A History of Britain, Volume 2 (50 page)

In 1710 Sacheverell was impeached in the House of Lords. The trial was a public-relations fiasco for the government. Henry Sacheverell became a hero of the streets of London, and Dissenter meeting-houses and chapels, including those of the Huguenot community who had settled around Spitalfields after their expulsion from France, were ransacked and burned to the ground. Sacheverell was escorted to his trial each day by a guard of myrmidon butchers and mobbed wherever he was sighted by delirious crowds yelling his name and issuing death threats against the Whig ministers. Inside parliament Sacheverell upended the onus of guilt, prosecuting not only the government but also the entire Whig version of the history of 1688 and especially their claim to lawful resistance, which he dismissed as a wicked oxymoron. Pro-Sacheverell riots broke out in virtually every major town in the southwest and Midlands and, faced with
a breakdown of order and insufficient troops to repress it, the government decided to cut its losses, whatever the embarrassment. Sacheverell was given a transparently trivial sentence – suspended from preaching for three years and the offending sermon to be burned by the public hangman. The news was greeted with bonfires and bells around the country, reminiscent of scenes at the Restoration of 1660, as well as another round of chapel-breaking. In the next election, the Tories swept to power.

When the Queen died in August 1714, the political nation held its breath. Anything and everything was on the cards, including another round of civil war. Street violence between party gangs became commonplace, the ‘Mughouse' vigilantes paid by the Whig John Holles, first Duke of Newcastle, taking it to the High Tory and Jacobite mobs that had ruled the alleys since the Sacheverell riots. Rumours took wing. Before she died, it was said, Queen Anne had let it be known that she wished her Catholic half-brother James Edward Stuart to succeed her, not the Elector of Hanover, and had even signed a will to make her intentions clear. But however hard they searched, no one could come up with the document that would get in the way of the succession of the uncharismatic middle-aged Elector George. The Jacobite press ridiculed him mercilessly as a lecherous dolt, with not a word of English at his command, sporting two mistresses, one fat, one thin, both ugly, who had not scrupled to have one of his own wife's former lovers murdered. His coronation was greeted with another wave of rioting in at least twenty English towns. Predictably enough, it was even worse in Scotland. At Inverness the proclamation of George's accession was interrupted by the town magistrates and ‘God save the King' shouted down by cries of ‘God damn them and their king'.

Not surprisingly, George took it personally and blamed the Tories for encouraging if not actually engineering the hostile demonstrations. As much of a soldier-king as William III, George also disapproved of the unseemly hastiness with which they had sought peace with France and the poor terms on which the Treaty of Utrecht had been settled in 1713. He wanted them out of power. Purges were conducted on office-holders and money taken from the civil list for the 1715 election, which duly produced the enormous Whig majority the king desired. Faced with the prospect of years in the wilderness and a permanently unsympathetic king, the Tory leaders, the Duke of Ormonde, and Bolingbroke, panicked and took a flyer on the alternative – James Edward Stuart. In hindsight it seems like an unbelievably foolhardy, if not insane, gamble. But after Sacheverell, Jacobitism had got into the bloodstream of English politics to a degree that would have been unthinkable ten years before. Even so, the problem – and it was a huge one – was that a King James III/VIII was
only going to be a possibility courtesy of a French invasion. And after decades of interminable war, an emptied treasury, desperate impoverishment, near famine conditions and partial occupation, France, if not Louis XIV, was utterly exhausted. Besides, an attempt had been made to land James Edward in Scotland seven years before, in 1708, which, although triggering a panic at Westminster and the passage of the Treason Act, ended in an ignominious débâcle. The ostensible leader of the rebellion, the Duke of Hamilton, had swiftly disappeared to Lancashire at the critical moment. A flotilla of English warships had barred the entrance to the Firth of Forth, while James's face erupted in an unkingly flowering of measles. The would-be James VIII never landed.

