‘Merde!’1
The famous shout of defiance from General Cambronne as he stood with the shattered remnants of the Old Guard near Hougoumont as dusk fell on 18 June symbolized in so many ways the days of ‘la gloire’, the extraordinary military adventure on which France had embarked after 1791.
The battle of Waterloo has passed into legend, destroying forever the French domination of Europe that had lasted for one and a half centuries. From now on, the language of diplomacy, the currency of power, was English and Britain was on her way to becoming the mightiest power the world has known.
But there were casualties along the way and never more so than in the months and years following that famous victory in the fields on the road to Charleroi. At first, of course, all was well. Britain celebrated the end of a gruelling twenty-two years of war, first against Revolutionary France, then Napoleon. The bells rang out, there were services of thanksgiving. And gentlemen in England, then-abed, read over and over, to their families and servants, the words of Wellington’s despatch to The Times.2
Wellington’s army would stay in France for a further three years, just to make sure that the restoration of the Bourbons was not a last flicker of monarchy and that Bonapartism would not raise its head again. The Emperor of the French – known to most Englishmen as Boney – was sent on board the Northumberland, bound for the grim, black rock that was St Helena. He would leave it as a partially mummified corpse twenty-five years later.
John Thomas Brunt, the Cato Street conspirator, supplied boots to the cavalry regiment the Blues, soon after Waterloo, and would have heard grumblings about the regiment’s quota sailing home. These men had served their country and in the months to come, at the insistence of the Duke of Wellington, they would receive their Waterloo medal, the first of its kind ever awarded to ordinary soldiers. Brunt’s co-conspirator James Ings might have attended street parties in his town of Portsmouth, jostling the crowded alleyways of the harbour with the sailors who had won their battle honours at Cape St Vincent, Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. He would have been stood rounds of drinks in the port’s taverns, hearing over and over again, ‘with advantages’, the deeds the Tars carried out on those days.
But by the late summer of 1815, James Ings was already in London, and would have read the signs in the London parks – ‘No dogs – and no soldiers in uniform’.
The euphoria of victory soon gave way to reality and to despair. What kind of England did men of the Blues come home to that summer? For all the nineteenth century was ‘the age of the cities’, we would be struck by how rural everything was. Britain was not yet the workshop of the world and if the ‘dark Satanic mills’ were increasing in number and London was the largest city in the world, England still had ‘mountains green’ and the metropolis was ringed with fields. The hay-loft in Cato Street, from which the conspirators planned to launch their revolution, was on the edge of civilization. Beyond the Edgware Road were pastures (the Cato Street building was a cow shed) and Hyde Park much more countrified than it is today. In the 1830s, Princess Victoria, writing her diary from the perspective of a 13 year old, talked of Kensington where she was born as ‘our dear village’. And from exactly the same vantage point, but many years older and of a more bitter disposition, the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett watched with revulsion the ‘great Wen’ that was London creeping inexorably across the fields towards him.
Most men and women worked on the land and were slaves of the seasons. In the summer, they toiled at the back-breaking work of the harvest, with sickle and scythe – it would be half a century before steam-driven threshing machines did some of the work for them. They rose with the sun and crawled home in the darkness, ready to sing lustily in church on Sunday of the harvest home. ‘Come, ye thankful people, come.’ In the winter, before the spring sowing, they huddled around peat fires in the tied cottages and prayed the squire for whom they worked would not evict them before the next harvest.
The fields themselves were still new in some places. The enclosure movement, which cleared woodland and drained marsh, was two generations old, but the trend had been speeded up in recent years by desperation. Britain had been a fortress on the edge of French-dominated Europe and had had to become self-sufficient or surrender. In 1801 parliament had passed the General Enclosure Act which cut through much of the red-tape surrounding the lengthy mechanics of enclosure. So now, in the south, hedges and fences surrounded the old common land. In the north, dry-stone walls criss-crossed the moors. There was still the need to prove land ownership. Without an actual written deed, a man whose great-grandfather had owned the land was forced to see it bought up by the local squire.
The law arrests the man or woman,
Who steals the goose from off the Common,
But lets the greater thief go loose,
Who steals the Common from the goose.
