Forces of Nature A History of Britain by Simon Schama

For thousands of years,

the mountains, lakes and forests of Britain have been just geography.

But in the late 1700s, they became something much more - the face of our nation.

Our countryside became our country.

When homesick travellers thought fondly of Britain,

they thought of their landscape - most of us still do.

And it was, for the first time, a landscape of ALL the British nations -

the wild places of Wales and Scotland,

the Peaks of northern England, rediscovered, relished, mapped.

For centuries, going to the country had meant, for the gentry, a stroll through a manicured estate.

An Arcadia as drowsy with sunshine as an Italian afternoon.

But in the second half of the 18th century, there was a sudden change in the weather.

The more adventurous Britons had enough of make-believe sunshine.

They wanted the real thing. They wanted it rough and were prepared

to go to places no-one in their right mind a generation before would have dreamt of setting foot.

Those who clambered up the crags

weren't just out for thrills. In the wild places, they thought,

might have survived Britons who'd stayed miraculously untouched

by the evils of town life, its corrupt politics and diseased bodies.

If we could somehow learn from their childlike innocence,

we could become like them and recapture what it meant to be free,

to be a natural born Briton.

Nature, in the last decades of the 18th century, came to mean something far more important

than gardening or hiking. A love of nature became code for a crusade, a revolution even.

And this time the crusaders weren't going to be in chain mail.

They would be poets, painters, hack journalists -

men and women who sensed a great change coming and were rushing to embrace it.

What they saw was dark and dirty weather.

Britain was about to be hit by an immense political cyclone - across the Channel, a revolution in France.

The boldest of the poets and pamphleteers longed for the storm to strike here, too.

More anxious souls were afraid that, where there was lightning, there would also be fire and destruction.

In the end, Britain would weather the storm.

But as the Duke of Wellington once famously put it,

"It was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life." Just how near run? Wait and see.

The journey to the guillotine

and a world war would start with the dreams of a philosopher.

But not any old philosopher.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was buried here at Ermenonville just outside Paris,

reshaped a generation's mental habits, turning them from creatures of thought to creatures of feeling.

Before him, the highest compliment you could pay anybody was to say they were reasonable.

After him, the compliment became, "Il a de l'ame." He has soul.

And the British couldn't get enough of it.

In the spring of 1766,

Rousseau, on the run from enemies -

real and imagined -

pitched up in Staffordshire.

Richard Davenport moved out of his country house in the village of Wootton

so that the great man could have a comfortable asylum in which to commune with nature.

Rousseau could have been forgiven for expecting a warm welcome.

His two most famous books, Emile -

a manual on education, no books before 12, disguised as a novel -

and the weepy of the age, the New Heloise, with forbidden love between tutor and pupil,

were smash hits among the sobbing and sighing classes.

At a distance, Rousseau may have been popular

but he was a paranoid - in Derbyshire,

he became convinced the servants were putting cinders in his soup.

In 1768, after more imagined slights, he left England.

But his ideas stayed

and put down deep roots among the book-crazy gentry.

Men like Brooke Boothby, one of his Derbyshire neighbours,

who had himself painted by the local genius Joseph Wright

as a man of feeling, in tune with the rhythms of nature.

What appealed to men and women of feeling in the English provinces

was Rousseau's belief that urbanity - the graces and fashions of metropolitan life -

were symptoms of everything that was rotten about the old world,

the cosmetic mask which hid the poxy disfigurement of a deceitful, vicious, terminally ill culture.

The antidote was to scrub away the mask and restore grown men and women to their true nature -

the simplicity of a child.

Childhood was where Rousseau's revolution began.

If it was to be properly preserved, the true nature of children

had to be nourished from the breast.

Since babies took their moral as well as their physical sustenance

from their mother's milk, it had better BE their own mother's milk.

Wet nurses might contaminate them with vice and disease.

So the virtuous, wholesomely patriotic life

began at the nursing nipple.

