Britain in the Eighteenth Century

That anniversary again

2007-03-18T17:34:00.001Z

A Telegraph review of some interesting books on the slave trade.

Political crisis, 1782-4

2007-03-15T08:40:00.000Z

How was it that Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister at the early age of twenty-four? See below for the complicated and fascinating answer.

The Rockingham Administration
On 27 March 1782 Lord Rockingham became Prime Minister for the second time, following North’s resignation and the earl of Shelburne’s inability to form a government. After 16 years in the political wilderness, his moment had come. Rockingham was First Lord of the Treasury, and Shelburne and Charles James Fox Secretaries of State. Shelburne was responsible for colonial affairs, Fox of foreign affairs – making him Britain's first Foreign Secretary. No place was found for Burke, who had to content himself with the non-Cabinet job of Paymaster of the Forces. There was no place either for the youthful William Pitt, who raised eyebrows when he told Rockingham that he would never accept a junior post.

Before he accepted this position, Fox had to stand again for his Westminster constituency, where he was challenged on his support for Catholic relief.

The fall of North’s ministry revived the prospects for 'economical reform'. Two bills were passed barring revenue officers and government contractors from Parliament. A more important measure was Burke’s Civil Establishment Bill removing 134 royal household officers, 22 of them tenable with a seat in Parliament and to restrict the Civil List to £900,000 per annum. It was a major achievement to carry this measure in the face of the court’s hostility and it helped to weaken the influence of the monarchy. But these measures were merely appetizers for the supporters of a more general reform of Parliament, three of whom (Shelburne, Fox and Richmond) were in the cabinet, with two younger spokesmen (Pitt the Younger and R B Sheridan) had come into Parliament in the 1780 election.

The Rockingham government was always potentially unstable, because of the king’s hostility and because of divisions within the government. In particular, Fox and Shelburne disliked each other intensely and Fox and Rockingham believed that Shelburne was the king’s spy in the government.

Ministers quarrelled over the peace negotiations. As Foreign Secretary, Fox was negotiating a treaty with France and Spain, while Shelburne dealt with America. This proved a powerful source of conflict. Fox wished to give unconditional independence to the Americans, Shelburne wanted more favourable terms for Britain.

Matters came to a head at a cabinet meeting on 30 June when Fox gave notice that he would resign if the Americans were not granted independence unconditionally in advance of the peace treaty. This move would have put the peace negotiations squarely within his department. This might not, on its own, have led to a crisis, but the moment of decision was forced on the government by the death of Rockingham the next day.

The Shelburne Administration
On the same afternoon that he heard of Rockingham’s death, the king wrote to Shelburne asking him to form a ministry. Fox, now the leader of the Whig party in the Commons (the nominal head of the party was the Duke of Portland) had believed that he or one of his followers might be Prime Minister, was devastated. On 3 July he told the king that he must appoint someone who had the confidence of his group – this was a bold challenge to the royal prerogative and was taken as such by the king. Fox was putting forward the novel constitutional doctrine that the Cabinet not the monarch should chose the Prime Minister. When it was clear that the king was determined to appoint Shelburne, he took his place on the back benches.

The Shelburne ministry was formed on 9 July after nine days of uncertainty. Few Rockinghamites joined his government. The government was to last a mere eight months, for five of which Parliament was in recess. Shelburne’s strongest card was his new chancellor of the exchequer, the 23 year old William Pitt, but Pitt was also a potential rival - an obvious successor to an unpopular first minister.

Fox was now the leader of the opposition in the Commons. He presided over the smallest of the three parties - Foxites, Shelburnites, Northites - and his service as Foreign Secretary had made him deeply unpopular with the king. His main asset was his extraordinary debating ability, only matched by that of Pitt the Younger on the government benches.

But much of Fox’s time was taken up with his raffish private life that centred round Brookes’s and the Prince of Wales’s circle About this time word got about that he was in love with the actress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, who had been the Prince’s mistress. But between the summer and autumn he abandoned Mrs Robinson for Mrs Elizabeth Armistead, who had also been the Prince’s mistress. By the end of the year it was clear that he was deeply in love with his ‘dearest Liz’.

Shelburne’s government was weak and unstable. He had the king’s support but his government was outnumbered in the Commons by the opposition members. His only asset was the well-known hostility between Fox and North. But early in 1783 it was clear that they were sinking their differences and prepared to combine to bring down the government. North's understanding with Fox was agreed on 14 February and announced in parliament on the 18th.

On 21 February the government was defeated in the Commons by 224 to 208 on the peace negotiations. Like North in 1782 Shelburne took defeat by a Commons majority as a sufficient cause for resignation. On 24 February he resigned and took Pitt into opposition with him. The king contemplated abdication if Fox was brought into government. On 5 March Fox offered further provocation when he declared in a debate that he

‘ever would maintain that His Majesty in his choice of ministers ought not to be influenced by his personal favour alone, but by the public voice, by the sense of Parliament, and by the sense of his people’.

This was a novel constitutional doctrine, but such was the king’s weakness that on 12 March he sent for North and told him that he accepted Fox’s presence in a government that would nominally be headed by the duke of Portland. Fox:

‘The King does this de la plus mauvais grace possible; and there are several unsatisfactory circumstances.'

Once again he had to stand for Westminster and once again he was re-elected.

The Fox-North Coalition
The new government, which was formed on 1 April, was greeted with derision and incredulity – Fox and North had made too many bitter speeches against each other in the past to be credible as a partnership. Reformers were especially outraged. Horace Walpole observed, ‘All parties are confounded and intermixed.’

The Coalition was also the logical outcome of the state of parties at Westminster. Fox had 90 supporters, North 120; Shelburne about 140. From Fox’s point of view a North-Shelburne alliance would undo all hopes of reform and had to be stopped at all costs. But though these were logical calculations, the coalition was seen by contemporaries and by posterity, as an extraordinary piece of political cynicism.

The king was especially outraged and was determined to make life difficult for the Coalition – for example by refusing to create peers. In June Parliament debated the prospect of giving a regular income to the Prince of Wales, now approaching his 21st birthday. When the government suggested £100,000 a year, the king was horrified and Fox began to fear that the dispute would bring down the government. A compromise was agreed £50,000 p.a.from the civil list plus the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall, with the prince to have his own house (Carlton House). But the king could not forgive the coalition and declared that he ‘wished himself eighty or ninety or dead’.

In September the definitive peace treaties were signed with France, Spain and America. In November the government brought in an India Bill, which had been drafted by Burke in consultation with Fox. The most controversial aspect of the bill was the proposal to replace the Court of Directors and transfer the political responsibilities of the East India Company to a body of commissioners sitting in London, appointed first by Parliament and subsequently by the Crown. All the Commissioners were named in the bill – and all were supporters of the Coalition. Even Fox’s modern apologists have trouble defending this partisan bill.

When the bill was debated in Parliament, Fox made eloquent speeches but was condemned as ‘Carlo Khan’ in Sayers’ opposition cartoon. On 3 December the bill passed the Commons. On 9 December the Lords debated the first reading of the bill. Fox watched in torment as his colleagues made a hash of their case.

The king chose this moment to plan his coup against the Coalition. On 11 December he made it known that those peers who voted for the bill

‘were not only not his friends, but he should consider them his enemies’.

This was a bombshell. The king was gambling on his position and if the Lords voted for the bill he planned to abdicate and retire to Hanover. On 17 December the Lords rejected the bill by a majority of 19. In the Commons a furious Fox laid the blame for the defeat at the door of

‘the illegal and extraordinary exertions of the royal prerogative’.

On 18 December the government’s resignation was hourly expected. At midnight, while Portland, Fox and North were in conference, messengers arrived from the king asking them to deliver up their seals of office. On the next day the 24 year old Pitt kissed hands as Prime Minister.

Pitt’s Minority Government
Pitt knew his government would only be temporary – he was outnumbered 2 to 1 in the Commons. He had great difficulty forming a government and his cabinet did not take shape until 23 December. The Whig hostess Mrs Crewe voiced the conventional wisdom when she described his government as a ‘mince-pie administration’ that would be gone in the New Year.

But in the recess, the Crown built up its powers of patronage. When parliament met, the government lost many divisions but Pitt kept his nerve and did not resign. In he meantime congratulatory addresses to the king poured in. The Opposition began to falter and lose confidence. On 1 March the Morning Chronicle wrote:

‘The unshaken firmness of the Ministry under the actual tortures of an experiment which, until these six weeks, would have been thought an idle dream if any man had pretended to foresee it, engages respect.’

On 21 March Pitt decided to dissolve. On 24 March the king announced the end of the session. (The Great Seal was stolen - dirty tricks? - and another had to be made.)

The Election of 1784
Thanks to the usual government pre-election manoeuvres (securing pocket boroughs) there was little doubt that Pitt would win the election. But the result was nevertheless a triumph, with Pitt making 70 gains. But an even more remarkable factor was the number of petitions that poured in supporting the king and condemning Fox. It was a complete reversal of the events of 1769 and 1779 when anti-government petitions had been mounted.

The election lasted five weeks, the last return coming in from London on 7 May. It aroused unprecedented interest with the number of caricatures reaching unprecedented proportions (many paid for by the government). Many Opposition members (notably the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord John Cavendish) lost their seats (‘Fox’s Martyrs’). [Cavendish had held York since 1768 and thought it was a safe seat.] Thomas Coke lost Norfolk. One Whig politician wrote to another:

‘We are cut up root and branch. The country is utterly mad for prerogative.’

Fox only held onto his Westminster seat after the duchess of Devonshire’s controversial canvassing. The election began on 1 April and finished on 17 May. The final result was: Admiral Samuel Hood 6,694; Fox, 6,223; Sir Cecil Wray, 5,998.

In Yorkshire William Wilberforce and Henry Duncombe overturned the mighty Fitzwilliam interest, thanks to the direction and organization of the radical clergyman Christopher Wyvill.

The election brought a decisive end to two years of political instability and set the tone for politics for the rest of the 18th century. Pitt was Prime Minister, Fox (in effect) Leader of the Opposition; the king had become popular and the Prince of Wales was unpopular!

This is the story I shall be taking up in September. I have already begun my next blog, though all it does at this stage is give a reading list. Go to http://ageofrevolution.blogspot.com or just click here.

The Opposition and the American war

2007-03-13T16:52:00.000Z

From 1775, with the beginning of the war, the opposition had been in a quandary. Chathamites and Rockinghamites were both horrified at the idea of making war on fellow Englishmen but neither wanted to see the empire disintegrate. Their only strategy for preserving the empire was wholesale concession to the Patriots’ demands, which would have yielded de facto independence and been completely unacceptable in Britain. In Britain pro-American radicals used the American terminology and called themselves ‘patriots’. This aroused the fury of Samuel Johnson, who, on April 7 1775 declared (according to Boswell) that patriotism was ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’. In his pro-government pamphlet Taxation no Tyranny, he wrote,

'We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’

Since the beginning of hostilities a radical fringe based in London, had been far more opposed to the war than the much more timid parliamentary Whigs, and they used the issues thrown up by the war to pursue the case for political reform in Britain. In 1776 Major John Cartwright (1740-1824) published Take Your Choice, in which he argued for universal suffrage, annual parliaments, secret ballots and equal member constituencies. In the same year the Unitarian minister Richard Price (1723-91) (right) published his Observations on Civil Liberty, arguing for natural rights both in Britain and America. This radicalism horrified the aristocratically based Rockinghamites.

The news of Saratoga became a rallying point for ‘patriotic’ opinion, and North’s Commons majority began to diminish as many of the independent country gentlemen deserted him. With the entry of France and Spain into the war in 1778, the opposition faced both problems and opportunities. They felt able to criticise the government with more freedom, but could not afford to be seen as the friends of France and Spain. Meanwhile, Chatham suddenly terminated his co-operation with the Rockinghams over their increasing readiness to acknowledge the independence of America:

‘I will as soon subscribe to transubstantiation as to sovereignty, by right, in the Colonies.’

On 7 April, clearly ill, he came to the Lords to defend this view. His speech—incoherent to most listeners—was a defiant cry against ‘the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy’ and ‘ignominious surrender’ to an ‘ancient inveterate enemy’. When he struggled to rise again he fell in ‘a sudden fit’ and was carried out senseless. The Lords adjourned in respect. He died on 11 May, having long since ceased to be politically significant.

The Yorkshire Association
Radicalism received another lease of life in Yorkshire, the largest parliamentary constituency. A grass-roots campaign against political and parliamentary corruption was led by Christopher Wyvill (1740-1822) a wealthy, liberal-minded clergyman. For Wyvill and the Yorkshire gentry, the ultimate cure for corruption in politics was to restore the independence of the Commons from executive influence through a programme of economical (administrative) reform. A large public meeting in York in December 1779 formed a County ‘Association’ of ‘gentlemen, clergy and freeholders’ and a petition was drawn up denouncing the waste of public money, alleging that in this way the crown had built up ‘a great and unconstitutional influence, which, if not checked, may soon prove fatal to the liberties of the country.

Wyvill’s petitioning movement was the first institutionalized extension of radicalism into the provinces. By the early months of 1780 he had obtained 26 petitions from the counties and another dozen from some of the larger boroughs. He proceeded to hold a meeting of delegates of the petitioning bodies in London in early 1780.

The Yorkshire Association was outflanked in its radicalism by the London movement. In April 1780 Cartwright, John Jebb , Brand Hollis and the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan (left) founded the Society for Constitutional Information, a standing unofficial ‘parliament’. But these middle-class dissidents and intellectuals were hardly natural allies of country gentlemen whose main concern was to see the land tax fall to a shilling in the pound. But one factor united the otherwise disparate opposition: the fear of excessive crown influence.

Dunning’s Motion
This fear lies behind the attempts of Rockingham and another reformist peer, the Chathamite 2nd earl of Shelburne (left) to use the support of Wyvill’s petitioning movement to strengthen their own campaign (even though there was considerable personal hostility between the two peers). The centrepiece of their attack in the 1780 session was Burke’s plan of Economical Reform, designed to reduce crown patronage and expenditure. On 6 April John Dunning’s resolution

‘that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’

passed the Commons by 233/215, but Burke never managed to gain majorities for his proposals.

Charles James Fox
Opposition came from another direction: the former Northite Charles James Fox. He had been an MP since 1768 when his father, Henry Fox, had secured for him the pocket borough of Midhurst. He immediately made a name for himself as a parliamentary debater and, ironically in view of his later career, his earliest speeches were attacks on Wilkes. Between February 1770 and March 1774 he served in North’s government – and resigned twice. Both resignations were controversial. His first resignation was in February 1772, ostensibly as a protest against the Royal Marriages Act, which he took as a personal slight on his mother’s Stuart family. His second resignation in February 1774 (from the Treasury Board) seems to have been on a point of parliamentary privilege: against North’s wishes he wanted the printer of an opposition pamphlet sent to the Tower. The motive was likely to have been personal animus against North. His conduct was too much for the king, who directed North to send him a note of dismissal: ‘Sir, his Majesty has thought it proper to order a new commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not perceive your name.’ From this time Fox’s hatred of the king became poisonous and was to have far-reaching political consequences.

Between 1774 and 1782 Fox moved over to the Rockingham Whigs. The issue that drew them together was America. Fox and the Whigs supported American because they believed that if George III succeeded in imposing a despotism in America he would do the same in Britain. Accordingly Fox referred to Washington as ‘my illustrious friend’, and he and his supporters adopted as their colours the blue and buff of Washington’s army. When he debated America, his remarks were often deeply personal – and aimed at North and his ministers.

The American debates brought Fox and Burke together, though Burke’s middle-class moralism did not mix easily with Fox’s ‘macaroni’ aristocratic ways. But from 1774 Burke worked hard to bring Fox over to the Whigs and the two men had a warm and affectionate relationship.

The Election of 1780
During the summer of 1780 the prospects for reform suddenly worsened when Cornwallis captured Charleston (it seemed for a while that Britain might win the war), while the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots terrified the propertied classes into conservatism. North called a snap election in the summer and the Rockinghams, tainted by their association with the Americans, performed indifferently. Burke did not even contest Bristol and was given Rockingham’s seat of Malton. The government kept its majority (though it lost 6 seats) but its fate depended on the war.

Charles James Fox was returned for Westminster. After twelve years in a pocket borough it was a considerable triumph to be elected for a ‘popular’ constituency.

One prominent new member was William Wilberforce who was elected for Hull (topping the poll with 1126 votes). In a by-election in January 1781 William Pitt the Younger was returned for Lord Lowther’s pocket borough of Appleby (having come bottom of the poll at Cambridge University the previous year). He attached himself to Shelburne, who had been his father’s disciple.

The Irish crisis
During the war, long-standing resentment of Ireland’s constitutional and economic subordination was expressed in the aggressively ‘Patriot’ and anti-English stance adopted not so much by Catholics but by members of the Protestant ascendancy in the Dublin parliament. Compared with their English counterparts they had fewer rights: judges were subject to arbitrary dismissal and Habeas Corpus did not apply. Above all, there was great resentment at the 1720 Declaratory Act which reasserted the superiority of the Westminster to the Dublin parliament. The war impacted on the Irish economy and highlighted the existence of legislation restricting the freedom of commerce.

After 1778 landlords raised volunteer militias to repel the threat of a French invasion. They were drawn from the ranks of the respectable (they had to provide their own Irish cloth uniforms) but they were not exclusively Protestant. Once assembled, the Volunteers supported demands being made by Henry Grattan (1746-1820) in the Dublin parliament for an end to commercial restrictions. Militia parades with posters bearing the slogan, ‘Free Trade - Or Else’ combined with a boycott of British imports helped persuade North to allow free access of Irish manufactured goods, including glass and woollens, to both Britain and colonial markets, with which Irish merchants would henceforth trade directly. Concessions merely whetted Irish appetites for full legislative independence. This campaign was supported by county and Volunteer meetings, like that of representatives from 143 corps of Ulster Volunteers at Dungannon on 15 February 1782. Following the pattern of the English political reform Associations the Volunteer Assemblies set up standing committees to implement their decisions and liaise with counterparts across the country. Irish demands were supported by the Rockingham Whigs.

The Fall of North’s Ministry
On 25 November 1781 the news of the surrender of Yorktown reached Britain and broke the morale of the government. Within a fortnight North had come round to the necessity of conceding independence.

In the early months of 1782 the government kept losing votes in the Commons as the opposition MPs – the Rockinghamites and the followers of Shelburne - united in a temporary alliance. On 18 March North told the king that he had lost the support of the independent members. On 20 March the king accepted his resignation. The will of the Commons had prevailed over his wishes. Twelve years of political stability were to be followed by two years of intense instability.

George was very reluctant to contemplate a Rockingham administration. On 21 March he asked Shelburne to form a government, but Shelburne refused, knowing that he did not have enough supporters. He advised the king to send for Rockingham. George reluctantly agreed though he refused to see Rockingham personally and he insisted that Shelburne be in the government as Colonial Secretary, and be in charge of the peace negotiations.

It was one of the king's worst moments. He had to accept a prime minister whom he disliked intensely.

'We the people'

2007-03-07T16:10:00.000Z

(If you click on the image above, you will be able to read the enlarged text.)

There is a good general discussion of the United States constitution in J. M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World (1983). Here are some of the points Roberts makes.

Following victory in the War of Independence a handful of American politicians had to thrash out a constitution in the face of huge uncertainties. The colonies were divided over the question of slavery. But they did not have the incubus of an illiterate peasant population, they had ample territory (the extent as yet undecided) and huge potential economic resources. They were also able to draw on the intellectual resources of European civilization and apply them to a new state and a virgin continent.

In 1781 the former colonies had agreed Articles of Confederation in which they took the name United States of America but these articles were judged inadequate to the demands of a new nation. Accordingly delegates from the states met at a constitutional convention in Philadelphia in May 1787. By September they had agreed on a new document drafted largely by James Madison. When nine states ratified it, it came into force in the summer of 1788. In 1789 George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the new republic.

The constitution was determinedly republican - something that was not normal in the eighteenth century. Secondly, its roots lay largely in the British political experience. The Americans inherited English Common law principles, the idea of a bicameral chamber and a head of state (though of course the American head of state was elected).

The doctrine of the separation of powers was at the heart of the American constitution. Government was divided between an executive (the President who was to serve a four-year term), Congress (the Senate, six year term, the House of Representatives (two years) and the judiciary (the Supreme Court).

One way in which the United States differed markedly from Britain was in the principle of federalism. There was no central government with strong powers of coercion. This principle was to be tested again and again over the next eighty years.

The Founding Fathers did not intend to establish a democracy but the principle of popular sovereignty was enshrined in the opening words of the constitution: 'We the People'. This was derived from John Locke's principle that governments held their powers in trust and that the people could overthrow governments that abused their trust. But this Lockean principle was hardly mentioned in eighteenth-century Britain. For the Americans to adopt it into their constitution was epoch-making.

In 1791 the first ten amendments to the constitution were added. This was the Bill of Rights (the title taken from the British Bill of Rights of 1689) which established principles of individual liberty beyond the reach of statute law.

The American crisis

2007-03-01T19:07:00.000Z

The posts on America owe a great deal to the standard histories of the period, notably Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford, 1989).

The American Colonies
In 1763 the British Empire in North America had emerged from a triumphant war with spectacular new gains. The whole continent to the east of the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay was under British authority. Yet within 12 years hostilities had broken out with the mother country, ans when Britain finally accepted American independence in 1783, all that remained of its North American Empire was Quebec and Nova Scotia. Why?

The thirteen British colonies in America were remarkably diverse, with little sense of unity, though many of them were bound together by a common Dissenting tradition, which differentiated them in many respects from the mother country. There was a general assumption in Britain that the King-in-Parliament at Westminster was sovereign over the colonies and that it enjoyed the right of taxing them. But this right was increasingly challenged by the colonists.

The Seven Years’ War inflicted serious damage on Britain’s relations with her colonies. The war had ensured British rule in Canada but the territorial gains made in the war had to be protected and consolidated; there were 80,000 French settlers in Canada, and an unreconciled Native American presence around the Great Lakes and the Ohio basin. In October 1763 a royal proclamation prohibited the colonists from further settlement west of the Alleghenies in order to prevent Indian unrest – a restriction that was offensive to the land-hungry colonists and was largely ignored. Furthermore, the insecurity of British rule in North America meant that troops were constantly needed. Britain believed that it was only reasonable for the colonists to pay for their protection, but the colonists objected on the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’.

The Stamp Act
When George Grenville took office in 1763 he found that the National Debt had doubled during the war to almost £143 million and that the estimated cost of defending America and Canada amounted to at least £300,000 pa. The most controversial measure of his administration was the Stamp Act, enacted in March 1765 - an impost on legal transactions, newspapers and dice imposed on the American colonies. Though it was to acquire great historical significance, it was a minor piece of taxation (part of a general raft of colonial measures) and would bring in no more than £60,000 p.a at a time when there was no immediate threat either from the French or the Indians. In parliamentary terms it was not controversial and it was opposed by only a handful of opposition MPs. However, it was the clearest possible assertion of the right to tax, and America,was already irritated by earlier taxes. Colonial legislatures promptly protested and their agents in London lobbied against the enforcement of the Act. They were met with surprise and incomprehension. British public opinion was not sympathetic to the Americans’ plea to be spared the burden of taxation. The British were paying an average of 26s a year, and the new taxes would cost the Americans only an extra 1s a year.

In May 1765 the Virginia Assembly passed a series of resolutions condemning the Stamp Act on constitutional grounds. This news was broadcast over the other 12 colonies and imitated by one legislature after another. In August 1765 the Massachusetts Stamp Distributor’s home in Boston was attacked by a mob. In fear of his life he resigned his position and a wave of riotous attacks spread over the northern colonies. The Governor of Massachusetts complained that he was the prisoner of the people and the British Crown proved unable to defend him. The tiny North American garrison (6,000 strong) was situated on the western frontiers and Canada, far from the trouble spots.

In October the Stamp Act Congress met in New York, declared ‘taxation without representation’ unconstitutional, instituted a boycott of British goods and talked about the American people arming themselves to defend their liberties. By this time Grenville had been replaced by Rockingham. The new ministry was slow to realise that it had a major crisis on its hands, but in January 1766 it proposed a twin solution. The ministry presented the Commons with a formula: repeal of the Stamp Act but this to be accompanied by a face-saving Declaratory Act, which uncompromisingly asserted Parliament’s right to legislate for the American colonies. In the debates that followed Pitt (soon to be earl of Chatham) made his last great Commons speech, attacking the Stamp Act and the taxation of the colonies in general (though he idiosyncratically asserted Britain’s right to control the commerce of the colonies). An ingenious campaign of persuasion was mounted in the House. The case was skilfully orchestrated by Edmund Burke, then Rockingham’s private secretary, making his political debut. In the crucial division of 22 February repeal was carried 275/167. This was followed by tumultuous scenes in the lobbies. It seemed to satisfy most of the British political nation: the ending of a damaging dispute, and the reaffirmation of parliamentary sovereignty. But the colonists for the most part chose to ignore the Declaratory Act and the issue of colonial taxation remained unresolved.

The Townshend duties
The Chatham ministry, formed in July 1766, soon identified as one of its priorities how to find some way of taxing America in view of the spiralling costs of the garrison (the estimates climbed to over £575,000 by 1767). Since the Americans had declared that internal taxation was unconstitutional, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, declared his intention to exploit customs tariffs to raise the necessary revenue. This involved the taxing of a number of commodities imported into the colonies from Britain: lead, glass, paint, paper and tea. But the Americans themselves had now moved on and many were now questioning Britain’s right to legislate for them under any circumstances whatsoever. Townshend further exacerbated the situation by taking advantage of Chatham’s frequent bouts of mental illness to alter the purpose of the tariffs from funding the garrison to funding imperial administration in America. They thus threatened to emancipate colonial governors and other imperial administrators from the control of the colonial legislatures which up till then had paid their salaries. The duties were formally enacted in June 1767.

In February 1768 the Massachusetts Bay Assembly protested in the strongest terms against Townshend’s Act and circulated other colonies with a request for joint action. In September 1768 there were new disturbances in Boston. This time the ministry was ready to use coercion and in Boston was occupied by a force of regular soldiers and a small naval squadron. The Americans were taken by surprise and their resistance was temporarily cowed.

In October 1768 Chatham resigned. The new Grafton ministry offered as a magnanimous gesture to suspend the tariffs provided the colonial legislatures explicitly accepted Westminster’s right to tax and legislate for America. This provoked a more militant trade boycott among the Americans. On 1 May 1769 the Cabinet decided by the narrow majority of 5/4 to suspend all duties except for tea in order to assert Parliament's right to tax. The ground for the final clash between Britain and its American colonies was thereby laid out.

