elevate his son to the throne. A new member of the strange family had come into the world in the preceding year. Alexandrina Victoria was better known by her second name. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, fourth son of George III, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Her mother’s family were all Germans, and she took pride in that fact; she married a German, and German was often the language of her court at Windsor and elsewhere.

George IV was already known to be fat, lazy and profligate. He had not endeared himself to many of his subjects by sending a message of congratulations to the magistrates of Manchester after Peterloo. It was said that he could at least have waited for an inquiry. But he did not dominate the farce. That starring role was reserved for his wife, Queen Caroline, who on the elevation of her husband was determined to claim all her rights as queen of Great Britain. Never was there a less likely queen; she, like her husband, was fat and profligate. She had entertained a string of lovers and now, in an aura of ill winds propagated by her lack of hygiene, set sail for her country.

They had married in unfortunate circumstances some twentyfive years before in St James’s Chapel, where the Prince could hardly stand upright. The shock of seeing, and smelling, his betrothed was too much for him and Lord Melbourne commented that ‘the prince was like a man doing a thing in desperation; it was like Macheath going to execution; and he was quite drunk’. Time was no healer. Princess Caroline created much scandal on her forced separation from her husband. She used Europe as her playground or payground and on one occasion in the Middle East rode into Jerusalem on an ass. She went to a ball with half a pumpkin on her head. On her return to England as presumed queen, the new king attempted every means of removing her, including a trial for adultery, prompting many remarks of a sarcastic ad hominem nature. But she survived the ordeal. Henry Brougham cross-examined the witnesses against her, to hear the reply ‘Non mi recordo’ time and again. It became a catchphrase of the moment, like the verse of an Italian song. The bill against her was abandoned. The trial was the only subject of conversation. ‘Have you heard anything new about the queen?’ was the question.

The extraordinary aspect of this ill-starred affair was the popularity she earned among the English populace. She was cheered and applauded wherever she went. She was for a while the queen of all hearts. She had been misused by the administration and mistreated by the king. Was that not also the condition of the country? Whether she knew it or not, she was a radical figurehead, embodying all the wrongs of the king’s unhappy and abused people. The women of London joined the city’s radicals in organizing large meetings and rallies in her cause. It seemed that the administration might be overturned by the plight of one woman. Sarah Lyttelton, a member of the royal court and wife of an MP, wrote that the king ‘is so unpopular, his private character so despised, and everything he does so injudicious as well as unprincipled that one can hardly wish him well out of it, except for the fear of a revolution’.

But then, in a matter of weeks, all pity and sympathy for Caroline disappeared. A verse became popular:

Most gracious queen, we thee implore

To go away and sin no more,

But if that effort be too great,

To go away at any rate.

When she accepted an annuity of £50,000 from the administration, she lost her audience. When she turned up at the doors of Westminster Abbey, in the summer of 1821, unsuccessfully trying one door after another in order to take part in the coronation ceremony of her estranged husband, she was mocked with cries of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Off!’. She was more or less abandoned, and died a few weeks later unmourned. Her fall from popular grace was in part due to the fickleness and forgetfulness of crowds who were eagerly waiting for the next scandal or sensation. The lesson was not lost on the more astute politicians who came to the conclusion that no popularity, or unpopularity, lasts for very long.

There were other ministers who sensed another change in the prevailing atmosphere. Robert Peel, a junior minister with a future before him, wrote to ask a friend in March 1820 ‘whether he did not think that the tone of England was more Whig – to use an odious but intelligible phrase – than the policy of the government’ and whether there was now a belief that the mode of government had to be changed. He was more accurate than he could have guessed, and within two years he had been propelled into Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry in order to alleviate the strictures of the Criminal Code. It was for this and other reasons that the 1820s seemed relatively quiet after the excitement of previous years and before the reform meetings of the 1830s.

One Whig measure was introduced, or alluded to, by Lord Liverpool in May 1820 to a deputation of City merchants. The advantages of free trade were calling to him. He knew that certain people believed that Britain had prospered under a protective system, but he was certain that the nation flourished in spite of it. In his slow, indirect and infinitely cautious way he did not put forward proposals of his own. Instead he set up parliamentary committees to examine the numerous and complex questions involved in what was by any standards a reversal of policy; as a result, goods might be imported into England in foreign ships. Foreign goods might be transported from any free port. Three hundred obsolete statutes on the laws of commercial navigation were repealed. The Annual Register described the measures as ‘vast beyond all question … this being the first instance in which practical statesmen have professed to act under the more literal principles of political economy’. So the process had begun.

By 1825 a Chair of Political Economy was established at Oxford. Memoirs and letters are full of the subject. Viscount Sidmouth wrote in the spring of 1826: ‘we hear nothing on all sides, at dinners, parties, in church, and at the theatre, but discussions on political economy and the distresses of the times’. Rarely has an academic discipline attracted so much attention with animated discussion on labour and profit, paper and bullion. An interesting connection can be discerned between theatricals and radical politics. The whole point and excitement of the Georgian theatre lay in its wilful blending of the real and the imaginary, which drew ‘dreamers of illimitable dreams’, including those nineteenth-century radicals who were as eager to change the conditions of their time as they were forthright in their optimism and their belief in progress. In the ‘low’ theatres, too, the emphasis was on the change and uncertainty of life where poverty, disease and unemployment were part of the drama.

The world beyond the seas was, as always, a cauldron of infinite troubles. In 1820 four revolutions broke out in Europe; Spain, Portugal, Naples and Piedmont were bubbling. Some of the nations of the Quadruple Alliance, pledged from the beginning to the support of monarchy, were ready to intervene. Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, was not. He wanted nothing to do with it, especially since the doctrine of nonintervention had become a matter of state policy. He told one colleague that ‘he was sick of the concern, and that if he could well get out of it would never get into it again’. England would play no part in continental broils. This stance might lead to a loss of influence upon the stage of the world, but anything was better than to become involved in affairs of which human foresight could not conceive the end.

In a message directed to Austria’s foreign minister, Prince Metternich, Castlereagh advised that ‘he must take us for better or worse as we are, and if the Continental Powers cannot afford to travel at our pace, they need not expect us to adopt theirs. It does not belong to our system.’ He deplored ‘dashing’. A significant Cabinet State Paper of 5 May 1820 declared: ‘this country cannot and will not act upon abstract and speculative principles of precaution’. In the early summer of the following year he declared in the Commons that ‘for certain states to erect themselves into a tribunal to judge of the internal affairs of others was to arrogate to themselves a power which could only be assumed in defiance of the law of nations and the principles of common sense’. He had all the pragmatism and practicality which the English applaud. The last thing the Foreign Office needed was an ideologue.

Trade was also climbing ever upwards and at the opening of parliament in 1820 the king felt able to say that ‘in many of the manufacturing districts the distresses … have greatly abated’. Even the French chargé d’affaires noted ‘the tranquillity which obtains in London and generally throughout England’. The king could go forward with a light heart, except that there was nothing else light about him. The thick and luxurious coronation robe added great weight to an already large frame, and during the ceremony he was constantly on the verge of fainting before being revived by sal volatile. Yet he still put on a good show. He may have been uncouth and sometimes ridiculous but he knew when he was on parade. In the month after the ceremony he travelled to Ireland, where he appeared ‘dead DRUNK’, according to an observer. This was the moment his wife chose to expire from drink and disappointment, and Castlereagh reported that George ‘bears his good fortune with great propriety’. ‘This’, he said on his arrival at Dublin, ‘is one of the happiest days of my life.’

3

Eternity work

Nothing in these days was left untouched by religious controversy. Religion was the air that the ‘respectable’ breathed. The religion of the day was in itself neither hot nor cold. Some parts were boiling while others were lukewarm. There was a Low Church of Evangelicals and Dissenters, and there was a High Church that moved towards Catholic ritual. There was also a Broad Church, Whig in its theology, that embraced a nationally based religion. Out of these great movements of faith came sects and groups that put their faith in general providence or special providence, in atonement or in hellfire. Calvinists, Methodists, Quakers, Arminians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists were all part of an informal ‘Evangelical Alliance’ that looked for points of contact with the Anglicans. There was among them a general and discernible movement towards piety and righteousness. But that was only to be expected. Eight out of nine of a Cambridge crew, having won the Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the Thames, went on to the East End for their missionary work. Among the Anglicans of the ‘Established Church’ there was not so much enthusiasm. They worshipped that which was customary and respectable, and perhaps looked with more horror on a poor man than an evil man. As Samuel Butler wrote of a rural congregation in The Way of All Flesh (1903), set in 1834: they were ‘tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised’. They were decent, undiscerning people.

A report by the census-takers of 1851 remarked that ‘working men, it is contended, cannot enter our religious structures without having impressed upon their notice some memento of their inferiority. The existence of pews, and the position of the free seats, are, it is said, sufficient to deter them from our churches.’ As for the indigent poor and those close to absolute poverty, no one really expected them to attend church or chapel. They would probably have been ejected if they attempted to do so. One costermonger admitted to Henry Mayhew, the social inquirer, that ‘the costers somehow mix up being religious with being respectable, and so they have a queer sort of feeling about it. It’s a mystery to them.’

What really interested observers was the fact that many of the ‘respectable’ classes had no faith at all. They were armoured with scepticism against the arguments of priests and preachers. Many of them did not know what to believe – if anything. The French historian Hippolyte Taine remarked that the average Englishman or Englishwoman believed in God, the Trinity and Hell, ‘although without fervour’. And that was the key. It was not a secular nation. It was an indifferent one. Hellfire preachers were regarded as a novelty and a spectator sport, even though they had many spirited followers. Ecstasies and faintings, so popular in the eighteenth century, were no longer the English style. The only source of communal passion now came in the form of hymns. The deathly hush of the English Sunday, denounced by Dickens among others, was a clear sign that the Church bred no passion and no enthusiasm. There was no sense of a popular faith which could still be found, for example, in Russia or America. There was instead an irritable dissatisfaction with the tenets of established faith; in particular the belief in hell was under siege. It became possible to be less dogmatic and less specific, with certain doctrines silently dropped. There still remained regional differences, however, that had been maintained since the seventeenth century; Anglicanism lay in the southeast of the country, for example, and Primitive Methodism in the southwest and northwest.

Lord Liverpool himself was of a ‘methodistical’ temper, and in 1812 had been instrumental in passing an act for the further toleration of Dissenters. William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides (1830), described them as ‘a bawling, canting crew’ and ‘roving fanatics’, but they had already become a large part of the congregation of England, from the Quakers to the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, all of whom held themselves apart from the Church of England. They in turn were prohibited from attending Oxford or Cambridge universities and were obliged to be married in chapels or buried in graveyards under the auspices of Anglican clergymen.

The largest religious group, after the orthodox, was that alliance between Evangelicals and utilitarians which did much to shape the temper of the age. The passion for moral reform was deep within both of them, with the belief in reason and the faith in renewal as the twin paths to enlightenment. To study and to labour, to preach and to denounce idleness and luxury; these were the twin elements of secular belief and religious faith which changed the nature of English sensibility. The Evangelicals practised the strictest interpretation of Scripture, a good companion to the ‘felicific calculus’ of the utilitarians who sought the greatest good for the greatest number. They shared pragmatism and dogmatism in equal measure, and were the moral agents for social as well as religious reform. ‘It is’, according to one of their number ‘eternity work’. But they were also zealous to redeem the time. A deluge of pamphlets and periodicals, concerned with self-improvement and practical morality, was aimed at anyone who could read.

Providence, progress and civilization were parts of God’s law. The Evangelicals preached individual regeneration, and the utilitarians promoted the doctrine of self-help. Their first success was the introduction of the treadmill into the regime of prisons, and by the 1830s their convictions had become public policy. Not all they preached was dour; the Evangelicals campaigned vigorously against the slave trade while the utilitarians attacked the Corn Laws and other obstacles to free trade. They demanded reform, and their joined forces helped to dissolve the politics of the 1820s. They drew in people who were on the brink of industrial change. George Eliot wrote that ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism – and it has abundance of fine drama for anyone who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it – lies among the middle and lower classes’. These were the classes who changed Britain utterly.

Charles Babbage, a Londoner born in Walworth in 1791, was one of the greatest inventors and analysts of the nineteenth century who fully fashioned what he called the ‘difference engine’ and the ‘analytical engine’, which are the direct predecessors of the digital computer. They were elaborate affairs of punched cards and dials which few people ever understood or now understand. Curiously enough, given his reputation as a reactionary force, the duke of Wellington seemed implicitly to realize the potential of the machines.

From the age of seventeen Babbage became obsessed with algebra; what made these figures live? He was so confident of his abilities with numbers that he dreamed of creating them in a mathematical process. He recollected that: ‘The first idea which I remember of the possibility of calculating tables occurred either in the year 1820 or 1821 … I expressed to my friend the wish that we could calculate by steam …’ This was in part a metaphor, since in a different account he recalled: ‘I am thinking that all these tables [pointing to the logarithms] might be calculated by machinery.’ Steam, engines and machinery were all part of the cloud of knowing. After he sketched some designs he fell ill with a nervous complaint. He had envisaged an engine for making mathematical tables which presaged a new world of machine tools and engineering techniques. It was so far ahead of other calculating tools that for his contemporaries it was equivalent to putting a television set in the hands of monkeys.

It was called the ‘difference engine’ because it computed tables of numbers by the method of finite differences. But then within a short time he began work on what became known as the ‘analytical engine’, which was essentially an automatic calculator. It worked like a cotton mill; the materials, the numbers, were kept in a storehouse apart from the mechanism until they were processed in the mill. Each part was designed to carry out its function, such as addition and multiplication, while being connected with every other part. He described it as an engine ‘eating its own tail’. He wrote that ‘the whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism’. These reflections might have come from another world, and were ignored until the middle of the twentieth century. They have been described as ‘one of the great intellectual achievements in the history of mankind’. Few people in England showed the slightest interest.

The engine was out of its time. Its technology was too advanced to be understood adequately. It was the most ingenious and complex machine ever built, but it had leaped across a historical period which had yet to be assimilated. We cannot be sure how many other devices or inventions have fallen through the cracks of time. A replica of the ‘analytical engine mill’ is exhibited in the Science Museum of London and still resembles some strange god hauled from an unknown cave. Somehow it still remains out of time. There is also another survivor. Half the brain of Charles Babbage is preserved in the Hunterian Museum, with the other half in the Science Museum.

The fact that the name of Babbage is still not as well known as the poets and novelists of the period is testimony to the fact that the Victorian intelligentsia did not take kindly to applied science. One who persisted through the sheer weight of his genius was Jeremy Bentham. He may properly be described as the ‘pan-progenitor’ (to adapt one of his neologisms) of utilitarians and the felicific calculus. Although he began his work and his investigations in the eighteenth century, he is best seen in the context of the succeeding century. He was another great London visionary, born in Spitalfields in 1748, a practical genius who may be placed beside Babbage himself. Bentham was not widely known in his own lifetime, despite the plaudits that have been heaped on him ever since. He and Babbage can still be hailed as prophets without honour.

Bentham propounded in all his work for reform the simple belief in ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, a radical maxim that propelled him through the thorny ways of legal reform, prison reform and Poor Law reform. If he had been a Christian, he might have taken as his motto Luke 3:5 – the crooked ways will be made straight, and the rough ways smooth. He was in part responsible for the working of the Reform Act of 1832, which led the way to adult male suffrage, and propounded the notion that ‘every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty’. The pursuit of rational solutions by means of rational methods was the greatest problem of the age. It was the music of the machine, of competition and progress. To be or not to be was no longer the question. That had become, does it work?

Bentham also helped to establish the Mechanics’ Institutes, which became one of the self-proclaimed glories of the Victorian Age. They were a venue not only for mechanics but for clerks or apprentices or shopkeepers who had been stirred by glimpses of the world of knowledge before and, so far, beyond them. The Institutes in fact became the venue of the middle classes, always aspiring, rather than the manual labourers for whom they were originally intended. Nevertheless, many of the most interesting biographies and fictions of the period are concerned with the arduous and sometimes painful exercise of self-education in the face of difficulties. There were some who got up before dawn to study by candlelight, those who read by the light of a tavern fire, those who would walk thirteen miles for a bookshop, even those who paid a penny to read the newspaper in the local alehouse.

The nineteenth century was not necessarily an ally to religion, therefore, as later pages will show. The growing regard for science as a mode of knowledge was not helpful for those who fostered religious truth, and the increasing indifference to religion itself was one of the first signs of what would become a more secular society. The Christian faith became more fractured and uncertain. The drama of evolution superseded that of redemption, and it became clear that the scientific model offered more insights into the practical business of life than any pamphlet by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) is as quintessentially Victorian as the Great Exhibition or the Albert Hall. Its thesis is based upon the twin imperatives of struggle and competition, and in the consequent race of life the ‘northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms’. There is nothing here of atonement, redemption or grace. It is a dark world indeed, dominated by the necessity of labour and the appetite for power, in which combat and slaughter are the principal components. To see Victorian civilization from the vantage point of Charles Darwin is to see it more clearly. He had also adopted Malthus’s doctrine that populations grow faster than their means of subsistence, and are thus doomed to extinction. This also is a key to Victorian melancholy, which was perhaps as influential as Victorian optimism.

It is of no surprise that the study of the gospels was losing ground to the investigation of stratigraphic geology. It is perhaps no more wonderful that the domain of science remained largely in the hands of Nonconformists rather than Anglicans. Geology had become the most popular of the sciences, and its adherents felt free to speculate upon the spans of millions of years. But the most significant aspect of geology in the nineteenth century lay in the fact that these adherents were amateurs drawn to the study through sheer intellectual curiosity. It was a topic for curates. The most prominent of the amateurs, however, was Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, born in 1799. Her father was a cabinetmaker but he soon began to neglect his occupation for the sake of fossil hunting. Lyme was the perfect location. The crumbling of the region’s cliffs had already begun in earnest and the fossils embedded therein were ripe for plucking. From an early age Mary Anning accompanied her father on fossil expeditions and it can only be assumed that his advice and her experience gave her an otherwise preternatural skill in recognizing and identifying the remains of previously unknown species. She was, according to a childhood friend, ‘a spirited young person of independent character who did not much care for undue politeness or pretence’. This bravura was generally laid to the fact that at the age of fifteen months she survived a great lightning strike which killed three people; she had been a sickly infant, as were so many of the babies of Lyme, but from that time forward she was spirited and adventurous.

Her pursuit survived her father’s death, which may even have quickened her search for what were known variously as Cupid’s wings, ladies’ fingers and devil’s toenails. Some of these she sold to visitors near the coach stop at the Blue Cups Inn in Lyme. It was not unusual for her to charge half a crown for an ammonite laid on a cloth with others on a table. Her first great success, however, came in the summer of 1811 when her younger brother, Joseph, came across the outlines of a strangely shaped head. It was embedded in a geological formation known as the Blue Lias, consisting of limestone and shale. He had no time to dig out the rest of the fossil, and the task fell to Mary. It took her a year of painstaking digging and excavating what seemed to some to be a large crocodile. But as she pieced it together, bone by bone, she eventually reconstructed a creature more than 17 feet long. It was to be called ichthyosaurus. From that time forward she became a geological celebrity. John Murray, a fellow enthusiast, noted: ‘I once gladly availed myself of a geological excursion and was not a little surprised at her geological tact and acumen. A single glance at the edge of a fossil peeping from the Blue Lias revealed to her the nature of the fossil and its name and character were instantly announced.’

It was believed astonishing that ‘this poor ignorant girl’ could talk with professors and other eminent geologists on their own terms and with equal knowledge. Yet she was not mentioned in lectures and she was not invited to colloquia. She was only a female. She wrote to a friend, Anna Maria Pinney, that ‘the world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of all mankind. I hope you will pardon me, although I do not deserve it. How I envy you your daily visits to the museum!’ Pinney herself wrote of her that ‘men of learning have sucked her brains and made a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished the contents while she derived none of the advantages’.

In pursuit of the light of the early decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, the student could look in vain at John Henry Newman’s tracts or Charles Spurgeon’s gospel missions in Southwark. He or she might look instead at Humphry Davy and the beginning of electrochemistry, at John Dalton and the atomic hypothesis, Michael Faraday or Thomas Young. Religion was not of course altogether neglected. Books such as Henry Brougham’s Discourse on the Objects, Advantages and Pleasures of Science (1826), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Intellect, were seen as an advantageous branch of natural theology. Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology (1830–33) declared that ‘we discover everywhere the clear proofs of a Creative Intelligence, and of His foresight, wisdom and power’. Shorn of Darwin’s savage vision, this was better than a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral.

4

A queasy world

Struggle was not very far from the surface of life. In August 1822 Castlereagh cut his throat with a penknife. The unending and weary oppression of work and watchfulness had taken its toll. He had been speaking and behaving oddly for some days; when a household servant tried to cheer him, he put his hand to his forehead and murmured: ‘I am quite worn out here. Quite worn out.’ He asked for an audience with the king, to whom he confided that he was homosexual and that he was ready to flee the country before exposure as such; he behaved oddly enough for the king to warn Lord Liverpool of his condition. He believed, in what was perhaps the final stage of a nervous breakdown, that he had been observed in a male brothel three years before and that he was still being blackmailed. This may or may not have been true, and there is some anecdotal evidence to support it, but it is significant that his mind gave way at a time when London itself was gripped by a homosexual scandal involving the bishop of Clogher in County Tyrone, who had been caught with a soldier. To avoid what he considered to be an overwhelming public and private scandal, Castlereagh put the knife to his throat.

By the end of 1820 it was already clear that, in men and measures, the cabinet would change or would surely fall. With Castlereagh gone, Liverpool’s administration had suffered a severe blow. It was also clear that Castlereagh’s greatest opponent, George Canning, would have to take his place. Canning had been ready to depart for India as governor general, but he could not resist the allure of high office at home. There was no one to match his popularity or his oratory; only he had the vitality and political intelligence to take on the Foreign Office while at the same time becoming leader of the House of Commons. Nevertheless, he had made many enemies as a result of his pro-Catholic stance. It was said that Castlereagh never gave a speech without making a friend, while Canning never opened his mouth without losing one. Wilberforce said that the lash of his sarcasm ‘would have fetched the hide off a rhinoceros’. He was always plotting and scheming. Apparently he would not ‘take his tea without a stratagem’, but in fact his policy was essentially that of Castlereagh conducted with more elan and publicity. He was a different kind of politician, much to the dismay of those of the old school. He dwelled in the open. It was to his disadvantage that he was the son of an actress, but he needed no fine inheritance to make his way. As soon as he entered the cabinet it was said that he began to look and behave as if he were prime minister. Wellington said that Canning’s temper was enough to blow him up. He was, as one contemporary put it, ‘perpetually doing & undoing’. A distinction is often drawn between ‘Whig Tories’ or ‘ultra-Tories’. But the phrases mean very little, and it is better to speak of those who supported Canning and those who detested him. Lord Liverpool, apparently more reticent and disengaged than ever, kept the balance.

Lord Liverpool had in fact accepted reinforcements for his administration from a group of disenchanted Whigs under the leadership of Lord Grenville, who had migrated in search of offices and emoluments. The marquess of Buckingham, for example, received a dukedom, while one of his acolytes gained a seat in the cabinet. Everybody won. Liverpool’s government had been further revived by the steady rise of Robert Peel. Peel had become chief secretary for Ireland at the age of twenty-four, and by all accounts acquitted himself well. He did everything well, in fact, and in 1822 he first joined the cabinet as home secretary, to be joined there by William Huskisson at the Board of Trade. The change of men had an instinctive, if not immediate, effect upon the administration. It seemed stronger and more robust, filled with the energy of new ambitions. Some observers disagreed that ‘Old Corruption’ could change. ‘To be sure’, Cobbett wrote, ‘when one dies, or cuts his throat (as in the case of Castlereagh), another one comes; but, it is the same body.’

Anyone with eyes to see, or ears to hear, knew what was going on. The poetry of Shelley and Byron, together with the prose of William Hazlitt, helped to encourage a mood of sharp or sullen cynicism against the nefarious powers of authority. Robert Southey attacked them as ‘men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society …’ It is hard not to sense the strength of feeling against the nobility and the ‘booby squires’ who might have been Whig or Tory for all the writers cared. In this period there were no fewer than nineteen Sunday newspapers. Seditious pamphlets and broadsheets against the administration found a lucrative market, and the new king was abused as roundly as Liverpool or Canning. For the legislators it was in many respects similar to living on the very rim of a volcano. Canning relished this uncomfortable position and, unlike his predecessor, played to the gallery whenever the occasion demanded it.

Opinion, such as it existed, was essentially a phenomenon of the middle classes that were now discovering their own strength. It was not a question of policy as such – although an issue like income tax could raise the slumbering beast – it was obeisance to an accepted code of duty, thrift and industry, any infraction of which had the direst consequences. The voting public were all middle class now.

It has been said that the newly refreshed cabinet was in every respect more ‘Whig’ than its predecessor. Peel began to liberalize the criminal code and brushed away the litter of fussy and outmoded legislation, abolishing the death penalty for a hundred different crimes. In the process he fashioned a revolution in nineteenth-century criminal justice. He changed the laws on transportation, abolished judges’ perquisites in favour of salaries, and simplified the criminal law. In all those measures he earned Canning’s approbation. The Metropolitan Police force came a little later.

William Huskisson, at the Board of Trade, had turned his attention to free trade. It was the catchphrase of the time, although its effects on prices or on the labour market were not properly understood. He followed earlier measures by reducing the tariff on imported goods and by allowing foreign vessels into English ports. It was a long time coming. More than one hundred years before, in Windsor Forest (1713), Alexander Pope had prophesied that:

The time shall come, when, free as seas or wind

Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind …

Huskisson also ventured to touch on the price of corn as a preliminary measure to the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1832. He could not hope to please both farmer and consumer, and there were so many special interests involved (including the wealth of the landowning gentry and the possibility of starvation among the poorer classes) that he had to move slowly. He set up a sliding scale where the duty on imported corn varied with its price in the domestic market. It was assumed, by those who did not understand it, to be a form of compromise. And in that muddled state it passed.

Just as Huskisson further opened up the protected economy of the nation, so Canning defied conventional diplomatic wisdom by recognizing the emergent South American nations. But Canning was always fated to be the lightning conductor of the storm of change. When he had taken on the Foreign Office after Castlereagh’s death he was confronted by another Congress of the ‘Holy League’ determined to extirpate popular liberties. But Canning was never a member of what was known as ‘the Vienna Club’, the old boys who had carved up Europe between themselves. He would have nothing to do with it, and he registered his displeasure by warning that if France or Spain should dare to invade Portugal, Britain’s old ally, Canning would undoubtedly intervene. The duke of Wellington, who acted as Britain’s representative at the Congress, had declared: ‘we stand alone, and we do so by choice’. It was not in Britain’s interests to alter the internal administration of other nations, but it was her choice to recognize and to nurture de facto governments that had sprung up from popular demand. It need hardly be said that the motivating principles were those of trade and finance.

When the Spanish began to surrender their South American colonies to the French, the English merchants, furious that trade could be snatched from them, found a strong ally in their government. British merchant ships acted as an unofficial war fleet to maintain supplies and communications between the various rebel territories. Simón Bolívar had an army of six thousand British volunteers to prove his part as ‘the Liberator’ for a string of countries from Venezuela to Ecuador. Canning was the single most important politician to lead the charge, or at least the insurrection. Towards the end of the conflict Britain recognized Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina as independent states; Venezuela and Honduras then joined the magic circle, thus guaranteeing that the South American continent would never again be enslaved by the Spanish empire. Native Amerindians, however, were to endure many decades of forced labour at the hands of Spanish settlers.

Most of the cabinet were opposed to supporting rebels against the lawful authorities; the monarchs and monarchists of Europe were horrified at the prospect of a string of new republics across the ocean. Plots against Canning were engineered in the capitals of Europe, with the active or tacit approval of some members of the cabinet, but they came to nothing. He said later that there was a conspiracy ‘to change the policy of this government by changing me’. Canning had the inestimable advantage of the Americans on his side. In the Monroe Doctrine of December 1823 the Americans had announced that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for any future colonization by any European powers’. Canning put it more succinctly in the Commons: ‘Contemplating Spain as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’ George IV was violently opposed to any independence for previously subject nations; the agitators for liberty were no less than traitors to their own imperial monarch, Ferdinand VII. Such matters touched too close to home. He refused to read out Canning’s report at the beginning of parliament, complaining that his gout made it impossible for him to walk and that he had lost his false teeth. Yet he could do nothing to restrain the policy and wish of George Canning. The last links of royal power were beginning to rust.

The question of Catholic emancipation had also divided the cabinet, with Peel opposed and Canning in favour. ‘There is little feeling, I think,’ Peel wrote, ‘in this country, upon the question. People are tired of it, and tired of the trouble of opposing it, or thinking about it.’ This was undoubtedly true of those whose religion was comfortably placed. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791 had dismantled many of the hurdles by allowing freedom of worship and liberating Catholics from the Oath of Supremacy. But in the hypothesized ‘age of improvement’ it was not enough. And then there was the little question of Catholic Ireland, which was not to be wished away. The Union of 1800 had abolished the Irish parliament but had left nothing in its place except a wholly inadequate civil service and bungling English administrators. The Anglo-Irish aristocracy was in large part venal and impotent while the Catholic peasantry had been brutalized and impoverished by English rule. To allow the vote to Roman Catholics in England and in Ireland was a measure of natural justice that was ever more necessary in the nineteenth century. Canning pushed and pulled at it with all his tenacity and taste for the spotlight. How was it possible to assist Simón Bolívar in his wish and desire for independence while at the same time denying Daniel O’Connell a similar courtesy?

A Catholic Association was established by O’Connell in the early months of 1823 after Irish hopes had been raised by the Whigs and dashed by the monarchy, even as the condition of the Irish themselves steadily grew more unruly and impatient. Most of them lived off what little land they possessed while being harassed by rack-rent landlords and obliged to pay one-tenth of their produce in tithes to a Protestant Church. When the more militant Catholics turned against their oppressors they were bullied and beaten by the Protestant ‘Peep-o-Day Boys’ and the ‘Ribbonmen’; they in turn relied upon ‘the Defenders’. In 1825 the Association was suppressed, but it reinvented itself as a group for educational purposes. It fooled nobody, but it was more difficult to prosecute. It was O’Connell who brought the priests and laity together in combination.

Combination had once been equivalent to conspiracy, but it had become a word of much wider import. The Combination Act of 1799, prohibiting the formation of trade unions, had been passed as part of the reaction to the Jacobin scare of that time. Yet in the 1820s combinations sprang up among groups as disparate as tailors, shipwrights, sawyers and coopers. They regulated wages, limited the number of apprentices and refused to work with those that had not joined them. A parliamentary committee discovered that some of these groups had been in informal existence for almost a century, but only in the 1820s were they given a name and an identity. The Stockport Cotton Jenny Spinners Union Society was formed in 1824, at the same time as other ‘union societies’ emerged in the familiar trades. They were known as ‘trade unions’ because they represented those in an historic trade; they had nothing to do with the working classes of the factories and mills.

One of the leading figures of this nascent union movement was Francis Place, conventionally known as ‘the radical tailor of Charing Cross’. He was one of those city radicals who have as long a history as the city itself; wherever there are large groups of men and women there will be common discontent and shared grievances. He had organized a strike among the makers of leather breeches, then an indispensable part of the working costume, but his failure in that effort did not dissuade him from helping to organize other radical associations. His chief aim, however, was to abolish the legislation which forbade the forming of trade unions. With the help of allies in parliament, a Combination Act was passed in 1825 which defined the rights of trade unions in a very narrow sense as meeting to bargain over wages and conditions – anything else might be construed as criminal. The act allowed workers ‘to enter any combination to obtain an advance or to fix the rate of wages, or to lessen or alter the hours or duration of the time of working, or to decrease the quantity of work …’ The Sheffield Mercury of 8 October 1825 reported that the mechanics of the kingdom, in combination, were ready to act in accordance with these narrow limitations. The act was passed during a period of prosperity but, when that prosperity faltered and began to fade, the new trade unions were ill equipped to deal with the slump.

The Catholic Association continued to thrive in Ireland under Daniel O’Connell’s leadership. The Roman Catholic Church supported it, and used its money for membership fees, and O’Connell himself became one of the heroes of Whig reform. Ireland was no less a candidate for victimhood than Sicily or Greece, and it became natural to talk of ‘the poor Irish’ as a race rather than as a special class. George IV did not help matters. He wrote to Robert Peel that ‘the king is apprehensive that a notion is gone abroad that the king himself is not unfavourable to the Catholic claims … he will no longer consent to Catholic Emancipation being left as an open question in his Cabinet’. The letter was of course shown to Wellington, among others, who wrote: ‘If we cannot get rid of the Catholic Association, we must look to civil war in Ireland.’

There had always been talk of civil war, and the temperature was raised when in 1825 a reform politician, Sir Francis Burdett, introduced an Emancipation Bill. It passed through the Commons by the end of April 1825; Peel and Lord Liverpool threatened to resign if the bill passed its final hurdles. Liverpool declared that ‘my particular rejection of the Roman Catholic religion is that it penetrates into every domestic scene, and inculcates a system of tyranny never known elsewhere …’ The old and familiar cry of ‘No Popery!’ was once more heard through the land. The Lords rejected the bill, but it was widely apparent that in terms of natural justice and national peace the Catholics would eventually succeed.

But then came the financial crash of 1825, the popping of yet another bubble of greed and overconfidence. By the middle of 1826 the once overworked mills were forced to close down, and their workers were put on short time. It seemed natural, even inevitable, for the economy to prosper for a few years and then go into decline. But nobody fully understood the lesson. A see-saw economy, as it has sometimes been called, was the image of this financial age. The major panic, the eye of the storm, lasted for ten days when many of the major institutions shut their doors against the blast.

The financial crisis coincided with the Catholic crisis, hitting landlords, farmers, artisans and social reformers alike. ‘As to ministers,’ one MP had observed, ‘they had fully proved their inability to govern. Never was the community so universally impressed with the conviction of the incapacity of their responsible ministers as at the present moment; so general was the feeling that all ranks of men looked to their removal as their only hope.’

The general situation was exacerbated by a chronic shortage of corn after a bad harvest. Very few people held land of their own, and the paucity of corn led to general and genuine distress. Many businesses were forced to close, and it was widely rumoured by the Evangelical population that the hand of God had been raised against the nation in a fit of justified wrath. Edward Irving had begun his visionary ministry two years before, and many now said that his denunciations and prophecies were nothing less than revealed truth. Was the second advent about to occur? Talk of apocalypse, divine punishment and the wrath to come was commonplace. John Martin painted The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1822, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834.

Parliament was more prosaic and practical. Half a million quarters of bonded corn were released from the warehouses, much to the chagrin of the landowners and farmers. Canning announced the measure to a plainly dissatisfied House of Commons. ‘I never saw’, one observer, Thomas Creevey, noticed, ‘anything like the fury of both Whig and Tory landholders at Canning’s speech, but the Tories much the most violent of the two.’ It was considered to represent nothing less than the destruction of the Corn Laws. It was believed that the liberty of the market in corn had other malign consequences, since the attack upon landowners and farmers was one step closer to a general reform which would ‘bring the overthrow of the existing social and political system of our country’. To destroy the Corn Laws would undermine the inherited system. According to the reformers, however, to support the Corn Laws would extinguish freedom for ever. The language was meant to be, and was taken to be, serious. Some even blamed the scarcity of corn on the effects of free trade and innovation. Canning had an answer. ‘Those who resist indiscriminately all improvement as innovation’, he said, ‘may find themselves compelled at last to submit to innovations, although they are not improvements.’

But even in their anger, and in the face of famine, the landowners did not attempt to thwart popular demand or tempt the wrath of God. The skies were searched for signs. The anger of the Almighty was further divined when a rag, tag and bobtail English army, intent upon annexation of the prosperous Ashanti region in West Africa, was defeated by the Ashanti themselves on the banks of the Adoomansoo, and all its officers beheaded. News from a region so remote, and so difficult to pronounce, only served to emphasize God’s power.

An election was held in June 1826 but it blew neither hot nor cold, with perhaps the faintest breeze for the Protestant cause. Lord Liverpool held on for a while, progressively enfeebled.

In an episode that might claim symbolic significance the duke of York, an arch-Tory and heir to the throne, died of dropsy at the beginning of January 1827, and was buried during an interminable service in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. It was attended by the duke of Wellington, the bishop of Lincoln, the duke of Montrose, George Canning and other dignitaries, but the bitter cold and the plain stone floor of the freezing chapel affected some of those who had come to the funeral. The bishop died, while both Wellington and Canning fell seriously ill. The old guard were being cut down by a cold scythe.

Lord Liverpool, in the face of all this discontent, finally made up his mind and died. He suffered a fatal seizure, six weeks after he had seen the duke of York lowered into the grave, but lingered for eighteen months before his surcease. His death let loose the dogs of party war, unmuzzled at last after a decade or more of false harmony, vicious rumour and whispered insult. Canning was the natural successor, but on his appointment as first minister six of his cabinet colleagues resigned. He was obliged to bring in some Whig colleagues, but it was rumoured that he was half a Whig himself. Palmerston, then secretary at war, took his side in the dispute against what he called ‘the stupid old Tory Party’. ‘On the Catholic question,’ he wrote, ‘on the principles of commerce; on the corn laws … on colonial slavery … on all these questions and everything like them the government finds support from the Whigs and resistance from their self-denominated friends.’ Did Canning not espouse the cause of the Catholics in marked contrast to Robert Peel, one of those ministers who had resigned? There were some who jeered that Peel and his friends were now officially ‘his Majesty’s opposition’. Only Liverpool had been able to keep order among them, which was perhaps his largest claim to competence. Had he secretly agreed with Peel or with Canning? No one ever knew. He was reserved, taciturn and enigmatical. The undersecretary at the Home Office decided that ‘Liverpool had fewer personal friends and less quality for conciliating men’s affections than perhaps any Minister that ever lived.’

But he lived in a queasy and uneasy world. Lord Holland wrote, at the end of 1826: ‘Political parties are no more. Whig and Tory, Foxite and Pittite, Minister and Opposition, have ceased to be distinctions, but the divisions of classes and great interests are arrayed against each other – grower and consumer, lands and funds, Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant.’ The duke of Wellington observed that government in this period was ‘impractical’.

5

The door of change

So George Canning stepped forward to become the first prime minister with the open support of those Whigs whom he had invited into office. He was distrusted by many, but it seems unlikely that a conspiracy or a cabal was waiting to undo him. The people who refused to serve with him, citing his support for the Catholics, did so openly enough. He begangoverning with some success, managing to formulate and pass a budget. Foreign affairs were still his first and last concern; he was obliged to negotiate with Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal over their various grievances. ‘I am quite knocked up’, he told a fellow minister. But the foreign secretary of the time, Lord Dudley, saw more of him than most others. He wrote that ‘never did I hear from him an unkind, peevish or even impatient word. He was quicker than lightning, and even to the very last gay and playful …’ This does not contradict William Hazlitt’s more censorious judgement of a man who liked to play ‘the game of politics’ involved in ‘dilemmas in casuistry’ and ‘pretexts in diplomacy’. He was still always the cleverest boy at Eton, full of gimmicks and easy eloquence. Hazlitt added that ‘truth, liberty, justice, humanity, war or peace, civilisation or barbarism, are things of little consequence, except for him to make speeches upon them’. He had enough fluency and engaging fancy to give some evidence for that claim.

Nature, rather than his protean sensibility, brought him down. He told the king that he felt ‘ill all over’ and on 8 August 1827, after one hundred days in office, he died so peacefully that no one around him noticed. He was one of those nineteenth-century statesmen who worked themselves to death in an almost literal manner. Without a proper civil service, without a proper party, he had no one except his friends and immediate family to support him. Wine did the rest. His foreign enemies rejoiced because, like Oliver Cromwell, his domestic reputation was ‘but a shadow of the glory he had abroad’, where he was known as the terror of tyrants.

He had of course left important business behind him, and in his last hours his mind was wandering over Portugal without anyone understanding what he meant. The hopes of the more liberal Tories crashed with him. It seemed to many that the Catholic cause, in particular, had been lost.

Canning’s successor is perhaps the least known of all British prime ministers. Viscount Goderich was known as ‘Goody Goderich’ and the ‘Blubberer’ for his apparent weakness against any challenge. It is said that he burst into tears when he handed his resignation to the king. He could no more manage the balance of Whigs and Tories than he could have followed Charles Blondin on a tightrope across Niagara. He lasted just six months and holds the remarkable record for a prime minister of never having appeared in parliament. He had only one thin skin, and shrank from any attention.

There is no evidence that Goderich or his ministers shared Canning’s fascination with foreign affairs, and it was only coincidence that during Goderich’s short ministry the British navy achieved a remarkable victory. Admiral Codrington, in an effort to aid the Greek war for independence from the Ottoman empire, sent a Turkish squadron to the bottom of Navarino Bay. In this action he was allied with the French and Russian navies, but the concerted action did not win instant independence for Greece. It was nevertheless the harbinger of that country’s secession from the Ottoman empire. Metternich said that the action ‘began a new era’ in European affairs. New eras come and go but the duke of Wellington, in particular, wished to maintain the Ottoman empire as a counterweight to Russia.

Whether Goderich approved of the undertaking at Navarino is of no consequence. He did not last long enough to make his opinion important. Huskisson had said of the new prime minister that ‘his health has been suffering, his spirits are worn out, and his fitness for business and power of deciding upon any questions that come before him are very much impaired’. He was said to be as firm as a bulrush. And so with great relief he resigned. He had neither appetite nor aptitude for the high post, and therefore tired of it quickly and completely.

The king, perhaps rueing his appointment, now chose quite a different leader in the redoubtable duke of Wellington. There must be a truism somewhere that good soldiers do not always make good politicians. Wellington never paid heed to public opinion. What he knew best was the battlefield. What was Portugal to him but the site of so many victories? After the first cabinet of the new administration he is reported to have said: ‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’ Wellington had Peel beside him, as home secretary and leader of the Commons, but he could not keep the cabinet intact. After that first cabinet one of the ministers noted that they exhibited ‘the courtesy of men who had just fought a duel’. The lord chancellor said that ‘we should have no cabinets after dinner. We all drink too much and are not civil to each other.’ They met, and disputed, and disagreed. They could concur on nothing. Wellington was deeply dismayed that, having accepted the post as first minister, he could no longer be commander-in-chief of the armed forces; such a dual post would have smacked of military tyranny. The king already regretted his appointment as prime minister and accused him of want of flexibility. There was a phrase. Either King Arthur must go to the devil, or King George will return to Hanover. Wellington’s first name was Arthur.

Peel himself was scathing about some of his more conservative colleagues: ‘Supported by very warm friends, no doubt, but these warm friends being prosperous country gentlemen, foxhunters &c &c most excellent men who will attend one night, but who will not leave their favourite pursuits to sit up till two or three o’clock fighting questions of detail …’

Peel knew, better than anyone else at Westminster, that detail is at the heart of policy. The administration was at best a shaky coalition of disparate interests, comprising his own supporters, the erstwhile supporters of Canning, and the king himself. ‘I must work for myself and by myself,’ Wellington told a colleague, ‘and please God however I may suffer I shall succeed in establishing in the country a strong government, and then I may retire with honour.’ The best of intentions, however, may be thwarted.

There had been some fortunate episodes, one of the most important being the success of the Whigs in managing to repeal the Test and Corporation acts in the spring of 1828. These acts had been devised to exclude Protestant Dissenters from a share in the administration. If they took Protestant communion on certain days of the year, they might take office under the crown. These obligations were lifted, and public offices became open to Dissenters who now enjoyed equality with the members of the Established Church. It was another step in the movement towards social liberation. It had the additional effect, considered only in passing, that the previously indissoluble bonds of Church and State had been broken. It was widely believed that Catholic emancipation was sure to follow. We may have a presentiment of the dying words of Arthur from Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’ in Idylls of the King: ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new …’

The repeal of the Sacramental Test Act, as it was known, had been proposed by one of the more prominent Whigs of the age. Lord John Russell came from an old and distinguished Whig family. Russell was an exiguous and apparently frail man who had reserves of strength and will that astonished his opponents. He was rather small and prim, with a reedy old-fashioned voice that he bequeathed to later members of his family. His household at Pembroke Lodge has been described as ‘timid, shrinking, that of a snail withdrawing into its shell full of high principle and religious feeling’. He was high-minded and thin-skinned. Victoria would consider him ‘impulsive’, ‘imprudent’ and ‘vain’. Compared to what she said of other political leaders, this was almost praise. One foreigner noted, however, ‘his apparent coldness and indifference to what was said by others’. A frigid intellect was another aspect of the Whig aristocracy. He had the natural flair and hauteur of a solidly based Whig family, but had quick wits and keen spirits that navigated him through the parliamentary turmoil.

In the same spring of 1828 the supporters of Canning, motivated by pique or perhaps by a misunderstanding, left Wellington’s cabinet in a body. It was in fact a rather eminent body. Viscount Melbourne, Viscount Palmerston and Lord Dudley Ward went out together and, according to David Cecil:

the three went to see Huskisson and then, leaving their cabriolets to follow slowly behind them, strolled back through the balmy silence of the spring night for a final consultation. Ward walked between the two others. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘now that we are by ourselves in the street, and no one but the sentry to hear, let me know right and left what is next to be done – in or out?’

‘Out,’ said Palmerston and William [Melbourne] echoed him … Poor Ward made a last try. ‘There is something in attaching oneself to so great a man as the Duke.’ ‘For my part,’ retorted William unmoved, ‘I do not happen to think he is so great a man. But that is a matter of opinion.’

Next day they were all three out.

Much to the delight of the Tories, gone were Huskisson, Palmerston and other notable parliamentarians. Wellington had let them go with so little remonstrance it became clear that he had not really wanted them with him in the first place. They had been chosen because they had acted as Canning’s worry beads, but they were not indispensable. With Wellington and Peel solely in charge, a Tory Paradise opened its gates.

In June 1828, a by-election in County Clare was won by Daniel O’Connell. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary, but supported any likely measure for the liberation of oppressed peoples. He opposed any act of violent intimidation or agitation in Ireland, however, believing that liberty by means of parliament was stronger and safer than liberation by armed struggle. But there were three faces to O’Connell: the one he presented to his close allies, the one he eventually demonstrated to the House of Commons, and the one he showed to his people. That was his skill and strength as a leader. To his people he was a man of his native soil, a man of Ireland with the eloquence of a barroom orator. In parliament he was passionate and at times almost incoherent. To his friends he was urbane and even languid. He was a master of mood and of tempo.

It had occurred to him, as to others, that although Catholics might not sit in Westminster there was nothing to prohibit them from standing for election, so he stood in the by-election for County Clare. He won the day. He could not take his place at Westminster because he was a Catholic and would not take the oath of allegiance. What was to be done? If he were refused a place on the benches it might create the conditions for a rebellion and even civil war in Ireland. If he did take his place it might prompt a similar situation in England, where the king clung – like a limpet or, perhaps, like a drowning man – to the Coronation Oath. It would need a palace revolution to move him. When you mix in the hive of zealous reformers, and the ever tempestuous Protestant mob roaming the streets of London, the dilemma was all too clear. There could be no general election since the Catholics, now following O’Connell’s example, would elect a phalanx of Roman Catholic MPs who could not be permitted to take their seats. If the Catholic Association had now proved stronger than the traditional landed interests, what was the point of the Protestant Constitution itself, which growled and pawed the ground but could do nothing?

Wellington and the king talked for hours, the king often in tears of grief and anger. Wellington was now convinced that Catholic emancipation was the only viable and practical course. The king grew more and more agitated until madness threatened him as it had his father. Lady Holland, the Whig hostess, heard from reliable sources that he talked for hours on the dreaded topic ‘and worked himself up into a fury whenever the subject was mentioned’. He threatened to retire to Hanover and never return to England. He boasted or pretended that he had fought at Waterloo. Wellington now believed that he had truly gone mad. But Wellington and Peel both knew that the game was up, and that the Irish could no longer be barred from Westminster. Hands were wrung. More tears were shed. Kisses were given and returned, at least on the king’s side. Eventually, on 4 March 1829, the king wrote to Wellington:

My dear Friend, as I find the country would be left without an administration, I have decided to yield my opinion to that which is considered by the Cabinet to be for the immediate interests of the country. Under these circumstances you have my consent to proceed as you propose with the measure. God knows what pain it causes me to write these words. GR.

It had to be done. It was done. The king could only be a diminished figure in the administration of the country.

Peel introduced the Catholic Relief Bill in March 1829. Everyone knew it was coming: Peel knew that the Catholic hour was at hand, Wellington knew it too. Perhaps no force on earth could now have stopped it. Daniel O’Connell’s erstwhile opponent in County Clare, Vesey Fitzgerald, sounded the alarm. ‘I believe their success inevitable – that no power under heaven can arrest its progress. There may be rebellion, you may put to death thousands, you may suppress it, but it will only put off the day of compromise …’ It passed its third reading by the end of the month and in April passed the Lords by a majority of two. ‘Arthur [Wellington] is King of England,’ the king complained. ‘O’Connell is King of Ireland and I suppose I am Dean of Windsor.’ The king seems to have persuaded himself that he had most of the country behind him. Others thought that ‘public opinion’ would be a force for liberal change but, in reality, it had no steady or certain voice.

On 13 April the bill received the royal assent, and Catholic Emancipation became law. The members of that once proscribed religion could now hold any public office in the United Kingdom with the exception of the Lord Chancellorship of England and the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland. Not all ran smoothly. The removal of Catholic disabilities would be balanced by a sharp rise in the Irish county franchise of minor landholders; the threshold was raised from a 40 shilling to a £10 freehold. Two hundred thousand electors lost their right to vote. The Catholic Association, once the cradle of Daniel O’Connell, was no more. But no Jesuits were allowed to instruct novices, in the hope that the black brigade would wither away.

It could be argued, however, that after 300 years the Anglican ascendancy had now come to an end. With the role of the sacred steadily being marginalized, the clergy of the Church of England took the role of the occupational professionals, imbibing the secular habits and manners of lawyers and others. The number of graduate clerics increased, and Church authority was transferred to a Privy Council Judicial Committee.

In the process the Tory party, the original anti-Catholic combination, had been reduced, with 173 members of the Commons and one hundred of the Lords fighting to the last stage. There was more to come. The door of change had been opened, and through it could be glimpsed the vista of electoral reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and Wellington were widely regarded as traitors to their cause. The dowager duchess of Richmond, believing that Wellington had ‘ratted’ on the Protestant cause, filled her drawing room with stuffed rats bearing the names of the ministers of the crown. But Wellington was more blasé; he did not care about the Catholics ‘one pin’ as long as they were gentlemen. Stirred as if by a trumpet, six Catholic peers entered the House of Lords for the first time. But it was not a question of party, Whig or Tory; they added their voices to the mixed response of various individuals to various matters of public concern. Charles Greville, the political diarist, remarked that ‘if Government have no opponents, they can have no great body of supporters on whom they can depend’. It was said, just to complicate matters, that the Wellington administration was ‘a Tory government with Whig opinions’.

This indeterminacy of opinion was one of the reasons why Robert Peel was able to push through so many legislative acts as home secretary. In 1829 he engineered his Metropolitan Police Improvement Bill, which at another time would have been highly controversial. Three hundred and fifty men had once been expected to supervise a city of more than a million people. ‘Think of the state of Brentford and Deptford, with no sort of police at night!’ Peel told Wellington. ‘I really think I need trouble you with no further proof of the necessity of putting an end to such a state of things.’ So he organized a highly efficient force of 2,000 men, arranged in a number of divisions, under the supervision of two magistrates or ‘police commissioners’. By the autumn of 1829 the ‘Peelers’ or ‘bobbies’, named after their creator, were on their beat with iron-framed top hats and truncheons. They were not necessarily popular, suspected of spying on the poorer sort in order to defend the property of the rich. When a man was accused of murdering a policeman in a riot, he was acquitted by the jury with a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’. There had been so much furore and frenzy in the year that Peel took the opportunity of sketching the outline of a quite new society.

The idea of a police force was met with horror as an assault upon individual liberty. Could not a sword or a pistol do the job? The hue and cry, as well as the ever vigilant mob, were always available in an unhappy incident. That was surely enough? ‘What! Is this England?’ Cobbett asked of the new police. ‘Is this the land of manly hearts? Is this the country that laughed at the French for their submissions?’ Yet all the authoritarian agencies of the day, whether they were utilitarians or Evangelicals, were not to be stopped. Too much unrest in the country provoked the need for further security.

The problems of the Catholics were eclipsed by the crisis of corn. All the people – tradesmen, manufacturers, farmers, labourers – were still enduring the hard conditions and ‘distressful times’ first manifest in 1826. The member of parliament for Kent stated that all the farmers in his county were insolvent. The silk weavers of Somerset were obliged to live on half a crown a week, hardly enough for salt and potatoes. In March riots erupted in London and were matched in Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne and elsewhere. The Riot Act was read in Stockport. It was a matter for Peel to decide at what point the studied neutrality of the government should degenerate into armed intervention. In 1830 the Manchester Political Union and the Metropolitan Political Union were established to promote social and political reform. Strikes, reform meetings and political activism by various trades also maintained their pressure for the next two years. At the close of the year, Thomas Attwood established the Birmingham Political Union and held what was the largest-ever indoor meeting. It was no wonder that the propertied classes were beginning to feel in a state of siege.

6

False hope

By 1830 the strikes had reached a climax, many of them directed against the ‘knobsticks’ or scabs who insisted on working. One union newspaper, the Union Pilot and Cooperative Intelligencer, proclaimed in the spring of that year that ‘the improvements of machinery will soon enable them to do without you’. A plethora of unions grew up – the Grand National Union, the Potters’ Union, the Grand National Consolidated and the Operative Builders’ Union. ‘The history of these Unions’, Friedrich Engels wrote, ‘is a long series of defeats of the working men interrupted by a few victories.’ By which he meant that the laws of economics, or perhaps the laws of capitalism, were irrefragable.

Spectators of the struggle for Catholic liberation noticed one or two matters that pertained to coming disorder. They observed that just two or three cabinet ministers could persuade or cajole the monarch to agree to proposals which he profoundly deplored. They observed that the same two or three members of the cabinet, if powerful enough, could sway the Commons and the Lords with arguments as well as threats and bribes. They observed also that the country as a whole did not particularly care about the constitutional measures which so exercised their leaders. Perhaps the giants and bugbears of conventional political discourse did not exist after all. The people may have been frightened of their own shadows. Not a dog barked when the Catholics and Dissenters were granted their civil liberties. The country was not the one that nursed the anti-Catholic Gordon riots fifty years before.

It has been suggested that the ‘middle classes’ were too concerned with their social and financial well-being to care much for the religious controversies of the period. Catholics and Dissenters, after all, could both aspire to being gentlemen. An anonymous article appeared in the Quarterly Review of January 1830, and gave a name to the rise of the middle classes. It confirmed that they were:

decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative party; a party which we believe to compose by far the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent and respectable portion of the proportion of this country and without whose support any administration that can be formed will be found deficient both in character and stability.

The word ‘Conservative’ was swiftly taken up. By the singular mysteries of numerology or chronology it was in this same year that the Whigs, once fissiparous, began to congregate together and to form a coherent platform of party policies.

The rural poor were less fortunate. The only reform they wanted (apart from the rapid extermination of farmers and landowners) was the number of coins in their patched and worn trousers. They came to a large extent from the stock of unemployed agricultural labourers who had haunted the English countryside since the end of the Napoleonic War. Many of the others were factory workers thrown out of employment by the gyrations of the manufacturing system. By 1830, just as the rudimentary workers’ associations were taking shape, so the agricultural labourers organized themselves into the fictional body of ‘Captain Swing’, the name they used to sign their letters. In the summer of the year the threshing machines of East Kent were attacked; by October one hundred had been destroyed, together with the paraphernalia of rural tyranny epitomized by the tithe barns and the old workhouses. The rick-burners had fire in their hands. They were protesting against tithes and enclosures, game laws and poor laws, and all the other constituents of rural misery and impoverishment. More than a thousand violent incidents occurred within a year.

The Swing Riots were not a national or coordinated movement; they emerged from a hundred local grievances which all found their centre in the need for basic subsistence. Francis Jeffrey, a Scottish advocate and editor, wrote: ‘The real battle is not between Whigs and Tories, Liberals and illiberals, and such gentleman-like denominations, but between property and no-property, between Swing and the law.’ Another Whig notable, Earl Grey, wrote in February 1830: ‘all respect for station and authority entirely lost – the character of all public men held up to derision …’

King George IV himself was now in a parlous condition, ‘scratching himself to pieces’. His reaction to Catholic emancipation, his hysterical antics, his copious tears, his prostrations, his temper and his shameless mimicking of his closest ministers did not endear him to Wellington and his cabinet colleagues. His last days were marked by volatile moods, sometimes lethargic and sometimes voluble, sustained by laudanum, cherry brandy and other cordials. This was the moment when the king began his slow but inexorable journey to the grave with the unspoken wish of his people that it might be concluded sooner rather than later. ‘My boy, this is death!’ he announced to a courtier, as if he had been expecting a long-awaited visitor. And so it was. Nobody mourned him. No one cared.

His successor was William IV, the ‘Sailor King’ of manifestly good intention but awkward manners. ‘Look at that idiot,’ George IV used to say of him. ‘They will remember me, if he is ever in my place.’ But of course they did not. The new king’s head was shaped rather like a pineapple, but there was a great deal of pith inside. He was called ‘the Sailor King’ because he had been for a while Lord High Admiral, and there were intimations that he was something of a Whig. ‘There is a strong impression abroad’, Charles Greville wrote in his notable diary, ‘that the King is cracked, and I dare say there is some truth in it. He gets so very cholerick and is so indecent in his wrath.’ This had been said of almost every sovereign since the first William, and might be said to be an occupational hazard.

Yet the fourth William had a benign, and almost raffish, demeanour. He was described by one contemporary as ‘a little, old, red-nosed, weather-beaten, jolly-looking person, with an ungraceful air and carriage’. He walked down the street alone, and attracted large crowds. When he rode out on his horse he often offered Londoners ‘lifts’. Melbourne remarked that ‘he hasn’t the feelings of a gentleman; he knows what they are, but he hasn’t them’.

The death of the king rendered an election necessary, but the only question seemed to be whether William would favour Wellington and his Conservatives or turn his attention to Earl Grey and the Whigs. The campaign was begun on 23 July but was interrupted and enlivened by news of another Paris revolution. It is a matter of conjecture how many Englishmen were aware of events across the Channel, but there was no doubt some connection with the fervours of ‘Captain Swing’ and the events of July in Paris when the regime of Charles X gave way to the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe. The bourgeoisie threw out the aristocrats with little bloodshed, but many in England trembled for their own country’s constitutional balance.

In the event, the election of 1830 settled nothing, but it brought forward all those issues of agricultural reform and electoral change that had dominated the last ministry. The Swing Riots had been enough to cause something close to panic among the landowning class. They wanted peace at almost any price, and the demand for political reform became ever more pressing.

Yet the Tories were in no position to guarantee it. They were already in an advanced state of decay, having been breaking up for some years over such measures as the Corn Laws and Catholic Emancipation. There were ultra-Tories, liberal Tories and Tory Tories with any number of splits and sects. This is of course characteristic of all political parties, but excessive good fortune or excessive misfortune can emphasize schisms and increase divisions. In a debate after the beginning of the new parliament, Earl Grey made a speech in which he urged the necessity of ‘reforming Parliament’. The duke of Wellington rose to reply and, in a speech which totally misread the mood of the country, he remarked that he had no intention of introducing reform and that ‘I will at once declare that … as long as I hold any station in the government of the country, I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.’ His speech was greeted with some protest. When the duke sat down he asked a colleague what was going on. ‘I have not said too much, have I?’ ‘You’ll hear of it,’ Lord Aberdeen replied.

The stocks fell on the following morning, and by the evening one member after another rose to remonstrate with Wellington. The Dictator had disowned Reform. It was as simple as that. It was soon feared that the ‘radicals’ – whoever they might be in the present circumstances – were bent on creating discord in the streets of London. The fear of instability mounted with rumours of a civil rebellion to topple the administration and monarchy in the recent French manner. Placards were circulated. ‘To arms! To arms! Liberty or death!’ The authors might be accused of plagiarism as well as insurrection. But the populace had more common sense than the incendiaries, and the crowds on the streets of the city remained in good humour. The day ended without a rifle shot. A few half-hearted attempts at riot in Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire were quickly dissipated by the lords lieutenant of the various counties.

The duke of Wellington reflected on the period some years later. ‘I induced’, he wrote, ‘the magistrates to put themselves on horseback, each at the head of his own servants and retainers, grooms, huntsmen, gamekeepers, armed with horse-whips, pistols, fowling pieces, and what they could get, and to attack in concert, if necessary, or singly, these mobs, disperse them, destroy them, and take and put in confinement those who could not escape.’ The defence of the realm was conducted still in almost medieval fashion.

But for Wellington the blunder of his speech proved his downfall. It was compounded by what seemed an act of cowardice. The king was supposed to attend a city banquet on Lord Mayor’s Day. The administration refused to allow it. They were not afraid of an attempt upon the king but upon the duke. The Commons was in a familiar state of uproar at the pusillanimity of the cabinet. The presence of the new police also provoked hostility as a French-inspired innovation against personal liberty. Wellington could no longer command the majority in his own party, let alone in the Commons. After a vote against his ministry he tendered his resignation to the new king, and William IV called for Earl Grey to lead a new Whig administration. The Wellington ministry itself had lasted for approximately three years, full of misery and misunderstanding, and now it fell unregretted. So the duke was succeeded by an earl, a confirmed Whig who is now better known as a tea than a man. Grey was an imperturbably aristocratic figure with an elevated forehead suitable for lofty thoughts. He loved ‘the people’ in the abstract but, as was said, he loved them at a distance. His perorations in parliament were as measured and stately as his demeanour. He had the look and manner of an elder statesman almost as soon as he joined parliament at the age of twenty-three.

Grey’s Whig cabinet was the most aristocratic gathering since the eighteenth century. Only three commoners found a place in a company of thirteen. Lord Palmerston, as an Irish peer, also sat in the House of Commons, but he can hardly be described as a commoner. Democracy was not even an issue. Yet every second thought was of reform. Grey was ‘deeply dejected’ at the prospect of becoming first minister, according to a colleague, and was complaining constantly. Not the least of his problems was the dilemma set by reform. He had often in the past signalled his favourable interests in the subject, but he could hardly be described as a democrat. His purpose was to maintain the aristocracy and buttress its power with remedial measures. He believed that proper reform would ‘find real capacity in the high Aristocracy … I admit that I should select the aristocrat, for that class is a guarantee for the safety of the state and the throne.’ He was restoring the old identity of the Whigs as aristocrats who directed and supervised the cause of reform. Disraeli later, and quite justifiably, described the orthodox Whig as ‘a democratic aristocrat’, even if it was a term which he professed not to understand. The cabinet itself was a broad coalition of conflicting interests. One Tory, the duke of Richmond, was a member. The new ministers replaced a Tory party that had been pre-eminent for the larger part of sixty years. There used to be a saying that everybody loves a lord.

A committee was established to consider reform as the burning question of the day. It was believed by Grey and his colleagues that it was necessary to effect ‘such a permanent settlement of this great and important question, as will no longer render its agitation subservient to the designs of the factious and discontented – but by its wise and comprehensive provisions inspire all classes of the community with a conviction that their rights and privileges are at length duly secured and consolidated …’ There was no appeal to the people. There was no talk of liberty and equality, let alone of fraternity. These were not matters that concerned the members of the committee. Their overriding ambition was to preserve the unity and harmony of the country, and in particular to preserve the property rights of the landed gentry. The key word was ‘finality’, which could only mean that the Whigs retained power indefinitely. By also including the more respectable freeholders in its provisions, the committee hoped to bring forward some conciliation between the landowners and the middle class so that both might reign unimpeded in their own domain. In January 1831 Grey wrote to a colleague: ‘I am going tomorrow to Brighton to propose our plea of reform. It is a strong and effectual measure. If the King agrees to it, I think we shall be supported by public opinion. If he does not – what is to come next?’ His fears seemed to be illusory. The king approved of the reform project in all its details.

Or so he said. He did not wish to defy or contradict his new first minister. He had some sense of what was known as ‘the spirit of the times’. Even as the social and economic condition of the country had changed significantly, the political system had remained immobile. Descriptions of it included paralysis and putrescence. Cornwall returned forty-four members while Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester returned none. In the borough of Old Sarum two members were elected by seven voters, but in fact the votes were attached to empty fields, as the landowner controlled the franchise. The list of absurdities was immense. The reformers had every justification on their side except the crucial one. Whatever the oddities and failures of the system, it worked. It maintained what the king described to Palmerston, now the new foreign secretary, as the ‘tranquillity of States and the Peace and Prosperity of the country’. The consequences of change might be frightful. The great figures of former parliaments would no longer be introduced into the system but would be replaced by ranks and ranks of mediocrities controlled by the electors. The landed interest would be subdued by a new urban or mercantile class with no traditional ties to the country. This would be only the beginning of a national transformation; England would become London, ruled by mobs and demonstrations.

The debate on the Reform Bill, therefore, took place in a state of great excitement. On the night of 1 March 1831, the leader of the House of Commons, Lord John Russell, began to read out the details of his proposal. Many of those present had anticipated that some twenty or thirty constituencies would be dissolved or changed. Russell, however, had determined that fifty-six ‘rotten boroughs’, each with two members, should be abolished. Thirty other constituencies were to lose one of their members, while 143 seats were to be transferred to the counties and the new towns. The uproar was immense, wholly commensurate with the most radical change in the electoral system yet attempted. A total of 102 seats, at the very least, would no longer exist. Others, yet to be determined, would take their place.

The Tories erupted into hysterical laughter at the enormity of the plan. It just did not seem possible. ‘Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again … It was like seeing’, Lord Macaulay wrote to an acquaintance, ‘Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver take the mace from the table.’ He explained how the Commons waited in intense excitement for the final tally of votes as ‘Charles Wood, who stood near the door, jumped upon a bench and cried out “They are only three hundred and one.” We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross, waving our hats, stamping against the floor, and clapping our hands.’ He described the demeanour of those who had opposed Reform. ‘And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation.’ The news soon passed from club to club in Westminster and beyond, where the calls went around of ‘We’ve beat ’em’ and ‘The game’s up’ and ‘They’re done for’.

The bill had passed by one vote, however, which was the next-worst thing to defeat. Grey was now determined to dissolve parliament, no doubt in expectation of a larger majority in favour of Reform. But the opposition was determined to avoid what was considered to be an unhappy fate and spoke eloquently against any move to dissolve. The king considered this to be a design against his prerogative, and he rode down to Westminster with the fixed decision to dissolve. It was done.

The subsequent election of 1831 was known as the ‘Dry Election’, since for the first time the voters did not need to be bribed to cast their vote. Dickens’s account of the Eatanswill election in The Pickwick Papers (set in 1827 but published in 1836) was a poignant reminder of the bribery and drunkenness that habitually took place. The men were kept continually drunk and locked in the public house until it was time to vote. Grey dissolved parliament and precipitated a general election with a popular cry of ‘The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill’. It was irresistible to all those except the constitutionally timid. It was, perhaps, the closest event to a referendum that England had ever known. London itself was decked with ‘illuminations’ for the event, a euphemism for mayhem and blackmail on the streets. Those who did not put a lighted candle in a prominent position had their windows smashed. You could follow the trail of the mob by the litter of broken glass.

A meeting of the National Reform Association in the Crown Tavern on Museum Street declared that ‘the evils inseparable from misgovernment, having at length pressed upon the people with a severity too great to be any longer quiescently endured, their first efforts have been directed to put an end to a system, the workings of which have entailed upon them such accumulated ills …’ The duke of Wellington believed the revolution had begun and saw nothing ahead but civil war and bloodshed. This had by now become a truism, with about as much reality as a bad dream. But it persisted. In the event the ministry of Earl Grey was returned with a much increased majority of 136. The Whigs themselves were surprised by the extent of support for Reform, and were even alarmed by the depth of popular feeling which they had aroused.

The debate on the second Reform Bill began in the summer, as the Thames continued its slow and noisome passage through the vicinity of Westminster. It seemed that at the time of heat everything was in decay. Everything stank of corruption. The second Reform Bill was passed in June 1831 and was carried with a majority of 136. Determined efforts to stall it were successful as proponents of the bill began to suffer from the burden of argument and division. Russell’s strength began to fail, and he was forced to relinquish his position to Viscount Althorp, whose natural robustness also gave way under the strain. It did not reach the Lords until September. At the beginning of October it was rejected by the peers with a majority of forty-one. Then came the reckoning. The Chronicle and the Sun appeared in mourning black, but the Chronicle announced that ‘the triumph of the wicked does not last for ever’. Parts of Nottingham Castle were burned down, and a meeting in Birmingham of 150,000 people pledged that no taxes would be paid until Reform was introduced. Francis Place, the radical reformer, made a speech in which he declared that ‘no reality we can create will be sufficient for our purposes. We must work on Earl Grey’s imagination. We must pretend to be frightened ourselves.’

Widespread violence followed in Bristol and for the first time since the seventeenth century some country houses were fortified with cannon. The magistrates warned that no rioter or demonstrator could be killed for fear of a conviction for murder. No one wanted to be responsible for another Peterloo. The bishops were hooted in the street, and were afraid to go about their diocesan business. Cobbett reported that ‘every man you met seemed to be convulsed with rage … a cry for a republic seemed pretty nearly general’. Thomas Attwood’s ‘Political Union’ in Birmingham was followed by similar societies, to the extent than an amalgamated National Political Union was established in London with the purpose of extending the suffrage to the lower middle classes and the working people. This was considered to be a threat to law and order, and the authorities attempted, largely in vain, to forestall their effect.

Disruption in the body politic was compounded by physical disease. In the autumn of 1831 cholera began to work its way through the city. John Hogg, a physician, described how ‘the disease generally began by relaxation of the bowels without pain, the evacuations being colourless’. This was followed by spasmodic pains in the bowels and diarrhoea; the condition of the invalid rapidly worsened with ‘excessive torture and prostration of strength’. Death was heralded when the body turned blue or livid, and the vital powers failed with ‘occasional evacuation of a chocolate-like fluid’. Fortunately death came within thirty-six hours. The epidemic increased in intensity. A placard was posted in Lambeth in the summer of 1832 asking:

has DEATH (in a rage) been invited by the Commissioners of Common Sewers to take up his abode in Lambeth … In this pest-house of the metropolis, and disgrace to the nation, the main thoroughfares are still without common sewers … unless something be speedily done to allay the growing discontent of the people, retributive justice in her salutary vengeance will commence her operations with the lamp-iron and the halter.

In the midst of death and disease, the political fire still burned. Despite the incendiary language, one comfort was available to the administration; people who are sick, or demoralized, do not start a revolution. Instead the victims often decided to take what was known as ‘the cold water cure’ by jumping off Waterloo Bridge.

The first and second Reform bills had fallen on the hurdle of the Lords, but a third attempt was made at the end of 1831 and the beginning of the following year. The Lords, fearful of social disorder and of threats to their privileges, passed it on 14 April 1832. Yet, astonishingly enough, three weeks later they passed a hostile amendment and the bill was lost once again. It was not wise to play the game of hazard with the populace. The duke of Wellington was once more asked to form a government with the express intention of introducing more moderate Reform. The country was now against him, with the promise of a run against the Bank of England with the slogan ‘to stop the Duke, go for gold’. But he had already stopped. In these unprecedented circumstances he could not form a government.

The king sweated in his chamber. No possible combination or contortion including Wellington would ever work. The only possible remedy was to pack the Lords with so many compliant peers that Reform would be passed. The king wept and struggled, wept and prayed, but he knew that the end had come. So he wrote a note. ‘His Majesty authorises Earl Grey, if any obstacle should rise during the further progress of the Bill, to submit to him a creation of Peers to such extent as shall be necessary to enable him to carry the Bill.’ It was enough. The threat was sufficient. The existing peers were more concerned with their status than with the voting rights of their inferiors. Most of them now prepared to absent themselves from the Reform vote and thus avoid the creation of new peers. How many might there be? Forty? Fifty? It was unthinkable. It could not happen. On 4 June 1832, the Reform Bill passed its third reading.

It was once believed that the new situation injected a popular vitality into the electoral process, and that the middle class had been able to surmount the interests of the upper classes. The evidence suggests otherwise. The old firm was still in place. All previous forms of corruption were still practised, although perhaps not so blatantly. ‘Pocket boroughs’, controlled by one grandee or family, were still to be found. Sudbury and St Albans were still open to the highest bidder. Peers and landowners continued to exercise unusual and unmerited electoral influence. Gang warfare between the parties was taken for granted. Without the secret ballot that was introduced later in the century, the constituents could be ‘worked’ and bribed by any number of means.

There was no sea-change in the voting system, with an extra 217,000 voters to add to the existing 435,000. There was a slow decline in the number of sons of peers and baronets in the Commons, but the landed interest lost only one hundred representatives in the course of thirty-five years. Some radicals were elected in the first reformed parliament, but only a sprinkling among the usual array of vested interests. John Stuart Mill wrote to a friend in 1833 that ‘our Gironde is a rope of sand … there are no leaders, and without leaders there can never be organisation. There is no man or men of commanding talent among the radicals.’ The Gironde had been a group of twelve French Republicans. But this was no revolution. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861) Mill concluded that it did nothing to change the nature of representation or to make room for any minorities within the general population. It was in effect a plausibly efficient way of maintaining the existing social system while gratifying the pretensions of some urban dwellers and radical enthusiasts. The proposals had nothing to do with manhood suffrage or annual parliaments, which had once been the indispensable demands of the radicals. Grey presented it as a reassertion of ancient, which is to say invented, rights. The crown, the landed interest, the middle classes and the people were meant to fit together like a political Rubik’s cube.

Nevertheless, it was accepted by some for want of anything better and by others in expectation of further innovation. It transpired that the landed interest could join now with the upper middle class and the more prosperous urban interests. It dismayed the Tories, perhaps, but it was well suited to the Whigs who could envisage a vast combination of interests to keep them in power. Reform had nothing to say, however, to the working class or to the lower middle class. They stayed where they were. If they were not £10 householders (occupying but not necessarily owning a house with a rental value of £10 a year) they were disqualified from voting. The proletariat, to use an anachronistic word, was not part of the system. Reform had nothing to do with democracy. Democracy was as incomprehensible as it was undesirable. The principal motive of Reform was expediency rather than principle; it abolished certain abuses, but other anomalies and inconsistencies were left in place. The aristocrats may have suffered a little (although even this is doubtful) but the radicals and reformers really gained very little. What Grey wished for was a crumb to the hungry, and the quelling of the possibility of insurrection. He foresaw, or said he foresaw, no need for any further improvements.

Yet this bill might act as a spur to greater change. John Bright, a leading radical, said that ‘it was not a good Bill, but it was a great Bill when it passed’. The fact that it was passed at all, in other words, was a measure of its greatness. No such measure had been introduced or accepted in any other English parliament, and it wholly discounted Edmund Burke’s theory that the electoral system could only be altered by organic and instinctive means. There was nothing organic or instinctive about the Reform Bill of 1832. It was devised by men with a mission to preserve their caste and to consolidate the stability of the state.

Other aspects of governance were revealed in the process. It had become clear that in any confrontation between the people and the Lords, the Lords must yield. The affluent middle class had played a part, too, which in itself marked an important change in the administration of England. Grey himself was entitled to feel some elation at his eventual triumph; if it had come to the making of peers, the king would have been forced to comply with a measure he profoundly detested. There was no contest.

One MP, Alexander Baring, warned that ‘in a reformed parliament, when the day of battle came, the country squires would not be able to stand against the active, pushing, intelligent people who would be sent from the manufacturing districts’. And could it be said that he was entirely wrong? There was indeed some apprehension about the proceedings of the first Reformed parliament in English history, with the fear that it might prove to be ungovernable. One cabinet minister prophesied that if the government ‘lose the control in the first session over the reformed House, the Meteor will be hurried into space, and Chaos is at Hand’. By the end of 1833 Grey’s son was describing the ministry as ‘utterly without unity of purpose and the sport of every wind that blows’. It was supposed that nobody could govern successfully or effectively. When the duke of Wellington had been asked what he thought of the new reformed parliament he replied: ‘I have never seen so many bad hats in my life.’

Yet the real effects of the Reform Bill were more significant than sartorial matters. The middle-class interest, now estimated to be approximately 20 per cent of the population, had grown in responsibility and influence; petitions were now flooding into the royal closet on matters concerning the slave trade and the corn trade. The power of the political unions and the labour combinations gave material advantage to the proponents of factory reform and trade union reform. The importance of political parties themselves was greatly enhanced by the influx of newly enfranchised voters and, from the 1830s, central party organizations and partisan clubs became part of the landscape of politics.

The redistribution of the ‘pocket boroughs’, and the subsequent dearth of independent members, therefore meant that party ties had grown stronger and more obvious. The two parties were left in charge of the field. As a result, reform had become the keyword of the political vocabulary. The Whigs wanted reform to preserve aristocratic privileges by making concessions to the middle classes. The Tories wanted reform to protect the poor in the old paternalist fashion with, for example, the concept of ‘just price’; the Tories attacked the new Poor Law, also, as an affront to the traditional authority of the landed gentry.

What infuriated many observers was that everything had changed and nothing had changed. That in fact seems to be the nature of English life. It was a revolution which had not changed the nature of governance. William Cobbett, as so often, put it most memorably. ‘Those happy days of political humbug are gone forever. The gentlemen opposite are opposite only as to mere local position. They sit on the opposite side of the house: that’s all. In every other respect they are like the parson and the clerk; or perhaps rather more like rooks and jackdaws; one caw and the other chatter, but both have the same object in view: both are in pursuit of the same sort of diet.’ One outsider clambering to get in, Benjamin Disraeli, asked in 1835: ‘What do they [the radicals] mean by their favourite phrase, THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE … ? … these Commons form a class in the State, privileged, irresponsible. And hereditary, like the Peers.’

The Lords had submitted but no lasting power had yet been secured over them. The Commons had won its victory, but it was still not supreme within the commonwealth. Many unanswered questions hovered over the relative status of the king and parliament. Whenever you came close to any question, however, you found muddle, ambiguity, inconsistency, deviousness and false hope.

7

The inspector

The Reform parliament, as it became known, was dissolved on 3 December 1832. In the ensuing election Grey achieved a large majority over his opponents in the new parliament which assembled on 29 January 1833. The Whigs were crowned with the laurels of Reform and comprised 441 members compared to 175 Tories under the leadership of Wellington and Peel. Peel was generally considered to be ‘the coming man’.

The new administration under Grey included some radicals heartened by the support for Reform. Three measures were crucial to their new stance as reformers opposed to the implacable Tories: the Factory Act of 1833, the Act for the abolition of slavery throughout the empire of 1833, and the New Poor Law of 1834, were the principal fruits of their activity. Their ambitions had a Benthamite cast, since Bentham and Bentham’s laws were congenial to younger and more liberal Whigs.

The Factory Act had its origin fourteen years earlier when Robert Peel had suggested a ten-year-old limit and a ten-hour day for the infants who worked in the cotton factories. He was following in the steps of his father, a rich textile manufacturer intent upon improving the conditions of his employees. The proposals disappeared into the hot air of the Commons, from which they emerged weak and practically unenforceable. However, they were revived by the troubled conditions of 1830 when Richard Oastler, a reformer, described in a letter to the Leeds Mercury the conditions of ‘thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, Parliament are this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system “colonial” slavery’. The county of Yorkshire was now represented in parliament by the giant of anti-slavery principles, Henry Brougham, who had been fighting the system for almost twenty years.

Oastler’s description caused a great stir. But the ‘factory system’ was still only imperfectly understood, and one commentator noted in 1842 that ‘the factory system is a modern creation; history throws no light on its nature, for it has scarcely begun to recognise its existence … an innovating power of such immense force could never have been anticipated’. If the characters of Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel – had suddenly come into existence they could not have caused more consternation than the new dispensation of affairs. Everything seemed too large, too complex, too diverse, to comprehend. To think on a national scale about armies and defences was not a new thing but to take a perspective on sanitation, education, housing and work had never before been attempted.

At the end of 1831 John Cam Hobhouse introduced a Ten Hours Bill to limit the employment of factory children, as a result of which a committee was established to investigate the conditions of what were already called ‘the white slaves’. An act came into force on 1 March 1834, which forbade the employment of children under nine, maintained a forty-eight-hour week for children between the ages of nine and thirteen, and a daily maximum of twelve hours for those between thirteen and eighteen years. It was widely flouted or ignored, and many complained that such government measures were in deliberate opposition to the principles of free trade and fidelity to contract. Yet a stand had been made. For the first time the administration took responsibility for the plight of children under eighteen. It was the first hesitant and flawed step towards a national system of education, although no one could have anticipated such an outcome.

As a result of the new legislation, independent inspectors of the cotton factories were introduced to ensure that government legislation was obeyed; it was part of the increase in bureaucratic control that led to inspectors of prisons, of housing, of building regulations, of paving and of street lighting. By the 1840s it was generally agreed that local issues should be governed by a central authority with its own bands of supervisors. The role of inspectors in every public service – sanitation and education among them – was one of the most significant aspects of the Victorian social system which was slowly transformed from the promptings of private initiative to the structures of state intervention. The ‘Society For This’ and the ‘Society For That’ gave way to the blue book and the Home Office.

One recent study of the influence of Evangelical belief on social and political matters in the first half of the nineteenth century has been Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement, its title an apt indication of the prevailing mood among the Christian devotees who, like all citizens of a newly revised world, looked back with horror and outrage at those who came before them.

The children of the mines provoked shame, if nothing else, in the middle-class households of the country. The death of children became one of the central motifs of the age. ‘Is Little Nell dead?’ asked those who had waited for the ship bearing The Old Curiosity Shop to the port of New York in 1841. The son of the assassinated prime minister, Spencer Perceval, touched upon the raw sensibility of the age when he stood up in the Commons and declared: ‘I stand here to warn you of the righteous judgment of God, which is coming on you, and which is now near at hand.’ Colleagues tried to drag him down to his seat and Hansard reported that ‘indescribable confusion prevailed’. It was in this atmosphere that the act for the abolition of slavery passed in the summer of 1833.

It had been the favoured reform of Evangelicals, and particularly of those reformers who came to be known as the Clapham Sect. Twenty-six years before, the slave trade had been abolished, and now slavery itself was banned within the bounds of empire. The original request had come from the Society of Friends, and their missionary or propagandizing qualities animated the political, humanitarian and philanthropic movements of the age. There was another factor. The slave trade had been conducted along the ocean and coastal routes, but England’s maritime supremacy was supposed to carry with it the force of law. All slaves under the age of six were to be freed unconditionally, therefore, while those above that age were to become apprentices with limited hours of labour and guaranteed wages. How quickly and completely these conditions were met on the other side of the world is another matter, but the slave owners were given £20 million in compensation.

Yet the free men of England themselves were not necessarily at liberty, bound by the iron shackles of poverty as tightly as any regimen of slaves. By 1830 one-fifth of the nation’s revenues were devoted to poor relief, against a scene of rick-burning, lawless wandering and the breaking of machines. With the dissolution of the old society, in which poverty was part of the hierarchical order of things, comfortable notions of the necessity of the labouring poor, and the holiness of poverty, were quite out of date. In 1832 the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws had completed its work and had come to the conclusion that no previous scheme of poor relief served its purpose.

So a new system of poor relief was introduced at this time, with the purpose of distinguishing between those who would not work and those who could not work. The old Poor Law was maintained by the people of the local parish, who best knew the circumstances of those who claimed relief; it had been operating since the beginning of the seventeenth century but was now regarded by the new breed of bureaucrats as outmoded and outworn. The New Poor Law was proposed in 1834 as a model of organization and efficiency. It was the Benthamite way. The old parishes were grouped into ‘unions’ which, under the supervision of three Poor Law commissioners in Whitehall, controlled the novel institution of ‘workhouses’ as instruments of containment and control. The new policy of central determination and local administration became the key contribution of the nineteenth century to social policy.

The Whitehall commissioners became known as ‘the three bashaws [pashas] of Somerset House’, ‘the Three-Headed Devil King’ or ‘The Three’. The instruments of their power were the local boards of guardians who ensured that only the sick or the properly indigent were permitted to enter the workhouse. Outdoor relief to able-bodied men was prohibited. Poverty was not enough; after all, the adult male could work himself out of poverty. Workhouses themselves were so constituted as to repel any but those in dire need; families were split up, the necessities of life were severely rationed and the inmates were obliged to take up repetitive, useless and wearisome tasks. One supporter of the system, the Reverend H. H. Milman, wrote that ‘the workhouses should be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation and humility; it should be administered with strictness – with severity; it should be as repulsive as is consistent with humanity’.

The introduction of this harsh regimen does in part explain the origin of Chartism as a mass movement of protest. The workhouses were hated by the people, and particularly by the poor; they were the agents of oppression and were known as ‘Bastilles’. To be obliged to enter a workhouse was, in effect, to go into a prison. The workhouse was also the child of the reformed parliament; no previous parliament could have created anything so uniform or so bureaucratic. It needed the Whigs, the reformers, the dogmatists and the Benthamites to bring it to fruition. It should also be remembered that the New Poor Law was proposed and passed by the Whigs rather than the Tories. Many Tories supported it, of course, but there was a band of radical Tories who denounced it as the enemy of the people. The suspicion of such institutions soon ran very deep, and accounts in part for the reluctance of parents to send their children into the new schools, which were often built in the dreary grey stone of the workhouse. Disraeli knew it as the new ‘Brutalitarianism’. This image of dour severity and no less harsh sanctimony endured for many decades as an example of what came to be known as ‘Victorianism’. It sprang out of high ambition and solid principle but, as soon as the light shone upon it, it became oppressive and disheartening.

In this period Princess Victoria began a number of ‘journeys’ through England in order to acquaint herself with the country of which she would one day be mistress. In one of the first entries in her diary she wrote that ‘we just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black …’ Her slight insouciance at the sight of her suffering subjects would be a token of the reign. As a young woman, too, she was possessed of a fierce temper during which she would lash out at those around her. King William was fond of his niece, but had nothing but contempt for the princess’s mother, the duchess of Kent, whom he suspected of manipulation and betrayal. Victoria did not have a happy childhood, therefore, alternately bullied and overprotected. She grew up in a glasshouse, while those around her were more interested in benefits for themselves than advantage for the girl. But she had a shrewd eye for insubordination. Even when small she was every inch a queen and preferred companions who played an obeisant role. ‘I may call you Jane,’ she told one childhood acquaintance, ‘but you must not call me Victoria.’ She may have been a prisoner in all but name, but she was a spoiled prisoner; all her life she remained headstrong, capricious and demanding.

She was an exacting correspondent, and it has been calculated that if her letters were placed from end to end they would encompass 700 volumes. This is a Victorian tendency taken to extremes. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the old king died a month after Victoria had come of age, thus avoiding a regency in which the new queen would have had to defer to the duchess of Kent and her advisers.

8

Steam and speed

The first steamboat crossed the Channel in 1816. If the wind was not strong the crossing took between three or four hours. A paddle-steamer soon rode out from Newhaven to Dieppe, while other steamers chugged away in the vicinity of Hamburg and Gothenburg. The first railway route was a ramshackle effort, its rails stretching only a couple of miles to the local colliery, and it is now generally agreed that the railway age really began in 1815. That is when steam rose to a new height. Many people are aware of James Watt’s inspiration from a boiling tea kettle, but few have seen the engraving of Allegory on the Significance of Steam Power. Watt sits dreaming in a corner while a circle of steam surrounds a vision of factories, chimneys and mills as a foretaste of the new England.

Steam came slowly. An engraving of 1809, Richard Trevithick’s Railway Circus, shows the inventor and engineer guiding his steam locomotive in a circle in front of a throng of spectators just as if he were parading a tame elephant at a circus. The entertainment was called ‘Catch Me Who Can’. But its central significance was missed.

The railway represented, in the phrase of the period, ‘the annihilation of time and space’. The landscape itself seems to have changed. It had long since lost its natural woodland but now its heaths, wastes and village commons were in this period ‘enclosed’ within small patches and areas, partly to make way for the new railway lines. For foreign travellers the English countryside presented a garden-like system of hedges and fences. Yet it was not necessarily picturesque. The northern factory towns, soon to be linked by the railway, were grim enough to compete with the broken-down slums of London where the air was foul and the water poisonous. In some of the rural districts, cottages were still made of mud and road scrapings, while huts of turf still contained the peasant and the pig equally. This is as much part of early nineteenth-century England as the Corn Laws and George IV. The trains would soon run at a speed whereby a blackened city slum might flash past after a colliery and not be distinguished from it.

The building of the railways was the largest human endeavour to take place in so short a time. The Stockton–Darlington Railway, under the supervision of George and Robert Stephenson, was opened in 1825, and the Manchester–Liverpool Line five years later. The Stockton–Darlington’s main line from Shildon to Stockton covered 22 miles, the longest for any locomotive. But the line was also used as a public thoroughfare shared with steam goods trains, horse-wagons and a rail stagecoach. The beginnings of any great enterprise are mixed and uncertain. The steam engine was by now well enough known, however, as were the metal rails that carried it on its short journeys. But nobody had any idea what a railway carriage should look like. The first of them were simply carriages designed for roads that were then placed on railway wheels, with a boot for articles and a rack on the roof for luggage. The carriages had a length of about 20 feet, a width of 6 feet and a body height of 6 or 7 feet; they were like Alice in Wonderland carriages, had Alice then been written.

The explosion had begun. Between the end of 1844 and the beginning of 1849 more than 3,000 miles of track had been laid, as opposed to 172 miles of new roads and streets; in this period the number of train journeys rose from 33 million to 60 million. It is not at all wonderful that the salient aspects of this period were universally attributed to ‘SPEED’. The canals were finished, the turnpike was an anachronism and the roads were neglected. The traps, the gigs, the flys, the chariots, the phaetons, the wagonettes, the dog-carts and the Whitechapels were soon things of the past. But what was the point of speed? William Cobbett met a countrywoman who had never in her life gone beyond the boundaries of her parish. He admired her and complained that ‘the facilities which now exist of moving human bodies from place to place are amongst the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals and, of course, of happiness’. Meanwhile the great dock system of London was being given its final shape with the East and West India, London, Commercial and Surrey Docks completed by 1816.

The great novelty of speed was the most surprising aspect of life. One contemporary, W. R. Greg, remarked upon a life ‘without leisure and without pause – a life of haste … we have no time to reflect where we have been and whither we intend to go’. This has no doubt been the complaint of many generations in which change is pre-eminent. When Thomas de Quincey’s ‘The English Mail Coach’ was published, with all its intimations of speed and doom, it had already been overtaken by the rushing train. In the year before that essay’s publication, Charles Dickens chronicled the apotheosis of the railway in Dombey and Son (1848) as the lines stretched out from London towards the unknown future. The headmaster of Rugby school, Thomas Arnold, stated in 1832 that ‘we have been living … the life of three hundred years in thirty’. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the idea of change has been incorporated and is part of the human nervous system. In the days of the railway it administered an electric shock. In 1833 Bulwer-Lytton observed that ‘every age may be called an age of transition … the passing-on, as it were, from one state to another never ceases; but in our age the transition is visible’. This was also the year in which the term ‘scientist’ was coined.

It had become what Carlyle called a ‘Mechanical Age’ of which the characteristics soon became evident. It encouraged uniformity and anonymity. It encouraged decorum and restraint. It was an age of quickness of action and reaction, quick at meals, quick at work, quick at dressing. Look deep into the Thames and you might see a tunnel already four years in the making, attended by diving bells. Look up and you could see the hydrogen balloons in the sky. Soon there would be no more exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, no more cries of ‘All right!’ as the coaches left the yards of the inns. Everything was moving forward.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English Traits (1856), observed that ‘mines, forges, mills, breweries, railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, have operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and action of men’. The steam engine became the metaphor of the age, and there were many discussions on the notional benefits of men operating like machines. Well, that would be progress.

Nevertheless, this was an age when it was not considered either just or fashionable to decry progress, especially when by the end of the 1840s the presence of electricity became known to a large audience. Its significance as an agent of material advance and increased production was quickly understood. The idea of an electrical culture which could be co-opted into an industrial machine culture was infinitely promising. The voltaic pile invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the discovery in 1820 that an electric current created a magnetic field, afforded new means of controlling and changing the natural world. The Victorians were the progenitors of science, the spectators of science, the demonstrators of science and the elucidators of science. Its practitioners were viewed as both shamans and showmen since electricity, in particular, had become the key component of an age which elicited wonder and surprise. In the National Gallery of Practical Science, a flea could be magnified to the size of a very large elephant, and an electrical eel was seen to stun its prey. (The death of the eel attracted much newspaper comment.) Faraday’s ‘Christmas lectures’ were inaugurated in 1825. He was the seer who announced in November 1845 that light, heat and electricity were ‘merely modifications of one great universal principle’.

If the world could be viewed as an electrical scheme, then the scientist became its natural interpreter and, perhaps, its exploiter. Nineteenth-century texts are filled with references to energy and power. The fashion for mesmerism, for example, was based upon the belief that the powers of the human body could be conducted and controlled by means of an invisible electrical fluid creating an ‘animal magnetism’ that bound one person with another; electricity was described by the English physicist James Joule as ‘this surprisingly animated elemental fire’.

In this period, theories of heat, light velocity and electricity were intimately related to the dynamic nature of energy. All was of a piece. These theories were in turn connected to the suppositions about power and dominance that governed social and sexual relations. The concept of political and social ‘system’ would emerge in the 1840s but already discussion centred on ‘the dynamics of systems’, on ‘fields of force’ and on ‘magneticcentres’. It is appropriate that the specifically English contribution to the science of the period lay primarily in physics and in the analysis of energy; it was a world spinning around electricity, magnetism, electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Specialist research societies, such as the London Electrical Society, emerged with a new breed of professional or specialized scientists. One very rewarding experiment lay in the application of electricity to a recently hanged corpse, where ‘every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish and ghastly smiles. At this point several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.’

This is close to the territory of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which the human being becomes in part a machine to be galvanized into life. It was one of the emblems of the nineteenth century, based upon the vision of factory workers being as mechanical as the machinery they attended and reduced in status to nothing more than ‘galvanized corpses’. Machinery was the agent of control and regulation, of order and of discipline.

In 1836 insects began to appear on a continually electrified stone, eliciting the deduction that electricity had in fact created them. The experimenter, Andrew Crosse, reported that ‘on the twenty eighth day these insects moved their legs, and in the course of a few days more detached themselves from the stone and moved over the surface at pleasure, although in general they appeared adverse to motion, more particularly when first born’. This is as ghastly as the account of the revivified corpse, and elicited equivalent responses of horror. The local farmers, believing that the electrical insects had blighted their crops, performed an exorcism in the vicinity. Leaving aside the possibility that the whole exercise was an elaborate hoax, it is assumed that the creatures were cheese mites or dust mites that had contaminated the equipment. The experiment was not replicated.

So if electricity was a living force then perhaps its machines could live? ‘No classes of beings’, Samuel Butler wrote in Erewhon (1872), ‘have in any time past made so rapid a forward movement. Should not that moment be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?’ The threat was real. ‘The delicacy of the machine’s construction’ will aid the advance of machine language as intricate as our own ‘daily giving them greater skill and supplying more of that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be better than any intellect … surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system’. And so the argument continued, accurately conveying the concerns of a much later period.

This is best understood in the context of the theology of the nineteenth-century world, the great burning lamp to which all paid their obeisance. The temples of this new deity were the Victorian exhibition halls, among them the Adelaide Gallery in the Lowther Arcade and the Polytechnic Institution in Cavendish Square. Here could be found a steam gun, a ferro-electric globe and an oxyhydrogen microscope. A 70-foot canal had been constructed to demonstrate the abilities of a paddle-driven steamboat. The collection was highly eclectic, including ‘weapons taken from the natives of Owhyhee, who were engaged in the murder of Captain Cook’. It suggests that even as late as the 1840s the elements of scientific progress were classified as wonders or marvels rather than the discoveries of men. They had no epistemological status of their own. The objects of the exhibition could also be seen as consumer items, similar to those in the new shopping arcades that were becoming part of the commercial world; the engines and machines that had previously been left for the workshop and the factory were steadily taking their place in a more familiar and acquisitive environment.

By 1830, industrialization had increased with more facility and progress than in any other country. England’s exports, too, were greater than elsewhere; the nation was producing 80 per cent of Europe’s coal and 50 per cent of Europe’s iron. All the steam engines in the world came from England, and in 1832 Nathan Rothschild argued that England was ‘the Bank for the whole world. All the transactions in India, in China, in Germany, in the whole world, are guided here and settled in this country.’ Yet in a sense the projections are spurious. They represent the account book of London and the nation. They know nothing of its life. Alton Locke, in Charles Kingsley’s novel of the same name, recollected London in this flourishing period. ‘I am a Cockney among Cockneys … my earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious ugliness.’ God had made him a Cockney for a purpose, ‘that I might learn to feel for the wretches who sit stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease with every breath, bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke, from their cradle to their grave. I have drunk of the cup of which they drink.’ Did anyone ever tell them that their city, without form or colour or life, was the ‘Bank for the whole world’?

Even if it was a bank for the world, it was not necessarily a welcome one. The whole purport of British foreign policy, under a succession of ministers, was to remain disentangled from the affairs of Europe as much as shame and danger would allow. In the spring of 1831 Austrian troops advanced into Modena and Parma in order to suppress rebellion and to counter French claims of suzerainty. The consequences were obvious enough, and the general conflagration would turn northern Italy into a battlefield. The war between the two sides lasted for almost two years. Viscount Palmerston, as foreign secretary of the time, made the English policy plain. ‘It will be impossible for England to take part with Austria in a war entered into for the purpose of putting down freedom and maintaining despotism; neither can we side with France in a contest the result of which may be to extend her territories: we shall therefore keep out of the contest as long as we can.’ What of the people who witnessed the Austrians marching through their territories? ‘If we could by negotiation obtain for them a little share of constitutional liberty, so much the better; but we are all interested in maintaining peace …’ It is one of the defining moments of English foreign policy. Peace meant trade. Peace meant industrialization. Peace meant low taxes and prosperity. Peace was paramount.

There had been a jolt. In September 1830, a trial run of the steam engine known as the Rocket was advertised; its boiler was painted sunflower yellow, and its chimney was white. This was the springtime of the machine. William Huskisson, the member of parliament for Liverpool, had agreed to be present on 15 September to witness the railway journey from that city to Manchester. It was already being acclaimed as the sensation of the hour. One prominent engineer of the period, Nicholas Wood, wrote that the projected railway seemed, by a common unanimity of opinion, to ‘be deemed as the experiment which would decide the fate of railways. The eyes of the whole scientific world were upon that great undertaking.’

The journey began smoothly enough at Liverpool and a stop was made at Parkside to take in water; the invited guests were told not to leave their carriages. Nevertheless, Huskisson leapt from his carriage to the ground between the tracks. He went over to greet the duke of Wellington, travelling in another carriage, when he was suddenly aware of the fact that the Rocket was bearing down on him on the parallel set of rails. A door was opened and hands were outstretched to help him; but he could not haul himself into the carriage; he fell onto the track and his legs were mangled by the locomotive. Huskisson died a few hours later. The death of a young and already well-known politician was in itself a considerable shock to the newspaper-reading public, but to die in such a gruesome and unprecedented manner provoked a sensation. It seems that Huskisson had never seen a train before, and was under the impression that like a horse or a stagecoach it could move out of the way.

It was also cause for sensation that one of the locomotives transported the ailing body of Mr Huskisson some 15 miles in twentyfive minutes, when it was generally believed that the railway could manage only 8 or 10 miles an hour. The actual and unprecedented speed struck observers and commentators with astonishment. So, paradoxically, the first fatal railway accident confirmed the supremacy of the train and conveyed to the public the power and possibility of the new form of transport. Suddenly it seemed that the island had shrunk in size. The elasticity of time itself was exemplified by the fact that one member of Lord Liverpool’s cabinet was robbed by a highwayman and another killed by a train.

In 1830, too, the actress Fanny Kemble had been permitted to travel on one of the new locomotives by its progenitors, the Stephensons, and reported that ‘you can’t imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical unvarying pace … I felt as if no fairy tale was ever so wonderful as what I saw …’ The instinctive analogy of complex machinery with magic and fairy tale is one of the more interesting characteristics of the first half of the nineteenth century. George Stephenson himself said, many years later, that ‘as I look back at these stupendous undertakings, it seems that we had realised in our generation the fabled powers of the magician’s wand’. It was the only language of wonder then available. Fanny Kemble herself was an insatiable seeker after sensation, and can be said to have thrown caution to the winds; but the great majority of railway passengers were, at that time, nervous travellers. The speed, the noise and the sheer novelty of being driven by a locomotive along metal lines were causes of anxiety if not of outright fear.

The Railway Regulation Act of 1844, passed long after Huskisson’s accident had been forgotten, was designed to consolidate the minimum standards for what had already become a means of mass transport. The first railway ‘boom’ was already taking place. Some investors had been made nervous by the publication of such pamphlets as Railroad Impositions Detected, which claimed that the Manchester and Liverpool railway had not made 1 per cent profit. Cautious investment and gradual success changed the views of speculators, however, with the signal intervention of the London to Birmingham line that opened in the autumn of 1838. In 1844, 800 miles of route were authorized by parliament; in the following year almost 3,000 miles were so approved. ‘The press supported the mania,’ as one writer of 1851 put it, ‘the government sanctioned it: the people paid for it. Railways were at once a fashion, and a frenzy. England was mapped out for the iron roads.’ Within fifty years sea was linked to sea, river to river as well as ports, towns, cities, markets and mines. The recent past was already slipping from view. The old inns and ancient country taverns became one of the prime objects of the camera to evoke what was being seen as ‘old England’. They were becoming part of the antiquarian tradition which had always been popular among the English. They were picturesque and made a pretty photograph.

It has been calculated that the most popular subject among Victorian photographers was the ruin; it could summon up sweet passages of silent thought which, as it were, sealed off the sights and sounds of the modern day. The poet Sadakichi Hartmann remarked on the daguerreotype that ‘it lies in its case among old papers, letters and curios. A frail casement of wood with black embossed paper. We cannot resist the temptation to open and glance at it … The image of some gentleman with a stock or some lady in a bonnet and puffed sleeves appears like a ghost-like vision.’ This might be the equivalent of reading a book of history such as this one, as the first railway engines pass through our field of vision.

A new system of communication had also been developed in this period, and its practicality was first adduced in 1827 when a telegraphic message was transmitted from Holyhead to Liverpool in approximately five minutes. Ten years later a telegraphic system was installed along the Great Western Line, and a cable between England and France successfully laid in 1851. At a time when, it was said, a householder sent a letter to his local fire company to warn that his house was on fire, the immediacy of the telegraph altered all perceptions of time and space. When a young man, Charles Bright, was knighted in 1858 for laying the first transatlantic cable, The Times described it as ‘the greatest discovery since that of Columbus’ and ‘a vast enlargement … given to the sphere of human activity’. Dickens concurred that it was ‘of all our modern wonders the most wonderful’. Such superlative praise was not then out of place. To transmit a message across hundreds of miles of space was considered tantamount to an increase in the rate of human evolution.

9

The pig is killed

By the beginning of 1834 the administration of Earl Grey was under duress. Throughout the previous year he had been contemplating resignation. ‘I go like a boy to school, and with very little expectation of finding myself equal to the discharge of any duties.’ His private doubts were compounded by the fissiparous state of his party in the Commons, where senior ministers clashed over the details of policy. Robert Peel did not want the Whig ministry to fall, however, until his party was ready to take over the administration. The problem was that some 150 nominal Whigs might also be classified as reformers or radicals; their politics were not clearly known and they were in effect unpredictable. One of them was a prizefighter, and another had fought a duel with his tutor, but the radical ‘wing’, if it can be so called, also included such old reformers as William Cobbett. It was in the interests of the Tories, therefore, to assist the government in moments of embarrassment or likely defeat; they had no more wish than the moderate Whigs for a radical coup.

The strain of maintaining this precarious position, as well as various crises in foreign policy, were the reasons for Grey’s reluctance to continue. His son complained that Grey ‘has no longer the energy to control a set of men each of whom is in this manner pursuing his separate interests … and the Government is consequently utterly without unity of purpose, and the sport of every wind that blows’. A windswept government is an unlikely refuge. Grey confessed often enough that he was worn out but that his colleagues would not let him go.

The impression is of ministers talking themselves to death. They could deal with specific measures but they could not bring themselves to discuss the principles of their actions. It would be too foolhardy. The problems of Ireland were characteristic of this, where some advised reform and reconciliation while others recommended more severe actions. The results were half-measures and contradictory signals of intent. The Coercion Act of 1833, for example, was one of the first issued by the Reform administration. It was supposed to enforce the powers of the government of Ireland against radical activity, by creating something very like martial law. Yet at the same time the administration attempted to placate the Catholics and to propose a bill for reform of the Church of Ireland. Some bishoprics were to be removed and the more fervent Protestant clergymen to be excluded from the more pious Catholic parishes. Something was given, and something taken away.

This was part of the ‘Irish Question’, although it was not at all clear what the question was. Disraeli wondered whether it meant the pope or potatoes. It might more tentatively be ascribed to Church tithes, or ‘the cess’. Some ministers wished them to be appropriated for the sake of the state, while others insisted that they should remain in the control of the Irish Church. When the cabinet split on that question, four ministers resigned. Ireland was an open wound which no English government could heal. Various proposals were made to Daniel O’Connell in order to acquire the support of the Irish members, but Grey and others were not inclined to agree with any bargain or compromise. When O’Connell decided that he had been duped he rose in the Commons and declared in strong and colourful language that he had been betrayed. ‘There,’ Lord Althorp whispered to John Russell, ‘now the pig’s killed.’ Althorp had been one of those who misled O’Connell, and he now resigned. So hopeless were the disagreements in the administration, so uncertain were its principles on the matter of Ireland, that Grey also resigned a few days later. ‘My political life is at an end,’ he said, with something like relief. Ireland had done for him.

Melbourne put the matter best. ‘What all the wise promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.’ Did it mean that the entire ministry would go down, with Grey playing the role of the captain on the deck? When asked the question he replied: ‘In theory, yes, but, in fact, no.’ The king himself favoured a form of coalition, which might mean Wellington and Peel together with the more suitable Whigs. It was not going to happen. Wellington politely refused on the grounds that it would be almost impossible to unite men ‘who appear not to concur in any one principle or policy’. Even the king conceded the point. Reluctantly he chose to ask Melbourne, as the only Whig who would ‘do’, largely on the grounds that he was considered to be no threat to anyone. Melbourne professed detachment on the matter. His private secretary, Thomas Young, said that ‘he thought it was a damned bore’, but what else could he do? It was perhaps his duty to obey his sovereign or, perhaps, inwardly, in the secret sessions of his heart, he realized the opportunity. Young had told him, at the time: ‘Why damn it such a position never was occupied by any Greek or Roman and, if it only lasts two months, it is worthwhile to have been Prime Minister of England.’ ‘By God that’s true,’ Melbourne replied. ‘I’ll go.’ Classical allusions always had an effect on the more aristocratic of the politicians eager to invoke honour and nobility under any circumstances.

Melbourne never betrayed his feelings in any matter, and would always speak inconsequentially to maintain his reserve. He was reluctantly chosen by the king ‘after cautioning him against the admission of persons with visionary, fanatical or republican principles’. The advice was not necessary. Melbourne would no more favour a fanatic or a visionary than a Roman monk or Egyptian conjuror. One of his first measures was to abandon the Coercion Bill and propose something milder. This was much to the discomfort of the king, however, who had thought the original bill to be too pacific.

The problems associated with Catholicism were not reserved to Ireland alone. There had in England always been an element in favour of Anglo-Catholicism, a High Church movement that wished to retain the ritual and ceremony of the Roman Church. It was an attempt to exorcize the spirit and nature of the Reformation and bring the English Church back into the purview of the old faith. It was of course utterly resented by the majority of Protestants who saw it as a threat to the modest and domestic demeanour of Anglicanism. But there were many now within the Established Church who were creeping towards the cross of the Roman benediction.

In the autumn of 1833 a pamphlet was issued that became the first of ninety, entitled Tracts for the Times, that conveyed the essential spiritual position of High Anglicanism; those who supported these doctrines in turn became known as Tractarians and, since many were based at Oxford University, were collectively called the Oxford Movement. One of their adherents, Dean Church, described the tracts as ‘brief stern appeals to conscience and to reason, sparing of words, utterly without rhetoric, intense in purpose’. They had been preceded by a sermon in the summer of the year 1833 at St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on the theme of ‘national apostasy’; the sermon was delivered by John Keble, who was then renowned for The Christian Year (1827), a series of poems for Christian festivals. He, too, wished to revitalize the established faith with a strong attachment to the Church fathers and a reaffirmation of the beauty of holiness.

The first tract had been composed by John Henry Newman, whose sense of spiritual purpose and simplicity of sentiment were at the centre of the new movement. His austerity and purity were emblematic of the high sense of resolve among the Tractarians who affirmed the Apostolic Succession against the Latitudinarianism inherited from the eighteenth century and the complacent pieties of the orthodox Anglican communion. Newman and his colleagues were like apostles in the desert of nineteenth-century convention. ‘I am but one of yourselves,’ he wrote in the first sentences, ‘a presbyter, and therefore I conceal my name, lest I should take too much on myself by speaking in my own person. Yet speak I must, for the times are very evil, yet no one speaks against them.’ They were utterly opposed to liberalism and the tendency to soften the moral authority of dogma. They were part of the spiritual earnestness of the nineteenth century and can be seen as complementary to the Evangelical revival embodied in Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. All of them reflected the godliness of English faith.

They reminded many Christians of the limits of established piety, and as a result provoked a controversy that haunted the nineteenth century. They were called Romanists or worse. Some of them were expelled from their colleges and excluded from the pulpit. From a lay perspective they might have been considered as enemies of the crown because of their allegiance to the pope. They in fact posed no threat at all. They were thoroughly loyal and, with their ingrained obeisance to authority, were perhaps more dependable than free-thinkers or Dissenters. They were in no sense related to the Catholic Association of O’Connell.

This was indeed a time of associations, fraternities and clubs for kindred spirits. But when did an association become a trained band, and when did a fraternity become a guild or even a union? In 1834, partly under the guidance of Robert Owen, the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union was established. It had been preceded by a Grand General Union of all the Operative Spinners of the United Kingdom and by a National Association for the Protection of Labour. These organizations were largely concerned with the preservation of the living standards of their members, but the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union had larger ambitions. It wanted to take aim against the Reform Act of 1832, which had left five out of six working men without a vote. Under the stimulus of Owen the Grand Union proposed to organize every trade or industry so that the working people could take control of the economic machinery of the country. It was perhaps an inspiring idea and drew some half a million supporters. But like many utopian projects it fell at that moment when reality breaks through. A myriad of strikes flared up without taking fire, and the workers were systematically ground down by the actions of politicians and magistrates. The employers had already fought back with something known as ‘the presentation of the document’, in which each man seeking work signed a promise to renounce the trade unions and all their works.

This is the context for the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm labourers from Dorset who were sentenced to seven years’ labour in Australia. Their offence had been to swear certain ‘secret oaths’ to bind them together when in fact they were following standard union practice in such matters. Melbourne and his colleagues upheld the judgement, thus earning the contumely of most of the working population and many of their political allies. A great demonstration was organized in London for what was called ‘the day of the trades’, but it seemed to lead precisely nowhere. Melbourne had in fact an instinctive sympathy with discipline and punishment ever since his days at school. He told his sovereign that flogging always had an ‘amazing effect’ upon him; it delighted him so much that he practised it on his serving maids.

Melbourne’s first attempt at government lasted only four months. His cabinet was buffeted by resignations, and he himself was aware of a most uncertain political future. ‘There exists a general uneasiness about something,’ Wellington wrote in October to the king’s brother, the duke of Cumberland, ‘nobody knows what, and dissatisfaction with everything.’ Melbourne himself gave at least the appearance of calm or even ennui. Everyone had been astounded by his rise to the premiership. He seemed lackadaisical, preferring not to do anything remotely radical. When the Hollands, a family of Whig grandees, visited Melbourne in his new state they ‘found him extended on an ottoman sans shirt, sans neckcloth, in a great wrapping gown and in a profound slumber’. One of his favourite phrases was ‘It’s all the same to me’. He was well known for judgements of a similar nature. ‘I generally find’, he said, ‘that nothing that is asserted is ever true, especially if it is on the very best authority.’ His knowledge of history was profound, if in his case ineffective, but he was castigated when he admitted that he had not read Wordsworth’s The Excursion. This was a period when even the grandest politicians had a working knowledge of the best of contemporary literature. ‘I’ve bought the book,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing when you leave a book on the table how much you know what is in it, without reading it.’ We may summarize his politics with a short note: ‘When in doubt, do nothing.’

But then there was a purge, at least of a symbolic kind. In the early evening of 16 October 1834, a red glow illuminated the sky. It soon became clear to the surprise and delight of eager observers that the Houses of Parliament were burning down. It was for some the most memorable event they would ever witness, as the great seat of empire subsided in flames. Many people immediately considered it to be a conspiracy. Could it have been Catholics or, worse, the Irish? Could it have been the French or the Russians? Could it have been radicals or trade unionists? Others believed it to have issued from the hand of God as a punishment for the passing of the Reform Act two years before. For others, it was simply a welcome relief. The old parliament had been cramped and constricted with all the damp and noisome smells of an ancient establishment; its tortuous corridors were an image of the delays and divagations of lawmaking. Its immediate neighbourhood shared the contagion. The cardinal-archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman, described ‘the labyrinth of lanes and courts and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity and crime’. Slum was a new word, but everyone knew instinctively what it meant.

Much of this was erased by the fire that spread so widely and so furiously that at midnight the light was that of noon. ‘It was a perfect fairy scene’, one observer recalled, testifying once more to the realm of magic and wonder that lay just beneath the nineteenth-century psyche. When parts of the building tumbled down, sometimes in the midst of the crowds, some applauded as if it were an exhibition. The artist Benjamin Haydon wrote that ‘the feeling among the people was extraordinary – jokes and radicalism universal’. In moments of enthusiasm the real feelings of nineteenth-century Londoners emerged. ‘There’s a flare-up for the House o’ Lords’, ‘A judgement on the Poor Law bill’, ‘There go the Hacts [Acts]’. At first light on Friday morning the devastation was clear. The Painted Chamber and the Commons Library were destroyed. The frontage of the Commons and the arcade in front of the House of Lords had gone; the facade had collapsed, the walls were in ruins and the roofs caved in.

While the smoke still rose over Westminster, the king had told Melbourne what everybody knew or guessed – that the Whig ministry, beset by resignations and departures, was in no position to maintain the government of the country; the strength of the administration in the Commons was so weak that the sovereign felt obliged to call for Wellington to take over the post of first minister. The duke demurred, however, and recommended Robert Peel, who was considered by all parties to be the most resourceful of all claimants. The fact that Peel was a Tory rather than Whig seemed to matter not at all. It did cause some controversy, however, that the king had effectively ousted his government without any recourse to parliament or the public. No monarch would ever dare the experiment again.

The Tories had waited for this moment with Robert Peel at their head. Whig or Tory, he was the natural successor in principle as well as in policy. Peel was at that moment in Italy, however, and Wellington acted as his caretaker. The duke took over the conduct of the country just as if he were filling a vacancy in the army command. He occupied all the offices of state from the middle of November to the beginning of December. He was called the dictator, not the caretaker, but he had none of Cromwell’s piercing ambition. He simply wanted regularity and efficiency. It was a time of much speculation, and in his novel Coningsby (1844) Disraeli recalled the winter of 1834: ‘What hopes, what fears and what bets! … Everybody who had been in office, and everybody who wished to be in office; everybody who had ever had anything, and everybody who ever expected to have anything, were alike visible.’

When Peel arrived in haste from Rome he came back to a country which was ready for a general election. He sensed the mood. Melbourne had concluded of the Reform Act that ‘if it was not absolutely necessary, it was the foolishest thing ever done’. Yet for Peel it was a decisive step which had created a new electorate. It was his task to engage this new electorate in a programme of limited reform. He had a strong if not subtle mind and, as he said, approached problems of politics as if they were problems of mathematics.

The circumstances of the country were ready for his attention. The responsibilities of ministers had increased considerably over the past two decades and had nurtured a group of parliamentary managers as well as experts on foreign, economic and imperial affairs. There was need of a first minister who could grasp the political complexities of his office as well as the political requirements of the time. The extension of parliamentary business engaged public attention, and there was rarely a period in which newspapers and periodicals commanded a larger audience. Their attentiveness and detailed reporting would encourage a new kind of minister. Peel might be one of the first.

Peel dissolved parliament in the closing week of 1834 with perhaps some hope that he might increase the strength of his party and perhaps even by some miracle of electoral politics acquire the mastery. He delivered what would now be called a manifesto in the guise of a letter to his constituents at Tamworth, thus reinforcing a new interest in what can be called public opinion; he promised a thorough reform of Church and State, and declared that the Reform Bill was a ‘final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question’. In this ‘Tamworth Manifesto’, Peel maintained that he was addressing ‘that great and intelligent class of society’ in order to present them with ‘that frank exposition of general principles and views which appears to be anxiously expected’. He was in other words talking to those people who had been the beneficiaries of the Reform Act, and promising action on their behalf. In the event he gained the large number of ninety-eight seats, but it was still not enough to claim a majority. He had the additional disadvantage of facing a union of opposing parties. In a parliamentary agreement known as the Lichfield House compact, the Whigs, the radicals and the Irish agreed to work together for Peel’s downfall. When the new parliament met on 18 February he knew that he was still on borrowed time. This was not a good omen for a new prime minister. But Peel might hang on, if only because the alternative was a government led once more by Melbourne.

He suffered six defeats in as many weeks and by the spring of 1835 it was clear to the king and the first minister that they were driving down a road that had ‘No Thoroughfare’ at its head. The final curtain closed when Peel was defeated in an act concerning Irish tithes. It is one of the many paradoxes of these difficult years that Ireland brought down more than one English government. Yet the hundred days or so in which he held office did wonders for Peel’s public reputation as a strong and purposeful politician. He had in the process helped to form a Conservative party freed from instinctive reaction and from the image of the rock-hard duke standing guard over its traditional values. The Times described his resignation as ‘a grievous national calamity’, and blamed the ‘excess of party zeal’ that had brought him down. There were complaints that the parties in opposition had made a compact without any shared principles except that of destroying the prime minister.

Peel had become a commanding figure; terse, reticent, with no appetite for small measures. He revealed himself to be of strong administrative mind. He was perhaps a politician without ideals, but what were ideals good for? That is why the Tamworth Manifesto was worthy of what Disraeli called ‘a party without principles’, a taunt that would later be thrown back at Disraeli himself. Daniel O’Connell remarked of Peel that ‘his smile was like a silver plate on a coffin’, but this coldness or hauteur was in part the product of shyness. He was genuinely a withdrawn person. Disraeli, in a later pen-portrait, remarked that ‘he was very shy, but forced early in life into eminent positions, he had formed an artificial manner, haughtily stiff or exuberantly bland, of which, generally speaking, he could not divest himself’. He was from the beginning, as Lord Rosebery said, always ‘the same able, conscientious, laborious, sensitive being’. He was rich enough, but he was not a lord and suffered under his questionable status. He retained his Lancashire accent throughout his life. He was above all a man of practical measures, never so much at home as in the House of Commons. He was often compared to a beacon over the rocks, a pilot in a storm-tossed sea and a light upon the horizon. Other clichés might suggest themselves. He had difficulties with individual members – sometimes he would close his eyes, sometimes look away – but if you presented him with a knotty problem he would almost certainly untie it. He also had an enormous sensitivity to pain, and once fainted when his finger was caught in a door.

So after his first foray into government he stepped down, as the Annual Register suggested, ‘not merely as the first but without a rival’, while his Whig opponents, dazed by the harsh treatment which the king had previously given them, lacked strength and purpose. Melbourne and Russell, their principal men, had not much to comfort them in Peel’s brief ascendancy except the prospect of office. There was very little choice for William but to reinstate Melbourne as first minister, a humiliation for the sovereign who had effectively dismissed him a few months before. It had been demonstrated that parliament and people had more power than the monarch.

The old parliament was now little more than a blackened shell after the great fire, and the new members assembled in a badly singed but still serviceable House of Lords, while the lords themselves were accommodated in the Painted Chamber that had largely escaped the flames. Melbourne guided the Lords while Russell was the dominant figure in the Commons. All the liberals, the moderates, the ultra-radicals, the radicals and the philosophic radicals huddled together in the service of Melbourne. As a result of the Lichfield House compact, the Whigs also depended upon the support of Daniel O’Connell’s Irish MPs to command a majority. They were the key. The parliamentary radicals, under whatever name, were of no account in comparison; they soon dwindled into sects or less than sects. Their weakness allowed Russell to oppose further changes to the Reform Act, which the radicals ardently wished for, and why he became known as ‘Finality Jack’.

The Tories had also been variously named, but the high Tories or ultra-Tories and the liberal Tories could all be enlisted under the banner of the Conservative party. It had its own club, the Carlton, its own associations and its own agents. There was, however, a crucial difference which eventually cost Peel dear. He hoped and believed that he was capable of constructing a modern Tory party ready for the challenges of the 1830s; but in fact the majority of the party were farmers, landlords and tenants whose chief preoccupation was the price of corn and the value of the agricultural interest. The preoccupations of Peel and of the Tory party did not necessarily cohere.

The second ministry of Melbourne was dominated by the prospect of a Municipal Corporations Act that had been under discussion by a select committee of parliament. A royal commission reported: ‘there prevails amongst the great majority of the incorporated towns a general and, in our opinion, a just dissatisfaction with the municipal institutions; a distrust of the self-elected municipal councils … a distrust of the municipal magistracy; a discontent under the burdens of local taxation’. It could not be a more comprehensively damaging report. The towns and counties were in the power of a group of self-selected oligarchs; the mayor and the councils collected the revenues for their own purposes, to enrich themselves or to maintain the power of their families in the localities. The act which came into law in 1835 as a result of these deliberations destroyed the power of civic guilds and all those self-interested parties of tradesmen and craftsmen who controlled the wealth of the town.

Instead the municipal franchise was to be given to all permanent ratepayers or householders, who were to choose their representatives for a three-year period. Mayors and aldermen were to be guided by elected town councils. It was the municipal version of the Reform Act. It passed through Melbourne’s hands, as first minister of the day, but it is doubtful whether he had much to do with it. Although the act applied only to the larger towns it had broken the cold spell of inanition that had settled over the country boroughs for many generations. It could be said, in fact, that the new breed of town councillors were more effective than members of parliament in such matters as public health and sanitation. Nonconformists and Dissenters were sometimes a majority on the town council, leading perhaps to more enlightened policies. ‘It marshals all the middle class in all the towns of England,’ one observer wrote, ‘and gives them monstrous power too.’

That power was clear enough to Melbourne, who stirred himself to promote the interests of Dissenters. In 1836 his administration created a civil register of births, marriages and death, thus breaking an Anglican monopoly, as well as enacting a Dissenters’ Marriage Bill which allowed civil marriage for the first time. In the same year London University received its charter, allowing the entrance of Dissenters who were still barred from the ancient universities. It would be agreeable to ascribe good intentions to Melbourne, but the truth is that he wished to keep the Dissenters on his parliamentary side. They were some of his strongest supporters.

In the same session, the stamp duty on newspapers was lowered from fourpence to a penny. The Morning Chronicle, for example, quickly became a paper of some stature and was described by John Stuart Mill as ‘the organ of opinion in advance of any which had before found regular advocacy in the newspaper press’, by which he meant that it was the first newspaper to introduce Benthamite theory into press discussion.

Melbourne’s Tory opponents were joined in spirit by the king and even by some members of the Whig party. It might seem that he stood on an eminence surrounded by swirling waters, but time and tide were working for him. The Irish and the radicals did not wish to lose him, for fear that the Tories would take his place. Peel had set a course of moderation, until such time as he could depend on a solid victory in an election. That time was still to come. Essentially Melbourne’s administration was kept in office with Peel’s indirect support. They were both men of conservative temper who could work together without seeming so to do. Yet Melbourne was not altogether in command of his destiny. He was working in the shadow of the king’s deep displeasure; William IV had never wanted him back.

Melbourne himself, however, was the very best leader for such a situation; he exuded bonhomie and had no principles to preserve at any cost. He was therefore infinitely malleable and flexible. A government measure might be adopted by the Commons only to be thrown out by the Lords; a period of discussion and compromise would follow, at the end of which a quite different measure would be proposed. Melbourne did not object to such a state of affairs, as long as he had his cabinet with him. ‘I will support you as long as you are in the right,’ one member told him. ‘That is no use at all,’ he replied. ‘What I want is men who will support me when I am wrong.’ He was not in any sense a reformer. Delay, postponement and ambiguity were his stockin-trade. Even when his Municipal Corporation Act was thrown out for the first time by the Lords he did not seem to care. ‘What does it matter?’ he asked. ‘We have got on tolerably well with the councils for five hundred years.’ The measure did eventually pass the Lords and become law. ‘We must see how it works,’ Melbourne stated. This was the distance he always maintained in the affairs of the world. In any case he left most of the detail to the ministrations of Russell, who had the ambition and the appetite for government and was thus doomed to disappointment.

Melbourne also had an indispensable ally in the cabinet with Viscount Palmerston as foreign secretary, who soon enough would strengthen this alliance with his marriage to Emily Lamb, Melbourne’s sister. Palmerston had held his post, apart from the brief Peel episode, since 1830; before that he had been a lord at the Admiralty and secretary at war. So he was used to the diplomatic game, which he fought with cunning and bravado. Like Melbourne he had no particular policy that could be associated with him, unless it were the pragmatic one of keeping Britain one step ahead of her enemies. He worked well and wisely, even though he was cordially hated by those who worked for him; this was because he made sure that they laboured hard and conscientiously.

When the country’s vital interests were at stake, he could be both formidable and resolute. He intervened in Belgium, in Portugal, in Spain and in Syria. In all cases Palmerston believed that Britain’s reputation was at risk and so, like a policeman of the Western world, it was the foreign minister who ensured that it was respected as well as feared. He was in one sense the only light in Melbourne’s ailing ministry. He seemed to speak his mind. He explained, for example, that ‘these half-civilised governments, such as those of China, Portugal, South America, all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order … their minds are too shallow to receive an impression that will last longer than some such period and warning is of little use. They care little for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it on their shoulders before they yield.’ He tapped a vein of xenophobia and self-assertion that at a slightly later date would be called jingoism.

The jingoes were soon to be found in the Stock Exchange, in the army and the navy, in the streets of fashion where the ‘swells’ gathered, among clerks and dockers and shopkeepers. It was believed that Palmerston had divined the national spirit. He called Austria ‘an old woman’ and ‘a European China’. He could bully and he could bluster. He was sometimes called ‘Lord Pumicestone’ for his ability to rub his allies in the wrong way. He was more generally known as the more kindly ‘Pam’ or the more mysterious ‘The Mongoose’, perhaps because of his ability to scotch foreign snakes. Bulwer-Lytton remarked that ‘generally when Lord Palmerston talks of diplomacy, he also talks of ships of war’. He sent weapons directly from Woolwich arsenal to the rebels in Sicily because of his distaste for the actions of King Ferdinand of Naples. He was no lover of rulers, hereditary or otherwise. Louis Philippe called him ‘l’ennemi de ma maison’ and at a later date Victoria constantly complained that he was taking vital decisions without consulting her or her husband. To this he merely shrugged his shoulders. He always mastered the facts, and he always knew that he was right. He treated the world as if it were a great game, improvising or giving way wherever required.

Palmerston was the proponent of what was called ‘restless meddling activity’, admonishing sovereigns, threatening prime ministers and generally stirring the large cauldron of international politics. Melbourne claimed to the queen that ‘his principle and his practice, too, is that nothing fails, except weakness and timidity, and this doctrine is generally right’. A case in point concerned North Africa, when Mehemet Ali, the pasha of Egypt, decided to rebel against his nominal superior, the sultan of Turkey. This was not to Palmerston’s liking, since the decline or disintegration of the Ottoman empire, ruled by the sultan, might give Russia or France the opportunity to gain the spoils of Egypt. France in particular was seen as a major threat, with the unspoken rivalry between the two nations ever present. Palmerston did what he liked to do, by conducting negotiations and making deals without his colleagues being able to play any role.

France soon faced a quadrilateral alliance between England, Russia, Austria and Prussia. It might be called the Northern alliance. But the prospect of war with France unnerved the English cabinet. When Palmerston proposed to make a treaty with the three nations, two members of the cabinet threatened to resign. At this Melbourne was seriously alarmed. Any split, or hint of a split, would be bound to damage him. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘let nobody resign or we’ll have everybody resigning.’ Palmerston was unmoved and professed complete disinterest in French threats. He merely said that they were bluffing. He persevered. Melbourne grew ill under the strain. The streak of nervous hysteria, fully exposed at times of crisis, was one of the most important characteristics of the Victorian sensibility. A few years later, Melbourne would write to Russell of the Queen that ‘it might make her seriously ill if she were to be kept in a state of agitation and excitement’. Arthur Young, the writer and social observer, was ostensibly speaking of the electric telegraph, but he had made a more general point when he referred to a ‘universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensitivity, from one end of the Kingdom to another’.

It might be described as the apocalyptic imagination. It was widely reported, on the basis of some obscure or invented texts, that London would be swallowed by a conflagration on 17 March 1842. The Times of that day reported: ‘the frantic cries, the incessant appeals to heaven for deliverance, the heart-rending supplications for assistance, heard on every side during the day, sufficiently evidenced the power with which this popular delusion had seized the mind of these superstitious people’. The wharves were crowded with people waiting for a steamboat to take them from the city, and the trains departing from London were crowded; others sought refuge in the fields. But nothing happened.

Palmerston was right all along. He confronted the French king, Louis Philippe, with the prospect of conflict. The king backed down, and soon enough Mehemet Ali’s military bluff was called. This bloodless victory over the French was a cause of immense rejoicing in England, and it was perhaps the only foreign triumph that the Melbourne government could claim.

Palmerston proceeded with an ad hoc policy but it was none the worse for that. He was perfectly clear-sighted about the direction of national affairs and, on the rare occasions when he propounded something like a philosophy, he was invariably practical in his analysis. There was always talk of the Ottoman empire being ‘in decline’ or ‘in decay’, for example, but Palmerston remarked that ‘half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by an abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity. Thus people compare an ancient monarchy with an old building, an old tree or an old man …’ But there was no such similarity.

He once said that ‘it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal; and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ He might also have said that he had no eternal party affinity, since he was always at arm’s length from his nominal leader. He preferred his own path. He stumbled on occasions, as we shall see, but always got up, brushed himself down, and continued on his way.

10

Young hopefulness

Agricultural and industrial unrest had continued through the 1830s. There had been fluctuations in prices, profits and rents that affected everyone. The seven fat years of corn, followed by the seven lean years, of Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41 might have been the symbol of the time. Nobody understood the reason for these changes, apart from the dictates of the seasonal cycle, and were quite unable to deal with the expanded demand or the sudden depression. Social unrest and riot had been exacerbated by the New Poor Law and by higher taxes, while events such as the Tolpuddle agitation did not bode well for the Melbourne administration.

In 1836 a group of London and Yorkshire radicals, including social reformers such as William Lovett and Francis Place, determined to establish the London Working Men’s Association. In May 1837, at a grand meeting in the British Coffee House on Cockspur Street, the Association issued its demands, which became known as the Six Points. These were for annual parliaments, universal male suffrage (female suffrage was believed to be a step too far), equal electoral districts, the removal of the property qualification for members of parliament so that young reformers might have a chance to attain the prize, secret ballots to deter bribery and bullying, and the payment of members of parliament once they had been brought there. This was to be of assistance to the workingclass member who had no other source of funds. The points at issue soon became known as The Charter and its adherents as Chartists.

The People’s Charter gave voice to the poor and the hungry who had not before been helped by the Reform Acts already passed. The miseries imposed by the New Poor Law also sharpened the injuries they sustained. The administration had bribed some of the middle classes, but they had turned their faces against all the rest.

In the autumn of the year the Irish activist Feargus O’Connor began the publication in Leeds of the Northern Star, which echoed all the remonstrances and denunciations of the Chartist orators where the workhouses became Bastilles and their dietary servings ‘hell broth’. Even at the price of four and a half pence it had the largest circulation of any newspaper outside London with its mixture of economic, social and political news from the vantage point of the oppressed.

Thomas Attwood, whose Birmingham Political Union had been disbanded, now joined the new great hope of the Chartists in provoking public reform. It would be wrong to dismiss these first Chartists as dreamers or insurgents out of their time. They were quite aware of the power of Irish nationalism, for example, and of colonial insurgents who might assist them in their own battles against the English authorities. In practical fact, however, the motives of the Chartists were unclear; their supporters came from so wide a field, and their aspirations, whether rural or urban, were so diverse that any form of organized leadership was almost bound to fail. It was a mass movement but its size did not help to define it, and its class consciousness was based upon mass rallies and meetings that seemed merely to inflame both speakers and audiences. It was a new type of organization, too, since it included the paraphernalia of speeches and mass meetings with the assistance of pamphlets, posters and newspapers. Never had a militant organization been so well organized.

A distinction was drawn between ‘moral force’ Chartists and ‘physical force’ Chartists. It sounds like a clear alternative, but the boundary remained confused. The hand-loom weavers, one of those groups of workers who were most savagely hit by economic change, were generally for ‘physical force’. The muddle was further compounded by the association between some Chartists and some Methodists who met on the same premises and sang the same hymns. The movement remained at the front of popular consciousness for the next three years. It was always connected with the fear of violence among the authorities but, in fact, very little occurred in these years of anxiety.

The radicals in parliament were becoming more and more frustrated by the delays and hesitations over every piece of legislation by the Whigs. One radical MP, John Arthur ‘Tear ’em’ Roebuck, complained that one day the mood was Whig and on the next day the reverse. ‘The Whigs, have ever been an exclusive and aristocratic faction, though at times employing democratic principles and phrases as weapons of offence against their opponents … When out of office they are demagogues; in power they become exclusive oligarchs.’ They were aristocratic in principle, and democratic in pretence. They came forward with large promises and mean performances. Their talk had been vague, and their measures largely ineffective and useless.

Yet Melbourne, the object of this anger, had one immense advantage. He knew that the king was dying and that his successor, a young girl of eighteen, did not have William’s prejudices. She did not share the same history. The closing days succeeded quickly. Throughout May and June 1837 King William deteriorated, and on 20 June he was dead from a heart attack. William died in the early morning, and Melbourne hardly waited for first light before informing Victoria of her new place in the world. The administration was in truth immeasurably strengthened by the death of the old man and the consecration of a new young sovereign. And why should the world mourn the old man’s passing? It is true that he passed the Reform Act and, if he were remembered for it, it was probably enough. Yet in the seven years of his reign he had also passed Municipal Reform, the abolition of slavery and the New Poor Law. Or perhaps it should be said that he let them pass. ‘He was odd,’ Queen Victoria wrote in her journal. ‘Very odd, and singular, but his intentions were often ill-interpreted.’

The king had died at just the right moment, a month after Victoria had come of age. Thus the young queen was disencumbered of all the courtiers, attendants, relatives and politicians who would have taken advantage of the regency to influence her. The young woman enjoyed to the full her newly discovered freedom. ‘Since it has pleased Providence to put me in this station,’ she wrote, ‘I shall do my utmost to fulfill my duty towards my country. I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’

She found an unexpected companion in Viscount Melbourne, who took on the role of paterfamilias to the young queen. His wit and imperturbable calm helped her to understand the political world around her, and his advice was practical rather than idealistic. It might have been said that he treated her like a daughter and she treated him like a father, except for that hedge of divinity which stands around the queen. He did teach her, however, some of that cool self-possession which she evinced all her life. He informed her that he did not go to church in case he should hear something ‘extraordinary’ from the pulpit. He advised her against reading Charles Dickens, since the novelist might provoke depressing thoughts. This was not perhaps the best advice for the conditions of the time. The Fleet Prison in The Pickwick Papers (1836) and Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist (1838) were far worse than even the novelist could bear to describe. The health of the metropolis did not in fact materially improve until 1870, the year of Dickens’s death.

The subsequent general election, on the death of the old monarch, brought back the Whigs with Melbourne, but Peel and the Tories were not far behind. Among the members led by Peel were William Ewart Gladstone, who had entered parliament five years before, and one new member, Benjamin Disraeli, but of course the new queen stood close by the side of Melbourne. She was capricious, she possessed a bad temper, but she liked what she called ‘mirth’ and dancing. Melbourne enjoyed the company of his new sovereign to the extent that he began to ignore parliamentary business. He had never enjoyed the rigmarole, but now he had happier reasons to let it slide. The queen had his full attention. She had had enough of those people who wished to take advantage of her; Melbourne had no such ambition. ‘She is the honestest person I have ever known,’ he once said. ‘The only difficulty is to make her see that you cannot always go straightforward, that you must go round about sometimes.’ He was alluding to her direct nature that would normally brook no obstacles. ‘When he is with her,’ Princess de Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador, stated, ‘he looks loving, contented, and a little pleased with himself … dreamy and gay, all mixed together.’

On 5 November 1837, Victoria opened her first parliament. The Tories had high hopes for a new session but the large number of singleminded Irish members could not help but dampen their expectations. It was business as usual with the added complication of the Chartists around the corner. So this is perhaps the best occasion to introduce that amorphous group of men and women who have been given the title of ‘early Victorians’. They were the loud, brusque, colourfully dressed progenitors of the more serious and industrious mid-Victorians; the latter, unlike their animated predecessors, would no more wear a blue cravat and velvet trousers than a flat cap and workmen’s boots. We see the early Victorians in the pages of Dickens, whose portraits of railway magnates, crossing sweepers, charity boys, spinsters, schoolmasters, retired nautical folk, private detectives, coffee-shop managers, second-hand clothes merchants, copying clerks and ladies’ maids comprise a wide world of which they could not see the horizons.

To speak in the broadest possible terms, and with ample possibility of contradiction, this was a world of boisterous energy and novelty, of excitement and of enthusiasm, of speed and sensation, of vigour and of bravado. Successive social reform movements were often led by the same core of fervent supporters. The artisans, tradesmen and shopkeepers, who seem so often to be the backbone of the emerging society, were independent in thought and in religion, individualist and non-deferential. This was the electorate of the Reform Acts. George Eliot, in 1872, looked back upon those times when reforms were begun ‘with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days’. In The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) Bulwer-Lytton interjected that ‘we moderns have fire, and passion and energy – we never sleep, we imitate the colours of painting, its life and its actions’. The writers of the time were voluminous – the three-volume novels must stretch to the crack of doom – but they were not necessarily verbose. Ruskin, Carlyle, Scott and Dickens could not be usefully abbreviated. It is a mark, perhaps, of innovation that the leading writers of the day looked upon the eighteenth century with something like contempt. Dickens himself added some false shelves in his library with the book-backs emblazoned with the ‘Wisdom of our Ancestors’ that included volumes on ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Superstition’.

Yet there is never light without shadow. There is another aspect of the 1830s which is infinitely more revealing. The great year of the Charter was 1838, in which the authorities anticipated attendant meetings, speeches, demonstrations, petitions and riots; one Chartist, writing at the end of the century in a memoir entitled Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903), recalled that: ‘people who have not shared in the hopes of the Chartists, who have no personal knowledge of the deep and intense feelings which animated them, can have little conception of the difference between our own times and those of fifty or sixty years ago. The whole governing classes – Whigs even more than Tories – were not only disliked, they were positively hated by the working population.’ There was real political antagonism in the various movements and societies, and in 1838 many mass meetings of working people were held by torchlight to protest their fate. At Bolton and at Stockport, at Ashton and at Leigh, many thousands gathered and ‘formed into processions traversing the principal streets, making the heavens echo with the thunder of their cheers … the banners containing the more formidable devices viewed by the red light of the glaring torches, presented a scene of awful grandeur’. It was as if the towns themselves were on fire.

The unions held aloof, as did the more radical Whigs. The leaders of the Corn Law agitation, which was even then growing fiercer, were not part of the movement. Chartists were about politics and not economics. This was in large part a workingclass demonstration of power. It had its roots in the centuries of popular agitation that had marked the history of England from Wat Tyler to John Ball and Jack Cade, as well as the Radical Associations, Political Unions and Democratic Associations of more recent years. The administration looked on in mounting horror at the size and spread of the protests; but one observer was more astute than most. ‘The Tories’, Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville wrote in his diary of June 1837, ‘prognosticate all sorts of dismal consequences none of which of course will come to pass. Nothing will happen because in this country nothing ever does.’

That was not strictly true. Something did happen in the autumn of 1838. An Anti-Corn Law League was established in Manchester with the sole aim of the ‘total and immediate abolition of the Corn Laws’. The League was properly based in the city where the cotton industry had declared the modern triumph of the machine and the vital issue of free trade in British commerce. Free trade was the central imperative. Was the farmer allowed to buy cheap and sell dear, as the market demanded, or should there be restrictions and tariffs on imported grain to keep the prices and profits of English farmers high? The Conservatives, ostensibly the party of the landowners and estate managers, were naturally in favour of maintaining the Laws; their opponents, from Whigs to radicals, were intent upon removing them so that corn could be cheaper.

There were many Dissenting ministers who were ready to declare that the Corn Laws ‘were against the Law of God, anti-scriptural and anti-religious’. The League launched a campaign, organized largely by Richard Cobden and John Bright, that was in effect a religious movement based upon the success of the anti-slavery cause where religion and politics also could not easily be distinguished. Free trade was itself something of a religious nostrum that encompassed cheaper food, more exports, larger employment and greater prosperity. Since nation would stretch out to nation, it would encourage peace as well as plenty. John Bright declared that this was a movement ‘of the commercial and industrial classes against the lords and great proprietors of the soil’. Bright was a Quaker who declared that ‘in working out our political problems, we should take for our foundation that which recommends itself to our conscience as just and moral’. The balance of trade was firmly in England’s favour, and free trade was deemed to be for ‘world bettering’. So material advances were intimately linked to moral improvement, fulfilling one of the great nineteenth-century principles. Palmerston wrote that ‘Commerce is the best pioneer of civilisation.’

The Anti-Corn Law League therefore mounted its national campaign with journals and pamphlets, speeches and meetings and demonstrations, denouncing ‘a bread-taxing oligarchy, a handful of swindlers, rapacious harpies, labour-plunderers, monsters of impiety, putrid and sensual banditti …’ In turn the farmers called those in favour of the repeal of the Corn Law ‘brutes, drudges, clodpates, bullfrogs, chawbacons and clodpoles’. The situation became ever more agitated throughout 1838 as the price of bread steadily rose. It rose from 55 shillings a quarter in January to 72 shillings in September and 74 shillings in December. In January of the following year, it was almost 80 shillings. Melbourne heard the mutterings of those who demanded free trade, but he chose to ignore them. ‘I doubt whether property or the institutions of the country can stand it’, he said. It may be that he was not ready to endure the wearisome disputes and crises that had accompanied the Reform Act. ‘I am listless and ill and unable to do anything, or think,’ he said, ‘which does not suit the time.’

It was Peel, the Conservative, who eventually led the charge for repeal. He was a practical administrator rather than a political philosopher, and it had already occurred to him that the price of wheat was far too high to be tolerated, with the situation made infinitely worse by the poor harvests of Ireland. In Ireland the dead were heaped up daily, while the newspapers revealed that men, women and children were dying of hunger in Scotland and England. Peel was a politician who, once convinced of the principle of a measure, never left it. He was not to be swayed by the vast preponderance of the Conservative party who wished to retain the Corn Laws. It was for them an article of faith, whereas for Peel it was one of reason and justice. The perilous situation in Ireland, where bad wheat had driven out the good after a series of harvests, was also one which could not be ignored. And if he could not rely on his Conservative party, he could still find allies enough elsewhere.

The Chartists had been no less eager than the Leaguers. At the beginning of February 1839, a General Convention of the Industrious Classes met in London to accept the Charter and to draw up a petition which would be sent around the country. It was essentially a national convention of the Chartists with one member representing a number of areas and, as its name implies, it encouraged reform rather than revolution. It had nothing to do with the movement of the trade unions; as one bricklayer put it, ‘trade unions are for botching up the old system; Chartists are for a new one. Trade unions are for making the best of a bad bargain: Chartists are for a fresh one …’ The Convention, if nothing else, was a form of People’s Parliament that was supposed to fill the vacancy left by radicals at Westminster where they seemed incapable of making any progress at all. These were called by Mrs Gaskell ‘the terrible years’. In Mary Barton (1848) she states that ‘this disparity between the amount of the earnings of the working class and the price of their food, occasioned, in more cases than could well be imagined, disease and death. Whole families went through a general starvation. They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings.’

The calling of the General Convention caused some to take fright, and there was talk of arms. An organized police force was introduced to more towns, the army was increased and some Chartists were arrested. But, as a historian of the time put it, ‘we are become a sober people’. There was no prospect of any armed conflict and, indeed, as so often happened, the conflicts between the radicals themselves were more ferocious than any outer agitation. What should be the methods used? Moral force? Intimidation? Physical force? Or some mixture of the three? Everything was planned for a march upon parliament and the presentation of a National Petition on the Six Points. Mrs Gaskell added that ‘they could not believe that government knew of their misery … yet the idea that their misery had still to be revealed in all its depths, and that then some remedy would be found, soothed their aching hearts and kept down their rising fury’.

The National Petition was to be issued at a mass convention of 1839, and then to be taken up by a variety of reformist clubs in a great march to Westminster. The petition was 3 miles long and contained 1,280,000 signatures. But a million more signatures would not have been enough. It was presented to the parliament, which on 12 July voted even against considering it. There were rumours of a national strike but the working men were not ready for it. Local activists then turned to the notion of a national uprising, but that had even less of a chance to stir England. Riots and strikes were irksome enough, but no one had the appetite for an armed uprising which no leader could properly direct or control. A ‘sacred month’ devoted to the cause was truncated to three days of strikes, during the course of which the more militant Chartists were arrested. Some of them were bound over while others were given prison sentences of several months. There was no general attempt at repression. Yet nothing seemed right. The presence of misery and starvation in the north was known but barely understood. Some people called it ‘the condition of England question’. It was a question, perhaps, without an answer. Thomas Carlyle wrote, in the opening sentence of Chartism (1839), that ‘a feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it’.

The Chartists in their zeal had nothing to do with the members of the Anti-Corn Law League, whom they called ‘a party comprised of avaricious grasping money-mongers, great capitalists and rich manufacturers’. Nothing could be more conducive to angering the lower classes than the network of financial and political considerations which used popular causes for their own benefit. They looked upon the Anti-Corn Law League as another special interest group destined to help the manufacturers who wanted cheaper bread for their workforce to keep wages down. It should not be forgotten that it was precisely in this period that Engels was considering the causes of workingclass revolution. J. A. Froude, the historian and man of letters, said that ‘all round us the intellectual lightships had broken from their moorings … the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars’. The members of the Anti-Corn Law League paid a subscription of 5 shillings per annum which, although it could just be afforded by the rising members of the middling class, was quite beyond the reach of the ordinary working people.

So there was very little ground between the two major groups who opposed the ministry for political or economic causes. It was a nice question whether the priority should be universal suffrage or the repeal of the Corn Laws. But that division ensured that the working classes never became a ‘movement’ in any revolutionary sense, and that the enemies of the Melbourne ministry remained separate from each other until its surcease. There was no class war in the orthodox sense. Sometimes the Chartists and the Leaguers would come together for a demonstration or a protest against the authorities, but their association was temporary and limited.

Melbourne was in any case busily occupied in guiding and educating the young queen, and paid even less attention to matters of public business. This, he might have said, was his public business. But there were other items. The Police Acts of 1839 might have been drawn up in an age of calm, with their prohibition of drinking at fairs and in coffee-houses and a ban on carrying ‘any cask, tub, hoop or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard or placard upon any footway’. Another offence consisted in ‘the circumstance of obscene words being written or chalked on the walls of building, gates of houses andpalings etcetera’. The police ‘will in such cases deface the words quietly in the night time when it is possible to do so’. Some of these words would have contained the slogans of the radical agitators who were always at work in the great city.

A political fracas occurred in the spring of this year, however, when Melbourne was brought down on a bill concerning Jamaica. The sugar traders had no wish to liberate the slaves of the region, but a Jamaica Bill to suspend the constitution of the island passed by only five votes. It was more or less a defeat, a humiliation that could be repeated at any time through want of confidence or want of power. The prime minister had no choice but to resign rather than confront more such blows. He wrote to Victoria that he expected her to ‘meet this crisis with that firmness which belongs to your character’. With the resignation of her loved minister, it would seem as if she herself had been voted out by the parliament, She could not eat or sleep; she cried continually. She wrote to the duke of Wellington asking him to take the place of Melbourne, but he gently refused. Sir Robert Peel was the next to face his mistress, but she found him ‘odd’ and ‘cold’. They had discussed the aspects of the new administration and at one juncture he mentioned that the ladies of the queen’s household, altogether Whig in persuasion, should accommodate Tories as well. On the following day she sent him a flat refusal; she could not have her intimate circle breached. She wrote to Melbourne, in disregard for the protocol of the court, that: ‘I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness: the Queen of England will not submit to such trickery. Keep yourself in readiness, for you may soon be wanted.’ It became known as the ‘Bedchamber Crisis’, although the queen herself had added to it the elements of high drama.

Peel retired from the fray with ill grace, and there were many contemporaries who believed that Victoria had in fact overruled the unwritten laws of regal conduct. Others, most of them Whigs, applauded her independence in such a sensitive matter as the royal household. So Melbourne was persuaded to rescind his resignation and remain prime minister for another two years. The duke of Argyll decided that he was ‘an excellent head of a party dying of inertia’. It was simply a question of getting through. A vote of no confidence in the spring of 1840 was lost by a majority of ten votes, and soon enough the Whigs lost three seats in disparate areas – one in a country borough, one in a cathedral town and one in an industrial town. Robert Peel waited for the moment.

The failure of the national convention of Chartists, and the almost contemptuous rejection of the petition by the members of parliament, had characterized the summer of 1839, sowing the seeds of violent retribution which took place in the early winter. Many of the most prominent Chartists were under arrest or on bail, but the strength of Chartism lay not in its leaders but in the communities from which it sprang. The village tailor or the village shoemaker, the innkeeper or the hand-loom weaver, were part of the fabric of the movement just as much as they were part of the community. That was its power, but also its weakness. For that reason alone they were not ready or prepared to fight against the police, against the magistrates or against the men at Westminster. Melbourne was once more in charge and earned a verse tribute from Winthrop Mackworth Praed:

To promise, pause, prepare, postpone

And end by letting things alone:

In short, to earn the people’s pay

By doing nothing every day.

On 4 November the miners and ironworkers of South Wales, led by well-known Chartists, marched on the town of Newport. This was the season of the year, marked by Guy Fawkes and his plot, when riot and disorder were commonplace. It is not clear what the men of 1839 wished to achieve, but a crowd of demonstrators surrounded the Westgate hotel where some of their Chartist colleagues were being guarded by a small military contingent. In this tense situation it takes only one man to lose his nerve. Shots were heard. The army fired into the crowd, which fled, leaving twenty or more dead. The three leaders of the Chartists were identified, arrested, tried and sentenced to death. But then, at the urgent instigation of the Lord Chief Justice, they were all reprieved. If they had been hanged further rioting might bring chaos; as it was, the fire of the Chartists seems to have been quenched by the bloodshed. The movement was suspended to discuss tactics and to initiate some internal reforms. It was the end of the first stage of their activity, and the Whig government congratulated itself on getting through the worst.

At the same time, in a land far, far, away, named Kensington Palace, Victoria met her future husband and was entranced by him. She was by nature highly sexed, and naturally longed for a husband. Albert was all she could desire. ‘Oh to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great a delight to describe! He is perfection …’ Her liberal use of italics is entirely characteristic. Her use of exclamation marks was also red-hot. On parliament voting to cut Albert’s allowance, on their marriage, she fired away: ‘I cried with rage … Poor dear Albert, how cruelly are they ill using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’ Their wedding was less Shakespearean. After the ceremonies were over, on 10 February 1840, and the couple put to bed, Prince Albert suggested to his new wife that their honeymoon at Windsor might be extended. This was the occasion for more italics and exclamation marks. ‘You forget, my dearest Love,’ she replied, ‘that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing.’ If he had had plans to rule alongside his wife, he was quickly disabused. He was fortunate if he was allowed to blot her page. Only during the queen’s confinement, and the birth of their first child, did Prince Albert come into his own. He began to act as her private secretary, with the key to all the official boxes. He was no longer blotting the ink but holding the pen.

This might in fact be called the great age of pen and ink, since it was the first age of the penny post and what was known as the ‘pillar letter box’. Rowland Hill, an inventor and social reformer, had done the sums and calculated that the best system was that of pre-payment beginning with the rate of one penny. He also recommended the use of ‘the little paper bags called envelopes’. The first penny black went on sale in May 1840. This in itself created a social revolution equivalent to that of the electric telegraph; it promoted social cohesion and advanced national consciousness, prompting Henry Cole, one of the most ingenious of the nation’s civil servants, to write in his memoirs that ‘of all the events of which my career has been connected no one I feel surpasses or, indeed, is equal in value to the world at large as the adoption of uniform penny postage … the glory of England for all time’. The first official report on the post office system remarked that the postage system evinced ‘the stirring industry and energy which is the national characteristic of all’. The stamp was such a symbol of national pride that no legend, only the head of the sovereign, ornamented it. It was greeted by ‘the innumerable friends of civil and religious liberty’ as ‘a conveyance of thought’ which would assist national self-determination and self-awareness. For more informal occasions the exchange of photographs by post was a significant token of friendship.

There are some vignettes of what became Melbourne’s last days in power. After one lengthy cabinet meeting the ministers were proceeding to the door when they heard Melbourne calling to them. ‘Stop a bit,’ he said. ‘What did we decide? Is it to lower the price of bread or isn’t it? It doesn’t matter which, but we usually all say the same thing.’ Melbourne did not take very well to Prince Albert. He felt a natural jealousy that he had been supplanted in the queen’s mind by a young and handsome foreigner. But he had grave doubts about Albert’s earnestness as an instrument of policy. ‘This damned morality’, he had once said, ‘will ruin everything!’ At a cabinet meeting in the autumn of 1840 a possible war between France and England was discussed or, rather, not discussed. Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, noted the intervention of Russell. ‘I should like’, he interposed, turning to Melbourne, ‘to know what is your opinion upon the subject?’ Nothing however could be got from Melbourne, and there was another long pause which was not broken till someone asked Palmerston, ‘What are your last accounts?’ On this Palmerston pulled out of his pocket a whole parcel of letters and reports from Ponsonby, Hodges and others, and began reading through them. In the middle of Palmerston’s reading someone happened to look up and perceived Melbourne fast asleep in his armchair.

When parliament reopened in January 1841, the prime minister was effectively still asleep. Parliament had become a debating chamber to which petitions were addressed. The unreformed chamber had been more of a theatre where Edmund Burke and others practised their oratorical skills. Those days were soon to disappear, a transition anticipated by the Westminster fire of 1834. It was now a more earnest and more partisan assembly, congregating under the watchful eye of the press who devoted much space to its dealings. The parties were not yet disciplined or controlled in any modern sense; they were essentially coalitions of like-minded members who could go their own way when they so wished. They were distinguished by the inclinations of their leaders but there was no such thing as party policy. ‘All is confusion,’ Greville wrote in this decade, ‘intermingling of principles and opinions, political rivalry and personal antipathy.’ Melbourne was still living and working in the eighteenth century, even if this was really the age of Robert Peel.

But by the beginning of 1841, having lost four by-elections in succession, Melbourne was aware of the shadow of the sword about his neck. The crash came when a motion of no confidence in Melbourne’s administration at the beginning of June 1841 passed by one vote. The subsequent general election confirmed the widespread belief that the Conservatives under Peel had become the party of government; their majority on their return to Westminster in the summer of the year, was more than ninety. Peel, having been cheated of office in the Bedchamber Crisis, now acquired a large enough party to do his best or worst. He became the first truly Conservative prime minister, the epithet ‘Tory’ now being considered a little old-fashioned.

The election did not pass without riot and general bravado. That would be too much to ask of a nation which had a tradition of popular protest. There was a large party, outside parliament, of brick-and stone-throwers who were eternally dissatisfied with the state of politics. They comprised the elements of the ‘mob’ which haunted public discourse. But the new masters of England – the middle classes in an alliance with the old ruling class – still had some reason for satisfaction. In its editorial on 29 July The Times claimed that ‘until now the world has never known an instance of a party being installed in power expressly by the vote of a great people’. The stance of Victoria was not influential in the election but her preference for the Whigs was well known and well publicized. Lord Ashley wrote: ‘I much fear that, in her total ignorance of the country and the constitution, her natural violence, her false courage, her extreme and ungovernable wilfulness, she will betray a disposition and a conduct which, while they will do no harm to us [the Tories] will be injurious to herself and to the Crown.’ Victoria was not, then, universally respected. Even her husband had some reservations. Albert told his German adviser, Stockmar: ‘Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties. She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches and suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy etc. etc.’ The new queen was not making a good impression.

It was a political revolution, but it was a relatively peaceful one. The Whigs had taken relief from the woes of government, according to Lord Clarendon, ‘in a kind of apathetic acquiescence … which looks as if all energy and intention were extinct’. They had once been the commanding party of the nation, self-selected rulers who came from great families utterly accustomed to power; they were now powerless and seemed set for a vast decline and eventual extinction.

The new parliament met for its second session on 3 February 1842, and all the formal conversations were animated by the financial condition of the country. Expenditure was still too high, but how, in particular, would Peel deal with the taxes still imposed upon foreign corn? This was the heart of the matter. The Whigs had gone to the election on the slogan of ‘cheap bread’, but nobody believed them. Peel’s intentions were still not clear, perhaps even to himself. Half his job was done for him by a bountiful harvest in 1842, succeeded by three more good harvests. His immediate actions were to reduce the tax on corn and to lower the tariffs on a wide range of goods; and, to balance the budget, he decided to reintroduce income tax. It had been dropped after the Napoleonic Wars but a fresh look was necessary at the nation’s revenues. He may not yet have been determined to abolish the Corn Laws altogether, but the thought of it cannot have been very far from his mind.

Peel wished to simplify the tax system, revise all the arcane duties and tariffs and generally to discipline the finances of the country. ‘I propose’, he said, ‘that for a time, to be limited, the incomes of this country should be called on to contribute a certain sum’ for the purpose of reducing the deficit. The amount was set at 7 pence in the pound for incomes over £150 per annum. To use one of his own phrases, ‘we cannot recede’. It came as an entire shock to his opponents, who took two or three days before crafting a reply. He had effectively initiated a financial revolution by which the entire system of revenue was changed. It was to be the predominant tone of his ministry.

He had a strong cabinet, however, to support him. Aberdeen replaced Palmerston at the Foreign Office and at once promoted cordial relations with England’s principal allies and eschewed the rougher tones of Palmerston. The duke of Wellington became leader in the Lords, but without a specific ministry to control. Gladstone was promoted to the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade; in the following year he became president of the Board and thus in a powerful position to indulge his appetite for statistics and numbers. Thomas Carlyle described him as a ‘most methodic, fair-spoken, purified, clear-starched, sincere-looking man’, which was, for Carlyle, praise indeed. Edward Stanley (Lord Stanley a little later) had once been chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland but was now promoted to colonial secretary; as the earl of Derby, in a subsequent reincarnation he would rise much, much higher. Benjamin Disraeli remained, much to his chagrin, on the back benches; he had believed that his pre-eminent abilities would be as visible to others as they were to himself, but Peel had no room for him.

Peel came to office as a doctor approaching a sick patient. He did not do much at first; he was too busy observing the symptoms and accustoming himself once more to prescribe. It was the worst year to begin a new rule. It was reported to the Commons by Sir James Graham, the new home secretary, that 1 million out of a population of 16 million were receiving poor relief. The cotton mills fell silent and the cost of food rose. The banks themselves were in serious difficulties, and investment had dwindled. It was perhaps the lowest point of the century. The spinners of Bolton had a myriad grievances, ‘namely, in the reduction of our wages, unjust and unreasonable abatements, in forcing upon us unhealthy and disagreeable houses, in charging us unreasonable and exorbitant rents … the above evils arise from class legislation, and we are further of the opinion that misery, ignorance, poverty and crime will continue to exist until the People’s Charter becomes the law of the land’.

These were the conditions that once more roused the spirit of Chartism in an outpouring of pamphlets and addresses to working people, placards and demonstrations. ‘Suffering caused by law’, John Bright wrote, ‘has made the whole population a mass of combustible matter, and the spark now ignited may not easily be quenched.’ Members of the Anti-Corn Law League vied with the Chartists for the support of working men, although the latter were more squarely on the side of the workers. The Leaguers were still in some quarters dismissed as laissez-faire ideologues who were on the side of employers in the great battle. In the Midlands and in the north, in Lancashire and the West Riding, the colliers walked out of their work. In May 1841, another national convention had assembled to create a petition of more than 1.3 million signatures seeking a pardon for certain Chartist prisoners. ‘They came pouring down the wide road in thousands,’ W. M. Cudworth concluded in Rambles Round Horton (1886), ‘a gaunt, famished-looking desperate multitude armed with huge bludgeons, flails, pitchforks and pikes, many without coats and hats, and hundreds with their clothes in rags and tatters’.

A radical journalist noted at the time that:

The spectacle attracted great attention, from the ragged street sweeper to the duchess with the golden eye glass. The city police behaved very favourably, but the metropolitan blues were very indifferent. The omnibus drivers were very rough and violent. We marched down, slow march, through Fleet-street, the Strand, past Charing Cross, the Horse Guards, and to the Parliament House. The windows of the public offices were particularly crowded, and great curiosity seemed to prevail.

Parliament was not to be turned, and the petition was once again rejected on the casting vote of the Speaker. This created a fury that had not been seen before. The strikes intensified, and there was speculation once more that it might lead to a general uprising. Police stations were destroyed, prisoners released and the houses of prominent magistrates or mine-owners were put to the torch. The spring had turned into a hot summer. Another petition was carried to parliament in the following year; the demonstrators were like waves of the sea forever beating against the rocks. The petition was claimed to contain more than 3 million signatures but yet was overwhelmingly rejected by the Commons.

This was the catalyst for the ‘Plug Riots’ or ‘Plug Plot Riots’ of 1842, when the steam-plugs on boilers were removed so that no industrial work could be done. It began in the collieries of Staffordshire and soon spread. With the coalfields closed, the whole of industrial England suffered privation. London, too, was feeling the pinch of want and unemployment. In Clerkenwell Green and Paddington, two centres for urban radicals, large crowds assembled. A report in the Sun of 23 August noted that the leaders of the crowd ‘were proceeding to condemn the conduct of the “Bluebottles” [police] when a loud cry was raised of “the Peelers! the Peelers!” On turning round it was discovered that about a dozen of the horse-patrol, armed with heavy cutlasses and backed by several divisions of police were rapidly advancing upon the crowd.’ The result was broken heads, broken limbs, and worse.

The wreckage was doubly damned since the ‘time-spirit’, as Carlyle put it, was behind the machine. There was still an aura of mystery and secrecy about machinery and its workings. It was in a sense thought to be beyond human control. One ‘disconsolate radical’, as he termed himself, wrote that ‘one rarely finds anybody who ventures to deal frankly with the problem of machinery. It appears to infuse a certain fear. Everybody sees that machinery is producing the greatest of all revolutions between the classes, but somehow nobody dares to interfere.’

If contemporaries did not interfere, they tried to ignore the problem altogether. This may help to explain the genesis of ‘the Young England Movement’ launched into life by the young Disraeli, still dissatisfied that his apparent genius was not appreciated by Peel and the other Tory leaders. What better course than to launch a party of his own? It turned its back upon industry and industrialism, preferring to dwell in an imagined feudal, hierarchical and pre-industrial age where the poorer folk and the nobility shared patriotic and Christian longings. It rejected utilitarianism, political economy, rationalism, Malthusianism and all the other early Victorian remedies for social ills. It was perhaps no accident that in 1842 Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur was published, inspiring a range of short and narrative poems that celebrated Lancelot, Arthur, Guinevere and the other august figures of national myth. In a paean to the ‘Time Spirit’, Carlyle hailed the Man of Letters as the Hero. ‘I say of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to the Priesthood of the Writers of Books.’

So the Round Table had once more become one of England’s icons. Young England was a young man’s creed. It was an idealist creed, but it was also an avenging creed damning all that had come before. In the spring of 1845 Disraeli announced that ‘a Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy’. The home secretary, Sir James Graham, took the trouble to write to a colleague that ‘with respect to Young England the puppets are moved by Disraeli, who is the ablest man among them … I consider him unprincipled and dishonest, and in despair [without office] he has tried the effect of bullying.’

Peel was nothing if not a reformer when vital interests were under threat, but it was usually necessary to bring his party with him. Corn was just such an issue at a time when bread was cheap but people were still starving. It might have been expected that the Conservatives would continue their support of farmers and landowners. To deny protection to corn, and thus to risk the danger of cutting agricultural livings, was emphatically not Tory doctrine. But Peel had set his mind to the problem and followed his convictions wherever they led him. He was now sure that the Corn Laws, which had the effect of raising the price of imported corn, had to be changed.

Peel was a reforming prime minister quite different from his predecessors. He familiarized himself with every department of state; he had an appetite for statistics and details of policy. He mastered his colleagues with his administrative fervour and general toughness of approach. ‘Peel has committed great and grievous mistakes’, Lord Ashley wrote in 1843, ‘in omitting to call his friends frequently together to state his desires and rouse their zeal … men would have felt they were companions in arms; they now have the sentiment of being followers in a drill.’

Disraeli may have been a singular figure but, in opposition to Peel, he was not a solitary one. He joined forces with George Bentinck in the fight for Protectionism and for what was known as ‘the Anti-League’ specifically opposed to the Anti-Corn Law League. It organized meetings and protests, in imitation of its successful opponents; it enlisted sympathetic MPs in its support of the values and principles of the landowners. It stood in line with those mild Conservatives who would negotiate between the various classes and interests in order to form a firm and just national settlement. They compared ‘the prosperity, growing wealth and full employment under the old trade’ with the vicious cost-cutting under ‘victorious free trade’.

Nevertheless, the proponents of the Anti-Corn Law League had the strongest speakers and perhaps the most compelling proposals. It was widely argued that those against the Corn Laws were on the side of science; this can be called quite simply the argument of the age, joining the intellectual merits of free trade with the Victorian faith in progress and efficiency. The adherents of the League introduced lessons of political science to those who had no inkling of such things; they lectured on profits and wages to merchants and artisans and clerks. Nine million pamphlets and tracts were distributed through a network of agents. A great meeting was held at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1843, where Cobden used the most contemporary imagery to describe the power of free trade. ‘There was a circle of continuous links which could not be injured in any one point, but it would like electricity pervade the whole chain [great cheering].’

It is hard to disentangle the various Tory policies that Peel had to consider. The Young England men were discussed by ministers, but they had very little effect on policy. The Tories of ‘the old school’ might be said to go back to James II and the Exclusion Crisis for whom reform of any kind was considered unnecessary and obnoxious. Orthodox Toryism was less pugnacious but maintained the settled conviction that the working population were of necessity inferior and that the patrician or governing classes were in effect born to rule. Liberal Toryism, as it were on the left-hand side, emphasized the powers of individual responsibility and held up the central image of ‘the market’ as balancing human values. They were on the whole in favour of parliamentary reform. Radical Toryism was a form of paternalism which was designed to sustain the morality and the well-being of every stratum of society. This was still considered to be a Christian country.

Very few members of parliament would have disowned Christian doctrine, whatever form of Christianity they espoused. A Whig radical and an orthodox Tory might choose the same church or chapel, and it was widely believed that by the early 1840s the moral and physical health of the nation was improved. Pauperism and crime had their climacteric in 1842, for example, and from that time forward they had gradually diminished in size and scale. An analysis of tax duties demonstrates that, from 1840, legislation had the effect of making spirits more expensive and thus of reducing their consumption. This may have been in part the result of Evangelical and Nonconformist missions that maintained their presence in East London and other deprived quarters. The success of the Salvation Army, after its foundation in 1865, may be a case in point.

The social renewal had taken fifty years. The clerk of Bow Street magistrates’ office knew of what he spoke. ‘I have no doubt’, he told one commission of inquiry as early as 1816, ‘that the manners of the lowest classes of society are much better than they were ten years ago, those excessive scenes of drunkenness which I have formerly observed are not by any means so frequent’. He was supported by the curate of St Giles, which had been the church on that pile of rottenness which was known as ‘Rats’ Castle’ in Holborn. ‘I think the face of the general appearance of the parish has improved within that time; there is not so great an appearance of vice as there used to be.’ ‘Yesterday,’ a German traveller wrote in 1835, ‘I wandered into Regent’s Park. Of eating, drinking, singing, music, dancing, not a trace – they walk up and down and lie on the grass which is growing bare and yellow.’ It was a remarkable transformation. No dancing. No drinking. No public sex. No ribaldry and blasphemy.

The public authorities, largely through the efforts of persistent reformers like Wilberforce and enlightened statesmen like Peel, modified the rigour of earlier decades. The worst punishments for felons and transported convicts were alleviated; imprisonment for debt was discontinued; some of the early Factory Acts were passed; children were banned from sweeping chimneys and dogs were prohibited from drawing vehicles like horses. The first public baths and wash-houses, established in 1845, admitted almost 80,000 people in the first year. Victoria Park in Bow became one of the lungs of London. Sir James Graham’s Factory Education Bill of 1843 survived a stormy passage in which the various denominations fought the brave fight over their right to supervise the moral and religious guidance of the working classes. A cumbersome compromise was reached among people who did not relish compromise. Separate classrooms were set aside for Anglican instruction, and Dissenting ministers were invited to attend the schools once a week. It was not enough for the Nonconformists, however, who objected to a permanent Anglican schoolmaster and a majority of Anglicans on the school boards. Eventually the bill created such dissension that it was abandoned altogether. Lord Ashley wrote to Robert Peel: ‘let this last trial be taken as a sufficient proof that “united education” is an impossibility. It ought never again to be attempted. The Dissenters and the Church have each laid down their limits which they will not pass; and there is no power that can either force, persuade, or delude them.’

This was also the period when self-help took on a political aspect with the growth of political societies dedicated to social reform. Trade unionism, Chartism and factory reform vied with benefit societies, secular societies and temperance societies in maintaining the social fabric at a time of perceived stress. The Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights can be placed beside the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Moral Reform Union beside the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals beside the Lord’s Day Observance Society. Chartism may have been the light that failed, but it illuminated the way for working men’s associations and eventually the Labour party.

No distinction was drawn between moral and physical hygiene or between moral and physical training. Indeed, the physique of the English seems to have been admired. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English Traits (1847), remarked that ‘they are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English taken at random out of the street, would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy, and handsome; at least the whole bust is well formed, and there is a tendency to stout and powerful frames.’ This is the period when the word ‘manliness’ was introduced as a new definition of ‘gentleman’.

11

City lights

If a traveller entered the heart of the kingdom, St Paul’s Cathedral, in 1841 he would have discovered, according to an official report of that year, that ‘the cathedral is constantly and shamelessly polluted with ordure, the pews are sometimes turned into cabinets d’aisance [toilets] and the prayer books torn up [for toilet paper]; the monuments are scribbled all over, and often with grossest indecency’. This was at the height of England’s power and wealth. There were other types of gloom. In November 1841 the darkness of London thickened in the fog where ‘hackney coaches drive up against church windows, old men tumble down cellars; old women and children stand crying up against lamp-posts, lost within a street of their own homes …’ The fogs of London were famous then. White, green, and yellow fogs were the exhalation of coal fires and steamboats, factories and breweries. Torches were lit to find the way. The smell and taste of the fog were of particular concern; it was known as ‘miners’ phlegm’.

Here is a London scene. On London Bridge, in the fog, two entangled lines of cabs are shrouded in darkness; the silhouette of the broad-shouldered driver of an omnibus can just be seen, as well as the red face of the conductor who seems to have shouted himself hoarse; the omnibuses fight for space among the cabs and the coal carts and the beer wagons. All is mist and dust, with the cacophony of London sounds – the crack of the whip, the snorting of the horses, the cries of the children, the shouting out of destinations.

It may act as a prelude to the theme of anxiety and the strain of life in Victorian London. It was believed with some reason that whole societies of people, rich and poor, privileged and outcast, suffered from nervous maladies of one kind or other. The Edinburgh Review noted that ‘throughout the whole community we are called to labour too early and compelled to labour too severely and too long. We live sadly too fast.’ For those of religious temper the strain of conscience was greater than that of any physical suffering; there were many, sitting in small rooms, who believed themselves to be doomed to hell. Insanity often followed.

Walter Pater, in turn, later wrote of ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness, that endless regret, the chords of which ring all though our modern literature’. This is a genuine strain of the Victorian temper that should be placed with all others. It was an age in which all the sustaining props of belief began to crumble. When insecurity and doubt began their insidious work, together with the suspicion, as the English divine Frederick Robertson put it, ‘whether there be anything to believe at all’. It was the panic at nothingness which the Victorians did their best to exorcize. Were we simply, as Charles Kingsley feared, ‘wheels of a vast machine’?

The following year was a time for contrast. On the night of 26 May 1842, Victoria and Albert were driven in a carriage to Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket for a royal ball. Two weeks before, the royal couple had graced a costume ball at Buckingham Palace where they had dressed as Edward III and his queen, Philippa. This was the same month in which the Chartist marchers presented their second great petition to parliament only to see it contemptuously rejected. It was on this occasion that a member later to be revered for his learning, Thomas Babington Macaulay, declared that ‘universal suffrage is incompatible, not with this or that form of government, but with all forms of government, and with everything for the sake of which forms of government exist’.

This was also the year when Edwin Chadwick published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain. In the course of this momentous report, largely financed and prepared by Chadwick himself, it was revealed that in the majority of the towns there were no attempts at sanitation. There was no drainage, and the refuse was simply thrown into the streets, where it would fester and rot; the courts and alleys were blocked by ordure and other filth, while there were no public pumps for the poor to find water. Fever was a powerful foe in all the metropolitan parishes, so that the poorest sickened and died before being carried to the workhouse.

In the same year Lord Ashley, who had already found fame for his factory reforms, persuaded parliament to appoint a royal commission on the state of employment in the mines. The details of the women, and the children, of the underworld were revealed to a nation previously unaware of what was essentially a domestic slave trade. The report also included illustrations and woodcuts of the workers – the women half-naked, the children almost completely so – bearing coal and dragging wagons like beasts of burden. They were beaten, stunted, malnourished and diseased. This was an aspect of the Victorian world – of Victorian civilization – that the public did not care to see. Almost at once the Commons passed a Mines and Collieries Act which prohibited female labour in the mines and raised the age of eligible children to ten. Yet the report had been salutary as well as severe. To know that English women and children had been reduced to a state only a little above savagery, to labour for long hours in filthy surroundings, to be exposed to all the opportunities of sexual licence, and to be injured or killed by the perils of defective machinery; all this was intolerable to the mass of people. The act was passed in the summer of 1842, but only after being severely curtailed in committee. Acts of mitigation had a thousand explanations without even mentioning the world of profit. The coaling industry was rich and powerful; two thousand collieries could not properly be investigated. What large body of men could examine them?

Conditions varied with each pit. How could standard measures of ventilation be used? Many questions were left unanswered. But why was no other industry being picked out in this fashion for remonstrance? What about needle-making or cobbling or work in the distilleries? There was no real response to this, which led many to despair of the whole industrial system as it existed in England. It was this despair which led directly to the agitation for better educational and sanitary provision. It seemed that some legislators would have to start from the beginning.

The report on the sanitary conditions of the towns and cities did not have a speedy resolution. Edwin Chadwick had numerous enemies who did their best to block his work when it was ready to be published early in 1842. The Poor Law commissioners, under whose imprimatur the report was commissioned, refused to sign it. So Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population was published under his own name. However, this subdued introduction did not affect its readership, which was soon calculated in the tens of thousands. One quarter of a million people each year flocked to the gutters and sewers. Two thousand eight hundred and fifty people were crowded into ninety-three small tenements. The excrement ‘was lying scattered about the rooms, vaults, cellars, areas and yards that it was hardly possible to move for it’. The living lay with the dead, both bitten by vermin. They could no longer be considered as human, merely the detritus left upon the shore. The average age of mortality in the capital was twenty-seven. Half the funerals were for children under the age of ten.

It could not be considered, therefore, easy reading. In the first pages Chadwick considered the case of a district of Tiverton:

The land is nearly on a level with the water, the ground is marshy, and the sewers all open. Before reaching the district, I was assailed by a most disagreeable smell; and it was clear to the senses that the air was full of most injurious malaria. The inhabitants, easily distinguishable from the inhabitants of the other parts of the town, had all a sickly, miserable appearance. The open drains in some cases ran immediately before the doors of the houses, and some of the houses were surrounded by wide open drains, full of all the animal and vegetable refuse not only of the houses in that part, but of those in other parts of Tiverton. In many of the houses, persons were confined with fever and different diseases, and all I talked to either were ill or had been so: and the whole community presented a melancholy spectacle of disease and misery.

English society might not in fact have been on the brink of collapse, but it seemed to many people of the time that this was exactly what was happening. ‘Certainly I have never seen, in the course of my life,’ Charles Greville wrote, ‘so serious a state of this as that which stares us now in the face, and this after thirty years of uninterrupted peace, and the most ample scope for the development of all our resources. One remarkable feature in the present condition of affairs is that nobody can account for it, and nobody pretends to point out any remedy.’ It was nobody’s fault.

But surely it was somebody’s fault. There was an immediate clamour against the parish vestries and the speculative builders who had allowed these conditions to fester and to spread. The engineers were at fault for improper maintenance, and the doctors at fault for negligent reporting. The reaction was so strong and so vociferous that the home secretary, Sir James Graham, was forced to institute a Royal Commission on the Health of Towns which gave him a breathing space of two years in which to do next to nothing. The Whig opposition did not harry the ministers concerned, as they should have done; the shock of defeat seemed to have left them immobile. Peel and his supporters had come to the conclusion that free trade, and commercial freedom in general, were the best remedy for social ills. The ‘blue books’ or statistical inquiries of Chadwick only served to illustrate the partial response to this great social evil. Organizations such as the Town Improvement Company, which hoped to run at a profit, and philanthropic associations such as the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes were established to fill the emptiness of parliamentary response.

Yet the Victorian city was, in many stretches, still the city of dreadful night. Lord Ashley, having visited what was known as a common lodging house (with men, women and children mingled together), told the Commons that ‘these houses are never cleaned or ventilated; they literally swarm with vermin. It is almost impossible to breathe. Missionaries are seized with vomiting or fainting upon entering them.’ ‘I have felt’, said another, ‘the vermin dropping on my hat like peas.’ No city was alike; each one had ills and vices of its own. The ‘city’ was not itself a favoured term. Victorians preferred the circumlocution of ‘large towns and populous districts’. Sheffield was essentially a congregation of small industrial districts. Birmingham had a more unified sensibility which would eventually be brought by Joseph Chamberlain to life. In Birmingham the small workshop was the key, where in Manchester it was the factory. The workforce was more skilled in Birmingham than in Manchester; housing and sanitation were also better. It was said, in fact, that Birmingham was the best-administered city in England.

Some urban leaders preferred Gothic, Grecian or Italian architecture for their public buildings. Since each city was different, there was no single or central style. This was complemented by the rise in the quality of the architectural fabric of the larger towns with town halls, mechanics’ institutes, churches, squares and public gardens. The Builder reported that ‘one can scarcely walk about Manchester without coming across frequent examples of the grand in architecture. There has been nothing to equal it since the building of Venice.’ Birmingham was, according to the Magazine of Art, ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’. Leeds boasted ‘whole streets vibrating with colour’. The conscious monumentality of these buildings was particularly striking as the tokens of a new urban age.

Nevertheless, there were towns and cities which emanated Victorianism like a whiff of coal smoke. Of Wigston in Leicester one historian of landscape, W. G. Hoskins, later wrote, ‘the sight of South Wigston on a wet and foggy Sunday afternoon in November is an experience one is glad to have had. It reached the rock bottom of English provincial life; and there is something profoundly moving about it.’ It had identical brick cottages and an iron church. It bears its origins in the nineteenth century like a birth-mark, all the flatness and uniformity an eternal reproach to the facile optimism that characterized many Victorians.

In 1830 Henry Brougham, himself a baron, spoke out in the Cloth Hall Yard of Leeds. ‘We don’t now live in the days of barons, thank God, we live in the days of Leeds, of Bradford, of Halifax and Huddersfield.’ These are the towns and cities that bear the stamp of the nineteenth century as surely as if by some trick of conjuration they had been manufactured out of steam. In Leeds a hundred woollen mills employed ten thousand people, and thirty firms spinning flax counted five thousand workers. Bradford was also a textile town, but Leeds leaped ahead with its burgeoning engineering industry. Of Sheffield an official report claimed that ‘the population is, for so large a town, unique in its character, in fact it more closely resembles that of a village than a town, for over wide areas each person appears to be acquainted with every other, and to be interested in each other’s concerns’.

In Manchester there was no such unity, but a gulf between masters and men, and a gulf between different types of working men. With its unruly people, its social divisions and its contrasts, the city was a seedbed of fiction. The most prominent among the Mancunian novels were Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), subtitled ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, and the same author’s North and South (1855), where the fictional city of Milton is based upon Manchester. A French observer noticed ‘the river Irwell, forming a kind of peninsula, and if one travels up and down it the whole neighbourhood looks like a grey colourless Venice. Instead of the black gondolas, coal boats glide up and down …’

Yet there was a kind of magnificence in its misery. Disraeli suggested in Coningsby (1844) that only a philosopher could understand ‘the grandeur of Manchester’, while Thomas Carlyle, who was just such a philosopher, suggested that the starting of the cotton mills at half-past five in the morning was as ‘sublime as Niagara or more so’. The suburbs seemed to be lying prostrate along endless streets while the central city was ornamented and rendered magniloquent with public spaces and public buildings. There was in fact a ‘Manchester school’ unified in support of the principle of free trade, whether seen from a financial or social vantage; it included Quakers, philosophic radicals, merchants, political radicals and manufacturers. There was a ferment of activity, of which Peel was the most successful beneficiary, and it was not unconnected to a perception of Elizabeth Gaskell on the Manchester crowd: ‘The only thing to strike a passerby was an acuteness and intelligence of countenance which has often been noticed in a manufacturing population.’ The social divisions were a cause of excitement rather than conflict, however, and it was widely believed that Manchester was the model of the city of the future. The Anti-Corn Law League was built up in Manchester. On the site of the Peterloo Massacre there rose, in 1856, the Free Trade Hall. It was the monument to the idea that first expressed itself here.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century Birmingham became the beacon of what was known as ‘the civic gospel’ and was proud of being known as ‘the best-governed city in the world’. In Birmingham there was greater diversity of trade than in, for example, Leeds. The concentration of smaller workshops other than factories encouraged an intimate and easier air between masters and men. A local Chartist remarked that ‘large manufacturers cannot shut up their men as they did in Manchester … for it was well known that [in Manchester] the working people were at the mercy of the manufacturers’. The labour force of Birmingham was more skilled, promoting more social mobility. Richard Cobden wrote that ‘the state of society’ was ‘more healthy and natural in a moral and political sense … There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer.’

