Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

It also confirmed the necessity of pursuing the war and slaying the dragon. ‘It is not the Cause of Nation against nation, but as you well observe, the cause of mankind,’ explained Edmund Burke. ‘We are at war with a principle. And an example, which there is no shutting out by Fortresses or excluding by Territorial Limits. No lines of demarcation can bound the Jacobin Empire. It must be extirpated in the place of its origin, or it will not be confined to that place.’ There had, in his opinion, never been a war like it, and other conflicts had been ‘the games of Children in comparison to it’.30 (#litres_trial_promo)

One of the worst things about the war as far as Burke was concerned was that it was in effect a civil war, since there was a home front. And even when, in 1802, the Treaty of Amiens brought an end to hostilities with France, the war at home continued. Food riots and disturbances in Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1801–02 were rumoured to be the fruit of a conspiracy by a society calling itself ‘the Black Lamp’. On 16 November 1802 Colonel Edward Despard, an Irish landowner and British officer of some distinction, who had been a member of the London Corresponding Society and been gaoled without charge for three years in the 1790s, was arrested in a public house in Lambeth along with a handful of soldiers and labourers. According to government informers, he believed that by seizing the Tower of London and the Bank of England he could bring about revolution, but it is not clear that he actually had any intention of doing so. He was also supposedly linked with the Black Lamp conspiracy. There is considerable disagreement among historians as to whether the Despard plot had any real substance, and whether the Black Lamp was an organised working-class movement or just the figment of an informant’s imagination. The government was taking no chances. Despard and six others were found guilty of treason and executed. Although there was little evidence as to his designs and connections, the government’s fears are well attested by the presence in the crowd at his execution of agents armed with rockets which they were to fire, should the need arise, to summon troops concentrated nearby in large numbers.31 (#litres_trial_promo)

War was declared against France once more in 1803. The threat of invasion galvanised patriotic fervour as Napoleon Bonaparte massed a large force in a camp outside Boulogne and set about building a fleet of barges in which to convey it across the Channel. That of moral contamination appeared slight, given that in 1803 the British government raised 85,000 men in the Militia, and over 400,000 volunteers. In the southern counties, about 50 per cent of all men aged seventeen to fifty-five came forward in what was an extraordinary social movement and demonstration of political will. In order to protect his flotilla of ungainly transports Napoleon needed the main French battle fleet. But this was disastrously defeated off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, a victory that removed the threat of armed invasion. Yet this did nothing to alter what seems to have become a convenient paradigm for the government.32 (#litres_trial_promo)

6

Order (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

While Trafalgar saved Britain from the threat of invasion, it also led to Napoleon’s domination of Europe. Denied the opportunity to get to grips with his English enemy on land, he struck the camp at Boulogne and marched off to deal with Britain’s Austrian and Russian allies. He forced half of the Austrian forces to surrender at Ulm, and defeated the rest, along with a large Russian army, at Austerlitz. He then turned on their new Prussian ally, whose forces he destroyed at Jena and Auerstadt, and crushed the last, Russian, army of the coalition on the fields of Eylau and Friedland.

Between 1805 and 1807 the triumphant Emperor of the French redrew the map of Europe and imposed his will on the Continent. He dismantled the Holy Roman Empire, turning its Emperor Francis II into Francis I of Austria. He reduced Prussia to the status of a second-rank power and garrisoned Berlin with French troops. And he forced Alexander I of Russia into an alliance which effectively set up a common security system dominated by France. In 1809 Austria tried to take advantage of Napoleon’s involvement in Spain by attacking his forces and allies in Germany, only to be defeated at Wagram. The future of the monarchy hung in the balance, and was only bought by the sacrificial offering of the emperor’s daughter Marie-Louise, who became Napoleon’s consort. This amounted to official sanction of his imperial status: their son was given the title of King of Rome, which proclaimed him as the next Emperor of Europe and heir to Charlemagne. If Old Europe did not like it, it had at least to concede one thing – Napoleon had put the evil genie of the Revolution back in the bottle and sealed it.

