This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  There are two conclusions one might draw from this. The first is that all power corrupts, and it hardly matters whether you’re talking about the Stuart court or the Blair one. Alternatively, one could draw roughly the opposite conclusion: that autocratic government tends to foster corruption on a major scale; while democratic governments and bolshy voters do at least limit the extent of sleaze. This second line of argument looks like a good one in principle, except that eighteenth-century Britain, an imperfect but real democracy, was itself so deeply enmired in corruption that the phenomenon was regarded as pretty much normal, like mud in autumn.

  Parliamentary management of the press offers one of the most glaring instances of that autumnal mud. So little were Britain’s first true parliamentary rulers comfortable with the idea of being criticized by mere journalists that they brought in the Stamp Act of 1712. The tax was Kremlinesque in its unabashed directness of purpose, the idea being to tax newspapers off the news-stands and into bankruptcy. Alas, the act contained an unfortunate loophole. For smaller newspapers, the act imposed a tax of one penny ‘for every printed copy’, but for larger ones the tax was to be three shillings ‘on one printed copy’. The tax came close to destroying the daily newspaper industry, which went into immediate decline, but the larger weekly newspapers, in blatant defiance of the act’s intended purpose, claimed that they had to pay their three-shilling tax on the first copy of any edition they published—all the others were to be tax free. Worse still, it was the opposition newspapers which jumped on the technicality. Newspapers loyal to the government felt obliged to pay the tax as it was intended, and so started going out of business.

  There were plenty of solutions available to the government of the day. They could simply have abolished a tax whose purpose was the repression of free speech, or they could at least have levelled the playing field by closing the loophole. Neither option appealed. Instead, the government took public money and used it to make secret payments to friendly newspapers and editors, thus keeping them in business, and ever more dependent on government favour. At the same time, hostile newspapers were prosecuted or bought off. The whole ugly episode was notable for the government’s utter disregard for an independent press, and its willingness to use taxpayers’ cash for narrow political advantage.

  Debasement of the honours system and underhand methods of controlling the press all have their echoes today, but we do at least feel reasonably secure in the knowledge that those appointed to run the most basic function of government—the defence of the realm—are in their positions on the basis of ability, not connections. That wasn’t always the case. In the Georgian navy, recommendations based on ‘interest’ or influence flew around right, left and centre (or rather, for the purist, starboard, larboard and amidships). These recommendations mattered. Almost to a man, the navy’s most senior commanders had obtained their positions through nepotism, influence or the use of aristocratic rank. If we consider just the Seven Years War, then even a short roll-call of senior names would throw up the following connections:

  ADMIRAL HAWKE Nephew of a commissioner of trade

  ADMIRAL KNOWLES Bastard son of the Earl of Banbury

  ADMIRAL TOWNSHEND Half-brother of a viscount

  ADMIRAL SMITH Half-brother of Lord Lyttleton and a relative of the prime minister

  ADMIRAL POCOCK Nephew of Lord Torrington, a First Lord of the Admiralty

  VICE ADMIRAL WATSON Nephew of Sir Charles Wager, another First Lord

  VICE ADMIRAL HOLBOURNE Protégé of the Duke of Argyll

  VICE ADMIRAL CARNEGIE aka the Earl of Northesk

  REAR ADMIRAL COLVILL aka Lord Colvill

  This list merely scratches the surface. One could also add the names of the senior men at the Admiralty (Anson, Boscawen, Forbes and West), as well as numerous other admirals or rising captains (Frankland, Hardy, Holmes, Rodney, Keppel, Douglas and Howe). Every single one of these men had significant connections to senior figures in the navy, the House of Lords or the government, and they all made full use of the connections they had.

  It’s as one surveys facts such as these that one is tempted to draw the obvious conclusion that Britain is just a grubbily corrupt country like any other; that it always has been and always will be; that wherever power or public money exists, there are plenty of Brits ready to thrust their noses into the trough. The conclusion is certainly true to an extent—but extent is everything. Before we descend into cynical gloom about our rulers, it’s worth reminding ourselves of a fact that receives almost no coverage at all, namely that today’s Britain is one of the least corrupt countries of any size, and the least corrupt large country in the world.

