The wool trade had long been important, as so many stunning English churches built or improved with wool money, and now all too often dwarfing their tiny congregations, show. Cotton was more amenable to machine production, and the growth of slavery in the American south made raw material abundant. From the 1750s a spate of new inventions, like John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, improved both the spinning of individual threads of cotton and then its weaving into finished cloth. The first inventions made individual handloom weavers more productive, and increased their income at a time of growing demand. But subsequent developments first began to bring individual processes together in small factories, and then, after Edmund Cartwright patented the power loom in 1785, saw the conversion of the whole cotton industry to the factory system. The process was gradual: there were only 2,400 power looms in use by 1814, 45,500 by 1829, and 85,000 in 1833. Similar developments, which often used the same machinery, also revolutionised the woollen industry.
The social impact of this change was enormous. Eighteenth-century Britain grew into a more polarised society. Improvements in literacy and communications made comparisons between rich and poor both frequent and striking: ‘The extravagant life-style of a ruling elite which seemed to live in a blaze of conspicuous consumption, and also the more modest but cumulatively more influential rise in middle-class standards of living, made the inequalities of a highly commercial, cash-based economy glaringly plain.’92 The politics of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had focused on the relationship between monarch and parliament, and latterly on the issue (much more than simply dynastic, for it involved political and religious questions) of the Hanoverian succession and Jacobite claims to the throne.
The dominant political issue of our period, however, was the nature of parliamentary representation. Until the first great Reform Act of 1832 the starkest polarity lay in the mismatch between a House of Commons which reflected the structure of medieval England and the fast-changing nation it ruled. The franchise was limited to men with the appropriate property qualification: only one man in seven had the vote in England, but a mere one in 44 in Scotland. Some constituencies, ‘pocket boroughs’, were in the pocket of the local magnate and dutifully returned him or his nominee; others, ‘rotten boroughs’ had a tiny number of electors whose bribery or coercion was facilitated by the fact that they voted in public. There was no relationship between parliamentary representation and population. In 1801 the 700,000 inhabitants of Yorkshire returned two county and 26 borough MPs, while Cornwall, with 188,000 people, had two county and 42 borough MPs. The tiny Cornish boroughs of Grampound and Tregony returned two members apiece, while Birmingham, Manchester and Bradford were unrepresented. The Norfolk constituency of Dunwich had gradually receded into the North Sea, but its fishy inhabitants were duly represented by two members. Few doubted that some sort of reform was essential: the difficulty was how it could be kept within constitutional bounds.
The pressures generated by agricultural and agrarian change found political expression as radicals, within parliament and outside it, demanded reform. The same pressures helped encourage the masses – designated ‘the crowd’ by sympathetic witnesses and ‘the mob’ by the more conservative – to riot with frequency and abandon.93 Often their outbursts had a direct economic cause. The silk-weavers of Spitalfields rioted in 1719–20 in protest against the import of cheap and cool foreign calico, and in 1774 English haymakers fought pitched battles with immigrant Irish harvest workers.
Innovation provoked physical opposition by those who felt threatened by it. In 1736 a collier was hanged for turnpike-cutting, the 1760s saw several serious clashes between weavers and soldiers, and in 1836 an upsurge of loom-breaking in East Lancashire, as the installation of power-looms gained full momentum, required the commitment of troops and culminated in a pitched battle at Chatterton. Other rioters had political motivates, though they often found themselves seconded by the disadvantaged and by simple opportunists. When John Wilkes, a well-to do journalist, MP and militia colonel, attacked the government over its use of general warrants, which permitted arbitrary arrest, and then demanded that the debates of the House of Commons should be published, he was supported not only by many of ‘the middle and inferior’ sort of men, but also by rural gentry and urban bourgeoisie. The authorities recognised that such rioters could not be treated as if they were disaffected coal-heavers or weavers. Juries, by definition middle-class, were not only inclined to acquit them, but, worse still from the government’s point of view, to convict magistrates who ordered the military to fire and the troops who actually did so.
The Gordon riots of 1780 were far more serious than the Wilkesite disturbances twenty years before. Lord George Gordon gained widespread support, much of it from the ‘middling sort’ of men, in his demand for the cancellation of the 1778 Toleration Act which had removed some legal constraints imposed on Roman Catholics. After the Commons rejected his petition, the crowd of supporters in Parliament Square was swollen by weavers and others. When a battalion of footguards opened a path to Parliament to allow its harassed denizens to escape, the mob embarked upon an orgy of violence, first burning the Catholic chapels belonging to foreign embassies, the only ones legally allowed to exist. The rioters then turned their attention to the law’s visible manifestations, destroying the houses of prominent politicians and magistrates, sacking Newgate jail, releasing all its prisoners, and looting and then burning a large Catholic-owned gin distillery. The government eventually cracked down hard, bringing over 11,000 regular troops into the capital. More than 300 rioters were killed, mainly by gunshot wounds, although some perished from drinking neat alcohol, or when buildings collapsed on them. Twenty-five were hanged on specially constructed gallows near the scenes of their crimes: seventeen of them were eighteen and three under fifteen. ‘I never saw children cry so,’ said one onlooker. Lord George himself, tried for high treason, was swiftly acquitted.
The Gordon riots terrified most middle-class radicals, who favoured political reform but feared the mob. And while the riots can be viewed as an anti-Catholic outburst which ignited the mindless violence often close to the surface of British society, there is indeed a good case for seeing them as ‘the nearest thing to the French Revolution in English history.’94 The mob attacked only rich Catholics, and then assaulted the visible symbols of governmental authority.
The French Revolution first attracted those who favoured political reform but swiftly alienated most of them by its growing violence. Its outbreak was widely welcomed in England, for France, a traditional enemy, was widely believed to be the very fount of tyranny. Well might Wordsworth proclaim:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven!
But in October 1790 Edmund Burke’s pamphlet Reflections on the French Revolution warned that the Revolution’s growing extremism might spread to England, resulting in the total overthrow of the established order, and the majority of public opinion soon came to regard Revolutionary France with horror and disgust. The government capitalised on this to clamp down heavily on the radicals, although even their ‘Corresponding Society’ – which did indeed have links with French revolutionary politicians – was ‘more foolish and fantastic than violent’. In 1792 the government first prohibited ‘seditious writings’, and then called up the militia, claiming that insurrection was imminent, and bringing conservative members of the opposition into its camp. The demand for reform was effectively stifled for the duration of the war with France, which lasted, with two brief breaks, till 1815.
Although reform again became a pressing political issue after Waterloo, working-class agitation never really joined hands with parliamentary radicalism, and urban resentment at the Corn Laws (which worked in favour of the landed interest by keeping corn, and thus bread, prices artificially high) was not shared by agricultural workers whose livelihood depended on their employers’ prosperity. As a result, the ruling elite never found itself facing a coalition of opposition which might conceivably