When he became First Consul and effective dictator of France in 1799, Napoleon had been faced by indescribable chaos, resulting from ten years of revolution and counter-revolution, internecine political struggle, random political terror, class war and open civil war in some parts of the country. The authority of the state had been undermined by the rapid succession of governments, each of which overturned the legitimacy of its predecessor. The law had been turned into a tool by rival political factions and justice had been politicised. Napoleon may have been a product of the Enlightenment and what conservatives saw as its depraved values, but he was a pragmatist. If he did not believe in Divine Right, he certainly had no time for Jacobin ideology, Illuminati, or dreamers of any kind. He believed in order, and he knew how to impose it.

The key to restoring the rule of law, stability and public confidence was efficient policing. Yet the police he inherited had for a decade been used almost exclusively for factional political ends. Their intelligence-gathering was geared to monitoring the attitude of the population to the incumbent government and looking out for sources of potential opposition. Unlike the detection of crime, this activity was not subject to the disciplines imposed by physical evidence. It was in the interests of police officials and informers to report as much and as frequently as they could, and to make sure that their information was as sensational as possible. It was also in their interests to report what they assumed their superiors would wish to hear. Hence a limitless supply of stories of plots, treachery and cowardice on the part of enemies of the people on the one hand, and of touching tales of devotion to the motherland, revolutionary virtue and bravery on the other. In a sense, the police were not so much reporting on as painting a version of events which suited what they believed to be the views and intentions of the rulers.

The informers, whether they were regular police employees or mouchards, were on the whole neither intelligent nor educated. Their brief was to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary, and since both their experience and their understanding were limited, a great deal of what they saw and heard did strike them as such. When they eavesdropped on a conversation between two educated people they were likely to understand nothing, or to misunderstand, and in either case it would appear to them potentially seditious. The volume of information thus generated grew massively, as did the appetite for more, and as the British historian Richard Cobb, who trawled through the relevant archives in depth, explains, a brief report was ‘clear proof of utter incompetence or of deliberate covering-up’, and if there was nothing to report, something had to be invented.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

The more theatrically such information was presented, the better it was likely to be received. Cobb illustrates this with a case from 1793, when two agents eavesdropped on the same conversation on the terrace of a Paris café. One of them, who knew what he was about, began with a detailed description of the suspect’s appearance and how he was dressed. He went on to say that the individual in question had uttered obscene propositions unworthy of a republican, that he had vilified the national representative body, berated the Convention, insulted national sovereignty, mocked the champions of the people, undermined the revolutionary government, mouthed overtly counter-revolutionary sentiments, expressed the desire to bring down the republican regime, revealed himself to be an agent of Pitécobourg (prime minister William Pitt and the commander of the Imperial Army operating against France, Prince Frederick of Saxe-Coburg), and so on. The other, either a novice or a man of singular candour, merely reported that the man in question had said: ‘Merde à la Convention.’ He would not have been congratulated on his brevity.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

All of this tended to the production of reams of intelligence which was virtually fictitious and therefore valueless. Although his desk groaned with voluminous reports, the prefect of police in Paris had, at the very best, a highly distorted idea of what was going on in the capital, only a hazy one of what was happening in other cities, and none at all on the state of affairs in vast areas of the country. And he had as little control.

While all but the most privileged had welcomed the overthrow of the old regime and the abolition of feudalism, few appreciated the imposition of the new revolutionary order. States are as greedy as feudal lords when it comes to taxes, and the officials of the new regime rapidly overtook the former masters in unpopularity. In rural areas, their attempts to impose the authority of the state were met with mulish cunning. Such resistance was made all the easier as the revolutionary climate allowed the private and the public, the criminal and the political spheres to become gradually confused, and more inextricably with every new development in the political process.

