The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  28.Ramsden, An Appetite for Power, p. 29.

  29.Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p. 263.

  30.As is argued rather unsympathetically in I. Newbold, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–41: The Politics of Government (1990). Leslie Mitchell has argued that the Reform Bill needs to be placed into the context of the old Foxite and Rockinghamite contest with the crown. On this view, the enfranchisement of middling order men with property would protect against royal tyranny. Such a nostalgic view fails to take full account of the peculiar circumstances of 1829–32. L. G. Mitchell, ‘Foxite Politics and the Great Reform Bill’, English Historical Review (1993), pp. 338–64.

  31.Briggs, Age of Improvement, p. 259; Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 239–40; Brock, The Great Reform Act, pp. 305–9; Evans, Britain before the Reform Act, pp. 92–3.

  Conclusion

  In the century and a half after the Glorious Revolution Britain experienced a number of the most important transformations in her history. These may be conveniently treated by recalling the themes which were outlined in the introduction to this book and which have constantly recurred in these pages.

  The first theme concerned the development of the internal structure of Great Britain and the transition from a polity based on multiple kingdoms to a settled and unified state. The Acts of Union with Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1800) occurred in different circumstances. The Union with Scotland contained many sections of Scottish society which had become reconciled to Union and preceded to become particularly enthusiastic participants in the life of the British Empire. Scottish society was, moreover, considerably more prosperous and harmonious than it had been in earlier decades. The Scottish Enlightenment of the second half of the eighteenth century established Scotland’s cultural place in Europe and emphasized her continuing distinctiveness within the framework of the British Empire. Although the important political decisions affecting Scotland were now taken in London, the northern kingdom was far from becoming a servile dependency of England. Political integration had not led to economic stagnation nor to the weakening of the social and cultural identity of Scotland, even if the more militant displays of Scottish national feeling were a thing of the past. Indeed, as the political incorporation of Scotland into England proceeded, so a romantic and nostalgic, and, in many respects, mythological version of the Scottish past was fashioned by writers like Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.

  There was some prospect, too, that the future of Ireland within the British state might yet be auspicious. Without the benefit of hindsight into the tragic experiences of Ireland later in the nineteenth century, it is at least arguable that Ireland might have followed the example of Scotland. The domestic problems of Ireland remained intractable, but Union had at last been accompanied by emancipation in 1829, and in the 1830s and 1840s British ministers, both Whig and Tory, made some attempts to deal constructively with Irish social and economic problems. Posterity was to learn that these attempts were to be unavailing. Even these well-meaning initiatives were incapable of surmounting the formidable religious division between England and Ireland. They were, moreover, much too modest even to contest the overwhelming power of Protestant property and its rights. Yet this did not seem inevitable in 1829. For much of the eighteenth century Ireland had been more secure within the Hanoverian political system than Scotland had been. If the ‘98 rising had changed all that, Ireland was quiet for two decades after Union. It still seemed possible to contemporaries after 1829 that peace, and even some prosperity, might come Ireland’s way. Yet emancipation had not been accompanied by the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church in its institutional aspects. Peel argued, in many ways understandably, that if a Protestant state like England imposed the Roman Catholic Church upon Ireland it would have led to serious political trouble with the Protestants. Yet again, it was the internal contradictions of the confessional state which caused damaging and disruptive difficulties to the welfare and future prospects for Britain. Nevertheless, and as we have seen, a rising sense of Britishness did much to dissolve internal tensions and to conceal weaknesses. Anglicization pulled people into certain conformities: of culture, consumption and manners. Furthermore, the magnetic pull of the capital city in all spheres of life brought people together. As Colin Kidd has observed, ‘The emulation of Englishness acted, up to a point, as a glue of integration.’1

  This brings us naturally to the second theme, the role of religion in the life of the British state and people. It is likely that by the end of our period religion was no less important in politics and in the life of the people than it had been at the beginning. The dramatic expansion of evangelical religion within the Church of England and the revival of Protestant Dissent outside it suggest that organized religion filled important needs during a period of unprecedented social and economic change, albeit of a religiously diverse character. At the same time, the confessional state could not indefinitely be sustained at such a time. Indeed, the attempt to re-establish the civil as well as the ecclesiastic power of the Church of England after the Restoration had been threatened from the outset even by the Stuart monarchy and its policies of religious indulgence. The ideal of a comprehensive, established church was not, in the end, to be achieved. Although Bishop Hoadley’s vision of a church which permitted the flowering of private religious beliefs, contained in his famous sermon in 1717, was many decades ahead of its time, it is significant that Convocation, the voice of militantly aggressive high-church Anglicanism, was suspended in the same year and in 1719 both the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts were repealed. By the end of the eighteenth century religious diversity was almost taken for granted, leaving only an Anglican monopoly of civil offices. (Even that was challenged, however, by the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791 and in effect wrecked by the legislation of 1828 and 1829.) If the Church of England survived the long eighteenth century intact and without the internal schismatic divisions that might have fragmented its structure, it remains true that it proved itself incapable of adjusting to the needs of a new urban society. Yet its resources, property and wealth were, and still looked, impressive. Between the Reform Act and 1851 the church was to show itself capable of an astonishing rehabilitation. Within twenty years the number of beneficed Anglican clergy was to rise from 11,000 to 18,000, while the besetting ills of pluralism and non-residence were virtually eliminated. In the first half of the nineteenth century, moreover, over 2,000 Anglican churches were built, most of them in the new industrial towns, and another 1,000 were built between 1851 and 1865. That the Anglican church was weakened by serious structural weaknesses in the eighteenth century can scarcely be denied. However, once its confessional status had been breached, it showed itself capable of a comprehensive renaissance.

