To what extent does the ‘stability’ thesis apply to Scotland and Ireland? Perhaps it is significant that Plumb regarded Scotland and Ireland merely as managerial problems requiring little more than containment. Indeed, he actually dismissed the government of Scotland and Ireland as ‘minor matters’.2 For Plumb, all that was needed in Scotland was sensible management of policy and patronage to allow time for the beneficial economic effects of the Act of Union to show themselves. No wonder that he credits Walpole with solving the Scottish problem. As for Ireland, the problem was successfully ‘contained’ early in the century. But later, with the consequences of economic prosperity, a growing number of Irish families were left dangerously outside the Irish establishment. Furthermore, Plumb’s peremptory account of political ‘stability’ in the Celtic kingdoms characteristically ignores the underlying religious problem. The existence of a Presbyterian religious establishment in Scotland alienated the mass of Episcopalians. Even worse, the existence of an Anglican establishment in Ireland offended the mass of the Roman Catholic population. In both countries there were denominational challenges throughout the Hanoverian period. On any definition, ‘stability’ could not be achieved in these circumstances. All that could be done was to use political patronage together with immediate security measures to keep the lid on potentially explosive situations. In Ireland this was achieved for several decades without much difficulty. So long as Jacobitism remained a threat to English supremacy in Ireland then the Ascendancy would make few serious difficulties for the British government. But, even on Plumb’s definition, this hardly amounted to a satisfactory and ‘stable’ situation. Even worse, in Scotland the idea of ‘stability’ surely cannot be maintained in the short term in view of the reaction against the Act of Union and the rebellions of 1715 and 1745.
On a more general chronology, it is difficult to accept the case that political stability had come to Britain by the middle of the eighteenth century. After all, the political convulsions of the early years of the reign of George III, the great political and military crisis of 1779–84, the Irish rebellion of 1798 and the attendant economic and political disruption, to say nothing of the great radical challenge to the political order between 1815 and 1821, do not suggest any long-term and settled stability. As we shall see in later chapters of this work, they suggest rather a recurrent tendency for Hanoverian politics to collapse into renewed instability. The achievement of stability in the first half of the eighteenth century may have been a notable achievement, but it was only a temporary one. That it represented any sort of enduring legacy is difficult to demonstrate.
Plumb’s optimistic treatment of the ‘stability’ of the period after 1725 may be reviewed and its validity questioned, but in the end, whether that period is to be described as ‘stable’ or ‘unstable’ can only be decided by reference to an agreed set of criteria. Strictly speaking, on Plumb’s own criteria – ‘the acceptance by society of its political institutions, and of those classes of men and officials who control them’ – we must conclude that stability did not prevail at all times because of the ‘45 rebellion, unless its ultimate failure is to be construed as ‘acceptance’. Elsewhere in his book, as we have seen, Plumb adopts different criteria of ‘stability’. For example, he demands ‘a sense of common identity’ among those who wield political, social and economic power, but unless ‘a sense of common identity’ is more closely defined, it is difficult to take the discussion much further. Furthermore, we are surely entitled to establish ‘whose stability’ we are referring to: that of the Whigs, or the Tories, or Walpole, or Bolingbroke, or Henry Pelham or William Pitt or, indeed, to which stratum of the population?
One way out of this impasse may be found in the reformulation of the stability thesis undertaken by Geoffrey Holmes in 1981.3 What Holmes sought to do was to investigate the social and economic foundations of Plumb’s alleged political stability. In doing so, he in effect changed the terms in which the argument was being conducted. In demonstrating that the foundations of stability were strong and healthy, he showed how political conflict could be managed and contained. In a sense, he scaled down the significance of such political instability as might be found because the social and economic groundwork of the regime was so secure. In this way, the ‘stability’ thesis could be broadened out into the social and economic arenas and, in this way, salvaged and strengthened.
Holmes argued that three major economic developments impinged upon the issue of political stability. The first was a modest increase in population. From the mid-seventeenth century down to 1736, the population of England and Wales increased by only a gentle 3–4 per cent per annum. As a result there was little pressure upon either economic or political resources. Indeed, the standard of living of the mass of the people almost certainly improved. Second, there is some evidence that real wages may have been increasing in some industries by as much as 25 per cent between 1680 and 1720. Certainly, agricultural prices remained stable between 1660 and 1750 and England became a grain-exporting country after 1670. For these reasons, popular protest was rarely tinged with political radicalism. Indeed, the lower orders seemed uninterested in popular agitation, and in dangerous years like 1688–9, 1715 and 1745–6, they remained strikingly docile. Third, a significant increase in the amount of employment available in the professions met the needs of the younger sons of the gentry, whether in the church, in the law or in the armed services, which increased in size so rapidly after 1689. Such career decisions amounted to family commitments to and personal investments in the regime. Moreover, the dramatic expansion in foreign and colonial trade opened up further prospects of employment and profit to the rural and urban elites. Had these opportunities not existed, such people might have become disenchanted with the regime and might even have had a motive for undermining it, for giving covert or overt support to the Jacobites or for resuming the rage of party with its attendant bitterness and mistrust. Certainly, many Tory families, shut out for decades from political power, were yet able to console themselves with reasonable economic prosperity and the possibility of professional advancement.