The Revolution had been unpopular from the very beginning in the Midi, for a variety of regional, religious and other idiosyncratic reasons, and throughout the 1790s the government in Paris had great difficulty in affirming the authority of the state and collecting taxes there. Much the same was true of the west and north-west of France, where dumb resistance gradually flared up into full-scale civil war with the royalist rising of the Vendée. Despite ruthless military action, bordering on genocide, by the revolutionary government, the region was never entirely subdued, and the authority of the state remained frail. In addition, many coastal areas and port cities retained their own ways of doing things, and flouted the government’s attempts to control their activities. They evaded tax through smuggling, and traded with the enemy on a regular basis. Many inland cities also displayed an independent spirit, which, in the case of Lyon, proved indomitable.

A major manufacturing centre at the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône, a vital centre of communication linking Switzerland, Piedmont and the valley of the Rhône, and between areas chronically resistant to control such as Burgundy, the Massif Central and the Midi, Lyon had a long tradition of rivalry with and opposition to Paris. The topography and architecture of the city itself defied control. The density of many-storeyed houses along narrow, winding alleyways leading up the Grande Côte provided ideal conditions in which political or criminal fugitives could go to ground (it would be an important centre of resistance activity between 1940 and 1945). The rivers provided ideal means of disposing of evidence, as bodies would only be plucked from the swirling waters as far away as Avignon, if at all. In addition, Lyon was uncharacteristic of French cities in that its houses did not have concierges, the prime sources of information for the police. Nor, because of its steep, narrow streets, did it have many horse-drawn cabs, and therefore no cochers de fiacre, cab drivers. The cocher de fiacre was by the nature of things a party to criminals getting away from the scene of a crime, transporting stolen property, smuggling people in or out of town, abducting girls, and many other forms of illegal activity. As he had to be licensed by the police he was, even if he tried to play for the other side, an essential source of intelligence.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

There were swathes of rural France where bands of brigands roamed unchecked. In the Ardèche no road was safe, even for heavily escorted army pay convoys. The Revolution had led to an increase in the numbers of people living outside the law, and the wars swelled these through a steady flow of deserters. The introduction of conscription in 1798 only compounded the problem. Conscription was conceived both as a duty and a right, with the citizen not only serving the state but also participating in its workings, a notion based on Rousseau’s ideal of the citizen-soldier. It was a useful tool for the imposition of the new order, inculcating in the conscript deference to military hierarchy and the state it served. But it also taught the docile how to fight and emboldened the timorous, and it forced those who did not wish to serve to go into hiding, where they could only survive through banditry.

The government’s attempts to impose its will encountered formidable obstacles. These began with the near impossibility in remote rural areas and the overpopulated slums of larger cities of establishing a person’s identity. Political fugitives, criminals, deserters or people on the run for any number of reasons changed names, of which they might have a variety, or were known only by sobriquets or nicknames, often derived from their region of origin, physical attributes or alleged intellectual, physical or sexual prowess. In May 1792 the Convention had introduced passports, which had to be carried by anyone travelling outside their commune. Many people had more than one passport, sometimes a pocketful, stolen or forged. It was not unknown for men to dress up as women in order to go through with a marriage to another man which would provide them with a new legal identity.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

The police strove to pin people down by filling their passports with descriptions of their physical appearance, listing colour of hair and eyes, height, weight and distinguishing marks such as missing limbs, fingers, toes, ears, noses and eyes, traces of smallpox and other diseases. Deformities were noted, along with possible causes – a broken leg badly set might connect with an escape from prison. Every blemish and scar was scrupulously noted, along with their supposed origin (pistol, gun or knife wound, sabre cut, agricultural accident, maiming by a wild beast, fire, scalding, etc.). Tattoos and brandings were deemed helpful, often denoting a spell in the army or navy, or past criminal conviction. Tics, accents, deportment, way of walking, even the expression of the eyes or face – suspicious, frank, shifty, timid, soft, provocative, and so on – were all meticulously listed.

