Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  She began her day with prayers in the royal chapel before immersing herself in public business; on two days of each week she attended long sessions of the inner cabinet (known at the time as the ‘secret council’), a practice that had generally exhausted the patience of her predecessors, and attended to the steady business of receiving ambassadors, replying to petitions, signing warrants and letters, giving counsel to, and soliciting advice from, various peers and notables. She told the archbishop of York that she scarcely found time for her prayers. It may be that she felt at a disadvantage as a woman, and a woman without an heir. All the time she heard the steps of the Hanoverians behind her, and indeed refused to allow the heiress elect, Sophia of Hanover, to travel to England. She did not wish to seem expendable.

  Her first address to the House of Lords, therefore, three days after the death of the king, may have been something of an ordeal for a woman as shy as she was cautious. From the throne in the Lords she declared that ‘as I know my own heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you, that there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England’.

  Her reference to her Englishness was no doubt a hit against William, whom she always despised, and his predilection for Holland. It was feared that she would be too lame from the gout to walk into the Lords but she processed with crown and heavy gown of red velvet with the order of the Garter emblazoned upon it. An eyewitness of the ceremony, Sir Robert Southwell, wrote that ‘never any woman spoke more audibly or with better grace’. She blushed, and seemed at times uneasy, but she had demonstrated her regality.

  The election of that year had favoured the Tories with a large majority and, within a few weeks of their victory, they introduced ‘the Occasional Conformity Bill’ which was designed to penalize dissenters and nonconformists in the practice of their religion and in their pursuit of civic office. Ever since the Act of Toleration of 1689 it had been perfectly proper for dissenters to take Anglican communion two or three times a year in order to qualify for public employment; the eucharist became their certificate of health. One of the most famous cases was that of the lord mayor of London, Sir Humphrey Edwin, a Presbyterian, who on one occasion worshipped at the Anglican service in the morning and in the evening attended his meeting house or conventicle at Pinners’ Hall on Old Broad Street. This double standard, known as ‘playing bo-peep with the Almighty’, was in the bill to be prohibited by use of fines or imprisonment.

  Anne was herself temperamentally of the ‘high church’ party, and favoured the measure as proof of Anglican piety, but the Whig majority in the Lords seem to have realized that a nation separated on religious matters might well divide on other issues. Marlborough himself did not see the point of antagonizing a large part of the population at time of war. So, despite the enthusiasm of the Tories in the newly elected Commons, the bill was allowed to drop. The queen herself sweetened the pill by establishing a fund known as ‘Queen Anne’s Bounty’, by which she agreed to surrender her additional revenues from tax on clerical incomes in order to supplement the salaries of those clerks who served in the poorest parishes.

  The most significant problem in these early days of her reign, however, was that of war with France. Marlborough was confirmed in office as captain general of the armed forces, although in theory he was inferior in rank to the queen’s husband, Prince George of Denmark. George himself was a royal nonentity of whom Charles II had remarked that ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober, but there is nothing in him.’ He died in 1708, so for the latter years of her reign Anne was a widow. Marlborough was of course in practical charge of the allied forces. He was the only possible candidate for the post. In fact the first year of the campaign was very much like the final year of the last, with precious little movement on either side; Marlborough, in addition, felt himself hampered by the caution or indecision of his Dutch field deputies. His consolation came in the dukedom awarded to him by the queen in 1702.

  Over the next months, despite the dilatoriness of the allies, the new duke was able to capture a number of significant towns along the Meuse, the great river that runs from north-east France into the northern sea beside ports such as Liège, Maastricht and Namur; the victories prompted John Evelyn to write that ‘such an concurrence of blessings and hope of God’s future favour has not been known in a hundred years’. This may have been something of an overstatement, but a great victory was indeed at hand.

  Marlborough’s line of fire along the Meuse had prevented Holland from falling wholly to Louis XIV but, together with his ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the duke now prepared a greater strategy. In a move as hazardous as it was unpredictable he marched his army away from the Low Countries and across the various German principalities towards Bavaria, the elector of which state was a close ally of the French, and through which a strategically important stretch of the River Danube flowed. His main purpose was to save the Habsburg capital, Vienna, from the enemy. In a feat that has sometimes been compared with those of Napoleon, Marlborough marched 20,000 men across 250 miles of Europe in six weeks while absorbing 20,000 more troops along his route. He had to move in conditions of speed and secrecy in order to camouflage his intentions not only from the French but also from his more pusillanimous Dutch colleagues, who believed that any forces taken from the Spanish Netherlands were thereby wasted.

  Marlborough prevailed. At the beginning of August 1704, the two forces faced each other close to the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which lay in a plain of stubble close to the Danube itself. The French and Bavarians were in defensive position, with the river and woods behind them, but Marlborough’s keen and continual attacks eventually broke them. The English cavalry, fighting in lines three deep, moved forward at a brisk trot with their swords ready; the infantry, three or four deep, were armed with muskets and ring bayonets. Towards the close of the fighting the French were compelled to retreat into the village of Blenheim itself, where in the face of overwhelming casualties the remnant was forced to lay down its arms.

