The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Political consolidation was matched by social consolidation. The social and propertied elite closed its ranks, in the Loyal Associations, in the army and navy, in the Volunteer regiments, on the bench, in the professions, in local and national voluntary and charitable bodies and, of course, in the church. E. P. Thompson has argued that the aristocracy were likely to have been confronted by a bourgeois challenge had the war not strengthened their position.41 Nothing could be further from the truth. As I shall argue in Chapter 10, until the second decade of the nineteenth century there was little sign of any desire among the middling orders to displace the aristocracy, every sign of their wish to collaborate with them. Political unity and social consolidation were accompanied by forms of economic response to the problems of the masses which served to safeguard the regime. The doubling of some food prices within less than two years in the middle of the 1790s created enormous pressure on resources, giving rise to terrible human distress. It was the operation of the Poor Law which did much to stabilize and perhaps to save the situation. In 1795 the Berkshire magistrates sitting at Newbury, following precedents elsewhere, laid down that a labourer’s wages should be supplemented out of the parish rate to an extent depending upon the price of bread. Furthermore, he should receive an allowance for his wife and each child. This humane set of decisions was furiously denounced by conservatives. Burke, in his flinty Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1797), somehow managed to convince himself that magistrates should not interfere with the operations of the free market, whose principles were equivalent to ‘the laws of God’. Had people listened to Burke it is likely that the countryside and towns might have been terrorized by roaming bands of starving vagrants. What saved the situation, however, was not merely the Poor Law – in 1802–3, according to one return to Parliament, no less than 90 per cent of those dependent on the Poor Law were also in receipt of outdoor relief – but, what is not to be underestimated, an immense expansion in private charity and relief. In 1795–6 the poor received more money in charitable gifts than they did from the Poor Law. In 1796, indeed, some evangelicals even founded the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, a body which proceeded to distribute cheap food and handy recipes while founding soup kitchens and subsidizing village shops.

  The avoidance of revolution in Britain has been recently attributed to the fact that the conservatives had the best of the political argument.42 It is true that the writings of Paley, Burke and Hannah More laid out the conservative case with clarity, weight and wit, but it is not obvious that their writings were superior to some of the greatest reforming literature in British history. Unless there exists a set of agreed external criteria by which it can be rationally demonstrated that, for example, Burke had the better of the argument against Price or Paine or Thelwall or Wollstonecraft or Godwin or Spence, it does not seem that superiority on either side can be established beyond dispute. Nevertheless, the ready availability of conservative literature may have helped to steady the intellectual support of the regime. Although Loyalist groups were by no means unvaryingly instruments of the state, Pitt’s government was happy to subsidise selected pamphlets and authors. Long before Burke pronounced his classic vindication of the regime in Reflections on the Revolution in France other writers had ventured their own defences of the existing system. The arguments in favour of the status quo were already in place by 1790. A natural process of simplification encouraged an enormous outpouring of popular literature designed to safeguard the labouring orders from sedition. Hannah More’s two-penny ‘Repository Tracts’ had a wide circulation: in 1795, at their height, 300,000 copies were sold or distributed free. How much notice was taken of such literature is impossible to measure but it may have had some effect, convincing humble people that, whatever their deficiencies, the laws, institutions and people with which they were familiar worked reasonably well and had weighty justifications. They may have been persuaded that to imitate the French Revolution would have been dangerous as well as ungodly, and that deference brought its own blessings. Indeed, the loyalists may have been more adept than their radical counterparts at speaking and writing simply and clearly to humble people. Much radical literature went over the heads of the masses. Much of it was intellectually demanding; little of it is strikingly popular. Even Paine, about whose popularity with the lower orders much is often assumed, is likely to have been too taxing for them. Furthermore, few radical writers – Paine and Thelwall are among the exceptions – actually had anything in the slightest degree realistic to suggest about the cure for poverty. Most radicals, of course, wanted to weaken rather than to strengthen the state. Most would have been horrified at the suggestion of a welfare state funded through taxation and manned by a benevolent bureaucracy.

  Such propaganda was underwritten by renewed religious pressures towards social discipline and conformity. These were years not only of Anglican recovery but also of Methodist revival in places as far apart as Lancashire and Cornwall. The Anglican church played a prominent part in promoting discipline and patriotic loyalty during the difficult years of war and poverty. Older arguments about the need for sanction and restraint were now accompanied by newer arguments about duty focusing upon the social needs of the 1790s. But it would be unwise to exaggerate the influence of a church whose hold on the mass of the people was by no means complete. The Methodists actively rivalled the Anglicans in their anxiety to tranquillize the masses. Although it used to be suggested that Methodism was a catalyst of protest and a vehicle of class formation, historians as distinct as Halevy and E. E. Thompson, however, have seen in Methodism a mechanism of social control.43 In the 1790s, at least, it was official Methodism that denounced agitation. In 1792 the statutes of the Methodist body identified respect for the monarchy and support for the government with the law of God. In the early nineteenth century the issue is much less clear-cut. During the Caroline agitation, however, official Methodism was on the side of the government.