Another lesson from Rousseau - forget about book learning. Cramming little heads with facts

did terrible damage to their animal high spirits, their instinct for freedom.

Get 'em outside. Let 'em romp.

But in an age of high infant mortality,

making a heavy emotional investment in your children

could rebound on you.

As Rousseau's disciple - Brooke Boothby - discovered

when his daughter Penelope died at the age of five,

romantic feeling could be as intense in sorrow as it had been in happiness.

"She was in form and intellect most exquisite.

"The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark

"and the wreck was total."

The poignant memorial speaks of the terror of loss,

of joy glimpsed, felt, experienced, and then cruelly destroyed.

And that was the romantic vision of Britain, too - a paradise in peril.

When men of feeling got off their high horses and left the sanctuary of their fantasy parks,

what they saw was the ugly reality of the countryside.

With the explosion in population, many thousands were leaving the land

and becoming dependent on the machines of the new industrial revolution.

Poets, like Oliver Goldsmith, were oppressed by a vision of deserted villages.

Sweet smiling village

Loveliest of the lawn Thy sports are fled

And all thy charms withdrawn

Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen

And desolation saddens all thy green

One only master grasps the whole domain

And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain

Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

In 1769, the year that Oliver Goldsmith was writing his poem,

a military officer with a social conscience, Philip Thickness,

published a horrifying account of four persons starved to death in a poorhouse at Datchworth.

To most complacent Britons,

this was supposed to happen in rat-infested corners of the Continent, not in Hertfordshire.

For those with eyes to see beyond the railings of their parklands,

two painful questions presented themselves about the real state of the British countryside -

what was to be done and who was to blame?

Was it the responsibility of the church?

Had the church grown too fat, too respectable, too indifferent to its duties towards the unfortunate?

Or was it a matter for the absentee landowning gentry

whose estates were run by men with an eye to profit?

Or was it wrong to think in terms of what had once been?

Was that just applying a coat of whitewash to a building that was rotten from top to bottom?

Was the answer not charity, but politics?

Thomas Bewick certainly thought so.

As a child outside Newcastle, he didn't need Rousseau to tell him about the freedom of fresh air.

He had played truant from school

and instead of filling his slate with improving knowledge,

he'd filled it compulsively with drawings, finding his way instinctively towards his vocation

as the first great illustrator of British natural history.

And Bewick's pictures weren't just meant for a gentleman's library.

Ordinary people wanted a book packed with images of the birds and animals of the British Isles.

But Bewick was looking at something else, too.

Between the plover and the waxwing, was a portrait of HIS world -

rain-soaked Northumberland, a tough, dark, gritty place, a world in a lot of pain.

In his churchyards, dogs snarl.

By his roadsides, poor bastards break rocks.

In his garrets,

blind old paupers slurp soup.

All this made Thomas Bewick very angry.

All this made Thomas Bewick a radical.

In Newcastle, he mixed in debating clubs with men like himself -

educated artisans, tradesmen and professionals, passionate in their devotion to liberty.

"It is by the good conduct and consequent character of the great mass of the people

"that a nation is exalted."

And what fired Bewick's radicalism wasn't just anger.

It was an emotion new to politics - sympathy.

What moved him was an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering.

A recognition that, deep down, we're all bonded by our shared human nature.

It was a call to action, echoed in pulpits up and down the country.

How could you feel the suffering of others

and not do all in your power to remedy it? For the first time,

there was a politics of suffering, one that could not turn a blind eye

to the plight of children, the aged, the sick and the poor.

Yet bigwigs DID turn a blind eye.

They believed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 sent James II and his Catholic despotism packing

and had given birth to a land of the free. In 1788, the 100th anniversary,

how tempting it was to continue patting themselves on the back

as being the most enlightened country in the world.

But for Bewick and his friends there was nothing to be complacent about.

The real problem of the Glorious Revolution, the radicals argued,

was that it had been hijacked by scoundrels who'd perverted it to satisfy their greed and ambition.

