THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
To Birgit Kristensen
for incomparable fortitude
THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
* * *
BRITISH POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY 1688–1832
SECOND EDITION
Frank O’Gorman
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Introduction
1Britain in the Later Seventeenth Century
Place
Belief
Gender
Society
Economy
Politics
Notes
2The Glorious Revolution in Britain, 1688–1714
The Glorious Revolution in England, 1688–1689
Crown and Parliament, 1689–1714
Politics and parties, 1689–1714
Britain and Europe, 1689–1713
The Glorious Revolution and the unity of Britain, 1689–1714
Notes
3Whiggism Supreme, 1714–1757
The Hanoverian Succession, 1714–1721
The Walpolean regime, 1721–1742
The Pelhams and patriotism, 1742–1757
Notes
4The Social Foundations of the Early Hanoverian Regime, 1714–1757
The identity of Britain
The ruling order: oligarchy and deference
The middling orders: enterprise and docility
Urban society: culture and elites
The common people: assertion, festivity and direct action
Notes
5The Political Foundations of the Early Hanoverian Regime, 1714–1757
Politics and print
Crown and Parliament
The state: central and local
Whigs and Tories
The Jacobites
Notes
6What Kind of Regime? (1714–1757)
A stable regime?
A confessional regime?
A European Regime?
Notes
7Patriotism and Empire, 1756–1789
Commerce and empire
William Pitt and the Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763
The origins of the American Revolution, 1756–1776
The American War of Independence, 1776–1783
Notes
8The Age of George III, 1760–1789
George III and the politicians, 1760–1770
Politics and party, 1770–1789
Reform politics, 1763–1789
Notes
9The Crisis of the Hanoverian Regime, 1789–1820
The revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1789–1820
Radicalism and patriotism, 1789–1820
The politics of wartime and after, 1789–1820
The avoidance of revolution, 1789–1820
Notes
10State and Church in Later Hanoverian Britain, 1757–1832
Monarchy and the party system, 1780–1832
The state and the law
The retreat from the confessional state, 1756–1820
Anglicans and Evangelicals
Methodists and Dissenters
Notes
11The Social Foundations of the Later Hanoverian Regime, 1757–1832
The United Kingdom
An imperial and commercial nation
The social order
A transfiguring aristocracy
A cohering middle class
A self-conscious working class
Constructions of gender in later Hanoverian Britain
Notes
12The Renewal of the Regime, 1820–1832
The coming of reform, 1820–1830
The passage of reform, 1830–1832
The Reform Act of 1832
Notes
Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LIST OF MAPS
CHAPTER 1
1.The counties of England and Wales in the eighteenth century
CHAPTER 2
2.Invasion of William of Orange
3.The War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of Utrecht
4.The counties of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
5.Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
CHAPTER 5
6.Scotland
CHAPTER 7
7.North America and the West Indies
8.British North America, c.1763
9.European battles of the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War
CHAPTER 9
10.Europe in 1789
11.French satellites and French conquests, 1792–1805
CHAPTER 11
12.Roads and navigable rivers of England, circa 1830
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The publication of a second edition of The Long Eighteenth Century allows me to revisit the opinions of the eighteenth century, to which I committed myself almost twenty years ago, and to reconsider the structure of the volume. In the event, and in the absence of any overpowering reason to reorganize the book, I have chosen not to refashion its outline but to persevere with its fundamental structure, namely, a number of essentially narrative chapters followed by more intensively thematic chapters in both the earlier and later sections of the book, which itself divides in the later 1750s. I took this opportunity of improving matters of style and presentation while correcting some errors that had been pointed out to me by reviewers and others. I have updated and considerably expanded the bibliography and included a number of maps. Most important of all, of course, I have attempted to update the narrative, taking account of recent research in certain fields, and improved and even expanded my discussions of several of them where scholarship has been particularly compelling. These include the European context to British development throughout, particularly during the Glorious Revolution, the period of the Jacobite threat and that of the Seven Years’ War. There has been no slackening in the rate of production of work on National Identity and the Four Nations and, not least, in the quantity and quality of research on Scotland and Ireland, and I hope to have reflected this fact in the relevant sections of this book. I have also sought to underline the importance of recent discussions about the Atlantic and commercial contexts to British imperial strategies and, indeed, to the American Revolution. Furthermore, I have expanded my discussions of gender and the status of women and confronted several of the issues with which recent writers have been concerned. I have also expanded my account of the abolition of the slave trade, a most significant subject in recent years. In general, I have sought to include more discussion of economic and cultural matters but without sacrificing the political focus of the text. I make no apology for coming to recognize more clearly than I had earlier that the Seven Years’ War had a greater impact upon British society than it is often given credit for. Nevertheless, in the end, I accepted the almost insurmountable logic, and its no less powerful associated tradition, that partitions the long eighteenth century at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
