The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  His fatal hesitations gave the government time to secure England before turning to disaffected Scotland. The standing army was doubled in size and the fleet was sent to watch the English Channel ports. Stanhope issued warrants against several of the English Jacobite leaders, placed garrisons around Jacobite centres like Bath and Oxford and sent troops to Bristol and Plymouth, thus stifling all prospects of a rising in the West Country.

  When it came, therefore, the English rising was half-hearted, confined to the far north and lacking in popular support. When the Scottish army crossed the border, the English Jacobites raised Northumberland but failed to take Newcastle. The Jacobites advanced as far south as Preston but found the country lukewarm in their support. Most of the 1,600 men who rallied to the cause were Roman Catholics. The Protestant majority – including most of the Tories – remained indifferent. The Jacobite advance south was blocked by superior forces and at Preston they surrendered the hopeless cause.

  As for the Scottish rebels, they had fought the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir only the day before the surrender at Preston in November 1715. Their failure to break through into the Lowlands was a severe setback. In several Scottish towns, Jacobites were not prepared to sacrifice their own careers, and the independence of their towns, by reckless adherence to a losing cause. That cause was severely hampered by the disunity of the clans and by the difficulty of coordinating their military efforts. Had the Scottish rebels of the south-west been able to coordinate their actions with the rising in the north of England, the outcome of the campaign might have been very different. Furthermore, they lacked effective leadership. The Pretender at last came onto the scene, but his landing at Peterhead on 22 December happened at least three months too late. After a few fruitless weeks, he accepted the inevitable, and on 4 February 1716, he left his cause, and its supporters, to their own devices and took himself off once again for France.

  The consequences of the ’15 were widely felt. Although it is often stated that punishments were not unduly severe by the standards of the times, several hundred Jacobites were transported, twenty-six were hanged and nineteen Scottish peerages were forfeited. Of even more significance were the effects on the political balance of power. The ’15 confirmed the political supremacy of the Whigs, condemned the Tories to the fringes of politics and established a new one-party ascendancy. Many of the remaining Tory JPs were deprived of their offices – sixty-eight in Middlesex, for example. Of even more far-reaching significance was the passage in May 1716 of the Septennial Act. The act extended the life of an elected parliament from three to seven years, and in so doing, extended the political supremacy of the Whigs into the next decade. Whether the peace and security of the kingdom would have been seriously endangered had the election that was due to be held in 1718 taken place is difficult to determine. Tory protests that the measure was unconstitutional were brushed aside. However, Stanhope rewarded Protestant Dissenters for their support both of the Whig Party and of the new dynasty by repealing the Occasional Conformity and Schism acts (December 1718). However, the ministry’s attempts to entrench its supremacy in the House of Lords by passing a Peerage Bill aroused so much opposition in the Commons and in the country that it was abandoned in February 1719. The bill would have restricted the ability of the crown to create peers and thus have guaranteed the Whigs a permanent majority in the House of Lords. A second attempt to pass the bill was frustrated in December 1719.

  The defeat of the Peerage Bill was the culmination of growing disunity within the ranks of the newly victorious Whig Party. Since the Hanoverian Succession, the Whig leaders, Sunderland7 and Stanhope, had struggled to maintain the cohesion and unity of their party. Almost from the beginning of the reign, the dominance of Stanhope and Sunderland was resented by Townshend and the rapidly rising Sir Robert Walpole.8 These political resentments were deepened by divisions within the royal family. They began to come to a head when the Prince of Wales acted as Regent while Stanhope accompanied the king on a visit to Hanover in the summer of 1716. During the king’s absence, the prince flaunted his position and, encouraged by Walpole and Townshend, appealed to the public. Differences over foreign policy, especially the prominence accorded to Hanover by Stanhope, sharpened these personal enmities. As a result, Townshend was demoted from his secretaryship and sent to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in December 1716. In the following April, he was dismissed from the government altogether. At this, Walpole and a number of followers resigned their own offices. Stanhope was now raised to the peerage and became First Lord of the Treasury, while Sunderland became the principal Secretary of State. The first of the Whig schisms of the Hanoverian period had begun.

