History of England 1-6

Others were more busy. The opportunities of wealth made possible by the ‘financial revolution’ helped to augment the number and power of what were known as ‘the middling orders’ comfortably ensconced between the landed gentry and the great army of manual workers and shopkeepers. They would include tenant farmers and factory-owners, government officers and city merchants, small businessmen and clergymen, doctors and lawyers; the rise of the salaried professions was one of the striking features of the early years of the century. If the manuals of conduct are anything to go by, the principal themes of this variously constituted class were those of enterprise, respectability, sobriety and hard work.

Daniel Defoe, himself an exceptional if sometimes erring exponent of the ‘middling’ virtues, reminded himself in the first chapter of Robinson Crusoe (1719) that ‘the middle state … was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind’.

The numbers of these fortunate citizens were necessarily increased as the economy improved. In the early eighteenth century one in seven was deemed to be of the middle state; a hundred years later, the proportion had become one in four or five. Some of them, however, were uneasily aware of their middle status and tried to insulate themselves from the abyss below them by striving to imitate the manners and customs of their immediate superiors. Appearances must be kept up; it was important to seem, and to be, credit-worthy so as not to ‘break’. The ultimate aim was the acquisition of gentility in one or two generations.

The middling ranks included many Anglicans but, proportionately, they contained more dissenters or nonconformists. Theirs was the faith of hard work and enterprise, after all, of ambition and of striving. But already religious dissent had become in part a matter of state compliance. The Presbyterians, the Congregationalists and the General Baptists, for example, had achieved a measure of acceptance with the Toleration Act of 1689 even if they were still excluded from public office. Their chapels and meeting houses were part of the urban and rural landscape. The Quakers who had once stripped naked ‘for a sign’, in accordance with the twentieth chapter of Isaiah, did, according to an antiquary, Abraham de la Pryme, ‘modestly and devoutly behave themselves’. This is the trajectory of all radical faiths. Its adherents become more complacent and more respectable; in particular they become older. It would take the Methodist revival of a later generation to excite the original fire in a bout of evangelical fervour that had not been seen in England since the middle of the seventeenth century.

Of course many of the population were without any religion at all, except for the residue of paganism and natural spirituality that had been inherited from previous centuries. The lower ‘classes’ of the early eighteenth century could be defined, as was done at the time, as ‘the mechanic part of mankind’. They lived by manual labour of a variety of kinds. They were in a literal sense the ‘hands’ of the country; those who served meals, those who drew water, those who hewed wood, those who stitched and those who spun. They comprised by far the greatest part of the working population, from colliers to mantua-makers, from watchmakers to shopkeepers, from footmen to cooks. Defoe described them as ‘the working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want’ and ‘the country people, farmers etcetera, who fare indifferently’. Some of those who worked on the land could not enjoy its fruits for themselves. If their sows bred piglets, or their hens chicks, these were taken to the market rather than to the table. The workers sold their apples and pears, and lived on skimmed milk and whey curds while their customers purchased milk and cheese. Their perpetual and useful toil reached its quietus in an obscure destiny.

Social historians, as historical fashions change, have concentrated upon those in even more difficult circumstances. It has been estimated that, at any time before the Industrial Revolution, approximately one quarter of the population was in a state of abject poverty. These are the people who in Defoe’s phrase ‘fare hard’. They can also be called the ‘labouring poor’. One such was Jeremy in William Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) who states that ‘my mother sold oysters in winter and cucumbers in summer, and I came upstairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar’. He had since come up even higher in the world, since he was now a gentleman’s servant. And that was the worth of the labouring poor. They could be made useful; their very plenitude was God’s blessing to the affluent. These were the ranks that helped to make up the industrial population of the factories and the humble skivvies of the kitchen. Discipline, deprivation and hard labour were supposed to be the sovereign curatives for idleness even if, as Sir William Petty put it, they only dragged the stones from Stonehenge to Tower Hill.

Lying beneath all were the miserable, the abject, the worthless. They would include the beggars, the vagrants, the severely crippled, the mad as well as the mass of ragged outcasts who lived in holes in the walls, in subterranean pits, in outhouses, and in bulkheads. One anonymous pamphlet of 1701, Reflexions Upon the Moral State of the Nation, reported that ‘they live more like rats and weasels and such like noxious vermin, than creatures of human race’. The helpless and incurable poor were generally disregarded except as elements in riot, dissipation or epidemic disease. They were objects of fear and loathing on the streets, and even the most charitable impulses of the reformers could scarcely make room for them. The poor were unavoidable, elemental, but not to be touched.

The death of his wife, Mary, in Kensington Palace at the end of 1694 had provoked in William a grief that was as deep as it was unexpected. The smallpox had taken her during a bitterly cold winter. When her husband had been absent with his army on the continent, she had always been something of a reluctant replacement. She felt herself to be ‘deprived of all that was dear to me in the person of my husband, left among those that were perfect strangers to me: my sister of a humour so reserved that I could have little comfort from her’. Mary and her sister, Anne, were in fact hardly on speaking terms. When her husband was by her side, Mary deferred without thinking to the king’s wishes but her compliant temper was accompanied by a cheerfulness and vivacity not readily apparent in her husband. When she ruled in his absence, however, she was resolute and not without dignity. She was widely, and perhaps sincerely, mourned.

Her death of course left her sister Anne in a singularly difficult position; she was now heir apparent who had in fact a better claim to the throne than its present occupant. It was incumbent upon William to pay his respects to her after a decade of neglect. Anne herself had come wholly to rely upon her principal lady-in-waiting, Sarah, countess of Marlborough, and upon Sarah’s husband, the first earl of Marlborough. Here were the makings of a court in waiting and, soon enough, the fortunate pair became duke and duchess.

Even while the abbey was covered in drapes of black for the late queen parliament acted, or rather failed to act, on a measure that would have incalculable consequences for the future state of the nation. In the spring of 1695 a resolution for ‘regulations of printing and printing presses’ was allowed to lapse, almost by oversight, and that chance led ineluctably to the emergence of what became known as ‘the fourth estate’. It was, in retrospect at least, a momentous change that emancipated English letters for ever from government control.

The public had previously been forced to be content with the official London Gazette. It was established in February 1665, and continues to this day as the official newspaper of record, although Captain Bluffe in Congreve’s The Old Bachelor (1693) claims, ‘Why, sir, there are not three words of truth, the year round, put into the Gazette.’ But, as a result of the lifting of prohibitions, the public prints were quickly in demand in a party-dominated and war-oppressed age.

Within a fortnight of the end of censorship, a paper entitled Intelligence, Domestic and Foreign began to circulate; this was followed by The English Courant, The Post Man, The Post Boy, The Weekly NewsLetter and others. Some of them left blank spaces so that the reader might fill in more current news before passing on the publication to friends or neighbours; many of the printed items were accompanied by the phrase ‘this wants confirmation’ or ‘this occasions many speculations’ or ‘time will discover the event’. The affairs of the world were very uncertain.

In the succeeding reign of Queen Anne more than forty newssheets were distributed on the streets and in the coffee-houses of London, many of them also finding their way to the provincial towns and cities. It took a full day to read only the most important of them. We may speak for the first time, therefore, of a politically aware nation, with the concomitant rise of the ‘journalist’ and the ‘essayist’. The power of the new press quickly became apparent and, in a letter from Lemuel Gulliver that opens his Travels, the celebrated if fictional surgeon recalls the remark of his cousin that ‘people in power were very watchful over the press’.

The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was issued on Wednesday 11 March 1702; it is printed on one side of a single sheet with news from Naples, Rome, Vienna, Frankfurt and elsewhere; the majority of its news paragraphs concerned the progress of the war and, in a postscript, its editor disparaged ‘the impertinences of ordinary newspapers’. It opened in a characteristically dry style with a report from Naples that ‘on Wednesday last, our new viceroy, the duke of Escalona, arrived here with a squadron of the galleys of Sicily’. The sheet was sold next door to the King’s Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge, and in the vicinity, very close to the neighbourhood that had already earned the soubriquet of ‘Grub Street’.

From the beginning these newspapers were largely business ventures, although some of them were in part subsidized by the political managers of the time who wished to create a discernible volume of ‘public opinion’ on any particular matter. The public prints relied largely upon advertisements and upon circulation, and so became part of that commercial society that was even then taking shape.

A few weeks after the death of his wife the king wrote to a colleague in 1695 that ‘I feel myself to be no longer fit for military command’; yet he added characteristically that ‘I will try to do my duty’. His duty compelled him to attempt the recapture of Namur, the most important fortress in the Spanish Netherlands; the citadel looked over a fruitful plain and two rivers, the Sambre and the Meuse, and it had never before opened its gates to an enemy. Three years earlier, however, the French besiegers under the command of Louis himself had broken the spirit of the town after eight days; it was the lowest point for England and its allies in the campaign against the French.

William knew well enough that it would be a signal victory to retrieve Namur after its occupation. After a series of feints and skirmishes he marched straight upon the town at the beginning of July 1695, and there began a series of bloody assaults and battles that endured until the total surrender of the citadel two months later. This is the conflict in which Uncle Toby, of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), injured his groin; he modelled the outworks of the citadel in his garden. The excitement and anxiety aroused by the campaign animated the London crowds, who flocked for news to the booksellers and coffee-houses. The king’s success was one of the most important victories of the Nine Years War, all the more significant because it had been conducted on land; it was the first major victory of that kind since Cromwell’s ‘battle of the dunes’ in 1658. On his return William engaged in a summer tour, ostensibly in triumph, but his reserved and suspicious nature was in evidence. He did not frequent the well-travelled roads and, in Oxford, refused a dinner for fear that it had been poisoned.

3

The idol of the age

The jubilation of victory was in any case short-lived. Despite the success in the Spanish Netherlands the war itself was becoming too lengthy and too costly to be easily endured. It had procured very little benefit for England itself. At the end of 1695 the exiled king, James II, issued a proclamation from his French court that did ‘fully authorize, strictly require and expressly command our loving subjects to rise in arms and make war upon the prince of Orange, the usurper of our throne …’. He did have supporters in England who were ready to obey the command, but they could not or would not move without the aid of a French invasion. Such an invasion, however, was a step too far for Louis XIV who already had continental entanglements to deter him.

Some conspirators were willing to act alone. Anne, a proper Stuart, would of course reign in the event of the king’s death; this prospect seems to have been the spur for a plot engineered at the beginning of 1696. As the king drove home to Kensington Palace after his weekly hunt in Richmond Park, he was obliged to pass through a narrow lane by the river at Turnham Green. Here he was to be surrounded by armed men and killed. Like most such plots it foundered on whispers and betrayals; William cancelled the hunt, but not before making use of it as an instrument of state. His disclosure of the conspiracy to parliament, in February 1696, caused a sensation and prompted members to form an association in the king’s defence not unlike that established to protect Elizabeth I against Spanish plotters.

The general mood, however, was still one of war-weariness. After the victory at Namur, the land war continued with no great victories and no signal defeats. It had become a war of attrition in which both parties were in danger of fighting one another to an expensive impasse. Yet a detached observer, if such existed, might have arrived at certain conclusions. William III had proved to be more than a match for Louis XIV; the energy and perseverance of England’s king, together with the support of his allies, had been able to check the progress of the Bourbon empire. The newfound financial strength of England could also prove formidable in future conflicts.

A treaty between the parties was drawn up and signed after five months of negotiation. The Peace of Ryswick, concluded in the autumn of 1697, seems to have favoured William; Louis surrendered much of the territory he had gained and, perhaps more importantly, recognized William III as the rightful king of England. This might seem to have been a significant blow to James II and the Stuart cause, but the promises of a king were not always to be trusted.

After nine years of a bloody and costly war, however, the bells of London rang in celebration on news of the treaty. William himself declared that ‘it is impossible to conceive what joy the peace causes here’. The seas would once more be safe, and the merchants might trade with impunity. The burden of taxation, or so it was hoped, would be immeasurably lightened; 75 per cent of the revenue had, after all, been devoted to the costs of war.

As soon as parliament opened, at the beginning of December, a debate commenced on the necessity of preserving a standing army. The king favoured the measure as a way of keeping check upon the French, but the preponderant opinion of the members was for an unarmed government. That was part of the old polity of England. It was now agreed that all the land forces enrolled since September 1680 should be forthwith disbanded and that there should be no bigger force on English soil than that which had obtained in the reign of Charles II. This would amount to some 7,000 men. The country gentlemen were not willing to pay taxes for an imposed army and, in particular, for foreign recruits. It was agreed, therefore, that the army of 7,000 should be comprised only of the king’s English subjects; as a result his Dutch bodyguards and his regiments of French Protestants were disbanded. William, hardly dissembling his anger, remarked that parliament had achieved a feat that the French had failed to accomplish in nine years. A victorious monarch could scarcely be more ignobly treated. It is no wonder, perhaps, that he was always pining for his homeland.

Parliament pressed home its supremacy when, at the beginning of 1701, an Act of Settlement was passed utterly debarring the Stuart dynasty from the throne. In the summer of the previous year Prince William, the last surviving son of the seventeen pregnancies of Princess Anne and her husband Prince George of Denmark, had died from fluid on the brain. When Anne assumed the throne, she would have no heir absolute. Although William had died at the age of eleven, he had already been hailed as the new Protestant champion. The king wrote to Marlborough that ‘it is so great a loss to me as well as to all England that it pierces my heart’.

The Jacobites had naturally been delighted at the news, hoping that James or his son would be rightfully reinstalled as rulers of the kingdom. But parliament had other ideas. It turned to Germany and, in particular, the only surviving granddaughter of James I. Sophia electress of Hanover was the daughter of the ill-starred ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth, whose rule as queen of Bohemia had lasted for a year before she and her husband were ousted by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. So by the strange serendipity of dynasty and fortune Sophia was set to become the next queen of England; if she was unwilling or unable to take the throne, she had a healthy Protestant son by the name of George Ludwig (George Louis) of Hanover.

The clauses of the Act of Settlement, dictated by parliament, made other demands. Every sovereign must be part of the communion of the Church of England. If a king was born beyond the shores of England, no English force would be obliged to defend his native soil. No king was to leave England, or Scotland, or Ireland, without the consent of parliament. These were all measures designed to obstruct any pretensions that the house of Hanover might claim. They might be German, but they would be obliged to rule as English sovereigns.

William knew that the Peace of Ryswick was by no means the end of hostilities, and that the French king’s overweening appetite for glory would encourage him in fresh fields of action. Spain proved to be the spur. The Spanish emperor, Charles II, better known as Charles the Sufferer, had endured a life of long disease. He was incapacitated and mentally incapable; his tongue was too large for his mouth, and he drooled continually. He had a huge and misshapen jaw, so that the rest of his face seemed to be in a kind of pit. His body was crooked and his mind more or less unhinged; he believed himself to have been bewitched since childhood, in which opinion most of his court and country concurred. He even allowed himself to be exorcized. He was the last of the Habsburg rulers of Spain, and the overwhelming evidence of inbreeding may have been the occasion for his manifold mental and physical weaknesses. He was an embarrassment in life, yet in death he would become a problem. He ruled Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, now largely consisting of Belgium, and he controlled the empire from the Americas to the Spanish East Indies. It looked more powerful on paper than it did in reality, but still it was grand enough to lure rivals.

In the spring of 1700, when he was months from death, there had been attempts to divide his legacy between the principal claimants. The greed of men, and the mischance of events, left any proposed arrangement in disarray. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I of Austria, claimed the inheritance on behalf of his son in a series of elaborate genealogical calculations; they depended upon the particular clause of a particular marriage contract. No box that Pandora ever opened could contain so much dissension. Louis XIV looked with horror upon an alliance between Madrid and Vienna; it would mark an arrow through French domains. Charles the Sufferer had in fact named as his successor Philip, duke of Anjou, who happened to be the grandson of Louis XIV. William III could not contemplate a union between Paris and Madrid: this could not be allowed. So great a Bourbon empire had never yet been seen.

Yet Louis was not to be diverted. Towards the end of November 1700, three weeks after the death of Charles, the French king proclaimed his grandson to be Philip V of Spain and true successor to the throne; he also took the precaution of interdicting trade between England and the Spanish Netherlands. Such a commercial and political offensive was followed by what might be considered a more private insult. In the middle of September 1701, James II died in the odour of sanctity, having been seized with paralysis while attending Mass in his chapel at Saint-Germain. His perpetual companions had been the austere monks of La Trappe, and he pleaded with his son and heir to follow the precepts and practices of the Roman Church. The French king, who had made vows at the deathbed of the dying king, now kept his promise to his cousin by recognizing the ‘Old Pretender’, the ‘King over the Water’, the ‘Old Chevalier’ – as he was variously known in England – to be James III.

This was a provocation too far. It violated the Peace of Ryswick, when Louis had solemnly agreed to recognize William III as the rightful king of England. It threw into doubt all the French king’s promises and avowals, and aroused all the old fears that Louis was about to impose by force popery, tyranny and universal monarchy.

At the beginning of June 1701 William had appointed Marlborough to be commander-in-chief and plenipotentiary in all negotiations concerning the security of England and its allies. The king recognized that Marlborough, already the ensconced favourite of Anne, would be by far the single most important figure and commander of the new regime; he wished above all else for continuity in his struggle against the French. By the end of the year a ‘treaty of grand alliance’ had been sealed between Holland, England and Austria. So began ‘the War of the Spanish Succession’.

William made his decision only just in time. He had for some months been afflicted by shiverings, headaches and nausea, but his quietus was delivered by a humble mole. In February 1702 he was riding through the park of Hampton Court when his horse stumbled on a molehill; the king fell and broke his collar bone, the complications leading to his death. For many years afterwards the Jacobites toasted ‘the little gentleman dressed in velvet’ who had supplied the coup de grâce in the park.

William was not greatly mourned, for he had not been greatly loved. He had been, for many, the least bad alternative. He had kept out the Stuart monarchs and their papist pretensions. Yet his legacy was in fact far more substantial than might at first appear. He had defied French power and limited its continental ambitions; he had successfully removed all the memories of the weakness and pusillanimity of the Stuart kings in thrall to money from Versailles. He and his advisers had also been able to place England on a far more advantageous financial footing, with the prospect of public credit stretching onwards. A new dynasty, a new foreign policy and a new economic dispensation, were not negligible achievements.

On 8 March Anne, at the moment of William’s death, became queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. She was perhaps not the most prepossessing of monarchs, but she had endured many calamities. She was thirty-seven years of age, and in the last sixteen of them she had suffered twelve miscarriages; of her five other children, four died in very early life. The oldest survivor, as we have seen, expired at the age of eleven. The years of mourning and frustrated pregnancy had affected both her appearance and her character. Her gout was so extreme that she was often to be found swathed in bandages. One Scottish commissioner, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, came to Kensington Palace in order to pay his respects and was alarmed to discover her ‘laboring under a fit of the gout, and in extreme pain and agony’; he added that her face was ‘red and spotty’, her dress ‘negligent’ and her foot ‘tied up with a poultice and some nasty bandages’. This was not an image of majesty.

