On 25 October 1809, a royal Jubilee was celebrated on the first day of the fiftieth year of George III's reign—as pedants pointed out, a year before the king had actually sat on the throne for half a century.Footnote 1 Loyalist accounts of the Jubilee would repeatedly stress the event's supposed spontaneity and unanimity. One account, by “the wife of a naval officer,” maintained, rather improbably, that the event had “started into every mind in every corner of the Empire by one common impulse. The idea, once expressed, moved with a rapidity almost unexampled; and what was the act of millions, was the spontaneous effusion of love in each individual, anxious to express in the most acceptable and becoming manner the overflowings of a grateful heart.” In short, the day was characterized by harmonious agreement: “the petty distinctions of party were forgotten.”Footnote 2

In historical retrospect, the Jubilee cannot help but seem a poignant final bow for an elderly monarch who, as events transpired, would very soon retire into the shade of mental illness and his son's Regency. Recent historians have sometimes echoed the naval officer's wife in presenting the Jubilee as a confirmation of general political harmony. According to one work, for example, the Jubilee demonstrates that the execution of Louis XVI “had only served to encourage the British people to cherish all the more the institution of monarchy and the person of their venerable king.”Footnote 3 But such a portrayal oversimplifies matters. The Jubilee's most astute historical observer, Linda Colley, has offered a more complex picture, noting (if incidentally) that radicals criticized the planned festivities. Colley's account, by unveiling one Rachel Charlotte Biggs as the woman who set the machinery of celebration in motion, also emphasizes the stage managing of the Jubilee and thus may implicitly throw into question the spontaneity and perhaps some of the sincerity of the jubilation.Footnote 4 Scholars drawing on Colley's work, however, have tended to overlook her acknowledgment of the moment's complexity.Footnote 5 The message that has stuck is Colley's overall portrayal of the Jubilee as a successful marshaling of popular sentiment in support of king and country, at a moment of national emergency—a fairly straightforward triumph for loyalism.

The Jubilee plays a prominent part in two of Colley's most important writings. In her article on the “apotheosis” of George III, the celebrations of 1809 mark the crowning moment in the monarchy's rehabilitation and illustrate the “efficacy of royal celebration.”Footnote 6 No longer vilified as a would-be tyrant trespassing on popular liberties, as he had been by many radicals in the first half of his reign, George had become, for a great many Britons, the beloved father of his people.Footnote 7 In Colley's hugely influential Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, the Jubilee plays several additional roles.Footnote 8 It serves (thanks to Biggs) as one of many instances of “womanpower” working behind the scenes during the French wars. It stands as evidence of the power of the press, since newspapers spread word of the impending day and stirred up excitement, undoubtedly compelling some foot-dragging municipal authorities to organize local celebrations. Finally, the Jubilee—as something of a grassroots operation, not centrally organized in any strong sense (Biggs notwithstanding)—offers a shining example of Colley's main thesis. This loyalist device helped invent the British nation, allowing far-flung towns and villages (and even, it was claimed, distant colonial possessions) to knit themselves, “From Thames to Ganges’ shores,” into an encompassing narrative—just as the hundreds of individual local celebrations that the naval officer's wife arranged by county and alphabet added up, like tiles in a mosaic, to a single image of a nation celebrating as one.Footnote 9 The overall effect of Colley's treatment is to demonstrate the power of loyalist belief and practice at the height of the Napoleonic wars.Footnote 10

I do not set out to dismiss popular interest in celebrating the king's anniversary nor to deny the reality of widespread affection for George III. But the idea of the Jubilee was considerably more contested than some late Georgian loyalists would have us believe. Attending closely to the content and consequences of radical complaints provides a more balanced account of contemporary popular opinion and reinforces recent arguments that British radicalism continued to be vital during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 11 It also reveals the Jubilee, as actually celebrated, to have been a hybrid political child of joint loyalist and radical parentage. Radicals not only criticized but actually recast the Jubilee, altering the way in which the day was observed. The October 1809 event was indeed “a milestone in national mobilization.”Footnote 12 But the nation that constructed the Jubilee, and that was in turn consolidated by it, was not politically uniform. This moment of monarchical commemoration was the product of political discord; it was constructed by contention as much as it was by consensus.

The Jubilee was an innovative spectacle of loyalty. No English monarch since Edward III, more than four hundred years earlier, had ruled for half a century, and no royal celebration had been so ambitiously national in its aims. Premised on simultaneous events across the kingdom, the Jubilee depended on local initiative. Subtly differentiated from community to community, yet betraying certain common themes and motifs, the celebration was shaped by a combination of local government action and centralized, if not precisely governmental, action. The celebration of October 1809 was carefully staged in a zone between state and civil society and was nourished and mediated by a press culture that carried proposals from metropolis to province and back again. The “invented tradition” of October 1809 would serve as a model for future state celebrations, most obviously the Jubilees of later monarchs.Footnote 13

The fact that opposition journalists and politicians pounced on the Jubilee lets us probe British political culture in a period that too often has been treated, if only by neglect, as one of dormancy for British radicalism. For a few weeks, heated criticism of the loyalist scheme reverberated in the City of London's governing Court of Common Council and in the pages of radical newspapers, including William Cobbett's Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, Leigh Hunt's Examiner, Daniel Lovell's Statesman, Henry White's Independent Whig, and the Leeds Mercury. The Times, independent minded but certainly not a radical publication, published a fair number of reformist criticisms of the planned festivities as well.

The Jubilee came on the heels of the Duke of York's disgrace, which had buoyed the spirits of government critics. He was George III's second son and the commander in chief of the army; the duke's mistress, Mary Anne Clarke, had revealed that she took bribes from army officers in return for promotions. A parliamentary backbencher, Colonel Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle, had introduced Clarke's evidence to the Commons; his immunity from prosecution effectively removed journalists’ fears that the government might sue them for libel in this case, and thus emboldened radical scribblers.Footnote 14 The affair that helped stir up radical opposition to the Jubilee had also helped inspire the event in the first place. In an 1812 letter to Nicholas Vansittart, who had recently become chancellor of the exchequer, Biggs described how she had “imagined and produced” the 1809 celebration. Wardle's “machinations” had prompted her to act, she recalled, because the surge in radical activity reminded her of the French Revolution's early stirrings.Footnote 15

As far as can be determined, Biggs was a woman of modest birth and with no exalted family connections. But she had a strong personality and a vigorous writing hand. She gained the ear of government ministers—first, William Windham during his tenure as secretary of war and, later, Vansittart—simply by writing them repeatedly. Biggs had a history of loyalist activism: she had anonymously published works criticizing the French Revolution (one described her captivity during the Terror) and had, in 1803, offered prepublication comments on an anonymous tract by the then-loyalist journalist William Cobbett (an editing opportunity made possible by Windham).Footnote 16 Faced with the unwelcome excitement of the Clarke affair in 1809, Biggs at first hoped that reformist activism might be counteracted by a royal tour of the country. Informed by the earl of Ailesbury, a courtier whom she described to Vansittart as a friend, that the king's health would not permit this, she proposed a Jubilee.Footnote 17

