removal of the restrictions caused by the Continental System excited
lively hopes among the trading community. During the war our exports had
chiefly depended upon an organized contraband trade. Even so, in 1811,
shipments had been made to the Continent to the value of £11,000,000.
It was supposed that, without restrictions, the sum might be doubled.
Everybody wished for a share in the golden harvest, and much money was
transferred from legitimate and lucrative trade to the purchase of
colonial produce for exportation. But what is called effective demand
for any commodity depends not on the desire of the purchaser, but upon
his power of purchase. The exhausting wars of late years so limited that
power of purchase that the exports of England either lay in the ports
unsold or were got rid of at less than the cost price. Nor did our
restrictive commercial policy allow a ready interchange of commodities,
which might have tended to render the disaster less. Peace with America
had produced somewhat the same effects. Thus, both in agriculture and in
commerce, widespread suffering and distress existed.
[Sidenote: Riots and political meetings.]
The difficulties were increased at the time by a considerable reduction
in the circulating medium. The fall in agricultural profits had ruined
many banks in agricultural districts, and induced others to restrict
their issue of paper money. A severe winter, a deficient harvest, and
the rise of the price of wheat before the close of the year (1815) again
to 103s., came to complete the general misery. The effect was a
widespread series of riots; rick-burning and machine-breaking were
constant, especially in the east of England. At Littleport, in the isle
of Ely, the town was for two days in the hands of the mob (May 22), and
the tumult was only suppressed after the military had been called out.
In the coal and iron districts, though the people on the whole behaved
well, great meetings of unemployed operatives took place; while in
Nottingham and the neighbourhood the Luddite disturbances broke out with
fresh vehemence. The discontent and unhappiness of the people before
long assumed the shape of a political movement. The change must be
attributed to the writings of Cobbett more than to any other single
cause. For some years he had published a Liberal periodical called "The
Weekly Political Register," in which, with remarkable clearness of style
and simple power of argument, he had constantly attacked the Government.
In 1816, he changed the price of his paper from a shilling to twopence,
and it at once became the oracle of the working classes. His view was,
that all the evils of the time might be cured by reform of Parliament.
He indeed went far beyond what the nation was then fit for, demanding
universal suffrage and annual Parliaments. But his work was the
beginning of the great agitation which continued till the passing of the
Reform Bill of 1832.
[Sidenote: Meeting in Spa Fields. Dec. 2, 1816.]
Against this new sort of opposition without the walls of Parliament the
Government set to work with violent measures of repression. The Hampden
Clubs, which had sprung up in all directions for purposes of
parliamentary reform, no doubt had fallen in many cases into the hands
of dangerous demagogues. In London they appear to have become connected
with a body of men known as Spencean philanthropists, after Spence, who,
at the beginning of the century, had made himself notorious by his
socialistic plans. To this society belonged Thistlewood, the two
Watsons, and a man of the name of Preston. Castle, a spy of the police,
crept in among them, and probably urged them to more reckless action
than they would otherwise have taken. According to his account, a great
plot was on foot for taking the Tower, seizing the Government, and
establishing a Committee of Public Safety. A meeting in Spa Fields in
connection with this plot was held upon the 2nd of December. It was to
be addressed by Mr. Hunt, a vain and empty demagogue, but before he
arrived the Spenceans had begun to act upon their own authority. Young
Watson had led a number of men to Snow Hill to ransack a gunsmith's
shop, and had there shot a gentleman who had remonstrated with him. The
crowd then marched to the Royal Exchange, where they were met by the
Lord Mayor, who courageously withstanding them, with only seven
assistants, easily dispersed them. Preston appears also singlehanded to
have climbed the wall of the Tower, and have summoned the guard to
surrender. Beyond this nothing formidable was done.
[Sidenote: Petition from the Corporation of London.]
