A History of Britain, Volume 2 (49 page)

Brutal and peremptory though the process may have been, the union was not a crude annexation. The Scottish Kirk retained its own identity and governance, the two systems of law were largely kept separate, and no changes were made to Scotland's universities, burghs and hereditary criminal jurisdictions. The parliament at Holyrood was to be done away with, by voting for its own abolition, but Scotland was to have 45 members in the Commons and 16 elected, so-called representative peers. The first set of MPs was elected by the Scottish parliament in 1707, but from 1708 general elections were held in the Scottish constituencies. To the dismay of some, the number of MPs had dropped dramatically from 157 to 45, but this might seem less of an outrage against a representative system when one considers that for much of the eighteenth century the entire Scottish electorate numbered only some 2600 in a population of one and a quarter of a million. What Scotland lost in 1707 was certainly not a democracy. But still it had been a true political nation, a place in the world. And now as the Chancellor of Scotland, James Ogilvy, Earl of Seafield, said as he signed the Act of Union, ‘There's ane end of ane auld sang.'

If one of those new Scottish members of parliament wanted a heartening vision of the Britain to which he had become attached – with whatever measure of reluctance or enthusiasm – all he had to do was take himself down-river to Greenwich to the handsome new Royal Naval Hospital. Christopher Wren's twin, colonnaded pavilions could not help but put the traveller in mind of the Cour Royale, the grandiose approach to Versailles. But at Greenwich the approach was by way of the Thames, and the vista, as befitted an institution of charity, was public and not blocked off by grandiose screens and grilles. Inside the Great Hall facing the chapel, the invidious contrasts with French autocracy continued in the ceiling allegory painted by James Thornhill: the first great visual manifesto of the post-1688 monarchy. The allusions to the most famous allegories of the baroque monarchies – Rubens' apotheosis of James I at Whitehall and
Le Brun's fawning celebration of the Sun King, Louis XIV, at Versailles – were glaring, the better to mark the differences between despots and constitutional monarchs. On Thornhill's ceiling, Apollo had changed sides from the vainglorious absolutist to William and Mary, the champions of Protestant freedom. Louis had taken things from the peoples of Europe: territories, cities, farms. But William was a giver, restoring to a duly grateful continent the cap of Liberty, while the arch-enemy (thinly disguised as Arbitrary Power) lies trampled beneath his feet. The invidious comparisons are trumpeted throughout the allegory. Over there, the curses of serfdom, popery and blind superstition. Over here, the wisdom of the arts and sciences to guide the omniscient, benevolent king. Over there, the Jesuits, over here, Newton. It would be these milder but sterling virtues that would make Britain great: Prudence, Temperance and Charity.

The blessings of charity are personified in the apparently venerable presence of the most senior pensioner in the Hospital, the reputedly ninety-seven-year-old John Wall (who in fact was constantly in trouble with the authorities for his filthy language and incorrigible drunkenness). But then it is vain to look to allegories to tell the truth. The image of the new Great Britain – peacefully devoted to toleration and freedom – was at odds with the historical reality of a state transformed by nearly three decades of war into an immense and formidable military machine. During the Restoration, the English army seldom consisted of more than 15,000 men. By the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, there were over 90,000 men in the army and more than 40,000 in the navy (although by 1715 this had dropped to a peace-time force of 32,000). Military spending – more than £5 million a year during the Nine Years' War, 1689–97 and over £7 million a year during the War of the Spanish Succession – had almost doubled, rising from £36 million to £65 million. By 1710, military spending had swallowed up almost 10 per cent of Britain's entire national income. To build a single first-rate ship would cost between £30,000 and £40,000. Keeping soldiers in the field and ships on the high seas, and supplying them with adequate victuals and munitions had added £40 million to the National Debt and created another kind of army – which would not be demobilized once the fighting had stopped: bond-holders, tax-assessors and accountants; customs-and-excise men, thousands upon thousands of them. By the end of the wars, Britons were being taxed twice as heavily, per capita, as their French counterparts, a burden that would only get heavier as the relentlessly martial eighteenth century rumbled on.

Bureaucratic, militarized and heavily taxed though post-revolution Britain was, there was one feature of the Greenwich myth that was true.
While Louis XIV could simply decide how much money was needed for his campaigns and then decree the funds into the treasury, in Britain the monarch and his ministers had to ask for it. So whether he liked it or not – and assuredly William did not – he and his successors had no choice but to go to parliament to fund their wars.

Virtually everywhere else in Europe, if not the world – from Ming China to Mughal India to Romanov Russia to Hohenzollern Prussia – the more militarized the state, the stronger the king. But in Britain, the longer the wars went on, the stronger
parliament
became, as the purse whose strings it controlled so tightly became bigger and bigger. Apart from the States General and provincial estates of the Dutch Republic, Britain was the only major European power where senior military men – generals like Marlborough – also sat in parliament and assumed a role as power-brokers, not to subvert parliamentary government but to reinforce it.

In one of the greatest ironies of British history, positions traditionally taken by monarchists and parliamentarians were now reversed. The Whigs, who in the reigns of Charles II and James II had insisted on limited monarchy, now found themselves to be running the war, while the Tory champions of unlimited monarchy were mistrustful of it, not least because nearly a quarter of all money voted in 1702–13 for expenditure on the army was going to foreign (especially Dutch) subsidies! The Tories also began to present themselves to the electors of the counties as the champions of the over-taxed landed classes, held to ransom by men whose commitment to the war was driven as much by profit as principle. It was a turnaround worthy of Dean Swift's most biting satires on the squabbles of Big Enders and Little Enders, but it had an entirely serious effect on British politics. For as long as the little-king party ran the war government, and the big-king party was more often than not in opposition, the role reversal dictated a benevolent equilibrium and ruled out the possibility of military autocracy.

