The Long Eighteenth Century

Home > Other > The Long Eighteenth Century > Page 7
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 7

by Frank O'Gorman


  The advantages of this arrangement arguably outweighed the disadvantages. If the system invited delay and local obstructionism it was at least cheap, reasonably broadly based and, not least, resistant to the threat of centralized absolutism. The propertied orders felt themselves to be incorporated within the state and had access, or the expectation of access, to patronage and influence. When this system worked well, it had all the strength of voluntary cooperation on a national scale. Attempts at centralized direction from above were rarely successful and usually unpopular. The regime worked best when the crown acted in concert with local interests. Only then, for example, would the revenue services, the bench and the militia function harmoniously and efficiently. Although the older literature on the English system of local government treated it with scant respect, the efficiency of the state at local level should not be underestimated. After 1660 there are clear signs not only of improved parish administration but also of a greater willingness by local elites both to carry out national policies and to oversee the local administration of matters such as the Poor Law, crime and migration with some thoroughness.

  Just as the father was the head of the family and head of the household, and just as the landlord was the paternal head of his estate, so the king was the father of his people. Contemporary beliefs about monarchy arose from the religious conception of the king as a semi-divine being, raised above the lives of normal men and women. While popes claimed to be the vicars of God on earth, Protestant monarchs in early modern Europe retaliated with their own assertions of divinity. Indeed, the legal fictions that were an inevitable part of government bestowed upon the monarchy ‘the divine right of kings’. According to this belief, the king owed his throne to God and he could do no wrong. Yet, the idea of ‘the divine right of kings’ has been greatly misunderstood. The idea that kings derived their authority from God does not automatically imply that they should be ‘absolute’ in the government of their kingdoms. The divine right of kings was a theory about the origins of royal authority and a defence of the hereditary foundations of monarchical government. It did not necessarily imply that kings were automatically above the law, nor did it deny that kings should obey the law. However, the divine right theory did expect subjects to obey their king and those who derived their authority or position from the king: active disobedience would be contrary to the will of God. In England, at least, kings used this theory to defend themselves against religious attacks from Catholics and Presbyterians, but proponents of the theory were usually careful to acknowledge traditional English parliamentary safeguards concerning consent to taxation and demands upon the king to observe the laws. To what extent this theological language of politics continued to dominate public discussion in the eighteenth century has been the subject of much scholarly discussion15; that it set the tone for political debate in the later seventeenth century cannot be seriously doubted.

  The government of Britain in the late seventeenth century, then, was still assumed to be the king’s government. Contemporaries found it difficult to conceive of the state independently of the person of the monarch. The monarch, or the chief ministers enjoying the favour of the monarch, was responsible for appointments not only to the major offices of state in London but also to the Privy Council in Edinburgh and to the viceregal administration in Dublin; the personnel of these governing institutions were answerable to him, not to the parliaments of their respective countries. The government was a royal government. Political and administrative action emanated from the king and his court. It was the monarch’s responsibility to summon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament, to control the armed forces, to conduct foreign relations and to dispose of appointments in both church and state. Royal servants lacked any sense of collective responsibility or awareness; the individuals who composed them owed their allegiance to the crown, not to each other.

  Furthermore, as the heads of the first family in the country, as leaders of society, as patrons of the arts and as arbiters of taste and fashion, the monarchs and their courts exercised enormous social influence. The cultural hegemony of the monarchy and of the court can scarcely be exaggerated in the years both before and after the Glorious Revolution. Indeed, the court was a vital political arena, with its own traditions, values and significance. A minister neglected it at his own peril. Its sheer size was considerable, amounting perhaps to 2,000 individuals, including both those who held offices in the household and those who held offices in the central executive. Membership of the court was regarded as an important barometer of royal favour; the presence of English and Scottish Catholics at the court of James II did much to aggravate prevailing fears both of the old faith and of the King’s favourable attitude towards it.

  Britain was a composite, monarchical state, yet the powers of Parliament had been permanently strengthened at the Restoration. (Indeed, the monarchy was restored at the behest of Parliament, not the other way round).The lower house continued in some important respects to strengthen its position thereafter. By 1688 the Commons had established their sole right to initiate money bills and to appropriate supplies. Although the House of Lords was restored in 1660, it soon acquiesced in a position of inferiority to the House of Commons. The crown was forced to develop techniques for managing Parliament. These, of course, included the promise, immediate or delayed, of offices and pensions, but there was never enough patronage to go round. This is not to argue that Parliament wished to deprive the crown of its traditional prerogatives. Parliament had a much more modest view of its pretensions. Its members were anxious to defend their interests and those of their constituency, to safeguard the traditional privileges of Parliament and, in a general sense, to protect the constitution. It was neither their intention nor their wish to establish parliamentary supremacy.

