Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  The discourse concerned demands, deceits, threats, conspiracies, manoeuvres and intrigues. X wished to be chancellor of the exchequer but, if Y vetoed the proposal, he could become minister for the House of Commons with the lucrative post of paymaster. A wanted B to remain lord lieutenant of Ireland, so that B could relinquish the office to A in an emergency. It would not surprise an observer of political life, in any century, to acknowledge that politics took precedence over policies.

  Pitt, however, held all the trumps with the support of the public and with the confidence of the Commons; so in the face of the king’s opposition he became secretary of the southern department, the most senior secretary of state, and allowed the duke of Devonshire to become nominal first lord of the treasury. He took office at a time of unease and failure, marked also by Pitt’s dismay at the convenient execution of Admiral Byng. He hardly had time to expedite his own war policy when the king’s younger son, the duke of Cumberland, refused to take up his command in Germany while Pitt remained in charge. It was the opportunity for which George II had waited, and at the beginning of April 1757 Pitt was dismissed.

  All was confused and uncertain. For three months a succession of ministers attempted to co-ordinate policy against France, but none of them had the verve or self-confidence of Pitt. In May a French army invaded Hanover, George’s own electorate, and at the battle of Hastenbeck in July the allies were beaten; the defeated commander, the duke of Cumberland himself, was forced to concede a treaty that gave authority to the French. The king was beside himself with fury, and laid the blame upon his incompetent son. He greeted him with a frigid silence. ‘Here is my son,’ he told his courtiers, ‘who has ruined me and disgraced himself.’ Since Cumberland never again took up a military office, his animus against Pitt would no longer be a consideration. It must have occurred even to the king that a strong hand was required against manifold enemies.

  At the end of June, when it was feared that the great wheels of the machine might stop, Pitt had agreed to enter a coalition with that veteran of all veterans, the duke of Newcastle. Pitt would take care of the war while Newcastle would administer all domestic business, including the raising of the revenues that Pitt required. Pitt and Newcastle were by no means natural allies; in fact they despised one another. They were united only in their desire to be ministers. ‘Fewer words, if you please, my lord,’ Pitt told the voluble Newcastle, ‘for your words have long lost all weight with me.’ The unlikely coalition turned out to be one of the most successful in English history.

  The circumstances of Pitt’s return were not propitious. The earl of Chesterfield wrote at the time that ‘whoever is in, or whoever is out, I am sure we are undone, both at home and abroad; at home by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill luck and incapacity . . . We are no longer a nation. I never yet saw so dreadful a prospect.’ In the autumn of 1757 John Wilkes, soon enough to become a vociferous agitator, wrote that there was ‘the most general discontent I ever knew, and every person I converse with, of all parties, seems to be under the dread of something very terrible approaching’.

  Pitt was faced with what, in the circumstances of the time, looked very much like a global war. From Quebec to Guadeloupe, from Senegal to East Frisia, from Prague to Louisiana, the two combatants and their allies faced each other in a battle for naval and commercial supremacy. It was the kind of war Pitt was born for. His over-arching policy was to open as many ‘fronts’ against France as possible, in order to tie down its forces, and to promote and support as many of its enemies on the field of battle. For this he needed ships, men and money, the latter of which Newcastle furnished him by imposing additional taxes. Pitt told the Commons that he needed funds ‘for the total stagnation and extirpation of the French trade upon the seas, and the general protection of that of Great Britain’. He demanded sovereignty over the high seas, in other words; he also faced a war of four fronts other than that of the European mainland – against the French on the continent of America, among the islands of the Caribbean, along the African coast, and in India.

