The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  During the summer of 1780 the prospects for reform suddenly worsened. In May 1780 the capture of Charleston by Cornwallis temporarily revived ministerial morale. More importantly, the Gordon Riots, which ravaged London in early June, leaving the capitol at the mercy of the rioters for six days, terrified propertied opinion, giving a fearful warning of what might happen if concessions were made to the popular voice.15 The Gordon Riots reminded contemporaries of the frailty of social order and of the ease with which social disciplines could disintegrate. The sheer ferocity of the Gordon Riots provoked a Loyalist reaction, allowing the institutions and forces of order to reassert themselves in London. (Of course, in most towns and cities, the law and order had been maintained all along.) Nevertheless, it is no wonder that the Economical Reform movement was temporarily under a cloud as Lord North dissolved Parliament and the political classes concentrated on the general election of 1780.

  The political scene was dominated during late 1780 and 1781 by the final acts in the drama in America. Wyvill summoned a second meeting of his congress for the spring of 1781, but the turnout was disappointing: only nine counties and two boroughs were represented. The fall of North’s ministry, however, revived the prospects for reform. The Rockingham–Shelburne ministry proceeded to pass some of the Economical Reform legislation which had been proposed in 1780. Crewe’s Act, to disfranchise revenue officers, achieved what it set out to achieve, but excessive expectations had always accompanied it: the number of revenue officers had always been exaggerated and the act cost the Treasury little more than the control of a couple of seats. Clerke’s Bill against contractors likewise passed easily, but it could be evaded by technically transferring the contract in question to a friend or relative. Burke’s Civil Establishment Bill was much more extensive, directed, as it was, to the elimination of secret influence, but compared to his grand scheme of 1780 it was notably more moderate. Burke conceded that it would save only one-third of the £200,000 per annum of which he had then boasted. Nevertheless, Burke removed 134 household offices, 22 of them tenable with a seat in Parliament, the third secretaryship and the Board of Trade, as well as a number of other offices. Yet he was able to effect few savings on pensions and he did not undertake the abolition of the separate jurisdictions. Finally, the bill sought to enforce economy on the king by restricting the Civil List to £900,000 per annum. Although the bill did not satisfy the over-optimistic expectations which it aroused, it was a major achievement to carry it in the face of the court’s hostility. If it did not transform the balance of the constitution in favour of the House of Commons, it kept up pressure in that direction. Taken together with the Younger Pitt’s administrative reform, Burke’s bill did much to weaken the financial basis of the eighteenth-century monarchy.

  These seemed to be famous victories, but to supporters of parliamentary reform they were little more than appetizers. The cabinet had three prominent supporters of parliamentary reform (Fox, Shelburne and the radical Duke of Richmond) and the election of 1780 had brought into Parliament two significant, younger spokesmen, Pitt the Younger and R. B. Sheridan. Wyvill decided to summon another congress for 1783, and in the meantime he put pressure on Pitt to keep the issue before the public. This he did in May 1782 by moving for a committee on the subject of parliamentary reform. Pitt adopted a moderate tone, arguing that he was not engaged in innovation but in restoring the constitution to its original purity. His motion was lost, but by the intoxicatingly close division of 161 to 141. This encouraged Wyvill’s new petitioning campaign in which twelve counties and, perhaps surprisingly, twenty-three boroughs submitted petitions. However, Pitt’s second reform motion on 7 May 1783 met with much less success. He denied that he was aiming at universal suffrage. What he was proposing was the gradual elimination of corrupt boroughs and their replacement by at least 100 county members. On this occasion, however, the opponents of reform, especially Lord North, shone in debate. Surely, argued North, the fact that his own ministry had been overthrown was proof, if proof were needed, that Parliament was susceptible to public opinion. A motion for the order of the day was carried against Pitt by the overwhelming majority of 144 on division figures of 293 to 149.

  The great political struggle between Pitt and Fox distracted attention from the issue of reform for over a year, but in 1785 Wyvill and Pitt decided to make one last effort. Pitt could rely on the neutrality of George III, whose ultimate dependence on his minister was obvious to all, but even Pitt lacked the strength to make the issue of parliamentary reform a government measure. Wyvill attempted to rouse the country, but in 1785 only two counties and ten boroughs petitioned. On 18 April 1785 Pitt proposed to disfranchise thirty-six rotten boroughs and redistribute their representation to the counties and the metropolis, leaving open the prospect that large, unrepresented towns might benefit from further redistributions. It was scarcely a radical measure, affecting neither the duration of parliaments nor the total number of MPs. It was a moderate, once-for-all package but Pitt’s motion was lost by 248 to 174.

