Mysterious Wisdom (26 page)

The peasants were trapped. A labourer could not make enough money to provide for his family and yet, at the same time, he was policed by a ruthless penal system in which stealing a watch could send him to the gallows and the snaring of a rabbit lead, under newly tightened game laws, to seven years' transportation. One of the amply laden apple trees which Palmer painted would have meant the difference between survival and starvation to a man for whom a ripe bough of russets provided food for his children and money for the rents that kept a roof above his head. ‘Crime is the inevitable consequence of desperation,'
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The Times
warned in October 1830. In the autumn of the very year that Palmer painted his
Coming from Evening Church
, the greatest rural rebellion in English history broke out.

After harvest home, peasant workers would traditionally have found their next job in the flailing barns where, wielding a staff with a free-swinging stick at the end, they would have manually beaten the sheaves of the corn, separating the good grain from the husks and straw. But with the arrival of the threshing machine, this winter employment was coming to an end. As the nights closed in, tensions grew. Soon, desperate gangs of men, dressed in dark clothes and with blacked-out faces, set out hallooing across the garden of England. Armed with cudgels and hatchets, hammers, axes and saws – and sometimes even guns – they descended on farmsteads, smashing the detested threshing machines and setting fire to the ricks. Sometimes dozens of labourers would stand around watching as a farmer's annual profit went up in smoke. None would have dared to put out the flames and there was little the landowner could do in the face of such frightening insubordination: he could neither command his attackers nor guard his steading round the clock.

Towards the end of the year, menacing semi-literate notes began to drop on to doorsteps. These – perhaps inspired by the frightening missives that had been sent during the Luddite rebellion of 1811 – threatened death. Farmers risked being burnt alive unless they got rid of their threshing machines and improved the conditions of their labourers, the letters warned. They were signed ‘Captain Swing', or sometimes just ‘Swing'. No one was quite sure of the source of this sinister name. William Cobbett thought it came from that part of the thresher's flail which was known as the ‘swing' or ‘swingel', but a Kent journalist suggested that it originated in the signal call customarily given to haymakers who, having taken a break to sharpen their scythes, would be summoned back to their labours by their leader or ‘captain' with a loud cry of ‘swing'. It also had hair-prickling associations with the hangman. Whatever the name's origins, within days it had become synonymous with rural riots. Imaginations ran amok. Captain Swing was hailed by the country folk as an avenging hero. The authorities were desperate to catch him. But no one could identify him, most likely because there was no such person. Swing was a mystery, which made him an even more potent force in the minds of the illiterate farmhands who followed where he led.

For a few short weeks riots swept across the south of England, spreading westwards from Kent to Sussex and Hampshire. Poverty fought property; destitution battled possession. Every day new and ever more alarming reports flooded in. Armed gangs were tramping the highways; granaries, barns and hayricks, stacks of corn, clover and furze were going up in flames. The plumes of black smoke were like sinister beacons: they could be seen for miles.

In Kent and Sussex the protest became particularly fierce. A gang of several hundred labourers surrounded the mansion of the rector in Wrotham crying out ‘Bread or blood!' and a baying mob was seen to attack the castle of Lord Abergavenny at Eridge Green, dispersing just before the soldiers arrived. Another gang dragged their overseer down the street and a parish officer was taken prisoner in a dung cart. Meanwhile, there were reports of arson attacks taking place in broad daylight, of fire-lighters tramping from parish to parish pressing even the most timid to join their mob, of suspicious outsiders hanging around farmers' markets, of plough boys compelled to leave their horses in the fields. All along the road to Canterbury the word ‘Swing' was chalked.

Some feared that England was on the brink of civil war, or worse, revolution. The search for Captain Swing grew ever more urgent. Several landowners capitulated, promising wage increases. Others destroyed their machines voluntarily. Meanwhile, special constables were hurriedly sworn in and landed gentry were encouraged to volunteer as watchmen or to join night patrols. Police bodies were hastily dispatched to wherever it was believed that there would be a gathering. Rewards were posted up for the capture of the arsonists. Soon, men were apprehended just for being in the vicinity of an unlawful gathering. Brought before the courts they were hanged as a gruesome example to all. But by the time that Home Office ministers and local magistrates had finally developed an effective anti-riot strategy, the majority of threshing machines had either been destroyed or dismantled, not to appear again until steam-powered contraptions began to operate in significant numbers in the 1850s. The riots that for a few short weeks had held centre stage had, by the end of the year, died down. Only a few smouldering embers remained, glowing darkly in Kent where the movement had started, a latent spirit of underground resistance which would flare up periodically at times of particular hardship with the odd alarming fire or attack on an overseer's property.