  Macaulay wrote in an essay in the Edinburgh Review, in 1834, that Pitt had serious weaknesses as war minister. He wrote that ‘we perhaps from ignorance, cannot discern in his arrangements any appearance of profound or dexterous combination’. Pitt was, perhaps, just lucky. He could not of course have by himself conceived and carried out all the manifest events of the war; much of the praise must be ceded to the officials of the Admiralty. But, if any man held together the various strands of the war effort, it was Pitt. His panache and energy were accompanied by hauteur and by sarcasm to his colleagues; he had very little faith in their abilities, and rarely confided in them. He was egotistical with the proud and domineering with the weak. Yet he had a vision of England and of the nation’s destiny, bound not by the narrow frontiers of Europe but by a global trading empire that would ensure the nation’s commercial and naval supremacy.

  16

  What shall I do?

  On a May evening in 1738 John Wesley was walking along Aldersgate Street in order to attend a Church of England religious society; in this period the walls of London were scrawled with messages such as ‘Christ is God’ and ‘Murder Jews’ while rising above him beyond Aldersgate Street was the recently finished dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. He had the proper Anglican credentials for an orthodox religious society; he had been a tutor of Lincoln College, Oxford, where he and his brother Charles set up a small society of fellow believers known as the ‘Holy Club’. In the late autumn of 1735 he had travelled across the ocean to the newly established colony of Georgia, a settlement of yeoman farmers that had turned its back on slavery. He returned, after a legal dispute, at the end of 1737.

  He had a companion in spirit. George Whitefield had joined the ‘Holy Club’ with the Wesley brothers and soon became known for his histrionic genius; he could make a congregation swoon in sorrow and David Garrick, the actor, told a friend that he would give £1,000 to utter an ‘Oh!!!!’ in the manner of Whitefield. But Wesley was temporarily bereft of his spiritual comfort. In 1738 Whitefield had also made the journey to Georgia.

  Yet by the time Wesley walked out of the little society in Aldersgate Street he was spiritually changed. One of the members of the society was reading to the assembly Martin Luther’s Preface to the Epistle of the Romans ‘about a quarter before nine’. He was reciting the passage that describes ‘the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ’. As Wesley put it: ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed.’ This was the first stage in what became known as ‘the awakening’, that moment when in Wesley’s words ‘God began His great work in England’ and which gathered its fruit in the Methodist movement.

  Wesley had found in Luther’s preface the belief that ‘we are under grace and not under the law’. That grace was the great bounty and blessing he tried to instil in congregations never before touched by the spirit. On his own return from Georgia, in 1739, George Whitefield preached in the open air, itself a rare and almost unknown occurrence, to an assembly of colliers at Kingswood outside Bristol. His words acted as a sword, releasing acts of collective piety and mass emotion. ‘Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ.’ It was this outward call to repentance that galvanized the Methodist cause. Crowds assembled from the local neighbourhoods to listen to what they considered to be the voice of God, and in March 1739, Whitefield wrote to Wesley that ‘you must come and water what God has enabled me to plant’. Four months later he wrote in his journal that ‘a great and visible alteration is seen in the behavior of the colliers. Instead of cursing and swearing, they are heard to sing hymns about the woods . . .’

  It was an unprecedented event in the history of English spirituality. ‘Field preaching’ had in previous centuries been the preserve of a few unorthodox or marginal figures, and the Dominicans had set up their pulpits in the marketplaces of the towns, but now whole communities who had never before been known to attend a church, gathered in the hills and open
spaces.

  Whitefield said that ‘a preacher, whenever he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear’. He cried aloud; he stamped on the wooden platform; he wept. ‘Oh my hearers, the wrath is to come! The wrath is to come!’ Wesley himself noted of one Methodist congregation that ‘the people [were] half-strangled and gasping for life’; ‘great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead; some with extreme noise and violent agitation. One man hurled himself upon a wall again and again, calling out “Oh what shall I do? What shall I do? Oh for one drop of the blood of Christ!”.’ It was said that Methodist preachers were ‘paid by the groan’.

  In previous centuries the Church would have turned on them with all the guile and fury at its command; the Lutherans of the sixteenth century, the Quakers and Anabaptists of the seventeenth century, felt the fist and the fire. But the Church was now not so strong. Anglicanism was, shall we say, slumbering? Many of its members were easy or indifferent; they attended worship every Sunday as a social duty, but nothing more.

