Nigel Jones

Terror plots, threats to liberties, banks in crisis: welcome to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars

A review of In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793 – 1815, by Jenny Uglow. Britain shuddered in Bonaparte’s shadow, living in constant expectation of invasion and occupation

In our own troubled times it is useful and comforting to recollect that ’twas ever thus.  Violent threats against prominent politicians? Jenny Uglow reminds us that in 1802 Colonel Edward Despard, a British officer turned radical agitator, was the last person in England to be sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, for a plot to kill King George III and the cabinet; while in 1812, the wildly unpopular hardline Tory Spencer Perceval became the only prime minister (so far) to be assassinated, the victim of John Bellingham, a deranged bankrupt.

Threats to civil liberties? The first Defence of the Realm Act was passed in 1798 by the younger William Pitt’s administration, extending the Treason Act to cover any political meeting and giving magistrates the power to detain without trial those they suspected of sedition, up to and including the leader of the Whig opposition, Charles James Fox.

Financial crises? In 1810 the bank Brickwood, Rainer & Co. crashed with debts of more than half a million pounds, taking down with it as it fell provincial banks in Salisbury and Exeter and five City of London merchant houses.

The following year no fewer than 20 banks closed their doors. The crisis caused the gloomy economist David Ricardo to warn that exchanging gold for worthless paper banknotes meant rampant inflation. Meanwhile the Revd Thomas Malthus complained that the incorrigible tendency of the feckless poor to reproduce themselves without the means to support their progeny would result in inevitable mass starvation.

In the event (perhaps thanks to a court character reference from an old comrade-in-arms, Admiral Horatio Nelson), Despard and half a dozen of his co-conspirators were spared the painful indignity of having their genitals hacked off and their guts extracted and burned before their eyes, and were merely hanged and then beheaded, before a delirious 20,000-strong crowd on a gaol roof in Southwark.

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