Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
is no doubt in a most alarming situation,’ William Wordsworth wrote from London to his wife Mary, ‘and if much firmness be not displayed by the government confusion & havoc & murder will break out & spread terribly.’17
A new ministry was formed by Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool. He had held government office since 1795, under Pitt, Addison and Portland, been secretary of state for war in Perceval’s cabinet, and would go on to serve as prime minister for fifteen years. A modest and undemonstrative man, he had proved himself a good administrator with a tough streak. He was intelligent and only forty-two years old when he assumed office, but although his mother was half Indian and he himself had travelled widely on the Continent, he took an insular and defensive view of the world. He had been at the storming of the Bastille, but does not seem to have derived from the experience any deep understanding of how revolutions are made.
His home secretary was Henry Addington, created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805, a capable if mediocre man who had proved an undistinguished prime minister from 1801 to 1804. The son of a physician and a parson’s daughter, he had grown up in the shadow of his school friend William Pitt, whom he admired enormously and who assisted his ascent in politics. He was an honest man, but dull, pompous and set in his views. Although he was fifty-five years old when he became home secretary in 1812, he had never been abroad or north of Oxfordshire.
One of the most notable members of Liverpool’s cabinet, and in some ways the most controversial, was the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. Born plain Robert Stewart in 1769, the same year as Napoleon and Wellington, his father was a politically ambitious Ulster landowner of Scots Presbyterian descent, while his mother was the daughter of the Marquess of Hertford, a man of immense fortune who was close to the king. This connection helped his father advance rapidly, to become Baron Londonderry in 1789, progressing within seven years via a viscountcy to an earldom and a marquisate of his own.
Castlereagh, to which title Robert acceded in 1796 when his father vaulted into his earldom, was educated at Armagh and Cambridge. He was swept up in the general euphoria attendant on the Revolution in France, and toasted the Sovereignty of the People with gusto. But when he made his grand tour at the beginning of the 1790s he had occasion to see the disorders and licence this involved. His Ulster soul was repelled, and his growing interest in a promising political career made him recoil. He had fallen under the spell of Pitt, who rewarded his devotion in 1798 by nominating him chief secretary for Ireland. Castlereagh played an active part in suppressing the Irish rebellion of that year and in pushing through the Act of Union, for both of which he was widely reviled, not just in Ireland. The poet Shelley famously labelled him a murderer, while Byron called him a cruel despot.
A reserved, sensitive man who loved flowers and animals and was never happier than when tending them at his modest country retreat in Kent, Castlereagh was also devoted to his wife. Their unfashionably homely ménage was the butt of jokes, yet he was close to the dissolute prince regent. A poor speaker, Castlereagh was nevertheless a good manager of his party in Parliament and a competent administrator, proving his worth during spells at the Colonial and then the War Office during the crucial years of 1806–09. As foreign secretary he would frame British policy single-handedly over a decade, exerting a decisive influence in Europe and playing a significant part in the defeat of Napoleon. He was trusted by Liverpool, and assumed a dominant role in the cabinet. This had inherited some of Perceval’s sense of evangelical destiny, which goes some way to explain why its members did not waver in moments of adversity or pause to ask themselves whether their opponents might not have a point.
The Luddite disturbances had diminished in frequency by the time Lord Sidmouth took over at the Home Office in June 1812, but chilling reports kept coming in from all quarters. Major Seale, commander of the South Devon militia, reported on 30 June that an informer had told him there was a huge conspiracy, stretching from Glasgow to London: delegates were travelling around the country holding meetings with local committees and planning diversionary risings in the provinces to draw troops away from London before they struck in the capital. The conspirators were allegedly armed to the teeth. The theme of a plot to lure troops away from London by staging diversionary disturbances recurs in other letters received by Sidmouth, and spies sent in information that appeared to confirm that ‘a general insurrection’ was being planned by ‘secret committees’. A ‘Mr. S’ in Bolton had been overheard telling the town’s machine-breakers that great personages in London such as Burdett were only waiting for them to make a move that would bring down the government, and encouraging them to give the signal by burning down a factory at West Houghton.18
In July both Houses set up committees of secrecy to report on the disturbances. The reports bristle with the stock phrases ‘it appears’, ‘there is reason to believe’ and ‘evidence suggests’, and paint an ominous picture of dark goings-on, based on presuppositions and unsupported inference. According to the Commons committee, the disturbances had nothing spontaneous about them, and were the result of ‘organised systems of unlawful violence’; ‘language of the most mischievous nature’ had been employed by the rioters, who demonstrated ‘a sort of military training and discipline’. It makes much of reports of the bands being marshalled by leaders with ‘signals’ and of the fact that ‘rockets and blue lights have been seen by night’. Both reports dwell on the degree of organisation and coordination displayed, on the stockpiling of arms, on the existence of regional ‘committees’, on the ‘signs and countersigns’ used to guard against infiltrators. They quote an oath allegedly sworn by all adepts not to disclose the identity of members of the supreme ‘Secret Committee’ which was supposedly ‘the great mover of the whole machine’. The unstated conclusion is that there was a far-ranging conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. On 23 July Sidmouth laid before Parliament a Bill giving magistrates wider powers. Soldiers were quartered in every inn throughout the affected localities, and camps were set up in Sherwood Forest and on Kersal Moor. By the end of the year some 12,000 regular troops had been deployed in the area, as many as Wellington had in the Peninsula.19
The Home Office received a steady stream of demands for military protection from factory owners and magistrates, while private individuals took their own precautions. The Reverend Patrick Brontë fired a pistol out of his bedroom window at Haworth Parsonage every morning. At Keswick in the Lake District the poet Robert Southey got hold of ‘a rusty old gun’ and kept it loaded against the revolutionaries. An ardent republican in the 1790s, he now smelled sedition ‘even among these mountains’, and warned Lord Liverpool that if the troops were withdrawn from London ‘four and twenty hours would not elapse before the tricoloured flag would be planted upon Carlton House’.20
General Maitland, commanding the regular forces in the north of the country, did not believe in the likelihood of revolution. Earl Fitzwilliam, now lord lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of the worst-affected areas, maintained that the disturbances were no more than ‘the offspring of distress and want of employment’. Such confrontations as did occur between rioters and troops or militia were usually non-violent, and crowds dispersed peacefully. In Sheffield, women had gone around in a mob, but rather than loot, they forced shopkeepers to sell them flour at a price they thought fair: a strong belief in the ‘rights of free Englishmen’ lay at the root of many of the incidents and shaped their course. In July, the same month that Sidmouth sent out the soldiers, Fitzwilliam reported that the incidents had ceased and the country was quiet. The knitters continued to gather, and there were sporadic outbreaks of machine-breaking, but the crisis was over. In February 1813 the prince regent issued a proclamation calling on ‘all His Majesty’s subjects to exert themselves in preventing the recurrence of these atrocious crimes, and to warn those who may be exposed to the machinations of secret directors of the danger and wickedness of such advice’. By then Fitzwilliam was able to report ‘that the country is fast subsiding into a state of temper which promises that no further outrage will disturb the public tranquillity’, and that it was safe to withdraw the troops.21
The authorities’ tendency to view food riots and Luddite disturbances in political terms