A History of Britain by Simon Schama: Episode 12 - Forces of Nature
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
The French Revolution sent shockwaves through Britain. While some watched transfixed, others were horrified.
Simon Schama explores why the British proved immune to the siren call of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
The French Revolution sent shockwaves through Britain. While some watched transfixed, others were horrified.
Simon Schama explores why the British proved immune to the siren call of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00For thousands of years, the mountains, lakes and forests of Britain
00:04had been just geography.
00:08But in the late 1700s, they became something much more,
00:12the face of our nation.
00:15Our countryside became our country.
00:20When homesick travellers thought fondly of Britain,
00:23they thought of the people.
00:26When homesick travellers thought fondly of Britain,
00:29they thought of their landscape.
00:31Most of us still do.
00:34And it was, for the first time, a landscape of all the British nations.
00:39The wild places of Wales and Scotland,
00:42as well as the peaks of northern England,
00:44rediscovered, relished, mapped.
00:50For centuries, going to the country had meant, for the gentry,
00:54a stroll through a manicured estate.
00:57An Arcadia as drowsy with sunshine as an Italian afternoon.
01:06But in the second half of the 18th century,
01:09there was a sudden change in the weather.
01:11The more adventurous Britons had had enough
01:14of make-believe sunshine and shepherds.
01:16They wanted the real thing.
01:18They wanted it rough.
01:20And they were prepared to go to places
01:23where no-one in their right mind a generation before
01:26would have dreamt of setting foot.
01:30But those who clambered up the crags weren't just out for thrills.
01:34In the wild places, they thought,
01:36might have survived the kind of Britons
01:39who'd stayed miraculously untouched by the evils of town life,
01:44its corrupt politics and diseased bodies.
01:48If we could somehow learn from their childlike innocence,
01:52we could become like them and recapture what it meant to be free,
01:57to be a natural-born Briton.
02:01Nature, in the last decades of the 18th century,
02:04came to mean something far more important than gardening or hiking.
02:09A love of nature became code for a crusade, a revolution, even.
02:15And this time, the crusaders weren't going to be in chain mail.
02:19They would be poets, painters, hat journalists,
02:22men and women who sensed a great change coming
02:25and were rushing to embrace it.
02:29What they saw coming was dark and dirty weather.
02:33Britain was about to be hit by an immense political cyclone,
02:37a revolution in France just over the Channel.
02:40The boldest of the poets and pamphleteers
02:43longed for the storm to strike here too.
02:46More anxious souls were afraid that where there was lightning,
02:51there would also be fire and destruction.
02:58In the end, Britain would weather the storm.
03:02But as the Duke of Wellington once famously put it,
03:06it was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.
03:09Just how near run? Wait and see.
03:37The journey to the guillotine and a world war
03:41would start with the dreams of a philosopher.
03:44But not any old philosopher.
03:48Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was buried here at Elmenonville,
03:52just outside Paris, reshaped the method of writing
03:56and wrote a book about it.
03:58It was a book about the history of the French Revolution.
04:02Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was buried here at Elmenonville,
04:05just outside Paris,
04:07reshaped the mental habits of an entire generation,
04:10turning them from creatures of thought to creatures of feeling.
04:14Before Rousseau, the highest compliment you could pay anybody
04:17was to say they were reasonable.
04:19After Rousseau, the compliment became,
04:22il a de l'âme, he has soul.
04:26And the British couldn't get enough of it.
04:32In 1766, Rousseau, on the run from enemies,
04:37real and imagined, pitched up in Staffordshire.
04:43Richard Davenport moved out of his country house
04:46in the village of Wotton
04:48so that the great man could have a comfortable asylum
04:51in which to commune with nature to his heart's content.
04:56Rousseau could have been forgiven for expecting a warm welcome.
05:00His two most famous books, Émile,
05:03a manual on natural education, no books before 12,
05:07thinly disguised as a novel,
05:09and The Weepy of the Age, The New Eloise,
05:12featuring forbidden love between tutor and pupil,
05:15were smash hits among the sobbing and sighing classes.
05:26At a distance, Rousseau may have been popular,
05:29but close up, he was a paranoid.
05:32And in Derbyshire, he became convinced
05:34the servants were putting cinders in his soup.
05:37In 1768, after more imagined slights, he left England.
05:44But his ideas stayed and put down deep roots
05:47among the book-crazy gentry.
05:50Men like Brook Boothby, one of his Derbyshire neighbours,
05:54had himself painted by the local genius Joseph Wright
05:57as a man of feeling, in tune with the rhythms of nature.
06:06What appealed to men and women of feeling in the English provinces
06:10was Rousseau's belief that urbanity,
06:12the graces and fashions of metropolitan life,
06:15were symptoms of everything that was rotten about the Old World.
06:19The cosmetic mask behind which lurked the poxy disfigurement
06:23of a deceitful, vicious, terminally diseased culture.
06:29The antidote was to scrub away the mask
06:32and restore grown men and women to their true nature,
06:36the simplicity of a child.
