Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  None of this is to say that their English cousins considered Irish Protestant landowners and merchants their equals. The English Parliament tightened its hold on its Irish counterpart by the Declaratory Act (1720). Throughout the period, it sought to restrict Irish trade so as to favor England. For example, an act of 1699 forbade the Irish from exporting woolens except through English ports, where they were loaded with exorbitant tariffs. It is no exaggeration to say that, as the period of this book closed, Ireland was ruled from London with every regard to the interests of the English ruling class, some regard to those of the Protestant Irish ruling class, and no regard at all to those of the majority native Irish population. As a result, the eighteenth century was to prove, in many ways, the most miserable in Irish history. In 1729 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) offered a startling comment on that misery by making the satirical suggestion, in A Modest Proposal, that since the English had apparently sought to liquidate the Irish in any case, they might as well eat their children. Even today, long after the establishment of an independent Republic of Ireland in the south, the memory of William’s relief of Ulster, victory at the Boyne, and their aftermath continues to rankle with Irish Catholics, while it is celebrated, tauntingly, by Ulster Protestants.

  The War and the Parties, 1688–97

  For England, William’s Irish victory provided a moment of relief. The danger of immediate invasion passed and the king returned to his capital in triumph. Still, the domestic political situation looked grim. Remember that after Beachy Head the French navy controlled the Channel and Louis threatened invasion. Worse, William remained unsure about his subjects’ loyalty to the new regime, especially his Tory subjects. After all, the very act which had led to the establishment of that regime – the Glorious Revolution – went against everything that Toryism stood for on the relationship between sovereigns and subjects. In fact, the Tories in William’s government found themselves living a number of contradictions. They were the party of Divine Right monarchy, yet they served a usurper. They were the party of high Anglicanism, yet the new king was a Calvinist who had brought with him a toleration for Dissenters. They were the party of peaceful isolation and friendship with France, yet they were forced to fight a European war against Louis XIV. They were the party of much of the landed gentry, yet the war forced them into a heavy tax on land.

  Is it any wonder that the Tories seemed to be half-hearted about the war and the king for whom it was being fought? Tories in the administration seemed to be uncooperative, corrupt, or suspiciously incompetent when it came to the war. Tories in Parliament tended to favor a “blue-water” strategy in which Britain would use its navy to harass the French empire overseas and protect mercantile investment in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean while remaining aloof from the land war in Europe. Tory landowners saw this as a cheap alternative to William’s advocacy of expensive armies and continental entanglements; William saw it as cowardly, defeatist, and of little help to his Dutch countrymen or European allies. Worse, by 1692 it became clear that a number of prominent Tory peers, including William’s ablest military commander, John Churchill, now earl of Marlborough, had been writing to King James, apologizing for their part in the Revolution of 1688 and, in some cases, offering assistance for a restoration. Most of these letters were probably just insurance policies against the possibility that James might return. Their authors may not have been committed Jacobites willing to risk outright rebellion so much as realists, careful to ensure the favor of whichever side won. Still, William cannot be blamed for assuming the worst. The most prominent letter writers, including Marlborough, were sent to the Tower and Tories began to be purged from the central government.

  In their place, William III began to name Whigs. If the Revolution of 1688–9 and the Nine Years’ War tore the Tory party apart with contradiction, they solved many such contradictions for the Whigs. After all, the Whigs had always supported the ideas of parliamentary sovereignty and revolution against a bad king. Whigs, many of whom were Dissenters, embraced the toleration. Whigs had no love for Catholic France and genuinely feared Louis’s ambitions; they therefore embraced Britain’s role in the Grand Alliance and Nine Years’ War. Since the Whig party included large numbers of merchants and financiers as well as landowners, they had less cause to grumble over high taxes on land. Indeed, many Whig landowners began to move over to the Tories.