  The reasons for Pitt’s defeat were fourfold. They bear examination because they throw light on his earlier failures and, more generally, upon the strategic problems faced by the reform movement. First, the disfranchisement of rotten boroughs represented an attack on property which thoroughly alarmed many sections of the political nation. Second, although couched in moderate terms the effect of Pitt’s proposals would have been really quite radical, adding, on Wyvill’s estimate, about 100,000 electors, 30 per cent of the existing total. Third, Wyvill had committed a tactical error in identifying his fortunes so closely with those of Pitt, thus excluding and discouraging Foxites and radicals. Fox, indeed, had agreed as a condition of the coalition with North in 1783 to drop reform, and the petitioning movement suffered from the failure of several counties which had petitioned in 1780 to do so in 1783 and 1785. He acknowledged that Lord North’s continuing hostility to parliamentary reform needed to be respected while declaring that, in any case, Pitt’s proposals for continuing gradual reform were unacceptable. Fourth, the fact that only two counties petitioned in 1785 is telling comment on the lack of support for reform in the country. Furthermore, several of the ten boroughs were relatively small places: Launceston, Scarborough, Lyme Regis, King’s Lynn and Morpeth. Public support for reform had evaporated. In short, the conditions which had given rise to the petitioning movement – high taxation, military defeat and economic recession – had now passed.

  Pitt recognized that little was to be gained by persisting with parliamentary reform for the present and allowed the issue to drop. With Pitt’s defeat the parliamentary reform movement lapsed although movements for moral and religious reform did not. The petitioning movement had been a remarkable and sustained mobilization of respectable opinion, owing much to Wyvill’s personal qualities of diplomacy and patience, and depending above all on his organizational genius. The canvassing of opinion from house to house in many counties of England required organizational exertions which were extraordinary for the times. Wyvill’s movement represents the first institutionalized extension of radicalism into the provinces. Building on the example of the Wilkites, Wyvill and his friends used the press and the printed word to good effect but relied to a much lesser degree on festive celebration and carnivalesque tradition. Although the movement for parliamentary reform waned in the second half of the 1780s, the accumulated experience, personnel and ideology which it had gathered were to be of immense importance in Britain in the age of the French Revolution.

  NOTES

  1.Until the work of Lewis Namier, the Whig interpretation of the reign of George III affirmed that Bute and the king wished to destroy the existing administration, raise the standard of prerogative and force Parliament, via bribery and corruption, to submit to the royal will. For the standard refutations of these discredited conspiracy theories, see L. B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd edn (1961), ch. 1; H. Butterfield, George III and the Historians (1957), ch. 6; R. R. Sedgwic
k, Letters of George III to Lord Bute (1939), ‘Introduction’; J. Brooke, George III (1972), chs 2 and 3.

  2.There is now some doubt that the king was afflicted with porphyria. It has been argued that his condition was one of bipolar disorder. See T. Peter, History of Psychiatry (2010).

  3.For Townshend see above, pp. 191–2. Augustus Henry, 3rd Duke of Grafton (1735–1811) was MP for Bury St Edmunds in 1756, he succeeded to the peerage a year later. He was one of Newcastle’s strongest supporters in the early 1760s, but gravitated to Chatham after the fall of the Rockingham ministry, in which he was Secretary of State for the Northern Department. He was outvoted in his own cabinet on the repeal of the Tea Duty and was immortalized in the venomous Letters of Junius, later served under North and Rockingham. William, 2nd Earl Shelburne and 1st Marquis of Lansdowne (1737–1805), served in Grenville’s cabinet but quite quickly attached himself to Chatham; between 1766 and 1768 he was a Secretary of State. Between 1768 and 1782 he was in opposition, becoming the leader of Chatham’s group on that statesman’s death in 1778.

  4.Henry Seymour Conway (1721–95), a nephew of Sir Robert Walpole, saw active service in the War of the Austrian Succession and in the Seven Years’ War. His support for Wilkes led to his dismissal from the service. He was Secretary of State under both Rockingham and Chatham, and became a fervent critic of the American war.

  5.Edmund Burke, the great philosopher-statesman (1729–97), was an Irish lawyer who came to England in 1750 to advance his fortunes. He published on philosophy and aesthetics in the second half of the decade, and in 1758 he started the Annual Register. After minor political office he became private secretary to Rockingham, entering Parliament in 1766. He made an immediate impact in Parliament and defended his party staunchly against the court, against North and against Chatham.

  6.Economical Reform was the elimination of corruption by administrative reform, including the abolition of offices and pensions and the reduction of fees and perquisites.

  7.J. A. Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition Crisis of the Constitution 1782–84 (1969), pp. 128–32.

  8.Burke devoted himself in these years to the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor General of India (1773–84) for alleged corruption and extortion. The trial began in 1788 and lasted until 1795. After some early enthusiasm, most of Burke’s party colleagues lost interest, tired of the laborious business.

  9.I. R. Christie, ‘Party in Politics in the Age of Lord North’s Administration’, Parliamentary History, 6 (1987).

  10.P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (1989), p. 379.