During the last two decades, I have been made powerfully aware of the onward march and, indeed, the towering popularity of cultural history, and I hope I have been able to indicate not only its value in matters of taste, consumption, manners and politeness but also its importance to politics and political culture, especially in the spheres of language and ritual. The relationships between cultural and political history continue to be debated among historians, and it is clear that in order to understand eighteenth-century political life – indeed, the experiences of men and women of all classes in all parts of Britain �
�� we need to move far beyond the outward structure and narratives of politics. Cultural history illuminates very many areas of eighteenth-century history, deepening and expanding our understanding of what used to be regarded as exclusively political topics. Certainly, the processes of politics can be marvellously illuminated through cultural approaches, such as ritual, language and identity. In this way, new political fields may be opened up. My own contributions to this field may be found throughout this book, but especially in Chapters 4, 5, 10 and 11. Cultural history unquestionably broadens the remit of political history and underpins, highlights and reveals its processes. If it frequently simply illustrates what we knew or expected already, on some occasions, it may also lead us into unexpected pathways and novel possibilities. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that the deployment of political history, interpreted in the widest and most flexible manner, remains perhaps the most valuable of all approaches to the history of the long eighteenth century. That century, to me at least, is best treated, best studied and best understood within the context of a firm scaffolding of political history in its social, cultural and economic contexts. Many themes in cultural history, crime, law and popular culture, together with our fascination for representation and identities, embrace a continuing preoccupation with how power was exercised, upheld, defended and negotiated. And where power goes, the historian of politics should be prepared to follow.
Introduction
Half a lifetime of teaching and research has left me unwilling to apologize for the appearance of a work of synthesis on British history during the ‘long eighteenth century’. The steady increase in the number of books and articles on the period pouring from the presses is a sign of great vitality and health. Strangely, no single volume exists which covers the entire period, although there are several excellent volumes on parts of it.1 This book is offered to the academic public in the belief that the time is ripe for a general synthesis of the fortunes of these islands in this most fascinating period of British history. After all, we need constantly to test and to review received opinions, to explore different approaches and even to construct new ‘models’, however tentative, of the history of Britain during the long eighteenth century.
The Whig historians used to portray the eighteenth century as a period of unalloyed success. According to the Whig interpretation, it was in this period that Britain set out upon her distinctive and unique quest. Alone among the European powers, Britain combined steady constitutional progress with unparalleled religious toleration and incomparable levels of freedom of thought and expression. On these secure foundations Britain was to expand her economy, undertake an ‘industrial revolution’ and acquire a worldwide empire. It was a dazzling vision. Its patriotic simplicities, in one version or another, prevailed into the second half of the twentieth century. Even recent social historians like Asa Briggs treated the last fifty years of the long eighteenth century as part of a period of ‘improvement’ in which the growth of towns, the development of reform movements, the march of industry and the demand for democracy formed the basic themes of a narrative of steady progress.2
Now we have abandoned Whig history and the visions that went with it. In the last century, eighteenth-century history has been rewritten on several occasions and according to different orthodoxies. The triumphalism of Whig history was first overtaken between the two great wars of the twentieth century by the ‘high’ political school of Sir Lewis Namier and his followers, which stressed the importance of material and practical influences upon politics in the past.3 ‘Namierite’ history emphasized the role played by individuals on the aristocratic political stage, yet minimized the importance of ideas and principles in determining behaviour. Influenced by Freudian ideas, notably the importance of the sub-conscious in human motivation, Namier found the simplicities of the Whig interpretation unacceptable. The roots of political behaviour were to be found deep in the personalities of individuals. The subject matter of history thus became less the interplay of political ideologies and more the political ambitions of individuals and the groups to which they belonged. Although these general approaches were, and remain, controversial, there can be no question that Namier placed the political history of the eighteenth century upon sound scholarly foundations. In the process, however, parts of the great narratives of Whig history were found to be unsustainable. According to Namier, there was no steady decline in royal power during the eighteenth century, no gradual development of a party system and few signs of progressive constitutional development.
Since the 1960s, a somewhat different approach, inspired by the work of E. P. Thompson and George Rudé, took a broader view of eighteenth-century society, examining its social divisions and locating the dynamic for political action in the social and economic realities in which people lived their lives. Consequently, these studies focused less on high politics and more on issues in social history, such as class and gender.4 Studies of crime and the law, of language and of popular culture transformed our understanding of the means by which power was upheld, negotiated and even challenged during this period. Consequently, our view of ‘politics’ was extended in ways which Namier and his followers would scarcely have imagined. This invigorating approach broadened the appeal of the long eighteenth century and introduced historians to a range of new methodologies and problems, hitherto neglected.
