Читать книгу A People's History of London - Lindsey German - Страница 11

4

Old Corruption and the Mob That Can Read

And because I am happy and dance and sing

They think they have done me no injury

And are gone to praise God and his priest and king

Who make up a heaven of our misery.

William Blake

OLIGOPOLIS

By the eighteenth century, the elite that ruled Britain and its pre-eminent city, London, was one of the most unaccountable, unrepresentative and inhumane ever known. The wealth generated through trade and a developing empire, the political success of the Act of Union with Scotland and the lack of any democratic control from below all helped to produce an oligarchy whose main aim was the creation of fabulous wealth, regardless of the human or social consequences. Politics was run by a small elite of Whigs and Tories who presided over the networks of a unified, London-based, political, business and office-holding class. Conversely, the vast majority of the population had no say in who was elected: ‘There were a few constituencies where perhaps 10 per cent of the male electorate could vote, but these were easily outnumbered by the “rotten boroughs”, where the Member was effectively nominated by his patron, a lord or a landowner or both.’1 The rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs ensured no wider democratic mandate, leading to a rampant corruption and of politics dominated by greed, self-interest, corruption and careerism.

London was the centre of this ‘Old Corruption’ and, housing more than a tenth of the whole population of England and Wales, dominated the rest of the country: ‘London was then far more important commercially, industrially, and socially, in relation to the rest of the country than it has ever been since. . . . The only place it could be compared with was Paris, and people were fond of discussing which was the larger and which the more wicked.’2

A city which grew at such speed exhibited many of the features we now associate with cities in the developing world: precarious living, slum dwelling, and no support mechanisms for the poor; unbounded and ostentatious wealth for the rich. As a result of the appalling death rate the city relied on a population born and brought up elsewhere to increase its size. That changed around the middle of the century, when mortality began to fall. ‘In towns deaths exceeded births, and yet the towns continued to grow. It was clear that they grew only at the expense of the healthier country districts; London, in particular, was regarded as a devouring monster.’3

The London of the eighteenth century was a city in transition. At its beginning, England had not long before reached the political settlement known as the Glorious Revolution which marked a compromise with its turbulent seventeenth-century past. The nation was establishing itself as the world’s number one trading and imperial power, but industry was still based on small craft and artisan production, while politics was not clearly defined on a modern class or economic basis.

Nevertheless, the city was starting to become more defined: the enclosure of the docks changed the patterns of work on and around the river and launched a new era of trade. Streets and buildings encroached more onto traditional open space, creating new areas and suburbs. Between 1720 and 1745, five of the great London hospitals, including Guys, came into existence and by 1800 there was the beginning of serious attempts to regulate the city in terms of health and housing, as well as law and order.4 In the last decades of the century, there were also improvements in London streets through paving, lighting and drainage: ‘In the [1780s] the pavements, the street-lamps, the water supply, and the sewers of London were regarded as marvels. It is worth noting that foreign visitors were deeply impressed with the safety of pedestrians in London.’5 This freedom was connected by some with the wider issues of liberty: ‘their laws are not made and executed entirely by people who always ride in chariots.’6

Politically, this was a time of hiatus among working people: they had left behind the radicalism of the English Revolution, although it lingered on in many forms. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, poets like Blake defined themselves in terms of the radical impetuses of that revolution, and E. P. Thompson recalls how ‘the wilder sectaries of the English revolution . . . were never totally extinguished, with their literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation and their anticipations of a New Jerusalem descending from above. The Muggletonians (followers of the tailor-prophet Ludovic Muggleton) were still preaching in the fields and parks of London at the end of the eighteenth century.’7 Many were influenced by a range of radical ideas, from Tom Paine’s astonishing bestseller The Rights of Man, to the theories of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French and American revolutions. At the same time, forms of working-class and collective organization were still embryonic.

The city was the scene of great extremes of affluence and poverty. Its fabric was held together by wealth made from slavery and empire. The rich spread out in this century from the traditional confines of the old City and Westminster to fill in many of the spaces in between, building fine houses in the Georgian squares of Bloomsbury and Marylebone. The upper and middle classes employed bevies of servants: one estimate puts the number at 200,000 in 1796, around a fifth of the city’s population at the time.8 The poor and the working people, on the other hand, lived in the growing suburbs which surrounded the city walls – Clerkenwell, Islington, Tower Hamlets, and Southwark, as well as in parts of the City and Westminster themselves. They were artisans, apprentices, small masters, servants, river workers, sailors, street vendors, criminals and prostitutes. The trades which Londoners carried out included carpentry, butchery and shoemaking, as well as silk weaving which was the specialty of French, Irish and other immigrants in Spitalfields.

