English 18th-Century Fleet

I received the Dukes carresses and flatteries as if I believed them good current coin In response to this need for courtesy and delicacy, wide swathes of English 18th-century life became fragile and dainty, in a way that no age in England, before or since, has managed. It became possible, for the first and only time, for a perfectly serious man to attend ceremonies at court in a lavender suit, the waistcoat embroidered with a little silver or of white silk work worked in the tambour, partridge silk stockings, gold buckles, ruffles and lace frill. Politeness became a kind of affliction. The Duke of Newcastle who had been so smooth with Hervey acquired the nickname Permis, as he prefaced every remark with the bogus-sycophantic phrase Est-il permis? This was the man to whom half of England had themselves been crawl- ing, hoping for preferment in church, court, government, army or navy. In some ways, natural human dignity had been sacrificed on the altar of a kind of rococo politeness.

A letter addressed to Newcastle in January 1756 concluded: That your grace will permit me to subscribe myself with the inviolable duty and attachment to your grace, My Lord Duke Your Graces Most devoted Most obliged Most obedient And ever faithfull humble servant W. Sharpe.

This was not a culture from which the heroic would emerge.

Apartments described as Frenchified (the adjective would also become slang for suffering from the clap) and floored in light deal, lit by modern open glazed windows, were furnished not with the big old comfortable chairs of the late 17th and early 18th centuries but little light French chairs, fitted with little swivel wheels on their feet and decorated with French linen festoonings instead of the thick welty damasks which England had once loved. Tables were no longer solid and immovable. They had been replaced by delicate gilded scuttling tables in front of what, as Horace Walpole described it, they now call a fireplace, a little low dug hole surrounded by a slip of marble and what does that do for a man? It toasts his shins. No longer did England have the giant roaring holes in the side of the room in which half trees were burned for hours at a time.

Mrs Caroline Lybbe Powys, a distant relation of the Austens, visited the by-then ancient and untouched late- sixteenth interiors of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire in 1757: Of course it is antique and rendered extremely curious to the present age, as all the furniture is co-eval with the edifice. Our ancestors taste for substantialness in every piece makes us now smile; they too would, could they see our delicateness in the same articles, smile at us, and I am certain, if anyone was to compare three or four hundred years hence a chair from the dining room of Queen Elizabeths days and of the light French ones of George II, it would never be possible to suppose them to belong to the same race of people, as the one is altogether gigantic, the other quite Liliputian.

Acceptable behaviour had become toy-like and it was not long before the anti-heroic fashion for a delicate sensibility ran out of control. Manliness, or even the ability to survive, had in fact almost entirely deserted those who were suffer- ing from the cult of sensibility. In the Abbey of St Peter and St Paul in Dorchester, there is this poignant epitaph to poor Sarah Fletcher who died in 1799 aged 29: Reader! If thou has a heart famd for Tenderness and Pity, Contemplate this Spot.

In which are deposited the Remains Of a Young Lady, whose artless Beauty, Innocence of Mind, and gentle Manners, Once obtained her the Love and Esteem of all who knew her, But when Nerves were too delicately spun to Bear the rude Shakes and Jostlings Which we meet in this transitory World, Nature gave way; She sunk And died a Martyr to Excessive Sensibility.

Of course, the Cult of Courtesy and Feeling was, at least in part, thought ridiculous even as it was happening – Dr Johnson defined Finesse in his 1755 Dictionary as an unnecessary word which is creeping into the language – and never more than when subject to the unforgiving verdict of the Grub Street journalists. No figure loomed more symbolically over the naval mythology of the 18th century than Admiral John Byng. Among navy men, he stood as an example of the honourable naval officer who had been betrayed by a combination of deceitful politi- cians and a crude, vengeful mob. He had been sent to the Mediterranean with a fleet that was inadequate in size, inadequately manned and inadequately equipped. His task was to relieve the siege which the French were laying to the British garrison in Minorca. On May 20 1755, he engaged their fleet under Admiral de la Galissonière, with the sort of inconclusive results which 18th-century naval battle often produced. His own leading ships were severely mauled by the French; de La Galissonière had adroitly withdrawn to leeward when it looked as if Byng was about to attack him with the centre and rear of the British fleet and Byng soon decided to withdraw himself to the safety of Gibraltar.