In politics, Country politicians thought the Triennial Act would bring in a golden age. Far from it, the effect of the Act was to accentuate the ‘rage of party’. ‘This beautiful rose has its prickle,’ wrote Daniel Defoe. ‘The certainty of the return of an election occasions a constant keeping alive of innumerable factions.’16 There was no alternative to faction, it transpired; harmony didn’t exist. King, Commons, army, church – all had tried to attain some sort of primacy over the nation in the past half century; all had failed. England’s new state of schism and division was a permanent condition reflected in its religious and political order, and it disabled its institutions from smothering change. There would be no return to civic virtue. There would be no return to certainty, or order, in a nation whose thinkers and inventors and businessmen and consumers kept relentlessly extending boundaries. Unending competition, restless change – this was the future to which England was damned.
The country should have descended into anarchy. That was what traditionalists had always predicted for such a state. England should have slid into civil war, given the distances that separated its extremes. It should have succumbed to God’s wrath. But it did not. Something different happened. England – Britain – became the most powerful nation on earth.
For some reason it proved durable, this place where power was forever divided and fought over, this hybrid state created by the Revolution – not just durable, but successful. Its remarkable achievement was to preserve competing power-bases intact and somehow hold them in a state of perpetual, stable reaction. To some, Newton’s spinning planets seemed an apt metaphor: vast masses thundering around one another without collision, movement united with harmony. That thunder was the sound of a new era. And as the Revolution endured, as it generated victories abroad and wealth at home, 1688 would increasingly be seen as the founding moment of a new nation.
And so a myth was born. The Revolution’s first phase had been military, and its second political. Its third phase was the long aftermath during which the foggy events of winter 1688, its betrayals and evasions, deals and compacts, its political illnesses and pragmatic compromises, were reinterpreted as a special kind of miracle – a Glorious Revolution.
XVII
‘A NEW ERA’
‘The Revolution is looked upon by all sides as a new era.’1
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke
In every sense, the Revolution created a new nation. The Act of Union with Scotland was signed in 1707. For centuries, England had dominated her smaller neighbours in the British Isles. After the Revolution that domination resulted in the creation of a new entity: Britain.
If there were compensations for Scots in the Union – and a measure of national independence – for Ireland there would be no such comfort in the new status quo, as James’s Catholic Kingdom was reduced to a vassal state. That was not, apparently, the intention of the Treaty of Limerick which William signed when the war ended in 1691, and whose terms were widely seen as generous, offering Catholics freedom of worship and allowing 12,000 Irish soldiers to emigrate into the French King’s service. But William had never cared about Ireland, and after 1691 paid little attention to it; his only concern was that it should not rebel. And the logic of that was inescapable: the dominance of Protestant government, English landowners, Presbyterians in Ulster. By 1703 only 14 per cent of Irish land remained in Catholic ownership. The Protestant ascendancy would even be bolstered by colonies of French Huguenot settlers. Jaques and Elisabeth Fontaine, ‘weary of business’ and with £1,000 in savings, would be among them (two years later they would once again find themselves hiding in the dunes as a French privateer raided the coast). Ireland had always crystallised the religious and political problems of England; now it became the repository of those problems, the place where they were finally concentrated, and where the bitterness and antagonism of 1688 would be preserved, undecayed, beneath the icecap of British government. The legacy of the Revolution in Ireland would be very far from glorious. As de Tocqueville famously wrote in 1835,
‘If you want to know what can be done by the spirit of conquest and religious hatred combined with the abuses of aristocracy, but without any of its advantages, go to Ireland.’2
It was to harness the potential wealth and power of England that William had embarked on his adventure in the North Sea. With her power consolidated at home, Britain would go on to fulfil all of his hopes abroad. Perhaps the most striking result of 1688, to foreigners at least, was the metamorphosis of le païs des révolutions into a major European power. In 1702, the year of William’s death, war with France was resumed over the issue of the Spanish Succession, and if King William’s War had seen the Sun King checked, Marlborough’s victories at Blenheim and Ramillies would finally prove the sickly and introverted British state cured of its ailments.
Victory was paid for by the new institution of public credit. War returned the Whig Junto to government, and they brought back with them all their corrupt paraphernalia of funds, and loans, and public credit. Their critics expressed outrage. The public finances had come perilously close to ruin in 1697. Debt, however, was now a permanent feature of the financial landscape. The Government had signed securities 99 years ahead, and a whole new edifice of financial institutions had put down roots in London, most notably in Threadneedle Street at the private house of John Houblon. England had stepped into an economic world as radically new as the universe opened up by Newton’s insights. It was a world in which wealth was based neither on the fixed asset of land, nor on labour, nor the primary exchange of trade, but on far more complex gearings of credit. It was a financial world projected three-dimensionally into the future.
