The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The right to vote was one of the more bizarre features of the electoral system. Its oddities were less the consequence of natural, local variation than of political calculation and electoral manoeuvring. They had little or no rational justification. After the Act of Union of 1707 there were 558 MPs elected by 314 constituencies. These consisted of 203 English borough seats, 40 English county seats, two English university seats, 12 Welsh county seats, 12 Welsh borough seats and 45 Scottish seats. Almost all English seats returned two members and voters, correspondingly, had two votes to dispose of. The qualification for the vote in the English county seats was the possession (not necessarily the ownership) of freehold property worth 40s. per year. In the boroughs the situation was extremely complex. There were several different types of qualification. In the 92 freemen boroughs the vote went with the status of being a freeman, which could be obtained by a variety of different methods, including by apprenticeship, by marriage to the daughter of a freeman and by purchase. In the 37 scot and lot constituencies the vote went to resident householders or occupiers of household property. In the 27 corporation boroughs the vote went with the status of membership of the corporation (or council). In the 29 burgage boroughs the vote went to the owners of specific pieces of property (burgages). Finally, in the six freeholder boroughs, the vote went to those who owned freehold property. Obviously, much depended on local circumstances, on structures of wealth, property, occupation and ownership. Consequently, the size of the electorate could vary from place to place. In the corporation boroughs and in most of the burgage boroughs it might be limited to a few dozen. The English and Welsh county electorates were normally counted in the thousands; the Scottish county seats in the hundreds. The borough electorate could vary enormously, from single figures to several thousands.

  Because of the propertied nature of the franchise, the size of the electorate failed to keep pace with population increase during the first half of the eighteenth century. Between 1689 and 1754 the electorate increased in size from about 240,000 to 340,000, a decrease in the percentage of adult males from about 20.6 per cent to 17.2 per cent – a distinct but not sensational decline. The distribution of electors, however, was seriously uneven. About half the boroughs actually had fewer than 100 voters. Fewer than thirty boroughs had more than 1,000 voters. Most seats were under some sort of control or attempted control. In about 20 per cent of the constituencies in 1715 the patron enjoyed such unrestricted power to determine the return as amounted to nomination. The number of nomination boroughs increased steadily to reach around 30 per cent by the end of the century. In a further 25 per cent of seats the patrons made recommendations to the electors (which might not always, of course, be accepted). This figure rose to over one-third by the end of the century. Other features of the electoral system appear to be unrepresentative and anomalous. Because it was considered to be a communal responsibility, voting remained public. There was no secret ballot until 1872. Consequently, the disposal of the elector’s two votes could be, and increasingly was, recorded and published. Because many electors were to some extent dependent upon their social superiors for employment, residence or purchase of their goods and produce, it was universally assumed that the latter would attempt to influence – at least to advise – the former in the disposal of their votes. In county elections, those electors who lived in or near a great estate would tend to vote en bloc for the same candidates. Even in the smaller, and not a few of the larger, borough seats, the enormous economic and social influence of a great patron in the neighbourhood could have a decisive effect upon the outcome of an election.

  The electoral system could not remain immune from hierarchy and subordination in a society in which both were rife. Electoral patronage was an inevitable fact of life in a propertied electoral system in a hierarchical society. Even then, however, the influence of electoral patrons was rarely complete. Money changed hands, favours were done and, at times, corrupt practices amounting to intimidation could occur, but in its rough and ready way the electoral system remained open, a market place for personal and political as well as financial transactions. Electioneering was an expensive, insecure and enormously time-consuming business. Consequently, the electoral process may best be viewed as the interaction of patronage and influence on the one hand with the desire of electors to maintain their social, occupational and political independence on the other.

  Elections thus have powerful reciprocal features. These were deep-seated cultural forces which operated independently of legislative enactments. First, patrons and their servants had to respect and promote the needs of the constituency and its inhabitants. The results of elections were determined by the way that the patrons involved themselves in a long-term and often very expensive relationship with the community and its welfare. Elections were opportunities for the non-voters as well as the voters to scrutinize their leaders, to criticize and to hold them to public account. We should not underestimate the alacrity with which people were prepared to use the prevailing regime for their own purposes. Second, the oligarchy’s ultimate control of the electoral system depended on the work, loyalty and efficiency of thousands of canvassers, committee men and subordinates performing much less elevated tasks. That control was rarely arbitrary and almost always involved mutual responsibilities. Third, the preoccupation of the Hanoverian political elite with, and enormous investment in, the electoral system involved them in a permanent commitment to parliamentary politics and representative processes. No doubt these features opened the electoral system to much criticism but at least ensured that it was to some degree responsive to the needs and wishes of local communities and thus, in so many ways, more flexible and open than might have been imagined in the late seventeenth century. Although the electorate in the age of Walpole and Henry Pelham was more placid than its predecessor, it retained many of its open and representative characteristics. For all the restrictive impositions of oligarchy – the Septennial Act, Last Determinations Act, more infrequent elections and the techniques of electoral manipulation – in spite of all these, many of the open and participative qualities of the electorate of the reign of Anne were never wholly lost and, in the open constituencies, indeed, very largely retained. In London and the great provincial cities like Bristol and Norwich regularly contested elections, high turnouts and tumultuous popular participation indicate that the Hanoverian regime was unable to repress dissent and opposition.14 These features, indeed, remained permanent and integral characteristics of the electoral system of the long eighteenth century.