This approach proved counter-productive in the long run. Those picked up by the police were predominantly vagabonds, beggars, pickpockets, harlots, fences and other petty criminals. Such people tended to be malnourished, crippled, maimed and diseased, their bodies covered with the testimony of a lifetime of marginal living in a dangerous and callous world. As a result the police ended up with detailed descriptions of legions of people with so many distinguishing features as to make none of them remarkable.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

On taking power, Napoleon adopted a form of administrative terror. He began by sending out military commissions backed by troops to dispense summary justice as they roved around the country, collecting unpaid taxes and recalcitrant conscripts. Once a semblance of order had been established these were replaced by special tribunals, which fulfilled the same purpose, but with due legal process and without the use of troops. They were nevertheless backed by force, in the shape of the Gendarmerie, the new name of the royal Maréchaussée.

The gendarme was the visible symbol of the state, and people took every opportunity to jeer at him, to jostle and impede him in his duties, and would often assist in the escape of those he had apprehended. Women, who resented their menfolk being taken away, were in the forefront of confrontations with gendarmes escorting conscripts and deserters, even if they were not from their own communities, and regularly caused affrays in which these were able to make their escape. But the efficiency of the Gendarmerie discouraged actual riots. The number of confrontations with the Maréchaussée thought worthy of being brought to the attention of higher authorities between 1771 and 1790 was 338, an average of about 1.4 per month. This dropped to virtually nothing under the Consulate and the Empire, but would begin to rise again when imperial authority started to disintegrate (the monthly average for 1813–17 would be 5.3, and it would remain at similar levels until 1850, a clear indication of the impact of the ruthlessness with which state security was enforced under Napoleon).6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Napoleon was the target of over thirty assassination attempts, but he knew better than to let this be known. ‘I do not like to have conspirators judged,’ he said to Pierre-François Réal, one of his senior police officials. ‘In such situations governments always lose out: it is so easy for a man to become a hero!’ He preferred would-be assassins to be thrown into gaol for a few months to cool off and then released. It was only when the conspirators could be successfully demonised that he would allow a public trial to go ahead. Assassination attempts were ‘mere diseases of the skin’, he said after one failed attempt on his life, while ‘terrorism’ was ‘an illness of the gut’. By ‘terrorism’ he meant those forces bent on undermining the state, and in this respect he saw the Jacobins as an altogether greater threat than the royalists conspiring against him, even if they did have the support and funding of the British government. The man who kept these terrorists at bay, his police chief Joseph Fouché, was as ruthless as himself, a cold, calculating individual whose instinct for survival was epic.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Born in 1759 to humble parents in a small village outside the port city of Nantes in Brittany, Fouché was educated by the Oratorian Fathers and later taught in their colleges around the country. In 1792 he was elected to the National Convention in Paris, where he established a formidable reputation and was among those who called most insistently for the death of Louis XVI. He was then sent to root out counter-revolution in the Vendée, where, as well as purging large numbers of people, he stripped churches and eradicated every vestige of Christianity, which he identified as the Revolution’s prime enemy: back in Paris he busied himself with establishing the new Cult of Reason which was to replace it. In October 1793 he was despatched to crush opposition in Lyon, where he staged mass executions in which hundreds of people were chained together, blasted with grapeshot and allowed to die in bloody heaps. He was expelled from the Jacobin Club by Robespierre two weeks before the latter’s fall in July 1794, in which he played a part, thus saving his own neck. Over the next five years he sided alternately with royalists and Jacobins, and, by virtue of deft positioning, managed to get himself appointed minister of police on 20 July 1799. One of the first things he did on setting up shop at his headquarters on the quai Voltaire was to clamp down ruthlessly on his former Jacobin colleagues and silence protest by imposing strict censorship on theatres, publishing houses and the press. To show he meant business, transgressors were shot.

Fouché delegated criminal investigation to the Sûreté, headed by Commissaire Henry. The latter took into his employ a petty thief, François Vidocq, whom he set up in a small, dark old house on the rue Sainte-Anne, between the quai des Orfèvres and the Sainte-Chapelle. From there Vidocq ran a network of agents, all of them criminals, who shamelessly preyed on their own kin. That took care of the basics of law and order.