This may have been one of the reasons why Prince Albert decided that he would visit Birmingham in 1843, much to the disquiet of his ministers. This was just a year after some of the most bitter strikes in living memory. Robert Peel noted that ‘the difficulty arose from the mayor of Birmingham being a Chartist, and the town council participating in the same violent and dangerous opinions … it would be accompanied by an immense physical demonstration of the trained masses of the second town in the country’. There had been riot in the air during the previous year when the Anti-Corn Law League prepared a declaration that ‘the country is on the eve of a revolution, and that the wheels of Government should be arrested’. The Chartists called for a general strike.

Nothing of the kind took place. In truth Walter Bagehot, the constitutional historian, was always of the opinion that the English were a naturally deferential people. How could they have survived for so long with few bureaucrats and with the help of amateurs only, without a standing army or a secret service or any of the other appurtenances of government? There had not been a police force until recent years.

Birmingham proved to be no different. The prince’s private secretary, George Anson, noted that the ‘280,000 population seemed entirely to have turned out on the occasion, the streets were literally jammed, but nothing could exceed the good humour and good feeling, and apparently excess of loyalty which pervaded the whole multitude’. Dire warnings and threats of revolution had in reality been followed by mass outbursts of loyalty and good feeling. We may take into account the well-known fickleness of crowds, but this does not seem to allow for the vast disparity between the revolutionary slogans and the loyal crowds. It may perhaps be wise to repeat Edmund Burke’s analogy of the grasshoppers and the cattle: the grasshoppers are small in number, but they make the worst din; the cattle murmur only, but they remain the solid life of the country. A report from Manchester completes the more settled picture on a more pathetic note: ‘Yet these poor people are of remarkably peaceable habits, and would have been glad to have work if they had been allowed.’

One incident of the previous year is an example of unsuccessful urban revolution. On Sunday, 3 July 1842, John William Bean, a sixteen-year-old boy, stood in a dark coat on the fringes of the crowds at the Mall waiting for the queen and her cortège to make their way from Buckingham Palace to St James’s and the Chapel Royal. He was described later as a ‘hunchback’ with a twisted spine and the lurch of a confirmed cripple. The more refined Victorians categorized him as one of the unfortunate victims of malign fate; to most of the London populace he was merely a freak, to be whistled at, spat at and stoned by the younger boys. He had sold his small collection of books, one of them a Bible, and bought a cheap pistol for threepence. At that day on the Mall he waited for the coach carrying the queen to pass by; then he aimed his pistol and pulled the trigger. Nothing much happened. The weapon did not fire. Another boy in the crowd, Charles Edward Dassett, saw what had happened and pulled the gun away from Bean. But he was too slow. A crowd had gathered around the small incident while a rumour spread that the queen had been shot. In the confusion Bean managed to slip away while Dassett was caught holding the pistol. It took some time for the confusion to be dispelled and the facts to be ascertained. Eventually a poster was put up with the description of a male ‘thin made, short neck, and humped back, walks a little on one side, long sickly pale face …’ The police leaped into action and hauled into their local stations any young hunchback they could find. It was reported that the number of ‘little deformed men detained’ was ‘astonishing’. But Bean was finally identified and arrested, sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. ‘It is worth being shot at’, Victoria said later, ‘to see how much one is loved.’

The cities of the north and the Midlands had one significant similarity. The slums of the poor were still areas shunned, meanly built with dilapidated houses leaning over the narrow and dirty lanes. For all the spacious streets and commodious houses of ‘Woolborough’ or Bradford, there were quarters where dwelt only wretchedness, misery and disease. The lower depths of English towns and cities had no drains, no sewers, no toilets, no water. The mills and factories, the pride of the north, spilled noxious fumes and corrupted water into the nearby streets. ‘In the manufacturing towns of England,’ one health inspector wrote, ‘most of which have enlarged with great rapidity, the additions have been made without regard to either the personal comfort of the inhabitants or the necessities which congregation requires’. And then there was the smoke, the Bradford smoke, the Leeds smoke, the Manchester smoke, each of a different colour and intensity, and each of a different odour; sometimes it condensed and congealed, falling as black rain or what was known as ‘blacks’. The mayor of Middlesbrough asserted that ‘the smoke is an indication of plenty of work – an indication of prosperous times – an indication that all classes of workpeople are being employed, that there is little necessity for charity and that even those in the humblest station are in a position free from want. Therefore we are proud of our smoke.’ If it was set at the right tempo and cadence, this could be a significant Victorian hymn.

A hymn too, might have been formed out of what was known as the ‘associative principle’ which grew up in the cities as part of the common interest and common dependency. This ‘principle’ of mutual interest also covered the various voluntary organizations and social groups which made up the cultural and spiritual life of the cities; choral societies, debating clubs, social clubs and sporting associations all formed the close-knit fabric. A respectable citizen, or his wife, might join The London Philanthropic Society for Providing the Poor with Bread and Coal in Winter or The General Domestic Servants Benevolent Institution.

But a different form of enterprise was reaching out. In 1844 twenty-eight flannel weavers, calling themselves the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, amassed a capital sum of £28 and opened a cooperative store in Toad Lane. Their plan was to sell goods at current prices and then retain the surplus cash as the common property of the membership. Their success was evident, their profits useful, and their reputation spread until it became the Cooperative Wholesale Society. Its members attended meetings after hours in which they discussed the topics of the day. In seven years they had made a gross profit of £900 and there was already talk of schools and housing for their workers. It was one of the most formidable legacies of the nineteenth-century world. It had a tenuous line with Chartists, also built upon solidarity and class interest, but by this time Chartism was in rapid decline. Other forces would have to take its place. At the heads of their articles was the promise that: ‘The objects of this Society are the moral and intellectual advancement of its members. It provides them with groceries, butchers’ meat, drapery goods, clothes and clogs.’

The city implies crowds, grim and monotonous as they make their way to and from their place of work with the steady tread of shoes or boots upon stone; sometimes light and rapid in pursuit of some street entertainment or diversion; and at other times stolid and purposeless like a vagrant without a home. All these and a thousand others make up the nineteenth-century crowd. ‘As we pushed through the crowd,’ Charles Kingsley wrote in 1850, ‘I was struck with the wan haggard look of all faces; their lacklustre eyes and drooping lips, stooping shoulders, heavy, dragging steps, gave them a crushed, dogged air which was infinitely painful, and bespoke a grade of misery more habitual and degrading than that of the excitable and passionate artisan.’

The politics of town and city soon became the politics of the nation. One radical pamphlet of 1885 noted that ‘the great towns as they now are constitute the source and centre of English public opinion. It is from them that Liberal legislation receives its initiatives; it is the steady pressure exercised by them that guarantees the political progress of the country.’ They had developed their momentum in a very short time. In the 1830s Manchester was still organized by a manorial court, and Middlesbrough was barely a name. Yet their new men came forward with their own remedies for social ills. They formed a new urban bourgeoisie, and the editor of the Leeds Mercury remarked of these new cities that ‘although they cannot boast of the historic glories of the great capitals of Europe … are even now superior to many of them in wealth and population and are laying broad and deep the foundations of a future destiny which may vie in interest and importance with some of the most famous cities of the ancient world.’ In the first fifty years of the nineteenth century Manchester’s population rose from 75,000 to 303,000, Birmingham’s from 75,000 to 247,000 and Leeds’s from 53,000 to 172,000. Between 1841 and 1901 the population of England and Wales more than doubled, and it was clear enough that the rising population came from urban surroundings.

The seaside towns, such as Brighton, Weymouth and Torquay, also flourished beyond their respective bounds. Spas and watering places, already with a decidedly dubious reputation, became more and more popular. William Cobbett noted that ‘to places like this come all that is knavish and all that is foolish, and all that is base; gamesters, pickpockets, and harlots …’ The example he mentions is now the genteel Cheltenham.

12

Charitable government

Those who were against government provision on principle summoned up visions of financial malfeasance and economic manipulation in England itself that proved quickly to be baseless. In fact something of an economic ‘boom’ had begun in 1844 and lasted for twenty years, during which period the railway system was more or less completed and the costs of production in cotton mills fell significantly. The impact of new technology and freer trade was now becoming part of public consciousness. In 1844 Gladstone, as president of the Board of Trade in the ministry of Peel, proposed a bill that would allow the government to buy out any railway after fifteen years. Peel did not favour the change, however, and instead proposed a scheme whereby every company would have to run a ‘third-class’ train every day at a penny a mile. These cheap trains had previously been open carriages, with holes in the floor to let the water run through, but the new bill insisted that they were fitted with roofs. Gladstone resisted the idea that cheap trains should run on Sundays on the grounds that ‘the working respectable mechanic would not choose the Lord’s Day for travelling’. First-and second-class passengers, however, were allowed the privilege of defying the Lord under the terms of the Railway Regulation Act.

In the same act provisions were made for the use of the electrical telegraph on every line. Three years before, the first telegraph system for commercial purposes was installed on the Great Western Railway between Paddington and West Drayton; it was only 13 miles in length but it heralded a new world of communication. A newspaper advertisement proclaimed: ‘The Wonder of the Age!! Instantaneous Communication … The Galvanic and Electro-Magnetic Telegraphs on the Great Western Railway … The Electric Fluid travels at the rate of 280,000 Miles per Second.’ The prospect of instant communication across vast spaces was considered to be a feat almost beyond the credible. In previous years the declaration of independence by the American colonies did not reach London for six weeks, while news of Trafalgar did not reach Westminster for twelve days. Within a relatively short time the electric telegraph became the means of mass communication, and was often described as the nervous system of Victorian culture. It controlled information and of course disciplined the railway network. It had a hundred uses. By annihilating time and space the telegraph revolutionized the control of the British empire, for example, and it was widely realized that ‘towns at present removed some stages from the metropolis will become its suburbs’. You could also play long-distance chess. Some years later, in 1889, Lord Salisbury described the telegraph as ‘a discovery which operates … immediately upon the moral and intellectual nature and action of mankind’. A quotation from Job was often employed: ‘Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are.’ It was also understood in terms of fairy story and enchantment. But Ali Baba had never stumbled upon anything so wonderful.

Samuel Smiles dated the start of ‘railway mania’ to 1844, the year of the Railway Act, when ‘the public outside the stock exchange shortly became infected with the same spirit, and many people, utterly ignorant of railways, knowing and caring nothing about their great national uses, but hungering and thirsting after premiums, rushed eagerly into the vortex of speculation … Shares! Shares! Became the general cry.’ Soon ‘the madness spread everywhere. It embraced merchants and manufacturers, gentry and shopkeepers, clerks in public offices and loungers in the clubs … No scheme was so bad that it did not find an engineer.’ Hasty and slipshod building was the result; tunnels were made of half-baked clay instead of bricks, and rubble was used for the foundation of bridges. There were already one hundred and four separate railway companies, and six years later the number had doubled. A popular writer of the time, Dionysius Lardner, wrote: ‘it is impossible to regard the vast buildings and their dependencies which constitute a chief terminal station of a great line of railways, without feelings of inexpressible astonishment … And then the speed!’

In this same year, the steam train reached its apotheosis in J. W. M. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway. An artist need have no opinion, and it is not at all clear whether Turner celebrated or demonized the locomotive. Any number of interpretations have been offered on the theme and composition of the painting; it has been described as a lament for the passing of the old ways or an enthusiastic rendition of the new force of steam that was changing the environment. Turner liked to travel, and it may have been his response to the new possibilities afforded by the train. The painting depicts a locomotive crossing the Thames over the Maidenhead railway bridge between Taplow and Maidenhead, but it is essentially an experiment in the vaporous sublime in which the material world of the train, the bridge and the outlying fields are wreathed in a veil of majesty and the laying down of pure colour elicits the most powerful and profound responses. Mist mixes with steam to show how two forms of reality mingle. The Great Western was already being called ‘the most gigantic work’, and Turner was moved to add the sublime to the grandeur.

Thackeray commented in Fraser’s Magazine that ‘the world has never seen anything like this picture’. The immediacy and energy of the painting are conveyed in his description that ‘there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite’. He notes that the rain ‘is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on the canvas with a trowel; the sunshine scintillates out of very thick smeary lumps of chrome yellow’. That one of the pinnacles of Turner’s late art should come in the depiction of a new form of transport confirms the phenomenon of the railway as a form of genre painting. The overriding impression is that of speed. Some painters were more interested in the machine itself, while for others the terminus was depicted with vivid intensity as the architecture of a new way of life.

It is always wonderful to discern the patterns and alignments that manifest themselves in any period. The building of the railways, for example, also satisfied the Victorian passion for geology as the rock face was cut out of the land. One painter’s view of the cuttings for the Manchester and Leeds Railway, for example, afforded ‘a rich treat to the geologist, exhibiting numerous beautiful sections of strata, consisting of alternate beds of rock, shale, sandstone and coal, in which the parallelism and thickness of each is preserved’. So the railway connects with the deep interests of Victorian scientists. It is also significant that at the time of cutting, tunnelling and excavation, the nineteenth-century interest in fossils and the imagined prehistoric worlds became of paramount interest. Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) became the work consulted for the nature of Creation and of the Flood, and the railway could become an instrument of Christian revelation. The nineteenth century began to explain itself and its concept of ‘deep time’. So the earth was believed to have been created on the night before Sunday, 23 December 4004 BC.

Those who did the cutting, and the shovelling, and the embanking, were the ‘navvies’ or ‘navigators’ who were dreaded by the communities through which they passed. They were dirty, ribald and not at all inclined to politeness. Many were Irish, while others came from the Midlands and the north. But they had a universally recognisable uniform. The navvy would wear a white felt hat with the brim turned up, a velveteen square-tailed coat, a scarlet plush waistcoat and brightly coloured kerchief about his neck; his trousers were of corduroy and were tied at the knee, with sturdy high-lace boots. They were wanderers, moving individually or in groups from one set of works to another. The police or the officials of the railway company did not try to discipline them. It would have been futile.

It is a hard irony that, however much the policy of Peel prospered, the enemies in his own party flourished. In February 1845 he brought forward what was called ‘the great Budget’ in which import duties were abolished or reduced. Yet his obvious supporters were disaffected by his further embrace of free trade, especially since he insisted on maintaining the income tax; it was no longer considered to be a temporary measure. There was another flurry of Tory outrage in the spring of the year when Peel was instrumental in granting taxpayers’ money to a Catholic seminar at Maynooth in Ireland. Not only was he against farmers, but he was on the side of the Roman Catholics! Rumours of treachery were everywhere. The Maynooth Bill was passed only with Whig support. Peel had wanted to tempt the Irish Catholics into friendship with the promise of real equality, but he seemed only able to infuriate the English. Yet the real betrayal, as it seemed to many Tories, was about to begin.

By the middle of October 1845, the dire news from Ireland upset all calculations. The potato crop had failed. This was a matter of life and death for a whole country where the potato was the only food. The duke of Wellington recorded Peel’s suffering at a calamity that should have been considered: ‘I never witnessed in any case such agony.’ He added later to a colleague that ‘rotten potatoes have done it all. They have put Peel in his damned fright.’ The duke’s tone is a measure of the standard response to the Irish calamity, leaving aside the fact that he himself was Anglo-Irish of Dublin stock. The English just wished it would go away. But the famine prevailed and lingered. Over the next three years 650,000 died; in the next three years a further 1,100,000 followed them into the grave. It was believed to be a form of genocide brought on by negligence and indifference.

The policy of England towards Ireland had always been characterized by a kind of shifty ignorance, and this was particularly true of the Famine. The government had no precedent on which to build. Mass starvation on such a scale was a disaster for which it was unprepared logistically and – even more to the point – ideologically. That it was the business of government to alleviate famine in an entire nation was a thought that occurred to no one in power at the time. As far as many in England were concerned, the sufferings of the Irish during the Famine were of the same kind as those they endured even in good years, just in greater degree: semi-starvation was the order of the day whenever the Irish had to wait for the next potato crop to ripen every year. And it is easy to forget that the progress of starvation and disease as a result of the Famine was, though terrible, relatively piecemeal; it was easy for British officials to point to the fact that the harvests were not uniformly disastrous. England and Scotland were not comparably affected. Nevertheless, corn was almost impossible to obtain either from the Continent or from America, a problem the British government could do little to remedy when it cast about for alternatives to the potato.

Two other intractable difficulties bedevilled the question: absentee landlordism and the tenancy system. Though both can ultimately be traced to English oppression and bigotry, they had acquired a distinctively Irish character. Most Irish landlords lived in England, and so when the better-intentioned among them returned to Ireland they discovered, to their horror and shame, that the sixty or so tenants on their lists had mutated into several thousand, clamouring feebly at their door. Simply in terms of finance, they were quite unequal to the demands made of them by the situation itself and, increasingly, by the government.

There was also the peculiar nature of Irish tenancy arrangements. In Ireland, tenancy was a Byzantine system of subletting which ensured that the smaller tenants could be hidden from the landowner by unscrupulous middlemen. They had, moreover, no rights worth the name. Owing to the urgent need to use all possible land for potato cultivation, acres in Ireland could be as dear as acres in Mayfair. The comparisons do not end there: rent in Ireland was effectively ground rent – the peasant paid for the privilege of living on the land. There was thus no ethic of reciprocal obligation such as obtained in England. With all this said in mitigation, however, it was widely felt in political circles that the Irish were guilty of lack of initiative or energy, and their supposed unimaginative attitude poisoned and weakened English fellow-feeling. One example will suffice. A priest from the west of Ireland, begging that a grain store be opened for his starving flock, was informed that such a gesture would go against the principles of free trade and upset the ‘mercantile interest’. The priest’s response was properly fierce, but the chilling obtuseness in the official he encountered was quite typical. While the Irish fell dead in their fields, beef, pork, lamb and a host of other necessaries were still being exported in bulk.

Free trade was Ireland’s Shiva, lord of destruction. The bitter irony is that the Irish were killed not by negligence or indifference, but by a fanatic application of free-trade dogma to an economy that was simply not ready for it. The foods imported were almost useless, the foods exported essential to the exporting country – yet import and export had become sacred nostrums. It was characteristic of Victorian England that once it had found a new toy it must wave it about at every opportunity. Free trade was the new toy, but Ireland was in no condition to play with it. Where the charge of ‘genocide’ has more force, however, is in the policy openly known as ‘extermination’ (though the word still carried its old sense of ‘mass eviction’). It was informed by much the same blithe indifference to Irish needs and realities as fuelled the mania for exporting. The land, it was felt, could not support the people, therefore the people must be driven from the land. English policy towards Ireland may be compared to a magnate suggesting to a beggar that his real problem was not starvation but short-sightedness.

Peel announced emergency measures to provide imported corn and to put the people to work on public projects. But still the people were dying by the roadsides before they were built. It was said that when they died they made no noise nor gave any sign. This was true of the western highlanders, too, when their potatoes rotted in the ground. Henry Kingsley noted from observation that ‘the oldest of the able-bodied men began to lie down, and to fall asleep in a strange quiet way’. A French observer, Gustave de Beaumont, noted that ‘in every nation there are poor people, more or less numerous. But an entire nation of paupers is something never witnessed before.’

At a cabinet meeting of November 1845 Peel proposed two measures which might help to assuage the hunger of Ireland and the anger of England. He proposed to suspend the Corn Laws as they were presently administered in order to alleviate the chronic shortages across the Irish Sea. He also proposed that parliament should consider the Corn Laws as a whole with a view to their repeal. The first measure was broadly accepted, even though many ministers considered it to be too late. The second measure was the occasion of fierce anger and debate, as a result of which Peel resigned. But he was not gone for long. His Whig opponent, John Russell, had recently pledged himself to repeal the Laws; and so he naturally took up the queen’s commission. He took about a fortnight to realize that without the commanding authority of Peel he did not have the power to act. He did not even have full control of his proposed cabinet, when Palmerston refused to hold any office other than that of foreign secretary. So Peel returned to the battle. The newspapers now sensed that the moment had come.

When parliament met once more, in January 1846, Peel made a speech in which he announced his conversion to the cause of free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws. ‘I will not withhold the homage which is due to the progress of reason and to the truth, by denying that my opinions on the subject of protection have undergone a change.’ The back benches behind him were silent. The debates continued until May, when a third reading was passed by ninety-eight votes.The salient feature of the result, however, was that 222 Tories voted against Peel’s measures. He had won the vote but had lost his party somewhere along the way. Now there were Peelites and anti-Peelites, the larger flock being shepherded by Disraeli and Bentinck. The Tory rebels had their revenge on the next day when they voted against Peel’s Protection of Life (Ireland) Bill, a measure which in ordinary circumstances they would have supported. But the circumstances were not ordinary. Disraeli had already dipped his pen in the darkest ink when in Sybil, published the year before, he had argued that there were ‘two nations’; everybody knew what he meant but he spelled it out in capital letters: ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’. He could make a novel, but not a programme for government, out of the truism.

The Conservatives never loved Peel, and they never forgave him. Disraeli in particular brought his energies to bear on Peel’s destruction. ‘I love fame’, he said, and for the rest of his life he acted on that assumption. He hardly needed to repeat the obvious. It was already clear that the days before Peel’s departure could be numbered.

There was much rejoicing at Peel’s belated defeat and Peel was obliged to resign; he was followed by the appointment of Lord John Russell as the head of a minority Whig government. But the deed had been done. The Corn Laws were gone. The middle-class shopkeepers and artisans cheered at the news. The Tory party may have withdrawn in smoke and confusion but, as Richard Cobden said, ‘the intelligent middle and industrious classes’ would be the beneficiaries.

Now that the Corn Laws had been removed there was an almost palpable sense of relief that an unjustified oppression, born out of social inequality and a self-interested legislature, had been lifted. Cobden addressed one of the last meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League and stated:

there is no human event that has happened in the world more calculated to promote the enduring interests of humanity than the establishment of the principle of free trade – I don’t mean in a pecuniary point of view, or as a principle applied to England, but we have a principle established now which is eternal in its truth and universal in its application … it is a world’s revolution and nothing else.

His exuberance may be justified by the occasion but it is also testimony to the high principles of the politics of the day.

The repeal of the Corn Laws also put aside any remaining talk of revolution on the French model. As Cobden wrote a few days later to Francis Place, ‘bless yourself that you live in times when reform bills, steamboats, railroads, penny postage and free trade, to say nothing of the ratification of civil and religious liberties, have been possible facts’.

The liberal Conservatives now followed Peel, although he disclaimed in any sense a Peelite faction; yet eventually Peelites joined with the Whig free-traders. The Protectionists, now bereft of leaders except for Disraeli and Bentinck, had all the appearance of having missed the omnibus. They seemed to be aware of the fact, and Bentinck was observed in the chamber making a bitter attack upon the government. ‘His voice was raised to a screaming pitch – his eye gleamed like a wild animal at feeding time and his whole demeanour was so excited that no man out of Bedlam ever came near it.’

The same sensation of unanticipated liberty had followed the Reform Act of 1832. Now, as then, was another chance to clear away the dead wood that had accumulated over the generations. John Stuart Mill wrote to his French philosophical counterpart, Auguste Comte, in 1847:

we have embarked on a system of charitable government … Today all the cry is to provide the poor not only with money … shorter hours of work … better sanitation, even education. That is to say they are to be governed paternally, a course to which the Court, the nobility and the wealthy are quite agreeable. They forget that what is done for people benefits them only when it assists them in what they do for themselves.

And so there passed a twelve hours bill and other salutary factory reforms (by which was primarily meant the textile industry), a new mines act and progress both with the poor law and public sanitation. The working day for women and children was steadily reduced from twelve hours in 1844 to ten hours in 1847; the hours for factory children were reduced to six and a half to make way for education; and the power of factory inspectors was significantly increased.

The process took some years and was accompanied by fiery speeches and reproaches. In his Memoirs Charles Greville notes of the furore accompanying one Ten Hours Bill which failed that there was ‘such intermingling of parties, such a confusion of opposition … so much zeal, asperity and animosity, so many reproaches hurled backwards and forwards’. It was in part the rage of Caliban looking in a glass. By 1847 the ‘system’ had emerged or, as Disraeli wrote in Tancred (1847), ‘men obey a general impulse, they bow before an external necessity’ which was also known as ‘the powers of society’. Six years later, however, Dickens declared that ‘our system fails’.

In 1847 itself there was already general talk of failure. One of the great motors of investment in the railway was the opposing tendency between ‘mania’ and ‘panic’. Those who have studied the madness and exhilaration of crowds are quite familiar with the phenomenon. There was in 1847, for example, a sudden ‘panic’ in the financial markets. A fall in the price of corn in the summer, prompted by the repeal of the Corn Laws, caused the bankruptcy of many dealers; a significant number of banks found that they were burdened by so many bad debts that they had to suspend dealing. The shortage of basic food supplies was responsible for a rise in prices, as well as trade deficits which created a drain of bullion from the Bank of England. The turmoil worked through the ‘system’ at precisely the time when ‘railway mania’ increased the demand for circulating capital. In America the cotton crop was less bountiful than usual at a time when England took 80 per cent of its cotton from the southern states. Turmoil and fear fed one upon another. Did the railways starve the country of capital or did they provide income and employment? But the panic subsided almost as soon as it arose, and became part of the general fluctuating and erratic nature of the business cycles which seemed to defy rational explanation. In the dark womb of time recovery seemed to come from nowhere. That is why some people related economic cycles to the phases of the moon.

Despite the interest in social reform there had been little progress in the education of the people. Even by 1870 only one child out of three attended a school of even the most rudimentary kind. Many people disputed that there was any progress to be made. Children were meant to work and to sustain their families in the unequal battle for survival. What was the point of stuffing their little heads with facts when they had no earthly use for them? Let them learn to work in a pin factory or cotton mill. And what was the point of universal literacy? The lower orders would only learn to read salacious propaganda, radical pamphlets and Whig tracts. The experiment of the ‘ragged schools’, meant for the children of the street, was not altogether a success; they were accused of spreading lice and bad habits.

Yet the educational reformers persisted. Their work took two forms. The ‘national schools’, established in 1811, used a model devised by Andrew Bell whereby older children acted as monitors and taught the younger children. Joseph Lancaster, another prominent educational reformer, used a broadly similar system but with more rigid discipline. When in 1833 parliament made an annual grant of £22,000 the amount was equally distributed between the two schemes; it could hardly be said to have been a generous provision. There were deep pits of ignorance which no funds could reach, abysses among the poor where no light could be seen. The Church and Dissent fought over the spoils of the little children, with the result that 75 per cent of the children who had gone through ‘the system’ only knew the letters of the alphabet and had little or no understanding of the words they uttered by rote.

The Whigs, together with assorted radicals, now governed Britain with any number of compromises, conditions and caveats. The leader of the party in the Commons, John Russell, was a natural debater without being a natural politician. Peel himself, in opposition, was withdrawing to the margin of visibility. ‘The fact is,’ he told a colleague:

that the state of public business while Parliament sits is becoming in many ways a matter of most serious concern. I defy the Minister of this country to perform properly the duties of his office – to read all that he ought to read, including the whole foreign correspondence; to keep up the constant communication with the Queen and the Prince; to see all whom he ought to see; to superintend the grant of honours and the disposal of civil and ecclesiastical patronage; to write with his own hand to every person of note who chooses to write to him; to be prepared for every debate, including the most trumpery concerns; to do all these indispensable things, and also sit in the House of Commons eight hours a day for 118 days. It is impossible for me not to feel that the duties are incompatible, and above all human strength – at least above mine.

Peel did not leave parliament. He thought it enough to resign his leadership of the party and forsake any further ambition. But he had to remain even if only to support the demoralized Whig party that had come into office as a result of his defeat. He could not contemplate the possibility of the Protectionists or radicals coming to power, and so he did all he could to prop up John Russell and his colleagues. He made it plain that he would support the Whig administration so long as they maintained the conditions of his policies. It was now believed that Peel essentially stood ‘above party’. While some still continued to speak of his betrayal there were many who applauded his rigour and determination to maintain the state and to protect Reform.

Everyone talked about Ireland. No political conversation could do without it. It was on every politician’s mind. Gladstone wrote to his wife in the autumn of 1845: ‘Ireland! Ireland! That cloud in the West! That coming storm! That minister of God’s retribution upon cruel, inveterate and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us the great social and great religious questions. God grant that we may have the courage to look them in the face!’ The Almighty was invoked for a number of reasons. For many it was the punishment for espousing Roman Catholicism or, in an alternative eschatology, the divine rebuke for sloth and fecklessness. More secular souls believed that providence had nothing to do with it, and that the failures were biological and mechanical. The harvests had in fact begun to improve by 1847, but they had left sickness, debility and fever in their wake.

13

The salamander

Peel’s resignation speech at the end of June 1846 was notable for its unaccustomed oratory. ‘It may be’, he said, ‘that I shall leave a name sometimes to be remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and earn their bread daily by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.’ He was escorted from Westminster by a cheering crowd. When Lord John Russell took office after Peel in the summer of 1846 he offered cabinet posts to Wellington and other Conservatives, but all of them refused. Peel remained the most prominent politician in parliament, and Cobden congratulated him as ‘the Idea of the age’, the word doubly underlined.

Lord Palmerston joined Russell’s cabinet as foreign secretary, thereby detonating some explosions of ill will in foreign capitals. It was a minority cabinet in the sense that the Whigs, radicals and Irish under Russell by no means represented a majority of the parliament. But Peel had no intention of leading a determined opposition against him. The Peelites were not so much a party as a fellowship of Peel’s former supporters. The Times noted that ‘their present difficulty is that they are not a party; they have not its ties; they have not its facilities; they have not its obligations’. But they still possessed Peel’s ideals of free trade and economic stringency; and perhaps most importantly they retained Peel’s independence of mind. It did not seem likely that they would be open to the bribe of cabinet posts.

In fact over the next twenty years squalls and tempests followed doldrums. Eight administrations followed each other, and for some years there was no party with a stable majority. There was at one stage a patched-up government between Whigs, radicals and Peelites, but this ill-starred coalition was directly responsible for the Crimean War. The general feeling was one of immobility, and if it had been hoped that the subsequent general election in the summer of 1847 might galvanize the electors and the elected, the expectation was largely unfulfilled. The result was much the same as before, with John Russell and his light cavalry dashing through the divided ranks of the Protectionists under Bentinck and the free-traders under Peel. But what exactly did it mean to call yourself a Whig or Tory? Nobody seemed to care very much, one way or the other.

It is significant that the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, asked for and accepted Peel’s advice on financial matters. In a debate Peel outlined what became his position for the rest of his life – that he would not encourage ‘a factious or captious opposition’ and that ‘I cordially approve of the general principles of commercial policy set out by the administration.’ John Russell was recognized as the leader of the Liberal party but he knew himself to be, at bottom, an old-fashioned Whig. So the Factory Act, passed in 1847, was an attempt at social amelioration, although the prime minister gave it only passive support. Women and young people were now allowed to work only ten hours a day in the textile mills; it was the result of a fifteen-year campaign. It has been described as a victory by the people against the government, and this may partly be true; it issued from a groundswell of support among operatives with encouragement from labour reformers such as Lord Ashley and John Fielden, a cotton manufacturer and MP for Oldham. It has also been described as a victory for landowners against the free-traders who had helped to repeal the Corn Laws. Those who supported laissez-faire were not inclined to support state intervention in traditions of employment.

John Russell took on his role as first minister with caution; his reforms were modest and moderate without a hint of revolutionary change. He had tinkered with the edges of the Irish famine, although it is not clear that any immediate changes would have made any difference to the suffering nation. It was left in the hands of God, who could not be criticized or blamed for His ministrations. Yet there were measures which had all the traits of what once would have been called Whig government. A Poor Law Board was established in 1847, and in the following year a parallel Central Board of Health was able to create local boards with statutory powers on public health from water to cemeteries. State control over education was strengthened, and the parliamentary franchise widened. A public welfare service was slowly coming into place. All these measures were manna for the quondam Whig aristocrats who had inherited a political sensibility which encouraged relief for all classes. The great landlords were, or thought themselves to be, the guardians of the nation who had a permanent interest in the welfare of all the people. Russell himself governed much as his Whig ancestry would suggest, with a waspish dominance, but he was not an inspiring prime minister; he was one of those who attain their eminence only by degrees.

The administration inaugurated by the ministry of Lord John Russell, had other consequences. The radical or Nonconformist members of parliament were now often businessmen or urban professionals; they sat for urban industrial seats, and the prosperity of commercial and industrial interests encouraged the rise of what might be called a professional class in suits of black and stovepipe hats. The great landowners could still ride this wave of new men, but gradually the temper and tenor of the Commons changed. It was no longer a congregation of the rich landlords and their dependants. It was now being affected by what eventually became known, by Disraeli and Salisbury, as ‘industrial’ Conservatism. There had been before the ‘landed interest’ or the ‘local interest’, composed of loyalty and patriarchy, but this was now diminished. The ubiquity of the railways meant that many on the land were displaced, and that many landowners became more interested in industry than agriculture. The lawyers of the railway companies were more than a match for the farmer, and the individual members of the ‘landed interest’ were on their own. So the lawyers also came into parliament. The politicians and agitators knew all about Protectionism and free trade, but those who were dependent on agriculture were woefully ill-equipped to deal with the issues of the day. Inevitably their influence waned. Various attempts to set up Protectionist societies fell apart; farmers and labourers alike were loath to engage in popular demonstrations, even if they could have been organized.

Rural depopulation, however, was something of a chimera. Some of it was the result of a steady stream of emigration to North America, and in each of the three years after 1847 more than half a million emigrants crossed the ocean. Yet such was the energy or fecundity of the people that the population continued to increase. We can speak of depopulation only in terms of the number of families involved in agriculture, which did diminish, but the overall population of the countryside remained the same. In the country areas, too, improved agricultural techniques and more labour-intensive crops increased the workload for those who stayed on the land. The pattern of movement from fields to the local town was significant enough, but the outline of rural change over fifty years was a sequence of small-scale migrations over a limited territory. There was a continuity, even though a cursory reading of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) would cure the reader of any illusion of rural comfort or tranquillity. The lives of the labourers were often dirtier and not less wretched than those of their dogs. They worked on the land because they feared and hated the spinning mills or, even worse, the privations of the poor house. The unknown was also the father of fear; when some manual labourers were being moved from north Devon to Kent, at the fiat of some landlord, they asked if they were ‘going over the water’.

In 1846 Harriet Martineau wrote to Elizabeth Barrett:

I dare say you need not be told how sensual vice abounds in rural districts … here is dear good old Wordsworth forever talking of rural innocence and deprecating any intercourse with towns, lest the purity of his neighbours should be corrupted. He little knows what elevation, self-denial and refinement accrue in towns from the superior cultivation of the people.

Yet the rural population had performed its duties. The King of Brobdingnag believed that ‘whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.’ In 1816 the population of the British Islands had numbered 19 million; forty-five years later it had reached 29 million. But they were still being fed.

The attention of the nation turned again to the generally forgotten fields of foreign policy. Eighteen forty-eight became known as the ‘year of revolutions’, much to the dismay of those who wished for a century of peace. It was perhaps fortunate that the most formidable member of the Whig cabinet was Viscount Palmerston, who once more reigned over the Foreign Office. Reign is the word, because he was the sole monarch of his domain. He was a consummate man of business, a tireless worker, and a man whose apparent recklessness concealed cunning and, on especial occasions, high seriousness. The temperature had been raised at the beginning of 1847 when the duke of Wellington rose up and prophesied gloom. He wrote privately to a fellow officer on the unprotected state of Britain and, as such things happen, his letter was leaked to the press. It was revealed to the public that there was ‘not a spot on the coast on which infantry might not be thrown on shore at any time of tide, with any wind, and in any weather, and from which such a body of infantry, so thrown on shore, would not find within a distance of five miles, a road into the interior of the country’. Immediate panic was the inevitable consequence. The fact was that Britain had for some time seemed to be uninterested in foreign affairs until they came too close for comfort.

The prospect of disorder loomed nearer when revolution touched France, Germany and Italy. In February fire and street-fighting filled the avenues of Paris, after Louis Philippe banned certain private meetings of the opposition parties; the troops shot at the crowd, and the riots followed. When Louis took off his wig he was, according to Victor Hugo, ‘but an ordinary tradesman’. He fled to England under the name of Mr Smith just as the Second Republic was proclaimed. In March the people of Berlin rose up, as a result of which William, Prince of Prussia, fled to England. Ludwig I of Bavaria followed the procession by abdicating in favour of his son. The emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, left Vienna for Innsbruck and then Moravia. The Hungarians demanded independence from Austria. The Czechs of Bohemia demanded their own parliament. Venice and Lombardy also rose against their old imperial enemy. The pope left Rome in disguise. But then the balloon burst.

One by one the rebel forces were defeated by the old guards; ethnic tensions were exploited as the Magyars turned upon Slavs instead of their common imperial enemy. One by one the rulers crept back upon their thrones. It might be described as a moment of madness in what Punch called ‘the Asylum of Europe’, but Lewis Namier described it as a ‘turning point at which history failed to turn’. It is perhaps better to say that the ambition for change and freedom outstripped the resources available. The coming men of 1848, at the head of the middle classes and working people, became the martyrs and shackled prisoners of 1849.

The temporary surge of freedom had remarkably little consequence in Europe. It put Louis-Napoleon at the head of France, where he conducted a moderately successful regime as the president of the French Second Republic before he inaugurated the Second Empire. The year of revolutions also prompted the Russians to intervene more powerfully in Hungary, where they faced the indomitable spirit of the republican hero Lajos Kossuth. The cabinet and the royal family did not wish Kossuth to call upon Palmerston during his subsequent wanderings in exile; but the politician who was now the idol of the people replied that he would invite anyone he liked to his house. Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, complained of Palmerston that ‘the ostentatious bidding for radical favour and the flattery of the democracy, of which his speeches were full, are disgusting in themselves and full of danger’.

Palmerston, like the salamander, lived in fire, sending robust diplomatic missives to every court and every capital; this was not to the taste of Victoria and Albert, who were constitutionally inclined to the older order which Kossuth, for example, was intent upon undermining. The complaints against the foreign secretary by the royal family were constant and demanding, but he had a habit of ignoring them or shrugging them off. ‘He was easy and obliging and conciliatory in little matters,’ Disraeli wrote of Palmerston as the lightly disguised earl of Roehampton in Endymion (1880), ‘but when the credit or honour of large interests were concerned, he acted with conscious authority … He was a man who really cared for nothing but office and affairs … but he was always playful and ever taking refuge in a bantering spirit.’ This is not the Palmerston that Victoria knew. She told Russell that ‘he was not always straightforward in his conduct’. This was the regal manner of calling him a liar and a hypocrite.

The nearest the nation ever came to the revolutions of 1848 occurred in the spring of that year when some latter-day Chartists organized a demonstration on Kennington Common. Their purpose was once more to deliver a petition to parliament on the need for universal suffrage and the secret ballot. Their numbers are not known for sure, but it was not the half-million of Chartist mythology. They were forbidden to march with their petition to Westminster and their leader, Feargus O’Connor, took a hansom cab instead to parliament while the crowds dispersed. It had not been a famous victory.

Such was the panic in advance, however, that the authorities had taken extraordinary measures. The cavalry and infantry were posted on both sides of the bridges that spanned the Thames; boats were made ready and cannon were stationed outside Buckingham Palace and the Bank of England; 170,000 volunteers were enrolled as special constables with truncheons and white armbands. It was clear that the fear of revolution, like those in Europe, was real. But the crowds simply melted away. This effectively ended the prospect of any revolutionary party in England.

Yet the trouble was not over. In the summer of 1848 an ill-judged and ill-timed revolution in Ireland was mounted by the Young Ireland movement in imitation of the revolutions in Europe. It degenerated into a shooting match between the rebels and the police which continued for some hours until the rebels were wounded or retreated. They had been trapped in the house of Mrs McCormack, and the fracas became known as ‘The Battle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage plot’. It is perhaps only surprising that the rebellion collapsed as suddenly and as completely as it did. The instinctive reaction of the English government was still one of rage. Russell wrote in 1849 that ‘we have granted, lent, subscribed, worked, visited, clothed the Irish; millions of pounds of money, years of debate etcetera – the only return is calumny and rebellion’. These were the predictable but unjustifiable remarks of one who in the heat of the moment had forgotten the contempt and savagery which the English had lavished on the Irish for centuries. The English found it easy to forget or to excuse their own barbarity; the Irish never did.

The year 1848 was when the first two volumes of Macaulay’s History of England were published, the preface of which declared that ‘the history of our country, during the last hundred and sixty years, is eminently the history of physical, of moral and of intellectual improvement’. It is a salutary instance of the fact that formal history can be quite at odds with the reality of the world. This ‘Whig interpretation of history’, as it has universally been called, acted as an intellectual comfort blanket for those who otherwise might harbour serious doubts about the future of the country.

Here we may justifiably substitute Liberal for Whig. The new term was first used in the mid-1830s, but its meaning was not clear. The Liberals suffered from weak leadership of which John Russell was the latest example, and their avidity for office was matched only by their inability to do anything much with it. Russell knew as much himself, and confessed that his party needed Peel and an injection of Peelites to give them strength and confidence. When in 1848 a group of fifty or sixty MPs decided to identify themselves as Radicals with their own political programme the Liberals were in a quandary. Were these Radicals potential allies or potential rivals? No one seemed to be sure. As a result Russell’s reputation gradually dimmed. The election of 1847 had only served to emphasize the fact that he was first minister only because the Conservative opposition remained fatally divided between the Protectionists and free-traders.

The Liberals were not democrats in any proper meaning of the word, and half of their elected members were landlords or the sons of landlords. They thought themselves to be the principal ruling party on the basis of past experience rather than present politics. As late as 1886 the Fortnightly Review could write that ‘only a few years ago the name [Whig] was a proud boast, an hereditary recollection, the appanage of a great party; now it is an historical recollection, recalling colours and cries, buff and blue …’

There is one other phenomenon closely associated with 1848. This was the year when spiritualism, with its panoply of levitations, ghosts, spirits, table tappings, automatic writing, telepathy and shadow photographs, became the popular version of the learned discourses and experiments on electricity. Utopian socialists were some of the earlier students of these methods, but scientists and politicians were touched by the new beliefs. Many of the first founders of the Labour party were occultists. It would be a nice question to interpret these waves of feeling – whether electrophysical or mesmeric or spiritual – which passed over the country (and indeed other countries) in this period. The Theosophical Movement of 1875 was part of this yearning towards the spirit, as was the rise of the Oxford idealists in the work of T. H. Green and the spell of J. H. Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel published in 1865. From where did this wind of idealism and awakening derive? It is impossible to say, but it might have been some sort of reaction to the ‘hard facts’ theory of education as parodied by Dickens in Mr Gradgrind and to the fixity of purpose and meaning in such Victorian shibboleths as free trade, profit and loss, and factory hours. In the same spirit, and in the same period, Christian Socialism sprang up among the determined or devout young men in plain opposition to Victorian materialism. It was suggested that the conventional tenets of Victorian Anglicanism were in direct opposition to God’s law. The law of life should be above the law of labour. The cash nexus was the work of the devil.

There was one figure who stalked the corridors of the House of Commons who might have been conjured by a djinn. Disraeli walked silently, looking neither right nor left; he walked with a permanent stoop, his eyes cast down to the floor. ‘See him where you will,’ a journalist from Fraser’s Magazine remarked in 1847, ‘he glides past you noiselessly, without apparently being conscious of the existence of externals and more like the shadow than the substance of a man’. The reporter added that ‘when he is speaking he equally shrouds himself in his own intellectual atmosphere, concentrating on the idea burning in his mind’. If he is interrupted he pays no attention or averts the speaker ‘with a gesture of impatience, or with something like a snarl’. When he sat in the chamber he did so ‘with his head rigid, his body contracted, his arms closely pinned to his side, as though he were an automaton, like one of those stone figures of ancient Egypt that embody the idea of motionless quiescence for ever’. Yet, in contrast, his speech often seemed careless or supercilious. He gave the appearance of not caring a damn for anybody. In reality he was always cautious, always calculating.

With the withdrawal of Peel, Disraeli, still in theory the Protectionist, was the leader in waiting. He was not everyone’s first choice. His unusual looks, his very precise way of enunciating English, gave him the false reputation of being a foreigner. And of course the word on everyone’s lips was Jew or ‘the Jew’. He knew it and did not mind it. He might have preferred it to his other nickname of ‘Dizzy’. With a leading Protectionist, Lord Edward Stanley (to become Lord Derby in 1851), consigned to the Lords, Disraeli was obliged to bear the heat and the dust of parliamentary combat. He was a realist by instinct. That is why the favoured theme of Protectionism was in fact losing its savour for him. He could do nothing, and go nowhere, with it. He was, to put it kindly, lukewarm on the matter. It had lost its savour, now that free trade had become the creed of the kingdom; it was a positive encumbrance.

Yet Disraeli was optimistic. In February 1849 he announced to his sister that ‘after much struggling I am fairly the leader’. The few words accounted for a multiplicity of past deals, compromises and broken promises. Disraeli was in the end the most astute and eloquent of any Tory. He also had the inestimable support, if not admiration, of the leading Tory in the Lords. Lord Edward Stanley came from a revered and noble family. He would do his duty to his colleague, but it was not clear whether he would go any further.

The tapestry of the time grew more complex. In August 1849,Victoria visited Ireland to great acclaim, despite the horrors that the country had only recently endured. When she stepped ashore at Cork an old man shouted: ‘Ah, Queen dear, make one of them Prince Patrick, and Ireland will die for you.’ The queen wore Irish linen decorated with shamrocks. She had purchased Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, which was even then being rebuilt. ‘I was brought up very differently,’ she said. ‘I never had a room to myself. I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’ This was a time when all England was drowning in cholera, reaching up to 2,000 fatalities each week. The diagnosis of a ‘zymotic’ fever, whereby the disease spread by fermentation, was anyone’s guess. It took the physician John Snow to trace the source of the cholera outbreak to a polluted water pipe in Soho.

At the end of June 1850 Sir Robert Peel’s horse slipped on the road of Constitution Hill. Peel lingered for a while but his injuries were too severe. This was a severe blow to the body politic, even though Peel had more or less given up party politics. He had agreed to save the administration from Protectionism, but his ambitions did not stretch beyond that. Prince Albert had greatly admired him and tried to manage the royal administration with the same efficiency and what might now be called modernity.

In his death lay a puzzle. Who had the right, and presence, to take his place as the leading free-trader? Gladstone had remained a ‘Peelite’ in Peel’s lifetime and said that Peel ‘had a kind of authority that was possessed by no one else’. He added significantly that ‘the moral atmosphere of the House of Commons has never since his death been quite the same and is now widely different’. Peel had brought a certain astringency and steady intellectual power that no one could contest or perhaps even emulate.

In fact, Peel suffered his fatal accident three days before one of the most redoubtable of English statesmen enjoyed what was arguably his greatest triumph in the ‘Don Pacifico Affair’. Pacifico, a Jewish businessman born in Gibraltar (and therefore a British citizen), had his house in Athens pillaged and fired by an anti-Semitic crowd. Another minister might have cooled heads with conferences and compromises. After few months of fruitless negotiation, Viscount Palmerston ordered British gunboats to secure Greek shipping to pay an indemnity and to organize a blockade. It was not the usual procedure. The queen had been furious that she had not been warned or advised about the matter, and that Palmerston had put the country at risk for the sake of one man; in short, the foreign secretary must resign. Prince Albert understood events more quickly. He wrote to Russell in the spring of 1850 that ‘his boldness pleases and his dexterity amuses the public; if his case be ever so bad a one he can represent it and dress it up to his own advantage’.

The sangfroid of Palmerston was below freezing point. He did not need to resign just yet; he had no particular regard for the queen, and never knowingly pandered to her feelings. He spoke for five hours in the Commons in his own defence, expatiating on the fact that it was the duty of the British government ‘to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad … as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say civis Romanus sum’. This was the peroration that Lords and Commons, already bewildered and nervous about the growing extent of the British empire, needed to hear. He won the debate by forty-six votes.

Towards the end of 1851 the president of the Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, took over the state machinery of the Republic and imprisoned many of his rivals to make way for the inauguration of the Second French Empire under his rule as Napoleon III. In England the royal couple, and the ministry, had concluded that nothing whatever should be done to praise or to blame the French action. But this was not Palmerston’s way. He let it be known that he approved of Louis-Napoleon’s action as the inevitable outcome of the situation in France. This was more than the royal couple could bear, the matter made infinitely more grave when Palmerston actually congratulated Louis-Napoleon on his success without first consulting them. This was Pilgerstein, or pumice stone as Albert contemptuously called him, at his worst. As first minister Lord John Russell considered that the die had been cast and, calculating that he might survive with a new foreign minister or without any foreign minister all, he ordered Palmerston to resign.

But he may have misjudged the man. Palmerston was not going to leave quietly. He crossed the floor with his allies and joined the Conservatives under Lord Derby, who was still better known for exercising horse flesh. ‘Palmerston is out!’ Charles Greville confided to his diary on 23 December 1851, ‘actually, really and irretrievably out. I nearly dropped off my chair yesterday afternoon …’ Lord Granville was his chosen successor and the queen instructed him to lay out a set of general instructions with the help of Lord Russell.

Peel’s sudden death had left men bewildered. Would X take over the leadership of the Peelites, leaving Y high and dry? Or would M dish the lot of them by going to the Lords? And, if so, what would N do? ‘Such was the confusion of the Ministerial movement and the political process,’ Punch wrote, ‘that everybody went to call upon everybody.’ After Palmerston was dismissed following constant royal pressure he promised to have his tit-for-tat with ‘Johnnie’ Russell as soon as may be. In February 1852 Russell introduced a Militia Bill and, when Palmerston successfully introduced an amendment, Russell resigned. This was Palmerston’s revenge. Lord Derby succeeded in the very slippery position of first minister of an unstable Conservative administration divided between Peelites and Protectionists.

Another crisis had already presented itself. In the autumn of 1850, after the pope had been restored to the Vatican by his French allies, he issued a brief for ‘the re-establishing and extending the Catholic faith in England’. England and Wales were converted into twelve sees, with Henry Edward Manning, soon to be archbishop and then cardinal, at the top of the procession in London. The furore was immense; the queen considered it to be an affront to her rule while the then prime minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed Manning as an ambitious convert.

In a letter to the comfortably orthodox bishop of Durham, Russell condemned the pope’s intervention as ‘insolent and insidious’. Russell knew very well that the queen considered him to be a small man in every sense, and needed some great cause to raise him higher. Now he had found it, and he was not about to let it go. In the queen’s speech, on the opening of parliament in 1851, she announced her ‘resolution to maintain the right of her crown, and the independence of the nation against all encroachments, from whatever quarter they may proceed’. All eyes turned to the papal apartments in the Vatican. Russell then issued a motion banning Catholic priests and prelates from claiming any territorial titles and ordering that lay gifts to them should be returned.

This pleased the people, not least the electorate, just as Russell had planned and hoped. It was in truth a minor storm in the baptismal font which caused no great alteration. But the cry of ‘No Popery!’ was one which united Englishmen, whether rich or poor, religious or neutral. The hawkers and the sweepers on the street knew all the words of the protest songs. It was clear that the pope would head the victims on Bonfire Night.

The missive from the pope coincided with mounting dismay in the ranks of Anglicans. Old-fashioned churchmen were not happy about the progress of ritualists within the Church of England; their vestments and thurifers belonged to Baal. Lord Shaftesbury remarked that he ‘would rather worship with Lydia on the bank by the riverside than with a hundred surpliced priests in the temple of St Barnabas’. The newly built church of St Barnabas, in Pimlico, was a treasure house of Catholic ritual, including a wooden screen to separate the participant clergy from the congregation. It contained fair cloths and jewels, all of them condemned by Nonconformists as the trappings of Satan. The outcry against papal intervention was therefore more bitter. ‘What a surprising ferment,’ Lord Shaftesbury wrote. ‘It abates not a jot, meeting after meeting, in every town and part in the country … it resembles a storm over the whole nation … All opinions seem for a while submerged in this one feeling.’ Benjamin Disraeli was an acute observer. He wrote to Lord Londonderry: ‘what do you think of Cardinal Wiseman? Even the peasants think they are going to be burned alive and taken up to Smithfield instead of their pigs.’

Catholicism in England was tainted by association with Ireland, adding to the sentiment of anti-popery. ‘In former Irish rebellions,’ one of Gladstone’s political allies, Sir William Harcourt, wrote, ‘the Irish were in Ireland. Now there is an Irish nation in the United States, equally hostile, with plenty of money, absolutely beyond our reach and yet within ten days of our shores.’ It was believed also that the Irish migrants were a threat to their English neighbours. A supposed humorist in Punch noted the ‘missing link’ between the gorillas of the jungle and ‘the Negro’ in the presence of the ‘Irish Yahoo’ in the lowest areas of London. The Birmingham Star remarked of the Fenian brotherhood that ‘numbers of insane people, of the very lowest class, get together stealthily in out of the way places for the purposes of drill. “Death to the Saxon” is of course supposed to be their watchword and their object, but of what they would do after the killing, neither they, nor anyone else, have the least idea.’ This is one of the most powerful anxieties of nineteenth-century England, and it was reinforced by statistics that purported to show the connection between the Irish and criminality. The fact that the Irish-born population in England rose by some 30,000 from 1841 to 1861 only served to increase hostility. The people did not need statistics but relied upon native observation. South Lancashire and London were the areas most affected. By the latter part of the century, however, xenophobia was being directed against the Jews of the East End. There was always an enemy somewhere.

The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, as Russell’s measure was called, passed with a large majority. It was repealed twenty years later after altering nothing whatsoever. William Ewart Gladstone travelled to Rome during the parliamentary recess of 1851, but not to kiss the fisherman’s ring. He had come to investigate the troubled politics of the region. He had also come, according to his first biographer, John Morley, ‘into that great stream of European Whiggism which was destined to carry him so far’.

He had gone down to Naples ostensibly for a pleasure trip but he seized the opportunity of visiting the prisons and prisoners there. He was appalled by what he saw. Here were filth and misery, ‘the sick prisoners, almost with death in their faces’. He was determined to bring the merciless injustices of Naples to the attention of the British press, thereby to mend them or end them. It was his first manifestation of the moral earnestness he would now carry with him everywhere; he possessed a passionate purposefulness combined with an angry will for improvement.

So the tit-for-tat by Palmerston against Russell had succeeded, with the earl of Derby as the bewildered Conservative victor. Disraeli had called Palmerston ‘an imposter, utterly exhausted, and at best only ginger beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted pantaloon’. Yet Pantalone might turn into Harlequin, and a vengeful Harlequin is to be avoided. Russell had therefore fallen from grace and favour.

14

A most gorgeous sight

By now public attention had moved on to the crystal palace in the park. There had been nothing quite like it, a transparent palace filled with marvels mechanical and electrical. It was considered by some to be the eighth wonder of the world, and London itself now greater than Athens or Rome.

On the first day of May 1851, some half a million people gathered in Hyde Park to witness the opening of the Great Exhibition by the queen. She wrote in her diary that ‘the glimpse of the transept through the iron gates, the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensation which I can never forget and I felt much moved’. Her husband had helped to supervise the funding and the construction of the great palace, perhaps with the idea of uniting the monarchy with the people in a joint celebration of England’s power and inventiveness.

It was reported that there were 100,000 exhibits and marvels on display from all over the world. The exhibition itself was devoted to four great schemes, the first a survey of the raw materials of the earth and the second of machinery and mechanical inventions. The third section was given to manufactures, and the fourth to sculpture and plastic art. More than 2,000 men worked on 2,000 cast-iron girders, 3,000 columns, and 900,000 square feet of glass; the vast glittering edifice was created out of 4,000 tons of iron and 400 tons of glass. The building itself was 1,851 feet in length from east to west and 408 feet in width from north to south, with an interior height of 128 feet. The language used to describe the architectural detail, of vault and transept, nave and aisle, was taken from the great cathedrals to which this was the closest relative. Almost 300,000 panes of glass glittered in the light and motion of a crystal fountain some 27 feet in height. It was built on the summit of a gently rising slope so that the entrance from the west would display the interior all at once.

The Exhibition attracted 6 million visitors, and thus set the tone of profusion and extravagance which the Victorians felt most keenly. Twentyfive thousand season tickets were sold in advance, and the average entrance fee was at first 5 shillings, with ‘shilling days’ eventually introduced for the ‘poorer sort’. On show were locomotives, microscopes, air pumps and cameras. But the spectacle of elm trees rising up at the sky within the great glass house seems to have been the first wonder. In the mid-nineteenth century there was no clear division between mythology and material progress. ‘Technology’ was too recent to have its own category and so was seen as the sister of Art. The ‘vulcanizing’ process came from Vulcan, the god of fire. The new techniques of manufacture were themselves the object of wonder. Cast iron was the material of the age, but here were also corrugated iron and zinc for those in the vanguard of the modern.

The colours were striking – blue, white and yellow for the verticals, blue, white and red for the curving girders and red, white and yellow for the roof bars. This was a thoroughly modern design, and the photographs of the interior reveal a surprising contrast with the usual dim and fudged Victorian interiors. In these photographs, also, the impression is of a bazaar or department store rather than an exhibition. It might almost be the work of Fortnum and Mason. To other visitors it resembled a vast railway terminus where in fact new locomotives were on display. It is possible to sense the context, or the conditions, of the ‘mass market’ which flourished in the next century.

The visitors participated in the universal excitement banishing the apocalyptic ferments of the 1790s, the rural unrest of the 1830s and the political controversies of the 1840s. They could forget the famines of Ireland and the Chartist meetings of the day before. A spell of peace and security seemed to hold the capital. Entire parishes, led by their clergymen, arrived in London; colonels came with their soldiers and admirals with their sailors; schools came with their pupils en masse, and manufacturers with their workers. The Illustrated London News had a cartoon of ‘Country Folk Visiting the Exhibition’ but it was not sardonic or cynical; it showed young and old wandering in wonder. The average Londoner, too, knew very little about the industrial and technological changes which generally occurred within workshops out of sight; the Exhibition, if nothing else, was a huge surprise.

A contributor to the Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts wrote:

the state of the metropolis throughout the whole period of the Great Exhibition will be remembered with wonder and admiration by all … Instead of confusion, disorder and demoralisation, if not actual revolution, which were foretold by some gloomy minds, instead of famine and pestilence confidently predicted by others, London exhibited a wonderful degree of order … it was like a gigantic picnic.

That can be seen as a further meaning of ‘exhibition’, as a way of ‘exhibiting’ the essential peacefulness of the British people. And this was the marvellous thing – 6 million people and barely a hint of violence. When the Victorians thought of crowds they thought of mobs, but the spectacle of Hyde Park, untouched, exorcized many of the panics that had been created out of thin air in previous decades. It seemed that ‘the people’, en masse, were not dangerous at all. Soldiers and policemen were ready for the call to arms, but it never came. This is perhaps the single most important aspect of the enterprise. It was also the context for the manufacture of glass beehives, also on display, in which the observer might reflect upon the discipline and cooperation of large numbers.

It is possible that the large crowds were overawed by the vision of a crystal palace never before dreamed of. They had a glimpse of the future and of progress as if they were a vision on a hill. It was related to that endemic optimism which accompanied the ardent endeavours of the time. Charles Kingsley put it best in his novel Yeast, published in volume form in the year that the Exhibition opened.

Look around you and see what is the characteristic of your country and of your generation at this moment. What a yearning, what an expectation, amid infinite falsehoods and confusions, of some nobler, more chivalrous, more godlike state! Your very costermonger trolls out his belief that ‘there’s a good time coming’ and the hearts of gamins as well as millenarians answer ‘True!’

The glass palace also acted as a giant machine for classifying and dividing the products of the earth and of the individual nations. A wig-maker complained that his product had been removed from ‘Art’ and placed in ‘Vegetable and Animal Substances chiefly used in Manufacture, as Implements, or as Ornaments’. Was a wig art or ornament? The question has never been settled. Many groups and subgroups grew up like the elm trees in the Exhibition Hall, and some unlikely combinations proved the variety and diversity of the enterprise. Just outside the Hall was placed a block of coal weighing 24 tons, as a symbol of England’s material wealth, and beside it stood a huge equestrian statue of Richard I as a symbol of the nation’s greatness. The Roman marble of the ‘dying gladiator’ was beside Nasmyth’s steam hammer, a penknife beside a graphic telescope. The visitor might be awed by the triumphs of British machinery, from a cigarette machine which produced eighty cigarettes a minute, to the copying telegraph which produced facsimiles of documents at the other end of the line and the ‘silent alarm bed’ which pitched the sleeper onto the floor at any given time. Ribbons were piled on silks, tapestries on carpets; ornamental plate and elaborately carved furniture, bowls of porcelain and ivory, were all gathered together. There were critics as well as admirers. Here, according to an article in Papers for the People, ‘we have sham-classic … sham stone-mouldings and tracery; sham-stone pillars …’ This was one of the nineteenth-century maladies, condemned by Carlyle, Ruskin and others who saw in their century the appetite but not the capacity for great work. Despite the mechanical and technological accomplishments there was a sense of something missing, something wanting, which no steam hammer or electric telegraph could assuage.

It was of course attacked by those who detested novelty of any kind. Some said that the Hall would collapse under the weight of its own glass or that a lightning storm might shatter it to fragments. What if people were baked alive in this giant greenhouse? Some said that it was simply an advertisement for free trade and therefore a gigantic fraud on the public. Others lamented the effect on one of the most important London parks, where the grass might never grow again. Might not the masses of people congregated together create an epidemic illness? But the major source of controversy was the sheer vulgarity of display which shocked some contemporaries. It was the kind of criticism that became vocal in the early part of the twentieth century when Victorianism was considered out of date. Lytton Strachey caught the mood in Eminent Victorians (1918).

But the seeds of the disenchantment can be found even before the time of the Great Exhibition itself. As Philip James Bailey puts it in his Festus (1839):

What England as a nation wants, is taste;

The judgement that’s in due proportion placed;

We overdo, we underdo, we waste …

When William Morris visited the Exhibition he remarked that the objects within it were ‘wonderfully ugly’. Other observers were less than impressed by the English contribution to the extravaganza, the French and the Americans in particular regarded as having supplanted Britain in various manufactures. The French had more taste and refinement, and the Americans more energy and gusto.

It was observed that many of the visitors were working men with their families, and the Exhibition may have reconciled many to the industrial culture all around them which they treated with due suspicion as the destroyer of employment. Charlotte Brontë also found herself among the crowds in Hyde Park. ‘Its grandeur’, she wrote, ‘does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there … It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth.’ Once again the language of magic and enchantment came easily to the Victorians. It was a mark of their sentimentality but also of their susceptibility to a world of novelties. ‘I made my way into the building,’ Macaulay wrote, ‘a most gorgeous sight … beyond the dreams of the Arabian romances. I cannot think that the Caesars ever exhibited a more splendid spectacle.’

It was the immensity of the collection that astounded the visitors. Individual objects might not satisfy the taste for sublimity. But one of the great Victorian imperatives was innovation. One of Victoria’s favourite exhibits was an envelope-making machine which could fold and gum sixty envelopes a minute; it fascinated her, perhaps, as a homely version of the ever-encroaching machine age. For better or worse, this was a peep-show into the soul of Victorian England. A dream of mechanical ingenuity and expertise, prompting some to ascend even further into the reaches of the imagination. A positive craze for the exhibition of novel inventions accompanied the event. A hall erected on the east side of Leicester Square included a diving apparatus, a ‘vacuum coated flask’, the ‘Aurora Borealis Apparatus’, the ‘Gas Cooking Apparatus’, the ‘Patent Ornamental Sewing Machine’ and ‘the Manufacture of Paper Hangings’.

The year 1851 was also the year of the national census which confirmed the impression that the middling classes were growing. The clerk, the shopkeeper and the man of business were part of an expanding constituency; the plumbers, house-painters and glaziers joined with the cabinetmakers, upholsterers and printers in their increasing numbers. The ‘railway servants’ had almost tripled in numbers in twenty years, as had the puddlers, forgers and moulders in the iron trade. It seemed that there could be no end to the expansion. This was also the first year in which the majority of the English lived in cities. And so, if the Exhibition was a way of exorcizing domestic and social fears, perhaps that was achievement enough for the moment.

15

Blood lust

After the fall of Lord John Russell at the hands of Palmerston, in February 1842, there followed one of those apparently interminable attempts to make a government. None of the candidates seemed capable of forming a coalition that would last longer than a day. Lord Derby, a Tory who had inherited the title from his father, was recommended to the queen as the least worst person to lead. He took the post eagerly enough, but found it difficult to create a cabinet of quality. He had intimated to the queen that he might have Palmerston, but she replied: ‘If you do it, he will never rest until he is your master.’ It was the kind of direct advice that her ministers might usefully employ.

Derby was scrutinizing a list of possible candidates for the cabinet when he is supposed to have said: ‘These are not names I can present to the queen.’ He had moved so far from the old Conservative leadership that none of Peel’s cabinet were called forth. Eventually, after another short spell in opposition, he managed to perform the trick. When the names were read out in parliament the duke of Wellington, now growing deaf, questioned in a loud whisper the names of those chosen. ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Who?’ So it became known as the ‘Who? Who? ministry’. It is perhaps best known for the fact that Benjamin Disraeli was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer. When he admitted that he had no expertise in finance he was told not to worry because ‘they give you the figures’.

Derby adumbrated a programme quite different from Palmerston’s, principally by ‘not indulging vituperation and intemperance of language’. Its purposes were clear. The times themselves seemed out of joint, and Derby was determined to safeguard the present institutions from the threat of an increasingly radical world. The Quarterly Review stated ‘we humbly but most earnestly’ desire the new government ‘to avert a democratic and socialist revolution’. The duke of Wellington confided to Croker, an Irish politician, that ‘it is some consolation to us who are so near the end of our career that we shall be spared seeing the consummation of the ruin that is gathering about us’. It is curious that even the most experienced observers will interpret politics through the peep-show of their own fears and illusions. It cannot be denied, however, that in a society so deeply divided between great wealth and grinding poverty there was bound to be resentment and anger on one side with fear and trembling on the other. One Tory, Robert Cecil (later to become Lord Salisbury), wrote: ‘the struggle, however, between the English constitution on the one hand and the democratic forces that are labouring to subvert it on the other, is, in reality, when reduced to its simplest elements, and stated in its most prosaic form, a struggle between those who have, to keep that they have got, and those who have not, to get it’.

One publication of the time added fuel, if not flame, to the fire. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published in volume form in 1851, anatomized the horrors of the city in terms of sheer pain, punishment and epidemic plague. Many children suffered death in squalid and pestilential conditions; the ordinary victims of London’s filth and stench knew that death came just as certainly and with little enough to assuage it. Mayhew included terrible stories of the urban poor. ‘When I went back to the lodging house they told me she was dead. I had sixpence in my pocket but I couldn’t help crying to think I lost my mother. I cry about it still. I didn’t wait to see her buried, but I started on my own account. I have been begging about all the time till now. I am very weak, starving to death. I would do anything to be out of this misery.’ This was really more terrible than anything in Dickens. There was a state within the state, a community of persons who had no real connection with the external world of events and characters which is chronicled by history. These are people who had no religion of any kind, no sense of their country, no knowledge of their rulers and indeed no sense of their real selves. They are our forebears, the unknown people who lived and died in a world which offered them little but misery and disease. Another deadly bout of cholera stirred Charles Dickens to fury, and in his periodical Household Words he declared that the incompetence of the authorities meant that ‘they are guilty, before GOD, of wholesale murder’. One more such attack ‘and you will see such a shake in this country as never was seen on earth since Samson pulled the Temple down on his head’. All his rage, his pity, and his impotence to force action, are visible.

Food riots were endemic in the early 1850s, largely in areas like the West Country where no adequate railway service was yet in use. Other grievances grew and grew. Factory operatives joined with miners in dispute with their employers, but perhaps the main issue was their under-representation in the Commons. The clamour for parliamentary reform returned as soon as it was realized that the measures of 1832 were barely adequate for a new electorate. Continental reforms following the ‘year of revolution’ added salt. Napoleon III instituted universal male suffrage for the workings of the Second French Empire, but it was not an example which the grandees of Westminster necessarily wanted to follow.

Nor was it a period of parliamentary calm. None of the ministries that fell apart in the fifteen years from 1852 to 1867 was ever despatched by a popular vote; they had all foundered on the rock of internal disagreement and division. Pressure from without was less deadly than pressure from within. The new parliament met on 4 November 1852, but it took a further two weeks to prepare the funeral car of Lord Wellington and to order the obsequies; he had died in September but it was considered not quite fitting to put the old man into the earth without proper parliamentary respects.

It was widely believed that the new administration could not last very long, and Derby decided to end the suspense with a summer election. The duke of Argyll had written that:

the year 1852 was a highly critical one among parliamentary parties, and yet singularly destitute of the nobler interests which ought to belong to them … The moment it became certain that all danger of a return to protectionism was a thing of the past there remained nothing but personal feelings and the associations of long antagonism to prevent all the free trade sections from uniting to form a new and a strong government. The whole year was spent in attempts, by endless interviews and correspondence, to realize the aspiration.

The election of that summer was once again an inconclusive contest, with the Whigs gaining more votes and the Conservatives more seats, but the general consensus seems to have been the continuation of the same policies under Derby. In one of his election speeches Palmerston adverted to the fact that in France an innkeeper would attract custom by christening his inn ‘The New White Horse’ or ‘The New Golden Cross’, whereas in England it would no doubt be called ‘The Old White Horse’ or ‘The Old Golden Cross’. It was an astute observation of the English character. It is often believed that Derby was simply a figurehead, but it did not seem like that at the time. Victoria told the queen of the Belgians that ‘our acquaintance is confined almost entirely to Lord Derby, but then he is the Government. They do nothing without him.’ She was not so sure of his colleagues. She told King Leopold that Derby had ‘a very sorry Cabinet. I believe, however, that it is quite necessary they should have a trial and then have done with it.’

Disraeli, as chancellor of the Exchequer in Derby’s government, had to remove the yoke of Protectionism from Tory necks. He did so cautiously and deliberately with a series of proposals to reduce the land tax and thus conciliate the agricultural interest to free trade. He had to plead and explain and exonerate; his entire effort according to Lady Dorothy Nevill was ‘to drag an omnibus full of country gentlemen uphill’. His central financial policies of low taxation and low government expenditure were not too far away from those of his great opponent in the Liberal party, William Ewart Gladstone, but he reached them by different means. Gladstone was in essence a moral leader whose robust principles were matched by a ferocious intelligence. Disraeli’s policies on taxation were driven by questions of political calculation. Gladstone’s principled vision encouraged a policy in which financial, foreign and military matters were closely related; the policies of Disraeli, with a whimsical touch here and there, did not materially add to them. They had once belonged to the same party, even though Peel had favoured Gladstone.

The appointment of Disraeli as chancellor came as a distinct surprise. The Edinburgh Review commented that ‘his appointment to this post was one of the most startling domestic events which have occurred in our time. People seemed never tired of talking and speculating on it. He glittered in the political horizon as a star of the first magnitude.’ Disraeli was never one to lower expectations and was eager to impress the English people with his major budget of December 1852.

‘Yes, I know what I have to face,’ he told the Commons. ‘I have to face a coalition.’ By which he meant Peelites, free-traders and various Irish representatives. Disraeli spent some hours in explaining and defending his measures, but all his efforts were in vain when Gladstone launched a bitter invective against them as frivolous and opportunistic. The duel between the two men took place in lightning and storm, with peals of thunder interrupting the cheers and counter-cheers that rang through parliament. Disraeli had planned, by means of his budget, to steady the national Exchequer after the inoculation of free trade had threatened some kind of nervous collapse, and at the same time he wished to install a more favourable system of taxation. The agricultural interest, for example, was to be rewarded a 50 per cent cut in the malt tax. As he sat down Gladstone, against all precedent, jumped to his feet. ‘My great object’, he wrote to his wife, ‘was to show the Conservative party how their leader was hoodwinking and bewildering them, and this I have the happiness to believe that I effected.’ The correspondent for The Times noted that Gladstone’s speech was ‘characterised throughout by the most earnest sincerity. It was pitched in a high tone of moral feeling – now rising to indignation, now sinking to remonstrance …’ This was the Gladstone style, which did not really change over twentyfive years. It was described by one colleague as ‘Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below’.

Derby’s son, Stanley, recorded that ‘Gladstone’s look when he rose to reply will never be forgotten by me. His usually calm features were livid and distorted with passion, his voice shook, and those who watched him feared an outbreak incompatible with parliamentary rules. So strong a scene I have never witnessed.’ Disraeli’s budget was defeated by nineteen votes, and Derby went down with it. It is usually believed that Gladstone delivered the significant stroke, but in truth Disraeli’s budget was fatally flawed. ‘Now we are properly squashed,’ Derby said. ‘I must prepare for my journey to Osborne to resign.’

On another occasion he would have been succeeded by Russell and a Liberal ministry, but after the ‘tit-for-tat’ with Palmerston they hardly possessed the confidence of the country, let alone each other’s. Instead the queen sought out the former followers of Peel who, standing apart from both sides, had acquired the reputation of being ‘statesmanlike’; they also happened to be the most accomplished members of the Commons. The Liberals were the larger party, but the erstwhile followers of Peel had most of the talent.

Some would not serve under Russell, and others would not serve under Palmerston. The earl of Aberdeen was the natural choice. He was the leader of the ‘Peelites’ and had been foreign secretary for five years under Peel himself. And the queen liked him. He took over the administration towards the end of the year on the clear understanding that he would reconcile Liberals and Peelites. His audience with the queen lasted an hour, primarily because they had already reached agreement of a kind. Aberdeen was willing to create a cabinet and then withdraw from the proceedings. It would be a farewell gift to his country. The proposed cabinet had a disproportionate number of Peelites, members of Aberdeen’s old party, and a few last-minute adjustments were required. The Times was enthusiastic: ‘If experience, talent, industry and virtue are the attributes required for the government of this empire …’ then the political experiment had been a success.

Russell, forever eager to maintain Whig or Liberal honour, was nominated for the Foreign Office, and Palmerston to the Home Office, realizing only too well that the queen herself would deter him from returning to the Foreign Office. Palmerston confessed to his brother-in-law: ‘I have for the last twelve months been acting the part of a very distinguished tightrope walker and astonishing the public by my individual performances and feats … So far, so well; but even Madame Saqui, when she had mounted her rope and flourished among her rockets, never thought of making the rope her perch, but prudently came down again to avoid a dangerous fall.’ It is interesting to note that he compares himself with a star-spangled female circus performer. The new cabinet held their first dinner on 29 December 1852, where Palmerston was all smiles.

Leaving Madame Saqui aside in the green room, this was in theory the most talented and most experienced cabinet of the century, with its members in favour of moderate progress and free trade. Gladstone joined them at the Exchequer, and proved to be one of the better chancellors of the nineteenth century. He was in a different league from Disraeli, who tended to prefer bright ideas to solid policy. Gladstone may have picked the knave of spades when he opted for the Treasury. He knew that it would be a heavy burden, but he did not flinch from it. He had already developed the habit of self-flagellation after his conversations with the women of the streets, the prostitutes whom he was keen to ‘rescue’ from their calling, and never more obsessively than in the 1840s and 1850s. Various biographers have diagnosed ‘emotional distemper’, ‘near despair’ and ‘private torments’. He was filled with repressed energy and repressed anger, quite unlike the demeanour of the ‘grand old man’ of later reports.

Gladstone’s subsequent budget of 1853 was most singular for its maintaining income tax but lowering or abolishing duties on all foodstuffs and on items from soap to life insurance, from dogs to tea. He spoke for almost five hours, the longest budget speech on record, and declared at the close:

these are the proposals of the government. They may be approved, or they may be condemned, but I have at least this full and undoubting confidence, that it will on all hands be admitted, that we have not sought to evade the difficulties of our position – that we have not concealed those difficulties either from ourselves or from others; that we have not attempted to counteract them by narrow or flimsy expedients; that we have proposed plans which, if you will adopt them, will go some way to close up many vexed financial questions.

He had, as one peer put it, ‘made a long and flying leap in his ascent to power’. The earl of Clarendon declared that ‘it was the most perfect financial statement ever heard within the walls of parliament, for such it is allowed to be byfriend and foe’. It was remarkable that Gladstone could look at one year in advance, in distinction from his predecessor, who knew about as much arithmetic as would calculate his publisher’s earnings.

It was a time of modest prosperity, encouraged by Gladstone’s homage to the ideals of free trade. British exports never grew more rapidly than they did in the seven years after 1850. The rate of growth of cotton exports doubled in the same period. Economic liberalism and the growth of free trade created an unprecedented demand and maintained the condition of what was essentially a financial new world; Henry Hyndman, a Marxist who managed to combine his creed with Victorian capitalism, compared the years from 1847 to 1857 with the great era of world discovery by Columbus and Cortez. This was also the period when mid-Victorian England witnessed the birth of ‘la semaine anglaise’, the Saturday afternoon of leisure, at least for the industrial labour force. Factory workers now passed their Saturday afternoons in the musical hall or at the market, in the pub or in the parks, shopping, exercising, drinking, flirting, socializing. Many dedicated their free time to sport, and especially to football, which was played and watched in industrial towns and cities across the country. Going to see the football on a Saturday afternoon became one of the most important of Britain’s male-bonding rituals. ‘It is now a stock saying’, commented one workingclass engineer, ‘that Saturday is the best day of the week, as it is a short working day, and Sunday had to come’. After the factory bell rang, the men downed their tools and gathered outside their workshops, eager to ‘devote themselves to the business of pleasure.’

It was said by Disraeli that the British people did not like coalitions – a surprising aspect of a nation that favoured compromise above all else. But there was also the favourite metaphor of ‘drift’, There was a feeling abroad in 1853 that events were getting out of control and that a looming war between Russia and Turkey over the collapsing Ottoman empire was becoming inevitable. These are moments when the prophets of fate and destiny are at their loudest. ‘We are drifting towards war’, Aberdeen wrote in June 1853, and only a month later he declared again: ‘we are drifting hopelessly’ towards war. So drift was the word on everyone’s lips. Why, then, did sober, rational men feel themselves to be hopelessly swept along? ‘If the country might be roused,’ Derby told a colleague, ‘it might be well; but we are falling into the fatal sleep which precedes mortification and death.’ It could be that the pressures of life encouraged blankness or fatalism, and that even the most experienced elder statesmen threw up their hands in despair and preferred to be lost in the maelstrom of events.

Aberdeen might have been made for the arts of peace, but fate decreed otherwise. He was in many respects an elusive figure, marked by the early deaths of both his parents and of his first wife. As a result, perhaps, he was disinclined to play a leading part in the world. ‘You look for interest and amusement in the agitation of the world,’ he told a noted contemporary, Princess de Lieven, ‘and the spectacle it affords, now I cannot express to you my distaste for everything of the kind … but I have had enough of the world … and would willingly have as little to do with it as is decent.’ Fourteen years after writing this, he became prime minister. He had an awkward manner and a diffident or difficult temperament. Disraeli had the most damning verdict when he described ‘his manner, arrogant and yet timid; his words insolent and yet obscure; his sneer, icy as Siberia; his sarcasms drear and barren as the Steppes’. Yet he also earned affection and admiration. Gladstone called him ‘the man in public life of all others whom I have loved. I say emphatically loved. I have loved others, but never like him’. He was in politics for most of his life but he never became a victim either of cynical self-regard or hypocritical self-abasement. He was not an oily man, to use a phrase of the day. He was bone-dry. It would perhaps be fruitless to investigate his foreign policy, apart from his need of ‘doing the job’ or ‘seeing it through’.

When at the end of 1852 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed the Second French Empire and became the Emperor Napoleon III, the world groaned. The tsar, Nicholas I, raged at the assumption of this parvenu ruling dynasty, but the lightning flash came out of the Holy Land. This sacred area, comprising Palestine and the shrines of Jerusalem, as well as the present Israel and Jordan, was under the control of the Ottoman empire. The new French emperor, ever in search of glory, threw his protection over a group of Catholic monks and placed a silver star with the arms of France in the sanctuary of the church of Bethlehem. He also seized the keys to the doors of the church and to the sacred manger of Jesus Christ. Nicholas I was now directly threatened. He was the self-appointed protector of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and sent an ultimatum that the Orthodox monks and worshippers should be placed under his protection.

The Ottoman empire could not allow its space to be contaminated in such a conspicuous fashion. Having obtained the support of France and Britain, its Sublime Porte or central government declared war on Russia in October 1853. The manger of Jesus Christ might have had little to do with it. ‘Really and truly,’ Palmerston wrote, ‘this is a quarrel more for times long gone by than for the days in which we live.’ It could perhaps be interpreted as a crisis between Orthodox monks and Roman Catholic monks over who should guard the Holy Places; Richard I might have ridden out on his charger, but it is hard to see Disraeli or Gladstone in such a martial posture. In truth the Russians and the Turks were essentially fighting over territory and the 12 million people inhabiting it.

Some believed that it would be a short war, others were convinced that it could extend indefinitely. It was commonly believed that it would be a great war that would redefine the map of Europe. The Register believed that it was a struggle ‘which may change, ere it closes, the destinies of the civilised world’.

At the beginning of the war the tsar attacked and occupied the two regions of Wallachia and Moldavia which now, with Transylvania, comprise Romania. Every thought of Aberdeen was for peace and compromise, but other members of his cabinet disagreed. Just as the war was beginning Aberdeen told John Bright that ‘his grief was such that he felt as if every drop of blood that would be shed would rest upon his head’. His son would later recall how he left an abandoned church on his estate to be rebuilt by a successor in deference to a sentence from Chronicles: ‘thou shalt not build an house unto my name, because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in my sight’.

In February 1854 more than five divisions of infantry and one of cavalry made their way via Malta to the north of the Crimea in the expectation that two or three short battles would determine the issue. England was the master of the world, was it not, with the railways and the electric telegraph, the screw-propeller steamship and perhaps most importantly a muzzle-loading rifle known from the name of its French inventor as the Minié. In comparison the Russians were still considered primitive.

So the people were with the soldiers, marching alongside as they made their way to their barracks, cheering and singing. But the singing was soon to stop. Eight days after the announcement of war, Lord John Russell withdrew a proposal for further electoral reform legislation, in the light of more significant events, and at once fell prey to what was called ‘an hysterical fit of crying’ on the floor of the Chamber. This was not the time to look for indulgence. The ensuing war destroyed the peace that had lasted since 1815, and inaugurated a period when every great power was at war with another great power. From 1853 to the 1880s, England was engaged in a European war once, France thrice, Austria thrice, Russia twice, Germany (Prussia) thrice, Italy twice, Denmark once and Turkey twice. It is little wonder that Europe was sometimes compared to an armed encampment and that the periods of peace were as hazardous and fragile as the periods of war. It was disconcerting too, that former enemies were now allies. The French experience of the English had been at the wolf’s throat, but now they were obliged to greet them as long-lost relatives.

Palmerston had no responsibility for foreign policy in these months, but he strongly opposed the Russians and argued that Britain, if necessary, should ally itself with Turkey. It was a contest between two less than lovely despots, but the English public (as the newspaper-reading classes might be called) supported Palmerston and his horror of the Russian bear. Aberdeen was still steering a middle course when the Russians set sail from their port at Sebastopol in the Crimea and sank the Turkish fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea. That finally decided British and French policy. It would be war against Russia which, for the French, might be a belated revenge for Napoleon’s fate in 1812. For the English it was an instinctive matter. For a foreign power to sink a foreign fleet was to trespass on Britain’s empire of the waves. On 14 December Palmerston resigned from the government, only to resume office ten days later. It was all very mysterious, unexplained and perhaps inexplicable. Was he pursuing his feud against Russell, or was he opposed to Aberdeen’s lukewarm war policy? Public opinion does not love a vacuum. This was the year when realpolitik was first coined.

It was soon believed that a Russian conspiracy was active within the inner circles of the administration. Who was, as the Morning Advertiser put it, ‘the interpreter of Russian wishes and the abetter of Russian purposes’? The suspicion soon fell upon the one foreigner who reigned at court, Prince Albert, who by every standard of speech and custom was indeed a ‘foreigner’. Did he not speak with a pronounced accent? It was whispered finally that he had been placed in the Tower for treason. Husband and wife became prostrated with nervous illness as the rumours mounted. ‘Since yesterday I have been quite miserable,’ he wrote to a companion, ‘today I have had to keep to the house.’

It was said that the Russians had long been preparing for war, made even more certain after the events at Sinope and the British demand that Russian ships leave the Black Sea. There was a feeling in the early weeks of 1854 that events were gaining a momentum of their own. ‘We have on our hands’, the tsar told the English ambassador in St Petersburg, ‘a sick man, a very sick man: it will be, I tell you frankly, a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us, especially before all necessary arrangements are made.’ The ‘sick man’ was Turkey and the Ottoman empire. These portentous words are perfect for the period – vaguely threatening, a hint of menace and danger, a sense of steel somewhere behind it. So the Russians seemed to have been set for this moment. Lord Shaftesbury told the Lords that ‘this was a long-conceived and gigantic scheme, determined on years ago, and now to be executed, for the prevention of all religious freedom, and so ultimately of all civil freedom, among millions of mankind’. The more inflated the rhetoric, the more readily it was believed.

Palmerston feared that Russian power might supplant the Turks, while Aberdeen was sceptical of Turkish rule over Europeans. The cabinet was divided, and just before England entered the war Disraeli had told the Commons: ‘I would like to know how the war is to be carried on with efficiency and success by men who have not settled what the object of war is.’ There was growing impatience with the English high command, who did not seem to know when or where they were going. When was the fighting going to begin?

The Turks believed that they were fighting for their survival, while the Russians were determined to augment and defend their empire. The forces of the Turkish allies, France and England, had turned their attention to the port of Sebastopol, from which the Turkish fleet had been detached to Sinope. In the middle of September they landed at Calamita Bay, on the western coast of the Crimean peninsula, and a few days later the first battle was fought near the banks of the river Alma. It was a case of hard pounding and heavy fighting, but the British infantry regiments and the Highlanders, in particular, eventually routed the Russians. One of the British colonels said: ‘and we have to do the same thing on new ground tomorrow, and perhaps once more before we reach the port of Sebastopol’. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British army, wrote a despatch to the foreign secretary in which he stated that ‘all our anxieties point to the last scene at Sebastopol’. It was on everyone’s mind.

The battle at Alma was a foretaste of the larger war. A contemporary traveller surveyed the dead shrouded in linen cloths. ‘What did these fellows know about the Turkish question? And yet they had fought and trembled, they had writhed in agony, and now father and brother, maid and mother, were weeping and breaking their hearts, and all about the Danubian principalities.’ It had been hoped that the soldiers of two mighty powers would make short work of the Russians. It was not quite like that. In front of a group of interested observers with bottles of champagne and opera-glasses, approximately 5,000 men died. This was quite a new sensation for the spectator, a real battle with all the blood and detritus flying in all directions. They had read accounts of the Napoleonic Wars but they could not have been prepared for the screams and the stench. Forty years of peace had prepared no one for war.

From the battle of Balaclava, fought in the next month, came two phrases of fire, ‘The Thin Red Line’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Both of them were in essence ambiguous; they could be redolent of triumph but they could also be tokens of disaster. The charge has effectively been taken out of time by Tennyson’s poem. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is at once a ballad, an ode, and a memorial of an event that would otherwise soon have been forgotten. It was written at a gallop, as soon as the news of the event reached England. Tennyson even uses the dactylic metre which has the cadence of a gallop to echo the horses. The charge of British light cavalry was led by the earl of Cardigan against Russian arms and forces; they consisted of the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons together with the 17th Lancers and the 8th and 11th Hussars. Their horses were unarmoured, therefore light and fast; the men were armed with lances and sabres to effect swift and massive shock. In charge of the British cavalry was the 3rd earl of Lucan. Cardigan and Lucan were brothers-in-law who despised one another. The British army was in the overall command of Lord Raglan.

Raglan ordered Lucan to deploy his cavalry to prevent the Russians from withdrawing captured naval guns from the redoubts in the valley between Fedyukhin Heights and the Causeway Heights. This was named by Tennyson as ‘the Valley of Death’. But the lie of the land around Lucan meant that he could not see the movement of the Russian troops in the vicinity. The Light Brigade could see the danger, but not one of them questioned the order to gallop unto sudden death. The English were on the left and the Russians on the right; and so the English charged them almost blindly. They were only obeying orders. The French forces were more sagacious and cleared the Fedyukhin Heights of the Russians.

The Light Brigade descended for three-quarters of a mile before they came under showers of shells and shot which surrounded them with a ring of fire: 670 men succeeded in getting through the Russian cavalry, but on their subsequent ascent of the hill 118 men were killed and 127 injured. Two-thirds of the brigade were destroyed. It had been a massacre. News of the disaster did not reach England for three weeks, and Tennyson read a leader on the affair in The Times of 13 November. The newspaper reported that ‘some hideous blunder had occurred’. In his poem Tennyson wrote:

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blundered …

But the poem is not a lament or criticism; it is couched in the language of heroism and of magnificence, as if the Light Brigade had been so many life-size statues suddenly come to life.

For Tennyson’s contemporaries it was a catastrophe, too, but on an heroic scale; it was a tragedy but at the same time a triumph. This was how the English characteristically understood their defeats. That is why they were considered by others to be almost obtuse in the face of imminent peril, to be valorous beyond the call of duty, and to be almost negligent about deaths and casualties. A French cavalry commander remarked that ‘the British cavalry officer seems impressed by the conviction that he can dash or ride over everything as if this sort of war were precisely the same as that of foxhunting’. The ill-starred charge has quite obliterated the charge of the Heavy Brigade which took place earlier on that same day; under the command of James Yorke Scarlett, the brigade ignored the conventions of warfare and charged uphill against a much larger formation of Russians. In this it was triumphantly successful, and the Russians were routed. Unlike the humiliation of the Light Brigade, however, this victory has been forgotten. It might seem that the British prefer heroic failure to heroic success.

In truth Balaclava was an unnecessary battle notable only for misunderstanding, arrogance and blunder. The valley of death into which the cavalry rode was no more and no less than an abattoir. But the theatre of war is not an area for shrewd or patient judgement. The charge of the Light Brigade may be considered by some as glorious, if costly. Others will still consider it to have been ill-timed, ill-judged and ill-conducted.

Balaclava led to the third of the infernal trio of battles, Inkerman, where once more the individual soldiers were lost in the mist of strife. One brigadier general recalled that ‘on our part it was a confused and desperate struggle. Colonels of regiments led on small parties, and fought like subalterns, captains like privates. Once engaged, every man was his own general.’ The Scots Guards could smell the Russians in their vicinity, a ‘peculiar strong leather-like smell’. When the fog lifted with the winter sun the dead and dying lay in heaps.

For every hundred men in the battalions, seventy-three were killed by hunger or by cold; and these were the troops from the richest country in the world. All that could be said was that they had done their duty, much more than the country which despatched them into the Crimea. The new recruits were often the first to die. There were no roads. Fuel was in short supply. There were no ambulances and the hospital ships were overcrowded. In one hospital more than half the patients died in one month. In another, where 2,000 were suffering from dysentery, only six shirts were washed. The Crimea was a festering sore. Albert wrote in a memorandum that ‘we have no generals trained and practised in the duties of that rank; no general staff or corps; no field commissariat; no field army department; no ambulance corps; no baggage train; no corps of drivers; no corps of artisans …’ The battle of Inkerman became known as ‘the Soldier’s Battle’, since it was fought one against another like any battle between Briton and Anglo-Saxon. The soldier lost in the fog of the battlefield is one of the enduring images of the Crimea.

Winter was now settling in. All battles ceased and the primary concern was the siege of Sebastopol itself with its Russian defenders. It was now heavily fortified, its defences very hard to pierce, and the difficulties of communication further hampered by bad weather and bad field control. The arena around Sebastopol became a place of suffering and pestilence. A fierce storm descended that did not blow itself out for three days. The story of the dying and wounded was transmitted to London and elsewhere by means of the electric telegraph. The correspondent of The Times, William Howard Russell, sent candid and uncensored reports of the chaos and inefficiency that are the handmaids of war. The dead were left unburied and the injured left untreated; there was no hygiene to speak of, and the medicines were in woefully short supply. The flies alighted on the festering wounds, and more died from filth and privation than from injuries sustained in battle.

The siege of Sebastopol has only indistinct links with that of Troy, but the idea of a siege had more than martial associations. It was always a sign of endurance, of individual heroism and ingenuity. But Sebastopol did not fall. The year was late, and winter came early to the Crimea; the troops were not adequately fitted, clothed or fed. Amoebic dysentery had already begun its work. As for the defenders of Sebastopol, they were reported to be in high spirits, confident that they could outlast any siege. The allied commanders were bereft of information, and did not even know the number of Sebastopol’s defenders. The earl of Clarendon wrote: ‘It seems to me, God grant I may be wrong, that we are on the verge of a monster catastrophe.’ He was not alone in his forebodings. The memory of the Great Exhibition was now hopelessly lost in the fog and fury of a war the English did not believe they could win.

At the end of 1854 Charles Greville wrote in his diary:

The last day of the most melancholy and disastrous year I ever recollect. Almost everybody is in mourning and grief and despair overspread the land. At the beginning of the year we set forth an army of joyous and triumphant anticipation … and the end of this year sees us deploring the deaths of friends and relations without number, our army perishing before the walls of Sebastopol, which we are unable to take, and after bloody victories and prodigies of valour, the Russian power hardly is yet diminished or impaired.

A world of suffering lay behind the words.

A British army surgeon reported that ‘we say here that “We did not take Sebastopol because the French would not fight by day, the English would not fight in the dark, and the Turks won’t fight at all.”’ There was a morsel of comfort. By the beginning of 1855 a railway, ‘The Grand Crimean Railway with Branch to Sebastopol’, was being built, notable for the speed of its construction and the fact that it was the first attempt to organize mechanized warfare. But Raglan, the commander of the British troops, had died – some say of disappointment, others of a broken heart and others of strain. The point was that everybody wanted the war to end. It had gone on too long, and had been responsible for the loss of too many lives, to be endured. The tsar emphasized in a despatch to a Russian commander, Michael Gorchakov, ‘the necessity to do something to bring this frightful massacre to a close’. This is what it had become, a massacre and not a war.

Another inglorious battle was fought in the spring of the year when the English forces attempted two sieges of the Great Redan, one of the fortresses guarding Sebastopol; they were forced off and were obliged to retreat, a signal contrast to the successful French assault of the fort at Malakhov.

The war had already engulfed Gladstone and his budget of 1854 which reversed much that had been decreed in 1853; income tax was doubled, and additional revenue was once more derived from sugar, spirits and malt. It was Gladstone’s belief that war costs should be borne out of revenue and not out of borrowing. ‘The expenses of war’, he told the Commons, ‘are the moral check which it has pleased the Almighty to impose on the ambition and lust of conquest that are inherent in so many nations.’ The combination of piety and belligerence was not to everyone’s taste, especially since Gladstone himself would soon enough have recourse to borrowing.

The real crisis of the Crimean War occurred towards the end of January 1855. A radical member of parliament, John Arthur Roebuck, was able to pass a resolution demanding a committee of inquiry into the mismanagement of the war. It was essentially a motion of no confidence, and almost at once John Russell resigned from the cabinet, saying that Aberdeen’s government was ‘the worst I ever belonged to’. His abrupt departure was considered by some to smack of ambition. The queen sent him a note expressing ‘her surprise and concern at hearing so abruptly of his intention to desert the Government on the motion of Mr Roebuck’. Russell had thoroughly disgraced himself in the eyes of most observers, and the queen never forgave him, but he attained office again after a few months. The parliament agreed to a committee of inquiry into the debacle by the surprising majority of 157 votes; the result was followed by silence, not cheering, and a few derisive laughs.

Aberdeen resigned his post into the hands of the queen after surviving for two years. ‘The country was governed for two years’, Disraeli wrote, ‘by all its ablest men, who by the end of that term had succeeded by their coalesced genius, in reducing that country to a state of desolation and despair that they could hear their heads thump as they struck the ground.’ The committee of inquiry itself was not a success. ‘I felt corruption all around me,’ Roebuck wrote, ‘but I could not lay my hand on it.’ The same discontent and frustration affected the public reaction. The Administrative Reform Association was established as a direct response to the mismanagement in the Crimea; it comprised City men and London professional men but it was slow, cumbrous, and achieved very little.

Someone had to take the blame, or at least to take the helm. It might be thought that no sane man would wish to take on the duties of a prime minister in wartime, but who will necessarily believe that politicians are altogether sane? It was thought that Derby, as leader of the Conservatives, might step forward; but, much to Disraeli’s fury, he refused to do so. Disraeli had an affection for the Levant and was bitterly disappointed that his leader in the Lords had shirked the fight against Russia. But you could never know what Disraeli was really thinking. Sir William Gregory, once on the fringes of the Young England movement, remarked: ‘that he was a man of immense talent not even his greatest enemy can deny; but even I, his personal friend, must confess that from his entrance into public life until his last hour he lived and died a charlatan’.

There seemed only one viable candidate, however he may have been disliked by the queen. Palmerston’s bravura and assertive patriotism, together with his ambition to crush any despot within reach, had endeared him to the workingclass radicals who might otherwise have abhorred the war. He felt that he had the support of the people, too. There was another way of looking at it. ‘I object to Lord Palmerston on personal grounds’, the queen said. ‘The Queen means’, Prince Albert explained, ‘that she does not object to Lord Palmerston on account of his person.’ It might have come from Lewis Carroll, if he had been writing at the time. ‘Pam’, as he was widely known, cobbled together a ministry, or, rather, he preserved the same ministry without the embarrassing presence of Aberdeen, Newcastle, former secretary of war, and of course John Russell, who like a jack-in-the-box returned later as colonial secretary. He could not be kept down. If it had not been for the occasion of a war, this particular ministry might have endured the course, but it did survive long enough to seal the peace. Palmerston had stepped forward, no doubt with a spring in his step. The old warhorse was pawing the ground but, more importantly, he elicited the support of the nation as a defender of its vital interests.

All the combatants were tired of the bloody and messy war fought over a small territory, but Palmerston did not wish to end it until England and France had taken Sebastopol. Once that was achieved, with the retreat of the Russians, the peace negotiations could begin in earnest. On 9 September 1855, the Russians eventually abandoned the fortress of Sebastopol. It was a victory of sorts for the English and French, but they hesitated to follow the enemy any further. Under the circumstances this was considered to be a famous victory. It is estimated that 300,000 Russians lost their lives in Sebastopol, which had by the end of the hostilities become a smoking ruin. One of the burial places was known as the Cemetery of the Hundred Thousand. A great storm tore down the huts and tents used by the allies. The British forces were reduced to shreds and patches.

The English public had become acutely aware of the imbecility of the military command, or what The Times on 13 December 1854 described as ‘the incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official interference, favour, routine, perverseness and stupidity which revel and riot in the camp before Sebastopol’. Nonetheless the British people expected a spring campaign to finish off the enemy. The blood of two years might otherwise be shed for nothing; the commanders had already lost a third of the army. There was a hunger for news. The first national penny daily, the Daily Telegraph, emerged on the streets on 29 June 1855. The walls of the wooden huts that sheltered the besiegers of Sebastopol were covered with engravings torn from the pages of the illustrated papers. Some inglorious fighting muddied the issue before its close. An attempt to storm the fortress of the Redan was aborted when the British refused to leave the safety of their parapet. One of their commanders, Colonel Windham, complained that it was the ‘greatest disgrace that had ever fallen on the British soldier’. It had not been a lovely war.

The English army was prevented from finishing its mission by the terms of the treaty of Paris, signed at the end of March 1856. The participants had become ever more determined to escape the quagmire of the Crimea, but they had conflicting purposes. The Russians wished to snatch what profit or dignity they could from their humiliation. The French and British wished to preserve the Ottoman empire from all possible harm, as a bulwark against the Russians, while at the same time renewing their own ancient and almost prehistoric rivalry. But the terms of the treaty lacked any sense of determination. The integrity of Turkey was guaranteed, the Danube was opened to shipping, and the Black Sea was neutralised. That was all. The treaty of Paris was disconcerting and disappointing to those who believed that England had been fighting a moral as well as a military battle. The English were shocked, and in many cases horrified by what they considered to be an inconclusive and ineffective peace. The heralds who announced it were hissed as they stood by Temple Bar, and no one was sure whether they should illuminate their windows in celebration. They might have been smashed. All the patriotism, all the expectation and fervour, all the ideas of a just cause, had come to nothing.

The expansion of Russia would be checked for fourteen years, but this was scarcely the victory the home crowds had been seeking. The conflict did not assist or make any military reputations, and the war itself had emanated from the fear of an attack which was never contemplated and a threat which barely existed. Lytton Strachey remarked that ‘its end seemed as difficult to account for as its beginning’. It was a war of foreboding, neither just nor necessary, but it was hurried on by public opinion in one of its moods of foolish optimism. The peace itself was premature and too partial to the enemy, with concessions over neutral shipping and trade with Russia. Diplomacy, not battle, won the day where the English had expected a significant victory. Aberdeen had drifted into war, and Palmerston drifted into peace. The fate of the European peoples still under the Ottoman empire would have to wait for another day.

The other effects of the war are difficult to determine. The disappointment of the peace had been too sudden, and too unexpected, to trace many more subtle consequences. It helped to sustain the movement for military reform, with a greater level of efficiency observed in the ‘Scientific Corps’. A Staff College was also established. It is said that the example of the soldiers encouraged a cult of heroism, such as that embodied in the Volunteer Movement of 1859 to strengthen the defences against a proposed but illusory threat from Napoleon III. This is hard to believe. This was the period when the cigarette – or, as it was first known, the paper cigar – was introduced to England by the soldiers coming home from abroad.

Palmerston had a ‘good war’ primarily because he had little to do with it. Gladstone had become more isolated in the heady atmosphere, and described parliamentary business at the time as ‘the tossing of a ship at anchor’, where there was ‘motion but no progress’. Disraeli, in turn, described the Tory task as ‘to uphold the aristocratic settlement of this country’. The aristocracy had indeed faltered, and in some cases been disgraced, but they came back fighting in later decades. All in all, nothing much had happened on the domestic front. One moment from a state visit to England by Napoleon III in April 1855 may leave an appropriate impression. At the end of the national anthems the French empress quickly looked behind her to make sure the seat was in place; Victoria sat down at once without turning. She was born to rule without hesitation.

Nevertheless, the war in the Crimea had become a national shame, more than humiliation, to which the efforts of Florence Nightingale and her cadre of nurses brought much relief. Her devotion to the soldiers, her selflessness in her duty, her courage in the face of difficulties, helped to soothe the suffering spirit of the nation with an embodiment of clear-headed and efficient administration. It could be achieved, after all. A report in The Times on her conduct perhaps gilds the lily a little but was what people wanted to read after the empty bravura of Raglan and Cardigan:

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary round.

Nightingale was not the only woman to devote herself to the sufferings of the soldiers. One other such was Mrs Mary Seacole, a ‘quadroon’ from the British West Indies who confronted prejudice against her sex and her race simply by knocking it down. Like many formidable women (Lady Hester Stanhope is another shining example from a period just before), she had a confirmed and powerful wanderlust. ‘I have never wanted [lacked] inclination to rove’, she wrote, ‘nor will powerful enough to carry out my wishes.’ This was the antithesis of the Victorian idea of a woman, immured in the house as a domestic prisoner. How much is ‘the angel in the house’ a masculine illusion foisted upon frustrated wives who may have had adventurous spirits as powerful as that of Mary Seacole?

She acquired many of her skills at the British Army Hospital in Jamaica, where yellow fever in particular led to many deaths. Of her decision to minister to the soldiers of the Crimea, she remarked that ‘heavens knows it was visionary enough’. But she recalled that in ‘the ardour of my nature, which carried me where inclination prompted, I declared that I would go to the Crimea’. She was not at first welcome, since Florence Nightingale had doubts about a non-white nurse, and she was also rebuffed by the War Office and the Medical Department. Eventually she decided to make her own path and to bypass the authorities by opening a hotel for invalids. Cards were printed and distributed in the war region, announcing a ‘BRITISH HOTEL’ where she intended ‘to establish a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’.

The fame of her skills as a healer and nurse soon spread. She called her patients ‘sons’ and she was universally known as ‘Mother Seacole’. As soon as she arrived on the Crimean peninsula she learned that ‘the hospitals were full to suffocation, that scarcity and exposure were the fate of all in the camp’. She built up a cadre of female nurses of whom she said that ‘only women could have done more than they did who attended to this melancholy duty; and they, not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands are moulded for this work’. It may not be going too far to suggest that without the unacknowledged assistance of the women the men would not have survived. Mary Seacole returned to England and died in May 1881.

Aberdeen’s fall after his humiliation had proved that ‘the public’ was now too great a presence to be ignored. It was what Carlyle sarcastically called ‘The Wonderful Face of Public Opinion’. This new ‘reading public’ wanted news and more news. Speeches were read out from the newspapers at social meetings and Lord Rosebery recalled that when he was a boy his family sat down after breakfast also to read the speeches. The street ballads, so much a part of nineteenth-century life, were often snippets and precis of news in rhyme and rhythm.

At the end of the Crimean War the nation was more than ever split by class consciousness. The numbing complacency and incompetence of the aristocratic military elite destroyed any confidence that the working classes possessed in their leaders. In the summer of 1855 a Sunday Trading Bill had just passed its third reading in the Commons, by which the licensing laws were restricted and Sunday trading forbidden. An immediate and furious reaction followed. A Chartist poster, in large print, was displayed over all London

New Sunday Bill prohibiting newspapers, shaving, smoking, eating and drinking and all other kinds of recreation and nourishment both corporal and spiritual, which the poor people still enjoy at the present time. An open-air meeting of artisans, workers and ‘the lower orders’ generally of the capital will take place in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon to see how religiously the aristocracy is observing the Sabbath and how anxious it is not to employ its servants and horses on that day, as Lord Robert Grosvenor said in his speech. The meeting is called for three o’clock on the right bank of the Serpentine, on the side towards Kensington Gardens. Come and bring your wives and children in order that they may profit by the example their ‘betters’ set them!

The carriages of the wealthy were ‘mobbed’ on three successive Sundays in Hyde Park. Those without carriages mobbed those with carriages; this is not quite the same thing as the poor mobbing the rich, but it came somewhere close to it. The repressive legislation was withdrawn, a sign of changing class consciousness in the 1850s and also of the nervous fear that beset the administration after the Crimean debacle.

It had been widely believed that the war would banish all the materialism and selfishness that had afflicted the nation and that a new mood of national unity and purpose would purge the ‘condition of England question’ which had been so much part of the periodical press. But the most promising hopes are the first to die. In 1859, five years after the end of the war, The Times delivered its judgement: ‘That ill-starred war, those half million of British, French and Russian men left in the Crimea, have discharged to the last iota all the debt of Christian Europe to Turkey. Never was so great an effort made for so worthless an object. It is with no small reluctance that we admit a gigantic effort and an infinite sacrifice to have been made in vain.’

Yet war expedited the process of invention and improvement, continued step by step in the directions suggested by earlier inventions and previous improvements. These, too, were largely created, as Isambard Kingdom Brunel put it, in correlation with ‘a demand which circumstances happen to create’. In 1856 the first approaches to the age of steel were made with the patenting of the Bessemer technique; a powerful blast burned out the carbon and silicon from pig iron which, when manganese was added, became steel. Steel rails eventually became cheaper than iron rails and were far more durable. In the same year a chemistry student discovered the process for creating mauveine, the first synthetic dye, which changed the clothes and the interiors of the world.

The ill-fated Administrative Reform Association, established in 1854 following the disaster in the Crimea, was merely a token of the fact that efficiency and modern organization were far more significant than personal bravery or heroics. War was a practical business to be run on business principles. This could have been the lesson of the Crimea. A tendency to preach lofty ideals was combined with disgust at existing political institutions. In the same year the Northcote–Trevelyan Report urged that open and competitive examination was the best way to find proper recruits for the civil service. It was in other words an implicit recommendation that the middle class should play an active role in the administration of the country. It was significant, perhaps, that Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859) became popular after the Crimean War. ‘At this moment,’ Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote at the beginning of 1855, ‘it would be an absurdity in the nobles to pretend to the position which was quietly conceded to them a year ago. This one year has done the work of fifty ordinary ones; or more accurately, it has made apparent what has long been preparing itself.’

The apparent thing was the emergence of a country organized by the middle classes on the virtues of thrift, self-help and businesslike efficiency. Local self-government was still seen to be the key to administrative progress. In 1855 the Metropolitan Board of Works was established, and three years later an act was passed for the cleansing of ‘that noble river’ the Thames, the state of which was ‘little creditable to a great country, and seriously prejudicial to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of the Metropolis’. So the businesslike work was being done. In 1863 the first section of the Metropolitan Underground Railway was opened, and in 1862 the Board of Works was authorized to build an embankment on the north side of the Thames from Westminster to Blackfriars Bridge. And business needs statistics. Between 1876 and 1884 the Board began schemes to displace 22,000 people and rehouse 28,000.

Within months of the treaty of Paris, Palmerston, who had become prime minister following Aberdeen’s resignation, once more made sacrifice to the god of war over a minor incident in the harbour of Canton. A ship manned entirely by Chinese seamen, the Arrow, flew the British flag for convenience; it had an English captain, too, and so sailed in the shadow of Viscount Palmerston. The captain of a passing cargo ship recognized one of the crew of the Arrow as an erstwhile pirate and called in the local authorities to arrest him. The ship was boarded and, apparently, the British flag was hauled down. The incident had become an insult and the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, ordered the immediate bombardment of Canton. The English newspapers took his side as if in some way he were countering the disappointment of the Crimean campaign. It has been called the Second Opium War, the first having been fought fourteen years before over the Chinese blockade of trade. This earlier incident was granted the soubriquet of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, and as a result the British confiscated Hong Kong and signed an ‘unequal treaty’ allowing them extensive trade privileges. But they were not enough. The second war, started on a pretext, was designed to garner larger and larger profits from opium by opening up China to foreign merchants.

It was essentially the conflict between a modern industrial power and an ancient system of civilization which considered its assailants to be nothing but barbarians. In turn the Chinese were caricatured as wife-murderers and child-beaters. Punch had said: ‘What do the Chinese matter to us? They are faraway and good for nothing.’ Never had two civilizations less in common. When Lord Elgin travelled to Shanghai in January 1859 he noted that ‘uninvited, and by methods not always of the gentlest, [he had] broken down the barriers by which these ancient nations sought to conceal from the world … the rags and rottenness of their waning civilisations’. But he had done more than that; he had introduced to the West one of the great powers of the world.

The first battle of Canton took place in 1857 and the allies, Britain and France, retained the city for three years. The Conservatives with a sprinkling of Radicals, ever ready to topple Palmerston from his popularity, drew up a motion against the Cantonese imbroglio. When Palmerston lost the vote he promptly dissolved parliament in the spring of 1857. By astute management and confident self-promotion he had become the hero of the hour, and the subsequent general election gave him for the first time an overriding victory over the Conservatives with a clear majority of eighty-five seats. Cobden and Bright, both illustrious pacifists, were rejected by their constituencies. It seemed that international morality would never beat national patriotism. The Emperor’s Summer Palace was burned down. This was the result, as Lord Derby put it, of ‘a Conservative minister working with Radical tools and keeping up a show of Whiggism in his foreign policy’. Palmerston, in other words, was following the tradition of British diplomacy.

The English were moving forward on another front. The great Moghul empires of India were beginning to break apart. In 1613 the ‘Company and Merchants of London were granted a trading station north of Bombay’. This was the beginning. In 1707 the last great Moghul left a divided country partitioned among sons, grandsons, Moghul governors and Hindu nobles. The English were not long in following and under the aegis of the East India Company became the predominant military and commercial power in the region. In 1849 the earl of Dalhousie, as governor general, annexed the Punjab to British India; this was followed by Sikkim, due north of Bengal, and Pegu in lower Burma. This was in turn succeeded by the colonization of the Muslim kingdom of Oudh. As a result ‘new’ British India was a third and a half larger than the previous colony.

‘We are making’, one British administrator said, ‘a people in India where hitherto there have been a hundred tribes and no people’. There are various stories of massacre and treachery in this process, although it is worth noting that they are generally associated with native rather than British atrocities, while the tales of heroism all concern the European minority. The self-congratulatory tone in fact concealed much barbarity on the part of the British colonists to the native peoples. Dalhousie, on leaving India, struck a more sober note. ‘No prudent man,’ he said, ‘having any knowledge of Eastern affairs, would ever venture to predict a prolonged continuance of peace in India.’ Yet Dalhousie also wrote, ‘We are perfectly secure so long as we are strong and believed to be so.’ The ambiguous end in Crimea might suggest that the British were not so strong as they used to pretend to be.

The reasons for the Indian War of Independence, and in particular the events of August 1857, were various. They ranged from the evidence of the Crimean campaign that the English were no longer good at war to the reluctance of native troops to serve in Burma and Persia. The East India Company was both a military compound and a commercial power. After the battle of Plassey in 1757, Robert Clive, Commander-in-Chief of British India, took Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, the cities manned by the native infantrymen known as sepoys and controlled by the British. It was not an idyllic posting. The deadly heat burned down, and cockroaches as large as mice scuttled beneath the doors of the Residency in Calcutta. This was the background to the Indian War. Drink was the only solace.

In 1856 and 1857 rumours of mutiny soon spread about the country. The only thing that superseded railway mania in India was religious mania. Here was the problem. It was widely believed and reported in fact that the new cartridges for the Minié weapon had been greased with the fat of pigs and cows, displaying sublime disregard for native custom. The story was untrue but it is a measure of the distrust of the native population for their colonial rulers. The cow is sacred to the Hindu, and the pig is a pollutant to the Muslims. For the Hindu it was a matter of losing caste for ever, in this world and in the next.

On January 1857 a general reported an ‘unpleasant feeling’ among the native soldiers. At the beginning of May eighty-five members of the cavalry stationed in Meerut were sentenced to ten years’ hard labour for having refused to touch the greased cartridges. The Muslims had sworn on the Koran, and the Hindus by the holy waters of the Ganges, that they would have nothing to do with the desecration. In the presence of the entire force the prisoners were stripped of their uniforms and were loaded with chains as if they were common felons. It was for some of them much worse than execution; it was degradation and worse than death. The sepoys erupted in rage, and were seen ‘dancing and leaping about, calling and yelling to each other’. English women and children were the first casualties. The native infantry were heard to call out: ‘Quick! Delhi! Quick! Delhi!’ They were on their way to the old Moghul capital.

On the following Sunday the regiment mutinied, broke open the gaol and released its prisoners before going on to gut the bungalows of the British and to massacre all their inhabitants. The mutineers then made their way towards Delhi, only 40 miles distant. Fear and rumour flew like the wind. Bahadur Shah, king of Delhi, was an ancient pensioner of the British, but was now helpless in the face of several insurrections. The massacres took place in bazaars and cowsheds, on the flat mud roofs and at the bottom of deep wells.

Two miles north of the city were stationed three native infantry regiments, but they attacked their white officers, and hacked many of them to death. The commander-in-chief, General Anson, was far away in the north. He was told that nothing could be done since transport was unavailable. He died of cholera two days later. Trials and executions of Indians followed apace, but it was noticeable that the men met their unhappy fate with great aplomb.

The disturbances moved rapidly through the North West Province; some of the local officials were pursued by rebels, and the province quickly subsided into a state of anarchy.

Cawnpore, on the west bank of the Ganges, had been considered safe within the emollient rule of Nana Sahib, but he no longer felt much reason to support the British and began a policy of condign punishment over his former allies. The sun beat down through the hot days of June and July, and the European contingent were felled by famine and disease. At Cawnpore they were promised safe passage by the Nana, if they laid down their arms and marched to boats waiting for them on the Ganges. Their embarkation was, however, the signal for the slaughter of all the men, women and children that had taken to the water. Only four survived.

The massacre at Cawnpore was a flame that gave the signal to the rebels of Lucknow. In 1857 Sir Henry Lawrence drove into the Residency at Lucknow and came upon a most desperate situation where ill administration and foolish vengeance provoked unrest. The English forces were caught off guard by the native forces and were closely pent and besieged in the Residency. The Residency was well fortified, however, and those within repulsed the siege against them.

Everywhere the English went, blood followed them. It is customary to call the native Indians mutineers or rebels, but they were nothing of the kind. If they had any parallels it was with the forces of Hereward the Wake who fought for their territories against the Norman invaders. This did not seem, of course, a satisfactory or credible version of events at the time. The British public, its appetite for violence not sated by the casualties of Crimea, erupted in a blood lust. One pamphlet of the time declared that as a preliminary measure every single mutineer should be hunted down and killed, adding that ‘India will not be secure so long as a single man remains alive’. The English were ready to create a wasteland and to call it good government. One Englishman suggested that those about to be executed should be forced to lick the blood of those whom they had killed or cut down, in the certain knowledge that the men ‘should leave this world with the conviction that their vile souls were about to migrate into the bodies of cats and monkeys’. Thousands were hanged or mutilated or suffocated or otherwise despatched. Blood and smashed bones were found at the bottom of many local wells. We may say with an Intelligence chief, Henry Hodson, that the whole countryside became ‘a steaming bog … scorpions like young lobsters crawled about in damp bedding’, while the lips of the men were caked with flies.

Months of bloody repression, and of sporadic warfare, were necessary before the disorder was contained. It could not go on for ever. A young officer, John Nicolson, was sent to stiffen the resolve of the British in Delhi, and in the middle of 1857 the assault had begun on the Kashmiri Gate, the Lahore Gate and the Kabul Gate. Once the advance had been successful there was another glut of mayhem, drunkenness and death. Martial law was imposed in the course of which the three sons of the king of Delhi were shot dead. Lucknow, like Delhi, was a wasteland.

The East India Company was relieved of its administrative ‘responsibilities’ – perhaps another way of adverting to the taking of treasure and plunder – and the powers of the Company were transferred to the sovereign with the help of a secretary for India and a Council. Thus India and its people came under the control of Queen Victoria, a hegemony emphasized by her accession to the title of empress of India. The office of secretary of state for India was instituted, with a council of fifteen advisers. In 1861 the Indian and English armies were united.

The prevailing belief that conquest by a ‘superior’ power would lead to ‘order’ was one of the visionary clichés that came to nothing. The governor of Madras, Sir Thomas Munro, had stated in a note composed in 1824 that ‘we should look upon India, not as a temporary possession but one which is to be maintained permanently, until the natives in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it’. So crumbled the hopes of a different world. The rebels still alive were forced into Nepal, and the sporadic risings in the rest of India were quickly suppressed. A day of thanksgiving was declared in July 1859 with the words ‘war is at an end. Rebellion has been put down.’ It had been contained. It had been put down. Most of the country remained loyal. The landlords had remained apart from the villagers. The army mutinies were confined to Bengal. The princes were content. Yet there was still a shuddering sense that the British empire had revealed its heart of darkness.

16

A dark world

The life of 1855 was the high water mark of mid-Victorian society. This was the period when Anglo-Saxon studies were revived, when Tennyson derived inspiration from the Arthurian epics and Pugin from the Middle Ages. All were looking backwards at earlier societies that were characterized by an organic unity, a collective will and a shared piety. Many of the most notable writers of the period – Ruskin, Morris, Carlyle – looked back with nostalgia to feudal or semi-feudal ages of England when hierarchy and authority were regarded with reverence. It was all a matter of myth, of course, but the myth mattered. Life mattered. Life was earnest. The High Church revival with John Keble and Edward Pusey shared a rapport with medieval England. At the opening of Macaulay’s History of England, published in 1848, he states: ‘I will relate … how from the auspicious union of order and freedom sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example …’ But the triumph of competitive enterprise and individual attainment was dismissed by Carlyle as ‘Pig Prosperity’. No epoch was so beset by energy and by doubt.

Walter Bagehot, who never did cease to comment on such matters, said that ‘in a period of rapid change such as is confronting men today, the preservation of such continuity with the past, with the standards they are used to, and the social world where they can find their way about, is essential …’ The Victorians were not always talking about Malory or medieval monasteries, but they were still looking for the same permanence, the same security and the same stability. At the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1855 the paintings praised were resplendent with ‘energy’, ‘passion’ and ‘feeling’. George Eliot was talking with a contemporary on God, Immortality and Duty, which may be considered the Holy Trinity of the period. She ‘pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’. We may think once more of the Crimean soldier fiercely slashing in the fog.

The picture of the family, at a dining table generally of mahogany, lingered well into the Edwardian age. There was no picture without a frame, no chair without upholstery, no screen or curtain without a tassel, no table without a cover, no box without its little objects, no maid without her pinny. Domestic servants became a necessity, and when Seebohm Rowntree completed a survey in York, he reckoned the keeping of at least one servant as a distinctive mark of the middle class as opposed to the lower class. There were visitings and dinings out, and when the moon was high they were known as ‘moons’; hospitality was a social duty, and those who did not mingle with their neighbours were considered to be very odd indeed. You greeted acquaintances with two fingers of the outstretched hand; good friends and family were offered three. Choral societies and learned institutes, social clubs and sporting associations might be patronized by doctors, lawyers, accountants, senior clerks, owners of superior merchandise, company directors and civic officials. These were what we might call, in general, professional people, the whole swathe of middle Britain getting together and spending.

They were not devoid of admirers. The editor of the Leeds Mercury, which might be considered a representative middle-class newspaper, wrote that ‘never in any country beneath the sun was an order of men more estimable and valuable, more praised and more praiseworthy, than the middle class of society in England’. James Mill wrote, as early as 1826, that ‘the value of the middle classes of this country, their growing number and importance, are acknowledged by all. These classes have long been spoken of, and not grudgingly, by their superiors themselves, as the glory of England.’ Henry Brougham evinced the same sentiments. ‘By the people I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name.’

But the slow process of social separation and division had begun early. In 1820 an anonymous contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine noticed that ‘it is too evident that the upper orders of Society have been tending, more and more, to a separation of themselves from those whom nature, providence and law have placed beneath them’. There were infinite gradations in these other orders. If we were to begin a disquisition on the upper middle class, the middle class, the lower middle class and the upper lower class we would need volumes which in the end would provide a complex stratification of manners that were in fact unique to each individual; any monolithic ‘class’ was a chimera made by doctrinaires and social statisticians. The movements between levels of class were intricate and, as one writer of the period observed, ‘in the middle classes we note an almost universal unfixedness of position. Every man is rising or falling or hoping that he shall rise or fearing that he shall sink.’ It can also be surmised that the struggle between the ‘working class’ and their supposed superiors was as nothing to the competition between workers who inhabited various levels of life and income.

Yet group activities do provide something of a group identity. Legal, medical and other professional institutions began to emerge, soon to be accompanied by civil and mechanical engineers, by architects and by accountants. In the previous century there had been five principal professions, but now there were twenty times as many constantly vying for status in the guise of dignity and decorum. The modern concept of public service was also becoming evident.

Social decorum was continued in the church where male and female sat on different sides; the more affluent had their own pews, and it was the custom of the poorer sort to remain after the service until their betters had left. Some women were daring enough to wear brown straw mushroom hats as part of their ‘Sunday best’ which became fashionable after 1856. The male of the house wore a tall hat and morning coat, and went to work in a horse-drawn omnibus. This is where he saw his neighbours, although they did not necessarily exchange greetings. Let us say that he worked in the City as an employer of one of those innumerable clerks in black who make so stiff a contrast with the street vendors and the local merchants.

The midday meal, costing from tenpence to one and six, consisted of beef or ham or veal with beer. If the customer was in a hurry he would pick up a pie from a street seller. Chicken bones were thrown into the gutter. If he had more time and money, he might visit a chop-house, from the windows of which he might on occasions be obliged to stare into the fog which was the breath of London. The street lamps were regularly turned on at noon. The American ambassador recorded: ‘I could not see people in the street from my windows. I am tempted to ask, how the English became great with so little daylight.’ The hours were long, up to fifty-two hours per week, but there was an ‘English’ half-day holiday on Saturday when the family might take a steamer or a tram to the parks or greener suburbs, while on Sunday, of course, the church called to the pious or the conventional. Others lolled in bed or made the pilgrimage to the local public house.

The life of the home was granted a less comfortable tone in the description of a cabinetmaker of the period:

The vast majority of them [families] in the towns and cities have no room to be merry in. The bread winner has to be up and off early and home late … His little ones are fast asleep. He gets a peep at them … A look at the wife is a painful one. What is the matter dear, oh nothing. Poor dear she has been at work too. Trying to earn a bite to keep them decent. If this is the case in ordinary times when employ was regular and dad comes straight home and denies himself a glass of ale till he gets there, his shirt wet with sweat and tired with a long walk, where does the merriment come in?

The lower orders were also a besetting problem. Friedrich Engels considered the industrial system to be at the root of all evil, and Walter Scott blamed the steam engine, while Thomas Chalmers directed his anger against the poor laws. Lord Liverpool accused ‘seditious and blasphemous publications’ for weakening ‘among the lower orders the attachment to our government and constitution’. ‘Seditious and blasphemous publications’ were the great cliché of moralists in the early age of mass reading.

To rest, and to do no work, however, was the great sin. The alluring adjective was ‘conscientious’. The severe and steady detail of the pre-Raphaelite painters was conscientious. Painting itself was seen to be the product of labour and study. The patient work of the painter is of the essence, in the minute reproduction of detail and the evidence of arduous technique. Every figure is a study. Ruskin wrote in The Stones of Venice (1851–53) that the power of drawing was accessible to anyone ‘who will pay the price of care, time and exertion’. One of the characters in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) is advised to look upon life and ‘to study its knotty problems closely, conscientiously’. The Victorians were in love with the wrinkled brow and the clenched hand. Ruskin’s moral scrupulosity ended in insanity; madness was for him, in that phrase from The Stones of Venice, ‘the price of care, time and exertion’. The sprightlier minds of the latter part of the century took a different view of the matter. They were not averse to industrialism and science, but they were opposed to seriousness. Whether in the wit of Wilde, the high spirits of Gilbert and Sullivan or the absurdities of Lewis Carroll, knotty problems and conscientiousness are ignored. They are rejecting a world in which the imperatives of George Eliot concerning God and Duty are taken seriously.

The term ‘Victorian’ did not come into general circulation until 1851, the time of the Great Exhibition, as if it were only then that the fruits of civilization were revealed. To be ‘Victorian’ in that period was to be up to date, to take an interest in all that was mechanical and progressive; it was to accept an age in which everything was out of scale with the preceding era. The steam engine, the steamship, the buildings in the cities, were larger and grander than anything that had come before. ‘Victorian’ was modernity itself in the home, with striped wallpaper, patterned Brussels carpets, hourglasses, wax flowers and wax fruit under glass. Harriet Martineau commented upon ‘the spread of a spirit of peace – of a disinclination, that is, for brute violence’. The conditions of housing and sanitation were improving, and being poor was no longer confused with criminality. Duelling was now quite out of fashion. Our ancestors would have been astonished if they had known that ‘Victorian’ would come to mean constricted, brutal or unhealthy. The truth is that nobody can live in an age to which he or she is not assigned. This is the paradox of gazing at Victorian painting or reading Victorian fiction. The reality would be disgusting and unendurable, just as the early twenty-first century might seem to a Victorian.

There are certain particulars which mark out the period. Holidays were coming into fashion, and are recorded in William Powell Frith’s painting Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside) of 1854. The women are of course fully dressed in shawls and crinolines, together with gloves and bonnets; it is a reminder that the lower classes had neither the time nor the money to take an excursion and would not arrive by the sea for another twentyfive years. The men wore their usual dark suits, with waistcoats, and it was not rare to see top hats between the sand and the sea. No one is swimming. It was indecorous. The people did no more than paddle, but there were entertainers and vendors to catch the attention. No one wanted the sunlight. Even a blush on the cheeks would have been indelicate. There is altogether a sense of defensiveness. It is the Victorian paradox of self-confidence and energy in execution together with the intimation or suggestion of tenuousness. The mingling of land and sea was one of the great tokens of melancholy in the face of eternity signified by Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’, when the waves:

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

The people are crammed together on the sands as if in formation. Yet they do not seem to be enjoying themselves; they are tentative because they owe their hours to work. Work was the key. Work was the appointed calling. They look as if they were ready to return to it at a moment’s notice. Carlyle noted that ‘there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness in work’. It may raise the prospect of salvation.

The moral aspect of painting was never overlooked. Fault was found in Frith’s painting of the seaside, for example, because it contained no vignette of a concerned mother overlooking a convalescent child. The Germans had already scoffed at English artists for a certain nervousness or understatement in the presentation of passion. The most that English painters managed in the depiction of human emotion was the representation of people in which something has been left unsaid, as in William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853) and Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1855). Some foreign artists appreciated the style. Théodore Géricault had achieved a triumph with The Raft of the Medusa but he left on record his appreciation of English (or Scottish) reticence in David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch:

I will speak only of one figure which seemed to me the most perfect, whose pose and expression draw tears, however much one holds them back. It is a soldier’s wife who, thinking only of her husband, searches with an unquiet and haggard eye the list of the dead … There is no crape or mourning; rather the wine flows on every table and the sky is unharrowed by any fatally presaging lightnings. But it reaches a final pathos like nature itself …

In regard to table manners, it is recorded that ‘it is not done to take wine without drinking to another person. When you raise your glass you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with great gravity.’ Words and phrases also had a life of their own. ‘Nice’ was constant, as was ‘you know’; ‘spoony’ suggested someone who was a bit of a weakling. In an era of rapid and remorseless change there was an abiding sentimentality for the past or ‘bygones’. Very good was ‘A1’ and bad was ‘shoddy’ or ‘very bad shoddy’; ‘bunkum’ was ‘buncum’ and ‘in course’ was used instead of ‘of course’. A ‘hobble’ was trouble. Other topical words and phrases abounded: ‘She would play old gooseberry’, ‘I think he is coming round to cotton to me’. ‘Antediluvian’. ‘Levanted’. ‘A screw loose’. ‘He is a Bohemian who hates the decencies of life’. ‘In a blue funk’. ‘There are moments when we try to give a child any brick on the chimney top’. ‘Chaff’. ‘Poltroon’. ‘Ta-ta’.

The Victorians had their guides, however, in the presence of several writers who can be said to comprise the mind of the nineteenth century. In an age of prose they were considered to be more remarkable than the poets and, compared to them, the novelists were mere entertainers. Thomas Carlyle himself was considered to be a modern prophet who created a language of declamation and lamentation that was intense and original. He was not one to use the language of the herd; the discourse of parliament was for him the defining disgrace of the nation, while electoral reform was no more than ‘shooting Niagara’, with an abysmal conclusion. Why stop short at householders when the beasts of the field do not have the vote? ‘Divine commandment to vote,’ he wrote. ‘Manhood Suffrage (Horsehood, Dog-hood ditto not yet treated of).’ He was profoundly out of sympathy with the middle classes to whom he believed that power had been entrusted, and all the middle-class nostrums from freedom of trade to freedom of speech were anathema to him. His political heroes were strong men with a taste for decisive action and arbitrary rule. He believed that slavery was of no consequence, and that only the strong needed to survive. He was treated as a prophet by some because many in the nineteenth century shared his views and his detestation of ‘Nigger Philanthropists’ and other liberal voices. There was nothing of Shaftesbury or Wilberforce in him; he would no doubt have been horrified if he had known that these two eminent humanitarians would come to represent Victorian civilization more than he ever could.

He discerned correctly that his was a mechanic and utilitarian age based upon calculation and constraint which touched economic theory, religion, education and the physical sciences. The philosophy of the utilitarians would lead only to a ‘greater perfection of Police’. Their network of sensible truths tied down the world and all the people in it. Laissez-faire, the philosophy of the moment, the truism of a thousand clowns, had replaced special responsibility with an impersonal ‘cash nexus’ which lowered human beings to the level of integers. ‘Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.’ His language is almost always heroic despite himself. He was fierce and eloquent and arresting.

In his deployment of the rhythm and cadences of prose he is not profoundly dissimilar to other writers of the great Victorian generation. Wherever we dig, we strike gold. There is the pellucid brightness of Thomas Macaulay’s prose, which shines with an even light as he converts the disparate facts of the eighteenth century into a convincing ifalso convenient history. There is George Eliot, with her solemnity touched by tenderness and, as Lord Acton put it, ‘a consummate expert in the pathology of consciousness’. John Ruskin will be of the same company; the structure of his thought reflects a particularly vibrant sensibility concerning architecture and stone. ‘I notice’, he wrote, ‘that among all the new buildings … churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions, and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic and the mansions and mills are never Gothic.’ It may seem commonplace but it deserves some consideration for its analysis of the Victorian age.

Charles Darwin has appeared in this narrative more than once, since he of all writers embodies the purest Victorian spirit. The notion of evolution by natural selection is so fitting to its age that it resembles a great jewel found in a rock; the removal of special creation by a deity meant that the age of miracles had passed, leaving some more comfortless than ever. The imaginative landscape of On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was equally compelling. It was a dark world indeed, dominated by the necessity of labour and the appetite for power. Even the bees ‘are anxious to save time’, and Darwin extols ‘the more efficient workshops of the north’; nature itself is described as frugal and even miserly with a continual desire ‘to economize’. Darwin also suggests the need for ‘heavy destruction’, with the subtext ‘let the strongest live and the weakest die’. He celebrates the spectacle of violent death with his discourse on the bee. ‘We ought to admire’, he writes, ‘the savage instinctive hatred of the queen bee, which urges her to destroy the young queens, her daughters.’ Combat and slaughter become the principal components of this world. He imagines all life on earth to be derived from one ‘common parent’ or ‘primordial form’; the offspring of this ‘prototype’ then develop into various species of animals or plants which in turn fight among themselves to ‘progress towards perfection’. So ‘evolution’ can be interpreted as a suitable Victorian myth. This is what Charles Dickens, in Dombey and Son (1848), called ‘competition, competition – new invention, new invention – alteration, alteration’. Everything is of a piece.

It carried very far. Beatrice Webb remarked of her mother’s beliefs in My Apprenticeship (1926) that ‘it was the bounden duty of every citizen to better his social status; to ignore those beneath him, and to aim steadily at the top rung of the social ladder. Only by this persistent pursuit by each individual of his own and his family’s interest would the highest general level of civilisation be attained …’ This returns the narrative to the world of work. A French observer remarked that: ‘On entering an office, the first thing you see written up is “You are requested to speak of business only”.’ Carlyle emphasized ‘that the mandate of God to His creature man is: Work!’

‘Men of letters’ were for the Victorians the epitome of a very broad band of learning, from social thinkers and political economists to philosophers and historians. It is something of a paradox that the century which produced the most elegant and voluminous prose should have only a small readership. It was estimated in 1861 that only 5 per cent of all pupils remained in school after the age of eleven; so we can confidently assert deep levels of illiteracy. Yet for the existing reading public the whole spirit of literature could be found in the morally useful where the essayist and the historian could be seen as preachers rather than scholars. In a world so permeated by religion the works of Ruskin, Eliot and Carlyle were prized for their moral exhortation and spiritual comfort. By the 1840s the Gothic novel and the histrionic romance had been superseded by novels that explored spiritual problems of the modern world or inquired into matters concerning social structure and social status. There was no necessary disparity between realism (in the English rather than French mode) and moral elevation. The other grace notes of the Victorian world were seriousness and self-confidence, with a certainty that was close to dogmatism.

This quality of interest could not last in a society where literacy was steadily increasing and where the printed word would soon become ubiquitous. It had led to what John Stuart Mill described as ‘the diffusion of superficial knowledge’. Matthew Arnold wrote to Arthur Hugh Clough that ‘these are damned times – everything is against one – the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends …’ Here was a Victorian perception – the absence of great natures was keenly felt. It had always been said that the various Reform Acts would eventually create a world of the middle class and the lower middle class in which previous values would no longer apply. When one of the old Whig aristocracy criticized Prince Albert for attending a meeting of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, the prince replied that ‘one has a duty to perform to the great mass of the working classes …’ This was the prevailing sentiment. The triumph of science and the rise of secularism effectively discontinued the tradition of Ruskin or of Carlyle; we know, even as we read them, that they are whistling in the wind.

17

Quite the fashion

One of the greatest contributions of the Victorian epoch to indigenous English culture is that of the music hall. There was a tradition of popular and often obscene entertainment that goes back to the jigs and comic songs of the Elizabethan stage and to the ‘singing booths’ of the fair. ‘Harmonic meetings’, taverns and ‘free-and-easies’ had their origin in the eighteenth century, but the true age of the ‘halls’ dates from the 1840s with the Canterbury Arms and the Surrey Music Hall, with their attendant aromas of gin, sweat and orange peel. The supper rooms of the 1850s added to the diversity, serving poached eggs on steak and devilled kidneys seasoned with red pepper. The attendant tavern concerts and ‘night cellars’ generally lived up to their reputations; the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane and the Coal Hole on the Strand were two of the more notorious. The famous song of the Cider Cellars was ‘Sam Hall’, with its refrain ‘damn your eyes!’ The songs were as Victorian as the Crystal Palace.

From Store Street to Hungerford Market the music halls became the major form of popular entertainment. From the 1850s onwards they flourished particularly in the East End where the conditions of living were hard if not harsh. There were four such halls – the Rodney, the Lord Nelson, the Eastern and the Apollo – in Bethnal Green alone.

Specialized performers such as the ‘Lion Comique’, the female ‘serio comic’ acts and the ‘heavy swell’ were always in demand. They tended to cultivate ‘coster songs’ and songs written in a ‘flash’ or Cockney dialect. But much attention was paid to the ‘chairman’ who introduced the acts, made topical jokes and generally encouraged the audience to drink up and enjoy the same. This was known as ‘wet money’ when the price of admission included a drink. Their songs, such as ‘Why Can’t We Have the Sea in London’ and ‘My Shadow is My Only Pal’, have no memorial, but they were the true token of popular sentiment. They were the songs of the poor, the songs of longing. No history of the nineteenth century would be complete without them.

One of the most celebrated of the artists was Dan Leno, born in 1860 in the neighbourhood of St Pancras. Like Charles Chaplin, he began his career as a clog artist. Clog dancing was a Victorian speciality, born out of life in the factories. The operatives in the textile mills tried to keep themselves warm by tapping their feet to the rhythm of the power mills, and soon enough it became part of a dance routine. Clog competitions became popular all over the north of England. Leno excelled with his speed and style to such an extent that he became in part identified with this eccentric form of dancing. He was on stage by the age of four, but did not create his individual act for another seven years, when he was billed as a ‘Descriptive and Irish Character Vocalist’. It was not until 1885, however, that he perfected the act that brought him fame. His first ‘turn’ was that of a harassed woman who sang ‘Going to Buy Milk for the Twins’.

No nostalgic evocation of the ‘good old days’ of the 1860s and 1870s is appropriate here, since the Leno family was often close kin to starvation and hopelessness. Leno’s principal memories are of the long walks from town to town in search of employment. Yet, as in the best pantomimes, his fortune changed in a grand transformation scene. In 1880 he won the award for ‘Champion Clog Dancer of the World’ at the Princess’s Palace in Leeds, beating off competition with his speed and precision. One critic noted that ‘he danced on the stage, he danced on a pedestal, he danced on a slab of slate, he was encored over and over again, but throughout his performance he never uttered a word’.

His stature of 5 feet and 3 inches, his pallid and strained face, his pursed lips, his small husky voice and his sudden leaps backwards became the marks of his performance. He combined a curiously wayward ‘patter’ with sudden bursts of wild capering; he could bawl with the best of them before falling silent with a puzzled expression on his face. He was humanity personified, humanity in its essence, the object of pity and sympathy and exuberant hilarity. The few extant recordings of his act scarcely do him justice, because it was in communion with his audience that he became superb. He became the audience. He retained the utmost fidelity to ordinary familiar life. ‘Whenever he is on the stage,’ a dramatic critic wrote, ‘be it theatre or music-hall, he literally holds the audience tight in his power. They cannot get away from him. He is monarch of all he surveys.’

Max Beerbohm put it best in the Saturday Review:

I defy anyone not to have loved Dan Leno at first sight. The moment he capered on, with that air of wild determination, squirming in every limb with some deep grievance that must be outpoured, all hearts were his … that poor little battered personage, so put upon, yet so plucky, with his squeaking voice and sweeping gestures; bent but not broken; faint but pursuing; incarnate of the will to live in a world not at all worth living in …

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the halls became more ornate, with gilt and plaster, with balconies and stage boxes, just as the public houses of the period became more grandiose with mirrors and lights, so that they resembled the workingclass notion of ‘palaces’ as they were soon called. Other halls were more enlightened. The Cambridge Music Hall in Liverpool, erected in 1866, contained frescoes of ‘Science’, ‘Music’ and ‘The Seasons’. It opened at a time of typhus and an American cotton blockade so that entertainment of even the most puerile kind was welcomed. Drink and the music hall were the solace of the people. It was the will to live in a world not at all worth living in. When all else failed, put on a pantomime.

Dan Leno came to London in 1885 where he began a gruelling life by performing in Bethnal Green, Drury Lane and Westminster Bridge Road. Three music hall performances in one evening were not regarded as excessive (some managed six or seven) and the phrase ‘I must hurry along to my next hall’ became familiar. George Robey recalled that Leno was ‘tearing from hall to hall, night after night. One would see him coming in from his brougham, still dripping with perspiration, and looking so tired.’ But as soon as he appeared on stage with the audience in front of him he was transformed. He was always a busy, restless man, and one theatrical contemporary recalled: ‘I can honestly say that I never saw him absolutely at rest. He was always doing something and had something else to do afterwards, or he had just been somewhere, was going somewhere else, and had several other appointments to follow.’

He played many parts, the majority of which were lower class or lower middle class; as was also said of Charles Dickens, ‘he had the key of the street’. Four of his most familiar roles were as a waiter, shop-walker, muffin man and landlady whose boast or threat was ‘Young Men Taken in and Done For’. They were part of the landscape of Leno’s imagination that was lower-class London in essence, with its fried-fish shops, its public houses, its pawnbrokers, its shellfish stalls, its old-clothes shops and its markets. Nowhere else was he at home.

Dan Leno barely survived the Victorian era which he had so closely represented. His final part as Mother Goose may have contributed to his nervous breakdown, and he was taken to Peckham House Asylum, where he was diagnosed with a syphilitic disorder that had turned his mind. His constitution was not helped by the large quantities of alcohol which he had imbibed over the years since childhood. Alcoholism was the curse of the performing classes, and a large number of artists succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver and related complaints. He was released and, on the vague hope of recovery, continued to perform. In another period of mental confusion, towards the end of his life, he was seen queuing for one of his own shows. His largest audience of the period, however, was the one that accompanied his funeral cortège in the early days of November 1904.

The ribald and boisterous humour of the music hall was by the 1880s diluted by the growing respectability of the increasingly dominant middle class. The comic books and essays were written by what could be called the Punch school of writers that was ironic and even sarcastic without being subversive. The periodical itself was established as a weekly in 1841, nine years after the first Reform Act, and its contributors included Thackeray, Thomas Hood, Douglas Jerrold, Henry Mayhew and assorted members of the circle of humorists who had assembled around Dickens. It was more famous, however, for its multifarious cartoons which satirized the news and politics of the week.

One of its more enduring contributions, still in print more than 120 years later, was The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. It purported to be the intimate journal of a middle-aged clerk of lowly background, Charles Pooter, who has aspirations towards respectability and even gentility. The Grossmiths both began as stage entertainers, with George Grossmith a principal artist for Gilbert and Sullivan, but they stepped onto the pages of fictional history, in Punch, in the spring of 1888. The initial critical reception was not overenthusiastic, since in certain respects it was perhaps too close to home to seem comic. The references were always up to date. But gradually its reputation spread, so that by the 1890s it was regarded as one of the most important contributions to the late Victorian era.

The Oxford English Dictionary derives many of its phrases from the text, including ‘I’ve got the chuck’, ‘dead cert’ and ‘a good address’. The actual address of the Pooters was ‘The Laurels’, Brookfield Terrace, Holloway (drawn by Weedon Grossmith as the last house in a two-storey terrace with a small front garden), an area of Islington which became heavily populated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It could be described as a new suburb except for the fact that London soon surrounded it. The narrative could have been written there from observation. The fashion for spiritualism and table-rapping is faithfully recorded, as well as the newspaper question of the day: ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ The domestic interiors of the suburban house are given in full detail, from the stags’ horns of plaster of Paris painted brown to the blue wool mats on which the vases were placed. Chrysanthemums, bicycles and stuffed birds were the properties of the day. The Grossmiths also drew up an anatomy of ‘home’ as the lodestar of Victorian longing and contentment.

In a different light, The Diary of a Nobody might be considered to be a substantial contribution to the new fashion for ‘realistic’ fiction. George Gissing, the great master of English realism, had written that he wanted to record ‘the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of the vast majority who are at the mercy of paltry circumstances’. This is also the aim and object of the Diary. Here in this constricted circle Gissing and the Grossmiths introduced the same problems of upward mobility, of children and of marriage, and of the slow redefinition of class at the turn of the century.

Here are some apposite remarks from The Diary:

‘Consequences’ again this evening. Not quite so successful as last night, Gowing having several times overstepped the limits of good taste … Pa, at all events, was a gentleman … I had a fit of the blues come on, and thought I would go to see Polly Presswell, England’s Particular Spark … as I am master of this house perhaps you will allow me to take the reins … I do not think such a style modest. She ought to have … covered her shoulders with a little lace … I feel as fit as a Lowther Arcade fiddle, and only require a little more ‘oof’ to feel as fit as a £500 Stradivarius … ‘Oh, I’m going in for manicuring. It’s all the fashion now’.

There were standard features – the one-price hat at three and six, the amateur theatricals, the hand-me-down frock coat, the fondness for fun and after-dinner games, the impromptu song recitals, the irate cab drivers, the annual week at Broadstairs (a little more select than Margate), the endless puns. And so the world went, in what was known as a right little, tight little, island. The phrases and expressions were all new-minted and bring the reader as close as possible to the language of the respectable classes of the late Victorian population, expressing the mild facetiousness and mild distaste, the clinging to standard conventions of good taste, the horror of anything approaching unorthodoxy, which prevailed among them. But The Diary of a Nobody suggests also that the conventions and phrases of the period were open to mockery even by those who employed them.

Wherever we turn we find new institutions and societies and clubs supplying what Dan Leno used to describe, concerning the Tower of London, as ‘a long-felt want’. The Reading Room of the British Museum was opened in 1857 for all those who wished to live in the shadow of the valley of the books. Anyone with any aspirations to scholarship and no other place to find it, from Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde, could acquire a ticket. There had been a reading room attached to the British Museum since 1759, but it was a ‘damp and dark room’ lined with stuffed birds. It emerged in its most familiar form in 1857 until its purpose was taken over by the British Library in 1973. Its circular shape represented by accident or design a giant cranium, but with a dome of 140 feet in diameter and a height of 106 feet, it was also a great feat of Victorian engineering. It is inferior to the Pantheon of Rome by 2 feet, and surpasses St Peter’s and the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

It became, at the very least, a powerhouse of thought fuelled by all the calculations and results and theories that rose into the mid-Victorian air. Karl Marx came every day for thirty years, scrutinizing the floods and eddies of economic history. Stalin came, Lenin came, Trotsky came, all of them seeking the fount or origin of historical wisdom. The whole of Bloomsbury, in the immediate vicinity of the Reading Room, became magnetized by communist theory, with meetings and events and clubs and committees springing up in the vicinity of the great dome. The middle and late years of nineteenth-century England were capacious enough to tolerate a political enemy in their midst. It is appropriate, therefore, that George Bernard Shaw should leave a third of his estate to what he called a ‘magnificent communistic institution’.

The Reading Room had an almost analgesic effect on the rest of the neighbourhood, since in the adjacent streets emerged theosophical, Swedenborgian, psychic and spiritualist organizations that became at once familiar and appropriate. This is another distinctive aspect of nineteenth-century England. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for example, established its headquarters in London just opposite the Reading Room.

When the Reading Room was completed the books came flying in by means of donations, wills, outright purchase, but principally by means of copyright legislation which demanded each published book from every publisher. This was of course condemned as ‘high-handed’, but it exemplified the national movement towards bureaucratization and control. As a result the problem of storage was perhaps the greatest dilemma the librarians ever faced. The Reading Room itself could house 303 readers. Another great problem lay in its lighting. Artificial lighting was not allowed, and in heavy fog the Reading Room was closed, banishing its readers to the outer darkness. But in November 1879 a ripple of applause echoed around the dome when the first electric lights were turned on. George Gissing wrote of the ‘sputtering whiteness of the electric light and its ceaseless hum’. But the atmosphere within the dome was heavy, and some people succumbed to what was known as ‘museum megrims’. Algernon Swinburne collapsed and hit his head on his desk.

For many years it was supposed to be a library of last resort to which readers were only admitted if they could not find the chosen book elsewhere. A later century would relax the rules, to no very great advantage. But others crowded in. Charles Dickens remarked on the number of ‘shabby-genteel’ people who were attracted to the books; perhaps the warmth, perhaps the relative comfort, or perhaps the pleasure of participating in what might be called a universal mind, attracted them. It afforded the sensation of being engaged in some vast enterprise of which the individual readers were a part. It was a Victorian experience. George Gissing wrote in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) that ‘at the time that I was literally starving in London, when it seemed impossible that I should gain a living from my pen, how many days have I spent at the British Museum, reading as disinterestedly as if I had not a care!’

Arnold Bennett described the readers as comprising ‘bishops, statesmen, men of science, historians, needy pedants, popular authors whose broughams are waiting in the precincts, journalists, medical students, law students, curates, hack-writers, women with clipped hair and black aprons, idlers: all short-sighted and all silent’. However it was not altogether silent. The noise of books being opened and paged through, like an autumn rustling of leaves, was familiar. Coughs and sneezes and sniffles abounded in people who were not well nourished. Voices were occasionally raised on the question of a missing book or of a long delay in receiving one. Sometimes a book was dropped. But how were the endless footfalls muffled? There was a perfect Victorian solution. A material called kamptulicon, of cork and rubber, was laid down.

Fictional personages have also been seen here. In Max Beerbohm’s story ‘Enoch Soames’ (set in 1895, published in 1916), the eponymous hero, after making a pact with the devil, reappears a hundred years after his death to see if his name had entered the general catalogue of books. Jonathan Harker, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), studied the maps of Transylvania under the great dome but could not find the location of Count Dracula’s castle. The great period of the Reading Room has been variously estimated but it roughly coincided with the flourishing days of Mudie’s Circulating Library.

Mudie’s Lending Library was situated one minute’s walk from the front gates of the British Museum, on the corner of Museum Street, and can be considered as a sort of commercial adjunct to the great library, where the customers could hire the latest fiction that was not yet available in the Reading Room. The demand was enormous and the latter decades of the nineteenth century were indeed halcyon days for the once great but now forgotten Victorian phenomenon of the three-volume novel.

Charles Edward Mudie opened his first shop in 1842, at the age of twenty-two, and charged his subscribers 1 guinea a year to borrow one volume at a time, and a 2-guinea subscription to borrow four books at a time. He soon discovered that fiction was the opiate of the people. The cost of novels was so high that Mudie’s subscription selling was an immediate success, but his refusal to stock ‘immoral’ books or novels ‘of questionable character or of inferior quality’ made a singular impression on the new fiction offered for sale.

He did, however, have a more benign effect on the popularity of scientific books; he purchased, for example, 500 copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. His books were not taken in only by households or individuals; they were delivered to institutes, reading clubs, book clubs, business clubs and others. About three and a half million volumes were in circulation at any one time, and the books travelled over most of Europe, America and the empire. By 1870 Anthony Trollope declared that ‘we have become a novel-reading people … from the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery maid’.

Prose of course had also been the medium of first resort in the eighteenth century, but the nineteenth century became the home of fiction. Mudie has some claim to turning the art of reading into a mass market where before it had been a specialized pleasure. Theologians and philosophers, historians and biographers had always commanded attention, but it is possible that the flood tide of books released by Mudie and other circulating libraries helped them to move slowly upwards. Much of the fiction that Mudie delivered was not of the highest quality, and was dismissed by some as trash; nevertheless, the conveyance of the printed word throughout the country had some effect upon literacy and education. There eventually came into being a class known as ‘the common reader’. Henry James described the onset of fiction in alarmist terms. ‘The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters, as would often seem, with submersion.’ Prose itself was linear, consequential, packed with meaning and reference; it could describe, command, elucidate, distribute and cancel. It was the language of power.

Mudie hired out the three-deckers of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and Henry James even if it was not a form that any one of them would have chosen. It was simply a new way of making money for the publisher – three volumes instead of one, priced at 31 shillings and 6 pence for the set. It also encouraged bulk orders from the publishers and steady sales for the authors. His forms of moral censorship were always an irritant, however, with the assumption that he would stock nothing that could bring a blush to the cheek of a young lady. This disqualified much fiction, especially from the Continent, at a stroke. The single volume came to be considered a low form more fitted for a street stall than the three-volume dignity. The railway bookstalls sold cheap reprints known as ‘yellow backs’, and they made a killing out of ‘shilling shockers’. Some of them were also known as ‘sensation novels’, which can be interpreted in a literal sense. The design of the sensation novel, after all, was ‘to electrify the nerves’. Many of the characters in these novels seem to be in a nervous state and may communicate their fear to the reader. Wilkie Collins, for example, was concerned with doubles and double identity, with monomania and delusion, tracing the paths of unconscious association and occluded memories thirty years before Freud began investigating the subjects.

Yet it was not a format that appealed to other writers who had to wrestle with the three volumes in order to import long conversations, long descriptions, long moral reflections, as well as double plots, to make up the bulk. In 1853 Charles Reade, one of the most successful novelists of the century, complained that ‘the three volume novel is the intellectual blot of our nation – it is the last relic of our forefathers’ prolixity and damned digressive tediousness … The principle of the three volume novel is this – write not what you have to say only – but what you have not got to say as well.’ Yet they were left on tables, draped over sofas, poised on the arms of armchairs and put on the bedroom table. They did not die of malnutrition until 1895, when other forms of literature were emerging.

18

The game cock

Palmerston’s majority at the end of the Indian War of Independence was not as firmly based as it seemed, and his personality was not the cohesive force it once had been. The ‘bundle of sticks’, as his party was called, was no longer firmly in his grasp. United they were unbreakable; individually they could be easily snapped. There is a portrait of Palmerston in this period. ‘He looked like an old gentleman, like a man who has used up his strength in fifty years of uninterrupted struggle but who knows how to cultivate his will power to a certain extent since it must serve instead of the rest of his strength as the whole once did. He looked like someone who is determined to rule to the end … there was no mirth on his lips, no gaiety on his brow.’ At a Royal Literary Fund dinner Turgenev had observed that his face was ‘wooden, hard and insensitive’, an opinion he shared with Victor Hugo. But Palmerston had a strong sense of humour. He said of the Brazilian government that it resembles ‘a Billingsgate fish-woman seized by a policeman for some misdeeds. She scolds and kicks and raves and calls on the mob to help her and vows she won’t go to the lock-up house but will sooner die on the spot; but when she feels the strong grip of the policeman and finds he is really in earnest she goes as quietly as a lamb though still using foul-mouthed language at the corner of each street.’ He still had the gift of turning foreign affairs into a Punch and Judy show, with himself as a frequently pugnacious Punch.

The counter-blow against him came from an unexpected source. In January 1858 an Italian nationalist, Felice Orsini, conceived a plan for the assassination of Napoleon III; largely as a consequence of lax police surveillance he gathered arms and men. Orsini himself travelled to England, where he persuaded a sympathetic gunsmith to build six bombs of Orsini’s own devising. On the discovery of the plot the French people fell into one of their fits of hysterics, largely aimed at the perfidious English. Palmerston, fearful of the charge that the country had become a haven for revolutionaries, and wishing to save face with the emperor, caused a Conspiracy Bill to be introduced. It was defeated on a second reading and ‘Pam’ had a great fall. A journalist, William White, noticed that ‘the “Great Minister”, who but yesterday rode on the top-most crest of the waves of popularity, is sunk so low that there is hardly a man of his former friends to say, “God save him.” Nor do men think of him in their speculations as to the future.’ The pattern of politics was routinely called ‘kaleidoscopic’ after the invention of 1817.

It came as a shock to the opposition as well as to the administration. Disraeli and Derby – known colloquially as ‘the Jew and the Jockey’ – prepared themselves for an unanticipated rule, with Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative administration. Their first step was faltering. Disraeli proposed his own India Bill, including the idea of an Indian council partly elected by the householders of the great English cities. Everybody laughed at him. A contemporary, William Fraser, wrote that ‘no one can form the least idea, from looking at Hansard, of what took place. The cheering, groaning, laughing were beyond belief. We considered ourselves justified in using inarticulate means of rendering the eloquence of the other side nugatory’; rude noises and explosive shouts, in other words, were the order of the day. Derby had become prime minister, but he was still the leader of a minority.

In the summer of 1858, the sanitary health of the capital once more came into open view. It was the summer of the ‘great stink’, where the turbulent flow of faeces and other animal matter created a miasma over the Thames and the city. The effluent from all the houses ran down to the river, where it collected and stagnated; this was the water used for drinking and for washing clothes, which was described as having a ‘brownish colour’. The smell permeated everything. Disraeli was seen in a corridor of the House of Commons doubled up with a handkerchief over his face. Victoria and Albert were about to take a leisure trip on the river but were forced by the smell to turn back. All smell was considered to be disease and recent outbreaks of cholera in London were blamed upon these gaseous eruptions. They rivalled in noxiousness the ubiquitous horse droppings which had for a long time been the characteristic smell of the city.

The foreshores were caked with excrement, and as far upriver as Teddington Lock the sewage was six inches thick and ‘as black as ink’. Like the Crimean War, nobody claimed responsibility for it. It was nobody’s shit. It was the system clogging itself. Yet someone, somewhere, decided that something should be done. An Act of Parliament in 1863 decreed that a vast and intricate network of sewers should be created. A civil engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, was chosen to be the saviour of London, which he duly became with his ingenious schemes of drainage.

The ‘great stink’ can be viewed beside another horror of 1858. The ‘lunacy panic’ of the year was aroused by the sudden awareness of the public, or the newspapers, that apparently normal people had ‘disappeared’ into lunatic asylums, generally at the instigation of greedy relatives. The ease with which it could be done was examined by Wilkie Collins, among others. ‘It is easy to prove that an obnoxious relative is insane,’ Lloyd’s Weekly reported in August 1858, ‘it is easier still to aggravate trivial symptoms by persistent bad treatment’.

In a world of privation and misery, madness could almost become epidemic. The apparent increase in cases of ‘brain disorder’ was widely noted. The Edinburgh Review speculated that it was the result of intense anxiety and competition in both social and commercial life; it noted that madness ‘derived from the extreme tension to which all classes are subjected in the unceasing struggle for position and even life’. It was even rumoured that Victoria had succumbed to the illness of her ancestor and was so violent that she had to be restrained in a padded cell. It was a subject constantly reported in journals, novels and medical textbooks. Together with cholera it can be seen as the defining medical image of the nineteenth century. Its antidote was generally taken in the form of laudanum, known as ‘Battley’s Drops’ or ‘Mother Bailey’s Quieting Spirit’.

Derby remained Conservative prime minister for fifteen months, but the larger action was behind the veil where Palmerston, Russell and other ambitious Liberal leaders vied for mastery. Russell condemned Palmerston for ‘levity and presumption’ but cautioned against any overt opposition to the Conservatives. Derby never had a majority, but he was not devoid of ambition. In March 1859, he and Disraeli introduced a parliamentary suffrage bill that would bring a form of equality to both town and country voters in an effort to bolster the Conservative constituency. But the Liberals and Peelites, working together, voted down the proposal (revived in 1884); Derby was obliged to resign and, at the subsequent April election, the Conservatives found themselves with thirty more seats but still in a minority.

Gladstone had already stated, four years before, that ‘the great characteristic of this singular state of things is that political difference no longer lies between parties but within parties’. On 6 June 1859, the Liberals, Radicals and the rump of what were still known as Peelites came together for a definitive meeting at Willis’s Rooms in St James’s Street where the Liberal party was formally baptized. Nominally they came together over the ‘Italian question’, essentially in support of the Italians over their Austrian masters, but the substance of the meeting can be found in The Times:

Lord John Russell next addressed the meeting and, after strongly deprecating the continuance of the Government in the hands of a minority, which he characterized as most unconstitutional and dangerous, expressed his hearty desire either to cooperate with Lord Palmerston, in the event of that noble Lord being called upon to form an Administration; or to avail himself of his assistance, in the event of his being required to conduct the affairs of the country himself. His Lordship adverted in the course of his speech to the state of the Liberal party, and expressed his opinion that in the event of a Liberal Government being formed it was essential that the three great sections of that party, the old Whigs, the Peelites, and the advanced Liberals should each be represented in it.

From that time forward the Liberals became the dominant party until the era of Disraeli. It can be said with some confidence that there were now only two parties, Liberal and Conservative, the rest of the Peelites dwindling away. The Liberal leaders, Russell and Palmerston, were known by the queen as ‘the two dreadful old men’. The last of the true Peelites was, perhaps, her now ailing husband.

In the same month a vote of no confidence was passed against Derby, and Palmerston became prime minister for the second time at the age of seventy-five. He was a wonder. To some he seemed to be no more than an aged pantaloon capering feebly in the corridors of Whitehall, but some called him ‘Lord Cupid’ for his youthful looks. To them he represented a special kind of English verve, vivacious until the end. He had become a ‘fixture’, a rock of ages. He lured Gladstone into the Treasury, but they were hardly comrades-in-arms. One member of parliament recalled that Gladstone would come to the first cabinet of each session armed with suggestions and proposals. Palmerston would stare down at his official papers and, when Gladstone fell quiet, he would tap the table saying: ‘Now my Lords and gentlemen let us go to business.’ He is also said to have remarked to Lord Shaftesbury that: ‘Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings.’ It was not a question of policy but of personality, which is the essential matter of politics.

Derby and Disraeli had no wish to deprive Palmerston of office for fear of something worse, so they arranged a three-year ‘truce’ with the prime minister without of course forfeiting the rights of a loyal opposition. Derby advised Disraeli to encourage Palmerston to rely on Conservative support ‘and looking to Palmerston’s increased age and infirmities, the oftener these can be brought into the same lobby in opposition to Radical moves, the better for it’. He conveyed the message to Palmerston that he could rely on the Conservatives whenever he was threatened by Radical demands. By this stage, however, Palmerston’s recovered popularity might have seen him through. He was walking with a colleague by the Crystal Palace. A contemporary observer, Viscount Ossington, noted: ‘The moment he came in sight, throughout the whole building, men and women, young and old, at once were struck as if by an electric shock. “Lord Palmerston! Here is Lord Palmerston! Bravo! Hurrah! Lord Palmerston forever!”’

The principals at Westminster were in any case deeply bound together on the ‘Italian question’ and the perfidy of Italy’s Austrian masters, although no one was very fond of the interested parties. That was always the way with foreign affairs. The general but often ignored rule was to stay out of the way of overseas imbroglios which seemed always to end inconclusively. One writer, John Trelawny, even suggested that foreign policy kept afloat the government in a world of threat ‘with the great apprehensions most men now have of the effect of change at this moment. America, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary – danger everywhere. Who is to open the ball in this dance of death?’ It was in fact Napoleon III who declared war on Austria; he had with him the new ally of Sardinia, which was eager to wrest more Italian territory from the maw of Austria; after defeats at Montebello and Solferino the Austrians were forced to come to terms, with the usual movement of territories from one overlord to another. These were the affairs of the world. The peasant still looked up at the sky in search of rain.

The year 1861 opened with the greetings of the Annual Register: ‘The internal state of the country at the opening of the year 1861 was generally prosperous and tranquil … the state of the agricultural and manufacturing interests … was apparently sound. Whatever demand had temporarily existed for constitutional changes appeared to have now completely subsided.’ Those who prophesied calm and contentment were, however, in a phrase of the period, ‘destined to have the wind in their faces’. In the spring and summer of the year there was yet another French invasion scare which created panic among the more credulous and would have thrown the finances of the country into confusion if Gladstone had not been their implacable guardian. In this year he also abolished the excise duty on paper which, as Gladstone himself put it, propelled ‘into vivid, energetic, permanent and successful action the cheap press of this country. To the most numerous classes of the community it was like a new light, a new epoch in life, when they found that the information upon public affairs … came to them morning after morning …’

The fear of France was succeeded, and superseded, by the fear of disruption with the United States. In May 1861 the Civil War broke out, dividing loyalties and counsel at Westminster. When seven slave-owning states seceded from the Union, the problem for the English administration became acute, rendered even more direct by the splits of public opinion. A significant body favoured the South, with whom trade was easy and profitable; the issue of slavery did not really enter the calculation. Others preferred to support the more ‘modern’ North with its business success and its instinct for economic and social progress. Yet perhaps a majority, or the largest minority, in the cabinet supported the South on the pragmatic grounds that the North would not be able to defeat the Confederacy.

Although the country professed neutrality that stance was seriously compromised when a Northern vessel detained two prominent Southern politicians on their way to England. It was fortunate that slow communications did not heat up the war. The opinion grew that it was imperative to keep out of the struggle, while conveniently forgetting that it was English statesmen and English parliaments who had helped to introduce slavery to those distant territories. The workers supported the North, and the manufacturers the South. The cotton operatives of Manchester and elsewhere were thrown out of work because of the fatal shortage of that commodity, and they might be said to have had mixed feelings on the matter. Palmerston, who himself favoured the Southern cause, was convinced that the North would never win, and made many jokes about the combatants. Dickens favoured the South, too, on the grounds that only its people could keep down the black population. Gladstone declared in one of his moments of mystic foolishness that: ‘Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.’ The slow success of Northern arms, however, reminded Palmerston that he would be foolish to support a losing side.

Prince Albert did much to calm the tricky and ambivalent confrontation, but it was almost his last service to his adopted country. In December 1861 he died after a married life of twenty-one years. Only four years before, he had been made Prince Consort as if to solidify his position in English governance. It was said that they had behaved as if they were queen and king, although the queen would not have taken kindly to the suggestion. It would be fair to say that Albert took care of ministerial and managerial matters in which his wife was not wholly interested.

But she had regretted placing such burdens on what she called ‘his poor dear stomach’. He had for many years had a nervous stomach which did not allow him to digest his food properly and provoked painful spasms. It is now suggested that he suffered from abdominal cancer or Crohn’s disease; his teeth were painful and he suffered from gumboils. He may have known that the end was coming, but it was not the kind of news that could be intimated to the queen. ‘I do not hang on to life,’ he told her ‘but you do – very much so.’

Victoria was called to the Blue Room of Windsor Castle where he lay. ‘Oh yes, this is death,’ she said. ‘I know it. I have seen it before.’ He faded slowly, fortified only by brandy. Melbourne had once said to her: ‘English physicians kill you; the French let you die.’ The English doctors were as always confused over symptoms, and used reassuring words as the palliative.

After her husband’s death the queen promptly swathed herself in mourning from which she did not emerge for many years. It was the chrysalis for a black butterfly. She cancelled all her public and private engagements. The whole country was draped in black from the corner shops to the new department stores. Theatres, concerts and all public entertainments were cancelled. The queen totally withdrew from public life for two years, only venturing out to unveil statues or busts of Albert. It was an Arthurian mourning. It was a Tennysonian mourning. She lamented the fact that there was no one to call her Victoria now, and that she had lost the one prop upon whom she wholly relied. She was a little ball of black, of piteous face, to be glimpsed in the back of a landau. She would do nothing, appear nowhere, until there were some who wondered if she had any real purpose at all.

Her ministers faced insuperable difficulties if they ventured to suggest any public engagement. Victoria wrote:

Lord Russell and Lord Palmerston both strongly felt that as a lady, without a husband, with all the weight of Government thrown upon her, with weakened health, quite incapable of bearing the fatigues of representation, she could not be expected to entertain Princes as formerly. Consequently she cannot invite them. It makes her quite ill, to be unable to do the right thing – and yet she cannot do so.

She had an heir, Albert Edward or ‘Bertie’, whom she considered to be less than useless. On one occasion she felt moved to write in her journal: ‘he is not at all in good looks; his nose and mouth are too enormous and he pastes his hair down to his head and wears his clothes frightfully – he really is anything but good looking’.

She would never turn to him for advice or comfort. She entered an almost cataleptic state of grief. If anyone dared to counsel her or advise her she responded with fury. Her only thought was of cherishing the memory of her husband with statues, parks and monuments. It would seem that the gentle training Albert had given her in the art and craft of ruling had largely been wasted, and by the mid-1860s the republicans of England were being given their second wind by virtue of Her Majesty’s stubbornness. It would not be in any case correct to say that she had retired under a stone. Her family network established over Europe would have persuaded her, whether she liked it or not, to participate in the world. She had one reservation. She had written: ‘I am also anxious to repeat one thing and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision viz that his wishes – his plans about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law!’

Gladstone was strengthening his position in the cabinet. He erred on the side of caution in his budgets, with strong rhetoric on the subjects of free trade and the defence of empire. He realized that he had no chance of ousting Palmerston but would have to content himself by waiting for his death, which surely could not be delayed for very much longer. As for further electoral reform, which was supported by Gladstone, the prime minister put it to one side for a while. There was no hurry. Reform had a vexed history. It had been attempted by Russell on two occasions without success, and Palmerston had not redeemed his pledge to introduce it. But it was probably wise to broach the matter once again when the public seemed apathetic, and no great issue would arise. The Reform Act of 1832 had produced none of the predicted effects, and there was no reason to believe that any new act would do so now. In any case it was not wise or expedient to continue to frustrate the industrial working class indefinitely.

Change must come sooner or later. Sooner was more politic. And so the pressure mounted slowly and gradually. In October 1858, Engels wrote to Marx that ‘the British working class is actually becoming more and more bourgeois’. This was not necessarily a comfort to the authorities because it had been clear enough that the more ‘bourgeois’ the worker the more he demanded certain civil rights. Another observer of the mid-nineteenth century can complete the picture. Henry Mayhew wrote:

the artisans are almost to a man red hot politicians. They are sufficiently educated and thoughtful to have a sense of their importance in the State … The unskilled labourers are a different class of people. As yet they are as unpolitical as footmen, and instead of entertaining violent democratic opinions, they appear to have no political opinions whatever; or, if they do possess any, they rather tend towards the maintenance of ‘things as they are’ than towards the ascendancy of the working people.

Palmerston made periodic visits to the regions in order to meet the people, and generally professed himself to be ‘touched’ and ‘comforted’ by their enthusiasm. He was the ‘game cock’, in boxing terms of the time, and had a few rounds still to win. But he was not ready just yet.

19

The unexpected revolution

Viscount Palmerston, and Lord John Russell as foreign secretary in Palmerston’s administration, had observed the abiding principle of foreign affairs by keeping out of trouble. They kept out of Italy and, more important, they had kept out of the United States, where infinite difficulties threatened. When Napoleon III suggested that a European army should cross the Atlantic, there was a moment of horror in the Foreign Office before it was realized that the idea was thoroughly impracticable. The old certainties survived. France was still the enemy, and in any case there was a royal ‘cousinhood’ between England and Germany on a continent where everyone was related to everyone else. But the absence of English entanglement in any European war did not mean that the forces of the country remained entirely idle. There was scarcely a year in which troops and ships were not engaged in warding off threats to the empire from Afghanistan to Zululand. On this, there was a political consensus. ‘The Tory party’, Disraeli claimed, ‘is only in its proper position when it represents popular principles. Then it is truly irresistible. Then it can uphold the throne and altar, the majesty of the empire, the liberty of the nation and the rights of the multitude.’

When Russia claimed its constitutional rights over Poland, in January 1863, the Polish revolutionaries provoked a fierce civil war on which England looked with horror. But it did nothing about it except to issue vague threats. When Russell mildly inquired of the Austrian ambassador whether Austria might use force against Russia, the ambassador returned the question. ‘As I had foreseen,’ he noted, ‘Lord Russell told me that this eventuality had not been examined yet and that, not being ready to answer me, he begged me for the present to consider his question as not having been put.’ Such was the dread of entanglements.

The situation did not change over the next two or three years as German and Austrian armies marched over Europe to proclaim their responsibilities. In an age when the world seemed to be utterly transformed by scientific and commercial advance, Europe itself achieved tumultuous change. Otto von Bismarck was a problem without necessarily being a threat. The kingdom of Italy was united in 1861, anticipating the creation of a united Germany by the controlling will of Bismarck, who forged together the multifarious German principalities and kingdoms under the control of Prussia. It is not the matter for a history of England, unless we engage in the grand game of consequences, but it is significant to note that Bismarck was the real master of the situation and that England played an almost negligible role in the creation of late nineteenth-century Europe.

The London workers had pledged their support to the Polish rebels, and the workingclass solidarity with the various nationalists struggling to be free indirectly advanced their own domestic causes. One expression of this confidence came in the guise of cooperative production, a combination of socialism and self-help, and in 1863 the North of England CoOperative Wholesale Industrial and Provident Society had been able to break the hold of the more exacting wholesalers. This was the period of friendly societies, building societies and savings banks which established their strength on the ideals of thrift, self-help and mutual security. In its beginnings it seemed to promise the slow and non-violent introduction of a socialist commonwealth, but these aspirations proved illusory. The working man and woman did not wish for social revolution, but rather for an improvement in their circumstances.

In the spring of 1864 the new demand for respectability became more influential in political counsels. On 11 May Gladstone explained to the Commons that ‘every man … is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution’ unless incapacitated by ‘some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger’. Gladstone had raced ahead of the pack. He seemed to be proclaiming the vote as a right, not as a privilege. He went on to say that the union of all classes, so much to be desired, should be promoted ‘by a reasonable extension, at fitting times and among selected portions of the people, of every benefit and every privilege that can justly be conferred on them’. Disraeli said that he sounded like Tom Paine. Palmerston accused him of promoting ‘the Doctrine of Universal Suffrage which I can never accept’. Interestingly enough, Palmerston linked Gladstone’s reform policy with his increasingly public role. ‘It is to be regretted’, Palmerston told him ‘that you should, as you stated, have taken the opportunity of your receiving a deputation of working men, to exhort them to set on foot an agitation for parliamentary reform – the function of a government is to calm rather than to excite agitation.’ At the end of May 1864 Punch published a cartoon in which Gladstone is the only rider on a racecourse. Palmerston, as the starter, is calling out: ‘Hi! Gladstone! Democracy! Too soon! Too soon! You mustn’t go yet!’

Gladstone had begun to recognize that the working classes were material which could be worked on. They might be tractable. He was beginning to see the possibilities of a wider public to which in later years he would appeal. To one delegation he stated that ‘the franchise ought to be extended to the working classes’. In the autumn of the year he toured the manufacturing districts, slowly feeling his way into a new territory of democracy. Already the Newcastle Daily Chronicle was alluding to a ‘Great Party of the People’ with Gladstone as its leader. He liked to allude to the great cotton famine of 1862 when the American Civil War deprived the north of that necessary material. Gladstone praised the people of south Lancashire, in particular, for ‘self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors’. These of course were the members of an ideal democracy. He was cheered and feted wherever he went. It is significant, therefore, that when Palmerston met a deputation of working men he was greeted with silence.

Palmerston was more successful in his proper home of parliament. He averted a vote of censure from the Lords on the question of ceding Schleswig-Holstein to the German Confederation, a controversy of infinite moment only to those who were directly involved. Palmerston had said that: ‘Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it.’ In fact the betrayal of Denmark by Britain provoked a great deal of anger and disgust. Was this the way to deal with allies? As a result the Prussians became more confident, and the British lost much influence. Matthew Arnold argued that Palmerston had found the country first in the world’s estimation, but left it badly diminished. The result may not have been as profound as this suggests, but the betrayal of Denmark did much harm.

Palmerston’s survival of the vote of censure was greeted with relief by all sides. No one was yet ready for Benjamin Disraeli, who stood in the wings, awaiting the exit of Lord Derby. Richard Cobden taunted the Conservatives even for considering the departure of Palmerston, who was sometimes considered to be more Conservative than Derby himself.

I think you are very wrong in trying to remove the noble Lord … he throws discredit on reform; he derides the 220 gentlemen who are prepared to vote for the ballot. He spends more money and is far more extravagant than we would allow you to be if you were in office. Besides all this, I have always been of the impression that after he has thoroughly demoralised his own party, he intends, when he makes his political will, to hand over office to you as his residuary legatees.

After Cobden had finished speaking he followed custom by putting his top hat back on his head.

Two books of opposite tendency were issued in 1865. Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, published in serial form between 1865 and 1867, was a treatise in favour of dullness. The eminent historian of Victorian England, G. M. Young, described Bagehot as ‘the greatest Victorian’ and ‘a man who was in and of his age and who could have been of no other … whose influence, passing from one fit mind to another, could transmit and can still impart that most precious element in Victorian civilization, its robust and masculine sanity’. It was a duty to be dull; it was a sin to be too clever by half, as the saying went. It bred suspicion. As Bagehot wrote, ‘the most essential quality for a free people … is much stupidity’. Do not investigate too much; do not aspire too much. That was the way to preserve liberty. Bagehot believed that it was ‘the dull traditional habit of mankind that guides most men’s actions … that dullness in matters of government is a good sign and not a bad one – in particular dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success’. Excitement breeds excess. Innovation, let alone revolution, breeds anxiety, trouble and conflict. This is one of the keys to the general stability of Victorian England.

Yet there had been a change. In previous generations the gentlemen of parliament amused or abused their colleagues with speeches which resembled after-dinner conversations. Now the age of the newspaper had arrived, together with its conglomeration of facts and opinions. The orators of Westminster, if they could still be called such, relied upon what Bagehot called ‘the patient exposition, the elaborate minuteness, the exhaustive disquisition’ on such matters as chancery reform and the registration of companies. Bagehot speculated further: ‘Regular business forms a regular statesman – quiet habits, sober thoughts, common aims are his obvious characteristics.’ The great idea was to be, or to appear, ordinary. And ‘if a steady observer really looks at actual life he will see that men never think if they can help it’. This can be taken as a fair summation of ordinary Victorian values.

Rare and singular exceptions can be found to that dispensation. In the same year as The English Constitution began its serialization, James Clerk Maxwell’s A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field also appeared. It is rarely mentioned in the histories of the period largely because it is still very difficult for the layman to understand. Maxwell’s principal achievement was the promulgation of electro-magnetic theory, which has been described as the ‘second great unification theory’, after Newton, in which electricity, magnetism and light were to be viewed as manifestations of the same phenomenon. This in itself might be seen as a quintessentially Victorian discovery, and one of great significance. A fellow physicist, Richard Feynman, wrote in the 1960s that: ‘From a long view of this history of mankind – seen from, say, 10,000 years from now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.’ It can be argued that Victorian scientific theory will surpass all the religious and social tenets of its age.

We may note, however, that in the period of Maxwell’s publication of his insights the greater fervour of the time – especially from the 1850s to the 1880s – was devoted to the problems of biblical criticism. The development of a more liberal theology, and freedom of doctrinal decision, made the world unsteady. Any number of causes célèbres provoked bitter fury and sarcasm, and the participants fought one another as if their life depended on it. Heresy trials and court cases were instituted which pitted Nonconformists against Anglicans, Presbyterians against Congregationalists, German against English theologians, bishops against priests. Was the biblical narrative inspired by the Word of God or was it the composite work of scholars in various periods? Was geology a savage assault upon the conventions of Genesis? The bishop of Natal, J. W. Colenso, published a series of examinations of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua in which he discerned inconsistencies, improbabilities and impossibilities. They could not have been inspired by a deity. Colenso wrote that ‘our duty, surely, is to follow the Truth, wherever it leads us, and leave the consequences in the hands of God’.

The pious, who included the powerful body of Evangelicals and High Churchmen, were outraged. How could a bishop, of all people, propound such views? Bishop Lee of Manchester was afraid for ‘the very foundations of our faith, the very basis of our hopes, the very nearest and dearest of our consolations’. There were calls for a heresy trial, although burning was not an issue any more. The bishop of Cape Town, Colenso’s superior, convoked a synod in the course of which Colenso was deposed as bishop. Colenso then appealed to the Privy Council in London, which declared that he could not be so degraded. Nevertheless the bishop of Cape Town anointed another bishop while Colenso carried on regardless, creating a schism that lasted for decades. A similar pattern became evident in English dioceses where liberal clerics provoked ultraconservative bishops and vice versa. The certainties of the past were in any case being eroded by what were seen to be ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ solutions.

The decay of religious doctrine is in some subtle way linked with the observations of Thomas Hardy and Rider Haggard that village tradition came to an end in or about 1865. The last links of the old world, and of old England, were finally to be severed. It had happened almost without anyone noticing it. This was the year in which the Fortnightly Review was first published, with the mission (for such it was) to encourage ‘Progress’ and to further illuminate ‘modern minds’ with a broadly scientific and secular outlook.

In this year, also, Matthew Arnold, in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, one of his Essays in Criticism, wrote that ‘epochs of concentration cannot well endure for ever; epochs of expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country.’ For Arnold, then, the dissolution of traditional modes of thought promised ‘expansion’. He wrote also that:

in the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in and mingle, though in infinitesimal small quantities at a time with our own notions. Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalizing influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure.

It is interesting, perhaps, that material progress is regarded as ‘passionate’.

An election, based upon the premise of economic stability and very little else, was held in the spring of 1865. The result was to be expected, with the Whigs under Lord Palmerston gaining a majority over Derby and his Conservatives. ‘I trust God will look mercifully on His poor overburdened creature’, Gladstone wrote of himself, ‘as he trips and stumbles along the road of life.’ He did in fact stumble on this occasion. He was rejected by the electors at Oxford, for being an earnest liberal with a touch of radical about him, and had to hurry north in order to be elected; he had always been in favour among the people of south Lancashire. He was greeted by a crowd of 6,000, whose enthusiasm soothed the wound of Oxford. ‘At last, my friends,’ he said, ‘I am come among you … I come among you “unmuzzled”.’ The interpretation was that Gladstone now was ready actively to promote Reform. Whatever he meant, the word did not appeal to his prime minister.

It was now clear enough that Palmerston could not continue indefinitely, and the observers of the political scene noted that Gladstone was in the process of spreading his wings over the electorate. Yet Palmerston seemed to have been given a magic potion. One dinner companion, Lord Ossington, observed how:

He ate for dinner two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very amply to a plate of cod and oyster sauce; he then took a paté; afterwards he was helped to two very greasy entrées; he then despatched a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest and to my mind the hardest slice of ham that ever figured on the table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared, just in time to answer the inquiry of his butler. ‘Snipe, my lord, or pheasant?’ He instantly replied ‘Pheasant!’

It might just have been too much. By the spring of 1865 he was beginning to look his age, and by the autumn he was dead.

