Rousseau and Revolution

  All these considerations are illustrated by religion. The doctrines, myths, and ceremonies of a religion may not conform to our present individual reason, but this may be of minor moment if they comport with the past, present, and presumed future needs of society. Experience dictates that the passions of men can be controlled only by the teachings and observances of religion. “If we should uncover our nakedness [release our instincts] by throwing off that Christian religion which has been … one great source of civilization amongst us, … we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it.”155

  Many Englishmen rejected Burke’s conservatism as a cult of stagnation,156 and Thomas Paine answered him vigorously in The Rights of Man (1791-92). But the England of Burke’s old age generally welcomed his ancestor worship. As the French Revolution went on to the September Massacres, the execution of the King and the Queen, and the Reign of Terror, the great majority of Britons felt that Burke had well predicted the results of revolt and irreligion; and for a full century England, though eliminating her rotten boroughs and widening her suffrage, kept resolutely to its constitution of king, aristocracy, Established Church, and a Parliament thinking in terms of imperial powers rather than of popular rights. After the Revolution France returned from Rousseau to Montesquieu, and Joseph de Maistre rephrased Burke for the repentant French.

  Burke continued to the end his campaign for a holy war, and he rejoiced when France declared war on Great Britain (1793). George III wished to reward his old enemy for recent services with a peerage, and with that title of Lord Beaconsfield which Disraeli later graced; Burke refused, but accepted a pension of £ 2,500 (1794). When talk arose of negotiations with France, he issued four Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797 f.), passionately demanding that the war go on. Only death cooled his fire (July 8, 1797). Fox proposed that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but Burke had left instructions that he should have a private funeral and be interred in the little church at Beaconsfield. Macaulay thought him the greatest Englishman since Milton—which may have slighted Chatham; and Lord Morley more prudently called him “the greatest master of civil wisdom in our tongue”157—which may have slighted Locke. In any case Burke was what conservatives had longed for in vain throughout the Age of Reason—a man who could defend custom as brilliantly as Voltaire had defended reason.

  VIII. THE HEROES RETIRE

  As the French Revolution advanced, Charles James Fox found himself in a diminishing minority in Parliament and in the country. Many of his allies were won to the view that England must join Prussia and Austria in fighting France. After the execution of Louis XVI Fox himself turned against the Revolution, but he still opposed entry into the war. When war came nevertheless, he consoled himself by drinking, by reading the classics, and by marrying (1795) his (and Lord Cavendish’s, Lord Derby’s, and Lord Cholmondeley’s) former mistress, Mrs. Elizabeth Armstead, who paid his debts.158 He welcomed the Peace of Amiens (1802), traveled in France, was acclaimed there with civic and popular honors, and was received by Napoleon as a patriot of civilization. In 1806 he served as foreign secretary in a “Ministry of All the Talents”; he labored to keep the peace with France, and decisively supported Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade. When he learned of a plot to assassinate Napoleon he sent the Emperor a warning through Talleyrand. Had Fox’s health not broken down, he might have found a means of reconciling Bonaparte’s ambition with England’s security. But in July, 1806, he was disabled by dropsy. A succession of painful operations failed to stay the progress of the disease; he made his peace with the Established Church, and on September 13 he died, mourned by his friends and his enemies, and even by the King. He was the most widely loved man of his time.

  The younger Pitt, prematurely old, preceded him to the Abbey’s vaults. He too found that he could bear the pace of political life only through the occasional amnesia of drink. The precarious sanity of George III was a constant problem; any serious conflict of views between King and minister might throw the crowned head out of balance and bring in a regency by the Prince of Wales, who would sack Pitt and call in Fox. So Pitt abandoned his plans for political reform, and withdrew his opposition to the slave trade, when he found that on these, as on many other matters, George was fretfully resolved to perpetuate the past. Pitt concentrated his genius on economic legislation, in which he served the rising middle class. Much to his distaste, he led England in war against what he called “a nation of atheists.”159 He did not do well as a war minister. Fearing a French invasion of Ireland, he tried to appease the Irish with a program of parliamentary union and Catholic emancipation; the King balked, and Pitt resigned (1801). He returned (1804) to head his second ministry; Napoleon proved too much for him; and when the news came of the French victory at Austerlitz (December 2, 1805), which made Napoleon master of the Continent, Pitt broke down in body and spirit. Seeing a large map of Europe, he bade a friend, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.”160 He died January 23, 1806, honorably poor, and only forty-six years old.