Fouché himself concentrated on what he called la haute police – state security. He created a new information-gathering network, which he financed ‘by making vice, inherent in any great city, contribute to the security of the state’, that is to say by imposing heavy taxes on gaming houses and brothels. He used these funds to employ as informers people of every class and milieu, so as to have eyes and ears in every rank in the army, in every salon and every household of note. He paid well, according to status and value of services rendered, and soon built up a remarkable matrix – it is believed that even Napoleon’s wife Josephine was in his employ.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Additional information was provided through the scrutiny of mail, which had long been carried out under the ancien régime for the purpose of spying on foreign embassies (and providing the king with salacious gossip about the amorous doings of his subjects). The practice was deemed offensive to the dignity of man by the idealistic revolutionaries, and on 26 August 1790 the National Assembly decreed that every postal official must swear not to violate the privacy of personal correspondence. But on 9 May 1793 the letters of émigrés were excluded from this on grounds of national security. Comités de Surveillance de Lettres were established in provincial towns, and by the time Napoleon came to power all correspondence was regularly pried into.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

The work was carried out by the ‘cabinet noir’, in a nondescript house in the rue du Coq-Héron which backed on to the postal sorting office. Most of its personnel had followed their fathers and sometimes grandfathers into the job, and they were carefully prepared to take on the task. They not only received a thorough education with a heavy stress on mathematics; they were sent abroad, attached to a diplomat, financier or merchant, so that they might pick up not merely foreign languages, which they had been taught in Paris, but also dialects, popular expressions, slang and the most commonly used abbreviations, and to familiarise themselves with the handwriting styles of different countries. Once they took up their work this was camouflaged by another, official, post with an equivalent salary and standing.

They would hover in the sorting office, pick out anything that aroused their interest and take it through a small door into a laboratory situated in the adjacent house. To unseal the packet, scan its contents, copy relevant passages and reseal it was the work of a moment, and it would be back in the sorting office before any delay could occur. ‘It was in vain that the arts of envelopes, seals and ciphers struggled to escape such intrusion,’ wrote Agathon Fain, a lifelong civil servant and director of Napoleon’s private secretariat. ‘The school of the rue du Coq-Héron knew how to circumvent every ruse. It was familiar with all the chemical possibilities; the science of mathematical probabilities and grammatical analysis provided it with proven methods of decryption; it was as skilled in taking impressions, softening wax and hardening it again under the replicated seal as it was in penetrating, with time and study, the most inaccessible ciphers.’10 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘I admit that there never has been a police as absolute as the one which I commanded,’ Fouché later wrote, but he justified it with the argument that intelligent policing protected people from what in its absence would be random state terror. He believed surveillance to be more effective than imprisonment, as, knowing or even suspecting that they were being watched, people behaved themselves. It was terror in kid gloves. ‘Surveillance was a policing method which was very light, and I had devised it precisely in order to protect the numerous victims of [Napoleon’s suspicion] from arbitrary detention,’ he insisted.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Between them, Napoleon and Fouché succeeded in restoring a degree of order in France, and in making people fear if not respect the organs of the state. Their system gradually spread through Europe, as Napoleon imposed French patterns on most of Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, parts of Poland and, briefly, Spain. The concurrent introduction of French methods into the armed forces of various states in Germany and Italy created a new class of military servants of the state, while the need felt by all sides to gather information and impose order expanded the numbers of those engaged on police work in every region. The consequence was a dramatic growth in state organs of control all over Europe.

Britain remained aloof from changes taking place on the Continent, but if French methods of state control had not affected it, the tendency to politicise questions of law and order had. And although the repressive measures of the late 1790s had extirpated every germ of subversion and Trafalgar had removed the threat of invasion, the British government continued to act as though it were under threat from the French pestilence, and from revolution in general. At the same time, it acquired some of the bad habits wafting across the Channel. The practice of prying into private correspondence was illegal in Britain, and was only permitted in exceptional cases of national emergency, requiring a specific warrant from the home secretary in each case. While no more than six warrants had been issued allowing the inspection of mail between 1788 and 1798, the number for the period 1799–1815 was 139.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

William Pitt died in January 1806, and was succeeded in office by Lord Grenville’s ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, which achieved little beyond the abolition of the slave trade. In March 1807 Pitt’s supporters returned to power under the Duke of Portland, who was succeeded two years later by Spencer Perceval, a much-liked man but an unpopular prime minister. Diminutive but determined, a clean-living, devoted father of twelve, a relentlessly cheerful evangelical fervently opposed to Catholic emancipation, hunting, gambling and the slave trade, Perceval was utterly convinced of the rightness of his views. To Britain’s isolation from the rest of Europe he brought a smug conviction that it was her Protestant destiny to resist the corruption that had laid all others low.