They'd packed Parliament with sycophantic placemen and sold their vote to pay their tailor's bill.

The real, forgotten lesson of 1668 was that the people were entitled to resist, to change their government,

entitled to the kind of sovereign that understood the reality of a limited monarchy.

If the memory of that first revolution was to mean anything,

a second revolution of justice would have to make good on its promise.

Then, in Paris on July 14th 1789,

the world would learn just how limited a monarchy could be.

The Bastille fell and nothing was the same again.

Though the fortress had just eight prisoners in it,

its grim towers and its cannon pointing into the heart of the city

was an emblem of everything detestable about the old monarchy.

In Bewick's world, toasts were drunk to the dawn of a new age of real liberty and the fall of despots.

And it was noticed that it had been ordinary people,

armed with muskets and slogans, who had stormed the citadel.

The inspiring moral was that the people, if pushed too far,

could and would take back their rights. Monarchy would be demolished.

So, when Doctor Richard Price, from his Unitarian pulpit in London,

congratulated King George III for recovering his sanity, he had the cheek to warn him

that unless he came to his political senses he, too, would go the way of Louis XVI.

"May you be led to such a sense of the nature of your situation

"to consider yourself more properly the servant than the sovereign of the people."

To the young, dressing down a king in the name of liberty was a heady pleasure.

William Wordsworth had been born in the Lake District, near Beswick.

He, too, had grown up in love with nature.

Now that love would extend to all of downtrodden humanity.

In 1790, on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, at the age of 19,

Wordsworth found himself in France.

What he saw there he described as,

"human nature seeming born again."

"Unhoused beneath the evening star, we saw dances of liberty

"and, in late hours of darkness, dances in the open air.

"We rose at signal given and formed a ring

"and, hand in hand, danced round and round the board.

"All hearts were open. Every tongue was loud with amity and glee.

"We bore a named honoured in France.

"The name of Englishmen. And, hospitably, they did give us hail

"as their forerunners in a glorious cause."

But not everyone felt as blissfully as Wordsworth.

Edmund Burke, the eloquent Irish MP who'd been the militant friend of the Americans,

now had a change of heart about revolution.

He too had lifted a glass to toast the dawn of liberty in July 1789.

But when the lynching started, Burke decided the revolution was, above all, an act of violence

and he denounced it in his vitriolic Reflections On The French Revolution.

"Amidst assassination and massacre and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated,

"they are forming plans for the good order of future society.

"They act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men and women lost to shame."

It's hard to know which was more painful -

the fact that Burke's savage denunciation came from an erstwhile friend of liberty and reform,

or that it flung back into the teeth of the radicals some of the mushier platitudes about nature.

They had taken it as read that nature filled your bosom with the love of mankind,

that nature was fraternal, was cosmopolitan.

Rubbish, said Burke, nature is rooted in place. It teaches you to love YOUR birthplace,

YOUR language, YOUR customs, YOUR habits. Nature is a patriot.

What Burke hated most of all was the naivety of well-meaning Whig politicians,

like his old friend Charles James Fox,

putting a few slogans into the heads of people not educated enough to understand what they were wrecking.

"Democracy? Mobocracy more like," said Burke.

Heads stuck on pikes,

the law of the lynch mob,

we don't want that here.

But for one unrepentant enthusiast, this was a travesty.

Tom Paine, whose book Common Sense had supported the Americans in THEIR revolution,

now took on Edmund Burke.

In 1791, he published his counterblast, The Rights Of Man.

It was a brilliantly calculated reply.

Burke had used flowery language to describe the mob's assault on the queen of France,

so Paine in contrast used the earthy, direct, street talk of ordinary people.

The kind of people Burke referred to as "the swinish multitude".

And what Payne's message was was that nature fought on the side of liberty.

At our birth, he said, we had certain natural rights

which no government, no sovereign could violate and expect to survive.

When Paine shouted, people listened.

He sold 40,000 copies of The Rights Of Man in a few months

and the people who bought them were people new to politics -

men like Bewick, men with grievances to air.

