NOTES
1.Nineteenth-century radical and Whig writers were particularly critical of the Whig regime, denouncing its repressive and inegalitarian features. Some recent writers have confirmed these criticisms, not least E. P. Thompson, in Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (1975) and Roy Porter, in English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982). Others, however, have been much more balanced in their judgements; see W. Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660-1815 (1998); W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–60 (1977).
2.In early 1714 Oxford attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the Pretender to renounce his Catholicism. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke launched his own separate negotiations with him. Even before the death of Anne, the Tories had become fatally divided into two factions.
3.Charles Townshend (1674–1738) was an erstwhile Tory who switched to the Whig Junto. He had been a firm supporter of Occasional Conformity and was one of the negotiators of the Act of Union in 1706–7. On the accession of George I, he became Secretary of State for the Northern Department and was closely involved in the suppression of the ’15. He refused to accompany the King to Hanover in 1716 and lost his place. He was soon restored, and by 1721 was once again Secretary of State for the Northern Department. His foreign policy in the 1720s eventually brought him into conflict with Walpole, leading to his resignation in 1730. James, 1st Earl Stanhope (1673–1721), served under Marlborough and became commander of the British forces in Spain in 1708. He was one of the managers of Sacheverell’s impeachment (1710) and became a leader of the Whig opposition in the last years of the reign of Anne. He took a leading role in the establishment of the Hanoverian Succession.
4.Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650-1730 (1998), pp. 323–34.
5.K. Wilson, (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (2004), pp. 84–91.
6.D. Szechi, 1715: the Great Jacobite Rebellion (2006), pp. 36–7. According to the terms of the Riot Act, a capital offence was committed if a crowd of more than twelve failed to disperse within one hour of a magistrate’s order.
7.Charles, 3rd Earl of Sunderland (1674–1722), one of the great architects of the Hanoverian Succession. His marriage to Anne Churchill in 1700 won him the support of the Duke of Marlborough. As Secretary of State, 1706–10, he was hated by Tories, who tried to impeach him after his fall from office. Thereafter, he became a close ally of the house of Hanover. His apparently excessive zeal consigned him to the relatively minor post of Viceroy of Ireland in 1714.
8.In 1714 Walpole (1676–1745) was only thirty-eight years of age and obtained the office of Paymaster General, a tribute to his reputation for financial skill. In the ministerial reshuffle of 1715, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.
9.See G. Holmes, Britain in the First Age of Party 1680–1750 (1987), p. 85. Speck, Stability and Strife, p. 212.
10.Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693–1768) was at first a supporter of Townshend but in 1717 went over to Sunderland. He became Secretary of State for the Southern Department in 1724. He was later to become one of the most influential and powerful Whig leaders of the century.
11.For a discussion of church–state relations, see below, pp. 6–8, 29–30.
12.D. Hayton, ‘Walpole and Ireland’, in J. Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (1984), p. 119.
13.D. Hayton, The Anglo-Irish Experience, 1680-1730: Religion, Identity and Patriotism (2012), p. 28.
14.G. Holmes and D. Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain, 1722–83 (1993), p. 216.
15.Sir William Pulteney (1684–1764), MP 1705–42, Secretary of War 1714–17, was a close ally of Walpole during the resignations of 1717 but was disappointed at not being offered a place.
16.Daniel Pulteney (?1674–1731) had become Lord of the Admiralty under Walpole in 1721 but was always a loyal supporter of Sunderland. He went into opposition with his brother and remained one of its mainstays until his death in 1731. Sir William Wyndham (1687–1740) had held high office in the Tory ministry of 1710–14 and had been arrested for complicity in the ’15. A leader of the Tory opposition to Walpole, he retained strong Jacobite sympathies.
17.Shippen (1673–1743) was the leading Tory–Jacobite in the House of Commons, sitting for various constituencies between 1707 and 1743. He was sent to the Tower in 1718 for his comments about George I, ‘a stranger to our language and constitution’. But he kept his hands clean during the Atterbury Plot. Almost singlehandedly he opposed the increased Civil List for George II in 1727. He retreated from politics in the 1730s, disliking the questionable consistency of the opposition Whigs.
18.Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) was one of the foremost wits and letter writers of his day. His stormy relationship with Walpole interrupted his diplomatic career in 1733, and he opposed the Excise Bill. Lord Cobham (1669–1749) served under Marlborough, but his opposition to the excise scheme led to his dismissal from his regiment. He joined the ‘boy Patriots’ but later allied himself with the Pelhams. His real claim to fame was the rebuilding of Stowe and his patronage of the arts. George Lyttleton (1709–73) was MP for Okehampton from 1735 to 1756 and, together with Richard Grenville (1711–79), MP for various constituencies between 1734 and 1752, and William Pitt (1708–78), MP for various constituencies from 1735 to 1766, formed the leadership of Cobham’s Cubs, an active and virulent opposition phalanx. The three of them made their maiden speeches on the same day, 22 April 1735, when they spoke in favour of a place bill.
