The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (5 page)

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⁵
Quoted in Dorothy Marshall,
English People in the Eighteenth Century
( London, 1956), 65.

⁶
Plumb,
Men and Centuries
, 9-14.

and perhaps relief from taxes on land. Progress in transportation and commerce and in manufacturing. was appreciated by those whose lives were affected, and perhaps ignored by the mass of men in the countryside who because remote were unaffected. But other sorts of changes and reforms were resisted with an obstinacy that reveals how profoundly traditional, conventional, and conservative English society was in the eighteenth century.

Public measures at the middle of the century afford a variety of examples of the bias against change. In 1751, Parliament had received a bill for naturalizing foreign Protestants; it reached a committee before protests from the City of London and elsewhere persuaded Henry Pelham, first lord of the Treasury, to abandon it. Two years later a similar effort was made on behalf of Jews. This "Jew Bill" earned an incredible notoriety despite its limited objectives. Its central provisions provided that Jews might be naturalized by private acts from which the words "on the true faith of a Christian" had been omitted from the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, which were still required. A similar statute had been accepted in the American colonies without opposition. The English bill slipped through an apathetic Parliament only to be repealed the next year after an immense public outcry. A careful Pelham tried to explain that only wealthy Jews would be able to afford a private bill and that the capital investments by this minority would add to public revenue. These restrained and reasonable arguments made no headway against ingrained prejudice and religious conservatism.
⁷

Religious conservatism was surely involved in resistance to another reform at about the same time -- the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in England in 1752. Before this change the new year began on March 25 in England; and the Julian calendar used in England lagged eleven days behind the Gregorian, long since adopted in continental Europe. The disparity was awkward for anyone who had anything to do with peoples outside of England, with merchants and diplomats suffering the greatest inconvenience. The Earl of Macclesfield, president of the Royal Society, threw the prestige of science behind the bill which would

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bring English practice into conformity with the eighteenth century's, and an uneasy Parliament went along. The new act remained in force, but not without Pelham and other leaders of Parliament hearing ugly cries about profanation of the saints' days, which of course were altered by the new calendar. "Give us back our eleven days" -- the days between September 2 and 14 had been eliminated-expressed the popular mood and popular enlightenment perfectly.
⁸

Attempts to reduce the consumption of gin ran into another kind of resistance. In 1736 Walpole had forced prohibitive duties on distillers and retailers of gin. Cheap gin had corrupted business, destroyed families, and seriously weakened lower class life. The Gin Act, well intentioned but poorly designed and impossible to enforce, hardly slowed the rate of consumption and the consequent demoralization of the poor. Men Walpole left office five years later, gin flowed as easily as ever. Hogarth
Gin Lane
( 1751) provided a bleak picture of its effects on ordinary people in London. Parliament acted again soon after, with more success though with no more popular support.
⁹

Beneath these curious episodes involving naturalization, calendars, and gin was a powerful conservatism that suggests that they were in no way aberrations, but rather characteristic of the deepest instincts of the culture. The excesses of the seventeenth century -- antinomianism, fanaticism, and a bloody civil war -- had not left a legacy of moral weariness or social fatigue, but they had created a suspicion of inspiration, extravagance, and innovation -- especially, though not exclusively, in day-to-day behavior, religion, and politics. There were, of course, cranks and fanatics in England throughout the eighteenth century, and there were political radicals, but all these sorts were outsiders, butting their heads against a social order resistant to all but the familiar, the known, and the conventional.

For the English air was no longer full of ghosts and sprites, furies and fairies, witches and goblins. It did not nourish the prophets and sectarians who had sought to make the world over in the full tide of the Spirit a century earlier. The process of clearing the atmosphere had begun while it was still full of fancies, and while men still dreamed extravagant dreams of the New Jerusalem incarnate in England. The dreams had given some men the strength to cut off the head of Charles I and to establish a holy commonwealth. Inspired, others drew up marvelous plans for the new order.
But in this heady atmosphere, still others

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shrank and drew back -- none with more skepticism toward romances and delusions than Thomas Hobbes.

