The Regency Revolution E-Book

Robert Morrison

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 629

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the HWA Non-fictionCrown Award 2020 'Superb' The Economist 'Elegant, entertaining and frequently surprising' New York Times The fascinating story of the Regency period in Britain - an immensely colourful and chaotic decade that marked the emergence of the modern world. The Regency began on 5 February 1811 when the Prince of Wales replaced his violently insane father George III as the sovereign de facto. It ended on 29 January 1820, when George III died and the Prince Regent became King as George IV. At the centre of the era is of course the Regent himself, who was vilified by the masses for his selfishness and corpulence. Around him surged a society defined by brilliant characters, momentous events, and stark contrasts; a society forced to confront a whole range of pressing new issues that signalled a decisive break from the past and that for the first time brought our modern world clearly into view. The RegencyRevolution is the most thorough and vivid exploration of the period ever published, and it reveals the remarkably diverse ways in which the cultural, social, technological and political revolutions of this decade continue both to inspire and haunt our world.

Leseprobe

THEREGENCYREVOLUTION

ALSO BY ROBERT MORRISON

The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey

THEREGENCYREVOLUTION

Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World

ROBERT MORRISON

This edition published by arrangement with W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Robert Morrison, 2019

The moral right of Robert Morrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-123-7

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-124-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-125-1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For CaroleAgain and Always

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PROLOGUE      The Regent and the Regency

CHAPTER ONE      Crime, Punishment, and the Pursuit of Freedom

CHAPTER TWO      Theaters of Entertainment

CHAPTER THREE      Sexual Pastimes, Pleasures, and Perversities

CHAPTER FOUR      Expanding Empire and Waging War

CHAPTER FIVE      Changing Landscapes and Ominous Signs

EPILOGUE      The Modern World

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My research for this book was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am deeply grateful for the council’s support. I would like to thank the following librarians and archivists for providing extra information and guiding me to new sources: Rachel Foss at the British Library; Susan Halpert at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Rachel Beattie at the National Library of Scotland; Kimberley Bell, Bonnie Brooks, and Jillian Sparks at the Queen’s University Library; and Chris Sutherns at Tate Images. For his indispensable assistance on this project, I would especially like to record my thanks to Jeff Cowton of the Wordsworth Trust.

Writing this book has been a complicated and exhilarating task, and I have benefited enormously from the expertise and support of a number of scholars and friends. I am grateful to Chris Baldick, Peter Bell, John Berry, Benjamin Colbert, Roy Golsteyn, Roger Hamilton, Wendy-Lee Hamilton, Kanonhsyonne Janice C. Hill, Markus Iseli, Paul James, Kaveh Khanverdi, Larry Krupp, John Kulka, Grevel Lindop, Amy Loyst, Charles Mahoney, Robert McCullum, Johanna McLeod, Peter McLeod, Martha Paul, Nick Paul, Ian Reed, Bob Richardson, Sir Christopher Ricks, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Nicholas Roe, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Lee Spinks, Vinita Srivastava, Nancy Stokes, John Strachan, and Duncan Wu. I would like to thank Lyndon Bray, Randy Paskuski, and Neil Sheets for being my bandmates for all these years. Thank you, as well, to Michael Davie, who has been such a good friend for more than three decades, and who walked with me around the Brighton Pavilion and John Keats’s house.

Anthony Holden and Alan Samson both believed in this project right from the start, and I am deeply grateful for their friendship and support. For invaluable assistance and advice, I would like to thank Guy Gavriel Kay and James Nightingale, as well as my literary agents, Julian Alexander and John Silbersack. At W. W. Norton, thank you to Nancy Palmquist and, in particular, to my editor Amy Cherry, who read the manuscript with such care, and who offered so many insightful suggestions.

For their love, friendship, and constant encouragement, I would like to thank Zachary and Alastair.

This book is for Carole.

  Leigh HouseBrewer’s Mills

INTRODUCTION

The Regency began on 5 February 1811. King George III had been crowned in 1760, and had presided over both the loss of the American colonies and Britain’s struggles against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. But he was replaced as Britain’s ruler because he suffered from some form of insanity, which struck him down several times during his long reign, and which in late 1810 cast him into darkness, clearing the way for the Regency of his dissolute eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, who ruled Britain as Prince Regent until 29 January 1820, when George III died and the Regent became King George IV. Despite its brevity, the Regency was a time of major events, from the Luddite Riots and the War of 1812 to the Battle of Waterloo, the explosion of Mount Tambora, and the Peterloo Massacre. And it had a glorious cast, including Jane Austen, Beau Brummell, Lord Byron, John Constable, John Keats, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, J. M. W. Turner, the Duke of Wellington, and of course the Regent himself. But there were dozens of other figures who made a decisive contribution to the period, including athletes (Tom Cribb), artists (Mary Linwood and Thomas Rowlandson), engineers (Thomas Telford), explorers (John Franklin), inventors (Charles Babbage), journalists (Pierce Egan), novelists (Mary Brunton and Maria Edgeworth), poets (John Clare), reformers (Elizabeth Fry and Robert Owen), and scientists (Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday). While I recognize the deep continuities between the Regency and the decades that both preceded and followed it, I believe the Regency is perhaps the most extraordinary decade in all of British history. It is certainly the period that most definitively marks the appearance of the modern world.

In fiction, the Regency is brought most vividly to life in William Makepeace Thackeray’s magnificent Vanity Fair (1847–48) and in the novels of Georgette Heyer, including Regency Buck (1935) and An Infamous Army (1937). Popular studies began with William Cobbett’s History of the Regency and Reign of King George the Fourth (1830–34), continued through a number of nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury accounts, and culminated in the 1970s and 1980s in a spate of shorter surveys, including those by Joanna Richardson, Donald Low, and Carolly Erickson. There have been a host of books on individual aspects of the Regency, including its architecture, art, fashion, furniture, politics, prizefighters, and rakes. There have also been a number of studies that fold the Regency into a longer historical survey, including Paul Johnson’s magisterial The Birth of the Modern (1991), or that see it variously as a part of the “Age of Atonement,” the “Age of Elegance,” the “Age of Improvement,” the “Age of Revolution,” or the “Age of Wonder.” Several studies, too, have been devoted to an examination of the “Regency world” of individual authors, including, most prominently, Austen and Byron.

