A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  Virtually everywhere else in Europe, if not the world – from Ming China to Mughal India to Romanov Russia to Hohenzollern Prussia – the more militarized the state, the stronger the king. But in Britain, the longer the wars went on, the stronger parliament became, as the purse whose strings it controlled so tightly became bigger and bigger. Apart from the States General and provincial estates of the Dutch Republic, Britain was the only major European power where senior military men – generals like Marlborough – also sat in parliament and assumed a role as power-brokers, not to subvert parliamentary government but to reinforce it.

  In one of the greatest ironies of British history, positions traditionally taken by monarchists and parliamentarians were now reversed. The Whigs, who in the reigns of Charles II and James II had insisted on limited monarchy, now found themselves to be running the war, while the Tory champions of unlimited monarchy were mistrustful of it, not least because nearly a quarter of all money voted in 1702–13 for expenditure on the army was going to foreign (especially Dutch) subsidies! The Tories also began to present themselves to the electors of the counties as the champions of the over-taxed landed classes, held to ransom by men whose commitment to the war was driven as much by profit as principle. It was a turnaround worthy of Dean Swift’s most biting satires on the squabbles of Big Enders and Little Enders, but it had an entirely serious effect on British politics. For as long as the little-king party ran the war government, and the big-king party was more often than not in opposition, the role reversal dictated a benevolent equilibrium and ruled out the possibility of military autocracy.

  Better yet, the Tories – who in the reign of Charles II had been content to see a single parliament renewed for more than fifteen years – now wanted more, not fewer, elections. Their most articulate spokesman, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who cast himself as the guardian of ancient English liberties, even went so far as insisting that frequent revolutions were a sign of political vigour. The Whigs, of course, felt that 1688 had been all the revolution the country needed, but since the revolutionary settlement had guaranteed triennial elections it was all but impossible for them to avoid regular political upheaval. And, for better or worse, the politics was the kind of combative partisanship that, without any anachronism, we can recognize as prototypically modern. The two parties were at each other’s throats, not just on the specific policies of the day (the corruption of ministers, the propriety and expense of the war, the profiteering of contractors) but also in their reading of the Revolution of 1688 and the character of the political nation that had been created – or reaffirmed – as a result of it. Paradoxically, neither of the parties was especially eager to represent what had happened as a historical rupture with the past. As the principal beneficiaries of the change, the Whigs were not about to endorse a view of opposition that seemed to license resistance to the king’s ministers. So they portrayed themselves as the real conservatives and James II as a renegade, like his father before him, bent on violating the fundamental tenets of the ‘ancient constitution’ – the rule of law, the Protestant settlement and the proper restraints imposed by parliamentary government. The ‘revolution’ that deposed him had been, then, an act of lawful resistance, the restoration of the authentic constitutional monarchy under which the nation now lived. ‘The tyrant conspired to enslave free-born Englishmen into SLAVES,’ a typical Whig polemic shouted, ‘the CREATURES of Popery and Tyranny! He would have had Papist Irishmen in your houses . . . quartered on your wives and daughters; he would have made TORQUEMADAS of your judges. He had broken his sworn CONTRACT with his people and Resistance to his despotism was a sacred duty, the calling of patriots.’

  The Tories remained adamant that the Whigs had usurped the title of defenders of the monarchy, while deforming its character. That monarchy remained what it had been before 1688: a divinely appointed office. Their own participation in 1688 had not in any way altered or compromised the sacrosanct nature of the institution, but had merely been an ad hominem act filling the vacancy that James had unfortunately created. There had been a change of personnel, not a change of constitution:

  RESISTANCE which is nothing but foul HYDRA-HEADED REBELLION is a very MONSTROSITY, an abomination unto God to whom alone it is reserved to decide the fate of His Anointed . . . King James was not cast out – Truly he resigned his throne and this being vacant Prince William was invited hither. But he has been captive to wicked counsellors, has dragged the country into wars so that his minions could line their pockets with our TAXES. Not content with plundering your purse they conspire at the DESTRUCTION of the true Church of England by a most disingenuous allowance of OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY (which is nothing other than the pernicious TOLERATION of Dissenters), his minions, the SEEDS OF CROMWELL, are even now encompassing the MURDER OF TRUE, Divinely-Appointed MONARCHY.