  The ruthlessness which underlay these factional differences should not be under­estimated. Walpole and Townshend rejoiced in the complete rupture of the relationship between George I and his heir. When the prince established his reversionary court in December 1717 at Leicester House, they used it as a rallying point for the opposition, a tactic that was to be used by oppositions throughout the long eighteenth century. Moreover, the new leaders of the Whig opposition shamelessly appealed to the Tories by opposing Stanhope’s repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism acts (1718), legislation which Walpole had enthusiastically opposed in Anne’s reign. They proceeded, even more shamelessly, to launch parliamentary assaults on placemen and pensioners and then went on to oppose the Peerage Bill of 1719. Their jingoistic attacks on Stanhope’s foreign policy for its excessive concern for the interests of the electorate of Hanover were equally designed to capture public support. Their purpose, of course, was to weaken the ministry and to force the leaders of the Whig opposition back into power. The positions of Stanhope and Sunderland steadily weakened. They faced the prospect of continuing parliamentary difficulties after the defeat of the Peerage Bill and they had to manage the serious divisions within the Hanoverian royal family. More urgently, they felt the need to break the power of the cabal of Hanoverian ministers who since the beginning of the reign had surrounded the king, threatening to undermine the position of his ministers. Desperate for security, they opened negotiations with the Tories, but these came to nothing. Meanwhile, Townshend and Walpole helped to effect a reconciliation between the Prince of Wales and the king in April 1720. Nothing now stood in the way of a political settlement. Within two months the leaders of the Whig opposition were back in office. Townshend became Lord President of the Council, but Walpole only received the post of Paymaster General.

  Whatever its divisions, the Whig Party had by 1720 already done much to establish the new dynasty. This could not have been achieved without the far-sighted foreign policy pursued during these years by Stanhope, which preserved peace and national security and thus contributed hugely to settling the new and in many ways unappealing dynasty. Both Britain and France had been exhausted by decades of war, and they negotiated a Dual Alliance in November 1716. This became the Triple Alliance with the adhesion of the Dutch in January 1717. The alliance committed all three countries to uphold the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, to protect the Hanoverian Succession and to expel the Jacobite Pretender from French soil. With the adhesion of Charles VI of Austria in August 1718, the Triple Alliance became a Quadruple Alliance. Stanhope, however, could not persuade the Spanish to adhere to it. The Spanish court had not been signatories to the Treaty of Utrecht and had ambitions to regain Naples, Sardinia and Sicily. In the summer of 1717, Spanish troops invaded Sardinia, which in 1713 had been handed to Austria. In accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, Britain came to Austria’s aid. Together with France, British troops engaged the Spanish army in the Iberian Peninsula and destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean. Early in 1719 two Spanish expeditions were despatched to Scotland in support of the Pretender. The first was dispersed in atrocious weather off Cape Finisterre. The other reached the Isle of Lewis before its military force, supported by a small band of Scottish Jacobites, was defeated. There would be no further attempted invasion of Britain for many years.
The success of Stanhope’s policy of peace, through alliances in Europe, did much to create the conditions in which the Hanoverian Succession could continue to establish itself.