Yet despite the wealth of interest, this book is the first in more than three decades to focus solely on the Regency years, and in its account of the period’s remarkable diversity, upheaval, and elegance, it pushes well beyond the scope of any previous work on the decade. It builds on the key sources about the Regency, including the memoirs and journals of Frances Burney, Joseph Farington, Rees Howell Gronow, and Henry Crabb Robinson. More importantly, it taps the rich stores found in recent biographies of leading figures, including Percy Shelley and the Duke of Wellington, as well as in new editions of works by Regency authors, from well-known writers like Jane Austen to lesser-known figures such as the courtesan Harriette Wilson and the diarist Anne Lister, who during the Regency recorded in code her joyous experiences of same-sex love.

Above all, this book ranges across the decade to mark the moment when Thackeray and Charles Dickens were boys, Benjamin Disraeli and Thomas Macaulay were teenagers, and John Keats and Thomas Carlyle (both born in 1795) were young men. It considers Britain at home and abroad, at war and at peace, at work and at pleasure. It brings the central figures of the period into dialogue with one another, as Turner chats with Constable, Lady Caroline Lamb pursues Byron, Wellington spies Napoleon across the battlefield, Keats watches Edmund Kean on stage, and Mary Russell Mitford enthuses over a lecture by William Hazlitt. In its dreams of equality and freedom, its embrace of consumerism and celebrity culture, its mass radical protests in support of parliamentary reform, and its complicated response to the burgeoning pace of industrial, technological, and scientific advance, the Regency signals both a decisive break from the past and the onset of the desiring, democratic, secular, opportunistic society that is for the first time recognizably our own.

THEREGENCYREVOLUTION

  PROLOGUE  

The Regent and the Regency

He burst into tears. It was May 1812, and his erstwhile friend Lord Moira had just explained to him that the country was in a “terrible state.” The Prince Regent admitted ignorance. He had not received any news from his ministers in the last three or four weeks, and he did not know what was happening in the kingdom. How bad were things beyond the opulent confines of his home at Carlton House in London, or his seaside retreat at the Brighton Pavilion? The answer, as Moira undoubtedly informed him, was that things were very bad indeed.1 In Ireland there were government crackdowns and bitter outbreaks of sectarian violence; in Scotland landlords were clearing their estates for sheep farming by forcing thousands of Highlanders from their homes; and in England there were riots in the industrial Midlands and widespread despair in the agricultural districts. And this was to say nothing of the monumental struggle Britain was waging in Europe against Napoleonic France, or the anger building between America and Britain that led less than a month later to the two countries descending into the War of 1812.

Long before Moira finished, the Regent was “very nearly in convulsions,” and Moira suggested that he return the next day in order to allow the Regent time to compose himself.2 Yet despite the stress these meetings caused him, and the turmoil that continued to sweep through the country, the Regent rarely took more than a sporadic interest in domestic politics. The result was repeated and often ferocious attacks on him by satirists, caricaturists, political enemies, and discarded friends, all of which created an image of him as self-indulgent, incompetent, and lachrymose that has endured from his day to ours.

Nonetheless, if widely despised and too often oblivious in matters of state, the Regent in matters of taste and style left a profound impact on his era, for in his love of both elegance and excess, violence and restraint, learning and lasciviousness, the low-brow and the high-minded, he embodied many of the extremes that have come to define his Regency, not only within court circles but also much further down the social hierarchies. His love of prizefighting, horse racing, and the theater set the tone for the age, as did his delight in consumerism. Gamblers bet wildly, like him, on cards and dice, losing far more than they could afford and racking up cripplingly high debt loads. The Regent’s vast consumption of food and especially drink empowered male and female debauchees from across the social spectrum. His days and nights of committed libertinism inspired rakes of both sexes, who throughout his Regency enjoyed an unabashed revelry of promiscuity and pornographic obsession.

The Regent had passions, however, that extended well beyond the stimulations of sport, gaming, sex, booze, food, and shopping. His cultural, aesthetic, and literary judgments have proven remarkably sound. John Rennie was his engineer and John Nash his architect, and together their building projects transformed Regency London. In fashion, he was for many years an intimate of George “Beau” Brummell, who set new standards for sartorial elegance in male dress. In art, he commissioned portraits from Thomas Lawrence and genre paintings from David Wilkie. In prose fiction, he championed Jane Austen, who did not admire him but who dedicated Emma (1816) “to his Royal Highness the Prince Regent” and who was “read & admired” by him at a time when her work enjoyed only limited popularity. In poetry, the Regent, like so many of his contemporaries, thought Walter Scott preeminent until George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron, skyrocketed to fame in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, whereupon the Regent asked to meet Byron, whom he “surprised & delighted” with his intimate knowledge of “poetry and Poets.” In science, the Regent knighted Humphry Davy, the most eminent chemist of the day. “The works of scientific men,” Davy declared, “are like the atoms of gold, of sapphire and diamonds, that exist in a mountain. . . . When sovereigns are at the expense of digging out these riches, they are repaid by seeing them gems in their crowns.” 3

The deep contradictions in the Regent’s character both energized and undermined him, and were evident from an early age. Born 12 August 1762, and named George Augustus Frederick, he was the eldest of fifteen children of King George III and Queen Charlotte (eight brothers and six sisters followed). Given the title of Prince of Wales within a week of his birth, he was as a child actively involved in a rigorous education that – on his father’s instructions – attempted to inculcate the virtues of honesty, hard work, and punctuality, and that eventually grew to include everything from lessons in boxing, fencing, and drawing to the study of mathematics, natural philosophy, languages, literature, music, agriculture, and the classics. George did well across this curriculum, but he sometimes showed an irritability and a lack of commitment that his father wanted beaten out of him. One of his sisters remembered how she had seen George and some of his brothers “held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip.” 4

Prince George seems to have taken such discipline in his stride, and to have continued to develop his knowledge of art, architecture, music, and literature. But by the time he was seventeen, he was already “rather too fond of wine and women” and in open revolt against his father, whose industry, uxoriousness, and parsimony he utterly rejected, and whose expectations he seemed hell-bent on disappointing.5 He took up with the brilliant Whig politician Charles James Fox, a bitter enemy of his father’s and a renowned champion of both liberty and dissipation. He accumulated gambling and consumer debts at a rate that almost beggars belief. He entertained several mistresses, including the beautiful actress Mary Robinson. In December 1785, after a tumultuous courtship, he secretly married Maria Fitzherbert, a Roman Catholic widow six years his senior, but the union was unlawful because members of the royal family needed the king’s consent to marry if they were under the age of twenty-five. The prince was twenty-three years old.

