Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Some of the native frenzy was dispelled, however, when the real Jacobites gathered upon British soil. The incident became known as ‘the Fifteen’. At the beginning of September 1715, the earl of Mar set up the Jacobite banner at Braemar in Aberdeenshire; it was reported that 10,000 men had taken their place about it. The Jacobite court had heard of the disaffection among the populace, and hoped to take advantage of it. But the population was never so warm as the active, and probably drunken, minority who had acclaimed James Edward Stuart.

  The report of the insurgency created something like panic in London where the Hanoverian king was not wholly secure upon his new throne. The newly created Riot Act was deployed with full force; Tory hawkers selling ballads or pamphlets were dispatched to the nearest house of correction, and anyone suspected of uttering treasonable sentiments was likely to be scourged or pilloried.

  Small forces from Lancashire and Northumberland, still Catholic in sympathy, joined the rebellion but these luckless few were defeated in a battle at Preston in November. Some were executed for treason while others were transported as convicts to America. When the bulk of them were marched to London, according to the diary of Countess Cowper, ‘the mob insulted them terribly, carrying a warming pan before them, and saying a thousand barbarous things, which some of the prisoners returned with spirit’. The warming pan was a symbol of the supposed illegitimacy of the ‘Old Pretender’ who was said to have been smuggled into the royal bedchamber in just such a vessel. The earl of Mar, at the head of the larger Jacobite army in Scotland, had also been defeated at Sheriffmuir in the same month; he waited anxiously for his Stuart master to arrive and take command of the perilous situation.

  The coronation of James Francis Edward, James III of England and James VIII of Scotland, had been supposed to take place on 23 January 1716, at the palace of Scone but, unfortunately, none of the participants arrived in time. James landed at Peterhead towards the end of December and started to make his way to the palace. Yet his steps were of course being followed by spies, and his army shadowed; aware of his dangerous position he took ship at Montrose on 5 February, together with the earl of Mar, and arrived in northern France five days later.

  In truth the rebellion had had little chance of success. The French, under the leadership of a regent after the death of Louis XIV only a month before, was in no position to raise an army for the ‘Old Pretender’; more importantly, they had no will to do so. Without foreign assistance any domestic rebellion was unlikely to succeed. Those Tories who supported the Jacobite cause (which may be confidently considered to be a minority) had no plan, no leader and no arms. They might as well have supported the king of Brobdingnag. The dislike of the Whig government did not translate into active opposition, and the fear of a Catholic king was enough to dispel any affectionate loyalty to the old cause.

  The Whig administration, however, was taking no chances with the volatile electorate. As a direct result of the Jacobite scare, parliament passed a Septennial Bill that extended its life from three years to seven years. What might have been a dangerous election in 1718, therefore, was postponed until 1722. It made it much harder for Tories to exploit Whig divisions if there was no possibility of an imminent election. It lent an air of security and authority to the administration and, as an additional advantage, it granted a further element of constitutional power to parliament itself.

  In the summer of 1716, two months after the Septennial Bill had been enacted, the king returned to Hanover. It was always where he longed to be. The territory had been granted to George’s family by the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, after some timely assistance against the Turks; it was small, comfortable, peaceable, and in all respects unlike England. It was the king’s intention to return there frequently, to hunt and to take the waters, but the problems of England restricted him to only five visits in thirteen years. Even these were too many for his English ministers who did not relish the administration of the kingdom at one remove. Wind and weather sometimes delayed his return, on which occasions parliament itself had to be prorogued. A minister of state always travelled with him, and any determined minister could create trouble for his colleagues a few hundred miles distant. It did not help matters that on this visit the king decided to remain in Hanover for six months; six months, even then, was a long time in politics both foreign and domestic.

  It was possible, after all, that the king might favour the interests of Hanover over those of England. He was intimately associated with the affairs of the Baltic region, with which England had very little to do, and the ministers in London were not eager to be drawn into what were for them provincial quarrels.

  Splits of a more personal nature soon became evident within the royal family. The truth was that the father, George Ludwig, hated the son, George Augustus, prince of Wales, and the son repaid that hostility in equal measure. It was in part the old problem of a living heir, waiting impatiently behind the arras for the fall of his predecessor; it has been a conundrum as old as monarchy itself. There were also certain ministers and courtiers who, feeling deprived of what they considered to be a proper measure of respect or reward, waited in expectation for the light of the rising son to restore them to health. In the fractious climate of early eighteenth-century politics, these factions became all the more vicious.

  When the king left for Hanover, for example, he appointed his son as ‘guardian of the realm and lieutenant’, an office not exercised since the time of the Black Prince in the fourteenth century. It was considered by the prince and his cohorts to be an insult, rendered more odious by the restraints that the king imposed upon his son’s supposed regency. The prince was to take no decisions on foreign policy without the approval of the king; he could not fill any of the more important positions of state, and should postpone any royal assent to parliamentary bills. Foreign dispatches were to be kept from him. Yet certain other dispatches, concerning his own behaviour, were to be sent onward to Hanover.