Lord North
In January 1770 Grafton was replaced by Frederick, Lord North (1732-92). North has been abused as a stock cliché - ‘the worst prime minister since Lord North’. Yet in 1804, looking over his reign, George III decided that he had been his best prime minister to date. Later prime ministers have envied him his 12 year period of office! Historians more recently have been concerned to rehabilitate him. He was the eldest son of Francis North, 3rd Baron Guildford and godson (and namesake) of Frederick Prince of Wales, and he was to inherit his father’s title in 1790. In the general election of 1754 he entered parliament (unchallenged) for the family seat of Banbury. His parliamentary debating skills and the patronage of the Duke of Newcastle secured his appointment to the Treasury Board in 1759 (under the leadership of his relation, Henry Legge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer) and a salary of £1,400, which enabled him to settle some of his debts. During the debates on the Wilkes affair he spoke eloquently and even ferociously for the government in spite of some private misgivings. In January 1764 he moved the Commons vote for the expulsion of Wilkes. With the fall of the Grenville ministry in July 1765 he resigned.

In July 1766 he became one of the two Paymasters General in the Chatham Administration. In October 1767 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, following the death of Townshend. In January 1768 he became Leader of the House of Commons.

When he became Prime Minister, North was determined to follow Grafton’s policy and not give way on the tea duty - the final token of Britain’s right to tax and legislate for the colonies

The Boston massacre
By 1770 Boston had become the heart of colonial resistance. Five weeks into North’s administration, troops occupying the city fired on rioters, killing five of them, in the ‘massacre’ of 5 March 1770. The real significance lay not in the small number of casualties but in the propaganda gift to the rebellious leaders, notably Sam Adams. Paul Revere was soon selling his colour prints of ‘The Bloody Massacre’ from his print shop in Boston – two other artist-engravers also issued prints that year. However, the British soldiers were acquitted after a defence by John Adams and by 1771 the American situation seemed calm enough for North to declare ‘the American disputes are settled, and there is nothing much to interrupt the peace and prosperity of the nation’.

The Boston tea-party
The tea duties had proved very useful to Britain as they financed the salaries of the governors of New York and Massachusetts, but for this reason they were very unpopular with American ‘patriots’.

In 1773 the government reduced the duties on tea in an attempt to aid the East India Company and to undercut the cost of smuggled goods. The Sons of Liberty saw this as an affront and on 16 December, dressed as Mohawks, they boarded the first tea shops to arrive in Boston harbour, and dumped their cargo in the harbour.

The Coercive Acts
Technically, this act was a breach of the East India Company’s private property. From the British point of view it was the last straw and caused a wave of public indignation. In 1774 North introduced the Coercive Acts (known to the Patriots as the Intolerable Acts) which were carried overwhelmingly in both Houses. Boston harbour was to be closed until reparation was paid and the Massachusetts Charter was remodelled, with the elected council being replaced by a nominated one. This simply convinced the Americans that there was a conspiracy to destroy their liberties. British goods were boycotted throughout the colonies.

Both sides were now locked into a cycle of action and over-reaction.

The Quebec Act
American opinion was further outraged by the Quebec Act (1774) which, among other controversial clauses recognized French civil law and the Roman Catholic establishment in Quebec, and permitted it to collect tithes. North further proposed to extend the Quebec frontier to include the region between the Ohio and the Mississippi, and this aroused the indignation of the colonists who wanted to extend into these territories themselves. This was cited as further evidence of the administration’s malign intent to subvert both Protestantism and the common law.

In autumn 1774 a Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia to coordinate resistance. That autumn in Britain saw a general election with little sense of ideological conflict. But the opposition drew comfort from Burke’s return for Bristol. Did this mean there was popular support for the colonists?

The Outbreak of War
The reports from America were discouraging. In April 1775 continuing unrest in New England caused General Gage, commander in Boston, to attempt the seizure of an arms depot and the arrest of the 'rebels' Samuel Adams and John Hancock. But they were alerted by Paul Revere, who rode from Boston to Lexington Massachusetts to warn them.. The result was the historical battle of Lexington on 19 April (‘the shot that rang around the world’) followed by the engagement at Concord in which ‘Minute Men’ forced British troops back to Boston. In a European setting these would have been minor skirmishes, but the effect in America was enormous. For the first time American blood had been deliberately shed by British hands.

When the Second Continental Congress assembled at Philadelphia in May 1775 George Washington, one of the Virginia delegates, was elected commander-in-chief of the Continental Army (15 June). On 17 June after receiving reinforcements, Gage attacked the American entrenchments at Bunker Hill outside Boston, taking them on the third attempt.

On 23 August 1775 the Patriots issued a Proclamation of Rebellion. On 4 March 1776 Washington occuped Dorchester Heights commanding Boston Harbour and the British evacuated to Halifax.

On 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence was drawn up in Philadelphia.

The British reaction
The Americans had far more to lose than the British. If they lost, they were traitors, if they won, they were entering uncharted territory. Moreover, North’s government continued to enjoy widespread support. Public opinion divided according to existing political positions, reflecting the relative strengths of government and opposition, Church and Dissent. The old Tory language of passive obedience enjoyed a revival, with the Americans portrayed as anarchists and ‘enthusiasts’. On the other side were those that petitioned against war with America, but they were hampered by the Whig ideology of parliamentary sovereignty; the issue did not concern the royal prerogative, but the right of parliament to legislate for the colonies. In 1775 the mercantile interest was solidly in favour of confronting the Americans - it was established economic orthodoxy that Britain could not survive without the captive colonial market. The appearance of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations did not immediately shake their instinctive mercantilism. It was also reasoned that the conflict would be a short one, as Britain had not lost a war for 110 years. What was ignored was the fact that Britain had won her previous wars with the help of European allies, whom she had deserted in 1762-3. In 1775 she was diplomatically isolated, with both France and Spain eager for revenge.

The loss of America

2007-03-01T19:03:00.000Z

The capture of New York
On 3 July 1776 30,000 British forces under General Sir William Howe landed at Staten Island. In August Howe captured Long Island and in September he gained control of New York City. The Americans were driven across New Jersey and into Philadelphia. The British held New York city and Long Island until the end of the war. The Americans had suffered significant casualties. Washington retreated across New Jersey and crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania on 8 December.

The campaign of 1776 also saw Canada preserved from American occupation. By the end of the year it seemed as if North had succeeded in his strategy of keeping New York and Pennsylvania loyal to the empire, dividing the colonies and securing a British stranglehold on colonial lines of trade and communication.

But the British had failed to follow up their victories and they had failed to destroy Washington’s army. On 31 December Washington re-crossed the Delaware by night, attacking a force of Hessians at Trenton and taking 900 prisoners.

Saratoga
In 1777 Howe took Philadelphia. However he was not able to accomplish his plan to join up with Burgoyne, who was advancing from Quebec, and Burgoyne was forced to surrender at Saratoga in upper New York province on 17 October 1777. Although not a disastrous defeat, it was a watershed in the history of the war.

Another watershed occurred when Washington's army retreated to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and held out for six months in appalling conditions.

The war becomes a European war
In February 1778 France negotiated a full-scale alliance with the United States. In 1779 Spain entered the war. After this there was no prospect of Congress accepting anything less than full independence. In August 1780 Russia, Sweden and Denmark inaugurated a League of Armed Neutrality against Britain. What had begun as a localized rebellion was now a world-wide war.

Military historians now believe that the British strategy was fundamentally flawed. Under a series of unimpressive commanders the British fought a series of uncoordinated campaigns. They were fighting a European style war in a vast territory. British troops, the German mercenaries and American loyalists won nearly every battle they fought but once the British left an area it reverted to American control.

With the possibility that Britain would lose the war went a worsening of the economic climate. Britain was now faced with a Bourbon invasion threat while at the same time had to maintain control of the Atlantic. Indirect taxes (stamp duties, customs duties, excise duties) increased. Carriages, auctions and male servants were now taxed. Alcohol, sugar, salt and soap, taxed already and very burdensome to the poor, were taxed more heavily. The government also raised money through premiums, loans and lotteries. War profiteers became targets of public hatred.

The surrender at Yorktown
On October 1781 Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown.
They were hemmed in by Washington's men from the north and the French fleet under Admiral De Grasse and had no choice. With this surrender, the war came to an end. 7,000 British troops were taken prisoner.

The debate on Wilberforce (update)

2007-02-27T07:27:00.000Z

I'm afraid we're going to get a lot more of articles like this in today's Guardian.

Yes, of course due recognition should be given to the many other abolitionists whose names are now far less well known than Wilberforce's. If Wilberforce had been able to read the article he would have completely agreed with this argument and only asked why his brother-in-law, James Stephen (great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf incidentally) should have been excluded. It was Stephen who devised the winning strategy that got the abolition bill through parliament.

As for Wilberforce being a member of the 'Tory Anglican establishment'. Well, he never claimed any party label and it is only retrospectively that he can be described as 'Tory'. He was of course an Anglican, as were all members of Parliament in this period. The slave trade could only be abolished by act of Parliament and therefore the bill could only be put forward by an Anglican. In the same way, women could only be given voting rights from a male Parliament!

Yes, Sir Samuel Romilly introduced the bill, but that was a diversionary strategy so that the bill wouldn't be too much associated with Wilberforce. In his speech Romilly paid a glowing tribute to Wilberforce as the man who had done more than any other to bring about abolition. This of course is not to belittle the heroic work of Wilberforce's friends, colleagues and allies.

But there are some letters in today's Guardian (including one from Melvyn) putting a more measured view.

Hogarth: francophile?

2007-02-24T12:53:00.000Z

There's an interesting review in today's Telegraph of Robin Simon's Hogarth: France and British Art. For all his strident John-Bullishness, Hogarth was greatly indebted to French art.

More on abolition

2007-02-23T15:48:00.000Z

There is a good article in this week's Economist on the abolition of the slave trade.

Britain and the slave trade

2007-02-22T17:47:00.000Z

This post owes a great deal to Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (Picador, 1997). See here for a time-line of slavery and abolition. See here for an excellent website on slavery and abolition.

Here are a couple of typically bland items from the 20 November 1762 issue of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal.

‘Arrived at Virginia, the Hector Chilcott, last from Angola, with 512 slaves.’
‘Tuesday died in Queen-square Mr King, Commander of a Ship in the African Trade.’

In 1698 the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and the trade was thrown open. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht awarded Britain the contract (asiento) to import slaves to the Spanish Indies. The government sold the privilege to the South Sea Company. A torchlight procession through London greeted the news of the grant. In addition to its requirement to carry 4,800 slaves annually for 30 years it had to pay the Spanish king thirty-three and a half pesos in silver for each captive delivered safe and sound. The South Sea Company agreed to buy in Africa the slaves required from the Royal African Company; take them to Jamaica where the ‘weakest’ would be eliminated; then carry the prime slaves to the Spanish market. The new South Sea Company established factories at Barbados and Port Royal, Jamaica for the shipment of slaves onwards to the Spanish ports (Cartagena, Panama, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, Havana).
The South Sea Company survived the Bubble of 1720. Between 1715 and 1731 it sold about 64,000 slaves to the Spaniards. In 1720 nearly 150 ships were engaged, mostly from Bristol and London, but a few also set out from Liverpool and Glasgow. The Royal African Company also revived its fortunes.

By the early eighteenth century Bristol had overtaken London as the main base for dealing in slaves. Between 1721 and 1730 the British carried over 100,000 slaves to the Americas: of these nearly 40,000 went to Jamaica, over 20,000 to Barbados, about 10,000 to mainland colonies such as South Carolina and nearly 50,000 to British Caribbean colonies. Between 1723 and 1725 about 56 ships a year left London; 34 left Bristol and 11 Liverpool. Between 1728 and 1732 Bristol was sending nearly 50 ships to Africa, sending well over 100,000 slaves on them. Merchants from Bristol were also pioneers in the business of carrying slaves to Virginia and in moving slaves from one North American colony to another.

Bristol’s pre-eminence lasted barely 20 years. In 1726 Defoe called Liverpool ‘the Bristol of this part of England’. The Mersey basin was deeper than the Avon and Frome, the rivers on which Bristol was built. The first recorded slave ship was the Liverpool Merchant of 1700 which carried 220 slaves to Barbados. By 1740 it was sending 33 ships a year to Africa. Thereafter the total grew. The Isle of Man was a warehouse of smuggled goods which enabled Liverpool merchants to evade duty. (They also provisioned for the journey in Kinsale in order to avoid tax.) While Bristol merchants tended to remain faithful to safe old anchorages in the Gold Coast and Angola, the Liverpool merchants struck out anew to seek Africans in Sierra Leone, Gabon and the Cameroons. In 1753 four families had private carriages in Liverpool; three were owned by slave merchants. Unlike Bristol, the Liverpool slavers were the founders of dynasties: the Leylands, the Cunliffes, the Bolds and the Kennions. Penny Lane is thought to have been named after the slave trader James Penny. The facade of the Liverpool Exchange carried the heads of Africans with elephants in a frieze and one street was commonly known as ‘Negro Row’.

See here for Liverpool's 2007 commemoration of the slave trade.

Jamaica had by now over overtaken Barbados as the prize colony. In 1712 her production of sugar already exceeded that of Barbados. The richest planter, Peter Beckford, owned at his death (1735) nine sugar plantation and was part owner of seven more. His son William, Wilkeite MP for the City, was the most powerful businessman in the City and was twice Lord Mayor.

The plantations
From a Board of Trade report presented to George I in 1721 it is possible to build up a picture of Britain’s colonies and plantations. What emerged clearly was that the Caribbean islands (St Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica) were of greater commercial value to Britain than mainland North America. North America provided 26 % of Britain’s imports and took 49% of her exports; the Caribbean 74% and 52%. However the white population of the West Indies was only 32,000 as opposed to 234,000 in North America.

In the first decade of the 18th century slaves began to be imported in substantial numbers onto the North American mainland in order to counter an acute labour shortage. Over 3,500 slaves were carried to South Carolina between May 1721 and September 1726. In 1732 there were in that colony probably 14,000 white people and 32,000 blacks: the first time a black majority was registered in an English colony on the mainland. Their task was to clear the cypress swamps and plant and harvest rice. Advertisements for ‘prime slaves’ and ‘strong, stout, hearty negroes’ were soon seen everywhere. From 1723 ships from Newport (RI) carried rum to Africa in exchange for slaves.

Sugar
In the middle of the 17th century it became clear to English colonists that sugar was commercially the greatest asset to be drawn out of the West Indies. In Britain per capita consumption of sugar rose from c. 2lb per annum in the 1660s to 13 lb per annum in the 1720s. English commerce was integral to the West Indian sugar economy by shipping slaves from West Africa to meet the huge demands for labour on the plantations. Between 1720 and 1729 British vessels took on board some 243,000 slaves in Africa and delivered c. 211,000 to America.
On the sugar islands the shortage and high cost of white labour created the demand. In West Africa local authorities made available a plentiful supply at an attractive price. The numerical balance on the sugar islands shifted dramatically and in 1722 there were 11 slaves to every free white in Jamaica. Conditions were extremely harsh, but it was harsh for all peoples - neither whites nor blacks reproduced themselves demographically.
Approximately one fifth of the population of the thirteen colonies were slaves.

Imports to Africa
The cargo most generally carried was cloth, which the Africans liked to wear untailored, wrapping the cloths around them. Perhaps 85% of English textile exports went to Africa before 1750 and over 40% during the following twenty years. Metal goods were also valued. Cowrie shells from the Maldives served as a unit of currency in west Africa. From the middle of the 17th century weapons were sold as West Africans developed a taste for muskets. Gunpowder was also popular. Alcohol was an increasingly valued commodity. West Africans had their own palm wine but came to enjoy European spirits, with rum replacing brandy by the end of the 17th century.

The slave traders
Over the period 1761-1807 the slave trade yielded an average of just under 10% on invested capital.

The typical slave trader was interested in all kinds of commerce as well as slaves. John Brown of Providence was also concerned with whaling to make spermaceti candles. He had a splendid mansion in Providence and was also a noted philanthropist - he founded Brown University.

Many of the Bristol slavers had houses in Queen Square, the first Georgian square in the city. Successful slave owners and merchants would often buy substantial country properties or invest in art. John Pinney, who owned a slave plantation in Nevis, built this house in Great George Street from the profits. It is now the Georgian House Museum and contains an exhibition showing the lives of the slaves on the plantations.

John Pinney's son, Charles, nearly married William Wilberforce's daughter, Elizabeth, until she came to see that the marriage would have been impossible. Charles became Mayor of Bristol and in 1834 he received £20,000 in compensation for the loss of his estates.

Most slave voyages were financed not by individual merchants but by partnerships, with six or more merchants participating.

All Christian denominations were involved in the slave trade. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had inherited the Codrington estate in Barbados. The slaves had the word 'Society' branded on them. Many Christians justified this involvement on the grounds that they were ‘redeeming an unhappy people from inconceivable misery’.

A typical slave ship would not have been a specialist vessel but a typical wooden cargo vessel. A high proportion of the British slave ships were naval prizes, the rest were built in British shipyards. The typical European slave ship would have been less than 200 tons burden. Such a ship, however, had to be armed because of the danger of pirates - though this decreased as the seas became safer in the 18th century. All ships were insured, often internationally.

Ordinary seamen were usually young men of low achievement and aspirations, who faced a life of poor pay, vile conditions and danger. The former slave trader turned Evangelical clergyman, John Newton declared: ‘There is no trade in which seamen are treated with so little humanity.’ At least a fifth of the crew usually died.
Slave mortality in the crossing fell from perhaps 15 to 20% at the beginning of the century to round 10% or less after 1783. But this varied greatly from voyage to voyage.

Bristol Journal, Sat 15 Jan, 1763: ‘The Oldbury, Watkins, is blown up on the Coast of Africa, with near 500 slaves on board.’

The Somerset Judgement
Most black slaves in England had been brought back by sea captains. Their status was legally uncertain. Some had been legally emancipated. Dr Johnson's servant, Francis Barber, had been freed by his previous owner, Colonel Bathurst; similarly a black valet in the service of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But slaves were often put up for public sale in Bristol and Liverpool.

Granville Sharp, then a junior clerk in the Ordinance Office (grandson of an Archbishop of York) took up the case of James Somerset, who had been brought to England by his master, Charles Stewart of Boston, in 1769. He escaped in 1771, was recaptured, then put on board the Ann and Mary, whose captain was John Knowles, bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold.

The case came before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield on the Court of Kings Bench. Mansfield decided that there was no legal definition as to whether there could or could not be slaves in England. After procrastination, he decided the case on the ground that slavery was so odious that nothing could be suffered to support it except positive law. Somerset therefore was freed. There was general rejoicing among the many blacks present at the hearing. However in 1779 Mansfield stated that his judgment went no further than to determine that the master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country. Little changed in the Caribbean and Africa, yet the judgment affected public opinion. 1779 saw the last known sale of a slave in England (in Liverpool).

Opposition grows
In 1774 John Wesley, who had seen slaves sold in Georgia, published his Thoughts on Slavery:

‘I would to God it [the slave trade] may never be found more: that we may never more steal and sell our brethren like beasts; never murder by thousands. Oh, may this worse than Mohammadan, worse than pagan abomination be removed from us for ever. Never was anything such a reproach to England, since it was a nation, as the having a hand in this infernal traffic.’

He struck a new note in his prediction that the time for repentance would soon come for England.

In 1780 with the war with Britain coming to an end, Pennsylvania abolished slavery; though the law applied only to future generations and delayed freedom for any slave until they had reached the age of 28. Between 1780 and 1804 similar acts of gradual or qualified emancipation were carried through in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Upper and Lower Canada.

In 1783 William Cowper’s poem Charity denounced the slave merchant who ‘grows rich on cargo of despair’.

In June 1783 a Quaker anti-slave-trade petition was presented to the Commons. It argued, in a fusion of Christian and Enlightenment thought, that the trade was inconsistent not only with Christianity, but also with humanity, justice and the natural rights of mankind generally.

The case of the Zong
This was a Liverpool slave ship. Its master was Luke Collingwood, its owners William Gregson and George Case, Liverpool merchants. In September 1781 it sailed with 442 slaves from São Tomé off the west coast of Africa. In between Jamaica San Domingue (Haiti) the ship lost its way, water became short, and many slaves died or became ill. Collingwood called together his officers and said that if the slaves on board were to die naturally the loss would be that of the owners of the ship; but if on some pretext affecting the safety of the crew they were to be thrown alive into the sea it would be the loss of the underwriters. Therefore 133 slaves, most of whom were sick and not likely to live, were thrown into the sea.

When the ship returned home the insurers disputed the captain’s claim. The owners therefore brought a suit against the insurers, demanding to be paid £30 for each slave, and were backed in King’s Bench; the underwriters then petitioned the Court of the Exchequer. In allowing the case to go to another court, Lord Mansfield remarked that the jury had to decide whether the slaves were thrown overboard from necessity

‘for they had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard)'.

By this time Collingwood was dead. The barrister for the owners argued that

‘So far from the charge of murder lying against these people, there is not the least imputation - of cruelty. I will not say - but [even] of impropriety’.

However Granville Sharp tried to prosecute the murderers in the Court of Admiralty but failed. The Solicitor-General, John Lee, deplored his ‘pretended appeal to humanity’, and declared that a master could drown slaves without ‘a surmise of impropriety’. But public opinion was turning. Sharp now had the support of most of the bishops, most notably Beilby Porteus, bishop of Chester. 1783 was the last year in which the Liverpool Quaker timber firm of Rathbone and Son supplied timber for the African trade. Even in Liverpool, therefore, opposition to the trade was building up. This was four years before Wilberforce took up the cause of abolition.

The elephant in the room

2007-02-22T17:24:00.000Z

The 24 March 2005 issue of Country Life had a fascinating article on the very welcome renovation of Danson House in Bexleyheath. The author, Chris Miele reports the following facts without comment:

'In 1753, the estate of John Styleman let the Danson property to John Boyd of Boyd and Company, a family business that had been founded on West Indies sugar plantations and subsequently acted as agents for other Leeward Islands plantation owners.

Boyd’s father Augustus was a resourceful man who left Northern Ireland to seek his fortune and found himself managing a sugar plantation on St Kitts.

He married into the local elite and became a planter.

Sugar was then unbelievably profitable – on an acre-for-acre basis, 20 times more valuable than arable land in the Home Counties.'

Miele doesn't explain how Augustus Boyd 'found himself' managing a sugar plantation! Nor does he think it necessary to explain why sugar was so profitable. To understand why it was such a profitable cash crop we need to look at another man with Kent and St Kitts connections, the Revd James Ramsay (1733-98).

Ramsay was a Scotsman, who went to London to train as a surgeon. In 1755 he entered the Royal Navy as assistant surgeon on the Arundel, commanded by his fellow Scotsman, Charles Middleton and stationed in the West Indies. In 1759 he went on board an infected slave ship. In 1762 he left the navy, returned to England and was ordained by the bishop of London.

He returned to St Kitts in charge of two livings, and what he saw there made him the bitter enemy of the planters. In 1781 he was finally forced from the island because of their hostility. He was presented to the livings of Teston and Nettlestead by Sir Charles Middleton, the local patron.

In 1784: at Lady Middleton’s urging, he wrote An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, one of the first publications of what was to become the abolitionist movement.

The type of sights Ramsay would have witnessed are described in Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains (Macmillan, 2005). Chapter 4 is called 'King Sugar' and it makes very harrowing reading.

'Cultivating and harvesting the crop was brutal work. If you were a field hand, you planted cane shoots in holes or trenches you dug by hand, often in marshland where the air was dense with mosquitoes. At harvest time you carried huge heavy bundles of cane to the mill. You then fed each bundle twice through powerful vertical rollers that squeezed out the juice, which flowed into large copper vats in the boiling house, where it was simmered, strained, filtered, and allowed to crystallize into sugar. ... Slaves ... had to work in the mill or boiling house four to six hours on alternate nights in addition to a full day in the fields. Their clothes soaked with joice, they often lay down to sleep wherever they were, too exhausted to walk to their huts. ... At night flames from the boiling house fires were visible to ships at sea.'

I'll spare you the details of the accidents to slaves operating unguarded machinery.

Slavery and the slave trade (general)

2007-02-22T17:22:00.000Z

This post tries to put the slave trade into a wider context. The subject of the European involvement in the slave trade is a vast one and there are many excellent web sites.

Background
Aristotle had divided human beings into two kinds: the masters and the slaves, and he argued that freedom and slavery were ‘natural’ rather than man-made conditions. It is important to realize that up to the nineteenth century slavery was the normal condition of society, though northern Europe was the exception to this rule.

In the Middle Ages in England and France slavery was replaced by serfdom (unlike chattel slaves, serfs had some property rights) and by the fifteenth century even serfs ceased to exist in England. But in the rest of the world slavery continued. It flourished in the Mediterranean in both Christian and Muslim societies. The Arab conquests of North Africa revived the old Roman slave trade; the nomadic Arabs of the southern Sahara traded in slaves with the black African societies of West Africa.

The European Slave Trade
According to Hugh Thomas (The Slave Trade, 1997, 23 ff) the slave trade took a new turn on 8 August 1444 when Portuguese seamen landed 200 African slaves near Lagos on the south west point of the Algarve. These slaves had been seized rather than purchased by a Portuguese raiding party. They were Muslim Azanaghi, some of whom converted to Christianity. From 1444 onwards, more and more kidnappings took place, though the Portuguese soon came to buy rather than kidnap slaves.

The Spaniards were the next nation to enter the slave trade. By the early 16th century the native Indians were in rapid decline possibly more through overwork than disease. For example, in Hispaniola (Haiti), one of the first European settlements, the local population collapsed from 4 million to 100,000. It has been estimated that the smallpox epidemic which spread through the Caribbean might have killed up to 90 million people. (James Walvin, Questioning Slavery, 2.)

Confronted with a labour problem, King Ferdinand gave authority in 1510 for fifty slaves to go to Hispaniola and Santo Domingo to work in the gold mines. The decrees did not specify that the slaves should be Africans though there is no doubt that Africans, though already in Europe, were intended. Further licenses granted rights to carry African slaves to the Americas. Soon ‘the complete collapse of the population of the Caribbean changed the African slave trade to the Americas into a major enterprise’ (Thomas, 96). The slaves worked in the mines and in the newly established sugar industry.

In the 1530s the Portuguese conquered Brazil and Africans were imported to work in the sugar plantations. By the end of the century Brazil was Europe’s main sugar supplier, with about 120 sugar mills along the coast in 1600 (Thomas, 135).

In the second quarter of the 16th century about 40,000 slaves were shipped from Africa to the Americas. The figure may have reached 60,000 by 1575 (Thomas, 114). By this time the Spanish market had eclipsed the Portuguese, who were able to make this dramatic progress thanks to their trading connections in West Africa (James Walvin, 1996, 3-4). Between 1600 and 1620 the African slaves were coming to eclipse the native Indian slaves.

In the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal ‘assumed that they could together retain the Atlantic as a private lake’ (Thomas, 153), but French, English and later Dutch ‘pirates’ posed continual challenges. In 1525 a French ship anchored north of the River Congo and from the 1530s captains from Dieppe were continually harassing the Portuguese. In 1562 John Hawkins captured at least 300 blacks in the River Sierra Leone and (illegally) sold them in Hispaniola. In 1600 the Dutch, who were still fighting Spain for their independence, secured half the carrying trade between Brazil and Europe and were trading for slaves along the Guinea coast. By 1641 they had displaced the Portuguese on the African coast through force of arms and commercial dealings with Africans (Walvin, 7).

