For thousands of years, the mountains, lakes and forests of Britain have been just geography.
But in the late 1700s,
they became something much more - the face of our nation.
Our countryside became our country.
When homesick travellers thought fondly of Britain,
they thought of their landscape.
Most of us still do.
And it was, for the first time, a landscape of all the British nations -
the wild places of Wales and Scotland,
as well as the peaks of Northern England, rediscovered, relished, mapped.
For centuries, going to the country had meant, for the gentry,
a stroll through a manicured estate,
an Arcadia as drowsy with sunshine as an Italian afternoon.
But in the second half of the 18th century,
there was a change in the weather.
More adventurous Britons had had enough of make-believe sunshine.
They wanted the real thing, and they were prepared to go to places
where no one in their right mind a generation before would have set foot.
But those who clambered up the crags weren't just out for thrills.
In the wild places, they thought, might have survived the kind of Britons
who'd stayed miraculously untouched by the evils of town life,
its corrupt politics and diseased bodies.
If we could somehow learn from their childlike innocence,
we could become like them and recapture what it meant to be free,
to be a natural-born Briton.
Nature, in the last decades of the 18th century,
came to mean something far more important than gardening or hiking.
A love of nature became code for a crusade, a revolution even.
And this time, the crusaders weren't going to be in chain mail.
They would be poets, painters, hack journalists,
men and women who sensed a great change coming
and were rushing to embrace it.
What they saw coming was dark and dirty weather.
Britain was about to be hit by a political cyclone -
a revolution in France, just over the Channel.
The boldest poets and pamphleteers
longed for the storm to strike here, too.
More anxious souls were afraid that where there was lightning
there would also be fire and destruction.
In the end, Britain would weather the storm.
But as the Duke of Wellington once famously put it,
it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw."
Just how near-run? Wait and see.
The journey to the guillotine and a world war
would start with the dreams of a philosopher.
But not any old philosopher.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was buried just outside Paris,
reshaped the mental habits of an entire generation,
turning them from creatures of thought to creatures of feeling.
Before Rousseau, the highest compliment was that someone was reasonable.
After Rousseau, the compliment became, "Il a de l'ame" - he has soul.
And the British couldn't get enough of it.
In the spring of 1766,
Rousseau, on the run from enemies,
real and imagined,
pitched up in Staffordshire.
Richard Davenport moved out of his country house in Wooton,
so that the great man could have a comfortable asylum
in which to commune with nature to his heart's content.
Rousseau could have expected a warm welcome.
His two most famous books,
"Emile" - a manual on natural education, thinly disguised as a novel -
and - the weepier the age - "The New Heloise",
featuring forbidden love between tutor and pupil,
were smash hits among the sobbing and sighing classes.
At a distance, Rousseau may have been popular.
But close up, he was a paranoid.
In Derbyshire, he was convinced the servants were putting cinders in his soup.
In 1768, after more imagined slights,
he left England.
But his ideas stayed
and put down deep roots among the book-crazy gentry.
Men like Brooke Boothby, a Derbyshire neighbour
who was painted by Joseph Wright
as a man of feeling, in tune with the rhythms of nature.
What appealed to men and women of feeling in the English provinces
was Rousseau's belief that urbanity, the graces of city life,
were symptoms of everything rotten about the old world,
the cosmetic mask behind which lurked the poxy disfigurement
of a deceitful, vicious, terminally-diseased culture.
The antidote was to scrub away the mask
and restore grown men and women
to their true nature, the simplicity of a child.
Childhood was where Rousseau's revolution began.
If it was to be properly preserved,
the true nature of children had to be nourished, literally, from the breast.
Since babies took their moral as well as their physical sustenance
from their mother's milk, it had better be their own mother's milk.
Professional wet nurses might contaminate them with vice and disease.
So the virtuous, wholesomely patriotic life
began at the nursing nipple.
Another lesson from Rousseau -
forget about book-learning.
Cramming little heads with facts and figures damaged their animal high spirits,
their instinct for freedom.
