Maintaining the contest with Buonaparte*: Britain in 1809
A snapshot of a nation in a given year is always going to displease, as much for its sins of inclusion as for those of omission. What I have done here is to choose several spheres of experience nationwide and to chart their situation in the year 1809. It is as much turned inwards as outwards. This was not just a time of huge international effort. It was also a time of industrial and population growth, from cottage to factory, from village to town, from animal strength to mechanical advantage. The opening is a sketch of the political situation at the beginning of 1809, and the rest of the paper looks in turn at the two major military events of the year, and then discusses social issues of the time, touching on questions of finance and demographics en passant.
I shall start with a little background…
In the aftermath of the Dos de Mayo and French repression of the revolt in Madrid and its environs, Asturian insurgents swallowed their pride and sent three deputations to the old enemy, Britain, seeking assistance in their predicament. The deputations were received rapturously by the London press, and in Parliament they were embraced by both sides of house. In his speech on the subject to the House of Commons, the Tory Foreign Minister Canning was to coin the famous principle (and I quote): “We shall proceed upon the principle, that any nation of Europe that starts up with a determination to oppose a power which, whether professing insidious peace or declaring open war, is the common enemy of all nations, whatever may be the existing political relations of that nation with Great Britain, becomes instantly our essential ally.”1 British action oversees was initially to see success in Portugal at Vimiero; though this was to be vitiated by the poor treaty of Cintra.2 Subsequently, however, the 30,000 British troops assembled to help the Spanish push the French out of Spain were themselves to be driven out of the Iberian peninsula by French forces in the autumn/winter of 1808-1809. On 19 January, 1809, the Lord Commissioner's speech, read out in the House of Lords, laid out the British position in the world at the beginning of that year.3 Not surprisingly, this was largely defined in opposition to France. And so the description of international politics noted the peace overtures which Napoleon and Alexander had made to Britain at Erfurt and their rejection by the British government (the sticking point had been the abandonment of the struggle in Spain).4 The speech regretted that the successful expulsion of the French from Portugal had been marred by some of the disgraceful articles in the Franco-British Cintra convention. British support for Sweden was to be continued. In the speeches that followed, relations with America were discussed, Lord Liverpool being concerned that the Orders in Council designed to retaliate against France were harming British/American relations. On the question of the budget, this was to be subordinated to war costs and the regular army was to be increased, as was the militia, which was gradually becoming a feeder for the regular army. As for the navy, it was voted in February 1809 that 130,000 seamen should be employed for the year 1809, including 31,400 royal marines – precisely the same as for 1808, at a cost of 10.5 million pounds.
So much for the opening of parliament for 1809…
In that year, that august body was to meet ninety-seven times (whether in the Lords or the Commons), the final meeting for that session taking place on 1 July. As for the two most important foreign policy decisions of the year, namely the campaign in Spain culminating in the battle of Talavera and the attempt on Walcheren, these were not subjects of extended debate (although the principles guiding them had been laid down) since parliament was not in session when the news arrived of the results of former and for the whole start of the latter.
The battle in Spain at Talavera de la Reina (27-28 July, 1809) was the final act in Britain's attempt to provide direct military assistance to Spain, taking troops from Portugal. However, owing to the inability of the Spanish and British commanders (Sir Arthur Wellesley and Don Gregorio de la Cuesta) to collaborate effectively, this Hispano-British victory was at best flawed and at worst pyrrhic, since casualties numbers were catastrophic (almost 800 deaths and a quarter of the troops present injured). The recriminations between the so-called allies went on long after the battle. Nevertheless, Wellesley was much feted for the victory by the Government (Canning was pursuing a policy to increase the former's status in parliament), though the King and many others lamented the huge loss of life. For his pains, Wellesley was to receive the title 'Baron Douro of Wellesley in the County of Somerset and Viscount Wellington of Talavera in the county of Somerset'. The long-term result for British policy in Spain however was nil, as the new duke was to be forced into a retreat into Portugal.
