The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (55 page)

Balked of power, deprived of action, the opposition through the
Craftsman
had their revenge on Walpole by taunting him with insults and obscene cartoons. Though he was always trying to have the printers and editors thrown into prison for abuse and slander, they usually managed to find some sympathetic judge who released them. Walpole was so infuriated by
The Beggar’s Opera
and a profusion of theatrical farces about him, many by the novelist Henry Fielding, that he passed the Licensing Act in 1737. This made the lord chamberlain the censor of the British theatre, without whose licence plays could not be performed. That role was not abolished until 1968.

Walpole was not only the first head of the government to be called prime minister, he was also the first prime minister to live at 10 Downing Street. Its spare, unostentatious elegance is symbolic of the power of the Whig oligarchy: George II might wear a crown and live in a palace, but the real power was exercised behind the façade of what looked like a quiet gentleman’s townhouse. It resembled a large number of housing developments being built all over Georgian London, still to be seen today in Bloomsbury and Islington. They were lived in by a remarkably successful upper class of Georgian gentlemen and their wives, whom foreign observers thought remarkably caste-free. The English aristocracy intermarried uninhibitedly with wealthy City families in a way that was unimaginable on the continent.

The first real check to Walpole, the English Colossus (one of the many nicknames by which the omnipotent prime minister was sourly known), took place in 1733 when he attempted to stymie the flourishing smuggling industry. There was no point trying to increase the customs duties paid when goods entered Britain, as that was where the smuggling came into play. Having no little experience of illegally imported French brandy himself, Walpole saw that the only solution was to tax the article at retail level and transfer tobacco and wine from Customs to Excise.

Ever since it had first been invented by the Long Parliament, Excise had had a bad name because of the brutality of the Excisemen. It was entirely up to them to decide what tax was to be paid, and they collected it with menaces immediately after they had made their inspection. All over the country angry Englishmen and women cried that it would be bread and cheese next if the government was starting to tax wine and tobacco. English liberty was at stake. The opposition, with its obscene and savage cartoons in the
Craftsman
, had primed its audiences well.

There was a very ugly mood in the capital not only among the poor, but in the city itself. A mob surrounded the House of Commons to make sure that the bill did not go through, and burned Walpole and Queen Caroline in effigy. Walpole himself made a humiliating escape through the back door of a coffee house. When he saw his majority sink to sixteen on the second reading, he withdrew the bill: the consummate pragmatist had seen the writing on the wall. He would not spill blood to get taxes, he said. Walpole continued in power for another nine years after this, but his monolithic state began to crumble.

The rock upon which Walpole actually foundered was the very policy that had made him so successful: his avoidance of war. Maintaining friendly relations with France and Spain for eighteen years despite some provocation had made the country prosperous, won elections and kept the Stuarts out. But by the late 1730s all the merchants and businessmen in the City of London who had been Walpole’s greatest supporters believed that what was needed against Spain was not peace but war.

Britain’s trading success in the South American markets–a Spanish preserve since Cortes–opened up by Utrecht had infuriated the Spanish. Although technically the English were allowed to send one ship a year to trade at the great market of Porto Bello, which was the entrepôt for South America, in practice the ship was accompanied by a great many other less official ships, which reloaded the one ship as she emptied. With the British government turning a blind eye to its nationals’ illicit behaviour at Porto Bello, the Spaniards’ only recourse was to carry out forced searches on all British shipping, since every British vessel was suspected of smuggling.

The English newspapers outdid one another with lurid accounts of Englishmen in Spanish jails suffering tortures worse than those inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition for simply plying their trade. By the late 1730s the Spanish coastguards’ habit of stopping and searching in an aggressive and violent fashion had become a silent war between the two countries. British businessmen believed that it needed to be recognized as such.