06:43Childhood was where Rousseau's revolution began.
06:48If it was to be properly preserved,
06:50the true nature of children had to be nourished literally from the breast.
06:58Since babies took their moral as well as their physical sustenance
07:02from their mother's milk, it had better be their own mother's milk.
07:06Professional wet nurses might contaminate them with vice and disease.
07:12So the virtuous, wholesomely patriotic life began at the nursing nipple.
07:21Another lesson from Rousseau, forget about book learning.
07:25Cramming little heads with facts and figures
07:28did terrible damage to their animal high spirits,
07:32their instinct for freedom.
07:35Get them outside. Let them romp.
07:41But in an age of high infant mortality,
07:44making a heavy emotional investment in your children
07:48could rebound on you.
07:54As a disciple of Rousseau,
07:56Brook Boothby discovered when his daughter Penelope died at the age of five
08:01that romantic feeling could be as intense in sorrow
08:04as it had been in happiness.
08:10She was in form and intellect most exquisite.
08:14The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark
08:18and the wreck was total.
08:24The poignant memorial speaks of the terror of loss,
08:28of joy glimpsed, felt, experienced and then cruelly destroyed.
08:34And that was the romantic vision of Britain too, a paradise in peril.
08:45When men of feeling got off their high horses
08:48and left the sanctuary of their fantasy parks,
08:51what they saw was the ugly reality of the countryside.
08:57With the explosion in population, many thousands were leaving the land
09:02and becoming dependent on the machines of the new industrial revolution.
09:08Poets like Oliver Goldsmith were oppressed
09:11by a vision of deserted villages.
09:17Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
09:21thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn.
09:26Amidst thy bowers, thy fields, thy meadows,
09:31thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn.
09:36Amidst thy bowers, the tyrant's hand is seen
09:40and desolation saddens all thy green.
09:44One only master grasps the whole domain
09:48and half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
09:53Ill fares the land to hastening ills appray
09:58and wealth accumulates and men decay.
10:07In 1769, the year that Oliver Goldsmith was writing his poem,
10:12a military officer with a social conscience, Philip Thickness,
10:16published a horrifying account of four persons starved to death
10:22in a poorhouse at Datchworth.
10:25To most complacent Britons, this was supposed to happen
10:29in rat-infested corners of the continent, not in Hertfordshire.
10:39For those who had eyes to see beyond the railings of their parklands,
10:44two painful questions presented themselves
10:47about the real state of the British countryside.
10:50What was to be done and who was to blame?
10:53Was it the responsibility of the church?
10:56Had the church grown too fat, too respectable,
10:59too indifferent to its duties towards the unfortunate?
11:03Or was it a matter for the absentee landowning gentry
11:06whose estates were being run by hard-nosed men
11:10with an eye to bottom-line profit?
11:13Or was it wrong to think in terms of what had once been?
11:17Was that just applying a coat of whitewash
11:19to a building that was fundamentally rotten from top to bottom?
11:23Was the answer not charity, but politics?
11:28Thomas Bewick certainly thought so.
11:32As a child outside Newcastle,
11:34he didn't need Rousseau to tell him about the freedom of fresh air.
11:39Bewick had played truant from school
11:42and instead of filling his slate with improving knowledge,
11:46he filled it compulsively with drawings,
11:49finding his way instinctively towards his vocation
11:53as the first great illustrator of British natural history.
12:01What's more, Bewick's pictures weren't just meant for a gentleman's library.
12:06Ordinary people wanted a little book
12:09packed with images of the birds and animals of the British Isles.
12:17But Bewick was looking at something else, too.
12:21Smuggled in between the plover and the waxwing
12:24was a portrait of his world,
12:27rain-soaked Northumberland,
12:29a tough, dark, gritty place,
12:32a world in a lot of pain.
12:36In his churchyard's dog's snarl.
12:40By his roadside's poor bastards break rocks.
12:48In his garret's blind old paupers slurp soup.
13:00All this made Thomas Bewick very angry.
13:04All this made Thomas Bewick a radical.
13:10In Newcastle, he mixed in debating clubs with men like himself,
13:15educated artisans, tradesmen and professionals,
13:18passionate in their devotion to liberty.
13:21It is by the good conduct and consequent character
13:25of the great mass of the people
13:27that a nation is exalted.
13:31And what fired Bewick's radicalism wasn't just anger.
13:36It was an emotion new to politics, sympathy.
13:40What moved him was an overwhelming feeling
13:43for the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering,
13:47a recognition that deep down we are all bonded
13:51by our share of the world's suffering.
13:54It was a call to action echoed in pulpits up and down the country.
14:03How could you feel the suffering of others
14:05and not want to do all in your power to remedy it?
14:11For the first time, there was a politics of suffering,
14:15one that could no longer take the place of the people.
14:19For the first time, there was a politics of suffering,
14:23one that could no longer turn a blind eye to the plight of children,
14:27the aged, the sick and the poor.