  The victory was complete; the French lost some 34,000 men, with 14,000 injured or taken prisoner, while the English and their allies lost about 14,000. On the following day the duke wrote to his wife that ‘I can’t end my letter without being so vain as to tell my dearest soul that within the memory of man there had been no victory so great as this’. The greater the carnage, perhaps, the greater the victory.

  Bavaria was knocked from the war, and Vienna was saved. The German principalities were spared the danger of French invasion, and the hopes of Louis for a quick and decisive war were thoroughly overturned. It was perhaps the most decisive battle of the entire War of the Spanish Succession, whereby the military power of England was affirmed and the spectre of Louis XIV was seen to be nothing but a shadow. It took eight days for the news of the victory to reach England, where it was met with jubilation. When Anne was given the news by a courier, she told him: ‘You have given me more joy than ever I have received in my life.’ But the joy was not unconfined, and it was noticeably lacking among those Tories who were opposed to Marlborough’s war policies as an expensive extravagance. What, in their judgement, did such European conflicts actually achieve?

  Party rivalry was characteristically intense and bitter during the reign of Queen Anne. She was herself an interim figure, neither Hanoverian nor Jacobite, so the rival ideologies of the realm had an open arena for their fury and resentment. The queen herself was determined to stand above parties, and it was her instinctive and pragmatic inclination to maintain a balance between them so that none should rule her; she wrote that ‘if I should be so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of either, I shall look upon myself, though I have the name of queen, to be in reality but their slave’. She disliked and distrusted the violent partisans on both sides; they were ‘merciless men’ whom she regarded with dread. But would it prove possible to steer an even course between them? The Tories were her church party of r
edoubtable Anglicans but they opposed Marlborough’s wars; the Whigs supported Marlborough and all his works, but they were eager to diminish the royal prerogative in favour of parliamentary rule. To whom could she flee?

  The political parties were not yet formally constituted, but they were becoming so. They were, in other words, in the process of turning into caricatures of themselves. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the two factions of Lilliput, known as ‘Tramecksan’ and ‘Slamecksan’, are divided over the respective heights of the heels of their shoes; the former wear their heels high, as ‘high Tories’, and the latter low. The animosities between them are so great that, as Swift puts it, ‘they will neither eat nor drink, nor talk with each other’.

  In the real world of early eighteenth-century London the Whigs and Tories frequented their own clubs, coffee-houses and taverns. The Whigs of aristocratic temper met at the Kit-Kat Club, while their Tory counterparts assembled at the Society of Brothers. The Tories patronized Ozinda’s Chocolate House in St James’s or progressed round the corner to the Smyrna or the Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall. The Whigs collected at St James’s Coffee House, perilously close to Ozinda’s, or drove further east to Buttons by Covent Garden. Pontack’s in Lombard Street, and the Old Man’s in the Tilt Yard, were also Whig favourites.

  Addison once described London as ‘an aggregate of nations’, with the customs and manners of St James’s as different from those of Cheapside as those of Tunisia or Moscow. Yet each region was united by means of its principal coffee-house that ‘has some particular statesman belonging to it, who is the mouth of the street where he lives’. It was a city of coffee-houses. They had begun life in the 1660s, when the burgeoning social intercourse after the godly rule of Cromwell demanded some comfortable venue. They could not have come at a better time for London society, and before long they were considered to be the most essential component of city life. A roaring fire guaranteed warmth and hot water; a penny on the counter brought you a dish of coffee or chocolate; the newspapers, hanging on the wall, were all that were needed for entertainment and conversation. It was a world of news.

  The illustrations of the time show that the coffee-houses were simple enough, with a few stools, chairs and plain deal tables. Smoking was the rule, and pipes were in almost every hand. Anderton’s in Fleet Street was the meeting place of Freemasons; Child’s, in St Paul’s Churchyard, was for book-worms and scholars; the Grecian was similarly the venue for learned men; Jonathan’s in Exchange Alley was the haunt of stock-jobbers; Batson’s in Cornhill was the place of physicians. If an invalid needed an immediate diagnosis, he or she would send a boy to Batson’s.

  Even the medical profession, however, was not free from the rage of party. When Doctor Oliphant began to associate himself with the Tories, his Whig patients deserted him. When a prominent Tory, Lord Oxford, found the coach of an equally prominent Whig waiting beside a house door, he refused to enter the premises. London also had its own Whig and Tory hospitals – St Thomas’s for the former and Bart’s for the latter. Who would wish to be treated by a member of the wrong party? Eton College was divided between the two factions, which resulted in frequent fights and quarrels. When Swift passed through Leicester in 1707 he observed that ‘there is not a chambermaid, prentice or schoolboy in this whole town but what is warmly engaged on one side or the other’. The Spectator of 3 January 1712 noticed that ‘the Whig and Tory ladies begin already to hang out different colours, and to show their principles in their head-dress’. Four years later the Freeholder observed that ‘Whig and Tory are the words first learned by children’.