As they became more vocal and more visible,

the forces of order, the party of Church and King, began to get distinctly nervous.

The Prime Minister, William Pitt, barely in his 30s, once hailed as a friend of reform,

was now firmly in the conservative camp and looked at events in France with growing horror and disgust.

It was time to batten down the hatches, mobilise the militia, beat the patriotic drum

and gag the likes of Tom Paine before they made mischief.

Houses were burned.

Conspicuous democrats roughed up.

Tom Paine just got out in the nick of time. He was tried in proxy for treason.

Those who stayed loyal to Paine came together in solidarity and defiance.

One place where dangerous thoughts were positively welcome

was 72 St Paul's Churchyard where Joseph Johnson, the bachelor Liverpudlian printer and publisher,

acted as kindly uncle to all those he fondly called his "ruffian gang".

On any given Sunday, you'd find a mix of painters like William Blake,

agitators for parliamentary reform, celebrity democrats like Tom Paine,

and you'd find women - articulate, intelligent and impassioned.

Among the women, the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft.

She was the spirit of the time. Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution.

Living a hand-to-mouth existence as a writer,

given a roof over her head by Johnson, Mary burst into print in outrage at Burke's reflections.

But while she was doing it, she also noticed that the rights of men weren't worth much

if they excluded the other half of human society.

So she produced her own amended version - A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman.

If nature was to be held up as the handmaid of liberty and equality,

we'd better think about the natural state of women.

The reason, she said, why women were SO slighted was that, from the time they were little girls,

their entire being was designed with the sole and sovereign aim of pleasing men.

She had no time for Rousseau's idea that women, by their very nature,

could be no more than wives and mothers.

There was nothing she could see in HER nature which disqualified her from being a true citizen.

For daring to say these things, Mary was abused as "unnatural".

Horace Walpole, the essayist, called her "a hyena in petticoats".

Like Wordsworth before her,

Mary Wollstonecraft hoped that in the new French Republic

she'd find like-minded souls with whom to share her radical views.

But what she landed in was the jumpy, paranoid dictatorship of the Jacobins.

Rousseau's face and his books were everywhere.

Slavishly obedient to his dogma, French women who meddled in politics were told to shut up

and nurse their babies for the revolutionary fatherland.

Those who dared organise political clubs, were beaten on the streets.

In August 1792, the monarchy had been overthrown and a revolutionary republic created in its place.

A month later, when Prussian and Austrian armies invaded from the east,

the paranoia became bloody.

1,400 men and women held in Paris prisons were demonised as a fifth column

and butchered in cold blood.

In the 21st century, we reckon we know all about the split personality of revolutions -

the transformation from the smiley face of liberty

into the ugly reality of a terror and a police state.

But at the end of the 18th century, no-one was reading a Rough Guide To Revolution,

especially not its most passionate enthusiasts

who saw first-hand the days of flowers and freedom and fraternity,

for whom the slogan of liberty and equality was a natural partnership.

To begin with, Mary shared the company and the optimism

of expatriate Americans, Irish, English and Scots who met at White's Hotel in Paris.

In the first flush of revolutionary bliss,

a little spilt blood wasn't going to spoil the rapture of freedom.

-Mary wrote...

-"Children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools."

But then, as the despotism of the crown

was replaced by the despotism of a police state,

doubts began to creep in. Just a few weeks after she arrived,

Mary saw Louis XVI going to his trial

and she found herself weeping at the dignity of his composure.

It wasn't at all what she'd expected.

Ironically, even the foremost spokesman for radical politics came under suspicion.

In the summer of 1793, Tom Paine went from being a local hero to a pariah.

He blotted his copybook some months earlier during the debates over the sentencing of Louis XVI.

Even though Paine was the most famous anti-monarchist, he'd argued, very bravely and recklessly,

that since Louis was an irrelevance, why sentence him to death?

He had also said that a really free republic

owed it even to its worst enemies to protect them against oppression.