  Transparency International,*

  Corruptions Perceptions Index 2006

  United Kingdom 8.6 out of possible 10.0

  Canada 8.5

  Germany 8.0

  Japan 7.6

  France 7.4

  USA 7.3

  Italy 4.9

  Russia 2.5

  The only countries that do better than us are mostly either small and Scandinavian (Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway), or small and a little bit British (New Zealand, Singapore, and Australia, which is smallish in population terms, if not geography). If you care to look not at who takes bribes but who is paying them, then you might expect Britain to do badly, given that many of its stronger industries (oil, mining and armaments, for instance) take its corporations into some fairly dodgy territory. All the same, Britain still does better than any of its big-country peers, except that it and Canada switch places at the top.

  The simple truth, counter-intuitive as it may seem, is that while Britain isn’t quite squeaky clean (you need to be Scandinavian for that), it still does very well indeed by international standards. Nor should this be surprising. When a country’s major political scandals revolve around expediting a visa for a nanny (the first Blunkett resignation), or taking a perfectly legitimate loan from a friend (the first Mandelson one), then that country’s politics would seem to be in fairly good shape.

  So what of the past? Are we a dirty country that’s cleaned up its act? Or a clean one that’s just got cleaner? It’s hard to say. The data available today wasn’t around twenty years ago, let alone two or three centuries back. What is clear, though, is that the attitudes of today don’t necessarily make sense when imported back into the past. All those honours flogged off by the early Stuarts? This certainly was a kind of corruption, and the Stuart court was compared unfavourably with that of Elizabeth by contemporaries. But in the early Stuart era, the number of ‘gentlemen’, or better-off middle classes, had vastly increased compared with the start of Elizabeth’s reign, and some kind of catch-up was certainly overdue. Furthermore, given that in England it was parliament, not the king, who held the purse strings, then that Stuart entrepreneurship can perhaps better be interpreted as a sign of the onset of constitutional government than as something fundamentally rotten in our make-up.

  How about those early eighteenth-century efforts to control the press? Shocking, of course, and it caused a furore at the time, but it needs to be reiterated that the British press of the era was the freest in the world. Historically speaking, it would seem more remarkable that the press was allowed to function at all than that the government was clumsily authoritarian in its response.

  Finally, what about all those nepotistic admirals? It’s all very well to tut-tut about cronyism, but in the end it makes no sense to judge an eighteenth-century system through purely twenty-first-century eyes. The simple fact is that the list of senior naval officers above includes those responsible for virtually every major British victory over a period of thirty years and more. Not one of those officers obtained his position without thoroughly meriting it. Although it’s certainly true that promotion in the Georgian navy depended heavily on ‘influence’, the recommendations of men of influence formed a highly competitive market of their own, allowing men of talent to thrust their way to the very top. In short, though connections certainly
mattered, ability mattered more.

  In the end, perhaps the best conclusion is the simplest. Government is a dirty business by nature, but the things most likely to clean it up are representative democracy, a free press and the weight of public opinion. Since Britain has, to a considerable extent, led the way in these respects, it would hardly be surprising if we had also led the way in the basic cleanliness of our public life. If journalists function as the natural killer cells in our political immune system, then stories about sleaze indicate an effective kill. It’s fine to enjoy the headlines, but we’d do well to bear in mind the context. Far from being doomed to live in a dirty country, we’re lucky enough to live in a clean one.

  * Transparency International is the world’s leading anti-corruption pressure group, and its stats have become the international benchmark in the field.

  WARFARE

  INVASION

  What’s the one fact everybody knows about British history? The fact that could decently claim to be the central fact about our past?

