Iron, too, was made as we have seen from the Patent Roll, 36 Henry VIII., part v., where the grant of the manor of Madeley to Robert Brooke, Esq. is expressly said to include “the rights attached to the whole of the place and buildings that go under the one name of the Smithy Place, and Newhouse called Caldbrooke Smithy, with its patronages in the aforesaid Madeley.”
The First Ironworks.—The Reynoldses.
The first ironworks were of course of a very humble description; the outcrop of the mines did not then determine the situation so much as the presence of a powerful stream which supplied a force to work the leathern bellows which blew the fires. The first Abraham Darby came to the Dale in 1709, and in 1713 the make was but from five to ten tons per week. In 1712 he used coal in smelting iron. He died at the Court House, Madeley, in 1717, and was succeeded by his son, the second Abraham Darby, who in 1760 is said to have laid the first rails of iron for carriages with axles having fixed wheels. The third Abraham Darby effected another great achievement, the casting and erecting the first iron bridge, for which he obtained the medal of the Society of Arts. The credit of having laid the first iron rails is claimed for Richard Reynolds, who succeeded the second Abraham Darby in the management of these works in 1763, and who, according to Sir Robert Stephenson, who examined the books of the works, cast six tons of iron rails for the use of the works in 1767. It was at these works, too, that the brothers Cranege anticipated Henry Cort by seventeen years by the discovery of the process of puddling in a reverberatory furnace, by the use of pit-coal, in 1766, under the management of Mr. Reynolds.
Mr. Reynolds also took a warm interest in the success and introduction of the steam engine, which he adopted in 1778. “For no one,” observes his daughter, “did he entertain sentiments of more affectionate esteem than for James Watt,” with whom, as well as with Wedgwood and Wilkinson, he was associated in several public movements of the time. Being a Friend he was opposed to war and refused Government orders for cannon; and he was stung to the quick when Pitt’s ministry proposed to lay a war tax upon coal. The country had been carrying on wars—wars everywhere, and with everybody, and to meet the lavish expenditure, the popular minister of the day, on whom Walpole tells us, “it rained gold boxes” for weeks running, “the pilot that weathered the storm,” sought to replenish the exchequer by a tax of 2s. per ton, to be paid on all coal without exception raised to the pit’s mouth. The iron-masters of Shropshire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire, as well as those of other English and Scottish counties were alarmed; it was felt to be an important crisis in the history of the trade. Deputations and petitions were sent up, but the wily premier had so carefully yet quietly surrounded himself with facts, that he knew of every pound of iron made and of every ton of coal that was raised. Pitt received the gentlemen connected with the trade with the greatest freedom and affability; bowed them in and out; appointed hours and places to meet their convenience, and left them dumbfounded at his knowledge of details of their own business. Mr. Reynolds entered the field in opposition to the tax, gave evidence before the Privy Council, and by petitions to the House and letters to members of the Cabinet, materially aided in defeating the attempt. The gravity of the occasion is, perhaps, even more evident to us, on whom the advantages of a cheap and plentiful supply of iron have fallen. We can better measure the consequences that must have followed. A tax upon coal at that period would have paralysed the trade, checked its development in this country, and thrown into the lap of others benefits we ourselves have derived; would have disendowed the island of advantages in which it is peculiarly rich,—upon which it is mainly dependent for its wealth, its progress, and its civilization. A tax upon coal would have been a tax upon iron, upon the manufacture of iron, upon its consumption, and its use in the arts and manufactures of the kingdom,—a tax upon spinning, weaving, and printing,—a tax upon the genius of Watt and Arkwright, whose improvements it would have thrown back and thwarted,—upon the extension of commerce at home and abroad. The immense advantages possessed by the manufacturers of the New World would then have given them the lead in a race in which, even now, it is as much as we can do to keep up. Our energies, just at a time when the iron nerves of England were put to their greatest strain, would have been paralysed, and we should have been deprived of our railways, our locomotives, our steam-fleets, and much of our commerce, and prosperity. Mr. Reynolds saw the evil in prospective, and in a letter to Earl Gower, President of the Council, dated the 7th month, 1784, takes a very just review of the past history of the trade and the improvements then about to be adopted. He says:—
“The advancement of the iron trade within these few years have been prodigious; it was thought, and justly, that the making of pig iron with pit coal was a great acquisition to the nation by saving the woods and supplying a material to manufactories, the make of which, by the consumption of all the wood the country produced, was unequal to the demand; and the nail trade, perhaps the most considerable of any one article of manufactured iron, would have been lost to this country, had it not been found practicable to make nails of iron made with pit coal; and it is for that purpose we have made, or rather are making, the alterations at Donnington-Wood, Ketley, &c., which we expect to complete in the present year, but not at a less expense than twenty thousand pounds, which will be lost to us and gained by nobody if this tax is laid on our coals. The only chance we have of making iron as cheap as it can be imported from Russia, is the low price of our fuel, and unless we can do that there will not be consumption equal to half the quantity that can be made, and when we consider how many people are employed on a ton of iron, and the several trades dependent thereupon, we shall be convinced the Revenue is much more benefited even by the consumption of excisable articles, &c., than by the duty on a ton of foreign iron; nor will it, I believe, escape observation that the iron trade, so fatally affected by this absurd tax, is only of the second, if indeed, on some account, it is not of the first importance to the nation. The preference I know is given, and I believe justly, as to the number of hands employed, to the woollen manufactory; but when it is remembered that all that is produced by making of iron with pit coal is absolutely so much gained to the nation, and which, without its being so applied, would be perfectly useless, it will evince its superior importance, for the land grazed by sheep might be converted with whatever loss to other purposes of agriculture or pasturage; but coal and iron stone have no value in their natural state, produce nothing till they are consumed or manufactured, and a tax upon coal, which, as I said, is the only article that in any degree compensates for our high price of labour, &c., or can be substituted in the stead of water for our wheels, and bellows, would entirely ruin this very populous country, and throw its labouring poor upon the parishes, till the emigration of those of them who are able to work shall strengthen our opponents, and leave the desolated wastes, at present occupied by their cottages, to the lords of the soil.”
