Sea Change (43 page)

NON-JURORS

To regularize the clearly irregular arrangement of 1689 whereby the deposed King James II was succeeded jointly by his elder daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, Prince William of Orange, all office holders under the Crown were required to swear allegiance to the new dual monarchs. The four hundred or so clergy (including five bishops) who felt unable to do so because they had already sworn allegiance for life to James were expelled from their livings and described as Non-Jurors (i.e. persons who had not taken an oath). Death and recantation made steady inroads into this number. Those who continued to hold firm even after James's death in 1701 were suspected (at least by the Government) of latent if not actual Jacobitism. The most Jacobite prelate of all, however - Francis Atterbury - had no difficulty in swearing the oath, only in keeping it.

NORTHERN DEPARTMENT, SOUTHERN DEPARTMENT

The seemingly obvious and natural arrangement whereby one Secretary of State deals with Foreign Affairs and another with Home Affairs was not adopted by the British Government until 1782. Back in 1721/22, two Secretaries of State shared responsibility for Home Affairs (according to which of them was on hand at the time) but divided between them responsibility for relations with the so-called Northern Powers (Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Germany and the Netherlands) and the so-called Southern Powers (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Turkey), hence the names of the two departments. Seniority was vested in whichever of the Secretaries had been in post the longer. At the start of 1721, this was Earl Stanhope, by its end Viscount Townshend.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The Turkish Empire was named after its ruling Ottoman dynasty and was also known as the Sublime Porte, a French translation of the formal title of the central office of the Ottoman Government in Constantinople (now Istanbul). It had recently lost control of Hungary to the Austrian Empire, but still held sway throughout the Balkans, as well as in the Holy Land and North Africa as far west as Algeria. An ambassadorial posting to Turkey was not without its complications. Edward Wortley Montagu was despatched to Constantinople in August 1716. He and his wife (the celebrated poet and letter-writer, Mary Wortley Montagu) arrived the following spring after an arduous overland journey, only to be recalled within months because of a ministerial upheaval back home (the resignations of Walpole and Townshend). They ended up spending sixteen months in Turkey (most of them waiting for the new ambassador to arrive) and ten months on their way there or back. Wortley Montagu's successor, Abraham Stanyan, reached Constantinople in April 1718. He may well have anticipated his own recall when he learned of another ministerial upheaval back home three years later (the return to office of Walpole and Townshend).

THE PAPAL STATES

A large area of central Italy (corresponding more or less to the present-day regions of Latium, Umbria, the Marches and Emilia-Romagna) was reserved for the Pope in his capacity as a temporal sovereign. As such, the Papacy was not revealed in a flattering light, the region, beyond the city of Rome itself, being a byword for poverty and maladministration.

POCKET BOROUGHS

Whilst the county constituencies of the British Parliament represented local landowning opinion with a fair degree of accuracy, many of the borough constituencies had such limited electoral rolls and arcane electoral procedures that they were, to all intents and purposes, in the pocket of a local magnate. The most notorious example of this was Old Sarum, a deserted Iron Age hill-fort near Salisbury, whose two Members of Parliament were returned by an electorate of three, tenants of Thomas Pitt, whom, not surprisingly, they unfailingly elected. Many such boroughs were transparently for sale. Hence Robert Walpole's brothers, Horatio and Galfridus, as well as his son, Edward, all sat at one time or another for the Cornish borough of Lostwithiel, controlled by a venal local landowner named Johns, who charged £20 per vote and a modest £300 for his travelling expenses on election day. (A very rare example of a pocket borough somehow slipping out of the pocket came in the 1722 general election, when Carr, Lord Hervey, son and heir of the Earl of Bristol — and father, persistent rumour had it, of Robert Walpole's youngest son, Horatio — failed to be re-elected for Bury St Edmunds, which his father had donated to him, apparently by reason of drink-sodden negligence. Hervey died the following year and it is not clear whether he was ever sober enough in the interim to appreciate his loss.)

THE SOUTH SEA COMPANY

The South Sea Company originated in the ambitions of a group of businessmen headed by John Blunt to turn the Sword Blade Company (which had originally manufactured and sold sword blades but was, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, serving sharper purposes) into a bank rivalling the Bank of England, whose directors had been profiting handsomely from underwriting the currency since its foundation in 1694. Their hopes of doing so relied on the favour of Robert Harley, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the summer of 1710 and was immediately faced with the problem of how to manage unsecured war debts of £9 million. Blunt was ready with a solution, which Harley eagerly adopted: the unfunded loans were to be converted into shares in a new South Sea Company, which would hold the monopoly on trade with Spain's American colonies. The company came formally into existence in September 1711, with Harley (by then Lord High Treasurer and Earl of Oxford) as Governor, the Sword Blade group prominent among the directors and one Robert Knight appointed to the post of chief cashier. Under the Treaty of Utrecht, which finally brought the War of the Spanish Succession (q.v.) to a close in March 1713, the company was granted a thirty-year contract for the supply of slaves to the Spanish colonies (the Asiento). They never actually managed to turn a profit on this business, but at political manoeuvring they knew no master. Oxford's fall from power and King George I's accession were smoothly accommodated, with the King and the Prince of Wales replacing Oxford as joint Governors. By 1719, Blunt and Knight had the entire National Debt of £31 million — and the consequent eclipse of the Bank of England — in their sights. This seemed to be rendered certain by the passage of the South Sea Bill in April 1720, the rapid conversion of most of the Debt into South Sea shares and the vertiginous rise in the value of those shares. But what went quickly up came even more quickly down. It came to be understood that even political corruption — the true basis of the entire scheme — had its limits. And there really was nothing quite as safe as the Bank of England.

THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

As the seventeenth century drew towards its close, the dominant preoccupation of the European powers was how to carve up the Spanish Empire on the death of the ailing and heirless Spanish King, Carlos II. In October 1700, Carlos nominated his distant cousin Philippe of Anjou, grandson of King Louis XIV of France, as his successor. A month later, Carlos died. Great Britain, the United Provinces and the Austrian Empire were pledged never to allow the union of the French and Spanish crowns and formed a Grand Alliance in September 1701 to secure Spain's possessions in the Netherlands and Italy for Austria. War raged in Spain, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries for the next twelve years. When the war ended, in 1713, it did so very much on the Grand Alliance's original terms, with a guarantee that Philippe and his successors would never claim the French throne. An historically very significant feature of the peace treaty was that the British seizure of Gibraltar in 1704 was rendered permanent.

THE STONE

Why so many men and women of the eighteenth century — Robert Walpole among them — should have succumbed to stones and gravel in the kidneys and bladder is something of a mystery. Diet seems the likeliest answer. Most people were probably chronically dehydrated, the drinking of water being a hazardous undertaking at the best of times. Dehydration is now thought to be the primary cause of stone formation. The fashion for coffee consumption can have been no help in this regard. And the widespread use of chalk to whiten flour must also have played its part. The only effective treatment was lithotomy — surgical removal of the stone, without the benefit of anaesthetic. The odds against survival were long. As Walpole discovered, however, the odds against surviving such supposed cures as lithontriptic lixivium -the potion Dr Jurin poured down his throat in March 1745 — were even longer.

SWANIMOTE COURTS

Forest law was a thicket of ancient offences and penalties governing land use and peat, timber and game rights in the Royal Forests. It was exercised, inconsistently and irregularly, by local Swanimote Courts (the name Swanimote meaning literally a meeting of swains). Their judgments could only be enforced if confirmed at a trial before the Chief Justice in Eyre (in Eyre being a judicial term similar to Errant, indicating an itinerant circuit court function). No Chief Justice in Eyre had actually sat in Windsor Forest since 1632. This did not render the Swanimote impotent, however. It could detain offenders, confiscate their guns, dogs and traps, and bail them to appear before the next Justice Seat in Eyre (whenever that might be) on ruinous recognizances. Paying its fines tended to be a better course to follow. And fines there were aplenty in Windsor Forest during 1721/22, discontent at the acquisition of Forest land by Whig grandees being at its height. The Windsor Swanimote was allowed to lapse in 1728 when it began exercising its power of acquittal rather too freely for Walpole's liking.

THE UNITED PROVINCES

Those provinces of the Netherlands which successfully rebelled against Spanish rule in the sixteenth century (known today simply as the Netherlands) formed an independent federation, governed by representatives of the provinces meeting at The Hague as the States General. In practice, Holland, the largest and richest province, determined national policy, articulated by its Grand Pensionary, selected from the pensionaries of the States of Holland. They had deliberately left the office of Stadholder vacant at the death of William III in 1702, preferring a collective leadership. In the course of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces won a reputation as Europe's most orderly, prosperous and civilized nation. (In 1670, Amsterdam became the first city in the world to introduce a truly effective system of street lighting.) Crime was minimal, poverty hard to find. But nothing lasts for ever. By 1721/22, the country's power and wealth had begun to decline — even though most of its inhabitants probably did not know it.

THE V.O.C.

Spanish embargoes on trade with the Mediterranean drove the Dutch to develop the East Indies market far faster than either England or Portugal, their principal competitors in the region. To regulate this market, the States General established in 1602 a United East India Company - the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. The company was federally constructed, with directorships allocated to the provinces in proportion to their capital contributions, and was delegated the power to maintain troops, garrisons and warships, govern the inhabitants of the East Indian colonies (comprising most of what is now Indonesia) and treat with local potentates as it saw fit. The V.O.C. became, in a sense, a state within a state, albeit one exercising its power on the other side of the world. It reaped huge rewards as the years passed, supplying Europe with tea, coffee, spices, porcelain and textiles. But it also incurred serious losses, with one or two shipwrecks every year. Those wrecked vessels, lying still in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, are ironically all that remains today of the V.O.C.'s once vast and mighty fleet. The company itself was dissolved in 1795 and not a single example of the many hundreds of its vessels that did not sink has survived.

APPENDIX C Map

The map overleaf illustrates the political structure of western Europe in 1721/22, marking places and states featured in the story. (It should be noted that the mosaic of German states is a simplified version of the bewilderingly complex and virtually unmappable reality!)