The war with France had turned into a trade war, which played havoc with grain prices and devastated the cotton industry. Perceval’s Orders in Council, which gave the Royal Navy draconian rights over the shipping of neutral countries, imposed in 1807 ostensibly as a response to Napoleon’s Continental System but also as a means to hound slavers, led to conflict with the United States and a sharp downturn in the economy. This was compounded by the failure of the harvests of 1809, 1810, 1811 and 1812, by which time an estimated one in five people in Lancashire towns was entirely dependent on relief. There were strikes in Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1808 and 1810, some violent. Economic depression in 1810 was followed by bank failures as a result of a shortage of specie. Unemployment generated by the introduction of machinery was intensified by the outbreak of war with the United States in 1812, which closed an important market. The weekly wage of handloom weavers in Bolton fell steadily from twenty-five shillings in 1805 to fourteen in 1812.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

The misery was only slightly palliated by the opening up of European markets in the course of 1812 and 1813 as Napoleon’s stranglehold on the Continent loosened following his disastrous defeat in Russia. The harvest of 1813 was unusually abundant, and cheap grain flowed in from the Baltic ports, hitherto under French control. The price of grain fell from 120 shillings to fifty-six, which alleviated the suffering of the poor but ruined many farmers. And the winter of 1813–14 was unusually severe, with the Thames freezing over in February.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

The government’s problems were exacerbated by a revival in the movement for parliamentary reform. A particularly irritating thorn in its side was the Wiltshire baronet Sir Francis Burdett, who having married the banking heiress Sophia Coutts could afford to carry on a running battle against the establishment, denouncing its corruption, humbug and despotic ways. Elected to Parliament in 1802, only to be excluded on a point of order, he was returned again in 1807 as a Member for Westminster. He continued to make trouble for the government until 1810, when he was sent to the Tower for contempt by the Speaker. At the news of his arrest, a mob gathered and clashed with the military escort conducting him to the Tower, and then roamed London breaking prominent ministers’ windows. He was released after three months.

Burdett had befriended other would-be reformers such as William Cobbett, Francis Place and Major John Cartwright. Cobbett, originally a supporter of the government, now campaigned on behalf of the poor workers of the north, and would move on to champion reform of Parliament. Cartwright was a long-standing campaigner for universal male suffrage, secret ballots and annual parliaments. Born in 1740 into an old Nottinghamshire landed family, he had served as a naval officer, filled an administrative post in the colonies and then commanded his county militia, settling down as a farmer in Lincolnshire. But in 1803 he had moved to Enfield so as to be closer to London.

In 1811 he helped set up a club named after the seventeenth-century parliamentarian John Hampden, who had defied Charles I. Burdett was chairman. Its original purpose was to create a lobby of influential people for electoral reform, but lack of interest made Cartwright look elsewhere. He set off on a tour of manufacturing towns, travelling on horseback despite his seventy-two years, setting up Hampden Clubs wherever he could, and there were soon flourishing branches in Royston, Oldham, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyme, Middleton and Stockport. Their purpose was entirely constitutional and their methods legal. That did not stop Cartwright from being arrested.

The authorities were in a state of alarm at the rising tide of popular discontent. Unemployment, falling wages and the high price of bread gave rise to despair as well as anger at technological innovation and new practices being brought into areas such as the stocking-weaving industry.

