Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (78 page)

The Oxford Ministry, 1710–14

Queen Anne raised Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, to power in order to save her from the “five tyrannizing lords” of the Junto. She expected him to assemble a ministry which would include the best men from both parties. This was consistent with Oxford’s own political philosophy of moderation, but it was made difficult by the fact that almost no Whigs supported the peace; and that the elections of 1710 and 1713 were Tory landslides. As a result, those few Whigs who sat in his government were increasingly unreliable in their support; while the Tories, led by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), demanded their removal. In short, Oxford walked a tightrope, trying to please the queen by hanging on to Whigs while trying to placate the vast Tory majority in the House of Commons by appointing Tories. As we have seen, he successfully negotiated that tightrope on the issues of peace and war. The issues of religion and the succession would cause him to fall off.

The Tories elected in 1710 and 1713 wanted to strengthen the Church of England and weaken Dissent. Specifically, they wanted to revive the power of the bishops and the Church courts, to establish new Anglican parishes in expanding cities, and to roll back the toleration. This last was a difficult personal issue for Oxford because, though associated with the Tories, his ancestry was Dissenting. Even Anne viewed the Tory program as needlessly divisive. But both realized that the Tories demanded such legislation as the price for their support of the peace. In April 1711 they agreed to the passage of a law to build 50 London churches; in December, more ominously, to one banning occasional conformity. In 1714 Parliament went further still, passing the Schism Act. This piece of legislation forbade Dissenters from teaching or keeping schools. That meant that the Anglican majority could shut down every Dissenting academy in the country, thus preventing Nonconformists from educating their children anywhere but at home. The last two acts were designed, like the old Cavalier Code, to drive them from public life and, eventually, out of existence. Because so many Dissenters were Whigs, these laws would also serve to reduce Whig electoral power. Not surprisingly, by 1714 virtually every Whig in government office had resigned or been sacked. This left Anne as much a prisoner of the Tories as she had once been of the Whigs.

But the issue which destroyed Anne’s confidence in Oxford, and thus the ministry itself, was the succession. Queen Anne had been in poor health for most of her reign, but the question of the succession became especially pressing after the winter of 1713–4, when she came dangerously close to death. As we have seen, Parliament had already named her successor, the head of the House of Hanover, via the Act of Settlement. Following the death of the Electress Sophia in May 1714, the heir designate was Georg Ludwig, elector of Hanover. While Georg had Whig support, the Whigs did not control the Commons. The Tories, who did, were split between those who supported the Hanoverian succession and those who secretly hoped for the restoration of the Pretender, Prince James. In order to maintain his majority in the Commons, Oxford had to keep both sides of the Tory party happy, usually by making conflicting promises to each. Moreover, in order to assure his position in the next reign, he negotiated with both men: like Warwick, Northumberland, or Robert Cecil before him, Oxford sought to be a kingmaker.

By 1714, the pressures of maintaining his delicate balancing act began to wear on Oxford. Anne, not one to be trifled with, complained to her cabinet that

he neglected all business, that he was seldom to be understood, that when he did explain himself, she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed, that he often came drunk, that lastly to crown all he behaved himself towards her with ill manner, indecency, and disrespect.
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What Anne meant by this last was that in the summer of 1714 she discovered Oxford’s double game with the Elector and the Pretender. In an emotional meeting at Kensington Palace on July 27, she demanded the lord treasurer’s staff from the earl. That night, Anne was overheard, through the bedchamber door, to be weeping. We will never know the cause: she may have been weeping for her broken friendship with Oxford; she may have been weeping for the end of royal initiative. That is, Anne knew that, within days, she was going to have to hand her government over, either to a Whig, like Marlborough, or to the Tory leader, Viscount Bolingbroke. Either way, she would be entirely in the hands of one political party. Parliamentary sovereignty left her no other course. Her personal wishes as queen were now secondary.

In the end, Anne never had to make this choice. On the morning of July 30 she seems to have suffered a stroke, perhaps the result of the tension produced by these events. Immediately upon being notified by the ladies of the Bedchamber in waiting, Whigs, Tories, Hanoverians, Jacobites all flocked to Kensington Palace, the succession and, indeed, the constitution itself at stake. The queen’s leading advisers consulted among themselves and recommended to the dying sovereign that she name as her lord treasurer Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, a moderate Whig and one of the “immortal seven” who had signed the invitation to the prince of Orange in 1688. Though popular with Tories, no one doubted that Shrewsbury would use his power to ensure the proclamation and accession of Georg Ludwig. According to one story, as her counselors guided her hand, containing the staff, toward Shrewsbury’s, Anne said, “use it for the good of my people.”
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The story is apocryphal; but the good of her people had usually been her guiding principle. Her actions at this moment assured the Hanoverian succession and preserved the post-revolutionary constitution. There remained one last act: Queen Anne, the last Stuart sovereign of Great Britain and Ireland, died at 7:45 on the morning of August 1, 1714. A new political world had dawned.