The critics failed to see the true possibilities of what the Whig financiers had achieved. Secured debt had allowed England to compete with a nation six times her size. ‘He who had the longest sword’, wrote Daniel Defoe, ‘has yielded to them who had the longest purse.’3 The financiers of the 1690s had shown how the spending power of the state could be expanded far beyond its traditional limits. On the basis of that wealth, Britain would engage in global warfare throughout the eighteenth century on a scale no previous European government had been able to contemplate and which none of her rivals, even wealthy France, could match. By the end of the Seven Years War, Britain’s ability to access money was celebrated as the ‘standing miracle in politics, which at once astonishes and over-awes the states of Europe’.4 Since war was now a matter of money, not courage, nations which could gear up their expenditure in that way would wield extraordinary power. They had the power to invest in global fleets with the firepower and range to build global empires, and the power to finance the continued innovation in warfare which both started technological arms races among the wealthy, and made war even more expensive – to the point where less wealthy non-European countries had neither technology nor money to compete.
‘National Debts,’ wrote Swift in 1713, ‘secured upon parliamentary funds of interest, were things unknown in England before the last revolution under the Prince of Orange.’5 Nicholas Barbon foresaw what could result from linked freedoms in politics and trade. Indeed, he provided something like a blueprint for the coming British Empire.
‘Trade may be assistant to the enlarging of Empire; and if an universal Empire or dominion of very large extent can again be raised in the world, it seems more probable to be done by the help of trade, by the increase of ships at seas, than by arms at land ... Since the people of England enjoy the largest freedoms and the best government in the world, and since by navigation and letters there is a great commerce ... the ships, excise and customs ... will in proportion increase ... to extend its dominion over all the great ocean: an Empire not less glorious & of a much larger extent than either Alexander’s or Caesar’s.’6
There would be a surprising side-effect to the development of public credit. Britain was not just a new state; it was a new kind of state. For public credit brought citizens after the Revolution into a new relationship
with their own government – not as subjects, not even as voters, but as investors. Leading citizens became stakeholders in the state. ‘It was said’, wrote the Country politician Bolingbroke in 1749,
‘that a new government, established against the ancient principles and actual engagements of many, could not be so effectually secured any way, as it would be if the private fortunes of great numbers were made to depend on the preservation of it; and that this could not be done unless they were induced to lend their money to the public, and to accept securities under the present establishment. Thus the method of funding and the trade of stock-jobbing began.’7
Citizens were no longer the children of a Filmerite monarch, nor the free individuals of Republican mythology, homesteaders meeting to mend the fences between them. A new architecture of government had been created, and it empowered not only those citizens, but the state itself. William Temple had marvelled that the Dutch paid taxes no autocrat would have dared levy. The same was true of post-revolutionary Britain. Even four shilling land tax was ‘tamely swallowed by those revolution gentlemen,’ Ailesbury remarked in disgust, ‘and let it be remarked that to the writing of this in the beginning of 1729, just forty years, the continued tax on land never ceased’.8 States accepted and enriched by their own citizens would have spending power far beyond the reach of traditional Kings.
No one planned this. No one before the Revolution had imagined a state which became increasingly rich, increasingly powerful, and increasingly adept at raising and spending money, a state whose institutions were permanent, not occasional, and whose bureaucracies would probe ever more intimately into private lives. But this was what followed. ‘The frequent parliaments which England has enjoyed during this reign’, wrote one foreign diplomat, ‘has given rise to an infinity of acts made for the public good.’9 In William’s reign, 809 Acts were signed, compared with the 533 Acts signed by Charles II, whose reign lasted twice as long. Sessions were prolonged, the volume of legislation increased, and the range of Parliament’s interest grew ever wider, while outside Parliament, Government bureaucracy expanded to manage this flood of legislation and to raise and spend the vast money flows generated by the war.
The majority of the population, of course, did not invest financially in the state. Their investment was of a different kind. Rule Britannia! sang Britons in the 1740s, Britannia rules the waves! Britons never shall be slaves! Throughout the eighteenth century it was the freedoms won in 1688 which tied Britons together, and which were held up to explain Britain’s success. ‘We find ourselves in possession’, wrote William Warburton in 1746, ‘of the greatest human good, CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY, at a time when almost all the rest of mankind lie in slavery and error. This is no ordinary mercy ... So that if there be any thing certain, this is not to be disputed, that we Englishmen (how unworthy soever) are at present most indebted to Providence of the whole race of mankind.’10 This was how 1688 became Glorious, woven into an existing tradition of British liberties – from Magna Carta to the Spanish Armada – to explain Britain’s emergence as a nation uniquely blessed by God with freedom. ‘The constitution of our government is the envy and desire of others,’ wrote Edward Pickard in a sermon, National Praise to God for the Glorious Revolution, more than seventy years after James fled,
‘and approaches nearest to that, which in theory has been described as the most perfect form. Here liberty not only glances but dwells, not partially, but in full splendour. Liberty, civil and religious ... and the still more sacred and valuable rights of conscience. Liberty! The native right of every man! The spring to all great and generous pursuits!’11
Radicals disappointed by the 1689 Convention might have been surprised how many of their own ideas flew in the weave of this national banner. But the radical sting was drawn by 1688 as surely as the threat of arbitrary government. English republicanism died with English absolutism, both superseded by the odd but durable balance which the Revolution put in place. The normal service of hereditary succession was resumed as soon as Protestantism was secured by the Hanoverian succession, which established George I on the throne after Anne’s death. The balanced constitution became a claim not of revolution but of stability, while the Septennial Act of 1716, by increasing the gap between elections from three to seven years, reduced the political fury of the 1690s to the bland hum of Whig supremacy. What remained was a passionate myth of freedom, a myth bound up in patriotism, in Britishness. ‘I am here in a nation’, wrote Montesquieu, ‘which hardly resembles the rest of Europe. This nation is passionately fond of liberty ... every individual is independent.’12 The reformer James Oglethorpe found a vivid illustration of that spirit when he spoke to a press-ganged sailor in the 1720s. ‘I that am born free,’ the man told him, ‘are not I and the greatest Duke in England equally free born?’ That was the legacy of the Glorious Revolution.
