The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  After the passage of the Triennial Act in 1694, the ministry became predominantly Whig. Until 1698 William enjoyed perhaps the most settled period of government during his entire reign. The influential Professor Plumb saw in these years the effective termination of the old contractual and constitutional Whiggism of the seventeenth century and the emergence of the managerial Whiggism of the eighteenth century.17 The Junto was strengthened by the disclosure of an assassination plot against the king in 1696 and attempted to capitalize on the plot by launching an association to which all office-holders had to subscribe, pledging their loyalty to William as the ‘rightful and lawful King’ or face dismissal. This dagger was aimed at the heart of the Tory Party. Few Tories lost their offices, but the Junto’s firm line at least ensured the loyalty of the magistracy and the militia. Meanwhile, the war was proceeding without particular success, but the government was able to finance it effectively enough and the king was able to make a respectable peace at Ryswick in 1697.

  Thereafter, the strength of the Whig government began to weaken. The ending of the war reduced the king’s dependence on them. Even the unusual organizing abilities of the Junto could not impose order on the unwieldy House of Commons. William made it clear that he desired a renewal of hostilities towards France and for that reason wished to retain a large standing army. The country had had enough of war, and its pacific sentiments were reflected in the emergence of the new Country party of Foley and Harley.18 Nothing could withstand the storm of Country opinion which swept through Parliament and throughout the political nation. Indeed, the king was forced to recognize the fact by including Tories in his governments.

  Between 1698 and 1700 the new Country party even enjoyed a majority in Parliament. These were turbulent and unpredictable years. No fewer than four general elections were held in four years between 1698 and 1702. Four years of almost constant electioneering kept the political temperature high and created a huge sense of public involvement in the affairs of the nation. The Country tide carried everything before it. Not only was the standing army savagely reduced in size; William’s grants of land in Ireland to friends and supporters were challenged and in the Resumption Act of 1700, they were to be reviewed. The passage of the Act of Settlement in 1701, with its constitutional provisions against placemen and foreigners, marked the effective continuing transition of the Tory Party from its traditional status as a party of prerogative towards its new status as a Country party. Its attacks on the Junto, its attempts to impeach three of its leaders for their alleged role in committing England to the partition treaties and its acceptance of Anne as William’s successor (March 1702) all served to stoke the fires of Court–Country partisanship.

  Yet during the reign of Anne, the conflict of Whig and Tory politics came to predominate over the politics of Court and Country. Tories dominated the early administrations of Anne’s reign. The queen preferred the Tories and mistrusted the Whigs, but in spite of the fact that she had the advantages of being English and Anglican, she lacked the force of personality to take the political initiative and was thus forced to depend on others, notably on the non-partisan Sidney Godolphin, for the management of Parliament and the prosecution of the War of the Spanish Succession.19 He was able to work with the lords of the Junto without surrendering to them. The Tories increased their majority at the general election of 1702 and proceeded to flex their muscles by attacking Occasional Conformity. Thrice they pushed bills through the Commons which would have subjected the practice to severe penalties, only to be thwarted on each occasion by Junto majorities in the Lords. In 1704 they even sought to tack the third Occasional Conformity bill onto the Land Tax. Divisions within the Tory ranks, not least a revolt of Harley’s followers in the Commons against the tack, killed it. These examples of Tory obduracy rebounded against the party. They also offended the queen and several of her political managers, who were sceptical about the wisdom of agitating religious divisions in the middle of a great war. Two of the leading Tories in the ministry, Nottingham and Seymour, resigned (April 1704), to be replaced by the moderate Tories, Harley – who was rapidly discarding his reputation as a Country Tory – and St John.20 The ministry was still in theory a Tory ministry, but it was led in the Lords by Godolphin,21 and it included Marlborough, both of whom gave the first priority to the prosecution of the war. The great military victories at Blenheim (1705) and Ramillies (1706) vindicated the ministry’s right to govern and did much to attract popular and parliamentary support. Further Whig successes discomfited the Tories. Between 1705 and 1708 the Whigs used their strength in both houses to force the queen to dismiss Tory ministers. Godolphin’s successful handling of the Regency Act in 1706, which provided for a regency between the death of Anne and the accession of the first Hanoverian monarch, offered the prospect of a trouble-free Hanoverian Succession. Furthermore, the negotiation of Union with Scotland in 1707 weakened the strategic position of the Jacobites in their safest retreat. The days of party coalition were numbered. They were ended when Godolphin and Marlborough struck, demanding the resignation of the Tories Harley and St John, who were replaced with loyal Whigs; at the general election of 1708, the Whigs gained about thirty seats.

