Collections and Recollections Part 6

To the Society of Friends--a body not historically or theologically Evangelical--belongs the credit of having first awoke, and tried to rouse others, to a sense of the horrors and iniquities involved in the slave-trade; but the adhesion of William Wilberforce and his friends at Clapham identified the movement for emanc.i.p.ation with the Evangelical party. Never were the enthusiasm, the activity, the uncompromising devotion to principle which marked the Evangelicals turned to better account. Their very narrowness gave intensity and concentration to their work, and their victory, though deferred, was complete. It has been truly said that when the English nation had been thoroughly convinced that slavery was a curse which must be got rid of at any cost, we cheerfully paid down as the price of its abolition twenty millions in cash, and threw the prosperity of our West Indian colonies into the bargain. Yet we only spent on it one-tenth of what it cost us to lose America, and one-fiftieth of what we spent in avenging the execution of Louis XVI.

In spite of all these conspicuous and beneficent advances in the direction of humanity, a great deal of severity, and what appears to us brutality, remained embedded in our social system. I have spoken in previous chapters of the methods of discipline enforced in the services, in jails, in poorhouses, and in schools.[10] A very similar spirit prevailed even in the home. Children were shut up in dark closets, starved, and flogged. Lord Shaftesbury's father used to knock him down, and recommended his tutor at Harrow to do the same. Archdeacon Denison describes in his autobiography how he and his brothers were thrashed by their tutor when they were youths of sixteen and had left Eton. _The Fairchild Family_--that quaint picture of Evangelical life and manners--depicts a religious father as punis.h.i.+ng his quarrelsome children by taking them to see a murderer hanging in chains, and as chastising every peccadillo of infancy with a severity which makes one long to flog Mr. Fairchild.

But still, in spite of all these checks and drawbacks and evil survivals, the tide of humanitarianism flowed on, and gradually altered the aspect of English life. The b.l.o.o.d.y Penal Code was mitigated. Prisons and poorhouses were reformed. The discipline of school and of home was tempered by the infusion of mercy and reason into the iron regimen of terror. And this general diminution of brutality was not the only form of social amelioration. It was accompanied by a gradual but perceptible increase in decency, refinement, and material prosperity. Splendour diminished, and luxury remained the monopoly of the rich; but comfort--that peculiarly English treasure--was more generally diffused.

In that diffusion the Evangelicals had their full share. Thackeray's admirable description of Mrs. Newcome's villa is drawn from the life: "In Egypt itself there were not more savoury fleshpots than those at Clapham. Her mansion was long the resort of the most favoured among the religious world. The most eloquent expounders, the most gifted missionaries, the most interesting converts from foreign islands were to be found at her sumptuous table, spread with the produce of her magnificent gardens ... a great, s.h.i.+ning, mahogany table, covered with grapes, pineapples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded by stout men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took little Tommy on their knees and questioned him as to his right understanding of the place whither naughty boys were bound."

Again, in his paper on _Dinners_ the same great master of a fascinating subject speaks the words of truth and soberness when he says: "I don't know when I have been better entertained, as far as creature comforts go, than by men of very Low Church principles; and one of the very best repasts that ever I saw in my life was at Darlington, given by a Quaker." This admirable tradition of material comfort allied with Evangelical opinion extended into my own time. The characteristic weakness of Mr. Stiggins has no place in my recollection; but Mr.

Chadband I have frequently met in Evangelical circles, both inside and outside the Establishment. Debarred by the strictness of their principles from such amus.e.m.e.nts as dancing, cards, and theatres, the Evangelicals took their pleasure in eating and drinking. They abounded in hospitality; and when they were not entertaining or being entertained, occupied their evenings with systematic reading, which gave their religious compositions a sound basis of general culture.

Austerity, gloom, and Pharisaism had no place among the better cla.s.s of Evangelicals. Wilberforce, p.r.o.nounced by Madame de Stael to be the most agreeable man in England, was of "a most gay and genial disposition;"

"lived in perpetual suns.h.i.+ne, and shed its radiance all around him."

Legh Richmond was "exceedingly good company." Robinson of Leicester was "a capital conversationalist, very lively and bright." Alexander Knox found that Mrs. Hannah More "far exceeded his expectations in pleasant manners and interesting conversation."