Three years later, the king became seriously ill with what appeared to be insanity, throwing the country into the so-called “Regency Crisis,” during which time George relished the thought of the money and influence that would be available to him should he become sovereign de facto, and he and his Whig friends engaged in pleasant games of “cabinet-making.” But in February 1789 the king unexpectedly recovered, and George went back to boozing and betting and womanizing and weight gain. Only a few months later, the French Revolution broke out. Though he had pushed hard for many years to be allowed to join the army, and though he was fascinated by military costume and strategy, George was always denied the opportunity to fight for his country because he was heir to the throne and his father forbade it. The decision humiliated him and meant that he was forced to sit on the sidelines while his brothers (with the exception of George III’s sixth son, sickly Augustus) served as high-ranking officers on the land or at sea. Byron later imagined George in 1791 as “full of promise” and “[a] finished gentleman from top to toe.” But well before that date, as one observer put it, George was “a man occupied in trifles, because he had no opportunity of displaying his talents in the conduct of great concerns.” 6

Britain went to war against Revolutionary France in February 1793, while George ran up such a mountain of new debt that – his secret marriage to Maria Fitzherbert notwithstanding – he agreed to marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, in exchange for a settlement that would make him solvent again. The couple met for the first time just a few days before their wedding. Neither was impressed. “I am not well,” said George on first seeing Caroline. “Pray get me a glass of brandy.” When he left the room, Caroline declared, “I think he’s very fat and he’s nothing like as handsome as his portrait.” 7 On their wedding day, 8 April 1795, George was drunk and collapsed in the evening by the fireplace of their bridal chamber, though he clearly managed to revive himself the next morning, for exactly nine months later a daughter, Charlotte, was born. Shortly thereafter Caroline moved out of Carlton House and into a separate residence. The brief, stormy marriage between the Prince and Princess of Wales was unofficially at an end.

George returned to the arms of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and then a new series of mistresses, while Caroline, warmhearted but light-headed, and famously disinclined to ablutions, embarked on her own career of sexual licentiousness. Her conduct – certainly no worse than his – prompted him to order what became known as the “Delicate Investigation,” in which a committee quietly looked into the salacious rumors surrounding her private life but determined that there was no conclusive proof of adultery. Husband and wife by now thoroughly despised each other. Public opinion was decidedly on her side. “I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband,” Austen stated flatly. The welfare and upbringing of the couple’s daughter, Charlotte, provoked especially bitter disagreements between them. “My mother was wicked,” Charlotte later wrote, “but she would not have turned so wicked had not my father been much more wicked still.” 8

The death in November 1810 of George III’s youngest and favorite daughter, Amelia, was a severe blow from which he was unable to recover, and by the end of the year it was evident that the madness that had afflicted him before had now returned in an even more virulent form. Forced to take action, Parliament introduced the Regency Act, and on 5 February 1811, the forty-eight-year-old Prince of Wales was sworn in as Prince Regent. One day earlier he had confounded many by announcing that he had decided to retain his father’s Tory ministers rather than appoint a new government from among his Whig friends. His decision was based in part on his fear of what his father would do if he recovered his senses and discovered that he had a Whig prime minister. But there were other factors as well. He no longer felt the same loyalty to the Whig party, especially after the death of Fox in 1806. He also disagreed with several leading Whigs over their support of Catholic emancipation, a campaign to remove the numerous political and civil restrictions that harassed Roman Catholics living in Britain, and an issue on which the Regent had no intention of giving any ground despite his love for Maria Fitzherbert. More decisively, he abhorred their willingness to abandon the fight against Napoleon and leave continental Europe to him, a pusillanimous policy that the Regent rejected in favor of unstinting support for the Duke of Wellington and a vigorous pursuit of the British war effort. The government imposed a one-year restriction on the powers of the Regent, but in February 1812 he assumed the full authority of the crown, and “might now, therefore, be regarded as virtually king,” as the essayist and opium addict Thomas De Quincey remarked.9 This made the Regent not only the most powerful man in Britain but also the man at the head of the wealthiest, strongest, most ambitious, vibrant, and productive country in the world – though Britain in the Regency was at the same time a country of strikingly paradoxical attitudes and experiences, and a country that was almost torn apart by radical anger and anguish.

  CHAPTER ONE  

Crime, Punishment, and the Pursuit of Freedom

I

John Bellingham spent the sunny afternoon of Monday, 11 May 1812, with his landlady, a widow named Rebecca Robarts, and her young son. Together they walked the two miles from 9 New Millman Street, where Bellingham had been a lodger for about four months, to King Street, next to St. James’s Square. Here they visited the European Museum, an institution devoted to the promotion of the fine arts, where they wandered for more than two hours, and Bellingham pointed out a sketch of the Last Judgment by the great Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. Sometime shortly after four o’clock they left the museum to begin their journey home, but when they reached Sidney’s Alley, off Leicester Square, Bellingham announced that he had to go and buy a prayer book, leaving Mrs. Robarts and her son to return to New Millman Street, while he headed off in the direction of Westminster. In under thirty minutes he made his way down crowded Whitehall, into Parliament Street, across Palace Yard, and up the broad steps of St. Stephen’s into the lobby of the House of Commons. He stopped, caught his breath, and positioned himself by the door. Just a few minutes behind him in the London streets was the evangelical Tory prime minister, Spencer Perceval, a devoted husband and father of twelve children who had assumed the premiership in October 1809 and who was then at the height of his political power. Scheduled to attend the 4:30 P.M. session, he had left 10 Downing Street late but decided against traveling by carriage. It was almost quarter past five before a brisk walk brought him to the doors of the House.1

Bellingham was waiting for Perceval, armed – as he had been throughout the afternoon – with two primed-and-cocked pistols. He had not wanted it to come to this, but what choice did he have? Eight years earlier, he had sailed from Liverpool to Archangel in Russia on a mercantile venture, but things had soon gone terribly wrong, and he found himself in prison for a debt that he insisted he did not owe. Confused and increasingly angry, he appealed to the British authorities for help, but they repeatedly informed him that his case was under the jurisdiction of the Russian government alone. After five dreadful years trying to prove his innocence, he was finally released in October 1809, and two months later he was back in England, where he immediately began to lobby the authorities for redress. His pleas, including one to the Prince Regent and one to Perceval, again fell on deaf ears.

