Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
Europe, as Napoleon imposed French patterns on most of Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, parts of Poland and, briefly, Spain. The concurrent introduction of French methods into the armed forces of various states in Germany and Italy created a new class of military servants of the state, while the need felt by all sides to gather information and impose order expanded the numbers of those engaged on police work in every region. The consequence was a dramatic growth in state organs of control all over Europe.
Britain remained aloof from changes taking place on the Continent, but if French methods of state control had not affected it, the tendency to politicise questions of law and order had. And although the repressive measures of the late 1790s had extirpated every germ of subversion and Trafalgar had removed the threat of invasion, the British government continued to act as though it were under threat from the French pestilence, and from revolution in general. At the same time, it acquired some of the bad habits wafting across the Channel. The practice of prying into private correspondence was illegal in Britain, and was only permitted in exceptional cases of national emergency, requiring a specific warrant from the home secretary in each case. While no more than six warrants had been issued allowing the inspection of mail between 1788 and 1798, the number for the period 1799–1815 was 139.12
William Pitt died in January 1806, and was succeeded in office by Lord Grenville’s ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, which achieved little beyond the abolition of the slave trade. In March 1807 Pitt’s supporters returned to power under the Duke of Portland, who was succeeded two years later by Spencer Perceval, a much-liked man but an unpopular prime minister. Diminutive but determined, a clean-living, devoted father of twelve, a relentlessly cheerful evangelical fervently opposed to Catholic emancipation, hunting, gambling and the slave trade, Perceval was utterly convinced of the rightness of his views. To Britain’s isolation from the rest of Europe he brought a smug conviction that it was her Protestant destiny to resist the corruption that had laid all others low.
The war with France had turned into a trade war, which played havoc with grain prices and devastated the cotton industry. Perceval’s Orders in Council, which gave the Royal Navy draconian rights over the shipping of neutral countries, imposed in 1807 ostensibly as a response to Napoleon’s Continental System but also as a means to hound slavers, led to conflict with the United States and a sharp downturn in the economy. This was compounded by the failure of the harvests of 1809, 1810, 1811 and 1812, by which time an estimated one in five people in Lancashire towns was entirely dependent on relief. There were strikes in Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1808 and 1810, some violent. Economic depression in 1810 was followed by bank failures as a result of a shortage of specie. Unemployment generated by the introduction of machinery was intensified by the outbreak of war with the United States in 1812, which closed an important market. The weekly wage of handloom weavers in Bolton fell steadily from twenty-five shillings in 1805 to fourteen in 1812.13
The misery was only slightly palliated by the opening up of European markets in the course of 1812 and 1813 as Napoleon’s stranglehold on the Continent loosened following his disastrous defeat in Russia. The harvest of 1813 was unusually abundant, and cheap grain flowed in from the Baltic ports, hitherto under French control. The price of grain fell from 120 shillings to fifty-six, which alleviated the suffering of the poor but ruined many farmers. And the winter of 1813–14 was unusually severe, with the Thames freezing over in February.14
The government’s problems were exacerbated by a revival in the movement for parliamentary reform. A particularly irritating thorn in its side was the Wiltshire baronet Sir Francis Burdett, who having married the banking heiress Sophia Coutts could afford to carry on a running battle against the establishment, denouncing its corruption, humbug and despotic ways. Elected to Parliament in 1802, only to be excluded on a point of order, he was returned again in 1807 as a Member for Westminster. He continued to make trouble for the government until 1810, when he was sent to the Tower for contempt by the Speaker. At the news of his arrest, a mob gathered and clashed with the military escort conducting him to the Tower, and then roamed London breaking prominent ministers’ windows. He was released after three months.
Burdett had befriended other would-be reformers such as William Cobbett, Francis Place and Major John Cartwright. Cobbett, originally a supporter of the government, now campaigned on behalf of the poor workers of the north, and would move on to champion reform of Parliament. Cartwright was a long-standing campaigner for universal male suffrage, secret ballots and annual parliaments. Born in 1740 into an old Nottinghamshire landed family, he had served as a naval officer, filled an administrative post in the colonies and then commanded his county militia, settling down as a farmer in Lincolnshire. But in 1803 he had moved to Enfield so as to be closer to London.
In 1811 he helped set up a club named after the seventeenth-century parliamentarian John Hampden, who had defied Charles I. Burdett was chairman. Its original purpose was to create a lobby of influential people for electoral reform, but lack of interest made Cartwright look elsewhere. He set off on a tour of manufacturing towns, travelling on horseback despite his seventy-two years, setting up Hampden Clubs wherever he could, and there were soon flourishing branches in Royston, Oldham, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyme, Middleton and Stockport. Their purpose was entirely constitutional and their methods legal. That did not stop Cartwright from being arrested.
The authorities were in a state of alarm at the rising tide of popular discontent. Unemployment, falling wages and the high price of bread gave rise to despair as well as anger at technological innovation and new practices being brought into areas such as the stocking-weaving industry.
Confrontations between workers and factory owners were sometimes violent, but more commonly took the form of collective bargaining, and the aggrieved workers were on the whole deferential. In Arnold, a small town outside Nottingham, knitters broke into workshops, removed jack-wires from the knitting frames to immobilise them, and deposited them in the local church, meaning to negotiate from a position of strength. The owners held firm, so public meetings were held to enlist the support of the wider population, but these were dispersed by troops. It was only then that the workers resorted to violence, against the hated machines which in their imagination stood for unemployment and downward pressure on wages.15
The machine-wreckers were known as ‘Luddites’, after a legendary figure, Ned Ludd, who probably never existed. Their attacks grew in frequency and ferocity in the second half of 1811, and by February 1812 about a thousand stocking-making frames had been destroyed. These were rented from the owners by the craftsmen who worked at them in their own homes, and were thus widely dispersed and vulnerable. A band of Luddites could sweep into a village at night, wreck several dozen frames and be gone in the space of an hour. As they grew bolder, they also destroyed machinery in factories and mills, sometimes burning these down in the process. The government reacted by strengthening an Act dating from 1721 to make frame-breaking a capital offence. Lord Byron made his only, highly impassioned, speech in the House of Lords against this.
Militia and troops were mobilised against the Luddites, which prompted some of them to arm, by raiding private houses at night or, in one case, the arms depot of the Sheffield militia. In this case they only took a few weapons, and concentrated on destroying the rest so they could not be used against them. But as detachments of regular troops patrolled at night, they heard, or fancied they heard, the occasional gunshot. This was taken as evidence of secret nocturnal drilling, although a more likely explanation would be poaching, a national pastime and an essential resource in hard times.16
On 11 May 1812 the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was shot at close range and killed in the lobby of the House of Commons. The news brought jubilant crowds onto the streets, and troops had to be called out to restore order and conduct the assassin to prison at Newgate. This unlikely hero was a merchant from Liverpool by the name of John Bellingham who bore paranoid grudges against various members of the establishment, and may have been put up to the act by some commercial interest. But his trial was conducted with such haste that the investigation did not cover all possible avenues, and, aside from his personal sense of injustice, his motivation must remain