Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  The Opera was literally the talk of the town, including endless speculation over the presumed or suggested targets of its satire. In truth it had many and various victims, among them courtiers, tradesmen, thief-takers, politicians and those strange creatures who were hysterically in love with opera and opera divas. But its general complaint was against human corruption. Lockit remarks that ‘Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.’ In the ‘condemned hold’ Macheath sings a lament to the tune of ‘Green Sleeves’:

  Since Laws were made for ev’ry Degree

  To curb Vice in others, as well as me,

  I wonder we han’t better Company

  Upon Tyburn Tree!

  The Beggar’s Opera was, all in all, very funny – not the elaborate and artificial comedy of Sheridan or Oliver Goldsmith, but the uproarious fun of the ‘low’ theatres. It outshone the sentimental comedies and heroic tragedies that were the staple of the age with its own particular mixture of burlesque and carnival, smut and innuendo. A male actor dressed in drag to play Polly Peachum, in a performance of 1782, whereupon one member of the audience ‘was thrown into hysterics which continued without intermission until Friday morning when she expired’. The episode consorts well with the epitaph John Gay composed for himself.

  Life is a jest; and all things show it,

  I thought so once; but now I know it.

  13

  The dead ear

  Sir Robert Walpole’s revenge upon Gay came rather late in the day when, in 1737, he introduced a bill to curtail the liberty of the stage. All plays had to be submitted to the lord chamberlain fourteen days before performance, and of course the vicious insinuations on the stage against Bob Booty ceased at once. The Licensing Act was in fact not fully revoked until 1968, and so Walpole’s retribution affected generations of playwrights.

  But were the insinuations against Walpole in fact justified? He was always robust in his own defence, accusing his opponents of being ‘mock patriots, who never had either virtue or honour, but in the whole course of their opposition are actuated only by motives of envy and of resentment’. It is true that he kept so tight a grasp on government policy and government patronage that there were some who felt unjustly excluded. Yet of course there was more to it than that. Venality was as intrinsic to the House of Commons as points of order; it is often the case that men and women who make the law also believe themselves to be above the law.

  In the time of Walpole direct bribes were not uncommon but corruption might take a more subtle guise. The granting of pensions, the distribution of honours, the placement of offices, the giving of sinecures, were accepted and acceptable means of gaining the support of any particular member. In a period when parliamentarians were not paid, a fine line divided justifiable patronage and bribery. It was not through his public salary alone that Walpole himself could have built the magnificent stately home of Houghton Hall. A reading of Anthony Trollope, however, might persuade detractors that the same tricks and devices were still at work in the 1860s. In more indirect forms they continue to this day. One of the principal rewards of power is money.

  Yet Robert Walpole, despite his power and prestige, could not buy the House of Commons. Not every man had his price. A large number of parliamentarians still voted according to their consciences or to their principles. There was no more striking instance of this independence than in 1733, when Walpole wholly misjudged the mood of the members. He had wanted to free the Port of London from its entanglements with customs regulations and customs officers which actively served to deter trade. He proposed that all tobacco be placed in a bonded warehouse for a small fee. The goods destined for re-export could recoup the fee while tobacco destined for the domestic market had to pay the conventional excise of 4 pence per pound. The same methods would be applied to the import of wine. It was a way of expediting the export trade, curtailing the prevailing vice of smuggling and simplifying the customs’ work at the Port of London.

  Unfortunately it was not seen in this benevolent light. Excise was believed to be an unnecessary and intrusive tax on the necessities of life. The subtleties of the scheme were ignored or misunderstood, and replaced by a vision of an army of excisemen combing the land in searches for offenders who had not paid the tax. Walpole’s opponents were quick to spread the rumour that he intended to apply excise to food and other necessaries, and that British liberties would be sacrificed; the model would then become the heavily administered and heavily taxed nations of Europe. True-born Englishmen would soon be reduced to the state of French peasants.