Get 'em outside. Let 'em romp.
But in an age of high infant mortality,
making a heavy emotional investment in your children
could rebound on you.
As a disciple of Rousseau, Brooke Boothby discovered
when his daughter Penelope died at age five
that romantic feeling could be as intense in sorrow as it had been in happiness.
The poignant memorial speaks of the terror of loss,
of joy glimpsed, felt, experienced,
and then cruelly destroyed.
That was the romantic vision of Britain, too - a paradise in peril.
When men of feeling got off their high horses and left their fantasy parks,
what they saw was the ugly reality of the countryside.
With the explosion in population, many thousands left the land
and became dependent on the machines of the new industrial revolution.
Poets like Oliver Goldsmith
were oppressed by a vision of deserted villages.
Sweet, smiling village,
Loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn, :
Amidst thy bowers, the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain,
and half a tillage stints thy smiling plain, :
Ill fairs the land,
to hastening ills a prey,
where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
In 1769, the year that Oliver Goldsmith was writing his poem,
a military officer with a social conscience, Philip Thicknesse,
published a horrifying account of four persons starved to death
in a poorhouse at Datchworth.
To most complacent Britons,
this was supposed to happen in rat-infested corners of the continent,
not in Hertfordshire.
For those who had eyes to see beyond their parklands,
there were two painful questions about the real state of the British countryside.
What was to be done and who was to blame? Was the Church responsible?
Had the Church grown too fat, too respectable,
too indifferent to its duties to the unfortunate?
Or was it a matter for the absentee land-owning gentry,
whose estates were being run by hard-nosed men
with an eye to bottom-line profit?
Or was it wrong to think in terms of what had once been?
Was that just applying whitewash
to a building that was rotten from top to bottom?
Was the answer not charity, but politics?
Thomas Bewick certainly thought so.
As a child outside Newcastle,
he didn't need Rousseau to tell him about the freedom of fresh air.
Bewick had played truant from school
and instead of filling his slate with knowledge,
he'd filled it compulsively with drawings,
finding his way instinctively towards his vocation
as the first great illustrator of British natural history.
What's more, Bewick's pictures weren't just meant for a gentleman's library.
Ordinary people wanted a little book
packed with images of the birds and animals of the British Isles.
But Bewick was looking at something else, too.
Snuggled between the plover and a waxwing
was a portrait of his world,
rain-soaked Northumberland, a tough, dark, gritty place,
a world in a lot of pain.
In his churchyards, dogs snarl.
By his roadsides, poor bastards break rocks.
In his garrets, blind old paupers slurp soup.
All this made Thomas Bewick very angry.
All this made Thomas Bewick a radical.
In Newcastle, he mixed in debating clubs
with men like himself - educated artisans, tradesmen and professionals -
passionate in their devotion to liberty.
It is by the good conduct and consequent character
of the great mass of the people
that a nation is exalted.
And what fired Bewick's radicalism wasn't just anger.
It was an emotion new to politics - sympathy,
an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering;
a recognition that deep down,
we are all bonded by our shared human nature.
It was a call to action echoed in pulpits up and down the country.
How could you feel others' suffering
and not want to do all in your power to remedy it?
For the first time, there was a politics of suffering,
one that could no longer turn a blind eye
to the plight of children, the aged, the sick and the poor.
Yet bigwigs did turn a blind eye.
They believed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688
had sent James II and his Catholic despotism packing,
and had created a land of the free.
In 1788, with a 100th anniversary upon them,
how tempting it was to continue patting themselves on the back
as being the most enlightened country in the world.
But for Bewick and his friends, there was nothing to be complacent about.
The real problem of the Glorious Revolution, the radicals argued,
was its hijacking by scoundrels
who'd perverted it to satisfy their own greed and ambition.
They packed parliament with sycophants and sold their vote to pay their tailor's bill.
The forgotten lesson of 1688 was that the people were entitled to resist,
entitled to change government,
entitled to a sovereign that understood the reality of a limited monarchy.