14:30Yet bigwigs did turn a blind eye.
14:33They believed that the glorious revolution of 1688
14:37had sent James II and his Catholic despotism packing
14:42and had given birth to a land of the free.
14:45It was 1788, with the 100th anniversary upon them,
14:49how tempting it was to continue patting themselves on the back
14:53as being the most enlightened country in the world.
14:57But for the likes of Buick and his friends,
15:00there was nothing to be complacent about.
15:03The real problem with the glorious revolution, the radicals argued,
15:07was that it had been hijacked by scoundrels
15:10who had perverted it to satisfy their own greed and ambition.
15:14They'd packed Parliament with sycophantic placemen
15:17and they'd sold their vote to pay their tailor's bill.
15:20The real forgotten lesson of 1688
15:23was that the people were entitled to resist,
15:26entitled to change their government,
15:28entitled to the kind of sovereign
15:30that understood the reality of a limited monarchy.
15:39If the memory of that first revolution was going to mean anything,
15:43a second revolution of justice would have to make good on its promise.
15:49Then, in Paris, on July 14, 1789,
15:53the world would learn just how limited a monarchy could be.
15:57The Bastille fell and nothing was the same again.
16:02Though the fortress had just eight prisoners in it,
16:05its eight grim towers and its cannon pointing into the heart of the city
16:10had become an emblem of everything detestable about the old absolute monarchy.
16:17In Buick's world, toasts were drunk to the dawn of a new age of real liberty
16:22and the fall of despots.
16:27And it was noticed that it had been ordinary people,
16:30armed with muskets and slogans, who had stormed the citadel.
16:36The inspiring moral was that the people,
16:39if pushed too far, could and would take back their rights.
16:43Monarchy would be demolished.
16:48So, when Dr Richard Price, from his Unitarian pulpit in London,
16:53congratulated King George III for recovering his sanity,
16:57he had the cheek to warn him that unless he came to his political senses,
17:02he too would go the way of Louis XVI.
17:07May you be led to such a sense of the nature of your situation
17:11to consider yourself more properly the servant than the sovereign of the people.
17:20To the young, dressing down a king in the name of liberty was a heady pleasure.
17:27William Wordsworth had been born in the Lake District,
17:30across the Pennines from Buick.
17:33He too had grown up in love with nature.
17:36Now, that love would extend to all of downtrodden humanity.
17:44In 1790, on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille,
17:49at the age of 19, Wordsworth found himself in France.
17:54What he saw there he described as human nature seeming born again.
18:03Unhoused beneath the evening star, we saw dances of liberty,
18:08and in late hours of darkness, dances in the open air.
18:13We rose at signal given, and formed a ring,
18:17and hand in hand danced round and round the board.
18:21All hearts were open, every tongue was loud with amity and glee.
18:26We bore a name honoured in France, the name of Englishman,
18:32and, hospitably, they did give us hail,
18:35as their forerunners in a glorious cause.
18:48But not everyone felt as blissfully as Wordsworth.
18:52Edmund Burke, the eloquent Irish MP,
18:55who'd been the militant friend of the Americans,
18:58felt a change of heart about revolution.
19:02He too had lifted a glass to toast the dawn of liberty in July 1789.
19:08But when the lynching started,
19:11Burke decided the revolution was, above all, an act of violence,
19:16and he denounced it in his vitriolic reflections
19:19on the French Revolution.
19:22Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation,
19:25perpetrated or meditated,
19:27they are forming plans for the good order of future society.
19:34They act amidst the tumultuous cries
19:37of a mixed mob of ferocious men and women, lost to shame.
19:43It's hard to know which was more painful,
19:46the fact that Burke's savage denunciation
19:49came from an erstwhile friend of liberty and reform,
19:53or that it flung back into the teeth of the radicals
19:56some of the mushier platitudes about nature.
19:59They had taken it as read that nature filled your bosom
20:03with the love of mankind, that nature was fraternal,
20:06was cosmopolitan.
20:08Rubbish, said Burke. Nature is rooted in place.
20:11It teaches you to love your birthplace,
20:14your language, your customs, your habits.
20:17Nature is a patriot.
20:23What Burke hated most of all
20:25was the naivety of well-meaning Whig politicians,
20:29like his old friend Charles James Fox,
20:32putting a few slogans into the heads of people
20:35not educated enough to understand what they were wrecking.
20:41Democracy? Mobocracy, more like, said Burke.
20:45Heads stuck on pikes, the law of the lynch mob.
20:48We don't want that here.
20:53But for one unrepentant enthusiast, this was a travesty.
20:58Tom Paine, whose book Common Sense
21:01had supported the Americans in their revolution,
21:04now took on Edmund Burke.
21:07In 1791, he published his counterblast,
21:12The Rights of Man.
21:14It was a brilliantly calculated reply.
21:17Burke had used the most flowery language
21:20to describe the mob's ungallant assault on the Queen of France.
21:25So Paine, in contrast,
21:27used the earthy, direct street talk of ordinary people,
21:31the kind of people Burke referred to as the swinish multitude.
