The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Nevertheless, on some calculations, the position of the Church of England was less than overwhelming. In England, Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters constituted at least 10 per cent of the population. In Scotland, over 30 per cent of the population worshipped outside the Church of Scotland, and in Ireland, around 90 per cent worshipped outside the Church of Ireland. Overall, perhaps 40 per cent of the population of Great Britain did not belong to established churches.2 Furthermore, the problems facing the Anglican church were much more acute outside England. They were particularly serious in Wales, where a shortage of decently educated clergy weakened the church’s ministry, and in Scotland, where the Restoration had imposed an Episcopalian form of church order that, in many places, was unpopular. In Ireland, the church was top-heavy: four archbishops, eighteen bishops and no fewer than 2,000 clergymen were at the disposal of no more than 350,000 Anglicans. Some congregations were tiny, reflecting the precarious situation of the Anglican church in that country.

  During his long reign from 1660 to 1685, Charles II had not wholly shared the authoritarian beliefs of many members of the Anglican church. For one thing, his scandalous private life seemed to many to make a mockery of the moral teachings of the church of which he was Supreme Governor. He was much more inclined to tolerate Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics than was the Anglican church. It was only with reluctance that the king was persuaded to accept and endorse the Clarendon Code of 1661–5 which established the framework within which religious uniformity was to be imposed. It excluded Protestant Nonconformists from any role in central or local government, imposed oaths and subscriptions upon them and levied penalties for attendance at non-Anglican services. It was intended to weaken not only the legal status but also the social position and the numerical size of the Protestant Dissenting churches and of the Roman Catholic Church.

  The Protestant Dissenters were the descendants of the Puritans of the reigns of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. However diverse their churches were, they were united on a number of fundamental beliefs: they believed the authority of the Bible to be superior to the authority of tradition; they believed in the legitimacy of the congregation against that of an established, episcopal church and they believed in their own freedom to practise their faith. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the moral strength of Protestant Dissent continued unimpaired. These are, after all, the great years of its literary classics: of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and of Fox’s Journal (1694). Their numbers probably remained stable at around one-third of a million in England and Wales in the second half of the seventeenth century. In London, and in the great Dissenting provincial towns such as Norwich and Newcastle upon Tyne, it was impossible either to silence the Dissenters or to close down Dissenting meetings or even to prevent them holding office in local government. Where Dissenters were less influential, however, their meetings were helpless before the forces of legal repression and illegal violence and intimidation. The greatest cause of desertion from the Dissenting churches, however, was financial impoverishment, the result of fines repeatedly and remorselessly exacted upon individuals.

  Of the Dissenting churches, the Presbyterians were the largest (at around 180,000) and the most respectable, drawing their following from the upper sections of the middling orders. The Congregationalists (or Independents) numbered around 60,000 and appear to have drawn their support from slightly lower down the social hierarchy, from artisans, tradesmen and retailers. Only the Baptists (also at around 60,000) seem to have attracted the poor to their services in any numbers. Finally, the Quakers, numbering 40,000–50,000 in the later seventeenth century, were steadily losing the somewhat sinister and subversive reputation which their distinctive speech, dress and social customs had earned them earlier in the century.

  Outside England, the fortunes of Dissent varied. Welsh Dissent was organized within ‘gathered churches’ (structured on a county basis), admission to which was strictly regulated. Presbyterianism, of course, was the national and established religion of Scotland, and in spite of its internal divisions, it enjoyed the loyalty of the great majority of Scots. In Ireland, the later seventeenth century witnessed growing divisions between the Anglicans of the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterians of the north of Ireland. These religious divisions, on the whole softening elsewhere, steadily widened in Ireland in the years before the Glorious Revolution.

  Fear of Roman Catholicism was the one thing that united the diverse Protestant churches of Britain. It had been consistently fostered since the reign of Mary Tudor, and anti-Catholic prejudices were by now deeply established in the popular mind. Protestants nursed exaggerated legends about Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth, about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot against James I, and, most recently, non-Catholics had experienced something like national paranoia at the prospect of a Catholic succession during the Popish Plot of 1678.3 By the later seventeenth century, however, many Catholics had largely abandoned any lingering expectations they may have retained of converting the country back to the old faith, which by 1680 commanded the allegiance of only 60,000 persons. Its survival depended upon the protection which its own social leaders, some of whom eventually conformed to Anglicanism, could provide, and upon the tolerant attitude of their Protestant counterparts. In spite of the fear with which Catholics were viewed in the popular mind, the recusancy laws were only fitfully enforced. Thanks to the tolerant spirit of Charles II and the sympathetic attitude of his court, the government made serious attempts to enforce them only in the mid-1670s and during the height of the Exclusion Crisis. The pragmatic attitude of Protestant landowners, together with the careful dispositions of most Catholics, took the sting out of a potentially dangerous situation. It was ironic, indeed, that it was not the actions of Catholics themselves but those of the Catholic James II that renewed ancient fears of popery, even though, as Defoe noted, people ‘do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

