By the second half of the eighteenth century the intensity of religious rivalry was no longer a threat to social stability as it had been in the seventeenth. Consequently, the prospect of relieving the Protestant Dissenters of some, at least, of their disabilities was not viewed unsympathetically by Parliament. In the early 1770s the Dissenters had attempted to obtain the release of their ministers from the need to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles. In 1779 Parliament at last agreed, demanding only that the ministers accept the Bible as the basis of Christianity, a sure sign that Britain was becoming a religiously pluralist society. Further reforms were now a distinct possibility. Parliament might have been sympathetic but extra-parliamentary opinion was less obliging. Even before their support of the American revolutionaries had rendered the Dissenters a suspect body, pro-government newspapers had already been whipping up religious prejudice against them, anticipating the sharp anti-Dissenting sentiment of the 1790s. In the late 1780s the Dissenters, led by the Presbyterians, launched an unsuccessful campaign to secure the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Efforts to secure repeal were defeated in Parliament in 1787, 1789 and 1790. Even before the French Revolution public opinion could not countenance the access of Dissenters to public office. Pitt’s arguments were oddly ambivalent. Although a friend to relief for Dissenters he argued that a bulwark against the radical wing of the Dissenters should remain in place. Pitt could see that public opinion was not ready for relief and that the Anglican church was particularly incensed at the persistent populism with which Dissenters pursued their goals. This, together with the rapturous reception they gave to the French Revolution, created a massive swell of opinion against Old Dissent, one of the manifestations of which was the Birmingham riots of 1791, directed against Joseph Priestley. Not until the early years of the new century did prejudice of this type begin to subside. In many ways this was unfair to the mass of Protestant Dissenters, many of whom did not identify themselves with the advanced political views of their more radical spokesmen, such as Price and Priestley. Although, as Professor Bradley has demonstrated, Dissenters had been prominent in the petitioning campaigns against the American war,36 many Dissenters remained neutral in their politics. Historians have perhaps tended to exaggerate the political consequences of the Dissenters’ rational and scientific educational theories and practices.
Yet there can be no escaping the extraordinary renaissance that the great Dissenting academies were undergoing during the second half of the eighteenth century. Those at Findern, Hackney and Warrington were simply the most famous of a much larger number of academies which led the way in curriculum innovation and teaching methods. Most of all, they disseminated current philosophies of science and, in particular, experimental science. By the end of the century they were providing a high standard of intellectual and scientific training. Their progressive curriculum, their commitment to scientific knowledge and their doctrine of self-improvement stood in harsh contrast to the catechisms and Christian pieties of the Sunday schools of the Anglicans and Methodists. Nevertheless, the achievement of the academies should not be exaggerated. Much depended upon the abilities, reputation and personality of a gifted master. After his death the quality of education available at an academy might decline sharply. Furthermore, the number of places at these academies was always so small that they cannot have directly touched the lives of more than a small minority of boys from the families of Protestant Dissenters.
NOTES
1.This case has been argued with considerable energy by L. Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820’, Past and Present, 102 (1984).
2.J. J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (1993), p. 131.
3.Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 124.
4.J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), p. 185.
5.D. Large, ‘The Decline of the Party of the Crown and the Rise of Parties in the House of Lords, 1783–1837’, English Historical Review, 78 (1963). Yet it is dangerously easy to exaggerate the ease with which governments controlled the upper house. The attendance of the party of the crown was often very poor. That of Scots peers between 1765 and 1775 was below 10 per cent. See W. C. Lowe, ‘Bishops and Scottish Representative Peers in the House of Lords’, Journal of British Studies, 17(3) (1978).
6.Although the writer is an active participant in these discussions, he will attempt to present both sides of the case as fairly as possible. The discussion on pp. 289–93 gives both sides of the case. The subsequent comments reflect his own opinions.
7.See for example, I. R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1750–1815 (1982); J. Derry, Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool (1990); J. C. D. Clark, ‘A General Theory of Party, Opposition and Government, 1688–1832’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980).
