This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  But for the moment, the Whigs were confident of their political power and there was stability at Westminster. There was, however, a little matter of a £50 million debt to be sorted out. The debt was the result of the war and taxes couldn’t be raised in sufficient amounts to cover it, so when an apparent sure-fire trading opportunity was presented, even the grandest snouts slurped from the eighteenth-century financial trough. The 1711 South Sea Company had been running with some success for nine years when it offered to absorb part of the National Debt. Of course, Parliament agreed. Consequently the shares in the company rose dramatically until, like so many wonder shares, their bubble burst. Many were ruined, others accused of corruption and the perils of bad investment at court found the King’s mistresses besides themselves with impending financial calamity. It was the steady figure and influence of Robert Walpole that would not save the day, but do enough for the monarch and his ladies to be every grateful. And why should he not be trusted? It was he who had warned them all that the South Sea scheme was doomed. They took little notice. They were making money, or so they thought. Walpole had himself been Chancellor, but had resigned in 1717. He had done so partly because he disliked the internal political jockeying for the position of the minister with most influence over the King, and partly because he disapproved of the government’s foreign policy. The court didn’t think a great deal of him especially when he boringly said that the South Sea scheme was but a bubble waiting to be pricked because instead of remaining a trading company it had become a finance house; and that was the root of its problem. Walpole should have known of course: he had himself been involved in the rush and grab for profit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  1721–6

  Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was a short, stout, ruddy-faced Norfolk farmer who hunted most of the season. In 1721 he became Britain’s first Prime Minister – a title quite new to government and one used pejoratively because he took so much authority on himself. A simple description of Walpole might be: the first Prime Minister and the person who managed the embarrassment and political position of court, party and government – the three victims of the greed and unwise investments of the moment. He brought political stability to Britain, and he set the style and method of government management for the rest of the eighteenth century. Walpole had been sent to Eton and then in 1696 up to Cambridge University. He was there for only two years, but would have been aware of the terrible turmoil of the country and the monarchy. In his first year, there was, or it was said that there was, a plot to assassinate King William III. In his second year, the War of the Grand Alliance against France came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick – the accord that momentarily set the balance of power in Europe in favour of the Habsburgs of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.

  Walpole left Cambridge because his brothers died and, at the age of twenty-two, he returned to Norfolk to run the family estate. Two years later, in 1700, his father died and Walpole became head of the family, married his first wife, Catherine, and then became the Whig MP for Castle Rising and, in the following year, for King’s Lynn – a seat he was to hold for most of the rest of his life. In 1708 he became Secretary of War and later Treasurer of the Navy. These were important posts: England was leading the Alliance in the War of Spanish Succession. Walpole was, by then, the established leader of the Whig Junto in the Commons. But when Queen Anne came to the throne, Harley became head of the Tory government. He needed to get rid of the outspoken Walpole and through some curious and historically unproven corruption, Walpole was actually expelled from the Commons and even sent to the Tower for six months. But by the time of George I’s accession, Walpole was back in favour and, in October 1715, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. That was the year of the Jacobite uprising and Walpole helped to put it down.

  Walpole’s rise to power had much to do with his own authority in managing party affairs and government but also, in the early years especially, it had a great deal to do with his cousin, who was also his brother-in-law, Charles Townshend, the second Viscount Townshend and later known as Turnip Townshend: he too was a Norfolk farmer.

  The brothers-in-law were clearly of similar persuasion and neither liked King George’s preparations for his adventures in the Baltic (Britain’s military power was one of the few attractions for the Hanoverian). Walpole said Britain could never afford the costs of personal wars and that the government could not be sure of its majority if it went ahead. He and Townshend were forced to resign.

  Walpole spent his time out of government getting on good terms with the Prince of Wales (the future George II who did not like his father anyway – no Hanoverian Prince of Wales ever liked his father) and by 1720 Walpole was back in favour enough to persuade the Prince to make it up with the King. Walpole became Paymaster General. By the following year, he was First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and sorting out the problems left by the bursting of the South Sea Company’s investment bubble. He split the remaining National Debt between the Bank of England and the Treasury and activated his fall-back, a sinking fund from taxes, in order to reduce it. His longer term aim was to have a stable monarchy, not an easy proposition given the personalities and personal ambitions of the Hanoverians.

  The King was learning to trust his English advisers, especially Walpole, which was wise because the advisers held the purse-strings, almost the only thing of interest to George I. So keeping the King and his mistresses in line was not too difficult although Latin had to be a reasonable lingua franca for Walpole and the monarch. Neither was proficient and their conversations rarely touched the heart of political and economic thought, but the relationship worked well enough and it reflected the apparently bland atmosphere of the Hanoverian court in London. One of the King’s mistresses, the Duchess of Kendal, was also happy to explain, if needed, Walpole’s views to the King, in exchange for a reasonable commission. Walpole certainly eased the financial anxieties of the King and his mistresses, but the lives of the vast majority were uncertain. Just as none of Queen Anne’s children had survived, as many as 20 per cent of babies died in their first year and one-third died before the age of five.