Confrontations between workers and factory owners were sometimes violent, but more commonly took the form of collective bargaining, and the aggrieved workers were on the whole deferential. In Arnold, a small town outside Nottingham, knitters broke into workshops, removed jack-wires from the knitting frames to immobilise them, and deposited them in the local church, meaning to negotiate from a position of strength. The owners held firm, so public meetings were held to enlist the support of the wider population, but these were dispersed by troops. It was only then that the workers resorted to violence, against the hated machines which in their imagination stood for unemployment and downward pressure on wages.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

The machine-wreckers were known as ‘Luddites’, after a legendary figure, Ned Ludd, who probably never existed. Their attacks grew in frequency and ferocity in the second half of 1811, and by February 1812 about a thousand stocking-making frames had been destroyed. These were rented from the owners by the craftsmen who worked at them in their own homes, and were thus widely dispersed and vulnerable. A band of Luddites could sweep into a village at night, wreck several dozen frames and be gone in the space of an hour. As they grew bolder, they also destroyed machinery in factories and mills, sometimes burning these down in the process. The government reacted by strengthening an Act dating from 1721 to make frame-breaking a capital offence. Lord Byron made his only, highly impassioned, speech in the House of Lords against this.

Militia and troops were mobilised against the Luddites, which prompted some of them to arm, by raiding private houses at night or, in one case, the arms depot of the Sheffield militia. In this case they only took a few weapons, and concentrated on destroying the rest so they could not be used against them. But as detachments of regular troops patrolled at night, they heard, or fancied they heard, the occasional gunshot. This was taken as evidence of secret nocturnal drilling, although a more likely explanation would be poaching, a national pastime and an essential resource in hard times.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 11 May 1812 the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was shot at close range and killed in the lobby of the House of Commons. The news brought jubilant crowds onto the streets, and troops had to be called out to restore order and conduct the assassin to prison at Newgate. This unlikely hero was a merchant from Liverpool by the name of John Bellingham who bore paranoid grudges against various members of the establishment, and may have been put up to the act by some commercial interest. But his trial was conducted with such haste that the investigation did not cover all possible avenues, and, aside from his personal sense of injustice, his motivation must remain a mystery. The event was nevertheless connected in the minds of many with the concurrent disorders. ‘The country is no doubt in a most alarming situation,’ William Wordsworth wrote from London to his wife Mary, ‘and if much firmness be not displayed by the government confusion & havoc & murder will break out & spread terribly.’17 (#litres_trial_promo)

A new ministry was formed by Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool. He had held government office since 1795, under Pitt, Addison and Portland, been secretary of state for war in Perceval’s cabinet, and would go on to serve as prime minister for fifteen years. A modest and undemonstrative man, he had proved himself a good administrator with a tough streak. He was intelligent and only forty-two years old when he assumed office, but although his mother was half Indian and he himself had travelled widely on the Continent, he took an insular and defensive view of the world. He had been at the storming of the Bastille, but does not seem to have derived from the experience any deep understanding of how revolutions are made.

His home secretary was Henry Addington, created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805, a capable if mediocre man who had proved an undistinguished prime minister from 1801 to 1804. The son of a physician and a parson’s daughter, he had grown up in the shadow of his school friend William Pitt, whom he admired enormously and who assisted his ascent in politics. He was an honest man, but dull, pompous and set in his views. Although he was fifty-five years old when he became home secretary in 1812, he had never been abroad or north of Oxfordshire.

One of the most notable members of Liverpool’s cabinet, and in some ways the most controversial, was the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. Born plain Robert Stewart in 1769, the same year as Napoleon and Wellington, his father was a politically ambitious Ulster landowner of Scots Presbyterian descent, while his mother was the daughter of the Marquess of Hertford, a man of immense fortune who was close to the king. This connection helped his father advance rapidly, to become Baron Londonderry in 1789, progressing within seven years via a viscountcy to an earldom and a marquisate of his own.