They no longer wanted adroit avoidance of hostilities–they were champing at the bit to use war to break into new markets, to get into South America and import her gold and silver. The City of London and the opposition saw the hidden hand of France behind the Spanish attacks on English shipping; they were sure that Walpole was being bamboozled by France, that what England was facing was not so much rivalry with Spain as a battle for trade and colonial supremacy with France. Walpole’s foreign policy was also alienating his master George II, because it had greatly weakened Austria. Like his father, as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire George II was loyal to the emperor in Vienna and believed that Austria must always be backed to limit the power of France. Then in 1737 Queen Caroline died. She had been Walpole’s greatest supporter, and from her death he had more difficulty in clinging to power. The tide was running against him.

By contrast, Pitt in his daring, his brilliance and his arrogance encapsulated the mood of British merchants. War against France at the beginning of the century had won Britain the trading supremacy conferred by Utrecht. War with Spain was necessary now. When in 1739 Walpole would have been happy to accept Spain’s offer of compensation, put forward in the Convention of Pardo, for rough handling of British seamen, Pitt swayed the House of Commons against him. There could be no more half-measures. Quivering, slender, furious and dressed in his customary black Pitt told the House from the opposition benches that the Convention of Pardo was ‘a surrender of the rights and trade of England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries’. The complaints of England’s despairing merchants were the voice of England condemning Walpole’s policy of peace at any cost. ‘If that voice were ignored,’ he warned in a sibilant whisper, ‘it would be at the government’s peril; it
must
and should be listened to.’

He sat down to a storm of applause, which was echoed next day in every newspaper. The Duchess of Marlborough let it be known that she had left Pitt a legacy in her will to point up Walpole’s pusillanimity and show that Pitt was her husband’s natural successor. In 1739 Walpole reluctantly opened hostilities in the war which is known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Britain’s ostensible
casus belli
was that one of her nationals, a Captain Jenkins, had had his ear cut off during a search when his ship was sailing through Spanish waters. But that had been back in 1731. It was simply an excuse.

Despite the great national excitement, the war did not open well. Though Porto Bello was captured, with the loss of only seven men, the few skirmishes were completely indecisive. In the middle of all this, a general election fell. Walpole scraped back into office, but it was with a very small majority. He was soon defeated on a vote of no confidence and in 1742 he retired. Much of his administration remained, including the Pelham brothers, but the foreign policy expert Lord Carteret, who had long languished in opposition, returned to power for two years under Prime Minister Spencer Compton (now Earl of Wilmington), propelled by his knowledge of continental affairs. For Carteret’s rise and Walpole’s fall were both the effect of a new war which had begun on the continent in 1740, the War of the Austrian Succession.

This soon superseded the War of Jenkins’ Ear. It had opened with the upstart kingdom of Prussia’s outrageous seizure of mighty Austria’s duchies of Silesia. Prussia was then a struggling north German state, but her soldiers and military traditions were shortly to become the wonder of Europe. Austria, however, was the home of the Habsburg emperor, whose dynasty had dominated the German-speaking lands of the continent for the past 300 years.

The figure behind the capture of Silesia was the twenty-four-year-old Frederick II of Prussia, whose father had died only a few months earlier. He had taken swift advantage of the accession of the young and inexperienced Maria Theresa to her father Charles VI’s hereditary dominions to rush his troops into the duchies of Silesia to the south of Prussia, claiming them as his own. He followed this up by defeating the Austrians at the Battle of Mollwitz. It was a fantastic humiliation for Maria Theresa and Austria, the great Habsburg power, to be defeated by the House of Brandenburg. Though all the emperor’s allies had signed the Pragmatic Sanction, a treaty which announced the indivisibility of all the Austrian possessions left to Maria Theresa, Prussia had no intention of honouring it.

Where Prussia led, other states followed. France and Bavaria, which had much to gain from dismembering the Austrian Empire, signed an alliance with Prussia. Maria Theresa rode to Hungary and rallied the Hungarians to her side, but the situation looked bleak for her. The whole German continent was in uproar, while the remnants of Austrian power in Milan were now harassed by Spain and Sardinia. For the first time in three centuries the electors had chosen as Holy Roman Emperor a candidate who was not a member of the House of Habsburg, preferring the Elector Charles of Bavaria whose armies were running amok all over Maria Theresa’s lands.

