The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  If these were the great years of William Pitt then they were harsh and bitter years for the opposition of Charles James Fox, the Duke of Portland and Lord North. Having gambled heavily – and lost – during the political crisis of 1782–4 they were now licking their wounds. Their prospects for the rest of the present reign seemed hopeless; they were marking time, hoping for the king to die and for the Prince of Wales to succeed. What was the point of the harsh and punishing round of constitutional opposition if failure was inevitable? Past reverses and the hopelessness of their future prospects gnawed away both at their confidence and at their sense of responsibility. They continued to indulge the Prince of Wales and to be identified with him in the public mind. This was to be most damaging. Not only was the prince widely disliked; he used the opposition for his own purposes – usually to help him extort money from Pitt and George III – and involved them in his private dealings. These were not only unwholesome. When he married Mrs Fitzherbert, a Catholic, in 1785, they became unconstitutional, for the marriage violated not only the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 (which required the consent of the monarch to the marriage of a royal) but also the Act of Succession of 1701 (which forbade the marriage of a monarch to a Catholic). Although Fox and the Whig leaders denied the rumours, such associations were politically damaging and compared badly with Pitt’s loyal service to his king and his country.

  The opposition was also plagued with problems of leadership. The Duke of Portland deferred to Charles James Fox in most things. Fox was a charismatic figure, whose talent for friendship and loyalty combined with great oratorical gifts. Although Fox was a towering public figure it was clear that he could neither control nor discipline the rising young men in the party, such as R. B. Sheridan, the playwright, and Charles Grey, the future Reform Bill prime minister. During these years, too, Edmund Burke drifted away from a central position in the everyday concerns of the opposition, applying himself to causes which transcended party, not least that of the reform of the government of India.8 Pitt was careful, after 1785 at least, to present the fewest possible targets for the opposition to aim at. Fox was frustrated and restless in the placid political climate, yearning for great events and dreaming of major issues. Opposition attendance at Parliament became casual and policy was sometimes treated lightly. On many issues, especially those touching taxation and tariffs, for example, the opposition agreed with Pitt and did little to oppose him. When they did, they carried little conviction. Their hostility to the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1786 was little more than traditional anti-French prejudice.

  Yet these years were not entirely without marks of positive achievement for the opposition. Its attendance may have been less than regular, but so was that of oppositions throughout the century. Indeed, a policy of occasional but wounding attacks could be more successful than months of solid, if pointless, toil. The defeat of Pitt on the Westminster Scrutiny, Irish Trade and Fortifications in 1785–6 owed much to the ability of the opposition to attack where Pitt was weakest and to rally the independents. Furthermore, the opposition maintained its cohesion and its identity. It stabilized its numbers and suffered few defections during the 1784–90 Parliament. It began to organize more effectively than it had done in the past, raising and spending money in a more systematic manner, preparing for elections and using propaganda in a more professional and bureaucratic manner than hitherto. In William Adam it had an efficient and willing party manager. Adam was a Scottish MP and former Northite who since 1782 had been close to Fox. He did much to weld the two wings of the coalition into a working unit, acting as a party whip. By 1790 the opposition controlled five London papers, had established three funds and employed a string of agents to help with the work of electoral preparation and national political organization. As the Regency Crisis of 1788–9 was to demonstrate, this opposition could sustain for several months a major organizational challenge to one of the most successful administrations of the century, dividing around 200 time and time again. Few oppositions of the century could claim as much.

  At the ideological level the coalition marked time, its two wings, Rockinghamite and Northite, incapable of sharing, and thus of shaping, a common political tradition. The Northites were never really incorporated into the party of Portland and Fox, and by the end of the decade the unity of the coalition was less coherent than ever. The old Rockinghamites believed that the king’s intervention in the House of Lords over the India Bill in 1783 had been simply a further manifestation of the system of secret influence which had existed since the beginning of the reign; the Northites, who made up 40 per cent of the foot soldiers in opposition and who had spent their political lives operating the system, found such language mystifying.9 Outwardly, at least, most of them went along with it. They would not have done so if they had been fed a diet of stale charges about Lord Bute. In the 1780s tirades against secret influence gave way to criticism of an overweening first minister and to defence of the independence of the House of Commons. The other serious division between the two wings was on the subject of parliamentary reform, but Fox had agreed to abandon his support for the measure when the coalition had first been negotiated. It cannot be regarded as a major bone of contention in the opposition between 1784 and 1790, but it remained a potentially serious problem which would in time return to torment the opposition.