While hunger and misery, the depression of trade, and the influence of a
few able demagogues, were driving the poorer classes to acts of
violence, and a dangerous union was being established between social and
political discontent, the middle classes were gradually arriving at the
same conclusion as their inferiors with regard to the necessity of a
thorough change in the constitution of Parliament. In December, only a
few weeks after the uproar in Spa Fields, the Corporation of London, of
late the firm supporters of the policy of Government, addressed a
petition to the Prince Regent, which throws a striking light upon the
feelings which the conduct of Government since the war had excited.
After a rapid summary "of the distress and misery, no longer limited to
one portion of the Empire, and under the irresistible pressure of which
the commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing interests are equally
sinking," the address goes on to say: "Our grievances are the natural
effect of rash and ruinous wars, unjustly commenced and pertinaciously
persisted in, where no rational object was to be attained; of immense
subsidies to foreign powers to defend their own territories or to commit
aggressions on those of our neighbours; of a delusive paper currency; of
an unconstitutional and unprecedented military force in time of peace;
of the unexampled and increasing magnitude of the Civil List; of the
enormous sums paid for unmerited pensions and sinecures; and of a long
course of the most lavish and improvident expenditure of the public
money throughout every branch of the Government, all arising from the
corrupt and inadequate state of the representation of the people in
Parliament, whereby all constitutional control over the servants of the
Crown has been lost, and Parliaments have become subservient to the will
of Ministers."
[Sidenote: Incapacity of the Tory party.]
It began to be evident that, as the great common interest of the war
disappeared, and the popularity and influence derived from its
successful termination wore itself out, the Tory party, with its
repressive and reactionary doctrines, would find itself wholly unable to
handle with success the domestic questions which inevitably arose. For
some years longer it successfully held its position. Circumstances
enabled it again to separate the middle and lower classes, and full time
was allowed it to exhibit its repressive principles of home government.
[Sidenote: Attack on the Regent. June 28, 1817.]
[Sidenote: Repressive measures of the Government. March.]
The success of the Government was due to the excesses of the mob, and to
the exaggerated fear which it was found possible to excite among the
propertied classes. The Regent had scarcely opened Parliament, with an
assurance that he was well convinced of the loyalty of the great body of
his Majesty's subjects, but was determined to omit no precautions for
preserving public peace, when, as he was returning from the House, he
was ill-received by the people, and a missile thrown from the crowd even
broke one of the windows of his carriage. This outrage encouraged the
Government to take vigorous measures. It was not difficult to represent
the whole project of reform as being indissolubly mixed with the extreme
doctrines of Cobbett and the Spenceans. A secret committee of both
Houses was appointed to inquire into the public disaffection; that of
the Lords reported the existence of a great network of societies and
clubs, which, under pretence of parliamentary reform, were attempting to
infect the minds of all classes with a spirit of disaffection, and
contempt of law, religion, and morality, while no endeavours were
omitted to prepare the people to take up arms on the first signal of the
accomplishment of their design. The Commons committee declared (Feb. 19)
that the Hampden Clubs aimed at nothing short of revolution. Armed with
these reports, which were no doubt extraordinarily exaggerated,
Government introduced and carried Bills for preventing attempts to
seduce soldiers and sailors from their allegiance, to give to the Prince
Regent all the safeguards of an actual sovereign, to prevent seditious
meetings, and lastly (March 3), for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus
Act till the 1st of the ensuing July.
[Sidenote: Secret political meetings.]
[Sidenote: The Derby insurrection. June 10.]