Some 11 million Africans survived the Atlantic crossing – the largest forcible migration in human history.

King Sugar
In the seventeenth century the northern Europeans established their own colonies in the West Indies. The Caribbean was converted into ‘the archipelago of sugar’ (Thomas, 188), manned by African slaves. In 1619 twenty Africans landed in Jamestown, Virginia, carried by a Dutch man-of-war, to work in the tobacco plantations.

In 1624 the Dutch established slaves in their colony of New Amsterdam. At first the legal status of Africans in America was poorly defined, and some, like European indentured servants, managed to become free after several years of service. From the 1660s, however, the colonies began enacting laws that defined and regulated slave relations. Central to these laws was the provision that black slaves, and the children of slave women, would serve for life.

Throughout the first half of 18th century, France and England battled for control of the Guinea Coast. In Lower Guinea, Britain’s main adversary was the Dutch. But when the Dutch Company was liquidated, the British soon gained control of the entire Ivory, Grain, and Gold Coasts. By the mid-18th century, Britain had full control of West African trade. In addition, the British won the asiento, the sole license to ship black slaves from Africa to Spanish controlled territories in America, in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. British dominance in the slave trade began a new period of change in the European/African relationship.

What work did slaves do?
There were few jobs that were not done by slaves. They were barbers and nurses, doctors, cow-keepers, messengers, clerks, cooks, shoemakers, butchers and jewellers. (Walvin, 42) But most slaves – women as well as men - toiled in the fields. On Sundays they could work on their own plots. This was encouraged by the owners on the grounds that it made them more contented. By the 1820s slaves in the British colonies were growing more of their own food than was provided by their owners (Walvin, 142).

In the Caribbean the extremely labour-intensive economy was geared to sugar, with the French West Indian islands being the largest sugar producers.

After 1793 cotton was the great slave crop in the United States. In 1790 the South was producing 3000 bales a year, by 1810 178,000 and more than 4 million by 1860. It was America’s greatest export. On the large estates slaves worked in gangs supervised by overseers.

The greater plantations also had large numbers of domestic slaves, mainly women. This made them a prey to the sexual attentions of their male owners. Yet their knowledge of family secrets and their care of the children could give them a degree of power within the households.

New biography of George III (updated post)

2007-02-17T09:22:00.000Z

Today's Telegraph has a review of a new biography of George III by the amazingly prolific historian, Jeremy Black. It paints a largely sympathetic portrait of the king.

There is a second Telegraph review here.

John Wilkes: a nineteenth-century parallel.

2007-02-08T19:53:00.000Z

In the 1880s Charles Bradlaugh was not allowed to take his seat as MP for Northampton, because as an atheist he refused to take the parliamentary oath. He was re-elected four times (just like Wilkes!) and eventually won the right to affirm.

Crime and the Law

2007-02-08T19:46:00.000Z

This is a very well-researched subject among historians of the eighteenth century. Our knowledge is in the process of being transformed by the wonderful Old Bailey website. Do visit!

Anxieties
To social commentators like Henry Fielding the key cause of crime was not poverty but ‘luxury’ - a word which symbolised the dangerous aspirations of those who sought material possessions and ‘diversions’ above their station. The gin epidemic, for example, was seen as a cause not a consequence of poverty. The growth of crime was the obverse of the consumer revolution: (a) increasing expectations (b) increase in volume and range of goods in circulation.

One strategy against crime, especially highway robbery, was the bill of exchange. But watches, silk handkerchiefs or even wigs could be stolen from individuals with relative ease from the swelling number of shops. The word shoplifting was first used in 1680.

Patterns of crime
During the first half of the century the incidence of crime appears to have been fairly stable. In the second half of the century, perhaps because of population pressures, crime began to rise, particularly in the towns. The overwhelming majority of crimes were against property. Contemporaries believed they were living in the midst of a crime wave.

The pattern of indictments for Surrey and Sussex shows a correlation with economic pressure; indictment levels matched wheat prices and the trade cycle. Indictments also rose after wars with the demobilization of large numbers of soldiers. This also reflects the gender and age structure of those indicted - young unmarried men. During wartime (with the removal of young males) women made up a larger proportion of those indicted.

Crime tended to be most prevalent and threatening in and around London. It was often the work of gangs and habitual offenders.

Criminals
The great fictional criminals are Moll Flanders and Macheath.
The Beggars’ Opera (1728) was arguably the most popular play of the 18th century. Boswell saw the play on 19 May, 1763 two weeks after witnessing the execution of Paul Lewis.
In 1724 the thief and escapee, Jack Sheppard was hanged. He is believed to have been the model for Macheath. After his second escape from Newgate and his subsequent recapture, many ballads were published about him. There were many ‘historians’ of his life and his portrait was painted by Sir James Thornhill. He received many distinguished visitors while in prison. He was used as a mouthpiece to denounce the hypocrisy of society. This glorification of the highwayman is especially associated with the Walpole era.

Sheppard was captured by the thief-taker, Jonathan Wild. Wild was by origin a buckle-maker from Wolverhampton. He then became a pimp, a brothel-keeper and finally a receiver of stolen goods. Posing as a ‘thief-taker’ he set up an ‘Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property'. He apprehended wanted felons with a posse of assistants for the reward. The felons he passed on to trial were his victims, set up by him. In 1725 one of his own gang, Blueskin Blake, whom he had betrayed, attempted to cut his throat. Wild was convicted of taking a £10 reward for the return of some lace whose theft he had arranged, and hanged.

Dick Turpin (1705?-1739) was convicted at York for horse-stealing and hanged in 1739. He became a popular hero after Harrison Ainsworth’s romance Rookwood (1834).

The law
Britain was a politically decentralized state, in which the sources of political and legal action remained parochial. Local law enforcement was in the hands of the magistrates (increasingly clergy) and the Quarter Sessions.

The Glorious Revolution established the principle of an independent judiciary and of regular meetings of parliament. English law was regarded as superior to all other systems. Torture was not allowed, legal proceedings were public, trial by jury was common, habeas corpus acted as a safeguard for liberties, and the judges were not subject to political intimidation.

It is a truism that the Revolution made the world safe for property - which was the only guarantee of full citizenship. But it is also true that the non-propertied saw the law as the guarantor of their interests as well. Gentlemen formed the smallest group of prosecutors; 14-18% of prosecutions were initiated by labourers or servants. Some historians (especially of the ‘Warwick school’ associated with E. P. Thompson) have emphasized the importance of ‘social crimes’ such as poaching and smuggling, which were not popularly regarded as crimes. But these were also big businesses, and although there was much sympathy for individual small-time highwaymen, smugglers and poachers, most Britons believed that the law protected all. There was widespread revulsion at the murder of a customs officer by a gang in 1749.

The administration of the law
Those who administered the law were local unpaid amateurs. Magistrates heard cases and took it upon themselves to discharge suspects or to send them for trial. Parish constables, who were responsible for arrests, were either appointed or elected annually. These people had to live in the community. Consequently a third of those prosecuted for crimes against property in Surrey between 1736 and 1753 were acquitted.

The Bow Street Runners: London presented a different pattern from the rest of the country. In an anonymous shifting population, the parish system was no longer effective as a unit of law and order. Felons were arrested by means of a general ‘hue and cry’ or through the action of professional thief-takers such as Jonathan Wild.

In 1748 Henry Fielding was appointed justice of the peace in Westminster. On December 9 1749 (in the same year that his Tom Jones was published), he moved into the large house in Bow Street (near the current Covent Garden opera house). The ground floor of the house served as his court room. Bow Street was next to the parish of St Giles where 30,000 people lived in cramped, unhealthy circumstances, and to the hundred of Drury - the theatre district around Covent Garden square which was notorious for its bawdy houses. In order to deal with crime, Fielding set up a band of six constables. Initially nicknamed Robin Redbreasts, on account of their scarlet waistcoats, they were soon known as the Bow Street Runners. Their functions included serving writs, detective work and arresting offenders. At first they worked for reward money, but they were later given one guinea a week plus a bonus for each successful prosecution.

When Henry Fielding died early in 1754 at the age of 47 his place was taken by his blind half-brother John who was principal magistrate for Westminster from 1754 to 1780 and pursued criminals with a religious zeal. His “runners” would pursue felons across the country and became widely feared, albeit they may have been little better than those they pursued. Fielding never tired of talking up the merits of his runners and was a tireless propagandist for the idea of a national police force, but his efforts were met with the familiar concerns about civil liberties and financial costs of such a scheme. He was knighted for his efforts in 1761.

In 1792 an Act of Parliament (the Middlesex Justices Act) established seven more offices on the Bow Street model and enabled the Bow Street office to be called on by other parts of the nation, laying the basis for the future Scotland Yard.

The penal code
The 18th century penal code is notorious for the high number of capital statutes. In 1688 there were about 50, by 1800, 200. A statute of 1698 made the theft of goods worth more than 5/- a capital offence. The Black Act of 1723 created 50 capital offences. Most of the Acts were specific: laws against damaging Fulham Bridge (1725), Westminster Bridge (1736) and forging an entry in the North Riding Land Register (1735). But people were usually executed for very traditional offences - forgery, sheep-stealing, theft from shops and warehouses. In fact there were probably fewer executions in the 18th century than the 17th. One reason for the huge number of capital offences lay in the conceptual poverty of English law. There was no overall criminal code or general definitions of offences so separate statues were required for separate crimes.

Trials
Trials lasted ½ an hour on average and the same jurors would hear many causes. But c. 1700 it became the practice to take a verdict at the end of each trial instead of requiring jurors to hold several cases in their heads at once. Juries acquitted over 1/3 of all prisoners.
By the time of George I the Crown began to engage lawyers regularly in certain kinds of case. From the 1730s defence council was also increasingly employed though this was technically forbidden in cases of felony. By 1800 counsel was commonly retained.

Executions
By the end of the century 200 people a year were executed in England and Wales alone. The number sentenced to death was far higher. Between 1770 and 1830 7000 men women and children were executed out of 35,000 sentenced. But the figures varied wildly from year to year.

Many judges sought strenuously to use mediation and negotiation and did not automatically reach for the most severe punishment. At the end of the quarter sessions the assize judges decided who of those they had sentenced should be reprieved. For those they did not spare, there was always the prospect of a royal pardon. The number pardoned increased from around 50-60% in the early to mid-18th century to c. 90% in the early 19th. Pardon was an assertion of the terrifying majesty of the law. But it was also a genuine attempt to take individual circumstances into account, such as the condemned person’s good record. Recent evidence suggests that judges weighed up the evidence very conscientiously.

Only a small proportion of those executed were murderers: in London and Middlesex only 10% of those executed between 1749 and 1771. Of the rest, 43 had been convicted of burglary and 31 of highway robbery. The law as theatre The cult of Tyburn was highly ritualised: the judge’s black cap, the triumphant procession to the gallows, the sympathy of the crowd, the ballad sales. There was a flourishing ‘confession’ literature.

In 1783 the Newgate Act ended the procession to Tyburn. As fashionable estates developed north of Oxford Street and close to the Edgware Road local landowners petitioned for the removal of the gallows and Newgate was decided on as the new venue. The Newgate gallows was built with a ‘drop’ though this does not seem to have shortened the progress.

Transportation
In 1718 and 1719 Acts were passed which extended the use of transportation and placed the administrative arrangements to effect the sentence on the county or borough authorities concerned, whether the sentences were passed at Assizes or Quarter Sessions. Transportation was to be for seven years for offences without benefit of clergy and for fourteen years for those condemned to death and pardoned on condition of transportation. In the 50 years following the Acts some 50,000 convicts were transported to the American colonies. This rapidly became the preferred penalty for property offences.

With the revolt of the American colonies the government resorted by an Act of Parliament of 1776 to holding would-be transportees in the ‘hulks’, old moored ships. But these could have held only c. 60% of those under sentence of transportation, which left several thousand kept in gaols. From 1787 transportation was resumed – but to Australia (and ended in 1840).

Imprisonment
Before the end of the 18th century prisons were primarily places of safe custody for those awaiting trial, or awaiting punishment in the form of execution of whipping, or in custody until fines, fees or debts were paid or sureties found. Until the end of the century prisons were run by the gaolers as a commercial enterprise, prisoners paying fees to the gaoler and also paying for their board and lodging if they could afford to. Gaolers made additional money selling liquor to their prisoners. But though local prisons were run for profit, they were provided for by the local authorities. In county gaols the prisoners were the sheriff’s responsibility and he appointed the gaoler. County justices were empowered to levy rates to give poor prisoners a small daily allowance of bread and beer. With the loss of the colonies, imprisonment became more popular. In 1776 only 653 persons were imprisoned (almost 60% were debtors). Most prison sentences were short. The prisons were county gaols or houses of correction. By the 1780s over 50% of men convicted on non-capital offences in Surrey, had received terms of imprisonment, in about 25% of the cases accompanied by a whipping.

The 1770s and 1780s saw the enthronement of imprisonment as the new key sentencing option. Solitary confinement was not seen as cruel but as a means to force the offender to reflect on his crime and repent.

The prisons came under attack from the reformer, John Howard, who from the 1770s exposed the dirt and disease in his reports on the State of the Prisons. But some of the conditions he described were temporary, due to the overcrowding following the end of transportation and from the greatest crime wave since the 1720s. The trend to incarceration was not reversed with the dispatch of the first transportation ships to Botany Bay.

By the end of the century c. 70% of non-capital offences were punished with imprisonment. Popular shaming rituals began to be replaced by forms of correction which occurred out of the public gaze and which at least some reformers believes should produce repentance and rehabilitation rather than merely serving to punish and deter.

Was the law an instrument of social control?
This is an over-simplification. Most litigation was introduced by private individuals against people of roughly the same standing. The law was used overwhelmingly by the broad middling orders of society against each other, rather than being used by the propertied elite against the rest. In the Essex Quarter Sessions between 1760 and 1800 over 20% of prosecutions for felony were brought by labouring men, and the lesser middling orders like tradesmen and artisans contributed 30-40% more. Trial by jury meant that verdicts in many cases were delivered by men of middling orders. By the end of the 18th century the ‘innocent until proved guilty’ principle had made its appearance.

Criticisms of the law
However, this did not prevent many criticisms of the law’s abuses. In 1735 the barrister William Hay (1695-1755) deplored what he claimed to be the execution of more persons for theft in every six months in London than for offences of all kinds in most other countries over three years. In 1767 an English translation popularised the pleas of the Italian jurist, Cesare Beccaria (1738-94) for consistent, predictable and non-retributive punishment. Critics viewed public executions with great distaste as degrading spectacles. The growth of sensibility allowed for a greater emotional identification with those who were executed.

The Middlesex elections

2007-02-01T17:05:00.000Z

The Rockingham ministry (1765-66)
At the beginning of 1765 the king was ill with pains in the chest and a feverish cold – possibly an early onset of the porphyria that was later interpreted as insanity. He continued unwell until the spring, by which time his relations with the Grenville ministry had broken down almost completely - particularly when they accused him of continuing to allow Bute to interfere. Lord Chesterfield:

‘He shows his Ministers all the public dislike possible, and at his Levée hardly speaks to any of them, but speaks by the hour to anybody else.’

The king wrote of his government being composed of ‘insolent’ men and said that the world might well suppose that England was at such a low ebb that ‘no administration [could] be formed without the Grenville family.’

In May George resolved to dismiss Grenville from office and turn to his uncle the duke of Cumberland. Cumberland tried to bring Pitt in, but he refused. In July the man chosen to replace Grenville was Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, a great Yorkshire landowner and political patron, and now head of the former Newcastle party. In effect, the great Whig families were back in office. The great (though temporary) achievement of Rockingham’s ministry was the temporary solution of the American crisis with the repeal of Grenville’s Stamp Act (of which more later), though in the teeth of much parliamentary opposition. His relationship with the king deteriorated and he resigned (with some relief) in July 1766.

The Chatham Ministry (1766-68)
The new government was nominally headed by Pitt the Elder now ennobled as earl of Chatham. But he accepted only the position of Lord Privy Seal, which did not carry executive responsibilities and the First Lord of the Treasury was Augustus Fitzroy, 3rd duke of Grafton. Chatham’s decision to take a peerage seriously undermined his repuration as the 'great commoner', and created a sensation. It had the added disadvantage of leaving the ministry without a strong voice in the Commons, apart from the rising star Lord North, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in September 1767. By this time Chatham was ill with nervous exhaustion and was in Bath for much of the time. On the great issues of his ministry, America and India, he had little to contribute.

Lord Rockingham became (in effect) Leader of the Opposition. He gathered round him a group of discontented Whigs and his private secretary was the Irish writer Edmund Burke (1729-97), who became MP for Wendover in 1766 and quickly established himself as a dominating speaker in the Commons. The Rockinghamites formed ‘the core of a revived Whig party’ out of the old Newcastle connection.

In the summer of 1768 Chatham retired and was replaced by Grafton (who had long been in effective charge of the administration).

The Middlesex Elections
Grafton’s premiership was dominated by America – and by John Wilkes.

1768 was a general election year. On 6 February Wilkes was back in London where he enrolled as member of the Joiners’ Guild and waited for the dissolution of Parliament. On 11 March Parliament was dissolved. Wilkes then issued his election address, basing his campaign on the issues of ‘general warrants and the seizure of papers’. On 16 March he presented himself as a candidate for the City of London. The polling took a week, but in spite of many enthusiastic demonstrations, he came bottom of the poll.

But this humiliation was promptly forgotten in the excitement caused by his declaration that he would stand for Middlesex, where the election was due in only five days. This was a serious challenge to the two sitting members, George Cooke (a Chathamite) and Sir William Beauchamp Proctor (‘country’ - usually voted for the opposition), who had expected to be returned unopposed. The two men promptly sank their political differences to form a joint interest and to arrange the transport of voters to the poll.

Although most of the electorate, which comprised c, 2,500 freeholders, lived in and around London, polling would take place in the county town of Brentford, ten miles to the west of the City. From 24 March Brentford was festooned in blue (Wilkes’s colour). Wilkes himself arrived in the town. The campaign was masterminded by an Election Committee that met regularly at the Kings Arms Tavern and the Mile End Assembly Rooms. In Brentford, Wilkes promptly secured most of the public houses for his friends, helped by the local influence of John Horne, who was parson of New Brentford. 12,000 handbills were distributed, advertising where supporters of Wilkes could find 247 carriages provided for their transport to the poll.

The election took place on Monday 28 March. Coaches were sent off singly as soon as they were full; then blue cockades were distributed and cards printed ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ were handed out. The returning officers were the two sheriffs elected for the City, Richard Peeres and William Nash. They prepared 15 poll books, one for each division of the county and set up booths at Brentford Butts. On the journey to the polls, coaches from London conveying voters for Wilkes’s opponents often had their windows smashed and the slogan ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ painted on them. Later it was to be claimed that hundreds of voters had been intimidated from polling. However, there was little violence at the poll itself in spite of the provocation of banners being displayed with ‘No Blasphemer’ and ‘no French Renegade’. Voting took place for several hours during the afternoon. When the votes were counted next morning, the result was Wilkes, 1,292, Cooke 827 and Proctor 807.

Success was achieved by a cocktail of superb organization and popular enthusiasm. The majority of Wilkes's votes came from outside the City: Westminster and the rural parishes to the north and west. In this highly urbanized county the bulk of the electorate were shopkeepers and artisans. The gentry, clergy, office-holders and merchants voted overwhelmingly for Wilkes’s opponents.

Burke:

‘Since the fall of Lord Chatham, there has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’.

Though he refused even to be chaired, the victory was accompanied by much disorder. Brentford was illuminated on Monday evening. The French ambassador’s coach was stopped and he was made to drink to ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. Inhabitants of the Strand and Fleet Street were forced to light up. The duke of Gloucester and Lord Bute had their windows broken. The Austrian ambassador, who refused to drink to Wilkes, was taken out of his coach and had ‘No. 45’ chalked on his shoes. The lawyer Alexander Wedderburn wrote,

‘The mob has been made sensible of its own importance. ... A Jack Straw or a John Wilkes are but the instruments of those whom they seem to lead’.

But the return of Wilkes had only added a political dimension to an already tense situation. The winter had been harsh (the Thames had frozen over) and economic recession had produced social distress and unrest. During the Middlesex election, soldiers stationed at the three London barracks of the Tower, the Savoy and the War Office were put on alert, and contingency plans were made to call on all troops within 60 miles.

The disturbances died down but the next threatening day was 20 April when Wilkes was due to attend court at King’s Bench.

On 19 April the cabinet met and the decision was taken to expel Wilkes as soon as Parliament should meet on 10 May; this was in the expectation that the Court of King’s Bench would decide against him.

On 20 April, Wilkes attended court before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield who freed him on a technicality. That evening the coal-heavers in Shadwell rioted: ‘Wilkes and Liberty and coal-heavers for ever!’

On 21 April the warrant was made out for Wilkes’s arrest. But it only applied to Middlesex and Wilkes had gone to visit a friend in Surrey!

On 27 April, Wilkes delivered himself into custody. Lord Mansfield rejected his application for bail and he was committed to the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark. However, his coach was intercepted by a mob when crossing Westminster Bridge. The crowd turned it round, moved the horses, and pulled it into the City, taking Wilkes to the Three Tuns in Spitalfields. Wilkes had to escape in disguise and make his own way to prison. He was to remain there for two years, a visible martyr to the cause of liberty.

The St George's Fields Massacre
The immediate result was an increase in disorder. 10 May, a crowd of at least 15,000 assembled at St George’s Fields. Troops of horse and of soldiers from the 3rd (Scottish) regiment of Foot Guards were dispatched to the scene. When one of the Surrey magistrates ordered the removal from the prison wall of a ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ poem, the hostile reaction led another JP to read the Riot Act. He was felled by a piece of brick. He gave the order to fire, Ensign Murray and three grenadiers pursued the assailant. They shot dead William Allen in his father’s cow-shed, mistaking him for the rioter. The Riot Act was read a second time. Foot soldiers were now reinforced by horse guards. They were ordered to fire into the crowd and killed six, including a woman orange-seller and a man on a passing haycart. The next day a coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of murder against the ensign and soldiers. They were held in prison for a week and then released on bail; because of conflict of evidence, none was found guilty at the subsequent trial in August. The massacre led to widespread riots; 500 sawyers in Limehouse demolished a windmill designed to saw timber.

Wilkes re-elected
On 12 May the Lords voted an Address of Thanks to the King; the Commons did the same, 13 May. Fear of disorder temporarily united them.

On 18 May, the ministerialist MP Colonel Henry Luttrell moved,

‘that the proper officer of the Crown do inform the House why the laws were not immediately put in force against John Wilkes, an outlaw, when he returned to the Kingdom’.

The government’s dilemma was encapsulated in a letter from Newcastle to Rockingham:

‘We must be either governed by a mad, lawless Mob, or the peace be preserved only by a military force; both of which are unknown to our constitution’.

But Rockinghamite MPs, including Burke, were among those visiting Wilkes in prison.

On 8 June, Wilkes’s outlawry was reversed on a technicality. On 9 June, a jury granted him damages against Lord Halifax, the Secretary of State who had issued the general warrant.

On 18 June Wilkes sentenced to ten months in prison for the North Briton and twelve months for the Essay on Woman, the sentences to run consecutively. For a while interest in him dropped, as Parliament was preoccupied with the growing American crisis.

On 5 June the Middlesex MP George Cooke had died. On 7 June, the Wilkite John Glynn announced his candidature. On 8 December, the poll was disrupted by violence. When the poll was resumed on 14 December, Glynn defeated Proctor. This showed that the Wilkites now had a hold on the seat.,

By the Christmas recess no final decision had been taken on whether to expel Wilkes from Parliament. The cabinet was divided, with some unwilling to make him a martyr.

On 3 February 1769 the Commons voted 219/137 to expel Wilkes.

On 4 Feb: Wilkes announced that he would stand again for Middlesex.

On 16 February, he was returned unopposed.

On 17 Feb the Commons moved 228/89 that since Wilkes had been expelled earlier he was ‘incapable of being elected a member to serve in this present Parliament’.

On 16 March, Wilkes re-elected; on 17 March he was again disqualified by the Commons.

On 20 March, he was readopted. On 24 March, Colonel Luttrell resigned his seat (Bosinney) in order to stand for Middlesex.

On 13 April, Wilkes defeated Luttrell by 1143 votes to 296.

On 15 April (Saturday) a very noisy House of Commons resolved 197/143 that Luttrell was the MP for Middlesex. From the disquiet at this overturning of the wishes of the electorate stemmed the beginnings of the parliamentary reform movement.

Wilkes’s Later Career
Wilkes was released early in 1770, to considerable rejoicing. His career now assumed new directions. In America he became a heroic symbol of liberty. In 1771 he was elected Sheriff of the City of London and began a campaign to secure the reporting of parliamentary debates. Fearful of a stand-off with the printers and the powerful interests in the City of London, the North government tacitly conceded defeat and after this newspaper reporting of parliamentary debates was established.

Wilkes was elected Lord Mayor in 1774. In the same year he was elected to Parliament for Middlesex, where he supported the American colonists and defended the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’, championed the reform of Parliament and advocated greater toleration for Catholics and Dissenter. On 21 March 1776 he made the first ever motion for parliamentary reform, urging the transfer of seats from rotten boroughs to London, the more populous counties and the new industrial towns. The motion was defeated without a vote.

Later in life he became a pillar of the establishment! He helped put down the Gordon Riots in 1780 and in 1782 when Rockingham became Prime Minister, the record of his expulsion was expunged from the records of the House. He left Parliament in 1790.

The Pressure for Reform
Wilkes was not an orator or a major political thinker. He played to the gallery, used mockery and satire and identified himself with English rights and liberties. His support extended far beyond London and Middlesex to the port towns, and a number of industrial regions. Membership of ‘Wilkite’ clubs seems to have been drawn mainly from the middle ranks of urban society: small merchants and manufacturers, wholesalers, innkeepers, retailers, and craftsmen. In the metropolis they included the Spitalfields weavers, the coal-heavers and day-labourers from the east end.

Wilkes was not really a radical, but radicalism arouse from the ranks of his supporters. In February 1769 a number of London merchants, lawyers and other professional groups formed the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. (Its first task was to settle Wilkes’s massive debts.) During the Parliamentary summer recess, opposition politicians the Society organised an extensive petitioning campaign, involving abut 20 of the 40 counties and some boroughs. The common theme was the implicit threat of the Middlesex Elections case on the rights of electors. But the movement also developed a broader agenda: shorter parliaments and a redistribution of seats. Some of the members of the Society came to adopt a radical view of the Glorious Revolution, emphasizing the right of resistance and placing Wilkes in the long line of Whig heroes, including Hampden, Sydney, and Russell.

