1. WHO TELLS THE NEWS?
The cathedral city of Canterbury had a barracks on the downs nearby until it closed, when the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders left, in March 2013. In the last fifty years soldiers have gone from here to the Falklands, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. This is my home town and I have seen feelings veer over time from antipathy - squaddies barred from pubs - to respect and sympathy - 'help for heroes' - and back to suspicion again. 'One does wonder, though, why they joined the army in the first place?' asked a woman, looking sideways at me on the bus. Not so different then, from the way people spoke about Wellington's 'scum of the earth', the heroes of the Peninsular War. The first barracks here were built for them in Military Road by a young speculator of dubious reputation. He made a fortune.
In the twenty-two years from 1793 to 1815, with a brief gap in 1802-3, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars touched people in every part of Britain. Boys who were babies when the wars began fought in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. Because of the way recruiting and balloting were organised, every village, every 'hundred', had to list its men, and men from one in five families were directly involved, in the army and navy, the militia and volunteers. As the years passed, so the bullish, flamboyant figure of Napoleon came to dominate so strongly that the whole conflict was given his name and Boney became the bogeyman of children's nightmares. The period has been labelled in different ways - the Romantic Era, the Age of Wonder, the Age of Scandal, the Age of Cant - yet behind all those lay a country at war. And as I thought about the men who marched away I began to wonder, how did the wars affect the lives of people in Britain, not those who fought, but those at home looking on, waiting, working, watching?
This book is an attempt to pursue that question by following a few people and families. It is a cavalcade with a host of actors - a crowd biography, if such a thing is possible. It moves from fields and farms to dockyards and foundries, theatres and fairs, drawing rooms and clubs. It follows the back and forth of war and domestic politics, seeing how news reached the people, how fear bred suspicion and propaganda fuelled patriotism, how victories were celebrated and the dead were mourned, how some became rich and others starved. The big names are here - Pitt, Fox, Nelson, Wellington, Wilberforce and others - but history is not a matter of individual lives, however powerful or heroic. It is multi-layered, with many facets. At some times in this story conflict at home seems more pressing than battles abroad, with the state silencing free speech, spies sending reports, the militia firing on crowds. In Ireland that conflict was deadly. For some people the reports and rumours of victories and defeats and the accounts of Napoleon's lightning marches were like a huge running serial that they could not get enough of. For others they were a muddle of confused events in places with difficult foreign names, humming in the background, slipping off the side of the page. The wars were like permanent bad weather, so all-surrounding that people stopped referring to them and merely said 'in these dismal times', 'in such troubling and dangerous times' or simply 'in these times'. They affected everyone, sometimes directly, and sometimes almost without their knowing it, and in the process the underlying structures of British society ground against each other and slowly shifted, like the invisible movement of tectonic plates.
To sketch the bigger picture, the telling swerves from general to particular, from the state of the wool trade or the action of a military campaign to a man tilling a field, a woman sitting on the stairs. And although the wars and the political disputes are areas of collective action - regiments and crews, parties, crowds and mobs - the detail of those lives also suggests how separate our lives are, even when we call ourselves a 'nation'. What has a widow tramping to see a wounded son to do with a countess gambling in St James's? How does a south Wales ironworker connect with a country banker, or an elderly clergyman in his study? What 'world' do they share?
The war rumbles beneath the late poems of Burns, and colours the work of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb, Clare, Byron and Shelley; it affects Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen; it prompts moral outpourings from Hannah More and angry articles from Cobbett and Leigh Hunt; it inspires paintings by de Loutherbourg and Turner. The prints of Gillray, Rowlandson, the Cruikshanks and fellow satirists are a version of the history in themselves, biased and brilliant. These names have endured. But men and women of all classes wrote letters, diaries and memoirs. And many thousands, from women applying for parish relief to relatives looking for places for war orphans, left no record but signed their name only with a cross, on documents still in the archives. Among the crowds, here are some of the voices in this book:
The Heber family of Shropshire and London, clergymen and bibliophiles
William Harness, soldier, and his wife Bessy
James Oakes, prosperous citizen of Bury St Edmunds
The Gurney family, Norwich bankers with many children and cousins
Samuel and Hannah Greg, of Quarry Bank Mill in Lancashire
The Hoare family, private bankers in Fleet Street
The Galton family, gunsmiths of Birmingham
William Rowbottom, Oldham weaver
Boys: Samuel Bamford from Manchester, William Lovett from Penzance, Thomas Cooper from Gainsborough, future Chartist writers and leaders
John Marshall, linen-mill owner from Leeds
Aristocrats: Amabel Hume-Campbell, Countess de Grey, and her friend Agneta Yorke; Lady Jerningham and her daughter Charlotte; Sarah Spencer, later Lady Lyttelton
Betsey Fremantle and her sister Eugenia Wynne
Mary Hardy, from a Norfolk brewing family
Farmers: James Badenach of Aberdeen, Randall Burroughes from Suffolk, William Barnard of Essex
Robert Pilkington of the arms depot at Weedon Bec, Northamptonshire
Sailors: Jane Austen's sailor brothers Francis and Charles; Lieutenant Thomas Gill; the Scottish seamen, John Nicol and Robert Hay
William Salmon, a young merchant mariner from the Bristol Channel
Thomas Perronet Thompson from Hull, soldier, briefly Governor of Sierra Leone
The Hutchinson family, farmers from County Durham, and their cousins the Monkhouses from Cumberland
The Longsdon family, farmers and textile merchants from Derbyshire
James Weatherley, factory boy in Manchester
The Chambers brothers, William and Robert, growing up in Peebles and Edinburgh
* * *
What did newspaper readers in a provincial town know, or think, about their country at the start of the 1790s? They were told, repeatedly, that Britain was a great power despite losing the American colonies only a decade or so before. The humiliation made the older generation nervous of war, yet the American conflict was also an arena where soldiers and sailors, contractors and arms-makers proved themselves and learned lessons. Since then, horizons had widened and trade had grown: travel books offered graphic accounts of distant countries and wild tracts still to be explored. People read of wars in India, trading posts in the East Indies, sugar and slavery in the Caribbean, rivers in Africa and new convict settlements in Australia. They began talking of 'empire'. And at home, they had become surprisingly fond of their king, George III, celebrating his recovery from a bout of madness in 1788 with tears and relief, and disapproving, by contrast, of the Prince of Wales and his extravagant ways.