His choice then was to leave, to find work elsewhere or to stay put as a ‘landless labourer’. Most took the latter road and carried on as before. But not quite as before. In the long, dark nights of winter such men huddled around their fires and puffed on their pipes. The firewood that crackled in their hearths was no longer free. The tobacco they smoked had a duty on it. Even the rabbit stewing in the pot belonged to somebody else and they risked gaol by trapping it. Most men muttered, shrugged, stirred the fire in the grate. But some men ‘knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the squire’ and perhaps, as the fire died and their children cried with hunger, they plotted murder and revolution.
Fifty years ago, social historians believed that the effects of change on the land – the combination of enclosures and the patenting of labour-saving devices like the horse-hoe and the seed-drill – drove thousands to the towns in a mass exodus. We now know that this was not the case. There was movement, certainly, but it was localized and piecemeal. Landless labourers moved to the next parish or the one beyond that and they continued to work the land. Even when the second generation3 did reach the towns, they tried to find work with animals or delivering foodstuffs. Thomas Hyden, one of the key witnesses in the trials of the Cato Street conspirators, was a cow-keeper. Edward Hucklestone, who gave evidence at Thistlewood’s trial, had become a shoemaker, but was ‘now articled to a cow-doctor in Newman Mews’.4 It was not until the 1770s that we see the first appearance of industrial mills and not until the decade of Cato Street that machinery began to be steam-driven.
In the long term of course, the complex series of interlocking events we call by shorthand convenience the Industrial Revolution was beneficial to everyone. The kind of poverty which the Cato Street conspirators believed, naively, could be laid at the door of Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet, has long vanished and it takes an extraordinary leap of imagination for us to see the world as Arthur Thistlewood saw it. The massive changes in British society from a rural way of life in which men lived in villages, were born and died in the same parish, to an urban existence, where the flotsam of society moved to the thud and grind of the machines, had no precedent. There was no blueprint and when mistakes were made – and they were, in large measure – it was because no nation in the world had experienced such changes before.
The new men of the Industrial Revolution – Josiah Wedgwood, Jedediah Strutt, James Watt, Jethro Tull and countless others – were men of vision driven by a thirst for knowledge or a thirst for profit or both. Improving landlords like Tull, ‘Turnip’ Townshend and Coke of Holkham, had the money, the time and the leisure to try out revolutionary new techniques on sections of their estates. Tull’s seed-drill, for example, made nonsense of the New Testament parable of the sower. No longer would seeds fall on stony ground or among weeds; neither could the wind blow them away, because the machine dug a hole for each seed and buried it. The result would be a massive increase in productivity and in food to fill hungry mouths in the long winters ahead. In the short term, however, it saw the laying off of labour and angry farm workers tried to smash the drill and beat Tull to a pulp.
Josiah Wedgwood built his Etruria factory along the banks of the Trent so that the water could power his machinery. He saw that the rising middle classes wanted to emulate their betters. The aristocracy and the gentry might eat off porcelain imported from China; Wedgwood could make the stuff in Staffordshire at a fraction of the cost. It was probably not his intention, but in creating a quality product at a cheap price, Wedgwood was obeying every rule in the capitalist book (some would say he wrote the book) and he was, incidentally, helping to narrow the vast poverty gap that existed in his day.
Other manufacturers and industrialists got the point and followed suit. Since machinery was made largely of timber and ran on water, whole forests disappeared and mills, with their distinctive rows of windows, sprang up along river banks, especially in the Midlands and the North. Obtaining money in the increasingly prosperous eighteenth century was not difficult. Until the wartime-engendered collapse of finance houses in 1797 there were over 300 banks in Britain, all of them operating under the shadow of a powerful financial system that was already over a century old. Interest rates for most of the century ran between 3 and 4 per cent. Without the need for planning permission, an entrepreneur could build on a fast-flowing river bank (for his power) as close as possible to an existing town (for his raw materials and a ready market) and he would advertise his goods in the increasingly widespread newspaper and printing businesses springing up everywhere.5 By the 1790s, Britain was indeed the nation of shopkeepers described as such nearly twenty years before by Adam Smith.6 But we were above all a nation of manufacturers. If we look at the nine men arrested by the Bow Street Runners on the night of 23 February 1820: James Ings and James Wilson were butchers; Richard Bradburn and John Shaw were carpenters; James Gilchrist and John Monument were shoemakers; Charles Cooper and Richard Tidd were bootmakers; William Davidson, always a little apart, had the highest status of them all – he was a cabinet-maker.