  The abuse could get ugly and personal. William III, his bitterest enemies put it about, was not only foreign and corrupt but a homosexual eunuch too, which explained his difficulty in begetting heirs. A typical serenade of the period went:

  He has gotten in PART the shape of a man

  But more of a monkey, deny it who can

  He’s the tread of a goose, the legs of a swan

  A DAINTY FINE KING indeed!

  He is not qualified for his wife

  Because of the cruel midwife’s knife

  Yet BUGGERING BENTINCK does please to the life

  A DAINTY FINE KING indeed!

  The differences between Whigs and Tories, then, were not just the petty quibbles of gentlemen who, once the political name-calling was done, could get together over a glass of wine or a tankard of ale. These differences cut to the bone. They went to rival coffee-houses (the Whigs to Old Slaughter’s, the Tories to the Cocoa Tree) and different clubs (the Whigs to the Kit Cat, the Tories to the Honourable Board of Brotherhood from 1709, or Edward Harley’s Board from 1720). They were two armed camps, bent on mutual destruction, and contested elections were fought, with everything the combatants could get their hands on: money, drink, entertainment, shameless promises of jobs, juicy libel and, in the last resort, either the threat or the reality of a serious brawl.

  From the poll-books kept by many constituencies we know that, even though the electors were for the most part the social inferiors of the candidate, they were anything but docile or easily impressionable. The voters of the fiercely contested counties were freeholders: literate, opinionated, informed by the newspapers and journals that mushroomed after the abandonment of the Licensing Act, and predictably bloody-minded about the hot-button issues of the day like toleration of Dissenters or Catholics and the imposition of new excises. By the standards of the time, the size of the electorate was surprisingly large: a quarter of a million adult males or 15 per cent of that population. And it was divided right down the middle, county by county, village by village. The poll-books of even the most modest hamlets show electors voting their party choice, irrespective of the opinion of the local squire – and switching that choice from election to election.

  The battle for power was so intense and so vicious that politicians and their respective camp followers – placemen and pen-pushers, hacks and roughnecks – were not inclined to be magnanimous in victory. As Queen Anne got older, and the anxiety about the succession became more acute, the temptation to make a pre-emptive strike on the enemy was virtually irresistible. Politicians on the losing end of elections were now faced with losing, not only their jobs along with the little barony of dependent supporters they had accumulated but their liberty too. Being out of power and out of place could now also entail impeachment, imprisonment, total personal and political ruin. To allow a floored antagonist to get up off the mat was to court destruction. Equally, to fail to nip a potent, scurrilous campaign in the bud while it was still an irritation rather than a threat was to show fatal weakness.

  So, with an eye to their future after the aged Queen Anne had gone, the Whigs decided to pluck out the most annoying thorn in their flesh:
the ultra-Tory, High-Church preacher Dr Henry Sacheverell. In 1709, thirsty for confrontation, Sacheverell had, in his own words, ‘hung out the bloody banner of defiance’ and on 5 November had preached a violent sermon in St Paul’s before the Corporation of London, condemning the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a transgression against God’s anointed and accusing the Whigs of putting the Church of England in danger by its de facto policy of tolerating Dissenters. For Sacheverell, both crimes were tantamount to bringing back the evil days of the Commonwealth, an overturning of everything that England truly was. To make sure that his alarm bell would be heard, he had 100,000 copies of the sermon printed and distributed. By 1710, the campaign to discredit the Whigs as the destroyers of the true Church had become ubiquitous and vocal. The government – unpopular through the prolongation of the war in Europe and the high costs in excises it placed on the people – either had to brazen out the shouting or stamp on Sacheverell before he became a real menace.

