CROWN AND PARLIAMENT, 1689–1714
It had not been the purpose of the Glorious Revolution to reduce the executive functions of the monarchy. Yet, the conservative intentions of the men of 1688–9 were in many ways frustrated by changes which occurred after 1689 in the working relationships between the House of Commons and the crown. Consequently, the balance of power and authority between crown and Parliament began to tilt a little more in favour of Parliament than the men of 1688–9 could ever have imagined. At the same time, successive monarchs between 1689 and 1714 were confronted with practical problems which made it difficult for them to execute their political functions.
One of the most vital developments that strengthened the autonomy, and consequently the self-confidence, of Parliament after 1689 was the greater regularity of its sittings. The Stuarts had ignored Parliament whenever it suited them, either by not summoning it or by allowing many years to pass between general elections. Although William retained the prerogatives of summoning and dissolving Parliament, the Declaration of Rights had demanded that Parliament be ‘held frequently’ following ‘free elections’. In practice, Parliament came to meet annually after 1689, because Britain was at war with France almost continually between 1689 and 1713. It was greatly in William’s interest to summon Parliament with some regularity so that he could solicit its agreement to the funds and supplies which he needed and which were raised on the credit of Parliament. Moreover, the sheer quantity of business, especially financial business, which had to be transacted each session, rapidly increased during William’s reign. Between 1689 and 1702, 809 bills were enacted, compared with 533 between 1660 and 1684. This made it much less likely that William III would prorogue Parliament as casually as his Stuart predecessors had occasionally done. Consequently, Parliament met annually throughout the period of the war and thereafter during the period of peace after 1713.
By 1694 the initial infatuation with William was giving way to a growing disenchantment with his high-handed view of his own powers and his willingness to involve England in expensive wars. The ruthless tactics employed by his ministers to maintain themselves in power, including the use of offices, places and pensions to secure support in Parliament, aroused considerable suspicion of the power of the executive. This apparent revival of powerful centralizing tendencies provoked a number of responses from Members of Parliament of which one of the earliest legislative achievements was the Triennial Act of 1694, which required general elections to be held at least every three years. Such bills had been mooted in 1689, 1693 and earlier in 1694 before the king’s resistance could be overcome. The Triennial Act was the first statutory restriction upon the royal prerogative of dissolving Parliament and must be regarded as a significant curtailment of royal power. In practice, ten elections were held between 1694 and 1716. In 1716 Parliament decided that such frequent elections were not conducive to political harmony and stability, and the Septennial Act lengthened the maximum period between elections to seven years.
The Triennial Act was not the only response to fear of increased executive power. Place bills to restrict the number of office- (or place-) holders who sat in the Commons were introduced in 1692 (unsuccessfully, because they were too sweeping) and in 1694 (successfully, because they were limited to Land Tax Collectors and Salt Duty Commissioners). Further, place bills removed Excise Officials (1699) and Customs Officials (1701). A further response to mounting suspicion of the executive was the practice of ‘tacking’ (or attaching to money bills, clauses relating to other issues). Tacking was used only as a last resort and when the Commons were reasonably united, as with the Place Bill legislation of 1694, 1700 and 1701. Even this occasional usage suggests that by the middle of the 1690s, Members of Parliament were prepared to exercise the financial influence over the monarchy which they knew they possessed. Later, tacking was used more widely. On a famous occasion in 1704, some Tories tacked the third Occasional Conformity Bill to the land tax in a rash and unsuccessful attempt to force it through the House of Lords. Other legislation reflected the growing suspicion of the executive. The Elections Act of 1696 sought to minimize the corruption of electors but concentrated unduly on the malpractices of sheriffs, neglecting the broader issues of treating, bribery and intimidation. Less spectacular, but rather more effective, was the development of appropriation of supply, a technique that went back to 1665. This meant that money voted for the war had to be used for the specified purposes for which it had been intended rather than for the wider schemes of William or his ministers. In the same way, the use of parliamentary committees sought to restrict the government’s freedom of action, an expedient that went back to the days of the Commonwealth. These committees reviewed such matters as the conduct of the war and the state of trade. Over the medium term, they did much to establish habits of vigilance over the executive and, indeed, to politicize a wider audience.
