The Years of Endurance by Arthur Bryant Page B
Authors: Arthur Bryant
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
Ads: Link
quick to
1 D'Arblay, II, 316.
notice it. " Ah, Mary," says he, " that's a pretty hat! that's a pretty hat!"
Because of these things and because, despite black spots in the national existence, most Englishmen were tolerably satisfied with their lot, King George's subjects echoed Parson Woodforde's prayer:
" And may so good a King long live to reign over us—and pray God that his amiable and beloved Queen Charlotte may now enjoy again every happiness this world can afford with so good a man, and may it long, very long continue with them both here and eternal happiness hereafter."
They could not follow events across the Channel without their viewpoint being affected by such personal considerations: and when the French people rose in their majesty and established liberty by flinging drunken insults at their sovereign and butchering his retainers, they refused to approve such goings-on. Liberty was one thing: " anarchy and confusion " another. Even John Wilkes, that tried champion of the populace's right to do as it pleased, observed that the new France was not a democracy but a mobocracy.
Not that Britons wished to interfere with their neighbour's concerns. The best of them continued to believe that good would come out of evil and that the licence which despotism had begotten would be succeeded by ordered freedom. For they knew that the French—that effervescent people—must be given time to learn the sober lessons which their own sane land had only mastered in the course of many centuries.
CHAPTER THREE
The Failure of Appeasement 1790-3
" This Country and Holland ought to remain quiet as long as it is possible to do so."
Lord Grenville, November, 1792.
F or a time it looked as though the first nation in Europe—formerly the terror of her neighbours—might prefer the road of peaceful evolution to that of revolutionary violence. The clamour of the angry fishwives on the march from Versailles was followed by a reaction: the upper middle-class and the more liberal of the nobility assumed a kind of loose control. A business government of rich men dedicated to the proposition of liberty for the talents irrespective of birth temporarily took the place of the old aristocratic muddle and inertia of Versailles. The King to all appearance accepted his new situation as the first clerk of the nation. A man of genius with one foot in both camps, Mirabeau—a rebel who understood the necessity of order and an aristocrat who was also a demagogue—kept liaison between King and Assembly. So long as he lived there was reasonable hope that the French Revolution would take the steady and decent course that every British lover of freedom wanted to see it take.
No one was more convinced that it would than the Prime Minister. A reformer and a lover of peace, William Pitt at 30, after six years as the youngest Premier in English history, was a living example of the triumph of reason. He had apparently no passions, no prejudices and, save for a liking for port, scarcely any weaknesses. By his industry, sound judgment and financial acumen he had raised his country in a few years from the despairing aftermath of a ruinous war to a prosperity unrivalled in the world. He had restored her finances, liberalised her commercial system and begun to rationalise her laws and parliamentary system. Without humiliating his sovereign, he had red uced the undue influence of the Crown and simultaneously ended the long political monopoly of the great Whig families. Instead he had set up a liberal" Tory " government representing the smaller squires and the commercial classes and legislating not for an hereditary clique but for the nation as a whole. He had done, in fact, or begun to do all those practical things about which the French theoretical philosophers and politicians never tired of talking.
The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with them: unlike his father, Chatham, he loathed the very
1 D'Arblay, II, 316.
notice it. " Ah, Mary," says he, " that's a pretty hat! that's a pretty hat!"
Because of these things and because, despite black spots in the national existence, most Englishmen were tolerably satisfied with their lot, King George's subjects echoed Parson Woodforde's prayer:
" And may so good a King long live to reign over us—and pray God that his amiable and beloved Queen Charlotte may now enjoy again every happiness this world can afford with so good a man, and may it long, very long continue with them both here and eternal happiness hereafter."
They could not follow events across the Channel without their viewpoint being affected by such personal considerations: and when the French people rose in their majesty and established liberty by flinging drunken insults at their sovereign and butchering his retainers, they refused to approve such goings-on. Liberty was one thing: " anarchy and confusion " another. Even John Wilkes, that tried champion of the populace's right to do as it pleased, observed that the new France was not a democracy but a mobocracy.
Not that Britons wished to interfere with their neighbour's concerns. The best of them continued to believe that good would come out of evil and that the licence which despotism had begotten would be succeeded by ordered freedom. For they knew that the French—that effervescent people—must be given time to learn the sober lessons which their own sane land had only mastered in the course of many centuries.
CHAPTER THREE
The Failure of Appeasement 1790-3
" This Country and Holland ought to remain quiet as long as it is possible to do so."
Lord Grenville, November, 1792.
F or a time it looked as though the first nation in Europe—formerly the terror of her neighbours—might prefer the road of peaceful evolution to that of revolutionary violence. The clamour of the angry fishwives on the march from Versailles was followed by a reaction: the upper middle-class and the more liberal of the nobility assumed a kind of loose control. A business government of rich men dedicated to the proposition of liberty for the talents irrespective of birth temporarily took the place of the old aristocratic muddle and inertia of Versailles. The King to all appearance accepted his new situation as the first clerk of the nation. A man of genius with one foot in both camps, Mirabeau—a rebel who understood the necessity of order and an aristocrat who was also a demagogue—kept liaison between King and Assembly. So long as he lived there was reasonable hope that the French Revolution would take the steady and decent course that every British lover of freedom wanted to see it take.
No one was more convinced that it would than the Prime Minister. A reformer and a lover of peace, William Pitt at 30, after six years as the youngest Premier in English history, was a living example of the triumph of reason. He had apparently no passions, no prejudices and, save for a liking for port, scarcely any weaknesses. By his industry, sound judgment and financial acumen he had raised his country in a few years from the despairing aftermath of a ruinous war to a prosperity unrivalled in the world. He had restored her finances, liberalised her commercial system and begun to rationalise her laws and parliamentary system. Without humiliating his sovereign, he had red uced the undue influence of the Crown and simultaneously ended the long political monopoly of the great Whig families. Instead he had set up a liberal" Tory " government representing the smaller squires and the commercial classes and legislating not for an hereditary clique but for the nation as a whole. He had done, in fact, or begun to do all those practical things about which the French theoretical philosophers and politicians never tired of talking.
The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with them: unlike his father, Chatham, he loathed the very
Similar Books