If the memory of that first revolution was to mean anything,
a second revolution, of justice, would have to make good on its promise.
Then, in Paris on July 14, 1789,
the world would learn just how limited a monarchy could be.
The Bastille fell and nothing was the same again.
Though the fortress had just eight prisoners,
its eight grim towers and cannon pointing into the city
had become an emblem of everything detestable
about the old absolute monarchy.
In Bewick's world, toasts were drunk
to the dawn on a new age of real liberty
and the fall of despots.
And it was noticed that it had been ordinary people,
armed with muskets and slogans, who had stormed the citadel.
The inspiring moral was that the people, if pushed too far,
could and would take back their rights.
Monarchy would be demolished.
So when Dr Richard Price, from his Unitarian pulpit in London,
congratulated King George III for recovering his sanity,
he had the cheek to warn him that unless he came to his political senses,
he too would go the way of Louis XVI.
May you be led to such a sense of the nature of your situation
to consider yourself more properly the servant
than the sovereign of the people.
To the young, dressing down a king in the name of liberty
was a heady pleasure.
William Wordsworth had been born in the Lake District,
across the Pennines from Bewick.
He, too, had grown up in love with nature.
Now that love would extend to all of downtrodden humanity.
In 1790, on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille,
at the age of 19, Wordsworth found himself in France.
What he saw there, he described as, "Human nature, seeming born again."
Unhoused beneath the evening star, we saw dances of liberty.
And in late hours of darkness,
dances in the open air.
We rose at signal given and formed a ring
and hand in hand, danced round and round the board.
All hearts were open. Every tongue was loud with amity and glee.
We bore a name honoured in France -
the name of Englishmen -
and, hospitably, they did give us hail
as their forerunners in a glorious cause.
But not everyone felt this blissful.
Edmund Burke, the eloquent Irish MP
who'd been a friend of the Americans,
now had a change of heart about revolution.
He, too, had lifted a glass to toast the dawn of liberty
in July 1789.
But when the lynching started,
Burke decided the revolution was, above all, an act of violence,
and he denounced it in his vitriolic "Reflections on the French Revolution".
Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated,
they are forming plans for the "good order" of future society.
They act amidst the tumultuous cries
of a mixed mob of ferocious men and women lost to shame.
It's hard to know which hurt more - the fact that Burke's savage denunciation
came from a friend of liberty and reform,
or that it flung back at the radicals
some of the mushier platitudes about nature.
They had assumed that nature filled you with the love of mankind,
that nature was fraternal, was cosmopolitan.
"Rubbish!" said Burke. "Nature is rooted in place.
"It teaches you to love your birthplace,
"your language, your customs, your habits.
"Nature is a patriot."
What Burke hated most of all
was the naivety of well-meaning Whig politicians,
like his friend Charles James Fox,
putting a few slogans into the heads of people
not educated enough to understand what they were wrecking.
"Democracy? Mob-ocracy, more like!" Said Burke.
Heads stuck on pikes,
the law of the lynch mob,
we don't want that here.
But for one unrepentant enthusiast, this was a travesty.
Tom Paine, whose book "Common Sense"
had supported the American Revolution,
now took on Edmund Burke.
In 1791,
he published his counterblast, "The Rights of Man".
It was a brilliantly-calculated reply.
Burke had used flowery language
to describe the mob's ungallant assault on the Queen of France.
So Paine, in contrast,
used the earthy, direct street talk of ordinary people,
the kind of people Burke referred to as the "swinish multitude".
And what Paine's message was
was that nature fought on the side of liberty.
At our birth, he said, we had natural rights
which no government, no sovereign, could violate and expect to survive.
When Paine shouted, people listened.
He sold 40,000 copies of "The Rights of Man" in a few months,
and those who bought them were new to politics,
men like Bewick, men with grievances to air.
As they became more vocal and visible,
the forces of order, the party of Church and King,
began to get distinctly nervous.
