Although he was both a party and economic reformer, Rockingham was not a Parliamentary reformer; he did not stay in power long enough for that to happen. Also, reformers need energy and he was probably too lazy. He much preferred horseracing to the everyday business of government. Once he actually forgot to attend his own Cabinet meeting. Add to this the double-dealings of the King and the campaign to persuade Pitt the Elder to return, and it was inevitable that Rockingham would not survive. At Westminster there were more or less three groups. First there were the Royalists who would support the government if that’s what the King wanted. Then there were the squires, the landowners who were not ambitious for public office, and who wouldn’t blindly support the government because the King said so; but they would give it a fair hearing if the monarch did. The third group contained those who were ambitious for public office and who would swing with the prevailing mood and hang upon the court’s coattails.
What was missing in Parliament was a formal ‘Opposition’. There were opposition groups, but no organized opposition. Certainly, during the early part of his long reign, it is unlikely that any opposition would have made much impression on George III. He thought in the Hanoverian manner, if that is indeed the characteristic shown as attention to detail but not much wider perception of the consequences of policy-making. He was wholly committed to the role of sovereign rather than the grandeur of his office. He took Parliament at its word; any rebellion within the American colonies would be resisted by force and in doing so, he, George would thus support the constitutional rights of Great Britain and its commercial interests.
The constitutional debate was by and large an uninteresting subject for a nation stirring to the call of another revolution – that of the opportunity of industry. At the start of the eighteenth century England and Wales had a combined population of almost five-and-a-half million. Illness, a very high child mortality rate and, in London, an adult death rate accelerated by cheap gin until the 1750s, meant that the population grew by only one million in the first half of the eighteenth century. In the next fifty years, partly due to huge increases in medical science, it grew by something approaching three million, ending the century at about nine million. Scotland, over the same period, went from little more than one million to nearly three million by the end of the century.
Most people expected to live until they were about thirty-one or thirty-two. By the end of the century that expectation had risen to thirty-nine. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any old people – after all, George III himself was on the throne for almost sixty years.
As the population grew so, of course, did towns and cities. For example, at the start of the eighteenth century, about 10,000 people lived in Glasgow. By the middle of the century there 25,000 and, 100 years on, there were more than 200,000. Bigger city populations meant bigger, sometimes redesigned, towns. In 1767 Edinburgh’s Town Council approved James Craig’s plan for the development of new buildings and for what was called feuing. A feu was a perpetual lease at a set rent. The pavement on each side of the street would be ten feet wide, not more than a foot higher than the road and there would be free access between pavement and road. Moreover, the city fathers were to ‘execute a common sewer’ in the middle of the street. Most importantly, anyone with a house in the street should be allowed to put their own drains in and connect to the public sewer. So there was no longer any need to empty chamber pots from the upstairs window and good drainage meant better health and therefore the possibility of lower death rates. Edinburgh would become one of the finest cities in Europe with modern planners determined that it should be so.
Not that there was too much interest in the south of Great Britain. London, as ever, was contemplating only power; in the 1760s it was more interested in the ailing Pitt, now the Earl of Chatham, who was suffering terribly from gout and from bouts of desperate depression. Gossip too surrounded the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, the taxes to be imposed on the Americas and the likely consequences, and the authorship of the Junius Letters. Here, for three years between 1769 and 1772, were seventy of the most vicious attacks – published in London’s Public Advertiser – on major political figures, particularly the Prime Minister, the Duke of Grafton, and even the monarch, George III.
If Junius (probably Sir Philip Francis) thought all pedestals should be toppled, he did not include a new hero of the day, Captain James Cook who would be remembered, without malice, as one of the great adventurers of the eighteenth century. James Cook was a navigator who had learned his trade well enough in east-coast colliers and then in the Royal Navy that he would become a fine explorer and hydrographer. Cook began the first of his three great voyages in 1768, and in a decade he sailed to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii; plotted the exact positions of the Easter Islands and Tonga, New Caledonia and Norfolk Island; surveyed the North American coast; and charted the extreme coast of Siberia before sailing south again to Hawaii. It was in Hawaii that he was murdered in 1779. He was mourned by a nation hardly at peace with itself and moving inexorably towards war with its American colonies.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
1769–70
The political atmosphere of 1769 was full of the signs of the beginnings of a dissolution of the then British Empire. But geographically there was still enormous ignorance of what lay south of the equator. Everyone knew about Europe, something of China, India and North America, but not much about the southern hemisphere.
Two centuries earlier, Columbus, Magellan and, by 1587, Drake, had shown that the world was far larger than most had imagined and that there was plenty of room for other continents. In 1606, a Dutch admiral, William Jansz, had discovered Australia. A few years later Abel Tasman and the Dutch navigator, François Visscher, found Tasmania and New Zealand in their search for a commercial route to South America. But very little detail was known, hence Cook’s expedition in the Endeavour.
