On succeeding to the French throne in September 1824, Charles X made clear what kind of king he intended to be, not least by having himself anointed and crowned according to the ancient rites of the French monarchy, in Reims Cathedral, which his predecessor had not dared to do. He felt strong enough to make gracious gestures to the duc d’Orléans, whom Louis XVIII had held at arm’s length, and to various Napoleonic generals, and he pardoned a number of political prisoners. The success of the Spanish campaign had proved the reliability of the army, the Carbonarist movement had withered, and there was a marked drop in the number of secret societies reported by the police. The elections of that year had passed off quietly, with the police openly canvassing for the royalist candidates and discouraging those who intended to vote otherwise.1
In January 1826 a new Austrian ambassador, Count Apponyi, arrived in Paris. He would move into a fine building, the Hôtel d’Eckmühl, belonging to the widow of Marshal Davout, at the corner of the rue Saint Dominique and the esplanade des Invalides, where his wife would host one of the most brilliant musical salons of Paris until his recall in 1848. In his instructions, Metternich expressed the view that while the foul influence of France was still threatening Europe with the ‘moral poison’ being poured all over the Continent through the publications it daily spewed forth like deadly ‘projectiles’, and that it was still ‘the great factory of revolutions’, the country itself was no longer susceptible to revolution.2
He had visited Paris in March 1825, meeting prime minister Villèle, whom he rated highly, and the police prefect Delaveau, who gratifyingly shared Metternich’s attitude and suspicions, and whose mind worked in much the same way when it came to seeing conspiracy everywhere – in May 1824 he had noted that wherever the Quakers Stephen Grellet and William Allen had been on their travels, insurrections had broken out, which in his opinion permitted no doubt that they had been involved. A cosy relationship sprang up between the French and Austrian police.3
Metternich was more worried by England than France, and took a dim view of the foreign secretary George Canning in particular. As far as he could see, the agitation against the Combination Acts was revolutionary, and their repeal in 1824 was a sign of the government’s weakness. It was apparently blind to the creeping influence of ‘the sect’, clear evidence of which was the plan to establish a new secular university in London. ‘I authorise you to say to His Majesty,’ he instructed Esterházy in 1825, ‘that I am certainly not mistaken when I say that if the plan were to be carried out, it would be the end of England.’ With the foundation of University College London in 1826, the first university in Britain opened its doors to students of every race and religion.4
The accession of Nicholas to the Russian throne had done nothing to reassure Metternich. He had a poor opinion of the new tsar, and feared the influence of his wife, whom he regarded as dangerously liberal. Although Lebzeltern had persuaded his brother-in-law the ‘dictator’ Trubetskoy to leave the Austrian embassy in St Petersburg, where he had taken asylum, and hand himself in, Nicholas regarded the Austrian ambassador as a Jacobin and demanded he be recalled, so Metternich no longer had a good source of information and influence in the Russian capital. As he surveyed a peaceful and politically quiescent Europe, he felt far from reassured.