  That’s easy, isn’t it? We’re an island. The last time we were invaded was in 1066. We’re protected by our coasts, virtually immune against attack; an island stronghold; or, to quote the Bard, a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war’. Shakespeare’s boast stands to reason, after all. Land transport is as easy as kiss my hand. It’s only when we get to the coast that things get more complicated. In the old days of wind and oar, sea transport must have been an immensely complicated and unpredictable way of getting around. No wonder that invading armies preferred to stay away.

  Of course, there is one teeny little flaw in this view of our history: namely, that it’s completely false. It’s not just that Britain has been invaded since 1066, it’s that we used to be invaded all the time. There have in fact been nine seaborne invasions which successfully toppled the government of England, and one which saw the Scottish throne change hands. For invasion anoraks, the dates are:

  1139 Matilda invades, toppling King Stephen (temporarily, at least).

  1153 Henry of Anjou invades, forcing Stephen to acknowledge him as heir.

  1326 Isabella and Mortimer invade, deposing Edward II and installing Edward III in his place.

  1332 Edward Balliol invades Scotland, defeating the Regent.

  1399 Henry Bolingbroke lands to seize the throne, becoming Henry IV.

  1460 Warwick invades, captures Henry VI and installs Edward IV.

  1470 Warwick invades again, this time putting Henry VI back on the throne.

  1471 Edward invades, beats Henry, and it’s his turn to be king again.

  1485 Henry Tudor invades, defeats Richard III and becomes Henry VII.

  1688 William of Orange invades and ascends to the throne.

  This list, however, is based on a fairly restrictive definition of invasion. Arguably, a successful invasion is one that succeeds in delivering hostile campaigning forces on to British soil, whether or not those forces go on to win the subsequent land war. If we expand the definition in this way, there were seven further occasions of successful invasion, namely 1069, 1101, 1215, 1405, 1462, 1469, 1487 plus a Scottish one in 1708. That’s eighteen invasions so far, and the total excludes countless other seaborne raids and landings; numerous occasions when foreign assistance was sent to local rebellions; any expeditions that failed to put troops ashore; and the count ignores Ireland altogether.

  Now of course, most of these invasions were mounted by domestic contenders for the English crown, a sort of bloody medieval version of musical thrones. The abrupt refashioning of the country that took place under William the Conqueror was fortunately never repeated, but that fact shouldn’t blind us to the truth that Britain has long been highly vulnerable precisely because of the seas around her. This assertion should hardly come as a surprise. Why do we think of the sea as a barrier? Quite simply because it is to us. Thanks to the car and (in an earlier age) the railway, we find it extremely easy to move about the country by land. It’s only once we get to the edge of it that the going gets tough. But this modern experience inverts an age-old historical reality, namely that land transport has been slow and cumbersome, transport by sea has been fast and easy.

  It’s hard to exaggerate how bad land transport used to be. Carts were rudimentary, roads basic, horses expensive. Rain and mud were the thieves of speed. Bandits and highwaymen were, well, just thieves. By contrast, the sea was fast, safe and reliable. In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith claimed that ‘six or eight men by the help of water carriage can carry and bring back in the same time the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh as 50 broad-wheeled wagons attended by a hundred men and drawn by 400 horses’. Smith probably exaggerated a tad, but his point was sound—and he wrote after decades of private investment in turnpike roads had transformed Britain’s previously backward road system.

  What’s more, if the goods in question were heavy—artillery pieces, for example—then moving them by land was so difficult it could only just be done at all. At the epoch-making Battle of Blenheim in 1704, the entire French army boasted about sixty guns, the allied side about fifty. By naval standards, this kind of firepower was simply piffling. A single ship of the line carried more firepower than an army. A battle fleet carried infinitely more. Nor was Blenheim exceptional. Nelson’s flagship Victory at Trafalgar would have easily outgunned Wellington’s army at Waterloo, and that’s not even to consider Victory’s infinitely greater rate of fire or the accuracy of her gunners. It wouldn’t be until the advent of the railway that armies could begin to compete with the firepower of navies, a transformation in warfare which any infantryman of the First World War would, unfortunately, understand all too well.

