by Hugh Brogan
The Old Order and the American Revolution
Novus Ordo Seclorum.
Motto of the United States of America
Many states and kingdoms have lost their dominions by severity and an unjust jealousy. I remember none that have been lost by kindness and a generous confidence. Evils are frequently precipitated by imprudent attempts to prevent them. In short, we never can be made an independent people except it be by Great Britain herself; and the only way for her to do it is to make us frugal, ingenious, united, and discontented.
John Dickinson, 1765
6 Imperial Britain 1660–1763
The obligation of each Briton to fulfill the political duties, receive a vast accession of strength when he calls to mind of what a noble and well balanced constitution of government he has the honour to belong; a constitution of free and equal laws, secured against arbitrary will and popular licence, a constitution in fine the nurse of heroes, the parent of liberty, the patron of learning and arts, and the dominion of laws.
George III
Here numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs, devour all revenue, and produce continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty.
Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Galloway, London, 25 February 1775
The American colonies are great to this country in general and indeed very justly, as being the principal sources of our balance in trade, and consequently of our riches and strength, by the great quantity of shipping employed, of manufactures vended and of the useful returns of their growth.
Horace Walpole, 1754
On 26 October 1760, King George II died at stool in his closet.1 His grandson, enemy and heir, also named George, was twenty-two years old. His reign was to be the second longest in English history, and one of the most eventful; he himself was to play a more important part in politics than any of his successors, although his role in American history was by no means so crucial as legend maintains. A word about his character is in order.
George III was no tyrant, whatever his enemies said. He was devoted to the British Constitution, and his political virtues leap to the eye if we compare him with those other royal failures, Charles I, Louis XVI and Nicholas II, and explain why he kept his life and throne while they lost theirs. He was above all things open, honest and loyal. Ministers who were true to their royal master’s person and policies could depend on his support. He was extremely hard-working, and gradually acquired an immense political expertise matching that of those other master-managers of eighteenth-century English politics, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) and the Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768). His private life was blameless (that is, single-mindedly uxorious); and since he had the sense to stipulate that the woman chosen for his wife should be uninterested in politics, this trait helped his popularity. Finally, he was a stout English patriot. ‘I glory in the name of Britain,’ he remarked. Not for him the longings of his grandfather and great-grandfather for their dear native Hanover. To him, Hanover was ‘that horrid electorate which has always lived upon the very vitals of this poor country’. His passion for agriculture and a country life earned him the nickname of ‘Farmer George’. These attitudes could only endear him further to most of his subjects. He was an intelligent patron of the arts and learning, and gave a pension to Samuel Johnson.
The King had the defects of his virtues. As a backward, secluded boy he was racked by self-distrust and clung for reassurance to the Earl of Bute (1713–92). Poor Bute was as weak as the King seemed, and at length failed his friend completely. But by then George had matured, and his self-confidence became such that he could for years prop up an appallingly weak Prime Minister: Lord North. Unhappily self-confidence all too often shaded into obstinacy and wilfulness. Furthermore, George thought that change of any kind was incompatible with the survival of his country and her greatness. The convictions he defended with passionate stubbornness were those of a narrow, second-rate intellect. Again and again he employed his political cunning, his powers as King and the respect won by his character (later, the timidity inspired by his madness) to prevent essential reforms.
In 1760 his inheritance was as magnificent as that of any monarch in history. No wonder that George and his bold Britons were full of self-glorification. But the spendour was transient. The next five chapters will explain how the English-speaking world came to split into two great but utterly distinct polities – how Farmer George’s biggest farm was lost.2
He could not have expected to lose it, coming to the throne, as he did, during an enormously successful war of expansion; and even before that war started in 1756, the British Empire was something to marvel at. The wildest visions of Ralegh, Hakluyt and Captain Smith had long been surpassed. At the mid-point of the eighteenth century Great Britain was strong enough to crush her last rival and become the leader and arbiter of the world.
Hers was, above all, an Atlantic empire. British ships ventured to China; the East India Company fostered a lucrative trade in South Asia and would soon win the rule of Bengal; but India was to be the heart of the second, not the first, British Empire. George Ill’s principal overseas possessions stretched in a gigantic bow round the grey ocean from Newfoundland, down the east coast of North America, across the Caribbean and the precious sugar islands to the west coast of Africa: a curve of some eight thousand miles. It was an empire built on, by and for trade; and in 1750 that trade was worth more than £20,000,000 annually. The imperial merchant marine was the largest in the world; King George’s subjects enjoyed the highest standard of living. There were fifteen million of them: fewer than the inhabitants of the kingdom of France, but, if various calculations proved sound (as they did), the empire was destined rapidly to overhaul the ancient rival in population as in everything else. Unlike its nineteenth-century successor, and in spite of the presence within its borders of Irish, Africans, American Indians and East Indians, it was strikingly homogeneous, the bulk of its people being white, Protestant and English-speaking. The wide seas acted, not as a barrier, but as a link – for water transport was, in the pre-railway age, far easier, and far cheaper, than land.
