Enemies of the State Read online

  To too many men of Arthur Thistlewood’s generation, home was a rat-infested hovel where cholera and typhoid would become endemic killers by the 1830s. Work was a suffocating mill, where stringent rules led to swingeing fines or dismissal. In the stifling cotton mills of Manchester, the most technologically advanced of their day, small children as young as 5 crawled under the eighty-spindled ‘jennies’, tying snapped fibres. Asthmatics died in their hundreds. The ‘healthy’ ones, with their long hair, ragged clothes and bare feet were walking disaster zones among the unguarded, moving machinery. Whole families went to work in the dark and came home in the dark, with bread and cheese for their only meals, taken alongside their machines. Some of them worked up to eighteen hours a day, the women earning half of their menfolk’s wages, the children half of that.

  It is easy to wax too lyrical on the plight of the factory workers, as Marx and Frederik Engels would in the 1840s. We have to see their lives in the context of what they had known in their early lives and what their fathers knew. And we have to acknowledge that, in terms of child labour at least, the first tentative steps of reform and government improvement, had been taken as early as 1802.8

  Whichever way we look at the social/industrial problem, what we are witnessing is the effects of an unprecedented series of upheavals onto an expanding generation in a brave, but terrifying, new world. But that was only the background – the long-term work and living patterns that had been developing by 1815 for a generation. Bolted onto all that was the peculiar set of circumstances that followed the end of the war.

  In terms of pure economics, the months following Waterloo were positive. So much of the investment, manifest today in the world’s hysterical stock markets, is about confidence. And in the summer of 1815 Britain was confident indeed. The Treaty of Paris, signed in May 1815 by the allies who had overthrown Napoleon, promised ‘perpetual peace and friendship’. To this end, various dignitaries – Talleyrand from France, Nesselrode from Prussia, Tsar Alexander of Russia and Lord Castlereagh from Britain – reconvened with their entourages (and in the case of Castlereagh, his wife) in Vienna under the genial auspices of Prince Metternich to establish thirty years of European cooperation. By this arrangement, Britain added to her territories and British businesses could congratulate themselves as being the richest, best organized and most technologically advanced in the world. Their nearest rivals, the French, were humiliated and beaten. They would never rise again.

  But the short-lived boom of 1815 hid a hornets’ nest of problems. The long years of war had created an economy that was inevitably geared to the war effort. In the 1790s, William Pitt as the Prime Minister launched a black crusade against the viciousness of the French Revolution, manufacturing turned to making weapons of war. In textiles, the most mechanized of all British industries, there was a huge demand for uniforms. Every soldier was issued with a new jacket or coatee every Christmas Day. It would be over a century before conscription was introduced by a British government, but at the height of the war against Napoleon, there were perhaps half a million men serving with the army and navy; they all had to be clothed. Sails were needed for ships of the line. The 104-gun Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, carried 6,500 square yards of canvas. Likewise the army needed tents, in all the theatres of war where they fought. Even in relatively non-confrontational areas like the West Indies or the virtually pointless campaigning of the Duke of York in 1794, the demand for textiles was voracious. And of course, the industry rose to the challenge. These were the great days of the handloom weavers, earning up to 22 shillings a week.9 There are accounts of these men swaggering through Manchester with gold-topped canes and pound notes stuffed into their hatbands.

  The huge demand for woollen and cotton textiles carried the seeds of destruction, at least from the point of view of employment. James Hargreaves’s ‘Spinning Jenny’, patented in 1769 but not in widespread use until the 1790s, could do the work of eighty individual spinning wheels which had been the centre of the domestic industry. Increasingly, the independent spinners and weavers were going to the wall by 1810. They had a stark choice: work in the new, all-pervasive mills or starve. Out of this dilemma, from 1811, were born the Luddites, weavers, spinners and stocking-frame knitters from Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, who in desperation and naivety saw the hated machines as their enemy and used their huge, two-handed lump hammers, made by the firm of Enoch & Co. to shatter their rivals. ‘Great Enoch still shall lead the van; Stop him who dare, stop him who can’. Matters were made worse by the year of Cato Street when the Revd Edmund Cartwright’s power-loom was in widespread use, cutting the ground from under thousands of weavers in the Midlands and the North. Many of the 60,000 who attended the fateful meeting at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, in August 181910 were weavers. They had gone to hear speeches about universal suffrage but only because they believed the vote would safeguard their livelihoods.