Nor did British freedoms belong only in the realm of myth. For the second time in forty years an encroaching monarch had been removed from his throne. No English King – even William III, by far the ablest and most energetic of them – would wield the sort of authority which James II aspired to and Louis XIV exercised. In England, elections were vigorously contested, while parliaments met every year to vote on all laws and approve all taxation. English citizens lived under the rule of law, without fear of arbitrary arrest.
Foreigners certainly found the Revolution’s achievements extraordinary. The English were the only people on earth, Voltaire thought,
‘who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have established that wise government, where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrained from committing evil; where the nobles are great without insolence, tho’ there are no vassals; and where the people share in the government without confusion.’13
Later generations, apt to confuse freedom with democracy, would not always rate 1688 so highly. ‘Mankind would scarce believe’, scoffed Tom Paine at the time of the far more dramatic revolution in France, ‘that a country calling itself free, would send to Holland for a man, and clothe him with power, on purpose to put themselves in fear of him.’14 But democracy was not the yardstick the English used to measure their own freedom. Like James Oglethorpe’s sailor, they felt ownership of their country. Many voted, while those who could not still participated in very public elections. The English were offered alternatives; they observed change. Government, and more importantly the law, was carried out on their behalf. Later writers might tell the eighteenth-century poor that they were not free, but for the most part they were unaware of it themselves. They believed themselves to possess freedom under the rule of law. They were free to think as they pleased, to read any book that scientist, churchman, fanatic or madman might choose to print. John Ray certainly found post-revolutionary England a more accommodating ground for scientific labour. ‘Philosophy and all sound learning,’ he wrote, ‘now that the favour of Princes smiles upon the efforts and stimulates the industry of scholars, show promise of wonderful advances.’15 The claim of liberty meant freedom, too, in the realm of ideas. Free printing distributed them; learned societies absorbed them; no one stopped them.
‘LIBERTY at the Revolution, O bright, auspicious Day! reared up her heavenly Form, and smiled upon our happy land. Delivered from the fears of tyranny and persecution, men began freely to use their understandings.’16
It also provided the means to pay for them. New ideas in themselves achieved little. William Wotton worried that the scientific revolution might be coming to an end. Risk culture, however, unlocked the investment needed to produce technological change from scientific breakthrough, and so turn science into a permanent revolution.
The stock-market boom of the 1690s wedded commerce to technology. ‘Stockjobbers’ would be accused of pure speculation, after the crash, but that was never entirely fair; the boom took off on a genuine surge of optimism about technology and new inventions. ‘This age swarms with
... a multitude of projectors,’ wrote Daniel Defoe, ‘who besides the innumerable conceptions which die in the bringing forth ... do really every day produce new contrivances, engines and projects to get money, never before thought of.’17 Exchange Alley would be one reason why the scientific revolution did not stagnate as William Wotton had feared. While philosophers opened the doors onto a world of limitless, expanding knowledge, their inventions broke the bonds of traditional economics. New products created new markets. New manufacturing techniques enhanced productivity.
Indeed, innovation was already transforming the economy in the 1690s. It was changing agriculture as marling, liming and the first experiments in crop rotation increased yields and spread the acreage which could be brought under cultivation. Falling land rents were not the fault of the growing town, Nicholas Barbon wrote, but the result of ‘the great improvements that are made upon the land in the country, either by draining of fens; improving of land by zanfoin or other profitable seeds; inclosing of grounds, or disparking and ploughing of parks’.18 A kind of early industrialisation had already given Holland dominance of European shipbuilding, cutting costs by standardised plans, huge output, and wind-powered sawmills. It was changing the textile industry with ribbon machines and ‘a mechanick engine contrived in our time called a knitting frame which ... works really with a very happy success’.19 It was happening with advances in ceramics, in metallurgy, in the smelting of copper.
The Last Revolution Page 43
