The Jaunt

At the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI travelled from Edinburgh to London to be crowned as Elizabeth I’s successor to the English throne, he promised that he would return to Scotland every three years. He managed to return once, in 1617, during his eighteen-year reign. Since the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, no reigning British monarch had come to Scotland at all, and the only member of the ruling dynasty to set foot north of the Border had been George II’s younger son and uncle to George III, William, Duke of Cumberland; sometimes called ‘Sweet William’ but more often referred to as ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, who brutally enforced reprisals after the failure of the Jacobite uprising in 1745. That George IV visited Scotland at all was due to an intricate alignment of Realpolitik, discomfiture, Machiavellian manoeuvring, stifling etiquette, propaganda and rampant bibliophilia.

The period around George’s coronation, on 19 July 1821, had been fraught. The King was, frankly, unpopular. Now a bloated, ailing parody of his once glamorous and dashing younger self, he was profligate, lecherous, sentimental and vain, slicked in powders and rouge and sporting a red wig. (A red wig? A foreshadowing of future parodic Scottishness!) His unpopularity had soared during the final throes of his acrimonious estrangement from his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. Determined to prevent her from attending his coronation as Queen Consort, he had been advised not to press for a divorce and instead organised for the introduction of the Pains and Penalties Bill 1820 to legally dissolve their marriage. It was, in effect, a public trial of the Queen to determine her adultery. If George had hoped that a Parliamentary Bill, rather than a divorce hearing, would draw a discrete veil over his own marital failings, he was sorely disappointed: Caroline’s defence attorney, Henry Brougham (one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review) threatened in the House of Lords to bring evidence of the monarch’s own frequent affairs. The trial descended into farce, with one witness, Theodore Majocci, being required to demonstrate a suggestive dance; another, Pietro Cuchi, testifying about the use of chamberpots and a chambermaid, Barbara Kress (in a scene now weirdly reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s impeachment) cross-examined about the specific nature of ‘stains’ she had seen on bedclothes. Although The Times, with phoney piety, lamented being obliged to report ‘filth of this kind’, the press had a field day, with increasingly salacious and pornographic details circulating in numerous satirical prints and broadsheets. Percy Shelley wrote an entire burlesque based on the play of Oedipus, Swellfoot the Tyrant, satirising the proceedings, while privately referring to Caroline as a ‘vulgar cook-maid’ whose sole redeeming quality was the nature of her opponents. The affair ended in a muddled stalemate: the Lords initially voted 123–95 in favour; then, after the divorce clause was dropped, 108–99 in favour, but the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool then withdrew the Bill in the face of public unrest. The Queen’s party declared a victory, to scenes of public rioting where pro-divorce newspaper offices were set alight and windows smashed.

The more serious side of the ‘solemn farce’ was Caroline’s tactical alliance with the Radical cause. Brougham, like his Whig allies in the Edinburgh Review, was pro-Reform; but Caroline became a figurehead for the more thorough-going proponents of democracy. William Cobbett, later to become famous as the author of Rural Rides, acted as a speech-writer. It was most likely he who penned her most famous endorsement of the Radical position: ‘If the highest subject in the realm can be deprived of her rank and title – can be divorced, dethroned and debased by an act of arbitrary power, in the form of a Bill of Pains and Penalties – the constitutional liberty of the Kingdom will be shaken to its very base; the rights of the nation will be only a scattered wreck; and this once free people, like the meanest of slaves, must submit to the lash of an insolent domination.’ Likewise, she declaimed, ‘All classes will ever find in me a sincere friend to their liberties, and a zealous advocate of their rights’ and The Times reported her as saying, ‘A government cannot stop the march of intellect any more than they can arrest the motion of the tides or the course of the planets.’ Her defence lawyers made a point of comparing George to Nero, the most autocratic of the early Caesars. As a figurehead for the Radicals, she did not survive her eventual capitulation to the Government’s offer of £50,000 per year; nevertheless, at the height of the trial over 800 petitions totalling over a million signatures in her support were delivered to the Government. Scott, no friend to the Radicals and well aware of the King’s shortcomings, was wryly detached and disinclined to take sides over the ‘Queen-fever’, as he called it. ‘I should not be surprised to see her fat bottom in a pair of buckskins, and at the head of an army, God mend all!’, he quipped.

The years in the approach to the Coronation were pierced not just by Radical discontent, but Radical activism. On 16 August 1819, a crowd of around 70,000 workers met in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to demand parliamentary reform and universal suffrage. The crowd was charged on the orders of the magistrate William Hulton by members of the Cheshire Yeomanry and the 15th Hussars, leading to the deaths of fifteen protestors (including four women) and around 600 serious injuries. On 23 February 1820, Bow Street Runners arrested the ten men behind the ‘Cato Street Conspiracy’. By the use of double agents and agents provocateurs, the Government had learned of a plot to invade the home of Lord Harrowby, Lord President of the Council, and execute the entire Cabinet. Five of the guilty men were transported, and five were executed. Among the grislier details to emerge during the trial was that the men had drawn lots to see to whom the honour would fall of slitting the throat of the hated Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh – immortalised by Shelley in The Masque of Anarchy

I met Murder on the way –

He had a face like Castlereagh –

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven bloodhounds followed him

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

and by Byron, after Castlereagh’s death

Posterity will ne’er survey

A nobler grave than this:

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

Stop, traveller, and piss.