  The prince was of course flattered by the king’s adversaries; now that he considered himself free of political responsibility, having been allowed none of his own, he came to realize that he might become an independent force in the formulation of policy. He might be able to create a faction or party in parliament itself that worked against the king.

  An unfortunate quarrel at the baptism of the prince’s first son, when the king’s choice of godfather was angrily opposed, led to a further division in November 1717. The king ordered his son to leave St James’s Palace, whereupon the wife of the heir, Caroline of Ansbach, decided to follow him. It was decreed that anyone who visited the renegade couple would be formally barred from any converse with the king. This would be war. Nothing like it had been seen since the days of the struggle between Mary I and Elizabeth I. Lord Hervey wrote of the prince that ‘he always spoke of his father as a weak man rather than a bad or dishonest one; and said . . . his father had always hated him and used him ill’.

  The prince of Wales and his consort removed themselves to Leicester House, north of Leicester Square, where they established what was to all intents and purposes a rival court. The prince no longer attended cabinet meetings as a sign of his status as an internal exile. When any minister fell out with the king, he had a natural welcome from his son. In Leicester House congregated disaffected Whigs and disgruntled Tories, disappointed place-seekers and divisive troublemakers entertained by music, dancing, feasting and fashionable conversation. The king, thoroughly discomfited by his son’s social success, broke the habit of a lifetime and also began to hold assemblies and public dinners. The drawing room at St James’s Palace was open three days a week; music, dancing and fireworks were enjoyed at Kensington Palace.

  Father and son were not reconciled for three years, and even then it was a half-hearted affair. The prince told his wife that when he entered the royal closet, formal but contrite, the king could only mutter ‘Votre conduite . . . votre conduite’, meaning ‘Your behaviour . . . your behaviour’. When they were seen in public
on the following day they did not speak.

  In the interim a shadow, no thicker than a bubble, had passed over the court, the city and the country.

  9

  Bubbles in the air

  The bubble first arose from an attempt by the Tories to set up an institution that might rival the Bank of England in providing public credit. In the spring of 1711 the South Sea Company was established. It comprised in the first instance all those who were owed money by the government for war loans approaching £10 million; they were persuaded to give up their annuities for stock in this new and enterprising company. They were guaranteed 4 per cent interest, funded by indirect taxes, but they were also to be partners in the projected profit from all trade with the Americas in a period when the proceeds of Spanish commerce were conceived to be enormous. It was a convenient way for the administration to handle existing debts, at a relatively low rate of interest, while shareholders might dream of another Eldorado. During the years of the War of the Spanish Succession, trade and industry were naturally subdued. But when Philip V of Spain entered a quadruple alliance with Great Britain, France and the Dutch republic early in 1720, in the treaty of The Hague, it was believed that the mineral wealth of the Americas would come to London as Zeus had come to Danaë in the form of golden rain.

  The fever hit when at the beginning of 1720 the St James’s Weekly Journal reported that ‘we hear that the South-Sea Company have in a manner agreed with the Treasury for taking into their capital the annuities of ninety-nine years’. The company had become so formidable and so confident that it had swallowed up a large part of the national debt. Its power and profit now depended upon the rise of the price of its stock. And what could stop an irresistible force? The value of its stock kept on increasing in the early months of the year, and by 24 June £100 of government stock was worth £1,050 of South Sea stock. The more shares were sought and prized, the higher their value rose; the higher their value, the more desirable they seemed.

  The first subscription was immediately filled. Sir John Evelyn sold some of his land to gain a share. Everyone pursued a quick profit, and everyone was chasing everyone else. You could buy the stock at one rate, selling at another rate for an enormous profit a few days later. It was reported that shares were purchased on the Stock Exchange ‘ten per cent higher at one end of the alley than at the other’. The men went to find their brokers in the taverns and coffee-shops; the women flocked for the same purpose to the milliners and haberdashers. Ministers and members of parliament were bribed by the company with free distributions of stock that could then be resold at the going rate. It quickly became known as ‘the bubble age’. ‘Bubble’ became the synonym for any kind of deception or deceit. Schemes and contrivances and projects were all ‘bubbles’.

  Tobias Smollett in his history of the period wrote that ‘Exchange Alley was filled with a strange concourse of statesmen and clergymen, churchmen and dissenters, whigs and tories, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and even with multitudes of females.’ Various other schemes for quick rewards were advertised at the time, taking advantage of the fatuity and gullibility of the moment. A scheme was proposed for making quicksilver malleable. A plan was suggested for importing jackasses from Spain. Projects were advanced for making salt water fresh. In this period eighty-six different schemes were advertised to potential investors, among them ‘for improving of gardens’, ‘for insuring and increasing children’s fortunes’, ‘for furnishing funerals to any part of Great Britain’ and for ‘a wheel of perpetual motion’. Projection was gambling under another name. Projection was speculation. Projection was a lottery.

