“He wrote his book when America declared independence,” he complained, “yet our ministers still have not understood his message.”
Ralph was not so sure. He felt uncomfortable with Adam Smith’s doctrines which seemed to him to describe too harsh and cruel a world, however free.
“But the Corn Law,” he agreed heartily, “ought to go.”
It stayed. The agricultural poor were starving. Craftsmen, especially weavers, were being thrown out of work by the new machines. A terrible and cruel peace seemed to be taking over from the long years of war. And reactionary ministers, in reality as confused by the dawning industrial age as the unhappy people, clamped down on all reform. When the unemployed rioted, when the so-called Luddites tried to break up the machines they thought were destroying their livelihood, they were crushed.
True, as the 1820s wore on, there were hints of reform. A rising figure in Parliament, Robert Peel, though certainly a Tory, began a modest reform which included founding the first London police force and removing some hundred offences from the list that carried the death penalty. Trade improved too, and some of the duties that Mason hated were removed.
But in Sarum, it seemed to Ralph Shockley, nothing ever changed.
Of all the many voices in England demanding reform at this time – voices, Ralph knew, far more powerful than his – none was more powerful than that of the great journalist and describer of poverty, William Cobbett. His weekly,
The Political Register
, was Ralph’s bible, and though he never allowed Porteus to know it, he would buy up extra copies of it and surreptitiously leave them sometimes where he knew some of the poorer farm workers or labourers might find them. It was an easy way for the schoolmaster in his fifties to make himself believe he was agitating for change. But sometimes his outrage at the poverty he saw overcame him and once, to Porteus himself in his own house, he cried:
“Why, Canon, beasts of burden are better treated than our farm labourers.”
To which, for once, Porteus made no reply – Ralph was never sure whether he was silent from contempt or from shame.
In all these years, it was the memory of a single day and of two encounters which always remained in his mind.
It was an overcast morning in late spring and he went walking on the high ground. There were sheep everywhere: not the old long-horned sheep – they had all gone now – but the new, more economical breed from the south downs. Hornless, except for the rams, with their true fleeces – three of them could feed, it was said, where only two of the ancient stock could had fed before. Wherever there were no sheep, there were fields of recently sown corn.
He liked the sweeping, desolate landscape: he had walked for an hour without seeing a single human being.
Then he saw the boy.
He was, at first, hardly more than a speck, a tiny figure standing all alone in the middle of a huge, furrowed field.
Ralph came slowly towards him. The boy stayed where he was. Ralph noticed the birds sweeping over the surface of the furrows cautiously, wheeling and dipping around its edges.
Only when he came to the edge of the field and stopped there did the boy move towards him. He was a handsome young fellow with a mass of unruly brown hair and a long, thin, slightly hooked nose. He could not have been more than ten; his jaunty bearing reminded Ralph of his own son at that age, although as he drew close, he saw the young fellow was pitifully thin.
“All alone?” he enquired pleasantly.
The boy nodded. “You’re the first person I seen all day, sir.”
“What are you doing here?”
The boy waved his arm at the huge field.
“Frightening birds off.”
“What time did you come here?”
“Dawn, just after.”
“When do you go home?”
“Dusk, just afore.”
“Have you eaten today?”
“No, sir.”
“And who sent you here?”
“My father, sir.”
“What does he do?”
“Works on farm.”
“His farm?”
“No. Mr Jones.”
“Where’s that?”
“Avonsford.”
Ralph nodded. Obviously this was an outlying field.
“So,” he said with a smile, “you’re a human scarecrow?”
“’Sright.”
“What’s your name, scarecrow?”
“Godfrey, sir. Daniel Godfrey.”
“Daniel Godfrey: human scarecrow.”
It was a common enough sight. He wondered how many days that spring Daniel Godfrey would stand alone in a field all day, waving his arms at circling birds.
Thoughtfully he made his way back, passing the deserted hill fort of Old Sarum before strolling down into the valley. It was below Old Sarum near the old tree where the three remaining electors met to vote their members to Parliament that he saw the second lonely figure.
But this time he knew exactly who he had to deal with: and he went boldly towards him.
There were many things that Ralph Shockley came to like about Bishop Fisher during Fisher’s eighteen-year reign at Sarum. One was the care he took of his diocese. It was Fisher who revived the old office of the rural deans to supervise and help the outlying parish clergymen, who could otherwise be sadly cut off. It was also a mark of Fisher’s wisdom, Ralph thought, that he had never offered Porteus any further office. Yet another point in the bishop’s favour was that he was one of a kindly and distinguished family. It was his own nephew John Fisher, who was archdeacon of Berkshire and who occupied the fine old Leadenhall in the close while his uncle lived at the bishop’s palace.
And it was Archdeacon Fisher’s close friend who stood before him now, a sketch pad in his hand, his eyes intent upon the deserted hill fort above them.
John Constable made many visits to Sarum; he stayed at Leadenhall many times; he corresponded with Fisher for nearly twenty years. He painted scenes of the cathedral with its stately spire from Old Sarum and from Harnham which were to become world famous. But it was on this single day that he met his most outspoken private critic.
For, with the thought of poor Daniel Godfrey fresh in his mind, Ralph Shockley now went straight over to where the great man was standing and, presuming on their slight acquaintance, interrupted his work.
The scene that Constable had just lightly sketched was a view of the old fort, surrounded by sweeping slopes of grazing sheep.
