by Frank McLynn
The Jacobites themselves were well aware of their vulnerability to hostile propaganda on this issue. They realised that, even if they could overcome the byzantine complexities involved in restoration of these lands, they would simply cause hardship and suffering to hundreds of powerful families and thus drive them to eventual revolt. Yet the fear that these fertile properties, about one-third of all the real estate in England, might one day be restored to their original owners, had always been the economic base on which the ideological superstructure of ‘anti-popery’ had been built.119 To get round this, James Francis’s advisers put it to him in 1724 that he should obtain a decree from the pope, in which the Catholic Church renounced all claim to these lands.120 The advice was never acted on for a number of reasons. James felt that such a disclaimer would harden rather than weaken the opposition to Jacobitism in England, as it would be construed as a pre-emptive bid to win hearts and minds, prior to a Jacobite invasion. Others raised the possibility of later popes annulling such a decree. William Shippen, the English Jacobite, objected that if James obtained such a decree, he would make himself appear more, not less, of a papal poodle; he would seem to be a man who did no more and no less than the pope ordered him to do.121 The issue was left in limbo, to provide wonderful propaganda for the Whigs. However, the matter was a running sore and even more acute in Ireland, always (and rightly) considered crypto-Jacobite, where further lands had been alienated as a result of the conquests by Cromwell and William: the effect of these had been to leave only one-seventh of Irish land in Catholic hands; hence for the Protestants a return even to 1640 was dreaded.122 Much of this expropriation, however, had taken place in the Cromwell era and, significantly, had not been reversed by Charles II, whose abiding concern, as he put it, was not to go on his travels again. Yet the land question was even more complex in Ireland since, as Bishop Berkeley (he of the esse est percipi principle in philosophy) pointed out in 1745, many Catholic landowners by that time held their property under the Act of Settlement of 1701; it was most unlikely, he alleged, that their titles would be recognised by an incoming Jacobite regime.123
Of all the revolutionary motives imputed to the Jacobites, the most worrying was the fear in Whig minds that an incoming Stuart regime would repudiate the national debt. The Whigs had ingeniously linked the fortunes of the Act of Settlement, which essentially outlawed Catholicism, with the national debt. To defeat Louis XIV in the war of 1689–97 William of Orange had needed huge sums of money, and to get these by new mechanisms he was prepared to trade off most royal prerogatives to Parliament.124 This was the genesis of the distinctive financial capitalism introduced after 1688, symbolised by institutions such as the national debt, the Bank of England (founded in 1694) and the South Sea Company, which gave Parliament full powers to approve all borrowing by the Crown.125 It was an abiding motif in Whig propaganda that the restored Stuarts would cancel the national debt and ruin bondholders. Pro-Hanoverians argued that to oust their regime was not just a matter of revoking the Act of Settlement, which could be done by a hastily convened Parliament after Stuart restoration but to ruin thousands, precisely since the Protestant succession and the post-1688 system rose or fell together. Under the Hanoverians, it was argued, Parliament was sovereign, but under the Stuarts this had never been the case and never would be. A monarch who could act on his own initiative, untrammelled by Parliament, had difficulty borrowing on the open market since he could not credibly commit to repayment in all circumstances and was likely to default if the going got tough, just as Charles II had done in 1672.126 Quite apart from the problems debt repudiation would cause to traditional allies like the Dutch (who were major debt-holders), cancellation of the national debt would mean destroying wealth: the author of the 1745 Calm Address argued that the debt was an interest-bearing form of wealth which the public owned.127 Charles Edward was well aware that this was a crucial issue but was determined not to give hostages to fortune. In a rare demonstration of political nous he decided to stall. In a proclamation dated 10 October 1745, issued during the prince’s halcyon sojourn in Edinburgh, he said the following about the national debt: ‘That it has been contracted under an unlawful government, nobody can disown, no more than that it is now a most heavy load upon the Nation; yet in regard that it is for the greatest part due to those very subjects whom he promises to protect, cherish and defend, he is resolved to take the advice of his Parliament concerning it.’128
The wide spread of the debt was in some ways the nub of the matter. By increasing the number of bondholders battening off the national debt, the post-1688 elite had coopted them into the new political and dynastic system. The countervailing lever the Jacobites had to play on was the interest of the gentry, who had to pay the land tax to service the debt. The Jacobite risings were the most severe manifestation of an underlying court/country fracture, pitting the moneyed interest against the landed interest; in post-1715 terms this meant Whig versus Tory. Jacobite propaganda therefore concentrated on the increasing load of taxation that had to be paid to service the debt. The crushing burden of taxation, it was alleged, affected agricultural production, made English trade goods dearer, and thus enabled England’s rivals to undercut her in world markets.129 For this reason many of James Stuart’s advisers counselled him to repudiate the debt altogether; mere cancellation with compensation to debt-holders was too onerous.130 From this it was a short step to the widely held perception that the restored Jacobites would cancel all debts and financial obligations incurred since 1689, and especially those that had accrued after 1714. The perilous relationship between debtors and creditors in itself underlines the much graver social dislocation portended by a successful Jacobite rising than by, say, the transfer of power in the ‘American revolution’.131 The Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which established the United States, set its face resolutely against any concessions to debtors. There was thus a huge class of actual or potential Jacobites among men who had nothing to gain from the post-1688 regime. It was a common gibe in Ireland in 1745 that Catholic debtors were withholding payment from their creditors until they could see the outcome of the rebellion.132 Bankrupts, too, were particularly likely, for obvious reasons, to be Jacobite. The correlation can be well observed in the career of Charles Caesar, MP for Hertfordshire – almost a textbook example of the connection between bankruptcy and Jacobitism.133 The Duke of Wharton – the so-called ‘Hell-Fire Duke’, who dabbled in freemasonry and the occult and performed occasional services for James Stuart in the 1720s – is another good example.134 In 1745 many financially ruined men were led into rebellion in the hope of recouping their place in the world. Leading examples of Jacobite bankrupts in that year were the prince’s secretary, John Murray of Broughton, and the Earl of Kilmarnock, who paid for revolt with his head.135 Government records contain much more evidence. Among members of the Scottish gentry alone we find in one indictment for rebellion in 1746 the following list of bankrupts: Sir John Wedderburn of Blackness, David Fotheringham of Powrie (who acted as the Jacobite governor of Dundee), James Lindsay of Glenquist, James Hepburn of Keith, Patrick Walland of Abertrothock and David Carmichael of Balmeddie.136 There was also a string of bankruptcies caused by agricultural depression in the 1730s that added a quiverful of ‘economic Jacobites’ to the ranks of the malcontent. One interesting contrast between the 1715 and 1745 risings concerns the motivations of the Catholics of northern England. In 1715 there was hardly a single Catholic gentleman in Northumberland who was not on the brink of ruin with a heavily mortgaged estate, and it was this which had brought them out for the ‘Pretender’. By 1745 this grouping had completely disappeared.137
Yet it was always the national debt, and the uncertainty about Jacobite intentions in this regard which most concerned supporters of the post-1688 regime and especially the Hanoverian succession. Almost nobody expected continuity with the old system: the options seemed to be cancellation, with compensation for bondholders, or outright repudiation. Most of James Stuart’s counsellors advise
d that the soft option was simply too expensive and was self-defeating. It was estimated in the early 1730s that if James Stuart was restored and wished to liquidate the debt, he would have to raise £3 million a year in compensation. At the same time he would have to pay £1,500,000 yearly for the army and foreign mercenaries and raise another £500,000 for the civil list and to maintain foreign diplomatic representation. A Stuart monarch would then be faced with the option of cutting down the latter two items of expenses to defray the payment on the debt and thus losing popularity fast. The hard liners among his counsellors warned him that squeamishness over repudiation would cost him dear. If he repaid bondholders, they would simply use the money to conspire against him. Besides, Jacobites had been deprived of the fruits of their estates since 1688; it was time for the Whigs to suffer for their beliefs.138 Meanwhile, a very shrewd move would be to win over the landed classes definitively to the Stuarts by making an outright gift of those entailed estates that came into the hands of certain great families in the reign of Edward VI and Elizabeth I; many noble families without a male heir lost estates worth £20,000 a year when such entailed estates reverted to the Crown. Such a gesture, moreover, would turn the tables on propagandists of ‘Abbey Lands’ and conciliate important sectors of the aristocracy.139 The key was to win over almost the entire landed interest, so that repudiation of the debt would cause hardship only to the Dutch or London financiers who had no military capability in England.
It is difficult to overestimate the fears caused by the Jacobite threat to the hegemony of financial capitalism. Supporters of the post-1688 dispensation otherwise as different as Daniel Defoe and David Hume were at one in seeing this as the gravest threat of all from the Stuarts.140 The national debt issue most clearly defines the Jacobite threat as revolutionary or, if the nomenclature is preferred, counter-revolutionary, but at any rate a phenomenon much more serious either than the original ‘Glorious Revolution’ or the ‘American Revolution’. Modern econometric studies underline the gravity of the threat, with violent market oscillations in evidence whenever there was a Jacobite rising or even when there were rumours of one.141 How could one seriously imagine that the Bank of England would survive in its pre-1745 form when it had lent money to the very people who had driven the Stuarts into exile and prevented their return for fifty-seven years? It is impossible toto dissent from the verdict of modern economists who have studied Jacobitism, viz. that the Jacobite threat was of a genuinely revolutionary variety.142 It is possible to speculate counterfactually how England might have evolved if Charles Edward had been successful in 1745. Despite the scepticism of Maurepas et al., the commitments to France could not be easily shrugged off, so that it is unlikely that the great conflict of the Seven Years War, settling the issue of global hegemony between Britain and France, would have been fought. England would probably have settled into a quasi-Scandinavian mode of development, with no far-reaching British Empire. Pace John Buchan, King Charles III (for James had already announced his intention of abdicating in favour of his son) would not have been able to prevent the separation and independence of the American colonies, as this was historically overdetermined. In economic terms, Charles Edward probably would have delivered some of his promises to the poor and dispossessed, especially given the strong Jacobite opposition to the anti-common people thrust of phenomena such as enclosure.143 Late eighteenth-century England under the Jacobites might not have been a brave new world but it would have been a very different one from the universe of Adam Smith, Captain Cook and Pitt the Younger.
