ONE DAY AT THE end of December 1784, several thousand people crowded into an inn yard in a town in the middle of England. It was cold; sky and rooftops merged in winter gloom. The shivering mass stood patiently. Many had travelled for miles, coming in by coach, by horse, on foot from distant towns and outlying villages. Some had spent the night half-frozen in stables, doorways, any kind of rough shelters. Assembled with an excitement barely dulled by cold, they waited. They waited for an hour, two hours, three hours, four … even rumours moved slowly. Nonetheless, the crowd did not thin; at its edges more latecomers arrived, all hopeful for a sight of the balloon. There was a promise it would ascend that day, with an aeronaut who would rise to the skies, a sight unlike anything most of the crowd had ever seen before. Many of them did not know quite what to expect. The demonstration was, the crowd understood, a beginning – and there was much that could go wrong. It was heroic to make the attempt. If it succeeded, the world of the air was a step closer to being open to human endeavour. The sea had once been uncharted; now the skies were on the brink of discoveries. Who knew where those would lead? What would it mean if people could travel like birds, as easy as eagles in the upper atmosphere? Here in Birmingham they were about to see a flight of imagination and new reality.

This crowd was enormous. Beyond the inn yard they swelled out into the streets, where all the shops were shut up in expectation of an event bigger than commerce. Some of those attending had followed the progress of this new invention through newspapers, pamphlets and the first of the new books discussing it.

ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT is usually characterised as having a drive to secularism, most obviously in the writings of those anti-clerical French philosophers – Voltaire, Diderot – who redrew the era's intellectual maps. The 1780s were a decade in which Enlightenment was as widely and explicitly pursued as it ever would be, before the implosion of the French Revolution turned secularism into an aggressive ideology determined to throw out old institutions and overthrow old class relations. What, then, is the significance of descriptions of aeronauts as gods? Is it a way of instating classicism as an alternative to clericalism? Is it a lightly allusive language that playfully creates a category of social actors for whom there needs to be distinction? Is it a carry-over from the ancient world, one of many that Enlightenment revivified, in which mythology appeals because it provides an explanatory system that is both secure and remote? What sort of ironies are at work in the metaphor? And how does the idea of aeronauts as gods fit with belief in God, which was upheld by much Enlightenment activity even as rationalism loosened the grip of piety for many? Why too did people evoke gods when they had a perfectly serviceable alternative, both classical and contemporary, in the term heroes?

Some light is shed by comparison to the language used about aeronauts in a later period. It has been suggested by a scholar of Victorian balloonists, Elaine Freedgood, that ballooning provided an escape from ‘the new social world created by industrial capitalism with its suddenly too-numerous and too-contingent object relations’, and that by the mid nineteenth century ballooning offered a way to enjoy silence and space, increasingly rare commodities. What she describes as ‘a necessary pause from the tearing pace of productivity and progress’ could equally apply to the 1780s, which felt hectic to people at the time. Even after fifty years of ballooning, the exceptionality of aeronauts was remarked on: ‘A person who makes an ascent in a balloon will become, at least in his own estimation, a person of consequence.’

IN FEBRUARY 1784 William Windham's head was full of balloons. An interesting thirty-four year old, Windham came from an old Norfolk family [Figure 4]. After extensive travels and a period in his local militia, he had begun a career in politics. In 1783 he had been appointed by the Fox-North coalition to the post of chief secretary to the Irish viceroy, Lord Northington. He served ably for a few months – he was a lifelong supporter of the cause of Catholic emancipation – before resigning on grounds of ill-health. In April 1784 he returned to politics as MP for Norwich, one of the few Foxite candidates to be re-elected. In February he was mostly in London, dividing his time between seeing people, going to the theatre – he was friends with Sarah Siddons – skating, which he did rather well, and scholarly pursuits. Always a man with a book in his pocket, Windham enjoyed mathematics and the classics. Having just started a diary, he confided to it, like many eighteenth-century people, a sense he was not getting enough done. On 7 February 1784 he wrote:‘Did not rise till past nine; from that time till eleven, did little more than indulge in reveries about balloons.’1 The day was not a vacuous one: he called on Sarah Siddons, then on Fox; he had intelligent company at dinner, in the persons of Edmund Burke, Samuel Horsley and Sir Joshua Reynolds, all members of the Literary Club, along with Samuel Johnson whom Windham fervently admired; and in the late evening, Mrs Siddons and Mrs Kemble paid him a visit. In the pattern of this sociable day, what did it mean to Windham to spend two hours in balloon reveries?

