Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (79 page)

Tories under Bolingbroke and, eventually, dissatisfied country Whigs such as Sir William Pulteney (1684–1764) charged that Walpole was corrupting Parliament, offering its members the Devil’s bargain of selling their votes for offices, lands, and titles. By the late 1720s, opponents accused the prime minister of setting a low moral tone for the nation itself. A growing opposition press gave him satirical nick-names like “Bob Booty” and “Bribemaster General.” In Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
of 1726 he appears as Flimnap, the corrupt and vain premier of Lilliput. Alexander Pope (1688–1744), in his
Dunciad
of 1728, cast him as “Palinarus,” who teaches “kings to fiddle and makes senators dance.” In
The Beggar’s Opera
also of 1728, John Gay (1685–1732) compares him to the crooked jailer Peachum, who acts as a fence for goods stolen by his loyal band of thieves.

In fact, Walpole was never entirely able to bribe or buy his way to power because the Old Corps never amounted to more than a fraction of the membership of either house. While they formed the core of Walpole’s parliamentary support, they could never,
by themselves,
deliver majorities. In order to maintain control of both houses for 21 years, Sir Robert had to convince independent members that his policies were the right ones. Like a modern politician who watches the polls, Walpole generally opted for the majority position on the great issues of the day. That is, on the succession, he was a staunch Hanoverian, who developed a spy system to ferret out Jacobite plots. In fact, the movement to restore the Stuarts was nostalgic, wildly impractical, and generally incompetent. But as long as Walpole could convince the king and political nation that all Tories were really Jacobites; that all Jacobites were a clear and present danger to the Hanoverian stability; and that he was their nemesis, his power was secure. In religion, Walpole observed that the vast majority of the country was Anglican: there were perhaps 340,000 Dissenters, amounting to about 6 percent of the population, and a mere handful of Catholics and Jews. Rather than pursue traditional Whig Dissenter aims like repeal of the Test Act, he did everything he could to safeguard the remaining privileges of the Church of England. This earned him the support of the Anglican majority in the countryside and Whig bishops in the House of Lords. On finance and foreign policy, he tried to reduce taxes by staying out of wars. While some Whigs and their mercantile allies wanted to repudiate the Treaty of Utrecht in favor of a more aggressive foreign policy, Walpole realized, as Oxford had done, that France, now led by the teenage Louis XV (1710–74; reigned 1715–74), was effectively broken for the time being as a military power and that Utrecht had secured British trade and colonial supremacy for a generation.

On three of these four issues – religion, foreign policy, and government finance – the prime minister sounds very much like a Tory. By choosing popular Tory positions on these issues, he made himself virtually impregnable on them (current politicians call this “triangulation”). The loss of something to fight about, combined with the infrequency and expense of elections as a result of the Septennial Act, lowered the country’s political temperature. Indeed, it is tempting to argue that there were no major issues facing the British polity for a generation after 1714. That temptation should be resisted, for the prosperity of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was working a quiet revolution on British society, wrenching it away from strict hierarchy and toward greater social fluidity and individual opportunity, and, thus, disrupting the inherited mental world of the English people. Nevertheless, speaking politically, the half-century or so following Anne’s death was far more stable than what came before – or after. Signs of instability would only appear in the 1730s and become serious in the 1750s. But that is a tale for another book. As this one ends, the English had found political peace at home. This, combined with their ability to wage war successfully abroad, produced a vibrant economy and a society on the verge of modernity.

An
Ancien Régime
or a Polite and Commercial People?

Since the late 1980s historians have advanced two competing images of England at the end of our period. One view, promulgated most memorably by J. C. D. Clark, argues that England was in 1714, and in 1760, and perhaps even in 1815, a fundamentally agricultural, traditional, conservative, Royalist, Anglican polity, still dominated by a privileged landed aristocracy. That is, he sees eighteenth-century England as very much an
ancien régime,
not so very different from other contemporary European monarchies or from the Stuart, Tudor, or even medieval polities with which our account started.
³
Other historians, most notably Paul Langford, have focused not so much on what looked backward but what looked forward in eighteenth-century England. That is, while Langford and others would concede that England was still very much run by the ancient landed aristocracy in partnership with the monarchy and the Church, he reminds us that the post-revolutionary English monarchy was, almost uniquely in Europe, a constitutional one; that the Church had competition from nonconformist Protestant faiths; and that the governing partnership was expanding to include the propertied middling orders.
⁴
Partisans of this view would argue, further, that the aristocracy’s hold on the larger society was loosening; that the new wealth created by the commercial, financial, and industrial revolutions was eroding hierarchy, increasing opportunity, and rendering English society much more fluid. In the words of Roy Porter, eighteenth-century England may have been “unashamedly hierarchical, hereditary and privileged,” but it was also “capitalist, materialist, market-oriented; worldly, pragmatic [and] responsive to economic pressure.”
⁵
It was, in short, fast becoming (to borrow from the title of a like-minded book) “the first modern society.”
⁶

Certainly, and despite the fact that the topmost links of the Great Chain of Being had been severed by the Glorious Revolution, English society remained hierarchical. Examined from the top down, this society also looks remarkably stable. The landed aristocracy seemed to have created for itself an ideal world, having tamed, by means of that revolution, both the king on the one hand and the general populace on the other. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the English nobility, in particular, often compared itself to that of ancient Rome and the period is often referred to as Britain’s Augustan Age. It was also a period in which novelist Henry Fielding’s (1707–54) slightly later definition of the word “nobody” – “all the people in Great Britain, except about 1200”
⁷
– might equally apply. But this does not mean that the Augustan aristocracy was a closed society. It was relatively open to upstarts from below, and perfectly willing to ally with members of the middling orders for political or economic advantage. The latter gained a new sense of their own respectability and even, by some definitions, gentility as they reaped the benefits of England’s growing prosperity. Both the aristocracy and their middling allies, however, worried that the attitudes and appetites of the lower orders threatened stability, property, and deference.

