The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The aristocracy continued to occupy positions of rarely questioned pre-eminence in national life in the second half of the long eighteenth century. Some historians have been tempted to describe Hanoverian society as ‘classless’, in view of the overwhelming ascendancy of the aristocracy.26 Indeed, such a description matches the social beliefs of the aristocracy itself, who never doubted their right to speak for the interests of those beneath them, thus ‘virtually’ representing their interests. Indeed, the landed estate itself united masters and servants, owners and tenants, into groupings of men and women of socially dissimilar status by the vertical bonds of loyalty. Nevertheless, the landed elite had a very highly developed sense of its own economic self-interest. It was an acquisitive and capitalistically inclined elite which had thoroughly incorporated the profit motive and the rest of free-market ideology into its ideas and practices. Although its members complained throughout this period of the burden of taxation, the available evidence suggests that they got off extremely lightly. In the second half of the century, their incomes increased enormously, by 70–90 per cent in England, 60 per cent in Wales and 90 per cent in Ireland. Furthermore, the weight of taxation was shifting steadily away from direct taxes on wealth and income, which included land, on the one hand to customs and excise duties on consumption, on the other. At the end of the seventeenth century the former claimed 36.3 per cent of tax income; by the early 1830s this figure had shrunk to only 10 per cent. Correspondingly, the latter contributed 52.6 per cent of tax income at the end of the seventeenth century but had risen to no less than 71.3 per cent in the early 1830s.27

  The landed elite, moreover, was heavily involved in what used to be termed ‘the Agricultural Revolution’. More recently, historians have extended the period of improvement in agriculture back into the seventeenth century and have persuaded us that the process was more gradual than used to be thought.28 Nevertheless, between 1700 and 1800 while the population of England, Scotland and Wales almost doubled the number of those working in agriculture rose hardly at all. The pattern of British, not just English, land-holding was unusually conducive to agricultural development. The great estates were securely in the hands of a small capitalist, rentier group committed to profits. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that landowners acted as agencies of agricultural improvement by diffusing information, by experimenting with new crops and new methods of breeding and by patronizing agricultural societies. A well-run estate heightened the landowner’s prestige and underscored his role in promoting and diffusing, rather than personally undertaking, agricultural improvement. Improvements in livestock, horses and cattle were one of the characteristic obsessions of the eighteenth-century aristocratic and gentry classes. Robert Bakewell’s experiments with livestock received much publicity and no little imitation. There can be no question that the size and shape of English farming animals improved immeasurably during the long eighteenth century. Of course, not every member of the aristocracy was interested in farming techniques, but even those uninterested in such matters could recognize the desirability of higher rents and more efficient methods of production. There were many ways in which landowners could assist their tenants to improve their farming methods. The landlord might withhold rent and sponsor schemes of drainage and building; for his part the tenant would lay out for stock, fertilizer and seed.

  The landed elite was intimately and actively involved in the enclosure and consolidation of open, cultivable land into larger units, which accelerated in the later eighteenth century. Historians now take a view of enclosures which contradicts the interpretation of them as the heartless expropriation of the English peasantry, depicted in generations of works since the Hammonds’s The Village Labourer, published in 1911.29 Historians are now inclined to treat the enclosure ‘movement’ of the eighteenth century as the culmination of a long process of agricultural change and one that served a number of social as well as economic functions. There was certainly nothing new about enclosures. A combination of private agreement among local proprietors and the passage of parliamentary statutes had already enclosed around 70 per cent of the land area of England by 1700, around 50 per cent of the cultivable land area, less in Wales and Scotland. As late as 1760, there were only some 130 enclosure acts on the statute book. The pace of enclosure by statute was at first gradual. Between 1730 and 1789 about 2.5 million acres were enclosed, much of it in the period 1760–80, when the heavy clay areas of the Midlands were enclosed. In a second burst, stimulated by high wheat prices, no less than 3 million acres of land were enclosed by Parliament between 1789 and 1815. About one-third of it was hitherto uncultivated land, especially in the north, where some of the unlikely and uneconomic land was then cultivated for the first time, because of increased levels of wartime demand and high prices. One thousand acts were passed between 1760 and 1800 and a further 800 between 1800 and 1815. By 1830 about 90 per cent of the land of England and Wales was enclosed.