The true nature of the expedition was classified. Cook had two sets of instructions: the first, entirely public, were given him by his masters, the Admiralty, with guidance from the Royal Society. He was to sail via Cape Horn to what was then called King George’s Island and what is now called Tahiti. He was to observe a transit of Venus in June 1769. It wasn’t until this had been done that he was allowed to open his second set of instructions, or Secret Orders. The Orders were not published until as late as 1928.
Secret
Whereas the making Discovery of Countries hitherto unknown, and the Attaining a Knowledge of distant Parts which though formerly discover’d have yet been but imperfectly explored, will redound greatly to the Honour of this Nation as a Maritime Power, as well as the Dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and may trend greatly to the advancement of the Trade and Navigation thereof; and Whereas there is no reason to imagine that a Continent of Land of great extent, may be found to the Southward of the Tract lately made by Captain Wallis38 in His Majesty’s Ship the Dolphin . . . or the tract and any former Navigators in Pursuits of the like kind; You are therefore in Pursuance of His Majesty’s Pleasure hereby requir’d and directed to put to sea with the bark you Command so soon as the Observation of the Transit of the Planet Venus shall be finished . . . You are to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery of the Continent above-mentioned until you arrive in the Latitude of 40 degrees, unless you sooner fall in with it.
The latitude forty degrees south runs roughly through Southern Australia and Tasmania and the southern end of New Zealand’s North Island. The furthest point north in the ‘Continent’, now known as Antarctica, mentioned in the Secret Orders is more than sixty degrees south. Cook’s Secret Orders instructed him that if and when he discovered the continent, he must measure it, survey the coastal waters, shoals, currents, tides and harbours, headlands and rocks. He was to look for fish, plants, minerals, precious stones, beasts and fowl and bring examples back to England so, as the Orders stated, ‘We may cause proper examination and experiments to be made of them.’
An
d, after a further list of orders, this most secret document concludes that the consequences of the voyage should remain secret and that when he returned he should take any notes, diaries or logs from his crew members and tell them they had not to breathe a word of what they had seen. He would, with all sealed reports, go straight to the Admiralty.
Cook did as he was asked but he didn’t find the great southern continent. However, he did experiment with shipboard medicine and it’s popularly said that Cook found the cure for scurvy – the fatal disease of many a long-distance sailor. It’s said that he gave everyone the juice of lemons and limes and that was that. In fact, the Admiralty had already done a great deal of research into keeping sailors healthy and the person who probably did more to cure scurvy was a naval surgeon called James Lind. More than twenty years before Cook sailed Lind had carried out a series of anti-scurvy tests using sailors as guinea pigs. On Cook’s second voyage, which lasted three years, he recorded the loss of only one man through disease. However, Cook observed that although lemons had their value, they were impractical to keep on board.
Cook should have died a hero, preferably of old age. He did not. Cook was killed by islanders in Hawaii in 1779. It was not a pre meditated act although the manner of his killing and dismemberment was sickening. By the time of his death, Cook had explored the edges of the Antarctic, staked the English flag across islands of the peaceful ocean, disproved the hypothesis of the great southern continent and developed charting and marine surveying to a level that was barely improved until modern echo and satellite technology. Most of all, Cook honoured the central ambition of George III, an ambition contained in those first Secret Orders. He opened a route that would allow English-speaking peoples to one day colonize the south-west Pacific.
Meanwhile, in the towns and countryside of these islands people believed themselves to be overtaxed. One adjustable form of revenue, the window tax, had existed since 1696. The formula was simple: each house was charged a single sum for the building itself and then so much per window. The idea was to raise millions, and millions were raised – and not a little opposition. It is still possible to see older houses where windows have long ago been bricked up to avoid the tax.
Of course, there was nothing new in taxation but at the start of the 1700s the government was taking £4.3 million a year from the people in taxes. By the end of the century it was nearly £32 million. As the country advanced, someone had to pay. Britain now had organized government and organized government was costly. The National Debt was rising. In 1700 it was about £14 million but by the end of George III’s first decade it was £129 million. By the end of the century it would be £456 million. The interest alone was £9 million a year and taxation had doubled.
And when the population wasn’t being taxed, some of it was being robbed in a more traditional manner. The magistrate Sir John Fielding wrote to the Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Jenkinson, to inform him of several recent robberies. Fielding wrote that the mugging and robbing often took place near the fields of Tyburn and Tottenham Court Road in London and that he had sent a foot patrol to search the area but ‘before they got out of the coach which carried them to the spot, they narrowly escaped being murdered by three footpads, who without giving them the least notice fired two pistols immediately into the coach’. At the time, there wasn’t a police force. Sir John’s only help came from the Bow Street Runners who were the nearest thing to an organized force. The Runners, as they became known, were set up in 1748 by Sir John’s half-brother, Henry Fielding, now better known as the author of Tom Jones. The year before Tom Jones was published, Henry Fielding was the Chief Justice of the Peace at Bow Street Magistrates Court. There was, in government, a considerable debate on what powers existed to maintain law and order. For example, in 1768 there was a mob riot in St George’s Fields, part of what is now south London, and the troops were called out. In a debate following the riots, Edmund Burke told the House of Commons that liberty was all and a police force must be treated with suspicion, yet must be considered. Burke would not trust certain law-makers with the code of liberty he endorsed and he was wary that a regular force was the beginnings of a police state unless its role was tightly monitored. In an increasingly affluent society, the question of how to maintain law and order brought considerable stress upon the government of the day. At the same time there was a need to reduce the cost of government and a need to find new ways of raising taxes, while the new methods of law and order should not threaten the security and liberty of the people.