  In 1710 Sacheverell was impeached in the House of Lords. The trial was a public-relations fiasco for the government. Henry Sacheverell became a hero of the streets of London, and Dissenter meeting-houses and chapels, including those of the Huguenot community who had settled around Spitalfields after their expulsion from France, were ransacked and burned to the ground. Sacheverell was escorted to his trial each day by a guard of myrmidon butchers and mobbed wherever he was sighted by delirious crowds yelling his name and issuing death threats against the Whig ministers. Inside parliament Sacheverell upended the onus of guilt, prosecuting not only the government but also the entire Whig version of the history of 1688 and especially their claim to lawful resistance, which he dismissed as a wicked oxymoron. Pro-Sacheverell riots broke out in virtually every major town in the southwest and Midlands and, faced with a breakdown of order and insufficient troops to repress it, the government decided to cut its losses, whatever the embarrassment. Sacheverell was given a transparently trivial sentence – suspended from preaching for three years and the offending sermon to be burned by the public hangman. The news was greeted with bonfires and bells around the country, reminiscent of scenes at the Restoration of 1660, as well as another round of chapel-breaking. In the next election, the Tories swept to power.

  When the Queen died in August 1714, the political nation held its breath. Anything and everything was on the cards, including another round of civil war. Street violence between party gangs became commonplace, the ‘Mughouse’ vigilantes paid by the Whig John Holles, first Duke of Newcastle, taking it to the High Tory and Jacobite mobs that had ruled the alleys since the Sacheverell riots. Rumours took wing. Before she died, it was said, Queen Anne had let it be known that she wished her Catholic half-brother James Edward Stuart to succeed her, not the Elector of Hanover, and had even signed a will to make her intentions clear. But however hard they searched, no one could come up with the document that would get in the way of the succession of the uncharismatic middle-aged Elector George. The Jacobite press ridiculed him mercilessly as a lecherous dolt, with not a word of English at his command, sporting two mistresses, one fat, one thin, both ugly, who had not scrupled to have one of his own wife’s former lovers murdered. His coronation was greeted with another wave of rioting in at least twenty English towns. Predictably enough, it was even worse in Scotland. At Inverness the proclamation of George’s accession was interrupted by the town magistrates and ‘God save the King’ shouted down by cries of ‘God damn them and their king’.

  Not surprisingly, George took it personally and blamed the Tories for encouraging if not actually engineering the hostile demonstrations. As much of a soldier-king as William III, George also disapproved of the unseemly hastiness with which they had sought peace with France and the poor terms on which the Treaty of Utrecht had been settled in 1713. He wanted them out of power. Purges were conducted on office-holders and money taken from the civil list for the 1715 election, which duly produced the enormous Whig majority the king desired. Faced with the prospect of years in the wilderness and a permanently unsympathetic king, the Tory leaders, the Duke of Ormonde, and Bolingbroke, panicked and took a flyer on the alternative – James Edward Stuart. In hindsight it seems like an unbelievably foolhardy, if not insane, gamble. But after Sacheverell, Jacobitism had got into the bloodstream of English politics to a degree that would have been unthinkable ten years before. Even so, the problem – and it was a huge one – was that a King James III/VIII was only going to be a possibility courtesy of a French invasion. And after decades of interminable war, an emptied treasury, desperate impoverishment, near famine conditions and partial occupation, France, if not Louis XIV, was utterly exhausted. Besides, an attempt had been made to land James Edward in Scotland seven years before, in 1708, which, although triggering a panic at Westminster and the passage of the Treason Act, ended in an ignominious débâcle. The ostensible leader of the rebellion, the Duke of Hamilton, had swiftly disappeared to Lancashire at the critical moment. A flotilla of English warships had barred the entrance to the Firth of Forth, while James’s face erupted in an unkingly flowering of measles. The would-be James VIII never landed.

  Without a better planned and better executed French military action in 1715, the only hope that the Tories and Jacobites had was for an uprising to begin in Britain itself – starting, of course, in Scotland. And this was very much on the cards. The glowing vision of mutual prosperity and pan-Britannic harmony sketched by boosters of the union like Daniel Defoe had, of course, failed to materialize. Arguably Scotland, even Highland Scotland, was no worse off than it had been before 1707, but new taxes on linen, malt and salt had been introduced, and no bonanza in Scottish exports to England had opened up. After the failure of the 1708 Jacobite plan the English law of treason was put into effect along the border, with fresh hardship for all those living in that region. The most obvious beneficiaries of the union had been those who were already among the richest and most powerful Scots, like the Duke of Argyll. There were other nobles, in particular the Earl of Mar, Secretary of Scotland from 1713 to 1714, who had served in the Tory governments of Anne, who saw 1715 as the coming of a long Whig winter – and then acted to guarantee it.