  Life took longer to destroy Sheridan. He had joined with Burke and Fox in the defense of America and the battle of Hastings; he supported Fox in applauding the French Revolution. Meanwhile that wife whose charm and gentle nature were favorite themes among his friends, and who had put her beauty on the hustings to help him win a seat in Parliament, died of tuberculosis in her thirty-eighth year (1792). Sheridan broke down. “I have seen him,” said an acquaintance, “night after night cry like a child.”161 He found some consolation in the daughter she had borne him; but she died in the same year. During those months of grief he faced the task of rebuilding the Drury Lane Theatre, which had become too old and weak for safety; and to finance this operation he incurred heavy liabilities. He had accustomed himself to luxurious living, which his income could not maintain; he borrowed to continue that style. When his creditors came to dun him he treated them like lords, entertained them with liquor, courtesy, and wit, and sent them away in a humor that almost forgot his debts. He remained active in Parliament till 1812, when he failed of re-election. As a member of the House he had been immune to arrest; now his creditors closed in upon him, appropriated his books, his pictures, his jewels; finally they were about to carry him off to jail when his physician warned them that Sheridan might die on the way. He succumbed on July 7, 1816, in his sixty-fifth year. He was rich again in his funeral, for seven lords and one bishop bore him to the Abbey.

  The half-mad King survived them all, survived even the triumph of England at Waterloo, though he knew it not. By 1783 he recognized that he had failed in his attempt to make the ministers responsible to him rather than to Parliament. The long struggles with the House of Commons, with America, and with France proved too much for him, and in 1801, 1804, and 1810 he relapsed into insanity. In his old age the people came to recognize his courage and his sincerity, and the popularity that had been denied him in his days of strife came to him at last, tinged with pity for a man who had seen England suffer so many defeats and was not permitted to witness her victory. The death of his favorite daughter, Amelia (1810), completed his divorce from reality; in 1811 he became incurably insane as well as blind, and he remained in seclusion, under guard, till his death (January 29, 1820).

  CHAPTER XXIX

  The English People

  1756-89

  I. ENGLISH WAYS

  SO much for the government; let us now consider the people. First, look at their figures. Doubtless Reynolds idealized them, showing us mostly the titled fortunate, and glorifying their corpulence with the robes and insignia of dignity. But hear Goethe on the Englishmen he saw in Weimar: “What fine, handsome people they are!”—and he worried lest these confident young Britishers, bearing empire in their stride, would disenchant German girls with German men.1 Several of these youths kept their figures into later years, but many of them, as they passed from the playgrounds of their schools
to the pleasures of the table, swelled in paunch and jowls, blossomed like a red, red rose, and fought in the still of the night the gout they had fed in the jovial day. Some Elizabethan robustness had been lost in Restoration roistering. English women, by contrast, were more beautiful than ever, at least on the easels: refined features, flowered and ribboned hair, mysteries in silk, poems of stately grace.

  Sartorial class distinctions were disappearing on the streets as a new plenty of cotton clothing issued from the multiplying mills, but on formal occasions they remained; Lord Derwentwater rode to his execution in a scarlet coat and waistcoat laced with gold.2 Wigs were waning, and they vanished when Pitt II taxed the powder that deodorized them; they survived on doctors, judges, barristers, and Samuel Johnson; most men were now content with their own hair, gathered at the back of the neck in a ribboned queue. About 1785 some men extended their breeches from knees to calves; in 1793, inspired by the triumphant French sans-culottes, they let them reach the ankle, and modern man was born. Women still laced their bosoms to the verge of suffocation, but the hoopskirt was losing fashion and breadth, and dresses were assuming those flowing lines that fascinated our youth.

  Cleanliness was next to godliness in rarity, for water was a luxury. Rivers were lovely but usually polluted; the Thames was a drainage canal.3 Most London houses had water piped into them three times a week for three shillings per quarter;4 some had mechanical toilets; a few had bathrooms with running water. Most privies (whose current name was “Jerichos”) were extramural, built over open pits that sent their seepage through the soil to wells from which much of the drinking water came.5 Nevertheless public sanitation was improving; hospitals were multiplying; infantile mortality fell from seventy-four per hundred births in 1749 to forty-one in 1809.6

  No one drank water if he could get something safer. Beer was considered a food, necessary for any vigorous work; wine was a favorite medicine, whiskey was a portable stove, and drunkenness was a venial sin, if not a necessary part of social conformity. “I remember,” said Dr. Johnson, “when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.”7 Pitt II came drunk to the House of Commons, and Lord Cornwallis went drunk to the opera.8 Some hackney coachmen added to their incomes by cruising the streets at late hours, picking up gentlemen who were “as drunk as a lord,” and delivering them to their homes. Drunkenness declined as the century advanced; tea took up some of the task of warming the vitals and loosing the tongue. Tea imports rose from a hundred pounds in 1668 to fourteen million pounds in 1786.9 The coffeehouses now served more tea than coffee.

  Meals were hearty, bloody, and immense. Dinner came about four in the afternoon for the upper classes, and was progressively deferred till six as the century declined. A hurried man might ease his hunger with a sandwich. This contraption took its name from the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who, not to interrupt his gambling with dinner, ate two slices of bread divided by meat. Vegetables were eaten under protest. “Smoking has gone out [of fashion],” Johnson told Boswell in 1773; but tobacco was taken in the form of snuff. Opium was widely used as a sedative or a cure.

