The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  36.Francis Rawdon-Hastings (1754–1826), 2nd Earl Moira, was a soldier who distinguished himself in the American war. He joined the opposition in 1789 and became a friend of the Prince of Wales. He saw service in Europe in the 1790s but drifted into politics, serving as Master-General of the Ordnance in the ‘Talents’ ministry and defending the interests of the Prince Regent. He was Governor-General of Bengal, 1813–22.

  37.I. Gilmour, Riot, Rising and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England (1992), p. 433.

  38.E. Macleod, ‘The Crisis of the French Revolution’, in H. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain (2006), p. 118.

  39.R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (1983); M. Elliot, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (1982).

  40.I. R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth Century England: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (1984), p. 42.

  41.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.

  42.Christie, Stress and Stability (1982), pp. 156 ff.; H. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1979), pp. 270 ff.

  43.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 40–53, 381–400; E. Halevy, England in 1815, 2nd edn (1949), pp. 410–28.

  CHAPTER TEN

  State and Church in Later Hanoverian Britain, 1757–1832

  MONARCHY AND THE PARTY SYSTEM, 1780–1832

  During the later Hanoverian period Britain remained a strongly monarchical state, government remained the king’s government and executive action was by definition an extension of the royal prerogative. Ministers were still responsible to the king rather than to Parliament, to a party or to each other, and the monarchy retained considerable powers. They could veto policy, as George III did in 1801 and again in 1807, and they could veto ministers, as George IV did in keeping Canning out of the cabinet until 1822. Furthermore, the personal popularity of the monarchy was at its height during the years 1784–1810. George III had achieved levels of popularity during the second half of his reign which would have been the envy of most of his predecessors. It owed much to his standing among the middling orders, his simplicity of mind and manner and the projection of his ‘Farmer George’ image. Moreover, his personal piety and unquestioned integrity rendered something of an Anglican role model. In short, he was the representative of the nation during a period of almost constant war. Furthermore, he was not identified with any one party. His two predecessors had been closely identified with the Whigs, to the evident distress of Tory opinion. Consequently, during the 1780s the monarchy became a powerful social symbol, a focus of national unity and the object of celebration and festivity.1

  Yet such arguments should not be taken too far. With the disappearance of George III from view after 1811 and his replacement by the obnoxious Prince Regent, the reputation of the monarchy began to suffer. The pro-Pittite press treated the king with respect but it was Pitt who was idolized, both before and after his death, not the monarch. There was more enthusiasm for the erection of statues of Pitt and Fox than for those of George III. Professor Sack has noticed that ‘there is very little evidence of any cult of royalty or cult of George III in the eighteenth century right-wing press’.2 Even the loyalist press could be critical of the monarch, especially at the time of the Caroline scandal in 1820–1. Furthermore, the language of prerogative was in steep decline. As J. J. Sack has concluded, ‘It is rare, though not impossible, to find an unqualified assertion of passive obedience and non-resistance in later Georgian England.’3 There could be no doubt about the indefeasible right of George III and his successors to inherit the throne, but divine right theory was being diluted into a vague assertion of the broader rights of society binding individuals into a commitment to its preservation. In a vague sense it was taken up by later reformers. ‘The indefeasible hereditary right of the sovereign was not abandoned by late eighteenth century radicals, but atomised into a possession of all individuals’ and who sought to employ a ‘diffused sense of divine sanction’.4

  By the early nineteenth century the monarchy no longer occupied the pivotal position in politics which it had formerly enjoyed. The delicacy of George Ill’s health in the last two decades of his reign was responsible for a continuing weakening of his power. The king had already shown himself unable to save the ministries of North (1782), Shelburne (1783) and Addington (1804). After the Regency Crisis of 1788–9 he could on some occasions remind the political world that he could still be a force to be reckoned with, but he could no longer keep continuously abreast of political and military affairs. This deterioration in the political influence of the monarch was emphasized by the indifference to politics of his successor as well as by his great unpopularity in the country. George IV was incapable of reversing this drift of power and influence away from the monarchy. Ministers preoccupied themselves with the business of government, taking for granted the approval of the king on many routine matters, thus continuing to oust him from any involvement in the day-to-day activities of government. George IV shouted and blustered at his ministers and was fond of boasting that he ruled them, but he normally gave way to their inflexible sense of political service.

  Furthermore, the long years of war after 1793 diminished royal influence over events. Ministers took the initiative over the complexities of military strategy and logistics. Unlike his grandfather, George III was not a military man; the crown increasingly adopted a passive rather than a proactive role. The great decisions taken during the war were those of a small group of ministers, Pitt, Dundas and Grenville. Even though Pitt the Younger had no party in the 1790s; he was behaving like a prime minister in his determination to centralize power in his own person and to reserve to himself key decisions about the personnel of his cabinet, as he did in 1794 over the Portland coalition. Indeed, by around 1800 it had become an established practice for the crown normally to accept unanimous advice tended by the cabinet. By then, significantly, George III had been complaining for some years that Pitt did not keep him adequately informed – a sure sign of the transfer of power and influence. Even so, the cabinet still lacked a collective sense of responsibility. It was still not customary for ministries to resign en bloc. They did so in 1782, 1783, 1806 and 1807, but not in 1801, 1804, 1809, 1812 and 1827. By 1812, however, some sense of collective cabinet responsibility had appeared, and it was to be further developed during Liverpool’s long ministry.