Prime Minister William Pitt, in his thirties,
once hailed as a friend of reform, was now in the conservative camp.
He looked on at events in France with growing horror and disgust.
It was time to batten down the hatches, mobilise the militia,
beat the patriotic drum,
and make sure the likes of Tom Paine
were gagged before they made mischief.
Houses were burned,
conspicuous democrats roughed up.
Tom Paine just got out in the nick of time.
He was tried in proxy for treason.
Those who stayed loyal to Paine
came together in solidarity and defiance.
One place where dangerous thoughts were positively welcome
was 72 St Paul's Churchyard,
where Joseph Johnson, the bachelor Liverpudlian printer and publisher,
acted as kindly uncle to all those he fondly called his "ruffian gang".
On any given Sunday,
you'd find a mix of painters like William Blake,
agitators for parliamentary reform,
celebrity democrats like Tom Paine.
And you'd find women - articulate, intelligent and impassioned.
And among those women, the most striking of all
was Mary Wollstonecraft.
She was the spirit of the time.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution.
Living a hand-to-mouth existence as a writer,
given a roof over her head by Johnson, Mary burst into print
in outrage at Burke's reflections.
While she was doing it, she noticed that the rights of men weren't worth much
if they excluded the other half of human society.
So she produced her own amended version,
"A Vindication of the Rights of Women".
If nature was to be held up as the handmaid of liberty and equality,
we'd better think about the natural state of women.
The reason, she said,
why women were so slighted
was that from the time they were little girls
their entire being was designed with the sole and sovereign aim
of pleasing men.
She had no time for Rousseau's idea
that women, by their very nature,
could only be wives and mothers.
There was nothing she could see in her nature
which disqualified her from being a true citizen.
For daring to say these things, Mary was abused as "unnatural".
Horace Walpole, the essayist, called her "a hyena in petticoats".
Like Wordsworth before her,
Wollstonecraft hoped that in the new French Republic
she'd find like-minded souls with whom to share her radical views.
But what she landed in was the jumpy, paranoid dictatorship of the Jacobins.
Rousseau's face and his books were everywhere.
Slavishly obedient to his dogma,
French women who meddled in politics were told to shut up
and nurse their babies for the fatherland.
Those who didn't, who dared organise their own political clubs,
were beaten up on the streets.
In August 1792, the monarchy had been overthrown,
and a revolutionary republic created in its place.
A month later, when Prussian and Austrian armies invaded from the east,
the paranoia became bloody.
1,400 men and women held in Paris prisons
were demonised as a fifth column and butchered in cold blood.
In the 21st century, we reckon we know about the split personality of revolutions,
the transformation from the smiling face of liberty
to the ugly reality of a terror and a police state.
But in the 18th century, no one was reading "A Rough Guide to Revolution",
especially not its most passionate enthusiast,
who'd witnessed first hand the days of flowers and freedom and fraternity,
and for whom the slogan of liberty and equality was a natural partnership.
To begin with, Mary shared the company and the optimism
of expatriate Americans, Irish, English and Scots,
who met at White's Hotel in Paris.
In the first flush of revolutionary bliss,
a little spilt blood wasn't going to spoil the rapture of freedom. Mary herself wrote:
Children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools.
But then, as the despotism of the Crown
was replaced by the despotism of a police state,
doubts began to creep in.
Just a few weeks after she arrived, Mary saw Louis XVI going to his trial.
Unaccountably, she found herself weeping at the dignity of his composure.
It wasn't at all what she'd expected.
Ironically, even the foremost spokesman
for radical politics came under suspicion.
In the summer of 1793, Tom Paine went from being a local hero to a pariah.
He'd blotted his copybook earlier,
during the debates over the sentencing of Louis XVI.
Paine was the most famous anti-monarchist,
but he'd argued very bravely and very recklessly
that since Louis was now an irrelevance, why sentence him to death?
He'd also said that a really free republic
owed it even to its worst enemies
to protect them against oppression.
