The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  In 1736 Bolingbroke returned to the arena of politics with Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, which attacked the corruption of Walpole’s administration, and called for a new spirit of selfless devotion in English politics.

  Neither Montaigne in writing his Essays, nor Des Cartes in building new worlds, nor … Newton in discovering and establishing the true laws of nature on experiment and a sublime geometry, felt more intellectual joys than he feels who is a real patriot, who bends all the force of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions, to the good of his country.40

  His hope turned to the younger generation. Visiting England in 1738, he cultivated the friendship of Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, who was now leading the opposition to Walpole. To Frederick’s private secretary Bolingbroke now addressed his most famous production, The Idea of a Patriot King. Frederick died in 1751, but his son, the future George III, derived from these pages some articles of his political creed.41 Essentially the essay was a plea for a benevolent monarchy, such as Voltaire and the philosophes were to dream of in the next generation. England—Bolingbroke argued—was now so debased that no one could save it except a king who should rise above faction and party, even above Parliament, take power into his own hands, repel and punish bribery, and rule as well as reign. But the patriot king would view his power not as a divine right but as a public trust, not as absolute but as limited by natural law, the liberties of his subjects, the freedom of the press, and the customs of the realm: and he would judge all issues according as they affected the prosperity and happiness of the people.42 He would promote commerce as the chief source of a nation’s wealth. He would, in Britain, strengthen the navy as the guardian of national independence and of the Continental balance of power.

  The Idea of a Patriot King was an attempt to build, with displaced Tories and discontented Whigs, a new party of Tories dressed in Whig principles, renouncing Jacobitism, and seeking to reconcile land with commerce, empire with liberty, public service with private wealth.I When the essay was published (1749) it became the rallying cry of young enthusiasts who, as “the King’s Friends,” looked to the monarchy to cleanse the government of England. It formed the political philosophy of Samuel Johnson and both the elder and the younger Pitt. It inspired the liberal conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli, whose Vindication of the English Constitution (1835) hailed Bolingbroke as the father of Tory democracy, as the man whose “complete reorganization of the public mind laid the foundation for the future accession of the Tory party to power.”44 It was the Bolingbroke and Disraeli influence that remolded the defeated Tories into the progressive “Conservatives” of England today.

  V. HOW TO GET INTO A WAR

  Meanwhile Bolingbroke’s propaganda shared with the bellicose spirit of a money-minded Parliament in ending Walpole’s long ascendancy. Basing his tenure on tranquillity preserved, the cautious minister shied away from foreign entanglements, agreed with Cardinal Fleury—who was ruling France on similar principles—to maintain as long as possible the peace established by the Treaty of Utrecht, and, for the rest, left the management of external relations to his able brother Horatio. But the retention of Gibraltar by England, and the rivalry between England and Spain for control of America and the seas, begot increasing violence as the years progressed. Both George I and his minister Stanhope, in January and June, 1721, had assured Philip V of Spain that England would give up Gibraltar as soon as the finances of Britain and the temper of Parliament improved; but the British public refused to countenance such a surrender.45 Let us follow now the English account of how England slipped into war; it will illustrate both the jingoism of the populace and the integrity of British historians.46

  The South Sea Company, we are told, “grossly abused” the privilege accorded to England by Spain, of sending one trading ship per year to the Spanish possessions in the New World, and “a large illicit trade had sprung up,” partly managed, partly connived at, by the company. Spain retaliated by boarding English vessels suspected of smuggling. Robert Jenkins alleged that in one such case (1731) he had lost an ear; he preserved it, displayed it in Britain, and cried out for revenge. The Spanish confiscated some English ships engaged in licit commerce, and kept English prisoners in irons; English privateers captured Spaniards and sold them as slaves in the British colonies. Smuggling continued; the Spanish government protested; Walpole, reluctant to reduce the income of the struggling South Sea Company, temporized, though he dealt severely with smuggling along the English coasts. The English merchant class favored war, confident of naval superiority, secure against invasion, and hopeful of new markets and expanded trade. The people were excited with factual and fictitious tales of Spanish brutality; Englishmen who clamored for action were hailed as manly patriots, those who advised moderation were called lily-livered cowards. Jenkins showed Parliament his ear in a bottle (March, 1738), whereupon Pulteney, Pitt, and others of the opposition to Walpole made hot speeches about the honor of England.II In martial counterpoint the Spanish public denounced the English as heretical dogs, and swallowed a story that an English captain had made a noble Spaniard cut off and devour his own nose.