8.See B. W. Hill, British Parliamentary Parties, 1742–1832 (1985); J. A. Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution (1969); F. O’Gorman, The Evolution of the British Two-Party System, 1760–1832 (1982); Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (1989).
9.See R. Stewart, British Politics, 1830–32 (1989), p. 4.
10.1802, 1806, 1807, 1812, 1818, 1820, 1826, 1830, 1831, 1835, 1839, 1841, 1847.
11.It is this ideological dimension to politics which makes a simple ‘government v. opposition’ view of early-nineteenth-century politics so inadequate. By reducing politics to office-seeking, it entirely neglects the historical dimension to the politics of the time and much of its emotional content. It also fails to take account of the ties of loyalty and sentiment between politicians in Parliament and those in the constituencies.
12.D. Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government, 1780–1840 (1994), p. 77.
13.See W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–60 (1977), p. 20.
14.Some of them extended the capital penalty to the protection of new forms of commercial property, for example, malicious damage to industrial land and commercial property such as factories, coalmines and turnpikes.
15.J. Rule, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (1992), pp. 236–44; V. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (1994), pp. 18–29, 30–2, 616–18.
16.J. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England (1986), p. 507. There is simply inadequate research to vindicate the view of Michael Ignatieff that the move towards incarceration revealed the development of a ‘disciplinary state’. One study, of the crucially important county of Lancashire, concludes that Lancashire’s prisons were not particularly regimented and were still characterized by ‘relatively humane administration’; M. de Lacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: A Study in Local Administration (1986), p. 55; M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1978).
17.D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh et al. (eds), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (1977).
18.As is argued by E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975). See also, however, E. Cruickshanks and H. Erskine-Hill, ‘The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism’, Journal of British Studies, 24(3) (1985), pp. 358–65; J. Styles, ‘Criminal Records’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), pp. 977–81.
19.D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree.
20.P. K. O’Brien, Power without Profit: The State and the Economy, 1688–1815 (1991), p. 9.
21.J. Beattie, ‘Crime and the Courts in Surrey 1736–53’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England (1977).
22.D. Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 95 (1982).
23.See above, pp. 174–8 for an extended discussion of this view.
24.Clark, English Society, pp. 372–3.
25.Clark, English Soci
ety, p. 373.
26.E. Virgin, The Church in the Age of Negligence: Ecclesiastical Structure and Problems of Church Reform, 1700–1840 (1989).
27.D. Hempton, ‘Religion in British Society’, in J. Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt (1990), p. 207.
28.E. Evans, ‘Some Reasons for the Growth of Rural Anti-Clericalism, c. 1750–1830’, Past and Present, 66 (1975), pp. 84–109.
29.N. Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain 1815–65 (1979), p. 63.
30.A. D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England (1976), pp. 27–8.
31.William Paley (1743–1805), one of the most influential and widely read Anglican publicists of the period, a passionate anti-deist and in many respects a utilitarian. Josiah Tucker (1712–99), a staunch defender of clerical subscription to the thirty-nine articles yet an advocate of American independence. Dean of Gloucester from 1758, he was a renowned economic theorist, anticipating several of Adam Smith’s arguments against monopolies.
32.R. Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (1989), p. 269.
33.B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (1988).
34.Howell Harris (1743–1805), the great pioneer of Welsh Methodists and advocate of ‘family’ and religious communities.
35.Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, p. 36.
36.J. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution (1986), ch. 6.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Social Foundations of the Later Hanoverian Regime, 1757–1832
THE UNITED KINGDOM
During the second half of the long eighteenth century the unity of the United Kingdom and Ireland endured and arguably strengthened, despite momentous challenges. By 1815 a coherent and powerful British polity had emerged, depending on an impressive army and navy which defended Britain from her enemies abroad. At home massive standing armies and militia regiments maintained the Revolution Settlement, and thus the supremacy of England within Britain. Military force, however, played only a limited part in its emergence. It was underpinned by a developing sense of a British identity. Indeed, as Professor Colley has remarked, the half-century following the Declaration of Independence was ‘one of the most formative periods in the forging of British identity’.1 I argued earlier that the growth of this identity was a consequence of four distinct yet related developments.2 All four of them continued into this period.