 

 

Palmer was aware of the Swing rioters and would have seen the great conflagrations on the dark hills at night. One of his farmer friends, the hop grower Samuel Love, was among the first to suffer incendiary attacks. Palmer had described him as ‘one of the best farmers hereabouts',
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though evidently, as far as his labourers were concerned, he was among the worst. But Palmer did not understand the predicament of the peasants: he didn't share their lifestyles or ambitions or worries. He spoke a completely different language to their broad vernacular. He was even on the way to becoming a landlord himself – albeit on a modest level – for he had already invested a family legacy in the first of the five cottages in the village that he was eventually to own and let out. The Ancients might often have felt the pinch of straitened financial circumstances but, at a time when the local landowner Lord Gage was recorded as paying his hedgers and ditchers two shillings a week, Richmond, keeping meticulous account of his expenditure in Shoreham, was living on ten shillings – and he didn't have a family to feed. What to a young gentleman felt like extreme frugality, to the average field worker would have felt more like wealth. Where extreme privation to the former meant giving up green tea or snuff, to the latter it meant going to bed without supper after a hard day's work.

‘Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in the cities,' Palmer later would write in an introduction to Virgil's
Eclogues
. His vision of Shoreham was an outsider's view. Describing its harvests as a wonderfully ‘pretty picture'
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he seemed rather more concerned that heavy rains would spoil perfect rustic views than worried that the labourers' crops would be ruined. Later he recommended the study of ‘picturesque farm implements'.
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Even where his works had some political resonance, he failed to ponder the more profound implications. As an eager young man, he had written to Linnell asking him to try to get hold of Blake's ‘terrific poem'
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on the French Revolution, but he was not a political radical like his visionary mentor. Blake, who had been imprisoned and stood trial for sedition, waged a lifelong war against state and Church, against an establishment which he saw as an instrument of repression and corruption. But Palmer, for all that he mourned ‘the old manners', the days when, visiting a farmer in Edenbridge, he had seen the labourers ‘clumping in their any-sounding hobnails, and dining cheerily at the side tables', did not seem to have been able to understand why suddenly these same peasants should have been meditating rick-burning while they eked out ‘a quarter meal of baker's bread be-alumed and rancid bacon under a hedge'.
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The Captain Swing riots had all but fizzled out by the end of 1830 but they had not been fruitless. They provided a powerful impetus for political reform. This was badly needed. Aristocratic families dominated the political landscape. ‘Rotten boroughs' – typically depopulated villages in which the electorate had dwindled to a tiny handful of constituents – had an undue influence on the make-up of Parliament because, however few its inhabitants, a borough had the right to elect two representatives to the House of Commons. Britain's parliamentary system no longer reflected the realities of a rapidly changing world. Six hundred and fifty-eight MPs had seats at Westminster, but neither Birmingham nor Manchester – both growing new industrial towns – were represented while the notorious Old Sarum, an abandoned relic of the medieval era, returned its two members despite being populated only by a few thorn bushes. There were also ‘pocket boroughs' owned by major landowners who could choose their representatives and, since the ballot was not secret and voters were easily intimidated or bribed, they usually got the man whom they wanted in. Not everyone could vote anyway: in thirty-nine English boroughs the right was attached only to certain properties; in forty-three the electors were the town council; in sixty-two only freemen were balloted. In the counties, if you were a freeholder of property worth more than forty shillings you could cast your vote and naturally you tended to do so in deference to the wishes of the local landowner for fear that he might otherwise withdraw valued favours. Parliament was not for the people. It was more like an exclusive club: the aristocracy forming the House of Lords, their friends and relations along with a sprinkling of other gentry making up the Commons. A ‘ruling few' dominated a ‘subject many', as Jeremy Bentham famously said.

From around 1815 on, a deep sense of dissatisfaction had been swelling in Britain. By 1830, reform was firmly on the agenda. The violence of the Swing revolt, the naked contempt of the workers, the hopelessness of the gentry in the face of their fury, had finally convinced an aristocratic elite that their rule could not continue unless changes were brought into effect. Both the emerging industrial classes and the commercial middle classes had to be given a more significant voice. Under the Whig administration of Lord Grey, a bill for reform was presented in March 1831. It went through its many drafts and readings, passes and rejections, amid such dramatic scenes of contention that the very stability of society seemed often at stake, until eventually, in June 1832, the Great Reform Act received the royal assent and the political map of Britain was redrawn.

The act did not bring about universal suffrage. In its final form it increased the electorate from around 366,000 to 650,000. About 18 per cent of the total adult male population (very few belonging to the working classes) could vote. In towns the vote was given to all whose homes were valued for rates at £10 per annum. In the counties it was given to forty-shilling freeholders as well as long leaseholders and tenants who paid more than £50 per annum rent. This led to the redistribution of seats in Parliament: those seats with less than 2,000 voters – the Earl of Caledon's Old Sarum among them – lost their representation; others which had previously returned two members were reduced to one and all the seats thus gained were redistributed, twenty-two to towns such as Birmingham and Manchester which now had representation for the first time, and sixty-five others re-allocated to the counties, many of which were divided into two. Old corruption was not completely rooted out. Some seventy seats remained under aristocratic patronage. But this was the start: it was a landmark event in the history of English democracy.