This not only made him unpopular, but dangerously undesirable.
In the summer, the chickens came home to roost.
Paine was arrested and locked up in the Luxembourg Prison over there.
He was saved from the guillotine only by an absolutely fantastic accident.
When somebody was about to get the chop,
someone came round and marked a cross
on the door of their cell.
In Paine's particular case,
the doors happen to have been open, so that the cross was made
on the inside of the door.
When the doors shut, that cross was invisible.
Paine escaped his date with the "National Razor"
by a freak of fate.
As the arrests and executions started to speed up,
Mary's natural exuberance began to cool.
She sat in her room,
scared and despondent, writing to Joseph Johnson.
I have seen eyes glare through a glass door opposite me.
And bloody hands shook at me.
"I wish I had even kept the cat with me, as I want to see something alive.
Death in so many frightful shapes
has taken hold of my fancy.
I'm going to bed, and for the first time in my life,
I cannot put out the candle.
By the spring of 1793,
the war between Britain and France had changed everything.
Instead of being treated as guests,
the expatriates were suspected of being a fifth column,
compromised by friendship with French politicians,
guillotined as traitors to the republic.
Mary must have felt it would be her turn any day.
Salvation appeared in the good-looking shape
of an American businessman and property speculator, Gilbert Imlay.
He registered her as his American wife
and thus free from the taint of being one of the enemies of France.
Nursing their baby in a quiet garden on the outskirts of Paris,
Mary the feminist had been saved from the revolution by motherhood.
But it was not to be a happy ending.
As Mary became more devoted,
Imlay's business trips became mysteriously prolonged.
When she followed him as far as London,
she found a new mistress.
On a rainy night in October 1795, she walked around Putney long enough
to make sure her best dress was heavily saturated.
Then she jumped off the bridge into the Thames,
leaving a note for Imlay.
"Let my wrongs sleep with me."
But she was not to be allowed her poetic suicide.
A boatman pulled her out.
She was 37 and she seemed to have lost everything except her child -
her faith in revolution and the people,
her belief in the possibilities of an independent woman's life.
The goodness of nature must have seemed a cruel joke.
Months later, she seemed to get a second chance at happiness
in the unlikely form of William Godwin,
a philosopher she'd met once before at Joseph Johnson's.
Godwin was notorious for his rejection of romance,
as well as marriage and private property.
But Mary's fire burned bright enough to melt his icy principles.
Though they'd agreed not to cohabit,
the sworn enemy of matrimony and a feminist
were wedded at St Pancras Church.
And as her months of pregnancy passed,
the two found themselves relaxing into conjugal cosiness,
to the point where Godwin was prepared, at least privately,
to admit the force of emotion as well as thought.
Which is what made the end so unbearable.
When the time for her labour came, Mary called a midwife.
But after the baby was born, another girl,
the placenta remained firmly lodged at the top of the birth canal.
Now, obstetric opinion at the time
held that unless the placenta was promptly expelled,
there was a lethal danger of infection.
So a doctor from Westminster Hospital was summoned,
and he stuck his hand up Mary and pulled.
The placenta came away in pieces
as Mary lay in agony, haemorrhaging.
She had been through so many terrors, so many ordeals, come so close to death,
and somehow managed to survive.
This time, with so much to live for, there would be no escape.
She died a week later of septicaemia.
Godwin wrote to a friend,
My wife is now dead.
I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.
I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy.
I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.
She is rightly remembered as the founder of modern feminism,
for making a statement, remarkable for its bravery and clarity,
that women's nature was not to be confused with their biology.
But nature, biology, had killed her.
Beyond her deathbed,
the struggle between liberty and repression raged on,
stopping for no one.
Meeting with radicals could now get you into serious trouble.
Habeas corpus had been suspended, printing presses were being smashed,
the doors of freedom were slamming shut.
And no wonder, for the stakes were as high as they could get.
Republican France was on the march,
and Britain was vulnerable where it had always been - in Ireland.