When war came, the London and provincial papers carried full reports of debates and immensely detailed - if late and often inaccurate - accounts of military and naval actions, copied from despatches in the officialGazette. Although papers carried a heavy tax and were expensive, news spread fast. Men and women interested in politics and the progress of the war devoured papers, pamphlets, and monthly and quarterly journals, discussing them in the book clubs that met in many towns, collecting eclectic libraries of history and travel, romances and philosophy, sermons and verse. These were social as much as literary gatherings: the Birmingham Book Club, which had been going since the mid-1770s, had a group portrait painted in 1792, showing a convivial bunch of radical tradesmen with clay pipes and tankards on the table, and not a book to be seen.1 In all clubs, members argued over their purchases, especially political works. In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, written in the late 1790s, General Tilney, a keen book club member, despatches the young women to bed, explaining, 'I have many pamphlets to finish before I close my eyes, and perhaps may be poring over the affairs of the nation for hours after you are asleep.'2
The news was part of daily life for many middle-class families. Mary Russell Mitford was five when the war broke out. Despite her family's financial problems as her father gambled his way through her mother's fortune, they could always afford their paper. As a toddler Mitford was perched on the breakfast table 'to read some Foxite newspaper, "Courier" or "Morning Chronicle", the Whiggish oracles of the day'. As a reward her mother would read the ballad of the Children in the Wood, 'and I looked for my favourite ballad after every performance, just as the piping bullfinch that hung in the window looked for his lump of sugar after going through "God save the King". The two cases were exactly parallel.'3 The leisured classes who could not afford a daily paper took one weekly, or relied on the Evening Mail, which arrived every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Friends and relatives commented on war news in the press as something shared. During the Revolutionary Wars, from 1793 to 1802, the Revd Reginald Heber exchanged letters almost every week with his sister Elizabeth in London. Elizabeth and her sister Anne sent groceries like Bohea tea, nutmeg or pyramid sugar to the Shropshire family, and looked after their sons when they went to school in the south. Their affectionate letters were often sprinkled with the phrase 'You will have seen in the papers', usually accompanied by expressions of horror at French excesses or the riotous populace at home.
Less well-off families sometimes shared subscriptions. William Chambers's father, an avid reader of the twice-weekly Edinburgh Star, could not afford to subscribe: 'All he could do was to be a member of a club to take in the paper, which was handed about to one after the other, each member being allowed to have it in turn for a certain number of hours.'4 Men also read the news in subscription reading rooms, coffee houses and taverns, which took a wide range of papers. Visiting Glasgow in 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth found 'the largest coffee room I ever saw', in the piazza of the Exchange. 'Perhaps there might be thirty gentlemen sitting on the circular bench of the window, each reading a newspaper,' she wrote in her journal, looking like 'men seen at the extremity of the opera-house, diminished into puppets.'5 The linen-mill owner John Marshall also admired the room, brilliantly lit with candles, and rarely with fewer than a hundred people in it. 'There are 1100 Subscribers to the Coffee Room at 28/- a year,' he noted carefully. 'They take London & Edinburgh papers & journals, country papers & 9 copies of the Sun, Star & Courier & all the monthly publications.'6 Although this was exceptional, most manufacturing towns and ports, even small ones, had reading rooms, sometimes with one room for British and one for foreign papers. At Teignmouth, the public library took the London papers, including the Hunts' weekly Examiner. In London, papers were hired out by the hour then sent to the provinces, an annoyance to the government, since vendors sent them back as 'unsold', dodging the tax.
The progress of the war and the battles of politics were played out, too, in songs and ballads, plays and processions. Queues formed round print-shop windows to see the latest satires, and pedlars carried broadsheets with crude woodcuts of ships and guns and John Bull in his many guises.
