Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (83 page)

Closely related to the aristocratic embrace of classical models was a confidence in human reason. The seventeenth century has often been referred to as the Age of Reason, the eighteenth that of the Enlightenment. Reason can be found everywhere in aristocratic life ca. 1700, from the mathematically proportioned symmetry of public buildings, country houses, and gardens to the popularity of John Locke’s
Essay on Human Understanding
(1690). In that work, Locke argued for the application of the new scientific method to all aspects of human life, as well as for a more optimistic and liberal view of human nature. Early in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, and others had conceived the scientific method by promoting the necessity of free, untrammeled enquiry; skepticism toward
a priori
assumptions and received ideas; the keen observation of nature; the coordination of a body of such observations with mathematics; and the testing of resultant theories about the world by experimentation. Over the course of the next hundred years, great observers, mathematicians, and experimenters – that is, scientists, many of them English – used this new intellectual tool to revolutionize human understanding of nature. For example, the physicist Robert Boyle (1627–91) discovered the laws of gas and pressure. In
The Skeptycal Chemist
of 1661, he proposed a theory of matter composed of many irreducible elements, thus refuting the old Aristotelian theory of only four. The physicist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) assisted Boyle in his experiments; described the true nature of combustion, elasticity, and the arch; invented the marine barometer and other instruments; and pioneered the telescopic determination of parallax of a fixed star. The astronomer Sir Edmund Halley (1656–1742) learned how to predict accurately such events as solar eclipses and the return of comets.

But perhaps Halley’s greatest service to learning was that, as secretary to the Royal Society, he encouraged the most brilliant of all English scientists, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Newton had wondered why, if Galileo was correct that bodies set in motion remain in motion, moving in a straight line, the planets do not fly out of orbit. To explain the simple, observable fact that they do not, Newton postulated an attractive force between heavenly bodies which kept them in their orbits. He argued that this force was the same one that holds our feet to the ground and which impels an apple to fall to earth: gravity. To further explain his observations of the movement of the heavenly bodies, he eventually postulated three laws of motion: that every body at rest or in motion remains so unless some force is exerted upon it; that the change in motion is proportional to the force exerted upon it; and that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In order to measure and predict these forces, Newton developed (in parallel with the German scholar Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz [1646–1716]) a whole branch of mathematics – calculus. The result was a series of mathematical formulae, supported by observation and experiment, which explained and could be used to predict the movements both of objects on earth, and of the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies. In 1687, with the assistance of the Royal Society, Newton published his findings in
Principia Mathematica: or the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

The book quickly caught the imaginations of not only scientists but lay people as well. It did so because it explained, for the first time to widespread satisfaction, how the universe worked. Pope captured the general euphoria:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Newton’s
Principia,
and the other discoveries noted above, suggested that the universe ran according to natural laws that were precise, unvarying, and readily discoverable by human beings using the scientific method. This meant that, if one only knew the applicable law, one could determine what nature would do next. Thus, human beings might one day be able to affect, even control, nature for their own use. It was no accident that the later eighteenth century would see the first vaccination for disease (smallpox) and the popularization of agricultural improvements by landowners anxious to apply the new scientific principles to managing their estates.

Increased human agency implied a diminished role for God in the world. This is not to say that Boyle, Hooke, Halley, and Newton were atheists; far from it. Newton, in particular, wrote commentaries on the Bible. But their embrace of rationality seemed to undermine the legitimacy of faith, while their portrayal of nature as unchanging and predictable suggested that the Supreme Being was not concerned at the fall of every sparrow. In the wake of the scientific revolution, many eighteenth-century Presbyterian clergymen rejected the mysteries of the Trinity and became Unitarians; some eighteenth-century Anglicans became Deists. Deists believed that the universe operated not as the moment-to-moment expression of God’s will exercised over every occurrence but, rather, according to the laws of nature, which He had established at the beginning of the world, set in motion, and allowed to run unvaryingly. God was a sort of celestial watchmaker; the world a vast mechanism. As humans figured out that mechanism, nature would be understood and, eventually, tamed.

Thus, we find reason even in eighteenth-century religion. Other Whig Anglicans became Latitudinarians. Not quite Deists, they nevertheless rejected the superstition of Roman Catholicism, the zealotry of Puritanism, and the rigid dogmatism of more conservative High Anglicans. For them Christianity was something that could be made rational, moderate, and accommodating to human and natural realities. It did not necessarily conflict with science. In fact, the new scientific discoveries were an argument
for
God’s existence in that they implied a rational Creator. Nor did Latitudinarian religion require great displays of emotion or encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture. Locke argued in
The Reasonableness of Christianity
(1695) that there was nothing in that belief system which contradicted reason. His self-proclaimed disciple John Toland (1670–1722) went further to assert, in
Christianity not Mysterious
(1696), that there was no need for suspension of reason in faith; that anything in the Bible which did not conform to human reason and scientific possibility was patently untrue. This infuriated High Church Anglicans, leading them to charge all Latitudinarians with heresy and infidelity. But the Latitudinarian philosophy fit beautifully with the eighteenth century’s optimism about human nature, its embrace of the Roman virtues of moderation and stoicism, and its rejection of the violent fanaticism of the seventeenth century. In particular, it complemented the aristocrat’s need to maintain dignity, self-composure, and aloofness from the emotions and enthusiasms to which ordinary mortals were prone.