Unlike the Spanish operation, the expedition to the Low Countries was (contrary to appearances) not planned as a joint event. Whilst Britain offered Vienna financial help in her forthcoming military struggle with France, the Walcheren plan was entirely home grown. The idea was to make a commando raid on Antwerp during the good sailing summer months and destroy all the ships and ship-building capacity there and then to leave before winter set in. Politically speaking, it ticked all three boxes of the sub-principles which Canning derived from his 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' principle noted above, namely 1) It was anti-French, 2) it gave the impression of being pro ally in operating a diversion on Napoleon's rear during the Austrian initiative; but crucially 3) it was of great interest to Britain in de-stabilising French influence in a region of huge economic and strategic importance for the British isles, i.e., the Low Countries.5 The expedition was however to be no repeat of the success at Copenhagen in 1807. Hesitations, incomprehension between the navy and army commanders and general slowness meant that the moment for attack was to be lost, the route to Antwerp was barred, and the fort at Walcheren was reinforced. In the end, only the island of Walcheren was taken after an extended siege, and of the 44,000 men sent, 23,000 were to die or fall sick. It was a debacle which brought the Portland administration down;6 although it was already in its death throes, given the prime minister's stroke and resignation and the related high profile duel between Foreign Secretary George Canning and War Secretary Lord Castlereagh.
Mr Christopher Hely-Hutchison (Radical and MP for Cork) presciently condemned the ill-fated affair during the debate on the vote of credit to Austria in May 1809, describing it as one of “the tedious and ill-concerted military operations of this government, who contrived to send our armies into the field always out of place and time.”7
The new administration under Spencer Perceval formed on 4 October was a compromise and it too was to end in physical demise, Perceval infamously becoming the only British prime minister ever assassinated – a deranged bankrupt blamed Perceval for his financial woes brought on by the war and Continental system.
On the other hand, the parliamentary session of 1809 did not just deal with foreign matters. In the first three months (up to mid-March), the lion's share of parliamentary time was taken up with a royal bribery scandal. The Commander in Chief of the army, Frederick Duke of York (the king's brother) was exposed by his unhappy mistress, Mary Ann Clarke, for the selling of military commissions. Indeed Mrs Clarke played the Press and establishment as skilfully as another 'Royal' was to do almost two hundred years later. This royal embarrassment was gleefully reported in full detail in the Paris Moniteur. In these days long before the concept of “royal family” had been invented, however, such dirt digging was not to affect public esteem for the king, as we shall see later. Towards the end of the parliamentary session a 'Cruelty to Animals bill' supported by Lord Erskine received its second reading,8 finally to be passed on 6 June. However, of greater importance, politically speaking was the attempt at parliamentary reform – though presented with a sort of fatalistic resignation as the opposition could get little passed since there was a Tory majority in both houses, the House of Lords being by far the most important house.
In June 1809, a motion was proposed by the agricultural reformer and MP for Carlisle, John Christian Curwen. As was consistent with the book he published in that year on “Agricultural Subjects, and on the best means of improving the condition of the Labouring Classes“9, his “Seats in Parliament bill” also known as “Mr Curwen's Reform Bill” (strongly supported by the Radical leader Sir Francis Burdett), was a call to end the parliamentary corruption by which seats in parliament were effectively sold to the highest bidder. The government's opposition to the motion took the form of support but with modifications. In the end the bill was so watered down that those originally supporting it voted against it because they thought that it would stand in the way of proper reform. A contemporary cartoon by Gillray supporting the government showed Burdett and his cronies burning all the founding texts of the British Constitution – implying that reform would lead to the end of England. The cartoon was naturally entitled “True reform of Parliament, – i.e. – patriots lighting a revolutionary-bonfire in New Palace Yard”.10 As a true ancestor of the gutter Press of today, Gillray always tarred opposition politics with the brush of French Revolutionary Republicanism.
Radicals were to have more success in another domain, though outside parliament. This was in the organisation and celebration of George III's Golden Jubilee on 25 October, 1809.