He cannot be accused of any startling innovations; he stood by no great cause except, of course, for the prosperity of the country. He was part of the furniture of his age, a solid position which he gained by caution (as a wolf is cautious when stalking prey), good fortune and astute judgement. He has suffered, perhaps, in comparison with Gladstone and Disraeli – without the moral gravitas of the one or the serpentine flexibility of the other. The Education of Henry Adams (1918) describes the political situation more floridly:

The years of Palmerston’s last cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of truce – of arrested development. The British system, like the French, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the British mind shown itself so décousu – so unravelled, at sea, floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church. England devoted thirty years of arduous labour to clearing away only a part of the debris …

Trollope put it more succinctly in Phineas Redux (1873) when he observed that ‘it is the necessary nature of a political party in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change’.

The death of Palmerston was considered to be a grave national calamity, but it did take the block away from any form of political or social advancement. Once again political reform was in the air. It had been bottled up and stored for so long that it seemed that it might now explode. ‘The truce is over,’ Disraeli wrote. ‘I foresee tempestuous times, and great vicissitudes in public life.’ A National Reform Union was established in 1864, and next year the Reform League promoted the policy of manhood suffrage. The tight bonds of legislation and conformity had been gradually released. The reduction or abolition of certain privileges, and the removal of religious disabilities, had lightened the atmosphere and freed the way for more humane legislation. Trade unions were slowly accepted as part of the world of work, and municipal reform helped to provide parks, schools and public baths. Sanitary hygiene, after the ‘great stink’ of 1858, had become a national imperative.

Palmerston died in harness, as the saying went. The premiership went from a man of eighty-one to one of seventy-three. Earl Russell, as John Russell now was, accepted the challenge. Some people were surprised that Russell would take up the old burden again but, as the king of Belgium told Victoria, ‘these politicians never refuse’. In any case the sky did not fall, and it was almost as if nothing had happened at all. Derby and Russell carried on like the old partners of rival firms and, naturally enough, the interest moved to the next generation of leaders. Gladstone and Disraeli were in the dressing room, preparing for their parts.

On the day of Palmerston’s death Gladstone had written a letter to Russell acknowledging that the older man was the obvious successor. ‘Your former place as her minister, your powers, experience, service and renown, do not leave room for doubt that you will be sent for.’ In turn Gladstone remained chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. He had become the most formidable chancellor in English history, and among his cabinet colleagues he was primus inter pares. His fiscal policy was one of undeviating caution. He kept down military expenditure, reducing taxes and tariffs wherever he could prudently do so, and managed to create annual surpluses. He had emphasized ‘the essential and vital connection between the growth of the industry of the country and the legislative process pursued within the last quarter of a century’. It was all part of the programme he had espoused in his speeches across the country. He was the right minister to introduce a new Reform Bill as one of the new administration’s first measures.

Reform was a jack-in-the-box. Whenever you opened the box of change, out it sprang with a grin upon its face. Its motto was ‘Here we are again!’ The atmosphere for change seemed to become more urgent when in March 1866 the bill-broking firm of Overend, Gurney and Company collapsed, setting off a financial panic. Even though Gladstone had been charged with putting forward a bill, he was uncertain how to steer the course. John Bright wrote to him: ‘you have had three months in which to form a bill which any man knowing anything on the subject could have done in a week’. Gladstone finally unveiled his proposals in March 1866, but they pleased nobody; he floundered in debate. Besides, they looked suspiciously like reheated porridge. The nominal majority of the Liberals plunged and the Russell government resigned in June. There were members of his party who suggested an immediate general election, but others believed that it would be unpopular. So the cabinet agreed to a resignation without a dissolution. The Conservatives were in without a fight.

The administration had been outvoted in what had become suspiciously like a game of tit-for-tat. Disraeli had been joined by a group of Liberals who were firmly and almost viscerally opposed to Reform; they were called, and eventually called themselves, ‘Adullamites’, after the cave of Adullam where David sought refuge from Saul. A ‘cave’ became the name for a party within a party. The Conservatives, long starved of office, took over power in the prevailing public expectation that Reform was now out of the question. They had not reckoned on Benjamin Disraeli, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to anticipate and even to shape the political weather.

The government of Russell and Gladstone had fallen on 18 June, and nine days later approximately 10,000protesters gathered in central London, complete with brass bands and red flags, to protest at this rejection of Reform with shouts and slogans such as ‘Gladstone and Liberty!’ and ‘Gladstone for ever!’ It was clear that he was the central figure of popular hope and expectation.

Mass demonstrations continued in Hyde Park, Victoria Park and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Marches were organized in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and elsewhere. The police attempts to control the protesters met with only partial success, and of course handed the cup of moral victory to those on the streets. But they were nothing like the previous demonstrators of London. The Gordon Riots were a distant memory. These were respectably dressed Londoners who behaved with sobriety and decorum. A few crushed flowers in Hyde Park, and some broken railings, were the extent of the carnage. Matthew Arnold had witnessed the scenes from a balcony along the Bayswater Road and was inspired to write Culture and Anarchy (1869). But the news of anarchy rather than culture spread, causing needless panic. If the public had recalled how peaceable the crowds of Hyde Park had been at the time of the Great Exhibition, they might have rested more easily. Those who had once been drill sergeants now organized the lines of the demonstrators with precision. Some of the protesters wore top hats. Their call was for ‘manhood suffrage’ or ‘household suffrage’, which was not at all the same thing as democracy for all. These were the old measures proposed for half a century. They were really associated with the idea of property, in particular of a house, so that the propertied classes would have a much larger stake in the direction of the country. The women, the poor and the vagrant were implicitly excluded from the process. The sober and well-organized marches and speeches for electoral reform impressed Gladstone, who was more than ever sure that the time for Reform had come. Yet the fact was that he had been defeated over Reform and was out of office.

The earl of Derby, however, also believed that the moment of the Conservatives had come. Standing with him was the arch-manipulator of the time, Benjamin Disraeli. It was Derby’s third minority Conservative government, but he informed his colleagues in the Lords ‘that he did not intend for a third time to be made a mere stop-gap until it should suit the convenience of the Liberal Party to forget their dissensions’. By some act short of magic he was determined to take his minority into a majority, and perhaps conjure together a scheme of reform measures that would attract a large number of adherents.

He was not yet sure from where support for Reform might come. He consulted the leading Adullamites, who were his enemies’ enemies, but they were not about to oblige him; they were, after all, still Liberals, even if they were not reformers. Lord Shaftesbury, who had acquired a reputation as a supporter of humanitarian causes, also declined to assist him. The Conservatives themselves were a heterogeneous assembly including liberal conservatives, conservative liberals and conservative radicals who might or might not be bound together. Yet Reform was a necessity. The failed measures, the false starts and the delaying tactics of those against change had created an opposing momentum which could not be denied for much longer. Derby wrote to Disraeli: ‘I am coming reluctantly to the conclusion that we shall have to deal with the question of Reform.’

Disraeli was not so sure. He had seen other ministers, including Gladstone, come to grief over a question which seemed to have no definite solution. It would require mature consideration but could not be avoided altogether, or else the Tories, Disraeli said, ‘must have dwindled away like the Jacobites or the non-jurors’. ‘I was determined’, he added, ‘to vindicate the right of the party to a free hand, and not to allow them to be shut up in a cage formed by the Whigs and Radicals, confined within a certain magic circle which they were not to step out of at the peril of their lives.’ But the public was apathetic. Nine out of ten cried out: ‘We must have a reform bill!’ but eight out of nine whispered to each other: ‘Does anybody want one?’ This was Bulwer-Lytton’s perception.

Derby would not avoid the issue, however, since as he told Disraeli, ‘the Queen spoke to me about it the other day. She said she is very anxious to see it settled, and that if she could do anything personally to bring opinions together, she would most readily do it.’ This was not quite a royal command, but it could not be easily overlooked. Disraeli dismissed the royal proposal of bringing Conservatives and Liberals together as a ‘phantom’, but he also knew the dangers of advancing upon Reform legislation in unknown territory. No one would believe that the Conservatives were serious unless and until they put forward a scheme bolder than anything Gladstone and Russell envisaged. They could not afford to be ‘outbid’ by the opposition. They had to propose legislation which would put Gladstone and the others in the shade.

Disraeli, however, would eventually emerge with the greater credit, together with the implicit assumption that he would replace Derby whenever the time came. His political agility and astuteness may not have been to the taste of some, but he dazzled or bewildered many others. It was not at all clear what his ulterior plan might be, except that he wanted to stay in power for as long as possible; he surrendered and fudged some positions, in order give the reform legislation a clear path. His goal seems to have been simply to succeed and, in a phrase of the period, ‘to dish the Whigs’ – to beat the Whigs at their own game of widening the electorate. Once the gate had been opened it would never be closed again, and from the muddle and confusion there eventually emerged a working democracy that has never been seriously threatened.

Disraeli was a great improviser, a master of the unexpected and a superb tactician. He proposed a much larger franchise by accepting household suffrage, and with the help of some recalcitrant Whigs batted away any attempt to restrict or hamper the extent of the new electorate. Amendments were added to enlarge the estimate of voters, and in the early summer private members’ bills added to the franchise. The residence requirement was reduced from three years to one. Lodgers ‘of ten pounds value’ were given the vote. In February 1867 Derby addressed the Lords on maintaining good relations with ‘the great Republic on the other side of the Atlantic’, with the obvious implication that republics are not all made up of wolves and hyenas. He announced that Disraeli would be putting forward certain plans that would require ‘mutual forbearance’. On the day that Disraeli was to put forward his proposals Viscount Cranborne, the secretary of state for India, did his sums and concluded that 60 per cent of the constituencies would be given to new voters.

On receiving Cranborne’s message Derby wrote at once to Disraeli that ‘the enclosed, just received, is utter ruin! What on earth are we to do?’ A compromise was reached that satisfied nobody. Yet Derby, strengthened by Disraeli, rejected the compromise. He would introduce household suffrage at whatever cost to the party. It was a matter of honour rather than of principle. Plans were drawn up that any man who could claim two years’ residence and had paid poor rates would be entitled to vote. But this was only the first of several amendments and corrections that steadily widened the scope of the franchise, so that, in the end, Derby had no idea of the number who had been affected. What had begun as a plan to alter the borough franchise had concluded as a scheme for household suffrage.

Disraeli had become the guiding agent of the legislation. He knew or sensed that the Conservatives would follow him as long as he regained the political initiative and refused to be cowed by Whig objections. Gladstone was ignored, therefore, and Disraeli seemed receptive to radical proposals to extend the vote. As the Conservatives had nothing to lose by extending household suffrage, they might as well endorse it with enthusiasm.

Derby was gradually weakened by ill health, but the Conservatives were in any case experiencing a semi-fevered fit of radicalism. They wanted to out-Gladstone Gladstone, a feat they had been longing to perform, and in any case they were bored with the details and the statistics. Disraeli was succinct and sharp, but above all he was unpredictable. Gladstone bored many of his colleagues. They wanted to get it over with, and in the process turn the Conservative party into an infinitely more attractive force than it had been before. ‘No doubt we are making a great experiment and “taking a leap in the dark”,’ the prime minister said after the Reform Bill had passed, ‘but I have the greatest confidence in the sound sense of my fellow-countrymen.’ In fact that ‘sound sense’ meant that the number of Radicals in parliament did not vary between fifty and one hundred; they were not particularly interested in the masses or in manhood suffrage, but in promoting industrial and commercial reform.

This is not unprecedented. Out of a chaos of cross-purposes, mistakes and misunderstandings some of the most enduring legislation has emerged, just as misinterpretations and false conclusions have been more responsible for wars than even the lies of statesmen. So of course there were no identifiable culprits or causes; everything took place in a fog of surmise and speculation. The most successful politicians are those who are able to ride the flood tide of conjecture and false claims. ‘It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events,’ Disraeli once wrote. ‘What an error to consider it a utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance.’ The Victorian passion for fairy tales never had a better exponent. A contemporary described him ‘as unlike any living creature one has met … The face is more like a mask than ever and the division between him and mere mortals more marked. I would as soon have thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet, or Lear, or the Wandering Jew.’

Nathaniel Hawthorne also sketched a pen portrait of Disraeli at this time.

By and by there came a rather tall, slender person in a black frock [coat], buttoned up, and black pantaloons, taking long steps but I thought rather feebly or listlessly. His shoulders were round, or else he had a habitual stoop in them. He had a prominent nose, a thin face, and a sallow, very sallow complexion, and was a very unhealthy looking person; and had I seen him in America I should have taken him for a hard-worked editor of a newspaper, weary and worn with night-labour and want of exercise, shrivelled and withered before his time. It was Disraeli, and I never saw any other Englishman look in the least like him.

In the end some 938,000 voters were added to the electoral roll in a mixture of last-minute consultations, misunderstandings, mistakes, obstinacies, cowardice and a small amount of plotting. It was the most unexpected revolution in English political history.

It is appropriate that Viscount Cranborne, soon to be known as Lord Salisbury, should enter the narrative at this juncture. He had a command of figures but, more important, he knew how to use them to party advantage. He was short sighted, tall, with a slight stoop; he was not a gloomy man, but he was not sentimental. He never subscribed to the facile notions or the ‘quick fix’ attitudes of Disraeli. He was too intelligent to be charmed by him. Cranborne is one of the few Victorian grandees who can be introduced by his journalism, his pursuit before entering the Commons. He was on common ground with the quarterlies and he admired Palmerston against all the odds, for example, as one ‘of those cynical philosophers who look upon Parliament as more useful for what it prevents than what it performs’. He was admirably blunt in his social and political opinions. ‘The state did not relieve the poor on the ground of philanthropy,’ he said, ‘but on the ground of general order.’ He abhorred parliamentary games and squabbles. He detested the opinionated and the self-important. He was firmly opposed to wider suffrage, with the belief that ‘the laws of property are not very safe when an ignorant multitude are the rulers’. He had no very high opinion of others, which made the familiar methods of electioneering a positive horror; in campaigns he was shy and withdrawn.

Instead, he was a great believer in doing nothing, when nothing seemed the better course. He was for example more and more dismayed as the arch-Liberal, Gladstone, embarked for distant and wilder shores. In any case he would have been happier beside Pitt and Wellington than Disraeli or Derby. He considered most of his celebrated contemporaries to be little better than political charlatans, mouthing the received wisdom with all the conviction of the recently convinced. The doorkeeper of the House of Commons noted in 1863: ‘he is haughty and proud, of intractable temper. He cannot submit to party discipline …’ Another contemporary observed: ‘he had small respect for the opinions of the house of Commons’.

It was whispered that Cranborne might make an ideal prime minister. Just before Salisbury travelled to an international conference Gladstone wrote to him: ‘You should personally know the men who are governing the world, and it is well to know them in circumstances which will allow you to gauge their character, their strength and their infirmities.’ This might be known as diplomacy of the old school, which Salisbury infinitely preferred to the reliance upon bold schemes and duplicitous enterprises. He once told Bulwer-Lytton that ‘English policy is to float lazily down stream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.’

At the end of 1867 Russell, at the age of seventy-five, relinquished his role as leader of the Liberals. As an unreconstructed Whig, he had outlived his time. He had been out of sorts with the leading principles of the age. He had, according to Punch, ‘no particular test of ability, but Debrett’s Peerage, and never knew that to fail’. Now in 1868 Gladstone might have come into his inheritance. In the cause of Reform, however, Disraeli had already outmanoeuvred him with the ‘romance’ of the extended franchise. Gladstone was humiliated by the debacle, and for a while considered retiring from the leadership itself. He seemed genuinely to have feared that Disraeli’s enfranchisement would give the vote to what was called the ‘residuum’ or lowest level of the people. He considered Disraeli capable of anything in pursuit of power. Disraeli had no such qualms, however, and was merely concerned to maintain the Conservative electoral hold upon the counties, where the vote was granted to £12 householders rather than the rural poor. Disraeli knew that he had favoured the most deferential electorate of all. He was not concerned if redundant votes piled up in the cities. His nominal superior was thoroughly in agreement with him. Stanley wrote in his diary that his father, Lord Derby, was ‘bent on remaining in power at whatever cost, and ready to make the largest concessions with that object’.

Both parties would have agreed on this, however. The balance of political power must be maintained at all costs; every version of Reform had been designed to stabilize the political structure, not to overturn or replace it. Yet it was not perhaps as simple as that. One of the consequences of the new Reform was to increase the number of urban representatives in the Commons, overturning centuries of rural predominance. A second and unintended result was the gradual politicization of the towns and cities. Soon enough the parties began to appeal to what they considered to be the urban vote. The Conservatives, in particular, began to organize working men’s associations. With the larger electorate, politics became a sport and a spectacle. Gladstone’s visage appeared on vases and on spoons; Disraeli jugs were placed beside octagonal plates bearing his image. He also became the darling of the cartoonists who could perform endless variations on his distinctive features. Portraits of these newly discovered heroes were to be found on teapots and coffee pots, jugs and snuffboxes. The essence of politics became diluted.

By gradual degrees a new prospect revealed itself. Parliamentary reform had been connected with the rise of what were often known as ‘the masses’. It was not necessarily alarming. Some observers had always distrusted the conventional wisdom that the lower orders were by nature radical and subversive, and now was the occasion to prove them right. Edmund Burke had intimated, for example, that they were in fact instinctively conservative. To use a current analogy, they were the beasts of the field who were content to chew the cud. A phrase arose, under unknown circumstances, that the country was open to a ‘conservative democracy’. At approximately the same time the idea of ‘household suffrage’ had become very appealing to those who wished to create as large an electorate as possible, on the supposition that householders would not be radicals. It could not be called a plan, but rather an instinct. As The Times put it, ‘Disraeli discerned the Conservative working man as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in the block of marble.’

Derby took medical advice at this stage and it was advised that he could not survive under the manifold burdens of the office. He had not been faced by the agonies of Reform only. There were problems and outrages far more pressing and dangerous. A conspiracy had been discovered in Ireland, organized by the Fenians, a ‘brotherhood’ which believed that Ireland had a right to independence, and that armed revolution was the only way of achieving it. As a result the suspension of habeas corpus locked up a thousand supposed Fenians for a year. A Fenian army was gathered in the United States and attacked Canada with disappointing results; the battle of Ridgeway in June 1866 was their last stand.

Closer to home they made an attempt on Chester Castle in the search for arms and ammunition. They were not successful. Whenever the queen drove out, she was followed by two of her suite armed with revolvers. A now predictable bombing outrage was attempted at the end of 1867 when the Fenians tried to bomb the notorious prison at Clerkenwell where some of their colleagues were being held. It was again unsuccessful but managed instead to kill several Londoners; there were twelve deaths and over a hundred casualties. This may have been one of the incidents which persuaded Gladstone ‘to pacify Ireland’ at a later date. Rumours abounded. It was reported that ‘one informant speaks of 155 Fenians and republican clubs in London alone, all unknown to the police. Several announced projects for blowing up the houses of parliament and assassinating the queen.’ It was said that a privateer filled with Fenians was coming from New York to kill her. Sticks of dynamite with clockwork mechanisms, known as ‘infernal machines’, were shipped from New York in crates labelled ‘cement’. Alone as she was in spirit, she became frustrated and nervous; she asked that the militia be made ready for any insurrection.

For many, there was worse to come. The rinderpest or cattle plague was spreading through the country. It is noted in a farmer’s diary of 1866 that:

W Carson, Foulsike, has not one of his stock left alive. They are all either dead or destroyed. Sir R Brisco and Captain James insists on destroying all the cattle where the disease breaks out whether they are healthy and well or ailing or recovering. I doubt they are taking the power out of the Almighty hands. I think the Lord will have some compassion on us and leave some alive but Sir R Brisco and Captain James will leave none alive.

In a country which according to the most recent census was still predominantly agricultural, the cattle plague was a catastrophe about which little could be done. It was worse than a plague out of Egypt, and several leading clerics called for a day of prayer and fasting to placate the Almighty.

A violent controversy had also fallen upon the empire when Governor Eyre of Jamaica had been accused of unremitting barbarity in his treatment of the black population. For every man or woman who decried Eyre’s disgusting treatment of the slaves, there was another to cheer him on. ‘We are too tender to our savages; we are more tender to a black than to ourselves,’ Tennyson told Gladstone, ‘niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.’ This is precisely the kind of comment, from a great man of letters, which emphasizes the extent to which the empire was permeated with racism. What went on in the backstreets of Calcutta, the alleys of Bridgetown or the farmland of south Nigeria could not bear examination. Could it really be said that the empire was under the rule of law? That was one of the reasons why in February 1868 Derby resigned his office under medical advice. He had retained his leadership of his party for twenty-two years, a record that has not yet been rivalled.

It could only be Disraeli now. The queen wrote to her daughter, the crown princess of Prussia: ‘Mr Disraeli is Prime Minister! A proud thing for a Man “risen from the people” to have obtained!’ It might be questionable whether he had in fact risen from the people, as if he had just wiped the coal dust from his face, but the princess knew what her mother meant. In any case he had inherited his minority government from Derby and was obliged to hang on until a general election might improve his fortunes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’

One of the doorkeepers of the House of Commons described Disraeli’s presence in that assembly. He ‘comes up the members’ private staircase, marches across the lobby, solemnly and slowly, generally alone, and speaking to no one as he passes’. On entering the chamber he ‘sits down, folds his arms across his breast and keeps immovably in this position, with his eyes fixed upon the ground until he rises to speak’. He never wore a hat in the chamber, unlike most of his colleagues, ‘for he neither winces nor laughs and seldom cheers; in fact he sits like an imperturbable statue … Though in the midst of his party, he appears not to be one of them, but as separate and as distinct as his race is from all the world.’ When he spoke he always began badly but soon warmed up. His theory of premiership, if such it was, is suggested in his portrait of Lord Roehampton in Endymion (1880): ‘Look to Lord Roehampton; he is the man. He does not care a rush whether the revenue increases or declines. He is thinking of real politics; foreign affairs; maintaining our power in Europe.’ He rarely met his opponent in verbal combat. When Gladstone performed his perorations Disraeli often pretended to be asleep; but he was ever alert. If Gladstone committed an error Disraeli quickly corrected him.

He did manage to pass some congenial legislation. Public hangings were abolished. The railways were improved. The first act of nationalization was passed when the Post Office was given permission to purchase all the telegraph companies; this was an important stage in the structural unification of the country. Yet when Henry James first arrived in London, in 1868, he saw little sign of progress:

The weather had turned wet. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness … A sudden horror of the whole place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of homesickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming.

Disraeli would no doubt have known of such dark, far-off things but they did not enter his calculations. He said that, in his audiences with the queen, he never denied nor did he contradict but he sometimes forgot. He was particularly attentive to her majesty. Victoria told her daughter that ‘he is full of poetry, romance & chivalry’. The new prime minister did in any case woo and flatter the queen in ways only he knew how to do, and his regular missives to her on parliamentary affairs were written in a style that combined Coningsby with the Lays of Marmion. He said later that ‘to keep in good humour the Queen is in itself an occupation’. Wilful, self-preoccupied and inherently nervous, she was what all queens should be. So he poured on the charm with profusions of loyalty and obedience. He treated her as the representative of England on earth, which in one sense she was. There were some who believed their relationship to be too congenial. Derby wrote to him that ‘nobody can have managed the lady better than you have; but is there a not just a risk of encouraging her in too large an idea of her personal power and too great indifference to what the public expects? I only ask, it is for you to judge.’ Some called him Mephistopheles. A later generation might have called him Svengali. In any case his only competitor was Gladstone, whom the queen found profoundly unsympathetic.

Time was pressing. He was prime minister and the old unreformed parliament would pass away in May 1868. Yet to leave with the old electoral register still in place would be a parliamentary and political embarrassment. His administration had only been in place for three months. The advice poured in. He consulted the queen, whose distaste for Gladstone or a further dose of Gladstone was well known. He decided to stay as long as circumstances permitted; there was also much parliamentary business to conclude. At the beginning of May, Disraeli moved to adjourn the House and advised the queen to dissolve parliament ‘as soon as the public interest will permit’ This in effect meant that they would wait until the electoral register was completed, which was now expected at the beginning of November. Despite the changes wrought by Disraeli it was widely believed that Gladstone and the Liberals would win again.

The election of November 1868 was hard fought, and the Annual Register declared that ‘it is to be feared that the corruption, drunkenness and demoralization’ were as evident as before. The wealthy member of parliament from Bristol was obliged to address his constituents from behind an open umbrella. The dead cats and dogs of the hustings were not yet finally buried. Nor were the bribes and the blackmail. The result was as expected, with a Liberal majority of 112 votes. Disraeli resigned at once, thus creating a precedent in which the wisdom of the electorate was more important than the procedures of parliament. It was clear enough that Gladstone had captured the loyalty of the public. He appealed to their sense of fair play. ‘Do not wait to continue from year to year the painful – the ignominious, I would almost say, the loathsome process of suspending personal liberty in order to keep large portions of the Irish people down by force.’ He also appealed to the newfound responsibilities of the reformed electorate, ‘now that you are invested with the privileges by which you are to govern yourselves’. That probably clinched the matter. When he was informed of the result he was felling trees on his country estate at Hawarden. He ceased for a moment and declared: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’

20

She cannot go on

Disraeli did not believe that Gladstone was the man of the future. The two men did not believe in one another at all. Their rivalry may have risen in part from the fact that both leaders were members of the House of Commons, but a deeper division was manifest. Gladstone was a man of conviction and principle, while Disraeli was a man of convenience and practicality. That is how it seemed on the surface, and to their contemporaries, but we may be doing an historic injustice to both men by relying on conventional wisdom. Behind Disraeli’s flippancy was a deep devotion to his Jewish faith, or at least a profound belief that he was one of the chosen people. He rated himself as highly as any English aristocrat, and behaved himself as such. He did not try to ape the manners of the aristocracy; he decided to make himself unique. Gladstone, too, had a share of practical and opportunistic politics – however hard he tried to disguise it – and it can be said that he framed his politics with one eye on God and Redemption and the other on the main chance. On taking office Disraeli had speculated on the greasy pole, while Gladstone remarked: ‘I ascend a steepening path, with a burden ever gathering weight. The Almighty seems to sustain and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself to be. Glory be to his name!’

Gladstone had won a surprisingly easy victory. The results in England were in balance but Scotland and Ireland put the result out of doubt. Disraeli could have given up his political career with honour, but he declined to leave the stage. The death of Lord Derby in the autumn of 1869 seemed only to steady his hand for a long career. There was a puzzle doing the rounds. ‘Why is Gladstone like a telescope?’ ‘Because Disraeli draws him out, looks through him, and shuts him up.’

The Liberal party had indeed been in confusion after Disraeli’s triumph with Reform, and Gladstone himself was baffled by the turn of the events before he came upon another cause that would unite his party. Ireland had become the mother of discontent and violence. But if his ‘mission’ was indeed to pacify the country, he had to proceed gradually and slowly with his new government. He could start with the religious question. ‘The time has come’, he said, ‘when the Church of Ireland as a Church in alliance with the state must cease to exist’. Unlike the Church of Rome, which held the faithful in its grip, the Church of Ireland was almost supernumerary. It took the tithes but did very little in return. All the religious duties and ceremonies of the people were performed under its aegis, but it had precious little authority.

Beyond Ireland, the British seemed more successful and confident. This happy condition was confirmed in 1868 when a British force under Sir Robert Napier invaded Ethiopia and rescued some British hostages. It was considered an affair of honour, but it also provided an intimation of the imperial instinct. This was in fact the period in which a relative indifference to empire changed gradually into positive enthusiasm. The establishment of telegraphic communications with Australia helped to instil a new sense of unity. It also became clear that other countries were struggling to fashion empires of their own, with Germany the prime mover. Germany, Italy and the United States had themselves created a national unity. Why should not Britain and the empire together form a similar union? The extension of the franchise in 1867 created a large mass of urban voters who were fledgling imperialists. One member of the Commons regretted that the new administration did not recognize ‘the great interest which the majority of the people, and especially the working classes, felt in the subject of the relations between the mother country and her colonies’. Another member regretted the implication ‘that the Government were indifferent to the wishes and aspirations of the colonists, and that the House of Commons had no sympathy with their wants and requirements’.

It was in fact widely believed that Gladstone and his colleagues wished to shake off the colonies as an impediment to their domestic demands and to their Irish concerns, but a great petition from working men to the queen stated that ‘we have heard with alarm and indignation that your Majesty has been advised to consent to give up the colonies’. ‘Imperialism’ was not coined until 1878, but it was anticipated a few years before. The Colonial Society was established in the summer of 1868 to counter any move towards separatism, and it was much encouraged by a policy of state-aided emigration to Australia and elsewhere. W. E. Forster, one of the prime agents of the administration, stated: ‘I believe the time will come when by some means or other statesmen will be able to weld a bond together which will unite the English-speaking people in our colonies at present – unite them with the mother country in one great confederation.’ Ruskin delivered a lecture in 1870 in which he emerged as another arch-imperialist. ‘This is what England must either do or perish: she must found colonies as fast and far as she is able. Formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country and their first aim is to advance the power England by land and sea …’

Edward Cardwell, Gladstone’s secretary of state for war, was tasked with the reform of the army, which he did by imposing professional standards upon its officers and insisting that promotion should depend upon merit rather than money. This further soured the relationship between queen and prime minister, however, since Victoria considered them to be her soldiers. Cardwell abolished flogging in peacetime and prepared an Army Enlistment Act so that men could join for shorter periods. Just as Cardwell was administering the army, Hugh Childers was reforming the navy by a similar process of economy and efficiency. He reduced the strength of squadrons in distant stations and brought the fleet closer to home.

Gladstone was still something of an enigma in office. The writer Emily Eden provided a succinct portrait of him:

I dare say he is very clever, and he is good-natured, doing his best to bring his mind down to the level of mine, but he fails. He is always above me; and then he does not converse – he harangues – and the more he says the more I don’t understand. Then there is something about High Church people that I can’t define, but I feel it when I am with them – something Jesuitical – and they never let themselves go … In short he is not frivolous enough for me. If he were soaked in boiling water and rinsed until he were twisted into a rope, I do not suppose a drop of fun would ooze out.

He stage-managed a debate of four days to discuss three Irish resolutions, one of them bringing the repeal of compulsory Church rates. He forced through an Irish Church Bill which did not only disestablish the Church of Ireland but also disendowed it. Complicated and controversial as the act was, it helped to placate Ireland by removing grievances from both Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. It was designed, also, to begin a process of reconciliation with the Irish. He spoke for three hours and, according to Disraeli himself, not a phrase was wasted.

In truth he did not know much of Ireland, and had never visited it, but he did have a good sense of timing, or perhaps of occasion. He once said that ‘the most striking gift entrusted to me is an insight into the facts of a particular era and their relation to one another’. He had in other words a highly developed and profoundly intuitive historical sense, and relied upon it to choose the time to act.

In 1870 he prepared an Irish Land Bill of true Gladstonian complexity, but he had remained faithful to his promise when tree-felling. The tenants could now achieve recompense for any improvement they made to their dwellings, and could claim compensation if they were evicted for reasons other than non-payment of rent. It made very little difference in the long term, but it cost Gladstone much power and ingenuity to get it through the Lords, who were naturally hostile to any measure in favour of tenants. But it is significant that Disraeli made very little noise about what might have been considered as anti-Tory legislation. He had covered his eyes, ears and mouth. Gladstone had also suggested to the queen that her family should establish a royal residence in Ireland to please the Irish people. Victoria rejected the idea with horror; she had too many gloomy and draughty palaces.

Other acts were passed in the first Gladstone administration, among them W. E. Forster’s Education Act, which allowed a revolution in educational practice as profound as it was beneficial. It would have been unthinkable to have removed the Church schools; they were the primary and often only source of education. The educational system was run by voluntary schools funded by two main religious bodies, the British and Foreign Schools Society (Nonconformist) and the National Society (Church of England).

Instead Forster increased state grants to voluntary schools, but more importantly he established a system of board schools or schools run by local boards of a non-denominational character. The local boards were set up to establish state schools, and in these establishments a daily act of worship of a non-denominational kind was introduced. They were financed by a local rate and, where appropriate, they were subsidized. This was as far as Forster and Gladstone could go, given the fact that a national school system would be inordinately expensive. But they had gone a long way. In 1870, when the Elementary Education Act was passed, there were fewer than 9,000 schools in England. Twenty years later 20,000 schools had been established. A national education system had finally been agreed. It was inevitable. One of the most bitter opponents of Reform, Robert Lowe, confessed: ‘I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.’ But they had to learn more than letters. They had to learn deference. They had to learn obedience. They had to learn literacy and numeracy or, as Lowe also put it, ‘an education that may fit them for business’. They had to have sufficient schooling, as Tawney said, to understand a command.

Other ameliorative measures were taken by the Gladstone administration. University religious ‘tests’ were abolished. The secret ballot was introduced, so that each voter could cast his vote in confidence, and another bill was passed against municipal corruption. A Mines Regulation Act was also passed, and imprisonment for debt was partially abolished. Much was achieved relatively quickly, despite John Bright’s warning that ‘you cannot get twenty wagons at once through Temple Bar’. The answer was to remove Temple Bar. (Its actual removal took place in 1878.)

With the slow dissolution of the ice of ages, other reforms followed. The civil service came under the aegis of a competitive examination system to help extirpate the nepotism that was still the bane of England. The three common law courts were replaced by a single Supreme Court of Judicature together with the Court of Appeal; the Court of Chancery was also abolished, thus blowing away the burdens of Bleak House (1853) and Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. A Local Government Board took the place of the Poor Law Board; in time this would become the Ministry of Health, as the state consolidated its hold. From this time forward, in fact, local authorities were established to administer local services. The Local Government Board Act of 1871 set up a central department which was responsible for all the affairs of local government from public health to public improvement; there would follow at a later date various housing officers, sanitary reformers and education inspectors. In an epilogue to this list of acts, some of which proved successful and some not, we may add an extract from a letter Gladstone wrote in March 1868: ‘But above all, if we be just men, we shall go forward in the name of truth and right, bearing this in mind – that when the case is proved, and the hour is come, justice delayed is justice denied.’

New bureaucratic offices and new administrators, after 1870, could not but help the formation of a fully fledged state. By the 1880s the word was in full bloom. How far the ‘state’ would interfere with the liberties of the individual was still an open question.

The term was lent more resonance in the summer of 1870 when, in a whirlwind campaign, Prussia thoroughly defeated France. This was what a highly organized and efficient state might be able to do. Bismarck, preparing for a decisive victory over its old enemy, had set a trap for the French by squabbling over the southern German states. In July 1870 the French declared war on Prussia but were thoroughly overmatched by their militarized enemy; the highly professional Prussian army made short work of the disorganized French. Within six weeks victory was assured. At the ultimate battle in Sedan, at the beginning of September, Napoleon III was captured and his wife Eugénie fled to England for exile. The Germans proceeded to elect an emperor of Germany and to take money and territory from France (including Alsace-Lorraine) as the spoils of war. So did the German empire arise from the ruin of France, with the English simply spectators on the side. The fact that Victoria favoured the Prussians, and adduced them as an example of glorious nationhood, did not improve matters. The myth of France as la grande nation had gone for ever. Now, after the collapse of the Second Empire, the Paris Commune of radicals and working classes might be a source of contagion for the working classes of England. But the important fact was simple: the new Germany held the hegemony in Europe, and no one could or would do anything about it.

In the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, the statue of Strasbourg was covered in black crepe and surrounded by garlands as a token of eternal mourning at its ingestion into the German empire. This ‘new world’, as some called it, was a spectacle worthy to be watched by Thomas Hardy’s President of the Immortals.

It had been a hot summer and, as Trollope remarked, ‘people were beginning to complain of the Thames’. Half the cabinet was unwell. ‘Gladstone’, Earl Granville remarked, ‘told Bessborough yesterday that he sometimes felt alarmed for his own head. Cardwell at the last Cabinet sat close into the fire, looking as if he wished to cut his throat.’ Spirits were very low. The historian Froude declared that ‘English opinion is without weight. English power is ridiculed. Our influence in the councils of Europe is a thing of the past.’ Bismarck joked that if the English army invaded Germany, he would send the Berlin police to arrest them. Lord Salisbury put it differently: ‘The fault really lies in the change in the nature of the spirit of the English nation. They do not wish, as they formerly did, for great national position, and they are glad to seclude themselves from European responsibilities by the protection which their insular position is supposed to give them …’

Gladstone wrote an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review on the European problem. He spoke for a ‘moral empire’ or ‘a new law of nations’ that might afford ‘Public Right as the governing idea of European policy’. As so often with Gladstone the high road did not lead anywhere in particular, and was in any case quite unsuited to circumstances. But he had already emerged as the ‘People’s William’. Some still small voice within him had whispered: ‘William, be a leader.’ He was already aware of the power which the press had acquired, and as early as October 1862 he had embarked on the first of his public speaking tours in the north where his personal presence, his command over large crowds, and his theatrical delivery, worked wonders. If the crowds did not hear anything, they could read it in the following day’s newspapers, made all the more valuable if the reader had been there in person. John Bright had said that a ‘public speech was more read and told more on opinion than a speech in a debate in the House’. Gladstone’s speeches were carefully stage-managed and meticulously planned, taking their cue from Covent Garden and the Haymarket as well as the music halls. These were the spectacles the Victorians understood.

Gladstone could not get enough of it; he revelled in the cheers, shouts and applause in a way that Disraeli, for example, did not. He was sometimes called ‘Mr Merrypebble’ as opposed to a glad stone. Mrs Gladstone was equally impressed. ‘Oh I shall never forget that day!’ she said of a speech in Tyneside in 1862. ‘It was the first time, you know, that he was received as he deserved to be.’ He explored the phenomenon in his study of Homer: ‘The orator’s work’, he wrote, ‘is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in a vapour, which he pours back upon them in a flood … He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice is, to be what his age will have him, what it requires in order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all.’ It is the finest description of how a politician can step forward in the spirit or shape of a people.

He gave the impression of supporting the cotton workers. He gave support to the representatives of trade unions and to the ‘junta’ of trade union leaders. He identified himself with the moral and upright working man. Yet it was not until 1871 that a Trade Union Act was published which removed from unions the threat of a charge of conspiracy and granted their funds the protection of the courts.

So much still remained to be done. In 1871, the Medical Officer for Health found a child of three making the notorious Lucifer matches in a hovel in Bethnal Green. Matches provoked a different kind of furore when in the spring of this year the chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe, proposed an indirect tax on them. This created mayhem, particularly among the match-workers of Bryant and May, whose unhealthy working conditions were not in any case well rewarded. This was the last straw. The tax was hastily withdrawn at the instigation of Gladstone, but the whole issue came to a head seventeen years later.

It was not an easy time. The Liberals were still composed of fragments and they were confronted with a hostile enemy in the House of Lords. Gladstone’s hope for unifying his party still lay in Ireland. But he had perhaps invested too much of his popularity and his credit in that nation, about which the English were largely indifferent. The efforts over disestablishment and land seemed to make very little impression on the Irish, who remained, as English politicians saw it, perpetually ungrateful. Gladstone felt that the best days of his administration were now over. As he told Clarendon, he felt ‘as a bee might feel if it knew that it would die upon its sting’. In the spring of 1872 Disraeli remarked of the Liberal front bench: ‘You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes.’ In the previous year The Times had commented that ‘the conduct of public business in the House of Commons during the present session has been more injurious to its reputation than the shortcomings of years full of passionate incidents. Nothing is done, legislation is at a deadlock.’ The burden of summer had grown too much; two cabinet ministers suffered nervous breakdowns and Cardwell, who had been seen by Earl Granville staring into the fire, was declared to be insane.

Gladstone and the queen were more at odds than ever. Her ‘repellent power’, as he described it, was generally directed at the prime minister. The depths of her own unpopularity were plumbed at the time of the birth and death of the Prince of Wales’s third son. His birth was greeted by Reynolds’ News as ‘Another Inauspicious Event’ but the death of the boy on the next day was heralded as ‘A Happy Release’. ‘We have much satisfaction’, the newspaper reported, ‘in announcing that the newly-born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working classes of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of State beggars they at present maintain.’

The froideur between statesman and monarch extended further when he suggested that she might spend more time in London, ‘as likely to be of great utility in strengthening the Throne under circumstances that require all that can be done in that sense, if indeed we can make it a new means of putting forward the Royal Family in the visible discharge of public duty’. She responded with one of those hysterical explosions to which she was prone. Gladstone’s influence was

really abominable … What killed her beloved Husband? Overwork & worry – what killed Lord Clarendon? The same. What has broken down Mr Bright and Mr Childers & made them retire, but the same: & the Queen, a woman, no longer young is supposed to be proof against all & to be driven and abused till her nerves and health will give way with this worry & agitation and interference in her private life.

There is a hint or implication here that Gladstone himself was responsible for the wreck of ministers, let alone of herself, but that was not really a fit and proper subject with which to accuse the old man. She concluded: ‘she cannot go on’. But of course she could, and did. Her accusations did have some merit, however. Bright, Childers and Clarendon were only the most recent public servants who had died or broken down at a relatively young age; among their predecessors were Pitt the Younger, Castlereagh, Fox, Liverpool and Canning, all of whom expired under sixty. It had much to do with the enervating and feverish atmosphere in which they were obliged to live. They had no rest, and were perhaps the early victims of the Victorian sense of duty and hard work. Their successors were in no better condition. The new burdens of empire, the new competitiveness among the industrial nations and the decline of agriculture all added further anxiety to already anxious public servants.

Queen Victoria relied upon the comfort and support of a much esteemed royal servant, John Brown, who treated her as an anxious father might treat a wayward daughter. As she grew more and more alienated from her family, including the heir apparent, she came to rely more and more on the kindness of those around her. It was said that John Brown was almost too kind, and there are unconfirmed reports that they were unofficially married, but these are tales for children.

Gladstone’s own self-imposed moral duty was to rescue Victoria from the depths of inactivity and unpopularity into which she had fallen. His efforts were not welcomed. ‘She looked very well at me and was kind,’ he reported, ‘but in all her conversations with me she is evidently hemmed in, stops at a certain point, & keeps back the thought which occurs.’ Reports had also reached her of her prime minister’s nocturnal encounters with fallen women. For him they seem to have been part of his mission, or vocation, but for an observer they might carry a very different significance.

Her own condition was not perhaps as serious as she imagined. Her private secretary, General Grey, wrote to the Prince of Wales that ‘neither strength nor health are wanting, were the inclination what it should be. It is simply the long, unchecked habit of self-indulgence – that now makes it impossible for her without some degree of nervous agitation to give up even for ten minutes the gratification of a single inclination or whim.’ She certainly could not bear the boredom of Gladstone’s explanations. ‘He speaks to me’, she said, ‘as if I were a public meeting.’

Gladstone himself was seriously contemplating resignation. He told Victoria that he did not wish to spend his old age ‘under the strain of that perpetual contention which is inseparable from his present position’. The failure of his Irish University Bill in 1873, which in effect would have placed Catholic institutions under the control of Dublin University, was simply the last burden. He signalled his intention to resign, but there was the problem of Disraeli. She had called for him to form an administration in place of Gladstone, but he demurred. He would have been more than happy to accept his sovereign’s wish, but not in the circumstances of the present House of Commons. He did not wish to lead another minority government and, privately, he wanted to give more time for his opponents to split even further. He wanted them to carry on, ever more desperate. Gladstone had no choice but to resume his yoke.

The queen had already recovered much of her popularity. What saved her was her son. It might have ended in a long-drawn-out disaster but for the sudden and dangerous illness of ‘Bertie’ on the tenth anniversary of his father’s death. At the end of November 1871, the Prince of Wales contracted typhoid fever at the very time that his father had been stricken with the same sickness. He seemed to be progressing, but then relapsed to the extent that Victoria hurried to Sandringham where he lay. On 11 December a newspaper wrote ominously: ‘The Prince still lives, and we may still therefore hope.’ Three days later, on the anniversary of Albert’s death, the nation waited in suspense. He came through. As he slowly recovered the country was inclined to support the queen. It might be asked how an irate nation intent on criticizing the monarchy should turn into a nation filled with pity for her. Was it because she was no longer seen as a queen but a mother? As a phrase it sounds well worn, but as a human truth it may have some resonance. We must also remember the fickleness and madness of crowds.

Victoria had also come out of hiding. She was driven to St Paul’s with her son and daughter-in-law in an open landau to deliver her thanks. From this time forward she was celebrated as the ‘mother’ of the people. Another consequence seemed to follow. At the Thanksgiving service Gladstone was coolly received by the assembled crowds; Disraeli, on the other hand, was widely applauded. Reasons could be found. Disraeli had begun the forward march to ‘Tory democracy’. Gladstone, despite or because of his victory in the general election, was considered unfairly as a bulwark against change. Disraeli was a ‘character’, considered something of a card, larger than life. A Conservative saw him in the Carlton Club a little while later, as still as marble and staring into space ‘as of one who looks into another world’. ‘I will tell you what he was thinking about,’ another member said to him. ‘He was thinking that he will be Prime Minister again.’ At a speech at the Crystal Palace, in the spring of 1872, he proclaimed that the newly enfranchised voters were Conservative ‘in the purest and loftiest sense’. They were ‘proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness’. His purpose was to create a coherent political programme at the very moment when Gladstone was in difficulties. He spoke of ‘the three great objects of the Tory Party or, as I will venture to call it, the National Party’. The established institutions of the country were to be maintained; the empire must be sustained and the conditions of the people improved. Imperialism and the status quo were his principal themes. Disraeli cleverly knotted the nation with the monarchy in domestic circumstances. ‘England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth is sacred. The nation is represented by a family … and in the hour of public adversity, in the anxious conjuncture of public affairs the nation rallies round the Family and the Throne, and its spirit is animated and sustained by the expression of public affection.’

The affection for Victoria herself was further heartened by a failed attempt on her life just as she returned from the Thanksgiving at St Paul’s to Buckingham Palace. As her carriage made its way through the Garden Gate a young man by the name of Arthur O’Connor brandished a pistol and called out in a weak voice: ‘Take that from a Fenian’. Uncharacteristically Victoria lost her equanimity on this occasion. ‘I was trembling very much, and a sort of shiver ran through me.’ She grabbed the arm of a lady-in-waiting and called out ‘Save me!’ John Brown, the devoted servant, grabbed the boy and held him fast, for which service he was awarded a gold medal. But the threat of assassination only increased the queen’s popularity, despite her confessing that ‘the fright caused by the attempt, the Queen felt for long afterwards’. The boy was taken and sentenced to a period in Newgate. She seemed to be impregnable.

It may be the merest coincidence that the balance of the parties began to swing in favour of the Conservatives. Growing dissatisfaction with the Liberals was manifest when the Liberal chief whip alluded to the danger posed by ‘the apathy and political discontent which is now so prevalent in our majority’.

In this year the postcard was introduced.

21

The Tichborne affair

He was known as ‘the claimant’ in headlines or on newspaper placards. His was the most famous trial of the nineteenth century, eclipsing those of Queen Caroline and Oscar Wilde; he was not only the talk of the town but also the talk of the world. Roger Tichborne was heir to a wealthy baronetcy. In the spring of 1853 he disappeared from England and eventually sailed to South America. In the following year he took ship from Rio de Janeiro, and after surviving a shipwreck he made his way to the Australian outpost of Wagga Wagga. According to the story he maintained, he set up as a butcher under the name of Tomas Castro. It was a good story. The transition from an heir of a baronetcy to a butcher was sufficiently startling in a world where even the slightest gradation in status was a matter of deep controversy.

The Dowager Lady Tichborne, after the death of her husband in 1862 and her younger son in 1866, grew disconsolate. Roger Tichborne, missing, was now the eleventh baronet. She advertised for her eldest son in The Times and elsewhere, her appeal even reaching the inhabitants of Wagga Wagga. Here all became known. Tichborne, or Castro, had already dropped hints about his past, and he was urged on all sides to sail to England and claim his inheritance. On 25 December 1866 he arrived in London. His mother seems to have known him at once. ‘He looks like his father,’ she said, ‘and his ears look like his uncle’s.’ Other members of the family were not so sure and denied any connection with the man. How could close relatives differ so much on the question of identity? Was it a question of inheritance? And why had Tichborne come so late to claim his share? It was a conundrum, made more complex by a report that ‘Roger Tichborne’ was in fact Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping. Confusion had been further compounded.

In London the law courts were never far away, and the funds for Tichborne’s claim began to be contributed. A putative baronet was a good investment. But he had also elicited public sympathy. The 1860s was the high point of what was known as ‘sensation literature’, which specialized in money, wills, murder and the dark secrets of apparently respectable families. It exploited the melodrama of the living room. The Tichborne case might have come from the pages of a ‘shilling shocker’, and part of its notoriety came from its coincidence with one of the most powerful fictional fashions of the time. Roger Tichborne, as he was now generally called, brought suit against Colonel Lushington, who was then resident at Tichborne House. The trial was so popular that it had to be moved from the Court of Common Pleas to the more commodious Court of Queen’s Bench, wherein it lasted from March 1871 to May 1872. The Era complained that ‘no one can go into any company whatever without being asked to discuss the matter’. The image of the claimant was modelled by Madame Tussaud and the queue to see it stretched down the street.

Matters other than notoriety were also at stake. The case of the claimant was taken up by radicals and what were known as the ‘artisanal’ class. Here was a poor man, a quondam butcher, who was now being cheated out of his inheritance by a band of aristocrats, landowners and property agents. The fact that he was now a baronet by his own admission did not make any difference. A phrase of the day was ‘Fair play’s a jewel’. As in the case of Queen Caroline, a victim was being hounded by the authorities for the sole reason that he or she challenged their power. The case was discussed in mechanics’ institutes and popular debating societies, at mass meetings and public houses; it became the object of humour in comedies and music-hall acts. A network of publicans set up a fighting fund for him, while the members of other trades from cab drivers to cabinetmakers contributed what they could. Two newspapers were devoted to his cause. The ‘claimant’ himself gave a series of public addresses around the country. He did not wish to be recognized as Sir Roger Tichborne. He claimed only the right to fair trial; he added that he was the victim of a conspiracy. He even led a large march to Wapping, where he was once supposed to have been a butcher.

The trial at bar of the ‘claimant’ for charges of perjury lasted from April 1873 to February 1874 in front of a panel of three judges. The populace, largely in favour of Tichborne, set up a fresh clamour. ‘Never was there a trial in England, I believe, since that memorable trial of Charles I,’ Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said in that year, ‘which has excited more the attention of the English than this.’ Ruskin was more contemptuous. ‘Just think … of that floor of idiotism that spent a couple of years or so of its life in writing, printing and reading the Tichborne trial.’ The claimant was eventually found guilty on two charges of perjury and was sentenced to two periods of seven years which he served in an exemplary manner, winning converts within the prison service itself. That might have been the end of the matter, but the interests of others were now at stake.

The claimant’s barrister, Edward Kenealy, had been disbarred for his behaviour in the courtroom; but his career then took a turn. He established ‘The Magna Carta Association of Great Britain’, invoking the ancient liberties of the English people; he was styled ‘the People’s Friend and the Champion of Poor “Sir Roger”’. He was duly elected as a radical member of parliament for Stoke. The entire episode contradicts the claims that radicalism was dead between the death of Chartism and the birth of socialism. The Tichborne claim had awakened the sympathy of those who opposed compulsory vaccination, the Lunacy Laws and the Contagious Diseases Act, where the duties of the state were supposed to override the rights of individuals. His name was deployed wherever the freedoms of the people were challenged. A banner at one Easter Monday demonstration spelled out ‘Release Tichborne, secure triennial parliaments and the prosperity of the people’.

When he came out of prison he opened a tobacconist’s shop but, popular acclaim having slowly dissipated, he did not succeed in the enterprise and died in poverty near Baker Street. Yet what had created the furore in the first place? The Tichborne case did attract for a while the fugitive interest of the crowds because it represented all that was wild and strange. The most sensational crimes of the period involved fraud or blackmail, and the case of Tichborne brought them into prominence. The reigning obsession was with what lay just below the surface, a world of nervous tension where the conventions of ordinary life concealed the burden of secrets and of irregular relationships. This was a world of confused identities where no one had a secure home. This was the world of Tichborne.

The case was of further interest because the Victorians were preoccupied by theories of heredity and of inherited characteristics. It filtered through the pages of Darwin into the most scandalous weekly. Could a butcher really be a baronet, or a baronet a butcher? It transgressed all the lines of respectable society, if anyone now knew what respectable society was.

22

The angel

‘Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace … they take us body and soul to themselves and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?’ Thus spoke Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Wives had no property rights and, as mere spouses, were deprived of their previous identities; at the same time they were incarcerated in the domestic world. The very being or legal existence of the woman was suspended. The husband could take her dresses or her jewels and sell them. She had no rights in the matter. So how can it be that in much social commentary women were mistresses of the house while being legally invisible? In public discourse of the nineteenth century they were disregarded; it was quite a different matter in private. It was one of the great lacunae of the late nineteenth century.

At the close of the eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft, the first systematic feminist, had died leaving the world her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was essentially a plea to middle-class women ‘to endeavour to acquire strength, both mind and body’. It had not gone unobserved; the then nascent trade unions, particularly those of the shopkeepers and box-makers, contained a large percentage of women. Women were of course active and even predominant in the still flourishing cottage industries of wall-hangings and lace-making. The notion of the married woman as keeper of the hearth and the husband as the bearer of the torch – indeed the whole notion of ‘separate spheres’ in the middle-class sense – was not yet born.

By the 1860s, however, the full outline of ‘the working man’ had developed. But what of his wife, his sister, his daughter and even his mother? Could they any longer be denied their identity? And what also of the unmarried woman? The spinsters and widows were objects of concern, but they had at least one advantage: they were, relatively speaking, free. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a married woman owned no ‘real’ property (land being the principal item), and, in principle, no ‘moveable’ property. She was herself the property of her husband under the law – in legal terminology, a feme covert rather than a feme sole. In cases of divorce, which in each separate instance required a special act of parliament, the husband was granted custody of the children as a matter of course. Any money the wife earned became the property of her husband. The very money in her purse was her husband’s. She could not sue or be sued. Her husband could treat her with as much brutality as he wished, confident that the complacency of the courts would overlook this.

It had not always been so. Anglo-Saxon women, when married, had rights and freedoms which under the Normans and their successors they were not to enjoy again until 1870. On issues of property, however, working women were in a superior position to those of the middle or upper classes for the simple reason that they had little of it. In fact many workingclass women availed themselves of the practical advantages of cohabitation, without marriage and with few questions asked, through the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Yet the notion of ‘separate spheres’ became more and more pronounced in public discourse. No one can say precisely when it was first coined, or by whom, but it proved immensely influential. The quintessential mid-Victorian image is of a man looking out of a window with his hands clasped behind his head, and of the woman, sitting in an over-elaborately decorated chair, absorbed in needlework with her head demurely downcast. For the woman the world was home; for the man the world was the outer world itself.

In many occupations, however, the work was separated by task and not by gender. On the Severn and in Shropshire, the men would build the frame for the coracle while the women would sew on the skin; in agriculture the men would cut and the women would gather, while in fishing the men would catch and the women would gut the fish and sell it. Other examples suggest that this duopoly reflected the sexual politics of the time. The butler and the housekeeper, the male coal digger and the female coal heaver, the housemaid and the footman, the male cotton spinner and the female weaver, are examples of separate but interlocking spheres. Male protest only arose when man and woman competed for the same role; hence the savage reactions to the first women doctors.

Victorian women were subject to any number of privations when they appeared in public. Enormous skirts were fashionable in the mid-1850s, and there were cartoons of men being pushed out of the windows of omnibuses by billowing fabric, and of women stuck in doorways. Many of them wore cumbersome crinolines on Sundays, but during the working day they resorted to any number of expedients. The pit girls, for example, wore men’s trousers. The fishwives wore several layers of skirts which were fastened so that the lower legs and feet were left bare; when the time came to prepare the fish for market, they wrapped themselves in large oilskin aprons. The female inmates of the workhouses wore a standard calico chemise, a flannel petticoat and a grey linsey skirt; a shawl, an apron and a pair of wool stockings completed the cheaply manufactured uniform. It was not only cheap; it never changed, and through the decades grew more and more antiquated. They were interchangeable, too, and the women would simply be given the last out of the wash.

Other restrictions prevailed. In the Girls’ Own Paper Mrs Jamieson wrote that in the morning young females must use ‘pure water as a preparatory ablution; after which they must abstain from all sudden gusts of passion, and particularly eschew envy, as that gives the skin a sallow paleness’. The young woman (although the term ‘woman’ was not to be used in demure households according to Dickens) must not stay up late, play cards or read novels by candlelight. Callisthenics, essentially waving the arms about, was the only suitable physical exercise. Female factory workers were in fact prescribed callisthenics as one of the day’s duties.

One of the other duties of the woman was doing the laundry, a job so laborious and so time-consuming that, if females had the means, they paid someone else to do it. In the 1861 census, professional laundry workers numbered 167,607, of whom 99 per cent were women. Home medicine was also the prerogative of women; male doctors and male pharmacists sold the drugs but the women of the house prepared and administrated the dosages. The women were also responsible for preparing home medicines, generally of an herbal nature. It was as much a part of the woman’s role as baking and preparing bread. The advertisements for patent medicines were largely directed at women and women’s fears, as in ‘the jeopardy of life is immensely increased without such a simple precaution as Eno’s Fruit Salts’. Epsom salts and senna leaves were also recommended to keep the ‘system’ in full working order. Advertisements were displayed for small hand-powered electrostatic machines with a pair of contacts for any part of the body including a ‘vaginal attachment’, the latter often used for ‘hysterical’ women. It was part of the medical vocabulary of the age.

Three Contagious Diseases Acts were passed in 1864, 1866 and 1869 that permitted the forced arrest of women deemed to be prostitutes; they were detained in isolation hospitals, for a period of approximately six weeks, where they were exposed to vaginal examination and other internal inspections. This was quite contrary to any belief in individual freedom, or the rights enshrined in habeas corpus, and the loud protests have been said to inaugurate the movement for women’s rights. It was said that young workingclass females, in particular, were being taken off the streets and forced to undergo what seemed to be a form of legalized rape. The acts were repealed in 1884, having done nothing but instil anxiety and outrage in the workingclass population. These were some of the attributes of male power.

The pressure on women increased as the towns and cities multiplied. Those turned off the livings on the land were forced to resort to hand-weaving just when it was challenged by the power loom. Neither poor diets nor hours of work nor conditions of labour managed to halt this movement into the towns. The plight of the women was aggravated by their situation. The men themselves encouraged many pregnancies, even if these augmented the exhaustion of their wives. This had primarily an economic purpose: the larger the number of children, the greater the eventual family income. The abolition of child labour, therefore, was only in part prompted by humanitarian concerns. Labouring children, blameless and exploited through they were, had the power to put their parents out of work, or at least to lower their wages.

The more respectable ladies of the middle-class house rarely had to deal with such conditions, although they were confronted by such forbidding texts as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) and Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854), books of vastly different tendency, but both of which helped to fasten the fetters on the home-bound wife. Patmore’s verses were not directed at an angel, or woman, or girl, or matron, or matriarch – or indeed at anything that might be recognized as human. The ‘angel of the house’ is a bundle of superterrestrial attributes, about which the female reader can only read and dream or weep:

And if he once, by shame oppress’d,

A comfortable word confers,

She leans and weeps against his breast,

And seems to think the sin was hers.

Virginia Woolf said that it was the duty of any female author to kill the angel of the house.

Mrs Beeton began her famous domestic sermons at the age of twenty-one in The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, but appearances are deceptive. Most of her recipes were lifted from earlier cookery books. Shewrote a good and lucid prose, however, and she performed the inestimable service of putting a list of ingredients before the recipes themselves. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in October 1861, contained the recipes but seasoned them with advice on such matters as servants and first aid. It was a vade mecum for any middle-class woman aspiring to respectability. In the opening she quotes from Oliver Goldsmith on the nature of separate spheres:

The modest virgin, the prudent wife or the careful matron are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other in virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver, or from their eyes.

Some might applaud, and others despise, the sentiments.

It would not be too surprising to discover, therefore, that hundreds of thousands of women signed anti-slavery petitions at the time when that cause excited maximum controversy. It could be inferred that they felt immediate or instinctive sympathy with the enslaved. One anti-slavery activist, George Thompson, stated in 1834 that ‘where they existed they did everything … In a word they formed the cement of the Antislavery building – without their aid we never should have been united.’ Wilberforce did not necessarily approve of their presence, however, and stated that ‘for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture’. In fact Scripture had nothing to say on the subject. Philanthropists could also be bigots.

Two waves of female petitions against slavery, in 1830–31 and in 1833, included those from 108 English, four Welsh, thirteen Scots and four Irish towns and villages. The female members of the dissenting chapels added 15,000 signatures. The Wesleyan Methodist anti-slavery petition in 1833 was signed by 100,000 women. The Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society represented the cause as ‘not exclusively a political but pre-eminently a moral one; one therefore on which the humble-minded reader of the bible which enriches his cottage shelf is immeasurably a better politician than the statesman versed in the intrigues of Cabinets’. This is the measure of the Victorian woman, no less practical and earnest than her male counterpart.

Many men demanded equal pay for women not on the grounds of equality but for fear that they would undercut and steal their jobs. In power looming, for example, men were greatly outnumbered by women. Some weaving associations made it a rule not to accept any man unless all the female members of the family working in the trade were union members.

It could even be suggested that the workingclass woman, though disadvantaged in most ways, had some consolations; she was as often as not the true mistress of the home. Having no prospects of a gradual amelioration of her and her family’s position, she was spared the bitterness and frustration of her middle-class contemporaries, and with no land, money or portion to offer it was possible that she could even marry for love. The upper-class woman, on the other hand, though a mere counter in the marriage market, could console herself with the thought that once married she would move to a comfortable home, replete with amusements and distractions; she was spared the worst horrors of child-raising, and she might have the opportunity to travel, write or translate. The middle-class woman, for all her apparent comfort, was arguably the most constricted; she had no real authority, and upon her fell all the force of Victorian moral scrutiny, while the intellectual morsels that passed for an education often served to aggravate longing and resentment. These women often became the mettlesome pioneers of political and social liberation.

One notable opponent of women’s freedom was the most liberated of females. Queen Victoria wrote that she was ‘most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write … [against] this mad wicked folly of “Women’s Rights” with all of its attendant follies on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety …’ We may still consider this to be the conventional wisdom of the period.

One of its most notable challengers, however, was Annie Besant. In 1877 she and Charles Bradlaugh were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act which had been passed twenty years before. Both of them might be described as professional agitators who delighted in turning the law and the world on its head. Bradlaugh was a professed atheist who would soon provoke uproar in the House of Commons, while Besant gained national prominence as a supporter of female workers. She was self-aware and self-confident from the start. ‘I hate affectation of all kind,’ she once remarked. ‘I never could bear those ridiculous women who cannot step over a straw without expecting the man who is walking with them to offer his hand. I always said to the man, “No, no. I have got legs of my own. Don’t trouble yourself.”’ Her personal likes and dislikes were plain.

Besant was said to be absolutely insensitive to the feelings of others. This is unjust but, in the context of her pioneering efforts, it is understandable. She had soon become aware of the social evils all around her through the eyes of a radical lawyer, William Prowting Roberts, a notable Chartist who took on the cause of the coal miner. ‘I have heard him tell how he had seen them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely reaching their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalized out of all womanly decency and grace.’ This was the horror world of the nineteenth century, the gulf into which all ‘Victorian values’ slipped. Besant married a young priest, but the marriage was not successful as she slowly crept closer to atheism. In the summer of 1874 she gave her first public lecture at the Cooperative Institute in Castle Street off Oxford Street on ‘The Political Status of Women’. From that time forward, while speaking in public, she experienced power and pleasure which would uplift her through all the personal perils of her political life.

Besant and Bradlaugh established a publishing company, one of whose first pamphlets, The Fruits of Philosophy, was prosecuted as an obscene publication. It was a treatise on the methods and virtues of birth control, a subject hitherto so mysterious that 133,000 copies were sold between March and June 1887. The test of obscenity was ‘whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’. An excerpt from the transcript of the trial may be illuminating:

SOLICITORM GENERAL: It is not whether work of this kind can be submitted to a college of philosophy, but whether it can be sold at the price of sixpence about the streets of London and elsewhere …

ANNIE BESANT: Do you, gentlemen, think for one moment that myself and my co-defendant are fighting the simple question of the sale or publication of this sixpenny volume of Dr Knowlton’s? … We have a much larger interest at stake, and one of vital interest to the public, one which we shall spend our whole lives in trying to uphold … there is no harm in gratifying the sexual instinct if it can be gratified without injury to anyone else, and without harm to the morals of society …

The name of Malthus was brought into the proceedings as testimony to the fact that the population was growing too rapidly and should be curtailed.

ANNIE BESANT: I have put it to you as plainly as I can the meaning of the word obscene, which will govern your verdict: I have pleaded that our intent is good, because it conduces to human and social happiness. I have shown you from Malthus – and he has never yet been disproved – what the law of population is … I have seen four generations of human beings being crowded together in one small room, simply divided into two of three beds, and I will ask you, after such an experience as that, you wonder that I risk even prison and a fine if I can bring some salvation to those poor whose misery I have seen.

She then turned to the other Victorian misery, early death. She stated that the death rate in Manchester was 117 in 1,000, and in Liverpool it rose to 132 in 1,000.

Put before yourselves clearly whether it is either moral or right to allow children to be brought into the world inoculated with the predisposition to be attacked by these preventable diseases, instead of putting, as I believe you ought to do, a check which would effectively relieve the population so terribly overcrowded; and you have to consider whether by refusing to apply such a check, we are not, by the very refusal, making a large class of criminals …

The origins of many Victorian prejudices are here, both in those who attacked a sixpenny pamphlet for encouraging birth control and in those who saw large numbers of children as responsible for a range of deadly diseases, a burden on the world’s resources and a terrible seed of crime. Certain crimes were, according, to Besant, specific. One was the practice of baby-farming, where unwanted children were given into the custody of men, women and even children quite unfit for the task. Besant referred to ‘a child three years of age employed as a ganger over eight other children …’ The prospect here was of early death. Another practice was of ‘overlying’ children, or in other words pressing them or suffocating them to death. Besant told the court that ‘when you consider that the number of these children who, if they had been born in a higher rank, would not have died, is calculated by Professor Fawcett as 1,150,000 you will see what a large and important question this is …’ Besant then cited John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy on the need for ‘plain language’, especially when Mill ‘pressed on all those who marry the duty of limiting their families’.

She continued then to describe the mother of a large and poor family who was labouring at the washtub three or four days after giving birth. ‘What am I to do?’ the woman asked her. ‘There is another mouth to feed. The children are there and must be provided for, and I must get about.’ I must get about. This was the Victorian imperative.

In his summing up the solicitor general, prosecuting the case, said:

this is a dirty, filthy book and the test of it is that no human being could allow that book to lie on his table; no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have it, and yet it is to be told to me, forsooth, that anybody may have this book in the city of London or elsewhere who can pay sixpence for it! … The object of it is to enable persons to have sexual intercourse, and not have that which in the order of Providence is the natural result of sexual intercourse.

Besant and Bradlaugh were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and then deemed not guilty on appeal. There is a mingling here of Low Church piety, mid-century moralism, social prejudice and sexual hypocrisy which seems to be thoroughly Victorian.

23

The empress

Gladstone had been denied the chance of resignation by Disraeli’s refusal to take up the administration. But there were other ways to skin a cat. Gladstone waited for an excuse or an opportunity. When his plans to reduce the army and naval estimates were blocked by the relevant ministers, on the grounds that they could be squeezed no further, it furnished as good a reason as any other. When he announced the dissolution of parliament to his colleagues, it came as a great surprise. The earl of Kimberley wrote in his diary that most of the cabinet ‘had not heard a whisper previously of such an intention on his part’. It was a ‘thunder clap’.

On the morning of Saturday, 24 January 1874, Disraeli opened The Times to read the news that Gladstone had called an immediate dissolution; the paper was filled with Gladstone’s election address, together with his pledge to abolish income tax. Disraeli summoned his senior advisers and, working through the night and day, prepared a manifesto for the Monday newspapers.

Gladstone had not found an issue with which he could identify himself with the electorate. His immediate record had been lacking lustre. His fiscal policy of austerity seemed the last word of an exhausted government. His only slogan was ‘the free breakfast table’, by repealing duties on tea and sugar, but it was not enough. His skills failed him, and Disraeli sailed on with 350 seats (100 of them uncontested). Gladstone could muster 242, and he retired to the back benches.

It was a significant election for other reasons. The Irish nationalists of the Home Rule League became the third-largest party in the form of fifty-eight seats, causing many fervent calculations among the Lords and Commons. It was the first election that employed a secret ballot. This may also have had something to do with the Irish success. Some observers also complimented the liquor trade on its benefactions to the Tory party: where the Liberals and Nonconformists might migrate to the chapel and meeting houses, the Conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the pubs. That at least is how a disgruntled Gladstone saw it. Lord Hartington, known as ‘Harty Tarty’, took over from Gladstone as leader of the Liberal party in the Commons and Earl Granville in the Lords. They were much closer in background and attitude to the old Whig party, and many Liberal MPs regarded Gladstone as leaning too far towards radicalism. They were glad to be rid of him.

The Conservatives, who had not possessed a majority for thirty-three years, had earned the right to be surprised. But certain things were in their favour. Gladstone had called the election at the worst time of year. Disraeli’s Reform legislation seemed at last to be bearing fruit. The organization of the party itself was also greatly improved. The dominant voice and personality were of course those of Disraeli, and he took the opportunity of sending one of his more vocal opponents, Lord Salisbury, to the India Office. This seemed to satisfy everyone for the time being. Nothing was to be achieved by bluster or bullying. All was conducted formally and with dignity. He mastered his ministers by mood and manners, but not by his policies. His ministers assumed a fertile mind on his part but, as the new home secretary, R. A. Cross, put it, ‘such did not prove to be the case; on the contrary he had to rely entirely on the suggestions of his colleagues and as they themselves had only just come into office, and that suddenly, there was some difficulty in framing the Queen’s speech’.

Disraeli’s métier was not in the detail but in the broad brush and the theatrical sweep. Victoria had long since tired of Gladstone’s manner and matter. She bridled at his nervous formality, viewed his Liberal policies as anti-monarchical, and considered him to be a very dangerous and even mad old man. Disraeli was different. He could have flattered his way out of a condemned cell and stolen the axe. He laid on the praise and congratulation with a very large trowel, and made sure that their respective opinions never clashed. He was hyperbolical to the point of fatuity, and in his correspondence she could become ‘princess of the Faery’ or the ‘Faery Queen’.

Where Gladstone’s first ministry had sprinted forward as if the hurdles were rushing towards it, Disraeli’s second administration at first managed few leaps. He was faced with a meagre opposition, with Gladstone taking what might have been seen as permanent retirement, but in any case he seemed averse to any kind of radical change on electoral reform or anything else. Disraeli was looking old, his pale and emaciated face contrasting oddly with his surprisingly dark hair.

The session of 1875 was more effective. A Public Health Act consolidated previous sanitary legislation on fresh water, street lighting and refuse collection. An Artisans’ Dwellings Act provided the funds for local councils to buy up areas of slum dwellings and rebuild them. Two acts equalized the legal status of employers and employees. An Agricultural Holdings Act compensated rural tenants for the improvements they had made. This was known as ‘suet pudding legislation’, reassuring and necessary, if rather bland, but it was part of Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ attempt to improve the conditions of the working people. The Conservatives under Disraeli did a signal service to the nation’s welfare without gaining much praise, and were happy to continue in much the same vein for the next two years.

In June 1875, Disraeli told the Commons:

permissive legislation is the characteristic of a free people. It is easy to adopt compulsory legislation when you have to deal with those who only exist to obey but in a free country, and especially in a country like England, you must trust to persuasion and example as the two great elements, if you wish to effect any considerable change in the manners and customs of the people.

Government, in other words, was slow and difficult, but by 1876 the principal measures of public health and sanitation had been passed. And in truth Disraeli’s heart was not wholly moved by domestic legislation. Berlin, Paris and Moscow were his orbit, not Manchester, Birmingham or Nottingham.

Inventions seem to have streamed forth in this period. A cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1876, and Graham Bell invented the telephone in the same year. The internal combustion engine was manufactured for sale in 1876. Electric light companies were established in the 1880s, and the turbine engine was invented in 1884. The first motor car drove out in 1885. The observer seems to be in the position of H. G. Wells’s time traveller moving through the factory system into the machine age.

Gladstone seemed to have become more amiable. ‘The Queen’, Granville wrote to him, ‘told me last night, that she had never known you so remarkably agreeable.’ This was the period when he spoke of retirement, and the imminent withdrawal from the fray might have encouraged high spirits. He wrote to Granville: ‘I see no public advantage in my continuing to act as the leader of the Liberal Party.’ Yet he still maintained a formidable presence. Disraeli reported to the queen, on one parliamentary session: ‘Mr Gladstone not only appeared but rushed into the debate … The new members trembled and fluttered like small birds when a hawk is in the air.’

Disraeli was also undergoing a change. Despite the legislative activity, for which he was nominally responsible, he had not proved to be as effective in government as in opposition, and a colleague complained that ‘in the ordinary conduct of business Disraeli shows himself at every turn quite incompetent to guide the House’. He was a born oppositionist, and even his advancement of the Reform Act might be construed as a charge against ‘the enemy’. The truth was that he was wearing out. He was often ill with bronchitis and gout, while the hours spent in the Commons were agony for him. Everyone saw the choice ahead of him – retirement or the House of Lords. Retirement was out of the question, and in 1876 he became earl of Beaconsfield. His last speech in the Commons was devoted to the loyalty owed to the empire. As he left the chamber he took one last look at the scene of his endeavours, and then passed quietly behind the Speaker’s chair; he was wearing a long white coat and ‘dandified’ lavender gloves. A political opponent, Sir William Harcourt, wrote to tell him, that ‘henceforth the game will be like a chessboard when the queen is gone …’

The year before, he had earned the distinction of purchasing a large interest in the Suez Canal from the khedive of Egypt. It was the passage to India, far superior to the Cape route, but it was unfortunately in the hands of the French and the khedive. With his flair for scheming and what his enemies called duplicity, he relied upon the imminent bankruptcy of the khedive himself. Disraeli set Baron Rothschild’s son to expedite negotiations, which were sealed when the Rothschilds agreed to lend the required £4 million. Disraeli wrote to Victoria: ‘It is just settled. You have it, Madame.’ Then he wrote to a confidante: ‘The Fairy is in ecstasies.’ Many of his colleagues deprecated the manner and method of Disraeli’s coup. Stafford Northcote, the chancellor of the Exchequer, remarked: ‘suspicion will be excited that we mean to buy ourselves quietly into a preponderating position, and then turn the whole thing into an English property. I don’t like it.’ Others were more enthusiastic. Derby commented: ‘so far as I can make out the purchase is universally popular. I might say even more, it seems to have created a feeling of something like enthusiasm far in excess of the real importance of the transaction.’ Derby was not sure of the consequences, however, and it was becoming apparent that Disraeli did not have a purposeful foreign policy. It was said that Derby, at the Foreign Office, would not look ahead, and Disraeli could not look ahead. Disraeli’s methods were fitful at best. He conceded to a correspondent that: ‘Turkish and Egyptian affairs get worse every day … we have plenty of troubles ahead, but perhaps they will vanish when encountered.’ This is another example of fairy-tale diplomacy.

Another episode of Disraeli’s fairy tale was manifest in the spring of 1876. During the previous winter the Prince of Wales spent four months travelling in India, and such was the enthusiasm for his visit that it occurred to Disraeli that the queen herself might just as well become empress of India. In truth the suggestion might have come from the queen. It would be a new symbol of British power, making the queen the imperial equal of the tsar of Russia. She revelled in the appointment, and enjoyed wearing the jewels that the princes and princesses of her new acquisition bestowed upon her. To some of her subjects it seemed to be a kind of heathenism and only a fine line from Roman Catholic superstition. Others believed that it was a preparatory move for changing the title of queen to that of empress of the British Isles.

Another name must now be added to the sum of talent and ambition. Joseph Chamberlain came out of Birmingham like a railway train, with which he was contemporaneous; he was a screw manufacturer and a Liberal whose pre-eminent talents of oratory and organization made him mayor of that city in 1873. A few years before, he had joined the Birmingham Education Society, but soon enough he stepped out of that small circle, and in 1867 established a National Education League. Just as Forster was devising his own education bill, Chamberlain asserted that ‘the vast numerical majority of the people of this country are in favour of national, compulsory, free and unsectarian education’. Chamberlain went into battle. His name spread widely enough, and one of his early biographers, Alexander Mackintosh, remarked: ‘he is already hailed amongst working class radicals everywhere as the coming leader of democracy’.

Chamberlain was at this stage in his life a radical Liberal, a dissident who had little affection for what might be called the ministerial Liberals in the House of Commons. He was elected to represent St Paul’s Ward in Birmingham, and began his campaign to change and cleanse the city. Once he had been elected as mayor he set out a programme of public works that was variously designated as ‘municipal socialism’ and ‘gas-and-water socialism’. He promoted the resources of lighting and clean water; he advanced slum clearance and rebuilding, all of which granted him a national reputation as the civic amenities of Birmingham were transformed.

It was now inevitable that he would move towards Westminster. In 1876 he was returned unopposed for Birmingham, and soon enough his talent for, or obsession with, organization prompted him to bring together the radical Liberals in the Commons as a distinct body. He noted that ‘the atmosphere is strange, unsympathetic, almost hostile’. There was soon a definite division between what might be called the conventional Liberals and the devotees of Chamberlain. At a later date Herbert Asquith, one of his opponents, said that Chamberlain ‘had the manners of a cad and the tongue of a bargee’. His language could, in a word of the day, be ‘choice’. He said that Disraeli was ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident’ and of Salisbury that he was ‘the spokesman of a class – of a class to which he himself belongs – who toil not neither do they spin’. Salisbury described this as a ‘Jacobin’ attack.

But the matters of the outer world soon encroached upon private politics. Early in 1876 it became clear that the Balkans were in a state of revolt from the Turkish empire. The great powers of Germany, Russia and Austria brought pressure to bear on Turkey, which was accused of maltreating its Christian subjects. When in 1876 the Bulgarians rose against the sultan and his empire, the retribution was savage; it is estimated that some 12,000 Bulgarians were murdered by Turkey’s irregular soldiers. Disraeli was inclined to take such reports lightly. They were a distraction, and no more. But Gladstone brooded on them, and when he brooded, a whirlwind together with hail and lightning might rise. He asked Disraeli, in his last weeks in the Commons before becoming earl of Beaconsfield, to institute an inquiry. Disraeli was concerned only to preserve British interests, and any talk of justice or humanity was essentially beside the point. ‘What our duty is,’ he said, ‘at this critical moment, is to maintain the empire of England.’

These might have seemed unexceptionable sentiments at a different time and from a different prime minister, but the presence of Gladstone introduced a note of exemplary morality into the debate that could not be dismissed. ‘Good ends’, Gladstone stated, ‘can rarely be attained in politics without passion and there is now, the first time for a good many years, a righteous passion.’ It was almost as if he had been waiting for the moment.

He had for some years believed that politics could only be practised and irradiated by ‘righteous passion’. That was essentially the reason he had become a politician and a minister. It might also have occurred to him that the moral outrage he evinced might also help to renegotiate his popularity with the irate electorate. He should strike while they were hot. The Daily News provided the necessary fuel with gruesome stories of sodomy, beheading, disembowelment and practically everything else. Disraeli dismissed the reports as the frothings of an anti-Tory newspaper and added that ‘oriental people seldom resort to torture but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner’. This was not one of his better observations.

Within four days, in September 1876, Gladstone had completed a pamphlet entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East; and his daughter confirmed that ‘the whole country is aflame – meetings all over the place’. Two hundred thousand copies were sold within the month, and Gladstone followed his triumph by an open-air meeting in Blackheath where in pouring rain he called out: ‘Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.’ Every pause in his speech was the occasion for shouts of ‘Long life to you!’ and ‘We want you!’ By the force of will and intelligence he was able to shape the vast populace into one highly sensitized human being. And at the end of the meeting people called out continually: ‘Lead us! Lead us!’

Disraeli was not impressed. He called Gladstone one of the worst of the Bulgarian horrors, and threatened Russia with the consequences of invading Turkey. This inspired one of the most memorable of music-hall songs:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money, too!

The acting leaders of the Liberal party, Hartington and Granville, feared that Gladstone might ignite a war between Russia and Turkey in which England would be obliged to take part. The queen described him as that ‘half mad man’. But Gladstone had regained his moral public, and to be in touch with the nation once more was vastly exciting. In the spring of 1877 he entered the realm of controversy by aligning himself with Joseph Chamberlain at the first meeting of the National Liberal Federation in Birmingham. He declared that the Liberal party was alone ‘the instrument’ by which a ‘great work’ could be accomplished. He saw Chamberlain as a fellow worker in that enterprise, ‘expecting to play an historical part, and probably destined to it’. Chamberlain might be described as a fellow missionary, but it was clear enough to Gladstone, as to Chamberlain, that the younger man wished to fashion the Liberal party in his own image. Gladstone was more intent on widening his own franchise by the evident moral challenge he put to his party.

The country itself was split into rival camps, those with Gladstone and the pro-Russians, while others supported Disraeli and Turkey. Disraeli told the queen that ‘in a Cabinet of twelve members there are seven parties or policies as to the course which should be pursued’. Most of the discussion centred on the interests of the various foreign powers involved, but some also on the careers of the ministers engaged in the conversations. Derby said that ‘to the premier the main thing is to please and surprise the public by bold strokes and unexpected moves; he would rather run serious national risks than hear his policy called feeble and commonplace’. The collapse of a conference at Constantinople at the beginning of 1877 led to a war three months later, and it became a matter of intervening in a fight between a serpent and a bear. The forces of the sultan were no match for the power of the tsar, and the Russians surged up to the walls of Constantinople. England, fearful of a wider war, was obliged to send the fleet to Constantinople. Disraeli was concerned with the Eastern Mediterranean and the route to India. He called up the reserves in England, a clear indication of an imminent war. As a result, Lord Derby resigned and Salisbury took his place as foreign secretary.

A treaty between the antagonists was signed at San Stefano in the early weeks of 1878, but as a result a much larger Bulgaria emerged that might threaten its neighbours. There followed more secret talks, more smuggled notes, more bribes and false promises, more betrayals. So in Berlin three months later it was arranged all over again, with a much diminished Bulgaria; England had agreed to defend Turkey against illegal violations, the sultan had agreed to effect necessary social reforms, and in the course of the complicated negotiations Britain was awarded Cyprus. She would return the island if Russia also gave back the land it had seized in Asia. It seemed to be, by the standards of the age, an honourable settlement. The prime minister returned to London as victor ludorum. The armistice was signed in March 1878. It was the first time that the queen had seen a telephone installed in Osborne House.

Yet for many it was not a matter of ‘peace with honour’. Lord Rosebery, a rising Liberal in the Lords, castigated Disraeli and his allies. ‘They have partitioned Turkey, they have secured a doubtful fragment of the spoil for themselves. They have abandoned Greece. They have incurred responsibilities of a vast and unknown kind …’ He had forgotten that Disraeli preferred responsibilities to be as vast and unknown as possible.

The new foreign secretary, the marquess of Salisbury, had travelled with Disraeli to Berlin even though he did not wholly agree with the premier’s Turkish inclinations. But he was even now one of the leading players who already had dreams of premiership. He watched with some scorn the theatrics of Disraeli in Berlin. He informed his wife that Disraeli ‘has not the dimmest idea of what is going on – understands everything crossways – and imagines a perpetual conspiracy’. Of his colleagues in the cabinet he wrote: ‘they are all middle-class men, and I have always observed throughout life that middle-class men are afraid of responsibility’.

That is perhaps why, as foreign secretary, Salisbury became entangled in a number of small wars. He seems to have been partly responsible for the Second Afghan War, which continued for two years and ended with the battle of Kandahar. A more serious conflict arose when English troops invaded the Zulu kingdom at the beginning of 1879. In January the massacre of an entire army column at Isandlwana prompted the dispatch of a further 9,000 troops; it was the largest single strike by a native army, and caused much consternation. Disraeli said: ‘the terrible disaster has shaken me to the centre’. The massacre provoked an equally gruesome revenge which was only partly reported. The bloody crisis continued into the summer, when the Zulu army was beaten at Ulundi. It was generally assumed that they had been defeated by what Charles Kingsley had described in Alton Locke (1850) as ‘that grim, earnest, stubborn energy which, since the days of the old Romans, the English possess alone of all the nations on earth’. But this was mere posturing and pretence, or rubbish derided in the phrase of the time as ‘leather and prunella’. The Zulus had been the victims of greed, racial hatred and bloodlust.

This was not how the empire had been conceived or imagined. The colonies were proving to be graveyards, and not just for the armies hurled into conflicts which they hardly understood. In West Africa half the arrivals perished within three months. In Sierra Leone the mortality stood at 483 per thousand and at the Gold Coast the level stood at 668 per thousand. In Ceylon the mortality was five times higher than that of Britain. Victoria understood the world better than most of her subjects or politicians. At the time of the worst fighting in Afghanistan she wrote that ‘our position in India and in the Colonies must be upheld’. She informed Beaconsfield that ‘if we are to maintain our position as a first-rate Power, we must with our Indian Empire and our large Colonies be prepared for attacks and wars somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY’.

In a letter to Lady Ely she declared: ‘I wish to trust my Government whoever it is but they should be well aware beforehand I never could if they intended to try and undo what has been done.’ According to the novelist Frank Bullen, ‘no youth would dare enter a school and speak against the Empire’. Were he to do so, ‘he would promptly be knocked down’. Adventure novels, short stories and illustrated periodicals continually strengthened the link between empire and heroism or adventure. Much praise was devoted to pride and prestige, but little to commerce, even though the inexhaustible search for trade and markets was the primum mobile of imperialism.

At the close of 1878 Gladstone confided to his diary that he believed in the battle for ‘justice, humanity and freedom’ and added: ‘If I really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God.’ This would have been a high justification even in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and would no doubt now be regarded as a form of mania except by those who follow on the less regarded path of religious radicalism. Gladstone had the Nonconformists behind him en masse, a force considerably more powerful and significant than radical liberalism. It was of course the sort of sentiment which would alienate and enrage an expedient man such as Disraeli.

This was the spirit in which Gladstone entered the Midlothian campaign of November 1879. It was for him an aspect of his denunciation of Turkish villainy, but he ranged over the whole field of national policy as a fitting prelude to the general election of 1880. He began his campaign at the country seat of Lord Rosebery, which boosted Rosebery’s career considerably, before he travelled between Liverpool and Edinburgh to initiate what were essentially a series of speeches that were part lectures and part sermons. He spoke at Carlisle, he spoke at Hawick and he spoke at Galashiels. It was perhaps the first proper political campaign. As Disraeli had said, ‘we govern men with words’.

Rosebery was waiting for him at Edinburgh station in a four-in-hand carriage to the accompaniment of bonfires and fireworks. ‘I have never gone through a more extraordinary day,’ Gladstone said. He had always been moved by the excitement of crowds, and for two weeks he lambasted the government for financial mismanagement, for virtually purloining Egypt and for making impossible commitments to the Turks in Bosnia. ‘From that time forward,’ he wrote, ‘until the final consummation in 1879–1880 I made the Eastern question the main business of my life. I acted under strong sense of individual duty without a thought of leadership; nevertheless it made me leader again, whether I would or no.’ Posters of him as ‘priest-king’ were pasted over the walls and windows; shop windows were devoted to his display.

So Gladstone was on the attack. He was now seventy-one years old and had seen the empire expand sporadically and haphazardly, obeying its own laws of growth through trade routes and across oceans, challenging here, bribing there, threatening elsewhere. For Disraeli it was all in a day’s work, to be reported to the Fairy Queen, but Gladstone never had an easy conscience. He took a whip to himself after his famous nocturnal conversations with the women of the street, and there is every reason to suppose that his political excitement elicited similar responses. ‘Let every one of us resolve’, he said ‘that he will do his best to exempt himself; ay, that he will exempt himself from every participation in what he believes to be mischievous and ruinous misdeeds.’ There were according to his own letters wild cheers and storms of applause. The towns through which he passed were illuminated by torches and fairy lanterns, by arches and decorations. ‘Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.’ For him, Disraeli was the violator of world peace who had offended against every canon of moral justice. Every word was disseminated to a nation that imbibed political campaigns as eagerly as stout. Disraeli professed himself to be tired of his opponent’s rhetoric primarily because he was so often the subject of it. For her part the queen refused even to consider Gladstone to be a serious political figure.

By 1879 the battering had begun taking its toll on Disraeli, for whom recent events were far from satisfactory. The trials of Afghanistan and Zululand have already been mentioned but there were grave difficulties closer to home. Reynolds’ News announced that 1879 offered only a record of disaster, ‘the dullest year we remember in trade and the most disastrous in agriculture’. Rising unemployment had coincided with bad harvests and had culminated in a great depression of trade and in industrial discontent. A wave of strikes from London masons to Lancashire cotton operatives was a token of the winter of 1878 and 1879.

An economic decline had been evident since 1870; unemployment rose by more than 6 per cent in three years. Income tax was raised to sixpence to pay for the mounting cost of Afghanistan and South Africa. Disraeli was worn to the bone after the Berlin conference and seemed to have lost much of his vital elastic power. The depressed agricultural prices in England spelled torment for Ireland. In 1879 the Irish National Land League was established, with Parnell as president and four Fenians on the secretariat. It was yet another tortuous combination in the labyrinth of Westminster politics. In the Commons itself the Home Rule League party Irish MPs who sat in Westminster under Parnell were the significant force. They could effectively hinder all legislation, but more particularly that which concerned Irish affairs.

Deluded by some stray good news, Disraeli dissolved parliament in March 1880, and marched into his own Valley of Death. Gladstone set off on another speaking tour, convinced that his living relationship with the electorate was the most potent tie. The queen described them as ‘mad unpatriotic ravings’. Yet it seemed that nothing could save the Conservatives in the election of 1880. Nothing did. Gladstone’s Liberals gained over a hundred seats, and such was his victory that he was chosen as prime minister once again over the nominal leadership of Hartington and Granville. ‘The downfall of Beaconsfieldism’, he said, ‘is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance.’ The faery lore of the past was still part of the Victorian imagination.

Gladstone took power like some caliph with the combined will of the people. The Conservative grandee Lord Salisbury commented: ‘I was not sorry for the prospect. But such a defeat as this is quite another matter. It is a perfect catastrophe – and may I fear break up the party altogether.’ There was a diversion. One of the members of the new parliament was Charles Bradlaugh, who had combined with Annie Besant in the fight for birth control. He now caused further controversy by refusing to take the official Oath of Allegiance on becoming a member of parliament, and demanded to affirm as an atheist. His stance provoked scenes of mock outrage that would do honour to Gilbert and Sullivan. He lost his plea, and when a by-election followed he submitted successfully for reselection; he entered Westminster with a large crowd and forcibly made his way into the Commons before being ejected into Palace Yard. He tried again on four other occasions, was ejected and then reelected. Bradlaugh was a self-publicist who thoroughly enjoyed his notoriety and even enjoyed his brief imprisonment when it generated further headlines. Having caused considerable embarrassment to Gladstone and the Liberal party, he finally took his seat in 1886. Two years later, in 1888, he secured passage of a new and more accommodating Oaths Act.

Disraeli did not seem to take his downfall too seriously. He must have anticipated it. His only burden was the number of begging letters he received for posts, offices, sinecures and appointments before his final departure from the stage. He was also aware the queen would miss him as much as he missed her; they had formed a warm friendship, and he knew how much she depended on her allies.

His political opponents, therefore, were hardly likely to receive a warm welcome from Buckingham Palace. Of Gladstone, Victoria wrote privately that ‘she will sooner abdicate than send for or have anything to do with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a Dictator’. She calmed down sufficiently to be persuaded by Disraeli that Gladstone was her only viable candidate and that in any case he was too old to last much longer. Actuarial prophecies did not in fact prevail. He survived in politics for another fourteen years.

Lord Derby played host to Gladstone in the autumn of 1881.

The general impression seems to be, and certainly it is that left on my mind, that he is more agreeable, more light and easy in conversation, than would be expected from his manner in public; no subject comes amiss to him, he is ready to discourse on any, great or small, & that with the same copiousness & abundance of detail which characterise his speaking. He has no humour, rarely jokes, and his jokes are poor when he makes them. There is something odd in the intense earnestness with which he takes up every topic. I heard him yesterday deliver a sort of lecture on the various different ways of mending roads, suggested by some remark about the Liverpool streets. He described several different processes minutely, & as if he had been getting up the subject for an examination … Since the days of Lord Brougham, I have heard nothing like his eager and restless volubility; he never ceases to talk, and to talk well. Nobody would have thought he had cares on his mind or work to do. His face is very haggard, his eye wild …

It is as good a contemporary description as you are likely to find.

Disraeli was no longer so animated or voluble. It may be that he suffered his election defeat with more anguish than he admitted. At a party meeting at his house in Curzon Street in February 1881, he seemed to be a ‘lean, dark, feeble figure’. His last visit to the Lords was in the following month, but he is supposed to have declined a visit from the queen with the words: ‘No it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.’ It is more likely that he did not want his sovereign to see him in so shattered a state. He did not rest from his labours, and his private letters are full of political rumours and advice; he attended dinners as before, and often resumed his old animation. But there were times according to his first biographer, G. E. Buckle, when ‘he sat silent and deathlike, a mummy at the feast’. He had conquered his opponents in the Commons many times, but what had it all been for? He caught a chill that developed into bronchitis and he fought with death for three weeks; but he knew intuitively that it was his final battle. ‘I had rather live,’ he said, ‘but I am not afraid to die.’ This he did at his house in Curzon Street in the spring of 1881.

24

This depression

In 1880 the queen’s speech in the first parliament after Gladstone’s victory noted that ‘the depression which has lately been perceived in the Revenue continues without abatement’. Three years later on the same occasion Randolph Churchill, an unruly and rumbustious Tory, attacked the fact that no mention had been made ‘of the marked, continued and hopeless depression of trade in this country’. The word was on everyone’s lips, although no one seemed to know what it was. The House of Lords demanded a Commission on the Depression of Trade ‘to ascertain what this depression is’. No neat solution was found, but the word entered the political vocabulary and has never since left it.

In the autumn of 1880 Gladstone wrote to the queen that:

the state of Ireland is without doubt not only deplorable but menacing. Its distinctive character is not so much that of a general insecurity as that of a widespread conspiracy against property. The evils are distinct; both of them sufficiently grave. There is one most painful feature in the case, namely that the leaders of the disturbed part of the people incite them to break the law, whereas in the times of O’Connell there can be little doubt that in the midst of a strong political agitation they stoutly denounced agrarian crime and generally enforced observance of the law.

The ‘Irish Question’ and its damnosa hereditas was for Gladstone what the ‘Eastern Question’ had been for Disraeli, a perpetual source of mischief and anxiety. With Parnell inside parliament and the Fenians outside, what wolf should be kept from which door? The Home Rule politicians and the activists of the Land League posed a formidable threat that Gladstone only barely grasped. Between 1879 and 1880 agrarian violence and evictions increased threefold. The first man condemned for evicting tenants was called Captain Boycott, and his surname became the nature of his punishment. ‘I am very anxious to see how Gladstone means to get out of this Irish mess,’ Salisbury wrote. ‘It looks very like a revolution. We shall have to reconquer Ireland if we mean to keep her: and is there stuff and fibre in the English constituencies – at present composed – for this? I doubt it.’

The problem of Ireland had never gone away – or was it, rather, the problem of England? There were English land-agents, there were English landowners, there were English absentee landowners, the administration in Dublin Castle was English. The truth was that the English had never gone away. So many acts had been passed, over so many years, but all of them had favoured the English.

The Land League had responded to evictions and the like with rural outrages; this inflamed the situation without remedying it. Perhaps that was its purpose. Yet Gladstone pursued a policy against ‘landlordism’ on the clear understanding that land reform was the panacea for most of Ireland’s problems. His Land Act of 1881 enshrined the ‘three Fs’, fair rents, free sale and fixity of tenure; a judicial authority was established for fixing the fair rents, which cleared the air a little without changing the political weather. Joseph Chamberlain, then president of the Board of Trade, had made it clear that ‘we are agreed that it is impossible to concede the present demands of the Irish party. It is therefore war to the knife between a despotism created to re-establish constitutional law and a despotism not less completely elaborated to subvert and produce anarchy as a precedent for revolutionary change.’ When parliament met early in 1881 a Coercion Act was passed first before the Land Act. Coercion would consign to prison anyone suspected of violence or intimidation.

Parnell’s attempt to stifle the Land Act, while at the same time vilifying Gladstone, earned him a cell in Kilmainham Prison, where he promptly assumed the role of martyr under the Irish Coercion Act. The problem seemed wholly insoluble except by underhand means. The tortuous process whereby Gladstone came to Home Rule would be worthy of Ariadne herself, but it seems likely that from his cell Parnell had offered to bring peace to Ireland on certain secret conditions. On 4 May Parnell and two others were released from prison on condition that they would support the Land Act and on the understanding that Gladstone would protect Irish tenants who had fallen behind in their rent. The Irish secretary, William Forster, promptly resigned in dismay, and Gladstone asked Lord Frederick Cavendish to take his place. Within a few hours of his arrival in Dublin Lord Cavendish was assassinated in Phoenix Park; the assassins hacked him and a companion with long surgical knives. The phoenix is the bird that is reborn in fire, and those of a mythical frame of mind might see the fate of Ireland fringed in flame.

The confusion in the cabinet was compounded in the last months of 1880 by an uprising of the Boers in the Transvaal, a territory that the British had annexed three years before. The dissension, as so often, had arisen over the question of fair or unfair taxation. An English force was caught in an ambush at the battle of Laing’s Nek at the end of January 1881, followed by a thorough defeat in the following month. The small army under General Colley was either captured or killed. Gladstone, who was suffering from a head injury, took to his bed. In effect he surrendered. At a convention in Pretoria Transvaal was declared to be independent but under British ‘suzerainty’. Words like that can mean little or nothing; they can also breed mischief, misunderstanding and eventually conflict. And so it proved in southern Africa.

The administration was acquiring a reputation for weakness, confirmed by the bombing of Salford army barracks in the middle of January by a group of Fenians; it was chosen because it had been the site of the execution of the ‘Manchester martyrs’ in 1867, when the members of the IRA were hanged for the murder of a police officer. It can be seen as one of the first ‘terror bombs’ in England. The ‘Clerkenwell Explosion’ at the end of 1867 must claim, if this is the right word, the primacy. Gladstone was now beginning to recognize the signs of ageing. He thought it could not be right that he ‘should remain on the stage like a half-exhausted singer, whose notes are flat & everyone perceives it except himself’. He ‘would be of no good to anyone’.

On New Year’s Day, 1881, the queen entered her own misgivings:

A poor Government, Ireland in a state of total lawlessness, and war at the Cape, of a very serious nature. I feel very anxious and have no one to lean on. I feel how sadly deficient I am, and how oversensitive and irritable, and how uncontrollable my temper is, when annoyed and hurt. But I am so overdone, so vexed, and in such distress about my country, that that must be my excuse. I will pray daily for God’s help to improve.

God did not necessarily answer her prayers. Just days after the stabbings in Phoenix Park, Gladstone ordered a naval expedition to Alexandria. It was perhaps the most unlikely event of his political career, contradicting all his policies and beliefs on the blessings of nonintervention. The financial situation of Egypt was the fundamental cause. Their funds were under the dual control of the French and English, a humiliating position for Egyptian nationalists who instigated a series of small coups. In February 1882 the British government ordered the removal of a nationalist ministry, and as a result faced the wrath of anti-Western rioters. The fleet was sent in May and, since commanders abhor a vacuum, the bombardment of Alexandria began in July. It was then decided to send a military force, and the nationalist army was thoroughly defeated at Tel-el-Kebir on 13 September. The victory surprised the rest of Europe, and gave an illusion of success which the Second Boer War finally dissolved. The radicals under Gladstone’s nominal leadership were appalled by the Egyptian action. ‘Dizzy had never done worse than, or as bad as, this bombardment,’ John Bright told Rosebery. Rosebery tried to defend the prime minister, but Bright cut him off: ‘Say no more, it’s damnable!’ The opinion spread that Gladstone’s conscience was a movable feast, settling wherever his self-interest led him.

Gladstone realized the advantages, and disadvantages, of winning what was plainly an unholy war. It was a squalid affair, conducted entirely for money, even though he had gall enough to lend it a sense of missionary purpose. But what was to be done now, with Egypt occupied by the British? ‘We have done our Egyptian business’ – he made it sound like going to the lavatory – ‘and are an Egyptian government.’ Soon enough all would be thrown in doubt by an uprising in the Sudan which caused Gladstone more damage than any other event of his life.

Disraeli’s natural successor as Conservative leader in the Lords was always to be Lord Salisbury. Not that he welcomed the appointment. He told the editor of The Times:

you are the first person who has come here to see me in the last few days who is not wanting something at my hands – place, or decoration, or peerage … Men whom I called my friends, whom I should have considered far beyond self-seeking, have come here begging for something, some for one thing, some for another, till I am sick and disgusted. The experience has been a revelation to me of the baser side of human nature.

At the election of 1880 the Liberals had gained 337 seats, with the Conservatives a distant second on 214 and the Home Rulers with a respectable 63. The size of the Liberal majority surprised all those who had not reckoned on the effects of the industrial slump and the agricultural distress. With no convenient benefit in mind, the Liberals turned to Gladstone as the harbinger of their good fortune, whereas Gladstone gave all the praise to God. It may have been piety, or determination, that obliged him to soldier on as prime minister for the next four years; for once, the phrase of soldiering is appropriate. Having attacked the Liberal grandees in his Midlothian campaign, he was obliged to include them in his cabinet for want of better; of the radicals, to whom his rhetoric appealed, only a few were chosen. Eight of the cabinet were tried and confirmed Liberals. Only Joseph Chamberlain and one or two others could be described as Radical. Chamberlain was an oddity. He sported a monocle even while he mocked ‘gentlemen’. But as president of the Board of Trade he managed to guide an Employer Liability Act for industrial accidents even as his radical fervour continued to circulate around South Africa, Ireland and Egypt. These were the great causes to be addressed.

Change was also close to hand. In 1881 H. M. Hyndman formed the Democratic Federation, which was soon known as the Social Democratic Foundation and can be described with only a little exaggeration as Marxism and soda water. But at least in a formal sense, Hyndman introduced socialism into England just at the time that land reform was being promulgated by the American reformer Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879), where he announced: ‘We must make land common property.’ The spirit of reform spread. The Socialist League went its own way with William Morris in 1884, the year in which the Fabian Society was formed. George Gissing said of the Fabians that they were ‘a class of young men distinctive of our time – well educated, fairly well bred, but without money’. Most of their names are now quite unknown to the public, but without their constant intercessions twentiethcentury English history might have taken a different course. The transition, from old radicalism to new socialism, was as important as the change from Whig to Liberal. It can be said, for example, to have promoted and justified state intervention on a scale never previously seen.

The state had in any case slowly acquired new powers. It had come to regulate factories, mines and lodging houses. Food and drink were more closely monitored, and minimum standards for education and public housing were also promulgated. A large number of officials and administrators now entered the service of what was becoming, to all intents and purposes, a modern state. The managers of it were now professional rather than amateur. This of course meant the gradual eclipse of the principle of laissez-faire which had been in the ascendant for most of the century. The Cobden Prize essay for 1880, A. N. Cumming’s ‘On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind’, reported: ‘we have had too much laissez-faire … the truth of free trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy … we need a great deal more paternal government – that bugbear of the old economists’. A Radical programme of the time noted the growing intervention ‘of the State on behalf of the weak against the strong, in the interests of labour against capital, of want and suffering against luxury and ease’.

Collective sports, with national cricket and football leagues, with public swimming baths, became the public pastime. Choral societies, and brass bands, and railway excursions, were the mood of the age in which the rules of collective conduct were paramount.

Collectivism can take many forms. In 1884 Randolph Churchill made a speech in which he declared:

Gentlemen, we live in the age of advertisement, the age of Holloway’s pills, of Colman’s mustard and of Horniman’s pure tea; and the policy of lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, has adapted it to politics. The Prime Minister [Gladstone] is the greatest living master of the art of personal political advertisement. Holloway, Colman and Horniman are nothing compared with him. Every act of his, whether it be for the purposes of health, of recreation, or of religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards.

It is one of the first examples of the ‘media politics’ that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a tendency that might conceivably have had its origins in the granting of the vote to urban artisans in 1867.

Gladstone was not helped, however, by the group of Tories under the leadership of Randolph Churchill himself. Churchill and his cohorts combined the contempt and bad manners of youth with the vigour of unfulfilled ambition. They paraded the virtues of something known as ‘Tory Democracy’, but when Churchill was asked what it was he replied: ‘to tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory Democracy is, but I believe it is principally opportunism. Say you are a Tory Democrat and that will do.’ They were, in other words, painfully naive, and not even the name of Churchill could save them from obloquy.

They became known as the ‘Fourth Party’, and were eager to eject the ‘Old Gang’ of Conservative grandees such as Stafford Northcote, who liked nothing better than to cause a fuss. Still some bills struggled exhausted on to the Statute Book, among them a Bankruptcy Act and a Patents Act in 1883; the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of the same year was designed to eliminate fraud and intimidation.

There was one other piece of unfinished business to do with the franchise. It had been a slow process. Disraeli’s wizardry with the Second Reform Act in 1867 was followed five years later by the Ballot [or Secret Ballot] Act whose name is its nature. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 was followed, in 1884, by the Representation of the People Act which applied the same franchise to the counties as to the boroughs. The Third Reform Act, as it became known, extended the vote to agricultural labourers, thereby increasing the electorate threefold. Of course it did not imply universal suffrage; all women and 40 per cent of men were still excluded from the electoral process.

Nevertheless, a great political storm was rising over a new redistribution bill of the following year. A wider franchise was considered to be ‘a good thing’, but for the Conservatives it had to be guarded by a wholesale redistribution of seats to protect the Tory interest. Tory Lords and Liberal Commons fought like stags in the rutting season, yet after some discreet pressure from the queen the two sides met at a house in Arlington Street to ponder over the redistribution of seats, in which manoeuvres Salisbury was the master tactician. The franchise of some seventy-nine towns, with populations under 15,000, was swept away. The rule now was for single-member constituencies to be carved out from the larger towns and cities: 160 seats were abolished and 182 were created. Two million extra voters were enfranchised. The great metropolitan conurbations were divided into roughly equivalent constituencies and great swathes of suburban seats were grouped around them. It was considered to be hubristic. Was not a larger franchise enough? In truth very few people understood the arithmetic of the calculations. If it were done, was the common cry, let it be done quickly.

Salisbury had stood his ground. Gladstone agreed to his terms, and Salisbury’s daughter recorded: ‘My father’s prevailing sentiment is one of complete wonder … we have got all and more than we demanded.’ Salisbury proved himself to be an excellent negotiator, seat by seat. He managed a number of compromises, with consequences which could not have been foreseen. His philosophy was essentially a simple one. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ It may be placed beside another of his maxims: ‘Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.’ The point was that Salisbury’s conservatism was tacit or unstated. It was the Conservatism of silence as perhaps invoked in ‘the silent majority’. The Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885 in fact created a flood of single-member seats which now dominated the parliamentary process. The country seat was now as potentially powerful as the town or the city seat; the miner and the agricultural labourer had now obtained the vote. As a consequence the landed proprietor lost much of his power of patronage. ‘Media politics’ was accompanied by the makings of a mass electorate.

An unexpected and welcome ally in nursing the new electorate was providentially found in the Primrose League, which had sprung up in 1883. The name was taken from Disraeli’s supposed favourite flower (he probably preferred the orchid), and soon became the largest voluntary society in England, with half a million members by 1887. It was inclusive and heterogeneous, barring only ‘atheists and enemies of the British Empire’. Members (who were known as knights, dames or associates according to the annual subscription fee they paid) swore allegiance to the sovereign, and declared their readiness to maintain ‘religion … the estates of the realm, and the imperial ascendancy of the British Empire’. The league was largely organized by women and became notable for its tea parties, garden parties and bicycle outings. Summer fetes, held at stately homes and attended by prominent Conservative MPs, were the highlight of its social programme. MPs also contributed to the Primrose League Gazette, the organization’s weekly newspaper. With its strong emphasis on hierarchy, honours, imperialism, archaic titles and rituals, the League inculcated in its members the values of deference, nationalism and respect for tradition. As the organization attracted a million less affluent, associate members, by the early 1890s, it might be said to have grafted the Conservative party upon the roots of the middle class and the lower middle class. It represented the growth of imperialist sentiment also, confirmed by the establishment of the Imperial Federation League in 1884. Imperialism, however, had its own disadvantages.

25

Frightful news

The domination of Egypt by Britain after the bombing of Alexandria created difficulties with that country’s neighbours. An uprising in the Sudan was led by its religious leader, the Mahdi or ‘Guided one’, whose forces overwhelmed the British garrisons on two separate occasions towards the close of 1883. The better part of valour may lie in retreat, and the British government decided to abandon Sudan in company with the Egyptian soldiers they had recruited. It was a difficult feat to accomplish, and so Gladstone and his cabinet sent General Gordon to organize the evacuation. Gordon, however, elected to disobey orders, to stay and fight. He was a soldier of the old school – small, stubborn, and self-sufficient. The sword and the Bible were his not always reliable guides, and as a famous warrior he may not have been the best officer to administer a retreat. Evelyn Baring cautioned that ‘a man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone’.

Gladstone confessed that they had selected Gordon from ‘insufficient knowledge of the man, whom we rather took on trust from the public impressions and from newspaper accounts’. Here is a new and timely account of the power of the press and the importance of ‘impressions’ gathered from the public. The situation would have been unthinkable thirty years before. It was accompanied by a general indifference to the imperial colonists who were treated somewhat as if they were country cousins. ‘When a distinguished colonist comes to London,’ E. G. Wakefield wrote in A View of the Art of Colonisation (1849), ‘he prowls about the streets and sees sights till he is sick of doing nothing else, and then returns home disgusted with his visit to the old country. Nobody has paid him any attention because he was a colonist.’

Gordon’s disobedience to his instructions from Whitehall did not bode well for his expedition to cow the Sudanese. When he arrived in Khartoum, the capital, in February 1884 he announced his intention of keeping and defending the city instead of evacuating it before ceding it to the Mahdi and his followers. When the Sudanese forces advanced and gave siege, he decided to stand and fight against all the odds. For two years he made his last stand in the city, bombarding London with plans to seize the initiative and capture or kill the Mahdi, while the feverish public demanded that a relief force be sent to rescue him from the fate he preferred to ignore. The country seethed. The cabinet could not agree on any action, and Gladstone reported in June 1884 that ‘they have no fresh reason to anticipate the necessity of an expedition for the relief of General Gordon’. They could either reject his proposals and send him home, or they could accept them and send reinforcements. Neither course was chosen.

Gladstone dithered as he found the whole country turning against him. The newspaper placards were huge. When would a relief force be despatched? ‘The Nile expedition was sanctioned too late,’ Baring wrote in Modern Egypt (1908), ‘and the reason it was sanctioned too late was that Mr Gladstone would not accept simple evidence of a plain fact which was patent to much less powerful intellects than his own’. On 26 January 1885, the besiegers broke into Khartoum, where General Gordon waited on the steps of the palace in his white uniform. They cut off his head and threw his body down a well. Two days later, the relief force arrived.

The outcry was immense. The queen sent an open telegram deploring the disaster. ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful,’ she wrote, ‘and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’ The message could have been read by any postmaster, and was no doubt intended to be. The cabinet discussed resignation but came to no certain conclusions; they could not see beyond their individual careers, and resignation meant death. The G.O.M. – the Grand Old Man, as Gladstone had been called – became the M.O.G. – the Murderer of Gordon. There had been no more painful disaster for fifty years, and it did much to alienate the British public from the Liberal government. Gladstone himself was covered in anger and hysterical rebuke.

A general sense of instability prevailed. Every member seemed to think that he had been betrayed by one colleague or another over Sudan, over the budget, over Ireland, over the Coercion Bill. Gladstone confided to his wife that it had been ‘a wild romance of politics with a continual succession of hair-breadth escapes and strange accidents pressing upon one another’. When in June 1885 the budget was rejected by the Commons, Gladstone took the opportunity to resign, whereupon Lord Salisbury took over as the Tory premier and remained prime minister for seven months. He had an idea. The Tories had a commanding majority in the Lords, and to act as radicals might not do them any great harm in the country. Disraeli had managed it once. So Salisbury, with the support of Gladstone, considered the possibility that the Tories were perhaps more likely to pass radical measures for Ireland. But it was no more than a chimera, and perhaps he knew as much. He was moved to comment on the nationalist proclamation that ‘we are to have confidence in the Irish people’. He replied that ‘confidence depends upon the people in whom you are to confide. You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots, for example.’

In his short period of office, known by Chamberlain as the Ministry of Caretakers, Salisbury sent a laurel branch to the land across the sea by dropping a crimes bill and by passing a land purchase bill for Irish tenants. But it was not going to be enough. Parnell pressed Salisbury for more. He subtilized his parliamentary tactics to the point that he could effectively curtail all proceedings. His was a double game for the benefit of Ireland. In the subsequent general election of 1885 he was triumphant. The Liberals won 319 seats, the Conservatives 249 and the Parnellites 86, and the balance of power. The results pleased no one except Parnell. The Liberals were the largest party, but that was less singular than the fact that they did not possess a majority. Salisbury led a minority government, and he knew that it could not last long. ‘Somehow I felt the whole thing melancholy,’ Lord Rosebery wrote. ‘Mr G was older, feebler, less victorious by much than in 1880, if victorious at all, and somehow one felt as if one was witnessing the close of that long & brilliant career.’ Gladstone was hoarse and sat silent before the new ministers who themselves did not have very much to say. On Ireland they were bewildered and uncertain, fearing trouble to come. Salisbury explained the inactivity by claiming that by taking office they were fulfilling a duty of honour to the queen. They needed to do nothing more until the time of the general election. So he decided to carry on with the assistance of Parnell.

Gladstone mocked this Irish union with ‘demoralized and dangerous Tories’, but it was not long before he was considering schemes that might unite him with Parnell. Yet Gladstone was in a quandary. Whatever his thoughts about Home Rule, he could not confide them to Parnell alone; it would be unwise and dishonourable. But he could not divulge them to his party without dangerous disruptions and divisions. So he was obliged to remain silent.

In December 1885, however, the Evening Standard published a document that seemed on the face of it to be a plan for Home Rule composed by Gladstone himself. Many doubted its veracity, and others its validity. It became known as the ‘Hawarden Kite’ and it turned out to have been flown by Herbert Gladstone, Gladstone’s son, as a way of diverting opposition. It included the statement that ‘nothing could induce me to countenance separation, but if five-sixths of the Irish people wish to have a Parliament in Dublin, for the management of their own local affairs, I say, in the name of justice, and wisdom, let them have it’.How could he deny the Irish self-government when he had championed it for Italy and Bulgaria? It was necessary, but it was also inevitable. Gladstone would take up once more the cares of office for ‘the creation of an Irish Parliament to be entrusted with the entire management of all legislative and administrative affairs, securities being taken for the representation of minorities and for an equitable partition of all Imperial charges’.

The varying reactions were immediate and profound. His multifarious enemies believed that he had betrayed England. He had betrayed Ireland. He had betrayed both. There was now no chance of cross-party allegiance, and he had painted himself into a corner. He had torn his party in half. He, or Herbert, might have claimed in defence that Gladstone simply wished to gain the initiative and assert his authority. But he continued his policy of obfuscation and silence.

While Salisbury ruled, Gladstone offered to support any Conservative attempt at a Home Rule Bill, but they were still not to be tempted into apostasy. Instead, with the tacit or complicit support of the Liberal Unionists, they adopted a new Coercion Act for Ireland. Parnell, of course, backed off and decided once more to support Gladstone. In a division of January 1886, Salisbury’s Tories were defeated by a potent combination of Liberals and Irish Nationalists. Three days later Gladstone was once more in power. He was summoned to office for the third time, with the implicit declaration that he was to draw up a bill for Irish Home Rule. He declared that ‘the hope and purpose of the new government in taking office is to examine carefully whether it is practicable to try some other method [than coercion] of meeting the present case of Ireland’. Everyone knew what he meant. For him, Home Rule had become inevitable.

One of his first actions was to send to anyone whom he suggested for cabinet office a proposal ‘for the establishment of a legislative body to sit in Dublin, and to deal with Irish as distinguished from imperial affairs’.

But a large number of Liberal MPs, including those of the oldest faction who still liked to call themselves Whigs, abhorred the idea of minimizing the role of parliament and of national as well as imperial disintegration. They rebelled, and their defection provoked the great schism of the Liberal party.

Gladstone seemed to relish the task of drafting a Home Rule Bill over the next few months. One of his private secretaries, Sir Algernon West, wrote of him that:

the intense enthusiasm with which he entered into the subject and the object of the moment was apt to dim, if not obliterate, the little loves and affections which crowd the life of smaller men. The execution of his great work was the one thing in his eyes, and the instruments and tools he used were dearer to him than anything else; and the men associated with him at the moment were always greater than the men who had passed away.

A few trusted civil servants, and a few reliable members of the cabinet, superintended by Gladstone, worked in haste and silence.

When at the end of March the cabinet met to discuss his proposals, which included an Irish government with powers of taxation, Chamberlain and the Irish secretary, Sir George Trevelyan, left the room and did not come back.

On 8 April the Commons whipped itself into a fever of excitement. Every space was taken. Gladstone was greeted with cheers from his admirers, who watched him being driven to Westminster, and by many rounds of applause from his supporters in the Commons. He spoke for three and a half hours, and the ensuing debate continued for sixteen days. At the close of the debate Gladstone rose and exhorted his colleagues: ‘Ireland stands at your bar, expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant …’ He must have known that he would lose. In the event 93 Liberals voted against him and the Home Rule Bill was defeated by 343 votes against 313. There were now Liberals and Liberal Unionists, the latter taking as hard a line on the maintenance of the union as their Conservative colleagues. The Liberal Unionists and the Conservative Unionists were as one on the vital principle of the day, and it would not be long before they formed a party.

Gladstone was not in the least disheartened. He blamed vested interests for his defeat and declared not for the first time that ‘the masses have been right and the classes have been wrong’. Many Liberals, however, blamed him for hitching his party to the wandering star of Irish nationalism which, as he told Rosebery, ‘will control and put aside all other questions in England till it is settled’. He believed the chimera in his own brain to be the overwhelming question.

After Home Rule had been voted down, the queen was asked to dissolve parliament. Let the people decide. The ensuing election battle was fierce. Randolph Churchill derided the Home Rule proposals as ‘this monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance and political hysterics … the united and concentrated genius of Bedlam and Colney Hatch would strive in vain to produce a more striking tissue of absurdities’. This was the way many people understood the situation. The United Kingdom, not to mention the Liberal party itself, was to be torn apart in order to ‘gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry’. Even though he looked old, bent and infinitely wearied, he was engaged once more in a national speaking tour, as if only the balm of popular acclaim could heal his wounded spirit. He noted in his diary on a speech in Liverpool at the end of June that he had spent ‘seven or eight hours of processional uproar and a speech of an hour and forty minutes to five or six thousand people … I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit, but the hand of the Lord was upon me.’ His biblical cadence suggests that he was beginning to adopt the role of an Old Testament prophet. The queen was dismayed. She said that it was ‘grievous’ to see a man of seventy-seven ‘behave as he does, and lower himself to an ordinary demagogue … if only he could be stopped’.

The electorate stopped him. ‘Well, Herbert, dear old boy,’ he told his son, ‘we have had a drubbing and no mistake.’ The Conservative Unionists and Liberal Unionists had a combined majority of 118 over the Gladstonians and the Irish Nationalists. At the end of the year he wrote in his diary:

it has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man’s direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this Whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently of my fellow men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me.

He was, in other words, not going to give up.

To almost everyone’s amazement, Gladstone seemed ready to carry on. He said that he remained at the disposal of his party and his friends while ‘giving special heed to the calls of the Irish question’. It had become his great cause, the fruit of his moral being. He might be the justified sinner, identifying his existence with a greater good. His anger against the enemy became more pronounced. ‘Ireland is perhaps the most conspicuous country in the world,’ he said, ‘where law has been on one side and justice on the other.’ No government ‘by perpetual coercion’ could stand, when it had been erected by ‘the foulest and wickedest’ means ‘that ever were put in action’.

Salisbury had in the interim created his Conservative cabinet, which Randolph Churchill dubbed ‘Marshalls and Snelgroves’ after the solid but uninspiring department store in London. Churchill was given the offices of chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House, from which eminence it was believed that he would catapult himself into the first office. Salisbury’s duty, as he saw it, was to sit tight and ensure that Gladstone and Home Rule were no longer on the table. It was also his duty, as first minister, to keep his party whole and united. This was not necessarily an easy task, with Randolph Churchill firing off grandiose schemes, vilifying his colleagues and threatening resignation with every twist and turn of his fortunes. Eventually Salisbury decided to silence him by accepting the most recent of his letters and, much to Churchill’s amazement, allowed him to resign. The menace was gone in an instant. Salisbury was now on his own, but he had a solid Unionist majority to comfort him.

Gladstone was still in good spirits, with his devotion to the cause of Irish Home Rule giving him the ballast to survive. He and Parnell had now a ‘union of hearts’ in the Irish cause. But there is always room for the unexpected. Parnell was fatally compromised by being cited in a divorce case; the evidence was overwhelming. John Morley, a Liberal statesman, had said once that ‘Ireland would not be a difficult country to govern – were it not that all the people are intractable and all the problems insoluble.’ Gladstone privately deplored ‘the awful matter of Parnell’, but for a time kept quiet until the public reaction forced his hand. Adultery and divorce were more heinous in Ireland even than in England, and even the most popular politician could not escape the fire. Yet it was Gladstone who threw the burning branch. He wrote to Parnell urging him to resign. Parnell refused, and almost at once Gladstone made sure that his letter reached the Pall Mall Gazette. As far as Parnell was concerned, the case was concluded. Gladstone had cast him into the outer darkness. Those who still voted for him were ‘either rogues or fools’.

The Irish question was the most important for Salisbury’s administration. Salisbury told the Lords that ‘for the moment, the guardianship of the Union supersedes every other subject of political interest’. He had said that: ‘The severity must come first. They must “take a licking” before conciliation would do them any good.’ For that purpose he appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as chief secretary for Ireland. Balfour had a languid and rather vague manner, in the style of the 1880s; with his wispy moustache and his juvenile good looks he could have been taken from the cast of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But appearances can be deceptive. In Ireland he was known soon enough as ‘Bloody Balfour’. He believed in the Tory policy of coercion, which he proceeded to apply without much remorse or doubt. ‘There are those who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in foreign garb,’ he said. ‘I see no reason why any local colour should be given to the Ten Commandments.’ Balfour introduced his Crimes Act in the spring of 1887, making boycotting, intimidation and resistance to eviction a criminal offence with a minimum sentence of six months’ hard labour. It was not considered to be a provisional or temporary measure; it was written in stone until such time as any future government might repeal it.

A contrary form of political action began to emerge in England. From 1886 a number of strikes took place in London. John Burns and Tom Mann, both of the Social Democratic Federation, were intent on organizing the engineers and promoting their claims for a fixed living wage. At the beginning of February 1886, the Federation also held a meeting in Trafalgar Square to demand the provision of public works for the unemployed. The crowd in the square grew in size, and on the advice of the police they moved to Hyde Park, but Pall Mall, with its clubs and emporia, lay along its route. The temptation was too great. Windows were smashed and shops looted. Burns told the waiting crowds at Hyde Park: ‘We are not strong enough at the present moment to cope with armed forces, but when we give you the signal will you rise?’ There were loud calls of ‘Yes! Yes!’ London heard the cries. The shops were boarded up and the banks were closed. Bernard Shaw put the response in context. ‘They do not want revolution,’ he wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘They want a job.’ The ‘unemployed’ and the phenomenon of ‘unemployment’ reached the public vocabulary in this period.

In the autumn of the year demonstrations and parades were banned from Trafalgar Square, which had taken over from Clerkenwell Green as the centre for radical activity. A free speech demonstration took place in the Square on 13 November which became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, with the police confronting the crowds. Skirmishes and scuffles occurred in Holborn and the Strand until the Life Guards cleared the Square; one hundred were injured and two were killed. It was the largest disruption of the period, though by continental standards it was relatively modest. In 1888 a group of radical agitators attending the annual Trades Union Congress at Bradford pressed for the foundation of an independent Labour party. In the same year Keir Hardie was instrumental in the establishment of the Scottish Labour party. There was no mention of socialism. That was considered too continental and redolent of revolution.

Nothing could be more paradoxical than the fact that the summer of 1887, when public discontent prevailed, marked the golden jubilee of Victoria. The little old lady insisted on wearing her bonnet (although garnished with jewels) as she drove in an open landau through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey. She was surrounded by her royal guards as well as seventeen princes, close relations from the Battenbergs to the Wittelsbachs, and innumerable imperial potentates. According to the Illustrated London News it was ‘the grandest State ceremony of this generation; one, indeed, practically unique in the annals of modern England’. The less she had to do, and the more remote her life became from that of her subjects, the more she was celebrated.

The empire now extended to Buckingham Palace and Balmoral, where two new Indian servants took the place of John Brown. Mahomet Buksh and Abdul Karim were soon to be given the title of munshi, or clerk and teacher. Victoria had decided to learn Hindustani.

George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894) charts the temperature of the nation at this juncture, and it records a prevailing indifference over the state of the monarchy, despite an intense love of spectacle which the jubilee provoked. Gissing’s characters are of the middle class and lower middle class living in the environs of Camberwell and Denmark Hill in south London, where the young women are sighing for higher status and more income. It is not the world of Anthony Trollope. It is the opposite. It is a world which was largely taken for granted, mild grey like its atmosphere on the borders of the great city. Gissing was a connoisseur of slovenly rooms in these suburbs. ‘The pictures were a strange medley – autotypes of some artistic value side by side with hideous oleographs framed in ponderous gilding.’ An autotype was a photographic print popular in the late nineteenth century; an oleograph was a photographic print made to resemble an oil painting. On tables and chairs:

lay scattered a multitude of papers: illustrated weeklies, journals of society, cheap miscellanies, penny novelettes and the like. At the end of the week, when new numbers came in, Ada Peachey passed many hours upon her sofa, reading instalments of a dozen serial stories, paragraphs relating to fashion, sport, the theatre, answers to correspondents (wherein she especially delighted), columns of facetiae and gossip about notorious people.

The children of a similar family ‘talked of theatres and racecourses, of the “new murderer” at Tussaud’s, of police-news, of notorious spendthrifts and demireps’. A demirep was a female of dubious reputation. In a slightly more elevated household, ‘on the table lay a new volume from the circulating library – something about Evolution … Her aim, at present, was to become a graduate of London University … to prepare herself for matriculation, which she hoped to achieve in the coming winter … She talked only of the “exam”, of her chances in this or that “paper”.’

The setting for the first part of the book was the great public occasion of the year.

She’s going to the Jubilee to pick up a fancy Prince … These seats are selling for three guineas, somebody told me … Thank goodness everyone is going to see the procession or the decorations, or the illuminations, and all the rest of the nonsense … I want to go for the fun of the thing I should feel ashamed of myself if I ran to stare at Royalties, but it’s a different thing at night. It’ll be wonderful, all the traffic stopped … And you know, after all, it’s a historical event. In the year 3000 it will be ‘set’ in an examination paper, and poor wretches will get plucked because they don’t know the date … What have I to do with the Queen? Do you wish to go? Not to see Her Majesty. I care as little about her as you do … I didn’t think this kind of thing was in your way. I thought you were above it … You have heard that Nancy wants to mix with the rag-tag and bobtail tomorrow night? … Now I look at it this way. It’s to celebrate the fiftieth year of the reign of Queen Victoria – yes but at the same time and far more, it’s to celebrate the completion of fifty years of Progress. National Progress without precedent in the history of mankind.

Most people had a clear sense in which the direction of events was moving. ‘Now, before the triumph of glorious Democracy … after all the people have got the upper hand nowadays.’ The phrases of the period ring through the pages of the novel. ‘Look sharp about it. Do you twig? … his temper was that ’orrible.’ A boyfriend was a ‘masher’. A fine man or woman was ‘a great swell’. ‘Oh what a silly you are. Go ahead! What’s the latest?’

Gissing reports the nature of the Jubilee from the level of the streets: ‘At Camberwell Green they mingled with a confused rush of hilarious crowds amid a clattering of cabs and omnibuses, a jingling of tram-car bells. Public houses sent forth their alcoholic odours upon the hot air.’ You can hear the voices: ‘A woman near her talked loudly about the procession, with special reference to a personage whom she called “Prince of Wiles”.’ An argument breaks out among the crowd: ‘We’re not going to let a boozing blackguard like you talk in that way about ’er Majesty.’ The characters often break into the latest music-hall song, sometimes mixed with pathos rather than with humour.

‘Ta-ta.’

26

Daddy-long-legs

The Salisbury government was held together more by Gladstone than by any other Tory grandee. As long as he pursued his dream or vision of Home Rule, and pursued it with determination, the administration would ensure that he remained locked out of office by staying in its place. That at least was the theory. Salisbury himself was still a remote figure, pessimistic or cynical according to taste, temperamentally averse to change of any kind and naturally appalled by social reform and social reformers. Yet it was his government that pushed through some legislation that seemed to Cardinal Manning to be the most radical since the 1830s.

The Local Government Act of 1888 set up popularly elected boards to run the counties and turned the cities into county boroughs. The squires and leaders of local society were at a stroke made redundant, replaced by administrators and bureaucrats who controlled everything from the police to the lunatic asylums. Thus was finally severed the link between the owners of the land and the powers of authority, even though England did not become a fully bureaucratized nation until the Local Government Act of 1894, which imposed elected local authorities for every village with over 300 inhabitants.

London had been an administrative chaos almost from the beginning of its existence, but the County Council Act, as the Local Government Act was known, ordained that it should be administered and governed by the London County Council. The ‘LCC’, as it was everywhere known, became a formidable presence in the capital, beyond the range of government departments and national policymaking. It reflected the contemporaneous taste for municipal socialism in the provision of public baths and wash-houses, parks and allotments and public libraries. It was also responsible for the swathe of ‘council houses’ and ‘council flats’ that was erected in all parts of the metropolis, and thus changed the texture of life in London for the next hundred years.

The first chairman of the LCC was a Liberal. In some respects Lord Rosebery resembled Chamberlain, although he was not himself an advocate of municipal socialism. But he was in advance of his colleagues on social matters, and was part of a new generation approaching the characteristic sentiments of the early twentieth century. He waged war against slum landlords and declared that London was ‘not a unit, but a unity’. His social radicalism was based on the principle of ‘getting things done’. He was what was known as a ‘coming man’, but no one could have known how far he would go.

The perils of the times, in an age of bewildering change, seemed infinite. To reach adulthood was itself an achievement. No one, except a few of the highly favoured, was ever completely well. It was a highly nervous age in which even the huntsmen, in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1880), discuss

the perils from outsiders, the perils from new-fangled prejudices, the perils from more modern sports, the perils from over-cultivation, the perils from extended population, the perils from increasing railroads, the perils from literary ignorances, the perils from intruding cads, the perils from indifferent magnates … Everything is going wrong. Perhaps the same thing may be remarked in other pursuits. Farmers are generally on the verge of ruin. Trade is always bad. The Church is in danger. The House of Lords isn’t worth a dozen years purchase. The throne totters.

It is in part a satirical account of the prejudices of a narrow section of society, but it does disclose the high anxiety, the fear and trembling, that afflicted the supposedly more robust and resourceful members of the Victorian public. Wilkie Collins described ‘these days of invidious nervous exhaustion and subtly-spreading nervous malady’. John Morley stated: ‘all is in doubt, hesitation and shivering expectancy’. In 1888 another writer, Elizabeth Chapman, wrote of ‘a general revolt against authority in all departments of life which is the note of an unsettled, transitional, above all democratic age’. A journalist, T. H. Escott, had perceived ‘old lines of demarcation being obliterated, revered idols being destroyed’. The seismic shift, the change of society, was felt before being properly understood. Among many it provoked nervous exhaustion, tremulousness and fear.

That is why one of the defining images of the age was the railway crash. The epitome of the new world, of time and speed, of ever-increasing momentum, was also the image of death and disaster. In Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed a hare is seen running before the Great Western Railway train as it crosses the viaduct at Maidenhead. Contemporaries would have known or recalled the old proverb that to see a hare running before you portends calamity. ‘We have seen a hare. We shall have no luck.’ The steam engine itself became a metaphor. There was journalistic talk of a ‘new improved patent, steam-engine way of passing a bill through the Lords’. The new entrepreneur measured, according to John Stuart Mill, ‘the merit of all things by their tendency to increase the number of steam-engines and make human beings as good as machines’. Yet it seemed that in the game of life it was necessary to train the mind and body ‘like a steam-engine to be turned to any kind of work’. There was great admiration for the power of machines and for the people who maintained them. An early historian of the cotton trade, Alfred Wadsworth, wrote ‘that the new machinery spread quickly in England because the whole community was interested in it’. Carlyle denounced the new respect for ‘steam intellect’. The references are everywhere.

But there was another Victorian way of looking at the world. Even as George Stephenson surveyed the railway world of 1850, the power and extent of which had changed the English landscape for ever, he told friends in Newcastle: ‘as I look back upon these stupendous undertakings it seems as though we have realised the fabled power of the magician’s wand’. For many this was a world of fairy magic, of sudden transformations, of spells and enchantments; the mundane had grown marvellous. The burning down of parliament in October 1834 had been described at the time as ‘a perfect fairy scene’. When Fanny Kemble visited the newly excavated Edge Hill tunnel she felt ‘as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful’.

To recognize endless novelty and change demanded some resort to images of magic and enchantment, as if only by such means could it be understood. The lighting of the streets by gas, the building of the tunnel under the Thames, the factory machinery that could replace the work of a thousand hands, all were seen in terms of wonder. The age of electricity had become a rival to gas, too, although it was said by Arthur Young in his Travels of the 1880s that the new electrical telegraphs created ‘a universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of alarm from one end of the Kingdom to the other’. Nothing seemed very far from chaos.

In her diary for 1882 Beatrice Webb pronounced the times as exemplifying the spirit of benevolence, where ‘social questions are the vital questions of today: they take the place of religion’. Social reports and surveys now lay beside sentimental novels and sensation novels and, although most of the world passed by, some stopped to consider the ragged child or the lean and drunken mother. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) provided a less idiosyncratic account than Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published forty years earlier, when individuals, rather than classes, were the object of study. The anecdote had given way to the statistic, representing a sea change in the representation of social history. Booth surmised, for example, that 30 per cent of the London population were in poverty, of whom about a third were ‘very poor’. ‘Very poor’ in the 1880s meant one small degree above destitution. But he believed that if poverty was definable it might also be curable; he also intimated the conclusion that the government itself must incur the responsibility for removing the areas of ‘occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’, painted black, from the maps of London.

But he did not necessarily blame ‘the poor’ themselves for their condition, which had been the standard response of earlier generations. They might be ‘hard working’ and ‘struggling’ but the economic conditions of the period were fatally opposed to them. It had nothing to do with laziness or drink, but the factory gates had been closed against them. There was a growing recognition that the poor were not an original or permanent part of society, and that the conditions of many of them might be remedied. It was generally believed that the improvements of the nineteenth century, from water provision to sanitation, had in fact ameliorated the worst conditions. The poorer parts of town were known for ‘glitter and gas’, with the chop-houses, the gin shops, the cook shops and the burlesque shows together with the ballad singers, the organ grinders, the travelling bands and the stentorian tones of the costermonger.

But a glance at one of Charles Booth’s ‘poverty maps’ quickly disabused any false optimism. Black marked ‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal’, while dark blue registered ‘very poor, casual. Chronic want’. Even the people of the stratum above, coloured light blue, were obliged to live on 18 shillings to a guinea a week. The East End was the heart of darkness, over a third of its population living below ‘the margin of poverty’. Conditions may indeed have improved since the 1840s and 1850s, but the very poor felt more deprived in comparison with others. An economist, J. A. Hobson, wrote in 1891: ‘the rate of improvement in the condition of the poor is not quick enough to stem the current of popular discontent’.

If the problem was not one of individual fecklessness, or even of bad luck, the blame was laid upon that increasingly popular term, ‘the system’, with a new recognition of, or concern for, ‘unemployment’. Trafalgar Square became the centre of meetings and demonstrations on behalf of this new element in the state. A Mansion House fund for the relief of the unemployed was established, but it could do ameliorative work only. The ‘unemployed’ became the shadow world to be regarded with trepidation. No one knew what to do with them. There was an even lower category, ‘the residuum’, which spread contagion everywhere. But the unemployed remained at the forefront of public consciousness.

The plight of the ‘labouring poor’ or the ‘deserving poor’ was not yet to be alleviated by collective means; there were some 700 philanthropic societies that worked in a generally uncoordinated and ad hoc manner. Certain streets, certain districts, even certain individuals became the focus of concern in a society which had no ‘safety net’ to catch those who had fallen out of the system. Instead there had been in place since 1869 the Charity Organisation Society which Henry James believed to be ‘so characteristic a feature of English civilization’. It was as practical and pragmatic as any other English society, but it did try to bring together the multifarious charities which were in danger of bumping into each other in the street.

Lothair, the titular hero of Disraeli’s novel published in 1870, remarked that ‘it seems to me that pauperism is not an affair so much of wages as of dwellings. If the working classes were properly lodged, at their present rate of wages, they would be richer. They would be healthier and happier at the same cost.’ The same insight had occurred to other enthusiasts for ‘model dwellings’, some of whom were rich philanthropists who began a course of slum clearance and new building still to be found in English cities.

The queen travelled to the East End in the spring of 1887 to open the ‘People’s Palace’, which was a concert room, a library and a singing gallery all in one. She heard what she called ‘a horrid noise (quite new to the Queen’s ears) “booing” she believes it is called’. Salisbury told her, in way of an apology, that ‘London contains a much larger number of the worst kind of rough than any other great town in the island … probably Socialists and the worst Irish.’

The East End of London had also become in the popular mind a place of mystery and of darkness. It was ‘the abyss’; it was ‘darkest London’ and ‘the nether world’. It was the city of dreadful night. It came to represent the essence of Victorian London and has been seen as such in a thousand television dramas. In the summer and autumn of 1888, however, it became the object of more particular attention. Two industrial disputes made a powerful impression, as if they were heavy with the weight of the future like dark clouds prophesying rain. The girls who worked in the Bryant and May match factory in Bow walked out of their jobs when two girls were dismissed for insubordination at the beginning of July 1888. The girls went on strike, and achieved some very prominent support. Their dismissal drew attention to their working conditions in a positively unhealthy environment. White phosphorus used in the manufacture of lucifer matches, for example, provoked a debilitating condition known as ‘phossy jaw’. They were the pale and unhealthy slaves of the industrial process. Seven hundred of them walked out of their place of employment, the Fairfield Works, and the factory was closed. They were vigilant for their cause, and their first protest march was to Fleet Street rather than to Westminster. They gained the support of journalists, MPs and the members of the various socialist parties that operated in the capital.

A prominent unionist, Tom Mann, wrote later:

the girls were soon organised into a trade union. Their case was conducted with great skill. A club was formed, which was used as an educational and social centre, and a spirit of hopefulness characterised the proceedings. The girls won. They had a stimulating effect upon other sections of workers, some of whom were also showing signs of intelligent dissatisfaction.

Most of the girls were of Irish ancestry and their shared culture was of great effect in the East End. And it was a defining moment for English trade unionism itself, and set the terms for a great dockers’ strike in the East End of the following year. Engels described the activity of the match-girls as ‘the light jostle needed for the entire avalanche to move’, soon to be demonstrated.

Meanwhile a shadow had fallen over the East End which claimed the nation’s attention. The brief reign of Jack the Ripper, from August to November of that year, aroused popular terror on an unprecedented scale. It was as if all the presumed darkness of the area had become concentrated in this elusive anonymous figure, and the fact that he was not captured led to the fugitive suspicion that the neighbourhood itself had killed the women. It was a catalyst for the nervous worn-out excitement that characterized the period.

Strike followed strike in the context of popular socialism and the demand for ‘democracy’ of some form or other. By 1887 the various unions in the cotton trade came together. A strike for a nine-hour day among engineering workers was successful even without the intervention of trade unions. In the same year Ben Tillett, a working docker, formed the Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union at Tilbury Docks. These working men became central in the emergence of what became known as the ‘new unionism’. It was designed to organize those trades which the old unionism had neglected or forgotten, under the principles of a legal minimum wage and a compulsory eight-hour day. The old unions, known as ‘the aristocracy of labour’, had ignored the poorer workers, the sweated labour, the unskilled workmen. John Burns and Tom Mann of the Social Democratic Foundation accused their own union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, of ‘selfish and snobbish desertion’ of the poor workers. In that year, too, the Labour Electoral Association urged: ‘working men must form themselves … as centres to organise the people’.

In 1888 the Miners’ Federation was formed. When Will Thorne started the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers Union at Beckton Gas Works in the early summer of 1889, he recalled that ‘the news spread like wildfire in the public houses, factories and works in Canning Town, Barking, East and West Ham, everyone was talking about the union’. To their surprise their demand for an eight-hour day was conceded without a struggle. The Great London Dock Strike took place in the same summer, when the dockers walked out for the sake of the ‘dockers’ tanner’; they were part of the wave of action which had begun with the match-girls in the year before. Ben Tillett had organized the poorer-paid employees of the dock, and when he called them out on strike they were soon joined by workers on both sides of the Thames. Their demands were a wage of sixpence per hour and a minimum of four hours for those unloading cargo.

They were one of the most exploited groups of workers, who relied upon casual labour and an inhumane system of crowding around the dock gates to see who would be hired. Ben Tillett stated: ‘we are driven into a shed, iron-barred from end to end, outside of which a foreman or contractor walks up and down with the air of a dealer in a cattle market, picking and choosing from a crowd of men, who, in their eagerness to obtain employment, trample each other underfoot, and where like beasts they fight for the chances of a day’s work’.

It was one of the last aspects of an earlier era to remain beside the Thames. But it was soon removed. For the first time since 1797, the Port of London was closed. Cardinal Manning, and the Salvation Army, became involved in the negotiation; Manning became a familiar figure in incidents of social dispute and G. K. Chesterton gave a memorable description of him resembling ‘a ghost clad in flames’ as the people in Kensington High Street dropped to their knees before him. We may presume that some of the kneeling crowd were the Irish poor, hoping for some measure of wage reform to alleviate their bitter poverty. The crisis was settled in September, with the unanticipated emergence of the dockers’ union as a force for the new century. Once again the conscience of the middle class was awakened and £18,000 was contributed to the union funds. And then the strike was finally won when £30,000 was sent by the labour unions of Australia to their comrades in need.

Engels wrote in December 1889: ‘the people are throwing themselves into the job in quite a different way, are leading far more colossal masses into the fight, are shaking society much more deeply, are putting forward much more far-reaching demands …’ The Annual Register put it differently: ‘For … almost the first time the representatives of the skilled workmen showed a readiness to throw in their lot with, and to support, unskilled labour …’ This was essentially the face of new unionism. It was designed to assist those who obtained no help hitherto, and it combined an economic with a political message. The old union leaders dressed like the employers; they wore expensive overcoats, gold watch-chains and tall hats. The new unionists simply looked like workmen. It was said that it was easy to break one stick, but not fifty sticks in a bundle. And the cry went up, from Liverpool to London: ‘Unionism for all!’ The movement even affected life at Westminster. A group of seventy radical Liberals voted together on social issues and even elected their own whip. It was in the spring of 1890 that the first ‘May Day’ demonstration was held in England, with ‘dense crowds as far as the eye could see marching up with music and banners, over a hundred thousand …’ That, at least, is what Engels saw. This was the period, too, when Joseph Chamberlain recommended a united Unionist front against the threat of socialism as well as of Home Rule for Ireland, and by the time of the next general election he had formed a coalition under the Conservative leadership of Lord Salisbury.

The Gladstonian Liberals had compounded the confusion by concocting a group of radical measures that was known as the Newcastle Programme. They included an act for Employers’ Liability for Accidents, Home Rule for Ireland, triennial parliaments, a local veto on the sale of alcohol, the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland and Scotland, as well as various other assorted measures which were designed to increase the Liberal vote for the election of 1892. It was significant only in the sense that, despite Gladstone’s sense of righteous mission on the subject, Home Rule was only one among other issues. It might seem, in fact, that the whole subject had been forgotten by everyone except the immediate protagonists. In a speech at the Mansion House Salisbury announced that he had never seen Ireland so peaceful. The vigour and calculation of Balfour’s rule as Irish secretary impressed all, at least all those who were ready to be impressed, as a great token of imperium in action. The majority of the English, as usual, treated the whole business with indifference.

In the 1880s and 1890s, too, the advent of socialist tracts and pamphlets marked a change of political tone. Engels connected the new dispensation to the gradual collapse of Britain’s imperial power. He insisted that the loss of Britain’s industrial and trade monopoly, so much a feature of the 1850s and 1860s, was ‘the secret of the present sudden emergence of a socialist movement here’. This was by no means the principal or only explanation, but it was part of the transvaluation of all values that characterized the years before the First World War. The poorly paid or the unemployed were really no longer viewed as a threat; they were being socialized, and those who had become attached to a union were also becoming part of the community. That may be one of the reasons why the middle class furnished the new unions with funds; it may have been done out of pity and charity but there may also have been an iota of self-defence. This covert form of self-preservation was one of the elements in what sceptics called ‘claptrap morality’.

In one of Gladstone’s speeches an observer noted that ‘his head looked like a white eagle perched on a black stump’. He refused all talk of resignation. He did, however, decide to migrate to the South of France for a holiday. When Gladstone returned from Biarritz in February 1892, his ministers were eager for news of his intentions, but he ‘talked almost entirely of trees’. His ministers were now impatient for him to be gone, as soon as possible, but he remained aloof. Rosebery said that he was in a condition of ‘righteous wrath’ and was still resolved to lead his party into the election of that summer. There were many, including the queen, who were astonished by the spectacle of a man in his eighties wishing to administer the nation and the empire – and this was for the fourth time. At the beginning of June 1892, Gladstone refused to take up the cause of legal eight-hour days because he was too busy with Irish affairs. Yet all was not well. He was being driven through the streets of Chester a few days later, when an old woman hurled a piece of hard gingerbread at him; it struck his left eye, and from the time of that blow his eyesight began to diminish. The election campaign was about to begin.

He did not win the election of July 1892, but he did not lose it; he gained the largest number of seats but did not command a majority without the support of the Irish Nationalists. Salisbury refused to resign and ensconced himself in the Commons waiting for a parliamentary vote of no confidence to eject him. In the middle of August he eventually received his quietus, and Gladstone returned with a minority government which he regarded as ‘too small’. Victoria was in any case horrified at the result. She declared that the incoming government would be filled by ‘greedy place-makers who are republicans at heart’. She could not yet bring herself to ‘send at once for that dreadful old man … whom she can neither respect nor trust’. Of course she had to resign herself to the situation and to the constitutional proprieties, but she disliked him. She thought the relationship between them was a sham, and that he was a sham.

Nevertheless, his inner will, combined with external victory, seemed to revive him a little. A contemporary journalist, Henry Lucy, noted that ‘in appearance he looks younger rather than older as the weeks pass. His voice has gained in richness and vigour, while his mind seems to have grown in activity and resource.’ In effect Gladstone ran a government with Irish Nationalist support, a most difficult position to maintain. Yet this late bloom could not last. He grew angry and on more than one occasion threatened to resign. Lord Acton described him as ‘wild, violent, inaccurate, sophistical, evidently governed by resentment’.

One of the more significant results of the election of 1892 was the election of Keir Hardie to the seat of West Ham South. He stood as an independent but he soon became involved in the creation of an Independent Labour party which would stand apart from Liberals as well as Conservatives. He had already created a surprise at Westminster by arriving in a cloth cap and tweed jacket, and his clothes perhaps marked his sense of vocation. The inaugural conference of the Independent Labour party was opened on 14 January 1893. Its purpose was to create a party majority on the necessity of labour reform, which meant they were more intent upon alliance with the trade unions than with the myriad socialist parties which had really become talking shops.

Gladstone was still in the thrall of Home Rule. He had given his assent to the Newcastle Programme but his heart was not in it. Chamberlain pressed him for the details of the imminent Home Rule Bill: ‘How long are you going to allow ducks and drakes to be made by the Irish party of all your British legislation?’ Gladstone introduced his Second Home Rule Bill in February 1893. He and Chamberlain were now pitted against each other as in some tableau of age and relative youth. ‘I say that never in the history of the world’, Chamberlain declaimed, ‘has a risk so tremendous been encountered with such a light hearted indifference to its possible results’. The Second Reading was carried for Gladstone, with the help of the Irish Nationalists, by a margin of forty-three votes. The members of the Stock Exchange marched in formation and burnt the bill in front of the Guildhall. The bill slowly went forward, but not without great bitterness and recrimination. A fist fight broke out on the floor of the Commons, much to the horror of the public gallery. The bill was already expiring but the House of Lords killed it by a majority of ten to one. There was no public outcry. English indifference effectively put the bill out of its misery, and Gladstone was heard to mutter: ‘I can do no more for Ireland.’ It seemed that he could do no more for anyone, and there were constant whispers that it was really time for him to go.

The final moment, for him, came when he delivered a letter of resignation to the queen at the beginning of March 1894. She accepted it in good spirits and seemed not at all perturbed by his resignation. ‘Mr Gladstone has gone out,’ she told the archbishop of Canterbury with a laugh. ‘Disappeared all in a moment.’ He was deeply upset by her lack of concern and of any attempt at commiseration or congratulation. He had stumbled a weary way and had become only the queen’s donkey. At a melancholy and lachrymose cabinet meeting, whose tears he did not appreciate, he gave his colleagues notice of his decision. Without the captain of so many years the ship seemed to drift. No one seemed capable of command.

On 15 March Lord Rosebery travelled to Windsor and kissed hands with the queen. She liked him well enough, even though she had no time for the party he represented. Rosebery had the advantage of being, in the queen’s eyes, the least objectionable Liberal. She said only that ‘she does not object to Liberal measures which are not revolutionary & she does not think it possible that Lord Rosebery will destroy well-tried, valued and necessary institutions …’ Rosebery was the Whig non plus ultra, regarding Conservatives as vulgar and other less aristocratic Liberals with only distant affection. He had also gained attention and admiration in the country for his handling of a long and complicated coal strike. So he became the chosen one. He had shown much promise in the cabinet but now, at the pinnacle of his career, he spoke with an uncertain voice. He was not sure what to do. His predecessor had so dominated the party that serious questions of policy had not been debated. Yet he was witty, and articulate, with an enviable ability to turn a phrase. In demeanour and dress he was of the 1890s. He was not Gladstone or Disraeli, or even Salisbury; he was not solid or necessarily reliable. He even looked flirtatious, and there were strange rumours about his relationship with his private secretary, the older son of the marquess of Queensberry.

When out of temper, he was irritable and impatient. The Spectator described him as a ‘butterfly Prime Minister, ephemeral in his essence’. In fact the Rosebery administration lasted for only fifteen months. The burden of his office proved too much for him, and he made the unpardonable blunder of stating that ‘the majority of Members of Parliament elected from England proper are hostile to Home Rule’. So the last eighteen months of frantic negotiation and political planning had in effect been for nothing. The new prime minister had no fire. He had no fight in his belly. He never really knew what he wanted, and the irritation he felt against other people was in reality irritation with himself. The cabinet was always in a state of indecision and disarray; he was now considered both too aloof and too flippant. He informed the queen, in the formal third person, that ‘Lord Rosebery in the meantime is shut up in a House almost unanimously opposed to his ministry and, for all political purposes, might as well be in the Tower of London.’ He could not have succeeded because he was oversensitive, resentful of opposition and inclined to paranoia. ‘He is’, Rosebery told the queen, ‘as Prime Minister more unfortunately situated than any man who ever held that high office.’ He could not sleep, and remained awake for nights at a time brooding and worrying. ‘I am unfit for human society,’ he told a colleague. This was not a good sign for a prime minister. Yet his sense of duty forced him forward.

On 19 February he summoned the cabinet and read out a prepared statement: ‘I cannot call to mind a single instance in which any individual in the party or the Ministry has spoken even casually in my defence within the walls of Parliament … The difficulties to which I allude have been hard to bear, indeed I could not undertake to face another session like the last.’ It was a strangely maudlin report from any prime minister, and confirmed his unfitness to govern. He was all bluster and self-pity. He was persuaded not to resign, for the time being, but a week later his body capitulated where his mind did not. He collapsed with influenza and the debilitating effect of the illness stayed with him. He said that he understood why people in public life committed suicide. On 21 June the secretary for War, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was censured by the Commons over a shortage of cordite, and on the following day Rosebery persuaded his cabinet to resign en bloc as a matter of confidence. A few hours later the queen sent a message inviting Salisbury to form another administration.

At the subsequent election in July 1895 a Liberal majority of forty-three was transformed into a Unionist majority of 152, which must be recorded as one of the most considerable reversals in English political history. Rosebery and his colleagues felt nothing but relief. When Chamberlain joined the new government, the pact between the Conservative and Liberal Unionists was sealed, and a formidable coalition emerged. Rosebery admitted that the Liberal party had become ‘all legs and wings, a daddy-long-legs fluttering among a thousand flames’. He always did have a talent for phrase-making. He had also invented a phrase, ‘the clean slate’, which might have been intended for Salisbury himself, who remained as prime minister for the next seven years.

27

Lost illusions

In the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, the heart of the late Victorian world was stripped bare. Wilde’s Irishness set him apart in England, and ensured that he looked from a distance at the customs and conventions of his adopted country. Of all people he recognized the follies of Victorian society and the vices it concealed. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was so funny that English audiences forgot – at least for the duration of the play – that they were laughing at every institution and value they held sacred. But of course it is a mistake to reveal to your contemporaries that their ideals are illusions and their understanding all vanity.

Like many of his generation, as a young man he donned the cloak of aestheticism, commonly known then as ‘art for art’s sake’. Art was to be divorced from morality and, as a result, had no social or political content to convey. Since Britain was going through another phase of its long industrial revolution (some historians have referred to it as the second industrial revolution), in which objects were made by machines rather than by craftsmen or artists, the divorce or disengagement from social circumstances might have been predicted.

After achieving fame, in the 1880s, as the popular spokesman of the Aesthetic Movement, Wilde became the unofficial leader of the Decadent movement of the 1890s, which can roughly be dated from the publication of the first magazine version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in June 1890. He has been identified therefore as a writer of the fin de siècle, who delighted in artifice and parody, celebrated style and pastiche, and mocked the values of previous decades. In Wilde’s time the end of Victorianism (and all it had come to represent) was in sight but nothing had taken its place. It was a time of spiritual, moral, social and artistic chaos, when even the most formidable conviction began to crumble, slide and eventually dissolve. It could be said that he lived in a worn-out society, theatrical in its art, theatrical in its life, theatrical even in its piety. The meanings of the nineteenth century had been hollowed out. Everything seemed to be on display, like the halls of Swan and Edgar’s. Wilde knew by heart the lesson of Balzac’s villainous hero Vautrin: ‘There are no longer any laws, merely conventions: nothing but form’. He responded to the theatricality around him by turning his conversation into an art, his personality into a symbol, and his life into a mystery play.

The fin de siècle of the nineteenth century was in part represented by the Yellow Book which flourished in the 1890s as the leading journal for aestheticism, decadence and symbolism – a trinity of terror for those who maintained a solid mid-Victorian sensibility. In March 1894 its first editorial announced that the aim of the magazine was ‘to depart as far as may be from the bad old traditions of periodical literature … It will be charming, it will be daring, it will be distinguished.’ It was not greeted with any great enthusiasm, and was discounted by some as a pile of ‘hysterical and nonsensical matter’. Its first art editor was Aubrey Beardsley, and he has been considered the progenitor of the startling yellow covers which were already associated with the more flamboyant French fiction of the era. Among the contributors in its short life were Max Beerbohm, Henry James, H. G. Wells and William Butler Yeats. It represented the gay death of the nineteenth century.

It might be presumed that Oscar Wilde was on the list of the Yellow Book’s contributors, but in fact he never took part in the enterprise and professed to despise it. Nevertheless Wilde remained, and still remains, the defining figure of the last years of the century, simply because he turned its values on their head. He was the ‘Other’ of late Victorian culture, dominated as it was by jingoism, John Bullism, Pooterism and black and white Puritan morality. He was enamoured of ‘beauty’ and ‘art’ rather than ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, which he regarded as second-rate, and baneful fictions.

We could easily extend the list of binary opposites further – Wilde was queer, rather than straight, and through his openly homosexual lifestyle he boldly challenged middle-class domesticity. He was concerned with surfaces rather than depths, the body more than the soul, and aesthetics instead of ethics. He was ‘serious’ about everything Victorians regarded as ‘trivial’, and vice versa. His addictions to ambiguity, indeterminacy and inconsistency were no less subversive. Rather than excavating and expressing a single, monolithic self, in his life and writings he effortlessly invented and discarded identities, referring to insincerity as ‘a method by which we can multiply our personalities’. His mercurial genius naturally expressed itself in the drama and the dialogue, in the paradox and in the parable, genres and forms in which he could perform a number of his selves and present a debate between doctrines rather than a single view. It is no surprise, then, that many commentators portray Wilde as a confirmed Nietzschean engaged in a furious war against Victorian morality, and in the transvaluation of late nineteenth-century middle-class Christian values.

Wilde was so much the master of his period that he could effortlessly adopt all its disguises and convey all its effects. He delighted in trying out and testing the limits of each literary form. He brought hilarious and provocative comedy back to the English stage, from which it had been exiled for many years. He invented the prose poem in English, and was a pioneer of symbolic drama. He was also one of the first authors to write a ‘French’ novel, Dorian Gray being French in subject and style, if not in language. That novel was fiercely satirical of English middle-class mores. The 1890 magazine version attracted outraged and outrageous reviews, in a large part because of its homoerotic overtones, which would have been even more pronounced had the publisher not censored Wilde’s radical and explicit typescript. Yet the outcry did not stop Wilde adding new chapters to the story the following year, for its publication as a novel in book format, in which he characterizes England as ‘the native land of the hypocrite’, and the English as a race that ‘balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy’.

In 1891 Wilde also composed his political essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ for the Fortnightly Review, in which he attacked the ‘stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism’ that pervaded English culture. Wilde rails against English public opinion, which, he says, exercises a ‘tyranny’ over art, politics and ‘people’s private lives’ through the press.

‘The Soul of Man’ expresses Wilde’s commitment to an anarchistic form of socialism. Its attacks on hypocrisy were however directly related to Parnell, and at the journalists and MPs who hounded him out of politics after his relationship with the married Kitty O’Shea became public knowledge at the end of 1890. Wilde’s criticism is a token of his staunch support for Irish Home Rule and of his essential Irishness – something recognized by everyone who knew him well, from the English Alfred Douglas to his compatriots Shaw and Yeats. Wilde’s Irishness allowed him to understand, and satirize, the English of the late Victorian period, because he was an insider-outsider, a man who shared their language but did not share the values and vision that informed and were propagated by that language.

On this language issue Wilde made some interesting pronouncements. ‘French by sympathy,’ he described himself in the winter of 1891, ‘I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.’ During his American lecture tour of 1882 he also declared: ‘I do not know anything more wonderful, or characteristic of the Celtic genius than the quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue. The Saxon took our lands and left them desolate. We took their language and added new beauty to it.’ So English–Irish relations offer a political context for Wilde’s paradoxes and his lush prose poetry. He was a colonial subject inverting and embellishing the language of the ruler, exposing its hidden prejudices and doublespeak. It is no coincidence that Wilde (like Samuel Beckett) wrote in French as well as English, and that in the early Nineties he contemplated becoming a French citizen when his French-language play Salomé was banned by the English censor from the London stage. ‘I am not English,’ he told a journalist at this time. ‘I am Irish – which is quite another thing’ – a pointed comment at a time when Ireland was nominally part of a ‘United Kingdom’.

Even as an Irishman Wilde set out to defy late Victorian stereotypes. On the English stage, and in the press, the Irish were often presented as feckless, drunken, sentimental and dirty ‘Paddies’. Wilde, like Parnell, always presented himself as calm, urbane, impeccably dressed; he also discarded his native brogue soon after matriculating at Oxford. Wilde’s philosophical and historical outlook, which was rigorously intellectual and scientific rather than emotional and intuitive, can also be seen in this context. ‘England is the land of intellectual fogs,’ he told Shaw, and he felt it was Celts like themselves who, contrary to popular prejudice, were best placed, because of their disinterested minds, to blow those fogs away.

In his 1895 appearances at the Old Bailey, Wilde seemed to revel in presenting himself as the subversive ‘Other’ of the late Victorian bourgeoisie, challenging, from the witness box, the ‘seven deadly virtues’ so dear to their heart. Rather than being diligent, he boasted in the courtroom of frittering his time away in restaurants. Where the bourgeoisie were thrifty, he proudly announced he spent £50 a week at the Savoy. Instead of associating with respectable members of his own class he socialized and slept with young men from the gutter. In preference to a noble life guided by notions of duty and responsibility, he declared that pleasure was the only thing one should live for, and self-realization the primary aim of existence. The fact that Wilde realized himself through homosexual rather than heterosexual relationships naturally made things much worse. At his first trial, the Pooterish men who comprised the jury – there was a stockbroker, a bank manager and several ‘gentlemen’ from Clapton – must have thought that the seven deadly sins were being paraded before them.

Wilde’s eventual conviction for ‘gross indecency’ caused a moral panic in late Victorian England. The nature of his offence was abhorrent to the respectable; moreover the trials had suggested that Wilde was a leading figure in a vast network of gentlemen who not only loved other men, but preferred men from the lowest orders. Only six years before Wilde’s trial, in what became known as the ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’, a brothel of boys working for the Post Office was revealed as the trysting place for members of the aristocracy, and even of the royal family. It was as if the hierarchies of power and society had been subverted and made rotten to the extent that aristocracy itself might be seen as a gigantic confidence trick. It was one of the first occasions, outside the enchanted realm of fiction, when the private lives of gentlemen, the staple of society, were investigated and found to be false and hollow.

These scandals and trials also represented, albeit in subliminal fashion, the overturning of sexual roles which the ‘New Woman’ and the loosening of the matrimonial laws pointed towards. It is no coincidence perhaps that Wilde himself was a supporter of the ‘New Woman’ to such an extent that soon after his conviction Punch announced: ‘THE END OF THE NEW WOMAN – The crash has come at last.’ The New Woman was the representative of advanced and adventurous ideas not unconnected in the public mind with decadent sexuality. The emancipated woman, as she was also known, challenged the conventional ideas of marriage, respectability, and legal and educational inequality. Cartoons in the satirical press were filled with images of women riding bicycles or wearing bloomers or sporting wire-framed spectacles; they were considered mannish or part of a ‘shrieking sisterhood’. Many wanted careers rather than continuous childbirth. It is interesting to note then that it is women who are the true protagonists of Wilde’s dramas, from Salome and Mrs Erlynne to Lady Bracknell and the Courtesan-Saint. They are witty and unafraid. They control the worlds Wilde portrays. They manipulate and dominate the men. So much has been said of Victorian patriarchy and the subjugation of women that it might be interesting to inquire into Victorian matriarchy and the subjugation of men. Females were the lawgivers of society – from the mansions of the West End depicted by Wilde to the back alleys of the East End – and their power was all the greater for being largely unacknowledged.

28

The terrible childbed

Salisbury’s cabinet prompted the great war at the end of the century. The Cape of Good Hope, known familiarly as the Cape Colony, was a British colony whose inhabitants were largely Afrikaners. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were neighbouring republics established by the Boers, the first Dutch-speaking settlers in southern Africa, in their quest for self-defence and self-definition. This led directly to the First Boer War, in which the British were soundly defeated and were forced to accept Boer control of the Transvaal under British suzerainty.

The discovery of diamonds made the Cape Colony rich under its prime minister, Cecil Rhodes, but then, fifteen years later, gold similarly transformed the fortunes of the Transvaal. English settlers rushed in with so great a thirst for the gold stuff that they soon formed the majority of the adult white population of what was still a Boer republic under the presidency of Paul Kruger. The English, known as ‘Uitlanders’, were obliged to pay 90 per cent of the taxation. They were susceptible to hastily imposed taxes, but they had no role in the government and no equality with the Dutch. So two hostile white tribes lived in the midst of a much greater black population. The tensions grew apace as the mining of gold became more and more successful.

This was the scene when plans were formed to invade the Transvaal and seize it for Britain. Leander Starr Jameson led a band of mercenaries into the territory in order to foment a rebellion among the Uitlanders and the rest of the British settlers. Five hundred men, with six Maxim guns, had invaded Kruger’s republic in order to overawe his people of the rifle and the Book. News of them reached the Boer government of Pretoria within a day, and they were still nowhere near their destination of Johannesburg, approximately 34 miles away. The raid, at the very end of 1895, was a complete failure from the start. Jameson and the other conspirators were surrounded and captured by the Boers who dispatched them to London for condign punishment. On the news of the defeat the Kaiser sent a telegraph to Kruger, congratulating him on his victory. The British press reacted furiously against this German slight, with headlines like ‘Get Ready’, ‘England Yet’ and ‘Hands Off’. The music hall refrain of the period was ‘We’re not going to stand it’. It served the German purpose, however, to whip up its own public opinion in response and to justify an increase in its naval power.

The Jameson Raid was financed and authorized by the magnate who had made a fortune out of diamonds, Alfred Beit, and by Cecil Rhodes himself. Yet it was generally believed to have been despatched at the instigation of the British politicians at Whitehall, particularly that of the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Salisbury, as prime minister, might have been suspected of knowledge if not of complicity, but it seems that he was only vaguely aware of the plans for the raid.

The lack of support for the British raid, which had all the characteristics of an invasion, and the universal obloquy which it attracted, emphasized what Arthur Balfour and others called ‘our national isolation’. The isolation had suddenly become more intense. Kruger and the Transvaal were the heroes of the hour, and the British were condemned as mischievous, incompetent, weak and, more precisely, conspiratorial. It seems probable that, after all, Chamberlain and the Whitehall gang had been in close contact with Rhodes and Beit. They were everywhere denounced.

These were the conditions leading to the Second Boer War, which was waged from 1899 to 1902. Some were ready and eager for battle. Jan Smuts, for the Boers, declared: ‘our volk throughout South Africa must be baptized with the baptism of blood and fire before they can be admitted among the great peoples of the world’. Kruger realized from the logistics of the Jameson Raid that his military forces, largely volunteer, were not altogether adequate. So he set about creating a viable military presence in the Transvaal. He was buying arms from Germany and elsewhere; Chamberlain informed Salisbury that Transvaal ‘had a stock of artillery, rifles and ammunitions of all sorts enough to furnish a European army’. The English were more conciliatory, and had appointed Alfred Milner as high commissioner for Southern Africa and governor of Cape Colony as a more sympathetic figure than his predecessor. Nevertheless, he was an English imperialist who considered himself to be part of ‘a superior race’ who ought to govern southern Africa.

His aspiration was strengthened with a petition of 21,000 British subjects, the Uitlanders, asking their home country to intervene in the tortuous affairs of Southern Africa. Milner and Kruger met at Bloemfontein to attempt to settle their differences. Milner’s military secretary wrote: ‘the conference goes on its rather weary way … meanwhile our Uitlanders will lose patience and upset the game’. Kruger, as rugged as an African hippo, remained obdurate; Milner believed that he would have to put more effort into ‘screwing’ Kruger. This was Chamberlain’s word. He might draw inspiration from events elsewhere. The English military had recently enjoyed some success. At the beginning of September 1898, Kitchener destroyed the Mahdist army at Omdurman; two days later the British and Egyptian flags were flying over the palace at Khartoum, which for Kitchener at least was some revenge for the death of Gordon. The victory was followed by a successful confrontation with the French in Fashoda, where the French sailed away to avoid a fight. All this put some spirit into the military authorities, and they were growing increasingly impatient with the negotiations between Kruger and Milner. It was said that Kruger would ‘bluff up to the cannon’s mouth’, a phrase of Cecil Rhodes; at the same time the typewriters of the English press were growing hotter in their calls for action.

The death of Gladstone, in 1898, intervened. He had returned to Hawarden Castle to entertain the colonial premiers who had come to England for the Diamond Jubilee. In his old age his major preoccupation had changed from Irish Home Rule to the prevalence of jingoism which swept the press and the music halls and filtered into streets with the orange peel and the bunting. He had never really been interested in imperial attitudes. He was suffering from facial neuralgia which soon metamorphosed into cancer. He died on 19 May 1898, at the age of eighty-eight, and in the spirit of the new age was taken on a London Underground train before his funeral at Westminster Abbey. For some he represented one of the last obstacles to the steady progress of the state, and for others one of the last memorials to a once resplendent nation.

The time had come to call Kruger’s bluff. He had organized a ‘foreign brigade’, among them troops from Ireland, Africa, Germany and Prussia. In retaliation the British brought on the forces of the empire: Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and Indians. Milner wrote in a memo that ‘the case for intervention is overwhelming’. The British had become the white helots, ‘Uitlanders’ who had no rights. British regiments were despatched from Bombay and Calcutta, and Smuts sent a secret memorandum in which he stated: ‘South Africa stands on the eve of a frightful blood-bath.’ They would either be a defeated and hated race, the pariahs of Africa, or the sturdy founders of a United South Africa. Salisbury wrote in a memorandum: ‘I feel convinced that the Dutch leaders in Transvaal, Orange State, and Cape Colony, have got an understanding together and have agreed to make a long pull and a strong pull to restore Dutch supremacy in South Africa. If that is their view, war must come; and we had better take it at a time when we are not quarrelling with anyone else.’ He had written two months before: ‘I see before us the necessity for considerable military efforts – and all for people whom we despise, and for territory which will bring no profit and no power to England.’ For Salisbury it was largely a question of prestige rather than power. It was to determine the identity of what was known as ‘Boss’ in southern Africa.

The Boers delivered an ultimatum, but on the same day the British troopships made landfall at Durban before they moved inwards into Africa. War was declared on 11 October. The Boers, without uniforms and with precious little leadership, had the initial advantage. They knew the country; they knew the places for ambush and retreat which were denied to the 20,000 British and the 10,000 Indians who followed them. The Boers were also very good shots, accustomed as they were to hunting the springbok and the wildebeest. The same readiness and proficiency were not evident on the British side. The physical condition of the volunteers was appalling: when 12,000 came forward in Manchester, 8,000 were rejected as unfit. The most significant failure of the British in South Africa was the poor quality of the troops, at a time when army standards had been deliberately lowered. It was considered shameful and revived the ‘Condition of England’ question in the more direct terms. A correspondent in London wrote to Milner: ‘People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering, while ever echoed round the shrill and awful cry of “Terrible Reverse of British Troops”.’

As garrison commander Robert Baden-Powell, aware of the large number of Boer forces, set up his headquarters at Mafeking to facilitate the arrival of British ships and to deter the population from aiding the Boers. At the beginning of October 1899 it was surroundedand shelled. No one then believed that ‘the Siege of Mafeking’ would endure 217 days. There was bad news elsewhere. ‘Mournful Monday’ was followed by ‘Black Week’ at the beginning of December which claimed 3,000 lives. An epidemic of enteric fever was meanwhile killing fifty soldiers a day who occupied Bloemfontein. Nowhere was safe. ‘What’s them ’ere blokes on that bloomin’ hill?’ The English tents were on the slopes of Mount Impati, in the British colony of Natal, and now the Boers had crept out of cover to remove them. The English repulsed them, but at the cost of fifty-one dead and more than two hundred wounded. It was the beginning of a war played out to the accompaniment of drums, mountain guns, the Boers’ ‘Long Toms’, rumbling carts, 94-pounders, the snorts and whinnies of the horses and pack mules.

When the English retreated into Ladysmith from the mountain it was reported that ‘they came back slowly, tired and disheartened and sick with useless losses’. The siege of Ladysmith then began. It was not a little war. Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley were for that period the arsenals of empire in an otherwise hostile terrain. It was a great war fought from an impossibly long distance. It riveted the attention of the world, much of which was wishing and hoping for the demise of the British empire. In the ensuing battle of Ladysmith the British were driven back into the town, with many dead or injured, where they endured a siege of 118 days.

The bad news of Ladysmith, and subsequent defeats, shook the nation as it had never been shaken before. Victoria had said: ‘we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat’, but even her confidence was modified. ‘No news today,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘only lists of casualties.’ The public reaction was more severe. Something had gone terribly wrong. The prime minister, Salisbury, seemed sanguine and almost listless, feeling that from the start he had been outwitted by ‘Milner and his Jingo supporters’. Yet he saw the point. Any defeat would cast a shadow over the country’s imperial supremacy, to which, of all recent prime ministers, he most fervently subscribed.

As for the public, it was a calamitous awakening. The editor of The Times commented at a later date that ‘our national life and thought never were the same again’. The veil of British mastery had been torn, revealing blunder after blunder. To the rest of the world it revealed that the British were as bad they had always believed them to be – blustering and hypocritical and essentially incompetent. One commentator, Karl Pearson, noted: ‘the spirits of one and all, whatever their political party or their opinions might be, were depressed in a manner probably never experienced by those of our countrymen now living’. A diplomat, Cecil Spring-Rice, remarked in December 1899: ‘One lies alone with a living and growing fear staring one in the face.’

One phrase, ‘splendid isolation’, had been taken up and circulated, but it steadily grew out of favour; it suggested an absence of policy rather than any positive contribution. In a speech to his Birmingham constituents in the spring of 1898 Chamberlain declared:

Now the first point I want to impress on you is this – it is the crux of the situation – since the Crimean war, nearly fifty years ago, the policy of this country has been a policy of strict isolation. We have had no allies. I am afraid we have had no friends … All the powerful states of Europe have made alliances, and as long as we keep outside these alliances – as long as we are envied by all and suspected by all – and as long as we have interests which at one time or another conflict with the interests of all – we are liable to be confronted at any moment with a combination of Great Powers … We stand alone.

It was one of the most important speeches on foreign policy made by an English politician. He spoke the truth as he knew it, and it did not need an omniscient observer to realize that, to the rest of the world, England was in danger of being overwhelmed. Her isolation, and the insignificance of her relatively small army, were well known. The dissensions among her politicians and the dangers of her street-bred masses were discussed, and the perils of her navy in defending the British empire throughout the world were obvious. Germany was the virile European state, and Russia was making its way to China and to India. There was hostility between the United Kingdom and the United States, and a civil servant in Pretoria remarked: ‘the fall of England shall be the crown of the end of the nineteenth century’.

At the end of January 1900 the two houses of parliament met for their last session in the reign of Victoria, who had been on the throne for sixty-six years. This was the parliamentary session in which Chamberlain, as colonial secretary, was almost universally reviled for the failures of the Boer War. He held back his head, and his eyes were closed. It was said that he looked like a soldier under fire.

Yet the mood of war soon changed. As in other recent British wars, initial defeats were succeeded by a national revival. Only a few days after Chamberlain’s speech on foreign policy, Field Marshal Roberts swept on to Bloemfontein, and the advance continued to Pretoria and Johannesburg. Within forty-eight hours came the relief of Kimberley and the liberation of Ladysmith; on 17 May 1900, Mafeking, besieged by the Boers, was relieved. Baden-Powell had held out for 217 days. It was perhaps the greatest victory of the war, and Baden-Powell became a national hero. The church bells rang, the schools closed for the afternoon, and the people danced around makeshift bonfires. Much of the anxiety, which had been the most deleterious of all responses to the war, was lifted. It was a time of ‘dancing, jumping, screaming in a delirium of unrestrained joy’. The effect was tremendous, greater than the celebrations of 1918 or 1945. London went ‘maficking’.

No one then knew or cared about the camps that Kitchener had constructed for the women and children of the enemy, but they soon became known as ‘concentration camps’, and were reviled as a new horror of war. Even the new leader of the Liberal party, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, spoke out against ‘methods of barbarism’, a phrase which delivered a huge shock to the members of his own party and to interested observers who believed that the imperial path was the way to glory.

The guerrilla war itself, at which the Boers were supremely adept, ended at the Peace of Vereeniging in May 1902. The independence of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were ceded to the British, but only with the promise of self-government and, in the immediate future, with copious funds for the restoration of the Boer farms, withered in the conflict, together with a general reconstruction and restocking of the two republics. England had been humiliated, its army had been ill-equipped and ill-trained, its policy of civilian incarceration had been condemned by the major nations. It was a terrible childbed for the twentieth century.

Salisbury had said: ‘you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying’. The living nations had enlisted science and industry, railways and weapons, that increased their range and power. The dying nations – well, they were obvious. Spain, China, Portugal, Turkey, were apparently all in the throes of senescence. Surely that could not be said of England?

In 1896 Lord Northcliffe established the Daily Mail; it boasted of a readership from Brighton to Newcastle, and at the same time there was some loss of interest in local or what were known as ‘provincial’ affairs. This was also the year when Marconi sailed to England to persuade the General Post Office to take his wireless. The first cinema picture was shown in the West End, and cars were no longer enjoined to bear a red flag in front of them. The world was winning through despite the best endeavours of its statesmen.

In the halls of the old establishment, however, gloom and monotony prevailed as the wheels of administration and empire seemed to grind slowly. Joseph Chamberlain, the most vigorous member of the cabinet, complained: ‘There is little backbone in politics and the great majority are prepared to swallow anything and to stick to the machine.’ The queen herself was perceptibly slowing down, and a visitor reported ‘intense monotony’ at court, where there was ‘a curious charm to our beloved Sovereign in doing the same things on the same day year after year’. The prime minister, the marquess of Salisbury, was becoming more distant from his colleagues and from the affairs of state. He was generally aloof, unwilling to engage with his cabinet or to propose new policies. He had always supposed that new policies were bad policies and his generally weary and negative view of the war added to the twilight world. One backbencher noted: ‘of all futile expedients, party meetings always struck me as being the most futile’. The voice of the Church was muted in the land. Lord Rosebery, stricken with inanition and a sense of failure, had finally abandoned the leadership of the Liberal party in the autumn of 1896. The parliamentary sessions of the next two years were recognized to be the dullest of a dull series. It culminated in the general election of 1900, known as the ‘khaki election’, based upon the ongoing Boer War. Lord Salisbury and his allies, the Liberal Unionists, returned once more to government.

Not everything revolved around politics. There was activity of every kind in other areas of national life. There was a vogue for the ‘new’ in implicit deference to the new century just below the horizon. There was the ‘new woman’ and the ‘new humour’, the ‘new hedonism’ and ‘l’art nouveau’. The ‘new’ was embraced in every aspect of life, in the department stores, in bikes and bloomers. The Kodak camera appeared in 1888. Families became smaller; more space and time and money were left for popular luxuries and distractions from the working day such as theatres, racecourses, pleasure gardens, fairs and music halls. The first motor-car race was held between London and Brighton on Motor-Car Day of 14 November 1896. Seventeen out of thirty cars finished the course. The defining phrase of the period was ‘we moderns’, perhaps given an ironical emphasis, but it was a genuine reaction to the coming death of the century.

Three months before the Second, or Diamond, Jubilee of June 1897 the queen had travelled to the Riviera to meet the members of her multifarious family. But there was a problem. The familiar royal household refused to let the munshi, her Indian servants, dine with them. In one of those acts of fury of which she alone was capable, the queen swept everything off her desk in a gesture of anger; ink-pots, papers, pens and blotting papers were hurled to the ground. It was evidence of the violent fury that she was never able to shake off. The munshi went with her to the South of France.

Envoi

The queen returned from a visit to Ireland in the spring of 1900, and on her return to Windsor Castle she was greeted by the boys of Eton College singing patriotic songs. She leaned out of the window, repeating many times ‘Thank you, thank you.’ The boys were astonished to see one of her Indian servants handing her a whisky and water. On two separate days she reviewed from her carriage a march past from two of the regiments returning from South Africa. The stress of the war had burdened her, and those who knew her best noticed the change. Her lady in waiting, Lady Churchill, remarked to her maid that the queen looked to be ‘a dying woman’. But Lady Churchill died first, of a heart attack, and the queen lamented: ‘that it should happen here is too sad’ and ‘the loss to me is not to be told’. On New Year’s day she had the strength to visit soldiers in a convalescents’ home. They were some of the last of her subjects she ever saw. In the middle of January 1901 she seemed confused, and on the following day took to her bed. At about four in the evening the queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, announced to the family that she was slowly sinking into death. A little while later she opened her eyes and whispered: ‘Sir James, I am very ill.’ She was later heard to murmur, according to her daughter, Princess Louise: ‘Oh I don’t want to die yet. There are several things I want to arrange.’ But there was no time left. There was nothing more to arrange. She died at 6.30 that evening, and with her died an era.