Biggs recognized that she would need assistance from the state but that the Jubilee could not appear to be inspired by government ministers. It is striking that this freelance propagandist took care that the event seem (in her words) “evidently non-official,” even as she availed herself of help from a Whitehall connection. When she sent “nearly a thousand” anonymous letters urging a Jubilee to the “chief acting persons of all towns of any note in the three kingdoms,”Footnote 18 she let a contact in the Home Office—John Reeves, the founder of the loyalist Association movement in 1792 and now superintendent of the Alien Office—place them into the London post for her.Footnote 19 But Biggs took care to use paper different from that used in government offices, and she refused Home Office franking of the letters. In other words, she accepted government assistance but took care to hide evidence of this fact. Biggs, moreover—though undoubtedly valuing the appearance of spontaneity—took care to script as much of the event as she could, writing speeches to be delivered, sketching transparencies to be displayed, and even outlining the play to be performed at Covent Garden on the day of the Jubilee (or so she later claimed). She also made use of the self-amplifying qualities of the press, sending “paragraphs to most of the provincial papers, … intimating to one town the preparations which were going on in another”—so that residents of York might be spurred on by preparations in Bristol and vice versa. Signing her letters with a variety of signatures, she turned her solitary voice into a very choir of loyalism.Footnote 20

Despite (or because of) Biggs's best efforts to fan the flames of loyalty, hostility to the Jubilee blossomed throughout the radical press in the autumn of 1809. The chief radical complaint was that the proposal came at a moment when celebration should be the last thing on British minds. Not until after Biggs had conceived of the Jubilee and had written her initial batch of letters, in the summer of 1809, did news arrive of military troubles in Spain and the Netherlands. A quarter of the British troops fighting at Talavera de la Reina were lost in late July, and the following weeks saw malaria lay low thousands of soldiers on Walcheren Island in the Scheldt River. By the time Biggs's suggestions began to bear fruit in local government and in the press, reports of the losses at Talavera and Walcheren were filling up newspaper columns—and animating radical quills. “When we should prostrate in sackcloth and ashes, we are to revel in mirth and festivity,” complained the Morning Chronicle.Footnote 21 William Cobbett expostulated that “no one having the common feelings of humanity” could have proposed “dancing and singing and ringing and rejoicing, while the nation is weeping over the scenes at Talavera and Walcheren!”Footnote 22 But that, Cobbett suggested, was precisely what the Jubilee would amount to.

By celebrating a span of time, the Jubilee offered an inviting target for those who wished to rain on the loyalist parade: as one Common Council member suggested, the loyalist decision to commemorate the half century offered an opportunity “to contrast the present condition of things with that of the end of the last reign.”Footnote 23 Radicals gladly detailed developments of the past fifty years: America had been lost, “torrents” of British blood shed, habeas corpus repeatedly suspended, and taxes multiplied.Footnote 24 One of Cobbett's correspondents compiled a table comparing the prices of foodstuffs in 1760 and 1809 to demonstrate how much the British had lost in the years since George's coronation. The table, he suggested, should be “read in every parish church in the kingdom, and by the king's permission printed at the back of the Form of Prayer.”Footnote 25

An anonymous letter to the rector of St. John’s, Clerkenwell—forwarded by the concerned clergyman to the home secretary, Lord Liverpool—also seized on the half century’s contrast. The disaffected writer insisted that if any “honest Man was to contrast ye present state of things with what they where [sic] at ye present King's accession there would be more cause of regret than Joy.” He complained of the “oppressive weight of the present bad managed government” and hoped that the minister's Jubilee sermon would avoid asking parishioners to “rejoice at Blessings which [do] not exist.”Footnote 26 The cleric, who told Liverpool that he feared many in his parish agreed with the anonymous writer, also forwarded a marked-up copy of a parish handbill announcing his Jubilee sermon and a collection for the poor.Footnote 27 Handwritten marginalia on the printed broadside bemoaned the “innumerable number of grievous & heavy Taxes unknown to this Country 50 years ago & from which I heartily & devoutly Pray Good Lord deliver us. Amen.” At the bottom of the sheet, the printed “God Save the King” was crossed out and replaced by “Long Live ye King & may he mend our ways and send his Subjects happier & better days.”Footnote 28

In the absence of any visible organizer of the Jubilee, conspiracy theories flourished. The mystery of its origins may have conveyed spontaneity to loyalists (“No man can say who first suggested the plan—it was the spontaneous effusion of every heart”).Footnote 29 To radicals, it intimated something more sinister. In that sense, Biggs's scheme backfired, overpowered by its very ambition. No contemporary guessed that anything like a thousand letters had been strewn across the kingdom, but the few letters (presumably hers) that did surface, to be reprinted or paraphrased in the press, raised suspicions.Footnote 30 Biggs insisted to Vansittart that her letters had been “not circular but almost every one different, & adapted to the place to which they were sent.” Both the Leeds Mercury and the Morning Chronicle, however, assumed they were dealing with “a ‘Circular,’” a chain letter being forwarded (perhaps with amendations or alterations along the way) from one loyal set of hands to another.Footnote 31 That these letters might all have come from a single writing desk was clearly (and understandably) inconceivable. The seeds Biggs scattered did fall on fertile ground, so perhaps the reality was not that different from the network of loyalists that some observers apparently imagined. Indeed, the notion that the puppet master behind the curtain was a middle-aged lady near Chepstow should arguably have been more troubling to radicals than the possibility that the Jubilee originated in Whitehall, at court, or in the offices of government contractors.

Two weeks before the appointed day, the Glasgow Courier published what must have been one of Biggs's many anonymous letters proposing a Jubilee, this one addressed to (and now forwarded to the newspaper by) Glasgow's lord provost.Footnote 32 Cobbett read the letter as evidence of “underhand means to feel the pulses of corporate bodies.”Footnote 33 The Morning Chronicle, too, smelled a rat. Robert Waithman, a linen draper and radical member of London's Court of Common Council, had recently—the Chronicle reminded its readers—alleged that proministerial members of the Court “had applied long ago to distant corporate bodies, endeavouring to induce those bodies to originate the jubilee, in order that, originating at a distance, it might seem the more disinterested.”Footnote 34 The Chronicle took the Glasgow letter to support Waithman's speculation, and the newspaper now asked “such independent Gentlemen as may be in possession of similar letters, to publish them for the information of the People of the United Empire.”Footnote 35 The anonymity of Biggs's campaign only fed opposition skepticism about its origins.