One of the great merits of Holmes’s treatment of ‘stability’ is its readiness to show the capacity of social factors to take the sting out of such problems as had proved incapable of political solution. An additional advantage of Holmes’s arguments is that they draw attention to dynamic elements in Hanoverian society. Too frequently, it has been assumed that the achievement of political stability was accompanied by oligarchical tendencies in political and social history whose consequence was to maintain the status quo. Yet when we look beyond Parliament and Westminster, we uncover an urban world where potential conflict flourished – between Whig and Tory, Anglican and Dissenter, local families and civic corporations, whether arising from national issues or local differences. Yet even in these communities most affected, local government continued to operate, streets were lit, houses and bridges were built, and schools were maintained. A civilized social life continued. The forces of community solidarity were in most places stronger than those of division and instability and could accommodate the pressures of change and innovation. The concept of stability, whether political or social, should not emphasize the absence of change and challenge but should rather incorporate them. Holmes’s thesis does this, as well as building valuable bridges between political and social developments. However, the stability debate, valuable though it has been in illuminating many of the political issues concerning the Hanoverian regime, has not even now succeeded in giving due weight to religious considerations.
A CONFESSIONAL REGIME?
England in the early eighteenth century was a confessional state, a state in which one official confession of faith, Anglicanism, was established by statute and enforced through the law – a faith, moreover, in theory accepted and practised by the vast majority of the population. Fear of Catholicism and arbitrary power was kept on the boil by the continuing threat of Jacobitism, by the rebellion of 1715, by the plots of 1717, 1
719 and 1722, by the rebellion of 1745, by the assumed threat of Catholicism in Ireland, by the constant justifications of the Penal Laws and by the economic and social punishments inflicted upon convicted Roman Catholic recusants. A confessional state was thus characterized by uniformity and conformity in religion. Moreover, a confessional state did not only service the religious needs of its people but also intervened widely in many areas of social life, such as education, the treatment of the poor and the care of the sick and hungry. Most contemporaries believed that adherence to the Anglican communion was necessary for the enjoyment of the full rights of a citizen. This is reflected in the fact that more religious works were published than any other category and the sermon remained the most effective means of spreading ideas and opinions.
At the end of the seventeenth century, the Church of England had survived the attacks of its enemies and had managed to maintain its established status. In the reign of Charles II, the position of the church had been guaranteed by Test and Corporation Acts and by the Licensing Act. After the Glorious Revolution, the protection provided by these guarantees was removed. The ending of censorship in 1695 was particularly serious, opening the doors to an avalanche of anti-Anglican propaganda. Attempts to reinforce the position of the church, for example by Tory bills Against Occasional Conformity, all failed at the hands of the Whigs. The Whig supremacy in the state after 1714 was matched by the supremacy of the low-church party in the church. In the famous Bangorian Controversy of 1717, the lower house of Convocation attacked the extreme low-church views of Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor.4 To prevent a prolonged and damaging dispute, the Whigs suppressed Convocation, the national representative body of the Anglican church. This deprived the church of its independent means of expression and its main focus of discussion. Without Convocation, the church was incapable of evolving measured policy responses to its own internal problems, still less to the challenge of its enemies. After 1717, the low-church party was in the ascendancy. Walpole and Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, were careful to promote only safe low-church men to the highest offices in the church after 1723, a policy that was largely continued by the Duke of Newcastle, who assumed the control of ecclesiastical patronage after the quarrel between Walpole and Gibson in 1736.5
Such developments have helped to convince generations of the Church of England’s enemies – Tories, Methodists, Evangelicals, Protestant Dissenters, Roman Catholics and radical reformers – as well as historians that the eighteenth-century church was little better than an instrument of state, a mouthpiece for the Whig supremacy. There is much to support this view. After all, the supremacy of the state over the Church of England was in practice demonstrated by the willingness of the bench of bishops in the House of Lords to defend successive Whig administrations, although they were on rare occasions prepared to vote against the government of the day if ecclesiastical interests were thought to be at stake, for example on the Quakers’ Title Bill of 1731, which may have damaged he church’s economic interests. Normally, however, conformity prevailed. Ecclesiastical patrons supported Whig candidates at parliamentary elections, while waves of sermons, pamphlets and treatises gave patient Anglican blessing to the Whig supremacy. It was demonstrated more widely by the phenomenon of lay patronage, the legal and historical right of lay patrons to appoint to clerical livings: by the middle of the eighteenth century, lay patrons were appointing to slightly over half of them. The domination of the church by the state could not be more starkly illustrated.
