The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Earlier in the eighteenth century the cosmopolitanism of the ruling classes had caused offence and even attracted ridicule. While many cosmopolitan habits persisted, not least the Grand Tour, it is possible to detect a more patriotic element in the cultural life of the second half of the eighteenth century. The founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 to advance the cause of British art unquestionably struck a note of cultural patriotism. This is also seen in the tendency to combine patriotic themes with classical motifs in landscape gardening, which appears as early as the 1780s. Furthermore, in the second half of the century the ruling elite came to employ culture for patriotic purposes, commissioning native art with relish. The 2nd Earl of Egremont had been a notable collector, especially of Italian art. His son, the 3rd Earl, however, collected British painting, especially the works of Gainsborough, Reynolds and Constable. In a very different way Britain began to pay court to its own literary masters. In the middle decades of the century Shakespeare, Spenser, Dryden and Bacon came into their own. In 1765 Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare raised the bard to a new status in British history. At a less elevated, yet arguably more important, level the respectable classes discovered not only the art and high culture of their own countries but also the rural, geographical beauty of Britain, which they proceeded to idealize almost as obsessively as they had done that of Italy.

  The British Empire, furthermore, had its economic and occupational attractions for the upper and middle classes throughout Britain. The strength of the burgeoning imperial loyalties thus created should not be underestimated. Already in the first half of the century awareness of and pride in empire were spreading throughout British society. In the second half of the century, however, Britain became an imperial nation, many of its people flocking to make their lives, their futures and their fortunes in the empire. The loss of the empire in North America in some ways actually facilitated the emergence of a British imperial identity as opposed to a British-American identity. The mere fact of empire reinforced assumptions about British superiority. Imagers of overseas empire, especially one that after 1783 was based on in the East among dark-skinned Asiatics, enabled Britons to assume a variety of roles: military conqueror, civilizing gentlemen and gentlewomen, enterprising merchant, Christian missionary, educational reformer, scientific collector and geographical explorer. British imperial identity was many-sided rather than monolithic, inclusive rather than exclusive.

  The significance of these influences moulding one or more British identities are important, but they should not be exaggerated. First, they run the risk of exaggerating the cohesion and stability of the British body politic, which was not infrequently in serious danger, as in 1715–16, 1745–6, 1779–84 and, as we shall shortly see, 1798. There was nothing inevitable about the success of the project to create a British state out of the composite state of the early eighteenth century. Second, there was no significant countervailing decline in Scottish, Welsh or Irish consciousness. A sense of British national identity developed alongside, not at the expense of, sentiments of Englishness, Welshness, Scottishness and Irishness. There was a complex interaction between national cultures within the broader framework of Britain. All nations within the British state, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and, not least, England, experienced a dramatic revival of interest in their own cultural traditions, in their art, their history and their literature.8

  Wales, for example, maintaining her own language and less addicted to participating in imperial adventures than the Scots and Irish, remained more distinct than either. Seen from London, Wales appeared to be stable and quiescent; Welsh Jacobitism was never very strong, and signs of positive resentment at Welsh incorporation into Britain were never very visible. But such perceptions should not allow us to underestimate the powerful evidence of residual Welsh self-awareness, depending on at least one traditional institution, the Court of Session, which administered a reasonably coherent and cheap system of justice. By the eighteenth century, however, Wales was moving away from its historic roots and acquiring an expanding middle class, aware of its own capacities and capable of taking the appropriate cultural and educational pathways to self-improvement. It was increasingly indignant at the linguistic hegemony of the English language in a Welsh-speaking society. For this the Welsh gentry had been at least partly to blame, because in the early eighteenth century they had begun to abandon their role as patrons and preservers of their own language and culture. Although poverty, public disorder, lawlessness and local isolation were further inhibitions upon the expression of Welsh self-consciousness, the spread of the printed word, the growth of tourism and an enhanced nostalgia for a lost Welsh culture were beginning to exert a discernible influence by the 1770s. The Wilkite and Wyvillite movements did not set Wales alight but they planted the seeds of politicization. From its lowest ebb in 1700, Welsh culture now began to experience a general revival, particularly in the fields of poetry and antiquarianism. In this way the Welsh used the power of the printing press to enhance their own identity within a British political and social framework but this sense of national identity had no political expression or significance.

  In Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century the complex processes of assimilation were continuing. The military disaster of 1745–6 marked the passing of the Jacobite option. Road-building in the Highlands and the subsequent restructuring of traditional Scottish society in the years after 1745 took the sting out of Scottish national feeling. Scotland was politically quiescent in the second half of the eighteenth century. There was now nothing to prevent the emergence of a powerful loyalty towards the Hanoverian dynasty in the northern kingdom, not least among the old Jacobite aristocracy. Even the son of Lord Lovat who was executed for treason in 1746 had the family estates restored to him three decades later out of gratitude for his part in the conquest of Canada. Emigration out of the Highlands and the service of many Highlanders in the armies of the crown acted as safety valves against any revival of militant nationalism.