But the entrepreneurs of the eighteenth century had fixed costs which they could not avoid. They had to buy land and build suitable premises. They had to pay for their raw materials and their machinery. They had to pay the going rate for transport costs, both for raw materials and finished goods. They had to pay to advertise and if they were sensible, they would insure all they had. Where they could save money – and virtually all of them did – was in the paying of wages to their workforce. Here, there were no fixed costs, no going rate. Each hiring was a private transaction between the employer – always, and until the 1870s legally, known as the Master – and the employee – the Servant. The terminology spoke volumes for the great poverty divide of the time. It was not until twenty-five years after Cato Street that Benjamin Disraeli used as the subtitle of his novel Sybil, the Two Nations, by which he meant the rich and the poor in England. It would be another three years after that, that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, a blueprint for doing something about that monstrous inequality.
So the entrepreneurs of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution built cheap houses for their workers as close as possible to the factory. That way, time would not be lost in travelling to and from work. They built them quickly so that profits would grow from the first day and they built them in terraces to save space. These ‘back-to-back’ tenements formed the nucleus of cities in the last decade of the eighteenth century, built haphazardly by individual industrialists with no recourse to civic planning, so that street upon street and alley upon alley became warrens of overcrowding and despair.
In the 1830s when the Whig government commissioned Edwin Chadwick and his team of civil servants to investigate the problem, a house built for a single family was home to sixty individuals, of both sexes and all ages. Typically, the attic, with no fireplace, a single window and a sloping ceiling, housed eight. The only means to the ground was via the floors below. The upper storey, intended of course as a bedroom, had perhaps two windows and a fireplace, but it routinely housed up to twenty people. The ground floor was identical, with two extra people crammed in here somehow. Below ground, steps led down to the cellars, often inches deep in water, where ten miserable souls had no view but other people’s shoes clattering at street level. The walls of every storey were wringing wet and every house was awash with vermin. People slept eight to a bed, children tucked into every conceivable angle and corner.
Water for these first- and second-generation industrial families came from stand-pipes that were owned by private water companies and these taps were usually turned on for two hours a day. Children queued to fill buckets and the water collected had to last for twenty-four hours, to be used for drinking, cooking, washing bodies and clothes. The toilet was a privy, a single shed on the ground next to the terrace. Its door was often hanging off and there would be no flush mechanism until the 1850s.7 The human waste was carried away into a neighbouring sewer (in effect an open drain) or merely collected in a pit until it was removed – and dumped nearby – by the euphemistically named night soil men.
Landlords were under no obligation to repair or maintain these premises and no tenant had the time or money to turn to law for redress. The overcrowding was appalling because tenants continually sublet in an effort to be able to pay their rent. And of course the bitterest pill of all was that the landlord was very often the factory master too. If a man lost his job, he would lose the roof over his head. There was no such thing as a fair rents tribunal and, like the wages he paid, the rent was fixed by the Master/landlord without any external control whatever. If a labourer would not work for the money offered, if he would not pay the rent demanded, there were plenty who would.
To too many men of Arthur Thistlewood’s generation, home was a rat-infested hovel where cholera and typhoid would become endemic killers by the 1830s. Work was a suffocating mill, where stringent rules led to swingeing fines or dismissal. In the stifling cotton mills of Manchester, the most technologically advanced of their day, small children as young as 5 crawled under the eighty-spindled ‘jennies’, tying snapped fibres. Asthmatics died in their hundreds. The ‘healthy’ ones, with their long hair, ragged clothes and bare feet were walking disaster zones among the unguarded, moving machinery. Whole families went to work in the dark and came home in the dark, with bread and cheese for their only meals, taken alongside their machines. Some of them worked up to eighteen hours a day, the women earning half of their menfolk’s wages, the children half of that.
It is easy to wax too lyrical on the plight of the factory workers, as Marx and Frederik Engels would in the 1840s. We have to see their lives in the context of what they had known in their early lives and what their fathers knew. And we have to acknowledge that, in terms of child labour at least, the first tentative steps of reform and government improvement, had been taken as early as 1802.8
Whichever way we look at the social/industrial problem, what we are witnessing is the effects of an unprecedented series of upheavals onto an expanding generation in a brave, but terrifying, new world. But that was only the background – the long-term work and living patterns that had been developing by 1815 for a generation. Bolted onto all that was the peculiar set of circumstances that followed the end of the war.