  So there was more to it than the difference between low heels and high heels. Even Swift, who made the analogy, became a lifelong Tory. The animus was such that the dominance of one faction over the other was enough to lead to imprisonment, exile, proscription, confiscation of estates, loss of office and even loss of life. The points of principle were manifold, concerning the role of monarchy itself, the structure of the Church of England, the basis of the Hanoverian succession, the nature of religious toleration, and the conduct of the war. When the conflict between money and land is thrown into the argument, the antagonisms could become fierce indeed. With the fundamental values and beliefs of the nation diverging so strongly, the queen and her ministers had to tread softly. This was by no means an ‘age of stability’, as it is sometimes described; in some respects it resembled the previous century without the imminent threat of armed conflict.

  In the early years of the queen’s reign the Whigs tended to be in the ascendant largely because they more eagerly supported Marlborough’s war against the French; but there was no basic equipoise, since the parties moved incrementally up or down according to the atmosphere or debate of the day. One of these periodic changes occurred in the general election of the spring of 1705; neither side secured an outright victory, but the Whigs seemed to have overcome the more virulent Tories; as a result the Whigs and more moderate Tories held the balance, with the latter under the leadership of Robert Harley.

  Harley may now have been consigned to the dust of history but he can be exhumed as representative of the eighteenth-century politician, the politician tout court, the naked politician. He began his climb as a member of the Commons in 1689 and soon acquainted himself so thoroughly with all the ploys of parliament that he became known as ‘Robin the Trickster’. Such was his success that he was elected Speaker in 1701, and soon became the inevitable candidate for higher office. As an orator he was neither fluent nor enlightening, but he made up for the lack of a wide view with a propensity for detail. He was a lover of intrigue and secrecy, relying for the most part on camouflage and dissimulation. He said nothing simple and nothing true. It was observed that he spoke so closely and unintelligibly that even he did not understand what he meant. Alexander Pope remarked that he ‘talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about; and every thing he went to tell you was in the epic way; for he always began in the middle’. This was an allusion to Horace’s advice to the epic poet always to begin ‘in medias res’ – in the middle of things.

  Yet Harley’s design was to obfuscate and confuse his hearers. He was secretive to the point of being mysterious, dilatory to the point of immobility. Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor, remarked that ‘if any man was ever born under a necessity of being a knave, he was’. He was odd and awkward in appearance, always ready to bow and smile, but with what the duchess of Marlborough described as ‘a constant awkward motion or other agitation of his head and body’.

  Yet he was also a politician of apparent good humour, treating every colleague as a potential ally and friend; he was fond of good company, but he had no friends. He was convivial with a purpose; his bonhomie was such that he had a reputation as a conciliator who was able to make the most diverse men and ambitions meet. He knew the secret spring of any man, and was so keen a judge of character that he knew the surest means of touching it. He had no principles beyond those of self-advertisement and self-advancement, although loyalty to the throne may be counted as one of his virtues even if it might be construed as loyalty to his own prospects. He was made for the politics of conspiracy: a perennial contriver and intriguer who tied himself in knots with his specious promises. One year he was a Whig, and the next a Tory. As long as he supported Queen Anne, it made little practical difference. Behold the politician of the age in all his infirmity, and the long line that followed him. We may repeat William Blake’s perception that ‘nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay’.

  4

  Hay day

  The early years of Queen Anne’s reign were blessed, like some miracle of the gods, by bountiful harvests. Between 1702 and 1708 the price of wheat was below the crucial figure of 30 shillings a quarter that generally provoked distress or riot. This naturally lowered the political and social pressures in the regions, as well as in London, where the market cost of bread was the single most imp
ortant factor in public content. In the autumn of 1708 Squire Molesworth of Yorkshire wrote that ‘we buy nothing but sugar and spice in the market, having all eatables and drinkables at home’. The superfluity of money, among the middling classes, accounts for the increasing purchase of clocks and mirrors, porcelain, carpets and curtains.

  Yet not all was of the gods’ making. Much can be attributed to aspirations reported in Gulliver’s Travels that ‘whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together’. The names of these indispensable experimenters – Jethro Tull, Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend, Arthur Young and his Annals of Agriculture, Robert Bakewell and his New Leicester sheep – are well enough known in the annals of agricultural progress.

  But the specific innovations of a few highly intelligent and observant men could not in themselves have created the ‘agricultural revolution’ that has been dated from the mid-seventeenth century. If ‘revolution’ is too strong in its implications, we may at least refer to a long age of improvement. The obstacles were very real. The forces of conservatism ruled the countryside, with the tillage of land and the raising of animals changing little over many thousands of years; the old habits and prejudices of the farmers were as deep as the soil, and anyone who questioned their efficacy was doubting the very nature of providence. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, according to John Aubrey, ‘even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, though it succeeded with profit, was looked upon with an ill eye’.