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Pelling, H., The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880–1900 (Oxford, 1966)

——, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain: Essays (London, 1968)

Perkin, H. J., Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1985)

Plumb, J. H., The First Four Georges (London, 1966)

Pollard, A., The Victorians (London, 1970)

Porter, A. N., & Louis, W. R., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999)

Prest, J. M., Lord John Russell (London, 1972)

Ramsay, A. A. W., Sir Robert Peel (London, 1928)

Read, D., Cobden and Bright: a Victorian Political Partnership (London, 1967)

——, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987)

Reay, B., The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990)

Robbins, K., John Bright (London, 1979)

Roberts, A., Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999)

Robson, R. (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark (London, 1967)

Royle, E., Chartism (London, 1980)

Royle, T., The Kitchener Enigma (London, 1985)

——, Crimea: the Great Crimean War 1854–1856 (London, 1999)

Russell, C. A., Science and Social Change: 1700–1900 (Basingstoke, 1983)

Saintsbury, G. E. B., The Earl of Derby (London, 1892)

Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century (Oxford, 1980)

Searle, G. R., Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993)

Shannon, R., Gladstone (2 vols) (London, 1982–99)

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Shenton, C., The Day Parliament Burned Down (Oxford, 2012)

Slater, G., The Growth of Modern England (London, 1932)

Smelser, N. J., Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: an Application of Theory to the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1770–1840 (London, 1959)

Smith, E. A., Lord Grey, 1764–1845 (Oxford, 1990)

——, George IV (New Haven, 1999)

Smith, F. B., The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966)

Somerset, A., The Life and Times of William IV (London, 1980)

Southgate, D., The Passing of the Whigs, 1832–1886 (London, 1962)

Stansky, P., Ambitions and Strategies: the Struggle for the Leadership of the Liberal Party in the 1890s (Oxford, 1964)

——, Gladstone: a Progress in Politics (New York, 1979)

Stewart, R., The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–1867 (London, 1978)

Swartz, M., The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1985)

Sweet, M., Inventing the Victorians (London, 2001)

Taylor, A. J. P., The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954)

Temperley, H. W. V., The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822–1827 (London, 1966)

Temperley, H. W. V., & Penson, L. M., Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902); or, Documents, Old and New (Cambridge, 1938)

Tholfsen, T. R., Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976)

Thompson, D., The Chartists (London, 1984)

Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1980)

Thompson, F. M. L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963)

——, The Rise of Respectable Society: a Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, 1988)

Thornton, A. P., The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: a Study in British Power (London, 1959)

Trevelyan, G. M., British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London, 1922)

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Young, G. M., & Handcock, W. D., Victorian Essays (London, 1962)

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——, Melbourne: a Biography of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (London, 1976)

Index

Aberdeen, George Hamilton Gordon, 4th earl of: and Wellington’s resistance to parliamentary reform, ref1; replaces Palmerston as foreign secretary, ref1; forms government, ref1; character, ref1; and Crimean War, ref1, ref2, ref3; resigns, ref1, ref2; Russell condemns government, ref1

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron, ref1, ref2

Adams, Henry Brooks: The Education of Henry Adams, ref1

Adelaide Gallery, London, ref1

Administrative Reform Association, ref1, ref2

Adullamites (Liberal group), ref1, ref2

Afghan War, Second (1878–80), ref1

Agricultural Holdings Act (1875), ref1

agriculture: prices, ref1; improvements, ref1; unrest, ref1; and depopulation, ref1; life and conditions, ref1; and political power, ref1

Albert Hall, ref1

Albert, Prince Consort: courtship and marriage, ref1; Melbourne’s jealousy of, ref1; critical view of Victoria, ref1; visits Birmingham, ref1; opposed to Palmerston’s policies, ref1; admires Peel, ref1, ref2; and Don Pacifico affair, ref1; accused of conspiracy, ref1; on maladministration in Crimean War, ref1; on Victoria’s criticism of Palmerston, ref1; death, ref1

alcohol: effects, ref1

Alexandria: bombarded (1882), ref1, ref2

Alma, Battle of (1854), ref1

Althorp, John Charles Spencer, Viscount (later 3rd Earl Spencer), ref1, ref2

Amalgamated Society of Engineers, ref1

analytical engine (Babbage’s), ref1

Anglicanism see Church of England

Anglo-Catholicism, ref1

Anning, Joseph, ref1

Anning, Mary, ref1

Annual Register, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Anson, General George, ref1

Anti-Corn Law League, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Anti-League, ref1

Arbuthnot, Charles, ref1

Ardwick, Manchester, ref1

Argyll, George Campbell, 8th duke of, ref1

army: reforms under Cardwell, ref1

Arnold, Matthew, ref1, ref2; Culture and Anarchy, ref1; ‘Dover Beach’ (poem), ref1; Essays in Criticism, ref1

Arnold, Thomas, ref1

Arrow (ship), ref1

art: and human emotion and behaviour, ref1

art nouveau, ref1

Artisans’ Dwellings Act (1875), ref1

Ashanti people (West Africa), ref1

Asquith, Herbert Henry, ref1

Atlantic cable, ref1

Attwood, Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3

Austria: war in Italy, ref1; war with France (1860), ref1; belligerence, ref1

Babbage, Charles, ref1

baby-farming, ref1

Baden-Powell, Lieut. General Robert, ref1

Bagehot, Walter, ref1, ref2; The English Constitution, ref1

Bahadur Shah, king of Delhi, ref1

Bailey, Philip James: Festus, ref1

Balaclava, Battle of (1854), ref1

Balfour, Arthur James, ref1, ref2, ref3

Balkans: crisis (1876), ref1

Baring, Alexander, ref1

Baring, Sir Evelyn (earl of Cromer), ref1; Modern Egypt, ref1

Bazalgette, Joseph, ref1

Bean, John William, ref1

beards and moustaches, ref1

Beardsley, Aubrey, ref1

Beaumont, Gustave de, ref1

Beckett, Samuel, ref1

Bedchamber Crisis, ref1

Beerbohm, Max, ref1, ref2; ‘Enoch Soames’ (story), ref1

Beeton, Isabella Mary: Book of Household Management, ref1

Beit, Alfred, ref1

Bell, Alexander Graham, ref1

Bell, Andrew, ref1

Bennett, Arnold, ref1

Bentham, Jeremy, ref1

Bentinck, Lord George, ref1, ref2, ref3

Berlin Congress (1878), ref1, ref2

Besant, Annie, ref1, ref2

Bible, Holy: critical study of, ref1

Birmingham: workshops, ref1, ref2; governance, ref1; Prince Albert visits, ref1; population, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain in, ref1

Birmingham Political Union, ref1, ref2

Birmingham Star, ref1

Bismarck, Prince Otto von, ref1, ref2

Black Dwarf (periodical), ref1

Blackwood’s Magazine, ref1

Blondin, Charles, ref1

‘Bloody Sunday’ (13 November 1887), ref1

Boer Wars: First (1880), ref1; Second (1899–1902), ref1, ref2

Bolívar, Simon, ref1

Booth, Charles: Life and Labour of the People in London, ref1

Bowring, Sir John, ref1

Boycott, Captain Charles Cunningham, ref1

Bradford, ref1, ref2

Bradlaugh, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3

brass bands, ref1

bread: prices, ref1

Bright, Sir Charles, ref1

Bright, John: criticizes Reform Bill, ref1; opposes Corn Laws, ref1; and Chartist protests, ref1; and Aberdeen’s concern over Russo-Turkish war, ref1; and Gladstone’s reform proposals, ref1; on Gladstone’s legislation, ref1; on public speeches, ref1; death, ref1; condemns bombardment of Alexandria, ref1

Brighton, ref1; Pavilion, ref1

Britain: popular disaffection and unrest, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; birth-rate and population increase, ref1; corruption condemned, ref1; constitution, ref1; improved trade, ref1, ref2; manufacturing dominance, ref1; colonial possessions, ref1; social reforms, ref1, ref2, ref3; individual physique, ref1; economic boom (1844–), ref1; emigration to America, ref1; in Crimean War, ref1; economic decline (1841), ref1; (1870), ref1, ref2; collective activities, ref1; radicalism develops, ref1; isolation in Boer War, ref1

British and Foreign Schools Society, ref1

British Museum: Reading Room, ref1

Brontë, Charlotte: visits Great Exhibition, ref1; Shirley, ref1

Brougham, Henry, Baron: defends Queen Caroline, ref1; anti-slavery, ref1; on urban life, ref1; on middle classes, ref1; Discourse on the Objects, Advantages and Pleasures of Science, ref1

Brown, Ford Madox: The Last of England (painting), ref1

Brown, John, ref1, ref2, ref3

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, ref1

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, ref1

Bryant and May match factory, ref1; women strike, ref1

Buckle, G. E., ref1

Buksh, Mahomet (munshi), ref1

Bulgaria: revolts against Turkey, ref1

Bullen, Frank, ref1

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3; The Last Days of Pompeii, ref1, ref2

Burdett, Sir Francis, ref1

Burke, Edmund, ref1, ref2, ref3

Burns, John, ref1, ref2

Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, ref1; The Way of All Flesh, ref1

Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron: on cant, ref1; political poetry, ref1; Don Juan, ref1

Cambridge University: religious restrictions, ref1

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, ref1, ref2

canals, ref1

Canning, George: attends lectures on finance, ref1; political achievements, ref1, ref2; supports South American independence movement, ref1; favours Catholic emancipation, ref1; on Corn Law, ref1; illness after duke of York’s funeral, ref1; succeeds Liverpool as prime minister, ref1, ref2; death, ref1; loses seat in Parliament, ref1

cant: as national characteristic, ref1

Canton, first Battle of (1857), ref1

Cape Colony, ref1

Cardigan, James Thomas Brudenell, 7th earl of, ref1, ref2

Cardwell, Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3

Carlyle, Thomas: on rise of machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; praises Gladstone, ref1; time-spirit, ref1; on Manchester cotton mills, ref1; criticizes Great Exhibition, ref1; on public opinion, ref1; nostalgia for medievalism, ref1; on ‘pig prosperity’, ref1; language, ref1; moral content, ref1; on work imperative, ref1; Chartism, ref1

Caroline, queen of George IV, ref1, ref3, ref4

Carroll, Lewis, ref1

Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount: as foreign minister, ref1; controls Commons, ref1; on Holy Alliance, ref1; Shelley satirizes, ref1; and attack on Prince Regent, ref1; hassled by London mob, ref1; opposes taxation, ref1; non-involvement in European revolutions, ref1; and George IV’s reaction to wife’s death, ref1; suicide, ref1

Catholic Association (Ireland), ref1, ref2, ref3

Catholic emancipation: as political issue, ref1, ref2, ref3; accepted, ref1, ref2

Catholic Relief Bill (1829), ref1

Catholics: stand for election, ref1; Peel supports, ref1; hierarchy and bishoprics re-established in England and Wales, ref1; see also Anglo-Catholicism

Cato Street Conspiracy (1820), ref1

cattle plague, ref1

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, ref1

Cawnpore, ref1

Cecil, Lord David, ref1

Central Board of Health: established (1848), ref1

Ceylon (Sri Lanka): mortality, ref1

Chadwick, Edwin: Report on the Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain, ref1

Chalmers, Walter, ref1

Chamberlain, Joseph: reorganizes Birmingham, ref1; rise to prominence, ref1; relations with Gladstone, ref1; on Irish problem, ref1; in Gladstone’s cabinet, ref1; political principles, ref1; on Salisbury’s cabinet, ref1; forms coalition under Salisbury, ref1; questions Gladstone on Home Rule Bill, ref1; and Second Boer War, ref1, ref2; on British isolation, ref1

Chapman, Elizabeth, ref1

Charity Organisation Society, ref1

Chartists, Chartism: as protest movement, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; General Convention (1839), ref1, ref2; National Petition, ref1; influence on social reform, ref1; call for general strike (1843), ref1; Kennington Common demonstration (1848), ref1; protest at Sunday Trading Bill, ref1

Cheltenham, ref1

Chesterton, G. K., ref1

Childers, Hugh Culling Eardley, ref1, ref2

children: legislation on labour, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; education, ref1

China: and Second Opium War, ref1

cholera: outbreaks, ref1, ref2

choral societies, ref1

Chorley, Henry, ref1

Christian Socialism, ref1

Christianity: prevalence, ref1

Church, Richard William, dean of St Paul’s, ref1

Church of England (Anglican): lacks enthusiasm, ref1; and dissenting churches, ref1; and Catholic emancipation, ref1; and Anglo-Catholicism, ref1; materialism, ref1; ritualism, ref1; and educational reform, ref1

Church of Ireland: disestablished, ref1

churches: one hundred new, ref1; attendance and decorum in, ref1

Churchill, Jane, Lady, ref1

Churchill, Lord Randolph, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

cigarettes: introduced, ref1

cinema: beginnings, ref1

cities and towns: conditions, ref1, ref3; politics, ref1, ref2

Clapham Sect, ref1, ref2

Clarence, William, duke of see William IV, King

Clarendon, George William Frederick Villiers, 4th earl of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

class (social): divisions, ref1, ref2, ref3

Clerk Maxwell, James: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, ref1

Clerkenwell Explosion (1867), ref1

Cleveland Street Scandal (1889), ref1

Clive, Robert, Baron, ref1

Clough, Arthur Hugh, ref1

cooperative movement, ref1

Cooperative Wholesale Society, ref1

coal mines: working conditions, ref1

Cobbett, William: radicalism and reform proposals, ref1, ref2; denounces Six Acts, ref1; on Castlereagh’s suicide, ref1; resists inauguration of police force, ref1; on demonstrations following parliamentary reform, ref1; on effect of parliamentary reform, ref1; condemns development of modern transport, ref1; on spa towns, ref1; Rural Rides, ref1, ref2

Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, ref1, ref2, ref3

Cobden, Richard: opposes Corn Laws, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; on Peel, ref1; loses seat in Parliament, ref1; taunts Conservatives over Palmerston, ref1

Cockburn, Sir Alexander, ref1

Codrington, Admiral Sir Edward, ref1

Coercion Acts (‘Gagging Acts’, 1817), ref1; (1833), ref1

Cole, Henry, ref1

Colenso, John William, bishop of Natal, ref1

collectivism, ref1

Colley, General Sir George, ref1

Collins, Wilkie, ref1, ref2, ref3; The Woman in White, ref1

Colonial Society, ref1

Combination Acts (1799), ref1; (1825), ref1

Commons, House of: effect of 1832 Reform Act on, ref1; see also Parliament

Comte, Auguste, ref1

concentration camps: in South Africa, ref1

Concert of Europe, ref1

Conservative party: as name, ref1, ref2; under Peel, ref1; supports Corn Laws, ref1; forms government under Derby, ref1; as cohesive party, ref1; and reform proposals, ref1; government under Disraeli (1874), ref1; election defeat (1880), ref1, ref2; election victory (1895), ref1; pact with Liberal Unionists, ref1; see also Tory party

Conspiracy Bill (1858), ref1

Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), ref1

corn: shortage, ref1; prices fall, ref1

Corn Law (1815), ref1

Corn Laws: utilitarians attack, ref1; repealed (1832), ref1, ref2, ref3; campaign against, ref1, ref3; Peel and, ref1, ref3; and Irish famine, ref1

Corporation Act (1828), ref1

Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, ref1

courts of law: reformed, ref1

creation: ideas on, ref1

Crimean War (1854–6), ref1, ref3, ref4

Crimes Act (1887), ref1

Croker, John Wilson, ref1

Cromwell, Oliver, ref1

Cross, R. A., ref1

Crosse, Andrew, ref1

Crystal Palace see Great Exhibition

Cudworth, W. M.: Rambles Round Horton, ref1

Cumberland, Ernest Augustus, duke of, ref1

Cummings, A. N.: ‘On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind’, ref1

Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts, ref1

Cyprus: Britain acquires, ref1

Daily Mail: established, ref1

Daily News, ref1, ref2

Daily Telegraph, ref1

Dalhousie, James Andrew Broun Ramsay, 1st marquess of, ref1

Dalton, John, ref1

Darwin, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3; On the Origin of Species, ref1, ref2, ref3

Dassett, Charles Edward, ref1

Davis, Jefferson, ref1

Davy, Humphry, ref1

death rates, ref1

debt: imprisonment discontinued, ref1

Defenders, the (Ireland), ref1

Delhi: in Indian Mutiny, ref1

Denmark: and loss of Schleswig-Holstein, ref1

de Quincey, Thomas: ‘The English Mail Coach’, ref1

Derby, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, 14th earl of (earlier Lord Edward Stanley): as colonial secretary, ref1; earldom, ref1; heads Conservative party, ref1; political programme, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; forms government (‘Who? Who? ministry’), ref1; calls summer election (1852), ref1; resigns (1852), ref1; on impending Russo-Turkish war, ref1; on war in China, ref1; as prime minister (1858–9), ref1; truce with Palmerston, ref1; and demand for electoral reform, ref1, ref2; third ministry (1866–8), ref1; on maintaining good relations with USA, ref1; resigns (1868), ref1; on Disraeli’s relations with Victoria, ref1; death, ref1

Derby, Edward Henry Stanley, 15th earl of: on Gladstone, ref1; as foreign secretary, ref1; resigns over Disraeli’s eastern policy, ref1; entertains Gladstone, ref1

Dickens, Charles: fictional characters, ref1; death, ref1; denounces English Sunday, ref1; on telegraph, ref1; Melbourne warns Victoria against, ref1; describes early Victorians, ref1; false bookshelves, ref1; on failure of ‘system’, ref1; parodies ‘hard facts’ education, ref1; on the poor, ref1; popular appeal, ref1; on readers at British Museum, ref1; favours South in American Civil War, ref1; Bleak House, ref1; Dombey and Son, ref1, ref2; The Old Curiosity Shop, ref1; The Pickwick Papers, ref1

difference engine (Babbage’s), ref1

Disraeli, Benjamin (1st earl of Beaconsfield): on Lord Liverpool, ref1; on nature of Whigs, ref1; on composition of Commons, ref1; on workhouses, ref1; on Irish question, ref1; on Peel’s shyness, ref1; enters parliament, ref1; overlooked by Peel, ref1; launches Young England movement, ref1; opposes Peel, ref1; on ‘two nations’, ref1; as protectionist, ref1; on industrial Conservatism, ref1; on Palmerston, ref1; manner, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; as party leader, ref1; on Catholicism in England, ref1; caricatures Palmerston, ref1; as chancellor of exchequer under Derby, ref1, ref2, ref2; budget defeated, ref1; on British dislike of coalitions, ref1; on Aberdeen, ref1; and Russo-Turkish war, ref1; on Crimean War, ref1; on failure of Aberdeen’s government, ref1; Gregory accuses of charlatanism, ref1; on upholding aristocracy, ref1; in ‘great stink’, ref1; parliamentary suffrage bill defeated (1859), ref1; truce with Palmerston, ref1; on role of Conservative party, ref1; on Gladstone’s support for reform, ref1; as leader in waiting, ref1, ref2, ref3; on reform following death of Palmerston, ref1; opposes parliamentary reform, ref1, ref2; political instincts, ref1; political practices, ref1, ref2; proposes enlarging franchise (household suffrage), ref1, ref2; appearance, ref1, ref2, ref3; caricatured, ref1; legislation, ref1, ref2; as prime minister (1868), ref1; relations with Victoria, ref1, ref2, ref3; rivalry with Gladstone, ref1; silence on Gladstone’s Irish Land Bill, ref1; on England as domestic country, ref1; election success (1874), ref1; health problems, ref1, ref2; receives earldom and leaves Commons, ref1; purchases Suez Canal shares, ref1; suggests Victoria become empress of India, ref1; and Balkan crisis (1876), ref1; Joseph Chamberlain mocks, ref1; attends Berlin Congress (1878), ref1, ref2; on Zulu war, ref1; Gladstone attacks in Midlothian campaign, ref1; on power of words, ref1; dissolves parliament (1880) and loses election, ref1; death, ref1; Coningsby, ref1, ref2; Endymion, ref1, ref2; Lothair, ref1; Sybil, ref1; Tancred, ref1

Dissenters (Nonconformists): as low church religion, ref1; Lord Liverpool legislates for further toleration, ref1; excluded by Test and Corporation acts, ref1; serve on town councils, ref1; oppose Corn Laws, ref1; influence, ref1; and public education, ref1; support Gladstone, ref1

Dissenters’ Marriage Bill (1836), ref1

Douglas, Lord Alfred, ref1

dress: and class, ref1, ref2

drink (alcoholic): effect, ref1

Dudley, John William Ward, 1st earl of, ref1

dyes (synthetic), ref1

East India Company: rule in India, ref1; powers transferred to Crown, ref1

Eastern question, ref1

Ecclesiastical Titles Bill (1851), ref1

Eden, Emily, ref1

Edinburgh Review, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

education: of working classes, ref1; reform, ref1, ref2

Edward, Prince of Wales (Albert Edward; ‘Bertie’): Victoria’s attitude to, ref1; death of son, ref1; typhoid fever, ref1; tour of India, ref1

Egypt: British intervention in, ref1, ref3

elections: conduct of, ref1, ref2, ref3; see also general elections

electoral reform: Cobbett advocates, ref1, ref2; movement for, ref1, ref2; and 1830 election, ref1; Grey advocates, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Wellington opposes, ref1; William IV and, ref1, ref2, ref3; Tory attitude to, ref1, ref2; Bright on, ref1, ref2; Russell supports, ref1, ref2; and inadequacy of franchise, ref1; Gladstone promotes, ref1, ref2, ref3; Disraeli opposes, ref1, ref2; Palmerston attacks Gladstone over, ref1; Conservative party’s proposals for, ref1; Derby and demand for, ref1, ref3; and Victoria, ref1; Salisbury on, ref1; see also Parliament; Reform Acts and Bills

electric light, ref1

electricity: development, ref1

electro-magnetic theory, ref1

Elementary Education Act (1870), ref1

Elgin, James Bruce, 8th earl of, ref1

Eliot, George: on Evangelicalism, ref1; on early Victorians, ref1; ideas and beliefs, ref1, ref2; prose style, ref1; moral content, ref1; Felix Holt, ref1

Ely, Jane, Lady, ref1

Emancipation Bill (1825), ref1

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: English Traits, ref1, ref2

empire: and treatment of black population, ref1; attitude to, ref1, ref2; administrative difficulties, ref1; expansion, ref1; Primrose League supports, ref1

energy: sources and development, ref1

Engels, Friedrich: on history of trade unions, ref1; on workingclass conditions, ref1; condemns industrial system, ref1; on working class becoming bourgeois, ref1; on popular demonstrations, ref1; on collapse of Britain’s imperial power, ref1

Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, The, ref1

entertainment (popular), ref1; see also music hall

Escott, T. H., ref1

Ethiopia: Napier invades, ref1

Eugenie, empress of Napoleon III, ref1, ref2

Europe: revolutions (1820), ref1; (1848), ref1; nineteenth-century wars, ref1

Evangelicals: and utilitarians, ref1; on social and political issues, ref1; religious earnestness, ref1; influence, ref1

Evening Standard, ref1

evolution, theory of, ref1

exhibition halls, ref1

Exmouth, Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount, ref1

Eyre, Edward John, governor of Jamaica, ref1

Fabian Society, ref1

factories: labour conditions, ref1, ref2; reforms, ref1

Factory Acts (1819; Cotton Factory Act), ref1; (1833), ref1; (1847), ref1

Factory Education Bill (1843), ref1

family: size, ref1; idealized, ref1

Faraday, Michael, ref1, ref2

Fashoda incident (1898), ref1

Fenian brotherhood, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Ferdinand I, emperor of Austria, ref1

Ferdinand II, king of Naples, ref1

Ferdinand VII, king of Spain, ref1

Feynman, Richard, ref1

fiction: popularity, ref1

Fielden, John, ref1

financial crises (1825), ref1

Fitzgerald, Vesey, ref1

food prices, ref1

food riots, ref1

Forster, William Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Fortnightly Review, ref1, ref2

fossils, ref1, ref3

France: and July monarchy (1830), ref1; opposed by quadrilateral alliance, ref1; Napoleon III forms Second Empire, ref1, ref2; universal male suffrage, ref1; alliance with Britain in Crimean War, ref1; supposed invasion threat to Britain, ref1, ref2; war with Austria (1860), ref1; defeated by Prussia (1870), ref1

franchise: demands for expanding, ref1, ref2; extended under legislation (1832), ref1; (1867), ref1, ref2, ref3; (1884), ref1; (1885), ref1; see also electoral reform

Fraser, William, ref1

Fraser’s Magazine, ref1, ref2

free trade: Lord Liverpool embraces, ref1; utilitarians and, ref1; Huskisson advocates, ref1; and Corn Laws, ref1; Peel advocates, ref1, ref2, ref3; and public well-being, ref1; and Irish famine, ref1; under Russell, ref1; see also protectionism

Friends, Society of (Quakers), ref1, ref2

Frith, William Powell: Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside; painting), ref1

Froude, J. A., ref1, ref2

Fruits of Philosophy, The (pamphlet), ref1

gas lighting, ref1, ref2

Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton, ref1, ref2; North and South, ref1

general elections: (1818), ref1; (1826), ref1; (1830), ref1; (1831; ‘Dry Election’), ref1; (1832), ref1; (1834), ref1; (1837), ref1; (1841), ref1; (1852), ref1; (1857), ref1; (1865), ref1; (1868), ref1; (1874), ref1; (1880), ref1, ref2; (1885), ref1; (1886), ref1; (1892), ref1; (1895), ref1; (1900; ‘khaki election’), ref1

geology, ref1, ref2

George, Henry: Progress and Poverty, ref1

George III, King: decline and death, ref1, ref2; visits Ireland, ref1

George IV, King (earlier Prince of Wales): as Regent, ref1; approves of Holy Alliance, ref1; criticized, ref1, ref2; petitioned by Hampden clubs, ref1; paranoia and obesity, ref1, ref2; unpopularity, ref1; accession to throne, ref1; opposes Catholic emancipation, ref1; accepts Catholic emancipation, ref1, ref2; decline and death, ref1

Géricault, Théodore: The Raft of the Medusa (painting), ref1

Germany: belligerence, ref1; unification, ref1, ref2

Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, ref1

Girls’ Own Paper, ref1

Gissing, George, ref1, ref2, ref3; In the Year of Jubilee, ref1; The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, ref1

Gladstone, Catherine (W. E.’s wife), ref1

Gladstone, Herbert, ref1, ref2

Gladstone, William Ewart: serves under Peel, ref1, ref2; advocates government purchase of railways, ref1; preoccupation with Ireland and Home Rule, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11; as ‘Peelite’, ref1; visits Rome, ref1; financial policies, ref1; attacks Disraeli’s financial measures, ref1; manner and style, ref1; as chancellor of exchequer under Aberdeen, ref1; encounters with prostitutes, ref1, ref2, ref3; praises Aberdeen, ref1; and Russo-Turkish war, ref1; and cost of Crimean War, ref1; isolation in Crimean War, ref1; on intra-party differences, ref1; as chancellor under Palmerston and Russell, ref1, ref3, ref4; on American Civil War, ref1; promotes electoral reform, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; loses parliamentary seat (1865), ref1; and Palmerston’s death, ref1; popularity, ref1, ref2, ref3; advises Salisbury on diplomatic method, ref1; Cranborne’s (Salisbury’s) wariness of, ref1; outmanoeuvred by Disraeli over reform, ref1; on pacification of Ireland, ref1; rivalry with Disraeli, ref1, ref2; Victoria dislikes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; election victory (1868), ref1; convictions and principles, ref1; Emily Eden portrays, ref1; legislation and reforms, ref1, ref2; and educational reform, ref1; anxiety over health, ref1; on European problem, ref1; public speaking tours, ref1, ref2, ref3; loses popular support, ref1; austerity policy, ref1; dissolves Parliament (1874) and loses election, ref1; debates in Commons, ref1; increased amiability, ref1, ref2; on Bulgarian atrocities, ref1; moral impulses, ref1, ref2; in Midlothian campaign (1879), ref1; on Eastern question, ref1; election victory and premiership (1880), ref1, ref2; Lord Derby describes, ref1; accepts Home Rule for Ireland, ref1; ageing, ref1, ref2; intervenes in Egypt, ref1; and Gordon in Sudan, ref1; resigns (1885), ref1; mocks Liberal–Parnellite coalition, ref1; returns to power (1886), ref1; and Salisbury’s government, ref1; holiday in South of France, ref1; refuses retirement, ref1; eyesight diminishes, ref1; forms minority government (1892), ref1; final resignation (1894), ref1; death, ref1; Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, ref1

Goderich, Frederick John Robinson, Viscount (later 1st earl of Ripon), ref1

Gold Coast: mortality, ref1

Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of the, ref1

Goldsmith, Oliver, ref1

Gorchakov, General Michael, ref1

Gordon, General Charles George, ref1, ref2

Gordon, Lord George: riots (1780), ref1

Gothic novel, ref1

Graham, Sir James, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, ref1

Granville, Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Great Exhibition (1851), ref1, ref2

‘great stink’ (1858), ref1

Greece: war of independence, ref1

Green, T. H., ref1

Greg, W. R., ref1

Gregory, Sir William, ref1

Grenville, William Wyndham, Baron, ref1

Greville, Charles Cavendish Fulke, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; Memoirs, ref1

Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl: on public lack of respect, ref1; political career, ref1; urges parliamentary reform, ref1, ref2, ref2, ref3; Wellington replies to, ref1; as prime minister, ref1; dissolves parliament (1831), ref1; increases majority (1831), ref1; forms new government (1832), ref1; ministry declines, ref1; resigns over Ireland question, ref1

Grey, General Charles, ref1

Grossmith, George and Weedon: Diary of a Nobody, ref1

habeas corpus: abolished (1817), ref1

Haggard, Sir H. Rider, ref1

Hampden clubs, ref1

Harcourt, Sir William, ref1, ref2

Hardie, Keir, ref1, ref2

Hardy, Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3

Hartington, Spencer Compton Cavendish, marquess of (later 8th duke of Devonshire; ‘Harty Tarty’), ref1, ref2, ref3

Hartmann, Sadakichi, ref1

harvests, ref1, ref2

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ref1, ref2

Haydon, Benjamin Robert, ref1

Hazlitt, William, ref1, ref2, ref3

Herries, John Charles, ref1

Hertford, Isabella Ingram-Seymour-Conway, marchioness of, ref1

Hill, Rowland, ref1

Hilton, Boyd: The Age of Atonement, ref1

Hobhouse, John Cam, ref1

Hobson, J. A., ref1

Hodson, Henry, ref1

Hogg, John, ref1

Holland, Elizabeth, Lady, ref1

Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, 3rd Baron, ref1, ref2

Holy Alliance (Russia–Austria–Prussia), ref1

Holy League, ref1

Home Rule Bill (1886), ref1; Second (1893), ref1

Home Rule League (Ireland), ref1

homosexuality, ref1, ref2

Hood, Thomas, ref1

Hoskins, W. G., ref1

Household Words (magazine), ref1

Houses of Parliament see Parliament

housing: for poor, ref1

Hugo, Victor, ref1, ref2

Hunt, Henry (‘Orator’), ref1, ref2

Hunt, William Holman: The Awakening Consciousness (painting), ref1

Huskisson, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; killed in railway accident, ref1

Hyndman, Henry Mayers, ref1, ref2

Illustrated London News, ref1, ref2

Imperial Federation League, ref1

imperialism, ref1; see also empire

income tax, ref1, ref2, ref3

Independent Labour party, ref1

India: British rule in, ref1, ref2; under Mughals, ref1; Victoria becomes empress, ref1

Indian War of Independence (‘Indian Mutiny’, 1857–8), ref1

industrialization, ref1

Inglish, Sir Robert, ref1

Inkerman, Battle of (1854), ref1

internal combustion engine: first manufactured, ref1

Ireland: union with England, ref1, ref2; George IV visits, ref1; Catholicism, ref1, ref2, ref3; Church tithes, ref1; and Coercion Acts, ref1, ref2; famine, ref1, ref2; absentee landlordism, ref1; tenancy system, ref1; Gladstone’s preoccupation with, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11; as government concern, ref1; harvests improve (1847), ref1; Young Ireland revolution (1848), ref1; Victoria visits, ref1, ref2; immigrants seen as threat, ref1; Fenian activities, ref1; affected by British agricultural depression, ref1; home rule question, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref7, ref8; disorder and revolt in, ref1; land reform, ref1

Irish Coercion Act (1881), ref1

Irish Land Bill (1870), ref1

Irish Land League, ref1, ref2

Irish Nationalists: support Gladstone, ref1

Irish Republican Army (IRA), ref1

Irish University Bill (1873), ref1

Irving, Edward, ref1

Isandlwana, Battle of (1879), ref1

Italy: Austrian intervention in, ref1; unification, ref1

Jack the Ripper, ref1

Jamaica: and treatment of black population, ref1

Jamaica Bill (1839), ref1

James, Henry, ref1, ref2, ref3

Jameson, Leander Starr, ref1

Jamieson, Anna Brownell, ref1

Jeffrey, Francis, ref1

Jerrold, Douglas, ref1

Jews: and anti-Semitism, ref1

jingoism, ref1

Joule, James, ref1

Karim, Abdul (munshi), ref1, ref2

Keats, John, ref1

Keble, John, ref1, ref2

Kemble, Fanny, ref1, ref2

Kenealy, Edward, ref1

Kent, Edward, duke of, ref1

Kent, Princess Victoria Mary Louisa, duchess of, ref1, ref2

Khartoum, ref1, ref2

Kingsley, Charles, ref1, ref2; Alton Lock, ref1, ref2; Yeast, ref1

Kingsley, Henry, ref1

Kitchener, General Horatio Herbert, ref1, ref2

Kodak camera, ref1

Kossuth, Lajos, ref1

Kruger, Paul, ref1

labour: conditions, ref1; see also children; women

Labour Electoral Association, ref1

Ladysmith, ref1, ref2

laissez-faire, ref1

Lancaster, Joseph, ref1

Land Act (Ireland, 1881), ref1

land ownership, ref1

language and words, ref1

Lardner, Dionysius, ref1

laudanum, ref1

Lawrence, Sir Henry, ref1

Lee, James Prince, bishop of Manchester, ref1

Leeds, ref1, ref2, ref3

Leeds Mercury, ref1, ref2, ref3

Lenin, Vladimir, ref1

Leno, Dan, ref1, ref2

Leopold I, king of the Belgians, ref1

Liberal party: takes over from Whigs, ref1; reorganized (1859) and dominance, ref1; fragmented under Gladstone, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain’s aims for, ref1; election victory (1880), ref1, ref2; election success (1885), ref1; radicalism (Newcastle Programme), ref1

Lichfield House compact, ref1, ref2

Lieven, Antoinette, princesse de, ref1, ref2

literature: respect for, ref1

Liverpool: death rate, ref1

Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of: political career, ref1, ref3; survives 1826 election, ref1; controls House of Lords, ref1; embraces free trade, ref1; ministry, ref1, ref2; Methodism, ref1; and Castlereagh’s decline, ref1; opposes Catholic emancipation, ref1; death, ref1; qualities, ref1; on working class, ref1

Liverpool Mercury, ref1

Lloyd’s Weekly, ref1

local government: and Municipal Corporation Act (1835), ref1; reformed (1871), ref1

Local Government Acts (1888, 1894), ref1

London: street life, ref1; riots (1820s), ref1; docks, ref1; great fire predicted for March 1842, ref1; fogs and condition, ref1; condition of poor in, ref1, ref2; underground railway first opened, ref1; insanitary conditions, ref1; mass demonstrations, ref1, ref2; government, ref1; dock strike (1888), ref1

London County Council (LCC),ref1

London Electrical Society, ref1

London Philanthropic Society, ref1

London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, ref1

London Working Men’s Association, ref1

Londonderry, Charles William Stewart, 3rd marquess of, ref1, ref2

Lords, House of: passes Reform Bill (1831), ref1; Commons occupies chamber after fire, ref1; see also Parliament

Lord’s Day Observance Society, ref1

Louis Philippe, king of the French, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Louis-Napoleon see Napoleon III, emperor

Louise, Princess, ref1

Lovett, William, ref1

Lowe, Robert, ref1, ref2

Lucan, George Charles Bingham, 3rd earl of, ref1

Lucy, Henry, ref1

Luddites and Luddism, ref1, ref2

Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, ref1

lunatic asylums, ref1

Lushington, Colonel (of Tichborne case), ref1

Lyell, Sir Charles: Principles of Geology, ref1, ref2

Lyme Regis, ref1

Lyttelton, Sarah, ref1

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron: on Whigs and Tories, ref1; on Reform Bill, ref1; condemns universal suffrage, ref1; prose style, ref1; History of England, ref1, ref2

McCormack, Mrs (‘Widow McCormack’), ref1

machines: social effect, ref1, ref2, ref3

Mafeking, ref1, ref2

Mahdi, the (Mohammed Ahmed), ref1, ref2

Malthus, Revd Thomas Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3

Manchester: weavers and spinners’ protest march, ref1; conditions, ref1, ref2; local government, ref1; population, ref1; cotton manufacture affected by American Civil War, ref1, ref2; death rate, ref1; see also Peterloo Massacre

Manchester Political Union, ref1

‘Manchester school’: supports free trade, ref1

Mann, Thomas, ref1, ref2

Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, archbishop of Westminster, ref1, ref2

manufacturing system, ref1

Marconi, Guglielmo, ref1

Martin, John: The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (painting), ref1

Martineau, Harriet, ref1, ref2

Marx, Karl, ref1, ref2

matches and match workers, ref1, ref2

Maxwell, James Clerk see Clerk Maxwell, James

May Day demonstrations, ref1

Mayhew, Henry, ref1, ref2, ref3; London Labour and the London Poor, ref1, ref2

Maynooth: Catholic seminar receives government grant, ref1

Mechanics Institutes, ref1

medievalism: as inspiration, ref1

Mehmet Ali, pasha of Egypt, ref1

melancholy, ref1

Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount: on Whigs, ref1, ref2; on George IV’s marriage to Caroline, ref1; quits Wellington’s cabinet, ref1; on William IV, ref1; on Grey’s resignation, ref1; summoned by William IV to form government (1834), ref1; upholds judgement on Tolpuddle Martyrs, ref1; first government, ref1; qualities and manner, ref1, ref2; condemns Reform Act, ref1; reinstated as prime minister (1835), ref1; supported by Palmerston, ref1; on Palmerston, ref1; and accession of Victoria, ref1; as adviser and confidante to Victoria, ref1, ref2; resigns and rescinds resignation, ref1; and Chartist agitation, ref1; fall from power, ref1; resentment of Prince Albert, ref1; on English and French doctors, ref1

Memoirs of a Social Atom, ref1

mental illnesses, ref1

Meredith, George, ref1

Methodism, ref1

Metropolitan Board of Works, ref1

Metropolitan Police: created, ref1, ref2

Metropolitan Political Union, ref1

Metropolitan Underground Railway, ref1

Metternich, Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel, ref1, ref2

middle class: patronizes Mechanics Institutes, ref1; voting rights and influence, ref1; characteristics and ideals, ref1, ref2, ref3; Carlyle’s lack of sympathy for, ref1; respectability, ref1; funds union movement, ref1

Middlesbrough, ref1

Midlothian campaign (1879), ref1

Mill, James, ref1

Mill, John Stuart: on Morning Chronicle, ref1; on poor relief, ref1; on diffusion of knowledge, ref1; on increase of machines, ref1; Considerations on Representative Government, ref1; Principles of Political Economy, ref1

Milman, Revd H. H., ref1

Milner, Alfred (later Viscount), ref1, ref2

Miners’ Federation, ref1

Mines and Collieries Act (1842), ref1

mob, the, ref1

Monroe Doctrine (US), ref1

Moral Reform Union, ref1

Morley, John, ref1, ref2, ref3

Morning Chronicle, ref1

Morris, William: on Great Exhibition, ref1; nostalgia for medievalism, ref1; and Socialist League, ref1

motor cars, ref1, ref2

Mudie, Charles Edward: Lending Library, ref1

Municipal Corporation Act (1835), ref1, ref2

Munro, Sir Thomas, ref1

Murray, John, ref1

music hall, ref1

Namier, Lewis, ref1

Napier, Sir Robert, ref1

Naples: revolution, ref1; Gladstone visits, ref1

Napoleon I (Bonaparte), emperor of the French, ref1

Napoleon III, emperor of the French (earlier Louis-Napoleon): as president of France, ref1; becomes emperor, ref1, ref2; institutes universal male suffrage, ref1; policy on Holy Land, ref1; as supposed threat to Britain, ref1, ref2; state visit to England (1855), ref1; assassination attempt on, ref1; war with Austria, ref1; capture by Prussians (1870) and exile, ref1

National Association for Women’s Suffrage, ref1

National Education League, ref1

National Gallery of Practical Science, ref1

National Liberal Federation, ref1

National Reform Association, ref1

National Reform Union, ref1

National Society (Church of England), ref1

National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers Union, ref1

Navarino Bay, Battle of (1827), ref1

navvies, ref1

navy: reforms, ref1

nervous hysteria: as Victorian characteristic, ref1

‘new, the’: vogue for, ref1

New Lanark, ref1

‘New Woman’, ref1, ref2

Newcastle Daily Chronicle, ref1

Newcastle Programme, ref1, ref2

Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, ref1, ref2

newspaper press: excise duty on paper abolished, ref1

Nicholas I, tsar of Russia, ref1

Nicholson, John, ref1

Nightingale, Florence, ref1

Nonconformism see Dissenters

North America: emigration to, ref1

Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount, ref1

Northcote, Sir Stafford (later 1st earl of Iddesleigh), ref1, ref2

Northcote–Trevelyan report (on civil service examinations), ref1

Northern Star (newspaper), ref1

Norwich Union Society, ref1

novels see fiction

Oastler, Richard, ref1

Obscene Publications Act (1857), ref1

occult and psychic, ref1, ref2

O’Connell, Daniel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

O’Connor, Arthur, ref1

O’Connor, Feargus, ref1, ref2

Old Moore’s Almanack, ref1

Omdurman, Battle of (1898), ref1

Opium War, Second (1856–60), ref1

optimism, ref1

Orange Free State, ref1

Orsini, Felice, ref1

Orton, Arthur, ref1

Osborne House, Isle of Wight, ref1, ref2

O’Shea, Kitty, ref1

Ossington, John Evelyn Denison, 1st Viscount, ref1, ref2

Ottoman Empire (Turkey): and Greek independence, ref1; Palmerston sees as threat, ref1; supposed decline, ref1; and Balkan crisis (1876), ref1; wars with Russia (1853–5), ref1, ref2; (1877), ref1

Overend, Gurney and Company: collapses (1866), ref1

Owen, Robert: opens New Lanark factory, ref1; establishes Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, ref1; Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System, ref1

Oxford Movement (Tractarians), ref1

Oxford University, ref1

Pacifico, Don David, ref1

Paine, Tom, ref1

Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount: supports Canning, ref1; quits Wellington’s cabinet, ref1; in Grey’s cabinet, ref1; as foreign secretary, ref1, ref2, ref3; marriage to Emily Lamb, ref1; supports Melbourne, ref1; on benefits of commerce, ref1; refuses office other than foreign secretary, ref1; resumes as foreign secretary under Russell, ref1, ref2; qualities, ref1; and Don Pacifico affair, ref1; approves of Napoleon III’s assumption of imperial crown, ref1; joins Conservatives, ref1; Disraeli mocks, ref1; Victoria warns Derby against, ref1; election speech on French-English differences (1852), ref1; as home secretary under Aberdeen, ref1; on Russo-Turkish war, ref1; resigns and resumes office (1853), ref1; urges alliance with Turkey against Russia, ref1; on Russian threat, ref1; as prime minister in Crimean War, ref1, ref2; and Second Opium War, ref1; wins 1857 election, ref1; physical decline, ref1; verbal style, ref1; defeated over Conspiracy Bill, ref1; in opposition, ref1; returns as prime minister (1859), ref1; Victoria deprecates, ref1; public recognition, ref1; and American Civil War, ref1; and Victoria’s withdrawal from public life, ref1; visits regions, ref1; neutrality in foreign affairs, ref1; attacks Gladstone over reform proposals, ref1; on Schleswig-Holstein question, ref1; death, ref1; election victory (1865), ref1; Cranborne (Salisbury) admires, ref1

Papers for the People, ref1

Paris, Treaty of (1856), ref1, ref2

Paris Commune (1871), ref1

parishes: and administration of poor relief, ref1

parks (public), ref1

Parliament: and cant, ref1; burnt down (1834), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; unruly behaviour, ref1; businessmen and professionals in, ref1; and ‘great stink’, ref1; Bagehot on, ref1; and household suffrage, ref1; rejects Bradlaugh for refusing Oath of Allegiance, ref1; see also electoral reform

Parnell, Charles Stewart, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Pater, Walter, ref1

Patmore, Coventry: The Angel in the House, ref1

Pearson, Karl, ref1

Peel, Sir Robert: attends lectures on finance, ref1; on national political sentiment, ref1; political career and achievements, ref1, ref2, ref3; opposes Catholic emancipation, ref1, ref2, ref3; as home secretary under Wellington, ref1, ref2; accepts Catholic emancipation, ref1, ref2; creates Metropolitan Police, ref1; and passing of Reform Bill, ref1, ref2; heads Tory party, ref1; proposes reform of factory working hours for children, ref1; and decline of Whig government, ref1; forms government (1834–5) and resigns, ref1; character, ref1; supports Melbourne, ref1; opposes Corn Laws, ref1, ref2; Victoria’s view of, ref1; premiership (1841) and administration, ref1; lowers taxes on corn, ref1; reintroduces income tax, ref1; and Corn Laws, ref1, ref2; reforming principles, ref1, ref2; advocates free trade, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; on Birmingham, ref1; on railway management, ref1; introduces 1845 ‘great budget’, ref1; and Irish famine, ref1, ref2; and party rebels, ref1; resigns, ref1, ref2; remains in Parliament, ref1; accident and death, ref1

Peep-o-Day Boys, ref1

penal system: changes, ref1

penny post, ref1

Perceval, Spencer: assassinated, ref1; son protests in parliament, ref1

Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, 1819), ref1, ref2

philanthropic societies, ref1

Phoenix Park, Dublin, ref1

photography, ref1

Piedmont: revolution, ref1

Pinney, Anna Maria, ref1

Pitt, William, the Younger, ref1

Pius IX, Pope: re-establishes Catholic Church in England and Wales, ref1

Place, Francis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Plug Riots (or Plug Plot Riots, 1842), ref1

Poland: civil war (1863), ref1

police: resistance to establishment of, ref1, ref2; anti-crowd actions, ref1

Police Act (1839), ref1

Polytechnic Institution, London, ref1

poor, the: conditions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; rural, ref1; relief, ref1; numbers, ref1; and children, ref1

Poor Law: reform, ref1, ref2; (New, 1834), ref1, ref2, ref3; commissioners, ref1

Poor Law Board: established (1847), ref1

Pope, Alexander: Windsor Forest, ref1

population: increase, ref1, ref2

Port of London: closed (1888), ref1

Portugal: revolution, ref1

post see penny post

Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, ref1

Primrose League, ref1

prisons: treadmills introduced, ref1

professions, ref1

prostitution, ref1, ref2

protectionism: and Corn Laws, ref1; Peel opposes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Bentinck supports, ref1; and agricultural workers, ref1; Conservatives divided on, ref1, ref2; Derby supports, ref1; Disraeli’s attitude to, ref1; Argyll on, ref1; see also free trade

Prussia: and unification of Germany, ref1; defeats France (1870), ref1

public health, ref1

Public Health Act (1875), ref1

public services: regulation and inspection, ref1

Pugin, Edward Welby, ref1

Punch (magazine), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Punjab: Dalhousie annexes, ref1

Pusey, Edward, ref1

Quadruple Alliance (1815), ref1, ref3

Quakers see Friends, Society of

Quarterly Review: on rise of Conservatives, ref1; on Derby’s government, ref1

Raglan, Lord Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, Baron, ref1, ref2, ref3

Railway Regulation Act (1844), ref1

railways: development and effect, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; first fatal accident, ref1; control and management, ref1; install telegraph system, ref1; investment and speculation in, ref1, ref2; in art, ref1; excursions, ref1; as image of the day, ref1

Reade, Charles, ref1

Redistribution of Seats Act (1885), ref1

Reform Acts and Bills (1831–2), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; (1867), ref1, ref2, ref3

Reform League, ref1

register of births, marriages and death: created (1836), ref1

Reid, Sir James, ref1

religion: and church attendance, ref1; pervasiveness and variety, ref1, ref2; and belief, ref1; and biblical criticism, ref1; see also Christianity; Church of England; Oxford Movement

revolutions of 1848, ref1

Reynolds’ News, ref1, ref2

Rhodes, Cecil, ref1, ref2

Ribbonmen (Ireland), ref1

Richmond, Charles Gordon Lennox, 5th duke of, ref1

Richmond, Charlotte Lennox, dowager duchess of, ref1

Ridgeway, Battle of (1866), ref1

rinderpest (cattle plague), ref1

Roberts, Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh, ref1

Roberts, William Prowting, ref1

Robertson, Frederick, ref1

Robey, George, ref1

Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, ref1

Rocket (steam locomotive), ref1

Roebuck, John Arthur (‘Tear ’em’), ref1, ref2

Roman Catholic see Catholic

Roman Catholic Relief Act (1791), ref1

Rosebery, Archibald John Primrose, 4th earl of, ref1, ref2

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th earl of: castigates Disraeli over Turkey settlement, ref1; and Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, ref1; and Bright’s criticism of bombardment of Alexandria, ref1; on minority government (1885), ref1; and Gladstone’s prediction on Ireland, ref1; as chairman of London County Council, ref1; on Gladstone’s retaining power in old age, ref1; character and qualities, ref1; as prime minister (1894–5), ref1; collapse, ref1; on Liberal party, ref1; gives up leadership of Liberals, ref1

Rothschild, Nathan, ref1

Rothschild family, ref1

Rowntree, Seebohm, ref1

Royal Academy: Exhibition (1855), ref1

Royal Commission on the Health of Towns (1843–4), ref1

Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1832), ref1

Royal Navy see navy

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, ref1

Ruskin, John: character, ref1; criticizes Great Exhibition, ref1; nostalgia for medievalism, ref1; style, ref1; moral content, ref1; imperialism, ref1; on Tichborne case, ref1; The Stones of Venice, ref1

Russell, John, 1st Earl (earlier Lord John Russell): proposes Test Act (1828), ref1; introduces 1831 Reform Bill, ref1; health failure and resignation, ref1; and Irish question, ref1; and Whig weakness, ref1; leads party in Commons, ref1; opposes changes to Reform Act, ref1; political ambitions, ref1; and Melbourne’s indecisiveness, ref1; pledges to repeal Corn Laws, ref1; debating, ref1; Peel supports, ref1; succeeds Peel as prime minister, ref1; reforms, ref1; and Victoria’s view of Palmerston, ref1; orders Palmerston to resign, ref1; condemns pope’s re-establishment of Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, ref1; resigns (1852), ref1; as foreign secretary under Aberdeen, ref1; and outbreak of Crimean War, ref1; resigns over Crimean War (1854), ref1; in Palmerston’s government, ref1; in opposition, ref1; and reorganization of Liberal party, ref1; Victoria deprecates, ref1; and Victoria’s withdrawal from public life, ref1; as foreign secretary under Palmerston, ref1; succeeds Palmerston as prime minister (1865), ref1; electoral reform proposals, ref1; resigns Liberal leadership, ref1

Russell, William Howard, ref1

Russia: in Crimean War, ref1; claims on Poland, ref1; wars with Turkey (1853–5), ref1, ref2; (1877), ref1

Sacramental Test Act (1828), ref1

St Barnabas church, Pimlico, London, ref1

St Paul’s Cathedral: condition, ref1

Salford: army barracks bombed by Fenians, ref1

Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd marquess of (earlier Viscount Cranborne): on telegraph, ref1; on industrial Conservatism, ref1; on tensions between constitution and democracy, ref1; on Disraeli’s parliamentary reform proposals, ref1; on English resignation, ref1; as secretary of state for India, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain attacks, ref1; as foreign secretary, ref1; on Gladstone’s premiership (1880), ref1; on Irish troubles, ref1; as successor to Disraeli, ref1; succeeds Gladstone as prime minister, ref1, ref2, ref3; leads minority government, ref1; accepts Randolph Churchill’s resignation, ref1; and Irish question, ref1; and Chamberlain’s coalition, ref1; on peace in Ireland, ref1; resigns (1892), ref1; forms government (1895), ref1; and Jameson raid, ref1; and Second Boer War, ref1, ref2; on living and dying nations, ref1; character and appearance, ref1; returned to government (1900), ref1

Salvation Army, ref1

San Stefano, Treaty of (1878), ref1

sanitation: improvements, ref1, ref2

Saturdays: leisure afternoons, ref1

Scarlett, General James Yorke, ref1

Schleswig-Holstein, ref1

schools: and child education, ref1

science: intelligentsia lacks interest in, ref1; nonconformists dominate, ref1; popular appeal, ref1; Victorian concern with, ref1

Scott, Sir Walter, ref1

Scottish Labour party: established, ref1

Seacole, Mary, ref1

seaside: and leisure, ref1; towns, ref1

Sebastopol, ref1, ref2, ref3

servants, ref1

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of (earlier Lord Ashley): labour reform, ref1n; criticizes Victoria, ref1; criticizes Peel for non-cooperation, ref1; on employment in mines, ref1; on condition of working class, ref1; criticizes ritualism in Church of England, ref1; on Russo-Turkish war, ref1; humanitarianism, ref1; and Palmerston’s view of Gladstone, ref1; denies help to Derby, ref1

Shaw, George Bernard, ref1, ref2, ref3

Sheffield, ref1

Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society, ref1

Sheffield Mercury, ref1

Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, ref1

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ref1; The Mask of Anarchy, ref1

Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Viscount: on distress in country, ref1; drinking, ref1; fears insurrection, ref1; on political economy, ref1

Sierra Leone: mortality, ref1

Sinope, Battle of (1854), ref1

Six Acts (1819), ref1

Six Points, ref1

slavery: abolition (1833), ref1, ref2; female petitions against, ref1

Smiles, Samuel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Self Help, ref1

Smith, Sydney, ref1

Smuts, Jan Christian, ref1, ref2

Snow, John, ref1

social conditions: legislation on, ref1

Social Democratic Federation, ref1, ref2, ref3

socialism, ref1, ref2

society: manners and behaviour, ref1

Society for the Diffusion of Intellect, ref1

Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, ref1, ref2

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, ref1

South America: independence movement, ref1

Southey, Robert, ref1, ref2

Spa Fields, ref1

Spain: revolution, ref1; and loss of South American possessions, ref1

spas, ref1

Spectator (magazine), ref1

speed: as novelty, ref1, ref2

spiritualism, ref1, ref2

sport, ref1

Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil, ref1

Spurgeon, Charles, ref1

Stalin, Josef, ref1

stamp duty (on newspapers), ref1

Stanhope, Lady Hester, ref1

state, the: and individual liberty, ref1; assumes new powers, ref1

steam power, ref1, ref2

steel manufacture, ref1

Stephenson, George and Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3

Stewart, Charles see Londonderry, 3rd marquess of

Stirling, J. H.: The Secret of Hegel, ref1

Stockmar, Baron Christian, ref1

Stockport Cotton Jenny Spinners Union Society, ref1

Stockton–Darlington Railway, ref1

Stoker, Bram: Dracula, ref1

Strachey, Lytton, ref1; Eminent Victorians, ref1

street ballads, ref1

strikes (industrial), ref1, ref2, ref3

Sudan: uprising, ref1, ref2

Sunday Trading Bill (1855), ref1

Swing, Captain (fictional): and agricultural riots, ref1

Taine, Hippolyte, ref1

Tamworth Manifesto (1834), ref1

taxation, ref1, ref2

Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union, ref1

Tel-el-Kebir, Battle of (1882), ref1

telegraph (electric): developed, ref1, ref2; on railways, ref1

telephone: invented (1876), ref1

Temple Bar, ref1

Ten Hours Bill (1847), ref1

Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron: inspired by Arthurian epics, ref1; on black population, ref1; ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ref1; Morte d’Arthur, ref1; ‘The Passing of Arthur’, ref1

Thackeray, William Makepeace: on Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, ref1; contributes to Punch, ref1; Vanity Fair, ref1

Thames, river: cleansing, ref1, ref2; embankment, ref1; and ‘great stink’ (1858), ref1; tunnel, ref1

theatre: and political ideas, ref1

Theosophy, ref1

Thompson, George, ref1

Thorne, Will, ref1

Tichborne, Roger, ref1

Tierney, George, ref1

Tillett, Ben, ref1

Times, The: printed by steam power, ref1; on Peel’s resignation, ref1; on result of 1841 election, ref1; on Peel’s circle, ref1; on Aberdeen’s government, ref1; on mismanagement of Crimean War, ref1, ref2; on Florence Nightingale, ref1; on Disraeli’s view of working classes, ref1; on conduct of Commons business, ref1; and Salisbury’s party leadership in Lords, ref1; on Boer War, ref1

Tolpuddle Martyrs, ref1, ref2

Torquay, ref1

Tory party: differences from Whigs, ref1, ref3; calls general election (1818), ref1; mocks 1831 Reform Bill, ref1; attitudes to reform, ref1; belief in superiority of governing classes, ref1; members vote against Corn Laws repeal, ref1; see also Conservative Party

Town Improvement Company, ref1

towns see cities and towns

Tractarianism see Oxford Movement

Tracts for the Times, ref1

Trade Union Act (1871), ref1

trade unions: banned under 1799 Combination Act, ref1; beginnings, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; accepted, ref1; development, ref1; funded by middle class, ref1

Trades Union Congress (1888), ref1

Trafalgar Square, London: as centre of demonstrations, ref1, ref2

transport: undeveloped, ref1

Transvaal: Boers in, ref1, ref2; gold in, ref1; in Second Boer War, ref1; ceded to Britain, ref1

Trelawny, John, ref1

Trevithick, Richard, ref1

Trollope, Anthony: on novel-reading, ref1; on unsanitary Thames, ref1; The Duke’s Children, ref1; Phineas Redux, ref1

Trotsky, Leon, ref1

Turgenev, Ivan, ref1

Turkey see Ottoman Empire

Turner, J. M. W.: Rain, Steam and Speed (painting), ref1, ref2

Twiss, Horace, ref1

unemployment, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; see also poor, the

United States of America: cotton production, ref1; emigration to, ref1; Civil War breaks out (1861), ref1; effect on cotton manufacture, ref1, ref2

utilitarians: and Evangelicals, ref1

Vansittart, Nicholas, ref1

Vereeniging, Peace of (1902), ref1

Victoria, Queen (earlier Princess): birth, ref1; on Lord John Russell, ref1; journeys through England (as princess), ref1; temper, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; upbringing and character, ref1; complains of Palmerston, ref1; accession, ref1; relations with Melbourne, ref1, ref2; and Bedchamber Crisis, ref1; and Melbourne’s fall over Jamaica Bill, ref1; courtship and marriage to Albert, ref1; and 1841 election, ref1; criticized, ref1; assassination attempts on, ref1, ref2; opposed to Palmerston’s policies, ref1, ref2; visits to Ireland, ref1, ref2; and Don Pacifico affair, ref1; affronted by re-establishment of Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, ref1; opens Great Exhibition, ref1; on Lord Derby, ref1; at Napoleon III’s state visit, ref1; rumoured madness, ref1; and death of Albert, ref1; withdraws from public life, ref1; and demand for electoral reform, ref1; good relations with Disraeli, ref1, ref2, ref3; distaste for Gladstone, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; rejects Gladstone’s suggestion for royal residence in Ireland, ref1; favours Prussians over French, ref1; and John Brown, ref1; regains public sympathy, ref1; opposes women’s rights, ref1; and Disraeli’s purchase of Suez Canal shares, ref1; sees telephone at Osborne House, ref1; on administration of Empire, ref1; letter from Gladstone on state of Ireland, ref1; speech in parliament on economic depression (1880), ref1; on lawlessness in Ireland, ref1; on fall of Khartoum, ref1; on Gladstone’s campaigning in 1886 election, ref1; golden jubilee (1887), ref1; booed in East End, ref1; on Gladstone in old age, ref1; accepts Gladstone’s resignation, ref1; on Rosebery and Liberal party, ref1; Diamond Jubilee (1898), ref1, ref2; on Boer War, ref1; ageing, ref1, ref2; visits Riviera, ref1; death, ref1; threatened by Fenians, ref1

Victoria Park, London, ref1

Victorian: as term, ref1

Vienna, Congress of (1815), ref1

Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, ref1

Wadsworth, Alfred, ref1

Wakefield, E. G.: A View of the Art of Colonisation, ref1

Ward, Lord Dudley, ref1

Watt, James, ref1

Webb, Beatrice, ref1; My Apprenticeship, ref1

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of: as national hero, ref1; disparages Prince Regent, ref1; on Babbage’s calculating machines, ref1; on George Canning, ref1; on foreign intervention, ref1; illness after duke of York’s funeral, ref1; on ‘impractical’ government, ref1; supports maintaining Ottoman Empire, ref1; as prime minister, ref1; agrees to Catholic emancipation, ref1; poor relations with George IV, ref1; opposes parliamentary reform, ref1; resigns, ref1; on passing of Reform Bill, ref1, ref2; fails to form government (1832), ref1; heads Tory party, ref1; declines to form government (1834), ref1, ref2; on Melbourne’s first government, ref1; deputizes for Peel as prime minister, ref1; declines Victoria’s appeal to replace Melbourne, ref1; as leader in Lords, ref1; on Peel’s reaction to Irish famine, ref1; declines cabinet post under Russell, ref1; pessimism on national defence, ref1; on Derby’s government, ref1; funeral, ref1

Wells, H. G., ref1, ref2

Wesleyan Methodist anti-slavery petition (1833), ref1

West Africa: mortality, ref1

Weymouth, ref1

Whig party: differences from Tories, ref1, ref2; and reform, ref1, ref2; develops unity, ref1; Disraeli on, ref1; election victory (1832), ref1; introduces New Poor Law, ref1; radicals in, ref1; opposes Peel, ref1; election victory (1837), ref1; opposes Corn Laws, ref1; becomes Liberal party, ref1; see also Liberal party

White, William, ref1

Wigston, Leicestershire, ref1

Wilberforce, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Wilde, Oscar: parodies earnestness, ref1; wit, ref1; reads at British Museum, ref1; life, style and ideas, ref1; trials and conviction, ref1, ref2; The Importance of Being Earnest, ref1; The Picture of Dorian Gray, ref1; Salomé, ref1; ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ref1

Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany: telegram to Kruger, ref1

Wilkie, David: The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch (painting), ref1

William IV, King (earlier duke of Clarence): on Whigs and Tories, ref1; accession, ref1; character and qualities, ref1; calls on Grey to form government, ref1; and Grey’s parliamentary reform, ref1, ref2, ref3; contempt for Victoria’s mother, ref1; invites Melbourne to form government, ref1; dismisses Melbourne and invites Peel to form government, ref1; reinstates Melbourne as prime minister, ref1; supports Tories, ref1; prejudice against Melbourne, ref1; death, ref1; political achievements, ref1

William, Prince of Prussia, ref1

Windham, Colonel Sir Charles Ash, ref1

wireless, ref1

Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Stephen, archbishop of Westminster, ref1, ref2

Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ref1

women: rights and status, ref1, ref2; employment conditions, ref1, ref2, ref3; dress and fashion, ref1, ref2; anti-slavery petitions, ref1; equal pay demands, ref1; match-girls’ strike, ref1; emancipation, ref1

Wood, Charles (1st Viscount Halifax), ref1, ref2

Wood, Nicholas, ref1

Woolf, Virginia, ref1

workhouses, ref1

working class: and religious worship, ref1; disenfranchised, ref1, ref2; and parliamentary representation, ref1; hatred of governing classes, ref1; and Chartism, ref1; poverty and starvation, ref1; behaviour, ref1, ref2; Chadwick’s report on, ref1; conditions and improvement, ref1, ref2; Engels on, ref1; political leanings, ref1; see also trade unions

Yeats, William Butler, ref1, ref2

Yellow Book (magazine), ref1

York, Frederick Augustus, duke of: death and funeral, ref1

Young, Arthur, ref1; Travels, ref1

Young, G. M., ref1

Young, Thomas, ref1, ref2

Young England Movement, ref1

Young Ireland, ref1

Zulu war (1879), ref1

1. Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of Liverpool, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

2. George IV, king of the United Kingdom and Hanover.

3. 1815 Bread Riot at the entrance to the House of Commons caused by the implementation of the Corn Laws.

4. The 1819 Peterloo Massacre at St Peter’s Field, Manchester.

5. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and 2nd marquess of Londonderry.

6. Caroline of Brunswick, consort of George IV, 1820.

7. The arrest of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820. The name comes from their meeting place near Edgware Road in London.

8. A model of the analytical engine, a calculating machine invented in 1837 by Charles Babbage.

9. Mary Anning, pioneer fossil collector and palaeontologist of Lyme Regis, Dorset.

10. The Rt Hon. George Canning, MP.

11. Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington.

12. William IV, king of the United Kingdom and Hanover.

13. The Rt Hon. Earl Grey.

14. An illustration of Daniel O’Connell for The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography.

15. The title page to The Life and History of Swing, The Kent Rick Burner, 1830.

16. A young Queen Victoria in 1842.

17. Prince Albert in 1840.

18. William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.

19. Robert Peel.

20. A photograph of Lord John Russell.

21. Lord Palmerston.

22. The Rt Hon. W.E. Gladstone.

23. Benjamin Disraeli.

24. The ‘Rocket’ locomotive designed by George Stephenson in 1829.

25. Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway painted before 1844 by Turner.

26. The royal family in 1846.

27. The Great Exhibition of 1851 held in a purpose-built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.

28. The Relief of the Light Brigade, 25 October 1854.

29. Mary Jane Seacole.

30. On Strike, c. 1891, by Hubert von Herkomer.

31. An illustration of music-hall performers for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1876.

32. Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside) by William Powell Frith.

33. The cover of The Illustrated London News depicting Mr Hawkins addressing the jury during the trial of the Tichborne Claimant.

34. Annie Besant, from Bibby’s Annual.

35. A descriptive map of London poverty, compiled and coloured by Charles Booth.

36. The key for Charles Booth’s poverty map.

37. A photograph of Lord Rosebery.

38. A group of Boer commandos armed with the German Mauser rifle, 1895.

39. Oscar Wilde.

40. Queen Victoria, empress of India, and Abdul Karim (munshi), 1894.

DOMINION

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

The History of England Vol. II: Tudors

The History of England Vol. III: Civil War

The History of England Vol. IV: Revolution

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City Queer City

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Three Brothers

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T. S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography Charlie Chaplin

Brief Lives

Chaucer J. M. W. Turner

Newton Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2018 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2018 by Macmillan

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-5098-8131-4

Copyright © Peter Ackroyd 2018

Cover images: Portrait of Queen Victoria, 1859 (oil on canvas) (detail of 192754), Winterhalter, Franz Xaver (1806–73) (after) / Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images

The right of Peter Ackroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

Peter Ackroyd

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

VOLUME VI

INNOVATION

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

1. The sun never rises

2. Home sweet home

3. The lie of the land

4. Plates in the air

5. The most powerful thing

6. Demands for reform

7. The Terrible Twins

8. What happened to the gentry?

9. Car crazy

10. Little hammers in their muffs

11. The Orange card

12. The black sun

13. Forced to fight

14. The regiment of women

15. The clock stops

16. England’s Irish question

17. Gay as you like

18. Labour at the summit

19. Where is the match?

20. Get on, or get out

21. Crash

22. The rituals of suburbia

23. Now we can have some fun

24. The country of the dole

25. The Fasci

26. The bigger picture

27. The Spanish tragedy

28. This is absolutely terrible

29. The alteration

30. The march of the ants

31. Would you like an onion?

32. The pangs of austerity

33. The cruel real world

34. An old world

35. The washing machine

36. Plays and players

37. Riots of passage

38. North and south

39. Elvis on a budget

40. This sporting life

41. Old lace and arsenic

42. The new brutalism

43. The soothing dark

44. In place of peace

45. Bugger them all

46. The first shot

47. The fall of Heath

48. The slot machine

49. Let us bring harmony

50. Here she comes

51. The Falklands flare-up

52. The Big Bang

53. The Brighton blast

54. Was she always right?

55. Money, money, money

56. The curtain falls

57. The fall of sterling

58. One’s bum year

59. Put up or shut up

60. The moral abyss

61. A chapter of accidents

62. The unhappy year

63. The princess leaves the fairy tale

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

1. Edward VII (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

2. King George at the opening of the Festival of Empire in 1911 (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

3. A tram in Yarmouth (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)

4. The Boy Scouts in 1909 (Hulton Archive / Stringer)

5. Emmeline Pankhurst in 1914 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

6. Herbert Henry Asquith (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)

7. David Lloyd George (Bettmann / Contributor)

8. The British Empire Exhibition, 1924 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

9. Flappers in 1925 (General Photographic Agency / Stringer)

10. The General Strike of 1926 (Vintage_Space / Alamy Stock Photo)

11. A Butlin’s poster from the 1930s (Retro AdArchives / Alamy Stock Photo)

12. Members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1928 (© Tate)

13. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

14. George VI on the day of his coronation (Hilary Morgan / Alamy Stock Photo)

15. Winston Churchill in 1940 (Keystone-France / Contributor)

16. The Empire Windrush arriving in Tilbury (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

17. The birth of the National Health Service (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

18. Rationing in 1949 (Popperfoto / Contributor)

19. The coronation of Elizabeth II (Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)

20. The Suez Canal in October 1956 (John Frost Newspapers / Alamy Stock Photo)

21. Harold Wilson (Popperfoto / Contributor)

22. The premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Frank Pocklington / Stringer)

23. Mary Quant (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

24. The 1966 World Cup final (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

25. The Beatles (Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo)

26. The queen watching television in 1969 (Joan Williams / Shutterstock)

27. A British family watching television in the 1970s (Homer Sykes / Alamy Stock Photo)

28. The three-day week (J. Wilds / Stringer)

29. The miners’ strike of 1984 (Manchester Daily Express / Contributor)

30. Margaret Thatcher (peter jordan / Alamy Stock Photo)

31. Princess Diana (Tim Graham / Contributor)

32. Tony Blair (Dan White / Alamy Stock Photo)

33. The Millennium Dome (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research assistants, Murrough O”Brien and Thomas Wright, for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume.

1

The sun never rises

The greatest shock of the Second Boer War was not the protracted and bloody guerrilla warfare, but the wretched condition of the British troops.* The conscripts were malnourished and sickly, their morale low. After the war was over in 1902, an inquiry revealed that 16,000 servicemen had died of disease, due to poor rations and constitutional weakness. Many of the English soldiers had been press-ganged by penury, but around 60 per cent of the volunteers had been rejected as unfit for service. This finding prompted further investigations into the ‘deterioration of certain classes of the population’, though they came at least fifty years too late.

Investigations into the military conduct of the war were equally disturbing. It had taken almost half a million British troops to subdue a Boer population similar to that of Brighton, at a cost of £250 million. The publication of these inquiries prompted the government to create a Committee of Imperial Defence to coordinate the armed forces, and stemmed the tide of English jingoism. In 1900, during the triumphant opening phase of the war, a wave of imperialist enthusiasm had carried the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition to power at the so-called ‘khaki election’. The Tory-dominated coalition secured a large majority over the Liberals, defying the ‘swing of the pendulum’ law of British politics.

As the war continued, those who had previously felt imperial pride expressed disappointment and shame. The working classes even declared their admiration for the Boer rebels. ‘What’s the good of talking about the Empire on which the sun never sets,’ one Londoner put it, ‘when the sun never rises on our court?’ By the end of the decade, patriotic platitudes concerning the ‘Great Empire’ provoked laughter.

Were the British army’s deficiencies symptomatic of a wider national degeneration? In the nineteenth century, many people had believed that English enterprise and integrity had helped to bring order to the distant territories and diverse cultures of the British Empire; at the beginning of the new century, they no longer believed these boasts. After the Boer War, it was customary for politicians to speak of the ‘consolidation’ or ‘integration’ of existing colonies, dominions and ‘spheres of economic influence’. It was thought that strengthening political and economic ties within the empire was crucial if England were to survive as a great power, at a time when Germany, Japan and the United States of America were flourishing.

Some politicians argued that the creation of a system of ‘self-governing dominions’ within the empire was the only way to secure unity, given the limited capacity of British troops and increasing nationalist sentiment in territories under British control. In the late nineteenth century, India’s educated elite had developed political theories based on the principle of ‘representative national institutions’. In Ireland, popular support for ‘Home Rule’ had been paramount for decades, and anti-English sentiment became more intense.

Similar criticism could be heard in England. The burning of thousands of Boer homes and farms by British troops, and the construction of 8,000 ‘concentration camps’ to house the evicted Boers, provoked outrage, and when around 20,000 women and children died in the camps, the anger grew. Then news reached England that the government had allowed 50,000 Chinese labourers to work in South African mines for paltry wages and in appalling living conditions. On the opposition benches, Liberal politicians took up the cry of ‘Chinese slavery’. Imperial expansion had been justified by the argument that Britain was bestowing civilization on ‘primitive’ societies. At the end of the nineteenth century, the English viceroy of India had boasted of importing ‘the rule of justice’ to the country, along with ‘peace and order and good government’. But in the wake of the Boer War, many observers regarded Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’ as an excuse for exploitation.

After 1900, the English were also forced to confront their economy’s diminishing international status. In the Victorian era, English manufacturers had dominated world trade. A combination of technological innovation and cheap labour had allowed goods to be produced inexpensively in England; the availability and expansion of imperial markets, as well as mastery of the seas, had ensured they could be safely sold around the world. Meanwhile, Britain’s colonies had commissioned elaborate engineering projects from English firms, with money borrowed from the City of London. The United Kingdom had been responsible for a third of the world’s manufacturing in the 1870s, but in the early 1900s this figure fell to 10 per cent.

England could no longer claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ – that title was now contested by Germany and the United States, which had been strengthened by unification in the second half of the nineteenth century and had developed modern production methods during recent wars. By 1900 the United States produced more coal and iron than England, while Germany’s mining technology, electrical engineering and chemical industries were superior. Part of England’s problem was that it had industrialized long before its rivals, and neither the government nor the representatives of capital and labour had the vision or the will to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector. England was technologically sclerotic, unable to add to its imperial territories and shut out from many international markets by the tariffs of foreign governments. Her staple export industries of iron, wool, shipbuilding and coal had entered their senescence. To compound the problem of declining exports, England was increasingly dependent on foreign imports. After 1900 there was a balance-of-payments deficit, with more money leaving the country than coming in. Over the next fourteen years, economic growth halved.

At the beginning of 1901, The Annual Register described the outlook for England as ‘full of misgivings’. A few weeks later, on 22 January, the nation’s anxiety was compounded when Queen Victoria died. As the news spread across the country, church bells tolled, theatrical performances were abandoned and traffic halted, as people poured onto the streets. For many, despair was coupled with bewilderment. It is sometimes said by foreign observers that monarchism is the religion of the English, yet by no means everyone in the country was a believer: the novelist Arnold Bennett thought that Londoners ‘were not, on the whole, deeply moved, whatever journalists may say’.

All the commentators agreed, however, that the queen’s death marked a transition in the country’s history. ‘We are less secure of our position,’ announced The Times. ‘Our impetus’ as a ‘nation may be spent’. Soon after Victoria’s death, the passing of the ethos of Victorianism was also predicted. In his parliamentary address, the Tory leader of the Commons, Arthur James Balfour, announced ‘the end of a great epoch’.

It was not long before another pillar of the Victorian establishment fell. In July 1902, Lord Salisbury resigned as prime minister on the grounds of bad health, his gargantuan weight placing an inordinate strain on his legs and heart. Ever since the split of the Liberal party over Irish Home Rule in 1886 and the defection of the Liberal Unionists to the Conservatives, the Tory grandee had controlled political life, holding office for all but three of those sixteen years. A Tory aristocrat of the old school, he abhorred the democratic tendencies of the modern age, seeing his party’s mission as representing the landed ‘governing’ class and maintaining the status quo in their interest. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse,’ was his most famous political pronouncement, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ Some observers saw, in the manner of Salisbury’s passing in the following year, an omen of the imminent collapse of the British Empire; others regarded his death as confirmation that the Victorian era had ended.

Nevertheless, Conservatives in the Salisbury mould endeavoured to deny the demise of the old order. To Tories, the Victorian verities, including laissez-faire economics and politics and the centrality to national life of the aristocracy, the crown, the Anglican Church and the empire, were sacred. Though the Liberals represented the commercial and Nonconformist sections of the English population, an influential aristocratic element within them was even more passionately committed to free-market capitalism than its rival party.

The passivity within the two parties reflected the inertia in the political system. The ‘first-past-the-post’ system of British elections made it virtually impossible for a new party to achieve an electoral victory. As a consequence, the Tories and the Liberals had shared power for decades. The right to vote was limited to males who paid an annual rent of £10 or owned land worth the same amount, which meant that 40 per cent of English males, as well as the entire female population, were excluded from the franchise. Since MPs were unpaid, only the wealthiest men could afford to stand for election to the Commons. Once elected, MPs devised legislative proposals that were modified or rejected by an unelected, Tory-dominated House of Lords, before being submitted to the monarch for approval. In addition to being the head of Britain’s church, army and aristocracy and one of its biggest landowners, the ostensibly ‘constitutional’ monarch actually enjoyed extensive executive powers known as the ‘royal prerogative’, which included the freedom to dismiss and appoint prime ministers.

In contrast to the English politicians, the country’s intellectuals celebrated the end of Victorianism, and eagerly devised plans for a brave new world. H. G. Wells compared Queen Victoria to a ‘great paper-weight that for half a century [had] sat upon men’s minds … when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly’. Radicals such as Wells used ‘Victorian’ as a pejorative term; a fairer, more rational era was coming. The Liberal economist J. A. Hobson remarked on the way increasing numbers of people suddenly appeared ‘possessed by the duty and desire to put the very questions which their parents thought shocking, and to insist upon plain intelligible answers’. What is the role of the state? What is the purpose of the empire? Why should women and the working classes be excluded from the electoral process? And what are the causes and cures of economic and social inequality?

Attempts to answer these questions produced a plethora of political and cultural movements. Socialist, anarchist and feminist groups were founded, while trade unions flourished. Some intellectuals turned to religious philosophies such as theosophy, or took up single-issue political causes including anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination. Many reformers looked to science to point the way to a brighter future. While different radicals promoted different means, the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb believed they were all working towards the same end: ‘The whole nation’, she wrote, is ‘sliding towards Social Democracy’.

The men who replaced the falling giants of the Victorian establishment did not quite match their stature. Victoria was succeeded by her eldest son Edward who, at the age of almost sixty, ‘got his innings at last’, in the words of the young Tory MP Winston Churchill. Born in 1841, Edward had a distinctly nineteenth-century appearance, with a thick moustache and rotund figure. He had a taste for cigars, women, gossip, jokes and military uniforms, but his greatest passion was food. The tone of his reign was set when his coronation had to be delayed as a result of an illness brought on by overindulgence. The new king’s conspicuous consumption was a source of embarrassment to the court, at a time when a large percentage of his subjects lived in poverty.

Edward was also animated by the conviviality, energy and exuberance that was characteristic of the Victorian era. Eyewitness accounts describe him as ‘roaring like a bull’ as he vented the ‘hereditary Hanoverian spleen’. Many of his political views also marked him out as a man of the previous century. In imperial affairs he deplored the idea of granting autonomy to the colonies. Yet compared to his fervently Tory mother, Edward was more neutral in party-political terms, and less inclined to interfere in the affairs of government and parliament. On the other hand, the new king was eager to exercise a decisive influence over the government’s diplomacy. As the speaker of a variety of continental languages and as a man who prided himself on being a ‘good European’, he was better qualified than most modern English monarchs to do so.

Victoria had not been amused by the hedonistic lifestyle of her eldest son, yet Edward’s amiability, elegant dressing and fondness for public appearances gained him numerous admirers. When his coronation eventually took place, it was enthusiastically celebrated, and he remained a popular king throughout his reign. The author J. B. Priestley, who grew up in the ‘Edwardian age’, recalled the enthusiasm the monarch inspired throughout the country, and believed Edward to be the most popular English king since Charles II. The overwhelmingly right-wing English newspapers presented the king as an icon through whom they could enjoy vicarious power and pleasure.

Like the succession to the throne, succession to the office of prime minister was a family affair. When Lord Salisbury retired in 1902, there was no election; instead he appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as premier. This was by no means the first occasion on which Salisbury had promoted a relative within his government, and nothing better illustrates the hegemony of England’s aristocratic governing caste, or the essential identity of the Conservative party.

Balfour offered a striking contrast to the king whose government he led, with his languid posture and subtle intelligence. His most famous publication was a philosophical tract called A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, and his taste for philosophic inquiry was accompanied by a genius for rhetoric. Yet this mastery of the parliamentary medium often made it difficult for others to identify his message. Balfour never appeared to advocate or condemn a point of view; instead of proposing a course of action, he preferred to analyse all possible options until none seemed viable. As a patrician Tory he had little interest in altering the status quo, yet there was something idiosyncratic about his suspicion of all forms of political passion. It was as though he was petrified by the prospect of anarchy, and he laboured to keep it at a distance through irony, oratory and even coercion. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s he had been known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ for his draconian policies. ‘To allow’ the Home Rulers to ‘win’, he had said, ‘is simply to give up civilisation … and authority’. Balfour regularly defended Conservative ‘values’, but he felt no enthusiasm for any specific political issue. Politics was an art to be pursued for its own sake rather than a means of getting things done.

Many of Balfour’s critics dismissed the prime minister as effete and ineffectual, while others lamented his lack of interest in the people he governed. It was said that he had never read a newspaper in his life. With little interest in the ‘lower orders’, and nothing but contempt for a middle class ‘unfit’ for anything ‘besides manufacturing’, the Tory prime minister epitomized the hauteur of the governing aristocratic elite. Was this the leader to face the challenges of a new era?

2

Home sweet home

Beyond the palace and parliament lay numberless streets of newly built houses. They were semi-detached or detached two-storey red-brick buildings, with slate roofs and bow windows, timber frames, casement windows and small front gardens. Peering over the hedges that protected the privacy of these new homes, the passerby could discern carefully arranged window displays behind lace curtains. In their tidiness, cleanliness and air of modest comfort, the homes of the ‘suburbs’ seemed to proclaim a prosperous and content population. During Edward’s reign, the suburban population exploded: in 1910, there were almost a million people living in ‘outer London’.

The new houses were given names like ‘Fairview’, or ‘The Laurels’ – the name of the home of the archetypal suburbanite Charles Pooter, hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s late-Victorian classic, The Diary of a Nobody. They were typically clustered in squares or along truncated streets. Nearby there would be a park, a bowls or tennis club and a row of shops. Men in dark suits and bowler hats would leave the houses for work, umbrella in hand; young mothers would push perambulators, and boys from the grocer’s and newsagent’s would make their deliveries. Few children could be heard playing in the streets. This was the deep consciousness of ‘middle England’.

The suburbs were characterized by a removal from the commercial and industrial concerns of urban centres. Pervaded by a spirit of rural and romantic make-believe, with their tree-lined streets and patches of grass, they formed cityless cities for those who could afford to escape the tumultuous streets of the centre. The more leafy and spacious the suburb, the higher the house prices and the higher the percentage of owner-occupiers. A house in the green south London suburb of Balham cost over £1,000 to buy or 12 shillings a week to rent, prices that only the middle classes could afford.

At the lower end of the suburban cohort were skilled craftsmen and artisans, who had authority at work and were addressed by their ‘betters’ as ‘Mr’ rather than just by their surnames. This group also included shopkeepers, tradesmen, publicans, teachers, boarding-house keepers and small-scale merchants. They generally rented houses in the ‘inner suburbs’ and sometimes kept a servant – a necessity in the labour-intensive Edwardian home, as well as a status symbol to demonstrate that they were a level above semi-skilled or unskilled factory workers or labourers. Members of the lowest of the ‘servant-keeping classes’ felt too superior to mix with the working people in the public house but could not afford to frequent middle-class restaurants. In fact, they often struggled to maintain their social status, which was everything in Edwardian England – slipping down the scale and moving from the inner suburbs to the inner city was perceived as tragic and irreversible. Bankruptcy, loss of employment and the sickness or death of a family member might be the cause of this misfortune.

Clerks in city offices were more secure in their social position; so too were civil servants, bookkeepers and assistant managers, who earned between £300 and £700 a year. Such people kept two or more servants and could afford to buy houses in inner suburbs, such as Chorlton and Withington just outside Manchester. Yet more leafy outer suburban areas were beyond their means, though not their aspirations. The most attractive and genteel suburbs were colonized by the upper middle classes – manufacturers and wholesalers, along with the accountants, architects, solicitors, barristers, doctors, vets, bankers, actuaries and surveyors who comprised the professional classes. As the nineteenth century had progressed, they had become increasingly powerful and well-organized, with the creation of associations for each occupation. They could afford to keep several servants and privately educate their children. After schooling, boys would often take up the same professions as their fathers; girls were encouraged to become shorthand writers or governesses while they awaited marriage.

Suburbanites could commute to work in the city along the recently established transport links, which included electric trams and omnibuses, as well as overground and underground trains. Balham, for example, was connected to the City of London via underground stations at Kennington and Stockwell, and Didsbury was connected to Manchester Central Station by an overland train. Trams were the cheapest way to travel, with special ‘workman’s fares’ for early-morning journeys allowing passengers to travel up to ten miles for a penny. Yet precisely because trams were popular with workers, the middle class tended to shun them and instead take the train.

Whenever a new train station was built just outside a city, estate agents’ offices would emerge nearby, offering land to speculators, construction firms and private buyers. In 1907, Golders Green in north London was connected to the City by the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway; immediately afterwards, the armies of builders arrived. ‘All day long’, remarked a local paper in 1910, ‘there is a continuous hammering which reminds one of distant thunder’, as the tiled, gabled and half-timbered ‘semis’ grew up around the station, the railway line and the roads. There was no development plan and local authority control was virtually nonexistent, so the houses were built close together to maximize profits. It was a sprawl that failed to take into consideration either the quality of life of the new inhabitants or the preservation of the countryside. By 1914 it was impossible to believe that Golders Green had been full of trees and hedges only a decade before.

The unrelenting development of these outer cities gave the impression that the English population was also expanding. Yet the low-density housing of the suburbs, in contrast with the high blocks of flats on the Continent and the older terraces in English cities, revealed a different demographic trend. The new houses suited England’s relatively ageing population. For the first time on record, the increase in England’s population slowed during the Edwardian period. Between 1900 and 1910 the birth rate decreased from thirty-six to twenty-four per 1,000 population; it was only the declining death rate and increasing immigration into the country that kept the population growing.

Declining birth and death rates meant that England was no longer the young, vigorous country it had been at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. In 1841 half of the population had been under twenty, but by 1914 the figure was less than a third. This development provoked further concerns about the robustness of the nation, while increasing immigration prompted xenophobia, with many complaining that England was ‘falling to the Irish and the Jews’. Popular anxiety over the racial ‘deterioration’ and ‘adulteration’ of the supposedly Anglo-Saxon English would inform the 1905 Aliens Act, which was introduced by the Tories to reduce immigration into Britain from outside the empire.

The keynotes of suburban life were privacy, domesticity and respectability. The privet hedge at the front of the semi-detached houses and their fenced back gardens ensured that the suburban family’s ‘home sweet home’ became their castle. Suburbanites could live undisturbed by their neighbours, with whom they might exchange no more than a few words. And yet everyone was aware of their social and economic status – the size of one’s house and its presentation proclaimed one’s ranking. The most affluent families set the standards to which all denizens of a suburb aspired: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, a phrase coined in 1913, was the aim of suburban life. Everyone in a suburb was also aware of a neighbour’s transgressions from genteel standards of morality, such as an unwanted pregnancy. A group-monitored respectability pervaded these outer cities, and the word ‘respectable’ became synonymous with the suburban middle class.

The aspirational character of middle-class suburbanites offered an obvious subject for literary caricature. ‘We live our unreal, stupid little lives,’ a suburban character comments in a story by the upper-middle-class author Saki, ‘and persuade ourselves that we really are untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence.’ Other authors mocked the supposedly unsophisticated cultural societies such as drama, singing, art and flower arranging that proliferated in the new neighbourhoods, together with the tennis, bowls and golf clubs that monopolized so much of the suburbanite’s leisure time. The suburbs themselves were also denigrated and denounced. In his 1910 novel Howards End, E. M. Forster described a stain of ‘red rust’ spreading out into the countryside around London.

Some intellectuals championed suburbia. The radical Liberal MP Charles Masterman predicted that the suburbs would become the major urban form of the twentieth century, replacing the countryside as the breeding ground of a new ‘English yeomanry’. Animated by the Victorian values of self-help, laissez-faire and individualism, it was believed that suburbanites were distinguished by their drive, ambition, worldliness and agnosticism. The suburban middle class was also on the rise as a political force. Partially enfranchised by the reform acts of the 1860s and 1880s and then fully enfranchised in 1918, their electoral choices would determine who governed England throughout the twentieth century. In acknowledgement of the growing power of that class, the 1911 census made the occupation of the male head of the household, rather than the land he owned or his family connections, the main criterion of social position.

Yet the new population had its limitations. Neither political consciousness nor a sense of solidarity could flourish in the suburbs, where private interests took precedence over public concerns. In the absence of a strong community spirit and a compelling code of public ethics, religious observance also declined. It was not that atheism was spreading among suburbanites; it was just that they dedicated their time to their families, to leisure activities and to spending money. Sundays in the suburbs were spent playing golf, tennis and bowls rather than going to church. Most members of the middle class remained Christian in their outlook, but they increasingly did not feel the need to affirm this by attending church. Their indifference to the established Church of England set the tone for the entire nation, and for the coming century. While the Anglican Church would continue to influence English culture in the decades ahead, its popular appeal and political power would be severely diminished.

3

The lie of the land

Beyond the suburbs lay the old villages of rural England, whose decay was constantly lamented. Over 1 million English people still worked the land, but they represented a dwindling percentage of the workforce. In 1851 a quarter of English males were agricultural labourers, but by 1911 the figure fell below 5 per cent. England was now an overwhelmingly urban nation, with over three-quarters of the population living in towns and cities – a development that alarmedthose who believed that the health of the English people was threatened by urban living.

Rural labourers lived in six main areas of the country – the grazing counties of the northwest, north-east and southwest, and the arable counties of East Anglia, the Midlands and the southeast. The agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century had ravaged the arable sector. In 1870 arable goods had accounted for half of the national agricultural produce, but by 1914 that figure had fallen below 20 per cent. Improvements in transport and preservation allowed producers as far away as New Zealand to export their goods to England; half of all food consumed in the country was imported.

Wages for those who worked the land were low at the start of Edward’s reign. The average pay for a sixty-five-hour week was around 12 shillings, a sum which the social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree described as ‘insufficient to maintain a family of average size in a state of merely physical efficiency’. Rural wages would increase by 3 per cent between 1900 and 1912, well behind the general 15 per cent increase in the cost of living over the same period. Where possible, agricultural labourers would rear their own animals for slaughter and cultivate their own allotments.

The English peasantry owned none of the land it cultivated. After the enclosures of the previous centuries, almost every rural acre belonged to private aristocratic landlords. Even in Ireland, where great swathes of the land had been appropriated by the British from the native Catholic population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the situation was more favourable to agricultural labourers, after the 1903 Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act offered subsidies to tenants who wanted to purchase land from landlords. Agricultural labour in Edwardian England was often characterized as cheerless toil for someone else’s benefit, while living conditions for the peasantry were frequently desperate. It is hardly surprising that so many labourers either joined unions and agitated for an improvement in their lot or left the land for towns and cities. With the country population decreasing, the traditional rural way of life, with its ancient trades, crafts and pastimes, slowly died out. Village festivals became less frequent and public houses shut down, while bread and meat were now bought from the baker’s and butcher’s vans that came from the nearest town.

On their journeys to England’s cities, emigrant rural workers would often meet wealthy townspeople travelling in the opposite direction by motor car. Upper-middle-class Edwardians decided to move to the country in order to return to the ‘simpler’ way of life that had been evoked in the works of such Victorian writers as John Ruskin. The magazine Country Life, founded at the end of the 1890s, exerted an even larger influence, with its promises of ‘peace, plenty and quiet’ for the ‘country-loving businessman’. Nostalgia for a largely imaginary version of traditional rural life would be a prominent feature of the urban middle-class imagination throughout the twentieth century. The more country life was destroyed, the greater influence the ideal of that traditional life exercised on the English psyche.

While rich city folk often claimed to love traditional rural life, they were not prepared to forgo modern comfort. Instead of renovating the dilapidated cottages left vacant by the city-bound peasants, they generally built their own ‘cottagey’ homes replete with modern conveniences. Numerous ‘riverside’ housing developments sprang up along the Thames, with regular railway services allowing their inhabitants to commute to the City. The new houses were in the countryside but not of it. The sounds of a piano or a tennis party would issue from them; city talk now filled the country lanes.

When the rural workers arrived in a city, they found streets upon streets of indistinguishable houses and shops. The majority of the workingclass men who inhabited inner cities were semi-skilled or unskilled labourers employed in factories or in the construction industry for a weekly wage. Others, still lower down the social and economic scale, assumed more precarious occupations, such as scavenger, knife grinder or hawker. According to the 1911 census, the leading occupational category for workingclass men and women in England was domestic service, with some one and a quarter million people employed as servants. The number of people in domestic work reinforced the Conservative idea of England as an ‘organic’ hierarchical society in which everyone had a place and knew it.

Workingclass people who were not live-in domestics often resided in the ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced city houses constructed during Victoria’s reign. These cheaply built ‘workers’ cottages’ were poorly insulated and lacked running water, though many were now lit by gas. Family life centred on the ground-floor room at the back of the house, which served as a kitchen and living room. The front room downstairs displayed the family’s best furniture and was used only on special occasions. There was a small garden at the back with an outdoor toilet; the garden could be used to grow vegetables or as a yard where work tools might be stored.

Just under half of the working classes were officially classified as impoverished. While the national income increased by 20 per cent over Edward’s reign, real wages dropped by around 6 per cent. When working husbands failed to bring in enough money to cover their family’s needs, their wives were forced to pawn the family’s possessions. In the first decade of the new century there were 700 pawn shops within ten miles of the City of London.

The ever-present fear of the working class was the penury that might come as a consequence of unemployment, ill health, a wage cut or injury at work. When the rent on a terraced house could no longer be paid, a once respectable family had to look for accommodation among the crowded and squalid slums of the ‘residuum’. It is thought that 35,000 people were homeless in London in 1910. They tramped the streets during the night and waited by the gates of the public parks until they opened, when they fell asleep on the benches. The workhouses offered little in the way of refuge. Their occupants would earn meagre meals by picking oakum and breaking stones all day, like prisoners – and any negligence could be punished by imprisonment.

The working classes were often described by middle-class observers as a different race – stunted, sickly, violent, exhausted and addicted to stimulants such as tobacco and alcohol. But while drink was condemned by genteel reformers as the ‘curse of the working classes’, drinkers often referred to it as ‘the shortest way out of the slums’. Religion was not one of the preferred stimulants of the ‘masses’ – less than 15 per cent of the urban working class regularly attended religious services. Some clergymen were concerned that the workers were regressing to paganism, while more acute observers believed they had never fully converted to Christianity in the first place. It may be significant that the denominations that retained some of their workingclass allegiance combined an other-worldly ethos with an interest in earthly, political concerns. Keir Hardie, who had become the first ever ‘Labour’ MP in 1892, was an ardent Nonconformist who declared that ‘the only way to serve God is by serving humanity’. The Anglican Church, meanwhile, was regarded with indifference by the workers, hardly surprising given its reputation as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’.

4

Plates in the air

Poor wages, fear of penury and conspicuous social and economic inequality made the workers anxious and angry. In a country where there was segregation at public baths between working people and the ‘higher classes’, class hostility was inevitable. In 1900 the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was established by socialist bodies including the Fabians and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), along with various trade unionists who were determined to secure their legal status and right to strike. The general aim of the union-backed LRC (or the Labour party, as it would be called from 1906) was to further workingclass interests in the Commons, by sponsoring parliamentary representatives who would, in Keir Hardie’s words, form ‘a distinct Labour group … and cooperate with any party promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour’. It conceived a programme of ‘gradualist’ socialism, designed to improve Britain’s existing economic, social and political system. Reform, rather than revolution, was its purpose.

The parliamentary rise of ‘Labour’, and the electoral challenge it posed to the Liberal party, are striking in the history of twentiethcentury politics. As early as 1901, the Fabian Sidney Webb argued that the emergence of a party of labour threatened the Liberal party’s status as ‘the political organ of the progressive instinct’ and as the main opposition to the Tories. Yet in the five years following its formation, ‘Labour’ was merely a parliamentary pressure group, with no aspirations to challenging the Liberals. It had only two MPs, one of whom was the redoubtable Hardie, known for wearing a cloth cap in parliament rather than the customary silk top hat. The sight of him at Westminster was a shock to many: ‘A Republic,’ wrote one journalist, ‘has insinuated itself in the folds of a monarchy.’ Hardie was lambasted by the overwhelmingly Conservative newspapers for his republican views. From the back benches, he advocated increasing as well as graduating income tax (which only 7 per cent of the population currently paid) to subsidize a programme of social reforms, designed to improve the conditions of the working class.

For the moment, no one listened to the voice of Labour. Balfour’s administration, which lasted from 1902 to 1905, showed little interest in introducing social legislation, while the idea of raising taxes was abhorrent to most Tories. Nevertheless the government did pass the 1903 Unemployed Workmen Act, which at least acknowledged that the state ought to address the problem of unemployment. The government’s most ambitious piece of domestic legislation was the 1902 Education Act, which provided funds, from local ratepayers, for denominational religious instruction; it also united the voluntary elementary schools run by the Anglican and Catholic churches with those administered by school boards. But the act provoked outrage on the Liberal benches. It was discriminatory against Nonconformists, they claimed, since it was predominantly Anglican schools that were to be subsidized by rates.

While the Education Act proved controversial, the political cause célèbre of Balfour’s tenure was protectionism. In 1902 a group of Liberal Unionists and Conservatives tried to persuade his government to impose tariffs on all imports coming into Britain from outside the empire. Their proposals effectively called for the end of laissez-faire economics and free trade – two of the great Victorian verities. The Liberal party united in opposition to the proposal, on the grounds that unfettered competition was natural, moral and patriotic.

The debate not only drew a clear dividing line between the two parties, it also split the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. Many Conservatives had sympathy with the arguments of the free-trade Liberals, and even more believed that the status quo should not be disturbed. How, they asked, could such a radical idea emerge from within a Tory-dominated coalition, whose central aim was to conserve things as they were, and to perpetuate the power the party had enjoyed at Westminster for almost two decades?

The answer was simple: Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary and Liberal Unionist leader, whose conversion to Tariff Reform guaranteed it would become the great issue of the day. Chamberlain, as the young Tory Winston Churchill commented, ‘was the one who made the weather’ – in the cabinet, in Westminster and in the country. The charismatic man with the monocle and the orchid in his buttonhole had been ‘Made in Birmingham’. Imbued with the confidence of a city that had experienced extraordinary material and technological progress during the industrial revolution, this former screw manufacturer was truculent, practical, energetic and ambitious. He was an emblem of Birmingham’s thriving commercial aristocracy – he had been mayor of the city in the 1870s and had improved its infrastructure through the implementation of a programme of ‘municipal socialism’.

Given Chamberlain’s character and background, it is unsurprising that not all Tories celebrated his defection to their side of the House in 1886, in protest at the Liberal government’s Irish Home Rule Bill. The old party of the landed governing class and the Anglican Church ought not, some Tories believed, to ally itself with manufacturers and dissenters, especially when they were as radical, flashy and potentially divisive as Chamberlain. Yet he proved to be a great electoral asset to what became the Unionist Alliance. His Liberal Unionist group contributed seventy-one MPs to the coalition after the 1895 election, while the policies he pursued as colonial secretary from that date had been immensely popular. Chamberlain was a zealous imperialist who believed ‘that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen’. His plan for the empire was the knitting together of ‘kindred races’ for ‘similar objects’; in particular, he aimed to strengthen the ‘bonds’ linking Britain, Canada and America in a ‘Greater Britain’. Yet unifying and integrating the empire were not enough to satisfy Chamberlain; he dreamed of expanding its frontiers. His aggressive policies had helped provoke the conflict with the Boers, which became known as ‘Joe’s War’. In the early days of the military campaign he had basked in the triumphs of the British troops, which helped secure a decisive electoral victory for the Unionist Alliance in 1900.

The speeches and journalism Chamberlain produced during the election campaign were peppered with slogans. ‘Every seat lost to the government,’ he had declared, ‘is a seat sold to the Boers.’ Chamberlain believed that subtlety of argument was inappropriate for the twentieth century: ‘in politics’, he would say, ‘you must paint with a broad brush’. His ability to speak directly to the voting lower middle class and the business classes, through simple language and the modern media, made Chamberlain unique among the coalition ranks. He was, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the man the masses knew’. While some Tories, and most Liberals, accused him of lowering the standard of public life with his ‘demagoguery’, the party hierarchy was forced to tolerate him.

With jingoism apparently dead following the debacle of the Boer War, and with the Liberal opposition gaining momentum, Chamberlain needed another popular cry. Besides, he was nearing seventy and itching for one last adventure. That adventure might also advance his ultimate ambition – the leadership of a Unionist government and the country. An acute interpreter of the spirit of the age, Chamberlain sensed that businessmen and the lower middle classes were slowly coming to the conclusion that free competition was a Victorian truism. It was this intuition that inspired Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform programme.

Chamberlain presented his plans to the cabinet in 1902. Some of his colleagues were persuaded by his argument that tariffs would protect British industry from foreign competition, but others were openly hostile. Balfour decided that he could not afford to lose the support of Chamberlain’s critics by backing the plan. The government’s official position was expressed in a characteristic Balfourian equivocation – Tariff Reform was desirable but impractical at the present time. Yet Chamberlain was not a man to wait. In May 1903, he defied Balfour by publicizing his proposals in a startling speech in Birmingham, insisting that England’s free trade policies, and the tariffs imposed by other nations on English goods, were destroying the country’s industry. ‘Sugar is gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it?’ Only the imposition of tariffs on goods coming into England from outside the empire could arrest the country’s economic decline and preserve English jobs: ‘Tariff Reform’, ran his new slogan, ‘Means Work for All’. Tariffs would, in addition, further the two causes closest to his heart – imperialism and social reform. They would bind the vast empire closer together, as a single economic, political and military unit, and raise government revenue which could be spent on domestic legislation. ‘The foreigner’ would thus pay for social reform, rather than the English taxpayer.

Chamberlain’s panacea for England’s difficulties was well received by his audience. Some Unionist MPs praised the programme as an ambitious bid both to revamp Disraelian ‘onenation Toryism’ and to revive the empire as a popular and party-political issue. But Balfour was dismayed. There was now intense pressure on him to join the side of either protectionism or free trade, yet his cabinet and party were divided on the issue. In the end, Balfour could not bring himself to choose sides and permitted members of his cabinet to make up their own minds. He also formulated an ambiguous piece of legislation that aimed to appease both factions within his party – ‘retaliatory’ tariffs were introduced on countries who had anti-British tariffs in place; protectionist measures would thereby promote free trade.

The only problem with this characteristic solution was that it satisfied neither faction. The prime minister’s reluctance to dictate an official line to his cabinet, meanwhile, was interpreted as a dereliction of his duty as leader. Representatives of both sides of the argument resigned from the cabinet, with Chamberlain declaring that he would leave the government in order to take his protectionist gospel to the country. Instead of confronting Chamberlain, Balfour told him that if he managed to convert the majority of the electorate, the coalition would back the Tariff Reform programme at the next election.

The episode undermined Balfour’s authority within his party and the Commons, where the Liberals were vociferous in their criticism. He believed in protectionism, they claimed, but knew the policy was unpopular, and had therefore sacrificed his most talented minister, and his own convictions, to pragmatic considerations. Balfour’s government was now bereft of an ambitious policy, as well as of its principal source of energy and ideas. Remarkably, Balfour managed to keep the plates spinning for a couple of years, but in November 1905 his fatally weakened government finally resigned. This may have been a ruse to expose divisions within the Liberal shadow cabinet, since it was now incumbent on them to form a government. If that is so, the ruse was a failure. Although he did not command the allegiance of all senior members of his party, the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman succeeded in forming a Liberal government and led his party united into a general election in January 1906, from which it emerged victorious. Five years into the post-Victorian era, the indolent patrician prime minister had been exposed and forced out of Downing Street; he would never lead the country again.

5

The most powerful thing

A sense of insecurity, as well as impotence, had pervaded Balfour’s administration. This was nowhere more obvious than in foreign affairs. With its economy languishing, its empire overstretched and its population growth slowing, Britain was no longer the pre-eminent world power, capable of confronting simultaneous challenges on many fronts. Some British people even wondered whether the country was strong enough to face a single threat.

The most likely menace was believed to come from Germany. That country’s burgeoning industrial might, its vast land army, the imperialist dreams of its Kaiser and its expanding navy inspired anxiety among the English. Admiral Tirpitz’s Navy Bill of 1900 specifically aimed to establish a fleet ‘of such strength that, even for the mightiest naval power, a war with Germany would involve such risks as to jeopardise its own supremacy’. This was interpreted as a thinly veiled threat to Britain. The Foreign Office declared that Germany ‘appeared to be aiming at political hegemony and maritime ascendency, threatening the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England’.

Conservative English newspapers urged the government to respond by building bigger and better battleships, and by 1905 a large portion of the English population agreed. The navy was the pride of a country that was celebrating the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar; by protecting trade routes and imperial borders, it guaranteed England’s prosperity as well as her security. Balfour’s government responded to popular demand by commissioning HMS Dreadnought, a vast battleship that was launched by King Edward at Portsmouth in 1906. Described by one English admiral as ‘the most powerful thing in the world’, it caused a popular sensation. But the United States, Japan and Germany soon joined in the game of battleships, and the press demanded that the government should win the international arms race.

But even if victory in that race were possible, would it secure the prize of peace? For however many dreadnoughts England stockpiled, it could no longer command the waves unaided. The country’s isolation from continental affairs had once been described by English politicians as ‘splendid’; it allowed England to concentrate on global affairs and expand its empire. But with that empire now overstretched, and with England’s economy diminished, isolation had become perilous. It was imperative that England now build European alliances, but the country had few friends on the Continent. The widespread distaste for its actions during the Boer War had further alienated potential allies. What had been the point of oppressing the free farmers of the volk apart from a lust for South African gold? The infamous conflict had lent credence to long-standing French suspicions regarding la perfide Albion; the possibility of an Anglo-French alliance seemed remote.

Nevertheless, King Edward was determined to improve relations between England and its closest neighbour. He understood the danger of England’s isolated position, and preferred the French to the Germans. His state visit to France in 1903 helped create the atmosphere in which an historic ‘Entente Cordiale’ was signed the following year. That agreement, based on mutual suspicion of Germany, marked the end of centuries of Anglo-French distrust. Meanwhile, Edward’s half-hearted attempts to forge more amicable links with the Germans came to nothing. The king soon fell out with the German emperor, and railed against ‘lying’ German officials; the Kaiser branded the English ‘degenerate’.

Germany soon put the Entente Cordiale to the test by opposing France’s bid to control Morocco. She sent a cruiser to the region, ostensibly to protect her economic interests but actually as a military challenge. To German indignation, England stood by her new partner and the Anglo-French alliance was strengthened. The Kaiser accused England of ‘pursuing an anti-German policy all over the world’, while anti-German sentiment spread in England. As H. G. Wells wrote in his novel Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916), ‘the worldwide clash of British and German interests’ became ‘facts in the consciousness of Englishmen … A whole generation was brought up in the threat of German war.’

England also looked beyond Europe’s borders for allies. Chamberlain continued to advocate the union of Britain and the United States in a ‘Greater Britain’ that would dominate the world economy and police the globe. While that appeared unlikely, a strong diplomatic friendship between the countries was a more realistic proposition. Ever since the 1890s, matches had been made between American heiresses and English aristocrats, while the historical and linguistic links that supposedly bound the two countries were celebrated. An agreement was eventually reached, involving a concession by Britain to America’s demands in Alaska and the Caribbean. England had been forced to recognize the new reality of the United States’ economic and naval pre-eminence. Yet neither these alliances, nor the manufacture of dreadnoughts, could quell concerns about England’s capacity to defend herself. Many felt that the martial might of the country was bound up with its racial and moral strength; both were now believed to be sadly lacking.

Another emblem of England’s anxiety was the Boy Scout Movement. Its founder, Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell, had taken part in the Boer War, and knew first-hand the alarming condition of the British troops. Convinced that the British Empire was in a state of decline, he was determined to halt the process. The shadow of imperial and racial catastrophe hangs over every page of his book Scouting for Boys, which became a bestseller in 1908. The book inspired the spontaneous creation of ‘Scout Patrols’ throughout England; there were over 100,000 scouts by 1910. The boys were organized by ‘masters’, many of whom were ex-soldiers; they encouraged the scouts to become fitter, more resilient and resourceful, through an emphasis on outdoor activities and survival skills. ‘Through Scouting, sickly, weak and barrel-chested boys would’, Baden-Powell declared, ‘be trained in the traits of manhood.’ With their army-style uniforms, ranks, flag ceremonies and troop inspections, the scouts formed an unofficial youth army. Their motto was ‘Be prepared’.

6

Demands for reform

The Liberals won the 1906 election with a huge majority. The Unionist coalition lost more than half of its 400 seats, with Balfour and many members of the cabinet among the casualties. Three hundred and ninety-seven Liberals were returned to the Commons, where the party held 241 more seats than their rivals. It was one of the most spectacular defeats in Conservative history; after twenty years of dominance, many Tories found it difficult to accept. Yet Balfour was stoical in defeat. As the election results had come in, he murmured: ‘These things will happen.’

During the election campaign, the Liberals had attacked the Unionist coalition’s record, and in particular the Boer War. They had also denounced Chamberlain’s protectionist plans, arguing that tariffs would increase the price of imported food. By accepting this argument, the electorate ensured that laissez-faire doctrine would continue to determine economic policy, perhaps to the detriment of a manufacturing sector in urgent need of reinvigoration. The 1906 election was therefore a protest vote. The electorate passed the severest possible judgement not only on the Unionist Alliance, but also on the Tories and on Toryism. Voters had decided that the party was not fit to face the challenges of the new century, and that the ‘governing class’ it represented was unworthy of power. It is suggestive that half of those returned to the Commons in 1906 were new MPs, very few of whom came from the landed gentry.

Balfour’s immediate concerns involved returning to the Commons and maintaining his own position. He achieved his first aim by means of a safe seat, but the second proved more problematic. Many Tories blamed his leadership for the election defeat. Leo Maxse, the editor of the right-wing National Review, thought Balfour had ‘fallen into complete disrepute outside the Commons’. To add to Balfour’s problems, the vast majority of Conservatives and Liberal Unionist MPs returned to the Commons in 1906 were pro-protectionist. This left him at the head of an alliance whose principal policy he did not altogether support; he was also vulnerable to a leadership challenge from Chamberlain. At the age of seventy, however, the dynamo of the Unionist Alliance was finally slowing down. Soon after the election, Chamberlain suffered a stroke and was forced to retire from public life. For the moment, Balfour was unchallenged as leader.

Balfour’s inept leadership and Chamberlain’s retirement were not the only reasons for the pessimism in the Tory party. The Conservative privy counsellor Sir James Fergusson had been defeated at the election by a workingclass trade unionist, and such losses seemed to presage a difficult time. ‘The Old Conservative Party has gone forever,’ one party veteran lamented. The Labour party was identified as the primary cause of the electoral rout, as well as the greatest cause for future concern: ‘The Labour Movement and Organisation’, one Tory politician commented, ‘has been of incomparably greater importance than anything else’. Balfour agreed, hearing in the results ‘a faint echo of the same revolutionary movement which has produced massacres in St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna and socialist processions in Berlin’.

Labour’s share of seats had increased sharply, from two to twenty-nine. Their success was facilitated by the secret Liberal–Labour pact of 1903, according to which each party allowed representatives of the other to stand unchallenged in selected constituencies. The two parties were united in their commitment to anti-militarism, free trade and social reform, though there were obvious differences in outlook. The Liberals aspired to represent the whole country, whereas Labour’s aim was to further the cause of the working class and the unions. Labour MPs also advocated far more extensive social reform than most Liberals.

By making the 1903 pact the Liberals bought the support of a small group of Labour MPs, at a time when a landslide victory for them seemed impossible. They were about the rise of Labour as an independent parliamentary force, and a party that might one day monopolize the votes of the less affluent electorate. ‘We are keenly in sympathy with the representatives of Labour,’ Campbell-Bannerman remarked. ‘We have too few of them in the House.’ It was a short-term calculation which had long-term consequences. The pact helped to establish Labour as a major party which could rival the Liberals for the anti-Tory vote among the progressive middle classes. Yet the risks were not only on the Liberals’ side. There was a danger that Labour would lose its distinct identity and eventually be absorbed into the Liberal party, whose extreme radical wing espoused views on social reform that were similar to its own.

Among the new intake of Labour MPs were the eloquent Scot Ramsay MacDonald, and the methodical Yorkshireman Philip Snowden. Both of these workingclass men had former links with the Liberal party, while MacDonald had been one of the main architects of the Lib–Lab pact. Although the pair declared their support for socialism, it was a parliamentary, Christian and nonrevolutionary variety. Like most Labour MPs, they were part of a generation of newly literate workingand lower-middle-class men. Their intellectual influences were British writers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, rather than Karl Marx. After establishing himself as one of the leaders of parliamentary Labour, MacDonald was determined that it should develop into a serious Westminster party rather than a trade union pressure group. The party might, he believed, one day displace the Liberals as the main electoral alternative to the Tories. Arthur Henderson, a self-educated Methodist and erstwhile Liberal sympathizer, joined MacDonald, Snowden and Keir Hardie in the Commons. Henderson’s rise from prominent unionist to Labour MP is emblematic of the key factor in Labour’s success: the decision of the unions to turn to politics to secure the legislative gains they had made.

The new Labour MPs were earnest, studious and often teetotal. Yet despite their distinctly un-revolutionary nature, their arrival in the Commons caused consternation among orthodox Tories. What would King Edward make of their uncouth appearance when he opened parliament? Advanced intellectuals and optimistic reformers welcomed the advent of the new men, and in doing so offered further evidence of the cultural divide in England between those who wanted to shore up the Victorian establishment and those who hoped to build a more egalitarian country from its ruins.

The success of politicians who preached socialism indicated that attitudes to state intervention were changing. Socialism implied the reorganization of society and the economy for the benefit of the whole community, rather than in the interests of an elite. Previously associated with the hated Poor Law, compulsory education and restrictions on alcohol consumption, the state was increasingly seen in a kindlier light. People gradually began to think of themselves as stakeholders in the nation.

The publication of various sociological studies into poverty showed that it could no longer be blamed on the immorality of the poor. It was seen instead as a consequence of social and economic circumstances beyond their control. The radical Edwardian intelligentsia established poverty as a fact that had to be acknowledged by the government and addressed by the state. After their interventions, few people believed that poverty could be eradicated through the efforts of individuals, municipal boards and voluntary organizations. Even The Times now spoke of the inevitability of increased reform and a degree of wealth redistribution managed by government. Many people looked to the new Liberal administration to reduce poverty, and to implement an ambitious programme of domestic legislation. But were the Liberals up to the task? After all, Victorian Liberalism had been built on a creed of noninterference.

To judge by the Liberals’ election campaign, the party was neither capable of, nor interested in, introducing extensive legislation. The Liberal leader – the portly, canny and likeable Scot Campbell-Bannerman (or C-B as he preferred to be known) – had based the campaign on the traditional Gladstonian platform of ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’. Rather than outlining an innovative and detailed programme, most Liberal electioneering had concentrated on criticizing Balfour’s government. That had also been C-B’s strong suit during his seven years as opposition leader. When he faced the subtle and patrician Balfour across the dispatch box in the Commons, it seemed, as one journalist put it, as if ‘a stout, amiable City man’ had been ‘called upon to face, with nothing better than a walking stick, a lithe fencer with a nimble rapier’. C-B was often effective and invariably imperturbable, which irritated Balfour enormously.

C-B had employed negative electioneering tactics out of necessity as well as choice. He led a fractious and disunited party, which could only come together in criticism of the opposition. When Balfour forced the Liberals to form a government at the end of 1905, the pro-imperialist faction of the party, which included such prominent MPs as Herbert Henry Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, tried to pack C-B off to the Lords, thereby assuming control in the Commons. C-B punctured the rebellion by offering the rebels key positions in his cabinet, on the condition that they drop their demands. They agreed, and backed his vague and anodyne election programme.

Disunity within the Liberal Party was an expression of the disparate character of the elements that comprised it. Nonconformists featured prominently, as did commercialists and industrialists; yet it also contained aristocratic Whigs, as well as radicals such as John Burns, the son of a washerwoman. The party had traditionally protected the rights of Nonconformists against attacks from the established church; it also defended commerce and industry against the landed interest. It was difficult, however, to formulate a coherent programme that might satisfy all of the factions within the party. Historically, the Liberals had preferred to advocate a series of single ‘causes’, such as Irish Home Rule, yet the danger of this tactic was that it made them seem a party of protest. The bonds linking its disparate elements might also one day be loosened, or some of those elements might switch their allegiance. Joseph Chamberlain’s defection from the Liberal benches to the Tory side of the House suggested that the party ought not, for instance, count on the undying loyalty of self-made Nonconformist businessmen.

At the beginning of 1906, however, Liberal supporters were in confident mood. Their 400 MPs took their places in the new parliament, behind a talented front bench that reflected the broad church of Liberalism. The three former ‘imperialist’ rebels sat alongside radical and Nonconformist MPs, while several cabinet members had titles. In early debates of the parliament, C-B overpowered Balfour: ‘The right honourable gentleman’, he declared, ‘has learned nothing. He comes back to this new Commons with the … same frivolous way of dealing with great questions. He little knows the temper of the new House … Let us get to business.’

‘Business’ included the implementation of social legislation that, while modest in scope and impact, represented a significant improvement on the efforts of Balfour’s administration. Free school meals were provided for every child, should local authorities apply for them; the power and legal status of the unions were reinforced by the Trade Disputes Act (1906); and the 1906 Workmen’s Compensation Act gave compensation to those injured at work. Abroad, C-B’s administration granted self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal Colony, closing an unhappy chapter of English history.

7

The Terrible Twins

On 3 April 1908, C-B stepped down as premier, exhausted by overwork and immobilized by a series of heart attacks. He died a couple of weeks afterwards, still resident in Downing Street. A competent successor was waiting in the wings, in Herbert Henry Asquith. Despite his earlier interest in rebellion, Asquith had been loyal to C-B as chancellor of the Exchequer, while also demonstrating his administrative ability. Asquith’s ‘mind’, Churchill commented, ‘opened and shut smoothly and exactly like the breech of a gun’, a portrait that captured something of Asquith’s nonchalant efficiency. His nonchalance was also suggested by his nickname ‘Squiffy’, which alluded to his habit of drinking heavily, even when there was political business to be conducted. He was in his element at a country house party, where he might enjoy cards and the companionship of attractive young women, or in a London club in the company of aristocrats.

The heart of the English establishment was a curious place to find a man of Asquith’s background. He came from a radical Nonconformist family in Yorkshire that had made its fortune in wool, and had been orphaned at an early age. Yet his difficult and puritanical middle-class upbringing, which instilled in him an unshakeable self-belief, had been complemented by an establishment education in the south of England. He had taken the traditional routes into government, via Oxford and the Inns of Court, acquiring at the first a consciousness of effortless superiority and at the second the ability to destroy the arguments of others. In the late 1880s, while his legal career flourished, Asquith became a Liberal MP and rose effortlessly within the party; in 1892 he served as home secretary under Gladstone.

Though Asquith made memorable speeches from the front bench, it was often difficult to remember the message behind his stylish rhetoric. He rivalled Balfour as a master of the art of elegant equivocation, and nor was obfuscation the only thing the pair had in common. ‘Asquith does not inspire men with great passions,’ one journalist commented, while even Asquith’s wife described him as a ‘cold hard unsympathetic man loved by none’. There was also a Balfourian indolence, dilatoriness and aloofness about the new Liberal prime minister. He rarely came to cabinet meetings fully prepared, but instead considered questions as they were raised. The aristocratic establishment was able to perpetuate itself by absorbing and fashioning members of the new, wealthy and powerful middle class who were willing to conform to its rules. Asquith would renounce his Nonconformism, for example, and convert to the Anglican tradition. He also decided to marry the daughter of a baronet, the eccentric society ‘wit’ Margot Tennant.

Asquith’s establishment views did not equip him to implement extensive and radical social reform, yet they did enable him to conciliate the diverse ideological elements in his party. In his convoluted orations, he struck a fine balance between competing Liberal creeds and factions. He would criticize the ‘misdirected and paralysing activity of the state’ in one breath, but acknowledge the ‘needs and services which could not be safely left to the unregulated forces of supply and demand’ with the next. He presided over the motley characters in his cabinet as a chairman rather than as an autocrat. The Whiggish faction of the party was represented by Reginald McKenna and a large group of earls and lords; the Gladstonian element by John Morley. The radical Liberal wing was pleased that Burns retained his position as president of the Local Government Board, while Nonconformists were delighted that the Welshman David Lloyd George had taken over from Asquith at the Exchequer. The most unexpected decision Asquith made was in appointing the former Tory MP Winston Churchill to the Board of Trade. These last two appointments of men with a passion for social reform and inordinate ambition and energy appeared promising to progressives.

Lloyd George, the son of a farmer, was brought up as a Welsh-speaker and ardent chapelgoer. It was there, as much as in the London courts he attended as a solicitor, that he learned the rhetorical tricks that established him as the greatest orator of the age. He acquired the skill of presenting complex issues as clear-cut struggles between right and wrong. He could be lofty and lyrical or pointed and precise, according to the character or mood of his audience, which made him equally persuasive in a tête-à-tête in the Commons’ smoking room, in a cabinet meeting or in front of an audience of thousands.

Lloyd George did not attend university but educated himself, reading widely in literature and political theory. He was drawn to the question of land ownership, since his links were with rural Wales. Though the landscape of his political imagination was pre-industrial, he had no arguments with industrialists, businessmen or with the accumulation of capital, and no interest in socialism. In his youth he had been attracted to Liberalism by Joseph Chamberlain’s programme of social reform. ‘Our Joe’ was an inspiration and a kindred spirit, yet the young Welshman would soon identify Chamberlain’s fatal flaws – the monomania and dogmatism that manifested themselves in his obsessive opposition to Irish Home Rule. When Chamberlain left Gladstone’s Liberal party over its Irish policy, Lloyd George remained on Gladstone’s side. It would not be the last time that his pragmatism overcame his principles.

In the Commons, Lloyd George came to public notice as the most eloquent opponent of the Boer War, attacking the ‘racial arrogance’ that sustained imperialism. It was not that he wished to disband the empire, rather that he wanted to refashion it as a federation of autonomous states. He demonstrated an affinity with C-B, who, on assuming office, rewarded his disciple by appointing him to the Board of Trade. Lloyd George’s greatest achievement in that capacity was averting a national railway strike. Drawing on all his charm and verbal dexterity, he had brokered a deal between the unions and the railway companies, who had previously been irreconcilable adversaries. Even the Daily Mail had been impressed by Lloyd George’s ministerial record, and welcomed the radical MP’s appointment as chancellor: ‘he has proved in office that he possesses in exceptional measure … practical business capacity … initiative, and large open-mindedness’. This irrepressible man of action, an eloquent Machiavelli with no establishment allegiances, would dominate Westminster politics for the next fifteen years.

Conservative journalists were not so enthusiastic about Churchill’s elevation to the presidency of the Board of Trade. A few years previously he had abandoned the Tory party, his natural political home, crossing the floor in protest against growing support for protectionism within the Unionist Alliance. According to the National Review, Churchill’s act of ‘treachery’ was typical of ‘a soldier of fortune who has never pretended to be animated by any motive beyond a desire for his own advancement’. The accusation of egotism would be repeated throughout Churchill’s career, along with the related charges of political grandstanding and of an addiction to power. Civil servants complained that Churchill was unpunctual, prey to sudden enthusiasms, and enthralled by extravagant ideas and fine phrases. He was a free and fiery spirit who inspired admiration and mistrust in equal measure. Allies hailed him as a genius, while his enemies regarded him as unbalanced and unscrupulous.

Although the Tory press highlighted Churchill’s pragmatism, he was not without principles. He was genuinely committed to social reform, just as his father, Lord Randolph, had been. He had found Balfour’s party reactionary and inhospitable; the Liberals welcomed him as one who could help them improve the conditions of the working classes. It was a shared commitment to social reform – as well as shared ambition – that brought Lloyd George and Churchill together inside Asquith’s government. The pair understood that a new period of political history had opened, in which the ‘condition of the people’ was the dominant issue. Both men were convinced that extensive reform was the context for future progress and social stability. Both also believed that domestic legislation offered the Liberals the opportunity of outmanoeuvring the Labour party and checking the spread of socialism.

‘The Terrible Twins’, as the Tory press dubbed them, were responsible for introducing a slew of social legislation and significantly increasing the portion of government expenditure devoted to social services. Churchill was instrumental in passing the Trade Boards Bill, which set down minimum wage criteria, and in setting up the labour exchanges that increased labour mobility. Lloyd George, meanwhile, was the driving force behind the 1908 Children Act, which protected minors from dangerous trades and abuse, and the Old Age Pensions Act (1908), which awarded non-contributory pensions to men over seventy who earned less than £31 a year. The 1910 Education Act, which aimed to provide youths with a choice of employment, was also Lloyd George’s proposal, as was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which moved the mentally ill from poorhouses and prisons to specialized institutions. Finally, and most famously, Lloyd George introduced the National Insurance Act of 1911, the first ever piece of health and unemployment insurance legislation.

When the first groups of elderly men came to collect their pensions, one post office worker recalled that ‘tears of joy would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say … “God Bless that Lord (sic) George”’. The popular elevation of the proudly plebeian chancellor to the status of a lord suggests that the Victorian spirit of deference was not yet dead, but the new legislation represented a twentiethrather than a nineteenth-century response to England’s social ills. Promoted by politicians and civil servants with professional rather than patrician backgrounds, it laid the foundation for the future welfare state by guaranteeing minimum standards for a portion of the population. It thereby granted people their rights as citizens, and welcomed them, in the contemporary phrase, ‘to the common table of the nation’. It is hardly surprising that the programme was described as a form of socialistic ‘New Liberalism’, or that it inspired enthusiasm among students and the young intelligentsia. The rising generation believed that Lloyd George and Churchill had gone some way to satisfying their demand for social justice.

Lloyd George and Churchill probably went as far as the Tory-dominated House of Lords and the laissez-faire ideology of many Liberals would allow them. There was also Asquith’s caution to overcome. While the prime minister assented to most of their policies, he prided himself on never being ‘pushed along against [my] will … by energetic colleagues’. Whenever he regarded a proposal as too risky, Asquith’s conservative instincts prompted him to apply ‘the brake’. In private, Lloyd George complained to Churchill about his ‘aimlessness’.

Yet it was also possible that danger could come from activity. That was one of the lessons that Asquith might have drawn from the controversy provoked by the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. Lloyd George’s budget was informed by the principle of the redistribution of wealth, a radical notion that had been alien to most Victorians. It aimed to fund the government’s extensive social welfare programmes with a graduated tax on high incomes and by taxing land through various measures, including a 20 per cent tax on any unearned increment of land values. The chancellor justified these unprecedented peacetime demands on wealth by calling it ‘a war budget … for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’. The proposed taxes would not affect middle-class salary earners or the majority of industrialists, whom Lloyd George identified as the Liberals’ natural constituency. Once again the chancellor was trying to quell social unrest and outflank Labour, whose MPs could only applaud him. If the price was to alienate the landed gentry, it was one Lloyd George was happy to pay.

Others were not so happy. The Liberal party grandee Lord Rosebery dismissed Lloyd George’s proposals as ‘tyrannical and socialistic’. Here was a call for the establishment to close ranks, regardless of party allegiance, and the Tory party was not slow in responding. Even the new breed of Conservative MPs, recruited from the wealthy business classes, denounced the budget as unjust. Stanley Baldwin spoke, in one of his first Commons speeches, of the excessive expenditure the aristocracy would have to undertake if the budget were passed. The atmosphere in the Commons had not been as tense since the debates on the 1832 Reform Act.

The atmosphere in the Tory-dominated Lords, meanwhile, was one of defiance mingled with dread. It threw out the People’s Budget and a constitutional impasse ensued, damaging confidence in the political system. Terrified by the possible ramifications, King Edward tried to arrange a deal behind the scenes, yet even the monarch’s efforts were in vain. The Tory peers justified their intransigence by arguing that the budget lacked an electoral mandate – an indication that Balfour believed they would win a general election.

The Terrible Twins welcomed the opportunity of taking the New Liberal case to the people, and Asquith assented to their demands for an election in early 1910. Lloyd George and Churchill directed the Liberal campaign with customary vigour. They formed the ‘Budget League’ and coordinated the activities of Liberal newspaper editors. They also used the latest technology, sending vans to remote areas of the country with speakers fixed to them so that their words could be broadcast in the highlands and lowlands. The struggle between the lower and the upper house was characterized as one of social democracy against inherited privilege. It was also cast as a war between an increasingly middle-class Commons, where the Liberals were dominant, and a patrician and Tory House of Lords. Lloyd George was determined to create a division between the middle class and the upper class; he would gain the allegiance of the former for his party, and unite every class below the aristocracy by identifying it as their common enemy. In his public speeches he described the unelected peers as ‘five hundred men chosen at random from among the unemployed’.

This language of class war appalled the establishment, with King Edward branding Lloyd George’s statements ‘improper’ and ‘insidious’. According to a Tory MP, the chancellor ‘set the fashion for attacking rich men because they were rich’. Yet the patrician Churchill was also responsible for introducing egalitarian and meritocratic ideas into Edwardian political discourse. ‘We do not only ask today, “How much have you got?”’ he declared, ‘we also ask, “How did you get it? Did you earn it by yourself, or has it just been left to you by others?”’ Churchill even advocated the abolition of the Lords, on the grounds that the Tories would always find a way of controlling the upper house.

Yet the omens were not good for Churchill and Lloyd George. The Tory party was able to mobilize its vastly superior financial and propaganda resources. The Times and the Daily Mail instructed the electorate to reject the Liberals and instead to back the Chamberlainite Tariff Reform as a means of funding social reform without raising taxes. The lower middle class seem to have been convinced by these arguments, while the suburban middle classes found Lloyd George’s class war rhetoric too socialistic. In the event, the Liberals lost 123 seats in the election, nearly all of which were taken by the Tories, but they returned to office courtesy of the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the burgeoning Labour party, which claimed forty seats.

The challenge of passing the ‘People’s Budget’ was now infinitely more difficult for the Liberal government; expediting the ‘wide programme of reconstruction’ that Lloyd George and Churchill had outlined during the election campaign was unthinkable for a minority administration. A friend of Asquith’s remembered how he ‘wandered about utterly wretched and restless’ in the days following the election, yet somehow the prime minister muddled through. However disappointing the election results were, he believed they gave his government a popular mandate for the budget. The best way to force the Tory peers to back down, he suggested, was for Edward to threaten to create enough new Liberal peers to ensure the budget’s safe passage. Although this proposal was not unprecedented, the king thought it ‘simply disgusting’. Like many members of the establishment, Edward believed the government was now controlled by an Irish party that planned to emasculate the upper house in order to force through a Home Rule bill. He decided to try to negotiate once again with Balfour and the Tory peers; when discussions led nowhere, however, he reluctantly acceded to Asquith’s demands with a proviso: he would threaten to create a crowd of new Liberal peers if the Lords continued to reject the budget, but only after two general elections had confirmed public opinion on the issue.

Asquith also pressed the king on a related matter – the introduction of legislation to alter the Lords’ power of veto. Once again, in the absence of a viable alternative, Edward reluctantly agreed. Asquith’s decision to pursue the reform of the Lords was no doubt instigated by pressure from the Irish MPs, yet his party had long desired to reduce the powers of the upper house. On his arrival in Downing Street in 1906, C-B had spoken of his desire to ‘clip the wings’ of the peers, and Lloyd George had been eager to carry out the threat of his old mentor for some time. To the chancellor, the upper chamber was not so much the ‘watchdog of the constitution’ as ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’.

Edward’s willingness to create Liberal peers proved persuasive, and the Lords eventually let the People’s Budget through with a few amendments. The Tory peers remained recalcitrant, however, on the proposals to restrict their powers, and demanded another election on the issue. One was called in December 1910, but it produced a virtually identical result to the January contest. Asquith once again claimed a popular mandate for his proposals and the new king George V, who had succeeded his father in May, saw no choice but to threaten the upper house with the creation of new Liberal peers in order to force through the reforms.

The government introduced a Parliament Act, which removed the right of the Lords to veto money bills and limited its veto over other acts. It passed through the Commons and a long debate in the Lords was followed by a narrow victory for the government. Balfour and his allies in the Lords had surprised many by backing down at the last moment in the face of the king’s threat. As a result, the Tory and Unionist ‘die-hards’, an influential aristocratic faction within the alliance, accused their leader and his allies of betrayal.

The passing of the Parliament Act, and the People’s Budget before it, constituted an extraordinary victory for the Liberal party. After a two-year struggle, a radical budget and revolutionary constitutional bill had been passed, despite the opposition of the Tory party and the landed establishment. The supremacy of the lower house had been formally established, and the status of unelected hereditary peers had been diminished. One of the provisions of the Parliament Act was that MPs received a salary; politics became a career, open to men from the professional classes, rather than a gentlemanly hobby. A significant step had been taken towards full parliamentary democracy.

Yet victory had come at a price. The Liberal government had lost its majority and was dependent on Irish support for its survival. That backing was dependent on the introduction of a Home Rule bill that was bound to be controversial. Moreover, the struggle had roused the anger of the ‘die-hard’ Tories, who had much of the aristocratic establishment behind them. ‘When the king wants loyal men,’ one of them commented after the Lords vote, ‘he will find us ready to die for him. He may want us. For the House of Lords today voted for revolution.’

8

What happened to the gentry?

In the announcement of the Lords vote, the Tory ‘die-hards’ sensed the demise of the landed gentry’s political pre-eminence. After the 1906 election, neither the Commons nor the cabinet was dominated by the territorial aristocracy. The five lawyers who sat on Asquith’s front bench attested to the new power of the professional classes. Following the introduction of MPs’ salaries in 1911, their political influence would increase. In local politics, too, the power of the landed interest had diminished. While Justices of the Peace, Lords Lieutenant and high sheriffs still tended to be drawn from the gentry, they could no longer determine local government elections, and they rarely stood as candidates themselves. It was the burgeoning middle class who now dominated in the English counties. As the state extended in scope and power, country society retreated. Now that local politics demanded administrative competence, how could it be regarded as an aspect of noblesse oblige?

Outside the political sphere, the territorial aristocracy had been declining for decades. In 1873 the publication of an official inquiry into English landownership had revealed that all of England was owned by less than 5 per cent of its population. This finding appalled the increasingly powerful middle classes, and landed privilege was attacked on several fronts. The gentry’s patronage in the professions was significantly reduced when the purchasing of army positions and ecclesiastical benefices was prohibited by law, and examinations were made compulsory. Open competition for places in the legal professions and the civil service soon followed; the amateurish aristocratic ethos that pervaded these occupations had been dispelled by the beginning of the new century.

The late-nineteenth-century agricultural depression further weakened the gentry. The value of land was the same in 1910 as it had been in 1880, during which period rents had fallen by around 40 per cent in the south and east of England. And then there were the death duties imposed by Liberal governments, and denounced by Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895): ‘Between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death,’ she declared, ‘land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.’ Many of the gentry decided to sell off their estates as a result. The additional land taxes that were introduced as part of the ‘People’s Budget’ led to the closure of even more country houses – an unprecedented 800,000 estates were put on the market between 1909 and 1914. Yet even before this surge in sales, the age in which the ‘great house’ had dominated the countryside had come to an end.

The demise of the landed gentry did not eliminate the aristocracy as a whole. After 1890, spectacularly wealthy members of the middle class had been permitted to enter the peerage. In the late nineteenth century the amalgamation of small, family-owned businesses had created corporations whose owners became almost unimaginably rich. Brewers, cotton and metal magnates were now as wealthy as landowners, and they demanded recognition from the establishment. Among the new Edwardian peers, representatives of finance, industry and commerce were dominant.

Many older aristocrats disapproved of the arrival of the new men, with some dismissing them as ‘plutocrats’. They had, it was said, made their money as a result of Victorian commercial and imperial expansion, and now had no other interest than in spending it ostentatiously. Punch magazine caricatured the group as vulgar, ignorant, greedy and obsessed with golf and motor cars. The gentry feared the plutocrats might ‘adulterate’ their caste, fears that were sometimes informed by anti-Semitism; the Tory ‘die-hard’ Lord Willoughby de Broke lamented the ‘contamination’ of old English stock by ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘Levantine’ finance. The anxiety, however, was prompted largely by unadulterated snobbery. ‘The rushing flood of ill-gotten gold has overflown its banks and polluted the crystal river of unreproved enjoyment,’ remarked a member of the Russell family. Existing members of the elite criticized new recruits as a means of displaying their pedigree, and disguising the fact their ancestors had also once been social climbers. Other aristocrats believed that upper-class society had been shrewd in swallowing the new millionaires, just as it had assimilated middle-class politicians such as Asquith and Baldwin. Had society not done so, these ‘keen-witted, pushing, clever and energetic’ men might, in Lady Dorothy Nevill’s view, have overthrown the social order.

The recently minted nobles, however, had no intention of dismantling the gentry. They acquired the landed estates that were coming onto the market, married into the gentry and supported the Tories. The nouveau riche press barons all sided with the old party of land, the crown and the Church, and that party’s power in the country was vastly extended through newspapers such as the Daily Mail. As one historian of the aristocracy, F. M. L. Thompson, observed, ‘The old order concentrated on the preservation of the power of property, manipulating the machinery of political democracy through mass ignorance, prejudice and apathy to delay the spread of social equality … for as long as possible.’

Like the Tory party, the City of London became an emblem of the marriage of convenience between the old and new aristocracies. Many of the gentry invested the money they had made from the sale of their lands in stocks and shares, sometimes following the advice of recently ennobled financiers. Over the Edwardian era, the value of their investments rose much faster than inflation. Younger members of the older aristocratic families even entered the City as stockbrokers, conferring ‘respectability’ on a profession previously regarded as middle class. Here was a thoroughly English revolution – a great change had taken place in society so that its fundamental structure might remain the same.

9

Car crazy

‘On Sunday morning, along the Kennington Road,’ Charlie Chaplin recalled of his early-twentieth-century adolescence, ‘one could see a smart pony and trap outside a house, ready to take a vaudevillian for a ten-mile drive as far as Merton or Norwood.’ In 1900 horses were the most common means of travel and the roads were relatively uncrowded, with railways carrying livestock as well as long-distance travellers. Within a decade, however, transport had changed rapidly, in every sense of the word.

The horses were first overtaken by bicycles with inflated tyres, which had been invented in the late 1880s by John Boyd Dunlop. The new tyres made bicycles far more comfortable to ride, and by 1900 ‘cyclemania’ was everywhere. Its leading lights were seen riding in the parks, the men in suits and boaters, the ladies sporting loose knickerbockers under their billowy dresses. At first cyclists were barred from Hyde Park, and confined to the less fashionable public gardens. Conservative aristocrats objected to the sight of unchaperoned ladies racing up and down Rotten Row in revealing knickerbockers, yet soon cyclists infiltrated every part of the city.

The press spread fears about the effects of prolonged cycling. Overenthusiastic cyclists might develop ‘bicycle hump’ by leaning too long over the handlebars; acute cases of ‘bicycle foot’ and even ‘bicycle face’ were reported. Since some of the cheaper bicycles were difficult to steer and had only rudimentary brakes, falling off was a more tangible danger, yet this did not stop intrepid cyclists from speeding around, regardless of safety.

In 1901 bicycles were the fastest means of transport on the roads, but they enjoyed supremacy for only the shortest of spells. Both bikes and horses were soon surpassed by motor cars, which could travel over 20 miles per hour by 1903. These petrol-driven automobiles had replaced the slow and unreliable steam-powered vehicles of the late nineteenth century. The driver of the early Edwardian motor car sat on a high box, just like a coachman, behind a windscreen if that optional extra had been purchased. If there was no windscreen, he or she ran the risk of being propelled forward over the front of the car whenever they braked too abruptly. Sometimes mischievous children would try to provoke an accident by throwing their caps into the path of oncoming vehicles. The motor car travelled on the left side of the road and overtook bicycles by pulling out to the right, a manoeuvre often accompanied by accidents and arguments. As only the wealthiest could afford automobiles – which cost hundreds of pounds to buy and hundreds per year to run – early drivers often looked down on cyclists, referring to them as ‘cads on casters’.

Some aristocratic motorists had an equally condescending attitude to the law. When Lord Portsmouth was stopped for exceeding the speed limit, he was belligerent: ‘I have been one of the chief magistrates of the county for some years,’ he told the constable, ‘and I have never heard of such an absurd thing as speeding. If I were you I should not take this any further.’ Other members of the old caste declined to pay the steep fines on the grounds that restricted speed limits were ‘un-English’. Drivers stopped by the police usually claimed to have been travelling under the speed limit; others tried to bribe the representatives of the law. When these tactics failed, the motorist would be hauled before the local magistrate. Among those charged with speeding in the period was the prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Such was Balfour’s notoriety on the roads that, when the Motor Car Act of 1903 was discussed in parliament, one humorous MP proposed that the 20-mile-per-hour speed limit in the legislation should not apply to him.

Motor cars became a symbol of the threat the urban world posed to the countryside. At weekends, the automobiles of affluent city dwellers piled up beside wayside inns. To local villagers, motorists looked like people from another world. They wore heavy leather or fur-lined suits and coats, cloth caps with ear flaps and rubber ‘ponchos’ in inclement weather. They were startling manifestations of the new spirit of the age.

In a country where class antagonism was increasing, it is not surprising that cars were seen as an emblem of England’s ‘idle rich’. During the debates over the 1903 Motor Car Act, one MP described driving as ‘an amusement which is indulged in principally by wealthy people’ and urged the Balfour administration to prove that it was not ‘a government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich’ by punishing aristocratic lawbreakers. Wealthy drivers ought to be taxed and made to contribute to the maintenance of country roads, and they should be forced to pass a test.

Such drivers may have been an unpopular minority but they were a formidable one. Lord Northcliffe, a fanatical early motorist, furthered the drivers’ cause in his newspapers. The Times described motor cars as ‘no mere article of luxury or amusement for a small minority’; they were instead a means of transport with potential to ‘serve the public’ and to become a ‘key English industry’ in the future. As part of its pro-motorist initiative, the newspaper attempted to distinguish blue-blooded drivers from the nouveau riche whose behaviour was blamed for the public outcry. ‘The number of owners and drivers of motor cars who are not gentlemen,’ the paper commented, ‘would seem to be unduly large. There is no turning a cad into a gentleman.’ The debate surrounding motorists was informed by contemporary anxieties concerning the ‘dilution’ of the gentry. The irony was that Northcliffe, the man responsible for this anti-plutocrat propaganda, had himself only recently been ennobled.

Those who supported the motorists claimed that reports concerning the number of accidents caused by vehicles were wildly exaggerated. They were part of a nationwide ‘motor car panic’, which was in part an attack on wealth and privilege. Yet the criticisms of dangerous drivers continued, largely because the facts supported the critics. In 1909 motor cars caused 373 accidents in Britain, but in 1914 there were 1,329 – though the rise was largely owing to the increasing use of the vehicles.

As they became an increasingly familiar sight on English roads, the ‘motor car panic’ died down. The press no longer exaggerated the incidence of minor accidents, and the government welcomed automobiles as a new source of revenue. Motor cars gradually became accepted in the same way that bicycles had been. Private cars were joined on the streets of London by taxis or ‘hackney carriages’, and jostled for space with hansoms, bicycles, electric and horse-drawn trams, and open-topped omnibuses. It is hard to think of another period of English history when so many different types of vehicle sped along the capital’s roads, or when London’s streets witnessed such mayhem.

The absence of transport management was partially remedied when the Liberal government introduced its Town Planning Act in 1909. Yet the pandemonium on the streets could no more be restrained by legislation than could suburban sprawl. The proliferation of motor cars and the sudden expansion of the suburbs were both expressions of the spirit of a speed-obsessed and restless age. The same spirit informed the numerous social reforms passed in quick succession by the Liberal government, as well as England’s breathless participation in an international arms race. Everything seemed faster following the death of Victoria and the decline of Victorianism, including thought and perhaps even time itself. The culture of the period might be compared to a new motor car, uncertain of its destination but intent on arriving in record time.

10

Little hammers in their muffs

King Edward VII had died unexpectedly, in the middle of the constitutional crisis and after a mere nine years on the throne. The apparently hearty sixty-eight-year-old had been ill for months, and a life of overindulgence had weakened his constitution. Yet as his ailments had not been widely reported, his death in May 1910 seemed sudden.

Asquith spoke for many of his countrymen when he described himself as ‘stunned’ by the news of Edward’s death. Outside Buckingham Palace the crowds stood silent, and 400,000 people visited the king’s coffin in Westminster Hall in two days. The organizers of the funeral wanted the proceedings to be as democratic as possible, so the wealthier classes were forced to queue along with everyone else to pay their last respects. Here was testimony to how England had changed since Victoria’s funeral less than a decade before; the tolerant and relaxed Edward had seemed far more accessible to his subjects than his mother had been. The newspapers celebrated the late king as ‘a very average typical Englishman in his tastes and habits’, while omitting to mention that he was not at all average in his indulgence of those tastes. Edward was the first English monarch to be presented to his subjects as ‘ordinary’. He was also one of the first stars of an emerging personality culture, created by the increasingly influential popular press. This may explain why, in the words of one cabinet member, ‘the feeling of grief and sense of personal loss’ in the country were ‘deeper and keener than when the Queen died’. Yet the public outpouring of emotion wasan expression of fear for the future as well as of sadness. ‘At home things seemed to be going from bad to worse,’ remarked one Tory MP.

The new king, George, was ‘heart-broken and overwhelmed’ by the death of the man whom he called ‘the best of fathers’. As a youth, Edward’s second son had trained as a naval officer, but on the death of his elder brother towards the end of Victoria’s reign he had become second in line to the throne, and his naval career had come to an abrupt end. Marriage, children, a crash course in constitutional history and tours of the empire followed, though George did not enjoy either of the latter pursuits, being as averse to foreign food as he was uninterested in books.

Short in stature and knock-kneed, George was a modest and devoted family man. His naval training had moulded his character. Although he lived like a conservative country squire, he thought and talked like a naval officer, with a booming gruff voice and a fondness for salty humour. He had inherited his father’s blue eyes and fair hair but lacked Edward’s Falstaffian figure, energy and bonhomie, as well as his passionate interest in high society and continental diplomacy. Within weeks of his ascent to the throne, George had the luxurious decor of Buckingham Palace toned down; he also decided to keep lavish public banquets to a minimum, since they did not agree with his poor digestion. George was intent on restoring the atmosphere of simplicity, earnestness and domesticity that had characterized the English court in the reign of his grandmother. While the king’s air of melancholy was sometimes dissipated on public occasions and while he could be explosive in private, he never acted impulsively. To the outside world, it seemed that the private and reserved king dedicated his time to hunting and stamp collecting. Yet his passion for those pursuits revealed a singlemindedness as well as a desire for order.

The history lessons George had received in his youth could not have prepared him for the political crisis that he faced after his coronation. Asquith had urged the new king to threaten the Tory-dominated Lords with the creation of new Liberal peers if they did not pass the bill that would restrict their powers. If George refused to do so, the prime minister would resign and go to the country. As a natural Tory, George had an instinctive dislike of the Liberal government; he hated that ‘damned fellow’ Lloyd George and regarded Asquith as ‘not quite a gentleman’. Yet against his instincts, he acceded to his prime minister’s demand; siding with ‘the peers against the people’ had seemed too dangerous in a nation increasingly exercised by inequality. In retrospect, George believed he had made a grave error, and blamed Asquith for exploiting his inexperience.

The early years of George’s reign would be both testing and fiery. Between 1910 and 1914, England’s society and economy seemed to be on the point of collapse, while the population was described as seething with unrest. The minority Liberal government – and the political system as a whole – appeared impotent in the face of new challenges and progressive demands. ‘In 1910,’ wrote the historian George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), ‘the fires long smouldering in the English spirit suddenly flared up, so that by the end of 1913 Liberal England was reduced to ashes.’

The first of the social and political conflagrations identified by Dangerfield came in the form of industrial action, which spread across the country after 1910. The Times described the strikes as ‘of an unexampled character’ in their extent and intensity. Throughout England, groups of workers downed tools. Most were protesting for better working conditions, while some were demanding an increase in wages, which had declined sharply in real terms. The failure of the ‘New Liberal’ social reforms to substantially reduce the incidence of poverty was also a source of discontent. ‘Some magical allurement,’ commented Ramsay MacDonald, seemed to ‘seize the Labour world’ as 1910 progressed. Without warning, hundreds of women factory workers in London stopped work and poured onto the streets. There the strikers shouted, sang and encouraged other workers to join the protest.

In 1911 the strikes proliferated and intensified. Protests overwhelmed the ports, the mines and the railways. ‘More works are being closed down every day,’ wrote Austen Chamberlain, son of Joseph and leader of the protectionist wing of the Unionist Alliance. ‘More trains are being taken off the railways. The whole machinery of national life is slowly stopping.’ Asquith used a similar metaphor when he spoke of the ‘severe strain upon the whole social and political machine’. It seemed that society and the economy, which in normal times worked independently of government control, were in danger of breaking down. The vast majority of trade unionists and Labour MPs did not want to replace the machine with another, socialist model, but they did want the government to ensure it apportioned a higher percentage of profits to the workers. State intervention should, MacDonald argued, be in the interest of the general community. Yet many Liberals felt this would represent a categorical rejection of laissez-faire politics and economics; it would also encourage the idea that wealth ought to be redistributed along with profits, through increased progressive taxation on incomes, on property and on assets, or even through direct redistributive socialist legislation. While the ‘People’s Budget’ had made steps in a reformist direction, Lloyd George had intended it as a defence against socialism, rather than as a promotion of that ‘illiberal’ ideology.

Asquith’s government had to improvise a response to the strikes, and without the benefit of a parliamentary majority. They tried various strategies, which enjoyed varying degrees of failure. Churchill, who had been promoted to home secretary in 1910, tried to force the strikers back to work by sending in the army to confront them. In Liverpool, riots broke out and the troops fired on protesters, killing two men. King George thought the situation ‘more like revolution than a strike’ and felt the government’s response should be more draconian. The English establishment was beginning to panic.

When Labour MPs attacked government coercion, Asquith tried passing legislation. One government-sponsored bill guaranteed a minimum wage to the miners, while another granted unions the right to establish funds for political purposes. Yet it was not enough to appease the strikers, including those who worked on the railways. In 1911 the government decided to play its best card and sent Lloyd George to broker a deal between the railway workers and their employers. The chancellor was famous as a ‘man of the people’, and posed as their ‘champion’. ‘He plays upon men round a table,’ Asquith’s secretary wrote, ‘like the chords of a musical instrument … until a real harmony is struck.’ Lloyd George’s verbal dexterity had its effect and an agreement was reached, though he could not repeat his success the following year, when he was unable to reconcile the striking dockers and their employers. After that failure, the government retreated from direct involvement in industrial disputes, and the strikes continued with increasing intensity. More than a thousand protests now took place annually, and involved over a million and a half workers – eight times the number who had gone on strike in each year of Edward’s reign.

In the long term, the consequences of these strikes were beneficial for both the unions and for the working class generally. Union membership swelled, becoming twice as high in 1914 as it had been in 1906, while workingclass consciousness was encouraged. Along with the rise of the Labour party, the strikes gave a clear indication to the government and ruling class that the low place allotted to workers in Victorian England was unacceptable to the labourers of the new century. They demanded a greater share of the fruits of their labour, and were prepared to take action if denied it.

The second social and political fire of the period was ignited by women campaigning for the right to vote. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s suffrage movements had demanded an extension of the franchise, in the hope that this would lead to an improvement in their parlous situation. Middle-class women could not take degrees or practise professions in Victorian England, while pay in the few occupations they were permitted to enter was grossly unequal. Workingclass women were either employed in factories as manual labourers with limited rights or stayed at home, where they might bear as many as ten children.

Demands for the female vote were denied by a late-Victorian establishment that feared the beginning of the end of male hegemony. The Edwardian establishment was equally unsympathetic to the suffragist cause. Nevertheless, women’s participation in the political process did increase in the early twentieth century. Women were now permitted to serve on local councils, vote in local elections and even become mayors. The rationale for allowing women to participate in local government was that it dealt with purely domestic affairs, women’s ‘natural sphere’. By the end of Edward’s reign, middle-class women also had much better access to higher education (despite still being unable to graduate) and to certain categories of employment, such as teaching and nursing.

Many so-called ‘go-ahead women’ began to complain about their limited professional opportunities, as well as unequal marriage rights and their lack of sexual freedom. Burgeoning female confidence was expressed through their widespread pursuit of dynamic new sports such as tennis, roller skating and cycling, and through new female fashions. Angles and curves were ‘out’, while loose-hanging and straighter garments were ‘in’; violent colours replaced demurer shades. One male journalist remarked: ‘In Victorian England woman was a symbol of innocence, a creature with pretty, kitten-like ways, but having no relevance to the business of the world. Today she is emerging into sex consciousness and beating at the bars of circumstance.’

It is unsurprising that the suffragist movement grew in the Edwardian era or that it became more radical in character. In 1903 the accomplished orator Emmeline Pankhurst, along with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, established the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU differed from previous suffragist organizations. ‘We resolved to limit our membership exclusively to women,’ Pankhurst declared, ‘to keep ourselves absolutely free from party affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action. “Deeds, not words” was our motto.’ When the Daily Mail derisively dubbed WSPU members ‘suffragettes’, they confidently appropriated and altered the term, pronouncing it ‘suffragets’, to emphasize their determination to obtain the vote. What the suffragettes wanted to ‘get’ was not a vote for every woman, regardless of class and property, since this was also denied to men. Instead they demanded that their sex ceased to be a disqualification for the franchise. Votes on the same terms as men would enfranchise only middle-class female householders, but establishing the principle of votes for women was the key issue.

By the time of George’s coronation in 1910, the resources of the WSPU had grown rapidly, while the number of sister suffrage societies had proliferated. Yet the growing strength of the movement did not result in greater parliamentary influence. A succession of private member’s bills relating to female enfranchisement were introduced around this time but failed to make their way through the Commons. Some backbenchers openly mocked the idea of women voting, while the leading politicians of the day were divided on the issue. Asquith believed that women’s ‘sphere was not the turmoil and dust of politics, but the circle of social and domestic life’. His wife and daughter, who as aristocrats did not require the vote to wield political influence, shared his contempt for ‘petticoat politics’, and physically restrained suffragette protesters who attempted to approach him. The king, too, dismissed the suffragettes as ‘dreadful women’. On the other hand, Balfour and Lloyd George expressed guarded sympathy for the cause, while some Labour MPs championed it – despite the ambivalent official response of their party.

Since the members of the Commons were unresponsive to their cause, the suffragettes decided to challenge them directly. They began interrupting political meetings with questions, and they attempted to disrupt sittings of parliament. On 18 November 1910, thousands of suffragettes marched on Parliament Square, where they were met with police resistance. Churchill had instructed officers to keep the protesters away from parliament by any means, an order that led to scores of women being hit, pushed and arrested. The Pankhursts were put on trial for incitement to riot, but ended up turning the proceedings into a dissection of the government’s incoherent opposition to women’s suffrage. The events of ‘Black Friday’ and its aftermath inspired support for the campaigners throughout the country.

From 1911 onwards, the suffragette movement became more militant. Activists set postboxes alight, chained themselves to railings, broke the windows of shops and male clubs, destroyed public flower beds and slashed cushions on trains. They also wrote graffiti on public buildings and vandalized paintings that depicted women as objects of male desire. Not all suffragists advocated these tactics, yet Pankhurst was convinced that violence was the only option. From 1913 suffragettes also carried out arson attacks, setting light to some 350 buildings over eighteen months in a carefully organized campaign. Leading suffragettes supplied instructions and flammable material to the incendiaries, who manufactured crude bombs and left them in prominent public places. Some of the devices failed to explode, but others damaged buildings, including Lloyd George’s house.

On 4 June 1913, Emily Davison provided the campaign with its most potent symbol. Striding out onto the race track during the Epsom Derby, she was knocked down by an oncoming horse belonging to King George and died in hospital four days later. Some historians suggest that Davison intended to pin a suffragette banner onto the animal, but there is a strong possibility that she was intent on martyrdom. ‘To re-enact the tragedy of Calvary for generations yet unborn,’ Davison had written in a newspaper article, ‘is the last consummate sacrifice of the Militant.’ Immediately after Davison’s death, the suffragettes claimed her as a martyr; over 50,000 sympathizers attended her funeral.

The weak Liberal government once again found itself in unknown territory; as before, its instinct was to respond with coercion. Asquith imprisoned approximately one thousand suffragettes, while denying them the status of political prisoners. This prompted many of the incarcerated women to go on hunger strike. Fearing that they might die in prison and be applauded as martyrs, the government insisted they be strapped to chairs and fed via tubes inserted into the nose and throat before reaching the stomach.

The treatment of the suffragette prisoners caused public outrage. In the Commons the recently elected Labour MP George Lansbury told Asquith: ‘You are beneath contempt … you will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women.’ The prime minister responded to criticism with legislation, just as he had done during the recent strikes. He introduced a bill which put an end to force-feeding in prison, and allowed enfeebled hunger strikers to be temporarily released in order to recover their health at home, before resuming their sentences. The bill became known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, after the cat’s fondness of toying with its prey, and the Liberals accompanied it with a counter-propaganda campaign. They caricatured the suffragettes as a small group of wealthy and unbalanced eccentrics intent on subverting law and order, rather than a mass movement with a popular political agenda.

Some historians argue that the government’s response was effective in the short term: the suffragette campaign decreased in militancy in the early months of 1914. Yet government repression had undoubtedly roused public sympathy for the suffragettes; it also gave their cause invaluable publicity. From a modern perspective, it is the brutality of the Liberal government that is conspicuous, along with its myopia. ‘Those who read the history of the movement,’ Emmeline Pankhurst predicted, ‘will wonder at the blindness that led the Government to obstinately resist so simple and so obvious a measure of justice.’

11

The Orange card

Male supremacism informed the government’s repressive response to the suffragette movement. Yet it may have also been prompted by the fact that the campaign took place at a time of unprecedented social chaos, during which Asquith’s minority administration felt under siege. Between 1910 and 1914, industrial action was evident throughout the country, and in 1912 the third political fire of the period broke out in Ireland.

Ireland was nominally amalgamated with England in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, yet it had been treated as a de facto colony by Britain for centuries. A union between the countries had been established in 1800, after the United Irishmen Rebellion against British overlordship had been brutally suppressed, with members of Ireland’s independent parliament bribed to support the Act of Union. The parliament in Dublin was dissolved, and thereafter Ireland’s elected politicians sat in Westminster. The British continued to govern the country through the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle.

Neither the 1800 Act of Union nor the British colonial administration rested on popular Irish consent, and nor was the British government’s record in Ireland in the nineteenth century by any measure exemplary. It took Britain three decades to fulfil its promise of repealing the penal laws that discriminated against the majority Catholic population. The government’s response to the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, which caused around 1 million Irish people to die of starvation or disease and another million to emigrate, was incompetent and indifferent when it was not cruel. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the majority of the Irish population had supported Daniel O’Connell’s movement to repeal the union, and in its second half they had consistently returned to Westminster MPs who campaigned for Irish Home Rule.

After the 1910 election, the minority Asquith government was dependent on the votes of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), led by John Redmond. As a price for the party’s support, Redmond insisted on autonomy for Ireland within the Union through the establishment of a Dublin parliament to deal with ‘local’ matters. The Liberal government agreed to the proposal, for principled as well as pragmatic reasons. The party had been committed to granting Home Rule to the Irish ever since its leader Gladstone had been converted to the cause in 1885 and allied his party with the IPP. Gladstone’s two attempts to pass Home Rule legislation in 1886 and 1893 had been sabotaged by the Tory-dominated Lords, but as the 1911 Parliament Act had deprived the House of Lords of its power of veto, implementing Home Rule might now be easier. In 1912 Asquith announced the government’s plan to introduce a third Home Rule Bill.

Yet Protestant Unionists in Ireland, along with a handful of Unionist Alliance MPs at Westminster, strenuously opposed the proposed legislation, arguing that Home Rule would allow Ireland’s Catholic majority to oppress them. Resistance was especially strong in the four north-eastern counties of Ulster that had majority-Protestant populations. These Ulster Protestants defended the Union, which maintained their hold on local economic and political power, and informed their cultural and religious identity. Some of them were descended from the English and Scottish settlers who had come to Ulster following the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century British colonization of the region, when land had been appropriated in order to establish a Protestant Ascendancy.

The Ulster Unionist MPs had a forceful and charismatic leader in Edward Carson, whose hatred of Home Rule was fanatical. Yet what gave Protestant Unionism influence at Westminster was support from the Tory party. The alliance of Toryism and Ulster Unionism dated back to 1886 when the Tories had opposed Gladstonian Home Rule, despite having previously favoured self-government for Ireland. In order to bring down the Liberal government, the Tories had decided, in the words of Randolph Churchill, that ‘The Orange card was the one to play’, a reference to the ‘Orange Order’ that had been founded in Ulster in 1795 to defend the region’s Protestant Ascendancy. The Tories had played that card repeatedly in the years that followed. In the 1890s they had opposed Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill and established an official alliance with Ulster Unionist MPs and peers. In the early twentieth century, the association had been strengthened. Amidst fears of imperial decline provoked by the Boer War, the idea of granting Ireland any degree of autonomy had become abhorrent to many Tories: the ‘root objection’, as Austen Chamberlain put it, was the idea that Ireland as a nation might one day leave the Union and the empire, thereby undermining them. The Tories were, moreover, in a fragile political position after defeat at the 1906 election and the 1911 Parliament Act. Divided over Tariff Reform, bereft of compelling ideas and deprived of the Lords’ veto, they were eager for a popular cry behind which to unite. Once more the temptation to play the Orange card proved irresistible, though the consequence was the increase of sectarian division in Ireland.

It is no coincidence that a staunch Unionist of Ulster Scots ancestry had around this time become prominent within the Tory party. The rapid ascent of the self-educated and self-made businessman Andrew Bonar Law can be attributed in part to his fervent Unionism, yet it was also a reward for his striking interventions in the Commons. According to one Tory MP, Law’s forthright parliamentary style was ‘like the hammering of a skilled riveter, every blow hitting the nail on the head’. It was, as Asquith noted, also an entirely new style in its use of insults and sarcasm: Law dismissed the Liberal cabinet as a ‘gaggle of gamblers’ and ‘swine’. Such combative rhetoric identified him as heir to Joseph Chamberlain, as did his protectionist views and enthusiasm for the empire, of which he believed Ireland to be an integral part.

The middle-class Law was himself the target of insults. Asquith referred to him as ‘the gilded tradesman’, while some aristocratic Tories found his manner disconcerting: ‘I felt,’ remarked one, ‘as if I were being addressed by my highly educated carpenter.’ In this new era, wealthy businessmen – even those who, like Law, had no English roots and adhered to Nonconformist beliefs – became the leading figures in the party of old England. Joseph Chamberlain had been the ‘trailblazer’, to use a contemporary term, with Law and others following in his path. The new era for the party began in earnest in 1911, when a beleaguered Balfour resigned the Tory leadership and Law replaced him. The witty English patrician had been superseded by a tough-talking, middle-class and teetotal Ulster Scot. If the appointment caused dismay among Tory aristocrats, it also provoked anxiety on the Liberal front bench: ‘The fools,’ remarked Lloyd George, ‘have stumbled on their best man by accident.’

Law’s elevation to the Tory leadership hardened the party’s opposition to Irish Home Rule. The new leader’s father had been a Presbyterian minister in Ulster, and he was proud of his membership of the Protestant denomination that held power in the four north-eastern counties of Ulster. They were a ‘homogeneous people’, he declared, who had a ‘right’ to participate in the Union. One of his first acts as leader was to rename the Conservative and Liberal Unionist party as the ‘Unionists’, an indication that Ulster Unionism was now integral to the party’s identity. He also struck up a close relationship with Edward Carson, who ensured that his Unionist MPs and peers took the Tory whip. While Law and Carson were zealots in the Ulster Protestant cause, the marriage of their groups was one of convenience. The Tory party offered the Ulster Unionists help in maintaining their ascendancy in north-east Ulster, while the Ulster Unionists were a weapon the Tories could employ against the Liberals and their proposed Third Home Rule Bill.

Law opposed Asquith’s Home Rule proposals with characteristic vigour. He declared that forcing a Home Rule bill ‘through the back door’ of the 1911 Parliament Act had no popular mandate – an election on the issue must be called. Law believed the Tories could win that contest against a fragile Liberal government by appealing to the traditionally anti-Irish British electorate. Asquith had no appetite for another election, so he ignored Law and introduced his Home Rule Bill, without making any special provision for the north-eastern Protestant minority. If the bill reached the statute book the Ulster Protestants would have to participate in an autonomous Dublin parliament, which would replace some of the old British colonial administration. The absence of any clause in the bill relating to the Ulster Protestants suggested that Asquith and Redmond underestimated the ferocity of Ulster Unionist and Tory opposition.

After the bill was introduced, Law excited popular Unionist anger outside parliament. In a series of public speeches in England and north-east Ireland, he declared that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will not go, in which I shall not be ready to support them’. If that was not clear enough, he added: ‘We shall use any means … Even if the Home Rule Bill passes through the Commons … there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities.’ This was fighting talk. For the first time since the seventeenth century, a British politician was openly inciting extra-parliamentary violence against the elected government of the United Kingdom. Nor was Law alone in making incendiary statements. Carson vowed that Unionists would ‘break every law’ if the bill were passed, while Tory MPs and ‘die-hard’ peers spoke of Ulster’s ‘moral right to resist’. Such inflammatory rhetoric provoked consternation among the Liberals. Asquith condemned Law’s statements as ‘a complete grammar of anarchy’, while Churchill said the Tories were determined ‘to govern the country whether in office or in opposition’; as they now lacked the Lords’ ‘veto of privilege’, they would do so through the ‘veto of violence’. Law attempted to use the royal veto, by which the English monarch could refuse royal assent to parliamentary bills. But King George, annoyed by Unionist intransigence, declined to exercise the veto, and nor would he dissolve parliament to force an election.

In truth, the Unionists in north-east Ulster needed little incitement from Law to rebel against Asquith’s bill. In 1912 the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers were established, and the following year these volunteers were organized into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Membership was limited to 100,000 men prepared to ‘defend’ the four north-eastern counties from Home Rule, with force if necessary. In 1914 they collaborated with the Ulster Unionist Council in an operation which saw 25,000 rifles smuggled into the north-east of Ireland from the German Empire. The British government did nothing to stop the gunrunning, and a new, militaristic chapter opened in Irish politics.

In response to the establishment of the Ulster Volunteers, Irish nationalists from organizations such as the Gaelic League, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the political party Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood formed the Irish Volunteers. While some Protestants joined, the majority of recruits were Catholic. Irish nationalism, and even Irish separatism, had flourished in the previous two decades among people disenchanted by the failure of conventional politicians to deliver Home Rule. The principal aim of the Volunteers was ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland … without distinction of creed, politics or social grade’. Their manifesto implied that, if all else failed, those rights and liberties could be maintained by arms. In July 1914, 1,500 rifles were brought from Germany into Howth, near Dublin, for the Irish Volunteers, whose membership had swelled to 200,000 people.

In the meantime, the Third Home Rule Bill slowly worked its way through the Commons, but was then rejected by the Lords. According to the 1911 Parliament Act, a bill could only become law without the consent of the Lords if it passed three times through the Commons in successive parliaments. This guaranteed its passage would be prolonged, and Law made sure there would be many additional delays along the way. Law and Carson also used the interval to foment Unionist rebellion, and to threaten the Liberal government with armed rebellion once again. ‘Do you plan to hurl the full majesty and power of the law,’ Law asked Asquith, ‘supported on the bayonets of the British Army, against a million Ulstermen marching under the Union Flag and singing ‘God Save The King’? Would the Army hold? Would the British people – would the Crown – stand for such a slaughter?’

While Asquith was not prepared to send the army into the north-east of Ireland to impose Home Rule, he did look to the armed forces for help in opposing the UVF. In March 1914, British intelligence reported that the Ulster Protestant organization was about to seize ammunition from various army buildings; there were even rumours of an imminent coup in Ulster and of a march on Dublin. The Liberal government issued an order for partial mobilization to the officers at the Curragh Camp in Kildare, the largest British army base in Ireland, yet many of them refused and threatened to resign in protest. Some soldiers believed that Irish Home Rule might undermine Britain’s Protestant empire, while others acted on the instigation of military officials in London with links to Law. The Unionist leader approved of their rebellion, arguing that all British citizens had the right to choose sides in what was effectively a civil war.

The so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ was the first time the British army had refused to follow a government order since the seventeenth century. An appalled King George thought the reputation of his army tarnished; the entire system of British governance in Ireland seemed on the point of collapse. The Liberal administration chose not to reprimand the mutineers, preferring to pretend that the affair had never happened. It was now obvious that Home Rule would not be implemented in the four north-eastern counties. The Ulster Unionists drew the moral that they were untouchable, while the Irish Volunteers concluded that they needed more weapons, since the British army would defend neither them nor the Liberal government’s Home Rule Bill.

Asquith and Redmond finally realized that the Tory-backed Unionists in Ulster were not bluffing. They would have to seek a compromise over the terms of Home Rule. Behind-the-scenes negotiations took place between Law, Carson, Asquith and Redmond. The prime minister raised the possible exclusion of the four Protestant-majority counties of north-east Ulster from the Home Rule Bill, but Carson insisted that the two Ulster counties with small nationalist majorities should also be exempt. Redmond rejected this notion and threatened to remove the IPP’s support from the government if it were pursued. A stalemate followed. With the Home Rule Bill almost on the statute book, Ireland was on the brink of bloody civil war.

But even though the Home Rule Bill did become law in the summer of 1914, no rifles were fired in Ulster. The sudden outbreak of war on the Continent drew the attention of all parties away from Ireland. The implementation of the bill was officially postponed until the end of the European conflict, with Asquith assuring the Unionists that he would consider amending it before it went into full effect. In return the Unionists agreed to postpone arguments over Ireland in the interests of national unity. The prime minister congratulated himself on his narrow escape: ‘the one bright spot,’ he commented in the summer of 1914, ‘was the settlement of Irish civil strife’. But strife in Ireland had merely been postponed.

12

The black sun

To many Liberals, the summer of 1914 seemed gloomy and forbidding. ‘I see not a patch of blue sky,’ the MP John Morley commented, alluding to the gloomy clouds over Ireland. To the east, the prospect of international strife had been growing steadily. After 1906 England had grown closer to France, with mutual fear and envy of Germany strengthening the entente. Germany, the Continent’s flourishing economic and military power, responded by investing so heavily in her navy that she almost caught up with Britain. Portions of the right-wing English press and population demanded the construction of yet more dreadnought battleships: ‘We want eight, and we won’t wait!’ was their rallying cry. Lloyd George argued that building a further four dreadnoughts would be sufficient, but the foreign secretary Edward Grey disagreed and Asquith commissioned a further eight battleships.

Germany’s allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, also increased their spending on armaments. The Italians threatened British ascendancy in the Mediterranean by building a fleet of new battleships. England now faced an uninviting choice between falling behind in the arms race, bankrupting herself by constructing more dreadnoughts, negotiating a non-aggression pact with Germany, or agreeing to French requests for the coordination of a continental defence strategy. She chose the last option, drawing up military plans with her entente partner that included their response to aggression from an unnamed third power, which could only be Germany. Anglo-German relations, meanwhile, failed to improve even after the death of the anti-German King Edward. The problem was that most people in the English government and ruling class shared the prejudices of their former king: Grey called Germany ‘our worst enemy and our greatest danger’. The Kaiser and the German establishment had similar views of the English, and it is unsurprising that talks between the two countries broke down. Germany wanted England to agree to the expansion of its navy and to promise neutrality in the case of a continental conflict, whereas England was only prepared to offer colonial concessions.

Britain, which still thought of itself primarily as a global power, became increasingly embroiled in the European argument, in large part out of fear that her empire was overstretched. Although Britain was part of an island off the Continent, it could not remain aloof from it because of its proximity; besides, the country now lacked the military and economic resources to maintain her empire without French assistance. After the Boer War, where the British army’s strength was uncertain and its navy no longer supreme, diplomatic isolation from the Continent would be perilous.

The 1907 Anglo-Russian convention was further acknowledgement of this reality. Since Russia was, like Britain, already allied with France, the three empires now formed a Triple Alliance, a counterweight to the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary. But the Kaiser dismissed this talk of balance as a smokescreen for a traditional anti-German Franco-British policy; in his mind, the Triple Alliance was simply another attempt to encircle Germany. Some English people questioned the anti-German premise of Britain’s balance of power strategy, and thought Grey was being too aggressive. Others regarded it as an inherently unstable tactic that might entangle Britain in a continental war.

The balance of power would only succeed, critics said, if there was a genuine equilibrium between the two sides, and if all the parties involved were committed to maintaining it. This was a remote possibility. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling; European nationalism was on the rise, particularly in the Balkans; Germany was determined to rival Britain as a naval as well as imperial power; and there was the constant possibility of international disagreements breaking out along the colonial borders of the European nations. Africa had provided a release valve for potential antagonism in the late nineteenth century, its vast lands and resources affording all the continental powers the chance to satisfy their economic and military ambitions. But Africa had been almost entirely carved up and plundered by Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, and the colonizers now stared at each other suspiciously across the continent’s internal frontiers.

The hardest test of the balance of power came on 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a nationalist Bosnian Serb. There had been assassinations of equally powerful figures before; this time none of those involved seemed determined to resolve the situation. Austria-Hungary felt threatened by Balkan nationalism and Russian ambitions in the area. Too weak to stand alone, they asked the Germans if they would support a declaration of war against Serbia, even if Russia were to stand by its Serbian allies. The Germans, who also feared Russian influence in the Balkans, were convinced that they would have to confront Russia at some point; it would be easier to do so sooner rather than later, given Russia’s long-term rearmament plans. So Germany offered Austria-Hungary a blank cheque, and war on Serbia was declared. Now the other pieces fell into place. The Russians, calculating that France would support them, mobilized their forces against Austria-Hungary in support of Serbia; Germany responded by declaring war against Russia. France, which had been fearful of a German invasion ever since its 1871 conquest of French territory, now mobilized in support of Russia.

Britain was the only major European power yet to make a move. Germany was convinced the British would not enter the struggle, and the mood of the Liberal cabinet was, according to Churchill, ‘overwhelmingly pacific’. In contrast, Law, leader of the Unionist opposition, was in a belligerent mood. He warned Asquith that ‘it would be fatal to the honour and security’ of the country ‘to hesitate in supporting France and Russia.’ Imperceptibly, yet inevitably, the cabinet came round to Law’s view; the momentum of events seemed to be moving Britain inexorably towards continental war. ‘We are all adrift,’ Churchill commented, ‘in a kind of dull cataleptic trance.’

On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France; the following day, Germany invaded Belgium. The Liberal administration condemned the violation of the neutrality of a continental country, and declared war on Germany in support of Belgium, and in order to aid her French and Russian allies. The government now believed it had little choice but to confront the country that Britain had identified as the greatest threat to her security and prosperity. Germany had to be stopped.

The government’s declaration was made in the confidence that war would be over in a matter of weeks, an optimism shared by all the belligerents. Britain’s fleet, which stood ready in the North Sea, was still superior to that of Germany, and it was believed that the Triple Alliance troops would sandwich Germany and Austria-Hungary with quick assaults from west and east. The extensive territories of the British Empire would, it was thought, provide an almost limitless supply of soldiers. For these reasons, Grey assured the Commons: ‘we shall suffer little more in war than if we [stood] aside.’ Churchill was certain the effects of the conflict would not be felt in England itself, where it would be ‘business as usual’.

Grey and Churchill were not the only politicians buoyed up by optimism. Only weeks previously, Lansbury, Hardie and Henderson had publicly denounced all ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ wars; yet now the Labour leadership followed the government line, with the exception of MacDonald, who resigned the chairmanship of the party on pacifist principle. Law and the Unionists offered Asquith’s government unhesitating support for the declaration of war and announced the end of active opposition in the Commons, as well as in Unionist Ulster. King George was also cheered by the declaration of war, and would become strongly anti-German over the coming months, despite his numerous German titles and family ties. In fact, he would soon disguise the Teutonic ancestry of the royal family by changing its name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

A mood of patriotism swept through England for the first time since the early months of the Boer War. It was mingled with relief that the country was defending a neutral neighbouring country from unprovoked aggression, rather than attacking farmers for gain. When the newspaper boys announced that war had been declared, people rushed out of shops and houses to cheer. Horatio Bottomley’s popular magazine John Bull set the tone, with its headline ‘The Dawn of Britain’s Greatest Glory’. Radical intellectuals were enthusiastic about an ideological crusade against ‘Prussian militarism’. Many progressives hoped the conflict would offer an opportunity to bury the failed political, economic and social culture of the nineteenth century, and to build something better. Was it the end of one age and the beginning of another? The politicians, the people and the intelligentsia displayed the naivety of a generation with no experience of European war. For those born in the second half of the nineteenth century, conflict meant engagements at a safe distance from Britain’s shores against significantly weaker forces. The last time the country had fought on the Continent had been during the Napoleonic era, a period that belonged to ancient history. Thus blindly, and with overweening confidence and eagerness, England entered a conflict that would become the first ever world war.

On one side stood Germany and Austria-Hungary, the ‘Central Powers’, which were eventually supported by the Ottoman Empire. On the other was the Triple Alliance of Britain, France and Russia, who were dubbed ‘the Allies’ and who were joined by the Italians. As the combatants moved towards Belgium, many sang their national anthems, the patriotism and optimism of the moment blending to produce a euphoric mood. Those who lived through the following years of agony and terror would remember the songs of the men who marched to the Western Front; some died with those songs still on their lips.

Countless British soldiers would be among the dead. In the first week of August, an Expeditionary Force of six British infantry divisions and one cavalry division was assembled. The plan was to send them to Belgium to support the French army. The newly appointed secretary of war, Lord Kitchener, a veteran of the anti-Boer campaign, believed that Belgium was too dangerous as a theatre of war. The French staff officers, and their allies among the British military hierarchy, overcame Kitchener’s concerns, but events would bear out his view. The decision to send its forces to Belgium deprived Britain of its tactical independence, committing the country to fight side by side with its French ally for the duration of the war.

Kitchener was even more concerned about troop numbers than he was about strategy. Being a great naval power, and the landlord of a vast and vastly populated empire, Britain did not believe it required anything like as large a standing army as other European nations. ‘Did you consider when you went headlong into a war like this,’ Kitchener asked the cabinet, ‘that you were without an army? Did you not realize the war was likely to last for years and require tens of thousands of soldiers?’ He was soon permitted to ask for volunteers among the male adult population.

Buoyed up by the feeling ‘that war was a glorious affair and the British always won’, as one soldier put it, a million men made their way to English recruiting stations, some of them walking for miles through the night. The slogans on the recruitment posters urged the population to respond to Kitchener’s call: ‘Your Country needs YOU’, ‘Women of England! Do your duty! Send your man Today to join our Glorious Army’ and ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’ After being given a few weeks’ training, the volunteers would line up in villages and towns and then march to the nearest train station, cheered along the way by those who remained. The train would take the men to military centres in England, from which they would soon be dispatched to the Western Front.

The fighting in that area, which became known as ‘The Battle of the Frontiers’, provided a salutary lesson. On 23 August 1914, the British engaged in their first major action, alongside the French at Mons in Belgium. The jubilant German army, which had just conquered Brussels, outnumbered the Allies three to one. In these difficult circumstances the British fought well, but they could not halt the German advance. The news of the Allied retreat, according to The Times, ‘broke like a thunderbolt’ back home in England. Questions were asked about the preparedness of the troops. The soldiers had been trained and equipped for an old-style imperial campaign, but were they ready for modern continental warfare? They had plenty of rifles but what about machine guns, hand grenades and telephones?

The Germans drove the Franco-British back mile after mile, a manoeuvre that became known as the ‘Great Retreat’. As the Allies withdrew from the towns and villages of northern France, they left behind them piles of dead bodies. The corpses of their own men were left behind, the retreating armies having no time to bury them. The conquering Germans killed or deported thousands of French and Belgian civilians, countless women and children among them, sometimes hanging the naked corpses up in butcher’s shops. Their conduct inspired the ‘great terror’ among civilians and prompted relentless anti-German propaganda in England. As a result, Germans were attacked on English streets and German shops and homes were looted, while many Germans were interned in camps for enemy aliens.

Well-executed Franco-British rearguard actions slowed the advance of the Germans, who halted east of Paris. When the belligerents confronted each other again at the Battle of the Marne in early September, the Allies emerged victorious. It was now the turn of the Germans to retreat, in the so-called ‘Race to the Sea’. The two sides engaged in offensives and counteroffensives as they moved through Picardy, Artois and Flanders. Ypres was recaptured by the Allies, who hoped to push the Germans back further, but their advance was halted. A decisive victory now appeared unlikely for either side. Their aim became to retreat no further, rather than to overwhelm the enemy.

The visible symbols of the stalemate were the elaborate rows of trenches the antagonists now dug opposite each other; they zigzagged down France from the Channel to the border with neutral Switzerland. These trench systems would eventually reach a total length of 25,000 miles. In between the opposing trenches lay a mine-filled ‘no man’s land’, an area exposed to machine-gun fire, mortars, flame-throwers, shells and a new weapon of death, the poison-gas canister. The killing was done at a distance by high-tech weapons, as the waves of men were fed to a vast killing machine. Any attempt to attack the enemy’s trenches was doomed to failure. If advancing soldiers miraculously managed to dodge the bullets, the mines and the gas canisters, they would have to breach a wall of barbed wire before confronting an enemy of vast numerical superiority.

When they were not engaging in futile attacks, the opposing forces sheltered in their trenches, exhausted and depressed by battle, disease, the falling temperatures of autumn and the death of their comrades. Some soldiers also suffered from ‘shell shock’ which left them in a state of helpless panic, unable to walk or talk, and prey to hysteria and insomnia. In the early months of the conflict, army doctors said such men were suffering from nerves or had weak constitutions, yet the disease became part of a new pathology of war. Life in the trenches was uncomfortable, anxious and restless. The noise of the constant gunfire and heavy shelling, mingled with the cries of maimed or dying men, was unbearable.

The soldiers realized that it was now a war of attrition, to use a coined phrase. ‘We have got to stick it longer than the other side,’ as one captain put it, ‘and go on producing men, and material until they cry quits.’ But who knew how long and how many deaths it might take to grind out a bloody victory? Given the type of warfare in which the antagonists were now engaged, and the huge industrial resources commanded by the Germans, it was likely the struggle would be prolonged and the death toll unprecedented. What had happened to the short, sweet war the government had predicted?

To make matters worse, the expected war at sea had not begun, since the Germans refused to engage the British navy and preferred to pick off British cruisers with their U-boats. When a German mine destroyed a British battleship, the commander-in-chief ordered the British fleet to retreat out of danger to the coast of Ireland. There was little progress either on the Eastern Front, where the battle was far more mobile than in the cratered killing fields of the west. The Russians quickly invaded East Prussia, while Austria-Hungary lost almost a million men in an offensive in the Carpathians. But the mood of optimism among the Allies stalled when the Germans forced the Russians back over their own borders, and Turkey decided to support the Central Powers.

English enthusiasm for war was further dampened as autumn turned to winter. Newspaper reports of deaths and casualties at first provoked pity and fear, then numb resignation. Soon so many soldiers were dying that there was no room in the papers to list all of the names. Across England, women and children dressed in mourning. Soldiers on crutches or in wheelchairs, returned from the front, became a common sight. As the optimism of the early days of the war evaporated, many intellectuals began to fear a German victory. Where was England’s legendary strength and pluck? By Christmas few believed the war would soon be over, and there was little surprise among the population when Kitchener requested further volunteers. Over the coming months, an additional million and a half men would enlist.

Kitchener had correctly predicted the difficulty and duration of the war; yet he was often wrong about military tactics. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, thought the secretary of war incompetent and sometimes ‘mad’; few now had faith in his Western Front tactics. In early 1915 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made a proposal which was intended to revitalize Britain’s strategy. Waging war on an entirely new front, far from Germany’s sphere of influence, would, Churchill told the cabinet, open up the war. And if the new front were to be at sea, then the horrific casualties of trench warfare would be avoided. Churchill suggested an ‘amphibious operation’, using ships and soldiers, on a strip of water called the Dardanelles, which separated Europe from Asia and which was under Ottoman control. If the straits were secured, reinforcements could be sent by the British and French to the Russians; Allied troops could also land in the area and capture Constantinople. The defeat of the Ottomans would materially weaken the Central Powers and in addition would help to protect the British Suez Canal.