Glancing at it, Ralph came straight to the point.
“It won’t do, Mr Constable. I complain of your scenes, because they are too pastoral – you make our Sarum too beautiful, our countryside too kind.”
And then he told him of the poor human scarecrow he had just seen, and reminded him about the pitiful condition of the agricultural labourers around Sarum.
“Why do your pictures not show these, too?” he demanded. Constable said nothing.
But Ralph, suddenly flushed as he used to be when he was young, had not done yet: pointing up to Old Sarum he cried:
“There, you know, lies the most rotten borough in all England – a deserted ruin that returns two members. Do you paint that iniquity, too, as a cheerful scene?” And he reminded him of the need for reform.
It was only after he had gone on in this vein for some time that Constable turned his kindly eyes upon him and Ralph noticed for the first time that the painter’s face was tired and strained.
“These things concern me too, Mr Shockley,” he answered patiently, “though I am only a painter.”
“But notice,” Ralph would declare proudly in later years, “how over Constable’s late works depicting Sarum, there is a dark and brooding air. I think perhaps that I put that there,” he would tell his children.
He had had no more encounters that day, but returned to the quiet of the close.
“The peace of the place!” he would say, in recalling that day. He had wandered into the cathedral. “And there I saw another wonder.” For the great west window had recently been restored, using ancient stained glass salvaged from many places: it gleamed softly in the afternoon light, and remembering how indefatigable Canon Porteus had been in promoting the cause of this lovely addition to the cathedral he chuckled:
“There’s something, at least, that he and I can agree about.”
“And there, I thought, I saw the whole of Sarum, as it had been in my lifetime,” he explained, “the good and the bad: the beauty of our cathedral, and the misery of our countryside. That’s why I have always remembered that day.”
In the year 1830 a terrible event took place at Sarum.
The people of the city were appalled, but it did not surprise Ralph Shockley in the least.
For in November 1830, the countryside rose.
There was nothing new in a riot. Luddites had often rioted and broken machinery in the north. There had been small riots in Sarum from time to time, when the cloth workers tried to increase their wages or fight new machines.
“They break a few heads, but they make their views known,” Mason used to remark to Ralph.
But this was something different.
There had been two terrible harvests. At the same time, farmers too, like the clothiers, had been introducing new machines. The riot was not a single rising: there were dozens of small mobs, Ralph heard, burning ricks and attacking machinery all over Hampshire and Wiltshire.
“It’s the start of a revolution,” Canon Porteus prophesied grimly.
“It’s the start of agricultural reform, more like,” Ralph corrected.
It was neither.
The riot at Salisbury was one of the most serious.
On November 23, 1830, a large mob moved across the ridge on the north-east side of the city known as Bishopsdown. They found a threshing machine and broke it up.
“There are thousands of them, and they’re armed,” a young clergyman assured him as he hurried down the High Street towards the cathedral close. “The Yeomanry is out already. They’ve come to kill us.”
Ralph did not believe him and, telling his son to take Agnes to the Porteuses’ house, he set out across the town. Soon he crossed the market place, turned east past the Black Horse and Swayne’s chequers, and came out on the patch of open ground on the eastern edge of the town known as Green Croft. Then he could see them, on the slopes above.
They were an impressive group – not thousands but several hundred and they carried bludgeons, iron bars and odds and ends of the machinery they had broken up. They were angry and desperate. He watched calmly as they swept down towards the town.
Standing by the corner he found a young weaver with whom he had shared Cobbett’s
Register
many times.
“The people in the close think they’ve come to kill them.”
The weaver shook his head.
“It’s Fige’s Iron Foundry they’re after,” he said. “Machines, not people.”
“It’s what I thought.”
Now there was a cheer as that notable Salisbury gentleman, Mr Wadham Wyndham, rode boldly out towards them at the head of a small force of special constables. The constables looked apprehensive. Wyndham did not.
Then he noticed something else. Waiting a little behind them was a large detachment of Yeomanry.
The procedure was simple, and Wyndham followed it correctly. First he addressed them and urged them to disperse. They came on. Then he ordered the Riot Act to be read. Still they did not move. They were almost all at Green Croft now.
There was no alternative. Wyndham ordered the Yeomanry to charge.
The battle did not last long. The Yeomanry were trained and armed; the labourers were not. In minutes they had been driven back to St Edmund’s churchyard and beyond. Some got away; some did not. Ralph watched the débâcle sadly.
“They captured twenty-two of them,” he told his family that evening. “Canon Porteus can sleep safe in his bed.”
It was a similar story in other places.
On December 27, 1830, a special Assize was opened before Lord Vaughan and Justices Alderson and Parke. Three hundred and thirty-two prisoners involved in the riots were tried. Ralph Shockley attended. It was a terrible business that left him profoundly depressed. Some of the prisoners were little more than children. Most, he guessed, had been swept into the riots for little more reason than that the rioters were passing and they had nothing better to hope for. The sentences were much as he expected.
For during Ralph Shockley’s lifetime, one of the most convenient discoveries ever to aid the administration of British justice was made: the continent of Australia was found.
“By placing men down there,” Canon Porteus reminded him, “they are as safely isolated from humanity as Napoleon on the island of St Helena. Escape is impossible. And that being so,” he added generously, “it is hardly necessary, I understand, to incarcerate them in cells.”