The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  When the King died in 1727, Walpole’s dependence on the monarch was demonstrated by George II’s preference for Sir Spencer Compton, an amiable courtier. Walpole had deserted the then Prince of Wales in 1720 and George II was anxious both to punish and to replace him. Walpole could only survive by demonstrating his indispensability to the new king. This he did by obtaining for him the largest Civil List which Parliament had ever voted. Furthermore, Compton’s legendary inability to compose the king’s speech from the throne, together with the influence of Queen Caroline (whom Walpole had been cultivating for some years) over her husband, combined to persuade the king to retain Walpole in office. The incident has always been taken to illustrate Walpole’s dependence on the monarch, but it equally illustrates the monarch’s dependence on the minister. (The smoothness of the succession in 1727, incidentally, also illustrates how firmly the Hanoverian dynasty had established itself in just thirteen years.) Even after the death of Queen Caroline in 1737, George II continued to be a loyal supporter of the minister, recognizing his talents and his service to the House of Hanover and, not least, his ability to carry government business smoothly through Parliament. Yet, the second Hanoverian king was considerably more assiduous than his predecessor and evidently keen to maintain royal influence over policy. In matters of foreign policy, the king usually got his way and, like his father, jealously guarded military patronage.

  Walpole’s supremacy was no less dependent upon his ability to persuade Parliament to agree to his measures. In the House of Lords, he maintained majorities for the government by adopting a number of tactics. During the period 1689 to 1714, the Whig and Tory parties had enjoyed something of a rough equality. Within a few years of his accession to power, Walpole had broken the strength of the Tories in the upper house. By the mid-1720s they found it difficult to assemble over 40 peers in a House of just under 200. By then, in comparison, the number of placemen in the Lords had risen to over eighty. From the beginning, Walpole was careful only to advance and to promote new peers who were likely to be friendly to his ministry. To this end, he revived the Order of the Bath. Furthermore, the sixteen Scottish peers were well disposed towards the dynasty. In addition, many of the bishops were reliable Whigs. In 1723 no fewer than six sees became vacant and Walpole was careful to ensure that only Whigs were appointed. Indeed, in association with Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, Walpole worked tirelessly to ensure the loyalty of the Church of England through careful and meticulous examination of new appointments. Such political spadework should be noted, but its importance should not be exaggerated. It is too easy to attribute Walpole’s achievement in the upper house to the exclusive use of patronage. Patronage played a powerful role, but it merely provided the materials from which a Lords majority might subsequently be fashioned. Adherents needed to be carefully managed, and in managing them, the Walpole ministry was characteristically thorough.

  Within a few years, Walpole had succeeded in taming the House of Lords. Although the institutional decline of the upper house was to be a slow and gradual affair, there can be no doubt that such a decline set in during Walpole’s tenure of office. As early as 1723, Lord Orrery complained, ‘The House of Lords are treated pretty much as an useless body and they seem to acquiesce under that threat for they neither are nor desire to be ... troubled with publick affairs.’ It is true that on occasions – a very few occasions – it could still assert itself, as it did during the Excise Crisis and over the Quaker Relief Bill in 1736. Furthermore, defective bills could be remedied and troublesome bills allowed quietly to expire there. Occasionally, the Tory opposition might launch a set piece debate in the Lords, but insofar as political fortunes were decided in the parliamentary arena, they were in the future not to be determined in the upper but in the lower house.

  It was even more vital, then, that Walpole should establish political mastery over the House of Commons. As in the Lords, the sensible use of patronage was vital. At a time when the state bureaucracy was increasing in size and when the principle of appointment to office on merit had not yet been established, this was absolutely inevitable. Indeed, the number of placemen in the House had been rising from about 120 in Queen Anne’s reign to around 180 in that of George II, an increase from less than one-quarter to around one-third of the House. It is utterly characteristic of the man and his methods that under Walpole their reliability signally improved. ‘Walpole thus had at his disposal a more solid and reliable phalanx of Court supporters in the Commons than any of his immediate predecessors.’9 In view of the weakening of party ties in this period, such a body of support was of the first importance to the minister. Some contemporaries, and some writers, may regard this as ‘corruption’. Others might interpret it as sensible allocation of political offices, in a body politic not yet committed to a meritocracy of talent.