The effect of these Acts was at once to give a certain reality to the
dangers on the false apprehension of which they had been based. Public
meetings being impossible, secret meetings, with all the dangers which
invariably attend them, sprang into existence. The worse affected and
more dangerous leaders of the people began to acquire influence, and
desperate designs, fomented and betrayed by spies in the employment of
Government, began to be entertained. It is impossible to suspect
benevolent gentlemen such as Lord Sidmouth of wilfully entrapping
ignorant artisans to their own destruction; but it is certain that use
was constantly made of spies who found it to their own advantage to
concoct and betray treasonable and atrocious conspiracies. The most
notorious of these spies was a man of the name of Oliver, who, giving
himself out as a delegate of London reforming societies, succeeded in
giving a new impulse to the plots in various parts of the manufacturing
districts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire. The violent
suppression by the military and constables of a peaceable meeting, known
as the meeting of blanketeers, at Manchester on the 29th of March, made
the people more ready to listen to his suggestions. The meeting was a
peaceful one, and acquired its name from the blankets or coats which
many of those assembled had strapped upon their backs. A few of them set
out upon a foolish march, intending to petition the Prince Regent in
person; but their intentions appear to have been quite peaceful, and
though many were apprehended, they were all discharged before trial. It
seems probable that what is known as the Derby insurrection was one of
the consequences of Oliver's representations. A man of the name of
Brandreth, known as "the Captain," went from house to house near
Pentridge, spreading such assertions as that England, Ireland, and
France were all to rise that night at ten o'clock, and that the
"northern clouds," or men from the north, would come down and sweep all
before them. A few men collected in arms at his summons. They do not
seem ever to have numbered much more than an hundred, and were without
difficulty dispersed, and many of them taken prisoners by the military
at a short distance from Nottingham. Such disturbances as these were
held to justify a second suspension of the Habeas Corpus.
[Sidenote: Suppression of seditious writings.]
[Sidenote: Mr. Hone's trial. Dec. 18, 1817.]
But it was not only against seditious actions that Lord Sidmouth
determined to proceed, but against seditious writings also. On the 27th
of March he wrote a circular to the Lords Lieutenant of counties, in
which he declared that in the opinion of the law officer the justices of
the peace might issue a warrant to apprehend any person charged before
them on oath with the publication of blasphemous or seditious libels,
and compel him to give bail to answer to the charge. Considering the
jealousy with which any political interference with the liberty of the
press was regarded, and that by Fox's Libel Bill even the judges were
held unfit to decide on the character of a libel, which was to be left
to the decision of the jury, it is difficult to conceive a more
high-handed interference with what was generally regarded as a
constitutional privilege. Considerable use was made of the instructions,
yet on the whole with so little success that the Government procured but
a single conviction. The most important of these trials was that of Mr.
Hone, which must have showed the Government, if nothing else could, how
odious and useless their attempts to stifle the free expression of
opinion was. Hone was a quiet and inoffensive publisher, a great
collector and reader of old books. He had published certain political
parodies, of which the subject can be pretty well understood from the
titles they bore, "The Sinecurist's Creed," "The Litany, or General
Supplication." It was against their alleged blasphemous character that
proceedings were taken. Each parody was the subject of a separate
trial, and the whole proceedings occupied three days. On the first day
Mr. Justice Abbott, on the second and third Lord Chief-Justice
Ellenborough occupied the bench. Hone defended himself, basing his
argument on the essential difference between parodies intended to throw
scorn upon the work parodied and those in which well-known writings were
travestied for the purpose of ridiculing some other subject, and
supporting himself by innumerable instances of political parodies
couched in biblical forms coming from the pens of well-known and
respected writers. His erudition enabled him to continue for many hours
on each day producing instances of this kind. With astonishing firmness
he refused to be browbeaten by Lord Ellenborough, and upon the third day
even attacked his judge for the partisan spirit in which he had charged
the jury the preceding evening. In all three trials, after a brief
consideration, the jury acquitted him. The persistency with which the
charges against Hone were pressed after his first acquittal entirely
discredited the grounds of public morality on which the Government was
professedly acting, and had all the appearance of a vindictive desire
for revenge on the part of men smarting under deserved political satire.
[Sidenote: The Alien Act. May 5, 1818.]
[Sidenote: The Indemnity Bill. March 13.]