The increasing taste for solid comfort and easy living which accompanied the development of humanitarianism, and in which, as we have just seen, the Evangelicals had their full share, was evidenced to the eye by the changes in domestic architecture. There was less pretension in exteriors and elevations, but more regard to convenience and propriety within. The s.p.a.ce was not all sacrificed to reception-rooms. Bedrooms were multiplied and enlarged; and fireplaces were introduced into every room, transforming the arctic "powdering-closet" into a habitable dressing-room. The diminution of the Window-Tax made light and ventilation possible. Personal cleanliness became fas.h.i.+onable, and the means of attaining it were cultivated. The whole art or science of domestic sanitation--rudimentary enough in its beginnings--belongs to the nineteenth century. The system which went before it was too primitively abominable to bear description. Sir Robert Rawlinson, the sanitary expert, who was called in to inspect Windsor Castle after the Prince Consort's death, reported that, within the Queen's reign, "cesspools full of putrid refuse and drains of the worst description existed beneath the bas.e.m.e.nts.... Twenty of these cesspools were removed from the upper ward, and twenty-eight from the middle and lower wards.... Means of ventilation by windows in Windsor Castle were very defective. Even in the royal apartments the upper portions of the windows were fixed. Lower cas.e.m.e.nts alone could be opened, so that by far the largest amount of air-s.p.a.ces in the rooms contained vitiated air, comparatively stagnant." When this was the condition of royal abodes, no wonder that the typhoid-germ, like Solomon's spider, "took hold with her hands, and was in kings' palaces." And well might Sir George Trevelyan, in his ardent youth, exclaim:--

"We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men.

For every gla.s.s of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten.

They lived above the foulest drains, they breathed the closest air, They had their yearly twinge of gout, but little seemed to care.

But, though they burned their coals at home, nor fetched their ice from Wenham, They played the man before Quebec and stormed the lines at Blenheim.

When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork, No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork.

But now that Jack gets beef and greens and next his skin wears flannel, The _Standard_ says we've not a s.h.i.+p in plight to hold the Channel."

So much for Social Amelioration.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] For a lively description of Andover School in the eighteenth century, see the _Memoirs of "Orator Hunt_.'"

X.

POLITICS.

I now approach the political condition at the turn of the century, and that was to a great extent the product of the French Revolution. Some historians, indeed, when dealing with that inexhaustible theme, have wrought cause and effect into a circular chain, and have reckoned among the circ.u.mstances which prepared the way for the French Revolution the fact that Voltaire in his youth spent three years in England, and mastered the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Deism of the English Freethinkers, and the English theory of political liberty. That these doctrines, recommended by Voltaire's mordant genius and matchless style, and circulating in a community prepared by tyranny to receive them, acted as a powerful solvent on the intellectual basis of French society, is indeed likely enough. But to pursue the theme would carry us too far back into the eighteenth century. In dealing with the recollections of persons whom one's self has known we must dismiss from view the causes of the French Revolution. Our business is with its effect on political thought and action in England.

About half way through the nineteenth century it became the fas.h.i.+on to make out that the effect of the Revolution on England had been exaggerated. Satirists made fun of our traditional Gallophobia. In that admirable skit on philosophical history, the introduction to the _Book of Sn.o.bs_, Thackeray first ill.u.s.trates his theme by a reference to the French Revolution, and then adds (in sarcastic brackets)--"Which the reader will be pleased to have introduced so early." Lord Beaconsfield, quizzing John Wilson Croker in _Coningsby_, says: "He bored his audience with too much history, especially the French Revolution, which he fancied was his forte, so that the people at last, whenever he made any allusion to the subject, were almost as much terrified as if they had seen the guillotine." In spite of these gibes, historians have of late years returned to the earlier and truer view, and have deliberately reaffirmed the tremendous effect of the Revolution on English politics.

The philosophical Mr. Lecky says that it influenced English history in the later years of the eighteenth century more powerfully than any other event; that it gave a completely new direction to the statesmans.h.i.+p of Pitt; that it instantaneously shattered, and rendered ineffectual for a whole generation, one of the two great parties in the State; and that it determined for a like period the character and complexion of our foreign policy.