Towards the end of 1827 Metternich remarried. Marie-Antoinette de Leykam, a great beauty, thirty-three years his junior, filled his life with happiness. The catty Dorothea Lieven, now a princess, her husband having been promoted, remarked that, the young woman being not particularly well-born, Metternich had abandoned the Holy Alliance for a mésalliance. In January 1829, only fourteen months into their marriage, she died, leaving him disconsolate. It was in a grim mood that he watched a new storm gathering in France.5
The Villèle ministry had been gradually implementing the Ultra programme of counter-revolution. It not only righted wrongs by, for instance, passing legislation which indemnified those who had had their property confiscated in the 1790s, but introduced measures making the Catholic faith, and particularly the Church, central to public as well as private life. Various laws were brought in to protect it and shore up its position, and in 1825 sacrilege was made a capital offence. As often happens in such a climate, officials and functionaries who may or may not have been personally devout displayed an excess of zeal, as in the case of the prefect of the department of Haute-Normandie, who banned a scheduled performance of Molière’s Tartuffe on the grounds that it insulted the Church. This caused such an outcry that he was overruled by the ministry in Paris, but that did nothing to allay a conviction growing in various quarters that the country was being surreptitiously clawed back by what Montlosier described as ‘an ambitious and invasive faction, creeping in the shadows under the inspiration of the Jesuits, an anonymous and illegal congregation, infiltrating the whole secular administration, affiliating to itself magistrates, suborning ministers, gaining and distributing all the favours …’ – and he was a royalist who had defended religion in the Constituent Assembly before emigrating in 1792.6
The Jesuits, legally excluded from France, were running several religious schools while the government turned a blind eye. Sensible estimates put their number at anywhere between 108 and five hundred, but liberals believed there were many more; those perturbed by creeping conservatism focused on the image of the Jesuits as the agents of a subtle counter-revolution (mirroring the Illuminati scare on the right) and began to see them everywhere. Some claimed the Jesuit house at Montrouge held as many as 50,000 priests – and there were even rumours that they were training in the use of firearms. While he was not counting on armed Jesuits to support him, the king was gradually positioning himself to carry out a real counter-revolution.7
On 12 April 1827 he insisted on attending a parade of the 50,000-strong Paris National Guard. This body represented the people of Paris in arms, with the units from the prosperous quartiers predictably conservative and those from the working-class ones decidedly less so, but all of them essentially interested in the orderly functioning of their city. The police had warned of discontent in their ranks, and even plots to assassinate the king during the parade, and his entourage advised him not to attend. In the event, the majority of the men cheered Charles warmly. A couple of the units also shouted: ‘À bas les ministres! À bas Villèle! À bas les Jésuites!’ Only one showed any hostility to Charles himself. But he was incensed, and an even angrier Villèle had no trouble in persuading him to issue a decree disbanding the National Guard. As Marshal Marmont, military commander of Paris, commented, the king seemed to be looking for confrontation; the National Guard, originally created in 1789, was a symbol of citizen-power, and its dissolution was an affront to the principle of the sovereignty of the people. It also pushed a large armed force into opposition.8
The act raised the political temperature, and this was further stoked by the police. The police chief Franchet d’Esperey was warned that a conspiracy was being planned by liberals including Lafitte and Merilhou, and took seriously reports that the comité directeur was sending emissaries into the provinces, their secret talisman a small gold heart the size of a hazelnut hanging from their watch chains; that in Rouen one Adrien Barbet, who had ordered a couple of daggers from a goldsmith, had been arrested and interrogated; that the principal liberals of Paris and London were concerting. Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart was refused permission to pass through French territory on his way back from Switzerland, as he was married to the daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, one of Napoleon’s brothers, which may or may not have been connected to another report, from earlier in the year, that Lucien had crossed into France from Switzerland disguised as a woman.9