Finally, it was suspicion of William, his foreign policy and his political methods which was responsible for the final, great statutory limitation placed on royal power in his reign, the Act of Settlement of 1701. The death of Princess Anne’s one surviving child, William Duke of Gloucester, on 30 July 1700 had thrown the political world into uncertainty. The primary aim of the act was to provide for the Protestant succession in this new situation. This it did by providing that George, Elector of Hanover, should succeed William’s sister-in-law, Anne, and by laying down that no Roman Catholic could inherit the throne. To safeguard England’s interests during the reigns of foreign monarchs, furthermore, the act stated that the agreement of Parliament was to be necessary for any war in defence of the continental possessions of a foreign king of Britain. To safeguard the interests of the English political nation, moreover, the Act of Succession prevented any foreigner from sitting in Parliament or Privy Council, from holding any civil or military office or from receiving any grant of land from the crown. The clause requiring parliamentary consent for the removal of judges was, however, less contentious than it sounds. William had not meddled in the appointment of judges, and the clause merely registered the final defeat of Stuart attempts to control the judiciary. Two important provisions of the Act of Settlement were subject to serious second thoughts: that which eliminated placemen and pensioners from sitting in the House of Commons and that which prohibited future monarchs from leaving the kingdom without the consent of Parliament. Neither of these provisions was ever actually enforced. The complete elimination of placemen might have made the Commons too difficult for the executive to manage. In the Regency Act of 1706, a less comprehensive removal of placemen was promised (though never rigidly enforced). The clause prohibiting a future monarch from leaving the country without parliamentary consent was repealed in 1714. Their passage, however, reflects the willingness even of many Tory MPs to go further towards restricting royal powers than the men of 1688–9 would have done. Those who continued to believe that monarchs were descended from God and deserved complete and unquestioning obedience were now in a diminishing minority.
A strong and ambitious king like William naturally wished to exercise the traditional prerogatives over foreign policy enjoyed by his predecessors. Much would depend on the extent to which king and Parliament could cooperate. Not every MP could understand why Britain should be dragged into a long and expensive war simply to suit the Prince of Orange. At first, William had to respect the anxieties of his new subjects concerning the vexed subject of the armed services. There was no political problem with the navy. The naval establishment and its costly and complex infrastructure had been growing during the second half of the seventeenth century. Between 1688 and 1713 the number of ships in the fleet doubled to over 300 – twice that of France – at a cost of around £3,000,000 per year. By 1713 Britain had become the greatest naval power in Europe. On the other hand, there was widespread suspicion, even in wartime, of William’s attempt to maintain a standing army. In 1699 the Disbanding Act legalized the existence of a peacetime standing army, a significant victory for William. Th
is confirmed the existing suspicions of his subjects. During the partition negotiations with France in 1696–7, an increasingly confident William acted as his own foreign minister. He did little to involve English ministers, preferring to use his Dutch negotiators to deal on their behalf. Parliament was furious. When the news of the Second Partition Treaty of 1700 was revealed in the following year, the Tory majority in the Commons was outraged and threatened to impeach the entire cabinet. A chastened king promised to obtain parliamentary approval for new alliances in the future. The matter did not end there. It led to the inclusion in the Act of Settlement of 1701 of a clause forbidding British soldiers from defending foreign territory for a foreign prince, a significant limitation upon the monarch’s freedom of action.
As with so many of the political and constitutional developments of the reign of William III, it was the political necessities of wartime rather than the constitutional provisions of the Glorious Revolution that defined and redefined the acceptable spheres of royal and parliamentary power. Much, in fact, remained unchanged. Nothing in the Revolution Settlement deprived the crown of the right to take the initiative in foreign relations. Nothing in the Revolution Settlement compelled the government either to explain its policy or to release information about it, although it might be tactically sensible for it to do so. Even in the reign of Anne, when parliamentary discussion of foreign affairs became much more common and much more partisan, the crown retained the initiative. Parliament might criticize the queen and her ministers, but it had no wish to seize control of the conduct of foreign policy. There was no great public demand for it to do so. Parliament and public tended to become involved in foreign policy questions mainly when commercial considerations were at stake and when Britain’s relations with the Bourbon powers were in dispute. There was much less public interest in Britain’s policy towards the rest of Europe.
There was in the politics of the post-revolution years a certain experimental quality, as king and Parliament strove to accommodate themselves to novel political circumstances in a period of unprecedented warfare. Although there were many areas of friction between them, they were, at bottom, partners rather than enemies in the business of government. At the same time it suited Parliament to place controls upon the crown’s financial independence. The financial settlement of 1689 allowed William £200,000 per annum, a sum that fell at least £250,000 short of peacetime expenditure and that entirely ignored accumulated debts of around £200,000. The outbreak of war in May 1689 rapidly made a nonsense of such inadequate provision. As early as 1690 Parliament assumed full responsibility for the land forces and voted annual supplies to pay for them. During the 1690s parliamentary approval of detailed estimates, augmented by the investigations of Commissioners of Accounts, became a regular matter. Finally, the Civil List Act of 1698 marked the formal abandonment of the old distinction between ordinary and extraordinary supply in favour of the more modern distinction between civil and military expenditure. By the terms of the act, William was provided with a Civil List of £700,000 per annum for life to cover the costs of the household and of the executive government, including pensions, ministerial salaries and secret service expenditure. All military and naval expenditure became, even in peacetime, the responsibility of Parliament.