THE SPITALFIELDS RIOTS

The silk weavers were among the most pugnacious sections of London society, strongly organized to protect their trade and repeatedly forced to defend themselves. In 1675 and 1697 they rioted against the introduction of new machines and production techniques. When in 1719 the weavers assembled again in Spitalfields and at the Mint (near the Tower of London) to protest against the import of calico which threatened the silk industry, they had the recently passed Riot Act read out to them.9 As one of the key sections of the embryonic London working class, they helped to define class consciousness in the city. Spitalfields was the centre of their home and work, wedged between the City and the East End, providing a densely packed area in which radical ideas could ferment. Many of the silk weavers were themselves refugees or descendants of refugees, Huguenots from France who fled Louis XIV’s anti-Protestant pogroms in the 1680s. They were notorious for militancy in pursuit of their trade: any dispute with the masters would involve them not only stopping work but ripping the silk which had been already woven, rendering it worthless. They also smashed machinery and did as much damage to their masters’ enterprises as they could, in this presaging some of the movements against industrialization and new machinery which took place outside of London. They were a formidable force that also played a major part in all the political and social upheavals of the time.

France began forced conversions to Catholicism in 1681, and in 1685 the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes outlawed Protestantism in France. Some 50,000 to 80,000 of these Protestants settled in England, about half of them in the London area, where they gravitated towards the two established French churches: in Threadneedle Street in the City, and at the Savoy in the West End. The Huguenot communities thus became based in Spitalfields and Soho. By 1700 there were nine French Protestant churches in the East End and twelve in the West End.

Protestant immigrants received a better welcome in London than others, partly as a result of virulent anti-Catholicism, partly because of propaganda that dwelt on the atrocities committed against Protestants in France. Despite the threat of anti-Huguenot riots in the East End in 1675, 1681 and 1683, there appears to have been little physical violence directed against the French refugees. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the accession of William and Mary, Huguenots received a remarkable level of charitable support.

The Spitalfields silk workshops occupying the majority of the Huguenots made their owners extremely wealthy. One, Francis Goodchild, became lord mayor of London. Weaving only declined in the late 1700s, as silk was driven out of the market by new Indian and Chinese fabrics. The Spitalfields Acts passed between 1765 and 1801 aimed at controlling wages and working conditions, and to protect the domestic market from overseas competition. But the business continued to shrink. Weavers fought their masters to protect their livelihoods in violent clashes, particularly in 1768–69.

The Spitalfields Riots of those years were the result of heightened class conflict in the industry. This took place against a background of hardship and poverty among the working people of London and growing industrial unrest in a number of areas. The silk weavers wanted to control the prices in the industry. The conflict started as one between different groups of journeyman weavers, the single-hand or narrow weavers and those with engine looms. The masters had reduced the prices they paid for piece work, adding to the grievances. Angry weavers resorted to direct action, cutting the silk in the looms of those weavers who had ‘broken the book’ of fixed prices. In the summer of 1768, there were repeated ‘cuttings’ in Spitalfields. The weavers went armed, and in one raid shot a young man dead.

A new agreement in the wake of these events rapidly broke down. By now, the journeyman weavers had formed committees which collected a levy from any who owned looms to pay for organization and strike action. They called themselves the Bold Defiance. And they demanded money from the masters. One who refused to pay the levy was sent a threatening letter: ‘Mr Obey, we give you an Egg Shell of Honey, but if you refuse to comply with the demands of yesterday, we’ll give you a Gallon of Thorns to your final Life’s End.’10 The weavers met in various pubs in the area to collect money and to organize. In 1769 they set their own prices in the food markets.11 Amid shortages of food and fuel, the weavers repeatedly resorted to destroying looms and cutting silk.

The looms of one journeyman weaver, Thomas Poor, were cut by a group led by John Doyle and John Valline. Valline also headed a crowd of 1,500 who attacked seventy-six looms belonging to master weaver Lewis Chauvet, because he wouldn’t contribute to the committee funds. The authorities decided to intervene, and a meeting of silk weavers in the Dolphin pub in Bishopsgate was broken up by soldiers, with deaths on both sides. The big masters, led by Chauvet, now underwrote the costs of soldiers billeted in Spitalfields and effectively occupying the area; Doyle and Valline were tried and sentenced to death. In an attempt to cow the unruly and militant weavers, the authorities decided not to hang them at Tyburn as was usual, but in Bethnal Green at the heart of the weaving district.