  Both governments behaved sensibly. La Quadra, Spain’s chief minister, issued for public consumption a hot letter to Walpole, but privately informed him that Spain would welcome a negotiated settlement. Defying popular uproar, the British government signed with Spain the Convention of the Pardo (January 14, 1739), in which both sides made concessions, and a commission was made to settle all outstanding grievances. Half the Spanish public accepted the convention; nearly all England rose in anger against it. The South Sea Company complained that the convention would severely limit its income and dividends; and the English ambassador at Madrid was also an agent of the company. Moreover, the Asiento by which Spain allowed England to supply Negro slaves to Spanish America expired on May 6, 1739, and Philip V refused to renew the contract.49 Nevertheless, pursuing his pacific policy, Walpole recalled the British fleet from the Mediterranean; then, wrongly suspecting that Spain was signing a secret alliance with France, he revoked the order, and bade the fleet protect Gibraltar. La Quadra protested; Walpole, yielding to the martial mood of Parliament and people, broke off negotiations; and on October 19, 1739, England declared war against Spain. The public, still calling Walpole a coward, rejoiced, and throughout England church bells rang. Now James Thomson wrote his stirring ballad “Rule, Britannia!” pledging that “Britons never will be slaves.”

  Normally nothing so strengthens a government as a declaration of war, for then the loyal opposition muzzles its guns. But Walpole’s ministry was an exception. His enemies rightly felt that his heart was not in marching armies or in squadrons belching fire; they blamed all military reverses on his mismanagement, and ascribed a naval success at Portobello (on the Isthmus of Panama) solely to the genius of Admiral Vernon, who was a member of the opposition. In February, 1741, Samuel Sandys proposed to Parliament that the King be advised to dismiss his chief minister. The motion was defeated, but only by Walpole’s solicitation of Jacobite votes. He survived another year; nevertheless he realized that his time was up, and that the country wanted a change.

  And he was exhausted. “He who in former years,” his son wrote, “was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow … now never sleeps above an hour without waking; and he who at dinner always forgot that he was minister, and was more gay and thoughtless than all his company, now sits without speaking, and with his eyes fixed, for an hour together.”50 New elections returned a Parliament overwhelmingly hostile; it defeated him in a minor matter, and on February 13, 1742, he resigned. Too old to face the tumult of the Commons, he easily persuaded George II to make him Earl of Orford, and as such he sank upward into the House of Lords. He had feathered his nest for his fall.

  He died, after suffering stoically a long and painful illness, on March 18, 1745, aged sixty-eight. England bade goodbye to peace, and set out, with Pitt after Pitt, to conquer the world.

  VI.
IRELAND: 1714–56

  Rarely in history has a nation been so oppressed as the Irish. Through repeated victories by English armies over native revolts, a code of laws had been set up that chained the Irish in body and soul. Their soil had been confiscated until only a handful of Catholic landowners remained, and nearly all of it was held by Protestants who treated their agricultural laborers as slaves. “The poor people in Ireland,” said Chesterfield, “are used worse than Negroes by their lords and masters.”51 It was “not unusual in Ireland,” said Lecky, “for great landed proprietors to have regular prisons in their houses for the summary punishment of the lower orders.”52 Many of the landlords lived in England, and spent there (Swift estimated) a third of the rents paid by Irish tenants.53 The tenants—racked by rents paid to the landlord, by tithes paid to the Established Church which they hated, and by dues paid to their own priests—lived in mud hovels with leaky roofs, went half naked, and were often on the edge of starvation; Swift thought “the Irish tenants live worse than English beggars.”54 Those landlords who remained in Ireland, and the deputies of the absentees, drugged themselves against the barbarism and hostility of their surroundings with carousals of food and drink, extravagant hospitality, quarreling and dueling, and gambling for high stakes.