Without a better planned and better executed French military action in 1715, the only hope that the Tories and Jacobites had was for an uprising to begin in Britain itself – starting, of course, in Scotland. And this was very much on the cards. The glowing vision of mutual prosperity and pan-Britannic harmony sketched by boosters of the union like Daniel Defoe had, of course, failed to materialize. Arguably Scotland, even Highland Scotland, was no worse off than it had been before 1707, but new taxes on linen, malt and salt had been introduced, and no bonanza in Scottish exports to England had opened up. After the failure of the 1708 Jacobite plan the English law of treason was put into effect along the border, with fresh hardship for all those living in that region. The most obvious beneficiaries of the union had been those who were already among the richest and most powerful Scots, like the Duke of Argyll. There were other nobles, in particular the Earl of Mar, Secretary of Scotland from 1713 to 1714, who had served in the Tory governments of Anne, who saw 1715 as the coming of a long Whig winter – and then acted to guarantee it.

On the assumption that James would arrive with the French in force, and that there would also be an English uprising in the old Catholic region of Northumbria, Mar raised his standard at the ancestral stag-hunt at Braemar in September. In the northeast Lowlands other disaffected nobles rallied to him, and in the west some (though not all) of the clans began to rally their Highland followers. Throughout Scotland, in fact, not just in the Highlands, support for the Hanoverian regime melted away alarmingly. Defensive trenches were dug in front of Edinburgh Castle. Perspiration flowed freely in London. Already in July, plans had been made for a hasty exit to Holland for George I.

But even though it may have had more going for it in 1715 than 1745, the Jacobite rebellion never came close to overthrowing the union and its German king. At Sherriffmuir, on 13 November, Mar's 4000
Jacobites fought a much smaller force of around 1000 under Argyll to a draw but still failed to take either Glasgow or Edinburgh. Reduced to futile marches and counter-marches, while waiting for a French invasion that seemed mysteriously postponed, the rebels found the momentum draining away from the rising. The English and Scottish components of a joint army had no sooner come together than they fell out and became reduced (as so many times before) to a raiding and wrecking force until finally cornered in Lancashire.

The
coup de grâce
actually took place a long way from the Tweed and the Tay at Versailles. Just a few days before Mar came out for the Stuarts, their greatest patron, Louis XIV, had died, leaving an infant great-grandson as his successor. Any chance that the Regent, Orleans, had of stabilizing his country and relieving it of the crushing burden of taxation depended on a peace policy. There would be no invasion. Just over six weeks after he had arrived in Scotland on 22 December 1714, James was back on board returning to France. Not long afterwards, the whole Jacobite ménage – 3000 Irish, Scots and English – which for years had camped at St Germain on Louis XIV's long-suffering generosity, was removed to the less grandiose milieu of Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine. Their cause was still gallantly flattered. But the truth was that they had become an expensive nuisance.

In England the Whig government and the king could breathe just a little more easily. The northern earls were, in the ancient style, beheaded for their treason (as their predecessors had been in 1569), allowing the Earl of Derwentwater to make a magnificently histrionic speech, on 24 February 1716, from the scaffold at Tower Hill, custom-ordered for Jacobite hagiographers. But even if, in hindsight, the rising of 1715 might look like a storm in a teacup, and even though successive Whig governments cynically conjured up the Jacobite bogey whenever they wanted an excuse to intimidate or incarcerate their political opponents, the threat had in fact been serious. And it didn't go away. In March 1719 a mini-armada of 29 Spanish ships and 5000 troops, with arms for another 30,000, set sail from Cadiz for Scotland, although the Protestant wind intervened as close as Coruña, dispersing it and stranding the Pretender.

Britain, though, was not yet becalmed. If anyone in 1715, or even 1720, had predicted that the next two decades would see an astonishing drop in the wind-speed of politics in Britain, they would have been written off as hopelessly deluded. But from being a political nation notorious for its feverish hyperactivity and infuriated partisanship, early Hanoverian Britain became – almost – sedate. And the man who administered the sedative was Sir Robert Walpole.