  Walpole and Townshend found themselves back in office just in time to confront the crisis over the shares of the South Sea Company and the famous episode of the ‘South Sea Bubble’. The company had been founded by Harley in 1711 to counterbalance the influence both of the Whig Bank of England and of the East India Company. His original intention had been to use anticipated commercial revenues, generated largely from South America to liquidate £9 million of the national debt (which then stood at £50 million). The favourable terms of the Treaty of Utrecht enabled the company to prosper, and between 1717 and 1720, it successfully negotiated with the Stanhope-Sunderland ministry to assume no less than £31 million of the national debt which was in the hands of private investors. In Harley’s scheme, these investors would receive 5 per cent per annum until 1727 and 4 per cent thereafter if they transferred their annuities into South Sea stock. The enthusiasm with which the company tried to persuade investors to convert their holdings created a financial crisis of the first order. The South Sea directors themselves helped to bid up the stock value, generating fictitious stock. They lent over £10 million on the security of their own stock and then issued new stock with little or no security. Individuals in the court, including the king, members of the cabinet and possibly even some of the king’s Hanoverian ministers joined in the frenzy, often at personally privileged and preferential terms. The market for South Sea stock soared from 100 at the start of 1720 to 300 by early April, then to over 700 by the beginning of June. By the end of the month, it stood at over 1,000. At this point some of the larger investors began to take their profits. By the middle of September, the stock had crashed to 400. By the end of the month, payments were suspended and the stock stood at 190.

  It was Walpole’s calm and masterly handling of the crisis which ensured his future political prominence. Although holding only the office of Paymaster General, he showed himself both capable of rising above immediate issues and enmities and willing to take a longer view of events. The first requirement was to quell the financial panic and to restore public confidence. This he did by persuading both the Bank of England and the East India Company to take over £9 million each of South Sea stock, thus ending the free fall in its value. By the end of the year, it was up to 200, a sure sign of returning confidence. By August 1721 it had risen to 400. It remained to clear up the confusion by recompensing those national debt holders who had mistakenly agreed to convert to South Sea stock. They received between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of the original sums. Many were inclined to grumble but part, at least, of their investments had been recovered. The economy was basically sound, and once the stock-jobbing mania had exhausted itself, the affairs of the nation returned to normal. Walpole, moreover, behaved with considerable constraint. To have lambasted the Stanhope–Sunderland ministry for its financial incompetence might have been good politics – it may even have caused the collapse of the government – but it would undoubtedly have alienated the king, it might even have let in the Tories and, conceivably, it might have reawakened the hopes of the Jacobites. And although Walpole earned himself considerable unpopularity by turning a deaf ear to cries for the punishment of directors, ministers and MPs, he at least kept his own hands clean during the ‘Bubble’ (although we now know that he had, in fact, invested at least £9,000 in stock).

  All of this, however, may not have been enough to ensure Walpole’s ultimate political supremacy had fortune not been on his side. Early in 1721 Stanhope died. At the same time, Sunderland, under accusation of seeking personal gain, was forced to resign from the Treasury. There could only be one successor. Walpole now commanded the political scene and he took his prize, in April 1721 becoming First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The long years of his political supremacy had begun. If there was still any question mark about it, his position was confirmed by the result of the general election of 1722. In spite of the South Sea Bubble, the Whigs increased the number of their seats from 340 to 380, whilst the Tories’ declined from around 220 to 180. Nothing could disguise the extent of Walpole’s triumph. During the middle of the South Sea crisis, many observers had been gloomily predicting a revival of the periodic instability which had so regularly plagued Britain in the previous century. Within two years these fears and doubts had been emphatically dispelled. Britain had entered the age of Walpole.

  THE WALPOLEAN REGIME, 1721–1742

  In 1721 Sir Robert Walpole was already an experienced and mature politician. He had entered Parliament in 1701 and, as one of the most ambitious and talented members of the Court wing of the Whig Party, he had consistently sought preferment and power. His experience in administration was extraordinarily wide. In 1705–8 he had served on the Council of the Lord High Admiral; in 1708–10 he had been Secretary at War; from 1710 to 1711 he had been Secretary of the Navy and from 1714 to 1715 he had been Paymaster of the Forces. Most important of all, he had been First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1715 to 1717. In all of these positions, especially the last, he had been resoundingly successful. His industry, his professionalism and his gift for mastering complex practical issues rendered him a formidable opponent. Indeed, his periods in opposition, especially between 1711 and 1714 and from 1717 to 1720, added almost as much to his reputation as his periods in office. His reasonable and persuasive oratory, his ability to move both the emotions and the minds of men and, above all, his extraordinary self-confidence marked him out as a future leader.

