The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 35) 9781783274499, 1783274492

Citation preview

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 35

THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITS EMPIRE

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 1

22/08/2019 08:57

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 2

22/08/2019 08:57

THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITS EMPIRE

Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

THE BOYDELL PRESS

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 3

22/08/2019 08:57

© Contributors 2019 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2019 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-78327-449-9 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 4

22/08/2019 08:57

Table of Contents List of Illustrationsvi List of Contributorsvii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction:The Making of the Protestant Succession Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes 1 The Political Consequences of the Cuckoldy German Turnip Farmer Daniel Szechi 2 ‘They May Well Bear the Same Name’: The Revolution and the Succession in the Election of 1715 Christopher Dudley 3 The Backlash Against Anglican Catholicity, 1709–18 Brent S. Sirota

1 20

38 60

4 ‘The End of the Beginning?’ The Rhetorics of Revolutions in the Political Sermons of 1688–1716 James J. Caudle

82

5 Security, Stability and Credit: The Hanoverian Succession and the Politics of the Financial Revolution Abigail L. Swingen

100

6 Colonial Policy in North America, 1689–1717 Megan Lindsay Cherry 7 Securing the Union and the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland, 1707–37 Allan I. Macinnes 8 Patriotism after the Hanoverian Succession Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

119

136 155

9 Displaced but Not Replaced: The Continuation of Dutch Intellectual Influences in Early Hanoverian Britain Esther Mijers

175

10 Some Hidden Thunder: Hanover, Saxony and the Management of Political Union, 1697–1763 Robert I. Frost

193 212

Index v

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 5

22/08/2019 08:57

Illustrations Figures 1 Bank and East India Company Stock Prices, 1713–15

54

2 Price of Wheat at Bear Quay, 1713–15

55

Tables 1 Partisan Voting in 1710

44

2 Partisan Voting in 1713

44

3 Clergy Voting in 1710 and 1713

45

4 Gentry Voting in 1710 and 1713

45

5 Partisan Voting in 1715

57

6 Clergy Voting in 1715

58

7 Gentry Voting in 1715

58

vi

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 6

22/08/2019 08:57

Contributors James J. Caudle is a Research Associate at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. His recent work includes the essays ‘The Origins of Political Broadcasting’, in Religion, Loyalty and Sedition: The Hanoverian Succession of 1714 and ‘The Defence of Georgian Britain’, in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901. Megan Lindsay Cherry is Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina State University. Her forthcoming book, New York Asunder, focuses on the political causes and consequences of Leisler’s Rebellion. Christopher Dudley is Associate Professor of History at East Stroudsburg University. His current research project is on elections and voter behaviour in the early eighteenth century. Robert Frost holds the Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the University of Aberdeen. His latest book, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, vol. 1 The Making of the Polish–Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569 (Oxford, 2015). He is now working on volume 2, and an article on the supposed Polish portrait of Charles Edward Stuart. Allan I. Macinnes is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde. He has just produced A History of Scotland (London, 2019). He is currently working on the interaction of Jacobitism, Enlightenment and empire in the eighteenth century. Esther Mijers is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. She specialises in the early modern relationship between Scotland and the wider world. Steve Pincus is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History at the University of Chicago and editor of the Lewis Walpole series in History, Politics and Culture at Yale University Press. He is completing Global British Empire to 1784 for Yale University Press. Brent S. Sirota is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is the author of The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014). He is currently working on a history of separations of church and state throughout the long eighteenth century. Abigail L. Swingen is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, CT, 2015). Her current project explores the politics and political culture of the Financial Revolution. vii

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 7

22/08/2019 08:57

CONTRIBUTORS

Daniel Szechi is Emeritus Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. He has written extensively on Jacobitism, and his most recent book, Britain’s Lost Revolution? Jacobite Scotland and French Grand Strategy 1701–1708, came out with Manchester University Press in 2015. He is currently working on decoding over six hundred letters written from the Catholic underground in Scotland to the Scots College in Paris 1697–1736. Amy Watson is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of the Early Modern Americas/Atlantic World at the Early Modern Studies Institute, University of Southern California. Her work has been published in the Scottish Historical Review, and she is currently working on a book project on party politics and the imperial rise of the Patriot movement in the eighteenth century.

viii

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 8

22/08/2019 08:57

Abbreviations AUL Aberdeen University Library BL British Library, London BLYU Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Bod. Bodleian Library, Oxford University Cobbett’s PH  Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England (12 vols, London, 1806–20) CSPC Kenneth G. Davies, William N. Sainsbury, Sir John Fortescue, Cecil Headlam and Arthur P. Newton (eds), Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series. America and the West Indies, 1610–1775 (39 vols, London, 1880–1984) CUL Cambridge University Library EcHR Economic History Review EHR English Historical Review EUL Edinburgh University Library GCA Glasgow City Archives HJ Historical Journal HL Huntington Library, San Marino, CA HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission HMC, Portland HMC, The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Welbeck Abbey (10 vols, London, 1891–1931) MAE Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh NRS National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography PRONI Public Records of Northern Ireland, Belfast SHR Scottish Historical Review TNA The National Archives, London WMQ The William & Mary Quarterly

ix

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 9

22/08/2019 08:57

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 10

22/08/2019 08:57

Introduction:The Making of the Protestant Succession Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes The peaceful accession of the electoral house of Brunswick-Lüneburg to the throne of Great Britain was roundly greeted with astonishment. The widespread reports of ‘such general joy’, as one observer put it, ‘nothing but Bonefires, letting out of Guns, and huzzaing, and drinking of King George’s health all night’, seemed to dispel at once the morbid apprehensions of insurrection and invasion, civil war and sectarian bloodshed that had long pervaded British politics.1 The American-born Henry Newman, secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, likened it to waking from a dream. Many naturally attributed such a turn of events to divine intervention. And as another public manifestation of the heavenly superintendence of the Protestant monarchy of Great Britain, Newman proclaimed the events of 1 August 1714, ‘not less miraculous, nor less seasonable than our late Happy Revolution was’.2 The comparison is, at once, both obvious and curious. Britons seldom felt the regard of providence as publicly and as tangibly as when it was confounding popery. And for a second time in living memory, the nation imagined itself preserved from the ruin of the Catholic Stuarts and their Bourbon sponsors. And yet, whether divinely engineered or not, the events of 1688–89 and those of 1714 represented rather different species of deliverance. The Glorious Revolution required an upending of law and dynastic right, the virtual annulment of a public theology that had for more than a generation immunised hereditary monarchy from resistance or critique. The Revolution might have been experienced immediately as an ‘appeal to heaven’ (in John Locke’s famous phrase) simply because it seemed to occur so far out beyond the edges of legality and orthodoxy. The Hanoverian Succession, by contrast, embodied the fulfilment of the royal will, statutory law, international treaties, and even, for many, Anglican orthodoxy as it had been reformulated in the

1

BL, Correspondence and Papers, 1700–1714, Add MS 32556, fol. 91. Henry Newman Letterbooks, Vol. IV, fol. 60 in S.P.C.K. Early Eighteenth Century Archives (London, 1976).

2

1

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 1

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

decades since 1689. A strange providence, indeed, that intervened to ensure the ordinary course of events. That the death of the last Stuart monarch Queen Anne at age forty-nine and the accession of her second cousin, once removed Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover seemed to partake of the miraculous, in spite of all the international and domestic forces long at work to guarantee its consummation, illuminates something of the tensions and contradictions besetting British politics in the early eighteenth century. A seemingly ineradicable insecurity haunted British public life during the reign of Queen Anne. In retrospect, the desire to render the Protestant Succession providentially continuous with the Glorious Revolution, to elide the two dynastic alterations as part of the same vaunted struggle against popery, arbitrary government and Bourbon aspirations to universal monarchy, perhaps suggests an unwillingness to confront the novelty of these politics. Such a bracketing may well have served a national mythology, but it does real violence to the historical specificity of the era. The persistent language of Whig and Tory, Protestantism and popery, Church and dissent, the wooden shoes of France and the butterboxes of Holland, doubtless projected a broad continuity with the politics of the later seventeenth century.3 The playwright Susanna Centlivre’s incendiary play The Gotham Election depicted a Whig mob bearing ‘a Pope, with wooden shoes and Wool in their Hats’, squaring off against their Tory counterparts, displaying ‘a Tub with a Woman-Preacher in it, and Laurel in their Hats’.4 But the inertia in public symbolism and rhetoric could not wholly conceal an evolving politics. The forces that threatened the succession of the house of Hanover, no less perhaps than those that ultimately ensured it, were new – born of the world wrought by the Glorious Revolution and its ensuing transformations in church, state, society, economy and geopolitics.5 Rather than treat the peaceful accession of the house of Hanover as a last postscript to the Glorious Revolution, this volume seeks to place the succession in a decidedly post-revolutionary environment, one whose politics and anxieties survived the Peace of Utrecht, the end of the Protestant branch of the house of Stuart, and the death of Louis XIV – that cluster of milestones in 1713–15 that appears to draw the curtain on an era. Gnawing anxieties over the security of the Protestant succession betrayed a fundamental disquiet regarding the prevailing norms and institutions of public life. Britain in the early eighteenth century was a society in flux, radically rethinking and reconstituting its polity and empire, its religion and intellectual life, its contours amidst the distinct peoples of the British Isles as well as the wider community of states in Europe. The death of Princess Anne’s only surviving child William, Duke of Gloucester, from smallpox on 30 July 1700, 3

Steven C.A. Pincus, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s’, HJ, 38:2 (1995), 333–61. 4 Susanna Centlivre, The Gotham Election, A Farce (London, 1715), p. 70. 5 Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rev. edn (London, 1987), p. 82.

2

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 2

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

less than a week after his eleventh birthday, immediately exposed the fragility of the Revolution settlement in church and state. Many close to the ailing King William III hoped that he would promptly re-marry, and sire a line that would, as the earl of Seafield put it, ‘represent him both as King of Britain and Prince of Orange’, perhaps creating the conditions for a formal union of Great Britain and the Dutch Republic.6 The Tory Sir Christopher Musgrave imagined the death of the royal heir portended the coming of a commonwealth, engineered by the lords of the Whig Junto.7 Jacobites at home and abroad imagined that the apparent failure of the Protestant line cleared the way for a restoration of the Catholic branch of the house of Stuart. Indeed, some long maintained that Anne herself had then pledged such a restoration to secure St Germain’s acquiescence to her immediately succeeding her brother-in-law.8 William III, however, had most likely already resolved to settle the succession in the Protestant house of Hanover; and probably confirmed as much when his mother’s cousin, the Dowager Electress Sophia of Hanover visited William’s palace at het Loo in September.9 Even the bill by which this designation was to be codified did not leave the Revolution settlement untouched. Resolutions in the House of Commons on 1 March 1701 called for the settlement of the crown in the Protestant line as well as for ‘further provision’ for ‘the security of the rights and liberties of the people’.10 The Act of Settlement formally designated the ‘most excellent Princess Sophia, and the heirs of her body, being Protestants’ to be next in the line of succession to the thrones of England and Ireland after William, Princess Anne, any children Anne might have, or any William might have from a subsequent marriage. The Act reiterated the prohibition on Roman Catholics or the spouses of Roman Catholics inheriting the crown first articulated in the English Bill of Rights in 1689. But the Act of Settlement went further still, imposing a series of limitations on the royal prerogative to better manage the inconveniencies of a foreign monarch. The possessor of the Crown was required to join formally in communion with the Church of England; forbidden from travelling abroad without parliamentary consent; and prohibited from unilaterally engaging in war in defence of any territory not attached to the English Crown. The Act also barred foreigners from receiving royal grants of land or office and from serving on the Privy Council or in either House of Parliament. Judges were to be allowed to serve during good behaviour; impeachment proceedings were immunised from royal pardon; and placemen and pensioners were excluded 6

State Papers and Letters Addressed to William Carstares (Edinburgh, 1774), pp. 581–2; James Vernon, Letters Illustrative of the Reign of William III from 1696 to 1708 (3 vols, London, 1841), III, pp. 124, 128. 7 HMC, Portland, IV, 3. 8 Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London, 1980), pp. 120–2. 9 Nesca A. Robb, William of Orange: A Personal Portrait (2 vols, New York, 1966), I, pp. 459–60. 10 Journals of the House of Commons 13: 1699–1702 (London, 1803), pp. 375–6.

3

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 3

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

from the House of Commons – a series of long-desired “country” reforms which significantly pared the power of the court. Though William reportedly took umbrage at these restrictions as reflections upon his kingship, the bill passed both houses of Parliament without a division in May 1701.11 This unilateral prescription of the Protestant Succession was not acceptable to the Scottish Parliament. Some members were not prepared to respond to any overtures towards political union, first from William then from Anne, without significant reparations for the collusion between the king and the East India Company that had contributed to the aborted Scottish endeavour to establish a colony at Darien on the Panama Isthmus. Others, not unsympathetic to the house of Hanover, were persuaded that interests of political economy in the wake of Darien first required closer association with England. This position was reinforced in 1703 when the Irish Parliament accepted the Protestant Succession prior to proposing political union, which was summarily rejected by the English ministry. For Jacobites and other Scots averse to political union, there was a distinct possibility that on William’s death, his commitment to the War of the Spanish Succession would turn into the War of the British Succession.12 The question of the Protestant Succession was intimately bound up with the other dynastic crisis upon which the fate of Europe turned. Carlos II of Spain died in October 1700, just a few months after the duke of Gloucester; and the French king’s decision to honour his final will bequeathing the entirety of the Spanish empire to Louis’s own grandson, Philip of Anjou, repudiated at a stroke nearly two years of painstaking negotiations over the partition of the Spanish dominions in Europe and America. As French forces moved against the Dutch barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands in early 1701, the Commons unanimously adopted a resolution urging William ‘to support his allies in maintaining the liberties of Europe’.13 In the summer, John Churchill, Earl (later Duke) of Marlborough was restored to command of the English forces and promptly dispatched to The Hague to negotiate the revival of the grand alliance against Louis XIV. The deposed king James II died in September mere days after the treaty between Britain, Austria and the Netherlands was concluded. The French king compounded his faithlessness by recognising James’s teenage son James Francis Edward Stuart as the rightful of king of England.14 William immediately severed diplomatic relations with France.15 Addresses against France 11

Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester, 1977), pp. 383–4; Brian W. Hill, Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister (New Haven, CT, 1988), pp. 65–6. 12 Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 89–91, 128. 13 Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics, pp. 289–90. 14 Mark A. Thompson, ‘Louis XIV and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession’, in William III and Louis XIV: Essays 1680–1720 by and for Mark A. Thompson, ed. Ragnhild Hatton and J.S. Bromley (Toronto, 1968), pp. 140–61. 15 Stephen B. Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty (New York, 1966), pp.

4

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 4

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

and ‘the pretended Prince of Wales’ poured into the court from throughout the kingdoms.16 In his speech at the opening of his final parliament in December 1701, William linked Louis’s actions directly to the French pretensions in Spain and, steeling the nation for war, declared ‘the Eyes of all Europe are upon this Parliament’.17 The cause of the Protestant Succession fused with that of resisting Bourbon aggrandisement, even as the battle lines in the Rhineland and the Low Countries were being drawn. William III died of a pulmonary fever on the morning of 8 March 1702, assured at least of the grand alliance, if not wholly of the Protestant Succession in all three of his kingdoms.18 One of his final acts was to convey royal assent to a bill requiring that clergy and office-holders swear an oath abjuring the pretensions of James Francis Edward Stuart; and to a bill attainting the same for high treason.19 The broad English consensus underpinning both the war and the succession that marked the final months of William’s life would slowly deteriorate throughout the reign of his sister-in-law and successor, Anne. But the morning of her accession, she assembled the Privy Council and affirmed before them her joint commitment to the Protestant Succession and to the reduction of France.20 She reiterated these in her first speech before parliament three days later, adding the recommendation that the houses consider some method of ‘attaining of an union between England and Scotland’, as indispensable to the peace and security of both kingdoms.21 In early May, Anne formally inserted Princess Sophia’s name among the prayers for the royal family in the liturgy of the established Church.22 The War of the Spanish Succession consumed almost the entirety of Anne’s reign. The formal declaration of war against France and Spain was issued 4 May 1702, less than two weeks after the queen’s coronation. Anne herself would only outlive the long conflict by some fifteen months. The dynastic settlement engineered at the outset was liable to be resented alongside the war’s other enormities – exorbitant taxes; corruption and profiteering; the 392–3. 16 Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs (6 vols, Oxford, 1857), V, pp. 93–6; The addressers address’d; or, A letter to those gentlemen of the respective counties and corporations, that have address’d His Majesty, upon the French Kings declaring the pretended Prince of Wales King of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1701). 17 His Majesties most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament: on Wednesday the one and thirtieth day of December, 1701 (Edinburgh, 1702). 18 Wout Troost, William III, the Stadtholder-King. A Political Biography, trans. J.C. Grayson (Aldershot, 2005), p. 262. 19 Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics, pp. 303–4; E. Neville Williams, The EighteenthCentury Constitution. 1688–1815. Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1960), p. 340. 20 G.M. Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne (3 vols, London, 1930–34), I, p. 163. 21 Her Majesties most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Wednesday the eleventh day of March 1701 (Dublin, 1702). 22 At the court at St. James’s, the second day of May, 1702. Present, the Queens Most Excellent Majesty in council. (London, 1702).

5

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 5

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

fecklessness of the allies; and protracted negotiations for the little-loved Union with Scotland. Even the perceived excesses of the religious toleration during the reign of Queen Anne were often defended in terms of fidelity to ‘the Protestant interest’, which the grand alliance putatively embodied.23 Jacobitism, however vague or sentimental, was often the beneficiary of these manifold discontents of the era.24 The politicisation of the Protestant Succession was not straightforward. Anne’s commitment to her Hanoverian cousins was steadfast, but no less so than her determination not to have a representative of their line settle in the British Isles. In early 1705, for instance, opposition Tories in the House of Lords sought to embarrass the increasingly whiggishly inclined ministry of Sidney Godolphin and the duke of Marlborough by moving to invite the Electress Sophia to reside in England as a guarantor of the Protestant Succession. It was an obvious trap. To support such a motion would be to enrage a jealous queen, implacably determined to prevent the emergence of a reversionary interest within her own kingdoms. But to oppose it invited questions about the government’s loyalty to the house of Hanover in the eyes of both their Whig supporters at home and their allies abroad – the electoral family, among them. The Whigs deftly evaded the snare, by proposing instead an act for continuing the government in the event of the queen’s death. Designed largely by the ardently Hanoverian Whig Junto, the Regency Act was the most significant bulwark of the Protestant Succession since the passage of the Act of Settlement five years earlier.25 The Regency Act allowed the parliament and the privy council to continue to meet and transact business for up to six months after the death of the queen and provided for an interim government of ‘Lords Justices’, comprising the leading officers of state at the time of the queen’s demise and the nominees of the successor, to oversee the transition of power and maintain law and order, until the new monarch arrived from abroad. And in a blow against the legitimists in both the juring and non-juring branches of the High Church Anglican clergy, the Act made it a crime to impugn parliament’s right and authority to make laws determining the ‘descent, limitation, inheritance and government’ of the Crown.26 The Regency Act effectively created the machinery by which Elector Georg Ludwig succeeded to the British throne a decade later – augmented, it should be noted, by the second article of the Treaty of Union, in which the 23

Brent S. Sirota, ‘The Occasional Conformity Controversy, Moderation and the Anglican Critique of Modernity, 1700–1714’, HJ, 57:1 (2014), 81–105. 24 Daniel Szechi, Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994), pp. 41–84; Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 161–94. 25 Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne, II, pp. 90–7; Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, pp. 84, 114, 132–4. 26 ‘An Act for better Security of Her Majesties Person and Government’, Addenda to the third volume of The statutes at large, Beginning with the Fourth Year of the Reign of Queen Anne, And Continued to the End of the Last Session of Parliament, April 1. 1708 (London, 1708), pp. 2412–16.

6

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 6

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

Scots had been persuaded by political bluff, military intimidation and economic pessimism to accept political incorporation with England in 1707. In early 1708, the political realignment that had been in the offing since late 1706 was finally brought to fruition. The duumvirate of Marlborough and Godolphin had grown steadily more dependent on Whig support to prosecute the war, consummate the Union, and stave off the increasingly intemperate forces of Anglican clerical reaction.27 On 11 February, against the queen’s wishes, the secretary of state Robert Harley resigned from his office, followed soon after by the other leading Tories in the ministry. They were all replaced by Whigs. The foiling of an attempted invasion of Scotland by French and Jacobite forces the following month revived the public’s commitment to the war effort and redounded to the Whig’s political benefit in the parliamentary elections that May.28 Flush with their first parliamentary majority of the reign and a growing foothold in the ministry, and bolstered by Marlborough’s shattering victory at Oudenarde that summer, the Whigs redoubled their commitment to their maximalist war aims.29 In a speech on the floor of the House of Lords, Lord Halifax pledged that the Dutch would have their barrier and the Habsburgs an undivided Spanish empire, so long as both pledged to serve as guarantors of the Protestant Succession in Great Britain.30 Indeed, the Whigs’ steadfast refusal to countenance any peace that did not deliver the whole of Spain to the Austrian claimant effectively wrecked the peace negotiations that began in the spring of 1709. Even an increasingly desperate Louis XIV would not consent to enlist in Allied efforts to dethrone his own grandson. In lieu of a workable truce, the Whigs negotiated a new barrier treaty that purchased Dutch adherence to the Alliance at the steep cost of British and Austrian commercial and territorial interests. In exchange, however, the States General pledged ‘to furnish by sea and land the succours and assistance necessary to maintain by force’, the terms of the Act of Settlement and the succession of the house of Hanover to the British throne.31 Jonathan Swift excoriated this clause for abrogating British sovereignty and reducing the kingdom to a province of Holland. ‘Do these gentlemen of revolution principles’, he wrote of the Whigs, ‘think it impossible, that we should ever have occasion again to change our succession? and if such 27

G.V. Bennett, ‘Robert Harley, the Godolphin Ministry, and the Bishoprics Crisis of 1707’, EHR, 82 (1967), 726–46; Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1720 (New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 164–73. 28 Daniel Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution? Jacobite Scotland and French Grand Strategy, 1701–8 (Manchester, 2015), pp. 14–72. 29 Stephen Saunders Webb, Marlborough’s America (New Haven, CT, 2013), pp. 162–84. 30 Frances Harris, The General in Winter: The Marlborough-Godolphin Friendship and the Reign of Queen Anne (Oxford, 2017), p. 265; ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 18: 1 March 1709’, in Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 18, 1705–1709 (London, 1767–1830), pp. 650–62. 31 A Collection of All the Treaties of Peace, Alliance, and Commerce, Between Great-Britain and Other Powers (3 vols, London, 1785), I, pp. 354–63; Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, p. 71.

7

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 7

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

an accident should fall out, must we have no remedy until the Seven Provinces will give their consent?’32 The Whig ascendancy was decidedly premature. Public support for the war effort had grown threadbare, worn away by the exactions of the excise men and the press gang alike. Worse, the influx of Protestant refugees from the Rhineland Palatinate threatened to depress wages and swell the poor rolls. That the Whig Naturalisation Act of 1708 absolved such immigrants of the necessity of conforming to the established Church brought home, in the eyes of many loyal churchmen, the malignant ecumenism of the so-called Protestant interest.33 The London clergyman Henry Sacheverell gave voice to such sentiments in the inflammatory fifth of November sermon he preached before the lord mayor and aldermen at St Paul’s in 1709, wherein he blamed the ills of post-Revolutionary English society on an excessive religious and intellectual toleration – ‘the modern Latitude’ – connived at by ‘false brethren’ in Church and state alike.34 Sacheverell cunningly steered clear of the dynastic question, but his idealisation of divine right monarchy seemed to impugn both the Glorious Revolution and the Protestant Succession.35 At his impeachment in the House of Lords in early 1710, Whig prosecutors articulated an unvarnished version of their doctrine of revolutionary resistance, permitting Sacheverell’s defenders to clothe him in the mantle of constitutional and theological orthodoxy. Sacheverell’s triumphant progress through the countryside following his narrow conviction and token sentence effectively put paid to the Whig resurgence. By summer, Queen Anne had dismissed her Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, broken personally with the duke and duchess of Marlborough, and dissolved her third parliament. The general election in the autumn was a Tory landslide.36 The question of the succession occupied the heart of British politics in the final four years of Queen Anne’s reign. The ascendant Tories, under the leadership of Robert Harley – created earl of Oxford and the Lord High Treasurer in May 1711 – had returned to power on a platform of peace abroad and Anglican hegemony at home. Both commitments, alongside their still smouldering resentment of the Union with Scotland, seemed to put them fatally at odds with the ideology of the Protestant interest, of which the Grand 32 [Jonathan Swift], Some remarks on the Barrier Treaty between Her Majesty and the States-General (Dublin, 1712), p. 10. 33 A View of the Queen and Kingdom’s Enemies, In the Case of the Poor Palatines. ([1711?]); H.T. Dickinson, ‘The Poor Palatines and the Parties’, EHR, 82 (1967), 464–85. 34 Henry Sachevrell, The perils of false brethren, both in church, and state (London, 1709), p. 15. 35 Brian Cowan, ‘The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society’, Parliamentary History, 31:1 (2012), 28–46; see also Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973); Brian Cowan (ed)., The State Trial of Dr. Sacheverell, Parliamentary History: Texts and Studies 6 (Hoboken, NJ, 2012); Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011), pp. 142–92; Mark Knights (ed.), Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (Malden, MA, 2012). 36 Keith Feiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (Oxford, 1924), pp. 422–3.

8

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 8

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

Alliance, the toleration of nonconformity, the Union and the Hanoverian Succession were all imagined a part.37 The Tories’ steady alienation of the allies, Hanover among them; their solicitousness toward France in the renewed peace negotiations; and the visceral antipathy toward Protestant nonconformity exposed in the Sacheverell affair, lent credence to the charges of Jacobitism with which their enemies unfailingly tarred them. ‘The scandalous imputation of being inclined to Pretenderism’, the non-juror George Hickes lamented, was ‘now a wound of greater offense than Atheism or Deism.’38 But given the Whigs’ long-standing insistence on the inseparability of the war and the succession, the charges were difficult to shake. As early as December 1710, the new ministry communicated to France that it was prepared to abandon Spain to the Bourbon claimant; and to renege on the generous barrier and commercial privileges that the British had promised the Dutch in the treaty of 1709.39 That these negotiations had been initially entrusted to the Jacobite Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey suggest, at the very least, that the ministry imagined some political advantage to be gleaned at home or abroad in holding open the possibility that peace might serve as prelude to a Stuart restoration. Even after Jersey was side-lined, the secretary of state Henry St John, who took over the negotiations, was still considered by French officials ‘well intentioned’ to the interests of the court of St Germain.40 Whether this was merely a feint with which to impress either Versailles or the sizeable Jacobite contingent within the party ranks, the effect was to engender an enduring mistrust between the Tory ministry and the elector of Hanover. When the signed peace preliminaries between Great Britain and France came to light in October 1711, they were denounced by George in a memorial to Earl Rivers, the special envoy to the Electorate. The duke of Marlborough followed suit, personally lobbying the queen against the peace preliminaries.41 The ministry responded with Jonathan Swift’s scabrous pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies, which castigated a war prosecuted solely ‘to enlarge the Territories of the Dutch, and increase the Fame and Wealth of our General’, the duke of Marlborough. Swift waspishly assailed the faithlessness and greed of the allies, but expended his most potent venom on the duumvirs Marlborough and Godolphin, alongside ‘the monied interest’ of their rapacious Whig accomplices, all enriching themselves in what was manifestly, ‘a War of the General and the Ministry, and not of the Prince or People’.42 Predictably, Swift was immediately accused of Jacobitism, of seeking to ‘change the Succession, in 37

Jeffrey Stephen, Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland, 1689–1716 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 165–96; Andrew Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge, 2006), passim. 38 Bod., Ballard MS 12, fol. 184. 39 B.W. Hill, ‘Oxford, Bolingbroke and the Peace of Utrecht’, HJ, 16 (1973), 241–63. 40 Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne, III, p. 179. 41 Harris, General in Winter, pp. 342–6. 42 [Jonathan Swift], The conduct of the allies, and of the late ministry, in the beginning and carrying on the present war (Edinburgh, 1712 [1711]), pp. 17, 37.

9

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 9

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

Complacency to France’.43 And to press the point, the Whigs had published the elector of Hanover’s missive denouncing the peace preliminaries – a somewhat reckless gambit, marshalling the opinion of the reversionary interest against the clear will of the court.44 Amidst this burgeoning print war, the opposition in the House of Lords managed to carry by a scant majority an address to the queen, ‘that no Peace can be Safe or Honourable to Great Britain or Europe, if Spain and the West-Indies are to be Allotted to any Branch of the House of Bourbon’.45 But the war effort probably could not be salvaged. The Commons’ address to the queen included no such rider. And by the dawn of the new year, the duke of Marlborough had been stripped of his offices and dismissed from his command; and the queen, in an audacious use of the prerogative, had created twelve new peers to swamp the last vestiges of parliamentary opposition to the peace. The policies of an ascendant Toryism did not yet openly threaten the Protestant Succession, but they certainly chipped away at the bulwarks which had been erected in its defence over the previous decade. The Tory ministry permitted its majorities in Parliament to hound Marlborough with corruption charges, until he finally quit England for the continent at the end of 1712 – there to await, and perhaps ensure, if necessary, the accession of the house of Hanover. The Union was battered by Anglicans in parliament, who imposed upon Scotland a religious toleration for the avowedly Jacobite Episcopal Church and restored the rights of ecclesiastical patronage to Scottish landlords, a device by which Jacobite ministers might be intruded into church livings without the consent of the congregation. The extension of the malt tax to Scotland in spring 1713 had Scottish peers and Junto lords alike openly calling for the repeal of the Union.46 St John, ennobled as the Viscount Bolingbroke in summer 1712, continued negotiating directly with the French, in contempt of the terms of the Grand Alliance. He pursued peace at the expense of Habsburg dynastic claims and Dutch commercial interests alike, issuing, most outrageously, his infamous ‘restraining orders’ of May 1712, which effectively prohibited the new British commander, the duke of Ormonde, from engaging with the French, costing the allies territory Marlborough had taken in previous campaigns. To his credit, Bolingbroke’s highhandedness with the allies was sufficient to secure an armistice with France in the summer of 1712; and, in early 1713, a revised barrier treaty with the Dutch, which significantly reduced the number of garrisons they were to be awarded on their Belgian frontier. Along with the severing of the French and Spanish 43

[John Oldmixon], Remarks on a false, scandalous, and seditious libel, intituled, The conduct of the allies, and of the late ministry, &c. (London, 1711), pp. 7, 10. 44 A memorial deliver’d to one of Her Majesty’s principal secretaries of state, by His Excellency the Baron de Bothmar, envoy extraordinary from His Electoral Highness of Hanover (Newcastle, 1711). 45 The humble address of the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal In Parliament Assembled, presented to Her Majesty On Tuesday the Eleventh Day of December, 1711 (London, 1711), p. 4. 46 Hill, Robert Harley, p. 195.

10

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 10

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

crowns, and the cession of the Spanish Netherlands to Austria, these became the basic foundations of the settlement ratified at Utrecht in early spring 1713. The treaty signed by Britain and France at Utrecht in April 1713 formally recognised Anne’s title to the Crown of Great Britain and the line of succession through ‘the most serene Princess Sophia, dowager of Brunswick-Hanover, and her heirs in the Protestant line of Hanover’, as well as a formal repudiation of the claims of James Francis Edward Stuart.47 And yet, if anything, anxiety over the fate of the Protestant Succession only mounted in the aftermath of the peace. The Whig opposition began the parliamentary session in April with plans to call for an invitation to settle a member of the electoral family in England, a move guaranteed both to infuriate the queen and embarrass the ministry.48 Though they perhaps wisely shelved this proposal, the opposition was formidable enough, with an infusion of Hanoverian Tory votes (those of the so-called ‘whimsicals’), to defeat the commercial clauses of the treaty with France in June.49 And this blow was quickly followed by the Junto Lord Wharton’s surprise motion to demand the removal of the ‘Pretender’ from Lorraine. Wharton’s motion, and the similar one made by General James Stanhope in the commons the next day, both carried.50 The addresses were of virtually nugatory diplomatic effect; but the ministry’s sputtering and equivocal response to their proposal widened the gap between the Hanoverian and Jacobite wings of the Tory coalition and handed the opposition a campaign issue heading into the general election of 1713.51 Indeed, in the final parliamentary election of Anne’s reign late that summer, accusations of Jacobitism and popery were virtually all the Whigs had.52 The peace was immensely popular, and the Whigs had to share credit for their most noteworthy political accomplishment, the defeat of the Anglo-French commercial treaty, with the ‘whimsical’ Tories. The election was another rout, with the Tories increasing their majority to over 200 votes. The question of the ministry’s solicitousness on behalf of the house of Stuart has been litigated extensively in the historiography.53 Neither Oxford nor Bolingbroke publicly deviated from the legally and geopolitically 47

‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship between . . . Anne . . . and . . . Lewis’, Collection of All the Treaties of Peace, Alliance, and Commerce, II, pp. 6–7. 48 Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, pp. 135–6. 49 Doohwan Ahn, ‘The Anglo-French Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 Revisited: The Politics of Rivalry and Alliance’, in The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. Alimento A and K. Stapelbroek (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 125–49; Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 234–70. 50 The case of the Pretender, Occasion’d by the Late Addresses in Parliament for his Removal from the Territories of the Duke of Lorrain (London, 1713). 51 Fieldhouse, ‘Oxford, Bolingbroke, and the Pretender’s Place of Residence, 1711–1714’, EHR, 52 (1937), 289–96; Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 368. 52 The risible tone of works like The character of a modern Tory; in a letter to a friend (London, 1713) was typical of the season. 53 See J.H. Shennan and Margaret Shennan, ‘The Protestant Succession in English Politics, April 1713–September 1715’, in William III and Louis XIV, ed. Hatton and Bromley, pp.

11

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 11

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

mandated commitment to the Hanoverian succession, and yet the ministry nevertheless remained politically unwilling or unable to act more robustly in its defence. The deteriorating relationship between the principals in the ministry exacerbated the political polarisation already afoot within the majority party. Bolingbroke sought to displace Oxford by firmly uniting the Tory party under his leadership, a nakedly partisan strategy which required appeals not only to the sizeable Jacobite contingent within the coalition, but also to the most revanchist elements of the Church of England, which was characterised not only by its traditional antipathy toward nonconformity at home, but also by a more recent alienation from Protestantism abroad – including the Lutheranism of the electoral family.54 Only a Tory bloc, monopolising office and infrangibly united on the still common denominator of Church principles, it was believed, might survive the coming of the Hanoverian dynasty and continue to wield power, in spite of the residual hostility of the elector who had not forgiven the ministry for its betrayals in the making of the peace.55 Outflanked on his right, Oxford, meanwhile, was unable to improve his credit at Hanover (or with the Whigs at home) without alienating the queen, who bitterly resented any additional efforts to secure the succession.56 The ensuing paralysis fostered a climate of paranoia for the safety of the Protestant succession, a situation immeasurably worsened by the queen’s near fatal illness around Christmas 1713. Anne was just recovering when the Whig MP and controversialist Richard Steele’s inflammatory pamphlet The Crisis appeared in January 1714: an accounting of all the statutory and providential securities for the Protestant Succession, on the one hand; and of the forces arrayed against it, on the other. ‘Her Majesty’s Parliamentary Title, and the Succession in the Illustrious House of Hanover is the Ark of God to Great Britain’, Steele proclaimed, ‘and, like that of Old, carries Death to the profane Hand that shall dare to touch it.’57 The pamphlet, though it sold upwards of 40,000 copies, was loudly denounced as a party engine, the work of ‘an obdurate Faction, who compass Heaven and Earth to restore themselves upon the Ruin of their Country’. Somewhat more darkly, Swift wondered if Whig vindications of the principle of resistance betrayed some ‘thoughts of introducing the Successor by another Revolution’, an oblique 252–70; G.V. Bennett, ‘English Jacobitism, 1710–1715: Myth and Reality’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 32 (1982), pp. 137–51. 54 See Thomas Brett, A Review of the Lutheran Principles; Shewing How they differ from the Church of England . . . In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1714); Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 23–4. 55 J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 146–69. 56 Hill, Robert Harley, pp. 206–7, 209–22. 57 Richard Steele, The Crisis, or, a discourse representing, from the most authentick records, the just causes of the late happy revolution: And The several settlements of the Crowns of England and Scotland (London, 1713), p. 37; Charles A Knight, A Political Biography of Richard Steele (London, 2009), pp. 135–70.

12

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 12

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

allusion to the widespread rumours that the duke of Marlborough might invade at the head of a Dutch or imperial army to secure the Protestant Succession by force.58 Anne’s final parliament opened amidst fears of both Jacobite and Hanoverian coups d’état. Her speech opening the session on 2 March, pointedly denounced those ‘who are arrived to the height of malice, as to insinuate that the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover is in danger under my government’ as disturbers of the present tranquillity.59 Oxford did nothing to alleviate the general anxiety by shortly thereafter seeking the leave to introduce a bill that purported to secure the succession ‘by making it high-treason to bring any foreign troops into the kingdom’. The Whigs immediately pointed out that such an act would effectively outlaw the military assistance pledged by the Dutch in the barrier treaties. And if Oxford sought only to target the forces of the ‘Pretender’ and his adherents, Bolingbroke pointed out, such activity was already illegal. Behind the scenes, Oxford threatened to resign over Bolingbroke’s defiance.60 The trial and expulsion of Richard Steele from the Commons the next day, ‘for maliciously insinuating that Protestant succession in the house of Hanover is in danger’, provided, at least, a fleeting opportunity for Tory party unity.61 The opposition rightly sensed the vulnerability of the ministry on the question of the succession, and that pressing for additional securities exploited widening divisions within the Tory party. On 5 April, Lord Wharton posed the question, ‘whether the Protestant Succession was in danger under the present administration?’ and the ensuing debate lasted seven hours. The Hanoverian Tory leader Lord Anglesey bluntly attributed the peril of the succession to the ministry’s failure to secure ‘a glorious and advantageous’ peace. The duke of Argyll agreed, having recently seen the devastation to France, and failing to comprehend the urgency of making peace with a king ‘whose dominions were so exhausted of men, money and provisions’. The question was ultimately answered in the negative, but only by a perilously narrow majority of twelve votes. The opposition would not relent, and Lord Halifax and the duke of Bolton immediately demanded that the queen be asked to issue a proclamation offering a reward for the apprehension of the ‘Pretender’, ‘dead or alive’. Jacobites in the Lords protested that such a bounty would be an invitation to murder, inconsistent with ‘Christianity, the law of nature and the law of all civilized nations’, and a proclamation for simply bringing the ‘Pretender’ to justice, should he land in Great Britain or Ireland, was left to the queen’s discretion.62 On 13 April, 58

Jonathan Swift, The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (London, 1714), pp. 12, 16; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 177. 59 Cobbett’s PH, VI, p. 1257. 60 Ibid., p. 1330; Hill, Robert Harley, pp. 210–12. 61 Cobbett’s PH, VI, pp. 1265–1327; The case of Richard Steele, Esq; being an impartial account of the proceedings against him. In a letter to a friend (London, 1714). 62 James Macpherson, Original Papers containing the secret history of Great Britain, 2nd edn (2 vols, London, 1776), I, p. 590.

13

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 13

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

the Commons also voted the succession out of danger, though similarly by an alarmingly slim majority.63 That week a far more consequential manoeuvre in defence of the succession was in the offing. Acting in concert with the Whig lords, the Hanoverian envoy Baron Georg von Schütz approached Lord Chancellor Harcourt and requested that the electoral prince (the future George II) be issued a parliamentary writ to take his seat in the House of Lords as duke of Cambridge. The presence of a member of the electoral family, it was hoped, would not only provide some assurance of the Hanoverian succession in the event of the queen’s demise, but it might also in the meanwhile serve as the nucleus around which a reversionary party might coalesce, one that might siphon enough forward-looking Tories from the majority to bring down the ministry.64 Harcourt demurred but did not refuse the application, pleading the necessity of consulting the queen. Anne’s profound aversion to having a Brunswick within her own dominions had not diminished in the years since the idea was first mooted. And Oxford’s frank admission that she could not legally deny the request began the alienation from the queen’s favour that would culminate in his dismissal that summer. The writ was duly issued, but the queen made it clear that she did not under any circumstances wish to see it answered. In a letter to the electoral prince, Anne coldly dismissed the entire scheme as ‘dangerous to the Tranquility of My Dominions, and the Right of Succession in your line’.65 The Lord Treasurer had provoked the queen, without meaningfully advancing the interests of her successor. His subsequent efforts to curry favour with the electoral family and the Hanoverian Tories, such as the payment of the Hanoverian troops who remained in the field after Ormonde’s withdrawal under the ‘restraining orders’ of May 1712, were blocked by the backbenchers and Jacobites in his own party. And his grudging acquiescence to Bolingbroke’s highflying Schism bill, the most serious rescission of the religious toleration in the post-revolutionary era, eroded any credibility he might have cultivated with the opposition. The electoral court tracked these developments with some disquiet; and when the dowager Electress Sophia died on 8 June 1714, her son’s revised list of nominees to oversee the succession was dominated by staunch Whigs to check the proclivities of what had been perceived as an unreliable ministry.66 In his final days in office, Oxford warned the queen that her favour for Bolingbroke was widely thought to conceal ‘some foul play and design for the Pretender’.67 His admonition did not save his job, but it may have prevented 63

Cobbett’s PH, VI, pp. 1333–8, 1346–8. Original Papers, II, pp. 628–9; Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, pp. 172–3. 65 Three letters sent, two from Her Most Gracious Majesty (London, [1714]). 66 John Kemble, State Papers and Correspondence Illustrative of the Social and Political State of Europe, (London, 1857), pp. 516–18; Macpherson, Original Papers, II, pp. 625–32; [Daniel Defoe], The secret history of the white-staff, Being an account of affairs under the conduct of some late ministers (London, 1714), pp. 28–9. 67 Hill, Robert Harley, pp. 219–20; Macpherson, Original Papers, II, p. 630. 64 Macpherson,

14

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 14

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

his rival Bolingbroke from capitalising on his fall. Three agonising days after Oxford’s dismissal, on 30 July, an ailing Queen Anne resolved to name as his replacement the moderate duke of Shrewsbury, a committed Hanoverian and, fittingly enough, one of the seven signatories of the letter inviting William of Orange to England a quarter-century earlier. With the queen likely past hope of recovery, the new Lord Treasurer and the council set about placing the kingdom in a state of military preparedness, disarming Roman Catholics, dispatching letters to Hanover requesting the immediate presence of the elector, and to the States General, reminding the Dutch of their obligations under the barrier treaty. Queen Anne’s life ended at Kensington Palace early in the morning of 1 August 1714, and with it the Stuart dynasty in Great Britain. The accession of King George I was proclaimed at St James Palace early in afternoon. ‘All the nobility attended the proclamation’, it was reported, ‘and there was not the least disturbance.’68 There were widespread congratulations on what the clergyman Edmund Gibson described as ‘the easy transition of the Crown to the protestant line’.69 The discontent, the partisanship, the political theology that that had inclined considerable swathes of the population toward Jacobitism had by no means dissipated, but neither had they materialised into any concrete effort to enthrone James Francis Edward Stuart. ‘At present the contest betwixt the two partys’, the London observer Ralph Bridges noted, ‘is who shall shew most Loyalty to the King.’70 And as the sense of anticlimax mingled with that of relief, many began to question the consternation that had so long pervaded British politics; the unanimity of the present moment, as James Brydges (the future duke of Chandos) put it, convincing some that perhaps ‘there were no designs of setting aside the succession’.71 ‘Where is the pretender’, the Whig clergyman White Kennett reported High Churchmen insolently asking, ‘or where is the danger of him. As if his not coming now were an Argument that he never meant it.’72 Hence the public sense, alluded to at the outset, of waking from a dream, of being momentarily uncertain of what was actual, and what had been the delusions of an overheated political imagination, still profoundly unsettled by revolution. II

The essays in this collection seek to revisit this moment of disquiet, its origins and its impact on civic life in the British world. Notwithstanding Whig enthusiasm for the accession of George I, which entrenched their political supremacy 68 HMC

Portland, V, p. 482. Bod., Collection? Gibson-Nicolson Correspondence, Add. MS A 269, fols 33–4. 70 BL, Collection? Trumbull Papers, vol. CCLV (1712–1714), Add. MS 72496, fol. 151. 71 HL, James Brydges, Duke of Chandos Letterbooks, Stowe Papers 57, Box 10, p. 185. 72 BL, Collection? BL Lansdowne, Letters from Bishop White Kennett to Rev. Mr. Samuel Blackwell, 1687–1720, MS1013, Lansdowne MS 1013, fols 199–200. 69

15

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 15

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

in Britain and the empire, Daniel Szechi reveals that among the less celebratory consequences was the propagation of a subversive British culture of mockery towards the Hanoverian Succession. This subversion certainly paved the way for the major Jacobite rising in 1715. As Chris Dudley demonstrates, at the general election which preceded the rising, the Whigs in England did not so much offer new politics but a far more plausible brand of continuity. Past divisions over the Church of England or the Hanoverian Succession worked against the Tories. The latter’s greater tolerance for sacerdotalism and High Church Anglicanism, which forged a clerical alliance between Anglican catholicity and the Jacobite inclined non-jurors was, as Brent Sirota impresses, anathema to Whig bishops, clergy and laity. They trenchantly promoted civic religion within the established Church of England, which remained an Erastian rather than independent institution. The political sermon carried debates on civic Protestant values to the country between the Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession. The message from the pulpit, as James J. Caudle amplifies, was equivalent to public broadcasting that reached out beyond the confines of coffee house to receptive local audiences nationwide. Yet coffee houses, along with clubs and societies for the promotion of science, the arts, philanthropy and public socialising were transforming political culture not just in London, Edinburgh and Dublin but in provincial centres throughout Britain and Ireland. No less significant in this transformation were newspapers in print and manuscript which mixed tales of the exotic throughout the known world with current affairs at home and abroad. The two Members of Parliament for Tamworth in Staffordshire, Sir Henry Gough and Thomas Guy, regularly sent manuscript newsletters to their constituents between January 1690 and June 1710 that were read aloud and discussed in a local inn. Reports of great earthquakes and other climatic irregularities leavened accounts of Treasury disagreements on rates of exchange, parliamentary debates on enumerated commodities and troop deployments in Scotland, Ireland, Flanders and Eurasia. Concerns about global challenges to the colonial trade, ranged from hanging pirates active in the Indian Ocean to French activities in Chile, New Mexico and the Great Lakes of North America.73 First reports of an ill-fated Scottish venture came in July 1698. Three Scottish ships with families of colonists had sailed from Leith for some port in Africa or America. Their destination was as yet uncertain. Brazil and Madagascar were mooted, but the most likely place was the Panama Isthmus.74 Although the colony at Darien duly foundered, it posed a real commercial threat to English as well as Spanish interests in the West Indies and the South Seas. This threat was only resolved by the Treaty of Union in 1707, which committed both Scotland and England to a common monarchy, a common parliament and a common fiscal policy. The Protestant establishment

73 74

HL, Huntington Manuscripts, HM 30,659/16, /47, /62, /75, 84, /87. HL, HM 30,659/77.

16

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 16

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

was enacted separately under the terms of the Treaty: Presbyterianism for Scotland and Anglicanism for England. The Union’s prescribed Hanoverian Succession did not lead to greater probity, accountability and transparency in public life before or after the accession of George I. However, public scrutiny through the press did intensify in the course of the mania for financial speculation that culminated in the South Sea Bubble and after the rise to prominence of Sir Robert Walpole who, as Britain’s first prime minister, willingly sacrificed principle for patronage. This scrutiny was notably more inventive and incisive when a fabulous and exotic global component at the margins of the known world was added; as particularly evident in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). As Abigail Swingen explains, party politics and polemics relating to the South Sea Bubble were of a piece with divisions between the Whigs on the one hand and the Tories and Jacobites on the other on the working out of the financial revolution. The contested search for security, stability and credit affected all significant initiatives in political economy from meeting the fiscal demands of an expanding army and navy to redefining the scope and privileges of chartered companies in the East Indies, Africa and the South Seas. Party divisions on issues of political economy, as Megan Cherry explores, affected colonial development and expansion in North America; albeit party and confessional allegiances did not necessarily carry the same resonance in New England as in England. As Scotland was beset by recession, rioting and rebellion in the wake of Union, judicious use of imperial patronage for Episcopalians as well as Presbyterians and for Jacobites as well as Whigs enabled Scots to exploit and profit from new horizons for adventuring in Asia and Africa as well as the Americas. At the same time, as Allan Macinnes indicates, the association with the Patriot Party of diverse Scots, from former Jacobites to constitutional reformers among the Whigs, offered the opportunity to amend rather than terminate the Union. The rise of the Patriot Party as a corrective to Walpole’s egregious use of patronage to control parliament, to restrict open trading and to appease French and Spanish aggression in the Americas is treated in depth by Steve Pincus and Amy Watson. The Patriotic Party agenda, networking and organisation had a trans-Atlantic significance. British civil and religious liberties were to apply to all colonies as to Ireland and Scotland as well as England. The Patriots can also be viewed as promoters of enlightened globalisation in favouring unrestricted manufacturing, high wages and widespread consumption of good and services to stimulate the economy rather than a protectionist empire based on commodities produced by slavery or subsistence labour. An enlightened political culture in Hanoverian Britain was integrally bound up with the European Republic of Letters whose focus on learning prioritised jurisprudence over religion, vernacular languages over Latin and producing journals over editing classics. Esther Mijers scrutinises the seminal influence of French Huguenots, as journal makers and booksellers in the Dutch Republic, in paving 17

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 17

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

the way for Enlightenment in Hanoverian Britain. Intellectual links with the Dutch Republic were more sustained in Scotland than in England. Indeed, the Enlightenment centred on Edinburgh has been viewed as the intellectual wing of the Whig supremacy in Scotland:75 a view that seriously underplays the integral contribution of Jacobite exiles to discourses on state formation and wealth creation. In furthering the European dimension to political discourse Robert Frost contrasts the ruling of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Electors of Saxony with Great Britain by the Electors of Hanover. The former were subject to fewer constitutional limitations, but their election as kings was subject to foreign interference. Their failure to establish a working consensus left the Commonwealth open to hostile diplomatic plays, and ultimately, to partition by 1763. As hereditary monarchs the Hanoverians worked within the British political system rather than against it. Their constitutional monarchy, however, was subject to two major Jacobite challenges in 1715 and 1745, whose impact was most acutely felt in Scotland rather than in England or Ireland. The Hanoverians also presided over an expanding, if rather ramshackle, empire. Apparent British stability could not disguise the corruption, venality and peculation in public life under the Whig supremacy. By the 1750s, the Jacobite exile, Field-Marshal James Keith, then ensconced in Sans Souci as adviser and confidant of Frederick II of Prussia, warned that unless Hanoverian Britain pursued political virtue and moral reform at home and abroad, no matter the repatriation of capital from Empire, it risked losing its colonies in America.76 In revisiting the era of the Hanoverian succession, this volume has not only considered the politics and religion that secured Protestantism as the established faith in England, Scotland and Ireland but also explored the wider European ramifications of state formation, confessional commitment, political economy, polemical culture and global adventuring. III

This volume stems, in no small part, from the tercentenary of the Protestant Succession having passed in 2014 with little fanfare. The events of 1 August 1714 quite obviously paled in significance before those of the same date two centuries later. And when the public’s already scant historical consciousness could be diverted from the commencement of the Great War toward the politics of the early eighteenth century, it was likely to consider that most consequential event 75

Thomas M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (London, 1999), pp. 64–83; Nicholas T. Philipson, ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (2 vols, Princeton, NJ, 1974), II, pp. 407–48. 76 Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Political Virtue and Capital Repatriation: A Jacobite Agenda for Empire’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 38 (2018), 36–54.

18

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 18

22/08/2019 08:57

INTRODUCTION

of Anne’s reign, the 1707 Act of Union, whose fate was to be decided in the looming Scottish independence referendum slated for September of that year. Even absent of such fierce competition that summer, the Hanoverian dynasty was, an editorial in The Guardian confessed, something of a ‘hard sell’, broadly incapable of fascinating posterity like its illustrious and often compellingly tragic predecessors, the Tudors and the Stuarts. The scattering of public notices roundly struggled to say much in favour of the unprepossessing monarchs of the house of Hanover, instead broadening their eulogies to encompass the general character of the age over which the dynasty presided. Unremarkable in their own right, the Hanoverians were rather generously afforded at least partial credit for the achievements of British modernity with which their long reign coincided. Even more noteworthy, the events of 1714, experienced by Britons at the time as miraculous, were duly, even dully, commemorated as inevitable. This volume is thus intended as reminder that what was perceived to be at stake in the Protestant Succession was the entirety of civic life: a constitutional polity and a confederacy among multiple kingdoms; a religious and intellectual culture; an expansive commercial empire; and the geopolitical order of Europe – a set of arrangements, novel, even experimental, in the early eighteenth century but now taken as absolutely foundational to modern British history.

19

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 19

22/08/2019 08:57

1 The Political Consequences of the Cuckoldy German Turnip Farmer Daniel Szechi On 31 October 1718, a group of Berkshire Whig JPs met to celebrate the anniversary of George I’s coronation. They apparently had a good deal to drink and when they were ‘mellow’ decided they would light a bonfire to signal to the world how much they loved their king. At that point the local ‘bumpkins’, being a ‘very waggish and very insolent’ lot, decided to have some fun at the expense of their betters. They accordingly, got a huge turnip and stuck three candles, and went and placed it at the top of a hill just over Chetwynd’s house. . . near Wattleton. When they had done they came and told their worships that to honour King George’s Coronation day a blazing star appeared over Mr. Chetwynd’s house. Their worships were wise enough to take horse to go and see this wonder, and found, to their no little disappointment, their star to end in a turnip.1

The significance of the humble root was, of course, that it was an unflattering allusion to George I. Everyone, even the Berkshire ‘bumpkins’, knew that a turnip signified poverty and was a reference to George’s allegedly threadbare German origins, and one with candles stuck in it to suggest horns added injury to insult by proclaiming his humiliating status as a cuckold.2 So why should we care if some English plebeians mocked their masters one autumn evening? They were a famously unruly people and incidents like it were commonplace by 1718. But therein lies its significance: it was a tree in a rather large wood. It is precisely its everyday quality that is so striking. Since 1714 plebeian English crowds had regularly and publicly mocked their king. For all the pomp and circumstance with which the new order carried itself in public, and despite the dreadful majesty of the law which made such seditious acts fraught with danger, the Hanoverian succession had brought on a crisis 1 HMC,

Portland, VII, 245–6. Robert Patten, The History of the Rebellion in the Year 1715. With Original Papers, and the Characters of the Principal Noblemen and Gentlemen Concern’d in it (London, 1745), p. A4; BL, ‘A Collection of Loyal Poems made in the years 1714, 1715 and 1716’, Add. MS 29981, fols 12, 14, 44.

2

20

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 20

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

in social authority that implicitly undermined the power of the British state. The monarchy was the symbolic heart of that British state and, as Douglas Hay argued in 2002, ‘once Jacobite ritual became public it eroded both the legitimacy and dignity of the Hanoverian line’.3 The crucial catalyst for the Scots political events discussed below was a drumbeat of confrontations, demonstrations and riots in England that suggested to many observers that the British polity might be on the verge of collapse.4 Which is odd, because despite this vein of all-too public mockery and the surge in public disorder 1714–22, George I was in general a reasonably competent ruler, with a great wellspring of political and administrative experience derived from sixteen years running the prosperous Electorate of Hanover. He was also an experienced soldier with a reputation for courage in an era that still expected its male monarchs to be at least symbolic military leaders, as well as a solid Protestant of unimpeachably Stuart descent.5 Given the cultural expectations of monarchy then prevailing in the British Isles, he should have been a ringing success as a king and have enjoyed universal popularity.6 I

So what brought about the alienation of great swathes of George I’s subjects from their new king and his dynasty? The principal cause lay in a political bargain he struck soon after his arrival in London. It is hardly surprising that Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, came to the British throne with a specifically Hanoverian agenda. While fully recognising he now had different and wider responsibilities, he was not about to forget his beloved Electorate. And at the time of his accession to the British crown Hanover was secretly committing itself to joining the Great Northern War against Sweden, and, indeed, fulfilled its pledges to the other members of the anti-Swedish coalition by formally declaring war in October 1715.7 Old soldier that he was, however, Georg Ludwig knew that Sweden would be a tough nut to crack, and his problem was compounded on 11 November 1714 when Sweden’s formidable warrior-king Charles XII reappeared 3 Douglas Hay, ‘The Last Years of Staffordshire Jacobitism’, Staffordshire Studies, 14 (2002), 62, 77–8; Paul K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 173–93, 205–6, 210–25; Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), pp. 21–57. 4 La Courneuve, Paris, Affaires Étrangères, Correspondence Politique (Angleterre) 264, fols 288–309; 266, ff. 144–149; David Laing and Thomas Macknight (eds), Memoirs of the Insurrection in Scotland in 1715. By John, Master of Sinclair. With Notes by Sir Walter Scott, Bart (Edinburgh, 1858), p. 20. 5 Ragnhild Hatton, George I. Elector and King (London, 1978), pp. 43, 69–104. 6 Hannah Smith, ‘The Idea of a Protestant Monarchy in Britain 1714–1760’, Past & Present, 185 (2004), 91–118. 7 Hatton, George I, pp. 184–9.

21

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 21

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

at Stralsund and swiftly began revitalising and rebuilding the Swedish military.8 George I could potentially provide a solution to this problem, if he could just negotiate a political deal in Britain that would allow him to commit the Royal Navy to acting on behalf of the anti-Swedish coalition in the Baltic. Only the Royal Navy could shut down the damaging privateering war Sweden was waging against Hanover’s partners9 and, even more importantly, prevent Charles XII from launching his new army across the Baltic to attack the coalition and Denmark in particular – as he had done in 1700, knocking Denmark out of the war for nearly ten years.10 There was, though, a major political obstacle: George I was effectively barred from using British resources to support specifically Hanoverian interests by the very ‘Act of Settlement’ which brought him to the British throne in 1714.11 This required him to consult Parliament if he wanted to involve Britain in a war transparently designed to benefit Hanover. Any such proposal would likely have proven politically divisive, profoundly unpopular out-of-doors so soon after the War of the Spanish Succession and, to cap it all, was not at all certain to be successful. It would also have alerted Sweden to what was coming. The alternative was to persuade the leaders of one of the British political parties to aid and abet the king in surreptitiously breaking the law. There seems little doubt that in the early eighteenth century the mass of the population in the dominant kingdom, England, was Tory-inclined in politics, so in principle the Tories might have been the best prospect for such a bargain. That way George would have been allied with the natural party of power and might have secured a stable government that would, more or less wittingly, stand by any deal he made with the party’s leaders. Unfortunately for their political future, however, the Tories had a well-established inclination towards xenophobia that Georg Ludwig had been made all too aware of even before he became George I. Worse, the party had also been responsible for pushing through the Peace of Utrecht, which he regarded as a betrayal of Britain’s allies in the War of the Spanish Succession. To round off a bad hand, the Tories’ leaders were also at daggers drawn with each other in the autumn of 1714.12 Thus, quite apart from any distaste George himself might have felt at dealing 8

Ragnhild Hatton, Charles XII of Sweden (London, 1968), pp. 399–400, 401–2, 414–15, 426–7, 462–71. It is worth noting George I’s priorities here: in early September 1715 the Jacobite rising broke out in Scotland and by early October the Jacobites were threatening to overrun the whole of the northern kingdom. On 4 October 1715, George as Elector of Hanover declared war on Sweden. Admiral Sir John Norris, by then in the Baltic, had already had his verbal orders personally from George I in May 1715 (John J. Murray, George I, the Baltic and the Whig Split of 1717 (London, 1969), pp. 112–13). 9 Wolfgang Michael, England Under George I. I: The Beginnings of the Hanoverian Dynasty (3 vols, Westport, CT, reprint 1981 of London, 1936 edition), I, pp. 287–8. 10 Hatton, Charles XII, pp. 132–7. 11 Michael, England Under George I, I, p. 3. 12 Geoffrey S. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rev edn (London, 1987), pp. 64–7, 248; Hatton, George I, pp. 105–6; Daniel Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics 1710–14 (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 153–81.

22

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 22

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

with the men who had sold out the allies (of which he was one) in 1711–12, this made it highly likely that one of the Tory chieftains would betray any secret deal out of prejudice, spite or rivalry. Hence George, very pragmatically, instead chose to make a pact with the Whigs, and signalled his intention to favour the party in the first ministerial appointments after his succession. Just as importantly, he permitted the Whigs to follow through with increasing thoroughness, purging Tory civil servants, officers and courtiers and replacing them with solid Whigs. He sealed the alliance by publicly urging the electorate to vote for the Whigs in the general election of 1715.13 The few token Tories included in his government in autumn 1714, led by Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham (who apparently knew nothing of the king’s Baltic policy), were purged in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715.14 The quid pro quo was that the Whigs’ leaders colluded with the new king in breaching the constitution and trying to provoke a British war with Sweden.15 As far as they were concerned this was a small price to pay for devastating the prospects of their mortal political foes, whom they had long viewed as the enemy of the good.16 The ends justified the means, and pleasing the new king doubtless boosted their own career prospects. In the big picture the upshot of this political pact was that the British Isles were set on a Whig path. The men who made this deal with George I, and their political heirs, ruled Britain and Ireland for the next forty-five years.17 Unsurprisingly, however, given the political circumstances that gave rise to the Whig ascendancy, their hegemony was not consensual and was never uncontested. Indeed, it was this ‘unnatural’ Whig order the Berkshire bumpkins and the legion of other plebeian Tory rioters and dissidents were protesting against. We can and should, of course, nuance this picture. The Tories occasionally had talks with dissident, or factionally embattled, Whig politicians about forming a mixed ministry; a solid bloc of Tory MPs were returned at every general election between 1715 and 1760; and some Tories were still appointed to the magistrates’ bench in the counties.18 It is, nonetheless, the case that the key political consequence of the advent of George I was a political system fixed in favour of the Whigs. The British Isles became, in effect, a one-party state, albeit one more like Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Kim Jong-un’s North Korea. Some time ago, J.H. Plumb posited that this was the only way to achieve political stability

13

Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: the Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 177–82; Romney Sedgwick (ed.), The History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1715–1754 (2 vols, London, 1970), I, pp. 19–20. 14 Henry Horwitz, Revolution Politicks. The Career of Daniel Finch, Second Earl of Nottingham 1647–1730 (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 246–52. 15 Murray, George I, the Baltic and the Whig Split, pp. 103–4; Hatton, George I, p. 187. 16 Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, pp. 13–81. 17 Horwitz, Revolution Politicks, pp. 248–50; J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London, 1967), pp. 159–89. 18 Colley, In Defiance, pp. 53–84, 118–45.

23

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 23

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

in the three kingdoms.19 The tacit consensus that the Hanoverian succession was a ‘good thing’ that has since suffused most of the historiography of the eighteenth century20 was plainly demonstrated in the favourable treatment the Hanoverian dynasty and the Whig ascendancy received in the great majority of media commemorations of its 300th anniversary.21 But how stable was the new order brought in by the Hanoverian succession? Between 1714 and 1803 the British states were some of the most turbulent in Europe. By a conservative count there were at least five major armed uprisings and one full-scale revolution, to say nothing of a host of ideologically driven raids, murders, conspiracies, plots and abortive invasions coordinated between insurgent organisations in the British Isles and sympathetic foreign powers. God save us from such stability in our own times. The historical questions this raises are twofold. On the one hand, how did the Whig regime keep control of the British Isles in the face of such chronic unrest? On the other, why was it so productive of opposition to the death? The first question has – at least implicitly – been addressed by a great many historians and there is consequently a raft of percipient studies dealing with the power of the British fiscal–military state, its deep roots in its particular constituency and so on.22 The second question has received less attention and is the implicit backdrop to the argument below. For reasons of space (and given the theme of this collection of essays), I can only deal with the immediate political consequences of the Hanoverian succession. This is, however, a very good historical moment within which to consider some of the problems that made the British polity so prone to insurgency and civil conflict in the first half of the eighteenth century. Our vision of the beginning of the Hanoverian era is dominated by the great Jacobite rebellion of 1715. But it was not assured that the Jacobites would, in fact, rebel. The smart approach (and one their leaders well understood) would have been to wait until the Whig regime got itself into serious foreign difficulties and then deliver the double hammer that brought down the government of James II and VII in 1688: a foreign army landing in the British Isles and widespread provincial uprisings.23 As argued elsewhere, impatience, the emotional and political ratchet effect and the illusory power of English Jacobitism led the movement as a whole 19 Plumb,

Growth of Political Stability, pp. 186–9. Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760 (Oxford, corrected 1952 reprint of 1939 edn), pp. 1–10; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 677–725; Chris Whatley, Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000), pp. 1–3. 21 Lucy Worsley’s ‘The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain’, broadcast on the BBC in 2015, is an excellent example of this tendency. 22 For a sample of these, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State (London, 1990); Jonathan Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Régime, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992). 23 For analyses of the military side of the Revolution of 1688, see John Carswell, The Descent on England (London, 1969); John Childs, The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution 20

24

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 24

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

astray.24 There were, too, major differences in aims, attitude, commitment and zeal between the English, Irish and Scots strands of Jacobitism, and at this time the pace-setting strand was the Scots Jacobite movement.25 This chapter will accordingly be concerned with one of the key elements of the succession crisis that set the three kingdoms on the road to the early-stage civil war that was the ’15: the failure of conventional politics – specifically George I and his ministers – to respond to the chronic, bitter political tensions between England and Scotland created by the Union of the two kingdoms in 1707. In essence the political system was structurally averse to easing these tensions by reform or accommodation, and the political consequences of the way it dealt with the political wing of Scots Jacobitism acted to boost the Scots Jacobite movement as a whole towards an armed uprising. II

One of the features of Jacobitism that has led historians in the field to argue that it was an early form of a modern revolutionary movement was that at particular times and in particular places it had two potential pathways – one military, one political – to the achievement of its objectives.26 These in effect gave rise to both a military and a political wing. English Jacobitism always had a prominent political wing, in the shape of a shifting cohort of ostensibly Tory MPs who covertly favoured a Jacobite restoration. And since the failure in 1692 to coordinate an English uprising and a French invasion, this political wing increasingly dominated the movement in the southern kingdom.27 So much so, indeed, that during the reign of the devoutly Anglican and popular Queen Anne the English Jacobites as a group effectively eschewed any thought of armed insurrection to achieve their objectives. Only the northern English Catholic Jacobites secretly kept up a military capability and they well knew they could not go it alone.28 This in large part explains the feebleness of the English Jacobite response to the Hanoverian succession. They had no underground military organisation, no secret arsenals and no military plans in place. They were thus

(Manchester, 1980); David H. Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North. Aspects of the Revolution of 1688 (London, 1976). 24 Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (London, 2006), pp. 51–101. 25 Daniel Szechi, ‘Jacobite Politics in the Age of Anne’, in British Politics in the Age of Holmes. Geoffrey Holmes’s British Politics in the Age of Anne 40 Years On, ed. Clyve Jones (Chichester, 2009), pp. 41–58. 26 For a discussion of this subject, see Daniel Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution? Jacobite Scotland and French Grand Strategy 1701–1708 (Manchester, 2015), pp. 73–4. 27 Daniel Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Revolution Settlement, 1689–1696’, EHR, 108 (1993), 610–28; Daniel Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710–14 (Edinburgh, 1984), passim. 28 Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution?, pp. 84–5.

25

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 25

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

reduced to making it up as they went along in 1714 and 1715, with predictable results.29 The Scots Jacobites’ experience was very different. For nearly fifteen years following the Revolution of 1688 their political wing was insignificant. The Williamites in Scotland swiftly seized control of Scotland’s parliament while the Jacobites were in disarray, and then entrenched their hold on power by passing legislation designed to exclude the Jacobites from Parliament and political office. The Revolutioners (as they subsequently became known) further benefited from the fact that William III and II wisely (from his point of view) never allowed another Scots general election to take place.30 His death in 1702, however, opened the way for the Scots political nation to express their feelings on the conduct of government over the course of his reign, and – perhaps inevitably – they punished Queen Anne’s government for the sins of its predecessor (though the fact that she kept the great majority of William’s old ministers in office did not help). As a consequence, her government found itself confronted by a powerful Country coalition composed of radical Whigs (who later became known as the Squadrone), not-very-covert Jacobites who, in a direct reference to the loyalists of the Great Civil War, called themselves ‘the Cavaliers’, individual ‘Country’ patriots and disgruntled magnate factions. The result was that Queen Anne and her ministers lost control of the Scots Parliament.31 This was a heady moment for the Jacobite Commissioners (i.e. MPs) in Edinburgh. The ongoing War of the Spanish Succession meant the Scots Jacobite movement as a whole was primarily focused on securing a French invasion, which they would join in a national uprising. Simultaneously, the Commissioners were free to try and fight off the prospect of a constitutional union with England (designed to secure the Hanoverian Succession), reform Scottish politics in a Country direction and obtain piecemeal gains for the Jacobite community in the interim between their distasteful present and the 29 The

Irish Jacobite movement’s capabilities are not directly relevant to the argument being advanced here, but it is worth noting that its structure was radically different. Because the overwhelming majority of Irish Jacobites were Catholics, and thus subject to constant government surveillance, day-to-day discrimination and episodic persecution, the movement in Ireland effectively never had a political wing. Unlike the English it did, however, have an overt military organisation, well-stocked arsenals and plenty of military planning in place. Unfortunately, as far its potential usefulness to the exiled Stuarts was concerned, because all this military capability was embodied in the Irish brigades in French and Spanish service it was not under the control of James and his ministers. 30 Derek J. Patrick, ‘Unconventional Procedure: Scottish Electoral Politics after the Revolution’, in The History of the Scottish Parliament Volume 2: Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1567–1707, eds Keith M. Brown and Alistair J. Mann (Edinburgh, 2012, reprint of 2005 edn), pp. 240–1; Patrick W.J. Riley, King William and the Scottish Politicians (Edinburgh, 1979), passim. 31 Keith M. Brown, ‘Party Politics and Parliament: Scotland’s Last Election and its Aftermath, 1702–3’, in History of the Scottish Parliament Volume 2, eds Brown and Mann, pp. 245–86; Patrick W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland (Manchester, 1978), pp. 31–66.

