The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Assumptions of British superiority over her neighbours, however, were still at an early stage of development. British art was still regarded as inferior to that of the continent, and many of the designers, artists, decorators and, especially, sculptors employed in country houses flocked in from Europe. The British elite was not yet culturally Britannicized. Its members revelled in Italian opera, imitated continental (especially French) manners and exhibited themselves in dress and hair styles which owed more to Paris than they did to London. The Hanoverian court acted as a conduit for foreign taste and influence. George I, for example, prided himself upon his patronage of Handel. Indeed, the cosmopolitanism of the court and of aristocratic lifestyles in the first half of the eighteenth century provoked satire, ridicule, and considerable amusement among the masses. The popular self-image which Britons liked to play up to when they prided themselves on being British was of a tough, even a warlike, people, proud and heroic, yet, at the same time, loving freedom and liberty, living life under the law and with everyone equal before the law. Above all, Britain was a land of religious freedom where different religious denominations lived in peace. There does seem to have been enough in the common experiences of being British in war, politics, religion and, less dramatically, in the social round of festive and celebratory rituals across the four nations to deliver a tolerably common experience of Britishness.

  Yet, it is undeniable that it is sometimes difficult to detect the differences between Britishness and Englishness and on occasion, what may be seen as Britishness was little more than a sense of Englishness.4 Hogarth and Fielding, for example, were fiercely nationalistic, but theirs was an assertion of a sharp English, as opposed to a British, identity. Against Professor Colley’s version of a growing sense of British identity, as something distinct from a growing sense of English identity, it is salutary to underline the role of aggressive English nationalism in the creation of a greater British synthesis, as some writers have been at pains to argue. There is considerable dispute about this. Gerald Newman had strongly reasserted the significance of the assertion of a vibrant English national feeling, but this has been viewed by others within the context of an emerging sense of British civilization.5 Contemporaries were conscious of some of these confusions. Some English people resented the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ replacing ‘England’ and ‘English’, and begrudged closer relationships with the much-disliked Scots and their associations with Jacobitism. They were, too, contemptuous of the Irish, a people whom they thought to be little better than barbarians. We should not, therefore, simplify a complex process by arguing that a sense of Britishness was superimposed on English, Scottish and Irish identities in the eighteenth century. Nor was Britishness a straightforward blending or merging of these separate identities. A range of Britishness was forged by an assertive English imperialism, political, economic and social, but which yet made space for a continuing assertion of Scottish and Irish national feelings. In my view, Professor Colley gives too little attention to English versions of national identity.

  In any case, it is dangerous to generalize about a single ‘national’ opinion, in view of powerful local diversity. For example, gust of sentiment that did so much to sweep Walpole from power was not uniform. Nor should it be misinterpreted as an early expression of British imperial attitudes.6 More likely, although such sentiments were sincerely held in some mercantile circles, at the popular level, they probably represented a much more traditional expression of anti-Catholic aggression. Popular British imperialism was not to be seen for another generation.

  Scotland after the Union maintained her own sense of national identity but within a British framework. The post-Union state included a number of features which safeguarded Scottish uniqueness, the legal and educational systems and, most of all, the Kirk, whose abiding influence among the politically mobilized laity and in popular language and culture more generally should not be underestimated. Yet, although the political incorporation of Scotland worked reasonably well in institutional terms, it failed to safeguard the British state from the ultimate reality of rebellion. The shock of the ‘15 underlined the dangers of Scottish separatism. After its suppression, Scotland could be persuaded to accept the Hanoverian Succession only through close and judicious management from London together with a careful distribution of offices. The poverty of the Scottish aristocracy enabled England to draw them into its orbit of patronage and influence. By the 1720s many members of the Scottish nobility were physically abandoning their country as they sought residence as well as education, culture and marriage south of the border. At the same time, the Lowlands were being drawn into the economic system of England by the dramatic commercial expansion of the first half of the century which benefited the merchants and gentry. After 1707, Scottish trade was drawn towards England rather than Europe, stimulating the production of cattle for food at first in the border counties and then more widely throughout England. Although the attention of historians has inevitably been drawn towards the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, it should not be forgotten that by the later 1730s there was already a more positive attitude towards Union. In the early years after 1707, Scottish lowlanders blamed the Union for their economic ills. Within two decades a remarkable degree of loyalty towards the Hanoverian royal house was evident, a solid, potential platform for the expression of Scottish patriotism within a British framework. This was founded in great part upon economic developments. Furthermore, Scots were able to take advantage of opportunities within the British Empire to seek office, earn profits and gain esteem.