  As the long eighteenth century neared its end, the tactical options of any sort of national or, still more, nationalist insurrection were steadily receding. Scotland was noticeably loyal during the American War of Independence, a stance which contrasted strongly with dissident stirrings in Ireland.9 By the end of the century there was emerging a powerful British sentiment, manifested in the great rebuilding of Edinburgh. As Linda Colley has remarked, ‘Scottish towns were now far more affluent places, secure in post-Jacobite stability, made fat on imperial trade, elegant private houses and imposing public building.’10 The showpiece was Edinburgh New Town, designed in 1767 as a celebration of British patriotism, and the most famous but by no means the only such example of imperial consciousness in Scotland. The rebuilding of Glasgow at the same time was triggered by the colonial trade, interests which were reflected in the names of some of the more prominent of the streets of the town.11 Such tendencies were enhanced by the unprecedented flow of Scottish professional and artistic talent into England. These people brought with them some of the older patriarchal and authoritarian attitudes which in Scotland, at least, were becoming increasingly redundant, but which were becoming increasingly typical of English society in the second half of the eighteenth century.

  By 1800 Scotland still retained many of the characteristics of a distinct nation, but it was a nation that was fairly comfortably contained within the wider unit of Britain. This was deliberate state policy. London began to look carefully to the stability of the Scottish economy by subsidizing basic industries like tanning and paper-making, by offering bounties to improve the manufacture of linen and by training skilled workers. Prosperity and patriotism were never far apart. The assimilation of Scotland into Britain had always been facilitated by access to imperial wealth and trade. After 1750 the Scottish economy grew at an accelerating rate, especially in the Glasgow region, faster even than that of England. Between 1750 and 1800 its overseas trade tripled in volume while that of England doubled. As the bitter legacies of
Jacobitism receded further into the past, a new Scotland was fast emerging. With it came a new sense of Scottish national identity within a larger, Britannic framework.

  But what was to be this new identity? At least two variants became available in the later eighteenth century. The first involved an exaggerated and nostalgic vision of Scotland. ‘Scots tried to balance out their loss of political independence by exaggerating their special characteristics – literature, education, religion and general “moral fibre”.’12 Furthermore, the writings of authors from Robert Burns to Sir Walter Scott served to present the history of the Scottish past as a romantic tale of cultural loss and a catalogue of military heroism against the English. This idealized view of Scottish society in the past, founded upon the clan system, was being propagated during the years in which that society was being dismantled after 1745.13 This romantic view of Scottish history and culture did much to shape nineteenth – and twentieth-century perceptions of Scottish national identity, but it is largely a wistful and fabricated version. An alternative version of Scottish identity was asserted during the Scottish Enlightenment of the second half of the eighteenth century. This was the ideal of a cosmopolitan and highly cultured and progressive Scotland occupying a proud place within a ‘British’ body politic. Building on the foundation of Scotland’s universities and schools, Scots writers and artists took advantage of this period of peace and moderate prosperity to experience an Enlightenment which even Voltaire celebrated, claiming that ‘at the present time it is from Scotland we receive rules of taste in all the arts – from the epic poem to gardening’. The Scottish Enlightenment was an extraordinary flowering of talent – Adam Smith in economics, Dugald Stewart in moral philosophy, David Hume and William Robertson in history, James Boswell in biography, James Watt in engineering, Tobias Smollett in fiction – which announced the arrival of a new cultural power in Europe, artistic, humane, scientific and progressive.

  In political terms, the assimilation of Scotland to England was starkly illustrated in the political imperialism of Henry Dundas. As Lord Advocate of Scotland in 1775, Dundas began to erect a huge empire of Scottish patronage, controlled from London. By the time of the general election of 1780 Dundas was the most powerful political figure in Scotland, enjoying the support of many of the forty-five Scottish MPs. At the general election of 1784 he influenced the return of half their number. Through the extensive deployment of patronage, thus procuring the loyalty of local and regional magnates, he was able to increase this support to well over thirty at the election of 1790. As Home Secretary in 1791 and as Secretary for War in 1794 he used this enormous influence to sustain the ministry of Pitt, to strengthen English control of Scotland and thus to enhance the integration of Scotland into the English body politic. In so doing he raised Scotland from its somewhat peripheral and subordinate status and brought Scottish interests squarely before the locus of power in London.

