Reflections on the Regency

I started watching Lucy Worsley's new series 'Elegance & Decadence: the Age of the Regency' on BBC 4 last night.

Seeing the Prince Regent reminded me of an obvious point; how often in the history of rulers of England you get parsimonious ones followed by profligate ones; the temperament and personality of each being reflected in the society of their time. So we could list: Henry VII / Henry VIII; Cromwell / Charles II; George III / George IV; Victoria / Edward VII; George V / Duke of Windsor. A common pattern. Clearly the extravagant ones are reacting against the strictures of their upbringing.

Much more importantly though, I only watched half the programme before I got impatient at its jolly japes, uncritical, the-Regency-at-its-own-estimation tone. After all, where did all the wealth that the Regent and the elite of society of that time were throwing about come from ?

The Regency was a very dark time indeed for many of those in this country who lived through it. On a brief survey, here are some examples.

There were the endless wars with revolutionary France that had been going on almost uninterrupted since 1793 and continued until Waterloo in 1815.

There were the agricultural workers moving to the new industrial centres, the raw beginnings of the factory system with all its injustices, including the destruction of the livelihoods of artisan families (hence the organised frame breakers in the 1810s.) It was illegal since the Combination Acts of 1799 & 1800 for working people to organise trade unions or bargain collectively to improve their conditions; the object being to prevent strikes undermining the war effort. (There is an episode of the Sharpe tv series called Sharpe's Justice which is set in Yorkshire during 1814, and within the framework of an adventure story portrays these clashes between factory owners and their workers of the time very well.)

There was colonial exploitation abroad, particularly for instance in the Atlantic slave trade, which was not prohibited in the British Empire until 1807; and slave labour on the plantations in the West Indies, which continued until 1839. Remember: it was British merchants and planters who were profiting from all this misery.

There was violent suppression by the authorities of any groups trying to get reform to representation in the Parliamentary system, most horrifically at Peterloo in 1819.

Another common and accepted abuse before and during the Regency period was the use of child soldiers, something we readily condemn in Third World conflicts today (Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia etc. etc.). During these particular days of Britannia's greatness you had as a normal part of a full military complement drummer boys in the Army, and powder monkeys in the Navy; these would be 10 years old and upwards.

Children also worked in the factories for unregulatedly long hours and low wages, at constant risk of serious injury. The first Factory Act to try and regulate their conditions of employment, with age and working hours restrictions and so on, came only in 1802. It did not provide for inspections and was widely ignored.

All in all, the Regency was not such a pretty picture to the majority of those living through it.

Now I realise that the programme was deliberately light-hearted and not meant to look at the things I mention above. Nor to be fair do I know whether they were raised later in the programme, or are raised later in the series, since I only as I have said watched the first half of the first one.

But my reaction to it made me reflect on something else; what a solemn Puritan I can be. And that made me reflect how the Puritan / Cavalier cleft in our political life is continuous until today from when it exploded into civil war in the 17th century. To some extent, Labour and the Conservatives still represent the different sides of that split. The Tories are more direct historical heirs of the Cavaliers of course. But if you consider the Labour Party's roots in Methodism and non-conformist Christianity generally, you can trace them by those means right back to the 17th century.