In terms of pure economics, the months following Waterloo were positive. So much of the investment, manifest today in the world’s hysterical stock markets, is about confidence. And in the summer of 1815 Britain was confident indeed. The Treaty of Paris, signed in May 1815 by the allies who had overthrown Napoleon, promised ‘perpetual peace and friendship’. To this end, various dignitaries – Talleyrand from France, Nesselrode from Prussia, Tsar Alexander of Russia and Lord Castlereagh from Britain – reconvened with their entourages (and in the case of Castlereagh, his wife) in Vienna under the genial auspices of Prince Metternich to establish thirty years of European cooperation. By this arrangement, Britain added to her territories and British businesses could congratulate themselves as being the richest, best organized and most technologically advanced in the world. Their nearest rivals, the French, were humiliated and beaten. They would never rise again.
But the short-lived boom of 1815 hid a hornets’ nest of problems. The long years of war had created an economy that was inevitably geared to the war effort. In the 1790s, William Pitt as the Prime Minister launched a black crusade against the viciousness of the French Revolution, manufacturing turned to making weapons of war. In textiles, the most mechanized of all British industries, there was a huge demand for uniforms. Every soldier was issued with a new jacket or coatee every Christmas Day. It would be over a century before conscription was introduced by a British government, but at the height of the war against Napoleon, there were perhaps half a million men serving with the army and navy; they all had to be clothed. Sails were needed for ships of the line. The 104-gun Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, carried 6,500 square yards of canvas. Likewise the army needed tents, in all the theatres of war where they fought. Even in relatively non-confrontational areas like the West Indies or the virtually pointless campaigning of the Duke of York in 1794, the demand for textiles was voracious. And of course, the industry rose to the challenge. These were the great days of the handloom weavers, earning up to 22 shillings a week.9 There are accounts of these men swaggering through Manchester with gold-topped canes and pound notes stuffed into their hatbands.
The huge demand for woollen and cotton textiles carried the seeds of destruction, at least from the point of view of employment. James Hargreaves’s ‘Spinning Jenny’, patented in 1769 but not in widespread use until the 1790s, could do the work of eighty individual spinning wheels which had been the centre of the domestic industry. Increasingly, the independent spinners and weavers were going to the wall by 1810. They had a stark choice: work in the new, all-pervasive mills or starve. Out of this dilemma, from 1811, were born the Luddites, weavers, spinners and stocking-frame knitters from Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, who in desperation and naivety saw the hated machines as their enemy and used their huge, two-handed lump hammers, made by the firm of Enoch & Co. to shatter their rivals. ‘Great Enoch still shall lead the van; Stop him who dare, stop him who can’. Matters were made worse by the year of Cato Street when the Revd Edmund Cartwright’s power-loom was in widespread use, cutting the ground from under thousands of weavers in the Midlands and the North. Many of the 60,000 who attended the fateful meeting at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, in August 181910 were weavers. They had gone to hear speeches about universal suffrage but only because they believed the vote would safeguard their livelihoods.
As with textiles, so with the iron industry. Swords for the cavalry, bayonets for the infantry, guns for everybody – the demand was huge. John Wilkinson remained the longest-serving supplier of swords for the army,11 but he was matched in the 1790s by Gill, Osborn and nearly 200 makers and cutlers. Thomas Gill’s sabres for the Light Cavalry had the boast ‘Guaranteed to cut iron’ stamped on their blades. A small firm, that of Underwood, became involved in Cato Street because Hector Morrison, one of the cutlers, was engaged by James Ings to sharpen two sword blades in February 1820.
‘They were made extremely sharp from heel to point’, Morrison told the jury at Ings’ trial. ‘The prisoner directed that they should be made as sharp as a needle at the point and that they should be made to cut both at the back and front.’12
Cannon and wheel rims for the Artillery, shot of all proportions, buckles and hooks and buttons – all of it came under the aegis of iron. The new Hussar jackets for certain regiments of cavalry after 1805 had no less than 97 buttons – only 19 of them actually fastened anything! Much was made at the Cato Street trials of the appalling weapons of mass destruction made by the conspirators in the days and weeks before 23 February. When Samuel Taunton, a Bow Street Runner, searched Richard Tidd’s house in the Holein-the-Wall Passage, he found 965 cartridges, 10 grenades and ‘a great quantity of gunpowder’. There were 434 balls (bullets) along with 69 ball cartridges and 11 bags of gunpowder, each weighing one pound. Sergeant Edward Hanson of the Royal Artillery shocked the jury at Thistlewood’s trial by describing the devastating effect of a hand-grenade:
The [tin] case contains three ounces and a half of gunpowder. The priming in the tube is a composition of salt-petre, powder and brimstone. The tin was pitched and wrapped round with rope-yarn which was cemented with rosin and tar. Round the tin, and in the rope-yarn, twelve pieces of iron were planted. From the lighting of the fusee to the explosion might be about half a minute. If one of them were to be exploded in a room where there were a number of persons, it would produce great destruction. The pieces of iron would fly about like bullets.13
Chain-shot, bar-shot, canister shot and grape shot, as well as cannon balls weighing between 9 and 64 pounds, were being produced in their thousands for use against the French, giving the iron masters huge profits and creating work for the new industrial classes lured into the workshops by the promise of high wages. It was dangerous, hot and dirty, but the money was good.
