A History of Britain

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.

Ripped By mstoll

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'âme" - 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,

"Émile" - a manual on natural education, thinly disguised as a novel -

and - the weepier the age - "The New Héloise",

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.