CROWN AND PARLIAMENT
Britain in the eighteenth century was a parliamentary monarchy. The structures, ideologies and conventions of parliamentary government lay in the future. As yet Parliament did not regard itself as a competitor of the crown. Indeed, for much of the eighteenth century, it adopted the role of junior partner in politics and administration. Particular political crises, such as those of 1733 and 1742, may give the impression that Parliament had permanently weakened the powers of the monarchy because it could demand a change of measure or of minister, but these were exceptional occasions. (In any case, it was not so much Parliament but threats from discontented ministers which endangered Walpole’s position on these two occasions). Parliament had the right to protest against ministers and their policies. It retained the right to impeach them and in the last analysis, it could refuse to support their continuation in office, but these were desperate measures to be used as a last resort. For the most part, it was assumed that Parliament would cooperate with the monarch in the exercise of executive powers. No Parliament in the early Hanoverian period refused to vote a tax or made a tax conditional upon the remedy of grievances. Efficient and stable government depended upon cooperation between king and Parliament, not upon conflict between them.
Standing at the centre of the political stage, the monarch was the dominant figure in the political life of the nation. Responsible for policy and for appointments, he initiated executive action and appointed the ministers who would carry it out. The power to appoint ministers was unquestionably the most important single power enjoyed by the monarch. By appointing the ministers, the king could at least influence and at best control both policy and patronage, although the realities of carrying business through Parliament meant that he needed to exercise his prerogative with care. The king retained the right to appoint to, or at least to approve appointments to, a host of lesser offices, in the royal household, in government departments, in the church and, most of all, in the armed services. In practice the monarch’s freedom to make such appointments was limited by a number of considerations: life grants, reversions, the freehold rights of office and the traditional rights of major office-holders to appoint their own subordinates. Both George I and George II reserved peerage creations exclusively to themselves; George II, in addition, was extremely careful about appointments to the Order of the Garter.
Foreign policy, in Britain as in other European countries, was still dominated by dynastic considerations. The Hanoverian monarchs were particularly jealous of their prerogatives in diplomatic affairs in view of their concerns for the electorate of Hanover. In a composite state like Britain in the eighteenth century, moreover, it was perfectly natural that the monarch rather than Parliament should conduct foreign policy, in view of the need for immediate diplomatic response and the overriding necessity for secrecy. After all, war was the ultimate expression of monarchical power and the epitome of national prestige and unity. It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of the Hanoverian kings on the conduct of British foreign policy in this period. Only once between 1727 and 1757 did a British minister succeed in defying the wishes of the monarch on an important diplomatic matter. This was when Walpole kept Britain out of the War of the Polish Succession in 1733. Normally, royal counsels prevailed. During the early part of his reign, George I and his Hanoverian advisers determined foreign policy themselves. For his part, George II was certainly prepared to stand up to Walpole. In 1740 he frustrated Walpole’s attempt to detach Frederick the Great from France. In 1741 he signed a treaty to maintain the neutrality of Hanover without consulting his ministers, and in the following two years he refused his ministers’ entreaties to allow British troops to assume the offensive in Germany in case such initiatives endangered Hanover.
Recent studies have suggested that Britain was well served by her monarchs after the Glorious Revolution.5 William III was unusually able and his successors, although dull and unexceptional, were conscientious, assiduous and, on occasion, extremely skilful. Queen Anne may not have been an inspiring monarch, but she was intelligent and honest. She was never merely a token presence and, in fact, attended more cabinet meetings than any other monarch of the period. If, in the end, the politicians and courtiers could influence her, it remains true that her opinions had to be taken into consideration. The first two Hanoverian monarchs had been carefully brought up to prepare for their princely careers. They were alike – hard-working and efficient. They had opinions of their own and their agreement could never be taken for granted. Moreover, it is a negative fact, though one of the greatest importance, that Britain did not experience a minority and a Council of Regency, and the consequent deterioration in royal power which normally accompanied them. It is not surprising, then, that the court remained the centre of intrigue, the hub of political activity and the cockpit in which the battle for royal favour was won and lost. At the same time, the role of the court as a social and cultural institution was beginning to decline. Anne had been able to maintain the political independence of the monarchy, but the court was too poorly funded either to sustain a court party or to maintain its role at the centre of social and cultural life.
The Whig historians of the nineteenth century were inclined to read the political history of the eighteenth century as a victory for Parliament and as the achievement of a ‘constitutional monarchy’.6 Certainly, politicians after the Glorious Revolution were willing to use their control of the House of Commons to force themselves into office and even to inflict their policies on the monarch. More recently historians have underlined the continuing, and possibly increasing, powers of the monarchy and the failure of much of the legislation of the period to restrict royal power.7 William III’s parliaments had been willing to use the threat of withholding revenue as a lever against the king’s expensive military policies, but Parliaments after 1714 were much more compliant. The Civil List continued to be immune from regular parliamentary scrutiny. George I obtained a better Civil List than Anne, while George II not only obtained a Civil List of £800,000 per annum but also was entitled to keep surplus revenues. This was not all. The Bill of Rights might have established the principle of parliamentary consent to taxation, but the fact remains that after the ‘Financial Revolution’ successive monarchs enjoyed an income of which any Stuart monarch would have been envious. The Bill of Rights also prohibited the existence of standing armies without parliamentary approval but it was upon massive standing armies, secured by compliant Whig majorities, that the Hanoverian dynasty depended for its survival against enemies without (the Bourbons) and rebels within (the Jacobites). In these and in other ways the eighteenth century saw a remarkable stabilization, and even in some areas a strengthening, of royal power. But it is not at all clear that Parliament was correspondingly weakened. While the powers of both Parliament and the monarchy strengthened during the eighteenth century, Parliament remained a subsidiary partner in a relationship that was normally harmonious and thus productive of great benefit to the country.
Consequently, it is easy to understand why theories of divine right continued to be influential, especially in Jacobite and some high-Anglican circles. In a society in which the principles of patriarchy, hierarchy and obedience to authority were unquestionably assumed to be valid, it was difficult for contemporaries to conceive of authority in any other manner. The idea that authority might derive from a contract between governors and governed was confined to a small minority of Whig and radical writers. Indeed, many people were concerned at the lingering power of the monarchy and the currency of divine right theories. In this, as in so many other respects, the ideological debates of the years after 1714 were a continuation of those of the years before. Royal absolutism had been defeated in 1688–9 but given the necessities of war, the growth of the royal bureaucracy and the enormous budgets handled by governments, a weakened monarchy could conceivably unsettle politics in the future. Finally, in an age with limited political information, contemporaries found it difficult to distinguish between
the powers of the government and the powers of the king. Consequently, many members of the political nation had an inordinate fear of the influence of the crown which they confused with that of the central government in general.
Still, there can be no denying the fact that while the king’s executive responsibilities continued to depend for their enforcement on parliamentary supply, some degree of conflict between king and Parliament was unavoidable. In the next century this tension was to be resolved by the emergence of the cabinet, consisting of members of the largest party in the Commons. Before then such a solution would have seemed dangerous. Indeed, the Act of Settlement of 1701 excluded office-holders from the Commons. Fortunately for continuing harmony and cooperation between the executive and the legislative branches of the government, the offending clause was repealed by the Regency Act of 1705. By its clauses office-holders created after 1705 were to seek re-election to Parliament, a provision that made possible the establishment and maintenance of harmony between the two branches.
In practice, the huge increase in routine government business after 1689 made it impossible for the monarch to exercise personal control. It required a cabinet of leading ministers to transmit it and to advise the monarch accordingly. However, the composition of the cabinet and its precise functions were nowhere laid down. Everything depended upon personality and circumstance. Walpole, for example, governed through a small group of four or five leading ministers which was called ‘the cabinet’, but it lacked agreed constitutional functions. When Walpole fell in 1742 his cabinet colleagues remained in office. The idea of cabinet solidarity was scarcely as yet in its infancy. Ministers were responsible individually to the king, not to each other, and not to a party. Cabinets existed to deal with the king’s business, and its members were appointed with that objective in mind. They were normally not appointed as a group and they did not come into office on an agreed programme of legislative measures. Indeed, much routine business was done by individual ministers conferring with the king in his closet, the small chamber in which the king gave audiences to his ministers. In theory, the cabinet could not have a leader or a leading (‘prime’) minister because every minister was appointed by the king and was responsible individually to the king. Indeed, the term ‘prime’ minister was a term of abuse in the eighteenth century, with its connotations of unjustified royal favouritism. During the reign of William III ‘prime’ ministers did not emerge because of the king’s tight control of business, but in the reign of Anne both Godolphin and Harley were accused of being ‘prime’ ministers. The term was more consistently used to describe ministers like Sir Robert Walpole and Henry Pelham, who found favour in the closet and who sat in the House of Commons as First Lord of the Treasury and ‘Minister for the King in the House of Commons’. Such ministers may with some justice be referred to as ‘prime’ ministers in the sense that they shouldered responsibility for the performance of the government as a whole, not least defending it in the House of Commons, but it is significant that their position could not be sustained by their successors. Their achievements were largely personal achievements, not those of a party. Indeed, their constitutional position was very different from the prime ministers of the later nineteenth century, who owed their position to electoral victory and to their leadership of a united cabinet and party.
Eighteenth-century governments, lacking such reliable party support, had to create their own majorities. These were fashioned principally from the solid phalanx of ‘placemen’ or Whig office-holders, who numbered 180 during Walpole’s ministry. Under Anne they had been notoriously unreliable. Under Walpole their reliability increased. It was very rare for defectors to number over a dozen on even the most dangerous issue. Even in Walpole’s day, however, it is possible to exaggerate their significance, and, indeed, their reliability over the lifetime of a Parliament. Of the 157 place-holders returned to the House of Commons at the general election of 1741, no fewer than thirty-three turned out to be regular members of the opposition. Of these thirty-three, nineteen held offices under the Prince of Wales and fourteen had offices for life. Of the remaining 124, at least nineteen voted against the government during the 1741–7 Parliament. We can only conclude that, essential though the systematic support of the placemen must have been to the survival of any administration, it was never enough to ensure any government’s safety.
A secure ministerial majority required leadership and direction of the placemen by a group who have been described by Sir Lewis Namier as the professional politicians, about 100–120 of whom sat in the eighteenth-century House of Commons. These men fought for, and occupied, the top posts. They were ambitious men, who, in pursuing the spoils of office and the rewards of political service, provided drive, energy and leadership both to government and to opposition. They included the great Whig political families of the eighteenth century with their dependents and retainers, including the Walpoles and Pelhams, the Pitts, Foxes and Devonshires. Whatever their material ambitions, these men exhibited ideals of service to the nation and a self-confidence borne out of generations of self-ascribed political leadership. Their ambitions gave shape and order to a Parliament which otherwise was prone to preoccupy itself with local concerns.
The remaining MPs – around 250 of them – have usually been described as ‘Independents’. In the sense that they were ‘backbenchers’, uninterested, for the most part, in making political careers on the national stage, the description is fairly apt. But many of them were prepared to use their positions to seek favours for family and friends and, it is worth remarking, sometimes for themselves. Many of them were extremely active in parliamentary committees, advancing the interests of their towns and counties. The Independents, whether Whig or, more usually, Tory, hated taxes, wars, contractors and parties. They were suspicious of political connections and their political behaviour was therefore unpredictable. Most Independents prided themselves on the fact that they could not be relied upon, and it was often for this reason that the leading politicians directed their energies and their oratory at them.
Indeed, the use of ‘influence’ was never enough to ensure the permanent security of even the most accomplished minister. As we have seen, a minister with the king’s confidence could be forced out, as Walpole was in 1742 and as Lord North was to be in 1782, but Parliament could not force a minister into office against the wishes of the king. When Henry Pelham died, George II reminded the rest of the cabinet that ‘he hoped they would not think of recommending to him any person who had flown in his face’. None of them did. Nevertheless, the wishes of Parliament could be of crucial significance. George II could not save Walpole in 1742 because the minister had lost the confidence of the House of Commons. Nor could George II save Granville in 1744. He did not have a minister in the Commons who had his confidence, and for the same reason he could not prevent Pitt storming his closet both in 1756 and 1757.
Ministerial survival depended not only on majorities in the House of Commons but also on effective control of the House of Lords. As we have seen,8 Walpole had established an overwhelming Whig supremacy in the upper house, although it retained its role as a deliberative and legislative assembly and preserved extensive legal powers as a court of appeal. If the House of Lords had declined in political importance since 1714, there is no sign that the peerage as a social group was losing its political eminence. Most cabinet ministers sat in the Lords; the peers controlled extensive estates, influenced numerous constituencies and manned the senior posts in the armed services, the church, the civil service and local government. Whether elected or not, peers and members of their families effectively represented the localities, lobbied to promote their economic interests in Parliament and, not least, sought favours and promotions at court. In these circumstances, the function of the House of Lords was to incorporate this wealthy and influential upper class within the political order with a constitutional guarantee of its continuing indispensability.
THE STATE: CENTRAL AND LOCAL
In its peac
etime operations, the Hanoverian regime was sustained less by military and bureaucratic means than by a constant set of interactions between the central government and the localities. The central government won widespread acceptance because it did not threaten the property and the privileges of local elites. Networks of clientage attached the gentry to the aristocracy and substantial elements within the middling orders to both. Loyalty to the regime was expressed as patriotic pride in the virtues of the regime: limited monarchy, religious toleration, representative government and the rule of law.
Consequently, most contemporaries accepted the dramatic increase in the size of the central bureaucracy in the first half of the long eighteenth century. At the start of this period the British state was governed by a bureaucracy that was exceptionally small by European standards but which grew quite rapidly: from about 150 to over 900 in the administrative departments and from about 2,500 to about 6,500 in the revenue departments between the Glorious Revolution and 1755.9 During this period, the British state became more coherent and many of its institutions more efficient. It was able, for example, to accomplish the demobilization of the great armies which had fought the War of the Spanish Succession with conspicuous success immediately after 1713. Furthermore, it was able to finance astronomical increases in state spending during the wars of the mid-century. Under Walpole, the annual budget had been around £5 million per annum; by 1748 it stood at £10 million and, by the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1760, at no less than £20 million. In fact, the capacity of the government to tax was actually growing faster than the economy. But the national debt, which had stood at £14 million in 1700, had reached what was to contemporaries an unimaginable £130 million in 1763. Such sums could only be sustained by an efficient system of public credit, sponsored by a wealthy, propertied public which had confidence in the institutions of the country. Britain was on the way to becoming what John Brewer has termed a ‘fiscal-military state’, capable of financing her military involvements in Europe from the 1690s onwards by means of long-term loans operated through a complex of capitalist institutions.10 By this time, the financing of the army and navy, the payment of subsidies to allies together with accumulated, earlier war debts accounted for 80 per cent of the income of the state. Parliament guaranteed the repayment of the national debt and could, as a consequence, borrow money from the capital markets long term and at low rates of interest. On such a foundation an enormous fiscal-military state was established, capable of raising an army of 100,000 at the time of William III and no less than 200,000 during the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 27