The Long Eighteenth Century
Page 28
Yet in peacetime, at least, most of the powers of the fiscal-military state were relaxed. Indeed, in peacetime the degree of decentralization of state power was remarkable and, in some areas, arguably, increasing during the century. The population remained profoundly suspicious of the executive and could be almost paranoid about the possible encroachments of an autocratic state, probably because of its recollection of the threatening precedents of Stuart interference in urban charters. Consequently, when new powers were sought and granted to local agencies, these were usually of a very specific and limited kind, often, as we have seen, to commissioners responsible for nominated purposes. Indeed, the County Rates Act of 1739 actually granted magistrates certain powers of taxation. Thereafter, bridges, highways and prisons came more and more under the influence of the enhanced power and authority of the bench.
Decentralization of the state was emphasized by its differing forms and structures in the sub-nations of Britain. Institutionally, Wales had become absorbed into England and retained no separate bureaucratic identity. The Act of Union, however, had left Scotland with considerable autonomy, and little attempt was made to diminish it until the defeat of the ‘45. Some roads were built after the ‘15, and a Board of Trustees for the Improvement of the Fisheries and Manufactures was set up in 1727. Such modest centralizing tendencies were accelerated by the ‘45. Until then, the danger of Jacobitism had dominated Anglo-Scottish relations. Only then, with its passing, was a firmer line taken. Even then, however, Scotland remained largely self-governing.11 Ireland was even more independent, governed through the Irish executive at Dublin and its accompanying legislature. Since British government depended upon the Protestant Ascendancy, no structural reform of the state was possible. When the Union of Ireland with England occurred at the end of the century, it was in circumstances of war and revolution which could not have been foreseen earlier.
The decentralization of executive action was, therefore, conscious and deliberate. Within a superintending framework, Hanoverian government was devolved – but this did not mean that the government was incapable, for example, of influencing economic and, to some extent, social policy. The government saw its role not as directing the economy but as creating the conditions in which enterprise might be pursued. In this spirit it effectively abandoned the imposition of export duties after Walpole’s revision of the Book of Rates in 1723. In this spirit, too, it attacked monopolies and combinations, whether of merchants concerned to keep prices high or of workers concerned to maintain the value of their wages. Furthermore, the government was prepared to react to local demands. The government permitted Parliament to pass private bills on a wide variety of topics. Private bills, in fact, accounted for about half of Parliament’s legislative output, many of them on economic, and to some extent on social, matters. Some were of a traditional character and were concerned with crime, vagrancy and poverty. Such piecemeal intervention could have serious consequences for the groups concerned. Other aspects of the legislation were of an innovative kind – enclosures, turnpikes and canals – thus ensuring that the state was seen to be friendly to commerce and manufacturing. Commercial and manufacturing leaders on the one hand and MPs on the other were normally well disposed to each other, and could usually cooperate in order to obtain legislation to promote their interests. In the 1720s, Parliament enacted about fifty bills per session; by the 1760s the number had increased to around 200. The most commonly recurring subjects of such legislation included enclosures, workhouses, river navigation, harbour improvements, turnpikes and schemes for the protection of trade and commodities. The cumulative effect of such legislation could be significant. For example, the legislative enactments of the period 1736–74 helped to transform fustian into a mechanized, mass production industry. The initiative for most of these bills came from private interests, but the early Hanoverian state was remarkably receptive and open to the demands of the propertied classes from outside the landed elite.
Local government continued to enjoy considerable autonomy from central control and interference. Local men resented the idea that central government should interfere in their affairs. The government might decide who should be appointed to a local office, but, once appointed, that official should be left alone. With the establishment of the Whig supremacy in the 1720s the wholesale political dismissals from the bench which had disfigured local government in the previous thirty years came to an end. Central government became less preoccupied with local administration. As a matter of course, the central government could apply to the Court of King’s Bench for a writ of mandamus to compel local institutions to carry out their functions, over, say, road and bridge maintenance, but it usually refrained from doing so. Nor, on the whole, did it trouble to monitor the actions they did take.
Within each county the dominant figure in local government was the Lord Lieutenant, assisted by Deputy Lieutenants, the number of which depended on the size of the county. The Lord Lieutenant sat at the top of the social order in the counties. He was almost always a peer, except in Wales, where aristocrats were at a premium. He was the principal local vehicle of royal patronage. He commanded the militia, a duty that assumed considerable importance during wartime. By the eighteenth century the electoral influence which a Lord Lieutenant formerly enjoyed was in decline. Compensation for this was found by taking over the office of Custos Rotulorum.12
It was not, however, this aristocratic elite that did the work of actually governing Britain in the localities, but the Justices of the Peace (JP), appointed by the Lords Lieutenant but drawn overwhelmingly from the gentry. In this sense, the gentry were partners in oligarchy. Sitting alone, a JP could handle most petty administrative and judicial matters in his part of the county, such as drunkenness, poaching and vagrancy. He could also issue warrants for arrest and refer prisoners for trial at quarter sessions. With a second justice, sitting in petty sessions, he could try minor offenders such as runaway servants and apprentices and exercise supervision over alehouses. Three justices could sentence a man to seven years’ transportation for rick-burning. However, four justices, sitting in quarter sessions four times a year, constituted the real cornerstone of Hanoverian local government, combining both executive and judicial functions. They were not entitled to decide capital cases involving life and death but they were able to deal with most aspects of local life. They appointed the overseers of the poor and the surveyors of highways. They dealt with gaming houses, disorderly houses and the suppression of nuisances. They exercised responsibility over the Poor Law and the poor rates, over gaols and houses of correction, over roads and bridges and, with diminishing commitment, over apprenticeships, wages and prices. They also played a crucial role in in the local allocation of the Land Tax and, in addition, they tried a wide variety of non-capital criminal cases.
These were substantial responsibilities, not to be undertaken lightly. Naturally, given the increase in population and the great social and economic upheavals of the period, the number of JPs was increasing rapidly during the early Hanoverian period, even though the post was voluntary and unpaid. In 1680 there were only 2,560 justices. In 1761 the number had risen to 8,400. Yet it was always a problem to find gentlemen willing to sit on the bench. The shortfall had to be made up by the parochial clergy. By the middle of the century contemporaries were noticing that many gentry families were avoiding the office of JP altogether, the deficiency being made good by Anglican clergymen. By the end of the century around one-quarter of justices were clergymen. In these circumstances, entry to the bench was not particularly exclusive. Increasingly, members of the middling orders were to be found quite comfortably rubbing shoulders with the traditional county elite.
The basic units of administration were the 10,000 ecclesiastical parishes (often called townships in some parts of the north of England). Most of them were small; less than one-tenth had a population in excess of 1,000. At this level of administration the most important duties were performed by the churchwardens, who were usually drawn from
local farmers and freeholders. They were assisted by a number of unpaid and voluntary parish officials whose duties are self-evident by their titles: the surveyor of the highways (who had the right to impose six days’ unpaid labour on male parishioners for road maintenance), the petty constable (who had to meet the militia quota for his parish) and the overseer of the poor. It is an important fact of eighteenth-century life that for most people the real symbols of authority were neither aristocrats nor gentry but constables, overseers and clergymen. The real social divide in many a parish was that between those who administered the system of poor relief and the social groups who experienced poor relief at one time or another in their lives. The parishes were not completely independent. Some of their officials (e.g. the constable) were appointed by the justices. Financial control of their activities, notably the Poor Law and the upkeep of roads, also rested with the justices. Final authority in the parishes lay, in theory, with the vestry meeting, an assembly of ratepayers which had the right to elect their officials. In many places their numbers might be few and important decisions thus taken by the squire, parson and a handful of local farmers.
Outside this county structure of local government were about 200 municipal boroughs enjoying the independence bestowed by royal charter. Governed by a mayor, aldermen and common councillors, the powers which JPs enjoyed in the countryside were exercised by corporate officials. Many of these boroughs had originally enjoyed an open franchise for elections to these corporate offices, but by the eighteenth century the franchise was usually restricted to the freemen of the borough and, in some cases, exclusively to the aldermen or councillors. In such places, the corporations had become little better than self-perpetuating oligarchies. Furthermore, the independence of corporate towns was rarely complete. Many of them had fallen in some measure under the influence of local, rural magnates.
London was exceptional in enjoying an open franchise of over 12,000 electors. The Court of Common Council, consisting of 234 freemen, was elected annually by the livery companies. It represented the mercantile, craft and retailing community of the capital. The Court of Aldermen, representing the great monied interests, consisted of twenty-six aldermen, elected for life. Between 1725 and 1746, however, the Court of Aldermen had the power to veto the activities of the Court of Common Council. The aldermen were closely tied in to the government’s funding requirements while the Common Council flirted with popular Toryism and adamant resistance to the financial oligarchy of the City. In 1746, however, Henry Pelham removed the veto, thus permitting the Common Council to monopolize executive functions, leaving the aldermen to judicial duties.
The system of local government was remarkable for the independence enjoyed by local officials. In normal times, the central government could try to secure their loyalty and compliance only by the care with which appointments were made in the first place. Lords Lieutenant would carefully sift the names of the justices they would recommend but, once appointed, justices were virtually uncontrollable. At times of crisis, however, supervision could be tightened. During national emergencies like 1715–16 and 1745–6 local officials cooperated closely with central government, reporting incidents or persons which threatened local peace and order.
It is difficult to generalize about the functioning of an entire system of local government and the performance of thousands of different officials carrying out their responsibilities in different places. Because it appears to be a patchwork of local forms and functions, the eighteenth-century system of local government can easily be dismissed as inefficient and, in the view of the method of appointment to office, in which political loyalties could count for more than ability, as corrupt. Measured against the standards of nineteenth-century reformed local government, it may have been so. In a society with severely deficient communications, however, there was much to be said for a system of local government which was locally based and locally manned, varying with local circumstances and, not least, operating according to custom and precedent. Furthermore, many JPs were conscientious in their attention to their duties. While they displayed the prejudices of their class, paying perhaps excessive attention to the protection of property, they tried to be fair, they showed that they could be flexible and they often displayed a conspicuously modern attitude in their treatment of the problems with which they were confronted. There are many examples of JPs calling in specialized assistance, appointing salaried experts and establishing special committees to deal with intractable difficulties. The gospel of ‘improvement’ ensured that local government often took the lead in treating the sick, educating the children and treating prison offenders.
On the other hand, the deficiencies of the local government system were serious. Local response to local need was, up to a point, admirable, but in important respects a national perspective was wanting. In a rapidly urbanizing country it was not obviously the wisest course to rely upon a system of corporate urban government best fitted for the sixteenth century, which was unpopular and in many cases corrupt. New towns were springing up and expanding for which no modern local government provision was made. Consequently, Manchester – and there are many other examples – was still being run by a manorial Court Leet even at the end of the eighteenth century. In other ways, too, a national, even a regional perspective was badly needed, to maximize, for example, the benefits to be derived from the steadily extending turnpike road and canal networks. Finally, in some cases there can be no doubt at all that some justices acted as judge and jury, using the law to protect their own property and their own privileges. No effective regulatory powers seriously impinged upon their autonomy, and thus upon their own discretionary legal power.
The government of Britain thus took place in the parishes, towns and counties; it was not inspired directly from the capital. In the same way most people had their experiences of parliamentary politics at the local level. Electoral politics, like local government, was remarkably decentralized. Indeed, electoral politics resembled two aspects of local government. First, rural elites may have enjoyed ultimate control, yet effective management was in the hands of large numbers of much humbler people. Second, the electoral system, like the local government system, was socially and politically exclusive in many of its features, but it drew in people from a much wider social catchment, thus ensuring that the roots of oligarchy extended deeply in and fairly widely throughout society.
At first glance, the ‘unreformed’ electoral system which lasted until the Reform Act of 1832 was narrow and unrepresentative. Most accounts compare it unfavourably with the electorate of the period 1694 to 1714.13 During this ‘first age of party’ between 1694 and 1714 the electorate had expressed the broad sense of the nation because of the frequency of triennial elections. After 1714 this was the case to a diminishing extent. The passage of the Septennial Act in 1716 gave time for electoral passions to cool. Its extension of the period between elections raised the value – and thus the cost – of seats. Consequently, electoral patrons sought to control the electorate more closely in order to render election contests unlikely. They were assisted by the government of Walpole. The Last Determinations Act of 1729, reinforcing a similar act of 1696, gave Parliament the right of determining the nature of the franchise in a constituency in the event of a disputed election. Walpole and succeeding ministers could now massage electorates to the advantage of friendly Whig candidates, almost always in favour of restriction rather than of enlargement.
At these less frequent elections, the number of constituencies that actually went to a poll declined remarkably. There had been 119 contested elections in 314 constituencies in 1715, and the peak was reached in 1722 with 154. In 1727 there were still 114 contests, but by 1741 this had declined to 94. By 1754 this had become a mere 62 and by 1761 only 53. This suggests that the closing up of the electoral system was a gradual process. The effect of the Septennial Act took time to make itself felt. Indeed, if we count up the number of contested seats at the four general elections of 1705, 1708, 1710 and 1713 we f
ind that the total is only four contests fewer than the total for the four general elections of 1715, 1722, 1727 and 1734. On these figures, the ‘first age of party’ continued well into the years of Sir Robert Walpole’s administration. Furthermore, the absence of a contest does not always imply the absence of electoral competition. The decision not to go to a poll was often only taken after extensive political canvassing and the expenditure of vast amounts of money and effort, when it might be apparent that further expensive effort would be fruitless. In this, as indeed in electoral activity in general, we would be wise to recognize the prominence of political issues. That these were often matters of local rather than national significance does not diminish their importance. Indeed, national issues – especially those involving religious matters – tended to linger longer in the constituencies than they did in Parliament.