Such an approach was challenged in the last two decades of the twentieth century by a number of ‘revisionist’ writers who insisted that politics was shaped less by economic than by dynastic and religious considerations.5 They have substituted for the old Whig, and newer, socially based interpretations of the eighteenth century, a much more traditional view of the social and political order. The strength of that order lay less in the competition of social and economic groups than in the elements of stability and continuity which it derived from its status as a rural, hierarchical society dominated by the monarchy, the church and the aristocracy. Where once it was possible to see ‘revolutions’, industrial, agricultural and cultural, revisionist historians now saw only steady, unspectacular evolution. Where once they had perceived the quickening pace of social advance, they now saw the powerful survival of seventeenth-century forms of thought and politics. Where once they had noted the emergence of a secular civilization, they now saw the obdurate survival of a profoundly religious culture. Where once they had seen the origins of the liberal state of the nineteenth century, they now saw only a hierarchical society, still based firmly upon birth, rank and property. While many of these things needed saying, the revisionist view of eighteenth-century Britain may now be viewed as too insular and too inward-looking to satisfy new generations of historians inspired by Britain’s role as an imperial power, absorbed by the issue of international slavery and captivated by the possibility of a global eighteenth century.6 Nevertheless, while many historians may, and do, differ strongly with particular arguments in revisionist history, most of them now study the eighteenth century for its own sake and in its own terms, not as a preparation for the very different mass urban and democratic society that came into existence late in the nineteenth century. Indeed, one of the most prominent non-revisionist historians, John Brewer, has written of Britain as a ‘fiscal military state’ in the eighteenth century, similar in many respects to the military monarchies of the Continent, far removed from the liberal state of the Whig historians.7
This she may well have been, but it is less the vision of an ancien regime which has motivated research into the ‘long eighteenth century’ in the last two decades but the powerful impetus of cultural history cultural issues. The motifs of class and class conflict no longer dominate, but they have been replaced, inter alia, by issues of identity, gender, language, consumption, communication and ritual. Indeed, there appears to be no frontier which historians of this period have been afraid to cross in their search for cultural issues to explore. As our understanding of the period advances, it becomes increasingly difficult to generalize about ‘the’ eighteenth century, or e
ven ‘an’ eighteenth century. It is becoming almost impossible to discern the character of the long eighteenth century in all its complexity. Furthermore, some of its features – the growth of towns, the demand for political, social and humanitarian reform and the establishment of parliamentary government – seem familiar to us because they anticipate the interests of later generations. Others, however – the huge inequalities of wealth, the exacting formality of manners, the destitution of the masses and the dreadful treatment of children – appear to us to be strange and irrelevant features of a society which have (thankfully?) almost disappeared.
The pages that follow may hopefully encourage the emergence of a new, and more compelling, synthesis of the long eighteenth century than has yet been forthcoming. One of the assumptions upon which this book has been written is that the period from around 1688 to around 1832 may helpfully be described as ‘the long eighteenth century’. This idea of ‘a Long Eighteenth Century’ was not exactly novel when this book was first published in 1997, but it nevertheless raised a few eyebrows. Such a description seems much less presumptuous now. Indeed, to argue for a ‘long eighteenth century’ between 1688 and 1832 makes a good deal of historical sense. Most of the alternative dates, such as 1700 and 1714 at the beginning, and 1783, 1800 and 1815 at the end, are much less defensible. New centuries rarely mark new beginnings and 1714 establishes a new dynasty, not a new order. True, the significance of the Glorious Revolution can be exaggerated, and we can fall into the trap of assuming that an entirely new epoch opened in 1688. However, in many areas of life and in the history of Scotland and Ireland as well as that of England, the Glorious Revolution was a watershed. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, contemporaries were in no doubt that the political structures and the religious order with which they were familiar had their origins in 1688. Furthermore, the period exhibits a certain consistency in its basic concerns and concepts; these shaped a distinctive narrative which, to contemporaries, commenced with the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy in 1688–9 and terminated with a series of legislative reforms after 1828. The main elements of the narrative include the fitful drive towards political centralization, the search for a harmonious relationship between king and parliament, the defence of the Protestant realm against the forces of popery and the expansion of industry, commerce and empire. At the other end, the year 1815 marks the end of a massive period of warfare, not the dawn of a new historical era. Few new themes appear in the years immediately after 1815. It is true that the significance of the 1832 Reform Act can be exaggerated; historians now generally agree that those who framed it were more intent on conserving as much as they could of the old order. Nevertheless, the Reform Act was a sign that this old order was coming to a close. Contemporaries believed this to be the case and, indeed, many – political, religious and social structures – were by then undergoing rapid and decisive transformation. The old dynastic and corporate state of the later seventeenth century was becoming the more orderly, coherent, rich and powerful state of the nineteenth century beneath the trappings of the monarchy, the established church and the aristocracy.
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