  The third theme introduced earlier in this volume was that of the cohesion of the social order. During the long eighteenth century the British state completed many stages in the journey by which a hierarchic society of orders became a class society. The protracted nature of this process has frequently been remarked upon and it was by no means complete by 1832. Indeed, it was only at the very end of the period covered by this book that the finely graded hierarchies of pre-industrial society finally transformed themselves into nationally organized, horizontally formed classes. Even then, however, lingering residues of the old formations were to be found in rural areas; religion and the power of the churches could mobilize people just as powerfully as the agencies of class. Nevertheless, class had arrived by 1832. The middle and working classes had forged their respective identities in their mutual interaction, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation. Whether the formation of classes inevitably led to class conflict is a topic of perennial fascination. That it could do is unquestionably the case; whether it inevitably would is much less obvious. Much depended on circumstances rather than upon any iron logic of class. Much depended, too, on the divisions within classes and the possibility either of healing or of containing them. The middle class in the 1820s, for example, was fissure
d by internal divisions between Anglican and Dissenter, between Whig and Tory and by yet further divisions of wealth and status, to say nothing of geography. Such divisions could be overcome in a variety of ways – by propaganda, by a common political or economic objective, by the operation of voluntary and charitable societies which brought them together and, not least, by the swelling patriotic sense of Britishness which was such a powerful feature of the latter half of the long eighteenth century. Such divisions, and such strategies for their management, must be regarded as integral features of class in general, and of class in politics in particular.

  If it is the case that British society displayed a notable, and in some respects a growing, social cohesion, then one set of reasons must have been the absence of any precipitous gulf between the aristocracy and the rest of society, together with the success of the English elite in incorporating the Welsh, Scottish and Irish elites, enabling them to maintain their property, power and political position and, in the end, in making their supremacy acceptable to a sufficient number of their fellow countrymen. After 1780 the parsimonious attitude towards the creation of peerages which had obtained since the early eighteenth century was reversed. Between 1780 and 1810 the number of peerage creations leapt by 55 per cent, from 189 to 292. This not only affected those with realistic pretentions to a peerage but also a much larger core of the rural elite, shading off into a broader group of gentry and then into ‘a large, amorphous and virtually self-defining body of gentlemen’.2 Their association with the throne, their involvement in the armed services, their rural, landed power, their identification of themselves with the growing ideology of Britishness and their involvement – often personal, philanthropic and charitable – in local life did much to make their leadership acceptable to society in general. Their role in the administration of the Poor Law and their continuing importance in the administration of law and order, not least the deployment of troops, preserved their hegemonic position in local communities. Only when levels of recorded crime soared and when the demand for parliamentary reform had reached the countryside was the rural elite tempted to consider alternative methods of governing the countryside. The Rural Police Act of 1839 was the tardy consequence. Nevertheless, the local magistracy continued to enjoy an Indian summer of prestige in rural areas in the middle of the nineteenth century. County government was not expensive and it was not inefficient; it was locally based and locally manned and thus capable of responding to local – especially ratepayers’ – opinion. In these and similar ways the ruling elite maintained its hold on power, national and local, partly by making timely concessions and partly by rendering its control acceptable to so many sections of the nation. Although few saw it at the time, the economic basis of landed supremacy was gradually ebbing as Britain became a more urbanized country and, in its social as well as in its economic life, more preoccupied with the town, its institutions, its facilities and its lifestyle.