The elections of November 1827 were accompanied by tumultuous demonstrations which, according to the testimony of one senior police official, groups of Ultras and police agents did everything in their power to provoke into violence. This failed to materialise, and, despite the greatly restricted electorate, a liberal majority was returned. Villèle was obliged to step down, and the king called on the moderate royalist vicomte de Martignac to form a new ministry. Martignac attempted to steer a middle course, bringing in legislation to relax censorship and to curtail the activities of the Jesuits, but he could not maintain power for long, and in April 1829 he was forced to resign. Reverting to his policy of confrontation, Charles replaced him with the prince de Polignac, the most extreme of the Ultras, who was said, rather unfairly, to believe that he had been entrusted by the Virgin Mary with the task of saving France. He did believe, as did the king, that the revolution, whose manifestations he saw everywhere, needed to be confronted head-on and royal authority re-established.10
The moment seemed propitious. The reports of departmental and police prefects over the previous three years speak of ‘complete tranquillity’ reigning throughout their regions and cities, and of widespread ‘devotion to the monarchy’. The secret police also reported little interest in politics, except at the time of the elections, after which it quickly lapsed. The Paris police reports are full of brawls, robberies, suicides, drownings, infanticide and misbehaving prostitutes, but there is no mention of the ‘seditious cries’ of earlier times. A new prefect of police, the politically moderate lawyer Louis-Maurice Debelleyme, cashiered the agents provocateurs and shifted funds from the political police to the pursuit of criminals. He also created a new force in Paris, the sergents de ville, who, though uniformed in military manner, were less formidable than the disliked Gendarmerie Royale.11
The harvests of 1826 and 1827 had been poor. The following years saw food shortages, unemployment and poverty, with grain riots in Ireland, Wallonia and the Rhineland as well as France. The winter of 1829–30 was glacial, and food prices in France rose by as much as 75 per cent in some areas. None of this translated into anything more serious than the odd bread riot. According to the contemporary socialist historian Louis Blanc, the people were gripped by a paralysing docility. They felt ‘a profound contempt for the Jesuits and the clergy’, and despised the Bourbon dynasty, mainly on account of the manner in which they had recovered their throne, ‘which [the people] associated with all the humiliations of the motherland’, but they had no sense of their rights or their power, and no vision of a better world, so ‘they were as incapable of wishing as they were of looking forward’, and there was ‘between the bourgeoisie and the people neither community of interests nor conformity of hatreds’. The dissolution of the National Guard had passed off without incident. The army was not giving cause for concern: a successful expedition to capture Algiers had given it something to do and had raised morale.12
On 2 March 1830, during the first session of the new, predominantly liberal, Chamber, a group of deputies addressed an appeal to the king, warning him that he was not listening to the voice of his people, and to adopt a more conciliatory approach. His reaction was to dissolve the Chamber and call a new election. This produced a landslide victory for the liberals. Given Charles’s attitude, many expected something in the nature of a coup d’état as they dispersed to the country to wait for the new Chamber to reconvene on 1 August.
On 25 July Charles signed four ordinances, dissolving the Chamber, reducing the electorate by 75 per cent and subjecting all publications to a government licence. ‘The king has thrown down the gauntlet to the liberals,’ Metternich wrote to Francis. Yet neither Charles nor any of his ministers had made any preparations or contingency plans for the reaction that was bound to follow this challenge. The day after issuing the ordinances, 26 July, he drove off to the château of Rambouillet to go hunting. The military governor of Paris, Marshal Marmont, who only learned of the ordinances from the newspapers, immediately sent to the king for orders. Having had no advance warning of them, he was not prepared, with not enough troops in easy reach, or victuals and ammunition for an emergency, while many officers were on leave.13
There was no immediate popular reaction. The report of the Gendarmerie of Paris for the night of 26–27 July reads much like those for any other day. It begins with the arrest of twelve men for illegal assembly and ‘perturbation du repos public’ on the place du Palais-Royal, and of one for ‘rébéllion’ at the barrière de Clichy. Otherwise, one has to look carefully among the reports of brawls and robberies, the drunks and the whores brought in for medical checks, a duel and a corpse fished out of the Seine to find out that there was also an ‘atrouppement’ which required the intervention of a few mounted gendarmes. The calm could not last. Alarmed at the action of the king, the Paris banks withheld credit, and a number of workshops closed and laid off workers.14
The next day saw barricades go up in various parts of the city, and people spilled out onto the streets airing a multitude of grievances, political aspirations and emotional desires. Students, artists, writers and composers joined in the exuberant explosion, Dumas, Béranger, Ary Scheffer, Liszt and Berlioz among them. The cry of ‘Vive la Liberté’ was accompanied by an astonishing variety of other slogans, including many connected with the running literary battle between the Romantics and the Classicists, which had erupted at the first night of Victor Hugo’s groundbreaking play Hernani in January.