  In short, the 1690s and the war which dominated them saw a seismic shift in the roles and composition of the two political parties in England. The Tories’ ideological problems with King William, his war, and co-religionists gradually turned them from being a court or government party into an opposition or “country” party of political outsiders. The same factors turned the Whigs, heretofore the radical opposition party, made up of political and religious outcasts, into the party of government – but with one crucial difference. The Tories (and before them their Cavalier and “court” ancestors) had been the party of the Crown because they had believed passionately, even irrationally, in the Great Chain of Being generally, and in the Stuarts as God’s lieutenants in particular. During the Civil Wars, many Tory families had suffered, losing loved ones and lands, for those beliefs. They had revered Charles II and even James II, in spite of their faults, not only because those kings rewarded them with positions at court, but because they were the rightful heirs, the ceremonial fathers of the country. For Tories, there was something magical and heart-stirring in the name of “king,” a name which only God, not Parliament, could bestow.

  The Whigs, on the other hand, felt no such affection for William III because they had never attached any magic to the title which Parliament had, in fact, bestowed upon him. If Whigs believed passionately in anything, it was in the rights of Parliament and the need to defend Protestantism. Many Whig families had made comparable sacrifices for their beliefs during the Civil Wars and, more recently, during the Tory revenge of 1681–5, but those beliefs were not necessarily Royalist. Their support for the new king was practical, a sort of business proposition. He was a chairman of the board or chief executive officer, not a god or a father. Though the Whigs would work hard on behalf of William’s regime, though many would develop some affection for him, they were not above threatening to quit or oppose his government in order to gain political advantage. In particular, Whig majorities, seeking to bolster Parliament’s power, sometimes threatened to withhold funds unless the king made concessions, such as a new Triennial Act in 1694 to force him to call Parliament at least once every three years. Since William III was far more interested in defeating Louis XIV and saving the United Provinces than he was in defending the prerogatives of the Crown, he usually gave in. These concessions did more to reduce royal power than had the Revolution itself. Thus, the political revolution of 1688–9 and the war that followed recast the two parties and, in the long run, further subordinated the British Crown to Parliament.

  The Rise of the Whig Junto, 1693–97

  In the short run, however, William III’s turn toward the Whigs gave him exactly what he wanted: a government and a parliament which would support the war. The Whig leaders proved to be exceedingly competent as war ministers. Those leaders comprised five men who, because they formed an effective and cohesive political and administrative team, came to be known as “the Junto.” The most flamboyant member of the Junto was Thomas Wharton (1648–1715), from 1696 Lord Wharton. He held a lucrative position at court as comptroller of the Household, and he was a brilliant orator, capable of swaying parliamentary opinion. He was also a great landowner. Given the realities of English electoral politics, this meant that he could dictate the representatives of a number of parliamentary constituencies and control their votes in the House of Commons. (He was also a notorious libertine and one of the great swordsmen-duelists of his age.) The Junto’s constitutional and legal expert was Sir John Somers (1651–1716), from 1693 lord keeper of the Great Seal, from 1697 Lord Somers and lord chancellor of England. Somers was an attorney who proved to be an excellent
draftsman of legislation, including the Bill of Rights of 1689. (He, too, was a bit of a rake and also a great literary patron.) The youngest member of the Junto, Charles Spencer (1675–1722), later to succeed his father as earl of Sunderland, proved to be an important leader in the House of Commons after Wharton and Somers were elevated to the Lords. Spencer also had useful connections to the Churchills (he married Anne Churchill [1683–1716], one of Marlborough’s daughters) and he would, in the next reign, develop foreign policy expertise. Naval affairs were handled by Admiral Edward Russell, from 1694 first lord of the Admiralty and from 1697 earl of Orford. In 1692, Russell won a decisive victory against the French navy at La Hogue, thus restoring Britain’s command of the sea and ending the invasion threat. Subsequently, he established a British naval presence in the Mediterranean and launched a reform of the Royal Navy, building new ships and updating dockyards. The former disrupted French trade and led to British dominance in the region for 250 years; the latter provided the infrastructure for overall British naval supremacy for decades.

