The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘All Englishmen are great newsmongers,’ wrote the foreign visitor Saussure in 1726.

  ‘Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoeblacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper. Nothing is more entertaining than hearing men of this class discussing politics and topics of interest concerning royalty. You often see an Englishman taking a treaty of peace more to heart than he does his own affairs.’17

  By then there were eighteen independent newspapers in London. Booksellers were trading in Norwich by 1701. Libraries opened in Bedford by 1700, Maldon in 1704. Published criticism, partisan Reviews, party-biased polemic – all stirred up the turbulent waters of the ‘age of party’. The free press was also instrumental in popularising the abstruse debates of virtuosi. That was the prime task of John Dunton’s Athenian Gazette (Resolving all the Most Nice and Curious Questions Proposed by the Ingenious). Pierre Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal carried summaries of the Ancient and Modern debates; the Athenian Mercury published a Young Student’s Library.

  A generation before, High Churchmen had hoped to control ideas in England. Free printing would allow ideas to spread without check, however; there would be no end to the asking of questions. In 1718 Ambrose Phillips would begin a magazine he called The Freethinker. Its masthead would be emblazoned not with the old tag WITH AUTHORITY, but with a new motto: Sapere Aude – Dare to Know! The question which would worry traditionalists in the new, unlicensed world was just how far thinkers would dare to go.

  XIII

  ‘THE ENEMIES OF RELIGION’

  ‘The benefit of printing has been so vast, that everything else wherein the Moderns have pretended to excel the Ancients, is almost entirely owing to it.’1

  William Wotton, 1694

  Traditionalists did not have to wait long to see their forebodings confirmed. In 1695, the year the Licensing Act lapsed, John Locke published his further thoughts on God. He entitled his book The Reasonableness of Christianity.

  It was something like a Baconian analysis of the Bible. Locke went back to holy writ, ‘the opinions and orthodoxies of sects and systems, whatever they may be, being set aside’,2 and began his analysis ‘ignorant ... whither it would lead me’.3 It led him into dangerous waters. Rethinking Christianity from scratch, Locke sought the irreducible truth on which all faith was founded. He sought a faith adapted to the political and intellectual developments of his age. By ignoring church doctrine, like an experimental philosopher tearing up his Aristotle, he thought himself better able to discover the inner truths of Christianity, truths which, like Newtonian laws of physics, would be valid at all times to all believers – and accessible to reason.

  Through reason, the unfortunates born outside Christendom could still attain salvation. Revelation was there to help uneducated men to the truth, but the paraphernalia of church practice was nowhere said in the scriptures to be necessary to salvation. Instead, like the vast mechanism of the universe governed by the single law of gravity, Locke concluded the whole of Christianity to be based at root on a single article of faith: He that believeth on the Son, hath eternal life; and he that believeth not the Son, shall not see life (John III, 36). That simple truth could be discovered through reason. All the theory, the dogma and ritual which had accreted around it over seventeen hundred years of church history was obscurantism with no basis in scripture, and could be discarded.

  As could the church. As, presumably, could the Trinity, which Locke did not even mention. The Trinity was the most hotly disputed theological subject of the 1690s. Unitarians were still widely regarded as heretics, excluded even from the Toleration Act. Perhaps Locke, always afraid of controversy, was frightened by the conclusions his own thinking led him to. He was convinced of ‘the Unity of God’, he told Limborch in 1676, and yet ‘I am a lover of peace, and there are people in the world who so love bawling and groundless quarrels, that I doubt whether I should furnish them with new subjects for dispute.’4

  He could not avoid dispute this time; nor could the comforts of Oates protect him from them. Without church, priests or miracles, with faith replaced by reason (not quite what Locke said, but his critics were usually too outraged to pay attention to the niceties of his argument), a mere creator usurping the omnipotent God who guided human affairs, this was not Christianity as most English men and women knew it. The compromise of the latitude-men had turned out to be no compromise. The Moderns had robbed the nation of its King; now they would destroy God as well.