  As with textiles, so with the iron industry. Swords for the cavalry, bayonets for the infantry, guns for everybody – the demand was huge. John Wilkinson remained the longest-serving supplier of swords for the army,11 but he was matched in the 1790s by Gill, Osborn and nearly 200 makers and cutlers. Thomas Gill’s sabres for the Light Cavalry had the boast ‘Guaranteed to cut iron’ stamped on their blades. A small firm, that of Underwood, became involved in Cato Street because Hector Morrison, one of the cutlers, was engaged by James Ings to sharpen two sword blades in February 1820.

  ‘They were made extremely sharp from heel to point’, Morrison told the jury at Ings’ trial. ‘The prisoner directed that they should be made as sharp as a needle at the point and that they should be made to cut both at the back and front.’12

  Cannon and wheel rims for the Artillery, shot of all proportions, buckles and hooks and buttons – all of it came under the aegis of iron. The new Hussar jackets for certain regiments of cavalry after 1805 had no less than 97 buttons – only 19 of them actually fastened anything! Much was made at the Cato Street trials of the appalling weapons of mass destruction made by the conspirators in the days and weeks before 23 February. When Samuel Taunton, a Bow Street Runner, searched Richard Tidd’s house in the Holein-the-Wall Passage, he found 965 cartridges, 10 grenades and ‘a great quantity of gunpowder’. There were 434 balls (bullets) along with 69 ball cartridges and 11 bags of gunpowder, each weighing one pound. Sergeant Edward Hanson of the Royal Artillery shocked the jury at Thistlewood’s trial by describing the devastating effect of a hand-grenade:

  The [tin] case contains three ounces and a half of gunpowder. The priming in the tube is a composition of salt-petre, powder and brimstone. The tin was pitched and wrapped round with rope-yarn which was cemented with rosin and tar. Round the tin, and in the rope-yarn, twelve pieces of iron were planted. From the lighting of the fusee to the explosion might be about half a minute. If one of them were to be exploded in a room where there were a number of persons, it would produce great destruction. The pieces of iron would fly about like bullets.13

  Chain-shot, bar-shot, canister shot and grape shot, as well as cannon balls weighing between 9 and 64 pounds, were being produced in their thousands for use against the French, giving the iron masters huge profits and creating work for the new industrial classes lured into the workshops by the promise of high wages. It was dangerous, hot and dirty, but the money was good.

  And demand for iron and textiles did not end there. Britain was rich enough by the 1790s to become the effective paymaster of Europe, supplying cash, cloth, iron and much else to keep the armies of Austria, Prussia and Russia in the field against the French. Four such coalitions were smashed by the combination of luck and zeal that characterized the Revolutionary armies. Under Napoleon, the coalitions collapsed even quicker. So the Austrians, for example, adopted a pattern of British cavalry sword they still used, in essence, up to 1914 and, in one memorable exchange of goods which flew in the face of all logic, Napoleon sent shiploads of corn to Britain in exchange for Nottingham-made boots so
that his troops could go on killing ours!

  We have already seen the impact of the wars on agriculture. Enclosure was the watchword. After 1806 Napoleon’s Continental System, though never fully functional, was designed to seal Britain off from the rest of Europe. We had never been self-sufficient in terms of foodstuffs and now the situation was worse. Reliance on the harvest and good weather became absolutely crucial and rural distress remained a burning issue for years to come.