Irish republicans were among the friends of revolution at White's Hotel.
They had dreamed of an uprising against the English.
But for the dreams to come true,
an insurrection had to coincide with a French invasion.
The French did come but they came too late and on the wrong coast.
By the time they got to Killala Bay in the west in the summer of 1798,
the rebellion of the united Irishmen in the east had been crushed
by a British Army at Vinegar Hill.
Stranded in the wilds of County Mayo, a long, long way from Dublin,
their only Irish help came from a troop of peasants, schoolmasters and priests.
All the bloody games we know so well started here -
masked men arriving at midnight, the stockpiling of arms,
the mercilessness shown towards anyone even faintly suspected
of collaborating with the English.
Hit-and-run slaughter was not a strategy.
The invasion stalled and went into retreat.
Finally, the French capitulated.
Wolfe Tone, the Protestant Irish Republican leader
who'd come with them, was tried for treason,
but committed suicide in prison before he could be hanged.
At least 30,000 Irish men and women died in 1798,
another of the tragedies that scarred the country,
but one which would be remembered indelibly,
though not accurately,
as a war of the Protestant English against the Catholic Irish.
For Pitt and the Westminster politicians,
it had been a close call - the enemy at the gates in Ireland,
another huge French army camped on the Channel coast.
A time for sweaty palms.
And a time for all radicals to ask themselves difficult questions.
How could you remain a cheerleader for revolution knowing now what you knew,
having seen the dreams turn to violence and bloodshed?
William Wordsworth had been as fervent as anyone
in the early days of revolutionary hope.
Now those hopes were turning to doubts.
By 1798, with the fate of Britain hanging in the balance,
he was renting a house in Somerset close to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Like Mary Wollstonecraft,
Wordsworth had lost his heart in revolutionary France.
But his lover and the mother of his children had been a royalist.
Late in 1792, with war impending,
he had to decide between staying, at peril to his life,
or returning to England.
He chose the latter path.
Being a friend of the people now required him to be an enemy of France.
Why? Because France, in the shape of Napoleon, had abandoned liberty,
and turned into nothing more than your common-or-garden tyrant,
bent on forcing Britain to its knees.
Wordsworth's other great love affair, with nature, was as strong as ever,
only now nature made him think not of revolution, but of home.
Sadder and wiser as he now was, could he preserve his old fire?
The solution was to abandon political dogma for poetry.
Hope lay not in the blood spilled in Paris,
but in the moral example of country people
whose lives were lived in simplicity and decency,
close to English nature.
The work of poetry now
was to make audible the voices
of the wounded and the destitute.
She had a tall man's height, or more No bonnet screened her from the heat
A long, drab-coloured coat she wore -
A mantle, reaching to her feet
Before me begging did she stand
Pouring out sorrows like the sea
Grief after grief.
On English land, such woes I knew could never be.
Nature did still have the power to transform lives,
but not through any kind of political agenda.
A vote would never make one happy.
A snowdrop in February, or a mother's love for her newborn, might.
He returned to his roots in the Lake District,
made his home at Grassmere.
Nature meant something different now to Wordsworth and Coleridge.
It no longer connected them with the wider world. It detached them from it.
When they talked about liberty, they no longer meant solidarity.
They meant solitude.
Up in the Lakes, the new affection for home
might be as innocent as a summer picnic.
But on the frontline of the war,
native loyalty meant something far more belligerent.
Nature had been recruited for patriotic propaganda.
Each time invasion threatened, this inward, insular sense of Britishness
became more emotionally charged.
Anyone faintly suspected of radical sympathies was branded a collaborator.
The country had never been so massively mobilised.
Not just an immense army and navy,
but a volunteer militia of 75,000.
And in 1803, in case of invasion,
another 300,000, ready to spring to arms
to defend hearth and home against the godless French.
When Napoleon turned history teacher, putting on a show of the Bayeux Tapestry
to remind the British that former conquests could be repeated,
what he got in response was a rude noise from the back of the class.