Since a “self-constituted body of ‘Merchants and Bankers’” played a prominent role in the City of London's Jubilee preparations,Footnote 36 radicals found it easy to attribute the event's conception to the mercantile interest and Old Corruption. Behind the Jubilee, opposition periodicals claimed, lay a cabal of “Contractors, Pensioners without services, Sinecure Placemen, Nabobs,” and “loan-jobbers.”Footnote 37 Cobbett, in characteristic fashion, added Jews.Footnote 38 Profiting from the ministry's wars and corruption, merchants (the argument went) had an interest in preventing the British people from recognizing the true authors of their woes. In short, the Jubilee arrived at a moment so very inauspicious for the nation not through bad timing but by deliberation: it was “a mere trick intended for the purpose of screening Ministers from an inquiry into their conduct, which was most culpable.”Footnote 39

Radicals branded the Jubilee “a diversion of the public mind,” a “curious Ministerial manœuvre to amuse the people of England, and to divert their attention from past and passing events.”Footnote 40 Cobbett suggested that the idea was “to amuse the people, to keep them, as long as possible, from seeing their real situation.”Footnote 41 This assertion was hardly flattering to the British populace, who came off as gullible pawns of the Jubilee's planners, a rapt audience for a great lie. There was more than a strain of antipopulism in the certainty of one Independent Whig correspondent that the event would appeal to “the infatuated people, so egregiously duped by unmeaning raree-shows, noise, confusion, and absurdity.”Footnote 42

That Britain was not what it might appear from the Jubilee—and that the Jubilee plans amounted to tinsel strewn liberally on a ragged tree—was hammered home with theatrical metaphor. “Would it not be a cruel mockery of the poor and needy to compel them to assist in the performance of comic parts with tragic hearts … ?” asked one correspondent in the Independent Whig.Footnote 43 Radicals saw “unfeeling mummery” in the “puppet-shew scheme” that forced men and women “to p[ut] on a false appearance.”Footnote 44 Conveniently enough, for those wishing to invoke the theater, the Jubilee arrived in the heat of battle over higher ticket prices at the new Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. A placard raised by one “Old Price” rioter early in October declared: “A new Farce is in rehearsal, called the Jubilee, and will be presented on the 25th instant.”Footnote 45

Intimidating urban householders into illuminating their windows—so they might make public (or, as the case might be, feign) support for a cause—was a well-established weapon of the Georgian crowd. Both radical and loyalist mobs employed the method (it had been a Wilkite favorite forty years earlier). That the call for a “general illumination,” in the case of the Jubilee, came from municipal governments across the kingdom, and well in advance of the event, only stiffened the backs of those who wished to portray the coming celebrations as inherently suspect. Would “the poor aged widow” be “exhorted … to dance and sing?” asked one reader of the Independent Whig. Would her children have to “strip off their sack-cloth and ashes, dress themselves up in the flickering garments of wanton mirth and festivity, illuminate their miserable mansion, join in the public riot, and celebrate the happy Jubilee!”?Footnote 46 Consider, wrote Leigh Hunt, “how many fatherless and childless persons, whose happiness has been the sport of 30 years’ bloodshed, will turn with sickening hearts from the glare of their own rejoicings, and seek refuge in some darker corner of the house from that night's ‘mockery of woe.’”Footnote 47 Nor was it only the poor inhabitants of radical journalists’ imaginings who considered illuminating out of fear. Even a patrician member of Parliament, the moderate Whig Charles Callis Western, considered engaging in the “hypocrisy” of lighting up, out of worry that keeping his house dark during the Jubilee might lead him to be “branded as a traitor.”Footnote 48

Some cynics numbered tallow makers among the Jubilee conspirators since they were obvious beneficiaries on any public occasion when people felt intimidated into burning candles.Footnote 49 One writer complained that “unprincipled monopolists,” weeks before the Jubilee, were already raising the price of tallow. Glaziers, too, were suspect, given how many unlit windows were “expected to be broken by their own and the Tallow-Chandlers’ boys, aided by a riotous mob, solely actuated by the love of mischief.”Footnote 50 Even one of the celebratory London theatricals created for the occasion of the Jubilee, Britain's Jubilee at the Lyceum, picked up this anti-Jubilee trope: its villain, Wick, is the owner of a tallow shop whose Jubilee spirit stems from self-interest rather than loyalty, and he is in communication with a secret committee of glaziers that will orchestrate demands for illumination and window breaking.Footnote 51

Eight years before the Jubilee, when the Addington government had signed preliminaries of peace with Napoleon, William Cobbett's print shop had been targeted by a crowd demanding he illuminate.Footnote 52 Not yet having undergone his peculiar political metamorphosis from idiosyncratic loyalist into idiosyncratic radical, he refused to light up, and suffered the consequences. At the time, Cobbett had suggested that illuminating public buildings—and thus effectively forcing private citizens to follow suit, lest they be exposed to mob violence—might be appropriate for an apolitical occasion such as the king's birthday, but not for a controversial measure of Cabinet.Footnote 53 Eight years later, a royal anniversary no longer seemed harmlessly nonpartisan. Cobbett anticipated “the gin-drenched rabble, armed with mud and brick-bats,” setting out to threaten householders with “smashery.” Their actions were not spontaneous. The crowd would perform, he wrote, “at the word of command from the Jews and Contractors, and other ‘Blood-suckers,’ as Lord Chatham used to call them, who, during the last half-century, have preyed upon the people of England.”Footnote 54 Here the radical tendency to see well-organized conspiracy behind loyalist actions overflowed into an outright paranoia that saw “the people of England” sandwiched between devious plutocrats, above, and their obedient mob followers, below.Footnote 55 In the weeks to come, the spectacle of popular loyalty represented by the Jubilee would lead Cobbett to further qualify and constrict his definition of “the people.”

One Independent Whig reader conveyed the obscenity of celebrating at this troubled juncture in a nightmare vision of “the mangled objects” now lying in military hospitals, “writhing in torture and perishing with disease.” Should these “miserable victims of ministerial folly” now be expected “to wave their bleeding stumps, exert their feverish tongues, and raise their dying voices, to commemorate the blessed effects of the benign and peaceful Councils of this prosperous reign?”Footnote 56 Another letter writer, “Caroline,” aimed a similarly sensationalist question directly at the king: “What should we think of our present most gracious Sovereign,” she asked, “were he to compel a set of blind, lame, and half-famished, beggars, whose infirmities and misfortunes were of his own creating, to torture themselves by an attempt to dance and sing merely for his diversion or renown?”Footnote 57

By directly implicating her “most gracious Sovereign” (and by using those damning italics), “Caroline” took a more aggressive stance toward the ostensible object of the whole celebration, George III himself, than did most Jubilee critics.Footnote 58 In the second quarter century of his reign, radical blame for corruption had largely shifted away from the monarchy to Parliament (or to a borough-mongering element within Parliament).Footnote 59 George had been remarkably effective at crafting for himself the public persona of “an ordinary private gentleman never happier than with his family, or when the forms and trappings of state were laid aside and he could move freely among his people,” and few Jubilee critics sought to challenge this image head-on.Footnote 60 Instead, they praised George's generally agreed-upon private virtues, the better to underscore the public sins of his reign. Leigh Hunt skewered the Jubilee by noting that frugal George must surely be offended by the waste of all the banquets and illuminations. The king's domesticity provided a lens through which to focus attention on the failings of his sons, particularly the dissolute Prince of Wales. Thus Hunt noted that a proper loyal response to a “temperate,” “domestic” king would be to “recommend his example to dissipated Princes.”Footnote 61

Many employed the time-honored distinction between a blameless monarch and his mischievous ministers.Footnote 62 Claiming all due “deference to the private virtues of our Sovereign,” one pamphleteer asked what would be thought of servants “who should appoint a day of feasting and merriment, to evince their respect for their employer at a time that his family was pining under misfortune and disaster, and his affairs brought to the brink of ruin by the ignorance and mismanagement of his clerks.”Footnote 63 Sometimes monarch was distinguished from ministers with a raised eyebrow, as when Hunt allowed, “To be sure, his Majesty has not done this, for ‘the King can do no wrong;’ but his Majesty's chosen servants have.”Footnote 64 Hunt's quotation marks distanced himself from the stock phrase and signaled that the king might indeed commit a wrong; it was he, after all, who had “chosen” the guilty parties. Other observers noted that certain reforms were the monarch's alone to set in motion. One category of the imprisoned—crown debtors—could be liberated only by “the demise of the Crown, or an Act of Grace from the King,” noted the Leeds Mercury; “should this act of clemency take place previous to the Jubilee it would reflect a brighter ray of glory on the head and heart of the King, than all the candles in his realm” (another swipe at illumination).Footnote 65