  Having full power over Ireland, the British Parliament stifled any Irish industry that competed with England. We have seen elsewhere how an act of 1699 destroyed the nascent wool manufactures by forbidding the export of Irish woolens to any country whatever. In like manner such foreign commerce as Ireland had preserved amid political turmoil and military devastation was mercilessly throttled by English laws. Irish exports were saddled with export duties that cut them off from nearly all markets but England.55 Many Irish had lived by raising cattle and exporting them to England; laws of 1665 and 1680 forbade the English importation of Irish cattle, sheep, or swine, of beef, mutton, bacon, or pork, even of butter or cheese. Ireland had exported her products to the English colonies; an act of 1663 required that, with a few exceptions, no European articles could be imported into English colonies except from England in English ships manned by Englishmen. The Irish merchant marine died. Said Swift: “The conveniency of ports and harbors, which nature bestowed so liberally on this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon.”56

  Protestants as well as Catholics were harassed by England’s legislation for her Irish subjects; and in one famous instance they joined the Catholics in overruling the British government. The export of money as rent to absentee landlords had by 1722 created a shortage of metal currency in Ireland. Walpole offered to relieve this by an issue of copper coins. The plan was reasonable, but was spotted with the usual corruption: the Duchess of Kendal was granted a patent to mint the new coinage; she sold it to William Wood, ironmaster, for £10,000; and to raise this sum plus his profit Wood proposed to coin £100,800 in halfpennies or farthings. As the total metal currency of Ireland was then only £400,000, the Irish protested that coppers would have to be used in payments as well as making change; that foreign accounts, including the rents of absentee landlords, would have to be paid in silver or bank notes; that the cheaper coins would drive the better ones into hoarding or export; and that soon Ireland would have nothing but troublesome coppers as its currency. To meet these complaints the British government agreed to reduce the new issue to £40,000, and it presented a report from Isaac Newton, master of the Mint, that Wood’s halfpennies were quite as good in metallic content as the patent required, and much better than the coins inherited from earlier reigns.

  At this juncture Jonathan Swift, Anglican dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, entered the argument by publishing a succession of letters under the pseudonym M. B. Drapier. With all the vehemence of his spirit and the resources of his invective, he attacked the new currency as an attempt to defraud the Irish people. He alleged that the coins sent to Newton for testing were specially minted, and that the vast majority of Wood’s halfpennies were worth far less than their face value; and, indeed, some economists confirmed his claim by calculating that Ireland would sustain a loss of £60,480 by the issue as first proposed.57 In the fourth letter Swift advanced to a powerful indictment of all English rule in Ireland, and laid down the principle that “all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”58 The Irish, including the majority of Protestants among them, responded eagerly to this bold note; ballads urging resistance to England were sung in the streets; and the English government, which had for centuries defied an entire people, now found itself in retreat before a single pen. It offered a reward of three hundred pounds for the apprehension of the author, but though hundreds knew that this was the gloomy Dean, no one dared take action against him. Nor would any Irishman face the anger of the people by accepting the new coins. Walpole acknowledged defeat, canceled the issue, and allowed Wood £ 24,000 compensation for his futile expenses and his vanished gains.

  The structure of Irish politics made impossible any resistance to English domination except by mob action or individual violence. Since no one could hold office except by adherence to the Church of England, the Irish Parliament, after 1692, was composed entirely of Protestants,59 and was now wholly subservient to England. In 1719 the English Parliament reaffirmed its paramount right to legislate for Ireland. Laws that in England protected parliamentary or individual liberty, like the Habeas Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights, were not extended to Ireland; the relative freedom of the press enjoyed in England had no existence in Ireland. The two parliaments resembled each other only in the corruption of their electors and their members. They differed again in the dominant influence of Anglican bishops in the Irish House of Lords.