  Consequently, there can be no doubt that the most important political reality about politics in Britain towards the end of the seventeenth century was the power and authority of the monarchy. So long as the king governed with the consent of Parliament, and in general maintained the approval of the people, his power would remain unimpaired and unchallenged. For its part, Parliament was normally anxious to cooperate with the monarchy in pursuing an agreed national interest. Indeed, for most of the period from 1660 to 1688, Parliament was not able to pose effective resistance to Charles II and James II. The popularity of James II throughout his dominions at the start of his reign is extremely suggestive of powerful monarchist tendencies within Britain. In many ways the reign of William III was to be a remarkable demonstration of the potential strength of the monarchy even after the Glorious Revolution, not an illustration of its weakness after it. Finally, it was not Parliament which challenged the monarchy in 1688 but the monarchy which, through a series of reckless miscalculations, abandoned its own traditions and deserted its own supporters. The reaction of the political nation to this crisis is the starting point for our discussion of the Glorious Revolution.

  NOTES

  1.For discussions of ‘composite states’, see e.g. J. E. Elliot, ‘Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present, 137 (1992); A. Williams, ‘The Mid-Seventeenth Century British State’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995); C. Russell, ‘Composite Monarchies in Early Modern Europe: The British and Irish Example’, in A. Grant and K. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom: The Making of British History (1995), pp. 133–46.

  2.Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (1997), p. 45.

  3.An alleged plot to replace Charles II with his Catholic brother James in 1678. Its instigator was the unprincipled adventurer Titus Oates. The plot generated widespread anti-Catholic feeling and led to several dozen death sentences against those thought to be involved. It provoked an ultimately unsuccessful movement to exclude James from the succession. Not until 1681 did both the judicial murders and the popular frenzy terminate.

  4.See R. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (1984); P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 3rd edn (1983).

/>   5.For the ability of quite ordinary women to employ the common law and to use such matters as marriage settlements to maintain their rights, see A. M. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (1993).

  6.A wife sale usually occurred at a market when a wife was sold to the highest bidder, often after being led around wearing a halter. The purchase was sometimes prearranged, involving an acceptable partner or even a lover ‘buying’ the woman. This traditional ritual was regarded by public opinion as an acceptable and legitimate form of divorce.

  7.J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty: England 1689-1727 (2000), p. 64.

  8.I. K. Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (1994); L. A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (1993); Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700.

  9.The following six paragraphs rely on Gregory King’s ‘Scheme of the Income and Expenditure of the Several Families of England … for 1688’, one of the earliest attempts to tabulate the social and economic structure of the population. It is further discussed in R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982), pp. 386–7; W. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 (1977), pp. 33–8.

  10.K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (1982), p. 35.

  11.M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1800 (1996). See E. Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (1967); E. L. Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (1971). The most convenient summary of recent research on the so-called ‘Agricultural Revolution’ may be found in chapter 3 of J. Rule, The Vital Century (1992); see also J. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (1986), chapter 5. See also the titles listed in the Bibliography, especially J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, v: 1640–1750, vi (1984–6).

  12.G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to its Causes, Incidence and Improvements 1750-1850 (1997); J. Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in England, 1640–1740’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 363–404; J. R. Wordie, ‘The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914’, Economic History Review, 36 (1983); J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (1977); Enclosures in Britain, 1750–1830 (1984).

  13.B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500–1750 (1976), p. 206.

  14.J. Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in England, 1640-1740’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 363–404.

  15.See J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), pp. 119–98; J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth Century Political Thought (1983), pp. 120–93.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Glorious Revolution in Britain, 1688–1714

  THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND, 1688–1689

  What came to be known in the early eighteenth century as the Glorious Revolution began with the sudden collapse of the popularity of King James II and the subsequent offer of the throne to William of Orange in 1688. The repercussions of these dramatic events amounted to a real watershed in the history of Britain – even, perhaps, a revolution. Whether they deserve to be described as particularly ‘Glorious’, as many mid-eighteenth-century commentators were fond of doing, remains a matter of opinion.

  When James II succeeded his brother, Charles II, in 1685, the prospects for his reign could not have been better. Although he was a Roman Catholic, he enjoyed widespread popularity, which was confirmed by his promise to respect the established position of the Church of England. Some refused to believe him. In the summer of 1685, led by the Duke of Monmouth, a rising of some 3,000–4,000 men in the West Country sought to defend the established state church. In the last pitched battle to be fought on English soil, at Sedgemoor, near Taunton, Monmouth’s rebellion was brutally suppressed. At the prolonged ‘bloody assize’ which followed, over 1,000 rebels were convicted, of whom 250 were executed. Most of the remaining rebels were transported. Even though such slaughter might have caused even his most enthusiastic supporters to pause, James’s position seemed well-nigh impregnable. The general election which he had called soon after his accession had given him a parliament dominated by Tories, who could usually be relied upon to protect and advance the interests of the monarchy. It proceeded to vote supplies for James which were more generous than those enjoyed by any of his Stuart predecessors.