In January, 1770, Grafton resigned, having lost the support of the Chathamites, and Lord North became premier. He was faced with two considerable problems: the growing movement for parliamentary reform and the crisis in America.

Edmund Burke
In May 1770, Burke published his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, though this was badly timed as the Wilkes agitation appeared to be subsiding. The Thoughts were seen as transcending immediate concerns. They were penned self-consciously as the manifesto of the Rockingham Whigs. In contrast to the prevailing view that party was ‘faction’, Burke saw it as the means of restoring integrity to public life because it would allow policy to be moulded by convictions and ideals:

‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joining endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle on which they are all agreed.’

He also declared, in a now frequently misquoted statement:

‘When bad men combine, the good men must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’

For the 18th century these were a bold and controversial statements. Burke displayed no personal animus against George III or even against Lord Bute. What was at stake for him was not the personality of monarch or politician, but the whole system of secret influence that had subverted the integrity of successive ministries. He thus developed a conspiracy theory that passed into the mainstream of Whig thought and provided them with a doctrine that sustained them in a long and hard fought war against executive power. (Conspiracy theories also became an ingrained habit of Burke’s mind – he was to develop still more when the French Revolution broke out.)

In 1774 Burke was elected MP for Bristol, though he was to fall out with his constituents over his support for the Americans. His Address to the Electors of Bristol expounded the now widely quoted principle of representative government:

‘Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’

This doctrine was to have a long life – but it showed that fundamentally Burke was no Wilkite or radical. He had little in common with genuine radicals such as the historian Catharine Macaulay, sister of the Wilkite Alderman Sawbridge.

By 1774 the reform movement was petering out. However it was revitalized by the crisis in America.

Hogarth's wild journey

2007-01-27T07:09:00.000Z

Fascinating article in today's Telegraph about Hogarth, tying in with Tate Britain's Hogarth retrospective.

John Wilkes

2007-01-26T11:29:00.001Z

John Wilkes (1725-97) was born in Clerkenwell, the second of three sons of Israel, a wealthy and pious malt distiller. Because his family were Presbyterians, he was educated (from 1734) at Hertford Academy, where he had mastered Latin and Greek by the age of 14, and (from 1744) the University of Leiden. In 1747 at his parents’ insistence he married Mary Meade, who brought him the manor of Aylesbury. Israel Wilkes settled £300 p a on him. John became a magistrate and a supporter of the local church. The marriage turned out unhappy, but Wilkes greatly loved his daughter Polly.

Wilkes spent the 1750s leading a double life of debauchery and political ambition in Buckinghamshire, where he played the role of country squire, and London. From 1752 he was associated with Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hell Fire Club and he was enrolled by Dashwood as one of the twelve ‘Franciscans’ or ‘Medmenham Monks’; one of the others was Lord Sandwich. In 1754 he wrote Essay on Woman, an obscene parody of Pope’s Essay on Man.

He also acquired the patronage of the Grenville family, who were centred round Lord Temple’s seat of Stowe in Buckinghamshire. Temple’s brother was George Grenville, his brother-in-law was William Pitt. In 1754 he stood unsuccessfully for Berwick and was made High Sheriff of Buckingham. In 1757 he separated from his wife (Polly lived with her father) and in July be became the (Pittite) MP for Aylesbury in a by-election that cost him £7,000, and became an officer in the Bucks Militia. The colonel was Sir Francis Dashwood.

In 1761 Wilkes was re-elected, avoiding a contest by bribery – offering 300 of the 500 voters £5 each. Before the new parliament met, Pitt resigned and Wilkes went into opposition with him, making his maiden speech in his favour in November 1761. On 5 June 1762 he published the first edition of the North Briton. The title was chosen to counter a pro-government paper, the True Briton, edited by Tobias Smollett (a Scotsman). The paper soon achieved a circulation of nearly 2000 and between June 1762 and April 1763 there were 45 numbers. In doing so, Wilkes made many enemies, the most formidable of whom was Hogarth, who depicted him with a leering squint. Early in 1763, the governor of Calais asked Wilkes how far the liberty of the press extended in Britain. Wilkes: ‘I don’t know, but I’m trying to find out.’

No 45 North Briton
On 19 April 1763 the king opened Parliament. His speech described the peace as ‘honourable to my crown and beneficial to my people’. On 23 April Wilkes printed no. 45 of the North Briton. This did not attack the king personally but it did attack the Princess Dowager, and the government ministers, who were described as ‘tools of despotism and corruption’ and denounced the ‘ministerial effrontery’ of obliging George III ‘to give the sanction of his sacred name’ to such ‘odious’ measures.

The government consulted the law officers of the Crown as to whether it would be possible to proceed against the publishers and printers of the North Briton for seditious libel by way of a general warrant. When the answer was in the affirmative, the warrant was issued. On 29 April the publisher and printer were brought before the Secretaries of State. They acknowledged that Wilkes was the editor. The government then sought further advice from its law officers. Wilkes was an MP. Did this mean he was immune from arrest? The law officers replied that

‘the publication of a libel, being a breach of the peace, is not a case of privilege, and that Mr Wilkes might be committed to prison for the same’.

At 6 am on 30 April Wilkes left his house, removed no 46 of the North Briton, and tore up the original MS of no 45. When he was brought before ministers he refused to answer questions. He was sent to the Tower while his house was searched for incriminating evidence. On 2 May he was granted a writ of habeas corpus. On 3 May he was brought by coach from the Tower to the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster Hall. A large and sympathetic audience heard him address the judges on the liberty of an Englishman. The proceedings were then adjourned until 6 May, and he was remanded back to the Tower, while Westminster Hall echoed to the cries of ‘Liberty!’

On 6 May the Chief Justice of Common Pleas, Charles Pratt, later Lord Camden, ruled that

‘the person of a member ought to be sacred, even if he should commit a misdemeanour. … We are all of the opinion that Mr Wilkes is entitled to the privilege of Parliament, and therefore he must be discharged.’

This verdict was a great shock to the ministry. Thousands escorted Wilkes home and the new slogan of militant radicalism was ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ In July Wilkes successfully sued for damages for wrongful arrest and the seizure of papers. The jury ruled in his favour because of their doubts about the legality of general warrants.

But in October the foreman of Wilkes’s journeymen printers handed over to the Solicitor to the Treasury a proof copy of the first 94 lines of Essay on Woman. It was the best weapon the government could have had. On 15 November Parliament reassembled. Wilkes’s old companion in debauchery, Sandwich, read out the printed text of the Essay. Sandwich was for the rest of his life nicknamed 'Jeremy Twitcher' after the thief in the Beggars' Opera who betrays his old comrades. Meanwhile in the Commons no 45 was voted a seditious libel and ordered to be burned by the common hangman. This led to a pistol duel between Wilbes and the MP, Samuel Martin who had denounced him as a ‘cowardly rascal’. Wilkes was so badly wounded (in the stomach) that many thought there had been a plot against his life. On 25 December he crossed to France and took up residence in Paris. In January 1764 he was expelled from parliament, though the debates showed wide concern over the legality of general warrants. On 1 November the Court of Kings Bench formally pronounced him an outlaw because of his refusal to return to England to answer the charges.

But Wilkes had already won a victory. On 6 December 1763 Chief Justice Pratt had ruled in the court of Common Pleas that general warrants could not be used as search warrants of unspecified buildings. This verdict was reinforced by judgements of Chief Justice Mansfield in the Court of King’s Bench on 18 June 1764 and 8 November 1764 that ended the use of general warrants.

Meanwhile, Wilkes was enjoying his exile. He took an Italian mistress, journeyed to Naples and then Geneva, and spent two months in the company of Voltaire. However in the light of his increasingly severe money troubles he began to plan a return to England.

George III and Bute

2007-01-25T17:28:00.000Z

The new king
The death of George II on 25 October 1760 was marked by a great enthusiasm in recognition of the promise which the new king, his young grandson, seemed to offer.

George III was born on 4 June 1738 at a house in St James’s Square rented from the duke of Norfolk. He was two months’ premature and given a hasty baptism. He was the second child and first son of Frederick Prince of Wales (‘Fritz’) and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. He was born into a deeply dysfunctional family. His father was detested by his parents, George II and Caroline of Ansbach. In 1742 the Prince and Princess of Wales moved to Leicester House in Leicester Square, and there established a court in rivalry with the king’s. Leicester House was the centre of opposition politics.

In 1751 his father died unexpectedly. George II: ‘I have lost my eldest son but I was glad of it.’ George became Prince of Wales. He was brought up at Kew by his mother, taught to be hostile to his grandfather, to deplore the lax morals of his court and his dependence on the Whig oligarchy.

The influence of Bute
In the year before he reached his majority (1755) his mother called in as companion and guide John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute (1713-92). Bute had lost his seat as one of the representative Scottish peers in the new parliament of 1741 and for a while left politics. But from 1747 he was a favourite of Frederick Prince of Wales, and when the prince died in 1751 he remained the confidant of his widow and helped her plan Kew Gardens. He was extremely handsome and the gossips believed that he was the dowager princess’s lover. When George was given his own household in November 1756, the king grumpily agreed that he should be made Groom of the Stole and it was widely assumed that he would be a candidate for high office once the prince became king.

The young George was infatuated with Bute, who, arguably, was the father he had never had. Bute wrote to George:

‘The prospect of forming your young mind is exquisitely pleasing to a heart like mine.’

In 1756 George wrote to Bute: ‘

I will with the greatest affection and tenderness be yours till death separates us.’

George's education took place at the time of the Seven Years War. Part of the policy of Newcastle, the Prime Minister, and Pitt, the Secretary of State, was to pour subsidies into Prussia in order to defend Hanover. Bute was a fierce opponent of this policy and George echoed his sentiments as his faithful pupil. In his correspondence, Newcastle was the king’s ‘knave and counsellor’ and Pitt ‘a true snake in the grass’ and the ‘blackest of hearts’. Even the king was not spared: ‘The conduct of this old king makes me ashamed of being his grandson.’ This is the true disservice Bute did the prince: he passed on his own prejudices and guaranteed that the first period of the king’s reign would be stormy. He was determined to get rid of Newcastle and Pitt and was unaware of how divisive this would be.

A ‘patriot king’?
On the day of his accession, George met the Privy Council at Carlton House. His declaration, drafted by Bute, spoke of the ‘bloody and expensive war’ in progress. Pitt insisted that this was replaced by the formula ‘expensive but just and necessary war’.

In November 1760 George declared to Parliament,

‘Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton’.

This was a reasonable statement – he was the first Prince of Wales since 1630 to have been born in England. But the word ‘Briton’ was controversial: Newcastle wrote:

‘I suppose you will think Briton remarkable. It denotes the author to all the world.’

George’s statement was a signal that he intended to be a ‘Patriot King’. What did this mean? Whig conspiracy theorists such as Horace Walpole were soon ready to believe that the king had a secret design to undermine the constitution. This was untrue. Yet with his accession there was a change of tone and policy that had profound political repercussions. He had imbibed from his mother a ‘Leicester House’ attitude along with the admonition ‘Be a King’. He seems to have decided that when he became king he must strengthen the role of the monarch and get rid of the ‘corrupt’ ‘Old Whigs’. He told Bute that he was determined not to be trampled on otherwise his subjects would come to esteem him ‘unworthy of the Crown’.

Initially George was popular. Unlike the first two Georges he had been born in England and thought of himself as an Englishman. This theme was reflected in the congratulatory addressed which flooded the columns of the newspapers. The new regime placed much emphasis on the extinction of ancient animosities. For the first time Tory country gentlemen were welcomed at court. Peerages and honours were distributed. The process of relaxing proscription was complete. The Whig oligarchies of shire and borough were finally compelled to give up some of their local influence. There was ‘an emotional home-coming for many churchmen’.
The king’s removal of their proscription finished off the old Tory party. The texture of the Whig party loosed leaving effective political control of Whig MPs in the hands of a group of political leaders. A further landmark of the past decades had also gone. The young king had no heir - there was no Leicester House around which dissidents could gather.

The ‘slaughter of the Pelhamite innocents’
The tensions between the king and his ministers were palpable. Newcastle:

‘I am the greatest cipher that ever appeared at Court. The young king is hardly civil to me ...This method of proceeding can’t last’.

In March 1761 Bute was appointed Secretary of State for the Northern Department. This was a relatively junior position but his real power was much more extensive. Pitt described him as ‘the minister behind the curtain’.

Pitt was the first to leave the government. As the war wound to a close he insisted, against the wishes of other members of the Cabinet, on a peace treaty which would satisfy Frederick of Prussia and destroy France as a colonial power. When peace negotiations collapsed, France entered into a secret alliance with Spain, and this led Pitt to propose a pre-emptive strike against Spain. When the rest of the Cabinet refused to accept this, he resigned on 5 October 1761.

Though George was pleased to see him go, he had not been directly responsible for his departure, and when Pitt came to surrender his seals, he granted him a pension of £3,000 a year and bestowed a peerage (Baroness Chatham) on his wife.

At the Lord Mayor’s banquet the king and queen’s coach was watched in silence, Bute’s coach was attacked by the mob and Bute had to be rescued by the bodyguard of prize-fighters whom he now employed. However, Pitt was cheered to the echo. Bute attempted to calm tensions by declaring war on Spain in January 1762. George told Bute: ‘This fresh enemy makes my heart bleed for my poor country.’ He openly opposed maintaining troops in Germany, and this brought him into conflict with Newcastle who saw it as a betrayal of Frederick. On 26 May Newcastle was persuaded to resign and on the following day Bute became first lord of the treasury.

Bute Prime Minister
Horace Walpole: ‘The new administration begins tempestuously. My father was not more abused after twenty years than Bute after twenty days.’ Press abuse had reached fever pitch. Bute was attacked in prints as the lover of the Princess Dowager. In June a new weekly periodical, the North Briton, appeared, edited by John Wilkes, Pittite MP for Aylesbury. The title was chosen to counter a pro-government paper, the True Briton, edited by Tobias Smollett (a Scotsman). The North Briton made satirical references to Bute, attacked the Scots and the government’s peace negotiations. Johnson was satirized for accepting a pension, and the constant references to Isabella and Mortimer were a thinly veiled attack on the Princess.

On 3 November the peace preliminaries were signed at Fontainebleau. Though Britain had made very significant gains, the terms were promptly attacked by Pitt as inadequate. The preliminaries passed both the Lords and the Commons by decisive majorities and received formal ratification on 10 February. But in the country at large they were regarded as a sell-out and by the spring Bute was the most unpopular man in the country. He now believed that his life was in danger. He was lampooned in over 400 prints and broadsheets and his emblem, the ‘jackboot’ was regularly burned alongside that of Princess Augusta’s petticoat. ‘The angel Gabriel could not govern this country.’ On 9 April he resigned and on 10 April a reluctant king sent for Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville (1712-70) – much to the anger of the Pitt/Grenville clan, furious at his ‘apostasy’. But Bute continued to be influential behind the scenes.

George’s relations with Grenville were extremely poor. Everyone found him tedious. Horace Walpole: ‘brevity was not his failing’. George:

‘When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for an hour more’.

He especially resented Grenville’s insistence that neither Bute nor his relatives play any role in policy decisions. But Grenville showed his political mettle by getting his way in this matter.
Grenville’s most notable contribution to politics was the Stamp Act (1765), which was so much resented by the American colonists. His other was the handling of the John Wilkes affair.

Remnants of Empire (benign)

2007-01-20T08:43:00.000Z

This is the scene outside our house every April, the time of the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi.

Scotland in the eighteenth century

2007-01-18T22:06:00.000Z

From the point of view of London, the main problem following the union of 1707 was the Jacobites, whose strongholds were in the inaccessible Highlands. Historians are divided about the extent of the Jacobite threat but however weak and ineffective the supporters of the Stuarts might have been, they could be used by hostile foreign powers. This had happened, for example, in 1719, when Spain supported an abortive invasion.

Government policy towards the Highlands was (a) to support the Campbells, the main Whig clan, (b) to support bodies such as the SPCK and (c) to keep a standing army the north centred on garrison forts like Fort William, Fort Augustus and Inverness.

In 1724 General George Wade was sent to Scotland. His subsequent report recommended the construction of military roads.
The first of these, from Dunkeld to Inverness, began in 1730. In 1739 he enlisted the loyal clans in the Black Watch regiment, its function to look out for cattle thieves and Jacobites. The men wore kilts and marched to the sound of bagpipes. In May 1745 they fought at Fontenoy.

Three months later Prince Charles Edward Stuart, raised his standard at Glenfinnan to rally the Jacobite clans. In September he entered Edinburgh with 2,000 men and defeated the army of General Cope at Prestonpans. In November the Jacobites marched into England but the English Jacobites failed to join them and having reached Derby in December the army retreated back to Scotland. In April they were defeated at Culloden.

The main reason for the Young Pretender’s failure was that he arrived in Scotland without the backing of a French force. But he also found less support in Scotland than he expected. Glasgow, which had profited from the Union, was solidly Whig and the Presbyterian clergy were adamantly opposed. Although the ’45 was subsequently constructed as a Scottish uprising against an oppressive England, in reality, Scotland was deeply divided over a Stuart restoration.

The government believed it had learned one vital lesson from Culloden: the powers of the Jacobite clans had to be broken. In 1747 the chiefs lost their hereditable jurisdictions, their lands were forfeited and the administration handed over to a Committee of Forfeited Estates, Highlanders were forbidden to bear arms, wear the kilt or play bagpipes, and all private schools were banned. For a generation, the Highlands were under an army of occupation.

The result was a dramatic social change as the clans at last submitted to the rule of law and the dictates of the British parliament. When Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited the Highlands in 1773, they found themselves in a peaceful society, with the chiefs converted into landlords. In 1782 the wearing of the kilt was again permitted and in 1784 the forfeited estates were handed back to their previous owners. By this time clan regiments had distinguished themselves in the Seven Years War and the Highlands were coming to be seen as exotic and romantic rather than barbarous.

In 1760 James Macpherson published the English-language text Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and later that year obtained further manuscripts. In 1761 he claimed to have found an epic on the subject of the hero Fingal, written by Ossian. He published translations of it during the next few years, culminating in a collected edition; The Works of Ossian, in 1765. The most famous of these poems was 'Fingal 'written in 1762. These poems caused a European sensation later influencing Goethe and Napoleon.

The Jacobite threat was effectively over in 1746 and by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle France gave up its support for the Stuarts. But English resentment at the Scots did not die down. The perception grew in England that the Scots were swarming south and taking English jobs. An example was William Murray who came to school in England at the age of fourteen, read for the English bar, married and Englishwoman and became Lord Chief Justice in 1757. It was with him in mind that Johnson said, ‘

Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he be caught young

When James Boswell came to London in 1762 he encountered genuine anti-Scottish hostility in a London theatre and a half-teasing, half-serious hostility from Samuel Johnson.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.(6 July 1763)

Would the English tolerate a Scottish Prime Minister?

The Seven Years War: reputations lost and won

2007-01-11T17:36:00.000Z

As well as being a major geopolitical event, the Seven Years War impacted on British politics and provides a window into the politics and the wider culture of the mid eighteenth century. This can be seen by looking at the careers of some of the major protagonists.

The Rise of Pitt the Elder
The dominating political figure of the war was the charismatic outsider William Pitt (1708-78). His father’s family were of lesser English gentry origin until his grandfather Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt (1653-1726) , merchant, MP and East India Company Governor, made the family fortunes. In February 1735 he was returned for the family’s pocket borough of Old Sarum. He had first attracted attention as a ‘Patriot’ Whig, a protégé of the anti-Walpole, Lord Cobham, with his scathing speeches attacking the government. This made him one of the most notable of ‘Cobham’s cubs’. In 1741 he spoke vehemently on the motion for the king to dismiss Walpole. As the war with Spain merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, and Britain agreed to take 16,000 Hanoverian soldiers into British pay, he broadened his attacks. In November he argued that this but another instance of the way in which ‘this great, this powerful, this formidable kingdom, is considered only as a province to a despicable electorate’. This characteristic recklessness deeply offended the king, and (more importantly) the Prince of Wales.

Politically Pitt had now no secure base within a coherent political group. He could never be the social equal of the Whig grandees. He never sat for a metropolitan seat or one of the great ports; never stood for Middlesex, Westminster, London or Bristol - all of them building up a tradition of electing opposition members. His preferred world was that of the country estate. He built a new house at Hayes and added a wing at Burton Pynsent (Somerset). His extravagance landed him in serious financial difficulties. Most of his wealth came from legacies and annuities. By the death of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 14 October 1744, inherited £10,000 ‘upon account of his merit in the noble defence he made for the support of the laws of England, and to prevent the ruin of his country’. He was an unsettling figure, unreliable and prone to manic depression, and frequently incapacitated with gout – attacks which sent him frequently to Bath - but he had the great advantage that he seemed different. He could be associated with the national interest because he seemed apart from the world of the court.

After a political crisis in 1746 George II was forced to reinstate the administration led by Henry Pelham and grudgingly appoint Pitt as Paymaster-General – a very lucrative but non-cabinet post that involved no contact with the king. Pelham’s brother the duke of Newcastle was now his patron and he sat successively for seats in the gift of the duke. His new role led him to defend the employment of Hanoverian troops as strongly as he had once opposed it. ‘If Pitt had died at any time during the next eight years he would have gone down in history as a canting patriot concerned only to raise his purchase price.’

In March 1754 Pelham died unexpectedly (through gluttony!). This led to a new period of political jockeying and a new administration was formed under Newcastle. Pitt hoped for advancement but his ambition was thwarted by the king’s hostility and by the ambitions of the new Leader of the House, Henry Fox. Meanwhile, with the defeat of Washington’s Virginia force in the Ohio valley, the country was drifting to war in America.

On 16 November 1754 he married Lady Hester Grenville (1720-1803): ‘the day from which I shall date all the real honour and happiness of my poor life’. It was a happy marriage and it allied Pitt with a powerful political family. But the honeymoon at West Wickham was short because Parliament was still in session. On 25 November he attacked Newcastle in the Commons – even though he was still in the government (though not the cabinet) and sat for Newcastle’s pocket borough of Aldeborough (Yorkshire). In the late summer of 1755 he became increasingly impatient with Newcastle’s policy of arranging subsidy treaties with Hesse-Cassel and Russia to protect Hanover in the event of war. In November he made a mocking Commons speech attacking the union of Fox and Newcastle to the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône, which was ‘one of the classical orations of the unreformed Parliament’.

At Lyons, I was taken to see the place where the two rivers meet, the one gentle, feeble, languid, and though languid, yet of no depth, the other a boisterous and impetuous torrent: but different as they are, they meet at last.

On 20 November 1755, he was dismissed as Paymaster. On the following day he attacked the ministry for being more concerned about the defence of Hanover than of America and Britain. This led him to make even more vitriolic attacks on the government, leading Horace Walpole to claim that his histrionic speech mannerisms ‘would have added reputation to Garrick’. But he was battling against a government with a 200 seat majority.

Admiral John Byng
The (European) war began with a ‘diplomatic revolution’ in which the Anglo-Austrian alliance collapsed and Britain formed an alliance (the Convention of Westminster) with her former enemy Frederick the Great on 16 January 1756. War was officially declared on 17 May, though by then the fighting had already begun. And from the start everything went wrong.

In March, Admiral Byng led an expedition to reconnoitre the Mediterranean and to protect Gibraltar and Minorca from French incursions. His fleet was small, for the Admiralty had decided to concentrate its ships of the line in home waters to counter an anticipated French invasion. The British and French fleets encountered each other off Minorca, and after a confusing and inconclusive battle, Byng retreated to Gibraltar to repair his vessels. This cost Britain Minorca, an island that, because of its position on the trade rout to Italy and the Levant, was strategically important for the protection of her commercial interests in the Mediterranean.

This was regarded as a massive national humiliation, and the search for scapegoats was relentless. The governor of Gibraltar had refused to reinforce Byng and the government had provided him with an inadequate force; but they were determined to punish Byng. They selectively published his dispatch, editing it carefully to impugn his reputation, and his name became a byword for cowardice. Crowds burned his effigy before his country house in Hertfordshire; at Gravesend he was hanged in effigy; at Covent Garden his ‘execution’ was preceded by a skimmington ride in which the effigy ‘was very whimsically executed in a Cart, with his back to the Horses, accompanied by chimney sweeps riding donkeys ‘with their Faces to the Tails’. Not surprisingly the main hostility seems to have come from the areas where the press gangs had been most in operation. The Admiralty was so taken aback by the fury of the demonstrations threat they changed their plans for bringing him to Greenwich for fear he would be torn apart by the hundreds on the Portsmouth road with pitchforks and clubs.
Part of the propaganda against Byng stressed his aristocratic connections (he was the son of Sir George Byng, later Viscount Torrington). Demonstrators at Richmond in Yorkshire decked out their effigy of Byng in a ‘genteel Navy Dress, a la Mode de France’. The aristocratic state was identified with ‘French interests’ and corruption at home and timidity, effeminacy and ignominy abroad.

Though Byng had been guilty of over-caution and inept seamanship rather than cowardice, he was court-martialled. On 14 March 1757 after the king brushed aside pleas for clemency, he was shot on his own quarter deck, ‘pour encourager les autres’ (Voltaire). But another motive was the need to maintain public order. The following months saw serious food riots.
In the meantime the government had changed.

Pitt as war leader
In October 1756, in the wake of the Byng affair, the loss of Fort Oswego to Montcalm and Calcutta to Siraj-ud-Daula, Newcastle and Fox resigned and in November the king agreed very reluctantly to a new government, nominally under the Duke of Devonshire, but with Pitt as Secretary of State (Foreign Secretary) the dominant figure.

Pitt inherited the problem of what do with Byng. He did not want him executed and his failure to save him contributed to an impression of weakness. In addition he was ill and could not command a Commons majority. In April 1757 he was dismissed after failure to achieve success in war. In the three-month’s confusion that followed (a caretaker ministry in the midst of an unsuccessful war), the Tories set about glorifying Pitt as a martyr. Expressions of support came in the press and the Pittites successfully manoeuvred the ‘shower of golden boxes’ (the freedoms of thirteen cities) which forced the king to take him back. In July the Pitt-Newcastle (Whig) coalition was formed, a coalition in which Pitt ran the war and Newcastle managed parliament. This was the government that finally secured victory.

Pitt’s great achievement lay not in detailed policy but in his qualities of leadership. In the eyes of his supporters he was the great ‘patriot’ minister. This is a term that needs unpicking. Before 1757 it had been the creed of opposition to Walpole and his successors, an appeal to the country over the heads of ‘corrupt’ governments. But now, in rhetoric at least, government subscribed to the ‘patriot’ programme. Pitt appealed to a sense of national destiny that defined Britain as a maritime power with trans-oceanic concerns. But he also followed Newcastle’s European policy of taking control of and paying an army in Germany (even though his role as Secretary of State for the Southern Department gave him no official say in German policy). He was later to say that ‘America had been conquered in Germany’. This was partly true, if only because the French were forced to divert men and resources to the Continent. However it laid him open to the charge of inconsistency and Frederick found him a disappointing ally. Far fewer British troops and a much smaller proportion of costs were to be devoted to the continent than in previous wars. However in the eyes of much of the public the Prussian victory at Minden in August 1759 was also a British triumph as it guaranteed the protection of Hanover and rendered French victory in Europe improbable.