To understand what Windham represented in balloon madness in 1784, his diary gives us some help. Diarists use diaries differently and not everything that matters is written down.

HISTORIANS AGREE THAT the institution of monarchy changed in the eighteenth century. ‘The French Revolution marks the transition of monarchy as a divine institution to a monarchy legitimised by the nation. This process, which had started long before 1789, was associated with a loss of the magical, with a desacralization of the monarchy and a separation between the king and the divine.’ Quite how and why the old order ebbed is ‘anything but a straightforward tale’, though one can point to factors like the power of Enlightenment critiques of absolutism; the growth of the press, which made monarchs less important; and, in Britain, where satire of the king freely circulated, the familiarising of royalty through royal families. At the same time there was also a growth in civic organisations, friendly societies and freemasonry, all variously keen on loyalist and royalist activities. Belief in monarchs as earthly representatives of divine power continued; what weakened was belief in the monarch as embodiment of divine right. In Britain, Queen Anne was the last monarch whose touch was believed to cure ‘the king's evil’, or scrofula; George I thought the idea abhorrent and stopped it. What Antoine de Baecque describes as the transition of sovereignty from the body of the king to the great citizen body was not an even process across Europe, and to complicate matters some monarchies played better in the new order than they had in the old, laying the grounds for monarchy to re-establish itself tenaciously in nineteenth-century Europe. ‘It is easier to document this apparent transformation in the monarchy's public status than account for it,’ says Linda Colley, though she suggests an upsurge in royal and national spectacle in Britain was partly due to an outpouring of patriotic art by Royal Academy painters, which benefited the reputation of their patron, George III, who had encouraged it. Tracking changes in France, Sarah Melzer and Kathryn Norberg also see the Bourbon monarchs benefiting from spectacle, with Versailles as its great theatre.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY was a period of nearly continuous wars between European countries. Monarchies realigned, changing alliances and altering definitions of nation. As nations established, contested and extended empires, nation acted as a term that encompassed more ground than simple geographical identities. This was not a new process but its particular components in the eighteenth century included new elements. What defined Britain included four countries, a Hanoverian monarchy and overseas dominions; British interests were therefore also simultaneously European and global, spread across continents and oceans, manifested through conflicts with peoples and treaties with nations. Making the case for Britain as physically and politically European, a historian in 2006 commented: ‘I took the trouble to ask the Map Librarian at the British Library whether he knows of any map of Europe which does not contain Britain. His answer was no. He knows of no map of Europe that does not contain the British Isles.’ Physical maps co-exist with mental maps in complex ways. What difference did it make to add air to land and sea as a place where nations operated? How did a new aerial dimension map on to a world in which European nations jealously guarded interests and zealously extended possessions whenever they could?

In exploring the role of balloons in eighteenth-century war, one must try to understand the world as it was when they appeared. English minds were full of uncertainty about peace. ‘It has been easy for later historians to underestimate the instability and insecurity of eighteenth-century Britain,’ says N. A. M. Rodger, who argues that ‘The motives which first created a dominant English navy in the 1650s, and which kept the British fleet the largest in Europe, were overwhelmingly defensive.

FASHION WAS A well-established idea and practice by the late eighteenth century. The concept, argues Hannah Greig, was a fluid one with meanings too multiple to be explained by one all-encompassing theory. Some historians see the whole century as one of consumer revolution, while others identify surges towards the end of the century. ‘Technical innovations in textile production were crucial in propelling and defining the Industrial Revolution. Fashion, especially fashion in clothing, was central to any remodelling of consumer expectations that preceded, or accompanied revolutionary increases in production.’ John Styles argues magisterially that those consumer expectations were not confined to the rich. Plebeian people took an interest in fashion and were leaders as well as followers of fashion. Literature that complained about luxury emphasised that all classes were too eager to buy and display. If the poor made do with ribbons and fairings rather than lace and jewels, they were nonetheless literate in the language of clothes – not least because many worked in textile-related trades – and contributed to making fashion an important cultural force.

Balloons played into this world in several ways. They inspired particular fashions in clothing, they promoted a new shape for women, and they accelerated the growth of fashion beyond a core category of clothing to encompass new categories including that of newness itself. For some of this there was a ready-made language: French. Ton, beau monde, à la mode were established terms for fashionability in the eighteenth century and applied easily to the latest products from France – of which balloons were one.