  More importantly for the future of Britain, the English reaction to the ‘45 led to the restructuring of Anglo-Scottish relations and, indeed, to the restructuring of Highland society. This reaction has often been depicted in harsh terms, and has been severely criticized by many Scottish writers.7 Coming in the wake of a rebellion, however, the terms are at least understandable. Thus, it was inevitable that the estates of the leaders of the rebellion would be seized (they were restored to their original owners in 1784). It was natural that the Scottish Episcopalian clergy – many of them Jacobite – should be required to take an oath of allegiance to the crown. What is less easy to understand is the attack on the Scottish way of life, by undermining the power of the clans and their culture, not least by the suppression of Highland dress. This, perhaps, can best be explained by the desire of the English to render another Jacobite rising impossible. Consequently, two acts were passed in May and June 1747 abolishing the hereditable jurisdictions of the Highland chiefs and their right of claiming military service from their tacksmen, or junior officers. But the safeguarding of Scotland was not simply a military question. It involved issues of Scottish national loyalty, and thus of national identity. The ‘45 had shown that Jacobitism was not sufficiently strong to form the basis of a permanent and viable sense of Scottish nationality. The only available alternative version was that of maintaining Scottish national identity within a British framework. The Duke of Argyll, the effective Scottish viceroy from 1746 until his death in 1761, ably assisted by Lord Milton, planned to build a peaceful, prosperous Scotland which would be loyal to the British crown of her own free will. The money from the forfeited estates was to be used to stimulate agriculture, commerce and industry. All of this took time and the effects were not seen overnight. By the 1760s, however, the economy of the Highlands was responding to encouragement and competition. This process was greatly assisted by the Turnpike Act of 1751, following which the construction of over 800 miles of road and 1,000 bridges did much to break down the isolation of the Highlands.

  If in Scotland the clan system enabled Jacobitism to survive long into the eighteenth century, in Ireland such structures of resistance were not available. In Ireland the mass of the peasantry remained sullen and disaffected, but they did not rise in 1745. The requirements for revolt did not exist in early Hanoverian Ireland. Poverty and inertia were not enough. The existence of an Irish Parliament at least permitted the expression of prote
st and grievance. The penal laws were enforced patchily and tended not to disturb the faith of the majority. The Irish Protestant authorities did not get very far in their attempts to convert the Catholic masses. The initial, if irregular, enforcement of the Penal Laws eased somewhat as the decades passed. It was not so much the peasant masses that the Anglo-Irish minority feared but the rapidly expanding Catholic middle class and the Presbyterian Scots, who had settled in Ulster in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Irish Catholic landowning class had been reduced to insignificance by the seizure of its land and by penal restrictions placed on them in 1704. Unlike some members of its Scottish counterparts, it had no stomach for rebellion. Before the 1790s, moreover, a Catholic nationalist movement did not exist.8 Indeed, the modern conception of a Gaelic, Catholic nation is a product of the late eighteenth century. The agencies of nationalism were feeble in the mid-eighteenth century. The Catholic hierarchy was weak and dispersed; furthermore, the Gaelic language was in steep decline. Little more than one-half of the population spoke it in the later eighteenth century. Even the Catholic church abandoned it. English was taught in the schools and English was normally the language of commerce. Traditional Irish culture was only safeguarded by a particularly elitist group of bards and poets, very little of which was available to the masses. It was no accident that the real threat to the peace and stability of Hanoverian Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century came from Scotland, not Ireland.

  Moreover, there is some evidence of an emerging British identity in Ireland. There is continuing evidence both that Ireland was benefiting modestly from her participation in British imperial commerce and that she was by contemporary standards a relatively settled and ordered, if junior, partner within a broader British jurisdiction, even if that fragile prosperity remained dependent upon Britain and British trade. At the cultural level, Ireland shared in the festive calendar of royal birthdays and was more than ready to participate in celebrations of British military and naval victories. Eighteenth-century Dublin was a prosperous British as well as Irish city, many of its buildings and statues testaments to an emerging imperial identity. Nevertheless, this theme should not be pressed too far in regard to the first half of the eighteenth century. For example, the term ‘British’ was rarely used in Ireland; other terms, such as ‘Protestant Irish’ or ‘Ulster Scot’, were more familiar. It was the lower clergy of the Church of Ireland who regarded themselves in an imperial sense as ‘Irish Protestants’. The bishops were, and were perceived to be, Anglican, and thus English rather than British. Yet even when these reservations have been noted, it is likely that even the Irish Catholics were unable to imagine a political arrangement that did not involve the supremacy of the British crown in Ireland.

  By the middle of the century, then, a political experiment of great complexity was proceeding, and with some success. The political, and to some extent economic and social, incorporation by England of her neighbours was being accomplished, and this was accompanied by a growing sense of a collective British identity, albeit still an incomplete one. But this did not occur at the expense of sub-British identities. Indeed, it is possible that both a British sense of identity and a Scots and an Irish sense of identity were all strengthening at the same time. Indeed, it was perfectly possible to retain a sense of Irishness or Scottishness, but to do so within a consciously British context. After all, national identities are never finished or complete, to be thereafter fixed and unchanging. They are much more complex and sensitive, especially in societies with powerful local variations and, not least, persisting religious differences.