This rather remarkable event was dreamed up by an obscure lady with no familial power or money, but a strong commitment to government and loyalist politics, a certain Rachel Charlotte Biggs. Concerned by the adverse fallout from the Duke of York's scandal, she wrote to politicians proposing a national celebration of George III's fifty years on the throne. It was in effect to be the first ever royal jubilee and only the second British monarch to reign that long. She was an able propagandist and took care to make sure that the idea for the event was (in her words) “evidently non-official”. She sent “nearly a thousand” letters urging a jubilee to the “chief acting persons of all towns of any note in the three kingdoms.”11 She also (so she later claimed) used the newspapers to encourage towns to vie with each other in the celebration sending “paragraphs to most of the provincial papers, … intimating to one town the preparations which were going on in another”. Now in the difficult context of the end of 1809 (failure in Spain and the Low Countries and the failure of the harvest and swiftly rising food prices), radicals were incensed that feasting and debauchery should take place, let alone in favour of the king. Cobbett saw the Jubilee as a loyalist device, with commoners bought off with beer and dinners to sing the praises of a monarch whose legitimacy was as suspect as Napoleon's.12 And Sir Francis Burdett thought that the jubilee was simply a “clumsy trick, to thrust joy down the throats of the people”.13 However, nationally speaking the king's stock was not particularly low. As Linda Colley has put it, “George III with his undoubted domestic probity and obstinate patriotism now seemed to many to represent a reassuring stability in the midst of national flux and humiliation, honest uncomplicated worth in contrast with those meretricious, complex and/or immoral politicians who had failed”.14 And so, whilst radicals could not prevent the event taking place, they could (and did, as Stuart Semmel has shown) influence the way in which the jubilee was celebrated. By a Press campaign highlighting the immorality of feasting in the face of such poverty and general want, many localities in the end made plans for celebrations aimed at providing for the public good. Not only was money put aside for widows and the elderly, schools were built and a royal pardon was granted to deserters and soldiers imprisoned for military offences. And so in Newcastle (to take one example as representative of the whole) there were “public rejoicings and acts of enlightened benevolence. In lieu of an illumination (thought at the time to be a scandalous waste of money and a temptation to the 'mob' to vandalism), above £600 was subscribed for founding a public school on the improved plan of education. By another subscription, ten debtors were liberated from prison. To this last the corporation subscribed 50 guineas, and the members for the town 30 guineas, making in all £186, 17s. 6d.”15 In the south of the country, such as at Reading in Berkshire, they set free Danish prisoners of war. In Abingdon they threw cakes from the top of the Market House. In Easthampstead they had fireworks.16 Contemporary pamphlets listed 666 separate events in England alone, with others organised in Wales, Scotland, Dublin, and parts of the growing empire. And of course there was more than just philanthropy. Some of the celebrations were traditionally boisterous with roasted oxen, games, municipal subscription dinners, the illumination of houses and much singing of “God save the King”. Even the mob it would appear was won over. As Palmerston noted: “Nothing could be better than its [the Jubilee's, ed.] effect in London… the only exertion of their [the mob's] sovereign authority was compelling all coachmen and servants to pull off their hat as they passed the illuminated crown over the Admiralty Gate”.17
And yet, we must not let this cross-party fervour lead us to think that everything was fundamentally 'all right'. The year was also marked by the industrial action and petitions to parliament to ameliorate the condition of the working people. 1809 saw the strike of Tyne keelmen against rising prices. And in the wake of the great Lancashire weavers' strike of 1808, the same workers sent a representative, Mr. Blackburn, to Parliament on 24 February, 1809, with a petition demanding the establishment of a minimum wage. As John Curwen noted, they really were much distressed. Parliament however refused to countenance the idea of a minimum or maximum level, shelving the petition, though allowing it to remain on the table.18 It was such high-handed treatment of suffering lower orders which led Bertrand Russell to describe those in power as “one of the worst and most cruel governments with which England has ever been cursed.”19 Discontent though was not just the privilege of the lower orders. The middle classes too were to rise up at the end of September in defence of their rights during the “Old price” riots at the Drury Lane Theatre, London. They were protesting at a dramatic hike in admission charges, and the dispute was to last more than two months. “It was a noble sight' said the Times, 'to see so much just indignation in the public mind”. Marc Baer has shown that the whole country, though faced with bleak news in the war against France, was obsessed with the theatre struggle – he has tracked down at least fifty broadsides, fifty pamphlets, dozens of prints and songs, and thousands of letters to the editors of Britain's periodical press.20 The disgust ostensibly at the rise in ticket prices also became a vehicle for complaint against other issues, such as morality, national identity, and British constitutional 'freedom'.
