The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (54 page)

This story, which quickly made the rounds of the court, was regarded as outrageous, that an Englishwoman and the wife of a great English landowner should be treated so by a mere Hanoverian. There was considerable sympathy and delight when it was heard that the enterprising Lady Nithsdale, not a whit discomfited by her ordeal, had picked herself up, wiped her tears away and hotfooted it to the Tower. With her ladies’ maid, and another woman, she had persuaded a guard who was softer-hearted than the king to let her in to say her goodbyes to her husband. The guard, made jolly with port that she had thoughtfully brought with her, scarcely noticed that when the attractive Lady Nithsdale left, she actually had three female companions with her rather than the two with whom she had arrived. As dawn broke, the sleeping figure of Lord Nithsdale was revealed to be a mere bundle of rags. Thanks to his wife’s daring, that evening he was drinking wine in the sweet air of France, while the heads of his unluckier companions were no longer attached to their bodies.

Though the Old Pretender remained alive he now had to find a safe berth other than his old home, France. The regent Orleans with an ailing boy-king Louis XV on his hands and with designs on the throne himself was anxious to have the Hanoverian government as his ally. If Louis XV died he would need English backing to claim the French throne, against its nearest heir the French King of Spain, Philip V. And in fact it was in Spain that the pretender found a warmer reception for his cause. It tallied perfectly with the Spanish chief minister Cardinal Alberoni’s burning desire to resurrect Spain’s former prestige as a world power which had been destroyed by the Treaty of Utrecht. The pretender was Spain’s chance to get her revenge on the English.

At the battle of Cape Passaro in 1718 the English had once again stymied Spain’s plans for supremacy in the Mediterranean, where her soldiers had seized Sardinia and Sicily, by defeating the Spanish fleet. Alberoni was so angry about Cape Passaro that he retaliated by taking up the cause of the pretender. He interested King Charles XII of Sweden in the plot, who was furious with George I for buying the ex-Swedish duchies of Bremen and Verden from Denmark. Charles XII was one of the greatest generals of the age, and if he had appeared in the Highlands at the head of an army the Hanoverians would really have had something to fear. But once again destiny seemed determined to keep George on the throne, because Charles XII died quite suddenly before this new plan got off the drawing board. Alberoni’s last attempt to put the pretender on the throne was in 1719 when 5,000 men under the command of Ormonde sailed for Scotland, but only 300 men reached her shores and they were soon defeated at Glenshiel.

The scare the Fifteen had produced resulted in a flurry of legislation to stabilize matters by strengthening the government. The Septennial Act increased the Whigs’ hold on power by providing that henceforth elections were to be called every seven years instead of every three; it lasted until 1911. One of George I’s principle secretaries of state, General Stanhope, veteran of the last war, by contriving a new Quadruple Alliance of France, England, Holland and the emperor Charles VI forced Spain to the peace table. Removal of the troublesome Alberoni was one condition England laid down. Without Alberoni’s patronage the pretender was once again condemned to roam Europe, looking in his usual rather halfhearted fashion for sponsors for his great enterprise. He at least had the consolation of having recently fathered a little boy, Prince Charles Edward, so the Stuart direct line would continue.

George I’s first government had originally been made up of a mixture of old Junto Whigs like Marlborough’s son-in-law the Earl of Sunderland and the brave and distinguished Stanhope. Stanhope, his aide John Carteret and Sunderland were the sort of Whigs William III would have recognized, ones who believed in the need for England to play her role in Europe. But the government also included a new generation of Whig statesmen, of whom the most important were Lord Townshend and his brother-in-law Sir Robert Walpole, who was then chancellor of the Exchequer, and they split with Stanhope over continental involvement. In many ways these two men were more like Tories than Whigs, given that their priority was to put the country’s finances on a sounder basis by avoiding wars and foreign entanglements of all kinds. After their break with Stanhope, who was now in effect chief minister, they retreated to their estates in Norfolk to bide their time. Any free hours they had in London were now passed at Leicester House, the home of the Prince of Wales, as they were building an opposition round the ‘reversionary interest’, as the party of the heir to the throne was known. It was not to be long before they were recalled by George I.

Whatever Stanhope’s diplomatic gifts, in many areas his government was unsatisfactory. But it was above all in financial matters that the administration was to come a cropper, for the bluff ex-soldier did not exercise sufficient control over his ministers, and in 1720 the crisis of the South Sea Bubble burst. This was a financial scandal of great magnitude, a side-effect of ministers’ new-found enthusiasm for getting people to buy shares in government enterprises to pay for public borrowing. Inspired by the Whig Bank of England’s success in paying for the wars in 1711 under Harley, the Tories founded the South Sea Company to take over £900,000 of the National Debt in return for a monopoly of all the trade to South America granted to England at Utrecht.