It was Walpole's intuition (as much as his calculation) to present himself as the soul of common sense. But much as he cultivated the impression that his bottom-heavy ‘soundness' and common-sense pragmatism rose naturally from his roots among the Norfolk gentry, ‘Squire Walpole' resembled the typical country gentleman about as closely as King George III would approximate to the average farmer. And although he would never have made a profession of it, Walpole's approach to politics arguably owed much to John Locke – not the Locke of the two
Treatises on Government
but the Locke of the
Essay concerning Human Understanding
, first published in 1690 and already run through several editions by the time Walpole was in his political apprenticeship. Of course Walpole was uninterested in the finer points of Locke's epistemology – the science of how we acquire dependable knowledge. But in common with many of his contemporaries he surely took on board Locke's flat denial of truths grounded in revelation rather than experience. If attachment to mutually intolerant beliefs, of the kind that had so bitterly divided the political nation, had not been brought about by some irrefutable epiphany but rather had been the product of particular historical happenstance, then perhaps another kind of historical happenstance could make them go away.

So Walpole set out to preside over a politics of reasonableness rather than righteousness. His management style was meant to make room for the realization of the non-political life, a principle abhorrent to the classical tradition that had dominated the seventeenth century, in which life was political or nothing. Walpole had the modern instinct that the pursuit of material satisfactions could take the edge off mutually destructive ideologies, so he did his best to massage the inflamed body politic with the ointment of epicureanism. Property, tranquillity and pleasure were to replace intransigence, intolerance and anathema as the sovereign instincts of public as well as private life. For the gentleman, the panelled library and the well-stocked deer park would do better than the venomous libel and the reckless conspiracy. For the common sort, honest toil and the satisfaction of simple wants would do better than drunken uproar and riot. Of course there was a huge element of self-interest in the propagation of this pastoral view of political quiet. Walpole wanted to de-fang English politics principally to ensure that his enemies remained toothless. But there is also no doubt that he tapped into a genuine sense of exhaustion at the factional bitterness that had disfigured public life since the death of Charles II. Richard Addison, the editor of the
Spectator
, spoke for many when he wrote that ‘there cannot a greater judgement befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division that rends a government into two distinct
people and makes them greater strangers to one another than if they were different nations . . . a furious party spirit which rages in its full violence . . . fills a nation with spleen and rancour and extinguishes all the seeds of good nature, compassion and humanity.'

The antidote, administered by Walpole, was what his generation called ‘politeness' – not just in the modern sense of good manners (although that was not unimportant), but rather a civilized self-restraint. The polite man, unlike the passionate man, wanted to strengthen the social bonds between men rather than sunder them; to give society an appreciation of the interdependence of its parts rather than the inevitability of its conflicts and incompatibilities. So the great project of Walpolean pragmatism was an attempt to change the subject of British politics – away from conviction and towards the practical business of making a fortune. The pursuit of self-interest, he might have said, ought not to be confused with aggressive selfishness; for instead of dividing the nation into so many discrete individuals, it actually tied them together in mutually compatible and fruitful enterprises. From such pursuits would come the greater good of the country. Which would
you
prefer, he might have asked, the unsparing attack of principles that led to incessant war and chaos, or what he had to offer: peace, which in turn would relieve the landed interest of the grievous burden of land taxes they were always complaining about, and political stability, all the desirable ingredients of what today might be classified as a healthy business environment?

From the beginning, Walpole had bet that the politics of the future would be more concerned with portfolio management than religious passion or legal debates. In 1712, at the height of the Tory ascendancy, he had been sent to prison for embezzlement, and the painful experience had taught him a lesson about the tight interconnection between political and financial fortunes. In 1720 he was able to put that precocious understanding to good use. He had been a minister in the Whig administrations of George I off and on for five years. Though there were still well over 200 Tories in the House of Commons by 1720, their Jacobite flirtation had, for the time being, broken them as a serious threat. But no sooner had the Whigs established their dominance than they themselves fractured into competing baronies and factions based on interest groups rather than ideologies. Driven by a ferocious ambition, Walpole was just one of a number of equally unscrupulous and intelligent sharks circling governments in Westminster, their nostrils sensitive for the slightest whiff of blood. It was only when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 that his reputation changed from one of shrewdness to indispensability, and this was a reputation largely of his own careful manufacture.