Bitter and by now obsessed, he decided to take matters into his own hands. In his early forties, with his wife and three children living in Liverpool, he relocated to London. After two months he fell behind in his rent to Mrs. Robarts, though she found him a kind and polite lodger and especially appreciated his willingness to escort her to church services. On about 21 April, Bellingham spent four guineas on a brace of seven-inch steel pistols that he bought from the celebrated London gunsmith William Beckwith. Over the next few days he took them to Hampstead Heath, where he practiced firing at trees. Shortly thereafter he hired a tailor to alter one of his coats by sewing into it a nine-inch-deep inside pocket on the left-hand side that could hold one of the pistols and that he could access conveniently with his right hand. Bellingham also began during these weeks to attend Parliament regularly, sitting in the Strangers’ Gallery and peering down through the gloom at the government benches, while frequently asking those seated around him about the identity of different ministers. Soon he put the name “Spencer Perceval” to the face, and Bellingham’s rage honed in on him as the leader of an oppressive and brutally indifferent government.2

Tall and large-boned, with a thin face, aquiline nose, sunken eyes, and sallow complexion, Bellingham was intensely aware of the pistol concealed in his dark brown coat, while the backup gun protruded awkwardly in the pocket of his nankeen trousers. Perceval, a much smaller man, with a pale face and wide eyes, now entered the lobby, wearing a blue coat, white waistcoat, and charcoal breeches. Bellingham knew him instantly, walked calmly and directly up to him with pistol drawn, and fired at point-blank range. The large bullet tore into the prime minister’s chest, creating a wound at least three inches deep as it passed over the fourth rib on the left-hand side and then downward toward the heart. “I am murdered!” Perceval screamed as he reeled backward against the door and then, staggering forward, collapsed facedown on the floor. It was only when two horrified bystanders turned him over that they recognized who had been shot, and the enormity of what had just happened broke upon the people in the lobby, before spreading quickly into the rooms beyond. Several men assisted in picking up the prime minister and carrying him into the Speaker’s apartments. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth and seeped from his chest into his shirt and waistcoat. Gently the men seated him upright on a table, but he did not speak again, and within a few minutes he was dead, the first and only British prime minister to be assassinated. Bellingham made no attempt to flee. When he was seized by lobby onlookers, there were large beads of sweat running down his face, and his body heaved as if a “billiard-ball . . . were choking him.” In the chaos, witnesses demanded to know why he had done such a thing. “I have been denied the redress of my grievances by Government,” he replied; “I have been ill-treated.” 3

Reaction to the murder was swift, and – more than any other single incident – it exposed the bitter class divisions within Regency society. Many people, both within the government and far beyond, deeply admired Perceval, not only for the virtuousness of his private life but for his political stance, which was anti-French, anti-Catholic, anti-slavery, and fiercely anti-reform. The House met the following day to pay tribute to their fallen colleague, and several members – from political allies like Lord Castlereagh, through rivals like George Canning, to opponents such as Samuel Whitbread – were overcome with emotion. “Mr. Perceval . . . I am singular enough to regard as the best and wisest minister of this reign,” wrote the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.4

Outside the House, however, the mood could hardly have been more different. An immense crowd of “from fifty to a hundred thousand persons” gathered in the hours following the murder, and – surprisingly, even shockingly – they were jubilant. What for Bellingham had been a personal vendetta became in the public mind a political assassination in which, on behalf of the angry, the impoverished, and the reviled, someone had finally hit back with lethal force. An anxious Coleridge heard exultant agitators toasting the event with “more of these damned Scoundrels must go the same way,” while the diarist and socialite Frances Calvert reported that “there were printed placards put on the House of Commons . . . stating that Mr. Perceval’s ribs were only fit to broil the Regent’s heart on. How horrible!” The poet William Wordsworth, in London at the time, came across a woman who was selling “the life of Bellingham” and who was glorying in the “good deed he did.” “Nothing can be more deplorably ferocious and savage than the lowest orders in London,” he reported, “and I am sorry to say that tens of thousands of the Middle class and even respectable Shop-keepers rejoice in this detestable murther.” Meanwhile, celebrations spread north to the manufacturing towns, where people rang bells, lit bonfires, and showed “the most savage joy.” From Kegworth in Leicestershire, the Irish poet Thomas Moore declared, “You cannot imagine what a combustible state this country is in – all the common people’s heads are full of revolution.” 5

The government sent troops into the streets, awarded Perceval’s widow Jane an annuity of £2,000 (about £150,000 today), supplemented by a still more lavish grant of £50,000 (about £3,800,000 today) for the support of her children. Then it set its sights on making an example of Bellingham, who was formally charged with murder and dispatched to Newgate Prison amid throngs of supporters. “What were the people to do who were starving?” demanded one commentator. “Not murder people,” snapped Wordsworth, “unless they mean to eat their hearts.” Bellingham was tried at the Old Bailey on 15 May and contended throughout the day that he was perfectly justified in killing Perceval. “What he had done was a mite to a mountain, compared with what Government had done to him.” The trial lasted eight hours, after which the jury withdrew for fifteen minutes and returned with a verdict of guilty. On Monday, 18 May 1812, one week after he had assassinated the prime minister, Bellingham emerged from New-gate into an early morning rain, calm and dignified, and ascended the gallows as “a score of persons in the mob set up a loud and reiterated cry of ‘God bless you! God bless you!’ ” Lord Byron looked on from a rented window. As the clock tolled eight, he and thousands of others watched as Bellingham was “launched into eternity.” 6