26

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 26

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

hoped-for Jacobite restoration. In the exciting crucible of Scots parliamentary politics of 1703–6, this led to the development of a politically radical Scots Jacobite ideological agenda, but, just as importantly, it also empowered the political wing within the Scots Jacobite movement.32 This boost in the authority of the political wing was consolidated and extended by the failure of the 1708 French invasion attempt. As France’s strategic-military crisis deepened in the years that followed, the military strand to Scots Jacobite activity had to be put on hold. This meant that if the Scots Jacobite community wanted to attack the Union and advance the prospect of a Jacobite restoration it could only do so through conventional politics. The Scots Jacobites correspondingly did not baulk at engaging with Westminster, the epitome and core of everything they hated about England and the Union. When, for example, a general election was called in 1710, Jacobite parliamentary candidates, ‘spoke litle above board, but under hand represented that now or never was the time to do something effectually for the king, and by restoring him dissolve the Union’, and thereby secured support from their Jacobite constituents sufficient to help return a good tranche of Jacobite MPs and peers.33 There was, though, a hidden downside (from a strictly Jacobite point of view) to this embracing of constitutional politics. Very few Scots Jacobite MPs could expect to be returned solely on the Jacobite vote. Virtually all of them had to build up local coalitions in order to get elected, and the great majority of them did so on the basis of one central agenda item that was, conveniently, as important for the great majority of Scots Jacobites as restoring the exiled Stuarts: diehard opposition to the Union.34 Significantly, hostility to Scotland’s absorption by the English polity (which was the way the Union worked in practice at this time) was far from being the exclusive property of the Jacobite community: it spanned all constituencies within the Scots political nation. In consequence, fighting for Scotland’s interests within the Union and trying to bring on, or exploit any political crisis at Westminster that would enable antiUnion Scots MPs to convince the overwhelmingly English-dominated British Parliament that they should let Scotland go, absorbed more and more of the Scots Jacobite MPs’ energies.35 They thereby pleased their voters, but in the process implicitly moved the restoration of the exiled Stuarts to the backburner. This tendency was dramatically demonstrated as early as 1706 and again in 1713, when the majority of the Scots Jacobites in the Scots and then the British

32 Szechi,

Britain’s Lost Revolution?, pp. 109–49. Anthony Aufrere (ed.), The Lockhart Papers (2 vols, London, 1817), I, p. 319. 34 David Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715, I: Introductory Survey (London, 2002), pp. 829–30, 844, 914–15, 927–31. 35 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and David Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715, III: Members A–F (London, 2002), pp. 623–6, 804–9; Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and David Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715, IV: Members G–N (London, 2002), pp. 962–5. 33

27

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 27

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

Parliament explicitly agreed to vote for the Hanoverian Succession if it would avert (in the first instance) or end (in the second) the Union.36 This slide towards constitutionalism produced significant tension within the Scots Jacobite movement between the primarily Lowland Jacobite MPs and their supporters and the more militant Highlanders. In early 1714, prompted by Highland Jacobite proposals for a rising,37 the Jacobite court directed one of its best agents, the Catholic priest Fr James Carnegy, to sound out both his Highland and Lowland contacts. He was particularly dismayed and angered by the Lowlanders’ response: You have reason to be kind to the Liddells [Highlanders], for they are the only forward freinds Sir John [James III and VIII] has. I’ve lost patience, yea and it has made me sick to find Mr Mark [Lowland Jacobites] so pusillanimous and inactive, tho never man offered fairer and seemed more resolute than he when Mr Gerard [the previous invasion plan] cam last hither. I com this minuit from visiting. . . Magnes [George Lockhart of Carnwath MP]. Magnes is. . . active and indefatigable, but seased with the same fear Mark is, so I find he as well as Mark will sit still and do nothing for John Gray [James] tho Benjamin’s wife [Queen Anne] faill [die], but let all be done that can in favours of Philip Nortoun [Hanover].38

Indeed, Carnegy was so disgusted that he asked his superiors at the Scots College in Paris, who were the conduit for the intelligence he sent to the Jacobite shadow-government, to withhold his account from the Jacobite king, perhaps in the hope that the Lowlanders would change their minds. The Lowland Jacobite leadership (which was dominated by Representative Peers and MPs) was then largely caught unprepared for any kind of military action when the queen died. They were nonetheless initially open to the idea of rising if James could get to Scotland quickly with a body of French troops.39 When that failed to transpire, they instead advised James to bide his time.40 Their subsequent response to the dismissal of the Tories and the installation of an overwhelmingly Whig administration by George I indicates, however, that although they were subsequently willing to develop a plan for a military uprising as a fall-back position,41 they were much more interested in exploring the possibility of using the fact that the Hanoverian Succession had passed off peacefully to overcome English objections to the dissolution of the Union. 36 Daniel Szechi (ed.), ‘Scotland’s Ruine’: Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs of the Union (Aberdeen, 1995), pp. 188–95; Geoffrey Holmes and Clyve Jones, ‘Trade, the Scots and the Parliamentary Crisis of 1713’, Parliamentary History, 1 (1982), 53; A Letter from a Scots Tory at London to his Friend at Edinburgh, in Relation to the Intended Address for the Dissolution of the Union (Edinburgh, 1714), p. 3. 37 Daniel Szechi, ‘Scotland and the Union in the Summer of 1714’, Swift Studies, 30 (2015), 154–5. 38 AUL, Blairs Letters 2/188/3. 39 AUL, Blairs Letters 2/189/3, 4, 6. 40 AUL, Blairs Letters 2/189/10. 41 AUL, Blairs Letters 2/188/15.

28

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 28

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

This was not entirely fanciful. Though many English politicians were of the same opinion as Speaker William Bromley, who in 1713 observed that he: ‘was not very fond of the Union in all respects, but since there were some advantages to England from it, and that they had catcht hold of Scotland, they would keep her fast’, the English Whigs had publicly accepted the possibility that they might acquiesce in the dissolution of the Union in 1713.42 This was at a time when Scotland’s parliamentary representatives were largely united in opposition to the Oxford ministry after backbench English Tories had brushed aside government objections and deliberately ignored the fact that Scottish malt was lower quality than its English counterpart in order to impose an equally heavy malt tax on Scotland as already existed in England, thereby outraging Scots of all stripes and causing a major political crisis. It is clear that the English Whigs were only out to exploit the ensuing political confrontation to serve their own interests, but the anti-Union coalition formed in the wake of the passage of the malt tax included the great majority of Scotland’s Whig MPs, and the Squadrone peers out-of-doors publicly gave the proposal their full support.43 Moreover, in the 1713 general election in Scotland both Whigs and Tories ran on an antiUnion, pro-Hanoverian Succession platform,44 and if the results are anything to go by, the Whigs convinced the electorate of their superior bona fides on the issue, as may be seen from the fact that they won the majority of the forty-five Scots seats.45 Lowland Jacobite discussions of which we know very little consequently followed the Hanoverian Succession, and as both parties geared up for the first general election of George I’s reign the Lowland Jacobite leadership (we can securely identify the earls of Linlithgow, Wigton, Southesk and Panmure, and Lockhart and Harry Maule of Kellie among those involved) suddenly and publicly proposed a nationwide Address calling on George I to support the dissolution of the Union.46 Thoroughly loyalist in tone and presentation, their argument was that since the Hanoverian Succession had now been secured, and George I was peacefully installed on the throne, there was no longer any need for the Union, which had, moreover, proved ‘the present ruin and growing decay of this nation’. Indeed, the only substantive threat to the peace and stability of the new dynasty would be the ‘insupportable difficultys’ the Union

42

Lockhart Papers, I, p. 427; Holmes and Jones, ‘Trade, the Scots and the Parliamentary Crisis’, pp. 55–9. 43 Holmes and Jones, ‘Trade, the Scots and the Parliamentary Crisis’, pp. 47–68; Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, pp. 122, 129–35. 44 Sincerely pro-Hanover Succession in the case of the Whigs. 45 It is worth noting that it was very rare indeed for Scots Opposition candidates to win a majority of the Commons’ seats in a general election 1707–1832 (Hayton, House of Commons 1690–1715, I, pp. 523–4; Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, pp. 147–51). 46 AUL, Blairs Letters 2/188/15; Lockhart Papers, I, 574–81; NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto VIII, ep. 160.

29

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 29

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

would continue to impose on Scotland.47 They also proposed a pledge to be taken by all parliamentary candidates: I am resolved to take all lawful opportunitys whatsoever to obtain the dissolution of this Union, and for that end will concur unanimously in all votes without reserves in all matters whatsoever (church matters alone expected) with such of the English members and partys as will concur with me to obtain that dissolution; and shall in the same manner oppose these, who shall oppose that dissolution. And in caice I shall be oblidged to differ with them, or with any of our own number upon church matters, it shall not hinder me from joyning with them afterwards in all other matters whatsoever in the manner I have mentioned, and that in the next and all other Parliaments until that dissolution is effectuated.48

Once again the Jacobite Parliamentarians were signalling their willingness to accept the Hanoverian Succession if this would lead to the dissolution of the Union, but there were, too, some practical politics involved. By proposing such a measure and such a pledge they were hoping that in the forthcoming election ‘he that will not engadge to use his endeavours for that end, it shall be a good objection against him’.49 The Jacobites could thereby either bounce the Squadrone into supporting the proposal or otherwise embarrass them so badly, given their previous commitment to ending the Union, as to give Jacobite/antiUnion candidates a decisive edge with the voters. In many respects it was the perfect apple of discord to lob into the Squadrone/ Whig camp. The Presbyterian Kirk was the mainstay of the ‘Revolution interest’ (by 1714, the Whig interest) in Scotland and its experience of the Union since 1710 had been distinctly unhappy.50 By judicious appeals to Anglican prejudices regarding Presbyterianism the Scots Episcopalian minority had managed to break the Kirk’s monopoly on legal religious practice guaranteed by the Act of Union, steering a Toleration Act through Parliament in 1712, and followed this victory up by confiscating the patronage of local Kirks from their regional synods and returning it to the landowners who had previously exercised the right of appointment. This led directly to a major schism in the Kirk, with up to 50 per cent of the Presbyterian clergy in some areas refusing to take new oaths of allegiance to what they regarded as an ungodly establishment.51 Though the Kirk’s leaders had high (and well-grounded) hopes that the new regime in London would be much more accommodating and sympathetic, ameliorating the Kirk’s situation would require parliamentary legislation, which in turn 47

NRS, Dalhousie Muniments GD 45/1/189; NLS, Wodrow Papers, Octavo VIII, fols 160–62. 48 NRS, GD 45/1/192/4. 49 NRS, Montrose MSS GD 220/5/331/14; Letter from a Scots Tory at London, pp. 2–3; My Lord, I had the honour of your lordship’s, bearing date at London 23d November... (anonymous open letter). 50 Jeffrey Stephen, Defending the Revolution. The Church of Scotland 1689–1716 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 19–76. 51 Ibid., pp. 165–81, 187–204.

30

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 30

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

meant that the government in fact could do little for Scotland’s Presbyterians until after the general election.52 It was therefore their experience of the period 1710–14 that governed the response of many Presbyterian clergymen to the Jacobites’ renewed anti-Union campaign. Nor were the common people of Scotland simply pawns in their masters’ (and ministers’) games. In 1706–07, while the Union was passing the Scots Parliament, there were widespread plebeian demonstrations of opposition to any kind of constitutional fusion with England, most dramatically in towns and cities like Dumfries, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling, and experience of the Union once it passed into law does not seem to have improved their opinion of it.53 In part this arose from the religious changes noted above. In Presbyterian areas of Scotland ministers who took the new oaths were regularly abused and sometimes deserted wholesale by their congregations.54 But, perhaps more importantly, taken as a whole, the Union had plunged Scotland into a deep and enduring economic depression which, in the way of these things, hit the poor far harder than the rich.55 The traditional plebeian response to hardship throughout Western Europe was to work the economy of expedients that always characterised their lives even harder, simply so as to survive. And in Scotland in the early eighteenth century one of the forms this took was active cooperation with, and participation in, one of Scotland’s growth industries after the Union: the vast and brazen smuggling operation operating through Scotland’s east coast ports. Whole communities were involved and, indeed, not infrequently defended the smuggling entrepreneurs amongst them by attacks on customs officers, riots aimed at releasing seized goods and simple obstruction of all forms of government intervention in their localities.56 Thus, insofar as the common people could influence Scotland’s highly elite-driven politics (which they certainly could to some extent in cities like Edinburgh), they, too, were predisposed to be sympathetic to proposals to break the Union. Finally, there were not a few elite Whigs who were distinctly unhappy with the way the Union had worked out in practice. The most disgruntled were the Whig nobility.57 One of the sweeteners proffered by the Marlborough–Godolphin ministry at the time of the Union was private assurances that Scots peers would be entitled to translation or promotion into a new British nobility which would 52

Robert Wodrow, Analecta: Or, Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences; Mostly Relating to Scotch Ministers and Christians [ed. Matthew Leishman] (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1862), II, pp. 290, 292–3, 294; NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto VIII, ep. 154. 53 Karin Bowie, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union, 1699–1707 (Woodbridge, 2011, reprint of 2007 edn), pp. 139–46. 54 Daniel Szechi (ed.), Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1698–1732 (Edinburgh, 1989), p. 60; Wodrow, Analecta, II, pp. 109, 111, 112, 130, 242, 261–2. 55 Whatley, Scottish Society, pp. 55–7. 56 Christopher Whatley, ‘Order and Disorder’, in A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600 to 1800, eds Elizabeth Foyster and Christopher Whatley (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 203–4. 57 NRS, GD 45/1/190; NRS, GD 220/5/624/1.

31

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 31

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

give them the full rights enjoyed by the former English peerage after the Union, the most important of which was an automatic seat in the House of Lords. Hence many Scots peers were willing temporarily (they assumed) to put up with the déclassé system of electing sixteen Representative Peers at every general election whose precedence in the Lords, when they got to Westminster, was less than the most junior English baron. Unfortunately for the Scots nobility, however, in 1711 when the Oxford ministry tried to bring in James DouglasHamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton, as the British duke of Brandon, both English Tory and English Whig peers united in blocking his translation on the grounds that it would open the way to the admission of a tidal wave of ‘mercenary’ Scots. Hamilton was humiliated by being left with a new peerage that excluded him from voting in Representative Peer elections or sitting in the Lords as duke of Brandon.58 Unsurprisingly, many of the Scots peers were mightily offended and disillusioned by the whole business. III

By 1714 there were then, important constituencies within Scotland that were not happy with the Union, which is why the Jacobites cannily pitched the proposal as they did. As may be seen from the pledge quoted above, they tried to neutralise the religious issue by ostentatiously excluding it from the commitment to solidarity in pursuit of a dissolution of the Union. Since the rights of the Scots peerage and the dynamics of the plebeian economy would revert to the status quo prevailing in 1706, it offered the (nostalgic) prospect of a more attractive future than their bleak present. And the Jacobites’ calculations initially proved correct. More than a few ministers of the Kirk were drawn to the idea. In November, ‘P. Erskine’ wrote from Durham to Robert Wodrow forthrightly opining, I’m still of opinion addresses should be sett on foot agst the Union and for redress of other grievances, to be presented before or about the sitting of the parlia[men]t, & I think . . . [illegible] . . . should be used that all Electors of members of Parlia[men]t should give instructions to doe all that’s possible for dissolving the Union.59

Robert Wylie, minister of Hamilton had more misgivings, but he agreed, this is the most proper season of addressing, in the begining of the new Gover[men] t, and if it have not all the desired effect, yet it may prepare for afterward, or in the meantime His Maj[esty] may think it reasonable to lighten the Union, to remove inequallities, and to ease us of many greiveances that are in it.60

58

Geoffrey Holmes, ‘The Hamilton Affair of 1711–12: a Crisis in Anglo-Scottish Relations’, EHR, 77 (1962), 257–282. 59 NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto VIII, ep. 156. 60 NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto VIII, ep. 165.

32

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 32

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

Even some ministers who were squeamish about working with the Jacobites wanted to take the opportunity to do something about the Union, it is strongly urged that now is ye proper season, & that if this opportunity be slighted we may be found very faulty to ourselves & to posterity. What if the Commission [of the General Assembly of the Kirk] should meet and draw a fair address containing the churche’s grievances and the wrong she sustaines by breaking the Rights of the Union; together w[it]h as ample a deduction of civill grievances as is in any of their addresses, and let the ministers signe that, and as many Jacobites as will.61

The Jacobites had clearly struck a chord with many of the Presbyterian clergy, and in a number of places, such as Dunfermline and Dysart, the ministers came out publicly in favour of addresses against the Union.62 It seems, moreover, that they were no less successful in appealing to plebeian opinion on the subject. An abiding problem in early modern history is, of course, that we very rarely hear the voice of the common people, and usually only then through the filter of their social superiors’ commentary on their statements and actions. Taking that as read, however, it seems clear that the plebeian response to the anti-Union campaign was positive. In Dunfermline ‘the city’ as well as the ministers joined in an address against the Union.63 Members of a militantly Whig club formed in Edinburgh in 1713–14 in order to take up arms for the Hanoverian succession in the event of a Jacobite rising were so apprehensive about the impact of the campaign that they sent emissaries, ‘west to deal with the people and to prevent ill impressions’.64 The reverend John Erskine admitted that in Edinburgh ‘it’s a popular argument with the Commonalty for their [the Jacobites] being good Countreymen that they show themselves against the Union’.65 More menacingly, as the anti-Union campaign in the city gathered momentum among the trades, the Provost and magistrates were threatened with retribution in flyers anonymously posted around the city, and the Jacobites, ‘threatens us with a mob’.66 By the beginning of January 1715 tensions in the city had heightened still further and new flyers were appearing on the streets calling on the trades to march on the Provost’s home and force him to submit to the popular will. The Provost was also sent anonymous letters (the classic plebeian means of exerting pressure on their betters) threatening to murder him for his refusal to join in an address against the Union.67 The campaign against the Union in Edinburgh finally culminated, at a rather more elite level, in a heated debate in the Faculty of Advocates over whether or not it should send 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto IX, ep. 4. NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto VIII, ep. 164; NRS, GD 220/5/454/12. NLS, Clerk of Penicuik Papers GD 18/2092/4. NRS, GD 220/5/434/12. NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto VIII, ep. 62. NRS, GD 220/5/382/12. NRS, GD 220/5/454/1; NLS, Wodrow Letters, Quarto IX, ep. 5.

33

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 33

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

up its own address against the Union. This was ultimately defeated by fifty-eight votes to forty-two and the anti-Union campaign began to dissipate, though as late as mid-March the Lord Justice Clerk noted that the Deacon Convenor of the Edinburgh trades was still, ‘bussy about it again’.68 Many Scots peers were inclined likewise to sympathise with the anti-Union campaign. From the outset, however, their commitment was brittle. What united them all was their wish to overturn the Brandon decision so that Scots peers who were promoted/translated to British peerages could sit in the Lords without let or hindrance and that the sixteen Representative Peers’ seats should not become hereditary. They expressed themselves strongly on both subjects in mid-November 1714 when they presented an address asking George I to intervene to secure this. Some thirty-three Scots peers signed the address and it was jointly presented by a Tory/Jacobite and Whig/Squadrone delegation consisting of James Graham, Duke of Montrose, John Ker, Duke of Roxburgh, John Erskine, Earl of Mar (the future leader of the Jacobite rising in 1715), Charles Douglas, Earl of Selkirk and Archibald Campbell, Earl of Islay. The king, however, returned a noncommittal answer and this allowed the Jacobites to try and move the issue on to focus on the Union tout court.69 At this point the Squadrone Whig peers seem to have dropped out, but some individual Whigs such as William Boyd, Earl of Kilmarnock and William Ross, Lord Ross, were still drawn to the idea.70 A nobleman’s primary duty was, though, the aggrandisement of his dynasty, and thus when it was made clear to these Whig outliers that the ministry in London disapproved of the proposal and would not look with favour on those who supported it, they too fell away. By the time of the election only the Jacobite peers were still discussing the proposal and it was brushed aside at the Representative Peers’ election, where the Squadrone (mainly) and Argathelian Whigs swept the board.71 What stopped the Jacobite-originated anti-Union campaign was a highly effective counterattack by the Squadrone. By 1714 they had become the British Whig Party’s Scottish wing, and they therefore enjoyed the full fruits of the Whig triumph in the months following Anne’s death. Montrose replaced Mar as third Secretary of State (effectively Secretary of State for Scotland) and a phalanx of Squadrone peers and MPs following on behind him took most of Scotland’s government offices.72 We should not, though, assume that because of this that they had become deracinated Quislings. The Squadrone absolutely believed that the Union was Scotland’s last, best hope, but they were not blind to its failings. Montrose and John Stair, Earl of Stair, for example, privately lamented the way Scotland and Scotsmen were treated by English politicians, and Lord Advocate Sir David Dalrymple of Hailes admitted he was straightly angry at the way the 68

NRS, GD 220/5/453/8; GD 220/5/468/3; GD 220/5/454/15. NRS, GD 45/1/190. 70 NRS, GD 45/14/370/1; GD 220/5/461/1. 71 NRS, GD 45/14/370/2; GD 45/14/371/2; GD 220/5/467. 72 NRS, State Papers, Scotland (copies) RH 2/4/391/6–7, 7, 10, 11. 69

34

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 34

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

Union continued to be ‘grossly abused by our haughty neighbours’, and feared for the country’s future if this continued.73 Nonetheless, the Squadrone also had a party dog in the fight. They were the Whig ministry’s men in Scotland and they were supposed to deliver a quiet country and a cohort of Whig MPs and peers to bolster its future majority at Westminster. The anti-Union campaign could have derailed their efforts in this direction, and so they threw themselves into dividing the nascent anti-Union coalition the Jacobites were trying to build up. The essence of their argument was that Presbyterian anti-Unionists could not trust anything that came from the Jacobite end of politics, that the Jacobites had their eye on securing a Stuart restoration in everything they did and that good Whigs could trust the new king to do right by them in due course.74 The Squadrone were of course caricaturing the Jacobites when they did this, and they completely ignored the critical divergence between the two core elements within the Scots Jacobite movement, but in principle they were correct in their assessment. Their counterargument accordingly told, little by little, and eventually succeeded in dividing Jacobite from Whig/Presbyterian antiUnionists.75 It was, though, a close run thing: at one point in December John Leslie, Earl of Rothes, described the effort to stop the anti-Union campaign in Fife as like trying to ‘stop the tide with our thumbs’. The trades in Edinburgh and Presbyterian ministers elsewhere were still supporting the anti-Union campaign until the end of January 1715.76 By the time of the general election in March, however, the Squadrone had prevailed on the Whig/Presbyterian interest to close ranks against the Jacobites. The natural advantages of being the government party in eighteenth-century Scotland, in terms of the patronage and influence they could deploy, then enabled them to score a thumping victory at the polls.77 The anti-Union campaign thus came to naught, leaving the Jacobites angry and frustrated as, it seems likely, were many absolutely non-Jacobite (even antiJacobite) clerical, plebeian and noble opponents of the Union. The net effect within the Scots Jacobite movement, however, was ominously positive in that it effectively reunited the primarily Lowland constitutionalists with the more military-inclined Highlanders. As far as the Scots Jacobites were concerned (and for that matter, their putative allies, the anti-Union Whigs/Presbyterians) it was now abundantly clear that there was no other way to redress their, and Scotland’s, grievances than by force of arms. The Whigs were clearly not going to do this; the only question now was whether the Jacobites had the resolution to take the military road.

73

NRS, GD 220/5/624/3; GD 220/5/434/11. Defending the Revolution, pp. 229–233, 238–40. 75 NRS, GD 220/5/331/14; GD 220/5/454/1; GD 220/5/434/12; GD 220/5/461/1; RH 2/4/391/39–40, 40. 76 NRS, GD 220/5/440/4, 8; GD 220/5/453/8, 11; GD 220/5/454/15; GD 45/14/373. 77 NRS, Kennedy of Dalquharran Papers GD 27/6/7/19, 21. 74 Stephen,

35

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 35

22/08/2019 08:57

Daniel Szechi

IV

In terms of setting Britain on track towards civil conflict the political consequences of the Hanoverian Succession were of overwhelming importance. The mere imminence of the arrival of the Hanoverian dynasty provided all the justification James, his half-brother and, at this time, close military advisor, Marshal James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, and the more militant Jacobite Highlanders needed for a rising in 1713–14. Nevertheless, James and Berwick were quite good enough soldiers to recognise that they needed more than just a coalition of Highland clans to overthrow the Whig regime in even one kingdom. They had to have Jacobite Scotland as a whole in arms.78 And it was the contemporary British political system that duly delivered this. The Whig response to the constitutionalist Scots Jacobites’ platform was not to steal their clothes and demonstrate that the Whig party understood Scotland’s grievances and could be the brokers of remediation, but rather to play a clever – indeed, too clever – game of divide and rule. The Squadrone thereby fulfilled their remit as the Scots wing of the Whig Party and delivered a solid bloc of MPs and peers pledged to support the government at Westminster. They conspicuously failed, however, to deal with Scotland’s problems either then or later, despite the fact that they were well aware of them, had committed themselves to obtaining redress in 1713 and privately felt those grievances as strongly as many other Scots. What lay behind this inaction was a fundamental, structural political problem. In the end the Scots Whigs were just a small contingent within a much larger Whig bloc. The party and the ministry’s agenda was firmly focused on consolidating Whig control of the state and power in London; as long as it was not directly causing trouble, Scotland (and Ireland and many other parts of the empire) was automatically on the backburner. But what about the king? George I was certainly informed about Scotland’s grievances, and – pace Tory depictions of him as a German blockhead – he was not stupid. So why did he not intervene and require his ministers to deal with the problem? The answer lies in his agenda as Elector of Hanover. In return for allowing the Whigs to make themselves supreme in the British Isles, the Whig ministry he installed aided and abetted the king’s commitment of the Royal Navy to confrontation, and from June 1715, war with Sweden without consulting Parliament, despite the fact this was a direct breach of British constitutional law. Intervening over Scotland’s grievances might have upset this quid pro quo and from a Hanoverian policy point of view was manifestly not worth the risk. The failure to redress Scotland’s grievances was, then, simply collateral political damage. What both George and his ministers failed to appreciate, however, was that their conduct, and their success, fundamentally altered the 78

Comparing the turnout and impact of the joint Highland–Lowland Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745 with the overwhelmingly Highland risings of 1689 and 1719 indicates they were right.

36

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 36

22/08/2019 08:57

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

balance of power within the Scots Jacobite movement and vindicated those who favoured physical force. As William Scott of Ancrum explained in the aftermath of the rising, in their initial efforts to end the Union the anti-Unionists had decided to adopt ‘the gentlest means that could be thought on’, and so humbly petitioned George I for relief. But when, those to whome applicatione was made (upon pretences that wee coud not miss to think selfish) not only refused to concur, but on the contrary used their outmost for the suppressing of them, then the unhappy advice of rising in arms was proposed, as ane undoubted demonstratione to his Majesty under hou great misery his subjects in Scotland were that they chose rather to sacrifice their dearest blood than entail a ruine on them and their posterity.79

By March 1715 it was transparently clear that only an armed uprising would enable Scotland to exit the Union. As the 1715 Jacobite rising and the subsequent survival of the movement up to 1759 despite its many defeats and failures indicates, this was, perhaps, the most serious political consequence of the coming of the cuckoldy German turnip farmer.

79

NRS, RH 2/4/309/105.

37

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 37

22/08/2019 08:57

2 ‘They May Well Bear the Same Name’: The Revolution and the Succession in the Election of 1715 Christopher Dudley On 1 August 1714, Elector Georg Ludwig’s designated regents, an overwhelmingly Whig group, took over the government of Great Britain from the Tory administration that had ruled under Queen Anne. In early 1715, this Whig ascendancy was reinforced by the large majorities the party won in the parliamentary elections consequent upon the accession of the new monarch. This hold on power would not be relinquished for nearly half a century. Conventionally, therefore, the succession of the house of Hanover and the ensuing 1715 election are considered a dividing line in British political history, separating the turbulent ‘age of party’ from that of the more staid ‘Whig oligarchy’. While the Whig ascendancy was an important change in eighteenth-century politics, this narrative suggests a discontinuity at the election of 1715 that did not exist. Indeed, despite the different outcome, the election of 1715 was actually quite similar to its predecessors of 1710 and 1713. In all three elections both Tories and Whigs used the framework of the Glorious Revolution to organise and present their beliefs to voters. And like the ideological contestations of the so-called ‘rage of party’ under Queen Anne, the politics of the Hanoverian Succession continued to be articulated and presented under the rubric of the Revolution. Reflecting on the two events, an anonymous author affirmed in 1714, ‘they may well bear the same Name, viz. THE REVOLUTION’.1 The election, then, did not mark a new politics, but rather a shift in the balance of power within existing politics. The Whigs triumphed because voters in 1715 sided with their version of the Revolution. This argument adjusts specific historical accounts of the 1715 election and larger narratives about the Whig oligarchy. Despite many important revisions, the most influential work on the Whig supremacy remains J.H. Plumb’s The Growth of Political Stability in England. Plumb describes a number of elements that prepared English society for the political dominance of one group, but 1

A Secret History of One Year (London, 1714), p. 3.

38

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 38

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

argues the decisive feature ensuring Whig dominance was the emergence of a leader in Sir Robert Walpole who was ‘willing to discard all those vestiges of old Whig principles that had clung to him during his early career’.2 The argument that the Whigs secured power by abandoning or reversing their principles is commonplace.3 In place of principles, according to these accounts, Whigs ruled through patronage and a variety of corrupt practices. Historical opinion is more divided about the Whig electoral victory in 1715. Some historians argue it was due to the oligarchic techniques later perfected by Walpole, but the majority argue for a genuine popular shift towards the Whigs in 1715. Linda Colley, from the former group, notes that the Tories won the majority of country seats and argues that the ‘choice of England’s 160,000-odd freeholders [voters in county elections]. . . was reversed by seventy-four petty boroughs’.4 The more common argument is that the Whigs came to power with popular support, with the construction of oligarchy coming later. Kathleen Wilson, for example, argues that ‘Whig claims to be the popularly sanctioned and sole guarantees of the Protestant succession’ were effective in 1715.5 Importantly, for these historians the Succession was a uniquely Whig issue. W.A. Speck, for example, characterised the election as a contest between two slogans, ‘the Church in danger’ for the Tories and ‘the Succession in danger’ for the Whigs, with the latter proving ‘more potent’.6 Most of these accounts also agree that, to at least some extent, the Whigs won by default. The loss of royal favour revealed in George I’s list of regents and the defection of key leaders such as Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and William Butler, duke of Ormonde, to the Jacobite cause demoralised Tories and discredited them with voters. 2

J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 177. The most important challenges to Plumb’s interpretation challenge his arguments that meaningful opposition to the Whig government disappeared in the 1720s. A wide variety of historians have done important work on the Tories, on opposition Whigs, and on Jacobites without significantly reappraising Plumb’s conclusions about the ruling Whigs. 3 For example, J.P. Kenyon argues Whigs embraced Tory principles after 1714: Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), p. 182. Nicholas Rogers argues that as Whigs became more oligarchic, the support they had enjoyed among the ‘lower ranks of the electorate’ dried up: Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Pitt and Walpole (Oxford, 1989), pp. 21–2. J.C.D. Clark argues the majority of Whigs never held Whig principles at all: English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 46–8. 4 Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 120. See also Romney Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754 (2 vols, New York, 1970), I, p. 20. Colley’s calculations mislead because she assumes only the counties were representative. Even if we assume that all small- and medium-sized boroughs were completely dependent on patrons, adding boroughs with more than 1,000 voters to the counties gives the Whigs eighty-nine seats and the Tories eighty-four. 5 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 96–7. See also Rogers, Whigs and Cities, pp. 24–5; W.A. Speck, ‘The General Election of 1715’, EHR, 90 (1975), 507–22. 6 Speck, ‘The General Election of 1715’, 508, 518.

39

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 39

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

This account of the election of 1715 is, at best, incomplete. The Whigs did use the Succession to rally support, but they were not unique in doing so. The Tories claimed to be the only reliable guardians of the Succession just as strongly as the Whigs did; this is what made the defections of Bolingbroke and Ormonde, as well as other evidence of Jacobite influence in the party, so damaging. Moreover, the Succession was not an isolated issue. Both parties linked their roles as protectors of the Protestant Succession to arguments about the nature of the revolution that had been central to party politics since the trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell in 1710. If the specific question of the Succession was new in 1715, the debate about the revolution in which it was inscribed had been carried on during the two previous general elections. To illustrate this, the chapter begins with an examination of the elections of 1710 and 1713, looking first at the rhetoric and then at how voters responded. It then turns to the partisan rhetoric surrounding the Succession and the election of 1715, including the way some Tories inadvertently undermined their own arguments. Finally, it explores how the public and voters responded in 1715, revealing continuity with the two previous elections and a broad concern for the Succession that favoured the Whigs. The significance of this argument is threefold. First, it becomes clear that the political arguments, religious disputes and electoral contests that comprised the early eighteenth-century ‘age of party’, were, in no small measure, a debate about the meaning and ramifications of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.7 Second, such a perspective allows us to interpret the Whig ascendancy with which the Hanoverian age commences as, for all intents and purposes, a victory in that debate. The effect of that victory, after 1715, was the transformation of the Glorious Revolution into a Whig Revolution; and the Whig Party into the rightful custodian of ‘revolution principles’. Third, in terms of party politics, the Hanoverian Succession was both a continuation and a redefinition of the Revolution: a continuation in the sense that Tories and Whigs were playing out the same disputes that began in 1688–89 and a redefinition in that the decisive Whig victory initiated their ascendancy in 1715. I

While there was little discussion of the Hanoverian Succession in 1710 or 1713, questions about the Revolution and the Protestant Succession of King William and Queens Mary and Anne played a key role thanks to the impeachment and trial of the Tory clergyman Henry Sacheverell. As the political trimmer James Brydges (later duke of Chandos) wrote shortly after the trial in the House of 7

This point could be seen as an extension of Steve Pincus’s argument about partisan divisions over the revolution between 1689 and the Assassination Plot of 1696: 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. 278–302, 461–73.

40

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 40

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

Lords, prosecuting Sacheverell ‘upon the point of Passive Obedience hath revived those disputes which had lain buried for fifteen years and upwards’.8 The Whig churchman Francis Hare wrote that issues that ‘seemed to lie dormant. . . by Sachaverel’s affair [have] been roused to a degree that has not been seen since the Revolution’.9 Writing on behalf of the Tory earl of Oxford several years afterward, Daniel Defoe argued that by 1710 ‘the Party War grew up to that extravagant height, as the like has not been known in these Nations since the Civil War’.10 The Sacheverell trial highlighted and sharpened the differences between Tories and Whigs about the revolution that provided the framework for the elections of 1710, 1713 and 1715. Sacheverell’s impeachment and trial centred on a sermon, The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church, and State, delivered on 5 November 1709 and subsequently published. One of Sacheverell’s themes, that the Protestant nonconformists and the Anglican Whigs who favoured their civic recognition posed a threat to the established Church, was simply an elaboration of the slogan ‘the Church in danger’ that Tories had used earlier in Anne’s reign to rally support.11 But Sacheverell drew a connection between these ‘false brethren’ in the Church to ‘false brethren’ in the state, whom he identified as those who held up the revolution as an example of resistance to unlawful authority. According to Sacheverell, the Revolution was a triumph of passive obedience. James II had not been resisted, but the refusal of his subjects to carry out his unlawful commands had sparked a crisis of conscience in him and he fled the kingdom, abdicating the throne. For Sacheverell, to claim that the Revolution had been brought about by resistance centred on William of Orange was ‘to endeavour to cast such Black and Odious Colours upon Both’.12 To claim that the Revolution involved resistance was to undermine its legitimacy. While some of Sacheverell’s rhetoric was discomfiting to other Tories, his ideas were not. As the Tory clergyman Ralph Bridges wrote in November 1709, ‘it is all what he says truth, but perhaps a little too unseasonable’.13 Leading 8

HL, Stowe Papers, ST 57, Vol. 3, fol. 204. BL, Blenheim Papers, Add. Ms. 61464 fol. 12. 10 [Daniel Defoe], The Secret History of the White Staff, Being an Account of Affairs under the conduct of some late Ministers, and of what might probably have happened if Her Majesty had not Died (London, 1714), p. 14. 11 This slogan led to a significant Tory blunder in 1705, when their leaders in the House of Lords vociferously argued the queen’s ministry placed the Church in danger during a debate at which Anne was present. This apparent attack on her stewardship of the Church pushed Anne towards the Whigs; G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 81–4; Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England in the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 164–74. 12 Henry Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church, and State: Set forth in a Sermon Preach’d Before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, At the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, On the 5th of November, 1709 (London, 1709), p. 12. 13 HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, Vol. I: Papers of Sir William 9

41

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 41

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

Tories organised and presented addresses to the queen defending Sacheverell. These addresses, in the words of the grand jury of Litchfield, condemned resistance and pernicious Republican principles. . . which, even within Memory, brought on a most unnatural Rebellion, subverted the Monarchy. . . [and] ruined the best and purest part of the Church Catholick.14

The Whig desire to return to the anarchy and confusion of the Civil Wars was a frequent theme of popular verse supporting Sacheverell. In the words on one such poet, Sacheverell’s opponents, Both Old Whigs and Fanaticks now strive to pull down The true Church of England, both Mitre and Crown; To introduce Anarchy into the Nation, As they did Oliver’s late Usurpation.15

Tories agreed with Sacheverell that resistance threatened the stability of the monarchy and church established by the Revolution. The Whig ministers who led the impeachment of Sacheverell in the House of Commons and his trial in the House of Lords sought to punish Sacheverell and to publicly discredit his Tory interpretation of the revolution.16 After all, as the dissenting minister John England confidently declared, ‘every body knows that the Revolution was founded in Resistance’.17 Robert Walpole, one of the House of Commons’ managers, put it most succinctly in notes for his speech at the trial: If the Doctrines advanced by Dr. Sacheverell are not criminal in the highest degree, it will follow that the necessary means used to bring about the Revolution were illegal and consequently that the present Establishment and Protestant Succession founded upon that Revolution are void and of no effect.18

For the Whigs, to claim that the Revolution had not involved resistance was to undermine its legitimacy. Trumbull, Part II (London, 1924), 884. 14 A Collection of the Addresses Which have been Presented to the Queen, Since the Impeachment of the Reverend Dr. Henry Sacheverell (London, 1710), p. 14. 15 ‘The Doctor Militant: Or, Church Triumphant’, in A Collection of Poems, For and Against Dr. Sacheverell (London, 1710), p. 17. 16 The ministry did not seek a public spectacle at first, but embraced the opportunity when it arose. See Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973), pp. 83, 130–1. See also Brian Cowen (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Chichester, 2012), pp. 1–35; Daniel Szechi, ‘A Non-Resisting, Passively Obedient Revolution: Lord North and Grey and the Tory Response to the Sacheverell Impeachment’, Parliamentary History, 31:1 (February 2012), 120–2. 17 John England, Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem. A Sermon Preach’d at Sherborne in the County of Dorset, on the Publick Fast, March 15, 1709/10 a little after the Rebellious Tumult, Occasion’d by Dr. Sacheverell’s Tryal (London, 1710), p. 11. 18 CUL, Cholmondeley Papers, Ch(H) 67 fol. 4/1.

42

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 42

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

Putting Sacheverell on trial to discredit the Tories and increase their own popularity backfired spectacularly for the Whigs. During the trial, crowds gathered around Sacheverell’s coach, ‘to huzza him from his Lodgings in the Temple to Westminster hall & from thence home again’.19 There were demonstrations in London and several other towns celebrating Sacheverell as a defender of the Church.20 Enthusiasm for Sacheverell carried over into the elections and a number of political observers noted the magnitude of the Tory victory – agreeing with James Brydges that ‘the prosecution of Dr. Sacheverell. . . has contributed the most to bring this Revolution about’.21 There were other important issues in 1710 and 1713, most notably the merits of continuing the War of the Spanish Succession in 1710 and of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 as well as the political economy of the proposed Treaty of Commerce with France in 1713. Tories and Whigs frequently integrated these issues into their larger narratives about the Revolution. The debate about Sacheverell, therefore, focused these elections on the Revolution and led the Tories to victory. The poll books from 1710 and 1713 show how the electorate responded to these issues.22 First, there was a high degree of partisanship and party loyalty. As Tables 1 and 2 illustrate, the vast majority of voters cast a partisan ballot (voting 19

BL, Blenheim Papers, Add. Ms. 61610 fol. 5. See BL, Blenheim Papers, Add. Ms. 61610 fol. 86; TNA, State Papers: Domestic, SP 34/12 fol. 59. 21 HL, Stowe Papers, ST 57 Vol. 4 fol. 92. Others included the Tory duke of Beaufort (HMC Portland, IV, 599), the Whig journalist Abel Boyer, An Essay Towards the History of the Last Ministry and Parliament (London, 1710), p. 59, and the Tory William King, A Vindication of the Reverend Dr. Henry Sacheverell, From the False, Scandalous and Malicious Aspersions Cast upon Him in a late Infamous Pamphlet, Entitled, The Modern Fanatick, 2nd edn (London, 1711), p. 9. 22 The poll books for 1710 and 1713 used in this chapter are: A List of the Names of the Persons, Together with the Places of their Freehold, Who Voted for Knights of the Shire for the County of Buckingham, at the Last Election held at Aylesbury, October the Fourth and Fifth, 1710 (London, 1711), List of the Names of the Gentlemen and other Free-holders That Voted for Knights of the Shire for the County of Essex: As the same was Taken the 24th of October, 1710 (London, 1711), The Poll at the Election of Knights of the Shire for the County of Southampton, Anno 1710 (London, 1714), Poll Books, &c. County of Northumberland (Newcastle, 1898), The Poll (Taken October 16, 1710) For the Election of Knights of the Shire of Rutland (London, 1710), The Poll for Knights of the Shire for the County of Surrey, Taken at Guildford the 11th and 12th Days of October 1710 (London, 1710), Poll, Taken October the 9th, MDCCX For the Electing Two Burgesses to Sit in Parliament, November the 25th 1710 for the Burrough of Derby (London, [1710?]), A List of the Names of the Persons, Together with the Places of their Freehold and Abode, Who Voted For Knights of the Shire for the County of Bucks, At the last Election held at Aylesbury, September the Second and Third, 1713 (London, 1714), A True Copy of the Poll for the Electing of Knights of the Shire for the County of Southampton; Taken at the Castle of Winchester, On Wednesday, August the 26th…1713 (London, 1714), A True Copy of the Poll for the County of Salop, Begun September the 17th, 1713: William Tayleur, Esq. Being High Sheriff, ([Shrewsbury?], 1714), The Poll for Knights of the Shire for the County of Surrey Taken at Guildford the 9th and 10th Days of September, 1713 (London, 1713), A Poll taken at the Borough of Lewes on Thursday the Third day of Sept. in the Twelfth Year of the Reign of Our Sovereigne Lady Ann by the Grace of God Queen of Great Britain etc. Anno Dom. 1713 for the Election of Knights of the Shire to serve for the Said County and the 20

43

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 43

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

for both candidates of the same party or plumping for the single candidate of one party). In the least partisan election, Northumberland in 1710, less than 20 per cent of voters split their votes. There was also a high degree of loyalty across elections in Hampshire, where 85.2 per cent of 1710 voters who cast a partisan ballot and could be identified as voting in 1713 for the same party in that election. Table 1: Partisan Voting in 1710 Constituency

Partisan Percentage

Buckinghamshire

96.8%

Essex

92.4%

Hampshire

96.9%

Northumberland

81.5%

Rutlandshire

88.4%

Surrey

91.4%

Derby (borough)

94.0%

Table 2: Partisan Voting in 1713 Constituency

Partisan Percentage

Buckinghamshire

94.4%

Hampshire

95.1%

Shropshire

91.9%

Surrey

85.3%

Sussex

83.3%

London

89.5%

In addition to confirming the power of the division between Tory and Whig in the electorate, looking at identifiable subsets of the electorate reveals some distinct patterns. The most notable and widespread such pattern was among clergymen. Table 3 shows that Tories carried the clergy in every single constituency, almost always by a considerable margin. The column ‘N’ gives the number of clergymen in each constituency. The columns ‘Tory diff’ and ‘Whig diff’ compares the percentage for the relevant party among clergymen to their result among all voters, so +17.7 means that Tories performed 17.7 percentage points better among clergyman than they did with all voters. Ensuing Parliament (Guildhall Library MS), H. Horwitz, W.A. Speck and W.A. Gray (eds), London Politics 1713–1717 (London, 1981), pp. 66–129.

44

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 44

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

Table 3: Clergy Voting in 1710 and 1713 Constituency

N

Tory%

Whig%

Tory diff

Whig diff

Buckinghamshire 1710

108

78.4%

16.0%

+30.1

-32.5

Essex 1710

150

88.7%

6.7%

+38.0

-34.9

Hampshire 1710

144

89.6%

6.9%

+35.3

-36.6

Northumberland 1710

45

77.8%

15.6%

+35.1

-23.2

Rutlandshire 1710

43

69.8%

20.9%

+26.0

-23.7

Surrey 1710

108

50.9%

40.7%

+0.7

-0.5

Buckinghamshire 1713

108

73.1%

22.2%

+24.5

-23.6

Hampshire 1713

105

74.3%

16.2%

+24.9

-29.5

Shropshire 1713

136

69.1%

26.5%

+25.7

-22.0

Surrey 1713

79

79.7%

13.9%

+35.1

-26.8

Sussex 1713

136

64.0%

21.3%

+18.8

-16.7

Tories enjoyed similar advantages among gentry, those voters labelled as gentlemen, knights and baronets, although the Whigs did carry that group in Surrey in 1710. Table 4: Gentry Voting in 1710 and 1713 Constituency

N

Tory%

Whig%

Tory diff

Whig diff

Buckinghamshire 1710

118

74.2%

23.4%

+25.9

-25.1

Essex 1710

74

59.5%

27.0%

+8.8

-14.6

Hampshire 1710

46

67.4%

28.3%

+13.1

-15.2

Surrey 1710

23

34.8%

52.2%

-15.4

+11.0

Buckinghamshire 1713

118

69.5%

26.3%

+20.9

-19.5

Hampshire 1713

49

63.3%

30.6%

+13.9

-15.1

Shropshire 1713

83

53.0%

33.7%

+9.6

-14.8

Surrey 1713

50

46.0%

38.0%

+1.4

-2.7

Sussex 1713

159

56.0%

28.3%

+10.8

-9.7

The election of 1715 occurred in a political context with several important features. It was highly partisan in general and there were well-defined partisan blocs in the electorate. Voters divided between the parties on a range of issues, but questions about the nature of the Revolution had return to the forefront as a framing device for many of these issues.

45

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 45

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

II

As in the 1710 and 1713 elections, the rhetoric and electorate were highly partisan in 1715. The same issues – war and foreign policy, trade and political economy, and the Church – divided Tories and Whigs. Members of both parties frequently connected these issues to larger questions about the Revolution, just as they had done in the aftermath of the Sacheverell trial, and argued that their party’s interpretation of the Revolution was the only defence of Britain’s liberties, prosperity and strength. The Succession, however, gained new importance in 1715. Both Tories and Whigs portrayed the accession of George I as a necessary consequence of the revolution. Both parties argued that their principles and their revolutionary ideology were the only sure foundation for the Hanoverian Succession, while those of the other party were dangerously incompatible with both the Revolution and the Succession. For some historians the Whig victory was predetermined by the court’s favour. Plumb, for example, characterises the decision of prominent Tories such as Bolingbroke and Ormonde to join the Whigs and others to withdraw from politics in 1714 and 1714 as evidence of ‘a moral collapse. . . [that] ran very deep in the party’.23 Colley persuasively argues against Plumb’s claim of massive Tory defections to the Whigs, but agrees that between 1715 and 1722 the party suffered from a lack of leadership and in 1715 particularly from ‘parliamentary defeatism’.24 But the Tory defeat seems obvious only in retrospect. Speck, for example, suggests that they were ‘more united than it had been at any time since 1710’ and that ‘the tories were in an extraordinarily powerful position in the constituencies’.25 So while the Tories had reasons to fear the worst in 1715, their situation was not entirely hopeless either. This was especially true since Tories appealed to voters on the basis of their loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty. Whig candidates and propagandists argued that the Succession preserved and protected the benefits of the Revolution, and applied that theme to a range of more specific issues in 1715. Whigs argued the Hanoverian Succession was the fruit of the Revolution and that it was impossible to defend either while denying the legitimacy of resistance. In the words of The Flying Post, Tories ought to be held accountable for promoting and presenting such Addresses as struck at the Hanover Succession, against which they set up Hereditary and Indfeasible Right. . . [which] struck at the very Foundation of the Revolution.26

23 Plumb,

The Growth of Political Stability in England, p. 166. In Defiance of Oligarchy, pp. 33, 46, 58, 183. 25 Speck, ‘The General Election of 1715’, 508. There was, of course, a major difference between 1710/1713 and 1715, namely that in the former the Tories had controlled crown patronage while in 1715 the Whigs did. Speck notes, however, that the Tories had won an election against the ministry as recently as 1705. 26 The Flying Post no. 3640, 5 May 1715. 24 Colley,

46

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 46

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

For Whigs both the Revolution and the Succession were based on resistance, which only they were prepared to acknowledge. Whigs also emphasised the continuing danger of Louis XIV’s France. Louis’s support for the ‘Pretender’ was an obvious threat to the Revolution and Succession, but Whigs took a broader view as well. The Revolution for them was about establishing Britain’s place in Europe. William Talbot, Whig bishop of Oxford, reminded his audience of this at the coronation of George I, noting that God delivered Britain at the Revolution for ‘the establishing a Balance of Power in Europe’.27 In a bestselling pamphlet that went through at least eight London and one Dublin editions, the insurer and Whig pamphleteer Charles Povey portrayed the Whigs as ‘Patriots’ determined to ‘settle in Europe a just Balance, founded upon a safe and general Peace’. The Tories, meanwhile, had made a peace designed ‘to raise the Grandeur of France’.28 Whigs also highlighted the economic threat posed by France, losing few opportunities to remind voters of the failed Treaty of Commerce. London’s Instructions to their newly elected MPs, for example, called on them to investigate why: the best Branches of our Trade were exchanged for Chimera’s, and the ruin of the whole endangered by a vile Treaty of Commerce with France.29

Richard Steele summed up the Whig approach, writing that William of Orange would have thought his work ‘but half done, if he had delivered only one Generation from Popery and Slavery’.30 Whigs in 1714 and 1715 wanted to connect every issue back to the Revolution and the Succession. Tories were equally willing to talk about the Succession. A number of Tory candidates for large constituencies, such as the four candidates for London, took out advertisements in London newspapers introducing themselves to voters as ‘Gentlemen of known Loyalty to his Majesty King George, and who have been always for supporting and preserving the Protestant Succession’.31 Sir Pynsent Chernock and John Harvey, Tory candidates in Bedfordshire, were recommended in an advertisement in the 3 February issue of The Post Boy as ‘Persons of known Loyalty to his Majesty King George, and zealously affected to the Constitution both in Church and State’. In the same issue, the Tory candidates for Aylesbury were identified as ‘Gentlemen of steady Loyalty and undoubted Affection to the Church, the King, and the Constitution’. Even Edward Harvey, 27

William Talbot, bishop of Oxford, A Sermon Preach’d at the Coronation of King George, in the Abbey-Church of Westminster, October the 20th, 1714 (London, 1714), p. 14. 28 [Charles Povey], An Enquiry Into the Miscarriages of the Four Last Years Reign (London, 1714), pp. 4–5. 29 Instructions by the Citizens of London, to their Representatives for the Ensuing Parliament (London, 1715). 30 Richard Steele, The Crisis: Or, A Discourse Representing the just Causes of the late Happy Revolution: And the Several Settlements of the Crowns of England and Scotland on Her Majesty without Issue, upon the Most Illustrious Princess Sophia Electress and Dutches Dowager of Hanover, and the Heirs of Her Body being Protestants (London, 1714), p. 14. 31 Post Boy no. 3074, 20 Jan 1714/15.

47

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 47

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

a candidate for Surrey and a Jacobite, was linked with his Tory partner Lord Guernsey as ‘being both Gentlemen of known Loyalty to his Majesty King George, and steadfast Friends to the Church of England’.32 These Tory candidates clearly wanted to distinguish themselves from their Whig opponents by their loyalty to the Church, but they were also interested in asserting their zeal for Hanover. Besides using it to differentiate themselves from the Whigs, the emphasis these Tory candidates placed on the Church reflected a broader narrative about the Revolution and the Succession. Tories, unlike Whigs, often included the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 in this narrative, placing the preservation of the Church of England at the heart of the story. The physician George Sewell summed up the Tory position in a 1714 pamphlet with the rhetorical question ‘has not there been a Restoration as well as a Revolution, and a Deliverance from Fanaticism as well as Popery?’33 For Sewell this analogy highlighted the absence of resistance in the Revolution and the danger of ‘fanatic’ ideas, a clear echo of Sacheverell’s argument that the Revolution was founded on passive obedience. For example, Edward Mathews, an Irish Tory clergyman, wrote that ‘The Revolution, founded on the Abdication of King James, his voluntary Desertion of the Throne, is intirely consistent with these Principles.’34 Tories saw the Restoration and Revolution as providential events that saved the Church without requiring illegitimate resistance from the people. Neither represented a break with the past. The Tory newspaper The Examiner rhetorically asked in June 1714 ‘was the Revolution meant for a Deliverance, or a Change’, clearly coming down on the side of the former.35 Because of this belief, Tory authors rejected the claim that the principle of resistance granted the Whigs ownership of the Revolution. Tories and good Churchmen, not Whigs, were responsible for securing its benefits. One author, quoting the Tory bishop of Rochester, proclaimed that the people who brought about the Revolution ‘were all of the Church of England, and the Principles

32

Post Boy no. 3080, 3 Feb 1714/15. For Harvey’s Jacobitism, see Sedgwick, House of Commons, I, p. 328. 33 [George] Sewell, The Reasons for Writing Against the Bishop of Salisbury, With Remarks upon His Lordship’s Spittal-sermon preached on Easter Monday Last (London, 1714), p. 15. See also Rex Redux: Or, the Restoration of his Sacred Majesty Charles II of Pious Memory, 2nd edn (London, 1713), p. 17; a timely historical work that referred to the Restoration as ‘so Glorious a Revolution’. 34 Edward Mathews, Curate of Carrickfergus, The Divine Original of Civil Government: A Sermon Preached at the Assizes Held at Carrickfergus, From the County of Antrim, The 17th of July 1713 (Dublin, 1714), p. 29. 35 The Examiner Vol. VI, no. 10, 25 June [1714]. For The Examiner, the true threat to the nation was the Whig effort to use the Revolution as an excuse to innovate. In January 1714, for example, it noted that only because Whigs ‘were not able to finish our Destruction and Overthrow in Three and Twenty [years]’ was it possible for the Tory ministry to restore British happiness.

48

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 48

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

on which they stood, were all Church of England Principles’.36 Theophilus Dorrington reminded his parishioners it had been ‘the main Body of the Nation, the truly Loyal Party, led by the Example of truly Christian Bishops’ who had stood up to King James and won the blessing of Providence.37 An anonymous Tory debunked Whig claims to sole ownership of the Revolution. ‘The Deists, the Dissenters, the Chur[ch]ills, the Sunder[la]nds’, i.e. the Whigs, ‘were not the Men who then stood in the Gap to defend us’.38 The true heroes of the Revolution were Tories. Tories built on their understanding of the Revolution to argue that their party was best positioned to secure the Hanoverian Succession. Thus, after James II abdicated in the face of passive obedience, the Convention met under the authority of Mary (James’s legitimate heir, assuming as most Tories did that James ‘III’ was spurious) and proclaimed William and Mary joint monarchs.39 To illustrate the legality of this procedure and their commitment to it, many Tories turned to yet another seventeenth-century precedent: the exclusion crisis of 1678–81: the parliamentary struggles to debar James, then duke of York, from the royal succession on account of his Roman Catholicism, which acted as the crucible of late Stuart party politics.40 Anti-exclusionist Tories, their early eighteenth-century successors argued, never contested that the succession could be altered. They merely disputed that Parliament could do it alone. William Wotton, for example, wrote that the Tory earl of Nottingham believed ‘the Power of limiting the Succession to the Crown is vested in the Sovereign, and the Three Estates; and he opposed the Bill of Exclusion upon prudential Reasons’.41 Tories, in other words, presented alterations to the succession as legal without needing to appeal to the extralegal principle of resistance. 36

The Bishop of Salisbury’s New preface consider’d (London, 1713), p. 7. Theophilus Dorrington, The True Foundation of Obedience and Submission to His Present Majesty King George, Stated and Confirm’d; and the Late Happy Revolution Vindicated from the Black and Odious Colours by some cast upon it (London, 1714), p. 22. 38 Hanibal not at our Gates: Or, An Enquiry into the Grounds of our present Fears of Popery and the Pre—der: In a Dialogue Between My Lord Panick and George Steady, Esq (London, 1714), p. 12. Churchill was John Churchill, later duke of Marlborough, the Whig general who had been James II’s general until the eve of the Revolution. Sunderland was Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, a highly opportunistic politician who had converted to Catholicism under James II, then become a Whig under William and Mary. His son, Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, was a leading Whig. 39 See for example The Private Sentiments of a Member of P—t, In a Letter to his Friend in London (London, 1715), pp. 19–22. 40 See, for example, J.R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis (London, 1961); Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1990); and Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994). 41 [William Wotton], A Vindication of the Earl of Nottingham From the Vile Imputations, and Malicious Slanders, Which have been cast upon Him in some late Pamphlets (London, 1714), p. x. Howard Weinbrot argues Wooton wrote this pamphlet against the extreme partisanship 37

49

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 49

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

Because they believed the Succession, like the Revolution, was founded on established legal procedures, Tories argued the real danger to it came from Whig attempts to impose a more radical interpretation. From the Tory perspective, as Jonathan Swift asked, ‘what hath Resistance to do with the Succession of the House of Hanover?’42 For Tories, George’s right to the throne was grounded on the long-standing right of King and Parliament to alter the succession, expressed in the Act of Settlement of 1701. This Act named Sophia, Electress of Hanover (George’s mother) and her Protestant descendants as the rightful successors to the crown. But because it rested on the same foundation as the Revolution – the right of the monarch and Parliament to alter the succession – Tories cited it as the foundation of Queen Anne’s right as well. Referring to the Act of Settlement and its multiple confirmations, William Wotton wrote ‘all that do not think Her [Anne] an Usurper are bound by those Laws’.43 As John Shore reminded the Sussex Quarter Sessions, ‘the Succession of the Crown. . . and the Preservation of our Religion and Properties, are happily Established by. . . Sound and Effectual Laws’.44 The Tory commitment to hereditary right, as one anonymous author put it, meant ‘no more than Hereditary Right according to that Act which excludes Papists’.45 For Tories the Succession, like the Revolution, was an unusual but not extraordinary event. It was governed by laws based on ancient constitutional principles and required no appeal to rights of resistance which they deemed extralegal. Tories also claimed they had proven their support for the Hanoverian Succession through actions. It had been, after all, a Tory administration that passed the Act of Settlement. Tories had also been in charge in 1714 and overseen the transfer of power to King George. Just prior to the 1715 election, for example, the Tory bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury, asked voters to consider ‘the Conduct of the Church Party; how they were the Men made and confirmed the Act of Settlement; how they were the Men recognized the King’s Title, and Proclaimed him with all possible Marks of Duty’.46 Responding to Whig claims that the Tory clergy were spreading disloyalty before Anne’s death, Jonathan Swift proclaimed, ‘that there are not Ten Clergymen in England. . . who do not abhor the Thoughts of the Pretender reigning over us’.47 Writing of Defoe’s Review and other writings: see Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture 1660–1780 (Baltimore, MD, 2013), pp. 88–9. 42 [Jonathan Swift], The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, Set forth in their Generous Encouragement of the Author of the Crisis (London, 1714), p. 16. 43 [Wotton], A Vindication of the Earl of Nottingham, p. xii. 44 John Shore, MD, A Charge, Deliver’d at the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, For the County of Sussex, Held at Chichester, On Monday the Fifth Day of April, 1714 (London, 1714), p. 13. 45 The Necessity of Peace and Union Among Members of the Church of England; Proving the Names of Whig and Tory Are Mischievous and Unreasonable, and tend only to destroy our Religion and Liberties (London, 1715), p. 5. 46 [Francis Atterbury], English Advice to the Freeholders of England ([London], 1714), p. 8. 47 [Swift], The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, p. 10.

50

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 50

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

at the end of 1714, an anonymous Tory looked back with pride on the party’s behaviour. ‘The Tories shew themselves to be governed by a steady Principle; their Loyalty dies not with the Prince. . . they have done all that Men could do in this important Conjuncture, to secure his Majesty’s Succession.’48 Since it was so secure, Tories saw Whig claims that the Succession was in danger as a dangerous partisan tactic. According to The Examiner, ‘the only Danger of the Protestant Succession’ was the ‘keeping up of Party-Rage, and the Promotion of Strife and Discord’.49 Tories argued that by making the illegitimate principle of resistance the basis for the Hanoverian Succession, Whigs weakened the case of it rather than strengthening it. The Irish Tory curate Edward Mathews complained that while believers in passive obedience and hereditary right ‘heartily run in with the present Settlements in the Illustrious House of Hanover. . . nothing less will satisfy some Persons than to make the Revolution a Rebellion’.50 John Shore agreed, arguing that the Succession was secured by ‘Sound and Effectual Laws’ rather than ‘Republican, as well as Popish Principle of deposing Princes’.51 Once the Whigs took power at Anne’s death, Tories feared that the regency’s concern to establish an exclusively Whig regime threatened the long-term stability of Hanoverian rule. As William Stratford, the Tory canon of Christ Church Oxford, wrote on 5 August 1714, ‘He [George] has it in his power to establish not only himself, but his family. . . If they who are his justices should be his counsellors, his reign will be uneasy, and should he stave off the evil in his days, it would come upon his posterity.’52 The Tory newspaper The Examiner agreed, arguing that the Whigs, by pretending to engross all Zeal for the Succession to themselves, and to make it the distinguishing Badge of One Party only (and that a very inconsiderable One) have. . . brought as much Detriment upon the Han—r Family, as it is in the Power of a few Clamourous Wretches to do.53

If there was a danger to the Succession, Tories argued, it came from Whig attempts to monopolise power. For Tories the Succession was important, but not a cause for alarm. It was secured by law, in the Act of Settlement; by affection, in the popular aversion to a popish king; and by the loyalty of the Tory ministry, who as the defenders of the Church were the best friends of both the Revolution and the Succession. The only danger to the latter came from Whigs who, whether from a desire to monopolise the glory of the Revolution or from more sinister motives sought 48

The Whigs Title To Be Sole Favourites Examin’d (Dublin, 1714), pp. 5–6. The Examiner Vol. VI, no. 6, 11 June [1714]. 50 Mathews, The Divine Original of Civil Government, p. 29. 51 Shore, A Charge, Deliver’d at the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, for the County of Sussex, p. 14. 52 HMC, Portland, VII, 198. 53 The Examiner Vol. V, no. 42, 23 April 1714. 49

51

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 51

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

to taint it with the doctrine of resistance. As long as the Revolution was understood as a limited event that had not changed anything fundamental in Britain, both it and the Succession were secure. III

Both Tory and Whig writers presented the Succession and its relationship to the Revolution as the central issue in 1715. But a number of incidents in 1714 and 1715 combined to undermine the Tory argument that there was no threat to the Succession, lending credence to the Whigs’ claim that the Tory party was rife with Jacobite sympathisers, confirmed by the defections of Bolingbroke and Ormonde to France and the ‘Pretender’, James Francis Edward Stuart. But the publication of Daniel Defoe’s The Secret History of the White Staff and its companion piece Advice to the People of Great Britain was even more damaging to Tories because it directly undermined the claims their candidates and polemicists were making. Defoe wrote The White Staff at the behest of Robert Harley, to defend the earl of Oxford against the Whig allegation that he supported the restoration of the ‘Pretender’. Defoe portrayed Oxford as a disinterested and patriotic moderate above party conflict. ‘The Parties who bandied the Nation against it self’, he wrote, ‘and by whose Rage our Ruin was so near’, only cared about places. They had lost any sense of national interest they once had. Oxford was cast as the nation’s saviour, a man who ‘saw with other Eyes than those Instruments saw with, and pursued other Ends than they pursued’.54 Oxford, according to Defoe, wished to preside over a moderate, bipartisan ministry, but was forced to rely on the Tories ‘by the Opposition he met with from the displaced Party’, the Whigs. He also faced opposition from two extreme factions among the Tories: those who were ‘really Jacobites in their Principles’ and hoped to find a way to bring in the ‘Pretender’, and a group of ‘High, Hot, out of Temper Politicians. . . acting upon Principles of absolute Government’.55 For four years Oxford and his moderate allies kept both sets of extremists in check, until the Jacobite faction forced him from power. Providentially, Anne’s death three days later threw the Jacobites into confusion, and the Protestant Succession went ahead. Defoe closed the first pamphlet, Advice to the People of Great Britain, with a call to non-partisanship, ‘that we cease that foolish strife, forget the Wrongs done to one another, and bury the Resentment of past Follies in the Joy of the present Establishment, joining together upon a disinterested Principle, to cultivate our 54

[Daniel Defoe], Advice to the People of Great Britain, With Respect to Two Important Points of their Future Conduct: I. What they ought to expect from the King II. How they ought to behave to him (London, 1714), pp. 5, 7. 55 [Daniel Defoe], The Secret History of the White Staff, Being An Account of Affairs under the Conduct of some late Ministers, and of what might probably have happened if Her Majesty had not Died (London, 1714), pp. 20–2.

52

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 52

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

own Advantages’.56 If factionalism continued, he warned, the ‘Pretender’ would find Britain an easy prey. The intended message of these pamphlets was that Oxford and his moderate, loyal Tory allies must be part of the new ministry, to hold the nation together. Whigs, however, found a different message. They took The Secret History of the White Staff as evidence for their arguments linking Tories and Jacobites. In a thanksgiving sermon for the accession of King George, the dissenting minister Simon Browne cited the Secret History as evidence of the dire state of affairs under the Tory ministry, ‘when the Advocates of the late Managers confess there was a design among them in Favour of the Pretender’.57 The author of The Conduct of the Tories noted that while they denied their Jacobite sympathies while in power, they had now ‘been acknowledged publickly by the Staff’.58 The Whig John Oldmixon used the Secret History to refute Francis Atterbury’s claim in English Advice to the Freeholders of England that the Tories were well affected to the Hanoverian Succession. ‘Has not the Staff owned’, Oldmixon wrote, ‘that the two great Ministers, who were to succeed him in the Management, were in the Pretender’s Interest?’59 For the Whigs, The Secret History of the White Staff confirmed their most potent argument against the Tories. There is supporting evidence that the wider public shared the Whigs’ concern about the Succession and that the Whigs’ arguments were more effective in mobilising popular support. First, the movement of stock and commodity prices during the illness and death of Anne and the accession of George suggests considerable and widespread public unease about the Succession. Second, the issues taken up by crowds in out-of-doors politics indicate Whig arguments about the Succession had more traction: pro-Whig crowds echoed Whig rhetoric about the Succession while pro-Tory crowds ignored or even opposed the Succession. The pattern of stock and commodity prices inferred widespread concern about the Succession from 1713 to 1715. Several London newspapers listed stock prices and the price of various commodities on a weekly basis.60 Stock prices were often cited by contemporaries as evidence of public confidence, and as 1713 turned to 1714 public confidence was declining. As Figure 1 indicates, the prices of Bank of England and East India Company stock began to decline in late 1713 and early 1714 with the queen’s health, only to revive sharply after the accession of George I on 1 August. Investors appeared to be worried about what would happen when Anne died, and were relieved when the house of Hanover came to the throne peacefully and without opposition. 56 [Defoe],

Advice to the People of Great Britain, pp. 10, 13–14. Simon Browne, A Noble King a Blessing to a Land. A Sermon Preached at Portsmouth, January 20, 1714/15 Being a Day of Publick Thanksgiving for the Peaceable Accession of our Sovereign King George to the Throne of Great Britain (London, 1715), p. 28. 58 The Conduct of the Tories Consider’d (London, 1715), p. 33. 59 [John Oldmixon], Remarks on a Late Libel privately dispers’d by the Tories, Entituled, English Advice to the Freeholders of England (London, 1715), p. 5. 60 The data I have used were taken from The Post Boy and The British Mercury. 57

53

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 53

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

Figure 1: Bank and East India Company Stock Prices, 1713–15

Commodity prices, particularly the price of wheat at London’s Bear Quay, exhibited the opposite behaviour, rising in late 1713 and early 1714 before falling back to previous levels after August 1714 (see Figure 2). Rising prices suggests increased demand, perhaps caused by people stockpiling in expectation of trouble. Combined with the data on stock prices, this suggests that in late 1713 and the first half of 1714 there was profound anxiety about the Succession. That both stock prices rose and commodity prices fell back to previous levels so quickly after 1 August suggests that the accession of George I and the installation of a Whig ministry resolved much of this anxiety. While this price data suggest that a wider public shared Whig concerns for the safety of the Succession, out-of-doors activity in 1714 and 1715 suggests that Whig arguments about the Succession generated greater popular support. Whig crowds almost always brought up the Succession, while for Tories the danger to the Church was a more reliable rallying cry. In other words, Tory arguments about the Succession failed to make a lasting impression even on Tory supporters. One sign of popular concern were the associations formed under Whig auspices in the spring of 1714. These associations, in the words of a Scottish group centred on the Edinburgh bookseller John Martin, intended ‘to take proper measures to hinder the enemies of our holy religion, her Majesty’s person & government & the protestant Succession in the family of hanover, from putting their hellish designs in execution’.61 For this group proper measures meant military preparations: they encouraged Whig gentlemen to arm and drill men and circulated a manual of military exercises. Others, like 61

NLS, Miscellaneous MS, MS 1789.

54

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 54

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

an association of London Whigs, focused on identifying potentially ‘dangerous persons’ to be watched.62 Figure 2: Price of Wheat at Bear Quay 1713–1563

There were also more public displays of concern and support. Often these were organised by Whigs, but they seemed to attract popular support. On the queen’s birthday in February 1714, for example, the Whigs staged a procession through London to burn effigies of the pope, the ‘Pretender’ and the devil. The procession was accompanied by 500 people carrying candles and torches, and chanting slogans such as ‘preserve the Protestant Succession’ and ‘No Popery, No Pretender’.64 In the spring of 1715 they embraced George’s birthday, 28 May, ‘with Bonfires, Illuminations, and other publick Marks of Rejoicing’ in London.65 Scottish Whigs organised similar celebrations throughout Scotland, including Edinburgh, Kirkcudbright, Aberdeen and Ayr.66 Popular activity in support of Tories, on the other hand, ignored the Succession and focused on the Church. During the Hertford election, for example, the Tory candidate was accompanied by about sixty people chanting ‘no Presbyterian, High Church and Sacheverell, Low Church and the devil’.67 62

London Politics 1713–1717, pp. 19–20. These ward books were in preparation as early as the club’s third meeting, 20 May 1714. During the ’15 they shared their lists with the government. For more on these London associations, see Gary Stuart de Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party 1688–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 262–4. 63 The error bars in this graph represent the range of prices given in London newspapers. 64 The Englishman no. LV, 9 Feb 1714. 65 The Flying Post no. 3651, 31 May 1715. 66 The Flying Post no. 3657, 14 June 1715. 67 An Account of the Riots, Tumults, and other Treasonable Practices; Since His Majesties Accession to the Throne (London, 1715), p. 16.