The aristocratic desire for control went beyond the world of nature and the self to that of men and women as political and economic animals. Hence the rise of political economists who sought to discover the laws of the political and economic world as Boyle, Halley, and Newton had done for the natural world. Sir William Petty (1623–87), John Graunt (1620–74), and Gregory King compiled early population statistics, while Charles Davenant (1656–1714), Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), and the versatile Defoe sought to explain and exploit the wider economy. All believed that human behavior, especially political and economic behavior, could be explained naturally (therefore, scientifically), reduced to quantitative data, and predicted with mathematical certainty. These virtuosi seemed wildly ambitious to their critics: Swift, a defender of the ancients, satirized these “projectors” and their relentlessly mathematical understanding of human nature in Book 3 of
Gulliver’s Travels
and, even more bitingly, in A
Modest Proposal
(1729). But their confidence tells us a great deal about the mindset and social milieu of their times.

Finally, Augustan art embraced the rationality and confidence noted above. As we have seen, the period’s architecture was increasingly classical in inspiration, which meant mathematical symmetry, simplicity, and rationality. Its gardens, laid out by Wise and others, were also regular, proportioned, and geometrical, at least up to 1714. Its music evolved gradually from the heavily ornamented baroque of Purcell and Handel to a more streamlined classicism, although that transition would not take place until the mid-eighteenth century. The poetry of the age was also eminently classical and rational in its models, subject matter, and structure. Its great poets translated classical texts into Augustan English: Dryden translated Plutarch and Virgil; Pope, Homer. All wrote in traditional forms or modifications of traditional forms such as epic, mock epic, and, above all, verse satire. All wrote, for the most part, in the very strict form of rhymed heroic couplets in iambic pentameter. Take, for example, Pope’s
Essay on Man
(1732–4):

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little or too much:

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused:

Still by himself abused or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

The effect of the poem, with its neatly trimmed lines, is not unlike that of a formal garden. But the author seems to be ambivalent about the human race’s advances, wary of reason’s limitations. He still agrees with the Great Chain in placing humankind between God and the beasts, but worries that, for all their powers of reason, they may incline more to the latter than the former. This uncertainty, combined with the new audiences that artists like Pope and Handel found to support themselves, implies that, despite their veneer of rationality and composure, all was not certain for the governing classes of Augustan England.

The Middling Sort and their Culture

Unlike the landed aristocracy, those whom Porter called “the swelling, prosperous middle ranks”
¹⁷
were not yet conscious of themselves as a separate class, and so not unified in pursuit of common aims. Nevertheless, it could be argued that they were responsible for the most dynamic changes – and tensions – in English life between the Restoration and the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They were the government officials who ran the wars; the military and naval officers who executed them; the “monied men” who financed them; the merchants who created the wealth in trade which supported and grew by them; and the professional men who solved the disputes which arose out of the resulting new wealth. All benefited from the expansion in the English economy which they helped to engineer. Later in the eighteenth century, these groups would demand a greater say in how the country was run; but for now they were content to ape their betters and aspire to be their junior partners in that enterprise.

Of all these groups, the oldest were the merchants. According to Gregory King’s estimate for 1688, these numbered about 10,000 families of substantial merchants who only acted as middlemen; and about 110,000 families of manufacturers, artisans, and tradesmen who actually made their goods prior to selling them (see table 1).
¹⁸
This group varied enormously in wealth. At the top were the great international merchants who invested in joint-stock companies or, increasingly, established family or partner-based firms sending out voyages on their own. They traded with North America and the West Indies for furs, tobacco, and sugar, in return for manufactured goods – and slaves. They traded with China and India for tea and cloth. They reexported these commodities, adding British wool (still over 70 percent of all exports), to Europe for grain; and to Russia for timber, furs, naval stores, and, of course, cash. Great merchants such as this could reap thousands of pounds a year. In Restoration London six aldermen were worth £100,000, while about 40 merchants had assets totalling around £30,000, rivaling the wealth of middling aristocrats and gentry, whom their daughters might marry. Their sons might inherit the family business outright or be apprenticed to another great merchant house, possibly amassing enough wealth to purchase land and, perhaps, get out of trade. Middling domestic merchants, trading within the British Isles for grain from the south, coal or wool from the north, or cheese and butter from the west, earned less, perhaps £200–1,000 a year. These might be substantial men in their localities, well connected with urban oligarchies, but less so with the local gentry.