Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (61 page)

Yet precisely the
non
-absolutist nature of Stuart rule gave it a certain resilience and flexibility. The so-called ‘Restoration’ of parliaments in 1660 did not, after all, mean a return to the fraught days of James I’s reign, when the English House of Commons had been crowded with aggressive Puritans seeking to check the royal prerogative. By the 1660s, a new generation was represented in Parliament, for whom those days lay in the remote past. And where there was dissent on the periphery of Charles’s empire - dissent which might, under different circumstances, have boiled over into open warfare - this was contained by a judicious mixture of concessions and coercion. In Scotland, where antagonism between Lowland Calvinists and Highland Catholics at times verged on civil war, James II followed his father’s example in delegating considerable power to the nobles who dominated the Scottish Parliament. When the Covenanters nevertheless sought to revive their ‘old cause’, his grandson Charles Edward decisively quashed them at Culloden in 1745 - with the enthusiastic support of the Highland clans who continued to adhere to the Catholic faith. Ireland was left even more to its own devices, despite similar tensions between the Protestant settlers of Ulster and the majority Catholic population of the rest of the island who, like the Scottish clans, benefited from the latitudinarian religious policies which had prevailed since the 1640s.

It was in America, however, that Stuart policies enjoyed perhaps their greatest success. A few radicals (influenced mainly by French ideas of natural law) may have expressed criticism of the continuing allegiance of the rapidly growing colonies to a remote British crown. But many Americans agreed with Lord Mansfield’s view that the colonies should stand in relation to Great Britain just ‘as Scotland stood towards England’. In the words of Daniel Leonard, talk of rebellion against the King was ‘more disgraceful to the annals of America than that of witchcraft’. The continued French threat from Canada - confirmed by the Peace of Paris in 1763, following Wolfe’s defeat at Quebecensured that American and British interests continued to coincide with respect to foreign policy and security. And in any case, as Benjamin Franklin observed in 1760, there was more disagreement between the fourteen colonies themselves than with distant London - hence the failure of proposals for a union of the colonies within the empire in 1754.

True, there was considerable friction in the wake of the Seven Years’ War over taxation, focusing principally on the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties of 1767. But on 1 May 1769 the Cabinet voted by a narrow majority to repeal them all in response to colonial protests, including the especially unpopular tea duty. This, as Jonathan Clark argues, seemed to prove the truth of the doctrine of ‘virtual representation’, which held that (in the words of Thomas Whately) MPs represented not only their own constituents but ‘all the commons of
Great Britain
’ as well - including the American colonies.

At the same time, the government in London saw the need to take a harder line when irreconcilable advocates of secession from Great Britain took up arms in 1776. Howe’s defeat of Washington’s army at Long Island and the Delaware River, Burgoyne’s victory over the rebels at Saratoga, and the final victory after Washington’s ill-judged attack on New York ensured that what threatened to escalate into civil war was nipped in the bud.

But what if the government had pursued a different line? What if it had insisted on some, if not all, of the unpopular taxes of the 1760s. Some historians have gone so far as to suggest that a full-scale war for American independence might have broken out of the sort which had freed the Dutch United Provinces from Habsburg rule nearly two centuries before. And what if the British had been less resolute and less successful in quelling rebellion? It may seem fantastic to imagine that Charles III (1766-88) might have forfeited his American colonies - but, as Clark shows, this was far from being an impossible outcome.

Of course, the sheer geographical extent of Stuart power in the 1780s could not disguise its relative financial weakness: part of the price of consent in the British Isles and North America was, after all, low taxation. Indeed, it can be argued that it was for precisely this reason that it had proved impossible for the Stuarts to defeat completely the French challenge in North America. This and other French successes overseas did much to consolidate the power of the Bourbon monarchy. The financial reforms of the reign of Louis XVI, implemented by Necker, ended the era of administrative decay which had threatened to undermine the monarchy’s power relative not only to the
parlements
- which had effectively vanished by the 1770s - but to the Paris mob as well. As in England, the mob was a very visible part of public life in the 1780s and 1790s, and at times of food shortage threatened to wreak havoc. But without some kind of institutional focus for opposition to royal power, even of the limited sort which the British parliaments still provided, it could do little but riot for cheaper bread, albeit in the name of ‘liberty’. The same pattern of relatively inarticulate urban protest was to recur in 1830 and - throughout the continent - in 1848. However, rising living standards as a consequence of increasing industrialisation in northern and central France as well as rapidly growing transatlantic trade with Canada and Louisiana tended to diminish popular political protest in the second half of the century. In view of the economic developments of the nineteenth century, it seems idle to speculate about what a successful popular rebellion against either the Bourbons or the Stuarts might have achieved in the 1790s.

