There were no Peacock
gaieties to tempt him in London, for old Sir Henry had died suddenly
soon after the ball in December; nor was there much of a season that
year, owing to the illness and death of George IV.
A regiment containing two old schoolmates of his was at Bristol, and
he spent a good deal of time there, and also in Yeomanry drill. As
autumn came on we rejoiced in having so stalwart a protector, for
the agricultural riots had begun, and the forebodings of another
French Revolution seemed about to be realised. We stayed on at
Chantry House. My father thought his duty lay there as a
magistrate, and my mother would not leave him; nor indeed was any
other place much safer, certainly not London, whence Clarence wrote
accounts of formidable mobs who were expected to do more harm than
they accomplished; though their hatred of the hero of our country
filled us with direful prognostications, and made us think of the
guillotine, which was linked with revolution in our minds, before we
had I beheld the numerous changes that followed upon the thirty
years of peace in which we grew up.
The ladies did not much like losing so stalwart a defender when
Griff returned to Oxford; and Jane the housemaid went to bed every
night with the pepper-pot and a poker, the first wherewith to blind
the enemy, the second to charge them with.
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