  Indeed, patronage alone would not have been enough to sustain the Walpole ministry for over twenty years. Three additional political ingredients were needed to establish ministerial control of the House of Commons. First, Walpole needed to identify himself with the Commons chamber. He attended the House assiduously, intervened in debate constantly and patiently, and in simple language, explained ministerial policy, and, of course, the dire alternatives, to the Country gentlemen who dominated it. Second, Walpole had to try to conciliate opponents within his own party. The Tories were a lost cause, but Whig opponents could be cajoled, convinced and persuaded to support the government. Walpole invested an enormous amount of time and effort in these personal appeals, often to very good effect. Third, the large body of Country gentlemen in Parliament had to be wooed and won. Their support could never be taken for granted. Walpole devoted himself to this objective by playing the country squire, by outrageously indulging in farmyard metaphors with an enhanced Norfolk accent, by keeping the Land Tax low and by a pacific foreign policy. By indulging in such political arts with patience and care, Walpole retained a personal respect in the Commons that was one of his greatest political assets.

  Above all, it is important to recognize that Sir Robert chose to retain his seat in the Commons. It is possible that he perceived that it was by now advisable for the head of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer to sit in the lower house in view of its influence over financial matters. Alternatively, he may have wished to avoid the upper house where two of his greatest rivals, Carteret and Townshend, might have outshone him in debate. Whatever his motives, it is clear that in uniting the Treasury with the political leadership of the House of Commons, he was establishing himself as a prime or first minister in an unprecedented manner. Those of his predecessors, such as Oxford, who had united control of the Treasury with leadership of an administration had usually sat in the House of Lords. Walpole’s presence in the Commons, together with the sheer length of his tenure of office, established a different set of precedents for future political leaders. Most of the long administrations of the eighteenth century, those of Henry Pelham, Lord North and the Younger Pitt, were led from the House of Commons.

  The Walpolean years were not only marked by the government’s ability to maintain itself in Parliament. They were also years of greater religious tranquillity than had been enjoyed for half a century. In view of the explosive potential of religious issues, indeed, this circumstance may be regarded as one of the keys to Walpole’s enduring political success. The first requirement was to confirm and defend the supremacy of the Anglican church. The natural champions of the church, the Tories, were tarred with the brush of Jacobitism and divided by the schism of the non-jurors. In view of the almost complete lack of interest of the first two Hanoverian monarchs in its organization and traditions, it was left to Walpole and the bench of Whig bishops to uphold the established church and, in upholding it, to subject it to the disciplines of partiality and patronage that accompanied many areas of life under the Whig oligarchy. The Anglican church proved to be one of the most loyal sponsors and supports of the Walpolean regime.