Both George II and the foreign secretary Lord Carteret agreed that this time treaty obligations to Austria should be fulfilled now that there was no Walpole to prevent it. Large subsidies were paid to Austria to help her hire troops to defend herself. A spate of negotiations by Carteret, the most gifted diplomat of his generation, removed Prussia from the war. He persuaded Maria Theresa to let Frederick keep Silesia. In return Frederick guaranteed George’s precious Hanover against the French. George himself, who was an ex-professional soldier, in person led a large army consisting of English, Hanoverian and Hessian troops to the Low Countries to attack the French and keep them away from the main theatre of war in the imperial lands. Wearing a yellow sash over his armour, the colours of Hanover, the king was victorious at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. But it could no longer be disguised that everything that Walpole had feared had come to pass. Britain and France were once more at war, with all the expense and disruption which that entailed.

Dettingen did a great deal of good for George II’s reputation in England –though some courtiers had to stifle yawns at his hundredth retelling of the battle. In the short term the French were frightened back across the Rhine. But over the next two years things began to look quite shaky for the Hanoverians. Walpole had said privately to friends when Britain exploded with patriotic pride as the war against Spain opened, ‘They are ringing their bells now, but they will soon be wringing their hands.’ He was right. French spies had reported to their government that there was still a lot of support for the Jacobite cause in England. Once again, as Walpole had always predicted they would, the French prepared to invade England and spark off a general rising to divert her from the Austrian War.

Their plans were defeated in 1744 by a great storm. Only tempestuous winds, what Pitt called ‘those ancient and unsubsidized allies of England’, prevented a French army landing on Britain’s coast. It was to have had the son of the pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as the Young Pretender, at its head. But French military success in the next year, 1745–the swingeing French victory over George II’s second son the Duke of Cumberland at Fontenoy, when the Dutch ran away and the British and Hanoverians were hopelessly outnumbered–prompted the French to concentrate their efforts in the Low Countries and to abandon the plan to conquer England and restore the Stuart line.

But their supposed puppet candidate, the twenty-five-year-old Prince Charles Edward, was not so easily put off. He was as spirited and courageous as his father had been sad and uninspiring. With Britain distracted by war it seemed the optimum moment to win back his ancestral lands. So began the Forty-five rebellion. With only seven men but 1,500 muskets, twenty small cannon, ammunition and 1,800 broadswords clanking in the hold, the prince landed at Moidart on the west coast of Scotland in late July 1745. He at last exerted in his handsome person the extraordinary Stuart charm that always cast such an ill-fated spell over its audience.

Many Highlanders doubted the wisdom of the enterprise without French backing, but the government in England took the threat extremely seriously. There was concern at the highest levels about whether there were enough guards to defend the royal palaces. The prime minister, Henry Pelham, who had taken over from Wilmington and Carteret because of the poor progress of the war, anxiously sent word to George II that he must return from Hanover. There seemed to be a level of disaffection among the people which might be turned into hostility towards German George and a welcome for the Young Pretender.

Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he was becoming known, seemed to have luck on his side. By the end of September he had taken both Perth and Edinburgh, and had inflicted a comprehensive defeat on the English general Sir John Cope at the Battle of Prestonpans outside the latter city. Until Prestonpans there had been a debate within the government whether the situation really merited recalling the troops from the Austrian Netherlands. Now it was deemed a first-class emergency. The British army would have to be back in London to defend the capital before Bonnie Prince Charlie got there.

Meanwhile many of the prince’s advisers urged him to declare Scotland’s independence, to wait for the arrival of reinforcements from France and reorganize his troops. But, carried away with his own success, the prince could think only of London. Avoiding Newcastle and General George Wade, Charles made for Carlisle. On 14 November it surrendered. Two weeks later the Scots entered Manchester. However, all was not well. Huge numbers of Highlanders, homesick away from their native glens, had deserted between Edinburgh and Carlisle. The English Jacobites, such as the Duke of Beaufort and Sir Watkin Wynn, refused to rise in the south because there was no French invasion to back them up.