London - Edward Rutherfurd [489]
Lord Bocton did not bet. Though he had a white flash in his dark hair, like his father, he was tall and thin like his mother’s family. He still wore the silk stockings and silver buckled shoes fashionable twenty years before, a black, buttoned-up waistcoat, a stiff white collar and a coat that was always dark green, so that his father used to remark, with perfect truth: “You look like a bottle.”
“Who’s this?” he enquired, nodding towards his son’s companion.
“A friend, father,” Lord Bocton began.
“Didn’t know you had any,” the earl snorted. “How did you like the speech?” He knew very well that Lord Bocton had not liked it at all. “Bocton here,” he continued to Carpenter, “is a Tory, you see.”
There were three political allegiances a man could hold in the reign of George III. The Tories, the party of squires and clergy, were for King and Country. Protectionist, since their income usually came from modest landholdings, they supported the Corn Laws whose tariffs on imports kept the price of their grain artificially high, and were naturally suspicious of any kind of reform. Stubborn old King George, mad or sane, suited them pretty well. The Whigs, as they always had, believed in keeping the king under Parliament’s thumb. A merchant party still led by great aristocrats whose wealth often included mining and trading interests, they were sympathetic to free trade and modest reform. It was absurd, they agreed, that while a handful of voters could send a member to Parliament from one place, some growing commercial cities had no representation at all, leaving the government of England, as Carpenter truly pointed out, not unlike the vestry of St Pancras. They were also sympathetic to the religious Dissenters, the Jews and, some at least, even to the Catholics who under the old Test Acts were still unable to hold any public offices. Their cause of reform might have prospered even under King George, but for one problem.
The French Revolution might have promoted freedom in much of Europe, but in England it did just the opposite. Even in the early years, the ferocity of the revolutionaries – the Jacobins as they were called – and the awful bloodshed of the Terror and its guillotine, alarmed many peaceful Englishmen. But then Napoleon had risen to power in France and tried to invade the island kingdom. When gallant Admiral Horatio Nelson put a stop to that by smashing the French fleet at Trafalgar, the French emperor tried to destroy England’s trade in Europe. No wonder then if most men in England, including the Whigs, rallied around the Tory prime minister Pitt, the incorruptible patriot, to defend England from this menace. Not only that, to most men of property the revolution became associated with the war, and the people’s rights it proclaimed seemed to promise only fearful bloodshed and disorder.
“We want no Jacobins here,” the English Parliament declared, and battened down its hatches against these treacherous revolutionary seas. Combination Acts were passed, forbidding unions and unlawful assemblies. To advocate reform of any kind during these years made a man suspect; and even after Wellington had terminated Napoleon’s career at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 this fear of revolution persisted.
There was, however, a third political group – a small band of radical Whigs known as Jacobins who continued to speak out for reform, for tolerance and freedom of speech. Their leader, during the darkest years of the struggle with Napoleon, had been Charles James Fox – dissolute, debt-ridden, lovable but, even his opponents conceded, the greatest orator England had ever known.
While he had declaimed in the Commons, Fox knew that in the House of Lords he could always count on the vote of the sporting Earl of St James. In Lord Bocton however, Fox possessed