‘Everything is still very quiet here,’ the liberal deputy the duc de Broglie noted on the evening of 27 July; ‘yesterday the police tried to provoke some riots, but failed miserably; people looked on and shrugged their shoulders. We are awaiting the peers and deputies who are still away, so we can deliberate and decide on a course of action.’ Later that night the situation began to change. As Marmont had gathered his troops together around the Louvre, the streets were left free and groups of workers and petty shopkeepers began to congregate. Members of the disbanded National Guard joined them, and the tricolour was hoisted here and there. By the morning of 28 July Paris was in a state of revolt. The situation was nevertheless salvageable, according to Marmont, who still could not obtain any orders from the king.15
This is the more surprising as Charles X and Polignac repeatedly claimed that a comité directeur had been planning an insurrection and distributing money to workers, manufacturing daggers and acquiring firearms. Yet, having decided on a confrontation, they omitted to prepare for it, and at the crucial moment the king’s nerve failed him. The challenge he had thrown down with his ordinances had, as Broglie points out, ‘encountered neither secret societies nor a comité directeur’, only a handful of baffled deputies wondering how to react. It should therefore have been successful, and almost certainly would have been if it had been backed by adequately prepared military force. But, in the words of Louis Blanc, Charles lacked the courage of the tyrant he aspired to be.16
In the face of insurrection, delay in the use of troops rapidly undermines their reliability, and as Marmont waited for orders his men began to desert. He pressed the king to take action, as he was still confident the situation could be brought under control, and he was probably right. Normally, a body as unpopular as the Gendarmerie Royale vaporises at the first sign that its paymasters might fall; it is usually those who do a government’s dirty work who are the first to be torn apart by insurgents. Yet its report for 28–29 July is more concerned with three women arrested for ‘provocation à la prostitution’ than anything else.17
‘I will, if necessary, mount a horse, but not a tumbril like my brother,’ the king defiantly announced to the duc de Mortemart. But he did not place himself at the head of his troops, or even issue any sensible orders to Marmont. In order to avoid being caught in a trap, Marmont began to withdraw from the city. After a certain amount of hesitation Charles climbed into a carriage and drove off towards the coast, where he took ship for England. Perhaps he had fallen for his own propaganda, and had come to believe that an all-powerful comité directeur had taken control and would embark on the bloodthirsty rites he and others like him attributed to it. In fact, as Béranger remarked, ‘the government of Charles X was alone in conspiring against itself at that moment’.18
The revolution had caught the leaders of the opposition unawares, and those, such as Lafayette and Lafitte, who had supposedly been plotting insurrection for years found themselves at a loss as to how to deal with the situation. If Metternich could have seen them, he would have laughed. But it was no laughing matter, as in his ineptitude the king had created a revolutionary situation, and power now had to be picked up out of the proverbial gutter where it was lying and order had to be restored.
Lafayette and other liberals hurried to appropriate this ‘anonymous victory’, as one of them called it. They were fortunate in that there were no other contenders: the more radical had also been taken by surprise, and the lower orders making up the revolutionary surge were leaderless. One observer noted that during the three days of the revolution, insurgent labourers deferentially asked middle-class men and students of the grandes écoles to lead them. Some believed that if Napoleon’s son had appeared on the streets there would have been a restoration of the Empire. By the same token, if the republicans had seized the initiative France might well have become a republic.19
The confusion was well captured by Louis Blanc, who witnessed the storming of the Tuileries and noted that the mob displayed a bewilderingly incoherent variety of loyalties, viciously destroying some portraits and doffing their caps before others. In the event, skilful manoeuvring by Lafayette, Lafitte and others resulted in the duc d’Orléans being named lieutenant general of the kingdom while the possibility of preserving the Bourbon monarchy still hung in the air, and then king when it turned out that it was not to be salvaged. Louis-Philippe I, as he became, took the title of King of the French rather than King of France, and adopted the tricolour as the national flag, thereby acknowledging the legacy of the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic empire, and with them the sovereignty of the people.20