The company was a joint-stock company: that is, people invested money and received a good dividend in return. Its directors aspired to manage the whole of the National Debt, which stood at the then enormous sum of £52 million, thanks to the cost of the French wars. With commissions it was a lucrative business and in 1720, by bribing government ministers, the South Sea Company was given permission by Parliament to take over half of it. The directors of the company proceeded to enrich themselves by persuading government stockholders that they would do better to exchange their state bonds for South Sea stock.

The combination of advertisements promising an opportunity to make enormous profits in the South Sea Company compared to government stock and of government ministers themselves backing the South Sea stock proved irresistible. The price of the shares skyrocketed, and everyone from dustmen, shopkeepers and chambermaids to merchants and MPs bought some. People behaved quite crazily: many of them borrowed the value of their house and belongings together and then bought shares with the borrowed money. Very few resisted the temptation to make so much apparently easy money, though the ageing Duchess of Marlborough said publicly she believed that ‘This Bubble will soon burst.’

By the winter of 1721 South Sea shares were yielding an astonishing thousand-pound dividend. But the company started to issue writs against other companies which were trying to cash in on its success, and this had a catastrophic effect on the market. For what happened was that confidence was lost in all ventures, especially the South Sea Company. The market crashed, so did share prices. With the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, people were wiped out overnight; hundreds of thousands of people faced bankruptcy. Panic and distrust of the government swept the country, particularly when it emerged that government ministers had accepted bribes to promote the shares. One minister committed suicide, and the chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie, was thrown out of the House of Commons for corruption. Stanhope died of a heart attack from the stress, while Sunderland was under investigation. The whole of England was verging on hysteria.

Meanwhile, in Norfolk, the ex-chancellor Robert Walpole continued calmly to run his estate and get on with his own business. Pleasant echoes of what was becoming an increasingly deafening chorus of demands that he should be brought back to rescue the government reached his sylvan retreat by every mail. Every newspaper called for him to save the nation. Walpole was the man who had spoken out about the dangers of the mania for speculation. He had ‘bottom’ he was a sensible politician with a real grasp of finances. Sunderland bowed to the inevitable, and on the back of the South Sea Bubble Walpole rose to supreme power. He was asked to take over the reins of government, and from then on he conducted himself brilliantly.

Sir Robert, as he soon became, abandoned the court of the Prince of Wales without a backward glance. With his brother-in-law Townshend he restored confidence to the country and sorted out the government finances. For the rest of George I’s reign there was peace at home and abroad. The economy made a rapid recovery, helped by the new trading opportunities opened up by Utrecht. One of Walpole’s greatest clevernesses was to make it very easy as time went on for most Englishmen to become Whigs. By the mid-century the number of Tories in the House of Commons had been reduced to sixty. Walpole even managed to placate the die-hard Tories by leaving the Church settlement unaltered–one of his favourite mottoes was ‘If it’s quiet, don’t disturb it.’ Though he personally believed in freedom of religion, he saw no point in upsetting the High Church elements by removing the Test and Corporation Acts which other Whigs had openly pledged to abolish. Equally he saw no reason why Nonconformists should suffer from civil disabilities, so every year he passed an Act of Indemnity for everyone who had violated the Test Act, enabling Dissenters too to hold office. This was a typical piece of subtle Walpolean compromise: it didn’t quite please everyone, but it pleased everyone enough for it to work.

Under the managing influence of such a clever, worldly man, the urge to restore the Stuarts died out quite rapidly. Though it remained a dangerous buried coal, it would require a great deal of activity to blow it back to life. How unvital it appeared is indicated by the fact that Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, was not executed in the wake of an abortive Jacobite conspiracy but merely banished. Even Bolingbroke was allowed back into the country, though he was banned from the House of Lords.

With the kingdom in such capable hands it was much easier for George I to spend several months each year out of the country relaxing at his old court of Herrenhausen, which he found far more appealing than anything London could offer. In 1727, when the first Hanoverian king died from a massive stroke at Osnabrück in Hanover, England remained quiet and peaceful and no Jacobite rising disturbed the straightforward and easy transfer of power from father to son. It was the middle of the night when Walpole brought the new king the news that his father was dead. It must have been a curious scene. Walpole, who was by now extremely large, had to lower himself with some difficulty to his knees to hail his new sovereign. George II, half asleep and pulling his breeches on, said crossly, ‘Dat is von big lie.’ He had consistently been denied any responsibility by his father, who had always refused to make him regent in his frequent absences, and he could not believe that he was now to be king.

