The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The path to Union was smoothed by the recognition in both countries that in a period of almost incessant European warfare the two countries could not continue their endless quarrels and disagreements. Earlier proposals for Union in 1688–9 and 1702–3 had failed to progress. But in 1704 the Whig Junto had come to see the necessity for Union. The seriousness with which they approached the negotiations in 1706 is borne out by the generosity of the concessions held out to the Scots. There was less enthusiasm for Union in Scotland, but in the end no effective alternative was proposed on which Scottish opinion could unite. It is true that the Kirk was hostile to Union. Furthermore, some elements in Scottish public opinion were bitterly xenophobic and a number of hostile petitions were received. Yet, resistance to Union, while both vocal and sometimes passionate, was surprisingly limited. Three-quarters of the Scottish burghs and two-thirds of the Scottish shires did not protest. Extra parliamentary opinion in Scotland appeared to be uninterested and apathetic. Yet, Union was not achieved, as used to be thought, simply by bribery, nor was it imposed upon Scottish negotiators. Indeed, Scottish political and social leaders were well capable of looking after their own interests. Indeed, the intellectual initiative for Union, now as earlier, came from Scottish almost as strongly as from English sources. In the end, a mixture of political conviction, political management, a very real anxiety to settle a recurrent problem and, not least, substantial concessions were enough to persuade the Scottish Parliament to vote itself out of existence at the end of 1706 and to agree to Union.32

  The Act of Union of 1707 provided for the political incorporation of Scotland into England. It created a new unitary state and established the biggest free trade area in Europe. The Scottish negotiators accepted the Hanoverian Succession and abandoned for ever the prospect of an independent Scottish dynasty pursuing an independent Scottish foreign policy. The Act of Union brought the number of MPs up to 558, giving Scotland forty-five members of the House of Commons (thirty county members and fifteen members to be elected from groups of burghs) and sixteen members of the House of Lords, to be elected by an assembly of Scottish peers. It cannot be maintained that the act established anything like an equal political partnership: although Scotland had one-quarter of the population of England, she was only allowed one-tenth of the representation in Parliament. Furthermore, in 1708 the new parliament proceeded to abolish the Privy Council of Scotland. There was no immediate protest at the disappearance of the council, although it amounted to a significant weakening of Scottish influence over the disposal of patronage in Scotland. There was, however, a Scottish Secretary of State appointed from and usually resident in London between 1708 and 1725, and again between 1742 and 1746. In practice, however, it was the aristocracy which was to govern Scotland during the eighteenth century, both in town and country.

  The Union had important consequences in religious and legal affairs. Since 1689 the English sovereign had accomplished the difficult feat of being both supreme governor of the Church of England and at the same time head of the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. After 1707 the independence of the two churches in their government, discipline and worship was to be recognized and respected. This, together with the fact that Presbyterians were now to be allowed to sit in Parliament, seriously weakened the established status of the Church of England. This apparent violation of religious conformity was bound to be used by the Protestant Dissenters in England as an unanswerable argument for permitting them the same privileges. Yet if the Union of Scotland and England were to proceed with reasonable prospects of success, such concessions were vital. This was why the Act of Union preserved both the legal and educational systems of Scotland. There was, in any case, no real need to merge them with their English counterparts. Consequently, the reputation of Scotland’s ancient universities and the place of Edinburgh as the legal capital of Scotland were sensibly allowed to continue.

  The Union had vitally important consequences for the Scottish economy. The trade and navigation of Britain and its commercial empire overseas were to be opened to the Scots within a common customs and excise system. While the Scots accepted the principle of taxation and trade regulation from London, the negotiators were anxious to ensure that the Scots were to be more lightly taxed than the English. The Scottish Land Tax was to yield only one-fortieth of the English assessment; the Salt Tax, after an intermission of seven years, was to be set at a lower level than in England, and Scotland was to be exempt from the Stamp Tax and the Window Tax. Finally, investors in the Darien Scheme were to get their money back. Within two decades some beneficial economic effects of Union were being felt. By the 1720s Scottish cattle had become a familiar sight in southern England; Scottish linens were being sold in increasing numbers in England, and the grim days of the famines of the late 1690s had become a distant memory.

  Within the structures which the Union established, both England and Scotland could begin to create for themselves a new set of relationships and identities within a British framework. In the short term, however, the Union deprived Scotland of independent means of expressing her national sentiments and underscored her economic and legislative subordination to England. This was evident, for example, in 1709 when the Treason Act replaced the old Scottish law of treason with the more humane English law. Similarly, in 1712 the Toleration Act granted freedom of worship to any clergymen willing to take an oath of loyalty to the government and abjure the Pretender. The established Church of Scotland was appalled. Although there may have been many reasons of state justifying the Union, and although the idea of an Anglo-Scottish Union goes back at least to the sixteenth century, as Colin Kidd reminds us, ‘it generated considerable popular hostility’.33 Although most Scots acquiesced in the Union after 1707, many did so unenthusiastically and blamed it for many of their misfortunes. This was the soil in which Jacobitism was to grow during the next half century.