This not only made him unpopular but dangerously undesirable

and in the summer, the chickens came home to roost.

Paine was arrested and locked up in the Luxembourg Prison over there.

He was saved from the guillotine only by a fantastic accident.

When somebody was about to get the chop, someone came round and marked a cross on the door of their cell.

In Paine's particular case,

the door happened to have been open so that the cross was actually made

on the inside of the door.

When the door slammed shut, that cross was invisible.

Paine escaped his date with the national razor, as it was called, by a freak of fate.

As the arrests and executions started to speed up,

Mary's natural exuberance began to cool.

She was scared and despondent, writing to Joseph Johnson.

"I have seen eyes glare though a glass door opposite me and bloody hands shook at me.

"I wish I had even kept the cat with me as I want to see something alive.

"Death, in so many frightful shapes, has taken hold of my fancy.

"I'm going to bed and for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle."

By spring of 1793, the war which had broken out between Britain and France had changed everything.

Instead of being treated as honoured guests, expatriates were suspected of being a fifth column,

compromised by their friendship with French politicians, guillotined as traitors to the Republic.

Mary must have felt it would be HER turn any day.

Salvation appeared in the shape of an American businessman and property speculator, Gilbert Imlay,

who registered her as his American wife

and thus free from the taint of being one of the enemies of France.

Nursing their baby in a quiet garden on the outskirts of Paris,

Mary the feminist had been saved from the Revolution by motherhood.

But it was not to be a happy ending.

As Mary became more devoted,

Imlay's business trips became mysteriously prolonged.

When she followed him as far as London, she found a new mistress.

On a rainy night in October 1795,

she walked around Putney long enough to make sure her best dress was heavily saturated.

Then she jumped off the bridge into the Thames,

leaving a note for Imlay, "Let my wrongs sleep with me."

But she was not to be allowed her poetic suicide.

A boatman pulled her out.

She was 37 and she seemed to have lost everything except her child -

her faith in revolution, in the virtue of the people,

her belief in the possibilities of an independent woman's life.

The goodness of nature must have seemed a cruel joke.

Some months later, she seemed to get a second chance at happiness in the unlikely form of William Godwin,

a philosopher she'd met once before at Joseph Johnson's.

Godwin was notorious for his rejection of romance as well as marriage and private property,

but Mary's fire burned bright enough to melt his icy principles.

Though they'd agreed not to cohabit, the sworn enemy of matrimony

and the feminist were wedded at St Pancras Church.

And as her months of pregnancy passed,

the two found themselves relaxing into conjugal cosiness to the point

where Godwin was prepared, at least privately, to admit the force of emotion as well as thought.

Which is what made the end so unbearable.

When the time for her labour came, Mary called a local midwife.

But after the baby was born, another girl,

the placenta remained firmly lodged at the top of the birth canal.

Now, obstetric opinion of the time held that, unless the placenta was promptly expelled,

there was a lethal danger of infection.

So a doctor from Westminster Hospital was summoned, and he stuck his hand up Mary and pulled.

The placenta came away in pieces, as Mary lay in agony, haemorrhaging.

She had been through so many terrors, so many ordeals, come so close to death and had survived.

This time, with so much to live for, there would be no escape.

She died a week later of septicaemia.

Godwin wrote to a friend...

"My wife is now dead.

"I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.

"I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy.

"I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again."

She is rightly remembered as the founder of modern feminism,

for making a statement remarkable for its bravery and clarity,

that the whole nature of women was not to be confused with their biology.

But nature, biology, had killed her.

Beyond her deathbed, the relentless struggle between liberty and repression raged on,

stopping for no-one.

Meeting with radicals could now get you into serious trouble.

Habeas corpus had been suspended.

Printing presses were smashed, the doors of freedom were slamming shut.

And no wonder, for the stakes were as high as they could get.

Republican France was on the march

and Britain was vulnerable where it had always been - in Ireland.

Irish Republicans had been among the friends of revolution at White's Hotel.

