The Age of Voltaire Read online

  Drinking was even more popular than gambling. Beer or ale was the national drink. The London male consumed a hundred gallons a year, or a quart per day, as safer and tastier than water. The damp climate created a demand for rum, punch, brandy, gin, cordials, whiskey; and wine was a favorite medicine. Taverns and liquor stores were everywhere; out of 7,066 houses in the parish of Holborn 1,350 sold liquor. Landowners—and therefore Parliament—smiled on the whiskey trade, since it opened an added market for their barley and wheat;59 almost a third of the arable land of England was planted to barley. In the upper classes whiskey tended to replace wine as the repeated wars with France hindered the commerce with Bordeaux and Oporto, and the Dutch and the Germans brought in their preference for hard liquor. Here, as in gambling, the government set the pace: Harley, prime minister under Anne, was reported to have come drunk into the presence of the Queen; Bolingbroke sometimes sat up all night drinking; and Robert Walpole had been taught drunkenness by a father resolved not to be seen drunk by a sober son.60

  When the passion for gin spread among the populace the government was disturbed. The spirits distilled in Britain rose from 527,000 gallons in 1684 to 5,394,000 gallons in 1735, with no comparable rise in population; on the contrary, physicians warned the government that gin drinking had rapidly increased the rate of mortality in London; and a Middlesex grand jury ascribed to that liquor much of the poverty and crime of the capital. Retailers of gin hung out signs promising to make their customers drunk for a penny, and offering them free beds of straw in the cellar.

  The alarmed rulers tried prohibition by taxation. An act of Parliament in 1736 laid a duty of twenty shillings a gallon on gin, and required fifty pounds a year for license to sell it. The thirsting poor rose in violent riots. As Walpole had predicted, the prohibition led to smuggling, secret distilling, and clandestine trade. The number of gin shops rose to seventeen thousand, the distilled gallons to over seven million, and crime increased. The experiment was abandoned, the license fee was reduced to twenty pounds, the duty to a penny per gallon; the people rejoiced and drank. In 1751 a series of moderate and ingenious measures (such as making small debts to liquor dealers irrecoverable at law) effected a mild improvement.61 The philosopher Berkeley illuminated the situation by denouncing the upper classes for the evil example they gave to the masses, and warning them that “a nation lighted up at both ends must soon be consumed.”62

  The moral level was low in business too. Great fortunes were derived from smuggling, piracy, and catching or selling slaves. Complaints arose that the water of the Thames was defiled by commercial as well as human waste, that wine was debased with cider and spirits of corn, that bread was adulterated with alum and chalk, that aging meats had their complexions freshened with chemicals dangerous to health and life. When attempts were made to check such practices, the patriots of business cried out for freedom and the right of “every man … to live in his own way without restraint.”63

  The government interfered with liberty, but chiefy to impress men into the armed services. When various financial inducements failed to man the navy, “press gangs” (from 1744 onward) were sent out by the state to snare, drug, or otherwise persuade men into his Majesty’s ships. Intoxication was the easiest method, for in that condition a man could be led to sign away a year or more of his life. From the time they were so brought on board, said Admiral Vernon (1746), such men were “in effect condemned to death, since they are never allowed again to set foot on shore, but turned over from ship to ship … without any regard for the hardships they have undergone.”64 “No man,” said Samuel Johnson, “will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.… The man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”65 Sailors secured by impressment were usually weak in body and mind, but the rough discipline and ruthless selection by ordeal of fire and flogging (as described and doubtless exaggerated in Smollett’s Roderick Random) made the survivors the toughest and proudest warriors on the sea.

  Piracy was still winked at as a form of commerce, but it was in decline as navies grew stronger. The slave trade flourished; English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese ships competed for the privilege of selling African Negroes to American Christians. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) Spain had transferred from France to England the Asiento, the contract to supply the Spanish colonies annually with 4,800 slaves. Of the 74,000 slaves transported to America in the one year 1790, the French carried 20,000, the Dutch 4,000, the Danes 2,000, the Portuguese 10,000, and the British 38,000—more than half the total.66 “The English alone, at a low estimate,” says an English authority, “carried over two million negroes to America in the period between 1680 and 1786.”67 Some Negro slaves were kept for service in English homes. The newspapers contained promises of rewards for the return of runaway slaves; one advertisement offered “a negro boy, about twelve years of age, … to be sold.”68 Slaves were sold at Paris till 1762, and even the popes had Turkish galley slaves from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.69 The Quakers began in 1727 a movement to end the British share in the slave trade; Steele and Pope supported them; the Methodists advanced the crusade; but the campaign for abolition made no substantial progress before 1772.