  To summarize, then, this discussion of Britain’s avoidance of revolution between 1789 and 1815: the extent of hardship was very great, the materials for revolution very limited. Support for a revolution, both external and internal, was marginal. The mass of reformers were moderate, the radical leadership divided and the forces of unity strong, and arguably getting stronger. Acquiescence in the existing social and political order was manifest while Dissent was strongly discouraged. Governments kept their nerve and did not fall into the error of relying upon force alone. In 1820 Britain emerged from the threat of revolution in many ways stronger than she had been in 1789. She had endured the ordeals to which she had been subjected without endorsing reforming ideologies of any sort, without parliamentary reform and, in Ireland, without Catholic emancipation. Indeed, the only change to the structure of the state was the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800. The crisis had been weathered with the existing political and social system intact. Indeed, it could then be argued that the crisis had been weathered because Britain had made no great structural changes and because she had maintained the existing political and social system. The avoidance of revolution thus reinforced the legitimacy of the status quo.

  NOTES

  1.William Wyndham, Lord Grenville (1759–1834), youngest son of George Grenville, Speaker of the House of Commons 1789, Home Secretary, 1789–90, Foreign Secretary, 1791–1801; leader of the war party in the government and its leading spokesman in the House of Lords.

  2.Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) entered the French army in 1785, and through his great victories in the north of Italy in 1796 established his reputation as the first great general of the French republican armies. He took a prominent role in dictating peace terms to the Austrians at Campo Formio.

  3.The Directory was the name given to the executive power in France, 1795–9. There were five directors jointly responsible for the conduct of affairs.

  4.See the accounts in A. Bryant, The Age of Endurance, 1793–1802 (1944), pp. 256–7; J. Holland Rose, William Pitt and the G
reat War (1911).

  5.P. O’Brien, ‘Public Finance in the Wars with France, 1793–1815’, in H. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution (1989); ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 41 (1988).

  6.In the First Partition in 1772 Poland lost half of its population and 30 per cent of its territory to Austria, Prussia and Russia. The Second Partition (1793) was mostly to the advantage of Russia. In 1794 a Polish rebellion led to the final share-out of the spoils in the Third Partition (October 1795), which removed Poland from the map altogether.

  7.It is often assumed that this tradition owes much to E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), G. Williams, Artisans and Sam-Culottes (1968) and H. Perkins, The Origins of Modern English Society (1969). It is, of course, much older, going back to P. A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History (1918) and W. Laprade, England and the Trench Revolution (1909). It was effectively repopularized in S. Maccoby, English Radicalism, 1762–85 (1955) and A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959) in the decade before the publication of Thompson’s great work.

  8.Edward Thompson remarked that ‘they resemble less the Jacobins than the sans-culotte of the Paris “sections”, whose zealous egalitarianism underpinned Robespierre’s revolutionary war dictatorship of 1793–4’; The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 171–2.

  9.J. A. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform: 1640–1832 (1972), p. 121. Indeed, one of the great achievements of Thompson, and of others who came after him, was to penetrate the (often underground) world of the LCS and other groups, their environments, clubs and coffee houses.

  10.Hannah More (1745–1833) was perhaps the most influential loyalist writer both before and after the 1790s. Her ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ (1795–8) is reputed to have enjoyed a circulation of 2 million.

  11.John Home Tooke (1736–1812) had begun his radical career in the Wilkite groups in London, continued it in opposing the American war and was a founder member of the SCI in 1781. Like Cartwright, Tooke believed in an idealized ancient constitution, now enfeebled through corruption. John Thelwall (1764–1834) began his radical career in close alliance with Tooke and was involved in the founding of the LCS.

  12.Thomas Erskine (1750–1823) was a close friend of Fox and Sheridan and a regular defender of radicals. He was frequently on good terms with the Prince of Wales and manifested an intense dislike of Pitt.

  13.W. Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History 1660-1815 (1998), p. 295.

  14.Francis Place (1771–1854) was the ‘radical tailor of Charing Cross’ who joined the LCS in 1794 and served as chairman of its general committee until 1797.

  15.Major John Cartwright (1740–1824), the ‘Father of Reform’, had an incredibly long radical career in which he never wavered from the principles expressed in his greatest work, Take Your Choice (1776): manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments and secret ballots. His radicalism was narrowly political, overwhelmingly patriotic and much less populist than that of Paine and others. Capel Lofft (1751–1824) moved in the same radical and Whig circles, opposed the American war and called for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.

  16.Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844) was an eminent landowner but represented Westminster from 1807 to 1837. Like Cartwright and Tooke, he looked back to a golden age of popular freedom, and he was a somewhat unlikely leader of the small radical group in Parliament in the early nineteenth century.

  17.William Cobbett (1763–1835) was a romantic radical, an ex-Tory who looked back with nostalgia to a pre-industrial Utopia. His Political Register (1802–35) appealed to popular audiences, clamoured for parliamentary reform and denounced the corruption of the establishment.