Her discomfort, and the disorder about her, were not helped by her evident reticence and shyness in company. At court receptions the foreign ministers and ambassadors would often sit around her in total silence. Her principal lady-in-waiting, Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, recorded that she never really cared for visitors; she was reluctant to ask questions, and even more unwilling to answer them. She confined her conversation to pleasantries of the lightest sort. How long have you been in town? How do you find our weather? She was neither clever nor witty, and upon matters of state ‘she never spoke but in a road’ or in a leaden, laborious and carefully rehearsed way.

There were reasons for her reticence. She was cautious by temperament, never wholly trusting her own judgement or that of others. Jonathan Swift, who observed her at court, remarked that ‘there was not, perhaps in all England, a person who understood more artificially to disguise her passions’. But there were matters for which no disguise was necessary. She was a fervent supporter of the high Anglican Church and, as one devoted to ritual, she was also addicted to protocol. She would remonstrate with a courtier or lady who wore a ruffle or a periwig or a coat out of place.

She began her day with prayers in the royal chapel before immersing herself in public business; on two days of each week she attended long sessions of the inner cabinet (known at the time as the ‘secret council’), a practice that had generally exhausted the patience of her predecessors, and attended to the steady business of receiving ambassadors, replying to petitions, signing warrants and letters, giving counsel to, and soliciting advice from, various peers and notables. She told the archbishop of York that she scarcely found time for her prayers. It may be that she felt at a disadvantage as a woman, and a woman without an heir. All the time she heard the steps of the Hanoverians behind her, and indeed refused to allow the heiress elect, Sophia of Hanover, to travel to England. She did not wish to seem expendable.

Her first address to the House of Lords, therefore, three days after the death of the king, may have been something of an ordeal for a woman as shy as she was cautious. From the throne in the Lords she declared that ‘as I know my own heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you, that there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England’.

Her reference to her Englishness was no doubt a hit against William, whom she always despised, and his predilection for Holland. It was feared that she would be too lame from the gout to walk into the Lords but she processed with crown and heavy gown of red velvet with the order of the Garter emblazoned upon it. An eyewitness of the ceremony, Sir Robert Southwell, wrote that ‘never any woman spoke more audibly or with better grace’. She blushed, and seemed at times uneasy, but she had demonstrated her regality.

The election of that year had favoured the Tories with a large majority and, within a few weeks of their victory, they introduced ‘the Occasional Conformity Bill’ which was designed to penalize dissenters and nonconformists in the practice of their religion and in their pursuit of civic office. Ever since the Act of Toleration of 1689 it had been perfectly proper for dissenters to take Anglican communion two or three times a year in order to qualify for public employment; the eucharist became their certificate of health. One of the most famous cases was that of the lord mayor of London, Sir Humphrey Edwin, a Presbyterian, who on one occasion worshipped at the Anglican service in the morning and in the evening attended his meeting house or conventicle at Pinners’ Hall on Old Broad Street. This double standard, known as ‘playing bo-peep with the Almighty’, was in the bill to be prohibited by use of fines or imprisonment.

Anne was herself temperamentally of the ‘high church’ party, and favoured the measure as proof of Anglican piety, but the Whig majority in the Lords seem to have realized that a nation separated on religious matters might well divide on other issues. Marlborough himself did not see the point of antagonizing a large part of the population at time of war. So, despite the enthusiasm of the Tories in the newly elected Commons, the bill was allowed to drop. The queen herself sweetened the pill by establishing a fund known as ‘Queen Anne’s Bounty’, by which she agreed to surrender her additional revenues from tax on clerical incomes in order to supplement the salaries of those clerks who served in the poorest parishes.

The most significant problem in these early days of her reign, however, was that of war with France. Marlborough was confirmed in office as captain general of the armed forces, although in theory he was inferior in rank to the queen’s husband, Prince George of Denmark. George himself was a royal nonentity of whom Charles II had remarked that ‘I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober, but there is nothing in him.’ He died in 1708, so for the latter years of her reign Anne was a widow. Marlborough was of course in practical charge of the allied forces. He was the only possible candidate for the post. In fact the first year of the campaign was very much like the final year of the last, with precious little movement on either side; Marlborough, in addition, felt himself hampered by the caution or indecision of his Dutch field deputies. His consolation came in the dukedom awarded to him by the queen in 1702.

Over the next months, despite the dilatoriness of the allies, the new duke was able to capture a number of significant towns along the Meuse, the great river that runs from north-east France into the northern sea beside ports such as Liège, Maastricht and Namur; the victories prompted John Evelyn to write that ‘such an concurrence of blessings and hope of God’s future favour has not been known in a hundred years’. This may have been something of an overstatement, but a great victory was indeed at hand.

Marlborough’s line of fire along the Meuse had prevented Holland from falling wholly to Louis XIV but, together with his ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the duke now prepared a greater strategy. In a move as hazardous as it was unpredictable he marched his army away from the Low Countries and across the various German principalities towards Bavaria, the elector of which state was a close ally of the French, and through which a strategically important stretch of the River Danube flowed. His main purpose was to save the Habsburg capital, Vienna, from the enemy. In a feat that has sometimes been compared with those of Napoleon, Marlborough marched 20,000 men across 250 miles of Europe in six weeks while absorbing 20,000 more troops along his route. He had to move in conditions of speed and secrecy in order to camouflage his intentions not only from the French but also from his more pusillanimous Dutch colleagues, who believed that any forces taken from the Spanish Netherlands were thereby wasted.

Marlborough prevailed. At the beginning of August 1704, the two forces faced each other close to the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which lay in a plain of stubble close to the Danube itself. The French and Bavarians were in defensive position, with the river and woods behind them, but Marlborough’s keen and continual attacks eventually broke them. The English cavalry, fighting in lines three deep, moved forward at a brisk trot with their swords ready; the infantry, three or four deep, were armed with muskets and ring bayonets. Towards the close of the fighting the French were compelled to retreat into the village of Blenheim itself, where in the face of overwhelming casualties the remnant was forced to lay down its arms.

The victory was complete; the French lost some 34,000 men, with 14,000 injured or taken prisoner, while the English and their allies lost about 14,000. On the following day the duke wrote to his wife that ‘I can’t end my letter without being so vain as to tell my dearest soul that within the memory of man there had been no victory so great as this’. The greater the carnage, perhaps, the greater the victory.

Bavaria was knocked from the war, and Vienna was saved. The German principalities were spared the danger of French invasion, and the hopes of Louis for a quick and decisive war were thoroughly overturned. It was perhaps the most decisive battle of the entire War of the Spanish Succession, whereby the military power of England was affirmed and the spectre of Louis XIV was seen to be nothing but a shadow. It took eight days for the news of the victory to reach England, where it was met with jubilation. When Anne was given the news by a courier, she told him: ‘You have given me more joy than ever I have received in my life.’ But the joy was not unconfined, and it was noticeably lacking among those Tories who were opposed to Marlborough’s war policies as an expensive extravagance. What, in their judgement, did such European conflicts actually achieve?

Party rivalry was characteristically intense and bitter during the reign of Queen Anne. She was herself an interim figure, neither Hanoverian nor Jacobite, so the rival ideologies of the realm had an open arena for their fury and resentment. The queen herself was determined to stand above parties, and it was her instinctive and pragmatic inclination to maintain a balance between them so that none should rule her; she wrote that ‘if I should be so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of either, I shall look upon myself, though I have the name of queen, to be in reality but their slave’. She disliked and distrusted the violent partisans on both sides; they were ‘merciless men’ whom she regarded with dread. But would it prove possible to steer an even course between them? The Tories were her church party of redoubtable Anglicans but they opposed Marlborough’s wars; the Whigs supported Marlborough and all his works, but they were eager to diminish the royal prerogative in favour of parliamentary rule. To whom could she flee?

The political parties were not yet formally constituted, but they were becoming so. They were, in other words, in the process of turning into caricatures of themselves. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the two factions of Lilliput, known as ‘Tramecksan’ and ‘Slamecksan’, are divided over the respective heights of the heels of their shoes; the former wear their heels high, as ‘high Tories’, and the latter low. The animosities between them are so great that, as Swift puts it, ‘they will neither eat nor drink, nor talk with each other’.

In the real world of early eighteenth-century London the Whigs and Tories frequented their own clubs, coffee-houses and taverns. The Whigs of aristocratic temper met at the Kit-Kat Club, while their Tory counterparts assembled at the Society of Brothers. The Tories patronized Ozinda’s Chocolate House in St James’s or progressed round the corner to the Smyrna or the Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall. The Whigs collected at St James’s Coffee House, perilously close to Ozinda’s, or drove further east to Buttons by Covent Garden. Pontack’s in Lombard Street, and the Old Man’s in the Tilt Yard, were also Whig favourites.

Addison once described London as ‘an aggregate of nations’, with the customs and manners of St James’s as different from those of Cheapside as those of Tunisia or Moscow. Yet each region was united by means of its principal coffee-house that ‘has some particular statesman belonging to it, who is the mouth of the street where he lives’. It was a city of coffee-houses. They had begun life in the 1660s, when the burgeoning social intercourse after the godly rule of Cromwell demanded some comfortable venue. They could not have come at a better time for London society, and before long they were considered to be the most essential component of city life. A roaring fire guaranteed warmth and hot water; a penny on the counter brought you a dish of coffee or chocolate; the newspapers, hanging on the wall, were all that were needed for entertainment and conversation. It was a world of news.

The illustrations of the time show that the coffee-houses were simple enough, with a few stools, chairs and plain deal tables. Smoking was the rule, and pipes were in almost every hand. Anderton’s in Fleet Street was the meeting place of Freemasons; Child’s, in St Paul’s Churchyard, was for book-worms and scholars; the Grecian was similarly the venue for learned men; Jonathan’s in Exchange Alley was the haunt of stock-jobbers; Batson’s in Cornhill was the place of physicians. If an invalid needed an immediate diagnosis, he or she would send a boy to Batson’s.

Even the medical profession, however, was not free from the rage of party. When Doctor Oliphant began to associate himself with the Tories, his Whig patients deserted him. When a prominent Tory, Lord Oxford, found the coach of an equally prominent Whig waiting beside a house door, he refused to enter the premises. London also had its own Whig and Tory hospitals – St Thomas’s for the former and Bart’s for the latter. Who would wish to be treated by a member of the wrong party? Eton College was divided between the two factions, which resulted in frequent fights and quarrels. When Swift passed through Leicester in 1707 he observed that ‘there is not a chambermaid, prentice or schoolboy in this whole town but what is warmly engaged on one side or the other’. The Spectator of 3 January 1712 noticed that ‘the Whig and Tory ladies begin already to hang out different colours, and to show their principles in their headdress’. Four years later the Freeholder observed that ‘Whig and Tory are the words first learned by children’.

So there was more to it than the difference between low heels and high heels. Even Swift, who made the analogy, became a lifelong Tory. The animus was such that the dominance of one faction over the other was enough to lead to imprisonment, exile, proscription, confiscation of estates, loss of office and even loss of life. The points of principle were manifold, concerning the role of monarchy itself, the structure of the Church of England, the basis of the Hanoverian succession, the nature of religious toleration, and the conduct of the war. When the conflict between money and land is thrown into the argument, the antagonisms could become fierce indeed. With the fundamental values and beliefs of the nation diverging so strongly, the queen and her ministers had to tread softly. This was by no means an ‘age of stability’, as it is sometimes described; in some respects it resembled the previous century without the imminent threat of armed conflict.

In the early years of the queen’s reign the Whigs tended to be in the ascendant largely because they more eagerly supported Marlborough’s war against the French; but there was no basic equipoise, since the parties moved incrementally up or down according to the atmosphere or debate of the day. One of these periodic changes occurred in the general election of the spring of 1705; neither side secured an outright victory, but the Whigs seemed to have overcome the more virulent Tories; as a result the Whigs and more moderate Tories held the balance, with the latter under the leadership of Robert Harley.

Harley may now have been consigned to the dust of history but he can be exhumed as representative of the eighteenth-century politician, the politician tout court, the naked politician. He began his climb as a member of the Commons in 1689 and soon acquainted himself so thoroughly with all the ploys of parliament that he became known as ‘Robin the Trickster’. Such was his success that he was elected Speaker in 1701, and soon became the inevitable candidate for higher office. As an orator he was neither fluent nor enlightening, but he made up for the lack of a wide view with a propensity for detail. He was a lover of intrigue and secrecy, relying for the most part on camouflage and dissimulation. He said nothing simple and nothing true. It was observed that he spoke so closely and unintelligibly that even he did not understand what he meant. Alexander Pope remarked that he ‘talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about; and every thing he went to tell you was in the epic way; for he always began in the middle’. This was an allusion to Horace’s advice to the epic poet always to begin ‘in medias res’ – in the middle of things.

Yet Harley’s design was to obfuscate and confuse his hearers. He was secretive to the point of being mysterious, dilatory to the point of immobility. Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor, remarked that ‘if any man was ever born under a necessity of being a knave, he was’. He was odd and awkward in appearance, always ready to bow and smile, but with what the duchess of Marlborough described as ‘a constant awkward motion or other agitation of his head and body’.

Yet he was also a politician of apparent good humour, treating every colleague as a potential ally and friend; he was fond of good company, but he had no friends. He was convivial with a purpose; his bonhomie was such that he had a reputation as a conciliator who was able to make the most diverse men and ambitions meet. He knew the secret spring of any man, and was so keen a judge of character that he knew the surest means of touching it. He had no principles beyond those of self-advertisement and self-advancement, although loyalty to the throne may be counted as one of his virtues even if it might be construed as loyalty to his own prospects. He was made for the politics of conspiracy: a perennial contriver and intriguer who tied himself in knots with his specious promises. One year he was a Whig, and the next a Tory. As long as he supported Queen Anne, it made little practical difference. Behold the politician of the age in all his infirmity, and the long line that followed him. We may repeat William Blake’s perception that ‘nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay’.

4

Hay day

The early years of Queen Anne’s reign were blessed, like some miracle of the gods, by bountiful harvests. Between 1702 and 1708 the price of wheat was below the crucial figure of 30 shillings a quarter that generally provoked distress or riot. This naturally lowered the political and social pressures in the regions, as well as in London, where the market cost of bread was the single most important factor in public content. In the autumn of 1708 Squire Molesworth of Yorkshire wrote that ‘we buy nothing but sugar and spice in the market, having all eatables and drinkables at home’. The superfluity of money, among the middling classes, accounts for the increasing purchase of clocks and mirrors, porcelain, carpets and curtains.

Yet not all was of the gods’ making. Much can be attributed to aspirations reported in Gulliver’s Travels that ‘whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together’. The names of these indispensable experimenters – Jethro Tull, Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend, Arthur Young and his Annals of Agriculture, Robert Bakewell and his New Leicester sheep – are well enough known in the annals of agricultural progress.

But the specific innovations of a few highly intelligent and observant men could not in themselves have created the ‘agricultural revolution’ that has been dated from the mid-seventeenth century. If ‘revolution’ is too strong in its implications, we may at least refer to a long age of improvement. The obstacles were very real. The forces of conservatism ruled the countryside, with the tillage of land and the raising of animals changing little over many thousands of years; the old habits and prejudices of the farmers were as deep as the soil, and anyone who questioned their efficacy was doubting the very nature of providence. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, according to John Aubrey, ‘even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, though it succeeded with profit, was looked upon with an ill eye’.

It would be hazardous to identify any specific reason for what became a period of significant innovation, in the later years of the seventeenth century, but some of the impetus may have been the result of the efforts of the Royal Society to investigate questions of drainage and crop rotation. When the level of prices fell in the early years of the eighteenth century there was even more reason to gather profit wherever it could be found.

The extent of further ‘enclosure’ was also one of the key agents of change. The ‘enclosure’ of land, making larger estates out of open fields and communal pasture, had been characteristic of English agriculture since the fourteenth century; it helped to arouse the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450. It became a matter of prominent public debate as a result of Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, in which More had condemned the conversion of arable land into pastoral. It was a case, he said, of the sheep eating the people.

The rise of population, the finite nature of resources, and the price of foodstuffs combined to make land the most desirable of all goods. When feudal ties were broken, when the laws and customs of manorial society ceased to operate, the demand from the prosperous was for land and more land. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was an instinctive law of being. The more land you owned, the greater you became. The more powerful you were, the easier it was to take away the customary but unwritten rights of the peasantry to gather the gleanings of the crop or to collect firewood; control of land was thereby extended.

A new race of landowners sprang up, and soon enough the landed gentry were a large component of parliament. They were protected, therefore, but the small freeholders and the cottagers were not. Those with the benefit of property purchased small parcels of further land in various locations, planning one day to join them together; they gained the manorial rights of parliamentary boroughs; they bought up ‘advowsons’ or land granted to the parson. The landowners wished to see their own territory from horizon to horizon, where the fruits of the field would be plentiful. To him who possessed much, more would surely follow.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century these enclosure agreements were organized by private treaty, in which no doubt bribery and blackmail played their part but in which common sense and mutual benefit played the larger role. The owners of the greatest number of strips in the old communal system might decide to join together and exchange land, for example, in order to provide soil for crops and pasture for husbandry. Another method was that organized by private Acts of Parliament. The first of these Acts was introduced in 1604 but the golden age of parliamentary enclosure, if that is the appropriate phrase, took place after the middle of the eighteenth century. It is more than likely that the parliamentary commissioners, employed to survey or to mediate land under dispute, tacitly supported the cause of agricultural reform; that was the spirit of the age. As a result, however, the balance was tipped against the independent voices of rural protest or the grievances of the ‘little people’. It required the owners of approximately 75 per cent of the land to initiate proceedings, ignoring the large majority of smaller owners.

Once the farmer owned the land, however he had acquired it, he could do what he liked and had no need to consult his neighbours. The advent of better drainage, and the introduction of rotating crops, increased the yield; the hedging and fencing of private land, and the new building necessary for storage, helped to create a wholly new agricultural landscape. The larger farmers were in addition much more open to new methods that encouraged efficiency and productivity. This has been called the economy of scale, or the birth of an agricultural industry based upon market forces.

So the land of England was slowly changed. The distinctive ‘checker-board’ aspect of the domestic countryside, with hedges or drystone walls enclosing the fields, is a direct consequence of the developments of the mid-eighteenth century. At the beginning of the following century Thomas Batchelor, in ‘The Progress of Agriculture’ (1804), remarks upon the new landscape:

And hawthorn fences, stretch’d from side to side,

Contiguous pastures, meadows, fields divide.