55

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 55

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

Contrary to the intention of Tory candidates and pamphlet writers, who tried to position themselves as defenders of both the Church and the Succession, crowds more commonly portrayed the two at odds. On the day of George’s coronation, a crowd in Bristol interrupted celebrations with cries of ‘God Bless Dr. Sacheverell’ and ‘Down with the Round Heads’.68 In Taunton on the same occasion, a crowd gathered demand that the Whig revellers ‘Sound for the Church, Sound for Sacheverell.’69 The same pattern sometimes repeated itself on a personal scale. James Jennings, a resident of Blackfriars, London, was celebrating the accession of George on 1 August when one of his neighbours, John Mollypratt, approached him and offered a health to ‘the Pious Memory of Queen Anne & Ended with a health to the Greatest of Tories’. Jennings counter-offered a health to King George, which Mollypratt refused. Some harsh words were exchanged. A few days later Mollypratt returned with some friends and asked pardon. Jennings agreed on the condition that Mollypratt and his friends ‘Drink his Majesties King George health & deny the Pretender’, but they refused.70 The popular reaction to the Succession has two important elements. First, there appears to have been fairly widespread concern about the Succession, echoing Whig claims that Tory rule had put it in danger. Second, there were two positions espoused by crowds and demonstrators. One supported the Whigs and the Succession. The other placed the Church in opposition to the Succession, flirting with Jacobitism.71 The loyal Tory position put forward by so many Tory candidates and authors – that the Succession was basically safe and that electing Tories would preserve both it and the Church – was absent. This could be an early indication of the ‘Tory crisis’ described by G.V. Bennett: that the logic of their ecclesiology and political theology pushed them towards Jacobitism almost in spite of themselves.72 But most fundamentally it revealed a divide between the Tory elite and their electoral base. At the level of popular reaction, both sides accepted the Whigs’ argument that the Revolution and Succession were exclusively compatible with Whig principles. IV

Despite the fact that the 1710 and 1713 elections produced large Tory majorities while the 1715 election produced a large Whig majority, the patterns of voting were very similar. None of the identifiable elements of the Tory coalition 68

[John Oldmixon], The Bristol Riot (London, 1714), p. 18. An Account of the Riots, Tumults, and other Treasonable Practices, p. 14. 70 TNA, SP 35/2 fol. 99. 71 For a more expansive analysis of the popular disturbances that ‘were seldom overtly Jacobite’, see Paul K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 173–9. 72 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, pp. 295–6, 307–10. 69

56

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 56

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

switched sides and, admittedly based on limited evidence, there does not appear to have been a massive net shift among individual voters. There does, however, appear to have been a more subtle but decisive move to the Whigs that, in a tightly contested political dynamic, produced a large change. Like the 1710 and 1713 elections, the 1715 election was highly partisan.73 As Table 5 shows, more than 80 per cent of voters cast a partisan ballot. Table 5: Partisan Voting in 1715 Constituency

Partisan Percentage

Bedfordshire

84.8%

Gloucestershire

94.3%

Norfolk

97.8%

Worcestershire

83.4%

Norwich

91.5%

There were also two constituencies in which a 1710 election can be compared to a 1715 or 1716 election. Unfortunately, both were bye-elections, meaning that there was only one candidate for each party and that we are a bit less certain about partisanship. The two elections, a 1715 bye-election in Essex and a 1716 bye-election in Northumberland, were quite different. In Northumberland there was a high degree of party switching. Only 61.0 per cent of 1710 Whig voters picked the Whig candidate in 1716, while just 54.6 per cent of 1710 Tory voters remained with their party’s candidate. Some of this disloyalty could be explained by divisions among Northumberland Tories over the Jacobite rising.74 Whatever the cause, the number of Whig defectors to the Tories (146) was nearly balanced by the number of Tories who went Whig (171) – neither party seems to have gained substantial advantage. In Essex, by contrast, there was an extremely high degree of partisan loyalty from 1710 to 1715. The Tories held onto 89.5 per cent of their 1710 voters and the Whigs did even better, holding 92.3 per cent of 73

The poll books for 1715 used in this chapter are: A Copy of the Poll for Knights of the Shire For the County of Bedfor, Taken at the Town of Bedford, February Sixteenth, 1714/5 (London, 1715), Gloucester, February the 9th, 1714[/15] Alphabetically Digested (London, 1714[/15]), A Copy of the Poll for the Knights of the Shire for the County of Norfolk Taken at Norwich, Feb. 18, 1714[/15] (Norwich, 1715), A Copy of the Poll For The County of Worcester, Taken the Second and Third Days of February, in the Year, 1714 between Sir John Pakington, Bart., Thomas Vernon, and Samuel Pytts, Esqrs.; Candidates for Knights of the said County (Worcester, 1715), An Alphabetical Draught of the Poll in the City of Norwich of Waller Bacon and Robert Britiff, Esqs.; Taken The Second of February, 1714[/15] (Norwich, 1714[/15]), An Alphabetical Draught of the Poll in the City of Norwich of Robert Bene and Rich. Berney, Esqs.; Taken The Second of February, 1714[/15] (Norwich, 1714[/15]), An Exact List Of the Names of the Gentlemen and other Freeholders That Voted for Knights of the Shire for the County of Essex, (In the Room of Thomas Middleton, Esq.; Deceas’d) As the same was Taken the 31st of May, 1715 (London, 1715). 74 Sedgwick, The History of Parliament, I, p. 295.

57

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 57

22/08/2019 08:57

Christopher Dudley

their voters. Each of the identifiable subgroups of voters were similarly loyal.75 Two cases with differing outcomes do not support any clear conclusions, but it does not appear that either party gained a significant net benefit from voter defections. The general demographic patterns in 1710 and 1713 were repeated in 1715. Tables 6 and 7 show that both clergy and gentlemen continued to support Tories, although by smaller margins that they had in the previous two elections. Whigs even won narrowly among clergy in Norfolk and Worcestershire and among gentlemen in Bedfordshire. Table 6: Clergy Voting in 1715 Constituency

N

Tory%

Whig%

Tory diff

Whig diff

Bedfordshire

93

46.2%

34.4%

+12.8

-17.0

Gloucestershire

88

72.7%

22.7%

+26.9

-25.8

Norfolk

305

42.3%

53.1%

-7.4

+5.0

Worcestershire

56

37.5%

44.6%

-6.9

+5.6

Norwich

46

58.7%

34.8%

+17.4

-15.4

Essex (bye)

175

87.4%

12.6%

+37.1

-37.1

Table 7: Gentry Voting in 1715 Constituency

N

Tory%

Whig%

Tory diff

Whig diff

Bedfordshire

105

28.6%

57.1%

-4.8

+5.7

Gloucestershire

45

48.9%

46.7%

+3.1

-1.8

Norfolk

90

75.6%

22.2%

+25.9

-25.9

Norwich

54

64.8%

29.6%

+23.5

-20.6

Essex (bye)

52

57.7%

42.3%

+7.4

-7.4

The voting data suggest a great deal of continuity in the 1710, 1713 and 1715 elections. The trends identified in 1710 and 1713 continued in 1715 despite the very different outcomes of the elections. There does not appear to have been a dramatic swing towards the Whigs in 1715. Instead, Whigs lost among clergymen and gentlemen by a little less and were perhaps able to entice a few Tory voters to change sides. It is also possible, although virtually impossible to demonstrate, that concerns about the Succession motivated a disproportionately high number of new Whig voters. 75

For Tories, 92.1 per cent of gentlemen, 97.7 per cent of clergy, and 97.5 per cent of esquires who voted Tory in 1710 did so again in 1715. For Whigs the comparable figures were 92.3 per cent of gentlemen, 100 per cent of clergy and 96.4 per cent of esquires.

58

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 58

22/08/2019 08:57

THE REVOLUTION AND THE SUCCESSION IN THE ELECTION OF 1715

The evidence from the previous section suggests the Succession was the reason for this subtle shift. The Whig argument that the Succession and Revolution were in danger as long as Tories were in power was more popular that the Tory arguments about the Revolution. The 1710, 1713 and 1715 elections were each about competing versions of the Revolution, but the death of Anne, the accession of George, and the more acute threat of the ‘Pretender’ pushed voters towards the Whigs in 1715. For contemporaries the politics of the Hanoverian Succession were the politics of the Glorious Revolution. Like the Revolution itself, Tories and Whigs each wanted the Succession but for different reasons. Unlike the Revolution, the Succession resulted in the unambiguous victory of one party over the other. The new monarch and the voters picked the Whigs as the only true defenders of the Revolution’s legacy. In this respect the Hanoverian Succession fits a pattern in revolutionary or post-revolutionary politics in which one party – such as the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, the Islamists in Iran, or the Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Mexico – successfully claims a contested multi-partisan revolution as its own.

59

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 59

22/08/2019 08:57

3 The Backlash Against Anglican Catholicity, 1709–18 Brent S. Sirota In his August 1709 visitation charge, Bishop Charles Trimnell cautioned the clergy of the diocese of Norwich against the temptations of clericalism. He urged the assembled clergymen not to succumb to the ‘desire to be greater than the plain Institution and design of our Office’. Amidst the intellectual climate of the early English Enlightenment, efforts to ‘traduce the whole Order of the Clergy’ abounded – recently epitomised in the freethinker Matthew Tindal’s The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, which Trimnell condemned with ‘utmost Abhorence’.1 But such outrages in no way justified what the bishop darkly referred to as ‘other Methods. . . to secure the Honour of the Clergy’, by which he meant articulations of clerical authority and autonomy far beyond what the doctrine of the Church of England, and perhaps Protestantism itself, allowed. Trimnell singled out for censure three notions in particular: first, the independence of the Church from the state; second, the conception of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a proper, material sacrifice; and third, the necessity of priestly absolution for remission of sins.2 These doctrines were emblematic of a wider theological and ecclesiological turn toward what we might call Anglican catholicity in the later years of the reign of Queen Anne, a movement to cultivate more primitive elements in the polity, sacramental theology and liturgy of the English Church at the expense of what was perceived as the solafideism and cramping Erastian Protestantism of the Reformation. In decrying these props of a resurgent sacerdotalism among the Anglican clergy, Trimnell effectively set the agenda for the campaign against Anglican catholicity that dominated ecclesiastical politics throughout the ensuing decade. The backlash against Anglican catholicity proceeded amidst a backdrop of genuine ideological realignment in English ecclesiastical politics. Church 1 On the controversy surrounding Tindal, see Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 174–8; see also Dmitri Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church-State Relationship’, HJ, 54 (2011), 714–40. 2 Charles Trimnell, A Charge Deliver’d to the Clergy of the Diocese of Norwich. At the Visitation of that Diocess, in the Year, 1709 (London, 1710), pp. 3–5, 24.

60

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 60

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

Whiggery was in the process of concluding its long migration from dissidence to establishmentarianism.3 Having long abandoned the posture of opposition it had assumed in the decade before the Glorious Revolution, Church Whiggery was now, in the main, an ideology of the Court. With its dominance of the postRevolutionary episcopate and its outsized commitment to Protestant monarchy, Whig churchmanship had virtually assumed the mantle of Anglican royalism that was once synonymous with Toryism. Anglican High Churchmanship, meanwhile, was in crisis. Ground between a burgeoning fiscal–military state and an increasingly open and pluralistic civil society, the partisans of the High Church struggled to demarcate the province of the ecclesial in public life. The gains High Churchmen had made in the latter part of Queen Anne’s reign – royal countenance, a toehold in the episcopate, the sitting of Convocation – were undoubtedly more apparent than real. That High Church clergy seized upon such gestures as grounds for a revived ‘ecclesiastical toryism’, whose core commitments – monarchy, hierarchy, conformity, the union of Church and State –were substantially unaltered from the reign of Charles II, only underscores their discomfiture in opposition.4 These establishmentarian instincts impelled Anglican High Churchmanship in the final years of the Stuart dynasty toward the kind of throne-and-altar churchmanship overwhelmingly associated with the incendiary preaching of the London clergymen Henry Sacheverell. But Sacheverell’s brand of political divinity was already an anachronism at the time of his impeachment in 1710. Its extreme royalism and episcopalism offered very little (beyond a season or two of partisan vainglory) to a disaffected inferior clergy seeking some measure of social and political independence from the Revolution state. Worse, its reluctance to actually engage the issue of dynastic legitimism and the question of the royal succession effectively confined what salience it possessed to the already dwindling lifetime of Queen Anne.5 Even as the paroxysm surrounding Sacheverell’s preaching and impeachment unfolded, catholic articulations of clerical authority and independence well beyond the retrograde tenets of Anglican Toryism were emerging as an alternative vehicle of clerical disaffection. 3

On Restoration Church Whiggery, see Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. 400–34; for its post-Revolutionary orientation toward the court, see Brent S. Sirota, ‘‘‘The Leviathan Is Not Safely to be Angered”: The Convocation Controversy, Country Ideology and Anglican High Churchmanship’, in Religion and the State: Europe and North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Joshua B. Stein and Sargon G. Donabed (Lanham, MD, 2012), pp. 41–61. 4 The phrase is from Charles John Abbey and John Henry Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1906), p. 51. 5 On the failures of Sacheverellism to forestall the Hanoverian Succession, see Daniel Szechi, ‘A Non-Resisting, Passively Obedient Revolution: Lord North and Grey and the Tory Response to the Sacheverell Impeachment’, in Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, ed. Mark Knights (Malden, MA, 2012), pp. 118–27.

61

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 61

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

The immediate source of this spirit of theological and ecclesiological catholicity that seized the Anglican clergy in the first decade of the eighteenth century was, undoubtedly, the schismatic communion of the non-jurors – those clerics and their lay adherents who had withdrawn from the established Church in protest of the Revolution of 1688–89 and the consequent ecclesiastical settlement. Bishop Trimnell certainly thought this was the case. The proponents of the doctrines he decried ‘are of the late Separation from us’, the bishop warned the Norwich clergy. But Trimnell cannily discerned that the appeal of their clericalist doctrines among the conformist (that is, juring) Anglican clergy might far outstrip that of their dynastic politics. He hoped that his clergy would not ‘be forward to entertain what they urge; purely because it seems to magnify our Office’.6 The bishop had reasonable cause for alarm. The recent campaign against Tindal had largely proceeded in the clericalist language favoured by the non-jurors. Moreover, that controversy had produced in the leading non-juror George Hickes’s extraordinary Two Treatises one of Anglican catholicity’s most magisterial works of apologetical divinity.7 More worrisome still were the blatant incursions of catholic doctrine into the mainstream of conformist Anglicanism. In March 1708, a London bookkeeper Roger Laurence, no longer assured of the validity of his nonconformist baptism in infancy, was surreptitiously re-baptised by John Betts, a reader at Christ Church, Newgate Street – unbeknownst to both the vicar and the bishop.8 Laurence then justified the rite in his anonymous tract entitled Lay Baptism Invalid, which denied outright the soteriological efficacy of sacraments performed outside the episcopal communion, that is, by those whose ordination proceeded outside the lines of apostolic succession. In 1709, the Kent clergyman John Johnson, vicar of Cranbrook, affirmed the sacrificial character of the Eucharist in the second part of his anonymous clerical handbook, The Clergy-man’s Vade Mecum.9 The intention of such efforts, warned the London clergyman John Hancock, was ‘to make some prejudiced People believe, the Church has gone a little too far in her Reformation, and must come nearer to Popery, before she come to the Truth’.10 Even though the appearance of these notions was to be substantially eclipsed by the throne-and-altar integralism that spectacularly commanded the public stage in the Sacheverell affair, the penetration of catholic ecclesiology 6 Trimnell,

Charge Deliver’d, pp. 5–6. George Hickes, Two Treatises, One of the Christian Priesthood, The Other of the Dignity of the Episcopal Order, 2nd edn (London, 1707); on Hickes’s Two Treatises, see William J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 279–82. 8 On Laurence, see the editor’s preface to R. Laurence, Lay Baptism Invalid, ed. William Scott (London, 1841), pp. vii–li. 9 [John Johnson], The Clergy-Man’s Vade Mecum, Part II (London, 1709), pp. cviii–cvix; Trimnell, Charge Deliver’d, pp. 13–18. 10 [John Hancock], An Answer to some things contain’d in Dr. Hicks’s Christian Priesthood asserted (London, 1709); Bod., Ballard MS 14, fol. 87. 7

62

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 62

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

and sacramental theology into the mainstream of Anglican thought was already unmistakable. In the years immediately preceding and following the Hanoverian Succession of August 1714, a significant number of influential Whig churchmen considered the condemnation and refutation of Anglican catholicity an ideological imperative. Indeed, the campaign was immediately bound up with the vindication of the Protestant Succession itself. And while the catholic tendency in Anglicanism was commonly associated with the non-juring communion and Jacobitism, it is important not to read the dispute as a mere cipher for dynastic politics. The threat Anglican catholicity posed was not merely to the succession of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In the eyes of Whig antagonists, the spectre of an autonomous, unaccountable spiritual power threatened the very possibility of a civil religion. At stake in the Protestant Succession, then, was more than simply the confessional allegiance of the ruling dynasty – it was the nature of English national Protestantism itself. Whig churchmen cultivated an English confessional identity predicated upon a civic and monarchical Protestantism, which linked Reformation to Revolution and both, of course, to the Protestant Succession in the house of Hanover.11 Anglican catholicity, by contrast, seemed to restrict the aura of divinity to the Church, its clergy and offices, relegating the forms and institutions of civic life to a lesser, if not an altogether uncovenanted sphere. The autonomous sacerdotal power claimed with mounting intemperance by Anglican High Churchmen could therefore be granted no quarter in the ecclesiastical nationalism over which Church Whigs claimed final custody. The backlash against Anglican catholicity, then, was more than a mere a doctrinal dispute or squabble between ecclesiastical parties. It was an effort to reinscribe the ecclesial firmly within civic life, to obviate the disjunction between spiritual and temporal, which the catholic tendency in Anglicanism portended. The zeal with which Whig churchmen sought to crack down on any stirrings of spiritual independence in this period goes some length toward accounting for the sheer worldliness of establishment churchmanship in the eighteenth century. I

Throughout the spring and summer of 1710, addresses prompted by the Sacheverell affair, poured into the court from nearly every civil and ecclesiastical constituency in the kingdom. Though variously coded to express their divergent political commitments, the addresses were virtually united in their exaltation of the monarchy and ecclesiastical supremacy of Queen Anne.12 While such 11

Rebecca Louise Warner, ‘Early Eighteenth Century Low Churchmanship: The Glorious Revolution to the Bangorian Controversy’ (University of Reading, PhD thesis, 1999). 12 HL, James Brydges, Duke of Chandos Letterbooks, Stowe Papers 57, pp. 55–6.

63

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 63

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

royalism was commonly hedged by what the Cinque Port of Hythe hailed as ‘Revolution Principles’, the addresses occasionally vented a decidedly less circumscribed vision of monarchy.13 The borough of St Albans, for instance, deployed jure divino language unreservedly, affirming that the queen’s ‘Right and Prerogative-Royal, is derived from the King of Kings alone’, and that she was, therefore, ‘accountable to no Power on Earth’, save her own conscience.14 Similarly, the county of Pembroke hailed the queen’s ‘high and exalted Dominion, deriv’d from the Hand of God’. The Corporation of Brecon pledged an unconditional loyalty to the sovereign, ‘fix’d upon such Principles, that admit of no Restrictions or Limitations in our Obedience’.15 The Irish Jacobite propagandist Charles Leslie was so gratified by the addresses’ affirmations of sacral monarchy and hereditary right that he considered them the first stirrings of ‘so Glorious a Revolution, so Happily Begun’ by which he meant, of course, a glorious counter-revolution through which the house of Stuart would be restored to the British throne.16 Leslie’s commandeering of the addresses on behalf of the Stuart cause only seemed to confirm the suspicions of Whig partisans.17 ‘What an Honour is this’, scoffed the arch-Whig London clergyman Benjamin Hoadly, ‘that the Non-Jurors and Papists speak the same Language about our Government that our Addressers do?’18 The plausibility that Leslie’s antics lent such charges placed enormous pressure on Sacheverell’s clerical brethren in London and Westminster to submit an address disclaiming any disaffection on their part to either the present establishment or the Protestant succession.19 The document quietly produced, reportedly by the leading High Churchmen Francis Atterbury, 13

A collection of the addresses which have been presented to the Queen, since the impeachment of the Reverend Dr. Henry Sacheverell. In two parts (London, 1711), II, p. 15. A Collection of the Addresses Which Have been Presented to the Queen Since the Impeachment of the Reverend Dr. Henry Sacheverell (London, 1710), I, p. 12. 14 Collection of Addresses, I, p. 25. 15 Collection of Addresses, t II, p. 2. 16 Charles Leslie, The Good Old Cause, Or, Lying in Truth, Being a Second Defence of the Lord Bishop of Sarum, From a Second Speech (London, 1710), pp. 30–1, 36; Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E. Doble (11 vols, Oxford, 1886), III, pp. 35–6. 17 See [Joseph Trapp], An Ordinary Journy [sic] No Progress: Or, A Man doing his own Business No Mover of Sedition (London, 1710), p. 7, where a pro-Sacheverell writer takes pains to distance the doctor’s cause from that of Leslie – an effort that was deeply resented by other non-jurors, Bod., Ballard MS 12, fol. 180; [Hilkiah Bedford], A Seasonable and Modest Apology in behalf of the Reverend Dr. George Hickes, and Other Non-Jurors (London, 1710), p. 14; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, III, pp. 35–7, 56–7. 18 [Benjamin Hoadly], The Jacobite’s Hopes reviv’d By our late Tumults and Addresses: Or, Some Remarks Upon a new Modest Pamphlet of Mr. Lesly’s against the Government, Entituled, The Good Old Cause: Or, Lying in Truth, &c. (London, 1710), p. 8; An Address to the Oxfordshire Addressors, and all others of the same strain (London [1710]); [Daniel Defoe], The Character of a Modern Addresser (London, 1710); Observator IX, 64 (23–26 Aug. 1710). 19 BL, Trumbull Papers, Add MS. 72495, fols 17–18; BL, White Kennett, Ecclesiastical History Notes, Lansdowne MS 1024, fol. 219; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, III, p. 44.

64

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 64

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

dean of Carlisle, and George Smalridge, a lecturer at St Dunstan-in-the-West, London, could not evade the mounting contradictions of Anglican Toryism.20 As one observer put it, the address laboured ‘to reconcile Hereditary Right with Parliamentary Limitation, and Irresistable Authority wth being Instrumental in the Revolution’.21 John Swynfen of St Magnus-the-Martyr, London Bridge, thought its professions on behalf of non-resistance and hereditary right irreconcilable with its affirmation of the Protestant Succession, ‘the one breathing nothing but the rankest Toryism, and the other the very spirit of Whiggism’.22 In spite of the bishop of London’s recommendation of the address, the Whig clergy of the metropolis largely refused to have any part of it – some departing from St Paul’s at the first airing of it, others declining to attend the reading altogether. By some accounts, the address presented to the queen at Kensington on 22 August 1710 bore the approval of less the half the clergy of London.23 Interestingly, the most prominent among the so-called ‘non-subscribing clergy’ of London – White Kennett, John Swynfen, John Hancock, Benjamin Hoadly – would soon be at the forefront of the assault on Anglican catholicity. The Anglican royalism on display in the Tory addresses, like that of Sacheverell himself, was plainly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions. But, as sharp-eyed observers noted, it also appeared orthogonal to the claims of ecclesiastical independence then gaining ground with the High Church clergy.24 And, indeed, these proceeded apace in the immediate aftermath of Sacheverell’s trial.25 Mere days after the verdict appeared William Nokes’s pointby-point refutation of Bishop Trimnell’s visitation charge from the previous summer. Writing, tellingly enough, under the nom de plume, ‘a Catholick’, Nokes assailed the Tudor Reformation, and its crowning achievement, the royal supremacy, as ecclesiologically ‘defective’. The overthrowing of the pope’s supremacy, he reasoned, in no way required that the monarch thereby become head of the Church. Similarly, in abolishing the mass, there was no just cause to disclaim the sacrificial character of the sacrament. And in altogether renouncing dispensations and indulgences, the priestly remission of sins was 20

London Gazette No. 4734 (22–24 Aug. 1710); on Atterbury and Smalridge’s involvement, see Bennett, Tory Crisis in Church and State, p. 123. 21 BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, fol. 219. 22 John Swynfen, The Objections of the Non-subscribing London Clergy against the Address from the Bishop of London, and the Clergy of London and Westminster, Printed in the Gazette, of Thursday, Aug 22, 1710 (London, 1710), p. 2; [Benjamin Hoadly], Some Short Remarks Upon the late Address of the Bishop of London and his Clergy to the Queen. In a Letter to Dr. S-m-l-d-g-e. (London, 1710); Review of the State of the British Nation VII, No. 67 (29 Aug 1710). 23 John Swynfen, The Reasons of the Absenting Clergy, For not Appearing at St. Paul’s, on Monday, August 21, 1710, 2nd edn (London, 1710), p. 25. 24 The High Church Mask pull’d off: Or, Modern Addresses Anatomized (London, 1710), pp. 11–12; The Voice of the Addressers: Or, A Short Comment Upon the Chief Things Maintain’d, or Condemn’d in our Late Modest Addresse (London, 1710), p. 16. 25 John Lewis, The Clergy of the Church of England Vindicated, In a Sermon Preach’d in the Metropolitical Church of Christ, Canterbury, On Tuesday, May 16, 1710 (London, 1710), pp. 7–19.

65

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 65

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

peremptorily abandoned. Nokes called for ‘a Revival and a new Reformation in Matters of Ecclesiastical Right and Discipline’ to undo the excesses of the first Reformation.26 In April 1710, the whiggishly inclined political commentator Ann Clavering witnessed a sermon at the Temple, in which an unnamed High Church clergyman affirmed that ‘no Prince on earth had the power to call God’s vicegerents (for so he stiled the parsons) to account on any score. Their power was from a more supreme being.’27 In May, the Bedfordshire rector Pawlet St John came to London to deliver the Bedford clergy’s Sacheverell address, and reportedly, while in town, preached a sermon at St James and elsewhere, ‘magnifying the Clergy, and exalting the Power of the Church, and willfully impugning the Queen’s Supremacy’.28 In July, the Somersetshire rector Thomas Coney preached a sermon in Sacheverellite Oxford in which he ceded an ‘absolute power in the prince’, but denied ‘that this Power should be transfer’d from Civil to matters purely Spiritual’. To do so, he warned, would be ‘to stretch the Prerogative, and confine the Priesthood; to strip the Church, to enrich the State; to be stingy to the Miter, and too liberal to the Crown’.29 The Devonshire vicar William Hume’s large treatise The Sacred Succession, Or a Priesthood By Divine Right, which appeared in October of that year, continued in this vein. Among the avant-garde of Anglican High Church thought, there was a burgeoning consciousness that the monarchy established on the Revolution footing was, in some very real sense, no longer amenable to the traditional methods of sacralisation. Neither indefeasible hereditary right nor political irresistibility disclosed the Crown’s divinity. This realisation impelled a palpable exteriorisation of the monarchy from the ecclesial sphere. ‘We know no Spiritual Authority’, William Hume wrote, ‘convey’d from Jesus Christ to the Civil Magistrate as such.’ If Sacherevellism embodied the traditional Tory faith that a union of throne and altar might be made sound under a pious sovereign and an orthodox episcopate, the Anglican catholic tendency harboured real doubts about the integration of church and state. That, warned Hume, was ‘Mr. Hobbs’s Polity’.30 As the royalist scales fell from the eyes of Anglican High Churchmen, non-jurors were happy to impart to their conforming brethren the wisdom of anti-Erastianism. Charles Leslie, for instance, couched his anonymous 1711 pamphlet The Mitre and the Crown in terms broadly acceptable to juring 26 [William Nokes], Modest reflections on the Right Reverend the Bishop of Norwich his late charge to the reverend clergy of his diocess (1710), pp. 51, 78–80. 27 H.T. Dickinson (ed.), The Correspondence of Sir James Clavering (Gateshead, 1967), p. 76. 28 BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, fol. 213; White Kennett, The Wisdom of Looking Backward, To Judge the Better of One Side or T’Other By the Speeches, Writings, Actions, And Matters of Fact on Both Sides, For the Four Years Last Past (London, 1715), pp. 33–4. 29 Thomas Coney, Honesty and Plain-Dealing an unusual Bar to Honour and Preferment. A Sermon Preach’d at St. Mary’s Before the University of Oxford Upon Act-Sunday, July IX, 1710, 2nd edn (London, 1710), p. 5. 30 William Hume, The Sacred Succession: Or, A Priesthood by Divine Right (London, 1710), pp. 87, 227–8.

66

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 66

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

churchmen.31 The crown, he affirmed, was void of spiritual power. ‘The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Power of governing and feeding [Christ’s] Church’, Leslie explained, ‘was expressly given not to Civil Magistrates, but to the Apostles.’ And nothing in Christian history suggested that Christ had ‘voided the Church’s Charter, resum’d the Ecclesiastic Powers originally granted to his Apostles, and their Successors; and transferr’d them upon the Emperors, Kings and Queens of the Earth’. Indeed, the recent history of England reinforced the hazard of such an error. The crisis of the reign of James II, Leslie averred, was entirely attributable to that monarch’s mistaken conceit of the royal supremacy. ‘I am humbly of Opinion, that if such Notions of the Spiritual Power of Princes, by Right of their Civil Sovereignty, had not been instill’d in that unfortunate King, he would never have attempted upon the Establish’d Church as he did.’ Leslie did not press the dynastic question, as he had earlier. Instead, he simply channelled clerical disaffection against the Anglican establishment itself, which had made ‘our Kings and Queens as Popes to the Church, Devourers of her inherent Spiritual Rights’.32 It fell to critics to ensure that such aspirations for ecclesiastical autonomy remained firmly implanted in their Jacobite milieu. The anonymous anti-Stuart pamphlet, A Letter from a gentleman at the court of St. Germains, for instance, had the ‘Pretender’ pledging to ‘readily grant the Clergy that Authority and Independency, for which they wish so ardently’.33 But this may have been beside the point. Anti-Erastianism’s appeal may have lain precisely in its tendency to render the vexed question of the succession ancillary. At stake in the critique of a royal encroachment on the ecclesial sphere was the reality and integrity of spiritual power. ‘’Tis evident from the sacred Writings’, Leslie wrote, ‘that not Christian Kings, as such, but Christian Bishops, and Priests as such, have, and are without Let or Impediment, to execute, the Power of the Keys.’34 In other words, the power claimed on behalf of the clergy, the power here inoculated from political interference or oversight, was, ultimately, sacramental – the commission to bind and loosen, on earth as in heaven. The notion of a Church independent from the state thus provided 31 Indeed, so effectively that the pamphlet has long been attributed (without evidence) to Francis Atterbury. See Walter Scott (ed.), A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts. . . of the Late Lord Somers, 2nd edn (London, 1814), XII, pp. 282–9. White Kennett, however, attributed the pamphlet to Leslie (BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, fol. 375). 32 [Charles Leslie], The Mitre and the Crown, Or, A Real Distinction Between Them. In a Letter to a Reverend Member of the Convocation (London, 1711), pp. 6–7, 11, 15–17, 21. 33 A Letter from a gentleman at the court of St. Germains, to one of his friends in England (London, 1710), pp. 45–6. The pamphlet has long been erroneously attributed to Daniel Defoe, but is now thought to be the work of the Huguenot refugee Pierre Des Maizeaux: P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, ‘Daniel Defoe and A Letter from a Gentleman at the Court of St. Germains (1710)’, Études Anglaises, 48 (1995), 61–6; Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Pierre Des Maizeaux: History, Toleration, and Scholarship’, in History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute, ed. Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin (Oxford, 2006), pp. 385–98. 34 [Leslie], Mitre and the Crown, p. 13.

67

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 67

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

the ecclesiological cover for a genuine insurgency in Anglican sacramental theology. The catholic tradition in Anglicanism seemed to authorise a more authentically intercessory priesthood, whose sacramental ministrations were indispensable from the economy of salvation. Irrespective of any dynastic agenda to which it might have been appended, such an extreme sacerdotalism plainly appealed to an aggrieved Anglican clergy whose resentments were manifold: the heavy hand of the Revolution state, the economic predations of a grasping laity, the encroachments of Protestant nonconformists on their sacred function and the corrosive anticlericalism of the so-called ‘freethinkers’. Anglican catholicity was more than merely an antidote to the Revolution; it was a bulwark against modernity itself. II

The reign of Queen Anne was singular in the audacity of the sacramental theology it produced. Those committed to interpreting the early decades of the eighteenth century as the fulcrum of the English Enlightenment often mistake liberalising and rationalising trends in religious thought for the whole of theological innovation. Conservative clerical thought, however, was not standing still, secure in the hegemony guaranteed by the Anglican establishment. On the contrary, the period witnessed affirmations of priestly authority arguably unequalled within the discernible bounds of Protestant thought. Most infamous was, without question, the non-juring layman and historian Henry Dodwell’s 1706 Epistolary Discourse, which argued that the naturally mortal human soul only received and maintained its eligibility for immortality through the sacramental offices of an episcopal priest. The episcopate and priesthood thus mediated not simply the soul’s salvation, but its very perdurance.35 Dodwell’s outlandish mortalism, it must be stressed, was roundly condemned by churchmen of all stripes.36 Such a theology, charged the London vicar John Turner, made the clergy ‘not only Lords but even Tyrants over the Souls of the People’; and the sacraments, instruments not of consolation, but of ‘slavery’. It was to make ‘the external Form of Church Government’ the better part of Christianity, Turner complained; ‘as tho’ the Gospel was equally concern’d to support an absolute and incontroulable Power, in the Bishops and Presbyters over the Souls of the People, as for their Sanctification and Salvation’.37 But for all its eccentricity, 35

Henry Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse Proving, from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul is a Principle Naturally Mortal (London, 1707); and see Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity’, in History of Scholarship, pp. 305–56; Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 60–7. 36 Although see Leslie’s tepid defence, Rehearsal, II, No. 36 (11 Feb. 1707). 37 John Turner, Justice done to Human Souls, In a Short View of Mr. Dodwell’s late Book, Entitul’d, An Epistolary Discourse (London, 1706), pp. 109–12; and see also Edmund Chishull, A Charge

68

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 68

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

Dodwell’s sacramental theology haunted English ecclesiastical politics for the remainder of the reign. As the extreme sacerdotalism of the Anglican catholic tradition came to the fore, Dodwell’s soteriology appeared less as an aberration than a harbinger of a broader clerical reaction. The quondam nonconformist Roger Laurence’s 1708 exposition of the nullity of baptism performed outside the episcopal communion had not gained much traction in the years since its publication.38 Laurence, a bookkeeper, was not a figure of much consideration; and, at any rate, his name had not appeared on the tract. Moreover, the paroxysm surrounding the preaching and impeachment of Henry Sacheverell soon shunted all other concerns to the side. However, in the wake of the Sacheverell affair, with catholic articulations of clerical independence and authority gaining prominence, the question of the validity of non-episcopal sacraments resurfaced. In a sermon on 7 November 1710 at his cathedral church in Salisbury, Bishop Gilbert Burnet, the pillar of the Revolution episcopate, singled out for condemnation ‘a Conceit lately got in among us, that denies all who are not baptized among us to be Christians, shuts them out of Christ’s Covenant, and thinks them no better than Heathens’. Interestingly, Burnet listed this error as but one ‘among the other wild Conceits of the Corrupter of our Faith and Church’, Henry Dodwell.39 Laurence responded to Bishop Burnet with the treatise Sacerdotal Powers, which affirmed the necessity of confession, penance and priestly absolution for remission of sins.40 Thomas Brett, rector of Betteshanger, Kent, entered in the burgeoning controversy with a published letter, congratulating Laurence for vindicating ‘those Spiritual Rights of the Clergy, which I fear some of our own Order are too ready to oppose’.41 Brett became the conformist clergy’s foremost exponent of Anglican catholicity, with its central claim of the indispensability of the episcopal priesthood for the efficacy of the sacraments and, hence, for the entire economy of salvation.42 Thomas Brett’s entrance might be said to mark the commencement of what historians typically refer to as the ‘lay baptism controversy’ of the final years of of Heresy, Maintained aganst Mr. Dodwel’s late Epistolary Discourse, concerning the Mortality of the Soul (London, 1706). 38 The Cornwall rector William Roberts preached a visitation sermon on the invalidity of lay baptism before Bishop Blackall at Okehampton in August 1709. But, significantly, the sermon was not published until the height of the controversy in 1712: William Roberts, The Divine Institution of the Gospel Ministry, and the Necessity of Episcopal Ordination, Asserted (London, 1712). 39 Gilbert Burnet, Two sermons, preached in the Cathedral church of Salisbury (London, 1710), pp. 22–3; and see Burnet’s letter to Dodwell from February 1711, printed in Gilbert Burnet, A Collection of Speeches, Prefaces, Letters, &c. (London, 1713), pp. 65–7. 40 [Roger Laurence], Sacerdotal Powers: Or the Necessity of Confession, Penance and Absolution (London, 1711). 41 [Thomas Brett], A Letter to the Author of Lay-Baptism Invalid (London, 1711), p. 15. 42 John Turner, A defence of the doctrine and practice of the Church of England against some modern innovations (London, 1712), p. 19.

69

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 69

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

the reign of Queen Anne. While I have used this term in the past, I have grown increasingly convinced of its inadequacy. First, the doctrinal insurgency was rooted in a broader revival of catholic ecclesiological and sacramental imperatives in Anglican High Church thought; of this revival, Laurence’s writings were arguably more a beneficiary than a catalyst. Second, the controversy, from the beginning, comprehended an interlinked series of ecclesiological and theological revisions, of which the invalidity of non-episcopal (or ‘lay’, as critics called it) baptism was only a single concern. The nullity of so-called lay baptism was of a part with other revisions, such as the sacrificial conception of the Eucharist and the necessity of priestly absolution for remission of sins, all of which entangled the episcopal clergy deeper into the economy of salvation than Protestant orthodoxy typically allowed. These, in turn, generally subsisted under an ecclesiology of ecclesiastical independence from the state, predicated upon an absolute distinction between spiritual and temporal power. Contemporaries – above all, critics – discerned these doctrines as fundamentally interconnected and responded accordingly. While the notion of the invalidity of non-episcopal baptism was singled out for episcopal condemnation, most contemporaries perceived it not as an isolated lapse from orthodoxy but as part of a broader program of clerical aggrandisement. The extraordinary series of sermons Thomas Brett preached in the final years of Queen Anne’s reign on the priesthood and the sacraments, along with the intense hostility these elicited from opponents, go some length toward confirming this apprehension. Beginning in autumn 1711 and continuing over the following year, Thomas Brett preached and published a series of sermons outlining the Anglican catholic vision of the Church and its mediation of the Christian economy of salvation.43 In the first of these, the sermon On Remission of Sins preached at several London churches in November, Brett begins with the Great Commission described in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John: As my Father hath sent me, even so I send you, by which the apostles were invested with the power to remit or retain sin. While only God is capable of forgiving sin, this passage reveals that he chooses to do so, ‘by the Ministry of Man’, namely, the apostles and their successors in the episcopate. Absolution, then, was mediated by an episcopally ordained priesthood, historically authorised to perform the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. ‘It was by these ordinances that the Apostles remitted Sins. And Sins are remitted by these sacred Institutions, even to this Day.’ Brett then struck at the basic evangelical premise that repentance and conversion were sufficient for the forgiveness of sin. One’s sincere repentance, Brett assured his auditors, only ‘qualify’d him to be forgiven’, that is, only entitled him to participation in the ordinances of the Church; and it was by these that he was actually reconciled. In other words, there was no ordinary hope of salvation outside the clergy and offices of the Church. God, warned Brett, ‘will not pardon the Sins 43

Bod., Ballard MS 15, fol. 105; BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, fol. 345; Bod., Ballard MS 30, fol. 62; Turner, A defence of the doctrine and practice of the Church of England, p. 19.

70

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 70

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

of those who will not accept of his Pardon, according to the Methods which he has ordain’d and appointed’.44 Brett’s London sermon reportedly ‘made a great Noise in this Town’.45 And he was accused of urging ‘the necessity of the Absolution of the Priest much further than is consistent with the Doctrine of the Church of England’.46 Brett followed up this performance with a sermon on The Honour of the Christian Priesthood, in which he more fully expounded upon his sacerdotalism. The clergy of the Church of England, he confessed, ‘are and ever shall be ready to serve you in all holy Functions and Ministrations’. But we cannot do this unless you pay us that Honour which belongs to us as Priests of the most High God. For unless you receive us, and hearken to us as to the Ambassadors of God, unless you account of us as the Ministers of Christ, and Stewards of the Mysteries of God, and accordingly receive his Sacraments or Mysteries at our Hands; unless you come to our publick Assemblies, that we may offer up the Sacrifice of Prayer and Praise for you; unless after the humble Confession of your Sins, you receive the Absolution we declare and pronounce to the Penitent; unless you obey us in Spiritual Matters, and submit to the Word of God as we rightly expound it to you according to the Scriptures; it is not in our Power to do you Service.

The social prestige of the Anglican clergy, then, was directly implicated in Christian soteriology. Failure to recognise and honour the clergy as an order of men set apart for the express purpose of transacting with the divine was more than just fashionable enlightened anticlericalism, it was an outright rejection of the only legitimately appointed means of Christian salvation.47 Brett’s ecclesiology cut two ways. The indispensability of the episcopal ministry to Christian soteriology rendered unlikely the prospect of salvation unmediated by the offices of the Church. Both the solitary faith of the enthusiast and the workaday virtue of the creedal minimalist were equally of no avail. But it also meant that sacraments performed outside the episcopal communion were inefficacious. Here he was picking up a theme from Roger Laurence and the non-jurors. Salvation was mediated by the sacramental life of the Church, but the sacraments were only operative when licensed by divine commission. Such a commission only adhered in an apostolic episcopate. Brett thus denied the legitimacy of all non-episcopal clergy. Lacking an apostolic commission, Brett declared, Protestant Dissenters were ‘usurpers of the sacred office’, and ‘the Word of God, which they Preach, without Power and Authority, and the Sacraments which they Minister, without Validity’. This point was expanded upon in his early 1712 sermon on The Extent of Christ’s Commission to Baptize. 44

Thomas Brett, A Sermon on Remission of Sins (London, 1711), pp. 9–13, 14, 18–21, 24, 38. [White Kennett], A Letter About a Motion in Convocation, to the Reverend Dr. Thomas Brett, L.L.D (London, [1712]). 46 William Quarles to Archbishop Tenison, London, 5 Dec. 1711, Lambeth Palace Library MS 941, §30. 47 Thomas Brett, A Sermon of the Honour of the Christian Priesthood, And the Necessity of a Divine Call to that Office (London, 1712), pp. 9–10. 45

71

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 71

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

‘All that have received what they call Baptism from such Dissenting Teachers, as never had Episcopal Ordination’, Brett warned, ‘are in a very dangerous state, and ought as soon as possible to get themselves truly Baptiz’d in our Church.’ In the preface, he responded to the mounting criticism that it was his intention to unchurch not only Protestant nonconformity, but the whole of Reformed Christendom. It was not he, Brett claimed, who had excommunicated non-episcopal Protestants. ‘They have unchurched themselves’, he explained, ‘by rejecting Episcopacy and like Jeroboam, have made priests for themselves, without any commission from Christ.’ It was only his intention ‘to reduce them from this dangerous error and endeavoring to persuade them to return to the Church’.48 Brett’s next published sermon on The Christian Altar completes the sequence. There, Brett distilled the recently published Eucharistic theology of the non-juror George Hickes and the conformist clergyman John Johnson of Cranbrook (whose defence of Hickes, entitled The Propitiatory Oblation, appeared anonymously in 1710), to affirm the sacrificial character of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.49 In Brett’s telling, the sacrificial character of the sacrament was the ultimate guarantor of the exclusive sacerdotal authority of the Anglican clergy. Whereas a commemorative account of the holy sacrament implied a notion of ministers as teachers and exhorters, merely putting the people in mind of the historical fact of the atonement, the sacrifice reinforced the transactional and intercessory function of a true priesthood, ‘ordained for Men in things pertaining to God’. The very being of the Church, Brett explained, depended upon the existence of a sacrificial altar, the point at which the priest made oblation on behalf of the people and procured for them the pardon of sin. ‘And if we have no Ministers to dispense the Mysteries or Sacraments of God’, he argued, ‘then we have no Mysteries or Sacraments, and consequently no Church of God.’ Again, Brett made the implications for Protestant nonconformists explicit. Lacking an episcopal priesthood, there could be no altar and, hence, no genuinely sacramental transaction with God. ‘What those unhappy, misguided People partake of is not the Sacrament’, he warned, ‘but a profane Mockery of that Divine Ordinance.’50 Arguably more than any other figure, Thomas 48

Thomas Brett, The Extent of Christ’s Commission to Baptize. A Sermon Shewing the Capacity of Infant’s to Receive, and the utter Incapacity of our Dissenting Teachers to Administer Christian Baptism (London, 1712), pp. iii, vi; and see Thomas Bennett, The Rights of the Clergy of the Christian Church (London, 1711); Henry Gandy, The Infant’s Advocate (1712); Isaac Sharpe, The Regular Clergy’s Sole Right to Administer Christian Baptism (London, 1712). 49 [John Johnson], The Propitiatory Oblation in the Holy Eucharist Truly Stated, and Defended, From Scripture, Antiquity and the Communion-Service of Church of England (London, 1710); on Johnson’s authorship, see Bod., Ballard MS 15, fol. 94. A significantly expanded, third edition of George Hickes’s Two Treatises appeared in 1711, with a new response to Church Whig attacks – including Bishop Trimnell’s 1709 visitation charge – on his Eucharistic doctrine. 50 Thomas Brett, The Christian Altar and Sacrifice. A Sermon Shewing that the Lord’s Table is a

72

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 72

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

Brett was responsible for the wholesale importation of catholic articulations of clerical authority into the mainstream of conformist Anglicanism. As his caustic and defensive prefaces to these sermons indicated, Brett was under no illusions about the blowback he would receive from Dissenters and churchmen of a lower ecclesiology. He was unmoved. ‘If the Doctrine is true’, he shot back, ‘To call it High flying, will not make it false, nor excuse you for acting contrary to it.’51 Whig churchmen tried in vain to staunch the inflow of catholic principles right at the breach. On 22 February 1712, Robert Cannon, archdeacon of Norfolk, moved to put the Lower House of Convocation in mind of the ‘false and dangerous doctrine’ in Brett’s sermon On Remission of Sins, which he did not find consonant with either Scripture or the doctrine of the Church of England. He deemed Brett’s sacerdotalism ‘a Political Engine, whereby the Priest might govern the People in Body and Soul’.52 Tellingly, the High Churchmen in the majority rallied to defend Brett. The dean of Carlisle, George Smalridge, admitted that he might not be able to defend every passage in Brett’s sermon but moved that if the Convocation were to concern itself with censuring books, ‘they should rather fall upon those that had depressed the authority of the Church too low than upon such as had raised it too high’. The motion was shelved. Archbishop Thomas Tenison’s efforts in April to solicit the concurrence of the bishops in a declaration against the notion that non-episcopal sacraments were not valid also failed. Tory prelates such as John Sharp, archbishop of York, privately concurred with Tenison’s condemnation, but refused to sign the declaration publicly ‘for fear it might give too much Advantage to the Dissenters’. And also, presumably, for fear it would further enrage the lower clergy that were becoming ever more invested in these affirmations of Anglican catholicity and the sacerdotal authority they seemed to confer.53 III

The Whig-dominated Anglican establishment remained determined to snuff out this nascent catholicity in its cradle. And with the episcopate and Convocation hamstrung by High Church intransigence, Church Whigs took to the pulpit and press to have such notions definitively banished from the preserve of Anglican orthodoxy. The backlash against Anglican catholicity began in earnest in early 1712 and continued through the accession of the house of Hanover over two years later. These years witnessed a steady stream of sermons and pamphlets reaffirming the centrality of the royal supremacy to Anglican ecclesiology, and Proper Altar, And the Sacrament of the Eucharist A Proper Sacrifice (London, 1713), pp. 3, 23–4, 30–1. 51 Brett, Honour of the Christian Priesthood, preface. 52 Letter About a Motion in Convocation, p. 9; BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, fols 364–365. 53 A more detailed narrative of these events may be found in Sirota, Christian Monitors, pp. 178–84.

73

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 73

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

disparaging pretensions of sacerdotal independence that were deemed incompatible with the Protestant lineaments of English nationalism. This campaign constituted the veritable crucible of establishment divinity in the eighteenth century, which actively militated against any possibility of discontinuity between the sacred and civic life. The threat posed by Anglican catholicity was never strictly reducible to either counter-revolutionary Jacobitism or the unspecified menace of ‘popery’, but rather that of a free-floating spiritual power unbound by the institutions of national life. In early 1712, William Talbot, bishop of Oxford, dispatched a charge to the clergy of his diocese in advance of a visitation. The missive conspicuously echoed Bishop Trimnell’s visitation charge of three years earlier. Talbot recommended ‘a steadfast Adherence to the Doctrines of our Church’. After devoting a single sentence to the fashionable anti-trinitarianism of the early English Enlightenment, the bishop turned to the doctrines ‘savouring too much of Popery’, which occupied the bulk of the charge. Talbot inveighed against the independency of the Church from the State, ‘which overthrows the Foundation upon which the Reformation proceeded’; the sacrificial character of the Lord’s Supper; the necessity of sacerdotal absolution; and the nullity of non-episcopal baptism. The narrow, exclusionary tendency of such doctrines were affronts, not only to orthodoxy, but to what Talbot deemed ‘the Publick Good’, a tender regard for which he urged upon his clergy; for ‘our Constitution in Church and State’, he reminded them, ‘is such, as no other Nation is bless’d with’.54 Roger Laurence shot back that the problem plaguing national life was the want of a real priesthood, ‘of having our State more frequently try’d by such Spiritual Judges as these, whom our Lord Jesus Christ has set over us’. Without this, he complained, there was only religious atomism, where ‘every poor Wretch how Ignorant and Wicked soever, is left to his own unguided Judgment, to pass Sentence for himself concerning his particular Reconciliation with God’.55 Bishop Talbot’s warning that Anglican catholic doctrines were incompatible with English national life was gaining ground. On 27 April 1712, John Swynfen, a veteran of the controversies over Sacheverell and the London address, used his farewell sermon at St Magnus-the-Martyr, London Bridge, to assail those who would divide ‘the true regular Church of his Country’. Of this, the nonconformists were, he had no doubt, guilty. But Swynfen praised the past efforts at comprehending Protestant dissenters and, acknowledging their miscarriage, accepted religious toleration as a sensible alternative. ‘A little Good Temper, and Charity, and Candor’, he noted, ‘may suffice to support the [Civil] Society’, where total unanimity could not be had. But recently, High Churchmen had adopted a different posture; they ‘shew their Zeal for the Church by calling 54

William Talbot, The Bishop of Oxford’s Charge to the Clergy of His Diocese at His Visitation in the Year 1712 (London, 1712), pp. 8–9, 10–19, 26–7. The appendix contains a digest of Elizabethan and Caroline divines, affirming the legitimacy of lay baptism. 55 [Roger Laurence], The Bishop of Oxford’s Charge, Consider’d (London, 1712), p. 24.

74

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 74

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

for Fire from Heaven on all that differ from it’. Worse, their intolerance was compounded by their heterodoxy; their serial betrayals of the Reformation risked legitimating the dissenters’ schism ‘by advancing Doctrines as neither them, nor we, nor any of our Fathers were ever yet able to bear’. The ensuing litany of deviations was becoming familiar. How will they account for this, who make the Christian Clergy, a real Priesthood! Who affirm, that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is a material Sacrifice! Who say, that private, which is but another Term for auricular, Confession, and sacerdotal Absolution, are necessary to the Pardon of Sin: And Lastly, who affirm, That they are no Christians, that is, not baptiz’d, who are not so by one Episcopally ordained.

These were not, Swynfen affirmed, the doctrines of the Church of England; if they were, ‘the Dissenters would have stronger Arguments against us than any they have yet been able to produce’. In his final appearance before the congregation at St Magnus, Swynfen styled himself ‘a Preacher of Peace, for these Seventeen Years’, of his tenure as lecturer. That he lit upon Anglican catholicity as the leading threat to public peace was surely a sign of the times.56 The same week as Swynfen’s farewell sermon appeared the Greenwich vicar John Turner’s Defence of the doctrine and practice of the Church of England against some modern innovations.57 Turner’s Defence was a brisk, but learned meditation on what he called ‘the New Doctrines that of late have made so much Noise about Town’. They were born, he pointed out, of ‘a zeal to support the sinking power of the priesthood’, and as such, they had ‘brought in many well-meaning Persons’, out of all proportion to their orthodoxy. Turner dismissed the argument that the royal supremacy was a betrayal of ‘divine rights and institutions of the Church’ out of hand; the doctrine has been affirmed by ‘the greatest of our Divines’ from Hooker to his own contemporary, William Wake. On the Eucharist, Turner was only willing to allow that it entailed an oblation of prayer and thanksgiving, not a propitiatory, material sacrifice. The latter was not necessary to constitute a real priesthood. ‘I can see no Reason but that Prayers and Praises solemnly offered up to God, thro’ Christ’, he wrote, ‘may properly enough be call’d the Christians Spiritual Sacrifice’, which was sufficient to justify the Anglican ministry. On the question of lay baptism, Turner conceded that persons performing baptism outside the episcopal communion were indeed guilty of invading the priestly office. But this, he contended, was not the question. The question was whether baptisms so administered were nevertheless valid, and, according to the doctrine of the Church of England, they were. The Church had never insisted upon re-baptism. On the issue of sacerdotal absolution, Turner only allowed the clergy of the established Church ‘a ministerial and general declaratory power’, to promulgate the terms of divine pardon; he denied the priesthood any judicial power to remit individual sins. 56 John Swynfen, A farewell-Sermon preach’d at the parish-church of St. Magnus, near LondonBridge, April 27, 1712 (London, 1712), pp. 12–13, 18, 23–5. 57 Post-Boy, No. 2647 (26–29 April 1712).

75

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 75

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

The clergyman’s authority was not a judge, he explained, ‘but rather of a counselor and interpreter of the law, whose office is to explain and declare the sense of it’. Turner’s pamphlet was particularly astute in tracing the genealogy of these ‘new Schemes’, as he called them – their Caroline antecedents; the origins of their revival among the non-jurors, whose schism required ‘exalting the priesthood to much greater heights that what the Principles of the Reformation can admit’; their interjection into establishment thought via the likes of Brett and Laurence. More importantly, he understood the intuitive appeal of these doctrines among conformist clergymen. But Turner worried that such notions, as he put it, drew ‘their Zeal into a wrong Channel’, and thereby transformed the character of religion in England; cooling, as it were, ‘the more substantial and important Duties of Christianity, as it increases in any Degrees of Warmth about Externals and Church Polity’.58 Given the anxiety over catholicity’s apparent privileging of ritual participation over holy living, it is fitting that Bishop Burnet decided to reissue his celebrated work of moral reformation, Discourse of the Pastoral Care, with a new preface attacking High Church sacerdotalism. Burnet proceeded with his attack by way of a startling apologia on behalf of Low Churchmanship. ‘Since I my self am ranked among the Low-Church Men’, he began, ‘I will open all that I know that is peculiar to them.’ Burnet celebrated the stolid, conformist Low Churchman as an ecclesiastical patriot, who rejoiced in the Reformation, the Revolution and the Royal Supremacy – by way of contrast with the High Churchman, whose orthodoxy was as suspect as his loyalty. The Low Churchman, wrote Burnet, considered the notion of ecclesiastical independence ‘a plain attack made on the Supremacy, vested by Law in the Crown, and a Casting a Disgrace on our Reformers, and on every step made in the Reformation’. He believed that ‘the raising the Power and Authority of sacred functions beyond what is founded on clear warrants in Scripture’, would provoke anticlericalism, rather than combat it. The Low Churchman ‘dare not Unchurch all the Bodies of the Protestants beyond Sea; nor deny to our Dissenters at home the several rights common to all Christians’. He knew no power in a priest to pardon sin, ‘other than the declaring the Gospel-Pardon’. He knew no sacrifice in the Eucharist, ‘other than the Commemorating that on the Cross, with the Oblation of the Prayers, Praises, and Almsgiving’. He refused to condemn to the right of private judgement in matters of religion, for this, he was certain, ‘strikes at the Root of the whole Reformation’. Burnet’s intrepid vindication of church Whiggery became, in effect, a kind of exercise in ecclesiastical nationalism – virtually collapsing Anglican orthodoxy and allegiance to the Revolution state.59 58

John Turner, A Defence of the doctrine and practice of the Church of England (London, 1712), pp. 3, 5–6, 9, 10–12, 18–33, 48–9. 59 Gilbert Burnet, The new preface to the third edition of the pastoral care (London, 1713), pp. 7–9.

76

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 76

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

This case was given its comprehensive form in the Whig layman William Newton’s extraordinary 1714 work, The Principles of the Low-Churchmen fairly Represented and Defended. Like Burnet, Newton unapologetically affirmed that the core tenets of Low Churchmanship were ‘nearest to the true Doctrine and regular Prescriptions of our Reformed Church’, and those ‘who would be thought High-Church-Men, have really abandon’d the old Principles, and run into new Pretensions, utterly unknown to the Church of England’. Most importantly, he discerned clearly that at the heart of Anglican catholicity was a bid for ecclesiastical immunity from the state – the ‘Sovereign Dominion’ of the clergy, as he called it. One must not even call this movement popery, as it harbours no ‘Design of bringing in the Power of the Bishop of Rome’. On the contrary, ‘it is much sweeter, and more agreeable, to be Supreme, that is, Popes themselves’. As Newton pointed out, these pretensions of ecclesiastical independence from the state were the fruits of a genuine ideological reorientation. Before the Glorious Revolution, ‘the higher the Church Men were, the higher they carry’d the Regal Supremacy’. It was only the socially and politically transformed circumstances of post-Revolutionary England that impelled the ‘Contention for a Church Self-sufficient and Independent from the State without any Head or Governour, but Christ in Heaven, and a Christian Priesthood on Earth’. Newton did not pretend that the civil power was the author of the divine commission to minister the Word and sacraments, only that the state determined the circumstances under which such a commission might be executed. The spiritual rights of the clergy could not be exercised ‘to the Disturbance or Damage of the State and Commonwealth’.60 The future primate William Wake echoed this line, inveighing against the ‘monstrous’ doctrine that Christ ‘set up his Church against the State; and Erected a Spiritual Kingdom, not only different from, but Opposite to, the Temporal Kingdoms of the World’.61 The radical Cambridgeshire clergyman Arthur Ashley Sykes argued similarly. ‘When our Saviour came into this World’, he wrote in 1716, ‘he came not with a Design to abolish Civil Government, or to be the Cause of Confusion in all Nations, but to settle such a Religion as might very well consist with it’.62 Here, then, was the true price of ecclesiastical nationalism. In their overweening ambition to contain the independent spiritual authority claimed by the High Church clergy, Church Whigs were willing to effect the neutralisation of the Church as a countervailing power. The Church was, as 60

William Newton, The Principles of the Low-Church-Men, 2nd edn (London, 1718), pp. vi, 4–6, 32, 51 61 ; [William Wake], A Vindication of the Realm, And Church of England, From the Charge of Perjury, Rebellion & Schism, Unjustly laid upon them by the Non-Jurors (London, 1716), p. 55; see also [John Lewis], A Vindication of the Right Reverend the Ld. Bishop of Norwich (London, [1714]), p. 20; Nathaniel Marshall, A Defence of Our Constitution in Church and State: Or, An Answer to the Late Charge of the Non-Jurors (London, 1717). 62 [A.A. Sykes], An Answer to the Nonjurors Charge of Schism Upon the Church of England (London, 1716), p. 29.

77

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 77

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

yet, not of the state, but it was nevertheless held constitutionally incapable of opposing the state. IV

In April 1715, it was reported that Dr Thomas Brett, rector of Betteshanger, Kent, had resigned his two livings in that county.63 Brett apparently could not comply with the oaths abjuring the ‘pretended Prince of Wales’ reimposed by statute in autumn 1714. Moreover, in the wake of the peaceful accession of the house of Hanover the previous August, Brett’s name had become a byword for the High Church contamination of Protestant orthodoxy in the final years of the reign of Queen Anne.64 After some months as a lay communicant in the established Church, he was received by George Hickes into the communion of the non-jurors.65 Brett’s comrade Roger Laurence’s path was somewhat less circuitous. Holding no office subject to the terms of the Act for the further Security of His Majesty’s Person and Government, he simply applied to Hickes, by whom he was ordained a priest in the non-juring communion in November 1714.66 The withdrawal of two of the leading sacerdotalists from the communion of the established Church only superficially altered the backlash against Anglican catholicity, which continued apace in the early years of the Hanoverian era. Their secession seemed to return the campaign to the somewhat less discomfiting form of a public indictment of treasonous non-jurors, rather than the quelling of a theological insurgency internal to establishment Anglicanism. And, indeed, the appearance in 1715 of White Kennett’s astonishing The Wisdom of Looking Backward, the double-entry bibliography of ecclesiastical controversy throughout the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign, seemed to put a stop on the dispute.67 But in truth, the debate over Anglican catholicity ground on. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the posthumous publication in October 1716 of a collection of George Hickes’s ecclesiological writings The Constitution of the Catholick Church should not be taken as the commencement of a new controversy.68 The appearance of Hickes’s writings is almost universally 63

British Weekly Mercury, no. 513 (23–30 April 1715). Flying Post or The Post Master, no. 3551 (5–7 Oct 1714); [Robert Watts], Two letters to the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Townshend (London, 1714); Thomas Brett, Dr. Brett’s Vindication of Himself, from the Calumnies Thrown upon Him in some Late News-Papers (London, 1715). 65 J.H. Overton, The Nonjurors: Their Lives, Principles and Writings (London, 1902), pp. 138–47. 66 Overton, Nonjurors, pp. 351–4. 67 Kennett, Wisdom of Looking Backward. In April 1712, Kennett reported having already compiled a paper ‘reciting many Passages out of late Sermons and Discourses directly impugning her Maties Supremacy’ (BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, fol. 376). 68 Hickes died on 15 December 1715. On the surreptitious publication of Hickes’s papers, 64

78

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 78

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

considered the catalyst of the so-called Bangorian controversy, so named for Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor’s response to Hickes, A Preservative Against the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors Both in Church and State, and the fallout therefrom.69 But the continuity with the preceding ten years of controversy is difficult to ignore. Indeed, much of the content of the Constitution of the Catholick Church was furnished from the same material, out of which Hickes published his Two Treatises in 1707, a perennial touchstone in the controversies during the reign of Queen Anne. In fact, the first to publicly attack Hickes’s work was not Hoadly, but White Kennett, now dean of Peterborough.70 Kennett excoriated Hickes’s ‘exalted Notions of the Kingdom of the Church, the Thrones of Royal Priests, Vicegerents of eternal Melchisedek, Spiritual Principalities, and other assumed Titles of Sovereignty’.71 His complaint was utterly in keeping with the long-standing Church Whig complaint about pretensions to ecclesiastical independence. Hoadly’s Preservative Against the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors appeared in November 1716.72 The Preservative scoffed at the ‘vain words of regular and uninterrupted successions; authoritative benedictions; excommunications, or absolutions; nullification or validity of God’s ordinances to the people, upon account of niceties or trifles’ – in short, the whole panoply of catholic doctrinal innovations, ‘the dreams of those who have separated themselves, or of those, who follow them in these doctrines’. Against Anglican catholic pretensions to spiritual independence, Hoadly championed an almost-Hobbesian sovereign state invested with nearly unlimited powers for its own self-preservation. ‘Whatever powers and privileges (be they of never so high a nature) belong to clergymen must come from God and Christ’, he admitted. ‘But God and Christ cannot give them any powers or privileges in such sense independent upon civil government, as to be inconsistent with it.’73 Again, the imperative was to nationalise Christian life, to defend what the historian John Neville Figgis called ‘A Christian Church-State’, and to neutralise any elements that obstructed this process of domestication.74 see Daily Courant, no. 4676 (15 October 1716). 69 See, for instance, Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols, New York, 1902), II, p. 157; William Bardford Gardner, ‘George Hickes and the Origin of the Bangorian Controversy’, Studies in Philology, 39:1 (1942), 65–78; Henry Rack, ‘‘‘Christ’s Kingdom Not of this World”: The Case of Benjamin Hoadly versus William Law Reconsidered’, in Church, Society and Politics, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1975), pp. 275–91; William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly, 1676–1761 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 147. 70 Daily Courant, no. 4694 (5 November 1716). 71 White Kennett, A Second Letter to the Lord Bishop of Carlisle, 2nd edn (London, 1716), p. 38. 72 Post Man and the Historical Account, no. 11520 (17–20 November 1716). 73 Benjamin Hoadly, A Preservative Against the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors Both in Church and State (London, 1716), pp. 98, 55. 74 John Neville Figgis, ‘Hoadly and the Bangorian Controversy’, The Guardian (11 Oct.

79

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 79

22/08/2019 08:57

Brent S. Sirota

The extirpation of independent spiritual authority left a fundamental instability at the heart of Church Whig ecclesiology. Civic life was granted some measure of divine sanction, but it could not be pretended that it was in any way instrumental in the Christian economy of salvation. Hoadly’s transgression, particularly in his infamous sermon The nature of the kingdom, or church, of Christ, preached at St James in March 1717, was to press this instability to its breaking point.75 Hoadly upended the continuity between Church and nation that Whig churchmen had been carefully cultivating for the better part of the decade. The visible Church fused into the machinery of the Hanoverian state was but an administrative convenience, bereft of any salvific function. The true Church was a kingdom not of this world. And Christ, preached Hoadly, ‘left behind Him, no visible, humane Authority. . . no Judges over the Consciences or Religion of his People’. Salvation was an individual matter: ‘Virtue and Integrity, as to our selves, and Charity and Beneficence to others’.76 Everyone, the bishop wrote, ‘may find it, in his own Conduct’.77 As Hoadly’s most formidable critic, William Law – another non-abjuror, who left the established Church at the Hanoverian succession – pointed out, this put an end to the Christian religion as a positive institution on earth. ‘You have taught the Layity’, Law chided the bishop, ‘that all is to be transacted between God and themselves.’78 The civil religion desired by Church Whigs could not really be saving religion; and a truly salvific faith, in the final analysis, hardly needed any public dimension to speak of. The work of the ensuing controversy, which Jonathan Clark deems ‘the most bitter domestic ideological conflict of the century’, was to hold together the individuating and magisterial dimensions of English national Protestantism.79 And, of course, to do so without recourse to a mediating priesthood, whose spiritual authority was irreducible to either of these elements. The intervention of Hoadly, alongside a number of other ecclesiastical radicals, made plain the gravitational forces acting upon Georgian churchmanship. The prevailing Church Whiggery of the Hanoverian age has long been singled out for its worldliness and spiritual poverty – enjoying, as Lytton Strachey famously put it, ‘the sleep of the comfortable’.80 But the ecclesiological imbrication of the Church of England in English civic institutions and national life becomes somewhat 1903), p. 1679. 75 BL, Letters from Thomas Burnet, Add. MS 36772, fol. 159. 76 Benjamin Hoadly, The nature of the kingdom, or church, of Christ. A sermon preach’d before the King, at the Royal chapel at St. James, On Sunday, March 31st, 1717 (London, 1717), p. 11. 77 Hoadly, Preservative, p. 90. 78 William Law, A Second Letter to the Bishop of Bangor; Wherein his Lordship’s Notions of Benediction, Absolution, and Church-Communion Are prov’d to be Destructive of every Institution of the Christian Religion (London, 1717), pp. 20, 24–5; and see William Matthews (ed.), The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716 (London, 1939), p. 369, on reading Hoadly and his own ‘strong disinclination to these external duties of religion’. 79 Clark, English Society, p. 352. 80 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York, 1918), p. 11.

80

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 80

22/08/2019 08:57

THE BACKLASH AGAINST ANGLICAN CATHOLICIT Y

more forgivable when we consider the divergent pull of Anglican catholicity, on the one hand, and Protestant atomisation on the other. The establishment was beset on either side – ideologically, if not always politically – by competing programs of virtual disestablishment: the spiritual independence claimed by a strain of Anglican catholicity; and the spiritual privatisation urged by a radical wing of the Low Church – and, indeed, within a few decades, by evangelicalism. The stolid, ecclesiastical nationalism forged at the dawn of the Hanoverian age deserves some credit not only for enduring throughout the eighteenth century, but also for reconciling, in large measure, the competing iterations of Anglican royalism that squared off during the Sacheverell affair at the beginning of the century. The vaunted Anglican ‘confessional state’ of eighteenth-century England, then, subsisted at the crux of these forces. While it may well have acted as a bulwark against religious liberalisation, it served simultaneously as a rampart against catholic re-enchantment.

