Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Furthermore, England's free market economy, itself fanned by enlightened individualism, depended on consumerism permeating down through the social strata. With the renaissance of provincial towns, the growth of communications and service industries and the commercialization of news, information and leisure, an expanding public hankered to participate in pleasures traditionally exclusive to the élite (see chapter 11). ‘It is evident,’ observed Madame Roland about England, ‘that man, whatever he may be, is here reckoned something, and that a handful of rich does not constitute the nation.’84

  It was under these circumstances, with plaudits to freedom pealing out from Parliament, press and pulpit, that opinion-makers spelt out their strategies for accommodating egoism within a stable social fabric. One choice lay in embracing inclusiveness. Whilst propagandists spoke for propertied and privileged élites, theirs was an ideology which espoused universalism: potentially, at least, reason was an attribute enjoyed by the whole nation, including women and the plebs. The best bid for accommodation and harmony would thus lie in assimilating the ‘people’ within the ‘public’ – all, that is, who qualified themselves for entry by their industry, civility, affluence or manifest loyalty. Impossible to impose by the sword, order might thereby be achieved through what Hume styled ‘opinion’, equality under the law, meritocratic social mobility, the reduction of civil and religious disabilities and the manipulation of allegiance and rising expectations.85 The corollary of this was, of course, that those who could not or would not play the conformity game were to be stigmatized: religious fanatics, obdurate lawbreakers and the idle and undeserving poor would be subjected to increasingly severe measures of disapproval and discipline.86 But in a society dismissive of predestination and doubtful about ancestral pedigree per se, few aspirant males were automatically debarred by birth or blood.

  Enlightened opinion tried out various strategies for achieving inclusiveness. One involved philanthropy and ‘paternalism’.87 The needy and the ‘unfortunate’ could be bought off by a humanitarianism realized in schools, hospitals, dispensaries, asylums, reformatories and other charitable outlets. The beauty of such enlightened largesse lay in fostering amongst the bien pensants the glow of a superior sensibility (see chapter 16).88

  Another assimilation strategy lay in displays of social openness. Foreigners were astonished to see how the ‘Quality’ consented to mingle with, rather than seclude themselves from, the nation at large. The hustings, sporting events, spas, pleasure gardens and urban parades – all encouraged social concourse. It startled the Prussian Carl Philip Moritz to find that in England ‘officers do not go in uniform but dress as civilians’. Having puzzled over what made St James's Park so special, he concluded: ‘It is the astonishing medley of people.’ The French traveller P.J. Grosley reacted similarly to London's resorts: ‘The pleasures of Vauxhall and Ranelagh unite both sexes, and all ranks and conditions.’ And what was it about cricket? ‘Everyone plays it,’ César de Saussure concluded, ‘the common people and also men of rank.’ And the English stagecoach? Why, responded Louis Simond, it contained ‘passengers of all sexes, ages, and conditions’. Likewise the coffee house: ‘[W]hat a lesson,’ remarked the Abbé Prévost, ‘to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine-merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffee houses… are the seats of English liberty.’89

  While historians point to a widening gulf between élite and popular culture,90 in England counter-currents were also at work. No doubt outrageous hamming went on in the public theatricals of the grandees, flouncing around at Vauxhall or at the hustings, but much of the population expected to participate in the modern partiality for amusement, display, fashion and preening. Enlightened fables sold social success to hopefuls like William Hogarth's ‘industrious apprentice’, while improving books for children courted those

  Who from a State of Rags and Care,

  And having Shoes but half a Pair;

  Their Fortune and their Fame would fix,

  And gallop in a Coach and Six.91

  Carrots lured those bent on embourgeoisement: the Lord Mayor's coach, Archdeacon Paley noted, was not for his benefit, but for society's – to fire the prentice boy's ambition.92 Money offered an entrée into a modern commercial dream world which led all to entertain hopes and allowed quite a few to realize them.