  11.N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Orders’, in H. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain (2006), p. 179.

  12.J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (1976), p. 174.

  13.Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), pp. 112–17.

  14.Indeed, William Dowdeswell’s early endeavours were impressive. His motion of 17 February 1768 was lost by 263 to 188.

  15.The Gordon Riots arose out of protests made by Lord George Gordon and his Protestant Association against the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. That act had been passed in order to permit Catholics to serve in British regiments during the War of American Independence, and it allowed them to do so by taking an oath of fidelity to the crown. What stoked the fires of religious intolerance in England was the panic aroused by the invasion scare of 1779 and, more seriously, by a march on Parliament led by Lord George Gordon and his Protestant Association in early June 1780. Attacks on Catholic premises gave rise to more indiscriminate violence, some of it directed against the rich and famous. After several days and nights of constant rioting, order was restored with the use of the army, but only after some 300 deaths and many thousands injured.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Crisis of the Hanoverian Regime, 1789–1820

  THE REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS, 1789–1820

  The French Revolution presented Britain with the most serious challenge to her social and political structure since the Glorious Revolution. The challenge existed at the military level: the danger not merely of invasion by the French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies but of the possibility of exhaustion and surrender. It existed at the political level: to many people it was an example of a successful revolution in church and state which might be imitated in Britain by the proliferation of new reform movements and ideologies. It existed at the social level: the threat to social cohesion posed by over two decades of warfare, accompanied by rapid economic change and by occasional, and extremely potent, crises of subsistence. It says something for the speed of her political and economic, and perhaps of her psychological, recovery after the disasters of the American war that Britain in the early 1790s was confident of her ability to chart her own future and to maintain her place in Europe. Nevertheless, her newly recovered confidence was to be severely tested in the following three decades.

  Most Britons reacted with approval to the early events of the French Revolution in the summer and autumn of 1789: the fall of the Bastille, the abolition of feudalism and the establishment of constitutional government. There was a widespread feeling that the French had set out on the same path that the British had been travelling since the Glorious Revolution. Everyone could rejoice in the collapse of tyranny and the liberation of the people of one of the greatest countries in Europe. George III may have reflected a wider view that France was now reaping what she had sown when she had supported the American rebels. The government rejoiced that one of Britain’s major competitors was likely to be weakened for some time. It now seemed possible that the limited rapprochement which the Anglo-French treaty of 1786 had created might be strengthened. Reformers, both secular reformers who were seeking to reform Parliament and religious reformers who were seeking the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, were particularly excited. Indeed, Protestant Dissenters had attempted without success to persuade the House of Commons to repeal the acts in 1787, 1789 and 1790. Thereafter, they welcomed the French Revolution, believing that it inaugurated a new era of reform, enlightenment and benevolence, claiming that Britain ought to follow that example. Poets and intellectuals were no less ecstatic, Wordsworth glorying in ‘human nature seeming born again’, Southey believing that ‘old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’

  MAP 10: Europe in 1789.

  MAP 11: French satellites and French conquests, 1792–1805.

  By 1792, however, this early euphoria had given way to alarm and fear. Although Pitt, in his budget speech of February 1792, was still expecting fifteen years of peace in the new Europe, events were taking a worrying turn. In April France declared war on Austria and invaded the Austrian Netherlands. Assuming that a country in the chaos of an internal revolution could offer little real threat to the peace of Europe, Pitt remained aloof from the war, a decision of possibly vital significance. In the summer, however, everything changed. In July Prussia came into the war against France. In August France abolished the monarchy. Worse, the September massacres were horrifying evidence that the revolution had become a revolution of blood. In September French armies threw the allied Austro-Prussian armies back towards the boundaries of France. In November the French invaded the Austrian Netherlands and crossed the Rhine at Mainz. At the same time the French government issued a decree inviting the peoples of Europe to rise up against their oppressors, offering them encouragement and assistance. On 21 January 1793 they executed Louis XVI and on 1 February 1793 declared war on Britain.

  What were to be Britain’s objectives in the war? Pitt, like his predecessors, was motivated by very practical concerns for Britain’s security and trade. He was much less concerned with problems about the internal state of France, such as the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the restitution of aristocratic estates. What preoccupied Pitt was the need to keep the Netherlands out of French hands. French occupation of the Austrian Netherlands and,
above all, the opening of the River Scheldt to traffic, were watched with horror in Britain. The closure of the Scheldt had been guaranteed since 1648 and confirmed as recently as 1785 (by France) and 1788 (by Britain). The French decision to tear up international guarantees and treaties, according to Pitt, threatened British commerce and, indirectly, her security. As Lord Grenville,1 the Foreign Secretary, put it in December 1792, ‘England never will consent that France shall arrogate the power of annulling at her pleasure ... the political system of Europe, established by solemn treaties, and guaranteed by the consent of all the powers.’