  Thereafter, however, the political pendulum swung back to the Tories. Continued allied victories at a time of economic depression and harvest failure provoked a general demand for an end to the war. By the summer of 1709, they argued, Britain had achieved her military objectives. Peace, patriotism and Anglicanism were conspiring to smile on the Tories. In 1710 Harley engineered the overthrow of Godolphin and brought about the collapse of the Whig cabinet. The general election of 1710 witnessed a Tory landslide. Riding on the crest of a wave, the Tory ministry passed an act against Occasional Conformity in 1711. In the same year they passed a Qualifications bill, which established the qualifications for a Member of Parliament at £600 for county seats and £300 for borough seats, measures intended to maintain the representation of landed gentlemen in the House of Commons. Yet, the last years of the reign were dominated by the complexities of Harley’s peace negotiations. The Treaty of Utrecht passed Parliament in April 1713, an event that acted as a launching pad for yet another Tory election victory in that year. These dramatic events led the Tories to overreach themselves. Some of them, arguing that the Hanoverian claim was much more distant than that of the Stuart, indulged the fantasy that James II’s son, the Old Pretender, might renounce his religion and thus qualify for the succession. Partly because this enabled the Whigs to claim that the Tories were Jacobites, and thus an unpatriotic and unconstitutional party, the beneficiaries of the Hanoverian Succession were to be the Whigs.

  Yet, parties were less coherent than they would become in the nineteenth century and exhibited serious divisions. For example, the Tories were always divided about Occasional Conformity. Furthermore, between 1710 and 1714, a backbench faction known as the October Club urged a more Tory policy on the Harley ministry, contributing significantly to divisions over the Hanoverian Succession. Party alone could not sustain a government. Royal support, together with the competent organization of parliamentary majorities, was likewise essential. By 1714 parties were of considerably greater importance to politics than they had been in 1689; however, we should not employ them as the primary marker of difference when describing the structure of ministerial politics in the reigns of William III and Anne. Furthermore, the differences between the parties should not be exaggerated. Whigs may have been sympathetic to the claims of Protestant Dissenters, but the vast majority of Whigs were Anglicans. Similarly, although the Whigs were the great and staunch defenders of the new monied interests, almost all Whig politicians were landed men. Finally, not all politicians were partymen. Godolphin, Harley and Marlborough were royal managers rather than party politicians.

  Yet, it is impossible to avoid the use of party labels in describing the ministerial politics of the reign of Anne. Contemporaries themselves used them. Party not only agitated Parliament and the world of high politics, but also
divided the electorate, the press, the clubs, the City of London and the corporations of many towns and cities. This was not all. The ‘rage of party’ divided the churches, the professions, the theatre and even the social life of the nation. There were many times when it truly seemed to contemporaries that it was threatening to rupture society in the widest sense.22 The Glorious Revolution, far from providing final solutions to social and political issues, had served rather to generate the most bitter divisions that British society had experienced since the civil wars. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that contention and disagreement did not normally destabilize the political system after 1689. Party conflict could be accommodated within parliamentary forms, conventions and routines, and even within the wider political nation.

  Party loyalties were both deeply felt and consistently held. In Parliament, the acid test of division lists reveals that even in the parliaments of William’s reign no fewer than 86 per cent of MPs voted exclusively for either the Whig or Tory parties, while in Anne’s reign the figure reached almost 88 per cent.23 In other words, party allegiance determined voting behaviour to a remarkable extent. An occasional dissident vote might be tolerated; regular disobedience to a party was extremely rare. The distinction between Court and Country, on the other hand, was much less well defined. Moreover, the fact that mixed or coalition governments existed in this period does not seriously dilute the significance of the party. Coalitions of parties can only be negotiated when the parties concerned have reached at least a minimal state of development, when individuals have identified themselves as Whigs and Tories and when they recognize that in a particular set of circumstances single-party government is not feasible.

  The Whig and Tory parties of this period displayed organizational structures of some sophistication. Both parties – particularly the Tories – were prone to internal divisions, but normally retained their cohesion. Their awareness of their own party identities did much to frustrate William III’s attempts to manipulate them as readily as he would have wished to.24 Both parties used the private influence and patronage of landed magnates as the solid core of their organization, but these were supplemented with a variety of other expedients. Both parties – particularly the Whigs – developed systems of whipping in their members in both houses, utilizing the informal resources of the London clubs to maintain the loyalty of their parliamentary supporters. Both parties used the power of religious denominations: the Tories used that of the Church of England, the Whigs the Dissenting congregations. Finally, both Whigs and Tories used the new power of the newspaper and periodical press to publicize and rally support for their cause. As early as 1704, no fewer than nine weekly newspapers were published in London with a total circulation of over 40,000.