21:36And what Paine's message was,
21:38was that nature fought on the side of liberty.
21:42At our birth, he said, we had certain natural rights
21:46which no government, no sovereign could violate and expect to survive.
21:53When Paine shouted, people listened.
21:56He sold 40,000 copies of The Rights of Man in a few months,
22:01and the people who bought them were people new to politics,
22:05men like Buick, men with grievances to air.
22:10As they became more vocal and more visible,
22:13the forces of order, the party of church and king,
22:16began to get distinctly nervous.
22:19The Prime Minister, William Pitt, barely in his 30s,
22:23once hailed as a friend of reform,
22:25was now firmly in the Conservative camp,
22:28and he looked on at events in France with growing horror and disgust.
22:35It was time to batten down the hatches,
22:38mobilise the militia, beat the patriotic drum,
22:42and make sure the likes of Tom Paine were gagged
22:45before they made mischief.
22:51Houses were burned, conspicuous Democrats roughed up.
22:59Tom Paine just got out in the nick of time.
23:03He was tried in proxy for treason.
23:09Those who stayed loyal to Paine
23:11came together in solidarity and defiance.
23:16One place where dangerous thoughts were positively welcome
23:20was 72 St Paul's Churchyard, where Joseph Johnson,
23:24the bachelor, Liverpudlian printer and publisher,
23:27acted as kindly uncle to all those
23:30who had formerly called his ruffian gang.
23:35On any given Sunday, you'd find a mix of painters like William Blake,
23:39old-time agitators for parliamentary reform,
23:42celebrity Democrats like Tom Paine,
23:45and you'd find women, articulate, intelligent and impassioned.
23:50And among those women, the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft.
23:56She was the spirit of the time.
23:59Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution.
24:08Living a hand-to-mouth existence as a writer,
24:11given a roof over her head by Johnson,
24:14Mary burst into print in outrage at Burke's reflections.
24:19But while she was doing it,
24:21she also noticed that the rights of men weren't worth much
24:25if they excluded the other half of human society.
24:28So she produced her own amended version,
24:31a vindication of the rights of woman.
24:35If nature was going to be held up as the handmaid of liberty and equality,
24:40we'd better think about the natural state of women.
24:45The reason she said why women were so slighted
24:48was that from the time they were little girls,
24:51their entire being was designed
24:54with the sole and sovereign aim of pleasing men.
25:00She had no time for Rousseau's idea
25:02that women, by their very nature,
25:04could be no more than wives and mothers.
25:07There was nothing she could see in her nature
25:10which disqualified her from being a true citizen.
25:15For daring to say these things, Mary was abused as unnatural.
25:20Horace Walpole, the essayist, called her a hyena in petticoats.
25:29Like Wordsworth before her, Mary Wollstonecraft hoped
25:33that in the new French Republic,
25:35she'd find like-minded souls with whom to share her radical views.
25:41But what she landed in
25:43was the jumpy, paranoid dictatorship of the Jacobins.
25:48Rousseau's face and his books were everywhere.
25:52Slavishly obedient to his dogma,
25:54French women who meddled in politics were told to shut up
25:58and nurse their babies for the revolutionary fatherland.
26:03Those who didn't, who dared organise their own political clubs,
26:07were beaten up on the streets.
26:12In August 1792,
26:14the monarchy had been overthrown
26:16and a revolutionary republic created in its place.
26:20A month later, when Prussian and Austrian armies invaded from the east,
26:25the paranoia became bloody.
26:391,400 men and women held in Paris prisons
26:42were demonised as a fifth column and butchered in cold blood.
26:54In the 21st century, we reckon we know all about
26:57the split personality of revolutions.
27:00The transformation from the smiley face of liberty
27:03into the ugly reality of a terror and a police state.
27:07But at the end of the 18th century,
27:09no-one was reading A Rough Guide to Revolution,
27:12especially not its most passionate enthusiasts,
27:15who'd witnessed first-hand the days of flowers and freedom and fraternity
27:20and for whom the slogan of liberty and equality
27:23was a natural partnership.
27:27To begin with, Mary shared the company and the optimism
27:31of expatriate Americans, Irish, English and Scots
27:34who met at White Street,
27:36who met at White's Hotel in Paris.
27:39In the first flush of revolutionary bliss,
27:42a little spilt blood wasn't going to spoil the rapture of freedom.
27:47Mary herself wrote...
27:54But then, as the despotism of the Crown
27:57was replaced by the despotism of a police state,
28:01doubts began to creep in.
28:04Just a few weeks after she arrived,
28:06Mary saw Louis XVI going to his trial
28:10and unaccountably she found herself weeping
28:13at the dignity of his composure.
28:16It wasn't at all what she'd expected.
28:21Ironically, even the foremost spokesman for radical politics
28:25came under suspicion.
28:28In the summer of 1793,
28:30Tom Paine went from being a local hero to a pariah.