In the year following (1785) the interests of the iron trade were again considered to be endangered from commercial arrangements proposed by the Irish House of Commons for the consideration of Parliament. Mr. Reynolds, Messrs. Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Wilkinson, and others, united in forming an association for the protection of the trade, under the title of “The United Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain.” The Shropshire iron and coal masters petitioned the House, and Mr. Reynolds again wielded the pen in defence of the trade. We extract sufficient to show the extent of the works. He says, addressing Earl Gower, under date 28th of the third month, 1785,—
“We solicit thy effectual interposition against a measure so injurious to us and to the many hundreds of poor people employed by us in working and carrying on mines, &c., for the supply of a large sale of coals by land and water, and of coals and mine for sixteen fire-engines, eight blast furnaces, and nine forges, besides the air furnaces, mills, &c., at the foundry at Coalbrookdale, and which, with the levels, roads, and more than twenty miles of railways, &c., still employs a capital of upwards of £100,000, though the declension of our trade has, as stated in a former letter, obliged us to stop two blast furnaces, which are not included in the number before mentioned. Nor have we ever considered ourselves as the first of many others employed in iron or coal works in this kingdom.”
We have considered the subject of our present sketch chiefly under one aspect only—as a man of action—and that mainly in connection with the iron trade, and in providing against those reverses to which not only that but other branches of industry were peculiarly liable, more particularly during the latter end of the last and the commencement of the present centuries. Mr. Reynolds, however, has claims no less distinguished under a classification beneath which is frequently found another division of human benefactors. He was not only a man of action—great in dealing with things tangible,—but he was a man of thought and of genius—as quick to devise and to plan as to execute. What is still more rare, he possessed those qualities in proportions so finely balanced, that their happy combination, during a long and active life, gave birth to schemes of noble enterprise, valuable to the district, and important to the nation. That which merited, from vulgar shortsightedness, the epithet of eccentricity, a state of deep and penetrating thought, was oftentimes the conceiving energy of a vigorous mind mastering in the mental laboratory of the brain, plans and schemes of which the noblest movements of the day are the just and legitimate offspring. The schemes he inaugurated were victories won, the improvements he effected were triumphs gained to the nation or for humanity.
That quality of mind which too often runs waste or evaporates in wild impracticable ideality, with him found an object of utility on which to alight, and under the magic of a more than ordinary genius difficulties disappeared, formidable obstacles melted into air, and the useful and the true were fused into one. He never felt the fluttering of a noble thought but he held it by the skirts, and made it do duty in this work-day world of ours, if it had relation to the tangible realities of time. “Though I do not adopt,” he writes to a friend, “all the notions of Swedenbourg, I have believed that the spiritual world is nearer to us than many suppose, and that our communication with it would be more frequent than many of us experience, did we attain to that degree of purity of heart and abstraction from worldly thoughts and tempers which qualify for such communion or intercourse.” He was not a man whose soul ran dry in solitude, or that grew melancholy the moment the click of money-making machinery no longer sounded in his ears. He was one of the old iron-kings, ’tis true, but with a soul in harmony with the silvery music of the universe. Often with no companion but his pipe, he retired to some retreat, consecrated perhaps by many a happy thought, and watched the declining sun, bathing in liquid glory the Ercall woods, the majestic Wrekin, the Briedden hills, and the still more distant Cader Idris. A deep vein of genuine religious feeling often appeared upon the surface, and seemed to penetrate reflections of the kind. Speaking of a new arbour he had made, be says—
“From thence I have seen three or four as fine sunsets as I at any time have seen, and if the gradual going down, and last, last twinkle of the once radiant orb, the instant when it was, and was not, to be seen—made me think of that awful moment when the last sigh consigns the departing soul to different if not distant scenes, the glorious effulgence gilding the western horizon with inimitable magnificence, naturally suggested the idea of celestial splendour, and inspired the wish that (through the assistance of His grace) a faithful obedience to the requirings of our great Maker and Master, may in that solemn season justify the hope of my being admitted into that city which hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.”