The ‘golden age’ would have to be deferred until the end of the war, but when peace came there seemed a genuine chance that political virtue could be renewed. The corrupt Junto fell from power after the war, Montagu resigning in 1699 and Somers in 1700. Impeachment proceedings were begun. Peace, it seemed, could reverse all the changes of the war years. There was even victory in the debate over standing armies. William went so far as to threaten abdication when both Houses passed a motion to reduce the armed forces to 7,000 troops, and then voted to disband the army. Had not the Bill of Rights outlawed ‘the raising or keeping of a standing army within the Kingdom in time of peace unless it be with consent of Parliament?’ Now an age of virtue could begin.
Public virtue would be matched by a new private morality. Country MPs enthusiastically promoted reformation through the statute book, their Bills ticking off London’s novelties one by one: stockjobbing, gaming, lotteries, the press, prophaneness, atheism, blasphemy. As the turbulent seventeenth century drew to a close, Whig and Tory, Anglican and Congregationalist alike called for a return to virtue. Wherever they looked, they saw a nation in freefall, a known place suddenly become unfamiliar, and their campaigns attacked novelty in all its forms: Lord Foppington’s wig, Newton’s universe, fashion, international trade, the stockmarket, gambling, newspapers, insurance, risk-taking, leisure, irreligion, technology, scientific advance, toleration.
‘We are fallen into those dregs of time wherein atheism and irreligion, sedition and debauchery seem to divide the world between them; wherein true and unaffected piety is out of countenance, wherein all the sacred ties to our sovereign are as loose as our manners, and in which that generous honesty and religious loyalty which was once the glory and character of our nation is vanished into disobedience and contempt of our superiors.’36
Not surprisingly, the most fervent counter-attack was reserved for atheism. What kind of Deity was it who, as Richard Bentley blandly put it in his Boyle lectures, ‘always acts geometrically?’37 Locke, Shaftesbury’s secretary, was ‘either a great stranger to the Christian religion or else a great corrupter of it’.38 He had won his commonwealth and was now trying to talk the nation into atheism. He was a pedant, a Unitarian, a Hobbist. In February 1697, John Locke wrote ‘in fright’ to his Irish friend William Molyneux that Dr Sherlock, one of the rising stars of the High Church, had launched an attack on him from his pulpit at the Temple. Oates hardly seemed safe enough a haven as traditionalists, outraged by the flood of pamphlets which followed the end of censorship, rounded on ‘the atheists’ in fury. ‘Heresies of all kinds’, screamed Francis Atterbury as he weighed up the years since the Revolution,
‘scepticism, deism and atheism itself over-run us like a deluge ... the Trinity has been ... openly denied ... all mysteries in religion have been decried as impositions on men’s understandings, and nothing is admitted as an article of faith but what we can fully and perfectly comprehend.’39
Wren’s unfinished Cathedral of St Paul’s was consecrated in December 1697. John Evelyn attended to hear the inaugural preacher deliver a diatribe against new ideas, one of many sermons he heard in those final years of the century ‘against the prevailing sect of ... Atheists & Politicians’.40 Traditionalists began to ask what, in the end, the Moderns had achieved.
‘This age is thought by many to be as learned and knowing as ever any was: for my part I know none that I think more conceitedly ignorant: learned in languages, in books, in notions and opinions of men, in sophistry, and the superficial ornaments of learning ... I easily grant. But for the interiora rerum ... in the great things of religion, profound understanding in true wisdom, and knowledge of the powers of nature, in these I take it to be very short.’41
John Locke, presumably, was one of the ‘pharisaical doctors’ on whom the same writer blamed half the debauchery of the age. Edward Stillingfleet attacked Locke; John Edwards stung him into repeated vindications of his position. Further criticism came from Mary Astell, who published a defence of traditional religion, The Christian Religion as Practised by a Daughter of the Church, whose text could have served as motto for all conservatives: Ask for the Old Paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls (Jeremiah VI, 16). Why should God be bound by a ‘natural’ constitution, Astell asked, for all the world like a monarch bowing to some metaphysical declaration of rights? Why should He be in thrall to human reason? Locke attacked the church; for that much slandered organisation, Mary Astell – and thousands of others – happened to feel profound love and respect; she was perfectly happy to submit to its teachings.