28:34He blotted his copybook some months earlier
28:37during the debates over the sentencing of Louis XVI.
28:41Even though Paine was the most famous anti-monarchist,
28:45he'd argued very bravely and very recklessly
28:48that since Louis was now an irrelevance,
28:51why sentence him to death?
28:53He'd also said that a really free republic
28:57owed it even to its worst enemies
29:00to protect them against oppression.
29:03Well, this not only made him unpopular
29:06but dangerously undesirable.
29:08And in the summer, the chickens came home to roost.
29:11Paine was arrested and locked up
29:13in the Luxembourg prison over there.
29:16He was saved from the guillotine
29:18only by an absolutely fantastic accident.
29:21When somebody was about to get the chop,
29:24someone came round and marked a cross
29:27on the door of their cell.
29:29In Paine's particular case,
29:31the doors happened to have been opened
29:34so that the cross was actually made
29:37on the inside of the door.
29:39When the door slammed shut, that cross was invisible.
29:44Paine escaped his date with the national razor,
29:48it was called, by a freak affair.
29:52As the arrests and executions started to speed up,
29:56Mary's natural exuberance began to cool.
30:00She sat in her room, scared and despondent,
30:04writing to Joseph Johnson.
30:13I have seen eyes glare through a glass door opposite me.
30:18And bloody hands shook at me.
30:21I wish I had even kept the cat with me
30:24as I want to see something alive.
30:27Death in so many frightful shapes
30:30has taken hold of my fancy.
30:32I'm going to bed, and for the first time in my life,
30:36I cannot put out the candle.
30:49HE EXHALES
30:59By the spring of 1793,
31:01the war which had broken out between Britain and France
31:05had changed everything.
31:07Instead of being treated as honoured guests,
31:10the expatriates were suspected of being a fifth column,
31:14compromised by their friendship
31:16and politicians guillotined as traitors to the Republic.
31:22Mary must have felt it would be her turn any day.
31:28Salvation appeared in the good-looking shape
31:31of an American businessman and property speculator, Gilbert Imlay,
31:36who registered her as his American wife
31:39and thus free from the taint of being one of the enemies of France.
31:46Nursing their baby in a quiet garden on the outskirts of Paris,
31:51Mary the feminist had been saved from the revolution by motherhood.
31:58But it was not to be a happy ending.
32:01As Mary became more devoted,
32:04Imlay's business trips became mysteriously prolonged.
32:10When she followed him as far as London,
32:13she found a new mistress.
32:17On a rainy night in October 1795,
32:20she walked around Putney long enough
32:23to make sure her best dress was heavily saturated.
32:27Then she jumped off the bridge into the Thames,
32:30leaving a note for Imlay.
32:32Let my wrongs sleep with me.
32:37But she was not to be allowed her poetic suicide.
32:40A boatman pulled her out.
32:43She was 37 and she seemed to have lost everything except her child.
32:49Her faith in revolution, in the virtue of the people,
32:53her belief in the possibilities of an independent woman's life.
32:57The goodness of nature must have seemed a cruel joke.
33:06Some months later, she seemed to get a second chance at happiness
33:10in the unlikely form of William Godwin,
33:13a philosopher she had met once before at Joseph Johnson's.
33:20Godwin was notorious for his rejection of romance
33:24as well as marriage and private property.
33:27But Mary's fire burned bright enough to melt his icy principles.
33:34Though they'd agreed not to cohabit,
33:37the sworn enemy of matrimony and of feminists
33:40were wedded at St Pancras Church.
33:44And as her months of pregnancy passed,
33:47the two found themselves relaxing into conjugal cosiness
33:51to the point where Godwin was prepared, at least privately,
33:55to admit the force of emotion as well as thought,
33:59which is what made the end so unbearable.
34:04When the time for her labour came, Mary called a local midwife.
34:09But after the baby was born, another girl,
34:12the placenta remained firmly lodged somewhere at the top of the birth canal.
34:17Now, obstetric opinion at the time held that
34:20unless the placenta was promptly expelled,
34:23there was a lethal danger of infection.
34:27So a doctor from Westminster Hospital was summoned
34:31and he stuck his hand up Mary and pulled.
34:35The placenta came away in pieces as Mary lay in agony, hemorrhaging.
34:44She had been through so many terrors,
34:46so many ordeals, come so close to death
34:49and had somehow managed to survive.
34:52This time, with so much to live for, there would be no escape.
34:56She died a week later of septicemia.
35:02Godwin wrote to a friend.
35:05My wife is now dead.
35:08I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.
35:12I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy.
35:17I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.
35:25She is rightly remembered as the founder of modern feminism
35:29for making a statement remarkable for its bravery and clarity
35:33that the whole nature of women was not to be confused with their biology,
35:38but nature, biology, had killed her.
35:48Beyond her deathbed,
35:50the relentless struggle between liberty and repression raged on,
35:54stopping for no-one.
36:00Meeting with radicals could now get you into serious trouble.