  In what seemed, especially to foreigners, a society perilously short of legal and regal subordination, integrative gestures also marked other enlightened strategies. As will become clear, reconciliatory strands were woven into enlightened discourse - confidence in the compatibility of individual and society, money and gentility, self-love and conscience, science and religion, even men and women. The tragic mind set of Stoicism and the otherworldly fixations of Christianity yielded to a faith in man's temporal capacity to remould himself and, in the course of time, surmount dichotomies. Whereas Christian humanism gloried in arduous choice - witness Samson Agonistes or Rasselas – the enlightened always wanted, nay, expected to have their cake and eat it.

  Addressing nagging fears that individualism would dig its own grave, it has here been suggested that one bid for harmony was to vest faith in the equilibrium expected to emerge from social roles and market forces. Another lay in putting confidence in a validating framework of natural order and religio-ethical teachings. Critical darts were doubtless hurled at the so-called metaphysical mumbo-jumbo which legitimized oppression – be it Platonism or predestination – but there were very few utter cynics or sceptics determined to deny cosmic truth altogether.93 There was a desire to destabilize and dismantle, yet we must never scant the enlightened desire to replace exploded systems with a superior orderliness, the urge not just to probe and puncture but to prove, preach and prescribe. Obsolete teachings were rejected, partly for being untrue, but chiefly because, whilst promising godly order, they had patently – witness the Wars of Religion – failed to deliver.

  To enlightened minds, the past was a nightmare of barbarism and bigotry: fanaticism had precipitated bloody civil war and the axing of Charles Stuart, that man of blood, in 1649. Enlightened opinion repudiated old militancy for modern civility. But how could people adjust to each other? Sectarianism, that sword of the saints which had divided brother from brother, must cease; rudeness had to yield to refinement. Voltaire saw this happening before his very eyes in England's ‘free and peaceful assemblies’:

  Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess'd the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker's word. And all are satisfied.94

  This passage squares with the enlightened belief that commerce would unite those whom creeds set asunder. Moreover, by depicting men content, and content to be content – differing, but agreeing to differ – the philosophe pointed towards a rethinking of the summum bonum, a shift from God-fearingness to a selfhood more psychologically oriented. The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’ – thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.

  This accent on refinement was no footling obsession with petty punctilio; it was a desperate remedy meant to heal the chronic social conflict and personal traumas stemming from civil and domestic tyranny and topsy-turvy social values. Politeness could be taught by education – Locke and his successors stressed ‘learning in the uses of the world’ – and perfected by practice. ‘The great art,’ preached James Boswell, ‘of living easy and happy in society is to study proper behaviour, and even with our most intimate friends, to observe politeness.’95 (That raucous drunk never learned.)

  Above all, the refinement of the self was to be a function of energetic sociab
ility. Solitude – ‘one of the greatest obstacles to pleasure and improvement’96 - bred hypochondria: cooped up in his study, the costive scholar succumbed to spleen. ‘[N]othing,’ deplored David Hartley, ‘can easily exceed the Vain-glory, Self-conceit, Arrogance, Emulation, and Envy, that are found in the eminent Professors of the Sciences.’97 To be enlightened, a gentleman had to be sociable, or, in Johnson's coinage, ‘clubbable’ (and the Great Cham's own Literary Club boasted the top minds of the day). Clubs like Mr Spectator's, masonic lodges, taverns, coffee houses and friendly societies – miniature free republics of rational society – sprang up to promote fellowship and good feeling.98 And the enlightened set about devising the arts and crafts of pleasing. Human nature was malleable; people must cheerfully accommodate each other; good breeding, conversation and discreet charm were the lubricants which would overcome social friction, contributing ‘as much as possible to the Ease and Happiness of Mankind’.99 ‘We polish one another,’ reflected Shaftesbury, ‘and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision.’100 The rational arts of ease, good humour, sympathy, restraint and moderation, based upon acceptance of human nature – all marked the new felicific formulae.101 This book will stress these distinctively British enlightening strategies: the drive not to subvert the system, but to secure it so as to achieve individual satisfaction and collective stability, within the post-1688 framework.