  On the assumption that James would arrive with the French in force, and that there would also be an English uprising in the old Catholic region of Northumbria, Mar raised his standard at the ancestral stag-hunt at Braemar in September. In the northeast Lowlands other disaffected nobles rallied to him, and in the west some (though not all) of the clans began to rally their Highland followers. Throughout Scotland, in fact, not just in the Highlands, support for the Hanoverian regime melted away alarmingly. Defensive trenches were dug in front of Edinburgh Castle. Perspiration flowed freely in London. Already in July, plans had been made for a hasty exit to Holland for George I.

  But even though it may have had more going for it in 1715 than 1745, the Jacobite rebellion never came close to overthrowing the union and its German king. At Sherriffmuir, on 13 November, Mar’s 4000 Jacobites fought a much smaller force of around 1000 under Argyll to a draw but still failed to take either Glasgow or Edinburgh. Reduced to futile marches and counter-marches, while waiting for a French invasion that seemed mysteriously postponed, the rebels found the momentum draining away from the rising. The English and Scottish components of a joint army had no sooner come together than they fell out and became reduced (as so many times before) to a raiding and wrecking force until finally cornered in Lancashire.

  The coup de grâce actually took place a long way from the Tweed and the Tay at Versailles. Just a few days before Mar came out for the Stuarts, their greatest patron, Louis XIV, had died, leaving an infant great-grandson as his successor. Any chance that the Regent, Orleans, had of stabilizing his country and relieving it of the crushing burden of taxation depended on a peace policy. There would be no invasion. Just over six weeks after he had arrived in Scotland on 22 December 1714, James was back on board returning to France. Not long afterwards, the whole Jacobite ménage – 3000 Irish, S
cots and English – which for years had camped at St Germain on Louis XIV’s long-suffering generosity, was removed to the less grandiose milieu of Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine. Their cause was still gallantly flattered. But the truth was that they had become an expensive nuisance.

  In England the Whig government and the king could breathe just a little more easily. The northern earls were, in the ancient style, beheaded for their treason (as their predecessors had been in 1569), allowing the Earl of Derwentwater to make a magnificently histrionic speech, on 24 February 1716, from the scaffold at Tower Hill, custom-ordered for Jacobite hagiographers. But even if, in hindsight, the rising of 1715 might look like a storm in a teacup, and even though successive Whig governments cynically conjured up the Jacobite bogey whenever they wanted an excuse to intimidate or incarcerate their political opponents, the threat had in fact been serious. And it didn’t go away. In March 1719 a mini-armada of 29 Spanish ships and 5000 troops, with arms for another 30,000, set sail from Cadiz for Scotland, although the Protestant wind intervened as close as Coruña, dispersing it and stranding the Pretender.

  Britain, though, was not yet becalmed. If anyone in 1715, or even 1720, had predicted that the next two decades would see an astonishing drop in the wind-speed of politics in Britain, they would have been written off as hopelessly deluded. But from being a political nation notorious for its feverish hyperactivity and infuriated partisanship, early Hanoverian Britain became – almost – sedate. And the man who administered the sedative was Sir Robert Walpole.

  It was Walpole’s intuition (as much as his calculation) to present himself as the soul of common sense. But much as he cultivated the impression that his bottom-heavy ‘soundness’ and common-sense pragmatism rose naturally from his roots among the Norfolk gentry, ‘Squire Walpole’ resembled the typical country gentleman about as closely as King George III would approximate to the average farmer. And although he would never have made a profession of it, Walpole’s approach to politics arguably owed much to John Locke – not the Locke of the two Treatises on Government but the Locke of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690 and already run through several editions by the time Walpole was in his political apprenticeship. Of course Walpole was uninterested in the finer points of Locke’s epistemology – the science of how we acquire dependable knowledge. But in common with many of his contemporaries he surely took on board Locke’s flat denial of truths grounded in revelation rather than experience. If attachment to mutually intolerant beliefs, of the kind that had so bitterly divided the political nation, had not been brought about by some irrefutable epiphany but rather had been the product of particular historical happenstance, then perhaps another kind of historical happenstance could make them go away.