Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  The winners in that conflict would depend on which party could capture royal government. This depended, in turn, on which party could forge a parliamentary majority. Such a majority by one party or the other would force the queen to employ its members in the “big-ticket” offices (lord treasurer, lord chancellor, the two secretaries of state, chancellor of the Exchequer, etc.) or face a parliament unwilling to support royal policy or, in particular, to vote money to fight the war. That is why after 1688, and especially during time of war, the sovereign had to choose ministers who could put together majorities in Parliament. Increasingly, that implied choosing ministers exclusively from the majority party. Anne, like William before her, was averse to this. As we shall see, she fought to maintain “mixed ministries” containing the best minds of both parties who would come together to push her agenda. The party leaders had a different idea. Their goal was to force the queen to name their party’s members to every post in court and government. Then it could force her to pursue its policies.

  All of this depended, at bottom, on which party could garner the most seats in a general (parliamentary) election. After the Revolution, in part because the Triennial Act (1694) required a new parliament every three years, such elections became more common. There were 11 major party contests between 1689 and 1715, more general elections than in any other similar time period before or since. And there were more contested seats than in any period of British history before the twentieth century. This served to increase party tensions, focus party positions, and introduce more and more people to political participation – and into conflict. Though the franchise was still restricted to male property holders worth 40 shillings in the countryside and a hodge-podge of different groups (sometimes the corporation, sometimes particular residents, sometimes the whole town) in towns, this still left more people with a vote than anywhere else in Europe. Moreover, thanks to inflation and each party’s attempts to increase its voter base through the courts, the number of potential electors was on the rise: from around 200,000 in 1689 to 330,000 or 5.8 percent of the population by 1722. This latter figure represented anywhere from a fifth to a quarter of the adult male population of England.

  Admittedly, actual turnout was often low and many voters still had little real choice in how they exercised this right. Some constituencies were so fully dominated by one family or political interest that there was never an opposing candidate. Even where a genuine choice was offered, a landlord or an employer might intimidate ordinary voters into following his lead because there was no secret ballot. On the other hand, many voters were property owners themselves and, so, free agents; moreover, in county elections or those for London’s MPs or other large corporations the electorate was so large that it was nearly impossible to keep track of or intimidate individual voters. In such cases, the candidates had to mount genuine campaigns. This implied not only speech-making and other propaganda but also treating voters to free beer, free meals, and, occasionally, more outright forms of bribery – though, again, a really large constituency was almost impossible to bribe. Indeed, treats were often given indiscriminately, not just to voters but to women and commoners who clearly did not meet property-based voting qualifications. All of this made electoral contests increasingly expensive for the candidates. It also meant that, possibly for the first time in English history, the will of the people really mattered: in the words of Geoffrey Holmes, “the English electorate emerged in the 1690s and remained for two decades a force genuinely, if crudely, representative of the will of the politically-conscious classes in the country.”9 Therefore, neither party could afford to ignore popular opinion. With the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, both sides churned out masses of political treatises, pamphlets, poems, and broadsides (one-page handbills, often with an illustration) in an attempt to shape it. By 1702, Harley had recognized the advantage of employing “some discreet writer on the government’s side”;10 two years later he hired Defoe to write The Review. Clearly, high politics in the reign of Anne would be about real issues. What were the issues that the “politically-conscious classes” fought over? What principles distinguished Whigs from Tories?

  The issues which dominated Anne’s reign and separated the Whigs from the Tories were in many respects the same ones that had wracked Stuart England all through the seventeenth century. The Revolution of 1688–9 had offered definite answers to those questions, but it remained to be seen whether and how those answers would be implemented. It will be recalled that the Revolution of 1688–9 and Act of Settlement of 1701 had seemed to establish parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament had chosen the monarch, implying precedence over him or her in the English constitution. Whigs were quite comfortable with this. They had supported the Revolution and would support Parliament’s choice of the Hanoverians to succeed Anne without reservation. Indeed, as the reign wore on, some Whigs began to seem indecorously anxious for the queen’s demise and replacement. But the Tories were torn about Parliament’s choice of the Hanoverians in 1701, as they had been about that of William in 1689. Hanoverian Tories accepted Parliament’s right to determine the succession and supported the Protestant heirs with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But Jacobite Tories secretly plotted for Prince James (called by his opponents “the Pretender”) to succeed the queen if he could be prevailed upon to renounce Catholicism. Anne was officially a Hanoverian, but, like Queen Elizabeth before her, she disliked talking about the succession because, of course, it depended on her death. Perhaps for this reason, Jacobites assumed that she was secretly one of them. Some even hoped to displace Anne while she lived. Indeed, should Louis XIV win the War of the Spanish Succession, he would establish not only Felipe V on the throne of Spain but James III and VIII on those of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