They dreamed of a great uprising against the English.

But for the dreams to come true, an insurrection had to coincide with a French invasion.

The French DID come, but they came too late and on the wrong coast.

By the time they got to Killala Bay in the west in the summer of 1798,

the rebellion of the United Irishmen in the east had already been crushed by a British army at Vinegar Hill.

Stranded in the wilds of County Mayo, a long way from Dublin,

their only Irish help came from an improvised troop of peasants, schoolmasters and priests.

All the bloody games we know so well started here.

Masked men arriving at midnight, the stockpiling of arms,

the mercilessness shown towards anyone even faintly suspected of collaborating with the English.

Hit-and-run slaughter was not a strategy.

The invasion stalled and went into retreat.

Finally, the French capitulated.

Wolfe Tone, the Protestant Irish Republican leader who'd come with them,

was arrested and tried for treason,

but committed suicide in prison before he could be hanged.

At least 30,000 Irish men and women died in 1798.

Another of the tragedies that scarred the country's history,

but one which would be remembered indelibly, though not accurately,

as a war of the Protestant English against the Catholic Irish.

For Pitt and the Westminster politicians,

it had been a close call. The enemy at the gates in Ireland,

another huge French army camped on the Channel coast.

A time for sweaty palms.

And a time for all radicals to ask themselves difficult questions.

How could you be a cheerleader for revolution knowing what you knew,

having seen the dreams turn to violence and bloodshed?

William Wordsworth had been as fervent as anyone in the early days of revolutionary hope.

Now those hopes were turning to doubts.

By 1798, with the fate of Britain hanging in the balance,

he was renting a house in Somerset, close to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft,

Wordsworth had lost his heart in revolutionary France,

but his lover and the mother of his child had been a royalist.

Late in 1792, with war impending, he had to decide between staying - at peril to his life -

or returning to England. He chose the latter path.

Being a friend of the people now required him to be an enemy of France.

Why? Because France, in the shape of Napoleon Bonaparte, had abandoned the cause of liberty

and turned into nothing more than your common or garden tyrant, bent on forcing Britain to its knees.

Wordsworth's other great love affair -

with nature - was as strong as ever. Only now nature made him think, not of revolution,

but of home. Sadder and wiser as he now was, how much of his old fire could he preserve?

The solution was to abandon political dogma for poetry.

Hope lay not in the torrents of blood spilled in Paris,

but in the moral example of country people whose lives were lived in decency close to English nature.

The work of poetry now was to make audible the voices of the wounded and the destitute.

"She had a tall man's height or more

"No bonnet screened her from the heat

"A long drab-coloured coat she wore

"A mantle reaching to her feet

"Before me begging did she stand

"Pouring out sorrows like the sea

"Grief after grief on English land

"Such woes I knew could never be."

Nature did still have the power to transform lives,

but not through any kind of political agenda.

A vote would never make one happy.

A snowdrop in February or a mother's love for her newborn might.

He returned to his roots in the Lake District,

made his home at Grassmere.

Nature meant something different now to Wordsworth and Coleridge.

It was no longer something which connected them with the wider world. It detached them FROM it.

When they talked about liberty now, they no longer meant solidarity,

they meant solitude.

Up in the Lakes, the new affection for home might be as innocent as a summer picnic,

but on the front line of the war, native loyalty meant something far more belligerent.

Nature had been recruited for patriotic propaganda.

Each time invasion threatened, this inward, insular sense of Britishness became more emotionally charged.

Anyone faintly suspected of radical sympathies was branded a collaborator.

The country had never been so massively mobilised.

Not just an immense army and navy, but a volunteer militia of 75,000,

and, in 1803, in case of invasion, another 300,000 ready to spring to arms

to defend hearth and home against the godless French.

When Napoleon turned history teacher, putting on a show of the Bayeaux Tapestry

to remind the British that conquests had happened before,

what he got in response was a rude noise from the back of the class.

