Enemies of the State Read Online Free PDF

to 1914 and, in one memorable exchange of goods which flew in the face of all logic, Napoleon sent shiploads of corn to Britain in exchange for Nottingham-made boots so that his troops could go on killing ours!
    We have already seen the impact of the wars on agriculture. Enclosure was the watchword. After 1806 Napoleon’s Continental System, though never fully functional, was designed to seal Britain off from the rest of Europe. We had never been self-sufficient in terms of foodstuffs and now the situation was worse. Reliance on the harvest and good weather became absolutely crucial and rural distress remained a burning issue for years to come.
    In terms of paying for the war, the poor had what, with hindsight, was something of a lucky break. To keep the coalitions sweet, Pitt arbitrarily withdrew gold from the banks and issued paper ‘promissory notes’ instead. In 1797, the same year as the naval mutinies at the Nore and Spithead, the banks collapsed in a spectacular crisis of confidence. Bank employees werebeaten up and their windows smashed as investors were told their gold had gone. A recurring theme of the pugnacious William Cobbett’s pamphlets from 1802 was hatred of ‘Mr Pitt’s paper money’. In 1799, Pitt hit upon the obvious and introduced a tax on incomes, graduated so that the rich paid most, on incomes of over £60 a year. Since no working man earned anything like that (farm labourers, for instance, subsisted on anything between £5 and £8), the poor found their financial burden lighter in these years. Direct taxation, which they did not pay, had largely replaced indirect taxation, which they did.
    And then, suddenly, from 1814, all that changed. Napoleon’s escape from his first imprisonment on Elba and the subsequent hundred days campaign that culminated in Waterloo proved to be a mere last gasp of ‘la gloire’. And after that long June day certainly, the demand for wartime industries collapsed overnight and the world had changed.
    No one needed swords, guns, bayonets, sail, tents, buckles, ammunition and warships. The Elizabethan statesman Lord Burghley had famously said, ‘Soldiers in peacetime are like chimneys in summer’ and in the summer of 1815, an estimated 300,000 of them came home.
    There were, no doubt, parties and handshakes and heart-warming reunions of families and friends. But reality must have kicked in quickly. An infantryman who had been lucky might have served under Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, since 1808 in Portugal and Spain. That meant he had been out of the workforce for seven years and the workforce had learnt to do without him. If he been a spinner or a weaver, he would find no chance of setting up again independently. If he went, cap in hand, to a Master, he would be asked what experience he had. None, except killing Frenchmen. The door would be slammed in his face. One of the five men who died at Newgate after the Cato Street conspiracy was ex-military; so was one of the principal witnesses against them. It would be fascinating to know how many ex-soldiers joined the Luddites to smash the hated machines, marched with the radicals at Spa Fields in 1816, 14 faced the yeomanry at St Peter’s Fields two years later and were in that crowd outside Newgate when the men of Cato Street met their maker. For the world had turned. Any cold analysis of revolution, any attempt to explain why one works and the other does not, must hinge on the role of the army. In France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, the army was divided, shaky, disloyal. In Britain in 1815–22, the army was rocksolid. But those who had left the army were a different matter. In some cases, whole regiments, like the 23rd Light Dragoons, were disbanded. In others, their strength was halved. The government of Lord Liverpool was desperate to save money and this was one obvious way of doing it. In the navy, the story ran the same as ships’ companies were