  What is even more remarkable than the intensity of party conflict within the political and social elite is the vehemence and consistency of party feeling and behaviour within the electorate.25 Growing rapidly in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, the electorate numbered around 300,000 by 1700. When allowance is made for the very substantial ‘turnover’ of voters – many of whom fail to vote from one election to the next – the maximum ‘electoral pool’ was probably something over 500,000, an astonishingly high figure for an early modern society. Furthermore, between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of adult males enjoyed the right to vote. This is, again, an impressively high figure when it is recalled that at least 50 per cent of the adult male population – many of them servants, paupers, cottagers or simply day labourers – lacked sufficient economic independence to have qualified for the vote on almost any franchise in the pre-democratic era. Indeed, as Professor Holmes has argued, few substantial towns lacked parliamentary representation in the early eighteenth century.26

  It was within this unique electorate that the party battle was fought. The sheer frequency of elections kept party passions on the boil. Between 1679 and 1716 no fewer than sixteen general elections were held, a rate of one election every two-and-a-quarter years. At times, it seemed that the country was in a permanent state of electioneering. However, not every constituency went to a poll at every election. Only about one-third of them polled at any single election. Over the same period, however, almost all constituencies were contested at least once. Only nineteen constituencies avoided a contest. In this situation it was perfectly feasible to maintain party loyalties among electors over time. Almost all constituencies were double-member constituencies in which voters had two votes. The vast majority of them – almost always over 80 per cent and often considerably more – voted a party ticket: two Whig or two Tory votes (it was very rare for candidates of the same party to stand against each other). Furthermore, the number of floating voters was small – somewhere between 10 per cent and 20 per cent in the counties, less in the boroughs. Most electors not only voted a party ticket but also continued to do so when they had further opportunities to vote. To some extent, the power of local party managers and patrons must be held responsible for this phenomenon of party voting. In some places the electorate was small and liable to be influenced by social and economic pressures. But in others there were simply too many voters to be influenced in this way; in these places partisanship must have been the consequence of personal preference, political principle and religious conviction.

  How important was the electoral power of the parties and the years 1689 between 1714? In many constituencies local issues might have dominated, but even here, national issues could penetrate, albeit shaped by particular circumstances. However, on most occasions the collective decisions of the electorate were national decisions which carried with them political consequences of the greatest significance. Indeed, they frequently determined the complexion of governments. The collapse of the power of the Junto in 1699–1700 was anticipated by the spectacular gains made by the Tories in 1698, itself a striking reflection of opinion out of doors. Further, the spectacular victory of the Whigs at the general election of 1708 cleared the ground for their return to power in the following months. Similarly, the election results of 1705 and 1710 seem clearly to have reflected national opinion.

  Party activity was unusually intense in this period, and few parts of the country were unaffected and few people could have remained unaware of it. There were many substantial issues for parties to feed on: the problem of the succession, the growing power of the executive, the explosive issue of religious toleration, the question of Britain’s place in the world and the conduct of her foreign policy. In this period, in short, there was much to be partisan about. Furthermore, it is surely no accident that this great age of party coincides with the ending of press censorship and the effective beginnings of a national newspaper and periodical press. Nor is it an accident that it also roughly coincides with the period when the Triennial Act was on the statute book, 1694 to 1716. On top of all this, it can hardly be denied that the context of politics in these years was unusual: the astounding occurrences of the Glorious Revolution and their aftermath; the subsequent period of political experiment and improvisation; the continued political uncertainty generated by the strains of war and the possibility of rebellion within Britain; and the persistence of religious passions and denominational rivalry. Such a combination of circumstances was unlikely to be repeated. Nevertheless, a political, party culture was being developed in these years as the parties fashioned their routines, organization and appeals.