81

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 81

22/08/2019 08:57

4 ‘The End of the Beginning?’ The Rhetorics of Revolutions in the Political Sermons of 1688–1716 James J. Caudle Much of the London political public probably first got the news of the Hanoverian Succession while they were in church on a Sunday morning, 1 August 1714, or soon after. On that day, at least one clergyman, the Congregational minister Thomas Bradbury received the news as he was delivering his sermon, by means of a falling handkerchief dropped from the gallery balcony of Fetter Lane Chapel. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, had arranged the handkerchiefdrop as a sign to Bradbury that Queen Anne, her health long deteriorating, had finally died. In his subsequent prayer, Bradbury invoked God’s blessing on George I and the house of Hanover and asked for a reading of the 89th Psalm about the covenanted choice of King David to rule Israel, a psalm which also gave thanks for divine mercy.1 The novelty and innovation with which the Hanoverian Succession was defended in the pulpit problematises the conventional vision of the events of 1714–16 as chiefly backwards-facing, a conservative reaffirmation of the so-called ‘revolution principles’ associated with the Glorious Revolution, ratifying and confirming rather than venturing beyond the perceived gains made in 1689.2 This chapter seeks to explore the ways in which Hanoverian preaching during and immediately following the coming of the house of Brunswick signals the emergence of a new political culture of pro-Georgian loyalism markedly distinct from the rhetoric of allegiance that attended the coming of William and Mary a quarter-century earlier.3 In both 1688–90 and 1714–16, revolution in England and Scotland was both explained and mediated by political sermons. In the absence of a coherent top-down state propaganda or audio media in this period, the sermon was one 1

Reportedly in John Patrick’s metrical form. J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977). 3 Hannah Smith Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 2; James J. Caudle, ‘Georgian Loyalism: The First Flowering, 1714–1727’, in ‘Measures of Allegiance: Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714–1760’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1995), pp. 364–420. 2

82

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 82

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

of the only ways for a message to be disseminated on a national level. The civic sermon can even be seen as one of the origins of British political broadcasting.4 Unlike the coffeehouse, which was chiefly a fashionable or at least middlingsort urban phenomenon and required a modicum of money for participation, the church was free, and existed at the level of small towns and isolated rural districts.5 In this chapter, I use the surviving corpus of published political sermons from this period, and a prosopography of the preachers, as evidence of massmedia discussion of the Hanoverian Succession of 1714. Through looking at these preached and printed sermons, one can better discuss the extent to which the accession was seen by contemporary clergy as a genuine break from what had come before, rather than simply a banal and inconsequential dynastic change from the line of Stuart to the line of Brunswick. In such an analysis, the surprising (or in their lexicon, ‘providential’) success of George’s taking power after Anne’s death was nothing less than a Restoration of the Revolution Settlement of 1688–90; a settlement which several of the sermons saw as having been threatened with destruction during the four last years of Queen Anne in 1710–14. Additionally, for some bolder preachers among the Whigs and Dissenters, 1714 was a proper revolution in its own right rather than simply a return to 1688, a new era bringing about new opportunities for equality of Protestant Dissenters. Integral to this analysis are linkages made at the time between the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, in sermons which attempted to show these two revolutionary moments as naturally linked and historically related. George’s victory in an unexpectedly peaceful and even leisurely accession and coronation was linked by analogy to nostalgic memories of William’s armed revolution, and some of the preachers had actually lived through those events. The political sermons on 1714 frequently connected the perceived core policies of the Glorious Revolution in civil rights and civil liberties to the policies expected to be brought in by the house of Hanover and the new branch of the Protestant Succession. I

For most eighteenth-century preachers, the past and the present existed in a continuum and a dialogue, rather than separated by historical distancing in the name of objectivity, or by means of a modern historiographical concept of 4

As in James J. Caudle, ‘Origins of British Political Broadcasting: The Sermon in the Hanoverian Revolution, 1714–1716’, The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, 2:2 (2016), 42–62. 5 Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermons, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, 2000), pp. 208–35.

83

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 83

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

relativist historicism. The world of 1688 was culturally immediate to a British or Irish preacher in 1714, or even in 1788, to a degree that events of a quartercentury or century ago would probably not be to those living in our own times, although the extent to which a given culture believes the past is directly relevant to the present exists on a spectrum.6 Additionally, for writers in 1714, the parallels between earlier seventeenth-century events, or even the events in ancient Mediterranean history such as King David’s accession or the Augustan age of ancient Rome would seem immediately relevant. The alteration in dynasties in 1714 may seem to be a non-event in which governance shifted in a dramatic manner without any blood being shed, and preserved the Stuart line, more or less. However, the peaceful accession (marred by Jacobite riots in some locales) was followed by a brief but shocking civil war in 1715 (the ’15), in which the Jacobites once again attempted to install their claimant onto the throne. To mobilise the people against the Jacobite challenge, ministers of both established and Dissenting churches preached ‘occasional’ sermons. An unknowable percentage of these were printed, some at the command of local elites. While there are some design problems associated with using printed sermons rather than manuscript ones, the relative completeness and abundance of the surviving political sermon corpus militates in favour of study of the published evidence. Whereas it is impossible to know how many manuscript sermons were written but have not been preserved, we have access to nearly all of the sermons printed on this topic 1714–16. Williamite preaching from 1688 to 1702 was an essential foundation of Hanoverian loyalism in its expression of the Protestant Succession, and the establishment of reasons, providential and constitutional, for the rejection of the Catholic Stuarts. Much of the pro-Hanoverian vocabulary of the monarch as guardian of the people’s civil rights and religious liberties which was deployed for George in the 1710s would have been familiar to writers for William in the 1690s.7 Furthermore, Hanoverian political arguments had more than a decade to incubate during Queen Anne’s reign, from the time of the Act of Settlement of June 1701. Indeed, the Hanoverian Revolution was built in 1701–07 and the machinery was simply ‘switched on’ to operate (mostly) as designed to, rather than invented from scratch in 1714. By Queen Anne’s death on what Hanoverian loyalists came to call the ‘Glorious’ 1 August, the churches of Britain, established and Dissenting, had had half a generation to prepare their clergy and congregations for the advent of the new dynasty of Georg Ludwig. In a more extended sense, they had had a quarter of a century 6

H.T. Dickinson, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the “Glorious Revolution”’, History, 61 (1976), 28–45. 7 Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermon Culture of the Glorious Revolution: Williamite Preaching and Jacobite Anti-preaching, 1685–1702’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford, 2011), pp. 480–94.

84

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 84

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

to advocate the importance of the Protestant Succession for civil rights and religious liberties. Some of the older preachers of 1714–17 had actually been old Williamites, that is, men of the Revolution and King William’s reign in 1689–1702. Nicholas Brady, who after advocating ‘the divine right of kings and non-resistance’ became ‘an outspoken and zealous Williamite’ who boasted of what his biographer called ‘(unspecified) sufferings for William III’s government and the protestant religion’, eventually served as chaplain to William III and Queen Mary, continuing on as a court chaplain through Queen Anne and then to Caroline, Princess of Wales.8 Joseph Boyse had been at King William’s army’s camp when he was laying siege to Limerick in August 1690.9 Richard Willis had travelled with William III to Holland as chaplain in 1694–95 and was ‘Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty’ in 1701. One generation later, after some less rewarding service as Chaplain in Ordinary to Queen Anne, Willis preached on ‘The Way to Quiet and Stable Times’ before George I in his new role as bishop of Gloucester on 20 January 1715, the thanksgiving day for the accession having been relatively free of violence.10 Others had been Court preachers to William, including William Talbot. The various war-fasts and war-thanksgivings of The Nine Years’ War (1688–97) had offered opportunities for linking William’s fortunes and the fortunes of the realm, just as the war-fasts and war-thanksgivings of the recently ended War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) had offered opportunities for loyal support of Queen Anne. The occasions for war-fasts were more abundant in the Williamite period, in which Parliament continued the practice of the 1640s of ordering a fast for every month in which the war continued.11 William Talbot had preached on one of these in 1691.12 The thwarting of the assassination plot against King William in 1696 provided an opportunity for many who would later laud George I’s accession to praise the Revolution. William Talbot preached on that occasion, as later, when bishop of Oxford, at the coronation of George I in 1714.13 Nicholas Brady deprecated ‘the late horrid plot’.14 So did William Stephens and Thomas Knaggs, Knaggs referencing God’s ‘delivering this kingdom’ from ‘a horrid and barbarous conspiracy of papists and other trayterous persons, to assassinate and murder his mos[t] Gracious Majesty’s royal person’, and thwarting ‘an invasion 8

James Sambrook, ‘Brady, Nicholas (1659–1726)’, ODNB. Joseph Boyse, Great news from the camp before Limrick (London, 1690). 10 Richard Willis, The Way to Quiet and Stable Times (London, 1715). 11 See Warren Johnston, ‘Preaching, National Salvation, Victories, and Thanksgivings – 1689–1800’, in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–1901, ed. Keith A. Francis, William Gibson, John Morgan-Guy, Bob Tennant and Robert H. Ellison (Oxford, 2012), pp. 261–74. 12 William Talbot, A sermon preached at the cathedral church of Worcester (London, 1691). 13 William Talbot, A sermon preach’d at the Cathedral Church of Worcester (London, 1696). 14 Nicholas Brady, A sermon preached at St. Catherine Cree-Church (London, 1696). 9

85

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 85

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

intended by the French’.15 Deuel Pead, in lauding ‘the deliverance of His Majesty K. William III. from assassination, and his kingdoms from invasion by the French’ celebrated ‘The Protestant King protected: the popish kings detected and defeated’.16 Pead also preached on the virtues of the Williamite Loyalty Oath, the ‘national Association’.17 One could also mention in this context John Sprint’s thanksgiving speech of 1693 on the ‘merciful preservation of our gracious King William’.18 In 1702, the death of William had provided opportunities for reflection on the thirteen years of his reign. Thomas Knaggs had offered a funeral sermon on ‘King William the Third, of glorious memory’, as had the Prussian Lutheran John James Caesar, lauding ‘The glorious memory of a faithful prince by a thankful posterity’, and Deuel Pead, in his eulogy on William’s ‘Greatness and goodness’.19 After William’s death, the sermons turned to the protection of his reputation and his legacy. The Sacheverell crisis in 1709–10, which inadvertently set in train a very public debate about the nature and meaning of the Revolution, had provided opportunities for clergy, especially the bishop of Oxford, who spoke on the first article of impeachment.20 The bitter memories of that crisis were apparent in the sermon by William Stephens, who spoke of ‘the Spirit of Slavery’ being ‘so far advanc’d among us’, that our former Deliverance wrought out by our late glorious King, was remembred only to be ridicul’d, and cast back into the Face of God on a solemn Feast-Day, by one [Dr Sacheverell] who pretends to be a Minister of God’s Holy Word’.21 Others among the Williamites connected to the Hanoverian Revolution had preached, or were soon after to preach, on the annual holiday of 5 November. Before 1688, the fifth had been celebrated merely as the thwarting of Gunpowder Plot and an occasion for No-Popery preaching against Catholicism. After William’s fortuitous arrival on 5 November 1688, it was repurposed as a combined celebration of the providential deliverances of 1605 and 1688. William Talbot had given such a sermon, The spirit of popery tryed, in front of William himself in 1699.22 Richard Willis preached before the House of Commons in 1705 on ‘the Happy Arrival of His Late Majesty on this 15

William Stephens, A thanksgiving sermon (London, 1696); Thomas Knaggs, A sermon preacht at Allhallows (London, 1696). 16 Deuel Pead, The Protestant King protected: the popish kings detected and defeated (London, 1696). 17 Deuel Pead, Sheba’s conspiracy, and Amasa’s confederacy (London, 1696). 18 John Sprint, Christian loyalty revived (London, 1694). 19 Thomas Knaggs, The vanity of the world (London, 1702); John James Caesar, The glorious memory of a faithful prince (London, 1702); Deuel Pead, Greatness and goodness reprieve not from death (London, 1702). 20 William Talbot, The Bishop of Oxford his speech (London, 1710). 21 William Stephens, A Second Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (London, 1714). 22 William Talbot, The spirit of popery tryed (London, 1699).

86

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 86

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

Day for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation’.23 Samuel Rosewell, a Presbyterian, was invited by ‘the Society of Young Gentlemen, &c. belonging to the evening-lecture in the Old-Jewry’ to preach on ‘the deliverance from the Gunpowder-Plot, and for the late glorious revolution’.24 John Edwards spoke in 1709 at the University of Cambridge on ‘the Deliverance from the Intended Bloody Massacre by Gunpowder; and for the Happy Arrival of King William, and the Great Blessings that accompanied it’ as one of the ‘Great things done by God for our ancestors, and us of this Island’.25 Thomas Ely’s 5 November sermon Israel’s Guardian delivered in 1714 connected ‘the deliverance of this nation from the Gun-Powder Plot’, ‘the late Glorious Revolution in 1688’, and ‘added’ to these ‘The Happy Accession of our Present Sovereign King George’.26 During the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, Benjamin Wills linked ‘Deliverance from the Gun-powder-Treason’ and ‘the happy Arrival of King William, of Glorious Memory’ as instances of ‘Divine Mercy Conspicuous in our Deliverance from Popery’.27 Samuel Wright in 1717 would similarly locate ‘the greatness of our salvation by King William III. (of glorious Memory)’ in ‘his delivering us from Popery and Arbitrary Power’.28 Similarly, in 1721, in Dublin, Nicholas Forster, bishop of Raphoe, connected ‘the happy deliverance of King James I. and the three estates of England, from the Gun-Powder Plot’ and ‘the Happy Arrival of His late Majesty King William on that Day, for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation’.29 The only real work that remained to be done in these sermons, once the state services had linked together Gunpowder Plot and Glorious Revolution, was to add the Hanoverian Succession and the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 as a further deliverance. The most indefatigable 5 November preacher of the 1710s, at least from the published evidence, was Thomas Bradbury, whom Queen Anne herself had nicknamed ‘bold Bradbury’, and that not in a very complimentary way. The historian of Dissent Walter Wilson wrote of him that ‘few persons had a greater share in promoting the succession of the House of Hanover’. Wilson observed that Bradbury kept the fifth as a sort of Loyalist Christmas: ‘Bradbury always preached on the 5th of November, then dined with some friends at a tavern, and after dinner sang the roast beef of old England.’30 The collection of his Fifty four sermons in 1762, three years after his death, noted that the sermons were delivered ‘chiefly on the fifth of November, in commemoration of the glorious 23

Richard Willis, A sermon preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1705). Samuel Rosewell, A sermon preach’d to the Society of Young Gentlemen (London, 1706). 25 John Edwards, Great things done by God for our ancestors, and us of this Island (London, 1710). 26 Thomas Ely, Israel’s guardian: a thanksgiving-sermon, 2nd edn (London, 1714). 27 Benjamin Wills, Divine Mercy Conspicuous in our Deliverance from Popery (London, 1716). 28 Samuel Wright, A sermon preach’d on the fifth of November in the year, 1719 (London, 1719). 29 Nicholas Forster, A sermon preached in Christ’s-Church, Dublin (Dublin, 1721). 30 Walter Wilson, The history and antiquities of dissenting churches and meeting houses (London, 1808–14), iii, pp. 532–33; Review Art. V, The Quarterly Review, 10, No. 19 (October 1813); 2nd edn, 1817, 119–20. 24

87

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 87

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

revolution by King William’. Bradbury preached 5 November sermons on ‘The Day of our Happy Revolution’ in 1700–02, 1704–08 and 1714–15, two of which were celebrating ‘The divine right of the revolution’, and he kept on lauding the 5 November in 1717–19, 1721, 1724–26 and 1732. His vision of the direct linkage between Revolution and Succession was summarised in his pairing of ‘the revolution and the reign of King George’.31 Thomas Knaggs, who preached on 5 November in 1691, 1693, 1697, 1702, 1716 and 1720, was also fervently committed to celebrating the Revolution, and placing his praise of it into print. These men were assuredly unusual, and even odd, in their assiduousness in publishing so many of their lucubrations regarding the increasingly Williamite holiday. The vast majority of political sermons never reached print, and we have limited evidence that most preachers felt compelled to offer a special sermon on the fifth, although they might feel morally or legally compelled to follow the Book of Common Prayer state service for the day (if ministers in the Church of England) or offer improvised prayers on the day. Similar eccentricity could be found on the part of the preachers who were obsessive in getting their sermons on the 30 January published, such as Luke Milbourne. These 5 November sermons of the 1710s were not anodyne or incapable of causing controversy. As John Edwards’s biographers noted, in 1711, Cambridge University’s vice-chancellor ‘would not permit’ the sermon Edwards had preached at St Mary’s on the 5 November to be printed at the university press. The vice-chancellor’s motivation was presumed to have been ‘a party spirit’ against the author, who was ‘a zealous Whig; and who, in his discourse, had enlarged much on our deliverance from Popery, on the blessings of the Revolution, and on the praises of King William’.32 The sermon was not published until 1710, and in London, rather than at Cambridge. Stereotypically, the Whig low-churchmen and Dissenters were thought to have special rights over the 5 November ‘Double Deliverance’ holiday, in the same manner that the Tory high-churchmen and non-jurors felt they had stewardship of the holidays of 30 January (Charles I’s execution) and 29 May (Charles II’s Restoration). Elisha Smith expressed the balance of the system in this manner in 1715: ‘The 30th of January and Restoration, have given very just Occasion for so many to assert the Rights of the Crown; the Revolution, that of the Liberties of the Subject. The People have seen, and confess the Sin and Error of Extreams in one Monument; the Prince in the other.’33 Despite those strong dividing lines, Williamite Loyalism, and Georgian Loyalism after it, began to make incursions into the High Royalist holidays.

31 Thomas Bradbury, Five anniversary sermons upon the fifth of November (London, 1705). For later sermons, see Fifty four sermons. . . chiefly on the fifth of November (3 vols, London, 1762). 32 Andrew Kippis et al. (eds), Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn (5 vols, 1778–93), pp. 543–6; C.J. Robinson, ‘Edwards, John (1637–1716)’, rev. Stephen Wright, first published 2004. 33 Elisha Smith, The Olive Branch: or the Sure Way to Peace, and Abolition of Parties, A Sermon Preach’d at Wisbeech, in the Isle of Ely, January 20, 1714/15 (London, 1715).

88

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 88

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

In his Restoration Day sermon for 1716, Edward Synge, bishop of Rapho, mentioned: our late most gracious Sovereign K. William; under whose most auspicious Influence and Reign, the Truth and Purity of Religion, in Opposition to Superstition and Idolatry, together with the Rights of a free People, in Opposition to Slavery and Oppression, were defended, and by the Establishment of a Protestant Succession, secur’d.34

II

In an age of party strife and political polarisation, it was inevitable that there would be some clashes between preachers and auditors.35 One immediately thinks of Henry Sacheverell, who preached before the lord mayor, aldermen and council of London in St Paul’s Church on 5 November 1709, and was put on trial by Whigs for allegedly insulting the Revolution by denying it involved any violent resistance to James II.36 At the low end of audience disapproval was the walkout faced by John Rowden in 1714, who repined at the people of Minching-Hampton in Gloucester regarding ‘the Contempt, which you cast upon it [his sermon on the death of Queen Anne], by going out of the Church when ‘twas Preach’d’.37 It was entirely possible for a preacher to be challenged or even assaulted for a strenuous defence of the Glorious Revolution, as well. Joseph Acres, preaching at St Mary in White Chapel, was nearly mobbed by Jacobites. ‘I know I have had many Enemies for almost as long time as I have been in Holy Orders, for my strict Adherence and active Endeavours to maintain and justifie the Revolution. I am sensible our All depends upon it.’ He specifically connected his having been rabbled not just to opponents of George, but of William as well. ‘[I]t was a Grief of Heart to me to hear some of you revile and curse the late King William of Blessed and Immortal Memory, who did great things for us both living and dying.’ Acres praised ‘the inestimable Legacy of the Protestant Succession’ and its ‘invaluable Fruits’.38 There were also general attacks by High Church and Jacobite mobs on Dissenting houses of worship. Thomas Bradbury was twice imperilled. ‘The mob burnt his meeting-house in 34

Edward Synge, The happiness of a nation, or people (Dublin, 1716), pp. 23–4. Pasi Ihalainen, ‘The Political Sermon in an Age of Party Strife, 1700–1720: Contributions to the Conflict’, in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, pp. 496–513; Geoffrey Holmes and W.A. Speck (eds), The Divided Society: Parties and Politics in England 1694–1716 (London, 1967); Brian Cowan, ‘The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society’, Parliamentary History, 31:1 (2012), 28–46. 36 Brian Cowan (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Malden, MA, 2012); Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973). 37 John Rowden, A sermon upon the death of Queen Anne (Oxford, 1714). 38 Joseph Acres, The true method of propagating religion and loyalty (London, [1714]), preface, pp. 3–4 (not paginated). 35

89

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 89

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

March 1710 and threatened him, but he escaped. According to his grandson, an assassin sent to kill him was converted by one of his sermons.’39 In 1714, a Church and king mob came to Monton Chapel, Eccles, Manchester and wrecked the chapel where the Georgian Loyalist Jeremiah Aldred preached, and £140 was paid as government compensation.40 Aldred described these attacks to his auditors: a furious Mob that rose up against us, arm’d with little, indeed, but Clubs and Staves, and Oaken Boughs; strong Drink[,] Noise and Tumult, Oaths and Curses, and a Spirit of Rage and Fury, which some (whom I shall not name) had breath’d into them.41

The Jacobite rebellions caused more occasion for violent opposition to preaching. The account of Samuel Peploe being threatened by rebels at Preston for praying for the ‘Hanoverian usurper’, accepted by the old DNB and Oxford DNB with caveats (‘tradition says’, ‘reportedly’, ‘alleged act’), might be challenged as a palimpsest of a famous story about Dr John Hacket in the Civil Wars of the 1640s.42 However, the account of the dangers faced by William Reid is not contested: ‘During the Rising of 1715 he preached for several Sundays at Auchterarder, and appeared in the pulpit with a pistol hanging at his breast. This so enraged the Jacobites that they threatened to burn the village of Dunning.’43 Most of the sermons were published with the blessing, or even at the formal request, of the congregation or the clergyman’s patron, a fact often noted in their title pages or their dedications. We can reconstruct elements of social networks and political connections from these contextual materials. However, a sizeable minority of the sermons were published, in the words of John Rowden, ‘to Vindicate [them] from the Misrepresentations of several Persons who were Offended at [them]’.44 Elisha Smith ‘Publish’d at the Request of some, and in its own Defence against the Misrepresentations of others’.45 Thomas Knaggs’ 30 January 1717 sermon was similarly ‘Publish’d to Stop the Mouth of Calumny and Slander’.46 Some sermons were published without the permission of the minister, such as a sermon by Henry Sacheverell on the 31 and 20 January 1715, the one ‘taken in Short Hand by one of his Parishioners’, and the other consisting of ‘Notes’.47 This means that many ministers, especially the more controversial ones, preached knowing that they might have a spy or two in their 39

John Handby Thompson, ‘Bradbury, Thomas (1676/7–1759)’, ODNB. Henry W. Aldred, ‘Yorkshire Ancient Families; The Family of Aldred’, in Old Yorkshire (London, 1891), pp. 190–2. 41 Jeremiah Aldred, The History of Saul and David, and the XIIIth of the Romans, Consider’d (London, 1716). 42 S. Baskerville, ‘Peploe, Samuel (bap. 1667, d. 1752)’, ODNB. 43 Hew Scott (ed.), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1915–50), IV, p. 269. 44 John Rowden, A sermon upon the death of Queen Anne (Oxford, 1714). 45 Elisha Smith, A sermon preach’d at Wisbeech (London, 1714). 46 Thomas Knaggs, The martyrdom of King Charles the first (London 1717). 47 [Henry Sacheverell?], A sermon preach’d January 31. 1714/5. . . To which is added. . . another Sermon, preach’d on the Twentieth of the same Month (London, 1715). 40

90

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 90

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

churches, scribbling notes in order to print the discourse that was meant to have been heard by the congregation alone. The sermons could also be subjected to rebuttals, as well, such as the anonymous Remarks on Two Sermons of Mr. Ferdinando Shaw.48 The problems encountered in the planning of a sermon during the Hanoverian Revolution were fairly consistent. At least in the early weeks (from 1 August on towards the royal funeral on 24 August), the drafting of a sermon necessarily began with what one wished to say about Queen Anne. Anne was a diverse monarch, as her brother-in-law William had been. Sermons praising her as a paragon of the Church and a second Elizabeth, perhaps even a modern saint, appeared. The paraphernalia could approach the hagiographical, as seen in England’s mournful monument, which referred to her as ‘a perfect pattern of Christianity’, who had produced ‘rules of devotion, pious meditations, and devout contemplations’ suitable for lay piety.49 The Queen Anne Loyalists saw her as a ‘most excellent’ monarch, and a ‘royal pattern’ for future rulers.50 Perhaps less anticipated was the spate of negative sermons such as Ahab’s Evil which portrayed her as an evil queen.51 Between the two poles of Anne as saint and Anne as witch was an interpretation in the Clarendonian strain, in which her early reign was lauded, but the ‘four last years’ were seen as a turning away. The legitimacy of Anne had been possible to defend on grounds of direct connection to the Stuarts of the Restoration, who included her brother-in-law William and her sister Mary. King George, by contrast, had to be traced in a roundabout way from the Stuarts of the Jacobean period, via his grandmother Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine, since this was the genealogy which produced the mostly closely related Protestant heir of the Stuart line. Anne’s unusual and even maternal regard for the Church of England as such – as opposed to the more generic Internationale of Protestant Christianity represented by kings William and George, which seemed more sympathetic to Protestant Dissent – distinguished her from her predecessor and her successor both.52 As Collier put it, ‘She did not act as a Step-Mother to the Dissenting Congregations.’53 The defenders of Anne often elected to ignore or suppress her connection to the messy and disturbing mechanics of the actual Revolution, and her too visible part in her father’s downfall.54 48

Remarks on Two Sermons of Mr. Ferdinando Shaw (London, 1715). England’s mournful monument (London, 1714?). 50 Nathaniel Marshall, The royal pattern: Or, a sermon upon the death of. . . Queen Anne (London, [1714]). 51 Ahab’s Evil (London, 1714). 52 Andrew C. Thompson, ‘Hanover-Britain and the Protestant Cause, 1714–1760’, in The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture, ed. Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (Farnham, 2015), pp. 89–106. 53 Nathaniel Collier, A sermon on the lamented death of Her sacred Majesty Queen Anne (London, 1714), p. 22. 54 One of the few accounts which stressed the familial aspects of the Revolution has been 49

91

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 91

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

The sermons then faced the question of how – or whether – to connect the new King George to King William as the days celebrating George’s accession (1 August) yielded to the celebrations of his landing (18 September), his coronation (20 October 1714), the thanksgiving for his ‘peaceable and quiet possession of the throne’ (20 January 1715), his Accession Day (1 August 1715), during the Jacobite rebellion (6 September to 14 November 1715) and after the rebel defeat (from 14 November 1715) and the thanksgiving for the Defeat of the Rebels (7 June 1716). Interspersed among these occasional days were the birthdays of William and George, and the Prayer Book’s annual state services commemorations of 30 January, 29 May, 5 November, and the anniversary of the king’s accession-day (1 August), the last of which had been a Williamite favourite, and the latter two of which quite quickly became pro-Georgian favourites.55 To connect William to George in a deliberate and overt manner, to reaffirm William’s putative achievement in the person of George, required more than simply offering generic rhetoric against popery and slavery and in favour of religious liberty and civil rights, and required more than speaking in defence of the Church of England (or the Toleration of Protestant Dissenters imposed by the state on a Church used to monopoly rather than hegemony). It required deciding as well – since George was to be king because of his mother’s dynastic link to the Stuart monarch James I – how much the Hanoverian style of rule was part of what Asch calls ‘the Legacy of Late Stuart Kingship’, as opposed to a breaking with that tradition.56 For those who chose to take up this theme, they faced some striking contrasts between William of Orange and George of Hanover. William had been a devoted husband whose fidelity to his queen and co-regnant Mary had been noted by his followers, though their marriage was never as greatly celebrated as the love match between Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark. George had a well-known breach with his wife Sophia Dorothea, and imprisoned her in the Castle of Ahlden, so she could no more be mentioned in royal praise than could his romantic partner Engherard Meleusine von der Schulenberg. However, there were significant similarities between Williamite and pro-Georgian propaganda. There was very little need to alter the rhetorical tropes against ‘Popery’ and ‘Slavery’ and in support of civil rights and religious liberties which had been used to justify and sustain the Revolution. Until the French Regency made a fragile peace with George’s Britain in the Triple Alliance of 1717, the anti-Gallican theme might be drawn upon, especially in anti-Jacobite sermons. The English Protestant Dissenters saw both William and George as protectors of their rights as religious minorities against attempts by the High Church to contain, curtail and perhaps eliminate them. The easiest of these Henri van der Zee and Barbara van der Zee, 1688: Revolution in the Family (New York, 1988). 55 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, CA, 1989). 56 Ronald G. Asch, ‘The Hanoverian Monarchy and the Legacy of Late Stuart Kingship’, in The Hanoverian Succession, pp. 25–42.

92

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 92

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

to explain to auditors was their connection to the Protestant Succession, since the Act of Settlement which paved George’s way to the throne had been signed into law by William himself in 1701 (although the Scottish Act of Security of 1704 had, for three years, presented the possibility of another Protestant being enthroned). Both William and George were successful military commanders: like William III, George was a warrior-king, seasoned in battle at Conzbrücke (1675), at the siege of Vienna (1683), on campaign in Hungary (1684–85), with William III’s army at Neerwinden/Landen (1693), at which he was almost killed, and most recently as a Reichsfeldmarschall (imperial field marshal) of the Holy Roman Empire in the campaigns of 1707–10. So the analogy with biblical warrior-kings such as King David was apposite with them. Both were seen as reliably Protestant monarchs (indeed, their claim to the throne was dependent on that). Yet both operated under the confessional burden of being monarchs from a non-English Protestant tradition – William from Dutch Reformed Calvinism, George from German Lutheranism – who had been placed in leadership over the alien Churches of England and Ireland and (more or less) of Scotland.57 William and George could both be easily portrayed as staunch defenders of the Protestant interest in Britain and on the Continent. Unlike the pious Charles I or Anne, seen by their advocates as holy monarchs, neither was a priest-king, and neither William nor George were models of personal rectitude and sacramental piety. Furthermore, neither was a scholar-king as James I had been. Perhaps most importantly, both could be argued by their partisans to have reversed a dangerous course for the nation, even though to modern observers the revolutionariness of George’s arrival is harder to intuit than it was to those alive in 1714. That which has traditionally made 1714 boring to undergraduates and other aficionados of violence, that it was a bloodless handing over of the keys from one ruling house to another ruling house (and both of these descended from Stuarts), was precisely what made it exciting to those alive in 1714, when the Tory party was seen to be infested with Jacobite agents.58 The celebratory sermons of 20 January 1715 gave thanks, prematurely as it turned out, for the ‘peaceable and quiet possession of the throne’. The avoidance in late 1714 of a civil war such as the ones which had shattered the three kingdoms in the 1640s was considered to be a sign of divine favour, though riots and attacks on Dissenting chapels were fairly constant.59 Likewise, the check of both Jacobite

57

Ralph Stevens, ‘“King George’s Religion”: Lutheranism and the Religious Politics of the Hanoverian Succession’, in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901, pp. 84–104; Hannah Smith, ‘The Idea of a Protestant Monarchy in Britain 1714–1760’, Past & Present, 185 (2004), 91–118. 58 Daniel Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710–14 (Edinburgh, 1984); Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT, 2006). 59 Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 180–92; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’, in

93

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 93

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

armies on the same days in mid-November 1715 was seen as a mark of divine favour, and a reversal of a potentially dire circumstance.60 Some sermons did make the links explicit, such as William Stephens, in his A Second Deliverance from Popery and Slavery, preached soon after George’s landing.61 George, like William, was proclaimed as a deliverer of the kingdom. John Archer preached on the theme of ‘King George’s Happy Accession’ as ‘The Kingdom Turned About’, as literal an evocation of the idea of revolution as one might imagine.62 An anonymous sermon, one of many works linked to Daniel Defoe (a layman), touted ‘our wonderful deliverance, by the happy accession of His Most Gracious Majesty King George, to the Throne of Great Britain, when we were just at the brink of ruin’.63 III

Since 1688, preachers had to make a difficult decision of how to describe the Revolution. The first generation had been forced to choose between accounts which stressed conquest, or a natural right of resistance to tyrants, or the defence of the historical constitution in Church and state when imperilled, or a narrow vision of Divine Providence et praeterea nihil, or the abdication as the mainspring, or some combination of these. The broad course of change in obedience preaching from 1660 to 1760 was to be, with notable exceptions, an alteration away from the Jacobean claims for the divine right of kings and their entitlement to the subjects’ obedience (at least of the passive sort) towards a rival view. From 1689, and especially from 1714, one sees more frequently the argument that the powers of kings emanated from a broader divine sanction for good government, a mode of rulership which, as it protected the subjects’ faith and civil rights, deserved their active obedience.64 In 1690–1714, the debate on Passive Obedience and Non-resistance had made discussion of the Revolution what a modern political analyst might call a ‘third rail’ for many preachers. By 1714, a substantial segment of the Tories believed it was not worth the candle to discuss the Revolution at all, and many of them sensibly drew a curtain across the unpleasantness of 1685–90, preferring to skip ahead to celebrating Anne’s Stuart virtues.65 This attitude was consonant to a Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 70–88. 60 Jonathan D. Oates, Jacobite Campaigns: the British State at War (London, 2011). 61 Stephens, Second Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (1714). 62 John Archer, The Kingdom Turned About (London, 1714). 63 The Protestant jubilee (London, 1715). 64 Gerd Mischler, ‘English Political Sermons 1714–1742: A Case Study in the Theory of the “Divine Right of Governors” and the Ideology of Order’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24:1 (2001), 33–61. 65 Ihalainen, ‘Political Sermon in an Age of Party Strife’; David Oakleaf, A Political Biography

94

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 94

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

Tory view in which although resistance to tyrants might be acknowledged to be necessary in extremis, this prudential truth known to the discreet and to the wise was not to be promulgated generally among the common people through sermons, given the dangers of rebelliousness as demonstrated in the tumults of the 1640s. Several of the preachers during the Georgian Revolution made overt connections of 1714 with 1688. William Stephens, on ‘the first Sunday after his Majesty’s Landing’, spoke of George’s arrival as ‘A Second Deliverance from Popery and Slavery’, describing William as ‘our late glorious King’, and George I as ‘our most gracious Second Deliverer, our Rightful and Lawful King GEORGE, the Preserver and Defender of our Faith’, arrived in order ‘to restore Liberty, Truth and Peace to this our Israel’, and indeed ‘restor’d’ the ‘Liberties, not only of Britain, but of Europe. . ., and the Jaws of Hell shut up by the preservation of God’s true Religion among us’.66 Jeremiah Aldred offered one of the longest explanations of the links between 1688 and 1714. In his narrative, the ‘unhappy Prince’ James II had begun his reign by ‘falling into the Hands of Popish Councils, and giving way to them, and his own Popish Principles (which are destructive of all Protestants and Protestant Governments)’. Aldred asserted that King James: assumed a Despotick Power to himself, broke in upon the Constitution of the Kingdom, ruled arbitrarily, dispensed with the Laws of the Land, and having set those aside, made his own unbounded Will the Measure of his Government, invaded the just Rights and Liberties of the People.

He offered as evidence the promulgation of ‘an absolute [Right] to annul and disable all Laws’, the Magdalen College case, the Seven Bishops, and the unparliamentary exaction of revenue in Scotland. Aldred asserted that James depended on passive obedience and non-resistance to achieve his goals: although he broke his coronation oath, he ‘relied upon the Oaths, and Subscriptions that the main Body of the Nation was under, not to resist upon any Pretence whatsoever’. In response, ‘some of the wisest and greatest Men in the Kingdom’ then: invited the Prince of Orange over to their Assistance, and to rescue them from utter Ruin; who coming over with armed Forces, was joined by several of the English Nation, and was very much encouraged by great Bodies entring into Associations with him (and otherwise).

Aldred embraced the conservative account that James II had ‘run away, and left the Crown. . . and by this Abdication left the Throne vacant’, although he added that James ‘by his Male-Administration. . . had. . . forfeited’ the crown ‘before’ William arrived. Through the old king’s default, ‘the Crown of James the Second returned into the Hands of the People, from whom he had received it, according to the Constitution of this Kingdom’. ‘Thus the Prince of Orange of Jonathan Swift (London, 2008). 66 Stephens, Second Deliverance from Popery and Slavery, pp. 34–7.

95

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 95

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

(having been the happy Instrument of our Deliverance from Popery and Slavery) succeeded, and was made King in the Room of King James the Second, who had abdicated.’ ‘[T]he Prince of Orange was made Rightful King’ in the way that David had succeeded Saul. Aldred’s account contained a sampling of most of the theories of the Revolution. He had a somewhat Lockean view that: the People by their Representatives, pursuantly to their Original Right, and the Excellent Constitution of this Kingdom, founded upon the Law of Nature (which grants to every Man Liberty and Property) did in order to secure their just Rights, re-assume the forfeited Crown into their own Hands, and gave it to their Great and Glorious Deliverer, King William.

He also spoke of ‘the People’ and ‘their Original Right’, mediated ‘by their Representatives conven’d’. Yet at the same time he lauded ‘the Fundamental Constitution of the Kingdom’ in a fairly traditional ancient-constitutionalist mode. For him, Britain: was never an Absolute Monarchy, wherein the Supreme Magistrate is left to act according to his own Arbitrary, and unrestrained Will, but a mixt Monarchy, which is so fenced and guarded, by just Laws, and solemn Oaths, that the Subject cannot insult the wisely limited Prerogative of the Prince, nor the Prince invade the just Liberties and Properties of the Subject with Impunity.67

The Baptist Benjamin Stinton discussed 1688 as having happened in ‘our own time’ to: The unhappy K. James II. He attempted the Subversion of our Laws, the Restoration of Popery, and to enslave us to a foreign Prince; and an Arbitrary Power: And that he might not want means for the accomplishment of all this, Officers fitted for his Design were put into the chiefest places of Power; an Army is raised in his own Dominions, and an Alliance form’d with one of the most powerful Nations in Europe. But God, by his Divine Providence, was graciously pleased to interpose in our favour at this critical juncture, and cause such a happy Revolution as ought never to be forgotten. The Kingdom was taken from him, not by the Wisdom of Man, or an Arm of Flesh, but by the mighty Power of God. And tho human Means were used, yet it plainly appears these of themselves were far short of effecting that glorious Change. Who, but God, filled the King’s Heart with Fear and Terror? infatuated his Counsels, and dispirited his Soldiers? And brought in our happy Deliverer without shedding of Blood, or making the least Breach in our happy Constitution?68

Elisha Smith’s preface discussed the vexed question of whether the Revolution in 1688 had been resistance, and if so, if said resistance had violated the biblical prohibitions against resistance to the higher powers. Smith remarked that: the Resisting the King’s Arbitrary Will in the Case of the Revolution, is not the Resistance forbid by the Apostle: Because the King Governing by Will and Pleasure, is not the Lawful nor the Higher Powers that are with us. . . The Supreme Powers which 67 Aldred, 68

History of Saul and David. Benjamin Stinton, A Discourse of Divine Providence (London, 1714), pp. 15–16.

96

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 96

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS our Constitution acknowledges, are only the Legislature, and a King governing by Law. But the unfortunate King James II. trampled on Laws, and governed by Will. Had he governed by Law, then any Resistance whatsoever to him, from the publick or private Persons, would have been Resisting the Powers that are, and in St. Paul’s Sense, must have incurred Damnation, and the Guilt of Rebellion. . . either there was not that Resistance at the Revolution, which St. Paul forbids, in our Government, or else that his Rules cannot be understood so generally, as to admit no Exception whatsoever to be Lawful. . . especially see and consider how much God seems to be pleased with the Revolution-Government.69

Aside from these serious discussions, there were mock-sermons which looked backwards to 1688, such as the one attributed to John Dunton, The hereditaryBastard: or, the royal-intreague of the warming-pan, which the author stated was ‘deliver’d (I can’t say preach’d) in publick by a lay-man’.70 The mock-sermon was one of many pasquinades to revisit the allegation that James II’s presumed son was in fact a supposititious child, who had been smuggled into his mother’s bed in a warming-pan. IV

The machinery of the Hanoverian Revolution, like that of the Glorious Revolution, had been designed by an alliance of Constitutional (anti-Jacobite) Tories and Country and Court Whigs who, at least in England, were chiefly associated with the national established Church. In the period 1689–1716, much of the preaching in support of the new settlement in Church and state was produced by clergy of the established church. However, Protestant Dissent formed an important exception to this overall pattern. Their actual proportions in the English population were perhaps 112 congregations in 1727, and around 166 ministers in that year. Bradley observed of their numbers, ‘In the early part of the eighteenth century the Dissenters comprised between five and ten percent of the population in. . . almost half of the English counties. . . predominantly in the south and southwest, the northwest, and the south midlands’, and they only exceeded 10 per cent in one county.71 Yet they produced a far larger percentage of the sermons on the Hanoverian Succession than their absolute numbers. This fact is worth exploring. Their rationale for so doing appears to have been twofold. First, they wished to set themselves under the protection of George as a deliverer from the dangers of the recent persecution, represented by the allegedly persecutory Occasional Conformity and the Schism Acts. Indeed, the death of Queen Anne on the day on which the Schism Act was meant to become law was seen not simply as 69

Elisha Smith, A sermon preach’d at Wisbeech (London, 1714), pp. v–vi, viii. The hereditary-Bastard: or, the royal-intreague of the warming-pan (London, [1715?]). 71 James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in EighteenthCentury Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 92–4. 70

97

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 97

22/08/2019 08:57

James J. Caudle

ironic coincidence, but as a divine and even miraculous interposition to save the Dissenting schools from gradual extermination. Second, they wished to portray themselves as a loyalist model minority (at least where the house of Hanover was concerned), freeing their reputation from the High Church claim that they were, by their very nature, dangerous fanatics and republican agitators, a stigma under which they suffered throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Because of the perceived hostile environment of the last years of Queen Anne, when it seemed as if the gains (however modest) in civil rights and religious liberties achieved in the generation from 1689 to 1709 were going to be reversed, Dissenters were the most likely to see the events of 1714 as a revolution and use that word to describe it. Shaw preached on ‘the surprising Revolution, which has lately happen’d in this Kingdom’.72 Bradbury, in his The establishment of the kingdom in the hand of Solomon, applied to the revolution and the reign of King George (1716), one of his myriad 5 November sermons, connected both 1688 and 1714 to the revolutionary deviation from primogeniture in the royal line, which had displaced Adonijah and enthroned Solomon as king.73 Bradbury, part of a deputation to George I, supposedly described the change as ‘the funeral of the Schism Bill, and the resurrection of liberty’.74 The Dissenters tended to celebrate the ‘The Glorious First of August’ as a day of jubilee long after George had died in 1727, as shown in George Benson’s sermon in 1758, lauding ‘the blessing of the revolution completed, by the protestant succession, in the amiable and illustrious house of Hanover’. ‘O that glorious first of August! that most signal day, which ought never to be forgot! That rendered the blessing of the revolution complete.’75 A significant segment of the published political sermons of this period, especially those on the fifth of November or William’s birthday, delved into the memories of the changes in 1688, and linked them to the new monarchy in 1714. Nonetheless, the Hanoverian ‘Revolution’ of 1714–16 was not invariably discussed in political sermons with specific reference to the Glorious Revolution of 1688–90. However, even for the many Whigs and Dissenters who did not allude directly to William III or to 1688, the vision of the Protestant Succession, the Toleration of Protestant Dissent, and protection of liberty and property from the supposed Jacobite menace drew deeply on the older traditions of preaching going back to the 1690s, and even earlier. Many clergy, especially the ‘Hanoverian’ or loyal Tories, found the Glorious Revolution to have been necessary to save the Church of England’s ascendancy from the ‘Popish’ 72

Ferdinando Shaw, Condolence and Congratulation (London, 1714). Thomas Bradbury, The establishment of the kingdom in the hand of Solomon, applied to the revolution and the reign of King George (London, 1716). 74 John Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges, 1702–1800 (2 vols, London, 1878), I, p. 93; Edmund Calamy, An historical account of my own life, ed. John Towill Rutt (2 vols, London, 1829–30), II, p. 301. 75 George Benson, The glorious first of August (London, 1758). 73

98

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 98

22/08/2019 08:57

RHETORICS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE POLITICAL SERMONS

menace, but to them, it was more a dirty necessity best forgotten than a blessed event constantly to be recalled. Bolingbroke, shattered when the death of Queen Anne seemed to mark the end of his political career, remarked, ‘[W]hat a world is this, & how does fortune banter us?’76 However, for Bolingbroke’s non-Deist contemporaries, it was Providence, and not Fortune, which had preserved and sustained the constitutional and ecclesiastical settlement of 1689 through the revolutionary crisis of 1714–16.

76 Sir

Harold H. Williams (ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (5 vols, Oxford, 1963–65), II, p. 47.

99

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 99

22/08/2019 08:57

5 Security, Stability and Credit: The Hanoverian Succession and the Politics of the Financial Revolution Abigail L. Swingen In the early summer of 1714, John Toland, the heterodox freethinker best known for his anticlerical principles, published a pamphlet outlining how enemies of Queen Anne and the intended Hanoverian Succession attempted to split the Protestant interest and promote Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. The Grand Mystery Laid Open was not just a call to good Protestants to be wary of confessional enemies of the state, however. The last third of the pamphlet contained a section titled ‘The Sacredness of Parliamentary Securities; Against those, Who wou’d indirectly this Year, or more directly the next (if they live so long) attack the Publick Funds.’ In it, Toland condemned those who wanted the government to negotiate lower interest payments it made to stakeholders in the national debt. These politicians, although they claimed to be concerned with the staggering state of the debt, were nothing better than Jacobites who wanted the return of the house of Stuart to the throne. Such schemes would require altering existing laws and would therefore have disastrous consequences for Britain and its constitution. No one would trust the government to keep its financial promises and lenders would withhold their money. The country would no longer be in a position to fight the wars that the national debt had been created to fund. Ultimately, the only way to guarantee Britain’s creditworthiness was to support Queen Anne and the Hanoverian Succession: [T]he house of HANOVER will be for the punctual payment of all the advantages granted by Parliament, and be as religiously exact in preserving the Publick Funds untouch’d, as in all things else they’ll be for GOVERNING BY LAW, without which they have neither any right to the Throne, nor security in it.1

1

John Toland, The Grand Mystery Laid Open: Namely, By dividing of the Protestants to weaken the Hanover Succession, and by defeating the Succession to extirpate the Protestant Religion (London, 1714), p. 48.

100

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 100

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION

I

In addition to these warnings, Toland’s pamphlet offered a particular view of the Glorious Revolution and its consequences. In discussing the importance of the national debt and public credit to Britain’s economy, Toland emphasised their connections to the constitutional settlement that had been reached in 1689. It was only after removing King James II from the throne that Parliament and the political nation were able to establish new financial mechanisms that provided much-needed revenues for the state. In this view, the creation of national debt, public credit and the Bank of England were all inextricably linked to the Revolution Settlement.2 Toland was hardly the only contemporary to make this connection between the Revolution and state finance. Most famous (and melodramatic) was Joseph Addison’s description in 1711 of ‘Publick Credit’ as a delicate woman seated atop bags of money, who thrived when supported by the Act of Toleration, the Act of Settlement securing the Hanoverian Succession, and the ‘Acts of Parliament as had been made for the Establishment of Publick Funds’. When threatened by the figures of Tyranny, Anarchy, Bigotry, Atheism, and a young man the exact age of James Stuart carrying a sword and a ‘spunge’ to wipe away the national debt, she ‘fainted and dyed away at the sight’.3 This portrayal of public credit equated the Jacobite cause not only with the restoration of the Catholic Stuart line to the throne, but with threatening the economic security of the nation. Such publications revealed a significant amount of anxiety about the uncertain state of the nation’s new financial establishment. During the ‘rage of party’, such concerns were absolutely political.4 Language that equated the possibility of a Jacobite invasion with dismantling public credit indicated that the success of the Financial Revolution was by no means guaranteed. Of course, such rhetoric utilised a fair amount of exaggeration for the sake of argument and persuasion. But it also exposed profound uneasiness concerning the security of the financial establishment among those who most strongly supported it. Thus, it became useful to portray the perceived enemies of this establishment as potential traitors to the nation, which had political, as well as party political, implications. Despite evidence of this apprehension, a number of historians have suggested that because the Financial Revolution ultimately succeeded, people across the political spectrum in early Hanoverian Britain by and large accepted it. By privileging an idea of broad ideological consensus, many scholars have insisted 2 Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009), chap. 12; Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 51–2. 3 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 3, March 3, 1711, in The Spectator in Four Volumes, ed. Gregory Smith (New York, 1964), I, pp. 10–13. 4 The phrase is from J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1967), chap. 5.

101

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 101

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

that the transformations associated with the Financial Revolution were largely removed from politics. Indeed, it has become commonplace for economic historians to downplay the importance of party political affiliations and ideological associations when analysing the significance of the Financial Revolution.5 This chapter departs from this idea of consensus by emphasising the highly contested nature of both the Financial Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession and the intensely ideological ways contemporaries connected the two. This went beyond the mere political rhetoric in printed pamphlets and broadsides, and spilled out into the streets of London in popular protests. Such ideological associations tell a deeply political story about the vicissitudes of the Financial Revolution as much as they tell one about economic transformation. This chapter will focus on three moments of upheaval: the credit crisis of 1709–10; popular antiHanoverian unrest in the spring of 1715; and the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and its aftermath. It will explore how the government responded to each and will pay particular attention to popular rhetoric that emerged during each crisis. By examining the connections between political ideologies and financial markets, this chapter will show that the Financial Revolution never fully rose above party politics in the popular imagination in early Hanoverian Britain. II

Britain’s Financial Revolution has traditionally been associated with the creation of the national debt and public credit on the part of the government to help pay for increasingly complex and expensive military endeavours in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.6 The widespread use of credit was not new, but the move away from using limited, personalised credit mechanisms toward impersonal, state-supported instruments of public credit fundamentally transformed British society by creating new investment opportunities for a wide variety of people throughout Britain and the Empire.7 In the first instance, the government relied on joint-stock companies for substantial loans. In addition to the Bank of England, created by Parliament in 1694, the government also utilised 5

Anne L. Murphy, ‘Demanding “Credible Commitment”: Public Reactions to the Failures of the Early Financial Revolution’, EcHR, 66 (2013), 178–97 and The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge, 2009); James MacDonald, ‘The Importance of Not Defaulting: The Significance of the Election of 1710’, in Questioning Credible Commitment: Perspectives on the Rise of Financial Capitalism, ed. D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and Larry Neal (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 125–46; B.W. Hill, ‘The Change of Government and the “Loss of the City”’, EcHR, 24 (1971), 395–413. 6 P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England (New York, 1967); Henry Roseveare, The Financial Revolution, 1660–1760 (London, 1991); Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets. 7 On older uses of credit, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998); Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015).

102

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 102

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION

the much older East India Company, which had broadened its interests beyond trade to matters of finance. The other major corporate lender was the South Sea Company, founded in 1711. Those who invested in these companies held a stake in the national debt, which became highly politicised. In forging relationships with the government in the form of loans, these companies became politicised institutions, associated as being either Whig or Tory entities. As a result, people often made investment decisions based not only on the potential for financial return, but also based on political ideologies and agendas.8 The emergence of these institutions and mechanisms did not go unchallenged. Not everyone supported these changes, and still others felt that such transformations did not go far enough in providing revenue for the state to execute its international and imperial agendas. Whigs and Tories, particularly in their ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ shadings, waged major battles over the establishment of the Bank of England, the creation of the national debt, issues of taxation, and the expansion of credit mechanisms on the part of the government.9 Generally speaking, Tories and their allies were wary of new financial mechanisms and institutions and labelled those who supported them the ‘moneyed interest’, who placed private desire for wealth above concerns for public safety and national security. Author and Irish Tory pamphleteer Jonathan Swift portrayed these men as ‘Upstarts, who had little or no part in the [Glorious] Revolution’, who ‘fell upon those new Schemes of raising Money, in order to create a Mony’d-Interest’.10 Although this position represented a variety of different constituencies, including tradesmen and artisans, they were often understood as supporting the traditional landed interests. They often played on popular xenophobia and anti-Semitism common in Britain at the time owing to the considerable number of families of foreign descent, particularly Huguenots and Jews, who were disproportionately involved in the new financial establishment.11 In contrast, Whigs and their allies tended to promote the interests of the new financial establishment and were themselves some of its biggest financial supporters. They dominated the directorships of the Bank of England and 8

Bruce Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1996), pp. 6–8, 18, 137. 9 W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, MA, 1977); Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rev. edn (London, 1987); Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000). 10 Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies, and of the Late Ministry, in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (London, 1711), pp. 7–8. 11 Holmes, British Politics, chap. 5; Gary S. De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 219–22; Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), p. 23; Perry Gauci, ‘The Clash of Interests: Commerce and the Politics of Trade in the Age of Anne’, in British Politics in the Age of Holmes, ed. Clyve Jones (Malden, MA, 2009), pp. 115–25; Geoffrey Holmes, ‘The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Past & Present, 72 (1976), 61–2; Tim Harris, Politics of the later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660–1715 (London, 1993), pp. 196–202.

103

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 103

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

eventually the East India Company. Like Toland and Addison, they labelled their political opponents as disloyal to the Revolution Settlement and out of touch with new the economic realities of statecraft and war.12 Of course, these characterisations are fairly general and did not always reflect exact ideological realities. Nevertheless, these labels and stereotypes existed and had to be reckoned with. They became especially pronounced during the credit crisis of 1710, which historian John Carswell has called ‘the first fully-fledged crisis in [Britain’s] commercial and financial revolution’.13 How contemporaries understood and dealt with this crisis, therefore, had significant consequences and set the tone for the political debate over issues of finance for the coming years. By 1709, after two decades of war with France, the national debt had grown to such a degree that the government had to seek new sources of shortterm funding on increasingly bad terms. This, combined with a string of losses in the War of the Spanish Succession, triggered a crisis of credit. Tories, who held few positions in Queen Anne’s ministry, hoped to benefit from growing disillusionment with these circumstances and the Whig politicians who had gotten the nation into this predicament. Tories and their allies also took advantage of widespread anger over Whig support for (and perceived participation in) religious nonconformity, brought on by the impeachment of the High Church firebrand Henry Sacheverell in early 1710, who claimed that support for religious dissent undermined the integrity of the Church of England and the constitutional relationship between Church and state. In the wake of the trial, crowds took to the streets of London and attempted to tear down Dissenters’ meeting houses and tried to inflict damage on the Bank of England. Thus, discontent over the influence of the Whig ‘moneyed interest’ combined with anxiety over the role of religious dissent in British society to give Tories and their allies a massive electoral opportunity by the summer of 1710.14 Throughout that summer, Whigs did their best to maintain political supremacy by arguing that their expertise and commitment to the new financial system uniquely positioned them to see the nation through the credit crisis and preserve financial and political stability.15 Some Whig propaganda maintained that an influx of Tories into the government would be particularly threatening because Tories, like Jacobites, embraced a policy of repudiating the national debt. ‘A Thorough Alteration’, maintained Benjamin Hoadly, the future bishop of Bangor and vocal defender of the Whig position, would bring in men who would use a ‘Political Spunge to wipe out the Debts of the Nation’. According to Hoadly, this was the equivalent of stealing private property, that pillar of the British constitution. 12 Holmes,

British Politics, p. 172; Carruthers, City of Capital, chap. 6. John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford, CA, 1960), p. 43. 14 Hill, ‘Change of Government’, 396–402; Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), p. 166; Holmes, ‘Sacheverell Riots’, 64; De Krey, Fractured Society, pp. 213–15. 15 MacDonald, ‘The Importance’, pp. 127–8. 13

104

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 104

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION What can be secure? What can be a Title, or a Right? Or, what can become of Property, if, in so publick an instance, against the Strongest obligations, and most solemn Security, and under the highest aggravations, it shall be invaded, and destroyed?16

Any political change could make those who held a stake in the national debt nervous and could cause prices to collapse and make the credit crisis worse. Whigs even let rumours spread that they would withhold their financial support from the government if their political allies were out of power.17 Such arguments provide some indication of the anxiety Whigs felt not only about losing power, but about the security of the financial establishment. This uncertainty necessitated portraying Tories as dangerous to the economic well-being of the nation to the point of threatening the constitution. Not surprisingly, Tories responded to these attacks. In an attempt to ease fears that a change in government would somehow threaten public finances, Daniel Defoe, writing on behalf of the Tory leader Sir Robert Harley, argued that the health of public credit, rather than relying on one person or one party, depended on ‘just and honourable Dealing’. Defoe knew of ‘no Persons or Parties in my Argument’. Similarly, polemicist Abel Boyer argued that it was ‘a wild Notion’, and a ‘False Suggestion’ that public credit depended on the power of one man or party.18 It depended instead on the proper functioning of the constitution, and, according to Defoe, ‘not upon the Well-Executing their Offices, by the great Officers of the Treasury, and the Exchequer, but the Care, Conduct and Vigilance of her Majesty and the Parliament’.19 Only an enemy of the Revolution Settlement, in other words, would wish to undermine public credit. Defoe also responded to the threat that Whigs would withhold their financial support from a Tory government. Such an idea was ridiculous to contemplate. It was as if ‘to say Nature will cease, [and] Men of Money will abstain from being Men loving to get Money’.20 Amidst these debates and confronting an increasingly tenuous political situation, in June 1710 the queen removed the unpopular earl of Sunderland from his position as secretary of state for the Southern Department. In what many considered to be a scandalous response, a group of financiers led by Sir Gilbert Heathcote, governor of the Bank of England, met with the queen and requested that she make no additional ministerial changes, claiming it would destabilise the nation’s finances at an already fragile time. For two months, the queen made no further alterations. But in August the Bank’s directors refused to discount some bills of exchange issued by the Treasury for military 16

Benjamin Hoadly, The Fears and Sentiments of all True Britains; With respect to National Credit, Interest, and Religion (London, 1710), pp. 8, 9. 17 Hill, ‘Change of Government’, 399. 18 Daniel Defoe, Essay upon Publick Credit (London, 1710), p. 13; Abel Boyer, An Essay Towards the History of the Last Ministry and Parliament (London, 1710), pp. 5, 58; see also Reasons for a Total Change of a Certain M---- and the Dissolution of the P----- (London, 1710). 19 Defoe, Publick Credit, p. 21. 20 Defoe, Essay upon Loans (London, 1710), pp. 15–16.

105

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 105

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

pay, something that had usually been a routine occurrence. Heathcote let it be known that the Bank wanted a written guarantee that the queen would not dismiss anyone else from the ministry, particularly the Lord High Treasurer, the earl of Godolphin.21 Tories were aghast: according to Boyer, ‘a greater Affront was, perhaps, never offer’d to the Crown of England, either by Subjects, or Friends’.22 In response, Anne not only dismissed Godolphin but named the Tory leader Sir Robert Harley the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although Harley did not remove all Whigs from the ministry, the Tories won a resounding electoral victory in parliamentary elections in October.23 The question remained, however, whether Tories would take action that would risk public credit. This seemed to be a real concern because as the Whigs had warned, Bank of England and East India Company share prices fell as election returns came in throughout the fall of 1710.24 But Harley, despite what many of his enemies claimed, had short-term and long-term plans to try to end the credit crisis. He first successfully managed a new Parliament dominated by Tories who held far more extreme positions than he did on the issue of the national debt and wished to end the war as swiftly and as cheaply as possible. He convinced them that continuing to fund the navy and the armed forces through 1711 was crucial for the war effort, which according to some historians put the minds of the ‘moneyed interests’ at ease and enabled improved relations between the Bank of England and the government. Harley then got the Commons to approve a new lottery loan to fund some short-term debts, loans the Bank agreed to support. These relatively small acts eased investors’ concerns about any debt repudiation and had the effect of stabilising markets.25 By the spring of 1711, Harley put into execution two other, and arguably more significant, responses to the credit crisis. First, he and his allies attempted to orchestrate a takeover of the Whig-dominated directorships of the Bank of England and the East India Company, both of which held elections in April of that year. Although these efforts were unsuccessful, some of the candidates put forward by Harley found themselves at the forefront of his next plan to address the issue of the debt: the creation of the South Sea Company. The impetus behind the South Sea Company was to assist the government in servicing a large portion of its short-term debts caused by the war, estimated to be about £9.4 million. Holders of these debts, including soldiers and sailors 21 Holmes,

British Politics, p. 174; De Krey, Fractured Society, pp. 223–4; Wennerlind, Causalities of Credit, pp. 165–8. The Bank had made a substantial loan to the government the previous year in exchange for its charter being renewed in 1707. 22 Boyer, An Essay Towards, pp. 20–1. 23 David Hayton, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690, 1715, vol. 1, Introductory Survey (Cambridge, 2002), p. 459. Heathcote, now lord mayor of London, was defeated in his run for a parliamentary seat. 24 Hill, ‘Change of Government’, 404; MacDonald, ‘The Importance’, p. 128. 25 Hill, ‘Change of Government’, 407; Murphy, ‘Demanding “Credible Commitment”’, 194; MacDonald, ‘The Importance’, pp. 131–5.

106

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 106

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION

who were owed wages as well as military suppliers whose bills the government had yet to pay, could exchange them for stock in the company at a rate of 6 per cent interest. As an added incentive to creditors and potential investors, the new joint-stock corporation was granted a monopoly on all trade to and from Spanish America. Harley knew that the terms of the peace with France then under negotiation would likely grant Britain the asiento, the exclusive contract to provide the Spanish American colonies with enslaved Africans.26 The contract promised to be extremely lucrative because the Spanish seemed to have a never-ending need for slaves but were not direct participants in the transatlantic slave trade themselves. Most important as far as Harley and his allies were concerned, the South Sea Company would function as a Tory alternative to the Bank of England that the government could rely on for loans. Many of the men who had been unsuccessful in the directorship elections for the Bank and the East India Company were appointed as directors of the new company, including Sir James Bateman and Samuel Shepheard, both long-time Iberian merchants, as well as Sir Theodore Janssen and Sir Richard Hoare, Tory bankers from the City. The Company received its charter in September, and by December over £9 million had been subscribed.27 In the meantime, the queen created Harley the earl of Oxford and appointed him First Lord of the Treasury. Far from repudiating the debt, Oxford and his allies saw the country through the credit crisis to great effect. Oxford’s successful handling of the crisis has led some scholars to conclude that from that point forward both Whigs and Tories understood the importance of maintaining public credit and funding the national debt. Economic historian Anne Murphy has argued that in the wake of Oxford’s accomplishments in 1711, ‘it was acknowledged that public credit was dependent on good government, rather than the government of one party’.28 The Financial Revolution, it seemed, had risen above party politics and ideological associations. The question remains, however, to whom was this apparent? It seems unlikely that everyone understood or believed this to be the case. The remaining sections of this chapter will show that the Financial Revolution remained contested territory for people of a variety of political persuasions. At the time of the Hanoverian Succession, this frequently spilled over into popular protest. In London action protesting the new regime often aimed directly at the financial establishment with crowds gathering outside the Stock Exchange or the Bank of England and even threatening the lives of the men who ran these institutions. The Hanoverian 26

Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, CT, 2015), chap. 7. 27 BL, Portland Papers, Add MS 70163, fols 239–41; Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, chap. 6; DeKrey, Fractured Society, pp. 151–3, 239–43; Carruthers, City of Capital, pp. 152–4; John G. Sperling, The South Sea Company: An Historical Essay and Bibliographical Finding List (Boston, MA, 1962), p. 25. 28 Murphy, ‘Demanding “Credible Commitment”’, p. 195.

107

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 107

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

Succession and the entrenchment of the new financial system remained associated in the popular imagination, which had profound political meaning. III

The Hanoverian Succession appeared to go smoothly, without any major uprising or negative reaction on the part of financial markets.29 But the political atmosphere remained tense for many months after the queen died on 1 August 1714. One week beforehand, Anne had removed Oxford as Lord High Treasurer and there was a widespread expectation that the new king, considering his European interests, would expel from the ministry the remaining Tories who had been so anxious to end Britain’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession.30 Anticipating a shift in government, throughout the summer and autumn Tories and Whigs took to the press, each side emphasising its loyalty to the new regime and desire to maintain public credit. Tory publications argued that Whigs had been responsible for raising the national debt and for alleged misappropriation of government funds, whereas Tories had maintained ‘the Honour and Dignity of Parliaments, both by their own Morals, and the Support of public credit’.31 Tory polemics also argued that the Tory ministry had done the nation a service by solving the credit crisis and ending the war, which slowed the growth of the debt and promoted the interests of British taxpayers. Defoe went so far as to claim that Whigs were so unscrupulous that they were willing to lose their own money by selling stocks in the Bank and South Sea Company to make the Tories look bad. Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, urged George I to avoid choosing Whig ministers who would ‘subject him to the Arbitrary Government of a Junto’.32 Whig pamphlets responded directly to these allegations. Despite Tory claims, argued one author, there was no evidence that Whigs had embezzled money from the government while in power.33 Nor had they raised the debt to unmanageable heights; in fact, another maintained, it was the Tories ‘By whose Management the Debts of the Nation encreased more after the conclusion of the Peace.’ This writer also recalled the change of ministry in 1710 as the beginning of Britain’s diminished status internationally and domestically: From the Date of this unfortunate CHANGE, not a single Accident went well for us; our Conquering Armies were now pursued; our Fleets return’d Home shattered and unsuccessful; and our Credit sunk to the lowest Ebb. We were in the Hands of Men, 29

Sir John Clapham, The Bank of England, A History: Volume I, 1694–1797 (Cambridge, 1958), p. 76. 30 Hoppit, Land of Liberty, pp. 389–90. 31 The Management of the Four last Years Vindicated (London, 1714), p. 45. 32 Daniel Defoe, A Letter to the Whigs (London, 1714), p. 46; Francis Atterbury, English Advice to the Freeholders of England (London, 1714), p. 6. 33 The Whigs Vindicated (London, 1715), p. 36.

108

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 108

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION who were unmoved by Tokens of Providence, and unconcern’d for the good of their Country.34

In the event, George I appointed a ministry dominated by Whigs, including the earls of Stanhope and Townshend as secretaries of state and the duke of Marlborough as captain general of the armed forces. Whigs also won a solid majority in parliamentary elections in early 1715.35 This parliament proceeded to impeach a number of men from the previous ministry, including Oxford, the duke of Ormonde who had served as captain general, and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the secretary of state who had been in charge of peace negotiations at Utrecht. Rather than face these charges, Ormonde and Bolingbroke fled to the exiled court of James Francis Edward Stuart in France. In choosing a Whig ministry, George I solidified the ideological association of the Whigs with securing the Revolution Settlement that had created public credit and guaranteed his place in line for the British throne. At the same time, a handful of Tory politicians became treasonably connected to the Jacobite cause. The ideological association of Tories with repudiating the debt and now with Jacobitism contributed to their political isolation from the new regime. Scholarship from the social sciences has explored these ideological connections most explicitly. For example, economists Douglass North and Barry Weingast attribute the success of the Financial Revolution to the constitutional changes that emerged as a result of the Glorious Revolution. According to North and Weingast, people grew comfortable investing in the institutions associated with the Financial Revolution because they now had recourse to laws and protections guaranteed by Parliament rather than an arbitrary and capricious king. Thus, the state was perceived as having a ‘credible commitment’ to pay its debts and otherwise meet its financial obligations.36 A number of scholars have tested the North and Weingast thesis by examining the impact of political change (or the threat of political change) on financial markets in the wake of the Revolution. Economists John Wells and Douglas Wills analyse how financial markets responded to the threat of Jacobitism. By investigating prices of Bank of England shares, Wells and Wills determine that during times of Jacobite activity or amid rumours of such activity, financial markets reacted negatively. Conversely, markets responded positively when the Jacobite threat was brought under control. They argue that this was not only because of the political threat Jacobites posed in terms of possible rebellion and war, but also because of James Stuart’s economic platform of repudiating the debt. Investors associated Jacobitism with negative behaviour in the stock market, thus increasing the

34

The Folly and Vanity of Impeaching the late Ministry Consider’d (London, 1715?), pp. 15, 11. Land of Liberty, pp. 389–92. 36 Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, ‘Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Economic History, 49 (1989), 803–32. 35 Hoppit,

109

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 109

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

perceived importance of the Hanoverian Succession for England’s financial health and security.37 Similarly, political scientist David Stasavage has determined that interest rates fell when Whigs were expected to be in control of the government because Whigs more regularly voted to support the national debt. Tories, on the other hand, did not, and in fact, occasionally spoke of suspending ‘debt payments and/or curtailing the role of the Bank of England’ in financial markets.38 It should be noted that Stasavage does not provide any evidence of specific Tory support of such policies except in terms of what he calls ‘rhetoric’. However, his work suggests the Financial Revolution had not risen above party political divides, even among investors who had supposedly learned that party associations no longer mattered when it came to securing public credit. The ideological association of Tories with repudiating the debt, fair or unfair, seemingly had an impact on financial markets. What this scholarship emphasises is that party political and ideological associations were not removed from financial considerations. One of the issues that many historians have taken with these approaches, however, is that by focusing primarily on markets and investors, these analyses are very top-down. None of these studies, for example, considers the popular hostility that met the Hanoverian Succession, which often focused its aggression on the financial establishment and the Whig ‘moneyed interest’. After George I’s accession, a number of demonstrations and riots took place that aimed at the new regime. One leaflet read, ‘You see what Riots and what Tumults have been rais’d in many Parts of this Island, particularly on Days set apart for publick Joy on the happy Accession of our good King.’39 According to historian Nicholas Rogers, such protests often involved artisans, tradesmen and others who felt disaffected from the new world of finance and betrayed by the Whigs who had once been seen as the party of anti-establishment and even radical ideals. These protests coincided with a period of economic uncertainty for many working people, which stood in stark contrast to the apparent wealth of the financial establishment.40 At the time, Whig polemicists placed the blame squarely on Tories for stirring up such disorders and inciting the violent actions of the antiHanoverian ‘mob’: 37

John Wells and Douglas Wills, ‘Revolution, Restoration, and Debt Repudiation: The Jacobite Threat to England’s Institutions and Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic History, 60 (2000), 418–41. 38 David Stasavage, ‘Partisan Politics and Public Debt: The Importance of the “Whig Supremacy” for Britain’s Financial Revolution’, European Review of Economic History, 11 (2007), 126–7. 39 The Necessity of Impeaching the Late Ministry (London, 1715), p. 7. 40 Nicholas Rogers, ‘Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian London’, Past & Present, 79 (1978), 70–100 and ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’, in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 70–88.

110

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 110

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION As for the Conduct of our High-Flyers towards K. George, I need only refer you to the Tumults and Disorders raised by them to the Day of his Coronation. And you will find that from William the Conqueror to this very Moment, never any of our Princes was so outrageously insulted on the very Day of his Inauguration.41

According to another pamphleteer, Tories had even tried to use the threat of the mob to maintain power, ‘as if the Outrages of a raskally Mob set to work by Hire, were to be accounted the Temper of a Nation’.42 Whigs, anxious about their own political position as well as the security of financial markets, pushed the idea that Tories not only wished to repudiate the debt but that they had orchestrated popular protests against the new monarch. The extent to which these anti-Hanoverian popular actions were truly Jacobite remains somewhat murky. As Rogers has maintained, Jacobitism became a broad anti-establishment ideology in the early eighteenth century, and therefore it did not necessarily mean that all those shouting their disdain for King George truly wished to see a Stuart restoration.43 But the government did not always make such nuanced distinctions, especially when demonstrations turned violent and aimed directly at the financial establishment. On George I’s birthday in May 1715, one such protest began at the Stock Exchange and threatened to spread to the Bank of England. John Blackwell, the constable for Cheapside, described the tumult in a petition to the Lords of the Treasury the following year. It began, ‘On the 29th Day of May 1715, there was a Design laid to raise three Mobbs in the City of London that Night. . . to proclaim the Pretender.’ The mob planned: to secure, or Seize, on the Bank of England, or set it on Fire; also to Assassinate and Murder such Majestrats of this City as appeared Zealous for his Majesty King George; or to set their houses and habitations on Fire; particularly the Right Honble Sir William Humphries [sic], Knt. Lord Mayor; [and] Sir Gilbert Heathcote & Sir Charles Peers.