Turning the spotlight on the king as pardoner was no casual matter. As the next section of this article will show, proposals for pardons and amnesties would multiply in the weeks leading up to the day of Jubilee. One letter in The Times, calling for a general royal pardon of all offenses besides murder “and the more atrocious crimes,” elaborated on the significance of this royal prerogative. The writer noted that the “Power of Mercy” was one that the king could employ “without the responsibility of Ministers.” Pardoning was a public arena in which the king, as opposed to his cabinet, could be held responsible—which is to say, it was an arena in which the king could do wrong. The letter's author was, in effect, daring the monarch to live up to the glowing words of his advocates. The approaching Jubilee must involve a quid pro quo: there was “a reciprocity of duties and an interchange of affections, which forbid the balance to preponderate on the side either of the Monarch or the People.” The people would be celebrating their ruler “in acts”; it was incumbent on the king to go beyond “mere words or form” and to let “the feelings naturally excited in [his] breast” exert themselves, too, in practical action.Footnote 66 Without public manifestation, the king's oft-lauded private virtues would remain purely theoretical.

The idea of a royal Jubilee, we have seen, came under immediate fire from radical journalists and their correspondents. This serves to reinforce Philip Harling's description of the year 1809 as an opposition flash point during the years of war against Napoleon.Footnote 67 But were British radicals mere impotent gadflies, sniping on the sidelines yet of little significance for the Jubilee as it was actually celebrated? Such a suspicion is belied by an examination of the periodical press as September waned and the appointed day approached. For weeks before the Jubilee, dissenting voices criticized the proposed “sensuality” of the event—its primary allegiance to the principles of drinking and gorging. For weeks, they proposed more seemly ways to mark the occasion.Footnote 68 And as 25 October drew near, the Jubilee began to take on the more solemn and charitable shape that its critics had proposed for it. Remarkably, the Jubilee's critics seem to have managed to shame at least some exuberant loyalist spirits into changing the manner in which the anniversary was observed. Radicals did not only resist, they also recast the Jubilee.

In mid- to late September, letters appeared in The Times and the Independent Whig proposing that the royal anniversary might best be marked by releasing debtors from prison. Debtor relief might be funded by restraining from boisterous celebration. A correspondent in The Times suggested that “instead of making themselves sick at the expence of three guineas a man,” the merchants, bankers, and Corporation of the City of London planning a sumptuous feast should each subscribe that sum for the relief of debtors and thus “restore an unfortunate father to his family, a useful hand to his occupation, a soldier or a sailor to the service and defence of his country.”Footnote 69 Others suggested that freeing debtors would mean honoring the Levitical description of the Jubilee as a fiftieth year of economic redemption.Footnote 70 It would also, some asserted, mean following the historical precedent set by Edward III during his own Jubilees, on the occasions of his fiftieth birthday and the fiftieth year of his reign.Footnote 71 Planning a Jubilee without some measure of economic redistribution would amount to ignoring the existing precedents, both biblical and English monarchical.

The wastefulness of illumination was repeatedly cited by advocates of Jubilee charity. More abstemious celebration might lead to greater charity, suggested one late September letter in The Times: if householders donated “that sum only, which they would waste on oil or tallow,” they might free many a father or son.Footnote 72 If half the houses in London refrained from lighting candles, they could put £15,000 toward the endowment of 150 almshouses, a reader of the Morning Chronicle calculated. Such a mode of observing the Jubilee would, moreover, be “a display more congenial to the character of the Sovereign” than the uneconomical burning of lights.Footnote 73

Such suggestions did not remain confined to the pages of newspapers. As municipal governments considered how to commemorate George's accession, opportunities arose for radicals and reformers to trumpet the misfortunes of George's reign, to criticize the apparently partisan agenda of the Jubilee, and to offer alternative plans for marking the occasion. Town governments may have obediently voted to transmit addresses of congratulations to the king. But these addresses did not always offer simple obeisance to the status quo. The Corporation of Nottingham, in lauding “that glorious Constitution of Government, over which, Your Majesty has so long presided,” made sure to add that this constitution “contains within itself the Power of reforming the Abuses incident to every human institution.” The Nottingham declaration prayed for the prolongation of George's life, so that he might “restore the Blessings of Peace, and extend the Privileges of Civil and Religious Liberty to every Subject of your widely extended Empire.”Footnote 74

Among local governments, the City of London's governing body, the Court of Common Council, held center stage, its debates broadcast across the kingdom in detailed newspaper accounts.Footnote 75 In mid-September, the subject of a Jubilee was first broached in the Common Council by the banker and member of Parliament Sir William Curtis (who had recently drawn ridicule for taking his luxurious, well-stocked yacht on a patriotic pleasure trip to observe the Walcheren expedition).Footnote 76 His fellow counselor, the radical linen draper Robert Waithman, criticized the notion of “a day of jollification.”Footnote 77 (Curtis bristled at Waithman's use of the new slang term—though his chagrin seems only to have encouraged other critics to pick up the word and apply it to the Jubilee.)Footnote 78 Waithman professed himself ready to subscribe to a congratulatory address to the king, “stuffed with as much loyalty as possible,” but drew the line at stuffing himself with turtle and venison at this time of public misery.Footnote 79

The next meeting of the Common Council found Waithman ready to endorse the idea that the Corporation should attend church on the morning of the Jubilee. But he now professed incredulity at the thought of an address of congratulations. “Were they to congratulate his Majesty upon the frequent suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and of the Constitution during his reign?” or on the loss of America, the interminable French wars, and the explosive growth of taxes? Alderman Matthew Wood, a druggist and one of the two sheriffs of London and Middlesex, protested the notion of illuminating Guildhall, which would be taken as a signal for a general illumination. Lighting up “would be an insult to the many families now in mourning for the loss of sons and brothers” whose “lives had lately been thrown away in ill planned and foolish Expeditions.”Footnote 80

At the heart, or belly, of debate this day lay the question of dinner. Should the Jubilee be marked simply by a solemn thanksgiving service or rather by an official meal—and if the latter, should the feast be funded by the Corporation of the City of London or by individual members of the Court? The debate pitted high-minded reformers, who thought it hardly becoming the dignity of the City to engage in “habitual characteristic gluttony,” against bon vivant loyalists, who thought the “greatest proof” of loyalty to be “chearfulness.”Footnote 81 The councillor and bookseller Joseph Mawman (aptly named, as Cobbett pointed out) was shocked by the thought of no feast—and horrified that members might themselves have to fork over money for their dinners. Requiring individual payment would make the feast “but thinly attended,” Mawman suggested—a remark that reformers pounced on as evidence of how thin “loyalty” itself could be.Footnote 82 Mawman could hardly see what the fuss was about, as the dinner “would only amount to about 1,000l.”Footnote 83 Another councillor shuddered at the thought of a thanksgiving service with no dinner: “it would be dreadful to go with an empty stomach into a cursed cold Church.”Footnote 84 Opposition observers took these ill-chosen words to demonstrate that the councillors confused loyalty with satiety.Footnote 85 After “a scene of tumult and confusion,” a large majority of those present voted for dinner, and a slim majority, against individual members footing the bill. Little more than a third of the entire council was in attendance. Further disorder prevented further planning, which was hence postponed for another meeting.Footnote 86