The campaigns in India and North America were unquestionably his area of responsibility. It was Pitt who devised the successful North American policy of an ambitious two-pronged attack on Canada and operations in the Ohio. Commanders were instructed to communicate directly with him and their precisely detailed instructions gave them little scope for discretion. In September 1758 news reached Britain of the capture of Louisbourg – an event that transformed Pitt’s morale. (In 1758 it was agreed to rename Fort Duquesne Pittsburgh.) His policy regarding India, seen as a subordinate theatre of war, was to respond to Company requests for help rather than to initiate policy. Although he famously described Clive as the ‘heaven-born general’ he did not respond to his requests to lure the government into acquiring more territory.

When he addressed Parliament in November 1759 Pitt was in triumphalist mood. He proposed a monument to Wolfe but asserted that he (Pitt) had done more for Britain than any orator for Rome.

And for the Grecians, their story were a pretty theme if the town of St Albans were waging war with that of Brentford.

He had become the most powerful figure in British political life.

Robert Clive (1725-1774)
For Clive's career, see here.
Like Pitt, Clive was a difficult colleague, a manic depressive who often acted erratically. But the way in which he held Arcot for fifty days in 1751 marked him out as a military genius. In 1757 he recaptured Calcutta from the forces of Siraj-ud-Dawlah. After his victory at Plassey, he replaced Siraj-ud-Dowlah as nawab of Bengal by Mir Jafir and was able to report to the directors of the East India Company that ‘this great revolution, so happily brought about, seems complete in every respect’.

Following Plassey Clive received lavish gifts from the new nawab, Mir Jafir, including a jagir, a grant of land revenue worth around £27,000 a year to the recipient. He invested £30,000 in Golconda diamonds at Madras in 1757, and was also able to negotiate the purchase of £230,000 bills to be drawn on the Dutch East India Company. Such actions later encouraged others to follow Clive's example and seek similar rewards, and they also began to attract considerable attention from those in Britain who were becoming increasingly uneasy about the ill-gotten gains being obtained by rapacious company servants, or ‘nabobs’ as they became known.

In November Clive 1757 he was appointed governor of the presidency of Bengal. Clive had not sought a position of political power in India but in January 1759 he outlined in a famous letter to Pitt, the suggestion that the British government should now take a fuller responsibility for the territories now under the company's control. Declaring that

so large a sovereignty may possibly be an object too extensive for a mercantile Company

he asked Pitt to consider whether the nation would derive greater long-term advantage from the Indian territories if they were brought under the management of the state.

Much of Clive's later career was overshadowed by controversy about how he had made his money. In the 1760s his jagir became deeply controversial, with a vigorously contested propaganda war fought out in pamphlets and newspaper articles. This did not prevent his unopposed election for Shrewsbury in 1761. He acquired substantial new properties and enriched his family.

By the early 1770s criticism was mounting and there was a growing debate about the respective roles of the government and the (now dangerously insolvent) East India Company in managing the vast new territories that had come under British control. The Commons set up a committee of inquiry in 1772, which gave Clive the opportunity to justify his conduct. His best known comment came when he recalled the riches offered to him by Mir Jafar in 1757:

Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!

In May 1773 he spoke for three hours in the Commons. Members unanimously passed a motion that ‘Robert Clive did at the same time render great and meritorious service to this country’.

Following the high drama of these proceedings, the East India Company was reformed by a series of legislative actions, most notably Lord North's Regulating Act of 1773.

In early November 1774 Clive fell ill, as a common cold steadily worsened. He travelled first to Bath for the waters and then moved on to London. By the time he arrived at Berkeley Square on 20 November he had been in considerable pain for some time, and his old ailments had returned with a vengeance. He resorted to large doses of opium, which brought some respite, but on 22 November, having abandoned a game of cards being played with friends, he was found dead on the floor of an adjoining room. There is controversy about whether he committed suicide by plunging a penknife into his throat but it has also been claimed that he was the victim of a fatal seizure after a larger than usual dose of opium.

Clive emerged as one of the heroes of the Seven Years' War, but a flawed one. He came to stand for an uneasy combination of military greatness, greed and love of power.

The sacrificial hero
For the iconic representation of the death of General James Wolfe at the moment of the taking of Quebec in September 1759, see here.

The American painter, Benjamin West, represented Wolfe in the manner traditionally associated with depictions of the body of Christ when it was taken down from the cross (Lamentation). But he departed from the traditions of history painting by depicting his characters in modern dress.

How the Indians saw the British

2006-12-30T11:59:00.000Z

Over the holidays I've been reading an essay by the Indian historian, Rajat Kanta Ray in the Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998) on how Indian society reacted to the establishment of British supremacy after the Battle of Buxar (1764) finally guaranteed British control over Bengal.

In the eyes of the pundit who wrote the Sanskrit work, The Pleasure of All the Gods, c. 1787, the seizure of power by 'the white-faced upstarts' was like the recurrence of the age of the demons. The late Mughal poet Sauda (1713-80) was aware of 'living in a special kind of age' when every heart was aflame with grief and every eye brimmed with tears.

How can I describe the desolation of Delhi? There is no house from which the jackal's cry is not heard.

Indians used the Arabic and Persian term inqilab (inversion) to describe the catastrophe.

But the new generation saw matters differently. In 1809 the westernizing reformer Raja Ram Mohun Roy saw the transition from Mughal to British rule as the passage to a 'milder, more enlightened and more liberal one'. In 1831 he travelled to England (accompanied by his cow- he was a Brahmin!) and was full of admiration for what he saw there.

The foundation of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817 helped to create a generation of westernized intellectuals. This new class was initially pro-British, but in spreading western ideas of freedom and representative government to India, the British (unwittingly) were to create Indian nationalism. Gandhi and Nehru were the products of the British educational system!

It's that man again (updated)

2006-12-17T07:28:00.000Z

You might enjoy this review in the Telegraph of David Starkey's Monarchy.

And here's another.

The Seven Years War

2006-12-13T16:58:00.000Z

This post owes a great deal to Frank McLynn, 1759: the Year Britain became Master of the World (Pimlico, 2005) and Jeremy Black, The British Seaborne Empire (Yale University Press, 2004).

This is what McLynn says about the war.

‘The year 1759 should really be as well known in British history as 1066 for this was when the British finally achieved the global supremacy they would maintain for at least another hundred years.’

Origins
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle seemed almost irrelevant to the British and French settlers and the traders across the oceans. The fundamental problem was that Franco-British colonial and commercial ambitions were mutually incompatible, and their rivalry extended to the West Indies and West Africa, as well as North America and the Far East. The war was the last major conflict before the French Revolution to involve all the great powers of Europe. Generally France, Austria, Saxony, Sweden, Spain and Russia were aligned on one side against Prussia, Hanover and Great Britain on the other. In Europe it was a struggle for dominance between France and Prussia. Abroad it was a colonial war between Britain and France. Some historians have seen it as the ‘first world war’.

The war made the reputation of a politician (William Pitt), two military leaders (Clive and Wolfe) and an admiral (Edward Hawke). It also destroyed the reputation and life of another admiral (John Byng).

In North America, where it is known as the French and Indian War, the war did not have a definite beginning. In 1748 the British government gave the Ohio Company, a group of Virginia landowners and London merchants, title to half a million acres in the Ohio valley. In 1749 the French sent a small force into the valley, and between 1752 and 1754 they drove out British traders and intimidated British Native American allies. In 1754 they began the construction of Fort Duquesne where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio River (now downtown Pittsburgh).

In India Joseph Dupleix, Governor of Pondicherry from 1742 followed an assertive and expansionist policy becoming a player in the volatile situation created by the decline of the Mughal Empire and in particular the disputes over the control of Hyderabad and the Carnatic (the major territories in south-central and south-eastern India). In 1749 the Nizam of Hyderabad, a protégé of the British, was defeated and killed by a mixed French-local force and a Frenchman, Charles de Bussy, became the key adviser to his two successors. The French were making important gains in Hyderabad, while separately a French protégé was recognized as the Nawab of the Carnatic.

At this stage it seemed possible that France would at least manage to contain Britain in both North America and India. Thanks to an influx of funds, the French fleet had been built up since 1749. She was also allied to Spain and Prussia (and this alliance was threatening Hanover) There was nothing inevitable in the ultimate British victory, though she had two leading advantages: a leading navy and a more prosperous colonial base than France in North America.

The French position unravelled first in India when they attacked the Maratha Confederacy, the most dynamic force in India. This diverted their attention from the British. In 1751 Robert Clive, a clerk in the East India Company’s service in Madras, captured Arcot in the Carnatic, a fort belonging to the Chanda Sahib, an ally of the French, and then held it against a siege of fifty-three days. This victory was followed up the following year when the French were defeated at Trichinopoly. These two victories made Clive, a hitherto obscure figure with no military training or powerful connections, famous and wealthy. Pitt described him as a ‘heaven-born general’.

These two victories wrecked Dupleix’ strategy and caused the collapse of his alliance system. He was recalled in 1754 and a provisional peace was reached with the British that winter, leaving Britain the dominant European power in south Asia.

In North America it was not so easy to reach a settlement as the British could not accept French claims in the Ohio valley. On 17 April 1754 a 500-strong French force forced the surrender of the garrison of 40 men in Fort Prince George. In May George Washington advanced at the head of a small Virginia detachment and defeated the French. But the French advanced in greater numbers and on 3 July Washington was forced to surrender at Fort Necessity. The British had fewer than 900 troops in North America and felt increasingly vulnerable.

In 1755 the British pursued an extremely aggressive policy in North America. They dispatched regulars to attack French bases and used the navy to attack the forts which threatened Nova Scotia. The Acadians, who were accused of disloyalty, were expelled. But in that year Britain suffered one of the great disasters in colonial history which convinced many that the French would win the war. On 9 July the inexperienced Major-General Edward Braddock was ambushed and defeated at the Monongahela River near Fort Duquesne. His defeat left the frontier wide open.

The early stages
The war began badly with the loss of Minorca (which will be looked at in a subsequent post).

North America: There were also defeats on land in North America. In August 1756 the new French commander, Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, captured Forts Ontario, George and Oswego, taking 1,620 prisoners and driving the British from Lake Ontario. The government, preoccupied with defending Britain from possible French invasion, did not devote enough time to North America. In 1757 Montcalm captured Fort William Henry at the head of Lake George.

In the same year William Pitt (the Elder) became one of the two Secretaries of State and the key figure in planning war policy. For 1758 he planned a three-pronged offensive on New France and Louisbourg gell to a successfully organized amphibious operation. At the same time a force mostly of Americans captured Fort Duquesne.

India: The British position in Bengal was challenged by the newly acceded Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula. In June he stormed the poorly defended Fort William at Calcutta after a brief siege and imprisoned between 60 and 150 prisoners in what became known as the ‘Black Hole’.
Clive was instructed to take Calcutta. In December 1756 he reached Bengal in command of 850 British troops and 2,100 sepoys and regained Fort William. He then marched inland to the Nawab’s capital of Murshidabad. On n 23 June he defeated Siraj-ud-Dowlah force of 50,000 at Plassey. Soon after the Nawab was killed and replaced by a British protégé. Clive became governor of Bengal. Although the fighting was not over, the situation had been radically transformed. Britain had triumphed though she owed her triumph as much to Indian factionalism as to any other factor.

The ‘Annus Mirabilis’
1759 was the annus mirabilis.
In Europe a British-German army defeated the French at Minden.
On 13 September Quebec fell to the British though General Wolfe died as the city was taken.

At sea the British were challenged by the pre-war increase in Bourbon naval strength. Together, France and Spain launched warships with a total displacement of c. 250,000 tons in 1746-55 while Britain launched only 90,000. But Spain did not join the war until 1762, by which time France had been defeated at sea. On 20 November 1759 Edward Hawke’s victory at Quiberon Bay (Brittany) in the teeth of a 40 knot gale guaranteed the Royal Navy complete command of the sea.

At the end of year David Garrick's 'Heart of Oak' was composed to commemorate the great events.

The end of the war
In 1760 the French forces in Canada surrendered (after a failed attempt to recapture Quebec. In 1761 the French surrendered at Pondicherry; Britain conquered Dominica, and Martinique, Grenada, St Lucia and St Vincent in 1762. When Spain entered the war, Britain captured Havana and Manila.

The achievements of the year of victories were sealed by the Treaty of Paris in February 1763. Britain returned many of its conquests including Guadaloupe, Martinique, Gorée (the slave port), Pondicherry, Cuba and the Philippines, but it retained Canada, Senegal, Grenada, Tobago, Dominica and St Vincent, and East and West Florida from Spain. The concessions led to a political crisis in Britain, but nevertheless this was the most successful war in British history.

One thing was decided irrevocably: India would be British and not French. Under the Treaty of Allahabad (1764) the Mughal Emperor granted the East India Company the civil administration (the diwani) of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This gave the company the right to tax over 20 million people. Long-term the British gained in India a huge market for its products and an almost inexhaustible supply of manpower for its armies.

However it is only in retrospect that this can be seen as a decisive turning point. The Indian historian, Rajat Kanta Ray has written in the Oxford History of the British Empire: the Eighteenth Century:

‘Which usurpation [of Mughal power] [the Maratha or the British] would finally gain supremacy was an issue that was not resolved until 1803, when the British captured Delhi and gained permanent control over the person of the Emperor and over the Red Fort.’

The British victory was based on naval superiority, but this in turn was only possible because Britain had one crucial advantage over France: the ability to borrow money. More than a third of British war expenditure was financed by loans. Pitt’s government spread the cost of war by selling low-interest bonds to the investing public. The National Debt grew from £74 million to £133 million during the war.

Before the war, Britain’s empire had been small enough and homogeneous enough to seem reasonably compatible with British values. But the post-war Empire included Quebec, with its 70,000 French (Roman Catholic) inhabitants as well as large stretches of Asia (Hindus and Muslims). This multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Empire was to pose new problems and challenges.

The First British Empire

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‘By 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later Great Britain had acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents. … They had robbed the Spaniards, copied the Dutch, beaten the French and plundered the Indians. Now they ruled supreme.’

This is the historian Niall Ferguson's take on the situation of Britain in 1815. But the road to this position of power was often a bumpy ride accompanied with defeats as well as victories. The period of what is known as the 'first British Empire' begins modestly in the 17th century and ends with defeat in America in 1783. The 'second British Empire' was forged in the wars with France between 1793 and 1815.

Go here for an excellent overview of the history of the British Empire.

In the European race for empire, the English were late beginners. It was only in 1655 that it acquired Jamaica. This was 150 years after Columbus had laid the foundations of the Spanish Empire which stretched from Madrid to Manila and encompassed Peru and Mexico. But England’s imperial ambitions (if not achievements) dated from the 16^th century. Envy of the Spanish Empire led the Elizabethan seaman to launch piratical raids on Spanish colonial ports and treasure ships. But the only successful colonization was that of Ireland.

Elizabeth's astrologer, John Dee seems to have been the first to write about a ‘British Empire and from the reign of James I and VI the term was used by enthusiasts for the integration of England and Scotland. During the 17th century claims were made to include the seas round

Britain

. From 1685 maps began to delineate the extent of ‘an English Empire in

America

’; after 1707 this became a British one.

In the second half of the 18^th century the term ‘British Empire’ acquired its now accepted meaning: a collection of territories and peoples ruled by

Britain

. In the early 18th century the poet Matthew Prior invoked a

Britain

that ‘rules an Empire by no Ocean bound'. From the 1760s it became conventional to speak and write of a single British Empire. In 1773 Sir George Macartney wrote of

‘this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained’.

The poet William Cowper saw Boadicea in the light of imperial expansion:

‘Regions Caesar never knew/Thy posterity shall sway’.

The term ‘British’ was a recognition of the role the Scots played in the Empire. The 'plantation of Ulster was a common ‘British’ venture. In the later 17th century enclaves of Scots and Irish settlers established themselves in predominantly English colonies in North America or the West Indies, a process that increased after 1707. During the 18th century Scots and Irish emigration to British America was much larger than English emigration. A high proportion of the East India Company’s army officers and civilian servants were Scots. By the 1740s Scots firms based on Glasgow had won a large stake in the tobacco trade of the Chesapeake.

Imperialism was a means of defending the Revolution Settlement by building a strong navy and by creating satellites that gave Britain a measure of independence from powerful European neighbours. Most of those who used the term saw it in extremely belligerent terms: it was an empire that rested on commerce and naval power over Britain’s rivals (France, Spain, the Netherlands). Colonial and trade wars were popular, land wars on the continent not. Pride in Britain’s maritime prowess and hatred of foreigners formed an important element in the British people’s sense of national identity.

Maritime wars became wars of expansion, especially in the thought of Pitt the Elder, even though territorial empire was not the explicit objective of such wars.

The Empire before 1756

North America
The British experience of colonization in America was to be very different from that of the Spaniards and Portuguese. The majority of Spanish and Portuguese colonists were single men, who took sexual partners from the indigenous or slave populations. The result within a few generations was a substantial mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos. British settlers brought their wives and children and preserved their culture more or less intact. John Rolf's marriage to Pocahontas did not set a precedent.

In 1497 Henry VII had sponsored John Cabot’s voyage and discovery of Newfoundland. In 1583 Newfoundland became the first English possession in the New World though Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s formal act of possession made little difference to the fishermen who were already spending half the year there.

The two original nuclei of colonization further south were the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland and the New England colonies.
In 1606 the Virginia Company was founded at Jamestown under John Smith. His discovery in 1612 that tobacco could be grown in the Chesapeake Bay area led to an influx of settlers ready to brave the harsh conditions.
On 9 November 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Cape Cod on the shores of what Smith had christened New England. Not all were religious zealots in search of heaven on earth; for many the motive was ‘not God but cod' (Ferguson). The Massachusetts Bay Company was founded in 1629. You can see how the life of the Pilgrims is renacted today if you visit Plimouth, Massachusetts.
The Hudson’s Bay Company was founded in 1670 to trade in furs.

English settlement was achieved at the expense of the Native Americans. By 1700 their numbers had reduced from over half a million in 1500 to less than half that number in 1700. The near disappearance of the original proprietors meant that the land belonged to the king and the Stuart monarchs were very ready to grant land to favoured courtiers. In 1632 Charles I granted Maryland to the heirs of Lord Baltimore, Charles II gave New Amsterdam (renamed New York) to his brother James and Pennsylvania to William Penn. A grant from Charles II in 1663 created the Carolina settlement. By the beginning of the 18th century the population of English North America was about 265,000. The most important early 18th century colony was Georgia, founded by James Oglethorpe as a refuge for debtors.

The Caribbean
The majority of British emigrants in the 17th century went not to North America but to the Caribbean. The first English West Indian settlements had been established early in the 17th century on Barbados and the Leeward Islands. Jamaica was conquered in 1655. Of the total population of some 145,000 at the beginning of the 18th century three quarters were black slaves largely employed in sugar cultivation.
(We will be returning to the Caribbean when we study the slave trade.)

India
In December 1600 Elizabeth gave a 15 year monopoly to the ‘Company of Merchants in London trading in the East Indies’ and in 1613 the Company established itself at Surat in north west India. But in 1602 the Dutch had established their own East India Company at Chinsura north of Calcutta. The inevitable tensions were among the causes of the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century. The Glorious Revolution can be seen in business terms as an ‘Anglo-Dutch merger’, which introduced the British to a number of crucial financial institutions that the Dutch had founded. It enabled the English to trade more freely in the East – Indonesia and the spice trade went to the Dutch, leaving the English to develop the newer Indian textiles trade. The textile trade proved enormously profitable, enabling the East India Company to outstrip its Dutch rival. Even before the Glorious Revolution, this had involved a relocation of trading bases. As Surat was gradually wound down Fort St George (Madras) was founded in 1639. Bombay was acquired in 1662 as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry. In 1690 the fort at Sutanuti on the Hugli was amalgamated with two other villages to form Calcutta.

The East India Company was a commercial monopoly. It was also a parasite on the periphery of the Mughal Empire, where power was centred on the Red Fort in Delhi. In 1700 the population of India was twenty times that of the United Kingdom and it has been estimated that India’s share of total world output was 24% (to Britain’s 3%). It was only with the Emperor’s permission that the EIC was allowed to trade at all. But by the 1740s the Empire was in decline. There were repeated invasions from the north and the provincial deputies (the nawabs) were carving out kingdoms for themselves. In order to protect themselves, the EIC began to raise its own regiments, equipping them with European weapons and subordinating them to English officers. The Company was beginning to acquire the characteristics of a state.

The First British Empire: the challenge from France (updated)

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In 1700 France had an economy twice the size of Britain’s and a population almost three times as large. Like Britain she was a colonial power. ‘New France’ stretched from Quebec to Louisiana.

In 1534 Jacques Cartier had taken possession of Quebec, which became the capital of ‘New France’. On his second voyage to Canada in 1535 he visited the site of what was to be Montreal, though the settlement was not founded until 1642 by Paul de Chomedy.

In the reign of Louis XIV it was Colbert’s policy to organize New France and subject the colony to close control. In 1679 René-Robert de la Salle (1643-87) received permission from Louis XIV to explore the Mississippi. In 1682 he led twenty Frenchmen and thirty Indians in canoes down the Illinois River to the Mississippi. He started the journey in February and reached the Gulf of Mexico in August, and claimed the whole basin, which he named Louisiana, for Louis XIV. In 1717 the decision was taken to found New Orleans. The fort of Baton Rouge was garrisoned in 1719. But Louisiana was never the economic miracle the French government hoped for and it was peopled mainly be transported criminals rather than voluntary settlers. After the collapse of Law’s Mississippi Company in 1719 it stagnated.

In the north Louisbourg (Louisburg) was founded on Cape Breton Island in 1713 to guard the Atlantic approaches to New France. It was a staggeringly ostentatious stronghold covering a hundred acres and encircled by ten-metre-high stone walls. It took so long to build and was so expensive that Louis XV said he was expecting its towers to rise over the Paris horizon. From its strategic position at the mouth of the St Lawrence, the inhabitants victualled their Newfoundland fishing fleets and potentially threatened Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. (However the fort was wildly ill-conceived: the humid weather stopped the mortar from drying, the fort was overlooked by a score of hillocks, and developments in gunnery had already made high stone walls an ineffective means of defence.)

By the middle of the eighteenth century French Canada had 70,000 inhabitants (far fewer than British North America).

The French sugar islands, Martinique and Guadaloupe, were among the richest in the Caribbean. In 1664 the Compagnie des Indes Orientales was set up with its base at Pondicherry south of Madras.

War and Empire, 1739-1748

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The War of Jenkins’ Ear
Britain and Spain were in dispute over the seizure of British ships. They also had a dispute over the boundaries between Georgia (British) and Florida (Spanish). These disputes were partially resolved at the Convention of El Pado, 1739 though in the Commons, ‘Patriot’ opposition was stirred up by the young MP, William Pitt, who argued that commercial interests could best be fostered by war and further colonial conquests Following the mutilation of Captain Jenkins, Britain, much to Walpole’s reluctance, declared war on Spain. In November Admiral Edward Vernon captured Puerto Bello. Otherwise, the war was unsatisfactory for Britain.

The War of the Austrian Succession
The war with Spain merged into a more general war that began over a dispute over Frederick the Great’s seizure of Silesia from Maria Theresa in December 1740, the heiress of Austria. It became a four-sided conflict between Britain and Austria against France and Prussia.
In the War of the Austrian Succession Anglo-French hostilities took place mainly in Flanders. However fighting spread to North America, West Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The contest with France was not about territory for its own sake, but about trade: the cottons and spices of India, the sugar of the West Indies, the tobacco and rice of the southern colonies of North America, the furs and fish of the northern colonies, the slaves of Africa. Such acquisitions were the only secure guarantee of lasting commercial supremacy.

In June 1745 Britain captured Louisburg and Cape Breton Island. In September the French captured Madras from the East India Company. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the war in 1748. Britain gave up Louisburg in exchange for Madras; France repudiated the Pretender.
But the peace seemed almost irrelevant to the British and French settlers and the traders across the oceans. The fundamental problem was that Franco-British colonial and commercial ambitions were mutually incompatible. Their rivalry could no longer be confined to Europe and the high seas. It now extended world-wide.

A consumer society

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In the eighteenth century many ordinary people, especially in urban areas, began to acquire consumer goods. This coincided with improvements in communications, housing and postal services.

Some commentators (such as Smollett) deeply disapproved of consumerism, linking it to the 'luxury' that was believed to have brought about the fall of the Roman Empire. Others, like Dr Johnson, saw it as the means of spreading prosperity among the poor.

Trade and Empire
The growth in consumerism was linked with international trade, which, between 1740 and 1780 increased by a third, and was one of the most remarkable periods of expansion in modern history. The original impetus came from outside Europe. A demographic surge in China created a consumer demand which attracted growing numbers of British and Dutch merchants. The Chinese gold they brought back to Europe, together with the rapidly expanding output of the Brazilian mines, helped alleviate the chronic shortage of specie, and allowed the stabilization of European currencies. It was also linked with the growth of Empires.

In the eighteenth century products from the tropics and sub-tropics became commonplace, with huge commercial and political repercussions.

Consumer goods
From the 1650s, as inventories and criminal records reveal, ordinary people began to acquire possessions that had previously been the preserve of the elite. They slept on mattresses rather than loose straw and sometimes in beds. They began to sleep apart from their children, not in separate rooms, but in separate beds. They bought additional clothing, most of it second-hand. By the end of the eighteenth century an increased amount of clothing and bedding was made from cotton. Ordinary urban dwellers began to use wallpaper and buy clocks and watches. In 1675 only one in ten Londoners’ inventories after death mentions clocks; in 1715 more than half did. It was the age of the small shopkeeper. In England the word ‘shoplift’ was used from the 1680s.

From the late 17th century people began drinking hot drinks (tea, coffee, chocolate) from china cups and many social occasions focused around the consumption of these drinks. Surveys of probate inventories and the Old Bailey records of stolen goods suggest that the 1720s saw a marked extension into the middling ranks of china, porcelain, tea and coffee pots, knives and forks and glassware. In 1675 only 9 % of English families had pewter plates. In 1725 they were owned by 45%. But pewter was going out of fashion as households that owned earthenware rose from 27 to 57%. By 1725 cups and other utensils for hot drinks were to be found in 15% of European families.

Walnut was being replaced by mahogany, a tropical American hardwood first imported to England in the 1670s. The historian Amanda Vickery has described how the Lancashire gentlewoman Elizabeth Shackleton bought mahogany furniture from Gillows of Lancaster.