And demand for iron and textiles did not end there. Britain was rich enough by the 1790s to become the effective paymaster of Europe, supplying cash, cloth, iron and much else to keep the armies of Austria, Prussia and Russia in the field against the French. Four such coalitions were smashed by the combination of luck and zeal that characterized the Revolutionary armies. Under Napoleon, the coalitions collapsed even quicker. So the Austrians, for example, adopted a pattern of British cavalry sword they still used, in essence, up to 1914 and, in one memorable exchange of goods which flew in the face of all logic, Napoleon sent shiploads of corn to Britain in exchange for Nottingham-made boots so that his troops could go on killing ours!
We have already seen the impact of the wars on agriculture. Enclosure was the watchword. After 1806 Napoleon’s Continental System, though never fully functional, was designed to seal Britain off from the rest of Europe. We had never been self-sufficient in terms of foodstuffs and now the situation was worse. Reliance on the harvest and good weather became absolutely crucial and rural distress remained a burning issue for years to come.
In terms of paying for the war, the poor had what, with hindsight, was something of a lucky break. To keep the coalitions sweet, Pitt arbitrarily withdrew gold from the banks and issued paper ‘promissory notes’ instead. In 1797, the same year as the naval mutinies at the Nore and Spithead, the banks collapsed in a spectacular crisis of confidence. Bank employees were beaten up and their windows smashed as investors were told their gold had gone. A recurring theme of the pugnacious William Cobbett’s pamphlets from 1802 was hatred of ‘Mr Pitt’s paper money’. In 1799, Pitt hit upon the obvious and introduced a tax on incomes, graduated so that the rich paid most, on incomes of over £60 a year. Since no working man earned anything like that (farm labourers, for instance, subsisted on anything between £5 and £8), the poor found their financial burden lighter in these years. Direct taxation, which they did not pay, had largely replaced indirect taxation, which they did.
And then, suddenly, from 1814, all that changed. Napoleon’s escape from his first imprisonment on Elba and the subsequent hundred days campaign that culminated in Waterloo proved to be a mere last gasp of ‘la gloire’. And after that long June day certainly, the demand for wartime industries collapsed overnight and the world had changed.
No one needed swords, guns, bayonets, sail, tents, buckles, ammunition and warships. The Elizabethan statesman Lord Burghley had famously said, ‘Soldiers in peacetime are like chimneys in summer’ and in the summer of 1815, an estimated 300,000 of them came home.
There were, no doubt, parties and handshakes and heart-warming reunions of families and friends. But reality must have kicked in quickly. An infantryman who had been lucky might have served under Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, since 1808 in Portugal and Spain. That meant he had been out of the workforce for seven years and the workforce had learnt to do without him. If he been a spinner or a weaver, he would find no chance of setting up again independently. If he went, cap in hand, to a Master, he would be asked what experience he had. None, except killing Frenchmen. The door would be slammed in his face. One of the five men who died at Newgate after the Cato Street conspiracy was ex-military; so was one of the principal witnesses against them. It would be fascinating to know how many ex-soldiers joined the Luddites to smash the hated machines, marched with the radicals at Spa Fields in 1816,14 faced the yeomanry at St Peter’s Fields two years later and were in that crowd outside Newgate when the men of Cato Street met their maker. For the world had turned. Any cold analysis of revolution, any attempt to explain why one works and the other does not, must hinge on the role of the army. In France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, the army was divided, shaky, disloyal. In Britain in 1815–22, the army was rock solid. But those who had left the army were a different matter. In some cases, whole regiments, like the 23rd Light Dragoons, were disbanded. In others, their strength was halved. The government of Lord Liverpool was desperate to save money and this was one obvious way of doing it. In the navy, the story ran the same as ships’ companies were axed. It was, perhaps a slow and painful death, personified by the painter J M W Turner in his haunting The Fighting Temeraire, as a graceful ship-of-the-line gilded by a dying sun, is towed along by a black, ugly steam tug to be broken up. Soldiers and sailors had seen death up close and personal. Life, to them, was cheap. Murder was always a solution. Such men were dangerous.