  In terms of paying for the war, the poor had what, with hindsight, was something of a lucky break. To keep the coalitions sweet, Pitt arbitrarily withdrew gold from the banks and issued paper ‘promissory notes’ instead. In 1797, the same year as the naval mutinies at the Nore and Spithead, the banks collapsed in a spectacular crisis of confidence. Bank employees were beaten up and their windows smashed as investors were told their gold had gone. A recurring theme of the pugnacious William Cobbett’s pamphlets from 1802 was hatred of ‘Mr Pitt’s paper money’. In 1799, Pitt hit upon the obvious and introduced a tax on incomes, graduated so that the rich paid most, on incomes of over £60 a year. Since no working man earned anything like that (farm labourers, for instance, subsisted on anything between £5 and £8), the poor found their financial burden lighter in these years. Direct taxation, which they did not pay, had largely replaced indirect taxation, which they did.

  And then, suddenly, from 1814, all that changed. Napoleon’s escape from his first imprisonment on Elba and the subsequent hundred days campaign that culminated in Waterloo proved to be a mere last gasp of ‘la gloire’. And after that long June day certainly, the demand for wartime industries collapsed overnight and the world had changed.

  No one needed swords, guns, bayonets, sail, tents, buckles, ammunition and warships. The Elizabethan statesman Lord Burghley had famously said, ‘Soldiers in peacetime are like chimneys in summer’ and in the summer of 1815, an estimated 300,000 of them came home.

  There were, no doubt, parties and handshakes and heart-warming reunions of families and friends. But reality must have kicked in quickly. An infantryman who had been lucky might have served under Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, since 1808 in Portugal and Spain. That meant he had been out of the workforce for seven years and the workforce had learnt to do without him. If he been a spinner or a weaver, he would find no chance of setting up again independently. If he went, cap in hand, to a Master, he would be asked what experience he had. None, except killing Frenchmen. The door would be slammed in his face. One of the five men who died at Newgate after the Cato Street conspiracy was ex-military; so was one of the principal witnesses against them. It would be fascinating to know how many ex-soldiers joined the Luddites to smash the hated machines, marched with the radicals at Spa Fields in 1816,14 faced the yeomanry at St Peter’s Fields two years later and were in that crowd outside Newgate when the men of Cato Street met their maker. For the world had turned. Any cold analysis of revolution, any attempt to explain why one works and the other does not, must hinge on the role of the army. In France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, the army was divided, shaky, disloyal. In Britain in 1815–22, the army was rock solid. But those who had left the army were a different matter. In some cases, whole regiments, like the 23rd Light Dragoons, were disbanded. In others, their strength was halved. The government of Lord Liverpool was desperate to save money and this was one obvious way of doing it. In the navy, the story ran the same as ships’ companies were axed. It was, perhaps a slow and painful death, personified by the painter J M W Turner in his haunting The Fighting Temeraire, as a graceful ship-of-the-line gilded by a dying sun, is towed along by a black, ugly steam tug to be broken up. Soldiers and sailors had seen death up close and personal. Life, to them, was cheap. Murder was always a solution. Such men were dangerous.

  William Pitt died, worn out by his exertions, in January 1806, but true to the promise he had made seven years earlier, as soon as was expedient after the war, the hated income tax was dropped. This of course meant that indirect taxation – duties on goods – had to increase. And this time all consumers were hit, including and most especially the poor. In 1815, Liverpool’s government spearheaded by the men who were due to dine with Lord Harrowby in February 1820, introduced the Corn Laws, one of the most divisive and class-conscious pieces of legislation ever put forward. Napoleon’s Continental System had totally collapsed by 1814 as Prussia, Russia and Britain conspired to drive his armies back into France. This meant that European ports were open and cheap, foreign corn was available and bread – the staple diet of most Englishmen – was affordable. 1813, 1814 and 1815 were also years of good harvests at home, so for a very brief period as war came to an end, rural distress was lessened and there seemed a light at the end of the tunnel of economic gloom.

  The Corn Laws changed all that. Faced with a loss of profits because of foreign competition, parliament (by definition and to a man, all landowners) placed a price on corn which affected the opening and closing of ports. Economically, this was slow and cumbersome, but to the people it seemed (and it is difficult to argue against this) that the real aim of government was to keep the cost of bread artificially high. If bread was dear, everything was dear – rent, clothes, other foodstuffs. The euphoria at the end of the war quickly changed to a dark mood of defiance and the scene was set for a class war bordering on revolution.