  The fourth theme raised in the introduction was the issue of Britain’s place in the world and the expansion of her overseas empire. These developments rested upon the strength, nationally and locally, of her economy. During the long eighteenth century Britain maintained her record of agricultural improvement whilst entering a period of sustained technological change and industrial development. This occurred during, and to some extent because of, an increase in the population of Britain from 6.3 million in 1701 to 16.4 million in 1831. The scale of this increase had dramatic consequences for demand and – combined with improvements in agricultural techniques and methods of breeding – with changes in industrial technology and production – conspired with yet further developments in communications to effect historic transformations in British society by the end of the long eighteenth century. It is possible to exaggerate their force and it may be true, as Jonathan Clark remarks, that ‘in 1832 Britain was still essentially horse drawn and sail driven’ and that it was not until the 1830s and 1840s, ‘when the railway and steamship arrived’, that the output of iron and coal surged ahead. As he comments, the British economy ‘was dominated by its traditional sectors and by traditional technologies, slowly evolving’.3 Many industries, indeed, had undergone little substantial change by 1832; yet others had been accelerating since the 1780s: cotton, iron and engineering. The British economy that entered the Victorian era was already an economy based on coal. In the 1830s, moreover, cotton employed almost half a million people and accounted for no less than 40 per cent of Britain’s export trade. By 1801 agriculture accounted for only 33 per cent of national income, a figure which declined steadily to 20 per cent by 1851. In the same period, the dominant place in the economy was taken by manufactures, increasing from 23 per cent to 34 per cent.

  Perhaps the most obvious and least disputed aspect of Britain’s growing economic weight lay in the extent of her commercial expansion. Already by 1714 Britain had become the major European commercial power, outstripping the Dutch, while London had become the centre of world – not merely European – trade. Already by then the ports of the west coast were heavily engaged in colonial trade. Professor Coleman has estimated that the annual value of all Britain’s commerce (imports, exports and re-exports) rose from £5.5 million in 1640 to an annual average of £7.9 million in the years 1663–9, but then grew remorselessly to over £20 million in 1752–4 and continued upwards to almost £28 million twenty years later. By 1789–90 their annual value was over £38 million.4 In other words, in the century after the Glorious Revolution the annual value of Britain’s commerce roughly trebled.

  The fifth theme with which this book is concerned is the place of Britain in Europe. We noted constantly Britain’s involvement in six major wars and their repercussions on politics and society, and it is not too much to say that warfare changed the nature of the British state. Britain became a major European power and, after 1800, a major world power by becoming, as Professor Brewer, has termed it, a ‘fiscal-military’ state. Britain became capable of financing her large military involvement in Europe from the 1690s onwards by means of deficit finance, long-term loans and the development of an elaborate system of capitalist institutions. Britain may not have been alone in Europe in expanding her armed services, her bureaucracy and her tax base. Nor was she alone in her agricultural, commercial and imperial development. Where she was arguably alone in Europe was in her ability to sustain these developments, indeed accelerating them during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. By that date, she believed herself to be pursuing an independent and unique course of development as an urbanized, industrial and imperial society. As a consequence, she believed herself to be aloof from the interests, experiences and values of her European neighbours. As we noted in Chapter 6, the structure of British society and politics was not altogether different from theirs. Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century a peculiarly British narrative of British history was beginning appear. Britain was in the forefront of technological and scientific innovation and was beginning to discard many elements of her ancien régime qualities as she trod the path to becoming a pluralist, representative and constitutional power, with an efficient, financially prudent, and bureaucratically professional, government machine. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries administrative and ‘Economical Reform’ had trimmed the size of the ‘fiscal-military state’, rendering it more respectable than that of some of its continental counterparts and less open to the accusations of corruption levelled at it by country politicians, radical reformers and even by Evangelicals.

  The final theme set out in the introduction was the development of constitutional government, and of liberal conventions, habits and institutions. This may be defined as the transition from a body politic deriving both its legitimacy and its momentum from monarchy to one that was coming to rest upon a parliamentary basis, and to be accountable to extra-parliamentary elements in the electorate and in public opinion more widely. Much of this could not have been foreseen immediately after the Glorious Revolution but, in time, the separate parts o
f its legacy were made to work in a coherent manner. During the long eighteenth century Parliament became a permanent and indispensable part of the political system; and if it was slow to develop its potential during the eighteenth century it nevertheless acted as a guarantee against any revival of royal autocracy. When such a revival became unlikely, Parliament could still act in a variety of capacities, as a sounding-board for opinion, as a legislative agency and as a focus for party conflict. The Whig state of the eighteenth century frequently allowed space for the expression of a variety of interests. By the early nineteenth century, these legislative and representational powers dominated politics and gave rise to something resembling a two-party system based on alternative ideologies and legislative objectives. This system enjoyed secure roots in the localities and fashioned political routines which were capable of considerable and ambitious improvements. Consequently, the Whigs were able to take advantage of the misfortunes of the Tory party in the late 1820s to undertake a comprehensive restructuring of the electoral, and ultimately, political order in 1830–5. The Whigs became the beneficiaries of their own reforms and they became the principal party of government between 1832 and 1867.

  The old dynastic and ‘composite’ state of the later seventeenth century had become the more ordered and more coherent body politic of the early nineteenth. The dynastic, Anglican state had become a rich and powerful capitalist society with a reasonably stable and adaptable political system. Much of the old order still existed: the church, the monarchy, the House of Lords and a propertied electoral system. But the leaders of the regime had been prepared to collaborate with the middling orders, to incorporate men and ideas and to adopt their political ideologies and organizational techniques.