What's more,
William Pitt was not about to go down with an arrow in his eye.
His war government mobilised on a scale never seen before.
When the king reviewed 27,000 volunteers in Hyde Park
in October 1803,
half a million of his subjects cheered him on.
This was Edmund Burke's loyalist dream come true,
the territorial urge to defend hearth and home
vindicated as the most natural passion of all.
Wordsworth now added his voice
to those who thought nature was not the cradle of democracy,
but the shrine of patriotism.
Save this honoured land from every lord
But British reason and the British sword.
Burke's nostalgia for a Merrie England,
still hanging on deep in the English countryside,
spawned an extraordinary boom in everything historical.
Suits of armour were taken out of barns, polished up and set in entrance halls
to trumpet the patriotic pride of the gentry.
For more than a decade, the war roared on,
as Britain confronted Napoleon's empire.
Epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal, a world conflict from India to the Caribbean,
with spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar.
During these roller-coaster years,
the country's woes were muffled.
Patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint.
The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax
on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo.
Surveying the carnage the day after,
Wellington famously said that the next worst thing to a battle lost
is a battle won.
He didn't know how prophetic his words would be.
Instead of tasting the fruits of victory,
the poor and the unemployed were looking for anything to eat.
The economy of post-war Britain
had fallen into the most terrible slump in living memory.
Even before victory, Napoleon's success at sealing off European markets,
together with a war against the United States in 1812,
had destroyed demand for British manufactures.
Tens of thousands of weavers and spinners were laid off
or had their wages cut.
Then hundreds of thousands more - demobbed soldiers,
munitions workers, makers of uniforms,
were thrown to the workhouse.
Misery spilled into violence.
Machines were smashed in Yorkshire and Lancashire.
While multitudes lost their jobs, the guardians of nature got them.
With the crisis at its worst,
Wordsworth applied for and got a post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.
Come election time, in gratitude,
he campaigned for the local earl's candidate against a radical.
He was the government's most obedient servant now.
Those who had sat at his feet years earlier,
when he'd seemed to be the first true poet of the people, were horrified.
There would be other heroes now,
heroes for unpoetical times.
William Cobbett, for example.
You'd never confuse William Cobbett with a poet.
He'd run away from his father's farm at the age of 14,
and he mostly educated himself.
But that was why the kind of language he favoured -
earthy, coarse, direct and belligerent, the language of the pub and barnyard -
was such journalistic dynamite.
The labourers seem miserably poor.
Their dwellings are little better than pig beds,
and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig.
Their wretched hovels are stuck upon bits of ground on the side of the road
where the space has been wider than the road demanded.
His tuppenny trash, "The Weekly Political Register",
was a one-man revolution in journalism,
belching outrage in 50,000 copies a week.
There's no doubt that until Cobbett came along
no one had ever got to the ordinary people,
robbed of their birthright by social parasites,
and turned them into political animals.
Cobbett was capable of mobilising an army of hundreds of thousands of petitioners,
enough to make the government nervous
and start muttering about a new peasants' revolt.
But at the critical moment, where was he?
In America, arranging to ship home the bones of Tom Paine.
But Cobbett's army, the foot soldiers of democracy, didn't need holy relics.
They needed a leader. What they got instead was a disaster.
They hadn't been looking for it.
The mass meeting that was called in August 1819
in St Peter's Field in Manchester was, its organisers insisted, to be orderly,
even nostalgic, demanding only that the rights of free-born Britons -
habeas corpus, free press, the right to honest representation - be restored.
It would be a festival for liberty.
The men of order in London and the magistrates in Lancashire saw it differently.
Manchester, with its out-of-work cotton spinners
and its over-educated rabble-rousers,
was a den of conspiracy.
It needed a lesson before revolution took root.
The jittery Manchester yeomanry was happy to oblige,
cutting a way through the crowds
to arrest the soapbox orator, Henry Hunt.
A small girl was trampled to death
under their horses' hooves.