These costs were unprecedented. The war (75 per cent of public expenditure under William) swallowed at least £5 million per year, a total of over £40 million by the end of his reign. At the end of the war in 1697, government debt exceeded £14 million; by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the debt had risen to £30 million. To finance debts on this scale required massive tax increases. Under William, customs duties on overseas trade were extended to a wide range of goods and increased to 20 per cent or even 25 per cent. Excise duties were imposed upon stamps, salt, malt and leather. Even more important was a revived assessment of the rateable value of landed estates in 1692, resulting in a land tax of 4s. in the pound. This was to be a particularly successful tax. It brought in about one-third of all tax revenue between 1693 and 1714. Its annual yield of about £2 million was not only predictable, cheap and (because locally assessed and collected) flexible; its reliability also enabled short-term loans to be levied on its security. But even these enhanced yields were not enough to meet the new levels of government expenditure. Something more than a reform of the revenue was needed to fund the enormous sums needed to finance the war.
What was needed was a system of government borrowing that did not suffer from the deficiencies of those adopted under the Stuarts, namely corruption, unpopularity and, not least, their liability to antagonize Parliament. These objectives were in large part achieved by the ‘Financial Revolution’ of the 1690s. This was, first, the process by which Parliament assumed responsibility for the management of a new system of government debt and, second, a series of technical measures by which government debts were serviced by taxation. Its origins are to be found in the £1 million loan of 1693 which the government raised by offering annuities to investors. For some years the government continued to raise money on a short-term basis. During William’s reign long-term debt represented only one-third of all government debt. Only in 1712 did it come to exceed short-term debt. By then, most government debt was floated either through annuities or through loans raised through state lotteries. In this way investment in British government debt became a reliable and regular income for investors. Hundreds of thousands of wealthy citizens with money to invest loaned money to the government and received their interest as annuities. Such loans may be usefully regarded as their own personal investments in the political and economic system.12
Parliament assumed responsibility for the management of government debt with the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. The bank was by statute able to raise money on the capital market and lend it to the government on condition that Parliament guaranteed the repayment of the long-term debt by allocating guaranteed funds to pay interest on the loans. Such a system of borrowing enabled the government to raise loans reliably and cheaply either through the bank or through the East India Company (and, after its establishment in 1711, the South Sea Company). The governments of William III were able to raise loans at 8 per cent, those of Anne at 5 per cent. (After the Treaty of Utrecht, interest rates sank to around 3 per cent.) As a consequence of these financial technicalities, Parliament became in effect the guarantor for the system of government finance in Britain after the Glorious Revolution. By 1714 the Treasury was presenting annual budgets for the approval of Parliament, thus rendering annual meetings of Parliament imperative. In this way, the Financial Revolution arguably may have had more extensive constitutional consequences than the Bill of Rights.
Yet, the consequences of the Financial Revolution went far beyond its constitutional implications. In the long term, this new ability of governments to pay for expensive wars helped to transform the position of Britain on the European stage and enabled her to become a world power. Government finance became more predictable; the ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ of 1672, in which the government defaulted on its repayments, could never be repeated. The economy, too, in general benefited from the new mechanisms of financial capitalism. Greater confidence in the stability and predictability of financial transactions greatly enhanced the expansion of private as well as public credit and finance. The amount of money in circulation rapidly increased. Cheques became common and promissory notes were legalized in 1705. Consequently, money could safely and swiftly be transmitted over long distances. Even before 1688 marine and other forms of insurance had been gaining in familiarity. Lloyd’s of London, in fact, was established in 1688. After 1688 such developments fed upon themselves. Many commercial enterprises came to be organized as joint-stock companies: by 1695 there were 95 of them in England, 44 in Scotland.
The Glorious Revolution, then, had indirect long-term consequences which surpassed the immediate political and constitutional changes. As we have seen, doctrinaire Whiggism was not the essential driving force o
n the events of 1688–9. Insofar as a new political direction can be discerned after 1689, it perhaps owed more to King William’s wars than it did to the Glorious Revolution. Recent studies of British identity and its European context have established that it was an event in European, not just British, and certainly not just English history. To treat the Glorious Revolution, as many Whig historians did, as a reflection of the genius of the English for moderation and for their ability to resist violent upheaval, is difficult to square with the bloodletting in Scotland and Ireland and the many years of warfare against France into which the revolution plunged the British Isles.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 9