Even the slick and imperturbable Walpole suffered a few days’ anxiety that George II would dismiss him from office, as he had hated his father so much and saw Walpole as his father’s man. In fact George offered the job to a nonentity named Sir Spencer Compton, but his sensible wife Caroline of Ansbach, who was a close friend of Walpole, managed to convince him that it was in his best interests to keep Sir Robert as prime minister. George II was crowned with Walpole stage-managing everything in his usual competent way.

The old king was buried in Hanover. No one mourned him very much, except the ‘Maypole’, now Duchess of Kendal. She had been very worried about his health ever since news had come that Sophia Dorothea, the unfortunate prisoner at Ahlden, had died. It had been prophesied by a fortune-teller that the king would pass away within a year of his wife, and as a result the duchess had been terrified by every omen. But though she was overcome with grief she was said to have a new consolation at her villa at Isleworth. A large black raven had flown into her house shortly after the king passed away and she became convinced that it contained his soul. Many stories circulated of how she could be seen curtseying to the raven and listening deferentially to its croaks–until she died not long after of a wasting disease.

In most ways George II was a far nicer man than his father; like George I he was a brave soldier, but taller and better looking. He spoke better English too, sometimes acting as his father’s interpreter with the English ministers. The first two Georges took such a close interest in the British army that it was the one institution that experienced some attempts at reform in an era very careless about public services. Discipline was improved, and the system of outfitting was overhauled. Commendably George II did not approve of the English practice of purchasing commissions, believing that the holding of a command should be merited. The success of British arms during the Seven Years War of 1756–63 which sealed the First British Empire was due in no small part to the Hanoverian influence.

One of the first things George II did when he became king aged forty-four was, rather touchingly, to put a portrait of his unhappy mother on display. (No one knew he had secretly always carried a miniature of her in his pocket, which he liked to take out and gaze at when he was alone.) The new king’s experience of England so far had been punctuated by humiliating rows between himself and his father. They culminated in George I threatening to have the then Prince of Wales arrested at his first son’s christening. Fortunately a great deal of soft pedalling by the prince’s clever, flirtatious wife Caroline of Ansbach managed to avert this.

Caroline of Ansbach had not been at all in awe of her late father-in-law, but she could see that she and her husband had far more to gain if he ate his pride and was on speaking terms with his father than if he was at daggers drawn. Blonde with a magnificent embonpoint and intellectual tastes (she corresponded with the leading philosophers of the day for amusement) Queen Caroline enjoyed ruling George II. She even tolerated his apparently insatiable appetite for mistresses–English ones, she opined, at least would teach him better English. Throughout her husband’s reign she continued to urge him to entrust himself utterly to the suave Walpole’s wisdom. For his part Walpole commented pleasantly, ‘I have the right sow by the ear.’

But, despite his own suffering at his father’s hands, George II’s atrocious relations with his own son and heir Frederick, the new Prince of Wales, who arrived from Hanover to live in England aged twenty-one in 1728, were no less a source of scandal. That intimate observer of the Georgian era Horace Walpole, Robert’s son, remarked that ‘it was something in the blood’ which prevented the Hanoverians from getting on with their heirs. After a quarrel with his parents, Frederick, or ‘Poor Fred’ as he was generally known, actually carried his wife out of their palace while she was in the middle of labour, to prevent his first child, Princess Augusta, being born near the hated pair.

Just as before, the opposition of out-of-office Whigs and Tories soon began to gather at the court of the new Prince of Wales at Leicester House. By the mid-1730s Frederick, Prince of Wales was its official sponsor. This had the beneficial effect of creating the ‘loyal opposition’ which of course was loyal, after its fashion, to the new dynasty, though its antics drove Walpole mad with rage. And antics they were, ranging from endless satires to plays and cartoons that poked fun at the prime minister. The truth was that, by unscrupulous use of spies and corruption, by both charming and browbeating the decent, straightforward, new king and his worldly wife, the quick-witted and cunning Walpole had absolute control of the country, just as he had under George I. What was new and admirable about Walpole (though there was much to appal) was that he valued peace and the wealth and progress it created, when most other European statesmen of the eighteenth century were interested only in the easy glory of war.

