Flint and Roses by Brenda Jagger

world were being kept alive—only just—by the haphazard, not always gentle, hand of charity.
    I had grown accustomed to tales of agricultural workers, the very ones who harvested the protected grain, dying of starvation in their cottages; of hand-loom weavers, who in this machine age could not earn the coppers necessary to keep body and soul together, expiring at their looms of the same dread disease. I knew that, whenever the winter was harsh, the spring late and inclement, the summer cool and soon over, producing a poor harvest or no harvest at all, corpses would be discovered under the hedgerows or picked up in our own littered back alleys, the pathetic remains of men who had gone on the tramp to look for work, and had failed.
    Free Trade, clearly, was the only answer. My father had fought for it all his political life, had promised it at the hustings in every electoral address. Free Trade, cheap bread, an end to the Corn Laws was the only answer, but our current political masters, Sir Robert Peel—who had not endeared himself to us by re-introducing income tax at the terrible rate of seven pence in the pound—and his closest associate, the ancient, aristocratic Duke of Wellington, who believed that industrialists like all other upstarts should learn to know their place and mend their manners, had proved impossible to convince.
    Elected by a party of country squires to serve the interests of country squires—to ensure that Englishmen ate English corn or no corn at all—they had for years resisted all pressures from the industrial towns, and it had taken the, tragedy of Ireland, where more than a quarter of the population were entirely destitute and the rest not too much better off, to present a situation where the choice could only be cheap food or the most bloody revolution.
    The Irish had long been with us in Cullingford, coming in boatloads and cartloads, barefoot and desperate and alarmingly prone to multiply, escaping from famine in Derry and Kildare to famine in Simon Street, since even our weaving sheds—where mainly women and children were required in any case—could not accommodate them all. But, in the year before my father died, the potato crop quite inexplicably began to rot in the fields, bringing hardship to poor men in England, who relied heavily on potatoes for food, bringing panic and chaos to poor men in Ireland, who had no other food on which to rely.
    And, as Ireland began its death agony and unrest at home began to simmer—yet again—into a revolutionary brew, the radical leaders making full use of the railways, as the Duke of Wellington had always said they would to muster their forces together, it became clear—apparently even to Sir Robert Peel—that if the people were to be fed and pacified, then the foreign corn must be allowed to flow.
    â€˜Peel cannot do it,’ his startled landowning friends said of him in London.
    â€˜He will not do it,’ we had declared scornfully in Cullingford, for, having risen to power as a staunch protectionist, we knew that his own party would not support him, that his own career was at stake, the flamboyant, fast-rising Mr. Disraeli having already dubbed him a turncoat and a traitor, even the Duke of Wellington, who disliked reform of any kind and thought the Corn Laws rather a good thing, holding himself aloof.
    Even then, had the next year’s potato crop shown a healthy face, perhaps Sir Robert would have hesitated, modified, compromised, saved his face and his prospects, as indeed we all expected him to do. But the new season’s potatoes were as black as their predecessors, and the remnants of the Irish people—those who had neither starved nor emigrated to Cullingford—were living on weeds and nettles and a murderous hatred of certain English landlords who, apparently unaware of the famine, went on insisting that their rent should be paid and issuing eviction notices when it wasn’t. And