Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes

      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 have brought it down.

      Yet there was agitation aplenty. In 1819 soldiers trying to arrest radical leaders at a reform demonstration in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, became violently entangled up in the crowd in the ‘Peterloo Massacre’. The following year witnessed a weavers’ rising in Scotland and the half-baked Cato Street Conspiracy – a plot to assassinate the Cabinet – in England. In the 1820s the falling price of woven cotton and unemployment amongst handloom weavers produced great suffering in Yorkshire and Lancashire. One weaver, William Thom, urged his readers to:

      Imagine a cold spring forenoon. It is eleven o’clock. The four children are still asleep. There is a bed cover hung before the window to keep within as much night as possible: and the mother sits beside the children to lull them back to sleep whenever shows any inclination to awake – the only food in the house is a handful of oatmeal – our fuel is exhausted. My wife and I were conversing in sunken whispers about making an attempt to cook the oatmeal when the youngest child woke up beyond his mother’s powers to hush it again to sleep. He fell a-whimpering and finally broke out in a steady scream, rendering it impossible to keep the rest asleep. Face after face sprang up, each saying ‘Mother!’ ‘Mother!’ ‘Please give us something.’ How weak a word is sorrow to apply to feelings of myself and my wife during the rest of that forenoon…I look to nothing but increasing labour and decreasing strength in interminable toil and ultimate starvation. Such is the fate of nine tenths of my brethren.⁹⁵

      In 1826 a serious outbreak of rioting amongst handloom weavers in Lancashire was put down by troops. Six civilians were shot during the disturbances, eight rioters were transported to Australia for life, and 28 more received various terms of imprisonment

      In 1830, during a wave of agrarian unrest, the diarist Charles Fulke Greville wrote that:

      London is like the capital of a country desolated by cruel war or foreign invasion, we are always looking out for reports of battles, burnings and other disorders. Wherever there has been anything like fighting, the mob has always been beaten, and has shown the greatest cowardice. They do not, however, seem to have been actuated by a very ferocious spirit, and it is remarkable that they have not been more violent and rapacious.⁹⁶

      Like so many of his ilk he feared revolution, and was clear that the struggle was defined on class grounds. ‘On Monday as the field which had been out with the King’s hounds were returning to town, they were summoned to assist in quelling a riot in Woburn, which they did: the gentlemen charged and broke the people…’⁹⁷

      The passing of the great Reform Bill in 1832 did not end agitation. Although it removed many of the defects of the unreformed parliamentary electoral system, there remaining glaring anomalies – the 349 electors of Buckingham returned as many MPs as the 4,172 electors of Leeds – and the House of Commons remained dominated by landed interests. There was widespread support for the People’s Charter, a petition which demanded manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs, payment for MPs, and annual parliaments. Chartist feeling ran high in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and gained much of its strength from Ireland, where the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had only blunted nationalist demands. The economic upsurge of the mid 1840s drew most of Chartism’s teeth, and its last revival, a monster petition delivered in 1848, fell miserably flat when it emerged that thousands of signatures were faked.

      The British army in the age of Brown Bess was the product of a society showing all the strains of population explosion coupled with radical changes in both industry and agriculture. Crime was common and its punishment potentially savage, with the pillory and the gibbet as spectacles of popular entertainment. As time went on society became more orderly: Robert Peel’s reorganisation of the London police in the 1820s was followed by improvements in policing outside the capital, and the growth of street numbers for houses made it easier for wanted men to be tracked down. Sanitation, too, improved, but it remained sporadic and epidemics were rife: the cholera outbreak of 1832 probably killed 31,000 people in Britain, and A.C. Tait, a future archbishop of Canterbury, lost five of his seven children to scarlet fever in 1856.

      The men who filled the army’s ranks came increasingly from an urban working class whose living conditions were only latterly improved by the burgeoning of the nation’s wealth. They were led by scions of the ruling elite, although, as we shall see, the officer corps showed a flexibility which characterised society more generally: if the period ended by emphasising the importance of the prosperous middle classes, so too did the army. And while the army’s most spectacular achievements were on foreign fields, it was always in demand to extinguish home fires, ignited by King Mob in the towns and Captain Swing in the countryside. For instance, while Sergeant Thomas Morris of the 73^rd Regiment wrote with feeling about Waterloo, he was scarcely less concerned about a riot in Birmingham two years later, which highlighted the problem faced by soldiers called to act in support of the civil power.

      The high constable went with us, and proceeded to read the riot act. On some brickbats and stones being thrown at us, our brave captain gave orders to load, and then gave direction that we should fire among the mob, when the high constable interposed, and said. ‘There was no necessity for that yet.’ ‘Sir,’ said our officer, ‘if I am not allowed to fire, I shall take my men back.’ The constable’s patriotic answer deserves to be recorded. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you are called out to aid and assist the civil power, and if you fire on the people without my permission, and death ensues, you will be guilty of murder, and if you go away, without my leave, it will be at your peril.’⁹⁸

      Above all it was an army born of paradox. It fought hard, and generally with success, in defence of an order in which most of its members had scant personal interest, and which showed as little regard for them once they had returned to civilian life as it did before they first donned