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Updated: June 25, 2025
Having drilled her army of divers to an unparalleled activity, she cast about for some fresh method of warfare, and so enrolled a regiment of heavers, who would lurk at the mercers' doors for an opportunity to carry off ledgers and account-books.
The 20th of June 1792 was one of the great days of the Revolution, but, on the whole, less an insurrection than a demonstration. Out of the two great faubourgs of the working classes, St. Antoine and St. Marceaux, came processions of market porters, market women, coal heavers, workmen, citizens, with detachments of national guards here and there.
This night we lay at Windsor, where, on Monday the 11th, in the morning, we went to prayers to the King's Chapel with Doctor Heavers, my husband's Chaplain. On our return we were visited by the Provost of Eton, and divers others of the clergy of that place, and Sir Thomas Woodcock, the chief commander of that place, in the absence of Lord Mordaunt, Lord Constable of Windsor Castle.
Coal heavers in London stopped to stare at him as he stalked by, and it is well authenticated that Sydney Smith said of him, "That man is a fraud; for it is impossible for any one to be as great as he looks." Mr. Webster, as I saw him that day, was in the vigor of his splendid prime.
Sometimes, indeed, a laden coal barge would bump itself into the place, and certain laborious heavers, seemingly mud-engendered, would arise, deliver the cargo in the neighbourhood, shove off, and vanish; but at most times the only commerce of Break-Neck-Stairs arose out of the conveyance of casks and bottles, both full and empty, both to and from the cellars of Wilding & Co., Wine Merchants.
In another direction you see large cases containing heaps of articles, reminding one of a shoemaker's furnishing-store wooden serving-mallets, fids, toggles, and heavers: iron prickers and marling-spikes; in a third quarter you see a sort of hardware shop shelves piled with all manner of hooks, bolts, nails, screws, and thimbles; and, in still another direction, you see a block-maker's store, heaped up with lignum-vitae sheeves and wheels.
"Miners' meetings have done some pretty good legislation," I pointed out. "Legislation; yes!" cried the doctor. "Haven't you discovered that the American has a perfect genius for organization? Eight coal heavers on a desert island would in a week have a full list of officers, a code of laws, and would be wrangling over ridiculous parliamentary points of order in their meetings.
The two children, with the heedlessness of their age, took on their usual gaiety, and ran to the window to watch the market-men, the coal heavers, and the fishwomen, who had come to Saint Cloud to congratulate the new King. The griefs of sovereigns in the period of their prosperity do not last so long as those of private persons. Courtiers take too much pains to lighten them.
As an old hand in deep-water ships, I knew the absolute necessity of preserving discipline, and that this can be done only by occasionally knocking down a malcontent; but no such considerations demanded the wholesale clubbing with heavers and handspikes which the men got from the trio. Belaying pins were not used they were too small and light for the gentlemen.
Here, too, would they tell old legends of what the Thames was in ancient times, when the Patent Shot Manufactory wasn’t built, and Waterloo-bridge had never been thought of; and then they would shake their heads with portentous looks, to the deep edification of the rising generation of heavers, who crowded round them, and wondered where all this would end; whereat the tailor would take his pipe solemnly from his mouth, and say, how that he hoped it might end well, but he very much doubted whether it would or not, and couldn’t rightly tell what to make of it—a mysterious expression of opinion, delivered with a semi-prophetic air, which never failed to elicit the fullest concurrence of the assembled company; and so they would go on drinking and wondering till ten o’clock came, and with it the tailor’s wife to fetch him home, when the little party broke up, to meet again in the same room, and say and do precisely the same things, on the following evening at the same hour.
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