  Locke denied it. He would die convinced that he was nothing less than a full and practising member of the Church. Unfortunately, if Locke was not prepared to follow his own thinking to its conclusion, others certainly were. Atheists were not wholly unknown in England. In 1689 a thirty-four-year-old called Charles Blount had published Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in English for the first time, and there were home-grown traditions which had also trespassed on the forbidden territory of a world without God. ‘Deists’ speculated that what lay behind the plethora of world religions might be a single ‘Natural’ faith, a religion before religions, universally true, unencumbered by church, doctrine, superstition, mythology or creed, and founded on universal laws. It was hardly surprising that Locke now found himself accused of Deism – particularly when Deists hurried to claim the celebrated philosopher as their own. ‘Mr T –‘, wrote William Molyneux from Dublin in May 1697, ‘takes here a great liberty on all occasions to vouch your patronage and friendship.’5 Mr T – was John Toland, who in 1696, at the height of the row over The Reasonableness of Christianity, published his own tract, Christianity Not Mysterious, which took Locke’s ideas even farther and linked them explicitly to Deism. Hence Locke’s frantic denial that Toland was any friend of his (‘He is a man to whom I never writ in my life, and, I think, I shall not now begin!’6). But the damage was in the text. John Toland’s tract followed Locke noisily down the path of scientific Christianity, dismissed organised religion (‘scholastic jargon’), preferred, like ‘the great man’, ‘the plain paths of reason to the insuperable labyrinths of the fathers, and true Christian liberty to diabolical and antiChristian tyranny’,7 and cheerfully seasoned his text with phrases from Locke’s Essay. In his eagerness to claim Locke for his camp, Toland forbore to mention that Locke saw reason as a starting point, not the sole measure of faith. That, however, seemed a hair-splitting distinction to traditionalists. When Toland was finished with Christianity, it was not only ‘Not Mysterious’; there was almost nothing left in it that a Christian could recognise.

  All this was devastating enough to traditional Christians. To injury, though, the tracts of the late 1690s added a great deal of insult. If Locke’s attack and Toland’s were carried out in the name of reason, what gave them a still more potent charge was the fierce anticlerical anger which burned through both. Anticlericalism had been a strand in Protestant dissent ever since the Reformation erupted in criticism of a corrupt church. Church, Benjamin Furly once wrote to Locke, was one ‘of the most pernicious words that have for above 1,000 years obtained amongst mankind ... [It means] a company of Clerical Coxcombs, fools, knaves and slaves.’8 Of the years after the Revolution, Gilbert Burnet, who had been elevated to Bishop of Salisbury and was therefore perhaps extra-sensitive about attacks on the church hierarchy, wrote:

  ‘It became a common topic of discourse to treat all mysteries in religion as the contrivances of priests to bring the world into a blind submission to them; Priestcraft grew to be another word in fashion, and the enemies of religion vented all their impieties under the cover of these words.’9

  Locke and Toland both thought the church’s rejection of reason a cynical ploy to retain power over ideas. ‘The clergy ... make the plainest ... things in the world mysterious, that we might constantly depend on them for the explication.’10 The churches would always try to suppress free thinking, just as the schools did, ‘that they may render us vassals and slaves
to all their dictates and commands’. That was Modern thinking, a Baconian instinct to reject existing authorities. If Jesus Christ was responsible for founding churches, another Deist shockingly wrote, ‘I think the old Romans did him right in punishing him with the death of a slave.’11

  The end of licensed printing unleashed a flood of revolutionary theory of this sort. Conservatives had always warned where the new ideas would lead. Latitudinarians had attempted a compromise, but there could be no compromise. A door had been opened through which human beings had rarely peered before: the door to a world without God. ‘No age’, wrote Daniel Defoe, ‘since the founding and forming the Christian Church, was ever like, in open avowed Atheism, blasphemies and heresies, to the age we now live in.’12

  This was not the only crisis, however, to face traditionalists in 1695. To correspond to the bonfire of all traditional values, the same year would see a corresponding crisis in the value of money. Financial risk had held out its dreams both to investors and the Government; it was about to show them its terrors.