Sir Robert Walpole was one of the most talented managers of Parliament that England has ever seen, and he was as greedy for power and wealth as his huge girth and many houses (including the nonpareil Houghton, his country house) suggest. His two chief henchmen were the Pelham brothers, one of whom, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, was the most talented fixer of elections in the history of Parliament. An apparently hesitant, scurrying figure, who looked, one wit said, as if he had lost half an hour somewhere and was busy looking for it for the rest of the day, the duke was a very shrewd judge of men, unequalled in the black arts of power-broking and using the government machinery for patronage. Like his master Walpole, Newcastle believed that ‘Every man has his price, it is only a matter of determining it.’

Walpole decided that the only surefire way to keep the Whigs in power and the Stuarts out was to use bribery to secure the adherence of the political and official class of both parties, whether it was by places in ministries or lord lieutenantships or the bench or money itself. MPs used to come to his office to receive handouts in gold. For all its corruption, this system brought real tranquillity to a potentially unstable country whose ruling dynasty had been introduced not much more than a decade before. And Walpole controlled it all with unprecedented efficiency. Nothing could be done, at least at the beginning of his rule, to prevent him driving whatever bills he wanted through the Parliament he handled so exquisitely.

But Walpole also pleased the Whigs’ natural constituency, the merchants and financiers, with his wholesale reform of the tax system. He was not just the hearty, hunting-mad squire who preferred to be in the saddle for eighteen hours a day, as his supporters liked to portray him. He was a real product of the Enlightenment. Though a coarse man, he was also a coldly intelligent one, convinced that any problem could be solved by the application of reason. It was practically a religion with him to get rid of the bumbling methods of the past, the red tape stifling the new businesses, and to apply scientific analysis to trade and industry and the reform of the tax structure. He and his officials in the ministries, who were frequently distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society, were obsessed by the new science of statistics.

In order to promote England’s manufactures and foreign trade, booming since Utrecht, Parliament was persuaded to abolish many of the import duties on raw materials as well as almost all export duties. What the Treasury lost at source it would gain in personal taxation. In other words, the government would reap more revenue from the pockets of the energetic businessmen who were causing fabulous wealth to flow into the country. Trade was growing dramatically more than it ever had before and changing society in the process.

The people with money were no longer the landed gentry, whose money came from farming. In the England of the 1730s wealth was moving to the City, to the traders, to the enterprising merchants arranging deals abroad, as evidenced by the massive increase in shipping. But though wealth was shifting into the hands of the merchants who were creating it, the tax structure reflected the past: the bulk of the money raised by the Treasury still came from the land tax, which fell heavily on the gentry, whereas merchants tended to live in cities and have their wealth in cash. Walpole changed all that. Though he belonged to the Whig party, his family background was that of the naturally Tory small-landowner class–many of his friends and many of his friends’ fathers had been ruined by the land tax, which had quadrupled as a result of the French wars. He now shifted the tax burden to the new wealthy. His sympathy for his fellow squires, the Tory backwoodsmen, was another factor damping down their desire for a Stuart on the throne again, as they saw how good Walpole was for their interests.

Commercially and financially Hanoverian England could not have been flourishing more vigorously. At the same time, with the amoral prime minister to set the tone, the country slipped into a period remarkable for the corruption of its public officials. The Church of England gave no lead: it was becoming a respectable occupation for the brother of the local squire, and very squirelike and unpriestlike the parson became in his comfortable Georgian rectory. It was only towards the middle of the eighteenth century that Methodism revived the religious zeal of the past. The lord chancellor Lord Macclesfield was even tried for selling judicial appointments. Many justices of the peace were connected to the criminal underworld by a kickback system, or were involved in the smuggling business which was sometimes arranged by entire villages. At Porthgwarra near Land’s End in Cornwall the deep tracks of a permanent pulley system may still be seen today where the best local families, and the worst, connived to outwit Customs.

Because there seemed no end to this system, a system without shame, the only recourse of the opposition was to satire. When one of George I’s mistresses sold the right to create a new copper coinage for Ireland to a highly unsuitable businessman named Wood, Dean Swift responded with
The Drapier’s Letters
(1724). George II’s court was clearly the thieves’ kitchen in John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
, with Walpole as its chief character MacHeath, the swaggering highwayman. Very sharp practice was the rule of this infinitely hard-edged, commercial, godless and ruthless age, so similar to our own, where the only sin was failure, and success was worshipped.