In any case, contemporaries were more impressed by the extent of religious revival than by inchoate urban bread riots. In England, this took the form of a relatively conservative Methodism. In Ireland, Poland and northern Scotland, there were significant but relatively unremarkable revivals of Catholic piety. But France and Spain experienced sporadic outbreaks of violent iconoclasm (a pattern which repeated itself in Russia in 1905 and 1915-16); while in Central Europe the millenarian Jewish prophet Karl Marx attracted a considerable number of followers, by no means all of them Jews, with his predictions of an impending apocalypse. Marx was of course arrested by the Mainz authorities in 1847 and spent most of his life in prison. Few of his writings survived the strict censorship of the period. Yet he indirectly influenced a host of Orthodox imitators in Russia, notably the priest Vladimir Ulyanov, whose brother was executed for his part in the abortive assassination attempt against Alexander II in 1881. If successful, it is worth noting, that could have postponed the creation of a representative assembly in Russia, the Duma, for a generation by putting Alexander’s reactionary son on the throne. Revisionist historians are fond of arguing that in fact material ‘class’ divisions played a more important part in such popular movements; but it is hard to see how the leading role of well-educated and relatively prosperous figures like Marx and Ulyanov can be explained in such terms.

Faced with the twin threats of food riots and religious cults, the monarchical states of Europe responded in two ways. Firstly, they sought to create more sophisticated and efficient forms of policing and administration. Secondly, they sought (as in the past) to export domestic problems by encouraging emigration.

However, the former strategy often implied a greater degree of centralisation than had hitherto existed. The resulting opposition to centralisation gave the age its distinctive political language. On the one hand, ‘unitarists’ and ‘federalists’ supported the drive for more efficient government, arguing not only for centrally controlled police forces and bureaucracies, but also for centralised revenue-raising agencies and banking systems - even, in some cases, common currencies. On the other hand, so-called ‘particularists’ or ‘states’ righters’ sought to defend what they saw as their traditional ‘liberties’. (Those few enthusiasts for French philosophy who sought to define their positions as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ soon came to sound quaintly old-fashioned.) The classic confrontation between the centralisers and the particularists came in British America, between the centralists who wished (for primarily religious reasons) to see the abolition of slavery throughout the American continent and the states’ righters who objected to this infringement of the states’ traditional liberties.

The resulting conflict boiled over into civil war, despite every effort by the imperial government in London to mediate between the two sides. However, as so often in such conflicts, imperial influence was ultimately exercised in such a way as to tilt the balance in favour of the particularists. Following Lee’s decisive victory at Gettysburg, the northern states were effectively forced by Palmerston and Gladstone to accept a compromise settlement, whereby the black slaves were given formal emancipation but no political rights (much as happened to the Russian serfs at around the same time); and the powers of the Viceroy, Abraham Lincoln, were substantially curbed. This settlement was formally agreed in April 1865, despite withering criticism from centralist or ‘imperialist’ supporters of the North like John Bright and Benjamin Disraeli. In fact, Disraeli’s prediction that the tacit continuance of unfree labour would prove economically unsustainable was to prove false. However, where he was right was in his prediction that the two sides would never wholly forget the polarisation of the Civil War. Just as he predicted, post-bellum America increasingly divided into North and South.