  A pamphlet, ‘A Letter from a Member of Parliament for a Borough in the West’, noted that ‘little handbills were dispersed by thousands all over the City and country, put into people’s hands in the streets and highways, dropped at their doors and thrown in at their windows; all asserting that excise men were (like a foreign enemy) going to invade and devour them . . .’. Like most panics it was unjustified; but, like most panics, it was effective in the short term.

  Walpole realized soon enough that the cause was hopeless. His effigy was burnt in the public markets, to a fanfare of rockets and bonfires, while cockades were worn with the motto ‘Liberty, property, and no excise’. The Whigs were still associated in the public mind with war taxes and the machinations of the Whig financiers who ruled the City; the people were understandably suspicious of what seemed to be new ways of raising money. After a supper at Downing Street, when the servants had left the room, he declared to his colleagues that ‘this dance it will no farther go, and tomorrow I intend to sound a retreat’. He had not altered his position but ‘the clamour and the spirit’ that had emerged over the excise had persuaded him to retire from the combat ‘for prudential reasons’. After the bill was abandoned he had to face a mob outside parliament; protected by a bodyguard he was obliged to flee in and out of a coffee-house before making his escape.

  Walpole had miscalculated. His native optimism had triumphed over his natural caution. The earl of Egmont noted in his diary that ‘it may be foretold that Sir Robert’s influence in the House will never again be so great as it has been’. Even though the king held fast to him, for fear of something worse, the opposition against him was growing ever greater. A general election in the spring of 1734 lengthened the odds against his eventual survival; his party, or what might be called the ministerial Whigs, acquired 347 supporters while the combined opposition of Tories and recalcitrant Whigs numbered 232. It would require great care and management to keep things in order, especially since the opposition Whigs, among them a group known by Walpole as the ‘boy patriots’ or ‘cubs’, were eager for power at any cost. They were sick of the ‘old gang’ or ‘the old corps’ or whatever opprobrious name was thrown at Walpole and his closest colleagues. What George II thought of the situation is unclear; he preferred conversation in the royal closet to correspondence, but his sympathy for Walpole remained.

  If there was one constant principle and motive in Walpole’s policies it was the wish to avoid war. He had an aversion to conflict. It was wasteful of men and money. It was uncertain, and provoked divisions within the nation. As early as 1726, the year before the old king’s death, there had been rumours of a war with Spain as retribution for attacks on British ships, but a somewhat half-hearted blockade of Porto Bello, the Spanish fort and naval base off the coast of Panama, came to nothing. Negotiations ensued which were, for Walpole, the next best thing to peace.

  Walpole also managed to stay out of the ‘War of the Polish Succession’ which began in 1733, one of those continental imbroglios involving many nations vying for mastery over slices of territory, but this was perhaps at the risk of ignoring international obligations and undermining previous alliances. The war lasted for five years until 1738, while Walpole remained on a neutral course. Many now sought an active war, however, largely on the understanding that France and Spain were denying English vessels access to foreign markets. Nothing more i
nfuriated the English than the loss of trade. It was widely believed that Walpole had treated the Spanish with more leniency than they deserved. Petitions were presented to parliament setting out in animated language the continued Spanish attacks on English vessels, despite the ‘understanding’ Walpole had negotiated. Alderman Wilmot, otherwise unknown to history, lamented that ‘seventy of our brave sailors are now in chains in Spain! Our countrymen in chains, and slaves to Spaniards! Is this not enough to fire the coldest? Is this not enough to arouse all the vengeance of a national resentment!’

  A previous incident further inflamed the situation. In 1738 Captain Robert Jenkins displayed to the Commons the severed ear that had been struck from his head by a Spanish officer in the course of an embarkation seven years before in 1731. The ear was too old to be confirmed as his, but it served the purpose of provoking public fury. It is possible that the captain lost his ear in some other disciplinary proceeding. The leathery appendage might have been picked up at a London hospital, or found in the street. Who knew, or cared to know, the truth? You could pick a fight over a dead ear.