More pressing as far as Scott was concerned were the events that stretched between April and September 1820. Depending on the political hue of the historian, these events are variously now known as the Weavers’ Revolt or the Radical War.

The spark which ignited the conflict was the publication of a draft proclamation, on 2 April, from the ‘Committee for Organising a Provisional Government’, formed on 21 March. The Committee comprised educated weavers, elected by the local workforce, most of whom had read Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and one of whom, John Baird, had served in the army and took over drilling the militants. The proclamation demanded universal suffrage, and called for a general strike and the ‘taking up arms for the redress of our common grievances’. Although a Glasgow police officer named Mitchell claimed that members arrested before the strike confessed ‘their audacious plot’ was ‘to sever the Kingdom of Scotland from that of England and restore the ancient Scottish Parliament’, the Proclamation included references to Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, and ended with an appeal to ‘Britons’. A celebrated elderly radical, James Wilson, when the insurrection came, carried a banner with the legend ‘Scotland Free Or A Desart’ [sic], creating the popular impression that the Radical War was not only a class conflict, but a national conflict. Wilson had previously edited a radical magazine, with the title The Black Dwarf; co-opting a title from the country’s most famous Tory. On the Monday following the proclamation, over 60,000 workers went on strike, mostly in Glasgow, Stirlingshire, Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Ayrshire. The next day, one John King (who was most likely a double agent) gave half a torn card to John Baird, and the other half to one Andrew Hardie, who both marched on the Carron Ironworks in the belief that they would be able to acquire guns, bayonets and ammunition there. Despite their hope that there would be a ‘small army’ for the operation, a mere thirty men participated. At Bonnymuir, the party skirmished with the 10th Hussars, and the revolution petered out. Indeed, it seems as if the entire debacle was in part encouraged by agents provocateurs. The aforementioned Mitchell wrote that ‘if some plan were conceived by which the disaffected could be lured out of their lairs – being made to think that the day of “liberty” had come – we could catch them abroad and undefended’.

Wilson was found not guilty of three charges of treason, but guilty of ‘compassing to levy war against the King in order to compel him to change his measures’. Although the jury recommended compassion and mercy, he was nevertheless sentenced to death as well. A crowd of 20,000 in Glasgow watched the execution of the sexuagenarian on 30 August. Hardie and Baird were executed on 8 September in Stirling. They were forbidden from making speeches, unless of a religious nature, on the scaffold by the Sheriff of Stirling, Ranald MacDonald of Staffa. They were hanged, and then beheaded by a medical student who had volunteered as executioner. He was heard to say, ‘I wish to God I had not had to do it’ after ceremonially lifting up the severed heads and announcing, ‘This is the head of a traitor.’ Eighteen other men were sentenced to transportation.

Scott, with all his naive enthusiasm for matters military, was permitted to raise a volunteer regiment (all bedecked in uniforms he designed himself) and offered their services to Viscount Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Tory administration’s manager of Scottish affairs – who politely declined. His letters at the time are full of hawkish fulminations: to Walter Jnr, then serving with the 18th Dragoons, he wrote: ‘the Radical scoundrels had forgot there were any men in the country but their own rascally adherents … I am sure the dogs will not fight and I am sorry for it. One day’s good kemping would cure them most radically of their radical malady & if I had anything to say in the matter they should remember the day for half a century to come.’

Scott had been impressed by the King’s coronation (he invited James Hogg to attend with him, but Hogg declined as it would mean him missing the St Boswell’s Fair) and wrote a description of it for Ballantyne’s newspaper. It was a magnificent affair, costing nearly a quarter of a million pounds more than his father’s. Queen Caroline had attempted to attend, and George had posted Bow Street Runners at the doors to forbid her entry: when she managed to gain access via Westminster Hall she was witnessed being held back with a bayonet to her throat. She was eventually dissuaded by Sir Robert Inglis and returned home. She fell ill that night and never recovered, dying three weeks later. At the time, her imminent mortality was not known, and Scott’s account verges on gloating. It was, he says, a ‘voluntary degradation. That matter is a fire of straw which has now burnt to the very embers, and those who try to blow it into life again, will only blacken their hands and noses, like mischievous children dabbling in the ashes of a bonfire.’ Scott had already broached the topic of a royal visit to Scotland when he first met George in 1815; the Coronation – to his mind – confirmed how such a spectacle could unite and bedazzle disparate classes and political opponents, even in the most infelicitous of circumstances. Both Melville and Scott were convinced that George IV’s visit to Scotland would, among other things, be an effective piece of propaganda: it would be a soporific to the ‘mechanicals’, with bread and circuses distracting them from radical politics, and an intoxicant to the loyal aristocracy, confirming Scotland’s trustworthiness. In his account written at the time, The Gathering of the West, John Galt explicitly maintained that ‘the Radical exploit has clour’t the character o’ Paisley wi’ the King, and a group of weavers form a committee to “gang in to Embro”, to behave in a loyal and dutiful manner’.