The delay allowed radicals to regroup. Their spirits were no doubt buoyed by public reaction to the meeting's results. The Times saw in the votes “a degree of civic beastliness, … that really almost turns one sick at the recital.” At least the avaricious “loyalty” of contractors could be traced to their desire to provide for their own dependents; this “eating species of loyalty,” by contrast, was “purely sensual and swinish.”Footnote 87 “A calf's head served up on gold plate is City patriotism personified,” Hunt admonished.Footnote 88 As they awaited the next Common Council meeting, radical members may also have taken comfort, and even some inspiration, from the provinces. At a Leeds meeting held during the interval between London's council meetings, local leaders organizing Jubilee commemorations had “reprobated” the idea of illuminating and of “treating the populace with beer.” In place of sensuality, the Leeds Mercury reported, there would be charitable collections for the poor, as “boisterous demonstrations of joy” would “ill comport with the advanced age of the Sovereign, and the portentous situation of the country.”Footnote 89 London's Court of Common Council may have been the most visible body debating how to observe the Jubilee, but it was not necessarily the fulcrum on which provincial changes depended.

At the next Common Council meeting, radicals proposed that the banquet money should instead be devoted to freeing small debtors from the City's prisons. The motion passed unanimously.Footnote 90 The Council resolved to subscribe one thousand pounds for the relief of small debtors; the lord mayor pronounced himself proud of the resolution, and “happy … to eat a bit of cold roast beef, and that only.”Footnote 91 As Cobbett wrote, the dinner supporters on the Council, who had originally “carried a measure, intended to set the example of boozing and gourmandizing and carousing all over the country,” would now have to go to a church instead of a tavern.Footnote 92 Records were not yet kept of which individual councillors attended meetings, so it is possible that the policy shift was a result, at least in part, of different members showing up to vote at each of the thinly attended debates. One might also add that the Common Council did not back away entirely from its original measures (the Guildhall would still be illuminated). No matter: the impression was that radical councillors had shamed their colleagues away from jollification and toward charity. Philanthropy had become the order of the day. Even the committee of merchants and bankers involved in planning the City's celebrations announced that they “no longer th[ought] it expedient to recommend a general illumination” of the City of London. Instead, they emulated the Common Council radicals, recommending a subscription for those confined for small debts.Footnote 93

During the weeks in which the City's councillors debated how to mark the Jubilee, the tide turned across the kingdom. In Edinburgh, magistrates rescinded their initial resolution to illuminate.Footnote 94 The city of York cited the “irregularities and disturbances usually attendant” upon illuminations as a reason for resisting the practice.Footnote 95 Glasgow authorities agreed to illuminate public buildings but specifically asked private citizens to refrain from lighting up.Footnote 96 Many local governments replaced illumination with more socially defensible alternatives. The Dorset town of Weymouth, until recently the king's summer retreat, decided that public dinners and general illuminations were inappropriate for these “awful times”; inhabitants should instead contribute to help their poor neighbors and “their fellow townsmen now prisoners of war in the hands of the enemy.”Footnote 97 A Birmingham meeting “resolved to discourage illumination” and to substitute collections for the poor.Footnote 98 A subscription for establishing schools for poor children replaced lighting up in Newcastle.Footnote 99 At a Liverpool meeting, a motion for general illumination was overruled so that sixty debtors might be freed “at half the expence of an illumination.”Footnote 100 Across the kingdom, towns recalibrated their plans for the anniversary. Their actions were reported in the provincial and metropolitan press alike; a Coventry meeting even resolved to advertise its Jubilee plans in two London papers, as if to underscore the fact that the provinces could set an example for the capital, not just the other way round.Footnote 101

The shift was sudden. No wonder Wick, the chandler villain of the play Britain's Jubilee, cannot believe the rumors that there will be no general illumination. When neighbors drop by to report the Common Council debate over dining and illuminating, Wick alludes to his devious plan to call initially for “no illumination” but then have the glaziers “call for lights—nobody prepared except our shops, no candles to be had, scarce articles all bespoke raise ’em cent per cent, make a little fortune by the maneuver you understand.”Footnote 102 His schemes are defeated by the public spirit of others. Not only are his expectations of an illumination dashed, he also finds himself inadvertently pledging to release the associate he has had thrown into debtors’ prison (he thinks he is signing a document that will recover the money he is owed). Written hastily in the days leading up to the Jubilee, Britain's Jubilee described the sea change that the event had undergone—the official abandonment of illumination in favor of relieving imprisoned debtors, whose plight is underscored in one scene in which a line of piteous prisoners files across the stage. The play's happy ending qualified, but could not efface, its reminder of British poverty and the confinement that debt could bring.Footnote 103

The Jubilee inspired a host of philanthropic proposals. To honor George's advanced age, the Morning Chronicle suggested that each county should fund “an Asylum for fifty women above the age of 50 each, and for seventy-one men above the age of 71 each—the one being the number of years that his Majesty has reigned, and the other the number of years he has lived.” Helping the aged and the poor (rather than “paying three guineas for a ticket to gormandise”) would be a “truly British mode of celebrating” that “would gratify the King's own heart.”Footnote 104 A similar proposal in a letter to the Sheffield Iris attracted 250 applicants. The notion of thus “nobly honouring the King himself in the persons of his poorest subjects”—celebrating the prince by clothing the pauper—offered a peculiar mirroring of the elderly monarchical body with those of his more unfortunate subjects.Footnote 105 Might some contemporaries have viewed the project with an egalitarian air of “there but for the grace of God” goes the king?

The power of the press—instrumental to Biggs's scheme—was now used by others, equally anonymous, to try to nudge celebrations in a more charitable direction. One writer in The Times proposed ransoming Englishmen currently held captive by “Moors”; another asked readers interested in clothing the poor to meet her on Jubilee day at the door of Westminster Abbey.Footnote 106 One letter proposed, on 16 October, that the king give an amnesty to all soldiers and sailors guilty of “desertion and all other crimes, not too atrocious.”Footnote 107 When Jubilee day arrived, the newspapers did indeed carry news of a royal pardon of deserters and of soldiers imprisoned for military offenses.Footnote 108 Would such an amnesty have occurred without the general clamor for pardons and liberations, amplified by newspapers both metropolitan and provincial? Perhaps, but some doubt is raised by the fact that when the home secretary, Lord Liverpool, presented the king with a proclamation for pardoning deserters, just two days before the Jubilee, he backdated it by five days so that it would appear to have been the product of the king's last privy council meeting (he also proposed amending the meeting's agenda accordingly).Footnote 109