Castlereagh, to which title Robert acceded in 1796 when his father vaulted into his earldom, was educated at Armagh and Cambridge. He was swept up in the general euphoria attendant on the Revolution in France, and toasted the Sovereignty of the People with gusto. But when he made his grand tour at the beginning of the 1790s he had occasion to see the disorders and licence this involved. His Ulster soul was repelled, and his growing interest in a promising political career made him recoil. He had fallen under the spell of Pitt, who rewarded his devotion in 1798 by nominating him chief secretary for Ireland. Castlereagh played an active part in suppressing the Irish rebellion of that year and in pushing through the Act of Union, for both of which he was widely reviled, not just in Ireland. The poet Shelley famously labelled him a murderer, while Byron called him a cruel despot.

A reserved, sensitive man who loved flowers and animals and was never happier than when tending them at his modest country retreat in Kent, Castlereagh was also devoted to his wife. Their unfashionably homely ménage was the butt of jokes, yet he was close to the dissolute prince regent. A poor speaker, Castlereagh was nevertheless a good manager of his party in Parliament and a competent administrator, proving his worth during spells at the Colonial and then the War Office during the crucial years of 1806–09. As foreign secretary he would frame British policy single-handedly over a decade, exerting a decisive influence in Europe and playing a significant part in the defeat of Napoleon. He was trusted by Liverpool, and assumed a dominant role in the cabinet. This had inherited some of Perceval’s sense of evangelical destiny, which goes some way to explain why its members did not waver in moments of adversity or pause to ask themselves whether their opponents might not have a point.

The Luddite disturbances had diminished in frequency by the time Lord Sidmouth took over at the Home Office in June 1812, but chilling reports kept coming in from all quarters. Major Seale, commander of the South Devon militia, reported on 30 June that an informer had told him there was a huge conspiracy, stretching from Glasgow to London: delegates were travelling around the country holding meetings with local committees and planning diversionary risings in the provinces to draw troops away from London before they struck in the capital. The conspirators were allegedly armed to the teeth. The theme of a plot to lure troops away from London by staging diversionary disturbances recurs in other letters received by Sidmouth, and spies sent in information that appeared to confirm that ‘a general insurrection’ was being planned by ‘secret committees’. A ‘Mr. S’ in Bolton had been overheard telling the town’s machine-breakers that great personages in London such as Burdett were only waiting for them to make a move that would bring down the government, and encouraging them to give the signal by burning down a factory at West Houghton.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

In July both Houses set up committees of secrecy to report on the disturbances. The reports bristle with the stock phrases ‘it appears’, ‘there is reason to believe’ and ‘evidence suggests’, and paint an ominous picture of dark goings-on, based on presuppositions and unsupported inference. According to the Commons committee, the disturbances had nothing spontaneous about them, and were the result of ‘organised systems of unlawful violence’; ‘language of the most mischievous nature’ had been employed by the rioters, who demonstrated ‘a sort of military training and discipline’. It makes much of reports of the bands being marshalled by leaders with ‘signals’ and of the fact that ‘rockets and blue lights have been seen by night’. Both reports dwell on the degree of organisation and coordination displayed, on the stockpiling of arms, on the existence of regional ‘committees’, on the ‘signs and countersigns’ used to guard against infiltrators. They quote an oath allegedly sworn by all adepts not to disclose the identity of members of the supreme ‘Secret Committee’ which was supposedly ‘the great mover of the whole machine’. The unstated conclusion is that there was a far-ranging conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. On 23 July Sidmouth laid before Parliament a Bill giving magistrates wider powers. Soldiers were quartered in every inn throughout the affected localities, and camps were set up in Sherwood Forest and on Kersal Moor. By the end of the year some 12,000 regular troops had been deployed in the area, as many as Wellington had in the Peninsula.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Home Office received a steady stream of demands for military protection from factory owners and magistrates, while private individuals took their own precautions. The Reverend Patrick Brontë fired a pistol out of his bedroom window at Haworth Parsonage every morning. At Keswick in the Lake District the poet Robert Southey got hold of ‘a rusty old gun’ and kept it loaded against the revolutionaries. An ardent republican in the 1790s, he now smelled sedition ‘even among these mountains’, and warned Lord Liverpool that if the troops were withdrawn from London ‘four and twenty hours would not elapse before the tricoloured flag would be planted upon Carlton House’.20 (#litres_trial_promo)