They feared that those attitudes and appetites would result in crime, disorder, riot, even revolution. In short, if England was both ordered and stable at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that order was often thought to be fragile, that stability provisional.

The Demographic and Economic Base

To understand what was happening in English society at the end of the Stuart period, it is necessary to confront the basic facts of demographic and economic change. First, the rapid population growth which characterized the period 1550–1650 slowed down and, for a few decades, even reversed. In fact, the number of people in England and Wales is estimated to have actually fallen from 5.5 million in 1661 to 5.2 million in 1686 before rising to 5.4 million in 1701 and 5.7 million by 1721. The population of the British Isles as a whole in 1714 would be about 9.5 million: 5.6 million for England and Wales, 1.1 million for Scotland, and a further 2.8 million for Ireland.
⁸
The demographic downturn is hard to explain.
⁹
During this period agricultural improvements made famine almost a thing of the past in England, but Scotland experienced it in 1696–9, Ireland in 1708–10. In fact, England became a net exporter of grain in the eighteenth century. Still, the occasional bad harvest, particularly in the 1690s, would cause a spike in the price of basic foodstuffs, reducing consumption and, so, resistance to disease. Illness was always a factor: 1665–7 saw the last, but arguably the most devastating, outbreak of plague in English history, killing 70,000–100,000 Londoners. Epidemics of diphtheria, dysentery, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid fever, typhus, and whooping cough also ripped through the populace periodically. All were virulent and often fatal, particularly among children. Professional medical help remained beyond the reach of most English men and women, and would have done them little good in any case: only after about 1750 would new scientific techniques have an impact on the curing, as opposed to the diagnosis, of disease. This left most villagers to rely on the local priest, cunning woman, or midwife for folkloric advice and herbal remedies. Their effectiveness was limited. Average life expectancy sank in the 1680s to under 30 years. The odds improved between 1700 and 1720, when the number of epidemics decreased and the harvests were generally good. As a result, life expectancy rose from about 37 in 1700 to perhaps 42 by the 1750s. But even as the odds improved, the lingering perception of a flooded labor market, combined with political and religious turmoil, led perhaps 300,000 English men and women to emigrate to America between 1650 and 1700.

But the real motor for population stagnation in this period (as for its rise later) was age at marriage. A higher proportion of the population chose either not to marry (some 20–25 percent), or to do so later than their Tudor and early Stuart predecessors. In a sample of 12 parishes, the average age at marriage for males during the last half of the seventeenth century was 28 years, for females 26 years. This meant a later start to childrearing, lower fertility, smaller families, and, ultimately, fewer people. Those families were kept smaller still by infant mortality, which remained high. Around 15 percent of all infants died within the first year of life; a further 10 percent expired before their tenth birthday. While it was still true that anyone who made it to their thirtieth birthday had a good chance of seeing 30 years more, old people remained scarce in this society. Rather, 40 percent of the population was under 20. This helps to explain the contemporary obsession with order and “reformation of manners” (see below): young people always strike their elders as being short on both. Finally, the death rate remained high – 30 per 1,000 per year – which left many broken marriages and families.

The slowdown in population growth had economic ramifications.
¹⁰
As in the period after the Black Death, the number of agricultural workers fell in relation to the amount of land available. This placed those workers in high demand, allowing them to command good wages and low rents. Combined with generally good harvests in the 1680s and the first two decades of the eighteenth century, it also meant lower food prices: 20 percent lower in the 1650s–80s than earlier in the century. This was all good news for poor tenant farmers, but bad news for landowners, who, remember, also bore a hefty Land Tax. Nevertheless, agriculture remained the beating heart of the English economy, feeding the whole population, employing most of it, and enriching its most powerful members. At the end of our period, two-thirds of the land in England was still being cultivated and perhaps 80 percent of the population lived in rural villages or hamlets. Most still worked as tenants on the estates of noble or gentle landowners; it has been estimated that 15–20 percent of the land was owned by peers and the wealthier gentry, 45–50 percent by the middling and lesser gentry, 25–35 percent by yeomen or husbandmen, and just 5–10 percent by the Crown or the Church.

In fact, the proportion of land held by the great magnates was increasing. Low food prices and rents, high wages and taxes annoyed big landowners, but they were rarely fatal. Rather, it was the middling and lesser landowners, the smaller gentry and yeomen who were hurt most significantly by the economic situation at the turn of the eighteenth century. Often, these smallholders fell into debt and had to sell to a magnate, sometimes becoming tenants on what was once their own land. This group formed the core constituency of the Tory party; no wonder they embraced Swift’s critique of the monied men, military contractors, and officers who seemed to profit from the wars while they fell into penury.

For those who could still afford to farm their land, the age saw a number of agricultural improvements which could lead to big profits. From 1660 on, great landowners increasingly hired full-time stewards to manage their lands better. New fodder crops like turnips and clover meant that animals could be kept year round, and the number of livestock in the country increased. This meant more fertilizer (manure), which produced richer soil, which yielded more wheat, rye, oats, and barley, which resulted in surpluses that could be sold to the continent. Where the soil was not so rich, there was always dairy or sheep farming: the 11 million sheep in England estimated by Gregory King in 1688 outnumbered people two to one. The same aristocrats who expanded or improved their holdings through enclosure and use of new fodder crops also exploited their mineral rights, becoming proprietors of mines and quarries. Finally, while some poured their profits into conspicuous consumption – say, a new country palace or a London townhouse – many more invested in trading ventures or high finance than had done so a century earlier.