That ministers (undoubtedly distracted by the cabinet chaos resulting from Lord Portland's stroke and resignation, and by the related duel between the foreign secretary, George Canning, and the war secretary, Lord Castlereagh) were scrambling to catch up with public opinion seems to be confirmed by a letter that the new prime minister, Spencer Perceval, wrote the king on 20 October, less than a week before the Jubilee.Footnote 110 Writing soon after George had signed a warrant to deposit £6,000 of surplus revenue from Gibraltar into his privy purse, Perceval informed the king that contributing to charity, and in particular debtor relief, had become “almost universal thro’out the country.” Perhaps, he suggested (and George promptly agreed), the king might want to channel some of the Gibraltar funds to the cause. Perceval's repeated emphasis on the “universality” of support for charity—something, he observed, the king “might not otherwise have known”—seems to confirm that the monarch, in his Jubilee actions, was following the people's lead.Footnote 111 Perceval, for his part, may have had the idea first put in his head by the Pittite placeman George Rose, treasurer for the navy, who had suggested to him on 10 October that the king release “as many of the Crown debtors as in prudence should be thought advisable.” Rose justified the action by noting that “exertions are making in many counties to release persons confined for moderate debts”—further evidence that news of provincial actions was percolating its way up the political ladder.Footnote 112 While George did engage in “calculated acts of benevolence” in an effort to burnish his image, as Frank Prochaska has shown, it seems clear that, in the case of Jubilee philanthropy, any calculation was reactive rather than proactive—a response to the already swelling tide of public charity.Footnote 113

The extraordinary transformation of the Jubilee was widely recognized. A few days before the anniversary, the Leeds Mercury hailed the change in plans: “The unmeaning and ill-timed fooleries of riotous exultation and ostentatious display, have given place to more pious and benevolent intentions.”Footnote 114 Others noted the change in order to condemn it. The Whiggish Morning Chronicle criticized the “gloom” with which some apparently wished to celebrate the Jubilee and pleaded that there be “no puritanical restraints that day on the people.”Footnote 115 Writers in the ministerial Morning Post criticized the alteration in more barbed terms, viewing the City's decision against illumination as an effort by a “Jacobinical” few to extinguish the joy of the day in favor of a “gloomy sadness.” Relief of debtors could go ahead (though some Post contributors questioned the motivations for this sudden “charitable fit”).Footnote 116 Still, charity could hardly justify refraining from “illuminations, bonfires, roasting of oxen, wrestling, cudgeling, and all the other national games.” Any municipal “lukewarmness” on the matter of such recreations was evidence of “degeneracy” from “the spirit of ancient times.”Footnote 117

Some must have shuddered at the hope, expressed in The Times, that “public generosity” would “[for]ever prevent the absurd and useless practice of illuminating, in all cases whatever”—even peace, when it came.Footnote 118 They need not have worried. Despite the radical makeover of the Jubilee, the twenty-fifth of October was still marked by sufficient “honest coarseness”—sufficient boozing, feasting, and illumination—to satisfy loyalist observers.Footnote 119 The actual Jubilee day was far from ascetic. Where “general” illumination had been eschewed, there was often “partial” illumination; where municipal authorities resolved to avoid lighting up, press accounts sometimes observed that “a great part of the respectable houses in town” would likely do so in any event.Footnote 120 Lamp lighters reportedly began their labors at the Bank of England at one in the afternoon and still had not finished the job by six.Footnote 121 The elites of many towns enjoyed exclusive balls and suppers (in Newbury, they danced till five in the morning).Footnote 122 Crowds in the London streets were “immense,” George Rose reported, “but all most perfectly quiet and civil.”Footnote 123 Indeed, the loyalist British Press reported that the efforts of “a few boys” to intimidate householders into lighting up (by shouting “Lights!”) went unheeded.Footnote 124 Intimidation would not prevail.

The king was the star of many of the hundreds of transparencies that were displayed on houses, businesses, and public institutions, though he had to share space with subjects ranging from Neptune and Britannia to the Bill of Rights and Magna Carta.Footnote 125 Much of the praise that was offered George may have had the effect of damning, by contrast, his son and heir, as when a Windsor transparency honored his “Temperance” or when a furniture maker's display in the Strand praised George's qualities “As a Monarch, a Husband, a Father, and a Christian.” (The Prince of Wales had banished his estranged wife from court a decade earlier.) The same Strand display hailed Queen Charlotte as “a virtuous Woman” and connected private monarchical morals to national fortune by claiming that “Old England may for ever bid defiance to all the world, so long as Virtue, Chastity, and pure Religion, reign in our Court.” Some anxiety about the royal succession was signaled here—not least because the death of the king could hardly be assumed to be that far off. There was something peculiarly elegiac about the transparency offered by the military and naval wine merchants Armstrong and Company, which showed a medallion of the king, flanked by likenesses of Nelson and Sir John Moore.Footnote 126 Both military heroes were dead; was George already being relegated to history alongside them?

Clearly the Jubilee remained a day of jollification, despite the increased role of philanthropy. Indeed, though radicals had painted a battle between charity and jollity, the two could coincide when countless local gentry and aristocrats rained a cornucopia of victuals on the poor. An early October letter in the loyalist Courier had fretted that if the needy were not given “a plentiful meal of meat, bre[a]d, and beer,” the Jubilee would “testify the exultation of the great, while the poor … will look on indifferent or envying spectators of our festivity and joy.”Footnote 127 One might (less than charitably) see this letter as advocating feeding the poor for purely instrumental reasons—as if the only reason to provide sustenance was to prevent popular apathy or resentment. It would be churlish to assume that only self-interest motivated those who offered food, drink, and merriment to their tenants and neighbors. Providing six pounds of meat, a loaf of bread, sixty pounds of potatoes, and a gallon of cider for every poor resident of the Somerset village of Hinton St. George, as Earl Poulett did, was a generous act of charity.Footnote 128 Still, such grand displays of largesse—scores of which were recorded in press and other accounts—conform to what Nicholas Rogers has described as the “theatre of paternalism.”Footnote 129 They represent a different and older subspecies of philanthropy from the subscription model. The feast of plenty was often “owned” by a named individual (rather than distributed, in joint-stock fashion, among a group of actually or effectively anonymous subscribers). Personal interaction between benefactor and recipient played an important role. When one P. Mighell, Esq., provided a dinner for two thousand poor Brightonians, he prevailed upon one hundred gentlemen to serve as stewards for the occasion, in a not untypical world-turned-upside-down gesture (presumably meant to serve the cause of “prudent mirth” detected by the British Press account of Mighell's plan).Footnote 130 Subscription philanthropy, in many cases at least, had less fleeting aspirations than the eat, drink, and be merry charitable banquet.

Much of this feasting was conducted with becoming restraint, in keeping with what Rogers has described as the increasing sobriety, order, and decorum of patrician largesse in the late Georgian period.Footnote 131 In Coventry, local gentlemen offered each poor person a pound of meat and a pound of bread, accompanied by a positively stingy single pint of ale.Footnote 132 (Compare this alcoholic portion to the extra pint of wine, or half pint of rum, given to every sailor in the Royal Navy for the Jubilee.)Footnote 133 But elsewhere, some of the day's celebrations sound as riotous as the window breaking that Jubilee reformers hoped to avoid. At Windsor, apparently very soon after the royal party itself had passed through, pudding, bread, and meat were thrown to the assembled throng, who were then “regaled with what was denominated a ‘sop in the pan,’ that is, with having the mashed potatoes, gravy, &c. thrown over them.”Footnote 134 At what should have been the epicenter of dignified loyalty on this day, in other words, the common folk were being drenched in the very stuff of charity—a carnivalesque, not to say gross, vision of bounty, rather than the orderly and dignified philanthropy suggested in reformers’ speeches.

