The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  NOTES

  1.The Act of Union of 1707 created a British state, ‘a United Kingdom by the name of Great Britain’. Strictly speaking, then, both ‘the United Kingdom’ and ‘Britain’ came into legal existence in 1707. Technically, therefore, Ireland remained outside Britain until the Act of Union of 1800.

  2.See Chapter One, pp. 13–14, for the early-eighteenth-century character of Britishness. Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1997 the number of works on British national identity has increased by an extraordinary degree, particularly so in the cases of Scotland and Ireland. Many of them will be found in the bibliography.

  3.L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992). The above account owes much but not everything to this source. My own view is that Professor Colley gives too much emphasis to Protestantism and not enough to some of the more gradual cultural and political developments, to which I would draw greater attention.

  4.In my view, Englishness arguably rested on two religious assumptions: that the English were a fiercely Protestant race and that they were God’s chosen people. It also rested on two secular assumptions: that the English were profoundly conservative, devoted to ancient ways, and that they had a genius for political moderation and freedom.

  5.See, for example, Alexander Murdoch’s strictures upon Gerald Newman’s arguments. A. Murdoch, British History 1660-1832: National Identity and Local Culture (1998), p. 95; G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (1987), pp. 52–3, 127, 134–46.

  6.See K. Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–85 (1995). Although Wilson argues that ‘even most humble citizens were drawn into the imperial effort, however distant or immediate that effort may have seemed’, much of her evidence relates to the 1750s rather than the 1730s and tends to confirm the existence of imperialist sentiments among the middling orders rather than among the mass of the people. See her ‘Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–85’, in L. Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (1994), pp. 128–64.

  7.B. Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain (1980), p. 278; A. J. Youngson, After the 45: The Economic Impact on the Scottish Highlands (1973); F. McLynn, The Jacobites (1985), pp. 126–9.

  8.M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution (1982); O. Dann and J. Dinwiddy (eds), Nationalism in Europe (1988); M. Elliott, ‘The Origins and Transformation of Early Irish Republicanism’, International Review of Social History, 23 (1978), pp. 405–28.

  9.Discussion of the Habakkuk thesis may be found in G. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power, pp. 280–5; W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife, c.8; J. Rule, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (1992), pp. 36–50.

  10.P. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (1982), pp. 158–9; A. Mclnnes, ‘The Emergence of a Leisure Town: Shrewsbury 1660–1760’, Past and Present, 120 (1988).

  11.For a more detailed discussion of legal enforcement of capital legislation, see below, pp. 288–900.

  12.The figures in the following paragraphs are derived from J. A. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth Century England (1984), esp. ch. 4.

  13.A standing order of the House of Commons in 1701 forbade the interference of the House of Lords in elections. It was more honoured in the breach than in the observance, but it was continually cited against peers out in the constituencies for over a century.

  14.See above, pp. 25–6.

  15.P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (1991), esp. ch. 4.

  16.N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (1984), p. 141.

  17.The literature on consumerism in the eighteenth century is vast. See particularly N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England (1982); L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (1988); J. Brewer and A. Bermingham, The Consumption of Culture (1985); J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (1994); B. Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: the Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (1991).

  18.‘There is a sense in which politics in this period is about the distribution and representation of this luxury, religion about the attempt to control it, public polemic about generating and regulating it, and social policy about confirming it to those who did not produce it.’ P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (1989), pp. 3–4.

  19.P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (1989).

  20.G. Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society (1982), p. 16. It should not be imagined that urbanization was free from internal tensions. For example, the professional life and culture of an ‘architect’ was quite different from that of a craftsman, who might well enjoy superior housebuilding skills.

  21.P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town (1989). The only serious conceptual fault with Professor Borsay’s masterly survey is his comparative neglect of the dark side of eighteenth-century urban life, with the consequent danger of idealizing many of its features.

  22.For the widespread, initial unpopularity of the new regime in 1714–15 see above pp. 65–71.

  23.Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 35.

  24.See R. Shoemaker, ‘The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies, 26(3) (1987), pp. 273–304, and the sources there cited.

  25.E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971).

  26.Enclosure may have delivered many economic gains to landowners and farmers, but the social cost should not be underestimated. Dr Keith Snell, for example, has assembled convincing evidence that enclosures boosted winter unemployment and squeezed women out of the rural workforce. It seems difficult to contest the statistical relationship which he has established between enclosure and poor relief. K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (1985).