Much the same happened when Gladstone and his successors sought to deal with the not dissimilar North-South division in Ireland. Here, the problem was not only an economic one (as in America, the North was industrial, the South agrarian, though reliant on poor peasant farmers rather than slaves). It was also a religious one, thanks to the seventeenth-century colonisation of the north of the island by Calvinists from Scotland. In the rest of Ireland there was a further division between the Dublin-based established church (as reformed by Laud) and the Catholicism of the peasantry. As in America, conflict arose from the resistance of one region to increasing centralisation. As the power of the Irish Parliament increased (which it did steadily under the influence of Grattan in the 1790s), so the Ulster Protestants came to fear for their traditional religious liberties. In an effort to avoid another civil war, Gladstone proposed Home Rule for Ulster - a separate parliament in Belfast for the six predominantly Protestant counties. But this was overwhelmingly rejected by the Irish Prime Minister John Redmond, who saw no reason to relinquish Dublin’s authority over the prosperous North of the island, and fervently opposed in London by imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain. As Alvin Jackson has shown, it was not until 1912 that the Asquith government was able to enact qualified Home Rule for the six counties of Ulster; and even this limited measure precipitated violence between Catholic Irish Volunteers and Protestant Ulster Volunteers, necessitating military intervention from England.

The second policy favoured by the nineteenth-century monarchies - emigration - led to rather different complications. From the 1840s onwards, millions of Irishmen, Scots, Germans, Italians, Poles and Russians were encouraged to depart their native lands. Russians mostly headed east to Siberia. But for most Europeans the most attractive destinations were undoubtedly in North America. However, both the Anglo-Americans and French-Canadians were profoundly hostile to any significant immigrations of people they regarded as foreigners. This did not present a problem for the Irish and Scots (curiously, the French did not prove to be such keen emigrants). But the Germans, Italians and Poles found themselves effectively without colonies to go to. It was partly the resulting sense of exclusion from the great global empires - and the growing fears of Central European governments about the social consequences of rural overpopulation - which inspired the great political changes which transformed the Central European map in mid-century.

The most important of these was the agreement of Austria and Prussia to settle their historic differences and to reform the Holy Roman Empire, making it into something more closely resembling a Western state - that is to say, a relatively decentralised federation under a single imperial head. After prolonged debate, agreement was finally reached in 1862-3 when the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph secured the support of the Prussian King Wilhelm I for his scheme. Against the advice of his Austrophobe minister president Bismarck, Wilhelm accepted Franz Joseph’s supremacy as emperor of a reformed empire on condition that its Foreign Ministry should be given permanently to Prussia - a concession which quickly changed Bismarck’s attitude. As a consequence, the Habsburgs effectively extended their empire from Lombardy to Lübeck, from Mainz to Memel - though their power within the larger states was, like British power in America, in some ways more notional than real.

This ‘reform era’ was made easier by the wars waged by Britain and France to prevent a Russian takeover of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans in 1854-5 (the Crimean War) and 1878-9 (the Bulgarian War). So long as the Tsar was kept from controlling the Black Sea Straits, the German Emperor was content to see the ancient kingdoms of Piedmont and Serbia extend their power in Italy and the Balkans. ‘Patriotism’ - the sense of loyalty to one’s own historic kingdom - came to be one of the vital sources of Habsburg strength. Those few intellectuals who argued for alternative ‘national’ allegiances based on language and culture went largely unheeded, though some modern scholars of ‘nationalism’ believe their importance has been underestimated.

The ultimate loser in this process was France. In the wake of the defeat of Russia in Bulgaria, there were those at Versailles who dreamt of cementing a permanent alliance with Britain. True, the British Foreign Office was deeply suspicious of the new German Empire, particularly when it embarked on programmes of naval construction and colonial acquisition which some saw as a direct challenge to British maritime supremacy. This probably explains why the idea of an Anglo-German alliance came to nothing. But traditional hostility to France - the loss of Canada had never been wholly forgotten - and a growing belief on the part of English imperialists like Chamberlain in the natural cultural and economic affinity between an American Britain and a German Europe dashed the hopes of French Anglophiles like the Cambon brothers. Instead, the Bourbons turned to the Romanovs (a natural diplomatic convergence, perhaps, of the two most centralised monarchies). Unfortunately for Versailles, as far as most British politicians could see, the resulting Franco-Russian alliance simply made Habsburg-Hohenzollern fears of ‘encirclement’ more legitimate. The obvious ease with which the Royal Navy was able to maintain its superiority over the German fleet - and the lack of any real colonial friction between the two empires - soon dispelled City fears of an Anglo-German antagonism. By contrast, British interests seemed much more directly threatened by Russia’s continuing expansion in Asia.