36:05Habeas Corpus had been suspended,
36:07printing presses were being smashed,
36:10the doors of freedom were slamming shut.
36:15And no wonder, for the stakes were as high as they could get.
36:19Republican France was on the march
36:22and Britain was vulnerable where it had always been,
36:26in Ireland.
36:30MUSIC
36:38Irish Republicans had been among the Friends of Revolution at White's Hotel.
36:43They had dreamed of a great uprising against the English.
36:47But for the dreams to come true,
36:49an insurrection had to coincide with a French invasion.
36:55The French did come, but they came too late and on the wrong coast.
37:00By the time they got to Killala Bay in the west in the summer of 1798,
37:05the rebellion of the United Irishmen in the east
37:08had already been crushed by a British army at Vinegar Hill.
37:13MUSIC
37:24Stranded in the wilds of County Mayo, a long, long way from Dublin,
37:29their only Irish help came from an improvised troop
37:32of peasants, schoolmasters and priests.
37:37All the bloody games we know so well started here.
37:41The number of men arriving at midnight, the stockpiling of arms,
37:45the mercilessness shown towards anyone even faintly suspected
37:49of collaborating with the English.
37:55Hit-and-run slaughter was not a strategy.
37:59The invasion stalled and went into retreat.
38:02Finally, the French capitulated.
38:06Wolfe Tone, the Protestant Irish Republican leader who'd come with them,
38:11was arrested and tried for treason,
38:13but committed suicide in prison before he could be hanged.
38:23At least 30,000 Irishmen and women died in 1798,
38:29another of the tragedies that scarred the country's history,
38:33but one which would be remembered indelibly, though not accurately,
38:38as a war of the Protestant English against the Catholic Irish.
38:48For Pitt and the Westminster politicians, it had been a close call.
38:53The enemy at the gates in Ireland,
38:55another huge French army camped on the Channel coast.
38:59A time for sweaty palms.
39:04And a time for all radicals to ask themselves difficult questions.
39:09How could you remain a cheerleader for revolution,
39:12knowing now what you knew,
39:14having seen the dreams turn to violence and bloodshed?
39:22The poet William Wordsworth had been as fervent as anyone
39:26in the early days of revolutionary hope.
39:29Now those hopes were turning to doubts.
39:34By 1798, with the fate of Britain hanging in the balance,
39:39he was renting a house in Somerset,
39:42close to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
39:53Like Mary Wollstonecraft,
39:55Wordsworth had lost his heart in revolutionary France.
40:00But his lover and the mother of his child had been a royalist.
40:04Late in 1792, with war impending,
40:07he had to decide between staying at peril to his life
40:11or returning to England.
40:13He chose the latter path.
40:20Being a friend of the people now required him to be an enemy of France.
40:25Why? Because France, in the shape of Napoleon Bonaparte,
40:29had abandoned the cause of liberty
40:31and turned into nothing more than your communal garden tyrant,
40:35bent on forcing Britain to its knees.
40:44Wordsworth's other great love affair, with nature,
40:47was as strong as ever.
40:49Only now, nature made him think not of revolution, but of home.
40:53Sadder and wiser as he now was,
40:56how much of his old fire could he preserve?
41:03The solution was to abandon political dogma for poetry.
41:07Hope lay not in the torrents of blood spilled in Paris,
41:11but in the moral example of country people
41:14whose lives were lived in simplicity and decency,
41:17close to English nature.
41:20The work of poetry now was to make audible
41:23the voices of the wounded and the destitute.
41:31She had a tall man's height or more.
41:34No bonnet screened her from the heat.
41:37A long, drab-coloured coat she wore, a mantle reaching to her feet.
41:42Before me, begging, did she stand,
41:45pouring out sorrows like the sea, grief after grief.
41:50In English land, such woes I knew could never be.
41:58Nature did still have the power to transform lives,
42:02but not through any kind of political agenda.
42:05A vote would never make one happy.
42:08A snowdrop in February or a mother's love for her newborn might.
42:13He returned to his roots in the Lake District,
42:16made his home at Grasmere.
42:22Nature meant something different now to Wordsworth and Coleridge.
42:26It was no longer something which connected them with the wider world.
42:30It was something which detached them from it.
42:33When they talked about liberty now, they no longer meant solidarity.
42:37They meant solitude.
42:39Up in the lakes, the new affection for home
42:42might be as innocent as a summer picnic.
42:45But on the front line of the engulfing war,
42:48native loyalty meant something far more belligerent.
42:52Nature had been recruited for patriotic propaganda.
43:00Each time invasion threatened,
43:02this inward incitement of a new invasion
43:05Each time invasion threatened,
43:07this inward insular sense of Britishness
43:10became more emotionally charged.
43:14Anyone faintly suspected of radical sympathies
43:17was branded a collaborator.
43:21The country had never been so massively mobilised.
43:25Not just an immense army and navy,
43:28but a volunteer militia of 75,000.
43:31And in 1803, in case of invasion,
43:35another 300,000 ready to spring to arms
43:39to defend hearth and home against the godless French.