Crowds lined the lengthy route from Newgate to the gallows, erected outside the Salmon and Ball pub which is still standing by Bethnal Green tube. The men expected to be rescued by the angry multitude which pelted the guards with rocks, but the execution went ahead. In anger and frustration, the gallows were torn down and reassembled outside Chauvet’s house as thousands attacked the building, burning furniture and breaking windows.12 The authorities never again dared to hang a weaver in Bethnal Green, and years later the weavers still bore a grudge against those who betrayed them. Eighteen months later, one of those who informed on them was cornered by an angry crowd and lynched.13

One lasting reminder of the Huguenot presence stands out. Just on the corner where Fournier Street, with its rows of Huguenot houses, meets Brick Lane in the East End of London stands the Jamme Masjid mosque. It started life in 1744 as a Huguenot church; fifty years later it became a Wesleyan chapel. From 1898 the building housed the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, serving the Eastern European Jewish community, until it was sold to the Bengali community in 1975. The building has been used for over two and a half centuries as a place of worship for the peoples of Spitalfields, yet the communities assembling within its walls have changed with successive waves of immigration to London. It stands today not only as the heart of the Bengali community but as a symbol of that movement and fluidity which is so characteristic of London’s history.14

LOVE, MARRIAGE AND MOTHER’S RUIN

Marriages of the poor had often been common law agreements, but this changed with the Hardwicke Act of 1753, which tried to prevent clandestine marriages by decreeing that from 1754 all marriages had to be conducted in the Church of England (only Quakers and Jews were exempted). This was an attempt to staunch the tide of ‘irregular marriages’ in the early eighteenth century. In London there were dozens of ‘Lawless churches’, most famously the ‘Fleet Prison Rules’. A business grew up around the Fleet prison to deal with clandestine marriages. The free market in marriages led to competition for custom, with people accosted in the streets ‘Madam, you want a parson? . . . Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married?’ Some ‘marriers’ would perform the service for two shillings and sixpence and sometimes even rented the ring to the couple. At another venue, the Savoy Chapel, it was estimated that almost 60 per cent of women marrying in the 1750s were pregnant.15 Many women who became pregnant could not marry and found themselves in a desperate situation in the city. Newborn children were left abandoned or neglected by mothers who could not look after them. Thomas Coram set up his foundling hospital in 1741 in response to the number of such babies.

The paintings of Hogarth show perhaps some of the most familiar images of London, with scenes of dereliction and debauchery often as a result of drink. ‘Gin Lane’ was not an exaggeration: from around 1720 to 1750 the excessive consumption of gin gave rise to major social and medical problems, and hence to a series of public outcries followed by attempts at social reform. In the early eighteenth century one in four houses in St Giles Rookery (the setting for Gin Lane) doubled as a gin-shop.16 Distilling of gin was a major enterprise in London, encouraged by the government to deal with several years of over-production of corn. This highly alcoholic but popular drink no doubt served to dull the pain of existence for the poor and to endow them with a temporary sense of exhilaration. However, it destroyed the lives of many people, bringing to the slums an extra hazard and worsening standards of family life and health.

Various Acts of Parliament were passed to address this problem, but partial alleviation was actually a result of pricing it out of the reach of the poor. Reformers like Henry Fielding and Hogarth used their artistic talents to campaign against excessive drinking and its connection with poverty.17 The cleaning up of Gin Lane by no means ended gin’s influence in London; it remained a popular drink in London until well into the second half of the twentieth century, the Gordon’s distillery prominent in pre-gentrified Clerkenwell until the 1970s and the name of ‘mother’s ruin’ still in popular parlance as a reminder of its most notorious effects.

However, if the poor struggled they usually survived. While there was undeniable poverty and often, no doubt, hunger, those in power ensured that the basics were available. There were few bread riots in London since the civic authorities were careful to maintain affordable prices for bread and wheat. In addition there was less threat of riot from the countryside in lean years: ‘England . . . had virtually ceased to be a peasant country, and London was, at its most vulnerable point, cut off from the countryside by the protective shield of the near-urban county of Middlesex.’18 The alternative to living in desperation was the workhouse, although it only achieved its full depths of notoriety a century later following the introduction of the Poor Law in 1834. While the workhouse was in theory a means of looking after the poorest in society, the hideous and punitive conditions which prevailed there ensured that it was viewed by many of the poor as an instrument of coercion.

