Buckley's Chance Read online

  But despite all this he had been found guilty of high treason. What came next stunned everyone. The Lord Chief Justice handed down his verdict, announcing that Despard and six of his co-conspirators were ‘to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are quite dead, then to be cut down and your bowels taken out and cast into the fire before your faces; your heads to be taken off and your bodies quartered’.

  The verdict astonished just about everyone except those within the King’s circle. The last man in living memory hung, drawn and quartered had been a Scotsman, David Tyrie, a clerk in the Portsmouth Navy Office convicted in 1782 of selling secrets to the French. But hours after the carpenters began erecting the gallows just south of the Thames on the roof of the gatehouse at Horsemonger Lane jail, Despard’s sentence was softened. No quartering or burning of the bowels would take place. Just a simple hanging and beheading, fit for a traitor.

  The crowd was the largest public gathering in London in decades and the handling of the execution would be talked about for years to come. After making a speech once again declaring his innocence, Despard stepped back and a noose was placed around his neck, the hangman ensuring the notch was tightened behind his left ear to ensure a quick death. One of Despard’s colleagues looked out at the vast execution audience and said: ‘What an amazing crowd.’

  Despard looked up at the skies and uttered his last words: ‘’Tis very cold. I think we shall have some rain.’

  It ended brutally. Despard’s body was taken down after hanging in the freezing air for more than 40 minutes. The surgeon responsible for the beheading tried to cut through a joint in the neck vertebrae but botched it and was quickly reduced to hacking. He was joined by the executioner who twisted Despard’s head back and forth until the surgeon’s blade finally severed it from the body. No wonder the crowd hissed. No-one really took offence when a traitor lost his head. The more humiliation the better. But this? There were many in the crowd who saw Despard as a patriot rather than a Judas, a loyalist trying to protect the nation from the real enemy.

  Which brings us to the second head that helps make some sort of sense of England at the turn of the 19th century. It belongs to King George III, the man Despard had been allegedly plotting to kill.

  But George doesn’t need any help when it comes to losing his head. He can do that all by himself.

  No wonder you’re happy to leave this country. You’re not one of the ruling class. Unlike them, you still had to trudge through streets strewn with horse dung while you were a free man. No carriage or footman for you. Unlike many of them you have not been a beneficiary of the enormous profits being made by the British East India Company as it plunders the world with its private army of 26,000 soldiers and fleet of powerful ships. The Age of Enlightenment, that era when philosophers and artists and scientists shone their lights on the human condition and celebrated a new age of scientific reason and discovery, never quite reached those parts of rural England where you grew up. The elites in their parlours and reading rooms can do as much thinking and measuring and studying as they like, but in Cheshire people know there are still ghosts and fairies and witches lurking in the countryside. Cunning folk – healers and magicians – still ply their trade through the small towns and villages. The sight of a white horse means you have to spit on the ground to avoid bad luck. Even a squinting neighbour can hint at misfortune to come. Seventy years earlier, just as the Enlightenment began, the parliament had made it a crime to accuse someone of witchcraft. But in most villages and hamlets there is an old crone everyone knows is hatching some sort of mischief.

  And now the Enlightenment is coming to an end. A new era of cold reason is replacing the age of curiosity. The first Industrial Revolution, with its steam-powered machines and grinding iron cogs, is underway. Massive swathes of the rural population are moving into the cities. London is already seething with more than a million people. Tens of thousands of prostitutes work its squalid streets, vying for trade in the thousands of gin houses and gambling dens.

  England might be the greatest power in the world – within a few decades the Empire will rule over one in four inhabitants of the planet – but much of the nation’s gold-embossed livery is falling apart. War has long been its greatest industry – more than 60 per cent of the government budget is allocated to the Navy and Army to support the never-ending hostility with France and others amid Europe’s constantly shifting alliances. But the treasury’s coffers could do with a lift. Only a year or two ago crop failures after a freezing winter and a rainless summer led to bread riots and mutterings that perhaps the French are not so wrong when they play at revolutions. In Essex, a recipe for turnip bread circulates among the poor. The effects of this new Industrial Age can be seen in Regent’s Park. There, with its 400 acres of rolling paddocks leased to farmers, smart men can tell how long the sheep have been grazing by the amount of soot blackening their wool.

  And ruling over this divided kingdom is Mad George. Nervous courtiers wonder when his next bout of insanity will strike. Days and weeks of mania have been happening more frequently in recent years and will only worsen. The King will be known to write sentences of more than 400 words – a considerable achievement even by the florid writing standards of the day. He will speak and roar for hours until, foaming at the mouth, his voice finally grows faint and he collapses. A rumour will spread from the elites to the streets that the King has shaken hands with a tree, mistaking it for the King of Prussia. Doctors will place him in straightjackets and apply poultices to draw out the ‘evil humours’. One manic bout will see him speak continuously for 56 hours.

  It will take another 200 years before the inheritors of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution – scientists in white coats in sterile laboratories – test a strand of the King’s hair and discover abnormal levels of arsenic, built up through 40 years of powdered wigs and make-up.