The mellifluous balance of Batchelor’s verse can be contrasted with the enclosure riots, the counter-petitions against proposed enclosure, and the anger against the withdrawal of common rights in the immediate countryside. Many of the small farmers, and the cottagers, were relegated to the status of labourers hired for money according to seasonal rates. The landed gentry, the richer owner-occupiers, and the larger tenants were in effective control. The peasants and the yeomen (best understood as smaller owner-occupiers), once the staple of the agricultural hierarchy, were diminished and ultimately disappeared. It represented a social revolution in the countryside.

When parliamentary commissioners were sent to a district in order to judge the merits of enclosure they were often met with threats, absence of cooperation, procrastination and wild rumours of local devastation; these hostile and often embittered responses embodied the last stand of custom, habit and tradition under threat from the forces of commerce and efficiency.

Yet the process of enclosure did materially affect the fertility and profitability of the land. It is unlikely, for example, that the farmers could have fed an ever-growing – and indeed rapidly accelerating – population without the benefits of large-scale production. The advantage of newly introduced crops – from sainfoin (or ‘healthy hay’) to lucerne (or alfalfa), from clover to the ubiquitous turnip – was evident in the fertility of the land that enriched the farmers and fattened the cattle. It soon became obvious and practicable to engage in regional specialization. The hops came from Kent, and the honey from Hampshire; Aylesbury ducks became as well known as Norfolk turkeys. In 1770 Arthur Young remarked that in the previous ten years there had been ‘more experiments, more discoveries, and more general good sense displayed in the walks of agriculture than in an hundred preceding ones’.

It has been estimated that by the middle of the eighteenth century the labours of one-third of the population in the field were now able to furnish sustenance for the remaining two-thirds. This was in a period when the economy was still primarily one of agriculture, where the abundance of foodstuff was the most accurate measurement of health, vitality and standard of living. So it was that in 1797 the Encyclopaedia Britannica could claim that ‘without any improper partiality to our own country, we are fully justified in asserting that Britain alone exceeds all modern nations in husbandry’, even though no mention is made of the poverty, distress, dispossession and injustice that accompanied the change in agricultural conditions.

In this age of improvement, however, myriad societies grew up for the betterment of agriculture. It became one of the great preoccupations of the period. Tenants’ dinners and farming clubs became the venue for discussions on agronomy; local societies fulfilled a similar purpose and shows, such as the Bath and West, encouraged experiment and innovation among their participants. There was nothing more potent than competition from a neighbour. At a later date periodicals such as the Farmer’s Magazine and the Farmers’ Journal, were issued and, in 1754, the Royal Society of Arts instituted a prize for agricultural improvement. As a crowning glory, a voluntary society was established in 1793 known as the Board of Agriculture, which was in a later century transmogrified into the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The same board went on to distribute many packages of Swedish turnips to all the regions of the country, and to organize Humphry Davy’s lectures on ‘vegetable chemistry’. The changes in agriculture were all part of the inventive and experimental spirit that had been evident since the middle years of the seventeenth century.

Talk of ‘improvement’, therefore, was in the air. The new discoveries in metals, mines and minerals were considered to be the harbinger of larger progress while the contemporary dispute between ‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’ was in part designed to correct the prevalence of ancient errors. Improvement trusts were soon to be established for roads, rivers and canals.

The spirit of enquiry was not always manifest in the higher echelons of the land. When a national census of population was proposed in 1753 it was condemned in parliament by the member for York as ‘subversive of the last remains of English liberty’ and ‘the most effective engine of rapacity and oppression’. When at last the population of Newcastle upon Tyne was counted, the result excited ‘universal surprise’ at the smallness of the total. The surprise derived from the belief that the population of the nation was fast outstripping its supply. The panic, like so many others, was without foundation.

Yet it is true that the trend of population was, from the early eighteenth century, only in one direction. It can be surmised that a population of some 6 million in 1714 rose to more than 6.5 million fifty years later; by 1781 it had reached 7.5 million and, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, 9 million. It was a history of continual, almost inexorable, development. It may be of some ancillary interest that by the middle of the eighteenth century the rapidly rising population was in the process of moving towards the north as well as to magnetic London.

The reasons for the rise in population have been variously stated. A decline in mortality, and an increase in fertility, are generally adduced as the principal causes; the absence of famine and the dearth of epidemic disease, the prevailing trends towards cleanliness, the increasing demand for labour, the abundance of food, the inclination towards early marriage and the growing success in the battle against sickness have all been cited. With such a wealth of circumstance the great work of fertilizing the soil, and feeding the population, could only go forward.

It was not a question of claiming domination over nature. This would have been considered blasphemous. But the results were clear. If you put the fleecy and fatty ‘New Leicester’ sheep of Robert Bakewell before the scrawny and ragged specimens of other farmers, the differences were obvious. Within the course of the eighteenth century the average weight of a sheep at Smithfield rose from 28 lb to 80 lb.

That power of change was not exclusively reserved for the beasts of the field. Beneath the soil lay the potential for transformations just as great. The first stage of industrial growth was marked by the transition from wood to coal, from organic to mineral, from a local and perishable source to a substance that seemed to be as old and as imperishable as time. Coal was the foundation. Yet first it had to be reached from the bowels of the earth.

The old fashion of excavating coal had been laborious and dangerous. The miners were lowered by rope many fathoms beneath the surface, where they took their place at the end of the track that they had already worked. They knelt, stooped or lay on one side in order to hack the coal from the main seam by means of pick, wedge or hammer; illustrations show them lying beneath immense layers of coal, as if they were likely at any moment to be crushed and obliterated. Their coal was taken away by pit ponies or by women and children who dragged large baskets from chains fastened to their waists. The hazards were everywhere, from gushing water to falling rocks and escaping steam, from asphyxiation by ‘choke-damp’ to suffocation in thick clouds of smoke and dust. Miners have always been associated with the dark and with subterranean depths; that is why they have generally been regarded with superstitious awe or irrational fear. They lived in darkness.

The inevitable cost to life was believed to be an economic, rather than a social, calamity. The loss of time, and men, meant loss of money. When the interests of the landowners and the mine-owners were at risk, of course, there was at least an incentive for remedial action. One of the most persistent and damaging problems was that of water gathering in the bases and hollows of the mines. ‘Horse-gins’, by which a wooden gear mechanism was driven by a horse trudging in a circle, bringing up buckets of water, was a first and not particularly efficient response; the contraption was also used to bring up coal.

The credit for the first ‘steam engine’, momentous though it may seem, is not certainly known. The palm is generally given to Thomas Savery who in 1698 patented his version of an atmospheric pump. An advertisement in the Postman of March 1702 recommended ‘Captain Savery’s Engines which raise Water by the force of Fire in any reasonable quantities and to any height … these are to give notice to all proprietors of mines and collieries which are encumbered with water, that they may be furnished with engines to drain the same’. The ‘fire’ was a furnace and boiler that provided the steam; the steam created the atmospheric pressure that moved the piston; the piston itself set in motion a pump. The menacing water was thus drawn off.

Savery’s engine was refined by a Dartmouth ironmonger, Thomas Newcomen, who by the first decade of the eighteenth century had devised an engine that could reach much greater depths. The first Newcomen engine was in use by 1712 and, at the time of Savery’s death in 1715, seven or eight were already in operation. Fifty more were erected over the succeeding twenty years; by the end of the century more than 350 had been installed. The success of the engine is testimony to its efficacy as well as its necessity, only eventually outperformed by the inventive works of James Watt.

It was not necessarily elegant, however, and Samuel Smiles records that

the working of a Newcomen engine is a clumsy and apparently a very painful process, accompanied by an extraordinary amount of wheezing, sighing, creaking and bumping. When the pump descends there is heard a plunge, a heavy sigh, and a loud bump; then as it rises, and the sucker begins to act, there is heard a creak, a wheeze, another bump, and then a strong rush of water as it is lifted and poured out.

The bulk and complexity of the first engines may have surprised contemporaries in the same manner as the early computers of the 1950s baffled the public. As with the computer, too, the most radical developments were not properly recognized or understood. The steam engine, for the first time, was able to convert thermal energy into kinetic energy. It turned heat into work. This was the source of power that would completely outstrip all previous resources, human or hydraulic, and would lead ineluctably to the enormous increase in industrial productivity that would one day earn the name of revolution. The wheezing and sighing engine changed the world.

5

The prose of gold

The late king had always nourished hopes of a union between Scotland and England, largely for defensive and military reasons; he did not want a Jacobite enemy at his back door, and over the centuries the Scots had notoriously been seen to favour the French. There had already been attempts at dynastic union between the two nations, but they had come to nothing. As dual monarch James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 also became James I of England, joined two crowns but not two realms; still, it was a precedent. Cromwell gathered Scotland in his embrace during the short-lived Commonwealth, but again the union fell apart.

Soon after the accession of Anne, however, a commission was established in 1702 to examine the long-standing dilemma. There was at first a signal lack of enthusiasm on both sides for the proposed arrangement. The leader of the Tories in the Commons suggested that union with Scotland was akin to marrying a vagrant ‘and whoever married a beggar could only expect a louse for her portion’. Yet reasons of state, and of defence, were more powerful than petty insults. In 1703 the Scottish parliament passed two Acts, of Security and of Peace and War, that threatened the governance of England. The Scots refused to confer their crown on the Protestant house of Hanover. They still yearned after the Scottish Stuart succession. The second Act declared that, on the death of the queen, the Scots would reserve to themselves any right of peace or war with both France and her allies. They might even withdraw their troops from Marlborough’s armies.

The prospect of an unfriendly power on the northern border concentrated the minds of the English politicians. The Whigs needed no persuasion of the need for union; their unequivocal support of the war, and their undeviating loyalty to the Hanoverians, made the choice inevitable. The Tories may in turn not have wished to seem openly disloyal to the queen or the administration, but in any case Anne took the precaution of nominating only one of them to the English commission. So the negotiations took place in an atmosphere of relative good grace amply mollified by bribes and other less overt forms of chicanery.

The commissioners convened at the Cockpit, a suite of offices in Whitehall, during the spring and summer of 1706. The two sides did not meet but instead preferred to exchange written suggestions and proposals, liberally larded with cash and promises to sweeten the Scottish lairds. The Scots contingent also hoped for a large portion of what was known as ‘The Equivalent’, the sum paid by England to satisfy the creditors of the previous Scottish administration. The ‘treaty of Union’ can be considered as a deal brokered under the table, therefore, but many of the Scottish commissioners were already in favour of a union with England.

The Scottish economy had been severely damaged by the continuing and apparently endless war with France. With foreign ports closed to its exports, the country more than ever required free trade with England in such commodities as cattle and linen. There seemed to be no doubt that the economic consequences of union would be beneficial. Adam Smith, the high priest of the Scottish economy, later wrote that

The union opened the market of England to the Highland cattle … Of all the commercial advantages, however, which Scotland has derived from the union with England, this rise in the price of cattle is, perhaps, the greatest. It has not only raised the value of all highland estates, but it has, perhaps, been the principal cause of the improvement of the low country.

In fact the treaty of Union was able to establish the largest free trade area in the world, and the manifest disadvantages of Scottish industry and agriculture were gradually removed.

Many of the Scottish people, however, were not so happy at the prospect of this arranged marriage. They had no wish to tie themselves to a richer and more powerful state, with all the dangers of being swallowed alive and becoming a Celtic appanage of the English Crown like Cornwall. Why should they turn their backs upon the old Stuart dynasty?

Nevertheless the various Acts of the ‘treaty of Union’ were passed by the beginning of May 1707, thus incorporating two nations or what Jonathan Swift called ‘our crazy double-bottomed realm’. In effect the treaty created a single sovereignty between the two nations and a single parliament, including Scottish representatives, but it also preserved the Kirk, Scottish law and Scottish local administration. From this time forward England, Scotland and Wales were united under the title of Great Britain.

The new flag, incorporating the red cross of St George and the white saltire of St Andrew, was popularly known as ‘The Union’ but it would of course make little difference to the war now being fought under its auspices. The success of Blenheim had been succeeded by little but disappointment and division among the allies, with neither Italy nor the Netherlands rescued from the French. The duke of Marlborough wished to invade France, and thus cut off the bull at the neck, but his fellow combatants gave him little, if any, support. They were too faint-hearted, and in any case too eager to defend their own territories.

Marlborough returned to the grim warfare in the Spanish Netherlands and, with the assistance of his Dutch and Danish allies, did manage to command a great victory at Ramillies in the spring of 1706. The French commander, Marshal Villars, described it as ‘the most shameful, humiliating and disastrous of routs’. As a result of the total defeat of their army the French withdrew from the Spanish Netherlands and abandoned a number of key towns; they retreated from Antwerp and Ostend, Bruges and Ghent and Lille.

The Bourbons were now in general disarray throughout their European possessions; an exception, perhaps, could be made for the Bourbon dynasty in Madrid that still held power through Louis’s grandson, Philip V, who remained the king of Spain for virtually forty years after a brief abdication in favour of his son. But now all seemed to be going well for the English and their allies. The capture of Lille in particular promised the key to Paris, and as a result Louis sent an envoy to The Hague for clandestine negotiations.

But the atmosphere in the English camp was not conducive to a treaty. Marlborough wrote to a Dutch general that ‘I am one of those who believe that France is not yet reduced to her just bounds, and that nothing can be more hurtful to us on this occasion than seeming overforward to clap up a hasty peace’. So the terms of any treaty were to be formidable. The least of them included the formal recognition of Queen Anne as legitimate sovereign in contrast to the spurious authority of the ‘Old Pretender’ who in the spring of 1708 added disaster to misfortune with a botched landing at the Firth of Forth; the proposed terms also included the demolition of the port at Dunkirk and the recall of Philip V from Madrid.

Louis XIV seemed prepared to yield all, or almost all. France and England had just suffered the coldest winters in living memory; the Thames became a Frost Fair and Lady Wentworth wrote to her brother of ‘post-boys being brought in by their horses to their stages froze to their horses stone dead’. Yet the bitter cold had more severely affected France, already afflicted as it was by famine, shortages and a general sense of failure.

Louis would go so far and no further. He could never sign the thirty-seventh article of the proposed peace which demanded that he remove his grandson from Madrid, by force if necessary, and replace him with the Habsburg Charles. It was an insult. To eject a member of his Bourbon house by arms, in favour of a Habsburg? It could never be. It is possible, even plausible, that Marlborough and his English negotiators made these demands precisely in order that Louis would refuse them and thus continue the conflict. The spoils of war were still very great, especially for a noble leader such as Marlborough. The duke had even asked the queen to confer upon him the title of captain-general for life, but Anne wisely rejected this as unconstitutional. Still, he had done sufficiently well. Blenheim Palace and Marlborough House were only two of the stone baubles he had collected.

The wealth and eminence of Marlborough were of course resented by those who opposed both him and the war itself; anger and frustration were also directed at the dominant Whig administration that held the purse-strings of the revenue. The Whig financiers were in any case growing rich on the loans they made to the administration, while the Tory squires were paying for government borrowing with heavy land taxes. The equation was not as simple as this, but this was how it appeared at the time. Nothing could be more onerous or more unfair. The Tories opposed the war on grounds of strategy as well as expense. Why fight on behalf of the Dutch who had for centuries been the great trade rivals of England? Why fight obscure battles on the continental mainland when nothing seemed to be gained from them?

The crisis in fact came with the battle of Malplaquet, southwest of Mons, in the early autumn of 1709. The English army and its allies won a paper victory at enormous cost, suffering double the enemy’s number of fatalities. The French withdrew in good order, while the English left more than 20,000 corpses on a battlefield that quickly became known as ‘the bloodiest in Europe’. Queen Anne sent no letter of congratulation to the duke. If the French could still fight in so spirited and determined a fashion, despite imminent projections of their collapse, who could foresee the end of war? The Tories called out against the carnage incurred, if not devised, by the Whig administration. Marshal de Villars, the commander of the French forces, wrote to the king that ‘if it please God to give your majesty’s enemies another such victory, they are ruined’. The original quote came from Pyrrhus, who was of course the father of the Pyrrhic victory.

The Whigs had now another enemy of quite a different type. Dr Henry Sacheverell, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, had already alienated the Whigs by his fervent high church tendencies. With the assistance of a high Tory lord mayor, however, and some fellow travellers he was chosen to preach before the City corporation at St Paul’s Cathedral on the signal occasion of 5 November 1709. He was known to be an orator with few rivals on the religious stage. ‘He came into the pulpit,’ William Bissett wrote in The Modern Fanatic (1710), ‘like a Sybil to the mouth of her cave, or a pythoness upon her tripod, with such an air of fierceness and rage, as is not possible to express.’ With pursed lips and keen ferocious glare, he had all the appearance of a martinet. He was not learned but he was authoritative; he was not clever but he was persuasive. He was one of those clerics who can repeat the clichés of the age as if they were written in letters of fire.

His sermon was entitled ‘The Perils of False Brethren, in Church and State’. The ‘false brethren’ were not difficult to identify; in fact they were displayed by Sacheverell like so many puppets on poles. His attack was upon religious nonconformists, in particular the dissenting brethren whom the Whigs sought to protect and who had been granted freedom of worship by the Act of Toleration twenty years before. They had been chosen, according to the preacher, to rule a land of ungodliness and licence. In a previous sermon, delivered in 1702, he had declared that ‘presbytery and republicanism go hand in hand’, by which he meant that the levelling principle of nonconformity could be applied to politics as well as to religion. It was the old argument, adumbrated by James I in his remark of ‘no bishop, no king’.

But Sacheverell now proclaimed it with unparalleled ferocity. He launched into a tirade against religious toleration. He practically accused the dissenters of being regicides. He advocated to the utmost the principle of ‘passive obedience’ by which the sovereign must be implicitly obeyed; any dissent should be treated as sinful and as unlawful. This could of course be considered to be an implied criticism of the Glorious Revolution that had removed James II from the throne, but more immediately it could be construed by some as a momentous attack upon the Whig cause and its advocates.

The Whigs were at this moment in an unenviable position, beset by the enemies of the continental war and by their opponents whispering in the queen’s ear that all was not well in the state. In these circumstances, the best mode of defence was considered to be attack. It was decided, against the advice of Anne herself, that the doctor should be brought before the Commons to explain himself. In the middle of December the Commons condemned his statements as ‘malicious, scandalous and seditious libels’; he was placed in custody and impeached for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’, for which he could be sentenced to life imprisonment.