  At table the Englishman could drink himself into loquacity, and then the conversation might rival that of the Paris salons in wit and excel it in substance. One day (April 9, 1778), as Johnson, Gibbon, Boswell, Allan Ramsay, and other friends gathered in the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Doctor remarked: “I question if in Paris such a company as is sitting around this table could be got together in less than half a year.”10 Aristocratic gatherings preferred wit to learning, and Selwyn to Johnson. George Selwyn was the Oscar Wilde of the eighteenth century. He had been expelled from Oxford (1745) because “he did impiously affect to personate the Blessed Saviour, and did ridicule the institution of the Holy Sacrament,”11 but this did not prevent him from getting several lucrative sinecures in the administration, or from sitting and sleeping in the House of Commons from 1747 to 1780. He had a host of friends, but never married. He had a passion for executions, but skipped that of a namesake of Charles James Fox, a political enemy for whom he hopefully awaited a Tyburn elevation—“I make a point of never attending rehearsals.”12 He and Horace Walpole were intimate friends for sixty-three years, without a cloud or a woman between them.

  Those who did not enjoy executions could choose among a hundred other amusements, from whist or bird-watching to horse races or prize fights. Cricket was now the national game. The poor squandered their wages in taverns, the rich gambled their fortunes in clubs or in private homes; so Walpole, at Lady Hertford’s, “lost fifty-six guineas before I could say an Ave Maria.”13 James Gillray, in famous caricatures, called such hostesses “Faro’s daughters.”14 To take losses calmly was a prime requisite of an English gentleman, even if he ended by blowing out his brains.

  It was a man’s world,“ legally, socially, and morally. Men took most of their social pleasures with other men; not till 1770 was a club organized for bisexual membership. Men discouraged intellect in women, and then complained that women were incapable of intellectual conversation. Some women, nevertheless, managed to develop intellects. Mrs. Elizabeth Carter learned to speak Latin, French, Italian, and German, studied Hebrew, Portuguese, and Arabic, and translated Epictetus with a Greek scholarship that drew Johnson’s praise. She protested against the reluctance of men to discuss ideas with women, and she was one of those ladies who made the “bluestockings” the talk of literate London.

  The name was first given to the mixed gatherings at the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Vesey in Hertford Street, Mayfair. At these evening assemblies card playing was banned and discussion of literature was encouraged. Meeting, one day, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who had a momentary reputation as poet, botanist, and philosopher, Mrs. Vesey invited him to her next “rout.” He excused himself on the ground that he had no clothes fit for a party. He was wearing blue hose. “Don’t mind dress,” she told him; “come in your blue stockings.” He came. “Such was the excellence of his conversation,” Boswell relates, “that … it used to be said, ‘we do nothing without the blue stockings’; and thus by degrees the title was established,”15 and Mrs. Vesey’s group came to be called the Bas Bleu Society. There came Garrick and Walpole, and there one evening Johnson awed all with pontifical discourse.

  But “the Queen of the Blues,” as Johnson called her, was Elizabeth Robinson Montagu. She was married to Edward Montagu, grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich and relative of Edward Wortley Montagu, husband of the volatile Lady Mary whom we celebrated in pages gone by.16 Elizabeth was a wit, a scholar, an author; her essay The Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) indignantly defended the national bard against the strictures of Voltaire. She was rich, and could afford to entertain in style. She made the Chinese Room in her Berkeley Square home the favorite center of London’s intellect and beauty; there came Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Fanny Burney, Hannah More; there artists met lawyers, prelates met philosophers, poets met ambassadors. Mrs. Montagu’s “excellent cook” put them all in good humor, but no liquor was served, and intoxication was taboo. She played Maecenas to budding authors, and scattered bounty. Other London ladies—Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Monckton—opened their homes to talent and charm. London society became bisexual, and began to rival Paris in the fame and genius of its salons.

  II. ENGLISH MORALS

  “In every society,” said Adam Smith, “where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have always been two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which one may be called the strict or austere, the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people, the latter … more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion.”17 John Wesley, who belonged to the austere class, described English morality in 1757 as a medley of smuggling, false oaths, political corruption, drunkenness, gambling, cheating in business, chicanery in the courts, servilit
y in the clergy, worldliness among Quakers, and private embezzlement of charitable funds.18 It is an old refrain.

  Then, as now, sexual differentiation was far from complete. Some women tried to be men, and almost succeeded; we hear of cases where women disguised themselves as men and maintained the deception till death; some joined the army or navy as men, drank, smoked, and swore like men, fought in battle, and bore flogging manfully.19 Toward 1772 “Macaronis” became prominent on London streets; they were young men who wore their hair in long curls, dressed in rich materials and striking colors, and “wenched without passion”; Selwyn described them as “a kind of animal neither male nor female, but of the neuter gender.”20 Homosexualism had its brothels, though homosexual acts, if detected and proved, were punishable with death.