  To think it had all begun so promisingly. There’s a portrait of George not long after his coronation, painted just after 1760 when he was 22. It shows a soft-looking young man with pale and slender fingers, cherubic lips and slim body swathed in an enormous fur cloak and gold finery. No hint of the madness to come, no sign of the flushed red face and narrow eyes and foam forming in a corner of his mouth. Say what you like about kings being disposed to madness and how all that damn inbreeding makes it inevitable, but don’t say George is not for England. He has ruled since 1760 and in his many saner moments has been keen to make his mark. Eager to shrug off concerns that his German predecessors of the last 200 years were more loyal to Hanover than London, he told the nation after his coronation that ‘born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain’.

  George has seen England through a period of unprecedented change. There have been many conflicts; success over the French in the Seven Years War and bloody battles throughout Asia and throughout Europe. But he also carries the blame for the loss of the 13 colonies during the American War of Independence and that scar still runs deep.

  It’s one of the reasons why you, William, now find yourself chained on HMS Calcutta and bound for New Holland. Those American colonies had proved to be a rich dumping ground for England’s criminals; from the early 1700s almost 50,000 convicts had been shipped to the New World and the Caribbean. Many were sold to private contractors who used them as nothing more than slave labour. But victory had given the American revolutionary leaders a determination to end their role as receivers of unwanted English goods. Cheaper fodder to pick their cotton had come with an endless supply of imported black slaves.

  George had been stubborn to the end. When negotiations began over a settlement to the revolution, he had written to his advisers saying he would not allow the Americans any favours but ‘permitting them to obtain men unworthy to remain in this island I shall certainly consent to’.

  So many had proven to be unworthy of remaining on English soil. And now, with a new century underway, the prisons are over
flowing. It is estimated up to one in eight Londoners survive on the proceeds of crime. There are more than 160 offences listed as worthy of capital punishment and if those soft magistrates showed a little less mercy then perhaps all those ships of the damned, clogging up the Thames with their 100,000 chained and tortured souls, would not be needed.

  But this is the problem with rapid progress. You know it from your days as a soldier. A fast march leaves the unfit and the unlucky behind, vulnerable to attack.

  In the reign of George III, the real madness takes place in the cities and towns where those left behind struggle to survive. We know a great deal about the bleak lives they lead from the work of Henry Mayhew, a rare journalist of his time who gets his hands dirty by delving into the reality of London street life in the 19th century.

  It must have taken Mayhew some work to win the confidence of London’s underclass. Pudgy and balding with hair hanging loosely over his ears, Mayhew hardly resembles an investigative reporter keen to expose society’s underbelly. He will become a co-founder of the satirical magazine Punch and go on to experience the life of many an editor in the 19th century – fleeing debtors, sometimes overseas. But his book London Labour and the London Poor is the work of a patient and observant anthropologist.

  And one who treads carefully. Mayhew discovers the ‘pure-finders’ – treasure hunters who haunt any area with a stray dog population in order to collect their faeces. Those who make a living from collecting it in buckets know dog turds as brown gold. It is a vital ingredient when it comes to softening leather used in the book bindingprocess. Why, this is the sort of thing that gets economists excited. Here, surely, is a great by-product of the Age of Enlightenment – the ruling class and its voracious reading habits creating income for the illiterate poor!

  A few blocks away you might find crossing sweepers, paid to remove the horse dung and mud from the streets so that the very same ruling class can cross the street without dirtying their shoes. There are mudlarks – usually old women and young children – sifting through the refuse and sewage on the banks of the Thames for anything that might be of value. Who knows, a bloated corpse could be sold on to a medical school for dissection. London is a tumult of noise and bodies pressing against one another, eking out a living in the biggest and filthiest city in the world.

  There is already talk of new laws to protect workers, but for the moment it is just that – talk. For now, children work 12-hour days in factories and six-year-olds are sent up chimneys to ensure dinner parties are not ruined by smoke and soot. The best of the sweeps, Mayhew learns, know how to navigate their way up the inside of the wider flues – elbows and knees out, edging carefully upward. But for the inexperienced, injuries and death come with the job. ‘I niver got to stay stuck myself, but a many of them did,’ one sweep tells Mayhew. The boy began his apprenticeship at the age of seven. The dead ‘were smothered for want of air, and the fright, and a stayin’ so long in the flue’.

  And always, the putrid smell of rotting food and the open sewer that is the Thames, its murky waters a depository for bodies, industrial waste and sewage. ‘Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river,’ Dickens will write sombrely. But others just shrug. ‘He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe,’ writes the humourist Sydney Smith. Is it any wonder that regular cholera epidemics sweep through the poorer parts of London? The smell will reach its climax with The Great Stink of 1849 when parliament is shut down; its MPs huddled behind curtains soaked with chloride of lime to avoid the nauseous stench. Nosegays – posies of flowers and scented herbs like rosemary and thyme – will become not just a fashion accessory but a necessity, particularly for judges not only battling the stink of the city but the lower classes who fill their courtrooms.