The first of these was military force. The American war had rallied the nation around the flag and the throne, but it was the long years of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which sealed the unity of Britain. By 1815 around half a million men were serving in the army and navy combined, and another 400,000 in the Volunteers – amounting to nothing less than one in four to one in five adult British males. Having recruited men from so many walks of life and from so many parts of the country, the authorities proceeded to treat them undifferentiatingly as patriots. Armed service did much to dissolve national loyalties and create a sense of common purpose and common effort. News of action on the high seas or on foreign battlefields filled newspapers and periodicals and focused attention on Westminster politics. Furthermore, from the 1813 inspection returns we can calculate that the army had become one-half English, one-third Irish and one-sixth Scots.3 Indeed, in the officer corps the English were already decisively outnumbered by the Scots and Irish.
This process was likely to be permanent. Once local defence had been conceded to local forces it would have been very difficult to reverse it. Already in 1794 Catholics in Ireland were being openly recruited, a conscious policy of assimilation which applied to officers and rank and file alike. By 1815 over one in six Catholic males in Ireland had seen military service with the British army; indeed, by the early nineteenth century probably three-quarters of the British soldiers in Ireland were Catholic. The loyalty which the army in Ireland displayed during the rising of 1798 was even more strongly exhibited after the Union of Ireland with England in 1800, in particular at the great king’s birthday reviews which began in 1804. Such symbolic events, together with the generous award of battle honours, represented the growing military incorporation of Ireland within Britain. Indeed, Irish attachment to Britain may be witnessed in the great memorial to Nelson that was erected in Dublin three years after Trafalgar, as well as in the construction of the great monument to Wellington in Phoenix Park. These developments were matched for Scotland by the creation of exclusively Scottish regiments, which became a source and a focus of Scottish pride. Over 70 per cent of Scottish soldiers were concentrated into ten, most of them Highland, regiments (the Irish, by contrast, were spread much more widely). The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars enabled the Scots as well as the Irish to engage in present, whilst perhaps reliving ancient, military glories.
The second development which facilitated the expression of a British identity was, as it had been earlier, religion. The years of war generated a feeling of Protestant imperialism which cannot be denied. Towards the end of the century, however, there are many indications that Protestantism was now less monolithic than it may have appeared earlier. Anglican resistance to the claims of the Ulster Protestants reminds us that there was serious disagreement among the British family of Protestant churches. Indeed the Episcopal (Anglican) church discriminated against Presbyterians much as it did against Roman Catholics. Furthermore, there, there are clear signs that the polite classes were beginning to abandon the rabid Protestantism of earlier decades. The internal Catholic threat had waned with the defeat of Jacobitism. The English Catholics had exhibited their loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty in 1745 when they had furnished troops and money. They were declining in numbers, too, from 115,000 out of a population of 5.7 million in 1720 to only 70,000 out of 7.5 million in 1780, a percentage decline from a tiny 2 per cent to 1 per cent of the population. Obviously Catholicism had by now become a mysterious ‘other’, more frequently imagined than experienced. Moreover, Whig politicians had no wish to make martyrs on the business of the previous century. They had to live up to their much-vaunted boasts about the virtues of public life in Britain, one of which was religious toleration. The passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 has to be seen in this context. (Indeed, the Scottish Bill was dropped due to popular pressure.) The act enabled Catholics to serve in the British army and legally to purchase and inherit land. Indirectly, the act led to the Gordon Riots of 1780, a terrifying reminder that among the lower classes more brutal sentiments still persisted. This was hardly surprising: anti-Catholicism was built into the fabric of the Hanoverian body politic. Indeed, what else could be expected of a society whose national enemy had been Catholic Spain and then Catholic France, and whose commercial and imperial future depended upon almost constant commercial competition with and warfare against the Bourbon powers? However, the Gordon Riots were unable to stop the march of toleration. In 1791 Pitt passed another catholic relief measure which permitted the building of Catholic churches and chapels and opened up the legal profession to Catholics. The act provoked very little opposition and, most significantly, played no part in the loyalist hysteria of 1792–3.
