covert) republicans; serious-minded Presbyterians and devout (though necessarily discrete) Roman Catholics.
The contrast was nothing if not visual: between the half-moon silver-gilt gorget, engraved with the royal arms, that officers wore at their throats, and the scarlet tunic, so often sweated to destruction, that it rested on; and between the blue and gilt blade of the sabres carried by the officers of the flank companies and the brain-biting sharpness of their edge. Those gold-laced officers’ tunics cost more than guineas, for tailors often went blind:
of all colours scarlet, such is as used for regimentals, is the most blinding, it seems to burn the eyeballs, and makes them ache dreadful…everything seems all of a twitter, and to keep changing its tint. There’s more military tailors blind than any others.
And the blue and gilt blades caused casualties long before they were drawn in anger: goldsmiths became asthmatic and paralytic because of the fumes of mercury they inhaled at their work.
There can be no better example of the contrast than Brown Bess herself. She was made in the gunmaking district of Birmingham, or the teeming hamlets around the Tower of London. Parts were usually manufactured separately, in hundreds of one-room workshops, where whole families filed away at locks and shaped walnut stocks. Yet even the India pattern, a war economy weapon deemed by modern collectors to lack the grace of earlier models, is more than a simple killing-machine. A double line is chiselled around the edge of the lock-plate; the brass trumpet-mouthed pipes that hold the ramrod have ornamental fluting, and the trigger-guard sweeps out, in front of the trigger itself, into an elegant acorn-shaped finial. In short, it is an artefact in the best of Georgian taste, but designed to impel a lead ball into the body of an enemy.
It was an era of rapid and unsettling change. Britain’s population was growing, after setbacks in the 1720s, and its distribution had begun to alter. In 1750 the population was about 5.8 million. It had risen to some 6.4 million by 1770, and almost 8 million twenty years later. By 1831 it was just over 24 million, and was well over 27 million in 1851. Throughout the period just over half the population of Great Britain lived in England, with Ireland containing around half as many inhabitants as England until the mass emigration of the nineteenth century reduced this proportion. Although London contained perhaps 10 per cent of Britain’s inhabitants in 1750, the balance was shifting away from the south towards the Midlands and the north as industry expanded and Britain’s burgeoning agriculture (about 2.5 times as productive as that of France) enabled the population of these growing towns to be fed.
By 1801 about 30 per cent of the population of Britain lived in towns, a far higher proportion than elsewhere in northern Europe. Towns like Manchester and Glasgow grew fast, with an emphasis on cleanliness and order as medieval centres were pulled down, jumbled lanes making way for straight streets and spacious squares, with piped water and sewerage. London was already bigger than Paris or Naples, and by 1750 it had overtaken Constantinople. Foreign and domestic visitors alike were astonished at the spacious houses of great magnates, the elegant symmetry of streets and squares, the Royal parks – Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Green Park and St James’s Park – the well-stocked shops of Covent Garden and Ludgate Hill, and the pleasure-gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh.
Yet even the most naive visitor could scarcely have been unaware of the contrast between polite London and the reverse of the medal. Simply getting there was not easy. The appalling roads of early Georgian England were infinitely improved as the century wore on and turnpike trusts repaired and maintained roads which could be used on payment of a toll. Provincial centres like Exeter, Manchester and York, three days away from London in the 1720s, could be reached in little more than 24 hours by 1780. However, travel remained uncomfortable and dangerous. Highwaymen were the aristocrats of crime: when James MacLaine was awaiting hanging in 1750, 3,000 people visited him in his cell in Newgate prison in a single day, and John Rann (‘Sixteen String Jack’) went to the gallows in 1774 in a new suit of pea-green, fine ruffled shirt and huge nosegay, and danced his last jig before an appreciative audience.
Robbers like this were bold and vexatious. Prime minister Lord North was robbed in 1774, and ten years earlier the Bath stagecoach was ambushed between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner. In 1771 five ladies and gentlemen on their way back from Vauxhall by river were boarded by ruffians near Westminster Bridge and had their watches and purses taken. On a less dramatic scale, shoplifters, pickpockets and hat-snatchers abounded: an account of 1764 complained that by midnight ‘the public streets began to swarm with whores and pickpockets.’89 César de Saussure, a French visitor, found little to chose between sport and riot.
The populace has other amusements…such as throwing dead dogs and cats and mud at passers-by on certain festival days. Another amusement which is very inconvenient to passers-by is football…in cold weather you will sometimes see a score of rascals in the streets kicking at a ball and they will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches and also knock you down without the smallest compunction: on the contrary they will roar with laughter…
The English are very fond of a game they call cricket. For this purpose they go into a large open field and knock a ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe the game to you, it is too complicated: but it requires agility and skill and everyone plays it, the common people and also men of rank.
Great cities had great slums, sometimes on their fast-expanding fringes, where countrymen arrived in the (generally vain) hope of making their fortune, and sometimes in the gaps between redevelopment. Conditions in these warrens were appalling.
From three to eight individuals of different ages often sleep in the same bed, there being in general but one room and a bed for each family…The room occupied is either a deep cellar, almost inaccessible to the light, and admitting of no change of air, or a garret with a low roof and small windows, the passage to which is close, kept dark, and filled not only with bad air but with putrid excremental effluvia from a vault [cess-pit] at the bottom of the staircase.90
The rustic who made his way to town had often been dispossessed by the steady enclosure of the countryside, part of it the result of parliamentary enclosure acts in the second half of the eighteenth century, but at least as much resulting from a slower and quieter process which was already long in train. Its general effect was to replace the small yeoman proprietors with a far steeper rural pyramid, in which large farmers, themselves often the tenants of gentry landlords, employed, as landless labourers, men whose fathers had once farmed their own land. This process paralleled a similar development in the towns, as individual artisans were swallowed up in large-scale enterprises, their loss of status being accompanied by dependency on ‘new men’. They were sometimes philanthropic, like Robert Owen, who added an institute and community centre to mills built by his father-in-law at New Lanark, but often they were more concerned with their profits than their workers.
Three industries rose head and shoulder above all others: coal, iron and textiles. Between 1750 and 1800 coal production doubled as steam pumps enabled miners to reach deeper, richer seams. Railways, their trucks drawn by horses at the start of our period but by steam engines before its close, took coal to the rivers and canals which carried so much of the country’s heavy freight. The construction of a canal from Worsley to Manchester in 1761 initiated a canal-building boom that saw over 2,500 miles built by the time that the railway moved centre stage. In mid-century coke became widely used for smelting iron, and cast iron items, which came straight from the factory and did not require the attentions of finery, mill and smithy, became increasingly popular. In the 1780s Henry Cort patented the processes of puddling and rolling, in which molten iron was first stirred to allow the sulphurous gasses to escape and then rolled to remove remaining impurities. War fuelled the demand for iron: in the decade from 1788 the output of pig iron in Britain doubled, and by 1806 it had doubled again.
But ‘textiles were the power which towed the glider of