In February 1698 a Committee of the House of Commons requested William to suppress ‘all pernicious books and pamphlets which contain in them impious doctrines’.42 The result of that campaign would be the Blasphemy Act, still in force today. The Reasonableness of Christianity and Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious were burnt by the public hangman. Toleration was also pushed back by High Church attacks on Dissenters and their practice of ‘Occasional Conformity’. New world and old had finally joined battle, and a jagged front line appeared between latitudinarian and traditionalist, Low and High Churchman, between Filmerite and radical, Tory and Whig – even between Ancient and Modern, for Francis Atterbury would ghost-write some of the Ancient answers to Richard Bentley. The modern qualities of balanced powers, materialism and free will were opposed by older values: hierarchy, mystery and a sense of belonging. The Revolution had proclaimed freedoms, allowed alternatives, but the world it created was actually a place of chaos and anarchy, where only the factious, the vicious and self-seeking prospered. The nation must turn its back on the dangerous future of the Moderns. From a Newfoundland where neither knowledge, money or manners had sure borders, it must return home to a world of certainties.
There was no reason to think this impossible. No one in the late 1690s could see the future. Government loans could be paid off. Fashion could be halted. Maybe the scientific revolution was no more than a brief flurry of activity. No one knew that Newton would ever be followed by Einstein, or that a man looking through a telescope would ever become a man flying through space. After all, the breakthroughs achieved in Athens had been followed by the stagnation of the schools, not by permanent, dynamic progress. The east, which had produced gunpowder, was now controlled by vast unmoving tyrannies. Maybe after this brief awakening, mankind could return to slumber.
William Wotton, champion of the Moderns, certainly feared so.
‘Natural and mathematical knowledge ... begin to be neglected ... for the humour of the age, as to those things, is visibly altered from what it was twenty or thirty years ago ... The public ridiculing of all those who spend their time and fortunes in seeking after what some call ‘useless natural rarities’ ... have so far taken off the edge of those who have ... a love to learning that physiological studies begin to be contracted.’43
Maybe the age of science was over. Maybe all the novelties of the 1690s, from banks to basset, were about to come to an end, and a new age of virtue to begin.
Economies enriched by vice, and churches emptied by subversive notions, clothes which disguised rank, card tables which exchanged the fortunes of Duke and pauper, Newton’s universe, Locke’s child with an empty mind – these were frightening prodigies. Reformation was the response. It was an attempt to return to ancient verities of faith, to close down the playhouses and gambling-dens, brothels and spas, to halt the mingling of classes and the degeneration of manners, to return England from the unpredictable future which Modernists predicted to the closed certainties of a Godly realm. It was carried out in the name of religion, by the power of the state and with the monarchy’s support. It was a concerted and powerful attempt to put an end to change.
How shocking was it, then, when the campaigns for reformation and virtue had no effect at all.