The political culture of the elite continued to act as a focal point of British unity. The abolition of the Irish Parliament in 1800 completed the legislative centralization of British political life and emphasized the claim of the Westminster Parliament to speak for the realm of Britain. At just this moment, the social prestige of the monarchy attained unprecedented heights. In the closing decades of the century the monarchy became the object of loyalty and, indeed, veneration not only in England but also in Wales, Ireland and even Scotland. George III gloried in the name of Britain and after his victory over Fox in 1783–4 attained huge popularity. The general sympathy for his indisposition in 1788–9 seems to have been genuine, highlighted as it was by the disgraceful and unseemly behaviour of his son. The years of war and patriotic sacrifice did much to rally the nations of Britai
n behind him. ‘Royal visits to every part of the kingdom, carefully choreographed and synchronised royal celebrations in which all classes and both sexes were encouraged to participate, an ostentatious royal patronage of British culture’ elicited approval, generated loyalty and encouraged the involvement of a wider audience.4 (George I and George II, in contrast, had never visited Scotland, Wales, the north of England or even the Midlands.) The launching of ambitious schemes of royal building and a growing demand for royal splendour converted the monarchy into a popular focus of loyalty and emulation. The royal jubilee of 1809 was celebrated in 650 different locations in England, but it was also celebrated throughout Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well as throughout the empire. Affection for the royal family was expressed by the purchase of a wide variety of consumer goods, pictures, books, medals and mugs and was represented in an incessant stream of monarchical poetry, much of it written in Scotland and Ireland.
Finally, the integration of the elites of Britain continued in this period to act as a strongly unifying influence. In the second half of the century elite groups in England, and indeed, in Britain, became increasingly coherent. Their rural leisure pursuits – hunting, shooting and endless visits to each other’s increasingly impressive mansions and estates – cemented their (often close) family and other personal relationships. On top of this, many of them also adopted a common urban lifestyle which demanded their presence in London, Bath or any of the county, spa and market towns which prospered in these years. This increasingly Britannic elite exhibited strikingly conformist social and cultural patterns of behaviour. Obviously, it was the political and social elite which was ‘britannicized’ first because they – merchants, bureaucrats, military adventurers – found that Britain and the British Empire served their interests. ‘The growing need to raise taxes and cannon fodder from the island as a whole (and from that other island across the Irish Sea) forced those elite Englishmen who initially monopolised civilian power in London to accept a quota of Scots, Anglo-Irish and Welshmen into their ranks.’5 On the other hand, the Scottish and Irish elites set out to ingratiate themselves with the English elite during the second half of the eighteenth century, and no insuperable barriers were placed in their way. The English ruling classes of the mid-eighteenth century probably felt more comfortable with their counterparts in Ireland than with their more touchy and Jacobite counterparts in Scotland. Yet Scots flooded over the border to seek office and employment, especially in London. Furthermore, in an expanding economy there was employment aplenty for talent from the north, whether political, military, mercantile, architectural, intellectual or, above all, medical. Over 200 students a year graduated from the University of Edinburgh, far more than from all of the educational institutions of England put together. No fewer than 47 per cent of the 249 men appointed as writers (clerks) in Bengal and 60 per cent of the 371 men allowed to settle in Bengal as free merchants were Scots in the decade after 1775.6 The resentment that Little Englanders like Wilkes felt for the Scots reflects the extent of the invasion. Scots played an invaluable part in the American and Indian theatres of war – the East India officer corps containing a large number of Scots. In Canada Scots were prominent in the conquest of Quebec. There are even some signs of the emergence of a British peerage at the end of the century. Of the 113 peerages created between 1780 and 1800, seven were promotions from the Scottish peerage and seventeen promotions from the Irish peerage.7
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 61