All contemporary Europe--all subsequent time--quivered with the shock and sickened at the carnage; but I have gathered that it was not till the capture of the Bastille that the events which were taking place in France attracted any general or lively interest in England. The strifes of rival politicians, the illness of George III., and the consequent questions as to the Regency, engrossed the public mind, and what little interest was felt in foreign affairs was directed much more to the possible designs of Russia than to the actual condition of France. The capture of the Bastille, however, was an event so startling and so dramatic that it instantly arrested the public attention of England, and the events which immediately followed in rapid and striking succession raised interest into excitement, and excitement into pa.s.sion. Men who had been accustomed from their childhood to regard the Monarchy of France as the type of a splendid, powerful, and enduring polity now saw a National Army const.i.tuted in complete independence of the Crown; a Representative Body a.s.suming absolute power and denying the King's right to dissolve; the summary abrogation of the whole feudal system, which a year before had seemed endowed with perpetual vigour; an insurrection of the peasantry against their territorial tyrants, accompanied by every horror of pillage, arson, and bloodshed; the beautiful and stately Queen flying, half naked, for her life, amid the slaughter of her sentinels and courtiers; and the King himself virtually a prisoner in the very Court which, up to that moment, had seemed the ark and sanctuary of absolute government. All over England these events produced their immediate and natural effect. Enemies of religious establishments took courage from the downfall of ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions. Enemies of monarchy rejoiced in the formal and public degradation of a monarch.

Those who had long been conscientiously working for Parliamentary reform saw with glee their principles expressed in the most uncompromising terms in the French Declaration of Rights, and practically applied in the const.i.tution of the Sovereign Body of France.

These convinced and const.i.tutional reformers found new and strange allies. Serious advocates of Republican inst.i.tutions, mere lovers of change and excitement, secret sympathizers with lawlessness and violence, sedentary theorists, reckless adventurers, and local busybodies a.s.sociated themselves in the endeavour to popularize the French Revolution in England and to imbue the English mind with congenial sentiments. The movement had leaders of greater mark. The Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Richmond, Lord Lansdowne and Lord Stanhope, held language about the Sovereignty of the People such as filled the reverent and orderly mind of Burke with indignant astonishment. In Dr.

Priestley the revolutionary party had an eminent man of science and a polemical writer of rare power. Dr. Price was a rhetorician whom any cause would have gladly enlisted as its champion. The Revolution Society, founded to commemorate the capture of the Bastille, corresponded with the leaders of the Revolution, and promised its alliance in a revolutionary compact. And, to add a touch of comedy to these more serious demonstrations, the young Duke of Bedford and other leaders of fas.h.i.+on discarded hair-powder, and wore their hair cut short in what was understood to be the Republican mode of Paris.

Amidst all this hurly-burly Pitt maintained a stately and cautious reserve. Probably he foresaw his opportunity in the inevitable disruption of his opponents; and if so, his foresight was soon realized by events. On the capture of the Bastille, Fox exclaimed: "How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!" At the same time Burke was writing to an intimate friend: "The old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true that this may be no more than a sudden explosion. If so, no indication can be taken from it; but if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for liberty, and must have a strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them." This contrast between the judgments of the 10 great Whigs was continuously and rapidly heightened. Fox threw himself into the revolutionary cause with all the ardour which he had displayed on behalf of American independence. Burke opposed with characteristic vehemence the French attempt to build up a theoretical Const.i.tution on the ruins of religion, history, and authority; and any fresh act of cruelty or oppression which accompanied the process stirred in him that tremendous indignation against violence and injustice of which Warren Hastings had learned by stern experience the intensity and the volume. The _Reflections on the French Revolution_ and the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ expressed in the most splendid English which was ever written the dire apprehensions that darkened their author's receptive and impa.s.sioned mind. "A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over England, and even echoed in all the Courts of Europe. Burke poured the vials of his h.o.a.rded vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom, and stimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspired imagination."

Meanwhile the Whig party was rent in twain. The Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re, Lord John Cavendish, and Sir George Elliot adhered to Burke. Fox as stoutly opposed him, and was reinforced by Sheridan, Francis, Erskine, and Grey. The pathetic issue of the dispute, in Burke's formal repudiation of Fox's friends.h.i.+p, has taken its place among those historic Partings of Friends which have modified the course of human society. As far as can now be judged, the bulk of the country was with Burke, and the execution of Louis XVI. was followed by an astonis.h.i.+ng outbreak of popular feeling. The theatres were closed.