Lloyd George liked the proposal, but Asquith was sceptical; Kitchener wavered, then agreed. Many of the plan’s supporters laboured under the illusion that the Turks were constitutionally weak. Churchill initially regarded the attack as a difficult operation, requiring a large force on the ground, yet Kitchener convinced him the navy could succeed virtually alone. But when the British and French began their assault on the Dardanelles in mid-March, Churchill received one of the greatest shocks of his career. The Allied navy was scuppered by Turkish mines, and the Turks repulsed its efforts to invade their territory. Another landing of British, French and colonial troops was attempted at the end of April, with the same result. While the Allied soldiers remained on the beaches, the Turks dug trenches that were as impenetrable as those of their German allies. When the Allied ammunition ran low, the attack was called off. One hundred and twenty thousand British soldiers had died, were wounded or went missing. When Churchill heard the news, he was distraught at the failure and loss of life.

After the debacle, the English press turned on the Liberal government and the British military high command. The war was being mismanaged; the troops needed reinforcements, different tactics and better equipment. Above all, greater supplies of high-explosive heavy artillery should immediately be sent to the Western Front. The Times and the Daily Mail campaigned for more shells. Lord Northcliffe, who owned both papers, backed up Lloyd George’s call for the establishment of a munitions department with himself at its head.

Meanwhile, opposition in the Commons was unconstrained over the ‘shells scandal’. Law openly attacked the government for the first time since the declaration of war. For its part, the Irish Parliamentary Party saw little reason to sustain the Liberal administration, now that Home Rule had reached the statute book. When Redmond withdrew his support, Asquith’s government was at the point of collapse. Grey had been proved wrong about the duration of the conflict, Churchill about the navy’s strength during the Dardanelles campaign and Kitchener about strategy. The only cabinet minister to have emerged with credit was Lloyd George, who had brokered a deal between the trade unions and business leaders. The unions had agreed to the dilution of labour through the introduction of a quarter of a million women, as well as unskilled or semi-skilled men, into factories and offices. In return, the chancellor had assured the unions that this would be a temporary wartime measure; he also promised that industrial profits would be controlled, an unprecedented concession to secure union support. In other ways, too, Lloyd George had shown a willingness to intervene in the wartime economy, in contradiction of his Liberal principles. He had imposed import duties, increased taxes, shored up the City banks, allowed the national debt to grow, and taken over factories that failed to meet their munitions quotas.

As the chancellor’s reputation rose, Asquith’s fell. Lloyd George seemed to display the initiative the prime minister lacked, and the chancellor’s friends in the press emphasized the contrast. The papers criticized Asquith’s reluctance to wield the considerable powers the war had bestowed on the state and mentioned his addiction to brandy. Friends claimed the drink cleared Asquith’s mind, yet the sight of a prime minister supine and sodden in the House did not inspire confidence, in either Fleet Street or the country. To journalists ‘Squiffy’ seemed as though he had survived into an age in which his skills of conciliation and his instinctive caution were no longer relevant. A twentiethcentury world war demanded a different kind of statesman. The future belonged to men like Lloyd George who were capable of decisive, improvised action as well as striking public gestures, and who could reach a vast public through the press. With Northcliffe on his side, the chancellor appeared irresistible.

After consulting Northcliffe and his potential partners on the opposition benches, Lloyd George declared, ‘We must have a coalition.’ As a pragmatist, he saw the advantages of a government based on a loose affiliation of parties, personalities and ideas. It would give him freedom for manoeuvre, without the constraints of the Liberal party’s hierarchy or its traditional creed. He was rooted in Nonconformist Liberalism, but sensed that it was a dwindling political force. Law’s Unionists, for their part, had no desire to assume sole responsibility for the military failures abroad, or for the hardship of the population at home. It seemed likely that conscription and food rationing might soon have to be introduced, and they believed that the people were more likely to accept these measures from a coalition than a Tory-Unionist government.

Lloyd George’s timing was impeccable. The public was weary of the stories of endless, senseless slaughter and martial failures, and close to hysteria after the recent appearance of German Zeppelins in the sky over London. With the population anxious for a change of fortune and direction, and with support in the Commons and Fleet Street for a Liberal administration wearing thin, Asquith reluctantly assented to the proposal for a coalition and the Liberal government came to an end in May 1915.

Asquith would lead the coalition, but he was leader in name only. He came to cabinet meetings with few proposals, and usually concluded them by postponing a decision. Lloyd George, the real leader, was given sole responsibility for the home front, coordinating all aspects of social and economic policy as minister of munitions. The influence of Asquith’s friends in the cabinet was diluted by the presence of the leading Unionists – Law, Balfour, Austen Chamberlain and Edward Carson. Arthur Henderson, who had taken over as Labour leader from MacDonald, became minister for education, and two other Labour MPs joined the coalition in the coming months. The presence of the Labour men gave the cabinet a genuinely ‘national’ appearance and also changed its social composition. The appointments suggested that Labour was no longer merely a protest party but a movement which was ready for office. Within the military hierarchy there was also a change of personnel. Churchill was demoted to chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, partly because of the Dardanelles fiasco but also to appease Law, who regarded the Tory renegade as an unbalanced maverick.

The new government was faced with the old problems – the absence of a convincing military strategy, the lack of manpower and equipment at the front, and the need to reorganize the economy and society in accordance with the demands of war. These last two challenges were ably met by Lloyd George, who hired a staff of businessmen to ensure that ever-increasing quantities of shells, tanks and machine guns were sent to the soldiers. During Lloyd George’s command of the ministry, the production of medium guns rose by 380 per cent and of heavy guns by 1,200 per cent. The munitions minister also appointed ‘controllers’ of shipping, food production, coal and labour, all of whom were experts in these sectors. His new breed of administrators extended the role of the state to all spheres of the economy and to countless aspects of civilian life. They took over factories, imposing strict regulations and new production procedures; they introduced industrial conscription and increased labour mobility. At the same time they placated the unions by reducing working hours, improving working conditions and keeping wages high. Lloyd George had no difficulty in convincing the Unionists in the cabinet that such concessions were necessary; Law understood that the unions were ‘the only thing between us and anarchy’.

Lloyd George and his men controlled the production and distribution of food, metals and chemical products. They also directed large amounts of state money to scientific and technological research, and to the study of management and production processes. Central government now seemed to control everything. Bureaucracy was expanded, with efficiency the aim; public expenditure increased rapidly, together with the amount of money collected from direct taxation. The number of citizens who paid income tax rose from 1 million to 8 million, while those who earned more paid more, with steeply progressive taxation imposed and accepted.

Here was an economic, social and political revolution. The newspapers spoke of ‘war socialism’ and a transformation in government, with businessmen and professionals supplanting wealthy, privately educated public servants. For the first time in history, many members of the lower middle and working classes felt appreciated and rewarded: wages rose, poverty was reduced, and the Labour movement was recognized as a vital part of the economy and society. And what was true for men was equally true for women, who entered the workforce in large numbers, especially in the newly created munitions factories. English women felt that they were participating not only in a great patriotic struggle but also in a national enterprise that was more egalitarian than anything they had previously experienced. The nation was starting to resemble a genuine community, based on the principle of the general good. ‘England has broken with her past,’ commented the historian W. H. Dawson, ‘and when the day of peace arrives we shall be confronted by an altogether altered situation.’

13

Forced to fight

Coalition policies produced positive results on the home front, but there were only failures abroad. After the Dardanelles debacle, plans to open up a new Eastern Front were abandoned; with no prospect of a naval engagement imminent, the government and the military command saw the Western Front as the only viable option – except that it was not viable at all. Since the French had aided the British in the Dardanelles, Kitchener felt bound to support them in their plans for an autumn advance against the Germans. The Battle of Loos was the biggest British attack of 1915, and one of the least successful. Little or no ground was gained, at the cost of the lives of 50,000 British men. The only evidence that ‘some of the divisions actually reached the enemy’s trenches’, reported one official during the battle, was that ‘their bodies can be seen on the barbed wire’.

After the carnage, Kitchener’s calls for volunteers became more frequent and hysterical. Yet when his appeals failed to inspire an enthusiastic response, Asquith was forced to contemplate the introduction of conscription. Both he and Balfour loathed the idea, while Lloyd George and Law favoured it – a vivid illustration of the division between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ men inside the cabinet. The new men thought conscription would show Britain’s allies and enemies that they ‘meant business’. ‘The fight must be to the finish,’ declared Lloyd George, whose primary war aim was to destroy the ‘German menace’. Yet Asquith, who hated the ‘horrible’ war and whose eldest son was fighting in the trenches, appeared intent on an accommodation with Germany.

The dearth of volunteers, and pressure from members of the cabinet, eventually compelled Asquith into action over conscription. Yet even now he acted with customary circumspection. His Military Service Bill of January 1916 imposed compulsory service on bachelors and childless widowers, while excluding married men. By taking this middle course, Asquith managed to conciliate most of his divided cabinet. A few months later, however, events dictated that compulsory service be extended to married men, and Asquith altered the Military Service Bill accordingly. Through the extension of conscription the state assumed control over the life and death of the entire male adult population; ‘Kitchener’s Army’ of volunteers was replaced by men forced to fight. It also resulted in the removal of able-bodied men from the factories at home and their replacement by women and less sturdy men.

Conscription was not extended to Ireland, a clear indication of that country’s uncertain status within the United Kingdom. The government realized that the Irish would not accept the forced recruitment of all adult males to defend either the Union or the British Empire; while the irony of conscripting Irishmen to liberate the ‘small Catholic nation’ of Belgium from a militaristic aggressor was obvious. An overwhelming majority of Irish Parliamentary Party MPs at Westminster had, in fact, voted against the Military Service Bill. Thousands of Irishmen, Catholics as well as Protestants, had come forward to fight following the declaration of war in August 1914; but volunteering for a ‘short and glorious’ war in 1914 was one thing, conscription imposed by the British government in 1916 another.

The IPP leader John Redmond had encouraged members of the Irish Volunteers to enlist in 1914, with the argument that their sacrifice would make the implementation of the Liberal Home Rule Bill more likely. While the majority of Volunteers had answered Redmond’s call to arms, around 12,000 refused. These men had lost faith in the British government’s willingness, or ability, to deliver on its promises of Irish self-government; in any case, they wanted far more autonomy than had been pledged in the Home Rule Bill. They believed that the world war offered them a unique opportunity of realizing their dream of an independent Irish Republic: ‘England’s difficulty’, they said, ‘is Ireland’s opportunity.’

On Monday, 24 April 1916, a small group of these Irish Volunteers, along with some soldiers of the Irish Citizen Army, staged an uprising in Dublin. They captured a number of official buildings, including the General Post Office, over which they raised the flag of the Irish Republic. Patrick Pearse, one of the rebel leaders, read out a ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ to passing Dubliners. He declared ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland’, and added that the new republic would ‘guarantee religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities’.

Pearse called for his fellow Irishmen and women to rise up, yet very few Dubliners showed any interest in doing so. Some felt the rebellion unnecessary with the Home Rule Bill already on the statute book, however uncertain its implementation date. Others considered it an act of questionable opportunism when almost 200,000 Irishmen were fighting at the front. Nearly everyone in Dublin thought the insurrection was doomed to failure. Differences of opinion among the Irish Volunteers had resulted in the participation of just 1,500 men, and the abandonment of plans for a nationwide uprising in favour of one confined to Dublin. The rebels also lacked an adequate supply of arms, after the British navy intercepted a ship carrying German weapons to Dublin.

The British government decided that bullets and bombs would be more effective than a blockade of the Dublin GPO. Heavy artillery was fired from a battery in Trinity College and from a patrol vessel on the Liffey, reducing the square mile around the Post Office to rubble. After a few days of bombardment and bloody street fighting, which saw the death of 200 combatants and 250 civilians, the rebels surrendered. Westminster’s rule in Ireland was restored and martial law was introduced, with military personnel taking control of the government of the country. Almost 200 rebels faced courts martial that were later deemed illegal, because they were held in secret and conducted by men who had suppressed the uprising. Ninety insurgents were sentenced to death; fifteen of these men had their sentences confirmed, including several men who had neither led the uprising nor been responsible for any deaths. The executions were carried out by firing squad in the first weeks of May 1916.

Edward Carson applauded the government’s draconian response. He told the Commons the rebellion ‘ought to be put down with courage and determination, and with an example which would prevent a revival’. Redmond also initially supported the executions, though he later became concerned that they would undermine popular support for constitutional nationalism and urged Asquith to stop the shooting. The prime minister eventually agreed that a ‘large number’ of executions might ‘sow the seeds of lasting trouble’ and ordered that they should cease.

Yet the damage had been done. Nationalist opinion in Ireland was becoming radicalized. ‘Changed, changed utterly,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats in his poem ‘Easter, 1916’. ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ The executed men were elevated to the status of martyrs by an Irish population that had been indifferent, ambivalent or hostile to the uprising itself. Some Irish people were stirred by the inhumanity of the executions, others by the rebels’ ‘sacrifice’. The bombardment of Dublin, news of atrocities committed by the British troops during the uprising and the summary justice of British officials after it, inspired aversion to British colonial rule in Ireland. The spectre of conscription also roused nationalist opinion. An unpopular, apparently futile and largely symbolic revolution had succeeded in awakening Irish opinion. The ultranationalist political party Sinn Féin would soon reap the electoral benefits of radicalization; they, rather than the IPP, now represented the nationalist cause.

The executions also outraged progressive opinion in England. One Liberal MP demanded that no more Irish people be put to death without a civic trial; another called for the prosecution of those who first imported arms to Ireland – the Ulster Unionists, with the tacit consent of the Tory Unionists, since it was the arrival of guns that had prompted the Irish Volunteers to arm in 1914. Asquith responded to the criticism by asking Lloyd George to arrange a deal between the Unionists and the IPP that would lead to the immediate implementation of Home Rule. Using all his charm and cunning, Lloyd George succeeded in persuading Redmond, Carson and Balfour to sign up to a plan that would exclude six counties of Ulster for the duration of war, with the promise to review the situation after hostilities had ceased. But the deal broke down when the ‘die-hard’ Tories in the cabinet demanded the permanent exclusion of the six counties, and Law withdrew from the negotiations. In the absence of a compromise in his cabinet, Asquith felt powerless to do anything; nothing, therefore, was done. Ireland was still ruled from Westminster, and nationalist feeling in the country continued to increase.

During the Easter Rising, word reached England that the eastern offensive of the Russians had collapsed. News from elsewhere was no better. At the end of May, German warships attacked the British Grand Fleet off the North Sea coast of Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. Although the German ship Lützow received twenty-four direct hits, it still managed to sink British ships including HMS Invincible, killing over 6,000 British seamen. When news of the deaths reached England, people were shocked and bewildered. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the Kaiser boasted that ‘the spell of Trafalgar is broken’, yet it was not as simple as that. A full analysis of the battle revealed that the Germans had also sustained serious losses; moreover, they had failed to achieve the twin aims of their mission – access to the United Kingdom and the Atlantic, and the crippling of the British fleet. Henceforth Germany would concentrate on submarine attacks against shipping in, or close to, British waters, a strategy that would have momentous consequences for the outcome of the war.

Meanwhile, on the Western Front, relentless inconclusive battles undermined the belligerents. The number of dead and wounded could not be comprehended, let alone endured. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916), there were nearly 60,000 British casualties, with almost 20,000 men killed – the heaviest losses for a single combat in the army’s history. ‘By the end of the day,’ wrote the poet Edmund Blunden, ‘both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, no road. No thoroughfare. Neither had won, nor could win, the War.’ The battle, lasting for more than four months, achieved nothing. The Allies advanced about six miles into German-occupied territory, but the Germans dug in and defended their new position. The price of the meagre advance? Over 350,000 British casualties, and over a million on all sides, in what was the bloodiest battle in history. No wonder the Somme became a symbol of the mud, blood and futility that characterized war in the West, or that English troops referred to it as ‘The Great F*** Up’.

The endless slaughter prompted English soldiers to ask why they were fighting. The French were defending their homeland, but that wasn’t the case for the British. Combatants also questioned the competence of Britain’s military hierarchy. Were their current tactics productive of anything other than carnage, as German machine guns mowed down row after row of attacking British privates?

Criticism of the army elite was sometimes couched in the language of intergenerational antagonism, but more often it was informed by class conflict. The author J. B. Priestley, who was shot, bombed and poisoned by gas on the Western Front, deplored the fact that ‘The British Army never saw itself as a citizens’ army [but] behaved as if a small gentlemanly officer class still had to make soldiers out of under-gardener’s runaway sons and slum lads … The traditions of an officer class killed most of my friends.’ The class antagonism experienced by the soldierswould be a prominent feature in the post-war political and social environment.

The writings of authors of the lieutenant and captain class contain powerful criticisms of the war, as well as vivid evocations of life on the Western Front. In Wilfred Owen’s verse innocent soldiers die, ‘guttering’ and ‘choking’, for empty patriotic slogans such as Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘How sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country’). In the pages of Robert Graves’s autobiography Good-Bye to All That (1929), the voices of the privates rise up again from no man’s land: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But we’re all f—ing dead.’

Lloyd George was appalled by the lack of military progress and determined to take a more prominent role in deciding strategy. His opportunity came in the summer of 1916, when HMS Hampshire was sunk by a German mine and Kitchener was among the drowned soldiers. On taking over as war secretary he fired off countless directives to the generals, in defiance of their objection to ‘civilian interference’; he also dismissed his Liberal colleagues’ proposal for a negotiated peace. Despite his new responsibilities, Lloyd George had energy left over to plot behind the scenes, frequently briefing the press about Asquith’s lack of vision, energy and flair.

In the autumn of 1916 the war secretary informed his political allies that reorganization was essential. He proposed a small war council ‘free from the “dead hand” of Asquith’s inertia’, which he would lead himself. The prime minister was dismayed, and rejected the plan. Before making his next move, Lloyd George consulted Law and Carson, who appeared inclined to support him rather than Asquith; their reaction emboldened him to resign. Over the coming weeks, there was much discussion between Lloyd George, Asquith and the Unionists, but when no compromise could be found, Asquith saw no alternative but to resign. Law was asked to form a government but declined to do so since the Liberals would not serve in it. The king then turned to Lloyd George.

The king accused Lloyd George of behaving like a blackmailer during the controversy, while Churchill said he effectively seized power. While these are exaggerations, Lloyd George undoubtedly displayed ruthlessness and certainly bears the main responsibility for forcing out Asquith. On leaving Downing Street, Asquith compared himself to Job, the Old Testament patriarch who endures appalling suffering through no fault of his own. The English public’s reaction was sympathetic to a departing prime minister who had recently lost his eldest son in the war. Yet most people probably shared the view of Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces: ‘I am personally very sorry for poor old Squiff. However, I expect more action and less talk is needed now.’

Most Liberal MPs tried to comfort Asquith in his distress, as did the party’s rank and file in London and the south of England. The Liberals now became the official opposition to Lloyd George’s coalition, though they were reluctant to oppose the conduct of a war which they themselves had begun. They were united only by a devotion to laissez-faire economics and a dislike, in Asquith’s phrase, of the new prime minister’s ‘incurable defects of character’. The Nonconformist and provincial sections of the Liberal membership, however, supported Lloyd George, as did a handful of Liberal MPs, including Churchill. More Liberal MPs would join the coalition in time.

The Liberal party thus split, just as it had done thirty years previously over Irish Home Rule. On this occasion, however, the schism would be fatal. Unlike Gladstone’s party of the 1880s, Asquith’s Liberals lacked a coherent political credo and a secure social base. Nonconformism no longer provided a popular political ideology, and the causes of free trade, laissez-faire economics and Irish Home Rule were now immaterial. The key economic and social struggle of the first half of the twentieth century was between capital and labour, and neither side looked to the Liberal party as its champion. For the workers, Labour was the new lodestar, while the representatives of capital and industrial wealth increasingly looked to the Tories. But the party of old England was also changing in response to the changing times, absorbing and promoting new men with new ideas, such as Law and Baldwin. They had far greater financial resources than the Liberals, too, and better links with the social elite and the press. Moreover, the British electoral system encouraged division between two main parties with contrasting creeds. A third, smaller party, with a more fluid identity, would always be under-represented in parliament.

With the exception of Lloyd George himself, Liberals did not appear in the new coalition’s war cabinet. The Unionists also dominated the wider administration, with Balfour at the Foreign Office and Carson at the Admiralty. Law now led the Commons, and the veteran Tory Lord Curzon the Lords. Lloyd George aside, the only indication the government was a ‘national coalition’, rather than a Unionist administration, was the presence of Labour’s Henderson in the war cabinet. Lloyd George was now, in effect, a president without a party. He deftly presided over the cabinet and oversaw the various ministries of government, to which he appointed his friends from the business world.

This system gave Lloyd George absolute control over home affairs, and considerable influence over the conduct of the war. ‘He pulled the levers,’ one government official wrote, ‘and the traffic moved in Westminster, in Fleet Street, in party offices, in town and village halls, in polling booths.’ Churchill, who joined the government as minister of munitions, was enthusiastic about Lloyd George’s despotism, while leading Unionists accepted the situation because it gave them influence without responsibility. ‘If the remarkable, unscrupulous little man wants to be a dictator,’ commented Balfour, ‘let him be.’ Over the ensuing months, Law and Lloyd George would form a successful working partnership, despite the striking contrast in their characters.

The king was among the many people who accused Lloyd George of mendacity, and nor was that the monarch’s only complaint about his new prime minister. Lloyd George regularly neglected to reply to his letters and often failed to appear when summoned to Buckingham Palace. The man who had risen in politics through his own merits had nothing but contempt for hereditary monarchy; he took pleasure in treating the king ‘abominably’, to use George V’s own term. Here was another wartime revolution – a middle-class politician intimidating the king. Lloyd George’s reputation as a ‘man of the people’ was also enhanced when he recruited three ministers from the Labour party to the coalition.

Lloyd George described his government as a ‘win the war’ coalition. He used the terrors on the battlefields of France as an argument for continuing the conflict, declaring that the ‘perpetrators’ must be ‘punished’. His message was faithfully broadcast by his old ally Lord Northcliffe and by Max Aitken, the owner of the Daily Express. Aitken, who had been instrumental in the removal of Asquith from office, would soon be elevated to the peerage as Lord Beaverbrook and appointed the coalition’s minister of information. Lloyd George’s propaganda efforts largely ensured that the country, however uneasily, still supported the war.

The prime minister, however, was eager to increase the war’s popularity by delivering a ‘knock-out blow’. He believed no mission was impossible – British troops could capture Jerusalem, help the Italians defeat Austria-Hungary or even gain the elusive breakthrough in France. In order to achieve that last aim, Lloyd George removed Britain’s largely incompetent military high command and placed the army under the authority of Robert Nivelle, a French general. Yet the next major engagement, at Arras in April 1917, was no more decisive and no less bloody than the battles preceding it.

In the same month, however, an incident took place that was to prove decisive in determining the outcome of the war. Over the previous few months Germany had conducted indiscriminate submarine attacks on any ships entering British waters, in an attempt to blockade Britain and starve her population into submission. The strategy resulted in the sinking of several vessels from the United States. The Americans were so incensed by the attacks that, on 16 April, they declared war on Germany. It was hoped that the United States might tip the scales in the Allies’ favour, though it would be months before American men and supplies reached the Western Front.

But as one ally was gained, another was lost. In Russia, the starved and weary population brought down Tsar Nicholas II, in what became known as the February Revolution, and a provisional government assumed power in his place. At first, Lloyd George welcomed the fall of the House of Romanov, and the opportunity to present the war as a moral struggle between the liberal ‘democratic’ Allies and the autocratic Central Powers. Yet Russia’s new government turned out to be unenthusiastic about a military crusade and proposed a peace with no annexations and indemnities.

Lloyd George’s strategy suffered a further blow in April, when the revolutionary Bolshevik leader Lenin arrived in Petrograd, in a train laid on by the Germans, to denounce the imperialist war. ‘The war,’ he declared, ‘is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out … to identify the interests of the thieves with the interests of the nation is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.’ It was a view that won wide acceptance in Russia, and also among the hungry working classes of Europe. Lenin’s Bolsheviks would become increasingly powerful over the coming months, and in November they would storm Petrograd’s Winter Palace, the seat of Russia’s government, and establish a ‘Soviet republic’. As head of the first ever socialist state, Lenin would end Russia’s involvement in the war by signing a treaty with Germany.

As the revolution unfolded in Russia there was no change on the Western Front. While the imminent arrival of thousands of American soldiers appeared to increase Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s confidence, it also prompted him to attempt to finish the job before the Americans reached France, no doubt in order to claim more glory for himself. Haig now believed the British could retake Ypres, march on to the Belgian coast and precipitate the fall of the German front. Lloyd George cautioned him against hubris and hastiness, but Haig silenced the doubters in the government and another bloody battle began, this time at Passchendaele, in July 1917. When the first British assault failed, Haig did not call off the operation, as he had promised; he remained convinced of a ‘tremendous’ breakthrough.

The battle persisted through August, September and October, with no breakthrough. The unseasonably early rains, and the volume of weapons and horses dragged over the terrain, turned the battlefield into a deadly morass in which thousands of soldiers drowned. During the ‘Battle of the Mud’ there were around 300,000 casualties on both sides, and once more the sacrifice of the Allied soldiers achieved little or nothing. Although Passchendaele was eventually taken in November, by a Canadian corps, there was no decisive victory.

By the closing months of 1917 there was no prospect of victory in sight. Because of the German submarine blockade, supplies of wheat in England were running low and compulsory rationing was introduced. The terrifying Zeppelins once more appeared in the London skies, where they were joined by Gotha aeroplanes. As the German aircraft rained down bombs on the English capital, 300,000 of its inhabitants took refuge in the Underground every night. Calls for a negotiated settlement with Germany could now be heard among the people; the campaigners for peace were now as vociferous as the propagandists for war. Numerous Labour supporters wanted to follow Soviet Russia and sign a treaty with the Germans, while Henderson resigned from the coalition in protest at its lack of engagement with European socialism. Even Unionist support for the war appeared to be waning; one leading light of the party warned that ‘prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world’.

As the war entered its fourth calendar year, there was no enthusiasm for it in England. Events in the spring of 1918 only darkened the mood. The German army, reinforced by soldiers transferred from the Eastern Front as a result of its treaty with Russia, decided to embark on a major offensive to take advantage of its numerical superiority before soldiers from the United States joined the Allies. General Ludendorff’s plan was to break through the opposition and then attack its trenches from behind. It enjoyed an excellent start, when the Germans overwhelmed the British at the Somme and advanced forty miles towards Paris. For the retreating Allies, the situation was desperate.

With American reinforcements still some weeks away, Lloyd George urgently needed more men. His war cabinet decided to impose conscription on Ireland, promising the nationalists the immediate implementation of Home Rule in return. But few Irish people believed Lloyd George’s promise, and many were outraged that he had made Home Rule dependent on the acceptance of compulsory military service. Nationalist opinion was inflamed: leading Sinn Féin politicians, along with the hierarchy of the Irish Catholic Church, pledged themselves ‘to one another to resist conscription by the most effective means at our disposal’. Undaunted, Lloyd George passed the new conscription law, and arrested many of the Sinn Féin politicians on trumped-up charges of collusion with Germany. The arrests only served to further galvanize support for nationalism in Ireland, while attempts by the British administration to implement the conscription law were unsuccessful.

Although there were no reinforcements from Ireland, the Allies managed to survive on the Western Front until the American soldiers started to arrive in the early summer of 1918. Around one and a half million United States troops landed in France, with 10,000 men sent to the Allied front every day. Reinforced by the American contingents, the Allies began a counteroffensive which would see the Germans retreat over all the ground they had taken in the spring. On the first day of the Battle of Amiens in August, a day Ludendorff called ‘the black day of the German Army’, the Allied forces advanced seven miles.

As the Germans were pressed back across France, news reached them that Turkish forces had collapsed in the east, giving the Allies an open road into Austria-Hungary. German soldiers began to surrender and desert en masse, while a German population facing starvation called for the end of the war. Politicians in Germany realized the war was lost. The German generals also reluctantly admitted defeat, but refused to take responsibility for it, thereby propagating the myth that the politicians had ‘stabbed them in the back’ by forcing them to sue for peace. The Kaiser abdicated and a German Republic was proclaimed, while Austria-Hungary disintegrated into numerous individual states.

On 11 November 1918, the German generals signed the Armistice. This agreement ended a global conflict that had lasted over four years, claimed around 18 million lives and left 23 million people seriously wounded, with millions more ill and homeless. The war also put unprecedented strain on the economic, social and cultural fabric of participating countries, as the example of Russia demonstrated. One English soldier, who was lucky enough to return from the front, described the war as ‘the suicide of Western civilization’.

14

The regiment of women

The war had offered abundant evidence that women were neither naturally passive nor destined by their sex to be ‘angels in the house’. During the conflict they had also demonstrated their fitness for ‘men’s work’ – by 1918 female workers were visible in shops and offices, on trams and trains, and in banks and schools. Women now went down mines, drove vehicles and worked on the land. They were employed in the civil service as well as in factories, while hundreds of thousands worked in government-run armaments plants. Many female munitions workers had left their family homes to live in lodgings or purpose-built hostels near the factories, becoming physically and economically independent from their parents or employers. While their earnings lagged far behind those of their male counterparts, women now earned on average twice as much as they had before the war period. For the first time in history, lower-middle-class and workingclass women – the unmarried as well as the married – had money in their pockets.

During the war almost 60,000 women also volunteered to serve in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. They were employed as clerks, mechanics, nurses and munitions workers at home, or sent to the Western Front to work as cooks and medical personnel. The Corps was directed by the physician Mona Chalmers Watson, who believed it represented ‘an advance of the women’s movement’ that softened the frontiers of gender. The ‘war-working type of woman’ appeared on the home front, sporting cropped hair, overalls and boots. Given the nature of their work, and the wartime fabric shortages, their attire had to be plain and practical. Frilly Edwardian dresses were replaced by short skirts, trousers or shorts. Along with the new jobs, clothes and freedom came a new confidence, which bred a determination never to return to the old dispensation.

The male establishment was fulsome in its praise of the women’s war effort. ‘How could we have carried on the war without them?’ Asquith remarked. ‘Short of actually bearing arms in the field, there is hardly a service … in which women have not been as active and as efficient as men.’ The former prime minister now declared himself a convert to the cause of women’s enfranchisement. As the fighting came to an end, many politicians agreed that granting women the vote might be a ‘fitting recognition’ of their contribution to the war. In private they admitted to other, more pragmatic reasons for extending the franchise: ‘As the atmosphere after the conclusion of the war cannot be calm,’ remarked one Liberal peer, there might be a return to pre-war suffragette agitation ‘if the grant of the vote is refused’. When a law conceding the vote to women over thirty reached the statute book in 1918, the victory belonged to the suffragettes who had campaigned before the war as well as to the women who had served during it.

The 1918 Representation of the People Act enfranchised over 8 million women, yet it was hardly a fitting recognition of women’s great wartime contribution, let alone an adequate response to suffragette calls for electoral equality. Under the terms of the act younger women were still denied the vote. As for parity with men, it preserved the gender gap by enfranchising all men over twenty-one years of age and all servicemen over nineteen, regardless of property qualification. In contrast, women over thirty received the vote only if they were either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register, a property owner or a graduate voting in a university constituency. The extension of the male franchise added over 5 million men to the electorate, and meant that women accounted for approximately 35 per cent of all voters, despite outnumbering men by almost 2 million.

The 1918 Representation of the People Act set the tone of post-war legislation relating to women. New laws promised great steps forward, but equality remained distant. As a result of the 1919 Sexual Disqualification Act and the Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children Act 1920, women could no longer be sacked because of their sex, while they were also permitted to become MPs, university students, architects and lawyers. Yet they were still barred from Cambridge University and the Stock Exchange, while their entry into medical professions was severely restricted.

One of the biggest blows to the cause of female equality was the dismissal of 750,000 women who had worked in factories on the home front, which left the proportion of females in employment lower than it had been before the war. The 1918 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act effectively re-established women as second-class workers, much to the relief of the overwhelmingly male trade unions who were anxious to secure work for male members returning from the front. Many on the left preached equality, but only for men. Labour was still a masculine party, despite the fact that work was no longer an exclusively male preserve. Some Labour MPs joined Unionists and right-wing male journalists in blaming the widespread male unemployment of the early Twenties on women. Few now spoke of women as the ‘saviours of the nation’.

During the Twenties, the attacks on women’s independence continued. Legislation specifically aimed at women tended to identify them as wives and mothers by concentrating on maternity or widowhood. A marriage bar was also introduced in professions such as the civil service and teaching, which meant that the many women who had been employed in these sectors in wartime now had to choose between work and marriage, with the implicit encouragement to select the latter.

Yet veteran feminists were on hand to protect the younger generation of women from the propaganda. The British author Rebecca West explained to her young ‘sisters’ that ‘the woman who does not realize that by reason of her sex she lives in a beleaguered city, is a fool who deserves to lose (as she certainly will) all the privileges that have been won for her by her more robustly minded sisters’. Guided by the old guard, many young women were able to lead confident and independent lives, despite the male establishment. The self-assurance of the young women of the decade seemed so radical to contemporaries that they were given a new name: ‘flappers’. In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute; in Edwardian England it was applied to young women who enjoyed the latest dances. The post-war flapper came to denote a young, zesty and sexually confident girl. By the early Twenties the term would imply all of these elements, and more – youth, unconventionality, impetuousness, independence, sexual heterodoxy, hedonism, confidence, high-spiritedness, a passion for fashion and the mimicking of masculinity.

The word ‘flapper’ was uttered by middle-aged men in a tone of stern disapproval. In a public lecture, one physician, Dr R. Murray-Leslie, condemned ‘the social butterfly type … the frivolous, irresponsible, undisciplined, scantily clad, jazzing “flapper”’. Yet demographics were against these male critics, since women now outnumbered men, especially among the younger sections of the population. The spirit of the age also favoured the flappers. In the Twenties young people were determined to drink and dance away the searing memories of war, while the old men who had brought about the carnage were to be laughed at, lambasted or ignored. Young women proudly appropriated the word flapper, using it to describe themselves and their sisters.

Some flappers came from the lower middle classes. Secretaries, waitresses, journalists, receptionists, teachers and shop assistants worked hard by day and caroused by night. Many of these ‘career girls’ were able to maintain independence from their families. Even if most could not afford to live away from their parents, they insisted on having a key to let themselves in after a ‘night on the tiles’. Yet it was mainly upper-middle-class or upper-class flappers who attracted the eye of novelists and journalists in the Twenties. Nina Blount, the daughter of a wealthy colonel in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (1930), offers a glorious archetype. On being asked if she’d ‘mind’ being seduced, she replies ‘not as much as all that’. The sexual experience following this exchange was probably unsatisfactory, to judge by a comment Nina makes later in the novel: ‘All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure, I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.’

Sex was a favourite topic of conversation among flappers. ‘We talk of everything,’ wrote a young woman in Eve magazine, ‘we do not rule out one single emotion or experience as being impossible or improper.’ Feminism informed and animated such behaviour. In the Twenties feminists encouraged their sisters to use birth control as a way to obtain freedom from birthing, domestic responsibility and lack of money. Contraceptives also offered women the chance to explore their impulses, tastes and capacity for pleasure. The intellectual Dora Russell described sex as ‘a thing of dignity, beauty and delight’ for women – ‘even without children, even without marriage’, physical satisfaction was possible for all. The most influential propagandist of the period was Marie Stopes. She established a birth control clinic in London, and disseminated knowledge of contraception through her book Married Love, a bestseller on its publication in 1918. Stopes encouraged women to see themselves as more than ‘the passive instrument of man’s need’, and to explore sexual pleasure as something of ‘supreme value in itself’.

This was a revolution without an articulated aim or ideology, yet the flappers were, in their own style, practical feminists. It was absolutely outrageous, according to some journalists, that a young, unchaperoned woman should be seen in public with a young man, let alone meet him in private. Meanwhile, the consequences of liaisons among the unmarried were too horrifying to be named: the newspapers referred to the increasing numbers of unmarried women who became pregnant as being in ‘a certain condition’. Fathers lectured their daughters on the dangers of lechery, drunkenness and stopping out late. Girls were warned that a quarter of London taxis participated in the slave trade; they had no handles on the inside, so passengers could not escape.

Ignoring the propaganda, the flappers strutted on the nocturnal streets of England’s cities, looking for places to dance. Upper-and upper-middle-class girls would be dropped off at classes in hotels or private houses by a chaperone or chauffeur, while those lower down the social scale would walk or take the tram or bus to lessons at the town hall. To a piano accompaniment, the teacher would help them master the steps of the dance currently in vogue. The jive, the one-step, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, the shimmy, the Varsity Drag and the fast foxtrot all enjoyed brief popularity during the decade; from 1925 everyone was doing the Charleston, described by an outraged newspaper as ‘freakish, degenerate, negroid’.

Most of the new dances came from the United States, and were characterized by vigour, gaiety and informality. Unlike the pre-war waltzes, everyone could do the Black Bottom, however they were dressed and wherever they happened to be. They were democratic dances for an age of burgeoning democracy. Some of the new steps had been imported by American soldiers, who had stayed in England after the end of the war; others featured in the American films that were shown in cinemas across the country. They were known as ‘rag dances’ because they were accompanied by ragtime piano tunes, or by the music that would come to define the decade – jazz. The word ‘jazz’ – a Creole euphemism for sex – covered a multitude of musical forms with syncopated rhythm, intermittent improvisation and an air of freedom and exultation. From its opening in 1919, the Palais de Danse in London’s Hammersmith hosted American jazz groups such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Outside of London, the purpose-built dance halls would arrive a little later.

Flappers also danced the night away at private parties. An upper-class hostess would invite friends round, often at only a few hours’ notice, and after dinner the guests danced to ragtime music. If there were no musicians available a gramophone would suffice, since they had become much cheaper and more compact; in the absence of a gramophone, a wireless would do. Chaperones, known as ‘dancing mothers’, or more colloquially as ‘alarm clocks’ and ‘fire extinguishers’, would keep an eye on proceedings.

The other great dancing venues of the period were the nightclubs, which opened across London despite being regularly persecuted under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act. The act, which had given wartime government extensive powers over society and culture, allowed the government to shut down places of entertainment should they be used for ‘immoral’ purposes. This gave nightclubs an air of illegality, which was enhanced by reports of the drug-fuelled orgies that supposedly took place inside them. The flappers who congregated at underground clubs such as the frequently raided ‘43’ on Soho’s Gerrard Street would mingle with aristocratic bohemians, the criminal elite, Oxbridge undergraduates and sports personalities. This establishment was run by the redoubtable Irishwoman Kate Meyrick, until she was caught serving intoxicating liquor without a licence and sent to prison for six months. Undaunted, she opened the Silver Slipper after her release, a club famous for its glass dance floor.

Other forms of pleasure available to flappers at clubs included cocktails and cigarettes. It was the first time women had smoked cigarettes in public, and the flappers flaunted their freedom by using ostentatiously long cigarette holders. Cocktails were regarded by many as the most romantic expression of modern life; Martinis, Manhattans, Bronxes and White Ladies all took their turn as the drink of choice. Some nightclubs also offered a new form of entertainment called ‘cabaret’, which consisted of floor shows featuring music, dance and song, with the performers either on stage or moving between the tables.

It would have been impossible to perform the dances favoured by the flappers, or to engage in other pursuits such as tennis, cycling and riding pillion on a motorcycle, in the laces, buttons and hoops that had impeded women’s breathing and movement before the war. Simplicity, lightness and comfort were all, with Coco Chanel’s ‘little black dress’ of 1926 emblematic of the period. Along with simplicity came inexpensiveness: dresses could be sewn at home from a single yard of fabric, and if the fabric was rayon, or ‘artificial silk’, the saving was all the greater.

For the first time in history, women aspired to boyish figures, with straight waists, flat chests and slender thighs, hips and buttocks. Achieving the desired androgynous physique was not easy for some, and many flappers turned to diets, massage, swimming and exercises, while others relied on clothes to suggest boyish slenderness. Where corsets had once accentuated the bust, breasts were now flattened by tight bodices or brassieres. Waists were eliminated, along with hips, by dresses that were straight, loose and cylindrical, and by baggy trousers. In donning trousers, some flappers wanted to allude to the uniforms factory women had worn during the war; it was a way of celebrating social and political emancipation. They also used clothes to proclaim their pleasure in sex and fleshliness. Flapper dresses, often dipping low at the front and back, were sleeveless and short; their skirts inched up the legs as the decade progressed.

‘In times of war and social upheaval,’ commented one fashion expert, ‘the tendency for women to cut off their hair seems almost to be irresistible.’ The bobs and the crops were often topped by the fashion sensation of the decade – the cloche hat spawned scores of imitations, and helmet-like hats appeared in shops everywhere. Some flappers preferred to wear them so low that the brim covered their eyebrows, but those who put on make-up raised the brims to show off the kohl and mascara around their eyes. Through such cosmetic means these women would achieve the desired look for a particular evening: ‘ethereal’ and ‘starved’ were among the most popular. Flappers who preferred a mischievous ‘little-girl’ pose painted their lips in a ‘cupid’s bow’ shape. Their widespread application of make-up was another audacious gesture; before the war cosmetics had been generally associated with whores and actresses.

Along with fashions in clothes came fashions in language. To express approval, a flapper might call something ‘jazz’, ‘the bee’s knees’ or ‘the cat’s meow’; disapprobation was indicated by epithets such as ‘Victorian’, ‘stuffy’ and ‘junk’. Boring men were ‘pillow cases’, and young men any girl could ‘borrow’ for the evening were ‘umbrellas’. Women eager for experience were admiringly known as ‘biscuits’, but if a girl stole a friend’s boyfriend she became a ‘strike-breaker’. In such epithets and phrases, we can hear an echo of the confidence and irreverence of the young women of post-war England.

15

The clock stops

Failure to grant electoral equality to women was not the only limitation of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. It also stopped short of establishing the principle of ‘one man, one vote’ in the constituency of residence – around one and a half million middle-class men enjoyed an extra vote, because of their ability to vote in university constituencies or in constituencies where their businesses operated. Neither did it introduce any proportional representation into the electoral system, but instead maintained the first-past-the-post formula, which strongly favoured the more established parties. The continued use of this system created widespread disillusionment among English voters. What was the point of voting for one’s preferred party in a constituency where it had no chance of winning?

Yet despite these defects, the 1918 Representation of the People Act was a revolutionary piece of legislation, tripling the electorate to around 21 million. It gave the majority of workingclass men a stake in society by granting them the vote for the first time. Like the enfranchisement of women over the age of thirty, the granting of the vote to workingclass men was regarded by some politicians as a reward for the enormous contribution these men had made to the war effort, both at home and on the Western Front. It was also an acknowledgement of the status and power that Labour and the unions had achieved during the war, and a pragmatic concession from a political establishment that feared a return to pre-war industrial unrest.

The consequences of enfranchising 14 million women and workingclass men would soon be evident; Lloyd George called a general election immediately after the armistice. Officially he sought a popular mandate to negotiate a lasting post-war international settlement, and to implement a programme of social and economic reconstruction. Yet there were also political reasons for calling an election. Lloyd George wanted to capitalize on his reputation as ‘The Man Who Won the War’ and as the prime minister who could, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘get things done’. The only problem was that he no longer had a strong and united party behind him. Only half of the Liberal MPs in the 1918 Commons backed him, the others standing by Asquith in principled but hopeless opposition. The prime minister also lacked a coherent political credo – traditional Liberalism had been exploded by the experience of war.

But the celebrated political fixer soon came up with a solution: a continuation of the national coalition, in peacetime, under his leadership. Lloyd George believed the traditional battle lines between the parties had become obscured during the war, events having blunted the divisiveness of debates surrounding free trade and protection, jingoism and anti-imperialism, state intervention and private enterprise. He hoped that consensus politics had replaced the old tribal and class-or interest-based politics and that he would emerge as a presidential figure with cross-party appeal. The Unionists signed up to his plan, partly because Lloyd George was unassailable. The party lacked a leader with the prime minister’s popular appeal and doubted its ability to appeal to newly enfranchised workingclass voters. Moreover, some Tories sensed the opportunity of destroying the Liberal party by driving a wedge between the coalition Liberals and the ‘Squiffites’.

The Labour party declined the invitation to remain in the coalition, preferring to work alone. The addition of a great swathe of the working class to the electorate gave them confidence, as did the doubling of the party membership to 3 million during the war, and the enhanced status and size of the unions, which now comprised 8 million members. The increase in subscriptions gave the party the resources to expand its National Executive and establish a network of branches throughout the country. The party’s recent experience of government, together with the demise of the Liberals, inspired optimism throughout its ranks, as did the fact that a socialist economy had been established during the war and accepted by the population.

Labour also believed it could exploit the radicalism that was sweeping across England after the war. People wanted to build a new and better society, and were determined that a capitalist or imperialistic conflict should never break out again. According to George Orwell: ‘After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable … You knew it was just a balls-up.’ A similar attitude may have prompted people to protest and riot during the 1919 Peace Day celebrations, which had been organized by the government to encourage national unity. In Luton a crowd stormed and burned down the town hall. The leaders of the nation were perturbed. As one senior courtier, Lord Esher, remarked, ‘The Monarchy and its cost will now have to be justified in the eyes of a war-worn and hungry proletariat, endowed with a huge preponderance of voting power.’

Labour felt emboldened to formulate radical policy proposals, including the nationalization of the railways, the workers’ control of industry and a capital levy to eliminate the national debt. Since workingclass men had been conscripted to fight the war, trade unionists and Labour MPs argued that the ‘accumulated wealth’ of the middle and upper classes should be ‘conscripted to defray the financial liability incurred by the conflict’. The party also decided to adopt an overtly socialist creed, which would clearly distinguish it from its Liberal rivals. In its revised constitution of 1918, it pledged ‘to the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof … upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production and control of each industry and service’.

The reference to ‘workers by brain’ suggests an attempt by Labour to attract the middle classes and the intelligentsia that had been drawn to the reforming Liberal administrations before the war. The adoption of socialism as the official Labour doctrine manifests a desire to distance the party from the unions and to broaden its social appeal; socialism was an international, supra-class creed rather than a workingclass or trade unionist one. Ramsay MacDonald advocated nebulous and gradualist socialism that was tailored to appeal to ‘the middle section’ radicalized by the war, whose ‘nucleus is the intelligent artisan and the intellectual well-to-do’. Yet Labour’s espousal of socialism, however cautious, left it open to attack from the centre and the right. In the run-up to the 1918 election, Lloyd George’s friends in the conservative press raised the spectre of a Labour-sponsored socialist revolution, while the prime minister claimed that ‘The Labour Party is being run by the extreme pacifist, Bolshevik group.’ But Labour was not intimidated into abandoning its endorsement of socialism; it was convinced that the centre ground of politics had shifted to the left.

The national coalition won the election by an enormous margin, with Unionist and Liberal candidates who received a letter of endorsement from Lloyd George and Law claiming over 500 seats out of 700. To add to the prime minister’s delight, MacDonald lost his seat – evidence that Lloyd George’s anti-pacifist jibes had been effective. The result was an expression of the population’s overwhelming gratitude for his wartime heroics and an endorsement of his plans to rebuild the country. The election had been won through promises of a better future, and the electorate’s belief that Lloyd George and his Unionist allies could fulfil them. Young Unionist candidates, such as Neville Chamberlain (the second son of Joseph, and half-brother of Austen), secured their seats with the pledge to ‘show gratitude to those who have fought and died for England, by making it a better place to live in’.

Although the results were a cause of celebration for Lloyd George, they might also have given him cause for concern. Labour had attracted strong support among the newly enfranchised working classes, increasing its share of the popular vote from 6 per cent to 21 per cent and polling almost two and a half million votes, but the first-past-the-post system ensured that this failed to translate into parliamentary gains. Nevertheless sixty MPs represented a significant increase on the forty the party had returned in 1910. Labour was now a powerful national force, and the largest single British party of opposition. Meanwhile, virtually all the Irish constituencies outside the four Protestant-majority counties in north-east Ulster were won by the ultranationalist party Sinn Féin, which replaced the IPP as the official political voice of Ireland. Many of the elected Sinn Féin politicians were serving jail sentences; all the party’s MPs declined to take up their seats in Westminster, refusing to take the oath to the British monarch or to recognize the right of a British parliament to intervene in Irish affairs. Instead the politicians set up their own parliament, the Dáil Éireann, in Dublin. Lloyd George’s government would now have to answer an even more urgent ‘Irish question’ than the one with which Asquith’s administration had grappled before the war.

The demise of the IPP also deprived the Liberals of their traditional support from the Irish benches, one of the reasons why the 1918 election results represented a death sentence for the Liberal party. The official ‘Squiffite’ Liberals won a mere thirty-six seats, with Asquith himself losing in East Fife, while the coalition Liberals amassed only 127 seats, making them the junior partner in a Unionist-dominated coalition. The Unionists, with 382 seats, had such a large majority in the Commons that they could, in theory, form a government without Lloyd George whenever they wished. Their dominance was reflected in the cabinet Lloyd George assembled: Law was Lord Privy Seal and leader of the House of Commons, Austen Chamberlain was chancellor, and Balfour was foreign secretary.

The Unionists had performed a brilliant manoeuvre. Under the aegis of a resplendent Liberal war hero, they had appealed to the new workingclass electorate. They had also attracted a fair share of the women’s vote, thereby establishing a strong relationship with the female electorate that would last throughout the twentieth century. The party had, moreover, exploited and exacerbated divisions in the Liberal party, while replacing it as the unofficial representative of business. Many of the 260 new MPs were self-made businessmen, and the overwhelming majority sat on Unionist benches. These new arrivals, who were famously described by Stanley Baldwin as ‘hard-faced men who looked as if they had done very well out of the war’, effectively replaced the aristocracy as the lifeblood of the Tory party. Only a dozen heirs to the peerage were elected at the 1918 election, while there were four aristocrats in the coalition’s twenty-two-man cabinet. Lloyd George had hoped the election would herald the arrival of a new consensual coalition politics, but the parliament which assembled at the beginning of 1919 was as divided as ever. When the prime minister rose to address it, he saw ‘the TUC on the one side and the Associated Chambers of Commerce on the other’ – Labour represented the former, while the Unionists represented the latter. Who did the Liberals on the other benches represent?

Although he was now isolated at the head of a Unionist-dominated administration, things went well for Lloyd George at first. He established hegemony over his Unionist colleagues in the cabinet through a characteristic combination of flattery and bullying, and bypassed many of his ministers as he had done during the war. He also ignored parliament, preferring to deal with issues directly as they arose.

The battle to win the peace on the home front began well. An influenza epidemic, which had claimed over 200,000 British lives since the armistice, gradually abated. The English larder was slowly ‘demobilized’, with meat, sugar and butter coupons phased out. The political, social and industrial unrest feared by many in the government failed to materialize – the 1918 Representation of the People Act had satisfied the popular appetite for reform and the post-war economy was buoyant. The war had created a boom, with high government spending and inflation stimulating the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. The army of workers expanded with the return of men from the front, but they were absorbed into the growing economy, and unemployment rarely exceeded 1 million (though the 750,000 women dismissed from their positions to make way for the returning men were not included in the figures). The boom continued after the war, sustained by the lavish spending of people who had saved money during the conflict, and by the ‘new men’ who had made vast fortunes out of it. An insufficient supply of goods caused a rise in both prices and wages, which encouraged people to spend more, which further boosted wages and profits.

The extravagant spending of the population was matched by Lloyd George’s government as it attempted to inaugurate its reconstruction projects. In 1918 it introduced an Education Act which raised the school leaving age to fourteen. The following year it passed a Housing Act, through which the state accepted responsibility for housing the working classes. So long as the economy was booming and neither business nor wealth felt oppressed by taxation, the Unionists allowed the prime minister to keep public spending high.

Lloyd George was optimistic that he could also succeed in international affairs. In January 1919, he went to Versailles, where the victorious Allies would dictate peace terms to the defeated Central Powers. The prime minister was confident that he could help orchestrate an enduring peace settlement that would be favourable to Britain. His aim was to remove the possibility of future German aggression without undermining her capacity to act as a counterweight to Soviet Russia on the Continent. So far as Britain’s specific aims were concerned, much had been achieved prior to the conference. The German navy had been destroyed following the armistice, and the Allies had tacitly agreed to deprive Germany of her colonies and divide them up amongst themselves. In the event the British Empire would be extended by almost 2 million square miles in Africa, Palestine and Mesopotamia, incorporating 13 million new subjects. Lloyd George could afford to be magnanimous at Versailles.

He also aimed to maintain the close alliance with the United States formed during the latter stages of the war. To further that objective, he endorsed President Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen-point plan as the basis for the peace settlement. One point of Wilson’s proposal was national self-determination for European peoples who had formerly been part of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Wilson and Lloyd George hoped that the emerging nation states would become harmonious liberal democracies, strong enough to resist the economic and political influence of Russia and Germany. Two other points of Wilson’s plan aimed to remove the potential causes of a future war. Armament reduction for all countries was proposed, along with the establishment of a ‘general association of nations’ for ‘the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike’. It was hoped that this association would replace the inherently unstable balance of power diplomacy.

On the German question, Lloyd George supported American attempts to curb France’s appetite for vengeance. The French were determined to reduce Germany’s frontiers and make the country pay onerous reparations, while Britain and the United States insisted that Germany should be diminished but not devastated, lest this create the conditions for future international discord. When the French proposed taking the Rhineland from Germany and establishing it as an independent state they were rebuffed; and when they suggested an exorbitant figure for German reparations, Lloyd George forced them to accept that the final amount of compensation would be decided at a later date.

Britain and the United States may have acted as a brake over these issues, but the French exacted revenge on Germany in other ways. The peace settlement of June 1919, which became known as the Versailles Treaty, restored to France the Alsace-Lorraine region which had been lost to Germany forty years previously, and permitted French soldiers to occupy the mineral-rich Saar region of Germany. It also declared the German city of Danzig a free state. Under the terms of the treaty, Germany lost 13 per cent of its pre-war European territory and 10 per cent of its pre-war population, while the German army was reduced to 100,000 men and the navy to 15,000. Germany was also forced to sign a ‘war guilt clause’, accepting responsibility for all the loss and damage of the war. The German government regarded this clause as a violation of honour and a lie, while one German official called the treaty ‘the continuation of the war by other means’. Over the next decade, the treaty’s punitive terms would provide a focus for popular anger in Germany, which would be expressed in support for the ultranationalist Nazi party.

It was not only the Germans who regarded the Versailles Treaty as harsh. The Cambridge economist and Treasury representative John Maynard Keynes argued that reparations were unwise because European harmony and prosperity were dependent on a strong Germany. Lloyd George agreed, but he was unable to convince the French that a powerful Germany was compatible with their security. Press and public opinion in Britain were also against him, with the right-wing newspapers conducting a ‘Make Germany Pay’ and ‘Hate the Huns’ campaign, supported by the Unionists. As a result Lloyd George was compelled to sign a treaty which he knew to be ‘greedy’ and ‘vindictive’ in its treatment of Germany, and unlikely to lay the foundations for a lasting European peace.

Neither did the treaty’s other clauses inspire much optimism among experienced observers. The numerous independent countries that emerged after the dismantling of the empires of the Central Powers, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, had no democratic traditions of their own; they also contained various, and often antagonistic, ethnic nationalities with historical links to the great continental powers. As for universal disarmament, none of the Allies was serious about reducing its arsenals and nor did the treaty clarify how many weapons should be decommissioned. Meanwhile, the forty-eight-member League of Nations, which was established to uphold peace, lacked an army and a navy. In their absence how could it police Europe effectively? The authority of the association was also undermined when the United States decided against joining, a retreat into isolation that was also a blow to Lloyd George’s diplomatic strategy. Since Britain lacked the military and economic capacity to supervise the globe alone, it required the assistance of the world’s emerging superpower. In the absence of a transatlantic alliance, Britain would be weaker and more isolated. It is unsurprising that English diplomats returned from Versailles in pessimistic mood. ‘If this was a war to make the world safe for democracy, it has failed,’ commented Lord Eustace Percy. ‘If it was a war to end war, it has left the future of the world more uncertain and more contentious.’

After signing the Versailles Treaty in June 1919, Lloyd George returned to an England barely recognizable from the one he had left. In the six months it had taken the Allies to share out the spoils of war, England’s economic boom had lost its momentum. ‘The whole thing came to an end, like the stopping of a clock,’ remembered Charles Masterman. The underlying cause of the recession was the international competition faced by Britain’s heavily indebted and technologically antiquated shipbuilding, coal and cotton industries. Meanwhile, the United States was enjoying the benefits of a technological revolution, based on automated machinery and new methods of management which ensured low-cost mass production. The native industries of India, Canada and South Africa were also flourishing. As British imports had not reached these imperial territories during the war, they had become self-sufficient. Engineering projects within the empire could now be carried out by local companies, and their products were more competitively priced. International demand for British produce was also affected by economic chaos on the Continent. How could the German people afford expensive British goods during the hyperinflation of the early Twenties?

Britain’s staple industries had received substantial investment during the war, and this was followed by an avalanche of orders in the immediate post-armistice period. Eight million tons of shipping lost in the conflict had to be replaced, and the shipbuilding, steel and iron giants had expanded to meet the demand. Yet wartime investment and post-war demand disguised the inherent weakness of these industries, as well as the serious damage done to the economy by the conflict. The country’s preoccupation with war had also offered the United States – which had been neutral from 1914 to 1917 – the opportunity to take over many of her customers. When government investment stopped, and the rush of post-war orders ended, Britain’s industries found themselves with a stockpile of expensive goods that no one wanted to buy. Total British exports were 20 per cent lower than they had been before the war, and Britain’s share of the world export market fell to 11 per cent, below that of the United States. To compound these problems, lavish post-war spending had stimulated inflation, and the government raised interest rates to keep prices under control. This discouraged borrowing and spending, and so reduced internal demand; it also meant that money borrowed in the lowinterest boom time would have to be paid back at higher rates. In consequence, many banks were overextended and many businesses collapsed.

Britain’s industrial activity and gross domestic product fell precipitately in 1920–21 and there was a sudden rise in unemployment. By the summer of 1921, unemployment in Britain exceeded 2 million (around 20 per cent of the working population). Long queues of men outside labour exchanges became a familiar sight in the old industrial centres of northern England. Among those waiting in line were many ex-soldiers, who came to the conclusion that the country they had fought for neither needed nor wanted them. ‘If they’d told me in France that I should come back to this,’ commented one former private, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. Sometimes I wish to God the Germans had knocked me out.’

In a bid to avoid industrial and political unrest Lloyd George acted quickly, extending unemployment insurance in 1920 to all those who earned under five pounds per week. The following year he allowed the unemployed to continue to draw benefit beyond the maximum period allowed under the insurance scheme, as long as they could prove that they were genuinely seeking employment. The extension was necessary because people were now out of work for long periods. Yet Lloyd George’s decisiveness could not prevent protests and industrial action. In 1921 the first Hunger March from London to Brighton was organized by the recently formed National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. In 1920 and 1921 engineers, miners, railway workers, cotton spinners, shipyard workers and even the police went on strike for better job security and the maintenance of wages. In 1921 alone, 85 million working days were lost to industrial action.

The government feared that strikes might coalesce into one general strike that would bring the economy to a standstill. Lloyd George drew up plans for such an eventuality, which included the creation of a Defence Force of 75,000 men that would police the protests, run public transport and distribute food. The authorities were anxious. ‘The people grow discontented,’ remarked King George. ‘Riot begets revolt and possibly revolution.’ The elite had good reason to be fearful. The Soviet Workers’ State inspired sympathy in the left-wing press, and communist movements seemed on the verge of achieving power in Italy and Germany. In 1920 a British Communist party was established, its very existence encouraging the belief that capitalism was on the verge of collapse. Most economists did not share this view, but many had lost faith in the system’s power to improve living standards and reduce inequality.

Yet as the crisis continued into 1921, the prospect of a revolution receded. At the beginning of the year, the resolve of the strikers appeared to weaken; the government enfeebled it further through a combination of threats, empty promises and the offer of slightly higher wages and shorter hours. Lloyd George was in a strong bargaining position; high unemployment meant that no alternative employment was available to the striking workers – the choice was between accepting the employers’ terms or semi-starvation on the dole. The prime minister had strengthened his position further at the end of 1920 by introducing an Emergency Powers Act: the coalition was now empowered to govern by decree should there be the threat of industrial action. In the circumstances, the strikers had little choice but to back down, and a general strike in support of the miners planned for 15 April was called off. The date became known as ‘Black Friday’, because many on the left regarded it as the last day on which a war against the capitalists and the government might have been fought and won.

Lloyd George emerged victorious from his battle with the Labour movement, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The alliance he had struck up with the unions during the war was broken beyond repair, and he could no longer pose as a ‘man of the people’. What chance did he and his coalition Liberals have of luring workingclass voters away from Labour, at a time when they were increasingly disappointed by the government’s failure to deliver on its promise to build a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’? While some progressive measures had been implemented, the most ambitious government projects were scaled down when the economic slump intervened. The 1919 Housing Act had offered local authorities the funds to build over 200,000 rental homes, yet when the slump arrived the building came to an abrupt halt with only half of the houses constructed.

In the middle of the slump, the coalition’s Unionist majority reminded the prime minister that national debt stood at £8,000 million – forty times higher than it had been in 1914. To the Unionists the slump was an opportunity to reduce the debt through public spending cuts, though this would have the effect of increasing unemployment and reducing aggregate demand in the economy. The alternative of raising income tax further seemed illogical, since Unionists regarded the rich as the productive classes on whom the economy depended. Allying itself with the popular ‘Anti-Waste’ campaign, which espoused the creed of efficiency and economy in government, the Unionist party promoted an emergency austerity programme that served as cover for their ideological aim of reducing public spending and general state intervention. Bowing to pressure, Lloyd George created a committee of businessmen to decide where the cuts should be made. The chosen victims included education, health and pensions, with the cuts amounting to £85 million. Labour politicians were quick to point out the prime minister’s hypocrisy: the man who posed as ‘the people’s champion’ had made the working class pay the nation’s debts.

16

England’s Irish question

While industrial action continued in England, another crisis broke out in Ireland. In truth Ireland had been in a permanent state of crisis ever since the Home Rule emergency of 1912–14, with the Easter Rising of 1916 followed by the anti-conscription protests of 1918. In 1919, the Sinn Féin-dominated Dáil in Dublin proclaimed a second Irish Republic, independent from the United Kingdom. Britain refused to acknowledge either the Republic or the Dáil, and ostensibly still oversaw the administration of the country from Dublin Castle. Yet the Dáil proceeded to bypass Britain’s colonial administration; they imposed taxes on the Irish people, directed local authorities and established their own courts of justice, police force and military, which was known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

This was a challenge to the empire, which at that point covered around a quarter of the earth’s land and incorporated a quarter of the world’s population. Yet the first two decades of the twentieth century had demonstrated that empire’s vulnerability, as well as Britain’s diminishing military and economic power. The Boer War and the Great War had severely tested the empire, while imperialism as an ideology was also under threat. The president of the United States had enshrined the principle of national self-determination in the Versailles Treaty, which encouraged many of Britain’s imperial territories to demand more autonomy. Independence movements flourished in Burma and Egypt, as well as in Ireland.

In India the National Congress was gaining in popularity under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, a former London lawyer who demanded dominion status for the country. The Government of India Act 1919 increased the involvement of native Indians in provincial councils, which were given greater powers. But it was not enough to convince the population of the legitimacy of continued British rule; social tensions remained high, and martial law was imposed. The consequences of this decision were immediate. On 13 April 1919, large numbers of Sikhs gathered in a garden in Amritsar to celebrate a religious festival and stage a political protest. Following the orders of Colonel Dyer, British troops covered the exits of the garden and opened fire on the unarmed crowd. According to the colonel, it was not ‘a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view’ throughout India. Between 380 and 1,000 people were killed.

Dyer received praise from Tories in parliament and in the press for ‘saving the Empire’. Although he was eventually dismissed from the army, a public collection for him raised £26,000. Anger at the killings spread throughout India. How could the English now claim to bring civilization to their ‘benighted’ subjects? In 1906 the British viceroy of India had spoken of ‘subduing’ the people of India, ‘not to the law of the sword but to the rule of justice’; now those words sounded hollow. In the aftermath of the massacre, many more Indians decided to support the National Congress. The incident marked the beginning of the end of British rule.

It was within the context of an overstretched and anxious empire that events in Ireland unfolded. Ireland was nominally part of the United Kingdom; its proximity made it vital to England’s security and prosperity. Unlike India, Egypt or Burma, the country had been under English influence since the twelfth century. Among those most concerned by the rise of Irish nationalism were the Unionists who dominated Lloyd George’s government; during the Home Rule crisis of 1912–14 they had zealously defended the interests of Protestant Unionists in north-east Ulster, even at the risk of civil war. The Ulster Unionists now lived in a de facto Irish republic, governed from Dublin by men who were from a different political, ethnic and sectarian tradition. The administrative control of the new republic did not extend to the north-east of Ulster, where the presence of British forces remained high, but there was no guarantee the situation would not change.

The Irish nationalist movement was composed of diverse elements, with differing aims. Many in Sinn Féin espoused independence from Britain, to be secured by peaceful methods where possible. On the other hand, the recently formed IRA was ready to fight the British and defend the recently proclaimed republic by force. The army was led by Michael Collins, who had a genius for military strategy.

The power and reach of Britain’s colonial administration was now diminished. Effective imperial government depended on the collaboration of the Irish population – on post office workers, tax collectors, local government officials and policemen – and the majority of them had voted for Sinn Féin. Judging that the time was now right to challenge British rule with force, the IRA declared war on the colonial government, thus beginning the ‘War of Independence’. Collins had learned from the failed Easter Rising that defeating the British by conventional military means was unrealistic; his plan was instead to make imperial rule in Ireland impossible. The IRA embarked on a series of guerrilla attacks on the personnel of the British state, ‘executing’ eighteen members of the Irish police force towards the end of 1919. The campaign was facilitated by Irish collaborators within the imperial police force and intelligence agency, and by countless members of the population who shielded the nationalist gunmen.

The success of the IRA campaign convinced the British government that its grip on Ireland was loosening, and its response was brutal. Lloyd George declared Sinn Féin illegal, appointed a draconian Irish chief secretary and recruited British ex-soldiers to ‘police’ Ireland. The unemployed ex-soldiers were promised ‘£15 a week … plenty of girls and lashings to drink’ as payment for destroying the IRA and quelling Irish nationalism. They formed a ‘terror squad’ and became known as the ‘Black and Tans’, a name that reflected the colour of their uniforms and recalled a breed of hunting hound. They proceeded to live up to their name by hunting down, kidnapping, torturing and executing suspects, raiding houses, looting shops and setting fire to entire villages.

The IRA responded by targeting the Black and Tans, while many civilians were caught in the crossfire. At Croke Park in Dublin on 21 November 1920, the Tans opened fire on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match. Twelve people were killed and sixty wounded on what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The British chief secretary claimed the forces had acted in self-defence, but it was in fact an act of revenge for the IRA’s killing of twelve British intelligence agents and members of its forces earlier in the day.

The Croke Park massacre and other atrocities undermined any moral or legal authority the British might try to claim in Ireland. British brutality also inspired further popular support for nationalism, which undermined the numerical advantage the British forces enjoyed over the IRA. As reports of British cruelty reached England, and as the death toll rose to over 1,000 (in a population of only 3 million), the liberal English press and intelligentsia increasingly sympathized with Irish nationalism and condemned the ‘terroristic’ methods of the coalition, which now declared martial law. George Bernard Shaw, an Irish dramatist and intellectual with considerable popularity in England, drew a parallel between the Black and Tans terror and the Amritsar massacre, and some of the English elite agreed with this analysis. ‘Things are being done in Ireland,’ Asquith told parliament, ‘which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism in Europe.’ ‘Are you going to shoot all the people in Ireland?’ King George asked Lloyd George. When the prime minister shook his head, the king continued, ‘Well, then you must come to some agreement with them. This thing cannot go on.’

At first, Lloyd George had defended the Black and Tans as ‘bravely’ defending the ‘civilisation’ of a ‘glorious’ empire from the threat of ‘terrorism’. Yet eventually he was forced to admit that ‘mistakes’ had been made by ‘a certain number of undesirables’. He was also compelled to pursue a more constructive policy. He introduced a fourth Home Rule Bill, officially called the Government of Ireland Act, which was passed at the end of 1920. By the terms of the act, one Home Rule parliament was established in Dublin, and another in Belfast to oversee the six counties of Ulster with substantial Protestant populations. Representatives of these two bodies would meet in a Council of Ireland, while a reduced number of Irish MPs would continue to sit in Westminster. The country would continue to acknowledge the ultimate authority of the British monarch and his representative in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant.

Unsurprisingly, this compromise satisfied none of the interested parties. The Irish nationalists did not recognize the Dublin Home Rule parliament and instead continued to convene the Dáil; the Ulster Unionists refused to acknowledge the Council of Ireland. The Unionists did, however, accept the new parliament in Belfast, despite their objection to Home Rule. Following the passing of the act, elections were held for both Home Rule parliaments. The Unionists won an 80 per cent majority in the ‘six counties’ in Ulster, while Sinn Féin claimed virtually every seat in the south. These results merely served to confirm the stalemate; they also exacerbated sectarian divisions, as violence spread throughout Ulster. Thousands of Catholics were forcibly evacuated from Belfast housing estates and anti-Catholic discrimination was common on the streets. The IRA, meanwhile, killed Protestant policemen in the ‘six counties’, while the Dáil decided to boycott trade between the ‘north’ and ‘south’.

Yet some good came out of the elections. When King George travelled to Belfast to open the northern Home Rule parliament, he called for ‘the end of strife amongst [Ireland’s] people, whatever their race or creed’. The monarch’s words were followed by a truce, along with talks in London for a peace treaty. The chances of finding a compromise solution remained slim – the nationalists demanded an independent republic for all Ireland, while the Tory-dominated coalition was determined to preserve the ‘integrity of the Empire’ as well as the interests of the Unionists of Ulster, who were once again threatening civil war. ‘If you are unable to protect us from the machinations of Sinn Féin,’ Carson warned the government, ‘we will take the matter into our own hands. At all costs, and notwithstanding the consequences.’

Lloyd George offered the nationalist delegation dominion status for the twenty-six counties outside of the six counties of Ulster with substantial Protestant populations. The southern dominion, to be called the ‘Irish Free State’, would be self-governing and free from British forces; members of its parliament would, however, still swear an oath of allegiance to the British monarch as official head of state. The six counties in Ulster, meanwhile, were offered the right to remain part of the United Kingdom under the name ‘Northern Ireland’. Privately, though, Lloyd George promised the nationalists that the boundary would be drawn in such a way that the six-county northern state would be politically and economically unworkable; Northern Ireland would, he implied, soon have to join the Irish Free State. The prime minister also confirmed his acceptance of a de facto united Irish dominion by officially designating the treaty a settlement ‘between Great Britain and Ireland’.

Tempering these private promises with the threat of renewed hostilities, Lloyd George badgered and bullied the nationalist representatives into signing the treaty on 6 December 1921. Collins realized that it did not represent ‘the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to’, yet believed it gave Ireland the ‘freedom to achieve’ that position. Most people in Ireland greeted the news that agreement had been reached with relief, yet the treaty’s critics argued that it opened up the near certainty of partition. Éamon de Valera refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British king and resigned as Dáil president soon after; Sinn Féin split into proand anti-treaty factions. These two groupings would fight a civil war that would last for around a year and claim 2,000 lives – a bloody beginning for the new ‘free’ state.

Immediately after the signing of the treaty, the Ulster Unionists opted out of the Free State. The ‘territory’, ‘province’ or ‘region’ of Northern Ireland was thereby established, and the union to which England belonged became ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. As the civil war raged in the south, the Unionists consolidated their power within NorthernIreland. They shaped electoral constituencies to guarantee clear Protestant majorities, and passed a Special Powers Act that gave the Unionist police the power to search and imprison Catholics without trial. The question of where the boundary would be drawn remained undecided for the duration of the Irish Civil War. After that conflict had ended, the impoverished Irish Free State, now led by De Valera, officially accepted the treaty and renounced its claim to govern the two Catholic-nationalist majority ‘Northern Irish’ counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. In return the British government cancelled Ireland’s debts to the British Empire. The British Boundary Commission of 1925 would confirm Northern Ireland’s status as a six-county state.

In the long term, the treaty and partition failed to solve England’s ‘Irish question’. Over the succeeding decades, Unionist-dominated Northern Ireland would oppress its Catholic population, creating resentment both north and south of the border. That border would become a focus for attacks by the IRA, whose aim was to end partition and expel British forces from Irish soil. The Irish Free State, meanwhile, would last for a mere fifteen years, after which the Dáil renounced Ireland’s dominion status and proclaimed the sovereignty of ‘Éire’ under a new constitution.

In the days following the 1921 treaty, Lloyd George was praised by his Liberal coalition colleagues for breaking the ten-year stalemate in Ireland, and for ending decades of uncertainty over the country’s constitutional status. Many on the right, meanwhile, looked forward to reaping the benefits of the new electoral dispensation, which ensured that a majority of Unionists would be returned to Westminster from Northern Ireland, while no Liberal-leaning Irish MPs from the south would sit in the Commons. Liberated from Irish issues, many Unionists started referring to themselves again as ‘Conservatives’ or ‘Tories’, and the old name of ‘the Conservative party’ was eventually restored.

Yet not everyone in the Conservative party welcomed the developments in Ireland. Fifty or so ‘die-hard’ Tory Unionists denounced the treaty as a betrayal of the Protestants living in the Irish Free State. They argued that a series of IRA terror attacks in Northern Ireland and London proved that Lloyd George had not settled the ‘Irish question’, openly criticizing the prime minister and attempting to turn their fellow Tories against him. While the majority of Tories continued to support Lloyd George, their enthusiasm for the coalition ebbed; when he started selling countless peerages and knighthoods for his own personal gain, it evaporated. ‘Bronco Bill’ Sutherland, an associate of the prime minister, would trawl London’s clubs and offer plutocrats baronetcies for around £10,000. One hundred and thirty baronetcies were sold in this way, along with 26 peerages and almost 500 knighthoods.

All governments sold honours in this way, and the Tories happily took some of the proceeds. What irritated them was that most of the money went to Lloyd George’s personal fund, since he was a politician without an official party. Besides, offering honours so indiscriminately made a mockery of a system designed to glorify and perpetuate the British ruling class, as well as the British Empire and the monarch who reigned over it. It is hardly surprising that George V accused his prime minister of ‘debasing’ the whole system, a charge that did not trouble the egalitarian Lloyd George. Yet many Conservatives took the king’s view, and began looking among their own ranks for a potential replacement.

There was, however, time for one last adventure. Lloyd George attempted to gain popular backing for British military intervention in support of Greece in its struggle against a resurgent Turkey. The Turks showed no desire to provoke the British forces into war, and the incident served only to emphasize how isolated Britain was and how overstretched its empire had become. Stanley Baldwin, an MP rising rapidly through the Conservative ranks, denounced Lloyd George at a Tory party meeting as a ‘terrible dynamic force’ that might split the Tories. It was time for the Tories to break away from the coalition, form a government and then fight an election under their own leader and on their own platform.

Buoyed by a recent by-election victory and encouraged by continuing division among the Liberals, the majority of Conservative MPs agreed with Baldwin. They had had enough of ‘the Welsh attorney’ ‘dictating’ to their party. Yet Austen Chamberlain, who had recently become party leader when Law had retired owing to ill health, took a different view; a split within the Conservative party seemed possible. After the vote of no confidence in the coalition Chamberlain resigned from the cabinet, followed by Lloyd George. The news of the resignations improved Law’s health significantly, and he took over the leadership of a caretaker Tory government. He would remain in power briefly while parliament was dissolved and a general election called.

When Lloyd George resigned, King George remarked that he would soon be prime minister again. Law and Asquith were too old to lead the country and MacDonald’s opportunity had not yet come, while Churchill belonged to the coalition Liberals who had lost their raison d’être. Yet without a powerful party to support him, there would never be a return to Downing Street for Lloyd George. The Tories thus tethered the Liberal scapegoat, before leading him out into the wilderness.

17

Gay as you like

If events in Ireland suggested the empire was breaking up, strikes across England suggested that society was breaking down. Unrest, discontent and division pervaded the country, while memories of the carnage on the Western Front were still vivid. It is hardly surprising that social and cultural life in the Twenties was characterized by confusion, pessimism and disquietude, yet there were also signs of vitality and exhilaration. Many would describe the decade as a time during which youth rebelled against their elders and attempted to forget the past.

Along with the flappers, the most famous revellers of the period were the bohemian aristocratic sets known as the ‘bright young things’. They largely comprised rich young hooligans from Oxbridge and the older public schools, along with their girlfriends and acquaintances. According to Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, the novel that immortalized them, their chief purpose was to party: ‘masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths’. This last gathering was the famous ‘Bath and Bottle party’ at St George’s swimming baths in London, where flowers and rubber horses floated on water illuminated by coloured spotlights. The guests, dressed in dazzling swimming costumes, drank ‘Bathwater Cocktails’ and danced to the strains of a black jazz orchestra, sometimes hurling themselves into the pool.

At these parties the transgressive infantilism of the set was given full and eccentric expression. The elder brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers of the bright young things had reached adulthood before the war, and many were now maimed, scarred or dead. Why should the young generation follow in footsteps that had led to the mass grave of the Western Front? The defiance of the group was also tinged with guilt at having been too young to die beside their older relatives.

The parties tended to be informal, crammed, wild and noisy. Obscenity and excess were the keynotes, as partygoers enjoyed sex, gin and ‘uppies’ (cocaine). The young hooligans also partied at breakneck speed: ‘they rush from one restaurant and party to another,’ a contemporary noted, ‘to a third and fourth in the course of an evening, and finish up with an early morning bathing party, transported at 60 mph to the swimming baths of Eton, or a race down the Great West Road.’ The young hedonists zigzagged across country roads ‘at high speed, under the influence of drink, in the hope, if there was a smash, that the case would be reported in the Sunday newspapers’.

The escapades of the young aristocrats were the hysterical last hurrah of that class. Having lost its grip on the Commons and its veto in the Lords, the aristocracy no longer dominated British politics. In economic terms, too, the caste was in decline. Taxes on land had been historically high during the war; after the armistice the Central LandOwners Association demanded the exchequer repeal them. Yet the anti-establishment Lloyd George maintained the land tax, and almost 50 per cent of country houses and 8 million acres of land were put on the market between 1918 and 1922. Over the decade that followed, the atrophy continued. By the time the American-born Tory MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon visited a number of the old great houses in the Thirties, he was overwhelmed by ‘the feel and smell of decay, of aristocracy in extremis’. There had perhaps been no greater change at the summit of English society since the Norman Conquest.

While the aristocracy was diminished in political and economic terms, its members remained influential in the creation of society’s crazes and fashions. Their influence was strong in the arts, where some of the set promoted ‘modernism’. That artistic movement was characterized by a conscious rejection of classical styles, and an interest in forms and themes appropriate to an urbanized and industrialized society. The children of privilege promoted avant-garde trends in music and painting, such as jazz and cubism, while in literature they championed the radical innovations of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.

Virginia Woolf was Bloomsbury’s best and boldest novelist. The stream-of-consciousness style she employed in Mrs Dalloway (1925) oscillates between direct and indirect speech, interior monologue and soliloquy. Like the bright young people, Woolf rebelled against the formal conventions and the ethos of the Edwardian period – a ‘fatal age’, according to her, ‘when character disappeared’. Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot, an American associate of the Bloomsbury Group, dramatized the disintegration of Western civilization during the war in his long poem The Waste Land (1922). In its deep ambiguities and elisions, and in its fragmented form, Eliot’s poem reflected the post-war period with all its anxieties, fears for the future and mournful memories. Many of the first readers of The Waste Land struggled to find meaning in its plethora of voices, styles, allusions and images, yet the poem was written to be uttered rather than understood. The bright young people heard the poem’s plangent music and realized that its rhythms and melodies were more important than its ‘meaning’.

Eliot occasionally attended parties organized by the bright young things, as did other Bloomsbury authors, such as Lytton Strachey. In newspaper interviews Strachey expressed sympathy with the set’s ‘struggle’ against the older generation and its harmful ‘taboos and restrictions’. His comments offer an insight into both the psychology of the bright young people, and the author’s own modernist tract, Eminent Victorians (1918). Strachey’s collection of biographical essays – or rather assassinations – had been written in the war, during which the author was a conscientious objector. Instead of writing the earnest, exhaustive and exhausting biographies favoured by the Edwardians and Victorians, Strachey penned short, sprightly and ironic portraits. His purpose was to attack his subject in ‘unexpected places [and] shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses’. To achieve those ends Strachey drew upon the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. In Eminent Victorians Strachey poured scorn on the Victorian values of Christianity and imperial service that had been espoused by a generation of ‘mouthing bungling hypocrites’. Those values had helped bring about the war, he implied, yet they were still being adhered to by the older generation.

Some of the bright young men also ridiculed pre-war ideas and ideals of masculinity. Beards, moustaches and pipes were discarded as outmoded emblems of male pomposity. The new men favoured clean-shaven faces, and brushed back their oiled hair. They sported outlandish, self-parodic costumes that were as far away as possible from Edwardian male seriousness. And, just as the flappers had appropriated masculine fashion, the bright young men purloined clothes traditionally associated with women: ‘nowadays,’ as one of them remarked, ‘boys are girlish.’ They wore wide trousers called ‘Oxford bags’, which billowed around the legs and came in light, bright shades. The suede shoes and high-necked pullovers favoured by the men likewise featured soft colours; they were the first males ever to don pink shirts. Their waistcoats were flamboyant and their evening dress was embellished with patterns. They wore attractive wristwatches and constantly consulted them with a flourish of the forearm. As a result, wristwatches became associated with effeminacy; men who did not meet acceptable standards of masculinity were referred to as ‘terribly wristwatch’ or as having ‘a wristwatch accent’. An effeminate enunciation and vocabulary was cultivated by bright young men. ‘My dear, how could you!’ they would exclaim. Their effeminate argot was brought to the stage by Noël Coward, whose plays enjoyed success towards the end of the decade.

Some of the bright young men were effeminate, some were homosexual and some were both. Of American descent, Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard grew up despising his father and adoring his mother. Tall, pale, aloof and flamboyant, Howard swaggered his way from Eton and Christ Church college, Oxford, to the West End, leaving a trail of pink champagne bottles and quotable utterances in his wake. He planned spoof art exhibitions, elaborate practical jokes, and parties at which he would cut a dashing figure in cross-dress or historical costumes. Some of Howard’s historical parties had themes such as ‘Homosexual Lovers Through the Ages’, a daring idea when the laws that had condemned Oscar Wilde to two years’ hard labour were still on the statute book. Howard was a dandy like Wilde, and together they established the figure as a gay archetype. Evelyn Waugh admired Howard’s ‘dash and insolence’, but others were less than enthralled by his self-centredness and melancholy. As the years passed, he became increasingly morose, like so many of the bright young people. He wallowed in lost youthful promise and in the fading of his gilded youth, like a goldfish in a emptying pool.

And indeed, even at the height of their gay abandon, melancholy pervaded the hedonistic parties of the age. When their infantile indulgences began to pall, these spoiled children were paralysed by tedium. ‘Bored young faces’ peer out at us from the pages of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, emanating a ‘sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility’. Another novelist, Richard Aldington, detected the same air of despondency: ‘all night the restless feet stamped … and the joyless rejoiced without joy; and at dawn, when the wind breathed an immense sigh … You could almost hear the rattle of the bones in this macabre pageant.’ The image of the desolate dawn was commonplace in eyewitness accounts of parties, suggesting a foreboding for the future as well as an inability to dance away the memory of the recent conflict. It is telling that Waugh’s portrait of the group, Vile Bodies, ends on the battlefield of a future war.

18

Labour at the summit

Lloyd George’s fall from power was followed by a decisive Conservative victory at the 1922 election. According to some commentators, Law won the election for the simple reason that he was not Lloyd George. ‘A drummer boy is an asset in battle,’ the taciturn Tory leader told voters during the campaign, ‘but he and his drum are a nuisance in peacetime.’ British voters agreed; their desire was for the ‘tranquillity’ and ‘stability’ Law promised. According to Stanley Baldwin, now elevated to the Exchequer, the electorate also voted for honesty, a quality Lloyd George signally lacked.

In fact, it was more complicated. The election result was a rebellion made in the shadow of the war. Four years after the armistice, the conflict and its consequences were still the central issues of politics, and the Tories won the election by proposing to govern as though it had never happened. Law declared that he would give free scope to the initiative and enterprise of the people, by reining in the power of the state. His call for minimum interference by the government heralded the end of ‘war socialism’, and of Lloyd George’s ambitious plans to rebuild a better country. The Tories also claimed victory courtesy of the new electoral dispensation in Ireland and the bias of a voting system which inflated their 38 per cent of the popular vote into 56 per cent of the parliamentary seats.

Yet despite its secure majority, the government lacked strength and stability. Austen Chamberlain declined to join Law’s government, along with various other ‘Conservative coalitionists’. Meanwhile, Law’s health was failing, and he resigned after only a few months in office. Who would replace the man Asquith had dubbed ‘The Unknown Prime Minister’? Lord Curzon was regarded by many as the heir apparent. The patrician peer had been foreign secretary since 1919, and he had held office under both Balfour and Salisbury. With his experience, background and air of authority, Curzon believed himself to be destined for the leadership.

Yet the party of the old aristocracy overlooked the autocratic lord for Stanley Baldwin, the son of an iron and steel magnate, and a member of the Commons. The choice was a sign of the ascendancy of the lower house at Westminster and indicated how far power had shifted to the businessmen within the Tory party. Despite his relative inexperience, Baldwin had the confidence of the City and of the commercial sector. Tory grandees complained that their party was being vulgarized by the advent of the plutocracy Baldwin represented, but their caste no longer dominated the party or the country. With characteristic pragmatism and shrewdness, Baldwin acknowledged the aristocracy’s cultural power by posing as a countrified businessman, yet it is notable that he promoted talented men from the middling rank. The most significant appointment in his first government was Neville Chamberlain as minister of health and then as chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Tories’ decision to back a businessman rather than an aristocrat brought few benefits in the short term. Baldwin had been instrumental in bringing down Lloyd George and was consequently distrusted by the coalition Conservatives. And then, only six months into his premiership, the prime minister had a Damascene conversion to Joseph Chamberlain’s controversial protectionist programme. Since Baldwin felt he required a popular mandate to implement such a radical proposal, he called an election. The inexperienced prime minister believed he could attract recently enfranchised voters with the arguments Joseph Chamberlain had elaborated two decades previously: if tariffs were imposed on imports coming from outside the empire, then trade would be boosted within it; this would protect jobs at home and revive England’s ailing industries. It would also raise revenue without the need to increase taxes. At the same time, the embattled empire would be transformed into a single economic unit with free trade inside its frontiers.

A new generation of voters, however, showed little enthusiasm for the old Chamberlainite cocktail of economic reform, social legislation and imperialism. At the 1923 election, the Tories lost 86 Commons seats. Although they remained the largest party in parliament, they had failed to win a popular mandate for protectionism; with his flagship policy rejected, Baldwin was reluctant to form a government. Neville Chamberlain, faithful to Baldwin and to his father’s memory, blamed the defeat on ‘the new electorate’, while Curzon attributed it to Baldwin’s ‘utter incompetence’. Yet Baldwin somehow survived as leader – the first of the many escapes that would characterize his career. That was partly due to a lack of alternative leadership candidates, but it was also because his espousal of protectionism and of ‘Tory democracy’ had positive side effects. It united the Conservative party and nudged the Tories towards the centre ground of politics. In an increasingly democratic era, that was an advantageous position for the party of privilege to occupy.

The real story of the 1922 and 1923 elections, however, was the rise of Labour. The party claimed 142 seats in 1922 (up 80 from the previous parliament), and 191 seats in 1923. This figure compared favourably to the 115 seats of a Liberal party which had recently reunited under Asquith’s leadership, and was 70 seats short of the Conservatives’ total. Over the two elections Labour established itself as the main opposition to the Tories – two decades after its formation, the party of the ‘have-nots’ was close to having power. Among the causes of Labour’s ascent, the widespread radicalism in post-war Britain and the party’s broad appeal to the working and lower middle classes who had been enfranchised in 1918 played a significant part.

Labour represented the newly enfranchised classes in a literal sense, filling the benches of the 1922 and 1923 parliaments with men from the working and lower middle classes. The arrival of the ‘masses’ at Westminster led to a marked change in its etiquette. Plainly dressed MPs from northern English (and Scottish) constituencies favoured an impassioned ‘soapbox’ style when denouncing unemployment or expressing solidarity with the underprivileged. On one occasion the new men broke out into a loud rendition of the party’s socialist anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, to the horror of the Speaker who suspended the session. The Morning Post condemned such ‘Bolshevist frightfulness’, while the Conservatives denounced the song as a ‘hymn of hate’.

Yet along with these radical workingclass MPs, a new breed of middle-class Labour politician entered the Commons. None of the Labour MPs elected in 1918 had attended public school, and only one had attended university; the overwhelming majority had been working men sponsored by the unions. But in the 1923 parliament, there were nine ex-public school and twenty-one university-educated Labour men, while the union-sponsored MPs were no longer in the majority. Some of the new recruits were middle-class intellectuals with links to the Fabians and the old Independent Labour Party, such as Clement Attlee, an Oxford graduate who had fought at Gallipoli. Others had only recently joined Labour from the Liberals, out of despair at the ineffectiveness of their old party. Labour was no longer the protest party of a single class or the parliamentary wing of the unions – it was starting to resemble the socialist workingand middle-class alliance that Ramsay MacDonald had envisaged after the war.

It is entirely fitting that the party now chose MacDonald, who had returned to the Commons in 1922, as its leader. He was a much better parliamentarian than his rival in the leadership contest, the union man John Clynes, and he was also a public orator of genius. His lyricism inspired comparisons with Lloyd George, as did his sharp political intelligence and instinct for survival. If Labour had always been a party of protest and practical politics, MacDonald was a master of both.

Yet despite these qualities, MacDonald had won the leadership contest only by the narrowest of margins, and the revolutionary wing of the party would soon complain about the moderate brand of evolutionist socialism he espoused as party leader. He believed that social progress could be made through parliament alone; British society, he argued, had an ‘enormous capacity to resist change’, because of the strength of its ‘inherited habits, modes of thought and traditions’. This inherent inertia meant that change could only be gradual. MacDonald believed that Labour might permanently replace the Liberal party as the main opposition to the Conservatives; a socialist utopia could wait for another day.

The 191 seats Labour won at the 1923 election made it the largest party to espouse free trade. Since voters favoured that policy over Tory protectionism, Labour had, Asquith declared, earned the right to govern the country with the support of his pro-free-trade Liberal party. Privately, the Liberal leader was hopeful that a minority Labour government would soon mutate into a free-trade coalition that he might lead. The ‘wild’ and ‘beggarly’ men who sat beside MacDonald on the front bench were, Asquith felt, likely to bring down his feeble government. There was a sense among the political elite that a Labour administration was inevitable, and that it could not be tried under safer conditions. Baldwin and Chamberlain espoused this argument – a minority Labour government ‘would be too weak to do much harm’, the latter commented, ‘but not too weak to get discredited’.

Even so, some prominent members of society were appalled by the idea of Labour governing the country. When the idea of a Labour administration was mooted, there was considerable nervousness over the prospect of a socialist ‘power grab’. The City and the press echoed the establishment’s fear and anger, and Asquith received ‘appeals, threats and prayers from all parts to step in and save the country from the horrors of socialism and confiscation’. Yet in the end the Liberal leader and his Tory counterpart decided that their parties ought not to stand in the way of MacDonald’s men, in case it provoked outrage in the country.

Would Labour accept what might turn out to be a poisoned chalice? Many in the movement advised against doing so, for fear that a minority government was bound to fail. Others warned that the party of idealistic socialism would be tainted by an inherently conservative political system. Yet MacDonald argued that it was only by accepting office that Labour could prove it was ‘fit to govern’. They must, he said, demonstrate that they could work within the existing political framework. If they rejected the opportunity, they would risk losing all of the electoral gains they had made since the war. In the end, MacDonald’s view prevailed.

And so Britain had its first ever Labour government, to the trepidation and astonishment of some party purists. One member of the new government remarked on the ‘strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought a ‘starveling clerk’ (MacDonald), a foundry labourer (Henderson) and ‘Clynes the mill hand’ to receive the seals of office from the king at Buckingham Palace, and George V himself was no less astonished: ‘I wonder what Grandmama [Victoria] would have thought of a Labour Government,’ he commented. Nevertheless, the king was impressed with the new prime minister who, he felt, ‘wishes to do the right thing’. In fact, the apparently ill-matched pair struck up a friendship that would prove to be an enduring one. So far as King George was concerned, the ‘socialist’ MacDonald was an improvement on the discourteous Lloyd George and the ‘indolent’ Baldwin, while the Labour party was now much less of a menace to the crown, having expunged all traces of republicanism from its constitution in the early Twenties. As for MacDonald, the king’s good opinion offered an entrée into society. In a development that perhaps did not bode well for harmony in the Labour party, some of MacDonald’s backbenchers began to refer to their leader as ‘Gentleman Mac’.

As a minority government, MacDonald’s administration had no scope to introduce a radical social or economic programme, yet this may have suited the new prime minister’s purposes. Although there was a majority of workingclass men in the cabinet for the first time in history, MacDonald also selected various ex-Liberals and a number of aristocrats. He gave the key position of chancellor to Philip Snowden, who agreed with MacDonald that Labour should ‘show the country we are not under the domination of the wild men’.

Accordingly, Snowden produced a budget in the Gladstonian rather than the socialist mould. He reduced food taxes and set aside money for the historic Wheatley Housing Act, by which half a million council houses would be built for low-paid workers. Yet the Labour chancellor was unwilling to increase the country’s debt by using public spending to counteract unemployment, which remained stubbornly above 1 million. During one debate on the issue, the new minister of labour confessed that he could not ‘produce rabbits out of a hat’.

Industrial action was an inevitable consequence of the parlous economic situation. The strikes forced Labour politicians to condemn as ‘disloyal’ and ‘Communistic’ protests with which they had formerly sympathized. They also had to refuse the demands of the very unions who funded them. Some trade unionists now openly defied the government; Ernest Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, refused to call off a strike when requested to do so by MacDonald, and there was also discontent among Labour backbenchers. Even middle-class MPs such as Attlee were disappointed by the party’s failure to produce effective policies, and concerned by the disdain MacDonald displayed for some of his proletarian colleagues. Meanwhile, relations between the administration and Asquith’s Liberals had also deteriorated, and without a majority in the Commons it was impossible to carry out parliamentary business.

Yet it was not internecine warfare or Asquith that brought down the government, but its supposed sympathy towards Soviet Russia. When MacDonald’s administration signed a commercial treaty with the country and quashed the prosecution of a communist British journalist, there was shock and anger. But it was nothing compared to the furore that followed the publication of a letter from the Russian President of the Communist International, implicating the government in communist activities. The letter was a fairly obvious forgery, but following its publication in the Daily Mail, ‘red peril’ hysteria spread throughout the country. It was an early example of the domination of British democracy by the popular press, which would become even more pronounced over the course of the century. The controversy gave the Conservatives an opportunity to attack the weak government; MacDonald resigned, and an election was called.

The Conservatives were in a better position to fight an election in 1924 than they had been a year previously, with Baldwin’s protectionist programme having united his party. Now the Tory leader made another astute move, dropping his unpopular Tariff Reform programme to deny the Liberals their traditional election cry of ‘anti-protection’. He shrewdly declined to set out detailed policy proposals during the campaign, but instead concentrated on criticizing MacDonald and his ministers. With the help of their friends in the press, the Tories communicated a simple message to the electorate: ‘a vote for Socialists is a vote for the Communists’.

At the election the Tories polled around 47 per cent of the popular vote and gained 67 per cent of the seats in the Commons. Liberal voters had turned to the Tories in their thousands; Asquith’s party lost 75 per cent of its seats and was reduced to a mere forty MPs, with the leader himself one of the casualties. Keynes predicted that the party would never again hold office but would instead become a political finishing school, supplying Labour with ideas and the Tories with ministers. Churchill would soon rejoin the Conservative party, retracing the steps he had made two decades previously. His desertion of the Liberal party was understandable. As an idealist intent on opposing socialism and promoting ‘Tory democracy’, it would have been pointless to remain. It was now obvious that the Liberals had no hope of challenging Labour as the main opposition party to the Tories: MacDonald’s men had increased their share of the popular vote to 33 per cent.

The election finally delivered the political stability the Tories had promised voters after the fall of Lloyd George two years earlier. There had been three elections, three prime ministers and two leadership battles since then, but the political turbulence was stilled. Clear battle lines were now drawn between the Conservatives and Labour, who had between them obliterated the Liberals and nullified the influence of that party’s mercurial genius Lloyd George. The two major parties were united under skilful leaders, both of whom had the experience of an unsuccessful term of government behind them. Given its superior resources, the backing of the press and the vagaries of the electoral system, it was inevitable that the Tory party would enjoy the larger share of power for the foreseeable future.

19

Where is the match?

Baldwin, now almost sixty, presented himself to the public as an unassuming country gentleman. On meeting him for the first time, few would have guessed that he came from a family with an industrial empire. The Tory leader would pause mid-sentence to take a long draw on his trademark pipe, a symbol of the Victorian rural world to which Baldwin constantly referred. In this bygone place, ‘old gentlemen spent their days sitting on the handles of wheelbarrows smoking’ while listening to ‘the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy’. This was England before the strikes, the gas canisters and the disintegrating empire; a society in which everyone had a place and everyone knew what it was. Baldwin believed in the population’s inherent love of the countryside and the domestic hearth. The English were, he thought, a nostalgic and conservative people, distinguished by the virtues of decency, modesty, justice and common sense.

‘Master Stanley’ claimed to have a second-class intellect, despite his education at Harrow and Cambridge. Yet first-class intellects, he claimed, were usually reluctant to follow instructions. Dangerous men of genius, such as Lloyd George, also made the mistake of believing they could solve problems through initiative. Far better to do nothing, the prime minister reckoned, or to cautiously react to events as they unfolded. The middle-class industrialist thus cast himself as the heir of Salisbury and Balfour; he provided a bridge between the plutocratic Tory party he led and the party of landed wealth over which his predecessors had presided.

When Baldwin took office, the king urged him to combat class war, but the Tory leader needed no urging. His vision of a harmonious England marked him out as a ‘onenation Tory’ of the Disraelian school, while his Tariff Reform programme of 1923 demonstrated that he was also a ‘Tory democrat’ in the mode of Chamberlain and Randolph Churchill. He criticized Labour for exacerbating class division and struggle, while his party stood ‘for the unity of the nation, and of all interests and classes within it’. He preferred to focus in speeches on potentially unifying issues, such as ‘Englishness’ or ‘the countryside’, rather than on controversial or divisive party-political matters. He also attempted to revive popular interest in the empire, and to associate his party with national institutions such as the monarchy and the Anglican Church. He had Baldwin’s remarkable management skills, as well as that sense of timing which is indispensable to a successful politician. This selfeffacing and ostentatiously average Englishman had known exactly when to strike Lloyd George, the pre-eminent politician of the age.

On entering Downing Street in 1924, Baldwin declared that his ambition was ‘to bring about a unity of the nation’, yet the nation he governed was characterized by class division. George Orwell would call England ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’. It was assumed that every aspect of an English person’s character and life – his or her education, attire, health, opinions, pastimes, manners, aspirations, wages and pronunciation – depended on social position.

It was certainly true that the working classes were less healthy than people higher up the scale. When in work, they had to ‘make do’ with a low weekly cash wage out of which they paid rent. Moving above the crucial £250-per-year threshold and through the gradations of the middle class, monthly salaries were more common, along with the ownership of houses and motor cars and the employment of servants. In the final band were the upper classes who had a monopoly on the country’s wealth. One per cent of the nation owned two-thirds of its assets.

Antagonism between the classes was acute and palpable. ‘The upper class,’ commented one Liberal MP, ‘despise the working people: the middle class fear them.’ The workers, with their collective bargaining power and readiness to strike, were a threat to those ‘above’ them. Manual workers appeared, to middleand upper-class eyes, ‘uncouth’, ‘filthy’ and ‘militant’; their wage ‘demands’ were seen as exorbitant, while the unemployment benefits that supported them when they were out of work seemed undeserved and costly.

There was also little solidarity between the upper and middle classes. Members of the upper class regarded the middling ranks as vulgar and insolent; their children were seldom permitted to play with ‘such people’, in case they picked up unfortunate habits. For their part, the middle classes were more critical of unearned upper-class wealth in the Twenties than perhaps at any other period in the century. The middling orders did, however, feel a residual awe for the waning aristocracy, and expressed this in an enthusiasm for the monarchy and the cultivation of upper-class accents. They also aspired to send their children to private schools, the ‘engines of privilege’ through which the upper class perpetuated their power. Meanwhile, both the middle and upper classes were resented by the workers. Baldwin was aware of ‘a growing feeling of class consciousness’ and a ‘bitter antagonism running through the workshops, north and south, east and west’, though he blamed it on the propaganda of the Labour party.

Class was not the only thing that divided the English – there was also the experience of the trenches. Those who had fought in the war and received scant reward for their suffering felt isolated from the rest of the population. ‘All was not right with their spirit,’ a journalist commented of workingclass ex-privates. ‘They were subject to queer moods, fits of depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure … the daily newspapers have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes, of violence and passion … The murders of young women, the outrages upon little girls.’ As usual, it was women who suffered the consequences of male alienation. As for the upper-middle-class and aristocratic officers, those who came home from the war found the old Edwardian guard still in charge of landed society, as though ‘the great interruption’ had never occurred.

Almost every facet of English life in the Twenties was marked by conflict between the generations. There was a sharp contrast between the regular church attendance of a portion of the older generation, for example, and the steep decline in churchgoing among the young. ‘We are lukewarm in religion,’ commented the young philosopher and radio broadcaster C. E. M. Joad, ‘unimpressed by authority, distrustful of moral codes, and impatient of moral restraints.’ Once more, the experience of war seems to have been decisive. Millions had prayed for peace, but their prayers had gone unanswered. What kind of God would sit by and watch such carnage? Besides, patriotic church ministers from all Christian denominations had encouraged the butchery; how could the young generation genuflect before them?

Baldwin’s eldest son Oliver was one of the decade’s angry young men. He had loathed his schooling at Eton, displaying a disdain for authority, discipline and tradition. Yet it was his experience of the Western Front that set him vehemently against ‘the old men’ who had ‘betrayed the young’. After the war Baldwin urged his son to marry the daughter of one of his political allies, but Oliver told his father he was homosexual and moved in with his partner. In 1924, his struggle against his father was expressed in the most emphatic way imaginable when he stood as a Labour candidate at the general election.

If Baldwin was unable to unite his own family, how could he unify a divided country? Any serious attempt to heal national divisions would require more than soothing rhetoric. Yet transmuting words into deeds was not Baldwin’s forte; he was better at setting the tone of government than he was at working out the finer points of policy. Nor were most MPs in his party enthusiastic about extending the role and power of central government. During the war the state had been omnipresent in the economy, but Conservatives believed those circumstances had been exceptional. In peacetime, the state’s job was merely to ‘hold the ring’, allowing manufacturers to introduce their own innovations, employers to bargain with workers and the market to function. ‘All the available evidence indicates,’ one Tory commented, ‘that State enterprise is inherently un-enterprising.’ Another Conservative remarked that central government had its ‘hand in all pockets and its rod on all backs’. Here we see the origins of the market-orientated, anti-state ideology that would dominate Conservative political and economic philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Yet despite these unpromising foundations, Baldwin’s government was more active than previous twentiethcentury Tory administrations. That was partly due to the presence in the cabinet of the man Baldwin called ‘the hundred-horsepower mind’. Although Churchill admitted to possessing a ‘limited comprehension of technical matters’, he had been rewarded with the exchequership by Baldwin. The prime minister hoped this onerous appointment would keep Churchill so busy that he would not interfere with other ministers; it was also intended to keep Churchill out of contact with the working classes, who had never forgiven him for sending troops to confront strikers during his time as Liberal home secretary.

In 1925 the chancellor made the momentous decision to return sterling to the gold standard, thereby linking the currency to Britain’s gold reserves. During the war, exchange rate stability and currency convertibility had been abandoned, and Treasury notes had replaced gold coins, since the government had needed to print money to cover its extraordinary costs. But the inevitable consequence of increasing the amount of money in circulation was inflation. Wary of increasing prices, Lloyd George’s coalition had announced that the gold standard would be restored in the mid-Twenties. Churchill, similarly concerned about the potential impact of inflation, decided that the economic conditions were right to fulfil this promise.

Yet in truth the 1925 Gold Standard Act was introduced for political rather than economic reasons. It drew a line under the years of war, intimating a return to the pre-1914 days of peace and plenty that Baldwin loved to evoke. Besides, the Treasury took the view that a failure to return to currency convertibility and exchange rate stability would ‘suggest our nerve had failed’. Churchill decided to fix sterling’s exchange value at the high pre-war rate of $4.86 – a lower exchange rate would imply that Britain’s economy had been surpassed by America in the intervening decade, and that sterling could no longer ‘look the dollar in the face’. Immediately after the passing of the act, the economic weather seemed favourable. Manufacturing production levels started rising slightly and unemployment began to fall. This gave Churchill the confidence to reduce supertax, to the delight of the plutocrats and gentry in his party. Yet he also increased public spending on education, health and housing, in accordance with his previous commitment to a ‘New Liberal’ social state and his current espousal of ‘Tory democracy’.

Churchill was not the only cabinet member whose father had been a proponent of that ‘onenation’ Tory creed. The new minister of health, Neville Chamberlain, was the son of Joseph, a Unionist famous for his commitment to domestic reform. ‘He was a great social reformer,’ Neville remarked of his father, ‘and it was my observance of his deep sympathy with the working classes which inspired me with an ambition to do something in my turn.’ Using the money Churchill made available to the health ministry – then responsible for housing, insurance, pensions and the poor law – the idealistic and indefatigable Chamberlain set about implementing welfare proposals directly inspired by his father’s ‘municipal socialism’. Over the next four years he introduced twentyfive acts that aimed ‘to improve the conditions of the less fortunate’. He united health, insurance and poor law services under one umbrella, extended pensions and insurance, and greatly empowered local government. During the same period Chamberlain established himself as Baldwin’s unofficial deputy; he also excelled in parliament, where his tenacious memory and grasp of policy detail inspired comparisons with Law.

The reserved and methodical Chamberlain admired, but did not entirely approve of, the flamboyant aristocrat over at the Exchequer. While the health minister admitted that Churchill was ‘brilliant’, his ‘amorality’, ‘want of judgement’ and ‘furious advocacy of half-baked ideas’ made him a ‘very dangerous man’. Indeed, in many respects Churchill resembled Lloyd George, whom Chamberlain regarded as a false friend to the British nation, and the tempter of its electorate. For his part, Churchill was impressed by Chamberlain’s proficiency but regarded him as narrow and unadventurous.

Yet while the pair were opposites in terms of character, they often worked in tandem on strategy. Together they also fostered an energetic and ambitious atmosphere within an otherwise undistinguished Tory cabinet. Enterprising policies were formulated, such as the establishment of a public Central Electricity Board to oversee electricity generation, distribution and investment. Although it was in effect a proposal for nationalization, the Tories preferred to call it ‘rationalization’. The resulting 1926 Electricity (Supply) Act would unify 500 separate generating stations under a state monopoly, prompting a fourfold increase in electricity production over the next decade.

Another ambitious act of nationalization was the granting of a Royal Charter, in 1926, for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Run by a director general and a board of governors selected by the prime minister, and funded from licence fees paid by wireless owners, its news bulletins, weather forecasts, children’s programmes, variety shows and coverage of national sporting events and state occasions soon reached every county of England. By the end of its first decade, the BBC would speak to people from every class, as technological advances reduced the price of the wireless.

Baldwin immediately grasped the possibilities offered by the new medium. With his clear syntax, crisp enunciation and evenness of tone, he became a master of the new art of broadcasting. It was said that he would take an audible drag on his pipe just before beginning a talk, so listeners would imagine him sitting next to them as they gathered around the wireless – the modern equivalent of the Victorian hearth. For the duration of Baldwin’s broadcasts, England became the harmonious society that his words invoked.

The most significant bill passed by Baldwin’s government was the 1928 Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act, which extended the franchise to all women over twenty-one, regardless of property ownership, and gave them electoral parity with men. It was a concession to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which vigorously campaigned for equality of voting rights throughout the Twenties. Although the bill was a cross-party measure, Baldwin convinced his party that the addition of almost 5 million women to the electorate would not be a threat to its re-election.

On the international as well as the domestic stage, Baldwin’s utterances were often followed up by action. The British Empire Exhibition, which ran from 1924 to 1925 at Wembley in London, was a vast and expensive propaganda exercise. Crammed full of symbols promoting peace and unity within Britain’s imperial territories, its official purpose was ‘to strengthen bonds that bind Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughters’. Along with all the palaces dedicated to British engineering and artistic ingenuity, the military displays and the musical performances, there were pavilions in which each colony or dominion exhibited typical products and traditional artefacts. Visitors could traverse the entire globe in a few hours, via roads named after imperial heroes such as Sir Francis Drake. By displaying a powerful British ‘mother country’ at the centre of a vast empire, the exhibition also aimed to rekindle imperial pride among the English lower classes. This was not an easy task in a post-war period when imperialism was constantly attacked by intellectuals, and when separatist movements within the empire had enjoyed considerable success.

King George made a speech at the opening ceremony that was broadcast to an audience of over 10 million people, the first of many occasions on which the monarch used the medium to promote imperial unity. George expressed the hope that the exhibition would bring lasting benefits both to the empire and ‘to mankind in general’. Concentrating on the former aim, the Tory government promoted self-government within the empire at the 1926 Imperial Conference of British Empire. The meeting reformulated the relationship between Britain, Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State, defining these countries as ‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another.’ The imperial parliament no longer determined any aspect of the domestic or external affairs of these dominions, which were decided by their own elected bodies.

In 1926, a relatively liberal viceroy in India was appointed. Lord Irwin, who believed that India should eventually be given dominion status, quickly established a cordial relationship with Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian leader had recently been imprisoned on a charge of sedition, after coordinating a ‘non-cooperation’ campaign during which thousands of Indians boycotted British goods and institutions. Baldwin sensed that nationalism was becoming an irresistible force in India; the selection of Irwin as viceroy acknowledged the situation.

A powerful challenge to Baldwin’s mission of conciliation would arrive soon enough. England’s industrial and manufacturing sectors had long been in decline and exports had fallen further since the post-war slump. Churchill’s decision to return to the gold standard had strengthened sterling and reduced import prices, but this made English exports even more expensive and harder to sell on international markets. In the country’s heavily indebted and antiquated coal, shipbuilding, iron, steel and cotton industries, profits declined and workers were laid off. Arguments inevitably rose about the extent to which the state should intervene in the economy in order to protect industries and those who worked in them. The English population had been radicalized by the experience of war; so had the thinking of economists. John Maynard Keynes argued that the state should take an active role in the peacetime economy and that wages should be determined by a standard of equity rather than by the market. Meanwhile, Labour and the unions enjoyed increasing political power. In such a climate, the Tories could no longer argue that the laws of the market were sacrosanct.

Nevertheless, many producers were adamant that the only way to reduce export prices was to cut wages, while the unions argued that profits could be used to modernize the staple industries. In 1925 mine owners proposed wage reductions of around 13 per cent, and the miners’ union called a strike. The Trades Union Congress was lukewarm about the industrial action but decided to support the miners, partly out of shame for its capitulation on ‘Black Friday’ four years previously and also in the hope that it might bring about a compromise: it would pressure the miners into accepting an accommodation if the prime minister could persuade the mine owners to reduce their demands. Baldwin, whose experience as an industrialist gave him an insight into the dispute, agreed to act as an ‘honest broker’ between the antagonists. While he blamed the ‘stupid and discourteous’ employers for bad management, he also criticized the restrictive practices of the workers. To the dismay of some in the Tory party, Baldwin averted the strike with the help of the TUC; he promised to subsidize the miners’ wages for nine months, during which time a committee would explore ways of increasing the efficiency of the coal industry.

The report recommended reorganizing and partially nationalizing the industry in the long term, while cutting wages in the short term. The mine owners opposed the former recommendations and the miners rejected the latter, so the negotiations were back to square one. To the government’s annoyance, the owners inflamed the situation by proposing increased working hours for the miners, as well as reduced pay. The miners responded by calling another strike, which the TUC was obliged to back. Despite the misgivings of many trade unionists, a ‘general’ strike of miners, railwaymen, transport workers, printers, dockers, ironworkers and steelworkers was announced. MacDonald and his supporters within the Labour party were dismayed, believing progress for the working man could best be achieved through parliament rather than by industrial action or widespread social protest. Baldwin was so horrified by the prospect of a general strike that he took to his bed. When he returned to the cabinet he found it divided between those who, like himself, favoured conciliation, and those who wanted to ‘stand up’ to the unions. Churchill was in the latter party, as was Chamberlain; their view prevailed.

The General Strike began at midnight on 3 May 1926. All union members in the specified trades ceased to work in support of the miners, at considerable cost to themselves and their families. With around 1.75 million workers striking, the economy might have come to a standstill. That it did not was due to the government’s careful planning and the efforts of middleand upper-class volunteers, who drove trains, delivered food and joined the ranks of the police. There were violent confrontations between the police and the strikers, especially in London and in northern cities. To Baldwin’s distress, Churchill did his best to aggravate hostility, branding the strikers ‘the enemy’, demanding the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the ‘subversives’ and proposing to arm any soldiers who confronted them.

Yet despite the episodes of violent class conflict in the General Strike, it is also remembered for the amity displayed between the strikers and the police. In many areas of the country, striking workers helped the police officers deliver food, while elsewhere the opposing sides played football against each other. If this was class war, it was not the sort of bloody conflict that had characterized similar episodes on the Continent. The strike was also remembered with fondness by many middleand upper-class volunteers as a break from routine. Privileged women enjoyed dressing and acting like members of the lower orders. By keeping the economy afloat during the strike, the volunteers were also determined to demonstrate a sense of patriotic duty.

The tendency of volunteers and later historians to highlight the lighter side of the strike obscures the sense of revolution that hung over the country. Baldwin was acutely aware of the threat. He condemned the strike as an anarchic and communist attack on parliamentary democracy and the liberties of the people, since the elected government had opposed the industrial action. The unelected unions, he claimed, were ‘starving the country’ in a bid to ‘force parliament and the community to bend to its will’. Baldwin was in effect forcing the TUC to back down or rise up in rebellion. His arguments were repeatedly aired by the pro-government BBC and by the only national newspaper circulating in large numbers during the strike – the government’s own British Gazette. One of the ironies of the episode was that strike action deprived the workers of what could have been their most effective ally – the press. The TUC could not convincingly answer Baldwin’s accusations of lawlessness, and it lacked the stomach for revolution.

In private, the prime minister pressed for concessions from the unions and the mine owners. George V, meanwhile, publicly expressed sympathy for the miners: ‘Try living on their wages, before you judge them.’ Herbert Samuel, chair of the Royal Commission, then proposed a compromise – that the TUC accept his recommendations for wage cuts on the understanding that his suggestions for the long-term reorganization of the mining industry would be implemented. Weary of the struggle, now in its ninth day, the TUC agreed. Many of the strikers regarded this as unconditional surrender, yet they had no choice but to return to work. The government had won the class war; the workers had lost.

In the aftermath of the TUC’s ‘betrayal’ of the miners, union membership fell sharply. It had become clear that the government could not be pressured by large-scale industrial action into forcing employers to make concessions to employees. After 1927, industrial disputes declined significantly, despite worsening economic conditions. There was a decisive shift of focus in the Labour movement, away from strike action and towards constitutional socialism. Parliament became the main theatre of the class struggle and the Labour party would be the beneficiary. Even so, the strike had demonstrated the power latent in a united working class. It is surely no coincidence that English employers would keep wages at higher levels than those of workers in other European countries.

The General Strike offered incontrovertible evidence, however, of entrenched class divisions in England. It also made a mockery of Baldwin’s government’s assertion that it would bridge the great divide. For while Baldwin had made conciliatory noises during the confrontation, he had deferred to the claims of the haves over the have-nots. He had also been either unwilling or unable fully to restrain Churchill. Armoured cars had been employed by the chancellor to supply food, while peace demonstrations had been violently broken up by the police. If Churchill’s actions during the strike tarnished the government’s reputation, within months it lay in ruins. In 1927 Baldwin introduced a Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act that outlawed any industrial action aimed at ‘coercing the government’ or ‘inflicting harm on the community’. It also banned all forms of ‘intimidation’ and abolished the unions’ political levy. The bill marked the declaration of a new class war.

20

Get on, or get out

After the General Strike and the Trade Disputes Act, Baldwin now appeared to some contemporaries in a much more calculating light. Instead of reaching out to the working classes as a whole, he seemed to target a segment within their ranks: a group comprising workers who, in Chamberlain’s phrase, had ‘the will and desire to raise themselves to higher and better things’. At its upper end, this segment included the lower-middle-class people who began to acquire houses in the suburbs. These homes were not built by Baldwin’s government but by private companies who made a healthy profit on the sale. While the government cap on rents made rented accommodation relatively cheap, it was not always a feasible option for the lower middle class, especially after the Tory administration stopped building council houses. Meanwhile, Churchill encouraged first-time buying by introducing tax-relief schemes for mortgage payments and by insulating lower-middle-class savings against inflation.

Baldwin’s Conservatives aimed to create the illusion of a property-owning democracy. They could thereby divide the working and lower middle classes between respectable and ratepaying Tory-voting suburbanites, and slumor council-house-dwelling socialist renters, and hoped to convert some of the latter into the former through relocation. Orwell spoke of a plot to turn a vast section of the population into ‘Tories and “yes-men”’, though naturally Baldwin described suburbanization in different terms: ‘Nothing can be more touching, than to see how the working man and woman after generations in the towns will have their tiny bit of garden.’

The ownership of detached or semi-detached property was a badge of status and respectability. The assumption of unprecedented levels of debt in the form of long-term mortgages, meanwhile, forced suburbanites to focus on keeping their jobs. Neither class consciousness nor political activism could flourish. ‘Get on or get out!’ went contemporary Tory slogans. ‘There’s plenty of room at the top.’ Baldwin’s tactics during the General Strike encouraged suburbanites to fear the working classes, while Conservative propaganda depicted Labour MPs as advocates of totalitarian socialism, determined to destroy middle England.

Baldwin’s genius was to claim the suburban lower middle class as the Tory’s natural constituency – no previous Conservative leader had attempted to cultivate its support. By welcoming the middling ranks, Baldwin extended his party’s electoral base and gave it a modern identity. After his second administration, the Tories were no longer exclusively the party of landed or commercial wealth; they were also the party of Daily Mail readers. The ideological links between these disparate groups included a dislike of high taxes, ‘socialism’ and the state, together with a vague but zealous nationalism. Once again, the Conservatives demonstrated their adaptability, and their understanding that superficial change was necessary if the fundamental social and economic order were to survive.

Despite suffering from fatigue, Baldwin was confident going into the general election of 1929. Although it was fought against a backdrop of rising unemployment and in the wake of the General Strike, the Tory leader hoped that those who had opposed the protest would vote Conservative, out of fear and gratitude. During the campaign the Tory party mobilized its superior financial resources and fell back on Law’s old ‘tranquillity’ pitch. Posters of Baldwin, billed as ‘THE MAN YOU CAN TRUST!’ appeared throughout England, emblazoned with ‘Safety First’. The slogan carried an implied warning about the revolutionary legislation a Labour government would introduce.

The Liberal party lacked a broad constituency and required a far more inspiring message. Lloyd George, who had finally replaced Asquith as leader in 1926, came up with a campaign distinguished by audacity, radicalism and flair – precisely the qualities the party had lacked during its decade under ‘Squiffy’. In the aftermath of the General Strike, Lloyd George had drawn on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and developed an ambitious programme of public works. He now promoted that plan under the slogan ‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’. Abandoning conventional economic wisdom, which saw unemployment as inevitable and held that if a government taxed and spent less, the population would have more, the Liberal leader argued that the government should borrow money to finance public works and increase employment. Since the programme was a rejection of laissez-faire economics, many Liberals met it with hostility and even incomprehension. They lacked Lloyd George’s intuitive insight into economic affairs, as well as his sensitivity to changes in the spirit of the age. His economic judgement had been right when he had introduced bold ‘socialistic’ measures during the war; events in the Thirties would prove that he was also right to advocate public spending in 1929.

Not for the first time, British voters appeared more progressive than most MPs. They responded enthusiastically to Lloyd George’s proposal, and his party secured a quarter of the popular vote at the 1929 election. Yet the bias of the electoral system towards the two main parties meant that this translated into less than 10 per cent of the parliamentary seats. For Lloyd George it was a pyrrhic victory in another sense – most of the Liberal MPs returned to the new parliament were traditional ‘Squiffites’, who condemned Lloyd George’s economic ideas as dangerous. The remaining seats were split fairly evenly between the Tories and Labour, though the latter emerged as the largest party for the first time in history, returning 287 MPs. Compared to their performance in 1924 the Tories won 9 per cent less of the popular vote, but lost 37 per cent of their seats. Baldwin was astonished that an electorate he had enlarged by 8 million people had been so ungrateful. The right of the Tory party, meanwhile, now looked to replace him as leader, with the help of the press barons, Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook.

The election result proved that voters had accepted Labour as a credible parliamentary party, with enough experience and middle-class MPs to be entrusted with power. MacDonald also reaped the benefits of the failure of the General Strike. He had achieved his two great aims – replacing the Liberals as England’s progressive party and making Labour ‘electable’. Did he now possess the vision to articulate and advance bolder objectives?

Baldwin and Chamberlain thought it would be ‘unsporting’ not to offer Labour the chance to form a minority government, but their ‘sporting’ gesture concealed a pragmatic motive. Baldwin wanted to nip in the bud Churchill’s plans for a coalition between the Tories and his old ally Lloyd George, while Chamberlain believed a minority Labour government would soon disappoint Labour supporters. King George was more than happy to send for his friend MacDonald; the Labour leader accepted the king’s commission, having warned his backbenchers that he would ‘stand no “monkeying”’ from them as prime minister. He assembled a cabinet of moderate politicians, including five men with titles – there would be no question of a Labour government introducing a radical socialist programme. Yet there was something genuinely radical about one of MacDonald’s appointments. Margaret Bondfield, a veteran suffragist, was selected as the new labour minister and became the first ever female cabinet minister. It was, as she declared, ‘part of the great revolution in the position of women’.

21

Crash

At the end of the decade, an economic crisis enveloped the Western world. After the 1921 recession, the value of American stocks had increased by 500 per cent, largely because of unregulated investor speculation. But when the bubble burst in the autumn of 1929, with the value of stocks plummeting by 40 per cent, the majority of ordinary citizens paid the long-term price – in lost jobs, increased taxes and severely reduced public spending.

The Wall Street Crash was the prelude to the largest and longest economic depression of the twentieth century, which would reduce worldwide gross domestic product by 15 per cent and diminish international trade by half. American loans had buoyed up trade in the West, giving other countries the cash to buy goods from the United States; now the loans and the demand for American products dried up. After the autumn of 1929, international prices, income, profits, employment and tax revenues all collapsed. With fewer jobs and less money in circulation, aggregate domestic demand was too low to stimulate weakened Western economies. To compound the problem, sharp deflation encouraged those who had money to hold on to it.

England was ill-prepared for the economic maelstrom that came across the Atlantic. Sterling was chained both to the gold standard and to an unrealistically high exchange rate with the dollar, and the country’s antiquated industries were in terminal decline. As England’s exports had decreased by a quarter over the past two decades, its imports had increased by approximately the same amount, leaving it reliant on international trade. Little had been done by politicians to improve the situation since the last crash, either by modernizing England’s declining industries or by rebalancing the economy through the creation of new ones. MPs expected market forces to provide a solution, but none was forthcoming. Over the next three years industrial production in England decreased by 23 per cent, export prices fell by 50 per cent and foreign trade plummeted by 60 per cent. As a result of the collapse in production and trade, unemployment rose by over 120 per cent during the same period. The picture was even darker in the regions dependent on the old industries. In the northwest, unemployment trebled in the early Thirties, while in the north-east over 70 per cent of adult men found themselves without work. The ‘unemployment problem’ now dominated politics and public debate.

Having been precipitated by one financial crisis, England’s industrial depression was followed by another. Sterling was sold off rapidly on the international markets, and vast amounts of money were withdrawn from the City of London. Much of this had been invested for short-term profit, but the City had accepted it with the risks it entailed. English banks had themselves indulged in speculation for short-term profit, borrowing from French investors at a rate of 2 per cent and lending to Germans at four or five times that amount. While the party lasted City banks did extremely well, but how long could it continue? In 1931 foreign investors suddenly withdrew their money from London, and City banks found themselves owing over £700 million. The Bank of England permitted them to withdraw gold from its reserves while French and American banks lent them £50 million, yet neither move was enough to shore up confidence in the City or in sterling. Foreign governments continued to withdraw around two and a half million pounds’ worth of gold deposits from the Bank of England every day.

The extent and impact of the ‘Great Depression’ was unprecedented; its causes and possible cures were a mystery to virtually all economists and politicians. Like the First World War, there appeared to be an inevitability about its unfolding. Nineteenth-century economic orthodoxy had held that markets would always expand and purchasing power would increase, but the events of the twentieth century had proved that to be false. Yet since no one had anticipated a restriction of demand, governments had no idea how to adapt to it. On the left, prophets of doom were predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism and Western society. Even the pragmatic MacDonald took the quasi-Marxist view that ‘the system under which we live has broken down … as it was bound to’.

Labour’s record during its early months in government did not inspire confidence in its ability to resolve complex problems. Its Coal Mines Act (1930) reduced working hours by just thirty minutes per day, and the miners felt betrayed. If Labour were merely a lesser evil to the Tories, how could the party claim to represent the workers? Labour’s education bill, which tried to raise the school leaving age to fifteen, was voted down, as was its proposal for electoral reform. This act would have replaced first-past-the-post with the alternative vote system, as well as abolishing plural voting and the university constituencies, but the minority government lacked the seats in the Commons to pass the legislation. The party’s one significant domestic achievement was its 1930 Housing Act, which initiated slum clearances and subsidized housebuilding.

As the industrial depression and financial crisis deepened in 1930 and 1931, a plethora of policies was advocated in parliament. Protectionism was once again espoused from the Tory benches, but this time under the euphemistic banner of ‘Empire Free Trade’. The idea was that the colonies and dominions should be ‘encouraged’ to offer preferential tariffs on British goods, though it was not clear how they would be so persuaded. Some on the left meanwhile proposed a reduction of the retirement age to sixty, thus freeing up jobs for younger people; others, such as Ernest Bevin, advocated the devaluation of the currency.

Lloyd George argued that the depression made his public works programme even more urgent. He was right, but it would take Keynes another few years fully to explain the reasons. According to the economist’s argument, published in 1936 under the title of The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money, public works and the reduction of interest rates were the only means to keep people employed and the economy functioning when investment from the private sector was unavailable. ‘Keynesian theory’ would become economic orthodoxy in the late Thirties, but few politicians apart from Lloyd George entertained such ideas at the beginning of the decade.

Yet one young Labour MP was thinking along Keynesian lines at that time. A member of the Economic Advisory Council created by MacDonald in 1930, Oswald Mosley advised the governmentto adopt an ambitious programme. Two hundred million pounds should be spent on extensive public works, the availability of credit ought to be increased, tariffs should be introduced and early retirement should be encouraged. Much of the banking and industrial sectors would have to be brought under state control, while a government body would ‘rationalize’ manufacturing, offer advice and oversee research. The crisis, Mosley said, had presented Labour with a unique opportunity to remodel the economy along centralized lines.

This was all too radical for Philip Snowden. The Labour chancellor was too attached to free trade and balanced budgets to approve such plans, while MacDonald did not have the imagination or the desire to overrule him. Despite styling themselves as ‘socialists’, neither Snowden nor MacDonald believed there was an effective alternative to the capitalist system; at most that ideology might be adjusted in the interest of workers, though even modest improvements would have to wait for more propitious economic circumstances. Besides, the pair were politicians, not economists, and it was their overriding aim to demonstrate Labour’s credibility to the electorate; the promotion of extravagant economic schemes that were unlikely to pass through parliament would not further that. It was far better to err on the side of safety and try to consolidate the electoral gains Labour had made under their leadership.

The rejection of Mosley’s proposal deprived Labour of his ideas and dynamism; he resigned before he could be expelled from the party for challenging the leadership. It also left the administration with no alternative but to fall back on the old economic orthodoxies, and on the idea of cross-party cooperation. After consulting the other party leaders and financial experts in the City and the Treasury, Snowden decided against significantly raising taxes or borrowing money, instead resolving to reduce government spending. The chancellor then created two committees to advise him on where the cuts should come. Expenditure on unemployment insurance made up a substantial segment of public spending and had risen from £12 million in 1928 to £125 million in 1932. It was inevitable that Snowden’s committees would recommend that unemployment relief be cut. In the event, they suggested total cuts of £96 million, in order to ‘save’ the country from a £120 million deficit, with most of the savings coming from a 20 per cent reduction in unemployment benefit.

The alarmist nature of the committee reports encouraged the further flight of investment from the City. The Treasury told the government that its inability to balance the budget was the problem, and urged it to implement the recommended cuts. The national debt was, they claimed, undermining international confidence in England’s ability to maintain its currency at its high valuation. If there were a run on the pound, the Bank of England’s reserves would not be sufficient to maintain the all-important gold standard. ‘To go off the gold standard,’ one banker said, ‘for a nation that depends so much on its credit would be a major disaster.’ Like the navy or the empire, the gold standard was a symbol of the country’s robustness; leaving it would be to renounce its status as a great power.

Over the ensuing days City experts and Treasury officials attempted to frighten the Labour government – sterling might, they warned, go under any day. After a few meetings, Snowden and MacDonald were thoroughly alarmed. Both were persuaded that anarchy would result if foreign confidence in sterling were not restored quickly and the gold standard maintained; both were convinced that reducing government expenditure on unemployment was the key to resolving the financial crisis. In accepting these arguments, Snowden and MacDonald also accepted Labour’s responsibility not just for solving the crisis but also for provoking it.

MacDonald told his cabinet he was ‘absolutely satisfied’ that economies on unemployment insurance payments were the only way to shore up confidence. Yet how could Labour ministers implement a policy that was, as MacDonald himself admitted, a ‘negation of everything that the party stood for’? After an intense debate, half of the cabinet ministers declared themselves against any reduction in unemployment benefit. The bankers, however, said that the Labour government’s inaction ‘would not do’, and Neville Chamberlain – an influential go-between for the City and the government – agreed. A stalemate ensued, and the cabinet increasingly felt it would have to resign.

When MacDonald explained the situation to King George, the monarch decided to consult the other party leaders. He and Herbert Samuel (standing in as Liberal leader for the sick Lloyd George) reached the conclusion that, since MacDonald had failed to secure support for the required cuts, the best alternative would be a ‘National Government’ composed of the three parties. MacDonald should remain as prime minister, because swingeing cuts would seem more palatable to the people if made by a Labour prime minister, and also to elicit Labour’s support for the coalition. The king persuaded Baldwin of the efficacy of the idea, before asking his old friend MacDonald to lead a coalition in order to resolve the national emergency. After some deliberation, MacDonald assented, before calling a meeting of his cabinet. Rather than announcing the government’s resignation, the policy which had been agreed upon, MacDonald informed them he would instead be forming a new emergency coalition to which only three of them were invited.

The motives of the protagonists in this episode have been scrutinized over the years. The king undoubtedly exercised extraordinary power by effectively nominating a prime minister and a government without consulting either parliament or the country, but there is no evidence to suggest that he did so in order to end Labour’s tenure in office. MacDonald has been accused of putting himself before a party that he no longer loved, and it is true that he had become increasingly alienated from the revolutionary and trade unionist elements in his party. Even so, the Labour leader appears to have convinced himself that he was making a genuine renunciation by sacrificing his government, and perhaps his own political career. It should also be remembered that everyone involved saw the National Government as temporary and established for the single purpose of averting a national emergency. ‘When that purpose is achieved,’ the king explained, after ‘about five weeks, the political parties will resume their respective positions’, and an election would follow. This assurance enabled Baldwin to persuade Tory MPs to participate in the National Government for which they felt little enthusiasm.

But how could MacDonald bring his outraged party with him? Apart from three Labour ministers who would enter the new ten-man coalition cabinet, and eight backbenchers, all of the Labour MPs vehemently opposed the National Government. ‘They choose the easy path of irresponsibility,’ remarked MacDonald, ‘and leave the burdens to others.’ Within the wider Labour movement, he and Snowden were vilified as ‘traitors’ – they had betrayed their colleagues, their party and democracy itself by making an unconstitutional deal behind closed doors with an unelected monarch. The pair were also derided as the dupes of the bankers, who had, it was said, exaggerated the financial crisis in order to pass anti-working-class legislation and bring down the Labour government. Long-standing suspicions about MacDonald were now openly expressed. The man who had wanted Labour to replace the Liberals had become a Liberal himself; ‘Gentleman Mac’ had sold his comrades for praise in the right-wing press and access to high society.

Baldwin and MacDonald were both men of moderation who had shifted their parties towards the centre ground of politics. They shared a loathing of Lloyd George and a determination to keep him out of Downing Street. They now formed a solid, centrist coalition, which aimed to insulate the country from political extremism at a time of economic and social turmoil. Yet they also insulated their government from innovative ideas on the left and the right, which might have improved the precarious economic situation. Labour proposed the nationalization of the banks, the transport system, the staple industries and land, while on the right the rising Tory Harold Macmillan advocated a planned economy. Lloyd George, meanwhile, continued to espouse a proto-Keynesian programme of public works. But Baldwin and MacDonald dismissed these radical suggestions.

Snowden’s budget of September 1931 drastically reduced government spending, cutting unemployment payments and public sector wages. It was opposed by 90 per cent of Labour MPs and the vast majority of union members, who were now irrevocably cut off from their former leaders. It was also attacked by civil service employees, 20,000 of whom organized a rally to protest against the government. The chancellor’s critics predicted his cuts would not restore confidence in either sterling or in the City, and they were right – foreign investors continued to sell the former and withdraw money from the latter. The Bank of England was now obliged to use large amounts of its gold to shore up sterling. To add to the sense of emergency, part of the navy went on strike in protest at the proposed 25 per cent cut to sailors’ wages.

On 21 September 1931, events forced the National Government to announce that no public sector pay cuts would exceed 10 per cent and Britain would leave the gold standard. Sterling was allowed to float freely against other currencies, and its value ceased to be linked to the amount of money the country possessed. It also meant that a government formed for the purpose of maintaining the gold standard had now abandoned it. ‘For me,’ wrote the novelist Alec Waugh, ‘as for most born before 1910, the announcement … was the biggest shock that we had known.’

But the sky did not fall, and nor did the economy. Sterling dropped by around 25 per cent in value, but then stabilized: it was weaker but steadier, and its steadiness revived investor confidence. Investors were also reassured by the presence of Baldwin and Chamberlain in the cabinet. Britain’s devalued currency, meanwhile, held out the promise of lower export prices and low interest rates, providing further cause for optimism. Going off the gold standard thus ended the currency crisis, where cutting unemployment benefit had had little or no positive effect. The bankers and the Treasury had been wrong all along, but the unemployed and the Labour government had paid the price.

In leaving the gold standard, the National Government lost its raison d’être, but gained a new one – to stabilize the new floating sterling. The Conservatives believed the currency could best be steadied by the introduction of a tariff programme; they demanded a general election, in order to secure a popular mandate for the policy. But they were happy to go to the country as part of a MacDonald-led National Government, since the king favoured its continuance. Besides, the Labour party would be isolated and vulnerable in its opposition to a cross-party coalition. ‘The insidious doctrines of class warfare cannot make headway against the general desire for national cooperation,’ Baldwin commented. ‘The great thing is to give socialism a really smashing defeat.’ Here was the real Tory agenda.

Yet MacDonald and the free-trade Liberals in the coalition were uncomfortable with the idea of promoting protectionism. The prime minister was also reluctant to campaign against the party he had helped to build. Nevertheless, Chamberlain correctly predicted that MacDonald would find the lure of power too strong to resist. Not even the cautionary tale provided by Lloyd George’s fall from the leadership of a national coalition in 1922 could dissuade MacDonald from agreeing. In any case, Labour left their former leader little choice but to join the National Government, as they expelled him from the party.

When a general election was called, the MacDonald splinter group, ‘National Labour’, broke away from the bulk of the Labour party. The Liberal party, meanwhile, was split three ways. The ‘Liberals’ were pro-coalition but anti-protection and the ‘National Liberals’ favoured both, while neither was palatable to Lloyd George’s ‘Independents’. Though the party-political situation was confusing, there was nothing unclear about the messages the Tories and Labour tried to communicate to the electorate. With the help of their friends in the press, the Conservatives blamed Labour for causing the economic crisis and claimed a new Labour government would give people’s savings to idlers on the dole. Labour, meanwhile, blamed the bankers for the crisis and vilified MacDonald, whose portrait at the party’s London offices was turned to face the wall. In response MacDonald and Snowden effectively bade farewell to Labour by describing its election programme as ‘Bolshevism run mad’.

MacDonald received his mandate, as the National Government won over 60 per cent of the vote and returned 521 MPs to the new parliament. The real victory, however, belonged to the Conservatives, who claimed 473 of the government’s seats. The vast majority of the middle classes, and over 50 per cent of the working class and the female electorate, had voted Tory. Baldwin had proved to his party that his dream of a property-owning democracy could be turned into a reality. He had also convinced many voters that a spendthrift ‘socialist’ government had caused the country’s economic malaise. Labour lost 235 seats and were reduced to a mere fifty-two MPs, an abysmal result that was probably also a judgement by some sections of the working class on the party’s poor record in office. On the other hand, their massive reduction in seats could also be attributed to the bias of the electoral system – the party’s share of the popular vote only decreased by 6 per cent. It was the middle classes, more than the workers, who had turned away from Labour. They also turned away from the Liberals, which was hardly surprising since the bulk now supported a Tory-dominated coalition. The election of 1931 marked the extinction of the great party of Gladstone and Lloyd George. For the rest of the century, it would be a simple fight between the Tories and Labour. And for the foreseeable future, there was no doubt which party would win. England was a Tory country of the south as opposed to the north, of the classes rather than of the masses.

Within the National Government the Liberals were now dispensable, while Snowden could be ignored. MacDonald was no longer even a figurehead but merely a cipher. Once more, there were clear parallels with the 1918 election, which gave Lloyd George office and the Conservatives power. Yet there was also an obvious difference: even fettered and outnumbered, Lloyd George had been an irrepressible and imperious leader; MacDonald, in contrast, was a spent force. The absence of dynamism at the heart of government would have devastating consequences for England, as would the lack of a substantial parliamentary opposition for the Tories. For the next eight or nine years the Conservatives would have everything their own way.

The Tories soon demonstrated their dominance in the coalition. Chamberlain, who replaced Snowden as chancellor, introduced a number of protectionist measures, despite the disapproval of some Liberals in the cabinet. At first he implemented import tariffs with the excuse of balancing trade; but then he did so more openly and paid tribute to his father, who had first espoused the protectionist cause. A general tariff of 10 per cent was imposed, while empire goods were exempted. The Tory’s grand design was a self-sufficient empire separated from the rest of the world by imperial preference, just as Chamberlain’s father had envisaged. The colonies and dominions would provide the ‘mother country’ with food and raw materials, as well as a market for its manufactured goods.

Yet there were a number of problems with the policy. The countries that comprised the empire had industries of their own, which they naturally wished to protect. They had also suffered during the recent crash, and could hardly afford English exports. Moreover, after the successes of the Irish and Indian opposition to direct British rule, independence was in the air. In the end, the colonies and dominions agreed to increase tariffs on imports from other countries, but left tariffs on British imports at their former high level. The Tariff Reform scheme – which Tories had promoted over the previous three decades – turned out to have a minimal impact on the economy. With the price of its goods too high, English exports increased only slightly. Critics of protectionism suggested that the Tories were not so much attuned to economic reality as in thrall to ideology.

The damp squib of Tory protectionism did, however, have significant political consequences. It alienated the free-trade Liberals in the government, and MacDonald, who was himself unhappy about the policy, struggled to keep them on side. Desperate to maintain unity, he reminded the Tories that they had promised to participate in a coalition. His appeal was not heeded, and when the chancellor refused to dilute his protectionist policies, the free-trading Liberals left the administration, along with Snowden. MacDonald was now even more painfully aware of his position as leader of a de facto Tory government; he became increasingly anxious, ill and enfeebled. The pro-protectionist ‘National Liberal’ faction, meanwhile, remained in the government and would eventually merge with the Conservative party. The Tories absorbed the right wing of the Liberal party, just as Labour had absorbed the left.

The Conservatives now finally accepted protectionism as a permanent aspect of the modern economy. They proceeded to take London’s public transport into public ownership, and would later nationalize coal royalties. Chamberlain also ‘rationalized’ aspects of the agricultural sector, establishing marketing boards that guaranteed high prices for farmers and supporting them with lavish subsidies. The chancellor’s ‘socialist’ approach to the ‘shires’, which were after all the Tories’ traditional heartland, is less surprising than it first appears. It was as natural for Chamberlain to please the landowners and farmers as it was for him to reduce assistance to those who had lost their jobs – which he now proceeded to do, using the old argument that cuts would restore ‘confidence’ in the pound. There would be no ‘socialist’ planning for the unemployed.

22

The rituals of suburbia

None of the chancellor’s measures had any great impact on the economy; far more influential was the policy that the Tory party had fiercely opposed – that of abandoning the gold standard. The weaker pound meant that English exports were more competitively priced; as global trade slowly picked up, they started to sell again on the international market. The difficulty of devaluation was that, in normal circumstances, the price of imports was bound to increase; but these were not normal times. The collapse of commodity prices after 1929 ensured that England’s international payments became balanced again, while production increased significantly. Unemployment started to fall – slightly at first but then steadily, decreasing to 10 per cent in 1937. Naturally, the Tory chancellor claimed all the credit.

Abandoning the gold standard also meant that the currency no longer needed to be supported by high interest rates. The base rate of interest was reduced to approximately 2 per cent – it had been set at around 5 per cent throughout the Twenties. This made borrowing cheap, while also encouraging investment and spending. Although the Tory-dominated National Government was averse to borrowing and spending on public works, private investors and businesses took up the role. There was a housebuilding boom, which saw 40 per cent more houses built in 1934 than in 1929; well over 2 million houses were constructed by the end of the decade. For the first time in its history, England contained more houses than families. Most of the new dwellings were constructed in the suburbs of towns and cities in the south and the Midlands, or in the ‘rural’ suburbs of existing suburbs. Others were erected along the roads between towns, in a so-called ‘ribbon development’. Around London, Slough, Hayes, Kenton, Uxbridge, Hillingdon, Feltham and Kingsbury were all greatly enlarged; geographers compared the capital to a giant octopus stretching its tentacles into the countryside. Such was the rate of expansion that various movements for the preservation of open space and the countryside were established, while criticism of suburban ‘sprawl’ was widespread. Baldwin – one of the architects of the mess – lamented the destruction of the countryside, yet took no practical steps to stop it.

The housing boom was funded by private investment, since the National Government had terminated the housebuilding programme Labour had tried to revive with its 1930 Housing Act. With building regulations and restrictions minimal, and money cheap, construction companies borrowed to buy up land, which was then quickly covered with houses. Over the interwar period, private firms built over 600,000 houses in London, while local authorities subsidized the construction of only 150,000 of the capital’s new homes.

With interest rates low, lower-middleand upper-working-class people could afford new homes. ‘Cheap’ houses were made available to those on regular wages by building societies such as Halifax and Woolwich that had flourished after the Wall Street Crash. Eager to lend from their overflowing reserves, the building societies reduced the deposit they demanded from prospective buyers to as little as 2 per cent. A new London house that cost £800 could be acquired with a deposit of £25, with the remaining debt paid off at an interest rate of 3 per cent; the government also offered tax relief on interest payments. Since there was little council housing available, the lower middle and upper working classes were compelled to take on debt to purchase houses. By the late Thirties, clerks, shopkeepers, foremen, postal workers, transport workers and teachers owned property, as did a fifth of manual workers. By 1938, 4 million people possessed a house, compared to less than 1 million fifteen years before. Thus the Tories continued to create a vast constituency of indebted suburbanites.

The new homes were filled with furniture and appliances. Goods acquired on ‘hire purchase’ would be delivered by an anonymous van, to spare the blushes of those who did not wish their neighbours to know they had bought them ‘on tick’. Yet many families possessed enough money to buy goods without having to borrow it, despite – or perhaps because of – the economic depression. The great paradox of the crisis, and the chief reason the English economy was able to recover from it, was that it left many people with more money in their pockets. For while wages had been falling since 1929, the purchasing power of those wages increased as a result of plummeting prices. Real wages were 10 per cent higher in the midst of the depression than they had been before it, and the margin of income left over after a family’s basic needs had been met was consequently larger. In 1938 a British family had double the income of a family in 1914, in real terms, and, with the size of families decreasing, income per head was almost 70 per cent higher. Increased family income, at a time when money could be borrowed cheaply, funded a national spending spree on houses, household goods and services.

The sudden emergence of a domestic consumer market in England meant that manufacturing and tertiary industries flourished, and new mass production processes enabled manufacturers to meet the increased demand. The cost of raw materials was now lower, as was the cost of the unskilled labour force required to oversee the machines, which kept prices down. The chemical industry was one of the strongest performers in the period. It produced pharmaceutical goods, fertilizers, artificial fibres for synthetic clothes, and plastics such as Bakelite, which were used for countless household appliances. The car industry also expanded rapidly, with assembly-line mass production turning out over half a million cars annually by 1937. Prices decreased as the decade went on, and by 1939 over 2 million British people owned private cars. In Longbridge and Oxford, Austin and Morris motors provided employment for thousands of people, whose wages could be spent on more goods, thus further stimulating the economy.

The greatest boom industry of the Thirties, however, was the electrical industry in its widest sense – electrical appliances, electrical engineering, and the production and distribution of electricity itself. Industrial demand for electricity was high since the new factory machines were run on this relatively new form of energy. Domestic demand was also high, with three-quarters of houses wired up for electricity by the end of the Thirties (compared to only 6 per cent in 1920). The price of electricity had decreased significantly since the Twenties, too, as a result of technological advancement and a fall in coal prices.

Baldwin, an experienced industrialist, understood that a new industrial revolution was taking place, in which the staple export industries of the former industrial revolution were being superseded by new industries serving the home market (over 80 per cent of English cars, for example, were bought in England). The Tory leader hoped that the expansion of the new trades would absorb the displacement of labour from the depressed heavy industries – that jobless miners and shipbuilders would become wireless technicians and electrical engineers. However, Baldwin did not indicate how the government would facilitate this ‘transition’, which would involve retraining and the relocation of countless communities in the north of England.

Other observers were more sceptical about the new industrial utopia. Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) was a satire ‘about the way life is being standardized, and men turned into machines’. In the film, Chaplin’s tramp persona is set to work on an ever-accelerating factory assembly line, suffering physical injury and a nervous breakdown as he struggles to keep pace with the vast and voracious machine. It was as though modern technology was using humans to manufacture a new race of demented robots.

Whether they were built for sale or rent, the suburban houses of the Twenties and Thirties tended to be of the uniform semi-detached variety. They were easily distinguishable from their Edwardian prototypes by their external features. They had roof tiles instead of slates and ‘Tudorbethan’ timbers, together with unadorned stucco or pebbledash walls. Along with their pastiche of older architectural styles, half-timber gables, leaded lights and inglenooks gave them a ‘rustic’ appearance.

To enhance the illusion that the suburbs were in the countryside, every house had a front and back garden. ‘It is amazing,’ commented a journalist, ‘how soon families, many of whom had never had a garden before, turn the rough land surrounding their new houses into beautiful gardens. In summer they are ablaze with colour.’ The front garden often had a privet hedge, to increase privacy and reduce noise. The back garden sometimes contained a shed or a greenhouse and was surrounded by a fence. This was the English family’s hallowed plot of land, the city dressed up in country clothes. The names of the new houses and streets contributed to the masquerade: ‘The Myrtles’ was situated in Meadow Rise, while ‘Acacia Villa’ stood in Fir Tree Crescent. The countrified, nostalgic architecture of the suburbs set the tone of Baldwin’s England.

For those who moved to the suburbs from the slums, the most novel feature of their new houses was an indoor bathroom, often upstairs. There would also typically be three bedrooms on the upper floor, with two reception rooms and a kitchen downstairs. Wired for electricity and supplied with hot water, the houses were well lit, with standard lamps throughout. There were sockets in every room for electrical appliances: wirelesses, gramophones, electric hairdryers, vacuum cleaners and electric sewing machines. The kitchen had the most sockets to accommodate toasters, ovens, electric irons, kettles, washing machines and refrigerators. These kitchen gadgets were ‘labour-saving’ – designed for families without domestic servants, where the woman of the house oversaw its management and maintenance.

The new ‘semis’ were referred to as ‘containers’ for the new mass-produced consumer goods. Stainless steel cutlery was stored in the kitchen drawers, while plastic ornaments were displayed on the mantelpiece in the lounge. That ‘living room’ was often crowded with mass-produced furniture: three-piece suites with a ‘jazzy’ striped design, ‘pouffes’, wooden bookcases, and dining tables with chairs of limed oak. Pastel shades were generally favoured for the walls of the downstairs rooms, while bolder and darker colours were not uncommon in the smaller upstairs rooms. Everything was practical, standardized, time-saving and efficient.

If the family possessed a car, it would be parked in the garage or outside in the street. Car owners, however, were a minority in the suburbs; most travelled by means of public services. There was the electric ‘trolley bus’, more comfortable and quieter than the ‘proletarian’ electric tram, which shrieked its way along the streets. The motor buses of the General Omnibus Company were also indispensable to those who lived just beyond the ever-expanding spider’s web of railways that spread out from England’s cities.

The daily commute from the suburbs was often a near-silent process. Men in dark hats and suits would quietly and neatly arrange themselves along train or underground platforms, or in the queue at the bus stop. Most buried their heads in newspapers and gave no more than a slight nod of greeting to the familiar faces around them. Those who did talk tended to speak in low tones and to stick to uncontroversial subjects, such as the weather, sport or gardening. Carriages were often full, but standing passengers did their utmost to avoid physical contact. Journeys passed without incident, but also without interest.

Train stations and bus stops were located next to the suburban shopping parade, which invariably offered the six essential trades of the period: a grocer’s, greengrocer’s, butcher’s, baker’s, dairy and a newsagent, tobacconist or confectioner, along with a post office. In mock Tudor style and with flats above the shops, these parades were meant to be the focal point of the suburban ‘community’, though they lacked the vibrant atmosphere of older urban markets. The shops were grouped together in order to isolate them from the surrounding residential streets, since tradespeople were unwelcome in addresses that aspired to respectability. The appetite for shopping among suburbanites was so great that it could not always be satisfied by the local shops or door-to-door salesmen. When suburban consumers demanded more, they headed to the high streets of the town or city.

These high streets were rapidly being colonized by ‘chains’ that purveyed mass-produced goods. Sainsbury’s, C&A, Littlewoods, Home & Colonial and Boots the Chemist were supplanting local, family-owned shops. In 1929, Marks & Spencer had a turnover of £2 million; a decade later it generated £23 million in its 250 countrywide stores. The ‘chains’ borrowed huge amounts of money and bought cheap, mass-produced, standardized goods from new English industries and from overseas. They had small profit margins but achieved sizeable returns because of their exceptionally large turnovers – a testimony to high domestic demand. The ‘chains’ seemed to be miracles of efficient business management, while customers marvelled at the novel shopping experience they offered. No assistants goaded them into buying a particular product; they were left to browse the well-stocked aisles themselves, comparing quality and prices for as long as they liked, before making up their own minds. Shoppers could now buy every item on their shopping list within a single store, a striking everyday example of the efficiency espoused by politicians in the period.

Yet not everyone was enthusiastic about the advent of the chain stores. As local shops closed across the country, to be replaced by yet another Woolworths, English towns began to look alike. Moreover, as locally sourced products were replaced in the new stores by mass-produced goods from abroad, local producers complained about the loss of business, while consumers noticed a significant reduction in quality.

The food sold by chain stores was of the mass-produced variety, too. Colourful and tasty comfort foods became available to the masses: custard, jelly, ice cream, blancmange, sponge cakes and chocolate eggs were all favourites of the period. A generation that had experienced wartime rationing at last had an opportunity to indulge its sweet tooth, while savoury tastes could also be satisfied with Marmite, Bovril and Smith’s crisps. Breakfast cereals arrived on the shelves of the chain stores, with Grape-Nuts, porridge oats, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Shredded Wheat among the most popular. Most of the food sold in the new stores, however, came in tins – sardines, salmon, peaches, peas, pears, pilchards and Spam. Tinned food might have been abhorrent to the higher classes, but it was a blessing to those lower down the social scale, and the tin opener became indispensable in most suburban kitchens. Many of the tins were imported from abroad, along with much of the fresh food, including eggs and tomatoes. While the food revolution of the period was a blow to native producers and generally involved a reduction in both quality and freshness, the increase in consumer choice was undeniable. An older generation which had grown up with an unvaried and often meagre diet was astonished to be now able to purchase frozen meat and exotic fruit in tins, and at reasonable prices.

Evenings in the suburbs came round quickly in the Thirties. Working hours had been reduced from sixty hours per week to around fifty, largely thanks to the pressure of the unions, and work on a Saturday generally finished at lunchtime. This meant more evening leisure time, but the remoteness of many suburbs from urban centres and their lack of public spaces and venues encouraged people to stay in. Among the two most popular suburban pastimes were gardening and ‘having a read of the newspaper’.

National dailies and local ‘rags’ found their way onto most suburban doormats each morning. The working man of the house would skim these papers at breakfast and peruse them with care at night (when he would also do the crossword, now a daily feature of newspapers). The total circulation of national dailies exceeded 10 million in the Thirties. By the end of the decade the Daily Express sold two and a half million copies per day, and the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror one and a half million each. These papers offered entertainment and accounts of the lives of sports and film celebrities, while older publications such as The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Morning Post were the serious purveyors of news, commentary and enlightenment. The high circulation of the Express, Mail and Mirror brought vast cultural and political influence, as well as wealth, to press barons such as Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere. Despite their earlier misgivings about Baldwin, the barons helped him consolidate the support of the Conservativevoting suburban lower middle class, and to identify the views of this new class with public opinion and the national interest.

Newspapers brought an avalanche of advertisements into suburban homes; as a result, advertising played a crucial role in stimulating the demand-driven consumer boom of the period. Manufacturers and retailers now spent over £60 million on newspaper advertising annually, with the heaviest investors including department stores and producers of cosmetics, cigarettes, medicines and processed foods. Flourishing publicity firms came up with catchy slogans for their products, such as ‘Player’s Please’ and ‘Friday night is Amami night’.

This second advertisement for shampoo was aimed at young women, a new and burgeoning market for advertisers. A particular form of femininity was being promoted, perhaps to counter the effect of large-scale female employment in the new light industries. In the Thirties, women generally dressed more conservatively than their flapper predecessors, with longer, tighter dresses emphasizing the ‘feminine’ figure. Although Edwardian heaviness had been banished from women’s wardrobes forever, shoulders were now broader and waists were coming back. Hair became longer, softer and curlier across the decade, while make-up became heavier and more widespread. By 1939, 90 per cent of women under thirty regularly used lipstick, powder, mascara and rouge.

Along with the more traditional look, traditional gender divisions returned. While women might work immediately after they left school, their ultimate destiny was to marry, have a family and settle down. Housewifery was regarded by many as the ideal career for women; for many it was the only option, since their professional progress was still hindered by the marriage bar. The housewife brought up the children and managed the house, with the help of the new electrical appliances. New ‘women’s magazines’, such as Woman and Woman’s Own, instructed women on how to run a household, while urging them to ‘be the junior partner’ within their marriages. As a result of propaganda and economic pressures, English women were forced back into the home in the Thirties. It is telling that it was not uncommon for the rooms in new suburban houses to be separated along gender lines, with the male head of the household having access to a private study, while the housewife might occupy the morning room. It is unsurprising that many housewives complained of boredom and fatigue and longed to return to work. Some were disappointed that, having won the right to vote, they lacked the political power to improve their lot.

Lonely suburban women spent a great deal of time reading books, as did the men after work. The bookshelves of the new ‘semis’ were often stocked with the latest publications. ‘Penguin’ fictions and the ‘Pelican’ educational series were launched in the late Thirties for only sixpence a book, while the ‘Reader’s Library’ hardback classics could be bought cheaply from Woolworths. By the end of the decade, book sales increased to 7 million per year. Books could also be borrowed from libraries, with 247 million loaned in 1939. The representatives of ‘circulating libraries’ would visit the suburbs on their bikes. ‘A romance or a detective story?’ they would ask young mothers, since these were the most popular genres among that demographic. Where Mills & Boon ruled the romance genre, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers dominated detective fiction, providing suburban readers with intriguing puzzles in exotic or aristocratic settings. Gangster novels, meanwhile, transported countless male readers to New York, while thrillers tapped into their unconscious fears about foreign invasion and war.

An alternative form of suburban home entertainment was provided by the radio. When the family came together after dinner, it was often around the wireless, to listen to a news broadcast or a light entertainment programme. By the end of the Thirties, compact sets could be purchased for as little as £5, which meant that every suburban family, and even some workingclass households, could afford them. Where workingclass families tended to leave the wireless on to provide background noise, the middle classes switched selected programmes on and off and listened intently. In the Thirties listeners had access to continental stations such as Radio Luxembourg, which were financed by advertising and broadcast popular music as well as comedy shows. This ‘American-style’ commercial fare was less restricted than the typical offerings of the BBC, where earnest, lengthy highbrow programmes and public-school accents dominated. While the BBC alienated many workingclass listeners, the aspiring suburban classes tuned in faithfully. Suburban families also listened to music on the gramophone, which had become cheaper and smaller since the Twenties, while 6-inch records were now available from Woolworths for sixpence. Popular songs of the period included ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and ‘Boomps-A-Daisy’, while among the most successful classical composers were Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar.

In the wealthier suburbs, ‘entertaining’ would take place in the evenings, but social gatherings elsewhere would usually be divided by gender. Small groups of women would get together to talk over a ‘nice cup of tea’ in the afternoon, while men might meet in the evenings for a game of cards or to listen to music. Talk did not flourish among the male population of the English suburbs, some of whom confessed to their ‘difficulties with English’ as well as a certain ‘terror of social intercourse’.

Contact between people living in the same suburb or street was limited. Neighbours were more likely to be heard than seen, since their radios or gramophones were audible through badly insulated party walls. The asocial lifestyle of the suburbs came as a disappointment to recent arrivals from rural or inner-city areas; they disliked the way their new neighbours just nodded when they happened to meet them. Some complained that the old social intimacy of the city doorstep was broken by the gardens and the distance between houses. Suburban living made the English a more private people, who saw their home lives as separate from the public spheres of work and politics. The weakening of class and political consciousness was an inevitable consequence.

Novelists satirized the ‘sterile’ suburbs, whose inhabitants were ‘shallow’ and ‘staid’. George Orwell was probably their most ardent critic. ‘To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak … To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra!’ That, according to the hero of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), was the appalling fate of suburbanites. Other intellectuals saw England’s spreading suburbia as a symbol of national decline – an outward-looking country that still possessed the largest empire the world had ever known had become private, provincial and insular. A nation of gardeners and housewives seemed ill-equipped to carry out the global role England had once assumed, or to take up the torch of activism from the suffragettes and the trade unionist radicals who had preceded them. But for many suburbanites, despite their lack of neighbourliness, the suburbs represented a definite improvement on the countryside or the crowded inner-city slums. Besides, most people had little choice in the matter of where to live, so they had to flourish in the outer cities. As one suburban housewife put it, ‘this was their life now and they weren’t going to let it go’.

23

Now we can have some fun

Public houses had provided meeting points in traditional urban and rural communities, but far fewer of them were built in the new suburbs. In Becontree there were only five pubs for over 110,000 inhabitants; on some estates they were prohibited altogether. The few that were built struck contemporaries as uninviting. In some establishments drinks had to be ordered from waiters in bow ties and consumed when seated. These were not the sort of places you could casually visit after work for a few pints and a chat while standing at the bar. Unsurprisingly, beer sales fell by a half and spirits by a third in the Thirties, compared to pre-war levels.

The cinema was more attractive to suburbanites as a place of entertainment, in part perhaps because it offered a kind of privacy. Films had been championed by the urban working class on their arrival in wartime England, and the small city nickelodeons and picture palaces of those years had been predominantly proletarian institutions. Yet as the Twenties progressed, the cinema had gradually become a respectable pastime: for the first time in history, a distinctly workingclass entertainment conquered the middle classes. The disappearance of snobbery towards the silver screen coincided with the advent of synchronized soundtracks, colour and the ‘talkies’ towards the end of the Twenties.

The talkies were at first billed as ‘All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing’ films, and some of the most popular early productions were spectacular musicals, such as those starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Other stars of the early cinema included Clara Bow, Greta Garbo and Errol Flynn, while Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck became household names among English children. Among the most popular genres of the Thirties were romances in exotic settings and Westerns, which depicted the life of frontier towns. Were these newly established American settlements a mirror image of English suburbia, or a free-spirited reproach to it?

Virtually all the films came from the United States, despite the introduction of protectionist Tory legislation to encourage the domestic industry. In comparison with American films, English productions were seen as stagy, lacking in action, and overpopulated by the middle and upper classes. Two of the greatest geniuses of cinema were, however, English: Charlie Chaplin and the director Alfred Hitchcock. Both men were from London but worked in the United States by the end of the Thirties, creating masterpieces that manifested the energy and ingenuity as well as the range and exuberance of the new art form.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) begins, and ends, in a shabby London music hall. It is a world that is about to be swept away, as people sensed at the time. Although it was based on a novel by John Buchan that had been published twenty years before, Hitchcock’s film has a contemporary setting and touches the hidden anxieties of mid-Thirties England. Apprehension for the future seems to cast shadows over everything. Nothing in the film feels real or solid; every set seems to be a backdrop to an imminent catastrophe. Scene follows scene, and climax follows climax. The main character, Richard Hannay, becomes unintentionally involved in a murder, and a plot to steal British military secrets by a ring of foreign spies. Hitchcock’s camera seems to chase Hannay as he rushes from London to Scotland and back again, then down to the Channel coast, in an attempt to clear his name and thwart the spies. Hitchcock included a number of scenes set in the lower-class London streets he had known as a boy. He remarked that English filmmakers often ‘ignore the people who jump onto moving buses … queues outside cinemas, music hall girls, traffic cops … [but] it’s in them that the spirit of England lies’.

A ticket to see The 39 Steps cost only sixpence. By the end of the Thirties around 15 million sixpenny cinema tickets were sold in England every week, and there were one hundred cinemas in Liverpool alone. Almost half of the entire adult population of major cities and their suburbs went to see a film weekly; a quarter of the population went twice a week, especially in the colder months. In the Thirties ‘super-cinemas’ were built that seated up to 4,000 people and had appropriately grand names, such as ‘The Ritz’, ‘The Majestic’ and ‘The Rialto’. On entering the cinema, the public passed through red-carpeted foyers and up wide staircases to their seats. Baroque or rococo-style cinemas, replete with cherubs, were not uncommon; others favoured designs with Egyptian, Greek, Indian or Roman themes. These were suitably exotic settings in which to see romantic films set in distant times and places and featuring glamorous stars. Before the film commenced a musician would play popular tunes on a Mighty Wurlitzer organ that rose slowly from beneath the floor to the level of the stage. During the film, audiences were invariably absorbed, and often opinionated; workingclass spectators in particular offered audible criticisms of the spectacle.

There is no doubt that films were responsible for profound cultural and social change. They were among the first forms of entertainment lower-class men and women could enjoy together, the pub remaining a predominantly male preserve. The cinema also offered young people a place to meet unaccompanied by their parents, and under cover of darkness: ‘To the Odeon we have come,’ ran the hymn of the Odeon Club for teenagers, ‘Now we can have some fun.’ The fun might include smoking, drinking and ‘necking and petting’.

The phrase ‘necking and petting’ testifies to another great cultural change wrought by the cinema – the introduction of American slang to the English streets. Nouns such as ‘bunk’, ‘dope’ and ‘baloney’ could now be heard in inner-city Manchester, while young boys in Durham threatened to ‘bump off’ each other, or at the very least give each other ‘the works’. Most youths now used the adjective ‘OK’ where they had previously said ‘all right’; many now said ‘yeah’ or ‘yep’ instead of ‘yes’, and ‘nope’ for ‘no’. To workingclass English ears, slang from across the Atlantic seemed democratic and liberating, since their own idiom signalled their lowly place within England’s rigidly hierarchical class system.

The cinema weakened the hold earlier forms of entertainment had on the population. Punch and Judy shows and barrel organs now lost their charm for children, as music halls did for adults, while provincial repertory theatres struggled to stay open. Other traditional leisure activities, however, retained their popularity. People danced just as much in the Thirties as they had during the ‘jazz age’ of the Twenties. City dance halls attracted suited and frocked customers on a Saturday night, while countless people ‘dropped in’ for a dance on their way home from work during the week. The working classes often preferred to hire venues such as mission or municipal halls, where they would only have to charge two shillings for a ticket. One eyewitness described men entering a dance hall together and lining ‘up on one side, the women on the other. A male made his choice, crossed over, took a girl with the minimum of ceremony and slid into rhythm.’ By the early Thirties, jazz had already given way to big band music, and that in turn would soon be supplanted by swing. New dances swept the entire nation for brief spells, among them the patriotic ‘Lambeth Walk’, the conga and the hokey-cokey. In the north of the England, ‘pattern’ or ‘formation’ dancing, which we know as ‘ballroom’, became the fashion.

Sport extended the wide appeal it had commanded since the late nineteenth century, despite the fact that women were still generally excluded. Few sports facilities were available for girls at state schools, and there was limited encouragement for women to attend workingclass sporting events as spectators. The Twenties had been the first decade of mass sporting crowds, with the construction of Wembley Stadium, the rebuilding of Twickenham and the expansion of Wimbledon. During the Thirties, the crowds of men swelled even further.

Yet, predictably, the particular sport depended on one’s class. The question ‘Anyone for tennis?’ was never directed at the working classes, and the cricket authorities also strove to preserve the sport’s aura of elitism. On scorecards the initials of ‘gentleman amateurs’ were printed, while only surnames were given for professional ‘players’ such as Jack Hobbs, despite the fact that he was the greatest cricketer of the age. Players had to address gentlemen either as ‘Mister’ or by their titles, while ‘amateurs’ referred to everyone by their first names. The captains of country and county teams were always amateurs – the idea of a ‘professional’ captaining England was unthinkable. While some spectators complained that an aristocratic pedigree did not guarantee runs and wickets, nothing was done to reduce the snobbery.

The most popular workingclass sports were rugby league in the north of England and football everywhere else. Both sports were exclusively male – the Football Association had banned women’s football in the Twenties. The passion for football among workingclass boys and men was universal. There were 35,000 junior football clubs in England by the end of the Thirties, while many businesses also organized teams. The great professional team of the decade was Arsenal, who won five league titles and two FA Cups. During the interwar period, sporting occasions such as the FA Cup and the Grand National were designated ‘national events’. They were reported by the BBC and often attended by members of the royal family, who presented the trophy. It was a fairy tale in which England’s aristocracy complimented its meritocracy.

Countless ‘punters’ bet on football matches. The most popular form of betting was the ‘pools’, where people predicted results and cash prizes were drawn from the entry money. ‘The extent to which the lives of so many in Liverpool centre round the pools,’ one sociologist commented, ‘must be seen to be believed.’ Many people also bet on horse racing, and you could also have a ‘punt’ on boxing, rugby league, or pigeon and greyhound racing. It is no coincidence that these sports were almost exclusively workingclass, since gambling was believed to have replaced drink as the vice of the workers. Their preference for speculation over saving was interpreted as a sign of profligacy, but it more obviously suggested a lack of faith in the future.

Other popular leisure activities of the period included hiking and cycling. The predominantly middle-class hikers looked and acted like grown-up Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, with their distinctive green shorts, long socks, rucksacks, and preparedness for any eventuality. On his solitary country rambles, the author J. B. Priestley would encounter ‘twenty or thirty people together and all dressed for their respective parts. They almost looked German, organized, semi-military, semi-athletic.’ The same writer also regularly came across cyclists, and wondered ‘exactly what pleasure they were getting from the surrounding country, as they never seemed to lift their heads from their handlebars’. According to the sociologist Richard Hoggart, ‘A sign of arrival at real adolescence’ for workingclass youths was ‘the agreement from one’s parents to the buying of a bike on the hire-purchase system. Then one goes out on it at weekends, with one of those mixed clubs which sweep every Sunday through town and out past the quiet train terminus.’

Hikers and cyclists were emblems of the decade’s contradictory relationship with the natural world. Suburbanites, whose new houses had encroached on the countryside, were eager to visit the country proper and experience the beauties and benefits of nature. But they reached it by means of transport which was harmful to its inhabitants and its landscape. An endless procession of cars, motorbikes and buses left London at the beginning of the weekend, filling the country air with petrol fumes. Having arrived at their rural destination, the suburban invaders proceeded to behave like town dwellers, in effect bringing suburbia with them. Into the early hours the tourists would sing and dance in the meadows and quiet villages.

The mania for hiking and cycling was part of a yearning for fitness and fresh air that was not unrelated to concerns about the nation’s health and military preparedness. The Health and Strength League, which boasted over 100,000 members, promoted fitness among England’s youth, in order to make it ready for another war. They successfully lobbied the parsimonious Tory-dominated government for £2 million in grants to local authorities for the construction of sports centres, playing fields, swimming pools, youth hostels and lidos.

The most characteristic leisure activity of the decade was probably the holiday. Over the course of the Thirties, the number of people entitled to paid holidays increased from 1 million to 11 million (around half of the entire working population) – the Holidays with Pay Act (1938) granted a week’s paid holiday per year to most factory, shop and office workers. This was a significant victory for the unions, who had campaigned for paid holidays for over twenty years, and a great boon for the workers. The most popular holiday destinations were seaside resorts, with 70 per cent of the population of some northern industrial cities visiting the coast over the summer. Londoners also loved to visit the seaside, with Southend among the favoured destinations. Those with more time, and money, could travel down to the English Riviera in the southwest.

At the beach, children would build sandcastles or go on donkey rides, while adults would sunbathe, read or play football. Anyone who wished could swim in the sea, and sailing boats could usually be hired. Along the promenade there were pubs, cafes and restaurants. Funfairs, zoos, concert and music halls vied for custom, as did large venues for ballroom dancing. In this carnival atmosphere, people tended to drink more and wear less. One visitor to Margate described the fun: ‘Singing, flirting, drinking, banjos and laughter; a distinct touch of sunburn; our lungs full of sea air, ourselves full of lobster and salmon.’

The passion for the seaside among the working classes prompted Billy Butlin to set up the first ever commercial holiday camp at Skegness in 1936. It proved so successful that he was encouraged to open other camps. By the end of the decade, there were more than one hundred commercial camps in England, which attracted over half a million holidaymakers each year. The camps offered three meals a day and entertainment for only 35 shillings per week in the low season. Entertainment typically included around-the-clock live music, dancing, sports, day trips, talent shows and beauty contests, including the selection of the ‘glamorous grandmother’. After a day of frenetic fun, the presenter on the camp’s Radio Butlin would say ‘Good night, campers’ at 11.45 p.m. Many holidaymakers ignored the announcement, however, and danced on long past midnight. At Butlin’s, and at the seaside generally, the working classes were determined to prove their fun was as good as that of their so-called ‘betters’.

24

The country of the dole

J. B. Priestley was one of millions of people who visited Blackpool in the Thirties, passing through the seaside resort in 1933 while compiling his survey of the nation, English Journey. Priestley liked the democratic atmosphere of the Lancashire resort: ‘you are all as good as one another so long as you have the necessary sixpence’, the town seemed to say to workingclass holidaymakers. People had formerly lived in ‘a network of relations up and down the social scale, despising or pitying their inferiors, admiring or hating their superiors’; but in the ‘American’ atmosphere of Blackpool, snobbery seemed to be losing its grip on the English psyche.

Yet some aspects of Blackpool manifested less welcome features of ‘Americanization’. According to Priestley, the entertainment on offer at the resort was ‘standardised’, ‘mechanised’, ‘calculating’ and ‘cheap’. In all these respects, the town was emblematic of the emerging England of mass production and mass consumption: the whole country, Priestley commented, was ‘rapidly Blackpooling itself’. ‘Everything and everybody’, Priestley concluded, ‘is being rushed down … one dusty arterial road of cheap mass production and standardised living.’

Priestley was depressed by the ‘monotony’ of this new mechanized country, but nevertheless thought it infinitely preferable to another England he encountered: the old ‘industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways … square-faced chapels, back-to-back houses … slag heaps … doss houses … sooty dismal little towns [and] grim fortress-like cities’. England’s urban centres had remained stationary in the nineteenth century, as if they were part of an industrial museum. Looking at the predominantly unemployed inhabitants of such places, Priestley thought there must still be a war on; this seemed doubly wretched to him since many of the unemployed he encountered had fought in France two decades previously.

This ‘country of the dole’ enjoyed none of the benefits of the decade’s economic boom. Those who lived in the north of England, and much of the Midlands, did not regard the period as an age of plenty, but as ‘the hungry thirties’ or ‘the devil’s decade’. After the brief post-war boom, Britain’s staple export industries were in terminal decline and reliant on shrinking international demand. By the late Twenties a quarter of British coal miners and steel and iron workers were unemployed, along with half of those who worked in cotton and a third of shipbuilders. The mining towns of Durham, the cotton towns of Lancashire and the metal and shipbuilding centres of Cumberland and the Tyne and Tees were officially designated ‘depressed areas’.

And then came the crash. After 1929, international demand collapsed, cotton exports and steel production were reduced by half, coal production fell by a fifth and shipbuilding by 85 per cent. The consequences for workers were predictable and devastating. By 1932 over 40 per cent of miners, 50 per cent of iron and steel workers, and 60 per cent of shipbuilders were out of work. In many towns the unemployment rate was over 50 per cent and in some it rose to 80 per cent after the younger inhabitants left in search of work. Not only were more people out of work in these ghost towns, but they were unemployed for much longer – for years or even decades. Industrial action was no longer an option after the failure of the General Strike, while parliament offered little scope for protest, since Labour MPs now comprised a mere 8 per cent of the Commons. Yet many English people felt it was the government’s duty to help the unemployed. Did the National Government have the vision to protect citizens who had lost jobs through no fault of their own?

The chancellor, Neville Chamberlain, insisted that mass unemployment was an inevitable consequence of market forces. All the government could do was wait until economic conditions improved, even if that was unlikely to happen for ‘at least a decade’. The contrast with his attitude to the 1931 financial crisis was marked. The cabinet now believed that the currency and the banks could be saved by ‘balancing the budget’, which in practice meant making deep cuts to unemployment benefit. While the miners, metalworkers and shipbuilders could be left to face a maelstrom of market forces unaided, the banks could not. The government practised free market capitalism for manufacturing and manual workers, and socialism for the financial and monetary sector. Critics on the left reminded the coalition that England was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the centre of the largest empire in history.

By doing nothing for the unemployed, the National Government exacerbated the impoverishment of a large part of the population. They tried to reduce the existing unemployment benefit in the name of ‘economy’; when the long-term unemployed exhausted the ‘insurance pay’ that was drawn from their own contributions or passed the six-month period of entitlement, the benefit they received was, in the words of one sociologist, ‘limited to the smallest sum that will keep [them] from dying or becoming unduly troublesome’. This meagre relief was granted to the unemployed only after a ‘means test’ had been carried out to ascertain whether the applicant was truly ‘destitute’ and ‘deserving’. If the unemployed man had alternative sources of income – either through savings, or because another member of their household was in work – then the benefit he received would be reduced or withdrawn.

The means test was popular among middle-class suburbanites. Money from the public coffers ought not to be ‘wasted’ on those who did not need it; besides, ‘lavish’ benefits would deter the unemployed from making an ‘effort’ to find work. It was believed to be perfectly reasonable that an unemployed man who refused to take up a job offer 250 miles from where he and his family had always lived should have his allowance cut off. The unemployed naturally took a different view – why should a man who was not responsible for the loss of his job be penalized for having saved? Why should his family face a choice between starvation and leaving their community to resettle hundreds of miles away?

The unemployed loathed the way in which the means test was carried out. Officials from the local Public Assistance Committee (PAC) would drop into their homes unannounced to see if their children were working or if they had recently purchased clothes or furniture. If either was found to be the case, the benefit payments to the family were cut or stopped. Alternatively, the PAC men would insist that certain household items and clothes be pawned before benefit could be claimed. One woman tried to prove her poverty to a committee official by showing him the drawer in which her baby daughter slept. Unimpressed, the representative ‘asked if the baby was being breast fed, and [when] I said yes he reduced the allowance for a child’ on the grounds that it would not require other nourishment. The means test was psychologically as well as economically damaging. Workers who had been independent for their entire lives were forced to open their doors to the successors of the hated Poor Law Guardians before being humiliated by probing questions. There was an irony in the way an increasingly bureaucratic social service state functioned: it had the power to intrude into every aspect of people’s private lives, yet it would offer them neither support nor security.

Between 1932 and 1933 over 180,000 benefit claimants had their relief cancelled, while it was reduced for half of those who continued to receive it, ‘saving’ the government £24 million. Chamberlain was forced to admit that the system required ‘rationalisation’, yet his attempt to improve its ‘efficiency’, via the Unemployment Act of 1934, did little to ease the plight of those without work. Nor did the provision of grants to certain ‘special’ areas of the country make much difference.

Unemployment became the focus of extensive sociological research. ‘From the London School of Economics and other places,’ commented the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘went annually many earnest persons, male and female, to plant their tents in depressed areas.’ Here was a manifestation of the political conscience of the age and also of its ‘scientific’ spirit. In 1936, the Mass Observation organization was founded to collect data concerning the British people; its monthly magazine offered statistics on economic and social trends to a public that was eager for facts.

As a result of these investigations, we know a great deal about life in the ‘hungry thirties’. According to Seebohm Rowntree’s ‘human needs’ standard, 30 per cent of proletarian families lived below the poverty line in northern cities such as Liverpool and York, at a time when the working classes comprised over 70 per cent of the population in such urban areas. To give readers an idea of what existence on the poverty line was like, Rowntree described everyday life for a family in which the wage earner was ‘never absent from his work for a single day’. Such a family ‘must never spend a penny on railway fares … never purchase a newspaper … never save … never join trade unions … must smoke no tobacco … drink no beer … have no money for marbles or sweets … nothing must be bought but that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of physical health.’ This meant a weekday dinner of boiled potatoes and white bread with ‘a lick of marge’, accompanied by ‘a pinch of tay’ with ‘a screw of sugar’ in it.

Those who lived below the poverty line lacked the income for the basic requirements of rent and the minimum diet. Parents in such households ‘literally starved themselves in order to feed and clothe their children’. A Liverpool family whose male head was unemployed ‘had nothing but bread, margarine and tea, with condensed milk, for breakfast and dinner’ and went ‘to bed early so as not to feel hungry’. They lived four or five people to a filthy room, in the squalid Victorian slums that remained standing after the National Government discontinued Labour’s clearance programme. There were an estimated 70,000 such dwellings in Manchester and 60,000 in Sheffield. No other European country had such extensive or insalubrious slums. Dampness, leaking roofs, peeling plaster and infestation of bugs were commonplace in these back-to-back terraces. None of the houses had hot water and many lacked clean cold water; several people would sleep in each single bed.

Living in these conditions took its inevitable toll on slum dwellers’ health. They were malnourished, with nearly 70 per cent of all workingclass children in the period having rickets; many were also afflicted with tuberculosis and anaemia. Often it was the mothers who suffered most. ‘Mam’ sacrificed her portion of the meagre household diet for her children, yet she became weak in consequence. A third of all women living below the poverty line were classified as suffering from ill health, while maternal mortality was identified as one of the most serious consequences of unemployment. Yet such findings were dismissed by the National Government, which attributed ill health to irresponsible household management. When doctors who worked in impoverished areas publicly challenged this view, their livelihoods were threatened by the government.

Along with sociologists, numerous novelists and journalists flocked to the underworld. ‘Dole literature’ of both the documentary and fictional variety became a popular subgenre in the Thirties. Affluent southerners enjoyed reading detailed accounts of the plight of those who lived ‘up north’. ‘Misery,’ as one novelist commented, is a ‘marketable commodity’, as was naturalism. The ‘Condition of England question’, which had been asked in the 1840s by authors such as Dickens, was now asked again with even more fervour. Autobiographies by manual labourers who had lost their livelihoods became popular, as did the volumes of essayists such as Orwell, who followed in Priestley’s footsteps and recorded his impressions in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Popular dole novels of the period included Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, in which an archetypal image of the genre appears. ‘Motionless as a statue’, an unemployed man hangs around a street corner, ‘gaze fixed on pavement, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, the bitter wind blowing.’

Many of these books vividly evoke the psychological impact of unemployment. Orwell was horrified to find that many men in the north of England were ashamed of being unemployed. ‘The middle classes were talking about “lazy idle loafers on the dole”, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.’ Their feeling of personal degradation was accompanied by a sense of impotence, and by depression, cynicism, mental instability, defeatism and fatalism. It was through work that the older working classes had defined themselves and their place in the world; without it, they felt hopeless. Youths, on the other hand, were less affected: Priestley described them as ‘undisciplined and carefree, the dingy butterflies of the back streets’.

The unemployed of all ages had a tendency to turn violent. Sometimes their violence was directed against officials at the labour exchange, and on other occasions it was directed against themselves. Home Office statistics show that two unemployed men committed suicide every day in England in the early Thirties. Yet the violence was generally sporadic, being smothered by an overwhelming sense of apathy and boredom. It was this, along with sheer exhaustion, that stifled the anger of the unemployed towards a system that had failed them. While some Tory MPs feared that a revolutionary situation had developed, the jobless displayed little appetite for revolution. ‘It cannot be reiterated too often,’ one sociologist commented, ‘that unemployment is not an active state … The overwhelming majority have no political convictions.’ Orwell was shocked by the lack of politically conscious misery he encountered in Wigan. He attributed it to the longevity of people’s suffering – after years without work, many had simply settled down to the dole as a way of life. He also reckoned that cheap luxuries, such as ‘fish and chips … chocolate … the radio, the movies’ had ‘between them averted a revolution’.