  The outcome of the war would also affect the great religious questions that divided the parties. On the most basic level, a French victory would mean the succession of the Catholic Pretender, who could be expected to relaunch his father’s program to emancipate his co-religionists all over the British Isles. But, as we shall see, the war went well, making a Catholic restoration increasingly remote. As a result, the parties fought mainly over the toleration of Dissenters. The Whigs had a strong Dissenting constituency and wanted to maintain and extend the toleration. The Tories aligned with the Church of England and thought the chief dangers to the Church were not Catholics but clerical poverty, rational skepticism, and Dissent. They worried about clergymen who could not support themselves; the new scientific knowledge and emphasis on reason which, combined with the end of censorship in 1695, seemed to undermine belief in revealed religion (see Conclusion); and the apparently growing number of Dissenters from the established Church. By 1714 there were, perhaps, 340,000 Dissenters in England, comprising about 6 percent of the population. This may not seem like much of a threat, but their prominence in society far exceeded their actual numbers. Tories knew that many of the new monied men, the leaders of towns, and the Whig party which supported them were Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, even Quakers, and that the war made them ever richer and more powerful. They also knew that some of these men flouted the Test Act by the practice of occasional conformity. Tories still equated Dissent with republicanism and disorder. They wanted to ban occasional conformity and roll back the toleration. Here, they seemed to have an ally in Anne. In one of her first speeches to Parliament she promised to employ those who “have the truest zeal” for the Church of England.11 Early in the reign, she supported a bill to outlaw occasional conformity. But as time went on she seems to have realized that she needed her Dissenting subjects too much – to help fight the war in which her nation was involved and her crown was at stake – to wage legislative battle against them.

  If the previous issues boiled down to who would win the war, the war boiled down to how much money Britain could throw at it. As we have seen, Tory politicians and the landowners they represented were reluctant to support another war against France. Some were Jacobites and so sympathetic
to Louis’s aims. Most had little love for the Dutch or German allies of William III’s Grand Alliance. Nearly all resented the Land Tax and the way in which it seemed to enrich the monied men, contractors, and military officers, many of whom were upstarts, Dissenters, and Whigs. Hence continued Tory advocacy of a “blue-water” strategy as the least expensive and most consistent with Britain’s seafaring tradition. The Whigs, on the other hand, were for taking the war directly to Louis, on the continent, as William had done, by means of an Allied army with a major British component. In short, Whig politicians were enthusiastic about this new war. They agreed with William on the need to stop the Catholic absolutist Louis in order to preserve not only the liberties of Europe but the liberties of Englishmen. They saw more clearly than their Tory opponents that defeat would spell an end to the Revolution Settlement, the Protestant succession, the toleration, and the financial and commercial revolutions. For Whigs, the fact that monied men, contractors, and career soldiers were making their fortunes out of the war was only an added incentive to support it. As a result, Queen Anne, temperamentally a Tory, would find herself, like William III, drawn increasingly to Whig politicians to get her war funded and fought.