While the ‘July Days’ did result in a change of regime, and although they were to be glorified as such in paint and print by the likes of Delacroix and Victor Hugo, they were hardly revolutionary: the motives and mood of those who came out into the streets could not have been further from those imagined by the likes of Metternich. ‘I was present at nearly every event of our revolution [of 1789], and I can assure you that those of 27, 28 and 29 July had nothing whatever in common with them,’ the former prime minister Louis-Mathieu Molé wrote to the Duke of Wellington on 18 August. ‘During the revolution, the people were the aggressors, and this time they were defending themselves; then, they were violating the law, this time, they were standing up for the law.’ He went on to point out that despite the high levels of exaltation and indignation, there had been little looting or criminal activity. ‘It was carried out without conspiracy and without conspirators,’ he explained; French society had been attacked, and it had defended itself. He was not the only one to note the great sense of fraternity between classes which united people in their enthusiasm.21
The only similarity between the July Days of 1830 and those of 1789 lay in the reactions they elicited. As then, news of the events in Paris was received like a clarion call by liberals and would-be revolutionaries throughout Europe, and like the distant rumbling of a dangerous volcano by the more conservative. To both, it revived memories of 1792, and with them either fear of or longing for the appearance of French armies exporting revolution or liberty on the tips of their bayonets.
The news from Paris was greeted with particular jubilation in Germany. A Prussian officer stationed in Mainz noted that ‘Many young men in the city put on the French cockade and sang the “Marseillaise”, and applauded in the theatre at every sentence expressing hatred of tyrants, and love of liberty.’ The events could not fail to resonate in Belgium, the francophone former Austrian Netherlands which had been incorporated into the new kingdom of Holland by the Congress of Vienna. The unsympathetic government of the Protestant Dutch King William I was deeply resented in these Catholic provinces. Two poor harvests and discrimination against the industries in the south of the country had caused serious hardship. Brussels was the home of many exiled French revolutionaries and former Napoleonic officers. Rather than start a revolution there, most of them rushed back to Paris, but the Dutch authorities nevertheless played safe and decided to cancel the celebrations of King William’s birthday scheduled for 25 August. This act of perceived pusillanimity emboldened local patriots. At a performance of the French composer Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici in Brussels that evening, the aria ‘Amour sacré de la Patrie’ was met with wild applause, which spontaneously turned into a rendering of the ‘Marseillaise’ by the audience. In a mood of exaltation, this spilled out of the theatre onto the streets, where the crowd developed into a mob which proceeded to riot, attacking government offices and tearing down royal insignia. The royal troops evacuated the city, leaving it to the civic guard to police, and the black, yellow and red colours of Brabant were hoisted.22
Barely two weeks later, on 8 September, in the wake of a bread riot in Brunswick, the palace of the reigning duke, Charles, was attacked by demonstrators calling for the reconvening of the local parliamentary body, the Estates. Charles, a petty despot known as the ‘diamond duke’ on account of his predilection for flashy jewellery, fled by a back door, and his guards stood idly by as the mob ransacked his palace. The duke’s brother William stepped in to take his place, and everything returned to normal – perhaps not surprisingly, as there is some evidence that the aristocracy of Brunswick had been behind the whole business. Disturbances of a similar kind broke out in Saxony and Hanover. In Hesse-Kassel, where William II had failed to bring in the promised constitution or to reform the corrupt administration, there were riots over the price of bread and such issues as guild regulations and tolls. Further up the social scale, the resentment focused on the monarch’s vulgar money-grabbing mistress, whom he wished to ennoble. The riots and confrontations which ensued forced William to call the representatives of the Estates. (When they did convene, in January 1831, they would insist on making his son co-regent, only aggravating the situation, as an unseemly squabble between their rival mistresses would eclipse more urgent political business and plague local politics for much of the next decade.)23