  The Spanish were not eager for conflict, and Walpole still favoured the slow dance of peace, and so a ‘Convention’ was cobbled together to cover all differences. It was not well received, particularly in the Commons. Walpole spoke for two and half hours in favour of the arrangement, but then a young man rose to speak against the contrived peace. ‘Is this any longer a nation?’ Shall we ‘bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention? It carries fallacy or downright subjection in almost every line.’

  William Pitt sat down, having fired one of the first verbal salvoes in what was for a while known as ‘the War of Jenkins’ Ear’. It would have taken a political seer of genius to realize that this young man of thirty would determine the nature of English politics, after Walpole, for forty years. William Pitt – ‘the elder’, as he later became known after the exploits of his equally famous son – came from a family that had grown rich on the spoils of India; his grandfather was called ‘Diamond’ Pitt. The young man followed the familiar course of Eton and Oxford before joining the 1st Dragoon Guards in 1731. He took a parliamentary seat four years later. It was his destiny.

  He was known as one of the ‘cub Whigs’ because of his youthful opposition to Walpole’s administration. He had also attached himself to Frederick, prince of Wales, who was implacably opposed to his father, George II, and thus to his father’s principal minister. Queen Caroline said of her eldest son that ‘my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world; and I most heartily wish he was out of it’. Nevertheless Pitt set himself up in the prince’s headquarters at Leicester House and was eventually installed as a ‘Groom of the Bedchamber’. From early on, therefore, Walpole marked him down as his enemy. Pitt’s speeches against peace were simply another token of their hostility.

  Yet his rhetoric could sting. Horace Walpole, the first minister’s son, remarked ‘how his eloquence, like a torrent long obstructed, burst forth, with more commanding impetuosity! . . . haughty, defiant, conscious of injury and supreme abilities’. It was believed that he did not know what he was going to say until he was on his feet but then, extempore, he drove all before him.

  It was sometimes difficult, in fact, for his spellbound auditors to recall exactly what he had said. Another parliamentarian, Henry Grattan, remembered that he voiced ‘great subjects, great empires, great characters, effulgent ideas and classical illustrations’. Pitt had a great fondness for Shakespeare and would read out the more tremendous passages to his family; he would quote only from the tragedies, and would pass the comedies to someone else. It is an inkling of his dramatic imagination. When we examine his illustrious contemporaries, in fact, the politicians of the age were on the whole consummate actors. Lord Shelburne, one of his closest allies in later life, described him as a ‘completely artificial character’. ‘He was always acting,’ Shelburne said, ‘always made up, and never natural, in a perpetual state of exertion, incapable of friendship, or of any act which tended to it, and constantly upon the watch, and never unbent . . .’ This was the man who became known as the great commoner.

  Shelburne also described Pitt as ‘tall in his person . . . with the eye of a hawk, a little head, thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect’. Extant portraits reveal a somewhat haunted face with watchful and weary eyes. He began to suffer physical ill-health at Eton which in the medical manner of the time was diagnosed as ‘gout’. Over succeeding years the ‘gout’ attacked various parts of his body so that he had the appearance of an invalid, spare and lean. When he began to suffer from bouts of mania and depression he was diagnosed with ‘gout on the brain’.

  For a man almost constantly in pain, and weary with the importunities of clients and colleagues, it was almost inevitable that he stayed somewhat aloof. He was cold and reserved, except in the company of his few intimates. He could be directed or swayed, but he would not be dictated to. That is also why he earned the reputation for being incorruptible, although in truth he was not without ambition and desire for profit; he also had the gift of changing his principles rapidly when the occasion demanded it. Yet he once spoke of the sense of personal honour ‘which makes ambition virtue’. There is not one public man in whom contraries do not collide. We may say in these early years of Pitt’s political career, however, that he had two principal ambitions; he aimed for English supremacy at sea and England’s supremacy over its neighbours.