  The Toleration Act of 1689 achieved exactly what its critics had prophesied; the religious temper was cool where it was not cold. Voltaire wrote in Letters Concerning the English Nation that ‘if one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace’. Various religious sects and groupings came together in public debates where matters of grace and redemption were argued in an atmosphere of civility. There was nothing mean or trivial about that, of course, but it did not provide the best response to the fierce piety of the Methodists and other evangelicals. The established emphasis now rested on a faith that was ‘pure’ and ‘rational’, amiable and undogmatic. The philosopher, David Hume, described it as ‘the most cool indifference’.

  ‘Old Dissent’ was in no better state. It had in its own fashion become orthodox. It contained no surprises and offended no one’s sensibilities. Once even the most fervent Church becomes established it surrounds itself with rules and regulations, customs and conventions, that weigh it down. The adherents of Old Dissent were the craftsmen and well-known traders; they had become as much part of English society as the squire and the parson. One of their number, Philip Doddridge, explained that they did not accommodate ‘the plain people of low education and vulgar taste’. Concerning the Roman Catholics the same bland latitude obtained. Daniel Defoe, in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, commented upon Durham that the town is ‘old, full of Roman Catholics, who live peaceably and disturb nobody, and nobody them; for we, being there on a holiday, saw them going as publicly to mass as the dissenters did on other days to their meeting houses’. Popular suspicion and resentment of them, however, among the London mobs, would once more emerge in the 1780s.

  In 1740 Wesley and Whitefield came to a crossing from which two paths led. Whitefield took the less travelled path and adopted the predestinarianism of the Calvinists, together with the exclusive notion of ‘election’; Wesley remained true to the Church of England, and in particular to the doctrine that redemption was available to all who willingly sought their salvation in Christ. He was a man of great talent for administration and organization and was sometimes called ‘Pope John’. In the course of his ministry he established 356 Methodist chapels, and organized the faithful into ‘classes’ and ‘bands’ with an annual conference at which he would exhort, condemn, praise and rebuke his followers.

  Wesley himself was a man whose optimism was matched only by his energy. ‘I do not remember’, he wrote when he was an old man, ‘to have felt lowness of spirit for one quarter of an hour since I was born.’ That enthusiasm lasted for all his eighty-seven years. He rose long before dawn, and preached his first sermon at five in the morning. In his eighty-fifth year he preached eighty sermons in eight weeks, and in the last year of his life travelled 70 miles on horseback in a day. He preached 800 sermons a year and in the course of his life travelled one quarter of a million miles. Such is the effect of burning conviction. More orthodox Anglicans (for Wesley insisted all his life that he remained a firm and committed Anglican) were afraid of his fire. He noted in his journal at the beginning of his ministry that ‘I was roughly attacked in a large company as an enthusiast, a seducer, and a setter forth of new doctrines’. Yet he always remained calm and self-disciplined, turning away wrath with a soft answer.

  One of Wesley’s critics denounced his followers as tinkers, barbers, cobblers and chimney sweeps; but in truth his constituency was much wider. It included a large body of artisans as well as those workers who were associated with commerce and manufacture; these might be described as the newly significant trades, among them miners, quarrymen and hand-loom weavers. The association between the Methodist ‘awakening’ and the onset of industrialism, however, is not easy to discern. It may be that Methodism offered its adherents a tight-knit social community, with its own principles of cohesion, at a time when other social ties were being weakened. It is also instructive that approximately half of the Methodist congregation were women, perhaps alienated from the male preserve of Anglicanism.