  Over all this was the enigmatic figure of William Cobbett. From 1802, the pamphleteer had written a series of polemical, from-the-shoulder articles in his Weekly Political Register. As the essayist Charles Hazlitt wrote of Cobbett, he would take on everyone and anyone. As a writer, he is enormous fun to read, if only because he is so inconsistent. In one passage, he extols the courage and honesty of Sir Francis Burdett, the radical MP. In another, he fairly burns paper:

  he is a sore to Westminster; a set-fast on its back; a cholic in its belly; a cramp in its limbs; a gag in its mouth; he is a nuisance, a monstrous nuisance in Westminster and he must be abated.

  He attacked: Pitt and his paper money; Robert Peel, the War Secretary; Thomas Malthus, the population parson,15 William Wilberforce, hero of the anti-slavers; Scotsmen; Americans; tea; corruption; Methodists; Quakers; Unitarians; and the landlord of the George Inn, Andover.

  In fact, he was by no means so bold face-to-face with his opponents and, although he served time in prison for his views, was just as likely to run to the safety of America (whose towns he said at one stage should be burnt down) as to stay. Ironically, the thing that Cobbett hated most was hypocrisy and in this, he was as guilty as the next man.

  Why is Cobbett so important in this story? Because the Political Register, especially in its cheaper form of the Twopenny Trash, reached thousands of the working class and was more of a Bible to them than any other radical tract.16 Those who read it believed it. Those who could not read it had it read to them, and still believed. Oddly, Samuel Bamford, the radical weaver from Middleton who witnessed ‘Peterloo’,17 believed that Cobbett’s works calmed the working class. This is difficult to accept; every line of Cobbett’s is contentious – it was in his nature.

  And the recurring dripfeed of the Register was how glorious it was in the good old days and how appalling things were now. This nostalgia is nonsense, but it is an all-pervading part of the human condition. For men, women and children, squatting in damp, freezing cellars, moving to the jar and grind of inhuman machines, to be told that their fathers and grandfathers had lived an idyllic, rural existence with roses twining around the door was hardly likely to instil a sense of contentment.

  The loss of jobs, the change in taxation, the arrival of the Corn Laws, the overcrowding of an increasingly desperate people into foul-smelling tenements and dangerous workshops and mills – this was the reality in a nation that had just emerged victorious from a quarter of a century of war. That there was economic distress and a discontented workforce in Lord Liverpool’s England cannot be doubted. But was it this alone that led James Ings to get his swords sharpened and George Edwards to pu
t the fuses in the grenades?

  For that, there had to be something more.

  Chapter 3

  The Shadow of the Guillotine

  The future Cato Street conspirator, William Davidson, was 3 when a ragged ‘army’ of sans-culottes, carrying scythes and pitchforks, swarmed through the alleyways and avenues of Paris on its way to the Bastille, long the symbol of governmental tyranny. It was 14 July 1789 – a day to be remembered.

  For three days Paris had effectively been in the hands of the mob – the terrifying peasantry whom the Whig politician Edmund Burke described as ‘the swinish multitude’. The rigid political structure in France – the three estates of Church, Aristocracy and Everybody Else – gave an unhappy country nowhere to go. Superficially, the list of complaints by the Third Estate (representing 96 per cent of the French population) against the first two were very much what the Cato Street conspirators would level at the Cabinet in 1820. The crucial difference was social mobility. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, was the son of an Earl (of Chatham) but the grandson of an official of the East India Company. In other words, in two generations the Pitt family had risen from the ‘middling sort’ to the aristocracy and to holding the most important political position in the land. Such meteoric rises were impossible in France, or indeed anywhere else in Europe and liberals there looked with longing and envy at the relative egalitarianism of the British constitution.

  Suffering prolonged economic difficulties, both in agriculture and industry, plagued by a series of failed foreign wars (mostly against the victorious British) and politically stagnant, the beleaguered Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General for the first time since 1614. The distinctions with which the three estates were supposed to greet the king underlined everything that was wrong with France. The Clergy were to show him homage, the Aristocracy respect and the Third Estate ‘humble supplications’.