  The ruling elite did far more, however, than maintain its unity and advance its wealth during this period. It was forced to undergo significant changes in its sense of purpose and in its self-image. The loss of the American colonies, the anti-aristocratic example of France in the 1790s, Britain’s early setback in the revolutionary wars and the pressures and strains of over two decades of warfare proved stern and formidable tests of the stamina of the British aristocratic oligarchy. Furthermore, the devastating criticisms of the theory and practice of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, set out in Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, were popularized by Spence and Cobbett and carried by them into the nineteenth century. They were developed into encyclopaedic and detailed criticisms of the role of the aristocracy in Thomas Oldfield’s History of the Boroughs (1797) and Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland (1816) which outlined the influence of aristocratic families in elections. John Wade’s Extraordinary Red Book (1816) and Black Book: or Corruption Unmasked (1819) listed in embarrassing detail the state offices which such families enjoyed. George Wade argued in the Black Book that no fewer than 487 out of 658 MPs were ‘returned by nomination’ while at least one-third of MPs owed their return to the influence of members of the House of Lords. Such a comprehensive indictment of ‘old corruption’ had never been produced before. Radical reformers and, increasingly, a wider public began to challenge the basic premises upon which aristocratic power rested. Unthinking acceptance of the right of the aristocracy to rule began to give way to accusations of nepotism and corruption albeit much exaggerated. Far from being a check upon the executive, Parliament itself appeared to be a site for aristocratic greed and jobbery.

  In the face of these dangers, the aristocracy stiffened the sinews of its unity. In the eighteenth century many boys had been educated at home on their estates by tutors. By the early nineteenth century the vast majority of sons of the peerage and gentry were being educated collectively in the public schools. Here they acquired habits of ostentatious patriotism and personal service. Aggressive masculinity, individual heroism and the gospel of patriotism were instilled by an unceasing diet of classical, particularly Roman, literature (Livy turned out to be an exceptionally useful source of wisdom on the subject of patriotism). It was a selective diet. Much, for example, was heard about Greek art and culture, but precious little about Greek democratic traditions. However, public schools boasted that they inculcated habits of physical toughness. These were exemplified in the customs of fox hunting, which grew massively in popularity in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. The hunt, with its emphasis on male bonding and physical rigour, advertised the tough-minded values of the British ruling order. It was not merely, however, in its education and leisure pursuits that the nature of the ruling order was being transformed. The Evangelical revival commended a more sober and less ostentatious style of life, encouraging increased attention to family responsibilities and discouraging gambling, swearing and fornication. How many members of the ruling elite were influenced in this manner is impossible to establish. Neverth
eless, the arrival of a new ideal of personal behaviour is significant; it is quietly recalled in the numerous conduct books published in these decades. By 1815 a more coherent landed elite had materialized, and was taking care to present a more acceptable face to the world.

  Most of all, however, it was the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which revived the confidence and the reputation of the British ruling class, enabling them to serve the state and to be seen to do so. It gave them a stage on which to enact the theatre of personal heroism and collective chivalry. It provided them with an opportunity to proclaim the power, as well as the future destiny, of the British Empire. Without any substantial alteration in its institutions, Britain was victorious in the battles against Napoleon, against the Irish rebels, against domestic radicals. Without any substantial concessions to those beneath them on the social ladder, the ruling classes had protected their property, vindicated their influence and reaffirmed their right to govern. Their code of honour had been upheld, and thus renewed. These sentiments were symbolized in the figure of Horatio Nelson, the tragic victor of Trafalgar. His patriotism, his leadership, his concern for hierarchy yet his indifference to money summed it all up. And after his death, the cult of the great man preserved and perpetuated the timeless values of a selfless elite. In spite of the claims of historians who claim that commercial and professional families were beginning to rival the traditional landed elite in wealth and power, there is, in fact, rather more evidence to the contrary. As both Philip Harling and Peter Mandler have argued, neither the Tory nor Whig Party became less elitist in outlook or personnel in the early decades of the nineteenth century.30

  A cohering middle class

  The values of the middling orders complemented those of the landed elite but did not compete with them. Indeed, there are many examples of mutual respect, if not mutual admiration between them. In the second half of the eighteenth century the middling orders and the landed elite continued to coexist with every sign of mutual respect, yet with occasional outbursts of mutual aversion. The landed classes had a traditional distaste for wealth unalloyed by manners. Their hackles might rise at the pretensions of some of the richer sections of the middling orders who rose to rival their own social pre-eminence. A modest flow of industrialists, merchants, bankers, lawyers, soldiers and sailors leavened the mass of hereditary peers, attracted a considerable amount of attention and provided enough of a continuing spur to encourage the ambitious and the aspiring. At the same time, many members of the middling orders had little time for the values of the ruling class – their flashiness, their snobbery, their immorality and, not least, their reluctance to pay their bills.