The radical William Cobbett was a prisoner in Newgate at the time, and he too witnessed the execution. The people’s enthusiasm for Bellingham, he concluded, did not mean that they were bloodthirsty. “Their conduct upon this occasion only shows, and it does show in the most striking light, the deep discontent that they felt at the terrible laws that had been passed . . . to abridge their liberties.” For some, it was possible to accept these disadvantages and restrictions, which extended from tight controls on the price and content of newspapers, through legislative measures that kept the price of food artificially high, to brutal laws that punished even minor transgressions. But many others simply could no longer tolerate a system in which power was consolidated in the hands of a privileged few, while consigning the vast majority to lives of want and despair. Driven variously by hunger, greed, boredom, and anger, tens of thousands of people turned – like Bellingham – to crime, which had a tighter grip on London in the Regency than in any previous or subsequent period, as criminals exulted in one last lawless spree before the government finally responded in the 1820s to repeated calls for legal, penal, and police reform. More broadly, throughout Britain the laboring classes assembled in unprecedented numbers to demand political reforms such as universal suffrage and annual parliaments. In response, the government enacted ferocious crackdowns, including the infamous Peterloo Massacre at Manchester, when British soldiers armed with axes and swords charged into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing eleven and wounding hundreds. Above all, the Regency’s most important radical, Percy Bysshe Shelley, looked directly at contemporary suffering and responded by championing not only political but also, and more urgently, moral and spiritual reform. In his finest writings, Shelley imagines a dramatic transformation in which humankind’s creative spirit is unbound, and “Love, hope and self-esteem” heal the divisions both within and between us.7

II

Crime was a pressing issue across the country. Contemporary assessments of it are marred by exaggeration, extenuation, and denial, but there is no question that the situation in the capital was especially acute because of its size. In 1811, London had around one million inhabitants, giving it ten times the population of other major centers, such as Glasgow (100,749), Manchester (98,573), Liverpool (94,376), and Birmingham (85,753).8 Further, while the rural poor flooding into British cities often drifted into unemployment and criminality, it was only in London that they could find “rookeries,” long-established, densely populated criminal districts occupied by tavern owners, lodging-house keepers, moneylenders, and beggars, all crowded together with criminals of every description. Whereas in other urban centers people might take to crime on their own, in the London rookeries they were recruited by hardened professionals, who taught them the best ruses, the fastest escape routes, and the surest hideouts before sending them into the streets to practice their trade.

The most notorious rookeries lay just outside the affluent square mile of the City, enabling thieves to plunder its centers of wealth and commerce and then go to ground only a street or two beyond its boundaries. Just across London Bridge in the borough of Southwark ran Tooley Street, its gin shops and proximity to the Thames long making it a favorite haunt of river pirates. To the northeast, in the Spitalfields–Whitechapel area, lay the seedy environs of Petticoat Lane. In Clerkenwell to the north was the slum located between “Whitecross-street, Golden-lane, the upper end of Bunhill-row, and the north end of Grub-street.” “Do you conceive that a number of the public houses in Whitecross-street and the parts adjacent are supported by notorious thieves, prostitutes and other bad characters?” the 1817 Parliamentary Select Committee on the State of the Police asked the magistrate Samuel Mills. “I am afraid they are,” he replied frankly.9 Worst of all, to the west was the lair of St. Giles (known as the “Holy Land”), its inhabitants crammed together in filth and despair, and at its heart, the Rats’ Castle, an infamous pub where criminals met, boasted, drank, and planned.

“Flash” language originated in the London rookeries, a mysterious and often humorous argot that reached the peak of its popularity in the Regency. A kind of “anti-language,” it was spoken by everyone from the criminal and sporting classes all the way up to chic aristos and the Regent himself. “To speak good flash is to be well versed in cant terms,” James Hardy Vaux explained in his Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1819), while Pierce Egan reported in his Life in London (1820–21) that “a kind of cant phraseology is current from one end of the Metropolis to the other.” The Old Bailey judge John Silvester got so tired of the accused women and men in his courtroom speaking to and of one another in flash code that, in 1816, he drew up his own “list of cant words with their meaning” in order to decipher what was being said. Several terms from the flash lexicon have proven remarkably enduring, including “pig” for “a police officer.” 10

Joseph Merceron was the Regency’s most powerful gangland boss and, like many of the London thugs who followed in his footsteps, he was based in the East End at Bethnal Green, an impoverished parish run by an elected vestry, with drinking dens behind every fifth or sixth door. Merceron began life as a clerk in a lottery office, but through fraud, intimidation, political cunning, and shrewd investments, he rose to become the owner of eleven pubs, the treasurer of the parish funds, and a justice of the peace. With this kind of grip on local affairs, he was able to renew pub licenses for friends and criminal associates (no matter how noxious their establishments) and to stack vestry meetings with boisterous, sometimes malevolent, crowds of artisans and weavers who ensured that his nominations were carried and that it was business as usual with his criminal operations. In 1818, Merceron was finally arrested on fraud and corruption charges. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. When he emerged, he soon found ways of winning back most of his old power.11

Beholden to men like Merceron, or working further down the criminal ladder, were a vast series of gangs, small-time operators, highway robbers, petty thieves, and pickpockets who ran rackets of every conceivable kind in an attempt to get their hands on the food, money, clothing, and luxury items that they saw all around them. In the neat summation of the essayist and poet laureate Robert Southey: “More offences are committed in England than in other countries, because there is more wealth and more want.” Stolen property typically made its way to a fence, who sold it on to other criminals or to members of the buying public who either did not know – or did not care – where it came from. Mrs. Diner of Field Lane traded exclusively in purloined silk handkerchiefs, which she kept in “a Cockloft through a Trap Door at the top of her house.” Mrs. Jennings of Red Lion Market “has secret Rooms by Doors out of Cupboards where she plants or secretes the property she buys till she has got it disposed of.” An unidentified woman in Gulston Street bought a whole range of stolen property, from petticoats to bread and cheese, stashing some of these articles “down her Bosom” and others in a barrow. Mr. Brand ran an old rag shop in Tottenham Court Road, but his special sideline was buying stolen pieces of lead.12