  27.E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (1975).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Political Foundations of the Early Hanoverian Regime, 1714–1757

  POLITICS AND PRINT

  Historians have focused upon political events and their constitutional significance in the long eighteenth century, but they much less commonly consider the purposes of politics and the origins and processes of political action. They are, perhaps, still influenced by the works of Sir Lewis Namier, who argued that its practitioners were dominated by personal ambition, not least the pursuit of place and profit.1 In this school of writing, individuals advance their own careers and the material interests of their families; they are for the most part uninfluenced by larger principles and untouched by altruistic motives. To trade instances for or against such a view of history and of human nature is not particularly instructive. To this writer, at least, politics in the eighteenth century was always something much more than the pursuit of place and office. Legitimate ambition and, sometimes, even sheer greed were powerful driving forces, then as now, but to allow these to obscure the more enduring and indeed more human values of service, honour and integrity is to allow cynicism to distort the true motives of men. They sought power, but it is often remarkable that they sought it on particular, very specific, conditions and not for its own sake. They sought it for the opportunity it might give them to influence the nation’s affairs, to be of service or to promote a cause. The extent of petitioning for place was indeed impressive, but in a society in which power was allocated by connection rather than by merit it was absolutely unavoidable.

  Leadership of the political order inevitably issued from a tightly knit social circle dominated by the court and by the great aristocracy. The impetus to political action rarely came from the middling orders, still less from a ‘public opinion’ that was as y
et vague and immature in the early eighteenth century. Public outcries against government were even on occasion the construction of these politically conscious elites rather than the spontaneous demands of extra-parliamentary groups. Nevertheless, public opinion out of doors could make itself heard and felt, as we have seen, in traditions of crowd action and rioting even during the more stately demonstrations of patriotic celebration and collective, local loyalty. The force of popular culture, inspired by a widespread awareness of the rights of the people against those who ruled them, should not be underestimated. Protests against the Excise in 1733–4 and Jewish naturalization in 1753 were impressive in their extent and force, but they were, in the last analysis, short-term gusts of opinion. In the second half of the long eighteenth century, public opinion on particular issues came to have much more staying power.

  Historians are understandably fond of treating politics as a public process, but political action was often generated in situations which were private (dinners, hunts, visits), often formal (levees, drawing rooms) and, frequently, secret (cabinets, closets). Public performances (in Parliament, in corporations and at elections) were frequently artificial and ceremonial events. In the narratives of historians, events sometimes acquire a logic and a pattern that was not perceived by the actors themselves, who were often ignorant of much that was going on around them and whose actions were consequently motivated by guesswork and subject to rumour and exaggeration.

  England did not, of course, have a written constitution. What passed for constitutional theory were disputed renderings of great events (the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian Succession, for example), particular legislative acts (such as the Act of Succession or the Septennial Act) and rival traditions of political action (Whig, Tory, Jacobite). On the whole, and in the absence of textbooks of constitutional theory which might have guided action, politics was tentative and experimental. At times – during the ministry of Walpole, for example – the political conflict was clear cut. At other times, however – during the period 1742 to 1746, for example, and then again during 1754 and 1757 – the problem of forming and sustaining both ministries and oppositions taxed contemporaries with difficult and often unprecedented problems which could not be resolved by reference to rival political theories or to repositories of past practice.

  Yet, political action was vindicated by reference to an agreed set of criteria. The starting point was the universal reverence for the constitution. Most Englishmen anticipated Edmund Burke’s belief that the English enjoyed the most perfect form of government in existence. The constitution, according to Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1758 but only published in 1765, was in conformity with the laws of nature; it was therefore not only rational and perfect but also, it followed, unalterable. This prescriptive idea of the constitution implied that insofar as ‘politics’ had a purpose it was to protect ancient liberties and historic freedoms. This constitution was envisaged in terms of a balance between King, Lords and Commons. Such a balance of the monarchical, the aristocratic and the popular elements prevented the domination of any single one of them and thus the degeneration of the state into, respectively, a tyranny, an oligarchy or a democracy. Such a balance, indeed, provided for the best features of each of these elements. This formulation was sufficiently vague to permit Whigs, Tories and even Jacobites to participate in the political life of the age. Suggested reforms to the political structure were usually dismissed on the grounds that they might upset the balance of the constitution. For it was that constitution which guaranteed the legal rights of the subject against the whims of kings and ministers and which protected the civil liberties of all Englishmen.