  When Robinson Crusoe profited from his merchandise, before setting off on his famous voyage, ‘my head began to be full of projects and undertakings beyond my reach’. Defoe knew of what he wrote. His first published volume was entitled An Essay upon Projects (1697), in which presciently he lamented ‘the general projecting humour of the nation’; every day arose ‘new contrivances, engines and projects to get money, never before thought of’, and from these devices we may ‘trace the original of banks, stocks, stock-jobbing, assurances, friendly societies, lotteries, and the like’, not forgetting ‘those Exchange mountebanks we very properly call brokers’.

  It was part of a culture in which the gambler was king. Sometimes the habit was confined to the card tables that could be found in palace and tavern, whorehouse and drawing room. A character in Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband, composed in 1705, laments the fact that ‘women can imagine all household care, regard to posterity and fear of poverty, must be sacrificed to a game at cards’. Gaming houses for men were everywhere. This mania for speculation and quick profit was materially responsible for the new interest in fire, marine and life insurance; insurances were made out for marriages and births, as well as deaths. Private gambling therefore became an intrinsic part of the public economy. It also had a more arcane consequence when the complex calculations encouraged Pascal and Fermat to devise mathematical probability theory.

  Gaming affected all classes. Horace Walpole reported that at Brooks’s club ‘a thousand meadows and cornfields are staked at every throw’. Politicians would win or lose thousands at Almack’s before returning to the debates at parliament; the more accomplished the politician, the more imperturbable his countenance. A particular costume was worn at Almack’s, consisting of a great-coat, pieces of leather to protect the ruffles, and a high-crowned hat with a broad brim to keep out the light; the hats were festooned with flowers and ribbons. On one occasion a Whig politician, Charles James Fox, sat for twenty-two hours playing at Hazard. Gentlemen bet on the life expectations of their fathers. Thomas Whaley, an Irish gambler and parliamentarian, bet that ‘he could jump from his drawing room window into the first barouche that passed and kiss the occupant’. When a man fell to the ground in a stupor opposite Brooks’s, the members of that club laid bets whether he was alive or dead. Others with fewer resources would bet on skittles or on dominoes in the local taverns, on the result of an election or the sex of an unborn child; the throwing of dice was not unusual during church services.

  Lotteries were instituted by the government in 1709, and for every year until 1824 a lottery bill was passed. The popularity of these gigantic confidence tricks was manifest from the very beginning. On 21 January 1710, it was reported that ‘yesterday books were opened at Mercers’ Chapel for receiving subscriptions for the lottery and, ’tis said, above a million is already subscribed’. Lotteries were sometimes known as ‘sales’ to lend them an air of respectability. If you bought a ticket for twopence, and thereby won a set of ‘new fashionable plate’, it could be regarded as a bargain. It was announced that six houses in Limehouse ‘are to be disposed of by tickets, and the numbers are to be drawn by two parish boys out of two wheels, at the Three Sun tavern in Wood Street’.

  Gambling and lotteries were considered by many to be the natural manifestation of a city based largely upon fraud and avarice, and of a society established upon wanton violence and corruption, where the vast disparities of wealth encouraged wicked or unscrupulous behaviour. The London Journal of 1720 excoriated the avarice and love of luxury of the age, while a few months later the Weekly Journal believed that the South Sea Bubble was ‘but the natural effect of those vices which have reigned for so many years’. In truth there have always been bubbles, and the measure of fraud and corruption in the city has not noticeably grown or diminished over the centuries. The regularity of panics became a matter of observation; they were often called ‘convulsions’, as if the financial body had succumbed to a fever. There does come a time, however, when one of the bubbles bursts with a more than usually resounding pop.

  This particular crisis came, as most financial crises do, suddenly and unexpectedly. A ballad was quickly doing the rounds of the fairs and markets:

  A bubble is blown up in air;

  In which fine prospects do appear;

  The Bubble breaks, the prospect’s lost,

  Yet must some Bubble
pay the cost.

  Hubble Bubble; all is smoke,

  Hubble Bubble; all is broke,

  Farewell your Houses, Lands and Flocks

  For all you have is now in Stocks.

  It was discovered that the South Sea Company did not have the cash available to pay for any stocks being returned. The projected profits on the Eldorado of Spanish trade were a mirage. When confidence disappeared, the mist of gain and of fortune evaporated. The value of the stock, which had originally been used to replace the annuities on government debt, plunged. By September 1720, it seemed that all was gone. The stockholders had lost their investments.

  Tobias Smollett wrote that ‘such an era as this is the most unfavourable for an historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vulgarity and mean degeneracy’. Yet the business of the bubble does much to elucidate, as one book’s title has it, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The craving for riches and the experience of failure, the giddy descent from wealth into poverty, the mania which gripped many thousands of people without good cause, the suicides, the dissolution of family ties, say more about the period than a thousand battles.