The threat of the sledgehammer, raised against a relatively small nut, confirmed all the public suspicions concerning an over-mighty Whig administration intent upon preserving its own interests. What had Henry Sacheverell done but proclaim his loyalty to the established Church and to cry out that its privileges were being violated? What was the high crime in being a staunch Anglican? Those who attacked him, indeed, might themselves fall under the suspicion of subversion.

It is a matter of some interest that the ‘mob’, or the ‘rabble’, or whatever other word covered the ordinarily unremarked inhabitants of London, was traditionalist; the people were by instinct loyal to the established authorities of monarchy and religion, and any cry of ‘the Church in danger’ could bring them out onto the streets. They might never have attended an Anglican service in their lives but the threat against the Church was enough to rouse them.

As the time for the trial of Sacheverell approached, the London crowds gathered with the aim of sacking the meeting houses of dissenters; the dwelling houses of certain nonconformist ministers were also ransacked, the books and furniture destroyed. The pulpits and pews, even the wainscot, of several conventicles were brought to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where they were burned on a pile to the shouts of ‘High Church and Sacheverell!’ The carriage of the queen herself was stopped while the people cried out ‘God save your Majesty and the Church! We hope your Majesty is for Doctor Sacheverell!’ Daniel Defoe wrote that ‘the women lay aside their tea and chocolate, leave off visiting after dinner, and forming themselves into cabals, turn privy councillors and settle the affairs of state … mobs, rabbles and tumults possess the streets … even the little boys and girls talk politics’.

The trial before the House of Lords began in Westminster Hall towards the end of February, to the excitement of a packed audience of spectators who had paid heavily for the privilege; a box had been constructed so that the queen might view the proceedings without being seen. Sacheverell himself arrived every morning in a glass coach, surrounded by a multitude of people with weapons and drawn swords. The defence rose to plead that the doctor had done nothing more than to defend the Church in a sermon that had been ‘made criminal by a laboured construction of doubtful words’.

Four days later Henry Sacheverell rose to defend himself, in a speech that had been written for him by the much more learned and eloquent bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury; Sacheverell claimed that he was only an ordinary priest who had dared to speak out of love for his country and for his religion against blasphemers and infidels. He had won the argument even before he began to speak, and the Whig leaders had cause to regret their ill-timed attack upon a popular favourite. He was deemed to be guilty by a narrow majority, and the sentence was a light one; instead of being consigned to the Tower for life, as he was threatened, his sermons were to be burned and he was suspended from preaching for three years.

In the eyes of the country this was tantamount to acquittal and a severe reprimand for the Whig authorities who had prosecuted him. The crowds of London became wild with excitement; bonfires were lit in the streets and windows illuminated by candles or torches in the old fashion for celebrating a great foreign victory. When Sacheverell read prayers at St Saviour’s, Southwark, the press of worshippers was almost too great. The country towns also rang with the bells of victory, and it seemed to many that the national mood was the harbinger of a new Tory era of Church and State.

The election of the following autumn seemed to burnish those hopes ever brighter. The Tories took the lead over the Whigs by a majority of two to one. The newly established government was led by a statesman who has been mentioned before, the political convolvulus Robert Harley, whose genuine fidelity to the queen was matched by a desire to create a ‘moderate’ ministry. Yet he had not anticipated the extreme Tory members who were deposited in the Commons by the high tide of their party’s success in the election; they formed an association, the October Club, in memory of their famous victory. They may have discharged more spittle than sense, and were described by Defoe as ‘moon-blind high-flyers’. Some opponents explicitly attacked them for an attachment to the Stuart cause but this was only barely justifiable; it might more fairly be said that they were Jacobean when drunk and Hanoverian when sober. In that, they embodied a large number of Tories who may have dreamed of a return to the old order but knew well enough that their welfare, their finances and their safety depended upon the house of Hanover.

The October Club, however, represented a powerful combination of those who were weary of war, even more weary of Whigs, and suspicious of the financial cabal that controlled military expenditure and domestic taxation. They were suspicious of Harley, too, who seemed to be willing to admit some of the Whigs into the new administration. Some believed that the spoils of the electoral war should go to the victors rather than to the defeated.

The political debates and divisions have to a certain extent been preserved in aspic by an age that includes the names of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as well as Defoe, Swift, Congreve and Pope. It can fairly be claimed, in fact, that the reign of Anne represented the golden age of political journalism. By the time the election of autumn 1710 was called, the war between the pamphlets and the periodicals had begun in earnest. Harley in particular had a keen eye for what at a different date might be called ‘public relations’. He scooped Defoe out of prison, where the writer had been banished for a contentious pamphlet, and placed him on the payroll both as a tame journalist and as a travelling spy. Defoe had already begun the publication of the Review, more formally known as A Review of the Affairs of France, in which he employed the events of the day as a force for moral and political satire; it came out in quarto form on three days a week, with digests of domestic and foreign politics, art, commerce, science and trade. It lasted for nine years, and Defoe wrote almost every word of it, steering English journalism in an opinionated direction from which it has never since veered.

Yet Harley also employed Swift. He had a good eye for argument and invective in the most promising of his contemporaries. Harley may have paid Defoe, but he flattered Swift whose status as a gentleman and a scholar was a little higher than that of Defoe as hack and a quondam tilemaker. Harley took Swift with him to Windsor, and the writer was one of the first to attend Harley’s Saturday Club dinners in York Buildings. So Swift’s Examiner was conducted on very different lines from those of Defoe’s Review; it had more style and scholarship, but less power and pugnacity. Defoe’s readership was largely made up of urban merchants and shopkeepers or, as one contemporary unkindly put it, the periodical was ‘read by cobblers and porters’; it was essentially appealing to urban loyalists. Swift addressed himself in principle to the rural gentry and the landed gentlemen. Harley needed both constituencies; so he had Swift in one pocket and Defoe in the other.

Swift was, however, in an ambiguous position. The earl of Orrery wrote that Swift ‘was elated with the appearance of enjoying ministerial confidence. He enjoyed the shadow; the substance was detained from him. He was employed, not trusted.’ Swift believed himself to be a deep-sea diver in politics but Orrery claimed that ‘he was suffered only to sound the shallows nearest the shore … perhaps the deeper bottoms were too muddy for his inspection’.

His boredom, hurt and disgust at the lies and false promises made to him by the prominent English politicians may have materially added to the weight of his misanthropy in his later and more celebrated writings. In Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, he seems to be one thoroughly disabused by human deception and disguise; his principal responses are those of mockery and disdain at all the claptrap of the world; he feels disgust but not pity, a disgust combined with the horror of life.

In the spring of 1709 a small folio half-sheet of four columns began to appear three days a week at the price of a penny; it contained an essay on the manners or morals of the day, together with notes and sketches from the various coffee-houses of the City. It was of a moderate Whiggish persuasion, but preserved its chaste and neutral demeanour. The Tatler was a London periodical, and in the capital the Whigs were the voice of refinement and discrimination. It professed to teach ‘public persons what to think’ but promised to contain material ‘which may be of entertainment to the fair sex’. It would also provide ‘accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainments’ under the names of the various coffee-houses and chocolate-houses where its reporters took their refreshment.

Its editor, Richard Steele, assumed the name of Isaac Bickerstaff and adopted the persona of a man of sense and tolerance, not at all willing to subject other parties to superlative praise or to excessive blame. He was a Whig who knew how to keep his temper, especially when the climate grew colder. He supported Marlborough while professing impartiality, and conveyed the essential values of Whig policy as somehow identical with common sense and good taste.

Within two years the Tatler had transmogrified into the Spectator under the editorship of Steele himself and Joseph Addison. It maintained the Whiggish tone of its predecessor even as the Tory administration of Robert Harley took over the machinery of government, and thus preserved its neutral urbanity. It covered disparate subjects deemed to be of interest to its audience, from the nature of whoredom to the metrics of Paradise Lost; it described a night at the theatre and chronicled immediate fashions, like a sudden efflorescence of coloured hoods at the beginning of 1712, everything pushed forward by the stream of forgetfulness that is human life.

The Spectator had disavowed any partisan affiliations, with Addison declaring that ‘my paper has not in it a single word of news, a reflection in politics nor a stroke of party’. His purpose was to teach manners and not measures, and he added that ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.’

This represents the refining tendency of the eighteenth century. The Spectator would civilize the Jacobites, the enthusiasts, the high church Tories and the ferocious partisans, out of existence. The great medium of truth would be sociable discourse and, of all the humours in the casebook of Hippocrates, only good sense would remain. The moral did not need to be emblazoned on the masthead of the periodical since it represented the temperate and tolerant society, the virtuous commonwealth, that was considered to be the proper and appropriate consequence of the revolution of 1688.

Of course the absence of enthusiasm, and the decline in earnestness of all kinds, might in turn arouse cynicism and fatalism. The plays of Congreve, written just before the accession of Queen Anne, are populated by characters who are naturally and instinctively deceitful; the world is a great theatre of folly, in which truth and virtue are nowhere to be found. It is a sphere of wit and foolery, animated only by sexual greed and the pursuit of money; the men lie, wheedle and betray; the women are lustful, silly and untrustworthy. The plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at a slightly later date, are preoccupied with hypocrisy and fraudulence in the service of money; metaphors of banking and finance, so central to the period, hold together the dramatic narratives in bands of gold. Sheridan had nothing but contempt for the vogue of sentiment that came to be so fashionable in the mid-eighteenth century, regarded by many as a trite and naïve refusal to countenance the real truths of the age. ‘If you have any regard for me,’ Sir Peter Teazle says in The School for Scandal (1777), ‘never let me hear you utter anything like a sentiment.’

We also have two more voices, from Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1693), to add to the cacophony of the period after the Glorious Revolution.

Brisk: I have a violent passion for your ladyship, seriously.

Lady Froth: Seriously? Ha ha ha!

Brisk: Seriously, ha ha ha. Gad I have, for all I laugh.

Lady Froth: Ha ha ha! What d’ye think I laugh at? Ha ha ha.

6

Waiting for the day

The desire now was for peace. After ten years of war against the French the nation was weary. The new Tory government, elected overwhelmingly in the autumn of 1710, was all too willing to bow to the public demand. When the new parliament assembled, and the duke of Marlborough had taken his accustomed seat in the House of Lords, the queen commenced her speech by announcing: ‘I am glad that I can now tell you that notwithstanding the arts of those who delight in war, both place and time are appointed for opening the treaty of a general peace.’ This was a Tory kick against the previous Whig administration but in the subsequent debate Marlborough took exception to the insinuation that he had prolonged the war artificially for reasons of private convenience or profit. When he made his appearance at court in the last week of the year Swift noted in a letter to his close friend, Esther Johnson, that ‘nobody hardly took notice of him’.

The duke’s principal political opponent had meanwhile become the hero of the hour when, in the spring of 1711, he had been the victim of an unsuccessful assassination by a French spy. Robert Harley had been stabbed twice in the chest but an elaborately ornate and padded waistcoat saved him from serious injury. His wonderful escape was a cause of much triumphalism, and in honour of his safe recovery the queen ennobled him as the earl of Oxford and earl Mortimer as well as promoting him to be lord high treasurer. In this superior capacity he lost no time in prosecuting his opponents still further and, the evening after the queen had denounced ‘those who delight in war’, he instigated proceedings against Marlborough for bribery and corruption.

The terms for a peace between France and England, so long looked for, were already being discussed in the course of secret negotiations at the beginning of 1711. The principal tenet, if it can be so called, was that the two countries would enter a secret understanding even at the expense of their allies. A Franco-British treaty would be enough to cow them into agreement. The second article would allow Philip V to remain on the throne of Spain in exchange for certain commercial concessions to the British in Europe and on the American continent. There was even some discussion of the ‘Old Pretender’ returning to England if he espoused the cause of Anglicanism but, in the unlikely event of James Edward becoming an apostate, it remained mere talk. It is a measure, however, of the crucial significance that the Stuart succession still held in English politics.

In November 1711 Jonathan Swift issued one of his most incendiary and effective pamphlets, ‘The Conduct of the Allies’, in which he declared that ‘no reasonable man … can be of the opinion for continuing the war’. He accused the Whig oligarchs of placing ‘a sort of artificial wealth of funds and stocks in the hands of those who for ten years before had been plundering the public’; he believed that ‘we are thus become the dupes and bubbles of Europe’. He accused Marlborough of ‘that unmeasurable love of wealth, which his best friends allow to be his predominant passion’. Towards the conclusion of his polemic he states that ‘we have been fighting for the ruin of the public interest, and the advancement of a private. We have been fighting to raise the wealth and grandeur of a particular family; to enrich usurers and stock-jobbers; and to cultivate the pernicious designs of a faction, by destroying the landed interest.’ It was a comprehensive catalogue of ills.

In the following month the duke of Marlborough was dismissed by the queen from all offices of state. His carriage was chased by angry members of the populace, crying out ‘Stop thief!’ The victor of Blenheim, and the saviour of Europe from Louis, had good reason to contemplate the turning of Fortune’s wheel. ‘Ah,’ Boethius had written in The Consolation of Philosophy, ‘dull-witted mortal. If Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune.’ Marlborough and his wife soon decamped to the continent where they hoped to find more enduring allies. Many of the Whig lords were still supporting the duke, and the further prosecution of the war, but Queen Anne managed to dilute their partisanship by creating twelve new peers on the first day of 1712. Now the House of Lords was in agreement with the Commons.

Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, had already fallen far out of favour. She was an earnest and argumentative Whig who had eventually exasperated and alienated the queen. Her supplanter in the position of royal confidante was Abigail Masham, who became ‘keeper of the queen’s purse’; Masham was also cousin to Robert Harley and was believed to have maintained the interests of that sinuous survivor. There were further rumours of over-familiarity between Masham and the queen, with what a ballad called ‘some dark deeds at night’ between the elderly sovereign and her servant. The queen’s gout and general ill-health would not have encouraged physical passion, but she may have needed familiar female companionship to withstand the ills of a predominantly male world. The more extreme sexual gossip seems on the face of it unfounded, therefore, but it was still assiduously promoted by the duchess of Marlborough in revenge for her usurpation.

When the eventual peace conference between France and England opened in Utrecht at the end of January 1712, much had already been agreed in clandestine negotiations. When the treaty was eventually signed in the spring of 1713, it had become clear that Great Britain was a world power fit to challenge France, and that in addition it was now the dominant naval power with bases at Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean. The British took firmer control of North America, with the possession of Newfoundland and Hudson’s Bay. And they had been granted the additional bonus of the asiento, a treaty that allowed English vessels to ship African slaves to the Spanish colonies of the Americas. The cup of maritime supremacy flowed over, and the articles signed at Utrecht were able to keep the peace between France and England for the next fifteen years.

The rejoicing was by no means universal. The war had continued during the course of the negotiations, and the duke of Ormonde had been sent out to replace Marlborough in command of the English forces. But it was not intended that he should compromise any quiet diplomacy with rough action; he was sent what was called a ‘restraining order’ that prevented him from taking part in any battle or participating in any siege. All was to be quiet on the various fronts. It did not take long for the allies to become acquainted with the position of their erstwhile colleagues who had suddenly become non-combatants; they reacted as much with disbelief as with fury. They had effectively been deserted on the field of battle.

One of those allies was George, prince-elector of Hanover, who like the other princes and commanders felt that he had been betrayed by the Tory administration desperate for peace. His interests had been sold behind his back. It was clear enough that England would get rid of her supposed friends as soon as they were unnecessary to her. So grew the myth of ‘perfidious Albion’. Unhappily for the Tories, however, George, heir to the house of Hanover, was more than likely to become the next king of England. How were Harley and others to shield themselves from his wrath?

In the last year of the queen’s reign, party loyalties, therefore, were screwed to the highest pitch. To vote with the Tories for peace was tantamount to disowning the coming prince. To vote with the Whigs for war was to ignore the fervent wishes of the nation. The volatile state of the nation’s politics was compounded by the problem of the ‘Old Pretender’. It was widely assumed that the queen secretly favoured her half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, in the place of the Hanoverians; this may have been true of some of her ministers, but there is no reason to believe that she harboured any such desire. She was fervently Protestant, and could not in conscience have endured the return of a committed Catholic. Since James soon publicly refused to renounce the old faith, the possibility of his succeeding Anne became ever more remote.

Some ministers and councilors still faced both ways, sending messages of assurance to the Stuart court while continuing to deal with the house of Hanover. The duke of Marlborough, now on enforced leave on the continent, was actively preparing his committed forces at Bruges, Ghent and elsewhere for action on behalf of the house of Hanover if it were threatened; yet at the same time he was maintaining contact with the Pretender. This vertiginous ambiguity, performed on a tightrope between two eminences, is an extreme form of the ambivalence felt by the nation between the candidates for the throne.

It is difficult to know, amongst all the bitterness and controversy, where the balance lay. It was said that the first claimant who arrived in England after the death of the queen, James or George, would be welcomed as sovereign. This was silly. The matter of succession had become a poisoned well of suspicion, rumour and intrigue. In a pamphlet of 1713, ‘Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover’, Daniel Defoe records that ‘the poor despicable scullions learn to cry “High Church; no Dutch kings; no Hanover!” that they may do it dexterously when they come into the next mob’ while their Whig antagonists ‘clamour “No French peace, no Pretender, no Popery!”’ In the spring of the following year Richard Steele wrote that ‘according to the situation of affairs, nothing but divine providence can prevent a civil war within a few years’. These were the gloomy prognostications of those who understood public affairs best. The age of Anne was not an age of stability.

The Tories themselves were at odds one with another. Some of them even crossed the Channel to attend the court of the Pretender while others remained quiet and in a phrase of the era ‘waited for the day’. Still others were more moderate or more realistic in their expectations, calmly awaiting the arrival of a Hanoverian king, while others actively supported the Hanoverian cause; they were known as the ‘Whimsicals’. The Whigs also remained in a state of confusion, indecision and alarm. Some of them, fearing a coup d’état arranged by the ‘Old Pretender’ and his allies, seem to have arranged themselves in military associations with arms and troops at the ready; but these may have been paper brigades born out of fear and rumour.

The confusion and anxiety of course grew worse as the queen’s health began to fail. She had said herself earlier in the year that she had suffered from ‘an aguish disposition, succeeded by a fit of the gout’, which could mean anything or nothing. Yet her perilous condition did not affect her frantic councillors who, in her own words, ‘neither regarded her health, her life, nor her peace’. The future of the country was for them too important to wait for an old woman. Their arguments continued over her deathbed, with the voices of the warring parties echoing through the corridors of state.

It was all too much. She was becoming feverish and bewildered. Her lord chancellor, Lord Harcourt, whispered to her the name of the duke of Shrewsbury; the duke had recently seen service in France and Ireland and, more importantly, he had never professed himself to be wholly Whig or wholly Tory. The white staff of the lord high treasurer would be in safe hands. It was the last appointment she ever made. On the following morning she was dead, with the doctor recording that ‘the immediate occasion of the queen’s death proved to be the transition of the gouty humour’ from knees and feet to nerves and brain. It had flown upwards and taken the sovereign with it.