Porcelain
The Chinese probably made the first true porcelain during the Tang dynasty (618-907) and for centuries they made the world’s finest porcelain (‘china ware’). By the 1100s the secret of making porcelain had spread to Korea, and in the 1500s and to Japan. As trade with the Orient grew during the 17th century porcelain (named from the Latin porcella, a sow) became popular with Europeans. By 1791 the East India Company had imported 215 million pieces of porcelain.
But by the early 18th century porcelain was also manufactured in many parts of Europe and beginning to compete with Chinese porcelain. In 1756 the town of Sèvres began producing its characteristic soft-paste porcelain. Hard-paste porcelain (Dresden ware) was produced at Meissen in Saxony from 1710.

Worcester porcelain was first produced in 1751. During its early years the factory produced soft-paste porcelain, much of it decorated with Chinese designs in blue underglaze. The willow pattern is said to have originated c. 1780 at the Caughley Porcelain works in Shropshire. It tells the story of Koongse and her lover Chang.

Cream ware: Cream coloured earthenware was first produced in Staffordshire between 1730 and 1740. The principal ingredients were white-firing clay and ground flint, the flint being used to increase the whiteness and strength of the composition. The result was a durable body, varying in tone from buff to a deep cream colour, which required the application of a clear lead glaze and a second firing to make it impervious to liquids.

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95) carried out an enormous number of trials to perfect the cream coloured earthenware body. He commenced work whilst still in partnership with Thomas Whieldon in Fenton, although his first really successful cream ware was produced at his Ivy House Works after 1759. It is probable that cream ware was amongst the first of Wedgwood’s productions as an independent manufacturer.

In 1765 Wedgwood opened his first London showrooms in Charles Street, off Grosvenor Square, and in June he received a commission to make an elaborate tea service in green and gold creamware for Queen Charlotte. In the following year he was officially appointed potter to her majesty and his creamware was renamed Queen's ware.

In 1770 Wedgwood received his first order from Empress Catherine II of Russia. Three years later she commissioned a large dinner and dessert service of nearly 1000 pieces for the Chesmensky Palace, familiarly known as La Grenouillière (the frog marsh). The ‘Frog’ service, then the largest ever ordered from a British potter, was decorated with hand-painted landscapes and a frog emblem at Wedgwood's Chelsea decorating studio, and supervised by Bentley. Its completion in 1774 marked the removal of the firm's London showrooms from Great Newport Street to even larger premises in Greek Street, where the service was displayed, by invitation, to the public. (This great service is now permanently exhibited at the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.) This was the most influential development in the history of British pottery. It achieved almost a monopoly of the high-quality earthenware tableware market in Europe.

Wedgwood was a skilled marketer. From 1772 it was Wedgwood's policy to mark everything made at his Etruria works in Staffordshire. He was the first earthenware potter consistently to mark his goods and the first ever to use his own name, which was impressed in the clay. He and Bentley undertook market research, cultivating influential patrons (several of whom permitted him to copy objects in their private collections), enlisting the help of ambassadors, and taking pains to produce wares suited to specific markets. In 1771–2, in a daring and ultimately successful experiment in inertia selling, unsolicited parcels of ware were sent to many of the noble houses of Germany in the hope of attracting orders and advertising the quality of the goods. Between 1773 and 1787 Wedgwood issued illustrated catalogues of his Queen's ware and ornamental wares, the later editions being published in French, German, and Dutch translations.

Coffee
Coffee is indigenous to Abyssinia and Arabia. It was first mentioned by an Arab physician at the end of 9th century. In the 15 and16 centuries it was cultivated in Yemen. In 1600 it was cultivated in India. The Dutch transported a coffee plant from Mocha to Holland in 1616 and started to cultivate it in Ceylon in 1658 and in Java in 1696.

The first coffee house opened in St Mark’s Square, Venice, in 1647. In 1650 the first English coffee house opened in Oxford. It was called the Angel and run by a Lebanese called Jacob. London’s first coffee house opened 1652 at the sign of Pasqua Rosee's Head in Change Alley, Cornhill. By Queen Anne’s death there were 500 coffee houses in London. In 1660 the Café Procope in Paris was the forerunner of numerous French coffee houses.

Tea
Tea was predominantly a domestic beverage and consumed by women as much as men. Many female domestic servants allegedly refused to work in any establishment where tea was not provided.

Until the Assam plantations were cultivated in the 1820s, tea came from China. It had been known there since 273BC. The first reference in Japan dates from AD 815. In 1595 and 1599 Jan Hugo van Linschooten sailed to India with the Portuguese and published an account of his travels which included a section on tea. In 1595 Portuguese harbours were closed to Dutch. This encouraged exploration in Java. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company was founded. In 1607 the first Dutch ship reached Japan and took tea to Java. In 1610 first tea transported to Holland from Java

The word tea (used in all European countries except Portugal and Russia) is based on tay from the Amoy dialect rather than the Cantonese ch'a. This is because the Dutch had established Batavia as a base in Java in 1596 and traded with ships from Amoy. The Portuguese traded out of Macao where Cantonese was spoken.

Pepys first drank tea in 1660. His wife tried it on the recommendation of an apothecary. In 1713 the East India Company negotiated a right of access to Canton and from then on regular supplies could be guaranteed. In 1706 the first tea shop was opened in the Strand by Thomas Twining to cater for ladies of fashion. It allowed women to mix shopping and pleasure and proved extremely popular. At home the tea party was a very inclusive event, a ceremony performed with kettle, teapot, china and silver. Ladies offered tea in the parlour in the same way as gentlemen bought ale in the tavern – it was all part of 18th century sociability. By 1720 9 million pounds were shipped in by the East India Company, increasing to 37 million by mid-century – in spite of punitive duties and the complaints of moralists like Jonas Hanway.

Sugar
Tea, coffee and chocolate were all drunk with sugar. The production of sugar, first from cane and later from beets, is one of the oldest and best studied technological processes. As early as 327 B.C. Alexander the Great reported cultivation of sugar cane in India. At that time, sugar was extracted from the cane by chewing and sucking. Later, a syrup was extracted by means of pressing and boiling the cane. This process which was first practiced in India in about 300 A.D. became the basis for producing sugar in solid form.

Sugar arrived in Europe from the crusades but it was initially a rare and expensive commodity. In the 1390s, a better press, which doubled the juice obtained from the cane, was developed. This permitted the economic expansion of sugar plantations to Andalusia and the Algarve. In the 1420s, sugar was carried to the Canaries, Madeira and Porto Santa Maria.

In 1493, Columbus stopped at Gomera in the Canary Islands, for wine and water. He stayed a month and when he finally sailed he took with him cuttings of sugarcane to Santo Domingo, the first to reach the New World. The Portuguese took sugar to Brazil. Approximately 3000 small mills built before 1550 in the New World created an unprecedented demand for cast iron gears, levers, axes and other implements. Specialist in mold making and iron casting were inevitably created in Europe by the expansion of sugar. After 1625, the Dutch carried sugarcane from South America to the Caribbean islands from Barbados to the Virgin Islands.

Sugar entered Britain in the 17th century as an apothecary’s ingredient. It was commonly sold in solid cones and required a sugar nip to break off pieces. A few thousand tons were imported in the 1650s; 23,000 tons in 1700; 245,000 in 1800.8 Sugar halved in retail price during the 17th century and dropped a further 20% by 1750. Total sugar imports for domestic consumption doubled from the 1660s to the end of the 17th century and doubled again by the 1730s.

With the European colonization of the Americas, the Caribbean became the world's largest source of sugar. Sugar cane could be grown on these island at vastly lower prices than sugar beets could be grown in Europe, or cane sugar imported from the East. Reacting to this increasing craze, the islands took advantage of the situation and produced up to ninety percent of the sugar that the western Europeans consumed. The largest sugar producer in the world, by 1750, was the French colony known as Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Sugar counted for 93% of the exports of Barbados.

African slaves became the preferred plantation worker as they were better able to fight off the diseases of malaria and yellow fever than the European indentured servants. (Most local Native Americans had died from European diseases like smallpox.)

Tobacco
Tobacco is native to the Americas. It began as an apothecary’s ingredient and alehouses provided both tobacco and china-clay pipes for their patrons. It was increasingly provided in shops. Smoking quickly became a masculine pursuit (though Dr Johnson’s wife, Tetty, was a life-long smoker). It was first grown commercially round Chesapeake Bay (the border between Maryland and Virginia) when in 1612 John Rolfe introduced a superior species of tobacco from Trinidad. The imported plants (Nicotiana tabacum) flourished in the Tidewater's soil and climate; soon a tobacco craze hit Virginia. The early settlers of Maryland followed suit and by mid-century, the Chesapeake colonies were exporting large and profitable tobacco cargoes, and their prosperity thereafter rose and fell with fluctuations in the international market. From 1617 to 1793 tobacco was the most valuable staple export from the English American mainland colonies and (later) the United States. The quantity of tobacco shipped to Great Britain rose from twenty thousand pounds in 1617 to over 40 million pounds in 1727. The main port of entry was Glasgow – this was the reason why the Glasgow merchants were overwhelmingly in support of the union with England in 1707.

The outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775 sparked the beginning of the end of the tobacco age. The American planters were heavily in debt to the Glasgow merchants and collection of these debts was impossible during hostilities. Glasgow tobacco fleets were also seriously threatened by hostile action. In 1783 when peace came, the now independent United States could send tobacco direct to Europe, cutting out the Glasgow merchants.

Tobacco profits dramatically increased the demand for labour. When early hopes that the Indians would work for the English proved ephemeral, a system of indentured labour (whereby one worked usually for four or five years in exchange for passage to America and all necessities during the period of service) was linked to head rights of fifty acres of land (sometimes one hundred acres in Maryland) to anyone who paid a person's passage to the colony. Indentured servants remained an important part of the Chesapeake labour force throughout the colonial era, but by the late seventeenth century they were no longer its core. In the eighteenth century, Maryland imported substantial numbers of British convicts as bound labourers, usually with terms of seven years, but again the supply fell short of the need.

Rice
Rice was to Carolina what tobacco was to the Chesapeake. From the middle of the eighteenth century it was also grown in Georgia. It was the fourth most valuable export crop from British America after tobacco, sugar and wheat.

Cotton
Arab merchants brought cotton cloth to Europe about 800 A.D. When Columbus discovered America in 1492, he found cotton growing in the Bahamas. By 1500, cotton was known generally throughout the world. Cotton seed are believed to have been planted in Florida in 1556 and in Virginia in 1607. By 1616, colonists were growing cotton along the James River in Virginia. During the 18th century an increasing number of clothes were made from cotton, which was lighter and easier to keep clean than wool. The invention of the cotton gin in the USA in 1793 greatly speeded up the production of cotton, and increased the prosperity of Liverpool and Manchester.

The Evangelical revival

2006-11-22T14:11:00.000Z

This is a huge subject and this post only scratches the surface.

Historical context
The Evangelical revival began in the 1730s in the context of developments in Britain, Europe and the American colonies. These included the relative decline of Old Dissent (Baptists, Independents), the dominance of High Church and Latitudinarian elements in the Church of England, the influence of German pietism in the form of the Moravians and the work of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts. More controversially, some historians have seen the Enlightenment as a key influence.

Pietism
From the 1670s Pietism became a new force within German Lutheranism, springing from unease at the inadequacies of the established church. The Pietist minister Philipp Jakob Spener, who worked at Strasbourg and Frankfurt, was concerned to work through the existing structures of church life to bring back a more personal religion to the Lutheran world. This involved encouraging the laity to form devotional societies (collegia pietatis) for prayer and study. The pietists were much helped by the hymn writer Paul Gerhardt (Wesley learned German so that he could translate pietist hymns into English).

Pietism found a base in the new university of Halle (founded 1694), which would train thousands of pastors.

The Moravians
One group which did separate out of the pietists had an influence out of proportion to its size. The Moravians (the Unitas Fratrum) traced their origin to the 15th century Hussites in Bohemia and Moravia. During the 16th and 17th centuries they survived as a movement though persecuted by the Counter-Reformation and suppressed by the Peace of Westphalia.

In 1722 a group of families adhering to the tradition of the Bohemian Brethren fled Moravia and settled on the estate of Spener’s godson, Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700-60), a nobleman and civil servant from Saxony. The Herrnhut community became the mother community of what was to be the Moravian Church, and the centre of Moravian work all over the world. In 1732 the first Moravian missionaries left Herrnhut to work among the black slaves in the West Indies.

The Moravians came to London in 1734 en route to mission work in the American colonies, and made contacts that led to the formation of the Fetter Lane Society. In 1735 they began work in Georgia among the dispossessed German Protestants who had taken refuge there.

The British Revival

Wales: In Wales, paradoxically, a sustained campaign of Anglicization generated a thoroughly Welsh, dissenting religious revival. Griffith Jones (1683-1761) worked for the SPCK to set up schools in Wales; Howell Harris (1714-1773) began itinerant preaching immediately after his conversion; he repeatedly sought ordination but was refused.

Scotland: The Established Church in Scotland was the Presbyterian Church. It faced a continual crisis over the issue of lay patronage, which led to schisms from the Kirk. It treated the Highlands as a missionary area, then one third of the population of Scotland.
In February 1742 a revival began in Cambuslang, south-east of Glasgow. In mid-July George Whitefield arrived there and 20,000 appeared there the day before communion. The following month 30,000 turned up.

England: The political context is very important for understanding the Evangelical revival in England. During Walpole’s long period as Prime Minister there was a deep revulsion at what was seen as the corruption of political life. Religious disaffection at Walpole’s failure to accept any programme for church reform merged with Tory ‘country’ traditions. By the 1730s there were a number of ‘religious societies’ of disaffected Anglicans, mainly in places of anti-court sentiment, such as London, Bristol and Newcastle. These showed a remarkable capacity for absorption and they quickly drew in the Moravians.

The Methodists
The first prominent Methodist was not John Wesley but George Whitefield (1714-70), who was converted in 1735, three years before Wesley, and who at the time of Wesley’s conversion was already using open-air preaching to dramatic effect.

John Wesley (1703-91) was born to parents who were politically divided. Both were Tories but Samuel accepted William as King and Susanna did not. The Anglican Church he knew as a young man was dominated by the Latitudinarians. As a result he started off his religious career with a High Church viewpoint out of step with the main establishment. He entered Christ Church, Oxford (a High Church stronghold), in 1720. He and graduated in 1724. In 1728 he was ordained priest. In 1729 he returned to Oxford to fulfil the residential requirements of his fellowship. There he joined his brother Charles and others in a religious study group, the ‘Holy Club’, one of a number of societies of devout young men. These societies were concerned with the ‘reformation of manners’ – attacking swearing, blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking. The ordered lifestyle and High Church piety of the Oxford club earned them the nickname ‘Methodists’.

Following his father’s death in 1735 Wesley was persuaded by the Jacobite Colonel, James Edward Oglethorpe, founder and governor of Georgia, to oversee the spiritual lives of the colonists and to missionize the Indians as an agent for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. While travelling out there he and Charles were much impressed by the piety and courage of the Moravians, who were also travelling there. Wesley’s stiff High Church piety antagonized many of the colonists, and many quarrels broke out. The worst concerned a naive attachment to the niece of the chief magistrate of Savannah. In December 1737 Wesley virtually fled from Georgia.

Back in London he met a Moravian, Peter Böhler, who convinced him that what he needed was simply faith. On 24 May 1738, he attended a Moravian mission in Aldersgate - an experience that was a turning point for him. It added a Protestant Evangelical fire to the Anglican Catholicism of his youth.

He then embarked on a lifetime’s mission throughout the British Isles in which he travelled over 200,000 miles and preached over 40,000 sermons. He quickly found that the ancient parochial structure of England was inadequate to his purpose and was not adapted to new population movements. In 1739 he was invited by Whitefield to come to Bristol and help preach to the colliers at Kingswood Chase. He came and found himself, much against his will, preaching in the open air. This enterprise was the beginning of the Methodist revival. Wesley was astonished at the dramatic results that followed, and the mass emotion of the crowds. Soon he was building up ‘societies’ which took the Oxford nickname, ‘Methodists’.

The Methodist society started at the Old Foundry, Moorfields, London and quickly spread to Bristol. As the new buildings went up the Methodists became institutionalized, though they were still part of the Church of England. Wesley always declared that the Methodists were a ‘society’ or a ‘connexion’ not a church but by the time of the great controversy with the Calvinists in 1771 Methodists numbered just over 26,000; by the time of his death in 1791 they were nearly 57,000.

In the early days of Methodism, Whitefield was better known than Wesley. It was he who first preached to the Kingswood miners. He established himself in London at the Moorfields Tabernacle (1741) and the Tottenham Court Chapel (1756).

The two men worked together for a while but as early as the 1740s differences surfaced over predestination. Whitefield and Selina Countess of Huntingdon (1707-91) were Calvinists. Whitefield became her chaplain in 1748. Following his death she set up her own chapels in the spa towns, Bath, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells. In 1768 she founded Trevecca College in Wales under the superintendence of Howel Harris for the training of ‘her’ clergy. In 1779 the Consistory Court in London disavowed her claim to appoint as many chaplains as she chose ; she therefore seceded from the Church of England and set up her ‘Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion’.

The Calvinist Methodists were only really successful in Wales. Their comparative failure in England can be ascribed in part by Whitefield’s failure to make legal provisions for his Connexion.

Wesley’s brand of Evangelical Arminianism was a distinct body of thought within Evangelicalism. His position within the Church was anomalous. What was the status of his congregations in Presbyterian Scotland? What about the law in England, which stated that all unauthorized religious buildings had to be licensed as Dissenting chapels? In 1787 Wesley reluctantly advised his societies that this had to be done.

A second, more serious force was pushing him away from the Church of England. Methodists in America found their work seriously affected when war broke out, and with the withdrawal of many Anglican clergy there was no-one to whom his followers could go to receive Communion. Accordingly in 1784 he took a stand on his own rights as an ordained priest of the Church of England to ordain men on his own initiative. With great inconsistency he was furious when the leaders of the American Methodists allowed themselves to be called bishops!

In 1784 Wesley drew up a Deed of Declaration; this appointed a Conference of 100 men (the ‘Legal Hundred’) to govern the Church after his death.

Do you want to read Wesley's sermons? Possibly not, but if you do, this website is the place to go to.

There is a useful timeline of Wesley's life here.

Hostility
The Methodists aroused extraordinary hostility. In 1748, for example, Wesley received a physical battering at Calne when the local curate advertised for volunteers to attack him. The war waged on the Staffordshire Methodists in 1743 and 1744 was perhaps the most bitter of all such campaigns of intimidation. They were ‘irregular’, they conducted mass meetings, and they arose at a time of deep political controversy. Their class meetings subverted the existing hierarchical society. They had (from the 1770s) women preachers such as Mary Bosqanquet They arose at a sensitive political time. They were thought to be Jesuits in disguise. Very soon they were accused of Jacobitism. At the end of the 18th century, the time of the French Revolution, they were accused of Jacobinism.

They were constantly accused of superstition, credulity, extravagant behaviour. When James Boswell expressed belief in the second sight, the duchess of Argyll put him down with ‘I fancy you will turn Methodist’.

Public Advertiser, 28 Feb. 1774:

‘The Methodists have got such Hold of the weak Part of Mankind, that if any of these People meet with any Opposition or Contradiction, they think they have a Right to take away their own Lives; on Wednesday last one of these infatuated Men threw himself into the River in this Town [Brigg]; and notwithstanding the Remonstrances and Endeavours of several Persons present, obstinately drowned himself.’

Anglican Evangelicals
The awakening was wider than Methodism and included prominent clergy such as Samuel Walker of Truro and William Grimshaw of Haworth, who never adopted Methodist itinerancy. In Olney William Cowper and John Newton produced the Olney Hymns (1779). Newton’s Authentic Narrative (1764) provided the record of his conversion and his previous life as a slave-trader. In 1780 Richard Cecil took over the proprietary chapel of St John’s Bedford Row. These Anglicans were the spiritual fathers of the age of Wilberforce, whose conversion in 1785 marked a new development in the history of Evangelicalism.

Religion in the eighteenth century

2006-11-17T09:09:00.000Z

Voltaire saw religious liberty as characteristic of England.

‘Everyone is permitted to serve God in whatever way he thinks proper.’

Strictly speaking, this was not the case. The 1698 Blasphemy Act made denying the doctrine of the Trinity, the truth of Christianity, or the authority of Scripture punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment. (For the notorious case of Thomas Aikenhead in Scotland, see here. For the case of the Chevalier de la Barre in France, see here, if you read French.)

In England the Blasphemy Law was rarely invoked. Since the Toleration Act of 1689 the Church of England had lost its powers to compel church attendance. Even before 1689 it had never provided a truly national religion. England (to a lesser extent Scotland) was a religiously diverse country. The Church of England was itself divided with bitter conflicts between Whigs and high Tories. The parish structure was proving inadequate in an age of population growth and incipient industrialization. New, disorderly settlements, such as the Kingswood colliery near Bristol, were not amenable to clerical control.

The 27 Anglican dioceses differed in size and wealth. Rochester had fewer than 150 parishes, Lincoln over 1500. Sodor and Man was the smallest (no seat in the Lords). There were great variations in episcopal income. Bishops were increasingly aristocratic; the fathers of over 20% of George III’s bishops were connected with the peerage. But it was also a career open to talent (Potter, Gibson, Warburton, Hurd). The annual Parliamentary session kept the bishops in London for a considerable time each year.

Anglican public worship was uniform: matins, ante-communion, sermon; evensong in the afternoon. There was great regional variation over the practice of ‘double duty’. Very few parishes fell below the canonical minimum of three communion services a year.

The parish churches we see today are the result of Victorian alterations: the raised steps leading to the altar in the east end of the church, the candles on the altar, the pews. Eighteenth-century churches had boxed pews that were rented out and opened by a pew-opener. The pulpit is likely to have been three-decker.

An age of negligence?
The historiography of the 18th century church has been dominated by anachronistic Victorian criticisms (Evangelical and Tractarian) that it was corrupt, materialistic and spiritually moribund. This was essentially a criticism of latitudinarian Whig bishops like Benjamin Hoadley (1676-1761) who insisted that the Church was subordinate to the state and never visited his diocese of Bangor in the six years he was bishop. But modern scholarship has found much evidence of conscientious Episcopal administration. The evidence of visitation returns suggests that the Church was more successful in maintaining frequent services than its critics claimed.
Clergy were now almost entirely graduates, and Queen Anne’s Bounty relieved much clerical poverty. But pluralism and non-residence were constant problems and were an open invitation to Dissenters and anti-clericals to attack the Church. Few new churches were built, but many galleries were put in.

Voluntary religious activity was a remarkable feature of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (founded 1698) printed Christian literature and promoted and co-ordinated the operation of hundreds of local charity schools. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (founded 1701) promoted overseas missions. The volume of religious publications remained high. On average nearly 100 sermons a year went into print during the first half of the 18th century. The hymns of Isaac Watts were widely sung (though hymn singing was not an official part of Anglican worship until the 1820s).

Personal religious attitudes are harder to quantify. But diaries, the contents of libraries and periodicals, literature painting and music show the evidence of Christian belief. Endowments of churches and schools are another form of evidence. There was still a large demand for religious chapbooks and ‘godly broadsides’. Popular superstition remained high – represented by almanacs and fortune tellers. John Wesley continued to believe in witches.

However, much of the higher reaches of the Church and the university of Cambridge in particular were dominated by latitudinarian or even deist thinking – a stress on natural rather than supernatural religion and reason rather then ‘enthusiasm’. Much of this was a reaction to the ‘fanaticism’ of the 17th century. This could lead to heresy or unbelief, but the commonest reaction was blandness.

There was no coherent alternative to Christianity. The scepticism of Gibbon and Hume was not representative. Bernard Mandeville was very secular in his thinking and John Wilkes notoriously anti-religious, but it is hard to know how widespread such attitudes were.

Dissenters
The Dissenting denominations were Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and Quakers. The Toleration Act gave freedom of worship to all but Unitarians, but required them to register their places of worship and ensure that only officially licensed preachers conducted Sunday services. In spite of these difficulties between 1689 and 1710 nearly 4,000 Dissenting chapels and meeting houses were licensed though their numbers were probably stagnant.

Because the Church of England dominated the countryside and the universities, Dissenting chapels were found predominantly in urban areas and were frequented by the middling sort. The sacramental tests acted as a barrier to the more lucrative and prestigious public offices, though after 1745 the passage of a series of annual Indemnity Acts increased the difficulty of prosecuting non-Anglican office-holders under the Test Acts, and Presbyterian businessmen effectively dominated several towns.

Case study: Bristol, which next to London had the largest Dissenting community in London, is a good example of this. The Dissenters, including many Baptists, were involved in local government from the highest to the lowest offices. Between 1754-84, 11 members of Lewins Mead Presbyterian chapel held the office of mayor, thus tying up the post for more than a third of the period. The unusually high occupational status of the Bristol Dissenters is confirmed by their dominance in local politics. Dissenters held one of the two sheriff’s seats for 15 of these 30 years and between 1771 and 1776 they did so without a break.

Dissenters could therefore vote and stand for Parliament, but only 25 Dissenting MPs have been identified between 1715 and 1760. The Lords was even more of an Anglican preserve. It was not possible for Dissenters to matriculate at Oxford and Cambridge, as this required subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Among Dissenting grievances was the fact that besides supporting their own chapels and meeting-houses, they had to pay local church fees - rates and tithes. Following Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) they could only be lawfully married in a parish church by a clergyman of the Church of England, yet they might be denied right of burial in a local churchyard.
Presbyterianism gave birth to what became virtually a separate Unitarian movement.

Roman Catholics
Catholics were just 1% of the population (at most 60-80,000 people), clustered geographically in Lancashire, Staffordshire, the north-east,West Sussex and London, under the authority of a vicar apostolic. Until the Irish immigration at the end of the century, they were expanding at a slower rate than the population as a whole. Catholics had to pay a double rate of land tax, and faced numerous restrictions on residence and travel. Yet enforcement was always patchy. Until the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791 (scroll down) penal laws made it difficult for Catholics to worship openly (and keep within the law) and to inherit property. With the relaxing of the law, life became easier. In 1792 Winchester Catholics erected an elaborate Gothic church.

Catholics were at pains to stress their loyalty to the Crown. From 1766 (the year of the Old Pretender’s death) the vicars apostolic ordered their clergy to pray for the King.

Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital

2006-11-13T21:02:00.000Z

Captain Thomas Coram (c. 1668-1751) retired to Rotherhithe in 1719 after achieving success in the New World, establishing a shipwright's business in Boston, and later in Taunton, Massachusetts.

On his frequent walks through the City on winter mornings, Coram was appalled at the sight of dead and dying babies abandoned on the streets. This inspired him to take action. In 1722, inspired by the foundling hospitals on the Continent, he advocated one for London. His idea was to petition the king for a charter to create a non-profit-making organization supported by subscriptions, but at first this met with no success. He found it impossible to gain the support of anyone influential enough to approach the king and there continued to be great opposition to the idea of a Foundling Hospital established, partly because it was considered to encourage wantonness and prostitution.