Heathcote was the former governor of the Bank of England as well as a former lord mayor. Humfreys was lord mayor at the time of the protest and had presided over King George’s coronation in October 1714. Peers was the lord mayor when Blackwell issued his petition and also served as a director of the East India Company. All three signed the petition as a testament to its authenticity and to Blackwell’s good character. All three were Whigs who represented the pinnacle of London’s political and financial establishment. In his petition, Blackwell described himself as having ‘manifested an indefatigable Zeal for the Hanover Succession ever since that happy Settlement’. He also noted that because of such zeal, he had ‘exposed himselfe to the greatest danger in suppressing Mobs’.44 41

Whigs Vindicated, p. 24. His Majesty’s Obligations to the Whigs Plainly Proved (London, 1715), p. 27 43 Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism’, p. 72. 44 TNA, Treasury Papers (T) 1/200, no. 33, 26 September 1716. 42

111

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 111

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

The ‘Tory mob’ continued to make the ideological connection between the Whig ‘moneyed interest’ and the settlement of the new regime. For many protestors, the Financial Revolution had not moved beyond party political divides and associations, despite Defoe’s assertions or the conclusions of later historians. This was recognised by contemporaries of all political persuasions and contributed to a Whig crackdown on public disorder in the wake of such popular tumults. In July 1715, Parliament passed and the king signed the Riot Act. According to the law, a public assembly of twelve of more people could be deemed a riot by local magistrates if the crowd refused to disperse after being read of a portion of the act. Even more troubling, the act provided automatic immunity to those authorities who either harmed or killed a suspect under arrest for breaking the law. The Act, which took effect on 1 August 1715, was designed to suppress the kinds of protests that had rocked London and other cities and towns since the arrival of George I. The law was deemed necessary by the government not only to keep crowds under control, but also to promote financial and political stability, especially considering that financial institutions and the men who ran them were often the targets of such protests. The Riot Act was part of a broader platform implemented by the Whig government that, in the words of historian J.M. Beattie, was ‘designed to deal vigorously with disorder, including crime, if that posed a threat to the stability of the regime’.45 This programme also included the passage of the Septennial Act in 1716, which increased the maximum interval between parliamentary elections to seven years, thus reducing the political and social uproars of triennial elections. Such laws betrayed a significant amount of apprehension on the part of the Whig regime that the only way to secure their political supremacy was through repressive measures. But in the wake of the unsuccessful Jacobite uprising in Scotland and northern England in the autumn of 1715 that alarmed the nation, this agenda worked. Although there were some minor changes to the ministry in the coming years, Whig dominance of government positions and Parliament seemed secure.46 IV

Throughout the early Hanoverian period, party political associations played a significant role in how the Financial Revolution was understood by contemporaries. Whigs utilised their association with protecting public credit, and that of Tories with Jacobitism and repudiating the national debt, as a way to maintain political power. Conversely, Tories tried to shake these connotations while at the same time portraying Whigs as motivated by greed and threatening to the traditional order of British politics and society. These ideological connections 45

J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750 (Oxford, 2001), p. 429; Hoppit, Land of Liberty, pp. 48–9; Rogers, Whigs and Cities, pp. 29–31; Rogers, ‘Popular Protest’, 74–5. 46 Stasavage, ‘Partisan Politics’, p. 131; Hoppit, Land of Liberty, pp. 397–403.

112

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 112

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION

became both more pronounced and more complicated in the wake of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the first major financial test of Whig hegemony after the Hanoverian Succession. Rather than focus on the causes of the Bubble, this section will explore how the government responded to the crisis in the form of rescue plans that were designed to strengthen public credit and assist those negatively affected by the scheme. These interventions by the government reflected a widespread fear that doing nothing could cause the financial system irreparable harm. Ultimately, government responses to the South Sea Bubble should be seen as part of a broader Whig agenda that helped secure both the financial establishment and the Hanoverian Succession. Although the South Sea Company had been founded as a Tory counterweight to the Whig-dominated Bank of England, a number of Whigs had assumed directorship roles after Queen Anne’s death and Oxford’s fall from power. By the end of the 1710s the Company was firmly ensconced in Britain’s financial establishment. It had numerous allies among the Whig ministry, many of whom were invested in the Company and had worked with the Company’s directors to develop a scheme to attract investment and drive up profits because revenues from overseas trade has been profoundly disappointing.47 The plan was based on servicing a portion of the nation’s debts, particularly a large pool of unfunded annuities, by exchanging them for new issuances of company stock. Parliament approved legislation enacting the scheme in early 1720. In order for the Company to meet its financial obligations and make a profit its stock price had to rise, so directors and major investors started swapping large pools of new shares in order to influence the market and drive up prices.48 Over the course of the spring and summer, the Company issued four new subscriptions amidst what one historian has called ‘a background of frenzied speculation’. Under increasing pressure, this spectacular level of speculation ceased in the early fall. Stock prices that had peaked at just above £1,000 in June sank to £190 by December.49 The nation was once again confronted with a major financial crisis, with public credit under threat. As was the case in 1710, critics and observers repeatedly employed the idea that the South Sea Bubble endangered public credit and therefore the constitution itself. Pamphlets describing the consequences of the Bubble often portrayed the men who orchestrated the scheme as nothing better than traitors who put the nation in danger of political uprisings and foreign invasions. ‘It being become the general and just Complaint of the whole Nation’, argued one writer in 1721, that publick Credit is lost and destroy’d, and by that means Trade ruin’d, Manufacturers starving, Money scarce, and that all Ranks of People, from the highest to the lowest 47 Carswell,

South Sea Bubble, pp. 68–76; Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, chap. 6. Land of Liberty, p. 335. 49 Dickson, Financial Revolution, p. 123; Helen Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of its Origins and Consequences (London, 2011), pp. 50–1. 48 Hoppit,

113

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 113

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen within this (lately famous) City, and our (not long since flourishing) Country (all, except Traytors, whose boundless Avarice occasion’d it) are reduc’d to a Degree of Misery before unheard of in the known World.50

A petition from the city of Coventry to the Commons blamed those who coordinated the scheme with undermining the constitution. ‘But look likewise with the utmost Concern upon the Shattered, Discontented, and in a manner Defenceless Condition of the Nation in General’, it warned, should any Revengeful Neighbour, take this Opportunity of our Weakness to Insult us, and we cannot believe that those Wicked Engineers, who have brought us into this State, design’d to undermine us for our Wealth alone, but to blow up our happy Constitution too.51

Destabilising public credit continued to be associated with threatening the Revolution Settlement and the constitution. Because of these potentially dire consequences, the government had to appear to be doing something to bolster public credit and improve investor confidence. Parliament approved an investigation into the scheme’s origins to see who exactly should be blamed for the scandal. The inquiry of a parliamentary committee eventually uncovered the corrupt actions of a number of high-placed politicians, including the First Lord of the Treasury the earl of Sunderland, Chancellor of the Exchequer John Aislabie, Treasury Secretary Charles Stanhope and Postmaster General James Craggs, as well as bribery on the part of some South Sea Company directors. By the spring of 1721, a number of these men had resigned in disgrace, and some former directors had their estates confiscated by the government.52 In addition to this investigation, Parliament enacted laws aimed at strengthening public credit. Such plans were often instigated by Sir Robert Walpole who, amidst these ministerial changes, was appointed First Lord of the Treasury in April 1721. He considered it essential for the health of public credit, and therefore the proper functioning of state finance, to rescue the South Sea Company by forgiving its debts and assisting those who had purchased shares at wildly inflated prices.53 These plans frequently involved the Bank of England and the East India Company, which were called upon to absorb some of the South Sea Company’s debts. Such plans often met with resistance from those who worried that combining the financial interests of the three companies would make them too politically powerful.54 But the involvement of the Bank and East India Company was crucial, Walpole argued, because ‘the Publick has 50

The Naked and Undisguis’d Truth (London, 1721), p. 1. A Collection of the Several Petitions of the Counties, Boroughs, &c, Presented to the House of Commons (London, 1721), pp. 21–2. 52 Dickson, Financial Revolution, pp. 171–6. 53 Dickson, Financial Revolution, pp. 161–2, 170–6; Paul, South Sea Bubble, pp. 102–03; Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 19, 10 January 1721 (London, 1803), XIX, 398. 54 Now or Never: or, a Familiar Discourse Concerning the Two Schemes for Restoring National Credit (London, 1721), p. 4; Cato’s Letters, no. 9, 31 December 1720 (Indianapolis, IN, 1995), p. 72. 51

114

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 114

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION

been & frequently must be obliged to apply to these Corporate Bodies for the support of Publick Credit’. In other words, public credit depended on these companies, because without the loans they made to the government, the state could not function properly. Therefore, Walpole’s plans also reflected a certain level of anxiety about the consequences of letting the Company fail. As Walpole explained to the king, ‘the publick security and the restoring & establishing publick credit in which your [Majesty’s] Government is so highly concerned are first to be consulted’.55 This message of supporting public credit through government intervention became particularly important as the crisis continued to play out and popular discontent became more widespread. Throughout 1721, hundreds of publications put rhetorical pressure on the government to do more to assist those negatively affected by the scheme. Many called for a shift in morality on the part of the nation’s political leaders: There can be no Cure for our dying Country, unless there be an entire Change wrought in the Minds of Men, who are, or shall be, entrusted with the publick Treasures, so as to make them prefer Honesty to Corruption, the Service of the native Country to sordid Gain.56

Others maintained that the continued reliance on financial securities via the Bank and East India Company to fix a crisis caused by abuses of financial securities was misguided. Tho’ by crafty Management, of Broker’s false Reports (that the South-Sea Company gets much by this Bargain) Stocks may rise, it may decieve [sic] many and Encourage that Ruinous Trade of buying and selling Stocks for more then it’s [sic] real Value.57

Hostility to the government’s response to the South Sea crisis was not limited to print. Indeed, protests took place regularly throughout London since the Bubble burst in the autumn of 1720.58 Sometimes this spilled over into the halls of Parliament. In the summer of 1721, Walpole proposed a further plan to rescue the South Sea Company, which forgave some £7 million of the Company’s debts.59 In his speech presenting the bill to the Commons, Walpole justified the proposal by stating that ‘the Interposition of Parliament became unavoidable’, because the Discontents of the People [are] daily increasing, and the uncertain and doubtful Events that threatened very great and valuable Properties, creating such infinite Anxieties and Dissatisfaction, had a most fatal and general influence upon on publick and private Credit. 55

BL, Walpole Papers, Add MS 74066, fols 1, 3–4. Naked and Undisguis’d Truth, p. 9. 57 Reasons against Ingrafting the South-Sea Fund with the Bank and East India Company (London, 1721), [p. 2]. 58 Dickson, Financial Revolution, p. 160. 59 Hoppit, Land of Liberty, pp. 406–08; Dickson, Financial Revolution, p. 176. 56

115

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 115

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

This discontent was evident in the Commons, where on the final day of debate, ‘a Croud of People were got together, in a tumultuous and riotous Manner’. It is unclear if these protestors were unhappy with government intervention per se, or if they did not like this particular plan because it did not do enough to assist those who had lost their fortunes in the South Sea scheme. In the event, justices of the peace were called in to bring the crowd under control and to ‘take care to prevent the like Riots for the future’, indicating a reading of the Riot Act.60 The Riot Act had been passed for this very reason, to protect the government and the financial system. Under such unpredictable circumstances, keeping the halls of Parliament and financial markets calm was of the utmost importance. Walpole’s plan to assist the Company passed the following day. It is worth exploring why these interventions were considered necessary by the Whig ministry under Walpole’s leadership. Charles Delafaye, an undersecretary of state, wrote a letter to Walpole that gave some indication of why such plans were thought to be essential for the nation’s well-being. In the spring of 1722, the South Sea Company and the Bank were in the midst of negotiating one final rescue plan to stabilise the Company’s finances. In his letter, Delafaye conveyed that news of the plan had eased investors’ anxieties: Another thing will make the Stocks rise is that the Bargain between the South Sea & ye Bank is lookt upon to be as good as concluded, & both partys seem eager to have it transacted in form & take offers as soon as may be. This will bring matters to a Settlement and make people easy.

According to Delafaye, investors were reassured by the continued involvement of the government in orchestrating agreements between these financial institutions. Such activity was welcomed and possibly even expected on the part of investors. In the same letter, Delafaye described ‘our Stock’ as the ‘Pulse of the Body Politick’.61 Such language reinforced the notion that the health of the British financial sector was intimately connected to the political system, and that political system, for the sake of security, needed the financial sector to remain stable. This was particularly important in the spring of 1722 in the aftermath of a general election and amidst news of renewed Jacobite activity. Not surprisingly, in light of the South Sea crisis, many assumed that Tories and their allies would chip away at the Whig majority in Parliament in the general election that took place in March and April 1722. However, this did not turn out to be the case. It is plausible that interventions by the state designed to rescue the South Sea Company contributed to the survival of the Whigs in power. Such interventions helped solidify the association of Whigs with the securing of the financial establishment, and as they themselves argued, the Revolution Settlement and the constitution. This was despite widespread 60

Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 19, 25 July and 3 August 1721, XIX, 638–9, 643–4; Carswell, South Sea Bubble, pp. 263–4; Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton, NJ, 2004), p. 146. 61 BL, Walpole Papers, Add MS 74066, no. 6, 29 May/9 June 1722.

116

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 116

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION AND THE FINANCIAL REVOLUTION

resentment about the Bubble, not to mention the popular press portraying Walpole as saving the South Sea Company in order to protect his cronies so they were ‘Skreen’d from Justice’.62 But Tories and others disaffected from the regime were unable to take full advantage of this dissatisfaction in the spring of 1722. Although the general election was hotly contested, often the most vigorous contests for parliamentary seats were fought between two varieties of Whigs (‘Court’ versus ‘Country’) rather than between a Whig and a Tory. As a result, Whigs, although now a more complex grouping, maintained their parliamentary majority.63 The failure of the Tories to exploit popular discontent in the general election of 1722 is something of a puzzle. Some scholars have argued that the financial consequences of the Bubble were not as bad as the propaganda and the myths surrounding it would have us believe; in fact, not only was the ‘frenzy’ surrounding the stock quite muted and rational, but relatively few people were affected by the demise of the scheme.64 One might conclude that because of the Bubble’s limited effects, Whig control of the government was never in danger. Others have avoided the question of politics entirely, emphasising that England’s financial markets were mature enough to survive the crisis.65 One can perhaps infer that it was because of this strength of the markets that the Whigs survived. Some historians have proposed that the reason why Tories were unable to capitalise on the Bubble was because of the South Sea Company’s past association with Toryism. Tories could not really claim the high ground because they were just as guilty as Whigs in causing the crisis.66 Conversely, the continued association of Tories with Jacobitism, repudiating the debt, and destabilising credit and the constitution, rather than with the South Sea Company per se, seemingly contributed to their continued political isolation. A number of Tories did themselves no favours in this regard in 1722, when a Jacobite plot was uncovered by the government amid the general election. Named after one of the main conspirators, Francis Atterbury, the bishop of Rochester, the Atterbury Plot would have involved both a domestic uprising as well as an invasion of armed regiments from France and Spain. Although the plot was not widely known until after the election, it involved a number of high-placed Tories.67 It fed into Whig propaganda that had questioned Tory loyalty to the new regime since at least 1714. 62

Collection of Several Petitions, pp. 9, 11. Land of Liberty, p. 408; Speck, Stability and Strife, p. 202. 64 Julian Hoppit, ‘The Myths of the South Sea Bubble’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., 12 (2002), 141–65. 65 Ann M. Carlos and Larry Neal, ‘The Micro-Foundations of Early London Capital Market: Bank of England Shareholders during and after the South Sea Bubble, 1720–25’, EcHR, 59 (2006), 498–538. 66 Carswell, South Sea Bubble, p. 190; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 195–6. 67 Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 119–21. 63 Hoppit,

117

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 117

22/08/2019 08:57

Abigail L. Swingen

The South Sea crisis and the various interventions of the part of the government that were designed to save the Company and assist investors played a role in solidifying both the Whig supremacy as well as the Hanoverian regime. How people responded to these interventions, with hostility or relief, underscored that they continued to make the ideological connection between the Financial Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession. Such responses also indicated that the Financial Revolution, far from being removed from politics, remained highly contested. Cracking down on popular protest and rescuing the South Sea Company indicated that as far as the state was concerned, the financial establishment was hardly removed from potential political turmoil. Although both Whigs and Tories attempted to portray their opponents as the true enemies of the Revolution Settlement, the particular association of Toryism with Jacobite plots and repudiating the national debt not only influenced financial markets but contributed to Tory political isolation. Ideological associations mattered when it came to the Financial Revolution throughout the early Hanoverian period.

118

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 118

22/08/2019 08:57

6

Colonial Policy in North America, 1689–1717 Megan Lindsay Cherry The impact of the Hanoverian Succession in America has received limited scholarly attention.1 One reason why this topic is under-studied is that historians widely subscribe to the explanatory device of salutary neglect – the notion that the British state pursued a policy of inattention towards the American colonies: it left the colonists mostly to their own devices between 1688 and 1763, and while it still passed laws regulating trade amongst the colonies, it never really enforced them. The belief in salutary neglect has served to excuse inattention towards British imperial and political events during the first half of the eighteenth century.2 Even the few recent works that have addressed political issues have focused far more attention on issues of political culture rather than the structures of power and impact of transatlantic events.3 The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89 instituted a seismic shift in power and sovereignty in the English state: in direct contrast to the absolutist leanings of Charles II and James II, the Revolutionaries believed that sovereignty now resided in the Crown-in-Parliament. A corresponding revolution occurred within religious matters after 1688–89. The Toleration Act of 1689 reaffirmed the Church of England as the religious establishment, but ended its legal monopoly over religious worship by allowing dissenters to worship freely, if not with the same rights as Anglicans. With this legislation England also became stoutly more anti-Catholic and convinced that the French posed a threat to their way of life. While some scholars have addressed the question of what the Revolution Settlement meant for England’s – and, after 1707, Britain’s – colonies in North 1

Jeremy Gregory, ‘The Hanoverians and the Colonial Churches’, in The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture, ed. Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (Burlington, VT, 2015), pp. 107–25; Brendan McConville, ‘Monarchy, Affection and Empire: The Hanoverian Dynasty in Eighteenth-Century America’, in ibid., pp. 171–86. 2 James A. Henretta, ‘Salutary Neglect’: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, NJ, 1972). 3 Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia, PA, 2011); Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).

119

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 119

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

America, they have not asked what impact the Hanoverian Succession had on this new imperial establishment.4 This chapter will address the impact of the accession of George I on the colonies. Did it reaffirm the Revolution Settlement in North America, or did it mark its own independent series of changes in the Empire? I

It makes little sense to speak of ‘British imperial policy’ towards North America in a period characterised by intense political disagreements. There was no unitary imperial policy that Britain pursued during 1689–1714. Instead, there were two starkly defined and opposing positions on a number of issues relating to the colonies. Broadly speaking, the Whigs and the Tories enunciated dramatically different visions of how the American colonies would benefit Britain. This section will delineate these two visions at variance. In their imperial policies, the Whigs sought to create a future in which heavily populated American colonies produced both raw and manufactured goods which would expand Britain’s trade throughout the world, while at the same time, serving as a market to consume such commodities. During the post-Revolutionary era, Whigs generally agreed that England would finance the nation and its wars by creating a long-term national debt that would be paid through land taxes and commercial revenues. The Whigs thought that the colonies could help inflate those revenues by both producing the raw materials necessary for English manufactured products and by serving as a rapidly expanding market that would consume these goods.5 To this end, throughout the quarter-century after the Revolution, Whigs frequently pursued projects that encouraged the settlement of the American colonies and bolstered the production of naval stores and other goods unable to be secured domestically. 4

Ian K. Steele, ‘The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire, 1689–1784’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire 2: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall, (Oxford, 1998), pp. 105–27; Ian K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford, 1968); Ned Landsman, ‘The Episcopate, the British Union, and the Failure of Religious Settlement’, in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), pp. 75–97; Ned Landsman, ‘The Legacy of British Union for the North American Colonies: Provincial Elites and the Problem of Imperial Union’, in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 297–317. 5 For the Whig economic vision, see Gary De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 22–9, and Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009), chapter 10. For these economic policies in America, see Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, WMQ, 69 (2012), 3–34.

120

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 120

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

The Tories held a radically different notion of how Britain could achieve greater wealth. They fought against Whig political and economic policies such as land taxes, eliminating trading monopolies, long-term borrowing and the Bank of England. Instead, they favoured monopolistic trading companies such as the old East India Company and the Royal African Company. Tories were also far less involved in colonial trade than their Whig counterparts.6 Economic advisors with significant ties to the ousted King James II or the Tory party sought to revive England’s balance of trade by expanding its imperial borders and encouraging monopolistic trading companies to extract resources from new territories abroad.7 Rather than encouraging manufactures, Tories focused on the re-export trade: they believed England would become wealthiest by importing goods from overseas and selling them at a profit to other countries. Tories believed that the best use of American colonies was in the production of cash crops like sugar and tobacco. Moreover, the Tories thought that manufacturing did little to enhance British wealth as compared to raw goods and sought to curb consumption of manufactured products both domestically and in the colonies in order to maximise trading profits.8 Thus, Tory imperial projects in North America focused on promoting raw goods that could be re-exported to other nations. Tories believed that crops like sugar and tobacco from the southern colonies and West Indies, and the fishery industry of Newfoundland, would be Britain’s quickest way to wealth. It followed then that the New England colonies were antithetical to the Tory vision: they competed with England’s existing manufactures and were full of political dissidents and religious dissenters. The American colonies also factored into the Tory’s favoured defensive ‘blue-water policy’ of using the Navy to aggressively protect and expand British trade overseas while striking out against their enemies’ colonial holdings. An understanding of the varying domestic political fortunes of the metropole is necessary to comprehend why various swings in colonial policy took place between 1689 and 1714. During this period, colonial policy adhered to a few main goals, but the focus that imperial administrators like the Board of Trade and the secretary of state for the Southern Department placed on specific projects depended on the political fortunes and specific temporal concerns of their party.9 6

De Krey, A Fractured Society, pp. 24–7, 125–6. Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism’, 24; Steve Pincus, ‘The Pivot of Empire’, Sir John Neale Lecture delivered at University College, London, 19 March 2010. 8 For more on the differences in Whig and Tory goals for the British Empire in the early eighteenth century, see Steve Pincus, ‘Addison’s Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early 18th Century’, Parliamentary History, 31(2012), 99–117. For Tory political economy, see Christopher Dudley, ‘Establishing a Revolutionary Regime: Whig One-party Rule in Britain, 1710–1734’ (University of Chicago, PhD thesis, 2010), pp. 199, 213–26; Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 182 (2004), 132–7. 9 Cf. Oliver Morton Dickerson, American Colonial Government, 1696–1765. A Study of the 7

121

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 121

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

In addition to this Whig–Tory struggle over determining imperial policy, other complicating factors muddle the narrative of British imperial policy’s path. Inter-institutional struggles over power between actors such as the secretary of state for the Southern Department, the Admiralty Department, the Privy Council and the Treasury Department all vied for power with the Board of Trade. Extra-institutional groups such as the bishop of London, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and countless writers on issues of political economy had their measure of influence as well. As a result, tracing an authoritative account of British imperial policy is a decidedly hard challenge. While certain tenets of the ‘Revolution Settlement’ remained constant throughout the years 1688–1714, this was a period of intense political change and cannot be viewed as a static era. Nor does it make sense to talk about British policy in terms of individual monarchs’ reigns; for instance, several dramatic political shifts occurred during Queen Anne’s tenure, both in Britain and in the colonies. King George I’s reign would witness additional shifts in policies pursued. Throughout much of this era, the rise to power of either the Whig or Tory political party often marked the beginning of a shift in guiding imperial policy. Nonetheless, there were a few imperial strategies pursued consistently by all metropolitan administrators throughout the post-Revolutionary period. Foremost among these was continuing the old imperial goal of consolidating control over the colonies. Yet this goal took the specific form of ensuring that the colonial governors were free to act on the Crown’s behalf, rather than being indebted to colonial assemblies for their salaries. While metropolitan attention to the American colonies was scant in the initial years of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, momentous shifts in imperial policy in North America occurred nonetheless. The first major change began in the colonies – the dramatic dismantling of the Dominion of New England. On 18 April 1689 a group of Bostonians seized the governor of the Dominion and threw him in jail with several of his associates. Soon thereafter, the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Plymouth and Rhode Island reinstated their previous regimes while rebels in New York and Maryland erected their own governments and declared loyalty to King William III. The settlement of issues of sovereignty and the war to impose King William’s reign in Scotland and Ireland significantly diverted imperial administrators’ attention away from England’s North American colonies. Only by 1691 did pressing issues in North America, like the resumption of Massachusetts Bay’s charter or replacing governors achieve resolution.10 By 1695, England’s British Board of Trade in its Relation to the American Colonies, Political, Industrial, Administrative (Cleveland, OH, 1912), p. 310; Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, pp. 124–32. 10 See Ian K. Steele, ‘The Board of Trade, the Quakers, and the Resumption of Colonial Charters, 1699–1702’, WMQ, 23 (1966), 596–619.

122

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 122

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

economy was in dire straits. This economic crisis brought to the forefront deep ideological divisions between metropolitan politicians on how England and its colonies ought to be governed. The first significant post-Revolutionary political tussle over English imperial policy came in the mid-1690s with Parliament’s focus on England’s overseas trade. Economists and politicians alike proposed plans during 1695–97 to resuscitate England’s lagging finances by promoting overseas trade. It was during this period that Whig and Tory writers began to clearly and vociferously define their positions on trade in opposition to that of their opponents.11 While Whigs and Tories espoused radically different opinions about which policies to encourage in the North American colonies, both groups agreed on the necessity of creating a Board of Trade (and Plantations) to help stimulate English overseas trade.12 Both the Ministry and Parliament were independently discussing the creation of a Board of Trade during the winter of 1695–96, and ultimately the Privy Council established the Board as an advisory council, thus securing the royal prerogative in the colonies.13 During King William III’s reign, highly competent diplomats and experts on trade and the plantations staffed the Board, and Whigs and Tories alike served without suffering the shifts in prevailing political winds. Despite following starkly different policies of political economy in the North American colonies, Whigs and Tories agreed on one political goal: that of limiting the influence that local assemblies exerted upon colonial governors. Members of both political parties saw this as a necessary step towards increasing governor’s dependence on and reliability to the Crown. In several colonies – such as New York, New Jersey, Barbados and New Hampshire – governors consistently found their salaries inadequate and had become reliant on ‘presents’ from their colonial legislatures. To metropolitan eyes, these presents looked very much like bribes. The Board of Trade sent the king a recommendation in 1701 that he ‘forbid the receiving of presents’ by plantations’ governors to ensure they were not rendered ‘precarious and dependent’ upon the gift-giving assemblies.14 The Board followed up with specific recommendations the next year.15 Ultimately, in 1703, Queen Anne’s Privy Council reviewed the salaries of American governors 11

For notable Tory pamphlets on trade, see Sir Josiah Child, A Discourse of the Nature, Use, and Advantages of Trade (London, 1694); Charles Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England. Which more immediately Treat of the Foreign Traffick of this Kingdom. . . Part II (London, 1698). For Whig pamphlets, see John Cary, An Essay on the State of England, In Relation to its Trade, Its Poor, and its Taxes, For Carrying on the Present War against France (Bristol, 1695); Sir Francis Brewster, Essays on Trade and Navigation. In Five Parts (London, 1695). 12 See R.M. Lees, ‘Parliament and the Proposal for a Council of Trade, 1695–6’, EHR, 54 (1939), 38–66. 13 Ian K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, pp. 10–18. 14 TNA, Colonial Papers, Board of Trade and Secretaries of State. General Entry Books, series 1,e] CO 324/7, pp. 454–5. 15 TNA, Barbados Entry Book, CO 29/7, pp. 507–17.

123

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 123

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

and in several cases doubled the salaries the Crown paid them while proscribing ‘presents’ from the colonial assemblies to the governors.16 This effort to limit the influence local legislators had over the governors was effective in the majority of the colonies until well into George I’s reign.17 Similarly, Whig and Tory imperial administrators alike shared the goal of converting colonies into royal colonies whenever possible. Between 1675 and 1730, the number of royal colonies doubled.18 One of the few things that Whigs and Tories, king and Parliament could agree upon was that Britain’s colonies were easier to administer if they were royal, rather than chartered or proprietary. II

One of the key ideological disagreements between Whigs and Tories over the American colonies’ role in Britain’s empire focused on the issue of manufactured goods. Concerns over England’s overseas trade and lagging woollen manufactures led Whigs to fully articulate their vision for what role the American colonies ought to play in Britain’s overseas Empire during the reign of William III. While the Whig party believed Britain’s path to prosperity lay in manufactures, the American colonies played an interesting role within this vision that has yet to be acknowledged. While the Whigs hoped that the colonies would produce manufactured goods not already made in Britain, they saw the colonial manufactories as subservient to their domestic counterparts. The Whigs wanted the colonies to supplement and stimulate England’s manufacturing by producing raw goods for those industries and by providing markets to consume the finished products. In 1699, the Whig-dominated Board of Trade specifically informed the House of Commons that it believed colonists in America ‘should only be employed in such things as are not the production of this kingdom, except for provisions for themselves and their neighbours’, so as not to be ‘prejudicial to this kingdom’.19 Accordingly, many Whigs sought to limit colonial efforts to manufacture products that were already produced in England, such as woollen goods.20 Whigs saw England’s overseas trade as resting 16

TNA, Minutes of the Privy Council, Whitehall, 10 April 1703, PC 2/79, pp. 353–7. The exceptions to the general rule were New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. See Leonard W. Labaree, Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System before 1783 (New Haven, CT, 1930), pp. 336–72. 18 Steele, ‘The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected’, p. 118; Jack P. Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (Charlottesville, VA, 2013), p. 124. By the end of George I’s reign, only Connecticut and Rhode Island remained chartered colonies, while only Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland remained proprietary colonies. 19 CSPC, Item 32, Vol. 17 (1699), pp. 17–18. 20 Jonathan Eacott has noted that weavers and Whigs alike sought to shut down woollen manufacturing in the colonies, but has not made the connection that this aligned with with the Whig vision of political economy. Instead, he portrays the issue as a blanket ban on any 17

124

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 124

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

on domestic woollen manufactures; they frequently repeated adages such as ‘Nine parts in Ten of our Exported Commodities doth come from the Sheep’s Back, and from hence alone is the Spring of our Riches.’21 Whigs wanted to eliminate any colonial competition with domestic manufacturers and instead foster colonial industries that would complement, rather than compete with existing domestic manufactures.22 The House of Commons quickly enacted such a policy with respect to the woollen industry, prohibiting the American colonies from producing their own woollen manufactures in 1700.23 From that point on, it was an established point of Whig political economy that American plantations ought not to compete with Britain’s own domestic manufactures, but instead strive to produce alternative goods. Ten years later, a commissary involved in another Whig colonial scheme noted that ‘there is nothing we So much apprehend, as that the Inhabitants of the Continent of America should fall into the manufacturing of Wool, Cotton and Silck’. The writer urged imperial administrators to make sure any such competing American manufactures were ‘timely prevented’ lest they harm domestic trade.24 One type of manufacture that the Whigs desperately wanted American colonists to produce was naval stores. Several Whig authors who penned tracts on political economy during the 1690s made this point. Sir Francis Brewster urged that encouraging naval stores ‘in our Foreign Plantations, as may advance that Trade to more than our own Consumption’; it could possibly also lower the prices of Baltic naval stores. Brewster accounted New England’s naval stores as ‘Superior’ to those manufactured in Scandinavian countries.25 The Lords of Trade had encouraged proposals for importing naval stores from America as early as 1694, and the Whiggish members of the Board of Trade made the naval stores project a central objective when they began meeting in 1696. The Board of Trade duly noted that ‘New England, and other northern colonies, have applied themselves too much, besides other things, to the improvement of woollen manufactures amongst themselves’ and not applied sufficient energy to trading schemes that would complement England’s existing strengths.26 As a textile trade (whether American or importing calicoes from India): ‘Making an Imperial Compromise: The Calico Acts, the Atlantic Colonies, and the Structure of the British Empire’, WMQ, 69 (2012), 731–62. 21 Anonymous, The Interest of England Considered: In an Essay upon Wooll, Our WoolenManufactures, and the Improvement of Trade. With Some Remarks upon the Conceptions of Sir Josiah Child (London, 1694), p. 3. 22 This is the same argument the Whigs and weavers used for the East India Company importing trading goods; see N.C., a Weaver of London, The Great Necessity and Advantage of Preserving Our Own Manufacturies; Being an Answer to a Pamphlet, Intitul’d, The Honour and Advantage of the East-India Trade, &c. (London, 1697), pp. 7–9. 23 G.H. Guttridge, The Colonial Policy of William III in America and the West Indies (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 177–9. 24 BL, Portland Papers, Add. MSS. 70164 [unfoliated]. 25 Brewster, Essays on Trade, p. 87. 26 Leo Francis Stock (ed.), Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments respecting North

125

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 125

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

result, Whigs and their colonial allies submitted a rash of competing proposals for producing naval stores. Supporters of American schemes for producing naval stores were eager to stress that this endeavour would be self-sufficient within the colonies and that no additional manpower would be drawn out of England. Governor Richard Coote, the earl of Bellomont, assured the Board of Trade in 1699 that New York could produce naval stores during times of peace by using soldiers already employed by the Crown. He also suggested that when the soldiers were not available, the work was easy enough that those ‘who are unfit for labor’, such as the elderly, women, or ‘children of ten years old and upwards’ could easily ‘make good earnings of it’.27 A decade later, another Whig governor of New York developed a scheme for producing naval stores that seemed tailor-made for Whiggish concerns. In 1710, Governor Robert Hunter of New York designed a proposal that combined two Whiggish pet projects – naval stores and resettling Protestant Palatine refugees. Whigs, both before and after the Hanoverian Succession, were determined to create a haven for foreign Protestants within the American colonies. They supported and developed several imperial schemes for settling the Huguenots and Palatines. Whigs and Low Churchmen were particularly supportive of a British foreign policy that would secure Protestantism throughout continental Europe. Whigs shared a strong belief that a nation’s wealth rested firmly on its population, which provided a strong impetus for them to accept foreign Protestants within their borders and informed the party’s consistent domestic goal of establishing a general naturalisation act that would allow foreign Protestants to be recognised as British subjects. Given this continental commitment and their imperial desire to populate the colonies in order to encourage British trade, Whigs and Low Churchmen were eager to resettle displaced European Protestant communities in Britain’s colonies in North America. Early efforts to settle foreign Protestants in American colonies focused on Huguenot refugees from France in the late 1680s and 1690s. Churchmen with diverse political backgrounds welcomed Huguenot refugees.28 Henry Compton, bishop of London, enjoyed a reputation during the late seventeenth century of being a tireless advocate on their behalf. Nonetheless, after the creation of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), Compton’s ‘evangelistic concerns and America (5 vols, Washington, DC, 1930), II, pp. 175, 266. 27 TNA, Original Correspondence. New York, CO 5/1042/22. 28 Brent Sirota has noted that in the 1680s, churchmen ‘from across the political and theological spectrum were proposing and collaborating on a variety of reform programs’, such as comprehension of Protestant Nonconformists. Under the reign of Anne, however, political divisions between churchmen became more pronounced. Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England in the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014), p. 70.

126

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 126

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

energies became confined to matters concerning the Church of England and his concept of Protestant Reformation turned more strictly to a reformation on Anglican lines’.29 Meanwhile, the SPG itself devoted its efforts to providing religious succour to the Huguenots during Queen Anne’s reign.30 An added benefit was that Huguenot communities occasionally converted to Anglicanism. Many colonists saw Huguenots as the closest religious neighbours to Anglicans in their religious pluralist landscape.31 The case of the Palatines took on a more political cast during the ‘age of party’. Thousands of poor Palatines fled southwest Germany in the spring and summer of 1709 and emigrated to Britain. During the War of the Spanish Succession, these Protestant refugees were pushed out of their homeland by pillaging and a harsh winter and flocked to Britain by the recent passage of the general naturalisation act in 1709. This influx of Palatine refugees fuelled Tory worries that Whigs were putting continental interests above those of British, and whatever their political leanings, Britons were unhappy with mushrooming camps of starving refugees cropping up in their midst. The Palatines were unwelcome in England, where they received little relief.32 Tories were especially wary of allowing the newcomers to settle, claiming that they were a danger to the Church of England.33 With everyone eager to relocate the refugees, Whig politicians came up with schemes to settle the Palatine refugees in colonial America during 1709. Thus, Governor Hunter’s 1710 proposal linking naval stores and the settlement of Palatine refugees was eagerly received by the Whigs. His plan would produce naval stores at a lower cost than obtainable in the Baltic states, would keep British coin in British pockets, and would strengthen British mercantile fleets and the naval convoys that protected them. It would add to the British Protestant population in the colonies, thus buoying colonial defences against French Catholics and their native allies. The Board of Trade added provisions to Hunter’s plan to ensure that it would better align with the Whiggish preoccupation of defending domestic manufacturers, as well. It made sure to stress that ‘for the better preventing those people from falling upon the Woollen Manufactures’, any lands the Palatine refugees might be granted after 29 Sugiko

Nishikawa, ‘Henry Compton, Bishop of London (1676–1713) and Foreign Protestants’, in From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750, ed. Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (Portland, OR, 2001), p. 363. 30 William A. Bultmann, ‘The S.P.G. and the French Huguenots in Colonial America’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 20 (1951), 156–72. 31 Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 199–215; Dixon Ryan Fox, Caleb Heathcote, Gentleman Colonist: The Story of a Career in the Province of New York (New York, 1926), chapter 8. 32 Alison Olson, ‘Reception of the Huguenots, Palatines and Salzburgers, 1680–1734: A Comparative Analysis’, in From Strangers to Citizens, pp. 482–3, 486. 33 H.T. Dickinson, ‘The Poor Palatines and the Parties’, EHR, 82 (1967), 472–4.

127

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 127

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

their seven-year indenture would be void ‘if such Grantee shall apply himself to the making the Woollen, or Such like Manufacture’. Moreover, the Board hoped that the Palatines would accept payment in the form of ‘Woollen and other Manufactures from hence’ rather than the ‘ready money’ they had to pay for naval stores in the Baltic. In so doing, the Board of Trade, dominated as it was by Whigs in late 1709, made sure to support the interweaving precepts of the Whig vision of the American colonies.34 One imperial project that had to navigate the shifting political winds of the age of party was the conquest of Acadia in North American New France. This imperial project interested both Whigs and the Tories, but for different reasons. Both parties were eager to deprive France of an American foothold and add to Britain’s trade, but they focused on separate ways in which the latter could be accomplished. Colonial opportunists who sought Acadia’s conquest for their own, more pressing, concerns were aware of this discrepancy in intentions between the Whigs and Tories and took care to pitch their plans of conquest with an eye to the reigning party’s preferences.35 The case of Samuel Vetch is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Samuel Vetch, a Scotsman with both Whig and Tory connections, pitched his core plan of conquering Acadia from the French between 1706 and 1710. Vetch shrewdly tailored his multiple proposals to the imperial preferences of whichever party held more power.36 He sent a lengthy scheme entitled ‘Canada Survey’d’ to the Whiggish Board of Trade in July 1708. In it, Vetch stressed a number of points that were sure to appeal to the Whig imperialists. He portrayed the French as the greatest threat to the British in North America, noted that they had ‘so mightily obstructed the British trade, all America over, and must in time totally ruin the same, unless seasonably prevented’. Vetch went on to argue that a swift strike could ‘wholly dispossess them of the Continent and Newfoundland’ at comparatively little cost. And he made sure to point out that the French stood poised to strike New Hampshire ‘and consequently deprive the Crown of Brittain of all the masts, timber and navall stores’. Vetch warned that as the French population in Canada grew, it would increasingly threaten the trade and security of all the British colonies not only on the mainland, but on the West Indian islands which they supported.37 The political fortunes of the Whigs and Tories were changing just as Vetch’s proposals were under consideration, however. Luckily for Vetch, his plan of conquering Acadia suited Tory imperial designs for a territorial empire. Just as the Tories were gaining in power in the ministry and public opinion, Vetch 34

BL, Blenheim Papers vol. DXLV, Add. MSS. 61645, fol. 98v–9v. J.D. Alsop, ‘The Age of the Projectors: British Imperial Strategy in the North Atlantic in the War of Spanish Succession’, Acadiensis, 21 (1991), 34. 36 J.D. Alsop has meticulously sketched out the differences between each proposal in his ‘Samuel Vetch’s “Canada Survey’d”: The Formation of a Colonial Strategy, 1706–1710’,’ Acadiensis, 12:1 (1982), 39–58. 37 TNA, Colonies General. Original Correspondence, CO 323/6/64. 35

128

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 128

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

began to amass Tory sponsors for his project and began to highlight parts of his plan, such as targeting Placentia (the heart of French-occupied Acadia), that would align most closely with the imperial preoccupations of the Tories. By November 1708, Vetch had convinced the arch-Tory imperialist Colonel Francis Nicholson to co-sponsor his plan.38 Other colonists with strong Tory ties also joined Vetch in calling for a reduction of the French in Canada that summer.39 Vetch and Nicholson ultimately prevailed, and led a successful joint effort between colonial forces and the Navy to reduce the French garrison at Port Royal in 1710, which they renamed Annapolis Royal in honour of Queen Anne. Vetch remained as the commander of Annapolis Royal, but found that once the goal of reclaiming Acadia for Britain had been accomplished, Tory imperial administrators in Britain had lost further interest in the island. The Tory ministry was intent on a limited military engagement in Canada; they had no desire to establish a fully functioning military garrison in Nova Scotia. Instead, the Tories pursued a quick end to the war with the French.40 For the next four years of their political tenure, the Tories turned a deaf ear to Vetch’s pleas for funds, provisions and reinforcements to outfit the existing soldiers at Annapolis Royal. When Whigs came back into power in late 1714, Vetch felt he might finally get relief under this new ministry. He wrote a petition to Secretary of State Lord Charles Townshend, in which he complained that he and Nova Scotia had been ‘entirely neglected or rather abandoned by the Ministry at home during the abovesaid three years’.41 During their ascendancy in 1710–14, the Tories were more interested in swift domination of French American assets and securing British trade in that region than in establishing a booming settlement. The Tories were far more invested in removing Newfoundland and its profitable fisheries from the grip of the French than in sustaining the British territorial presence in Nova Scotia. Doing so, it was hoped, would allow the British to re-export fish to southern European countries, thereby lining Britain’s coffers while depriving France of a lucrative trade. The Newfoundland project also dovetailed neatly with Tory defensive strategies during War of the Spanish Succession. A crucial part of the Tory party’s ‘blue-water’ policy was ‘overseas aggressiveness’ in order to enhance the overseas British trade while simultaneously reducing other powers’ imperial holdings.42 This naturally led the Tories to favour the idea of striking at Placentia. A conquest there would both increase British trade by securing a near-monopoly

38 K.H. Ledward (ed.), Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations: Volume 1, April 1704– January 1709 (London, 1920), pp. 556–9. 39 TNA, Original Correspondence. New York, CO 5/1049/63. 40 Geoffrey S. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967), pp. 75–81. 41 TNA, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Entry Book, CO 218/1, pp. 113–25. 42 Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s “Blue-Water” Policy, 1689–1815’, The International History Review, 10 (1988), 41.

129

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 129

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

on North Atlantic cod fisheries, and also deprive the French of a crucial maritime base from which they harassed New England merchant ships.43 The idea for this Newfoundland project began gaining traction during the reign of Queen Anne. In 1705, William Cary authored a letter to the Board of Trade on behalf of merchants from the town of Bideford who traded with Newfoundland. Cary, a Tory, attested to the profit that England could reap from the fishing industry at Newfoundland, which produced both dried cod and fish oil. He noted that wresting Newfoundland away from the French would allow the English to export these goods in ‘great quantities to Spain and Portugal and Italy’.44 Colonial petitions frequently decried French predations on English colonists and fishermen. In discussing the terms of a potential peace with France in 1706, Godolphin mentioned the ‘several incroachments and usurpations on the dominions in Newfoundland’ and argued that it ‘is of so great consequence to us, that it will bee strongly insisted upon’.45 Luckily for Vetch, the Whig strategy of continental warfare was under mounting criticism by the summer of 1707, and popular pressure called for more assertive overseas interventions against Britain’s enemies. When the Tories had gained control over all levers of government in the wake of the election of 1710, the Newfoundland project began to come together. Secretary of State Henry St John was eager in the summer of 1710 to support the fisheries of Newfoundland.46 The Tories continued to press in peace negotiations for the complete withdrawal of the French from the island, which they finally achieved in the Treaty of Utrecht. Tories considered these gains to be favourable, especially as they believed ‘such terms. . . will secure our Trade’.47 Newfoundland was a perfect fit for the Tory imperial vision of how North America would fit into the British empire. Tories continued to favour specific imperial projects during their brief ascendancy in 1710–14. The career of Alexander Spotswood, a moderate Tory and military protégé of Marlborough, is a prime example. He became lieutenant (and acting) governor of Virginia in 1710. Immediately upon his 43 In

contrast, Whigs were far more likely to seek land warfare as a solution to their foreign problems. See [Joseph Addison], The Present State of the War and the Necessity of An Argumentation Consider’d (London, 1708), pp. 16–17. 44 CSPC Item 798, Vol. 22 (1704–1705), pp. 56–357. Cary also pointed out that this trade would also be the ‘best nursery for seamen’, something that would encourage Tories who believed in a blue-water policy. 45 CSPC Item 1532, Vol. 22 (1704–1705), p. 736; The Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Henry L. Snyder (Oxford, 1975), Vol. II, letter 672A. 46 Brian Holden Reid, ‘Is There a Tory Strategy?’, in The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, ed. Jeremy Clark (Burlington, VT, 2015), p. 267. For St John’s personal financial interests in the Canadian expedition, see Stephen Saunders Webb, Marlborough’s America (New Haven, CT, 2013), pp. 227–33. 47 Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), p. 304; Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies, and of the Late Ministry, in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (London, 1711), p. 95.

130

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 130

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

arrival, Spotswood began implementing his Tory imperial impulses. He tried to convince the House of Burgesses to create a state-sponsored iron mining monopoly, and when that failed, he created his own mining company on private lands. In 1714, Spotswood again attempted to erect a monopoly, the Virginia Indian Company (VIC), this time to centralise all Indian trade while simultaneously financing a strong defensive barrier. In exchange for enjoying a twenty-year monopoly on trade with Native Americans, the VIC would be mandated to erect and guard Fort Christianna, hold and preserve sufficient gunpowder for the colony’s defence. They were also obliged to build and maintain a Christian school for Native children; moreover, places were to be guaranteed within the company’s ranks for graduates of either that school or William and Mary.48 Spotswood’s efforts were stymied by fierce opposition from Virginian ‘Country party’ members such as William Byrd, who used close ties to Whigs in England as well as legislative opposition in Virginia to defeat Spotswood’s plans. Spotswood’s personal frustrations would soon be echoed by Tories throughout the empire: as Whigs ascended to power alongside George I, Tory imperial projects fell out of favour.49 III The Hanoverian settlement marked a dramatic shift from the previous era of the ‘age of party’ and its dramatic oscillations between Whig and Tory imperial projects. King George I’s accession brought in a new Whig ministry in September 1714; Whigs dominated the elections for a new Parliament that began in January 1715, and the passage of the Septennial Act in 1716 virtually secured Whig dominance of the central government. While some Whig imperial priorities carried over after 1714, several new institutional and political developments characterised British imperial policy under George I’s reign. The Board of Trade saw significant changes following the Hanoverian Succession. First, it, took on an all-Whig cast, which was reflected in the projects it pursued thereafter. In November 1714, the king called for a complete replacement of personnel on the Board of Trade.50 Second, the Board of Trade was institutionally weakened soon after George I’s accession. The office of the secretary of state for the Southern Department siphoned off the Board’s power over colonial affairs. Upon the promotion of James Stanhope, earl of Stanhope, to the position of secretary of state for the Southern Department, he began 48

A. Brock (ed.), The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Virginia, 1710–1722, rev. edn (2 vols, New York, 1973), II, p. 89. For an excellent study on Spotswood as governor; see Stephen Saunders Webb, Marlborough’s America, pp. 330–70. For more on the VIC, see TNA, Original Correspondence. Virginia, CO 5/1386, pp. 62–64; W. Neil Franklin, ‘Act for the Better Regulation of the Indian Trade: Virginia, 1714’, WMQ, 72 (1964), 148–9. 49 The Board of Trade even considered retiring its colony in Newfoundland; see TNA, Newfoundland Entry Books, CO 195/6, p416–84. 50 TNA, Entry Book of Letters &c.,CO, 5/190, pp. 19–20.

131

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 131

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

to quickly absorb the functions and power of the Board of Trade. Finally, the Board began to see rapid turnover, which only accelerated its decline in power and relevance. The membership of the Board of Trade was noticeably unstable during the years of 1717–20. Its personnel were frequently drawn off to serve in diplomatic missions or Ministry posts. This frequent turnover led to a dearth of institutional memory and inexperienced officers amongst the Board. By 1720, only three members from the original 1714 Whig Board of Trade still served in their posts.51 Domestic political changes ushered in by the Hanoverian Settlement also affected imperial policies towards America. The dramatic shifts in Britain’s foreign policy which followed the Hanoverian Succession had ripple effects in the colonial arena. While Whigs had notably demanded ‘no peace without Spain’ during Anne’s reign, they split on foreign policy priorities towards Spain under George I. By 1717, a schism erupted which threatened to tear the Whigs apart. Both Stanhope and Charles Spencer, third earl of Sunderland, were committed to carrying out George’s pro-Hanoverian foreign policy, which included an alliance with France that many Whigs found distasteful. By the spring, Townshend and Robert Walpole had left the ministry and quickly became leaders of a fierce opposition which even drew upon Tories and the royal heir Prince George for support in stymying the government’s proposed measures.52 While the Whig schism of 1717–20 did not dramatically change imperial policies towards America, colonial projects did attract less intense interest during this brief period. Nonetheless, there was still a marked continuation of several Whig policies from 1689–1714. Issues relating to the strength of the navy divided Whigs domestically, but each group continued to encourage the development of naval stores in British America. While the Whigs were largely split on issues surrounding the Baltic, the Stanhope–Sunderland ministry was comfortable deploying the Royal Navy to the Baltic and Mediterranean.53 The Board of Trade followed the ministry’s lead and devoted themselves to plans to encourage colonial naval stores projects, both to support the fleet and to minimise Britain’s reliance on Swedish naval stores. While Whigs had favoured naval store production schemes in the colonies for years, there was an increased impetus under the Stanhope–Sunderland ministry to encourage these projects and free Britain of its dependence on naval stores from that region.54 The Board of Trade entertained numerous proposals on this 51 Steele,

Politics of Colonial Policy, p. 151. W.A. Speck, ‘The Whig Schism under George I’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 40 (1977), 171–9; Jeremy Black, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714–1727 (New York, 2016), pp. 77–8; Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, pp. 400–3. 53 For more on the ministry’s colonial policy, see Shinsuke Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower and the Atlantic (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 194–9. 54 TNA, Despatches and Miscellaneous, CO,5/4/10i. 52

132

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 132

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

matter, and produced an official report encouraging this policy.55 Stanhope was ‘especially responsible’ for heightened efforts to develop the naval stores trade in the colonies, even after the issue was no longer under his jurisdiction.56 Whiggish concerns over competing manufactures continued unabated during George I’s reign. Knowing this, one colonial governor made sure in his missives to the Board of Trade to note that ‘wee are furnish’t with noe Manufactures of any kind which wee used formerly to have from England’.57 Whig writers and imperial administrators continued to stress during King George I’s reign that colonial manufactures ought not to overlap with those produced in Great Britain. The noted merchant and writer on colonial trade, Joshua Gee, who was a frequent advisor of the Board of Trade, urged imperial administrators to constrain colonial manufactures to naval stores, flax and hemp production, and iron mining entirely.58 The Board endeavoured to convince King George I to exempt American naval stores from customs duties to serve as ‘an encouragement to that Trade’ and to lure colonists away from making woollen manufactures. They hoped that this reorientation towards naval stores would further ‘occasion a great exportation of our woollen manufactures, to pay for the said timber and other Naval Stores’.59 Imperial-minded Whigs aligned with the ministry continued to focus on increasing the colonial population, both to produce more trade goods, but also to serve as consumers of British manufactured goods. Joshua Gee advised the Board in 1717 to increase the numbers of indentured servants transported to the colonies, including the transportation of ‘children caught picking pockets’.60 Over six hundred Jacobite prisoners similarly found themselves indentured and transported to several colonies.61 Finding ways to engage the poor in trades that would benefit the nation was another frequent preoccupation. A proposal by Thomas Coram and others to develop a colony between Maine and Nova Scotia touched upon several key parts of the Whig imperial platform. Moreover, this plan indicates that the Stanhope ministry turned an eager ear to imperial proposals by their domestic political allies. Coram’s plan 55

TNA, Original Correspondence. New York, CO 5/1051/4; CO 5/1051/19; Original Correspondence. Proprieties, CO, 5/1265/58; Original Correspondence. Virginia, CO 5/1318/1; Original Correspondence. Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, CO 2/217/19; CO 218/1, pp. 170–83; Despatches and Miscellaneous, CO 5/4/17i; Colonies General. Original Correspondence, CO 323/7/118. 56 Basil Williams, Stanhope: A Study in Eighteenth-Century War and Diplomacy (Westport, CT, 1979), pp. 202–3. 57 TNA, Original Correspondence. New York, CO 5/1051/19. 58 Joshua Gee, ‘Memorial Relating to the Trade of the Plantations’, Senate House Library, University of London, MS99. This memorial also formed the core of his later arguments in Joshua Gee, The Trade & Navigation of Great-Britain Considered (London, 1729). 59 CSPC Item 505, Vol. 28 (1714–1715), pp. 220–1. 60 CSPC Item 505, Vol. 29 (1716–1717), pp. 271–2. 61 Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion: Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain (Aldershot, 2005).

133

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 133

22/08/2019 08:57

Megan Lindsay Cherry

was a predecessor to the colony of Georgia in the 1730s, and even went by the same name. Coram proposed to settle disbanded soldiers for the purpose of making naval stores. His plan also specified that ‘as this country is cold, and not fit for any manufacture, they must have their whole supplies from Great Britain’ and therefore would boost consumption of domestic woollens.62 This proposed settlement had the support of several Whigs who were known to side with the Stanhope ministry, such as James Berkeley, third earl of Berkeley. It was also one of the many projects proposed by Joshua Gee.63 Gee put forth several proposals for encouraging the iron trade in American plantations at a time when politicians were concerned with weaning Britain’s dependence for iron ore from foreign countries, especially Sweden.64 When this scheme was presented before Parliament, it was granted by several allies of the ministry, such as Daniel Pulteney and Charles Cooke.65 During the Whig schism, the opposition Whigs had little to offer in the way of constructive colonial policies, but instead focused their attention on arguments that British foreign entanglements would injure its foreign trade, and lead to increased taxation and growing debts.66 Historians have noted that once the Whigs reconciled in 1720, a shift occurred in their policy towards Spanish America. Thenceforth, the government’s policy for Spanish-American trade was one of ‘security and improvement’, whereas ‘naval expeditions to secure new trading bases were temporarily laid aside as too risky an option because they could endanger commercial relations with Spain’. While colonists continued to propose such schemes, they were largely ignored in the metropole.67 Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble’s burst, Walpole and his allies would retreat from riskier Whig policies of the past: instead of striving to develop new areas of trade, they instead focused on protecting existing colonial economic ventures.68 Ultimately, as seen in the divisions under King George II’s reign, the Whig party lacked real unity on both domestic and imperial issues. Thus, within the sphere of British America, the Hanoverian Succession was neither a simple reaffirmation of the settlement of the Glorious Revolution, nor did it mark a dramatic transformation in imperial strategy. Rather, it served both as an opportunity for British imperialists to renew their commitment to the 62

Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments respecting North America, III, pp. 422–3. Original Correspondence. Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, CO 217/2/24, CO 217/2/26. 64 TNA, Original Correspondence. Proprieties, CO 5/1265/58; Colonies General. Original Correspondence, CO 323/7/135; Thomas Wendel and Joshua Gee, ‘Joshua Gee’s Memorial to the Board of Trade, 1717’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 93 (1969), 13–22. 65 Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments respecting North America, III, pp. 422–3. 66 Black, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714–1727, p. 94; Satsuma, Colonial Maritime War, p. 194. 67 Satsuma, Colonial Maritime War, pp. 246, 222. 68 Heather Welland, ‘Interest Politics and the Shaping of the British Empire, ca. 1720–1791’ (University of Chicago, PhD thesis, 2011), p. 43. 63 TNA,

134

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 134

22/08/2019 08:57

COLONIAL POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA

central precepts at the heart of the 1689 Settlement and marked a shift towards a new era in colonial administration in which Whigs alone determined imperial policies in North America.

135

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 135

22/08/2019 08:57

7 Securing the Union and the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland, 1707–37 Allan I. Macinnes The Hanoverian Succession did not have a uniform British impact. From an Anglocentric perspective, it consolidated the bipartisan Revolution of 1688–89 that was reaffirmed by the extension of the English state to include Scotland in 1707. The immediate impact of the Hanoverian Succession was to promote the Whig supremacy in Britain and Empire, albeit this was not fully secured until the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1715–16.1 From a Scottish perspective, the Revolution of 1689–91 was an exclusive Whig achievement, uncompromised by any accommodation with the Tories. James VII was deposed in Scotland, whereas he was deemed, as James II, to have abdicated in England. Certainly, Whig interests at the Revolution in Scotland spilled over into the Union of 1707.2 However, there was no predetermined path from Revolution to Union. The English parliament rejected union with Scotland in 1689 and again in 1703, as also with Ireland in 1703, 1707 and 1709. The Irish parliament was subordinated to the British by the Declaratory Act of 1720.3 Union with Scotland was driven on from 1705 by the English ministry. In part, this was because of the perceived threat of invasion from France through Scotland in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession. More pertinent were issues of political economy. The English state, during first the Nine Years War of 1688–97 and, subsequently, during the War of the Spanish Succession, had become increasingly disconcerted by the rogue behaviour of Scottish commercial networks as major interlopers in the colonial trade to the Americas. These networks circumvented the English Navigation Acts through tramptrading, a practice the Scots had exported from the Baltic to the Caribbean, through counterfeiting of shipping documentation and through the judicial 1 See Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000); Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 1660–1722 (Harlow, 1993). 2 Christopher A. Whatley with Derek J. Patrick, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2007). 3 James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800’, Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1987), 236–63; Jim Smyth, ‘“Like Amphibious Animals”: Irish Protestants, Ancient Britons, 1691–1707’, HJ, 36 (1993), 785–96.

136

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 136

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

packing of colonial courts, particularly in the Delaware. Networks operated not only from Scottish and colonial ports but through commercial hubs based in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Hamburg as well as London. The Union was specifically designed to bring these networks under control.4 The Union did not close the door to foreign backing for Scottish Jacobitism which was offered variously from France, Spain, Sweden, Russia and the papacy before and after the Hanoverian Succession. In addition to major risings in 1715–16 and 1745–46 (respectively the ’15 and the ’45), there were minor risings in 1708 and 1719; there were innumerable plots well into the 1750s. At the same time, Scotland was afflicted by riot and misgovernance in the wake of the Union. A measure of stability was promoted through local economic initiatives in both town and country and by the ongoing resilience of commercial networks at home and abroad. As this chapter will argue, Scotland was only becoming comfortable with the Hanoverian Succession after George II succeeded in 1727. The Union itself was still being secured in the following decade. This was signposted by the opening up of new imperial horizons for Scots, particularly for those not enamoured with the terms prescribed in 1707 and by a party realignment which offered an alternative patriotism to that of the Whig Supremacy or of Scottish Jacobitism. I

There was no straight correlation between English and Scottish politics from the Revolution to the Hanoverian Succession. Political polarity between Whigs and Tories in England was not replicated in Scotland, where division in the 1690s, especially from the failure of the Darien venture on the Panama Isthmus, was between Court and Country. The Union was carried by the Court Party with assistance of a minority grouping known as the Flying Squadron or Squadrone Volante, who defected from the Country Party in 1704. The Squadrone, which split over the issue of the Hanoverian Succession, was more committed than the Court Party as a whole to the Whig interest in England. The Country Party was not a Tory grouping, but rather a confederation of ambitious placemen attempting to acquire or gain office, of constitutional reformers who wished to end the political and social dominance of feudal landowners in Scotland, and of Jacobites who wished to restore the exiled Stuarts. The Jacobites followed the Country Party in resisting the Hanoverian Succession as laid down unilaterally in the English Act of Settlement of 1701. They jointly imposed constitutional checks on Queen Anne’s eventual successor in Scotland, much to her chagrin. The Union shattered the Country Party; few of their number were returned among the forty-five MPs and sixteen elected peers to the first British parliament 4

Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007).

137

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 137

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

in 1708. The Jacobites reverted to extra-parliamentary activities, though there was some covert alignment with the Tories. While some prominent members associated with the Tories, the Court Party broadly aligned with the Whigs. John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll and his brother Archibald, earl of Islay, headed the strongest Scottish grouping. The Squadrone remained a competing Whig interest in Scotland. Scottish members acted in a block against the Tories imposing a malt tax in 1713 and against endeavours by the Whigs to convert the sixteen elected into twenty-five hereditary peers between 1719 and 1722.5 The Treaty of Union created the United Kingdom with a common monarchy, a specified Hanoverian Succession and a common parliament. Scotland retained its own private law and judicial system, its own ecclesiastical establishment which ran education and poor relief, and its own local government. The majority of the twenty-five articles related to political economy. With regards to uniform regulation: article IV created a common market; article V brought Scottish commercial networks within the scope of the English Navigation Acts; articles VI and VII introduced common trade regulations as Scotland became liable to the same customs and excise duties as England. The cumulative effect of uniform regulation was to allow the free flow of capital within Great Britain. No longer could English investors be prevented from investing in Scottish ventures, as happened at Darien. Uniform regulation also ruled out the tariff wars that had been marked by two Alien Acts inimical to Scottish interests, the first for the American colonies in 1696 and the second in 1705 for English domestic markets. Scottish commercial networks were now guaranteed access to the American colonies of the Crown. Although they could trade legally in the West Indies, the East Indies remained a monopoly of the merging East India Companies based in London. Once this merger was concluded in 1708, it became the only remaining English trading concern able to exclude rival companies or restrict adventurers participating in commerce overseas. There was no possibility of the English becoming the British East India Company. The Scottish carrying trade was specifically targeted with respect to exports of wool from England, a practice that was now proscribed throughout the UK; the immediate beneficiaries were English not Scottish manufacturers. Because Scotland was now guaranteed access to English domestic and colonial trade, it was not unreasonable to expect that Scotland should contribute to the English national debt. However, this debt had been magnified by the War of the Spanish Succession and stood at around £20 million with a shortfall of £3 million in the funds for its service. Article XV indemnified Scotland with a capital Equivalent of £398,085 that was to be paid over seven years for higher public burdens; for the standardisation of the coinage; and as reparations for 5

Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Queen Anne and the Making of the United Kingdom’, Swift Studies, 30 (2015), 120–38; Clyve Jones (ed.), ‘Letters of Lord Balmerino to Harry Maule, 1710–1713, 1721–2’, in Miscellany XII (Edinburgh, 1944), pp. 113–68.

138

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 138

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

Darien where the loss of venture capital (around £153,000) had proved critical but not crippling to the Scottish economy. A rising Equivalent of £2,000 was to be paid annually for seven years to promote the manufacture of coarse woollens and then fishing and other manufactures such as linen. As the Equivalents were to be raised by the higher levels of customs and excise after 1707, the Scots were effectively paying for their own compensation, reparations and development funding. Specified exemptions principally concerned taxes on salt (article VIII) and malt (articles XIII–IV), that can be viewed as economic palliatives. In order to curtail smuggling of vast quantities of foreign salt used to cure herring, beef and pork for export, delayed payments and drawbacks were allowed on higher import duties. However, the main design was to ensure a rolling seven-year exemption for Scottish salt used for domestic consumption from the higher rates paid in England to meet the Crown loans to the East Indian Company. The malt tax was not to be levied on beer produced and consumed in Scotland for the duration of the War of the Spanish Succession.6 In terms of stimulating economic growth, the Union lived up to expectations in only three aspects. Droving of black cattle took off with unrestricted access to expanding markets stimulated by the growth of London into Europe’s largest city, by naval demand for salt beef, and by the growth of manufacturing towns in England. However, the area of Scotland which immediately benefited from this trade was the Highlands and Islands which, along with the north-east, were the Jacobite heartlands. Unrestricted access to the American colonies after 1707 enabled Glasgow merchants to secure dominance in the tobacco trade, primarily by expanding the store system under which the merchant rather than the planter bore the risk of trans-Atlantic shipping. Advances of credit on future tobacco sales in Europe was tied to the purchase of merchandise from the colonial store, a practice that was particularly suited to the expansion of small plantations along the Chesapeake and into the hinterlands of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. The Glasgow merchants took advantage of drawbacks of customs for re-export by shipping out huge quantities of tobacco to the Isle of Man and then bringing small amounts back illicitly to ports in the south-west of Scotland. Whitehaven, hitherto third after Bristol and Liverpool in the Atlantic trade, was so eclipsed by Glasgow that the Cumbrian town actually petitioned for repeal of the Treaty of Union in 1710. Scottish entrepreneurs duly extended the store system perfected by the Glasgow tobacco lords into the Caribbean in order to enhance profits from sugar and rum. The Treaty of Utrecht, which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, further opened up opportunities in the sugar trade. Scots as well as English planters benefited from the expulsion of the French from St Kitts and the eradication of any Spanish threat to reclaim 6

Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, History of the Union of Scotland and England, ed. D. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 190–3; Douglas Watt, The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 219–42.

139

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 139

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

Jamaica. Scots eventually gained a foothold in the African slave trade through the concession of the Spanish asiento to British suppliers, notably the South Sea Company.7 II

As smuggling developed nationwide in the wake of higher duties on customs and excise, Jacobites were to the fore in the illicit importation of wines and brandy from France. While successive British governments feared the association of Jacobitism with this clandestine pursuit in Scotland, political capital for the exiled Stuarts rarely if ever accumulated beyond the Highlands and the north-east.8 Nevertheless, Jacobitism was the immediate beneficiary from the inevitable political recession that followed on from the concession of free trade between unequal partners as a central tenet of Union. Scottish Jacobitism traces its roots to two interrelated factors, traditionalism and Episcopalianism. The dynastic appeal of Jacobitism was grounded in adherence to the hereditary principal of kinship. The royal house of Stuart was the rightful trustee of Scotland in the same way that Highland chiefs and Lowland heads of families were the customary protectors of their kindreds. Dynastic legitimacy was seen as the source of justice, the basis of government. But the lawful exercise of government in Scotland was imperilled by the sundering of genealogical continuity, first by William of Orange in 1689 and then by the Hanoverian Succession of George I in 1714. Tradition was reinforced by hierarchical religion. In Scotland, adherence to Roman Catholicism was a minority pursuit. The confessional allegiance of Scottish Jacobites, especially in their heartlands, was overwhelmingly Protestant but Episcopalian. At the Revolution of 1689–91, Presbyterianism had ousted Episcopalianism as the established Kirk of Scotland. A minority of Episcopalians, particularly career-minded politicians and merchants engaged in the colonial trade, were prepared to seek an accommodation first with William of Orange, then Queen Anne and the Hanoverians in order to secure religious toleration. Meeting houses of these Episcopalians – known as the jurors – effectively became outposts of the Church of England. The refusal of the vast majority of Episcopalians to abjure the exiled Stuarts led them to reject an accommodation with the Presbyterian establishment in 1695 and 7

Thomas M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 55–71; Stuart M. Nisbett, ‘Clearing the Smokescreen of Early Scottish Mercantile Ventures: From Leeward Sugar Plantations to Scottish Country Estates’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London, 2014), pp. 109–22. 8 Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism Towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000), pp. 171, 194–7; James Allardyce (ed.), Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period, 1699–1750 (2 vols, Aberdeen, 1895), I, pp. 1–27, 131–65; HL, Loudoun Scottish Collection, box 15/LO 7973; box 46/LO 12761.

140

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 140

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

toleration from the British government in 1712. As a result they, like the Roman Catholics, were subject to penal laws.9 Popular antipathy to the Union saw in Jacobitism an appropriate vehicle to end Scottish political subjugation. Patriotism no less than dynasticism became its driving force. Patriotism was based on the concept of patria that was founded on humanist teaching, specifically neo-Stoicism, in Scottish universities. The identity of the Scottish people was expressed through the momentous attainments of scholars, soldiers and adventurers no less than monarchs, an identity that was energised by epic heroism of the likes of William Wallace, the leader of the Scottish community of the realm during the Wars of Independence from England in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Patrick Abercromby and George Mackenzie, both with strong family connections to the Jacobite heartlands, articulated the concept of the patria in the immediate aftermath of Union to signal that territorial nationhood should take precedence over dynastic statehood.10 Adding to their covert influence on Scottish political life after 1707 was the deep penetration of Jacobites into government posts, such as justices of peace and commissioners of supply in the shires, the magistracy in the towns, in the postal and even the customs services. In the ’15, the Jacobites took control of the towns of Perth, Dundee, Montrose, Aberdeen and Inverness and their respective rural hinterlands from the outset of the rising.11 Jacobites were also embedded into Scottish commercial networks. They made full use of inventive mercantile banking and credit transfers as the networks not only retrenched their position in France but also expanded into Spain and Russia. Entrepreneurial Scots, with Jacobites to the fore, continued the long-standing engagement of their countrymen with the Dutch and to a lesser extent the Danes in the East and West Indies. They were also prominent in the formation of the Ostend (Austrian) and Swedish East India Companies. In the course of Russian service, some even pursued trade on the overland route to Persia.12 Scottish Jacobitism came within the remit of a Commission of Trustees from 1720. The Commission became embroiled in the factions attending the Courts in exile rather than preparing for risings, plotting the removal of the government 9

Allan. I. Macinnes, ‘Jacobitism in Scotland, an Episodic Cause or National Movement’, SHR, 86 (2007), 225–52; D. Szechi, ‘Constructing a Jacobite: The Social and Intellectual Origins of George Lockhart of Carnwath’, HJ, 40 (1997), 977–96. 10 Patrick Abercromby, The Martial Achievements of the Scottish Nation (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1711–15); George Mackenzie, The Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers of the Scottish Nation (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1708–22); L. Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania (Brussels, 2004), pp. 87–107. 11 Elizabeth K. Carmichael, ‘Jacobitism in the Scottish Commission of the Peace, 1707–1760’, SHR, 58 (1979), 58–69; Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period, I, 39–54, 195–205. 12 G. Chaussinand-Nogaret, ‘Une Élite Insulaire au Service de l’Europe: Les Jacobites au XVIIIe Siècle’, Annales, 28 (1973), 1097–122; G. Behre, ‘Sweden and the Rising of 1745’, SHR, 51 (1972), 148–71; NRS, Stirling Hume Drummond Moray of Abercairney Papers GD 24/1/449–57.