Children and adolescents were intimately involved in these criminal activities. Ringleaders sent them into recently completed homes to steal the doors, shutters, and brass knobs, after which they made their way across the rooftops to adjoining inhabited houses and looted them as well. Other youthful lawbreakers slipped into haberdashers’ and linendrapers’ shops on their hands and knees and made off with various items, or worked from outside the store, using a knife to remove windows and then grabbing whatever was within reach. If they were apprehended, their handlers hoped that, “in consideration of their youth,” the magistrates would dismiss them. If they returned home empty-handed, they were usually flogged. The 1817 Select Committee on the State of the Police heard a great deal of testimony about young offenders. One, “Q. R. aged twelve . . . has a mother who encourages the vices of her son, and subsists by his depredations.” Another, “C. D. aged ten . . . was committed to prison in the month of April 1815, having been sentenced to seven years imprisonment.” A third, “E. F. aged eight,” has been “in the habit of stealing for upwards of two years.” In Covent Garden, between thirty and forty boys slept every night under sheds and baskets, and then awoke in the morning with theft as their only means of obtaining food. The MP Henry Grey Bennet calculated that there were more than 6,000 boys and girls living solely on the proceeds of crime, and this number was, he added, a conservative estimate.13

The most notorious Regency thieves were the “resurrection men,” who stole bodies from graveyards and sold them to medical professionals, who needed them to teach their students the techniques of surgery. One such was Astley Cooper, who ran a thriving private practice, but who was also a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital (where one of his students was the poet John Keats), and a lecturer in anatomy at St. Thomas’s Hospital, only a few minutes’ walk away. Doctors like Cooper bought dead bodies because, legally, they had access only to the corpses of hanged criminals, and this supply, estimated at around 80 bodies each year, was nowhere near enough to meet the demand, as there were 1,000 medical students in London and almost that same number in Edinburgh.14 Cooper was unapologetic. Tens of thousands of British soldiers were in desperate need of life-saving or life-enhancing surgery, especially in the days and weeks following Waterloo. It was crucial that surgeons increase their knowledge of the human body and improve their operating skills. If that meant illegally purchasing corpses, so be it.

One of the most remarkable documents from the Regency is a diary kept by Joseph Naples, a member of the “Borough Boys,” London’s most successful gang of body snatchers. Led by the sharply dressed, pockmarked, ex-prizefighter Ben Crouch, and with a keen eye to business and convenience, these “sack ’em up men” or “shushy lifters” were based in Southwark and regularly preyed on the large burial ground situated to the south of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s that both of them used to dispose of their unclaimed dead, as well as on the three smaller cemeteries located nearby, though when circumstances demanded it the gang also traveled much farther afield. Different bodies sold at different prices, depending on size and age. In 1812, adult cadavers (or “subjects” as they were euphemistically known) of either sex brought the resurrectionists £4 4s (roughly £324 today) each, while corpses under three feet (“smalls” or “large smalls”) were priced by the inch and, given the high levels of child mortality in the Regency, especially plentiful. Most of the corpses dug up and sold – it perhaps goes without saying – were those of poor people.15

DATED 31 DECEMBER 1815, this engraving by John Thomas Smith is part of his Vagabondiana collection and shows two boys selling matches.

Naples’s diary covers thirteen months, from November 1811 to December 1812, and throws searching light on the brutish business of Regency grave robbing. A slight, civil man “with a pleasing expression of countenance,” Naples’s favorite activity was getting drunk, but on many nights he was out with the Borough Boys on raiding missions. 12 December 1811: “went to Bunhill row got 6, 1 of them . . . named Mary Rolph, aged 46.” 15 March 1812: “went to St. John’s, Got 1 Large and 1 Large Small, Burnt.” 22 October 1812: “got 3 adults 2 M. 1 F. (left one behind us) 1 small & 1 Foetus.” 16 The gang sold most of these bodies to the London hospitals – “1 for Mr. Cooper’s Lectures” – but there was also brisk demand among medical practitioners elsewhere. “Sent 7 into the Country,” Naples writes in February 1812, while in December he is “packing up” 12 bodies for Edinburgh. The Borough Boys faced a number of problems, from bad weather, night patrols, and guard dogs to diseased corpses and competition from a rival Jewish gang led in all probability by Israel Chapman, with whom one night they “had a row.” But Naples still made good money. The gang settled their accounts twice in February 1812: in the first instance, “each man’s share £21 9s. 4d.” (£1,677), and in the second, “each man’s share £23 6s. 9d.” (£1,810).17

III

Gun violence created a portion of these corpses. Dueling was illegal but commonplace. In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), Colonel Brandon describes his duel with John Willoughby as “unavoidable,” and while Elinor sighs “over the fancied necessity of this,” she presumes “not to censure it.” Abraham Bosquett, the author of The Young Man of Honour’s Vade-Mecum (1817), recounts his extensive experience of dueling, damns in particular the bloodthirstiness of too many seconds, and offers much useful advice: “due attention also should be had to the position of the body; the side, which is by much the narrowest, should carefully be given, the belly drawn in, and the right thigh and leg placed so as to cover the left.” The Regency’s most infamous duel involved the volatile Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell and a merchant named John D’Esterre, who belonged to the Corporation of Dublin (a Protestant stronghold) and who took umbrage at O’Connell’s contemptuous criticism of it. The two men met twelve miles outside Dublin on 1 February 1815. D’Esterre fired first and missed. O’Connell replied with a bullet that ripped into the thigh of his antagonist. D’Esterre died two days later.18

Other, far less ritualized kinds of gun violence also flared across the Regency, as people, like Bellingham, sought vigilante justice to solve their problems or release their frustrations. Though the circumstances remain mysterious, Percy Shelley claimed that on the night of 26 February 1813, he “just escaped an atrocious assassination” when an attacker twice broke into his house in North Wales. Perhaps motivated by anger at Shelley’s radical politics, the assailant in the first exchange allegedly shot at Shelley, who returned fire, driving the intruder off the property and into the surrounding woods. Later that same night the assailant or his agent returned to fire on Shelley a second time, and on this occasion the bullet passed through Shelley’s flannel nightgown. Shelley escaped both attacks without injury, while the intruder, according to Shelley’s first wife Harriet, may have received a bullet wound in the shoulder. On Saturday evening, 17 February 1816, the actress Frances Kelly was onstage at Drury Lane when George Barnett, an obsessed fan who had been sending her threatening mail, suddenly pulled out a gun and fired at her from the pit (or floor of the house), spraying shot across the stage but hitting no one. On Wednesday, 8 April 1818, Lieutenant David Davies, a mentally unstable half-pay officer who was demanding a military pension for a self-inflicted injury, fired at the secretary at war and future prime minister, Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, as he bounded up the first flight of stairs at the War Office. Palmerston groaned deeply when he was hit, but he escaped with only a severely bruised and burned back, while Davies was acquitted on the grounds of insanity and committed to the Bedlam asylum for the mentally ill. On Tuesday, 28 January 1817, the Regent was returning down the Mall to Carlton House after formally opening Parliament when an angry mob pelted his carriage with stones, and, it appears, bullets were fired from an air gun. He “pretends he was shot at,” sniggered the Regent’s liberal-minded brother, the Duke of Sussex. But Lord James Murray, who was in the royal carriage at the time, “spoke distinctly” of “two small holes . . . within one inch of each other through an uncommonly thick plate glass window; and the space between the two holes was not broken.” 19