Charity, in short, did not elbow plain festivity out of the picture. The rich merchants who had subscribed (as the Statesman sarcastically reported) “the enormous sum of—Five Pounds Each” still dined that night at a sumptuous feast costing three guineas a head. (Thus, the paper concluded, “the liberation of a Prisoner, according to Civic estimation, is worth exactly 37 shillings more than a single dinner.”) Lloyd's and the Bank of England went ahead with an illumination costing £3,000, according to the Statesman, while the merchants and bankers’ subscriptions for relieving debtors “does not yet amount to two-thirds of that wanton, wasteful, and insulting expenditure.”Footnote 135 Nor was the Common Council itself quite as abstemious as some had hoped. According to some reports, the lord mayor ended up giving his guests “a dinner, at least equal to that of the three guineas cram at Merchant Taylor's Hall,” and served on fine plate—not, it would seem, the cold roast beef he had promised.Footnote 136

In short, radicals who had dwelled on the distress of the people now found themselves, after the Jubilee, having to account for the apparently widespread merriment. The first step was to minimize the extent of the celebration: “The fact is,” Leigh Hunt insisted, “that there was scarcely one lane or one alley lighted up throughout the whole metropolis; on an average, not one street in ten was illuminated.”Footnote 137 Hunt's next step was to offer a taxonomy of the “six classes of persons conspicuous in celebrating this Jubilee,” a listing that deserves to be quoted at length if only to exhibit the degree of its bile. The celebrants, Hunt wrote, included

According to Hunt, then, the impulses driving men and women to mark the Jubilee might be variously classified as idiocy, idleness, imitation, intimidation, and interest (two species of this last, both economic).

The limitations of Hunt's Linnaean exercise should be obvious. Plain, sincere loyalty is, naturally, absent. But even some factors that other radicals cited are missing: the desire to bolster support for the ministry, not necessarily motivated by economic self-interest but rather by support for its policies, and the belief that a country at war should not be weakened by dwelling on the bad news of failed expeditions but should, if necessary, be distracted away from such events. In an age when popular spirit was seen as a fundamental element of national character—and when the debilitation of national character was felt to endanger national survival—even a cynical effort to divert the public's attention could be characterized as true patriotism, having little or nothing to do with personal profit. Hunt, in short, left no room in the Jubilee for a volunteer propagandist such as Biggs.

Nor did William Cobbett. Of the factors listed by Hunt, the two that Cobbett emphasized were intimidation and economic self-interest. These were intimately connected in his presentation. The financiers and contractors composing Cobbett's detested “Jubilee crew” were driven by the desire to line their pockets. Their hirelings, the “ragamuffins” coercing honest householders into lighting up, were impelled by the need to line their bellies. “The Crew” had bribed them “with offal from the shambles, and with dregs from the cellar,” and they had succumbed because of sheer hunger: “We appear to be a people, a very great part of whom are actually starving. We seem to be preparing one single meal of victuals and drink for the king's subjects, as it were by way of making up for a life of starvation; and, when these fed people set up a shouting for joy at feeling the effects of a belly-full, we are to proclaim it to the world as a proof of national loyalty; and, what is more, as a proof of the people's having been happy, having enjoyed prosperity, for the last forty nine years!” In Cobbett's neat presentation, then, not only was hunger the motive force behind the Jubilee (inasmuch as the event sought to distract people from this among other national ills) but food was the mechanism of its enforcement and success. The neediest would “be crammed and made drunk,” would “sing and bawl out the praises of those who stuff and who drench them,” and would threaten the broader community into illumination.Footnote 139 Hunger, in Cobbett's analysis, was the “mortifying” truth revealed by charitable efforts to feed the poor.Footnote 140 Cobbett effectively disqualified the philanthropic motivation of the day's charity. Landowners who fed their tenants could not win: callous sensualists if they feasted without including their social inferiors, they were guilty of shameless bribery if they treated them to beef and beer.

Cobbett's picture of a violent “herd” driven by animal desires hardly seems in keeping with his reputation as a populist.Footnote 141 But in fact Cobbett's writings frequently distinguish between a good “people” and a bad.Footnote 142 In the case of the Jubilee, he emphasized that the organizers had known better than to appeal to “the people of England, properly so called.” Instead they directed their attention to “the twelve hundred thousand miserable creatures, called paupers,” and, having secured their allegiance for a day, “bid us refer [to the paupers] for a knowledge of the public sentiment.”Footnote 143 The battle over the Jubilee was in some sense, then, a battle over defining “the people.” Loyalists, according to Cobbett, hoped paupers would be mistaken for the people; he, by contrast, sought to distinguish the two. But by drawing a sharp line between recipients of charity and the people “properly so called,” he was effectively discounting more than one-eighth of the English population. We might defend Cobbett against the charge of rank antipopulism by noting that in his presentation, it was precisely the rabble's hunger that caused it to act against the interests of the people; in that sense, paupers were less the pawns than the victims of the Old Corruption whose will they served. But Cobbett's handling of the politics of hunger was muddled; at a later point, he would note ruefully that food and coal had been provided to nearly half the village of Hampstead, which according to Cobbett's reasoning presumably meant that half the population had stooped to a demeaning admission of pauperism.Footnote 144 What was left of “the people” once the hungry had been removed?

In Cobbett's reading, the goal of all this intimidation and bribery was uniformity—fabricating the appearance of unanimous support for the ministry. An alternative reading held that intimidation might aim not to hide but to spotlight division. Robert Waithman had warned that the Jubilee's purpose “was to set up a cry of loyalty, and throw the odium of disloyalty upon every one who ventured to express a difference of opinion.”Footnote 145 The fear that the Jubilee might function as a loyalty test seems hardly unfounded when one considers the Morning Post correspondent who characterized critics of illumination as “pretended patriots” and the claim of another that “The jacobin, the disaffected, the traitor, and the spy, will glory in the general gloom, and smile to see our Sovereign's anniversary solemnized with sulky darkness.”Footnote 146

A letter to Cobbett's newspaper, probably from the barrister Daniel Rowland, raised both possible readings.Footnote 147 Rowland read the Jubilee as revealing a “silent system of coercion, that exists in this country, and which on occasions like the present is enforced and executed, through all classes of the people.” But the one case he offered of the people being “constrained … to express sentiments they do not possess” seemed in fact to hinge on the loyalist desire not to forge harmony but to unveil hidden dissent. A gentleman in Epping, John Conyers, had addressed a letter to the town's solicitors urging “friends to the king and government” to wear royal blue cockades on the Jubilee day (and asking the local milliner to prepare adequate quantities). This measure, Conyers had predicted, would “tend to produce some curious discoveries.”Footnote 148 Conyers does not seem to have meant by this a curious unanimity. Clearly he intended the disaffected not to don masks of affection but rather to refuse the ribbon—and in doing so expose to public scrutiny their own disloyalty.