William Pitt died, worn out by his exertions, in January 1806, but true to the promise he had made seven years earlier, as soon as was expedient after the war, the hated income tax was dropped. This of course meant that indirect taxation – duties on goods – had to increase. And this time all consumers were hit, including and most especially the poor. In 1815, Liverpool’s government spearheaded by the men who were due to dine with Lord Harrowby in February 1820, introduced the Corn Laws, one of the most divisive and class-conscious pieces of legislation ever put forward. Napoleon’s Continental System had totally collapsed by 1814 as Prussia, Russia and Britain conspired to drive his armies back into France. This meant that European ports were open and cheap, foreign corn was available and bread – the staple diet of most Englishmen – was affordable. 1813, 1814 and 1815 were also years of good harvests at home, so for a very brief period as war came to an end, rural distress was lessened and there seemed a light at the end of the tunnel of economic gloom.
The Corn Laws changed all that. Faced with a loss of profits because of foreign competition, parliament (by definition and to a man, all landowners) placed a price on corn which affected the opening and closing of ports. Economically, this was slow and cumbersome, but to the people it seemed (and it is difficult to argue against this) that the real aim of government was to keep the cost of bread artificially high. If bread was dear, everything was dear – rent, clothes, other foodstuffs. The euphoria at the end of the war quickly changed to a dark mood of defiance and the scene was set for a class war bordering on revolution.
Over all this was the enigmatic figure of William Cobbett. From 1802, the pamphleteer had written a series of polemical, from-the-shoulder articles in his Weekly Political Register. As the essayist Charles Hazlitt wrote of Cobbett, he would take on everyone and anyone. As a writer, he is enormous fun to read, if only because he is so inconsistent. In one passage, he extols the courage and honesty of Sir Francis Burdett, the radical MP. In another, he fairly burns paper:
he is a sore to Westminster; a set-fast on its back; a cholic in its belly; a cramp in its limbs; a gag in its mouth; he is a nuisance, a monstrous nuisance in Westminster and he must be abated.
He attacked: Pitt and his paper money; Robert Peel, the War Secretary; Thomas Malthus, the population parson,15 William Wilberforce, hero of the anti-slavers; Scotsmen; Americans; tea; corruption; Methodists; Quakers; Unitarians; and the landlord of the George Inn, Andover.
In fact, he was by no means so bold face-to-face with his opponents and, although he served time in prison for his views, was just as likely to run to the safety of America (whose towns he said at one stage should be burnt down) as to stay. Ironically, the thing that Cobbett hated most was hypocrisy and in this, he was as guilty as the next man.
Why is Cobbett so important in this story? Because the Political Register, especially in its cheaper form of the Twopenny Trash, reached thousands of the working class and was more of a Bible to them than any other radical tract.16 Those who read it believed it. Those who could not read it had it read to them, and still believed. Oddly, Samuel Bamford, the radical weaver from Middleton who witnessed ‘Peterloo’,17 believed that Cobbett’s works calmed the working class. This is difficult to accept; every line of Cobbett’s is contentious – it was in his nature.
And the recurring dripfeed of the Register was how glorious it was in the good old days and how appalling things were now. This nostalgia is nonsense, but it is an all-pervading part of the human condition. For men, women and children, squatting in damp, freezing cellars, moving to the jar and grind of inhuman machines, to be told that their fathers and grandfathers had lived an idyllic, rural existence with roses twining around the door was hardly likely to instil a sense of contentment.
The loss of jobs, the change in taxation, the arrival of the Corn Laws, the overcrowding of an increasingly desperate people into foul-smelling tenements and dangerous workshops and mills – this was the reality in a nation that had just emerged victorious from a quarter of a century of war. That there was economic distress and a discontented workforce in Lord Liverpool’s England cannot be doubted. But was it this alone that led James Ings to get his swords sharpened and George Edwards to put the fuses in the grenades?
For that, there had to be something more.