Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  On three of these four issues – religion, foreign policy, and government finance – the prime minister sounds very much like a Tory. By choosing popular Tory positions on these issues, he made himself virtually impregnable on them (current politicians call this “triangulation”). The loss of something to fight about, combined with the infrequency and expense of elections as a result of the Septennial Act, lowered the country’s political temperature. Indeed, it is tempting to argue that there were no major issues facing the British polity for a generation after 1714. That temptation should be resisted, for the prosperity of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was working a quiet revolution on British society, wrenching it away from strict hierarchy and toward greater social fluidity and individual opportunity, and, thus, disrupting the inherited mental world of the English people. Nevertheless, speaking politically, the half-century or so following Anne’s death was far more stable than what came before – or after. Signs of instability would only appear in the 1730s and become serious in the 1750s. But that is a tale for another book. As this one ends, the English had found political peace at home. This, combined with their ability to wage war successfully abroad, produced a vibrant economy and a society on the verge of modernity.

  An Ancien Régime or a Polite and Commercial People?

  Since the late 1980s historians have advanced two competing images of England at the end of our period. One view, promulgated most memorably by J. C. D. Clark, argues that England was in 1714, and in 1760, and perhaps even in 1815, a fundamentally agricultural, traditional, conservative, Royalist, Anglican polity, still dominated by a privileged landed aristocracy. That is, he sees eighteenth-century England as very much an ancien régime, not so very different from other contemporary European monarchies or from the Stuart, Tudor, or even medieval polities with which our account started.3 Other historians, most notably Paul Langford, have focused not so much on what looked backward but what looked forward in eighteenth-century England. That is, while Langford and others would concede that England was still very much run by the ancient landed aristocracy in partnership with the monarchy and the Church, he reminds us that the post-revolutionary English monarchy was, almost uniquely in Europe, a constitutional one; that the Church had competition from nonconformist Protestant faiths; and that the governing partnership was expanding to include the propertied middling orders.4 Partisans of this view would argue, further, that the aristocracy’s hold on the larger society was loosening; that the new wealth created by the commercial, financial, and industrial revolutions was eroding hierarchy, increasing opportunity, and rendering English society much more fluid. In the words of Roy Porter, eighteenth-century England may have been “unashamedly hierarchical, hereditary and privileged,” but it was also “capitalist, materialist, market-oriented; worldly, pragmatic [and] responsive to economic pressure.”5 It was, in short, fast becoming (to borrow from the title of a like-minded book) “the first modern society.”6

  Certainly, and despite the fact that the topmost links of the Great Chain of Being had been severed by the Glorious Revolution, English society remained hierarchical. Examined from the top down, this society also looks remarkably stable. The landed aristocracy seemed to have created for itself an ideal world, having tamed, by means of that revolution, both the king on the one hand and the general populace on the other. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the English nobility, in particular, often compared itself to that of ancient Rome and the period is often referred to as Britain’s Augustan Age. It was also a period in which novelist Henry Fielding’s (1707–54) slightly later definition of the word “nobody” – “all the people in Great Britain, except about 1200”7 – might equally apply. But this does not mean that the Augustan aristocracy was a closed society. It was relatively open to upstarts from below, and perfectly willing to ally with members of the middling orders for political or economic advantage. The latter gained a new sense of their own respectability and even, by some definitions, gentility as they reaped the benefits of England’s growing prosperity. Both the aristocracy and their middling allies, however, worried that the attitudes and appetites of the lower orders threatened stability, property, and deference.

  They feared that those attitudes and appetites would result in crime, disorder, riot, even revolution. In short, if England was both ordered and stable at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that order was often thought to be fragile, that stability provisional.

  The Demographic and Economic Base

  To understand what was happening in English society at the end of the Stuart period, it is necessary to confront the basic facts of demographic and economic change. First, the rapid population growth which characterized the period 1550–1650 slowed down and, for a few decades, even reversed. In fact, the number of people in England and Wales is estimated to have actually fallen from 5.5 million in 1661 to 5.2 million in 1686 before rising to 5.4 million in 1701 and 5.7 million by 1721. The population of the British Isles as a whole in 1714 would be about 9.5 million: 5.6 million for England and Wales, 1.1 million for Scotland, and a further 2.8 million for Ireland.8 The demographic downturn is hard to explain.9 During this period agricultural improvements made famine almost a thing of the past in England, but Scotland experienced it in 1696–9, Ireland in 1708–10. In fact, England became a net exporter of grain in the eighteenth century. Still, the occasional bad harvest, particularly in the 1690s, would cause a spike in the price of basic foodstuffs, reducing consumption and, so, resistance to disease. Illness was always a factor: 1665–7 saw the last, but arguably the most devastating, outbreak of plague in English history, killing 70,000–100,000 Londoners. Epidemics of diphtheria, dysentery, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid fever, typhus, and whooping cough also ripped through the populace periodically. All were virulent and often fatal, particularly among children. Professional medical help remained beyond the reach of most English men and women, and would have done them little good in any case: only after about 1750 would new scientific techniques have an impact on the curing, as opposed to the diagnosis, of disease. This left most villagers to rely on the local priest, cunning woman, or midwife for folkloric advice and herbal remedies. Their effectiveness was limited. Average life expectancy sank in the 1680s to under 30 years. The odds improved between 1700 and 1720, when the number of epidemics decreased and the harvests were generally good. As a result, life expectancy rose from about 37 in 1700 to perhaps 42 by the 1750s. But even as the odds improved, the lingering perception of a flooded labor market, combined with political and religious turmoil, led perhaps 300,000 English men and women to emigrate to America between 1650 and 1700.