What's more, William Pitt was not about to go down with an arrow in HIS eye.

His war government mobilised on a scale never seen before.

When the King reviewed 27,000 volunteers in Hyde Park in October 1803,

half a million of his subjects cheered him on.

This was Edmund Burke's loyalist dream come true.

The territorial urge to defend hearth and home vindicated as the most natural passion of all.

Wordsworth now added his voice to those who thought nature was not the cradle of democracy,

but the shrine of patriotism.

"Save this honoured land from every lord

"But British reason and the British sword."

Burke's nostalgia for a merry England, still hanging on deep in the English countryside,

spawned an extraordinary boom in everything historical.

Suits of rusting armour were taken out of barns, polished up and set in entrance halls

to trumpet the patriotic pride of the gentry.

For more than a decade, the war roared on

as Britain confronted Napoleon's empire.

Epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal. A world conflict from India to the Caribbean,

with spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar.

During these roller-coaster years, the country's woes were muffled.

Patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint.

The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax

on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo.

Surveying the carnage the day after,

Wellington famously said that the next worst thing to a battle lost is a battle won.

He didn't know how prophetic his words would be.

Instead of tasting the fruits of victory, the poor and the unemployed were looking for ANYTHING to eat.

The economy of post-war Britain had fallen into the most terrible slump in living memory.

Even before victory, Napoleon's success at sealing off European markets,

together with a war against the United States in 1812, had destroyed demand for British manufacturers.

Tens of thousands of weavers and spinners were laid off or had their wages cut.

Then, hundreds of thousands more - demobbed soldiers, munitions workers, makers of uniforms -

were thrown to the workhouse.

Misery spilled into violence.

Machines were smashed in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

While multitudes were losing their jobs, the guardians of nature were getting them.

While the crisis was at its worst,

Wordsworth applied for and got a post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland.

Come election time, in gratitude, he campaigned for the local earl's candidate against a radical.

He was the government's most obedient servant now.

Those who had sat at his feet 15 years earlier,

when he'd seemed to be the first true poet of the people, were horrified.

There would be other heroes now. Heroes for unpoetical times.

William Cobbett for example.

You'd never confuse William Cobbett with a poet.

He'd run away from his father's farm at the age of 14 and he mostly educated himself.

But that was exactly why the kind of language he favoured - earthy, coarse, direct and belligerent,

language of the pub and barnyard - was such journalistic dynamite.

"The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig beds.

"Their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig.

"Their wretched hovels are stuck upon bits of ground

"on the roadside where the space has been wider than the road demanded."

His tuppenny trash, The Weekly Political Register, was a one-man revolution in journalism,

belching outrage in 50,000 copies a week.

There's no doubt that, until Cobbett came along, no-one had ever got to the ordinary people of Britain -

robbed of their birthright by a bunch of social parasites -

and turned them into political animals.

Cobbett was capable of mobilising an army of hundreds of thousands of petitioners,

enough to make the government nervous and start muttering about a new peasant's revolt.

But at the critical moment, where was he?

In America, arranging to ship home the bones of Tom Paine.

But Cobbett's army, the foot soldiers of democracy, didn't need holy relics. They needed a leader.

What they got instead was a disaster. They hadn't been looking for it.

The mass meeting that was called in August 1819 at St Peter's Field in Manchester

was, its organisers insisted, to be orderly,

even nostalgic, demanding only that the rights of freeborn Britons - habeas corpus,

free press, the right to honest representation - be restored. It would be a festival for liberty.

The men of order in London and the magistrates in Lancashire saw it very differently.

Manchester, with its grumbling, out-of-work cotton spinners

and over-educated rabble-rousers, was a den of conspiracy.

It needed a lesson before revolution took root.

The jittery Manchester yeomanry was happy to oblige,

cutting a way through the crowds to arrest the soapbox orator Henry Hunt.

A small girl was trampled to death under their horses' hooves.