  In Ireland the Glorious Revolution was even more violent than it was in Scotland, and it was to have consequences that were to be even more bitter and long-lasting. The Irish Catholics and an important minority of Protestants remained loyal to James II, who regarded Ireland as a base from which to launch a military crusade, backed by France, to regain his Scottish and English thrones. This counter-revolution was to be firmly grounded upon Irish resentments. To the Catholic majority in Ireland, the Glorious Revolution meant neither political freedom nor religious toleration; it meant foreign occupation and military conquest. Ultimately, it was to confirm existing humiliations, not least the legal and social subordination of the Catholic majority, and to endorse the expropriation of Catholic landowners.

  The reign of James II had seen the introduction of policies sympathetic to the majority Catholic population: religious toleration, the opening up of the corporations and the army to Catholics and, not least, the promise of land redistribution. The momentum of events favourable to the Catholics was seriously disrupted by James’s failure to maintain his position in England in the winter of 1688–9, but his arrival from France in March 1689 at last promised to establish a pro-Catholic polity in Ireland. Within weeks, most of Ireland was in his hands, except for parts of Ulster, notably the besieged city of Londonderry. James summoned the ‘Patriot Parliament’ which, like the convention in England, was an irregular and revolutionary body. Its actions were hasty and thoroughly infected with the spirit of a vengeful Catholicism. This predominantly Catholic Parliament repealed Poynings’ Law,34 abolished judicial appeals from Ireland to England and took steps to protect Irish trade and industry. Most provocatively of all, it confiscated without appeal the property of 2,400 Protestants. James dared go no further in the direction of establishing a Catholic state for fear of alienating still further the Irish Protestants. Indeed, serious divisions existed within the Irish Parliament and these fatally weakened James’s cause.

  For a while, the military situation hung. However, the siege of Londonderry was relieved on 10 August 1689, an enormous moral and military victory for the embattled Protestant po
pulation. The English invasion of the same year, however, failed to make much progress and with greater resolve and firmer leadership James might have occupied the whole of Ireland. William himself led the invasion of 1690 with an army of no fewer than 37,000 men that included Danish, Dutch and German contingents. He attempted to reach a negotiated settlement, promising religious toleration for Catholics and the retention of Catholic estates, but he received no response. James was overconfident of his military position. However, the shattering defeat of the Catholic forces at William’s hands at the Battle of the Boyne (1 July 1690) led ultimately to the collapse of his cause, to his retreat to France and to the Treaty of Limerick.

  MAP 5: Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  The Treaty of Limerick of October 1691 marked the surrender of the Jacobite army in Ireland. In his anxiety to concentrate on the European theatres of war, William offered conciliatory terms: Irish soldiers were allowed to retreat to France and Roman Catholics were in the future to enjoy a measure of religious toleration. Yet, Jacobite demands for the restoration of all Irish Catholic estates and for Catholics to be allowed to hold military and civil offices and to sit on corporations were turned down. There was to be no equivalent of the English Declaration of Rights. In spite of the relative moderation of its terms, the treaty was to become a symbol of English occupation of Ireland and, like the events that led up to it, the siege of Londonderry and the Battle of the Boyne, part of a historic and – eventually – mythological narrative of victorious and heroic Protestant resistance to Roman Catholicism.

  The moderate provisions of the Treaty of Limerick were insufficient to satisfy the Protestant lust for revenge against the Catholics. Thereafter, Protestant landowners, genuinely terrified of the possible combination of Catholicism and Jacobitism, took matters into their own hands. This had not been William’s original design, but he was now absolutely dependent upon a Protestant minority which now wished to ensure that the Catholics would never again represent a threat to the Protestant supremacy in Ireland. The years after 1691 erected the structures of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’.

  The most characteristic features of the post-Limerick regime were the penal laws passed by the first Parliament against the Catholics and the dispossession of Catholic land. The major purpose of the penal laws was to entrench the minority Protestant landlord class in power by weakening the civic status of the Catholic majority in a number of ways. Catholics were to be excluded from Parliament (1691); they were to be excluded from the army and prevented from possessing firearms (1692); Catholic children were not to be sent abroad for their education (1695); Catholic bishops were to be banished and missionary priests from abroad were no longer to be tolerated (1697). After the ‘Popery Act’ of 1703, indeed, Catholics were to be excluded from all public offices. Further, they could not buy land and they could only inherit it on the basis of gavelkind (i.e. partible inheritance), a provision that led to the fragmentation of such Catholic estates as remained. In 1641 Catholics had held 59 per cent of the land of Ireland; in 1688 they still held 22 per cent; by the end of William’s reign, they held only 14 per cent, a figure that steadily declined still further to 5 per cent by 1778. Almost as important as the land grants, however, was an act of 1695 that weakened most existing tenancies to tenancies-at-will, leaving tenants more easily liable to increased rents and even to eviction. Whatever the possible justification for this treatment of the Catholic population and however inconsistently the legislation might have been enforced, none of it was vetoed by the Westminster Parliament.