  Political morality reflected the triumph of a hard commercial spirit. Hardly anything could be effected without bribery, and nearly every official had his price. Offices were sold, and votes in Parliament were bought like merchandise. M.P.s sold their franking privilege. Noble lords sold positions in their households,70 and “obstructed attempts to check the purchase of nominations to Parliament, or of members of the Commons.”71 “Rotten boroughs,” with a handful of inhabitants, sent to Parliament as many representatives as counties abounding in population and industry; “Old Sarum,” with not a single resident, sent two delegates; and such boroughs were easily controlled by men of birth or wealth. Businessmen, seeking political influence commensurate with their economic power, bought nominations or nominees to Parliament for some £ 1,500 each.72 All in all, this half century was the most corrupt and merciless in English history; and the historian finds it no simple matter to explain how, from the venality of that age, Britain has risen to such high repute for the integrity of its businessmen and its government.

  Amid the debasement of morals and politics there were many touches of humanitarian sentiment. There were homes, however ill-kept, for the old, the disabled, and the poor. There were guilds in which masters were kindly fathers to their apprentices; there were families that sheltered and educated orphans; there were associations—“box clubs”—for mutual aid in evil days. There was an impressive example—the first in modern history—of international charity when England contributed £ 100,000 sterling to her economic ally, Portugal, for the relief of sufferers from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.73 Between 1700 and 1825 one hundred and fifty-four new hospitals and dispensaries were established in Britain, four in London in one generation (1700–45). Most of these institutions were financed by private subscription. The best of those set up in the first half of the eighteenth century was the Foundling Hospital, organized by Captain Thomas Coram. Hogarth painted him in 1740 as a gift to the hospital: rotund, white-haired, kindly, with the royal charter at his right hand, and a globe at his feet; for Coram had earned his fortune as a captain in the merchant marine. Retiring, he was shocked by the high infant mortality in London, and by the number of infants exposed or deserted by mothers with no funds to care for them or no father’s name to give them. Coram persuaded highborn ladies to sign a petition for a foundling hospital; he secured a charter and two thousand pounds from George II; his appeal for contributions was met with unexpected generosity; the great Handel gave an organ and the now precious score of his Messiah, and directed concerts that raised ten thousand pounds. In 1739 the trustees commissioned Theodore Jacobsen to design a spacious group of buildings and grounds, which became one of the proudest sights of London.

  V. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  The people of eighteenth-c
entury England were a tough breed, accustomed to hardship and violence, and capable of surviving anything except death. Two corporals fought each other with bare fists till both expired; two sergeants dueled till both suffered mortal wounds. A soldier who asked leave to marry an army prostitute was punished with a hundred lashes; he appeared the next day, his back all raw, before the same officer, and repeated his plea; this time it was granted. A drummer boasted that he had received 26,000 lashes in his fourteen years with the army; he received four thousand more in the one year 1727; he recovered cheerfully, and was soon reported as “hearty and well, and in no ways concerned.”74

  Brutal punishments, administered in public, encouraged public brutality. By a law repealed in 1790 a woman convicted of treason, or of murdering her husband, was to be burned alive, but custom allowed her to be strangled before burning.75 Men guilty of treason were cut down from the gallows while still alive; their bowels were extracted and burned before their faces; they were then beheaded and quartered. Gallows were raised in every district of London, and on many of them the corpses were left for the nourishment of birds. A man might hang for half an hour before he died. It was usual, however, to dull the senses of the condemned with brandy; and the hangman, if well disposed, would pull on the dangling legs to hasten death.

  The callousness of spectators and criminals gave hangings the character of a festival; people lined the road to see the condemned ride in the carts to Tyburn; stalls and peddlers sold gin and gingerbread, nuts and apples, to the crowd; street singers sang ballads not quite so well as Captain Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera. The public, never enthusiastic about laws or policemen, made heroes of criminals who carried off their exploits successfully, or, when captured, faced trial and death with scorn or smiles. Jack Sheppard, “Rob Roy” (i.e., Robert Macgregor), Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, all flourished in this period. Jack, after almost daily robberies in or near London, was betrayed to the police by Jonathan Wild; he escaped, was rearrested, escaped again, was caught in his cups, and was hanged, aged twenty-two, before a crowd of thousands that expected him to escape even with the noose around his neck. Defoe and Ainsworth told his story profitably, Sir James Thornhill painted his portrait. Turpin distributed money to mourners to follow his cart in state to the gallows; but what made him most famous was the fictitious account that Ainsworth wrote of Dick’s breakneck ride from London to York. Likewise, Fielding’s Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great has carried that scoundrel down the centuries. Most of that powerful satire is fiction, but it is no more interesting than the facts. Jonathan, like Janus, had a double face. He organized, managed, and exploited thieves, bought their stolen goods at his own price, and betrayed them to the magistrates when his confederates rebelled. At the same time he opened a pretty office where he received people who had been robbed; he promised, for a substantial consideration, to get their goods or money returned to them; on the proceeds he maintained several mistresses, and lived in style for nearly fifteen years. But his prosperity outstripped his prudence; he was arrested as a dealer in stolen goods; and he was hanged to the joy of an enormous multitude (1725). He may have been part model for Mr. Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera.

