billet would often be escorted by the entire household, jubilant at having regained its "own Scotsman."
Cohesion without coercion, wealth without slavery, empire without militarism, such was the spectacle Britain presented. "I begin to be afraid, like the frog in the fable," wrote an Englishwoman that summer, "we shall all burst with national pride, for never, to be sure, did we stand half so high before." Now that the revolutionary dream had flickered out in ruin, Britain's strength and prosperity was the wonder of mankind. She had annihilated the fleets of an enemy who when the war began had nearly three times her population, defeated all attempts to keep her troops from the Continent, and, forcing Napoleon to expend half a million men in Spain, had roused and united Europe against him. In the closing months of the war she had subsidised the entire Grand Alliance.
Yet, while withstanding tyranny abroad, she had preserved liberty at home. It was this that made her the object of such universal interest. The dreams of a new birth of freedom founded on resounding phrases had proved in the past generation a bloody and destructive delusion. The French had shown themselves incapable of liberty. The authoritarianism of Prussia had broken, Austria had become a byword for defeat, the antique chivalry of Spain had dissolved under the hammer-blows of the Revolution. The smaller states of Germany and Italy had thrown in their lot with the conqueror. Even the Russians had proved barbarians in the grain. Only one kingdom had emerged victorious while assuring her people social order and freedom of choice. Britain might not be the Utopia of the philosophers, but she was nearer it than anything mankind had yet achieved.
Was the reality behind the splendid facade, the nation behind those proud white cliffs as strong and healthful as it seemed? There could be no doubt of her prosperity and social cohesion. The great mass of her people, Simond reported, appeared happier and more respectable than any other he knew. The good manners of her country folk, their open, friendly faces, the curtseys of the children on the roads and the raised hats of their elders, bespoke a society against which the waves of egalitarian revolution and the new creeds of envy and infidelity had beaten in vain, The English plainly loved their country and found inspiration in serving it. They were free as individuals to rule themselves, which made them self-reliant, resourceful and morally, as well as physically, courageous. They had a religion, deeply personal, which enabled them to set a course by conscience and secure the enduring strength of common standards of thought and behaviour. Together these things gave them an underlying unity which allowed for almost limitless diversity and was therefore far more stable than one enforced by a centralised and brittle authoritarianism.
Their belief in freedom was a passion, almost a religion. " 'Tis liberty alone," proclaimed their favourite poet:
"that gives us the flower
Of fleeting life,
its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it.
All constraint Except what wisdom
lays on evil men Is evil."
For the abstract liberty of the mass acclaimed by revolutionary France they had little use. The fabric of their law had been woven in the course of centuries to sustain that of the individual. The legal protection of his person and property against all comers, particularly against the King's officers, was, even more than Parliament, England's distinguishing institution. Parliament itself had been created to ensure it.
For this pragmatic race, hatred of power was an obsession. Even the occasional soldiers posted at street corners to restrain the crowds during the Allied Sovereigns' visit were denounced as intolerable. Keats at Naples felt unable to visit the opera because of the guards on the stage. "The continual visible tyranny of this Government prevents me having any peace of mind," he wrote, "I could not lie quietly here; I will not even leave my bones in the midst of this despotism." An English lady described how she and her husband, travelling through the dragooned French countryside after the war, chafed at the closed gates and the sentries who paraded the towns.
1
1
Lady Shelley, I,
215.
It struck the Frenchman, Simond—even after his long residence in America—as remarkable that at the height of the War visitors to Portsmouth were allowed tc pass through the walls and fortifications without being questioned. Simond, II,
247.
See also Bury,
I,
207;
Keats, IV,
112.
Such hatred of constraint arose p
artly from a belief that power c
orrupted, and that it could not be safely entrusted, untrammelled, o anyone. For this reason the British
Constitution was an intricate b
alance of rights and functions in
which it was impossible to say p
recisely where power resided. The Ki
ng having in the past tried to m
onopolise it, the King's powers had
been drastically shorn. Though h
e still possessed great influence and could be a source of grave embarrassment to the Ministers
whom he appointed, he could in m
ajor matters act officially only thr
ough them. His right even to a p
rivate secretary was questioned. Y
et the Ministers who exercised h
is former powers were themselves dependent on the goodwill of
Parliament.
