Jenny Uglow Quotes

Before the battle they had been discussing whether there might be life after death, and Windham and Rochester had made a pact that if there was, the first to die would come back and tell the other. But, said Rochester, he [Windham] never did.

Like many boys unhappy at school Lear built an inner life and learned that one way to be accepted was to make people laugh, to become an amiable buffoon. While he fretted about being ‘half-educated’ he was glad, he said later, to have escaped the straitjacket of conventional teaching, as so many of those who had been laboriously and expensively educated lost their learning, ‘& remain like Swift’s Stullbruggs – cut & dried for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures: – whereas I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge’.

On the third morning of the riots Burdett saw a constable, balanced on a ladder, peering through his library windows, and heard soldiers break in downstairs: he was arrested reading the Magna Carta to his son, an aptly dramatic scene. He was then taken to the Tower in a coach guarded by six hundred cavalrymen wielding sabres.

On Easter Sunday, 18 April, the Te Deums were sung and the Lord was praised for removing the tyrant. ‘Nap the Mighty is gone to pot,’ wrote the nineteen-year-old Thomas Carlyle in amazement, with double underlining.

Amabel Hume-Campbell came from a stalwart Whig family. She was the daughter of Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (whose brother Charles was made Lord Chancellor just before his death in 1770). Prodigiously clever, frustrated that she could not enter politics herself, Amabel wrote two studies of the French Revolution, and of French ambitions, in 1792 and 1796.1 As she went through life she garnered a bevy of titles, her husband’s and her own – Baroness Lucas, Lady Polwarth, Countess de Grey – but she always felt stoutly a Yorke. Her husband Lord Polwarth died when he was thirty, and by now, in her mid-forties, she had been almost fifteen years a widow, sturdily independent and a diligent letter-writer, as her scholarly, bluestocking mother Jemima had been.

When William Harness, a regular soldier, was recruiting in Sheffield, he set off with three or four other officers, as he told his wife Bessy: Then follows a Cart with a Barrel of ale with fidlers and a Man with a Surloin of Roast Beef upon a pitch fork, then my Colours of yellow silk with a blue shield with a reath of oak leaves and trophies, and in Silver letters on one side ‘Capt. Harness’s Rangers’, on the other ‘Capt. Harness’s Saucy Sheffielders’.8 The sergeant, corps, drums and fifes followed. ‘You can conceive the stir in a prosperous place like this all this noise must make. I am become very popular.’ Harness was one of many officers recruiting their own companies. He had been in the army for thirteen years, saving money to marry his ‘adored Bessy’, Elizabeth Biggs, in 1791. During her long wait Bessy took up botany, tried to run a book club in her home town of Aylesbury, and loyally made him shirts.

Sinclair was even more impassioned. He owned large estates in Caithness and in the 1790s he compiled his detailed Statistical Account of Scotland, a compendium of information on geography, economy and society and history that would eventually grow to twenty-one volumes. Putting the new theories

Pitt himself had declared that he could think of no greater evil than ‘the tearing of seventy or eighty thousand persons annually from their native land, by a combination of the most civilised nations, inhabiting the most enlightened quarter of the globe’.29 There was no nation in Europe, he went on, ‘that has, on the one hand, plunged so deeply into this guilt as Britain, or that is so likely, on the other, to be looked to as an example, if she should have the manliness to be the first in decidedly renouncing it’.

Our Shepherds’, he wrote angrily, ‘Thirsted to make the guardian Crook of Law/A tool of Murder’: Giants in their impiety alone, But in their weapons and their warfare base As vermin working out of reach, they leagued Their strength perfidiously to undermine Justice, and make an end of Liberty.

When John’s wife died in 1792, he had entrusted his eleven children to his oldest daughter, seventeen-year-old Kitty, unconcerned that they wore bright clothes, were rude to neighbours or joined hands across the road to hold up the Norwich coach. While the boys went away to school the girls studied at home at Earlham Hall, reading Rousseau, Voltaire and Paine, and sketching with the Norwich artist John Crome. Clever and forceful, they drank in the radical ideas of the Norwich Unitarian James Alderson and his daughter Amelia, who was a friend of Thomas Holcroft, John Horne Tooke and the Godwin circle, and would marry the painter John Opie in 1798. The Gurneys were well-known figures, not least because of their support for reform. But their political opinions made no difference to their careful, clever banking. One of the Gurneys’ regular East Anglian clients was James Oakes of Bury St Edmunds.

This morning I thought of nothing but the election; I was so interested in it,’ wrote eleven-year-old Louisa. ‘Norwich was in the greatest bustle. We had blue cockades and I bawled out of the window at a fine rate – “Gurney for ever!” Hudson was tossed in the chair. He looked most handsome. I never saw him so handsome or so well.’ In the evening, they heard that Windham had won. ‘I cannot say what I felt, I was so vexed. Eliza and I cried. I hated all the aristocrats; I felt it right to hate them. I was fit to kill them.’2 Louisa was swift to apply political to personal. A few weeks afterwards, angry that her sister Richenda was treated differently just because she was two years older, she scrawled, ‘there is nothing on earth I detest so much as this. I think children ought to be treated according to their merit, not their age. I love democracy, whenever and in whatever form it appears.