19.Henry Pelham (1695–1754) was the brother of the Duke of Newcastle and, like him, sided with Walpole against Carteret. In the 1730s, when he was Paymaster General, he acted as Walpole’s deputy, and became regarded as the minister’s heir apparent. In 1742 he took over The Duke of Devonshire (1720–64), was one of the great aristocrats of the Whig supremacy, known as the Marquis of Hartington, until he assumed the peerage in 1751. He was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1755–6 and prime minister in 1756–7 in the Pitt-Devonshire government. Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke (1690–1764), was the legal expert of the old corps and a distinguished Solicitor General (1720), Attorney General (1724) and Lord Chancellor (1737).
20.The political doctrine of ‘Broad-bottom’ implies the formation of either a government or an opposition upon as broad and wide a basis as possible. ‘Broad-bottom’ further implies negotiation, consensus and coalition, leading to a government of national union. The purpose of ‘Broad-bottom’, at least as announced by Bolingbroke’s Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism (1736), was to establish the dynasty on as broad and solid a foundation as possible, to inaugurate the reign of virtue and to destroy corruption. The idea was further developed by Bolingbroke, in The Idea of a Patriot King in 1738, as a manifesto for Prince Frederick’s accession to the throne.
21.John, 4th Duke of Bedford (1710–71), had joined the opposition to Walpole and served in Henry Pelham’s ministry, resigning in 1751.
22.William Stanhope, 1st Earl of Harrington (1690–1756), Secretary of State 1730–41, 1744–46.
23.Henry Fox, 1st Lord Holland (1705–74), father of Charles James Fox. Fox had been an MP since 1738 and a loyal supporter of Walpole in his later years. He had been Secretary at War during Henry Pelham’s ministry and joined Newcastle’s cabinet in December 1754, becoming Secretary of State and leader of the House of Commons a few months later.
24.Henry Legge, 1st Lord Dartmouth (1706–64), an office-holder since the mid-1730s and an MP for various constituencies between 1740 and 1764. He was Treasurer of the Navy (1749–54) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (April 1754 to November 1755).
25.Many historians have repeated Horace Walpole’s memorable phrase that ‘for some weeks it rained gold boxes’, but in truth, Pitt and his friends received the freedom of only eighteen cities. See P. Langford, ‘William Pitt and Public Opinion, 1757’, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), pp. 54–80.
CHAPTER FOUR
The
Social Foundations of the Early Hanoverian Regime, 1714–1757
THE IDENTITY OF BRITAIN
Few subjects have been as popular as that of British identity during the long eighteenth century. Perhaps as a response to uncertainties about the preservation of the Union in the early decades of the twenty-first century, many historians, especially cultural historians, have devoted themselves to investigating the emergence of a ‘British’ identity, its constituent features and its extent. Cultural issues – education, language, religion, manners, residence and social ambition – are of equal, arguably of greater, importance than purely political considerations in understanding this development.
Between 1714 and 1757, the texture of the British state1 was tightening politically, socially and culturally. This was a European development, as monarchs and ministers centralized their territories and rationalized their administrations. Although British rule was steadily enforced over Scotland and Ireland, these sub-nations retained a strong sense of their own separate identities, valuing highly their own traditions, institutions and privileges. In such a composite state as Britain, sentiments of national identity were bound to be complex. It is too simplistic to think in terms of English dominion over Celtic nations. The Scots and the Welsh did not see themselves as Celtic victims of Anglo-Saxon domination. Their languages were very different indeed, while the Lowland Scots and some sections of the Welsh population were not even Celtic. There were many internal differences and massive regional and local cultural variations. For example, the Lowland Scots and the northern English shared many of the same behavioural patterns, as distinct from those of the Highland Scots. In this sense, Scotland was not one nation but two. We should also resist the temptation to assume that English dominion was constantly resented and bitterly resisted. It is surely significant that very few of the Welsh and Irish thought of Wales and Ireland existing apart from England and, to judge from the patchy support for the Jacobite cause in 1715 and 1745, not many Scots.
During these years, a sense of British identity was continuing to display itself.2 There was nothing new in this. Nevertheless, Professor Colley’s recent work has memorably charted this development after 1707. What follows is my own reconstruction of the development of a British identity in the context of recent work on political culture, albeit one that owes much to her work.3 The following account highlights four elements which, in their very different ways, contributed to the strengthening of a British national identity in this period: warfare, religion, political culture and elite unity.
First, the years of war against France between 1689 and 1713 and then again between 1740 and 1763 promoted, if intermittently, an intense and widespread British sentiment. France was the national enemy, presenting serious military and political dangers to Britain. The stakes in these wars were high: the political and military leadership of Europe, the control of trade and, ultimately, the future of empire. The collapse of Jacobitism, followed by the spectacular military successes of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), created powerful sentiments of British triumphalism and national euphoria, a heroic history shared collectively by the nations of Britain, unlike the traditional, separate histories of England, Scotland and Wales. The armed services became a melting pot for the peoples of Britain. By the middle of the century, one-quarter of the officers in the British Army were Scots. Indeed, the English were actually outnumbered in the officer corps. This rearming of the Celtic kingdoms is a development of critical importance in the history of the British state, and one that was unlikely to be reversed. In the case of Scotland, indeed, it enabled the Scots to recapture the heroism of their former martial traditions by superimposing the military valour of the past upon the present. In this sense, Britain was a site in which Scotland and, to a growing extent, Ireland, could recapture, rewrite and even reinvent their former national glories.