Yet revolution was to break out – first in the British Empire, then in the kingdom of France: in other words, in the two most modern, richest, best-governed polities in the world; and it broke out in the more advanced of them first. This was not a coincidence, but historians are still groping for, and quarrelling over, the explanation. It is a large and difficult question. No answer can be final.
Still, the point must firmly be made that it was growth, not decay, victory, not defeat, that touched off the American and French Revolutions. Alexis de Tocqueville long ago pointed out that
It is not always the going from bad to worse that causes a revolution. It happens more often that a people who have borne without complaint, and apparently without feeling, most oppressive laws, throw them off violently as soon as their weight lightens. The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform.3
With modern historical knowledge, we would have to modify these remarks before ourselves applying them to the French old order; and they would have to be still more sharply qualified before they could be applied to the first British Empire; but there is still much relevant truth in them, worth pondering. For Tocqueville points to the phenomenon now known as ‘the revolution of rising expectations’. It was such a revolution that undermined the old order throughout the West.
No social system can ever be perfect, and the failings of the old order early became manifest. But it was destroyed by its success. It had been given its final shape by the English and French of the seventeenth century and their greatest statesmen. Their work had been far from fruitless. They had not merely solved, in rough and ready fashion, the problems of religious and c
ivil strife which had plagued their countries; they had not merely made those countries the mightiest and most progressive states in the world. They had created the modern French, British and American nations, whose overriding characteristic turned out to be a restless creativity. This creativity could not long be confined within the political, economic, intellectual and social structure which generated it. The men of the eighteenth century came to expect, and inexorably to demand, more than the seventeenth-century ordering of their world could possibly provide. A home and refuge thus became a prison. Only in the British Isles did it prove possible to break out fairly peaceably, and even there the Irish had a ghastly history. Overseas, the mighty edifice which George III inherited collapsed in tumult and war, and the fate of the French kingdom needs no retelling here.
To be sure, periods of self-criticism were frequent even while the old order was at its height. Montesquieu was only the greatest name among the critics who rose up against the French monarchy between the death of Louis XTV and the Seven Years War. In Britain, the long ascendancy of Robert Walpole drove opposition politicians of all stripes into frenzied denunciations of ‘Robinocracy’ and the decline of British liberty. The classic phrase ‘bribery and corruption’ began to be heard – in North America, among other places. The cry went up that an oppressive Parliament had succeeded the oppressive Stuarts. ‘Power’ (we would say ‘the state’ or ‘bureaucracy’) must be brought under control again by such devices as manhood suffrage, parliamentary reform and freedom of the press. Opposition writers spread abroad an oppressive anxiety, a mood reinforced by the long, undistinguished years of the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1750 fear and worry were growing as another great struggle with France drew near, for many doubted the capacity of the ruling clique to achieve victory, or even to avert defeat. Henry Pelham (1695–1754), the chief minister, was better fitted for reducing the national debt and the size of the navy than for conducting a war.
In spite of all, the underlying mood of mid-century Britain – the right little, tight little island – was one of unlovely and almost bottomless complacency, bred by sixty years’ success in all fields of life. The realm of Great Britain4 was the heart and chief beneficiary of the lucrative Empire. The gross national product was worth some £48,000,000 annually, £15,000,000 being exported. The countrymen and heirs of Newton, Marlborough, Pope, Hogarth, Chippendale, Kent and Locke, contemplating themselves and such monuments as Parliament and the Bank of England, saw little to criticize. On the contrary, they brooded on their innumerable virtues and on the compliments they incessantly paid themselves. The national mood was well symbolized by the toilsome lawyer Blackstone, whose Commentaries attempted to demonstrate the wisdom, consistency and rationality of the Common Law of England, that extraordinary hodge-podge from the deep past. The lower orders congratulated themselves on being freeborn, and on not wearing wooden shoes like backward foreigners. The anthem of the age proclaimed:
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine;
All thine shall be the subject main
And every shore it circles thine.
Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!
Britons never never never shall be slaves!
You may, therefore, boldly defy the best-read historian to assign a single reign in all our annals when these great ends of government were more religiously intended or more generally obtained than under his present Majesty’s auspicious, mild, and steady administration: nay, you may boldly challenge the most discontented and querulous of all his subjects to point out that nation under Heaven where he will venture to assert, that he could live so happily, in all respects, as he does in England.
Thus an anonymous admirer of the constitution in 1748. His views are representative. Yet the Hanoverian -perhapsone ought to say the Walpolean – political system was, as has been said, the solution to the problems of Stuart England. To deal with the problems of Georgian Britain it would have had to be flexible and adaptable. Unhappily it was dangerously rigid.