  The Established Church in Ireland included about a seventh of the population among its adherents, but it was supported by tithes taken from the peasantry, nearly all of whom were Catholics. A small proportion of the people followed the Presbyterian or other Dissenting creeds, and received a measure of toleration, short of eligibility to office. Catholics were excluded not only from office but from all the learned professions except medicine, and from nearly every avenue to higher education, wealth, or influence.60 They were forbidden to purchase land, or to invest in mortgages on land, or to hold any long or valuable lease. They could not serve as jurors, except where Protestants were not available. They could not teach in schools; they could not vote for municipal or national offices; they could not validly marry a Protestant.61 Their religious worship was permitted, if celebrated by a priest who had registered with the government and had taken the Oath of Abjuration disclaiming allegiance to the Stuart line; other priests were liable to imprisonment, but this law was seldom enforced after 1725; in 1732a committee of the Irish Parliament reported that there were 1,445 priests in Ireland, 229 Catholic churches, 549 Catholic schools. After 1753 the zeal of the English abated, and the condition of the Catholics in Ireland improved.

  The disorder of religious life shared with the poverty of the people and the hopelessness of social advancement in demoralizing Irish life. The ablest and bravest Catholics—who would have raised the level of Irish capacity, morality, and intelligence—emigrated to France or Spain or America. Many Irishmen sank into beggary or crime as an escape from starvation. Robber gangs hid in the countryside, smugglers and wreckers lurked near the shores, and some property owners kept as many as eighty bravos to do their bidding regardless of the law. Thousands of cattle and sheep were slaughtered by roving bands, apparently as acts of Catholic revenge upon Protestant landlords. It was difficult for a people to respect the laws passed by an Irish Parliament that often spoke of the Catholics—three quarters of the population—as “the common enemy.”

  There were some brighter elements in Irish life. The cheerful, easygoing, laughter-loving temper of the people survived through all their hardships; and their superstitions and legends surrounded their lives with magic and poetry without leading them to such violence as marked the witch
craft persecutions in Scotland and Germany. The Anglican clergy in Ireland included some fine scholars (e.g., Bishop Ussher of Armagh), a prominent philosopher (George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne), and the greatest writer of English in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Dublin Society, founded in 1731, labored to improve technology in agriculture and industry, to stimulate invention, and to encourage art. There were many cases of individual Protestants helping indigent Catholics, and of magistrates applying leniently the Draconian regulations of the penal code.

  But by and large the Irish scene was one of the most shameful in history. A degrading poverty, a chaotic lawlessness, a nomadic pauperism, 34,000 beggars, countless thieves, an upper class living in drunken extravagance amid a starving peasantry, every crop failure bringing widespread starvation—“the old and sick,” said Swift, “dying and rotting by cold and famine and filth and vermin”62—this terrible picture must find a place in our conception of man. After the long and bitter frost of 1739 came the desperate famine of 1740–41, in which, by one estimate, twenty per cent of the population perished, leaving many deserted villages. In the county of Kerry the number of taxpayers fell from 14,346 in 1733 to 9,372 in 1744. Berkeley calculated that “the nation probably will not recover this loss in a century.”63 He was wrong. Patiently the women bore children to replace the dead. Religious ardor declined among the Protestants as education spread; it increased among the Catholics as their religion identified itself with the struggle of the nation for freedom. The high birth rate favored by the Catholic Church, as her secret weapon against all opposition, soon countervailed the depredations of famine, pestilence, and war; by 1750 the population of Ireland had risen from approximately 2,000,000 in 1700 to some 2,370,000. In the long run the faith and fertility of the oppressed overcame the arms and greed of the conquerors.