  The faith spread in the manufacturing districts of the north-east, the north midlands and the Potteries; it flourished in the mining areas and in the fishing villages, areas that had tended to protect themselves from official authority. Cornwall and Wales were, for that reason, centres for those of Methodist persuasion. Methodism, more than Anglicanism, was aligned to native sensibilities; Wesley, for example, was happy for his preachers to speak in Welsh. Methodism also appealed to that sense of rapture dear to the Celts and to many other oppressed peoples. Towns were more susceptible than villages. It was perhaps not surprising that Wesley, who professed himself to be a Tory and a devout Anglican, should gather together a motley congregation of whom many were radical and anti-authoritarian in tendency. The message of individual redemption, beyond the orthodoxies of the established Church, was more important than the messenger. As a result, individual Methodists were denounced as levellers, democrats and even atheists.

  Methodism was also the spring and fountain of the evangelical enthusiasm that materially affected the climate of English spirituality in the 1780s. The meetings of the Methodists were well known for weeping and hysterical laughter, cries and shouts and confessions; it was returning in spirit to the ‘enthusiasm’ of the previous century that had largely been extinguished at the time of the Restoration. The early eighteenth century had not been a time for God’s elect, but under the leadership of Wesley the elect returned in armies to the Lord. ‘Old Dissent’ was in turn partly replaced by ‘New Dissent’, when the enthusiasm of artisans and other urban workers affected the congregations. The middle decades of the eighteenth century were indeed the time for sects who walked and prayed on wilder and wilder shores. In the streets of mid-eighteenth-century London appeared little clusters of Moravians, Muggletonians, Sandemanians, Hutchinsonians, Thraskites, Salmonists, Swedenborgians and Behmenists. For the young William Blake it was a ‘golden city’.

  The evangelical revival seems to have appeared at approximately the same time as the emergence of Methodism; this is not at all unexpected, since they were the roots of the same tree. As the Methodist movement grew in strength and intensity, so did the emphasis on a new awakening infuse Anglicans and dissenters with the same desire for personal spiritual renovation. Yet the evangelicals, as they became known, were averse to open-air meetings and to the wilder manifestations of enthusiasm; some of the more famous of them, like William Wilberforce and Hannah More, worked quietly but actively for social reform and the inculcation of Christian manners. They worked against all the forces of eighteenth-century society that they deemed to be immoral – gambling, drinking and cruelty to animals among them. They were also strict Sabbatarians. They belonged to the world of property and patronage, and can perhaps be best seen as the more establis
hed or higher-ranking equivalent of the lowly Methodists. One of Hannah More’s great successes was a little book of 1795 entitled Tales for the Common People.

  It was much more likely, therefore, that their missionary activity would take the form of societies and small groups of like-minded supporters such as the Clapham Sect or Clapham Saints which began to meet in 1790. Societies for the ‘reformation of manners’ became familiar, among them the Society of Universal Good Will, the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, the Society for Promoting the Religious Instruction of Youth, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They were complemented by the Society for the Propagation of the Bible in Foreign Parts, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society.

  One of the principal effects of the evangelical revival, however, was the steady growth of ‘Sunday schools’ in the later years of the eighteenth century. The Sunday School Society was established in 1785, and within half a century some 17,000 schools had been instituted for the benefit of poor children who might acquire the elements of reading and writing. But the first purpose of these institutions was to promote religious and moral instruction, and in particular to indoctrinate the children with the rules of discipline and obedience. Many of the pupils in fact became part of the child labour force that was a significant aspect of the Industrial Revolution.

  17

  Do or die

  William Pitt’s vision, of global supremacy, seemed within reach. The early course of the Seven Years War was wholly changed by the victories of Frederick of Prussia, the ally of England, who soon acquired a reputation as the Protestant hero of Europe. In November 1757, at Rossbach in Saxony, he defeated the combined armies of France and Austria. A month later, at Leuthen in Bavaria, Frederick defeated a much greater Austrian army and seized Silesia. As if emboldened by these victories another allied commander, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, chased the French out of Hanover and pushed them back across the Rhine. Chesterfield, so doleful before, conceded that ‘the face of affairs is astonishingly mended’.