There was also (it would seem) considerable contemporary interest (if not positive action on their behalf) in the plight of the poor. In 1808, the poet Robert Southey published a satirical description of England as if written by a Spanish observer, a certain Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, entitled Letters From England. It is generally considered to be an accurate picture of the country at the time. In his chapter on the poor, Southey paints a grim picture. He surmised that about one tenth of the population received 'poor assistance' from the church. The unemployed poor could not leave their parish of origin to find work in another. If they did, they would simply be sent back to where they came from. It is true that there was poor relief in the shape of the Poorhouse, which acted not only as a sort of crèche, night shelter, geriatric ward and orphanage but also provided work for the poor. It was frequently considered an expense to parishes. The poor naturally considered the Poorhouse the most appalling prospect and were ready to suffer the worst privations in order to avoid ending up there. Southey goes on to talk of food shortages when the harvest failed (as in 1809)21 and he poured scorn on the trickle down theory of wealth (and I quote): “The improvements of society never reach the poor: they have been stationary, while the higher classes were progressive. The gentry of the land are better lodged, better accommodated, better educated than their ancestors; the poor man lives in as poor a dwelling as his forefathers when they were slaves of the soil, works as hard, is worse fed, and not better taught. His situation is therefore relatively worse.”22 In Southey's opinion the poor man in a civilised country was “a victim of civilization”. However this was a problem which was to rumble on throughout the 19th century, with no agreement on the solution. Indeed some contemporary reformers held that poor relief undermined the position of the “independent labourer”, and the only contemporary attempt at improve conditions, the 'Speenhamland system', merely served to make matters worse. That the situation was not uniformly catastrophic has been shown by recent research in the condition of the poor during this period. George Boyer has reported significant variations in poor relief, with the agricultural poor of the South East receiving twice as much poor aid as the poor in the industrial north and west.23 Furthermore, poor relief in Britain was significantly higher than that in Continental Europe in the period of the Napoleonic Wars and later.
Yet one crucial feature set England apart from the rest of Continental Europe at this time: its urban landscape. By 1793, Britain was the world's leading textile and metal goods manufacturer, a major iron-ore producer, and by a great deal the world's greatest primary producer of copper, tin and coal. Its mining industry was much celebrated at the time. The Jarrow colliery had, in 1803, one of the world's deepest mine shafts – 840 feet deep. Contemporary commentators noted that the state of war meant economic prosperity. Joseph Lowe, writing in 1822, remarked that “the army, the navy, the public offices of government opened a career to numbers of every class, and by absorbing a very large proportion of the candidates for employment, created a corresponding briskness in agriculture, trade and professions.”24 “The expenditure of government, through its various channels and subordinate agents, had occasioned a demand for almost every species of produce”.25 Although, as Robert Owen pointed out, the lack of workforce encouraged the invention of machines and chemical discoveries so as to obviate the need for manual labour when supplying the materials required in the pursuance of the war,26 thus storing up problems for the future. Exports were to increase from £38 million in 1808 to £48 million in 1810, a record in itself.27 But the positive effects of this industrial boom were offset by the massive increase in population seen in the years 1801-1811. Whilst the population had grown (on average) by 0.5 million per decade in the period 1761-1801, it grew by twice as much in the following decade.28 Another crucial statistic for this period was that, by 1800, only the Netherlands had more people living in towns than Britain, and many of Britain's smaller towns were heavily industrialised. Towns themselves were closely linked to the countryside by a modern network of toll roads, canals and rivers.29 And so given this extraordinarily industrialised society, Napoleon was correct to surmise that the Continental System would bite, causing bankruptcies and layoffs. That it did not succeed in the end need not concern us here. Some continental visitors to the British Isles left colourful accounts of their brush with the nascent industrial behemoth. A young Swede described London in 1809 using the following words: “One passes through eternally long streets, between houses all alike, all dark and smoke-begrimed. One penetrates ever deeper into an atmosphere of coal smoke in whose twilight moves an unending multitude of people, past shops without equal for splendour and abundance. In this huddle of houses one comes with amazement upon St. Paul's Church, a high colossal shape which seems to look down with indignation on the race of shopkeepers who buy and barter beneath its walls…”. A German described industrial Manchester (in 1814) as follows: “There are hundreds of factories in Manchester which are five or six stories high. At the side of each factory there is a great chimney which belches forth black smoke and indicates the presence of the powerful steam engines. The smoke from the chimneys forms a great cloud which can be seen for miles around the town. The houses have become black on account of the smoke. The river upon which Manchester stands is so tainted with colouring matter that the water resembles the contents of a dye-vat.”