In Britain, the reverberations of the events in Paris were less sensational but more serious, and when he landed at Portsmouth as part of the exiled Charles X’s entourage, Marshal Marmont was astonished to see the French tricolour being flown everywhere. ‘The feeling at Portsmouth was entirely in harmony with that which had caused the revolution in France,’ he noted. The Whig Earl Grey’s reaction reflected the views of many. ‘What could be done by legal resistance to a power which had overturned all law? Force was the only resource, and, thank God, it has triumphed,’ he wrote to Princess Lieven on 3 August. ‘The people of Paris seem to me to have shown no less moderation than courage, and are entitled to the thanks and admiration of everyone who feels that they have not only preserved the liberty of France, but have prevented the destruction of that of every country in Europe.’ The Whig politician Henry Brougham sent Broglie his ‘hearty congratulations on the greatest event for liberty in modern times’.24
The death of King George IV on 26 June, exactly a month before the revolution in Paris, and the subsequent dissolution of Parliament had once again raised the issue of parliamentary reform in Britain. The success of the revolution in bringing about constitutional change in France with a minimum of bloodshed made some consider the use of force in order to achieve it there. ‘With the Parisian affair of July 1830 there arose here, amongst the bulk of the nation, a loud cry for changes of the most important nature,’ in the words of the politician and landowner Edward Gibbon Wakefield. ‘This new Revolution produced a very extraordinary effect on the middle classes, and sent a vast number of persons to me with all sorts of projects and propositions,’ noted Francis Place in July. ‘Everyone was glorified with the courage, the humanity, and the honesty of the Parisians, and the common people became eagerly desirous to prove that they too were brave and humane and honest. All soon seemed desirous to fight against the Government if it should attempt to control the French Government.’ News of the subsequent relatively bloodless revolution in Belgium two months later only raised the expectations of the reformers and the levels of fear of the defenders of the status quo. These had been feeling under threat from another quarter.25
In the summer of 1830 a new kind of disturbance had broken out in rural areas of southern England, starting in Kent and gradually spreading westwards and then northwards as far as Leicestershire. Labelled the Swing riots, after a mythical ‘Captain Swing’, it was essentially a spontaneous labourers’ revolt, driven by poverty and low wages attendant on the agricultural depression. But a mix of other gripes, including resentment against tithes, rents, game laws and the introduction of threshing machines, backed up by Radical agitation, sucked in tenant farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters and other country dwellers. The riots varied in form and ritual. In many cases the first call was to the vicarage, whose incumbent was asked in more or less threatening ways to reduce tithes. Others confronted were tithe collectors, overseers of the poor, bailiffs and wealthy farmers. The negotiations generally passed off civilly, with food and drink sometimes offered to the protesters, who claimed that they were acting within the law. It was only when they met with a refusal to negotiate that things would turn ugly; they would burn hayricks and threshing machines, and might manhandle the offending farmer as well, and perhaps duck him in his pond.26
The predominantly nocturnal and sporadic character of the attacks, with flames lighting up the night sky and the rioters, sometimes numbering a couple of hundred, melting away into the countryside to reappear no one knew where or when, could not fail to induce fear among the propertied classes. The government despatched units of cavalry to towns such as Tunbridge Wells, Cranbrook and Canterbury, more in an attempt to make a show of force than to quell the riots, which were too volatile. It left the rest up to local magistrates and landowners. England was still a long way behind the Continent when it came to policing.27
Despite the fiasco of Peterloo and the alarms connected with the Cato Street conspiracy, Queen Caroline’s trial and her funeral procession, and despite the need to call on the military again and again to quell the food riots occasioned by the agricultural depression of 1822 and those attendant on the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824, there had been stiff resistance to the idea of creating a force to keep order. Only in Ireland was the need for an efficient peacekeeping force generally recognised, and a rural police to cover the island had been established in 1822. The rest of the United Kingdom made do with traditional forms of policing, which were considered adequate, particularly as, after the political excitement of 1820, the attitude of the government to unrest had altered.