  If all this were not enough, the English government continued to discriminate against the Irish economy, as it had done throughout the seventeenth century. Ireland was already excluded from the Navigation Acts and was prevented from sharing in colonial trade except through English ports. Consequently, her shipping industry collapsed. In 1667 the importation of Irish cattle, sheep and swine into England had been prohibited. In 1681 butter and cheese were added to the list, seriously damaging Irish agriculture. Furthermore, the Irish woollen industry was irreparably weakened by an act of 1698 that restricted Irish woollen exports to England, where they were seriously disadvantaged by high import duties. Linen thereafter replaced wool as the major Irish export industry. Whether the Irish economy would have prospered in the absence of such discrimination is unclear; its ability to compete with the more advanced economy of England, and even that of Scotland, is by no means obvious. What is undeniable, however, is the ability of the Westminster Parliament to determine the economic future of Ireland and its willingness to wield that power in the interests of its own members and their constituents.

  Long before then, English politicians and pamphleteers had begun to treat Ireland as a conquered country and had come almost to rejoice at her status as a colony. In the early eighteenth century, the Catholics perhaps comprised three-quarters of the total population, the Presbyterians and other Dissenters (especially Huguenots and Quakers) perhaps another 10 per cent. The minority Anglican nobility, gentry, clergy and professional men – the Protestant Ascendancy – comprised the rest of the population. The establishment of the Protestant Ascendancy and the passage of the penal laws were widely welcomed in England. Many English landowners were happy to see Ireland reduced to client status. In 1720 this status was brutally defined in the Declaratory Act, which stated that acts of the Irish Parliament could be vetoed by the Westminster Parliament but that the legislation of the latter was automatically to be accepted by the former. Indeed, English treatment of Ireland compared unfavourably with the treatment that Scotland received after the Union. It can hardly be denied that the religion and the laws of Ireland were treated with much less consideration than those of Scotland.

  What, if anything, might be said to justify, even to mitigate, the harsh treatment meted out to Ireland in the decades after the Glorious Revolution? The trend in recent discussions of the penal laws has been less hostile and less nationalistic. Sean Connolly has emphasized the variety of motives lying behind them, not least the cultural imperatives of Protestantism and the wish to convert the Catholics to Protestantism.35 Furthermore, the penal laws were not enforced uniformly and they were not always enforced harshly. Few, if any, individuals were executed for their religion. Furthermore, the continuing presence of over 1,000 priests and 4,000 monks and nuns ensured that the Catholic population was able to maintain the regular practice of its faith. The penal laws were, rather, a guarantee of continued subservience on the part of the Catholic population and, perhaps, a reserve armoury of powers which could be called upon in a crisis. Indeed, they did much to reinforce the confidence of the Protestant and their sense of mission in Ireland. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that the decades following the accession of George I were, in fact, years of modest economic and social recovery in Ireland. Few things are more revealing than the peace of the Irish countryside in the first half of the eighteenth century. But the fact remains that many sections of the Irish population nursed their grievances without having available the mechanisms of peaceful protest and, consequently, without the expectation of redress. By the early eighteenth century, the political and social problems of Ireland had reached an impasse. Just as the Anglo–Irish landowners were dependent on British military support for their existence, so the native peasantry would be dependent upon foreign intervention for the restoration of their religious freedoms. For the moment, a sullen culture of resigned despair prevailed. In the end, as the Irish rebellion of 1798 was to reveal, these problems could only be resolved with outside intervention. In 1714, however, this could not be foreseen. In any case, the historian should study the history of Ireland in the eighteenth century for its own sake and on its own terms, not as a preparation for what was to happen in the 1790s.

  By the same token, we should not read the history of the British colonies in North America as a prelude to the American Revolution of the 1770s. Throughout the British colonies, in fact, the Glorious Revolution had been greeted
with varying degrees of enthusiasm. There had been little affection in the colonies for the Stuart monarchs, who had been more than ready to tamper with local charters and interfere with the rights of local elites. In the West Indies the revolution was at first greeted warmly. James II had imposed heavy taxes on sugar and tobacco and had limited the bargaining power of local assemblies. The reluctance of William to repeal and reduce these taxes, however, steadily diminished the approval which had been initially displayed. In the mainland American colonies, however, the Glorious Revolution was greeted with rather greater enthusiasm. Here, the Stuart monarchs had made wholesale assaults on colonial charters. Indeed, most colonies at least sent some expressions of gratitude to William. Many of them went much further. Seven of the colonial legislatures, in their anxiety to secure formal safeguards of their liberties, attempted to pass their own versions of the Bill of Rights. Enthusiasm for the Glorious Revolution gave rise to social and political upheavals in Massachusetts, New York and Maryland, and took Virginia to the brink of revolution. In the end, however, order was restored and colonial expectations satisfied at least in part. The attack on colonial charters was not revived by William, and during the subsequent decades there was much less interference in the internal politics of the colonies than there had been before 1688. Most important of all, the future of the colonial legislatures never seriously came into question. Yet in other ways, and as in Scotland and Ireland, the Glorious Revolution led to a greater rationalization of control from London. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, all formerly private colonies, came under the immediate control of the crown. Furthermore, a new Navigation Act in 1696 extended metropolitan control over the imperial trade of the colonies. In the following year, in an attempt to obtain convictions in the trials of those accused of breaking the laws, the vice admiralty courts were extended into every colony.