For one thing, it was deeply aristocratic and oligarchical. On the eve of the great changes that collectively are known as the Industrial Revolution, landed wealth was still the supreme source of power and prestige. The gentlemen of England were wiser than the French noblesse: less insolent, spendthrift, exclusive, military, Court-oriented, selfish and crass. But (or perhaps therefore) they had an even firmer grip on their country. The great families of the Whig aristocracy had palpably gained most from the Glorious Revolution. Since 1689 the British political system had reflected their influence, their acres, their rent-rolls; but the lesser gentry, the squirearchy, secure in their manor-houses and their justiceships of the peace, were quite as deeply committed to the system as the grandees. Their lesser status only made them less intelligent, for it kept them mostly in the countryside with none but dogs, horses and huntsmen for company. In everything, individually and collectively, they showed the effect of narrow horizons. Shooting, hare-coursing, fox-hunting and port were their pleasures; church-going was their religion; farming and gamekeeping their only business. Snobbish by vocation, for they were compelled to cherish the values of blood, land and cash which kept them at the top of the heap, they were also as besottedly insular as any of their most ignorant inferiors. In politics, whether in Parliament or out of it, they were deeply conservative; reluctant to pay, or to vote, taxes, though conscientiously doing so when obliged by law; contemptuous of merchants and of fortunes won in trade (unless lucky marriages brought such fortunes their way); loyal to the King, the Protestant religion and old customs; more reluctant than any duke or businessman to contemplate radical change, except perhaps for the enclosure of the common fields.
As to the Whig grandees, they had wealth, worldliness and intelligence enough to be rakes or reformers if they chose without much risk. Their basic conservatism did not become conspicuous until they were frightened by the French Revolution. They were as reluctant as the squires to contemplate the loss of power, or any alteration in the scheme of things which had given them ascendancy. But their position was complicated by this very instinct for power. According to the Whig tradition, they had wrested authority from the Stuart kings to exercise it themselves, in the name of Protestantism and the landed gentry; this left them with a residual suspicion of the Crown, no matter who wore it. All went fairly well while George I and George II let themselves be guided by the oligarchs; but the emergence of the active, opinionated George III soon revived the divisions and tensions within the oligarchy itself that had marked the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. A vigorous king made a vigorous opposition likely: it only needed an issue, which the times swiftly provided. Then, as long before, the role of the monarchical executive again became a leading question of British politics.
The tradition of such a full-bloodedly aristocratic society was bound to be that office was primarily a form of property, a source of income. No higher end could be imagined for the public service than that of providing for the dependants of the gentlemen and peers of Britain, men whose position entitled them to insist on decent provision, out of the national purse, for their younger brothers and other poor friends and relations. Hence the power wielded by the King, or his trusted Minister (a Walpole, a Pelham), through the medium of deaneries, bishoprics, clerkships, commissions in the army, colonial governorships, etc. – the whole vast machine of patronage. Even this was only part of the social system that it symbolized; for example, the municipal government of England had been falling into the hands of little local oligarchies since before the Civil War. But it was the part that mattered, for politics largely consisted of squabblings over the allocation of the patronage plums, and it was the part through which the Empire was governed. Inevitably we must ask, how efficient was it?
No simple answer can be given. Clearly, a system which could bring the British, in war and peace, to the pinnacle they had attained by the end of the Seven Years War was both vigorous and efficient, if only
by the skin of its teeth. But it had conspicuous failings, for all that.
In the first place, the patronage machine, skilfully used, gave whoever commanded it an almost unbreakable hold on the politicians. The House of Commons could and did rebel from time to time, bringing down such long-dominant Ministers as Walpole and Lord North; but it did not do so often, and seldom or never succeeded in forcing an unwanted Prime Minister on the King, at any rate for very long. Throughout the Georgian age no ministry ever lost a general election. So it was dangerously possible for a government to persist in ruinous policies long after public opinion would have sanctioned their abandonment, and still longer after their unwisdom should have been clear to Ministers – or to the King.
Secondly, a system so riddled with jobbery, so studded with sinecures – a government service which had as so prominent an object the protection of politicians’ clients, or of retired politicians themselves,5 was not very capable of putting the right man in the right place. This affected offices high and low. An exceptional man at the head of affairs, like the elder Pitt (1708–78), might know how to find the right person (say, General Wolfe) for the right job (the conquest of Canada); nevertheless there was all too much likelihood that an emergency would find a man of only passable competence in the place of urgency. More important, the everyday level of knowledge and capability in the middle and lower ranks of the public service was adversely affected. We need not take too seriously the case of the member of the Board of Trade who thought that Virginia was an island; but his like proliferated, and made it difficult to conceive and carry out wise policies. Surveying the Age of Walpole and the Age of Chatham,6 we may think that the wonder was that the imperial and domestic administration was so well conducted; but its deficiencies were real, and were soon to emerge as fatally important.