  Lawlessness ran the social scale from the gentle pickpocket to the smuggling merchant to the titled duelist. There were hundreds of duels, some in the open street, some in Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, but most of them on the “Field of the Forty Footsteps” behind Montagu House (now the British Museum). They were seldom fatal, for pistols were clumsy, and few men could aim them accurately at thirty paces; probably many combatants were careful to fire above the head; in any case reconciliation was normally achieved after the first drawing of blood. The duels were illegal, but were humored on the ground that they encouraged a cautious courtesy of speech. Arrests were rare except for fatalities; and if the survivor could show that he had followed the rules of the game he was released after a brief imprisonment.

  In 1751 Fielding, then a magistrate, published An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, etc., with Some Proposals for Remedying the Growing Evil. He ascribed the increase predominantly not to poverty but to the rise of “luxury” among the lower classes; the common people now had money enough to go to taverns, amusement parks, theaters, masquerade dances, and operas; and there they met persons adept in promiscuity and crime. The second cause, the great novelist thought, was an increase in the consumption of gin.

  Gin is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than an hundred thousand People in this Metropolis. Many of these wretches swallow Pints of this Poison within the Twenty-four Hours; the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see and to smell, too.76

  The third cause was gambling. The fourth was the incompetence of the law; it left the capture of criminals to watchmen

  chosen out of poor, old, decrepit people who, … armed only with a pole, which some of them are scarcely able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of his Majesty’s subjects from the attacks of gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate, and well-armed villains.77

  Even if the watchman was not terrified by the violence of the robbers, he could be bribed; so could the constable to whom he reported; so could the magistrate to whom the constable brought a criminal. The policing of London was entrusted to 1,000 constables, 474 beadles, 747 watchmen. Between arrest and conviction lay 2,214 lawyers in London, some of them men of legal learning and reasonable integrity, some of them not quite so. Dr. Johnson said of a man who had just left the room that he “did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney.”78

  Fielding did not agree with Coke that “the wisdom of all the wise men in the world, if they had all met together at one time, could not have equaled” the excellence of the English constitution. He would have admitted that that constitution, as Voltaire and Montesquieu had recently pointed out, had admirably arranged for the protection of the individual and his property from the tyranny of a king; he would have praised habeas corpus and trial by jury, and the great law schools in the Inns of Court. Certainly it was no small matter that an Englishman was free from arrest without legal warrant, from imprisonment without trial, from punishment without conviction by a jury of his peers; that he could not be taxed except by consent of Parliament; that he could assemble with his fellows provided he committed no disorder; that he might say what he pleased, short of sedition, libel, obscenity, and blasphemy. But the lawmakers of England had been so eager to protect the individual from the state that they had failed to protect society from the individual. The machinery of enforcement was breaking down before the spread and organization of crime.

  The common law was administered by magistrates, or justices of the peace, whose decisions could be appealed to judges sitting in Westminster or traveling six months a year to hold assize courts in the county towns. These judges enjoyed life tenure, and displayed a reasonable level of integrity. Ecclesiastical courts survived, but they were limited to trying non-criminal cases involving only the clergy, or the validity of marriages, or the administration of wills. The Court of Admiralty had jurisdiction over exclusively maritime cases. Above these courts was the Court of Chancery, presided over by the lord chancellor. The supreme court of the land was Parliament itself, with the Commons trying commoners and the Lords trying peers. Equality before the law was still imperfect, for peers usually escaped punishment. The fourth Earl of Ferrers was executed in 1760 for killing his steward, but when the Duchess of Kingston was tried before the House of Lords in 1776 and was convicted of bigamy, she was freed with only the payment of fees. Latin remained the language of the courts till 1730, when English displaced it, paining Blackstone grievously.

  In trials for capital felony (and most felonies were capital) the accused was allowed to hire counsel if he could afford one; the counsel might cross-examine the witnesses for the prosecution, but was not permitted to address the court; this was left to the prisoner, who, through weakness
of body or mind, was in many cases incapable of presenting his defense. If he was acquitted he was returned to jail till he had paid all the fees exacted by the keepers for their services; before this regulation was revoked in 1774 there were several instances of acquitted men dying in jail. If convicted, the prisoner faced one of the severest penal codes in the history of law.

  The code was an advance on the past, and on Continental procedures, in barring torture and punishment by the wheel, and it no longer split noses or cut off ears. Otherwise it had all the barbarity that sturdy Englishmen then considered necessary to control the natural lawlessness of mankind. When the penalty was flogging at the tail of a cart drawn through the streets, the executioner would sometimes receive an extra sum, collected from the spectators, to ply the thong with special vigor.79 A prisoner who refused to plead on a capital charge was required by law to be laid naked on his back in a dark room, and weights of stone or iron were placed upon his breast till he was pressed or choked to death;80 this law, however, was not enforced after 1721, and was repealed in 1772.