Men of Honour by Adam Nicolson Page B

were working in commerce or industry, equalling the number working on the land. Barely one in ten Europeans lived in towns; in 1800, a quarter of the English did. By 1815, that proportion would have risen to a third. There were a million Londoners by 1811, an unprecedentedly vast agglomeration of human beings, a mass of humanity which amazed and appalled its inhabitants, as though it were some sublime effusion of the earth itself; towns in northern England were already black from the smoke of their ‘manufactories’. There were no internal trade barriers and Britain was the largest free-trade area in Europe.
    The 18th-century English were acknowledged throughout Europe for their violence, shooting highwaymen and seducing 17-year-olds, swearing and farting in public, congratulating themselves on their lack of the effeminate refinements which the French affected. One young English nobleman returned from Paris wearing a wig made of very finely spun iron wire. He became famous for it, a measure of what the English were not. Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, ate apples in the chamber of the House of Commons to demonstrate his ordinariness. It was not unknown to be shot at in London. Horace Walpole, the Prime Minister’s nephew, had to dodge pistol shots in Hyde Park. ‘Anything that looks like a fight,’ one French traveller, Henri Misson, wrote home, a little scandalised, ‘an Englishman considers delicious.’
    They liked to bet on anything. The craze for cricket, which swept the country, was largely fuelled by gamblingon the outcome of matches, or even on the turn of a single ball. Twenty thousand people came to see Kent play Hampshire in 1772. Lord Sackville batted for a Kent side captained by Rumney, his head gardener. The delights of risk and chance were high on the list of English pleasures. Between its medieval and its 19th-century proprieties, the English spirit of the 18th century had become astonishingly mobile. They were no longer bound to the land. They had made the great escape from the essentially static patterns of a rural agrarian world and moved into the accelerated, modern rhythms of the commercial, the urban, the industrial and the sudden. ‘Nobody is provincial in this country,’ Louis Simond, a Swiss-American visitor in the first years of the 19th century wrote.
You meet nowhere with those persons who never were out of their native place, and whose habits are wholly local—nobody above poverty who has not visited London once in his life; and most of those who can do so, visit it once a year. To go up to town from 100 or 200 miles distance, is a thing done on a sudden, and without any previous deliberation. In France the people of the provinces used to make their will before they undertook such an expedition.
    They were, by European standards, strikingly literate. By 1790 there were 14 London morning papers and another in the evening. The first Sunday paper began production in 1799. Papers were read at breakfast and as a result an English tradition had already begun: conversation at breakfast was never ‘of a lively nature’. They were clean and well fed. The Duc de Rochefoucauld considered the English the cleanest people in Europe. They were also immensely sociable, milling through the streets in crowds. ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly thinking there was a mob,’ Horace Walpole wrote, ‘and it was only nymphsand swains, sauntering and trudging.’ It was a harddrinking country. There were 16,000 drink shops in London; William Pitt, who had been administered daily glasses of port as a sickly child, was by the 1790s a fourbottles—a-day man (although the port was not so alcoholic and the bottles smaller than ours.) People horded into taverns, where, according to Dr Johnson, ‘the true felicity of human life’ was to be found. They loved a show. The theatre in Drury Lane held over 3,600 people. George III would