  WHIGS AND TORIES

  The Hanoverian Succession marks a major transition in the history of party. Between 1689 and 1714 the Whigs and Tories had engaged in a fairly equal competition for power. They had shared the spoils and, in Anne’s reign, alternated in government with the Whigs. After 1714 the victory of the Whig Party enabled it to monopolize office and influence and to take its revenge on the Tories. The Whigs were an informal combination of aristocratic leaders, landed gentry, metropolitan and provincial commercial interests and their supporters out in the country. The Tories were consigned to the margins of politics and became a party of permanent opposition. By 1742 there were fewer than 140 Tory MPs and after 1747 fewer than 120, as they fell back upon family boroughs and counties traditionally Tory. (The Tories might have declined still further had it not been for the propertied nature of the electoral system.) In this manner the ‘rage of party’ subsided, but it did not disappear. The Whigs could not allow it to. Their political domination depended, in part at least, upon their ability to demonize the Tories, to present them as a party of plotters and conspirators, engaged with the Jacobites in treason and rebellion. Only in this way could they convince the political nation in general, and the monarch in particular, that the Whig Party alone could maintain legitimate government. In this they were remarkably successful. Only when the political nation ceased to accept these assumptions did Whig supremacy come into question.

  So overwhelming was the extent of Whig v
ictory over the Tories that some historians, notably Sir Lewis Namier15 have wondered whether party continued in any meaningful sense to exist. Certainly, there are countless examples of the continuing hostility which contemporaries displayed towards parties: they were accused of dividing the nation, of spreading sedition and acting merely as the vehicles of individual self-interest. In view of all this, some historians have wondered whether it is more useful to adopt a ‘Court v. Country’ rather than a party interpretation of politics after 1714.16 After all, it is argued, the old party issues of the succession, of religion and of foreign policy were largely resolved. After 1714 the old party battles were replaced by a straightforward conflict between the Whigs, who monopolized court favour, and the Tories who, cast adrift on the seas of permanent opposition, were left to represent ‘Country’ opinion, in alliance with ‘opposition’ or ‘Country’ Whigs, hostile to the court.

  There is some truth in these arguments. After 1714 the intensity of party conflict was weakening and at certain times Country Tories and Country Whigs did act together. Detailed analysis of division lists, however, reveals that in Parliament many Country Whigs chose not to vote with the Tories. When it came to the point they simply could not trust Tories, too many of whom were thought to be tainted with Jacobitism. In the constituencies there are some interesting examples of electors choosing to vote a Country ticket by dividing their two votes between a Tory and a Country Whig. But this was most unusual. For example, in only seven out of 112 contests in England and Wales were Court Whigs opposed by a Tory and a Country Whig at the general election of 1734.

  There was a Country platform, but there was no Country party in the early Hanoverian period. During their lengthy proscription from office the Tories maintained a notable cohesion, but both Tories and opposition Whigs retained their separate identities, their distinct social routines, their own party organizations, their own clubs and their own whipping arrangements. They were capable of presenting a unified front on particular occasions, particularly during Walpole’s later years, but they were never capable of sustaining such unity. Samuel Sandys, a leading Tory, regarded place and pension bills as ‘the flurries of a day’, not as long-term political goals. In truth, Country Whigs and Country Tories had always found it difficult to work together. In the years of Whig disunity between 1717 and 1720 Tories and opposition Whigs tried to coalesce in opposing the government’s foreign policy, but they were not able to cement a stable alliance. Furthermore, although Tories and Country Whigs could unite against standing armies, their reasons for doing so were very different: Tories hated standing armies on principle; many Whigs accepted the principle but wished to reduce the size of the army. Even more fatal to the thesis of a ‘Country party’ of Tories and opposition Whigs were the events surrounding the threatened no-confidence motion of February 1741 against the ministry of Walpole. This should have been an ideal opportunity for Tories and Country Whigs to work together, but the Tories refused to vote with the Whigs on the grounds that the motion threatened the royal prerogative of appointing ministers. The Tories were determined not to be pawns in the endgame of the opposition Whigs.