  XIV

  ‘NOTHING IS MORE FANTASTICAL THAN CREDIT’

  ‘I could give a very diverting history’, Daniel Defoe wrote ruefully, ‘of a patent-monger whose cully [victim] was no body but myself.’1 Two hundred pounds in a diving company went the way of all his other ventures, and Daniel Defoe entered the nightmare world of the failing speculator.

  ‘What shifts, what turnings and windings in trade to support his dying credit; what buying of one, to raise money to pay another; what discounting of bills, pledgings and pawnings; what selling to loss for present supply; what strange and unaccountable methods, to buoy up sinking credit!’2

  The end came when he sold his civet cats twice over, once to a fellow-businessman, and once to his mother-in-law. Defoe was one of the first to go under in the share boom, declared bankrupt in October 1692 in the almost unimaginable sum of £17,000.

  John Houghton did ‘caution beginners to be very wary, for there are many cunning artists among [stockjobbers]’.3 In May 1694, amid preparations for the launch of the Bank of England, the number of share prices he quoted rose from 10 to 54. Excited by Neale’s Million Adventure and the launch of the Bank, investors rushed to sink their fortunes in Diving Companies and Mines. But like tulip fever before it, this was a speculative boom in which stocks were whipped up far beyond their natural value. What Houghton forbore to point out was that many of the new companies were not carrying out trading operations at all. Halley’s diving bell never raised a single ingot of silver. The copper mines may well have been full of ore, but if they were in America no one would ever find out. The Lute String* Company admitted at the end of the boom ‘that for 8 months past we have sold little or nothing’.

  The accusation levelled at projectors afterwards – not least by Parliament, which clamped down on stockjobbing two years later – was that men like Nicholas Barbon set up companies and talked up share prices, then sold at the peak and disappeared. In fact, not even many of the projectors made fortunes. ‘How bare-bon’d they are’4 was one joke. John Houghton had tracked London’s first investment boom. Now he was forced to report the first crash. ‘I know not what to say,’ he wrote of the Saltpetre Companies, ‘because they shut up their gates and keep all close, but they have laid out a great deal of money in building.’5 In September 1696 just thirty-four companies were quoted on his lists, and most had blanks against their share price. Two of the diving companies disappeared in a week.

  They were not much lamented. To most, the stockmarket frenzy had been a disreputable incident, a kind of madness imported by the Dutch. It had nothing to do with trade. To conjure wealth out of thin air, to stake capital on long odds, was not real business. ‘The new breed of stockjobbers’ really belonged among Charles Cotton’s huffs, hectors, divers, and cross-biters. The great irony, of course, was that William Phips’s great treasure find had nothing to do with new inventions at all; it was luck pure and simple – ‘a mere project, a lottery of a hundred thousand to one odds, a hazard which if it had failed, everybody would have been ashamed to have owned themselves concerned in it!’6 In December that year Houghton reduced his list back to the nine long-established companies, and the share boom was over.

  Eighteen months earlier, Michael Godfrey had travelled to Flanders to hand over the first instalment of the Bank of England loan. William’s armies were laying siege to Namur, which Louis XIV had taken earlier in the war. As he watched expensive groups of sappers digging at a snail’s pace towards the walls and listened to costly explosions in the far distance, it was easy enough for Michael Godfrey to see where the syndicate’s money was going. He must have enjoyed the dinner held for his party. Nevertheless it was an ill-omened visit. After dinner they set out on a further tour of the trenches. Perhaps the reception had induced too much Dutch courage; perhaps bad luck was in the air. Either way, as Michael Godfrey inspected the positions his Bank had paid for, he approached the French lines too closely, was struck by a cannonball and killed.

  There was mourning for Godfrey in the City. In the wider country, though, grief may have been muted. For to most people in England, the Bank and its related financial innovations were not an economic triumph, but a dangerous adventure which had dragged the whole nation into the world of risk, threatening to pull it into the same vortex into which the projectors had disappeared. ‘Dutch Finance’ was not a breakthrough in the management of human affairs but

  ‘a canker which will eat up the gentlemen’s estates in land, and beggar the trading part of the nation, and bring all the subjects in England to be the monied men’s vassals.’