  GENDER

  The construction of gender in the later seventeenth century was founded upon apparently timeless social wisdom, justified by a number of familiar biblical texts and confirmed by practical usage. The book of Genesis taught that God had created woman out of man. The Epistles of St Paul preached the Christian doctrine of the natural inferiority of women: wives should submit to their husbands as to the Lord. Most contemporaries, female as well as male, assumed that female inferiority arose naturally, out of the obvious fact that men and women possessed different qualities. The construction of masculinity arose out of the qualities which, it was believed, men possessed. Not only were they physically superior to women; they were also assumed to be rational, decisive and consistent. Women had less positive qualities: they were emotional, their passions uncontrollable and their behaviour, inevitably, inconsistent. Because women were assumed to be of inferior intellectual ability to men, it followed that they were ill-suited to public life and responsibilities. Their duties lay in childbearing and in tending the family. The performance of such duties required obedience, submission and modesty.

  The central unit of British society was the family. Its importance as the foundation of all social life and order cannot be overstated. All the churches treated marriage as an indissoluble bond: they decreed monogamy and lifelong fidelity, and forbade adultery, divorce and homosexuality. The health of the family was a barometer of the health of society as a whole. The family was also the basic unit of economic life, in manufacturing and in retailing as well as in farming. It was within a family – their own or someone else’s – that most people worked. A son who wished to marry usually left the family home and set up his own household – a new economic as well as social and emotional unit. The family was, in some respects, too, the basic unit of political life in this period, as in others. It was always assumed that political divisions at court or within the upper orders of society would reverberate down into the middling and lower orders and lead to divisions within as well as between househo
lds. Thus, the unity of the commonwealth might be endangered. Indeed, the family served as a common metaphor for the state: the king as the father of his people, the kingdom as a confederation of households.

  People lived their lives in a nuclear family rather than in an extended family or kinship group. Few households – rarely much more than 5 per cent – contained three generations of co-residing kin; the lower down the social scale, the fewer. The size of household naturally varied with wealth and social status. Some of the great aristocratic households may have contained a score or more individuals; a middling-order household perhaps six to eight and a household from the labouring masses perhaps three or four. Furthermore, from the (admittedly limited) surveys which have been completed, it appears that kinship relations outside the nuclear family were not of vital significance, even in small rural communities.4

  Because the health of the social order depended upon the continuing cohesion of the family, the behaviour, especially the sexual behaviour, of women had to be carefully controlled. The ideal of female chastity was a subject to which contemporary writers returned on countless occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Female promiscuity was a threat to the stability of the family and, in the event of separation, to the welfare of children and, indirectly, to the smooth, hereditary transmission of family property. Women’s place was in the household, the patriarchal household. Women were discouraged, especially by the church, from complaining about or seeking to change their situation. They were, in fact, excluded from holding office in the Anglican church. Women who enjoyed some leisure were not expected to advance their intellects; they were to promote themselves as social adornments, adept at conversation, dancing and music.

  Because women were socially inferior, they had fewer legal rights than men. Within the landed classes, the inheritance of an estate passed through all the sons before descending to the daughter. In the household, wives were required to accept the authority of their husbands just as their children, especially their daughters, had to. Women had no rights in common law over their own property once they married, or over matrimonial property acquired after marriage. They had no legal rights over their children and they had few legal rights over their own persons. Husbands were permitted to physically punish their wives, and if they ran away, their husbands were entitled to force them to return and even permitted to incarcerate them. The legal status of women was akin to that of underage children: they were regarded by men, and must to an extent have regarded themselves, as goods and chattels to be treated as men thought fit.

  Consequently, it was expected that the mass of women would work either in the household or in the basic and most servile of occupations, including labouring work and domestic service. Their sisters in the middling orders contented themselves with running the household, caring for their children and, perhaps, developing their social talents. Insofar as women from the middling orders aimed at social improvement, so they might seek to affect the mannerisms of leisure at the expense of the routines of work. For the mass of women, however, life consisted of some combination of work in the household, physical labour and service. These harsh facts, together with their childbearing obligations, defined the lives of the vast majority of women in Britain.