43:45When Napoleon turned history teacher,
43:47putting on a show at the Bayer Tapestry
43:50to remind the British that if conquests happened before,
43:53they could certainly happen again,
43:55what he got in response was a rude noise from the back of the class.
44:02What's more, William Pitt was not about to go down
44:06with an arrow in his eye.
44:08His war government mobilised on a scale never seen before.
44:15When the King reviewed 27,000 volunteers in Hyde Park
44:19in October 1803,
44:21half a million of his subjects cheered him on.
44:25This was Edmund Burke's loyalist dream come true.
44:29The territorial urge to defend hearth and home
44:33vindicated as the most natural passion of all.
44:43Wordsworth now added his voice to those who thought nature
44:47was not the cradle of democracy, but the shrine of patriotism.
44:53Save this honoured land from every lord,
44:57but British reason and the British sword.
45:06Burke's nostalgia for a merry England
45:09still hanging on deep in the English countryside
45:13spawned an extraordinary boom in everything historical.
45:17Suits of rusting armour were a symbol of the British
45:21who, in their rusting armour, were taken out of barns,
45:24polished up and set in entrance halls
45:27to trumpet the patriotic pride of the gentry.
45:34For more than a decade, the war roared on
45:37as Britain confronted Napoleon's empire.
45:40Epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal,
45:43a world conflict from India to the Caribbean,
45:47with spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar.
45:52During these rollercoaster years, the country's woes were muffled.
45:57Patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint.
46:05The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax
46:09on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo.
46:22CHEERING
46:29Surveying the carnage the day after,
46:32Wellington famously said that the next worst thing to a battle lost
46:36is a battle won.
46:42He didn't know how prophetic his words would be.
46:46Instead of tasting the fruits of victory,
46:49the poor and the unemployed were looking for anything to eat.
46:54The economy of post-war Britain
46:56had fallen into the most terrible slump in living memory.
47:03Even before victory,
47:05Napoleon's success at sealing off European markets,
47:08together with the war against the United States in 1812,
47:12had destroyed demand for British manufacturers.
47:16Tens of thousands of weavers and spinners were laid off
47:20or had their wages cut.
47:22Then hundreds of thousands more demobbed soldiers,
47:26munitions workers, makers of uniforms,
47:29were thrown to the workhouse.
47:33Misery spilled into violence.
47:35Machines were smashed in Yorkshire and Lancashire.
47:42While multitudes were losing their jobs,
47:45the guardians of nature were getting them.
47:48While a crisis was at its worst,
47:50Wordsworth applied for and got
47:52a post as distributor of stamps for Westmoreland.
47:56Come election time, in gratitude,
47:59he campaigned for the local Earl's candidate against a radical.
48:05He was the government's most obedient servant now.
48:10Those who had sat at his feet 15 years earlier,
48:13when he'd seemed to be the first true poet of the people,
48:16were horrified.
48:19There would be other heroes now, heroes for unpoetical times.
48:24William Cobbett, for example.
48:27You'd never confuse William Cobbett with a poet.
48:31He'd run away from his father's farm at the age of 14
48:35and he mostly educated himself.
48:37But that was exactly why the kind of language he favoured,
48:41earthy, coarse, direct and belligerent,
48:44the language of the pub and the barnyard,
48:47was such journalistic dynamite.
48:51The labourers seem miserably poor.
48:54Their dwellings are little better than pig beds
48:57and their looks indicate that their food
49:00is not nearly equal to that of a pig.
49:03Their wretched hovels are stuck up on bits of ground
49:06on the side of the road,
49:08where the space has been wider than the road demanded.
49:16His Tuppany Trash, the weekly political register,
49:19was a one-man revolution in journalism,
49:22belching outrage in 50,000 copies a week.
49:29There's no doubt that until Cobbett came along,
49:32no-one had ever got to the ordinary people of Britain,
49:35robbed of their birthright by a bunch of social parasites
49:39and turned them into political animals.
49:45Cobbett was capable of mobilising an army
49:48of hundreds of thousands of petitioners
49:51enough, at any rate, to make the government nervous
49:54and start muttering darkly about a new peasants' revolt.
49:58But at the critical moment, where was he?
50:01In America, arranging to ship home the bones of Tom Paine.
50:08But Cobbett's army, the foot soldiers of democracy,
50:11didn't need holy relics.
50:13They needed a leader.
50:15What they got instead was a disaster.
50:19They hadn't been looking for it.
50:21The mass meeting that was called in August 1819
50:25at St Peter's Field in Manchester
50:27was, its organisers insisted, to be orderly,
50:30even nostalgic,
50:32demanding only that the rights of free-born Britons,
50:36habeas corpus, free press,
50:38the right to honest representation, be restored.
50:42It would be a festival for liberty.
50:48The men of order in London and the magistrates in Lancashire
50:52saw it very differently.
50:54Manchester, with its grumbling, out-of-work cotton spinners
50:58and over-educated rabble routers, was a den of conspiracy.
