The War of Wars Read online

  In architecture the Palladian fashion was succeeded by the neoclassical and, later, by the Gothic revival. Robert and James Adam, James Wyatt and William Chambers scattered their perfectly proportioned gems around England. In art, Hogarth’s acerbic and idiosyncratic brilliance was succeeded by the finest generation of British painters – Gainsborough, Stubbs, Constable, Hudson, Kauffman, Ramsay, Zoffany, Lawrence, Turner, Hoppner and Reynolds. The Royal Academy and the British Museum were founded.

  The Grand Tour to Italy became de rigueur for wealthy Englishmen, who called on Venice, Florence and Rome, travelled to Naples to experience eruptions of Vesuvius, and, in the case of the wealthiest, had their portraits painted by Pompeo Batoni. It was the greatest flowering of art, literature and architecture in British history.

  But Britain was also on the threshold of a new, altogether more serious age. The effervescence of the eighteenth century and its light, airy, exuberant art, architecture, literature and criticism were about to be replaced by the ponderousness of administration. The huge Indian empire acquired by Clive’s buccaneering adventurism in the finest tradition of the English gentleman amateur now brought searing responsibility. Above all, the new supremacy of the middle classes, based on prosperity, a flourishing entrepreneurial spirit and technical and business innovation associated with such pioneering giants as Brunel, Telford, Stephenson and Davy was about to give way to the new period of disfiguring mass urbanization and industrialization.

  Major change was perceptibly creeping across the land. It was the age of speed, travel, and the end of the first generation of bright young things since the Restoration a hundred years before. The next fifty years wrought more change to the British landscape than the previous 500.

  Speed astonishing by the standards of previous generations became possible. As late as 1740 it still took around six days to travel from Chester to London. By 1780 it took just two days. The time from London to Gloucester was slashed from two days to one. A journey from Bath to Oxford took only ten hours, at a miraculous speed of seven miles an hour.

  By 1770 turnpike roads, which had barely linked Birmingham, Chester and Manchester with London twenty years before, crisscrossed the whole country in an intricate gridlock from Truro to Aberystwyth, Holyhead, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Hull, Norwich and Dover. By 1765 there were an astonishing 20,000 private coaches on the road, excluding stage coaches and hackneys for public transport. The proliferation of private transport broke down rural isolation and local commercial monopolies, bringing local prices tumbling.

  Another communications revolution was under way – the canals snaking across Britain. This had begun with the waterways constructed to bring cheap coal to Liverpool and Manchester in the late 1750s. By the 1780s a hugely improved canal system permitted the economic transport of bulk goods the length and breadth of England, transforming local economies and making possible the development of cities well away from the coast or from ready sources of raw material. It was this colossal public investment, harnessing private capital, that permitted the industrial revolution to get seriously under way.

  A revolution was under way in the countryside too: enclosures, by which individual farmers took over common land, were spreading rapidly. The land not owned by the big estates was being privatized. Nearly 4,000 enclosure acts were passed between 1750 and 1810, affecting roughly a fifth of all land in England and Wales.

  The old village communes were replaced by a class of prosperous middling farmers, while the poorer rustics became seasonal labour dependent on the owners’ whim. Much hardship was caused, but the employment offered by the new agricultural improvements was also considerable. ‘Engrossing’ permitted the amalgamation of small tenant farms into bigger units, driving many peasant smallholders off the land. Farming banks sprang up around the country, financing the new prosperous farms to stockpile their produce and drive up prices.

  The novelist Frances Brooke summed up the impact of the changes in her History of Lady Julia Mandeville.

  It is with infinite pain I see Lord T—pursuing a plan, which has drawn on him the curse of thousands, and made his estate a scene of desolation; his farms are in the hands of a few men, to whom the sons of the old tenants are either forced to be servants, or to leave the country to get their bread elsewhere. The village, large and once populous, is reduced to about eight families; a dreary silence reigns on their deserted fields; the farm houses, once the seats of cheerful smiling industry, now useless, are falling in ruins around him; his tenants are merchants and engrossers, proud, lazy, luxurious, insolent and spurning the hand which feeds them.

  There was a breakdown in the old privileged relationship between landowners and farm labourers, many of the latter becoming the fodder for the new industries. It is wrong, though, to see enclosures as a cause of the industrial revolution, except in that they released some capital. Industry did not spring up to absorb surplus labour: rather the new unemployed were lucky that industry expanded at about that time to provide them with work. Even farm workers with settled employment were attracted by the supposed comforts and wages of the new industries.

  There was, too, a dramatic self-confident expansion of urban Britain. London, from around 500,000 inhabitants in 1700, had nearly doubled by 1800. Even more impressive in relative terms was the fourfold growth of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds between 1700 and 1770. At the beginning of the century only seven towns – Newcastle, Bristol, Yarmouth, York, Exeter, Norwich and Colchester – had more than 10,000 people; by 1800 the number was more than fifty. The urban population jumped from around a fifth in 1700 to around a third in 1800, or about 2 million of England’s 6 million people.