Conclusion: Augustan Polity, Society, and Culture, ca. 1714

Imagine a woman, born around 1630 under the government of King Charles I and the Anglican religious ascendancy. Imagine that she still lives in 1714, having beaten the odds to grow to the ripe old age of 84. As a child, she might have heard her parents and grandparents (if hers were among the few living grandparents) reminisce about the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, and political and religious strife under Queen Elizabeth and King James. She would almost certainly have heard her parents complain about hard economic times. In the 1640s, while she was a teenager, her father and brothers might have gone off to fight in the Civil Wars. At the end of the decade she would have witnessed the dismantling of the national Church and the execution of her king. In her twenties, during the 1650s, she would have been ruled by a series of unstable governments and exposed to a wide variety of political and religious ideas. In 1660, at the age of 30, she would have experienced the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the Church of England, but thereafter, during her middle age, heard of unsuccessful foreign wars, domestic plots, and increasing tension between king and Parliament over money and religion. Then, in 1688, at the end of her fifties, she would have lived through a second revolution in Church and State. This would be followed in her old age by two decades of almost continuous warfare abroad and bitter party strife at home. Now, at the end of her life, she was to be ruled by a new, foreign king. After a life lived through times so interesting, she might have been forgiven for doubting that he and his advisers could bring England peace, stability, and prosperity. And yet, that is precisely what King George I (reigned 1714–27)
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and his advisers managed to accomplish.

Hanoverian Political Stability

The Treaty of Utrecht, the death of Queen Anne, and the safe accession of the new king from Hanover solved problems that had tormented the British state and its citizens for over a century. After 1714, and particularly after a Jacobite rebellion in Scotland fizzled in the following year, the related questions of sovereignty and the succession were settled once and for all: Britain was to be a constitutional monarchy ruled by Parliament’s nominee, the nearest Protestant heir, George of Hanover. Protestantism would remain the official religious orientation of the British State, as represented by the Anglican Churches of England and Ireland and the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland. Thanks to Marlborough’s victories and the benefits reaped from the Treaty of Utrecht, Britain would continue to be a European and a world power and its economy would prosper as never before. Indeed, the Hanoverian connection would require greater involvement in Europe, just as Britain’s expanded colonial empire and economy would necessitate more frequent activity abroad. This would, in turn, continue to require a strong military and naval profile, which meant, further, that Parliament and the government funds would have to continue to keep the Crown well supplied with money. Since King George, his ministers, and his parliaments all shared Whig sympathies, there was to be little debate on these issues.

As heir designate, Georg Ludwig had taken a keen interest in British politics, and he had concluded that only Whigs could be trusted to support the Hanoverian succession and continued involvement in continental Europe. This conviction was only confirmed when, in the autumn of 1715, a small band of Scottish Jacobites led a brief and unsuccessful revolt against Hanoverian rule, giving Whigs the opportunity to smear Tories as Jacobite rebels. Even before the “Fifteen,” as it came to be called, King George began to purge Tory officeholders and appoint Whigs at the center and in the localities. This facilitated a Whig landslide in the general election of 1715. The Whigs also won back the leadership of the Lords when George obligingly created 14 new Whig peers. The Whigs’ overwhelming parliamentary majority enabled them, in 1716, to pass the Septennial Act. This legislation repealed the Triennial Act of 1694 and instead required that a new parliament be elected only every seven years. This guaranteed that the Whigs would have seven years to further establish themselves in power and to ensure that they would be victorious in the next election. It also meant that individual electoral contests would be less frequent, more important individually, and so more expensive to mount – thus freezing out the middling and minor gentry who formed the backbone of the Tory party. This, combined with the Hanoverian bias against the Tories, would ensure that Whigs dominated the political world through the reign of George’s son, George II (1683–1760; reigned 1727–60).

But which Whigs? The leaders of the Junto’s generation died off soon after Anne did, leaving younger Whigs to fight a bitter internal struggle for control of the party and government. That struggle was especially significant because, unlike his Stuart predecessors, George was not particularly interested in running the country himself. He was, after all, 54 years old when he ascended the British throne. He spoke little English, and was far more concerned with the affairs of tiny German Hanover, which he continued to rule as elector. Historians have recently demonstrated that George was more active in British affairs than used to be thought, especially military and foreign policy. Nevertheless, he needed a “premier minister” to whom he could delegate the management of Parliament and the details of both domestic and foreign affairs.

The eventual winner of this competition was Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). Knighted in 1725, Walpole was a Whig gentleman from Norfolk. He had served as Anne’s secretary at war and treasurer of the navy from 1708 to 1711, and was the Junto’s point man in the Commons during the Oxford ministry. After a period in opposition, Walpole returned as first lord of the Treasury in 1721 following his successful handling of a financial scandal known as the South Sea Bubble which had conveniently brought down his rivals.
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Sir Robert would retain this position for 21 years. Walpole is usually thought of as the first modern prime minister and he still holds the record for the length of his premiership. More to our purposes, he presided over a quarter-century of political stability which put an end to many of the problems that had wracked English public life for most of this book. How did he do it?

He did it, first, by the careful distribution of government patronage. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, several decades of war and colonial acquisitions had expanded English government tremendously. Besides the pensions, real estate, and honors the Crown had to give away, it controlled a central bureaucracy of over 12,000 offices. King George allowed Walpole free play to distribute the government’s patronage so as to increase his following. If a peer or an MP voted as Walpole bid, he might receive a government job; or a good Church living for a younger son in the clergy; or a promotion for a nephew in the army; or similar favors for his provincial friends and neighbors – all of which added to the power and prestige of that peer or MP in his home county. On the other hand, if he voted
against
Walpole’s government, he might lose his office, be powerless to assist his family and friends, and acquire the reputation of being “out of the loop.” This policy resulted in a cadre of about 75 peers in the House of Lords (including a nucleus of loyal Whig bishops, see below) and about 150 MPs in the House of Commons who always supported the prime minister no matter what their personal feelings. Indeed, they were so reliable that contemporaries began to call them “the Old Corps.” Thus, Walpole did much to master the old problem of central versus local control.