  The War, the Union, and the Parties, 1702–10

  To recap, the War of the Spanish Succession, sometimes known in North America as Queen Anne’s War, was ostensibly fought to determine who sat on the throne of the Spanish Empire: France’s candidate, the Bourbon Philippe, duke of Anjou, who called himself Felipe V; or the Alliance candidate, the Habsburg Archduke Charles of Austria, who called himself Carlos III. The war would also determine the balance of power in Europe for at least a generation and possibly a century. Closer to home, its outcome would decide who sat on the British throne (thus, it was also the war of the British succession), the constitutional and religious makeup of the British Isles, and whether Britain or France would dominate the Mediterranean and Atlantic trades. Befitting a conflict with so much at stake, the War of the Spanish Succession was to be a true world war, fought in the forests and valleys of North America and on the high seas of the Mediterranean and Caribbean, as well as on the plains of Europe. The principal combatants comprised France and Bavaria, on the one side, versus the Grand Alliance, consisting of Britain, the Dutch Republic, Denmark, most of the Holy Roman Empire (including the states of Austria, Prussia, and Hanover), and, after 1703, Portugal and Savoy, on the other. At first, this Grand Alliance moved cautiously, for Anne’s Tory government pursued the campaign at sea while the still awesome reputation of Louis XIV and his armies intimidated Britain’s Dutch and German allies on land. In the spring and summer of 1702 Marlborough managed to capture key forts on the Meuse and Rhine rivers (see map 13). But for the remainder of the 1702 and 1703 campaigning seasons the Allied armies did little, while the British taxpayer grumbled.

  Finally, late in 1703, the French broke the stalemate – but the Allies were to reap the rewards. Louis XIV and Maximilian II of Bavaria (1662–1726) decided to try to knock the Holy Roman emperor out of the war by marching on Vienna. In response, Marlborough worked out a brilliant plan with the commander of the Allies’ southern armies, Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736), which they put into effect in the summer of 1704. Ignoring protests from other Allied commanders, Marlborough’s army drove south from Flanders deep into enemy territory. He met Eugene’s forces coming up from the south at the end of June, thus splitting the French and Bavarian forces in two. This march was one of the great feats in the annals of military history: 40,000 troops covered some 250 miles in just six weeks. The duke, with Godolphin’s financial and logistical support, planned every detail down to having new boots waiting at predetermined intervals along the route for his advancing soldiers. Finally, on August 2, 1704,12 the Allied forces, totaling 52,000 men, cornered the French and Bavarian army of 60,000 under Marshall Camille de Tallard (1652–1728) between the villages of Blindheim and Hochstedt on the banks of the River Danube (map 13).

  Map 13 The War of the Spanish Succession, 1702–14.

  Having displayed his brilliance as a strategist in getting to this place, Marlborough now proved himself a consummate tactician. Holding his main forces in reserve, he made a feint to capture the first village. This broke up the French and Bavarian center. In the late afternoon, he committed the bulk of his army, including over 80 cavalry squadrons, against the exhausted enemy troops. For the first time in living memory, the French line broke and its soldiers ran, heading into the river. The battle of Blenheim, as the British called it, had turned into a rout (plate 24). Thirty thousand French or Bavarian troops were killed or captured; 28 regiments and 18 generals surrendered. At the end of the day, the duke, tired but elated with victory, wrote a dispatch to his wife on the back of a tavern bill which read, in part, “I have not time to say more, but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen, and let her know her army has had a glorious victory.”13

  Indeed, Blenheim proved to be one of the most decisive victories in European history. In the short term, it saved Austria from French invasion and kept the Holy Roman Empire in the war. At the same time, it knocked Bavaria out of it. This left Louis bereft of allies. He would henceforward have to fight a defensive war. That would be difficult because the flower of the French army had been crushed at Blenheim. It would take years to rebuild its strength. But Blenheim was even more devastating for the French on a psychological level. Remember that Louis XIV had dominated the European scene for 50 years. He had been able to do so in large part because of the French army and its reputation for invincibility. Now, for the first time in decades, that army had not only been defeated; it had run from the field of battle. No wonder that the Sun King forbade the name of the battle to be uttered in the precincts of Versailles. The psychological effect on the British side was just as pronounced. For the first time since Agincourt in 1415, a British army under a British commander had won an unequivocally significant continental victory. (In fact, most Allied troops at Blenheim were not British, but this is how the victory was widely perceived.) Clearly, the financial revolution had paid off: a nation which had repeatedly embarrassed itself in foreign wars could now play with the big boys. Blenheim marked Britain’s coming of age as a European – and therefore a world – power.