The unemployed may not have been revolutionary, but they did not suffer in silence. Thousands of unemployed people, organized by the communist-led National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), participated in protests against the means test and the benefit cuts. The press portrayed the demonstrators as violent Bolshevik troublemakers who used bricks and stones in skirmishes with police. The police’s official policy was to ‘disperse’ any protesters who were ‘disorderly or about to become disorderly’ with baton charges on horseback. Some policemen even turned rifles on the protesters; many were wounded, and a few were killed. The policewere granted greater powers by the National Government in 1934, when a Sedition Bill enabled them to stop and search anyone ‘suspected’ of ‘sedition’. Countless arrests followed the protests, but the NUWM was undeterred. It organized a number of ‘hunger marches’ from northern cities to London’s Hyde Park, the protesters sleeping in workhouses and hostels on the way. These marches attracted coverage in the press and were frequently mentioned in parliament by Labour MPs.

Yet Labour’s official attitude to the protests and hunger marches was ambivalent. Under the new leadership of Clement Attlee, the party refused to organize demonstrations with the communist NUWM, and condemned the violence that erupted during some of the protests. It was a classic Labour compromise: the party members expressed solidarity with a popular left-wing movement, while distancing themselves from its revolutionary programme. The communists accused Labour of lacking the boldness to make the most of the revolutionary moment, but the truth was that the Labour leadership wanted to postpone that moment indefinitely. Although Attlee and other leading Labour figures attempted to distance themselves from the conservatism of the MacDonald era with radical economic proposals, they were as committed as their former leader to gradualist socialism, achieved through parliamentary reform.

The march that inspired most sympathy among Labour MPs was the ‘Jarrow Crusade’ of 1936. During the late nineteenth century, Jarrow’s shipyard had flourished and its population had increased tenfold between 1850 and 1920. By 1932, however, there was no work for 80 per cent of its adult population, many of whom suffered from ill health, with deaths from tuberculosis higher than in the nineteenth century. The following year, the Labour candidate for Jarrow, ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, implored MacDonald to help the town. The erstwhile Labour leader and current coalition prime minister promised he would keep Jarrow in mind, yet MacDonald was now politically irrelevant; Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, told the inhabitants of Jarrow to ‘work out their own salvation’.

In early 1936, Wilkinson, by now the town’s MP, set about organizing the Jarrow Crusade. Funded by a popular appeal, the hunger march was intended to protest against Runciman’s disregard and to publicize the plight of a ‘town that was murdered’. The organizers had no affiliation with the NUWM or with communism; it was a Labour initiative. In the autumn, 200 unemployed male inhabitants of the town marched over 250 miles to London, taking just over a month to complete the journey. When they eventually arrived in the capital, the marchers declined to join a Communist party rally and instead organized a meeting attended by as many as 15,000 sympathizers at which speeches were given, songs sung and banners waved. The marchers wanted to carry a petition to the government asking for assistance, but coalition representatives refused to receive their deputation. In parliament Labour MPs condemned this decision, describing the government’s ‘complacency’ as ‘an affront to the national conscience’; Runciman, however, defended the coalition’s record and pointed out that unemployment in Jarrow had improved in recent months. No central government assistance would be offered to the town. As for Jarrow’s local government, its Unemployment Assistance Board stopped the marchers’ benefits while they were away, on the grounds that the men would not have been able to work had employment become available.

Many of the marchers believed their efforts had been a waste of time, yet other protesters took a more positive view. They argued that their demonstrations had ‘highlighted the situation that people were in’ and had ‘shown the authorities we are not prepared to take things lying down’. Besides, even though the campaign may not have produced immediate results, the memory of the protests remained with those who had grown up in ‘the devil’s decade’ and who would come of voting age in the Forties. That ‘depression generation’ would use its vote to demand the nationalization of Britain’s ailing industries and the creation of a welfare state in which hunger marches would no longer be necessary.

25

The Fasci

The course of Britain’s continental foreign policy had been set by Lloyd George at the peace conference in 1919. Its central aim was the reintegration of a peaceful Germany into the international community. A contented and economically flourishing Germany was, Britain believed, necessary for European stability; it was also vital to the balance of continental power, especially now that the ‘threat’ of communism had emerged in Russia. British and French suspicion of Soviet Russia deprived them of their former ally on Germany’s eastern border. No one in Britain believed a successful war could be fought against Germany without Russian aid; therefore Germany had to be mollified.

Britain remained at a remove from European affairs throughout the Twenties. Some observers detected the revival of an age-old isolationist instinct, typical of an island people. We do not have to look very far back in history for the main cause of English aloofness: a terror of becoming embroiled in another European conflict, after the horrors of the Great War. Another factor was the country’s perception of itself as an imperial, rather than as a European, power. Pre-eminent politicians of the age, including Baldwin and Chamberlain, regarded continental affairs as a sideshow to the empire and the ailing domestic economy. The main object of foreign policy was not central Europe but the Mediterranean and the East, where Japan was perceived as a growing menace. In the Twenties, government officials even regarded American ambitions as a bigger concern than the prospect of a resurgent Germany. These worries were partially allayed when a naval treaty was signed in 1922 between Britain, the United States and Japan, but they did not disappear entirely.

In any case, Britain believed it was unnecessary to intervene extensively in continental affairs, since the prospect of European war was remote. In the view of British politicians, previous European conflicts had been caused by the aggression of an overambitious continental power, such as Napoleon’s France or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. In the Twenties, no power was capable of conducting a war beyond its frontiers. Following the Versailles Treaty, Germany had no army and no armaments, and Russia had been economically and militarily enfeebled by revolution; France, meanwhile, had neither the desire nor the military capacity to embark on a campaign of conquest. Successive British governments of the Twenties confidently told their military commanders that no major European war was likely for ‘at least ten years’.

From 1918 to 1931, every British government pursued the country’s key goals – reintegrating Germany within the international order, while promoting the League of Nations and disarmament. In 1923 France had been in dangerous confrontation with Germany when the latter had defaulted on reparation payments. In response French troops had occupied the Ruhr area of Germany. MacDonald, who assumed the role of foreign secretary as well as prime minister in the Labour government of 1923, helped to resolve the situation by facilitating the first negotiated post-war agreement, the Dawes Plan. The accord ended the French occupation and attempted to set reparation payments at a level that was both fair and feasible for Germany, which was then in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. MacDonald energetically promoted the League of Nations, and attempted to draw the ‘selfish and unscrupulous’ French further into its orbit, in order to moderate their hostility towards Germany.

In contrast to MacDonald, Baldwin was, in the words of his private secretary, ‘reluctant to study Europe’. Nevertheless, his foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, built on MacDonald’s work and helped engineer the Locarno Treaty of 1925. Through these accords Germany and France guaranteed each other’s frontiers and agreed to settle any future disputes by arbitration, with Britain and Italy promising to assist any party whose territory was threatened. On the armament question, while Labour and Tory governments both advocated arms reductions, their motives differed. MacDonald, a staunch internationalist and former pacifist, favoured disarmament for idealistic reasons; the Conservatives regarded it as an excellent way to save the Treasury money. Throughout the Twenties, defence expenditure was lowered by successive chancellors, including Churchill, until by 1933 it accounted for only 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product. The nascent Royal Air Force received limited funding, and the number of its squadrons was reduced from 187 in 1919 to 18 in 1923, while the army lacked the necessary equipment to fight a large-scale war. Plans were drawn up for a new British naval base in Singapore to counter a potential Japanese threat, but the idea came to nothing. Although a reduction in defence spending was usual in peacetime, some people saw it as a symptom of Britain’s economic decline, while others were concerned about the country’s capacity to protect its empire.

In the years following Locarno all was quiet on the European front, to the delight of British politicians eager to direct their attention elsewhere. Germany consistently paid its reparations, which were gradually scaled down; it also attended meetings of the League of Nations. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, was determined to place ‘a peaceful Germany at the centre of a peaceful Europe’; this aim seemed realistic, since the country had recovered after the slump of the early Twenties. The improvement in German living standards, after the appalling poverty of the hyperinflationary years following the war, encouraged political stability in its democratic Weimar Republic.

In 1928 Germany signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact, along with Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Italy and several other countries. The signatories repudiated war as a means of resolving disputes; a multilateral armament reduction agreement, or even a multilateral disarmament treaty, at last seemed a possibility. The disarmament cause found a passionate and articulate advocate in MacDonald in the late Twenties and early Thirties.

During these years, many English intellectuals were in favour of disarmament. Historians espoused the view that the arms race, rather than German aggression, had been the main cause of the Great War. It was therefore imperative that all nations reduced their armaments and allowed the League to arbitrate international disputes. A variety of vivid war memoirs were also published at the end of the Twenties, reminding readers of the horrors of conflict. Partly as a result of these publications, pacifism gained great currency among the general population; the Oxford Union passed the motion that ‘in the next war this House would not fight for King and Country’, not that many English people believed war was imminent. In its commentary on 1929, The Times wrote, ‘Except for sundry disturbances confined to imperial localities … the year passed everywhere in tranquillity.’

And yet closer observation of the continental scene would have revealed a disquieting development. Most of the independent democratic states created at Versailles from the ruins of the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire, such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria, had abandoned democratic government and turned to authoritarian rule. Nor had the ethnic minorities within these new countries been successfully integrated; much of the large German population living inside Czechoslovakia, for instance, regarded Germany as its true home. Meanwhile, Portugal and Spain also jettisoned democracy for military government. The shift towards authoritarian rule across Europe was seen as potentially detrimental to peace, since the new rulers criticized the League and espoused aggressive nationalism. The movement to which they belonged was as yet nameless and shapeless. Soon it would have a title of its own.

The miasma then spread to Italy. The country had arrived at Versailles determined to carry off some of the prizes of victory. During the war, the British and the French had promised the Italians extensive territorial gains in return for military support, including most of the Dalmatian coast and a number of colonies. Yet Italy’s claims were rejected, with the British and French reneging on their ‘gentleman’s agreement’. In consequence the Italian representatives angrily withdrew from the conference, and the peace settlement was reviled in Italy. It was in this context that ultranationalistic and paramilitary organizations, or ‘Fasci’, emerged throughout Italy in the early Twenties. These disparate and violent groups were also summoned into existence by the rise of Italian communism during Italy’s severe post-war economic depression. The communists organized massive strikes and demonstrations, inspiring fear among the industrialists and the property-owning classes, who no longer believed that the liberal political elite of Italy’s nascent democracy was capable of dealing with them.

One of these ‘Fasci’ was led by the war veteran and former socialist newspaper editor Benito Mussolini. With rousing rhetoric and considerable charisma, Mussolini held out the vague promise of a ‘national rebirth’. He would impose ‘authority’ and ‘order’ on a society that appeared to be descending into chaos, and take control of the failing economy with the help of the industrialists. He would also redress the terms of the ‘mutilated war victory’ by extending Italy’s territories. His vision, at once atavistic and modern, appealed to many among the middle and landowning classes who saw no fundamental incompatibility between ‘Fascism’ and their staunch Catholicism. The movement flourished in the country at a local level, and by the autumn of 1922 possessed 300,000 members. Encouraged by the groundswell of support, Mussolini decided to try to seize power by marching on Rome with his paramilitary ‘blackshirts’. The march instilled fear in an anxious establishment and the Italian king invited Mussolini to become prime minister. Despairing of Liberal politicians and democracy, the elite had simply surrendered.

The new prime minister made short work of his political opposition, altering the electoral law to his party’s advantage and arranging the assassination of his rival, the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti. He then proceeded to suppress all other political parties and non-Fascist newspapers, and locked up political dissenters. By these means, and with the connivance of the Italian elite, Mussolini established a totalitarian Fascist state that assumed control of the economy and the judiciary, while encouraging militarism and discipline in the population through the creation of youth organizations. It also restricted personal freedom, with the threat of arrest to any intellectual who opposed Mussolini in word or deed. Finally, the government created a cult around Mussolini, as Italy’s godlike leader, or ‘duce’.

MacDonald soon established cordial relations with the murderer of Matteotti. Churchill praised the ‘gentle’ Duce in the press, as the saviour of ‘civilised society’ in Italy and ‘the necessary antidote to the Russian poison’. The fear of communism invariably overcame concerns about the threat Fascism posed to democracy. Few British politicians were worried about Mussolini’s expansionist ambitions, none of which were likely to upset the balance of power in Europe.

In other words, an ultranationalist, outwardly aggressive totalitarian state was tolerable in Italy because it was not Germany. Not only was Germany a powerful economic force, but the country was situated at the heart of the continent. Any attempt to extend its borders westwards would provoke another war, and, while eastern expansion was much less of a concern now that Russia was no longer a British ally, an enlarged Germany might still be a threat to continental peace and to British interests.

Another ultranationalist right-wing party had emerged in Bavaria during Germany’s economic depression in the early Twenties. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party offered an antidote to burgeoning German communism. According to the party leaders, Germany had been denied her ‘rightful’ position as the greatest European power by the ‘Marxist’ politicians who had ‘stabbed’ the country ‘in the back’ by surrendering in 1918, and by the ‘vindictive’ Allies at Versailles. The National Socialists were led by Adolf Hitler, a war veteran who earned a reputation as ‘Germany’s Mussolini’ for his mesmerizing rhetoric and eagerness to use paramilitary violence against his opponents. Yet while Hitler’s party attracted strong support among the Bavarian middle class and the landholding peasantry, it failed to secure the blessing of the Bavarian army. When it attempted a coup in 1923, it was easily quashed and its leaders were imprisoned. In jail Hitler composed his rambling semi-literate autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he vilified the Jewish race as a ‘poison’ that had adulterated the ‘pure’ Germanic race. He also identified ‘Russia and her vassal border states’ as the territory into which Germany must expand in order to gain essential ‘living space’. After his release from prison, Hitler renamed his party the ‘Nazis’, but they made little electoral headway, claiming only twelve seats and a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928.

When the financial crash came in 1929, everything changed. In severe economic depression, the appeal of the Nazis increased exponentially. It was stimulated by the widespread support for the Communist party, which organized strikes and protests throughout the country. The German economy appeared to be on the point of collapsing – production fell by 40 per cent, while unemployment rose to 30 per cent. Hitler blamed the crisis on the usual suspects – the Jews who ‘controlled world finance’ and the politicians who had drafted the ‘punitive’ Versailles Treaty. At the 1930 election the Nazis and the communists gained around a third of the popular vote between them; two years later they claimed over half, with the Nazis emerging as the largest single party.

It was difficult to see how the country could be governed without the consent of either the Nazis or the communists, and it was clear which party Germany’s leaders would favour. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor of the German Reich, in the belief that his presidential power could control the inexperienced and ‘vulgar’ Bavarian demagogue. The industrialists and the wealthier classes saw Hitler as a puppet, and preferred any alternative to communism. Yet once in power, Hitler proved to be as ruthless as Mussolini, arresting and killing political opponents, abolishing the unions and the free press, and establishing a one-party totalitarian state. His corporatist approach to economics echoed the Duce’s, as did his emphasis on internal ‘order’ and ‘discipline’. His obsession with German racial purity and persecution of Jews went beyond Italian Fascist anti-Semitism. Hitler was also more emphatic than Mussolini in his criticisms of the Versailles Treaty, demanding that its clauses should be revoked immediately and that Germany should be permitted to rearm.

Hitler’s rise to power did not arouse great concern within the Tory party or England’s right-wing press. Most Conservatives saw the Nazis as preferable to the communists, and many sympathized with Hitler’s grievances. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail praised the new German leader as the ‘saviour’ of his nation and even applauded his anti-Semitism. Hitler’s features soon became as familiar to the British public as those of a native politician. Churchill was virtually alone on the government benches, in the months after January 1933, in describing Nazism as a threat to the British Empire.

26

The bigger picture

The rise of Nazism caused the first significant division between the Tories and Labour over foreign policy since the war. In contrast to the Conservatives, Labour MPs vociferously opposed the Nazis from the outset, on ideological grounds. The party did not advocate rearmament as a means of preparing for a struggle with Fascism, but continued to promote multilateral disarmament. Labour had no faith in the failed diplomatic and military strategies of the pre-1914 era; instead they believed that the collective resolution of disputes through the League of Nations, coupled with disarmament, was the only way of confronting the Fascist dictators and guaranteeing a lasting peace.

Conservative MPs were equally enthusiastic about the League, though for more pragmatic reasons. They hoped the organization might maintain continental peace so that Britain could avoid an expensive and unpopular rearmament programme, and concentrate instead upon her pressing domestic and imperial concerns. The League inspired zeal among the population in the early Thirties. To a generation which believed that the senseless carnage of the recent war had been caused, in large part, by a lack of foresight and judgement among the major powers, the attraction of a supranational organization was obvious. It would, they believed, resolve all disputes, at minimal risk to its members.

The English saw the League as the answer to potential diplomatic problems, yet its existence begged many questions. How could the organization’s authority be backed up by force, in the absence of an army or of rearmament of its most powerful members? The League’s supporters appeared to believe that its moral authority made rearmament unnecessary: the mere threat of economic sanctions would, they thought, force an aggressor to back down. But while this may have sounded convincing in theory, it had yet to be proven in practice. Another potential flaw was the question of how the League could settle disputes impartially in cases where the interests of larger and smaller members clashed. In principle all members of the League were equal, but in reality states such as Luxembourg and Lithuania yielded far less influence with the organization than France, Italy, Japan or Britain. It augured ill that powerful nations such as Britain simply ignored the League whenever it was convenient for them to do so; they never, for example, referred disputes within the empire to the League for arbitration.

In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, officially a Chinese territory but in practice an autonomous province. In the months before the invasion, Manchuria had descended into a state of social and economic anarchy, and the Japanese took control in order to protect the numerous commercial interests they possessed there. Sympathetic to Japan’s point of view, the Tory-dominated National Government ensured the League did not condemn the country as an aggressor or invoke sanctions against her. Instead the British conducted an inquiry into the conquest and found that many Japanese grievances were justified, though they had acted unlawfully. It was a classic diplomatic fudge designed to reconcile China to the loss of territory and justify a reprimand to Japan on the international stage, yet it satisfied neither party. China felt let down by the League, while Japan withdrew from it in protest.

The Manchurian incident demonstrated the limitations of collective security. The League failed to arrive at a satisfactory settlement because Britain and France were unwilling to confront Japan, a powerful League member like themselves, with sanctions or the threat of force. At the same time, the episode reinforced fears among Conservatives concerning Britain’s commitment to collective security; might its membership of the League embroil the country in a disastrous war over an affair that was of little significance to its people or its imperial interests?

While the Manchurian invasion was still being investigated, the members of the League met in Geneva at the World Disarmament Conference. The meeting inspired optimism in England, partly because of the presence of representatives of the United States, now the world’s pre-eminent power. However, it soon became clear that several of the participants, including Japan and Italy, had no real appetite for disarmament, while Russia was also reluctant to reduce its military capacity, since it believed itself to be surrounded by hostile neighbours. In any case, the conference soon ran into the difficulties that had bedevilled continental diplomacy since Versailles: Germany wanted parity of armaments with the other great powers, but France would not allow this in the absence of military guarantees from Britain and the United States to defend her borders. Eventually Germany was offered armament parity following a four-year trial period, but the proposal arrived too late: once Hitler was installed as German chancellor at the start of 1933, the time for compromise was over. Eager to consolidate his power and popularity, he rejected the offer as a ‘personal and national insult’, before withdrawing from the conference and the League.

Hitler’s audacious move was greeted with approval in Germany, and dismay everywhere else. The gloom outside Germany intensified when he openly embarked on an extensive rearmament programme. The reaction of the National Government to these events was revealing. Without consulting the League or its old ally France, it decided to secure its own interests by striking a naval agreement with the Nazis, in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. The French, who regarded the Anglo–German naval pact as illegal and treacherous, drew the lesson that Britain would place its own concerns above those of collective security. Hitler, meanwhile, concluded that the Allies were divided, and that the League was weak; he could proceed to revise the Versailles Treaty with impunity.

The British chiefs of staff were disturbed by the League’s inability to deal with events in Manchuria and Germany and urged the National Government to rearm. An additional £40 million should be spent on the army, £90 million on the navy and £15 million on the air force. The civil service, overseen by Sir Warren Fisher, also recommended a review of Britain’s defences, and advised the National Government to bear in mind that Hitler was the author of the expansionist manifesto Mein Kampf. Churchill, who believed he was ‘preparing for war’, also begged the government to rearm, and to immediately form a ministry of defence.

Yet the National Government was reluctant to increase military spending – neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain regarded Hitler as a serious threat. The idea that he was a deranged ideologue who would stop at nothing to extend Germany’s borders was too absurd and appalling to contemplate. The government wanted to believe him when he declared that he merely wished to redress Germany’s complaints concerning the Versailles Treaty, and that he desired ‘good relations between England and Germany’. In Britain’s view, Germany’s grievances were legitimate, and nor would their remedy conflict with Britain’s essential interests – the security of its empire and its supremacy of the seas. And if revoking the Versailles Treaty involved the acquisition of some ‘living space’ for Germany in the east, then perhaps that would be acceptable, since Russian rather than British interests would be threatened. ‘If there is any fighting in Europe to be done,’ remarked Baldwin, ‘I should like to see the Nazis and the Bolsheviks doing it.’

Rearmament was, in any case, neither an economically nor electorally attractive policy. In 1932–3 Chamberlain reduced defence spending to its lowest level in eight years. An increase in expenditure on armaments would entail raising taxes or increasing the public debt, and Chamberlain had vowed not to do either. Meanwhile, the public clung to its belief in collective security and disarmament. The fact that Labour was gaining ground in local and by-elections on an overtly pacifistic platform encouraged the National Government to believe, as the civil service put it, that the ‘public is not yet sufficiently apprised of the reality of our dangers to swallow the financial consequences of the official recommendations’.

Inertia and exhaustion also played their part in the government’s feeble response to the Nazi threat. Baldwin and MacDonald were now beset with the afflictions of illness and age: increasingly deaf and suffering from lumbago, the Tory leader was, as Churchill spitefully put it, ‘amazingly lazy and sterile’, while MacDonald would be ‘far better off in a home’. Even in their prime, MacDonald and Baldwin would have been unable to deal with the mad gangster who now ruled Germany; by the mid-Thirties they lacked the requisite lucidity, energy and decisiveness even to attempt that demanding task. Yet it was above all the prospect of another horrific war that determined MacDonald and Baldwin’s cautious response. Both men were loath to rearm since they believed, as Baldwin put it, that ‘great armaments lead inevitably to war’, and both were convinced that a second world conflict would destroy Western civilization.

Even so, the government eventually acknowledged that the international situation had grown more ominous. Baldwin, who took over as prime minister from MacDonald in 1935, signalled a shift in the administration’s attitude. He committed to maintaining Britain’s naval strength and achieving parity with Germany’s burgeoning air force, yet the civil service was not satisfied by these assurances. It took the unprecedented step of publishing a White Paper, in which it warned the government that given Hitler’s decision to rearm, it could no longer rely on collective security to guarantee peace. Britain had to urgently address its military deficiencies. Baldwin finally admitted the truth of such arguments, and defended the White Paper in the Commons against criticisms from pro-disarmament Labour MPs. Meanwhile, Hitler used its publication as an excuse to reintroduce conscription in Germany, and to announce his plans to expand a German air force that he claimed had already achieved parity with the RAF.

The National Government responded by signing an agreement with France and Italy in April 1935. The ‘Stresa’ declaration committed the three countries to opposing ‘by all practicable means’ any ‘repudiation of treaties which may endanger the peace of Europe’. While the agreement reaffirmed each country’s commitment to the League, it also suggested that the National Government now accepted that collective security could no longer be maintained. In effect, the declaration represented a return to the diplomacy of pre-League and pre-war days, when alliances had aimed to create a balance of power. Britain and France had recruited Mussolini as an ally because they feared he might side with his fellow Fascist Hitler, and thus tip the balance in Germany’s favour.

Despite Baldwin’s conversion to the cause of rearmament and old-style diplomacy, his government still prevaricated when it came to implementing the recommendations of the White Paper. Rearmament was still unpopular among voters, and an election would have to be called soon. Since the beginning of the Thirties, countless pacifist movements had emerged in Britain, while organizations such as the League of Nations and the National Peace Council circulated millions of pamphlets and leaflets every year, promoting the cause of peace. Between 1934 and 1935 the League conducted a survey into British attitudes to collective security that became known as the ‘Peace Ballot’, because it revealed overwhelming support for multilateral disarmament.

In October 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia, ostensibly to redress the Versailles Treaty, which had denied the Italians a share of the Allies’ colonial spoils. Britain saw Abyssinia as a legitimate sphere of Italian economic and colonial influence; it also wished to maintain cordial relations with its recently acquired Mediterranean ally. Yet Abyssinia was a member of the League, and now appealed for assistance; its fellow members condemned Italian aggression and demanded decisive collective action. Britain, however, refused to criticize Italy openly; instead the National Government tried to tempt Mussolini to call off his invasion with the promise of land in British Somalia.

Yet Mussolini declined to be bought off, and his troops pushed forward. The League decided to impose limited economic sanctions against Italy, a proposal the National Government reluctantly agreed with, to the annoyance of some Tory backbenchers and the delight of a group of Labour MPs. The pacifist section of the party disagreed, however, and Labour split into two factions. Baldwin’s unerring political instinct prompted him to call an election. During the campaign he successfully exploited Labour’s divisions, while boasting of the National Government’s success in hauling Britain out of its economic malaise. A Conservative-dominated National Government would, he promised, do everything in its ‘power to uphold the Covenant and maintain and increase the efficacy of the League … collective security can alone save us’. Baldwin had not attended a single meeting of the organization, yet now posed as its defender.

Baldwin struck a winning formula on rearmament that confirmed his genius for equivocal language. He asked for a mandate from the electorate to ‘remedy the deficiencies which have occurred in our defences’ in order to further the aims of the League, while at the same time giving his word ‘that there will be no … materially increased forces’. Since voters were themselves ambivalent about rearmament, they were perhaps inclined to give Baldwin the benefit of the doubt. In any case, he was Britain’s most experienced politician following Lloyd George’s retirement. Labour, meanwhile, was growing in confidence and cohesion under the leadership of Clement Attlee. Yet although Attlee was a unifying force within a divided party, he lacked Baldwin’s public appeal.

At the election of November 1935 the Conservatives lost some seats, as was usual for an incumbent government, but still claimed almost 50 per cent of the popular vote. They also increased their dominance within the coalition, since both the National Liberal and National Labour parties suffered heavy losses. Attlee’s Labour performed well, gaining 38 per cent of the popular vote, yet Labour’s 154 MPs posed no serious threat to the government. With hindsight, the most significant consequence of the result was that it left in power the ‘old gang’, as they were derisively known at the time. Baldwin assembled a cabinet of the ‘second-class intellects’ he favoured, who could be trusted to react cautiously to events rather than to try and influence them. The sharpest and most dynamic member of the government was Chamberlain, the chancellor, but he had no flair for foreign affairs, which now dominated parliament.

Churchill, meanwhile, was alienated from the party leadership. This was partly because of his opposition to its cautious rearmament, but mostly because of his views on India. A few months prior to the election, Baldwin had passed the Government of India Act, which granted the country virtual self-government. Churchill had bitterly opposed the bill, on the grounds that it would lose British manufacturers a key market and cause unemployment at home. The introduction of democratic elections, he argued, was also of no real advantage to India, since the country was not ready for them. Besides, it would only increase the power of Gandhi, whom Churchill described as ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, posing as a fakir’.

Churchill had openly challenged Baldwin over the Government of India Act, yet only fifty or so Conservative MPs had joined him. Most Tory backbenchers had seen no reason to fight their popular leader over a lost cause, while many older Conservatives regarded Churchill as a shameless careerist. Meanwhile, younger politicians in the party, such as Harold Macmillan, saw him as a reactionary anachronism. Another prominent young Tory, Anthony Eden, was equally hostile to Churchill and stood by Baldwin, who rewarded him with the offer of a seat in the cabinet. Henceforth Churchill was isolated in the Commons; he made speeches in which he warned of impending disaster, but they invariably went unheeded.

Once in office, Baldwin reneged on his key campaign promises and rearmament now began in earnest. Over the next two years, the chiefs of staff looked to match Germany in every military department, having identified her as the potential enemy. The government’s official aim was still to convince Germany to return to the League, yet a contingency diplomatic plan was necessary should that fail. Part of the strategy was the courting of Italy, a potential ally of Germany. As a result, Baldwin’s electoral commitment to ‘increase the efficacy of the League’ was severely tested by events in Abyssinia, where the Italian invasion continued.

Representatives of the League now demanded full sanctions against Italy, including an embargo on oil. They also urged the deployment of a naval fleet in the Mediterranean, to halt the flow of supplies and men between Italy and Africa and to suggest the threat of war. Yet the government was unenthusiastic about both the embargo and the naval manoeuvres, which might involve losses and leave Britain exposed to Japanese ships in the Pacific. It did not believe the French would join the British fleet, and it was also intimidated by Italian air power. Behind these various excuses, historians have sensed the British government’s overwhelming desire to avoid alienating a key ally, as well as the fear of provoking another war. Baldwin viewed that prospect with terror, as did the pacifist king: ‘I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself,’ commented George, ‘sooner than allow this country to be brought in … to a horrible and unnecessary war.’ Instead of taking action against Italy, the foreign secretary Samuel Hoare tried to buy off Mussolini with an improved offer that involved Abyssinia ceding extensive territories.

Somehow Hoare’s secret plan was leaked, to public outcry. The National Government had sworn to defend the League, but was now bypassing it in favour of an ally guilty of unprovoked aggression. Protest marches were organized throughout England, and countless petitions were drawn up, while Labour MPs spoke out against the government’s perfidy. The government dropped the plan, while Hoare was forced to resign as foreign secretary. He was replaced by Anthony Eden.

In the absence of an alternative policy, Baldwin reluctantly contemplated imposing oil sanctions on Italy. But as the prime minister procrastinated, Mussolini urged his armies to press on. To break the staunch Abyssinian resistance, the Italians used poisonous mustard gas, in contravention of the 1925 Geneva Protocol; they also indiscriminately attacked civilians, Red Cross units and medical facilities. Eventually, in May 1936, the emperor of Abyssinia surrendered and left his country.

The exiled emperor demanded that the League condemn Italy’s ‘violations of international agreements’ and criticized Britain and France for condoning the Italian conquest. ‘It is us today,’ he prophesied; ‘it will be you tomorrow.’ His efforts were in vain. Under pressure from the British and the French, the League recognized Italian Abyssinia and ended sanctions against Mussolini’s regime. Once again the public was outraged, while Churchill accused Baldwin of ‘discrediting’ the League. The National Government believed that undermining the organization was justified if the goodwill of Italy was secured, yet its handling of the affair was an abject failure. By imposing limited sanctions, Britain had angered Mussolini, who now announced that the Stresa declaration was void. The news was welcomed by Hitler, who embarked on diplomatic discussions with his fellow Fascist dictator in Italy. European Fascism was uniting.

With Italy now friendly towards him, and the British and French preoccupied with the Abyssinian question, in March 1936 Hitler decided to remilitarize the Rhineland, in contravention of the Versailles Treaty and the Locarno Pact. He was relying on the British to reject calls from the French for united military action against Germany. If the National Government would not stand up to Mussolini when he had invaded the territory of a fellow League member, Hitler calculated that it would not oppose a peaceful movement of the German army into German territory, and his gamble paid off. The government declined to support French calls for military action, a tearful Baldwin admitting to the French government that Britain’s limited military resources rendered such action impossible. He added that public opinion was also against military intervention – most English people had no objection to German soldiers going into their ‘own backyard’.

Labour wholeheartedly approved of Baldwin’s decision. The only voice of dissent was from Churchill, who warned of an impending catastrophe and urged the government to join the French in opposing Hitler with force. With the enormous benefit of hindsight, many historians have taken Churchill’s view that March 1936 was the last time a military challenge to Hitler might have been mounted by the Allies without precipitating a devastating war.

The government justified its feeble response to Hitler by emphasizing the bigger diplomatic picture. ‘It is the appeasement of Europe as a whole,’ the foreign secretary assured parliament, ‘that we have constantly before us’. His attempt to direct attention to the ‘bigger picture’ did not inspire much confidence, since the picture was not only bigger but bleaker. The treaties of Versailles and Locarno had been ripped up by Hitler, who was unwilling to agree to any new accord that might stabilize international relations. As for the League, it had been emasculated during the Abyssinian affair and was now moribund.

Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland was applauded by the German people, and by the country’s elite. The German chancellor had proved to his country, and to the world, that he could dictate to the other European powers. He soon crowned his success by establishing an alliance with Italy, which was formalized as the Rome–Berlin ‘axis’ in October 1936 (and later confirmed when both powers signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan). While publicly Hitler claimed to have no further territorial ambitions in Europe, he secretly extended his rearmament programme in order to prepare Germany for a ‘worldwide conflict’. The first stage of his plan, announced in Mein Kampf over a decade previously, was to embark on a war against the Soviets, in order to secure land in the east. It is hardly surprising, then, that experienced observers of the diplomatic scene looked to the future with foreboding. Austen Chamberlain, the former foreign secretary, remarked that he had never ‘seen blacker clouds on the horizon’.

27

The Spanish tragedy

Recent diplomatic events had been watched with fascination and horror by the English people. For the first time since the Versailles conference, foreign policy captured the popular imagination and dominated parliamentary debate. Hitler and Mussolini featured in countless British cartoons and advertisements, while their regimes were discussed endlessly in the papers and the pubs. Support for the League of Nations had been a decisive issue at the 1935 election, and the government’s ‘betrayal’ of that organization during the Abyssinian invasion had brought thousands onto the streets in protest. While ‘Leagueomania’ was stronger on the left than on the right, it nevertheless cut across the parties and the classes. Yet the next act of the unfolding European tragedy would divide English opinion clearly along political and ideological lines.

In July 1936, the Spanish military hierarchy tried to seize political power, under the leadership of the ultraconservative General Franco, who admired the Fascist governments of Italy and Germany. Franco’s aim was to re-establish ‘Catholic Spain’, and to crush the modern ‘diseases’ of democracy, socialism and secularism. To achieve this, the Second Spanish Republic would have to be defeated and a military dictatorship established. Spain was deeply divided between a Catholic, authoritarian and monarchical right and a secular, socialist left. The Left flourished in the urban, proletarian centres of Catalonia and the Basque Country, while the Right was dominant in most rural areas, where landowners and the Church held power. These deep social divisions ensured that Franco’s attempted coup provoked a lengthy and bloody civil war.

The conflict soon expanded beyond Spain’s borders. Italy and Germany declared their support for Franco, while the Soviet Union sided with the Republic. It became an international and ideological battle in microcosm, as well as a rehearsal for a full-scale continental war. It also posed a diplomatic and ideological challenge to the governments of Britain and France. A fellow European democracy was crying out for support, but what would be the diplomatic price of assisting her? And what would be the price of refusing aid to the Spanish Republic and standing aside?

France’s left-wing government at first offered military aid to Spain’s republican forces, yet fears that its assistance might provoke its own civil war convinced it to withdraw its offer. Since Britain’s military and civil service favoured Franco, and its establishment feared Communism more than Fascism, the Conservativeled National Government encouraged caution. Baldwin’s principal aim was to try to prevent the Spanish Civil War from turning into a continental conflict, even though there was a risk that maintaining European peace might result in the destruction of European democracy. Bypassing the League, the National Government brokered a nonintervention deal between the European powers and established a committee to enforce it.

The Italians and the Germans soon began to provide Franco with military support on a lavish scale; in response, the Soviet Union offered aid to the republican forces. Both sides wanted to secure an alliance with the future Spanish government; they also regarded Spain as a convenient training ground for their armies and armaments. The nonintervention committee lived up to its name by declining to intervene, even though evidence of Fascist and Communist meddling was conspicuous. The obsolete League, meanwhile, played no significant role. The failure of collective security, as well as British and French inaction, gave considerable advantage to Franco. Democratic British and French governments looked on as the democratic Spanish government was eventually defeated, and the influence of Fascism spread further across the continent.

Labour MPs criticized the National Government’s policy of nonintervention, yet they had no appetite for the war that might follow the pursuit of an alternative strategy. Nor were they unequivocal in their advocacy of the republican cause, since it was supported by Communist Russia. The party’s qualified response disappointed intellectuals on the English left, who took up the cries of ‘Arms for Spain’ and ‘Fight against Fascism’. Some of these radicals left Labour and joined the British Communist party, whose membership swelled from 1,300 in 1930 to 15,000 by the autumn of 1936. Many on the left saw the civil war as a straightforward struggle between Fascism and democratic socialism, the only moral and political basis upon which a civilized future might be built. The English left wanted to hasten and share in this glorious victory. Opposing them were pro-Fascist intellectuals and the vehemently anti-Communist journalists in the right-wing press – the Daily Mail dubbed Franco’s men ‘Crusaders of Righteousness’. Some Conservative MPs also espoused pro-Franco views, while more pragmatic Tories, such as Baldwin, were happy to see Fascists and Communists killing each other.

The Spanish Civil War undoubtedly spread ideology among English youth in the Thirties, but there are deeper reasons for that generation’s engagement in politics. It had, in the words of the poet Edmund Blunden, been in ‘the nursery in 1914’, and was now confronted with the increasingly real possibility of ‘a world roaring with bigger bombs’. It is hardly surprising that the Thirties generation were, in many respects, the opposite of the bright young people. The Twenties cult of the hedonistic rich had been replaced by what Evelyn Waugh called the ‘solemn cult of the proletariat’. A sober style of dress – corduroy trousers, woollen jumpers, plain white shirts – was favoured in the Thirties, together with thick moustaches and beards. Even the flamboyant Brian Howard was forced to tone down his appearance, lest the left-wing opinions he now espoused lack persuasiveness.

Earnestness and ideology also permeated English literature and art throughout the decade. In the Twenties, many authors and artists had tried to escape from history and contemporary politics by focusing on stylistic experimentation. In the Thirties, history and politics returned as the central theme of art and literature. According to a cliché of the decade, a work of art was ‘first of all a social and political event’ and its relation to the world and to history was more important than its place within an artistic tradition. In this climate many authors became topical and didactic, while others, like the plain-speaking Orwell, aimed at stylistic transparency. A parallel development can be seen in the proliferation of clubs formed in the decade to ‘save’, ‘fight’, ‘defend’, ‘declare’ or ‘overthrow’ various political causes.

One such organization was Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club. This socialist society sent its 60,000 members the magazine Left News and its ‘Book of the Month’, along with various educational titles. By the end of the decade it had circulated over half a million publications; many of them espoused the republican cause in Spain or anti-fascism, while others focused on poverty at home, the most famous example being Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). A number of LBC publications championed the Communist cause, both in and outside Russia. In 1937 the club published an augmented edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s 1935 book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, dropping the question mark from the title in deference to Stalin. The fact that the Soviet dictator had recently conducted show trials as part of his ‘Great Purge’ of 600,000 officials and peasants did not tarnish his reputation in the eyes of the authors or the publisher. Such naivety was common on the left, where many saw Stalin as a champion of democratic socialism.

Throughout England, Left Book Club centres were established, providing venues for discussion groups and lectures. According to Orwell, who gave a number of LBC lectures, the meetings were typically attended by ‘old blokes from the local Labour Party [in] overcoats’; argumentative youths from the local Communist party; and young women who sat with their ‘mouths a little open, drinking it all in’. Many members of the audience wore orange LBC badges, which bore the organization’s watchwords: KNOWLEDGE, UNITY, RESPONSIBILITY.

Some middle-class intellectuals did much more than write books, pledging to defend the Spanish Republic with their lives in the International Brigades. Of the 30,000 European male and female idealists who fought on the republican side in Spain, around 2,400 came from Britain. Among them were undergraduates, artists and poets, such as Julian Bell and W. H. Auden, who wrote memorably about their experiences. For some of the middle-class soldiers, stretcher bearers, ambulance drivers and nurses, the war was the defining experience of their lives. It provided a mirror image to the defining middle-class political experience of the previous decade – the General Strike, when many volunteers had defended the status quo against the workingclass strikers. Other volunteers in Spain, however, were disillusioned by their experience. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) tells the depressing tale of infighting on the republican side, which the author witnessed during his spell of active service. Communism in action proved a disheartening spectacle, with the Russian soldiers behaving brutally towards their allies as well as their enemies. Orwell’s seven months in Spain turned him into a vehement anti-Stalinist; yet some on the left were not interested in his criticisms – the Left Book Club refused to publish Homage.

Partly because of the famous war literature produced by intellectuals, the English contribution to the republican effort is sometimes regarded as a middle-class affair, yet the largest numbers of English recruits were drawn from the working classes. The first English memorial to one of the fallen volunteers was erected to Percy Williams, a twenty-three-year-old apprentice railway engineer from Swindon, who died two months after joining the International Brigades.

Five hundred and twenty-six British volunteers died in Spain, and around 1,200 were wounded. These casualties, and the death of a quarter of a million combatants on all sides, curbed the idealistic optimism of the English left. The horrors of war, which included 80,000 executions on both sides and the Francoist bombing of militarily insignificant targets such as the town of Guernica, increased their disillusion. As Franco and the Fascist forces advanced, few on the left retained their hopes of victory in Spain and even fewer their optimism concerning the ultimate defeat of Fascism. Socialism no longer seemed to be inevitable, or even desirable, in its Stalinist form. Yet at the same time, the civil war strengthened the Left’s conviction that the Fascists had to be opposed, and that a war between democracy and Fascist dictatorship was likely. ‘To be anti-war,’ wrote Julian Bell, ‘means to submit to fascism, to be anti-fascist means to be prepared for war. War will come.’ Pacifism steadily lost its appeal on the left. Socialists now urged the National Government to press ahead with rearmament and to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini.

The Spanish Civil War offered members of the English left their first real encounter with fascism, a political ideology that had failed to flourish in England, despite the best efforts of Sir Oswald Mosley. After Mosley was expelled from Labour in 1931, he had created a ‘New Party’ to promote his corporatist economic policy. Under the influence of Mussolini’s ideas, and in the growing conviction that liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy were unlikely to survive following the depression, Mosley transformed the party into the British Union of Fascists.

The BUF united various Fascist splinter groups under Mosley’s leadership. Authoritarian, nationalist, anti-Semitic and rabidly anti-communist, the party offered itself as the only viable alternative to an eventual communist success. Like its policies, the BUF’s ethos was Italian – a group of violent and uniformed paramilitary stewards called ‘blackshirts’ would ‘protect’ ‘The Leader’ from anti-fascist protesters during public meetings and marches. Their most notorious march took place in October 1936, through an area with a large Jewish population in London’s East End. Around 6,000 police attempted to ensure the safe passage of the 2,500 marchers but they were repulsed by approximately 100,000 anti-fascist protesters, with many women and children among them. After a series of running battles with the police, the anti-fascist protesters forced the BUF to divert their march.

Mosley possessed charisma, and an aristocratic hauteur admired by his workingclass followers. With impassioned and eloquent speeches, he bewitched the crowds and certain sections of the press. His populistic diatribes against the ‘old gang’ of the establishment impressed the young and the poor, who felt ignored and despised by mainstream politicians. During its first two years, the BUF attracted 50,000 members and also received the vociferous backing of the Daily Mail, which ran the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Yet the BUF’s popularity never translated into parliamentary gains, and no more than a handful of Conservative MPs offered Mosley their support. Moreover, unlike the Communist party, the BUF lacked middle-class intellectual champions.

After 1934, Mosley’s blackshirts became increasingly violent, and their activities were disowned by sympathizers who aspired to represent respectable opinion. The National Government attempted to eradicate political violence by introducing the 1936 Public Order Act, which banned all quasi-military organizations and demonstrations. After the bill passed into law the BUF’s membership dwindled to a few thousand, and in the end it was no more successful than the British Communist party. After 1937 mutual vilification was the raison d’être of both parties, with communist protesters the largest presence at Fascist meetings.

Why did fascism and communism fail to sway England, despite widespread poverty and the ineffectiveness of the political elite? It has been argued that Mosley’s movement was doomed because its mass meetings, uniforms and leadership cult had no antecedents in English politics, yet this explanation is unsatisfactory. Political violence was often seen on England’s streets in the Thirties, while the English taste for military pageantry and for organizations such as the Boy Scout movement suggests that the Fascist ethos was not entirely alien to its culture.

Even so, a belief in parliamentary democracy and the rule of law was deeply embedded in English life, however undemocratic and fallible the political and legal systems were in practice. Through successive reform acts, the entire adult population of the country had been enfranchised, which had given the political system some legitimacy. The English governing class was allowed to govern by the people, ultimately because it offered them protection, whether actual or perceived, in return for their obedience, according to the traditional social contract.

28

This is absolutely terrible

At the beginning of 1936 it became obvious that the health of George V was declining rapidly. Regular BBC radio bulletins kept people informed about his deteriorating condition. On 20 January, the announcer read out the words of George’s physician, Lord Dawson – ‘the King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close’. Dawson then administered two lethal injections of morphine to the monarch. A swift denouement guaranteed a relatively painless end for the king, and also ensured that his death could be announced in the morning edition of The Times rather than in the evening newspapers. George remained a model of decorum to the end.

Lord Dawson also accelerated the king’s death in order to ‘preserve dignity’. As he lay dying, his mind wandered and his speech was irritable. On being informed that he might soon be well enough to revisit the town of Bognor, he exclaimed ‘Bugger Bognor!’ The official version of George’s final words was ‘How is the Empire?’ – he was the last British monarch who might have plausibly mentioned imperial matters on his deathbed. By the time of the next royal passing, the empire would be diminished beyond recognition.

George V had been a relatively popular king, to judge by the public grief that followed his death. Yet this may also have been evidence of anxiety concerning the future, as well as nostalgia for the supposedly stable nineteenth-century world in which his character had been formed. As George’s coffin was drawn through London, it received a jolt when it crossed a set of tramlines and the sapphire cross and ball of diamonds on top of the imperial crown fell down into the street. Some regarded this as an ill omen.

George V was succeeded by his son Edward, who commanded as much popular affection as his father, though for different reasons. Nicknamed ‘Prince Charming’, Edward VIII was a dashing twentiethcentury dandy with a distinguished war career and countless love affairs behind him. As Prince of Wales, the carefree Edward had shown as little interest in marriage as he had in preparing himself for his future public role. His current inamorata was Wallis Simpson, a striking American who had married a British-American businessman following a divorce from her first husband. George V had disapproved of the affair, as well as of his son’s behaviour. ‘After I am dead,’ he prophesied, ‘the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’ Edward VIII set the tone of his reign in his first weeks as king by repeatedly breaking with protocol. He was also unorthodox in his outspokenness on political matters, expressing sympathy for the unemployed as well as for the Indians who demanded full autonomy for their country. None of this went down well at court or in Downing Street. Neville Chamberlain resolved to tell the new king to ‘settle down’, but was dissuaded by Baldwin from doing so.

A few months into his reign it was rumoured that the king intended to marry Mrs Simpson, who had filed for her second divorce. The problem was that the government, along with the dominions, the Church of England, the wider royal family and the royal household, objected strongly to the proposed marriage. Edward was the titular head of all of these institutions, and bound, by precedent and protocol, to heed their views. Society, still dominated by the aristocracy, was equally disapproving, while the public’s view was summed up by MacDonald – ‘they do not mind fornication, but they don’t like adultery’.

Edward underrated the strength of conservative opinion within the establishment, and overrated his ability to influence it. He espoused the view that his marriage was a private matter; yet most of the governing elite begged to differ. Adopting a firm yet tactful manner, Baldwin told Edward he would resign if the marriage proceeded; this was effectively an ultimatum, since it might provoke a ‘king versus government’ constitutional crisis. Edward’s champions, who included Rothermere and Beaverbrook as well as Churchill, suggested a marriage by which Simpson could become Edward’s wife but not queen. But Baldwin, along with the empire and the royal family, refused to compromise.

As the crisis dragged on, many people became tired of it, and blamed Wallis Simpson for threatening the survival of one of the oldest institutions in the world. Meanwhile, Edward was increasingly seen as brazen, dictatorial and unbalanced. In the end he was forced to make a choice between Wallis or the crown: ‘I am going to marry Mrs Simpson,’ he told Baldwin, ‘and I am prepared to go.’ He then made a farewell radio broadcast to the nation and became the Duke of Windsor once more, retiring from public life on a vast salary. He was succeeded as king in 1937 by his younger brother, George.

‘This is absolutely terrible,’ George VI told a cousin. ‘I never wanted this to happen. I’m quite unprepared.’ Diffident and volatile, George sometimes spoke with a pronounced stammer, and he responded to the news of his brother’s abdication by sobbing like a child. Generally regarded as a ‘good sort’ with unexceptionable qualities, he emerged bewildered from a cloistered family into the limelight. As a young man he had been taught that routine, discipline and manliness were paramount, just as duty and loyalty were imperative. He learned that he must sacrifice his private interests for his public role. This upbringing moulded a ‘sound’ character, quite different from that of Edward. In one of his first public utterances as king, George said that he would respect ‘the duties of sovereignty’ and declared his ‘adherence to the strict principles of constitutional government’.

Yet George’s sheltered youth had hardly prepared him to rule over a country living through a difficult period of its history, with division inside its borders and menaces without. So far as foreign affairs were concerned, he supported the government’s policy of appeasement. No one could deny that George had pluck – he had demonstrated this at Jutland, where he had seen active service in 1916, and he would draw on that experience in the years to come. The stolidity of his character reminded people of his father; some observers came to see his reign as contiguous with that of George V, with no intervening abdication. The flashy Edward was soon forgotten.

Baldwin had emerged triumphant from the abdication episode. To the surprise of many, ‘Master Stanley’ had seen off a series of apparently insurmountable challenges – a constitutional crisis, an economic depression and confrontations with Lloyd George and Churchill, the greatest politicians of the age. People now hoped that he would succeed in calming the confrontation brewing on the Continent. Yet the prime minister decided, at the beginning of 1937, that it was time to bow out. While his decision to retire was prompted by exhaustion and increasing deafness, it ought to have alarmed political observers: the supreme political survivor may have sensed that he would be unable to steer the nation through what Churchill called ‘the gathering storm’ of continental diplomacy.

‘No man has ever left in such a blaze of affection,’ commented Harold Nicolson in his diary. Baldwin had presented himself as a Victorian paterfamilias to the nation – earnest, benevolent and stern. Unfortunately, however, he was forced to deal with post-Victorian problems – including economic depression and Hitler – that were beyond his capabilities. Because he viewed England as an imperial power, he had taken little interest in the continental affairs that would determine the destiny of his country. On retiring, Baldwin was made an earl for ‘services to the country’, another emblem of the marriage of convenience between the English plutocracy and the aristocracy.

The man to whom Baldwin passed the chalice of the premiership received it eagerly, showing no concern that it might contain poison. Neville Chamberlain had been in Baldwin’s shadow since the Twenties; his family had been waiting for Britain’s highest office for almost forty years. Neville’s father, Joseph, had been the most influential politician of his day, yet had never managed to climb to the summit in an age when aristocrats still dominated politics. Neville’s stepbrother Austen had led the Conservative party but not the country – an anomaly in an era of Tory hegemony.

Neville Chamberlain had a fair domestic record. He had been a diligent health minister and a conscientious, if unimaginative, chancellor. He would enhance his reputation during his time as prime minister by passing the Factories Act, the Coal Act, the Holidays with Pay Act and a Housing Act, all of which improved workingclass conditions without costing the Exchequer, or offending Tory sensibilities, too much. Only a skilful and determined politician, with a vast capacity for work and for mastering microscopic technical detail, could have formulated and passed such legislation. Chamberlain was also a consummate manager of all departments of government, who knew in detail what each of his ministers was doing. The contrast with his indolent predecessor could not have been more marked. Where Baldwin looked like John Bull in slippers, Chamberlain, as one contemporary put it, ‘was corvine, with piercing eyes and a curving beak of a nose’.

Yet along with his efficiency, earnestness and singlemindedness, Chamberlain had several character flaws that would come to impede him. He was shy and oversensitive; his introversion and self-reliance made him obstinate, arrogant and tactless. This charmless man was as rigid as the black umbrella he seemed to carry with him everywhere. Entirely deficient in imagination, emotion and intuition, he put his faith in common sense, rational self-interest and fair play. Since he was guided by these values and motivations, he assumed the same of everyone else. His personality represented the narrow, puritanical and thrifty side of the English mercantile, Nonconformist character. It had been revealed during the abdication crisis, when he had urged the king to make his mind up over the marriage before the end of 1936, lest his shilly-shallying ‘hurt the Christmas trade’.

Chamberlain wanted to deal with continental matters quickly, so that he could concentrate on more important domestic and imperial issues. Like his father and his mentor Baldwin, he saw his country within the global context of an empire of ‘white dominions’ rather than as a European power. Unlike Baldwin, however, Chamberlain had a hubristic belief in his capacity to settle all difficulties and disputes through personal negotiation. One consequence of this attitude was that he adopted a far more active approach to European diplomacy; another was that he ignored the Foreign Office and Churchill when they warned him about Hitler’s untrustworthiness and territorial ambitions. Chamberlain preferred to rely instead on his own judgement and on the advice of an inner circle – all of them members of the so-called ‘old gang’ of experienced but unimaginative politicians. Churchill was disturbed by the ‘marked dearth of men of ability’ surrounding Chamberlain. Perhaps only an ageing, insular empire, and an archaic political system, could have produced such leaders. ‘These men’, Mussolini remarked, ‘are the tired sons of a long line of rich forefathers and they will lose their empire.’

As Lloyd George had once said, ‘Neville has a retail mind in a wholesale business’, and it was this meticulous ‘retail mind’ that now attempted to deal with the gangster and gambler in charge of Germany. Chamberlain’s strategy was the apparently reasonable and in some respects well-intentioned policy of appeasement, first invoked by Eden after Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland. Appeasement involved addressing Hitler’s grievances regarding the ‘flawed’ Versailles Treaty, and permitting the extension of Germany’s influence in Eastern Europe. Germany might be permitted to absorb the German populations who lived in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria, all of whom ‘merited’ self-determination. If any of these developments sparked a regrettable war, it need not involve Britain. In terms of military policy, Britain would continue to rearm, while its diplomatic strategy would be to court Mussolini, in a bid to weaken the Rome–Berlin axis.

Chamberlain and his inner circle believed that the restoration of Germany’s power and status would satisfy Hitler and encourage him to ‘settle down’. Appeasement would be promoted through direct negotiation with the German dictator; conferences were suitable in some circumstances, but there was nothing better than face-to-face discussion for resolving difficult issues. In November 1937, Chamberlain sent his trusted cabinet colleague Viscount Halifax to inform Hitler that Britain was sympathetic to German territorial claims to Austria, Danzig and Czechoslovakia. At the same time the prime minister opened up a private line of communication with Mussolini: ‘an hour or two tête-à-tête with Musso,’ he mused, ‘might be extraordinarily valuable’.

The motivations of the appeasers, and the relative merits of their policy, have been endlessly debated. Appeasement was above all else inspired by the desire to avoid another bloody and costly conflict, and the English press amplified the message. In the late Thirties, the appalling consequences of a second world conflict were endlessly discussed, with visions of the coming apocalypse vividly depicted by the wireless and the newspapers. England’s cities would be reduced to rubble; its future generations would live amidst ruins. Since the English population was overwhelmingly anti-war, appeasement was an eloquent expression of its mood.

Yet appeasement also revealed a reluctance on Britain’s part to attend to its European responsibilities, as well as an unwillingness to condemn the Nazis, either on ideological or moral grounds. Continental issues often appeared as a distraction to Britain. With its colonies and dominions averse to participating in another conflict, the country sought continental peace at any cost. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, as well as his assassination of political opponents, had become common knowledge, yet reports of Nazi brutality did not concern the men who formulated Britain’s foreign policy. Some Conservatives admired the way Hitler had ‘restored’ his country’s economy, while the English upper classes flocked to the extravagant parties laid on at the German embassy. George VI spoke for the ruling class when he described Nazi Germany as preferable to the ‘Bolshevik’ alternative.

Some historians see appeasement as part of Chamberlain’s subtle plan to play for time and to address the deficiencies in Britain’s defences. Rearmament was intensified between 1937 and 1939, while all departments of government were prepared for another war. Yet Chamberlain’s rearmament effort was too little and too late. The £1,500 million he earmarked for defence expenditure in 1937 fell short of the £1,884 million the various defence departments saw as essential. In any case, Chamberlain had supervised the economy since 1931 and could have spent more on defence before 1937.

Other historians follow Churchill in regarding appeasement as both hapless and hopeless. Chamberlain and his colleagues, the argument runs, turned out to be the victims of Hitler’s hypocrisy and mendacity, and vainly clung on to the hope of peace because they could not face the prospect of another war. The government should have embarked on a more extensive rearmament programme, whileChamberlain ought to have constructed a grand anti-fascist alliance with France and Russia. With powerful allies and weapons behind him, the prime minister might have called Hitler’s bluff. In the end, it is hard not to see the period 1937 to 1939 as a series of wasted opportunities and, in Churchill’s memorable phrase, as a ‘line of milestones to the disaster’.

Between 1937 and 1938, Britain tried to persuade Mussolini to withdraw his troops from Spain and to recognize the Mediterranean status quo, in return for an acknowledgement of his Abyssinian conquest; the Duce was not tempted. Neither would he help Chamberlain with his attempts to persuade Hitler to resolve the ‘Austrian question’ through negotiation. In March 1938, without warning the other European powers, Hitler sent troops into Austria to incorporate the country into a Greater Germany. There was no opposition from the Austrian army or government.

Chamberlain was not averse to Germany absorbing Austria, despite the fact that the country was a democratic republic and a member of the League. But he was ‘deeply shocked’ by Hitler’s unilateral show of force and sent an official protest to Berlin. When German diplomats told him that Austria was none of Britain’s business, Chamberlain became angry. But what was he going to do about it? This was the question Churchill asked in the Commons, warning that Europe was ‘confronted with a programme of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage’.

It is doubtful that Hitler ever engaged in precision planning, yet Churchill’s argument was soon justified by events. After Austria, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia, where a majority of Germans lived in the northwest area known as the Sudetenland. He declared that he would ‘defend’ the ‘liberties’ of these Germans and ensure their right to join a Greater Germany. His intention was to incorporate the Sudetenland, perhaps as a prelude to the annexation of other parts of Czechoslovakia.

Following Hitler’s absorption of Austria, Chamberlain had been asked in the Commons to pledge support for Czechoslovakia’s independence. Created by the Versailles Treaty, the country had been exceptional among the new Eastern European states in maintaining its democratic institutions since 1919. Rich in industrial and military resources and occupying an important geopolitical position, its borders had already been guaranteed by France and Russia. Yet Chamberlain declined to follow – ensuring the Czech frontiers would be militarily impossible and diplomatically risky, carrying with it the possibility of provoking another European war. Army chiefs, meanwhile, had warned the prime minister that British intervention would be like ‘a man attacking a tiger before his gun is loaded’. Chamberlain believed that neither the public, nor the armies of the empire, would ‘follow us … into war to prevent a minority from obtaining autonomy; it must be on larger issues than that’.

The Russians, eager to halt any possible German territorial advance in the east, proposed a conference whose aim would be to stop continental aggression. The Labour party and Churchill saw this as an opportunity to establish an alliance that would deter Hitler and encourage opposition to him within Germany. Yet Chamberlain declined to participate – he loathed Communism and thought the Soviets wanted to embroil Britain in a war with Germany. He informed the ‘idealistic cranks’ and ‘warmongers’ in the Commons who criticized his decision that conferences were, any case, ineffective. It was far better to take the direct, personal route.

Over the spring and summer of 1938, Chamberlain talked things over with Hitler and Mussolini on various occasions. These private discussions took place in a public climate of fear and panic, created by the threat of German invasion of the Sudetenland. During these talks, Chamberlain came to believe that Hitler was prepared to use force to facilitate the ‘self-determination’ of the Sudetenland Germans. Nevertheless, his confidence in Hitler’s trustworthiness, and in his own ability to orchestrate a peaceful solution, remained undimmed. For his part, Hitler came away from the discussions confident that Britain would not oppose him with force should he annex the Sudetenland.

But Chamberlain was determined to do far more – or rather far less – than simply back down. The prime minister now privately persuaded France to renege on its commitments to upholding Czech borders. This was not difficult, since the French had no appetite for another war and nor could they guarantee Czech borders in the absence of British assistance. Chamberlain urged France to accept the absorption into Germany of all Czech areas containing a majority of German people, in return for the promise that Britain would guarantee the new Czech borders. Reluctantly France agreed. The prime minister then pressured the democratic Czech government to accept these terms, making it clear that the alternative would be a German invasion during which France and England would stand aside. With both the French and the Czechs in tepid agreement, Chamberlain returned triumphantly to Hitler on 22 September 1938, to announce that he had come up with a settlement that satisfied everyone.

Yet instead of thanking Chamberlain, the German chancellor now insisted on the immediate occupation of German-speaking areas by German troops. Chamberlain demurred on the usual grounds that ‘the use of force’ should be avoided. The French and the Czechs agreed, and a diplomatic stand-off ensued. France now declared she would stand by Czechoslovakia’s frontiers and Britain reluctantly pledged to assist France. In the Commons, Churchill urged the government to hold its nerve, since the partition of Czechoslovakia would represent ‘a complete surrender by the Western democracies to the threat of force’. The choice, he told a friend, is between ‘War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War a little later.’

In the last week of September, however, it seemed likely that war would come first. London schools and hospitals were evacuated, sandbags were piled around public buildings and millions of gas masks were distributed. In anticipation of air raids, numerous trenches were hastily dug in city parks across the country and the navy was mobilized. The mood among the people was fearful: ‘We were expecting 30,000 casualties a night in London,’ the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘and we believed ourselves … to be within three hours of the zero hour. It was just like facing the end of the world.’

On 27 September, a weary Chamberlain addressed the nation on the radio: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is,’ he said, in his stiff, thin voice, ‘that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ It was an extraordinary description of Germany and Czechoslovakia from a man who spoke of the intimate ties within the far-flung empire. Yet it is precisely because Britain was a vast global power that its governing class saw European ‘quarrels’ in these distant terms.

Despite his weary tone of resignation, Chamberlain still hoped to find an escape route. When Hitler asked Chamberlain to intervene with the Czechs, the prime minister grew optimistic once more, assuring the German chancellor he would secure his ‘essential’ demands ‘without war, and without delay’. With the help of Mussolini, a four-power conference was hastily organized at Munich. There, on 30 September, an agreement was struck that gave Hitler almost everything the British and French had denied him a few days previously. It dismembered Czechoslovakia, ceding to Germany the industrially rich Sudetenland, which effectively destroyed the country’s infrastructure and military capability. Britain and France guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s new borders with the threat of force, but since Germany and Italy did likewise, the agreement was worthless. How would the Fascists oppose their own acts of aggression? Representatives of the Czech government were forced to wait outside the room in which the deal was struck; Chamberlain yawned as he informed them of its details afterwards.

After the conference, Chamberlain had another of his tête-à-têtes with Hitler, during which he asked the chancellor to sign a declaration committing Germany to ‘the method of consultation … to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries’ and describing the Munich Agreement as a symbol ‘of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again’. Hitler was delighted to sign the declaration and, when Chamberlain stepped off the plane on his return to England, he waved the accord in the air. ‘The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem,’ he announced, ‘is only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.’ Later that evening he was even more jubilant: ‘There has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour,’ he declared. ‘I believe it is peace for our time.’

Many newspapers echoed Chamberlain’s triumphalism, while most English people felt overwhelming relief. ‘The general opinion,’ commented a clergyman, ‘is that the P.M. has saved civilisation … No one seems to care which side has got the better of the other. The one thing they care for is that there will be no war … Thank God.’ Sugar umbrellas were sold in the shops, confirming that the prime minister who carried a brolly with him everywhere had become a national hero.

Yet voices of dissension soon rose in the Commons. Attlee complained that a democratic European country had been ‘betrayed and handed over to a ruthless despotism’, while Churchill called the affair ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’. He predicted that Hitler would now advance triumphantly ‘down the Danube Valley to the Black Sea’ without ‘firing a single shot’, and that Britain would, in the near future, be forced to accept ‘subservience to Germany’. After returning home from one parliamentary debate, the diarist Harold Nicolson went to bed ‘pondering the Decline and Fall of the British Empire’.

Yet perhaps Chamberlain was not taken in by the rhetoric he had used on his return from Munich. In the winter of 1938 he claimed to have signed the Munich Agreement only in order to buy necessary time to rearm. He now made plans to create an army capable of fighting a continental war and bolstered the RAF. On the home front, meanwhile, detailed evacuation plans were drawn up for the major cities, and an increasing number of gas masks were distributed. Sandbags accumulated at the end of residential streets, and ‘blackout’ tests were carried out across England, in preparation for air strikes. The population watched these developments with a mixture of anxiety and disbelief. How could it have come to this, only two decades after the carnage of the Western Front?

The descent from Munich to war was rapid. A few days after the conference, Hitler, with his eye on the Free City of Danzig, declared his determination to settle the fate of ‘other German populations’ not yet incorporated into the Fatherland. He then demonstrated his belief that he could act with impunity by carrying out a pogrom against Jews, foreshadowing the genocide to come. In Austria, the Sudetenland and in Germany, Nazi thugs murdered hundreds of Jewish German citizens and destroyed their houses, shops, schools and synagogues. The widely reported massacre provoked outrage in Britain, but did not immediately alter its government’s foreign policy.

In January 1939, with the help of Germany and Italy, Franco finally defeated the Spanish Republic. Fascist forces had again prevailed over a democratic continental government, and Britain had been unwilling, or unable, to prevent it. In an attempt to improve relations with the Italians, Chamberlain recognized Franco’s Spanish government a few weeks later, and embarked on further talks with Mussolini’s government in Rome. The prime minister left these talks convinced of the ‘good intentions’ and ‘good faith’ of the Fascists, while the Italians were convinced only of Britain’s weakness. A decidedly unimpressed Mussolini rebuffed Chamberlain’s advances and moved closer to Hitler, transforming Italy’s political axis with Germany into the military ‘Pact of Steel’.

Meanwhile, Hitler encouraged internal division inside what remained of the Czech state. In the early months of 1939 the mutilated country disintegrated, and the western half fell into his hands, with the eastern portion becoming the independent state of Slovakia. By annexing ‘Czechia’, Hitler not only ripped up the agreements he had signed at Munich, but he also contradicted almost every official statement he had ever made on foreign policy, by absorbing non-German peoples into the Reich. There seemed to be no limit to his expansionist ambitions, and no rationale to his policy.

Over the spring of 1939 there was a sea change in English opinion. The papers now advocated standing up to Hitler, even if this made war probable. ‘Who can hope to appease a boa constrictor?’ asked one journalist. At long last, the threat of Fascism was widely recognized. ‘We’ll have to stop him next time,’ people commented in pubs across the country. ‘We’ll have to cry Halt. We’ll have to go to war.’

Even Chamberlain now changed his tune. In a public speech made after Germany’s annexation of Czechia, he asked: ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by another?’ Even the prime minister could see that appeasement had failed. He also warned Hitler that Britain would ‘take part to the uttermost of its power in resisting’ any attempt to ‘dominate the world by force’. The prime minister backed up his words with action, by announcing the conscription of 200,000 men for six months’ military training.

Chamberlain also made a momentous diplomatic commitment when reports of German troops’ movements on Poland’s border prompted the prime minister to pledge Britain’s support for Polish independence, a promise that was seconded by the French. It was an uncharacteristically bold gesture from Chamberlain, and unprecedented from a British prime minister in peacetime. It was also extremely rash, since there was no access to Poland for either British or French troops. Moreover, with only France supporting Britain, the country was in a much weaker position than she had been a year previously when Czechoslovakia and Russia would also have stood up to Hitler. ‘I cannot understand,’ the seventy-six-year-old Lloyd George complained in parliament, ‘why before committing ourselves we did not secure the adhesion of Russia … If we are going in without the help of Russia we are walking into a trap.’ Churchill and Labour agreed, and once more demanded a ‘Grand Alliance against aggression’ including Russia. Yet Chamberlain did not rate Russia highly as a military power and had a profound loathing of communists: ‘I distrust Russia’s motives,’ he said, ‘which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of Liberty.’ The contrast with his attitude towards Hitler and Mussolini could not have been more marked.

Nevertheless, discussions did take place between Britain and Soviet Russia in the first six months of 1939. The British wanted a pledge of military assistance from the Russians, should that be desired by both Britain and Poland; the Russians, meanwhile, sought a more general and mutual guarantee against German aggression. The talks did nothing to diminish suspicion on either side, and were conducted half-heartedly by Chamberlain’s government, who may have seen them as a means of prompting Hitler to return to the negotiating table. Once there, Chamberlain was prepared to offer the German chancellor the control of Danzig, and economic influence in Africa and in the east of Europe – exactly what the Russians most feared.

Once again, Chamberlain’s hopes were not realized. Instead of opening fresh discussions with Britain, Germany embarked on its own talks with Russia, which would pave the way for the Nazi– Soviet Pact of August 1939. Russia agreed to remain neutral should Germany become embroiled in a war, and Germany agreed to limit its territorial ambitions in Poland. Germany was no longer ‘encircled’, and Russia was no longer isolated. News of the pact was greeted with consternation in Britain. Conservative MPs, who had seen Nazi Germany as an infinitely lesser evil than Soviet Russia, felt betrayed by Hitler, while the Left felt betrayed by Stalin.

Chamberlain spoke publicly of his determination to honour Britain’s agreement with Poland, while privately trying to lure Hitler away from Poland with the promise of economic rewards. Pressure was also placed on Poland to accede to German demands over Danzig, but the Poles stood firm. Hitler, unconvinced that Britain and France would go to war over Poland, thought he could once more deceive the enemy with a successful yet limited war in Poland, followed by negotiations in which Britain and France would cede to his demands.

On 1 September 1939, German troops entered Poland, and its planes attacked Warsaw. Britain’s response was to urge Hitler to withdraw his troops, as the prelude to a negotiated solution to the ‘Polish question’. When Chamberlain mentioned this plan in the Commons the next day, he was greeted with silence. Arthur Greenwood, acting as leader of the Labour party for the convalescing Attlee, demanded that Chamberlain send an immediate ultimatum – ‘Every minute’s delay now means the loss of life, imperilling our national interests, imperilling the very foundations of national honour.’ Chamberlain agreed and an ultimatum was sent the following morning at 9 a.m. When it expired two hours later, Britain was officially at war with Germany. She was soon joined by France, India, the colonies and the dominions. Ireland, which had declared itself a sovereign state in 1937, exercised its right to remain neutral.

On 3 September 1939, air-raid warnings could be heard across London, sandbags were filled and thousands of children were evacuated to the countryside. They filled the platforms of the capital’s railway stations, gas mask boxes in hand, just as a violent thunderstorm burst in the skies above them. The contrast to the mood in 1914 could not have been more marked. There was no rejoicing, no enthusiasm. Instead, as the writer Vera Brittain put it, ‘the expected had happened, and was accepted with philosophic pessimism’.

29

The alteration

If war had indeed fallen on England, then it appeared to have done so with remarkable diffidence. Preparations for the predicted casualties of bombing had been intensive, with two million beds set aside in Greater London alone, and yet the terrible bombardment from the air remained unseen, unfelt and unheard for eight months. Rumours of war lay far off. The blackout had been put in place, the children prepared, and rationing had begun, but where was the enemy?

In fact, the enemy had other concerns. Until 1938, the possibility of war with Britain had not been seriously entertained by the Nazis. There had been no attempt, for example, to identify the most vulnerable or valuable targets. German intelligence had been uncharacteristically amateurish. In any case, Poland had to be secured before any further ventures could begin. Defended by an army that combined great gallantry with pitiful weaponry, Poland swiftly fell and burned. The Poles had rejoiced at Britain’s declaration of war, but as the bombs fell on Poland’s cities, the French and the British divisions in France did nothing. They outnumbered their German counterparts by more than two to one and yet a brief French incursion into the Saar region of Germany was all they achieved. Indeed this ‘invasion’ served only to convince the Germans, if further persuasion was needed, of Allied timidity. The Polish commander-in-chief was informed that the Siegfried Line had been broken and then that the operation ‘must be postponed’. The first was a simple lie and the second one of those painful euphemisms that were to characterize so much of the conflict. Why then did France and Britain stand by when they were committed by treaty to intervene ‘within two weeks’ with a ground attack on Germany? The French, led by a commander who trusted to the strategy of the previous war, felt unprepared, and the British were still divided.

Meanwhile, a German official wrote, ‘it is the Führer’s and Goering’s intention to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation. More than that cannot even be hinted in writing.’ But the clandestine madness, and the vindictive cruelty, should soon have become obvious. From the outset, a policy obtained of bewildering the conquered peoples; savage violence alternated with hypocritical gestures of conciliation, particularly where the Jews were concerned. Even the forced moves to artificial ghettoes were presented as a means of protecting the Jewish minorities from their gentile neighbours. Nazi policy towards other Poles, however, was forthright from the first. They were plucked from their homes and shifted in vast numbers to the east, frequently before being casually murdered. It was considered vital to destroy the nation’s cultural leaders, so the intelligentsia went the way of industrialists and nobles. Priests were singled out for particularly savage treatment.

In time, the use of buses, theatres, concert halls and even churches was prohibited to all but those of German stock. The intent was to kill or drive out all but a rump population, kept alive solely to furnish the Greater Germany with slave labour, leaving the land ‘free’ for German settlement. Polish children were given a bare minimum of education, the most important task of such ‘education’ being to engender in them a sense of inferiority to their conquerors. This was to prove a template for later conquests. A policy of removing elements considered ‘unfit’, ‘undesirable’, ‘degenerate’ or ‘useless’ commenced. In suburban Brandenburg a euthanasia centre was established, where the insane and mentally impaired were destroyed.

Anxiety and terror were the responses of those in England who listened to the wireless and accurately heeded the signs: horror at the rapid German advance and fear that the ‘Blitzkrieg’, or ‘lightning war’ would soon be visited upon their own country. The term well evoked the successive shock, terror and destruction that characterized the German military approach. Soon enough Britain would feel the force of its first wave. Hitler teased his next victim cruelly. At a rally he proclaimed, ‘They are asking themselves in England, “When will he come? Will he come?” I tell you: He is coming.’

Norway had done its best to remain neutral, but the Reich had invaded anyway. The Allies had sent forces against the great battleships that heaved their way up the fjords, but were soon obliged to withdraw. Britain’s first active engagement with the enemy had ended in humiliation at Narvik. On 7 May, the mood in the House of Commons was incandescent. Lloyd George openly called for Chamberlain to ‘sacrifice the seals of office’. Before proposing a division, Herbert Morrison of Labour reminded the House that defeat would be ‘a fatal and terrible thing for this country and, indeed, for the future of the human race’. Most celebrated is the appeal of Leo Amery, who, invoking Cromwell, urged: ‘In the name of God, go.’ The stern, succinct reproaches of Sir Roger Keyes, a war hero who had bedecked himself in full uniform for the occasion, carried perhaps more weight than anything. His refusal to blame any individual or party, and simple protest that it ‘was not the Navy’s fault’ was eloquent enough. As for Churchill, he had been reinstated as First Lord of the Admiralty on the day that war was declared, and thus felt bound to support the government he had so relentlessly attacked, whatever his private misgivings. When the results of the division were announced, the government found that its majority had been reduced to double figures. It was a defeat in all but name.

On 10 May, Chamberlain asked Clement Attlee and the Liberals whether they would be prepared to join a coalition government. Attlee’s polite but firm response was that the party’s National Executive Committee must be consulted before any decision was made; they confirmed that Labour would not serve with Chamberlain as prime minister. The jibe ‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again’ had been thrown at him for months, but now he could concede with honour. That evening he resigned. Lord Halifax was regarded as more reliable than Churchill, but he knew that he was not the man to lead the nation at such a time; Churchill immediately assembled a war cabinet of all parties and persuasions.

On the day of Chamberlain’s resignation, German forces invaded Belgium and France. Churchill promised the House ‘only blood, toil, tears and sweat’. These all soon poured out as the British Expeditionary Force – sent to France in September 1939 – fled to the coast. Britain was isolated and seemed likely to be crushed, but Halifax believed peace could be salvaged from the wreckage of honour. On 25 May, he proposed to the war cabinet that Italy be approached as mediator between Britain and Germany. Many in the cabinet had expressed admiration for Mussolini, Churchill among them; surely the Duce could be persuaded to soften the demands of the German enemy? In the following days, Churchill left the Italian option open, but at the last, seeing his war cabinet inclined to a dishonourable peace, he suddenly recalled both duty and panache. On 28 May, he appealed to the twentyfive members of the outer cabinet: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end,’ he declared, ‘let it end when each of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground.’

On 10 July 1940 came the first attacks from the air; the Germans had come at last. Bombers like the feared Junkers Ju 88 pounded the cities and ports of Britain, while the nimble Messerschmitt Bf 109 engaged the Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires. Many commentators wondered how Britain could survive such an assault. Hundreds of thousands of civilians would die, the radar would prove useless, and the Royal Air Force was surely no match for the invincible Luftwaffe. Yet by the end of the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe, overstretched, outgunned and outfought, was forced to abandon its attacks on the country beyond the metropolis. Now it was the turn of London.

‘The spirit of the Blitz’ was at the time seen by foreigners as a miracle of the communal soul. From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, by night and day, the German air force sought to destroy London. Aside from the obvious target of the East End Docks, St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace and the House of Commons were hit. Pubs also seemed to attract their due share of attention from the Luftwaffe. After one such attack, an observer remembered alcohol pouring into the street and ‘an old man with a cup, scooping it up out of the gutter’. In such straitened times, the sight must have evoked less disgust than rueful admiration.

The populace as a whole was not always responsive to government appeals. It is characteristic of Londoners to shrug off a summons to vigilance; in spite of the deaths and the burnt-out homes, the misery and the fear, they showed themselves unbowed. Dance halls still opened, pubs were busy and the children who were left still played. Since no one knew when bombs might strike, after a while there seemed little point in worrying about them. In time the city came to regard ‘blitzing’ as only another instance of bad weather. Nevertheless, while the Nazis made typically malevolent provision for the weak and helpless, Britain made a very different kind of provision for its own. Tales of what might happen under aerial attack had been circulating for years; at all costs, the defenceless must be moved to safety. ‘Operation Pied Piper’ was the fanciful name given to the mass evacuation of the young from Britain’s cities.

Plans for the evacuation of children had been drawn up long before the declaration of war; Baldwin himself had warned the nation about the horrors of aerial bombardment. The Spanish Civil War had shown how much destruction could be wreaked on cities from the air. The bombing could also break hearts – nothing destroys morale like the death of children. This was made plain in a public information leaflet thrust through every letter box in the country in July 1939:

We must see to it that the enemy does not secure his chief objectives – the creation of anything like panic, or the crippling dislocation of our civil life. One of the first measures we can take to prevent this is the removal of the children from the more dangerous areas. The scheme is entirely a voluntary one, but clearly the children will be much safer and happier away from the big cities where the dangers will be greatest.

For the purposes of evacuation, the country was divided into three regions: ‘danger zones’, ‘neutral areas’ and ‘reception areas’. Danger zones were areas of obvious importance to the nation and therefore to the enemy, including big cities, docks, factories and industrial complexes. Neutral areas comprised the smaller towns, larger villages and the suburbs, while reception areas were exclusively rural. Parents and children were enjoined to keep gas masks at the ready in small boxes hung about the children’s necks. In the event, no gas attacks came, but that they were expected at all is telling.

On 31 August 1939, the order came from the ministry of health: ‘Evacuate Forthwith’. War had not even been declared, but one evacuee, Irene Weller, remembered mothers standing on their doorsteps ‘crying as we walked to the station … I said to my brothers as we walked past our house, “Don’t look round whatever you do,” because I knew my mum would be there waving.’ They all looked straight ahead, weeping. It had been anticipated that 3.5 million children would need to be withdrawn in the three days scheduled for the evacuation; in the event the number was nearer to 1.9 million.

Many children turned up where they were not expected. Anglesey had been expecting 625 children and found itself host to 2,468. Cultural clashes were frequent – an English child billeted in rural Wales, for example, could find herself having to learn an alien tongue. As the social scientist Richard L. Titmuss observed: ‘Town and country met each other in critical mood.’

Yet practical inconveniences were inconsiderable beside the uneasy awareness that you were yourself considered an inconvenience. That this might be overlooked if you were personable cannot have proved very much of a solace. Susan Waters, a twenty-one-year-old teacher, arriving in Bedford from Walthamstow, remembered a scene ‘more akin to a cattle or slave market than anything else’. Some women would specify ‘two fair-haired, blue-eyed little girls’, while farmers might size up boys to see if they were strong enough to work. John Wills from Battersea noted that ‘if you were similar to Shirley Temple you were grabbed right away’. A woman appeared to be checking the evacuees’ hair and inspecting their mouths. A helper suddenly intervened to save the children from further indignity. ‘They might come from the East End,’ she said, ‘but they’re human beings. They’re children, not animals.’ And the evacuees could scarcely be expected to have the necessary clothing. Few had serviceable boots, for example. Indeed, Liverpool quickly became known as ‘plimsoll city’ – the children’s parents could afford nothing hardier, and plimsolls were worthless as protection against countryside mud.

‘Verminous heads’ were reported in Weymouth, and the response of some foster parents and ‘aunties’ was to shave them bald. A Lancashire chemist mentioned one particularly resourceful, or cash-strapped, woman who used sheep dip on her charges. Impetigo, a particularly virulent skin disease, was rampant among almost a quarter of the evacuees sent to Wrexham. There had been no time to medically examine them prior to departure. Yet in the universal cliché applied to every precarious situation, no one was to blame.

There were also happier tales. Between the frets and the joy, a middle note may be heard in the recollection of one reluctant evacuee. She was met by an equally reluctant ‘grey-haired lady’, who welcomed her new charge with the remark: ‘Well, come in. I didn’t want you, but come in anyway.’ A large dog was the first to greet this child, its paws on her shoulders. ‘The people of Littlehampton are the kindest in the world,’ reported one relieved headmistress. Experiences varied according to area, cultural and social expectation, and human nature. Mothers who had waved off ten-year-olds were to find themselves, six years later, hugging teenagers. Sharp-eyed scrappers came back chastened, wild ones were tamed and soft ones hardened.

In September 1939, the government was and was not prepared. Officially, it had been firm in its commitment to peace, but, as is so often the case in British affairs, Whitehall proved more prescient than Westminster. Civil servants had been turning the cogs of war while Chamberlain hoped for peace. The devastating power of aerial bombardment was not underestimated, though it happily proved to be exaggerated. The penultimate roar of the Nazi dragon came in the shape of the V1, a pilotless plane better known in Britain as the ‘doodlebug’, whose rise led to a third wave of evacuees. Then came the V2, hitting the earth at more than 3,500 miles per hour. Milton may have named Pandaemonium, but Hitler created it.

30

The march of the ants

On 10 May 1940, the Germans carved their bloody trail into Belgium and towards Holland. The more factional among Labour MPs still found it hard to accept that Hitler was the true enemy; for Aneurin Bevan, hostility to Germany was a distraction contrived to divert the workers’ energies from the real business of destroying capitalism. Small wonder, perhaps, that Churchill was later to say of him that he would prove ‘as great a curse to his country in peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war’.

But a new government must be formed, and with Chamberlain gone and Churchill as prime minister and minister for defence, Labour could join it in good conscience. Meanwhile, the German forces continued to advance, crossing the French border and threatening Holland. The British and French failed to hold their positions and the British Expeditionary Force, outflanked and outgunned, retreated to the coast. The Germans reached Brussels, their fifth conquered capital, and captured Antwerp and Cambrai. ‘This,’ said Churchill, ‘is one of the most awe-striking periods in the long history of France and Britain.’

There was a ray of hope in May, when the experts of Bletchley Park disarmed the most formidable of Germany’s secret weapons. Under the guidance of the mathematician Alan Turing, a machine was devised which could crack the feared Luftwaffe’s Enigma code. Generated by a device adapted by the Germans from a Polish model, the code’s settings were changed every twenty-four hours. It was necessary to use the prophetic powers of Turing’s machine only in desperate need, and the authorities were forced to let many ships sink rather than reveal their ability to decipher the German code. It was perhaps the greatest breakthrough of the war, but tragically compromised by the realities.

On the evening of 26 May 1940, ‘Operation Dynamo’ was launched by the English to rescue the men of the Expeditionary Force stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk. Every available water vessel was commandeered in pursuit of this miracle, but official ineptitude and the exigencies of the moment ensured that some of the troops were left behind.

On the following day, the King of the Belgians abdicated; he had had enough, as had other continental rulers overtaken by Fascism. ‘We must possess the continent,’ Churchill declared, ‘to make our way with every stop through “disaster and grief”.’ One major disaster was the capture and occupation of Paris. Was there worse to follow? On 2 July, Hitler ordered his forces to make detailed plans for the invasion of Britain. The plan gives an early glimpse of the erratic and deluded mind later evinced by the Führer. Even Göring did not believe that the preconditions for invasion could be met.

But if the nation was not aware of the possibility of invasion, it was scarcely the fault of government. All the talk about turning pots and pans and kettles into Spitfires and Blenheims kept the home fires burning. In 1943, 110,000 tonnes of scrap metal were being collected weekly. Iron railings, many of them ripped up from stately homes, fed the furnaces. ‘The Great Saucepan Offensive’, during which the women of Britain were exhorted to ‘give us your aluminium’, proved alarmingly successful once Lady Reading gave it her support. Only minutes after a speech in which she had urged her sisters to act, she walked home to see women converging on the nearest depots, saucepans in hand.

Nor did the fever to give stop with armies of women. The famous Children’s Salvage Group were enjoined to gather whatever they could – and they responded, their nimble hands collecting when the national need demanded it. ‘There’ll always be a dustbin,’ they sang, to the tune of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Tales of First World War veterans offering their artificial limbs abound, although they were courteously refused. By 1943, government statistics claimed that each of the country’s homes had provided about half a ton of salvage.

In the drive to save paper, even libraries were not spared. Private owners denuded themselves of all but those books that were of national importance. All paper had to be salvaged, and wrapping paper was prohibited. By 1945, the National Book Drive had brought in more than 100 million books. Rationing, meanwhile, was extended to all foodstuffs apart from bread, vegetables, offal, game and fish. The result was a great upsurge in general health, but also in flatulence. The spirits of the people were still robust. While the army fought, the civilians, amidst making, mending, rummaging and whistling, did their best to laugh both at circumstance and at the enemy. A spoof pub sign portrayed Hitler’s distinctive hairstyle and moustache, and underneath ‘The Bore’s Head’. Comedy, whether in the music halls, on the wireless, or in homes, rose to happy heights.

It was as well that it did. The Battle of Britain, as it was known, beginning in July 1940, was Hitler’s experiment on British preparedness; German High Command recognized that unless German force could dominate the island’s air defences, there could be no security for the Nazi project in Europe, let alone an invasion of Britain. More attacks followed: the docks of London were particular targets, together with those of Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol. Göring directed operations; he opposed the wanton bombing of civilians because he saw no strategic advantage to it. By the end of September 1940, 1,500 civilians had been killed, but by the beginning of November, the Germans no longer dived over London. Their pilots and their planes had reached the limit of their usefulness. But within the areas of Europe ‘under German influence’, terror and violence mounted ever higher. Thousands of infants, boys, girls, crippled men and women were flung on burning piles and shot in ditches before being obscenely violated.

But Hitler’s will was undeniable, and by 14 November 1940, the city of Coventry was in ruins. A photograph of the time shows a priest standing quiet beside the lines of bodies. By contrast, the city of Oxford was spared – Hitler had intended it to be the capital of an occupied Britain in the event of a successful invasion. In similar fashion, he decided not to destroy Paris.

Russia, however, as the ancestral leader of the ‘degenerate’ Slavic nations, was to receive less considerate treatment. The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact had been signed the previous year, but Hitler had no intention of honouring it. The failures of the USSR in the Winter War against Finland, coupled with Stalin’s timely cull of his own officers, gave him his opportunity. Hitler had issued a decree that ‘The struggle against Russia was one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be carried out with merciless harshness.’ This was not a war, he said, that could be waged ‘in a knightly fashion’. The language of spite, violence and murder sprang to his lips as if from some secret recess of Hell. Hitler told his officials that his great invasion of Russia was to occur on 20 May.

Slaughter by conventional means carried on. During the bombing of Belgrade, 17,000 civilians were killed in a single day. The Yugoslavs signed an act of surrender, and national dissolution followed. Serbia, now under occupation, was succeeded as leader of the former union by a newly forged Fascist state of Croatia, with results that would be felt decades after the war had ended. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the Greek dictator Metaxas refused the Italian demand that he surrender his country’s ports. The Italian invasion of Greece, undertaken largely to impress Germany, was considered ‘easy to accomplish’, but it quickly sank into a vortex of lives lost in the cause of national self-respect. An overconfident Italian army found itself driven back into the mountains of Albania by dogged Greek opponents, but this hope for a free Europe quickly died when the Germans moved in to aid their ally, and Greece was divided between the two Axis powers.

Another large annexation was taking place. In the early morning of 22 June 1941, the Germans initiated their attack on Russia. Sixty-seven aerodromes were attacked and five cities subjected to bombardment, before the Germans began their march across the frontier. Three thousand Ukrainians were killed by the NKVD, the Communist secret police, followed by the massacre of Jews in Romania. This was not war as it had ever been envisaged. As the Germans advanced closer to Moscow, barbed wire and deep ditches were laid along their route. Seven thousand Jews at Borisov were shot ‘in the manner of tinned sardines’. The killers confirmed their slaughter by consuming bottles of alcohol. Such a recourse was not unusual: German doctors engaged to separate the healthy from the sick in the death camps could stomach such work only when drunk.

Everything changed on 11 December 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent American response, when Germany declared war on the United States. The Allies, immensely heartened, counselled time and patience – victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. Hong Kong surrendered to the Axis powers on 25 December, and 11,000 Allied prisoners were taken. The death camps multiplied in almost unimaginable ways. In Sobibor, in the Lubin district of Poland, the Axis troops killed 250,000 Jews in a year. Auschwitz was one of the most notorious of the camps, but the procedure was to be one of ‘concealment’. Whether this suggests guilt or fear of punishment is difficult to determine, though the euphemisms employed are telling: ‘special treatment’ referred to the mass murder of Jews; a ‘special action’ was an individual massacre. The latter often served as popular entertainment for visiting officials.

31

Would you like an onion?

In Britain, as rationing became even more severe, the most unlikely foodstuffs became luxury items. Jokes about onions wrapped up and offered as house-warming presents or wedding gifts quickly proved prophetic, but beer was still very much available. Despite severe rationing of grain, the government accepted that it would be foolish to deny the nation its follies. An unintended consequence was the new acceptance of women in pubs, or, rather, the new willingness of women to enter them. And grain could go to still more salutary uses. As a sign outside one bomb-wrecked pub proudly proclaimed: ‘Our windows are gone but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them.’

Nevertheless, life for civilians was harsh and uncertain; it was increasingly felt that the nation’s soldiers had it easy by comparison. Aerial bombardment had ensured that the ordinary citizen was placed in the front line, while the soldier was frequently kicking his heels, waiting to leave. One observer, speaking for many, noted: ‘Although I can readily believe that most serving men want to play their part in winning the war, I can’t resist the taunt that joining the Army is about the quickest way to forget all about it.’

Such sentiments were generally felt, if rarely uttered, and instead found their way into the nation’s disgruntlement as a joke. Caustic jeers about soldiers ‘practising for when they meet Rommel’ (in other words, running away) abounded in a nation whose sense of deference to the military had worn thin. Others jibed at ‘the chairborne troops’, the vast sub-army of auxiliary staff, who seemed to many to be little more than clerks. And in a time of austerity, some could not fail to notice that soldiers had certain material advantages over their compatriots. Much of this resentment was groundless, of course, and nor did it preclude gratitude. Yet the perceived discrepancies in life between soldier and civilian engendered an attitude quite different from that of twenty years before.

When the soldiers did encounter Rommel, the jokes about flight withered in the speakers’ mouths. The first battle of El Alamein had checked the German Eighth Army in its advance against Alexandria, but it had not been as successful as the second battle, under Bernard Montgomery. Like Wellington, ‘Monty’ was a martinet who cared deeply for his troops and received from them a respect leavened by wry affection. Sir John Cowley, recalling his first meeting with Montgomery, was to say that it took only the sight of that slight, wiry figure unhitching his jacket and rolling up his sleeves to know that all would be well. Lord Dowding, who commanded the air force, was of similar constitution; stern in most other ways, he would call his men his ‘lambs’.

The first battle, in the summer of 1942, had stopped the Axis advance. The second went much further, resulting in the retreat of the Afrika Corps and the German surrender in North Africa in 1943. It was the turning point of the war, the culmination of the Allied desert campaign that changed the whole conflict. If the invincible Rommel could be stopped, what else might be achieved? That turning of the tide was matched with the Russian defence of Stalingrad and the ability of British and Commonwealth troops to expel the Germans from Egyptian territory. This may have been the moment when Hitler and his officers were revealed as superior only in the art of killing. The campaign was related to ‘Operation Torch’, devised to expel the Germans from North Africa with 300 warships, a large force of merchant ships and over 100,000 men. The church bells rang through England.

In the same month as the invasion began, November 1942, the Red Army launched an opposing force against the Germans north of Stalingrad, before moving south of the enemy forces and encircling them. The siege of Malta was also broken. Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca, with Churchill insisting that the Allies ‘cannot let Russia down’. It was also agreed that ‘Hitler’s extinction’ must take priority over the defeat of Japan. The Stalingrad trap had caught the Germans, and the Axis surrendered the city. It was a great victory and must have suggested to Hitler and his cohorts that the writing of destiny was on the wall, not that Hitler had succumbed internally. The air raids against Germany continued day and night. Preparations were now being made for a cross-Channel invasion, with an elaborate deception arranged to convince the Nazis that the Americans and English were to aim for Pas de Calais rather than their true destination of Normandy. The monthly loss of German aircraft rose to 1,581.

Both Western and Eastern Fronts were now being attacked by the Allied forces, with mutual distrust set aside. The nightmare of Hitler’s Aryan empire was being torn apart piece by piece. The Red Army had advanced almost 1,000 miles in a year, while the breaking of the Enigma codes gave the Allies an accurate and invaluable insight into German military preparations. The situation in Berlin became disordered, yet still the Germans threw more and more innocents upon the fire. Several thousand Jews were sent each day to Auschwitz, including more and more from newly annexed Hungary. The most obscure islands in the Aegean were raided to find the handful of Jews who had escaped the Greek mainland, and all this while the Allies marched further north and approached the gates of Rome. The Reich had reached the last limits of self-delusion.

By 6 June, the Allies had landed on the strand in Normandy, and in less than twenty-four hours 155,000 were assembled there. Hitler, not knowing the enemy’s true destination, was for once unsure of himself. At the same time Churchill was informed that the Axis was running out of aircraft fuel. Its empire had been sustained by resources plundered from other nations, which were slowly being detached from their conqueror. A more private note of revenge was struck when a group of conspirators attempted to destroy Hitler; after its failure, the would-be assassins were hanged or shot, with Hitler invited to watch their bodies swinging.

In the spring of 1944, Churchill announced the number of casualties so far: 120,958. A report from the Reich noted, ‘in this uneasy period of invasion and retribution … The people of Germany are beginning to long for peace.’ British intelligence had now, by virtue of Ultra, discovered the position and size of all German military formations. It is one of the great mysteries of the war that the Germans did not suspect some secret military intelligence. The Allies were on the verge of a cross-Channel invasion of northern Europe, and Goebbels felt obliged to write that ‘Germany must be made more desolate than the Sahara.’ It came from the depths of despair, but it also evoked Hitler’s belief that if Germany was defeated, it did not deserve to survive.

The ending had come. On the evening of 5 June, the Allied flotilla approached the beaches of Normandy. Hitler had ordered that the aim should be to repulse the enemy and send them ‘back into the sea’, but it was as futile as Canute’s order to the waves. By midnight, more than 50,000 Allied combatants were on French soil. By 25 August, the general commander of Paris, General von Choltitz, had surrendered, to be triumphantly replaced by General Koenig. Yet it was not members of his group who liberated Paris, but the legions of the free Spanish. A German general who visited Hitler reported that ‘it was a tired, broken man who greeted me, who shuffled onto a chair, his shoulders drooping, and asked me to sit down … He spoke so softly and so hesitantly, it was hard to understand him. His hands trembled so much he had to grip them between his knees.’

By February 1945, Berlin was deemed to be a fortress city in the charge of the Germans, but a further gesture was needed. This was the American and British attack upon Dresden from the air. The rocket scientists nurtured by Hitler fled for haven. As the Russian soldiers closed in on Berlin, the Nazi leaders made their final preparations. Their fates are well known. Hitler shot himself in the mouth, while his wife swallowed poison. Their bodies were soaked in petrol and enveloped in fire. Goebbels and his wife, loyal to the last, died with him, making sure to kill their children first. The justification for this was given by Goebbels’s wife in her last letter to the world: ‘everything beautiful’, she wrote, ‘is about to be destroyed.’

Their allies in militant nationalism fled such a fate, only to be outrun by justice. Mussolini and his mistress were shot and suspended by their legs in a market square. Vidkun Quisling, ‘minister president’ of Norway, whose name would become a byword for collaboration, was shot in October 1945, still proclaiming that he had had his nation’s best interests at heart. In Slovakia, Jozef Tiso, the priest turned Fascist dictator, was caught and hanged in 1947. Ion Antonescu, the Romanian ‘conducatore’, was executed in 1946. Hungary’s Ferenc Szálasi, the brutal mummy’s boy of ‘Hungarism’, was executed in the same year. Only Ante Pavelić, the head of the infamous ‘Ustashe’, the Croatian separatist movement whose cruelty had shocked even the Nazis, managed to evade justice. He found a sympathetic host in Juan Perón of Argentina, who also welcomed a remarkable number of fugitive Germans. Regarding the war in Europe, the last word belongs to its victims. One of the inmates of Buchenwald, snatched from death at the last hour, wrote that ‘you were our liberators, but we, the diseased, the emaciated, barely human survivors, were your teachers. We taught you to understand the Kingdom of the Night.’

In Britain, the celebrations that had greeted the end of the First World War were muted, even sombre, when compared with the geyser of joy that burst forth on VE day. In no previous war had the English civilian been made to feel the force of the conflict so intimately or relentlessly. The notion of the ‘home front’ would have been almost inexplicable to a previous generation. Londoners had faced obliteration once every thirty-six hours for over five years, threatened at their work, having their meals, putting their children to bed, and going about the ordinary business of their lives. It had been a time when the ‘moral economy’ of war had been complicated, at times even reversed. If the soldier had suffered and died as a combatant, so too had the civilian.

But there was to be a moral inventory for the Allies to complete. The names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not be forgotten, and nor would that of Dresden. Closer to home, the Channel Islands had been liberated from the Germans, but the tale there is not wholly comforting. A photograph from that occupation shows a German officer and a British ‘bobby’ chatting amicably by a roadside. It may be that this image was taken for propaganda purposes, but it seems unlikely. Either way, it serves as a sobering corrective: Britain could afford a sense of triumph and relief, but not of complacency or self-indulgence.

When VE day was announced, a ration-ridden nation felt able to loosen its halter for a moment. For the children, there was a special treat of free ice cream. One mother, speaking of the day when the surrender of the German armed forces was announced on the wireless, remembered offering this earnest injunction to her four-year-old: ‘“Marian,” I said. “You must remember this all your life. It’s history.” But the reception was poor; and I could see that she would forget at once any word she happened to hear.’

32

The pangs of austerity

The nation that gathered at the polling booths in June 1945 was weary and ripe for a gust of optimism. But where the Labour party threw up the sash and flung open the window, the Conservatives seemed huddled in a corner, growling out their maledictions with little regard for the national mood. As Churchill warned, ‘Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise but upon the right of an ordinary man and woman to breathe freely, without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.’ Many might have agreed, but he went further: ‘No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They will have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.’ If his reference to wartime conditions was merely unfortunate, this proved disastrous. Its manifest hyperbole at once disgusted and alienated many supporters.

By contrast, the Labour party attacked the profiteer and promised that most elusive of grails: economic equality. While Churchill invoked his wartime record, Labour looked further back, citing the hardship that had wasted the Thirties. In the Daily Mirror, a cartoon showed a veteran holding out the promise of peace to the people of Britain, with the plea that they should not squander it ‘this time’. More subtly, Labour slipped a lever under the very cornerstone of Conservatism. ‘Freedom is not an abstract thing … there are certain so-called freedoms that Labour will not tolerate: freedom to exploit other people, freedom to pay poor wages and to push up prices for selfish profit, freedom to deprive the people of the means of living full, happy, healthy lives.’ There was, of course, an element of ‘shadowboxing’ in all this: the claims of the two parties were not irreconcilable. Nevertheless, the majority of the people, stirred by the appeals to solidarity and equality, made their choice. The success of the Labour party in 1945 was as unexpected by some as it was desired by others.

There were those who drew up elaborate plans for a better, safer world. Although Sir William Beveridge has great claim to be the founder of what became known as ‘the welfare state’, the Tories were also part of the group of experts that fashioned the report entitled Social Insurance and Allied Services in 1942. This, in turn, built upon the work of Lloyd George and the Liberals in the 1900s. In any sense that matters, the new welfare state was the lucky progeny of natural enemies. In 1944, one commentator declared that ‘the time and energy and thought, which we are all giving to the Brave New World is wildly disproportionate to what is being given to the Cruel Real World’. Every second thought was now directed towards the goal of reconciling the claims of employer and employee. It was believed that the unions would lie down with employers as lambs with lions.

The Labour party had no desire to continue in coalition with Churchill and the Conservatives. Many aspired to some ‘good old days’ after the years of hardship, and a few were foolish enough to trust them. But the vision expounded by the Labour party was to be a new dawn for a new epoch, and with a new breed of man in mind.

This was reflected in the rival campaigns. Labour fought with the vigour and vitality derived from a new horizon, while Churchill could not help but dwell upon his victories. Few relish being reminded of a period of pain, even by their deliverer, and so it proved. In the general election of July 1945, Labour won 393 seats and the Conservatives won 219, an exceptional result. Even the most stubborn Tory might have felt the force of a rising wind.

Despite his reputation for diffidence, the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, had a strong and independent mind. He formed a group of men who had that much in common with him, though little else, and neither did they have a great deal in common with each other. Aneurin Bevan, the minister of health and housing, was a Welsh bull with the face of a cherub, gravel in his belly and helium in his heart; the minister for fuel and power was Hugh Gaitskell, his stare one of almost lunatic intensity, as fierce in his centrism as Bevan was in his socialism; there was Hugh Dalton, the new chancellor, of vampiric appearance, loyal soul, brilliant mind and disastrous naivety; Stafford Cripps, his successor, lean and prematurely withered, an austere tribune always licking his upper lip as if to moisten his punishingly ascetic vision. And then there was Attlee himself, small and tight-featured, with a grin that could disarm the most obdurate adversary. Their very dissonance was to prove their glory.

The world was still much as it once was, with Lyons’ Corner Houses and steam trains. Most goods were still rationed, paid for with warm heavy coins. The slump had left its mark, and 7 million houses were without hot water. It was the same old pre-war world, steadily more constricted and diminished. The effect was all the more unusual since the public sector of the country was slowly being populated by ministries, departments, red-brick boxes of officials packed together in computations for the future. In the spring of 1948, 42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate, compared with 19 per cent in 1945. Everyone was locked to the future, except those who were deluged in the dizzying present of jazz and bands. Others were preoccupied with planning to better their families, and even their nation – there was real hope that a more serious-minded consciousness would outweigh frivolity. But as Orwell wrote: ‘Everyone wants, above all, a rest.’

But who had the time to rest? And what was there to sweeten it? ‘Clothing? Not here, mate. Food? Try next door. Fuel? There may be a can nearby. Beer and baccy? No chance.’ The Express announced ‘Meat and Eggs going to be Off next week’, a term widely used deep into the Fifties. One group, however, promised ‘On’, come what may. This was the ‘spiv’, the ringmaster of the wartime underworld. He was a profiteer, of course, but though despised, he was still needed. He was instantly recognizable: a trilby, a pencil moustache and a sloping stride. He could not proclaim his wares in the time-cankered fashion of the street hawker, as his antecedents might, but murmured them in a downward glissade of confidentiality. Behind him would stand his straight man, lending him a patina of respectability, with the available wares in a little box. He was a creature of the twilight, amoral rather than immoral.

In Cecil Day-Lewis’s children’s novel of the post-war years, The Otterbury Incident (1948), the chief villain, Johnny Sharp, is a spiv. Against two plucky bands of boys, themselves rather prone to scavenging, he and his accomplice wage a quietly implacable war. Sharp is softly spoken, slinky in movement and prone to Americanisms. He addresses people as ‘buddy’, another affectation typical of the spiv; but the American influence on the national voice was to outlast the spiv by generations.

After the war, over a quarter of the working population had to be brought back into the fold and retaught the ways of the civilian. Overseas service had trained men and women for combat, but not for the demands of a nation in a state of material haemorrhage. The rigours of austerity, the demands of regular work and the expectations of wives, husbands and sweethearts could prove both bewildering and dismaying. Where was the opulent, cheerful nation they had left? Why were there so many ruins? And what had happened to the courtesy they remembered?

The contraction ‘demob’ has the sting of dismissiveness, and its connotations were ambivalent. On the one hand, such men and women were conquering heroes; on the other, they had escaped much that the civilian had been obliged to endure, and were often reminded of it. More than one returning soldier overheard, ‘There’s one who had a good war!’ Some among them, prisoners of war in particular, could be certain of sympathy and respect. But however they were greeted, there can be little doubt that ‘demobs’ were regarded as a burden. One child of the time remembered her father digging hungrily into the cheese on the dining table and asking her mother whether there was any more. ‘No dear,’ she replied, ‘you’ve just eaten the family’s ration for the week.’ Afterwards ‘he was very quiet’.

From the viewpoint of the returning soldier, it was often a question of having one’s expectations upended. ‘It had made my blood boil,’ recalled one, ‘while we were sweating in a jungle on a few shillings a day. Now I’m beginning to see how impossible it is to live on present-day civilian wages – let alone pre-war pay. The value of money is topsy-turvy.’ Another said, ‘I have to take the laundry, and calculate so that I have enough to wear before I can collect it again … I’m more harassed by small worries than I have been for five years.’ Such ‘small worries’, coalescing often into implacable panic, were the staple of the world in which the demob was forced to acclimatize.

But the population wanted social change; for what else had the war been fought? Were the impoverished days of the 1930s to return? The celebration of the royal wedding in November 1947 might have been considered a positive jubilee, but the reports sound muted. Ursula Wood, later married to Ralph Vaughan Williams, considered it ‘as quiet as a Sunday’. Orderly crowds gathered in restrained groups with the occasional bonfire to enlighten the proceedings. Some travellers waited to join the last 68 bus, illuminated with pale-blue lighting. Nor were civilians always impressed by the demob’s efforts in the workplace. He was supposed to be complacent and work-shy – a host of satirical terms were soon coined. ‘Stripes disease’, ‘pippitis’, ‘air crew’s chest’, ‘storeman’s clutch’, ‘ranker’s dodge’ and ‘scrimshanking’ were all expressions flung at the demob’s back, and sometimes at his face. A veteran, writing in the Picture Post, felt minded to offer a counterblast: ‘As one who has had five years’ holiday in foreign lands at public expense, I feel that it is high time I turned my hand to honest work and civilian life, while some overburdened civilians are given the chance of rest and recuperation in the Forces. Why should the delights of a camping holiday in sunny Burma or a cruise to Japan be denied these jaded people?’ It is clearly unwise to speak of demobs in general. Their narratives touch every point: from ease to starvation, from ‘cushy’ staff posts to incarceration under unrelenting hosts.

33

The cruel real world

This was a time for even more privation. Bread rationing was reintroduced in the summer of 1946, and the cloud of a new terror occluded the sun with the threat of atomic war. It may seem odd that people can prevail under such circumstances, but patience and resignation had become customary. After constant attacks in the press, the prime minister, Attlee, felt obliged to reassure the nation that ‘many of these restrictions fall heavily on the housewife. You can be assured that the Government will ease them as soon as it is possible to do so … On the question of bread rationing, your knowledge and good sense was an important factor in steadying and educating public opinion in the face of the press campaign last summer.’

The late 1940s inaugurated what may be termed the ‘housewives’ war’, which was in part a war against the political classes. That the burden of increasingly restrictive rationing fell heaviest upon housewives was a fact denied by none, but while Conservative women aimed their darts at the government, women loyal to Labour reserved their wrath for the opposition. It was an unglamorous affair, and there were no clear or certain victors beyond the pale of Westminster and Whitehall.

The measures were provoked by a dollar economy, and by huge food import cuts. There was a further reduction in the clothes ration, and the use of foreign currency for pleasure travel was suspended. Hugh Dalton was forced to resign after he inadvertently supplied a journalist with details of the 1947 budget. He was perhaps the first victim of what became known as the press ‘leak’. Stafford Cripps was now chancellor, and seemed quietly intent on spreading his own brand of punitively abstract philanthropy. But, like Churchill himself, he led by example. A proud Spartan, he demanded nothing of others that he was not prepared to do himself.

As the 1940s progressed and a new election came closer, political rhetoric rose both in heat and in shrillness. ‘We’re up against it’, ‘We work or want’, ‘A challenge to British grit’ – such appeals were characteristic of the Labour approach. They would have had a certain resonance only a few years before, but many were now beginning to wonder why wartime appeals were being made in a time of peace. As ever, the press was divided. Where the Labour-supporting papers emphasized that the cuts were inevitable, their Conservative counterparts scoffed at what they saw as excuses for simple mismanagement.

While it was generally agreed that wartime rationing had introduced a diet that was far healthier than before, by the late 1940s the case was not so clear. The suggestion that rationing had begun to badly affect the nation’s basic health was first raised in May 1947 by Dr Franklin Bicknell in his paper ‘Dying England’. Speaking for the government, Michael Foot proclaimed that on average children were ‘stronger … than any breed … we have ever bred in this country before’. It is true that not even the Conservatives went so far as to say that the nation was starving. On the other hand, the medical world was increasingly troubled by the effects of the low fat ration. The fatigue and irritability so characteristic of the age might have been provoked less by the existential agonies of a war-weary nation, and more by a lack of carbohydrates.

The opposition’s case was put most forcefully by Lord Woolton, former minister for food during the war. He is now remembered best for the Woolton Pie, composed of whatever was left in the larder, but at the time he was still revered as the quiet saviour of the nation’s health and heart. He had refused to allow the fat ration to dip below 8 oz ‘if we were to maintain the nation’s health and productive capacity’. Now it had fallen to 7 oz. ‘That is a dangerous position,’ he maintained.

Labour countered such concerns with an appeal to community spirit. What was needed was the attitude of ‘cooperative effort’, ‘courage’ and ‘common sense’ – in short, something like the spirit of the Blitz. But to many, that spirit had come to require not so much sturdiness and solidarity as an almost angelic forbearance. The word ‘propaganda’ was now used without embarrassment by all sides in the austerity debate – the cuts of 1947 worked both ways. Horns sounding in the cause of export production and solidarity were answered by trumpets for free enterprise and individual effort. The local elections of that year heard the first answering murmur to the trumpet. The ‘food and basic petrol election’, as it was termed by Morgan Philips, resulted in large local election gains for the Conservatives, but did not sway the nation as a whole.

By 1948 the rationing had eased somewhat, the shop lights were on and the electric lights flashed occasionally. But prices were rising. ‘Dreariness is everywhere,’ one school teacher lamented. ‘Streets are deserted, lighting is dim, people’s clothes are shabby and their troubles [laid] bare.’ ‘Oh, for a little extra butter!’ one social worker complained. From the late 1940s onwards, a tilt towards consumerism may be discerned.

It is often maintained that there was little to choose between the competing parties’ aims, but that claim was made in hindsight – the differences were clear enough at the time. The Labour demand for a socialist democracy with full employment and a state that provided for its citizens ‘from cradle to grave’ sat uneasily with the Conservative promise of individual affluence and freedom from state interference. A tacit acquiescence in the post-war settlement grew to be the hallmark of all parties, but that was to come later.

Rationing had tightened under Stafford Cripps. The public’s initial reaction was understandably resentful, but the mood swiftly softened when it was discovered that ordinary households could cope with the new austerities, however uncomfortably. Some resentment remained, yet in spite of continued shortages, the English could at last share in a luxury that had been rationed for centuries: a sense of gratitude. The new government was no sooner in power than it began to make good its promises; foremost among them was that none in these islands should ever again fear illness or want. In 1942, the Liberal William Beveridge had drawn up a paper in which he identified ‘Five Giants’: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. By ‘ignorance’ Beveridge meant lack of education, by ‘squalor’ poor housing and by ‘idleness’ unemployment. These could, and should, be amended by the state. Thus, in 1946, the National Insurance Act was passed, ensuring benefits against unemployment and sickness and provision for mothers and widows. No one, in principle, needed to starve. The Industrial Injuries Act provided for those stricken at work, and the Butler Act offered free schooling for all. There remained only the matter of the nation’s health, and that would take longer to resolve. On 5 July 1948, three years after Britain went to the polls, the labourer, the clerk, the miner, the midwife and the seamstress, together with their children, could go to the doctor without fear of paying a penny. For Labour, it was the great new promise for the great new era. ‘It’s real Socialism,’ proclaimed Aneurin Bevan, adding, ‘and it’s real Christianity too, you know.’

Here was a revolution with no clear precedent in England. Whatever G. K. Chesterton may have believed, the monasteries and friaries of pre-Reformation England were not ‘the inns of God where no man paid’. Similarly, those who drew up the Tudor poor laws and established the parish system of relief had no conception of universal healthcare. Victorian refinements to those laws taught the lesson that sickness should be understood as the consequence of feckless living. Even the comparatively enlightened provisions of the 1911 National Insurance Act were confined to working men.

Rationing might have slimmed the nation down, but it had done nothing toavert disease. Tuberculosis, ‘the white plague’ of the Victorians, was still abroad, with few X-rays available to detect it. Diphtheria could cause a child to choke. Rickets and polio crippled the young as surely as they had a century before. Measles could be fatal. Scarlet fever, smallpox and influenza were as widespread as ever. Furthermore, the nation was simply run-down. The faces of the poor showed concave cheeks, chap-fallen jaws, grey, stubby teeth, and a nutcracker profile. As if poor sanitation, overcrowding and unsympathetic elements were not enough, children were still subject to Victorian notions of nutrition, being fed on starchy breast milk substitutes. Indeed, artificial feeding could be as dangerous for children as lack of hygiene. At a time when diarrhoea alone could kill a small child within days, it was common for a hospital administrator to spend half her day filling out death certificates. The imbalance of provision between rich and poor was dark and ugly. There was one GP for 18,000 people in the East End, while in the suburbs ‘it was one for every two hundred and fifty’. Money had to be put on the shelf for the doctor in case anyone fell ill; if there was no money, people would pay in kind, with eggs perhaps, or vegetables.

Medicine was, in every sense, a private affair. Even funding for hospitals was secured by charity parades or private benefactors. The doctor himself was a breed apart. You did not visit him – he came to you. Pre-eminent in that world was the consultant, tailed by his subordinates in the hospital as a king by his courtiers. Any love he or the general practitioner had for the sick might have been considered incidental. Yet the reason for what seems like a rather mercenary approach is simple enough. Before the NHS existed, a GP bought his practice. Like any other professional, he sought to enlarge his business, improve it, and perhaps sell it on at a profit. He had a capital investment in his work and sought to preserve it.

Nye Bevan, for one, did not see why matters should remain so. His own father had ‘died from dust’, in miners’ parlance. Bevan himself had started working in the pits of Tredegar at the age of twelve. He spoke of how food on the plate became a family’s calendar: you knew it was the weekend when there was almost nothing. ‘My heart is full of bitterness,’ he wrote, ‘when I see … the ill and haggard faces of my own people … There must be another way of organising things.’ There was, and it lay nearby. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society had been founded at the end of the previous century as a means of providing the local workers with healthcare they could not otherwise have afforded. Workers put in ‘thruppence a week’ of their earnings and received free medical, dental and optical care. It was, as one resident recalled, a ‘miniNational Health Service’. Bevan took it as his template.

The National Health Service Act had been passed along with the rest of the welfare legislation, but the other bills would not need quite such lavish preparation. The Conservative party under Churchill was opposed to Bevan’s proposals on the basis of cost. Bevan wanted a truly national health service, invested in by the employee but sustained by taxation. But this, its opponents argued, would be costly, unwieldy, ineffective and, given the high levels of taxation required, would necessitate a threat to English liberties. Surely such matters could be devolved to the regions. But the population wanted social change; for what else had the war been fought?

On 3 January 1948, Bevan offered his pledge: free healthcare for all, to be delivered on 5 July of that year. In a speech he reflected that ‘there is a school of thought, you know, that believes that if a thing is scarce, it ought to be dear … But this is not an orthodox government, and I am not an orthodox Minister of Health.’ It was an assessment shared by his most implacable opponents, the nation’s doctors, represented by the British Medical Association.

Members of the BMA had already become known as the ‘shock troops’ of the middle class. For the BMA, the proposed reforms were tantamount to an invasion of medicine by the state. The objection was not as disingenuous or self-interested as it appears: teachers would later display similar concerns about national curricula. And how would lawyers react if they were told to become servants of the state? Medical science had become a true science by the early Forties, and doctors were rightly proud of what had been achieved.

Dr Charles Hill, the leader of the opposition to Bevan, had been the ‘Radio Doctor’ during the war, dispensing homely advice to 14 million people in a voice as warm as a freshly baked loaf. Now, speaking on television against the reforms, his voice was grim and dour as he raised the old Tory shibboleth of freedom. ‘We all want better healthcare, better treatment … But in organising them, let’s make sure that your doctor doesn’t become the state’s doctor, your servant, the government’s servant.’ For all that Hill came from Islington, he acquired a slight West Country accent for this occasion, reassuringly bluff and English.

On 13 January 1948, the BMA called a plebiscite of its 35,000 members. ‘Our independence,’ it insisted, ‘will have been sacrificed to a soulless machine.’ An openly vituperative press campaign was launched, with Bevan satirized as ‘fuhrer’ in letters to the nation’s newspapers. The whole project was denounced as a ‘socialist plot’. On 9 February, Bevan presented his bill for an unprecedented fourth time; while in Newcastle, London and Liverpool, the BMA’s efforts bore fruit and the NHS was rejected outright by doctors. In Brighton, the ratio of rejection was 350 to 1.

Amidst all this, a subgroup emerged: the Socialist Medical Association, composed overwhelmingly of students, led what support there was for the NHS, in the face of hostility and ridicule. It was not uncommon for members of this group to be pointed out as ‘communists’ in the middle of a lecture. It was of a piece with the BMA’s language. They were convinced that with assimilation would come regimentation. Doctors would be forced to ‘march up and down’. The word ‘totalitarian’ was ubiquitous.

On 18 February 1948, the results of the BMA’s plebiscite came in. Thirty thousand had voted against, 86 per cent of the membership. Outwardly Bevan contrived to appear at once unbendable and good-humoured, but in private he confessed to a growing desperation. He consoled himself by trying to recall what first provoked his mission. ‘When I hear the cacophony of harsh voices trying to intimidate me, I close my eyes and listen to the silent voices of the poor.’ The man who it was said could make others believe that ‘their dreams were realisable’ was beginning to doubt. The bill had been passed but could not proceed. With victory in sight, the BMA felt it could begin to patronize its foe. Bevan was compared to ‘a very difficult patient’, self-willed but powerless.

Now at last the nation spoke. On 1 March 1948, a Gallup poll showed 87 per cent of the people in favour of the NHS, yet even this endorsement could not end the impasse. The National Health Service had a head but as yet no body, and if doctors chose not to work within his system Bevan had no means of compelling them. And so, unable to persuade the middle men of medicine, Bevan determined to woo its aristocracy. On 10 March he paid a visit to Lord Moran, president of the Royal College of Physicians and former doctor to Churchill. Moran headed the nation’s consultants and they in turn controlled the great charity hospitals: Barts, St Thomas’s, the London Hospital. These mighty institutions had reached financial extremis; in their vulnerability lay Bevan’s advantage.

The two men took an instant liking to one another. Moran, known as ‘Corkscrew Charlie’ for his supposed deviousness, saw in Bevan not the orator in his parliamentary pulpit, but a charming and persuasive man with whom one could reach an accommodation. Everything now rested on Moran, but he faced a challenge from Lord Horder, physician to kings and queens and a man whose views tallied with those of the BMA. On 26 March 1948, the Royal College of Physicians held its election. One by one its members dropped their silver coins into the bucket. Moran won, by only five votes.

Moran wrote to Bevan, explaining the deeper causes of the BMA’s intransigence. ‘My dear Nye,’ he began. ‘The irrational fears of GPs [are] that one day you will turn them into salaried servants of the state.’ This, Bevan felt, could be addressed. He therefore presented an amendment on 7 April which ensured that GPs would never be civil servants or wage slaves without a new Act of Parliament. What was more, he promised that the GPs could join the new health service while maintaining their private practices, something he had learned from the Tredegar Association. The cynicism was as striking as the magnanimity. ‘I stuffed their mouths with gold,’ Bevan boasted. But the BMA, still confident of final victory, remained unbiddable.

In spite of growing scepticism in the press, on 12 April Bevan insisted that his health service would be launched on time. The government appealed again to the nation, this time via a press campaign. ‘Every forty minutes, a child dies of diphtheria’, it was emphasized. Twenty million people now signed up for the service. Within five weeks, 75 per cent of the adult population had put themselves down for the free healthcare promised.

On 4 May 1948, the BMA turned again to its members for support. Now, however, almost 40 per cent had changed their minds. The swing was by no means complete, but it was enough. And so, on 28 May, the BMA advised all its members to join the NHS. What seemed a remarkable capitulation carried a caveat: they called for a delay. This would have meant final defeat for Bevan, whose riposte was to point out that there would always be more demands and more delays. The reply worked admirably.

But the NHS was still far from ready. Moreover, in two years costs had almost doubled, to £180 million. Most of the 3,000 hospitals were crumbling; age and the Blitz had seen to that. In London, not one hospital was unscathed. Most worrying of all, with five weeks to go, 30,000 new nurses were needed. Another campaign was launched, revealing once again the Labour government’s readiness to adapt to new media, but the press resumed its attacks: ‘Free for All’ and ‘Stop this Bad Bill’ were among the milder headlines.

It was Sunday 4 July 1948 and the NHS was to be open for business on the following day. Yet Bevan chose this day to launch an attack on his political opponents so intemperate as to be self-defeating. All the resentments of the past few years inspired this otherwise generous man to describe the Tory party as ‘lower than vermin … They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation.’ Why did Bevan launch his spectacular assault the day before the birth of the NHS? There was little in the way of calculation at work. In truth, while he spoke like a poet he thought like a child, with an immovable sense of right and wrong.

On the next day, the NHS was inaugurated. The event was signalled by the opening of the Trafford Park Hospital in Manchester. ‘It was like a wedding,’ remembered Mary Bane, a nurse. True to form, Bevan greeted everyone. He proclaimed that ‘we have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers. Now we are the builders.’ Attlee himself, in a period of illness, refused a side ward, insisting that he should be treated like anyone else. Nurses would find him chatting happily with his fellow patients. A spirit of gratitude, so long dammed up, now gushed forth. Even administrators would be given little presents, as if they had wrought this miracle themselves. There was, of course, a huge backlog of diseases, phlegmatically borne for want of any alternative. Women came to their GPs with their uteruses turned inside out. Men had gone about their affairs with hernias ‘the size of balloons’.

All this came at a cost: 240 million prescriptions were filled out, a fourfold increase in two years. The budgetary caps were soon broken, and an upper limit of £170 million swelled to £352 million in the space of two years. A citizen would soon have to wait half a year to see an optician. Thirty-three million sets of false teeth were made in the first nine months, many of them for children. Bevan and others had imagined a decrease in the numbers of people using the NHS as the nation became healthier, but a different law applied: gas expands to fill the space available. As medicine developed and demand increased, so costs rose. But the effects of the new service could not be denied. Deaths from infectious diseases fell by over 80 per cent. For a while, the opposition remained unconvinced and unrepentant. Lord Horder spoke of ‘this temporary minister’ and predicted that the good old days of private practice would soon return. But the NHS remained, and its GPs remained its motor. The role of the doctor had come full circle: he was again the helper and healer.

Bevan himself resigned in 1951 over Hugh Gaitskell’s introduction of prescription charges for dental care and spectacles. The funds were needed for a project particularly loathsome to a man of Bevan’s sympathies, the Korean War. Attlee felt obliged to speak of Britain’s ‘very serious financial position’; the Americans withdrew their ‘Lend-Lease’ provision, which had provided supplies without Britain having to pay for them, resulting in a disproportionate excess of imports over exports. In eighteen months, a committee was set up on the ‘Socialisation of Industries’ to concentrate on the Bank of England, civil aviation, the coal industry and cable and wireless, but the fatal continuation of union opposition, mismanagement and general incompetence did not respond to optimism. The era that had offered so many sweeping commitments was finding it harder to sustain them. In the Labour manifesto of 1950, the party in government still felt able to recall its New Testament roots:

Socialism is not bread alone. Economic security and freedom from the enslaving material bonds of capitalism are not its final goals. They are means to the greater end – the evolution of a people more kindly, intelligent, free, cooperative, enterprising and rich in culture. They are means to the greater end of the full and free development of every individual person. We … have set out to create a community that relies for its driving power on the release of all the finer constructive powers in man.

Never again was any party able to speak in such utopian terms. Once again the country seemed to be stumbling towards crisis. If it could happen in war, it could happen in peace. The scheme of nationalization had been put in place but many questioned whether it was of any actual benefit. They might have agreed with Churchill, who said it was ‘proving itself every day to be a dangerous and costly fallacy’. Nothing was going as well as it appeared.

An almost hung parliament in 1950 led Attlee to call a second election. Perhaps he had grown complacent, or perhaps he desired vindication. In 1951, after only six years, the Conservatives were returned to office, promising an end to austerity and the beginning of wealth. But austerity, in one form or another, was to last until 1955.

34

An old world

On 6 February 1952, the king died, and, quite by accident, an Elizabethan age was established. Another herald was the establishment of the Conservative government in 1951. Domestic duties were no longer considered as inevitable as they had been, and the status of nursing and teaching rose proportionately. Women were no longer merely duchesses, mistresses, housewives or labourers, but teachers of mathematics and gymnastics. It had taken the carnage of the world wars to illuminate that. There were complaints, as at all times of social change. Surely it was not proper to train women as doctors in a world where cuts in services were continually threatened?

The coronation of the young queen was, if anything, more panoplied and pearled than that of her father. For those with ears to hear it, however, a new and sombre note had been struck. The new monarch of Great Britain was not the Empress of India; she was proclaimed simply as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. Her declared devotion to ‘our great Imperial family’ was celebrated, but she understood her new place.

The preceding year had been marked by the Festival of Britain. If it could not match the opulence of its Victorian model, then that was its glory. The times were quieter, pockets shallower and the people less inclined to triumphalism, but the bunting fluttered and the beer flowed. The Festival inaugurated, too, the establishment of the ‘South Bank’ as one of London’s cultural centres. There were jarring moments, of course. One of the exhibits was a collection of printed rayon cloths, and the king was invited to inspect them but had no notion of their purpose. When enlightened, he was heard to mutter: ‘Thank God we don’t have to wear those.’ Despite all outward gestures to popular sentiment, the royal family could not fully share the shared experience. Their role during the war years was revealed as an anomaly.

The empire was in fact on the brink, though few cared to recognize the fact. India had gone in 1947, lost, according to political legend, by the condescension of the middle-class English rulers. In truth, the efforts of Gandhi, Congress and the Muslim League had done much to convince the British that they had outstayed their day. The government was presented with a choice: the nation could afford an empire or a welfare state, but not both. The princes of the subcontinent were warned by Lord Mountbatten that if they resisted integration into the successor states of India and Pakistan they would be cut adrift, with neither dominion status nor a place in the Commonwealth. Independence came at midnight on 15 August 1947, and with it partition. Although none had foreseen this, some 14 million people were displaced as a consequence and countless lives lost. The line dividing India from Pakistan was drawn by the British, with scant regard for local realities or feelings.

Without India, what value the empire? To be sure, people admired the blaze of imperial pink on the map, but the empire had been a faint glimmer of gaslight in the minds of most. The paradox of an imperial and industrial superpower that allowed so much poverty in its midst was precisely what had inspired Marx and Engels. Cyril Radcliffe, on many occasions a defender of the empire, and the man who was tasked with dividing India from Pakistan, found himself agonizing over the question for the rest of his life: ‘The gifts we brought … were Roman: peace, order, justice and the fruits that those things bring … Such benefits were admirable.’ But he also felt obliged to issue a caveat: ‘It may be that the government of one people by another can never be the best government in the long run, since benevolence and fairness are no substitute for national inspiration.’ Though he was speaking of India, his remarks may serve for the empire as a whole, which was to undergo osmosis on a vast and humbling scale.

It began quietly enough. When the Empire Windrush docked in the summer of 1948, it brought less than a thousand people from the Caribbean. Some had paid their way and some had hitched a lift, while others were soldiers. They had heard of the ‘mother country’, as it was still known, but few had visited it. At first, they and other groups were met with placards bearing the legend, ‘Welcome to Britain’. But what welcome lay behind the placards and the smiles? As the settlers settled, the legends changed and ‘No Coloureds’ became a common sight on boarding-house windows. In its own hideous way, it was inclusive. Any skin pigmentation darker than pink was refused. Who knew what might happen to the sheets?

The experience for the immigrants was dislocating in many senses. You arrived, and then you moved and, more often than not, moved again. The migration did not stop at Southampton. A soldier recalled:

When we arrived at Tilbury, a few people, political people, mostly Communists, you know, tried to befriend us … But all it needed at the time was who hadn’t got any place to go to, wants somewhere to go, and that was uppermost in our minds … you’ve got to go around and look, because in those days, it’s either two or three of you in a room, in those days, as a black man, it’s very hard to get a room, you wouldn’t get one. They always put on the board, ‘Black – niggers not wanted here’, on the board you know, these boards out there, ‘No Niggers’ or ‘No Colour’, things like that.

Vince Reid, the only teenager on the boat, highlighted a fact that many in England had chosen to forget: the Windrush generation represented only the latest chapter in the long tale of a Black England. ‘I was a boy. And I wasn’t expecting anything. But how I was received was when I went to school, first of all, I was a subject of curiosity, which is quite surprising when you think that you had black soldiers in England. And, you know, people would come up and rub your skin and see if it would rub off the black, and rub your hair and, you know, it’s really insulting.’

War films of the time, and later, show little of black men and women contributing to the country in any way. But for the immigrants, visibility could prove a curse. Tryphena Anderson recalled: ‘You’re not thinking of your skin, but you feel other people are thinking of it. And every little thing you do reflects on your reaction … if you get on the bus, and there’s an empty seat, you sit down … But when the bus fills up and you find you’re the last one to have somebody beside you, then you know something is wrong.’

Then there was the cold, which could steal through the thickest clothing, let alone the light but formal dress favoured by the new arrivals. Theirs was not solely, however, a tale of dislocation and prejudice. Warmth and friendliness could be found, often in the most surprising places. One immigrant recalls a visit to a butcher: ‘I got a mixture of genuine affection and a lot of curiosity. I always remember going into my first Dewhurst butcher’s shop, when I was about seven, and this big, large lady looked at me. She kept looking at me and then she turned to the butcher, and said, ‘Ooh, I could eat him.’ I’ll always remember Dewhurst butcher’s shops.’

The England to which they had come was hag-ridden and worn. The proud imperial nation of rumour or propaganda could be discerned with difficulty in a small, cramped island, still gasping from the blows of a war it had nearly lost. The promise of ‘diamond streets’ was belied by ones that seemed paved with lead, gashed by bomb sites, beside grey houses interchangeable in size and shape and a population which seemed so old. Along with anxiety, fear and relief, the immigrants sometimes felt a certain pity for the nation that had adopted them:

But what was most striking, I think, was the age of the people. At that time there were old men working on the stations, and on the buses there were old men or old women. There weren’t very many young people. And then we began to realise that the war had taken its toll of the young people between eighteen and probably thirty-five … and people were living in prefabs, and that was quite strange. You couldn’t understand why they were living in what we saw as huts.

Other customs also attracted bewilderment. There was a vast and varied network of child support, but many Caribbeans found it at once invasive and remote – the deeper support of family appeared to be lacking. Another novelty for many of the Windrush generation was being addressed as ‘sir’, which seemed bizarre rather than respectful. Some of the customs they encountered provoked fear and dislike among the immigrants, and for many it was difficult to determine which was harsher, the coldness of the climate or the coldness of the people.

It is easy to forget that while England might have wanted cheap labour, the early immigrants had other concerns, with education not the least of them. Among other blandishments, England had been touted as the land of educational opportunity, yet not all found it so. Russell Profitt found many sympathetic teachers but also a wayward and confusing secondary system. He had come from a culture where education was taken seriously as a tool for self-betterment; where study, not leisure, was the point of schooling. He encountered the new welfare-state approach to education, and racism was not quite the issue:

Most people in senior positions wanted to be helpful, but I don’t think they really understood the emotions I was experiencing, having to come to terms with the racial issue, having to come to terms with an education system that was quite different from the one I’d experienced in the Caribbean, where we were a lot more formal and a lot more structured and set in relation to work that we had to do by certain times. A number of black kids just got lost in the system.

Twenty years later, many mothers of Caribbean origin would be expressing concerns similar to those of Profitt’s mother: ‘My mother hadn’t gone through education in Britain, and so I don’t think she fully appreciated the way the system worked … The pressure was not on in the way I think Caribbean families expected pressure to be on teenagers.’ Baroness Amos recalls being relegated to the bottom of the class as a matter of course:

When I went to school, that was a bit of a shock, because I wasn’t tested before I was put into a class, and I was put into the bottom class, and I found everybody was kind of way behind what I’d been used to. But my parents were very assertive about that and went up to school and ensured that I was given a test, and I was moved. I think the other thing that I found difficulty dealing with was the environment, and the fact that it felt like a much less disciplined society.

She recalls reactions that derived from simple ignorance, an ignorance that was not unkind but inadvertently intrusive. ‘I was in the school choir, we would go and sing in what were then called old people’s homes, at Christmas. And they would all touch my skin and touch my hair, and I was the first black person they had ever seen.’ The empire had been an abstraction to most; now it was made flesh. Englishmen and women had new neighbours, new shoots in their garden, new influences to accommodate. The best in all major parties acknowledged a duty of care to the immigrants, whether because one should pay a debt of reparation to those colonized or because one does not let down old retainers. But no leader could afford to shout out the benefits of a multiracial community.

Just as the controversy concerning race rose higher and sharper in the Houses of Parliament, in clubs and in private homes, the very notion of racial supremacy was given its quietus. On 25 April 1953, Watson and Crick revealed the existence of DNA. With this discovery, our inheritance was shown to respect neither persons nor ideologies. ‘Racial’ origins might exist, but they determined nothing that might lead one group to consider itself superior to another. The lesson was to take many decades to filter down, and such affirmation would certainly be needed.

35

The washing machine

On 5 April 1955, Churchill retired as prime minister. He had had enough of his post, of parliament and even of power. For some years, anecdotes had circulated about his decline. He had known, and adapted to, more worlds than any of his generation, yet he could never reconcile himself to the loss of empire. His younger years had been spent fighting for it, and his later years maintaining it. Even his belief in a united Europe was born in the conviction that the Continent should take care of itself; Britain had an empire to govern. His successor would have agreed.

Anthony Eden had been the heir apparent for some time and could not always hide his frustration. Chafing at Churchill’s intransigence, he once dropped a hint about retirement. Churchill was heard to growl: ‘Don’t worry; it’ll be yours soon.’ There was little in Eden’s character to suggest that he would be anything less than a credit to his party. He had won laurels on every field: academic, military and diplomatic. And it doubtless helped that he was handsome and with a gentle charm. But there were worrying signs. Eden showed himself to be a foot-stamper, raging when he could not get his way. And it was unkindly suggested that he ‘bored for England’. Nor was the impression Eden gave of unassuming sincerity always borne out by events.

Eden distrusted his predecessor’s Atlanticism, but equally disapproved of any involvement in the nascent European Communities. His position was perhaps that of a latter-day Salisbury: unemphatically imperialist, but emphatically Tory. He was often accused of a lack of conviction but maintained that the preservation of peace was his lodestar. In any case, his conviction and resolve were soon to be tried. As the decade progressed, it was as if the submerging empire sought to whirl him down in its wake. The British state left its possessions with many backward glances of longing and not a little brutality, though the British people themselves had other concerns. And while it has been suggested that India had become unmanageable and even uneconomical by 1947, that Gandhi and Congress were ‘pushing at an open door’, many other colonies were restive.

Kenya was one such. If India was the jewel in the diadem of empire, East Africa was the string of pearls binding it. But British rule in Africa had left many communities at odds with each other. The Kikuyu had been the dominant tribe in the Kenyan highlands before the arrival of Europeans. During the Thirties they were expropriated, the final insult. The largely abandoned houses of ‘Happy Valley’, the supreme symbol of decadent Britishness in the colony, fell to the torches of the Mau Mau in the Fifties. Bloodletting became familiar on all sides, with colonial authorities resorting to the methods that might brand them as ‘imperialists’, and the Mau Mau to those techniques that would confirm them as ‘savages’. The death toll was vast. The Mau Mau outlasted the death of their leader in 1959, and four years later came independence. In the case of Kenya, the grievances were at least clear. Far less clear was the case of Cyprus.

On 1 April 1955, Britain’s most peaceable colony received a violent calling card from a new guerrilla group, EOKA. It seemed inexplicable to the mandarins of Nicosia, let alone to those of Whitehall – Cyprus had no obvious economic problems and its people were renowned for their lack of political ardour. When EOKA attacked a police station in Limassol, the initial reaction was one of bafflement, but the complaint of the assailants was simple. Why would the British not surrender their claims on Cyprus and let it join with Greece? In his memoir Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell found that his sympathies lay with the authorities: ‘as a Conservative, I saw their point. If you have an empire, you do not simply give it away.’ It was the presiding spirit, and at the time it still seemed an obvious and immutable law.

But such tempests rolled over distant seas; at home, all was calm. Eden, only weeks after Churchill’s resignation, felt ready to call an election. His confidence was vindicated. On 26 May 1955, the Conservatives again won the general election, with 345 seats to Labour’s 277. Among other considerations, the result represented something like a kiss blown to the new prime minister. The mandate was as much personal as political. Eden’s popularity sprang from his modest manner, his lack of overt jingoism and from the fact that he did not appear to be of the old guard. The age of ardent rhetoric and mighty personalities had passed, to be succeeded by that of ardent goodwill and good intentions. People were now ready for relaxed and unstated glamour.

That Eden was very much of the old guard, having been trained and educated under their systems, was overlooked. But surely the ancient conflicts had been dissolved in the post-war solution? For while the decade was Conservative in flesh, it remained Labour in soul. That a Labour epoch should result in a Conservative era was an irony that few statesmen, thinkers, housewives or labourers had the time or will to ponder. Once again, they had other concerns. The perennial needs were how to secure food, water and a roof. Beyond that, how to give them life and grace? The washing machine was a start.

36

Plays and players

Household appliances, or ‘white goods’ as they were termed, made slow and hesitant headway through British households. The glories of the ‘labour-saving device’ were not always apparent, but the washing machine undoubtedly aided the harassed housewife. It revolved and churned, slowly but assiduously, before the results were passed through a hand-operated or automatic mangle. It was the age of modern conveniences, or ‘mod cons’.

Some older traditions could still be found, although they often came in a modern guise. Families were encouraged to adopt a fashion known as ‘DIY’. The ancient art of pickling, too, was practised in households long after formal austerity had ended. It was to be expected: fridges were both expensive and cumbersome. Nor, in a climate that was scarcely subtropical, was the usefulness of these new appliances immediately clear. Still, they advanced on the swell of prosperity.

But there was a catch: these utensils were not always built with durability in mind. This was an unsettling development but perhaps an inevitable one, given that Britain had moved from being an exporting to a consuming society. A survey conducted in 1953 found housewives’ chief concern was that these new gadgets should last, but it was increasingly recognized that they did not. The market was skewed in favour of the supplier, and the interests of supplier and consumer were inherently at odds.

One of the more distinctive developments of the Fifties was the emergence first of the milk bar and then of the coffee bar. England had been a nation of tea-drinkers from time immemorial: tea, after all, had rescued England from the gin craze of the early eighteenth century and was the settling beverage of what has been called an instinctively phlegmatic nation. Coffee had been the drink of intellectuals, of the restless and the politicized, and had never gained wide popularity.

As is often the case, it was immigrants who changed this – Italian immigrants in this instance. The coffee bar, fuelled by the sprightly and galvanizing espresso machine, began to appear first in Soho, then all over London, and then throughout the land. At first glance, it bore little relation to the coffee houses of the eighteenth century, yet a family relationship can be discerned even in the variations: pipe smoke had been replaced by cigarette smoke, the stench of bodies by that of cooking grease, and the politics by music.

There were other signs of emerging affluence. In 1954 the meat ration ended, and wartime austerity fell away. Another shoot sprouted on 14 September in that very eventful year, when the first comprehensive in London, Kidbrooke School, opened its gates. Less than a decade after its inception, the grammar school system was already under assault. Children were selected, at the age of eleven, for grammar schools, secondary moderns or technical colleges. It is perhaps best understood as a mentality that saw privilege as something that must be earned. Paradoxically or not, we may see in it the impulse that led William of Wykeham, in the fourteenth century, to establish a college for boys disadvantaged by circumstance but avid for learning. It is noteworthy that neither Attlee nor his successors in the Fifties attempted to dismantle the public schools. Perhaps they had more nostalgia than some of their successors. By these lights, the grammar school meritocracy set up under Labour in the Forties was unimprovable. If universal education was to be imposed, then a basic fact had to be acknowledged: different pupils had different aptitudes. Let the academic become academics, and the handy become handymen. If you failed the eleven-plus you were simply meant for other tasks, often more socially useful.

The first objection lay in the title of the exam. Was it wise, just or even sensible to determine the future prospects of a child at eleven? The second objection, of course, was that rejected pupils could not help but feel that failure, and express it. Secondary moderns became bear pits for the unwary. The third was that the role of technical colleges was ill-defined, for all the benefits they brought to many, and as a result they were underfunded. They soon disappeared, and even now they represent an unmarked grave in the history of education.

It was a year of advances. On 2 February 1954, the government announced £212 million for road development, including the first motorways. In the same month, it announced that 347,000 new houses had been built in the previous year. They were sturdy and serviceable, if oddly designed; they tended to the triangular, particularly in the suburbs of London.

While England’s physical highways thickened and deepened, the country’s moral certainties seemed increasingly fragile and vulnerable. On 13 July, Ruth Ellis was executed for the murder of her lover, becoming the last woman to be hanged in Britain. The calm courage in her decision to admit her guilt impressed many. When the prosecuting counsel asked whether she had truly intended to kill her lover, she replied: ‘It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.’ In true eighteenth-century fashion, she dressed herself immaculately for her trial, and even dyed her hair. A campaign for her reprieve was launched, but she wanted no part of it. Her executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, wrote later that hers was the one execution for which he felt not a jot of remorse. Her record was against her, certainly, but then so was that of many men.

Ellis’s execution pricked awake a sleeping giant: the justice of capital punishment itself. The cabinet was divided on the question. The Commons were to vote for abolition in 1956, but the Lords voted against. When Pierrepoint sought the position of official executioner, it had to be explained to him that no such office existed: it was not quite English. Rab Butler, home secretary in 1957, was not at first an abolitionist, but his agonies over the choice of life or death were palpable. ‘Each decision,’ he wrote, ‘meant shutting myself up for two days or more … By the end of my time at the Home Office I began to see that the system could not go on, and present day Secretaries of State are well relieved of the terrible power to decide between life and death.’

The Homicide Act of 1957 was a compromise that satisfied no one, least of all the humane Butler. It was predicated on the notion that punishment should be exemplary rather than condign. The legal and moral incoherence of this approach would soon be apparent, and only a few years had to pass before government was obliged to choose between unravelling the tangled noose and cutting it.

It was a decade in which many supposedly inviolable traditions would be questioned. In 1957 a report on sex and sexuality was assembled. It is ironic, perhaps, that the Wolfenden Report echoed many of the concerns raised by the law it sought to overturn: the Labouchere Amendment. The issue, as before, involved prostitution. The ‘blackmailer’s charter’, as the 1885 amendment was known, was motivated in part by its author’s drive to extirpate underage prostitution. The Wolfenden Report sought to protect prostitutes from being exploited any more than they were already. Two years earlier, the Church of England had assembled a memorial on the question of sexuality, urging the government to ‘separate sin from statute’. It is hardly coincidental that the Church’s reputation for gentle compromise arose just as its political influence began to falter.

Meanwhile, the Cold War crept across minds and cabinet tables in a new Ice Age of anxiety. In its progress, it encouraged a curious doublethink. On the one hand, Stalin’s purges, the Ukrainian famine and even the Gulag itself were scarcely known; Stalin was still invoked as ‘Uncle Joe’. On the other, the Red Menace hung like a crow over a peaceful meadow. Its hour would come soon, it was whispered, and in that hour all freedoms, and perhaps all life, would be extinguished. For it, too, had the Bomb.

The Labour party under Attlee disavowed any connection with communism and even expelled members suspected of being fellow travellers. Communists were held to have powers of concealment almost preternatural in scope, and on 11 February this superstition seemed vindicated when Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who had disappeared in 1951, now took shape again in Moscow five years later. Of the two, it was Burgess who caught the public imagination. He was charming, erudite, handsome and clever, qualities that made his apostasy all the more puzzling. ‘Surely only the aggrieved could become socialists?’ ran the reasoning. But Burgess had no genuine grievance, beyond a conviction that his peers had failed to appreciate his gifts. Like many English radicals, Burgess quickly found that he had little taste for Russia or the Russians. Apart from anything else, he missed cricket. Again, like many radicals, his nursery was Eton College. This school has often been seen as the forcing ground of the English establishment, but any paradox dissolves under scrutiny: Eton taught self-reliance within an atmosphere of uneasy equality.

Anger howled in many alleys during this supposedly settled period. The English theatre, dominated for four hundred years by bourgeois or aristocratic concerns, was to celebrate the kitchen and the bedroom along with the fury they might nurture. On 8 May 1956, Look Back in Anger was first staged.

English theatre was previously notable for three professional playwrights and two poets. J. B. Priestley, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan had very different styles and political opinions, but their subjects were broadly the same: middle-or upper-middle-class people whose ingenious attempts to fend off reality led to comic or tragic failures. They were schooled in the tradition that the business of art was to entertain rather than preach. While these three wrote in a style that owed at least something to the cadences of ordinary speech, T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry wrote in verse, on explicitly or subtly religious themes. During the post-war years, overt religious affiliation was gradually being diminished. How could it draw audiences when it could scarcely keep congregations?

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger embodied other spirits. And when Jimmy Porter, a young man fulminating against the world, savages the women in the play for their supposed distance from reality, he sets the tone for later generations. The play could only have belonged to the newly affluent, newly educated Fifties. The Royal Court used the expression ‘angry young man’ to describe Osborne, shrewdly hinting that they had coined it. But it was a term already current in 1951. And its most distinctive avatars appeared in fiction, not on the stage.

To call the movement ‘leftist’ would be reductive and inaccurate, and ‘workingclass’ will not quite serve. The opening salvo of the movement is an instance in point. John Wain’s Hurry On Down, published in 1953, tells the story of Charles Lumley, an irritant abroad, and his search for freedom and authenticity. Such a quest is ideally bourgeois, but the time was not ripe for that irony to be apparent: the middle classes were not yet rich enough. Lumley becomes a window cleaner, a chauffeur and a drug dealer. True love proves his salvation in an ending that is at best uneasily hymeneal: he and his love simply look at each other, their expressions ‘baffled and enquiring’.

In an introduction to the 1985 edition, Wain took up the gauntlet of critics who had accused him of being peripheral to the angry young men. As he pointed out, his novel predated those of others in the movement. ‘If anything,’ he wrote, ‘I started it.’ This claim can be justified on other grounds. In many ways, Charles Lumley is far more typical of the movement than either Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. Though in no sense a son of the tenements, Charles contrives to reinvent himself as one. Once a social fetter, a workingclass origin had become a rosette.

One of the book’s characters, an old soldier, speaks of how the working classes had ‘got above themselves since the war’. C. S. Lewis, too, felt that the working classes had been ‘flattered’ under the post-war settlement. If so, it was a flattery that many were eager to accept. A superstitious dread grew around what had once been known as ‘middle-class values’, even as the middle classes spread inward from the suburbs and so deep into the heart of national life that they seemed close to comprising the majority.

Like the post-war consensus itself, the phenomenon of the angry young men was in part the creature of public perception. In any case, it would have defeated the object of those authors to be placed in a group; it was a confused and fissiparous trend. And what provoked the anger? Partly the perceived failures of the political class, but primarily the continuing existence of class in the first place. The culture of aristocracy had gone up in steam, and a mist of gentility fell. ‘True’ democracy lay as far off as ever. The promises of the Left had addled, and those of the Right were so much chaff. England seemed a drab, chiffon-choked, tea-and-cake-smothered boutique, all too often with a ‘CLOSED’ sign. So what remained for a reflective soul but indiscriminate anger? As Kingsley Amis suggested in later years, ‘annoyance’ might be the better term. Amis himself made a literary career of it, and his protagonists evince this quality to a high degree. In Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon ends his lecture on ‘Merrie England’ with a comically drunken diatribe directed at ‘The Esperanto crowd’, but the rage expressed is curiously apolitical. In this, Amis was as much of his nation as of his class. The English rarely maintain intensity in political matters – sooner or later, their instinct is to wipe the sweat from the demagogue’s collar and propose a soothing cup of tea.

The post-war years had brought fables of spiritual or material collapse, from That Hideous Strength to Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four. During the Fifties, the novel seemed to be settling back to its journalistic roots – quotidian in subject, unpretentious in style – but the zeitgeist is a wayward wind. Among writers of fiction, another response was offered to the bewilderments of the post-war world, which was to fly above it. In 1955, The Return of the King, the last instalment of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was published. It was the resurrection of heroic romance, tempered by its author’s memories of war.

It tells of a small, unregarded race of Middle-earth, the ‘hobbits’, who ‘arise to shake the counsels of the great’. The freedom of the world hinges upon the destruction of something tiny, beautiful and evil, a ring forged by a fallen angel. While elves, men and dwarves fight, two hobbits are tasked with the destruction of the great destroyer. A whole world, formed of its author’s experiments in language, came into being, to the extent that if anyone were to point out that ‘Middle-earth’ is only a translation of the Norse ‘Mittlegard’, the hearer would respond with a shrug. It was there, whatever its origins.

For the English journalist Bernard Levin, it offered a beautiful and salutary reminder that the ‘meek will inherit the earth’; for the American critic Edmund Wilson, it was ‘juvenile trash’, a story of good boys being rewarded. In spite of the naysayers, the popularity and influence of The Lord of the Rings grew to unprecedented heights. Tolkien himself, a scholar and devout Catholic, was later to find his work taken up as a banner by most unlikely allies, a group that came to be known as the ‘hippies’.

In 1958, T. H. White offered a quite different vision of the past and of how it should be interpreted. Like Tolkien, he was an academic, and unappeasable loathing for the cant of politicians and the horrors of imperialism also bind the two. But there the comparisons cease. Where The Lord of the Rings progressed from being a story for children to a novel for adults to a romance for our ancestors, The Once and Future King was postmodernist, which so soon after modernism was a remarkable feat. A picaresque version of the story of King Arthur, it subverts everything possible in the revered legend. Here, Arthur is ‘Wart’, an idealistic but callow boy who is to be sent to Oxford in the Dark Ages. Merlyn is an eccentric tutor with birds in his hair, whose wisdom comes from having lived backwards.

Beneath the aphorisms and persiflage, White’s book hews its way into the rotten heart of statecraft and of power. Anachronisms abound, and the last is the most terrible. Mordred’s troops use shells on London, at which juncture Arthur knows that the age of chivalry is truly dead. In time, ‘fantasy’ would be the lazy catch-all term for this genre. It is one that both authors would have rejected – they were addressing reality.

37

Riots of passage

In an age renowned for its dourness, foliage seemed to sprout from the furniture. Roses were stitched on bedspreads, lilies on sofas and orchids on ‘pouffes’. Images of the countryside enriched an increasingly suburban England. That the countryside was in retreat lent the fashion an added poignancy. But if interiors had become cosier, public spaces had grown unforgiving. The ersatz opulence of rose-scattered sofas was met by a countertrend in public spaces, owing much to the new severity of American and continental fashions. Clean, sharp lines were favoured in cafes, clubs and office blocks, as if the world of science fiction had already landed.

Another group of angry young men began to appear; they may have been rebels without causes, but they possessed flags and war cries in abundance. In 1953, vague references to the ‘New Edwardian style’ sharpened to a name: the Teddy boys had arrived. They bore little relation to the clean, pretty boys of the Eighties who would wear bright colours and winsome smiles – the ‘Teds’ of the Fifties did not set out to please. It had begun as an upper-class trend. After the war, tailors had attempted to encourage trade by resurrecting the fashions of the Edwardian era. Their market was the wealthy, but workingclass teenagers developed a taste for the new style. How could they afford it? Either by paying in instalments or by sticking to the cheapest but most distinctive items of the look. Its prodigality spoke of a new phenomenon in an affluent working class. The Teds did not merely copy the clothing of the 1900s – they parodied it, adding elements such as the ‘zoot suit’ favoured by black gangs in the United States. A mirage of respectability would become the conduit for rebellion. Quickly, and cheerfully, they established a reputation for violence. The Garston ‘blood baths’ of Liverpool, where Teddy boy gangs regularly clashed, were infamous.

But not all teenage boys were Teds, and not all Teds were members of gangs. The stigma was largely unearned; it was, above all, a style. More significant was the role of the press in creating that stigma. English youth had been cynosures of disapproval since the glory days of the apprentices in the seventeenth century. The Teds were heirs to the apprentices, in spirit if not in diligence, and thus a fear of supposedly feral youth was again coaxed from its cave. No one who stood out in those days could be trusted, particularly when they wore a costume which was considered to be ‘as outlandish as it was sinister’.

Here, Edwardian elegance was twisted. In place of fob watches, the Teds sported bicycle chains, their purpose unsettlingly clear. The tight ‘drainpipe’ trousers stopped just below the ankle. Broad, crêpe-covered ‘beetle-crushers’ stood in place of brogues. And then there was the famous hairstyle, on which two birds made their mark: a cockatoo’s comb in front and a ‘duck’s arse’ behind. Just as the last strands of aristocratic influence were falling between the shears, the dandy had been resurrected, though now he was workingclass.

And in this perhaps lay the true offence. For though it was only ever hinted at, many must have felt that it was simply not ‘proper’ for the working classes to ape the dress of their betters. Swinging their chains, combing their hair, locking and unlocking their razors, the Teds paced the streets. Their uniform was their own rather than the garb of a trade, for they had no trade. Thus we may truly speak of the first teenage ‘style’, not that they were in the slightest measure revolutionary. If anything, they could show a vein of fascism. Events later in the decade were to bear this out.

Whether the Teddy boy was as great a source of societal pollution as many believed is doubtful; it was more significant that pollution as a whole had become an urgent matter of public health. When the mist of the Thames met the murk of the chimneys in a fog of eerie green, silence and blindness fell. For years, Londoners had told visitors not to trouble themselves about it, but any such insouciance lost its charm in 1952. In that year, the ‘London Smog’ claimed 4,000 lives. The gay, gaudy city that Monet had painted less than a century before was obliged to clear its lungs. On 5 July 1955, the Clean Air Act was passed, a somewhat delayed response to the smog that had struck in the coronation year.

A simple trade agreement between France and Germany in the late Forties was now taking root as the European Communities began to cohere. The cabinet’s Economic Policy Committee remained unconvinced on Europe. It was ‘against the interests of the United Kingdom to join the Common Market’, it asserted in November 1955. This was understandable. There was a confidence that England, supported by the Commonwealth and with her mighty transatlantic ally beside her, could retain her former stance.

In 1956, the island received a double irruption from East and West. Khrushchev and Bulganin arrived from the Soviet Union to begin an official visit to the UK. Little came of it in practical terms, but its symbolic significance was enough. Bullish, brash but shrewd, Khrushchev had nothing in common with Eden, who on this occasion offered little but a blustering assurance that Britain would go to war to guard her oil reserves. The visit was further marred by the mysterious loss of a British soldier around the wreck of a Russian submarine. The other irruption was the showing of Rock Around the Clock, a short American film about nothing in particular. Its significance was to be far more than symbolic, since it was the first rock-and-roll musical extravaganza.

The first signs could be felt of a fraying in the post-war consensus. On 1 June 1956, Macmillan warned Eden of financial collapse. Inflation would continue if Britain continued to live beyond its means. The promise of full employment had been central to the Attlee settlement, but, coupled with defence spending and overseas commitments, it was proving hard to sustain. From the disenchanted and disenfranchised Left came a new approach. In that year, Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism was published. Crosland remains an ambiguous figure in the annals of the Labour movement, and this in part reflects the ambiguity of his thought. His book was well regarded at the time, but it is little remembered now. The oversight is easily explained: his ideas were taken up, almost forty years later, by a politician far more ambitious and considerably more accommodating.

Crosland argued that the post-war consensus was in danger of failing its own goals. Nationalization had become an empty shibboleth. Socialists were in danger of mistaking means for ends. They must remember that their primary mission was to abolish poverty, not inequality. He wrote: ‘We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places.’ There had been too much flattening in the socialist vision; it was time for humanity to be lifted. In one respect, Crosland’s insights were tacitly acknowledged to be unanswerable. Nationalization needed nourishment, after all. The trope ‘while stocks last’ increasingly applied not just to necessities in the home, but to those that fed and fired the household. How long could coal, gas or electricity last?

Perhaps Calder Hall, now known as Sellafield, was named by someone with a sense of historical irony. No hall of the fading nobility needed to be demolished for this nuclear power station to replace it. Thus, on 17 October 1956, it became Britain’s first nuclear power station. The young queen opened it ‘with pride’. England was ready, in principle, to have her firesides warmed and her streets made safe by what Oppenheimer, the inventor of the Bomb, called ‘the destroyer of worlds’.

In 1956, England was to be weighed and found wanting. Far away, in a protectorate that had grown tired of being protected, a man had seized power – with cunning, bullets and a brilliant smile as his weapons. Gamal Abdel Nasser had plans for Egypt, and indeed for the whole Arab world. In what was proclaimed as a simple assertion of sovereignty, on 26 July 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal. This was taken badly in Westminster.

Anthony Eden was in many respects an instinctive diplomat, with an almost preternatural gift for languages and for compromise. He had no obvious reason to clash with Nasser. They were both patriots, after their fashion; both knew well the limits and dangers of militarism. But Nasser was a consummate opportunist. In quietly shifting from Egyptian nationalism to pan-Arabism, he had amassed far greater moral resources than his British counterpart could boast.

When Nasser took the Canal, for many countries the chief artery of oil into Europe, Eden was moved to respond. And his response was unequivocally warlike and strangely personal. What moved him to compare his former ally to Mussolini and Hitler remains a puzzle. He was to claim in his wilderness years that he could not stand by and see the lessons of the Thirties forgotten. Whatever his motives, on 5 November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt.

The dishonesty in the plan was palpable even then. Israel was to launch an attack on Egypt, and then France and Britain would ‘intervene’ before leaving an armed force for the maintenance of peace, the cooling of tempers and the reopening of Suez. Israel had some reason for her actions; the other aggressors had only an excuse. Besides, too much in the plan had been predicated on the support of the United States. Churchill might have been able to coax them, but he would have had a deep well of respect to draw from. Eden did not, and his hunger to bring down Nasser led him to disregard the most glaring tokens of American unease. The United States had in any case made clear its opposition to any act that might so much as smell of European colonialism, and Eisenhower denied any American support for the Suez adventure. With that, a barren cause became a lost one. As they were advancing down the Canal, British and French troops were given the order: cease fire.

Reactions to the debacle were mixed. People who had never cared about the empire were moved to wonder why Britannia invicta had been worsted. Eden attempted to brazen it out but heart trouble struck, a misfortune seen by some as less an act of God than of expediency. Perhaps they were right, and his life was not in fact as deeply in peril as his doctor suggested. He never disavowed his decision over Suez. Perhaps, having committed himself so far, he could not withdraw. Eden was not stupid, but his judgement was bewildered by the fear of being considered a weakling. Churchill foresaw it all and feared for his successor: ‘Poor Anthony’ was his verdict. In any event, on 9 January 1957, Eden resigned.

It was as well that he did. The empire he had known and loved had begun to haemorrhage. The Mau Mau in Kenya were unbroken, despite the capture and execution of their leader. The EOKA fighters in Cyprus still raged. And on 6 March 1957, Ghana won independence, precipitating the end of British colonial rule in West Africa. Suez is often seen as the moment when the British Empire collapsed. It was not: the Second World War had rendered the empire unsustainable. But it represented the moment when the absence of something never before valued began to be felt.

Having lost its empire, Britain had to find its strength, or ‘credibility’, in other arenas. Britain might have established Calder Hall for innocent, or at least neutral purposes, but the nuclear arms race must still be run. On 15 May 1957, Britain tested its first hydrogen bomb. The battle to achieve this was painful for everyone, whatever their political stripe. Churchill, who had seen more wars than any of his peers, was horrified at this new development.

Aside from building houses and dismantling empires, caring for the old and for the young, and receiving guests that it had once known only as servants or slaves, England had to address the perennial problem of how to direct and mobilize its citizens. Inspired as much by the German as by the American example, the first motorway was laid. On 5 December 1958, the M6, the Preston Bypass, was opened and the ‘motorway age’ was thus tacitly inaugurated. And in 1959, the M1 was opened. The motorway was to acquire almost mythic connotations. In later years, it became, like the Thames, a cynosure of wonder.

To call national service a ‘rite of passage’ would be simplistic or misleading. For many it had the character of a pointless hiatus, robbing the participants of precious years that could have been spent working or playing. For others it was an exhilarating introduction to manhood and responsibility. In either case, it was almost impossible to avoid. A nation that had only recently emerged from war needed to keep its spine stiff and its sinews supple. National service was a typical example of how a temporary emergency can prompt a major alteration. Britain still had the peace to keep in Europe, allies to support and an empire to protect. It was promoted as a kind of trade-off for all the benefits of the welfare state. But the allies proved unstable and the empire untenable.

The training itself was if anything harsher than that imposed in wartime – there was an illusion to protect, along with the remains of empire. Dangers there were, whether roaring or skulking, and the still renowned British military was needed to face them. But in any case Britain needed its youth to be healthy, if they were not to end up like Teddy boys, shiftless and disobedient. In the event, the Teds flourished under national service. The hair was a problem, of course, but it could be hidden. In fact, the style was the only real objection of the training officers. One observed: ‘We’re a proud lot in the Airborne and feel that these modern fashions that a few of the chaps like rather lets (sic) the mob down.’

Other contemporaries were less predictable. Among the few who mourned Eden’s departure deeply were four young men whose brand of humour created at a stroke the modern alternative tradition. Eden’s consonants, snipped off by his protruding front teeth, had been succeeded by the languorous vowels of Harold Macmillan, which were far less susceptible to imitation. The Goons, the lords of Fifties radio comedy, must have sighed in disappointment at the gently genial new PM. They came together above a fruiterer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush, and their backgrounds were as difficult to represent as the new age itself. Michael Bentine was an Old Etonian, Peter Sellers a Jewish boy from Muswell Hill, Harry Secombe was a Welshman, and Spike Milligan had been born in India, his father an army captain.

Unlike many later comedians, the Goons had no interest in innuendo, or indeed in sexual matters of any sort. It was comedy in the tradition of Ben Jonson or the Restoration playwrights, with the difference that the types shown by the Goons were all not merely eccentric but palpably insane. The nation had excitement and opportunity, but too little in the way of salutary madness, which now the Goons unveiled. To get life insurance, all one had to do was to ‘get deceased’, for example. And the names were a feast. Denis Bloodnok, always blaming his wind on ‘curried eggs’, tells us nothing and suggests everything. And it was comedy for radio, for airwaves that could carry at last something more bracing than cheerful propaganda and interminable organ music. The voices, whether shrieking or whining, bellowing or wheedling, filled the home with brisk and contrary winds of every sort.

A forgotten irony lies in the notion of the post-war consensus, since in truth it had been developed under both Labour and Tory auspices. By the mid-Fifties, however, notions of a grand ideological confrontation existed only as fodder for journalists. The belief that the state must support its citizens if it is to demand anything of them had been tacitly absorbed by all parties. The post-war consensus was at last in place. The only question was whether it could hold its own.

Nationalization of services was almost complete by the mid-Fifties. To return the means, and the fruits, of production to the producers had been the grand mission. But how much had really changed? The children’s book series Thomas the Tank Engine by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry spanned three decades but began in 1945. The anthropomorphic engines have a fond mentor in the rotund shape of the Fat Director, Sir Topham Hatt, Bt. In the tale of James the Red Engine, the Fat Director becomes the Fat Controller. Clearly, nationalization has struck. It had been a project advanced as much by Conservatives as by socialists, and it was not always easy to see how the central cast had altered. The Fifties saw a gradual acceptance of the post-war settlement. Government cooperation with the union movement continued, and even accelerated, under the Conservatives. At this point, all appeared to be in agreement.

With widening education, however, came a certain unease. Was to be educated to accept the thirty pieces of silver? Such a notion would have seemed strange a hundred years earlier, when an education was a source of pride for many of the working class. But the working class was itself in transition, culturally and racially. The word ‘minority’ also changed its meaning in the Fifties. Before, it had usually referred to the Welsh or to women; now it turned outwards, to signify the immigrant. The notion of a ‘white’ England was most often a chimera; there had been black communities in England long before the Windrush generation, just as there had been black servicemen in the war. And as for the empire, the English knew it as something in the papers – now they learned of it through their neighbours.

But the riots that broke in Notting Hill in the summer of 1958 had nothing to do with neighbours. It was a hot, hate-filled summer. One black resident recalled the riots thus: ‘We could feel the pressure was there … You were constantly being threatened on the streets.’ ‘Kill the niggers!’ rose the cry on Portobello Road and Colville Road. It was a grisly echo of the Thirties, when ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Yids’ cawed from the throats of blackshirts. Caribbeans were targeted, and their property attacked. But then, after years of battening down the hatches, they turned. ‘We were getting the worst of it, until a few of us decided to fight back … And when they came, we attacked before they did and they ran away.’ The police did their best, but the tide had turned. As well as bruisable skin, ‘minorities’ had heart, muscle and spirit. It was not the Teddy boys’ finest hour. They participated gleefully in the baiting of Caribbeans, but were then repelled.

Racism was not the only neurosis to afflict the country. As Hugh Gaitskell saw it, there was a creeping undercurrent of anti-Americanism too. ‘It is easy to see,’ he said, ‘how powerful anti-American sentiment can be when to this already difficult relationship is added the genuine fear felt by many people that America will land us all in war.’ It was prophetic in many respects, but he need not have worried. Beyond the environs of Westminster, the people were largely untroubled by the concerns Gaitskell ascribed to them. By the Fifties, any residual resentment towards American culture was balanced by a hunger for its boons. And the music sent over the airwaves was a boon indeed. Whatever was resented in the fiscal debt to the United States, the youth of England appreciated this inrush of hope.

First from the jukeboxes of the milk bars and then from the cafes, in the music that cooed over the airwaves there was an influence both old and new. It was the brash, generous, overbearing confluent of the United States. During the Second World War, willing girls and reluctant boys had begun to notice that Americans seemed to have it all, and the Fifties did everything to encourage that impression. In 1956 Bill Haley & His Comets released ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an example of the new trend known as rock ’n’ roll. The genre had numerous parents, all of them black, but political considerations required that its ambassadors be white. Haley himself was a plump little man with a kiss-curl on his forehead, fronting what was, in essence, a jazz band. Yet his energy and panache submerged all objections.

He was followed by Elvis Presley, or ‘the King’, as he became known. Songs like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Hound Dog’ would not have passed muster later, when musicianship and wordcraft were prized, but when sung in the Elvis purr and accompanied by gyrations so suggestive as to give the singer the sobriquet ‘Elvis the Pelvis’, they achieved mass hysteria and Olympian sales. It also helped that he was not merely handsome but beautiful, exciting but unthreatening. This was not, of course, the rock ’n’ roll that purists recognized; for them, Chuck Berry was the king. In lifting the old blues from the piano to the guitar, he had become the founder of a genre. This would be remembered in the slumbering years.

The blaze of excitement soon settled in England. Sooner or later, the instinct of a young audience is to scramble onto the stage and join in, but despite its workingclass origins, rock ’n’ roll needed instruments that were far beyond the means of English youth. Pianos, double basses, drums and even guitars lay at an impossible distance. It seemed as if an old law would reassert itself: the passion dies that cannot be performed.

The name ‘skiffle’ was a dialect word from the West Country, meaning ‘a mess’. In the United States, the term came to be applied to a kind of music in which only the most rudimentary instruments were employed. Appropriately enough for such a ramshackle genre, skiffle came to England by accident. Chris Barber had formed a jazz band, and its new banjoist was Lonnie Donegan. They were recording a disc but had run out of songs to play. Donegan had a suggestion: ‘What about some skiffle?’

In the United States, its homeland, skiffle had already been forgotten. Unlike jazz or the blues, it was barely a genre. This was interlude music at best, a distraction proposed when there was nothing worthwhile to be played, no real musicians to play it and few instruments to play it with. Nonetheless, the other two unpacked their instruments. And then, in what has been called his ‘pseudoblues wail’, Donegan broke into ‘Rock Island Line’. No one knows when the song was written, but all agree that the songwriter was a convict, and the song is one of yearning for escape.

The song tells of an engine driver who successfully smuggles a stash of pig iron past a railway toll gate. A more American theme could scarcely be imagined, but that was the point. Not Bill Haley & His Comets, nor Elvis, nor even Buddy Holly so galvanized the British young. They were haloed at an almost unbridgeable remove from British realities. In any case, white rock ’n’ roll, or ‘rockabilly’, the music offered by Haley and Elvis, could be a curiously sedate affair; it was music for joyful or even elegant dancers. Perhaps, when the Teddy boys tore up the cinema seats, they were not so much fired by rock ’n’ roll as impatient with it. Skiffle might have been rudimentary, but it was never sedate.

Moreover, Donegan, short, thin, ostentatiously workingclass and British, was ‘one of us’ – if he could do it, so could everyone. And then there was the simple rush of the tune, and the wild, whooping triumph in its chorus. The skiffle craze was sparked. As has been many times remarked, ‘We owe it all to Lonnie Donegan.’ The principle was simple. If you wantedrhythm, you scraped a washboard; if a double bass, then you strung a washing line to a sweeping brush and rammed it into a tea chest. If you couldn’t afford a guitar, you could surely get a banjo. A comb-and-paper kazoo could serve for a harmonica, and puffing into a jug created a sound not unlike a tuba. In short, you could create such music on your own.

Skiffle itself might have died without issue. The sound was thin and scratchy, and the ease with which it could be played made it restrictive for serious talents. That it did not die is in some part due to a man nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, whose real name was Paul Lincoln. On 22 April 1956, he and Ray Hunter refounded a club in Old Compton Street as a coffee bar, ‘The 2i’, with a music venue downstairs. There was little or no seating. The tiny stage for the musicians was built from milk crates and planks. Even the microphone had been a relic of the Boer War. Performers were paid, so the legend ran, in coffee and Coca-Cola, and alcohol was not served. Skiffle could not have wished for a warmer cradle. It did not last long into the succeeding decade, and in this it was typical of the coffee bar boom. Espresso bars still flourished, but no longer as conduits of musical talent. They would never die, but they would have to adapt.

38

North and south

On 8 October 1959, the Conservatives under Macmillan won the election by 365 seats to Labour’s 258. The unofficial campaign slogan was ‘We’ve Never Had It So Good’. Macmillan had proved himself worthy – now he had only to make ‘it’ even better, whatever ‘it’ was. He had beguiled and persuaded the nation by virtue of his Edwardian charm, but he remained in certain respects a little-known figure.

‘A born rebel’ was how Lloyd George described the young Macmillan. The young of Sixties England might have found it hard to spot a rebel in their prime minister, but those living further afield would not have been surprised. By 1960, decolonization was already underway, but the process had been halting. Macmillan had always believed in the nascent strength of the smaller Commonwealth nations, and on 6 January he reaffirmed this in a speech in Ghana. The choice of location was deliberate: Ghana had won its freedom by peaceful means, its new leader following the example of Gandhi. This, coupled with the sobering examples of chaos and bloodshed in former French and Portuguese possessions, led the shrewd and compassionate Macmillan to conclude that empire could not coexist with African nationalism.

This speech passed largely unnoticed, but when he repeated its central points in the parliament of apartheid South Africa, the world took note. After thanking the relevant dignitaries, Macmillan proceeded: ‘At such a time it is natural and right that you should pause to take stock of your position – to look back at what you have achieved, and to look forward to what lies ahead.’ The tone was that of a kindly headmaster sending his boys off into the wider world, and was received as such. However, his next observation garnered him a good-natured laugh. ‘This afternoon I hope to see something of your wine-growing industry, which so far I have only admired as a consumer.’

The following section could have been received as a polite nothing, but for the more attentive there was a bite beneath: ‘We in Britain are proud of the contribution we have made to this remarkable achievement. Much of it has been financed by British capital.’ He praised the South African contribution to the two world wars, saying, ‘As a soldier, I know personally the value of the contribution your forces made to victory in the cause of freedom. I know something too of the inspiration which General Smuts brought to us in Britain in our darkest hours.’ The reference to Smuts, a hero of Anglo-South African relations but no friend of apartheid, would not have been missed. Then came the sweetener: ‘Today, your readiness to provide technical assistance to the less well-developed parts of Africa is of immense help to the countries that receive it.’ At last, he moved to the image for which the speech would be remembered. South Africa, he said, was ready ‘to play your part in the new Africa of today … Ever since the break-up of the Roman Empire, one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations … Today the same thing is happening in Africa, and the most striking of all the impressions that I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness.’ Macmillan’s voice rose in declamation as he rapped the lectern. ‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent. And whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. And we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’

There was silence in the hall at this blasphemy. But Macmillan, the consummate performer, was prepared. His message, if not his tone, became unctuous. ‘Of course you understand this better than anyone; you are sprung from Europe, the home of nationalism. And here in Africa you have yourselves created a new nation. Indeed in the history of our times you will be recorded as the first of the African nationalists.’ It was a masterly performance – this was logic not so much employed as deployed. And with his most resonant image behind him, Macmillan came to the true point. ‘We may sometimes be tempted to say “Mind your own business”. But in these days I would expand the old saying, so that it runs, “Mind your own business, but mind how it affects my business, too.”’

For of course, if South Africa continued along its present course, mayhem would be the result. Macmillan concluded with what may best be described as a sermon.

Our aim has been … not only to raise the material standards of life, but to create a society which respects the rights of individuals – a society in which men are given the opportunity to grow to their full stature. And that must in our view include the opportunity of an increasing share in political power and responsibility; a society in which individual merit, and individual merit alone, is the criterion for a man’s advancement, whether political or economic … Those of us who by the grace of the electorate are temporarily in charge of affairs in my country and yours, we fleeting transient phantoms of history, we have no right to sweep aside on this account the friendship that exists between our countries.

Rarely has one speech had such an influence. In its aftermath, South Africa fulfilled the ugliest expectations of the world first by committing the Sharpeville Massacre and next by withdrawing from the Commonwealth altogether. By the end of Macmillan’s tenure, the fourteen colonies of Africa had been granted independence and reduced to four. Macmillan had won many friends for Britain abroad – in the United States, the UN and in Africa itself.

And Macmillan needed all his friends, for the ranks of his critics were swelling. Recalling a broadcast by the prime minister, Malcolm Muggeridge observed unkindly:

He seemed, in his very person, to embody the national decline he supposed himself to be confuting. He exuded a flavour of mothballs. His decaying visage and somehow seedy attire conveyed the impression of an ageing and eccentric clergyman who had been induced to play the prime minister in the dramatized version of a Snow novel put on by a village amateur dramatic society.

Nevertheless, Macmillan could boast of many admirers. While his cabinet was composed overwhelmingly of public schoolboys and while his family connections stretched from Westminster to Chatsworth House, he had a fan in a tall, saturnine young student with a fondness for sweaters by the name of Peter Cook. With Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, Cook formed the ‘Beyond the Fringe’ group. Unlike the Goons before them, they derived their humour not from caricature but from observation. They performed with almost no set beyond a piano. The target appeared to be what was becoming known as ‘the establishment’, and yet their humour had always a samizdat quality in its ironical deference. In one sketch of 1961, Peter Cook played the prime minister in a spoof party-political broadcast. His meandering, deadpan delivery was uncanny. Such satire was addressed at a persona, of course, but this persona was itself a role that Macmillan assumed. It was a success. Intransigent foe and improbable allies were to be swayed by it.

Macmillan, who was dubbed ‘the most radical politician’ in Britain by Attlee, was in fact a ‘soft’ socialist, and the economic policies he urged upon his chancellors reflected this. In times of dearth, demand must be stimulated. Thus was inaugurated a period of ‘stop-go’ economics; government spending was increased to ensure growth, and then curtailed in order to stanch inflation. The result was ‘stagflation’, a monster sired by spending and bred upon austerity.

By the spring of 1962, Selwyn Lloyd, the upright, talented, but unimaginative chancellor of the time, was the target of ever more hostile feeling. The Orpington by-election of March, where the Conservatives were heavily defeated by the Liberals, was only one sign of a wider disaffection. Leicester was also lost, to Labour. Called to the cameras, Lloyd was unrepentant. The important thing, he maintained, was that the chancellor do ‘the right thing’, regardless of by-elections or popular feeling in general. Yet his sharp, fluent delivery was belied by his hands, which swayed and jerked like those of a puppeteer. Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, was not alone in feeling that the malaise sprang from the leader rather than from the chancellor. He wrote to Macmillan, claiming that ‘the party had lost its sense of direction and its sense of conviction, and this was due to neglect from the centre’.

Macmillan was unmoved. While he felt respect, affection and even pity for his brilliant but troubled chancellor, he had grown dissatisfied. The country had turned against the Tories, and it would not be long before it turned against Macmillan himself. Lloyd, he wrote in his diaries, was ‘finished’. There were fears that the government might tumble. Iain MacLeod, Conservative party chairman, privately urged the prime minister to remove Lloyd, and events moved swiftly. A leak to the Daily Mail suggested that Macmillan was intending a radical reshuffle. The source was never named, but all knew that Rab Butler was responsible. When Macmillan summoned Lloyd for a talk, the chancellor was at first perturbed and then astonished; Macmillan seemed ‘flustered’ and upset, staring at the floor. The affable, imperturbable grandee babbled about mysterious ‘plots’. At last, Macmillan broke the news. A ‘less tired’ mind was needed in the Treasury. Outwardly, Lloyd remained cheerful, but Jonathan Aitken, the sole remaining member of his staff, recalled, ‘He was broken by it, shattered … He walked up and down our croquet lawn for five hours.’

As Butler put it, ‘A prime minister has to be a butcher, and know the joints.’ Other ‘joints’ would now be severed, in what became known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. On 13 July, Charles Hill, the housing minister, Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor and an early supporter of Macmillan against Butler, Percy Mills, Sir John McLeigh, Harold Watkinson and David Eccles were all informed that they must step aside. Macmillan later claimed indeed to have felt greater pain than the men he had removed, yet his reaction was not surprising. Macmillan’s grandson observed that even before giving away prizes at a prep school, Macmillan would be ‘sick and quivering’. There had been no plot, of course, and the only result of this professional butchery was a widespread loss of faith in Macmillan. ‘Supermac’ became ‘Mac the Knife’ and then ‘Supermacbeth’.

But two more victories awaited him. Both were in his dealings with the United States, in the contested field of nuclear defence. Macmillan had long urged the need for Britain to possess an independent nuclear capacity. The Americans were sympathetic, but there was one difficulty: why should Britain feel the need for a deterrent of its own, the ‘Europeanists’ at the White House enquired, just when it was seeking admission to the protective pale of Europe? And what would the Europeans themselves feel about this? Macmillan believed that without a deterrent of its own, Britain would lose stature. Moreover, surely the strength of Britain’s proposed marriage to the Community lay in its substantial military dowry? First, the Skybolt missile was proposed, but, after endless wranglings and misunderstandings, the scheme was dropped. With weeks to go before negotiations with the EEC were to begin, Polaris was substituted. Britain was now a true nuclear power. The arrangement had been smoothed by the warm personal relations between Macmillan and President Kennedy. While their subordinates bickered, the two war veterans quietly took matters in hand at Nassau. It seemed that the ‘special relationship’ had been triumphantly reaffirmed. One cloud crossed the bright, hopeful sun. When, in a telephone conversation, Macmillan recalled the glory days of Nassau, the president was oddly distracted and unresponsive. ‘When was that?’ asked a puzzled Kennedy. ‘The Nassau meeting,’ answered Macmillan. ‘Oh yes – very good.’

But if relations with the United States had now warmed, those with the European nations were floundering. Among the six original nations of the Community, France, led by de Gaulle, was the paramount power. His hostility to his former benefactors had always rather slumbered than slept; the knowledge that Britain possessed an independent nuclear capability yet seemed unwilling to share it with its continental neighbours pricked it awake. But now, it seemed, mighty Albion wished to join the European Economic Community. Neither de Gaulle nor Adenauer, his German counterpart, was minded to make the process easy.

‘I don’t believe in abroad,’ Quentin Crisp once wrote. ‘I think that all foreigners speak English behind our backs.’ Crisp’s words would have had resonance for many in England. Now many felt that the United Kingdom was about to wander into the same crevasse as its predecessors, at unfathomable cost. Thus the Labour politician George Brown remarked on Britain entering the Common Market: ‘It is not the price of butter which in the end really matters. It is the size, stability, strength and political attitude of Europe that matters. We have got to have a new kind of organisation in Europe…if we don’t succeed, I doubt whether there will be much of a Britain for our children’s children.’

Yet even so ardent a Europhile as Brown believed that Britain could, and should, enter the fold as its shepherd. The new chancellor, Reginald Maudling, was forthright on the question when he confessed that ‘the French do not want us in Europe at all. The Community of the Six has become a Paris/Bonn axis’. This complaint would echo down the decades, though with Berlin in place of Bonn. In opposition, Harold Wilson invoked a fear that entry into the Common Market would be a betrayal of the Commonwealth: ‘If there has to be a choice, we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Düsseldorf.’ Gaitskell, though in many ways sympathetic, was also realistic. Many Labour members saw Britain being ‘sucked up in a kind of giant capitalist Catholic conspiracy … unable to conduct any independent foreign policy at all’.