  As for the Dissenters, Walpole was anxi
ous to reward them for their fidelity to the throne and to the Whig Party. Consequently, his annual Indemnity acts cushioned them from the force of the Test and Corporation Acts. In addition, after 1723 he quietly set aside a small sum for the relief of widows of Dissenting ministers. This was not enough for some vociferous elements within Dissent. The Committee of Dissenting Deputies (a union of Baptists, Independents and Presbyterians) petitioned Parliament for the outright repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1736 and 1739. On both occasions they were defeated heavily in the House of Commons. It says something for Walpole’s political skills that he was able to extricate himself from such an embarrassing position with little or no loss of political face. But on the Quaker Tithes bill he was not so sure-footed. In 1736, after six years of evasion, Walpole agreed to support the Quaker Tithes bill, which would have softened the effects of prosecutions against the Quakers for their non-payment of tithe. The measure slipped easily through the Commons, but in the Lords, the bishops revolted against Walpole’s support of the measure and threw it out. Subsequently, Walpole did not press the matter. However, the episode ended his friendship with Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. The latter’s influence over ecclesiastical patronage was subsequently lodged with the Duke of Newcastle.10 The incident is revealing as one of the few occasions when Walpole managed to alienate one of his natural constituencies of support. In the same session some opposition Whigs made a bid to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. Although they failed by 251 votes to 123 in the Commons, the issue raised the political temperature. The session of 1736 is interesting because it reminds us that religious sentiments were still potent. Unless they were kept in check, they might easily revive to upset the political cohesion so painstakingly fashioned by the minister. Yet, the Dissenting challenge to the position of the Church of England had been resisted, and with some ease. Symbolically, the same year saw the publication of William Warburton’s Alliance between Church and State, the classic justification of the established church and of its close relationship with the state.11

  Walpole’s long ministry rested, then, on structures of support in politics and in religion, but these could neither have been devised nor conserved without the economic stability which was one of his greatest achievements. Britain needed peace and prosperity after the clamour of the South Sea Bubble. Peace would help to nullify the Jacobite threat and to rally the nation behind the dynasty. Walpole stated his economic objectives in October 1721:

  To make the exportation of our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in manufacturing them, as practicable and as easy as possible; by this means the balance of trade may be preserved in our favour, our navigation increased, and the greater numbers of our poor employed.

  Like his contemporaries he had a (somewhat exaggerated) belief in the importance of exporting manufactured goods in promoting economic growth, the prosperity of the nation and the employment of its people. Walpole was fortunate that his years of power coincided with a fairly strong recovery in trade following the War of the Spanish Succession and with the low price of grain following the good harvests of the period. In the 1720s, moreover, Walpole launched a series of attempts to encourage trade and enhance revenue from customs duties. He stimulated manufacturing industry by removing export duties from over one hundred articles; he issued bounties to encourage the export of selected commodities, including silk, sugar and spirits, and he protected certain domestic industries, including linen, paper and silk, from foreign competition. Furthermore, he abolished duties on agricultural exports, including grain. In a much-needed attempt to reform the outdated and confusing customs system, and to reduce smuggling, he issued a simplified system of import duties, summarized in a revised Book of Rates. Finally, he established a bonded warehouse system for taxing key imported commodities like tea, chocolate, coffee and cocoa.

  Care needs to be taken in evaluating Walpole’s commercial policies. For one thing, it is not realistic to regard him as an early free-trader, a pioneer looking ahead to the achievements of the Younger Pitt, Peel and Gladstone. It is true that he encouraged trade but, by the same token, he was capable not only of protecting domestic industries, as we have seen, but also of regulating them by, for example, issuing minimum standards of quality for cloths, linen and serges. If this were not protectionism enough, he pushed through Parliament in 1721 and 1726 acts to provide for the regulation of wages by JPs and for the prohibition of combinations of workmen.

  How effective were Walpole’s thoroughgoing attempts to engineer economic recovery and to increase the volume of trade? Perhaps the extent of his achievement should not be exaggerated. Certainly, the volume of Britain’s trade expanded in the Walpole years, exports from £7 million to £10 million a year between 1721 and 1738, the last year of peace, imports from £6 million to £7.5 million, yielding a significant improvement in the balance of trade from about £1 million to £2.5 million. This was a useful, but hardly astounding, increase. Indeed, exports were to rise even more steeply in the twenty years following the fall of Walpole. Many of his attempts to boost individual industries, particularly silk, were unsuccessful. In the absence of reliable statistics, it is difficult to be precise, but it may be that the natural operation of an economy during a period of both national and international peace was just as productive of growth as any amount of political intervention.

  A peacetime Britain, moreover, could afford to reduce government expenditure and thus cut taxes. Walpole lowered the Land Tax to 2s. in the pound between 1722 and 1726, in 1730 and between 1734 and 1739. In 1731 and 1732, indeed, it stood at only 1s. in the pound. To pay for these reductions in the tax bills of the landed classes, he increased the revenue from indirect taxes, which fell disproportionately upon the poor, such as those on malt, salt, soap, sugar, leather and candles. Indeed, the yield from these excise duties increased from just over £8 million per annum in the period 1706 to 1710 to just over £14 million between 1731 and 1735. By then, excise duties amounted to around one-half of total government revenue (the Land Tax, by comparison yielded less than one-fifth between 1731 and 1740). The efficiency with which these excise duties were levied by inquisitorial visits from excise officials was the source of much popular resentment. The phenomenon of a minister popular with the landed classes, while unpopular with the masses, may to some extent be explained by these patterns of taxation.

  Furthermore, like most members of the upper and middling orders, Sir Robert Walpole lamented the extent of government indebtedness and abhorred the size of the national debt. Popularly regarded as a measure of the health of the economy, it had reached the alarming figure of £54 million by 1721 and required £3 million in interest payments each year. Walpole devoted himself to its reduction by the use of a sinking fund. Although he had initially launched the idea, the fund had been established in 1717 by Stanhope and Sir Robert took over the existing fund. By the end of his ministry, the national debt stood at £46 million and the annual interest charge at £2 million. Moreover, he managed to reduce the interest rate from 6 per cent in 1721 to 4 per cent in 1727, which went some way to reducing the financial drain of the debt on the Exchequer. In 1727, indeed, he succeeded in raising a loan of £1 million from the city at only 3 per cent. This contributed to economic success, indeed, even if the investing classes may have regretted the falling rates of return on their loans. To what extent it was necessary for political success to rest upon the effective manipulation of capitalist practices and institutions cannot be determined here. What may be suggested is that Walpole was more of an economic manager than an economic reformer. The improvement of the economic condition of the masses was not considered by him, or by most members of the ruling elite, to be a government responsibility. It was that of local government, private agencies and the churches. This was territory where Walpole refused to tread.

  The Walpolean period saw continuing English domination of Ireland and Scotland. The general election of 1715 had returned a safe Whig majority to the Dublin Parliament,
and because neither the Triennial Act nor the Septennial Act applied to Ireland, there was no need to hold another general election during the rest of the reign of George I. The Tories were consigned to a hopeless future in opposition and shortly began to lose their cohesion. Consequently, there seemed no possible political threat to the Whig supremacy in Ireland.

  The only significant opposition to that supremacy came not from the Tories, and not from the Catholics but from the Protestants. They had shown signs of dissatisfaction with their political subservience to London even before the Hanoverian Succession. In 1698, indeed, a new strain of Irish Protestant patriotism was announced with the publication of William Molyneaux’s The Case of Ireland Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, in which the author, an Irish MP, argued for the independence of the Irish Parliament. Such sentiments were aroused once again by the Declaratory Act of 1720. To Protestants, this final symbol of English dominion over Ireland was humiliating. In 1722 they began to act the part of patriotic Irishmen, defending the rights of their country. The issue on which this unlikely situation arose was trivial enough. The English Treasury had sold the right to issue a new copper coinage for Ireland to the Duchess of Kendal, who in turn had sold the right to an Englishman, William Wood, for £10,000 in 1722. The fact that an Englishman could make a healthy profit out of the Irish coinage, a coinage that, incidentally, turned out to be of mediocre standard, without the slightest consultation either with the Irish government or with the Irish Parliament, provoked a storm of protest. The publication of Dean Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters aroused Anglicans, Presbyterians and Catholics with its clarion call, ‘you are and ought to be as free a people as your Bretheren in England’. Such patriotic language transformed the shoddy dispute into a full-blown discussion of Anglo-Irish relations and the much-resented maltreatment of the subject country.