XVI
‘THE EVENING OF THE WORLD’
‘All men agree that atheism and prophaneness never got such an high asc
endant as at this day. A thick gloominess hath overspread our horizon, and our light looks like the evening of the world.’1
Proposals for a National Reformation of Manners, 1694
The town was too far gone along its path of profit and pleasure to embrace morality with any enthusiasm. William Legge remembered the outmoded regulations which the early campaigns threw up:
‘One was, that hackney coaches should not drive upon [Sun]day; by another, constables were ordered to take away pies and puddings from anybody they met carrying of them in the streets: with a multitude of other impertinences, so ridiculous in themselves, and troublesome to all sorts of people, that they were soon dropped, after they had been sufficiently laughed at.’2
Thespians roared back at Collier with a squib entitled The Immorality of the English Pulpit. The years since the Revolution had not produced a godlier world. On the contrary, the future of vanity and luxury predicted by Nicholas Barbon was becoming reality before reformers’ eyes. What chance of a godly life was there in this humming, restless town, its streets lit up even at midnight by the links of revellers, its alleyways echoing with the shouts of drunks, and the calls of prostitutes? Could anyone resist ‘those impertinent amusements’ chastised by Mary Astell, which ‘so constantly buzz about our ears, that we cannot attend to the dictates of our reason?’3 Perhaps man really was ‘an animal,’ as Bernard Mandeville would write, ‘having like other animals nothing to do but to follow his appetites.’4 It must have been easy to believe so, walking past one of those infamous houses which now seemed to fill the whole town,
‘[where] impudent harlots by their antic dresses, painted faces and whorish insinuations allure and tempt our sons and servants to debauchery ... [where] bodies are poxed and pockets are picked ... [where] many a housekeeper is infected with a venomous plague which he communicates to his honest and innocent wife.’5
Syphilis was indeed spreading through the town, and another vice, too, was making its streets increasingly dangerous. War with France had closed off French brandy imports, and to replace them the Government had passed, in 1690, An Act for Encouraging the Distilling of Brandy and Spirits from Corn, a measure to establish an English distilling industry. Here was another example of commercialisation replacing old monopolies. Controls on distillers were swept away. No licence was needed to distil spirits, nor to sell them; no apprenticeship was required to break into the industry. Duties on corn spirits were slashed. In the course of the 1690s, the quantity of spirits produced in England – nearly all of it in London – would more than double. The resulting spirits were flavoured with aniseed, cinnamon or cloves, or coloured with prunes to counterfeit French brandy. Increasingly popular, though, was the juniper flavouring borrowed from the Dutch to make ‘Geneva’, soon shortened to gin. ‘Madam Geneva’ became the angel of the London slums. Spirit-drinking had been developing as a fashion among the rich ever since the Restoration (when Hortense Mancini died in 1699, John Evelyn thought she had ‘hastened her death, by intemperately drinking strong spirits’6). Now, with cheap home-made spirits available all over London, the poor found themselves able to emulate the manners of their betters, and by the turn of the century the extent of the gin craze was starting to become apparent. ‘Tis a growing vice among the common people,’ warned Charles Davenant, ‘and may, in time, prevail as much as opium with the Turks, to which many attribute the scarcity of people in the East.’7
Not everyone wanted to abandon the new town. Delarivier Manley tried to leave, taking a stagecoach to the West Country after she broke with Lady Castlemaine, but she did not last long.
‘I am got, as they tell me, sixteen miles from you and London, but ... the resolution I have taken of quitting London ... forever starts back and asks my gayer part if’t has well weighed the sense of ever ... I took coach with Mr Granville’s words in my mouth, Place me, ye gods, in some obscure retreat ... yet you see how great a change two hours has produced ... The green, inviting grass, upon which I promised to pass many pleasing solitary hours, seems not at all entertaining. The trees, with all their blooming, spreading beauties, appear the worst sort of canopy because, where I am going, they can offer their shade to none but solitary me.’8
Even those who did escape found London’s shadow stretching ever further across the country. Through the newspaper in the carrier’s cart, through stagecoaches, through the summer return of the wealthy (and their servants) from the London season, the capital’s diseases were beginning to infect the whole nation. When Celia Fiennes visited Tunbridge she found ‘two large coffee houses for tea, chocolate, etc., and two rooms for the lottery and hazard board’. Ipswich, of all places, had two coffee houses by 1696 – although quite what they were like is open to doubt. Macky found Shrewsbury also full of ‘coffee houses’, ‘but when you come into them, they are but alehouses, only they think that the name of coffee house gives a better air’. Shrewsbury’s fashionable met on the new gravel walk on Wednesdays to stroll ‘as in St James’s Park’.9 The new century would open the floodgates to provincial newspapers, booksellers, printers. There would be physical transformation as well. In four hours on 5 September 1694, the old centre of Warwick was entirely destroyed by fire. Its new face would be the orderly mask of international classicism – nothing to do with Warwickshire, everything to do with the modern style.* Other centres, without a fire to sweep out the old, reclad old timber-framed structures with modern veneers. Provincial market towns had once inhabited their own quiet world, remote from the hubbub of affairs. Now they were satellites revolving around the fashionable sun of London.