  Down to the 1760s Ireland was more securely under the control of the British government than was Scotland. In political terms, the ancien régime in Ireland continued comfortably enough into the second half of the eighteenth century. The power of the Protestant Ascendancy was unimpaired. The alliance of the British administration of the Lord Lieutenant at Dublin Castle with the Anglo-Irish Protestant landed interest provided stability, and a tolerable degree of prosperity, even if it did not seek to cure the fundamental religious and economic problems of the island. In the Irish Parliament an opposition party of ‘Patriots’ emerged under Henry Grattan and Henry Flood.14 They advocated greater political autonomy for Ireland within the British Empire and demanded greater commercial equality. The concession of an Octennial Act in 1768, which provided for regular elections to the Dublin Parliament at least every eight years, did little to satisfy Patriot opinion.

  Meanwhile, the economy of Ireland was experiencing a period of steady growth. Although she remained little more than an economic dependency of England – between 1720 and 1800 the percentage of Irish exports shipped to England rose from 44 per cent to over 80 per cent – some sectors of the Irish economy prospered. Agricultural prices doubled and rents quadrupled in the last third of the century as Irish landlords struggled to cope not only with English demand for grain but also, more importantly, with the social and economic consequences of the rapid growth in the population of Ireland during the eighteenth century, from about 2.5 million in 1701 to about 4.57 million in 1791. Although English regulation had weakened the ability of the Irish woollen and cattle industries to export, the Irish developed alternative export trades in butter, linen and hides. Indeed, in 1758–9 concessions permitting the freer export of Irish dairy produce to European markets reinvigorated Irish dairy farming in some areas. These signs of economic development were reflected in the continued growth of market towns like Cork and Limerick, in the remarkable development of Dublin and in the growth of the great mansions of the landlords of the Ascendancy. A small middle class, much of it Catholic, was expanding. Increasingly well informed and self-conscious, it began to press for the repeal of the Penal Laws. Some beginnings were made to dismantle the Penal Laws. In 1780 the sacramental requirement for all office-holders under the crown was abolished.

  These promising economic developments were damagingly affected by the interruption to trade with the American colonies caused by the war. The resulting economic problems – unemployment, high prices and shortages – created unsettled conditions in which protest against English rule, often in conscious imitation of American precedents, became widespread. Indeed, the Patriots within the Irish Parliament now came out in support of the American rebels. In these conditions, religious resentment revived. Some Irish peasants, angry at having to pay tithes to the Church of Ireland, joined the secret society of Whiteboys, which carried out physical attacks on landlords, tenants, cattle and ricks. Such actions were imitated by other religious groups, notably the Steelboys, a group of Ulster Presbyterians.

  Economic crisis was matched by a vacuum of security. British troops were required for service in America and Ireland was left almost defenceless. This military vacuum became an imminent crisis in 1778 when the prospect of a Franco-Spanish invasion of Ireland became a real possibility. The vacuum was filled by the emergence of the Volunteers in Ulster in 1778, officered by the Irish Protestant gentry. The Volunteers began to act as a political as well as a military force and, appealing to Protestant and Catholic alike, demanded economic and political reform. Their influence spread rapidly; by 1780 there were about 40,000 Volunteers. At war with half of Europe in 1779–80, and facing a repetition of American techniques of popular agitation, the British government had no alternative but to make sizeable economic concessions. In 1780 a series of statutes enabled Ireland to export glass and wool, to import gold and silver and to trade with the empire and other parts of the Atlantic world on the same terms as the English themselves. This bought off protest for a time. As in England, however, the defeat of British troops at Yorktown created political earthquakes in Ireland. At the great Dungannon Convention in February 1782, representatives of no fewer than 80,000 Volunteers demanded greater political freedom for Ireland. In 1782 Rockingham repealed both Poynings’ Law and the Declaratory Act of 1720, thus achieving legislative independence for Ireland. The Williamite Settlement was at an end.

  ‘Ireland is now a nation,’ rejoiced Grattan, but she was not to be an independent nation. In fact, the new parliament, ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, as it is usually termed, was a great disappointment to the Irish. A third of its members were pensioners or placemen; only half were returned by anything resembling free election. The parliament still did not represent the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian populations, who together made up over 90 per cent of the population. Nor could members of these denominations become MPs. Indeed, it was not Grattan’s Parliament at all, dominated as it was by the Anglo-Irish oligarchy. It was helpless to weaken further the traditional English monopoly of political, ecclesiastical and judicial power. Yet it was just powerful enough to
unsettle relations with England on major issues. It forced Pitt to drop his trade proposals of 1785. Furthermore, and potentially even more dangerously, it chose in 1789 to follow Fox’s line and to install the Prince of Wales as regent. By then, the minority had developed what Marianne Elliot has termed a ‘constitutional nationalism’ – an awareness of themselves as the leaders of Irish opinion, an alternative ruling elite.15