  Too much should not be made of such social strains. Rural and urban elites may have differed in many of their social habits, but they adopted a common code of manners and professed a common code of honour. They revelled in the routines of gentility and courtesy and shared strikingly similar leisure habits. There was no cultural divide here. Social tensions between the ruling classes and the middling orders were less the origins of a new class hostility than the continuing discomforts of incorporating new money and new men into traditional social structures. ‘Charity, benevolence, and the responsible values of a sadly missed antique age, legitimized the retention of riches.’31

  Even the wealthiest members of the middle classes showed little inclination to rock the aristocratic boat. It was no surprise, then that the City of London was the traditional home of an old commercial elite which revelled in imperial acquisition, commercial expansion and hostility to Britain’s Bourbon competitors. The London aldermen, in particular, included some of the richest commoners in Britain. It was no surprise, then, that the great merchants of London began to marry their sons and daughters into the gentry. The growth, in particular, of the London ‘season’ enabled vitally important social contacts to develop between the middle and upper classes. By the middle of the eighteenth century both the London residences and rural retreats of the big bourgeoisie were beginning to emulate those of their landed counterparts. Provincial merchants, however, were much less concerned to acquire landed estates. They enjoyed a secure social status and felt little need to defer to the provincial gentry. On the whole, however, merchants and professional men found general acceptance in polite society. They had achieved a considerable degree of social acceptance and had no wish to transform the social order. Rather, they wished to turn it to their own advantage.

  Such patterns of mutual acceptance were the culmination of decades of collaboration and cooperation in activities as varied as philanthropy, the founding of charity and Sunday schools and the establishment of hospitals and clinics. Middling order involvement was absolutely necessary to the statutory bodies and committees which sponsored, launched, organized and maintained the canals, turnpikes and charities which abounded in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, many of the progressive causes in social reform such as the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807), the reform of Parliament (1832) and the abolition of slavery (1833) enabled men of these middling and upper ranks to cooperate. Moreover, it was in the patronage of science and technology that men of the middling orders found support and sponsorship from their social superiors.

  At the political level such collaboration may be seen in their fading interest in constitutional change, epitomized in the ongoing activities of the government of the Younger Pitt and the gradual abandonment of its earlier reformism. The architect of parliamentary reform in 1782, 1783 and 1785 became unwilling to extend further religious toleration to Protestant Dissenters in 1787 and 1790. In the 1790s, indeed, the government became hostile to most politically liberal measures. After their flirtation with reform in the early 1790s, the middle classes largely abandoned it; indeed, the aristocracy and the middling orders joined together against the radical threat of the 1790s. The collaboration continued unabated into the new century, even intensifying during the threats of invasion of 1803 to 1806 amidst constant demonstrations of patriotic loyalty. Indeed, the middling orders endorsed the reconstruction of the social image of the aristocracy and even participated in it, flocking into the militia regiments, sporting the colourful uniforms of the Volunteers and thus rallying to the defence of the existing social structure. The growth and the rising importance of the middling orders was not restricted to England. In Wales, however, an urban middle class remained weak during much of the eighteenth century, still dependent on occupations that were based on services to agriculture and to the landed elite. An autonomous urban middle class did not appear until the early years of the nineteenth century. The Scottish middle class was much more like the English. The professions, especially the law, advanced rapidly after 1750, while commercial interests prospered with new imperial opportunities not only in European markets but also in India, North America and, eventually, in China. The movement of the Edinburgh middle classes into the new town typified these developments and symbolized their physical segregation. Even in Ireland, a Catholic middle class, largely based on the textile trade, had emerged by the end of the century. Furthermore, there was a visible influx of Irish entrepreneurs into commerce and industry around the time of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

  Not surprisingly, the middling orders of Britain were capable of flexing their political muscles when the occasion demanded. As early as 1765–6 they maintained a formidable nationwide protest against the damaging economic consequences of the Stamp Act disorders in America. Even more serious and better organized were their protests against Pitt’s government in the mid-1780s. In 1784 Pitt imposed an excise tax on fustian and in 1785 attempted to establish free trade with Ireland. The first of these measures aroused opposition within the textile industry, the second provoked more general consternation. They aroused a strong reaction among provincial merchant and manufacturing communities and led to the establishment of the General Chamber of Manufacturers. Many provincial urban elites displayed a marked Nonconformist consciousness, and they were now prepared to combine in peaceful political agit
ation against the measures. Petitioning campaigns were launched, local committees of correspondence were established and a nationwide organization was established to coordinate opposition. Faced with such hostility, not least sixty petitions against his policy, Pitt relented and the measures were heavily amended.

  It is tempting to see in these economic debates of the mid-1780s an important watershed in the rise of a self-conscious middle class, but we should not place undue emphasis on them. Although the agitation was successful, it was not to be the immediate harbinger of a united middle-class consciousness. The Chamber of Manufacturers disbanded in 1786. Many of those who supported it were at once divided over the issue of free trade, provoked by the Eden Treaty of 1786, which liberalized trade with France. During the next two decades, indeed, the middling orders were divided by a series of issues: by the attempt of the Protestant Dissenters to secure the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts between 1787 and 1790, by the Regency Crisis of 1788–9, by the impact of the French Revolution on Britain, by the issue of parliamentary reform in the 1790s and, after 1793, by the question of war against France. It was not before the campaigns against the Orders in Council in 1808–12 that the old unity of 1786 was to be recaptured. The success of the campaign in 1812 encouraged the middling orders to establish permanent local chambers of commerce.