By 1820 the country had emerged from the post-1815 depression. There was an agricultural crisis in 1822 and a financial one in 1826 following the bursting of a bubble, largely caused by a rush to invest in the newly independent former Spanish colonies of South America. In November 1825 panic had spread in the money market and there was a run on the banks; sixty country banks and six London houses failed. This caused much distress and some rioting, put down by troops, but economic growth resumed and calm descended. Liverpool’s government had softened its attitude, and no longer regarded every civil disturbance as incipient revolution. It was succeeded by a ministry under Canning, whose outlook was so little reactionary as to brand him a crypto-Jacobin in Metternich’s eyes.
The second half of the 1820s saw the formation of trade unions and other organisations, and this was accompanied by a wide-ranging debate on economics, the principles of the organisation of capital and the problems of social adaptation to a changing and increasingly industrialised world, but it was a debate that was neither political nor revolutionary. The Radicals of the 1790s had been a mixed lot, drawn from many levels of society, and their political activities, which entailed some expense, the paying of fines, the need to move domicile, periods in gaol and frequent changes of wives or partners, had propelled even the more respectable of them into a downward spiral as they embraced any trade they could in order to survive, becoming printers, bookbinders, stone-cutters, breeches-makers, braces-makers, shoemakers, publicans, brothel-keepers, pimps, clerks, teachers, preachers, pickpockets, and so on. They had either died, fallen away or moved on. The old Spencean Radical underworld was dead. Most of the extremists of the previous decades had become respectable tradesmen ‘in business’. There were now more prosecutions for pornography than sedition or blasphemy. The only truly revolutionary events of the decade were the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in the following year, but these did not produce a threat to law and order.28
On 15 April 1829 Robert Peel, home secretary in Wellington’s Tory cabinet, put forward a Bill which became law as the Police Act on 19 June. This set up a statutory authority for the London metropolitan area in the person of the home secretary, who appointed two commissioners to exercise it on his behalf, in the first instance a colonel and a lawyer. The new force faced hostility from the Whigs, from magistrates and from parish councils, whose jurisdiction the Act appeared to infringe. It was widely denounced as an attack on civil liberties, an attempt by the government to establish a private army and introduce ‘espionage’ into the country, and as thoroughly un-English. When they first appeared on the streets in their blue uniforms and top hats (blue tailcoat and white ducks in summer), their only weapons a rattle and a truncheon, the members of the new force were either ridiculed with epithets such as ‘Peelers’, ‘Bobbies’, ‘raw lobsters’ and ‘Jenny Darbies’ (gendarmes), or vilified as oppressors and spies.
There was still no organised police force in rural areas, and the yeomanry regiments raised during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had mostly been disbanded – possibly a good thing: in Wiltshire, which had kept its yeomanry, the Swing riots developed a more bitter and violent edge than elsewhere. In other areas, landowners took matters into their own hands. The Duke of Richmond enrolled a private constabulary which patrolled his estates in Sussex, while others assembled bands of retainers, grooms and gamekeepers to hunt down the rioters. The troubles continued to spread, and in the light of events taking place on the Continent, Wellington grew uneasy. On 26 October 1830 he drew up a ‘memorandum on the precautions to be taken to prevent any disaster to the troops in case of their being called out in the north of England’, although he argued that the military should not be used unless ‘their employment is not only legal, but necessary’.29
Those at the other end of the British political spectrum made light of his fears. ‘The manie des revolutions would not be to be feared if Governments were wise and moderate,’ Grey wrote to Princess Lieven in September. ‘I have never yet known a popular revolution that might not be ascribed to provocation on the part of the Government, more or less remote. “Ce n’est jamais par envie d’attaquer, mais par impatience de souffrir, que le peuple se soulève,” is an observation as old as Sully, which all history will verify. That the example of France will give encouragement to the people in different countries, who suffer from the same oppression, to wish for similar relief cannot be doubted. But the security against this is not to be found in armies and Holy Alliances.’ He went on to point out that if the settlement reached at Vienna had been more equitable, there would have been no trouble in the first place. There was much truth in this, as the events of the next couple of years were to show.30