Second, although warfare was perhaps the most important single factor in conditioning the sense of Britishness that developed in the first half of the eighteenth century, it was given moral justification through being linked to the force of religion. Early British national sentiment was essentially Protestant. In this version of the national epic, Britain was a Protestant nation, favoured by God, a bastion of liberty in a Europe dominated by the Catholic powers of France and Spain, a nation that had pioneered unique political processes and forms, a nation blessed with prosperity and enterprise, to whom famine and dearth were unknown. The history of British Protestantism since the Reformation could be narrated as a continuing struggle against the papacy and the Bourbon powers and, most recently, against James II, Louis XIV and the Jacobites. At the popular level, hatred of Roman Catholicism, stoked continually in the press and from the pulpit and maintained by regular doses of festival and ritual, united the mass of the people. The elite classes did little to discourage it. It was not only on 5 November but also on Saints’ days and on national and local anniversaries that this version of history was endlessly recycled. Nevertheless, this argument, while justifiably noting many aspects of popular feeling, should not be pressed too far. After all, what did Protestantism mean? Protestantism was a very broad church indeed, which meant different things in different parts of Britain. In Ireland, for example, it implied the need to safeguard the fruits of the Glorious Revolution against a hostile, Catholic majority. In Scotland, on the other hand, it implied the Presbyterian ideal of rebellious nonconformity. The form that it took varied widely, both between and within the sub-nations of Britain. Furthermore, by the middle of the eighteenth century, many members of the educated elite were coming to distance themselves from distasteful displays of religious intolerance. Had not the Irish and English Jacobites proved their loyalty to the dynasty during the ‘45? Many Britons were coming to pride themselves upon their nation’s religious pluralism, its tolerance of different denominations. We now know, for example, that within the Anglican church there was considerable admiration for the French church, and even, between 1717 and 1720, a negotiation – albeit unsuccessful – for a possible union of the two churches.
This brings us to the third element in the emergence of Britishness in the eighteenth century, the political culture of the propertied, politically conscious part of the population. In the early eighteenth century, the sense of a British political identity was more than a vague cultural tradition; it had real political meaning. It related to the structure of the state and to the circumstances which in the recent past had fashioned it. Indeed, the event that established the context for the long eighteenth century, the Glorious Revolution, had been a seismic event of British proportions. But it, too, meant different things to different people. Groups appropriated one version or another of the Glorious Revolution for their own use. For Whigs throughout Britain, the Glorious Revolution had achieved constitutional monarchy and safeguarded the rights of Parliament. For Tories, the Glorious Revolution had preserved and guaranteed the Anglican establishment. For Protestant Dissenters in England, it had guaranteed their religious freedom. For Ulster Protestants, the events of the revolution, especially the Siege of Derry, had highlighted their valour and their collective identity. For radical Whigs, the revolution had represented the victory of liberty over tyranny. In the middle of the eighteenth century, then, the legacy of the Glorious Revolution might be looking a little ragged, contaminated (as many thought it had become) by corrupt politicians, but there remained a powerful consensus which reverenced the British (not the English) Constitution and worshipped at the shrine of British rights and liberties. The supremacy of the British Parliament was almost universally respected and its writ acknowledged. It acted as the focus for most forms of political action, not least political lobbying, political agitation and party activity.
At the same time, and fourth, a British elite was beginning to emerge as the landed classes from all parts of Britain and began to fuse into a self-conscious, British ruling class. A British or a Britannicized elite was emerging, increasingly uniform in its values, lifestyles, educational and marriage patt
erns and social and political ambitions. The Anglicization of the elite in Wales, Scotland and Ireland forged a vital sense of common identity. Rapid turnover in the ownership of estates created a highly mobile market in land. Given the continuing status of landownership and in view of the profits to be made from land, members of the landed classes were prepared to buy estates in any part of Britain. Moreover, as more Irish, Scottish and Welsh members of the landed classes sought and found employment in London and, later, in imperial service, they forged common social and cultural styles and indulged in intermarriage on a massive scale. By the 1770s contemporaries had begun to refer to a ‘British’ ruling class.
What did ‘Britishness’ mean? At one level, it involved an acceptance of the geographical cohesion of the political units which made up Britain and a love of their physical characteristics. These qualities were represented in the popularity of maps, atlases and the flood of tourist literature which started to appear during the first half of the eighteenth century. At another level, it meant an awareness of belonging to Britain and a pride in her cultural traditions, her poetry, literature and music, whether high- or lowbrow. At the same time, the English elites and elites elsewhere in Britain and the colonies emphasized their withdrawal from traditional patterns of life and their incorporation into some notion of ‘Britishness’, as distinct from an attachment to Scottishness, Welshness or Irishness. Some attempts were made to formulate symbols of Britishness, but these had not gone very far by 1720. The figure of John Bull had appeared in 1712 but was not yet widely known. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘God Save the King’ had not yet been composed.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 20