  Nor did sea transport merely have the edge in terms of speed, brute transportation capacity and reliability; it also offered the killer advantages of surprise and secrecy. Attacks by land came so slowly that the intended target of attack generally knew all about it well in advance. Attacks by sea, on the other hand, came by surprise. Defenders had no way of knowing if an attack was coming—or where—or when—or in what strength. Britain was, in effect, surrounded by an open highway to invasion. There must have been countless Britons who wished the country had had the good fortune to be surrounded by that most effective of barriers: more land, bad roads, a few hills and plenty of mud.

  In short, if you want the central fact of British history, perhaps it’s this: that the country was highly vulnerable not despite its island nature, but because of it. For five hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, the country got invaded a lot, and there was damn all its rulers could do about it. But exceptional vulnerability called forth an exceptional response: the navy. In 1588, the men and ships of the Navy Royal (as it was then) defeated the largest invasion force that Spain, the world’s richest and most powerful nation, could muster. Within little more than two hundred years, the Royal Navy was more powerful than every other navy in the world combined. During the great age of British expansionism, it was the navy which protected our trade, the navy which won our wars, the navy which made empire possible. If you’re looking for a central fact, then there it is. An island nation, surrounded by danger, seeking security the only way it could: by learning to master the element that threatened it.

  THE MIGHTY MONMOUTH

  In 1758, Britain and France were at war, as they had been on and off for sixty years, as they would be on and off for another sixty.

  On 28 February, the French ship Foudroyant was on its way to Cartagena to relieve the French commodore stationed there. The Foudroyant’s name translates roughly as ‘lightning-striker’, and the ship deserved the boast. It was a brand-new eighty-gun two-decker, one of the finest of its class. The ship was under the command of a senior officer, Admiral Duquesne. She was in all ways a pretty formidable piece of naval hardware.

  On that night of the 28th, however, she was intercepted by a British squadron of three ships of the line: the Monmouth, 64, Swiftsure, 64, and Hampton Cou
rt, 70. (The numbers after the name of each ship are the standard way of representing her number of guns.) On the face of it, the British squadron was much more powerful, but that night its three ships were widely separated. HMS Monmouth encountered Foudroyant at about 8 p.m. The other British ships would not be able to join the action until close to midnight. That was four hours of fighting, ship to ship, with the Monmouth’s 64 guns against the Foudroyant’s 80.

  That still sounds like a reasonably equal contest, until one delves a little deeper. The Monmouth was not in the first flush of youth. Although ships are female, and therefore normally entitled to a certain privacy in these matters, it seems appropriate to mention that she had been built in 1667, and was, at the time of the action with Foudroyant, some ninety years old. What’s more, her guns were smaller than those of her enemy. Monmouth’s guns could shoot a broadside totalling 504 pounds. Foudroyant, the lightning-striker, could fire a massive 1,222 pounds—and those are French pounds, which were 8 per cent heavier. In total, therefore, Foudroyant had more than two and a half times the firepower of its enemy. When you combine that with the fact that the British ship had smaller scantlings—that is, a lesser thickness of timber armouring her sides—the contest was profoundly unequal.

  The battle began at about eight in the evening. By half-past nine, Monmouth’s Captain Gardiner was struck in the head by a piece of flying grapeshot. He was carried below, where he subsequently died. His place was taken by Lieutenant Robert Carkett, and the battle continued. Heavy fire from the Foudroyant brought down the Monmouth’s mizzenmast, rendering her hard to manoeuvre or sail. But the elderly Monmouth continued to fight. Before long, she brought down the mainmast of her enemy, and before long the French ship’s fire began to weaken. By midnight it had almost completely ceased. When HMS Swiftsure finally arrived on the scene, she poured one broadside into Foudroyant, which struck her colours immediately. The honour of taking possession of the defeated vessel would normally have gone to Monmouth, except that all her boats had been completely destroyed and she had no way of getting over there. A small, ancient, hopelessly outclassed vessel had defeated one of the newest and best ships in the French fleet.