The field turned into bloody chaos - the enraged crowd surrounding the yeomanry,

regular mounted troops coming to extricate them, slicing their way through the bodies.

11 were killed. Hundreds more badly wounded.

At least 100 of the injured were women and small children.

This is the way an eyewitness, the artisan Samuel Bamford, recalled it.

"In ten minutes, the field was an open and almost deserted space.

"The hustings remained with a few broken and hewed flag staves erect

"and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping,

"whilst over the whole field was strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls shoes, trampled, torn and bloody.

"The yeomanry had dismounted. Some were easing their horses' girths

"and some were wiping their sabres."

Peterloo struck old-time radicals like Thomas Bewick with nauseated horror.

"Unnatural" was the word which rang through the denunciations.

The selfish, wicked men who had done such a thing had forfeited for ever

the right to be thought of as the natural governing class of Britain.

"They have sinned themselves out of all shame.

"This phalanx have kept their ground and will do so until, it is feared,

"violence from an enraged people breaks them up.

"Or till the growing opinions against such a crooked order

"of conducting the affairs of this great nation becomes apparent to an immense majority."

Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo by throwing themselves into campaigns of practical action,

which they embarked on with religious fervour.

Those who laboured for change did so now, not only in secret political clubs,

but in the light of churches and chapels. Their targets were unnatural institutions.

The Church's monopoly. The ban on Catholic voters in Ireland.

In the manufacturing towns, a hue and cry to have their own MPs.

Unless these things were done, a revolution, they said,

would be MORE, not less likely.

In 1830, a new revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside

meant the votes for change could not be postponed.

The Whigs took office for the first time since 1789 as the champions of reform without revolution.

And the Parliamentary Reform Act they passed in 1832 made good on their word.

But the English counties weren't the only place where something had to be done to avert bloodshed.

In Surinam, Guyana and in Jamaica,

pushed to the edge by hope and desperation,

there had been slave rebellions put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look like a picnic.

# Steal away

# Steal away

# Steal away to Jesus... #

The message of the Romantics - we are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin,

we all share, praise be to God, the same nature - could at last be embraced,

not as a cry for retribution, a call to the barricades, but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade.

Abolitionism healed old wounds. It brought together Thomas Bewick and William Wordsworth

under the same great tent of righteousness.

# ..Steal away to Jesus... #

The organisers of the campaign used all the weaponry of the new age of good causes -

the revival meeting, complete with hymns, the propaganda tour and the travelling exhibition,

models of slave ships,

chests full of the merchandise that might be traded instead of slaves.

# ..My lord, he calls me

# He calls me by the thunder

# A trumpet sound... #

In 1834, Britain abolished slavery, and at a time, contrary to some legends,

when the market for its products was becoming more, not less, lucrative.

It was the first great 19th-century victory for the party of humanity.

So was the place where the regeneration of Britain would happen

not, as the young Wordsworth had imagined, in the hills and dales,

but in chapels, churches and town halls?

He had supposed that our redemption depended on escaping from cities,

that the best of human nature withered and perished when a hedgerow turned into a street.

Perhaps it was the end of HIS dream of a return to the childlike innocence of uncorrupted nature,

but that dream never had a chance of becoming real,

not in a Britain powering its way to industrial modernity.

What Wordsworth had wanted was that nature, the British countryside, should be the negation of the town.

Instead, it had somehow become its accomplice.

Instead of needing to get deep into the enfolding heart of the country,

those who could never have made the trip anyway, could now find nature, literally, in their own back yard.

In garden allotments given to them by railway companies, an echo of the old strips they'd lost to enclosure.

In their little gardens attached to the terraced house

which stood in for the cottage lot they had left behind.

For the first time, a park meant not the private estate of an aristocrat,

but a public place in a town without barriers of class or property,

laid out, as here in Birkenhead in the 1840s,

with ponds and rambles and lawns.

The kind of place where parents would bring children to give them something of the pleasure of nature.

It was not, I suppose, sublime, but neither was it at all ridiculous.

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