Better yet, the Tories – who in the reign of Charles II had been content to see a single parliament renewed for more than fifteen years – now wanted more, not fewer, elections. Their most articulate spokesman, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who cast himself as the guardian of ancient English liberties, even went so far as insisting that frequent revolutions were a sign of political vigour. The Whigs, of course, felt that 1688 had been all the revolution the country needed, but since the revolutionary settlement had guaranteed triennial elections it was all but impossible for them to avoid regular political upheaval. And, for better or worse, the politics was the kind of combative partisanship that, without any anachronism, we can recognize as prototypically modern. The two parties were at
each other's throats, not just on the specific policies of the day (the corruption of ministers, the propriety and expense of the war, the profiteering of contractors) but also in their reading of the Revolution of 1688 and the character of the political nation that had been created – or reaffirmed – as a result of it. Paradoxically, neither of the parties was especially eager to represent what had happened as a historical rupture with the past. As the principal beneficiaries of the change, the Whigs were not about to endorse a view of opposition that seemed to license resistance to the king's ministers. So they portrayed themselves as the real conservatives and James II as a renegade, like his father before him, bent on violating the fundamental tenets of the ‘ancient constitution' – the rule of law, the Protestant settlement and the proper restraints imposed by parliamentary government. The ‘revolution' that deposed him had been, then, an act of lawful resistance, the restoration of the authentic constitutional monarchy under which the nation now lived. ‘The tyrant conspired to enslave free-born Englishmen into
SLAVES
,' a typical Whig polemic shouted, ‘the
CREATURES
of Popery and Tyranny! He would have had Papist Irishmen in your houses . . . quartered on your wives and daughters; he would have made
TORQUEMADAS
of your judges. He had broken his sworn
CONTRACT
with his people and Resistance to his despotism was a sacred duty, the calling of patriots.'

The Tories remained adamant that the Whigs had usurped the title of defenders of the monarchy, while deforming its character. That monarchy remained what it had been before 1688: a divinely appointed office. Their own participation in 1688 had not in any way altered or compromised the sacrosanct nature of the institution, but had merely been an
ad hominem
act filling the vacancy that James had unfortunately created. There had been a change of personnel, not a change of constitution:

The abuse could get ugly and personal. William III, his bitterest enemies put it about, was not only foreign and corrupt but a homosexual eunuch too, which explained his difficulty in begetting heirs. A typical serenade of the period went:

The differences between Whigs and Tories, then, were not just the petty quibbles of gentlemen who, once the political name-calling was done, could get together over a glass of wine or a tankard of ale. These differences cut to the bone. They went to rival coffee-houses (the Whigs to Old Slaughter's, the Tories to the Cocoa Tree) and different clubs (the Whigs to the Kit Cat, the Tories to the Honourable Board of Brotherhood from 1709, or Edward Harley's Board from 1720). They were two armed camps, bent on mutual destruction, and contested elections were fought, with everything the combatants could get their hands on: money, drink, entertainment, shameless promises of jobs, juicy libel and, in the last resort, either the threat or the reality of a serious brawl.

From the poll-books kept by many constituencies we know that, even though the electors were for the most part the social inferiors of the candidate, they were anything but docile or easily impressionable. The voters of the fiercely contested counties were freeholders: literate, opinionated, informed by the newspapers and journals that mushroomed after the abandonment of the Licensing Act, and predictably bloody-minded about the hot-button issues of the day like toleration of Dissenters or Catholics and the imposition of new excises. By the standards of the time, the size of the electorate was surprisingly large: a quarter of a million adult males or 15 per cent of that population. And it was divided right down the middle, county by county, village by village. The poll-books of even the most modest hamlets show electors voting their party choice, irrespective of the opinion of the local squire – and switching that choice from election to election.

The battle for power was so intense and so vicious that politicians and their respective camp followers – placemen and pen-pushers, hacks
and roughnecks – were not inclined to be magnanimous in victory. As Queen Anne got older, and the anxiety about the succession became more acute, the temptation to make a pre-emptive strike on the enemy was virtually irresistible. Politicians on the losing end of elections were now faced with losing, not only their jobs along with the little barony of dependent supporters they had accumulated but their liberty too. Being out of power and out of place could now also entail impeachment, imprisonment, total personal and political ruin. To allow a floored antagonist to get up off the mat was to court destruction. Equally, to fail to nip a potent, scurrilous campaign in the bud while it was still an irritation rather than a threat was to show fatal weakness.

So, with an eye to their future after the aged Queen Anne had gone, the Whigs decided to pluck out the most annoying thorn in their flesh: the ultra-Tory, High-Church preacher Dr Henry Sacheverell. In 1709, thirsty for confrontation, Sacheverell had, in his own words, ‘hung out the bloody banner of defiance' and on 5 November had preached a violent sermon in St Paul's before the Corporation of London, condemning the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a transgression against God's anointed and accusing the Whigs of putting the Church of England in danger by its
de facto
policy of tolerating Dissenters. For Sacheverell, both crimes were tantamount to bringing back the evil days of the Commonwealth, an overturning of everything that England truly was. To make sure that his alarm bell would be heard, he had 100,000 copies of the sermon printed and distributed. By 1710, the campaign to discredit the Whigs as the destroyers of the true Church had become ubiquitous and vocal. The government – unpopular through the prolongation of the war in Europe and the high costs in excises it placed on the people – either had to brazen out the shouting or stamp on Sacheverell before he became a real menace.