  18.Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt (1773–1835), a patriotic landed gentleman who became the greatest agitator of the early decades of the nineteenth century. He drifted into the circle around Place, Tooke and Hardy. Eccentric and egotistical, he nevertheless achieved national eminence in the years after 1815.

  19.Henry, Lord Brougham (1778–1868), an eminent lawyer who was accepted into the Prince Regent’s circle. A great opponent of slavery and a champion of public education, he led the cause of Queen Caroline in 1820.

  20.Ten years after his illegal marriage with Mrs Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales had married Princess Caroline of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel. Their relationship did not prosper, the queen went abroad and the prince wished to divorce her. In 1806 he persuaded the government to launch an inquiry into her much-publicized personal life while abroad, but the case against her was not proven. After 1815, when the Regent’s health was not good, there was some possibility that his daughter Princess Charlotte might succeed to the throne. The Whigs, Brougham in particular, adopted the queen’s cause. The death of Charlotte in 1817 reduced Caroline’s value to them, but it did not eliminate it altogether.

  21.Sir John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham (1756–1835), First Lord of the Admiralty, 1788–94, Lord Privy Seal 1794–6 and President of the Council, 1796–1801.

  22.Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742–1811) had been Treasurer of the Navy since 1783 and was a Commissioner of the Board of Control after 1786. He was, in effect, minister for Scotland and had, in addition, control of Indian affairs.

  23.The son of George Grenville, becoming Home Secretary in 1790. After 1791 Grenville was to be Pitt’s Foreign Secretary and he resigned with Pitt in 1801.

  24.The 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam (1748–1833) was Rockingham’s nephew and heir, and he strongly embodied Rockingham’s principles. He became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland after the Pitt–Portland Coalition of 1794, with tragic and disastrous consequences.

  25.Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Baron Loughborough (1733–1805). He had been close to Bute but supported Wilkes before joining North’s government in 1771 as solicitor general. He became attorney general in 1778, and eventually attained his ambition to be Lord Chancellor in 1793.

  26.William Windham (1750–1810), a friend of Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. MP for Norwich, 1784–1802, he was a conservative Whig who sided strongly with Burke against Fox in 1792–3. He was Secretary at War, 1794–1801.

  27.Portland became Home Secretary; Fitzwilliam became Lord President of the Council with a promise of the Irish Vice-Royalty; Lord Spencer became Lord Privy Seal; Lord Mansfield entered the cabinet without portfolio while Windham became Secretary at War.

  28.Grey’s motion advocated household suffrage, triennial Parliaments, abolition of rotten boroughs and the establishment of more county seats. It formed the foundation of Whig policy on parliamentary reform until the 1820s. The motion was lost by 256 to 91.

  29.‘Catholic emancipation’ was the term given to the policy of freeing Catholics from the disabilities which prevented them from holding offices, voting and serving in Parliament. It was not achieved until 1829. For the situation in Ireland, see pp. 368–72.

  30.John Scott, 1st Lord Eldon (1751–1839) was an outstanding lawyer but a reactionary conservative. He became solicitor-general in 1788 and Lord Chancellor in 1801–6 and 1807–27. Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Lord Liverpool (1770–1828), Foreign Secretary under Addington, Home Secretary and leader of the House of Lords in Pitt’s second ministry, 1804–6; leader of the opposition to the ‘Talents’ ministry (1806–7). Robert Stewart Castlereagh (1769–1822), Secretary for Ireland, 1798–1801, Secretary for War and the Colonies, 1805–6, 1807–9; Foreign Secretary, 1812–22.

  31.George Canning (1770–1827) came into Parliament in 1794, was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1796–9, Paymaster 1800–1 and Treasurer of the Navy 1804–6. Canning was Foreign Secretary in Portland’s ministry but resigned in 1809. Spencer Perceval (1762–1812) was MP for Northampton, 1796–1812. He was a Pittite but, as attorney general under Addington, he defended the government in the Commons against Pitt, Fox and Windham. As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Portland, he had difficulty forming his own administration in 1809 because of the enmity between Canning and Castlereagh. Kept in office by the Pr
ince Regent, Spencer Perceval is the only British prime minister to be assassinated.

  32.Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) came into Parliament in 1809; he was Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, 1810–12, and Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1812–18. He was later to be Home Secretary and Prime Minister.

  33.J. E. Cookson, Lord Liverpool’s Administration (1975), ch. 2; M. Bentley, Politics Without Democracy, 1815–1914 (1984), pp. 31–46.

  34.See F. O’Gorman, The Emergence of the British Two-Party System (1982), p. 91.

  35.Samuel Whitbread (1758–1815). Whig MP for Bedford (1790–1815) and a Foxite Whig of radical tendencies, he took the lead in the impeachment of Melville. He took a popular line on most issues but was disappointed at not receiving office under the ‘Talents’ and in not becoming leader of the opposition when Grey went to the Lords in 1807. A moderate parliamentary reformer, Whitbread also took a leading interest in social issues. Thomas Brand (1774–1851), MP for Helston 1807 and Hertfordshire (1807–19), was an independent Whig and leading reformer.