In setting out, as this article has, to demonstrate the considerable extent and influence of the Jubilee's critique, one must take care not to assume, as Cobbett and Hunt did, that all Jubilators were either fools or knaves. Scholars have warned of the ultimate inaccessibility of the minds of a celebrating crowd.Footnote 149 That “the ignorant and the hungry” were given “victuals and drink, in order to make them shout for joy,” as Cobbett put it, may naturally stir up some “doubt of the sincerity of our jubilee.”Footnote 150 Still, a blanket cynicism about the motives of loyalist crowds is no more acceptable, or convincing, than a similar dismissal of radical protest would be.Footnote 151 Indeed, Cobbett himself made this point when he challenged loyalist observers to explain the “Jubilees” celebrating Napoleon in cities across the continent. If these were insincere events, scripted to cover up hatred of a tyrant, then why might not the same be true of George's festival? And if the Jubilee of 25 October demonstrated popular loyalty, then how could one claim the continental festivals to do anything but the same?Footnote 152

But if the loyalty and royalism of many Jubilators cannot be questioned, their loyalism is another matter. Historians have noted the dangers of applying this term too loosely and thus ascribing a particular set of antireformist beliefs to individuals whose patriotic love of king and country did not necessarily dictate uniformity on matters of policy.Footnote 153 One could toast the king without hailing his ministers, the war, or the unreformed constitution—or, once the radical critique had been voiced, without denying the fact that some British bellies were less than full. “We do not say the times are good; / We know the poor are short of food,” conceded one broadside song. But George's good intentions (“Our King would feed them if he cou’d, / And give peace to the nation”) and the continued war against Napoleon required Britons to think of things other than “happy lives” and to instead “forget your cares, and sing / ‘Great George our King,’ with spirit.”Footnote 154

What is convincing about Hunt's breakdown of the motivations for Jubilee participation is his recognition of multiple origins—his realization that no one factor motivated those who celebrated the Jubilee. We should bear this in mind when we try to characterize not only the Jubilee's supporters (as Hunt imperfectly did) but also its critics. This article has argued that radicals and reformers successfully turned the Jubilee from an event of pure jollity into, if not a day of solemn charity, then at least one whose sensuality was tempered by acts of philanthropy. But further qualification is in order. Not all critics of a frivolous Jubilee were radicals. The Times, which published many of the criticisms discussed already, was hardly a radical organ; undoubtedly a good number of those who wrote in its pages considered themselves moderate reformers or independents—critics of doctrinaire loyalism but not necessarily well inclined toward more radical reformers. One letter writer in the ministerial Morning Post recommended debtor relief in religious, apolitical terms that suggest an evangelical sympathy for the change of the day's tenor (though this, it should be emphasized, came after the radical-instigated modulation had already been set in motion).Footnote 155 It seems unlikely that the ultraloyalist journalist Henry Redhead Yorke, who claimed that criticism of the Jubilee was confined to London's Common Council, believed himself to be publishing the words of a radical when he printed a letter arguing that “The Jubilee will be no Jubilee, if it adds to the hardships of the poor” by the “childish ostentation” of illumination, and recommending “a general contribution” to the poor instead of a general illumination (though the letter's swipes at the Walcheren expedition and the proliferation of patronage did in fact conform to the opposition playbook).Footnote 156 Radicals and reformers were undoubtedly the motive forces in moving the Jubilee discourse and practice away from simple festivity, but they carried a good part of mainstream political opinion along with them.

That radicals could, in the thick of war, influence public opinion in this fashion may suggest philanthropy was noncontroversial and nonpartisan. Indeed, Malcolm Chase, in his study of the shifting notion of Jubilee, has characterized the 1809 freeing of debtors and amnesty of deserters as “politically anodyne aspects of the biblical festival” that were “diligently sought out by loyalists.”Footnote 157 But as we have seen, these were in fact the tools with which radicals, not loyalists, remade the Jubilee. Charity was not in itself radical—but neither was it quite apolitical. In contrast to the exclusive dances and suppers originally envisioned—in contrast, even, to local gentry's grand displays of largesse—subscriptions to relieve debtors tended to create a more egalitarian Jubilee, one that might, if in a fashion all too narrow and temporary, lessen economic suffering and cut the bonds of obligation. And appropriately so—as Chase points out, economic redistribution was inherent in the biblical decree of a Jubilee year. “Was not the Jewish Jubilee a Levelling Scheme?” the radical preacher James Murray had asked in 1775.Footnote 158

This is hardly to say that visions of radical redistribution inspired the givers of charity. Nor did the technique of subscription, detached from personal contact with charity recipients though it was, entirely remove the theatrical paternalism so evident in the feasts provided by generous local gentry. The motives of some Jubilee philanthropists were likely mere “vanity and fashion,” as The Times suggested (Biggs herself was ready to allow that “the love of popularity, distinction & festivity” inspired many).Footnote 159 Cobbett saw the move to charity as evidence that the “trick” of the Jubilee had “failed, and utterly disappointed its planners and proposers.” Overwhelmed by radical criticism, the Jubilee crew had used philanthropy as a shield to cover their retreat; charity had allowed them “to let down easy their plan of rejoicing, at a time when men feel only fear and distress.”Footnote 160

From the standpoint of charity, moreover, the Jubilee's legacy was distinctly limited. “Thousands of unfortunate debtors” may have been reunited with their families, one observer noted, but only a few short months would pass before the prisons would be “as well tenanted as ever.”Footnote 161 One reader of the Gentleman's Magazine regretted that the Common Council had chosen to relieve individual debtors (some inevitably “unworthy”) rather than build fifty almshouses, which might have had a more lasting effect.Footnote 162 The fact remained that the Jubilee debate had shifted so far that the question was no longer whether but how best to relieve the poor. The rhetorical significance of the Jubilee had been transformed in a manner that would leave a mark on future royal celebration.Footnote 163

Looking back on the Jubilee in 1812, Biggs marveled at “the almost literal obedience with which my suggestions were everywhere adopted.” Because her purpose in writing Vansittart was to gain belated compensation for her Jubilee expenses, and perhaps some further employment, allowances must be made for self-puffery. She may have done much to influence the superficial trappings of Jubilee; her remark about “literal obedience” referred to the fetes, flags, and transparencies she had proposed. But the Jubilee as celebrated was not the one she had envisioned. After the fact, Biggs was happy to claim credit for “how many thousand persons were liberated, cloathed, & fed” because of the event.Footnote 164 But the surviving letters in which she had anonymously proposed the Jubilee make no mention of charity. She had called for “reviews and public breakfasts in the morning, and balls and illuminations in the evening,” not for subscriptions to release prisoners.Footnote 165 The efforts of radicals and reformers had transformed the Jubilee into a more sober affair, or at least changed the terms of discussion so that sobriety became one of the day's ostensible goals.

The Jubilee turned out to be not simply a spectacle of loyalist devotion but also a platform for radical discontent. Neither dormant nor impotent, radicalism could influence national politics even at the height of war. Biggs's plan had depended on the press serving as a conduit for the Jubilee message: learning through newspapers of the Jubilee efforts undertaken by more enterprising communities, laggard towns would be stirred into action themselves. The press performed as desired, pumping her suggestions through the veins of the body politic—but then it did the same for the trimmings and modifications urged by reformers. The imagined nation was knitted together through loyalist fervor, but also through radical protest.