The whole population wore mourning. The streets rang with the cry "War with France!" The very pulpits re-echoed the summons. Fox himself was constrained to declare to the electors of Westminster that there was no one outside France who did not consider this sad catastrophe "as a most revolting act of cruelty and injustice."

But it was too late. The horror and indignation of England were not to be allayed by soothing words of decorous sympathy from men who had applauded the earlier stages of the tragedy, though they wept at its culmination. The warlike spirit of the race was aroused, and it spoke in the cry, "No peace with the regicides!" Pitt clearly discerned the feeling of the country, and promptly gave effect to it. He dismissed Chauvelin, who informally represented the Revolutionary Government in London, and he demanded from Parliament an immediate augmentation of the forces.

On the 20th of January, 1793, France declared war against England. The great struggle had begun, and that declaration was a new starting-point in the political history of England. English parties entered into new combinations. English politics a.s.sumed a new complexion. Pitt's imperial mind maintained its ascendency, but the drift of his policy was entirely changed. All the schemes of Parliamentary, financial, and commercial reform in which he had been immersed yielded place to the stern expedients of a Minister fighting for his life against revolution abroad and sedition at home. For though, as I said just now, popular sentiment was stirred by the King's execution into vehement hostility to France, still the progress of the war was attended by domestic consequences which considerably modified this sentiment. Hostility gave way to pa.s.sive acquiescence, and acquiescence to active sympathy.

Among the causes which produced this change were the immense increase of national burdens; the sudden agglomeration of a lawless population in the manufacturing towns which the war called into being; the growing difficulties in Ireland, where revolutionary theories found ready learners; the absolute abandonment of all attempts at social and political improvement; the dogged determination of those in authority to remedy no grievance however patent, and to correct no abuse however indefensible.

The wise and temperate reforms for which the times were ripe, and which the civil genius of Pitt pre-eminently qualified him to effect, were not only suspended but finally abandoned under the influence of an insane reaction. The besotted resistance to all change stimulated the desire for it. Physical distress co-operated with political discontent to produce a state of popular disaffection such as the whole preceding century had never seen. The severest measures of coercion and repression only, and scarcely, restrained the populace from open and desperate insurrection, and thirty years of this experience brought England to the verge of a civil catastrophe.

Patriotism was lost in partisans.h.i.+p. Political faction ran to an incredible excess. The whole community was divided into two hostile camps. Broadly speaking, the cause of France was espoused, with different degrees of fervour, by all lovers of civil and religious freedom. To the Whigs the humiliation of Pitt was a more cherished object than the defeat of Napoleon. Fox wrote to a friend: "The triumph of the French Government over the English does, in fact, afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise;" and I have gathered that this was the prevalent temper of Whiggery during the long and desperate struggle with Republican and Imperial France. What Byron called "The crowning carnage, Waterloo," brought no abatement of political rancour. The question of France, indeed, was eliminated from the contest, but its elimination enabled English Liberals to concentrate their hostility on the Tory Government without incurring the reproach of unpatriotic sympathy with the enemies of England.

In the great fight between Tory and Whig, Government and Opposition, Authority and Freedom, there was no quarter. Neither age nor s.e.x was spared. No department of national life was untouched by the fury of the contest. The Royal Family was divided. The Duke of c.u.mberland was one of the most dogged and unscrupulous leaders of the Tory party; the Duke of Suss.e.x toasted the memory of Charles James Fox, and at a public dinner joined in singing "The Trumpet of Liberty," of which the chorus ran--

"Fall, tyrants, fall!

These are the days of liberty; Fall, tyrants, fall!"

The Established Church was on the side of authority; the Dissenters stood for freedom. "Our opponents," said Lord John Russell, in one of his earliest speeches--"our opponents deafen us with their cry of 'Church and King.' Shall I tell you what they mean by it? They mean a Church without the Gospel and a King above the law." An old Radical electioneer, describing the activity of the country clergy on the Tory side, said: "In every village we had the Black Recruiting-Sergeant against us." Even within sacred walls the echoes of the fight were heard. The State Holy-days--Gunpowder Treason, Charles the Martyr, the Restoration and the Accession--gave suitable occasion for sermons of the most polemical vehemence. Even the two Collects for the King at the beginning of the Communion Service were regarded as respectively Tory and Whig. The first, with its bold a.s.sertion of the Divine Right of Sovereignty, was that which commended itself to every loyal clergyman on his promotion; and unfavourable conclusions were drawn with regard to the civil sentiments of the man who preferred the colourless alternative. As in the Church, so in our educational system. Oxford, with its Caroline and Jacobite traditions, was the Tory University; Cambridge, the nursing mother of Whigs; Eton was supposed to cherish a sentiment of romantic affection for the Stuarts; Harrow was profoundly Hanoverian. Even the drama was involved in political antipathies, and the most enthusiastic adherents of Kean and Kemble were found respectively among the leaders of Whig and Tory Society.