  Regardless of the fortunes of this or that ideology, a deeper transformation was afoot: the rise and triumph of lay and secular public opinion, the fourth estate, the information society, involving the birth, infancy and troubled adolescence of the modern intelligentsia.102 Many features mark Britain's men of letters (notably a paradoxical anti-intellectualism), which make sense only when seen in terms of the unique circumstances of the Enlightenment's birth pangs. Enlightened opinion-makers gazed upon their navels, pondering their self-identity and their strategies for the seduction of society by the printed word – as did such satirists as Swift, who pricked their pretensions. The pen is mightier than the sword, Bulwer Lytton was soon to proclaim; that aperçu would have sounded more curious still without the enlightenment experience.103

  2

  THE BIRTH OF AN IDEOLOGY

  ‘Tis well an Old Age is out,

  And time to begin a New.

  JOHN DRYDEN1

  I am here in a country which hardly resembles the rest of Europe. This nation is passionately fond of liberty… every individual is independent.

  MONTESQUIEU2

  The he half-century after 1660 brought decisive transformations to British power politics and its clashing ideologies. Years of civil strife led to the beheading of the Lord's anointed, Charles I, on 30 January 1649, the establishment of a republic, the abolition of the House of Lords and the Bench of Bishops, and to the rule of the Major Generals and Cromwell's doomed Protectorate – events which drove the young John Locke to despair of ‘this great Bedlam England’.3 During the Interregnum, England's traditional governors had been bruised and battered, as God's own nation was redeemed or ravaged by New Model Army pikemen, chiliastic preachers and antinomian agitators advancing ‘New Jerusalem’ schemes which ranged from the communism of the Diggers to Ranter free love. Hence the audible relief at the Restoration. ‘Never so joyfull a day,’ John Evelyn recorded in his diary the day Charles II rode into London: ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.’4 It was not only the King who hoped never again to have to go on his travels; the old political nation was bent on stabilization, and for many in the Cavalier Parliament this meant vengeance against and repression of those who had turned the world upside-down and, as the 1662 Fifth Monarchist Rising showed, had every intention of doing so again.5

  Measures were passed to ram the lid back on. The Anglican Church was restored, with its bishops, courts and most of its privileges. Censorship was reimposed. The so-called Clarendon Code – the Corporation Act (1661), the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Conventicle Act (1662), the Five Mile Act (1665) and the Test Acts (1661, 1673) harassed non-Anglicans, curbing their rights to preach, teach and hold office. The Act of Uniformity, for example, required all clergy and schoolmasters to subscribe to a declaration of conformity to the Anglican liturgy and to forswear disloyal oaths.6 The next decades saw the apogee of Divine Right preaching and of royal thaumaturgical healing. Thomas Hobbes might be the Devil incarnate, but he was hardly alone in looking to a mighty sovereign to end feuding and fanaticism.7

  In some ways, the Restoration worked. Building on Cromwell's recent conquests overseas, trade prospered. The Court exuded a louche brilliance and the ‘Merrie Monarch’ a winning charm, at least for those who had loathed the Puritan Zeal-of-the-land-busies. Culturally and artistically, a dazzling half-century followed, with the work of Wren, Gibbons, Lely, Kneller, Purcell, and the dramas of Dryden, Aphra Behn, Etheridge, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar,8 while the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, promised to best the world in science.9

  Restoring order, however, proved easier said than done. Interregnum England had grown fatally factionalized, and everyone had scores to settle. No realist could expect that the entire kingdom would now flock back into the Anglican fold; the Court dallied with Catholicism, while many of the middling sort had put down sturdy sectarian roots – an identity given permanence once the repressive Clarendon Code alienated even mainstream Protestant dissent. Politicians locked horns over law and liberty, the religious settlement, Crown–Parliament relations and foreign alignments. As commercial policy began to count for more to what was becoming a ‘trading nation’, and Louis XIV's militarism grew more threatening, discord deepened and parties formed.10