  Russell’s victory at La Hogue enabled William to take the war to the French on the continent. This required large armies supported by an extensive logistical network to train, pay, feed, clothe, equip, and transport them. To this must be added the charge of the expanding Royal Navy. The result was the most expensive war in English history to date. The Nine Years’ War drove total government expenditure to about £5.5 million a year, three times its average annual peacetime revenue. Failure to raise this sum would doom the British war effort and, perhaps, the Revolution Settlement. In order to pay for each summer’s campaign, William had to turn to Parliament. In 1693 that body voted a Land Tax of four shillings in the pound; that is, for every pound’s worth of land an owner possessed, he had to pay the government four shillings (or one-fifth of a pound). Theoretically, this meant that all landowners owed one-fifth of their annual income from land to the Crown. But William’s government never received that level of funding because taxes were assessed and collected by local JPs and other landowners, who were reluctant to assess their neighbors up to the real value of their estates or to collect rigorously the taxes so assessed (which came on top of the poor rate, tithes for the Church, etc.). In any case, this tax was never expected to yield more than £2 million a year. As a result, the new regime was falling behind in the arms and money race with Louis – who, remember, did not have to call a parliament to tax his people.

  This brings us to the financial genius of the Junto, Charles Montagu (1661–1715, from 1700 Lord Halifax). Named a lord of the Treasury in 1692 and chancellor of the Exchequer in 1694, Montagu realized that in order to win the war, William’s government would need lots of ready cash – quicker and more abundant cash than could be raised by the Land Tax. He saw an alternative source of income in the wealth flowing into the country from the commercial revolution. As will be recalled, the Customs and Excise were already the most profitable taxes in the Crown’s portfolio. The parliaments of the 1690s raised Customs rates as high as 25 percent and extended the Excise to all sorts of new products, including leather, coal, malt (important for brewing), salt, spices, tea, coffee, and wine. But such taxes took as long to collect as the Land Tax; nor did Montagu wish to expand them any further, as that would have the effect of strangling the goose that was laying the golden egg of English commerce. Rather, he wanted to persuade its keepers – large and middling merchants and investors in trading ventures – to loan ready money to the Crown voluntarily. This was a tough proposition because the Crown was a poor risk: recall that, in 1672, Charles II had actually declared a kind of bankruptcy.

  Montagu and the Whigs, copying innovative Dutch financial techniques, had another idea. In 1693 Parliament authorized the government to solicit a loan of £1 million on the security of a fund fed by the Land, Excise, and other taxes. This marks the establishment of a funded national debt. For the first time, interest on the debt was guaranteed to be paid out of a specific “pot.” This made such loans much more attractive as their repayment seemed much more secure. Montagu went farther by proposing that in future the Crown make no promise to pay back the principal of such loans by any particular date; instead, they would remain outstanding for the course of the war, if not longer. But the Crown did promise to pay lenders 14 percent interest on their loan, out of the fund described above, for life. What this meant was that, if William won the war and the lender lived, he and his family could make their investment many times over. This was so attractive that, as time went on and trust in the regime’s promises grew, the government found that it could lower the interest paid to as little as 3 percent and still find takers. Later, the Crown also offered lenders self-liquidating annuities for a number of lives or for 99 years, and sold tickets to public lotteries. They also charged corporate bodies like the East India Company and, in the next reign, the South Sea Company vast sums in return for the privilege of being allowed to exist. The greatest example of this fund-raising strategy, and Montagu’s crowning inspiration, was the charter for the Bank of England, established in 1694. In return for an immediate loan of £1.2 million, the Bank was allowed to sell stock in itself, receive deposits, make loans, and even print notes against the security of its loan to the government. In future years, the Bank of England would be the Crown’s greatest jewel: its largest single lender, its principal banker, and the manager of this funded national debt which Montagu initiated.