141

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 141

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

or capitalising on continuing unrest with Union. It ceased to function after its secretary, George Lockhart of Carnwath, fled Scotland in 1727.13 In the next year, David Scot underlined that Scottish Jacobitism did not have exclusive copyright on the patria. He produced a historical riposte to the works of Abercromby and Mackenzie, which rebranded the patria with a British identity. As evident from the subscription lists to the works of these three authors, the patria appealed across the political divide between Jacobites and Whigs to a common Scottish culture. Loyalty to the territorial nation became a more pressing concern than allegiance to the exiled house of Stuart or the incumbent house of Hanover.14 Shorn of any national coordinating agency, the purported involvement of Scottish Jacobites in plots during the 1730s was essentially based on false intelligence or was an excuse for commercial crime in the city of London. The transplanting of communities from the central and northern Highlands to the newly established colony of Georgia during that decade was ostensibly a means of decanting Jacobite clansmen to protect American frontiers. This was also an opportunity for younger sons of the landed elite with limited prospects at home to demonstrate their entrepreneurship in and around Savannah. The Argyll colony projected along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina from 1739 involved Jacobite as well as Whig entrepreneurs as promoters and planters. The original Argyll Colony established in Jamaica a decade earlier in the western parishes of Hanover, Westmoreland and St Elizabeth was again predominantly but not exclusively a Whig concern. But all three ventures tied Jacobites from the Highland heartlands into the expansion of the British Empire.15 Legacies from the Americas sustained spiritual support for Episcopalians from Perthshire to Shetland.16 However, Episcopalians were increasingly caught up in controversies over liturgical usages as well as toleration. Grounded in a spirit of obedience and submission to rightful royal authority, non-juring Episcopalianism had become the sacramental cement of Scottish Jacobitism. The non-jurors desired to distinguish themselves from the Presbyterians with whom they had shared a doctrinal commitment to Calvinism. They were also reluctant to become adjuncts of Anglicanism. Some non-jurors, given more to pietism than political action, were inclined to move in the direction of Flemish 13

Daniel Szechi (ed.), The Letters of Lockhart of Carnwath, 1698–1732 (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 38–303; P.S. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1975), pp. 8–50. 14 David Scott, The History of Scotland: Containing All the Historical Transactions of the Nation, from the Year of the World 3619, to the Year of Christ 1726 (Westminster, 1728). 15 TNA, Secretaries of State: State Papers Scotland, SP 54/19–21; HL, Loudoun Scottish Collection, box 4/LO 7063, /LO7065; Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996), pp. 229–32. 16 NRS, Records of the Episcopal Church of Scotland: Episcopal Chest, CH12/12/846 & /1231; AUL, Records of the Scottish Episcopal Church: Diocesan Office – See of Aberdeen & Orkney, MS 3320/4/6 & 6/75.

142

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 142

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

mysticism, others towards flirtation with Coptic Christianity.17 A group of Scottish and English non-jurors, describing themselves as the ‘Orthodox and Catholic Remnants of the British Church’, began a rapprochement with Greek and Russian Orthodoxy from 1716. Despite backing from Peter the Great of Russia, there was limited unity among the English non-jurors, who were far less, if at all, committed to the armed overthrow of the Hanoverian Succession. With Scottish endeavours increasingly directed to returning their English colleagues to ‘the usages of the primitive church’, negotiations had collapsed by 1728. Among subsequent subscribers to new spiritual paths that sacramentally united non-jurors as the true apostolic heirs to the primitive purity of the Universal Catholic Church, few were prepared to risk all for political deliverance by open rebellion.18 III

The three decades after 1707 witnessed the serial mismanagement of Scottish affairs from London. The first demonstration of misgovernance came in the initial British Parliament of 1708 with the passage of the Act for Improving of Union. Instead of making the Union ‘more complete’, the act consisted of three measures that brought home the nature of political incorporation. The first measure was the establishment of a Court of Revenues for Customs and Excise to extend English fiscal regulation and administration to Scotland. English dominance over the judicial proceedings of this court gave an added edge to smuggling not just as an illicit activity but an expression of political protest. The second measure was the imposition of the English Treason Law to ensure easier conviction of Jacobites and to make forfeiture lasting through the introduction of a concept alien to Scots Law, the tainting of the blood. The third measure was the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council which deprived Scotland of its central executive that also acted as a central intelligence agency. Gun-running and credit transfers by Jacobites became more difficult to monitor.19 There were further breaches in the spirit if not the letter of the Treaty of Union. In 1709, James Douglas, 2nd duke of Queensberry had been rewarded 17 A. Emsley Nimmo, ‘Liturgy: The Sacramental Soul of Jacobitism’, in Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond, ed. Allan. I. Macinnes, Kieran German and Lesley Graham (London, 2014), pp. 39–54; AUL, Pitsligo Papers, MS 2740/18/1/18; Dundee University Archives, Brechin Library manuscripts Br MS 3/DC 89 & BR MS 2/1/11/3. 18 NRS, Records collected by Bishop Alexander Jolly: Folio Volume CH12/19/3, /6; Anon., The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem, being the Liturgy of St. James . . . restored to its Original Purity (London, 1744); Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT), pp. 154–5. 19 Mount Stuart House, Rothesay, Notes. Hon. William Dalrymple, First Parliament of Great Britain 1707–8, A 817/3, pp. 3, 38–43, 88–92 and Loudoun Papers, unmarked green deed box, bundle 1706/October–December.

143

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 143

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

with a British peerage as duke of Dover for his piloting of the Union as head of the Court Party through the Scottish Estates in 1705–07. But he was denied the right to vote for the elected peers. Two years later, James Douglas-Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton, who had led ineptly the opposition of the Country Party to Union, was created earl of Brandon. He was not only denied the right to vote for elected peers, but he was also barred from taking his seat in the House of Lords to deter other Scots from seeking British peerages. When the Tory ministry introduced an augmented malt tax in 1713, before the formal conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, Scots were outraged, especially as the equalising of duties worked to their material disadvantage. Leading Scottish politicians who had supported the making of the Union now began to work closely with those politicians who had opposed it and remained sceptical about its efficacy as members of the British Parliament.20 A further contributory factor for Scottish disillusion with Union was the failure of British negotiators to achieve a favourable commercial treaty with France in anticipation of peace, particularly as Scottish shipping as well as exports of salmon and herring, textiles and unfinished wool had all suffered since the Union. Trade with France, which had been healthily in the black notwithstanding high imports of wine and brandy, was now firmly in the red. The motion eventually debated in the Lords during 1713 was not actually to dissolve the Union but to instigate a formal debate towards the same end. The Union was only saved by four proxy votes.21 Mismanagement also extended to religion with the passage of the Toleration and the Patronage Acts in 1712, which followed on from a celebrated judicial appeal by an Episcopalian clergyman, James Greenshields, an Ulster-Scot. His preaching and use of an Anglican liturgy in Edinburgh in defiance of the local presbytery led to his imprisonment by the town council, a decision upheld in the Court of Session but lost on appeal to the House of Lords in 1711. This legislation on ecclesiastical matters was the first substantive breach in the Act for securing the Protestant religion and Presbyterian church government as embodied within the Treaty of Union. As such, the Acts were more a cause of tension for Presbyterians than Episcopalians. Presbyterians were further discomfited on being required not only to accept the Acts but to swear an oath of loyalty for public office that was couched in terms of the Anglican confession which many found anathema. Presbyterian Dissenters could draw on the militant tradition of the later Covenanting Movement in defence of civil and religious liberties, a tradition not wholly laid to rest by the Revolution of 1688–91. Although the Revolution had favoured Presbyterianism, this was 20

HL, Loudoun Scottish Collection, box 23/LO 8831, /LO 8868, box 33/LO 9116, box 42/LO 9347, box 43/LO12573; AUL, Duff House (Montcoffer Papers), MS 3175/A/2380; Reasons for Dissolving the Treaty of Union Betwixt Scotland and England In a Letter to a Scots Member of Parliament, from one of his Electors (London, 1713). 21 Anon., The History and Defence of the Last Parliament (London, 1713); Anon. The Trade of Scotland with France considered (Edinburgh, 1713); Siobhan Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite Court: Scottish Migrants in France, 1688–1718’, in Living with Jacobitism, pp. 99–110.

144

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 144

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

castigated as an erastian version by militant Cameronians, rural guerrillas based mainly in the south-west.22 Presbyterian dissent was a noted feature of civic as well as religious life in Fife in the run up to the Hanoverian Succession. But the continuing militancy of the Cameronians was most evident in Galloway. Wholesale enclosures to increase profits from the droving trade were resisted vigorously by a group that became known as the Levellers for their destruction of dykes and willingness to oppose the landed interest. By 1724, their activities produced the first reading in Scotland of the Riot Act passed in 1715 to counter popular opposition to the Hanoverian Succession in England. This was viewed as an unwarranted intrusion by the British government in the Scottish judicial process.23 A more significant intrusion had already occurred with the punitive handling of forfeitures against leading Jacobites involved in the ’15. Prominent Jacobites in the Highlands and Lowlands were forfeited by legal attainder rather than by the due process of law. Retrospective dating of forfeiture to the outbreak of the rising also had a destabilising effect on rentals, mortgages and other credit transfers that implicated tenants and landlords who had not gone out for the Jacobite cause. The Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates were determined to ensure a punitive financial return to the British government in the teeth of protests from the Scottish judiciary and leading politicians. However, the Scottish Jacobite elite were sufficiently well connected to their Whig counterparts that there was a nationwide determination that landed families should not be utterly ruined. In the Lowlands, forfeiture was partially obstructed by the Scottish courts allowing the process of sequestration, based on bad debts, to take precedence. Estates sequestered were usually put under the charge of a kinsman or local associate of the person forfeited. But forfeiture had also opened up the way for speculative interests, notably the York Buildings Company of London, to purchase Jacobite estates with a view to asset-stripping timber and mineral rights. Among clans where chiefs and leading gentry had been forfeited, clansmen ensured that government endeavours to sell their estates to other Scottish landowners or incoming adventurers were usually frustrated. Rents continued to be paid to chiefs and gentry in exile. When government troops attempted to lift rents from the forfeited estate of Kenneth MacKenzie, 5th earl of Seaforth, in Wester Ross in 1721, his chamberlain, Donald Murchieson, mobilised the MacKenzies for an ambush. At Ath-na-Mullach in Kintail, the government troops were repelled with significant casualties. After six years of civil disobedience, the forfeited estates were restored to Highland chiefs and leading gentry in return for sureties for their own and their clansmen’s peaceable conduct.24 22 HL,

Loudoun Scottish Collection, box 18/LO 8351 and box 45/LO 9439; Jeffrey Stephen, ‘English Liturgy and Scottish Identity: The Case of James Greenshields’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, pp. 59–74. 23 TNA, Secretaries of State: State Papers Scotland, SP 54/7; pp. 166–7; T. Christopher Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (London, 1970), pp. 325–8. 24 Margaret Sankey and Daniel Szechi, ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism

145

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 145

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

In the interim, the threat of rioting, which had led the British government to postpone rather than implement the augmented malt tax in 1713, duly became a reality in 1725. When a revised malt tax was introduced, it was resisted by brewers in west and central Scotland. The most notorious protest was the Shawfield Riot in Glasgow when the mansion of the local MP and trans-Atlantic trader, Duncan Campbell, was razed because he had not vociferously opposed the imposition of the malt tax. Reports that rioting was endemic in the city were grossly exaggerated, but disorder certainly spread on account of the inept handling of the mob by the military. The magistrates and the town council were blamed by the British government and, after a brief period of incarceration in Edinburgh, punitively fined by the Scottish judiciary. General George Wade who was dispatched from England to restore order went on to enforce a military occupation of the Highlands in order to contain Jacobitism, which had not actually featured as an incendiary factor. Events in Glasgow led to a significant change in Scottish political management. The judicious exercise of patronage was now devolved to Archibald Campbell, earl of Islay. The Squadrone was side-lined.25 Smuggling, which was a perennial source of disturbances in ports with customs houses, such as Leith, Montrose, Aberdeen and Glasgow, was intimately bound up with the Porteous Riot in Edinburgh. The city guard opened fire on a mob attempting to free a convicted smuggler in 1736. The mob regrouped, then seized and lynched John Porteous, as captain of the City Guard. Although the mob had included contingents from Fife and other contraband districts, the political fallout was less pronounced than after the Shawfield Riot. Order was restored without punitive action being taken against the magistrates or town council. The riot was attributed to the lack of coordination between the military and the Scottish judiciary. No Jacobitism was detected. While smuggling continued as an endemic coastal pursuit, supportive rioting was exceptional after 1737.26 Likewise, militant expressions of Presbyterian dissent tended to be localised and contained. The endeavours of patrons to impose ministers on vacant parishes against the wishes of the congregations did lead to sporadic protests against the Patronage Act. If a majority of the congregation dissented, the matter was left to the resolution of the relevant presbytery. Islay and his placemen in the Kirk were prepared to uphold the rights of the patron over the congregation and thereby ride roughshod over popular dissent. Ebenezer Erskine, minister of Stirling, and a few associates seceded from the Kirk to establish the 1716–1745’, Past & Present, 173 (2001), 90–128; Macinnes, ‘Clanship’, in Commerce and the House of Stewart, pp. 194–7. 25 TNA, Secretaries of State: State Papers Scotland, SP 54/15–17; R. Renwick (ed.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow 1718–38 (Glasgow, 1909), pp. 222–31, 260–4, 268–9, 283–5. 26 TNA, Secretaries of State: State Papers Scotland, SP 54/22; Whatley, Scottish Society 1707–1830, pp. 105, 142–3.

146

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 146

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

Original Schism of 1733. Continuing protests against patronage within the Kirk coincided with unrest over changes in estate management from customary to commercial contracts. But local communities tended to express their dissent through individual acts of civil disobedience and non-compliance rather than by communal rioting.27 IV

Protracted delays in fully redeeming the Equivalents had contributed to the mounting resentment towards serial mismanagement prior to 1727. In part, delay can be attributed to smuggling which lessened the tax that accrued from customs and excise, leaving little or no surplus to meet the Treaty of Union’s obligations to Scotland. But for two decades successive British governments lacked a clear strategy how the debentures granted to creditors for the unredeemed Equivalents were to be honoured. Debentures were regularly traded as financial commodities in Edinburgh and London, where Scottish and English Equivalent Societies were respectively formed in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession. Pressure from the Equivalent Societies that they be jointly licensed to offer banking facilities was conceded by the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole in 1724. Ongoing fear of Scottish Jacobitism contributed to the eventual provision of development funding of £30,000 that was channelled from 1727 through the Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures in tandem with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Board of Trustees was modelled on the Irish Board that had aggressively developed the linen industry in Ireland since 1711. The Royal Bank was a co-partnery formed by the debenture holders on the Equivalents. Venture capital for the promotion of fishing and textiles was limited and applied mainly to raising manufacturing standards for linen and wool. Sheep farming districts in the Jacobite heartlands were excluded from access to woollen bounties.28 The Bank of Scotland, established for commerce in 1695, had undertaken the re-coinage of Scotland in the wake of the Union, when incremental profits from droving did much to sustain its inflow of cash. Its governor, John Holland, had shunned such speculative ventures as the Dutch Lotteries, the French Mississippi project promoted by the Scottish émigré John Law and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. He had fended off speculative interests from London in the shape of the Royal Exchange Assurance Company in 1722. Holland was adamant that there was no room for a second bank, particularly as only thirty-eight out of the 210 debenture holders on the Equivalents were Scottish 27

William Ferguson, Scotland: 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 119–24; Thomas M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London, 1999), pp. 56, 73, 75, 129–30. 28 John S. Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society 1707–1764 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 118–30; HL, Loudoun Scottish Collection, box 23/LO 11426; box 26/LO 7203; box 36/LO 9154; TNA, Secretaries of State: State Papers Scotland, SP 54/6.

147

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 147

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

residents. The Royal Bank commenced operations with an authorised capital in excess of £150,000 to the Bank of Scotland’s £100,000. Scotland benefitted immediately from their aggressive competition. Pioneering of note issues, overdrafts and deposit accounts facilitated commercial enterprise on the basis of credit rather than secure funds; a basis which attracted inward investment from England where banking practices remained conservative. By 1737, this Union dividend had increased funding for exports of linen and woollens directly to colonial stores through Glasgow and other Scottish ports rather than indirectly through London, Bristol and Liverpool.29 Reviews of the state of Great Britain issued in the aftermath of Union continued to specify economic opportunities rather than the attainments of Scotland in relation to the indigenous development of fisheries and manufactures and overseas engagement with the Empire.30 Scottish merchant houses in London were active in funding new fishing initiatives on the Cromarty Firth in the northern Highlands and injecting fresh capital into the flagship Scottish woollen manufactory established at Newmills in East Lothian in 1685, albeit it ceased trading in 1718. Public debate within Scotland in favour of co-partneries for fisheries and textiles was reinvigorated in the aftermath of the ’15. Particularly prominent as promoters of commercial initiatives were merchants and landowners from the north-east, usually of an Episcopalian but not necessarily of an overt Jacobite persuasion. They found ready support from local government in town and country, regardless of religious divisions between Episcopalians and Presbyterians. Their confidence in the capacity for growth in textile manufacturing found early endorsement of sorts from England. Clothiers in the county of Northumberland and in the town of Leeds, Yorkshire, petitioned the British government to restrict imports of woollen goods and yarn from Scotland in 1719; a petition that was ignored for fears of increasing Scottish disaffection.31 The competition between the two national banks and a widely contested general election sparked off renewed debate in 1734 on how landed enterprise should be prioritised and encouraged.32 In Highlands and in Lowlands, justices of the peace and the commissioners of supply were not content to maintain stability through oversight of prices and 29

James Armour, Proposals for making the Bank of Scotland More Useful and Profitable and for raising the Value of the Landed Interest of North Britain (Edinburgh, 1722); Richard Holland, Some Letters relating to the Bank of Scotland (London, 1723); S.G. Checkland, Scottish Banking: A History, 1695–1973 (Glasgow and London, 1975), pp. 58–71. 30 See Edward Chamberlain, Magnae Britanniae notitia (London, 1708 and London, 1710); Guy Meigle, The Present State of Great Britain (London, 1707) and The Present State of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1718); Anon., The British Merchant (London, 1721). 31 NRS, Journal of William Fraser, merchant, London, CS 96/524; TNA, Reports from the Board of Trade, 1719–21, PC 1/3/59, /91. 32 See [Patrick Lyndsey], The Interest of Scotland considered with regard to its Police in imploying of the Poor, its Agriculture, its Trade, its Manufactures & Fisheries (Edinburgh, 1734); Anon., An Enquiry into some things that concern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1734).

148

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 148

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

wages. They increasingly took a proactive role, in building up the infrastructure of roads, bridges and harbours; in encouraging co-partneries to improve farming as well as fisheries and manufactures; and in developing planned villages to deepen and diversify estate management and act as bridges between rural and urban society.33 Across Scotland, the creation of co-partneries to promote fisheries, linen and woollen goods enjoyed the backing of the Convention of Royal Burghs. But it was left to the leading towns to maintain manufacturing standards for exports. Glasgow was intent on establishing itself as a centre of excellence for the manufacture of woollen plaiding and printed linens, especially handkerchiefs. The magistrates and town council had used a local tax on malt to promote urban development from 1695. They were engaged on an ambitious programme of quayside extension and street construction prior to the Shawfield Riot. From 1726, they were obliged to meet reparations (just under £6,100) from this local tax. Nevertheless, they engaged in the progressive borrowing of £14,000 to continue financing urban development throughout the 1730s.34 As well as the proactive role of local government in town and country, Scotland benefited from the commercial resilience of its traditional trading links with North Sea and Baltic states. If measured primarily through a forensic examination of port books and customs records, Scottish trade to northern Europe appeared to be stagnating at the Hanoverian Succession.35 However, this evidence only relates to commodities passing through Scottish ports. If account books along with correspondence and journals of merchants and entrepreneurial gentry are brought into play, commercial resilience in northern Europe was complemented by expansion in the Mediterranean. The Dutch connection survived discriminatory articles against networking and shipping in the Treaty of Union. Some Scottish merchant houses even relocated from Aberdeen to Amsterdam, while others built up their trade in salmon and cured fish to Livorno and Venice. Other Scottish merchant houses in Edinburgh actually pulled out of their formerly illicit engagement with the American colonies to concentrate on northern European ventures. The only discernible casualty in the wake of Union was the decline of Dundee as the main importer of timber from Norway as a direct result of mercantilist legislation by Denmark-Norway to protect that kingdom’s shipping. The Baltic trade was actually reinvigorated by Scottish re-exporting of kolonial goods such as tobacco, coffee, tea and sugar in addition to the staple exports of herrings, cloth and skins. Increasing imports of such raw materials as flax, timber and iron were processed respectively through linen manufacturing, the construction 33

AUL, MS 3175/A/2382; Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, pp. 224–5. Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow 1718–38, pp. 10, 43, 74–5, 125–6, 130–1, 139, 170–1, 187–91, 217–18, 254–5, 266, 271. 35 P.R. Rossner, ‘New Avenues of Trade: Structural Change in the European Economy and Foreign Commerce as Reflected in the Changing Structure of Scotland’s Commerce, 1660–1760’, Journal for Scottish Historical Studies, 21 (2011), 1–25. 34

149

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 149

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

industry and metalworking. The development of strong trading access for Baltic goods between Leith in the east of Scotland and Liverpool in the north-west of England reinvigorated overland routes through Dumfries and Kirkcudbright. The prosperity of these two towns in southern Scotland continued to be enhanced by their connections to the Isle of Man as the main centre of tobacco smuggling operations from Glasgow. The Union brought Scottish shipping the added bonus of guaranteed rather than occasional convoy protection from the Royal Navy. But this necessitated the curtailing of tramp-trading within the Baltic; albeit Liverpool became the key gateway for Scottish entrepreneurs seeking to break into the African slave trade.36 V

The managerial dominance of Islay and his associates from 1725 ensured that the limited offices and other places of profit in Scotland tended to be monopolised by Presbyterians and other committed Whigs rather than by Episcopalians or wavering Jacobites. This latter grouping had conspicuously greater success in seeking placement in the Empire largely on account of the pervasive contacts of John Drummond of Quarrel, international financier and diplomat.37 A committed Unionist who became MP for the Perth Burghs, he retained strong Episcopal and Jacobite connections. As a director of the East India Company, Drummond was the chief mover in placing Scots regardless of their political or religious affiliations in India until his death in 1740. Scots became particularly prominent in both the military and mercantile branches of the Company in Bengal. Drummond also aided Scottish and Ulster-Scottish commercial networks in Bombay and Madras from where they tramp-traded through the Indian Ocean to the South China Seas. Drummond exercised more limited patronage in the West Indies, Virginia and the Carolinas where Episcopalians had considerably fewer scruples than Presbyterians in accepting the oaths according to the Anglican confession prescribed for holding public office, both civic and military. Attaining placement in Empire was no guarantee of prosperity. Governor Robert Cowan of Bombay reckoned in 1733 that the chances of any adventurer, Whig or Jacobite, returning from India with a fortune were one in five hundred.38 36 N.E.

Bang and K. Korst (eds), Tabeller over Skisfart og Varetransport gennem Oresund, 1661–1783 og gennem Storebaelt, 1701–48 (4 vols, Copenhagen, 1930–53), I, 48–91; NRS, Letter and account book of John Watson, younger, merchant, Edinburgh CS 96/3309; AUL, MS 3175/A/2342. 37 George McGilvary, ‘John Drummond of Quarrel: East India Patronage and Jacobite Assimilation, 1720–80’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, pp. 141–58; NRS, Stirling Hume Drummond Moray of Abercairney Papers GD 24/1/464n-o. 38 PRONI, Londonderry Papers. Papers of Sir Robert Cowan, Outward Letter Books, 1721–1723, D654/B1/1A and /1AA; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Union, Empire and Global

150

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 150

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

Governor Cowan, a perennial pessimist, and a vociferous anti-Jacobite, headed an Ulster-Scottish network drawn mainly from County Londonderry which also included, through marriage, James MacRae from Ayrshire. His links with the Jacobite clan from Wester Ross were historic rather than current. Having made their initial mark as seafarers fighting pirates, they both moved on to become successful commercial governors; Cowan on the western seaboard of India as governor of Bombay from 1729 to 1734 and MacRae on the eastern seaboard at Madras as governor of Fort St George from 1725 to 1731. Both were reliant on the political patronage of Drummond to sustain them in office and were duly relieved of their posts when they lost his confidence.39 The scale of their trading operations, nominally on behalf of the East India Company, ranged from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf through the Straits of Malacca to Canton in China. Cowan and MacRae returned from India as nabobs, each with reputed fortunes in excess of £100,000. Cowan’s plans to establish himself as an English gentlemen, first by becoming a knight and then a MP for a Cornwall constituency, were cut short by his death in 1737. MacRae soon demonstrated his Whig credentials on returning to Scotland. An estate acquired near Monkton in Ayrshire was renamed Orangefield. He donated a bronze statue of William of Orange to Glasgow in 1735. The following year he paid £12,000 in cash to purchase the estate of Houston in Renfrewshire, the price being equivalent to almost twenty-one years’ rent, a rate of purchase rarely exceeded in Scotland since the South Sea Bubble.40 Two further case studies of Scottish networks give snapshots of Episcopalian and Jacobite penetration of Empire. The foremost tobacco lord in Glasgow during the 1720s was Andrew Buchanan. He and his family operated not only in Virginia and the Chesapeake but also in the trade in sugar and rum from Jamaica. Buchanan and his family were Episcopalians. By 1725, they had established the Buchanan Society, ostensibly to provide education and poor relief for impoverished clansmen who had migrated to the city from Loch Lomond. The society was a front to sustain the meeting-house run by Alexander Duncan, the non-juring bishop of Glasgow. Having acquired an extensive estate at Drumpellier in Lanarkshire by 1735, Buchanan served as lord provost of Glasgow in 1740–41 when his brother Neil became an influential MP representing the city and other western burghs. In 1726, the Buchanan network was joined by William Simpson, an Aberdeen merchant who dealt principally through Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London with occasional shipments of salmon to Livorno in Italy. During the ’15, Simpson not only supplied gunpowder to Jacobite forces assembled in Aberdeen but he also served on the Jacobite town council. A Adventuring with a Jacobite Twist, 1707–53’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, pp. 123–40. 39 PRONI, Outward Letter Books, 1723–1735, D654/B/1/1B, /1C, /1E, /1H, /1K, /1L, /1M, /1N, /1P & European letter Books, 1728–1734, D654/B/1/2A, /2B, 2C, /2D. 40 PRONI, Bruce Family Papers, T304/1/1B32 and /B36; GCA, Records of the Lenox Family of Woodhead, T-LX/14/3.

151

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 151

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

committed non-juror, he escaped censure on the strength of his political connections in the city and shire. He expanded his commercial activities, initially into the Baltic and then the tobacco trade. From being an agent supplying tobacco from Glasgow, he was directly shipping tobacco from Virginia by 1729.41 The second network was that run by Donald Cameron of Lochiel, chief of a predominantly Episcopalian and inveterate Jacobite clan. His family had speculated adeptly in the colonial land-market in New Jersey prior to the Union. The Camerons and their commercial associates in Lochaber were intent on developing the garrison town of Fort William into a centre for trans-Atlantic trade. Their entrepreneurial activities ranged from droving cattle to providing timber for Cumbrian iron-masters through Whitehaven, to smuggling contraband wines from France and trading legitimately through Fort William, Belfast and Madeira to Philadelphia, New York and Boston. By 1734, they had acquired a plantation in Jamaica that was run imprudently by Donald’s younger brother Evan. The Camerons not only traded with committed Jacobites networks, they worked with the Campbells of Barcaldine who were keen to throw over past tainting with Jacobitism in the ’15. The Campbells were also engaged in ventures to New York, Jamaica and acted more speculatively in prospecting for gold in Brazil by 1728. They sought to demonstrate their loyalty to the Hanoverian Succession through service overseas in the British army and the royal navy.42 The appeal of Empire for Jacobites and Episcopalians had particular value for the United Kingdom. The very interests which sought to end the Union were neutralised if not won over by Empire. Indeed, the imperial pillars which secured Scotland within the Union were in place by 1737. The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession stimulated the formation of a new Scottish Jacobite Association by 1739, which continued in existence until the ’45. Since the ’15 however, the shift in favour of new imperial horizons meant an increasing number of families sympathetic to Jacobitism remained benevolently neutral rather than actively committed to the cause. No less significantly, Scottish clans and families could express their dissatisfaction with the Union and the Whig supremacy without becoming Jacobites following the rise of the Patriot Party after the accession of George II. While the Camerons remained Jacobites, the Campbells of Barcaldine were flirting with the Patriot Party by the general election of 1734. The Buchanans, who were prominent political patrons in placing aspiring entrepreneurs in the tobacco colonies, swung behind the Patriot Party. They were instrumental in promoting legislation in the early 41 GCA, Research Papers & Notes compiled by R.F. Dell, TD 1022/11; R. Edwards, Glasgow’s Episcopalians: Rebel Romantics (Glasgow, 2008), pp. 16–18; NRS, Journal of W. Simpson merchant, Aberdeen, CS 96/597. 42 Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, pp. 147, 149, 226; NLS, Cameron of Fassifern (Brodrick Haldane Collection) Acc. 11337, Accounts and Letters, 1732–41; NRS, Campbell of Barcaldine Papers, GD 170/307, /733, /735, /740, /763, /776, /819, /850, /929, /3076 and /3089.

152

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 152

22/08/2019 08:57

SECURING THE UNION AND THE SUCCESSION IN SCOTLAND

1740s that awarded drawbacks on customs for linen exports, which actively encouraged the formation of commercial co-partneries for manufacturing and colonial trading.43 The Patriot Party differed in important respects from the Jacobites in Scotland. First, they could organise openly with James Grange, Lord Erskine – the brother of John, earl of Mar, who had led out the Jacobites in the ’15 – being retained as the Patriots’ principal agent from 1734. Second, the Patriots liaised constructively with their counterparts in England, mainly through John Dalrymple, 2nd earl of Stair, an army general and a British diplomat who served with distinction in Paris from 1715 to 1720. Stair came from a family in the south-west of Scotland who were staunch Unionists in the Court Party. But he had switched to the Squadrone on falling out with the Argyll faction among the Scottish Whigs. Stair regarded Sir Robert Walpole as ‘certainly the greatest man this Island [has] ever seen with all ye power of parl[iamen]t vested in him’, but was virulently opposed to the prime minister’s corrupt and controlling nature.44 Third, the Patriots looked primarily across the Atlantic rather than to continental Europe. Two key players in formulating Patriotic perspectives to challenge Walpole were Scots with a Jacobite hinterland. Sir William Keith, erstwhile governor of Pennsylvania who retained strong family ties to Aberdeenshire, was a prominent colonial polemicist. Keith stressed that the British nature of Empire was predicated on equality rather than English dominance. He effectively promulgated an alternative view of Empire to that of territorial expansion and colonial dependency as promoted by Walpole. For Keith supported a revitalised Whig perspective on the development of manufactures and shipping within the American colonies to allow them to trade as equal partners in Empire. Accordingly, he became an American spokesman for the Patriot Party in the 1730s. On Keith’s relocation to London he contended that British subjects at home and abroad were bound together by rights and liberties applied equitably and without privileging one part of the state over another.45 Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope was another visionary, who had acquired a forfeited estate in the West Highlands on the Ardnamurchan peninsula where he attempted to demonstrate exemplary landed enterprise through extractive industries linked to canal building. His endeavours met with blatant and even violent obstruction from clansmen (especially Camerons) unwilling to accept removal from their traditional lands for a migrant workforce. Nevertheless, he remained committed to innovative landed enterprise and even anticipated 43 Anon.,

The Occasional Patriot, written in plain Scotch (Edinburgh, 1734); NRS, GD 170/763.; GCA, Hamilton of Barns, TD 589/572, /588, /592, /629. 44 NRS, GD 170/763; AUL, William Duff of Braco, MS 2727/1/27 and Duff House (Montcoffer) Papers, MS 3176/A/1675; BLYU, Stair Papers, Osborn Collection, OSB MSS 24/ Box 1/ folders 1 and 5. 45 AUL, Gordon of Buthlaw & Cairness, MS 1160/4/7–8; Sir William Keith, A Short Discourse on the Present State of the Colonies in America (1732) and Essay on the Nature of a Public Spirit (1734) and The History of the British Plantations in America (1738).

153

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 153

22/08/2019 08:57

Allan I. Macinnes

Adam Smith in arguing for transatlantic union in 1740; an argument that harmonised with contemporaneous British critiques of mercantilism which called for the repeal of commercial restrictions on Ireland as on the American colonies.46 Despite their organisation, their British liaison and their political vision, the Patriots had not made much headway in Scotland at the general election of 1734, where they were comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Argyll faction. Indeed, they only mounted an effective challenge to Walpole after the duke of Argyll broke with the prime minister in 1738. The Argyll faction in alliance with the Patriots became a powerful parliamentary influence following the general election of 1741 in which they enjoyed marked success in Scotland. Their cohesion was crucial in bringing down Walpole by 1742.47 However, the fall of Walpole and the recalibration of the Whig Supremacy in no way endangered the Hanoverian Succession. The ’45 certainly shook the British establishment, but the Jacobites were unable to change the British government or restore the Stuarts by force of arms.

46

Sir Alexander Murray, The true interest of Great Britain, Ireland and our plantations: or, A proposal for making such an union between Great Britain and Ireland, and all our plantations, as that already made between Scotland and England (London, 1740). 47 BLYU, Stair Papers, Osborn Collection, OSB MSS 24/ Box 1/ folders 6–9; AUL, MS 3176/A/1678/2; GCA, Lennox Family of Woodhead, T-XL/14/63–4.

154

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 154

22/08/2019 08:57

8 Patriotism after the Hanoverian Succession Steve Pincus and Amy Watson The death of Queen Anne and the accession of the first Hanoverian king of Great Britain, George I, signalled a radical political reorientation. Contemporaries were certain that the new king would bring with him Whig advisors, Whig courtiers, and above all, Whig politics. A fictional Tory in Bernard Mandeville’s lively dialogue written on the occasion of the Hanoverian succession complained that after George I succeeded to the throne the Tories were thrown out and the Whig ‘party carries it swimmingly’.1 The former Tory secretary of state, Viscount Bolingbroke who agreed with Mandeville about little else in this period, lamented the sudden growth ‘of Whig malice and power’ after the Hanoverian Succession. ‘I see clearly that the Tory party is gone’, Bolingbroke informed his political ally Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester.2 The early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’ has long been understood in binary terms. Scholars, when they have accepted the existence of party, have by and large followed the Whig journalist and Secretary of State Joseph Addison in asserting that ‘the general division of the British nation is into Whigs and Tories, there being very few, if any, who stand neuters in the dispute’.3 Nevertheless by the 1720s and 1730s a new political category had emerged: the Patriots. Again and again, the contributors to the new popular opposition paper The Craftsman praised the ‘the true Patriot’ who deserved ‘popularity’.4 In the later 1730s the contributors to another opposition journal Common Sense deployed the term.5 In Scotland, one group of journalists simply called their production The Patriot. Opponents of the Whig ministry’s excise scheme appropriated Joseph Addison’s play Cato to liken their political stance to that of the

1

Bernard Mandeville, The Mischiefs that Ought Justly to be Apprehended from a Whig-Government (London, 1714), p. 3. 2 TNA, State Papers, SP 35/1, fols 117–118. 3 Joseph Addison, Free-Holder; or Political Essays (London, 1758), No. 54 (originally published 25 June 1716), p. 379. 4 The Craftsman (London, 1731–37), Vol. I, No. 21, pp. 121, 123; Vol. 2, No. 54, p. 58; Vol. 2, No. 70, p. 194; Vol. 3, No. 109, p. 169; Vol. 6, No. 213, pp. 252–5; Vol. 9, No. 303, p. 94; Vol. 11, No. 357, p. 15; Vol. 12, No. 400, p. 154; Vol. 13, No. 445, p. 171. 5 Common Sense, No. 62, 8 April 1738; No. 70, 3 June 1738; No. 88, 7 October 1738.

155

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 155

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

‘Roman Patriot’.6 Defenders of the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, by contrast, mocked those who prided themselves on their patriotism. Why, after decades of political strife between Whigs and Tories, did a new opposition group, the Patriots emerge? What did the Patriots stand for? What did they achieve in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession? I

Historians have long debated the structure and vibrancy of party politics during the administration of Britain’s first prime minister Robert Walpole. The longdominant interpretation put forward by J.H. Plumb holds that Walpole and the Whig party he controlled enjoyed almost total power over the British state. According to Plumb, Walpole through expert political management created an oligarchic, single-party government with ‘almost monolithic stability’. In a political system determined primarily by access to place and patronage, partisan opposition was drained of its ideological stakes: ‘There was no sign of the revival of party, no violent division about policy in any constitutional sense, and certainly no wish to change a system of government that the political nation found curiously satisfactory.’ In Plumb’s interpretation, Walpolean oligarchy left no room for organised, principled partisan contention.7 Scholars since Plumb have reasserted the importance of Hanoverian partisan divisions, rejecting the idea that Walpole’s grip on power was an ‘impregnable’ one.8 Many of these historians have focused on the so-called ‘Country’ opposition to Walpole, a consciously non-partisan conglomerate of Whig, Tory, Jacobite and independent politicians who stood opposed to the alleged corruption of the Whig ministry. Historians have attributed diverse motives to this group: Quentin Skinner, for instance, has claimed their opposition was ‘self-interested’, their rhetoric ‘designed. . . to serve [a] polemical purpose’, while W.A. Speck believes their defence of British liberty was a sincere ideological stance, arguing that they were ‘react[ing] to the rise of secular politics’. Both Skinner and Speck, however, agree that this Country opposition’s reformist creed at times proved effective in challenging the Whig party’s hegemonic control over the British state.9 6 William Pulteney, A Review of the Excise Scheme (London, 1733), p. 71. See also A Candid Answer to a Letter from a Member of Parliament (London, 1733), p. vi. 7 J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967), pp. 189, 186. 8 Ibid., p. 189. 9 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society, In Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London, 1974), pp. 126–8; W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 6–7, 223. See also J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 2016 [originally 1975]), especially pp. 477–505.

156

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 156

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

One of our contentions in this chapter is that the Country opposition was in fact made up of several ideologically distinct groups that made temporary political alliances in their efforts to bring down Britain’s leading minister. Other historians have agreed with this notion of separate oppositions. Linda Colley, for instance, has drawn attention to the continued relevance of Tory partisanship in the age of Walpole, arguing that the Tories viewed the Country group as ‘a temporary coalition’. ‘The tory parliamentary party’, she claims, ‘retained ideological identity, [and] a capacity for concerted political action.’10 Historians have likewise asserted that Jacobitism promulgated a distinct ideological program, elucidating the movement’s commitment to social and religious hierarchy, and its imperial commercial ambitions.11 This chapter will argue that the Patriots, like the Tories and the Jacobites, were a discrete group within the broader country coalition. The Patriots began in the 1710s–20s as an interest group within the Whig party, then transformed in the 1720s–30s into a political opposition aligned with the Tories, and finally emerged in the 1730s–40s as a distinct party in their own right, with a singular organisational structure and ideological agenda. The scholarly work that has been done on Patriotism in the age of Walpole has focused on its popular dimension, examining the urban parades and protests that served as an extra-parliamentary critique of Britain’s imperial policy. Kathleen Wilson, for instance, argues that Patriotism was primarily a popular campaign in English cities in favour of a bellicose and expansionist British imperial policy. In her narrative, the War of Jenkins’ Ear and Admiral Edward Vernon’s spectacular victory at Porto Bello ‘fuelled a nationalist ardour at home that was specifically anti-administration in content’, putting popular pressure on political leaders to pursue a more militant, ‘Patriotic’ foreign policy.12 Nicholas Rogers’s Whigs and Cities is largely complementary to Wilson’s work, highlighting the important role played by independent urban merchants in the political agitation of the period as well as their motives for supporting an interventionist Patriot agenda: namely, the immense opportunities they saw in expanding Britain’s Atlantic commerce.13 In both Wilson and Rogers’s work, Patriotism is portrayed as an urban protest movement more than an organised party, centred on the imperial concerns of a commercially minded English populace. 10

Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 96, 7. 11 See Allan I. MacInnes and Douglas J. Hamilton, ‘Introduction: Identity, Mobility and Competing Patriotisms’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London, 2014), pp. 1–13; Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45 (London, 1979). 12 Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past & Present, 121 (1988), 74–109; and The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 137–64. 13 Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989).

157

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 157

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

Our approach in this chapter differs from that of Wilson and Rogers in two key respects. We argue that Patriotism was, first, not an exclusively popular movement in composition, and second, not an exclusively English one in scope. While public engagement was central to its core mission, the Patriot movement operated like a traditional partisan organisation as well, building a leadership of political elites who shaped the group’s platform and guided – but by no means controlled – its out-of-doors campaigns. And while English cities were key sites of Hanoverian partisan contestation, the Patriot movement also made political inroads further afield, extending its reach to Scotland and even British America by the end of the 1730s. In both its political organisation and in its ideology, Patriotism had a markedly imperial perspective, seeking to create a political state that served the interests not just of Englishmen, but of Britons across the empire as a whole. II

There had been serious fractures in the Whig party since the schism of 1717–20, in which Robert Walpole and his followers had emerged as the clear – though by no means undisputed – leaders of both the party and the British ministry it controlled.14 It was not until the mid-1720s, however, that dissension solidified into a permanent break, with the creation of a Patriot opposition movement openly dedicated to countering Walpole’s ministerial agenda, and ultimately, removing him from power. Over the course of the 1720s–1730s, these Patriots built a partisan opposition with a sophisticated level of organisation, including a press wing, a dedicated party leadership, an innovative ideological agenda, and a network of supporters that was transatlantic in scope. The Patriots’ organisational strengths – particularly in terms of public outreach and mobilisation – served as a check on Walpole’s political ambitions throughout the next decades, belying the myth of a supposedly impregnable Whig oligarchy. The man most responsible for the Patriot opposition’s creation was William Pulteney, a Whig MP and former Walpole ally who had increasingly soured on both the prime minister’s policies and his hierarchical approach to political leadership. A consummate politician with a gift for fiery rhetoric, Pulteney broke openly with the ministry in 1725, and immediately began drawing together a group of Whigs who opposed the recent direction their party had taken. His Whig followers were at first a small but energetic group, including his cousin Daniel Pulteney, and fellow MPs Henry Howard, John Rushout and Samuel Sandys, but by the early 1730s, the movement had expanded its ranks to include prominent Whigs like John, Lord Carteret and Philip Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield. While these Patriot leaders had diverse geographic and family 14 See

Jeremy Black, ‘Parliament and the Political and Diplomatic Crisis of 1717–18’, Parliamentary History, 3 (1984), 77–101.

158

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 158

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

backgrounds, a large number had served together in the British diplomatic service in the 1710s, a common experience that both bonded the group socially and ensured that foreign policy would be a key part of their agenda. The nascent Patriot movement’s most urgent priority was to find political allies who could provide the numbers and support they needed to overthrow the Whig Supremacy. Luckily for them, Walpole already had a group of inveterate enemies who were obvious candidates for an opposition coalition: the Tories. In the movement’s early years, William Pulteney invested a great deal of time in building relationships with Tory politicians like Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and William Wyndham, as well as the Tory-leaning group of writers known as the Scriblerians headed by Alexander Pope, John Gay and Jonathan Swift. He traded visits with them at their country estates to socialise and plot strategy, corresponded with them regularly, and dined with them at banquets in the City of London to celebrate their political victories.15 As ties between Pulteney and the Tories strengthened, they began to coordinate their political writings, sharing ideas and sometimes authorship on anti-Whig pamphlets and satirical works.16 The most significant of these joint Patriot/Tory publications was the twice-weekly newspaper The Craftsman, which put out its first issue in December 1726. The Craftsman was the brainchild of Pulteney and Bolingbroke, the two politicians working in tandem to both fund the enterprise and supply it with content, writing a constant stream of editorials under the pen name of Sir Caleb D’Anvers on the evils of Walpole and his ministry. This political collaboration struck a chord with the British public, attracting an unprecedentedly large readership; according to one contemporary account, it had a circulation of 13,000 at its peak in the early 1730s.17 As the success of The Craftsman and similar anti-Whig publications showed, there was a British audience hungry for such collaborative opposition journalism, and the leaders of both parties were eager to make the coalition a lasting – perhaps even permanent – one. The Craftsman frequently utilised anti-partisan rhetoric in its pages, declaring that the coalition signalled the beginning of a politics based not on party but on the public good: ‘Both sides wish to accomplish the same end, viz. the happiness of their Country. . . [therefore] let the names of Whig and Tory be forever buried in oblivion.’18 For a time, this call to eliminate party seemed almost possible, with Patriots and Tories forging working partnerships and affectionate friendships over their shared opposition to the Whig ministry. The Patriot duke and duchess of Queensberry became patrons of Tory John Gay’s anti-Walpole literary endeavours; the Tory John Arbuthnot began paying social calls to Patriot Sarah Churchill; the Patriot Lord Carteret 15

See Sir Harold H. Williams (ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (5 vols, Oxford, 1963), III, pp. 271–3, 322–5, 438–9. 16 See ibid., III, pp. 438–9. 17 The D’anverian history of the affairs of Europe, for the memorable year, 1731 (London, 1732), p. 80. 18 The Craftsman, No. 40, 24 April 1727.

159

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 159

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

gave public toasts to Tory Jonathan Swift’s health.19 Ultimately, though, this moment of political harmony would be fleeting: persistent ideological differences between the two groups over issues like religious toleration and royal prerogative increasingly divided them as the 1730s progressed.20 But in the short term, this temporary marriage of political convenience served the Patriots well, giving the burgeoning movement a ready-made body of allies who already possessed the partisan infrastructure, supporters and literary reputation to immediately begin contesting Walpole’s political dominance. The Patriots also began creating their own organisational networks, focusing on expanding the movement to include like-minded partisans from outside England’s borders. Their earliest and most politically prominent recruits were from Scotland, where many were dissatisfied by the Walpolean state’s treatment of their nation in recent controversies like the malt tax crisis of 1725. Patriotism attracted a significant portion of Scotland’s sixteen representative peers: most notably, the Whigs John Dalrymple, earl of Stair; Alexander Hume-Campbell, earl of Marchmont; and James Graham, duke of Montrose. It also won supporters amongst Whig members of the Scottish Bar such as James Erskine, Lord Grange, and even some Jacobite writers like Thomas Ruddiman.21 These men played important leadership roles in the Patriot organisation almost from its beginning, ensuring that the movement would have a British – even imperial – partisan outlook rather than a narrowly English one. This Patriot leadership’s first logistical challenge was to create a secure method of communicating sensitive political information between England and Scotland.22 In October 1733, Lord Grange began employing messengers to ferry letters between London and Edinburgh, a scheme funded in part by a subscription raised by William Pulteney.23 At the same time, the Patriots serving in Parliament engaged several men in Scotland to update them regularly about political developments north of the border so that ‘we may have intelligence of what is doing there, and the people below may not be kept in Ignorance of what is passing above’.24 With this fixed communication network established, English and Scottish Patriots engaged in a voluminous political correspondence. The earl of Chesterfield, for instance, regularly wrote to both 19

Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, III, pp. 165–6; ibid., IV, pp. 188–90. See Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, pp. 220–2. 21 Most Patriots were firm proponents of the Hanoverian succession and tried to distance themselves from Jacobitism in their writings. See NRS, Erskine Family Papers, GD 124/15/1427/2. In practice, however, they frequently accepted Jacobite sympathisers into their ranks. 22 They could not rely on the postal service because any opposition letters sent via the post were ‘lyable to be intercepted and inspected’ by Walpole’s spymasters in the post office. See NLS, Yester Papers, MS 7044, fols 43–46. 23 NLS MS 7044, fols 43–46; NRS, GD 124/15/1427/1. 24 NRS, Hume of Polwarth Papers, GD 158/1414 and Graham Family Papers, GD 220/5/1286. 20

160

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 160

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

Marchmont and Stair, proving instrumental in helping them concoct a plan to challenge the result of the Scottish peers election of 1734.25 William Pulteney corresponded with almost all the important Scottish Patriot leaders at one time or other, writing especially frequently to Lord Grange, with whom he shared a passion for partisan wheeling and dealing.26 As these letters show, the Patriots viewed Scotland as a central staging ground for their political struggle, investing considerable time and resources into integrating the nation fully into the Patriot partisan apparatus.27 While not as extensive as its efforts in Scotland, the movement also began making inroads across the Atlantic, particularly amongst political elites in British North America. In New York, for instance, a group of Whigs inspired by The Craftsman’s call for virtuous leadership began a campaign in 1732 to rid themselves of their authoritarian governor, the Walpolean William Cosby. When these New York protestors – who called themselves ‘Patriots’ – reached out to London political leaders for aid, the English Patriots were all too willing to lend their support. Prominent English Patriots corresponded with the antiCosby leaders in New York to offer political advice, update them on their suit’s progress in London, and help forward their petitions to the Privy Council.28 They also attended strategy meetings with Lewis Morris, the New York Patriots’ representative in London, and publicised the New Yorkers’ plight in The Craftsman and other opposition newspapers.29 This active involvement suggests that the Patriots had an imperial perspective on their movement’s scope, viewing the New Yorkers’ campaign against abusive government in America to be an integral part of their own campaign against abusive government in Westminster. The final and perhaps most important aspect of the Patriot movement’s organisation was public outreach: in England, Scotland and British America alike, the Patriots proved adept at mobilising ordinary Britons to support their cause. The Patriots understood the value of the press as a political tool, with newspapers in particular playing a central role in their early campaigns. The Craftsman, having captured the English public imagination in the late 1720s, soon inspired a series of copycat newspapers across the British Atlantic. In Scotland, Patriot leaders in 1734 began to publish a newspaper entitled The Thistle, which emulated The Craftsman’s style quite explicitly, going so far as to use the Scottish knightly 25

NRS, GD 158/3/1, fols 44–45. NRS, GD 124/15/1427/1–4. 27 For more on the Patriot movement’s organisation in Scotland during this period, see Amy Watson, ‘Patriotism and Partisanship in Post-Union Scotland’, SHR, 97 (2018), 57–85. 28 See The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden (9 vols, New York, 1917–37), II, pp. 105–06, 111–12; Eugene R. Sheridan (ed.), The Papers of Lewis Morris (3 vols, Newark, NJ, 1993), II, pp. 83–5, 86–9, 201–03. 29 See Beverly McAnear (ed.), Robert Hunter Morris, An American in London, 1735–1736 (Philadelphia, PA, 1940), pp. 376, 179, 194–5; The Papers of Lewis Morris, II, pp. 133–5, 138–44; Old Common Sense, No. 44, 10 Dec. 1737; Common Sense, No. 48, 31 Dec. 1737; The Craftsman, No. 602, 21 Jan. 1737/8; The Craftsman, No. 616, 29 April 1738. 26

161

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 161

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

pseudonym Sir William Wallace in tribute to The Craftsman’s Sir Caleb D’Anvers. Thomas Ruddiman’s Caledonian Mercury had also developed a discernibly Patriot viewpoint by the 1730s. New York and Pennsylvania had their own Patriotleaning newspapers as well: John Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal and Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. All of these newspapers followed a similar formula, including both articles recycled from London’s opposition press and original material focused on local political affairs. These papers, then, did more than just repeat London Patriot ideas wholesale; they also applied those ideas to local circumstances, hoping to convince readers that they had a personal stake in overturning the Whig ministry’s harmful imperial policies. Patriot newspapers consistently asserted the movement’s commitment to popular political engagement: it was the British people – not a ministry or even a monarch – who gave the government political legitimacy. As the New-York Weekly Journal put it in 1735, ‘the Power or Strength of every free Country depends entirely upon the Populace’. ‘When the Governors and the People in general are of different sentiments’, the article continued, ‘the Liberties of the Country must be at an End, or their Government must be speedily changed’.30 And newspapers encouraged the people to exercise this power, reporting on the political activity of ordinary men and women with approbation. The Craftsman’s commentary on the excise crisis of 1733, for instance, praised small-scale London vendors – tobacconists, vintners, ballad sellers – for actively resisting and even ridiculing the Walpole ministry’s dictums.31 Ultimately, these Patriot efforts to win over the British public would prove largely successful, at least in urban commercial centres. In moments of partisan upheaval like London’s excise crisis of 1733, New York City’s Zenger trial of 1735, and Edinburgh’s Porteous Riot of 1736, urban populaces consistently took the Patriots’ side.32 By the end of the 1730s, Sir Robert Walpole retained control over Britain’s Parliament, but the Patriots claimed to represent the interests of the British Atlantic people. Patriotism thus owed its success in part to its focus on political inclusivity, but the movement’s appeal cannot fully be understood without examining the movement’s innovative political ideology, which centred on an aggressive and American-focused British foreign policy. III

The Patriot ideological program was multifaceted, including policies on consumer tax reduction, state investment in manufacturing and infrastructure, 30

New-York Weekly Journal, No. 100, 6 Oct. 1735. The Craftsman, No. 345, 10 Feb. 1733. 32 Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975), pp. 44–61; A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, Printer of the New-York Weekly Journal (London, 1738), pp. 30–1, and New-York Weekly Journal, No. 93, 18 Aug. 1735; NLS, Culloden Papers, MS 2968, fol. 46; NRS, GD 158/1440. 31

162

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 162

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

and the elimination of press censorship. But from the movement’s beginning, commerce and foreign policy were the centrepiece of the Patriots’ mission. The Patriot leadership believed that Britain could ensure its future prosperity only by expanding its commercial reach westward, viewing Spanish America and the Spanish Caribbean in particular as promising new markets for Britain’s manufactured goods. This Patriot commercial expansion, it was argued, would benefit British merchants of all kinds, rather than merely those few in statebacked trade monopolies like the East India Company and the South Sea Company who benefited from the Whig status quo. And ultimately, the Patriots were willing to take aggressive measures, even the use of military force, to realise this vision of an independent, geographically expansive British trade. The fledgling Patriot organisation’s first opportunity to advance their foreign policy agenda came with the outbreak of the minor Anglo-Spanish War in 1727. The conflict began with news of a secret alliance between Austria and Spain, which threatened Britain’s trade monopolies. This Austro-Spanish alliance posed problems for the English East India Company, with Spain allegedly promising to commercially support the rival Austrian Ostend Company.33 But more importantly, the alliance gave Austria trading rights in the Spanish West Indies, which had previously been the exclusive domain of the South Sea Company. Whig ministers, many of whom were investors in the two companies, were outraged by this intrusion on the corporations’ commercial privileges. Secretary of State Newcastle warned that if nothing were done, the Austro-Spanish alliance ‘must in time end in the entire ruin of our companys and greatly affect the other branches of our trade’.34 The Whig ministry hence initiated the war, but with limited aims: to protect their trade companies from new competition, and to enforce existing commercial agreements between Britain and Spain. The Patriot opposition was virulently opposed to Britain’s commercial monopolies, and its leaders were initially sceptical of an expensive conflict intended to defend their interests.35 But within a year, the Patriot group had become the war’s most aggressive supporters, recognising in the conflict an opportunity to force Spain to open up its profitable American markets to wider British trade. The Patriot MP Joseph Jekyll gave a rousing speech in Parliament in support of the war, encouraging those assembled to follow the example of their ‘glorious ancestors’ who ‘beat them [Spain] into Peace, or forc’d them to buy it’.36 There were even Patriotic literary efforts devoted to the conflict, with Scottish Patriot James Thomson publishing a poem entitled Britannia that celebrated the war as ‘just’ and warned against ‘trusting to false Peace’. The poem also explicitly identified the Patriots’ stake in the war, arguing that Britain must advance the ‘Flood of Trade. . . till the boundless Tide/ Rolls in a radiant 33

TNA, State Papers, SP 94/85, fol. 43. TNA SP 94/85, fol. 19. 35 See The Craftsman, No. 33, 31 Mar. 1727; The Craftsman, No. 61, 2 Sept 1727. 36 The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, Vol. 7 (London, 1742–44), p. 42. 34

163

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 163

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

Torrent o’er the Land.’37 For the Patriots, then, the Anglo-Spanish War was worth fighting not because it defended the limited trade between Britain and Spanish America, but because it offered a chance to expand that trade to previously unattainable levels. Unfortunately for the Patriots, Robert Walpole was not interested in fighting an expensive, protracted war for expanded British commercial rights. When early military skirmishes in 1727 and 1728 at Gibraltar and Porto Bello ended in stalemate, the notoriously pacifistic British prime minister decided to cut Britain’s losses and begin negotiating for peace. In 1729, the war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Seville. From the Whigs’ perspective, this treaty was a great success, restoring British corporations’ exclusive commercial arrangements with Spain. As one Whig writer noted proudly, it ‘reestablish’d the foreign possessions and privileges of Great Britain which had been attacked and molested upon the foot of former treaties’.38 But this return to the status quo ante pleased neither the Patriots nor the Tories, both groups offering harsh criticism of the peace agreement, though for ideologically different reasons. Tory critiques of the Treaty of Seville focused on Britain’s landed empire, denouncing the treaty for failing to win territorial concessions from Spain, and for failing to defend Britain’s imperial possessions from future Spanish conquest. The Tory–Jacobite Fog’s Weekly Journal, for instance, argued that the Whig ministry should have demanded a Caribbean island as the price for British peace: ‘Hispaniola or St. Domingo make a considerable Figure, and by the little Care which the Spaniards have taken of it for some Years past, one wou’d think it wou’d not be impossible to persuade them to part with it.’39 Lord Bolingbroke concentrated more on the security risks the Treaty of Seville posed to Britain’s existing colonial possessions. Pointing out that the treaty made no provision for the disputed territory of Gibraltar, Bolingbroke speculated that Spain would use the omission as justification for taking the territory back: ‘if the Spaniards had a sincere Intention to confirm that Right, they would have suffered it to be expressed’.40 According to Bolingbroke and his fellow Tories, the Treaty of Seville had done nothing to secure and expand Britain’s territorial empire, making it at best, a wasted chance, and at worst, a dangerous precedent for Spanish imperial encroachment. Patriot writers, on the other hand, condemned the Treaty of Seville for its commercial policy, arguing that the Whig ministry had squandered an opportunity to win trade concessions in Spanish America. They complained that the Treaty did nothing to protect independent British merchants trading 37

James Thomson, Britannia. A Poem (London, 1729), pp. 10, 4, 12. ‘Anon. paper on transactions abroad from the Treaty of Seville to the Treaty of Vienna, and later ratifications’, BL, Walpole (Wolterton) Papers, Add 74014, fol. 100. 39 Fog’s Weekly Journal, No. 70, 24 January 1730. For a similar critique, see Fog’s Weekly Journal, No. 69, 17 January 1730. 40 [Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke], The craftsman extraordinary. Being remarks on a late pamphlet, intitled Observations on the conduct of Great Britain (London, 1729), p. 31. 38

164

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 164

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

in the Spanish Caribbean without official sanction, who frequently had their ships and goods seized by Spanish patrols or guarda costas. William Pulteney noted that the treaty only provided restitution for merchants engaged in ‘lawful’ commerce ‘without specifying, or explaining what shall be deem’d unlawful Commerce; which hath ever administred Matter of Dispute between the Spaniards and the English’.41 To the Patriots, a successful treaty would have settled this ‘dispute’ in the independent traders’ favour by allowing them to trade openly in Spanish America, or at the very least, by giving them due process before confiscating their property. But as The Craftsman asserted in anger, the Treaty of Seville had won Britain no commercial gains whatsoever, failing to ‘adjust’ Britain’s ‘Rights and Privileges of Trade, in the West Indies, which have been for many years contested between Us and Spain’.42 After advocating for a war to open Spanish American markets to all British merchants, the Patriots were instead given a peace in which those markets remained closed to all but a single Whig-backed corporation. It was an unequivocally disappointing result. The Anglo-Spanish War was a minor, short-lived conflict that did little to change the commercial relationship between Britain and Spain. But it had a significant impact on Britain’s internal partisan divisions. The conflict impelled the Patriots to begin formulating a coherent foreign policy centred on creating new markets for independent British trade, and using war as a tool for this commercial expansion. This agenda distinguished the Patriot movement both from its Whig opponents, and its Tory allies. While the Patriots’ commercial vision would not win out in 1729, the Patriots had by no means conceded the issue, continuing to make a case for an aggressive American foreign policy to the British people over the course of the next decade. The later 1730s provided the stage for a larger partisan debate about the proper direction for British foreign policy. Walpole’s Whig party had redoubled its commitment to maintaining peace with Spain, hoping thereby to expand the profitability of the sugar/slave monoculture in the West Indies. The Patriots, by contrast, had coupled their advocacy of prising open Spanish American markets in the Caribbean with a plan to create a new colony on the American mainland that would simultaneously act as a trading base in the Caribbean and a wedge between Bourbon possessions in Florida and Louisiana. The Walpoleans, unlike their Patriot opponents, laid the heaviest emphasis in their analyses on the importance of production. They believed that British economic growth depended on labour, whether free or unfree, whether producing exotic plants like sugar and tobacco or manufactured goods in Sheffield, Manchester or Birmingham. Two polemical productions from writers with deep associations with the Whig ministry, William Wood and Joshua 41 William Pulteney, A short view of the state of affairs, with relation to Great Britain, for four years past (London, 1730), p. 32. 42 The Craftsman, No. 187, 31 January 1730.

165

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 165

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

Gee, encapsulated their thinking.43 In their view, the value of colonies lay in producing raw materials, and the most valuable raw material produced in the British Empire was sugar. This is why William Wood, himself the owner of plantations in Jamaica, insisted that ‘the labor of negroes is the principle foundation of our riches from the plantations’.44 Walpoleans constantly argued that because British prosperity depended on trade, and above all on shipping bulky colonial raw materials to Europe, war should always be a last resort: ‘Our differences [with Spain] at present are founded entirely on affairs of commerce, to which nothing can be more fatal, nothing more destructive. . . than [even] a successful war, and nothing more beneficial than a safe and honorable peace’, argued the loyal Walpolean Whig William Bentinck the 2nd duke of Portland.45 War ‘is both a dangerous and a destructive expedient to any nation, especially a trading and industrious nation’, asserted Horace Walpole the surveyor and auditor general of America. ‘It is the bane of trade, and the parent of idleness.’46 ‘We certainly ought not to have recourse to arms as long as there is any prospect of obtaining redress in a peaceable manner’, concluded Horace’s elder brother, Sir Robert Walpole.47 Spanish attacks on British vessels in the Caribbean carrying manufactured goods had continued apace after the Treaty of Seville just as William Pulteney had predicted, but because these Spanish depredations did no damage to sugar production, they did not justify going to war. Spanish depredations, argued Walpoleans, could do no great damage to British prosperity. ‘In a war, the most successful war’, argued Thomas Gordon who had become one of Walpole’s most reliable defenders, ‘we must suffer more in three months (take the expense and danger together), than we have suffered from Spain in twenty years.’48 Patriots embraced a radically different vision of empire. They rejected the Walpolean emphasis on a slave-based empire of production in favour of an empire of consumption. Patriots insisted that prosperity depended on a creative interplay between consumption and production, in which spiralling consumer demand 43 For

Wood’s Whig connections, see Bank of England 10A97/2, ff. 493, 251, 284; 10A97/1, ff. 215, 221; 10A97/2, f. 251; CUL, Ch(H) Corresp/1276, 1286. For Gee’s connections, see Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (London, 1920–28), Vol. 4, 13 December 1721, 10 January 1722, 10 April 1722, 31 May 1722, pp. 331–40, 346–63; ibid., Vol. 5, 7 January 1725, 31 March 1726, 16 May 1728, 29 November 1728, pp. 134–40, 221–30, 404–13, 431–40. 44 William Wood, Survey of Trade (London, 1719), Part III, p. 179. See also Joshua Gee, Trade and Navigation of Great-Britain Considered (London, 1729), pp. 25–6, 125–6. 45 Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 880. 46 Ibid., X, p. 1255; Horace Walpole, The Grand Question, Whether War or No War with Spain (London, 1739), p. 8. 47 Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 586. Walpole received full support in this way of thinking from the moderate Tory James Brydges, 1st duke of Chandos; HL, Stowe Collection, ST 57/51, pp. 257–8. 48 Thomas Gordon, Appeal to the Unprejudiced Concerning the Present Discontents (London, 1739), p. 29.

166

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 166

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

created incentives for the manufacture of better and more consumer goods. The state, they believed, should do everything it could to create more consumers and more buying power in the colonies while at the same time prising open more foreign markets for British manufactures. Patriots believed that the Walpolean preference for sugar colonies blinded them to the aggressive and successful policies of the French leading minister, Cardinal Fleury. Fleury and his Spanish allies threatened to drive the British out of North America and marginalise them in the Caribbean. The powers of the Bourbon family compact immediately threatened the economic and geopolitical basis of the British Empire. The Patriots were convinced that consumption was the key to economic productivity. ‘Natural commodities, however valuable’, argued the lord mayor of London Sir John Barnard who more than anyone else articulated the precepts of Patriot political economy, ‘are never of any great service to a country, because they maintain no great number of subjects, nor enrich many individuals’. Sugar and tobacco, however valuable they might be to the planters, did not create new consumers. Both crops relied on slaves for planting, harvesting and processing. Since slaves were not regularly paid wages, they had very little disposable income with which to purchase consumer goods. Whereas Sir Robert Walpole and his supporters described the sugar islands as Britain’s equivalent of the Spanish American mines, Barnard pointed out that though the gold and silver of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of America are commodities of great value; but as they are produced by the labour of slaves, and enrich only the King and a few Lords, they have rather diminished than increased the power and the riches of both these kingdoms.

The problem with mineral extraction and the cultivation of sugar, tobacco or rice by slaves is that ‘they maintain no great number of industrious subjects in which the power of a country subsists’.49 Patriots argued that the dynamic British manufacturing sector was increasingly dependent on colonial demand.50 Exports to ‘Portugal and the British plantations’ had become, according to the authors of The Craftsman, ‘the most beneficial if not the only branches of trade which give a balance to Great Britain’.51 ‘Of all the branches of our commerce that to our colonies is the most valuable’, wrote the boy Patriot George Lyttelton in an essay reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine. ‘It is by that alone we are enabled now to carry on the rest.’ This was because, unlike European markets that could be shut to British manufacturers by trade restrictions, colonial markets were ‘most secure’.52 Patriot political economic analysis that prioritised the interaction between consumers and producers over the Walpolean focus on production alone 49

Cobbett’s PH, X, pp. 156–7. Ibid., X, pp. 784–5. 51 The Craftsman, No. 643, 4 November 1738. 52 George Lyttelton, Considerations upon the Present State of our Affairs (London, 1739), p. 4. Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 9, January 1739, p. 32. 50

167

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 167

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

had three corollaries. First, the Patriots emphasised that wealth needed to be distributed evenly to generate the broadest possible consumer base. Second, Patriots were increasingly sceptical of the value of chattel slavery, because slaves in the sugar and tobacco colonies could never become consumers. Third, the Spanish depredations on British shipping in the Caribbean were economically devastating precisely because the guarda costas made it increasingly difficult to penetrate Spanish American markets with British manufactured goods. The Patriots were sure that Walpolean inaction was leading inexorably to Bourbon hegemony in the western hemisphere. A defensive war had become the only hope for the preservation of the Empire. The issue was one of ‘selfpreservation’, argued the long-time Patriot spokesman Walter Plumer. ‘I am sure’, he thundered in the House of Commons, that ‘every British subject ought to choose to live upon bread and onions rather than see the House of Bourbon giving laws to Europe’.53 Cardinal Fleury’s policies, thought the editors of the New-York Weekly Journal, had made the French ‘dangerous to all Europe, and by craft and cunning are likely to obtain their ambitious views which they could not in so many years effect by force of arms’.54 Whereas supporters of Sir Robert Walpole argued that for a trading nation, peace was always preferable to war, Patriots insisted that war was sometimes the only means to defend trade. ‘When trade is at stake it is your last retrenchment’, argued the Patriot rising star William Pitt, ‘you must defend it or perish.’55 ‘It can never be admitted, that because peace is cheaper than war, and because it is good to save money, therefore any terms of peace are to be gladly received, rather than to make war’, agreed his fellow Cobham Cub George Lyttelton. ‘An acquiescence that may ruin our trade, the only source of our riches, is not economy’, he pithily concluded.56 ‘Our trade is at present in the most imminent danger’, agreed Alderman Robert Willimot of London, ‘undone’ by the Ministry’s refusal to ‘resent any injury done to our trade’. ‘A just and well conducted war’, Willimot argued by contrast, ‘can never bring our trade into any danger.’57 Walpoleans and Patriots had developed, by the late 1730s, competing imperial visions. Walpoleans believed that imperial prosperity depended on the peaceful development of Britain’s sugar islands to counter increasing French competition. Patriots, by contrast, believed that Britain’s imperial prosperity required an urgent reorientation of political economic priorities in favour of colonial consumption and prising open Spanish American markets in the face of aggressive French expansionism. Both groups insisted on the intimate interconnections between colonial and European issues, between geopolitical and political economic concerns. Neither prioritised one over the other. 53

Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 699; TNA, Leveson-Gower Papers, PRO 30/29/1/12/4, fol. 357. New-York Weekly Journal, No. 268, 6 November 1738. 55 Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 1280. 56 George Lyttelton, Considerations upon the Present State of our Affairs, p. 17. 57 Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 1320. 54

168

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 168

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

The Patriots demanded war with a dizzying barrage of pamphlets, squibs, essays, ballads and prints. Sir Robert Walpole and his supporters argued with equal passion that war at the present moment would be a mistake. Both sides refused to give an inch to the other. Why, then, were the Patriots finally able to overcome Walpolean intransigence and force George II to declare war on Spain in October 1739? IV

The frequency and ferocity of the Spanish depredations cannot in and of themselves explain why George II ultimately declared war in October 1739. The Spanish guarda costas had been attacking British shipping in the Caribbean for over two decades. ‘These insults and abuses’, Sir John Barnard complained, ‘have been continued I may say without interruption’ for ‘near 24 years’.58 ‘Everyone knows that it is more than 20 years since the Spaniards first began to encroach upon or invade some of our rights and privileges’, agreed the Tory leader Sir William Wyndham.59 Political observers in the late 1730s understood that the British dispute with Spain was about much more than depredations in the Caribbean. The pacific British negotiators Benjamin Keene and Abraham Castres knew that ‘the two principal and most important points’ were ‘the limits of Georgia and the freedom and security of the navigation of His Majesty’s subjects in America’.60 ‘The differences that currently divide the English and the Spanish consist of two principal points’, agree the author of one French court memorandum: ‘the one regarding Georgia and the other the visitation of ships’.61 Observers were increasingly certain that the new British province of Georgia, which had been founded in 1732, would prove an insoluble problem. The Spanish both feared that the new province of Georgia would threaten Spanish Florida and that the British had no legitimate claim to the territory that they now called Georgia. For both reasons the Spanish were anxious to eliminate the new province. ‘The Spaniards have taken the alarm upon a British colony being settled in Georgia’, observed Lord Polwarth.62 Georgia has given ‘great umbrage and uneasiness to the Spaniards’, agreed the Jamaican James Knight.63 The Spanish were not just alarmed and uneasy; they wanted the British to surrender 58

Ibid., X, p. 580; Hugh Hume Campbell, Lord Polwarth, State of the Rise and Progress of our Disputes with Spain (London, 1739), p. 11. 59 Cobbett’s PH, X, pp. 720, 1267. The Gentleman’s Magazine printed a catalogue of the ships taken since 1728: Vol. 8, March 1738, pp. 163–4. 60 New York Public Library, Hardwicke MSS 78; BL, Walpole Papers, Add 9131, fol. 251. 61 Réflexions sur les Différents de l’Angleterre avec l’Espagne, 139, MAE, 53MD/493, fol. 12. 62 Polwarth, State of the Rise and Progress of our Disputes with Spain, p. [49]. 63 BL, Papers Relating to Jamaica, Add 22677, fol. 28.