  THE RULING ORDER: OLIGARCHY AND DEFERENCE

  Like most regimes in human history, eighteenth-century Britain was an oligarchy (i.e. rule by a few) in which power and wealth were most unevenly distributed. Britain’s oligarchy was an aristocratic oligarchy and after the defeat of the Tories, increasingly a Whig, aristocratic oligarchy. In the subsequent decades, the aristocracy proceeded to confirm its wealth and its power. As in most of Europe, governments and states developed in partnership with their aristocracy. In Britain, this aristocratic order was anxious to convey the image of an elegant society whose leaders resided on magnificent country houses inside a federation of great estates which together made up around one-quarter of the cultivable area of England and Wales. On any calculation, these great estates prospered during the eighteenth century. Not many of them were broken up or sold off, even in part. In many cases, the pattern was towards consolidation, as the process of enclosure clearly demonstrates, especially in some southern, eastern and midland counties of England. Great houses became richer, finer and more opulent. Althorp, Blenheim, Bowood, Castle Howard and Petworth remain towering monuments to the health and wealth of the aristocratic estates of Hanoverian England.

  There were many reasons for this. Since about 1680 the proportion of the land held by the aristocracy had been increasing at the expense of the gentry. Indeed, the growth in the size of the great estates is one of the characteristic features of this period. According to Professor Habakkuk, the fall in agricultural prices of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the incidence of the Land Tax induced landed proprietors to farm and to administer their estates more profitably. Great estate owners were better able than their smaller neighbours to meet the challenges of falling agricultural prices and declining rent yields. Furthermore, the operation of the strict settlement (which protected the unity of an estate from the attentions of spendthrift heirs) prevented the fragmentation of the great estates. The use of mortgages to purchase further properties and the availability of cheap loans (3–5 per cent) to finance improvements worked to the same end. Moreover, while access to government office, and the profits that went with it, enabled the aristocracy to prosper, high wartime taxation (1689–1713) hit the gentry with devastating effect. Finally, the growing status of Parliament, and of the prestige of owning or representing a county seat, gave a further push towards the consolidation of holdings. Coke of Norfolk represented that county for four decades, and subordinated the administration of his estate to that end.

  Support for the ‘consolidation’ thesis is also to be found in Wales. Although aristocrats were thin on the ground in Wales, the behaviour of the greater gentry – families like the Bulkeleys of Anglesey, the Mostyns of Flint and, most of all, the Wynns of Wynnstay – conformed to the pattern identified by Habakkuk. Such families aped the English aristocracy with the restoration and the enlargement of their country houses and the landscaping of their grounds. They sought to exploit their estates and the resources that lay in them. In Wales, moreover, the smaller gentry seem to have been victims not merely of economic forces favouring consolidation but of a statistically alarming failure of direct male heirs. Estates then passed to females or to distant male heirs, many of them resident in England. The position in the Lowlands, (but not the Highlands) of Scotland also confirms the broad outlines of Habakkuk’s thesis. There, the great landowners increasingly monopolized political and economic leadership. Down to 1747, indeed, they enjoyed their own hereditable jurisdictions. In Ireland the position of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy stabilized during the first half of the eighteenth century. This was a period of prosperity in Irish agriculture, and few demands for significant change were heard. Between 1720 and 1780, rents paid to Irish landlords tripled, while those paid to absentee landlords doubled.

  There are, however, a number of important technical difficulties with the theory of the consolidation of the great estates. The strict settlement was applied to only one half of estates in England. Even where it did apply, it was not always the major factor in building up the estate. Furthermore, mortgages were an unlikely source of funding for further property purchases because the interest rate payable on the mortgage was likely to exceed the probable return on the purchased property. Furthermore, although some families did prosper from government office, the vast majority did not. After 1714, indeed, non-Whig families were excluded for political reasons from
the really profitable offices.

  Although there is much of value in the thesis of the rise of the great estates at the expense of the smaller, it is doubtful if such a general theory could apply everywhere. Where a resident aristocracy existed, there was a clear tendency for great estates to grow at the expense of smaller proprietors. This was certainly the case in the Midlands and in the Thames Valley, parts of the south-east and some parts of the north-west, but this may not always have been for the reasons advanced by Habakkuk. It may have been the capacity of larger producers to survive the low prices and overproduction of the period 1730–50. It may have been the ability of the larger proprietors to take greater, long-term advantage of the boom years of 1750 to 1780 than their smaller counterparts. Furthermore, we should not ignore the wealth that many aristocratic families derived from sources other than land. Many landlords (‘fundlords’, as William Cobbett called them) took healthy profits from their holdings in government stock, the Bank of England and the great commercial companies. Many of them profited from the urban property and estates that they owned, especially in London, but also in rising provincial centres. The Duke of Norfolk and the Wentworth-Fitzwilliam family profited on an enormous scale from their properties in Sheffield. Others profited from the industrial developments of the time. Many estates contained potentially profitable assets, mines, woodland and valuable mineral deposits, such as the coal which inspired the Duke of Bridgwater to create the Bridgwater Canal. Furthermore, many families profited from skilfully arranged marriages. A well-endowed heiress might bring with her a fortune to rival any that might be made from painfully achieved agricultural improvement. Consequently, we find a very mixed picture. The thesis of a rise of the great estates can, therefore, be applied, to particular parts of Britain but sometimes for reasons other than those advanced by Habakkuk.