  BRITAIN AND EUROPE, 1689–1713

  It cannot be emphasized frequently enough that the primary context of British history in the eighteenth century is the European one. Of all the long-term consequences of the Glorious Revolution, the reorientation of Britain’s place in the world was to be one of the most important. After playing a limited and usually marginal role on the European stage during most periods of the seventeenth century, Britain turned her face towards Europe after the Glorious Revolution. She became prominently involved in the war against France (1688–97) and then became a major participant in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13).
These were only the first instalments of a Second Hundred Years’ War against France, a war that was to last until 1815. This long, and ultimately successful, warfare established a fiscal-military state, fuelled massive, commercial transformation and generated the acquisition of a worldwide empire. Consequently, the political objectives of William III cannot be understood from an exclusively British standpoint.

  This reorientation of Britain’s diplomatic position met with initial misgivings in England. At first, people were much less interested in the balance of power in Europe than they were in their own domestic preoccupations. They cared less for King William’s continental concerns than they did for their own. Yet, they were unenthusiastic about a possible restoration of James II, and they certainly did not want a pro-Catholic regime imposed upon them with the aid of France. Consequently, and in spite of initial misgivings, Britain’s expansive attitude after 1689 eventually chimed with public opinion, not least because William’s crusade against Louis XIV’s attempts to dominate Europe were seen to promote Britain’s political, religious and economic interests. William III’s strategic objectives embraced British interests of policy in four major areas. First, William inaugurated a commitment to maintaining the balance of power in Europe, by opposing the domination of Europe by any single country. In the century after 1688, this referred to France or coalitions dominated by France. In part, at least, this reflected the mounting abhorrence within Britain of the client status to which the Stuarts had persisted in reducing the country. But one further cardinal reason for pursuing this objective was the defence of the Netherlands against French domination, which was an essential part of her military strategy in the Nine Years’ War. Between 1679 and 1688 France had occupied a number of areas on her east and north-eastern borders, notably Luxembourg and the Spanish Netherlands and, in 1687, in contravention of international treaties, inaugurated a policy of economic warfare against the Dutch. Contentious at first, the commitment to keeping the French out of the Low Countries became a generally accepted and legitimate objective during the War of the Spanish Succession. Second, a further paramount British objective was to be the maintenance of the Protestant religion. Patriotic enthusiasm for the Protestant succession was never far below the surface in seventeenth-century England, and it was now reinforced by a new wave of Protestant sentiment, unleashed by the Glorious Revolution. The events of 1685–9 gave rise to a dramatic strengthening of the resolution and resolve of large sections of the Protestant ruling establishment, a determination to make sacrifices abroad in order to maintain the safety of the Protestant succession at home. From this standpoint, the Glorious Revolution seems less like a parliamentary revolution than a Protestant Anglo-Dutch enterprise undertaken by William III in accordance with his long-established anti-Catholic strategies. On one crucial occasion, at least, Louis XIV played straight into William’s hands. His recognition of Prince James Edward Stuart as rightful King of England in 1701 – just three months after the Act of Settlement had legislated against the possibility of a Catholic monarchy – provoked indignation in England and actually helped William to take a united country into the War of the Spanish Succession. These dynastic themes interacted powerfully with what, in the long term, was to be of even greater significance – the third objective, Britain’s commercial prosperity. To a country already accustomed to protecting its commercial interests via the Navigation Acts, it was natural to protect her markets and to seek new ones. When they entered the Nine Years’ War in 1689, the British, suspicious of Dutch commercial competition – well they might after the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the second half of the century – insisted that the Dutch should take stern measures against French commerce and should not make peace with the French independently. During the war, the British closed their markets to French imports, thus permitting native industries to prosper, not least those newly established by the inflow of Huguenot refugees following Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685: silk, cutlery, paper and glass. Such issues were important but they remained something of a sideshow during the Nine Years War. They became, however, a principal consideration in the events leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish succession war. The prospect of the Spanish empire falling under French control threatened Bourbon economic, as well as political, predominance not only in Europe but also in commercial waters outside Europe. Britain could not stand aside and allow the commercial balance of power in Europe to be determined by others. As Professor Jones has pointed out, from this time onwards, economic, commercial and imperial matters form a substantial part of all the peace treaties and diplomatic alliances negotiated by Britain.27 But it was impossible to disentangle the destiny of European from that of extra-European commerce. This leads directly to a fourth aspect of British overseas strategy after the Glorious Revolution: the pursuit of imperial power and possessions. The great wars of these years were not merely wars in and for European objectives. They were fought within an extra-European context of rapidly increasing significance. Consequently, imperial control had to be tightened. Scotland and Ireland had to be drawn more safely into England’s orbit. Further afield, the mainland American colonies were brought more firmly under the direction of the Board of Trade, while British policy sought to incorporate them more closely within an Atlantic economy directed from London.