  Pitt, then, was one of those who hammered Walpole on the necessity for war. He also hailed his political ally, Frederick, the prince of Wales, as the protector of the naval strength of England and the guardian of the trade of the country. Liberty of the Seas! Liberty and Property! Prosperity of the City of London! These were the catchphrases used by Pitt and his youthful allies. Adam Smith described a war against Spain as a ‘colony war’ to safeguard the high seas as well as British possessions overseas. Horace Walpole blamed the martial pressure upon ‘the disaffected and discontented part’ in parliament, and also upon those who belonged to the court of the prince of Wales who wanted to create a warrior prince on the model of a medieval monarch. ‘My God,’ Queen Caroline said, ‘popularity always makes me sick; but Fretz’s popularity makes me vomit.’

  Yet it was public opinion itself, animated by these belligerent parties, which pushed Walpole into a war that he did not wish for. To compound the insult many of his former allies now blamed the first minister for acquiescing in the fervour for conflict. When he eventually declared war in October 1739, there was an outburst of popular rejoicing. ‘They now ring the bells,’ he said in one of his more maladroit remarks, ‘they will soon wring their hands.’

  All seemed to go well with the first victory of the conflict when Admiral Edward Vernon in November 1739 captured the Spanish base of Porto Bello in South America. It was greeted with jubilation and in the following year, when Vernon was preparing a second fleet, ‘Rule Britannia’ was first sung at the prince of Wales’s country retreat at Cliveden. The towns and cities of England organized festivals to the ‘Immortal Vernon’ and his name was aligned with those of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. The stunning success of the ‘blue water’ policy was also a harsh rebuke to Walpole and those ministers who preferred a less belligerent policy.

  But no war goes to plan, as Walpole was uneasily aware. The conquest of Porto Bello lasted for no more than three weeks, and in the following summer Admirals Nicholas Haddock and John Norris failed to stop the Spanish and French fleets from sailing into Caribbean waters. Another truism of war states that one conflict can blend into another without the protagonists being fully aware of the fact. So the war against Spain was changed, as if by a transformation scene at the ballet, into the ‘War of the Austrian Succession’.

  This is how it happened. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI, had no son, so it had been agreed that he sh
ould be permitted to leave intact his Habsburg dominions (including Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, the Netherlands and parts of Italy) to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa. No sooner was the emperor in his grave, however, than the various interested parties pounced on his legacy. There was no honour among thieves, even if they were sovereigns; they swarmed about the sight of blood. Frederick II of Prussia invaded the Habsburg province of Silesia since, in his own words, ‘ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me, carried the day, and I decided for war’. He was, at least, candid. Spain and France were also two of the principal aggressors and, since they were also two of England’s most prominent enemies, England itself was in 1740 perforce drawn into the European conflict. There were too many monarchs, and too few thrones, to satisfy every combatant. New dancers came on the stage with reverberating clashes of thunder and bolts of lightning.

  In September 1741 George II astonished his ministers, and his people, by declaring the electorate of Hanover neutral. It was understandable. His territory was surrounded by the larger powers which already had their mouths open for more. Yet he had withdrawn from a dispute in which England was still an active participant; he had in effect two foreign policies, one of peace and one of war. A nation at war cannot be led by Janus, and it was widely believed that the foreign interests of the country were subordinated to those of Hanover. Pitt in particular was scathing about what he considered to be the parasitical Hanoverians, a stance that incurred the lasting enmity of the king.

  Walpole had endured enough, and in the first month of 1742 he resigned his office. ‘This war is yours,’ he told a fellow minister, soon to become the duke of Newcastle, ‘you have had the conduct of it. I wish you joy of it.’ Newcastle himself deserves a reference in this history in his own right since he was quintessentially, inimitably, of the eighteenth century; he could have come from the stage of Congreve or the pages of Smollett. He was a powerful Whig grandee and consummate master of electoral tactics, but he was also something of a buffoon. In an age of tears he was well known for copious weeping; he refused to sleep in beds not previously slept in, had a great aversions to chills and damps, would not travel by sea, and never stopped talking. It was said that he had woken half an hour late in the morning and spent the rest of the day trying to make up for lost time. W. E. H. Lecky, in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, described ‘his confused, tangled, unconnected talk, his fulsome flattery, his promises made at the spur of the moment and almost instantly forgotten, his childish exhibitions of timidity, ignorance, fretfulness, perplexity . . .’.