It is salutary to remember that at its inception, the European project was what we might call ‘faith-based’. Purely practical considerations came later, when the aftermath of the Second World War made trade cooperation a matter of overwhelming urgency. But now negotiations for Britain’s entry had begun, led by the chief whip, one Edward Heath. He spoke for many of his generation when he recalled what he had seen at the Nuremberg trials: ‘We were surrounded by destruction, homelessness, hunger and despair. Only by working together had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation. Reconciliation and reconstruction must be our task.’

Heath was a magnificent negotiator, whose talent for detail, doggedness and deep love of all things continental raised him above any previous British minister. However, he had to deal with the hostile de Gaulle and the suspicious Adenauer. On 29 January 1963, France announced that it would veto the British application. Familiar objections were advanced: Britain was an insular nation with maritime interests and had too close and dependent a relationship with the United States. But de Gaulle went further: ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘there would appear a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and leadership which would soon swallow up the European Community.’

It was hard for the British delegates to determine which was the more demoralizing, the veto itself or the hypocrisy with which it was sauced. De Gaulle, for all his swagger, was simply frightened at the thought of the British crashing into his pond. He acquired infamy as a man who could neither forget nor forgive a benefit. Macmillan himself, who had supported de Gaulle during the war in defiance of his superiors’ doubts, felt less bitterness than grief. The mass of the people were either delighted or, more worryingly for their leaders, indifferent. The success of Macmillan’s ‘stop-go’ economic policies was also under increasing question, as was his continuing fitness for rule. But it was neither incompetence nor senescence nor nemesis which brought down this wily innocent.

John Profumo, the minister for war, was respected in the Commons. He had a modicum of talent, an easy charm and a weakness shared by many men in power. At a party at Cliveden House, then owned by Lord Astor, Profumo had met a model named Christine Keeler, the protégée of one Stephen Ward, osteopath and socialite. Initially cool, Keeler was nonetheless an impressionable teenager and soon began an affair with Profumo that lasted just under a month, and there the matter might have rested. But Keeler had also made the acquaintance of ‘Eugene’, a Soviet attaché and spy. Periodicals picked up on the increasingly insistent hum of rumour, and Keeler herself began to blab.

Profumo denied any impropriety to the House and even sued the relevant newspapers. But when the case came to court and both Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies testified, he was left helpless. He resigned and vanished into the East End to do penance by helping the poor. Meanwhile, Keeler went to prison for perjury, the largely innocent Ward committed suicide, and Mandy Rice-Davies contrived an elegant skip from notoriety to fortune. The leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, knew better than to exploit the scandal for its sexual content. Instead he stuck to the question of national security, leaving Macmillan diminished and lame. At last the prime minister resigned, for reasons of ill health, protesting his innocence of the whole affair. He had presided over boom and bust, prosperity and uncertainty, had restored, or perhaps even created, the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, had rescued his party from the disaster of Suez and overseen the end of empire. Who then was to replace this splintered colossus?

The Establishment Club in particular, set up by Peter Cook to continue the tradition of Beyond the Fringe, mourned his loss: he had been prodigal meat for satire. But while the satire boom was only scotched by television, the Establishment Club was killed by it. The vein of alternative comedy was by no means exhausted, however. Private Eye was founded in 1961, produced by a very different crowd from that of Beyond the Fringe. They were more acerbic and less funny, but the venture flourished.

With the airing in November 1962 of That Was the Week That Was, the new comic movement moved to the television. After the show was cut to a watchable length, its fans were treated to the growing presence of household names on the screenwriting credits. Keith Waterhouse was one. Above all, there was David Frost, flat and uninspiring but a television ‘natural’. But the show’s appeal soon waned. It became, of all things, pompous: wit descended to invective, harmless joshing to self-important malice.

In The Other England, the journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse attempted a survey and analysis of England as a whole. It was published in 1964 as a kind of sequel to Priestley’s English Journey, although ‘corrective’ might be the more fitting term. Moorhouse begins by referring to an article entitled ‘The Condition of the North’. It was written by George Taylor, chief education officer for Leeds, who commented that

it is fairly safe to assert that the Northern child will receive his education in an old, insanitary building planned on lines wholly inappropriate for contemporary teaching, his teachers will be too few in number, probably inexperienced, possibly unqualified, and constantly changing … If he attends a grammar school, its children will be, like him, drawn entirely from the local workingclass community.

The assumption that grammar schools catered for the working class is one Moorhouse challenges. The grammar schools were intended primarily for the industrious working class, but they somehow abandoned an ethos of intellectual endeavour for one of material advantage. He went on to add, ‘I would suggest that one of our Englands today is a circle whose perimeter is approximately one hour’s travel by fast peak-hour train from the main London termini; the other England is the whole of the country outside that circle.’ In short, the Home Counties represented a hallowed pale of wealth and opportunity.

An anonymous article written in the early Sixties by a resolutely southern author for a national newspaper, and quoted by Moorhouse, sums up best what was wrong with the metropolitan mind: ‘I was eating a moussaka in Bolton the other day which (though nice) was made of potato, and it suddenly made me realise how little you can take aubergines for granted out of town.’ The inadvertent comedy is of course twofold: the sneer is ostensibly directed at the north, but it also reveals how little the author knows of what most Londoners ate. For Moorhouse, the real divide is between the Home Counties and everywhere else. Yet for all his affection for the regions he knew, Moorhouse was ready to cheer on the wrecking ball and the bulldozer; in this he was typical of the cognoscenti. ‘I, too, should hate to see these [customs] go because they mark a people still in touch with their roots. But if they represent the price to be paid for making Lancashire cleaner, less dilapidated, and generally more wholesome, then I’m afraid I should be on the side of those who are prepared to pay it.’ It may be suggested that this approach has fallen foul of history.

It was no longer true that ‘Britain’s bread hangs by Lancashire’s thread’, as the slogan put it in the Fifties. Most of the cotton mills still remained at the beginning of the Sixties, but they were scarcely the source of the nation’s prosperity. Nonetheless, the looms rattled on; in the third quarter of 1963, they numbered 123,400. As a cultural or political force, however, Manchester was in hibernation. In 1963, the United States closed its consulate there, and the Manchester Guardian was the Guardian by the early Fifties.

Manchester Grammar remained the leading light in preuniversity scholarship, however, putting the public schools to shame. The city even had its own answer to the ‘London Peculiar’ – the phenomenon known as ‘Darkness at Noon’, the great canopy of soot that occluded the city.

39

Elvis on a budget

Religious differences could still linger. In the early Sixties, the Scottish community, anxious to preserve Liverpool as a bastion of the Reformed faith and the Tory party, cried out in a pamphlet: ‘Romanism is the greatest enemy of our civil and religious liberty and if we lose these inestimable privileges for a mess of Socialist pottage we shall indeed be unworthy of the heritage won for us by our grand Protestant sires.’ However, such conflict began to ease when the slums were cleared and new houses built; the communities were no longer sequestered. Those of different confessions were obliged to cooperate.

Then there were the football fans who were, as Moorhouse observed, Liverpool’s most controversial export. ‘A strange, alien people they were, too,’ he wrote, ‘who swore more fluently and often than we did and who openly relieved themselves on the Bolton terraces, which didn’t go down at all well in that continent town.’ The Cavern Club on Mathew Street also had little to recommend it to the non-specialist. Yet it was to acquire a certain cachet and even piety of a kind.

The bouncer on the door disapproves of unexpected visitors. ‘This place,’ he observes gently, ‘is becoming a bloody shrine.’ And so it is. There are CND symbols and other daubs of paint crudely applied around the entrance. Half-way down the steep wooden staircase you find yourself stumbling into an atmosphere which is thick, sweet, almost tasty. In the Cavern something like a couple of hundred youngsters are compressed together under three low barrel-vaulted ceilings separated by stubby, arched walls … The walls are running with condensation. No one seems to notice the acute discomfort of being there.

This ‘foetid ill-ventilated hole’, as Moorhouse puts it, was an unlikely ‘shrine’ to what was soon known as ‘the Mersey Sound’.

The well-attested but elusive link between delinquency and a lack of education had long preoccupied all the major parties. In October 1963, the Robbins Report on higher education led to a flowering of new universities. These were not ‘red-brick’, in colour or in connotation. Rather they were of plate glass. They won many awards but few devotees. Yet they were quite as rigorous in their demands upon the students as any that preceded them. It was surely no accident that the iconic quiz show University Challenge was aired on TV just as the building of ‘plate glass’ reached its apogee in 1963, nor that the first university to win the challenge was the humble University of Leicester.

On 19 October 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home became prime minister, to the dismay of Rab Butler’s supporters, who felt that the natural successor had been passed over in favour of a desiccated Scottish nobleman. For its own part, the opposition was delighted. Here was a prime minister whose very appearance ran counter to their vision of a nation gleaming and galvanized. But though cadaverous, aged and out of touch, Douglas-Home had a thorough mind and was helped in his role of physician to social grievances by a courtesy and warmth rare in politics and rarer still among the aristocracy.

The inevitable election fell, and was won by Labour – the only surprise lay in the narrowness of the victory. ‘Be prepared’ is the Boy Scout’s watchword, and Harold Wilson – who had assumed the leadership of the Labour party after the death of Gaitskell – adhered to it throughout his political life. Even in the presence of the queen he could not restrain himself from harking back to his days as a Scout. Like Enoch Powell, he had spent his time at Oxford indulging in what was still considered a rather eccentric pursuit – learning. Those who had observed his intimidating capacity for work chose to recall him as a plodder, forgetting his formidable intelligence. Yet he was a member of that surprisingly common breed, the unreflective prodigy. Grand political creeds held scant appeal for him and even at university he had shown little interest in politics. He was also genuinely benign, wanting the best for everyone as long as not too much was required in the way of moral courage. In short, he was almost as kind as he was genial and almost as genial as he was clever.

Wilson was vastly aided in his work at Number Ten by his wife’s indifference, which left him free to spend the necessary hours closeted with aides and ministers. Mary Wilson, reclusive, devout and devoted to her husband, took little part in parliamentary life. Instead of doing the rounds, she composed poetry. One of her volumes sold 75,000 copies on its first print run. Whether explicitly religious or simply expressive of a vague but poignant yearning, her poems are suggestively titled: ‘The Virgin’s Song’, ‘If I Can Write Before I Die’, and a piece that might have been named by one of her husband’s more ardent critics on the left: ‘You Have Turned Your Back on Eden’.

Still, Harold Wilson needed a helpmeet. Though Marcia Williams was strictly only Wilson’s political officer, she soon became his confidante, imposing her will in matters that lay far beyond her remit and openly challenging ministers of the crown. Predictably, hints of a dalliance sometimes surfaced, but for all Wilson’s lapses into political infidelity, he was devoted to Mary. He was also a northerner, quick-witted, seemingly phlegmatic and reassuring. In this he had his luck to thank, for the north had already come to prominence with a speed that none could have predicted.

‘Did you have a gramophone when you were a kid?’ asked an American interviewer of George Harrison, lead guitarist of the Beatles. The answer came in the amused, undulating tones of Liverpool. ‘A gramophone? We didn’t have sugar.’ It was a classic Liverpudlian tease, and of a piece with Harrison’s character.

Liverpool was not quite in the doldrums suffered by Manchester, but it was scarcely a cultural hub, at least not so far as London was concerned. For all its racial and religious diversity, and its accomplishments in trade, it seemed, in the words of a contemporary, ‘utterly unglamorous’. And yet in one vital respect, Liverpool was blessed. It had access to the sea, which meant access to records and American music.

Boredom can awaken the sleepiest creative urge. The banality, as much as the poverty, of post-war Britain inspired the musical bloom of the Sixties. For there was little or nothing to do when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and the Davies brothers grew up, little at least in the way of leisure. The family could provide music, fun and a hearth, but this triad is itself suggestive that England had not only declined but contracted. Beyond the home, the world of pleasure was thin. The music halls were in retreat and the cinema was a minnow beside the whale it had been in previous years. Rationing was still in force. Children still played in bomb craters, often finding toys sturdier than any to be glimpsed in shop windows.

For those in their teens, the world was scarcely brighter. Simple pleasures, furtive transgressions, sporadic and apolitical violence were the recreational prospects to hand. The young men brought up amidst the ruins of the Blitz had nothing but a promise of freedom offered from abroad. And one could always improvise: having nothing, the young had to make. As we have seen, however much rock ’n’ roll might be worshipped, loved and danced to in England, it could not easily be emulated in its most glamorous form. Even guitars were almost a luxury item. As for drum kits or amplifiers – these items might as well have been the golden fleece. How could anyone follow Elvis on a budget of shillings?

Liverpool had a proud, if murky, past but no observable future until, as if by magic, there appeared four saviours. The Beatles arrived at the Cavern Club via a long and winding road. In the late Fifties, John Lennon, an artistic maverick of workingclass stock and middle-class upbringing, had established a skiffle group called the Quarrymen. When the polite Paul McCartney offered to play, Lennon was confronted with a choice. The younger man’s obvious talent was clearly a threat, yet it would enrich the band immeasurably. Later, George Harrison, a friend of McCartney’s, joined, with nothing but a slow, wise wit and ‘the dogged will to learn’ to recommend him. The future Beatles lacked only a drummer. Indeed, the search for a permanent drummer, one who moreover would be a true ‘Beatle’, was to exercise them for almost three years. During those years, the Beatles had served in Hamburg. Their career had been undistinguished to date. One rival even complained of the impresario Alan Williams’ decision to recruit ‘a bum group like the Beatles’. But it was in Hamburg that they became the Beatles. Forced to contend with nightly bar fights, they learned that playing music was about pleasing others, or else. When they returned to Liverpool in 1961, they were hardened and fast. The songwriting partnership forged between Lennon and McCartney seemed to later commentators a gift from the gods: a minor lyrical genius (Lennon’s) was smelted with a major musical talent (McCartney’s). Now they needed only a manager far-sighted enough to see this.

He appeared in the shape of Brian Epstein, a charming, gifted salesman, who owned a record shop in Liverpool, and was, moreover, homosexual. Invited to the Cavern, he found himself entranced by the group and offered his services as their manager. ‘All right then, Brian,’ said the typically gracious Lennon. ‘Manage us.’ ‘Guitar groups, Brian,’ said one unimpressed producer. ‘They’re on their way out.’ And so it seemed. The record labels were unimpressed by the Beatles’ music, and still more by their caustic humour. Decca, the biggest corporation of all, turned them down. But there was still Parlophone, which had George Martin, a classically trained musician who was used to orchestras and the occasional novelty act. He recognized their talent and, having recently worked with the Goons, was amused by their irreverence. When, at the end of one session, he asked if there was anything they didn’t like, Harrison observed, ‘Well I don’t like your tie, for a start.’

They had to do the rounds of cover versions, of course, but then they presented Martin with a song of their own, ‘Love Me Do’. It was pronounced an ‘odd little dirge-like thing’ by Martin. When Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones first heard it, he felt ‘physical pain’, and he cannot have been alone. It was not much of a song by later standards, but it reached number seventeen in the charts and was a respectable achievement.

‘How Do You Do It?’ would, in George Martin’s words, ‘make the Beatles a household name’. But they were unimpressed – they had grown bored of performing others’ work. They had a song of their own, they said. This was ‘Please Please Me’. When they had finished, George Martin spoke over the tannoy. ‘Congratulations, gentlemen,’ he pronounced, ‘you have just made your first Number One.’ And so it proved. From its opening notes, the song is a cascade of ebullience, with the inimitable harmonies that would soon emerge as the Beatles’ trademark. Written largely by Lennon, it was sung in the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent used by all British performers at the time. The chords, too, were American-inspired, and yet it was clearly English. The harmonica ‘riff’ which opens this rock song almost precisely replicates that most English of sounds, the peal of church bells.

The oyster had been prised open at last. ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ all went to number one. And the sound at their concerts was ‘one of incessant screaming’ from delirious fans. Having seduced the United Kingdom, they conquered the United States, and the phenomenon known as ‘Beatlemania’ was born. It has been said that the British bands of the Sixties were simply offering the Americans American music, stripped of any ugly political associations. But they were also offering the United States a version that was distinctively English, with rhythms, tunes, traditions and frustrations peculiar to England. By now any musician from Liverpool was hunted, then feted. The Mersey Sound was succeeded by Brumbeat, and the Tottenham Sound. There was hope for everyone. The Beatles were followed by the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Troggs, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals – all both singing and composing.

For those of a certain age, the history of this English music is well known. Where once it was surprising it is now familiar, but the music and lyrics seem fresh. That was their contribution, to the Sixties and beyond.

The Stones and the Beatles were friends, uneasily sometimes, but the Kinks were not friends with either. Prickly and intense, they did not make friends easily. Gerry and the Pacemakers had known the Beatles since the beginning. The Who didn’t know anyone. But the point was not friendship so much as fruitful competition.

Where the Beatles were influenced primarily by rock ’n’ roll, the Stones were a blues band, and never strayed very far from those roots. And between the Beatles and the Stones lay a tiny but crucial age gap. Lennon and McCartney had both been ‘Teds’, while Jagger and Richards were part of a new breed peculiar to the Sixties, the ‘Mods’.

The term itself derives from ‘modernist’; unlike the Teds, the Mods saw themselves as the heirs to the American ‘beatniks’. They were, in short, of the middle class. Not that they advertised the fact. Rather, they followed the trend established in the previous decade for aping the manners and mannerisms of the street. They wore their hair long, in imitation of bygone Chelsea artists. The accent, however, was all their own, comprising a nasal drawl – in this respect, Mick Jagger was the exemplar. In the words of one radio journalist, his cadences were imitated ‘by almost every middle-class public schoolboy in the land’.

In respect of violence, however, the Mods stood proudly in the Teddy boy tradition. Sentencing a Mod, George Simpson JP offered a denunciation worthy of Cromwell: ‘These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums … came to Margate with the avowed intent of interfering with the life and property of its inhabitants.’

The Stones had been in no real sense ‘rivals’ to the Beatles. Under the leadership of Brian Jones, they were undoubtedly talented and distinctive, but they were also derivative, and seemed content to rework the forgotten classics of the Mississippi Delta. Their new manager Andrew Loog Oldham had other plans for them. They must become the ‘anti-Beatles’. ‘The Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to burn your town!’ and ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ were among the slogans he coined. Above all, he had plans for Mick Jagger. It was the frontman, not the leader, who caught his attention. Brian Jones would or could not write songs in the new style, which he despised as chintzy and commercial. Loog Oldham saw that his protégés would disappear if they didn’t follow the Beatles in songwriting. By the mid-Sixties, most of the major bands were writing their own material – there was simply no choice. The Beatles had not only opened the gate for others, but inadvertently chivvied them through. Neither Jagger nor Richards was an instinctive or natural songwriter. But with ‘Satisfaction’ this was to change. It had its origins, so legend has it, in a dream. The opening guitar instrumental, or ‘lick’, is ominous, funereal, even threatening. In its harsh rise and fall it seems to growl that ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’

40

This sporting life

It is most unlikely that Harold Wilson sympathized with this new musical aesthetic, for all his extolling of youth. But he felt some allegiance to his fellow northerners. This led him to propose that the Beatles be awarded MBEs for services to export. The queen approved, and in 1965 John, Paul, George and Ringo received their small gold crosses. Of Her Majesty herself, they said: ‘She was great, just like a mum to us.’ One disgruntled old soldier sent back his own MBE, protesting that the honour had been awarded to ‘vulgar nincompoops’. And even those who were more sympathetic must have agreed with Geoffrey Moorhouse: ‘One day it will all be over,’ he wrote. ‘We shall have worn out our records of “She Loves You”’.

In politics, as in music, nothing is ever certain. Given his five-seat majority, Wilson could not embark on the restructuring of Britain to the extent that he desired. His wishes, however, were Olympian. The rush of provision between 1964 and 1965 for the most vulnerable now seems uncanny in its beneficence. In 1965, redundancy payments were introduced. Council homes increased from 119,000 in 1964 to 142,000 in 1966. The Protection from Eviction Act ensured that tenants need never fear a rap on the door in the early hours. The Industrial Training Board provided for generations of workers to come. The Trade Disputes Act of 1965 restored the legal immunity of union officials. And the Race Relations Act made it an offence to discriminate against any on the basis of race. Most revealingly, widows’ pensions trebled in 1966. It was as if a sacred well had overflowed into a river of gold. The government’s majority needed all the support it could muster, yet the goodwill of Wilson and his colleagues was beyond question; it was their deep intent to unfurl the canopy of the welfare state far wider than Beveridge and even Bevan could have conceived. By 1965, the sociologist T. H. Marshall could speak of a new consensus in the belief that it was the business of the state to look after the people.

It was education that had brought Wilson from Huddersfield to Downing Street, and he wished that advantage for all. Under his aegis, the percentage of GNP spent on education outstripped that on defence. Thirty new polytechnics were built. There were free school meals for children. The number of teachers in training vastly increased and the student population grew by 10 per cent each year. Every citizen, Wilson hoped, would soon be assured of some form of tertiary education. In 1969 the Open University was inaugurated; if you still could not go on to higher education, it would come to you. The dream of universal education was not as radical as it appeared, yet it was not to be. Instead, Wilson was to be credited for a step over which educators, politicians and parents have been at war ever since.

On 12 July 1965, Anthony Crosland assembled plans for a fully comprehensive system of secondary education, one that would do away with the divisive eleven-plus. Many had received a grammar-school education superior to that of the best public schools; but for those who failed the eleven-plus, the experience of a secondary modern had only served to dig a deeper sense of inferiority. Wilson’s own attitude was hard to gauge. Outwardly, he gave Crosland his familiar support, while privately he felt corralled by the Labour Left. He had even been heard to declare that grammar schools would go ‘over my dead body’. The problem grew more urgent as Labour’s tiny majority fell to one. The balance of payments, moreover, was revealed to be the worst since the war. The government had to go to the country.

The prevailing mood in the government and party was sleepy, unhurried and even bored. It was another sign of Wilson’s infectious self-belief, which the obvious unpopularity of the opposition’s new leader, Edward Heath, buffed to brilliance. Where Wilson came across as easy-going and confident, Heath seemed awkward, intense and uninspiring. And who, after all, could have expected an election less than two years after the previous one? Richard Crossman recalled the mood on the day of his own re-election, a day of ‘steady, perfect electioneering weather … Now it is we who are on the top of the world.’ The public agreed, and the Labour party resumed government with over a hundred more seats in the Commons.

It had been a beautiful morning, but there were ominous signs. Jim Callaghan, the chancellor, now faced a storm-tossed pound, and for the first time a forbidden word began to be whispered – devaluation. Just as this new threat emerged, an old one, union militancy, rose up from a long slumber. The NUS, the seamen’s union, walked out over weekend shifts. A shipping strike could do nothing but damage British maritime trade, perhaps catastrophically, and it would also make a nonsense of George Brown’s voluntary incomes policy. He had set the rate of wage increases at 3.5 per cent, while the workers were asking for 17 per cent. In a furious bid to break the impasse, Wilson spoke of ‘politically motivated men who … are now determined to exercise backstage pressures, forcing great hardship on the members of the union and their families, and endangering the security of the industry and the economic welfare of the nation’.

Blaming communist agitators worked and the strike was called off, but the victory came at an almost prohibitive price. It did nothing to help the pound and it sapped Wilson’s popularity among the backbench left and even within his own cabinet. This, in turn, led to a stillborn coup against Wilson, known as the ‘July plot’. The nation would never have accepted the erratic George Brown as a replacement for Wilson, but nonetheless it had been an enervating few weeks, and Wilson was ready to accept any distraction.

Since the Edwardian period, organized sport had acquired increasing prominence in national life. But it was cricket that dominated the early half of the century. Football was a local affair and inspired fierce loyalties, but the success or failure of the national team usually evoked little more than well-disposed apathy. With the growth of television, however, popular sympathies began to shift. Football was exciting to watch, but gentle on people’s attention span. A ninety-minute game was perhaps preferable to a five-day test match. Nonetheless, the news that the 1966 World Cup would be hosted by England caught the nation unprepared. It was hard for his aides even to make Wilson understand that football might stretch further than his native Huddersfield Town. As ever, he quickly adapted. But after a dispiriting series of failures, few imagined that England could win the tournament.

Alf Ramsey could imagine it, however, and he set out to ensure it. Ramsey was a scion of the respectable working classes; football was not a game to him, and his players were encouraged to understand that. While it would be unfair to suggest that England sleepwalked through the first three matches, theirs was not a game to inspire the faithful. But with the match against Argentina, all was changed. The England players might have been less skilful than their opponents, but they were dogged and relentless. Towards the end of the game, a header by Geoff Hurst won the game for England.

The Argentines took the defeat badly, despite having bent the rules to breaking point, and Ramsey’s inflammatory words after the game did not help matters. He used the term ‘animals’ to describe the defeated South Americans, and much of the world sympathized openly with them. The formidable Portugal side then lost to the English in the semi-final, in another result that confounded expectation. England was now in the final, and on home turf. At last the public was stirred and ‘football fever’ born.

The opponents in the final were West Germany. Joshing in the press about two other recent conflicts could not conceal the lack of real anti-German animus in the population – if anything, the German economic miracle of the post-war years had attracted admiration. The two sides were similar in many respects, tending to persistence rather than flair. The Germans scored first, a setback that served only to prick the torpor of the England side. England first equalized, then drew ahead. In the last frenetic ten minutes, the game became a true contest. The Germans drew level with one minute to go, and then the whistle blew. The English players were almost despairing, but Ramsey recalled them to their duty during extra time. ‘You’ve won the World Cup once,’ he told them. ‘Now go out and win it again.’ What followed proved one of the most controversial goals in history. The ball ricocheted between the German goalposts and at last the goal was given, to huge German protests. There was no debate about the next one, however: with seconds to go, Geoff Hurst lashed the ball into the German net. 4-2. England had won the World Cup.

The players collapsed, wept and embraced. The sun blazed brighter, the fans roared, and Bobby Moore, having wiped his hands before greeting the queen, held aloft the World Cup. The austere Ramsey, delighting in his players’ happiness, doffed his usual reserve and kissed the trophy.

With its new mandate, and despite a deeply unpopular austerity programme, Wilson’s government could at last begin its social programme in earnest. And so, after a long and often bitter battle, the efforts of Wolfenden, Lord Acton and their colleagues were at last vindicated. In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act legalized homosexual relations conducted in private between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one. Amidst the relief, joy and outrage, the act also provided some light comedy. In later years, a cartoon appeared, showing two middle-aged men in a bed, in the open air. Beside them, a police officer remarks: ‘Over 21 you are, consenting you may well be, but I question the privacy of Berkeley Square.’

41

Old lace and arsenic

It is in a sense ironic that 1967 should be remembered as the ‘Summer of Love’; the previous year had produced rather more of that commodity, for it was in 1966 that London had come to flower. The realms of drama, film, art and music glittered with palaces and blazed with gardens. It was the year of Lesley Hornby, a tiny, huge-eyed ghost of a girl better known by her family’s affectionate nickname, ‘Twiggy’. Led, or misled, by her example, young girls strove for a shape that later generations would regard as emaciated.

Twiggy herself was only the newest petal on an unprecedented bloom of English fashion. Indeed, by 1966, even Italy was prepared to offer an only slightly ironic bow to English efforts. Mary Quant was hailed as ‘the queen of the miniskirt’ by Epoca, while boutiques such as ‘Lady Ellen’ and ‘Lord Kingsay’ were to be found in Milan itself. Like many of a Welsh background, Mary Quant had recast herself as English almost at the moment she arrived in London. Her mission was simply ‘to open a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories … sweaters, scarves, shifts, hats, jewellery, and peculiar odds and ends’. This was hardly enough to distinguish her from many other designers, but she went further. She wanted, as she put it, ‘clothes that were much more for life, much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in … clothes to move and run and dance in’. It was to have huge repercussions, not so much for the country itself as for others’ perception of it. The young were the new market, and youth was all. From the King’s Road in Chelsea to the United States, her clothes – bright in colour, sharp in outline, endlessly adaptive – spread over continents. Rightly was Quant named the ‘Queen of Fashion’.

She had imagination and could tease out the silken quality in gingham, tartan, flannel and even PVC, the delight of fetishists. For her, there were no marriages of convenience between material and shape, only love matches. By 1966, she had been awarded the OBE, her companies bringing in more than £6 million a year, and five hundred designs soaring from her sewing machines annually. The boutique style also took off elsewhere, with Carnaby Street as the leader. The new clothes swirled around a new type, and indeed created it: this was the ‘dolly bird’, skinny, girlish, sexually assured and affluent. For despite the gushing of Quant and others, the new trends in fashion lay far beyond the reach of ‘dockers’ wives’. Twiggy herself was unimpressed. ‘Bazaar in the King’s Road,’ she said, ‘was for rich girls.’

It was likely, too, that the theatre was for rich patrons. The dominant item on the early-Sixties stage was still the kitchen sink. The dark, the ‘gritty’, the consciously inelegant, were paramount, just as affluent audiences expected and required. When a shift occurred, it did so teasingly.

Joe Orton was born plain ‘John’, of immaculately workingclass stock. After training as an actor, he met Kenneth Halliwell, an aspiring novelist. When Orton and Halliwell appeared in her office to discuss their joint novel, their prospective agent, Peggy Ramsay, was left with one clear impression. ‘Kenneth was the writer, John was basically his pretty and vivacious boyfriend.’ Yet it was the consort who was ultimately to wear the crown. Unlike his lover, Orton had never particularly wanted to be a writer, and this lack of vocation counted in his favour. It was writing rather than being a writer that appealed to him.

His first play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, appeared to owe much to the kitchen sink drama of the Fifties. It was set in a dank suburban household, with little in the way of glamour and a large rubbish tip outside. Kath and Ed, siblings in middle age, live with their father, Kemp. Enter Mr Sloane, a young workingclass man to whom both brother and sister find themselves irresistibly attracted. Kemp is suspicious and hostile, with some justification, for the callow ingénu of the first act soon reveals himself to be a cool, manipulative sociopath. Having impregnated Kath, he goes on to beat Kemp to death when the latter identifies him as the murderer of his former employer. Although the death is strictly manslaughter, Kath and Ed succeed in blackmailing Sloane, and he is forced to let them ‘share’ him. The unforgiving austerity of the plot is, however, belied by the play’s idiom. The flat cadences of the early scenes recede and a puckish, Wildean note intrudes. When Sloane asks whether he can be present at the baby’s birth, Ed assures him: ‘I think to be present at the conception is all any reasonable man need ask.’

Buoyed by the generosity of Terence Rattigan, the play performed well and profitably. Only a few days after the opening night, however, the papers received a letter from one ‘Edna Welthorpe (Miss)’. Indignant at the ‘filth’ displayed, she concluded that ‘today’s young playwrights take it upon themselves to insult the ordinary, decent public … the ordinary, decent public will shortly strike back – now!’ The solecism at the end was the master touch, for of course Miss Welthorpe was none other than Joe Orton himself. The forename was offered in tribute to Rattigan, who always maintained that ‘Aunt Edna’ was his ideal audience member.

Loot, Orton’s next performed work, was a black farce in which Inspector Truscott, a cheerfully corrupt policeman, investigates a burglary, only to pocket much of the titular loot before sending an entirely innocent widower to jail. The kitchen sink had yielded centre stage to the coffin, where the casket holds the stash. When faced with the proposition that it is the business of the police to protect the honest and decent, Truscott remarks, ‘I don’t know where you get these slogans, sir. You must read them on hoardings.’ This Wildean strain dances with still greater abandon in Orton’s later plays. What the Butler Saw was performed posthumously. Orton’s finest work, depicting the gradual unravelling of sanity and justice in a psychiatric ward, it ends with the cast, traduced, abused, ravished and raving, ascending a stair into the light, carrying the ‘missing parts’ of a statue of Winston Churchill. Every kind of ‘perversion’ is gleefully displayed for the audience’s disgust and delectation.

The play was jeered and heckled at its opening. Sir Ralph Richardson, who played the charming, sinister and palpably insane Dr Rance, was advised from the stalls to ‘give up your knighthood!’ Orton’s penchant for ‘black farce’ had its counterpart in what has been called the ‘comedy of menace’. Where theatre was concerned, black was a tone that leaked into the brightest palettes of the time. Harold Pinter gave tacit approval to the expression ‘comedy of menace’, but the comedic quality was not always easy to discern. He had begun to write in the late Fifties, but it was in the Sixties that his reputation began its true ascent. The Caretaker was performed in 1960, and The Homecoming six years later. In The Homecoming, the tale springs from the common motif of two strangers coming to town. In the course of the plot a husband returns from America to his workingclass family, all male, with a woman he announces as his wife. She behaves in a remarkably unwifely manner, proceeding to seduce two of his brothers in front of him. It soon becomes clear that the brothers and paterfamilias want to keep her, as sister, as mother, and as something else – a something hinted at in the word ‘business’. The husband departs for America, leaving his willing wife in the hands of his father and brothers, who comprise a brood as clinging as it is predatory. Pinter’s gift to the theatre of the Sixties was his willingness to carve in negative space, to saturate the pause and the silence with generally malevolent intent. Asked what his plays were concerned with, even what they were about, he replied, ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.’

As if in harmony, the dystopian strain in English fiction returned. Anthony Burgess composed A Clockwork Orange, ‘being the adventures of a young man whose principal hobbies are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven’. Set in a not-too-distant future, it lays out a society at once authoritarian and feckless, in which the untrammelled young have adopted an argot called ‘nadsat’. The intent behind the devising of this patois, a kind of thieves’ cant of the future, was to render the book ageless. It incorporates English, Romany, and cockney rhyming slang, but above all, Russian. In a West that had heard Khrushchev’s grandiose threat ‘We will bury you!’, it was all too plausible that Russian should become the language of power.

The young man, Alex, has nothing to complain of. He is clearly of the middle class, and as clearly a sociopath. There is no reason behind his savage quest for unending self-gratification – indeed, it is his lack of obvious criminal motivation that makes him so unsettling, particularly to those who look for some ‘trauma’ to explain the existence of evil. He leads a gang of three ‘droogs’ on night-time escapades which reliably end in careless and sickening violence. When not with his pals, he is given to the casual rape of underage girls, and to Beethoven. When the gang turns against him, he finds himself in prison. There he is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, a kind of extreme aversion therapy which renders the patient incapable of violence or lust. When he is released into the world, his former victims, finding that he is helpless, beat, humiliate, abuse and incarcerate him. At last Alex is given the opportunity to reverse the treatment, an opportunity of which he happily avails himself. In the last chapter (omitted from the American version), a sedate and subdued Alex realizes that the lust for destruction has ebbed from him. Rather than remaining a ‘clockwork orange’, he may find the will to rejoin the human race.

Of the many people anxious to let wholesome light into this dark world, Mary Whitehouse, a Warwickshire housewife, was the most vociferous. Spurred on by what she considered the moral cowardice, even treachery, of the BBC, she founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in the early Sixties. From the pens of the bespectacled, redoubtable Whitehouse and her followers poured a steadily swelling torrent of complaint. Once, asked whether she had actually seen a programme that had so offended her, she replied with mocking disdain: ‘I have too much respect for my mind!’ When it was insinuated, in an interview with Johnny Speight, that her views were fascist, Whitehouse successfully sued the BBC. It was one of several private prosecutions she mounted – few had the same success, though many proved influential.

Those who disagreed with her were apt to do so in satirical fashion. Soon after the Speight affair, Till Death Us Do Part, a television series written by Johnny Speight which depicted the comically hapless struggle of Alf Garnett against the forces of progress, had Garnett reading one of her works and cheering every line. Whitehouse had objected to the repeated use of the word ‘bloody’ on that programme; in that episode, the ‘bloody’s flowed without cease.

To her supporters, Whitehouse was a brave, decent Christian, attempting to reverse a contagion that had spread from the world of entertainment and into the English household. To her detractors she was a bigot intent on halting and even reversing any increase in freedom of expression and social progress. The truth is perhaps more subtle: she seemed convinced that to be a Christian entailed being a theocrat. Yet her influence proved greater than her supporters dared hope. Her campaign ‘The right of a child to be a child’ led many years later to the passing of the Protection of Children Act.

In her conviction that wild flowers are never more than weeds, she often aimed at the most seemingly innocuous TV programmes. Violence, as much as sex, disturbed her deeply, and when a show she wrongly understood to be for small children depicted a humanoid plant throttling one of the characters, she felt bound to lodge a protest. This was a pity since she and the protagonist of Doctor Who had much in common. Both were outsiders, rebels who saw themselves as healers, and both sought to interfere as much as they could in matters they felt to be of moral consequence.

A man finds himself trapped in an alien and primitive environment. His craft, which had once traversed many lands swiftly and fluently, now creaks and shudders. So far, the traditional motifs need no introduction. Here, however, a curious anomaly is introduced. The man’s ship alters its shape to suit its environment, but something has gone wrong, and the ship is stuck in the shape of a Sixties police box. His story begins in inconvenience, and what else is a story but a succession of inconveniences? Doctor Who had a difficult birth. First broadcast in 1963, it struggled to crawl from script to screen, but by the late Sixties it amounted to a national addiction, with production values best described as homely and a central figure who was old, eccentric and unglamorous. England’s answer to Superman looked, and thought, rather like Bertrand Russell.

It was part of a wider trend, discernible even in A Clockwork Orange, in which ‘white heat’ forged only monsters of metal. This is most apparent in the figures of the Daleks. With their pepperpot armour, spindly weapons, lavatory plunger eyes and, above all, their voice – like the bark of a cockney sergeant – the Daleks should have been comic. Instead they were terrifying, for under the metal exterior lurked the loathsome result of an experiment in eugenics. In this dreadful parody of humankind lay, it was hinted, our common fate if science were ever given the power to rule. Time and again, the Doctor must confront the prejudices of frightened races whose leaders have told them that the gods will punish them if they do not obey. Miracles are then revealed as scientific trickery, with gods shown to be mere computers. The Doctor thus acted as a kind of corrective to the missionaries of the Victorian period, urging the primacy of facts over faith.

His other great enemy was imperialism. The mass will to conquer and devour was outmanoeuvred again and again by the Doctor’s courage and wisdom, but never finally defeated. On the screen, as in the world, evil recuperates as if by reflex. But the Doctor was no superhero. Aside from his longevity, his only weapons were his intellect, his trench humour, his pluck and his sometimes quixotic compassion. The Doctor, in short, was a profoundly English creation, in manners, accent and wit. It is tempting to hear in his tones an echo of what one journalist referred to as ‘benevolent post-war paternalism’: Britain no longer ran the world, but it could perhaps heal it. This was an unarguable manifestation of the Sixties spirit.

The visual art of the Sixties was the result of schooling in the Fifties. Its roots had been planted in 1957, and from then on the plant grew as swiftly as willow. In the decade of the consumer, art had become public. As the critic Robert Hughes observed, in any clash between pop culture and art, art could not possibly win. Very well, then art would become pop; buildings, album covers, advertising logos and theatre sets all evinced the new spirit.

The world of colour, so long occluded, found its greatest exponent in David Hockney. A true child of the grey moorland, he caught the rising sun and like a sunflower bent towards it. Coming to prominence in 1963, he went on to dominate the Sixties with paintings of swimming pools, beautiful men, sun and sea. In his paintings, colour and light, exuberant splashes and clean, crisp lines are composed in a manner that lifts the most cynical heart. In many ways, modern art had begun as an act of retreat rather than of advance. With the fashionable efflorescence of photography, it was widely predicted that figurative art would wither and perish. Yet the remarkable flourishing of art in the Sixties is best known for being shamelessly figurative in character, largely in its subverting of images familiar from popular consciousness. The ‘Situation’ exhibition in 1960 established a paradox: the primacy of all things American and the distinctiveness of all things British. The contributing artists were keen to identify with all things American, from ‘action paintings’ to Dacron suits.

But the American influence can be exaggerated. English artists did not follow the American lead in art any more than in politics. In fact, the relentless succession of stars and soup tins across the ocean found little favour in Britain. Even when they used such images, the instinct of the artists was to subvert rather than merely replicate. Peter Blake’s Self-Portrait with Badges (1961) embodied the paradox with charm and delicacy. A short and unprepossessing Englishman in middle age, standing in a suburban garden, looks flatly at the viewer, his clothes adorned with badges from America. His eyes seem to say: ‘I’m trying to look American. It isn’t working, is it?’

As much of this art reveals, the decade was increasingly exercised by the rapidly growing influence of psychotropic substances. Cannabis had been available for years, if you knew where to look. The houses and tenements of the West Indian community were widely supposed to be thick with resinous smoke, but like all such racial totems this was largely a myth. What cannot be denied is that by the mid-Sixties, a few hours of ‘ease’ was cheaper and more accessible than ever it had been before. However, cocaine was the toy only of the rich, heroin was scarcely heard of, and ‘magic mushroom’ could be found only in the less salubrious markets of the capital. To be sure, the pills known as ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ were widely used, but they had been in circulation for years.

The peculiarly Sixties offering was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Its origins were innocent enough. When LSD was developed in the late Fifties, it was hailed in some quarters as balm for hurt minds. This reaction derived from LSD’s unique property among hallucinogens: it provoked what was called ‘synaesthesia’. While under the influence of ‘acid’, the subject found that his senses swapped their functions: sounds could be seen, smells heard. This was followed by a state in which the senses simply elided, leaving the subject in a state of whimsical ecstasy.

No less an authority than Aldous Huxley had praised its curative powers. More significantly still, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had tried acid and declared it beneficial, a remarkable endorsement from one understandably suspicious of altered states. The problem, as so often, was that the recreational user could never be sure that the acid he had bought was quite what it appeared. It was not long before acid was ‘cut’ with strychnine, producing a state of agitation and fury. Sometimes substitute hallucinogens were sold and these offered only horrible visions, lasting sometimes for days. LSD had sunk into the mire by the end of the decade, leaving little trace.

Like so many trends of the Sixties, this largely metropolitan habit scarcely grazed the consciousness of most people, yet the wider effect, as filtered through the arts, was incalculable. Michael English and Nigel Waymouth composed posters and album covers that at first recalled art nouveau, but which belonged in temper and in subject only to the Sixties. Wild images, extravagant lines, colours that refused to cooperate, swirled about and about within a fantastical vision that came to be known as ‘psychedelic’.

42

The new brutalism

Brandy apart, the prime minister himself did not indulge in mindaltering substances, though few could have blamed him. For three years, the government had been attempting to fulfil its social and strategic commitments while placating its creditors. It had even resorted to borrowing from the IMF, a humiliating position for a supposedly great power. Now there was nothing for it, it seemed, but to devalue the pound.

While Wilson’s government had hugely increased welfare provision, the difference in economic outlook between Labour and Conservative was still one of degree rather than of kind. Wilson had largely followed his Conservative predecessors, who in turn had largely followed Attlee. The post-war consensus had yet to be challenged on any scale. It is hard to see how any one party, let alone any individual, was to blame. This thought cannot have greatly consoled the prime minister as he faced the cameras on 27 April 1967. With a smile that seemed almost a plea for mitigation and in a voice that sought rather than offered reassurance, he told the nation that ‘From now the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or your purse or in your bank, has been devalued. What it does mean is that we shall now be able to sell more goods abroad on a competitive basis.’

It was a gift to the opposition, and Edward Heath was scathing: ‘Having denied twenty times in thirty-seven months that they would ever devalue the pound, they have devalued against all their own arguments.’ The image of Wilson as a political eel was now fixed in the minds of parliamentarians, while his reputation among the public for amiable bluntness suffered accordingly.

Once again, however, it is hard to see how things could have been better managed. The clue lies in Wilson’s preamble to the announcement. He had said that the ‘decision to devalue attacks our problem at the root’. Later economists might have observed that the ‘problem’ lay not in the root but in the branches – overladen, overextended and caught in a mass of tangles. The Labour government of the late Sixties, like the Macmillan government before it, had committed itself to a programme in which a hundred irreconcilable aims jostled for priority. Nor could the effects of the six-day war on oil prices have been predicted. The current account for the balance of payments did recover, however, and its recovery lasted until 1970. It would be left to another generation to address the problem of money supply, the ‘root’ problem.

The spring had been dour indeed; what hope then for the summer? The Beatles had conquered America, but the joys of live performance had started to pall. ‘One more hotel, one more stadium, one more run for your life,’ was their summing up of the experience. The disillusion had begun after a carelessly provocative remark by John Lennon that ‘Christianity will die, it will vanish and shrink. We’re more popular than Jesus now.’ Lennon’s startled apology in the wake of public protest did nothing to mollify the deeply religious states of the American South and Midwest. And when crowds began burning Beatles paraphernalia, the Beatles began to sense that their popularity was not after all unassailable. The coup de grâce, however, came with their visit to the Philippines. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos had arranged a meeting with them, but due to an administrative glitch they failed to appear. It is never prudent to snub a despot, and when they were assaulted by the very guards assigned to protect them, the Beatles fled. Touring, they decided, had lost its charm. Instead they closeted themselves in their studio, writing, composing, editing and, above all, experimenting. When asked what magnum opus they were assembling, they were uncharacteristically coy.

In the world of fashion, a dual trend of nostalgia and mysticism became apparent. The seeds had been laid in 1964, when Barbara Hulanicki set up Biba, a fashion boutique whose ethos was quite different from that of Mary Quant or Carnaby Street. In 1965 she remarked, ‘I love old things. Modern things are so cold. I need things that are lived.’ It soon became obvious that her taste was widely shared. The clothes marketed were voluminous, richly coloured, and just decadent enough to excite without offending. The ‘Belle Époque’ of the early twentieth century was everywhere evoked but at affordable prices. In this, as in every other respect, Biba broke with its predecessors. By 1967, its store on Kensington High Street, with its Egyptian columns andstained-glass windows, was drawing as many as 100,000 customers a week.

Biba set the pattern for the era, and its influence was to last deep into the Seventies. It was more prophetic than countercultural, but those who came to be associated with its bedizened, opulent style stood defiantly against the prevailing culture. From 1967, the more troubled current of youth found a tributary that ran into tree-tangled Middle-earth. Their proclaimed values were those of peace, brotherhood (and sisterhood), universal (and free) love, and recreational use of the softer drugs. The hippy trend was without obvious precedent. The Mods and the Teds could boast of an inheritance of bloodiness, but the hippies turned away from it. The cult had many limitations and absurdities, but its devotees forswore the fist or the broken bottle; the object was peace.

At first, they were instantly recognizable. The body was swathed in scarves, beads, kaftans, voluminous trousers. The word ‘hippy’ is of uncertain provenance, but it seems to have had its origins in black American ‘jive’ in the early twentieth century. It signified ‘with it’, or ‘cool’. Neatly inverting the circumstances of the pop invasion, here was a largely American stem grafted onto English roots. The 400,000 who gathered for the Isle of Wight Festival in 1967 were imitating American models, yet they were at one with their sisters and brothers in the United States in invoking English masters: Gerrard Winstanley, the English interregnum anarchist, Aleister Crowley, the early-twentieth-century mage and visionary, William Blake and J. R. R. Tolkien were held to be the prophets of the movement. Later, the hippies began to assimilate the influences of the East, and the ‘hippy trail’ from Istanbul to India became a fixture of their lifestyle. In this practical orientalism, they took their lead from the Beatles.

On 1 June 1967, the Beatles’ long-awaited album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released. The cover alone was a feast. The Beatles, dressed as Edwardian bandsmen, stood against a vast collage of famous or esoteric figures, while to their right stood the effigies made in their honour by Madame Tussauds. The album was arranged as to give the impression of a concert in the grand old style of the village pavilion. In some of the songs, like ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, this impression was reinforced. Over others, like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, a silken, starry cape of psychedelia spread. Paul McCartney sang of workingclass parting in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, and of the unsuccessful wooing of a meter maid in ‘Lovely Rita’. No one song resembled another. Sgt. Pepper was not perhaps the Beatles’ best album, but like the Beatles themselves it was greater than the sum of its parts. Its example inspired musicians of the later Sixties both to further heights of creativity and to further depths of pretension.

The expression ‘British architecture’ had become almost oxymoronic by the mid-Sixties. The eager acolytes of Le Corbusier dominated the Royal Institute of British Architects, and were austere in their attitude to anything that smacked of native sentimentality. Le Corbusier himself had declared that cities were ‘far too important to be left to their citizens’; to the English, this was not so much heresy as blasphemy. The lawn, the flower bed, the garage and the tumbledown house stood for the spirit of homely self-reliance that the English have always imagined to be their birthright.

There could be no denying the impact of brutalism, on individual lives and on the English skyline. The Sixties marked the apogee of the ‘high-rise’ building. Its benefits seemed obvious. Unlike the new towns, which ate into the countryside at a rate that appalled many in the countryside and suburbs, tower blocks trespassed only on the territory of birds. Considerations of safety and even practicality counted for little. Ian Nairn, one of the most far-sighted of architectural writers, made the point baldly: ‘The outstanding and appalling fact about modern British architecture is that it is just not good enough. It is not standing up to use or climate, either in single buildings or the whole environment.’ British brutalists were trying to ape continental models while ignoring continental standards.

The poet John Betjeman showed himself the true heir of Chesterton in his fulminations against soulless modernity. He was to save St Pancras station and countless other examples of Victorian architecture from demolition. But it was the proposed abolition of nature that angered him most. We will never know the extent to which Betjeman and others saved the English landscape from being ‘improved’ beyond recognition, but it is unlikely that the mass supplanting of families from their homes could have long continued. The tower block and the new town were both going the way of all fashions by the end of the Sixties, although the latter was to have a brief and undistinguished revival in the Eighties. The compound failures of the brutalist experiment had led by the late Sixties to a resurgence in softer, older traditions. After a long enchanted sleep, art nouveau had begun to stir, in housing as much as in fashion. Wallpaper in the William Morris style was pasted on walls; the beams on Tudor houses were uncovered.

In October 1967, a private member’s bill by the Liberal MP David Steel became law. Although it concerned the contentious matter of abortion, it was proposed in the same spirit as the Sexual Offences Act as a compassionate means of ending distress. The bill enjoyed broad cross-party support, allowing trained doctors to perform what had hitherto been the preserve of unscrupulous and often unqualified backstreet practitioners. In the Sixties film Alfie, the eponymous workingclass lothario, played by Michael Caine, gives a girl he has seduced some ‘help’, as it was termed, in the form of a shifty doctor. When Alfie later goes into the room where the abortion has taken place, his face contorts in a daze of horror. Many such films dealt with the question, few so powerfully; the image must have swayed many to the belief that no woman should have to suffer such conditions or such shame.

On 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell, the honourable member for Wolverhampton, gave a speech in the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. His audience was the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre and his subject was immigration. The audience was expecting edification and even entertainment; what they witnessed was an eruption of lava from a suburban lawn. With his jaw clenched, his voice caught between a bark and a snarl, and eyes which, in the words of Kingsley Amis, suggested someone ‘about to go for your throat’, Enoch Powell was never biddable and seldom diplomatic. Ever willing to hector, to argue, he could not steel himself to woo or placate. This quality brought him to high office but rendered negligible any chance of his retaining it.

Powell had been a brilliant classicist at university, a superb organizer during the war, a fiercely meticulous minister, and a conscientious MP, his ear ever open to the concerns of his constituents – whatever their origins. He had a command of fourteen languages and was able to canvass in six of them. If he had shown concern over the rate of Commonwealth immigration in the early Sixties, he was scarcely alone. And it should be noted that when the more extreme elements of the anti-immigration lobby asked for his support in the late Fifties, they were met by cold reproof or icy silence. He was thus a plausible demagogue, but an improbable racist. As the speech gathered in pace and hyperbole, the moustachioed, methodical public servant became a bearded John Knox. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily heaping up its own funeral pyre … Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

The so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech earned Powell immediate dismissal from Heath, lasting opprobrium in the House of Commons and the warm endorsement of 74 per cent of the electorate. He was to be remembered as the man who had deliberately stirred a sleeping dragon, but Powell had only himself to thank for this. His speech was not just inflammatory, but mendacious. He had cited unnamed constituents feeling afraid in their own homes. He had spoken of ‘excreta’ being shoved through the letter box of an elderly white woman. A man was quoted saying that ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. It is probable that these mysterious constituents never existed. All the tokens of a mind warped by passion were in place. His friend Michael Foot, as far from Powell in political outlook as he was close to him in patriotism and intellect, reflected that ‘It was a tragedy for Enoch … a tragedy for all of us.’

Powell scorned the notion that one race could be ‘superior to another’, but logic compelled him to follow his reasoning wherever it led. His premises, however, were not universally shared. For him the object of politics was the coherence of the state and society, and many might have agreed. Many, too, would have accepted his notion of a realm united under a queen, with parliament as sovereign. But he considered this coherence or unity to be as necessary in town and village as it was in Westminster and believed that if it should be threatened, bloodshed would follow. As he never tired of asserting, it was not for him a question of colour. However that may be, his speech destroyed his chances of ever again attaining high office. It did not, however, curtail his influence on politics. Although his more apocalyptic predictions came to nothing, in the field of economics he was to prove the prophet of the movement that would become known as monetarism.

43

The soothing dark

For members of the ‘commentariat’, the early Sixties had been heavy with pessimism, even of fatalism. The Economist had noted that ‘All the political parties are going into their annual conferences with plans … to put Britain right by bringing it up to date; each promises that, like a detergent, it will wash whiter. The British have become, suddenly, the most introspective people on earth.’ It was not alone. Nonfiction presses ran almost dry with laments for the ‘state of the nation’. One of the most influential was Suicide of a Nation (1963), edited by Arthur Koestler. In this book, Malcolm Muggeridge articulated an ominous thought. ‘Each time I return to England from abroad the country seems a little more run down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier; its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier … and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’ This mood had lifted in the second half of the decade, but it was to reassert itself. It cannot have helped that, in 1967, de Gaulle had for the second time vetoed Britain’s joining the Common Market. The Wilson administration seemed dazed and bewildered in the face of continental obduracy.

But, as ever in the Sixties, the people had their diversions. Watching the television had become something of a national sport in itself, and by the end of the decade, all but the poorest homes had their own set. And the small screen accommodated every taste – one could be stirred by The Avengers, comforted by The Forsyte Saga or amused by Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son and a gentle but brilliantly observed comedy about the Home Guard called Dad’s Army. Certainly, there was little to draw people to the larger screens. British cinema comprised scarcely more than Bond, pop art pretension and camp comedy. It could hardly be otherwise: by the late Sixties, funding for British films came almost exclusively from the United States, and when the quality of British film began to wane, the flow of money stopped.

One fine Sixties innovation, however, was the so-called ‘caper movie’. The greatest, and silliest, example of this genre was The Italian Job, released in 1969. Here, a plausible crook named Charlie Croker steals 4 million pounds’ worth of bullion from under the noses of the Mafia, aided by a team of very English criminals. They manage to get their stash up into the Alps when disaster strikes. The film ends with their bus leaning over a vast gulf, and Croker (played by Michael Caine) assuring the gang that he has ‘a great idea’, with somewhat frayed confidence.

For all the film’s virtues, it might have vanished had it not so winningly caught a particular brand of Englishness: amateurish, sunny and yet quietly implacable. And it represented, too, a reversion to the spirit of the early Sixties. This was not the slick, self-assured world captured in the Bond films. The times were less certain and so was the culture reflecting them; perhaps, in spite of the empty promises of statesmen, the dulled diamonds of flower power and the disappointments of technology, there existed the conviction that ordinary, traditional pluck might see the nation through. In any case, the end of American funding was not the disaster it might have been. For one thing, it led to the success of the Hammer studios. Towards the end of the Sixties and deep into the Seventies, films about Dracula and Frankenstein, witches and werewolves were devoured avidly by audiences and excoriated eagerly by critics.

Then there were the Carry On films, which in the Sixties took a turn for the bawdy. Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor and, on occasion, Frankie Howerd, starred in films where no sacred cow was left unmolested. From the hospital to the camping field, from ancient Rome to imperial India, the Carry On team titillated and tickled the audience. In a very English eschewing of the erotic, they brought back a spirit of holiday fun, with brassieres popping and zips jamming.

For those with money or taste, the theatre could still offer distraction and even intellectual challenge. Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born ‘university wit’ who had never gone to university, began to bewitch audiences with plays of punishing erudition, unabashed persiflage and broad comedy. Less ostentatious in his erudition but no less lyrical was the young Peter Shaffer, whose The Royal Hunt of the Sun reimagined the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the perspective of the compromised Incas. Such interpretations were to become his unchallenged demesne.

The great pop bands of the early Sixties were scarcely in retreat, but the hysteria surrounding them was spent and a long-delayed scepticism could at last be felt. Fleet Street, once the Beatles’ most ardent well-wisher, was beginning to roll its eyes at what seemed their growing perversity. Why couldn’t they just stick to playable tunes? Why all this cleverness? Satirists, too, were again sharpening their knives.

The musical invasion of the Sixties had been an invasion of groups. Just as the United States was the arena of individual endeavour, so it tended to be the cradle of the solo artist. Britain, comparatively more communal in its approach, represented the land of the band. Thus there were the Who, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, and in the latter half of the decade, the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Certain patterns emerged: the upper-or upper-middle-class manager, full of enthusiasm but short on experience, the predominantly workingclass origin of the band members, the American influence and its subsequent jettisoning.

Of all the bands, the Kinks were the most distinctively English. Towards the end of the Sixties, they began to compose wistful elegies and biting eulogies for the country, its vistas and its customs. Like many of their contemporaries, they had begun as a rhythm and blues band, but by the end of the decade they celebrated and satirized contemporary life in the cadences of the music hall and the folk song.

The ‘beautiful people’ did their best to quiet the warring world through ‘flower power’, yet the hippies and musicians of England were less strident in their anti-militarist stance than those of the United States. It was not, after all, the sons of the English who were fighting in Indochina. For all the mockery he suffered, Wilson was by no means the poodle of Washington. He refused, for example, to allow British troops to serve in Vietnam. The pop songs of the time often seemed to celebrate or advocate a certain kind of liberty, but the singers themselves were rarely revolutionaries by conviction. A sometimes forgotten bond between the various groups was art school. Nowadays considered a middle-class institution, it was, for those coming of age in the Sixties, a wardrobe through which the aspirational working class could enter the Narnia of the arts.

The role of a British group had been to learn from the American masters and then offer them the ultimate homage of a cover version. But to write your own songs? Could it be done? Was it not a hubristic betrayal of the masters to try to improve upon them? While classical music is, of all the forms, the most rooted in individual genius, pop music had been authorless. In that it resembled, of all things, the music of the sacred. With the advent of the Beatles and their followers, this had changed. In previous eras, the music and dance of the working class had either been adapted for polite society or dismissed; now it stood alone, unadorned and unapologetic. This had wider consequences. During the Sixties, the aspirational impulse that drove many to speak ‘posh’ began to recede. In interviews, a young musician whose stage name was Cat Stevens spoke in the languid tones of bohemian Chelsea. Middle-, let alone upper-class, tones were to be flattened or expunged.

This new grit flew everywhere, changing accents and idioms. Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud had been known to rehearse in evening dress, but this was not the Sixties way. The working class had always exerted a deep influence on film and the theatre, but in this decade the influence was actively celebrated. Michael Caine, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp and a flock of others gave the working class not respectability, but glamour.

By the late Sixties, recreational drugs, previously a minority interest even among the wealthy, were impinging upon popular consciousness. Rates of cocaine and heroin addiction had tripled by 1970. The embedding of a drug habit was in some ways easier then, and the reason seems clear: government had forbidden without informing, and no one knew exactly why these delightful diversions should be proscribed. As Mick Jagger put it: ‘We didn’t know about addiction then; we thought cocaine was good for you!’

44

In place of peace

Industrial relations had been cordial for much of the Sixties, at least by comparison with many of Britain’s neighbours. But by the end of the decade, ‘strife’ was again apparent, and Wilson and Barbara Castle, the new employment secretary, could feel in the nation a growing unease. Castle took to the task of taming the unions with something akin to despair; as a member of the party’s left, she knew better than most what the harvest would be. Nonetheless, her northern persistence and native ardour drove her on. After a lengthy period of consultation, on 16 January 1969 the White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ was published. The tenor of the document was simple. The unions must restrain their brood or government would declare them unfit parents and act accordingly. In detail, this included the right of the employment secretary to demand a strike ballot if she felt that the national interest was imperilled, a twenty-eight-day period of mandatory work in the event of a stalemate in negotiations, and, crucially, the establishment of an Industrial Board which would have the power to bind and to loose in any confrontation between unions. Its decision would be legally enforceable. This was of particular importance since the most intractable union ‘troubles’ tended to arise not between employers and employed but between unions competing for the highest wages. Much of this would have seemed unexceptionable, but for the contingencies the White Paper envisaged. A threat crouched over all; financial penalties awaited if the unions refused to comply, and, if these too were flouted, prison.

It is perhaps surprising that even then most Labour voters and MPs were generally supportive of these radical proposals. But neither MPs nor voters counted beside the unions who funded the Labour party. Moreover, a new breed of union leader had come to power; he was a militant, as often as not a Marxist, whose only care was to fence his members’ rights in a girdle of barbed wire. And he had an ally in cabinet: the home secretary, James Callaghan. Callaghan had been an undistinguished, if tenacious, member of the cabinet. At once instinctively loyal and quietly ambitious, of the Left but never a Marxist, he was above all a union man. Callaghan disliked Barbara Castle, partly on the dubious grounds that she was somehow less workingclass than himself and partly because she was university educated. His time would soon come.

The bill announced by ‘In Place of Strife’ was swiftly put to the test. In February 1969, a strike broke out at the Ford Motor Company. It was in some ways a textbook case of irreconcilable interests. Management had drawn up a plan whereby, in exchange for forswearing any unofficial action, members would be awarded a generous pay rise and larger holiday benefits. Having initially approved the plan, union leaders swiftly altered course when their members, unmollified, walked out. The impotence of adjudicators was further emphasized when a court injunction in favour of the offer fell on deaf ears.

Those on the parliamentary back bench would have none of the White Paper’s provisions, the press was divided, the unions scornful, and many formerly amenable MPs increasingly disillusioned. Still worse was to come. On 26 March, the NEC (the National Executive Committee of the Labour party) gathered to discuss Castle’s proposals. Fifteen colleagues had already proclaimed their opposition to the paper when Callaghan joined their number, with arm uplifted. ‘In Place of Strife’ limped on for a few weeks, but Callaghan’s blow had struck it to the heart and soon it collapsed. In its place the unions accepted a ‘solemn and binding’ commitment to keep its members within the bounds set by government. That stirring, utterly vacuous expression was to rumble through the next decade.

The increasing malaise of 1969 was only slightly offset by the news of a glorious collaboration between French and English designers: the supersonic aeroplane, Concorde. If there were any notably high spirits, however, these were occasioned chiefly by the spectacle of Tony Benn at the airport in Toulouse quite literally worshipping the great sleek vulture of steel beside him. Technology was, he explained, his religion.

When the last election of the decade was announced, in 1970, Labour’s mood could not have been more buoyant. The balance of payments seemed healthy, and the disappointments of the past few years were matters on which the government chose not to dwell. After all, much good had been done. Labour could point to its care for the disadvantaged, for the young, even for the elderly – though for many in the Sixties, England was no country for the old. It could boast of its international standing, and it could claim that the young had never been so fully or richly educated, the poorest never so well provided for. Yet there seemed no need to dwell on the past when the future too would surely be Labour.

There were moments of farce to enliven what otherwise promised to be a cosily predictable result. George Brown went so far as to punch a student who had heckled him. He was to lose his seat, alas, to the surprise of none. Crossman was uneasy, however. ‘We have given [the electorate] three years of hell and high taxes. They’ve seen the failure of devaluation and felt the soaring cost of living.’ Yet all the auguries suggested not only that Labour would win but win comfortably. The superstitious Wilson was convinced that, as in 1966, the World Cup would prove his biggest asset. It was perhaps unwise, however, to indulge too close an association between Labour’s success and that of the national team; on Sunday, 14 June, England was kicked out of the tournament by West Germany. Some felt that the tide had turned.

Ted Heath, dour and unpersonable though he might be, was pulling his considerable weight in his party’s cause, to great effect. When he spoke on television, many were struck by his urgency and clarity. By contrast, Wilson came across as complacent and superior. Then arose the worry that Labour voters might not turn out in the numbers needed. It took all too little to tip the scales – a shift of no more than 5 per cent. The Conservatives won 46 per cent of the vote and 330 seats; Labour 43 per cent and 288 seats; while the Liberals had to make do with six.

Wilson contrived to remain phlegmatic; perhaps he knew that his era had not quite ended. He bequeathed to his successor a balance of payments rather less than projected, and a nation rather less optimistic than it had been some six years before. Indeed, among the many swansongs for the Sixties, a gentle ballad by the Stones perhaps best captures this mood: ‘No Expectations’.

45

Bugger them all

When Edward Heath received applause, it was with an open-mouthed beam. It was as if, beneath his carapace of surly self-reliance, he could not quite believe his good fortune. But this smile was seen after concerts he had conducted, not after his electoral win. The expression he wore when he walked into Downing Street was more sombre – there was work to be done. It has been said that the choicest prey for nemesis is the man with too many talents, and this was certainly true of Heath. A skilled yachtsman, conductor and musician, he was also a far abler politician and prime minister than many allowed at the time or have conceded since. His failure, if such it was, was a table of misfortunes ready-laid for him. Then he had his own nature with which to contend. More than any prime minister before him, he was convinced of his self-sufficiency.

Douglas Hurd recalled the moment when he realized that the election had swung to the Conservatives: ‘The car radio persisted in telling us extraordinary good news … Extraordinary to me, but not to Mr Heath. To him it was simply the logical result of the long years of preparation, and of the fact that the people of Britain, like the people of Bexley, were at bottom a sensible lot.’ Heath had planned for power, and his appointments reflected this. Many of the old guard were to remain, and others to be promoted. It was a ‘young’ cabinet, with forty-seven the average age. His ‘power base’ was to be formed of those who owed everything to Heath himself. His mood may be inferred from an uncharacteristic instance of vulgarity: ‘Bugger them all,’ he is said to have exclaimed. ‘I won.’ ‘They’ were the naysayers, the sneerers and jeerers of the Tory right and of the press. However, they were not yet routed, whatever Heath may have hoped.

It was unfortunate that Heath’s premiership should have coincided with a miners’ strike in January 1972 followed by a dockers’ strike in July of the same year, both of them ominous auguries. Nor did matters improve when the government, having so loudly proclaimed its compassion and commitment to ‘fairness’, announced that it would be renewing sales of arms to South Africa. This, and the Rhodesia question, would sour relations with the Commonwealth for years to come. But, as Heath never wearied of explaining to the nation, there was work to be done. The dockers’ strike led to the proclamation of the first state of emergency. Four more were to follow.

Of all the relations that concerned the people, particularly after the compromises and failures of the previous government, those with the unions loomed largest. On television, Heath was challenged on the question. ‘Would you face a general strike?’ ‘Yes. I have always made it plain. I have said we are going to carry out a thorough reform of industrial relations.’ He promised, too, a ‘quiet revolution’. Such revolutions rarely set the public aflame, and this was to be no exception.

In any case, there was no real revolution. Heath’s chief object was to contain the forces of organized labour, rather than to undermine them. Indeed, he always proclaimed a steadfast admiration for the TUC in particular and the unions in general, however opaque this regard often seemed to the public. Union leaders usually found him both responsive and affable. Jack Jones was to recall Heath’s willingness to give his opponents a sensitive and respectful hearing, a judgement that would have surprised those who saw only the unsmiling face or unbending rhetoric. He was not to be the last prime minister betrayed by his affection for organized labour.

Heath had long been convinced that politics was a matter for specialists, and so he began to invite businessmen into the business of government. Like so many of his ventures, it was well-intentioned, but he had Whitehall to reckon with. His Programme Analysis and Review was an attempt to bring a degree of specialist knowledge to questions of policy and reduce the need for bureaucracy. Whitehall’s response was polite and inexorable. It was noted by a Whitehall observer, Peter Hennessy, that ‘their first step was to remove it from the grasp of Heath’s businessmen … and to draw it into their own citadel in Great George Street from which it never emerged alive’. It was to become a familiar story: Heath’s attempts to reduce bureaucracy more often than not added to it. In this instance, the number of civil servants increased by 400,000.

It was Heath who coined the expression ‘think tank’, to describe a body chosen to advise the cabinet on policy. A scion of the Rothschild clan headed the first of these bodies, but its warnings of an oil crisis went unheeded. Most importantly perhaps, Lord Rothschild had identified the enemy: ‘that neo-Hitler, that arch-enemy, inflation’. Inflation, long recognized as a hindrance, was now the foe-in-chief.

A further strike by miners in February 1974 led to a second state of emergency. The willingness of Heath to resort to such a measure under conditions that rarely justified the title ‘emergency’ revealed much about his attitude to opposition. Beneath the granite self-confidence could often be heard the slam of a childish foot on a floorboard. And yet it was a time for which the expression ‘U-turn’ might have been coined. Rolls-Royce, in trouble over engines to be supplied to American ‘Lockheeds’, had to be rescued, in clear defiance of Heath’s election promises. But what could he do? It would not be true to suggest, as some have, that Heath despised or underrated America’s contribution to world prosperity or world peace. There can be little doubt, however, that he viewed the ‘special relationship’ as a hindrance to his European ideal. That the United States had consistently supported Britain’s attempts to join the bloc was a circumstance that Heath contrived to ignore. Henry Kissinger put it thus: ‘His relations with us were always correct, but they rarely rose above a basic reserve that prevented – in the name of Europe – the close cooperation with us that was his for the taking.’ As ever, it was not that Heath had no ear for advice or public opinion, merely a poor nose for changes in the wind.

On the question of the swelling war between India and Pakistan, Heath’s rejoinder to Kissinger could not have been clearer:

What they wanted from the special relationship was to land Britain in it [the war between India and Pakistan] as well … and I was determined not to be landed … Did we lose anything by it? No, of course not. We gained an enormous amount. I can quite see that it’s rather difficult for some Americans, including Henry, to adjust themselves to this, but it’s necessary for them to do it. Now, there are some people who always want to nestle on the shoulder of an American president. That’s no future for Britain.

In this, as in so many respects, Heath wished to place himself in opposition to Wilson. As Kissinger put it, ‘There was a nearly impenetrable opacity about Heath’s formulations which, given his intelligence, had to be deliberate … [He] could not have been more helpful on diagnosis or more evasive on prescription … He wanted Europe to formulate answers to our queries: he was determined to avoid any whiff of Anglo-American collusion.’

Heath went further: the nine countries of the EEC should henceforth act as one in their dealings with the United States. The irony, of course, was that his relentless cold-shouldering of the United States compromised the very advantage that Britain was supposed to be bringing to the EEC. But Heath supported Nixon over Vietnam, and it is one of the more curious ironies of the age that Wilson was accused of sycophancy in his dealings with America, while Heath, who actively supported her when times were propitious, was accused of obduracy. In any case, it was clear to all by now that Heath’s priority was to gain Britain entry into the Common Market. His love of the EEC did not lie in the tradition of pragmatism characteristic of most British Europhiles, and it owed little even to the earnest talk of ‘supranationalism’ characteristic of Thirties and Forties intellectuals. His Europhilia was patriotic in origin – he believed that Britain must shrink to become great again.

Heath had been the chief negotiator during the failed application of 1963. For all his vigour, intelligence, attention to detail and Europhilia, the French had vetoed Britain. But Heath would never give up, and the experience gave him the clue to a solution; he saw that it was France, not the smaller nations, which must be wooed. He turned what powers of charm he possessed to the seduction of Georges Pompidou, the new president. One difficulty presented itself even before negotiations began. This was the Common Agricultural Policy, clearly designed to advance French agriculture. If Heath recognized that France was the chief beneficiary of European largesse, with Germany as the patient provider, he determined to overlook the fact. A greater difficulty was the demand that sterling, as the world’s paramount currency, be removed as a precondition for European monetary union.

The public was to prove itself ambivalent, as was the opposition, with opinion polls suggesting resistance to entry was as high as 70 per cent. As for the opposition, it was deeply divided. On the one hand, Labour under Wilson had also attempted to join the Common Market. On the other, ordinary members and MPs were for the most part highly suspicious, on both socialist and patriotic grounds. The EEC was capitalism incarnate, and a threat to Britain’s sovereignty. It did not help that even with the urbane and benevolent Pompidou at the French helm, negotiations remained halting and ponderous. Once again, Heath determined to deal with matters himself. In conversation with Willy Brandt, Heath pressed the British case with almost messianic urgency: ‘The world will not stand still. If Europe fails to seize this opportunity, our friends will be dismayed and our enemies heartened. Soviet ambitions of domination would be pursued more ruthlessly. Our friends, disillusioned by our disunity, would more and more be tempted to leave Europe to its own devices.’

For the climactic meeting with Pompidou, Heath prepared himself by drinking tea in the park, and receiving the opinions of experts. It was all suitably English. Pompidou himself put the European case, politely but clearly, when interviewed by the BBC. ‘The crux of the matter,’ he said, ‘is that there is a European conception or idea, and the question to be ascertained is whether the United Kingdom’s conception is indeed European. That will be the aim of my meeting with Mr Heath.’ However, the European idea represented, in practice, a French one. Perhaps recognizing this, Pompidou went on to disavow federalism, and thus was the issue of the ‘European conception’ left to slumber. Its reawakening in later years was a reversal that Heath would not live to see.

The meeting was almost uncannily successful. The two men liked each other, and, more significantly, understood one another. It took a mere two days to reach agreement. Nothing was yet official, but nothing needed to be. When Heath spoke before the Commons, a still, small voice raised an objection on the minor matter of sovereignty. Would the prime minister please clarify the nation’s status as a member of the EEC? Heath’s reply was brusque and dismissive. ‘Joining the Community does not entail a loss of national identity or an erosion of essential national sovereignty.’ The first stage had been passed, with the Commons advised merely to ‘take note’ of the terms.

Like it or not, Heath was meanwhile obliged to give his attention to some outstanding matters which the country considered to be of more pressing concern. The first was the continuing issue of industrial relations. For many who grew up in the Seventies, ‘the union’ was a creature of vague menace, endowed with preternatural abilities. By night, it hung ‘closed’ signs on shop doors. It gobbled food from supermarket shelves. It had only to lift its trident and traffic would stop. It was popularly supposed to have power even over the weather; when the union leaders shook their heads, snow would fall in endless, spirit-crushing showers. Nothing could be expected of the world while ‘the union’ was supreme. This dragon was neither red nor white, but grey, its polyester suit defying sword and lance alike.

1970 had been a punishing year for industrial relations, with more days devoured by this dragon than at any time since 1926. Heath’s response was the Industrial Relations Bill. He said, ‘I do not believe for one moment that the unions are likely to put themselves in breach of the law. They will not choose to act in such a way as to risk their funds … in ill-judged and unlawful actions.’ However, he would be disappointed. The bill achieved the remarkable feat of being rejected by the TUC even before its provisions had been published. Barbara Castle, herself carrying the bruises from her attempts to reform the unions, was unimpressed and asserted that ‘We shall destroy this bill!’ In fact, it promised little more than had Castle’s own paper ‘In Place of Strife’, but the unions could hardly treat a Conservative government with greater latitude than they had shown a Labour one. Jack Jones, the head of the TGWU, foresaw difficulties ahead for all sides. The unions had little choice but to man their palisades against a government that refused to compromise.

The act was passed on 5 August 1971, but its weakness soon became apparent. As the unions swiftly realized, a way out of the provisions was to obey only one of them: that which gave them the right not to register. Most unions did just that, and those that did register – notably the electricity union – were suspended. The bill was not killed, but merely atrophied from disuse until it was given its quietus by the next, Labour, administration.

So if the unions themselves were as mettlesome as ever, what of the incomes policy by which the government had set so much store? In principle, inflation would still be kept at bay by nonstatutory wage restraint. For a long time, it represented one of the government’s quiet victories. But it was not to last. In a speech at Eastbourne, Heath trumpeted the achievements of the government by 1971. ‘Our strength is not just figures on a balance sheet, although we have those too, our strength is not just courage in adversity, although we have shown that time and time again … We never know when we are beaten and that way we are never beaten. We know no other way than to win … For too long we have walked in the shadows. It is time for us now to walk out into the light to find a new place, a new Britain in this new world.’ The platitudes rolled out, all the more dispiriting for their hollowness. The fact remained that the government could not honour its electoral promise to leave industry to its own devices.

The same was true of its attempt to sell council houses to their tenants. A mere 7 per cent of council housing was sold during the Heath years. Nor could Labour councils be blamed – Conservativerun councils were quite as unwilling to sell valuable stock. Other misadventures occurred. It is perhaps not surprising that the notion of a Channel Tunnel was first advanced under Heath, but this too proved elusive. It should be remembered that few of Heath’s projects wilted entirely; rather, they needed different gardeners and better weather.

The appointment of Keith Joseph to the Department of Health and Social Security was perhaps paradigmatic both of Heath’s strengths and of his weaknesses. At first glance, Joseph was the ideal choice. Insatiably compassionate and ferociously able, he was a man whose intentions could not be faulted, but the result of his efforts to reduce bureaucracy was a remarkable multiplication of officials. It was in many ways a tragedy, yet Heath was determined to follow his vision. He felt, as many Tories felt, that the time had come to prioritize. The elderly, and large families on low incomes, were consistently neglected and he felt bound to redress this. In a speech, he also made clear his conviction that the welfare state was acting as a crutch to healthy limbs. ‘Unless we are prepared to take on more of the responsibilities for the things we can do for ourselves, then the State itself will never be able to do properly the jobs which genuinely demand community action.’ Nye Bevan could never have accepted this, and nor could his successors.

Meanwhile, the comprehensive boom had acquired an unstoppable momentum, despite the efforts of the new education secretary, Margaret Thatcher, one of Heath’s many promising protégés. She found herself presiding over the creation of more comprehensives than any such minister before or since, and she showed herself willing to adopt and even extend socialist programmes when she felt the need. Her saving of the Open University was a case in point, though her decision to abolish free milk for primary school children chilled many, and earned her the sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher’. Perhaps her gender counted against her, as it would do on future occasions. Other initiatives met with similar obloquy. When Heath decided that museums should charge visitors an entry fee, there was mass protest. The justification, that people appreciate more what they must pay for, seemed shallow beside the imperative to offer the poor opportunities for nourishment that they would otherwise be denied.

Strikes had been a feature of the Heath premiership from the beginning, but rarely had they imperilled the nation’s basic needs. In 1972 they did. The mining industry was in the last stages of senescence, with 600 miners leaving every week. Pits which at the turn of the twentieth century had dominated skylines, villages and lives were progressively abandoned. But moribund or not, the industry still provided the one fuel upon which people could safely rely. So when the government was faced with a demand for a 47 per cent rise in wages, to be spread out over the different jobs at the pit, it was in a quandary. The amount asked was surely prohibitive. But there were two factors that countered this. The people were solidly behind the miners, and secondly, coal stocks were not as high as they might have been. The resources lay with the miners.

Even as they had seen the wages of their fellow labouring groups rise inexorably throughout the Sixties while their own remained static, even as the number of pits halved during that decade, they had uttered barely a murmur. Their working conditions were abominable. The heat was such that Kentish miners frequently worked naked. Flooding claimed many lives, and the dust was not merely a daily torment but a constant cause of early death. Visibility in the mines was extremely poor and the shifts long. Miners had been hailed as heroes of the home front, renowned for their loyalty to the twin Victorian virtues of self-reliance and solidarity. For these reasons alone, they could count on a deep reservoir of support and sympathy among the general public. Until 1972, however, the true extent of their grievances was little understood.

It was the Yorkshiremen, already known as the most politicized among the miners, who raised their heads above the parapet. In July 1971, their call for an overall pay rise of 47 per cent was approved by the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers). Given their patience over the previous decade, the claim was scarcely exorbitant, but it ran directly counter to government policy. The Heath administration had committed itself to a pay ‘norm’ of 8 per cent for all manual workers. Only thus, it was felt, could inflation be kept down.

Joe Gormley, the head of the NUM, did not approve of unions attempting to guide government, let alone subvert it, and he had no time for communists, who were increasingly unabashed in proclaiming their allegiance. But the days when a union leader could count on the unqualified support of his nearest subordinates were nearing an end. The generation below Gormley had grown weary of acquiescence, and in any case he still had his members’ interests to protect. After fruitless bargaining with the Coal Board, a ban on overtime was declared, to be followed, on 8 January 1972, by a general strike.

The press, the public and the politicians were united in at least one conviction: the strike was doomed. Coal stocks were healthy and the industry was not the indispensable artery it once had been. Besides, it was argued, the nation surely had enough oil. But the optimists were taking far too much for granted. Initially, the miners had been lukewarm in their support for a strike, but once the ballots were filled the decision could not be rescinded. Although the press saw the strike as hopeless, it believed it to be just. Nor were coal stocks quite as full as many wished to believe, or the power stations as invulnerable. And as for oil, many seemed to have forgotten that it had quadrupled in price.

What is more, the miners had a new weapon. Both law and tradition had long accepted the right of strikers to surround the disputed workplace and dissuade any of their fellows from entering to resume work, but Arthur Scargill, a young Marxist from Barnsley, had developed a refinement in the ‘flying picket’. If local numbers were insufficient to dissuade the potential ‘scab’, the answer was to bus in striking miners from elsewhere. Moreover, he knew that for the strike to be effective, it must not merely shut down the pits, but render the entire network of energy inoperable. He was quite frank in his aims. ‘We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies … We had to declare war on them and the only way you could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points … we wished to paralyse the nation’s economy.’

It was one of the many tragedies of Heath’s tenure that he was obliged to combat a group that he greatly admired. He had been heard to proclaim that the trouble with the unions was that they were not ‘too strong, but too weak’, but such scruples gained him little sympathy in this struggle. So the coal pits lay idle, and the nation began to suffer. An unofficial three-day week began. Candles disappeared from shop shelves and the mood among the public grew darker. But the miners could count, for the time being, on its support. For its part, the government was bewildered and desperate. Robert Carr, employment secretary, confessed that ‘there was no doubt about it, our intelligence about the strength of opinion within the miners’ union generally was not as good as it should have been. We just didn’t know the miners.’

There was one vast coke plant in Saltley, a suburb of Birmingham, which still held out. Here the lorries defied the strike, passing through the gates every day unhindered, and Arthur Scargill saw his opportunity. The police were there, of course, but it was not long before they were hopelessly outnumbered. Yet the so-called ‘Battle of Saltley’ on 10 February 1972 was in most respects a peaceable affair, with what violence there was emerging from scuffles between miners and lorry drivers.

Scargill still lacked the numbers he needed, however. He addressed the workers of Birmingham itself with the appeal that ‘We don’t want your pound notes … Will you go down in history as the working class in Birmingham who stood by while the miners were battered, or will you become immortal?’ The call reached deep and far. What happened next began with a banner appearing on the top of a hill. Behind it was a mass of people. And then a ‘roar’ was heard from the other side of the hill. They had come in their thousands. In the crowd were last-minute reinforcements, the weak fired with the passion of warriors. As a result, the Battle of Saltley seemed a peasants’ revolt bedecked with the colours of chivalry; indeed, it was as ‘King Arthur’ that Scargill was to be commemorated.

It is idle to observe that the victory was largely a symbolic one; as so often happens, the symbol had become a sacred ritual which struck those who did not observe it. ‘We looked absolutely into the abyss,’ said Willie Whitelaw. Thus a strike that most thought would die within days paralysed the nation. A council of state announced a third state of emergency. Victoria Graham caught the mood of many of her generation when she observed to a friend: ‘When we were suffering for the nation’s survival during the war the task was easy, but now we seem to be silently suffering, as we watch the country brought to its knees.’ For her, as for many others, the miners’ struggle evoked tyranny. Douglas Hurd expressed the prevailing mood in government from the standpoint of the defeated: ‘The government was now wandering vainly over the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time.’

A new blackout seemed to beckon. The sombre truth was that the nation needed fuel and could no longer afford oil. The stocks of coal could not be used, and power stations were running at 25 per cent capacity. Nurses were forced to care for their patients by candlelight. A nation without electricity was, it was said, only weeks away. It was time to lay down arms and sue for peace. The truce, for such it was, was ignominious. Lord Wilberforce, who presided over an inquiry into the strike, gave the miners almost everything they wanted; and, where he did not, Heath himself obliged, sullenly and desperately. On 19 February, he granted everything the NUM demanded, conceding more than even the Wilberforce Report had suggested.

Characteristically, Heath appealed to the country. Appearing on television, he conceded none of his adversaries’ claims. No one had won, he stated. All had lost. Without naming the unions directly, he made clear his view that the world had changed, and for the worse, and that if the spirit of unity were abandoned, there would be further trouble. For his part, Arthur Scargill had learned that the ‘unions united can never be defeated’. Perhaps he had not heard of the error of Stoicism: the fallacy that you have only to succeed once to succeed always.

46

The first shot

It was the fate of the Heath administration to know no respite. The strongest city will fall when attacked from all sides and ‘Heathco’ faced a ceaseless barrage. Principal among its vicissitudes was the unrest in Northern Ireland. For years, the Province had been held in fief by the Protestant majority. The Catholic minority was disadvantaged in most ways that free citizens might be expected to resent, in matters such as housing, employment and even the electoral register. Thus far Martin McGuinness was correct in calling the Province ‘a unionist state for a unionist people’ – its borders had been fixed to ensure that an otherwise narrow Protestant majority would be a decisive one.

The Unionists had their own resentments. When they looked south of the border, they saw not the benign nation recognized by the English, but a predatory theocracy determined to lash them to the mast of Rome. Their chief spokesman in the Seventies was the Reverend Ian Paisley MP. He was feared by many in the north as a fanatical and bigoted zealot, but in truth he was neither. Though he detested the papacy and feared the Republic, he won warm plaudits from his Catholic constituents as a fair-minded and considerate MP. Similarly, he never lent his name or support to the Protestant paramilitaries, and he was to oppose the policy of internment. Those who knew him best were wont to ascribe his public stance less to fanaticism than to irresponsibility. He was a show-off rather than a demagogue, and in this he resembled another staunch defender of the Province’s integrity, Enoch Powell.

The ‘Troubles’ began in the late Sixties. Unionist wrath had been aroused by a series of incidents and, as a result, Catholics now stood in fear of their lives. Hundreds of families were driven from their burning homes until it seemed that little less than a pogrom was under way. In 1969, frantic appeals to the government both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland at last bore fruit when Callaghan agreed that troops must be sent in. The army was greeted with tea, cakes and chips in a carnival of relieved gratitude, but the honeymoon soon waned. Loyalists had drawn first blood, although this was soon forgotten. The Ulster Volunteer Force killed a barman, for no better reason than that they were drunk and he was Catholic. Although IRA atrocities were more frequent and larger in scale, Loyalists showed from the first a penchant for elaborate sadism. The IRA justified its deeds as acts of war, the Loyalists as demonstrations of ‘loyalty’. Both sides proclaimed that they were protecting their own communities, and neither respected sex, age, or civilian status. The innocent were killed on the basis of supposed complicity with the foe, and dead civilians were passed off as combatants. Indeed the conflict in Northern Ireland was above all one in which the civilian was placed in the front line.

The IRA always maintained that the English were at fault; in a sense they were, for one Englishman can certainly be blamed for much of the havoc and misery that blighted the Province during the Heath years. Sean Macstiofain’s life was a tragicomedy of self-reinvention. He was baptized John Stephenson; his father was an English solicitor and his mother was born in Bethnal Green, rendering their son rather less Irish than most of his enemies. Nonetheless, his mother early imbued him with a keen sense of his supposed Irishness, and in this certainty was incubated a fierce nationalism. Those who adopt a cause are often far more zealous than those born to it, and so it proved here.

Until 1969, there had been only the Official IRA. Its leadership, however, increasingly drew away from Irish nationalism and towards theoretical Marxism. Both bullet and ballot were considered bourgeois distractions. Its stated goal now was to ‘educate’ the workers of Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, to the point where they would, of their own volition, throw off their economic oppressors. However, Macstiofain and other romantic nationalists hungered for flesh. The result was a split from which arose the Provisional IRA, formed to protect and avenge Catholic communities, fight the army and subvert British rule. Its time soon came. The honeymoon of the British army and the Catholic population had long soured when, in the summer of 1970, a detachment of troops entered the Falls Road in search of a cache of weapons. When they re-emerged it was to a street filled with men and women in a mood of raging protest. After all that had been endured, this was too much. The troops came under attack and soon had to call for reinforcements. The best they could achieve was a stalemate. On 3 July 1970, a curfew was imposed on the Falls Road. The Troubles had taken wing.

The English were for the most part indifferent. Given that the Province was a problem that would not go away, would it not be sensible to send it away? Why not withdraw from Northern Ireland altogether? After all, the terrorists had struck only those people across the sea, and misery and violence were felt by many to be the birthright of the Irishman. Let him get on with what he knew best, as long as he didn’t bring his baggage over here. But then in 1971, the IRA detonated a bomb at the military camp in Aldershot. Five people were killed, all of them civilians. Among the dead were two elderly cleaning ladies and a Catholic priest.

With Belfast soon subject to a bombing campaign, with almost daily reports of murder, and children dismembered by shrapnel, Brian Faulkner, the Northern Irish prime minister and a bastion of the Unionist establishment, begged Heath for powers of internment. On 5 August, Heath granted them, with the proviso that such internment must not target the Catholic community alone. On 9 August, the army burst into the homes of almost four hundred Catholic families, destroying sacred statues and tearing up family photographs all on the basis of useless intelligence. Many of those ensnared had little or no connection with militant republicanism and, of those that did, one had last been active during the Easter Rising. The IRA leadership was quite untouched, and now had a host of new volunteers.

As if all this were insufficient to crack the last foundations of trust, there was also the nature of internment itself. The notorious five techniques of interrogation were used, which included subjecting the internees to ‘white noise’ and sleep deprivation. Beatings and forced confessions were commonplace. Such techniques seemed only to vindicate the IRA’s central premise that this was indeed a war against imperialism. Internment was a disaster, not least because, in defiance of stated government policy, the vast majority of suspects were Catholic. It scarcely helped that this debacle was presided over by Reginald Maudling, a minister temperamentally and morally unfit for the task in hand.

With internment exposed as a moral and political failure, social cohesion in a state of haemorrhage and the two communities terrified of one another, another option began to drift into political discourse. It needed only a crisis for it to take flesh. Derry (or Londonderry, as the British called it) was the Province’s second city, and for months the army had attempted to ensure order there with the minimum of intervention. However, sniper attacks upon soldiers were a weekly occurrence, and the Protestants had begun calling for a curfew. By August 1972, civil rights marches had been banned. One group, peaceable in intent, decided to call one regardless. Paratroopers were sent in with orders to halt or at least redirect the march. Nervous, resentful and with a tradition of toughness to defend, they were not perhaps the ideal choice.

Even today, no one knows who fired the first shot or why. The paras later claimed that they had only opened fire when they were shot at. However that may be, a peaceful demonstration became a rout, as screaming people fled the soldiers’ bullets. By the end of the day, thirteen Catholics lay dead. No direct IRA involvement was ever proven, and the houses from which the soldiers saw firing were later shown to have held neither snipers nor weapons of any kind. And yet it is scarcely conceivable that trained men would have opened fire with no provocation whatever. The truth may never be known. For the time being at least, ‘Bloody Sunday’ stripped the British government of any moral authority: for those in the Catholic community, the Republic and many in the wider world, it had the burning brand of imperialism. Only two years before, the army had been admired for the tolerance and good humour it had usually displayed. Now what was left of that reputation was gone.

It was the end of the Northern Ireland parliament, and Direct Rule at last took shape. The government proclaimed it was left with ‘no alternative to assuming full and direct responsibility for the administration of Northern Ireland until a political solution for the problems of the Province can be worked out in consultation with all those concerned’. Whatever decision was to be made regarding the future of the Province, it was clear that the Republic must in some way be involved. Given that such a proposal would have been quite unacceptable to the Unionists, there was only one man who had a chance of presenting it: William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw. Genial, loyal and boundlessly benevolent, he could charm the claws from a tiger.

Whitelaw and others forged a national executive at Sunningdale, composed of all parties, including representatives from the South. In later years it would be seen as the precursor to the Anglo-Irish and Good Friday Agreements. Had goodwill prevailed it might perhaps have succeeded, but it was stillborn. Scarcely had the necessary antagonisms been aired when Whitelaw was summoned back to England to deal with the second miners’ strike. If only he had stayed to chair the executive, if only the Unionists had been more tractable, if only the Nationalists had seen the other side’s point of view: but it was not to be. In any case, the more zealous in the Protestant community saw the agreement as nothing more than an attempt to subvert the clear will of the majority. The Province fell victim to a general strike, and worse was to follow. Belfast was taken over by Loyalist paramilitaries, while the army stood by and the RUC colluded. The rule of law had been replaced by the rule of a faction. The options remaining to the government were martial law or capitulation, and they chose the latter. There was a further political price to be paid; the Unionists never forgave Heath for the Sunningdale Agreement, which they regarded as an attempt to subvert what they saw as their ancient rights, and their foes saw as their unjust privileges.

47

The fall of Heath

Amidst what can seem only a forest of white flags, some undoubted victories for Heath’s government may be discerned. The Family Income Supplement was one. An early piece of legislation, it helped countless poor couples to raise families on very little. Other laws to help the disadvantaged were legion. That Heath had turned his political energies in that direction was a source of puzzlement to many of his foes.

But perhaps this humanitarian impulse showed itself most clearly in Heath’s decision to allow the Asians of Uganda to enter Britain as refugees. Expelled by Idi Amin, these people still held British passports granted by Macmillan, and now looked to the mother country for succour. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that there should have been the slightest resistance to such a plea, but concerns about immigration were still alive. The meat porters of Smithfield came to parliament in a crowd of 500 to show their support for Enoch Powell. He had declared that the question of passports was ‘a spoof’, and maintained that ownership of one conferred no right of residence. In the circumstances, it was an ugly and specious argument, and the government crushed it. Heath himself never wavered; the refugees arrived, and the country showed itself at its best. Government help aside, Asian communities were quick to offer shelter, food and housing, as were other groups. It was perhaps Heath’s noblest hour; his grandest was still to come.

Having wooed and won the French, Heath had now to persuade parliament; while it had approved the decision to enter the European Community, it had yet to examine the terms. Ominous growls of future dissent could already be heard. The first difficulty lay in the sheer bulk of the papers involved. The task of reducing the terms to a digestible length fell to, among others, the future chancellor, Geoffrey Howe. Howe had a thoroughly, even oppressively, academic mind, and the arranging or clarifying of minutiae was perhaps his greatest gift. The result was a triumph, with the rolling ribbons of barely comprehensible directives cut down to a simple set of clauses. At one level, this could not but backfire, for with all obfuscation now removed, the full extent of the EEC’s new powers stood open to the naked eye. One clause in particular was prominent. Clause Eleven stated unambiguously that EEC law would prevail over British law and be ‘enforced, allowed and followed accordingly’.

None could ignore this, and Michael Foot, for one, had no intention of doing so. He had been dissatisfied by the whole process of simplification, calling it no more than ‘a lawyer’s conjuring trick’. But Clause Eleven deeply dismayed him. He and Enoch Powell did their best to filibuster, but the Speaker would not budge. He apologized for the fact that the House had not had the opportunity to consider the protocols more fully, but such was the hour. The House was assured that ‘a thousand years of English Parliamentary history [was] not about to be supplanted by the Napoleonic code’. Despite this, there was never any doubt as to the outcome. Although ‘full-hearted consent’ to the terms of entry was notable by its absence, a clear majority of MPs voted through the last of the legislation. And thus, on 17 October 1972, royal assent for entry was granted. On 1 January 1973, Britain entered the EEC.

The birth pangs of membership had only just begun – in little over two years’ time the whole issue would be subjected to the first of two plebiscites – but for now, Heath, Howe, Whitelaw and Pompidou could congratulate themselves on a duty well performed. Besides, the angry and the ignorant would surely see sense once the benefits of membership had become apparent. It was as well that Heath had realized his deepest dream, for as the year unfolded he had once more to face a recurring nightmare.

Over a billion pounds had been poured into the mining industry since the last miners’ strike, a clear reversal of previous policy. The miners, most assumed, were not spoiling for a second round. But their wages, though healthier than they had been, were not enough to draw more young men into the pits; an estimated 600 men were still leaving the industry every week. Then there was the renewed question of oil. Prices had been high enough two years previously, but now, after the Arab–Israeli war, they had quadrupled. In the miners’ gradual progress towards a second strike, there was no element of malice or greed. Their case was simple and even innocent in its way. They were going to ask for a further 35 per cent because they knew they were likely to get it. And so, once again, the cogs of negotiation creaked into movement. Heath was determined that the miners should stay within the bounds of his celebrated ‘stage three’ (a wage bracket which included some 4 million manual workers), while the miners and their leaders were equally determined to move out of it.

It was oil that proved decisive. The nation now relied upon it for 50 per cent of its energy. This in turn led one ‘little man’, who had been hanging back during one of the negotiations, to offer an observation. ‘Prime Minister,’ he asked, ‘why can’t you pay us for coal what you are willing to pay the Arabs for oil?’ It put Heath in a false position. Friends and colleagues noted a new lassitude in him, a weariness that cloyed his usually agile movements. What few of them realized was that Heath had physical as well as political handicaps with which to contend. An underactive thyroid gland had rendered him sluggish in thought and movement. The affliction could not have struck at a worse time.

Just when most, if not all, seemed lost, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress issued a remarkable minute. ‘The General Council accept that there is a distinctive and exceptional situation in the mining industry. If the Government are prepared to give an assurance that they will make possible a settlement between the miners and the National Coal Board, other unions will not use this as an argument in negotiations in their own settlements.’ Such a statement amounted to a hitherto unimaginable concession. The TUC seemed to be offering its sacred cow to the knife. Was it, many wondered, too good to be true?

Alas, it was. In a pattern that had become depressingly familiar, each side blamed the other for the failure of the agreement. As far as the unions were concerned, Heath rejected the offer, and as far as he was concerned, the fault lay with his subordinate, Tony Barber. But it is unlikely in any case that an agreement could have been reached: the government was too suspicious and the TUC was in no case to honour its resolution. In later years, some union leaders still insisted that ‘we could have made it stick’, but Gormley was always dubious. Len Murray, already a leading light in the union movement, even claimed that the government had the unions ‘over a barrel’: ‘If [Heath] had taken the offer and it had failed to work, and other unions had broken through, he would have been home and dry with all his anti-union policies – Industrial Relations Act and incomes policy. If it had worked, it would have been his great political triumph, showing he could bring the unions to heel.’

But Heath was not the man for such politicking. He was weary, and his capacity for optimism was running low. For months negotiations limped along, but after two years of economic U-turns, and with a defeat still fresh in his memory, Heath could scarcely surrender now. On 13 December 1973, he announced the three-day week. Another such had been put in place less than two years earlier, with ruinous runs on candles, but this one was official. It came into force on 1 January 1974. Unsurprisingly, the measure was resented, but the resentment sprang not merely from the inconvenience; it was felt to be premature and therefore politically futile. Against the advice of Whitelaw, Heath decided that the impasse with the miners could be broken only by going to the country. William Rees-Mogg of The Times agreed, though for reasons Heath was unlikely to have welcomed. ‘The Government’s policies have changed so much since 1970,’ observed Rees-Mogg, ‘that there is ample constitutional justification for an immediate election.’ But Heath had not called the election to defeat the miners; for him, the issue was broader and deeper. In a political broadcast, he summarized his stance. ‘The issue before you is a simple one … Do you want a strong Government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed? Do you want Parliament and the elected Government to continue to fight strenuously against inflation? Or do you want them to abandon the struggle against rising prices under pressure from one particular group of workers?’

As we have seen, Heath was broadly sympathetic to the unions, having himself risen from a scarcely privileged background. Ever assiduous, he had made it his business to understand the struggles and complexities of workingclass reality. But he could never bring himself to endorse the principle of collective bargaining, and without that he could make no headway with the unions. He stated his objection with customary frankness: ‘We have all seen what happens in that situation. The strongest wins, as he always does, and the weakest goes to the wall.’

And so, weakened in body and morale, Heath called an election, and a minute but telling swing to Labour was noticeable from the first. Still he soldiered on – there was work to be done, if only he could be given just a little more time. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Wilson returned to the attack, cheery and confident, the friend of the unions and the tribune of the people. When the results of the February election came through, it was clear that Heath’s attempts to balance the budget while satisfying the unions had left the country unmoved.

But Wilson’s victory was not yet complete. His was a minority government, and it would take a further election in October to secure power. Heath fought for time and a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals. To his sad and undignified fall, the Spectator played both raven and cockerel. ‘The squatter in No. 10 Downing Street has at last departed … Mr Edward Heath’s monomania was never more clearly seen than in the days after the general election when, a ludicrous and broken figure, he clung with grubby fingers to the crumbling precipice of power.’ It was sadly suggestive of Heath’s tenure that the most vitriolic of the attacks upon him should have come from a conservative periodical. And there was one more humiliation to come, from a quarter he could never have suspected; it was the work of one of his own protégés, and, more shocking yet, a woman.

When he took over government in June 1970 he had little idea of the tribulations which were to beset him. The faltering economy, the disintegration of Northern Ireland, two coal strikes and the exploding price of oil during the Arab–Israeli war were to leave him with the demeanour of a waxwork. His attempts at a corporate exercise in state affairs ended in failure, largely because the trade unions refused to participate, but this was only one of many disappointments that afflicted his premiership. The worst was the one which lingers in historians’ memory. Before the gruesome climax of the second miners’ strike he had reversed his policy of noninterference in industry, losing much authority in the process. He was in many respects a hapless figure, rendered more powerless by the firstminers’ strike. The miners were carefully arranged to make the maximum impact, and the ‘flying pickets’ increased the strike’s efficiency. The miners won their case and climbed the ladder of industrial pay, while at the same time trumping other workers. The leaders of richer unions such as power workers and the dockers set their feet on the government’s rickety incomes policy, snapping it. The CBI, the TUC and the government could go on no more. The parlous state of Northern Ireland only thickened the brew.

Even his greatest achievement, Britain’s acceptance by the EEC, was not greeted with great celebration. Many felt indifferent, hostile or bored by any closer relationship to the adjoining land mass; it brought pizza parlours and wine bars, but it was not enough to change anyone’s way of life. It was certainly not enough to persuade the Labour party to embrace the European Community. The party was in any case in such disarray that it was almost impossible to know what was happening.

Yet to close with such a sweeping catalogue of failure would be as unjust as it would be unfeeling. Heath began with a solid majority and the warm wishes of press and public behind him. He was highly able and formidably diligent; and there could be no denying his patriotism. Unlike the expansive Wilson, he was uneasy before camera and microphone. The English love an underdog, and he had his ardent sincerity and sense of mission to recommend him. However, a leader must inspire courage in others, and Heath had not the skill to do so.

Harold Wilson did not expect to reoccupy Number Ten so soon after his recent eviction, and nor, it seemed, did he greatly want to. On the steps of Downing Street, on 10 October 1974, he announced: ‘Well, there’s a job to be done, and I’m going to go in and start on it now.’ As rhetoric, it was scarcely Churchillian. From that statement alone, it should have been clear that his white heat had cooled to grey ash.

The miners’ strike was swiftly resolved, to the benefit of the miners; there seemed little choice. Other matters outstanding were to prove soluble, after the fashion of the time. The Labour party had promised a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EEC, for the reason that the Tories had mishandled the negotiations, conceding too much too soon. Behind this palpable window dressing were sharper concerns. One was that the Labour movement as a whole remained unconvinced of the benefits of EEC membership. Most pressing of all, the new government needed a distraction from what Wilson himself admitted to be ‘the same old solutions to the same old problems’.

The ‘divine right’ of kings in England had been replaced by the ‘supremacy’ of parliament, but the proponents of British membership of Europe knew well that this supremacy was now limited; there was the overriding authority of the EEC to be reckoned with. This presented a democratic anomaly: how could the laws of parliament be at once sovereign and contingent? The government had no answer to this, so the problem was handed over to the people. Of the two main parties, it was the Conservatives who were the more ardent in the cause of continued participation. As the opposition, they would not have to face any adverse consequences for some time yet; furthermore, most of them sincerely believed that the Common Market meant just that – a sisterhood of capitalist nations, with no governess to answer to.

Before the Seventies, there had been little native entertainment for children on the television, and none in colour. With the growing availability of colour televisions, parents might have expected a rainbow of wholesome family fun, but it proved otherwise. Instead, the children of the decade opened a doll’s house and found that it was haunted. The Seventies were the heyday of what has been termed ‘shoestring fright’, when horror could be expressed from floodlights and cardboard. However, while the new programmes were not invariably dark – there was much in the way of comedy and whimsy – they had an eeriness that later decades could not emulate. Doctor Who, already perhaps the greatest single influence on this new demographic, entered what has been called its ‘Gothic phase’.

And so in this period the pre-teens of Britain were cowering behind their sofas. The ghostly music of Children of the Stones left even adults reluctant to linger near the television. The Feathered Serpent had human sacrifice and unholy resurrection. In Escape into Night, a young girl’s attempts to recreate reality beget only nightmares. Adults, sitting through the trials of Crossroads, must often have felt a wistful envy.

And the worlds to come could be quite as forbidding. In Timeslip and The Tomorrow People, the future imagined was at once authoritarian and apocalyptic. In Blake’s 7, England’s somewhat straitened offering to the science fiction genre, ‘the Federation’ is a vicious, dictatorial oligarchy that, like the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seeks to replace memory and warp identity. And so, caught between these pincers, the childish imagination was offered a homely, if gritty, version of the real in Grange Hill, a series based upon the trials of a suburban comprehensive school. Here we were introduced to benignly anarchic ‘Tucker’ Jenkins, the vicious ‘Gripper’ Stebson, and the long-suffering Mrs McCluskey, high-minded and well-meaning but doomed to grapple with the intractable perversity of adolescence.

On the older medium of the radio, the English were offered a comedy series for adults that could have been sheltered only under the quietly crumbling cliff face of the time in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent had imagined an ordinary day beckoning, before remembering that his house is to be demolished. His friend Ford Prefect, in reality an alien from Betelgeuse Seven, informs him that something rather greater than his house is soon to be destroyed; from far above mankind hears: ‘People of earth, your attention please … As you are no doubt aware, the plans for the development of the outlying regions of the western spiral arm of the galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star-system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.’ Oh dear.

48

The slot machine

The aliens who have come to destroy the earth, the sadistically dutiful Vogons, happiest when disgruntled, could only have been conceived by an Englishman of the Seventies. Later in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we are introduced to two philosophers who have gone on strike in protest at the creation of a computer designed to solve the ultimate question of ‘life, the universe and everything’. The computer, for them, is trespassing on their territory. ‘You’ll have a national Philosophers’ strike on your hands!’ ‘Who will that inconvenience?’ asks the computer, Deep Thought. ‘Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience, you box of blacklegging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!’

That last assertion, of course, is somewhat improbable, hence the bite of this topical lampoon. For on the one hand, strikes hurt the people a good deal; on the other, the usefulness of the work withheld was not always clear. At any rate, it was between the two elections of 1974 that the Labour government made peace with the unions, but on the unions’ terms – no other choice seemed available. For this was the era of the Social Contract, by which parliament guaranteed the rights of the working man and received, in theory, the goodwill of the unions. It was never a formal or legal arrangement, and no statute of that name was ever enacted. It was Michael Foot, the scion of Fabian idealism, who prepared the acts with which this high-minded but hazy concept will always be linked. ‘The Parliamentary Labour party and the unions are linked as never before!’ he asserted.

Michael Foot was born in Plymouth into an overtly political family of Liberals, who naturally held the ascendancy in the West Country. Since his father, Isaac Foot, was elected MP for Plymouth on two separate occasions and subsequently became the city’s lord mayor, it would be fair to assume that the young Foot had inherited the mantle of influence. He was a clever child; his headmaster declared that ‘he has been the leading boy in the school in every way’, and he naturally took the familiar path to Oxford and then moved on to the presidency of the Oxford Union. This was a time of political transition, as the Liberal party slowly gave way to the burgeoning Labour party. Foot soon identified himself as a socialist, in part under the influence of Stafford Cripps, the father of a close friend, and in part propelled by the poverty of Merseyside and Liverpool, of which he had been previously unaware – there had been no such sights in Plymouth. He learned the reality as a shipping clerk in Birkenhead immediately after leaving Oxford. He also read voraciously to bolster his newfound beliefs: Bennett, Wells, Shaw, Russell and others were all on his new curriculum.

Foot began his political career in journalism, moving from the New Statesman to Tribune and then to the Evening Standard, of which at the age of twenty-eight he was appointed editor. He went on to the Daily Herald, a fully paid-up organ of the Labour party, and then reverted to Tribune, in January 1937. He had a thorough understanding of the left-wing press in England, and equally knew the spite and prejudices of right-wing proprietors like Northcliffe, who dominated the political debates of the day.

Along with two colleagues, he wrote a tract entitled Guilty Men attacking the appeasement of the Chamberlain government, before becoming the most celebrated of the anti-war journalists. He became an integral part of the English dissenting Left and a close ally of Aneurin Bevan, the greatest and most eloquent of workingclass politicians. Foot’s political rise reached its first summit in 1945 with his election as Labour MP for Devonport.

He lost the election of 1955 by just one hundred votes and renewed his editorship of Tribune at the time of Suez. On the issue of the enveloping nuclear fear of that decade, Foot and Bevan were at odds, with Bevan veering towards the nuclear option so as to avoid ‘going naked into the conference chamber’. Nevertheless, Foot was strongly supported by committed unilateralists like Frank Cousins. After his return to parliament in 1960, representing Bevan’s old constituency, he embarked on another phase of his life with his membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In its first years it was a national phenomenon but gradually it began to lose support. Gaitskell pledged to ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love’ against unilateralism, and the ragtag procession of activists began to seem less relevant in the changing world. There were many in CND who hated the Labour party, and there were many in Labour who were indifferent to the issue of nuclear disarmament. So his return to the Labour party was fractious and troubled, but his abiding pleasure came in his representation of Ebbw Vale, which was equivalent to going home.

By 1974, when he was sixty-one, Foot had become a member of the cabinet in Harold Wilson’s government. As secretary of state for employment, his primary purpose was to administer the Social Contract, with no fewer than six bills for the purpose of uniting the trade unions with the Labour party. Two of the major proposals were the establishment of ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) and the Employment Protection Bill, to defend the rights of workers. He was the most prominent socialist in the cabinet and believed he had every right to stand as the leading left-wing leadership candidate, after the resignation of Harold Wilson. He did not succeed but did sufficiently well to become in effect deputy prime minister under James Callaghan. It was a time of pacts and alliances, and Foot led the way to a ‘Lib–Lab’ pact late in the spring of 1977, though it fell apart in the following year.

After Callaghan’s defeat in 1979, Foot returned to the opposition. Then, with the political demise of Callaghan, a vacancy revealed itself. Three candidates stepped forward – Denis Healey, Peter Shore and Jon Silkin – but each exhibited an Achilles heel, and Foot emerged as leader in late 1980. It cannot be said that he was a natural leader, though he was not helped by the split between the Labour party and the SDP at the beginning of 1981.

But Foot remained the stalwart and self-confident exponent of the socialist creed. He was the living embodiment of left-wing values in the twentieth century, to be compared with Russell and Orwell. He was, according to his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘an utterly committed symbol of permanent opposition, a rebel, a maverick, in eternal conflict with authority’. He was an orator and not a politician. Perhaps most importantly, he maintained the role of public culture and civic discourse at a time when they seemed to be fading away. He was, in many ways, the last of the great Labour intellectuals and deserves an honoured place in the history of the twentieth century.

The Social Contract was reached between the TUC and the Labour government from 1974 to 1977. The premise on which it was founded now seems quixotic; the unions would show restraint if the government worked with them – in other words, if the government was prepared to accept every union demand for the protection of its members. ‘Please play nice,’ was the government’s hopeful exhortation. It was thus a corporatist experiment, and far more radical than the post-war consensual politics with which it is sometimes confused.

Beneath the Social Contract lay a basic ambiguity in the power relation between employee and employer, and, later, between employees and government. It was also predicated on the assumption that the unions would act as one, but they were effectively in competition with each other. The only certain effect was that, by 1976, it was as if the unions had discovered, according to Tom Jackson, leader of the postal workers, ‘a gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that had suddenly got stuck in favour of the customer’.

The unions were led not merely by old-fashioned workingclass socialists, but often by men who had fought against Fascism. When they had begun their crusade, the most basic workers’ rights were still to be attained, but the new generation had gained a degree of prosperity. The union leaders, however, often applied their ‘street-fighting’ mentality to contemporary conditions; capital was still the enemy and the union member was still the underdog. But by the late Seventies even the most ardent union leaders had begun to fear that their members’ demands had become unsustainable. Jack Jones spoke of ‘fair for all, not free-for-all’, and Hugh Scanlon openly expressed doubts about the country’s ability to cope. By this stage, however, a shift, so slow as to be almost imperceptible, had begun; the old guard was losing control over an increasingly ‘individualist’ membership. And so the late Seventies were marked by a discontent that was more petty capitalist than socialist.

But this still lay some way off. By 1976, there were few instances of industrial action. The unions had, after all, got almost all they wanted. But with prices rising and the pound falling, Wilson felt it was time to honour his promise to give the people a referendum on Europe. Previous polls suggested that only a minority supported Britain’s membership. The advocates of a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum set for 1975 should have had no grounds for complacency, yet their mood on the campaign trail was buoyant. Unexpected alliances coalesced: Conservatives offered their canvassing skills to Labour; Labour members lent Conservatives their buses. A festival atmosphere prevailed.

The mood in the ‘no’ camp was quite different. Although the government of the day had given equal funding to both sides, the ‘yes’ campaign could count on the support of big business – the ‘no’ campaign was a humble pile of pea-shooters beside the cannon of their rivals. Like their opponents, they came from seemingly incompatible positions; unlike them, these positions appeared to be those of the radical fringe. The National Front and the British Communist party, for example, were Eurosceptic. And so, as Enoch Powell and Tony Benn hectored the people from the same platform, many wavering voters saw only division and demagoguery. How could a nation that so obviously looked askance at Europe listen so warmly to the Europhiles? Across the Channel lay the Continent, where an ordinary family could now take its holidays; there was the Common Market, which made those holidays possible; and then the EEC, which surely had nothing to do with either holidays or the Common Market, was not regarded as having designs on English liberty.

The prime minister’s attitude to the EEC was informed by cheerful ignorance. Wilson knew little of Europe and cared even less. The Scilly Isles were his preferred holiday destination and he considered champagne a poor substitute for beer. For Wilson, the referendum represented little more than an opportunity to steer the nation’s attention away from more proximate concerns. For his part, Callaghan was unconvinced. His apathy was apparent in a television interview where he refused to say whether the people should vote for or against remaining in the Common Market, even though his own government theoretically supported it. Yet even the government’s indifference counted in favour of the vote for ‘yes’. When the votes were counted, the referendum showed a majority of over 60 per cent in favour of remaining. The matter, for the moment, was closed. Now remained the question of failing exports, and other commitments which extended beyond the power of any single government to address, let alone resolve.

Harold Wilson had planned to resign at sixty, yet there was little to suggest that he would give up what power he had. However, there were no policies that were likely to come to fruition, and no garlands left to win. One civil servant recalled that Wilson seemed to be ‘living through one day to the next’, and there were more disturbing tokens of decline. His paranoia grew more acute as the Seventies progressed, and he saw spies everywhere. So fearful was he of the supposed influence of BOSS, South Africa’s infamous Bureau of State Security, that when rumours were brought to him about a dark conspiracy to murder Jeremy Thorpe, his friend and rival, he contrived to assure even parliament that BOSS was behind it. He was convinced that Number Ten was being bugged.

In the course of one remarkable interview he went further yet, to the brink of sanity itself. ‘I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room,’ he informed two journalists. ‘Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing in the corner. That blind man might tell you something, lead you somewhere.’ He began to delegate, and to drink, more and more. His once unassailable memory had begun to totter. The cabinet had not known of his plans to resign and, when the announcement came, it took everyone, even Callaghan, by surprise, and shock overwhelmed feelings of relief or regret. In March 1976, at a farewell party at Chequers, a photograph of the outgoing prime minister showed a little old man with wandering eyes and a vacant smile.

49

Let us bring harmony

After the surprise of his departure, Wilson was largely forgotten. But he had deserved better. In terms of his electoral record, he was the most successful prime minister in history. He had united a party whose constituent elements were never at ease with each other; he had presided over the golden age of the welfare state; and he had shown himself an unsurpassed political tactician. But he had outstayed his day.

In previous years, Roy Jenkins had been the favourite to succeed him, at least among members of the press. But as a passionate Europhile with tastes to match, he could never command the allegiance of the Left, while Michael Foot would never woo the Right. And Denis Healey, for all his brilliance, was simply too rebarbative. In any case, Wilson had picked his successor. In the event, ‘Big Jim’ Callaghan won the leadership by 176 votes to Michael Foot’s 137. The result was a clear endorsement, yet, for those on the right, an unsettling augury; Foot’s hour would come. Callaghan had long dreamed of the moment when he would kiss the sovereign’s hand. ‘Prime Minister,’ he was heard to murmur, ‘and never even went to university.’ The queen herself had been puzzled and disturbed by Wilson’s decision, but she acquiesced with her habitual grace.

During the Sixties, the Labour government had tried desperately to ensure full employment while keeping down inflation. Wilson had attempted a six-month price and pay freeze, but it had not answered. Between 1964 and 1979 there had been no fewer than eight incomes policies, and all had run aground. The centre could not hold when the periphery was under assault. Healey’s attempted rescue of the economy was testament to his remarkable agility and persistence. Thanks to his efforts to curb public spending, deeply unpopular though they were, inflation fell from 29 per cent to 13 per cent in under nine months. The fragility of sterling, however, was a matter that none could ignore. The government employed every resource to prevent its collapse, but the world was unconvinced. Appearances were still against the pound. The Bank of England spent almost all its reserves in propping it up, but it seemed set to equal the dollar. What could be done? There was the eccentric proposal offered by Tony Benn that Britain become a ‘siege economy’, placing tariffs on imports yet somehow still able to export freely. Other members of the cabinet knew that there was no recourse left but an appeal to the highest financial authority in the world, the International Monetary Fund. The crisis came when Denis Healey, arriving at Heathrow to fly to the United States, was told of the pound’s collapse. His place, he saw, was at home. He drove back to Westminster. And so the United Kingdom, once the world’s banker, had to doff its pride and beg money of its allies.

For that is what it amounted to. The IMF was funded largely by the United States and Germany, which made absurd the suggestion of Anthony Crosland that it could be blackmailed by threats of Britain withdrawing its foreign military commitments. Britain was in no place to make demands. The IMF team, when it arrived on 1 November 1976, was composed of several nationalities, but there could be no disguising the fact that the spirit informing their mission was American. It was clear to the IMF that Britain would not only need a thorough spring clean; it would have to throw out many objects of sentimental value. It had been usual for such loans to be renewed indefinitely, but no such latitude was extended to the feckless British. A December date was fixed and a rigorous programme of spending cuts demanded. For a loan of almost £4 billion, it seemed to the IMF scarcely unreasonable. And yet the British proved to have some fire in their bellies still. At a moment of seeming impasse, Callaghan picked up the telephone in front of the chief negotiator, and threatened to call the president if no leeway was offered. Was it pure bravado? Perhaps, but it had the desired effect and the loan was agreed.

Despite the fact that matters turned out remarkably well, it was a sombre prime minister who addressed the Labour party conference in 1976. He had begun to undergo a change of heart, one too subtle and incremental to be called a conversion, but it must have seemed a shift of tectonic proportions to the delegates in Blackpool. After paying tribute to Harold Wilson, who perked up from a somnolent doze when he heard his name, Callaghan began to dismantle the post-war consensus. ‘Mr Chairman and comrades,’ he said. ‘No one owes Britain a living, and … we are still not earning the standard of living we are enjoying. We are only keeping up our standards by borrowing and this cannot go on indefinitely.’

Amidst all the agonizing about inflation, deflation and disinflation, Callaghan had found the wound. Those to the left of the party, like the young Dennis Skinner, were aghast that questions of ‘productivity’ could be mooted at all, but Callaghan was unmoved: Britain had been singing for its supper rather than earning its keep. Here was an old socialist speaking, and he was impatient of fecklessness. The world the people of Britain had known could no longer be justified: ‘That cosy world is gone.’ His tone was dull and gravelly; he relished the words no more than did his listeners.

It is hard to appreciate the extent to which inflation exercised the finest minds. In Seventies Britain, ‘push’ and ‘pull’ on supply and demand worked simultaneously; with increased wages, spending power grew, and prices rose. A largely unionized nation responded by asking for higher wages, and employers had to raise prices to cover their costs, which in turn led to higher wage demands. If you were affiliated to a union, the spiral need not inconvenience you, but if you were not so affiliated, or were not a wage earner at all, you could find yourself unable to afford anything beyond the absolute necessities. There were other factors too. For example, the problem was exacerbated by the unions’ fondness for ‘free collective bargaining’ for wages, but that can only work where they have similar traditions, where their interests do not intersect, where the nation has no other commitments, and where there is money in the collective pot. These conditions could not be met. Small wonder that Roy Jenkins likened the role of government in this period to that of the mountaineer on a wild and unpredictable upland. ‘The bigger [beasts] were known as union leaders and the smaller ones as constituency parties, and … when they did come down, they must on no account be enraged.’

Certainly Bill Bryson, an American observer, found this to be so. While working for a UK newspaper, he found himself having to deal with the print checker. This man looked through the proofs at his leisure, if at all, and was not averse to using force to prevent anyone, however important, from crossing the line into his office; for this of course represented a breach of ‘demarcation’. When Bryson himself attempted to proffer the proofs, the man retorted, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m eating pizza!’ The print unions were run on lines that recalled medieval guilds or Masonic lodges: each union had its ‘chapel’, and each chapel had its ‘chapel father’. If miners had their ‘pit villages’, so the printers had what we might call ‘print families’: it was not so much a cartel as a family concern. Other unions could boast similar traditions.

It was all a far cry from the world envisaged by Barbara Castle, who in February 1975 had reflected in her diary: ‘To me socialism is not just militant trade unionism. It is the gentle society in which every producer remembers he is a consumer too.’ And Callaghan himself felt bound in 1978 to remark that ‘Society today is so organized that every individual group almost has the power to disrupt it. How is their power to be channelled into constructive channels?’ The question was never to be resolved in his political lifetime.

1976 had been the hottest year in recorded history and one of the most scorching in the world of British politics, so it was with relief that the government and the nation welcomed the celebrations for the queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. It seemed as if every house had its bunting, every street its party. Callaghan, as firm a believer in monarchy as he was in every traditional institution, was delighted to be called up by the queen to share the accolades. But once the bunting was taken down, the nation was once again revealed as poor, shabby and, above all, discontented. The punk band the Sex Pistols had released ‘God Save the Queen’, a less than reverent celebration of her role in which she was described as being a ‘moron’. It was banned by as many radio stations as could keep up with its popularity, but reached number one in the charts.

Callaghan had established a cap on wage increases of 5 per cent in order to hold down inflation. It was audacious for the time, but it held, more or less, until 25 September 1978, when the Ford workers agreed to strike. With inflation standing at 8 per cent, 5 per cent was not enough, they argued. Their action took immediate effect. From then on, strikes sprang up like toadstools after rain. Most damagingly, the public sector unions, many of them representing the least affluent, felt bound to join in. Callaghan saw his pay policy unravel almost daily, and Michael Foot, who had done so much to champion the unions and had the most right to feel betrayed, unleashed a speech of unprecedented fury at the Labour party conference. The delegates were reminded with biting sarcasm of the kind of pay policy they could expect under the Tories – it was known as ‘unemployment’.

But the unions were unmoved. Indeed, with such awards dangling in front of their members, they had little choice. By the late autumn of 1978 the expression ‘Winter of Discontent’ was on everyone’s lips. People lay unburied in coffins, with the bereaved families turned away. Lorries bringing in emergency supplies were attacked, hospitals were picketed and refuse built up into stinking slag heaps in Leicester Square, while pickets proclaimed that it was not ‘a question of whether the country can afford to pay us, but of whether they can afford not to’. All of this and more contributed to a sense that the unions were fast becoming enemies of the people. It was never, of course, a general strike – most unions did not participate – but the effects hurt the public materially and emotionally, as striking became known abroad as ‘the English disease’.

Towards the end of the crisis, Callaghan agreed to an interview with the political journalist Llew Gardner. Callaghan’s voice was, as usual, reasonable and reassuring, his soft Hampshire accent enlivened by occasional flickers of hauteur. But his eyes were cold and furtive behind his spectacles, his finger jabbing at an imaginary chest. He had a message for the unions: ‘You can’t get more out of the bank than there is in it!’ Asked what happened to sour relations so terribly, he answered: ‘Too much responsibility has been devolved from the centre onto local shop stewards who do not fully comprehend the basic tenets of trade unionism.’ ‘Wasn’t 5 per cent an unrealistic figure?’ Gardner asked. ‘The realistic figure,’ barked the prime minister, ‘is the one the country can afford! Not the one people conjure out of their heads.’ Gently prodded on the question of talks with the trade unions, Callaghan remarked, ‘There is a time for reticence.’

Reticence was the keynote in other respects. The notion of a secret ballot had already been mooted by Margaret Thatcher. Surely, she maintained, union members must be allowed to vote without fear of reprisal. Callaghan expressed an openness to this thought, but not, he emphasized, if it was made a legal requirement. And there perhaps lay the crux. For Callaghan, a union man still, the law should stay away from organized labour. Besides, he hinted, the unions were above the law, and had the means to retain that position. Moss Evans, the new head of the TGWU, did as much as anyone to ensure Callaghan’s downfall, yet he understood this predicament. His message to the government was itself a melange of defiance and helplessness: ‘I won’t and I can’t restrain the stewards.’ Among the general public, meanwhile, the expression ‘Social Contract’ had become a swear word. ‘I don’t give a Social Contract about that!’ was a retort commonly heard.

That the Conservatives had a quite different policy from the unions was obvious, but even the Labour party and the unions, despite their symbiosis, had separate agendas. Though people spoke of Labour as the parliamentary wing of the trade unions, they had to govern and the trade unions had to protect their members – the two programmes were bound to conflict sooner or later. In any case, although the most contentious quarrels lay between Labour and Conservative, the most bitter rivalry lay between different unions. Britain’s unions were the oldest, and the most diverse, in Europe. By 1960, there were still 180. The English trade union tradition was local and particular, an inheritance, perhaps, from the medieval guilds and later from the friendly societies. Each trade, however small, had its union, and the difficulty lay in the fact that one union would find itself in inevitable competition with another. So it was that the conditions established under the Attlee consensus, and extended under the Wilson government, enabled the various unions to compete, with no legal checks upon them.

Douglas Hurd, who had been an adviser to Heath during the miners’ strike, summarized the question thus: ‘In a public sector dispute, the employee barely suffers. Any temporary loss of income is usually covered by the union and is in any case quickly recouped out of the eventual settlement. The employer, the actual administrator of the public concern, does not suffer at all, for his salary is secure. It is the public, and only the public, which suffers, first as consumer and later, when the bill comes in, as taxpayer. The public picks up the tab for both sides.’ Paul Johnson, the historian and journalist, put the matter more vividly yet: ‘[The unions] did not plan the victory … [and] they do not know what to do with it now that they have got it. Dazed and bewildered, they are like medieval peasants who have burnt down the lord’s manor.’

But surely it need not have come to this. Was there not North Sea oil, discovered in the late Sixties, to look forward to? The promise of it was to become a sticking point for the left wing of the Labour party. In the run-up to the IMF bailout they asked why the government needed to squeeze wages when North Sea oil was almost, as Tony Benn put it, ‘running up our shores’. It was in this context that the far Left held the IMF responsible for the meltdown of the late Seventies. However that may be, Callaghan found himself in parliament facing a noconfidence vote and lost by a tiny margin.

And so the parties went to the country. Callaghan had personal appeal, but nothing else to offer. Thatcher might be less likeable, but she had a plan. Perhaps no one in her position could have lost. In later years she would pay tribute to Callaghan, saying that in happier times ‘he would have been a very successful Prime Minister’. She even admitted that he often worsted her in the House of Commons. Still, the nation had had enough, and the Conservatives came to power, though with a surprisingly modest majority. On her way to Buckingham Palace, Margaret Thatcher addressed the nation in the words attributed to St Francis: ‘where there is discord, may we bring harmony’. In years to come it became apparent that it was the working class and not the bourgeoisie that had ignited the Thatcher revolution. There had been money in union membership; there was still more in becoming an entrepreneur.

50

Here she comes

The grocer’s daughter had worsted the carpenter’s son; more significantly, the shopkeeper had triumphed over the shop steward. There would be no more rule by union fiat. For all its seeming goodwill, Thatcher’s invoking of St Francis would have misled few who heard it. The nation knew well that it had elected a terrier with a burning torch gripped in her teeth. Not for Thatcher ‘the orderly management of decline’ that Sir William Armstrong had suggested was the real business of twentiethcentury governance.

She began as Methodist and became an Anglican, a change of emphasis that affected her political personality. Her accent, which in moments of anger or stress betrayed the cadences of her native Lincolnshire, first hardened and then softened into the genteel warble of a suburban nanny. Although her origins were theoretically lower-middle-class, she managed to obscure the fact by marrying a highly successful businessman, Denis Thatcher. She found her personality partly by identifying with others and partly by play-acting.

Thatcher had entered parliament in 1959, three years after the Suez crisis, but she had to live with that failure all the same. The English political class, according to one historian, ‘went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing’. If she ever contemplated such a thought, she quickly cast it aside. The journey from Grantham to Oxford was the first stage of her political maturity. She fought implacably to become the MP for Finchley, and once she had attained that position she solidified it with hard work and slowly made her ascent. She first became a parliamentary undersecretary, and in 1967 she joined Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet, as minister for fuel and power. In October 1969, she made another leap and became shadow education minister. After the Conservative victory in 1970, she became a minister in her own right, as secretary of state for education and science. Her liberal or free-market supporters, however, might not have been particularly enthusiastic about this term of her office, in which she sanctioned 3,286 comprehensive schools and rejected 328. It could be said that she was following her statutory duties, but she performed them with a vengeance.

There began in 1971 another series of struggles between the government and the public sector unions, with Heath beginning to give ground to Rolls-Royce and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. In turn came the National Union of Mineworkers. These were the conditions for the irresistible rise of Mrs Thatcher. During the campaign for the Conservative party leadership she maintained her composure, but there was a large element of ambition in her remorseless advance. None of her colleagues yet knew of what material she was made. Certain traits, however, were becoming clear. Defeatism was the plague against which she fought relentlessly. Pessimism was the second curse. And Ted Heath was, in her eyes, the embodiment of both.

When it became apparent that after two defeats Heath could no longer lead the party, Thatcher expected her friend and colleague Keith Joseph to put himself forward. Ever diffident, he declined, leaving Thatcher to uphold and defend the new creed known as ‘monetarism’. It remained to inform Heath of her decision; legend has it that he offered her the blunt retort ‘You’ll lose!’ The truth was that he heard her out and said simply, ‘Thank you.’ On her victory for the party leadership, knocking out Heath, Whitelaw, Prior and Peyton, Thatcher remarked that ‘I almost wept when they told me. I did weep.’ Plenty more tears would follow.

On 4 May 1979, Thatcher drove to Buckingham Palace, and so began one of the more unusual periods of English history. The economy was turbulent, but she had an instinctive conviction that her financial policies were correct. This was confirmed and encouraged by her more or less permanent dissatisfaction with, and distrust for, the nascent European Community. ‘They are much cleverer than us,’ she said; ‘they will run rings around us.’ But she was also guided by what many considered to be old-fashioned nationalism. She had been happy to support the ‘Common Market’ when it was still referred to as such, but the creeping federalism within Europe came to unsettle and even enrage her and she referred to VAT payments to Europe as ‘our money’ or ‘my money’.

Above all, Thatcher saw Conservatism as an ideal, not merely as a political stance. It was precisely the notion that Conservatism could be something as vulgar as a crusade that so displeased the patricians of the party, but it was to be her distinctive contribution to a party that had spent the post-war years in broad agreement with Labour. Another of her particular skills was sensing the mood of the nation, at least in her early years. ‘I think,’ she said in a television interview in 1978, ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ The remark caused intense outrage among the ‘media’, but not perhaps among the population as a whole.

She faced a nation directed by the fluctuations of the stock market and by the relentless drive of materialism, by the energy of popular music and the colourful panorama of television. Because of the latter medium, the nature of news and comment had an instantaneous visual impact that supplanted analysis and reflection. The country shone with screens, with flickering images lasting for no more than a few seconds. Thatcher was the ideal embodiment of such a world – if ever an ascending prime minister was willing to act as chameleon, it was she. Under the auspices of the PR consultant Gordon Reece, she doffed the faintly ridiculous hats which reminded too many of the Mothers’ Union. She underwent voice training. The playwright Ronald Millar provided her with mantras: ‘Let us be cool, calm – and elected’ was the first. Laurence Olivier himself assisted in her voice coaching sessions. The singer Lulu and the comedians Kenny Everett and Ken Dodd were all happy to be associated with Thatcher. This was to change – in the years to come, no self-respecting ‘artiste’ would dream of giving succour to the lady from Grantham.

Employment in the early Eighties became of paramount importance, with lists of the most significant redundancies read out on the television news as if they were casualties in a war. But for Thatcher, these casualties were the price to be paid if inflation was to be conquered. She had inherited a tax system that could be described as either ‘confiscatory’ or ‘redistributive’ according to personal conviction. The upper rate of tax was set at 83 per cent, but it began at £20,000; it was not levied only upon millionaires. Thus it seemed as if Labour had taxed the rich to feed the poor, only to render everyone poor. It is within this context that Thatcher’s ‘Franciscan’ exhortation should be understood.

The Labour government had proved itself unable to contain the divisions within the nation; with the Conservative government, there would be no more juggling of incompatible priorities. This was the true ‘Thatcher revolution’, at least in principle. Inflation was the great danger, and it must be crushed before any reforms could be contemplated. So far as she and her chancellor Geoffrey Howe were concerned, the solution was to control the money supply and let the market adjudicate in matters of price. Monetarist theory had at its heart a dictum that was simple enough: government should not spend what it did not have, and what it spent must be worth something. Thatcher and Howe had only to be thrifty, but the ‘dismal science’, as economics had become known, was young and inexact. They soon found themselves dismayingly close to the position of their predecessors, cramped and hobbled by circumstance. The monetarist drive in Howe’s first budget ran counter to election promises that could not lightly be cast aside. To honour the latter, and to support the hundreds of thousands left unemployed by the new policy, the government found itself pouring millions more into social benefit than was sustainable under monetarism. The result was recession.

Had it all been a costly and ghastly mistake? The human price was already apparent: unemployment had reached 2 million by 1980 and was climbing. Three hundred and sixty-four economists had written to the press to testify that this revolution had no basis in sound economics. Many were predicting a U-turn, a challenge to which Thatcher offered a celebrated retort at a Conservative party conference: ‘You turn if you want to; the lady’s not for turning.’ Caught off guard when the conference was invaded by activists protesting at job cuts, she rose to the occasion, observing that ‘It’s wet outside, I expect they wanted to come in … It’s always better where the Tories are.’ Although she lacked a sense of humour, she was quite capable of wit.

Naturally, no U-turn was forthcoming. In other fields, matters were more auspicious. The ‘Right to Buy’, the policy by which the Tories promised council tenants the opportunity to purchase their homes, had been the jewel of the Tory manifesto, and it was set in place. The pledges to restrict secondary picketing and to establish secret ballots were likewise in the manifesto, but it would be a while before they could be tested. The top rate of tax was reduced from 83 per cent to 60 per cent, the European average. In the eyes of many, the previous rate had been one of the chief causes of the country’s relatively poor economic performance. The rich could always seek other climes.

The cost of the war on inflation mounted ever higher, and its casualties began to protest. Riots broke out in the early Eighties, motivated in part by the insensitive ‘sus’ laws, later known as ‘stop and search’, and in part by mass unemployment in the black communities. They began in the depressed district of St Paul’s in Bristol in April 1980, and spread to Brixton in London the next year, with burning buildings, tear gas, police charges and mob attacks. The frenzy was contagious, and riots took place in at least 58 British towns and cities. The Times reported that fears about the breakdown of law and order were being widely expressed in foreign centres, no doubt laced with schadenfreude. Some commentators went perhaps too far. ‘The extinction of civilised life on this island,’ wrote E. P. Thompson, ‘is probable.’ It was an opportune moment for dismay: at the end of March 1982, there was a strong warning that the Argentinian navy was about to invade the sovereign territory of the Falkland Islands.

51

The Falklands flare-up

Neil Kinnock, later leader of the Labour party, said of Thatcher that she had ‘the greatest gift: the right enemies’. Certainly General Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina was an ideal enemy. He had come to power in a coup and had ensured that some 20,000 of his compatriots ‘disappeared’. Now the Falkland islanders were next on his list of internal undesirables.

It had the makings of a great naval adventure, but it played out in the eyes of a world looking for disasters. Many wanted to see the back of Thatcher and cheered on the Argentinians. Others wanted to retain Britain’s influence and cheered the British contingent. It was a small turf war, but it had momentous consequences for Britain. Was it about to decline into a third-rate power? A genuine fear of failure invaded the military, as well as the diplomatic contingent, Westminster and the public at large.

As early as 1976 there had been negotiations between Britain and Argentina about the sovereignty of the islands. In early 1982, the Argentinian government formulated plans for a military solution, and the possibility of confrontation came closer when it was proposed to withdraw HMS Endurance from its hydrographic work in the vicinity – to the Argentinians, it appeared like the prelude to a more general withdrawal.

An Argentinian invasion fleet sailed on 28 March, with the instruction to protect the lives of the island population. Its presence became known to the British authorities by 2 April, and five days later the first stage of the ‘task force’ was under way. Diplomatic initiatives, led principally by the Americans, now became vital. It was not militarily or financially feasible, the British Foreign Office suggested – it would be better to back down or to reach an accommodation. But Thatcher would have none of it: ‘They wanted us to negotiate. You can’t negotiate away an invasion! You can’t negotiate away that the freedom of your people has been taken … by a cruel dictator. You’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to have the spine to do it!’

For their part, the British people confined their protests to hurling cans of corned beef at the windows of the Argentine embassy, while a BBC broadcaster conveyed something of the spirit of the time as he signed off with ‘Let’s just hope we win,’ his tone at once gently patriotic and grimly wistful. The BBC was not always a friend to Thatcher, but here, perhaps for the last time, she found in it an ally.

The United Kingdom was not quite the lone wolf of journalistic imagination. American ‘Sidewinders’ proved crucial in the race for air supremacy, for example, as did the collaboration of France in sharing intelligence. Yet the odds were heavily against her. After several failed missions, the British military operation began on 1 May, when a ‘total exclusion zone’ had been imposed around the islands. One of the principal objects of attack was ARA General Belgrano, an Argentinian light cruiser that posed a serious threat to the British. A submarine was dispatched and the Belgrano sank, with the loss of more than 300 lives. The furore was immeasurably increased when it was discovered that it had been sailing away from the ‘total exclusion zone’. Retaliation was swift: HMS Sheffield was attacked by an Exocet missile, and Argentinian anti-aircraft batteries injured three Harriers. More mediation followed under the guidance of the Peruvians, but it came to nothing. In Britain, Tony Benn claimed that not only had the Belgrano been torpedoed, but with it any chance of a settlement. He cannot have known that Galtieri could afford to climb down no more than could Thatcher. His regime, too, was at stake.

There seemed little option but to mount an armed invasion against the islands, with all the risks that the intervention implied. The landing itself was deemed to be a success. There was some confusion in the Argentinian High Command, which meant that their attacks on the British were still sporadic. But Argentinian naval intelligence was nevertheless effective and a container ship, the SS Atlantic Conveyor, went down, as did six Wessex, one Lynx and three Chinook helicopters. The reaction in Britain was one of shock and incredulity. Could the nightmare materialize, and the power of Britain be threatened? Many believed in any case that Britain had become restless, irresolute and essentially weak. Could this be an apocalypse that might destroy the reputation of the nation? For the prime minister it was an ordeal by fire that could only have one conclusion. The national mood, if not exactly summoned by drums, was sounding a fiercer note.

The Battle of Goose Green was a British success, and the British moved on to Stanley with high hopes. The final assault was on 13 June, and the Argentine forces signalled their surrender on 15 June. It was a victory with many difficulties along the way and largely dependent on chance. A different season of the year, a different set of political circumstances or more reliable Argentine bombs, and all could have changed. Nonetheless, it could be claimed that English gallantry was still alive. One man to receive the Victoria Cross posthumously was Colonel ‘H’ Jones who, holed up by a long line of Argentine machine-gunners, roared to his men, ‘Come on, A Company, get your skirts off!’ and rushed out to take the enemy position, alone and in the teeth of their fire. His death gave heart to his men and dismayed the Argentines, who quickly surrendered. But the war had shown other sides to the nation, as well as to Thatcher herself. She wrote letters of condolence to the families of every British soldier killed, yet was angry to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury mentioning the Argentine bereaved as proper subjects for prayer. Her powers of sympathy were often stunted by a lack of imagination.

For Thatcher, it had been a time of constantly strained nerves, arguments and tears. She had stared national humiliation in the face and had not flinched. She kept her will intact, and faced down those who predicted failure. It was a great national and personal victory. If she had become indomitable, it could only reflect brightly on her political future.

52

The Big Bang

The prime minister realized that it would be opportunistic to call an election on the merits of the victory in the Falklands War, but there were other ways of taking advantage of the situation. In the words of her new chancellor, Nigel Lawson, ‘she came to believe in the media presentation, and to act in a quasi-presidential style’. Norman Tebbit, though fiercely loyal, had to admit that ‘she could be merciless’. Her bullying rose to the surface, with the gentle Howe as its chief victim. They had once been allies, sharing a methodical rigour and an insatiable appetite for work. Perhaps she saw him as her true rival in diligence. Almost supernatural qualities began to be ascribed to her. It was rumoured that she subsisted on coffee and vitamins alone, and that she bathed in an electric bath. The writer Iain Sinclair suggested half-facetiously that she was a latter-day witch.

It was in this period that Thatcher began to espouse the imprecise notion of ‘Victorian Values’. There were already signs of intrigue against her. A leak from the Central Policy Review Staff suggested large budget cuts, but her landslide victory in 1983 did nothing to mitigate her zeal. Steady privatization was maintained without much comment. The sale of British Telecom was continued, and local government spending came under scrutiny. Her victory in the Falklands had increased her confidence. Her opponent, Michael Foot, had been committed to a manifesto of socialist retrenchment so radical that it was dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. At the beginning of 1984, she stripped the unions at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of their rights, imposing upon them the secret ballot and a prohibition on secondary picketing.

In the same year, she began yet another confrontation. Three years ago, she had been forced to back down in the face of a miners’ strike. Now another threatened, and the National Union of Mineworkers saw nothing to suggest that they should not win again. Moreover, their leader was now Arthur Scargill, who had so triumphantly routed Edward Heath. For Thatcher, it was a fight between democracy and militant trade unionism, against an attempt to ‘substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law’. For Scargill, the aim was not merely to win, but to ‘roll back the years of Thatcherism’. For Tony Benn, perhaps the only Labour politician fully to back the miners, it was Thatcher’s war on the strongest union. If it was won, then the others would be cowed.

The battle took on familiar lines. The NUM refused to hold a national strike ballot and the Nottinghamshire miners carried on working. They belonged to another union and proved to be Thatcher’s inadvertent and even unwilling allies – she could claim that it was miner against miner. Moreover, having learned from her predecessors’ mistakes, she had enough coal to withstand any strike. At the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’, mounted police dispersed the flying pickets on which Scargill had placed such hopes. The nation watched and concluded that this was a barren cause, which brought out the worst in everyone. The strike ended on 13 March 1985, though the majority of miners had returned to work long before that. The banners of the unions flew in the breeze and brass bands played as men rejoined the ranks of those they had termed ‘scabs’. Although it was not seen as a defeat, it presaged one. The Nottinghamshire miners, to whom Thatcher had sent her thanks in writing, were to lose everything they had fought for under her successor. A Conservative government would still eventually close their pits.

She went back to the first principles of privatization. Her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had written to her in 1983 warning that the new life of the private companies would impinge upon ‘the giant utilities and unprofitable companies’, but nothing could stop her now. Twenty-three enterprises, including the British Gas Corporation, British Telecom and the National Coal Board, were up for sale. Half of the shares of British Telecom were put on sale in November 1984 at a low price, which rose by 43 pence on the first day and never dipped. For the first time in its history, the stock exchange seemed a benevolent institution, and it spread a sparkle over the late period of capitalism that socialists could not overcome. In effect it changed the whole attitude of the country: private and public wealth now went hand in hand. The first mobile telephone sets were sold, and the proportion of homes that were owner-occupied rose from 55 per cent to 67 per cent. It was an extraordinary metamorphosis, though it went largely unnoticed at the time. But on 27 October 1986, the fissures of the financial volcano merged and created a mighty explosion which became known as the ‘Big Bang’.

53

The Brighton blast

On 12 October 1984, the Conservative party was to hold its conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. In the early hours of the morning, Norman Tebbit noticed the chandelier above his head swaying. Within seconds, the ceiling began to collapse. Tebbit sensed the cause in a moment. The building had been bombed. He survived, though his wife, Margaret, was left paralysed from the neck down. In later years, he would remember the friendly grip of Fred, a fireman, pulling him through the rubble and to safety.

The IRA’s principal target also survived, though her bathroom was wrecked. Five people were killed in the blast, among them the wife of the chief whip, John Wakeham. After she had visited the survivors and comforted the staff, Mrs Thatcher and her husband retired to bed for a few hours. ‘We said a prayer and tried to go to sleep,’ she recalled. Daybreak brought two urgent questions. The first was whether the delegates should immediately return to Westminster. But though shaken and sleepless, Thatcher was unmoved. ‘The conference will go on as usual,’ she told the press, pale-faced and wary-eyed. A second question now arose: given that most of the bedrooms in the hotel were now crime scenes, what were the delegates, still in pyjamas and nightgowns, to wear to the conference? Marks & Spencer were prevailed upon to open their doors at 8 a.m. And so, with all immaculately dressed, the conference started at 9.30 ‘precisely’, as Thatcher was quick to point out. She had proved yet again that she could be neither cowed nor deflected, and the nation took note.

‘We do not surrender to bullets or bombs,’ Thatcher had proclaimed in 1983. If she had, it would have been no wonder. The IRA had been intensifying its campaign, pressing ever harder on the nerve of British fears. Two members of the Irish security forces had been killed; a Unionist politician had been assassinated; and Harrods, the symbol of all that was affluent on the mainland, was targeted. Six people died. The IRA’s campaign had intensified since the late Seventies. In 1976, in the aftermath of bombings in Guildford and Birmingham, the Labour government had withdrawn political status from those convicted of terrorist offences, a policy that Thatcher continued. ‘There can be no question of granting political status,’ she said. ‘A crime is a crime is a crime.’ The IRA was only the most famous, and not always the most brutal, of the terrorist groups in the Province, but if every atrocity was presumed to be the work of the IRA, then it had only itself to blame. Moral considerations aside, the political folly of taking ‘the war’ to the British mainland should have been apparent to its high command. But the IRA was still riding high on the deaths of the hunger strikers in 1981, a cause which gained it yet more funds from the United States. With the Brighton bombing, however, direct attempts on the life of the premier ended. ‘Today we have been unlucky, but remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always,’ the IRA offered. But it was bluster.

The bombing had occurred in the midst of negotiations with the Irish Republic. While it was generally agreed that nothing should divert this process, Thatcher was in no humour for what she called ‘appeasement’. Her Irish counterpart, Garret FitzGerald, was a genial, well-meaning man, but he too had the sensibilities of his people to consider. Time and again, Thatcher ruled out any talk of an executive, or even consultative, role for the Republic in the affairs of the Province. The truth was that she understood little of Ireland or of its history. On one occasion she wondered aloud whether the Catholics might not be better off moving to the Republic. Hadn’t that been done before? Yes, but under Cromwell, it was pointed out. The Unionists, moreover, were largely excluded from the process, a fact that the Reverend Ian Paisley was not slow to allude to.

But still the process continued, until on 15 November 1985 the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed. The concessions now appear cosmetic; at the time they were radical. The Irish were given their cherished ‘consultative role’ in the Province, while accepting that there could be no change to its constitution unless the majority of the population should desire one. That possibility seemed remote to the British, but less so to their Irish counterparts, who knew that the demographics of the Province had begun to tilt towards such an eventuality.

While Thatcher evinced little concern for the Province, her opposite number in Washington cared a great deal. Ronald Reagan had been the chief spur to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The two politicians were very different beasts. Reagan had won his position by conjoining an easy, unaffected charm and an equally easy patriotism, but a keen intellect was not his distinctive trait. In later years, when asked why she had held in such high esteem a man whom she would never have appointed to her cabinet, Thatcher replied: ‘Because Ron has an instinctive understanding of the greatness and destiny of America.’ As cold warriors, they were popularly supposed to be inseparable, but here their approaches differed. For Thatcher, the West’s nuclear deterrent was an indispensable guarantor of both freedom and peace. Had not the doctrine of mutually assured destruction kept the great Bear in his cage? For Reagan, nuclear missiles were at best a necessary evil. He was heard to exclaim at meetings, ‘Why don’t we just abolish nuclear weapons?’

Many asked the same question. One of the most effective of the anti-nuclear protests came from a group that became known as ‘the women of Greenham Common’, who combined the recently rediscovered authority of their sex with a fierce antagonism to nuclear weaponry. Their protest arose from the arrival in England of American cruise missiles; these were stationed at RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire, which became the focus of mass demonstration when in 1982 the women set up an extended camp, intending to remain as long as the rockets stayed in position. On 1 April 1983, the women formed a human chain around the site, which caught the world’s imagination. The camp settled into something like a mini city, with different quarters for different groups. It was a long wait, of some nineteen years, and the camp was not disbanded until 2000. In the end, the missiles were removed from Greenham Common as the result of a nuclear treaty between the United States and the then Soviet Union, but the women refused to leave until a memorial for their achievement was set up. Had they succeeded? In any direct sense, the answer must be no. But they set a new, strange and deeply English example of peaceful rejection of power.

It was Thatcher who first struck a mattock into the ice of the Cold War. In February 1984, Yuri Andropov, the ageing premier of the USSR, died. Thatcher attended his funeral, where she impressed the Politburo and the Russian people with her dignity and courtesy. She also formed a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a man, as she said, ‘she could do business with’. It helped that Gorbachev had defied precedent by bringing his wife. Konstantin Chernenko succeeded Andropov only to follow him into the grave, and Gorbachev was appointed in his place. The empire he had inherited was vast in scope but sick with senescence. Its economy was doubly vulnerable: firstly, oil and gas accounted for half its exports. Secondly, in order to keep pace with the United States, it was obliged to spend a vast percentage of its GDP on defence. These disadvantages might have counted for less had its once legendary technological initiative not atrophied since the Sixties. In sum, having run out of ideas, the USSR was beginning to run out of money and will.

The Special Defence Initiative, better known by the sobriquet ‘Star Wars’, was Reagan’s suggestion as to how the Cold War impasse might be broken. The intention was to spend over a trillion dollars on a satellite system that would effectively end the possibility of conventional nuclear conflict. When the subject was raised during talks over the future of mid-range nuclear weapons, it became crushingly clear that the USSR could never match such an innovation. Thus began the end of the Cold War and, ultimately, the dissolution of what Reagan had once called the ‘Evil Empire’. SDI ended its days in 1993, stillborn. It was perhaps the greatest bluff in history, and a bluff all the more remarkable for being inadvertent.

The contribution of Britain to the end of the Cold War may easily be exaggerated. Neither the women of Greenham Common nor Thatcher herself were to lift that swaying sword from its hook, but it was Thatcher who made the first overtures to the eastern bloc. For all his personal warmth and evident goodwill, Reagan was seen as Thatcher’s charming guide, a guru without innate authority for the role. The enduring image of him was that captured by a new British television comedy: he was shown as hardly ever leaving his bed, his face either twisted in consternation or alight with a brainless smile. The president, along with every politician, actor, singer, celebrity, churchman, member of parliament and member of the royal family, was a latex puppet. Spitting Image not only lampooned the coarseness, cynicism and vulgarity of the time – in many minds it embodied it.

The puppeteers responsible were Peter Fluck and Roger Law. They mischievously altered their names to ‘Luck’ and ‘Flaw’ in the concluding credits, although alternative malapropisms had no doubt occurred to them. The humour was not so much a rifle as a blunderbuss, with shot flying everywhere and everyone wounded. If the Tory cabinet was presented as a court of nervous sycophants led by a dictator, the Labour party appeared as a crew of unelectable clowns. The voice artist captured perfectly the prime minister’s laboured mellifluousness, but also let her lapse into a Lincolnshire growl when crossed. However inspired its puppets or its jokes, the show could never be accused of delicacy. The puppeteers confuted their critics with an unanswerable observation. ‘People say we’re too savage, but you don’t hear anyone accusing Conservative Central Office of being gratuitously benevolent.’

These were the years when alternative comedy at last reached the home, though it was never domesticated. The Young Ones depicted four students sharing a sublimely dilapidated house. We were introduced to a hippy, a punk, a ‘wide boy’, a sociology student and their erratic Polish landlord. Of the four, only Mike, the wide boy, was a creation of the Eighties and yet he was the character who provoked the least laughter. For until deep into the decade, the favourites remained the old favourites. The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise still set the nation laughing, as, until his death in 1984, did Tommy Cooper. Their baton was picked up by Cannon and Ball and Little and Large. The direct, apolitical and apparently artless comedy of former years never lost its hold, and many comics whose oeuvre might be thought antithetical to variety later paid tribute to that tradition.

In the Eighties, a second musical invasion occurred. After the dip of the Seventies, British pop music began once more to startle and surprise, and the American charts were soon awash with British acts. A third of all ‘chart-toppers’ were British; such an invasion had not been seen since the Sixties. For decades, popular music had been driven by a quest for the ‘authentic’, with the ‘serious’ musician habitually looking backwards to an heroic age of purity. In the Eighties the source of inspiration shifted: the future now issued a peremptory summons. The anthem for this change was the suggestively titled ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by the Buggles. Style was all, and it was a style in which the wildest retrogression mingled with an almost astringent futurity. The names of the groups themselves evoked this: Visage, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, the Style Council, New Order, the Human League, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Gary Numan and the Eurythmics. The alarmingly named Kajagoogoo had begun its brief life in the public eye as ‘Art Nouveau’. In Adam and the Ants, the dandy had returned, but without the menace and aggression of the Fifties Teddy boys. Adam Ant was swathed in the glittering lustre of a Regency beau at a masquerade or the voluminous cloak of a highwayman. Elegance could find other manifestations: Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran performed in what seemed to be the best of Savile Row tailoring. The ‘New Romantics’ was the term applied to many of these groups.

The guitar, the supremely workingclass instrument, now ceded place to the synthesizer, an unmistakable symbol of modernity. This portable electric keyboard provided the distinctive sound of the early Eighties with a frantic but colourless buzz. The prevalent timbre of the voices was dull and punctuated by leaps into falsetto. The old word ‘band’, connoting brotherhood, was replaced by ‘group’; impersonal, expressive of nothing. It was a fitting reflection of the age. Indeed, with ‘groups’ springing up and dying back over mere months, it was small wonder that many artists, women in particular, chose to go solo. The pop musicians of the period were seldom openly gay, but it scarcely mattered; the queer ethos was everywhere. As if in reaction, groups like Wham! evoked the style of Fifties rockers in their sun-swept, if ersatz, masculinity. In one of the period’s better ironies, it transpired that George Michael, the lead singer and the supposed embodiment of clean-cut heterosexuality, was himself gay.

And at a time when homosexuality had become the object of increasing hostility, gay groups were well placed to resurrect a forgotten musical genre in the protest song. Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a largely gay group whose music suffered so much tinkering in the studio that only trace elements of its members’ contribution were discernible. The public cared little, however. In ‘Relax’, they offered a song so obviously suggestive of sex that it was taken off the air. In the video for ‘Two Tribes’, world leaders were shown in a boxing ring. During the Seventies, English musicians had largely eschewed the great questions of the day; even the Sex Pistols addressed them only obliquely. In any case, no focus for anger could exist when there was still a political consensus. In the Eighties, an enemy had arisen in the human shape of Margaret Thatcher. Now a spring of dissent could blossom.

By the late Eighties, the individualism of most recent music had receded before a movement whose aim, if it had one, was the dissolution of the self. ‘Acid house’ had arrived from the United States by way of the party island of Ibiza. It was an almost entirely electronic confection, with musicians nowhere to be seen. The dull thrum of the beat was overlaid by a still darker bass note, and within those liberal confines the ‘songwriters’ were free to add whatever tunes or lyrics they could lift from other artists. The effect could be mesmerizing or galvanizing. LSD was the amuse-bouche for early acid house. However, the drug was quickly displaced by MDMA or, when taken in pill form, ‘ecstasy’. The emblem for the drug, and for the music, was a smiling face. For a time, the ravers were indeed all smiles, but the drug was still illegal. The government began to clamp down on the revellers and the concerts decamped to the countryside, where ‘raves’ could continue unmolested. ‘House party’ no longer evoked a weekend away in a stately home, but a vast open-air concert in the dead of night. There was a gathering known as the ‘Second Summer of Love’ in 1988, where 50,000 attended, and a third in 1989.

Initially these conclaves proved almost impossible for the law to detect. However obvious the signs of their presence – lorries, lights, stadia, music swelling over fields of sugar beet – the raves could spring up anywhere, and the organizers proved adept at luring the police into countryside cul-de-sacs. But such strategies fell victim to an ancient principle: once the crime has been committed, time favours the law. The police began to adopt the methods of their quarry and soon the illegal outdoor ‘rave’ became little more than a wistful memory.

The music itself was to prove yet another example of the English genius for restitching foreign fashions. In front of a solitary disc jockey mixing melodies and beats, dancers swayed and writhed as if before a priest preparing a sacrifice. Indeed, it seems more than coincidental that this movement ripened in tandem with a religious revival, one as striking as it was ephemeral. The Pentecostal movement, largely Afro-Caribbean in origin, had spread to the white suburbs and even into the city. There it became‘charismatic’. As if its meaning had not already changed enough, ‘house party’ could now refer to a weekend away on an evangelical retreat. There was a surge of new religious movements or cults, with Mormons, ‘Moonies’ and Hare Krishna devotees increasingly in evidence. The first tales of alien abduction began to be heard and garish rumours of satanic sexual abuse slid into the tabloid press. Happily, they proved insubstantial, but they too were a sign that the so-called age of consumption was avid for the wondrous, the bizarre and the unearthly.

In the spring of 1984, news came that Ethiopia had fallen victim to a famine. Even to a nation jaded by pictures of Belfast bombings, the images of suffering had the power to move and appal. One man was convinced that something could be done, and by musicians. Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, possessed an almost boundless force of will. In November 1984, he and Midge Ure of Ultravox composed ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ for famine relief, and it soon sold over 3 million records. But Geldof had only begun his mission. He appeared on television, tired, tousled and plainly impatient, addressing the camera with jabbing finger. ‘If you’ve given your money already, go to your neighbour and bang on their door and tell them to send some too.’ In 1985, he employed his formidable skills as missionary and arm-twister to cajole the great and good of the musical world to play at a concert, for free. It was to be called ‘Live Aid’. Although George Harrison had established a precedent in a concert for Bangladesh in 1972, nothing on this scale had been attempted. More remarkable yet, it was all arranged within a month. Over a fifth of the world’s population watched the concert and it generated many millions; as with many such feats, the purity of the original vision occluded many troublesome questions about its effects. The important thing, as Geldof proclaimed, was that something be done. The idea is with us still: good intentions are sacred in themselves. It was not quite a Thatcherite position, but it suited the climate well and set a precedent. The role of the musician was no longer to furnish entertainment; he or she was now moral instructor and spiritual guide.

Another conception of the artist as deserving beneficiary rather than paid jongleur was seen in the artistic community’s response to Thatcher and Thatcherism. Indeed, the reaction of many artists seemed not so much emotional or intellectual as olfactory; she stank in their nostrils till they quivered. Jonathan Miller spoke of her ‘suburban gentility … her saccharine patriotism.’ How could such a one understand the aspirations and yearnings of the true artist? The hatred had at least as much to do with her policies as with her personality. Although her government spent more on the arts than its predecessor, it spent less as a percentage of GDP, which could not help but impinge upon an innately delicate realm. Particularly for those in the performing arts, labour-intensive and largely unprofitable as they must be, the smallest dip in subsidy could result in ruin; this was seen in the collapse of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1982. The answer, Thatcher reasoned, was to bring in the businessmen, which only exacerbated matters for the intelligentsia: was the holy of holies to ring with the vulgar cries of the costermonger? Moreover, the theatre particularly had a proud tradition of leftist sympathies; the values of drama and Thatcherism were thus felt to be irreconcilable.

54

Was she always right?

In some quarters of the artistic establishment, Thatcher was openly declared a fascist. Her politics were understood as ‘an authoritarian dogma … bright with pastels’. In Greek, Steven Berkoff’s reimagining of Oedipus Tyrannus, the Jocasta character refers to Thatcher as ‘dear old Maggot’, mentioning that her portrait is on the wall beside one of Hitler. A production of Richard III was criticized for failing to make a comparison between the hunchbacked tyrant and the current prime minister. An increasingly politicized Harold Pinter seemed to take it for granted that Thatcher represented a new and sinister mutation of the fascist plague. In popular culture, the notion was still more prevalent. A video for the pop group the Communards depicted Britain as a totalitarian state, with grey overcoats and menacing guards in evidence. And Spitting Image regularly portrayed Thatcher in the attire of a military leader who had attained power by dubious means. It may be that the word ‘fascist’ had lost some of its power as the generations rolled. When Enoch Powell was heckled with cries of ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’, he remarked, ‘Before many of those accusing me of fascism and Nazism were born, I was fighting both fascism and Nazism.’

Thatcher herself was certainly authoritarian in temperament and often in address. She was deeply unpopular even among many who voted for her. She was unapologetic in her belief that the police were the guardians of law and order and should be respected as such. That she presided over more than her due share of battles between policemen and dissidents cannot be denied. In education, she imposed a national curriculum on unwilling teachers, though her influence in that sphere was far less pervasive than was generally believed. During the Falklands War, her willingness to accept help from the Chilean dictator Pinochet stained her in the eyes of many. And it may be that her very poise counted against her: she was always right.

But her regime was as liberal as any before or since; she was a lifelong foe of tyranny; she placed herself in the firing line whenever one existed; she was democratically elected three times; and she gave succour to the impulse for freedom whenever she thought it had a chance of life. The charge that she was a ‘Little Englander’ was harder to refute, though in truth she was more of a ‘Big Englander’; she did not understand the aspirations of Wales or Scotland, and tended to construe Great Britain as no more than a greater England.

But whether a ‘little’ or ‘big’ Englander, Thatcher was hard to perceive as a European. This was not through want of effort on her part. She had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Market and a leading participant in the negotiations that led to the Single European Act. It may be that landslide of 1987 had lent Thatcher a new sense of confidence that rendered impregnable her notion of Britain leading Europe by its example of capitalist revolution. It was her misfortune to have as antagonist a man whose understanding of the European Community, and Britain’s role in it, was quite different.

Jacques Delors had been appointed president of the Commission in part owing to Thatcher’s good offices. In her eyes, he was vastly preferable to the alternative candidate, a socialist; Delors respected Thatcher as a ‘rich and complex character’, who had done much to accelerate the progress of the Single Market. In the aftermath of the Single European Act of 1985, a largely British achievement, they had worked well together; yet few political honeymoons have proved quite so tempestuous or indeed ephemeral. Delors, like de Gaulle before him, found it hard to distinguish between the interests of France and those of the European Community. Moreover, the brash new anglophone world forged by Reagan and Thatcher was little to his taste. And for all his energy and apparent modernity, Delors seemed the denizen of an older world, one in which France ruled the conference table just as Britain ruled the waves. On one occasion, when asked why he refused to speak in English, Delors retorted: ‘Parce que le Français c’est la langue de la diplomatie … ’ (Because French is the language of diplomacy). And in a growling undertone, he added: ‘et de la civilization!’ (and of civilization).

Between two such mastiffs, each convinced of the justice of their cause, a clash was inevitable. On 6 July 1988, Delors delivered a speech in which he predicted that 80 per cent of the Community’s economy and much of its social and political policy would be determined at European rather than national level. He added, two weeks later, that the ‘germ’ of a European government was now laid. These statements alone would have been enough to irritate and even dismay the British prime minister, but Delors then committed a more serious offence. On 8 September, he took his case for federalism to the British TUC.

Under Michael Foot, the Labour party had been almost implacably hostile to Britain’s membership of the EEC. The European project was a capitalist cartel that had compromised Britain’s sovereignty and would render nearly impossible the implementation of a truly socialist programme in Britain. By 1987, with the more pragmatic Neil Kinnock as leader, the party had softened its stance. Speaking quietly, Delors appeared to promise the unions a restoration of the rights they had assumed in the Seventies. ‘Dear friends,’ he said in valediction. ‘We need you.’ Almost to a member, the congress rose in enraptured applause. It says much for his powers of persuasion that even Michael Foot, seeing his beloved unions wooed, now began to support the EEC.

Not only had Delors placed himself in the vanguard of a vision that Thatcher could never accept, he was now appealing to her oldest and greatest enemies in its defence. An opportunity to make her feelings known came quickly when, in September 1988, she was invited to address the College of Europe in Bruges. Her speech began innocuously enough, as she hastened to root Britain firmly within Europe, its traditions and values. Then the tone changed: ‘But we British have in a special way contributed to Europe. Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom … Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe would have been united long before now – but not in liberty, not in justice.’

Up to this point, the speech had been well judged, with references to British help for Europe balanced by praise for Belgian courage. Now she directed the conference’s attention to the east. ‘The European Community is one manifestation of … European identity, but it is not the only one. We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.’ The message was plain: Europe must look beyond Western Europe. But the vision, though expansive, was incomplete. Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania and Russia, having nothing in the way of a capitalist tradition, simply did not count. ‘Europe,’ she continued, ‘will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity.’ The nation state, not the Commission, should be at the heart of Europe. That this ran counter to at least some of the reforms established by the Single European Act was an irony lost on her. Nonetheless, Thatcher’s understanding of a Europe run by European nations was thoroughly of a piece with her support for British membership in 1973. The term ‘Eurosceptics’ was not yet in currency, but even if it had been, the Bruges speech furnishes no evidence that Thatcher was of their number.

Later in the speech, she made the assertion for which the speech will always be remembered. ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ Perhaps she imagined that this would go down well in Bruges, a rival Belgian city, but it seems improbable. Ironically enough, the expression ‘superstate’ was one of the few with which none in her party, or in the Foreign Office, took issue at the time.

The free movement of peoples was all very well, she suggested, but border controls were needed if the citizen was to be protected from crime, drugs or illegal immigrants. The speech trumpeted NATO, though with a warning that member states of the union should begin to pay their share. She also invoked her bête noire, protectionism. ‘We have a responsibility,’ she said, ‘to give a lead on this, a responsibility which is particularly directed towards the less developed countries. They need not only aid; more than anything they need improved trading opportunities if they are to gain the dignity of growing economic strength and independence.’

It was a point that was also to be raised by many on the left, for whom the European Community was an overfed giant that squatted on the smaller economies, crushing all breath from them. It was altogether a remarkable affair, but none foresaw how deeply it would alter Thatcher’s reputation and her dealings with those in Europe. Howe was forthright when he read the first draft, remarking that ‘there are some plain and fundamental errors in the draft and … it tends to view the world as though we had not adhered to any of the treaties.’ It was a just point, but then Howe went further. While he agreed that ‘a stronger Europe does not mean the creation of a superstate’, he re-emphasized the unpalatable fact that it ‘does and will require the sacrifice of political independence and the rights of national parliaments. That is inherent in the treaties.’

This Thatcher could never accept, yet Howe was right. Clause Eleven of the Treaty of Accession had made it quite clear that the laws of the European Community would supersede those of the English parliament. Thatcher’s curious doublethink on the matter ended in what Howe was later to call her ‘defection’ from the party. Whatever the intention may have been, the speech achieved precisely the opposite of what many had hoped. Thatcher could not but intrude her own vision in a speech conceived to celebrate AngloEuropean unity. Now, however inadvertently, she had opened a fissure between herself and her colleagues in the cabinet, in the party and in Europe.

55

Money, money, money

The Conservatives had been elected on a promise of economic salvation, reelected when recession turned into a boom, and elected again because enough of the populace had become wealthy. New wealth had created new types – along with the ‘yuppie’ was the ‘wide boy’, immortalized by the comedian Harry Enfield and his catchphrase ‘I’ve got loadsa money!’ This figure marked a revolution. There had been only a few epochs in English history in which ‘conspicuous consumption’ was not a matter for shame; this decade was one such epoch, but with a difference. The arrivistes of the Tudor or Victorian periods had attempted to array themselves in the ermine of pedigree, but the newly rich of the Eighties had no such anxieties. They did not seek to hide their origins or to emulate the accents of the upper class. They had ‘made good’ and that was enough.

In tandem with the wide boys strode the Sloane Rangers, a type made famous by The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The ‘Sloanes’ were rich, conservative and rural in sympathy if not always in location; they dressed in tweeds and ‘ate jelly with a fork’. In many respects they were thought to represent the last hurrah of old money, but this was erroneous. By the end of the decade, those who had inherited wealth still accounted for the top 57 per cent of the wealthy. ‘Popular capitalism’ was the term Thatcher adopted to encapsulate her vision of a property-owning democracy, an expression that had little resonance and less charm for many of the poorest.

‘Care in the community’, as it became known in the late Eighties, was an offshoot of the influential Griffiths Report of 1983. The report’s main suggestion was that superfluous expenses might be removed if managers could oversee and correct an organization sometimes lacking in efficiency and accountability. In the same spirit, it encouraged the view that the elderly or mentally ill should receive treatment at home. Roy Griffiths believed fervently in the NHS, but he felt it could do better under something resembling a business model. Moreover, the notion that patients could be better served within their own homes seemed a more humanitarian proposition than a lifetime spent within an institution. But many could not thrive or even survive at home, and found too little around their home that could be called a community. The cumulative result was a rise in homelessness. The National Audit Office suggested that the figure in 1989 had reached 126,000.

When a little-known MP named Jeremy Corbyn rose in the House to call the soaring levels of homelessness a ‘disgrace’, Thatcher barely turned her head. In this case, she could not easily be blamed. By 1990, a startling 100,000 council houses stood empty, and the government was to spend £300 million renovating them. Another 600,000 private properties were similarly unused, and that was harder to remedy. Grants and other incentives to housing associations were provided by the Housing Act of 1988, but the crisis of homelessness could only be eased, not abolished.

The unions had been tamed, but another traditionally leftist foe had submitted neither to lash nor leash. For the Tories, animated by the principle that ‘central knows best’, local councils were a hydra of jostling irritations. The first of these, predictably, concerned money. True to her conviction that people can be trusted to take responsibility where they feel they have a financial stake, Thatcher was anxious about the seeming unaccountability of so many local councils. If, she reasoned, the rates levied on property were to be replaced by a tax on the individual, members of the public would become true local taxpayers, shareholders with the right to demand proper standards. Councils in turn would therefore have to justify their expenditure and their policies. The notion was first seriously mooted in 1983 and took some years to gestate. When at last the new tax was approved, it was given the most innocuous of titles: the community charge.

A second thistle hid within a paradox. The Tories might govern the land, but their rivals governed the cities. The consequences of this lay in education, which was the responsibility of local government and persistently overlooked by the Conservatives. Those children, the vast majority, who did not go to private schools, grew up under a right-wing government but received a left-wing education. This alone ensured that the shadow of the post-war consensus still stretched over the Thatcher government, and that years after the memory of the Seventies had dulled, Thatcher was still vilified in increasingly vague but no less vituperative terms.

In some left-wing boroughs, the children of immigrants were encouraged to read and write in their mother tongues rather than in English. Young, Gay and Proud was the title of a book for secondary school students. The honest impetus behind such initiatives did not protect them from attack. Indeed it was precisely the eclectic approach of such councils that led, some argued, to the Conservative victory of 1987. In its election campaign, the Conservative party placed some of the more provocative textbook titles with the question: ‘Is this Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education?’

Under Ken Livingstone, or ‘Red Ken’, the Greater London Council had proved particularly noxious to the prime minister, with its unabashed socialism, its sometimes uncritical support for fringe causes, and its wholehearted welcome of anything associated with ethnic minorities. That it was led by a true Londoner, who recognized that afternoon tea and scones had given way in the metropolis to curry and rice, did not sweeten matters. Happily for Thatcher, the GLC had its gun squarely trained on its own foot. When it transpired that the council had spent more on the advertising campaign to preserve its own existence than the money collected for the Ethiopian famine, its socialist credentials became harder to maintain.

No longer was there talk of the unions bringing down the government, but Nigel Lawson was not alone in feeling that the prime minister’s renewed self-confidence in the wake of the 1987 landslide was not entirely wholesome. And this self-confidence was now deployed in an arena where the foe had grown considerably more nimble. Thatcher’s last great achievement in Europe had been the Single European Act. Although it had included legislation that freed the Community from any internal trade restrictions, the act also paved the way for monetary union. It was perhaps an uneasy recognition of this that had led to the Bruges speech. But now an unsettling shift had occurred. Where before Thatcher had been at the heart of matters, pushing for ever fewer trade restrictions, she now seemed alone. It is possible that her very strength now seemed an anachronism; the new Europe, under Jacques Delors, had a warm embrace for biddable ciphers, not for those who knew their own minds, however flawed.

Unsuspected by Thatcher or Reagan, the eastern bloc had been steadily crumbling for years. The nations of central and Eastern Europe relied on Russia for their oil and gas, and on Western loans for much else. Russia itself needed Eastern Europe for raw materials. It could not continue. Eastern Europe faced bankruptcy and Hungary was the first to go, slipping away from the bloc in 1988 with so little fanfare that its pioneering defection is hardly remembered. In 1989, the harassed leader of East Germany announced that citizens from East Berlin would be allowed to cross the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was first climbed before being breached and then torn down. Czechoslovakia and Poland fell next. The nations closest to Russia, culturally and politically, took longer, but by that point it scarcely mattered to the West: a great shadow had lifted. Thatcher’s own contribution had been ancillary to the contest between Reagan and Gorbachev, but a midwife was still indispensable. Yet what role now for Britain in the uncertain world that had opened?

The European Community had changed too, but here also Britain’s role seemed diminished. Jacques Delors had imbued the increasingly tired and sclerotic EEC with his own sharply federalist vision, in which monetary union would render national currencies obsolete. More radically yet, such a union would be followed, in time, by its political equivalent. British statesmen since Macmillan had urged their colleagues to press on with European membership in order to influence the Community at its heart, confident that it could ‘steer Europe away from federalism’. To some extent, this promise had been fulfilled. On Britain’s insistence, the EEC had at last begun to consider those countries behind the Iron Curtain as European. And the Single European Act was a largely British project. But as Thatcher noted, there was no hope of a retreat from the federalist course, and with the unification of Germany looming, Britain’s pretensions to the status of paramount European power appeared self-deluding.

But first, the currency question had to be addressed. Both Nigel Lawson, the chancellor, and Geoffrey Howe, now foreign secretary, believed that entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism could no longer be delayed. Thatcher was unconvinced, but the big beasts were not to be cowed. On 25 July 1989, they warned that they would both resign over the issue. The challenges had begun to mount. When they flew out for the Madrid Summit later that day, an arctic silence prevailed between Thatcher and Howe. At the summit, Thatcher surprised the rebels, agreeing that Britain should enter the ERM. A month later she removed Howe from the Foreign Office, but if she recognized that the anger she felt towards him was now being reciprocated, she did not show it.

On 26 October, Lawson resigned, a decision long in the brewing. In the end, he had been undermined by Sir Alan Walters, Thatcher’s economic adviser, who questioned his judgement in an article for the Financial Times. Keeping sterling pegged to the fortunes of the Deutschmark had become Lawson’s obsession, and even rising inflation could not divert him. It was a rare lapse: he had been responsible for lifting almost a million of the poorest out of the tax system, for sowing and irrigating growth and investment on every side. His was a remarkable talent and the prime minister could little afford the loss.

When John Major was summoned to Number Ten, in order to replace Lawson as chancellor, he found the nation’s unbendable leader ‘close to tears’. She had never been so outfaced, and now a frightened little girl broke through the carapace. A more superstitious woman might have begun to study the signs: 1990 was full of disquieting omens. By-election results appeared to predict a Conservative defeat. On 30 July, Ian Gow, Thatcher’s former parliamentary private secretary, was killed by the IRA. Resignations, defections and conspiracies seemed to loom in the shadows. A month after Lawson’s resignation in October 1989, the unthinkable happened in the form of a challenge. Sir Anthony Meyer bid for the leadership. Thatcher received almost ten times as many votes, but the tremors of dissent were unmistakable. The next of many resignations came about largely by ill luck and unthinking flippancy, when in July 1990 Nicholas Ridley resigned over a faux pas in which he had compared European Monetary Union with the Third Reich. As with so many such blunders, much depended on context.

On 5 October 1990, Major and Thatcher announced Britain’s entry to the ERM. Major beamed, while Thatcher slipped on her patient smile. She had wanted inflation brought down first, while Major had argued that ERM membership would achieve that. Inflation was then running at 10.9 per cent. Nonetheless, euphoria flowered in the press and in the City. It would take only a few years for the flower to shrivel. The Rome Summit was held at the end of October. It was ragged and unsatisfactory, and Thatcher was not impressed by the Italian chair. At last, Thatcher openly opposed stage two of the Delors Report. She had envisaged the ‘ecu’, as it was still termed, as a currency that would run in tandem with national currencies, but now it seemed as if it would be imposed. Whatever lay over the hill could not be seen, but Thatcher saw smoke rising, and that was enough for her.

When she returned to the House, Thatcher found it in savage and mocking revolt. Baited by both Kinnock and Paddy Ashdown, she turned and bit. ‘Mr Delors said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the senate. No, no, no.’ It was intoned with utter finality. Howe, for one, was appalled. If it was hard for many to see how her position differed materially from his, it was clear enough to him. In her Bruges speech, Thatcher had spoken approvingly of the use of the ecu. Now, an unfathomably deep crevasse had opened.

On 1 November, having been effectively demoted and disparaged, Howe resigned as deputy prime minister and lord president of the council. He asked to speak in the House to explain his decision, and in soft tones began to dismantle his colleague and former ally, the prime minister. His first remarks were suffused with quiet irony. ‘If some of my former colleagues are to be believed, I must be the first minister in history who has resigned because he was in full agreement with government policy.’ Thatcher sat still, head cocked, an indulgent smile on her lips. ‘Not one of our economic achievements,’ he continued, ‘would have been possible without the courage and leadership of my right hon. Friend.’ Thatcher’s smile did not alter. He invoked too their former collaboration in Europe, ‘from Fontainebleau to the Single European Act’. Then, with the preliminary courtesies performed, he began the attack. ‘There was, or should have been, nothing novel about joining the ERM.’ He told the House that he and Lawson had consistently urged Mrs Thatcher to join the ERM, before assuring it that he did not ‘regard the Delors Report as some kind of sacred text’. He invoked Macmillan, who in 1962 had urged the nation to take its place at the heart of the EEC. Howe protested that we should not ‘retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our own control over our own destiny in the future …’ He went on to say that ‘had we been ready, in the much too simple phrase, to surrender some sovereignty at a much earlier stage … we should have had more, not less influence, over the Europe we have today. We should never forget the lesson of that isolation.’ A choice between a Europe of entirely independent states and a federal one was ‘a false antithesis, a bogus dilemma … as if there were no middle way. We commit,’ he urged, ‘a serious error if we think always in terms of surrendering sovereignty.’ He contrasted Churchill’s stance with ‘the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend … who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent … scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy”, to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe”. What kind of vision is that, Mr Speaker … for our young people?

‘None of us wants the imposition of a single currency,’ he assured the House. ‘The risk is not imposition but isolation … with Britain once again scrambling to join the club later, after the rules have been set … Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardized the pound sterling, my Right Honourable Friend replied simply, “Yes.” The question of the ecu would be addressed “only by future generations. Those future generations are with us today.”’ Visibly warming to his theme, Howe decided that a cricketing metaphor might be apt. The chancellor and the governor of the Bank of England, he suggested, had been placed in the position of ‘opening batsmen … only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain’.

The House laughed loud and long. Nigel Lawson, in the row behind Howe, permitted himself the briefest flash of a grin. He then quoted a letter to him from a British businessman living and working on the Continent, trading in Brussels and elsewhere, who wrote that ‘people throughout Europe see our Prime Minister’s finger wagging and hear her passionate, “No, No, No”, much more clearly than the content of the carefully worded formal texts.’ A little later, Howe’s reserve broke. ‘Cabinet government is all about trying to persuade one another from within … the task has become futile.’ If there had been any doubt as to Howe’s real intent, it was dissolved by his final words: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’ The House heard the simple words of a man honestly aggrieved. It was a reliably devastating device.

The next day, Michael Heseltine formally challenged the prime minister for the leadership. He had had a mixed career under Thatcher’s rule. While he had done much to invigorate Liverpool and the Docklands area, and had served well as the government’s ‘ambassador’ in its dealings with environmental groups, he was perhaps too flamboyant and ambitious to garner very much affection in the House. He was also a passionate Europhile at a time when such a loyalty seemed suspect. Less than five years previously, he had resigned from the cabinet over the so-called ‘Westland affair’, a controversy so involved and intricate that Thatcher later reflected, ‘I can’t even remember what the actual Westland thing was about now.’ Few could.

At root, it was the tale of an ailing helicopter company that some felt needed to be rescued. Two bids for Westland had been made, one American and one European. Michael Heseltine, as defence secretary, had strongly supported the European bid. Given that it was the less ‘capitalist’ of the alternatives, offering far more bureaucracy than its rival, it was never likely to have Thatcher’s support. In an effort to contain him, Thatcher placed Heseltine under something like a gagging order, but it proved quite ineffective. On 9 January, he demanded in cabinet that all the options be discussed, and when Thatcher refused, he swept out and announced to the press outside that he had resigned. As he gathered his papers, she said simply, ‘I’m sorry.’ Whether or not she was sincere, the sentiment was widely shared. Indeed, ‘Tarzan’, as Heseltine had become known, enjoyed far greater popularity than the prime minister herself. Moreover, he had not been idle in his five years on the back benches. He had toured constituency associations all over the country, sounding out support obliquely but unmistakably.

Heseltine’s gesture dominated the headlines, but the matter of greater moment was the cabinet’s agreement to approve the community charge, introduced on 1 April 1989 in Scotland and a year later in England. The choice of April Fool’s day was an unhappy one; the sly, bland misnomer never caught the public imagination and it was soon replaced by ‘the poll tax’. A fomenter of riots and a slayer of kings, the poll tax had brought down Richard II himself, and the attempt to implement it proved disastrous from the outset. It was formidably difficult to collect, and its manifest inequities enraged even natural Conservatives. While it might have seemed only fair that the citizen should pay for what he or she received in services from the local council, the less well-off were immediately disadvantaged. How could it be just that a poor widow should pay as much as a millionaire? A campaign of non-compliance began, under the slogan ‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’. Kenneth Baker, architect of the tax, assured the country on television that ‘the community charge is here to stay’. The bland complacency in his smile seemed to many to sum up the government’s attitude to all popular discontent, and then came the riots.