7

The great Scriblerus

The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus was composed privately in 1714 by the Scriblerus Club. The society itself was a parody of the multifarious clubs, literary and artistic and philosophical, that became most prominent at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was itself composed of two clubs or groups of men with shared affinities. One was a Tory assembly that included Swift and Bolingbroke. The other comprised younger and more facetious men, among them Pope and Gay. They were joined together as the Society of Brothers which began to meet in 1711. Their principal opponents were the Whig authors, such as Addison and Steele, who circulated about the Spectator.

It was Pope who in the autumn of 1713 helped to form the Scriblerus Club out of the ‘Brothers’ with the proposal for a monthly satire that would parody the age. They met on Saturdays in the rooms of John Arbuthnot at St James’s Palace; Arbuthnot was personal physician to Queen Anne as well as an author. He is still the least well known of the company. He was born in north-east Scotland but he migrated to London in his twenties, when his first book was published. It was entitled Of the Laws of Chance and was addressed to the prevalent taste for gambling, including backgammon, dice and the lottery. Gamblers, after all, were at the political forefront of the age. Arbuthnot discovered, or his colleagues discovered for him, a vein of wit and satire that made him the perfect companion and co-worker.

Swift said that the Scriblerus Club represented ‘a friendship among men of genius’, and Pope returned the compliment by remarking that it comprised ‘some of the greatest wits of the age’. In the early summer of 1714 Pope wrote to Swift that ‘Dr Arbuthnot is singular in his opinion, and imagines your only design is to attend at full leisure to the life and adventures of Scriblerus … The top of my own ambition is to contribute to that great work, and I shall translate Homer by the by.’ Swift himself remarked, some years after, that ‘I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done. There are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and if they could be united would drive the world before them.’ One of its members, Robert Harley, had of course been first lord of the treasury, and the queen’s principal minister, since 1711, and so its significance became ever greater.

The Memoirs was at first designed to become part of the satirical periodical that Pope had proposed. Instead it became a single treatise, a mock biography of a foolish and gullible hero who has all the makings of a learned simpleton. The text was revised and enlarged from time to time, culminating in its publication in the second volume of Pope’s prose works in 1741.

Satire had become the single most important response to public events in an age that eschewed polemic and serious argument. You were not a gentleman if you took life too seriously. It was also a question of common sense; a word that, with its meaning of ‘good sound practical sense’, is first noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in a text of 1726. But that common sense must be combined with moderation or, as Pope had put it in An Essay on Criticism (1711), ‘not dully prepossest, nor blindly right’. Amiability was also a key term of the time, but it had its limits. Balance was the key. It was part of the movement of the time with the disquisitions of the Royal Society on the one side and the essays of the Spectator on the other; it represented an easy plainness, a modest and sensible attempt at truth. The historian of the Royal Society, William Sprat, characterized the prose of scientific discourse as ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness, as they can’. The men of letters, poets and dramatists as well as essayists, were intent upon using to best advantage the language that men do use. It was said by a contemporary critic, Colley Cibber, that the plays of John Vanbrugh seemed ‘no more than his common conversation committed to paper’.

The rhetoric of speculation, and of enthusiasm, was now being displaced by the prose of fact and opinion; satire was taking the place of dogmatism and, although the age of theological disquisition was by no means dead, there was an emphasis now upon ‘characters’ and ‘observations’ in the public prints. This helped to reanimate the discourse of the political news-writers and pamphleteers. The essay was the true sermon of the period and, as the Spectator noted in a dramatic context, ‘the town has an opportunity of doing itself justice in supporting the representations of passion, sorrow, indignation, even despair itself, within the rules of decency, honour and good breeding’.

The growing class of readers, or what soon became known as ‘the reading public’, fastened upon what was contemporary and what was immediate; it took an unusual and even perhaps unprecedented interest in the affairs and interests of polite society. It was the immediate bed from which rose the novel in all of its forms, and of which the journalists Swift and Defoe were two of the most accomplished practitioners. And what might else explain the rise of what could be called the conversational, rather than rhetorical, drama at the command of Congreve, Vanbrugh and John Gay?

If we are to hear, or overhear, the voice of the age of Anne, therefore, it is perhaps in the pages of its literature. The tone is at once learned and comic, inspired and facetious; it is quite unpretentious and is designed in fact to deflate pomposity of every description. It represents a reaction against revolutions, glorious or otherwise, against warfare that seemed both endless and unproductive, against political and religious animosities that were now regarded as outdated and unnecessary.

Satire of course had existed as long as fools or hypocrites could be found but, after the bitter controversies and proclaimed certainties of the seventeenth century, its themes became enlarged with irony and condescension. It was not enough to defeat an opponent in argument. It was necessary to ridicule him. Pope and Swift, in particular, were masters of acerbic derision. It was the temper of the time. All the members of the Scriblerus Club had already constructed several satirical personae.

Pope himself had much to be acerbic about. As a Catholic he was debarred from university or government employment; he suffered from tuberculosis of the spine that rendered him a cripple of low and bent stature. It was he who complained about ‘this long disease, my life’. His poetry, composed largely in heroic couplets, became first the fashion and then the expression of the period. His couplets evinced the formal and artificial style, at a time when formality and artificiality were in any case the marks of good breeding.

Yet the safety of the clipped couplet did not, in the case of Pope, preclude eloquence and genuine feeling. The early decades of the eighteenth century are depicted as those of restraint, but there was much wild feeling and enthusiasm to be restrained. It was no longer considered proper to wear your heart upon your sleeve. All was to be achieved by allusion and indirection. If it were indeed an ‘age of reason’, as the older textbooks allege, it was reason that gave the point to passionate analysis. What could be a more passionate pursuit than to reason oneself out of the darkness of the recent past?

The Memoirs was from the start a collaborative enterprise designed, in the words of Pope, ‘to have ridiculed all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough that he had dipped in every art and science, but injudiciously in each’. So the little book became an assault against fashionable taste and the purveyors of contemporary wisdom, conceived in the spirit of what Swift described on his funerary monument as ‘saeva Indignatio’ or savage indignation. In particular the Scriblerians, if the term may be allowed, were the absolute opponents of contemporary science – known as ‘mechanical philosophy’ or ‘corpuscular philosophy’ – that reduced everything to its material constituents; they abhorred the technical language of the experimentalists as so much nonsense, as well as the assumption that there was no spiritual component to be discovered in the world.

There was no shortage of other targets. One of the intellectual controversies of the time was that between the ‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’, those who revered classical learning against those who followed the new philosophy of science and experiment. Both schools, or tendencies, are satirized in the Memoirs for their avowal of fixed positions and of unfruitful speculation. The book ridicules the coffee-house bores, the clubbable bores and the pedantic bores who took advantage of what was a relatively new social freedom. Everyone seemed entitled to his or her own opinion.

Martin Scriblerus is born in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials, well known for its astrologers and doctors who, in the absence of proper medical attention, were the resort of both rich and poor. The allusion here is to the credulity and superstition that swept through the eighteenth century, led from the front by those who put their faith in book learning rather than experience. Martin’s father, Cornelius Scriblerus, had previously consulted the works of Aristotle to discover the best moment for conception.

Martin himself is first seen frequenting ‘the outside of the palace of St James’s’ in the reign of Queen Anne ‘which, notwithstanding those happy times which succeeded, every Englishman has not forgotten’. He was later to be glimpsed ‘under the piazza by the dancing room in St James’s’, and it is not wholly impossible that this neighbourhood contained his simple lodging ‘in a small chamber up four pairs of stairs’. It may even have resembled Arbuthnot’s own lodgings in the palace.

The author is wary of astonishing the reader with too much low detail, however, since ‘I dare promise the reader that, whenever he thinks any one chapter dull, the style will be immediately changed in the next’. The remark is in the same tone as that of a later passage in which it is revealed that ‘the style of this chapter in the original memoirs is so singularly different from the rest that it is hard to conceive by whom it was penned’. It is impossible to think of a seventeenth-century author who would write in such a manner. It is, however, very close to the style of Tristram Shandy, the first two volumes of which were published in 1759. The combination of cleverness and facetiousness can be considered as a true token of eighteenth-century sensibility.

One habit of the time was ‘the recovery of manuscripts, the effossion [digging up] of coins, the procuring of mummies’. In this period, too, much attention was paid to physiognomists, phrenologists and chirographists who analysed the faces, heads and palms of their clients in the belief that inward qualities could be deciphered from outward signs. The Scriblerus Club satirizes all of these pseudo-sciences that, together with quack remedies like hartshorn and Hungary water, dominated the world of eighteenth-century medicine. ‘What makes the English phlegmatic and melancholy but beef? What renders the Welsh so hot and choleric but cheese and leeks? The French derive their levity from their soups, frogs and mushrooms.’

Medical practice, as well as theory, was investigated. Martin Scriblerus, in search of enlightenment, ‘purchased the body of a malefactor’, freshly hanged, and ‘hired a room for its dissection, near the Pest-fields in St Giles’s, at a little distance from the Tyburn Road’. The ‘pest-fields’ were those open spaces where the victims of the plague had been buried in the previous century. His manservant carried the corpse back in a hackney coach at midnight, for fear of provoking attention, but when the corpse farts (a very eighteenth-century touch) the household is plunged into confusion. In the ensuing commotion the manservant is brought before a local justice, but his plea in his own defence is composed entirely of puns. This was another hit against the tastes of contemporaries. In 1719 was published The Art of Punning; or, The Flower of Languages; it was composed by Tom Hood, one of the notable ‘punsters’ of the time.

The narrators also satirize the modern practices of logic and philosophy that turn antique syllogisms and propositions into absurdity. This was the prolonged curse of scholasticism that had dominated the medieval period. How do angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? Much of this was aimed at the universities where the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas were still considered to be holy writ. Classicism was the only curriculum.

The young Scriblerus also evinces an interest in the literatures of Persia and Araby. He takes pleasure in the exhibitions of wild animals and other ‘wonders’ that delighted the people. They included a dwarf and conjoined twins, the horn of a unicorn, the foot of an elk and the thigh bone of a giant. The curious came to the freak shows, like that ‘at Mr John Pratt’s, at the Angel in Cornhill’ or that ‘over against the Mews Gate at Charing Cross’, and had to pay sixpence for entrance. Foreign lands were also the object of wonder and enquiry rather than of possession and domination. This was still the world of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and other exotic fantasies.

The Scriblerus Club itself seems to have dissolved, or gone into a decline, soon after the death of Queen Anne in the summer of 1714. Yet the close connection of wit and satire anticipated the greatest works of its members, among them Gulliver’s Travels, The Dunciad and The Beggar’s Opera. It was part of a unique period in English literature as well as English history.

8

The Germans are coming!

Queen Anne died on the morning of 1 August 1714, and on the same day the high officers of state congregated at the gateway of St James’s Palace where they proclaimed ‘that the high and mighty Prince George, Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign, of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege Lord, George, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etcetera … ’. George had won the race over James Edward. It has been estimated that fifty-seven other people had a better hereditary claim; nevertheless the elector of Hanover, as he was also informally called, was the only Protestant among them and had therefore been acclaimed as monarch.

The cry went up after the proclamation that the Germans were coming in droves, eager to adorn themselves with the treasures of England, but in the event only ninety staff or entourage made the journey with the new king. Among them were the usual courtiers and officials, together with apothecaries and tailors as well as a complete kitchen staff (the culinary expertise of the new and unknown country could not be taken for granted); on the ship also were George’s two Turkish body servants, Mehmet and Mustafa, and two court mistresses who caused almost equal astonishment.

Fräulein von Schulenberg was a lover of long standing, and one of her two ‘nieces’ betrayed a close resemblance to the new king; she had first refused to travel to England with George, according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘fearing that the people of England who, she thought, were accustomed to use their kings barbarously, might chop off his head in the first fortnight’. She changed her mind only when she learned that her rival was also on the way. At a later date Horace Walpole, the man of letters and connoisseur, recalled Frau von Kielmannsegge sporting ‘two fierce black eyes, large and rolling … two acres of cheek spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed’.

The London mob was highly delighted by the fact that one was very thin, and the other very fat. It was like a nursery rhyme. The new sovereign’s unhappy wife, Sophia, was not to be seen. She had been imprisoned for almost twenty years in the castle of Ahlden after being found in an illicit liaison with a German count; the count himself disappeared in mysterious circumstances, thus giving the Hanoverian court something of the atmosphere of the castle of Otranto. George’s wife never left confinement, but her son did eventually become king of England.

‘George Ludwig’ landed at Greenwich on 18 September and in the following month was crowned in Westminster Hall. He was not exactly a golden prince. Sophia, before their doomed marriage, had shouted that ‘I will not marry the pig snout’ and thrown his miniature against a wall. She was perhaps a little unfair. He was rather short but his physiognomy was not out of the ordinary; he had a somewhat heavy countenance, with a high broad forehead, which showed little sign of liveliness or animation. He had a large nose and what were described as ‘vacant’ eyes. He was reserved to the point of woodenness, a natural hesitation that made him slow in speech and in thought. As a result he was considered to be stiff and cold in manner, but this may only have been a defensive stance in an alien environment. As Lord Chesterfield said, England was too big for him.

It is not clear whether or not he could speak English, but surviving documents suggest that he understood a lot and wrote a little. In any case he had French, the international language of diplomacy, to support him. He had certain characteristics that he shared with the preceding Stuart dynasty, among them ruthlessness and stubbornness. Perhaps these are the traits of any successful monarchy. He had embarked on his first military campaign at the age of fifteen so he could not be accused of faint-heartedness, and he had ruled Hanover for sixteen years. He was no neophyte. Thackeray wrote of him that ‘he was more than fifty years of age when he came among us; we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him. He took our loyalty for what it was; laid hands on what money he could; kept us assuredly from Popery and wooden shoes. I, for one, would have been on his side in those days.’ Wooden shoes were a token of French servitude.

Since he was by nature reserved and informal he did not keep a majestic court. He maintained an inner German retinue that carried out the necessary duties, and as a result he seemed to his subjects to be essentially remote. He rose early but did not emerge from his chamber until noon to consult his ministers; after these meetings and conferences, which could last as long as three hours, he retired once more to his bedchamber. He walked in the gardens of St James’s in the late afternoon, and spent the evening playing cards with one of his mistresses. Visits to the opera or theatre were occasional, and they were not accompanied by any ritual or fanfare; the king avoided the royal box. The courtiers themselves were not vainglorious; they did not dazzle; there was no attempt to maintain the cult of monarchy. With the exception of Mustafa and Mehmet, and of course the thin and the fat mistresses, there was nothing exceptional about them.

The new king came to England with an instinctive dislike of Tories. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that many of them still supported the Stuart cause. And he could not forgive the Tory politicians who engineered the treaty of Utrecht by leaving their allies deserted on the field, of whose number he was of course one. Nevertheless it was widely believed that, like Anne, he would attempt a moderate administration combined of both parties; but in practice this even-handedness lasted for a moment only.

On his accession, for example, the new king stripped the duke of Ormonde of his military command; Ormonde had succeeded Marlborough, and had given the order for his troops to stand down. In the following year the duke was impeached for high treason on suspicion of supporting the Jacobite cause. The Tories in general were cast into outer darkness accompanied by menaces of impeachment, dismissal or permanent exclusion from office. The great earl of Oxford, once mere Robert Harley until the dagger went through his waistcoat, was sent to the Tower where he remained for two years. Others, like Ormonde himself, fled to France and to the embrace of the ‘Old Pretender’. These self-imposed exiles flocking to the court of Saint-Germain did more harm to the Tory Party than a thousand vicious pamphlets. To be a Tory was now reckoned, in some quarters, to be a Jacobite. The established Anglicans, who were associated with the Tories, also lost some of their lustre; the king conformed to the national liturgy, but at heart he remained a fervent Lutheran.

The new Whig administration, now sheltering under the aegis of the king, was no longer a radical force in politics; it had quite naturally lost the anti-monarchical fervour, for example, it had adopted during the ‘exclusion crisis’ of 1679 when James II was the target. It had now become the ruling party; it represented the merchants, the tradesmen, the professional classes and the urban gentry who controlled the financial institutions of the country. Yet any ruling class, faced with no coherent opposition, will become an arena for ambition, envy and private antagonism; there is always someone who wishes to be pre-eminent.

There were indeed many splits and schisms between the dominant Whigs, leading the French ambassador to remark that the English would crucify Christ again if he returned to govern England. Young Whigs fought against old Whigs, the ‘court’ Whigs were opposed to the ‘country’ Whigs, the parliamentary Whigs were hostile to the royalist Whigs. Without an interesting or interested Tory party, parliament seemed to be of no earthly use. One Tory member, Sir Charles Sedley, was rebuked for walking along the Mall during a particularly important debate. He replied that he knew exactly what was going to happen, ‘and an honest man signifies no more in that house to rectify it, than a drop of essence to perfume a pail full of stale piss’.

Yet the Whigs themselves were not entirely approved or accepted. The majority of the population, most of whom did not have a vote, were equally indifferent to the German dynasty; it was estimated in 1715 by the Austrian Resident in England, Johann Philipp Hoffmann, that two-thirds of the nation were in fact actively hostile to the Hanoverians. This was an exaggeration. Riots in the streets of London were commonplace, however, and attacks upon the meeting places of dissenters continued as if the Sacheverell ‘High Church’ riots had never ceased. On the anniversary of the Restoration of 1660 a crowd assembled before the statue of Queen Anne, in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, and called out ‘Down with the house of Hanover!’ and ‘God bless King James III!’ The health of the ‘Old Pretender’ was drunk in inns and taverns all over the country. On the evening of King George’s birthday, May 28, a mob gathered at the Stock Exchange, armed with sticks and clubs, calling out for ‘High Church and Ormonde!’ At Cheapside the people cried out ‘No Hanoverian! No Presbyterian Government!’ The London Record Office reported the arrest of one citizen who laid ‘fifty guineas that the king did not reign twelve months’.

The protests were not on a revolutionary scale but they shook the new Whig ministry and questioned its administration of the rule of law. This was the burning context for the drawing-up of a statute known as the ‘Riot Act’ by means of which a crowd of twelve or more was guilty of a capital felony if it failed to disperse within a hour of a proclamation ordering it so to do. Any officers, under the instructions of the magistrates, were granted indemnity for their actions in dispersing the new breed of rioters. The Act was of great benefit to the authorities in periods of civil unrest, such as disruption in time of famine or unemployment, and was in fact so useful that it remained on the statute book until 1967.