  The only threat to Pitt’s political supremacy in these years occurred during the Regency Crisis of 1788–9. In November 1788 the king was once again afflicted with an attack of porphyria. On this occasion the attack was so serious as to raise the possibility of his permanent incapacity. In October 1788 Pitt introduced a Regency Bill which would have installed the Prince of Wales, albeit with reduced powers, on the throne as regent. Unwisely, Fox and his friends opposed and delayed the passage of the bill, arguing that the limitations placed upon his power, including that which prevented him from making peers, unfairly derogated from royal power. They would have been better advised to have accepted the limitations, and passed the bill. Had they done so, the prince would almost certainly have removed Pitt’s government and replaced it with one fashioned from the opposition. As it was, the opposition was left to argue an unconvincing case and one that emphasized the absolute hereditary right of the prince to succeed to the throne without the need for parliamentary sanction. This was scarcely good Whig doctrine. Burke was horrified at this assertion of hereditary, royal power. Rockingham would have turned in his grave. Moreover, they argued the case badly; Pitt was far more at home in the tricky world of historical precedents and constitutional theory than Fox. After bitter political exchanges lasting for several months, the bill passed the Commons. The king recovered in February 1789, just in time to prevent the passage of the bill through the Lords. Once more Pitt had repulsed the attacks of Fox and the opposition, safeguarded his ministry and won the gratitude of the king and most sections of public opinion. On the eve of the French Revolution, therefore, Pitt’s administration appeared to be almost untouchable. During the following years, it would be tested to its very foundations.

  REFORM POLITICS, 1763–1789

  The reform movements of this period have customarily been seen as the ancestor and origin of the reform movements of the early nineteenth century and thus of the Reform Act of 1832. Its critical place in the emergence of a modern, reformed and more democratic political system gives it particular significance. So compelling has it seemed that many historians have actually adopted the perspectives of the reformers themselves and claimed that Hanoverian politics were corrupt, its electoral system ludicrously unrepresentative and its management autocratic and intimidating. On this reading, Britain badly needed a new electoral system to keep abreast of the remarkable changes in population, in society and in the economy.

  In the face of such an emotive, thematic interpretation, a few warnings need to be issued. Most contemporaries were in fact content with their parliamentary system and the electoral structure which underpinned it. To the modern mind the distribution of seats,
the varied nature of the franchise and the rumbustious method of electoral campaigning seem anomalous and unfamiliar. The old electoral system, however, lasted as long as it did because it worked in a rough and ready fashion to meet contemporary requirements. The output of private bill legislation demonstrated Parliament’s readiness to provide for local needs. Moreover, the fact that the electoral system may not have been representative did not unduly trouble contemporaries. It was not intended to reflect population. It is true that new towns sprang up and old ones increased in size, but it is important to recognize that some of their residents could vote in county elections even if the town lacked separate representation. At the same time, we should not be too ready to assume that the eighteenth-century reform movement was simply a by-product of social and economic changes. Radical reform was not simply a response to the increase in population: reform opinion was to be found in some areas of the country least affected by it. The demand for reform was not merely a consequence of rapid industrialization: in the 1760s industrialization had hardly begun. Similarly, the demand for reform cannot be linked exclusively to urbanization because reform activity, especially in 1779–85, was to be found in many rural areas. Least of all, was it a reflection of the rise of the middle class: many sections of the middling orders were notably unsympathetic to reform. In any case, the key reform demand was less for the enlargement of borough electorates than for their transference to county constituencies.

  More plausible is the view that the origins of many aspects of the radical reform movement of the later eighteenth century had to some extent been anticipated by the Tory Party, and, to a more limited extent, by the opposition Whigs, of the first half of the century. There is some similarity, for example, between the open boroughs in which the Tories enjoyed strong popular support (Bristol, Coventry, London, Newcastle, Norwich, Westminster), those unrepresented towns which might in the middle of the eighteenth century more realistically be labelled Tory than Whig (Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester) and those towns which were later to be identified with reform. It was the opposition to Walpole which commanded the great urban centres and the Tories who were the ‘popular’ party. Tories wished to remodel the electoral system in order to improve their prospects of power. Chronically incapable of persuading the Commons to pass their place and pensions bills, they moved on to adopt a platform of measures which would later be included within the label of parliamentary reform. These included a variety of expedients whose purpose was to increase the influence of electors over their MPs, not least campaigns for ‘instructions’ which would bind MPs. As early as 1722 several constituencies were demanding undertakings from their members that they would support a triennial act. During the Excise Crisis of 1733–4, indeed, over fifty constituencies instructed their members against the excise, and on subsequent issues between 1733 and 1756 no fewer than twenty-one constituencies instructed their MPs on at least three occasions. By then the Tories had come to embrace the principle of the redistribution of seats, especially the abolition of rotten boroughs and their redistribution to the counties. After the demise of the Tory Party in the early 1760s its traditions of extra-parliamentary political action and its programme of parliamentary reform were available for any political group that wished to protest against the men and measures of the governments of George III. By this period the relation between politics, press and people was changing. It was becoming harder for the government and the political elite to restrict political debate while numerous contacts between high politics and opinion out of doors were developing. The growth of the press, the spread of coffee and tea houses and the founding of political clubs expanded the opportunities for political debate. All that was needed to mobilize discontents was a political crisis and a popular figure who could work on the materials of protest. The first was provided by the accession of George III and the ending of the Seven Years’ War; the second was furnished by the astonishing figure of John Wilkes. The social and economic background – post-war depression, declining trade and lower wages, rising unemployment and higher prices – did not create the Wilkite agitation, but did much to provide an audience and not a few participants.