  Moreover, the patronage and influence once available to the monarch had considerably diminished. On his accession, George III surrendered his hereditary revenues in return for a fixed annual Civil List of £800,000, which inevitably failed to keep its real value. In spite of opposition taunts to the contrary, the value of the resources available to the monarch tended steadily to fall thereafter. Pitt’s Civil List Act of 1804 marked the end of the old idea of an independent provision for the crown. Thereafter, the Civil List was funded by and accountable to Parliament. At the same time, the Economical Reform legislation of 1782 and the steady stream of reforms to the administrative and fiscal system undertaken by Pitt and later by Liverpool had a slow but cumulative effect. By 1815 the amount of influence available to monarchs and their ministers was very limited. It was not only the influence of the monarchy itself but also that of the Court and Treasury Party which was diminishing. Ministers found it increasingly difficult to maintain their majorities in Parliament. In the 1780s it had still been possible to identify about 180 officeholders in the Commons. By Liverpool’s time the number had shrunk to 60–70. Even more serious was the deteriorating position of the crown in the House of Lords. In spite of occasional reverses there, ministers normally used the influence of the crown over the peers to support themselves. Yet the party of the crown in the House of Lords still looked to the monarch for their lead, as the events of 1783 demonstrated, when George III used his influence to bring about the defeat of Fox’s East India Bill. Pitt’s peerage creations and the addition o
f Irish peers after 1800, however, swamped the party of the crown. From constituting almost half of the upper chamber in 1800, the party of the crown accounted for little more than 20 per cent in 1830.5 Consequently, Liverpool’s government found Parliament difficult to control because it could no longer depend for its strength upon the distribution of patronage and it had not yet built up the more reliable party majorities of later decades.

  By the later eighteenth century the pattern of politics was being fashioned by party influences; by the decade immediately before the Reform Act it was being dominated by them. The history of party in this period is particularly contentious. This was a confusing, sometimes bewildering, period of political, not merely party, development. Contemporaries themselves found it difficult to agree among themselves exactly what the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ meant, what the differences between the parties were and what the common ground was, especially when both parties were changing with some rapidity and both were capable of multiple identities. It may simplify the discussion and highlight the relevant issues to approach the problem of party through the conflicting interpretations of recent historians.6

  One group of historians argues that in the half-century before the 1832 Reform Bill parties played an insignificant role because the structure of politics did not change markedly between the 1770s and the 1820s.7 Pitt’s government of 1783–1801 did not rest on a party basis any more than North’s had. Like most eighteenth-century governments, Pitt’s was chosen by the monarch and Pitt himself governed on inclusive, national (as opposed to exclusive, party) grounds. When both monarch and minister were united in this endeavour, stable government was possible. It was not parties that gave governments their majorities but the legitimacy that came with royal support, the deployment of royal patronage, the claim of ministerial ability and the backing of the independent members. In the same way, according to this version, Fox’s opposition was not based on party considerations. It was pragmatic, dependent (as oppositions traditionally were) on the support of the Prince of Wales. In the Parliaments of 1784 and 1790, moreover, Fox depended heavily for numerical support upon the non-party Northites, whose political principles and conduct had been denounced by the Rockingham Whigs for over a decade. It was the personal rivalry between Pitt and Fox which gave some superficial resemblance to a two-party system. After 1801, moreover, even this degree of duality collapsed with the disintegration of Pitt’s following.

  Furthermore, the parties were not separated by great political issues in the early nineteenth century. The war, the abolition of the slave trade, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform cut across government and opposition alike. There was, on this reading, no clear ideological divide between them. The supporters of Pitt’s administration, and of those of its immediate successors, did not accept the description ‘Tory’. They were Whigs. Pitt may have differed with Fox on certain issues, not least on the role of the monarch in appointing ministers, but he was just as good a Whig as Fox was.

  Furthermore, Pitt the Younger did not believe in party. After he fell from power in 1801 he fastidiously refused to organize his friends into a systematic opposition. Pitt never doubted the right of the king to dismiss him in 1801, nor did the vast majority of MPs. He was perfectly relaxed when some of his friends accepted office under Addington; he did not expect them to waste their careers in opposition. It was up to them to seek service with the crown, not to band together in an organized party in order to force themselves upon the monarch. Only after his death in 1806 could Pitt’s followers even begin to contemplate behaving as a party. Charles James Fox, on the other hand, had for years been proclaiming the value of acting in a party united in its principles; but it is difficult to see just what united a party that included on the one hand Grenville’s supporters and on the other reforming Whigs like Samuel Whitbread. Furthermore, Fox’s party remained dangerously dependent for its return to office upon the goodwill of the heir to the throne. Its inability to reach an understanding with him in 1811–12 damned its political prospects for two decades. When the Whigs did return to office in a party ministry in 1830, it was the consequence less of their own initiatives than of the political self-destruction of their opponents.