Murder often dominated Regency headlines, but no killer fixed the public imagination like the Irish-born John Williams, the sailor presumed responsible for two horrendous acts of carnage in London’s East End. Near midnight on Saturday, 7 December 1811, Williams slipped quietly into Timothy Marr’s lace and pelisse warehouse at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, and, armed with a ship carpenter’s maul and an iron ripping chisel, he ruthlessly dispatched Marr, his wife Celia, their three-month-old son, Timothy junior, and James Gowen, Marr’s apprentice. Twelve days later, and scarcely a two-minute walk from the Marr home, Williams struck again, this time in the King’s Arms pub, where he brutally murdered the owner John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth, and their servant Bridget Anna Harrington. On this occasion, though, two people inside the house survived, for Williams did not notice the Williamsons’ granddaughter Catherine, who was asleep upstairs, or the Williamsons’ lodger John Turner, who caught sight of Williams during the attacks, and who managed to escape by climbing out a third-story window, screaming as he descended down knotted sheets, “They are murdering the people in the house!” 20

The public panicked. As news spread of the audacity, savagery, and inexplicability of the crimes, the Irish playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan was appalled at the xenophobia that surged to the surface, as rich and poor alike blamed foreigners, starting with the Portuguese and moving on to the Irish. Eleven-year-old Thomas Macaulay, who was in London at the time, vividly recollected “the terror which was on every face,” as people barred their doors and armed themselves with blunderbusses. From three hundred miles away in Keswick, Robert Southey reported that “we in the country here are thinking and talking of nothing but the dreadful murders, which seem to bring a stigma, not merely on the police, but on the land we live in, and even our human nature.” Urban overcrowding, mass social displacement, and the unpredictable rage of a solitary individual seemed to be behind the killing sprees, while extensive coverage in newspapers such as the Morning Chronicle and the Times, coupled with advances in print and travel technologies, meant that, for the first time, a local killing rose to the level of a national obsession. People everywhere felt vulnerable as never before. “Our houses are no longer our castles,” announced the coroner after the second spate of killings; “we are no longer safe in our beds!” 21

Circumstantial evidence against Williams started to mount soon after the Williamson murders, and on Christmas Eve he was committed to Coldbath Fields Prison, where three days later he was found hanged in his cell, an apparent suicide. The Regency’s most celebrated portrait painter, Thomas Lawrence, who was fascinated by the faces of murderers, was allowed to see Williams shortly after he was cut down, and drew a haunting sketch of the dead man: “the forehead the finest one could see, hair light and curling, the eyes blue and only half closed; the mouth singularly handsome, tho’ somewhat distorted, and the nose perfect.” 22 The court decided to hear the evidence against Williams, but the circumstances of his death were widely interpreted as a confession of guilt (though several commentators raised substantial doubts regarding whether or not he acted alone, or even if he was involved). On the last day of 1811, amid a crowd that was estimated at over ten thousand people, Williams’s body was publicly exhibited in a procession through the Ratcliffe Highway and then taken to the nearest crossroads, where a stake was driven through his heart and his corpse forced down into a narrow hole.

IV

Attempting to hold back the waves of crime that swept through London was a cumbersome, antiquated, and often bloodthirsty system of law and order. To be sure, the government had long been trying to control the mayhem and personal notoriety that flourished in the underworld. Back in the mid-seventeenth century, the City of London began to pay watchmen to patrol the streets at night calling out the time, checking that windows and doors were secured, and making the occasional arrest – though the crime-fighting abilities of these men were soon eclipsed by their reputation for drunkenness, decrepitude, corruption, and, especially, somnolence. A much more effective system was introduced in Westminster in the mid-eighteenth century, when officials established a small force that became known as the “Bow Street Runners,” a professional unit of “thief-catchers” who were funded by the government and whose active investigation of crimes clearly distinguished them from the watchmen, who remained within the City and were essentially peacekeepers.23

Law enforcement continued to take important steps. The government exploited the latest technologies when it installed gas lighting in the streets of Westminster, an innovation that repelled – in Keats’s words – “all the power of darkness” and that greatly curtailed the nocturnal activities of vandals and footpads. It struck a number of Select Committees to investigate various aspects of crime prevention, including three on the State of the Police. It consulted widely among magistrates and police officers, including John Townsend, the most famous Bow Street Runner of the day. Short and corpulent, but smartly turned out “with a flaxen wig, kerseymere breeches, a blue straight-cut coat, and a broad-brimmed white hat,” Townsend “was said . . . to have taken more thieves than all the other Bow-Street officers put together.” 24 Available for private hire as a bodyguard, detective, and security officer, Townsend had an unmatched reputation for discretion, cunning, and courage, while no one knew the criminal fraternity like he did. His known employers included Vauxhall Gardens, the Bank of England, and the Regent himself. Townsend was a principal witness before the 1816 Select Committee, where he answered questions on issues such as rewards, police salaries, horse patrols, and the conduct of jurymen.