The rate of change in the nation in the 1770s was rapid enough to frighten people who were used to the slow rates of change characteristic of previous generations. Perhaps every generation argues that case, but during this period the reasons were, to many of the eight or so million people in England, Wales and Scotland, coming to mean revolutionary rather than evolutionary change. There were technological and scientific innovations and the first tentative steps towards the Industrial Revolution were taken.
In the first decade of the century, twenty-two new patents were registered. By the 1760s the figure was 205. By the last decade of the eighteenth century there would be more than 900 new inventions. In 1769 a one-time barber and wigmaker patented a machine that would make him a famous, rich, dark satanic mill-owner. His name was Richard Arkwright and his invention was a spinning frame powered by water.
In the same year, James Watt patented his steam engine and Josiah Wedgwood opened another pottery. The Royal Academy had just been established and its first president, Joshua Reynolds, gave the first of his Fifteen Discourses, in which he claimed history painting to be the most noble form of art. Tobias Smollett left England for ever, William Smith, the founder of English geology, was born and, in the summer of 1769, the men of Hambledon were having a lean season on the cricket field.
Perhaps Britain was not a poor nation. Certainly the level of gambling suggested that the rich were very rich and that the not-so-rich thought gambling a simple way to become so. But the sums involved were sometimes enormous, even by twenty-first-century standards. In the eighteenth century, thousands of pounds were bet on a horse or the turn of a card and, perhaps more surprisingly, bets of around twenty-thousand guineas were not uncommon at the more fashionable cricket matches. However, there was still a need for foundling homes, charity schools, parish workhouses and the burial of those who had died undernourished and badly cared for.
At the same time, the courts were recognizing that new schemes, inventions or processes were just as much part of a man’s property as was his house or livestock. The courts were having a harder time with the question of religion. There was no question that the English could have anything but an Established Church of England. Therefore, the term dissenters covered other religions, everything from Protestants to Catholics to breakaway groups such as the Congregationalists. In Scotland, the question of religion would become simpler. There was no Established Church. The Church of Scotland was the majority church, but not established in law and answerable to Parliament as was the case south of the border. There were too the smaller groups, particularly the Episcopalians. These were the devotees who refused to go along with the 1690 ‘victory’ of Presbyterians in the Church of Scotland. Episcopalians were minority worshippers to the degree that in 1705, when they first had bishops, consecration took place in secret. Politically, Episcopalians were linked to a losing but sensitive cause – that of the Jacobites. In 1712 the Toleration Acts made clear that being an Episcopalian was fine as long as worshippers did not support Jacobite claims to the throne. Few would agree to that and after both the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings, Episcopalians were further persecuted.
The position of the Catholic Church was even harder to come to terms with for any political administration. Very simply put, Catholics were potential enemies of the State. There was no question of having a Catholic monarch. Nor could a monarch marry a Catholic. Even in the twentieth century, when Prince Michael of Kent married a Catholic, he had to give up
his right to the English throne – he was eighth in line of succession at the time. Moreover, because Roman Catholics in the eighteenth century made up three-quarters of the population of Ireland, there would always be a suspicion, especially from the Anglican ruling class, the so-called Protestant (more accurately the Anglican) Ascendency, that Catholics would harbour ambitions for dramatic rather than token Emancipation. Indeed, at the time of the French Revolution, Dissenters in Ireland, of which Catholics made up a considerable majority, went about calling each other ‘Citizen’. Catholics had been subjected to suppressive laws dating from the 1570s. Although in the eighteenth century some of the restrictions were relaxed, they still had no right to vote or to sit in Parliament. Even when they could vote, because of restrictions on membership of the Parliament, Catholics could only vote for Protestants. And so Catholic Emancipation did not come about until 1829 and even then it was not a freedom without fences.
The Whigs, even though they had what could be described as Non-conformists within their noble ranks, had been the controlling group that had organized the Protestant succession and, since then, they’d had an unshakable grip on government. Every British Prime Minister but one (Bute) had been a Whig.
But now as the year 1769 moved to a close, the reign of the Whigs was about to be broken. The political climate was one of radical thinking, public opposition to Crown and government, and growing rebellion in America and in Ireland. Furthermore, in spite of the picture of rich and healthy Britain painted by Arthur Young, and the industrial innovation, there was an increasingly obvious economic depression settling over the management of Britain’s affairs.
This Sceptred Isle Page 44
