The End of Yeoman England

THE AGE OF ELEGANCE (450 pp.)--Arthur Bryant--Harper ($4.50).

King George III was as mad as a hatter, blind, doddering and virtually a prisoner in Windsor Castle. His son George, the Prince Regent, was fat, gross and so unpopular that he hardly dared show his face in public. When he did, he was booed. His adulteries were public knowledge, but his broad-beamed princess, Caroline, was also indiscreet. Soon, and quite openly, she was to take an Italian lover and stand a parliamentary trial for her conduct. London's streets were full of soldiers being demobbed, and the most popular man in England was Alexander I, Czar of Russia, who had conquered Napoleon (with some help from the Russian winter).

That was England in 1814, after Napoleon had been packed off to Elba, but England only in her most sensational aspect. After two decades of war, she was still the richest nation in the world and in many ways the most attractive. Yet she was changing fast. Between industrialism and the effects of the Napoleonic wars, England would never be the same again.

Czarist Parallel. Few historians are better equipped to tell this story than Briton Arthur Bryant. In two previous books (The Years of Endurance, Years of Victory), he covered the decades 1793-1812 with the grasp of a Gibbon, the imagination of an epic novelist. The Age of Elegance is the last of a trilogy and, if anything, more readable than the others.

Bryant tries neither to teach nor to hector, but his book is full of parallels with the history being made today. The Czar's soldiers had smashed Napoleon's Grande Armee, but had become the terror of the people they liberated. "Better the French as enemies," German peasants were beginning to say, "than the Russians as friends." The fears of Europe were much the same as the world's today: "What if. having occupied Finland, Bessarabia and Poland, the northern colossus should now strike southwards across the central Asian deserts to the Indian Ocean?" And when British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh opposed a puppet Poland under Russian control, "he was curtly informed that Russia, already in occupation of Poland, possessed an army of 600,000 men." Most familiar of all: "[Castlereagh] knew that the Czar would bluff and bluster from gain to gain so long as he thought that the West was pacific and divided."

Some of Bryant's best pages describe the fighting of Wellington's army in Spain. His account of the battle of Waterloo is a model of brevity, exact and graphic. But it is old England itself which most excites Bryant, its landed wealth, its civilization, its regard for personal liberty, its native good sense. No mere passionless chronicler, Historian Bryant knows what he likes and doesn't like. "True aristocracy, after true religion," he writes, "is the greatest blessing a nation can enjoy." And the older England had enjoyed that blessing, along with several lesser ones--including the best diet in the world.

"The English ate," says Bryant, "as though eating were an act of grace . . . They ate more than any people in the world, because they grew more. A Hampshire farmer at his wedding dinner fed his guests from his own land on beef, fowls, a gammon of bacon and a sucking pig, a green goose, river-fish, plum pudding, apple-pie, cheesecakes, custards, home-brewed beer, home-made wine and syllabub."

Karl Marx's Mistake. To less nostalgic historians, Bryant's almost lyrical regret for the passing of an essentially yeoman England may seem purely sentimental. But nobody can accuse him of glossing the ugly side. England's "counterfeit" aristocrats took no steps to "enforce a reasonable standard of social justice." The industrial age was allowed to come in on a reckless wave of unrestrained self-interest. Long before the age of elegance was over, savagely angry mobs of hungry, jobless Englishmen were threatening revolution. The basis was laid, not for a new England --harmoniously balanced between classes --but for two new Englands: an England of possessors and an England of the dispossessed.

Karl Marx, grubbing down all the grim details in his notebooks, concluded that by an inexorable "law" of history, the two Englands would soon meet head-on in a bath of blood. It never happened. Historian Bryant thinks he sees why: a leaven of Englishmen determined to find a new balance. "If we are a Christian nation," wrote old Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "we must learn to act nationally as well as individually as Christians." It was this conviction, expressed in their own ways by generations of reforming Englishmen, that Marx forgot to account for.

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