Some of the native frenzy was dispelled, however, when the real Jacobites gathered upon British soil. The incident became known as ‘the Fifteen’. At the beginning of September 1715, the earl of Mar set up the Jacobite banner at Braemar in Aberdeenshire; it was reported that 10,000 men had taken their place about it. The Jacobite court had heard of the disaffection among the populace, and hoped to take advantage of it. But the population was never so warm as the active, and probably drunken, minority who had acclaimed James Edward Stuart.

The report of the insurgency created something like panic in London where the Hanoverian king was not wholly secure upon his new throne. The newly created Riot Act was deployed with full force; Tory hawkers selling ballads or pamphlets were dispatched to the nearest house of correction, and anyone suspected of uttering treasonable sentiments was likely to be scourged or pilloried.

Small forces from Lancashire and Northumberland, still Catholic in sympathy, joined the rebellion but these luckless few were defeated in a battle at Preston in November. Some were executed for treason while others were transported as convicts to America. When the bulk of them were marched to London, according to the diary of Countess Cowper, ‘the mob insulted them terribly, carrying a warming pan before them, and saying a thousand barbarous things, which some of the prisoners returned with spirit’. The warming pan was a symbol of the supposed illegitimacy of the ‘Old Pretender’ who was said to have been smuggled into the royal bedchamber in just such a vessel. The earl of Mar, at the head of the larger Jacobite army in Scotland, had also been defeated at Sheriffmuir in the same month; he waited anxiously for his Stuart master to arrive and take command of the perilous situation.

The coronation of James Francis Edward, James III of England and James VIII of Scotland, had been supposed to take place on 23 January 1716, at the palace of Scone but, unfortunately, none of the participants arrived in time. James landed at Peterhead towards the end of December and started to make his way to the palace. Yet his steps were of course being followed by spies, and his army shadowed; aware of his dangerous position he took ship at Montrose on 5 February, together with the earl of Mar, and arrived in northern France five days later.

In truth the rebellion had had little chance of success. The French, under the leadership of a regent after the death of Louis XIV only a month before, was in no position to raise an army for the ‘Old Pretender’; more importantly, they had no will to do so. Without foreign assistance any domestic rebellion was unlikely to succeed. Those Tories who supported the Jacobite cause (which may be confidently considered to be a minority) had no plan, no leader and no arms. They might as well have supported the king of Brobdingnag. The dislike of the Whig government did not translate into active opposition, and the fear of a Catholic king was enough to dispel any affectionate loyalty to the old cause.

The Whig administration, however, was taking no chances with the volatile electorate. As a direct result of the Jacobite scare, parliament passed a Septennial Bill that extended its life from three years to seven years. What might have been a dangerous election in 1718, therefore, was postponed until 1722. It made it much harder for Tories to exploit Whig divisions if there was no possibility of an imminent election. It lent an air of security and authority to the administration and, as an additional advantage, it granted a further element of constitutional power to parliament itself.

In the summer of 1716, two months after the Septennial Bill had been enacted, the king returned to Hanover. It was always where he longed to be. The territory had been granted to George’s family by the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, after some timely assistance against the Turks; it was small, comfortable, peaceable, and in all respects unlike England. It was the king’s intention to return there frequently, to hunt and to take the waters, but the problems of England restricted him to only five visits in thirteen years. Even these were too many for his English ministers who did not relish the administration of the kingdom at one remove. Wind and weather sometimes delayed his return, on which occasions parliament itself had to be prorogued. A minister of state always travelled with him, and any determined minister could create trouble for his colleagues a few hundred miles distant. It did not help matters that on this visit the king decided to remain in Hanover for six months; six months, even then, was a long time in politics both foreign and domestic.

It was possible, after all, that the king might favour the interests of Hanover over those of England. He was intimately associated with the affairs of the Baltic region, with which England had very little to do, and the ministers in London were not eager to be drawn into what were for them provincial quarrels.

Splits of a more personal nature soon became evident within the royal family. The truth was that the father, George Ludwig, hated the son, George Augustus, prince of Wales, and the son repaid that hostility in equal measure. It was in part the old problem of a living heir, waiting impatiently behind the arras for the fall of his predecessor; it has been a conundrum as old as monarchy itself. There were also certain ministers and courtiers who, feeling deprived of what they considered to be a proper measure of respect or reward, waited in expectation for the light of the rising son to restore them to health. In the fractious climate of early eighteenth-century politics, these factions became all the more vicious.

When the king left for Hanover, for example, he appointed his son as ‘guardian of the realm and lieutenant’, an office not exercised since the time of the Black Prince in the fourteenth century. It was considered by the prince and his cohorts to be an insult, rendered more odious by the restraints that the king imposed upon his son’s supposed regency. The prince was to take no decisions on foreign policy without the approval of the king; he could not fill any of the more important positions of state, and should postpone any royal assent to parliamentary bills. Foreign dispatches were to be kept from him. Yet certain other dispatches, concerning his own behaviour, were to be sent onward to Hanover.

The prince was of course flattered by the king’s adversaries; now that he considered himself free of political responsibility, having been allowed none of his own, he came to realize that he might become an independent force in the formulation of policy. He might be able to create a faction or party in parliament itself that worked against the king.

An unfortunate quarrel at the baptism of the prince’s first son, when the king’s choice of godfather was angrily opposed, led to a further division in November 1717. The king ordered his son to leave St James’s Palace, whereupon the wife of the heir, Caroline of Ansbach, decided to follow him. It was decreed that anyone who visited the renegade couple would be formally barred from any converse with the king. This would be war. Nothing like it had been seen since the days of the struggle between Mary I and Elizabeth I. Lord Hervey wrote of the prince that ‘he always spoke of his father as a weak man rather than a bad or dishonest one; and said … his father had always hated him and used him ill’.

The prince of Wales and his consort removed themselves to Leicester House, north of Leicester Square, where they established what was to all intents and purposes a rival court. The prince no longer attended cabinet meetings as a sign of his status as an internal exile. When any minister fell out with the king, he had a natural welcome from his son. In Leicester House congregated disaffected Whigs and disgruntled Tories, disappointed place-seekers and divisive troublemakers entertained by music, dancing, feasting and fashionable conversation. The king, thoroughly discomfited by his son’s social success, broke the habit of a lifetime and also began to hold assemblies and public dinners. The drawing room at St James’s Palace was open three days a week; music, dancing and fireworks were enjoyed at Kensington Palace.

Father and son were not reconciled for three years, and even then it was a half-hearted affair. The prince told his wife that when he entered the royal closet, formal but contrite, the king could only mutter ‘Votre conduite … votre conduite’, meaning ‘Your behaviour … your behaviour’. When they were seen in public on the following day they did not speak.

In the interim a shadow, no thicker than a bubble, had passed over the court, the city and the country.

9

Bubbles in the air

The bubble first arose from an attempt by the Tories to set up an institution that might rival the Bank of England in providing public credit. In the spring of 1711 the South Sea Company was established. It comprised in the first instance all those who were owed money by the government for war loans approaching £10 million; they were persuaded to give up their annuities for stock in this new and enterprising company. They were guaranteed 4 per cent interest, funded by indirect taxes, but they were also to be partners in the projected profit from all trade with the Americas in a period when the proceeds of Spanish commerce were conceived to be enormous. It was a convenient way for the administration to handle existing debts, at a relatively low rate of interest, while shareholders might dream of another Eldorado. During the years of the War of the Spanish Succession, trade and industry were naturally subdued. But when Philip V of Spain entered a quadruple alliance with Great Britain, France and the Dutch republic early in 1720, in the treaty of The Hague, it was believed that the mineral wealth of the Americas would come to London as Zeus had come to Danaë in the form of golden rain.

The fever hit when at the beginning of 1720 the St James’s Weekly Journal reported that ‘we hear that the South-Sea Company have in a manner agreed with the Treasury for taking into their capital the annuities of ninety-nine years’. The company had become so formidable and so confident that it had swallowed up a large part of the national debt. Its power and profit now depended upon the rise of the price of its stock. And what could stop an irresistible force? The value of its stock kept on increasing in the early months of the year, and by 24 June £100 of government stock was worth £1,050 of South Sea stock. The more shares were sought and prized, the higher their value rose; the higher their value, the more desirable they seemed.

The first subscription was immediately filled. Sir John Evelyn sold some of his land to gain a share. Everyone pursued a quick profit, and everyone was chasing everyone else. You could buy the stock at one rate, selling at another rate for an enormous profit a few days later. It was reported that shares were purchased on the Stock Exchange ‘ten per cent higher at one end of the alley than at the other’. The men went to find their brokers in the taverns and coffee-shops; the women flocked for the same purpose to the milliners and haberdashers. Ministers and members of parliament were bribed by the company with free distributions of stock that could then be resold at the going rate. It quickly became known as ‘the bubble age’. ‘Bubble’ became the synonym for any kind of deception or deceit. Schemes and contrivances and projects were all ‘bubbles’.

Tobias Smollett in his history of the period wrote that ‘Exchange Alley was filled with a strange concourse of statesmen and clergymen, churchmen and dissenters, whigs and tories, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and even with multitudes of females.’ Various other schemes for quick rewards were advertised at the time, taking advantage of the fatuity and gullibility of the moment. A scheme was proposed for making quicksilver malleable. A plan was suggested for importing jackasses from Spain. Projects were advanced for making salt water fresh. In this period eighty-six different schemes were advertised to potential investors, among them ‘for improving of gardens’, ‘for insuring and increasing children’s fortunes’, ‘for furnishing funerals to any part of Great Britain’ and for ‘a wheel of perpetual motion’. Projection was gambling under another name. Projection was speculation. Projection was a lottery.

When Robinson Crusoe profited from his merchandise, before setting off on his famous voyage, ‘my head began to be full of projects and undertakings beyond my reach’. Defoe knew of what he wrote. His first published volume was entitled An Essay upon Projects (1697), in which presciently he lamented ‘the general projecting humour of the nation’; every day arose ‘new contrivances, engines and projects to get money, never before thought of’, and from these devices we may ‘trace the original of banks, stocks, stock-jobbing, assurances, friendly societies, lotteries, and the like’, not forgetting ‘those Exchange mountebanks we very properly call brokers’.

It was part of a culture in which the gambler was king. Sometimes the habit was confined to the card tables that could be found in palace and tavern, whorehouse and drawing room. A character in Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband, composed in 1705, laments the fact that ‘women can imagine all household care, regard to posterity and fear of poverty, must be sacrificed to a game at cards’. Gaming houses for men were everywhere. This mania for speculation and quick profit was materially responsible for the new interest in fire, marine and life insurance; insurances were made out for marriages and births, as well as deaths. Private gambling therefore became an intrinsic part of the public economy. It also had a more arcane consequence when the complex calculations encouraged Pascal and Fermat to devise mathematical probability theory.

Gaming affected all classes. Horace Walpole reported that at Brooks’s club ‘a thousand meadows and cornfields are staked at every throw’. Politicians would win or lose thousands at Almack’s before returning to the debates at parliament; the more accomplished the politician, the more imperturbable his countenance. A particular costume was worn at Almack’s, consisting of a great-coat, pieces of leather to protect the ruffles, and a high-crowned hat with a broad brim to keep out the light; the hats were festooned with flowers and ribbons. On one occasion a Whig politician, Charles James Fox, sat for twenty-two hours playing at Hazard. Gentlemen bet on the life expectations of their fathers. Thomas Whaley, an Irish gambler and parliamentarian, bet that ‘he could jump from his drawing room window into the first barouche that passed and kiss the occupant’. When a man fell to the ground in a stupor opposite Brooks’s, the members of that club laid bets whether he was alive or dead. Others with fewer resources would bet on skittles or on dominoes in the local taverns, on the result of an election or the sex of an unborn child; the throwing of dice was not unusual during church services.

Lotteries were instituted by the government in 1709, and for every year until 1824 a lottery bill was passed. The popularity of these gigantic confidence tricks was manifest from the very beginning. On 21 January 1710, it was reported that ‘yesterday books were opened at Mercers’ Chapel for receiving subscriptions for the lottery and, ’tis said, above a million is already subscribed’. Lotteries were sometimes known as ‘sales’ to lend them an air of respectability. If you bought a ticket for twopence, and thereby won a set of ‘new fashionable plate’, it could be regarded as a bargain. It was announced that six houses in Limehouse ‘are to be disposed of by tickets, and the numbers are to be drawn by two parish boys out of two wheels, at the Three Sun tavern in Wood Street’.

Gambling and lotteries were considered by many to be the natural manifestation of a city based largely upon fraud and avarice, and of a society established upon wanton violence and corruption, where the vast disparities of wealth encouraged wicked or unscrupulous behaviour. The London Journal of 1720 excoriated the avarice and love of luxury of the age, while a few months later the Weekly Journal believed that the South Sea Bubble was ‘but the natural effect of those vices which have reigned for so many years’. In truth there have always been bubbles, and the measure of fraud and corruption in the city has not noticeably grown or diminished over the centuries. The regularity of panics became a matter of observation; they were often called ‘convulsions’, as if the financial body had succumbed to a fever. There does come a time, however, when one of the bubbles bursts with a more than usually resounding pop.

This particular crisis came, as most financial crises do, suddenly and unexpectedly. A ballad was quickly doing the rounds of the fairs and markets:

A bubble is blown up in air;

In which fine prospects do appear;

The Bubble breaks, the prospect’s lost,

Yet must some Bubble pay the cost.

Hubble Bubble; all is smoke,

Hubble Bubble; all is broke,

Farewell your Houses, Lands and Flocks

For all you have is now in Stocks.

It was discovered that the South Sea Company did not have the cash available to pay for any stocks being returned. The projected profits on the Eldorado of Spanish trade were a mirage. When confidence disappeared, the mist of gain and of fortune evaporated. The value of the stock, which had originally been used to replace the annuities on government debt, plunged. By September 1720, it seemed that all was gone. The stockholders had lost their investments.

Tobias Smollett wrote that ‘such an era as this is the most unfavourable for an historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vulgarity and mean degeneracy’. Yet the business of the bubble does much to elucidate, as one book’s title has it, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The craving for riches and the experience of failure, the giddy descent from wealth into poverty, the mania which gripped many thousands of people without good cause, the suicides, the dissolution of family ties, say more about the period than a thousand battles.

It soon became apparent that certain ministers and directors of the company had sold out before the reckoning, and the anger of the public against them was boundless. There were calls for the principal among them to be broken on the wheel. The only stay against civil strife was the feeling that the ruin was so general that ‘something’ would be done; the whole financial order could not be undermined.

At this juncture the rotund and rubicund figure of Robert Walpole may be introduced; for it was he, more than any other politician, who calmed the panic and restored the South Sea Company to something like solvency. He was a Norfolk man who never lost his accent and who seemed to represent the frank and candid image of the born countryman; he chewed his home-grown apples on the front bench and kept his temper. He was said to read the reports from his farm manager before he turned to the newspapers.

He was thickset, short and plump with a noticeable double chin; in the many portraits he looks genial enough, if a little blasé, and in life he was known to be good-humoured and convivial. He was always the first to welcome new members of parliament in what soon became his domain. He dressed well, in particular for the sessions of parliament when he was outfitted like a groom for a bride. He knew how the Commons worked; he knew how its members felt. He believed that the only safety for a minister lies, as he said, ‘in having the approbation of this House’.

He understood people all too well. He was reported as saying that there were ‘few minds which would not be injured by the constant spectacle of meanness and depravity’ and he told a future first minister, Henry Pelham, that ‘when you have the same experience of mankind as myself you will go near to hate the human species’. Yet this black and misanthropic pessimism never affected his apparent affability. He made the most of all human weakness. He liked others to drink in his company so that he could take advantage of their indiscretions. He knew the price of every man, and he did not hesitate to rid himself of those who owed him only dubious loyalty. He was in charge of all appointments, both local and national; he superintended the offices of the Church no less than those of the army or the navy. He created what at a later date might be called an ‘establishment’. No office was too unimportant, no sinecure too small, to escape his attention.

If he had a fault, in society, it was his excessive coarseness. Even for the eighteenth century his ribaldry was considered a little too much. Princess Caroline once had to chide him for lewd language in front of her ladies. The fourth earl of Chesterfield, albeit a doyen of excessive respectability, described him as ‘inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals, he had a coarse strong wit, which he was too free of for a man of his station’. Walpole could laugh off criticism of this kind, however, since for twenty years he held the state in his hands.

He was one of those English politicians who survive on their reputation of bluff common sense. He would stand no nonsense. He professed to believe in common sense and, so he said, in fair play. He wanted moderation at all costs. He wanted balance. He wanted peace at home and abroad so that trade might flourish. Flatter the time-servers. Meet emergencies with expedients. Pay bribes when they were necessary. Give way in the face of public clamour, however misconceived. One of his favourite proverbs was ‘Quieta non movere’, ‘Don’t disturb things that are quiet’. It might be the motto of his legislative career, and that of many subsequent politicians.

He was a pragmatist in the very literal sense that he really had no policy except that of survival. A man of business and an administrator, he was marked by energy and capacity for work. At a later date Chesterfield wrote that George II said of him that he was ‘by so great a superiority the most able man in the kingdom, that he understood the revenue, and knew how to manage that formidable and refractory body, the House of Commons, so much better than any other man, that it was impossible for the business of the crown to be well done without him’. This of course implies that he was nothing of a thinker and, as he said himself, that he was ‘no saint, no Spartan, no reformer’.

He always was a thoroughbred Whig, however, who for a short time had even been imprisoned in the Tower by the Tories during their ascendancy. ‘I heartily despise’, he wrote to his sister, Dolly, ‘what I shall one day revenge.’ Incarceration in fact did him no harm at all. He had accepted various offices of state, and in 1717 became for a period first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer; he made a great deal of money in a mysterious and still unknown fashion before resigning ‘because I could not connive at some things that were carrying on’. It was not a matter of principle, however, but of internal politics. Nevertheless in June 1720, at the height of the Bubble, he became paymaster general of the forces and was thus in a position to help direct the affairs of the treasury.

The Bubble was indeed his opportunity; he had been associated with financial matters for almost as long as he had been in parliament and, as a Whig, he was on the best of terms with the directors of the Bank of England. He had been suspicious of the South Sea Company, as a direct rival to the bank, but nonetheless had invested some of his funds with it. He was not one of those who made a quick or sensational profit, however, and it seems more than likely that he lost a large sum of money on his transactions. This also lent him further credibility in his scheme to salvage the situation. He had shown his acumen in the past, but it was now necessary to demonstrate his equanimity.