Without the suppor
t of a working majority of its m
embers, they could not carry on the business of the country. And
parli
ament itself was a balance of confli
cting powers: of rival parties a
nd often rival Houses.
Nor did power reside in the pe
ople—that question - begging abs
traction, so dear to the rationalising
philosophers of the eighteenth c
entury, in whose name the French had drenched the world in blood. The House of Commons, like the Hou
se of Lords, so far as it repres
entcd anything definable, represented the interests and property of
t
he country, though not as they were in
1815
but as they had been c
enturies before when the parliamentary system began. Little more
t
han 400,000 out of the English and
Welsh population of ten and a h
alf millions enjoyed a parliamentary
vote, and only 4000 out of two m
illion Scots. And this restricted franchise was exercised on the most
i
llogical variety of grounds. In the cou
nties it was the prerogative of
freeholders, in many boroughs of a handful of occupants of particular tenements, in one or two constituen
cies of everyone who b
oiled a pot on his own hearth. More than a third of the House of Commons' seats were at the dispos
al of a couple of hundred land-o
wners who virtually nominated the electors. Their righ
t to do so w
as bought and sold, sometimes under the hammer, like any other
pieces
of property: a practice which, pa
radoxically, tended to correct t
he antiquated distribution of the fr
anchise, since it enabled new fo
rms of wealth unrepresented by geography to secure it by purchase —an example both of the conservati
sm of the English and of their g
enius for making the illogical work. Nor did the electorate even possess an absolute right to vote. It could be deprived of it by Parliament, which if the Crown consented might, as it had done in the past, prolong its own existence. For the English left every Parliamen
t
free to change the laws as it cho
se. They would not be bound even
by a Constitution.
This baffling confusion was the aspect of their polity of which t
hey
were most proud. For it stressed the importance of the individual for whom, in their view, all government existed. For there wa
s
another and indefinable forc
e—one not counted but weighed—to
which every legal power had at times to defer. It was the sum tota
l
of the political consciousness of the individuals who made up th
e
nation. The most powerful Minist
er of the age, William Pitt, had
been able to take office at the outset of his career with the King' support but without a parliamentary majority partly because publi
c
opinion, disgusted with those i
n office, was known to be behind
him.
Even the views of uneducated individuals could at times influenc
e
political action in this extraordinary country. For, since there wer
e
no proper police and the only protection of Government in a capita of a million inhabitants were th
ree regiments of Foot Guards and
twelve hundred Horse, the London mob could subject Parliamen
t
and Government to a most unple
asant ordeal. In the seventeenth
century it had more than once changed the course of history and though the ruling aristocracy had learnt to humour and manage it they could never wholly ignore it. Thir
ty years before, it had tried to
burn down the capital in order to
prevent a mitigation of the in
tolerant law against Catholics. During the rejoicings for Salamanc
a
it had terrorised London for three nights, firing in the streets, setting coaches alight—in some cases
with their occupants inside—and
stoning the residences of the anti-war party. The iron railing outside London houses were not there for ornament. A howling mob round the door, a showe
r of brickbats at the windows, a
lighted torch against the lintel were the statesman's reminde
r
that, however irrational and ill-organised, the people had a will o
f
its own.
Even in ordinary times the
mobile,
as it was called, played a par
t
in politics. At every contested election the candidates had for week to run the gauntlet of a roug
h, drunken mob which paraded the
streets, surrounded the hustings an
d pelted speakers and voters. In
the London suburb of Garrat
near Wandsworth, a mock-election
was held during every general election
, in which all the most notorio
us characters of the metropolita
n underworld appeared as candid
ates—a kind of political "Beggar's Opera."
For the sake of practical loc
al convenience the right to vote wa
s treated as a form of tenure, tr
ansmitted, like an estate or title, by inheritance or purchase. But he right to throw a dead cat at a candidate and to support one's Party with the full force of one's lungs and fists was regarded as fundamental, and inalienable.
"Our man for
ever, O— Yourn in the river, O !
"
s
ang the Radical shoemakers o
f Towcester and the rival Tory p
oachers of Silverstone as they rolled up their sleeves before the
Hu
stings
.
"The whole mob of Middlesex blackguards pass through
Pi
ccadilly twice a day," wrote Wal
ter Scott during a Westminster b
y-election, "and almost drive me ma
d with their noise and vociferat
ion." Before it ended one of
the candidates was wounded and an
other forced to hide for his life in a churchyard.