  But the real motor for population stagnation in this period (as for its rise later) was age at marriage. A higher proportion of the population chose either not to marry (some 20–25 percent), or to do so later than their Tudor and early Stuart predecessors. In a sample of 12 parishes, the average age at marriage for males during the last half of the seventeenth century was 28 years, for females 26 years. This meant a later start to childrearing, lower fertility, smaller families, and, ultimately, fewer people. Those families were kept smaller still by infant mortality, which remained high. Around 15 percent of all infants died within the first year of life; a further 10 percent expired before their tenth birthday. While it was still true that anyone who made it to their thirtieth birthday had a good chance of seeing 30 years more, old people remained scarce in this society. Rather, 40 percent of the population was under 20. This helps to explain the contemporary obsession with order and “reformation of manners” (see below): young people always strike their elders as being short on both. Finally, the death rate remained high – 30 per 1,000 per year – which left many broken marriages and families.

  The slowdown in population growth had economic ramifications.10 As in the period after the Black Death, the number of agricultural workers fell in relation to the amount of land available. This placed those workers in
high demand, allowing them to command good wages and low rents. Combined with generally good harvests in the 1680s and the first two decades of the eighteenth century, it also meant lower food prices: 20 percent lower in the 1650s–80s than earlier in the century. This was all good news for poor tenant farmers, but bad news for landowners, who, remember, also bore a hefty Land Tax. Nevertheless, agriculture remained the beating heart of the English economy, feeding the whole population, employing most of it, and enriching its most powerful members. At the end of our period, two-thirds of the land in England was still being cultivated and perhaps 80 percent of the population lived in rural villages or hamlets. Most still worked as tenants on the estates of noble or gentle landowners; it has been estimated that 15–20 percent of the land was owned by peers and the wealthier gentry, 45–50 percent by the middling and lesser gentry, 25–35 percent by yeomen or husbandmen, and just 5–10 percent by the Crown or the Church.

  In fact, the proportion of land held by the great magnates was increasing. Low food prices and rents, high wages and taxes annoyed big landowners, but they were rarely fatal. Rather, it was the middling and lesser landowners, the smaller gentry and yeomen who were hurt most significantly by the economic situation at the turn of the eighteenth century. Often, these smallholders fell into debt and had to sell to a magnate, sometimes becoming tenants on what was once their own land. This group formed the core constituency of the Tory party; no wonder they embraced Swift’s critique of the monied men, military contractors, and officers who seemed to profit from the wars while they fell into penury.

  For those who could still afford to farm their land, the age saw a number of agricultural improvements which could lead to big profits. From 1660 on, great landowners increasingly hired full-time stewards to manage their lands better. New fodder crops like turnips and clover meant that animals could be kept year round, and the number of livestock in the country increased. This meant more fertilizer (manure), which produced richer soil, which yielded more wheat, rye, oats, and barley, which resulted in surpluses that could be sold to the continent. Where the soil was not so rich, there was always dairy or sheep farming: the 11 million sheep in England estimated by Gregory King in 1688 outnumbered people two to one. The same aristocrats who expanded or improved their holdings through enclosure and use of new fodder crops also exploited their mineral rights, becoming proprietors of mines and quarries. Finally, while some poured their profits into conspicuous consumption – say, a new country palace or a London townhouse – many more invested in trading ventures or high finance than had done so a century earlier.