  A grateful queen rewarded Marlborough by granting him the royal manor of Woodstock. Parliament rewarded him by funding the construction of a magnificent palace there called, appropriately enough, “Blenheim.” The emperor rewarded him with the title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Far more important than these honors, the British ruling class finally got behind the war. Thomas Coke, a Tory MP from Derbyshire, wrote in response to Marlborough’s bold march: “the country gentlemen, who have so long groaned under the weight of four shillings, in the pound, without hearing of a town taken or any enterprise endeavored, seem every day more cheerful in this war.”14 This was good news for the Whigs, who did well in the parliamentary elections of 1705 and 1708. The Tories, frustrated, grew increasingly desperate. In 1704 they offended the queen and nation by attempting to tack a clause banning occasional conformity onto the annual bill for the Land Tax: that is, they would hold funds for the war hostage unless Parliament did their bidding on the religious issue. Failing in this, they insulted Anne in 1705 by moving in parliament that the Church was in danger under her administration. Failing once again, they infuriated her in the same session by moving that a member of the Hanoverian family be invited over to live in England until the queen died. They did not do this because they were committed Hanoverians. Rather, they sought to put the queen into an embarrassing position. Like Elizabeth before her, Anne naturally saw such a plan as morbid and dangerous to her interests, but how could she refuse without looking like a Jacobite? In the end, all the Tories succeeded in doing was convincing Anne that they were irresponsible and untrustworthy. Even before Blenheim, she had begun to employ more Whigs in her government, and she continued to do so in 1705 and 1706. Gradually, and sometimes against her will, the Junto began to
return to power, to prosecute Queen Anne’s war as they had done King William’s.

  Plate 24 The battle of Blenheim. By kind permission of His Grace, the Duke of Marlborough.

  The Whig resurrection between 1704 and 1710 had important repercussions both at home and abroad. First, Whig parliamentary majorities guaranteed that the war would continue to be funded liberally. As a result, by 1708 Marlborough, Godolphin, and the government they headed grew ever more dependent on the Whigs. The Whigs’ financial generosity combined with Marlborough’s brilliant generalship led to a succession of victories against the French: at Ramillies in 1706, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709, and Bouchain in 1711. Nor were Britain’s allies idle. In 1706 Prince Eugene swept the French out of Italy (see map 13). In 1703 the Allies opened a second front in Spain itself. At first they succeeded here as well, capturing Gibraltar and defeating the French fleet at Malaga in 1704, then taking Barcelona in 1705 and Madrid in 1706. But the war in Spain overextended the Allies, who were also fighting at sea and in North America as well as in northern Europe. Moreover, the largest portion of the Spanish people, the Castilians, favored Felipe V. As a result, the Allied forces suffered two disastrous defeats, at Almanza in 1707 and Brihuega in 1710. These virtually guaranteed that the Bourbon Felipe, not the Habsburg Charles, would occupy the Spanish throne. Still, this was Louis’s only major success; the Grand Alliance stymied him on every other front and in every other war aim. By the end of the decade, Marlborough’s victories and the sheer expense of fighting a world war against the British financial juggernaut had just about brought the Sun King to his knees.

  At home, the Whig ascendancy at court and in Parliament enabled that party to pass legislation to safeguard the Protestant or Hanoverian succession. In 1706, they responded to the Tory demands for a Hanoverian to live in Britain by securing passage of the Regency Act. Instead of subjecting Queen Anne to the discomfort of her successor’s presence on site, this legislation established a Regency Council, to be stocked with staunch pro-Hanoverians, to act as an executive and to ensure a smooth transition on her death. As a further safeguard, Parliament was to remain in session following that event for six months. Thus were the Tories outmaneuvered and the Protestant succession strengthened. Incidentally, this legislation also repealed the provision of the Act of Settlement which forbade government officers from sitting in Parliament: the Whigs knew that they would be the court party under a Hanoverian, and they wanted to ensure that they controlled both the legislature and the spoils of government.