Without wars to fight and blessed with low taxation, the British concentrated on domestic trade by improving the country’s communications. The enthusiasm for building canals, which would see 3,000 miles cut into the country by the end of the eighteenth century, had started by 1720. Stone roads were laid. Travel through the country became much faster, increasing profits for both merchants and farmers able to sell to a bigger market. For the aspirant middle classes, the successful tradesmen moving away from living over the shop, whose burgeoning wealth meant their wives had servants and were freed from household drudgery, the first circulating library was opened in Edinburgh by Allan Ramsay in 1726. Its imitators that sprang up nationwide soon featured that celebration of middle-class life, the novel, as it began to emerge under Fielding and the bookseller Samuel Richardson. The middle classes had the money to attend to their health, and at the same time indulge their new
amour propre
by rubbing shoulders with national leaders of fashion in the pump rooms of Bath. Bath’s regular crescents and squares were built on Enlightenment principles with bigger windows to let in the light and closer attention to hygiene. But despite these material improvements for the fortunate, even to its contemporaries the age of Walpole appeared a sleazy period for manners and morals. Its crudity and cruelty were epitomized in the work of William Hogarth, notably in
The Rake’s Progress
, painted between 1733 and 1735.

Against such a background, it was remarkable that those who were uncorrupt and disinterested continued to flourish at all. For more high-minded currents did exist in Walpole’s England. The spirit of philanthropy was represented by the Tory James Oglethorpe who in 1732 founded Georgia as a new colony in America for people released from debtors’ prison. The Wesley brothers began to revitalize the Church of England in the late 1730s, in a movement known as Methodism. Their charismatic preaching, devotional faith and infectious enthusiasm provided comfort for many like the poor whose lives on earth were very harsh, and who were not served well by a Church which had lost much of its mission.

One member of the opposition determined to resist the snares of the Walpolean system was the extraordinary young MP William Pitt, the other dominant figure of the reign of George II. By the mid-1730s the theatrical Pitt had made a name for himself as an exceptional speaker. Despite the little that has survived of his speeches in an era before shorthand or television or radio, he is considered by historians, as he was by his contemporaries, to have been the greatest orator the House of Commons has ever produced. He was part of the opposition to Walpole who called themselves Patriots and claimed the moral high ground in the face of his cynicism. Unlike the Stuarts, Walpole never tried to avoid Parliament–indeed the Parliamentary system developed to an unparalleled extent under him. Nevertheless his use of bribery and corruption was believed by the Patriots to have ushered in a new kind of tyranny.

Walpole called them contemptuously the ‘Patriot boys’, with all that that suggests of juvenile and foolish behaviour. But by the mid-1730s they consisted of the most impressive of the Whigs–William Pulteney, Carteret, the diplomat and wit Lord Chesterfield, the aristocrat Grenville brothers and their brother-in-law William Pitt himself. Pitt’s maiden speech attacking jobbery in the government was so striking that Walpole had his army pension removed, in hopes that he would be muzzled. But Pitt was not at all embarrassed by financial hardship. He drove around town in a shabby old carriage, publicly proclaiming his poverty in pointed contrast to the ostentation of Walpole’s wealthy placemen. He became the scourge of Walpolean sleaze, denouncing corruption, placemen and yes-men.

Walpole’s talent for hogging the limelight ensured that for the next decade there were constant defections of the more talented members of government to the opposition. The prime minister ultimately preferred to have all the glory himself. He soon drove out from the Cabinet any MP with too independent a voice, like the talented foreign policy expert Carteret, whose command of German was so good that there had been a real risk he might supplant Walpole in George II’s counsels. Many others, like Pulteney, left because they disapproved of Walpole’s foreign policy, which was predicated on friendship with France even if that meant ignoring treaty violations. In 1730 Townshend, who as Walpole remarked had previously been the ‘senior partner’ in their relationship, found the going too hard against the ambitious Walpole and retired from government to experiment with his cattle on his country estates. ‘Turnip’ Townshend made his name for posterity by discovering the value of turnips as a winter feed.

Chief among the mischief-makers of the mixed opposition of Tories and disaffected Whigs was the ex-Jacobite Bolingbroke, whose shenanigans continued to be tolerated by the unruffled Walpole. The minute Walpole had allowed him back into the country Bolingbroke had begun his scurrilous polemical magazine the
Craftsman
. Dedicated to insulting Walpole, the ‘man of craft’, it called on all patriots to establish higher standards in public life, and was intended to revive the Tory party and make them fit for office. Bolingbroke’s booklet
On the Idea of a Patriot King
was eagerly embraced by the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales, the idealistic young man with intellectual tastes who headed the Patriot movement. In fact Poor Fred never became king, predeceasing his son, the future George III, after succumbing to pneumonia in 1751. But that son, having absorbed all these ideas, saw himself as the Patriot king, and from 1760 onwards would try and replace aristocratic Whig power with the ‘King’s party’.