The turning point in Coram’s campaign was the ‘ladies petition’ of 1729 signed by 21 peeresses, and the patronage of Queen Caroline. His petitions came before the king in council in July 1737. Subscriptions poured in and on 17 October 1739 the King signed a Royal Charter for a hospital for the ‘education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children’. The Governors and Guardians of this new enterprise met to receive the Charter on 20th November 1739 at Somerset House. The group included many of the important figures of the day: dukes and earls, magnates and merchant bankers. Supporters of standing included Dr Richard Mead (the foremost physician) and the artist William Hogarth.

The first children were admitted on 25th March 1741, into a temporary house in Hatton Garden. Scenes of extraordinary drama and poignancy followed as the cries of the departing mothers and children echoed through the night.

The Governors began the search for a permanent site that would house the purpose-built hospital. A solution was found in the area known as Bloomsbury Fields, the earl of Salisbury's estate, lying north of Great Ormond Street and west of Gray's Inn Lane. It consisted of 56 acres of land amidst green fields. The price was £7000, the earl himself donating £500 of this to the Hospital. The first children were received on 1 October 1745. In 1750 a benefit concert of the Messiah was performed there. Hogarth was both a governor and a benefactor.

The hospital quickly became one of the sights of London and wealthy ladies watched from behind screens as the mothers had their babies accepted or turned away. Babies had to be turned away because there were never enough places as women poured in from the provinces in order to place their children. By 1770 parliamentary grants had ceased and the hospital became a private establishment relying on voluntary subscriptions.

The great Enlightenment love affair

2006-11-03T06:50:00.000Z

As a diversion from purely British history, you might enjoy reading this review in the Telegraph of David Bodanis's Passionate Minds: the great Enlightenment love affair. The subject of this book is Emilie du Châtelet, Voltaire's mistress and (more importantly) a considerable scientist in her own right. And this is a different type of book altogether from Nancy Mitford's frothy Voltaire in Love which purports to deal with the same subject.

Du Châtelet's greatest achievement was to translate Newton's Principia into French. She also, as the review in the Economist (not on line) points out, 'exposed Newton's obscure geometric proofs using the more accessible language of calculus. And she teased out of his convoluted web of theorems the crucial implications for the study of gravity and energy. That laid the foundation for the next century's discoveries in theoretical physics.'

She died from a childbirth infection, aged 42.

The book raises important issues for October and February starters alike. Was there a role for passion as well as reason in the Enlightenment? Did women have an Enlightenment? If so, why are the female philosophes and intellectuals so much less well known than the men?

PS. The Guardian reviewer thinks du Châtelet's achievements have been exaggerated.

Eighteenth-century philanthropy

2006-11-03T01:44:00.000Z

Although the eighteenth century has a reputation for lax morals (and this may be true when it is compared with the Victorian period) it was also an age of profound moral earnestness and of burgeoning philanthropy. One of the key moral values was ‘benevolence’. Both the aristocracy and the middling sort founded and contributed to numerous and varied charities, which acted as a sort of proto-welfare state.

Besides ‘benevolence’ there were other motives for charity. One was ‘social control’ – fears of a moral collapse among the ‘common people’ and the desire for trustworthy servants. Another was the fear that the population was declining and the consequent need to save lives – especially young lives.

The most modern forms of charity were subscription charities. The first efflorescence of these charities occurred in the 1690s alongside other forms of subscription association such as the Reformation of Manners societies and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Certain features marked the new charities out:
(a) They were not linked by any formal ties to the apparatus of local government and they drew no revenue from any form of taxation.
(b) They devoted considerable care and energy to wooing subscribers, often publishing annual reports and subscribers’ names.
(c) They commonly gave subscribers a voice, even outright control over management.

Below are a series of posts relating to various eighteenth-century charities.

Charity schools

2006-11-03T01:42:00.000Z

Charity schools, which emerged at the end of the 17th century and burgeoned in the 18th century, were the first widely popular form of subscription charity. They arose to supply the need for trustworthy servants and in early 18th century London they were the chief outlet of philanthropy. In the 1690s they were no more than a handful; by 1700 there were 112, educating 2597 boys and 1490 girls. In 1723 the high water mark was reached when 1,329 charity schools were recorded, though the numbers then remained static until the 1770s. One reason for the decline in growth lies in the fact that after 1714 the Whigs suspected them of Jacobitism.

Education: They provided education in the 3 Rs but at their heart was Christian instruction. They were catechitical schools established to give instruction in reading the Bible and the catechism and sometimes (in the cases of the boys) in writing and casting accounts. The children, who attended between the ages of 6 and 10, received instruction and clothing which marked them off from grammar school children and those in the private venture schools. On Sundays the teachers accompanied the pupils to church and sat with them in pews reserved for them.

Teachers: These were required by the SPCK to be communicant members of the Church of England, of ‘meek temper and humble behaviour’. London charity-school masters were full-time teachers. They had to be in school from 7 to 11 am and 1-5pm in summer (with shorter hours for winter. The men had to be able to ‘write a good hand’ and understand basic arithmetic. They had to be approved by the minister of the parish. Women teachers were not required to understand arithmetic.

Financing: Some children paid a nominal sum, others had their schooling financed by charity. The subscription schools drew funds not only from the well-to-do but also from substantial numbers of the middling sort. The funds and the administration were vested in trustees, usually members of families resident in the neighbourhood. Charity sermons were an important money-raising device.

From the mid 18th century subscriptions fell off and many schools had to depend on charity sermons and personal bequests. The decline was probably caused by minimal population growth and signs of a labour shortage in the 1730s and40s. By the end of the century, when the population began to rise, charity schools were overtaken by Sunday schools, which had the advantage of not taking the children away from work.

Charity schools flourished in the provinces. The first parish based school in Bristol was sparked by a bequest in 1699, which allowed for the education of seven poor orphans of Temple parish. It was founded by Arthur Bedford, vicar of the Temple church; the patron was Edward Colston. Bedford was a correspondent for the SPCK.

Case study: Mary Webb’s school, Fishponds, Bristol. The school was set up following the will of Mary Webb, dated 15 October 1729. The school was to be set up in the parish of Stapleton for teaching ‘Twenty poor Boys and Ten poor Girls’ and the master was to be paid £15 pa.; the remaining part of the charity was to provide an almshouse and 12d a week for ‘three poor old Women’ of the parish.

Hospitals

2006-11-03T00:40:00.000Z

For most of the 18th and 19th centuries hospitals were the resort solely of the poor; the better off were treated in their own homes. There is no evidence that hospital treatment improved the health of the patients!

St Thomas’s Hospital had been refounded in Southwark in 1551 on a former monastic foundation. In 1693 the governors decided to rebuild and the rebuilding was completed in 1709. Over 250 patients could be accommodated in wards each containing 12 to 29 beds. The finest room in the hospital was the governors’ hall where gold-lettered wall tablets recorded the names of subscribers.

Some of the earliest of the new general hospitals were foundation charities paid for by wealthy philanthropists. The physician John Radcliffe (d. 1714) of Oxford left a bequest for both the extension of St Bartholomew’s in London and the erection of the Radcliffe Infirmary in his home town. Another physician John Addenbrooke (d. 1719) of Cambridge He left a modest fortune ‘to hire, fit-up, purchase or erect a building fit for a small physicall hospital for poor people’—an intention only disclosed in his will. Though the master and fellows of St Catharine's were given responsibility as trustees, the will was only implemented with the aid of subscriptions and an Act of Parliament. The hospital was not completed until October 1766.

Guy’s Hospital was chartered by Act of Parliament following the will of Thomas Guy (d. 1724). He profited greatly from well-timed investments in South Sea stock and the hospital was founded from the bulk of his fortune of £200,000. It was intended for 400 sick persons deemed to be incurable for treatment elsewhere and took in 2,000 patients per annum. A ward for incurable lunatics was also established.

But Guy’s was not typical. The other general hospitals established at this time were subscription. They were entirely dependant on gifts and legacies and there were administered by governors appointed by the subscribers.
1720: Westminster; this was largely due to the initiative of Henry Hoare, banker of Stourhead.
1733: St George’s
1740: London (by 1785, 7,000 patients a year)
1745: Middlesex

With very few exceptions the management and administration of provincial hospitals were entirely in the hands of all male subscribers of 2 guineas per annum and benefactors of £20, otherwise known as governors, each of whom had the right to recommend patients and to have a vote in the management of affairs. Women made up to 10-20% of annual hospital contributors and up to 25% of weekly ones, but they had to exercise their privileges by proxy.

The potential for undue influence by the elites was circumscribed by the use of ballots during contested elections and second by the rule that the accounts had to be opened to any subscriber. Persons whose subscriptions were not paid up were excluded from privileges.

The enthusiasm of the medical profession aroused fears that infirmaries were being used to carry out experiments on the poor. But the main benefit for physicians lay in the fact that they were permitted and expected to have paying pupils of their own in attendance.

The London hospitals carried out an increasingly specialized range of treatments:
1749: British Lying-in Hospital in Long Acre
1750: City of London Lying-in Hospital
1752: General Lying-in Hospital (later Queen Charlotte’s)

1746: two smallpox hospitals were founded.
1746: the Lock Hospital for venereal diseases: patients received moral instruction as well as medical care. It was closely associated with Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion. Her preacher, Martin Madam, was her chaplain until his public advocacy of polygamy in 1780 compelled him to resign. His assistant was Thomas Haweis, who was the executor of Lady Huntingdon’s will.

1751: St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane was established partly because the waiting lists for Bedlam were so long, partly because Bedlam’s constitution did not did not allow subscribers to share in its government. Public viewing at Bedlam finally stopped in 1770 at considerable financial loss to the foundation. The most successful ‘mad doctor’ at St Luke’s was the highly respected William Battie.
1763: Newcastle asylum
1776: Manchester
1777: York
In 1796 the Quaker William Tuke founded The Retreat in York, a model of human care of the mentally ill.

Provincial case study: The Bristol Infirmary
The first voluntary general hospital in the provinces was the Winchester County Hospital admitted its first patient in 1736. This was followed by the Bristol Infirmary. In 1736, 78 people signed a memorandum promising subscriptions of from two to six guineas annually. The subscribers alone were to have the power to recommend one inpatient and two outpatients at a time for admission to the hospital. An initial £1,500 was provided by John Elbridge, the Controller of Customs. The Imfirmary’s motto was ‘Charity Universal’. The first patients, 17 men and 17 women, were admitted in December 1737. The opening of the Infirmary was celebrated by a church service at St James attended by the Mayor and Corporation, the medical staff and the trustees (the subscribers).

In 1788 plans for the enlargement of the Infirmary began.

28 June 1788: Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal:

‘The foundation Stone of the Centre Building of our new Infirmary was laid on Tuesday last when William Turner, Esq of Belmont, Somerset [now Tyntesfield], nobly presented one thousand pounds to the Treasurer towards completing the benevolent design. - May the opulent of our city and neighbourhood speedily follow so humane and liberal an example! and thereby prevent the capital stock of this excellent charity from being diminished, which otherwise must be the case before the building can be completed ... the increased size of the Hospital will require a great increase of income to support it, and the annual subscriptions for that purpose being extremely precarious, its permanent fund should be as inviolate as possible. ...’
25 Oct: FFBJ: ‘Last week died in College Green, Miss Turner, sister of Wm Turner, Exq of Belmont, near Wraxal, Somerset, - who, we have good authority to say, has left a very handsome legacy to our Infirmary’.

Some other charities

2006-11-03T00:04:00.000Z

The Magdalen
At the onset of the Seven Years War moral outrage over prostitution helped lead to the foundation of the Magdalen in 1758. A number of businessmen were involved, including the Baltic merchant John Thornton. At the same time the Female Orphan Asylum was founded. The Magdalen preacher William Dodd was later hanged for forgery. In 1765 Queen Charlotte bestowed her patronage.

The Marine Society
In 1756 the philanthropist Jonas Hanway, a member of the Russia Company, approached his fellow member, the Hull merchant John Thornton, with a proposal to encourage the unemployed of London to volunteer for the Royal Navy with an offer of a suit of clothes, the Admiralty bounty and a religious tract. The Marine Society was founded on 25 June 1756, its (revealing!) motto: ‘Charity and Policy United’). In 1786 it commissioned the first pre-sea training ship in the world for poor boys of good character.

Eighteenth-century society

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Population and Family
In 1689 England had c. 4.93m, Scotland c.1.2m, Ireland c. 2m, Wales c. 300,000. In European terms Britain accounted for c. 4% of the Continent’s inhabitants. France had nearly 22m, Spain c. 8.5m and Italy and Germany c. 12 m each. By 1726 England’s population had risen to 5.44m.

Between 1714 and 1740 population growth was steady rather than spectacular. Between 1741 and 1771 the annual increase grew by 0.5%. But between 1771 and 1811 the increase was 1%. By the time of Waterloo the population of England had risen to 10.5 million. The Industrial Revolution broke through the age-old constraints which had until then imposed a population ceiling of 5 million.

Compared with today, English society in 1700 had a large proportion of young people. In the second half of the 17th century the average age of women at first marriage was 26.5 years. This rose slightly between 1700 and 1719, before declining significantly in the second half of the 18th century. This pattern of marriage - taking place well after the age of sexual maturity - was a significant brake on population growth, helping to limit average family size to a little less than five. Men married on average a year later at about 27 or 28. In the first decade of the 18th century 10% of the population were celibate. Illegitimacy rates were low – only 2% of births c. 1700.3 However, between 15 and 20% of first births were pre-nuptially conceived (three times the level of France). Figures for abortions are (of course) unobtainable.

In England (and most of Western Europe) the nuclear rather than the extended family was the norm and most people established their own home at marriage. Old people lived in their own homes (or almshouses) only moving in with their children when they became very frail.

Town and Country
Probably 80% of the population lived in scattered hamlets and villages though England was more urbanised than most European countries. In 1700 London had a population of 500,000, making up half the urban population and was overtaking Paris as Christendom’s largest city.5 (By 1775 London’s population had increased to 750,000.) Only six other English urban centres had more than 10,000 people. But by 1700 Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield had already emerged as important centres of industry and trade. Defoe described Manchester as ‘one of the greatest, if not really the greatest, mere village in England’. Bristol, Liverpool and Whitehaven were expanding because of the Caribbean trade. To quote Julian Hoppit

‘England in 1700 ... was far from simply an agrarian society and was already a mixed economy with prominent industrial and commercial sectors.’

The Middling Sort
English society was fluid rather than fixed. But it was also hierarchical consisting of the royal family, the five degrees of nobility, the gentry, the ‘middling sort’ and the (probably) 70% who did manual work, who were described as ‘the labouring poor’, the ‘vulgar’ or ‘the common people’. Few questioned the divine plan for a hierarchically ordered society.

On the other hand it was also recognized that the ‘middling sort’ were growing in importance. It has been estimated that by the 1760s they comprised 40% of the population.

Who were the 'middling sort'? A rough definition is people earning between £40 and £400 pa (the professional and mercantile classes and those traders and craftspeople who paid the poor rate and had a modicum of disposable income).

Their rise in wealth and status attracted the attention of conservative moralists like Oliver Goldsmith (‘Of the Pride and Luxury of the Middling Class of People’, The Bee, 1759):

'Of all the follies and absurdities which this great metropolis labours under there is not one … appears in a more glaring and ridiculous light than the pride and luxury of the middling class of people … You shall see a grocer or a tallow-chandler sneak from behind the compter, clap on a laced coat and a bag, fly to the EO table, throw away fifty pieces with some sharping man of quality.’

[E and O tables were so called from the letters E and O, the turning up of which decided the bet. They were otherwise called Roulette and Roly Poly, from the balls used in them. They seem to have been introduced in England about the year 1739. The first was set up at Tunbridge and proved extremely profitable to the proprietors.]

From c. 1680 doctors were establishing professional status. Like attorneys – another growing body – they were distinguished by a body of knowledge they claimed to utilize. The other professions were the clergy (an increasing number of whom were graduates) and naval and military officers.

‘Polite’ Society
The term, derived from the Greek polis (city state), carried implications of good breeding and sociability. ‘Politeness’ united (most of) the aristocracy gentry and middling sort in a common culture of ‘gentility’. These members of polite society read the periodicals, the Tatler and Spectator, and (from 1738) the Gentleman’s Magazine. They frequented the spa towns of (eg) Bath, Tunbridge (not yet Tunbridge Wells) and Buxton. Those who could afford to do so spent the winter in London where they attended plays and concerts, and retreated to the countryside in the summer where they paid ceaseless calls on their neighbours and attended the provincial theatre and assemblies.

Coffee Houses
One particular notable sphere of ‘polite society’ was the coffee-house, an institution that had existed in England since the reign of Charles II. It was often a domicile for the keeper and his family, sometimes a first-floor room in a private house. Men sat at tables, read the newspapers that were supplied and drank coffee. In 1714 there were probably 650 in London and Westminster. In some of them there was strict political segregation. The Tories met at the Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall, Ozinda’s Chocolate House in St James’s Street, Smyrna in Pall Mall. The Whigs met at the St James’s Coffee House, Button’s Coffee House in Covent Garden and Whites (a gambling club).

The most important of the Whig clubs was the Kit-Kat Club, which flourished between 1696 and 1720. Its toast was ‘to the immortal memory of King William’. It took its name from Christopher Cat, a mutton-piemaker and proprietor of the Cat and Fiddle in Grays Inn Lane where the society first met. It had fifty-five members, including the most powerful Whig grandees. Literary members included Addison, Steele, Congreve and Vanburgh. The club’s artist was Sir Godfrey Kneller. The Kit Kat contributed to the building of the new Haymarket Theatre (opened April 1705). Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane depicted the Whig ideal of a constitutional monarchy.

The coffee house was masculine space. (The tea-table was women’s space - and this was purely domestic.) However, the keeper of a coffee-house was often a woman - a ‘coffee-woman’. She had low social status and was often associated with prostitution.

Coffee houses fitted into the Spectator project of masculine ‘politeness’ – intelligence and good breeding without foppery. Foppery was when men imported female manners into the masculine sphere. The fop used the coffee house for a frivolous end. There were fears that the openness and freedom of coffee houses would be an opportunity for atheism and foppery. There were also fears that the coffee houses were tainted by partisan politics. The Tatler and the Spectator argued that the public sphere should be a school for moral reflection rather than heated political debate.

In 1791 a German resident of London (Frederick Augustus Wenderborn) published a travel guide for continental readers. He estimated that London alone then had three thousand coffee houses compared to a mere six or seven hundred in Paris. He warned his readers that they would find the locals hunched over newspapers, diligently reading. He was not the only foreign observer to comment on the newspaper reading habits of the British public.

Social mobility
Visiting foreigners frequently commented on the social mobility they met with in England.15 This was a source of pride to Englishmen, as it seemed the natural complement to their legal rights and political liberties. Rags to riches stories featured in plays and novels. ‘Polite society’ enjoyed instances of humbly born poets whose ‘untutored’ genius was rewarded by fame and riches. One actual instance was the thresher, Stephen Duck, who, thanks to the patronage of Queen Caroline, became a court poet. Many clergy and literary men were of modest origins. Johnson was the son of a bookseller. The biblical scholar Thomas Scott was the son of a grazier.

Poverty
Below the middling sort a skilled worker might in prosperous times command up to £60, which would place him at the top of ‘the labouring poor’. Within this group, the sharpest line of demarcation was between those who paid the poor rates and those who were not only exempted by poverty but who were all too likely to find themselves applying for relief.

How many fell into this category? In 1700 about 30% of the population was unable to pay the hearth tax. Each year c. 15% of the population was in receipt of some sort of charitable aid. Somewhat more than a half of the English people would experience poverty at some point in their lives. Few enjoyed reasonably full and secure employment, and those under 14 and over 59 were usually judged unable to provide fully for themselves. It has been estimated that more than half of English people in this period would experience poverty at some point in their lives.

The poor rate: Uniquely in Europe, poor relief in England operated in a ‘mixed economy’ of charity (private and public) and parish relief under the Acts of 1597-1601 and 1662. Philanthropic individuals set up charitable schemes such as almshouses. The parish levied a compulsory poor rate on its better off inhabitants. This could work surprisingly well. The Poor Law operated in a face-to-face world where people and their problems were known. A person with a settlement had a real claim to relief. The Poor Law’s great strength was its statutory basis, flexibility and low overheads. By 1700 it was able to relieve c. 4-5% of the population on a permanent basis. This was a remarkable achievement.

The workhouse experiment: But for all the merits of the poor law, the money raised was never enough, especially in hard times. Only the resources of the rate-paying parishioners could be drawn upon. This meant that in poor parishes very little relief could be provided for the poor. The parishes lacked the means to provide the sort of institutions to deal with poverty that were available on the Continent.

In Bristol in 1696, inspired by the Quaker John Bellers, all 17 parishes came together to form a Corporation of the Poor to provide a house of industry where pauper labour would be made profitable. The new workhouse had an educational purpose – to train the children of the poor in the hope that it would reduce expenditure on poor relief and cleanse the city streets of vagabonds.

In 1723 the Bristol experiment was endorsed by Act of Parliament, known as Knatchbull's Act after the Kentish MP who sponsored it. Parishes, either singly or in collaboration with others, were permitted to establish workhouses and withhold relief from applicants who refused to enter them. One of the main aims of the workhouse movement was to stimulate the profitability of such establishments by entrusting their management to private contractors. But in practice – as happened in Marylebone - contractors often exploited the poor and defrauded the parish. By the 1770s there were nearly 2,000 workhouses in England, with a capacity in excess of 90,000.

The next significant development in workhouse history was Gilbert's Act (1782). This laid down that in places where it was adopted, workhouses were to be used only for the aged and infirm and for children, not the able-bodied.

English commentators frequently complained that the system of poor relief was ineffectual. Critics said it drained the middling sort – those who contributed – and encouraged idleness. In 1786 Joseph Townsend’s Dissertation on the Poor Laws argued that the poor laws should be abolished, forcing the able-bodied poor to starve or work for their livelihoods, leaving the plight of the rest to voluntary charity. But no government was willing to adopt such a draconian solution.

Hogarth: An Election

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There is a good website on Hogarth's election paintings with lots of useful links to commentaries, explanations and analyses of Georgian politics here.

A few statistics: After 1707 the House of Commons returned 558 members representing 314 constituencies:
England, 489 members, 245 constituencies
Wales 24 members, 24 constituencies
Scotland 45 members, 45 constituencies.

This representation remained the same until 1800, with the increase of 100 Irish members.

The Empire Lectures

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If you can, try to get to some of these amazing Empire Lectures offered jointly by the National Maritime Museum and the Institute of Historical Research.

The rise of Walpole

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In effect, the Septennial act extended the Whig political supremacy for the next decade. But the lack of a Tory challenged meant that the Whigs began to quarrel among themselves and by 1717 two factions had developed: James, 1st earl Stanhope and Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland versus Charles Townshend and his brother-in-law, Robert Walpole.

Walpole was the third son of a Norfolk squire. Born in 1676, he had been destined for the Church, but the deaths of his brothers propelled him into politics. In 1699 he married Catherine Shorter, the daughter of a Baltic timber merchant. From 1702 he had been MP for Kings Lynn, identifying himself as a Whig. In 1706 he became a member of Prince George’s Council of Admiralty, where he showed himself prepared to work with the Tories. When the Whigs fell from power in 1710 he remained in office for another year as Treasurer of the Navy. He showed an immense capacity for hard work (in his office at 6 am) and immense ambition. However he was sent to the Tower in 1712, which made him a Whig hero. His period of imprisonment had been short and comfortable, and he was able to write a pamphlet answering Swift. With the return of the Whigs to power in 1714-15 he was made first Paymaster of the Forces. This was a junior position, but his dominance of the Commons made him a high-profile politician.

The first Whig schism
Political resentments were deepened by divisions within the royal family. In the summer of 1716 Stanhope accompanied the king to Hanover leaving the Prince of Wales as regent. During the king’s absence, encouraged by Walpole and Townshend, the prince flaunted his position. The clear implication was that the opposition Whigs were encouraging the accusation that Stanhope was neglecting Britain for Hanover.

This was to be a common theme of the reigns of George I and George II. The European situation in 1716 was very tense. Since 1700 Sweden and Russia had been involved in the Great Northern War. In 1715 George I in his capacity as Elector of Hanover, allied with Russia, Prussia and Denmark against Sweden.

Stanhope saw the war as a chance to make Britain a major player in European diplomacy. In Hanover he negotiated secretly with the French government which secured Britain’s support for France against Spain. This was a far-reaching diplomatic revolution, secured in the Triple and Quadruple Alliances (1717, 1718).

In December 1716 the king dismissed Townshend as Secretary of State and demoted him to the lord lieutenancy of Ireland. This caused the Prince of Wales to quarrel openly with his father. In April 1717 Townshend was dismissed from the government and on 10 April Walpole resigned his own office. Stanhope became First Lord of the Treasury.

There was now a concentrated parliamentary opposition in which Walpole was opportunistically prepared to ally with the Tories. The figurehead was the Prince of Wales, who in December 1717 set up his own court at Leicester House. Walpole was the chief politician attached to this court, and he enjoyed a long and enduring friendship with Princess Caroline.

However, opposition was not a fruitful tactic. Though the opposition could rally their troops in the commons, the government had a majority in the Lords. So long as the ministry had the king’s confidence there was no reason why Stanhope should not remain in power and Walpole be excluded from it.

In April 1720 a reconciliation of sorts took place between the king and Prince of Wales. In June Townshend became Lord President of the Council and Walpole returned to his post of Paymaster General. But these were junior positions. It would need something else to restore Walpole to his former position.

The South Sea Bubble
This was the first great stock-market crash in England. It became a symbol of sleaze and the 'get-rich quick' mentality of the age.

The South Sea Company had been founded by Queen Anne's minister, Robert Harley in 1711, as a counter to the Whig dominated Bank of England, and, with a capital base of £9.2 million and the prospect of a lucrative trade to Spanish America, it immediately became one of the leading commercial enterprises of the age though Britain’s cool relationship with Spain always made it a dangerous project.

At the beginning of 1720 the price of South Sea stock rose dramatically, fed by bluff and lies from the Company. By June it had reached an unsustainable price; by September it was sinking fast and many were ruined. There were spectacular bankruptcies; Lord Londonderry lost £59,000, the dukes of Bolton and Wharton were in a similar plight. ‘It was a defining moment of early financial capitalism’ (Hoppit, 2000, p. 338). Walpole showed no more foresight than anyone else – like many others, he lost heavily. But the fact that he was in Norfolk in September and October at the height of the panic gave him the air of being above the fray.

November 1720 saw the publication of the first of Cato’s Letters by the radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, ‘to call for public justice upon the wicked managers of the South Sea Scheme’ and to attack corruption in general. In December the governors of the Company were arrested and their assets confiscated.

In February 1721 with attacks on the government intensifying, Stanhope defended himself so vigorously in the Lords that he burst a blood vessel and died. In March John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was voted guilty of fraud by the Commons and sent to the Tower.

The next victim was Sunderland. If he fell, the ministry would crash, and if that happened, the king would be forced to turn to the Tories.11 On 15 March he was tried in the Lords for corruption, but was acquitted by 233 votes to 172. A few weeks later he resigned and was replaced by Walpole as First Lord. (He died in April 1722.)