By the summer of 1720 he was effectively the chief minister in his attempt to restore confidence in the finances of the country. In this undertaking he was supremely equipped by nature. Chesterfield noted in his Characters that Walpole ‘was so clear in stating the most intricate matters, especially in the finances, that while he was speaking, the most ignorant thought they understood what they really did not’. He had to give the impression that financial stability had been restored and that the national debt was under control. He persuaded the directors of the Bank of England to buy up some of the South Sea Company’s holding of government stock, thus reducing the company’s debt and placing it on a more stable foundation. He confiscated the ill-gained wealth of the company’s directors and distributed it as liberally as he might. He also maintained a ‘sinking fund’, which he had in fact devised three years earlier, revenue set apart for future projects and financed by special or specific taxes; this was also a measure to ensure future confidence in the financial system. For this relief he was given much thanks by king and government. It is difficult to overestimate the calming effect that the right politician can induce. Walpole stilled the storm to a whisper, and the waves of the sea were hushed.

He had performed another service also, for which he earned the further nickname of ‘the Screen’ or ‘the Screen-Master General’. Certain ministers had colluded with the directors of the South Sea Company in the illicit making of profit; the king himself, together with his mistresses, had also been involved in what might be considered to be illegal profiteering. Walpole was concerned above all else to maintain the balance and the apparent integrity of the state. A parliamentary committee was established and the directors of the company were forbidden to leave the country. One or two still fled abroad to general execration and one noble peer, Lord Stanhope, died of apoplexy after being charged with corruption. A death or two might be convenient, since the dead cannot speak or confess, and Walpole was not particularly concerned with the directors of the company; they could be sacrificed to public anger.

But he was concerned to shield his ministerial colleagues from attack, even though some of them had been his personal enemies; by dint of intimidation and the suborning of witnesses, therefore, the principal suspects were cleared of all charges. He had indeed been the screen behind which the great could conceal themselves, and his power was vastly increased. In the spring of 1721 Robert Walpole became once again first lord of the treasury, with immense powers of patronage. All strings led to him. The subsequent period has been variously known as ‘the age of Walpole’ and ‘the age of stability’. He was for twenty-one years the dominant minister in the country, who was able to combine political mastery with economic supremacy in a manner previously unparalleled. He had no party. He had only the support of the king, and was obliged to rely upon the independent members of parliament as well as the natural supporters of the court. That is why he always moved so carefully. He was required to balance the various forces within the nation to sustain his mastery; he had to satisfy the financiers as well as the aristocrats, the dissenting merchants as well as the Anglican gentry.

To call his period one of ‘stability’ is perhaps the merest truism. That, after all, was what mattered to him. But he did not single-handedly create that stability. The durability of the house of Hanover, with the threat of the Stuarts removed, had something to do with it. The happy employment of making money, and the ingenious promotion of trade, also had a large part to play in the quiescence of financiers and merchants. Anglicanism was accepted and acceptable, if not entirely loved. The Septennial Act, which restricted general elections to every seven years, maintained a period of calm. Party fervour and religious enthusiasm were therefore contained; an improving standard of living, together with more employment, worked their own spell upon the body politic.

Yet Walpole had his own fair share of luck, an indispensable requirement for a successful politician. The chaos of the Bubble had revealed a record of government weakness and financial incompetence of which its Stuart enemies could have taken advantage. The Speaker, Arthur Onslow, recalled that, at the time the Bubble was pricked, ‘could the Pretender then have landed at the Tower, he might have rode to St James with very few hands held up against him’. Others also considered the possibility of James Edward Stuart taking advantage of this opportunity and regaining the throne. One of the principal Jacobites, Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, had concealed himself in lamb’s clothing as an unexceptionable Tory. In the spring of 1721, however, he wrote to James that ‘with a very little assistance from your friends abroad, your way to your friends at home is become easy and safe’. Yet Walpole’s quiet was not disturbed.

The first minister was on the watch. It has been said that he saw Jacobites everywhere, even under his bed, but he knew well enough that any Jacobite plot would taint the Tories still further and attach the king more closely to his loyal government. It had been arranged by James’s supporters, for example, that the duke of Ormonde would invade England with a body of Irish troops. It was not perhaps the most sensible plan, and was in any case immediately bedevilled by divisions among the English rebels and by a plethora of spies who were ready to reveal anything and everything for money. All of course came to nothing. The bishop of Rochester was himself arrested and sent into exile.

Walpole was aware that the conspiracy had never really amounted to much, but he would not let the opportunity pass. Onslow remarked that the discovery of the Jacobite plot, ‘was the most fortunate and greatest circumstance of Walpole’s life’. The king was with his first minister forever. The Tories were discomfited, because of their implicit association with the Jacobites, and many of them withdrew from public life; the recovery of their party was, for the foreseeable future, impossible. In the summer of 1723 the ministers of the king ordered that ‘all and every person whatsoever’ over the age of eighteen should submit to an oath of allegiance to the present sovereign.

In the same period Robert Walpole gracefully and gratefully declined a peerage, knowing full well that his real power lay in his command of the Commons. His decision, which seemed surprising to some, was an indication of the fact that parliament had indeed become the sovereign body of the nation with responsibilities and duties far beyond those of the monarch. It was now the final arbiter of English liberties, which could be no longer left to the mercies of even the most benevolent Hanoverian sovereign. Parliament had become the arena in which conflicting political views, or political factions, could be heard with the minimum of controversy. It was the great forum for the address of grievances. That is why only thirty years later, in 1757, a Lincolnshire crowd protesting against the plan for a reserve of professional soldiers agreed that ‘if parliament was not to be trusted there would be an end of all things’.

Yet no sooner had Walpole mastered all the tricks and balances of administration than a major player in the game of power was suddenly taken away from him. At the beginning of June 1727 George I began a journey to Germany in order to be greeted by all his favourite relatives. Seven days into his travels, he complained of stomach pains arising from too many strawberries and oranges. Many sovereigns suffered from surfeits of food. He grew pale and faint, revived only by a liberal dose of smelling salts. Then he fell into an uneasy and noisy sleep that deteriorated into lethargy and unconsciousness. He had the strength to raise his hand in greeting to his old childhood palace at Osnabrück, but died the following night.

This was a grave and possibly fatal blow to Robert Walpole. He had been close to and influential with the old king. His relations with the son and heir were hardly marked by the same sympathy and understanding; indeed the heir treated the politician with a great deal of suspicion. But the new king had the inconceivable good fortune of a wife, Caroline of Ansbach, who understood the leading players of the nation much more acutely than her husband. When Walpole managed to provide a civil list granting George II far more funds than his father, his happy and influential position was retained.

It is hard to estimate the legacy of George I, on the presumption that you cannot prove a negative. He had maintained the stability of the Hanoverian dynasty, and his own familial ties and alliances had managed to reconcile Britain to the varying leaders and factions of Europe. In this endeavour he was assisted by Wapole who above all else hated war. It was bad for business and wrecked the economy.

A Dutch diplomat at George I’s court reported that ‘he is much concerned with his reputation but is not excessively ambitious; he has a special aptitude for affairs of state, a well-ordered economy, very sound brain and judgement … he bears justice in mind at all times and, withal, he is goodhearted’. These are the familiar marmoreal words used to embalm mediocrity, or at least those sovereigns who avoided catastrophe.

It should be added that the life and energy and progress of the nation were taking place without the first George knowing or caring anything about it.

10

The invisible hand

Between 1724 and 1726, in the last decade of his life, Daniel Defoe published an encomium to his native country in three volumes entitled A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. It is not at all clear whether he made this tour contemporaneously in person or nostalgically in spirit; it is also uncertain whether he used observers on the spot or relied upon a capacious inventory of recollected details. He was blessed with a powerful memory and a gift of almost perfect observation, and so we can forgive the touches of imagination that give the book its life and energy. It has survived because it captures the very spirit of the time.

The spirit was one of energy and of progress, in a constant rehearsal of ‘the improvement in manufactures, in merchandises, in navigation’. The ‘present time’ was his ideal. When the polite world and the not so polite world were in a fever of gambling, the industrious and trading classes were taking advantage of unprecedented conditions for growth in what Defoe describes as ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’, with its improvements in ‘culture’ as well as in ‘commerce’, with its increase in ‘people’ as well as in ‘buildings’. He notes of Devonshire, for example, that ‘the people are all busy, and in full employ upon their manufactures’.

At a time when ‘manufactures’ were not associated with the coming revolution in industry, their improvement and ubiquity were already a matter of astonishment. In the solid houses of the more prosperous citizens were displayed the cloth from Malmesbury, the knives from Sheffield and the glassware from Nottingham. What drove all was trade, the great engine of growth. For Defoe trade is ‘an inexhausted current which not only fills the pond, and keeps it full, but is continually running over and fills all the lower ponds and places about it’.

The temples of trade were the towns. The indigenous trade of a town or city ‘is a kind of nostrum to them, inseparable to the place’ such as the clothing trade of Leeds, the coal trade of Newcastle upon Tyne, the herring trade of Yarmouth and the butter trade of Hull. Defoe rejoices in Norwich, ‘the inhabitants being all busy at their manufactures, dwell in their garrets at their looms, and in their combing shops, so they call them’. Work was available for everyone. Defoe was pleased that in Taunton ‘there was not a child in the town, or in the villages round it, of above five years old, but, if it was not neglected by its parents, and untaught, could earn its own bread’.

The antiquarians of the previous century, such as Elias Ashmole and William Camden, snuffled out the traces of antiquity as if they comprised the perfume of England; but for Defoe the medieval town of Worcester ‘is close and old, the houses standing too thick’. Instead he praises the village of Stratford outside London for the fact that ‘every vacancy [is] filled with new houses’ with ‘the increase of the value and rent of the houses formerly standing’.

This was the century in which trade came to be regarded as the most important activity of the nation, quite opposed to religious and political considerations. New kinds of book multiplied, published in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them Charles Davenant’s Two Discourses on the Public Revenues and Trade of England, Adam Anderson’s An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, David Macpherson’s Annals of Commerce, Charles King’s The British Merchant and William Wood’s Survey of Trade. And of course it would be remiss to ignore Daniel Defoe’s own The Complete English Tradesman.

‘Our trade is our chief support,’ Lord Carteret explained in the Lords, ‘and therefore we must sacrifice every other view to the preservation of our trade.’ Where once the English had congratulated themselves on the purity of their religion or the balance of their unwritten constitution they now prided themselves on the extent of their commerce; it was widely believed, and reported, that it was the most considerable in the world. Which nation, effectively, could rival it? Which country had the navy to do so? In one of the Letters Concerning the English Nation, ‘On Trade’, Voltaire, the French philosopher and historian, noticed opportunely that England had become ‘so powerful by its commerce, as to be able to send in 1723 three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanc’d parts of the Globe’.

Commerce was, essentially, power gained without war. John Gay conveniently expressed it in verse:

Be commerce, then, thy sole design;

Keep that, and all the world is thine.

And of course all this implied great social changes, in which the merchant and the trader were no longer considered to be in the lower half of the social spectrum some way down from clergymen or barristers. In the same letter Voltaire noted that the brother of Lord Townshend, a minister of state, was a merchant in the City and that the son of the earl of Oxford was a tradesman in Aleppo. Robert Walpole married the daughter of a timber merchant. Commerce possessed not only freedom but also prestige. That is why the Whigs, the patrons and masters of commerce, had the advantage over the Tories. Trade now created gentlemen, even if they had not yet permeated the upper ranks of the aristocracy.

The merchants were now accepted as potentially the most useful members of the commonwealth. Thomas Turner, a local shopkeeper from East Hoathly, near Lewes, kept a diary between 1754 and 1765 in one entry of which he notes ‘how pleasant is trade when it runs in its proper channels, and flows with a plentiful stream. It does, as it were, give life and spirit to one’s actions.’ It was as necessary as the blood running through the veins. It had become the national metaphor.

The two great topographical facts of the century, related in necessarily intimate ways, are the growth of London and the growth of the towns. The union of England and Scotland had created the largest free trade area in the world, and therefore within the bounds of this island state the finance of London was combined with the commerce of Liverpool, the coal of the midlands and the industries of the textile north. So everything grew together as if they were under the silent guidance of a fundamental law of being.

The figures tell their own story. In the course of the eighteenth century imports, as well as exports, increased five times; in the same period re-exports increased by a factor of nine. In the years between 1726 and 1728 imports rose 22 per cent, exports rose 27 per cent, and re-exports increased by 57 per cent. Re-exports is the neutral name for colonial produce that by law had to be shipped to Britain before being taken in turn to continental Europe. The English then got the best of the bargains by buying cheap and selling dear. It was also the most effective manner of acquiring, in return, much-needed European goods.

The cloth from the East India Company, the sugar from the West Indies, the tobacco from Virginia and Maryland as well as all the tea and the rum and the spices from various parts of the world transformed the appurtenances of English life; this transformation amounted to great cultural and social as well as commercial change. When the commodities and fashions and luxuries were poured into the country, trade and customs naturally expanded.

In his Tour Defoe notes the sudden and unexpected growth of English towns. Frome, in north-east Somerset, ‘is so prodigiously increased within these last twenty or thirty years that they have built a new church, and so many new streets of houses, and these houses are so full of inhabitants’. The population of Halifax has ‘increased one fourth, at least, within the last forty years, that is to say since the late Revolution’. Of Liverpool he writes that ‘I think I may safely say at this my third seeing it, for I was surprised at the view, it was more than double what it was at the second; and, I am told, that it still visibly increases both in wealth, people, business and buildings: what it may grow to in time, I know not.’

In 1700 Norwich was the only provincial town with more than 25,000 inhabitants; by 1820 fourteen more could be found. The inhabitants of towns such as Hull and Nottingham, Leeds and Leicester, had increased five times in the same period. The populations of Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester had expanded twenty times. In 1700 less than one quarter of the people lived in towns; a century later that figure had risen to an average between one-third and two-fifths. England was slowly but ineluctably becoming a cohesive urban society, quite unlike Germany, France, or Italy.

There was hardly a town, large or small, that had not been in part rebuilt. They arrived as wattle-and-daub, or as oak and other timber, but they were revived in brick. The marble for the assembly rooms and the baths would soon arrive. Brick, however, was the material of choice for the emerging middle class. The prosperous enjoyed the comfort of brick with the additional advantage of large windows; the houses were considered to be ‘classical’, meaning of regular proportions, and they were built into a variety of well-tempered shapes. The square, the circus, the arcade and the crescent were all in the height of architectural taste.

The paradigm for this extensive renovation and refurbishment was London itself. On one of her journeys Celia Fiennes observed of Nottingham that it was ‘the neatest town I have seen, built of stone and delicate, large and long streets, much like London and the houses lofty and well-built. The marketplace is very broad – out of which runs a very large street, much like Holborn, but the buildings fine.’ The emphasis here is upon space and spaciousness; the new town was to be carefully distinguished from the cramped and noisome quarters of the Jacobean and Stuart city. These were increasingly reserved for the poor or for the industrial workers. As population increased throughout the century, and as the need for space grew ever more pressing, the more prosperous citizens tried to create enclaves for themselves like Old Square in Birmingham that has now in its turn been razed.

And so we can date the rise and rise of the country town. It was no longer the small town, no longer the market town, but the prosperous hub of what was quickly becoming a provincial society with its services, its shopkeepers, its entertainments and its meeting places. There was an increasing need for domestic and professional services; lighting and clean streets would soon become required in this newly constructed environment. By the 1730s sixteen provincial towns had introduced oil-burning lamps onto the thoroughfares. Coffee-houses and concerts, balls and literary societies, were also no longer the prerogative of the capital.

The architecture of the period was one characterized by harmony and restraint; Gothic excesses or mannerist convolutions were no longer required. As in the social conduct of the gentlemen and ladies, all was to be governed by restraint and decorum. The proportions of the edifice were to be exact and harmonious, following the golden rule of symmetry in the placing of windows and the subdued use of ornament. This in turn encouraged a balance and proportion of streets, crescents and squares with the stated ambition of promoting social harmony in the newly built or newly extended towns and cities of the country. Nothing should be singular, excessively individual, or idiosyncratic. There was a new lightness in the air, eschewing the heaviness and ponderousness of the recent past. White was the colour of modernity. But were the houses and public buildings, with their Doric columns and pilasters, like unto whited sepulchres? Propriety can itself act as an enervating force, as became obvious in the regimented and restrictive life of Bath or Tunbridge Wells. For turbulent or eccentric spirits, if any by chance happened to find themselves there, these spas might have been the equivalent of open prisons.

In the domestic interiors of the middling sort, in the 1740s or 1750s, the fashion for propriety and harmony also prevailed. To drink tea out of a blue-and-white china cup was the beau idéal. The cup could then be placed upon a tea table, made of walnut or mahogany, highly polished and lacquered. Oak was no longer fashionable, too redolent of the Stuart times. Silver tea sets and linen napkins were part of the setting. The windows would have curtains, if they were to be wholly respectable, and the walls themselves were furnished with a clock, a mirror, a print and an engraving. The floors were no longer made up of plain boards but were covered with deal and ornamented with carpets. The old stone fireplaces had given way to marble. Writing tables and card tables were expected. There might even be a bookcase. The plain and thickset furniture of a previous age was supplanted by chairs and sofas of a greater lightness and curvilinear elegance. The line of beauty was, according to Hogarth, serpentine. In advertisements for the new domestic comforts, praise was lavished upon the ‘neat’ and the ‘neatly done’.

Of the poorer dwellings we know very little. The hovels of the labourers, the rooming houses of the clerks, the small houses of the shopkeepers, the lodgings of the artisans, all have been swept away or so changed as to have become unrecognizable. The small cottages and shacks have been torn down, sometimes by human agency and sometimes by the wind and the rain. They did not contain Wedgwood china or patterned wallpaper; at most they included a bed, a table, and two or three chairs that were so badly made that they would not even now find their way into a provincial museum.

The more affluent dwellings possessed between three and seven rooms, designed for a family of approximately five members with two or three servants. Two female servants and a boy were the standard repertoire of domestic service. The rooms themselves were arranged on a different pattern. In earlier periods an observer would be forgiven for thinking that the whole range of human activity could take place in one or two rooms; but by the eighteenth century, in the wealthier households, there was a noticeable separation of functions. The [with]drawing room came to be used for conversation, the dressing room for female intimacies; the bedrooms and nurseries were always upstairs, and the servants were relegated to the back of the house. In poorer families the parlour took the place of the drawing room, but in even more pinched quarters the life of the household still revolved about the kitchen. These domestic conditions survived well into the twentieth century.