  The fiscal expedients described above were so far reaching that they have been dubbed “the financial revolution” by their historian, P. G. M. Dickson. Their impact was profound. First, in the short term they enabled His Majesty’s government to raise fabulous sums of money very quickly. This, in turn, enabled William to raise and supply his armies in Europe and to maintain his navies across the Atlantic. Admittedly, the one weakness in the Junto system was that there was no great military leader. With Marlborough tainted by Jacobitism, William III acted as his own general and he was generally not thought to have been a very good one. The early years of the war saw a series of catastrophes as the Grand Alliance (consisting of the British, the Dutch republic, the Holy Roman emperor [Austria], Spain, Savoy, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hanover, and Bavaria) lost land battle after land battle, fortress after fortress to the armies of Louis XIV. This led to increasing Tory demands for withdrawal from the continent in favor of their preferred “blue-water” strategy, as well as “country” demands for investigations into government misconduct. Nevertheless, thanks to Britain’s vast financial and material resources, William’s unrelenting determination, and the Junto’s sheer competence, the Grand Alliance held and the French began to be worn down. By 1695 the Allies took the key French fort at Namur (see map 12, p. 291). More importantly, Louis (or, more accurately, the French taxpayer) was running out of money. In 1697 both sides sought peace. According to the Treaty of Ryswick, the French king agreed to recognize William III as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland and, thus, withdraw his support for King James. He also agreed to restore nearly all the territories he had seized since 1678 and to negotiate a Partition Treaty with William to ensure that when Carlos II of Spain died, no one European power would receive the whole of the Spanish empire. Daniel Defoe (1660?–1731) explained these developments when he wrote that “‘tis not the longest sword, but the longest purse that conquers.”4 Thanks to the financial revolution and Britain’s longer purse, the greatest army in Europe had been stopped; Louis XIV’s dream of a Franco-Spanish empire was put on hold; and the Dutch republic, European Protestantism, and, in Britain, the Revolution Settlement in Church and State were safe. For the moment, at least.

  In the long term, the wealth produced by the financial revolution – what historian John Brewer has called the “sinews of power” – would ensure Britain’s growing military domination of Europe in the eighteenth century, and the world in the century after that (see below). A second long-term effect of the financial revolution was that it initiated the funded national debt of Great Britain. The British
government was now committed to pay or service that debt for the foreseeable future. Clearly, it would have to collect more taxes and contract more debt, every year, in order to continue to pay the interest on the debt already contracted. In other words, the debt would be self-perpetuating: though it would be greatly paid down during periods of peace, it would never go away completely. In order to secure Parliament’s continued approval for contracting and servicing the debt, William III would have to summon it annually, as well as agree to a Commission to examine his government accounts in 1691; to the Triennial Act in 1694; to the reduction of his Dutch guards in 1698; and to provisions reducing the royal prerogative in the Act of Settlement of 1701. The financial revolution thus played a key role in shaping the English constitution – and increasing the power and initiative of Parliament.

  And yet, while the war and the financial revolution reduced the personal power of the sovereign, they vastly increased that of the Crown, that is, His Majesty’s government. That government now had at its disposal enormous armies and navies and the expanding bureaucracy necessary to oversee and supply them. For example, William’s army numbered 76,000 men, almost twice that of James II. It has been estimated that the central administration comprised some 4,000 officials in 1688. By the 1720s it would come to over 12,000, with over 3,000 officers serving the Excise alone. Old departments grew while new ones would be established, such as the Office of Trade and Plantations (to administer Britain’s new colonial acquisitions) and new revenue-collecting departments (a Glass Office, Salt Office, Stamp Office, and Leather Office). The Treasury increasingly controlled this vast bureaucracy, and sought to run the government more efficiently and thriftily. In order to weed out old, corrupt practices, it initiated adequate salaries and pension schemes, drew up handbooks of conduct, and calculated statistics to make realistic appraisals of the tasks at hand. As this implies, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a growing sense of professionalism among government workers. Men like William Blathwayt at the War Office (ca. 1650–1717), Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) at the Navy Office, and William Lowndes (1652–1724) at the Treasury were career bureaucrats who remained in office despite shifts of faction and party.5