The vigour, heartiness, and sincerity of this political hatred put to shame the more tepid convictions of our degenerate days. The first Earl of Leicester, better known as "c.o.ke of Norfolk," told my father that when he was a child his grandfather took him on his knee and said, "Now, remember, Tom, as long as you live, never trust a Tory;" and he used to say, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." A little girl of Whig descent, accustomed from her cradle to hear language of this sort, asked her mother, "Mamma, are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?" and her mother judiciously replied, "They are born wicked, and grow worse." I well remember in my youth an eccentric maiden lady--Miss Harriet f.a.n.n.y Cuyler--who had spent a long and interesting life in the innermost circles of aristocratic Whiggery; and she always refused to enter a four-wheel cab until she had extorted from the driver his personal a.s.surance that he never had cases of infectious disease in his cab, that he was not a Puseyite, and was a Whig.

I am bound to say that this vehement prejudice was not unnatural in a generation that remembered, either personally or by immediate tradition, the iron coercion which Pitt exercised in his later days, and which his successors continued. The barbarous executions for high treason remain a blot on the fair fame of the nineteenth century. Scarcely less horrible were the trials for sedition, which sent an English clergyman to transportation for life because he had signed a pet.i.tion in favour of Parliamentary reform.

"The good old Code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And each old English peasant had his good old English spies, To tempt his starving discontent with good old English lies, Then call the British yeomanry to stop his peevish cries."

At Woburn, a market town forty miles from London, under the very shadow of a great Whig house, no political meeting could be held for fear of Pitt's spies, who dropped down from London by the night coach and returned to lay information against popular speakers; and when the politicians of the place desired to express their sentiments, they had to repair secretly to an adjacent village off the coach road, where they were harangued under cover of night by the young sons of the Duke of Bedford.

The ferocity, the venality, the profligate expenditure, the delirious excitement of contested elections have made an indelible mark on our political history. In 1780 King George III. personally canva.s.sed the Borough of Windsor against the Whig candidate, Admiral Keppel, and propitiated a silk-mercer by calling at his shop and saying, "The Queen wants a gown--wants a gown. No Keppel. No Keppel." It is pleasant to reflect that the friends of freedom were not an inch behind the upholders of tyranny in the vigour and adroitness of their electioneering methods. The contest for the City of Westminster in 1788 is thus described in the ma.n.u.script diary of Lord Robert Seymour:--

"The Riotts of the Westr. Election are carried such lengths the Military obliged to be called into the a.s.sistance of Ld. Hood's party. Several Persons have been killed by Ld. J. Townsend's Butchers who cleave them to the Ground with their Cleavers--Mr. Fox very narrowly escaped being killed by a Bayonet wch. w'd certainly have been fatal had not a poor Black saved him fm. the blow. Mr. Macnamara's Life is despaired of--& several others have died in the difft. Hospitals. Next Thursday decides the business.

"July 25.--Lord John Townsend likely to get the Election--what has chiefly contributed to Ld. Hood's losing it is that Mr. Pulteney is his Friend--Mr. P. can command 1,500 Votes--& as he is universally disliked by his Tenants they are unanimous in voting against him--wch. for Ld. H.

proves a very unfortunate circ.u.mstance. The Duke of Bedford sent 10,000 towards the Expenses of the Opposition.

"It is thought that Lord Hood will not attempt a Scrutiny. One of Ld.

Hood's votes was discovered to be a carrot-sc.r.a.per in St. James's Market who sleeps in a little Kennel about the Size of a Hen Coup.

"Augt. 5th--The Election decided in favour of Ld. J.T., who was chaired--and attend'd by a Procession of a mile in length. On his Head was a crown of Laurel. C. Fox follow'd him in a Landau & 6 Horses cover'd in Favors & Lawrels. The appearance this Procession made was equal in splendor to the public Entry of an Amba.s.sador."

