Read Online Men of Honour by Adam Nicolson - Free Book Online

read little but King Lear as his own madness came on. Boxers were media stars: Jim Belcher, Dutch Sam, Bill Stevens ‘The Nailer’, Tom Crib and Daniel Mendoza all wrote their boxing memoirs and were feted in the streets. One London show featured Bruising Peg, a woman gladiator, accompanied by Macomo the Nubian lion tamer. In Charlotte Street in London there was a brothel staffed by flagellants. It was the first great age of the hunt, the aristocracy of England pursuing hounds across hedgerows in precisely the way, 150 years later, they would take up skiing.
    This is the other side of the French and Spanish view of the English as rapacious, amoral go-getters. It was, needless to say, only obliquely related to the English view of themselves. They saw themselves as the apostles and champions of freedom, set against the various benighted tyrannies, whether revolutionary or Catholic, which had Europe in their grip. The poet laureate, Henry James Pye, who was only given that title because he was a supporter of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, celebrated the English vision of modern Englishness in his 1798 poem Naucratia: or Naval Dominion . As a good Tory, gazing out over his acres from the beautiful Palladian villa which he built at Faringdon in Oxfordshire, as loyal MP for Berkshire and a vengeful police magistrate for Westminster, said to be ‘destitute alike of poetic feeling or power of expression’,he had embraced the civilising beauties of Britain’s business mission:
By love of opulence and science led,
    Now commerce wide her peaceful empire spread,
    And seas, obedient to the pilot’s art,
    But join’d the regions which they seem’d to part,
    Free intercourse disarm’d the barbarous mind
    Tam’d hate, and humaniz’d mankind.
    The British warships were not usurping the freedom of the seas; they were establishing it, a maritime, commerceextending force of Roman good. ‘Opulence’ had yet to acquire its derogatory modern note. Wealth was still unequivocally marvellous. Edmund Burke loved to describe the British House of Commons as ‘filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and political distinction, that the country can afford.’ How delicious life was! By the end of the century, a profoundly satisfying complacency had come to settle on British consciousness and the eminently respectable Pye effortlessly embodied it. Not unlike the King he adulated, Henry Pye was the sort of person for whom the Battle of Trafalgar was fought.
    If smugness was widespread, even the self-congratulation of Naucratia does not quite match the breath-taking complacency of some other contemporary propaganda. An anonymous song, published in about 1801, was to be sung in the voice of ‘The Blind Sailor’:
A splinter knocked my nose off,
’My bowsprit’s gone!’ I cries
    â€™Yet well it kept their blows off,
Thank God ‘twas not my eyes.’
    Scarce with these words I outed,
Glad for my eyes and limbs,
    A splinter burst and douted 1
Both my two precious glims. 2
    I’m blind and I’m a cripple,
Yet cheerful would I sing
    Were my disasters triple,
’Cause why? ‘twas for my King.’
    However grotesque that kind of statist propaganda might now seem now—and did seem then, to those radicals in England opposed to the war and its savage carelessness with poor men’s lives—there is nevertheless an important point about the degree to which England was prepared, throughout the period from 1689 until 1815, to subscribe to war. Over that period, the country had been at war for more than half the time. The only long gap was the 16 years of Robert Walpole’s consciously peace-seeking administration from 1713 until 1729. Throughout the long 18th century, Britain was either at war, preparing for war or paying off the enormous costs of war. At