There is no better evidence for the growing wealth of the country than the rising status of the provincial town as a focus for social life. Just as the population began a steady migration towards the towns and other urban centres, so the national culture in turn acquired an urban tone that had previously been confined to London and the largest cities. Much of it derived from the pressure of emulation, the greatest solvent of social change. The weekly stagecoach brought down the newest London goods, and it was the ambition of every relatively prosperous householder to make the annual journey to the capital. London actors trod the boards of the New Theatre in Norwich or the Leeds Theatre in Hunslet Lane; London books made their way onto the shelves of the circulating libraries, by means of which books were rented for a period rather than purchased. The Annual Register of 1761 noted that ‘the same wines are drunk, the same gaming practiced, the same hours kept and the same course of life pursued in the country and in the town … Every male and female wishes to think and speak, to eat and drink, and dress and live after the manner of people of quality in London.’ And so by a miracle of metamorphosis emerged the gardens, the walks, the pleasure gardens, the theatres, the concert venues, the libraries and the booksellers.

The ‘walk’ might be a gravelled path, or a promenade, or a tree-lined avenue, or a terrace, where ladies and gentlemen might perambulate without being accosted by the lower sort or polluted by unnecessary noises or smells. These walks also outlined a form of social discipline and observation where the fashionable or the notable could be greeted with a bow. It was customary for the upper and middling classes to go on parade when the lower classes were still at work, thus avoiding any untoward encounters. It is perhaps worth noting, in this increasingly commercialized culture, that these rural walks were the direct begetters of the shopping parades or ‘window-shopping’.

Those who now considered themselves to be part of what became known as ‘polite society’ patronized these places as much to be seen as to see; there was nothing so snobbish as a country town, even in its new incarnation. There were now certain ways to dress, to greet acquaintances, to sip coffee, to converse, or to dance. The local theatres were schools of manners that replaced the ‘courtesy books’ of an earlier civilization. The concern for ‘improvement’ that played so large a part in the mercantile and mechanical aspects of life could now be applied closer to home. Throughout human history the city has always been the symbol of political and aesthetic life; it is possible to speculate that, in the eighteenth century, Britain began that urban experiment on a national scale.

The professions flourished, creating an entirely new class of middling society. The town gentry made space to accommodate the clergymen, the attorneys of common law courts and the solicitors of Equity and Chancery; the physicians and even the surgeon-apothecaries were also acquiring new status with the emergence of the charity hospitals which provided treatment for the poor at no charge. The number of professional government servants rose, creating a career bureaucracy which became well versed in business of every sort pertaining to the administration of the country. By the beginning of 1714, 113 commissioners were at the head of eighteen different offices, each of them well staffed. By the 1720s some 12,000 public servants had become permanent employees. The eighteenth century marked the emergence of government as we have come to know it.

The public buildings – the town hall, the corn exchange, the guildhall, the court house, the mansion house, the financial exchange – began to be dressed in a new and more imposing fabric in which civility and sociability were the guiding principles. Fashions were followed even in charity: the schools were the first to be granted more imposing premises, succeeded in turn by hospitals and then by prisons. The polite person was also the sociable person that, by definition, meant the charitable person. The great increase in charitable funding happened at precisely the time when polite society found its name and calling. Twenty-four hospitals were established between 1735 and 1783, nine of which were raised in the 1740s and 1750s. The public institutions of the time, from prisons to schools, were the project of voluntary organizations and had nothing whatever to do with any central administration. So we read of the Marine Society, the Philanthropic Society, the Royal Humane Society and many others, all of them memorialized in stone buildings that largely survive. Politeness also meant morality.

If the public institutions of the provincial town represented its spirit of improvement, one other new arrival epitomized the recent fashion for sociability. ‘Assembly rooms’ were precisely that, large rooms in which people might congregate for a variety of functions. They were quite a modern thing, infinitely preferable to the old gatherings at assizes or at horse-fairs; in his Tour Defoe in fact criticized ‘the new mode of forming assemblies, so much, and so fatally now in vogue’. He was possibly commenting upon what might be considered the indiscriminate mingling of the sexes on such occasions, although the codes of conduct were very severe.

The Assembly Rooms at York looked like nothing so much as the gallery of a great palace with individuals, couples, or groups sauntering idly through. A tearoom and a card-room were among the more polite amenities; but the great venue was the ballroom, in which three tiers of seating around the room allowed the spectators to see the dancing, the dresses and the jewels.

Balls, and dances, were often held on a weekly basis; an annual subscription or ticket allowed you access to a supposedly glittering world of wax candles, chandeliers, branched candlesticks and lighted sconces. To the sound of a score of musicians in the gallery the couples would dance the minuet or, later, the more robust country dances of the period. Everyone would be watching everyone else; strangers would be observed and criticized; sudden meetings and pairings would be noticed at once. This was still the country, and not the city.

It was all very artificial and very tiring, the exhaustion of the male participants no doubt alleviated by frequent resort to the bottle. Balls might be described in somewhat impersonal terms as mating displays in which either sex looked for and, if fortunate, found a prospective partner. There was an element of make-believe in it, with a veneer of classical order and harmony coating some more traditional activities, but no more so than in many eighteenth-century social pursuits.

The other great innovation of the age was the ‘pleasure garden’, a direct descendant of the ‘tea garden’ of the seventeenth century which had generally been the rural adjunct to an inn. Yet the pleasure garden was planned on an altogether more brilliant and ambitious scale, with musical performances, balls and promenades along tree-lined walks; even plays were sometimes performed. Statues and ornaments and paintings and frescoes and architectural conceits completed the panoramas of pleasure.

The two most celebrated of these gardens, Vauxhall Gardens south of the River Thames and Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, were soon attracting thousands of visitors who were regaled with tea, liquor and ham sandwiches so exiguous that they became the butt of theatrical jokes. It was claimed that a competent waiter could cover the 11 acres of Vauxhall with the slices from one ham.

The gardens were lit at night by a thousand lamps, thus giving the illusion of Scheherazade and the nights of Arabia, but in a relatively short time they became the venue for more impolite colloquies and engagements in which darkness was favoured. It was almost inevitable, perhaps, that the more high-minded aspirations towards culture should be turned into what were essentially entertainments of a not very inspiring kind. It is said that there were more prostitutes in the gardens than there were waiters. This may also provide an insight into the eighteenth-century city.

Another eighteenth-century attraction, the ‘spa’, was the epitome of healthful and rational pleasure; it was closely followed in popularity by the regimen of exercise and social intercourse to be found in the seaside towns. It was considered good, and even necessary, to escape from the ‘great wen’ of London with its clouds of disease and corruption. The spas were descended from the healthful wells, or holy wells, that had emerged over many hundreds, and even thousands, of years of religious celebration. But the religion was now wholly forgotten. The Roman goddess of the Bath waters, Sulis Minerva, was silent. The Virgin Mary, patron of many medieval establishments, was no longer heard. St Chad, the patron saint of medicinal springs, was entirely forgotten. Instead we encounter the figure of Beau Nash, the presiding master of ceremonies at Bath, complete with slender cane and white beaver hat. He conducted a regime of what might be described as pleasurable or curative servitude, with the attendant delights of plays, concerts, gaming, horse-racing, card-playing, bookshops and all the other paraphernalia of Georgian cultural life.

There were competitors in the great game of health but Bath held the palm. This was the place where ageing or ailing politicians, sick of the pressures of Westminster, would go for what generally turned out to be a temporary or wholly ineffective remedy. Any visitors of distinction would be greeted by a peal of bells from Bath Abbey and a musical serenade at the door of their lodgings. There was no question of anonymity in this world; the whole point was to be recognized as an eminent social being. One of the many rules at Bath prohibited the use of screens in public places lest ‘they divide the company into secluded sets, which is against the fundamental institution of these places’. The pre-eminent concern was for society itself.

The baths were the first engagement of the day, followed by the coffee-shops for the male and shops of dainties for the female; there was time for concerts, lectures, or more spiritual pastimes before noon. The two or three hours before dinner could be filled with outings, promenades and card-playing before another official visit to the pump room in the evening. Large spaces were provided for all these communal activities, once more emphasizing the vitalizing and benevolent flow of social life.

The life of the seaside towns was perhaps a little more boisterous, with the uncertain impact of the wind and the waves on the polite society assembled there. There was as yet no settled view of nature other than as something vaguely picturesque and, in the right hands, ripe for ‘improvement’. Gardens could be manicured or tempted into sinuous rills but the sea was altogether ungovernable except by those sailors who despite their recent triumphs still had a somewhat unsavoury reputation. For those of an iron constitution there were manuals such as Richard Russell’s Dissertation upon the Use of Sea-Bathing, published in 1749, but even by this decade only the most hardy visitors could be lured into the water. It was much better to promenade along a safely covered walk.

Civilization meant civility; this comprised, in the spas and seaside towns, order and sociability. It meant all the gestures of recognition and of greeting, all the gradations of talk, the conventions of formal introduction, the manner of advancing into a room or of a male opening the door for a member of the opposite sex. The sociable man was the man par excellence. It was he who, literate and polite and urbane, embodied the spirit of the age. The flow of social life, as it has been described, softened and modulated the person. As the earl of Shaftesbury put it in Characteristics (1737), ‘we polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision’. Thus both men and women could be described as ‘genteel’ or ‘complaisant’ if they observed the fashions and conventions of the day. It was not done to be jaunty, or enthusiastic, or even in a hurry. We may be tempted to recall the remark of Tacitus upon the manners of the native English under Roman rule: they called it civilization, when in fact it was part of their servitude. These eighteenth-century worldlings were slaves to the false gods of the aspiring middle classes – the minor gentry, the professional classes, the wealthy merchants – who followed the theatrical posturings of the elite.

The unruly man, the impolite man, was one who according to Samuel Johnson in the Adventurer of February 1754 manifested ‘a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgement’; he was, in other words, anti-social. The other extreme, from which all polite men also fled, was the effeminate creature of nods and bows and grimaces. The attendance at Italian opera and the drinking of tea were both signs of male effeminacy, and they signalled a very real fear that the new taste of the age was destroying the older masculine culture of the Stuart and Elizabethan worlds. The new fashion of men kissing, on greeting, was particularly deplored. In Colley Cibber’s Love Makes a Man; or, The Fop’s Fortune (1700), one actor congratulates another. ‘Sir, you kiss pleasingly. I love to kiss a man. In Paris we kiss nothing else.’

The great medium of sociable life was of course the conversation in which public judgement and private taste were finely mingled; it was widely assumed that civilized values and public truth were best acquired through social intercourse and dialogue. Samuel Johnson could not have existed without the conversation with kindred spirits that calmed the overheated excitements of his brain; it made him aware of the larger world in which he had his being, so different from the silence of terror or torpor that he feared. As he said in the Rambler of January 1752, ‘none of the desires dictated by vanity is more general, or less blamable, than that of being distinguished for the arts of conversation’. This may not have been recognized by Isaac Newton or by William Blake, but it was readily apparent to those who lived in the middle years of the eighteenth century. A man was made for conversation.

Certainly it accounts for the notable emergence of clubs as the medium of male exchange, not least the ‘Conversation Societies’ which met weekly in well-regulated venues. ‘Whether the study of natural philosophy, or that of profane history, is more useful to mankind?’ ‘Is it a duty incumbent upon parents to inoculate their children, as a means to preserve life?’ The clubs were intended to foster cheerfulness and conviviality, friendship and mutual understanding, perhaps in unconscious aversion to the political and religious divisions of the last century.

Clubs were now to be found everywhere. Some clubs made their homes in taverns, among them the Essex Head Club, the Ivy Lane Club, the Turk’s Head Club; all of these had some connection with Samuel Johnson. John Macky, in Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne (1732), observed that ‘almost every [London] parish hath its separate club where the citizens, after the fatigue of the day is over in their shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their thoughts before they go to bed’. Joseph Addison, one of the high priests of eighteenth-century civilization, remarked that ‘man is a sociable animal’ but perhaps he did not include women within this truism, since none of the clubs noted at the time catered for female members.

Every male industry, trade, interest, tradition, activity, art, or ambition now had its club. London numbered 3,000, while Bristol had approximately 250. There could scarcely have been a time when an Englishman needed to be alone. It is perhaps no wonder that the pleasures of solitude were among those adumbrated by the coming ‘romantic’ movement of the early nineteenth century. Yet it was also a time of seclusion for those who wished it; partitioned churches and partitioned taverns were as common as more open settings. There is the story of the man who had eaten at the same tavern for twentyfive years. Over those years he and his neighbour in the next cubicle had never spoken. Eventually the man plucked up the courage to call out:

‘Sir, for twentyfive years we have been neighbours at dinner, and yet we have never spoken. May I enquire your name, sir?’

‘Sir, you are impertinent.’

It is a very English exchange.

To ‘club’ was to come together for mutual benefit, to create a common stock or pursue a common end, to become partners or to make up a specified sum. Some clubs were therefore akin to trading organizations and there were clubs for coal-heavers and clubs for silk-weavers, clubs for hackney-cab men and clubs for shoemakers, clubs for clock-makers and clubs for wig-makers, clubs for farriers and clubs for gingerbread-makers.

There were Art Clubs and Music Clubs, Philosophical Clubs and Literary Clubs, Mug House Clubs and Fox Hunters Clubs; at the Terrible Club, which met in the Tower at midnight on the first Monday of the month, its members had to cut their beef with a bayonet and drink a concoction of brandy and gunpowder. Some other clubs sound too arcane to be taken seriously. At the Lazy Club members were supposed to arrive in their nightshirts, and at the Silent Club not a word was allowed to be spoken. The Club of Ugly Faces specialized in just that. The Tall Club, the Surly Club and the Farters’ Club had a similarly specialized membership. Some of the members of the Kit-Kat Club, painted by Godfrey Kneller, still adorn the walls of the National Portrait Gallery. With Addison, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Walpole and Steele among them, the visitor will become acquainted with the faces of early eighteenth-century English society, culture and now history.

11

Consuming passions

It is often suggested that the fairs and markets of medieval or Elizabethan England diminished and died a natural death. That was not strictly true; wherever there was a chance of making money a stall could be put up or a trestle table placed against a house door. Fairs and markets survived to serve the needs of their local area, as markets do still. But they were to be ‘improved’. The old open marketplaces were swept away and the market crosses taken down as nuisances to traffic; in the newly designed markets the various goods were grouped together and given a ration of space.

Yet something else had arrived that would eventually change the nature of retailing all over the country. By the mid-eighteenth century every village had a shop. A shop came to differentiate the village from the hamlet. The impetus had come from London, the source and spring of marketing. There had since Roman times been emporia of many goods and many nations in the capital. So it was at this later date. The Royal Exchange in the City, built in 1567, was, for example, rivalled by the New Exchange on the Strand constructed forty-two years later. They were two quintessentially London institutions. In the earlier years of the seventeenth century shops were usually no more than sheds or stalls or basements, but the Great Fire of 1666 in particular gave them room to expand and to breathe.

Certain houses, or the ground floors of houses, were designed for retailing; it was not long before the virtues of display became paramount. Glass windows were still too expensive for the poorer retailers, but they could open up their fronts and sell there before boarding them again at night. And in a gawking, loitering age of display it was inevitable that the larger shops should take on the characteristics of a theatre of taste. They had assumed the functions of the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange by being at the same time both warehouses and galleries, auction rooms and bazaars; soon enough sash windows gave way to bow windows for the display of even more goods and delicacies.

‘The shops are perfect gilded theatres,’ the Female Tatler observed in 1709, ‘the variety of wrought silks so many changes of fine scenes, and the mercers are the performers in the opera … “This, Madam, is wonderfully charming. This, Madam, is so diverting a silk. This, Madam, my stars! How cool it looks”.’ It was a perpetual puppet play, in which commerce is transformed into an art or into a game. Sophie von la Roche noted in her diary for 1786 that ‘behind the great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy’. It was the beginning of what has been described as leisure shopping. She passes ‘a watchmaking, then a silk or fan store, now a silver-smith’s, a china or glass shop’. These are the harbingers of Heal’s, Swan & Edgar, and Fortnum & Mason, all of which arrived in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

It has been described as a ‘commercial revolution’ but of what, precisely, did this revolution consist? The contents of the more prosperous households may provide a clue to the prevailing or fashionable taste. The inventory of a rich City merchant, Mr Crowley, taken in 1728, revealed ‘two pairs of India blue damask window curtains … damask hangings lined with canvas, six carved and silvered bark stools shifted and covered with silver and gold brocade … a settee and two square stools … a Persian carpet, a carved and silvered frame for a tea-table and one ditto for a tea water kettle … a small ebony cabinet inlaid …’. The list goes on to include other goods of relatively high worth. By the standards of the day this was not necessarily an opulent household although, in earlier periods of English life, it would have been considered lavish in the extreme. A rich grocer’s widow, Mrs Forth, seemed to luxuriate in mahogany with a dressing table, a bed, a chest of drawers, an easy chair and fourteen other chairs of the same wood. The number of households that possessed cups for hot drinks rose 55 per cent in the thirty years before 1725, demonstrating the speed and specificity of fashion.

An inventory of a great manufacturer, Boulton & Fothergill, gives another impression of the time with ‘snuff boxes, instrument cases, toothpick cases – gilt, glass and steel trinkets, silver filigree boxes, needle books etcetera – all manner of plated goods, as tea urns, tankards, cups, coffee pots, cream jugs, candlesticks, sauce boats, terrines …’. By 1702 wallpaper was coming in and, according to an advertisement of the period, ‘at the blue paper warehouse in Aldermanbury (and nowhere else) are sold the true sorts of figured paper hangings, some in pieces of twelve yards long, others after the manner of real tapestry’; in the following year hangings were offered ‘in imitation of gilded leather’. Clocks, pictures, prints, mirrors, all of them could now be seen behind the bay windows of the most select shops.

But if you turned the corner from the Strand into Catherine Street, or from High Holborn into the passages beside Drury Lane, the characteristics of a consumer society would have been much more difficult to recognize. There were no luxuries here, only the necessary aids for survival. There were no names above the shops, only rudimentary signs. There were no windows, only open doors into dimly lit interiors. In Hogarth’s ‘Noon’ a small girl snatches eagerly from the gutter a piece of broken and discarded pie.

It has been estimated that there were 3,000 shops in the neighbourhood of Holborn and more than 2,500 in the area of Southwark. In the City approximately 6,500 shops had a ratio of twenty-two customers to each shop; the proportion of people to shops in Clerkenwell was thirty to one.

The majority of these would be small backstreet shops or ‘petty shops’. Like the village shops which they most closely resembled, they would have a range of essential goods on their shelves including tea, sugar, cheese, salt and butter. Other items were bought occasionally and measured in small quantities, among them yellow soap, spices, dried fruits, nuts, treacle, candles and flour. The customers would buy only on a daily basis, purchasing precisely what they required to survive until the following day. They might often rely on credit. The shopkeepers were frequently as poor as the customers themselves, all of them living off the same plain diet.