The field turned into bloody chaos,
the enraged crowd surrounding the yeomanry,
mounted troops coming to extricate them, slicing their way through the bodies.
Eleven were killed,
hundreds more badly wounded.
At least a hundred of the injured were women and small children.
This is the way an eye witness,
the artisan Samuel Bamford,
recalled it.
In ten minutes, the field was an open and almost deserted space.
The hustings remained, with a few broken and hued flag staves erect,
and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping,
whilst over the whole field was strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls and shoes,
trampled, torn and bloody.
The yeomanry had dismounted. Some were easing their horses'girths
and some were wiping their sabres.
Peterloo struck old-time radicals
like Thomas Bewick with nauseated horror.
"Unnatural" was the word which rang through the denunciations.
The wicked men who'd done such a thing
had forfeited for ever the right to be thought of
as the natural governing class of Britain.
They have sinned themselves out of all shame.
This phalanx have kept their ground, and will do so, till, it is feared,
violence from an enraged people breaks them up
or perhaps, till the growing opinions against such a crooked order
of conducting the affairs of this great nation
becomes apparent to an immense majority.
Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo
by throwing themselves into campaigns of practical action,
crusades which they embarked on with religious fervour.
Those who laboured for change
did so now not only in secret political clubs,
but in the light of churches and chapels.
Their targets were unnatural institutions -
the monopoly of the Church of England, the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland,
in the manufacturing towns, a hue and cry to have their own MPs.
Unless these things were done, a revolution, they said,
would be more, not less likely.
In 1830, a new revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside
meant the votes for change could not be postponed.
The Whigs took office for the first time since before 1789
as the champions of reform without revolution.
The Parliamentary Reform Act they passed in 1832
made good on their word.
But the English counties weren't the only place
where something had to be done to avert bloodshed.
In Surinam, Guiana and Jamaica, pushed to the edge by hope and desperation,
there had been slave rebellions put down with a ferocity
which made Peterloo look like a picnic.
(SOLO BARITONE) # Steal away
# Steal away
# To Jesus... #
The Romantics' message - we are all brothers and sisters,
we all share, praise be to God, the same nature -
could also be embraced not as a cry for retribution,
a call to the barricades, but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade.
Abolitionism healed old wounds.
It brought together Thomas Bewick and William Wordsworth
under the same great tent of righteousness.
The organisers of the campaign used the weaponry of the age of good causes -
the revival meeting, complete with hymns,
the propaganda tour and the travelling exhibition.
Models of slave ships.
Chests full of the merchandise that might be traded instead of slaves.
# My Lord, he calls me
# He calls me by the thunder... #
In 1834, Britain abolished slavery, and at a time, contrary to some legends,
when the market for its products was becoming more, not less, lucrative.
It was the first great 19th-century victory
for the party of humanity.
So was the place where Britain's regeneration would happen
not, as Wordsworth had imagined, in the country,
but in chapels, churches and town halls?
He had supposed that our redemption depended on escaping from cities,
that the best of human nature withered and perished
when a hedgerow turned into a street.
Perhaps it was the end of his dream
of a return to the childlike innocence of uncorrupted nature.
But that dream never had a chance of becoming real,
not in a Britain powering its way to industrial modernity.
What Wordsworth had wanted was that nature, the British countryside,
should be the negation of the town.
Instead, it had somehow become its accomplice.
Instead of needing to get deep into the enfolding heart of the country,
those who could never have made the trip
could now find nature literally in their own backyard.
In allotments given to them by the railway company,
the echo of the old strips they'd lost to enclosures.
In gardens attached to terraced houses,
which stood in for the cottage lot they'd left behind.
For the first time, a park meant not the private estate of some aristocrat,
but a public place in a town, without barriers of class or property,
laid out, like here in Birkenhead in the 1840s,
with ponds and rambles and lawns,
a place where parents would bring children
to give them something of the pleasures of nature.
It was not, I suppose, sublime.
But neither was it at all ridiculous.