  There were then about 6.7 million people living in England, Wales and Scotland. By the end of the century, that figure would be approximately 10.5 million. The increase in population reflected advances in medicine and the general well-being of the people. However, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, of those who survived childhood, life expectancy was thirty-five years. People died in what would now be called ordinary circumstances, not because there was some genetic reason for dying young. It wasn’t a characteristic of the human race, especially the British people, to have short lives. Someone who did get through an epidemic or a war might well live to what, even now, would be called an old age. It was simply that when people did fall ill they couldn’t rely on medicine to cure the simplest of ailments, and so something like measles quickly became an epidemic. Also surgery was crude; there were no anaesthetics and, although alcohol may have helped the symptoms of pain, the results of shock could be death. This meant that more people were dying than were being born.

  And in 1720 another, unexpected, epidemic appeared: cheap gin. Low taxes on alcohol and a freedom to distil encouraged people to abandon beer for the much cheaper gin. It was, among the poor, a killer. And there’s evidence to show that the gin epidemic was very much concentrated in London, where perhaps as many as one in ten were dying from drink. Daniel Defoe claimed that because gin used much corn, the landed classes and the traders benefited from the fashion. Parliament took its time to do something about the problem but the solution was, after all, simple: tax gin out of the poor man or woman’s grasp and send them back to ale – which medically, at least, was probably less harmful than the water. The traders did not mind who paid what or what they bought. A drunk would be merry on whatever the tipple and would wake up in his or her same station in life whatever the drinking companions of the night before. That was
the generalization.

  Yet, overall there was a slow but perceptible shift in people’s stations in life. The eighteenth-century class system was being reshaped. There was increasing prosperity and innovation. The trading classes were elevated. Walpole’s first wife, Catherine, was the daughter of a timber merchant of Kent. The older families were struggling to keep their wealth. The trading classes (and at this period these would include bankers) now had the money to bail out and buy out some of the less fortunate. Here were what Daniel Defoe called, ‘the richest commoners’. And Defoe was well qualified to write about the changes in the class system. He understood every nuance of the London underclass. His father’s name was Foe but Daniel changed it to Defoe in about 1703 – when he was in his early forties. His father was a butcher and he, Daniel Defoe, became a hosiery trader. He was also a Protestant. Defoe joined Monmouth’s rebellion against the Catholic James II and then signed for William of Orange’s army in the Glorious Rebellion of 1688. He started pamphleteering and produced a notorious tract entitled, The Shortest Way with Dissenters. But this was hardly some popular diatribe. Defoe himself was a Dissenter, a Non-conformist. He was illustrating what he saw as the farce of intolerance.

  Trade is so far here from being inconsistent with a Gentleman, that in short trade in England makes Gentlemen, and has peopled this nation with Gentlemen. After a generation or two, the tradesmen’s children, or at least their grand-children, come to be as good Gentlemen, Statesmen, Parliament-men, Privy Counsellors, Judges, Bishops and Noblemen, as those of the highest birth and the most ancient families. Thus the Earl of Haversham was originally a merchant. The late secretary Craggs was the son of a barber. The present Lord Castlemaine’s father was a tradesman. The great grandfather of the present Duke of Bedford, the same. We see the tradesmen of England, as they grow wealthy, coming every day to the herald’s office, to search for the Coats of Arms of their ancestors in order to paint them upon their coaches. It was said of a certain tradesman in London, that if he could not descend from the ancient race of gentlemen, from which he came, he would begin a new race who should be as good Gentlemen as any that went before them

  Centuries earlier the aristocracy had emerged in English society, a class that assumed rights over others by birth – an aristocracy that spread from the family of monarchs. Here Defoe was concerned with a new aristocracy, a mass migration from the bottom up. But he disliked much of what he saw. He travelled about Britain observing the old order of the island. But he did so with the sharp sense of the successful tradesman he was and that his father had been before him. What he saw was the beginning of a new revolution, the Industrial Revolution. In the 1720s the development of science and a curiosity about things mechanical, coupled with the new opportunities for the trading people, mark the track towards the term ‘industrial’. For instance, in agriculture – the largest industry in Britain at the time – until the eighteenth-century farmers scattered seed by hand. In 1701, a man called Jethro Tull invented the wheeled seed drill. And because he did so, corn, for example, began to grow in rows. And the gap between those rows needed to be weeded, so Tull developed a hoe drawn by a horse.

  Travelling through Yorkshire – which Defoe called a ‘frightful country’ – in the early 1720s, Defoe described the textile industry. This was possible, he said, because there was coal and fast running water. Even the villages were arranged to dig the coal and to catch the water to produce the cloth that the growing manufacturing masterclass and their markets demanded.

  Note this use of the word manufacture. It wasn’t new. It had developed as a reference to the subject Defoe was describing: cloth-making. And the place where all those lusty fellows worked was already called a factory. Originally the term was used for a place where traders worked for overseas markets. But by the 1700s the two words were acceptably joined: manufactory. And while Defoe travelled throughout England watching the ways of the new Hanoverian age, in London its protectors, Walpole and Townshend, were preparing for its next generation. At a distance the Prince of Wales also watched and waited. For the days of George I were now drawing to an end.