  Sir Robert possessed the personal qualities essential to political success in any age, but he possessed in particular those qualities that most closely met the needs of the 1720s. A country squire from Norfolk, Walpole was a man of his class, revelling in its pursuits and ostentatiously wallowing in its fashions. He was more concerned with the pleasure and pursuits of the countryside than with those of the capital. It was typical of Walpole that he almost always seemed able to sense the prejudices and sentiments of the Country gentlemen in the House of Commons upon whom he relied, in the last analysis, for his majorities. Yet, Walpole was much more than a rural squire. Partly through his marriage to the daughter of a merchant, he was familiar with the London mercantile classes. Such connections were indispensable in the age of the Financial Revolution. Never an idealist, he was an exponent of pragmatism, of caution and of common sense. He was practical, unsentimental and, when it mattered, ruthless. This is not to claim that Walpole governed wilfully, neither in his own personal interest nor in a narrow and partisan manner. He had a coherent and consistent perception that the national interest demanded international peace, domestic unity, economic prosperity and commercial expansion. These objectives he pursued consistently throughout his long administration. Although he was a practical politician rather than an intellectual in politics, it would be an injustice to accuse him of lacking principle. From his earliest days in politics, he had identified himself with the Court wing of the Whig Party. He unwaveringly championed the Glorious Revolution, the Revolution Settlement and the Hanoverian Succession. He condemned the Tory peace of Utrecht. He opposed the Tory ideology of passive obedience with assertions of the Whig principles of rights of resistance and religious toleration. Significantly, Walpole was to be a champion of the rights of the Protestant Dissenters throughout his career. On occasion, he could be stubbornly consistent and loyal to his party and to his family. In 1710, for example, he refused Harley’s invitation to join his Tory administration. Further, in 1717 he defied George I’s summons to him to remain in the ministry and thus to abandon his brother-in-law, Townshend.

  In the spring of 1721, Walpole commanded his party, occupied the Treasury, which commanded the bulk of patronage, and enjoyed the respect of a grateful public after the South Sea Bubble. In late 1722, he was fortunate that the revelation of a harebrained Jacobite plot in which Francis Atterbury, the Bishop o
f Rochester, was closely implicated enabled him to consolidate his power more firmly than anyone would have thought possible. Walpole struck hard. Atterbury was banished, habeas corpus was suspended for a year and Catholics and non-jurors suffered the humiliation of a special tax of 5s. in the pound. Walpole had given a taste of what his opponents might expect and an indication of the firmness with which he intended to govern the country.

  Walpole’s supremacy – the longest in British political history – was built upon a number of sound and solid foundations – political, religious, economic and diplomatic. There has never been much disagreement about his abilities, his strength of character and his keen tactical sense. It is by now a platitude to observe that Walpole, like all eighteenth-century first ministers, owed his long tenure of power both to the confidence of successive monarchs and to the support of Parliament. Walpole was always aware of his dependence upon the monarch who had appointed and who could dismiss him. Fortunately for Walpole, the power of George I’s Hanoverian advisers had already lapsed. The king had no great love for Walpole, but he respected his abilities and honoured Walpole with his confidence. George I probably envisaged the inclusion of the Tories in his governments, but their responsibility for the Treaty of Utrecht, which he believed had sacrificed the interests of the House of Hanover to the popularity of their party, persuaded him to acquiesce in the single-party rule of the Whigs to an extent that William III and Anne would never have done. Yet although deficient in his mastery of English, the king never entirely surrendered his ultimate independence in politics, especially over questions of foreign policy and military affairs – not least between 1717 and 1720 – and his agreement on these matters could never be taken for granted. Nevertheless, continuing concerns for Hanover – he visited the electorate in 1716, 1719, 1720, 1723 and 1725 – together with his personal limitations disabled him from either exploiting or extending the powers of the crown.