It was also a matter of tact: in 1821, the new King George had visited Ireland, incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801. During the celebrations, Dunleary was renamed Kingstown, and George met with Daniel O’Connell, the young lawyer and campaigner for Catholic Emancipation known as ‘The Liberator’, who presented the King with a laurel wreath. The men loathed each other, yet managed, albeit symbolically, to present a united front. In another iconic gesture, the monarch met with an old man who had participated in the 1798 revolt, who declared that though he had fought against George III he was ready to die for his son. He surveyed the valley of the Boyne, where his ancestor William III had triumphed over James VII and II, ending the Stuart monarchy, and visited Slane Castle there (the lady of the house, the Marchioness Conyngham, was his current mistress). To strengthen his position as a British monarch, ruling a United Kingdom, it was necessary that the Irish visit should be paralleled with a trip to Scotland.

There were, however, certain factions that were more keen for George to travel to Europe before any spree north of the Border. The Ulster-born Castlereagh, who had been Chief Secretary of Ireland during the 1798 rebellion, had developed a diplomatic protocol known as the Congress System. Sometimes seen as a precursor to bodies such as the League of Nations, the United Nations or the European Union, Castlereagh negotiated a series of regular meetings; initially between the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria (in 1812) and quickly expanded to include post-Napoleonic France. Every two years, these powers would meet to decide collectively the direction of European policy and maintain mutual security. Early successes included the resolution of the Polish-Saxon Crisis at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 and the approach towards Greek independence at the Congress of Laibach in 1821. Another Congress, in Verona, was scheduled for 1822, in order to deal with the presence of Austrian troops in northern Italy, the ongoing situation between Turkey and Greece, and, most importantly, the proposed French intervention in Spain. This issue would eventually lead to the collapse of the Congress System, as Britain did not support France while Austria, Russia and Prussia did.

The Congress of Verona featured some of the sharpest intellects and most powerful characters of the period. Tsar Alexander I, accompanied by his minister of foreign affairs, Count Nesselrode, came from Russia; Prince Hardenberg and Count von Bernstorff represented Prussia; the French sent Chateaubriand, the dashing, complex poet-diplomat who founded their version of Romanticism and the Duc de Montmorency; and from Austria came Prince Metternich, the brilliant, calculating arch-reactionary and advocate of the strictest state repressions. Wellington – for reasons that will become evident – was the British contingent. The fact that three of the chief diplomats would eventually have dishes named after them – Beef Wellington, the Chateaubriand cut of steak and Nesselrode Pudding (a confection of ice-cream, maraschino cherries and chestnuts, named as a sly retort to English plum pudding) – is one of the weirder curios of diplomatic history.

Princess Dorothea de Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador to Britain, was a former mistress of Metternich and his current spy. Metternich was eager – or as eager as that master-strategist could manage – that George IV should attend the Congress of Verona. They had met after George’s visit to Ireland, and the Austrian had flattered George that his natural arena should be the international stage, shaping the destinies of whole countries. Through de Lieven, he continually reminded George how European monarchs, on his more authoritarian and arbitrary model, did not worry themselves over parliaments that questioned their expenditure, debated their sexual morality or allowed their public humiliation in the press – his censorship was so stringent that Metternich famously demanded a minimum limit on the word count of any book to be published, reasoning that the lower orders would not embark on a book were it sufficiently daunting in length. Fundamentally, Metternich had realised George IV’s overriding characteristic: he could be charming, even brave in the face of illness, and occasionally perceptive – but he wanted, above all, to be liked. A man who could be swayed thus would be easily manipulated at the Congress.

The British Government was well aware that their monarch, among such men, was a liability: the other parties were sending their chess grand masters and hoping Britain sent their top gin-rummy player. The Cabinet needed an alternative, and the King needed to be cajoled in that direction instead. The visit to Ireland demanded a reciprocal arrangement with Scotland; Scotland was riven with potential radicals, both armed and parliamentary; and the King could not be allowed to jeopardise national interest in Verona, given his naivety, silliness, mistresses and gullibility. If there were a nail in the coffin of the Verona trip, it may have been the realisation that the King had once slept with the wife of Prince Hardenberg. The future of Europe should not rest on protracted pique over a youthful moment of slobbering and thrusting. The King would go on a Jaunt to Scotland instead.