  This secretive, traditional and essentially retrospective style of politics was in constant tension with a print culture that was popular, vigilant and often critical of the regime. This print culture – a culture of writers and readers, of authors and editors, of bookshops and printers, of newspapers and periodicals – did not first appear in the eighteenth century. No fewer than 320 periodicals had already been published between 1641 and 1655, while a London bookseller named George Thomason collected over 23,000 books and pamphlets printed between 1641 and 1660. Thereafter the number diminished, only to increase once again at the end of the seventeenth century.2 Furthermore, no fewer than 700 newspaper and periodical titles appeared between 1620 and 1700. The ending of licensing in 1695 opened the door to the publication of a greatly increased numbers of titles. Nevertheless, the 900 that appeared between 1700 and 1760 represent a considerable extension of a process already under way and one that now became irreversible.3 The sudden growth of printing in London after 1695 encouraged the growth of large numbers of printers and publishers. The London market could not absorb them all, so many of them migrated to provincial towns. In spreading the printed word and public awareness to the provinces, the local press was of the first importance. By 1720 there were no fewer than seventy printers in London and thirty in the provinces. By mid-century most towns had their own printing firm and booksellers. It has been estimated that Newcastle upon Tyne had up to fifteen printers, publishers and booksellers by the middle of the century and, at one time, no fewer than seven newspapers.4 Although successive administrations tried in vain to stem the tide of personal and political comment by imposing stamp duties (1712, 1725, 1757, 1776), government’s more usual response was to use the press itself, paying subsidies to newspapers to follow the approved line and employing its own printers and writers. This was cheaper, and much less contentious, than purchasing printing firms, still less trying to silence them by arbitrary means. By using the press for political purposes, the government was both recognizing its importance and legitimizing its use.

  What makes developments in print culture in the eighteenth century so important is the spread of newspaper readership and its effect upon politics. The first daily paper, the Courant, appeared in London in 1702. By 1724 there were three, and by the middle of the century there were no fewer than a dozen papers appearing in the capital either daily, bi-weekly or tri-weekly. The first provincial newspapers followed rapidly. By 1723 there were twenty-four and by 1753 there were thirty-two. About twenty further provincial papers had appeared during this period but had failed to survive – a significant indication of the precarious finances of newspaper publication. By the 1760s even a small market town in Yorkshire, Knaresborough, had a coffee house taking four London newspapers. Newspaper circulation rose steadily from about 50,000 per week in the first decade of the century to about 200,000 in the middle. Because they were available in inns, taverns and clubs, because they could be read by countless numbers in print-shop windows, and because of the common practice of passing newspapers from hand to hand, the circulation figure should be multiplied by between five and ten. It is likely, therefore, that at least one million people each week were reading a newspaper by the middle of the eighteenth century. Statistics of press circulations, however, tell us little about the ways in which newspapers were read and how an ‘audience’ was thus created. For most people, reading meant reading aloud or being publicly read to in taverns and clubs. Furthermore, the common practice of indirect transmission of news and opinions should not be overlooked. The role of print shops, posters, graffiti and even gossip can never be measured, but should not be forgotten.

  The quality as well as the quantity of the press deserves special emphasis. Between 1700 and 1760 the newspaper and periodical press was enhanced by a galaxy of writers of the first rank, including Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, Steel and Swift. The press was not politically neutral. Most titles, playing to the public gallery, tended to be hostile to the government of the day. No wonder that successive Whig governments were inclined to be hostile to the press. Their inability to prevent its rising circulation, however, is a striking commentary on the growing and insatiable demand for political news and comment. The political dramas of the long eighteenth century were played out be
fore a very vociferous and frequently very hostile audience.

  No less striking was the expansion of the periodical press. The most important periodicals appeared in the first two decades of the century. The Spectator, the Examiner and the Tatler all appeared then, employing the talents of some of the greatest writers of the age. The Craftsman in the 1720s was always a stern critic of Walpole. The most popular of them all was the Gentleman’s Magazine, which first appeared in 1731. Both of these latter enjoyed circulations in excess of 10,000. The periodical usually included an essay on some current political, religious or moral topic and was often deliberately directed at a closely defined readership. Its influence was felt far beyond the number of its readers, its contents being widely excerpted in other media.

  The discreet yet overlapping elements of the new print culture – printers, newspapers, booksellers, libraries – cumulatively constituted a cultural development of the first importance. The emergence of printed media had a continuing and irreversible effect on politics throughout the eighteenth century. The press informed and criticized, provoking debate and discussion. It reflected the expansion of the political nation and, to some extent, helped to enlarge it further. Inns, coffee houses, subscription libraries and book clubs did much to establish and maintain habits of reading among many sections of the middling orders and, by the second half of the century, increasingly among the lower orders. Of course, the speed and extent of this process should not be exaggerated. Literacy remained restricted to about half the population, and oral culture persisted in Britain well into the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, by the 1720s, print culture was available to everyone who could read and to many who could not. This new print culture affirmed the dominance of the culture of the upper classes, but it at least made space available for the opinions and ideas of its critics and penetrated quite far down the social scale. The print culture was not, in the end, friendly to the exclusiveness of aristocratic and government elites. The idea of a public opinion accessible to all in the public realm replaced earlier assumptions about the secrecy that must accompany matters of state. In a very real sense, then, the politics of the elite and the politics of a wider public opinion were not hermetically sealed cultural and political worlds. Through Parliament and parliamentary elections, in the churches and chapels and in the political clubs, debating societies and inns and taverns, politics was becoming widely available and easily accessible, as William Pitt and John Wilkes were shortly to demonstrate.