  The second half of the eighteenth century also at last saw a concerted drive for urban improvement: the dingy, higgledy-piggledy, crack-paved, open-sewered streets were no more. In 1754 Westminster was paved and lighted. Drain-pipes replaced spouts. Jutting house signs were replaced by numbers. Piped water was introduced, as celebrated by George Keate in 1779: ‘The good order preserved in our streets by day – the matchless utility and beauty of their illumination by night – and what is perhaps the most essential of all, the astonishing supply of water which is poured into every private house, however small, even to profusion! – the superflux of which clears all the drains and sewers, and assists greatly in preserving good air, health, and comfort.’ Slums and appalling conditions continued to thrive in the approaches to London and other major cities. But the cramped industrial kennels of the Victorian era had not yet sprung up. For the most part England was a joyous combination of the best of the old with the vigour, dynamism and change of the new before the latter’s ill-effects were to sink in.

  With France’s acceleration into revolutionary chaos after 1789, all this seemed at risk. Britain’s constitutional monarchy, its well-mannered oligarchical and aristocratic system, its ordered economic revolution – all seemed suddenly endangered by the call for ordinary people to rise against their masters on the other side of the Channel. Britain’s only defence was that it had evolved its own version of a Rousseau-style social contract between governors and governed by sharply reducing the power of the monarchy, permitting free speech, and a lively and vigorously combative parliamentary system – in marked contrast to the centralized and stultified style of monarchical rule now tottering in France.

  But would these defences hold, in the face of the French revolutionaries’ contemptuous dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a sham? Pitt by 1790 was not at all sure. He adopted a two-pronged policy: doing as little as possible to excite the enmity of revolutionary France – a policy which was deeply unwise and unrealistic, as we shall see in a moment – and, domestically, a crackdown on the very freedoms Britain had come to cherish over the previous three-quarters of a century.

  This hard domestic line was to last well beyond Pitt’s lifetime and the end of the Napoleonic wars – in fact, for more than four decades all the way to the Great Reform Bill of 1832 – and may in fact have bro
ught Britain to the verge of revolutionary upheaval. It was disastrously misconceived: the tragedy was all the greater for its being implemented by a young idealistic reformer who had worked with his great friend William Wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade and pressed for political democracy and Catholic emancipation in Ireland. Men such as Lord Liverpool, Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington have rightly been blamed for the harsh reactionary policies of the first three decades of the nineteenth century: but the creator of these policies was none other than idealistic, enlightened young Pitt himself.

  The flame of panic was lit by Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France which, from a man so reformist and wedded to liberty, came as a shock in its ferocious denunciation of the revolutionaries and all their works. This precipitated Thomas Paine’s counterblast, The Rights of Man, which secured a phenomenal readership at the time of some 200,000. Pitt’s reaction was to abandon any attempts at parliamentary reform and adopt an uncharacteristic policy of repression.

  In May, 1792 a royal proclamation was issued calling on the militia to act against ‘evil-disposed persons acting in concert with persons in foreign parts’. A bill was introduced to prohibit revolutionary propaganda. Prosecutions were brought on trumped up charges of sedition. A young lawyer and advocate of parliamentary reform, Thomas Muir, was sentenced to fourteen years transportation and a clergyman, Thomas Palmer, to seven years for the same offence.

  Senior committees were set up in each house of parliament in 1794 which reported that traitorous conspiracies existed to foment revolution. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended – in the event for a full six years. In 1795 the King was shot at and stoned at the opening of parliament: his coach was destroyed. A Treasonable Practices Bill and a Seditious Meetings Bill were promptly passed which forbade unauthorized meetings of more than fifty people and dispensed with the burden of proof for treason. The country’s multiplicity of ‘popular societies’ were suppressed. Restrictions were imposed upon the freedom of the press.

  In December 1792 3,000 daggers were found in a house in Birmingham, and Burke caused a sensation by throwing some of them on the floor of the House of Commons. The cabinet sat until four in the morning to discuss the implications, with Pitt declaring melodramatically: ‘Possibly by this time tomorrow we may not have a head to act or a tongue to utter.’ He told Wilberforce in 1795 that he would be executed in six months were the government to fall and feared that he would be murdered in his carriage. This shrill, panicking representative of the old order lashing out in all directions contrasts sharply with the image of the cool British statesman projected at the time, and is reminiscent of the attitude of some of France’s pre-revolutionary aristocratic fops.

  Yet some of his apprehensions seemed justified. In August 1789 there had been bread riots in North Wales. In July 1791 a ‘Bastille Dinner’ in Birmingham had triggered off several days of rioting and resulted in two hangings. Troops were poured into the Midlands, from Warwickshire to Oxford. The following year rioting broke out in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

  The situation was exacerbated by a sudden economic downturn in the crucial year of 1792 after years of economic expansion, as a result of an inflationary explosion being fuelled by a contraction in the money supply, which put up bread prices. Indeed from around 1789 to 1802 by coincidence there were poor harvests as well, of which the worst was in 1792. In November of that year there were more than a hundred bankruptcies – double the worst total ever recorded. By the following year there were nearly 2,000 in the year as a whole, double the figure for the previous year.