The system pursued by the Tories, though for the time it was successful
in keeping up a general dread of popular violence, and thus temporarily
hushed the agitation for reform, was gradually alienating from
Government all classes but the one immediately connected with it, and
forcing the nation at large to look upon Government itself as its
natural enemy, and to fix its hopes more and more upon some
constitutional change. Indeed, though its large majority in the House
enabled the Government to reject all liberal measures, and to pass those
which it itself produced, a powerful Opposition began to show itself
within the walls of the House, which the conduct of the Administration
did not tend to conciliate. The extension of the Alien Act, which
reserved to the Government the power of removing aliens who were objects
of suspicion, and which had already been twice renewed since the peace,
for a further period of two years, was regarded as an attack upon the
English right of asylum in favour of the Continental despotisms. It was
warmly opposed, and a flaw found in it which secured its rejection. By
the Act of Union, shareholders in the Bank of Scotland became
naturalized subjects. An alien, by taking shares in the Bank, could
therefore evade that Act. A clause was introduced to check this means of
evading the Act; but as naturalized subjects had certain exemptions
with regard to the payment of duties, the Lower House held that the
introduction of the clause was an infringement of their privilege, as
being in fact the introduction of a money clause. It had therefore to be
dropped and a new Bill introduced. Even an attempt on the part of
Government to gain popularity turned to its discredit. A show was made
of destroying numerous sinecures; but as this destruction was coupled
with a Pension List of an amount almost equal to that of the sinecures
destroyed, the trick excited more anger than gratitude among the public.
But the great contest of the time was on the subject of the indemnity
demanded by the ministry to cover acts done during the suspension of the
Habeas Corpus Act. A sealed bag of papers was laid upon the table of the
House, which the Government demanded should be referred to a committee
of secresy. The committee was to be appointed by ballot, but lists were
circulated among the ministerial majority of the members for whom they
should vote; in fact, therefore, the committee was nominated by the
Government itself. The report declared that the suspension was
necessary, and that the Government had used the powers given them well.
But the demand for an indemnity, while the grounds for that indemnity
were kept studiously secret and examined only by the Government
nominees, for the avowed purpose of keeping from the public the names of
the witnesses who had given secret information, increased still further
the bad impression which the employment of men like Oliver had already
created.
[Sidenote: Condition of the royal family.]
Under other circumstances loyalty for the Crown might have served to
lessen the growing division between the Government and the people; the
state of the royal family, and the character of most of its members, was
now such as to weaken all such feeling. For the old King and Queen there
was doubtless respect and pitying affection; but it was known that both
the afflicted monarch himself and his faithful wife and guardian might
at any moment die. As it was, they lived retired from the public view.
The Prince Regent, the ostensible sovereign of the country, was
understood to be little more than a selfish voluptuary. His reception on
the opening of Parliament of 1817 shows how much he had lost the
affections of the people. His unhappy domestic relations, shortly to
become the ground of a keen party struggle, not only afforded a
perpetual subject of scandal, but seemed to forbid the possibility of a
direct male heir to the throne. The people's hopes were centred on the
Princess Charlotte, the Regent's only daughter, but lately married to
Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and the blow was felt to be heavy when
she died in 1817, immediately after giving birth to a child which did
not live. It seemed for the instant highly probable that the large and
strong family of the old King would come to an end in the first
generation. Before the close of the following year this probability was
lessened. No less than four members of the royal family were then
married--Princess Elizabeth, the Duke of Clarence, the Duke of
Cambridge, and the Duke of Kent, who married respectively the Landgrave
of Hesse Homburg, the Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, the Princess
Augusta of Hesse, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg Saalfield, the
widow of the Prince of Leiningen and sister of Prince Leopold. Had the
family been at all popular such events, under the circumstances, would
certainly have afforded joy to the nation. As it was, they only afforded
an opportunity for the expression of a deeply fixed belief in the
extravagance and wastefulness of the royal family. Of all the marriages
that of the Duke of Kent with a sister of Prince Leopold was alone well
received. The demand for an increase of income on behalf of the other
princes was strongly resisted in Parliament; the sum proposed for the
Duke of Clarence was reduced by nearly half, and a grant of £6000 for
the Duke of Cumberland, who had been married three years previously, was
absolutely rejected by a majority of six members, a result which was
received with loud cheers.