Only one thing could be said for certain of English politics. No
po
wer
could be openly exercised without provoking a reaction. The greater the power, the greater the reaction. Even the mob was subject
t
o this law of diminishing returns, since, whenever it went too far, it
au
tomatically
created an alliance of law-abiding persons against it. England might canonise admirals—for their sway was too distant to
t
hreaten anyone's private liberty—but she never worshipped long it the shrine of any living statesma
n. Popularity with one faction w
as certain to arouse the enmity of an
other; vilification of William P
itt, the national saviour during the war, became the
credo
of Whigs md radicals for a generation after his death. It was symptomatic of his jealousy of power that the offi
ce of Prime Minister had no rec
ognition in law, and that the Cabine
t—the inner council of supreme o
ffice-holders, who were at once t
he Government and the managers o
f the parliamentary majority—was unknown to the Constitution,
i
ts members modestly called themselves "his Majesty's confidential
s
ervants." They did not even possess an office or a secretary.
As for bureaucracy, what there was possessed no political power,
t
he
Civil Service was purely clerical and was nominated by the
s
tatesmen for whom it devilled. Thes
e viewed it chiefly as a means o
f rewarding supporters and prov
iding for younger sons. Walter S
cott praised Croker, the Secret
ary of the Admiralty, for never
scrupling to stretch his powers to serve a friend.
1
Such patronage
though valuable for securing Party discipline, was no foundation fc a strong executive. Ninety-nine Englishmen out of a hundred viewe
d
with sturdy contempt a bureaucracy recruited by jobbery. Th
e
country gentleman who nam
ed a litter of puppies, Placeman
Pensioner, Pilferer and Plunderer, expressed this.
2
Any attempt t
o
increase the size and powers of th
e Civil Service was certain to be
assailed. Even the Foreign Office had a staff of only twenty-eigh
t
including the two Under-Secretaries and a Turkish interpreter. Th
e
Home Office consisted of twenty clerks. As every document had t
o
be copied by hand, such administrators had no time for regulatin
g
other people's lives.
3
It was a source of amazement to foreigners that a country s
o
governed, without a regular
police and with so small an Army
should be so orderly. At Brighton, a town in
1811
of 14,000 people there were neither justices nor municipality, yet crime was almos
t
unknown and the doors left unbarred at night. The capital, th
e
world's largest city, was patrolled by a handful of police officers an
d
a few hundred elderly night-watchmen. Little Mr. Townsend, th
e
Bow Street "runner," with his flaxen wig and handful of top-hatte
d
tip-staffs, constituted almost the sole
force for executing the Govern
ment's will. Everything else was
left to the Justices and parish
constables.
Yet the English were not a timid or submissive people. Th
e
brutality of an English crowd
could be a formidable phenomenon
. Even at royal levees there was so
much shoving that the removal of
fainting ladies from a "squeeze" was a part of Court routine; whe
n
Carlton House was thrown open to well-to-do sightseers after fete, shoes and fragments of clothing were gathered up afterward in hogsheads.
4
In poorer districts fighting was almost incessant
1
"If any office should be at your disposal," wrote Wordswo
rth to Lord Lonsdale, "the duties
of which would not call so largely upon my exertions as to pr
event me from giving a consider
able proportion of my time to study, it might be in your Lordship's power to place me in situation where, with better hopes of success, I might advance towards the main object of m
y life; I mean
the completion of my literary undertakings." De Selincourt, II,
486;
Lockhart,
306.
See also
idem,
IV,
349;
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
8tn
March,
1822;
Cobbett, I,
41;
Granvill.
I,
22;
Peel, II,
140;
Lady Shelley, II,
90;
Simond, II,
190-2.
» T. E. Austen-Leigh,
The Vine Hunt.
2
Woodward,
61, 189.
See Emma Mount-Edgecumbe's account of how her uncle, Lor
d
Castlereagh, sent for her to copy out a long dispatch to Wel
lington after Waterloo. Brownlow
121.
3
"Many a delicate female was extracted from
the me
lee nearly
in naturabilis
and obliged
t
o
hide herself in a corner till a petticoat could be procured." Simond, II,
227.
See
Ann. Reg
Mitford,
Life,
II,
187.
The same thing had happened when Nelson lay in state
at
Greenwich
few
years before. See
English Spy, 219.