Perhaps with more hope than realism it was Hobbes who, in 1651, consigned superstition to the past and who assumed that rationality distinguished the mind of his day. In the past, now happily departed according to Hobbes, men explained invisible agencies by calling up "a god, or a Divel." Their own mental quirks and events in nature which seemed inexplicable were explained, and men had "invoked also their own wit, by the name of Muses; their own ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own lusts, by the name of Cupid, their own rage, by the name of Furies."
¹⁰

But such explanations had long since lost their power to persuade. Reason and light apparently governed the eighteenth century, along with the down-to-earth, the solid, the dependable, the commonsensical realities.

The general understanding in the eighteenth century about the nature of government and what it should do reflected faithfully the bias of this conservative culture. There was nothing remotely resembling the present-day idea that government ought to promote the general welfare and the public interest. Of course eighteenth-century government was not hostile to these purposes, but something rather different -- much more limited -- was expected of it. Government existed to maintain "the king's peace," as the common law and ancient tradition had it. This notion implied more than keeping order, more than catching lawbreakers and punishing them; it involved taking action, or remaining inactive if that were necessary, to see that things went on pretty much as they always had. Maintaining the king's peace constituted the core of domestic policy; foreign policy ordinarily entailed the analogous provision for national security. In practice, the one abiding problem in foreign affairs before the American Revolution was the question of Hanover, which Britain had taken on when the first of the Georges was crowned.

All government was the king's. From the lowest official in the parish to the greatest minister, service undertaken was in the name of the monarch; it was personal, not institutional, service, though of course it was in fact institutionalized in an elaborate and clumsy structure of government. At the top the king himself took an active part.
He was

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the leader of the executive, those ministers who exercised the powers of the Crown. Within limits the king chose the ministers who served him -- the limits being essentially the willingness of the leaders of Parliament to combine with others to do the government's work, and their ability to command the support of the membership of the two houses. No combination -- nor individual -- could be forced on the king, and great leaders commonly did not refuse the monarch's request that they put together a ministry to do his bidding, provided, of course, that they could work with others acceptable to the king.

The great source of leadership, and ultimately of power, in government was the House of Commons, a body of some 558 members. Eighty of these were sent from the counties, the universities sent four, and the remaining sat for the cities and boroughs. Why men wished to act in Commons reveals much about English politics. Few apparently came with great ideas about policy or even with the purpose of serving some organized social or economic interest. Rather, they came for power and status, or to serve some local purpose, or because their families expected them to.

With most members animated by purposes so limited, and with the nation agreed that no fundamental issues existed, it is not surprising that politics usually came down to the question Charles Dickens puts in the mouth of Lord Boodlein
Bleak House
: "What are you going to do with Noodle?" Bewildered by the shifting alignments of the day and sorely put to find a place for every deserving man, Lord Boodle saw the awful choices facing the Crown in forming a new ministry should the present government be overthrown, choices which "would lie between Lord Goodle and Sir Thomas Doodle -- supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the Leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him the Presidency of the Council: that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him in the Woods and Forests, that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost and gone to pieces . . . because you can't provide for Noodle!"
¹¹

The Lord Boodles of the political order rightfully attributed great

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importance to the distribution of offices; the system after all depended upon providing for one's friends and followers. Boodle, of course, overestimated the size of the catastrophe that would overtake the nation should Noodle go unprovided for -- the country would not go to ruin, but the ministry might, and given the myopia endemic to this sort of politics, the temptation to regard the ministry as the nation is understandable.

In fact, if parliamentary government only imperfectly represented the nation, it did manage to contain, if not always to express, the interests of landed society. No matter how severe the shuffling of ministers and governments, this capacity remained intact. William Pitt, one of the rare men of ideas who played the game, entered the government in 1757 and left it in 1761; Newcastle held various offices over a fortyyear period. His departure a year after Pitt's did not shake the system. The same men, or the same sorts of men, popped up, played their parts, passed off, and perhaps reappeared, but the government continued to do about the same kinds of things, as did the Parliament. What Parliament did so far as what we would call public policy was not very much. It was not the ruler, nor a source of energy and activity impressing its will upon the nation. The nation was best served when left alone and liberty would flourish if unattended to by meddlers in Parliament. The landed interests took care of themselves and thereby served the nation and the king.