Was by a musket ball.
“Britannia and her heroes
Will long bemoan their loss;
For he was as brave an Admiral,
As e’er the ocean crossed.”
Other memories of his carried back those who heard him talk in his latter years to a state of life that was very unlike the present. The baker who supplied them with bread kept his reckoning by tallies. Their milk-woman had just such another score as that which was presented to Hogarth’s Distressed Poet. A travelling tailor used to come his rounds, and, in accordance with the common custom, live in their house while he was making clothes for the family. In every show of feats of horsemanship, the performance always ended with the burlesque of the Tailor riding to Brentford to vote for John Wilkes. Whenever any disaster came upon the country, there were still found old people who solemnly shook their heads, and gravely pointed it out as another instance of the divine wrath for the great sin that the nation had committed when it made the change of style.
The changes that he saw in the currency were very great. In his early childhood, gold pieces—guineas, half guineas, and seven shilling bits,—were not uncommon, but they began to disappear, and before long were scarcely ever seen. When one did come to hand, it was called a stranger. About the year 1813, one of his brothers sold a guinea for a one pound note and eight shillings in silver. As the gold began to be hoarded, these one pound notes took their place. Bank of England notes were in Birmingham looked upon with suspicion, for they were more often forged than provincial notes. The silver coins of the realm were so well worn, that hardly any of them bore even a trace of an effigy or legend. “Any that were still unworn were called pretty shillings and the like,” and were suspected by the lower class of dealers as something irregular. Together with the state currency, tokens circulated to a great extent. There were Bank of England tokens, of the value of five shillings, three shillings, and one shilling and sixpence. The parish of Birmingham had its notes for one pound, and five shillings, and its workhouse shilling, as the coin was called. It had been issued by the guardians as a convenient means of distributing out-of-door relief. All these coins and tokens were more or less forged. The coins of the realm stood lowest in point of security, then the Bank of England tokens; while the parish tokens were hardly ever imitated, and were everywhere received with confidence. Forgery was constantly carried on. One daring and notorious forger and coiner, named Booth, long defied the police. His house stood in the midst of an open plain, some miles from Birmingham, and was very strongly barricaded. The officers had more than once forced an entry; but so careful had been his watch, that, by the time they had been able to break in, all proofs of his crime had been destroyed. Rowland Hill had seen him riding into town, on his way to the rolling-mills, with the metal in his saddle-bags. The boy took more than a common interest in the man, as in this very rolling-mill one of his own brothers was employed. One day the messenger whom Booth had sent with the metal had forgotten to bring a pattern. “Taking out a three-shilling piece, the man inserted it in one slit after another of the gauge, until he found the one which exactly corresponded with its thickness, and this he gave as the guide.” His long freedom from punishment rendered the coiner careless, and he was at last surprised. The whole Birmingham police force was mustered, and a troop of dragoons was got from the barracks. A ladder had been brought, and an entrance was made through the tiling of the roof. It seemed as if they were once more too late, for at first nothing could be found. One of the “runners,” however, in mounting the ladder, had through the bars of an upper window seen Booth hurriedly thrusting papers, that no doubt were forged notes, into the fire. A hole was broken into the chimney, and in it were found one whole note, and one partly burnt. The prisoners were taken to Birmingham, and thence were sent by the magistrates to Stafford, under the guard of a small body of horse. Booth was hanged.
It is scarcely wonderful that criminals openly defied the laws, for the police-force of Birmingham was very small. The town contained in the early years of this century about seventy thousand inhabitants. Yet the whole police-force for day duty consisted of less than twenty men. By night, guard was kept by the usual body of “ancient and most quiet watchmen.” The town, moreover, like all other towns, was but dimly lighted with its oil-lamps. Rowland was about seventeen years old when, “with almost unbounded delight, I first saw,” he writes, “streets illuminated by gas.” Yet the peace was, on the whole, not ill kept. From 1803 to 1833 there were but three riots, and of these only one was at all serious. The town had not even in those days a Recorder, and the criminals were sent to the Assizes at Warwick. The stage-coaches, as Rowland well remembered, were all furnished with strong staples, to which the fetters of prisoners were fast locked. He had himself, when he was still a little lad, sat on the coach beside a man thus fettered. The fellow made light of his position. “He had,” he said, “only robbed a hen-roost, and they couldn’t touch his neck for that.” Some idle gossip, seeing Rowland thus sitting by the thief, at once spread the report that the boy on the coach was going to Warwick on the charge of robbing his master.
I have been carried away in my narrative not a little distance from the quiet home in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton. The old farm-house was endeared to Rowland Hill by one memory, for here it was that he first met with his future wife. Her father, Mr. Joseph Pearson, was a manufacturer of Wolverhampton. “I regarded him throughout life,” said his son-in-law, “with esteem and affection. He was in the town, near to which he resided, the recognised leader of the Liberal party, and, at a later period, when the town became enfranchised, was the standing Chairman of the Committee for returning the Liberal candidate. He had always been a staunch Liberal, to use the modern term, and I doubt not was regarded by his Tory neighbours as a Jacobin; for so all were held who either preferred Fox to Pitt, or ventured to question the justice or necessity of the war of 1793. I have been told that during the course of that war he once took part in a meeting held in the market-place of the town to petition for peace, when cannon, brought out in apprehension, or feigned apprehension, of a tumult, stood pointed at the assembly.” He had once, when a young man, during his year of office as constable of the borough, faced a mob of colliers bent on bull-baiting. He pulled up the stake, and put a stop for that day to the sport. About the same time Basil Montagu had to flee for his life from a country town, where he, too, had spoilt sport by saving an innocent man from the gallows. Mr. Pearson took great pleasure in Thomas Hill’s society. In social position he was, indeed, above him, for he was a man of considerable property, and a magistrate for the county. In Mrs. Hill’s rice-puddings, in the making of which she was “a notable woman,” and in her husband’s talk, he found, however, enough to satisfy him.
Rowland was but a year older than Mr. Pearson’s eldest daughter. The beginning of his courtship he has himself told in the following words:—