But England was not just its factories and industry. In the first decades of the 19th century, religious practice (and belief) was a primary part of English life. Prominent members of Parliament were also deeply religious men – Spencer Perceval was to write an authoritative tract on Biblical prophecies and William Wilberforce (on the other side of the political divide) headed a group of evangelical parliamentarians called 'The Saints'. Evangelicals (some sectarian) had taken their mission to the cities, a field of action into which the more staid parts of the established Anglican church had failed to move. Indeed if we are to believe Southey's scathing description of it, this “Low and Slow” Church of England must be thought wanting.30 The poet mercilessly pilloried what he perceived as lack of belief, the poor but omnipresent preaching, the barely decorated buildings, and the colourless liturgy. The institution was thoroughly socially stratified and dependent upon patronage; it was the governing party at prayer. Pews in buildings had to be rented, while the ‘humble poor' stood in other parts of the church. As the Book of Common Prayer still enjoins, those who went up to the altar to receive the very infrequent communion did so in social order. Interestingly, Southey (in his Spanish Catholic pose) also thought that the lack of monasteries and convents in this eminently Protestant church left the poor and infirm without assistance. Methodism and non-conformist forms of Christianity, with their charismatic outdoor preachers, were to prove more popular with the country and urban poor. This was not however to say the Church of England was entirely ineffectual. It did possess an evangelical wing which found its embodiment in a group called the Clapham Sect, some of whose members were in significant positions of power, notably Charles Grant, the powerful East India Company chairman, and Lord Teignmouth, former Governor General of India. Not surprisingly, later in the 19th century the sect was to develop (and I quote) “into perhaps the only successful religious 'pressure group' in the political history of England”.31
To sum up then this year of 1809…
When the parliamentary session for 1810 met at the beginning of that year, the political situation was, internationally speaking, largely the same as it had been in 1809. The Scottish representative peer, George Boyle, 4th Earl of Glasgow, noted in his speech to Parliament on 23 January, 1810, the “eventful” nature of the “present crisis” and the “gloomy … picture presented by the existing situation of Europe”.32 So Britain was indeed back to square one in terms of “maintaining the contest with Bonaparte”. 1809 had seen the failure of the Walcheren expedition and the humbling of Austria, Britain's only major ally, and the tightening of the Continental System. To this latter was soon to be added the Fontainebleau decree of 18 October, 1810, ordering the seizure of all imported British colonial goods and their public burning – bread in Britain was to reach its highest annual average price of over 122 shillings per quarter in 1812. There would also be increasing numbers of bankruptcies in 1810 and 1811. However, Britain was not the only country in Europe to suffer financial hardship. Russia was to devalue its currency in September 1810, and German and Dutch banks were to fail at the same time, causing French banks to call in debts. And yet Parliament might have had a good look at home too, for things were far from rosy there. Despite that fact that the continuation of the war with France, implying the maintenance of a huge navy and significant army, kept industry ticking over, and regardless of the fact that exports were up, the harvest of 1809 had failed and working men were becoming increasingly unhappy at the government's turning a deaf ear to their problems (the Lancashire workers' petition had failed to secure a legal minimum wage, there had been middle-class riots and coal-mining related strikes). As for the poor, their lot was harsh, and it was only the liveliness of non-conformist and evangelical religion, and not that of the mainstream Church of England, which fed their souls, but not their bellies. But there had only been one 'feel-good moment' that year: the jubilee. What had begun as a government celebration had been successfully turned into a cross-party, fully national celebration. It was this establishment of the national myth via the celebration of the jubilee which was to see Britain through these exceedingly dark years.