10
The Advent of the Chartists
ONE OF THE surprise outcomes of the English Civil War was the retreat, evinced both by the 1660 Restoration and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, from any notion of power to the bourgeoisie, let alone the toiling classes. For almost 200 years the landed aristocracy had a fairly clear run at power and hegemony. After the defeat of the Jacobite rising at Culloden in 1746, there were no real challenges to their position for another another 100 years, though the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 signalled a fairly clear-cut victory over the landed interest by the new class of capitalists produced by the Industrial Revolution. More significantly, there were no revolutionary challenges to the ruling class. During these 100 years, it is true, the elite had to deal with serious outbreaks of rioting and even the rise of the crowd as a new factor in politics. The Wilkite riots of the 1760s were really the pursuit of mainstream politics by other means.1 The Gordon riots of 1780 were far more serious, and some have even seen them as a révolution manquée, working from the fact that the rioters, ostensibly enraged against Catholics, took care mainly to target the property of wealthy Catholics; Romish craftsmen and labourers, from the same social stratum as the rioters, were left alone.2 In fact, all the Gordon riots did was to expose the unreality of ‘spontaneous combustion’ (a theory later avidly exposed by Rosa Luxemburg) as a means to revolution. Extrapolating from the Gordon riots, many observers then and since have wondered why England did not follow France into revolution in 1789 or even beat the French to it. On superficial indices England in the 1780s seemed more vulnerable to revolution than France. The Bourbon monarchy appeared stable while the British constitution was riddled with corruption; France’s ruling dynasty was at least homegrown, where the Hanoverians were boorish Germans; England emerged from the American War of Independence a beaten nation militarily, while France was on the side of the victors; and the entire lengthy tradition of rioting and popular disturbances in England made its population seem more refractory and rebellious than the cowed French. There can be many answers to the question of why France swung hard left into revolution while the English sailed the seas of continuity. Some of them are obvious. The peasantry was not an issue in England, the British had not emerged from the American war bankrupt as the French had, and their economy was in better shape.3 Not insignificantly, the Gordon riots were a false dawn if viewed as inchoate revolution. From 1792 to 1815 almost continual war in France coupled with severe repression at home – principally Pitt the Younger’s ‘white terror’ and his Two Acts (against Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings) – put most thoughts of even mild social protest on the backburner.4
After Waterloo, British politics was dominated for a long time (until 1832) by the issues of Catholic emancipation and electoral reform. The former was achieved by 1828, but the latter was altogether more intractable. There had been pressure for the extension of the franchise ever since the founding of the London Corresponding Society in 1792. In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, a campaign for universal male suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot was led by the charismatic Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. Government cracked down hard, first in the notorious Peterloo massacre of 1819, when a peaceful radical movement in Manchester was broken up by the military, leaving some 700 demonstrators seriously wounded; 15 were killed outright and many others crawled away to die from their wounds afterwards.5 In some ways this was the most heinous reponse to popular protest ever seen in English history, for the troops were not facing armed and destructive rioters but unarmed demonstrators; moreover the level of vicious, misogynistic violence meted out to women protesters shocked even those with no sympathy for radical causes.6 Peterloo was followed by Hunt’s imprisonment for nearly three years and the passage of the Six Acts, suppressing radical meetings and publications, limiting the numbers of people who could assemble for political discussions, curtailing civil liberties and making it a crime even to discuss certain books and journals. As one historian has remarked: ‘It is not fanciful to compare the restricted freedoms of the British worker in the post-Peterloo period in the early nineteenth century with those of black South Africans in the post-Sharpeville period of the late twentieth century.’7 It is a myth that Peterloo led to any softening in elite attitudes or that it influenced MPs to pass the Reform Act of 1832. What operated most forcibly was the law of unintended consequences. The Tories under the Duke of Wellington repealed the anti-Catholic p
enal laws out of a sense that the situation in Ireland was reaching boiling point. However, many Tories argued that the danger from northern cities was just as great and, in any case, the people there were largely nonconformists who would offset the newly emancipated Catholics. It became even more difficult for the diehards to hold the pass against parliamentary reform when Wellington alienated his own party with a fatuous no-change speech. After losing a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons, Wellington resigned and the parliamentary initiative passed to the reform-minded Whig Lord Charles Grey. He it was who managed, at the third attempt, to enact the so-called Great Reform Act.8