Workers read the papers aloud in taverns, so that even the illiterate could follow the news.7 When Alexander Aikin visited the great copper mine in Parys, Anglesey, on a mild summer Sunday in 1797, he saw 'a circle of men gathered around a point of rock on which was seated the orator of the party reading a newspaper aloud and commenting upon it'.8 But still, local and personal concerns came first: weather and wages, bread and board, children and love affairs. The sailor John Nicol found this when he borrowed the papers from the owner of a quarry where he was hiding from the press gang. 'The other workmen assembled in my cottage on the evenings I got them and I read them aloud,' he remembered. 'Then we would discuss the important parts together. When they spoke of heavy taxes I talked of China. When they complained of hard times I told them of West Indian slaves - but neither could make any impression on the other.'9
As the men (and some women) marched and sailed off to war, letters from soldiers and sailors were longed-for events. 'I could almost have jumped out of the window to snatch the letters from him,' wrote Sarah Spencer, waiting in the bow window in the sunshine for the messenger who collected their letters from the post, and might bring one from her midshipman brother.10 As letters circulated, family and friends often found their accounts at odds with the official despatches. From Flanders in 1794, Major William Harness wrote home to his wife, complaining about the inaccuracies of the press and the lack of trust in the army:
I can easily suppose that this event will give place to infinitely less probable reports in the English Papers; for we have seen that credulous Country put in alarm from accounts that deserve as little attention, by the flaming Editor of a Newspaper, whose ignorance of the geography of the Country, of position, and dispositions, can only be equalled by his absolute blindness of the force, even of ourselves. My Bessy will never let her judgement be drawn away by these hired pervertors of Truth.11
This tirade was prompted by Bessy telling him that she had been reading the Courier. 'That iniquitous paper', he raged. 'What a diabolic Trade do these despicable wretches rest their subsistence upon!' 'All read of war,' Coleridge wrote in 'Fears in Solitude', 'The best amusement for our morning meal!'
Alternately trusting and distrusting the papers, people made their own records. In letters, diaries and memoirs they tried to make sense of the times, as well as recording their daily lives. William Rowbottom, a hand-loom weaver, living in Burnley Lane near Oldham, was approaching forty at the start of the war. Almost every day he wrote in his vellum-bound notebooks, in sloping copperplate. He rarely wrote of himself, his brothers and sisters, his wife Anne - or Nanny - and their six children.12 Instead he recorded local events, as a conscious historical exercise. He loved statistics - the number of households, the records of births, marriages and deaths. He listed prices - meal, flour, pease, malt, treacle, butter, bacon, soap, salt and candles - and marked their rise and fall. His politics are clear: on 26 December 1797, he wrote, 'Died the great patriot who put a stop to general Warrants, John Wilkes Esquire FRS'; on 14 July 1800, 'Died Crispin Clegg, tailor of Royton, a person formerly attached to the Cause of Freedom.' He used the word 'patriot' in its old sense of one speaking for the country against a cabal of ministerial and court interests, the way the Tory Samuel Johnson had used it, in 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' In his account people march past, ballad-singers, grocers, blacksmiths and innkeepers; they die from old age, consumption and fever; they kill themselves for love or for the shame of bankruptcy; a mother, holding her baby in her arms, leans too close to the spindle on her spinning wheel. These daily losses seem more terrible than the impersonal lists of numbers lost at sea or in battle. But behind everything rolls 'this disasterous war'.
At the other end of the social scale, diarists, letter-writers and memoirists among the aristocracy and gentry also recorded events. Betsey and Eugenia Wynne, for example, began writing their diaries in exercise books on the same day, when they were eleven and nine, and Betsey kept hers up, with one pause, until she died in her eightieth year. The Wynnes lived abroad after Betsey's high-living father met financial trouble in the mid-1780s, but in 1796, alarmed by the progress of the French army, they left Florence and sailed from Livorno on theInconstant. In Naples a few months later, Betsey married the frigate's captain, Thomas Fremantle, their wedding organised by Emma, Lady Hamilton. Sailing with the fleet after the attack on Tenerife in which Nelson lost his arm, the nineteen-year-old Betsey nursed both her badly wounded husband and his commander: as Thomas reminded her years later, remembering Nelson, 'the first note he ever wrote with his left hand was to you.'13 So Betsey's diaries move from sea battles and crowded ports to London parties and politics, the love-lives of her sisters, Eugenia, Harriet and Justinia, and the years of bringing up her nine children, waiting for letters from Thomas, her 'caro sposo', to 'my dearest Tussy', as he called her, when he sailed off to war again.
Some of Betsey's elite set were wild and improvident, some were pious, some brilliant, some boring, some wealthy, some drowning in debt. But they all wrote constantly. They wrote in the morning and the afternoon and in the early hours, in studies and boudoirs, clubs and their country houses. They wrote at home and on the road - many coaches had fitted writing desks. They sent notes across town and wax-sealed letters to the country; they wrote to children at school, to friends they had seen an hour ago, and to their soldier and sailor sons and husbands. Opening the thin, closely written sheets, men on campaigns read accounts of balls and outings, pets and horses, the hay crop and the filling of the beer casks, like news from another world.
Copyright © 2014 by Jenny Uglow