  By the early 1700s the British monarchy had lost its sparkle. It was no longer the one element by which the nation could be governed. Furthermore, the monarchy had lost its Englishness, its Britishness. The line of kings and queens, albeit with Norman, Angevin, origins, was broken. The carefully developed responsibility of successive monarchs had been kingship – the promise to protect the people from invaders and lawmakers in return for the right to rule. When, in the past, a king or queen talked about ‘My People’ there was a sense of responsibility but most of all, identity. This essential part of kingship had disappeared. Now there was a German King on the throne who spoke little or no English and who cared little or nothing for his people. He was succeeded by his son who hated him, and who was unpopular with his people, too, and who would sooner have been in Hanover.

  And as identification with the monarchy waned, the British Protestants saw themselves as favoured, chosen, set aside for greatness by their Protestant ethic. The only people to be feared or scorned were Catholics. The Whigs were determined to stay in power and take every opportunity to denounce the Tories as Jacobites – and therefore promoters of a Catholic monarchy. The Whigs were becoming the ruling aristocracy. Against this background the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, determined his threefold task of stabilizing the economy, the monarchy and the Whig party.

  Old enemies reappeared, or tried to: one of them was Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the Tory plotter against Marlborough who had gone into exile once George I became King. And new and rising politicians nibbled at power such as the arrogant and ambitious John Carteret; the one-time ally of Walpole, William Pulteney; and the bland Henry Pelham and his brother, Tom Pelham-Holles, the first Duke of Newcastle. Walpole was careful to exclude from his circle those who threatened, and encourage those who could never do so. The Opposition courted the Prince of Wales and bribed the King’s mistresses, but in the latter case, so did Walpole and usually with more effect than the Opposition. He knew far more about the needs of the King’s ladies. None of this suggests that he was in total control. There were too many factions, too many opportunities to disrupt and corrupt government, the court and the institutions – especially the Church and the law. There was a constant: the King needed the government and both needed Parliament. Furthermore, whatever their differences, the King understood that he needed his son to succeed him; but most of all, he needed Walpole. It is too easy to say that attempts by Walpole’s enemies to distract the King from the Prime Minister’s methods of political management were unlikely to succeed. Walpole had to constantly demand that all members of the Cabinet must totally obey him. What he couldn’t control were events abroad, although he tried, by distancing the Cabinet from them.

  Austria and Spain, once enemies, joined forces under the Treaty of Vienna in the spring of 1725. Spain was demanding the return of Gibraltar from Great Britain, and the Austrian Ostend Company was a direct competitor of the East India Company. Then Russia joined Austria. How to prosecute foreign policy and when necessary war encouraged a strong difference of opinion between Walpole and his trusted, but not always bright, brother-in-law, Townshend. For example, Townshend quickly organized, too quickly according to Walpole, a new alliance of Britain, Hanover, France and Prussia. To Walpole this was entirely against the delicate balance he was trying to maintain. Parliament didn’t want to go to war but here was Townshend bringing together an anti-Austria cabal in the name of the House of Hanover. It never came to war, but it could have.

  The ordinary people weren’t particularly preoccupied with matters in Europe, but rather more with matters at home, in particular with a new tax. For centuries the nation had grumbled about the burden of taxes and rioted against the levying of them: they were usually imposed to raise money for wars. But now there were riots against local levies, toll taxes. The roads of Britain were in a sad state of repair. The roads that the Romans
had built 1,300 years earlier were in better condition than roads built much more recently, because those who remained after the Romans were not builders. And, of course, there had been a massive increase in traffic.

  The tenant farmers, the most frequent users of the roads, had to pay the road surveyors and, in eighteenth-century England, national attention to road building and repair was in its infancy. So, to build and repair the roads the people had to pay tolls. Daniel Defoe thought the toll taxes worked well.

  Turn pikes or toll bars have been set up on the several great roads of England, beginning at London, and proceeding thro’ almost all those dirty deep roads in the Midland Counties especially; at which turn pikes all carriages, droves of cattle and travellers on horseback are oblig’d to pay an easy toll; that is to say, a horse a penny, a coach threepence, a cart fourpence, at some six to eightpence, in some a shilling. Cattle pay by the score, or by the herd, in some places more. But in no place is it thought a burden that ever I met with, the benefit of a good road abundantly making amends for the little charge that the travellers are put to at the turn pikes.

  Not everyone agreed with Defoe, especially those who had to pay. Moreover there were enough people grumpy at the charge for the mood to gather pace to the extent that in 1726 the people rioted against the charges. Not that the protest did much good for them. The turnpike had first appeared in the 1660s and from now until the end of the eighteenth century it was to be the main means of improving the road system. In the 1700s more than 1,000 turnpike acts were passed. Britain was beginning its great industrial journey.