LAW AND ORDER

How was the government to maintain control of this growing population in such a city, where little was planned and where everyone was left to fend for themselves? The favoured strategy of much of the city’s rich and ruling elite was to clamp down on anyone who might challenge its supremacy, and to turn the very condition of being poor into a crime. There was also a very visible policy of deterrence. London in the eighteenth century was full of prisons: the most famous was Newgate, whose site was by the present Old Bailey, and which was the equivalent in London consciousness (and London memory) of the hated Paris Bastille. But there were also the Fleet, the Clink, the various Bridewells, and other lock-ups scattered across the working-class areas of Clerkenwell, St Giles or Southwark. The history of London in the eighteenth century is repeatedly interwoven with the history of these prisons. In a city as closely packed as London, with no police force until well into the nineteenth century, the prisons were a constant reminder to the poor of the weight of the law and how close they might be to retribution. And many of them were very close.

The number of hanging offences in English law expanded dramatically in the course of the eighteenth century, nearly all of them for crimes against property rather than the person. The Black Act passed in 1723 increased potentially capital offences to more than 200.19 Theft in many cases was a capital offence, and many went to the gallows for stealing bread or a piece of meat. If the poor sometimes ended up as dangerous criminals, this legislation was also part of a process of criminalizing poverty itself. Those who stole from their masters, who left their apprenticeships early, or who were desperate to feed their families could all move very quickly from leading respectable working lives to seeing the inside of the prison walls.

Jack Sheppard was one of the poor who became a criminal. He was a legend in his own very short lifetime. When in 1724, at the age of twenty-two, he went to the gallows at Tyburn Tree he was a popular hero. In the public imagination his remarkable escapes from prison and the cat and mouse game he played with the authorities dwarfed his career as a robber; he remained a hero long after all his contemporaries were dead. He was the inspiration for the highwayman Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, written four years later, and in which his nemesis Jonathan Wild was the jailer Peachum (to ‘peach’ meant to grass or inform). His story became an instant hit at fairs: Harlequin Sheppard was performed at the Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, just round the corner from Newgate, only months later.20 More than a century after his death in 1839, the novel Jack Sheppard written by Harrison Ainsworth proved a bestseller. It was also turned into a stage play, and frequently pirated.

Such was the fear of Sheppard’s example influencing the London poor that the Lord Chancellor responded by banning the licencing of any play with the name ‘Jack Sheppard’ in it for forty years.21 His fame spread far outside London: Commissioner Horne, from the Children’s Employment Commission, reported in 1841 that, of children in Wolverhampton, ‘several had never heard the name of the Queen nor other names, such as Nelson, Wellington, Bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who had never heard even of St Paul, Moses, or Solomon, were very well instructed as to the life, deeds, and character of Dick Turpin, the street robber, and especially of Jack Sheppard, the thief and gaol-breaker.’22

Sheppard was not from a criminal family. Born in Spitalfields, the industrial silk-weaving area, in 1702, he was left in the Bishopsgate workhouse when his widowed mother went into service in the house of a draper. He was eventually apprenticed to a Covent Garden carpenter to follow the family trade. Indeed, Sheppard first fell foul of the law and was imprisoned for breaking his indentures, the terms of his apprenticeship as a carpenter, by leaving before his time was served. His path from apprentice in a respectable household to notorious criminal was not so distant from the lives of many young people in the city. His good looks, his romancing (his lover was Elizabeth Lyon, known as Edgworth Bess) and his daredevil behaviour all made him a hero in many eyes. Sheppard first escaped from the St Giles roundhouse in April, then from the new Bridewell prison in Clerkenwell in May, then from Newgate in August. Edgworth Bess helped him in a number of these escapes (as he had originally helped her), and his departure from Newgate was carried out by him dressing up as a woman. Recaptured the following month, Sheppard escaped from Newgate yet again, despite precautions including handcuffs, irons and chains within a locked room.

The amazement of the authorities and of London’s population knew no bounds, although Jack himself was more modest in his ‘true confessions’: ‘though people have made such an outcry about it, there is scarce a smith in London but what may easily do the same thing.’23 Richard Holmes argues that while the escapes were daring, they were comprehensible in light of ‘his outstanding skills as a carpenter and builder . . . his great physical strength combined with a small gymnastic body [which] gave him a natural mastery of building materials and an instinctive understanding of the construction (and deconstruction) of every kind of lock, wall, window, bar, spike, chimney-breast, floor, ceiling, roof or cellar.’24

In the period between his third and fourth escapes, when he was recaptured disguised as a butcher and again imprisoned in Newgate, Daniel Defoe described the mood in the city:

His escape and his being so suddenly retaken made such a noise in the town, that it was thought all the common people would have gone mad about him, there not being a porter to be had for love nor money, nor getting into an alehouse, for butchers, shoemakers and barbers, all engaged in controversies and wagers about Sheppard . . . Tyburn Road [was] daily lined with women and children, and the gallows as carefully watched by night lest he should be hanged incog., for a report of that nature obtained much upon the rabble. In short, it was a week of the greatest noise and idleness among mechanics that has been known in London.25

The anticipation of Jack’s fate at the gallows was more intense than usual, but of a piece with eighteenth-century attitudes to hanging. As E. P. Thompson put it, ‘all the symbolism of “Tyburn Fair” was a ritual at the heart of London’s popular culture.’26 Executions attracted crowds with all the drama and paraphernalia of fairs and entertainments, despite their grim meaning. Tyburn was not the only place to fulfil the need for grisly spectacle. Across London, at Execution Dock in Wapping, hundreds of pirates were hanged between 1716 and 1726.27 And in what is now part of south London, Surrey’s convicts were hanged on Kennington Common.

DISSENT BEYOND THE LAW

The poor were not the only ones criminalized by the eighteenth-century state. Nearly any form of oppositional activity, or indeed radical thought, was made illegal. There was no democracy in Britain in the eighteenth century: the oligarchy which controlled the city and the country decreed that those who opposed its rule would be subject to the most severe repression. In the space of only eight years the Riot Act (1715), the Transportation Act (1719), the Combination Act (1721), the Workhouse Act (1723) and the Black Act (1723) all became law. Collectively they represented a determination to prevent collective forms of action among the emerging working class and labouring poor either in the form of demonstrations or trade union organization.28

Thought crime was equally frowned upon. Those who, for whatever reason, rejected God and Priest and King were persecuted, banished, prosecuted and sometimes even executed for their beliefs. Even some who did believe in God were driven out: there was one established Church, headed by the king, and those who espoused alternative religions or ideas were not even allowed to live within the city walls. Dissenters from the Anglican Church of England were persecuted by five Acts of Parliament brought in at the Restoration and collectively known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles II’s advisor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. The Five Mile Act (1665), the final act of the Code, ruled that Dissenting ministers were forbidden from coming within five miles of incorporated towns or the place of their former livings. They were also forbidden to teach in schools. This act was not rescinded until 1812.

While the Five Mile Act had the effect of physically removing fomenters of opposition to the establishment from the most populated parts of the city, it succeeded in establishing areas where dissenting ideas flourished. And while dissent from established ideas was effectively banned, the strength of non-conformist views of a non-religious nature also grew, gaining impetus in the second half of the century under the profound influence of first the American and then, more spectacularly, the French Revolution. This in turn had a big impact on London politics.

In the mid 1780s Mary Wollstonecraft first came into contact with radical ideas in Newington Green, outside the limits of the Act. Here she was to encounter new ways of thinking about society, women and education that were all important themes in her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She arrived in Newington Green in her mid-twenties with her sisters Eliza and Everina, and her friend Fanny Blood took on responsibility for all of them – having encouraged Eliza, who was suffering from a breakdown, to leave her husband and baby. Mary had long hoped to live with Fanny and was to take care of the financial upkeep of Fanny’s parents, with whom she had lived for some time previously near Fulham. The trio was joined by Everina who had left the home of her disapproving older brother.

As a solution to the vulnerable situation in which the women found themselves, Wollstonecraft decided they should set up a girls’ school. The educational requirements of girls were considered to be so inferior to those of their brothers that it was quite usual for such schools to be set up by women with no educational training. However, Wollstonecraft developed an interest in radical theories of education, including those of the Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau whom she would later reproach (in A Vindication) for his advocacy of an inferior quality of education for girls – something she argued was inconsistent with Enlightenment ideas of reason. These ideas were promoted in her first book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, written at Newington Green.

Although an Anglican, Wollstonecraft soon became acquainted with the radical circle of Dissenters that lived in and around the Green. She went to the Dissenter chapel – which remains on the Green today – to hear the sermons of Dr Richard Price. Price had supported parliamentary reform and the American independence movement, and was in contact with foreign radicals including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps most importantly for Wollstonecraft, many Dissenters held groundbreaking ideas about women’s rights and had, in their milieu, women who defied convention and established themselves as commentators and pamphleteers on subjects including education and politics. Hungry for ideas, she made friends with John Hewlett, a local schoolmaster who introduced her to Dr Johnson, then living in nearby Islington, and Joseph Johnson, another Dissenter, interested in radicalism and ideas around education. He was also a publisher, and was to bring out Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.29