  To what extent was the situation of women really as bleak as the above paragraphs have suggested? Was the inferiority of women as complete and as comprehensive as both the Bible and the law demanded? In spite of the inhibitions upon their political and social roles, there were already signs that women were becoming active participants in the print culture of the times and even in its artistic and political activities. Addison would not have lampooned female politicians in the years after the Hanoverian Succession of 1714 if their activities had not become an issue. Furthermore, their contribution to educational, charitable and patriotic activities was already marked. In these areas, as in other aspects of eighteenth-century society, women were already making their presence felt. Furthermore, in everyday life, practice could be rather different from precept. Although the law favoured the interests of the husband, the wife had some basic safeguards. On marriage, her property became her husband’s, but she retained possession of her land (if any), and it could not be sold without her consent. In this way, women from the middling and higher orders might seek to retain some influence over the disposal of part, at least, of the property they brought into a marriage. Moveable goods, however, became the property of the husband. (Single women and widows could, of course, own property, run businesses and make wills, although only about one in five of named executors were women.) Furthermore, the realities of daily life as well as the personalities of countless men and women may have modified the harshness of religious dogma about the inferiority of women. In order to make a living, husband and wife had to work side by side. It is often forgotten that, in addition to giving chapter and verse for the existence of patriarchal authority, the Bible also gave detailed guidance about its exercise. St Peter had called for husbands to exercise their authority with caution, kindness and understanding. What held the family together was the love of God and the mutual love of husband and wife, not the tyrannical authority of men over women. As Dorothy Leigh had written in 1616 to all husbands, ‘If she be thy wife, she is always too good to be thy servant, and worthy to be thy fellow.’ Contemporary writers were in no doubt where final authority in the family lay, but they insisted that wives should be treated with honour and consideration: they should neither be belittled nor humiliated. A Christian father had responsibilities towards the members of his family as well as rights over them; these responsibilities included the instruction of the family in the Christian religion, the protection of the lives and persons of its members and the enhancement of their personal growth and welfare. The daily needs of life demanded mutual support and partnership rather than the ruthless tyranny of one individual over others. Whether in the courtly guides to behaviour read by the landed elite, in the conduct books of the middling orders or in the popular literature of the day, relations between the sexes, although unequal and, to our generation, unedifying, were somewhat more complex than a casual reading of legal and biblical texts might indicate.5

  The age of marriage in the later seventeenth century was late. Men married in their late twenties, women slightly earlier. Most marriages were entered into freely and without the intervention of parents. Only among the upper ranks of society, and when land and other forms of property were at stake, did arranged marriages survive into this period in any number. For those lower down the social scale, marriage was a much more casual matter. Many couples married without a church ceremony and its associated formality and expense. Some of them casually terminated their marriage, either by desertion, by mutual agreement or by the public ritual of wife sale.6

  There is considerable evidence that young people were sexually active both before and after marriage. Up to 20 per cent of first births were conceived before marriage. Perhaps one-third of newly married couples bore their first child within a year of marriage.7 As a result, the population of children swelled in seventeenth-century Britain. It has been estimated that around 40 per cent of the population of England was dependent children living in the households of their parents. Parents, then as now, invested most of their social and emotional capital in the upbringing of their children. Although historians have often given the impression that the treatment of children in this period was harsh, formal and even brutal, it may well be the case that such a conclusion has been arrived at by concentrating unduly on selective evidence largely drawn from the experience of the upper classes. Obviously, the enforcement of discipline over children, especially girls, was more rigid than it has come to be in the twenty-first century; the sanctions against disobedience in a patriarchal society were intimidating. Furthermore, the practice of sending children out into service or into apprenticeships in other people’s households would today be regarded as insensitive, as would the widespread employment of young children in the work of the household,
farm or shop. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that parents in all ranks of society cared for their children with genuine love and affection, and did what they could to provide a wholesome, Christian upbringing for them. There is, moreover, evidence to show that children were regarded as a blessing, as a source of pleasure and emotional fulfilment and, of course, as a prospective support in old age.8 The horrifyingly high death rate – about one-quarter of children failed to survive to their tenth birthday – did not breed indifference or callousness towards the young. Genuine parental grief at the experience of child mortality is suggestive of powerful family bonding. Examples of physical brutality are rare, although beating remained as a last resort. (In the schools, however, it was frequently used as a first resort.) The employment of children in the family economy, moreover, was almost inevitable in a non-mechanized society and, more particularly, one that did not make institutional provision for the education of children. To teach children, even small children, useful skills not only prepared the child for adult life but also discouraged begging, idleness and crime. Child labour might be regarded as necessary to the very well-being of the family.

  The dark side in the treatment of women and children involved orphans and the illegitimate. They had few legal rights and were liable to severe chastisement and beating. The plight of unmarried mothers was particularly distressing: the culpability of women was taken for granted, their resort to abortion and infanticide illegal, tragic and often followed by severe punishment. Thereafter, their prospects of marriage would be minimal; prostitution, begging and poverty were the likely consequences. The birth of a bastard child was regarded as a threat to the stability and order of normal social life because it created a form of family but a family without a head. Such a child was usually pursued with contempt, hostility and, not least, with legal disability. Such severity was a reflection of the contemporary belief that sexual promiscuity posed a threat to the status of the family. But widows were no such threat. Indeed, widows, especially widows with property, were highly prized in this society. They assumed the vital role of bringing up children without the assistance of a husband and they had the capacity to establish a new family unit.