  Meanwhile, Charles was playing with fire. His Declaration of Indulgence (1672) opportunistically suspended statutes against Nonconformists and Catholics – a measure he was soon forced to rescind, but which inevitably deepened debates over the accommodation (‘comprehension’) or the muzzling of dissent.11 A little before, he had acted treacherously, in the secret clauses of the Treaty of Dover (1670), by providing for England's conversion to Catholicism in return for the Sun King's gold, in a move meant to secure Crown independence from Parliament. Smelling a rat, the more extreme Whigs, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, fell to conspiracies, desperate at all costs to stave off re-Catholicization. This clove the political nation: the succession of Charles II's Papist brother, James, was feared since it posed palpable threats to Protestantism, and hysteria was whipped up by the fabricated ‘Popish Plot’. Radical Whigs resorted to desperate measures in the Exclusion Crisis, backing the succession of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles's illegitimate, but at least Protestant, son.12 Spying was met by counter-espionage, accusation by counter-charge. Outmanoeuvred, Shaftesbury fled, and his secretary, John Locke, joined him in exile. Radicals who, like them, found refuge in the Dutch republic, that hotbed of dissidence, conspired with émigrés from France, especially after Louis’ Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) created a Huguenot diaspora which fed pan-Protestant paranoia.

  Contained in the twilight years of Charles's reign, crisis erupted after James II's accession in 1685. Monmouth's revolt ended ingloriously at Sedgemoor but, in the wake of that débâcle, the arbitrariness of royal repression alienated top politicians and bishops, mighty aristocrats, urban corporations and the universities. Natural conservatives temporarily found themselves bedfellows with hotheads in repudiating a regime contemptuous of legality and rights, one increasingly ruling through prerogative and smelling of Popery. When James's consort, Mary of Modena, belatedly gave birth to an heir (spurious, according to the ‘warming-pan legend’), events were triggered which led to an invitation to William of Orange, the Dutch stadtholder, to invade and eject James Stuart.13

  Yet James's ‘abdication’ in the bloodless ‘Glorious Revolution’ of November 1688 sparked as many problems as it solved. The Bill of Rights, imposed upon William in the Revolutionary Settlement as a condition for his accession to the throne, guaranteed regular (
triennial) parliaments, security of person and property, broad toleration for Protestants and other freedoms. In effect, contrary to its own basic instincts, the political nation had been driven, in the name of safeguarding rights and religion, to pass measures which, at the Restoration, would certainly have been regarded as dangerously unsettling. Stuart folly, parliamentary factionalism and the fickleness of fate had brought about what proved an irreversible liberalization of the constitution – one which most of the élite wanted to be final. 14

  Yet, the genie was out of the bottle once again, as during the Interregnum; the demons raised by James could not be silenced. Quite the reverse. The post-1688 political machinery was untried, office was up for grabs, allegiances were volatile and the principles and policies of William and Mary's regime became matters of raging controversy. Radical arguments repudiating Divine Right and patriarchalism15 had been enunciated to rationalize first resistance to, and then the expulsion of, James. But by what title did William himself reign and rule? Had such a right been conferred upon him by the nation? If so, did that amount to popular sovereignty? If a ‘Protestant wind’ had blown him to Torbay in 1688, did Providence bless each and every victorious usurper? Could prelates who had broken their sacred oaths of allegiance to James then in conscience swear fealty to William?

  Moreover, 1688 could nowise be a final solution.16 Jacobite counter-coups long remained threatening. Orangism dragged England into the ‘world war’ against France, that finale of the Wars of Religion. William's strategic rapprochement with Protestant Dissenters put the Church of England under ever greater strain, and religious tensions intensified with the arrival of some 80,000 Hugue-not refugees, fanning anti-Catholic panic. The ‘pacification’ of Ireland, the cost of William's ‘grand alliance’ wars and the expansion of the executive and standing army (serving, many averred, Dutch rather than British interests) further deepened divisions.17