  How did James so quickly and so completely dissipate these enormous advantages? The answer is twofold. First, he was driven by a sense of religious destiny, a desire to see his country convert back to the Old Faith. This, he believed, might gradually and peacefully be achieved if the penal laws which discriminated against Catholics, and prevented them from holding office, were abolished. If this happened, Catholics would be able to show that they were loyal citizens. Second, throughout his reign, James overestimated the strength of his position. Even in 1685 he was unable to persuade the Tories of the wisdom of his religious policy, and by November 1685 Parliament had demonstrated its reluctance to implement a policy of Catholic toleration. James prorogued it, and it never met again. It is just possible that James might have kept his throne had he been willing to respect the privileged position of the Anglican church, and, at the same time, had he been able to maintain the Tories in office. His refusal to guarantee the first ensured his failure to achieve the second. He used a pliant judiciary to dispense individuals from their obligation to obey the Test Acts and then, in the Declaration of Indulgence of April 1687, suspended all tests and granted full liberty of worship.1 Yet, there was much less support for this policy of toleration than might have been expected. It threatened to establish a pluralist state, dismantling the privileges of the Anglican church and reducing it to the status of the Catholic and Dissenting churches. Determined to obtain the approval of a new parliament for his actions, James dissolved the old one in July 1687. But the king had not realized the inherent contradictions of his actions. Predictably, the Tories and the Anglicans were horrified at what he was trying to do; but even the Dissenters were unenthusiastic, fearing the consequences for the Protestant sects of a policy of toleration for Catholics.

  These miscalculations were to have disastrous consequences. The king aroused general anxiety during his preparations for a general election in and after the autumn of 1687, when his supporters ruthlessly purged the borough corporations in an attempt to secure a compliant parliament. Recent attempts to justify James’s actions have suggested that he was engaged in a serious attempt to establish a new ruling class by creating an alliance between the urban middle classes and the gentry against the aristocracy. These arguments, however, have been unconvincing and in any case overlook the pro-Catholic intentions of the king.2 Had James been successful in his schemes, Parliament would have ceased to be either a representative of the propertied classes or a check upon royal government; it would have become little more than a rubber stamp for royal wishes. But there is no evidence that James was consciously seeking to erect a royal absolutism either based upon the doctrine of the divine right of kings or modelled upon the kingship of Louis XIV’s France. Nor was he planning to establish a modern, centralized and bureaucratic state apparatus, as Steve Pincus has suggested.3 There is no evidence of the detailed planning or of the availability of appropriate royal servants necessary to achieve these aims. James was unwittingly exceeding the boundaries of his subjects’ tolerance in pursuing his religious objectives so enthusiastically.

  In spite of the growing concern aroused by the actions of the king, there is little evidence to suggest that James was facing an imminent rebellion, still less a revolution, in the spring or even as late as the summer of 1688. The aristocracy and the gentry had severe reservations about the actions and purposes of their king, but there was no indication that they wished to mount a rebellion against him. Indeed, the political situation in 1688 was quite different from that of the early 1640s. Parliament
was not sitting. It could thus neither focus nor express such sense of national grievances as may have existed. In 1642 Parliament had challenged the royal prerogative, claimed sovereignty in the state and, in the end, raised an army. Parliament in 1688 wished to do none of these things. There was one further, crucial difference. In 1688 Scotland and Ireland were quiet. Disorder in the Celtic kingdoms was a consequence, not a cause, of the Glorious Revolution. Last, and by no means least, James enjoyed not only the support of a large and powerful standing army of around 20,000 men but also the security of the biggest navy in Europe. He enjoyed, furthermore, the friendship and the patronage of Louis XIV of France.

  The birth of a son to the king on 10 June 1688 added an entirely new dimension to the situation. James had two daughters from his first (Protestant) marriage and until now he had had no surviving children at all from his existing fifteen-year (Catholic) marriage. It had been universally assumed that his controversial political and religious experiments would give way to a more traditional, Protestant regime in the next reign when he would be succeeded by his Protestant daughter, Mary. Now the birth of a Catholic, male heir threatened to postpone indefinitely the prospect of a Protestant succession. Even if James died while his heir was still a child, a regency would inevitably be dominated by his Catholic wife. Tories, fearful for the fate of the Anglican church, were just as alarmed as Whigs. Mary was the wife of William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, the most renowned defender of the Protestant faith in Europe, a man who could hardly tolerate passively the prospect of his wife’s immense British inheritance drifting into the pro-Catholic orbit of his lifelong rival, Louis XIV. Indeed, ever since 1672, when Louis had invaded the United Provinces, William had assumed the mantle of both Dutch and European champion of Protestantism against the imperialist designs of the Sun King.

 

‹ Prev