This was not seen at the time as a particularly momentous move as the office of Prime Minister did not really exist. The king disliked Walpole, as did most politicians, who resented his obvious love of power and lack of scruple. The Opposition was still out for the government’s blood and accusing Walpole of covering up for his colleagues’ misdemeanours. At this time he acquired the nickname, the Skreen-Master. Few Prime Ministers can have obtained office already so unpopular! But he was to hold the post for 20 years.

The 1722 Election
The election of March 1722 was the most hotly contested in the 18th century. 138 constituencies in England and Wales went to the polls, 20 in Scotland. If it had been decided by the votes of those counties and cities and boroughs with over 500 voters, or had it been determined by the total votes cast, the Tories would have won (and they would also have won the elections of 1734 and 1741). But in the mass of smaller boroughs, in many of which magnate influence or venality (or both) were pronounced, the Tories were totally crushed. The Whigs increased their majority to c. 200 even before hearing petitions.

As the results were coming in, Sunderland died of pleurisy (19 April), thus removing the one prominent Whig who might have posed a challenge to Walpole.

The Atterbury Plot
In May the public was informed of a Jacobite plot by Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester. In August Atterbury was arrested and was refused release under habeas corpus. When Parliament met in October, they agreed to suspend habeas corpus. In January 1723 both Houses passed a Bill of Pains and Penalties against Atterbury with huge majorities. In June he went into exile. With his departure went many of the last hopes of the High Church and the Tories.

By this time Walpole was supreme - hated and despised though unassailable. It was the beginning of an uninterrupted run of twenty years as Prime Minister (the ‘Robinocracy’, the ‘Venetian Oligarchy’) that, according to J. H. Plumb, gave the country a stability of government it had not known for a hundred years. But this was only possible because the Whigs had created one-party rule and because Europe was at peace.

Robert Walpole: the first prime minister

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The accession of George II in 1727 June did not bring about the fall of Walpole, as many had expected (and hoped). Walpole did not lose power even though George had frequently expressed his dislike of him because of the terms he had negotiated over the new king’s reconciliation with his father in 1720. But over the years Walpole had safeguarded himself against dismissal by cultivating Caroline, the new queen, and scrupulously avoiding Henrietta Howard, George’s mistress. As he put it, 'I got the right sow by the ear'. Caroline, ‘the most powerful queen consort of the Hanoverian period’ (New Dictionary of National Biography) was determined to keep him. On 15 June the king and Walpole had a long and fruitful talk about the civil list – the most generous treatment ever accorded a sovereign. The king had £800,000 pa, the queen £100,000. Only Walpole could have got such grants through the Commons. It was becoming clear that he would continue in office – but on what footing?

The ‘Robinocracy’
Walpole’s survival as the king's minister appeared to be a remarkable demonstration of his political dominance. It became a commonplace to describe him as 'the great man'. He was immensely powerful even though he faced constant opposition in parliament, the press, the nation at large. Townshend was a possible focus. He was no longer his brother-in-law (Walpole’s sister, Dolly, Townshend’s wife, had died in 1726) and there was increasing coolness between them. Lacking some important political friends, he had to cultivate the king and to build up a powerful patronage network.

This patronage stood the administration in good stead in the election of 1727. Walpole’s agent in the South-West wrote to him: ‘Every town has been tampered with [by the opposition] … if you don’t send money here beforehand, you may miss your views in more towns than one.’ However, the opposition published anti-government pamphlets and The Craftsman coined the phrase the ‘Robinocracy’ to describe the regime. Ballads were published with refrains such as ‘Robin will be out at last’. The opposition won two London seats.

Walpole and the Arts
On 29 January 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opened in London and ran for an unprecedented 62 nights. The political satire of this work was much more pointed and personal than anything in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Audiences found it easy to draw parallels between the highwayman Macheath and the thief-taker Peachum on the one hand and Walpole on the other. Henceforth the link between the thief and the corrupt statesman became a familiar trope in opposition literature, drawing especially on the popular accounts of the life of Jonathan Wild, the notorious mastermind of the London underworld executed in 1725 and the model for Gay's Peachum.

As delayed retaliation, in 1737 Walpole carried a bill through Parliament – the Licensing Act – which subjected plays to scrutiny by the Lord Chamberlain, making it impossible to produce a play that did not carry the government’s approval. For the rest of the eighteenth century, the theatre was politically bland.

Prime Minister
Walpole’s official title was First Lord of the Treasury, but he was also unofficially referred to as Prime Minister – a term of abuse. In 1735 he moved into 10 Downing Street (then no 5), the residence of a Mr Chicken, and he secured the property as a residence for all future First Lords of the Treasury.

The Excise Crisis
While the opposition were complaining that parliament was a mere rubber stamp for the executive, the government was threatened by a crisis of its own making in the 1733 session. This was the defeat of the Tobacco Excise Bill, a major plank in his fiscal strategy. In outline, Walpole's proposals were simple and broadly similar to the legislation introduced for tea, coffee, and chocolate in 1723.

1. All tobacco and wine (the legislation relating to wine was never introduced) were to be placed in the king's warehouse until all duties had been paid.
2. The existing customs duties, payable on import, were to be replaced for the most part by excise duties, payable when the goods were removed from the warehouse for consumption.

Walpole clearly saw this as an essentially technical measure that would increase government revenue, perhaps by as much as £300,000 a year, by curbing fraud and smuggling. He himself had considerable experience of smuggling – when Secretary at War he had smuggled his wines up the Thames; customs officers at Lynn once confiscated the brandy he was running in. In her old age his mother wrote him a letter telling him how she had foxed the customs officers at Wells. But Walpole the public man wanted to clean up the system. The sum saved would assist him in his aim of keeping the unpopular land tax low – an important consideration as a general election was due the following year.

But the measure was a political blunder and the proposals provoked massive opposition. Some of this came from retailers and traders who were concerned that the legislation would subject them to inspection by excise officers. Far more important, however, was the hostility of the wine and tobacco merchants, both in London and in the major provincial ports, many of whom were heavily implicated in fraud; the legislation represented an attack on a powerful pressure group with a vested interest in the existing system. Opposition propaganda made much of fears that the Tobacco Bill was merely the first step towards a ‘general excise’, a charge denied by Walpole. But underlying this was a concern about the expansion of the excise service, whose ‘arbitrary’ powers of search were seen as a threat to English liberties. Walpole's proposals, far from appealing to the country gentlemen by reducing their tax burden, appeared to be an attempt to concentrate power still further in the hands of an already over-mighty, and possibly corrupt, state.

In March 1733 he introduced the proposals in the Commons against the background of large demonstrations in Westminster. At first he secured relatively comfortable majorities, but when parliament resumed in April after the Easter recess, his majority collapsed. On 10 April it fell to just seventeen on a motion to receive the City of London's petition against the bill. That evening he told a meeting of his supporters,

‘This dance it will no farther go, and tomorrow I intend to sound a retreat’.

On the following day he announced the withdrawal of the excise scheme. During the celebrations in the City that night Walpole was burnt in effigy by the mob. On 23 April he rallied his dispirited supporters when he delivered an impassioned speech in the Cockpit denouncing the crisis as the malicious work of discredited Tories and professing his life-long devotion to Whig principles.

He survived the crisis because he had the support of the king, who had showed his support by dismissing his opponents, Chesterfield and Clinton, from their court offices. In the following year he was returned to power but with a reduced majority. He was not as powerful as the opposition believed.

The fall of Walpole

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The Fall of Walpole
In 1737 the opposition acquired a new leader in the person of Frederick Prince of Wales, who represented a ‘reversionary interest’ – a recurrent problem for the Hanoverians. In Leicester House, Frederick gathered round him a group of opposition politicians and writers, all waiting for the new king to put them in power. In the same year he lost a powerful ally with the death of Queen Caroline.

In 1738 Britain’s relations with Spain deteriorated dramatically. British possession of Gibraltar, the establishment of the new colony of Georgia, and the depredations committed by Spanish coastguards against British merchants trading with South America and the Caribbean combined to turn government policy towards Spain into a major subject of debate in both press and parliament. Satirical prints provided a particularly vivid summary of the opposition's case; in one, Walpole was portrayed standing by while a Spaniard removed the claws from the British lion. In March 1738 the Commons mounted a detailed investigation of Spanish depredations against British shipping and became extremely worked up over the 1731 mutilation of the merchant seaman Captain Robert Jenkins.

When parliament reassembled in February 1739, however, the opposition immediately attacked what it saw as the unsatisfactory provisions of the convention of El Pardo signed in the previous year and in particular the continued assertion by the Spanish of a right of search of British vessels. The ministry's majority collapsed in the Commons. In the Lords the Prince of Wales had voted against the administration for the first time, and the opposition had mustered seventy-four votes in the biggest Lords division of the Walpole period. Britain declared war on Spain. Walpole told the duke of Newcastle: ‘It is your war and I wish you well of it’.

In its early stages the war saw British victories, notably Vernon’s capture of Puerto Bello, which inspired a wave of popular enthusiasm. But Vernon was an opposition Whig and his victories did Walpole no good. In 1740 a land war broke out over the Austrian succession. Again, Walpole was reluctant, but his foreign policy had been to back the empire and he had pledged Britain by treaty to support the claim of Maria Theresa to the Habsburg inheritance.

In the 1741 general election the government lost seats in Cornwall and Scotland. The two great Scottish borough-mongers, Argyll and his brother Islay, were resentful over the harsh treatment of Edinburgh after the Porteous riots. In Cornwall the Prince of Wales had extensive electoral interests. Vernon put up in seven constituencies and was returned in 3. Walpole’s majority was reduced from 42 to 19. At the same time his health was deteriorating and his will for political survival becoming more fragile.8

On 28 January 1742 the government lost a division on the electoral petition from Chippenham. (The hearing of electoral petitions was a means by which a government increased its majority.) 1 February 1742 Walpole resigned; this was reluctantly accepted by the king. On 11 February he was promoted to the Lords as earl of Orford.

Walpole’s fall was an event of great constitutional importance. He fell because he had lost the support of the Commons – not the Crown. It was not until 1746 that Henry Pelham had the confidence of both king and Commons and was able to form a stable ministry. This stability lasted until 1754.

Selected book list for the period

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Barker, Hannah and Chalus, Elaine (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700-1850, Routledge. 2004
Black, Jeremy, The British Seaborne Empire, Yale, 2005
Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power, Unwin, 1989
________Pleasures of the Imagination, Yale, 1997
Cannon, John, Parliamentary Reform 1640-1832, Cambridge 1973
Cash, Arthur H., John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, Yale, 2006
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation Yale, 1992
Corfield, Penelope, The Impact of English Towns, 1700-1800, Oxford, 1982
Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property, Methuen, 1977
__________The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Macmillan, 1994
Emsley, Clive, Crime and Society in England 1750-1900, Longman, 1996
Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain made the Modern World, Penguin, 2004
Foreman, Amanda, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, HarperCollins, 1998
George, Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1965
Gilmour, Ian, Riot, Risings and Revolution, Pimlico, 1993
Gregory, J and Stevenson, J, The Longman Companion to Britain in the Eighteenth Century, Longman, 1988
Hibbert, Christopher, George III, Penguin, 1998
Holmes, Geoffrey and Szechi, Daniel, The Age of Oligarchy, Longman, 1993
Hoppit, Julian, A Land of Liberty? Oxford, 2000
Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People, Oxford, 1989
O’Gorman, Frank, The Long Eighteenth Century, Arnold, 1997
Pittock, Murray G. H., Jacobitism, St Martin’s Press, 1988
Plum, J. H, Sir Robert Walpole, 2 vols. Allen Lane, 1956
Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982
________Enlightenment, Penguin, 2000
Prest, Wilfred, Albion Ascendant, Oxford, 1998
Rogers, Nicholas, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain, Oxford, 1998
Rudé, George, Wilkes and Liberty, Oxford, 1962
Rule, John, Albion’s People, Longman, 1992
Smith, Hannah, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714-60, Cambridge, 2006
Sobel, Dava, Longitude, Walker, 1995
Speck, W. A., Stability and Strife, Edward Arnold, 1977
Stevenson, John, Popular Disturbances in England 1700-1832, Longman, 1992
Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters, Penguin, 1977
Tillyard, Stella, Aristocrats, Vintage, 1994
___________ A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings, Chatto, 2006
Uglow, Jenny, The Lunar Men, Faber, 2002
Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter, Yale, 1998
Watson, Steven, The Reign of George III, Oxford History of England
Williams, E. N., The Eighteenth Century Constitution, Cambridge, 1965

The eighteenth century: an overview

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Whose eighteenth century?
Historians write about a ‘long eighteenth century’, meaning the (relatively stable) period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 and the Great Reform Act of 1832. The start of the premiership of Pitt the Younger at the end of 1783 is often seen as a ‘half-way mark’ in this long century.
How is the period to be interpreted? There have been a variety of interpretations:

1. Whig: The Whig historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portrayed the period as one of unalloyed success. Stuart absolutism had been defeated, and Britain combined religious toleration with economic success and political freedom (though not democracy) in a way that made it the most progressive country in the world.
2. Namierite: The ‘high politics’ school of Sir Lewis Namier in the post 1945 period abandoned Whig grand narratives and stressed the role of individuals acting their power games on an aristocratic political stage. Ideas and ideology were firmly minimized.
3. Marxist/radical: In the 1960s historians like E. P. Thompson focused on issues such as popular culture and class divisions. This was ‘history from below’ with the middle classes (so important in the Whig narrative) firmly downgraded in favour of a ‘patrician/plebeian’ dichotomy.
4. Revisionists: In the late 1980s and early 1990s the historian J. C. D. (Jonathan) Clark used the terms ‘ancien régime’ and ‘confessional state’ in order to stress the conservative, hierarchical nature of English society and the continuing importance of religion.
5. The British dimension: In 1992 Linda Colley’s Britons argued that the eighteenth century saw the creation of a British (rather than purely English) nation united round a popular Protestantism and imperialism, with France as the hostile ‘other’. Unlike Thompson, who stressed the deep class conflicts in society, Colley’s model is one of consensus.

These interpretations have varying degrees of validity. All have problems. The Whig version is too triumphalist, the Namierite one too fixated on high politics and too dismissive of ideology. The radical version ignores the continuing forces of conservatism and the growing (cultural if not political) power of the middle classes. The revisionists pay little if any attention to popular politics and Colley ignores Ireland and the often very acrimonious divisions within Protestantism. There will never be a ‘final’ narrative of the eighteenth century.

Characteristics of the 'long eighteenth century'
For all the differences of interpretation, the period possesses a certain unity and witnessed some hugely important developments.
1. The nation state of Great Britain came into being. Wales had been peacefully absorbed into England in the sixteenth century but until 1707 Scotland remained an independent nation state. The Glorious Revolution acted as a powerful catalyst for political and economic unity. It was fear of a disputed succession that led to the union of parliaments. This was an economic as well as a political union. Scots now paid the same taxes and customs duties and competed for the same government and administrative posts. But since the Revolution settlement the Scots had been permitted to maintain their own law, and Presbyterianism remained the established religion.
The union reinforced a trend which had begun in the 16th century. Since the Reformation Scots and English had shared Protestantism, and since 1603 the same dynasty. The King James Bible had brought written Scots more in line with English.
By the 1740s and ‘50s the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘Great Britain’ were being used by some in preference to ‘England’ and ‘English’ - much to the resentment of many English people. The Scots term ‘North Britain’ never really caught on. But Rule Britannia (composed in 1740 by the Scotsman James Thompson) and the British Museum (founded in the 1750s) were terms that lasted. This may be because of the iconographic significance of Britannia.
But anti-Scots feeling was real and significant. No Hanoverian monarch visited Scotland until George IV in 1822 - his wearing of the kilt led to the association of ‘Scottishness’ with the British monarchy. George III’s prime minister Lord Bute was the target of John Wilkes’s satire.
God save the King, first sung at a London theatre in September 1745, encapsulates the ambiguity of Britishness. Although circulated in Scotland as well as England, it has a verse about ‘rebellious Scots’. By 1800 it had become a more unequivocally British anthem.

2. Religion played a major role in the state Although the eighteenth century is often seen as a century of religious apathy compared with the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain was a profoundly Christian country and witnessed two waves of a major religious revival, the first beginning in the 1730s, the second in the 1790s. Religious sectarianism had not disappeared and anti-Catholicism remained a ferocious force. London saw two major religious riots, the Sacheverell ‘Church and Queen’ riots (against Dissenters) in 1709 and the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in 1780. The establishment in England was firmly Anglican. The monarch had to be Protestant. The Toleration Act (1689) grated freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, but the Test and Corporation Acts (in theory) barred them from public office. In Scotland, Presbyterianism was the established religion. A series of penal laws, especially harsh in Ireland, discriminated powerfully against Roman Catholics.

3. Britain remained a hierarchical society Politics was dominated by the aristocracy who (along with the bishops) made up the House of Lords. Most members of the Commons were connected in some way to the aristocracy as heirs, relations, or clients. The aristocracy and country gentry retained enormous prestige throughout the period (though anti-aristocratic rhetoric increased from the end of the century). The ‘middling sort’ (not referred to as the middle classes before the 1790s) were increasingly numerous and wealthy, but on the whole they did not aspire to political power. The majority of the population was poor – though the degrees of poverty varied greatly. Few believed it was appropriate for the ‘lower orders’ to have a political voice.

4. Britain was an increasingly wealthy trading nation During this period national wealth doubled in real terms. The consequence (and the cause) was a growing domestic market which could only be satisfied through commercial expansion, both at home and overseas. London was the largest city in western Europe and the provincial towns grew in wealth. Britain sought and won an empire in the West Indies, North America and Asia against international competition and by the end of the period was indisputably the world’s great imperial power.

5. Britain was a major European power engaged in a series of wars against other European countries, notably France. She fought the ‘second Hundred Years War’ in 63 of the 144 years between 1688 and 1832 (44%), all but one of them victories. These wars created their own institutions for tax gathering, financial investing and military administration - and in doing so they transformed the British state.

6. The Glorious Revolution had ended the prospect of a centralized and absolute monarchy Power was increasingly located in the ‘King in Parliament’. After 1689 Parliament became a permanent part of the constitution and its work-load dramatically increased. In the countryside the aristocracy and gentry were responsible for local government. However men of humbler background were not excluded. Parish officials were chosen from outside the gentry. Elections were conducted by men of the middling sort. Lower down the social scale there was a world of popular political culture with its (sometimes violent) rituals. The government was in the hands of the aristocracy and gentry but, lacking a continental-style machinery of repression, it could not have continued without the consent, to some degree, of the governed.

George I

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Accession
George Louis, Elector of Hanover, owed his accession not to divine hereditary right, but to the Act of Settlement of 1701. He was the son of the Electress Sophia, the most direct Protestant descendant of James I.

Though George was in Hanover when Anne died on 1 August 1714 he was immediately proclaimed. The Jacobites did not stir, ‘their muttering speaking loudly of their lack of numbers, organization, resources, and commitment’ (Hoppit (2000), 384). He was important for what he was not as much as for what he was: not a Catholic, not an ally of France, and he was bound by the terms of the Act of Settlement rather than the ideology of divine right. His accession dealt the death-blow to the divine right of kings.
He came to the throne aged 54. Since 1694 he had been divorced and his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, was a prisoner at Ahlden. He was physically unprepossessing and his knowledge of English was rudimentary (though he knew French, German and Latin well, and had a little Dutch and Italian) He had a great deal of military experience. He had fought France in 1676, 1677 and 1678. He had campaigned against the Turks in 1683-5 and had fought briefly in the Nine Years War.

He finally arrived at Greenwich on 18 September, having been delayed by contrary winds and by his own lack of urgency. He brought with him some 90 ministers, courtiers and servants, including two Turkish grooms, Mehemet and Mustapha. His family included his mistress Melusine von der Schulenburg (the ‘Maypole’; made duchess of Kendal, 1719) and her three (unacknowledged) daughters and established them in St James’s Palace. He also brought his half-sister (wrongly thought to be his mistress, Sophia Charlotte von Kielmannsegge (the ‘Elephant’; made countess of Darlington, 1721). His son George Augustus, now Prince of Wales, was installed with his wife Caroline and their daughters Anne, Emily and Caroline. Their son Frederick (born 1707) was left behind in Hanover.

The limits of George’s power were defined by the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. He had to be a Protestant, he was forbidden to give office, title or estate to a foreigner without Parliament’s consent, he could appoint but could not dismiss a judge, he could appoint and dismiss ministers and dictate foreign policy. He controlled a vast amount of patronage. But he needed Parliament (a) for money and (b) because no minister could survive long without its support.

The Tories Purged
On his accession, George sided with the Whigs, seeing the Tory administration’s Treaty of Utrecht as a betrayal of the Grand Alliance. Though he made some overtures to the Tories, the result of his accession was a massive transfer of power after which the Tories’ prospects were extremely grim.

a) There was a clean sweep of the cabinet, which for the first time in English history changed completely. All the prominent new men were Whigs: Townshend and Stanhope were Secretaries of State for the Northern and Southern Departments, respectively. Robert Walpole was Paymaster and Marlborough Captain General.
(b) The Privy Council changed drastically. George reduced their numbers from 82 to 30 and the only Tories left in it were those who had proved their Hanoverian credentials.
(c) There was a purge of departments of state. The Treasury was put into commission; commissioners of the land tax and customs and excise were purged.
(d) There was a purge of local administration. Even before George came over, the regents replaced those lords lieutenant suspected of being Jacobite. The duke of Beaufort was removed from the lord lieutenantship of Hampshire. The governor of Portsmouth was replaced. A Whig was appointed to the vacant post of lord lieutenant of Lancashire. The king eventually changed 22 of the 42 lords lieutenant. There was a similar purge of JPs.

George’s coronation on 20 October was marked by riots and disturbances in Birmingham, Bristol, Chippenham, Norwich, and Reading.

In January 1715 writs went out for the new Parliament. The Tories had done very well in the election of 1713. They had 114 ‘safe’ seats and a majority in the ‘large’ constituencies of over 500 voters. They held 79 of the 92 county seats. They hoped to appeal to popular prejudices against foreigners and Dissenters and they campaigned on the ‘Church in Danger’ slogan. But because of Whig control of most of the reins of central and local government, the new House of Commons comprised c. 341 Whigs to 217 Tories. The Tories had been badly hit but they were not decimated and in Bolingbroke they had an inspiring leader.

The Whigs were not magnanimous in victory, and raked over the ashes of Anne’s last ministry in order to avenge themselves on their Tory opponents. Papers were seized and impeachments launched. On 27 March Bolingbroke, fearing for his life, fled to France and became the Pretender’s secretary. In July the duke of Ormond fled. His and Bolingbroke’s estates were confiscated by acts of attainder. The earls of Oxford and Strafford were impeached on charges of deserting the allies and making a separate peace with France. On 27 July Oxford was placed in the Tower until 1717.

Such events produced a desperate reaction from the Tories, including attacks on Dissenting meeting-houses. Every suitable occasion, from the anniversary of Anne’s coronation (23 April), George I’s birthday (28 May), the anniversary of the Restoration (30 May) saw Jacobite activity in the capital. During June and July rioting reached epidemic proportions. In response the ministry rushed the Riot Act through Parliament. It was introduced on 1 July and obtained the royal assent on 20 July. On 21 July Habeas Corpus was suspended for six months.

The Fifteen
In August 1715, having been snubbed by George I, John Erskine, earl of Mar, took sail in a collier for Newcastle and then for Fife. On 6 September he raised the standard at Braemar for James VIII and III. Eighteen lords and c. 12,000 men rallied to his standard. There was a very real prospect that Scotland, embittered by the Union, would rally behind him and become a Jacobite stronghold.

But circumstances did not favour the Jacobites. Louis XIV had died (21 August/1September) and the Regent would not contemplate helping James; neither Spain nor Sweden was tempted to fill the breach.11 James’s refusal to convert to Anglicanism or even to express a commitment to the Church of England fatally hampered him.

Though it had been taken by surprise in Scotland, the government acted quickly in England. The arms and houses of Catholics and non-jurors were seized and their arms and horses impounded. The militia called up, troops garrisoned in the major towns, and the army expanded. In November there were further riots in London – gang fights between ‘Jacks’ and loyalists but these were offset by the loyalist addresses that poured into both Houses of Parliament.

On 13 November there was an indecisive battle between government forces (led by the duke of Argyll, and including 6,000 Dutch and Swiss reinforcements) and the Jacobites at Sheriffmuir.

English Jacobitism was not wholly ineffectual. There was a small rising in Northumberland where the Pretender was proclaimed on 9 October and some support in Lancashire, the risings led by earl of Derwentwater and Thomas Forster, MP for Northumberland (a man of no military experience). On 22 October the Scots army crossed the border and marched towards Lancashire, but the Anglo-Scottish Jacobite army was defeated at Preston on 13 November.

On 23 December the Pretender landed at Peterhead – he had no new ideas and no promises from foreign powers. James lacked the personality to rouse his followers. In February 1716 he re-embarked for France.

After the rebellion 19 Scottish peerages were forfeited by attainder. The seven peers capture at Preston were impeached, found guilty and sentenced to death, though only two – Derwentwater and Kenmure – were executed. 26 others were hanged while hundreds were transported. But the government’s revenge was far less severe than James II’s after the Monmouth rising. Jacobitism did not cease to be a danger but the Pretender had shown himself an uninspiring leader – like his father, he had deserted his people in time of need - and the lack of foreign support had proved a fatal blow. From 1717 James was an isolated figure living in Rome. The next serious Jacobite rising would have to wait a generation, with a new leader and with Britain and France at war.

The Septennial Act
On 10 April 1716 the Whigs passed the Septennial Act, on the grounds that the Triennial Act fomented feuds and party strife and occasioned ruinous expense. But Lord Islay gave the game away: frequent elections rendered ‘government dependent on the caprice of the multitude and very precarious’. The Whigs had moved a long way from the demagogy of Shaftesbury. Having begun as the ‘country’ party, they were now firmly oligarchical.

Politics had been transformed. The Tories were condemned to minority status (many of the remaining Tory JPs were deprived of their offices); the independence and unpredictability of elections faded away as the Whig magnates tightened their grip on the electorate; the number of ‘open’ or ‘popular’ constituencies shrank. The seven year gap was meaningful. All the parliaments of George I and George II ran their full term, except in 1747 when only six years had elapsed since the last election. (Had an election been held in 1718 the Whigs, at that time in crisis, might have lost.)

The basic paradigm to describe this period is one of increasing stability, which demonstrably existed between the late 1720s and the early 1760s. This does not preclude riots and disturbances, but it assumes:

(a) a sense of common identity among those who wielded power, not only in politics but over the social and economic fabric of the country
(b) an acceptance by society of its political institutions and of those classes of men who controlled them.
However it has also been argued that the evidence of the mid-1730s does not suggest that the Act necessarily made politics more tranquil.