Policing was not the only area of the Regency criminal justice system that needed thoroughgoing reform. The “Bloody Code” was the nom de guerre for England’s notoriously severe system of punishment, in which more than two hundred major and minor crimes carried the death penalty. Moreover, many of these offenses related to property, so, in addition to its practical applications, the Code itself came to symbolize the vicious lengths to which the landed elites were willing to go to guard their possessions and stockpile their wealth. With policing so haphazard in the cities, and left essentially to magistrates and the militia (when they could be found) in the country, the idea was to create policies of punishment that terrified the populace into law-abiding behavior. The judge John Silvester and the attorney general Sir William Garrow, a brilliant barrister with more than three decades of experience in British courtrooms, were among those who defended the system, while there were others who saw the upsurge in crime as a reason to make the Bloody Code even bloodier.

Many political and legal activists, however, were deeply opposed to capital punishment, denouncing it as government-orchestrated, counterproductive barbarity, and campaigning indefatigably to have the number of crimes it applied to drastically reduced or eliminated altogether. Percy Shelley, in his “Essay on the Punishment of Death,” described the abolition of capital punishment as “the first law which it becomes a reformer to propose and support.” The Edinburgh medical graduate John Polidori argued in “On the Punishment of Death” that relying on capital punishment to deliver justice pointed to “some radical error in the very foundation of our criminal laws.” The lawyer and MP Sir Samuel Romilly succeeded in 1808 in having the death penalty abolished for the crime of picking pockets, but his efforts during the Regency to enact further reforms met with limited success. “There is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with loss of life as in England,” he lamented in 1811.25

The greatest reason for reforming the Bloody Code was simply that it did not work very well, as Romilly and many others insisted. It did not act as a deterrent, as rising crime rates clearly demonstrated, and in some instances it seems to have incited criminals to additional acts of violence: a highwayman faced the death penalty if he was caught, so he had nothing to lose by killing his victim, and something to gain in terms of his own safety. Judges in many instances struggled to condemn a prisoner to death, especially when it was a child, who from the age of seven could be hanged for poaching a rabbit, or stealing a piece of lace, or cutting down a growing tree. Similarly, in many instances victims refused to prosecute, witnesses refused to testify, and juries refused to convict if they felt that the accused was going to the gallows. It was a set of laws, declared the great English philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham, that united “violence to feebleness” and that produced levels of capriciousness that greatly undermined public confidence in the judicial system. Human lives depended on the whims of judges, some of whom were ferocious, others of whom were merciful.26

V

Unsurprisingly, many judges and juries looked at other legal options in an attempt to steer a just course between the ruthless capital convictions mandated by the Bloody Code and the known realities of Regency social and economic life, mindful, as William Cobbett maintained, that “poverty has always been the parent of crime.” Some prisoners were pardoned, especially when family members or charitable institutions pledged to take charge of them. Some were given lesser physical penalties such as time in the pillory, where they were locked helplessly into place for one hour while jeering crowds pelted them with mud, rocks, fruit, vegetables, and dead animals. Thousands of others, many of whom had had their capital sentences commuted, were put on transport ships and sent halfway around the world to the British penal colony in New South Wales, Australia – though conditions on these vessels were so horrendous that many who had escaped the noose at home died at sea long before their ship reached Botany Bay.27

Still other prisoners were packed onboard broken-down ships known as “hulks.” These had originally been used as a temporary measure to house the surplus prison population, but by the Regency they had become a standard part of the penal service. During the day the convicts were sometimes taken ashore in work parties, but for the rest of the time they were incarcerated on the ship and literally going nowhere. It was the closest thing the Regency knew to hell on earth. “There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed,” wrote the convict James Hardy Vaux; “and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard among them.” 28

Life in Regency prisons was an improvement on the hulks, but boredom, overcrowding, disease, and aggression were endemic here as well, while negligence and poor design led to the indiscriminate mixing of male and female convicts, first-time offenders and hardened criminals, petty thieves and underworld bosses, the tried and the untried, the sane and the insane. According to the journalist John Badcock, there were in 1816 twenty-eight jails in London alone. Newgate, one of the oldest, was notorious for fostering, rather than correcting, criminality, for “no one can enter [its] walls . . . without going out from thence more depraved and corrupted than when first committed thereto,” declared the 1814 Report from the Committee on the State of the Gaols. One of the newest, the Surrey House of Correction (later Brixton Prison), was infamous as a champion of the treadmill, a form of punishment invented in 1817 as a way of using human labor to grind corn. Hailed as a new “corrective” measure, it was detested by prisoners as dangerous, exhausting, and souldestroyingly futile, for most of the time it was attached to nothing and simply beat the air.29

Leigh Hunt, editor of the radical Sunday newspaper the Examiner, is the most famous prisoner of the Regency. From the founding of the paper in 1808, he and his older brother John, its publisher, lashed the government and the monarchy in its pages and evaded the various prosecutions mounted against them. But when in March 1812, as the Regent approached his fiftieth birthday, the Tory Morning Post hailed him as the “Glory of the People” and an “Adonis in Loveliness,” it was another stomach-turning piece of government tosh that the Hunts simply could not let pass. In reply they reached an apex of scorn that was clearly defamatory. The Regent “was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity!” 30 Sir William Garrow acted for the government. Henry Brougham, the future Whig lord chancellor, defended the Hunts. It took the jury all of ten minutes to convict them of libeling the Regent. The brothers were sentenced to two years in prison, Leigh in Horsemonger Lane and John at Coldbath Fields.

Leigh entered his cell for the first time on 3 February 1813, and within days his health began to give way. Ruffian laughter and the constant clanking of chains badly unnerved him, as did the locking of all the doors and gates between him and the outside world. “I do not exaggerate when I say there were ten or eleven,” he declared, and “every fresh turning of the key seemed a malignant insult to my love of liberty.” His own arguments regarding his status as a political prisoner, coupled with the voices of influential Whig supporters, soon won him concessions, and within six weeks he had been moved from his initial cell into far more salubrious accommodations on the south side of the prison infirmary. Here his family joined him, and a carpenter and painter transformed the rooms into “a bower for a poet,” the walls “papered . . . with a trellis of roses,” the ceiling “coloured with clouds and sky,” and the barred windows “screened with Venetian blinds.” Hunt added bookcases, fresh flowers, busts, pictures, and a pianoforte. Further, outside there was a small prison yard that he converted into a garden, with green palings, a trellis, a narrow lawn, more flowers, and an apple tree, “from which we managed to get a pudding the second year.” 31 It was one of the most extraordinary establishments in the whole of the Regency.