A by-election was impending in Yorks.h.i.+re, and Pitt, paying a social visit to the famous Mrs. B.--one of the Whig Queens of the West Riding--said, banteringly, "Well, the election is all right for us. Ten thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorks.h.i.+re to-night by a sure hand." "The devil they do!" responded Mrs. B., and that night the bearer of the precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the Great North Road, and the ten thousand guineas were used to procure the return of the Whig candidate. The electioneering methods, less adventurous but not more scrupulous, of a rather later day have been depicted in _Pickwick_, and _Coningsby_, and _My Novel_, and _Middlemarch_, with all the suggestive fun of a painting by Hogarth.

And so, with startling incidents and culpable expedients and varying fortunes, the great struggle for political freedom was conducted through the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, and it has been my interesting fortune to know some of the toughest of the combatants both among the leaders and in the rank-and-file. And from all of them alike--and not only from them, but from all who remembered the time--I have gathered the impression that all through their earlier life the hidden fires of revolution were smouldering under English society, and that again and again an actual outbreak was only averted by some happy stroke of fortune. At the Election of 1868 an old labourer in the agricultural Borough of Woodstock told a Liberal canva.s.ser from Oxford that in his youth arms had been stored in his father's cottage so as to be in readiness for the outbreak which was to take place if Lord Grey's Reform Bill was finally defeated. A Whig n.o.bleman, of great experience and calm judgment, told me that if Princess Victoria had died before William IV., and thereby Ernest Duke of c.u.mberland had succeeded to the Throne, no earthly power could have averted a revolution. "I have no hesitation in saying," I heard Mr. Gladstone say, "that if the repeal of the Corn Laws had been defeated, or even r.e.t.a.r.ded, we should have had a revolution." Charles Kingsley and his fellow-workers for Social Reform expected a revolution in April 1848.

But, after all, these testimonies belong to the region of conjecture.

Let me close this chapter by a narrative of fact, derived from the late Lord de Ros, who was an eye-witness of the events which he narrated.

Arthur Thistlewood (whose execution for the "Cato Street Conspiracy" I have described in a previous chapter) was a young Englishman who had been in Paris in the time of Robespierre's ascendency, and had there imbibed revolutionary sentiments. He served for a short time as an officer in the English Army, and after quitting the service he made himself notorious by trying to organize a political riot in London, for which he was tried and acquitted. He subsequently collected round him a secret society of disaffected citizens, and proceeded to arrange a plan by which he hoped to paralyze Government and establish a Reign of Terror in London.

One evening, in the winter of 1819-20, a full-dress ball was given by the Spanish Amba.s.sador in Portland Place, and was attended by the Prince Regent, the Royal Dukes, the Duke of Wellington, the Ministers of State, and the leaders of fas.h.i.+on and society. "About one o'clock, just before supper, a sort of order was circulated among the junior officers to draw towards the head of the stairs, though no one knew for what reason, except that an unusual crowd had a.s.sembled in the street. The appearance of Lavender and one or two well-known Bow Street officers in the entrance-hall also gave rise to surmises of some impending riot. While the officers were whispering to one another as to what was expected to happen, a great noise was heard in the street, the crowd dispersed with loud cries in all directions, and a squadron of the 2nd Life Guards arrived with drawn swords at a gallop from their barracks (then situate in King Street), and rapidly formed in front of the Amba.s.sador's house.

Lavender and the Bow Street officers now withdrew; the officers who had gathered about the stairhead were desired to return to the ballroom.

"The alarm, whatever it might have been, appeared to be over, and before the company broke up the Life Guards had been withdrawn to their barracks. Inside the Amba.s.sador's house all had remained so quiet that very few of the ladies present were aware till next day that anything unusual had happened, but it became known after a short time that the Duke of Wellington had received information of an intended attack upon the house, which the precautions taken had probably prevented; and upon the trial of Thistlewood and his gang (for the Cato Street Conspiracy) it came out, among other evidence of the various wild schemes they had formed, that Thistlewood had certainly entertained the project, at the time of this ball, to attack the Spanish Amba.s.sador's house, and destroy the Regent and other Royal personages, as well as the Ministers, who were sure to be, most of them, present on the occasion."