On Saturday, 31 March 1990, a protest in Trafalgar Square was blocked by the police. In minutes, violence had erupted. The nation saw mounted policemen charging at civilians, but felt no sympathy for the forces of the law. Thatcher blamed ‘Marxists’ for the violence, and the Marxists blamed the anarchists, but behind the whole protest movement lay the Militant tendency. Thatcher’s sympathies were plain: at the sight of smashed windows and overturned cars she could only exclaim, ‘Oh, those poor shopkeepers!’

After her grand ‘No, no, no’ in the Commons, popular perceptions of Thatcher shifted. She was increasingly regarded as unhinged as well as tyrannical. Spitting Image presented her with the manner of a Nero or Caligula, with rolling eyes and fiddle in hand. But she was not deranged nor even deluded, merely blinkered. She was, however, alone, having sacked more ministers than any other prime minister in British history. The poll tax had put her at odds with the nation, and her position on Europe with her own party. With Whitelaw incapacitated by a stroke, and Tebbit having left the cabinet to care for his wife, she had lost both her protectors, the guard dog and the guardian angel. Like many ministers before and since, Howe resigned when there was comparatively little to resign from. As far as he was concerned, the captain seemed bent on scuttling the ship. It was a just cause for mutiny.

56

The curtain falls

In the first ballot of the leadership contest, Thatcher won her majority, and expressed almost oleaginous pleasure to the cameras. But it was a charade and all knew it; her majority was not large enough to fend off a second ballot. Had only two of Heseltine’s supporters voted the other way, she would have won outright. The outcome of a second ballot was far from certain. Heseltine was not popular enough to win, but the fact that he had lost by a whisker boded no good. One by one, her ministers came to visit her. None could guarantee the loyalty of his colleagues.

On Thursday 22 November, Thatcher announced her resignation. Tebbit was to call Heseltine ‘a serial Conservative assassin’. The image is not altogether apt: an assassin usually works for others. In the House, Thatcher was greeted by waving ballot papers. When pressed by the opposition on the question of betrayal, she supported her party. Privately, she was distraught. Alan Clark, a true believer, attempted to turn her mind to the glories of the past, but she could not be distracted. The nation did not mourn, but the staff at Downing Street openly wept as they presented her with a silver teapot. ‘How useful,’ was her characteristic response. A camera pointed at her limousine caught her leaning forward, with tears in her eyes and biting her lip.

Her vision had been refracted through prisms softer than her own, but when she spoke her mind, without filter or script, the effect was too often discordant and divisive. And towards the end, she even spoke her mind in defiance of government policy. Not Salisbury, Disraeli, Baldwin or even Sir Robert Walpole had sought so openly to remould the nation in their image. For this attempt alone, popular memory has found it hard to forgive her. Then must be reckoned the 3 million who lost their jobs in her battle with inflation, the hammer taken to the old mining communities, the disintegration of union power, her perceived philistinism, her weakness for tub-thumping, and the suspicion, shared by colleagues and country alike, that she could not listen.

In her own eyes, Thatcher had not ended the post-war settlement but had simply withdrawn it to the frontiers of the feasible. Certainly she did not turn Britain into a copy of the United States, as some suggested. In 1979, Thatcher found herself at the head of a mixed economy, and it was a mixed economy that she bequeathed, though the balance had tilted in favour of the private sector. But she did offer security, of a sort – security for the future, in bricks and mortar, in shares and investments, in a promise of wealth that could be passed on. Perhaps she would have wished the City less acquisitive, British culture less avid for pleasure, or the people less stubborn, but these were birds she had hatched. When Kingsley Amis told his heroine that his latest book concerned a Communist takeover of Britain, Thatcher advised him to ‘get another crystal ball’. And indeed she proved the better seer. Yet although she contributed to the end of the Cold War, it seemed to some as if she had no real desire for a peaceful settlement. She could never quite acclimatize herself to a world without the Red Menace. It had been the enemy for so long that she found it hard to identify new enemies except in relation to old.

When she left Downing Street, the Iron Lady floated away to political oblivion. But she could comfort herself with one certainty: John Major, her appointed dauphin, would surely continue her work. He had defeated Heseltine and Douglas Hurd. The ‘boy from Brixton’, charming, unassuming but tenacious, was ‘gold, just gold’, she told others. If he was wanting in fierce conviction, if he appeared a little too pragmatic on European questions, he was nevertheless ‘one of us’.

That John Major would succeed Thatcher in vision as well as in office was taken for granted by all save Major himself. For all his apparent mildness, Major was resolved to be a leader. The differences, both in style and in address, were legion. Some were more subtle than others. Thatcher may be called the last of the truly ‘English’ prime ministers of the twentieth century. She had wanted not only a nanny but ‘an English nanny’ to bring up her children. This sense of Englishness also informed her attitude to the Celtic nations. As a Londoner, John Major was only incidentally English, and his outlook was metropolitan rather than national. ‘What has the Conservative Party to offer to a workingclass kid from Brixton? It made him Prime Minister.’ So ran the party slogan for the 1992 election. The suggestion was cunning, if not entirely accurate. His father had run a business making that most English of artefacts, the garden ornament, and his mother had been a music hall artiste. The Majors’ fortunes dipped when the business ran into difficulties and the family was obliged to move into lodgings. Despite later claims, the family was more of the lower middle than of the working class, but the diligence so often associated with that group was not noticeable in the young John. He left school with only three O levels and a deep sense of shame for having let his parents down.

Once he had been elected as an MP, however, Major’s progress was startlingly swift. He became prime minister after only two years in the cabinet, during which time he had been foreign secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer. This remarkable ascent was to prove a mixed blessing; he had little experience and almost nothing in the way of identifiable political conviction. His great strengths, however, were already apparent. Where other politicians would pay attention chiefly to those they thought might be of use, Major greeted everyone with unaffected warmth. If anything, he paid more attention to ordinary people, seeming happiest when chatting to elderly mothers or attendant wives. He was, moreover, famous for an almost photographic memory for names and faces, and an attention to detail which impressed all who spent even a little time in his company. It was as well that Major had already established a reputation for emollience, for the clan of which he found himself head was a bloody and fractious one. Sharply aware of this, he divided his cabinet almost equally between the left and right wings of his party. His would be a rule by consensus, cabinet ‘as it should be’, as one former minister put it.

The ‘flagship’ of Thatcherism, the poll tax, had evoked Thatcher at her most doctrinaire, and was popularly thought to have destroyed her. Aside from its tainted association, the tax proved as unworkable as it had been unpopular. Fittingly, it fell to Michael Heseltine to put the already moribund community charge out of its misery. He replaced it with the ‘council tax’, a comparatively innocuous levy that is still with us. The poll tax had been in existence for less than a year, costing over £1.5 billion to set up and dismantle. In other respects, too, it proved costly. The Tory presence in Scotland took more than a generation to recover.

But before any domestic matters could be settled, the instinctively pacific John Major found himself leading a nation at war. In the previous year, a crisis had arisen in the Persian Gulf. Saddam Hussein, the bellicose ruler of Iraq, had invaded the gulf state of Kuwait, ousting its emir and redirecting its oil supplies to Iraq. The crisis came in the last stages of the Cold War, and President Bush had other reasons for bringing about a swift conclusion. The international community was supportive of the United States, and Britain, the United States’ chief ally, could scarcely be seen as a laggard.

Bush invited Major to Camp David. The gesture was presented as a meeting of families as much as of war leaders, but few doubted its true purpose. The president felt it best to address the real issue immediately: Iraq had been given until Thursday, 2 November 1990 to withdraw, but the president was under little illusion that it would comply. Diplomacy would still be employed, but, ‘John,’ he said, ‘if all this fails, we’re going to have to commit our troops in battle.’ Major assented. The United States could count on its ally, and it was made clear that neither cabinet nor parliament need be consulted. Like Thatcher, Major had been expecting war; unlike her, he approached it with no relish. He concealed his reservations so well that the president saw only wholehearted support. The meeting was otherwise affable and informal. Major’s style was more friendly and casual than Thatcher’s had been and the president warmed to him accordingly.

Saddam proved intransigent and the deadline for withdrawal loomed. War had become inevitable. On 16 January, the air attack would begin, a largely American effort intended to destroy at least 50 per cent of Saddam’s airborne strength. The counterinvasion was to be termed Operation Desert Storm. Before sending his troops to possible death, Major wanted to speak to them. He had no military experience of which to boast, even in the form of national service. All the more reason therefore for him to speak and, above all, to listen. When he met the troops, he quickly discovered that uncertainty was the chief concern. When Major told them that in all probability they were to be called upon to fight, he sensed mass relief. In spite of his military inexperience, he was in his element. The troops found him approachable and good-humoured. And Major was struck, above all, by the youth of the soldiers; they were, he reflected, no older than his own children.

He had promised the troops that the nation was behind them. This was true in part, but to people in their late teens and early twenties, weaned on a progressive and even pacifist education, this was a war fought not to contain aggression but to keep the oil flowing. But if expressions of disquiet were small and even unpopular – it was not unknown for students to be jostled or even assaulted – they established a precedent that would be followed on a far greater scale. The war itself was won by the spring. As a war leader, Major had been vindicated. Now a very different kind of struggle beckoned, one which he was determined should not bear the character of a conflict.

1991 was the year in which the communities of Western Europe met in Maastricht to determine the future direction of the European project. Major described himself as neither Europhile nor Eurosceptic, but as chancellor he had made his support for Britain’s entry to the ERM plain. It was at Maastricht that the strands of theory, economic expediency and political necessity were woven together. There, the European Economic Community became the European Union. Major’s was among the younger, more vigorous voices, and this, combined with his tenacity, ensured that two treasured ‘opt-outs’ were embedded in the final document. The United Kingdom would be obliged to accept neither the Social Chapter, in which were enshrined the rights to a minimum wage and to a maximum working week, nor, in the immediate future, monetary union. But critics were quick to point out that these assertions of power placed Britain on the fringes of influence, while doing nothing to halt the federalist advance. The treaty cannot be said to have aroused much enthusiasm among the English people, but it had consequences that were overlooked in the usual partisan squabbling. The Single European Act of 1987 had turned the Common Market into the Single Market; Maastricht removed any doubt that something far more comprehensive lay ahead.

57

The fall of sterling

The journalist Simon Heffer went so far as to proclaim that ‘nothing happened at Maastricht to keep Britain off the conveyor belt to federalism; indeed, quite the reverse’. This was perhaps an exaggeration, but it could not be doubted that, in obtaining the concessions it did, the Major government was implicitly offering a concession of its own. Britain could be only a rock in the midst of the federalist tide; it had no power to turn it. When Major commended the treaty to the House of Commons, he appeared to acknowledge as much, if only by omission: ‘This is a treaty which safeguards and advances our national interests. It advances the interests of Europe as a whole. It opens up new ways of cooperating in Europe … It is a good agreement for Europe, and a good agreement for the United Kingdom. I commend it to the House.’

In the eyes of moderates across the House, quiet persistence had succeeded where intransigence had failed. Even some Eurosceptics were pleased, or at least relieved. Thatcher herself largely kept her counsel, though in a private letter to Sir Bill Cash, a prominent Eurosceptic, she expressed the belief that the new direction of the EU was ‘contrary to British interests and damaging to our parliamentary democracy’. The rapture, or relief, in England was not altogether echoed on the Continent. Many were irritated by the opt-outs that Britain had secured. A federal Europe was the inevitable destination, so why did Britain insist on a back route? It should be noted that throughout the process, the mandarins of the Commission were perfectly clear in their intent. As one negotiator observed, ‘It’s getting tiring having to drag Britain along … we can lose the word “federalism” if they want, but …’ The elision was eloquent. In the event, ‘subsidiarity’ was the genial obfuscation selected in preference.

It was at the committee stage in parliament that the treaty’s labour pains began. Beside the Labour party, which wanted the opt-outs removed, the government had to reckon with dissent in its own ranks. At the treaty’s second reading, twenty-two ‘Maastricht rebels’ either voted against the government or abstained. Having lost the whip for their integrity, or audacity, few among them were surprised when it was returned to them. Major had intended this as an act of magnanimity but it was interpreted as weakness. On and on the negotiations trudged, with the rebels tabling amendment after amendment. With defeat looming again, it seemed that only another election could resolve the matter, but rather than take the issue to the country, he took it to the House. A confidence motion was proposed, and Major obtained his mandate. And so, after almost two years of prevarication and obstruction, the Maastricht Treaty was passed, by forty votes, on 20 July 1993.

It is easy now to forget the comparative youth of the movement known as Euroscepticism. Unlike Enoch Powell or Tony Benn, whose shared hostility to the European project was radical and immovable, the Eurosceptics were simply Thatcherite: they wished Britain to remain in the European Community, but in a free trade association rather than as part of a single polity. Any desire to ‘liberate’ Britain from Europe was confined to the fringes of the Right and the Left. But the fringe was now wider and its voice far louder. The treaty had been passed in a sullen, angry mood. Only months after Maastricht, the tycoon James Goldsmith set up the Referendum party. Its stated aim was to have a referendum on the subject of Britain’s continued membership of the EU, but many saw in this only resurgent nationalism. Similarly, the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, appeared in 1994 with a stated aim of withdrawing from the EU altogether. These two were regarded for a time as follies rather than parties, but they were at least ‘respectable’, disavowing the far right, its beliefs and all its works.

But in the early Nineties new groups were seen. Flyers began to appear on street corners and in telephone booths, depicting a skull with a Nazi helmet and urging violence against ‘the Enemy’. Names never before heard began to enter the lexicon. There was ‘Combat 18’, whose aims were openly terrorist. The British National Party, their first patron, was too soft for them. ‘Race – not nation,’ they proclaimed. There were also the mysterious ‘White Wolves’, who eagerly claimed every murder of a minority member as their own doing. The placatory but insidious voice of extreme nationalism, the League of St George, once excused James Goldsmith for being Jewish, however, conceding that ‘none of this is his fault’. Xenophobia has rarely been militant in Britain, and most of these groups soon choked on their own bile.

The election of 1992 had been preceded by a long and only intermittently optimistic Conservative campaign. The land was still in recession, and perhaps many missed in Major the ferocity and certitude of Thatcher. Neil Kinnock was the object of much affection and, being naturally flamboyant, he often had the best of Major in the House. Moreover, the Conservatives had been in power for thirteen years. On polling day, the prevalent mood was subdued. Only Major seemed buoyant as he returned to his Huntingdon seat. It was not until the early hours that the miracle became apparent: the Conservatives had won, and with the greatest polling majority ever known. Yet the 14 million votes translated into only twenty-one extra seats. The Tories had been confirmed in government, but their majority was too small to allow them to exercise power as they sought.

Neil Kinnock, so often decried as ‘the Welsh Windbag’, resigned with dignity – for all his achievements, he had led the party to its second defeat. Like Thatcher, he had a weakness for the soundbite. His advice to those living in a Conservative world had been stark. ‘Don’t be old, don’t be sick, don’t be ordinary, don’t be poor, don’t be unemployed.’ For Labour, the defeat of 1992 represented a watershed. Kinnock had been both firebrand and conciliator, a leftist bruiser and a cunning statesman, but his journey was not one he could share with his party.

John Smith, his successor, was by conviction a modernizer, though in an age where cosmetic considerations were paramount, he did not look like one. With his bullet head, his spectacles and thinning hair, he recalled a dour trade union leader of the old school. But his uninspiring exterior concealed a quick intelligence, a sharp sense of humour, and a deep sense of social justice. His judgement, however, was not always sound. While the country and the City were still reeling after Black Wednesday, he launched an attack that would have been more credible had he not himself supported the move into the ERM.

Britain had entered the ERM in the last days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Since then, nothing had occurred to make the move seem anything but benign. Nigel Lawson had insisted that British interest rates be tied to those of Germany. Thatcher was unconvinced but when Major professed himself in agreement with Lawson, there was little that the Iron Lady felt she could do but accept. The pound, she ordained, was to be ‘pegged’ to the Deutschmark at 2.95. When Major, then chancellor, told his opposite number in Germany of the decision, he was told that such a matter was not one for the prime minister to decide. The rules of the EC dictated that the matter be discussed and agreed upon. That was not Thatcher’s style, of course, and the rate remained. It was not a propitious start, nor, as events were to prove, a wise decision.

Entry into the ERM, touted by Major among others as a cure for inflation, had by 1992 done nothing to ease the recession of the late Eighties. If anything, it seemed to have accelerated it. One million lost their jobs. A new and virulent strain of poverty appeared, one which struck the previously affluent, and with it arrived a new term, ‘negative equity’, with houses suddenly worth less than the mortgages taken out to pay for them. Moreover, the high interest rate that Britain was forced to adopt brought the country back to the unhappy days of the Seventies; British exports became once more uncompetitive. Still, inflation appeared again to be shackled, as Major had prophesied. But even here, an objection could be raised. At a dinner hosted by Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, Major crowed his triumph as the prime minister who had ended the threat of inflation. At this, one of the journalists present asked, ‘What’s the point of having low inflation if the economy is not just on its knees, but on its back?’ In one form or another, the question would be repeated in the months to come.

On the Continent, within the quiet confines of the Bundesbank, troubling events had also begun to unfold. East Germany was now within the capitalist pale of the West, but the cost of its inclusion was climbing ever higher. The Bundesbank was independent of the German state and could take decisions as it saw fit. In the summer of 1992, it raised interest rates. Helmut Schlesinger, the Bundesbank president, felt bound to act according to ‘what is necessary at home’. In Britain, the effect was instant. High interest rates hit the housing market, and ‘For Sale’ boards sprang up like nettles. By late summer, currency traders began to sell pounds and buy Deutschmarks, with the result that sterling sank to the lowest level permitted within the ERM. Once again, a British chancellor was caught in a web of irreconcilable priorities, but despite his private misgivings, Norman Lamont publicly rejected the possibility either of devaluation or of exit.

Chancellor Kohl had sent Major a letter in which he indicated that he would also like to see German interest rates lowered. Major had high hopes. Lamont was altogether less sanguine. At a meeting of national and EC finance ministers in Bath, Lamont was met by protesters demanding that Britain leave the ERM. Neither he nor his continental colleagues were reassured. There was much to be discussed, not least the vulnerable state of many currencies within the EC. For the continentals, however, the meeting was to be a cordial affair, in which delicate matters might be raised, but not quarrelled over. Lamont, however, was desperate, and was not disposed to be diplomatic. The French finance minister recalled his questioning as ‘without introduction and without conclusion: quick, brutal, cutting’. Four times Lamont asked Schlesinger whether he would not lower interest rates. Schlesinger, a financial grandee unaccustomed to being berated like a scullion, recalled: ‘One cannot be treated as an employee … one cannot accept it. I thought, “He is not my master … I must bring this exercise to an end.”’ In an obvious snub, he switched to Bavarian dialect in an aside to Waigel, the German finance minister, saying: ‘I think I should go now.’ It was all Waigel could do to restrain him from marching off. Lamont left empty-handed.

Worse was to follow. On 11 September, in Rome, the value of the imperilled Italian lira plummeted. Speaking on the telephone to John Major, Giuliano Amato, the warm and expansive Italian premier, had a chilling message for his British counterpart: once the traders have finished with us, they will come for you. But Major refused to devalue, just as he refused any suggestion of leaving the ERM. He was confident that his policy would survive. From Germany came the signs of a faint thaw, as Schlesinger offered to lower interest rates, should the currencies that were struggling agree to ‘realign’. This, for Major, was out of the question. For Italy, however, there was no escape, and the lira was devalued by 7 per cent. Surely this would satisfy the Germans? The response was a token 0.3 per cent cut in interest rates. European solidarity appeared to be fraying by the week. For all the public assurances offered by Major and Lamont, banks, pension funds and international companies had no doubt that the pound would depreciate. The result was one of those tragically self-fulfilling prophecies that haunt international finance, a world in which perception is often the principal reality.

Perhaps Schlesinger was still smarting from Lamont’s assault; perhaps he was simply putting the needs of his own country first. But when, on the evening of Tuesday 15 September, he suggested in an interview that the pound should have devalued along with the lira, he unleashed a cyclone. Schlesinger later protested that his remark had been offered unofficially, but it made no difference. Dawn had barely given way to sunrise on Wednesday 16 September when the feast on sterling began. George Soros, one of the more avid of the predators, recalled his conviction that ‘the Bundesbank was egging on the speculators’. In desperation, the Bank of England entered the fray, buying sterling on a colossal scale, but £1 billion was lost in minutes. The spade drove deeper, digging further into public money. The bank would have to raise interest rates; 12 per cent was agreed by Major. Perhaps he had no choice, perhaps it was the presence of Hurd, Clarke and Heseltine in Admiralty House that swayed him. All were convinced Europhiles. But the interest hike did not deceive the speculators, who saw in it only an act of desperation, and selling increased. Kenneth Clarke’s chauffeur spoke for many when he quietly said, ‘It hasn’t worked, sir.’ The politicians had been isolated from events, caught in the tragicomic position of knowing less ‘than anyone in the United Kingdom’.

Eddie George, the governor of the Bank of England, realized that ‘the game was up’. Britain had to get out. Once again, Hurd, Heseltine and Clarke, the ‘big beasts’, were summoned. Lamont desperately urged suspension, but the others overruled him. Interest rates were yanked up once more, to 15 per cent. It hadn’t worked the first time, so clearly they must try again even harder. The prime minister had mortgaged his reputation; he could not now withdraw. After a negligible rise, the pound slipped again. By the afternoon, the Bank of England had spent £15 billion in defence of sterling. Behind the scenes, the prime minister gave way. At 4 p.m., abruptly, there was silence on the trading floors as the news came that the Bank would no longer shore up the pound. The silence, one trader confirmed, lasted perhaps three seconds, before a whoop of triumph broke out. As if determined to give its audience one last flamboyant flourish, the pound dived through the bottom of the ERM. As one trader put it, ‘There was a sense of awe … that the markets could take on a central bank and win.’ Open competition had turned on its nurse.

At 7.30 p.m. on 16 September 1992, forever known as ‘Black Wednesday’, Norman Lamont announced Britain’s suspension from the ERM. It was to be a temporary measure, he assured the cameras, to be reversed when matters were ‘calmer’. The prime minister had remained uncannily composed throughout the debacle, but now he cracked. He determined to speak to Fleet Street; he wanted to reassure the chief editors that all was well and to ask them how they would present the day. But they were no more deceived than the speculators had been. Kelvin Mackenzie of the Sun genially informed him that he had ‘a big bucket of shit on my desk … and I intend pouring it all over you’. Major rallied enough to give the joshing answer, ‘Oh, you are a wag!’

A sense of collective responsibility ensured that Lamont remained, but he resigned nine months later. For all his outward protestations, he had never believed in Britain’s membership of the ERM and would remember the involvement of Heseltine, Hurd and Clarke with some bitterness. He wondered why the prime minister was spending so much time closeted with the big Europhile beasts while, as he put it, ‘we were haemorrhaging’. Major in turn insisted that since it was a question as much political as economic, the crisis was one in which the other ministers had a right to a say. For their part, the beasts felt like ‘doctors being brought in to watch the death of the patient’. In truth, there was no ready scapegoat for Black Wednesday; none could have foreseen the alacrity or skill with which the markets leapt on the stricken pound.

Lawson and Major had both accepted that sterling must be ‘pegged’ to the Deutschmark; only later did their folly become apparent. Beneath the rhetoric of mockery and outraged patriotism, the Eurosceptics were jubilant, dubbing Black Wednesday ‘White Wednesday’. Their stance had been vindicated, and by their own opponents in Europe. For amidst all the blasts and counterblasts, the quiet words of Schlesinger to Waigel were heeded. ‘In 1948,’ he said, ‘remember, we had nothing, and look at what we have now. We achieved it by pursuing our own line of policy. We mustn’t weaken now.’ Thatcher herself broke her long silence to voice her agreement. ‘I do not blame the Germans,’ she said on 8 October. ‘They have managed the new currency in exactly the way we should have managed ours. They put their country first.’ And so, despite the avowals of friendship and the appeals to solidarity, the most ardently Europhile nation on the Continent had shown that if needs be it would advance its own interests over those of the European Union. So be it, mused the Eurosceptics. Perhaps the example should be followed.

58

One’s bum year

‘There’s no such thing as Majorism,’ said Thatcher dismissively in an interview, but the jibe was unjust. Major was not a revolutionary, but the time did not require such a figure. After the withdrawal from the ERM, a ‘disaster’ from which the economy itself recovered with ease, it was felt that the Conservative party needed some peptone in its blood, which Major provided. On 8 October 1993, he gave a speech at the Conservative conference in Blackpool that came as close as any to encapsulating his view of the world.

The old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy – they’re still alive, they’re still the best of Britain. They haven’t changed, and yet somehow people feel embarrassed by them … It is time to return to those old core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family and not shuffling off on other people and the state.

As such, it should have been unexceptionable, but Major did not foresee the reaction of the press.

It is imprudent in any government to pose as moral guardian, but the danger here was greater yet. The ‘Back to Basics’ speech was quickly construed as an appeal to some potent but hazy notion of Victorian sexual probity, despite Major’s own denials. It was unfortunate that the country in 1993 was falling prey to what Macaulay termed ‘one of its periodic fits of morality’. In this instance, the supposed fecklessness of single mothers was the object. The more right-wing members of the government openly fanned this resentment, evoking the Victorian distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. The party that proclaimed itself a tower of rectitude was ripe for shaking.

The News of the World began the frenzy. David Mellor, a close ally of the prime minister, was discovered to be having an affair with an actress called Antonia de Sancha. Piers Morgan, then editor of the News of the World, remarked that ‘probably every Tory MP is up to some sort of sexual shenanigans’. And so it proved. In January 1994, scarcely a day passed without a Tory MP being unmasked. One vocal supporter of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, Tim Yeo, was found to have fathered a child outside his marriage; it was, to use the period’s most popular euphemism, a particularly egregious ‘error of judgement’. But not all the peccadilloes were sexual in their nature. Indeed, it was the fact that so many of the scandals lay in banal cases of financial impropriety that alerted Major to a disquieting truth: the press had turned against him. The Daily Telegraph, once the Tories’ sturdiest ally, was no more sympathetic to Mellor than it had been to Lamont. ‘It is not the business of the press to protect Mr Mellor’s family,’ a leader tartly observed. ‘It is Mr Mellor’s.’

1993 had been an unhappy year in every respect. The miners had successfully challenged another set of deep pit closures, but the closures went ahead anyway. The government’s probity was once more in question. That the pits closed had been the ones worked by the very miners whom Thatcher had praised during the strike of 1984 only added to the gall. Thatcher herself claimed that she would never have permitted such a betrayal.

But if 1993 was hard for the government, the previous year had been troublesome for an institution once thought unassailable. In 1992, Princess Anne divorced Captain Mark Phillips, the Duke and Duchess of York separated, Major announced the separation of Charles and Diana in the House of Commons, and Windsor Castle was devastated by fire. To these dramatic events may be added a slew of photographs, taped recordings and television revelations, all of which were damaging to the monarchy. The queen herself summed up her feelings in an after-dinner speech towards the end of the year. It had been, she said, an ‘annus horribilis’.

If the Tories under Major had stinted on bread, they had been more niggardly still in providing circuses. This was to change in 1994. The English had traditionally baulked at the idea of lotteries. Now, in the aftermath of recession, the advantages both to the nation and to the Tory party seemed obvious; all was grey, and a ‘flutter’ might provide some much-needed gaiety. It might also provide a novel source of revenue, as its critics felt bound to remark. On 7 November, John Major inaugurated the National Lottery, and with it a custom previously thought the preserve of those unfathomable continentals. And if it was, in some measure, a ‘stealth tax’, it was one that benefited the arts, the sciences and the lucky few who won.

It was in 1994, too, that the last great privatization came into force. The days had long passed when the railways were Britain’s boast. The system was complex beyond utility, the machinery archaic, the service indifferent. British Rail was seen as the last great nationalized behemoth and its privatization was trumpeted as a Thatcherite stroke against inefficiency and state planning. Less advertised was the fact that the move was in part the result of an EU directive. The result was a bewildering array of individual companies, each with supposedly discrete responsibilities. That the privatization would improve the rail service was doubted at the time, and the doubts remain. It seemed to many that Major could not get it right.

It was sadly ironic that this supremely conciliatory man should have presided over a cabinet more deeply divided than any in modern memory. Michael Portillo recalled telling Major that he and other Eurosceptics would accept even their own dismissal if unity could be achieved. He could perhaps have played Heseltine to Major’s Thatcher but did not take the role. In any case, Major assured him, he would never sack Portillo himself.

The reputation of the Tories for economic omniscience had been damaged by ‘Black Wednesday’, but there was no reason for them to despair. The recession had ended, and even ‘Tory sleaze’, the catchphrase of the time, did the Conservatives little harm. For after all, was there any alternative? The generation that remembered the Seventies was still politically alert. The Labour party represented, it seemed, a fast-vanishing constituency. The aspirant working class had long ago settled behind the Thatcherite banner, their ardour for political change dampened by affluence. If there was to be a successful counter-revolution, it would have to find its recruits elsewhere.

59

Put up or shut up

In the election of 1983, a young barrister named Anthony Blair had won the seat of Sedgefield. The man forever associated with the modernizing wing of Labour entered parliament just as the country rejected its socialist wing. As a comparative newcomer, Blair saw that there was no future in that faith, at least not for the British Labour party. It was fruitless, he felt, merely to rail against Thatcherism. The British had elected Thatcher three times, even while rather disliking her; clearly she was getting something right. Thatcherism must be understood and learned from – even, if necessary, emulated. He knew that any change in the party must be radical; pruning would not serve. Under the leadership of John Smith, he ensured that the block vote previously enjoyed by the unions should be replaced by ‘one man, one vote’. In democratizing the unions, Thatcher had demoralized them; in democratizing the Labour party at the expense of the unions, Blair sought to revivify it. It was the first of several links with Labour’s past to be snapped beyond mending.

John Smith died suddenly on 12 May 1994 of a heart attack. At once forthright and subtle, progressive and ‘right-wing’, he was universally lauded as a ‘decent man’. This is a sobriquet which tends in parliamentary circles to hint at someone ineffectual and uncharismatic, but he was sincerely mourned. Who now was to succeed him? One of the three contenders, John Prescott, put forward the choice with unusual precision. ‘The Labour party has always had a socialist and a social democratic wing. I am a socialist. Tony Blair is pleased to call himself a social democrat.’ The other candidate was Margaret Beckett, deputy leader of the Labour party and, like Prescott, of the Left. The result of the leadership election left the more cerebral Tories uneasy; Tony Blair had won, and with over 50 per cent of the vote.

The early Nineties were ready for him. The vines of Eastern Europe had withered before those of the New World, the pub had been succeeded by the wine bar, the public servant by the career politician, the celebrity by the ‘artist’, the adman by the ‘creative’. At its most extreme, right and wrong became ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’. Such curious verbal manoeuvres shadowed another movement characteristic of the time. ‘Political correctness’ was an American import. When not lampooned, it was assailed as ‘liberal fascism’, malignant and stultifying. The Guardian remarked in its defence that it seemed to be attacked ‘nine times as often as it [is] used’. In essence, it expressed what Martin Amis has called ‘the very American, and very honourable, idea, that no one should be ashamed of what they are’. Thus, ‘the disabled’ became ‘the differently abled’. While the idiom lent itself easily to satire, the principle behind it survived and even prospered. The Tories found it hard to align themselves with the new spirit. In local elections they polledonly 27 per cent of the vote and lost nearly one-third of the seats they had won in 1990.

Although no formal challenge to his leadership had yet materialized, John Major knew that his authority was being undermined by the Eurosceptic right. ‘Put up or shut up’ was his message to his critics. Beneath the fighting words, however, lay the old conciliatory impulse. The Right had to be appeased. In an interview he attacked the practice of begging and encouraged the public to report it to the police. A furore ensued. The shadow housing minister, John Battle, claimed that by cutting benefits for sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds, the government was responsible for the increase in young people living on the streets. Other social problems arose in Major’s ‘classless society’. Nicholas Scott, minister of state for social security and disabled people, admitted to having authorized civil servants to assist in the drafting of a large number of amendments to the Civil Rights Bill. In addition, Scott had talked the bill out, speaking for over an hour. Several people were arrested on 29 May as disabled people protested outside Westminster. Although called upon to resign, Scott remained in office.

In Europe, the oft-repeated refrain that Britain would be ‘at the heart’ was proving difficult to sustain. In June, at a European Council meeting in Corfu, John Major vetoed the candidacy of Jean-Luc Dehaene as president of the European Commission, declaring that he objected to Dehaene’s ‘interventionist’ tendencies, and to what he had described as French and German attempts to impose their candidate on others. As the other candidates had withdrawn, this gesture was widely interpreted as sabre-rattling. Mitterrand declared that ‘Great Britain has a concept of Europe completely at odds with that held by the original six member states.’ It was an observation with which few could honestly disagree. In the UK, the use of the veto was seen as yet another genuflection before the party’s Eurosceptics. The government’s obsession with all matters European was revealed to be one that the electorate did not share. Elections to the European Parliament turned out to be spectacularly anticlimactic, with turnout a modest 36.4 per cent. In July, Major decided upon a cabinet reshuffle. Amidst other changes, he appointed a Europhile, Jeremy Hanley, to the party chairmanship and a Eurosceptic, Michael Portillo, to the post of secretary of state for employment.

The party’s various ‘sexual shenanigans’ were damaging insofar as they came in the wake of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign; the ‘cash for questions’ scandal was another matter. This corruption was a reproach to everything upon which the British prided themselves. Two MPs were suspended for accepting money from a Sunday Times journalist posing as a businessman. Later in the year, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton found themselves having to answer similar charges. For Hamilton in particular, the struggle to clear his name would prove protracted, bruising and finally disastrous.

Other problems remained. Northern Ireland dogged Major’s tenure, but now at last there seemed the possibility of a solution. John Major welcomed a statement by the IRA leadership that ‘there will be a complete cessation of military operations’ at midnight on 31 August 1994, but sought an assurance ‘that this is indeed intended to be a permanent renunciation of violence, that is to say, for good’. The UK government had repeatedly declared that three months free from violence was necessary to confirm any IRA commitment. This the IRA proved incapable of delivering. Indeed, the surreal alternation between the IRA’s earnest public pronouncements and its continuing campaign of violence led many to wonder whether the government’s approach held much promise of success. On 19 September, Major said that the IRA was ‘very close’ to providing assurances that its currently open-ended ceasefire would be permanent. On a visit to the United States, however, Gerry Adams appeared to undercut such optimism by saying that ‘none of us can say two or three years up the road that if the causes of conflict aren’t resolved, that another IRA leadership won’t come along’. That the two sides differed materially on the question of ‘causes’ was for the time being an insoluble conundrum.

In September, the prime minister gave a speech calling for a ‘real national effort to build an “anti-yob” culture’. This was criticized in the press as an attempt to counter Tony Blair’s declaration that he would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, but such criticisms missed the mark. The ‘anti-yob’ culture was entirely of a piece with Major’s world view. He understood the temptations that poverty presents, but refused to accept that they could not be resisted.

Protests grew over the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. It was a fitting response to a bill which restricted the right of public protest, but it had no effect. Tony Blair was a notable signatory to the bill. The Big Issue, a magazine set up by homeless people to address homelessness, asked Blair to explain his decision. In a smog of recrimination and impasse, one small symbolic gesture shone out. The queen visited Russia, the first of her family to do so since 1917, but the Duke of Edinburgh, in a rare denial of duty, refused. As far as he was concerned, the heirs of the Bolsheviks were the heirs of those who had ‘murdered my family’.

Concerns about what had become known as ‘the environment’ came to a head in this decade. The ‘greenhouse effect’ and anthropogenic global warming had both been identified in the late Eighties, but only in the Nineties did they begin to affect policy. A Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was established, with the aim of reducing pollution caused by motor vehicles.

In November, John Major announced that ‘preliminary talks’ with Loyalists and Sinn Féin could begin, in the light of the former’s ceasefire. But the discussions continued in tandem with further incidents. Feilim O’Hadhmaill, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, was sentenced to twentyfive years’ imprisonment for having plotted an IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland. It was a winter of problems. In December, the government was forced to back down on a proposed VAT rise after losing a parliamentary vote; the chancellor proposed increased duty on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and diesel instead.

In the meantime, the Conservatives lost the Dudley West constituency – the haemorrhage of by-elections had begun. The Common Fisheries Policy had long been one of the more contentious terms of British membership of the EU, and in January 1995, it sparked a debate in the House of Commons. Why, it was asked, did countries with no historical claim on the North Sea have rights in it? It was a running sore, but the vote was carried. The prison population had risen from 40,000 to 50,000 under the tenure of Michael Howard. A breakout was attempted at Whitemoor Prison, with five IRA members involved. Into this and related matters, the European Commission of Human Rights issued a ruling that, if upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, would remove from the home secretary the power to determine the length of time that juveniles convicted of murder should remain in prison.

Meanwhile, Europe and its discontents rumbled on. Major declared that ‘the UK should refuse to participate in a single European currency in 1996 or 1997 but might participate in 1999, subject to fresh, more stringent conditions than those already set out in the Maastricht Treaty’. On 16 February, he asserted: ‘we shall retain our border controls’. A joint framework document for Northern Ireland was at last agreed but promptly leaked. The joint framework agreement included the removal of the Republic’s claim on the six counties, but mooted a ‘north-south body’. It was to be yet another near-win for a government that was not so much ill-managed as ill-starred.

60

The moral abyss

‘A disgusting feast of filth.’ ‘Sheer, unadulterated brutalism.’ Such were among the criticisms levelled at Blasted, a new play by the playwright Sarah Kane that opened in 1995 at the Royal Court. Both author and artistic director were reportedly aghast at the press reaction. By all accounts the play was not easy to watch, but it was no harder than many other productions from the Royal Court. In this light, ‘a disgusting feast of filth’ seems hackneyed as well as overwrought and a little suspect. And so it proved. The furore that burst from the press night was nothing more than a puckish Fleet Street plot. Newspaper theatre critics had met during the interval and agreed to make this play a succès de scandale. The controversy achieved what controversies tend to achieve, with full houses and long queues at the box office.

Blasted begins with the romance between a seedy, self-destructive tabloid journalist in middle age and a frightened, stuttering girl in her twenties. It is a black comedy, but any summary of the plot must remain conjectural; we never quite know how much is to be accepted as symbolism. In the first act, we are given a nasty, tender and tortured exploration of rape and, possibly, paedophilia; in the second, a homoerotic tale of male violence. Kane herself remarked that the thematic progression from rape to war was a matter of the merest logic.

Thus was inaugurated a remarkable resurgence in new writing for the theatre, compared at the time with the arrival of kitchen sink drama or with the rise of Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter. It showed an attempt to present rather than to represent. The demolition of the ‘fourth wall’ in Victorian theatre was here taken one phase further, in an avowed desire to make us feel the action in a way that even Brecht could not have foreseen. Dialogue tended to austerity; the characters to self-absorption; staging to the unabashedly violent.

Many others followed Kane, the most celebrated of whom was Mark Ravenhill, whose Shopping and F**king explored similar questions through the prism of Nineties commercialism. This movement, in some ways peripheral, reflected the state of England at the time in a way that was not formally accurate, but strikingly suggestive. These were the dying days of an increasingly discredited Conservative government, compromised by sleaze allegations and a perceived loss of authority in economic matters.

Thatcherism was ‘in decline’, but it had left its mark, and Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane responded with plays that traced the broken arch over a moral abyss. The violence they invoke is often so extreme as to be unfeasible. Moreover, if these playwrights knew about genuine privation in the council estates, or war, or extreme poverty leading to extreme depravity, then their plays do not show it. But then that was never the point.

In this period, the perceived purpose of radical theatre changed subtly but deeply. The Fifties and Sixties notion of theatre ‘changing society’ had given way during the Thatcher years to the notion of play as product. Now the theatre as engine of change was lent new life, but the new direction to be offered was never clear. The ideal had a poignant charm in its utopian belief in the power of entertainers to act as prophets.

The hard dirt track of purely political theatre was unavailable to the playwrights of the Nineties. Communism had failed, morally, politically, militarily and economically; now its alternative seemed equally barren. As a consequence, the new theatre of the Nineties had no politics in any sense that a playwright of the Sixties or Seventies would have recognized.

61

A chapter of accidents

In March 1997, John Major gave a surprisingly Thatcherite verdict on the future of the ERM. ‘I do not anticipate joining [the ERM] in the lifetime of the parliament … Europe may be forced to return to … a parallel currency.’ The government meanwhile completed the sale of its remaining 40 per cent share in National Power and Powergen. It had wanted to privatize the Post Office, too, but this was a treasure too dear to the hearts of the nation to squander.

The government, in many ways so successful, was cruelly jinxed or, according to taste, mercifully frustrated. Of particular concern was the status of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States. Inevitably, perhaps, Ireland was the chief cause of friction. Major and Clinton clashed over the visit of Gerry Adams to the United States. Major wrote a letter to Bill Clinton, but little came of it. The dream of the special relationship could be sustained under Reagan, and even advanced under Bush, but the expansive Bill Clinton and the modest John Major found that they had little in common. The chief issue was once again the unwillingness of the IRA to speak unequivocally about total decommissioning. Major visited the United States, where he found the president more friendly than helpful.

On 29 April 1995, a special conference of the Labour party voted to restore Clause IV, on the need for thorough nationalization, but the new dynamic of the party could not be halted. In the following month, the Conservatives sustained their worst local council defeat in post-war electoral history. On 22 June 1995, with the flourish that he kept in reserve for crises, Major unexpectedly resigned in order to begin a leadership contest and acquire a fresh mandate. With the leadership open, he was challenged by John Redwood, a prominent Eurosceptic and right-winger. But for all his populism, he seemed too much the mandarin. In the event, Major won the leadership contest on 4 July. His mandate in the country might be withering, but the party was his once more. A further cabinet reshuffle ensued, though it did not encourage confidence. The tally of by-election defeats lengthened further, with the loss of Littleborough and Saddleworth to the Liberal Democrats.

Elsewhere, there were riots in Luton and Leeds after rumours that police had beaten up a thirteen-year-old boy. The early release of Private Lee Clegg, a British army paratrooper serving a life sentence for murder for shooting a Catholic teenager riding in a stolen car, also led to three days of rioting. It is noteworthy that the Major government, under a man whose mission had been to unite, suffered more such disturbances than its defiantly anticonsensual predecessor. In August, ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ was launched in London to crack down on mugging. Sir Paul Condon, who had claimed that 70 per cent of muggers were black, said that he expected this operation to result in the arrest of large numbers of black youths. Under the most auspicious circumstances, such a move would have been controversial, but the circumstances were anything but auspicious. Memories of the death of Jamaican-born Joy Gardner, who had died while resisting deportation, were still fresh. In a manner that was to become familiar, the three officers concerned were acquitted. Riots in the city of Bradford were one result.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal of troops continued in Northern Ireland; once again there were no further concessions from the IRA. Despite Major’s good intentions, it seemed to many that the Republicans were dictating terms. In September, the government began ‘reviewing’ its support for the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECHR had condemned the shooting of three IRA members in Gibraltar. The Convention was to prove a growing irritant to the Eurosceptic wing of the party, and even to the country as a whole. Its judgements were generally admitted to be humane and sensible, but the propriety of its attempts to overrule parliament was increasingly called into question.

In the meantime, Alan Howarth, a Tory MP, defected to Labour, citing the strengths of Tony Blair and the ‘arrogance of power’ he considered endemic in his own party; Emma Nicholson followed suit later in 1995, though she defected to the Liberal Democrats. The defections were enough to create unease that would soon sharpen into fear.

The phenomenon of ‘benefit tourism’ increasingly seized the headlines in an England where anxieties about the foreign wastrel elided easily with fears of the creeping power of the EU. The High Court ruled against two ‘benefit tourists’, saying that local authorities were not obliged to house vulnerable homeless nationals from other EU countries. Nevertheless, the Appeal Court was to rule a year later that local councils had a legal obligation to provide food and shelter for asylum seekers whose right to claim social security benefits had been withdrawn. The Queen’s Speech in November showed itself strongly tough on crime and illegal immigrants, a transparent attempt to ape and subvert the Labour party’s stated intention of being ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. The home secretary, Michael Howard, announced new measures against bogus asylum seeking. And as if to remind the electorate of the one area in which the Tories could still claim popularity, the government lowered income tax in that year’s budget. But certain poltergeists seemed reluctant to depart the House; on the question of standards in public life, the government suffered a fifty-one-vote defeat. MPs would now have to declare what financial benefits they received from consultancy agreements.

In December 1995, at the Madrid Summit, the introduction of the ‘euro’ was announced. On majority voting and the powers of the European Parliament, the UK found itself once more isolated. The government’s overall majority was now reduced to three and it found itself defeated on the Common Fisheries Policy, but the vote had no direct effect on its policy – it no longer seemed to matter that the government was worsted so often in the Commons.

1996 seemed to bring with it some reprieve, or at least some welcome distraction. In an education debate, it was remarked that both Harriet Harman and Tony Blair, supporters of comprehensive education, had sent their children to selective and grant-maintained schools. Though this was not without precedent, it reminded the House, and the nation, of the sharply bourgeois direction taken by the party of the workers.

In February, the Scott Report was published. Set up to investigate the Arms-to-Iraq affair, it was the most extensive of its kind. There had been no need, and certainly no reason, for parliament to remain in ignorance of high-quality weaponry being sold to Iraq. In mitigation, Iraq had become the greater enemy since its days as perceived bulwark against Iranian extremism. The selling of arms to a rogue nation with which Britain had so recently been at war would have raised eyebrows but little else. As it was, the government seemed intent on obstructing the judiciary at every turn. At last, though with fierce criticism of the government’s conduct, the report established that no British arms had reached either Iraq or Iran ‘during the conflict in question’. However, the government was perceived as at once bullying and pusillanimous, and it could ill afford such a reputation.

The IRA called off its ceasefire with a bombing in London’s Docklands in which two people were killed. More bombing attempts followed, some of which were stillborn. On 15 and 18 February 1996, two other bombs were discovered. The first was defused and the second went off by accident. A hit list was subsequently discovered, including members of the royal family. In a fine display of bluster, Mitchell McLaughlin blamed the UK for ‘procrastination’ in its negotiations. Naturally enough, Gerry Adams said he knew nothing of the attack. On 5 April, the largest explosive device ever found on the mainland was discovered on Hammersmith Bridge. The IRA claimed responsibility for this, too, as it began a campaign of disruption targeting motorways and rail services as well as London’s transport system. The IRA had by no means finished with the ancient enemy.

Over the twilight of the Major years, a shooting star appeared, barely noticeable at first. It was a book, but of the sort usually read with hunched shoulders and furtive glances to the side, for it was not ‘proper’ or ‘real’ literature. Yet somehow it caught the imagination of the pensioner, the secretary, the tea lady, the manager, the magnate and the shop girl as surely as that of the pre-teens for whom it was written. Its author’s path was not smoothed by mercies. As J. K. Rowling recalled, ‘I knew nobody in the publishing world. I didn’t even know anybody who knew anybody.’

What followed had no precedent. The book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, became a phenomenon so striking that for some it altered how books were read and even understood. The plot of the saga may be swiftly summarized. Harry Potter, the half-blood son of wizards, must overcome Lord Voldemort, his parents’ killer and the would-be conqueror of the wizard realm. This realm exists adjacent to our own, but may be entered through ‘Platform nine and three-quarters’ at King’s Cross station. The plots of the individual books amount to a system of arches, with any weakness or ambiguity handed over for the next section to carry. The result is that the eyes of the reader are always straining ahead. We see elements of Cinderella, the Ugly Duckling, the schoolboy tales of Jennings, The Lord of the Rings and even Christian myth. Some beasts or characters, such as boggarts, unicorns, spectres and trolls, are familiar from folklore; others could only spring from the anxieties of the late twentieth century. Thus, we meet ‘dementors’, spirits who plunge the sufferer into a state eerily evocative of manic depression.

Critics, commentators and scholars have puzzled over the unparalleled success of the series. At one level, the cause seems clear enough: the appeal of myth does not distinguish the child from the adult. But that in itself would not account for it. Rather, in these books, an ancient theme met a still more ancient motif. There is a secret heir, whose royalty must be concealed from the world and even from himself. A uniquely English sensibility made the translation possible. Perhaps most pertinently, Harry Potter united two previously disparate strands in children’s fiction, the naturalistic and the fantastic. The first tends to show the child’s struggle for ‘self-realization’, while the fantastic depicts the child taking part in a great, even cosmic, struggle. Uncertain, idealistic and orphaned, Harry Potter is a bespectacled everyman with only the urge to do right sustaining him. The age, too, was ready. In exciting without offending, the books were impeccably Blairite. They were fun, endlessly inventive and a generation was raised with them.

The Bosnian civil war had exercised Major’s considerable energies, but to little avail. Among other leaders, he had stood out for his calmness and sense of purpose. He had drawn up a plan to reconcile the warring parties, but assumed that all would act from their best impulses. When David Owen drew up a plan for the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines, the Serbs, in particular, would have none of it. Theirs was a world in which the Ottoman Empire was still in place. They referred to Muslim Bosnians as ‘Turks’. A prominent Serb cleric stated that the Vance-Owen plan would ‘drive the Serbs back into the hills’. It must have seemed unsettlingly redolent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

For all its limitations, ‘Operation Irma’ proved a ‘light after dark’, as one UN official put it. Major had been appalled by the plight of Irma, a Muslim girl rendered paraplegic by a Serb bomb in Sarajevo. He ordered an airlift, and momentum gathered for a wider operation. When his government was attacked for its perceived tokenism, Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, said, ‘It’s better to do something for someone than nothing for anyone.’ The Major government’s decision to impose an arms embargo upon all parties equally only served to restrict the Bosniaks, who, unlike the Serbs or Croats, had no neighbours to assist them.

Sadism and violence had been unleashed at home, too, all the more shocking for their domestic setting. In Gloucester, Fred West was discovered to have buried the bodies of countless girls, including his own daughter, in various places around his house and elsewhere. He hanged himself in prison. Rosemary West, his wife, was sentenced to ten terms of life imprisonment. Their house was razed to the ground, the only conceivable commemoration.

In the BSE crisis of March 1996 may be seen the stirrings of a wider crisis, which touched on Britain’s relations with the EU and raised troubling questions of national identity. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, was a condition that affected cattle whose fodder had been adulterated with animal matter. The symptoms, which included erratic behaviour and loss of motor control, gave the condition the name ‘mad cow disease’. The EU acted swiftly, voting for a ban on British beef, a decision challenged by the National Farmers’ Union. Thus fell what was termed ‘a beef curtain’ across Europe, but the effects of the ban on the farmer could not be laughed away. Having insisted that ‘we cannot continue’, John Major urged a compromise, though one that required a mass slaughter of British cattle. The action was fiercely and deeply resented. Why, some asked, was the government at Westminster so bluntly indifferent to rural needs? Was Britain merely a nation of burghers? From this sense of grievance the Countryside Alliance was born, a long and near intractable thorn in the side of government.

Other divisions were evident. The armed forces minister, Nicholas Soames, informed the House that the British army would oppose any move to remove the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. Four ex-service personnel planned to challenge the ban in the House of Lords, but on 9 May 1996, parliament maintained the ban, despite warning that ‘action in the European Court of Human Rights would force a change in policy within three years’. Westminster once again seemed caught between the forces of modernity and those of tradition, with no rudder to guide it beyond the ambiguous influence of Brussels. The Referendum party was one of the many manifestations of a prevailing desire to cut the Gordian knot. That party, among others, spelt more local election disasters for the Tories. And the froideur between John Major and his predecessor intensified. Some comfort for the Tories was derived from Jonathan Aitken’s exoneration of complicity in the sale of weapons to Iran.

On Saturday, 15 June 1996, the IRA ended yet another ceasefire by detonating a bomb in Manchester. As far as they were concerned, Major had broken faith in demanding the immediate decommissioning of arms. The bomb was the largest ever detonated in peacetime, yet none were killed. It appeared that this was quite deliberate; prominent buildings and government morale had been the only intended victims. The IRA had alerted the police to the bomb’s presence over an hour before the explosion: enough time to remove residents and shoppers from the vicinity. Such finesse illustrated a change: together with an undimmed readiness to use force, there seemed a new willingness to spare life.

62

The unhappy year

The winds of the time blew fitful and contrary. On 15 July 1996, the Conservatives tightened asylum legislation, in spite of an amendment proposed in the Lords. In the same month, ministerial salaries rose, with attendant protest. Industrial unrest resumed with a postal dispute and a strike of underground train drivers. British Energy was at last completely privatized, with still controversial nuclear power involved.

The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee decided not to recommend a ban on the private ownership of guns; since a massacre had occurred at Dunblane in Scotland only a few weeks previously, the ensuing protests were as inevitable as they were extensive. The shooting of an IRA suspect in the same month only added to the unease. Restrictions on handguns were eventually tightened, but no ban ensued. John Major reaffirmed that all paramilitary activity must cease before Sinn Féin could be invited to participate in further talks. As the prospect of a general election loomed, a reduction of 1 per cent was announced in the basic rate of income tax. It was a token gesture, but the government could promise little else in the circumstances. In December, and amidst further unrest over cash for questions, the Tories lost their majority. The fragility of the government was never more obvious than in January 1997, when it brought two Conservative MPs in an ambulance to attend a vote. The same tactic had of course been employed during the Labour government’s efforts to defeat a noconfidence motion in 1979, but that was in a less squeamish era.

With the loss in February of the South Wirral seat to Labour, the government was left in a parliamentary minority. The armed forces minister, Nicholas Soames, came under pressure to resign, having admitted to ‘very serious failings’ over the MoD’s handling of Gulf War Syndrome. Nor was it a happy year for British justice. The Bridgewater Three, victims of a miscarriage of justice almost twenty years before, were at last released.

This paled beside the furore aroused by the Stephen Lawrence case. Lawrence, a black teenager, had been murdered in 1993 by a gang of five white youths. The cry of ‘What, what, nigger?’ uttered by the youths as they crossed the road to assault their victim might have hinted that the attack was racially motivated, but the police seemed curiously obtuse in that regard. That their own delay in arresting the suspects and their disregard for the testimony of the only witness – also black – might be construed as racist was another possibility to which they seemed oblivious. In a ghastly paradox, there was overwhelming evidence of racially motivated murder but almost no direct evidence against the chief suspects. The errors of procedure committed by the police suggested an attitude that was informed by prejudice. Neville Lawrence, father of Stephen, put it thus in a sombre judgement. ‘When a policeman puts his uniform on, he should forget all his prejudices. If he cannot do that, then he should not be doing the job – because that means that one part of the population is not protected from the likes of those who murdered Stephen.’ After charges against the five were thrown out, Stephen’s parents embarked upon a private prosecution in 1994, but it foundered for lack of evidence. An inquest in February concluded that Lawrence’s death represented ‘an unlawful killing in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths’, but nothing came of this. It fell to the Daily Mail, not known for its championship of the oppressed, to highlight the injustice. The next day, on the front page were shown the faces of the five accused with the stark message ‘Murderers’ above. The Mail then challenged the suspects to sue, but they did not. Justice, of a sort, would be served in the years to come.

By March 1997, the government reeled rather than ruled. Yet its predicament was in some ways puzzling. There was no lack of talent, diligence or goodwill. Equally, however, there was no effective majority, too much self-defeating rhetoric and far too many scandals. A general election was called for 1 May 1997. The government’s decision, though welcomed by the other parties, was overshadowed by the continuing controversy concerning cash for questions. Allan Stewart became the latest in a long line of Conservative politicians to resign over allegations about their private lives. Piers Merchant, however, refused to resign. It seemed as if questions of guilt or innocence were long forgotten – to stitch the tattered robes of credibility with numbed and indifferent fingers was all that could be expected. When the prison ship Weare arrived in Portland Harbour, recalled to ease prison overcrowding, it seemed grimly symbolic.

The issues dominating the election were the economy, the UK’s future relationship with Europe, education, the NHS and proposed constitutional reform. On the economy the Tories had cause to congratulate themselves. Under Major, the country had seen the longest sustained economic growth in post-war history. He and his colleagues could only hope that the country would bear that success in mind. On all the other issues, Labour held the initiative. Having now styled themselves ‘New Labour’, Blair and his party found themselves subjected to a strikingly provocative advertising campaign. In one poster, the Tories depicted him with Luciferian eyes and the slogan ‘New Labour, New Danger’. Less flamboyantly, the Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown, assured his supporters at a conference: ‘New Labour, No difference!’

In the last days of the campaign, the Tories received an unexpected windfall to their morale. On 21 April 1997, Jacques Santer, the president of the European Commission, delivered a ‘Message to the Eurosceptics’. ‘We have decided on our direction,’ he said, ‘so there is no point at all in keeping our feet on the brakes – it is even dangerous. Be constructive, not destructive. That is my message for the sceptics – wherever in Europe.’ Whether or not it was aimed at the snarling naysayers of Tory Britain, it was certainly construed in that light. Major asserted openly that the Tories had been vindicated in their reserve towards Europe, while New Labour was incandescent. Alastair Campbell suggested that someone call Santer and ask him ‘what the fuck he was playing at’. Robin Cook, shadow foreign secretary, issued a public rebuff. And the Tories, gleeful for once, released a cartoon of Tony Blair sitting on the lap of Chancellor Kohl. Was it paranoia or pooterism that led to such a storm? Mr Santer did not mention British Eurosceptics by name, and he had more proximate concerns of his own. At any rate, all political parties were publicly united in opposition to this ‘attempt to interfere’ in British politics.

In many ways, the election of May 1997 recalled that of 1979. But where the Callaghan government had contrived to find slivers of gold in the dark cave, the Major government saw only defeat. As constituency after constituency brought in its results, Tony Blair addressed the faithful. ‘You know I don’t like to be complacent,’ he announced, although his beam belied him, ‘but it’s looking pretty good.’ Indeed it was; the country had swung from Conservative to Labour by a margin of 10 per cent. For once, ‘landslide’ was apt; the government was buried beneath its own debris. Speaking of politics as ‘a rough old game’, John Major tendered his resignation as Conservative leader. Ever sanguine, he had already booked seats at the Oval for that afternoon. One party refused to take its place in the House of Commons. Sinn Féin was bound never to collude with the hated British polity. Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker, therefore issued a prohibition: since Sinn Féin had refused their seats in parliament, they would be denied their seats in the ‘Commons facilities’. It was an impeccably English response.

Major’s had been a troubled premiership, but by no means a disastrous one. Edwina Currie’s judgement that although ‘one of the nicest men ever to walk the halls of Westminster’, Major should ‘never have been prime minister’ represents the orthodoxy but not all the truth. Others thought the government successful and its leader sly, but it could not be claimed that it had been a period marked by vision. Amidst the uncertain or ephemeral achievements, one deserves commemoration: one last onslaught on the post-war consensus had been launched in 1991 in the form of the Citizen’s Charter. It had been assumed by the creators of the welfare state that those who provided state-funded services would do so with a smile; that this need not be the case was a contingency few had anticipated. Public servants were to establish charters in which their obligations to consumers would be set out. It represented a clear reversal of attitudes traditional since the Second World War, a Thatcherite initiative but one ‘with a human face’, as Major’s supporters put it.

But the face was one of which the people had tired. Major both evoked and invoked the past, whether in his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign or in quoting Orwell’s England of ‘warm beer and cricket’. Even his status as a workingclass boy made good had begun to count against him as the decade progressed. And if Major had shown that class could be discarded, Blair offered a promise of class transcended. He was, moreover, young, and his voice, emphatic and eager, seemed to carry all the certitude of youth. In place of parliamentary rhetoric, he spoke in an idiom all his own, with a blend of the company boardroom and the popular radio station. He was metropolitan to his marrow.

‘Cool Britannia’ was the watchword of this epoch. Like Harold Wilson, but for different reasons, Tony Blair sought to identify with the culture of the young. Wilson’s courting of the Beatles was not a gimmick; he recognized the value of the common touch, but he knew also that his pipe and his age were against him. For Blair, however, inviting pop stars to Downing Street was an existential statement; in the manner of middle-class public schoolboys the country over, he believed that he could become proletarian by proxy, that ownership of a guitar and cordial relations with workingclass pop stars granted him access to the world of the labouring man. A spirit of conciliation seemed to seep through his very smile, always ready to sink into a thoughtful grimace should its object fail to reciprocate. People spoke of the ‘Blair effect’. He was charismatic, clearly middle class and ‘trendy’, although it was John Prescott, the seaman’s son and well-known ‘bruiser’, who declared that ‘we are all middle class now’. When Blair came to power, many on the Continent felt in his accession the gust of a warm wind. A fluent French-speaker, Blair was more Europhile than any of his immediate predecessors and understood the sometimes blunt, sometimes byzantine, ways of the European Union. Like Major, he saw himself as the heir to Thatcher, perhaps with more reason. More than one former colleague used the word ‘messianic’ to describe him.

63

The princess leaves the fairy tale

And so came about the disappearance of a prime minister who had made far less impression on the public than most of his predecessors. Yet that year was distinguished by one shocking and tragic event in the marriage of the Prince of Wales. Charles and Diana were not the best matched of couples. He was a man of strong convictions and a stubborn streak; she had come of age with only a vague idea of what it meant to be a member of the royal family. A curious snobbery informed this ignorance. Her family regarded the German-descended Windsors as parvenus; Diana was even heard to say that she felt she had married beneath her. Nevertheless, in more formal times it could have been the model of an arranged marriage, with each going their separate ways. Their holidays were taken apart; their friends seemed to have little in common. But the public was always present, with ears pricked and eyes hungry.

It soon became apparent, to those at court, that the princess was seriously disturbed. She threw herself down the stairs and used a penknife, a lemon slicer and a razor blade against herself, while her husband carried on his principal duties of hunting and fishing. The truth was that they had nothing in common but the children, but she had the gift of intimacy. There are certain people who for a brief period represent the ideals of the nation and come to embody them. She herself acknowledged this attribute when she recognized that ‘you can make people happy, if only for a little while’. The ‘queen of people’s hearts’ was the one figure who came to represent the Eighties and Nineties, principally by first defying and then by ignoring the traditions in which she had been raised.

Diana Spencer was born in 1961 in what would have been the best of circumstances, had she not been the classic ‘third girl’ and had her parents not argued constantly until they separated in 1967, a traumatic episode that did not leave her. She was to all appearances an ordinary girl, but ordinariness can be one of the most effective disguises. She was talkative, with a marked tendency to giggle, but she was enormously afraid of the dark. When her father suggested that she should be dispatched to a boarding school, she is supposed to have said, ‘If you love me, you won’t leave me.’

She failed her O levels and in the same period began to suffer from bulimia, but she also began a series of meetings and encounters that began to suggest what a royal marriage might entail. The ears and eyes of the public grew larger. The queen herself played no part in guiding or advising the young couple, although by Diana’s own account, the publicly unresponsive Prince Philip did. It seems that destiny or, in this instance, fate, was to make its own progress.

The narrative of the next few years has been retold a thousand times. ‘The pack’ were at her heels, chasing every move she made. In a mood of deep despondency, she told her sisters that marriage would not be possible. ‘Bad luck,’ they said. ‘Your face is on the tea towels.’ It was on the mugs too, with ‘my prince’, as she called him, supporting Diana with one arm, and her head cocked at an angle. Her reception within the palace elicited feelings of anxiety and betrayal, while her loneliness was compounded by disappointment. It has been said that while a man fears a woman’s future, a woman fears a man’s past; and so it proved in this instance. Another love still held sway over the prince. There were confidential interviews with ‘friends’, and books, authorized or unauthorized. ‘I never thought it would end up like this,’ she told one friend. ‘How could I have got it all so wrong?’ Their separation was announced in the early months of 1996, and their divorce soon after.

An impulsive and unselfconscious person, Diana rarely calculated the effects of her actions on others, but nothing could have averted the final disaster. She was in Paris with her companion, Dodi Fayed, when they entered the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel and their speeding car crashed. At four in the morning of 31 August 1997, she was declared dead. The press took a morsel every hour, as if watching the collapse of a stock market. At one point, Diana was struggling, at another she was said to be recovering. The nation awoke to news of her death.

Her death released a torrent of tears. These were shed for her smile, for her work with the victims of AIDS and of landmines, for her status as a free spirit and wronged wife. And inevitably she was mourned in mythic terms, as fearless martyr and sacrificial lamb. The shock of her demise in Paris was compounded by the fact that her two young sons were still in England; her former husband hardly seemed to enter the nation’s sorrow. Her relative youth was one cause of dismay, but it was her sudden and brutal absence that provoked the greater mourning. Something seemed to have torn out the heart of Britain, recognized even in the overwhelming wave of grief that dominated the days after her death.

It soon seemed as if England had become moist in mind as well as in soul; some universities began to include ‘Diana studies’ on their curriculum. When the singer Elton John adapted his song ‘Candle in the Wind’ to celebrate Diana, the nation bought the record by the million. So promiscuous an outpouring of grief inevitably provoked satire. A cartoon in Private Eye showed a frightened householder being menaced by two men in dark glasses with the reproach ‘We have reason to believe you haven’t bought “Candle in the Wind”.’

It was Blair who coined the expression ‘the people’s princess’; it may be that he saw himself in the role of ‘people’s prince’. But for all the later calumnies, New Labour was not a one-man show. At the apex of the new government stood a triumvirate of equals. Blair brought his charm and Brown his brain and his industry, while Peter Mandelson offered his skills as a strategist. He became known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’, but the jibe was as frivolous as it was unjust. Like many in the new government, he had abandoned the strict socialism of his youth only with intense misgivings. Mediating the ‘message’, as it became known, was Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press officer. He had been editor of the Daily Mirror, and the knowledge accrued there served him and the government well. Under his auspices, ministerial pronouncements became subject to strict censorship; to be ‘on message’ was all.

Having clawed at its cage for eighteen years, Labour bounded out with teeth bared. If the economy seemed serviceable, little else did. Haste was needed. Under Gordon Brown, the Bank of England was permitted to set its own exchange rates, a concession that effectively granted it independence. It was a move widely praised, even in the Tory press. The government also sought to discard the image of Labour as the party of the cloth cap, backward-looking and aggressively masculine, by bringing 101 female MPs into parliament. The jibe of ‘Blair’s babes’ soon acquired currency, though the term was swiftly dropped. Its mocking successor, ‘Tony’s Cronies’, would take longer to exorcise.

For Blair, Europe represented a wound that would turn septic if not addressed. Major had opted out of the Social Chapter. Blair accordingly opted in, accepting the Maastricht Treaty in all its fullness. Signs of future conflict were nevertheless apparent when, after a particularly difficult set of discussions, the normally ebullient prime minister offered the bleak observation ‘We can’t do business like this.’ With such an imposing majority, Blair could perhaps afford some latitude in respect of parliamentary procedure. In a move widely seen as presidential, he reduced the amount of time allowed for Prime Minister’s Questions. There was, he assured everyone, too much to be done.

Devolution for Scotland and Wales had long been on the new movement’s agenda. ‘Central knows best’ had been the damning slogan ascribed to the Tory administrations of the past decade; such an impression of arrogance must be avoided at all costs. Therefore, and in another break from the party’s roots, unity would now encompass diversity. In 1997 the government announced referenda on the question of devolution. The Scots had been chafing for some such concession for years, while the Welsh, having spent the best part of two millennia in a struggle with the English, were more blasé. Scotland was given back its parliament, and Wales was offered an assembly.

These were the halcyon days for the government. Even airy talk of a political ‘third way’, under which New Labour would inaugurate an era of apolitical politics and harness capitalism to serve the common good, found eager listeners. The twin extremes of trade union hegemony and unfettered monetarism were alike disposable. ‘Socialism’, as Blair put it, was the new watchword. There was nothing original to this initiative, but it proved a useful soundbite.

In the spring of 1998, the spirit of devolution took a new turn. It was determined that a new London Assembly should be set up, at once a nod to the former Greater London Council and a rebuff to its connotations. Ken Livingstone was not deterred by the fact that his name lay at the root of those connotations. After much internal wrangling, he was expelled from the Labour party for running against Frank Dobson, the official Labour candidate for Mayor of London. Blair had warned against Livingstone, saying: ‘I can’t think of Ken Livingstone without thinking of Labour’s wilderness years … I think he would be a disaster for London.’ Livingstone went on to prove that the New Labour consensus was not universally shared. Speaking as the newly elected Mayor of London, he began, ‘As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted sixteen years ago …’

Blair’s government developed a taste for what came to be known as ‘humanitarian intervention’, one of the more revealing euphemisms of the period. Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, had spoken of Labour conducting ‘an ethical foreign policy’, but how could such a policy be maintained? There can be little doubt that some of the causes selected were deserving. Under Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia had already made itself a pariah during the Bosnian civil war. Its subsequent repression of the largely Albanian province of Kosovo led in 1999 to a bombing campaign sponsored by Britain. This had the effect of forcing a Serbian withdrawal but also of imbuing the Serbs with something like the spirit of the Blitz. In Belgrade, posters were unveiled that alluded to this irony. ‘We’re following your example’ was their message.

Less obviously ‘ethical’ was Britain’s support for George W. Bush’s bombing of Iraq in 1998. In Sierra Leone, too, the British government intervened; violent rebels had threatened the legitimate government, not to mention vital British interests. Perhaps as a result of this injection of realpolitik, the British venture was successful, but this ‘humanitarian’ approach to military action divided conservatives and socialists alike. The question of the propriety of invading another nation because one disapproved of its rulers was one that did not deter the new administration. If a minority was oppressed, they were right in every respect, and come what may.

Legislation throve in those fecund years. The Human Rights Act of 1998 was passed and thus the European Convention on Human Rights became ‘native’. The National Minimum Wage Act, passed in the same year, was opposed by Tories on the grounds that it would lead to unemployment. It did not, and this failed prophecy did little for the Conservatives’ reputation. Welsh and Scottish devolution brought about another, unintended, change. Blair was fond of invoking ‘the British people’, but with the reassertion of Celtic identity came something like a crisis of Englishness. The West Lothian question remained; it was an anomaly and, some said, an injustice. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs were allowed to vote in the British parliament on purely English affairs.

The matter of the euro had bedevilled the government of John Major. Publicly, Blair expressed himself in favour of the currency, but his chancellor was less enthusiastic and proclaimed five ‘tests’ for Britain’s entry into the eurozone. The crucial ones were whether economic convergence with other European nations could be achieved, and were they flexible enough? The answers remained doubtful, and therefore the euro was rejected. Gordon Brown’s Five Tests, it is worth noting, were Thatcherite in inspiration. Despite this, the Tories affected scorn as their response.

It cannot be doubted that in one respect Labour fell short. Where the Tories had been able to mine a rich and colourful seam of scandal, involving sexual indiscretion, bribery and perversion, New Labour could offer only a dusty bundle of financial improprieties. There were some exceptions, of course. In January 1998, the son of the home secretary Jack Straw received a police caution after admitting to possession of cannabis. Straw himself had recently declared that he would not support the drug’s legalization. Most scandals, however, were of the ‘Geoffrey Robinson’ type. Robinson, the Paymaster General, was accused by the Conservatives of hypocrisy after it was revealed that he had failed to register an offshore trust, having abolished tax relief on savings over £50,000. It was a dreary effort. The revelation that Robin Cook had been conducting an affair was more tragic than comic. Meanwhile, the Conservatives under William Hague set new procedures for the election of the party leader; whereas the decision had rested solely with the parliamentary party, the new rules gave all party members the vote, which inevitably led to a swing to the right.

The problem of restricted opportunity had to be addressed and so the welfare-to-work scheme was launched, intended to lift the unemployed out of welfare dependency. In a similar spirit, the March 1998 budget promised ‘work for those who can, security for those who can’t’. Behind the soundbite lay nothing that Thatcher herself would not have approved. However, disaffection still flourished. In the spring, 200,000 joined the Countryside Alliance on a march on London. The Alliance had arisen partly as a response to a private member’s bill to outlaw hunting with hounds, but also to the government’s perceived indifference to the concerns of the countryside. There were to be many such public protests during the Blair tenure. The Alliance rarely won its battles, yet its very existence was an omen. The old divide between the metropolis and the land was to become not narrower but wider in succeeding years.

In September 1998, foreign affairs remained to the fore. The government confirmed that it would grant full UK citizenship to 100,000 citizens of the remaining British dependencies. Asylum applications were shown to have risen by 6,000. In a small but resonant echo of the new influx of women to parliament, Marylebone Cricket Club voted to admit women to its membership. At so early a stage, any government would be obliged to pour out a stream of promises; nonetheless, such announcements were evidence at least of excellent intentions.

1999 was as frenetic a year as its predecessor. In January, Paddy Ashdown stepped down as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Robin Cook’s ex-wife wrote a book, serialized in The Times, in which she wrote of his having felt that he had ‘sold his soul to the devil’ by abandoning his socialist principles in favour of the Blair regime. Buckingham Palace announced the engagement of Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones, photographs of whom frequently showed her in poses and styles reminiscent of the late Princess of Wales.

The decline of manufacturing gathered pace, with The Economist reporting that manufacturing employment was 57,000 lower in July than in February 1996, the biggest single loss being British Steel’s decision to shed up to 10,000 jobs. The last tin mine closed, at South Crofty, thus ending 3,000 years of tin mining in Cornwall. It was reopened in 2001, having been bought by a Welsh mining engineer, and was once again Europe’s only remaining working tin mine. Crofty aside, the mining industry in England could boast of no amelioration. The Annesley-Bentinck coal mine, the oldest in the UK, was closed. Elsewhere, too, the signs were bleak. Fujitsu announced it was to close its Newton Aycliffe semiconductor plant. The TUC urged the government to take ‘remedial action’. Blair was sympathetic but made clear that he could not help the ‘twists and turns’ of world markets, instead promising to ‘help the hurt’.

For those with eyes to see, some modest gains were apparent. British Aerospace took over the Marconi defence electronics arm of the GEC, becoming Europe’s biggest defence and aerospace company. Signs of progress emerged elsewhere, too. The government again voted to lower the age of sexual consent for homosexuals. Other liberal measures were assured of a similar progress. The death penalty was formally abolished for all offences, in accordance with Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In February 1999, the Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence case was published. The report became famous for its controversial use of the term ‘institutional racism’ to describe the workings of the Metropolitan Police, though a close reading of the report reveals something more circumspect:

It is vital to stress that neither academic debate nor the evidence presented to us leads us to say or conclude that an accusation that institutional racism exists in the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] implies that the policies of the MPS are racist. No such evidence is before us … It is in the implementation of policies and in the words and actions of officers acting together that racism may become apparent.

The expression referred to a culture in which even black officers were by their own admission often complicit. Clearly something had floated up between the cracks of policy.

The government suffered three defeats in the House of Lords over plans to abolish the hereditary component of the upper chamber. Blair himself expressed a certain affection for the sanctuary of ermine and scarlet, but remarked, ‘I just don’t see what it’s got to do with Britain today.’ The House of Lords Act of 1999 reduced the number of hereditary peers to ninety-one; thus the great reform of the upper house was at last achieved. But if Blair or his successors imagined that an elected house would be more pliable than a hereditary one, they were quickly disabused.

Nonetheless, many born to privilege were tottering. Jonathan Aitken, whose hubristic lawsuit against the Guardian newspaper had backfired, was forced to plead guilty in 1999 to two charges of perjury. Accused of corruption by both the Guardian and World in Action, he had sued them, armed with imprudent clichés about the ‘sword of truth’, before the sword duly turned on him. Like Oscar Wilde, he went to jail and wrote a ballad, and, like Profumo, he began a lifetime of penitence.

Social amelioration proceeded apace. A £60 million government campaign to halve the incidence of under-eighteen pregnancies by 2010 was announced; single mothers must be protected, but underage pregnancies avoided. Somehow, a Cromwellian politics could coexist with cavalier liberty. Like Margaret Thatcher, Blair wanted a Britain that would suit his own personality.

Much that was odd or wayward died in this time, though much of the same strand was born. Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony party gave up his anarchic ghost. And yet a Carnival against Capitalism broke out in the heart of capitalism itself, the City of London. It was, by later standards, a happy affair, with a spoof edition of the Evening Standard, the Evading Standard, printed and circulated. In similarly quixotic fashion, Tony Blair announced his bill to ban hunting with hounds in July 1999, as the Countryside Alliance had predicted, even though they could not have foreseen the forum for that announcement, on the television programme Question Time. It was also a busy month for relations with the Continent. The European Commission formally lifted its ban on beef imports from Britain. The great matter of Europe impinged in other respects. Forty, mainly religious, independent schools confirmed that they would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against legislation banning corporal punishment in all UK schools. The irony of such an appeal was lost on them.

In December 1999, the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, came into force. For thirty years, the Troubles had blighted Northern Ireland; over 4,000 lives had been lost. How could a tourniquet to the bloodletting be applied? Somehow, irreconcilable demands must be respected and met. Under the government of John Major, a ‘three-strand’ solution to the problems of the Province had been mooted. Under Blair, this was now implemented. The central suggestion was radical indeed. Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom, but only for as long as the majority of its citizens wished it so. The ‘Good Friday Agreement’, as it became known, would not have been possible without careful movements in the wings of power. Two taoiseachs, three prime ministers, a president of the United States and the leaders of both the nationalist and Unionist communities of Northern Ireland all brought about the conditions for a devolved Assembly and Executive, for ‘north-south’ cooperation between the north and the Republic, and for ‘east-west’ cooperation across the Irish Sea.

It almost collapsed. Deadlines for agreement came and went. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist party wanted nothing to do with the whole affair. It was made acidly clear to the prime minister that his presence was needed if any sort of deal was to be reached. ‘This is not the time for soundbites,’ he declared before setting out. ‘Let’s leave them at home. I feel the hand of history on our shoulders.’ He was much mocked at the time, yet after only three days the warring parties laid down their fears, prejudices and hatreds. The Republic gave up its constitutional claim to the six counties, while England repealed the act of 1920 that had formally divided the island. While both nations therefore retained their interests in the affairs of the Province, they had in a sense withdrawn from it.

Blair was perhaps more fortunate than his predecessors. His allies and delegates were more emollient; he inherited happier conditions; above all, the Province longed for air, as the referenda on the agreement made plain. And Blair was obviously sincere in his desire for a settlement that would benefit all. In the end, only the Democratic Unionist party refused to accept the treaty, and the overmastering pull of peace drew the scattered filings together. The agreement was to undergo many vicissitudes in the new millennium. For much of its first decade it was suspended due to disagreements over policing and decommissioning. There were inevitable casualties. David Trimble, the hard-bitten leader of the Ulster Unionist party, had committed his followers to the agreement on the understanding that the IRA would surrender its weapons, and, when it did not, he and others like him were obliged to cede place and power to more radical elements. In England, the news was received with a blend of hope and weariness – most had grown wary of the ‘new beginnings’ promised in breathless headlines. For those who cared, Northern Ireland had been retained for the Union, but on entirely new grounds. The future of the Province now rested with the people of Northern Ireland rather than with the parliament of the United Kingdom. In constitutional terms nothing of substance had changed, except for the underlying principle.

The land of prophecies and dreams was silent as the new millennium approached. The only prophecy to exercise public concern was dismally prosaic; it was rumoured that a ‘millennium bug’ would cause computer software to collapse unless it could be aligned with the coming date, but the problem was largely resolved in advance. And so England awaited the new age much as it always had. It may be that the quiet revolution of Blairism had assuaged what longing there had been for change. Despite its roaring for flesh, the English lion is often content with a simple bone.

Still, the millennium had to be marked somehow, and its central image was to be the Millennium Dome. Intended to recall a vast and imposing spaceship, it seemed to many a giant, bloated beetle. It had, in fact, been the brainchild of the previous government: Michael Heseltine had seen an opportunity to reclaim toxic land in Greenwich.

British politics seemed to have come to an end. Postwar dogma had been replaced by Thatcherite dogma. This new orthodoxy was massaged under Blair, but any changes were cosmetic. The once mighty Liberal vote had retreated, and the party itself renamed as the Liberal Democrats, though each of its new leaders assured the nation that they were still a force to be reckoned with. By early 2000, polls revealed that Blair’s reputation for trustworthiness stood at 46 per cent, no small achievement for an incumbent prime minister. It might have been higher had his promises not proved difficult to fulfil.

After years of Thatcherism, a more ‘progressive’ mood could be detected. In 1997, the British Social Attitudes study recorded that 75 per cent of the people said they favoured tax rises for public service improvements. Polls revealed a populace far less exercised than it is now by questions of ethnicity. Concern about immigration lay at 3 per cent in 1997, while interest in foreign affairs stood at 2 per cent. Asylum seekers and economic migrants were no longer a bugbear. The wealth divide grew, although all incomes rose. A benignly self-centred nation emerged.

The Nineties have been called the decade of ‘spin’, but the novelty lay in the prominence of the spin doctors, who had taken the place of trade union leaders as the most important national figures outside government. The collapse in voter turnout reflected a government adept at soothing the populace; as a result, parliamentary discourse acquired the attributes of a patois: ‘tackle’, ‘raft’, ‘package’, ‘deliver’ and the suggestive ‘meaningful’. Is it uncharitable to suggest that when John Major left Downing Street, he took the English language with him? It may be that he took pragmatism with him, too. He could not match the wild-eyed millenarianism of his predecessor, while Blair was nothing if not a believer. ‘The eyes of the world’, ‘the hand of history’, ‘the right thing to do’: resonant banalities of this sort were his demesne, and for five years they worked.

And so, with many bangs and flashes of fireworks, the twentieth century ended. No bug had bitten, no rapture had occurred, and the frost added glitter to the great white marquee. In accordance with the spirit of the time, the Dome enshrined the future. Yet the past seems to gain in allure as modernity cloys. It may be that as the millennium progresses, the English will recover what was once their glory in that most precious and fugitive of instincts: a capacity for awe.

The End

Footnote

1. The sun never rises

* This is a history of England, rather than of Britain. However, British institutions, such as the British army, navy, government, monarchy and empire, are constantly referred to in this book, as they are inextricably bound up with England’s history. For the same reason, certain events which took place in the wider United Kingdom are also covered.

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——, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998)

——, Parties and People: England 1914–1951 (Oxford, 2010)

Mackintosh, J. P. (ed.), British Prime Ministers in the Twentieth Century (vol. 1. Balfour to Chamberlain; vol. 2. Churchill to Callaghan) (London, 1977–8)

McSmith, A., No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London, 2010)

Maillaud, P., The English Way (London, 1945)

Marquand, D., Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977)

——, Britain Since 1918: the Strange Career of British Democracy (London, 2008)

Marsh, P. T., Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, 1994)

Marwick, A., The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1973)

——, Women at War, 1914–1918 (London, 1977)

——, British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1996)

Masterman, C. F. G., The Condition of England (London, 1909)

——, The New Liberalism (London, 1920)

——, How England is Governed (London, 1921)

——, England After War: A Study (London, 1922)

Medlicott, W. N., Contemporary England 1914–1964 (London, 1967)

Middlemas, K., Diplomacy of Illusion: The British Government and Germany, 1937–1939 (London, 1972)

——, The Life and Times of George VI (London, 1974)

——, Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911 (London, 1979)

——, Power, Competition and the State (vol. 1. Britain in Search of Balance, 1940–61; vol. 2. Threats to the Postwar Settlement: Britain, 1961–74; vol. 3. The End of the Post War Era: Britain since 1974) (Basingstoke, 1986–91)

——, The Life and Times of Edward VII (London, 1993)

Middlemas, K., & Barnes, A. J. L., Baldwin: a Biography (London, 1969)

Monk, R., Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London, 1996)

——, Bertrand Russell, 1921–70: The Ghost of Madness (London, 2000)

Montgomery, J., The Twenties (London, 1970)

Moore, C., Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1. Not for Turning (London, 2013); vol. 2. Everything She Wants (London, 2015)

Moore, J., Portrait of Elmbury (London, 1957)

Morgan, K. O., Keir Hardie (London, 1967)

——, The Age of Lloyd George (London, 1971)

——, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford, 1979)

——, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford, 1997)

——, TwentiethCentury Britain: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000)

Morgan, K. O., Britain since 1945: the People’s Peace (3rd edn.) (Oxford, 2001)

——, Michael Foot: A Life (London, 2007)

Mosley, O., My Life (London, 1968)

Mowat, C. L., Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London, 1955)

Muggeridge, M., The Thirties: 1930–1940 in Great Britain (London, 1940)

Nicol, P., Sucking Eggs: What your Wartime Granny Could Teach You About Diet, Thrift and Going Green (London, 2009)

Nicolson, H. (ed. N. Nicolson), Diaries and Letters (3 vols.) (London, 1966–8)

Orwell, G. (ed. P. Davison), The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 vols.) (London, 1998)

Osgerby, B., Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Oxford, 1998)

Overy, R. J., The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009)

Parker, J., King of Fools (London, 1988)

Pearce, M., & Stewart, G., British Political History, 1867–1990: Democracy and Decline (London, 1992)

Peden, G. C., British Economic and Social Policy: Lloyd George to Margaret Thatcher (Oxford, 1985)

Pelling, H., Modern Britain, 1885–1955 (London, 1969)

——, Britain and the Second World War (London, 1970)

——, A Short History of the Labour Party (London, 1972)

Percy, E., Some Memories (London, 1958)

Perkin, H. J., The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London, 1989)

Phillips, M. G., & Phillips, T., Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of MultiRacial Britain (London, 1998)

Pimlott, B., Hugh Dalton (London, 1985)

——, Harold Wilson (London, 1992)

Plowden, W., The Motor Car and Politics, 1896–1970 (London, 1971)

Pollard, S., The Development of the British Economy, 1914–1990 (4th edn.) (London, 1992)

Ponting, C., Breach of Promise: Labour in Power, 1964–1970 (London, 1989)

Priestley, J. B., English Journey: Being a rambling but truthful Account of what one Man saw and heard and felt and thought during a Journey through England during the Autumn of the Year 1933 (London, 1934)

——, Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections (London, 1962)

Pugh, M., The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–1939 (Oxford, 1982)

——, State and Society: British Political and Social History, 1870–1992 (London, 1994)

Ramsden, J., The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940 (London, 1978)

Raymond, J., The Baldwin Age (London, 1960)

Read, D., Documents from Edwardian England, 1901–1915 (London, 1973)

——, Edwardian England (London, 1982)

Reynolds, D., Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century (London, 1991)

Rose, J., The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven & London, 2001)

Rose, K., King George V (London, 1983)

Rosenthal, M., The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (London, 1986)

Sampson, A., Macmillan: A Study in Ambiguity (London, 1967)

Sandbrook, D., Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London, 2005)

——, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, 2006)

——, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 (London, 2010)

——, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London, 2012)

Seaman, L. C. B., Life in Britain between the Wars (London, 1970)

Skidelsky, R., Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931 (London, 1967)

——, Britain since 1900: A Success Story? (London, 2014)

Smith, S. B., Diana: The Life of a Troubled Princess (London, 1999)

Stevenson, J., British Society, 1914–45 (London, 1984)

——, & Cook, C., The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression (London, 1977)

Stewart, M., The Jekyll and Hyde Years: Politics and Economic Policy since 1964 (London, 1977)

Strange, J.-M., TwentiethCentury Britain: Economic, Cultural and Social Change (Harlow, 2007)

Sykes, A., Tariff Reform in British Politics: 1903–1913 (Oxford, 1979)

Symons, J., The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London, 1960)

——, Between the Wars: Britain in Photographs (London, 1972)

Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961)

——, The First World War: An Illustrated History (London, 1963)

——, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965)

——, The Second World War: An Illustrated History (Harmondsworth, 1976)

Taylor, C., Return to Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2006)

Taylor, D. J., Orwell: The Life (London, 2003)

——, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London, 2007)

Thompson, F. M. L. (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950 (vol. 1. Regions and Communities; vol. 2. People and Their Environment; vol. 3. Social Agencies and Institutions) (Cambridge, 1990)

Thomson, D., England in the Twentieth Century, 1914–63 (Harmondsworth, 1965)

Thorpe, D. R., Alec Douglas-Home (London, 1996)

Tiratsoo, N., From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain Since 1939 (London, 1997)

Todd, S., The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London, 2014)

Tomlinson, J., Problems of British Economic Policy, 1870–1945 (London, 1981)

——, Employment Policy: The Crucial Years 1939–1955 (Oxford, 1987)

Turner, A. W., Rejoice, Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s (London, 2010)

——, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London, 2013)

Vincent, D., Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in TwentiethCentury Britain (London, 1991)

Vinen, R., Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era (London, 2009)

Vital, D., The Making of British Foreign Policy (London, 1968)

Walton, J. K., The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2000)

Wells, H. G., Mr Britling Sees It Through (London, 1916)

Williamson, P., National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992)

Wilson, J., C.B.: A life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London, 1973)

Wilson, T., The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (London, 1966)

Winterton (Earl), Pre-War (London, 1932)

——, Orders of the Day (London, 1953)

Woodham, J. M., TwentiethCentury Design (Oxford, 1997)

Woodward, E. L., Short Journey (London, 1942)

Young, J. W., Britain and European Unity, 1945–1992 (Basingstoke, 1993)

Youngson, A. J., The British Economy: 1920–1957 (London, 1960)

Ziegler, P., Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (London, 1993)

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I., Women in TwentiethCentury Britain (Harlow, 2001)

ARTICLES

Articles relating to twentiethcentury English history published in the following journals:

Cambridge Historical Journal (London, 1923–57)

English Historical Review (London, 1886–)

Historical Journal (Cambridge, 1958)

History (London, 1912–)

Journal of British Studies (Chicago, 1961)

Past & Present (Oxford, 1952–)

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (London, 1872–)

Index

abortion, ref1

Abyssinia: Italian invasion (1935), ref1, ref2, ref3; emperor in exile, ref1

ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service), ref1

Acton, Lord, ref1

Adam and the Ants, ref1

Adams, Gerry, ref1, ref2, ref3

Adenauer, Konrad, ref1, ref2

advertising, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Africa, colonization, ref1

agriculture: wages, ref1; depression, ref1; Chamberlain’s measures, ref1; BSE crisis, ref1

Aitken, Jonathan, ref1, ref2, ref3

Alamein battles (1942), ref1

alcohol: effects, ref1; cocktails, ref1; beer, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Aldington, Richard, ref1

Alfie (film), ref1

Aliens Act (1905), ref1

Amato, Giuliano, ref1

American: slang, ref1, ref2; music, ref1

Amery, Leo, ref1

Amiens, Battle of (1918), ref1

Amin, Idi, ref1

Amis, Kingsley, ref1, ref2, ref3; Lucky Jim, ref1

Amis, Martin, ref1

Amos, Baroness, ref1

Amritsar massacre (1919), ref1, ref2

anarchists, ref1, ref2

Anderson, Tryphena, ref1

Andropov, Yuri, ref1

Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), ref1, ref2

Anglo-Irish treaty (1921), ref1

Anglo-Russian convention (1907), ref1

Animals, the, ref1, ref2

Anne, Princess, ref1

Annual Register, ref1

Anti-Comintern Pact, ref1

Antonescu, Ion, ref1

appeasement, ref1

Arab–Israeli war (1973), ref1, ref2

architecture: suburban, ref1; Sixties, ref1

Argentina: fugitive Germans, ref1; Falklands war, ref1

aristocracy: political parties, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; landholding, ref1, ref2; establishment, ref1; Lords reform, ref1; new, ref1; in decline, ref1; sporting role, ref1

army: condition of troops, ref1, ref2; ‘Curragh Mutiny’, ref1; troop numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; volunteers, ref1, ref2, ref3; equipment, ref1, ref2, ref3; Western Front losses, ref1; conscription, ref1, ref2; officer class, ref1; conscription (1939), ref1; jokes about inactivity, ref1; demobs, ref1; ban on homosexuals issue, ref1

Arras, Battle of (1917), ref1

arts: modernism, ref1; Sixties, ref1; psychedelic, ref1; response to Thatcher, ref1, ref2; government spending, ref1

Ashdown, Paddy, ref1, ref2, ref3

Asquith, Herbert Henry: relationship with C-B, ref1; chancellor, ref1; administration, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; background and character, ref1, ref2; drinking, ref1, ref2; career, ref1, ref2; speeches, ref1; religion, ref1; marriage, ref1; election (January 1910), ref1; Lords reform, ref1; on death of Edward VII, ref1; George V’s view of, ref1; response to strikes (1910–11), ref1; response to suffragettes, ref1; third Irish Home Rule Bill (1912), ref1, ref2, ref3; on Law, ref1, ref2, ref3; dealing with Ulster Protestants, ref1; doubts Dardanelles strategy, ref1; loss of reputation, ref1; coalition leader, ref1; view of conscription, ref1; war strategy, ref1; response to Easter Rising (1916), ref1; Irish Home Rule plan (1916), ref1; forced out by Lloyd George, ref1; support for women’s suffrage, ref1; post-war Liberal party leadership, ref1, ref2; loses seat (1918), ref1; on Black and Tans, ref1; election results (1923), ref1; suggests Labour minority government, ref1; relationship with Labour government, ref1; election defeat (1924), ref1; replaced by Lloyd George (1926), ref1

Asquith, Margot (Tennant), ref1

Astaire, Fred, ref1

asylum seekers: local councils’ obligation to, ref1; legislation, ref1, ref2; rise in number, ref1; not a concern, ref1

Atlantic Conveyor, SS, ref1

Attlee, Clement: background, ref1; view of MacDonald’s administration, ref1, ref2; Labour leadership, ref1, ref2; election results (1935), ref1; on Munich Agreement, ref1; illness, ref1; response to coalition proposal, ref1; prime minister (1945), ref1; appearance and character, ref1; cabinet, ref1; on rationing, ref1; on Britain’s financial position, ref1; calls second general election, ref1; education policy, ref1; on Macmillan, ref1

Auden, W. H., ref1

Auschwitz, death camp, ref1, ref2

Austria: German population, ref1; British policy, ref1, ref2; German incorporation, ref1; massacre of Jews, ref1

Austria-Hungary, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Awdry, Wilbert and Christopher: Thomas the Tank Engine series, ref1

Baden-Powell, Robert: career, ref1; Scouting for Boys, ref1

Baker, Kenneth, ref1

Baldwin, Oliver, ref1

Baldwin, Stanley: on People’s Budget, ref1; background, ref1, ref2; career, ref1; on new MPs (1918), ref1; on Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3; on 1922 election, ref1; chancellor, ref1; Conservative leadership, ref1, ref2; conversion to protectionism, ref1, ref2; view of Labour minority government, ref1; election campaign (1924), ref1; election victory (1924), ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; vision of a harmonious England, ref1; on class consciousness, ref1; relationship with son, ref1; opinion of Churchill, ref1; broadcasts, ref1; miners’ strike intervention, ref1; general strike (1926), ref1, ref2; housing policy, ref1; cultivating suburban lower middle class, ref1, ref2; general election campaign (1929), ref1; election results (1929), ref1, ref2; in National Government, ref1, ref2; view of new industries, ref1; view of continental affairs, ref1, ref2; policy towards League of Nations, ref1, ref2; opinion of Hitler, ref1; old age, ref1, ref2; military spending, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; fear of another war, ref1; response to remilitarization of Rhineland, ref1; threatens to resign over Edward VIII’s marriage, ref1, ref2; retirement, ref1; on dangers of bombing, ref1

Balfour, Arthur James: on death of Victoria, ref1; A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, ref1; character, ref1, ref2; administration, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; protectionism issue, ref1, ref2; defeat at 1906 election, ref1; leadership, ref1; relationship with C-B, ref1; People’s Budget crisis, ref1; speeding offences, ref1; view of suffragettes, ref1; resignation of leadership, ref1; in coalition cabinet, ref1, ref2; view of conscription, ref1; Ulster home-rule plan, ref1; foreign secretary, ref1, ref2; view of Lloyd George, ref1

Bane, Mary, ref1

Bank of England: gold reserves, ref1, ref2; using gold reserves to support sterling, ref1; ‘Socialization of Industries’, ref1; supporting sterling, ref1, ref2; unable to support sterling, ref1; setting exchange rates, ref1

Barber, Tony, ref1

Battle, John, ref1

Beatles: background, ref1, ref2; in Hamburg, ref1; recordings, ref1; Beatlemania, ref1; relationship with Stones, ref1; MBEs, ref1, ref2; US and Philippines tour, ref1; writing, ref1; Sgt. Pepper, ref1; press attitude to, ref1; status, ref1

Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken): relationship with Lloyd George, ref1; campaign to replace Baldwin, ref1; support for Baldwin, ref1; support for Edward VIII, ref1

Beckett, Margaret, ref1

Belfast parliament, ref1, ref2

Belgium: African colonies, ref1; German invasion (1914), ref1; BEF, ref1; German invasion (1940), ref1, ref2; abdication of king, ref1

Belgrade, bombing, ref1

Bell, Julian, ref1, ref2

Benn, Tony: on technology, ref1; hostility to European project, ref1, ref2; economic views, ref1, ref2; on Belgrano sinking, ref1; support for miners, ref1

Bennett, Alan, ref1

Bennett, Arnold, ref1, ref2

Bentine, Michael, ref1

Berlin Wall, fall (1989), ref1

Berry, Chuck, ref1

Betjeman, John, ref1

Bevan, Aneurin: appearance and character, ref1; minister of health and housing, ref1; on free medical care, ref1; memories of childhood, ref1; establishing NHS, ref1; resignation over prescription charges, ref1; vision of welfare state, ref1; relationship with Foot, ref1, ref2; nuclear policy, ref1

Beveridge, Sir William, ref1, ref2

Bevin, Ernest, ref1, ref2

Beyond the Fringe (stage revue), ref1, ref2

Biba, ref1

Bicknell, Dr Franklin, ref1

bicycles, ref1, ref2

Big Issue, ref1

Black and Tans, ref1

Black Wednesday (1992), ref1, ref2, ref3

Blair, Tony: career, ref1; leadership election (1994), ref1; ‘tough on crime’, ref1; policy on right to protest, ref1; children’s schooling, ref1; election (1997), ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; opt-in to Social Chapter, ref1; Good Friday Agreement, ref1; reputation for trustworthiness, ref1

Blake, Peter: Self-Portrait with Badges, ref1

Blake, William, ref1

Bloomsbury Group, ref1

Blunden, Edmund, ref1, ref2

Boer War, Second (1899–1902), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Boers: concentration camps, ref1; self-government, ref1

Bondfield, Margaret, ref1

Boothroyd, Betty, ref1

Borisov, German massacre of Jews, ref1

Bosnian civil war, ref1

Bottomley, Horatio, ref1

Bow, Clara, ref1

Boy Scout Movement, ref1, ref2, ref3

Bridgewater Three, ref1

Brierley, Walter: Means-Test Man, ref1

bright young things, ref1, ref2

Brighton, Grand Hotel bombing (1984), ref1

Bristol: docks bombed, ref1; riots (1980), ref1

Britain: ‘civilizing mission’, ref1, ref2; population, ref1; immigration, ref1; imports, ref1; ‘Greater Britain’ plan, ref1, ref2; threat from Germany, ref1, ref2; car accidents, ref1; Versailles Treaty, ref1; industrial activity, ref1; naval agreement with Germany, ref1; war with Germany (1939), ref1; response to invasion of Poland, ref1; German air attacks (1940), ref1; Hitler’s invasion plans, ref1; Battle of (1940), ref1; VE day, ref1; welfare legislation, ref1; consuming society, ref1; hydrogen bomb, ref1; ‘special relationship’ with US, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; EEC negotiations, ref1, ref2, ref3; devaluation (1967), ref1; sovereignty, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; joins EEC, ref1; EEC referendum (1975), ref1; Falklands war (1982), ref1; ERM membership, ref1, ref2; death of Diana, Princess of Wales, ref1

British Aerospace, ref1

British Boundary Commission (1925), ref1

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), ref1, ref2, ref3

British Empire Exhibition (1924–25), ref1

British Expeditionary Force (BEF): assembled (1914), ref1; retreat (1940), ref1, ref2; Dunkirk rescue, ref1

British Gas Corporation, ref1

British Gazette, ref1

British Medical Association (BMA), ref1

British National Party, ref1

British Rail, ref1

British Social Attitudes, ref1

British Steel, ref1

British Union of Fascists (BUF), ref1

Brittain, Vera, ref1

Brown, George: view of Common Market, ref1; voluntary incomes policy, ref1; character, ref1; loses seat (1970), ref1

Brown, Gordon, ref1, ref2

Bryson, Bill, ref1

BSE crisis, ref1

Buchenwald survivor, ref1

Bulganin, Nikolai, ref1

Bulgaria, ref1, ref2

Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange, ref1, ref2

Burgess, Guy, ref1

Burns, John, ref1, ref2

Burton, Richard, ref1

buses, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Bush, George, ref1, ref2

Bush, George W., ref1

Butler, R. A. (Rab), ref1, ref2, ref3

Butlin, Billy, ref1

Caine, Michael, ref1, ref2, ref3

Calder Hall nuclear power station, ref1, ref2

Callaghan, James: home secretary, ref1; opposition to ‘In Place of Strife’, ref1; sends troops to Northern Ireland, ref1; indifference to referendum, ref1; Wilson’s resignation, ref1, ref2; Labour leadership, ref1; IMF negotiations, ref1; tribute to Wilson, ref1; economic policy, ref1; on disruption of society, ref1; monarchist, ref1; pay policy, ref1; ‘Winter of Discontent’, ref1; appearance, ref1; message for unions, ref1

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), ref1

Campbell, Alastair, ref1, ref2

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry (C-B): election victory (1906), ref1, ref2, ref3; appearance and character, ref1; relationship with Balfour, ref1; relationship with Lloyd George, ref1, ref2; death, ref1

Canada, industry, ref1

cannabis, ref1, ref2

capital punishment, ref1, ref2

Carlyle, Thomas, ref1

Carr, Robert, ref1

Carson, Edward: Ulster Unionist leadership, ref1; relationship with Law, ref1, ref2; Irish Home Rule issue, ref1; coalition cabinet, ref1; response to Easter Rising executions, ref1; Irish Home Rule plan, ref1; supports Lloyd George, ref1; at Admiralty, ref1; threatens civil war, ref1

Cash, Sir Bill, ref1

Castle, Barbara, ref1, ref2

Cat and Mouse Act, ref1

Central Electricity Board, ref1

Central LandOwners Association, ref1

Central Powers, ref1

Chalmers Watson, Mona, ref1

Chamberlain, Austen: on strikes (1911), ref1; on Ireland, ref1; in coalition cabinet, ref1; chancellor, ref1; party leader, ref1, ref2; Law’s government, ref1; foreign secretary, ref1; gloom, ref1

Chamberlain, Joseph: background and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; opposition to Irish Home Rule, ref1, ref2; plan for the empire, ref1, ref2; Boer War policy, ref1; Tariff Reform programme, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; US relationship, ref1; influence, ref1, ref2, ref3; retirement, ref1

Chamberlain, Neville: elected (1918), ref1; career, ref1, ref2; view of Labour minority government, ref1; minister of health, ref1; welfare proposals, ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2; opinion of Churchill, ref1; general strike (1926), ref1; election results (1929), ref1; in National Government, ref1; chancellor, ref1, ref2, ref3; protectionist measures, ref1; on unemployment, ref1; view of continental affairs, ref1, ref2; opinion of Hitler, ref1; reduces defence spending, ref1; view of Edward VIII, ref1; advice to Edward VIII, ref1; premiership, ref1; approach to European diplomacy, ref1; appeasement policy, ref1, ref2; relationship with Mussolini, ref1, ref2; protest on Germany’s incorporation of Austria, ref1; Czechoslovakia policy, ref1; discussions with Hitler, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; broadcast to the nation, ref1; Munich Agreement, ref1; preparations for war, ref1; recognition of Franco’s government, ref1; Rome talks, ref1; pledges support for Poland, ref1; negotiations on Danzig, ref1; ultimatum to Germany, ref1; Commons assault on, ref1; resignation, ref1, ref2

Chanel, Coco, ref1

Channel Islands, German occupation, ref1

Channel Tunnel, ref1

Channon, Henry ‘Chips’, ref1

Chaplin, Charlie, ref1, ref2; Modern Times, ref1

Charles, Prince, ref1, ref2

chemical industry, ref1

Chernenko, Konstantin, ref1

Chesterton, G. K., ref1

Children Act (1908), ref1

Children’s Salvage Group, ref1

Choltitz, General von, ref1

Christie, Agatha, ref1

Church of England, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Churchill, Lord Randolph, ref1, ref2, ref3

Churchill, Winston: on Edward VII, ref1; on Joseph Chamberlain, ref1, ref2; on Asquith, ref1; Board of Trade appointment, ref1, ref2; background, character and career, ref1; relationship with Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; ‘People’s Budget’ crisis, ref1; suggests abolition of Lords, ref1; home secretary, ref1, ref2; response to strikes (1910–11), ref1, ref2; response to suffragettes, ref1; on Conservative Irish policy, ref1; on outbreak of WWI, ref1; First Lord of the Admiralty, ref1, ref2; Dardanelles strategy, ref1, ref2; demoted, ref1; Law’s view of, ref1; on Lloyd George seizing power, ref1; minister of munitions, ref1; coalition Liberal position, ref1; rejoins Conservative party, ref1; chancellor, ref1; return to gold standard, ref1, ref2; reduces supertax, ref1; increases public spending, ref1; opinion of Chamberlain, ref1; actions during general strike (1926), ref1, ref2; tax relief for mortgage payments, ref1; election results (1929), ref1; defence spending, ref1; opinion of Mussolini, ref1, ref2; opinion of Nazism, ref1; opinion of Hitler, ref1; opinion of Baldwin, ref1; views on India, ref1; opinion of Gandhi, ref1; isolated in Commons, ref1; response to remilitarization of Rhineland, ref1; on abdication crisis, ref1; warns Chamberlain about Hitler, ref1; concern about Chamberlain’s advisers, ref1; view of appeasement policy, ref1; on Czechoslovakia, ref1; on Munich Agreement, ref1; on Russian involvement, ref1; prime minister and minister for defence, ref1, ref2; forms coalition war cabinet (1940), ref1; ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech, ref1; on German advance, ref1, ref2; election campaign (1945), ref1, ref2; on nationalization, ref1; retirement, ref1; on Suez crisis, ref1; on hydrogen bomb, ref1

cigarettes, ref1, ref2

cinema, ref1, ref2, ref3; Rock Around the Clock, ref1; The Italian Job, ref1; Carry On series, ref1

Citizen’s Charter, ref1

City of London, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Civil Rights Bill, ref1

civil service: open competition for places, ref1; ‘marriage bar’, ref1; preparations for war, ref1; enlargement, ref1

Clark, Alan, ref1

Clarke, Kenneth, ref1

class (social): divisions, ref1, ref2; see also aristocracy; middle class; working class

Clean Air Act (1955), ref1

Clegg, Lee, ref1

Clinton, Bill, ref1

clothes: women’s, ref1, ref2, ref3; flappers, ref1; bright young men, ref1; youth in the Thirties, ref1; Teddy boys, ref1; Mods, ref1; Sixties fashion, ref1, ref2

Clynes, John, ref1, ref2

coal: industry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; WWI, ref1; strikes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; working conditions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; nationalization of royalties, ref1; fall in price, ref1; unemployment, ref1; fall in production, ref1; stocks, ref1, ref2, ref3; pit closures, ref1, ref2; National Coal Board, ref1, ref2, ref3

Coal Act (1938), ref1

Coal Mines Act (1930), ref1

cocaine, ref1, ref2, ref3

coffee bars, ref1, ref2

Cold War, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Collins, Michael, ref1, ref2

Combat ref1, ref2

Committee of Imperial Defence, ref1

Common Agricultural Policy, ref1

Common Fisheries Policy, ref1, ref2

Common Market see European Economic Community

Commons, House of: unpaid MPs, ref1; salary for MPs, ref1; cash for questions, ref1, ref2; MPs’ declaration of benefits, ref1; Sinn Féin MPs refuse seats, ref1

Commonwealth: troops, ref1; queen’s title, ref1; role in Britain’s European policy, ref1, ref2; smaller nations, ref1; South Africa withdrawal, ref1; immigration, ref1; relationship with Britain, ref1

Communist party, British, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

community charge (poll tax), ref1, ref2, ref3

Concorde supersonic aeroplane, ref1

Condon, Sir Paul, ref1

Conservative party: coalition with Liberal Unionists, ref1, ref2; policies, ref1, ref2; ‘values’, ref1; protectionism issue, ref1; ‘onenation’ Toryism, ref1, ref2, ref3; ‘die-hards’, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; name, ref1, ref2; Irish policy, ref1; support for war declaration, ref1; attacks on conduct of war, ref1; new men with new ideas, ref1; attitude to central government, ref1; electoral base, ref1; National Government, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; view of disarmament, ref1; views of Hitler, ref1; view of League of Nations, ref1; opposition to NHS, ref1; by-election defeats (1962), ref1; leadership election (1979), ref1; ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, ref1, ref2; ‘sexual shenanigans’, ref1, ref2; ‘cash for questions’, ref1, ref2, ref3; by-election defeats, ref1, ref2, ref3; defections, ref1; loss of majority, ref1; Hague leadership, ref1

Cook, Peter, ref1, ref2

Cook, Robin, ref1, ref2, ref3

Cooper, Tommy, ref1

Corbyn, Jeremy, ref1

cotton industry: free-trade issues, ref1; magnates, ref1; international competition, ref1; strikes, ref1; decline, ref1; unemployment, ref1; mills in 1963, ref2

Council of Ireland, ref1

Country Life, ref1

Countryside Alliance, ref1, ref2, ref3

Cousins, Frank, ref1

Coventry, bombing, ref1

Coward, Noël, ref1, ref2

Cowley, Sir John, ref1

Crick, Francis, ref1

cricket, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill (1994), ref1

Cripps, Stafford: appearance and character, ref1, ref2; chancellor, ref1, ref2; rationing under, ref1; influence, ref1

Crisp, Quentin, ref1

Croatia, fascist state, ref1

Croke Park massacre (Bloody Sunday, 1920), ref1

Crosland, Anthony: The Future of Socialism, ref1; education proposals, ref1; on IMF, ref1

Crossman, Richard, ref1, ref2

Crowley, Aleister, ref1

currency see sterling

Currie, Edwina, ref1

Curzon, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3

Cyprus: EOKA, ref1, ref2

Czechoslovakia: German population, ref1, ref2, ref3; British policy, ref1, ref2; borders guaranteed, ref1, ref2; Sudetenland ceded to Germany, ref1; new borders guaranteed, ref1; Czechia annexed by Germany, ref1; leaves eastern bloc, ref1

Dáil Éireann, ref1, ref2, ref3

Daily Express, ref1, ref2, ref3

Daily Herald, ref1

Daily Mail: on Lloyd George, ref1; support for Conservatives, ref1, ref2; on suffragettes, ref1; on munitions, ref1; publication of fake Russian letter, ref1; readership, ref1; sales, ref1; praise for Hitler, ref1; pro-Franco views, ref1; support for BUF, ref1; Macmillan reshuffle leak, ref1; on Stephen Lawrence case, ref1

Daily Mirror, ref1, ref2, ref3

Daily Telegraph, ref1

Dalton, Hugh: appearance and character, ref1; chancellor, ref1; resignation, ref1

dancing, ref1, ref2

Dangerfield, George: The Strange Death of Liberal England, ref1

Danzig: German claim, ref1, ref2; Chamberlain’s offer, ref1

Dardanelles campaign, ref1, ref2, ref3

Dave Clark Five, ref1, ref2

Davies, Ray and Dave, ref1, see also Kinks

Davison, Emily, ref1

Dawes Plan, ref1

Dawson, Lord, ref1

Dawson, W. H., ref1

Day-Lewis, Cecil: The Otterbury Incident, ref1

de Gaulle, Charles: liberation of Paris, ref1; hostility to Britain, ref1; vetoes Britain’s EEC membership, ref1, ref2; view of EEC, ref1

de Sancha, Antonia, ref1

de Valera, Éamon, ref1

Defence Force, ref1

Defence of the Realm Act (1914), ref1

defence spending: reduced, ref1, ref2; recommended increase, ref1; Chamberlain’s effort, ref1

Dehaene, Jean-Luc, ref1

Delors, Jacques, ref1, ref2, ref3

Delors Report, ref1, ref2

Democratic Unionist party, ref1

devolution, Scottish and Welsh, ref1, ref2

Diana, Princess, ref1, ref2

Dickens, Charles, ref1, ref2

disarmament: Versailles Treaty, ref1; promoting, ref1, ref2; World Disarmament Conference, ref1; public belief in, ref1, ref2; nuclear, ref1

DNA, discovery, ref1

Dobson, Frank, ref1

‘Dr Death’ (Paul Lincoln), ref1

Doctor Who (TV series), ref1, ref2

Dodd, Ken, ref1

Donegan, Lonnie, ref1

Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, ref1

Dowding, Lord, ref1

D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, ref1

Dreadnought, HMS, ref1

Dresden, bombing, ref1, ref2

drugs, recreational, ref1, ref2, ref3

Dublin parliament, ref1, ref2

Dunblane massacre, ref1

Dunlop, John Boyd, ref1

Durrell, Lawrence: Bitter Lemons, ref1

Dyer, Colonel, ref1

Easter Rising (1916), ref1, ref2

Eccles, David, ref1

Economic Advisory Council, ref1

Economist, The, ref1, ref2

Eden, Anthony: opinion of Churchill, ref1; foreign secretary, ref1; on appeasement policy, ref1; prime minister, ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3; political views, ref1, ref2; election (1955), ref1; Macmillan’s financial warning, ref1; Suez crisis (1956), ref1; resignation, ref1, ref2

education: Caribbean immigrants, ref1; first comprehensive school, ref1; grammar schools, ref1, ref2, ref3; secondary-modern schools, ref1; technical colleges, ref1; public schools, ref1; eleven-plus exam, ref1, ref2; Eton, ref1; attitudes to, ref1; new universities, ref1; Wilson government’s expenditure, ref1; polytechnics, ref1; fully comprehensive system proposals, ref1; comprehensive boom, ref1; free school milk, ref1; left-wing, ref1; corporal punishment, ref1

Education Acts: (1902), ref1; (1910), ref1; (1918), ref1; (1944, Butler Act), ref1

Edward VII, King: appearance and character, ref1; accession, ref1; popularity, ref1, ref2; ‘Edwardian age’, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; ‘Entente Cordiale’, ref1; view of Germans, ref1, ref2; Labour MPs, ref1; People’s Budget crisis, ref1; death, ref1, ref2

Edward VIII, King (duke of Windsor): accession, ref1; appearance and character, ref1; relationship with Wallis Simpson, ref1; abdication, ref1

Edward, Prince, ref1

Egypt, German forces expelled, ref1

Eisenhower, Dwight D., ref1

elections: ‘first-past-the-post’ system, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; right to vote, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; see also general elections

electoral reform, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

electricity: engineering, ref1; transport, ref1, ref2, ref3; nationalization, ref1; production, ref1, ref2; industry, ref1; domestic use, ref1, ref2, ref3; post-war, ref1; supply, ref1; union, ref1; cuts, ref1

Electricity (Supply) Act (1926), ref1

Elgar, Edward, ref1

Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land, ref1; verse drama, ref1

Elizabeth II: wedding, ref1; accession, ref1; coronation, ref1; opens nuclear power station, ref1; meetings with Wilson, ref1; MBEs for Beatles, ref1; Wilson’s resignation, ref1; silver jubilee, ref1; ‘annus horribilis’, ref1; visits Russia, ref1; son Charles’s marriage, ref1

Ellis, Ruth, ref1

Emergency Powers Act (1920), ref1

empire: public attitudes, ref1, ref2; immigration from outside, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain’s plan, ref1, ref2; overstretched, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Lloyd George’s plan, ref1; Ireland’s position, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; supply of troops, ref1; expansion during WWI, ref1; Baldwin’s policy, ref1, ref2, ref3; Conservative policy in coalition government, ref1; Churchill’s view, ref1, ref2; League of Nations role, ref1; Neville Chamberlain’s position, ref1; queen’s titles, ref1; value of, ref1; loss of, ref1, ref2; African nationalism, ref1

Empire Windrush, HMT, ref1

employment: urban and suburban, ref1; rural, ref1; women in wartime, ref1, ref2; ‘marriage bar’ for women, ref1; see also unemployment

Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children Act (1920), ref1

Employment Protection Bill (1975), ref1

Endurance, HMS, ref1

Enfield, Harry, ref1

Engels, Friedrich, ref1

English, Michael, ref1

Enigma code, ref1

Entente Cordiale (1904), ref1, ref2

environmental concerns, ref1

Epstein, Brian, ref1

Esher, Lord, ref1

Establishment Club, ref1

Ethiopia, famine, ref1

Eton College, ref1

European Commission, ref1, ref2, ref3

European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), ref1, ref2, ref3

European Court of Human Rights, ref1, ref2, ref3

European Economic Community (Common Market, EEC): British views of, ref1, ref2; British negotiations, ref1; de Gaulle’s veto, ref1, ref2; Heath’s policy, ref1; Labour view, ref1, ref2, ref3; acceptance of Britain, ref1, ref2; sovereignty issue, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Clause Eleven of Treaty of Accession, ref1, ref2; Foot’s doubts, ref1, ref2; British entry (1973), ref1; Conservative view, ref1, ref2; referendum (1975), ref1, ref2; Thatcher’s view, ref1, ref2, ref3; Single Market, ref1, ref2; eastern Europe, ref1, ref2; Wilson’s attitude, ref1; federalism, ref1, ref2, ref3; Howe’s speech, ref1; Maastricht Treaty (1992), ref1, ref2

European Union (EU): established, ref1; Thatcher’s view, ref1; ERM crisis, ref1; directives, ref1; single currency (euro), ref1, ref2; ‘benefit tourism’, ref1; BSE crisis, ref1

Eurosceptics: National Front, ref1; Communist party, ref1; term, ref1; Thatcher’s position, ref1; Major’s position, ref1; response to Maastricht, ref1; aims, ref1; response to Black Wednesday, ref1; Portillo’s position, ref1, ref2; Major’s relationship with, ref1, ref2; Britain’s use of veto, ref1; leadership challenge, ref1; ECHR issue, ref1; Santer’s message to, ref1

evacuation of children (1939), ref1, ref2

Evans, Moss, ref1

Eve magazine, ref1

Evening Standard, ref1

Everett, Kenny, ref1

Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM): Thatcher’s policy, ref1, ref2; Britain’s entry, ref1, ref2; Major’s position, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; effects, ref1; fall of sterling, ref1, ref2; Britain’s suspension from, ref1, ref2

Fabian Society, ref1, ref2

Factories Act (1937), ref1

Falklands War (1982), ref1

Family Income Supplement, ref1

Faulkner, Brian, ref1

Fayed, Dodi, ref1

feminists: groups, ref1; post-war, ref1, ref2

Fergusson, Sir James, ref1

Festival of Britain (1951), ref1

Financial Times, ref1

Fisher, Sir Warren, ref1

FitzGerald, Garret, ref1

flappers, ref1

Flynn, Errol, ref1

food: imports, ref1; rationing (1917–19), ref1, ref2; mass-produced, ref1; tinned, ref1; families below the poverty line, ref1, ref2; rationing (1940–54), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; BSE and beef exports, ref1, ref2

Foot, Isaac, ref1

Foot, Michael: on healthy rationing diet, ref1; on Enoch Powell, ref1; on EEC entry terms, ref1; background and character, ref1, ref2; Social Contract, ref1, ref2; Tribune editor, ref1; Guilty Men, ref1; elected MP (1945), ref1; loses seat (1955), ref1; unilateral disarmament, ref1; in Wilson’s cabinet (1974), ref1; Lib–Lab pact, ref1; Labour leadership candidacy (1976), ref1; Labour leadership (1980), ref1; speech on strikes (1978), ref1; election defeat (1983), ref1; EEC policy, ref1

football: in General Strike, ref1; popularity, ref1; seaside, ref1; fans, ref1; World Cup (1966), ref1

Forster, E. M.: Howards End, ref1

France: ‘Entente Cordiale’, ref1; defence strategy, ref1; African colonies, ref1; mobilization, ref1; Germany declares war on, ref1, ref2; desire for vengeance after WWI, ref1; occupation of Ruhr, ref1; Stresa declaration (1935), ref1; response to Manchurian incident, ref1; response to Spanish civil war, ref1; Czechoslovakia policy, ref1, ref2, ref3; pledges support for Poland, ref1; war with Germany (1939), ref1; response to invasion of Poland, ref1; German invasion (1940), ref1; German occupation of Paris, ref1; trade agreement with Germany, ref1; Suez (1956), ref1; Heath’s negotiations, ref1; Falklands war, ref1

Franco, General, ref1, ref2, ref3

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ref1

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, ref1

free trade, ref1, ref2; see also Tariff Reform

French, Sir John, ref1

Freud, Sigmund, ref1

Frost, David, ref1

Fry, Christopher, ref1

Gaitskell, Hugh: appearance and character, ref1; minister for fuel and power, ref1; introduction of prescription charges, ref1; on anti-Americanism, ref1; view of European Community, ref1; Profumo affair, ref1; nuclear policy, ref1

Galtieri, General Leopoldo, ref1, ref2

Gandhi, Mahatma, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Garbo, Greta, ref1

Gardner, Joy, ref1

Gardner, Llew, ref1

gas: lighting, ref1; poison, ref1, ref2, ref3; masks, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; supply, ref1; Russian, ref1, ref2

Geldof, Bob, ref1

General Belgrano, ARA, ref1

general elections: (1895), ref1; (1900; ‘khaki election’), ref1, ref2; (1906), ref1, ref2, ref3; (January 1910), ref1; (December 1910), ref1, ref2, ref3; (1918), ref1, ref2; (1922), ref1; (1923), ref1; (1924), ref1, ref2, ref3; (1929), ref1; (1931), ref1; (1935), ref1; (1945), ref1; (1950), ref1; (1951), ref1; (1955), ref1; (1959), ref1; (1964), ref1; (1966), ref1; (1970), ref1; (February 1974), ref1, ref2; (October 1974), ref1, ref2; (1979), ref1, ref2; (1983), ref1, ref2; (1987), ref1, ref2, ref3; (1992), ref1; (1997), ref1

General Omnibus Company, ref1

generations, conflict between, ref1

Geneva Protocol (1925), ref1

gentry, landed, ref1, ref2, ref3

George, Eddie, ref1

George V, King: accession, ref1, ref2; Lords reforms, ref1, ref2; appearance and character, ref1; opinion of Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; response to strikes (1910–11), ref1; coronation, ref1; view of suffragettes, ref1; Irish veto question, ref1; anti-German, ref1; changes name of royal family, ref1; fear of revolution, ref1; concern for Ireland, ref1, ref2; opens Belfast parliament (1921), ref1; concerned about sale of peerages and knighthoods, ref1; opinion of MacDonald, ref1, ref2, ref3; advice to Baldwin, ref1; first broadcast, ref1; sympathy for miners, ref1; formation of National Government, ref1; fear of another war, ref1; death, ref1

George VI, King: accession, ref1; appearance and character, ref1; naval career, ref1; political views, ref1; visit to Festival of Britain, ref1; death, ref1

Germany: industry and technology, ref1, ref2; expansion of armed forces, ref1, ref2, ref3; Morocco naval incident, ref1; African colonies, ref1; declares war on France, ref1, ref2, invades Belgium, ref1; Mons victory, ref1; army’s treatment of civilians, ref1; naval strategy, ref1, ref2, ref3; peace treaty with Russia, ref1, ref2; abdication of Kaiser, ref1; Republic, ref1; Armistice, ref1; colonies divided between Allies, ref1; reparations, ref1, ref2; terms of Versailles Treaty, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; communist movement, ref1, ref2; Weimar Republic, ref1; Nazism, ref1; withdrawal from League of Nations, ref1, ref2; naval agreement with Britain, ref1; conscription reintroduced, ref1; expansion of air force, ref1; Rhineland remilitarized, ref1; Anti-Comintern Pact, ref1; support for Franco, ref1; massacre of Jews (Kristallnacht), ref1; Pact of Steel with Italy, ref1; annexation of Czechia, ref1; Nazi–Soviet Pact (1939), ref1, ref2; invasion of Poland (1939), ref1; invasion of Belgium and France, ref1; invasion of Greece, ref1; invasion of Russia (1941), ref1; war with US, ref1; death camps, ref1; Allied air raids, ref1; Red Army advance on Berlin, ref1; trade agreement with France, ref1; post-war economic miracle, ref1; EEC role, ref1; IMF role, ref1; unification, ref1; interest rates, ref1; Bundesbank, ref1, ref2

Gerry and the Pacemakers, ref1

Ghana, independence, ref1, ref2

Gibraltar, IRA members shot (1988), ref1

Gielgud, John, ref1

Gladstone, William Ewart: Irish policy, ref1, ref2, ref3; Liberal party, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Goebbels, Joseph, ref1

gold standard: return to, ref1, ref2; maintaining, ref1; leaving, ref1, ref2

Gold Standard Act (1925), ref1

Goldsmith, James, ref1, ref2

Gollancz, Victor, ref1

Good Friday Agreement (1998), ref1, ref2

Goons, the, ref1, ref2, ref3

Goose Green, Battle of (1982), ref1

Gorbachev, Mikhail, ref1, ref2

Göring, Hermann, ref1, ref2, ref3

Gormley, Joe, ref1, ref2

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), ref1

Government of India Acts: (1919), ref1; (1935), ref1

Government of Ireland Act (1920), ref1, ref2

Gow, Ian, ref1

Graham, Victoria, ref1

gramophones, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Grange Hill (TV series), ref1

Greece: invasions (1941), ref1

Greenham Common, women’s camp, ref1

Greenwood, Arthur, ref1

Greenwood, Walter: Love on the Dole, ref1

Grey, Sir Edward: pro-imperialist, ref1; naval policy, ref1; anti-German, ref1; attitude to war, ref1, ref2

Griffiths, Roy, ref1

Griffiths Report (1983), ref1

Grossmith, George and Weedon: The Diary of a Nobody, ref1

Guardian, ref1, ref2

Guernica, bombing, ref1

Gulf War (1990–91), ref1

Gulf War Syndrome, ref1

gun ownership, ref1

Hague, William, ref1

Haig, Douglas, ref1, ref2

Haley, Bill, ref1, ref2

Halifax, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3

Halliwell, Kenneth, ref1

Hamilton, Neil, ref1

Hampshire, HMS, ref1

Hanley, Jeremy, ref1

Hardie, Keir, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Hare Krishna, ref1

Harman, Harriet, ref1

Harrison, George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Harry Potter books, ref1

Healey, Denis: Labour leadership candidacy, ref1, ref2; sterling crisis, ref1

health: working classes, ref1, ref2; slum dwellers, ref1; benefits of food rationing, ref1, ref2; private medicine, ref1; diseases, ref1; National Health Service (NHS), ref1; ‘care in the community’, ref1

Health and Strength League, ref1

Heath, Edward: European negotiations, ref1, ref2; leader of opposition, ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; election defeat (1966), ref1; on devaluation of pound, ref1; dismissal of Powell, ref1; election victory (1970), ref1, ref2; cabinet, ref1, ref2; states of emergency, ref1, ref2; relationship with unions, ref1, ref2, ref3; US relations, ref1; European negotiations, ref1; incomes policy, ref1, ref2, ref3; on welfare state, ref1; miners’ strike (1972), ref1; Northern Ireland internment, ref1; achievements, ref1; British membership of EEC, ref1, ref2; illness, ref1; miners’ second strike (1974), ref1, ref2; three-day week (1974), ref1; election defeats (1974), ref1, ref1; loses leadership election (1975), ref1

Heffer, Simon, ref1

Henderson, Arthur: career, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; on WWI, ref1; Labour leadership, ref1; resignation from coalition, ref1

Hennessy, Peter, ref1

heroin, ref1, ref2

Heseltine, Michael: career, ref1; leadership challenge, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; replaces poll tax with council tax, ref1; Black Wednesday, ref1; Millennium Dome, ref1

hiking, ref1

Hill, Dr Charles, ref1, ref2

Hindenberg, Paul von, ref1

hippies, ref1

hire purchase, ref1, ref2

Hiroshima, atomic bombing, ref1

Hitchcock, Alfred, ref1; The 39 Steps, ref1

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (radio and TV series), ref1, ref2

Hitler, Adolf: coup attempt, ref1; Mein Kampf, ref1, ref2, ref3; anti-Semitism, ref1, ref2; political career, ref1; rise to power, ref1, ref2; reintroduces conscription, ref1; expansion of air force, ref1; relationship with Mussolini, ref1; remilitarization of Rhineland, ref1, ref2; ‘no further territorial ambitions’, ref1; Anti-Comintern Pact, ref1; grievances about Versailles Treaty, ref1; Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, ref1; persecution of Jews, ref1; assassination of political opponents, ref1; absorption of Austria, ref1; claim to Sudetenland, ref1; Chamberlain’s discussions with, ref1, ref2, ref3; Munich Agreement, ref1; massacre of Jews, ref1; annexation of Czechia, ref1; Polish policies, ref1; proposed attack on England, ref1; planning invasion of Britain, ref1; comic portrayal in England, ref1; bombing policies, ref1; invasion of Russia (1941), ref1; assassination attempt (1944), ref1; death, ref1

Hoare, Samuel, ref1

Hobbs, Jack, ref1

Hobson, J. A., ref1

Hockney, David, ref1

Hogg, Quintin (later Lord Hailsham), ref1

Hoggart, Richard, ref1

holidays, ref1

Holidays with Pay Act (1938), ref1, ref2

Holland, German invasion, ref1

Holly, Buddy, ref1

Homicide Act (1957), ref1

homosexuality: bright young men, ref1; Baldwin’s son, ref1; legalization ref1; gay groups, ref1; armed forces ban issue, ref1; age of consent lowered, ref1

Hong Kong, surrender (1941), ref1

Horder, Lord, ref1, ref2

House of Lords Act (1999), ref1

household appliances, ref1

Houses of Parliament see Parliament

housing: suburban, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; rural developments, ref1; ‘workers’ cottages’, ref1; slums, ref1, ref2; homelessness, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; cap on rents, ref1; tax relief on mortgage payments, ref1; ‘property-owning democracy’, ref1, ref2, ref3; slum clearances, ref1, ref2, ref3; housebuilding boom, ref1; suburban ‘sprawl’, ref1; home ownership, ref1; furnishings, ref1, ref2, ref3; suburban architecture, ref1; gardens, ref1; art nouveau, ref1; sale of council housing, ref1; local council-rates reform (community charge), ref1; negative equity, ref1; effect of high interest rates, ref1;

Housing Acts: (1919), ref1, ref2; (1924), ref1; (1930), ref1, ref2; (1938), ref1; (1988), ref1

Howard, Brian, ref1, ref2

Howard, Michael, ref1, ref2

Howarth, Alan, ref1

Howe, Geoffrey: character, ref1, ref2; dealing with EEC entry terms, ref1, ref2; chancellor, ref1; first budget, ref1; relationship with Thatcher, ref1, ref2, ref3; foreign secretary, ref1; ERM issue, ref1; resignation speech, ref1, ref2

Hughes, Robert, ref1

Hulanicki, Barbara, ref1

Human Rights Act (1998), ref1

Hungary: regime, ref1; Jews sent to Auschwitz, ref1; execution of Szálasi, ref1; leaves eastern bloc (1988), ref1

hunger marches, ref1, ref2, ref3

Hurd, Douglas: on Heath election, ref1; on miners’ strikes, ref1, ref2; leadership candidacy, ref1; Black Wednesday, ref1; foreign secretary, ref1

Hurst, Geoff, ref1, ref2

Huxley, Aldous, ref1

immigration: legislation (1905), ref1; Caribbean, ref1; public concern about (1997), ref1

Imperial Conference of British Empire (1926), ref1

‘In Place of Strife’ (White Paper), ref1

Independent Labour Party (ILP), ref1, ref2

India: political issues, ref1, ref2, ref3; industry, ref1; Amritsar massacre (1919), ref1, ref2; self-government, ref1; war with Germany (1939), ref1; partition, ref1; independence, ref1, ref2; war with Pakistan, ref1

Industrial Injuries Act (1946), ref1

Industrial Relations Act (1971), ref1, ref2

Industrial Training Board, ref1

inflation: Edwardian era, ref1; WWI, ref1; Twenties, ref1, ref2; Churchill’s policy, ref1; Fifties, ref1; stagflation, ref1; Seventies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; Eighties, ref1, ref2, ref3; Nineties, ref1, ref2

influenza epidemic (1918–19), ref1

interest rates: raised (after WWI), ref1; Keynesian views, ref1; gold standard and, ref1, ref2; mortgage, ref1; tied to Germany’s, ref1; raised (1992), ref1

International Monetary Fund (IMF), ref1, ref2, ref3

Invincible, HMS, ref1

Iraq: Gulf war (1990–1), ref1; arms-to-Iraq affair, ref1; US bombing (1998), ref1

Ireland: home-rule question, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; land ownership, ref1; history of British government, ref1; third Irish Home Rule Bill (1912), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Ulster Protestants, ref1, ref2, ref3; no conscription, ref1; Easter Rising (1916), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; conscription (1918), ref1, ref2; election results (1918), ref1; Dáil Éireann, ref1, ref2; Irish Republic proclaimed, ref1; ‘War of Independence’, ref1; Croke Park massacre (Bloody Sunday, 1920), ref1; fourth Home Rule Bill (1920), ref1; elections (1921), ref1; partition, ref1; Irish Free State (1922), ref1; sovereign state (1937), ref1; neutrality (1939), ref1; negotiations, ref1; Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), ref1; see also Northern Ireland

Irish Citizen Army, ref1

Irish Free State, ref1

Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7

Irish Republican Army (IRA): established, ref1; campaign against police force, ref1; terror attacks, ref1; atrocities, ref1; Official, ref1; Provisional, ref1; Aldershot bombing, ref1; Brighton Grand Hotel bombing (1984), ref1; mainland bombing campaign, ref1; funds from US, ref1; murder of Ian Gow, ref1; ceasefire (1994), ref1, ref2; decommissioning issue, ref1, ref2, ref3; members shot in Gibraltar (1988), ref1; mainland bombing resumed, ref1, ref2; suspect shot, ref1

Irish Republican Brotherhood, ref1

Irish Volunteers, ref1, ref2, ref3

Irwin, Lord, ref1

Isle of Wight Festival (1967), ref1

Italian Job, The (film), ref1

Italy: arms spending, ref1; African colonies, ref1; communist movement, ref1; Locarno Treaty, ref1; response to Versailles conference and Treaty, ref1; Fasci, ref1; Mussolini’s rise to power, ref1; Stresa declaration (1935), ref1; invasion of Abyssinia (1935), ref1, ref2, ref3; Anti-Comintern Pact, ref1; support for Franco, ref1; Pact of Steel with Germany, ref1; mediation question, ref1; invasion of Greece, ref1; Allied advance on Rome, ref1; fall of lira (1992), ref1

Jackson, Tom, ref1

Jagger, Mick, ref1, ref2

Japan: arms race, ref1; naval treaty (1922), ref1; invasion of Manchuria, ref1; withdrawal from League of Nations, ref1; Anti-Comintern Pact, ref1

Jarrow Crusade (1936), ref1

jazz, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Jenkins, Roy, ref1, ref2

Jews: immigration, ref1; Hitler’s view of, ref1; Hitler’s persecution, ref1, ref2; BUF blackshirts, ref1, ref2; Nazi massacres, ref1; in Poland, ref1; massacre in Romania, ref1; Borisov massacre, ref1; death camps, ref1, ref2; in Aegean islands, ref1

Joad, C. E. M., ref1

John, Elton, ref1

John Bull, ref1

Johnson, Paul, ref1

Jones, Brian, ref1

Jones, Colonel ‘H’, ref1

Jones, Jack, ref1, ref2, ref3

Joseph, Keith, ref1, ref2

Jutland, Battle of (1916), ref1, ref2

Kane, Sarah: Blasted, ref1

Keeler, Christine, ref1

Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928), ref1

Kennedy, John F., ref1

Kenya: Mau Mau, ref1, ref2; independence, ref1

Keyes, Sir Roger, ref1

Keynes, John Maynard, ref1, ref2, ref3; The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money, ref1

Khrushchev, Nikita, ref1, ref2

Kilmuir, Lord, ref1

Kinks, the, ref1, ref2

Kinnock, Neil, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Kissinger, Henry, ref1

Kitchener, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Koestler, Arthur, ref1

Kohl, Helmut, ref1, ref2

Korean War, ref1

Labour party: origins, ref1; Lib–Lab pact (1903), ref1; MPs (1906), ref1; support for war declaration, ref1; coalition cabinet, ref1, ref2; supporters, ref1; membership, ref1; radical policy proposals, ref1; constitution (1918), ref1; socialism, ref1; main opposition party, ref1, ref2; MPs, ref1; leadership, ref1; free-trade policy, ref1; front bench, ref1; forms minority government (1923), ref1; relationship with Soviet Russia, ref1; response to National Government, ref1; response to Snowden’s budget, ref1; attitude to hunger marches, ref1; opposition to Nazis, ref1; view of League of Nations, ref1; response to Spanish civil war, ref1; joining wartime coalition, ref1; manifesto (1950), ref1; European policy, ref1, ref2, ref3; NEC rejects ‘In Place of Strife’, ref1; Social Contract, ref1, ref2, ref3; SDP split, ref1; death of John Smith, ref1; leadership election (1994), ref1; New Labour, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Labour Representation Committee (LRC), ref1

laissez-faire economics: Conservative position, ref1; Victorian values, ref1, ref2; debate (1902), ref1; Liberal position, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; Lloyd George’s programme, ref1

Lamont, Norman, ref1, ref2

land: ownership, ref1; rents, ref1; taxation, ref1, ref2

Lansbury, George, ref1, ref2

Law, Andrew Bonar: parliamentary style, ref1; background and character, ref1; Conservative leadership, ref1; Irish policy, ref1; war policy, ref1, ref2; attack on government’s conduct of war, ref1; coalition cabinet, ref1; opinion of Churchill, ref1; view of conscription, ref1; Irish Home Rule plan, ref1; declines to form government, ref1; career, ref1; general election (1918), ref1; Lord Privy Seal and Commons leader, ref1; retirement, ref1, ref2; election victory (1922), ref1

Lawrence, Stephen, ref1, ref2

Lawson, Nigel: on Thatcher, ref1, ref2; on privatization, ref1; ERM issue, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; resignation, ref1, ref2; Howe’s speech, ref1

Le Corbusier, ref1

League of Nations: established, ref1; US not a member, ref1; British policy, ref1, ref2; German policy, ref1; arbitration role, ref1, ref2; critics of, ref1; British public support for, ref1, ref2, ref3; Manchurian incident, ref1; Stresa declaration (1935), ref1; Italian invasion of Abyssinia, ref1, ref2, ref3; imposes sanction on Italy, ref1, ref2, ref3; Baldwin’s policy, ref1, ref2; recognizes Italian Abyssinia, ref1; discredited, ref1, ref2; British protests at government’s betrayal, ref1; Spanish civil war, ref1; obsolete, ref1; Germany’s occupation of Austria, ref1

League of St George, ref1

Left Book Club, ref1, ref2

Left News, ref1

leisure activities, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Lenin, ref1

Lennon, John, ref1, ref2, ref3

Levin, Bernard, ref1

Lewis, C. S., ref1

Liberal Democrats: by-election gain, ref1; defection to, ref1; leadership, ref1, ref2, ref3; name, ref1

Liberal party: split over Irish Home Rule, ref1, ref2; policies, ref1; effects of Labour emergence, ref1; Lib–Lab pact (1903), ref1; social legislation, ref1; radical wing, ref1; minority government, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Irish issues (1914), ref1; declaration of war, ref1; ‘shells scandal’, ref1; wartime coalition (1915), ref1; in opposition (1916), ref1; fatal split, ref1, ref2; post-war, ref1; free-trade policy, ref1; split three ways, ref1; extinction, ref1; name, ref1

Liberal Unionist party: coalition with Conservatives, ref1, ref2, ref3

literature: popular reading, ref1; ‘dole literature’, ref1; earnestness and ideology, ref1; stylistic experimentation, ref1; ‘angry young men’, ref1; A Clockwork Orange, ref1, ref2; Harry Potter, ref1

Live Aid concert, ref1

Liverpool: riots (1911), ref1; cinemas, ref1; the ‘pools’, ref1; living below the poverty line, ref1; slums, ref1; evacuees, ref1; docks bombed, ref1; NHS rejected by doctors, ref1; Garston ‘blood baths’, ref1; slum clearance, ref1; football fans, ref1; Cavern Club, ref1, ref2; Beatles, ref1; influence on Foot, ref1; invigoration, ref1

Livingstone, Ken, ref1, ref2

Lloyd, Selwyn, ref1

Lloyd George, David: chancellor, ref1, ref2; background, character and career, ref1; relationship with Asquith, ref1; ‘People’s Budget’ (1909), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; George V’s view of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; response to strikes (1910–11), ref1, ref2; response to suffragettes, ref1; view of Law, ref1; view of Dardanelles plan, ref1; munitions department proposal, ref1; wartime reputation, ref1; minister of munitions, ref1; view of conscription, ref1; Irish Home Rule plan, ref1; war secretary, ref1; coalition government, ref1; supporters, ref1, ref2, ref3; war strategy, ref1, ref2; national coalition (1918), ref1, ref2; election victory (1918), ref1, ref2; cabinet (1918), ref1; Versailles peace conference and Treaty, ref1, ref2; unemployment insurance, ref1; action against strikers, ref1; public spending cuts, ref1; response to IRA campaign, ref1, ref2; fourth Irish Home Rule Bill (1920), ref1; sale of peerages and knighthoods, ref1; support for Greece, ref1; resignation, ref1, ref2; Liberal leadership (1926), ref1; election campaign (1929), ref1; public works programme, ref1, ref2, ref3; Independent Liberals, ref1; opinion of Chamberlain, ref1; on need for Russian support, ref1; calls for Chamberlain’s resignation, ref1; on Macmillan, ref1

local councils: women serving on, ref1; housing, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; elections, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Thatcher’s view of, ref1; community charge (poll tax), ref1, ref2, ref3; obligation to asylum seekers, ref1

Locarno Treaty (1925), ref1, ref2, ref3

London: suburbs, ref1, ref2; transport, ref1, ref2; homelessness, ref1; traffic, ref1, ref2; Zeppelin raids, ref1, ref2; nightclubs, ref1; hunger marches, ref1, ref2; IRA terror attacks, ref1; general strike, ref1; expansion, ref1; housebuilding, ref1, ref2; BUF marches, ref1; preparations for war (1939), ref1, ref2, ref3; evacuation of children, ref1, ref2; Blitz, ref1, ref2, ref3; NHS rejected by doctors, ref1; hospitals, ref1; coffee bars, ref1; comprehensive education, ref1; smog, ref1, ref2; Notting Hill riots (1958), ref1; Brixton riots (1981), ref1; Harrods bombing, ref1; GLC, ref1, ref2; mugging, ref1; IRA bombs (1996), ref1; Assembly, ref1; Countryside Alliance march, ref1; Carnival against Capitalism, ref1

Loog Oldham, Andrew, ref1

class="book">Loos, Battle of (1915), ref1

Lords, House of: Tory-dominated, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; rejects People’s Budget, ref1; abolition suggested, ref1; veto issue, ref1; passes People’s Budget, ref1; veto restricted, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; new peers, ref1; rejects third Home Rule Bill, ref1; leadership, ref1; vote on capital punishment, ref1; challenge to ban on homosexuals in armed forces, ref1; asylum legislation issue, ref1; number of hereditary peers reduced, ref1

LSD, ref1, ref2

Ludendorff, General, ref1

Luftwaffe, ref1, ref2, ref3

Lulu, ref1

Maastricht Treaty (1991–3), ref1, ref2; opt-outs, ref1, ref2, ref3

McCartney, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

MacDonald, Ramsay: background and political views, ref1, ref2; Lib–Lab pact, ref1; election (1906), ref1; on strikes (1910), ref1; pacifist principles, ref1, ref2, ref3; gradualist socialism, ref1; loses seat (1918), ref1; career, ref1; Labour leadership, ref1; administration, ref1, ref2; cabinet (1924), ref1; foreign policy, ref1; resignation, ref1; general strike (1926), ref1; election results (1929), ref1; administration, ref1; cabinet (1929), ref1; on Great Depression, ref1; economic policies, ref1, ref2; prime minister in emergency coalition (National Government), ref1, ref2; expelled from Labour party, ref1; election (1931), ref1; position in National Government, ref1, ref2, ref3; disarmament cause, ref1; relationship with Mussolini, ref1; old age, ref1; opinion of Edward VIII, ref1

McGuinness, Martin, ref1

McKenna, Reginald, ref1

Mackenzie, Kelvin, ref1

McLaughlin, Mitchell, ref1

MacLean, Donald, ref1

McLeigh, Sir John, ref1

MacLeod, Iain, ref1

Macmillan, Harold: on planned economy, ref1; opinion of Churchill, ref1; financial warning to Eden, ref1; prime minister, ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Ghana speech (1960), ref1; ‘wind of change’ speech in South Africa (1960), ref1; supporters, ref1; critics, ref1; ‘stop-go’ economics, ref1, ref2; cabinet reshuffle, ref1; nuclear policy, ref1; US relations, ref1; Profumo affair, ref1; resignation, ref1; passports for Ugandan Asians, ref1

Macpherson report (1999), ref1

Macstiofain, Sean, ref1

Major, John: chancellor, ref1, ref2; ERM entry, ref1, ref2, ref3; leadership election victory, ref1; character, ref1; background and career, ref1; prime minister, ref1; cabinet, ref1; Gulf war, ref1; Maastricht Treaty, ref1, ref2, ref3; on inflation, ref1; currency crisis (1992), ref1; ‘Back to Basics’ speech (1993), ref1, ref2, ref3; privatization of railways, ref1; dealing with Eurosceptics, ref1; vetoes Dehaene’s presidency, ref1; cabinet reshuffle, ref1; ‘anti-yob culture’ speech, ref1; on ERM, ref1; US relations, ref1; leadership resignation and re-election (1995), ref1; Vance–Owen Bosnian peace plan, ref1; resignation as Conservative leader, ref1

Malta: siege broken, ref1

Manchester: suburbs, ref1; transport, ref1; American slang, ref1; slums, ref1; docks bombed, ref1; NHS inauguration, ref1; in 1960s, ref1; education, ref1; ‘Darkness at Noon’, ref1; IRA bombing (1996), ref1

Manchester Guardian, ref1, ref2

Manchuria, Japanese invasion (1931), ref1

Mandelson, Peter, ref1

manufacturing: decline, ref1, ref2; boom after WWI, ref1; mass production, ref1; new industrial revolution, ref1; after crash (1929), ref1; decline (1996), ref1

Marcos, Ferdinand, ref1

Marne, Battle of the (1914), ref1

Marshall, T. H., ref1

Martin, George, ref1

Marx, Karl, ref1, ref2

Mass Observation, ref1

Masterman, Charles, ref1, ref2

Matteotti, Giacomo, ref1

Maudling, Reginald, ref1, ref2

Maxse, Leo, ref1

MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club), ref1

MDMA (‘ecstasy’), ref1

Mellor, David, ref1

Mental Deficiency Act (1913), ref1

Merchant, Piers, ref1

Metaxas, Ioannis, ref1

Meyer, Sir Anthony, ref1

Meyrick, Kate, ref1

Michael, George, ref1

middle class: suburban life, ref1; move to the country, ref1; view of working classes, ref1; Chamberlain’s appeal to, ref1; voting patterns, ref1, ref2; establishment views, ref1; taxation, ref1; MPs, ref1; powerful, ref1; peers, ref1; social mobility, ref1; women, ref1, ref2, ref3; Law’s background, ref1; flappers, ref1; extra vote, ref1; Labour’s appeal to, ref1, ref2; Labour MPs, ref1, ref2; lifestyle, ref1; class consciousness, ref1; homes, ref1; Conservative appeal to suburban lower middle class, ref1, ref2; Conservative voters, ref1, ref2; wireless listening, ref1; cinema going, ref1; hiking, ref1; view of means test, ref1; view of unemployment, ref1; involvement in Spanish civil war, ref1; BMA, ref1; in theatre and literature, ref1; Mods, ref1

Militant Tendency, ref1

Military Service Bill (1916), ref1

Millar, Ronald, ref1

Millennium Dome, ref1, ref2

Miller, Jonathan, ref1, ref2

Milligan, Spike, ref1

Mills, Percy, ref1

Mills & Boon, ref1

Mitterrand, François, ref1

Mods, ref1, ref2

Mons, Battle of (1914), ref1

Monster Raving Loony Party, ref1

Montgomery, Bernard, ref1

Moonies, ref1

Moore, Bobby, ref1

Moore, Dudley, ref1

Moorhouse, Geoffrey: The Other England, ref1, ref2; on Beatles, ref1

Moran, Lord, ref1

Morgan, Kenneth O., ref1

Morgan, Piers, ref1

Morley, John, ref1

Mormons, ref1

Morning Post, ref1, ref2

Morrison, Herbert, ref1

Mosley, Oswald, ref1, ref2

Motor Car Act (1903), ref1, ref2

motor cars, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

motorways, ref1, ref2

Mountbatten, Lord, ref1

Muggeridge, Malcolm: on unemployment research, ref1; on Macmillan, ref1; on state of England, ref1

Munich Agreement (1938), ref1, ref2, ref3

Murray, Len, ref1

Murray-Leslie, Dr R., ref1

music: rock ’n’ roll, ref1; guitars, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; skiffle, ref1; Sixties, ref1, ref2; British chart-toppers, ref1; New Romantics, ref1; synthesizers, ref1; ‘Acid house’, ref1; ‘Second Summer of Love’ (1988), ref1; raves, ref1

Muslim League, ref1

Mussolini, Benito: rise to power, ref1, ref2; approach to economics, ref1; Stresa declaration (1935), ref1, ref2; response to sanctions, ref1; invasion of Abyssinia (1935), ref1, ref2; relationship with Hitler, ref1, ref2, ref3; courted by British government, ref1; opinion of British government, ref1; Chamberlain’s policy toward, ref1, ref2, ref3; death, ref1

Nagasaki, atomic bombing, ref1

Nairn, Ian, ref1

Narvik, Battle of (1940), ref1

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, ref1

National Book Drive, ref1

National Coal Board, ref1, ref2, ref3

National Congress, India, ref1, ref2, ref3

National Farmers’ Union, ref1

National Front, ref1

National Government: formation, ref1; cabinet, ref1, ref2; Labour opposition, ref1; leaving the gold standard, ref1; election (1931), ref1; Tory-dominated, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; departure of free-trading Liberals, ref1; housing policy, ref1, ref2; unemployment issue, ref1, ref2, ref3; police powers, ref1; sympathy for Japan, ref1; naval agreement with Germany, ref1; rearmament concerns, ref1, ref2, ref3; Stresa declaration (1935), ref1; response to invasion of Abyssinia, ref1, ref2, ref3; election (1935), ref1; response to Spanish civil war, ref1; nonintervention policy, ref1, ref2; Public Order Act (1936), ref1

National Health Service (NHS): established, ref1; prescription charges, ref1

National Health Service Act (1946), ref1

National Insurance Acts: (1911), ref1, ref2; (1946), ref1

National Labour party, ref1, ref2

National Liberal party, ref1, ref2, ref3

National Lottery, ref1

National Minimum Wage Act (1998), ref1

National Peace Council, ref1

National Review, ref1, ref2

national service, ref1

National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis), ref1

National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), ref1, ref2

National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, ref1

National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, ref1

nationalization: Labour policy for railways, ref1; Conservative policies, ref1; Labour proposals, ref1; demand for, ref1; ‘Socialisation of Industries’ committee, ref1; Crosland’s arguments, ref1; near-completion of, ref1; Labour party’s Clause IV, ref1

NATO, ref1

navy: arms race, ref1; dreadnought battleships, ref1; strike (1931), ref1; treaty (1922), ref1; Narvik defeat (1940), ref1

Nevill, Lady Dorothy, ref1

New Party, ref1

New Statesman, ref1

News of the World, ref1

newspapers: right-wing, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; motorist debate, ref1; readership, ref1, ref2; praise for Hitler, ref1; response to Munich Agreement, ref1; BMA press campaign, ref1; Profumo case, ref1

Nicholas II, Tsar, ref1

Nicholson, Emma, ref1

Nicolson, Harold, ref1, ref2

Nivelle, Robert, ref1

Nixon, Richard, ref1

Nonconformists: political representation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; MPs, ref1, ref2; education issue, ref1; Asquith’s background, ref1, ref2; Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3; Law, ref1

Normandy, Allied landings (1944), ref1, ref2

North Sea oil, ref1

Northcliffe, Lord: pro-motorist campaign, ref1; supports Lloyd George, ref1, ref2, ref3; influence, ref1

Northern Ireland: established, ref1; Special Powers Act, ref1; unrest, ref1; internment policy, ref1, ref2; the Troubles, ref1, ref2, ref3; army sent in, ref1; civil-rights marches banned, ref1; Bloody Sunday (1972), ref1; Direct Rule, ref1; Loyalist paramilitaries, ref1; RUC, ref1; IRA ceasefire (1994), ref1, ref2; peace talks between Loyalists and Sinn Féin, ref1; joint framework document, ref1; withdrawal of troops, ref1; paramilitary activity, ref1; Good Friday Agreement (1998), ref1

Norway, ref1, ref2

nuclear power, ref1, ref2

nuclear weapons: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ref1; hydrogen bomb test, ref1; Polaris, ref1; unilateralism, ref1; Greenham Common protest camp, ref1; SDI (‘Star Wars’), ref1; US–USSR treaty, ref1; SDI (‘Star Wars’), ref1

O’Connell, Daniel, ref1

O’Hadhmaill, Feilim, ref1

oil: sanctions on Italy, ref1, ref2; British reserves, ref1, ref2; supply route, ref1, ref2; prices, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; crisis, ref1; North Sea, ref1; Russian, ref1, ref2; Kuwait, ref1

Old Age Pensions Act (1908), ref1

Olivier, Laurence, ref1, ref2

Open University, ref1, ref2

Operation Desert Storm, ref1

Operation Dynamo, ref1

Operation Eagle Eye, ref1

Operation Irma, ref1

Operation Pied Piper, ref1

Operation Torch, ref1

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, ref1

Orgreave, Battle of (1984), ref1

Orton, Joe, ref1; Entertaining Mr Sloane, ref1; Loot, ref1; What the Butler Saw, ref1

Orwell, George: on WWI, ref1; on class, ref1; on property-owning democracy, ref1; Keep the Aspidistra Flying, ref1; The Road to Wigan Pier, ref1, ref2; style, ref1; on Left Book Club, ref1; Homage to Catalonia, ref1; on post-war mood, ref1; Foot comparison, ref1; quoted by Major, ref1

Osborne, John, ref1, ref2

Ottoman Empire, ref1, ref2, ref3

Owen, David, ref1

Oxford Union: pacifist motion (1933), ref1

pacifism: MacDonald’s, ref1, ref2; public attitudes, ref1, ref2, ref3; decline among socialists, ref1

Paisley, Ian, ref1, ref2, ref3

Pakistan: independence, ref1; war with India, ref1

Pankhurst, Emmeline, ref1, ref2

paper salvage, ref1

Parliament see Commons; Lords

Parliament Act (1911), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Passchendaele (third Battle of Ypres, 1917), ref1

patriotism, ref1

Pavelić, Ante, ref1

pawn shops, ref1, ref2

Peace Day celebrations (1919), ref1

Pearl Harbor (1941), ref1

Pearse, Patrick, ref1

Pentecostal movement, ref1

‘People’s Budget’ (1909), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Percy, Lord Eustace, ref1

Perón, Juan, ref1

Peyton, John, ref1

Philip, Prince (duke of Edinburgh), ref1, ref2

Philips, Morgan, ref1

Phillips, Mark, ref1

Pierrepoint, Albert, ref1

Pinochet, Augusto, ref1

Pinter, Harold: The Caretaker, ref1; The Homecoming, ref1; view of Thatcher, ref1

Poland: authoritarian rule, ref1; German population, ref1; pledges by Britain and France, ref1; Danzig position, ref1; German invasion (1939), ref1, ref2; Hitler’s Polish policies, ref1; death camps, ref1; leaves eastern bloc, ref1

Polaris missile, ref1

police: powers, ref1; acquittals, ref1; institutional racism, ref1

political correctness, ref1

pollution: concern, ref1; smog, ref1, ref2; motor vehicles, ref1

Pompidou, Georges, ref1, ref2

population, ref1

Portillo, Michael, ref1, ref2

Portsmouth, Lord, ref1

Portugal, ref1, ref2

Powell, Enoch: background, ref1, ref2; ‘rivers of blood’ speech, ref1; dismissal by Heath, ref1; view of Northern Ireland, ref1; Ugandan Asians issue, ref1; hostility to European project, ref1, ref2, ref3; called a fascist, ref1

Prescott, John, ref1, ref2

Presley, Elvis, ref1, ref2

press barons, ref1, ref2, ref3

Priestley, J. B.: on Edward VII, ref1; on officer class, ref1; on hikers and cyclists, ref1; English Journey, ref1, ref2, ref3; plays, ref1

Prior, Jim, ref1

prison issues, ref1, ref2

Private Eye, ref1, ref2

privatization: Thatcher’s policy, ref1, ref2; British Telecom, ref1, ref2; British Gas Corporation, ref1; National Coal Board, ref1; British Rail, ref1; National Power, ref1; Powergen, ref1; Post Office question, ref1; British Energy, ref1

Profitt, Russell, ref1

Profumo, John, ref1, ref2

prostitution, ref1

Protection from Eviction Act (1964), ref1

Protection of Children Act, ref1

protectionism: debate, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain’s plans, ref1, ref2; support for, ref1, ref2; Austen Chamberlain’s position, ref1; Law’s views, ref1; Baldwin’s position, ref1, ref2; lack of voter support for, ref1, ref2; ‘Empire Free Trade’, ref1; MacDonald’s position, ref1; Neville Chamberlain’s measures, ref1; Conservative policy, ref1, ref2; Thatcher’s view, ref1

Public Assistance Committee (PAC), ref1

Public Order Act (1936), ref1

pubs, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Punch magazine, ref1

Quant, Mary, ref1, ref2

Quisling, Vidkun, ref1

Race Relations Act (1965), ref1

racial attitudes and issues: skin colour, ref1; education, ref1; Notting Hill riots, ref1; Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, ref1; ‘sus’ laws, ref1; Bristol riots (1980), ref1; Brixton riots (1981), ref1; Stephen Lawrence case, ref1, ref2

Radcliffe, Cyril, ref1

radio (wireless): dance music, ref1; BBC licence fee, ref1; Baldwin’s broadcasts, ref1; electric sockets for sets, ref1; cost of sets, ref1; class listening styles, ref1; life on the dole, ref1; death of George V, ref1; Edward VIII’s farewell broadcast, ref1; news of coming war, ref1, ref2; Chamberlain’s broadcast, ref1; comedy, ref1, ref2; news of German surrender, ref1; banning Sex Pistols, ref1

railways: suburban links, ref1; commuting, ref1; strike averted, ref1; carrying livestock, ref1; strikes, ref1, ref2, ref3; nationalization proposal, ref1; privatization, ref1

Ramsay, Peggy, ref1

Ramsey, Alf, ref1

rationing: suggested (1915), ref1; food (1917–19), ref1, ref2; start of (1940), ref1; food (1940–54), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; healthy diet, ref1, ref2; grain, ref1; bread (1946), ref1; responses to, ref1; clothes, ref1; fat, ref1; meat rationing ended (1954), ref1

Rattigan, Terence, ref1, ref2

Ravenhill, Mark: Shopping and F**king, ref1

Reading, Lady, ref1

Reagan, Ronald: Anglo-Irish Agreement role, ref1; appearance and character, ref1, ref2; relationship with Thatcher, ref1, ref2; SDI (‘Star Wars’), ref1; Delors’s view of, ref1; relationship with Gorbachev, ref1; special relationship, ref1

Redmond, John: IPP leadership, ref1; Irish autonomy demand, ref1, ref2; negotiations, ref1; withdraws support for Liberals, ref1; Irish Volunteers, ref1; response to Easter Rising executions, ref1; Irish Home Rule plan, ref1

Redwood, John, ref1

Reece, Gordon, ref1

Rees-Mogg, William, ref1

Referendum party, ref1, ref2

Reid, Vince, ref1

religion: church attendance, ref1, ref2; working classes, ref1; movements (cults), ref1

Representation of the People Act (1918), ref1, ref2

Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act (1928), ref1

Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act (1918), ref1

Rhys-Jones, Sophie, ref1

Rice-Davies, Mandy, ref1

Richards, Keith, ref1, ref2, ref3

Richardson, Sir Ralph, ref1

Ridley, Nicholas, ref1

riots: Liverpool (1911), ref1; Notting Hill (1958), ref1; Bristol (1980), ref1; Brixton (1981), ref1; Leeds, Luton, Bradford (1995), ref1

Robbins Report (1963), ref1

Robinson, Geoffrey, ref1

Rogers, Ginger, ref1

Rolling Stones, ref1, ref2

Rolls-Royce, ref1, ref2

Romania: massacre of Jews, ref1; execution of Antonescu, ref1

Rommel, Erwin, ref1

Rosebery, Lord, ref1

Rothermere, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3

Rothschild, Lord, ref1

Rowling, J. K., ref1

Rowntree, Benjamin Seebohm, ref1, ref2

Royal Air Force (RAF), ref1, ref2, ref3

Royal College of Physicians, ref1

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, ref1

Royal Court Theatre, ref1, ref2

Royal Institute of British Architects, ref1

Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), ref1

Runciman, Walter, ref1

Ruskin, John, ref1, ref2

Russell, Bertrand, ref1, ref2

Russell, Dora, ref1

Russia: Triple Alliance, ref1; Germany declares war on, ref1: February Revolution (1917), ref1; peace treaty with Germany, ref1; oil and gas, ref1; disintegration of Soviet Union, ref1

Saddam Hussein, ref1

Saki (H. H. Munro), ref1

Salisbury, Lord, ref1, ref2

Saltley coke plant, Battle of (1972), ref1

Samuel, Herbert, ref1, ref2

Santer, Jacques, ref1

Sayers, Dorothy L., ref1

Scanlon, Hugh, ref1

Scargill, Arthur, ref1, ref2, ref3

Schlesinger, Helmut, ref1, ref2

Scotland: community charge (poll tax), ref1, ref2; devolution, ref1, ref2

Scott, Nicholas, ref1

Scott Report (1996), ref1

scrap metal and salvage collection, ref1

Screaming Lord Sutch, ref1

SDP (Social Democratic Party), ref1

Secombe, Harry, ref1

Sedition Bill (1934), ref1

Sellers, Peter, ref1

Serbia: WWI, ref1; occupation of (WWII), ref1; bombing of (1999), ref1

Sex Pistols, ref1, ref2

Sexual Disqualification Act (1919), ref1

Sexual Offences Act (1967), ref1, ref2

Shaffer, Peter, ref1

Shaw, George Bernard, ref1, ref2

Sheffield, HMS, ref1

Sheffield: slums, ref1

shopping, ref1

Shore, Peter, ref1

Sierra Leone: intervention, ref1

Silkin, Jon, ref1

Simpson, George, ref1

Simpson, Wallis, ref1

Sinclair, Iain, ref1

Single European Act (1985), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Sinn Féin: formation of Irish Volunteers, ref1; political status, ref1; arrests for collusion with Germany, ref1; MPs refuse to take seats in Westminster, ref1, ref2; dominates Dáil, ref1; electoral supporters, ref1; declared illegal, ref1; election results (1921), ref1; split, ref1; negotiations issues (1994–6), ref1, ref2

Skinner, Dennis, ref1

Sloane Rangers, ref1

Slovakia, ref1, ref2

Smith, John, ref1, ref2

Smith, Tim, ref1

Smuts, Jan, ref1

Snowden, Philip: background and political views, ref1, ref2; chancellor, ref1; budget (1924), ref1; response to Great Depression, ref1; in National Government, ref1; budget (1931), ref1; on Labour election programme, ref1; replaced as chancellor, ref1; resignation, ref1

Soames, Nicholas, ref1, ref2

Sobibor death camp, ref1

Social Chapter, ref1, ref2

Social Contract, ref1, ref2, ref3

socialism, ref1, ref2, ref3

Socialist Medical Association, ref1

Somme, Battle of the (1916), ref1

Soros, George, ref1

South Africa: Chinese workers, ref1; industry, ref1; Macmillan’s speech (1960), ref1; Sharpeville massacre, ref1; withdrawal from Commonwealth, ref1; BOSS, ref1

Soviet Union: supports Spanish Republic against Franco, ref1; Czechoslovakia policy, ref1; British discussions (1939), ref1; Nazi–Soviet Pact (1939), ref1, ref2; war against Finland, ref1; German invasion (1941), ref1; Gulag, ref1; rise of Gorbachev, ref1; disintegration, ref1

Spain: military government, ref1; Franco’s attempted coup, ref1; civil war, ref1, ref2, ref3; International Brigades, ref1; Franco’s victory, ref1; British recognition of Franco’s government, ref1

Special Defence Initiative (‘Star Wars’), ref1

Spectator, ref1

Speight, Johnny, ref1

spies, ref1

spin doctors, ref1

Spitting Image (TV series), ref1, ref2, ref3

spivs, ref1

sport, ref1, ref2

Stalin, Joseph: reputation, ref1; Nazi–Soviet Pact (1939), ref1, ref2; cull of officers, ref1; purges, ref1

Stalingrad, Russian defence, ref1

Stamp, Terence, ref1

Starr, Ringo, ref1

Steele, David, ref1

sterling: gold standard, ref1, ref2; devaluation suggested, ref1; gold standard abandoned, ref1, ref2; stabilizing, ref1; ‘balancing the budget’, ref1; European monetary union questions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; collapse, ref1; Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), ref1, ref2; pegged to Deutschmark, ref1, ref2, ref3; fall of, ref1; suspension from ERM, ref1

Stevens, Cat, ref1

Stewart, Allan, ref1

stockbrokers, ref1

Stopes, Marie: Married Love, ref1

Stoppard, Tom, ref1

Strachey, Lytton: Eminent Victorians, ref1

Straw, Jack, ref1

Stresemann, Gustav, ref1

strikes: (1910–14), ref1, ref2; (1920–21), ref1; (1924), ref1; miners (1925–6), ref1; general strike (1926), ref1; seamen (1966), ref1; Ford (1969), ref1; miners (1972), ref1, ref2; dockers (1972), ref1; general strike (1972), ref1; ‘flying pickets’, ref1, ref2, ref3; miners (1974), ref1, ref2; miners (1984–5), ref1; underground train drivers, ref1

suburban life, ref1, ref2, ref3

Sudetenland: Hitler’s plan to annex, ref1; ceded to Germany, ref1; massacre of Jews, ref1

Suez crisis (1956), ref1

Suicide of a Nation (edited by Koestler), ref1

Sunday Times, ref1, ref2

Sunningdale Agreement (1973), ref1

Sutherland, ‘Bronco Bill’, ref1

Szálasi, Ferenc, ref1

Tariff Reform: suggestion, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain’s conversion to, ref1, ref2; opposition to, ref1; press support for, ref1; Conservatives divided over, ref1; Baldwin’s policy, ref1, ref2, ref3; ‘Empire Free Trade’, ref1, ref2; Mosley’s policy, ref1; Conservative policy, ref1; Neville Chamberlain’s introduction, ref1

taxation: death duties, ref1; land taxes in People’s Budget, ref1, ref2; wartime income tax, ref1; proposed VAT rise, ref1; income tax lowered, ref1, ref2; public attitudes to (1997), ref1

Taylor, George, ref1

Tebbit, Margaret, ref1, ref2

Tebbit, Norman: on Thatcher, ref1; Brighton bombing, ref1; leaves cabinet, ref1; on Heseltine, ref1

technology: innovation, ref1, ref2; election (1910), ref1; factory assembly lines, ref1; Benn’s view of Concorde, ref1

Teddy boys (Teds), ref1, ref2, ref3

television: satire, ref1; football, ref1; Mary Whitehouse’s views, ref1; Doctor Who, ref1, ref2; audiences, ref1; programmes, ref1, ref2; politicians on, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; colour, ref1; news, ref1; Spitting Image, ref1; comedy, ref1; revelations about royal family, ref1; Question Time, ref1

That Was the Week That Was (TV series), ref1

Thatcher, Denis, ref1, ref2

Thatcher, Margaret: education secretary, ref1, ref2; secret ballot suggestion, ref1; on Callaghan, ref1; election victory (1979), ref1, ref2; background, ref1; parliamentary career, ref1; monetarism, ref1, ref2; Conservative leadership election (1975), ref1; prime minister (1979), ref1; attitude to EEC, ref1, ref2; vision of Conservatism, ref1; appearance, ref1; economic policy, ref1; no U-turn, ref1; ‘right to buy’ for council tenants, ref1; union reform plans, ref1; taxation policy, ref1; Falklands war, ref1, ref2; character, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; election victory (1983), ref1; privatization, ref1, ref2; miners’ strike (1984–5), ref1; Brighton bombing (1984), ref1; Irish negotiations, ref1; relationship with Reagan, ref1, ref2; view of Gorbachev, ref1; attitude of artists to her, ref1, ref2; called a fascist, ref1; unpopularity, ref1, ref2, ref3; regime, ref1, ref2; Single European Act (1985), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; election victory (1987), ref1, ref2, ref3; relationship with Delors, ref1; Bruges speech (1988), ref1, ref2, ref3; ‘popular capitalism’, ref1; local council-rates reform (community charge), ref1; ERM debate, ref1; challenge to leadership, ref1; ERM entry, ref1, ref2; Howe’s resignation speech, ref1, ref2; Heseltine’s leadership challenge, ref1, ref2; community charge protests, ref1; resignation, ref1; response to Maastricht, ref1; on Black Wednesday, ref1; relationship with Major, ref1, ref2; on pit closures, ref1; effect of democratizing unions, ref1

theatre: Look Back in Anger, ref1; Joe Orton’s plays, ref1; Pinter’s plays, ref1; Stoppard’s plays, ref1; Shaffer’s plays, ref1; Blasted scandal, ref1; Nineties resurgence, ref1

think tanks, ref1

Thompson, E. P., ref1

Thompson, F. M. L., ref1

Thorpe, Jeremy, ref1, ref2

Till Death Us Do Part (TV series), ref1, ref2

Times, The: on death of Victoria, ref1; on wealth redistribution, ref1; supports Tariff Reform, ref1; on motor cars, ref1; on strikes, ref1; on Allied retreat, ref1; munitions campaign, ref1; content, ref1; on 1929, ref2; on death of George V, ref1; editors, ref1, ref2; on riots, ref1; serializes Cook memoir, ref1

Tirpitz, Admiral, ref1

Tiso, Jozef, ref1

Titmuss, Richard L., ref1

Tolkien, J. R. R., ref1, ref2; The Lord of the Rings, ref1

Town Planning Act (1909), ref1

Townshend, Pete, ref1

Toynbee, Arnold, ref1

Trade Boards Bill, ref1

Trade Disputes Acts: (1906), ref1; (1966), ref1

Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act (1927), ref1, ref2

trade unions: flourishing, ref1; membership, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Labour party, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; legislation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; strikes (1910–14), ref1; status of women, ref1, ref2; wartime concessions, ref1; general strike (1926), ref1; political levy abolished, ref1; working hours, ref1; campaign for paid holidays, ref1; ‘In Place of Strife’ (1969), ref1, ref2; Heath’s policies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Industrial Relations Act (1971), ref1, ref2; Social Contract, ref1, ref2, ref3; ‘free collective bargaining’ for wages, ref1; print unions, ref1; ‘Winter of Discontent’ (1978–9), ref1; English tradition, ref1; rivalry between, ref1; Thatcher’s policies, ref1, ref2; Blair’s policies, ref1

Trades Union Congress (TUC): miners’ strike (1925–6), ref1; general strike (1926), ref1; Heath’s view of, ref1; rejects Industrial Relations Bill, ref1; mining industry issues, ref1, ref2; Social Contract, ref1; Delors speech (1988), ref1; manufacturing closures, ref1

transport: commuting, ref1, ref2; trams, ref1, ref2, ref3; buses, ref1, ref2, ref3; trains, ref1, ref2, ref3; motor cars, ref1, ref2; bicycles, ref1, ref2; speeding, ref1; electric trolley buses, ref1

Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), ref1, ref2, ref3

Tredegar Medical Aid Society, ref1, ref2

Tribune, ref1

Trimble, David, ref1

Triple Alliance, ref1, ref2, ref3

Turing, Alan, ref1

Twiggy (Lesley Hornby), ref1, ref2

2i club, The, ref1

U-boats, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Ugandan Asians: passports, ref1; expelled by Idi Amin, ref1; arrival in Britain, ref1

UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), ref1

Ukraine: NKVD killings, ref1; famine, ref1

Ulster: four Protestant-majority counties, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; six counties, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Ulster Unionist Council, ref1

Ulster Unionists: leader, ref1; relationship with Conservative party, ref1, ref2; opposition to Irish Home Rule, ref1, ref2; importing arms, ref1, ref2; living under Dublin administration, ref1; recognize Belfast parliament, ref1; remaining in UK as ‘Northern Ireland’, ref1; Good Friday Agreement (1998), ref1

Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), ref1, ref2

Ultra code, ref1

Unemployed Workmen Act (1903), ref1

unemployment: fear of, ref1; consequences of, ref1, ref2; blamed on women, ref1; after WWI, ref1; Twenties, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; benefits, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; Thirties, ref1, ref2; means test, ref1; violence, ref1; suicides, ref1; in Jarrow, ref1; in 1980, ref2; in black communities, ref1; predictions (1988), ref1

Unemployment Act (1934), ref1

Unionist Alliance, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Unionists: name, ref1, ref2; Irish Home Rule Bill, ref1, ref2; leadership, ref1; support for declaration of war, ref1; wartime coalition, ref1, ref2; waning support for war (1917), ref1; blaming women for unemployment, ref1; peacetime coalition, ref1, ref2; election (1918), ref1, ref2; Versailles Treaty, ref1; austerity programme, ref1; Irish nationalism concern, ref1; response to Anglo-Irish treaty, ref1

United States: coal and iron production, ref1; arms race, ref1; UK alliance, ref1, ref2; declares war on Germany, ref1; Wilson’s peace settlement plan, ref1, ref2; isolation, ref1; technological revolution, ref1; Wall Street crash (1929), ref1; naval treaty (1922), ref1; Pearl Harbor, ref1; war with Germany, ref1; withdrawal of Lend-Lease, ref1; Suez crisis, ref1; special relationship, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; support for Britain’s EEC membership, ref1; funds for IRA, ref1

University Challenge (TV quiz), ref1

Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, ref1

Ure, Midge, ref1

V1s and V2s, ref1

Vaughan Williams, Ralph, ref1, ref2

Versailles: peace conference, ref1, ref2; Treaty (1919), ref1, ref2, ref3

Victoria, Queen, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Vietnam War, ref1, ref2

villages, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

wages: agricultural labourers, ref1; working classes, ref1; strikes, ref1, ref2; rise (WWI), ref1, ref2; miners (1925), ref1, ref2; public-sector cuts (1931), ref1; purchasing power, ref1; post-war, ref1; miners (1972), ref1; Seventies, ref1

Waigel, Theodor, ref1, ref2

Wain, John: Hurry On Down, ref1

Wakeham, John, ref1

Wales: evacuees, ref1; devolution, ref1, ref2

Wall Street crash (1929), ref1

Walters, Sir Alan, ref1

Ward, Stephen, ref1

Waterhouse, Keith, ref1

Waters, Susan, ref1

Watkinson, Harold, ref1

Watson, James, ref1

Waugh, Alec, ref1

Waugh, Evelyn: Vile Bodies, ref1, ref2, ref3; on left-wing youth, ref1

Waymouth, Nigel, ref1

Webb, Beatrice, ref1, ref2

Webb, Sidney, ref1, ref2

welfare state: foundations, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; cost, ref1; approach to education, ref1; expansion, ref1, ref2; Heath’s policy, ref1

Weller, Irene, ref1

Wells, H. G.: on Queen Victoria, ref1; Mr Britling Sees it Through, ref1; influence, ref1

Wembley Stadium, ref1

West, Fred and Rosemary, ref1

West, Rebecca, ref1

Western Front: casualties, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; BEF, ref1; trench warfare, ref1, ref2, ref3; arrival of US troops, ref1; post-war effects of experiences, ref1

Wham!, ref1

White, T. H.: The Once and Future King, ref1

White Wolves, ref1

Whitehouse, Mary, ref1

Whitelaw, William ‘Willie’: on miners’ strike, ref1; character, ref1; Sunningdale Agreement, ref1; dealing with second miners’ strike, ref1; European policy, ref1; advice to Heath, ref1; party leadership candidacy, ref1; illness, ref1

Who, the, ref1, ref2

Wilberforce report (1972), ref1

Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest, ref1; imprisonment, ref1, ref2

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Wilkinson, ‘Red’ Ellen, ref1

William of Wykeham, ref1

Williams, Alan, ref1

Williams, Marcia, ref1

Williams, Percy, ref1

Willoughby de Broke, Lord, ref1

Wills, John, ref1

Wilson, Edmund, ref1

Wilson, Harold: on Common Market entry, ref1; election victory (1964), ref1; prime minister, ref1; character, ref1, ref2; MBEs for Beatles, ref1, ref2; reforming achievements, ref1, ref2; re-election (1966); response to seamen’s strike, ref1; six-month price and pay freeze, ref1; ‘July plot’ against, ref1; devaluation of the pound (1967), ref1; reputation, ref1; US relations, ref1, ref2; industrial-relations policy, ref1; election defeat (1970), ref1; election victory (1974), ref1, ref2; EEC referendum (1975), ref1; mental decline, ref1; resignation, ref1, ref2; Callaghan’s tribute, ref1

Wilson, Mary, ref1

Wilson, Woodrow, ref1, ref2

Windrush generation, ref1, ref2, ref3

Windsor Castle, fire, ref1

Winstanley, Gerrard, ref1

Wolfenden report (1957), ref1, ref2

Woman and Woman’s Own, ref1

women: demands for vote, ref1; local government participation, ref1; suffragettes, ref1; wartime employment, ref1, ref2; clothes, ref1, ref2, ref3; vote for women over thirty, ref1, ref2; post-war dismissal from employment, ref1, ref2; ‘marriage bar’ in employment, ref1, ref2; flappers, ref1; fashions, ref1, ref2; vote for all women over twenty-one, ref1; first female cabinet minister, ref1; housewives, ref1; reading, ref1; ‘Great Saucepan Offensive’, ref1; employment opportunities, ref1; Greenham Common camp, ref1; MCC membership, ref1

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, ref1

Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), ref1

Wood, Ursula, ref1

Woolf, Virginia: Bloomsbury Group, ref1; Mrs Dalloway, ref1

Woolton, Lord, ref1

working hours, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906), ref1

World Cup (1966), ref1, ref2

World Disarmament Conference, ref1

World War, First: outbreak, ref1, ref2; Armistice, ref1; Versailles peace conference, ref1; causes of, ref1

World War, Second: declared, ref1; Dunkirk, ref1; Normandy landings, ref1, ref2; VE day, ref1, ref2

Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act (1903), ref1

Yardbirds, ref1, ref2

Yeats, W. B.: ‘Easter, 1916’, ref1

Yeo, Tim, ref1

York, Duke and Duchess of, ref1

Zeppelins, ref1, ref2

1. Edward VII. He was the eldest son of Queen Victoria and was considered to be the most popular monarch since Charles II.

2. King George at the opening of the Festival of Empire at the Crystal Palace in 1911.

3. A tram in Yarmouth. It was the cheapest form of travel, even along the seashore.

4. The Boy Scouts in 1909. By the following year, there were over 100,000 of them.

5. Emmeline Pankhurst in 1914. One of the first suffragettes, who also established the Women’s Social and Political Union.

6. Herbert Henry Asquith, prime minister from 1908 to 1916. He was also known as ‘Squiffy’ because of his habit of over-drinking.

7. David Lloyd George, prime minister from 1916 to 1922. His passion for social reform was matched only by his energy and ambition.

8. The British Empire Exhibition, 1924. A vast and expensive propaganda exercise to promote the unity of Britain and its dominions.

9. Flappers in 1925: young women determined to dance and drink away the memories of wartime Britain.

10. The General Strike of 1926. It heightened the sense of revolution hanging over the country.

11. A Butlin’s poster from the 1930s. The first ever commercial holiday camp was established at Skegness in 1936.

12. Members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1928, a set of writers and artists who fostered radical innovation in the post-war world. From left to right : Frances Partridge, Quentin and Julian Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell and Beatrice Mayor; kneeling: Roger Fry; sitting: Raymond Mortimer.

13. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, a 1940 film in which he parodied Adolf Hitler.

14. George VI on the day of his coronation, 12 May 1937. He was a reluctant king, who nevertheless fulfilled his duties as monarch in war and peace.

15. Winston Churchill in 1940. Implacable and strong-willed, he guided his country to victory in 1945.

16. The Empire Windrush in 1948. Passengers from the West Indies disembarking in Tilbury.

17. The birth of the National Health Service. Guided by Nye Bevan, it came into operation on Monday, 5 July 1948.

18. Rationing in 1949. The long lines proclaim that, even four years after the war, tea, sugar and eggs were still in short supply.

19. The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. She was to become the longest reigning monarch in English history.

20. The Suez Canal in October 1956. The newspaper headlines emphasize the significance of what turned out to be a British disaster.

21. Harold Wilson, in October 1964, entering Downing Street after his election victory. The defeated Conservatives had been in power for thirteen years.

22. A scene outside the Royal Court in June 1956. It marked the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

23. Mary Quant in April 1964. She became known as ‘the queen of fashion’ in a fashion-conscious era.

24. The 1966 World Cup final. The victory of England in the final was perhaps the summit of the country’s sporting achievement.

25. The Beatles in August 1966. The four members of the group were at the pinnacle of their success, but the tour of 1966 was their last.

26. The queen watching television in 1969. A relaxed family scene, suggesting that the royal family was becoming more ‘open’ to the public.

27. A British family watching television in the 1970s. The ‘box’ was now essential and ubiquitous.

28. The three-day week, 1973, imposed by Edward Heath at the end of that year to minimize the use of electricity.

29. The miners’ strike of 1984. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, confronts the police.

30. Margaret Thatcher, prime minister, in 1986. She had already gained recognition as the Iron Lady.

31. Princess Diana being interviewed in November 1995 about her life apart from the royal family, which led to her divorce from the Prince of Wales.

32. Tony Blair, on the day after the election of 1 May 1997, when he defeated John Major and the Conservatives.

33. The Millennium Dome, now known as the O2 Arena for music and entertainment.

About the Author

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

The History of England Vol. II: Tudors

The History of England Vol. III: Civil War

The History of England Vol. IV: Revolution

The History of England Vol. V: Dominion

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City Queer City

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Three Brothers

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T. S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography Charlie Chaplin

Brief Lives

Chaucer J. M. W. Turner

Newton Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2021 by Picador

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