  All of this contributed to a general paranoia on the issue of public security at a time of immense social and economic change. It can be argued that the government was not viciously repressive in the circumstances; but the abandonment of all impetus towards reform – which Pitt had earlier espoused – was taking place against a pressure cooker of economic grievances which were to flare up in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.

  Understandably Pitt reflected the temper of the times: his repressive measures were hugely popular and passed by enormous majorities in both houses. There was also a climate of fear that Britain was being subverted by spies and conspirators from France originally masterminded by the Revolution’s last ambassador, the Marquis de Chauvelin, actually a rather inadequate and incompetent personality. Pitt’s fears may have been exaggerated by the one time he had been set upon by a mob during his premiership – outside Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street, when his life may indeed have been endangered (but Fox, the pillar of the club, was not to blame, as was later alleged).

  Touchingly Pitt displayed one further sign of his old reformist spirit. After being shown the conditions under which the working classes lived and worked in the small town of Halstead in Essex by his secretary, Joseph Smith, and remarking that he had no idea such awful conditions existed in England, he issued a bill of some 130 clauses setting up schools of charity in each parish to provide work for the destitute to be run by justices, who could build warehouses, buy materials and buy bread. Friendly societies were to be set up, child allowances were to be provided, and each person was to be allowed a loan to purchase a cow. In this remarkable version of a primordial welfare state, Pitt showed where his heart lay; but the bill was considered too progressive by some and not enough by the radicals, and was allowed to lapse. Thus one of the French Revolution’s first casualties was the cause of moderate reform in Britain.

  Chapter 14

  THE RUSSIAN OGRE

  The British Foreign Office had perhaps unrivalled powers of analysis and intelligence at the time – its detached view of the European theatre was the best anywhere on the continent. The trouble was that this calculated objectivity was always designed to lead to a single conclusion: to take any action short of war. This suited Pitt’s own preoccupations with domestic affairs, and in ordinary times was probably the right policy. However, the French Revolution had entirely reshaped the map of Europe to a much greater extent than anyone was aware of at the time.

  The Foreign Office analysis, shared by Grenville although his suspicion of the French was much more pronounced than that of his subordinates, was more or less as follows: continental Europe was a patchwork, and an extraordinarily complex one at that, of a kind enormously satisfying to the largely classically educated minds running the Foreign Office. What was needed was to preserve the balance of power through an alliance here, a subsidy there, a nudge somewhere else. The British empire offered scope for bold and imaginative ventures. By contrast Europe was a mass of moving diplomatic pieces and a chessboard on which there were multiple players. Before, and all the more so immediately after, the French Revolution, complacency simply oozed from the diplomatic mandarins: the Revolution had brought low Britain’s greatest rival, a belated revenge for the French support of America in the War of Independence. This, in brief, was their view of the continental quilt.

  Towards France, Britain’s oldest antagonist and rival, there was a scarcely disguised contempt. The country had been virtually bankrupted by the Seven Years’ War and then the American War: the events of 1789 appeared to have removed it as a player from the European stage. This was immensely agreeable to the British. Then there was another traditional enemy, Spain. This was in a state of seemingly unstoppable decline. Both of these maritime rivals were on the wane.

  The real threats to European stability were at arms’ length: Russia, which was growing steadily more assertive under the initially anti-British court of Catherine the Great; and the newly emergent Prussia which, however, challenged the power of an old British enemy, Austria. Austria had long vied with Britain for control of the Low Countries and traditionally tended to side with France. Finally, Poland and Sweden were two smaller but at the same time somewhat assertive powers in their own right, while the Low Countries, the German states of central Europe, the Italian states and the Balkans were prizes to be argued over. The Ottoman empire in the east was also in decline
.

  The trouble with this complacent traditional analysis is that it took no account of two sea-changes now occurring: the first was the French Revolution itself; the second was the modernization of the rest of Europe. For Britain and France were not alone in being affected by the new political ideas after the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Liberalism and reaction were almost at war in Spain and Portugal; the Swedes, Prussians and Poles regarded themselves as newly modernizing societies. Catherine the Great and her ministers considered that they were at the forefront of an enlightened autocracy. Joseph II of Austria had just introduced sweeping reforms across his huge Habsburg possessions.

  With commerce and trade spreading exponentially across the continent, all Europe was convulsed – as indeed France had been through the centralizing reforms of the French monarchy and the hostility they had aroused among the nobility. The British believed all they had to do was ensure freedom of commerce for British goods and for navigation; the rest could more or less look after itself. To understand how England blundered its recalcitrant and belated way into war in 1793, a quick look is necessary at the rather modest crisis which preceded it, before returning to continental Europe in which revolutionary France sprang up like a lion in a herd of gazelles.