[Sidenote: The ministers' insecurity with the present Parliament.]
The insecurity felt by Government, in spite of its large majority, in
the present Parliament betrayed it into conduct which still further
increased its unpopularity. The Parliament was now in its sixth session,
and therefore approaching its time of dissolution. But several
circumstances might call it again into existence. A clause in the
Regency Act provided that Parliament should be summoned on the death of
the Queen. The ministry had lately got the clause repealed; but the
death either of the King or Regent, if happening before the day
appointed for the assembling of the new Parliament, would have caused
the reassembling of the old. Both King and Queen might die at any
moment; nor was the Regent's health good. The dissolution was therefore
hurried on in a manner which caused much anger. On the 10th of June
Parliament was prorogued and dissolved at the same time, a form of
proceeding unprecedented since the days of Charles II. The temper of the
country was not improved by this step, and the elections were attended
with the bitterest party strife. In Westminster Sir George Murray, who
stood on the Tory interest to replace if possible Lord Cochrane, who had
withdrawn to take command of the navies of Chili, was so ill-used that
his life was thought to be in danger. Several Radical candidates offered
themselves, among others Hunt the orator; but the more respectable
inhabitants contrived to save themselves from the disgrace of such
representatives by bringing in Romilly, without any expense of his own,
at the head of the poll. The other member was Sir Francis Burdett. In
the same way the City of London elected four Liberals, rejecting three
old ministerial representatives. This clearly showed the rising temper
of the middle classes. But as the representation was then arranged no
great change was possible, and the ministers found themselves still in
possession of a large majority (July).
[Sidenote: Evacuation of France by the allies. Nov. 30, 1818.]
Before the assembling of the new Parliament (Jan. 14, 1819) one piece of
foreign history deserves notice. A congress was held at Aix-la-Chapelle
(Oct. 2, 1818), at which the final evacuation of France by the allies,
although only three of the five years stipulated were accomplished, was
agreed upon. This wise and just act seems to have been chiefly due to
the Duke of Wellington, in opposition to some of the extreme Tories of
the Cabinet.
[Sidenote: Resumption of cash payments. May 1819.]
In spite of their parliamentary majority, the ministry did not feel very
secure upon their seats, and it was perhaps more with a view of
re-establishing their credit with the country than from increased wisdom
that the Cabinet so far changed its views with regard to the currency
question as to accept the truth of the doctrines which Francis Horner
had some years (1811) before laid down, and introduced a measure in
accordance with the plans of Ricardo, the political economist, for the
resumption of cash payments. The Bank had already issued a considerable
quantity of gold. Since 1817 as much as £6,000,000 had been put into
circulation, but as the paper money still continued, as a matter of
course this partial action produced no good effect; the gold had found
its way out of the country, chiefly to France. It was now ordered that
this voluntary payment in gold should cease. An examination of the
affairs of the Bank proved that it was in excellent condition, and a
series of resolutions were passed and subsequently embodied in Bills by
Mr. Peel. By these, from the 1st of February 1820, the Bank was obliged
to exchange its notes for gold ingots, in not less quantity than sixty
ounces, at the rate of 81s. the ounce; in October of the same year the
rate was to be reduced to 79s. 6d. the ounce; on the 1st of May 1822
the rate was reduced to the regular mint price of £3, 17s. 10½d.; and in
May 1823 all notes were to be paid on demand in legal coin. As a fact,
on the 1st of May 1821 the Bank resumed complete payment in cash.
[Sidenote: Foreign Enlistment Bill.]
[Sidenote: Catholic emancipation rejected. May 3.]
[Sidenote: Reform of Scotch burghs. May 6.]