51:03It needed a lesson before revolution took root.
51:08The jittery Manchester yeomanry was happy to oblige,
51:12cutting away through the crowds
51:14to arrest the soapbox orator Henry Hunt.
51:19A small girl was trampled to death under their horses' hooves.
51:24The field turned into bloody chaos,
51:26raging crowds surrounding the yeomanry,
51:29regular mounted troops coming to extricate them,
51:32slicing their way through the bodies.
51:4011 were killed, hundreds more badly wounded.
51:44At least 100 of the injured were women and small children.
51:49This is the way an eyewitness, the artisan Samuel Bamford, recalled it.
51:57In ten minutes, the field was an open and almost deserted space.
52:03The hustings remained, with a few broken and hewed flagstaves erect
52:08and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping,
52:12whilst over the whole field were strewed caps, bonnets, hats,
52:16shawls and shoes, trampled, torn and bloody.
52:21The yeomanry had dismounted.
52:23Some were easing their horses' girths
52:25and some were wiping their sabres.
52:31Peterloo struck old-time radicals like Thomas Buick with nauseated horror.
52:37Unnatural was the word which rang through the denunciations.
52:41The selfish, wicked men who had done such a thing
52:44had forfeited forever the right to be thought of
52:47as the natural governing class of Britain.
52:54They have sinned themselves out of all shame.
52:58This phalanx have kept their ground and will do so until, it is feared,
53:03violence from an enraged people breaks them up.
53:07Or, perhaps till the growing opinions against such a crooked order
53:11of conducting the affairs of this great nation
53:14becomes apparent to an immense majority.
53:23Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo
53:26by throwing themselves into campaigns of practical action,
53:30crusades which they embarked on with religious fervour.
53:36Those who laboured for change did so now
53:40not only in secret political clubs
53:42but in the light of churches and chapels.
53:47Their targets were unnatural institutions,
53:50the monopoly of the Church of England,
53:52the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland,
53:55in the manufacturing towns a hue and cry to have their own MPs.
54:00Unless these things were done,
54:02a revolution, they said, would be more, not less, likely.
54:10In 1830, a new revolution in France
54:13and a wave of violence in the English countryside
54:16meant the votes for change could not be postponed.
54:20The Whigs took office for the first time since before 1789
54:25as the champions of reform without revolution.
54:29And the Parliamentary Reform Act they passed in 1832
54:32made good on their word.
54:35But the English counties weren't the only place
54:38where it was said something had to be done to avert bloodshed.
54:43In Suriname, Guyana and in Jamaica,
54:46pushed to the edge by hope and desperation,
54:49there had been slave rebellions,
54:51put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look like a picnic.
55:05SINGING CONTINUES
55:14The message of the Romantics,
55:16we are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin,
55:19we all share, praise be to God, the same nature,
55:22could at last be embraced, not as a cry for retribution,
55:26a call to the barricades,
55:28but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade.
55:34Abolitionism healed old wounds.
55:37It brought together Thomas Buick and William Wordsworth
55:41under the same great tent of righteousness.
55:51The organisers of the campaign
55:53used all the weaponry of the new age of good causes.
55:57The revival meeting, complete with hymns,
56:00the propaganda tour and the travelling exhibition.
56:03Models of slave ships.
56:06Chests full of the merchandise that might be traded instead of slaves.
56:26In 1834, Britain abolished slavery,
56:29and at a time, contrary to some legends,
56:32the market for its products was becoming more, not less, lucrative.
56:37It was the first great 19th century victory for the Party of Humanity.
56:46So was the place where the regeneration of Britain would happen,
56:50not, as the young Wordsworth had imagined, in the hills and dales,
56:54but in chapels, churches and town halls.
56:58He had always supposed that our redemption
57:01would be escaping from cities,
57:03that the best of human nature withered and perished
57:06when a hedgerow turned into a street.
57:10Well, perhaps it was the end of his dream,
57:13of a return to the childlike innocence of uncorrupted nature.
57:17But that dream never had a chance of becoming real,
57:21not in a Britain powering its way to industrial modernity.
57:26What Wordsworth had wanted was that nature, the British countryside,
57:31should be the negation of the town.
57:34Instead, it had somehow become its accomplice.
57:40Instead of needing to get deep into the unfolding heart of the country,
57:44those who could never have made the trip in any case
57:47could now find nature literally in their own backyard.
57:51In garden allotments given to them by the railway company,
57:54the echo of the old strips they had lost to enclosures.
57:58In the little gardens attached to the terrace house
58:01which stood in for the cottage lot they had left behind.
58:08For the first time, a park meant not the private estate of some aristocrat,
58:13but a public place in a town without barriers of class or property.
58:18Laid out, like here in Birkenhead in the 1840s,
58:21with ponds and rambles and lawns.
58:24The kind of place where parents would bring their children
58:27to give them something of the pleasures of nature.
58:31It was not, I suppose, sublime, but neither was it at all ridiculous.