More recently, a revisionist approach to the issue of the extent to which England was a confessional state in the eighteenth century has attracted considerable attention. To revisionist scholars, the church was the dominant social force in the eighteenth century. ‘The ubiquitous agency of the state was the church, quartering the land not into a few hundred constituencies but into ten thousand parishes, impinging on the daily lives of the great majority, supporting its black-coated intelligentsia, bidding for a monopoly of education, piety and political acceptability.’ Anglicanism was much more than a ‘political theology’; it was a pervasive social cement binding all orders of society. ‘The ideology of the Confessional State thus legitimised social hierarchy, underpinned social relationships and inculcated humility, submission and obedience.’6 According to this interpretation, Britain was governed not so much by a Whig supremacy as an Anglican supremacy, in which an Anglican elite retained control of the most powerful positions not only in the church and in politics but also in the universities, the public schools, the armed services and the other professions. Challenges to the confessional state might occur, but such challenges simply provided opportunities for the reassertion and reiteration of the principles and assumptions upon which it was based. During the crises associated with Jacobitism and, later, in the crises occasioned by first the American Revolution and then by the French Revolution, many Anglican clergy preached sermons reminding their congregations of their place in the confessional state. Through obedience and submission to the church, the state would be strengthened and preserved.
Such a revisionist interpretation of English society presents a conservative view of a stable and continuing church-state, one that emphasizes the importance of traditional institutions and attitudes at the expense of modern and ‘progressive’ forces such as secularism, radicalism and reform. In many ways, revisionism has been a healthy corrective to an established historiography which, for several decades, had played down the influence of Anglicanism upon public as well as private life in the eighteenth century.7 It is, moreover, in line with the results of recent research which has reasserted the central significance of religion in political and social thought. If the early eighteenth century was not a golden age of Anglican culture, it was, nevertheless, a buoyant one. Religious themes continued to be powerful in painting, literature and music, and excellent religious verse was composed. Concerts of church music became very popular and the sale of religious artefacts became something of a vital sub-theme in the development of consumer markets. In the middle of the century, the sacred oratorios of Handel epitomized this society’s continuing preoccupation with religious themes. Furthermore, when contemporaries discussed the relationship between the state and the church, they did so in theological terms, in terms that owed more to Hooker and Filmer than to Locke and natural rights.8 This was of great political as well as theological significance. It did much to ensure the loyalty of Tories to the regime. The Tories of the early eighteenth century may have been defeated politically, but the strength of their attachment to the Anglican church guaranteed their allegiance to the regime. They did not need to be told that the continuing strength of the church was absolutely necessary to the preservation of social order. Most people, not just high-church writers, accepted the interdependence of church and state as both natural and desirable.
But to what extent has this revisionist approach to the Church of England succeeded in refuting the old allegations which had been so devastatingly critical of that church? To what extent can the extensive claims for the Anglican church contained within the revisionist thesis of a confessional state be justified? These, for convenience, may be separated into four distinct issues. To what extent was the church in the confessional state controlled by the political authorities? To what extent was the church corrupted by its association with the state? How successfully did the church maintain religious practice and belief among the mass of the people? Finally, in what degree was the church able to maintain the confessional state by enforcing religious conformity?
On the first of these, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Church of England came under stringent political control after 1714. Its bishops were required to reside in London, in order to attend Parliament, rather than their dioceses during the (normally lengthy) annual sessions. The highest posts in the church were treated as political appointments. Many of the lowest, including those subject to lay patronage, were outside the church’s control (the church itself had the right to appoi
nt to little more than a quarter of all livings). Politicians and administrators may have paid their respects to the ideals of a confessional state, but when we peruse their private correspondence, we rarely find Anglican principles among the explained motives for their actions.
Yet, we should not rush to condemn the church. Its religious and administrative standards remained high and exhibited little sign of decline or degeneration, at least during the period covered by this chapter. Walpole, Gibson and Newcastle tended to promote to the bench of bishops reliable and competent men who had both pastoral and administrative ability. Their relationships with the state were marked more by cooperation than by servility. On occasion they had the temerity to oppose government measures, such as a proposal to reduce the duties on spirits in 1743. The early Hanoverian bench included some distinguished names such as Wake of Lincoln and Canterbury and Nicolson of Carlisle. Others may have had lesser reputations, but there were few sinners among them. Recent research has discredited anecdotal evidence about the fabulous, wealthy and aristocratic lifestyles of the Hanoverian bishops, although many of them were from aristocratic backgrounds. On the whole, although the bishops may not have been men of great religious passion, they were something more than the political time-servers of historical legend.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 33