  Finally, a large proportion of MPs did not take a party whip. The Act of Union with Ireland had added 64 more county members, most of whom had little liking for party, to the existing 80–90 independent, English county members. When to these are added the 60–70 court and administration members, who would support any government, it is clear that at least a third of the 658 members of the House of Commons were indifferent to party in the years of Lord Liverpool. Furthermore, so long as most MPs brought themselves into Parliament and did not owe their return to centralized party institutions, they cannot in any valid organizational sense be regarded as party men. Governments in the early nineteenth century were constructed from the pool of Pitt’s supporters, together with those acquired by the Portland coalition of 1794. Oppositions were based on the heirs of the old Rockingham Party, reinforced by Northites, by Prince of Wales men on some occasions and, for much of the period, by the Grenvilles. There was, then, a consistent duality in politics, but it was not a duality arising from the conflict of two political parties.

  We may summarize this sceptical interpretation of the role of party in the second half of the long eighteenth century by concluding that while parties in some vague sense may have existed, there was no party system. Politics was not dominated and determined by parties as it was to be later in the nineteenth century, one of them in office, marked by its own organization and its self-consciousness as a party, the other in opposition, seeking through its own efforts to displace the governing party. This interpretation has the particular merit of reminding us of the continuing importance of the power of the crown and of emphasizing traditional political ideas and ideals. It also warns us not to mistake political loyalty for party. It is true that the long years of the ministries of North, Pitt and Liverpool lent a certain polarity to politics in which habits of association and common feeling were forged. In view of the failure of these loyalties to endure in the political confusion of 1782–4, of 1801–12 and even of 1828–30, this should not be confused with the enduring loyalties of a modern party system.

  This interpretation of early-nineteenth-century politics has been challenged by a number of historians8 who, while accepting the general view that the ultimate conquest of Parliament and politics by two parties still lay in the future, are still inclined to emphasize the tendencies towards two-party politics which they discern in the decades before the Reform Act of 1832. Acknowledging the formal survival of the monarch’s prerogative of appointing ministers, they argue that after the first decade of the century the effective power of the monarchy went into a rapid decline. The actions of George III in 1801 and 1807 were not to be repeated. Liverpool tolerated George IV’s prejudices and was prepared to humour them but there were limits. Although, as is often pointed out, the king kept Canning out of the cabinet until 1822 and kept Sidmouth in until 1824, that was as far as Liverpool would go, and George IV had little influence over the cabinet changes of 1827–8. In the routine of politics, moreover, the increasing power of the cabinet was formalizing relations between the monarch and his government. His assent was now being taken to be a formality. When the king was no longer the hub of executive government then a Tory, as opposed to a king’s, government, could come into existence.

  As we saw earlier in this chapter, the old supports of royal power in Parliament were eroding with the steady decline in the number of independents and of the court and administration party and the corresponding increase in the number of party men. By 1812, if not earlier, party MPs were in a clear majority. Furthermore, in the early nineteenth century most MPs were remarkably consistent in their support of either government or opposition on the big issues. Party defined loyalties. On a series of great national issues, on constitutional and foreign policy questions and on many reform issues, government and op
position thought and voted differently. During Liverpool’s long administration, only about 10–15 per cent of MPs wavered in their loyalty to government or opposition by voting for both. In a single session of Parliament only about 5 per cent of MPs would vote on both sides. Attendance at Parliament could be patchy, and some division lists distinguish carefully between solid supporters of government or opposition and their ‘fringe’ supporters; but frontbench decisions about policy and procedure were now being normally accepted by backbenchers. On most social and economic questions party did not determine policy positions, but on certain very important occasions it did, such as on the Orders in Council and on the property tax. Even on issues usually regarded as crossing party lines, party was still an important influence. Catholic emancipation is always regarded as an issue that transcended party, but almost all Whigs supported it while a majority of Tories opposed it. By this time, too, the number of party divisions was beginning to overhaul the number of non-party divisions in any one session. In such ways, then, party was exerting an increasing influence over the proceedings of Parliament, although the cohesion of parties was much less complete than it later became. Admittedly, early-nineteenth-century writers and speakers tended to use a number of almost interchangeable terms to define political conflict: king versus Parliament, ministry versus Parliament, king versus people, government versus opposition and, of course, Tory versus Whig. In the end, however, they all came down to the same thing. The routine of regular support for either government or opposition was replacing the mid-eighteenth-century ideal of political independence.

  During the mid-eighteenth century formed opposition had been frowned upon and the formation of parties regarded as illegitimate. The Foxite Whigs, however, positively revelled in the language and rhetoric of opposition, while Fox flamboyantly draped himself in the mantle of party. By the early nineteenth century the existence of party in opposition needed little justification. Even during the French revolutionary war it was generally recognized that a responsible opposition was an integral part of the political order; its disappearance during the secession of 1797–1801 was noted and condemned. By then the old Rockinghamite arguments in favour of parties had been commonly accepted. Even those on the other side of the House of Commons were coming to accept the legitimacy of party. In 1830 the Tory John Wilson Croker remarked that ‘party attachments and consistency are in the first class of a statesman’s duties’.9 Even on the Tory side of the House, party had arrived.