  Overseas trade may not have anchored the British economy, but it got the most attention from contemporary writers and government officials. In fact, the desire to expand England’s foreign trade figured in every decision to go to war between 1585 and 1763. The Commonwealth and restored Stuart governments had laid important foundations for growth in the Navigation Acts and the acquisition of territory in the West Indies. The former helped break the commercial domination of the Dutch; the latter made possible the lucrative sugar trade. Meanwhile, the period 1650–1730 saw another boom in the American colonial population (including the British West Indies and, from 1713, Newfoundland, but excluding slaves) from 55,000 to 538,000. That population supplied about half of Britain’s transatlantic imports and absorbed almost a quarter of its exports. In addition, the period after the Revolution of 1688–9 saw the loosening of the old trading company monopolies, such as the Royal Africa Company, and the Russia Company; the penetration of English trade into new markets; the continued rise of the new draperies; and the expansion of credit facilities with the stock market boom and financial revolution. The East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company were virtually the only chartered monopolies that survived into the Hanoverian period, the latter continuing in operation today. Against this could be placed the wartime devastation wrought by French privateers on English shipping. But the eventual harvest from the wars against France was a bumper crop for trade: above all, the commercial provisions of Utrecht, which expanded British trade in the Mediterranean, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Spanish colonies.

  Overall, British trade grew in total gross value from £7.9 million in 1663–9 to £14.5 million by 1722–4. Imports rose 40 percent between 1700 and 1750, passing exports in value, for Britain’s most important trade was no longer the export of wool but the importation of sugar from the West Indies and the reexport of sugar, colonial produce, or Asian goods to Europe. Sugar was the premier commodity of the eighteenth century. Demand was insatiable, rising from £26.2 million in the late 1660s, to £42.5 million by the early 1700s, to £92.6 million by the late 1720s. Increasingly, African slaves harvested that sugar as the notorious “triangular trade” hit its stride. First, English slavers shipped metal goods and textiles to Africa where they were traded for native people, usually captives in local wars. In the second leg of the triangle, the infamous “middle passage,” those captives were then transported, under appalling conditions, to the New World at the rate of over 5,000 a year. Altogether, perhaps 1.4 million Africans were shipped by British slavers to the Americas between 1662 and 1749, one fifth dying before ever reaching land. If they survived the voyage they might be sold to plantation owners in the Spanish colonies; or in the British West Indies, for whom they harvested sugar; or in Virginia and the Carolinas, where they harvested tobacco. That sugar and tobacco were then sent to American or British ports for refining and distribution to Great Britain and Europe – the third leg of this notorious triangle of demand, greed, and cruelty. As for the slaves, wherever they ended up, they were treated like human machinery, forced to work in a sweltering climate under brutal conditions on vast plantations whose landlords were often resident in the mother country. The Herefordshire squire Ferdinando Gorges (ca. 1628–1701) is a prime example: he was known as “king of the Blacks” because he first made his wealth as a Barbados slave trader before investing it in land during the late seventeenth century. In short, much of Britain’s prosperity in the Augustan period and beyond was erected on the backs of captive Africans and at the expense of Native Americans driven slowly from what had once been their land.

  Asian goods amounted to just 13 percent of England’s total import trade. They were led by imports of cottons, silks, spices, and indigo from India and, by the 1720s, tea from China. Unfortunately, the East India Company still had little but wool to offer in return, though the new draperies were somewhat more attractive than the old heavy woolens. For the most part, therefore, the English paid for Asian goods with bullion (silver and gold), some £537,000 a year by the 1720s.

  The English people increasingly wanted and could afford what their empire and trading partners had to offer. As population growth slowed down and the labor market shrank, wages rose, providing more disposable income for ordinary men and women. Large landowners, professionals, merchants, and monied men were doing well enough to demand luxury items. They wanted madeira and port wine from Portugal; figs, raisins, and oranges from Spain; silks and olive oil from Italy; sugar, tobacco, furs, and salt-fish from America; coffee from the Middle East; and, as we have just seen, the many goods of India and China.11 The continent wanted these things too; British merchants, British sea captains, and British ports exploited this desire, dominating the reexport trade, which rose 76 percent between 1700 and 1750. Since the Navigation Acts stipulated that every commodity sent to or from a British colony or possession had to ship in an English (after 1707 a British) vessel, captained by an Englishman with a mostly English crew, the English merchant marine expanded to meet the demand. It rose from 115,000 ships in 1629 to 323,000 in 1702, becoming the largest in the world. Since the same legislation required that most of this trade (including all bulk items, like sugar) had to pass through an English (from 1707 British) port, the yields to the king from Customs grew, as did the wealth of his merchant subjects. Most of this trade flowed to Britain and the continent through London: in 1722–4 the metropolis handled 8
0 percent of England’s imports, 67 percent of its exports, and 87 percent of its reexports. But the trade boom also enriched western ports like Bristol, Liverpool, and, in Scotland, Glasgow. Cities with naval bases and dockyards, like Plymouth and Portsmouth, also grew with the wars. Britain had become the great crossroads of the world’s trade.