  The writer of that assault, John Briscoe, had good reason for suspicion of ‘monied men’, having once entered a business partnership with Nicholas Barbon. In a wide-ranging attack on the new City, he gave Barbon, Godfrey and their kind no quarter. Landowners were burdened by tax while City men, far from being taxed, made profits out of the war. The City diverted investment away from trade and industry, with former merchants talking only ‘of lottery-tickets, annuities, bank-bills &c and ... contriving how they may draw their money out of trade to put it in upon some of the ... funds’.’7

  These were legitimate arguments, but alongside them there was a great deal of more instinctive suspicion of the devilry in Exchange Alley. To Ailesbury, City talk was ‘as unintelligible and intricate ... as Greek and Hebrew are to those that understand not one word of those languages’.8 He only knew that vast fortunes were being made in ways which had not existed in his father’s time, and which he did not understand now; and he saw those fortunes enriching not the country’s legitimate leaders but new men, Dissenters and immigrants. There was no inherited wealth here, there was no honest toil; only a kind of witchcraft inspired by greed.

  ‘Tis the principle of us Modern Whigs to get what we can, no matter how’, bragged Tom Double, the satirical monster Charles Davenant dreamed up to heap scorn on this new breed of moneyed men, the carpet-baggers of the Revolution. The backdrop, not surprisingly, was Garraway’s coffee house.

  ‘Thanks to my industry I am now worth fifty thousand pound, and 14 years ago I had not shoes to my feet ... [and] I can name fifty of our friends who have got much better fortunes since the Revolution, and from as poor beginnings ... I have my country-house, where I keep my whore as fine as an Empress ... I have my French cook and wax-candles ... I drink nothing but Hermitage, Champagne and Burgundy; Cahors wine has hardly admittance to my side-board; my very footmen scorn French claret.’9

  Tom Double’s grandmother had sold food in Fleet Market, but that was no future for an ambitious man in a new world. The Revolution changed everything, his own fortune turning when he ‘bubbled’ a country gentleman at backgammon and turned up in the Prince’s retinue with swell talk about his contacts in the City.* From then on Tom Double had never looked back:

  ‘’Twas I put Tom Neal upon the Million Lottery ... You had never had the Bank of England if I had not introduced Michael Godfrey to the a
cquaintance of Charles M[ontagu]e ... And tho a great man pretends now to have devised the Exchequer Bills, they had never been dreamed on, if it had not been for me.’10

  For someone, if not for landowners and merchants, it ‘rained gold and silver’ in the Whig years. The prolonged war? A plot of the Modern Whigs: ‘Our party can reap no advantage but by a long, bloody and expensive war ... and then we shall have the fingering of all the money that must be given to maintain it.’11 They enriched themselves at the expense of the old Tory trading Companies like the Royal African (which had done its best to change sides after the Revolution with a gift to William of stock valued at £2,000) and East India; they enriched themselves most shockingly of all at the expense of England’s landed gentry. By comparison with City wealth, farmland looked increasingly like a burden, heavily-taxed, unsellable and impossible to convert into cash.

  In the meantime, even the 1690s’ more enjoyable novelties were wearing thin. ‘Banks & lotteries every day set up,’ John Evelyn complained in 1696 (‘besides taxes intolerable,’ he went on, ‘& what is worse & cause of all this, want of public spirit in a nation daily sinking under so many calamities’12). In the search for novelty, one lottery latecomer offered as its prize keyboard lessons with Purcell and Draghi. By 1695, even the once enthusiastic Locke had come round to the view that the City was too powerful, and was damaging trade. To most Englishmen, the Financial Revolution was not a triumph of economics. It meant further disorientation from a secure world which they knew and recognised. They found the theories of free marketeers equally worrying. And their doubts seemed to be confirmed when it became clear, in 1695, that even the coin of the nation was no longer secure, and England faced economic disaster.

  John Locke had warned friends soon after the Revolution that the currency faced collapse. ‘When at my lodgings in London,’ wrote Damaris Masham,