  No, you don’t need this world, William Buckley. It certainly doesn’t want you. And this new home of yours for the next few months, the Calcutta. It might be small and stifling. And lives will certainly be lost before this journey across the world is completed. But it feels solid. Reliable. Years of salt water and rain have flowed down through the decks, seeping through cracks and knots, all the way into the bilges where the wood has swelled and sealed itself into a thick, impenetrable skin.

  That’s oak for you, doing what oak does best. You’re not a shipbuilder, even though you’re good with your hands. But oak is something you know about. It feels and smells of home.

  3

  YOUR MOTHER, 16 AND UNWED

  In late 700 AD, in the cold autumn soil in the kingdom of Mercia, the shell of a small acorn begins to crack. Above ground, King Offa is in the midst of his long and bloodthirsty reign as one of the most successful rulers of the Dark Ages. Viking raiders are about to begin plundering the coastline of Britain. They will look upon many of the English as easy pickings; soft worshippers of a Christian god with no concept of Valhalla, no idea about the glory of death with an axe in your grip and the blood of an opponent on your hands.

  But Offa is a man the Vikings can easily admire. He is ruthlessly stitching together an empire that will make him the greatest English monarch history has yet known. Offa has set about uniting many of the seven kingdoms that now make up Britain. Rival kings not interested in bending the knee are quickly disposed of. Even a son-in-law who grows too powerful is assassinated.

  Maybe that’s why this small acorn is already growing, its emerging root feasting on the nutrients and moisture below. The land around here is fertile, thick with the blood and bone of Anglo-Saxons and Celts and Romans and all the tribes that came before them. It will take Offa decades to build his kingdom. For this acorn, it will only take six months before its first small green shoot breaks the surface to be greeted by a spring sun. But it will still be there more than a thousand years later, still dropping acorns, still feeding off the rich soil as, not very far away, a young, unwed woman, scared and lathered in sweat, exhausted from the endless contractions, finally pushes a very large baby boy out of her womb.

  A few years later two well-educated brothers from London, the antiquarians Daniel and Samuel Lysons, will begin an ambitious and epic series on the topography and history of Britain they will call Magna Britannia. Hitching a wagon loaded with supplies, they travel throughout rural England, arriving one day in the small village of Marton in Cheshire, once a part of the kingdom of Mercia. ‘Not far from the chapel is a very fine oak,’ they will note, ‘… which although but little known is believed to be the largest in England.’

  Little known elsewhere, perhaps. But, William, you know that oak. Every child – every person – in Marton is aware of the Oak and its secrets. In the early 1780s, long after Offa has turned to dust, it has become one of the oldest sessile oak trees in the world, still grimly holding on to life, still sucking out the last of the marrow from those medieval bones. Its girth is more than 50 feet and decay has long set in, eating away at its heartwood and splitting the trunk, leaving it resembling three separate trees that have come together, arms embracing but with a respectable amount of space between them, like reluctant relatives at a family reunion.

  The Lysons brothers, true sons of the Enlightenment, have measured and examined this oak. But like all city types with their heads buried in books, they’ve missed the obvious and no-one in the village is likely to let them in on the secret. The Oak is an old sage from a past era, a dispenser of wisdom and medicine. Who needs word getting out that the bark from the Oak – just a small piece – can cure warts and other skin diseases if you rub it on your skin? Farmers hang the bark in their homes for good luck, warding off evil spirits. The grand old tree is a relic from those Dark Ages when magic and mysticism were as feared as Offa’s sword.

  Even two centuries after your birth, the village of Marton will not have changed that much. The ruts from the wooden wheels of carriages might be covered in bitumen but the small lanes will still be there, hugged by
native hedges blended with hawthorn and blackthorn and holly, a little elder and dog rose here and there, the lush rolling country filled with shallow valleys and lazy dairy cows until the open plains meet the Pennines to the north, a range of hills and small mountains known as the backbone of England.

  Even the half-wood house you are supposed to have been born in, down in Marton Lane not far from that gnarled old tree, is still there. No longer recognisable, perhaps. But it will make a visitor wonder why on earth you would want to escape from this place. That feeling of being trapped, that need to get free, must run deep. How often did you wander past the Davenport Arms Inn as a young man and look up at the crest – a serf’s head with a rope around his neck? From the 1300s the land around here was ruled by the Davenports, the game wardens appointed to protect the King’s forests and hunting grounds. Thieves caught poaching deer or hares and captured highwaymen who had been plundering passing carriages would be hauled down to the inn and put on trial in one of the upstairs rooms. Once that guilty verdict was announced – and the Davenports, zealous guardians of their fiefdom, didn’t waste time with due process – a small crowd would gather outside. Once the rope had done its work, the body would be placed in a gibbet and suspended outside for all to see, rotting until the crows had pecked it clean and the bones had bleached in the sun.

  So much beauty around here. And just as much horror never far from the surface.

  A faded document shows William Buckley is baptised on 31 March 1782, just down the road from Marton in Siddington at the All Saints church, an old timber-framed building going back to the 1300s. The good Lord must be looking carefully after the place. When the bishop welcomes you into the house of God and dabs your head with holy water, the walls of the church are bulging; someone years earlier decided to replace the centuries-old thatched roof with heavy Kerridge stone slabs, and now the church’s sides are swollen and buckling under their enormous weight.