169

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 169

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

Georgia. The Court of Madrid made it clear that they wanted ‘Great Britain to abandon Georgia’, reported the New-York Weekly Journal.64 This was not mere Patriot propaganda. The Spanish ambassador in London, Thomas Fitzgerald, told all who would care to listen that the King of Spain ‘will bear a twenty years war before he will suffer us to keep Georgia’.65 These were not new threats. The Spanish governor of St Augustine, Don Francisco del Moral Sanchez warned in 1736 that war between the crowns of Britain and Spain was inevitable since the Georgians settled ‘on the lands belonging to the King his master’.66 Thomas Fitzgerald himself offered a gentler warning to the duke of Newcastle later that year.67 In diplomatic circles the Spanish emphasised their right to Georgia, but they did so with such vehemence because both they and the French understood the new colony as the keystone of American Empire. ‘It is the interest of all Europe as well as that of the Spanish that the English abandon’ Georgia, wrote one French commentator.68 This was not only because Georgia was in an ideal situation to interrupt the trade to Spanish America, argued another French memorialist, ‘but because the English in Georgia were capable of intercepting the navigation of Louisiana which could one day become considerable’. ‘Every day the Georgians take new measures for penetrating into the interior and threaten to destroy our establishments which are still weak’, this author concluded.69 The development of Georgia, thought the inhabitant of Savannah Hugh Anderson, was ‘sufficient to oblige the French. . . to send over numbers of regular forces to reinforce their garrisons, and the Spaniards to augment their forces at St. Augustine and erect new fortifications’.70 ‘Whatever the Spaniards may pretend’, argued the editors of the Daily Post, ‘it was France that has the greatest interest in the destruction’ of Georgia.71 The ‘French and Spaniards’ were covetous of Georgia, the trustees knew, because ‘Georgia is the key of all North America’.72 64

New-York Weekly Journal, No. 295, 6 August 1739. BL, Egmont’s Journal, 15 March 1739, Add 47069, fol. 40; Egmont’s Journal, 26 March 1739, Add 47069, fols 46–47; Benjamin Martyn, An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (London, 1741), pp. 3–4; John Tate Lanning, ‘A Descriptive Catalogue of Some Legajos on Georgia in the Spanish Archives’, Georgia Historical Quarterly, 13:4 (1929), 414–16; John Tate Lanning, The Diplomatic History of Georgia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1936), pp. 159–60. 66 TNA, Colonial Office, Board of Trade and Secretaries of State. Original Correspondence. Georgia, CO 5/654/1, fol. 46. 67 TNA, CO 5/654/1, fols 64, 111; BL, Newcastle Papers, Add 32797, fols 166–9. 68 Extrait d’une Lettre de Londres, 24 December 1739, MAE, 53MD/493, fol. 23. Our translation. BL, Egmont’s Journal, 30 March 1739, Add 47069, fol. 48. 69 Réflexions sur les Différents de l’Angleterre avec l’Espagne, 1739, MAE, 53MD/493, fol. 12. Our translation. 70 TNA, CO 5/640/2, fol. 287. 71 Daily Post, No. 5600, 23 August 1737. 72 TNA, CO 5/654/1, fol. 109. 65

170

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 170

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

By 1739 the French had successfully responded to the challenge of Georgia by encircling the British American settlements. ‘If the French be allowed to destroy our Indians nation by nation in time of peace’, warned the secretary to the Georgia Trustees and Patriot literary figure Benjamin Martyn, all of Britain’s American ‘settlements must soon meet with the same in case of a war’.73 This, the British thought, had long been the French plan. ‘The French have long ago formed a design to settle a communication from Louisiana by the branches of the River Mississippi through the back part of this continent to Canada’, maintained the Council and Assembly of South Carolina.74 Georgia, it turns out, was a characteristically Patriot enterprise that temporarily received the support of the Walpolean administration. The Georgia project combined the ‘religious-philanthropic’ impulse of the Bray Associates,75 the commercial impulse to develop a consumer society, and the geopolitical imperative to balance the growing threat of the French and Spanish in North America.76 The trustees put into practice the political economic ideals of the Patriots. The first law of Georgia outlawed slavery. The trustees instead aimed to populate the new province with poor Britons and immigrants who would not only add to the labouring population but also to the consumer base. Salzburgers, Swiss, Italians, Irish and Highland Scots all flocked to the new province.77 In order to support the immigrants to the new province, the trustees provided start-up costs for the ‘improvements of the province such as raising of silk, wine, oil, and other produces’, understanding well that ‘the expense whereof private persons are not able to bear’.78 By the mid-1730s a wide variety of Britons had become enamoured of the Georgia project. In March 1735, Parliament’s Committee of Supply voted the tremendous sum of £26,000 for ‘settling and securing the colony’.79 This was only one of the many parliamentary grants secured for the colony, justifying the 73

TNA, CO 5/654/1, fol. 81. TNA, CO 5/638, fol. 159. 75 Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier 1670–1732 (New York, 1981 [originally 1928]), p. 303 and ‘The Origins of Georgia’, Georgia Historical Quarterly, 14 (1930), 102–7; BL, Vernon Papers, Add 40794, fols 9–10; BL, Egmont Papers, Add 47000, fols 53–4. 76 Crane, ‘Origins of Georgia’, 94–102; BL, Add 40794, fol. 10. Brent S. Sirota and Kathleen Wilson have both drawn attention to the anti-Walpolean bent of the trustees’ politics. See Brent S. Sirota, Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014), p. 248; Kathleen Wilson, Sense of the People, p. 163. 77 BL, Add 40794, fol. 10; James Oglethorpe, A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia (London, 1732), pp. ii–iii, 44–5; TNA, CO 5/636/1, fol. 8; TNA, CO 5/636/3, fols 253–254; TNA, CO 5/636/3, fol. 327; TNA, CO 5/640/1, fol. 112; BL, Egmont’s Journal, 13 December 1738, Add 47069, fol. 9; Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 1057; Martyn, An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia, pp. 38–9; An Account Shewing the Progress of the Colony of Georgia (London, 1741), pp. 5, 13, 15, 18, 20, 23–4, 28, 32. 78 TNA, CO 5/654/1, fol. 109. 79 BL, Add 40794, fol. 11. 74

171

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 171

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

Patriot John Lord Carteret’s claim that ‘the nation has been at immense charges in settling and supporting’ Georgia.80 As the military and diplomatic pressure from the French and Spanish became ever more vociferous over the course of the decade, the Georgia trustees wanted a more permanent parliamentary commitment to the province. While they were no doubt thrilled with the yearly financial outlays, they explained to Sir Robert Walpole that it was time-consuming and difficult to build a new society under conditions of ‘uncertainty’.81 The problem was that the trustees made this request exactly at the moment in which the diplomatic tensions with Spain over Caribbean depredations were coming to a head. In this circumstance Sir Robert Walpole and his supporters among the Georgia trustees prepared to surrender the province to the Spanish to avert war. In early January 1739, Sir Robert Walpole was promising his confidants and the Spanish ambassador ‘that Parliament would give no money this year to the Trustees of Georgia’.82 By the end of the month, it was ‘in everybody’s mouth that Georgia is to be given up to the Spaniards’.83 The Walpoleans on the Board of Trustees, Thomas and Christopher Tower, John Laroche, William Sloper and Thomas and Henry Archer, tried to prevent petitioning Parliament for further support on the grounds that Britain’s right to the province was dubious at best.84 The Patriots immediately commenced a lobbying campaign to save their colony. At the Georgia board the Patriots lined up in defence of Britain’s right to the colony.85 Those who worried that Walpole would ‘hazard the colony itself’ began meeting separately twice per week to coordinate their efforts on behalf of the colony.86 James Oglethorpe, the Patriot politician who served as the colony’s de facto governor, urged the radical London alderman and former Georgia trustee George Heathcote to ‘animate our friends to apply to Parliament’.87 Heathcote responded by expressing ‘much zeal for the colony’.88 The City merchants trading to America offered to petition the House of Commons on behalf of Georgia on the grounds ‘that the whole trade thither is unsafe if Georgia be given up and that they in that case will trade no more here’.89 Sir 80

Cobbett’s PH, X, p. 1113; Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 8, September 1738, p. 476. TNA, CO 5/667, fol. 54. 82 BL, Egmont’s Journal, 18 January 1739, Add 47069, fol. 16 and 29 January 1739, Add 47069, fol. 20. 83 Ibid., 27 January 1739, Add 47069, fol. 20. 84 Ibid., 24 January, 19 February and 24 February 1739, Add 47069, fols 18–19, 30, 32–3. 85 Ibid., 24 January 1739, 29 January 1739, Add 47069, fols 19, 20 and, 6 February 1740, Add 47070, fol. 23. 86 Ibid., 7 February 1739, Add 47069, fol. 27. 87 TNA, CO 5/640/2, fol. 227. 88 BL, Egmont’s Journal, 17 January 1739, Add 47069, fol. 15. 89 Ibid., 29 January 1739, Add 47069, fol. 20. See also Geraldine Meroney, ‘London Entrepôt Merchants and the Georgia Colony’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 25 (1968), 230–44. 81

172

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 172

22/08/2019 08:57

PATRIOTISM AFTER THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

William Keith defended Britain’s right to the colony on the pages of his Patriot journal The Citizen.90 Carteret predicted that ‘this affair of the peace and of giving up Georgia will hang’ Sir Robert Walpole. No wonder Walpole believed that ‘the gentlemen of Georgia were his enemies’.91 In March 1739, the Georgia trustees and their Patriot allies achieved a great parliamentary victory. Sir Robert Walpole succumbed to ‘the apparent discontentedness of the people’ and allowed the Georgia motion to move through the House.92 Parliament ultimately voted to support the province with £20,000 to cover both military and civil needs despite the leading minister’s misgivings. Georgia, the trustees’ secretary crowed, was now ‘generally looked on as a national concern’.93 The Lords who voted against the conciliatory Convention of the Pardo also included a clause in defence of Georgia in their well-publicised dissent.94 It was the parliamentary vote to support Georgia, combined with the noisy but ineffective parliamentary complaints against the Convention of the Pardo that the Walpolean Benjamin Keene thought had pushed the AngloSpanish negotiations over the brink. ‘Our Patriots went nigh to unhinge the late Convention’, he complained to his fellow diplomat Robert Trevor. ‘They missed indeed of their aim in that point; but I wish they may not have gained it in another.’ The result of the Patriot triumph on Georgia had eliminated any diplomatic room for manoeuvre, ‘the consequence whereof is but too visible’.95 French observers agreed that the ‘King of England is no longer capable of ceding Georgia because of the resolutions taken by Parliament’. These resolutions Walpole acceded to only by ‘necessity and constraint’, realising that they placed ‘insurmountable obstacles’ in his attempts to avoid war because Spain ‘will never surrender its claims on this province’.96 The new province of Georgia had broken the British parliamentary deadlock over Spanish depredations and forced the reluctant Walpole administration to declare war against Spain in October 1739.

90

The Citizen, No. 32, 3 February 1739. This effort was coordinated with the Patriots among the trustees (BL, Egmont’s Journal, 20 February 1739, Add 47069, fol. 31). 91 BL, Egmont’s Journal, 31 January 1739, Add 47069, fol. 23. Patriots continued to want to force a parliamentary debate on the colony after war had been declared (ibid., 16 January 1740, Add 47070, fol. 13). 92 Ibid., 4 February 1739, Add 47069, fol. 25. 93 TNA, CO 5/667, fol. 112; BL, Egmont’s Journal, 7 February 1739, Add 47069, fol. 26 and 18 December 1739, BL, Add 47070, fol. 12. In the spring 1740, Walpole told his friends that Georgia would be ‘given up’ in peace negotiations with Spain (ibid., 19 May 1740, Add 47070, fols 44–5). 94 BL, Add 47000, fol. 101. 95 BL, Walpole Papers, Add 73937, fol. 171. 96 Réflexions sur les Différents de l’Angleterre avec l’Espagne, 1739, MAE, 53MD/493, fol. 12.

173

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 173

22/08/2019 08:57

Steve Pincus and Amy Watson

V

Whigs greeted the Hanoverian succession with unbridled enthusiasm. They were right to believe that the accession of George I would put an end to the prospect of Tory hegemony that had seemed almost inevitable in the last years of Anne’s reign. But the Tory political demise did not, in fact, usher in a period of Whig hegemony. It did not put an end to the rage of party. Not only did the Tories survive as a substantial political force in the localities and in Parliament, but a new party emerged, the Patriots, to contest the power of the Whig establishment. By the end of the 1730s the Patriots were a potent political force. They developed a coherent party organisation. As the Walpolean Whigs became increasingly Anglocentric, the Patriots developed networks in Scotland and across British North America, and we might have added Ireland and the West Indies as well. They increasingly cultivated newspaper editors and printers who avidly printed and reprinted their essays and squibs. They also developed an increasingly enthusiastic following in both Houses of Parliament. The Patriots also developed an increasingly sophisticated imperial ideology that radically diverged from the policies being followed by the Whig government. Robert Walpole and his followers had a coherent imperial policy that gave preference to English prosperity and slave-based colonial production. The Patriots, by contrast, demanded a more confederal Empire based on colonial consumption. This alternate vision allowed the Patriots to move beyond their radical Whig base and attract former Jacobites like Sir William Keith. Their insistence on an integrated empire in which all had equal status as subjects of the Hanoverian kings was much more than an anti-Walpole alliance of convenience. By focusing on consumption, the Patriots necessarily elevated the political value they accorded to subjects in Ireland, Scotland and British North America. This Patriot vision of Empire was therefore coherent and, unlike the Walpolean, not Anglocentric. Forged during the Anglo-Spanish conflict of the 1720s, the Patriot imperial ideology ultimately gained political traction in the crisis of the late 1730s. The Patriots persuaded a large part of the British political nation in 1739 that Georgia, North America and the Caribbean trade were all vital national interests. It was the power of this ideological vision that ultimately forced the great Whig prime minister, Robert Walpole, to concede the necessity of war. While this Patriot political victory proved short-lived, they had succeeded in outlining an alternate vision of empire that would shape imperial politics in the later 1740s and 1750s.

174

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 174

22/08/2019 08:57

9 Displaced but Not Replaced: The Continuation of Dutch Intellectual Influences in Early Hanoverian Britain Esther Mijers On 20 August 1731, the first issue appeared of Justus van Effen’s De Hollandsche Spectator. Emulating Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s groundbreaking English-language periodical, as Van Effen readily acknowledged, it represented a departure in Dutch learning.1 Van Effen had previously been involved in a number of French journals and his decision to publish De Hollandsche Spectator in Dutch arguably exemplified the conclusion of the role the United Provinces had played in the virtual community of Protestant European scholars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, known to contemporaries as the Republic of Letters, for some fifty years. By choosing Dutch over French, the language of international learning, he sided with those who rejected cosmopolitanism in favour of a Dutch language communicatie-gemeenschap (intercommunication).2 It cemented Van Effen’s reputation as a representative of a rather staid period in Dutch history, marked by economic, political and, by extension, intellectual decline. For a long time, the Dutch Enlightenment was considered in stark contrast to the cultural achievements of the Golden Age of the seventeenth century and the intellectual heights of the Republic of Letters. Recent historiography has been kinder, in part as a result of a redrawing of the chronological and geographical boundaries of the early Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel and others.3 1

P.J. Buijnsters (ed.), De Hollandsche Spectator (Deventer, 1984), No. 1. Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, Religie, Tolerantie en Wetenschap in de Vroegmoderne Tijd (Utrecht, 2008), p. 18. 3 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001). See also Wiep van Bunge, De Nederlandse Republiek, Spinoza en de Radicale Verlichting (Brussels, 2010) and Spinoza Past and Present: Essays on Spinoza, Spinozism and Spinoza Scholarship (Leiden, 2012); Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750 (Amsterdam, 2002); Sonja Lavaert and Winfried Schröder (eds), The Dutch Legacy: Radical Thinkers of the 17th Century and the Enlightenment (Leiden, 2016). 2

175

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 175

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

I

The current historiographical debates regarding the Dutch Enlightenment have tended to focus on its philosophical and scientific achievements.4 Less attention has been paid to its transmissions and impact abroad. Indeed, one might argue that the historiography of the Republic of Letters, with its innate attention to international exchanges, sits somewhat awkwardly alongside it, without much integration or even awareness. This is certainly the case for the relationship between the British Isles and the United Provinces, where the Republic of Letters has normally been considered in isolation rather than as part of the wider or early Enlightenment. Chronologically predating the Enlightenment, the Republic of Letters was both its predecessor in the framework it provided for learned exchange through personal contacts and by proxy, via the rise in learned journals, as well as in intellectual terms, as its discussions focused on scholarly practice and scientific truth.5 By contrast, there was arguably no common project which defined the Republic of Letters, unlike the Enlightenment, despite being firmly anchored in the geopolitical world of the late seventeenth century, which may go some way to explain this historiographic state of affairs. As a result, some, mainly Anglophone, historians, led by Anne Goldgar and John Pocock, consider the two as opposites, whereas continental historians, most notably Daniel Roche, tend to see them as (virtually) interchangeable.6 Indeed, for all their historical, not to mention geographical, proximities, the joint intellectual and cultural history of England, Scotland and the United Provinces suffers from a distinct paucity of treatment by historians.7 This is all the more remarkable when we consider that from 1689 until 1702, the three nations were united in a personal union by William of Orange.8 Perhaps hampered by a crowded field of works on the Williamite Revolution on the one 4

N.C.F. van Sas, De Metamorfos van Nederland (Amsterdam, 2004), ‬pp. 385–97. See W.W. Mijnhardt and J.J. Kloek (eds), 1800: Blueprints for a Society (London/Assen, 2004). 5 Lorraine Daston, ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, 4 (1991), 367–86. 6 For an overview of this particular historiography, see J. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 38–41. See L.W.B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web. Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002), pp. 1–19; J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion 1: The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764; 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning. Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT, 1995); Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des Lumières: Académiciens Provinciaux, 1680–1789 (2 vols, Paris, 1978), esp. chapter IV; Esther Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’: Scottish Students, Charles Mackie and the United Provinces, 1650–1750 (Leiden, 2012). 7 See Stephen Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (Oxford, 2011); Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles. SeventeenthCentury English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000). 8 Eather Mijers and David Onnekink (eds), Redefining William III. The Impact of the King-Stadholder in International Context (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2007), p. 3.

176

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 176

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

hand and what has been called the ‘unionist turn’ on the other, the ‘end’ of the Republic of Letters has at best been accepted without question and at worst ignored.9 Yet its impact and influence extended well beyond the creation of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, raising serious questions regarding the westward swivel of the British gaze.10 Moreover, there are qualifications to be made about the long-held view that the importance of the United Provinces as the centre of the Republic of Letters, as its ‘intellectual entrepôt’ as Graham Gibbs has called it, was lost due to the ‘displacement of its cultural hegemony’ to England.11 This chapter considers the ongoing intellectual, academic and cultural influence of the Dutch Republic in early Hanoverian Britain, towards the end of the Republic of Letters, between 1700 and 1735. In particular, it explores the changes that took place in the Dutch intellectual landscape, namely the decline of Latin in favour of French scholarship, and the effect this had on the scholarly relationship with the British Isles. Some historians have argued that the rise of French learning in the wake of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 marked the beginning of the end of Dutch domination in the Republic of Letters.12 Here, however, it is argued that the absorption of French Huguenot intellectuals into the Dutch academic and wider scholarly system was not only proof of its strength and viability, but also served to rekindle ties with the British Isles, ensuring the continuation of ‘Dutch’ influences within a reinforced framework of the Republic of Letters. The Huguenot networks served as channels of communication across Europe and especially between Britain and the United Provinces. As a result, there was no immediate geographic shift or displacement, rather a gradual replacement of the humanist tradition by Dutch scholars, scientists and publishers with the new French learning and new forms of publications, most notably the French learned journal, which kept the United Provinces at the heart of the learned world. 9

Alisdair Raffe, ‘1707, 2007, and The Unionist Turn in Scottish History’, HJ, 53 (2010), 1071–83. Although Raffe discussed Scottish history, one might argue that English history post-1707 has, of necessity, been considered in this same framework of parliamentary union. 10 This is implicit in the historiography of the relationship between England and the wider world. Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe, pp. 2–3; Mijers and Onnekink, Redefining William III, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–13. 11 G.C. Gibbs, ‘The Role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepôt of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 3 (1986), 323–49; Mordechai Feingold, ‘Reversal of Fortunes: The Displacement of Cultural Hegemony from the Netherlands to England in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in The World of William and Mary. Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, ed. Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (Stanford, CA, 1996), pp. 234–61. 12 The idea of England replacing the United Provinces’ position at the end of the seventeenth century also underpins Mark Somos, Secularisation and the Leiden Circle (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2011).

177

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 177

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

II

The development of the United Provinces as the intellectual powerhouse of Europe is inextricably linked with the country’s historical and physical situation. Its reputation for commercial success can be traced back to its location. Geographically positioned between the North Sea and the great rivers Rhine, Maas, Waal and Scheldt, and politically linked to both the Spanish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, the United Provinces, as the commercial successor to Charles V’s Burgundian and Phillips II’s Spanish Netherlands, benefited from direct trade links with the Iberian peninsula, the old Hanseatic cities, the British Isles and France, to name but the most obvious. The Reformation forged new political alliances but never quite severed the old ones, leaving the Dutch at the crossroads of Europe. Open to business, the Dutch took a pragmatic view as far as most things were concerned, including religion. The lack of political centralisation and absence of an established church fostered a climate in which scholars and scientists enjoyed relative freedom. Urbanised, literate, highly skilled and wealthy, the Dutch in the seventeenth century were both producers and consumers of knowledge. These were the conditions in which the Dutch reached their intellectual peak. Although the idea of a virtual community of scholars was hardly new, the Republic of Letters that emerged in the late seventeenth century differed from previous incarnations. Defining this Republic of Letters is a historiographical minefield for a number of reasons.13 The first question, of what was the Republic of Letters, has occupied historians for decades. Paul Dibon defined it in 1978 as ‘an intellectual community transcending space and time’.14 He situated it firmly in the late seventeenth century, where it has remained ever since although few can agree on the exact dates, geography or meaning. Although many emphasise that the concept of the Republic of Letters is not specific to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Historians often make a distinction between an ‘old republic’, which was a ‘small and close-knit cosmopolitan elite with its roots in Renaissance humanism and whose citizens were linked by networks of correspondence and shared erudite neo-Latin culture’ and a later one that emerged towards the end of the seventeenth century, in part as a result of religious and political events in France and England.15 By the eighteenth century then, the Republic of Letters had become a vernacular world, which was more public, 13

For one of the most recent attempts to define the Republic of Letters, see Anthony Grafton, ‘A Sketch of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters’, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 1:1 (2009), http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/34. 14 Paul Dibon, ‘Communication in the Respublica Literaria of the 17th Century’, Res Publica Literaria. Studies in the Classical Tradition, 1 (1978), 43–55. A year earlier J.A.H.G.M. Bots had discussed the ideal and reality of the Republic of Letters in his inaugural lecture: Republiek der Letteren. Ideaal en Werkelijkheid (Amsterdam, 1977). 15 April G. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters. Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY, 2007), p. 3.

178

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 178

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

open and democratic than its predecessors. Contemporaries recognised this distinction, setting themselves apart from earlier times. As Maarten Ultee has pointed out, ‘the term “Republic of Letters” does appear in print much more often from 1680 to 1720 than before’.16 A second historiographical problem relates to the geographic confines of the Republic of Letters. While the older literature by Annie Barnes, Erich Haasse and Paul Dibon concentrated on the Huguenot refuge and its concerns, more recent works have included the Roman Catholic world of Jesuit scholarship and science.17 Furthermore, correspondence, printing houses and publishers, the dissemination, spread and reception of philosophical and scientific works of authors such as Spinoza, Hobbes and Huygens, and membership of learned societies have been all been used to map its participants and activities.18 Lastly, the Republic’s actual significance and purpose has divided historians, not least because of its double meaning. [O]n the one hand, the Republic of Letters is a historiographical tool to refer to networks of scholars organized around academic institutions, learned journals, informal gatherings and epistolary exchanges; on the other hand, it is the normative ideal of a community of scholars and writers who have egalitarian and personal relationships, autonomous from political power, from religious solidarities and from national identities.19

If the origins of the Republic of Letters and its development, has received a great deal of attention, its conclusion has garnered much less interest. The unwritten assumption appears to be that it was simply overtaken by or absorbed into the European Enlightenment. In the United Provinces, its later years were characterised by a bitter battle between the proponents of the new French learning and those who adhered to the original ideal of the Latin traditions and who considered Dutch as its natural successor. Wijnand Mijnhardt has described this as a culture war in which the Dutch chose their own language 16

M. Ultee, ‘The Republic of Letters: Learned Correspondence 1680–1720’, Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 95–112. 17 Annie Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République des Lettres (Paris, 1938); Erich Haase, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge: der Beitrag der französischen Protestanten zur Entwicklung analytischer Denkformen am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1959); Paul Dibon, ‘Communication in the Respublica literaria of the 17th Century’, Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition, 1 (1978), 43–55. For Catholic networks, see for instance Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 18 Robert Mayhew, ‘British Geography’s Republic of Letters: Mapping an Imagined Community, 1600–1800’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65 (2004), 251–76. 19 Antoine Lilti, ‘The Kingdom of Politesse: Salons and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 1:1 (2009): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/38. See Anne Goldgar, ‘Singing in a Strange Land. The Republic of Letters and the Mentalité of Exile’, in Die Europeäische Gelehrtenrepublik in Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus, ed. Herbert Jarmann (Wiesbaden, 2001), pp. 105–25 and Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT, 1995).

179

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 179

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

over French cosmopolitanism. For Mordechai Feingold and more recently Mark Somos, this marked the ceding of intellectual dominance to Britain, whereas Mijnhardt has considered it as bestowing new vigour onto Dutch scholarly debate, producing a ‘counterculture that in the long term proved far more influential than the frenchification process it rebelled against’.20 Yet when we consider the relationship with the British Isles, we can see an ongoing and enduring exchange, which remained firmly embedded within the framework of the Republic of Letters until around 1735. III

Early modern England, Scotland and the Dutch Republic had an important shared history, which culminated in a brief, joint monarchy under the King-Stadholder, William of Orange, from 1689 until 1702. From the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in the late sixteenth century, the three countries had been close, although separate allies. The Dutch city of Vlissingen (Flushing) had been an English garrison town throughout much of the Revolt, only to be returned to the Dutch by James VI and I in 1616. The towns of Veere (Campveere) and Middelburg were home to the Scottish and English Staples during the seventeenth century; the former survived until well into the eighteenth century. While Scotland and the United Provinces were especially closely connected through commerce, Calvinism and culture, the Dutch relationship with England was less cordial, deteriorating as the seventeenth century progressed, despite or arguably because of the Cromwellian Parliament’s failed attempt at an Anglo-Dutch union less than forty years before the Williamite Revolution and the ensuing personal union. Perhaps more viable was the suggestion of a Scottish-Dutch union, in the years leading up to the Union of Parliaments in 1707.21 Formal political and diplomatic connections existed as a result of the connected histories of the three nations and the matrimonial ties between the houses of Stuart and Orange. The presence of the court of Elizabeth of Bohemia in The Hague and the diplomatic functions of the Scottish Staple at Veere, further deepened such ties. At a semi-formal level, the presence of stranger churches – Greyfriars in London, the Scottish Kirk in Rotterdam and the garrison churches in the provinces of Zeeland and Holland – and the English and Scots Brigades on Dutch soil, provided institutional links, which facilitated exchanges between both England and the United Provinces and between Scotland and the United Provinces. On the Dutch side of the Channel there was a significant presence of British merchants, political exiles, students and 20

Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, ‘Dutch Culture in the Age of William and Mary: Cosmopolitan or Provincial?’, in The World of William and Mary, p. 220. 21 Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire. The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 201–43.

180

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 180

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

other visitors, while their counterparts were far less numerous on the other side. The pull of the United Provinces dominated significantly. While it is impossible to provide accurate numbers of migrants and visitors, we can say something about the trends, patterns and networks and the way in which they continued into the early eighteenth century. The first half of the Republic of Letters coincided with a high point in the intellectual and cultural relations between the United Provinces, Scotland and England. The Williamite Revolution saw the return of the British exiles, taking with them some of the goods, especially books, and ideas, which they had known while abroad. The most famous of these men was of course the philosopher John Locke.22 The rise of the Dutch influence during the reign of William III has been explored extensively.23 For Scotland, the return of its exiles had even bigger implications as James VII and II’s Episcopalian supporters were replaced by Williamites.24 Although the new monarchy quickly turned to disaster for Scotland, the intellectual connections with the United Provinces remained intact and continued to expand.25 Rather than signifying the end of this intellectual exchange, in many ways, the 1690s were the start of a second wave of British visitors, students and consumers who went abroad attracted by Dutch scholarly and scientific achievements, and which survived the Union of 1707. Their story has been told numerous times, most recently by Daniel Margóscy in his splendid account of the Republic of Letters as a marketplace for natural history, medicine and its many associated disciplines.26 His protagonists – collectors and buyers of preserved specimens, anatomical drawings, scientific texts and maps – visited a dynamic country, at the peak of its intellectual prestige. This was an international space, increasingly determined by an Anglo/ British-Dutch axis and reinforced by the Huguenot refuge, which had settled on both sides of the Channel. The second half of the Republic of Letters saw the end of William of Orange’s personal union, and, with the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the Stuart–Orange connection, and the birth of the United Kingdom 22

Luisa Simonutti, ‘Political Society and Religious Liberty. Locke at Cleves and in Holland’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14 (2006), 413–36. 23 See for instance, Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch. How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London, 2008); John David North and Peter Wolfgang Klein (eds), Science and Culture under William and Mary, (Amsterdam, 1992); D.J. Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge, 2003); H. Roseveare, The Financial Revolution 1660–1760 (London, 1991). 24 J. Carswell, The Descent on England: A Study of the English Revolution of 1688 and its European Background (London, 1969); G. Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton, 2004); Esther Mijers, ‘The Netherlands, William Carstares and the Reform of Edinburgh University 1690–1715’, History of Universities, 25:1 (2011), 111–42. 25 Esther Mijers and Steve Murdoch, ‘Migrant Destinations, 1500–1750’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, ed. T.M. Devine and Jenny Wormald (Oxford, 2012), pp. 320–38. 26 Daniel Margóscy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL, 2014).

181

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 181

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

of Great Britain, incorporating Scotland, the Dutch’s most loyal partner. Yet, the British overtaking of the Dutch as the intellectual powerhouse of Europe, as Feingold and Somos have described, was still far from a foregone conclusion. When we look at the channels of intellectual and cultural exchange – the universities, the Grand Tour and the book trade – we see this upsurge further illustrated. The number of British students at the four Dutch universities of Leiden – the oldest, most prestigious and undoubtedly the most important for British students – Groningen, Franeker and Utrecht, continued to grow after 1700. The Dutch universities had been attractive to English and Scottish students throughout the seventeenth century. In the period 1676–1700, 881 British students matriculated in the United Provinces, 736 of them at Leiden alone.27 After the Union of 1707, their numbers rose to a total of some 2,000. The number of English students at Leiden peaked with around 175 matriculations in the period 1725–34. These were largely medical students.28 Scottish student numbers reached their high point a decade earlier, with around 200 matriculating in the period 1715–24, although their overall numbers were not only higher but remained more constant until c. 1740, when both numbers began to decline rapidly.29 Indeed, Scottish students made up the majority of British students, over two-thirds, and showed more diversity in both their choice of studies – they also studied law and, in much smaller numbers, theology, aside from medicine – and their preferred university. The period 1721–40, the University of Groningen saw a spike in Scottish student numbers who were attracted by the university’s reputation for French learning.30 Looking beyond the Dutch universities to visitors more generally, we see numbers rise in line with the increases in student numbers.31 A visit to a Dutch university was usually accompanied by further travel in the United Provinces or a Grand Tour of Europe. Many treated their Dutch education as part of an academic pilgrimage, for others the Dutch universities were the final destination. After 1700, the universities became part of a longer itinerary for those seeking a polite rather than an academic education. To most, Dutch universities were not only academically but also literally the gateway to Europe. Originally 27

H.T. Colenbrander, ‘De Herkomst der Leidsche Studenten’, in Pallas Leidensis MCMXXV (Leiden, 1925), pp. 275–303; Hugh Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt 1560–1700 (Cambridge, 2013), p. 223; Daniela Proegler, English Students at Leiden University, 1575–1650. ‘Advancing Your Abilities in Learning and Bettering Your Understanding of the World and State Affairs’ (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2013). 28 Martine Zoeteman, ‘De studentenpopulatie van de Leidse universiteit, 1575–1812. “Een volk op zyn Siams gekleet eenige mylen van Den Haag woonende’’’ (University of Leiden, PhD thesis, 2011), p. 261. 29 Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, p. 195. 30 Ibid., pp. 36–42. 31 Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London, 1985), p. 6. C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in United Provinces during the Stuart Period. Edward Browne and John Locke in the United Provinces (Leiden, 1993) and De Ontdekking van de Nederlanden. Britse en Franse Reizigers in United Provinces en Vlaanderen, 1750–1795 (Utrecht, 2001).

182

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 182

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

regarded as an integral part of a young nobleman’s upbringing, the Grand Tour, in line with the general motivations for going abroad, became increasingly fashionable.32 After the Anglo-Scottish Union, there was a definite increase in Grand Tourists and by the middle of the eighteenth century it had become more of a status symbol than a serious education. Some universities began to cater to these students, offering polite and gentlemanly pursuits, such as riding, fencing, dancing and modern languages. Others now specialised mainly in the granting of degrees, like Harderwijk and some of the French universities.33 Gradually, the Grand Tour eclipsed the continental universities altogether for the European education of young British gentlemen.34 There was much to see and do in the United Provinces within a small geographical space. The different university buildings and their scientific theatres and botanical gardens, the curiosity cabinets and hospitals, the government buildings in The Hague and Leeuwarden, the stadholderly and the former Bohemian courts, the different religious sects – Lutherans, Arminians, Anabaptists, Puritans, Quakers, Cameronians, Catholics and Jews – and their houses of worship, the bleach fields in Holland and the many places of historic interest amazed, educated and sometimes also offended these visitors.35 Many tourists marvelled at the religious diversity. Visits to one or more sects or churches made for a religious education outside the lecture halls and classrooms.36 The Jewish synagogues in Amsterdam were especially popular, both out of curiosity and for scholarly reasons. Following the travel guides, a tour of the United Provinces would usually also include a visit to Delft and Dordrecht for their historic significance, Haarlem and the coastal fishing villages of Scheveningen, Loosduinen, Noordwijk, Katwijk and Rijswijk.37 After their tour of the Dutch provinces, most proceeded to travel south. Arnhem and Nijmegen were a favourite stopover on the way to Germany or the southern United Provinces, as were Breda and ‘s-Hertogenbosch on the way to Flanders.38 Many also visited the army, and the fortifications of the cities along the southern 32

See Margaret F. Moore, ‘The Education of a Scottish Nobleman’s Sons in the Seventeenth Century’, SHR, 31 (1952), 1–15; Duncan Thomson, A Virtuous and Noble Education (Edinburgh, 1971). 33 Hilde de Ridder Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe. II. Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Cambridge, 1996), p. 433. 34 Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe, pp. 201–13. 35 For an extensive description of the different tourist attractions in the United Provinces, see Van Strien, British Travelers in Holland, pp. 113–54. See also Hopetoun Research Group Studies, The Diaries and Travels of Lord John Hope (n.p., n.d.) and William Sinclair’s notes on his tour of the United Provinces. NRS, Sinclair of Freswick Papers, GD136/375. 36 Van Strien, British Travellers in Holland, pp. 201–11; Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff. Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge and London, 1992), p. 75. 37 William the Silent, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain, had been murdered in Delft. Dordrecht was famous as the birthplace of Hugo Grotius and for the Synod. 38 Van Strien gives a description of the various routes and destinations in the Dutch Republic, British Travelers in Holland, pp. 71–5. See NAS, Records of Brodies, WS, GD247/177/6/15.

183

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 183

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

borders. Others took the opportunity to study the (military) arts of fortification, engineering, land surveying and draining. Understanding military affairs and the land, which had been so often contested, were all parts of the educations of many gentlemen in Holland. Throughout the eighteenth century, the United Provinces remained the introduction to the rest of Europe. Sometimes travellers, instead of taking the rather expensive Grand Tour, only did part of it. Joseph Taylor, who visited the British army in 1707 after finishing his law degree, referred to his trip to the southern Netherlands, where the army was stationed, and the United Provinces, as ‘my small tour’.39 There were several ways to do the Grand Tour. Travellers bound for France and Italy, continued to land in Holland and Zeeland and often visited the other Dutch provinces, before they went on the rest of their Grand Tour. Places visited usually included Ghent, Brugge, Brussels, Spa and sometimes the University of Louvain in the southern Netherlands. The tour usually went via courts and capitals of some of the German states – Aachen, Cleve, Hanover, Dusseldorf and Heidelberg and other centres of royal or princely political power. France was a must in peacetime – Paris, Versailles and Fontainebleau, Orleans, the cities along the River Loire. Switzerland was sometimes visited as were other parts of France. Italy, Spain and, to a certain extent, France as well, were tainted with traditional connotations of Catholicism and absolutism, whereas the United Provinces and Geneva, for obvious reasons, were favoured as bulwarks of Presbyterianism.40 Some went to Florence, Rome, Bologna and Venice, places full of Roman antiquities, historical interest and even old universities but few got to Naples or beyond. By the early eighteenth century, a visit to Italy, but not Spain, had become an integral part of the Grand Tour as tolerance increased and interests in art and antiquities grew. Along the way, travellers acquired different goods and possessions. Books and paintings, decorations, furnishings and scientific instruments were the most popular merchandise to be brought back from the United Provinces. Dutch chimney pieces, gilt hangings and china, but also architectural and garden designs and ornaments, met the increasing demand for the Dutch and French styles. During their visit visitors were not only introduced to Dutch learning, they were also exposed to new cultural, political and social ideas and to continental culture in general. As Stephen Conway has argued, Europe made the British more polite.41 The United Provinces served as the intellectual and cultural entrepôt and acted as an intermediary to those British seeking European refinement.

39

Joseph Taylor, The Relation of a Voyage to the Army. In Several Letters from a Gentleman to his Friend in the Year 1707, ed. C.D. van Strien (Leiden, 1997), p. 47. 40 Black, The British and the Grand Tour, passim. 41 Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe, pp. 109–35.

184

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 184

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

IV

The appeal of the United Provinces for the British in the early Hanoverian period was greatly enhanced by the arrival of the French Huguenots. While the relationship between French, British and Dutch Protestants went back to the Reformation, the Huguenot refuge made a particular impact as its contribution now focused on the world of learning rather than on confessional concerns. The seventeenth century had been a high point of the Dutch book industry.42 By the end of the century, however, it saw itself deprived of some of its biggest names when the publishing houses of Elsevier and Blaeu were left without successors. The arrival of great numbers of Huguenot journalists and booksellers gave a much needed new lease of life to the Dutch book trade and took the industry in a new direction – that of French scholarship – and introduced a new type of publication, the French learned journal.43 The Latin humanist tradition, the cornerstone of the Dutch universities, was challenged by new philosophical and scientific ideas; a new language of learning and new forms of dissemination, the more accessible learned journals, produced by an extensive European-wide Huguenot network of journalists, publishers and scholars.44 At the same time the noticeable ‘shift from Latin to French’ ensured that the Dutch Republic’s role of entrepôt ‘changed from an intellectual service to an economic one’, specialising in Dutch editions of the classics.45 This Latin trade was given a further boost by the wars with France.46 As a result, the Dutch intellectual influence in the British Isles at the start of the eighteenth century became arguably more diversified and dynamic: Dutch editions of the classics and compendia on law and medicine still were the mainstay, while at the same time French books and learned journals began to make their way across the Channel, and with it, new ideas. The arrival of these Huguenot contributors who came to define the Republic of Letters happened in two stages. The closing down of the Protestant academies 42

Book historians have defined this in terms of Dutch presence at the German book fairs, which began to decline towards the end of the century, only to be replaced by a bookseller-tobookseller exchange. See Roger Chartier, ‘Magasin de l’Univers ou Magasin de la République? Le Commerce du Livre Néerlandais aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Sciècles’, in Le Magasin de l’Univers. The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Booktrade, ed. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al. (Leiden, 1992), pp. 293–4. 43 For example, it has been calculated that of the 230 booksellers in Amsterdam between 1680 and 1725, more than a hundred belonged to the Walloon Church and eighty were Huguenot refugees (G.C., ‘Some Intellectual and Political Influences of the Huguenot Emigrés in the United Provinces, c. 1680–1730’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (1990), pp. 255–87). 44 Hans Bots, ‘Le Rôle des Périodiques Néerlandaises pour la Diffusion du Livre (1684– 1747)’, in Le Magasin de l’Univers, p. 50. 45 Mijnhardt, ‘Dutch Culture in the Age of William and Mary’, p. 220. 46 P.G. Hoftijzer, ‘Het Nederlandse Boekenbedrijf en de Verspreiding van Engelse Wetenschap in de Zeventiende an Vroege Achttiende Eeuw’, in Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis (Leiden, 1998), pp. 59–71.

185

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 185

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

in the early 1680s had seen established academics and other intellectuals leave France for safe havens in England, the United Provinces and Switzerland. Two of the most famous members of this first generation of the Huguenot refuge were Pierre Bayle, who arrived in the United Provinces in 1681, and Jean Leclerc, who had settled there three years later. Others ended up in England. Their networks were extended by the presence of English and, to a lesser extent, Scottish exiles in the early 1680s and their sympathisers and intellectual heirs. Connected by a common political cause and intellectual interests, the members of the Huguenot refuge found themselves in firm alliance with the circle around men such as John Locke and Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury. By the time a second generation of French journalists and booksellers arrived in the early 1700s, including the Paris bookseller Prosper Marchand who settled in the Hague in 1709 and the journalist Pierre Desmaizeaux who took up residence in London in 1700, a strong information network, based on friendship and admiration for the great men of the Republic of Letters – Bayle and Leclerc – was already in existence, which itself had been grafted onto the existing connections and nodes of exchange of the older Republic. As a result, a web was spun by Huguenots on both sides of the Channel, and which would bring together a closer intellectual, academic and cultural connection between Britain and the United Provinces as its interests and forms of dissemination were transnational. If the seventeenth century had been the Latin phase of the intellectual and cultural relationship between England, Scotland and the United Provinces and had relied on the movement of people, goods and ideas, the early eighteenth century represented the French phase, not bound by national borders but internationalist in its membership and its ideas. Arguably, this not only reinvigorated the world of learning but it also cemented the connections between Britain and the United Provinces, ensuring its ongoing impact. For an illustration of how all this worked in practice, we need to look at how some of these networks, within the wider Huguenot web, functioned. The correspondence of the journalist and ‘the ‘‘chef’’ of the London journalistic scene’, Pierre Desmaizeaux offers a fascinating insight.47 Extending to nine folio volumes, his correspondence lists names in the United Provinces, Britain, France, Switzerland and the German states. Desmaizeaux maintained an extensive network of like-minded literary, political and scholarly figures, including Shaftesbury, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, John Toland, Anthony Collins and the other members of the Rainbow Coffee House Group. His most important contact was his friend Pierre Bayle, whose work he edited and whose biography he wrote. He also edited the work of Locke, Samuel Clarke and Toland, and acted as agent to many others.48 As a journalist he was the 47

BL, Desmaizeaux Papers, Add MS 4281–4289: 1688–1744; U. Janssens, ‘French Protestants and Private Societies’, in La Vie Intellectuelle aux Refuges Protestants: Actes de la Table Ronde de Münster du 25 juillet 1995, ed. J. Haeseler and A. McKenna (Paris, 1999), p. 104. 48 J. Dybikowski, ‘Des Maizeaux, Pierre (1672/3–1745)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7546 (accessed 11 December 2016); Elizabeth Grist, ‘Rainbow Coffee House group

186

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 186

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

English correspondent for a number of the French learned journals, which were published in the United Provinces and in France, including the Dutch Journal Littéraire. He also contributed to the dissemination of Newtonianism and the work undertaken by the members of the Royal Society.49 Desmaizeaux was without doubt one of the central members of the Republic of Letters, yet he is most often discussed in relation to those towering names whose work he edited, published or helped distribute.50 Most importantly here, was his direct connection with the United Provinces, especially with the bookseller and publisher, Thomas Johnson. Johnson, a Scot by birth, had arrived in the United Provinces around 1700, the same time that Desmaizeaux settled in London. Johnson may have been slightly younger than Desmaizeaux but the two men were near-contemporaries and moved in the same circles. They cooperated on the Journal Littéraire, for which Johnson was one of the publishers, and on a four-volume edition of Pierre Bayle’s Oeuvres Diverses.51 Looking further into Johnson’s career, we see a man whose network grafted onto existing ones and whose activities, better than any others, illustrate the new relationship between Britain and the United Provinces as part of the Republic of Letters. Born in Edinburgh c. 1677, he established himself as Libraire Anglois in The Hague and was an integral part of the Huguenot web of scholars, journalists, publishers and agents. Johnson’s activities spanned the full spectrum of the Republic of Letters: he published traditional works in Latin, new French scholarship in collected works and learned journals, plays and historical works in English, texts by English deists and freethinkers and Spinozist tracts, and acted as intermediary between French, English and Scottish intellectuals, book collectors and journalists. Despite his background, Johnson began his career as part of the Huguenot refuge. A clear representative of the new French scholarship, his first publications, in 1705 in cooperation with the Frenchman Jonas l’Honoré and from 1706 onwards by himself, were all in French, and included a number of translations of English texts by contemporary authors, including Toland and Sir Paul Rycaut, and political pamphlets. From 1710 onwards – the year the Copyright Act was passed in England – he added a second line of activity, and began to specialise in affordable copies of popular English texts. Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, Gilbert Burnet and, most famously, William (act. 1702–1730)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/94590 (accessed 11 December 2016). 49 Jean-François Baillon, ‘Early Eighteenth-century Newtonianism: The Huguenot Contribution’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 35 (2004), 539. 50 J. Almagor, Pierre Des Maizeaux (1673–1745), Journalist and English Correspondent for FrancoDutch Periodicals, 1700–1720 (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1989); Janssens, ‘French Protestants and Private Societies’, pp. 99–110. 51 Collectie Prosper Marchand, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, March 2, T. Johnson to Ch. Levier, Rotterdam, 30 April 1729 and Rotterdam, 23 July 1729; BL, Desmaizeaux papers, Add MS 4284 fols 177–91. Pierre Bayle’s Oeuvres Diverses (The Hague, 1727–31).

187

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 187

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

Shakespeare were illegally ‘Neatly & correctly printed, in small Volumes fit for the pocket’.52 It is not altogether clear how he came about this opportunity to reprint but it seems plausible that his Scottish background provided him easy access to English clients, whom he may have first encountered via his French collaborators.53 Johnson was clearly well connected in England. The Junto politician Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland was an early book buying client, as was the lawyer John Somers, Baron Somers, another member of the Junto.54 His rise as an English bookseller coincided with the Anglo-Scottish Parliamentary Union of 1707 and he seems to have benefited greatly from the increase in Scottish and English Grand Tourists and visitors who continued to arrive in the United Provinces in the early eighteenth century.55 In 1731, he produced A Guide for English Travellers through Holland, which was no doubt aimed at his Scottish as well as his English clients. In the back, Johnson listed the English books and plays, available in his shop, placing an ‘Advertisement’ promoting his export trade to Great Britain and beyond: Gentlemen may be furnished by the said Thomas Johnson, with all sorts of French, as well as Latin and Greek Books, whether printed in Holland, or in France or Germany, or any other forrein Country: and likewise with many Italian and Spanish Books; all at reasonable rates. And on writing to the said bookseller, or to any Merchant in Rotterdam, they may have Books sent for them to any Sea port of Great Britain or Ireland, or to any of the English Islands or Plantations, or Factories abroad, by the conveniency of Shipping from Rotterdam to those places.56

His shop soon became a meeting place for British travellers and students. Toland used it as his postal address in 1708 in his correspondence with Leibniz and other members of the latter’s group of freethinkers and republicans were Johnson’s clients friends, including the Rotterdam-based merchant and Quaker Benjamin Furly, whose famous library was a hub for men of a radical and heterodox bent, and the philosopher and freethinker Anthony Collins.57 Johnson also published their work, including a French edition of Toland’s Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hannover (1706) and Shaftesbury’s Lettre sur 52

B.J. McMullin, ‘T. Johnson, Bookseller in The Hague’, in An Index of Civilisation. Studies of Printing and Publishing History in Honour of Keith Maslen, ed. R. Harvey et al. (Clayton, Vic., 1993), p. 100. 53 Scots in the American colonies also followed this pattern of behaviour (Esther Mijers, ‘Scotland, the Dutch Republic and the Union: Commerce & Cosmopolitanism’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London, 2014), pp. 93–109. 54 BL, Blenheim Papers, Vol. DLVII, 1699–1715, Add MS 61657, fol. 78 and Vol. DLVIII, Add MS 61658, fol. 80. 55 Otto Lankhorst, ‘De Uitgevers van het Journal Littéraire’, Documentatieblad Achttiende Eeuw, XVIII (1986), 144–5. 56 A Guide for English Travelers through Holland, &c. &c. (Rotterdam, 1731). 57 J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 29, 50, 130, 171–2.

188

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 188

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

l’entousiasme (1709). Johnson’s reputation was such that Paul Rapin de Thoyras contacted him when he was negotiating with publishers in the late 1710s over the first edition of his famous Histoire d’Angleterre.58 From 1717 until 1730, Johnson was a printer for the London Company of Booksellers.59 Alongside his English activities, Johnson also maintained a substantial Scottish network. He exported frequently to Scotland. His English plays were much cheaper than the London versions and therefore very attractive. He also printed Latin texts – Alexander Cunningham’s Horace and the accompanying Animadversiones among others.60 Finally, he published contemporary texts, including his own editions by subscription.61 He had several outlets in Scotland: the booksellers in Edinburgh, John Mackie and Gavin Hamilton; George Stewart, the printer of the University of Edinburgh; and David Randie, who was both a bookseller and postmaster. He also sent books directly to the Edinburgh lawyers and to Scottish academics, such as William Anderson, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Glasgow and Charles Mackie, Professor of History at Edinburgh.62 Johnson’s substantial Scottish network was to a large extent based on his role as agent for Scottish students and visitors and in particular, on his close and lifelong personal friendship with Charles Mackie, who cooperated with Johnson on several occasions.63 In 1722, the two friends were involved in a joint project to print the Complete Works of Pierre Bayle for the Scottish market. Johnson was the instigator as he explained to Mackie, ‘I don’t know if you have very many in Scotland acquainted with Bayle’s writings,. . . but I shall be better able to judge by the number of Subscribers. . . .’64 Mackie looked after the subscription list on Johnson’s behalf and he managed eleven takers. This was the first time Bayle was made available for the Scottish market. Johnson’s activities were not without controversy. He had a profound interest in radical authors and dabbled in Spinozist clandestina. In 1706, he published Johannes Colerus’ La Vie de Spinosa, one of the first biographies of the great Dutch philosopher. A decade later, he cooperated with The Hague publisher, Charles Levier, on his edition of one of the most notorious clandestine philosophical texts of the early Enlightenment, La Vie et l’Esprit de Mr. Benoît de Spinosa oú Traité des Trois Imposteurs (1709), which was based 58

Collectie Prosper Marchand, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Brieven van Paul de Rapin Thoyras (1661–1725) aan Charles Levier (–1734), [s.a.] and 1717–21. Johnson also was considering proving Rapin with some of the source material for the Histoire d’Angleterre, via the diplomatist George Stepney, but the latter’s death in 1707 put an end to this project. With thanks to Miriam Franchina. 59 McMullin, ‘T. Johnson, Bookseller in the Hague’, p. 100. 60 EUL, Mackie Papers, La.II.91c/9, /31, /39, /45,. 61 EUL, La.II.91/26, /32–47 and La.II.91/34. 62 EUL, La.II.91/34, /62, Andrew Fletcher and his nephew, Lord Milton, also bought books from him. Irene J. Murray (ed.), ‘Letters of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun to his Family, 1715–16’, in Scottish Historical Society Miscellany, X (Edinburgh, 1965), pp. 145–73. 63 Mijers, ‘New from the Republick of Letters’, pp. 107–57. 64 EUL, La.II.91/34,.

189

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 189

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

in part on Colerus. His contemporary Prosper Marchand noted that the two men were ‘remplis d’irreligion’.65 John Toland was also implicated in the Traité’s publication and Johnson’s close involvement with his circle is further evidence of his radical interests, which were disseminated through his French journals, the political Le Mercure Galant, the spectatorial Le Misantrope and the learned journal Le Journal Littéraire, which he published from 1713 until 1728.66 Although, he was not part of the latter’s editorial board, which included Justus van Effen, Prosper Marchand and the Newtonian Professor of Mathematics, Astronomy and Philosophy at Leiden, Willem ’s-Gravesande, he played a role of significant importance in both the foundation of the journal and in deciding on its subject matter. Emulating the famous journals of Bayle and Leclerc, the journal aimed to inform its readers of ‘l’etat des Sciences & des occupations des Savans’. Its tone was critical and progressive, in line with Johnson’s more subversive interests. English natural science, moderate theology and the discipline in which these two were combined, the so-called physico-theology, as well as freethinking philosophy were discussed extensively. Its success was immediate and it was read widely across the Republic of Letters, including in Britain, by an illustrious readership, most famously Sir Isaac Newton.67 The journal contained a relatively high proportion of British articles, supplied by Desmaizeaux and other British correspondents, such as Gilbert Burnet, the son of the great Whig bishop. Many of the English publications mentioned were available in Johnson’s shop. In 1728, Johnson left the Journal Littéraire and moved his shop from The Hague to Rotterdam, the ‘bibliopolis’ of the Dutch Republic, where he stayed until his death in 1735.68 He was succeeded by his Scottish widow, Jane Wemyss, and their son, Alexander, until 1745. Eventually his remaining stock was bought by a Dutch bookseller, Hendrik Scheurleer. Johnson was undeniably a key figure in the Republic of Letters, and like his better-known counterpart Pierre Desmaizeaux, instrumental in connecting the scholarly interests of early Hanoverian Britain and the United Provinces. His career reflected the changing nature of the Dutch intellectual landscape. Johnson’s activities spanned the full range of publications for which the United Provinces was famous, from traditional Latin works through to French learning, whether radical, scholarly or popularised in learned journals. Moreover, he contributed to making available to a wider English audience theatre plays, most notably those of William Shakespeare, Rapin’s new English history, Newtonian science, and moderate theology, and he introduced the works of Pierre Bayle to Scotland. Finally, he also played an instrumental role in the activities of the predecessors of the 65

Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), p. 395. 66 Champion, Republican Learning, pp. 170–2. 67 Lankhorst, ‘De Uitgevers van het Journal Litéraire’, 144–50. 68 H. Bots, O.S. Lankhorst and C. Zevenbergen (eds), Rotterdam Bibliopolis. Een Rondgang langs Boekverkopers uit de Zeventiende en Achttiende Eeuw (Rotterdam, 1997); EUL, La.II.91/62.

190

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 190

22/08/2019 08:57

DUTCH INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY BRITAIN

Radical Enlightenment, the Spinozists, deists and freethinkers who gathered in Furly’s library in Rotterdam and Johnson’s own shop in The Hague. As such, he represented the full spectrum of interests of the later Republic of Letters. By the time of his death, these were being pulled apart and separated into an English sphere and a Dutch sphere. The latter subsequently went on to develop in a particularly national direction, as is illustrated by Van Effen’s move from the Journal Littéraire to De Hollandsche Spectator.69 V

The second half of the Republic of Letters displayed a dynamism and vigour which is worth considering in its own right, as well as for the way it (re)connected early Hanoverian Britain and the United Provinces. In the Williamite period, religious and political concerns had tied the three nations separately and bilaterally, and their intellectual, academic and cultural exchanges had echoed these in the shape of student movement and a trade in Latin, theological and humanist texts. The early eighteenth century saw a new interest emerge, in new scholarship in science, history and literature. British Grand Tourists now sought politeness and refinement abroad, and new learning at home. The absorption of large numbers of Huguenot contributors to the Republic of Letters shows its ongoing viability. Their activities in the United Province gave a new impetus to a world of learning which was at risk of becoming old-fashioned, although still considered worthy. The new French scholarship and new forms of dissemination made available ideas from across the Channel. As has been pointed out by Jean-François Baillon: While most French-language periodicals published there were actually in the hands of Huguenots, they were one of the main sources through which Continental writers had access to English thought in an ever-expanding Republic of Letters whose lingua franca was French.70

The correspondence and publications of Pierre Desmaizeaux illustrates this development. Still, as this chapter has argued, a similar argument can be made for the French, Dutch and other continental material which reached Britain’s shores through the same medium and the same networks. Thomas Johnson’s activities provide an insight into this. His Latin, French, English and Scottish endeavours ensured a lasting impact in both England and Scotland. His role among the booksellers, publishers and intellectuals in The Hague and Rotterdam echoed that of Desmazeaux in London and require much more investigation and detailed analysis than this chapter has allowed. What is clear is that his entrance and acceptance as part of the Huguenot web, his English 69 70

Mijnhardt and Kloek, 1800: Blueprints for a Society, passim. Baillon, ‘Early Eighteenth-century Newtonianism’, 536.

191

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 191

22/08/2019 08:57

Esther Mijers

patronage and his Scottish connections, as well as his close cooperation with Dutch booksellers and scholars, tightened the British–Dutch scholarly axis of the Republic of Letters for some three decades. Johnson and his collaborators changed its nature and displaced the original Dutch intellectual influence from Latin to French and by doing so kept the United Provinces’ hegemony at its heart and its eventual replacement at bay until well into the eighteenth century.

192

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 192

22/08/2019 08:57

10 Some Hidden Thunder: Hanover, Saxony and the Management of Political Union, 1697–1763 Robert I. Frost Is there not some chosen Curse, Some hidden Thunder in the Stores of Heaven, Red with uncommon Wrath, to Blast the Man Who owes his Greatness to his Country’s Ruin! Joseph Addison, Cato. A Tragedy in Five Acts (1713)

For the historian, the parallels between the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the early eighteenth century are striking, even if the subsequent fates of the two states mean that direct comparisons have rarely been undertaken. Both were union states that had transcended the loose personal or dynastic unions that characterised the political structures of much of late medieval and early modern Europe by implementing the only two full parliamentary unions seen in Europe before 1789: between Poland and Lithuania in 1569, and between England and Scotland in 1707. Like Scotland after 1707, Lithuania kept its own legal system and its own laws after 1569. In both cases, the unions were part of a wider union state in which other parts had a different relationship to the centre: in the United Kingdom, Wales had been incorporated into England in the 1530s, while Ireland had its own parliament until 1801; in Poland-Lithuania, Royal Prussia was included in the 1569 parliamentary union, but had wide privileges, including the retention of its own law codes and urban representation in its Landtag, while the Ukrainian palatinates incorporated into Poland from Lithuania in 1569 kept Lithuanian law and their own chancery records, the Metryka Ruska. I

The similarities were not just structural. Both systems struggled with the problems of religious pluralism and both drew heavily in their political thought and artistic culture on the heritage of the Roman Republic with its defence of liberty against dictators or kings who sought to undermine it: Joseph Addison’s 193

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 193

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

great tragedy Cato, which opened in April 1713 to wild acclaim from Whigs and Tories alike, was not translated into Polish until 1809, but its sentiments suffused Polish political culture. When Addison’s Cato states that ‘A day, an hour of virtuous liberty/ Is worth a whole eternity in bondage’, he is expressing a common Polish sentiment: malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem (better in perilous liberty than in quiet servitude), a phrase echoed by Rousseau and made famous by Thomas Jefferson as the Americans boldly constructed their own version of the republican vision. There is another parallel. Both systems bestowed their thrones on German electors at the turn of the eighteenth century, initiating personal unions that were deeply controversial and which gave rise to very similar concerns about foreign rule and the subordination of the larger kingdom’s interests to those of the smaller electorate. Both faced serious challenges to the new order, in the shape of Jacobitism in Britain and Ireland between 1714 and 1746, and with the election of Stanisław Leszczyńśki as king of Poland not once, but twice, in 1704 and 1733. Yet despite these parallels, there have been few attempts to compare the two unions at anything more than a superficial level: even the proceedings of a conference on the two unions in Dresden in 1997, while containing some excellent articles on the individual unions, do little to explore the parallels and contrasts.1 This lack of interest owes much to the different fates of the two unions. On George I’s accession in 1714 the British union had already embarked on the upward trajectory which ensured that by the time the British link with Hanover was severed in 1837 Britain was established as one of the world’s dominant powers. Its Empire was large and growing, its enemies had been vanquished at land and sea, and its economy was surging ahead of its rivals. While the rise of sentimental Jacobitism from the 1820s blackened the reputation of the Hanoverians – in particular in Scotland – their lack of romantic appeal has never prevented historians from recognising their considerable achievements. In contrast, the reigns of the Saxon kings of Poland-Lithuania, Augustus II (1697–1732) and his son Augustus III (1733–63) have traditionally been painted in the darkest of hues, and have been accorded a considerable degree of responsibility for the Commonwealth’s collapse into political chaos and social anarchy. When John Sobieski swept down from the Vienna woods at the head of his magnificently accoutred hussars to shatter the besieging Ottoman army in 1683, Poland-Lithuania still seemed to be one of the dominant powers in eastern Europe. Eighty years later it was a laughing stock, as the great paladins of the Enlightenment poured scorn on its political system, scoffing at the notorious liberum veto, by which the objection of one envoy was sufficient to break the Sejm – the Polish-Lithuanian parliament – and torpedo all legislation, 1

Rex Rexheuser (ed.), Die Personalunionen von Sachsen-Polen 1697–1763 und Hannover-England 1714–1837. Ein Vergleich (Wiesbaden, 2005).

194

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 194

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

including taxes. Only one Sejm escaped being broken in the thirty-year reign of Augustus III. Within thirty-two years of his death the Commonwealth no longer existed. The extent to which the Saxon kings should be blamed for preparing the way for the Partitions (1772, 1793, 1795), which removed Poland-Lithuania from the map is open to question. Since 1945 historians, led by Józef Gierowski and Jacek Staszewski, have produced a revisionist account of the Saxon period. Without denying the disasters visited upon the Commonwealth by Augustus II’s ill-judged launching of the Great Northern War in 1700, they have stressed a more positive legacy of reform after 1717. Staszewski has argued that Augustus III became rather popular among the Polish szlachta (nobility), since he had little ambition, did not – unlike his father – seek to impose absolute monarchy upon them, and largely left them alone. Gierowski has challenged the negative view of the 1717 reforms, suggesting that they initiated a long process culminating in the Four-Year Sejm of 1788–92, which introduced a series of enlightened reforms and passed the Constitution of 3 May 1791, which may have provoked the second and third partitions, but which demonstrated that the Commonwealth had the capacity to transform its political system.2 Despite these very different trajectories, there is much that is comparable in the two unions that raises interesting but little asked questions about the functioning of political unions.3 In both cases, established real unions entered on relationships that were deliberately intended to be purely personal in nature: there was no intention in any of the parties involved to promote political or institutional integration of the German electorates of Hanover with Britain, or Saxony with Poland-Lithuania, although Augustus II did consider the possibility and had ambitious plans for developing economic relations between Saxony and Poland-Lithuania. Whatever the intentions of the monarchs, the British and Polish-Lithuanian parliaments were adamantly opposed to such ideas. Both placed stringent controls on their new kings to ensure that the government of the composite parts of the union was kept rigidly separate. In practice, this rigid legal principle proved difficult to enforce – as it always did in personal unions – and rows about the undue influence of Germans and the favouring of the interests of Germans broke out frequently in Westminster and Warsaw. This chapter cannot hope to effect a full comparison; it merely seeks to use the different experiences of personal union to consider the nature and workings of personal unions.

2

Józef Gierowski, The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the XVIIIth Century. From Anarchy to Well-Organised State (Cracow, 1996); Jacek Staszewski: August II Mocny (Wrocław, 1998) and August III Sas (Wrocław, 1989). 3 See Robert Frost, The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 36–46.

195

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 195

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

II

The circumstances under which the Hanoverian Welfs and the Saxon Wettins acquired their thrones were different. George I’s accession in 1714 depended on a decision taken thirteen years earlier, when the English parliament passed the Act of Settlement in June 1701 following the death of the duke of Gloucester, the only surviving son of Queen Anne. The succession was settled upon George’s mother Sophia, the nearest Protestant in the line of descent from James I. This decision was extended to Scotland through the 1707 Union, but it was the Act of Settlement that established the rules of the game for George, who became the nominated heir on his mother’s death two months before Anne died on 1 August 1714. Roman Catholics were excluded from the throne, and Parliament ensured that should a similar situation arise in the future, whereby there were no heirs of the monarch’s body, the succession could only be settled with its consent. Foreign-born subjects, even if naturalised, were not to be appointed to office in Britain; neither were they to be granted lands or titles: resentment at William III’s wave of Dutch interlopers remained strong. The monarch was not to leave the country without parliamentary consent, while it was decreed that: this nation be not obliged to engage in any war for the defence of any dominions or territories which do not belong to the Crown of England, without the consent of Parliament.4

The Act of Settlement echoed similar measures in Poland-Lithuania, where kings had been elected since 1572 by the citizen body, the szlachta, which constituted some 6–8 per cent of the population. The szlachta retained respect for hereditary principle, and sought to find a foreign dynasty from which it could choose its kings. It took three attempts to find one after 1572, and PolandLithuanian therefore had experience of brief personal unions with Transylvania (1576–86) and Sweden (1592–99). Although the Vasa dynasty, descended in the female line from the Jagiellons, who ruled Poland-Lithuania from 1386 to 1569, supplied the Commonwealth with three kings between 1587 and 1668, it was driven from the Swedish throne in 1599. The Polish Vasas did not surrender their claims to Sweden until 1660, but the szlachta was disinclined to revive the personal union and was always suspicious of attempts by Sigismund III (1587–1632) and his sons Władysław IV (1632–48) and John Casimir (1648–68) to conduct foreign policy in their own dynastic interests, or to influence the succession, as when John Casimir launched a campaign for an election vivente rege in the 1660s, despite it having been declared illegal in 1530.5 The Sejm 4

Andrew Browning (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1660–1714 (London, 1953), pp. 129–34. 5 Volumina Constitutionum tom I, volumen 2 (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 80–1; Robert Frost, ‘The Limits of Dynastic Power: Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and the Problem of Composite Monarchy in the Age of the Vasas, 1562–1668’, in Limits of Empire: Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History, ed. Tonio Andrade et al. (Farnham, 2012), pp. 136–54.