  This is not to say that the attitudes and ideas of Court and Country were not at times of the greatest importance both within and without the political nation. But the hypothesis that early Hanoverian politics was dominated by these distinctions cannot be accepted. The basic structural polarity of politics in this period remained that between Whig and Tory. This argument can be developed with reference to four related issues. First, we now know – Namier could not have done – that the Tory Party continued to exist as a functioning political entity throughout this period and into the 1760s.17 We now also know that the Jacobites represented a more considerable danger to the regime than used to be thought. Together, the Jacobites and the Tories constituted a real threat to Whig hegemony. In the end the threat was repulsed but nobody at the time, least of all the Whigs, could be certain that it would be. It is, then, the conflict between the Whigs on the one hand and the Tories and Jacobites on the other which constituted the central agenda of politics in the post-1714 period, not that between Court and Country. Second, although Namier had argued that in the constituencies little more than emotional nostalgia for the old party battles lingered on, we now know that in many places the conflict between Whigs and Tories dominated electoral politics long into the Hanoverian period. Although the survival of party was uneven, and the timing and the pattern of its ultimate decline varied from place to place, there could be no doubt of its currency, especially in the boroughs, many of which remained open to election contests.18 In these we find that electoral activity was characterized by party issues, a party-conscious electorate, impressive party organization and, not least, popular enthusiasm for one side or the other. The election of 1722, for example, was accompanied by noisy demonstrations by Tories, which sometimes had Jacobite overtones. Furthermore, the electoral history of London in the reigns of the first two Hanoverian monarchs can only be understood within a party framework.19 Third, and, in some degree as a consequence, contemporaries were coming to recognize the constitutional value of party connections and thus to recognize them as thoroughly legitimate political forms. In the 1740s, for example, many writers accepted the abiding reality of party divisions and pointed to their usefulness in preserving parliamentary and personal liberty. In the 1750s, indeed, some of the Whigs who remained outside the charmed circle of the Pelhams were even arguing the virtues of formed and systematic opposition based on party connection. Finally, although Namier declared that ‘the political life of the nation could be fully described without ever using a party denomination’ there can be no doubt that party terminology was in common usage down to and including the 1750s. For example, after the general election of 1754 Lord Dupplin, a government election manager, classified every single MP in party terms. Party labels were still widely employed during election campaigns and in their reporting. In general, then, we may be satisfied that, although the party battle was by no means as intense as it had once been, the distinctions between Whig and Tory continue to provide the most relevant and intelligible structural framework for understanding early Hanoverian politics. Yet there can be no denying the ineluctable decline of party tensions in the 1740s and 1750s. The old issues of religion, the succession and of foreign policy had lost much of the immediacy they had enjoyed in the earlier decades of the century. Independent Country gentlemen in both parties showed increasing signs of adopting Country stances on place bills and the Septennial Act. In the constituencies, there is some evidence that the strictly partisan voting of the reign of Anne and the early years of George I was slightly weakening. From the evidence we have, the non-partisan vote roughly doubled in London between 1710–13 and 1727 and in Bristol between 1722 and 1734. Furthermore, while we may recognize the overall continuation of a Whig–Tory duality in Hanoverian politics, there were other sources of support for, and opposition to, the dynasty: political, religious and cultural.

  The conflict of parties in the eighteenth century was based on the principle that it was legitimate to oppose the king’s government. In strict constitutional theory, political opposition could be, and was, deemed unpatriotic and even treasonable because ministers were appointed by the king; in practice, opposition was a regular feature of eighteenth-century political life. Its value in keeping ministers on their toes, criticizing their actions and thus limiting their pretensions, was widely recognized even by government writers during the 1730s and, after the fall of Walpole, by a flood of pamphlets. Some of them recognized only the right of MPs to oppose measures; others proclaimed the right of the opposition to displace ministers. In the 1750s some writers went so far as to lament the absence of opposition and to deplore the possible dangers to liberties which might follow its disappearance. But none of these writers was prepared to countenance an indiscriminate opposition. For example, a formed or ‘systematic’ opposition, designed to force the king into a wholesale replacement of his minist
ers, was considered illegitimate. Opposition leaders like Pulteney and Carteret did not seek to dictate a general removal of Walpole and his ministerial colleagues. What they sought were places for themselves and some of their friends. This was entirely permissible, recalling as it did the seventeenth-century convention that it was a duty to oppose the king’s ‘evil counsellors’. Such ministerial changes normally amounted to little more than minor adjustments of personnel, and rarely carried with them serious policy implications. This distinction is an extremely important one: it lies at the heart of the political strategies of successive oppositions and it goes far towards explaining the nature of party conflict in the early Hanoverian period.

  These inhibitions upon ‘systematic’ opposition help to explain the currency of the ‘heir-apparent’ cycle, the tendency of successive heirs of the throne to act as the focus of political groups opposed to the existing administration meeting at the Prince’s court at Leicester House in London. Between 1717 and 1720, 1737 and 1742, 1747 and 1751 and 1755 and 1757 the court of the heir to the throne acted as the political and social focal point of the activities of politicians in opposition. For their part, the heirs had much to gain from putting pressure on their fathers. In 1720 the future George II obtained greater social freedom for himself; in 1742 Frederick, Prince of Wales, doubled his personal allowance and in 1756 the future George III gained approval for the appointment of Lord Bute to lead his household. More generally the heirs liked to surround themselves with friendly politicians who would assist them in preparing for the reign to come. Thus, although there had not yet evolved a shadow cabinet, Leicester House offered nothing less than a shadow court in which those opposed to the existing monarch and his ministers could register their loyalty to the dynasty. Circumstances and conventions, then, both permitted and even facilitated the practice of party politics after 1714. The rest of this section will explore the (very different) experiences of the Whig and Tory parties and try to analyse their respective qualities as parties.