In 1697, the year William called for an end to profaneness and immorality, William Hogarth was born. The town he would draw in the first half of the next century was a frightening and unfamiliar place, a city of harlots and gamblers and gin-drinkers, a violent town, heartless and without traditions, devoted to risk and display, careless of its morals, covetous, thoughtless, abounding in energy. Most of all, it was a place of transformations, just as reformers of the 1690s had feared. In Hogarth’s prints, the town transformed heirs into madmen, clean-faced country girls into poxed whores. ‘The company is universal,’ Horace Walpole would complain after a visit to Ranelagh Gardens in 1744, ‘from his Grace the Duke of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital – from my Lady Townshend to the kitten.’10
’Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes
Lords of mechanics, Gentlemen of rakes
Antiquity and birth are needless here;
’Tis impudence and money makes a Peer.’11
Small wonder that reformers targeted that temple of illusions, the theatre. Novels of the eighteenth century told of random lives spinning from wealth to poverty, victory to disaster – and none more so than Daniel Defoe’s triumph of 1722, Moll Flanders. This was the social alchemy which London had always threatened, and no power on earth could stop it.
The underlying problem for Reform was that society had become too diverse to unite around a reform platform. Many were put off by the manners of the new Puritans, ‘your thorough-paced ones,’ as John Vanbrugh described them, ‘with screwed faces and wry mouths ... [who] make debauches in piety as sinners do in wine’.12 At the very least there was a goodish whiff of self-righteousness in the air. Even William, getting used to the diminished status of Kings after 1689, cannot have liked the hectoring tone of Reform zealots as they urged him to ever stronger measures: ‘If you have not zeal enough, nor charity enough, nor courage enough, nor true wisdom enough, to do this generously and resolutely for the honour and service of God ... your religion is vain, your courage brutish and your wisdom foolishness ... not to say earthly, sensual and devilish!’13 Some complained that the Societies only attacked the poor. In any case, there was no general agreement that it was the law’s job to police private behaviour. Magistrates did not welcome informers thrusting Society indictments under their noses, and threatening them until they signed. Within months of the campaign’s launch, serious accusations of impropr
iety were being made against Sir Richard Bulkeley’s headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn, which was discovered to be manufacturing statistics on a massive scale. Apologists for the Societies denied these charges vigorously, but whether from spite, or because most magistrates disliked seeing the legal system hi-jacked by fundamentalists, Sir Richard’s tame magistrate, Ralph Hartley, was thrown off the bench, and, despite a full scale Royal Proclamation in January 1692, the reformers would spend the next five years on the defensive. The 1692 Jamaica earthquake – a further warning from God – made no difference. Bartholomew Fair showmen made a puppet-show out of it, crowds poured in, and the puppeteers, to evangelical outrage, drank a health to the next earthquake!14
Conservatism was as fissured and factious as everything else in England. Jeremy Collier thought the Societies were Commonwealthmen; they thought him a Jacobite. Thomas Papillon wrote passionately about the need to reform the nation’s morals, but to most traditionalists he was a ‘monied man’, one of the corrupt beneficiaries of the Revolution. Country Whigs read republican literature and leaned on Tory votes. John Toland preached virtue, but he was an atheist; John Locke hated debauchery but hated the church even more. No one was more pious than John Evelyn, but he sat on the committee which appointed the Boyle lecturer. Nothing so well sums up the impossibility of a united Reform platform as Collier’s assault on the stage. Many in the Societies thought playhouses were funded by Collier’s allies, the French, in order to corrupt the nation’s morals. There was no single vision of virtue which could be reimposed on the nation, nor of faith, nor of the economy, nor of politics. High Churchmen rejected the Societies for Reformation of Manners because they were ‘seedlings of the Good Old Cause and sprouts of the rebellion of ‘41’. John Sharp, the former minister of St Giles-in-the-Fields who was now made Archbishop of York, went so far as to outlaw them from his diocese. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was founded in part as an Anglican alternative to the (mostly) Dissenting Societies for Reformation of Manners. As the Societies’ campaigns continued, a decade later, one High Churchman would vilify them as ‘the base product of ill nature, spiritual pride, censoriousness and sanctified spleen’.15
The Last Revolution Page 42