196

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 196

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

had long sought to impose control over the conduct of foreign policy. In 1611, following Sigismund’s intervention in Muscovy’s Time of Troubles it banned the monarch from declaring an offensive war without parliamentary consent and showed little interest in Vasa plans to regain the Swedish throne.6 The King’s Business was not the Commonwealth’s Business. After the trauma of John Casimir’s reign, the szlachta spurned foreign candidates to elect two successive native noblemen: the nonentity Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki (1669–73) and John Sobieski (1674–96). Sobieski may have triumphed at Vienna in 1683, but the problems of electing a native magnate became all too obvious during his reign, as he favoured his own family and coterie in a policy whose worst effects were seen in Lithuania, control of which he handed over to the Sapieha family in an abandonment of the traditional policy of playing the great magnate factions off against each other. On his death, therefore, the szlachta looked abroad once more. The favourite was the duc de Conti, nominated by Louis XIV of France. Friedrich August, Elector of Saxony since 1694, was better prepared, however. The Wettins had been thinking of the Polish throne for some time. In 1692, as part of the negotiations over the establishment of Hanover as the ninth Electorate, George I’s father Ernst August had promised to support a Saxon candidature for the Polish throne.7 When Sobieski died, Friedrich August moved swiftly. In a move that astonished Europe, the Elector of Saxony – the cradle of the Reformation – became a Catholic in a hastily arranged secret ceremony. The news arrived in Warsaw during the election Sejm, but was received initially with scepticism. On 26 June 1697, the first day of polling, twenty-nine delegations declared for Conti, but there were seven candidates and this was well short of a majority. The Saxon delegation, with consummate timing, turned up that afternoon under Jacob Heinrich Flemming, Friedrich August’s favourite, with 40,000 thalers to sweeten the voters. The combination of promises, gifts and the sensational news of the conversion helped produce an agreement among Conti’s opponents to back Friedrich August. Forty delegations declared for him the following day, but the primate and interrex Michał Radziejowski refused to accept that Conti had lost. He declared him elected, then hastened to the Collegiate Church of St John to lead a Te Deum Laudamus. The Saxon supporters remained on the election field. Radziejowski’s act was repudiated by Stanisław Dąbski, bishop of Cujavia, who declared Friedrich August elected after Conti’s supporters did not return to discuss the matter by 7 pm, the hour appointed by Dąbski at the request of the remaining electors.8 The outcome of the double election was decided by Friedrich August’s arrival in Poland in early July. On 15 September, as Conti finally passed through the 6

Volumina Constitutionum, tom III, volumen 1 (Warsaw, 2010), p. 13. Jacek Staszewski, O miejsce w Europie. Stosunki Polski i Saksonii z Francją na przełomie XVII i XVIII wieku (Warsaw, 1973), pp. 69–70, 90. 8 Staszewski, August II, pp. 60–1. 7

197

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 197

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

Sound into the Baltic, Dąbski crowned Friedrich August, under the name of Augsutus II, in Cracow Cathedral. The tortoise does not always win the race. III

There were many in Britain and Poland-Lithuania who looked with scorn on their new German kings. There is no doubt who struck the more kingly figure. George, who had serious doubts about ascending the British throne, was not as dull or unprepossessing as is often suggested, but his poor English, stiff, shy manner, and reluctance to perform the public duties of monarchy did little to endear him to his subjects. His court was far from glamorous, and his personal life bore the whiff of scandal: he had repudiated his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle after she conducted an affair with the handsome Swede Philipp Christoph von Königsmarck, and brought with him to London his long-standing mistress, the dowdy Melusine von der Schulenburg.9 There are advantages to dullness. While George’s English was rather better than legend suggests – he could understand spoken and written English and after 1720 occasionally annotated English texts in English – Augustus never bothered to attain even a smattering of Polish: those of his ministers who did not speak French – twenty-one out of thirty did – could not communicate with him; at least one complained that his career was thereby badly affected.10 Nobody could accuse Augustus of a lack of glamour, however. His willingness to spend vast amounts of money made him one of the leading patrons of art in baroque Europe; while his military endeavours invariably ended in failure, he transformed Dresden into the jewel of the Elbe, while his magnificent artistic legacy bears eloquent testimony to his refined taste.11 His nickname of Augustus the Strong was well-earned. Always willing to show off his prodigious physical strength – his party tricks included straightening horseshoes and crushing silver goblets with his bare hands – he also had a prodigious sexual appetite, which he indulged with a string of mistresses, one of whom, Aurora von Königsmarck, was the sister of Sophia Dorothea’s unfortunate Swedish lover, who paid for his affair with his life. Augustus’s adventurous love life was not nearly as energetic as alleged by Pöllnitz in his dirt-digging fantasy La Saxe Galante, but it was exciting enough, and was facilitated by the refusal of his wife, Christiane Eberhardine to convert to Catholicism or to visit Poland, where she was never crowned.12 9 For a sympathetic account, see Ragnhild Hatton, George I, Elector and King (London, 1978), especially pp. 128–32, 170–3. 10 Ibid., pp. 129–30; Andrzej Sowa, Świat ministrów Augusta II: wartości i poglądy funkcjonujące w kręgu ministrów Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1702–1728 (Cracow, 1995), p. 58. 11 See Unter einer Krone. Kunst und Kultur der sächsisch-polnischen Union (Leipzig, 1997). 12 Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz, La saxe galante: or, the amorous adventures and intrigues of Frederick-Augustus II, late King of Poland (London, 1750).

198

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 198

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

Poles viewed this decision with suspicion, and distrusted the sincerity of Augustus’s conversion, initially at least, while in Saxony the conversion provoked a storm: ‘it would have been better had Friedrich August been drowned in his bath as a child’ was the observation of Kresse, Kreishauptmann of Schwarzenberg.13 Saxony – unlike Britain under James VII and II – eventually reached a modus vivendi with its Catholic rulers, surviving until 1918 as a Protestant state under the rule of a Catholic dynasty. But his conversion caused Augustus serious difficulties in Saxony. In contrast, in the British–Hanoverian union the religious issue – while not unproblematic – worked more to George’s advantage: the refusal of James Stuart in 1713 to follow Augustus’s example by renouncing his faith effectively ended his hopes of the throne. The dynasty’s public Lutheranism in Hanover and public Anglicanism in England did not pose substantial problems for it or most of its subjects, whether British or Hanoverian, despite the occasional objection.14 The considerable religious problems within the British union were long-standing and had nothing to do with the Hanoverian connection. For Hanover, unlike Saxony, there was a strong expectation among leading Hanoverian politicians on the eve of the union that the association with Britain would bring the new Electorate great benefits.15 IV

Both monarchs faced difficult accessions, but George played his hand more shrewdly. The traumatic legacy of the 1640s ensured that there was a substantial body of opinion in Britain that remained uneasy with the implications of the events of 1688. While Mary and Anne were on the throne, the fig leaf of dynastic continuity could be maintained for most people, despite the immediate appearance of the non-juring schism within the Anglican Church. It was harder to maintain any semblance of legitimacy for a dull German princeling, however, when there were over fifty better-placed candidates directly descended from his grandmother, Elizabeth of Bohemia, including an adult male son of James VII and II. A considerable number of his new subjects felt unable to take the oath to George. The Jacobite threat was a real one, particularly in light of the widespread discontent in Scotland over the 1707 union. Opposition was bolstered by religious divisions over the seizure of power in the Scottish Kirk by the Presbyterians after 1688, which created powerful resentment among the many Episcopalians in the Highlands and the north-east. Many felt that the 13 Wieland Held, Der Adel und August der Starke. Konflikt und Konfliktaustrag zwischen 1694 und 1707 in Kursachsen (Cologne, 1999), p. 53. 14 See, for instance, Thomas Brett, A Review of the Lutheran Principles; Shewing How they differ from the Church of England. . . In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1714). 15 Heide Barmeyer, ‘Die Personalunion England-Hannover. Entstehung, Etablierung und Fortsetzung aus hannoverscher Sicht’, in Die Personalunionen, p. 293.

199

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 199

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

Hanoverians had been imposed on Scotland, and anti-Hanoverian feeling was strong enough to produce significant support in Scotland for the ’15, the most serious of all the Jacobite challenges to the Hanoverians. The rising’s failure was due in part to the incompetent leadership of the earl of Mar and of James ‘VIII and III’ himself, not to mention the lack of support from France, still reeling from the War of the Spanish Succession and the death of Louis XIV just four days after the standard was raised on the braes of Mar. Its failure to gather support in England beyond Catholic pockets in the north proved fatal to its chances, however. Non-jurors may have felt unable to swear the oath of allegiance, but many were influenced by the Protestant doctrine of non-resistance, and were reluctant to take up arms. Divisions over the succession were not between Whigs and Tories, but were largely within the Tory party. A large majority of Tories were, however, Hanoverians, at least after James’s refusal to convert, and most of those that were not did not come out in open support of the Rising. Despite the fact that there was a six-week delay between Anne’s death and George’s arrival in England, his accession was achieved remarkably smoothly, and the 1715 election produced a substantial Whig majority in the Commons. The Rising actually helped strengthen the Hanoverian grip on the throne: the clear demonstration that the vast majority of the English electorate had no desire to restore the Stuarts and the fear of further Jacobite insurrections enabled George’s government – with Sir Robert Walpole taking the leading role – to clamp down on expressions of pro-Jacobite sentiment, which was largely driven underground.16 The crushing of the ’15 by no means extinguished opposition or discontent, however, and the successful establishment of the Hanoverians on the throne owed much to George’s willingness to accept the terms on which he had been offered his crown, and to work within the British system to achieve his aims. George was an experienced, practical politician whose policies were driven by sober common sense.17 He kept close control over the government of Hanover, driving his ministers hard during his frequent visits, and insisting that he should retain the power to decide over the most important matters, in particular foreign policy and the army through Hanoverian ministers based in London in his German Chancery: his 1720 Testament stipulated that at least two of the seven members of the Hanoverian Geheime Rat should accompany him at all times.18 Their presence in London provoked considerable jealousy and suspicion, however, especially with regard to the conduct of foreign policy. In particular, the deployment of a British naval squadron under Admiral John 16

Graham Gibbs, ‘Union Hanover/England. Accession to the Throne and Change of Rulers: Determining Factors in the Establishment and Continuation of the Personal Union’, in Die Personalunionen, pp. 246, 266–7, 269–70. Paul S. Fritz, ‘The Anti-Jacobite Intelligence System of the English Ministers, 1715–1745’, HJ, 16:2 (1973), 265–89. 17 Barmeyer talks of his ‘nüchternen Realitätssinn’ (sober realism), Die Personalunion, p. 293. 18 Hatton, George I, p. 163; Dieter Brosius, ‘Die Personalunion Hannover-England. Politische Institutionen und Prozeduren aus hannovercher Sicht’, in Die Personalunionen, pp. 304–05.

200

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 200

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

Norris to the Baltic in 1716 after Hanover’s declaration of war on Sweden on 2 October 1715, following the negotiation of treaties with Denmark, Prussia and Russia, stimulated a wave of accusations that George’s actions were in direct breach of the Act of Settlement.19 Such complaints were to be heard down to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. As Graham Gibbs observes, most of the major political crises of this period centred round accusations that ‘the steerage of British foreign policy was coming from Hanover’.20 Yet for all the intense heat and rhetoric generated by such crises, there was always a powerful body of opinion that recognised that Britain could not simply pursue a blue-water policy and ignore conflicts on the continent. Since its accession to the grand coalition against Louis XIV in 1692 – the price for its raising to the status of an Electorate – Hanover had consistently taken an anti-French line, but the British shift to an alliance with France in 1716 also suited Hanover. Interests did not always align so closely, however, and in the rapidly shifting waters of European diplomacy in the 1730s and 1740s there were indeed moments when the relationship came under considerable strain. Nevertheless, even if William Pitt famously claimed when in opposition that ‘this great, this powerful, this formidable kingdom is now considered only a province to a despicable electorate’, he rapidly changed his tune when in office. As had been the case during the wars against Louis XIV, Britain could not ignore Europe, and there were many strategic advantages to the connection that considerably outweighed the disadvantages.21 The consensus among the British political elite is demonstrated by the reaction to George’s plans to end the personal union in the early years of his reign. When he floated the idea in his testament, drawn up in 1716 and amended in a 1720 codicil, which suggested that if his son, the future George II, should have two sons, one should inherit Britain and the other Hanover, he received some support in Hanover, where, after a bruising clash in 1719, it was felt that George was allowing his British ministers to dominate him at the expense of Hanover. His British ministers, however, opposed the idea. The union’s advantages were already becoming apparent, while it was believed that further attacks on the principle of primogeniture might play into Jacobite hands. Although George secured the necessary imperial recognition for his testament, it was quietly suppressed by George II in 1727.22 Thereafter little thought was given to the dissolution of the union on either side until the accession of Victoria to the British throne in 1837 forced the issue. Despite the real tensions in the relationship, by the accession of George III in 1760, the union had settled down into a comfortable marriage. In 19

See the classic study by J.F. Chance, George I and the Northern War (London, 1909). Gibbs, ‘Union Hanover/England’, p. 272. 21 For a concise presentation of the case, see Brendan Simms, ‘Hanover in British Policy 1714–1783. Interests and Aims of their Protagonists’, in Die Personalunionen, pp. 311–34. 22 Hatton, George I, pp. 165–9. Barmeyer sees less support than Hatton for the dissolution of the union: Die Personalunion, pp. 294–6. 20

201

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 201

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

Hanover the long absences of the electors led to a revival of the estates that was welcomed by the local elites. The spectre of absolutism was lifted, while the convenient conversion of the Wettins to Catholicism allowed Hanover to emerge as the leading Lutheran power in Germany. Hanover had expanded its territory in part because of the British connection and through British support at the many peace conferences of the eighteenth century. British and Hanoverian interests were by no mean identical, but the two powers – one largely maritime, one distinctly continental – complemented each other better than the frequently quoted rhetoric on both sides allows. There was little left to complain about. In Britain – or at least in England – while the dynasty was not loved the stability and economic prosperity it brought secured it acceptance that was increasingly less grudging. While ageing Tories might maintain that peculiar sentimental attachment to the Stuarts that blossomed in the nineteenth century as a form of establishment anti-establishmentarianism, in England at least they showed little inclination to support Charles Edward Stuart in 1745–46, with only the Manchester regiment playing any part in the fighting. The union worked. V

The skill of the first two Georges in working through British institutions is highlighted by the very different story of the Saxon-Polish union. Augustus’s approach to his new kingdom after 1697 contrasts very starkly to that of George I after 1714. To be fair to Augustus, for all the similarities between the two unions, he won his throne in very different circumstances. George arrived in London as the ruler of an Electorate that had only recently been stitched together and was still struggling to bolster its position within imperial, let alone European, politics. He ascended the throne of a reconstituted British union that was recovering strongly from the crisis of the 1640s. James VII and II’s reign had brought renewed strife, but the assertion of parliamentary authority following his hasty flight in 1688 had laid the foundations of the system that Parliament entrusted to George in 1714. Anne’s reign may have been wracked by party strife, but the dubious allure of Jacobitism obscures the fact that even among those who might have welcomed the return of the Stuarts, very few – in England at least – rejected the new authority of Parliament. This broad consensus enabled Britain to develop, under parliamentary leadership, the institutions that underpinned its rise in the eighteenth century. In playing a leading role in the various coalitions that had defied Louis XIV since the late 1670s it had formed the ideology of resistance to the claims of absolute monarchy which animated the wars against France for generations to come, which animated resistance to the restored Stuarts by the Scottish covenanters and which justified the domestic political settlements of 1689 and 1714. Most importantly, the foundation of the Bank of England enabled 202

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 202

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

Parliament to place state finances on the firmest of foundations, allowing it to build up its navy, its empire, and its self-esteem. In the Saxon-Polish union the polarities were reversed. Saxony was a flourishing, wealthy electorate which had long played a leading role in the Empire and which had recovered well from the Thirty Years’ War. Its electors enjoyed considerable power, although their authority was far from absolute and they still relied to a considerable extent on the cooperation of the Saxon estates. Augustus’s conversion to Catholicism shattered the broad consensus that had brought a considerable economic upturn after 1648 and meant that the Saxon estates became more assertive, while his long absences in Poland after 1697 ensured that they would claim a larger part in governing the state and challenge the absolutist tenor of Augustus’s style of governing. Poland-Lithuania, for all its considerable potential, was still struggling to recover from its own mid-century political crisis, after the great Cossack revolt of 1648 brought civil war, political paralysis and foreign invasion. Unlike Saxony, Poland-Lithuania had experienced nothing but war since 1648. The Cossack rebellion was followed by war against Muscovy (1654–67), Sweden (1655–60) and Transylvania (1657), all fought largely on Polish territory. Shortly after the suspension of the war with Muscovy, which saw the Commonwealth cede Left Bank Ukraine and Kyiv at the 1667 Andrusovo Truce, the long cycle of wars against the Ottomans began.23 In 1672 Podolia and the key strongpoint of Kamieniec Podolski was lost. The relief of Vienna in 1683 was a rare highpoint in what became a long, grinding war of attrition that drained the Commonwealth, leaving it desperate for peace by 1697. Augustus had led the Saxon army against the Ottomans in the 1690s, which explains some of his appeal in 1697. The end of the war in the 1699 Peace of Karlowitz meant that he began his reign with a significant foreign policy success that saw the return of Podolia and Kamieniec. His problems were domestic. Many Conti supporters refused to accept his election. Although the text of his pacta conventa – the agreement drawn up at the start of every reign since 1572, in which the constitutional limits on royal power were restated and augmented – had been agreed by Flemming in early July and lodged in the Warsaw Castle Court, it was not printed and circulated, and the king swore to uphold a slightly different text at his first public Catholic mass in early July. He renewed his oath at his coronation, but the text of what he had sworn to uphold in July had disappeared, and because the election was still contested, the Coronation Sejm was shortened to two weeks, with the promise that everything would be sorted out at a Pacification Sejm to be called to restore harmony to the kingdom.24 23

Kyiv was ceded for three years, but the Poles were in no position to demand its return in 1670. An ‘eternal peace’ was signed in 1686, which recognised Russian rule over Kyiv, but was still awaiting ratification by the Sejm in 1697. 24 Staszewski, August II, pp. 63, 70.

203

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 203

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

It was nearly two years before the Pacification Sejm opened on 30 June 1699, by which time Augustus had already given many indications of his style of ruling, which took little account of the sensibilities of the Commonwealth, or the limitations on his power. These were laid out in the final version of his pacta conventa, which was printed with the acts of the Pacification Sejm, where it was finally confirmed by all parties. The document was considerably longer than the Act of Settlement, running to eleven closely printed pages in the standard edition of the acts of the Polish Sejm. Several clauses echo the Act of Settlement, reflecting the common concerns aroused by personal unions. Augustus and his queen were to profess the Catholic faith. He was not to appoint foreigners to office or promote them as candidates for ennoblement. Foreigners were not to be granted leases on royal land, and officials of the royal court were to be exclusively drawn from the native Polish and Lithuanian nobility. He was allowed foreigners in minor positions in his bedchamber, although the queen was limited to four persons from her own country among the leading ladies of her bedchamber. Public documents were to be issued in Polish or Latin. Augustus was not to bring foreign troops into the Commonwealth without Sejm consent or declare offensive war without Sejm approval. On account of the continuing war against the Ottomans, he was allowed to keep 6,000 Saxon troops in the Commonwealth at his own cost until peace was made.25 On the surface, the 1699 Pacification Sejm appeared to live up to its name. Augustus had made his peace with Radziejowski, and the divisions created by the contested election were formally healed.26 In Lithuania the cruel Sapieha hegemony had provoked civil war, but Karlowitz, signed in January, was matched in December by the concession of defeat by Frederick III of Brandenburg-Prussia over Elbing, which Brandenburg troops had occupied in 1698 in a dispute that went back to the 1650s, and control of Elbing returned to the Commonwealth. The two years since the election had been turbulent, but many of the difficulties seemed to have been overcome. Already, however, Augustus was showing little inclination to keep the terms of his pacta conventa, or to work through the Commonwealth’s institutions. The Elbing episode gave an early indication of Augustus’s modus operandi. On 7 June 1698 at a secret meeting in Johannisburg in Ducal Prussia, Augustus signed a private agreement with Frederick III. Its exact terms are unknown, but it seems that in return for Frederick’s cession of Crossen on the Oder, which would open up a direct line of communication between Saxony and Poland, Augustus agreed to turn a blind eye to Frederick’s occupation of Elbing. Augustus neatly exploited the inevitable outrage this act provoked in Poland, threatening a war against Brandenburg-Prussia which would have received considerable support in Poland.27 25

Volumina Legum (Petersburg, 1860), VI, pp. 14–27. Dybaś, Sejm pacyfikacyjny w 1699 r. (Toruń, 1991), pp. 228–34. 27 Józef Andrzej Gierowski, ‘Dyplomacja polska doby saskiej (1699–1763)’, in Historia dyplomacji polskie, ii 1572–1795, ed. Zbigniew Wójcik (Warsaw, 1982), pp. 350–2. 26 Bogusław

204

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 204

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

War never came, and in the end Frederick had to hand Elbing back. On the surface, this was a diplomatic success, although the failure on the Commonwealth’s part to meet its financial obligations gave Frederick an excuse to occupy part of Elbing’s landed possessions in 1703.28 The episode demonstrated, however, that Augustus saw foreign policy as the king’s business, and had little intention of respecting the numerous legal constraints on his conduct of it. On this occasion, he was able to deflect criticism and exploit the outrage provoked by his clandestine deal. His next excursion into secret diplomacy did not end so favourably. To be fair to Augustus once more, the Commonwealth’s politicians were slow to realise that by 1697 the conduct of international relations had changed irrevocably. Diplomacy had become a highly professionalised operation, and the tempo of diplomatic activity had quickened considerably as a growing network of resident ambassadors represented their princes and pursued their interests in close contact with their ministers back in the capital, to whom they reported regularly, often on a day-to-day basis. While Peter I’s Russia was soon to join this new diplomatic world, the Commonwealth remained mired in the past. The Sejm’s desire to keep control over foreign policy ensured that, as in the past, ambassadors were appointed for one-off embassies, to negotiate a treaty or to attend a peace congress. Since the Sejm did not sit permanently, and was increasingly subject to disruption when it did, supervision of foreign policy effectively lay with the Senate Council, which was in part the royal council, on which government ministers sat, and in part a check on royal power, the custodes regis ac legis, complete with senators resident, who from 1641 were elected by the Sejm for six-month periods to keep an eye on the king. Formally, the chancellors of Poland and Lithuania were responsible for running the Commonwealth’s diplomacy. The situation was complicated by the fact that the hetmans – the commanders of the Polish and Lithuanian armies – had considerable diplomatic powers. In practice, only the Polish grand hetman maintained resident agents in foreign capitals, and then only in Istanbul, Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania and the Crimea, as part of Poland’s defensive system on its southern borders. Otherwise there were no resident ambassadors.29 Augustus had no time for this cumbersome system. Since Poland-Lithuania had no diplomatic service he operated largely through the Saxon diplomatic service, to the extent that Gierowski has suggested that in this aspect the PolishSaxon union was indeed a real union.30 Yet Augustus’s conduct of foreign affairs was far less formal than this suggests: Saxony maintained resident envoys largely at the other German courts, not the major European capitals, and Augustus was quite happy to circumvent the normal controls within the Saxon 28

Elbing had been pawned to Frederick’s father in 1657, but when the Swedes evacuated it in 1660 the Poles occupied it without repaying the loan. 29 Staszewski, O miejsce, pp. 17–23. 30 Gierowski, ‘Dyplomacja polska’, p. 389.

205

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 205

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

system, financing his diplomatic adventures as much as he could from his own funds, outwith the control of the Saxon estates, and circumventing the Geheime Rat, the official estates body that sought to keep an eye on his activities, in favour, after its establishment in 1704, of the Geheime Gabinet, a close group of advisers personally dependent upon him. For Augustus, the king’s business was the king’s business alone. Augustus’s blithe refusal to respect legal norms had catastrophic consequences for the Commonwealth. In late 1699, with domestic harmony apparently restored – at least in Poland – the Turkish war ended on favourable terms, and Frederick III seemingly outflanked, he was in a strong position. He had even been permitted to keep his Saxon troops in the Commonwealth on account of the continuing disturbances in Lithuania. Within three years he had recklessly squandered all of these advantages through his decision to mount what he intended to be a swift strike to conquer Livonia, where there was growing discontent with Swedish rule. Ignoring the Saxon and Polish-Lithuanian estates, Augustus had already signed an offensive alliance with Christian V of Denmark in March 1698 when he met Peter I of Russia at Rawa Ruska four months later. The two monarchs hit it off famously, indulging in macho posturing and gargantuan drinking bouts, which Augustus won, despite Peter’s famous capacity for holding his drink. Although Peter was sensibly more concerned with ending the Ottoman war before he entered any binding commitments on other fronts, there was much talk of what both men might gain from an attack on Sweden under its new king, the apparently callow youth, Charles XII. Augustus hoped that an attack on Sweden, whose military frailty had been abundantly demonstrated since 1660, would bring an easy victory that he could present to the Commonwealth as a fait accompli. He had some justification for acting, as he had promised in his pacta conventa to restore to the Commonwealth provinces that had been torn from it, one of which was Livonia, seized by Sweden in the 1620s and ceded formally in 1660. It was not his fault that he came up against one of the most talented military commanders to have led an army into the field, and a military system that had been transformed since the absolutist coup of 1680. The poorly prepared Saxon attack on Riga failed dismally; Charles forced Denmark out of the war in a matter of weeks, and then turned on Peter, destroying a Russian army at Narva in November 1700. Augustus scrambled desperately to save himself from the consequences of his own folly, but Charles proved merciless. In January 1701 he invaded the Commonwealth. Had Augustus possessed the patience and a willingness to work through the Commonwealth’s institutions, he might have been able to build support for an aggressive foreign policy. Few Poles, however, were interested in retaking Livonia. More might have supported action against Russia: exiled nobles driven out of the territories annexed by Russia since 1654 had long formed a vociferous pressure group, while the Sejm had never ratified the ‘eternal peace’ of 1686. It 206

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 206

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

would have been difficult to muster support for a new foreign adventure so soon after the end of the Turkish war, but Augustus did not even try. Not speaking the language made it difficult for him to interact effectively with anyone outside a very narrow group of politicians. Only Jan Jerzy Przebendowski, a Germanspeaking Catholic convert from Royal Prussia, retained Augustus’s confidence throughout his reign.31 As a Prussian, Przebendowski was something of an outsider, lacked the backing of major magnate factions, and was in no sense a Walpole who could use government patronage to control the Sejm. Augustus was not interested in working through the Commonwealth’s institutions, however, and he paid the price. Radziejowski, who, with considerable reservations, had made his peace with Augustus in 1699, was outraged by the invasion of Livonia. When Charles invaded, Radziejowski claimed that the Commonwealth was not a party to the war. Charles rejected the idea, but consistently supported moves to depose Augustus. Radziejowski entered determined opposition to Augustus; interpreting his powers as primate broadly, he presented himself as legitimately holding the monarch to account for his breaches of the law. Many rallied to the opposition cause, forming the Confederation of Warsaw in early 1704. Backed by the military power of Sweden, the Confederation declared the deposition of Augustus on 16 February 1704; in July Stanisław Leszczyński, Charles’s candidate, was elected king. These actions by no means united the Commonwealth. Only a few hundred nobles, guarded by Swedish troops, took part in Leszczyński’s election, and a rival confederation was set up in Sandomierz in May 1704 to combat the Swedes and Radziejowski, who was deposed as primate. Thus began a civil war, in which the majority of the Commonwealth’s noble citizens supported Augustus as their legal monarch despite his cavalier actions. When he was forced to abdicate in 1706 following Charles’s invasion of Saxony, the Sandomierz confederates rejected his abdication as illegal, and carried on, as best they could, the government of the Commonwealth, raising armies, collecting taxes and conducting diplomatic relations in a demonstration that the Commonwealth’s principle of self-government was not a fantasy. When the Swedish grip over the Commonwealth was loosened after Peter’s shattering victory at Poltava in July 1709, the Sandomierz confederates welcomed Augustus back as their king. Augustus, however, squandered the greatest opportunity since the 1650s to reform the Commonwealth’s political system. The 1710 Warsaw Council, which confirmed his return to the throne, was not a proper Sejm, but it demonstrated that, with the support of the Commonwealth’s institutions, the king could achieve much. It agreed to raise an army of 64,000, and approved the taxes to support it. Yet Augustus returned to his old ways. He refused to call a Sejm, continued to govern with a small group of favourites and Saxons, reintroduced Saxon troops into the Commonwealth despite an explicit ban, and paid the price, as ever-widening circles of those who had supported him became 31 Staszewski,

August II, p. 77.

207

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 207

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

convinced – not without reason – that he was planning an absolutist coup. By 1715 nobles in both parts of the Commonwealth had seen enough. The confederations of Vilnius and of Tarnogród were formed to oppose the king and to secure the withdrawal of the Saxon troops. Under Russian mediation peace was negotiated and formally confirmed at a special one-day session of the Sejm in 1717, which did not debate the settlement – as had been agreed in advance – thereby earning the title of the Silent Sejm. Augustus was forced to abandon his ambitious plans. Thereafter the Wettins drew in their horns, and the framework established in 1717 survived in its essentials until 1788. Although there is much in Gierowski’s argument that the 1717 settlement does not deserve its black reputation, since it set the Commonwealth on the path to reform by conceding important new principles, such as the establishment of a permanent army supported by permanent taxes, it fell far short of what might have been achieved in 1710: the army was reduced to a paper strength of 18,000 men, which was simply inadequate. Nothing was done to create a proper diplomatic service. For the next seven decades, the Commonwealth became the object, not the subject of European diplomacy. VI

Although the Commonwealth’s traumas were extensively reported in British newspapers, it featured little in British political debate, despite the apparent similarities between the two union states. While there had been considerable interest in the Polish-Lithuanian union in 1603, there was much less discussion of its constitutional structure in 1707, despite much interest, particularly in Scotland, in Polish politics. Poland-Lithuania was the only example of a parliamentary union in contemporary Europe, but the nature of its union drew little comment. By 1707 Poland-Lithuania did not seem a useful model. Whereas in 1603 Protestantism had still been strong, and there had been many links between Polish and British Protestants, the Counter-Reformation had by 1707 reduced Polish-Lithuanian Protestantism to an embattled minority.32 Poland did feature in political debates in early eighteenth-century Britain, but as a useful screen for attacks on political rivals. The Sejm was seen as a chaotic model of how not to conduct parliamentary business, and the term ‘Polish Diet’ was used frequently in mocking attacks, as in Daniel Defoe’s satire The Dyet of Poland, in which British politicians are given the thin disguise of crudely polonised names.33 The piece demonstrates more knowledge of Poland-Lithuania than British scholars suggest, but its intention is to lampoon 32 See

Robert Frost, ‘Hiding from the Dogs: The Problem of Polish-Scottish Political Dialogue, 1550–1707’, in Scotland and Poland: A Historical Relationship, 1500–2009, ed. T.M. Devine and David Hesse (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 21–37. 33 Anglipoloski of Lithuania [Daniel Defoe], The Dyet of Poland. A Satire (London, 1705).

208

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 208

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

a range of politicians, and in particular the High Tories: Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham becomes Finsky, and Sir Edward Seymour is ruthlessly mocked as Seymsky.34 Similar tactics were adopted in a 1723 pamphlet concerning the troubles in Poland-Lithuania in 1715, the year of the formation of the Vilnius and Tarnogród confederations.35 Written by a Tory, this is a more-or-less open attack on Sir Robert Walpole framed within a discussion of tyranny and sedition. ‘ENGLAND, compared with POLAND’, it declares, ‘shines like VENUS placed near a LAZAR by the Painter’, and begins with an approving quote from an article by the Jacobite politician Philip, duke of Wharton, in the True Briton: That a Kingdom can never be happy, where the Interest of the King is opposite to the Good of his People, and when a Prince is obliged to overturn the Bulwarks of Liberty in order to maintain Himself upon the Throne.36 Wharton attacked Augustus II’s plans to make the throne hereditary for his son, the future Augustus III, remarking that: ‘Every Patriot ought to oppose such attempts and endeavour to preserve the Government in its Antient and Natural Purity.’37 The author of An Abstract pursued the theme with enthusiasm, excoriating Augustus and the Saxons amidst a turgid elaboration on Aristotle’s ideas on tyranny and sedition. He ended by quoting the attack of Marcus, Cato’s son, on Julius Caesar at the start of Addison’s Cato, when he calls for some hidden thunder ‘to Blast the Man/Who owes his Greatness to his Country’s Ruin!’38 Both Wharton and the author of An Abstract make it clear that in Poland the Caesar figure threatening the Republic was Augustus. The all-too-obvious target in England, however, was not George, but Sir Robert Walpole. An Abstract rails at how ‘the MONARCH or SENATE is wholly influenced by two or three men’, attacks the corrupt distribution of honours, and laments the insidious role of parties.39 While the numerous passages blaming Poland’s ills on the introduction of foreigners into the government and foreign troops into the kingdom could be seen as an oblique attack on the Hanoverians, the main thrust was directed at the king’s ministers. While this was an age-old tactic for deflecting charges of lèse majesté that was necessary given the harsh anti-sedition laws passed after 1715, the pamphlet attacks the operation of the English system, not the Hanoverian connection. Nevertheless, the sound common sense of George I and his decision at the start of his reign to work within the system, and to use 34

See Maria Edelson, ‘The Vehicle of allegory in “the Dyet of Poland” by Daniel Defoe’, Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria, 24 (1988), 33–51, and Wanda Krajewska, ‘Daniela Defoe, “The Dyet of Poland”’, Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, 1 (1965), 1–30. 35 [W.E.B.J.], An Abstract of the Troubles in Poland of the Year 1715 with Political Remarks and Reflections (London, 1723). 36 Ibid., p. 1; The True Briton, xiii, Monday 15 July 1723, p. 109. 37 Ibid., p. 110. 38 An Abstract of the Troubles, p. 34; Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis, IN, 2004), p. 8. 39 Ibid., pp. 4, 15.

209

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 209

22/08/2019 08:57

Robert I. Frost

Englishmen to manipulate it in his interest, meant that most Englishmen did not respond to the siren call of Jacobitism. The Hanoverian link was far from unproblematic, given that the legal restrictions that sought to keep their government entirely separate were impractical; especially in the conduct of foreign policy, the king could not keep matters entirely separate. Yet the legitimate fears of many in 1714 about Hanoverian influence were exaggerated. George may have arrived with ninety Hanoverian ministers, courtiers and servants, and while he ignored the clause in the Act of Settlement barring foreigners from advising him on English matters, in general he governed – as his son was to govern – Britain by the spirit if not the letter of the Act. After deciding in favour of the Whigs in 1714–16, George left the government of the country substantially – though by no means entirely, especially with regard to foreign policy – to his ministers, to the extent that Parliament was persuaded by Walpole to repeal the clause in the Act of Settlement barring him from leaving England without parliamentary permission. George was able to visit Hanover on six occasions after 1714, spending a total of thirty-three months there.40 George II made no secret of his preference for Hanover over Britain; as Dann pithily observes: ‘He loved Hanover and did not love England. He knew it, everybody knew it, and he knew that everybody knew.’41 It did not become a political issue, however, because despite his spectacular conflicts with his father in the 1720s, once he was king he followed his father’s example. He prudently kept Walpole at the helm despite his long-term hostility to George I’s ministers, and continually stressed to his Hanoverian ministers, anxious for greater British support in the series of wars between 1740 and 1763, that the British constitution did not allow it.42 The first two Georges provide a fine example of how to manage the myriad problems of a personal union, and how to carve out an important role for an unpopular foreign monarch within a consensual, parliamentary system. Their reigns were by no means easy, but the rhetoric of opposition during the frequent political crises should not disguise the underlying constitutional stability of the United Kingdom. The contrast with the Saxon rulers of Poland-Lithuania could not be starker. By 1717 Augustus II had blown the very real chances he had enjoyed in 1699 and 1710 of introducing political reform. He may have drawn back thereafter, but he did not follow the example of the Hanoverians. Augustus III may have spoken Polish and been far less assertive than his father, but he made little attempt to find a Polish Walpole to manipulate the political system to his advantage. He placed his faith firmly in his Saxon minister favourite Heinrich von Brühl, who cheerfully ignored many of the legal restrictions placed on the monarch, and interfered continually in Polish matters. The 40

Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 387–8, 398. Uriel Dann, Hanover and Great Britain, 1740–1760. Diplomacy and Survival (Leicester, 1991), p. 141. 42 Ibid., p. 137. 41

210

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 210

22/08/2019 08:57

HANOVER, SAXONY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF POLITICAL UNION

most eloquent symbol of the attitude to Polish law of both Saxon kings was the practice that arose after 1717, when it was decreed that no document touching Poland-Lithuania could be signed, and no discussions on matters Polish could be held, outside the territory of the Commonwealth. The letter of the law, but not its spirit, was obeyed: both Augustuses would stir themselves occasionally from Dresden, crossing the Polish border to Wschowa (Fraustadt) the nearest town in Wielkopolska, to meet senators and sign documents on Polish soil, before scuttling back to Saxony. It was no way to manage a personal union. Augustus III’s lack of ambition ensured that there was no need of hidden thunder to blast him from the throne, but the manifest shortcomings in the Commonwealth’s system of government were not addressed. By 1763 the rumblings came from outside, and his successor’s reign demonstrated how difficult reform had become. Three years earlier, George III had ascended the British throne declaring his pride in being a Briton. He was never to visit Hanover, and his reign was beset by all kinds of political problems. They were the problems of a great and flourishing imperial power, however, in which Hanover played little part. The Welfs coped admirably with the problems of composite monarchy. The Wettins did not.

211

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 211

22/08/2019 08:57

Index

Abercromby, Patrick  141–2 Aberdeen  55, 141, 146, 149, 151 absolutism  52, 66, 95, 96, 119, 184, 195, 202, 203, 206, 208 Acadia 128–9 Acres, Joseph  89 Act for Improving of Union  143 Act of Patronage  144, 146 Act of Settlement  3, 6, 7, 22, 50, 51, 84, 93, 101, 137, 196, 201, 204, 210 Act of Toleration  30, 101, 119, 144 Addison, Joseph  101, 104, 155, 175, 186, 187, 193–4, 209 Aldred, Jeremiah  90, 95–6 Alien Acts  138 American colonies, British  119–26, 128, 138–9, 149, 153, 154 Amsterdam  137, 149, 151, 183 Anderson, Hugh  170 Anglesey, Lord  13 Anglican/Anglicanism  17, 62–3, 68, 73, 78, 127, 142, 199 Catholicity  16, 60–3, 65–70, 73–81 clergy  6–7, 16, 62, 68, 71,72 orthodoxy  1, 73, 74, 75, 76 Toryism  61, 65 See also Church of England Anglo-Scottish Union  5, 6–7, 9, 25, 27–9, 136–7, 138–9, 143–4, 180, 181, 182–3, 188, 193–4, 196, 199 anti-union campaigns  27–35, 37, 17, 136 resentment of  8, 10, 25, 26, 37, 141–2, 144, 152 trade aspects  140, 147, 148, 149–50 see also Treaty of Union Anne, Queen  12, 56, 85, 92, 93, 94, 100, 129 accession  5, 11, 40, 91 death  2, 15, 34, 51, 52, 53, 59, 82, 84, 89, 99, 113, 155, 181, 196 ecclesiastical supremacy  63–4

reign of  19, 38, 41, 91, 104, 108, 122–3, 199 ecclesiastical matters  60–1, 68, 69–70, 78–9, 83–4, 85, 87 foreign policy  130, 132 instability during  2, 5, 202 Jacobites, attitude of  25–6, 137, 202 religious tolerance  6, 97–98, 127, 140 Tory ascendency  8, 11, 38, 106, 174 Scottish attitude toward  4, 137 succession after  3–4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, 50, 53, 83, 84, 91, 100, 200 Archer, John  94 Ath-na-Mullach 145 Atterbury, Francis  50, 53, 64, 108, 117, 155 Augustus II, king of PolandLithuania  194, 195, 197–9, 202, 203–7, 209, 210–11 pacta conventa  203, 204, 206 Augustus III, king of PolandLithuania  194, 195, 209, 210–11 Austria  4, 7, 11, 141, 163 see also War of the Spanish Succession Austrian Ostend Company  141, 163 Baltic  22–3, 132, 201 see also under trade Bank of England  53, 101–7, 109–11, 113–14, 121, 202 Bank of Scotland  147–8 Barbados 123 Barnard, Sir John  167, 169 Bayle, Pierre  186, 187, 189, 190 Bedfordshire  47, 57, 58 Bengal 150 Benson, George  98 Bentick, William, 2nd duke of Portland 166 Belfast 152 Berkeley, James, 3rd earl of Berkeley  134 Bill of Exclusion  49

212

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 212

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

Blackwell, John  111 Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures 147 Bombay 150–1 Book of Common Prayer  88, 92 Boston 152 Boyd, William, earl of Kilmarnock  34 Boyer, Abel  105–6 Boyse, Joseph  85 Bradbury, Thomas  82, 87–8, 89, 98 Brady, Nicholas  85 Brandon case  32, 34, 144 Brazil  16, 152 Brett, Thomas  69–73, 76, 78 Brewster, Sir Francis  125 Bridges, Ralph  15, 41 Bristol  56, 139, 148 British Empire  2, 16, 18, 19, 102, 136, 158, 177, 194, 203 North America  120, 124, 153 Patriots’ vision  17, 153, 166–7, 168, 174 Scots in  142, 148, 150, 151–2 Tory vision  128, 130, 131, 164 Whig vision  153, 165, 166, 174 Bromley, William  29 Browne, Simon  53 Brunswick-Lüneburg, Electoral House of see Electorate of Hanover and House of Hanover Brydges, James, duke of Chandos  15, 40, 43 Buchanan, Andrew  151, 152 Buckinghamshire  44, 45 Burnet, Gilbert  69, 76, 82, 187 Butler, William, duke of Ormonde  10, 14, 39–40, 46, 52, 109 Caesar, John James  86 Caleb D’Anvers, Sir (pseudonym)  159, 162 Calvinism  93, 142, 180 Cameron, Donald of Lochiel  152 Cameron, Evan  152 Cameronians  145, 183 Campbell, Archibald, earl of Islay  34, 138, 146, 150 Campbell, Duncan of Shawfield  146

Campbell, John, 2nd duke of Argyll  13, 138, 154 Campbells of Barcaldine  152 Canada  128–9, 171 Cannon, Robert  73 Canton 151 Carnegy, Fr James  28 Caribbean  136, 139, 164–8, 169, 172, 174 see also West Indies Carteret, Lord John  158, 159, 173 Cary, William  130 Centlivre, Susanna  2 Charles I 88, 93 Charles II 48, 61, 88, 119 Charles XII, king of Sweden  21–2, 206–7 Chesapeake  139, 151 Christiane Eberhardine, queen of Poland-Lithuania 198 Church of England  3, 12, 16, 48, 56, 60, 91, 92, 93, 98, 104, 119, 126, 140 Conformists  62, 66, 69, 72, 73, 76 Convocation  61, 73 doctrines  60, 62, 63, 70, 73–7, 79 Episcopalianism  61, 62, 68, 69–73, 74, 75 Erastianism  16, 60, 66–7 High Church  6, 15, 16, 55, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 73, 74, 76–7, 78, 89, 92, 98, 104 jurors  6, 62, 66, 140 Low Church  55, 76–7, 81, 88, 126 missionary societies  122, 126 non-jurors  6, 9, 62–3,64, 66, 68, 71–2, 76, 78–9, 88, 143, 199 royal supremacy  63, 65–7, 73, 75, 76 sacerdotalism  16, 60, 63, 68, 69, 71–3, 74–6, 78 see also Anglican/Anglicanism Churchill, John, duke of Marlborough  4, 6–7, 8, 9–10, 13, 31, 49 n. 38, 109, 130 Churchill, Sara, duchess of Marlborough 159 Civil Wars  1, 25, 26, 41, 42, 84, 90, 93, 203, 204, 207 Clavering, Ann  66

213

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 213

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

coffeehouses  83, 186 Colerus, Johannes  189 Collier, Nathaniel  91 Collins, Anthony  186, 188 commodities  125, 131, 133, 144, 149, 171 fish  144, 149, 151 flax  133, 149 iron  134, 149 linen  139, 147, 149, 152 naval stores  120, 125–7, 132–4 silk  125, 171 stock prices  53–5 sugar and rum  121, 139, 149, 151–2, 165–7, 168 textiles  147–8, 149 timber  149, 152 tobacco  121, 139, 149, 151, 152, 165, 167, 168 wine  144, 152 wool  124–5, 127–8, 133–4, 138, 139, 144, 147, 148, 149 Compton, Henry  126 Coney, Thomas  66 Connecticut  122, 124 n. 18 Connections between France and Great Britain  4–5, 9–10, 11, 43, 47, 92, 119, 126, 144, 168, 201 England and Scotland  4, 5, 7, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 141, 153, 160, 193 England, Scotland and the Dutch Republic  3, 7, 9, 17, 18, 141, 147, 149, 176, 177, 180–2 180–2, 185–92 Conti, duc de  197, 203 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury  186, 187, 188 Coote, Richard, earl of Bellomont, governor 126 Coram, Thomas  133–4 Cosby, William, governor  161 Country Party  26, 131, 137, 144, 156–7 Court Party  137–8, 144, 153 Covenanting Movement  144, 202 Cowan, Robert, governor of Bombay 150–1 Craggs, James  114 credit crisis (1709-10)  102–8

Cunningham, Alexander  189 Dąbski, Stanisław 197–8 Dalrymple, John, 2nd earl of Stair  34, 153, 160–1 Dalrymple, Sir David of Hailes  34 Darien  4, 16, 137, 138, 139 Declaratory Act  136 Defoe, Daniel  17, 41, 52–3, 94, 105, 108, 112, 208 Delafaye, Charles  116 Delaware  124 n. 18, 137 Denmark/Danes  22, 141, 149, 201, 206 Derby (borough)  44 Desmaizeaux, Pierre  186–7, 190, 191 Dissenters  2, 42, 53, 71–2, 73, 74, 75, 76, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97–8, 104, 119 Dodwell, Henry  68–9 Dorrington, Theophilus  49 Douglas, Charles, earl of Selkirk  34 Douglas, James, 2nd duke of Queensberry 143–4 Douglas-Hamilton, James, 4th duke of Hamilton  32, 144 See also Brandon case Dresden  194, 198, 211 Drummond, John of Qarrel  150–1 Dryden, John  187 Dumfries  31, 150 Duncan, Alexander  151 Dundee  141, 149 Dunton, John  97 East India Company  4, 53, 103–4, 106–7, 111, 114–15, 121, 138, 150–1, 163 East Indies  17, 138, 141 Edinburgh  16, 18, 26, 55, 144, 147, 149, 160, 189 anti-union riots  31, 33–4, 146, 162 Faculty of Advocates  33 Porteous Riot  146, 162 Edwards, John  87, 88 Effen, Justus van  175, 190, 191 Elbing 204–5 Electorate of Hanover  9, 21, 23, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202

214

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 214

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

Elizabeth Stuart of Bohemia, Electress Palatine  91, 180, 199 Ely, Thomas  87 England/English  21, 22, 87, 120–1, 137, 177 manufacturing  124, 126, 130, 133, 138–9, 148 religion  17, 18, 76, 81, 119, 199 see also Church of England succession  3, 4, 6, 11, 15–16, 136, 145, 200, 202 see also Connections between, Republic of Letters England, John  42 English Bill of Rights  3 English Navigation Acts  136, 138 English Treason Law  143 Enlightenment  18, 60, 68, 74, 175–6, 179, 189, 191, 194 Episcopalianism  10, 16, 17, 30, 150 Jacobitism, within  10, 140, 142, 151–2, 199 Religious influences, from  142–3 Scottish  17, 30, 144, 148, 150, 181, 199 See also under Church of England Erskine, Ebenezer  146 Erskine, James, Lord Grange  153, 160–1 Erskine, John  33 Erskine, John, earl of Mar  34, 153, 200 ’Erskine, P.’  32 Essex  44–5, 57, 58 Finch, Daniel, 2nd earl of Nottingham  23, 49, 209 fishing  121, 129, 130, 139, 147, 148–9, 183 Fitzgerald, Thomas  170 Fitzjames, James, duke of Berwick  36 Flemming, Jacob Heinrich  197, 203 Fleury, Cardinal  167, 168 Florida  165, 169 Forster, Nicholas  87 France/French  13, 86, 140, 141, 152, 178, 184, 186 alliance with  132, 201 Bourbons  1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 165, 167, 168 journals  175, 177, 185, 187, 190, 191

North America and the Caribbean, in  16–17, 127, 128–30, 139, 147, 165, 167, 168, 170–2 scholarly language, as  175, 177, 179, 182, 185, 186, 187, 190, 191–2 support of Stuarts  4–5, 7, 9, 25, 26–8, 47, 109, 136, 137, 200 wars against  104, 107, 202 see also War of the Spanish Succession see also under Connections with Franklin, Benjamin  162 Frederick II of Prussia  18 Frederick III of Brandenburg-Prussia 204–6 Friederich August, elector of Saxony see August II Furly, Benjamin  188, 191 Galloway 145 Gay, John  159 Gee, Joshua  133, 134, 166 Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover  see George I George, Prince of Denmark  92 George I  9, 20–1, 88, 91, 92–3, 198, 199, 200, 202, 209 accession  1, 2, 15, 17, 46, 47, 53–4, 56, 59, 83, 120, 131, 155, 174, 194, 196 Great Northern War, participation in 21–3 loyalty towards  47–8, 50–1, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 98 politicies under  9, 21–3,28, 39, 97, 108–9, 122, 124, 131–4, 200–1, 210 resistance against  20–1, 110–11, 112, 199 Scottish relations  29, 34, 36–7, 140 George II  14, 134, 137, 152, 169, 201, 210 George III  201, 211 Georgia  134, 142, 169–73, 174 Germany/German  127, 183, 184, 186, 188, 194, 195, 198, 199, 202, 205 Gibraltar 164 Gibson, Edmund  15 Glasgow  31, 139, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151–2

215

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 215

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

Shawfield Riot  146, 49 Glorious Revolution  1, 2, 8, 26, 38, 45, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 91, 176, 180, 181 Church aspect  68, 69, 76, 77, 92, 98, 119 Dissenters 98 resistance/obedience to  40–3, 47, 89, 94, 95 Scottish perspective  136–7, 140, 144 sermons on  82–3, 85, 86, 87–8, 89, 92, 94, 96–7, 98 Settlement  101, 104, 105, 109, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 122, 134, 135 state finances  101, 104, 105, 109 Tory interpretation  46–52, 59, 94 Whig interpretation  46–7, 56, 59, 63 Gloucestershire  57, 58 Godolphin, Sidney, earl of Godolphin  6–7, 8, 9, 31, 106, 130 Gordon, Thomas  166 Graham, James, duke of Montrose  34, 160 Grand Alliance  4–6, 8–10 Grand Tour  182–4, 188, 191 destinations 183–4 Great Northern War  21, 195 Greenshields, James  144 Gunpowder Plot  86–87 Habsburg  7, 10 Hacket, John, Dr  90 The Hague  4, 180, 183, 186, 187, 190, 191 Halifax, Lord  7, 13 Hamburg 137 Hampshire  44, 45 Hancock, John  62, 65 Hanover Electorate of  9, 21, 22, 142, 184, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200–2, 210, 211 House of  2–4, 6, 7, 10–13, 18–19, 38, 50, 51, 53, 63, 73, 78, 82, 83, 87, 98, 100, 142 Hare, Francis  41 Harley, Robert, earl of Oxford  7, 8, 11–13, 14, 29, 32, 41, 52–3, 105, 106–7, 108, 109

Heathcote, George  172 Heathcote, Sir Gilbert  105–6, 111 Hickes, George  9, 62, 72, 78–9 Hispaniola 164 Hoadly, Benjamin  64, 65, 79–80, 104–5 Holland, John  147 Holy Roman Empire  93, 178 Huguenots  17, 103, 126–7, 177, 179, 181, 185–7, 191 Hume, William  66 Hume-Campbell, Alexander, earl of Marchmont 160–1 Hume-Campbell, Hugh, Lord Polwarth 169 Hunter, Robert, Governor  126–7 Ireland  3, 16, 17, 18, 23, 36, 93, 100, 122, 136, 147, 154, 174, 188, 193 Isle of Man  139, 150 Jacobites/Jacobitism  3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15, 18, 56, 100, 101, 104, 109, 111, 116, 133, 157, 194, 199, 200, 201, 202, 210 ecclesiastical matters  16, 32, 63, 67, 74, 89, 92, 98 English 24–5 imperial adventuring  150–3 Irish  25, 26 n. 29, 64 risings  16, 18, 23, 24, 34, 37, 57, 84, 87, 92, 93, 112, 136, 141, 145, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 200 parliamentarians  13–4, 30 Scottish  4, 16, 25–8, 31, 33–5, 36–7, 137–8, 139, 140–2, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152–3 forfeitures  143, 145, 153 Highland  28, 35, 36, 142, 145 Lowland  28–9, 35, 145 Tories, associations with  11, 12, 17, 25, 34, 40, 52–3, 93, 109, 112, 117–18, 138, 164 Whigs, associations with  34–5, 145 Jamaica  140, 142, 151, 152, 166 James I and VI  87, 92, 93, 180, 196 James II and VII  4, 24, 41, 48, 49, 67, 89, 95–7, 101, 119, 121, 136, 181, 199, 202

216

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 216

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

’James III and VIII’ see Stuart, James Francis, Edward Jekyll, Joseph  163 Jennings, James  56 Jews  103, 183 John Casimir, king of PolandLithuania  196, 197 John Sobieski, king of PolandLithuania  194, 197 Johnson, John  62, 72 Johnson, Thomas  187–92 Jurors  5, 66, 143 see also under Church of England Keene, Benjamin  169, 173 Keith, James  18 Keith, Sir William  153, 173, 174 Kennett, White  15, 65, 78–9 Ker, John, duke of Roxburgh  34 Kirk of Scotland  30, 32, 140, 146, 147, 180, 199 Kirkcudbright  55, 150 Knaggs, Thomas  85–6, 88, 90 Laroche, John  172 Latin as scholarly language  177, 179, 185, 186, 187, 190–2 Laurence, Roger  62, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 78 Law, John  147 Law, William  80 Leclerc, Jean  186, 190 Leiden 182 Leith  16, 146, 150 Leslie, Charles  64, 66–7 Leslie, John, earl of Rothes  35 Levellers 145 Levier, Charles  189 Lithuania  see Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Liverpool  139, 148, 150 Livonia 206–7 Livorno  149, 151 Locke, John  1, 96, 181, 186 Lockhart, George of Carnwath  28, 142 London  16, 30, 36, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 55, 64, 65, 66, 70, 82,102, 104, 111, 142, 143, 186, 200

Patriots  160, 161–2 popular protests  102, 104, 107, 111, 112, 115 trade center  137, 138, 139, 147 148, 151 Louis XIV, king of France  2, 4–5, 7, 47, 197, 201–2 Louisiana  165, 170–1 Lutheranism  12, 93, 183, 199, 202 Lyttelton, George  167, 168 Mackenzie, George  141–2 Mackenzie, Kenneth, 5th earl of Seaforth 145 Mackie, Charles  189 MacRae, James  151 Madras 150–1 malt tax  10, 29, 138, 139, 144, 146, 149, 160 Mandeville, Bernard  155 Marchand, Prosper  186, 190 Martin, John  54 Martyn, Benjamin  171 Mary, Queen  40, 49, 82, 85, 91, 92, 131, 199 Maryland  122, 139 Massachusetts Bay  122 Mathews, Edward  48, 51 Maule, Harry of Kellie  29 Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki, king of Poland-Lithuania 197 Montrose  141, 146 Mollyprat, John  56 Morris, Lewis  161 Murray, Sir Alexander of Stanhope  153 Musgrave, Sir Christopher  3 Naturalisation Act  8, 126, 127 Netherlands/Dutch book industry  17, 185, 188–91 Calvinism 93 Enlightenment  175, 176 intellectual landscape  177–8, 190 religious sects in  183 scholarly language, as  175, 179, 185 universities  182, 185 see also under Connections between, Grand Tour, Republic of Letters, War of the Spanish Succession

217

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 217

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

New England  17, 121, 122, 125, 130 New Hampshire  122, 123, 128 New Jersey  123, 152 New York  122, 123, 126, 152, 161, 162 Newfoundland  121, 128, 129–30 Newman, Henry  1 news media  16–17, 46, 47, 155, 161, 164, 167, 170, 173, 182 Caledonian Mercury 162 De Hollandsche Spectator  175, 191 Journal Littéraire 187 New York Weekly Journal  162, 168, 170 Pennsylvania Gazette 162 The Craftsman  155, 159, 161–2, 165, 167 The Examiner  48, 51 Newton, Sir Isaac  190 Newton, William  77 Nicholson, Francis  129 Nine Years’ War  85, 136 nonconformity  9, 12, 41,62, 68, 69, 72, 74, 104 non-jurors  16, 142–3, 152, 200 see also under Church of England Nokes, William  65–6 Norfolk  57, 58 Norris, John  22 n. 8, 200–1 North America  16, 17, 119, 122, 167 see also under Patriot Party British colonies in  18, 119–28, 130, 135, 174 North Carolina  139, 142 Northumberland  44, 45, 57, 148 Norway 149 Norwich  57, 58, 60, 62 Nova Scotia  129, 133 Occasional Conformity Act  97 Oglethorpe, James  172 Oldmixon, John  53 Ottomans  194, 203, 204, 206 Palatine refugees  8, 126–8 Parliament British  6, 10, 16–17, 138, 171, 202 election 1708  137 election 1710  38, 40, 41, 43–6, 56–9, 106, 130

election 1713  11, 38, 40, 41, 43–6, 56–9 election 1715  38–9, 40, 41, 45–6, 56–9, 109, 131, 200 election 1722  116–17 election 1734  152, 154, 161 election 1741  154 House of Commons  3, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 42, 86, 106, 114, 115–16, 124, 125, 168, 172, 174, 200 House of Lords  3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13–14, 32, 34, 40–1, 42, 111, 144, 173, 174 legislation  10, 30, 50, 65, 85, 101, 102, 109, 112–16, 123–4, 134, 171–3 see also under respective acts Scottish representation  27–30, 144 supremacy over monarch  3–4, 22, 36, 49, 196–7, 210 English  136, 196 Irish  4, 136, 193 Scottish  4, 26–7, 31, 331 Patriot Party  155–8 British America  158, 161–2, 174 commerce policy  163–8, 171, 174 foreign policy  157, 162–5, 168–9, 171–3 imperial vision  158, 160, 161, 168, 174 public support  159, 161–2 Scotland  17, 152–4, 155, 158, 160–2, 174 urban protests  157 Pead, Deuel  86 Pelham-Holles, Thomas, duke of Newcastle  163, 170 Pennsylvania  153, 162 Persia 141 Peter I the Great  143, 205, 206 Philadelphia 152 Philip of Anjou  4 Pitt, William  168, 201 Plumer, Walter  168 Plymouth (North America)  122 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth  18, 193–6, 197, 198, 203–7, 208–11 diplomacy  205–6, 208 Saxon-Polish union  202, 203, 205

218

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 218

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

szlachta  195, 196, 197 Sejm (parliament)  194, 195, 196–7, 203–4, 205, 206–7, 208 Pope, Alexander  159, 187 Porteous Riot, Edinburgh  146, 162 Porto Bello  157, 164 Portugal  130, 167 Povey, Charles  47 Presbyterianism  17, 31, 140, 142, 144, 148, 150, 184, 199 anti-Unionism  30, 32, 35 dissenters  144–5, 146–7 clergy  30, 31, 33, 35 Pretender see Stuart, James Francis Edward Privy Council  3, 5, 6, 122, 123, 161 Protestants/Protestantism  2, 8, 12, 16, 18, 60, 63, 68, 85, 95, 100, 140, 144, 185, 199, 200, 208 Dissent  71, 74, 83, 91, 92, 97, 98 English national  18, 63, 80–1 monarchs  1, 3, 11, 15, 21, 50, 61, 63, 68, 86, 91, 93, 196 nonconformity  9, 41, 68, 72 orthodoxy  70, 78 refugees  8, 126–7 see also Huguenots Prussia  193, 201, 204, 207 Pulteney, Daniel  134, 158 Pulteney, William  158–61, 165, 166 Radziejowski, Michał  197, 204, 207 Reformation  60, 62, 63, 65, 74, 75, 76, 127, 178, 185, 197 Regency Act  6 Republic of Letters  17, 175, 176–7, 178–80, 181, 185–7, 190–2 Rhode Island  122 Riot Act  112, 116, 145 Roman Catholics/Catholicism  15, 86, 100, 119, 140–1, 143, 179, 183, 184, 197, 198, 200, 202 British monarchy  3, 196 Jacobites  25, 26 n. 29, 28 Poland-Lithuania  199, 202, 203, 204, 207 Scots College (Paris)  28 Stuarts  1, 3, 49, 84,101 Ross, William, Lord Ross  34

Rotterdam  137, 151, 180, 188, 190, 191 Rowden, John  89, 90 Royal African Company  121 Royal Bank of Scotland  147–8 Ruddiman, Thomas  160 Russia/Russian  137, 141, 143, 201, 205, 206 Muscovy  197, 203 Rutlandshire  44, 45 Sacheverell, Henry  8–9, 40–3, 46, 48, 55–6, 61, 62, 63–6, 69, 74, 81, 86, 89, 90, 104 Saxon-Polish union  202, 203, 205 Saxony  195, 199, 203, 204, 205, 207, 211 Schism Bill  14, 97, 98 Schulenburg, Engherard Meleusine von der  92, 198 Schütz, Baron Georg von  14 Scot, David  142 Scotland/Scottish  4, 16, 17–18, 25–37, 208 Act of Security  93 Convention of Royal Burghs  149 Episcopalianism  10, 17, 10, 140, 142, 144, 148, 150–2, 181, 199 merchants  139, 140, 148–9, 151 misgovernance 143–5 non-jurors  142–3, 151–2 Patriotism  137, 141, 142 Presbyterianism  17, 30–1, 33, 35, 140, 142, 144–5, 146, 148, 150, 199 see also under Anglo-Scottish Union, Connections between, Jacobites, Republic of Letters, Scott, William, of Ancrum  37 Septennial Act  112, 131 Seven Year’s War  201 Sewell, George  48 ’s-Gravesande, Willem  190 Shakespeare, William  187–8, 190 Shawfield Riot, Glasgow  146, 149 Shore, John  50, 51 Shropshire  44, 45 Sigismund III, king of PolandLithuania  196, 197 Simpson, William  151 slavery  17, 107, 165, 166, 167–8, 171, 174

219

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 219

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

Smalridge, George  65, 73 Smith, Adam  154 Smith, Elisha  88, 90, 96 smuggling  31, 139, 140, 143, 146, 147, 150, 152 Somers, John, Baron Somers  188 Sophia, Dowager Electress of Hanover  3, 5, 6, 11, 14, 50, 196 Sophia Dorothea, Queen  92, 198 South Carolina  139, 150, 171 South Sea Bubble  17, 102, 113–18, 134, 147, 151 South Sea Company  103, 106–7, 108, 113–18, 140, 163 Southern Department  105, 121–2, 131 Spain/Spanish  5, 130, 137, 184 America and Caribbean, in  4, 16–17, 107, 134, 139, 163, 164–73, 174 Anglo-Spanish War (1727)  163–5, 174 commercial relations  134, 140, 141, 163–4, 166 Empire  4, 7, 164, 178 Netherlands  4, 11, 178 War of Jenkins’ Ear  157, 169, 173 See also War of the Spanish Succession Spencer, Charles, 3rd earl of Sunderland  105, 114, 132, 188 Spinoza/Spinozism  179, 187, 189, 191 Spotswood, Alexander  130–1 St John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke  9, 10, 11–15, 39–40, 46, 52, 99, 109, 130, 155, 159, 164 St John, Pawlet  66 Stanhope, Charles  114 Stanhope, James, earl of Stanhope  11, 109, 131–4 Stanhope, Philip, earl of Chesterfield 158 Stanisław Leszczyńśki, king of Poland  194, 207 Steele, Richard  12, 13, 47, 175, 186 Stephens, William  85, 86, 94, 95 Stock Exhange  107, 111 Stratford, William  51 Stuart, James Francis Edward (The Pretender)  4–5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 36, 47, 49, 50, 52–3, 55–6, 59, 67, 109, 111, 199, 200

Stuart, House of  2–3, 9, 11, 15, 19, 27, 61, 64, 83, 84, 91, 140, 142, 180, 202 restoration of  9, 35, 91, 100, 101, 111, 137, 154, 200, 202 Sweden/Swedish  21–3, 36, 132, 134, 137, 141, 196–7, 201, 203, 206, 207 Swift, Jonathan  7, 9, 12, 17, 50, 103, 159, 160 Switzerland  184, 186 Swynfen, John  65, 74, 75 Sykes, Arthur Ashley  77 Synge, Edward  89 Talbot, William  47, 74, 85, 86 Tenison, Thomas  73 Thomson, James  163–4 Tindal, Matthew  60, 62 Toland, John  100–1, 104, 186, 187, 188, 190 Tory/Tories  11, 12–13, 155 ascendancy  8, 10, 22, 129, 130 Church/religion policy  9, 13, 16, 41, 54–6, 61, 65–6, 88, 98, 127 Country   97, 103 Court 97 decline  7, 28 economic policy  17, 103–7, 108–11, 112–13, 117–18 election campaign 1715  46–52, 56, 59 election results  8, 11, 39–41, 43–6, 56–8, 104, 106, 117 George I, relations with  22–3, 28 Glorious Revolution, attitude to  38, 40–2, 43, 48–9, 52, 59, 94–5, 98, 118, 136 government  7, 10, 12–13, 38, 105, 144, 174 imperial policy  120–2, 123–4, 128–31, 164 Jacobite relations  9, 11, 17, 25, 34, 53, 93, 109, 112, 117, 118, 138, 164 Patriots, relations with  157, 159–60 Scottish  29, 34 Succession, attitude to  6, 9, 16, 29, 40, 47–52, 52–6, 59, 200 Townshend, Lord Charles  109, 129, 132

220

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 220

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

trade  46, 103, 107, 113, 138, 140, 144, 149, 153, 163, 178 Atlantic  139, 146, 149, 152, 157, 174 Baltic  125, 127–8, 136, 149–50, 152 Board of Trade  121–8, 130–3 book trade  182, 185, 188, 191 colonial/overseas  16, 119–21, 123–6, 128–31, 133–4, 136, 138–9, 140, 141, 151–2, 163–7, 168, 170, 172 droving  139, 145, 152 slave trade  107, 140 tramp-trading  136, 150 Transylvania  196, 203, 205 Treasury  16, 105, 107, 111, 114, 122 Treaty of Seville  164–5, 166 Treaty of Union  6–7, 16, 19, 138–39, 143, 144, 147, 149 Treaty of Utrecht  2, 11, 22, 43, 109, 130, 139 Trimnell, Charles  60, 62, 65, 74 Turner, John  68, 75–6 Ukraine  193, 203 Ulster-Scottish networks  150–1 Veere 180 Venice  149, 184 Vernon, Edward  157 Vetch, Samuel  128–30 Villier, Edward, earl of Jersey  9 Virginia  130–1, 139, 150, 151, 152 Virginia Indian Company  131 Wade, George  146 Wake, William  75, 77 Walpole, Sir Robert  17, 39, 42, 114–17, 132, 134, 147, 153, 156–7, 158–60, 164, 165–68, 172–3, 200, 210 opposition to  17, 153–4, 162, 174, 209 Walpole, Horace  166 War of the Spanish Succession  4, 5, 10, 22, 26, 43, 85, 104, 108, 127, 129, 136, 138, 139, 144, 200 Austrian interests  4, 7, 11 Dutch participation  4, 7, 9–11, 15 French participation  4–5, 9–11, 13, 136 peace negotiations  7, 9–10, 130 West Indies  10, 16, 121, 128, 138,

141, 150, 163, 165, 174 see also Carribean Wharton, Thomas, Lord Wharton  11, 13, 209 Whigs  11, 13, 137, 158 ascendancy  7, 8, 23–4, 28, 38–9, 40, 54, 109, 129, 131, 155, 210 Agathelian  34, 153–4 Church policy  8, 16, 41, 55–6, 61, 63, 65, 73, 76, 77, 79–80, 83, 88, 97–8, 104 Country  97, 103, 117 Court  97, 103, 117 decline  8, 106 economic policy  17, 103–6, 107–8, 110–13, 116 election campaign 1715  46–52 election results  7, 38, 39, 40, 44–5, 56–8, 109, 116, 131, 200 Financial Revolution, role in  103–13, 116–18 foreign policy  132, 134, 165 Glorious Revolution, attitude to  38, 40, 42–3, 46–9, 51–2, 56, 59, 109, 118, 136 government  6, 7, 10, 24, 39, 112, 117, 174 imperial policy  17, 120–8, 131–5, 162, 163–7, 168, 171–3 Junto  3, 6, 10, 11, 108, 188 oligarchy  38, 155, 156, 158 Schism (1717-20)  132, 134, 158 Scottish  18, 29, 30, 31, 33–4, 35, 36, 55, 138, 145, 150, 151, 153, 160 Squadrone  26, 29, 30, 34–6, 137–8, 146, 153 Succession, attitude to  9, 12, 14, 15, 40, 46–7, 50–6, 59, 64, 98, 113 Supremacy  18, 118, 136, 137, 152, 154, 156, 159 Whitehaven  139, 152 William, duke of Gloucester  2, 4, 196 William III  3–5, 86, 88, 91, 92–94, 95, 98, 122–4, 140, 176, 180–1, 196 accession  15, 40–1, 49, 82, 87, 96 assassination plot  85–6 comparisons with George I see under George I

221

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 221

22/08/2019 08:57

INDEX

death  5, 26, 86 opposition to  85–6, 89 Williamite Revolution see Glorious Revolution Willimot, Robert  168 Willis, Richard  85, 86 Wilson, Walter  87 Władysław, king of Poland-Lithuania 196

Wodrow, Robert  32 Wood, William  165–6 Worcestershire  57, 58 Wotton, William  49, 50 Wright, Samuel  87 Wylie, Robert  32 Wyndham, Sir William  159, 169 Zenger, John Peter  162

222

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 222

22/08/2019 08:57

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY I Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Politics, Culture and Ideology Gabriel Glickman VIII England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion Joseph Cope IX Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 Matthew Jenkinson X Commune, Country and Commonwealth The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 David Rollison XI An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 223

22/08/2019 08:57

XII London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War Jayne E.E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 Brodie Waddell XIV Remaking English Society Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 Julia Rudolph XVI The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts Edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor XVII The Civil Wars after 1660 Public Remembering in Late Stuart England Matthew Neufeld XVIII The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited Essays in Honour of John Morrill Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell XIX The King’s Irishmen The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 Mark R.F. Williams XX Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions Edited by Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare XXI Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England Mark Hailwood XXII Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700 Fiona Williamson XXIII British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 John Cramsie

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 224

22/08/2019 08:57

XXIV Domestic Culture in Early Modern England Antony Buxton XXV Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 Craig Spence XXVI Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland Essays in Honour of John Walter Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington XXVII Commerce and Politics in Hume’s History of England Jia Wei XXVIII Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers XXIX Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England Caroline Boswell XXX Cromwell’s House of Lords Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642–1660 Jonathan Fitzgibbons XXXI Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson XXXII National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 Jenna M. Schultz XXXIII Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London Lena Liapi XXXIV Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall

9781783274499_txt_print.indd 225

22/08/2019 08:57

BRENT S. SIROTA is Associate Professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. ALLAN I. MACINNES is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde. Contributors: James Caudle, Megan Lindsay Cherry, Christopher Dudley, Robert I. Frost, Allan I. Macinnes, Esther Mijers, Steve Pincus, Brent S. Sirota, Abigail L. Swingen, Daniel Szechi, Amy Watson. Cover: Le Couronement Du Roy George Roy De la Grande Bretagne (The Coronation of King George, King of Great Britain), by Claude Dubosc after Louis Chéron, 1714 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Cover design by Greg Jorss.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire

Was the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty of Brunswick to the throne of Britain and its empire in 1714 merely the final act in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89? Many contemporaries and later historians thought so, explaining the succession in the same terms as the earlier revolution – deliverance from the national perils of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. By contrast, this book argues that the picture is much more complicated than straightforward continuity between 1688–89 and 1714. Emphasizing the plurality of post-Revolutionary developments, it explores early eighteenth-century Britain in light of the social, political, economic, religious and cultural transformations inaugurated by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and its ensuing settlements in church, state and empire. The revolution of 1688–89 was much more transformative and convulsive than is often assumed; and the book shows that, although the Hanoverian Succession did embody a clear-cut reaffirmation of the core elements of the Revolution settlement – anti-Jacobitism and anti-popery – its impact on various post-Revolutionary developments in Church, state, Union, intellectual culture, international relations, political economy and empire is decidedly less clear.

Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes

The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk I PI2 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA