The Regency period has been dubbed the Age of Elegance. It is famous for fine houses on classical lines, flamboyant balls, ladies in elegant dresses, Beau Brummel and, topping it all like a star on a tiered cake, the Prince Regent himself. The Regency was also an age of riots and when Wellington’s men returned from the battle to end the Napoleonic Wars they found a country at war with itself.
Just three months before the Battle of Waterloo, Lady Melbourne, one of the fading beauties of the Regency period, wrote to her niece Annabella, Lady Byron, about a mob riot outside her elegant stucco-fronted house overlooking Horse Guards Parade in the heart of Whitehall:
A Mob having assembled upon the Parade (Horse Guards) to rescue a Man who had been taken up by the constables, it was necessary to have ye assistance of the Military and about a dozen of the Horse Guards galloped at the people and dispersed them. Two Men were rode over but not hurt – and this passing close to my Windows* made it impossible not to leave off writing and it was with great difficulty I could finish my letter … last Night the Mob had many attempts upon different Houses but found them all guarded and no mischief was I believe done.
The mob was protesting against a bill to keep the price of corn artificially high to protect the farmers – including the landowning aristocracy – that also increased the price of bread, the staple food of the poor. Riots caused panic in the government of Lord Liverpool and redcoats ringed the Houses of Parliament to protect MPs from the violence of the mobs when they voted the Corn Laws through. Nicholas Vansittart, the Chancellor, told MPs that if they voted against the Corn Laws they were giving in to mob rule:
There would be more real cowardice in giving way to the threatening riots which existed, and in transferring the legislative functions from their constitutional guardians, the King, the Lords, and Commons, to an outrageous mob.
Riots were not new – they had been going on for a generation in protest at the hardship caused by the social upheaval with a mass population shift from the country to the factories, as Britain changed from an agricultural society to the first industrialised nation on earth – but Lady Melbourne noted that the violence had increased:
Today it rains hard which will probably prevent their assembling in great Numbers and the Town is full of Military so I conclude the Ministers think themselves tolerably Safe – they were very much frightened and not without reason for this Mob seems to be extremely savage and much more in earnest than any I ever remember. They tear up the Iron rails and force open the door of the House and if they get in as they did at Mr Robinson’s (Frederick John Robinson was a vocal advocate of the Corn Laws) they throw all the furniture out of the Windows into ye Street where it is broken to pieces or carried away …
Elizabeth Milbanke, Lady Melbourne, was remarkable, even in an age of extraordinary women. She had a string of lovers including the two royal princes, George and Frederick (Duke of York), both of whom fathered children by her, but she was far more politically astute than her fashionable friend, Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire, and just as beautiful in her prime. Lady Melbourne climbed the social ladder on her back, securing titles and advancement for her family through her lovers while presiding over a Whig salon that attracted the shining wits* of the age, including Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who drew on Georgiana and Lady Melbourne for Lady Teazle and Lady Sneerwell in his farce School for Scandal. In her letter, dated 12 March 1815, Lady Melbourne said someone had tossed a loaf of bread into the gardens at the Prince Regent’s Carlton House as a warning about the Corn Laws. It had been dunked in blood, she said, and tied up in a black mourning crape: ‘This has caused some mirth as it must have been done by some person as a Joke but which I have no doubt would be taken very seriously,’ she added. Lady Melbourne was hinting at fears there was a darker, more sinister threat to the monarchy from the turmoil on the streets. The French Revolution began with a bread march by women seeking relief from hunger to Versailles, supposedly prompting Marie Antoinette to say: ‘Let them eat cake.’ The aristocrats of Britain feared the Terror that had gripped Paris was stalking London. It was only three years since Spencer Perceval, the prime minister, was assassinated by John Bellingham. It had nothing to do with revolution – he was a deranged businessman with a grudge against the government – but it unnerved Cabinet ministers. Lady Melbourne had a daily reminder across the road from her front door that King Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in 1649, long before the French adopted the idea. Bread riots carried real menace in Regency Britain, and the poverty was made worse by the sudden outbreak of peace that left many ex-soldiers destitute. Tens of thousands of men were discharged from the army with little prospect of work.
As N.M. Rothschild predicted, the government adopted austerity with the peace by abolishing income tax and slashing spending. The defence budget was cut by 75 per cent from £43 million in 1815 to £10.7 million in 1820. The army was more than halved over the next decade from 233,000 in 1815 to 92,000. The soldiers – the ‘scum of the earth’ – had to find a living where they could, mostly in the new factories. Rifleman Benjamin Harris saw:
thousands of soldiers lining the streets and lounging about the different public houses with every description of wound and casualty incident to modern warfare … the Irishman shouting and brandishing his crutch; the English soldier reeling with drink; and the Scot with grave and melancholy visage sitting on the steps of the public house amongst the crowd listening to the skirl of his comrades’ pipes …1
The Prince Regent seemed impervious to the plight of his people, and came to embody all the grievances of the mob. He had become regent in 1811 to take over the powers of the king from his father, King George III, when he became incapacitated by bouts of ‘madness’, thought to be a blood disorder called porphyria.* He celebrated with a lavish party at Carlton House terrace – live fish were carried in an ornamental canal on the banquet table and the dinner service cost £60,000 – and he went on a huge palace spending spree to match his new powers. The Prince Regent overspent the £2.8 million (the equivalent purchasing power of £181 million today) he was granted on the Civil List over the three years from 1812 to 1815 by a staggering £900,000 (£58m today). Worse, ‘Prinny’ asked Parliament to advance him a further £100,000 (£6.4m) to celebrate becoming an unrestricted Regent, including a new suit of clothes. He ran up bills all over town – he had a massive credit account of £490 – equivalent to £31,000 today – at his Savile Row tailor Jonathan Meyer (later Meyer and Mortimer) often for letting out his clothes to accommodate his growing girth. They still have the account books in copperplate script for enlarging a jacket in the breast and a yellow waistcoat made higher in the neck with added lace to hide his double chins. He was lampooned as a gluttonous, drunken, womanising, gambling, bloated buffoon, but ‘Prinny’, like a spoiled child, refused to tighten the royal belt. In 1815 he commissioned his architect John Nash – the architect for his ambitious redesign of central London with Regent Street – to carry out a lavish refurbishment of interiors at Carlton House and turn his classical villa by the sea at Brighton into a Moghul-inspired pleasure palace with domes and fabulously exotic chinoisserie that brought the shock of the Orient to the East Sussex coast. Here he could indulge his twin passions of food and fun. The Whig MP George Tierney successfully demanded a Commons inquiry into the royal expenses after protesting the Prince Regent had run up bills of £260,000 for furniture, upholstery costing £49,000 and plate and jewels costing £23,000 in a single year for Carlton House.
By 1816, even the Tory government of Lord Liverpool had become alarmed at the prince’s excesses. In an extraordinary move, the prime minister, the Leader of the Commons Lord Castlereagh and Chancellor Sir Nicholas Vansittart wrote a joint letter to the prince warning him to call a halt to his lavish extravagance or they would not weather the coming storm. They clearly feared the Prince Regent’s spending could be the spark that could set off an English revolution. Tom Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man had proved popular, vastly outselling Edmund Burke’s 1790 attack on the revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France. They reminded him the government was having to ‘enforce a system of economy and retrenchment’ to reduce the debts caused by the Napoleonic Wars and the aftermath of Waterloo. Landowners were ‘obliged to submit to losses and privations as well as to retrenchment’. They told him bluntly the only means of ‘weathering the impending storm is by stating on the direct authority of Your Royal Highness and by your command … that all new expenses for additions or alterations at Brighton or elsewhere will … be abandoned.’
Their warnings went unheeded. In 1817 a mob attacked the Prince Regent’s carriage when he was returning from Parliament after reading the King’s Speech. The Lord of the Bedchamber, James Murray, who had been in the carriage with the Prince Regent, was summoned to the Commons to give evidence to MPs about the attack. He said:
On his royal highness’s return from the House, between Carleton House Gardens and St. James’s gardens, the glass of the carriage on the left side of his royal highness was broken … It seemed to have been produced by two bullets of a small size; about a quarter of an inch apart.
The incident was passed off as an exaggeration by the Prince Regent – many thought the bullets were probably a couple of stones. However, Murray’s evidence (two holes were punched in tough glass without smashing it) suggests they may have been bullets fired from an airgun (there was no sound or smell of powder) and two years later there was a serious assassination attempt on the Cabinet.
The unrest was strongest in the burgeoning towns of the newly industrialised Midlands and the North – Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bradford and Leeds, which were denied representation in Parliament. The new mills with their spinning machines, driven by water or steam, put whole families out of work. One spinning machine operated by a single minder could do the work of over 700 spinners; they brought poverty to entire families who had made a living with their cottage looms and single-spindle spinning wheels. It was little comfort to them to know the factories in the cities would produce more jobs than the fields in the coming decades and drive the British export boom that boosted incomes in the Victorian period.
In their frustration some organised gangs smashed the new weaving and spinning frames in the factories that had taken their jobs. The anonymous gang leaders penned death threats to the magistrates who tried to tackle the lawlessness signed with the nom-de-guerre ‘King Lud’ and the legend of the Luddites was born. Many were proud artisans whose skills were also lost to machines and new mass manufacture. While the landowning aristocrats remained the ruling elite at Westminster, the factory bosses and the merchants became the new ‘aristocrats’ of the Midlands and the North, with even less sympathy with the Luddites’ demands than the old aristocrats. There was no police force, and the mill owners mobilised volunteer militias, backed by the law through local magistrates, to smash the mobs who had smashed their machines, or make them swing for their crimes on the gibbets.
Lord Byron – a month before he burst onto the literary world with his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – was so troubled by the plight of some Nottinghamshire weavers who were facing the death penalty that he travelled down from his stately home at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire to the House of Lords to denounce the government in his maiden speech:
These men were willing to dig, but the spade was in other hands; they were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them. Their own means of subsistence were cut off; all other employments pre-occupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be the subject of surprise.
The rural poor felt besieged. Not only were their cottage industries under attack from the mill owners, but their ancient rights to graze some sheep or a cow on the commons were taken away by Parliamentary Bills allowing local landowners to enclose their land. A total of 906 enclosure bills were introduced between 1800 and 1810 – nearly double the number in the previous decade. It was little more than legalised land theft, though it replaced the medieval farming system with modern production techniques. The cottage dwellers risked deportation to the colonies if they poached on the land.
The peasant-poet John Clare poured out his heart in his poetry about the loss of his childhood haunts in the flat lands of Northamptonshire:
These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’.
‘The Mores’, John Clare
Clare shared a two-up-two-down cottage in Helpston with his family of ten, including his father and mother. The cottage is now a museum. Ironically, he was sponsored by the Tory Marquess of Exeter and the Whig, Earl Fitzwilliam, who enclosed his country lanes.
In 1816, Byron was forced into exile because of rumours spread by his ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law, of his sodomy – then a crime punishable by death. He embarked on a journey to see the Alps, Mont Blanc in Chamonix, and Lake Geneva and visited the battlefield at Waterloo. In a letter from Karlsruhe on 16 May 1816, Byron told his old friend, John Cam Hobhouse, that while a coach wheel was being repaired in Brussels, he:
of course seized the opportunity to visit Mont Saint Jean where I had a gallop over the field on a Cossack horse left by some of the Don gentlemen at Brussels and after a tolerably minute investigation returned by Soignies having purchased a quantity of helmets sabres and all of which are consigned to the care of a Mr Gordon at Brussels (an old acquaintance) who desired to forward them to Mr Murray – in whose keeping I hope to find them safe some day or other …
The helmets and sabres went to Newstead but smaller souvenirs are still held by his publisher, John Murray, in their offices at 50 Albermarle Street, London. Virginia Murray showed me Byron’s Waterloo souvenirs. They are wrapped in tissue paper in boxes and include a large ball of canister shot stained red, perhaps by blood, an eagle badge of the 55th, and a couple of leather Napoleonic cockades that had the same shock effect in Regency London as a Nazi swastika still has now. Byron was disappointed to find the fields at Waterloo already under the plough, but was even more disparaging about the battle. He wrote to John Murray saying he had rode across the battlefield with ‘pain and pleasure’. ‘The Plain at Waterloo is a fine one – but not much after Marathon and Troy – Cheronea and Platea – Perhaps there is something of prejudice in this but – but I detest the cause and the victors – and the victory – including Blücher and the Bourbons.’ Byron compared Waterloo unfavourably to the Battle of Marathon in Ancient Greece:
And Harold stands upon this place of skulls,
The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo;
How in an hour the power which gave annuls
Its gifts, transferring fame as fleeting too!
In ‘pride of place’ here last the eagle flew,
Then tore with bloody talon the rent plain,
Pierced by the shaft of banded nations through;
Ambition’s life and labours all were vain;
He wears the shatter’d links of the world’s broken chain
More down to earth, Frances, Lady Shelley, on her own tour to Waterloo and Mont Blanc, noted in her diary on 20 July 1816 that Byron was already engaged in another affair: ‘Lord Byron is living near here with Percy Shelley or rather with his wife’s sister as the chronique scandalous says.’ She was referring to Claire Clairmont, a starry-eyed 17-year-old who had had an affair with Byron in London and had pursued him to Geneva, where he had taken the handsome Villa Diodati overlooking the lake with his friend and physician John William Polidori. Claire had followed Byron to Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s muse, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Claire’s step-sister, who stayed at the nearby Maison Chapuis. The weather was atrocious – the lake and the hills echoed to the boom of some spectacular storms of thunder and lightning in the summer of 1816, possibly caused by the after-effects of the Tambora volcano. They were forced to shelter indoors, and passed the time making up ghost stories that would make Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin famous as Mary Shelley. Mary was the daughter of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, a radical writer and supporter of the Enlightenment. Mary Wollstonecraft had been intoxicated with the Revolution; she had written a feminist response to Burke called The Rights of Men (1790) followed by A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and arrived in Paris a month before Louis XVI was guillotined.
Villa Diodati is still there today, largely as it was when Byron and the Shelleys were there, though Cologny is a rich and exclusive suburb for the bankers and jewellers who still cluster in the Swiss city. The villa is elevated on a steep grassy hill with airy views over the lake, the marina with its towering fountain and the Jura mountains beyond.
When I visited the villa, a crowd had gathered nearby to watch a couple of vintage biplanes marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War with a dog-fight over the lake. Byron and his friends had a similar grandstand view for the spectacular thunderstorms that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus:
A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.
Mary Shelley’s original manuscript in the Bodleian library in Oxford contains Percy Shelley’s hand-written annotations in the margins and his personal revolutionary manifesto for Britain:
The republican institutions of our country (Switzerland) have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants; and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England …
These were views that would strike a chord with the Radicals at home: the monster would soon be on the loose in Britain, and the real storm was about to break.
* Melbourne House is now the Scotland Office, next to Horse Guards.
* Sheridan was a master at a play on words.
* Doubts were cast on the modern porphyria diagnosis in 2013 by more research suggesting he was bipolar.
1. W.H. Fitchett, Wellington’s Men – Rifleman Harris, 1900.