  Wilkes had been in Parliament as MP for Aylesbury since 1757. Although he had moved on the fringes of Pitt’s circle, he had made little mark in the House. In June 1762, however, he founded the North Briton, an opposition newspaper which was intended to be a counterblast to the pro-Bute Briton. The paper quickly became notorious for its outspoken attitude to the royal family, even alleging a sexual relationship between Bute and the Princess Dowager. Then, in the famous issue no. 45 on 23 April 1763, Wilkes attacked not only the Treaty of Paris but also the ministry and the person of the king in offensive terms. The king, according to issue no. 45, was either a liar or the instrument of lying ministers. Such language almost invited retaliation. George Grenville’s response was to issue on 30 April a general warrant for the arrest of those responsible for the offending issue, and Wilkes was imprisoned. General warrants did not name an accused individual but merely specified the crime of which he was accused. They were capable of an alarmingly wide interpretation: the accused’s person, home and possessions were at the mercy of the authorities. Wilkes made a flamboyant public protest against the unconstitutionality of general warrants, even though they had been used throughout the century. Lord Chief Justice Pratt freed him on the grounds that his imprisonment had violated his privileges as an MP Wilkes, however, asserted that he owed his liberty not to his status as an MP but to the common-law tradition of English freedom. Determined to keep the issue alive, Wilkes sued the government for trespass. He was successful, the judge declaring general warrants ‘unconstitutional, illegal and absolutely void’ – a verdict which established the precedent for the later legal processes which put an end to the warrants. After these embarrassments the government decided to make an example of Wilkes. On 15 November 1763 the House of Commons voted by 237 to 111 that issue no. 45 was a ‘false, scandalous and seditious libel’. At the same time, the cabinet denounced Wilkes for his part in the composition of the Essay on Women, a semi-pornographic parody of Pope’s Essay on Man.

  At this point Wilkes, fearing arrest, left for Paris, and he was absent when Parliament returned to the matter of general warrants. His expulsion from the House was voted on 19 January 1764 by 225 to 64; and, after one of the most famous debates (and narrowest divisions) of the century on 17/18 February 1764, Parliament approved the conduct of the ministry by 232 to 218. It was natural for the government to make use of its majorities and of the courts against the absent Wilkes, but it earned little public credit for doing so. Not surprisingly, however, the rising tide of sympathy for Wilkes ebbed in his absence.

  Wilkes returned to England for the general election of 1768, hoping that his election to a seat would save him from the sentence of outlawry which had been passed against him. Furthermore, he hoped for better treatment from the Chatham administration than he had received at the hands of George Grenville. His victory at Middlesex, however, led only to his imprisonment on outstanding charges of blasphemy and libel. Rioting in his favour led to the ‘Massacre of St George’s Field’ in May 1768, in which seven people died and fifty were injured. However, Chatham’s government was no more sympathetic to Wilkes than Grenville’s had been. Its majority in parliament expelled Wilkes from the House for his attack on the government for the ‘Massacre’, and a new election for Middlesex was ordered. At the subsequent election Wilkes was again returned and duly expelled. At a further election he was elected yet again, and not only expelled but also replaced by his defeated opponent, Colonel Luttrell, who had obtained only a quarter of Wilkes’s votes. It was one thing to expel a member for his personal behaviour, and even for his political opinions, but it was quite another to seat his defeated opponent. In the opinion of many, the rights of the Middlesex electors were being seemingly ignored and, indeed, overridden by an autocratic government.

  By now, Wilkes had become something of a popular hero. His cont
inuing imprisonment only emphasized his popularity and invited some sort of popular response. It came in the shape of an avalanche of gifts and of money. His release early in 1770 set off rejoicing on an unprecedented national scale. Wilkes’s extraordinary career now assumed new directions. He became a hero in America as a symbol of English liberty. He was elected as an Alderman of the City of London in 1769, Sheriff in 1771 and in 1774 Lord Mayor. He defended the freedom of the press during the Printers’ Case in 1771 and with the help of the London mob safeguarded the publication of parliamentary debates. Elected to Parliament once more in 1774 Wilkes advocated popular causes, spoke for the American colonists, defended the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’, championed the reform of Parliament and advocated greater toleration for Catholics and Dissenters. Later in life, with the experiences of the Gordon Riots and the French Revolution behind him, Wilkes became a conservative pillar of the establishment, but his earlier extraordinary career as a ‘man of the people’ deserves further analysis.