Accession of the House of Hanover.
Repeal of Occasional Conformity Act and Schism Act.
The accession of George I. brought with it the predominance of the
Whigs. They had on their side the royal power, the greater part of the
aristocracy, the dissenters and the higher trading and commercial
classes. The Tories appealed to the dislike of dissenters prevalent
amongst the country gentlemen and the country clergy, and to the
jealousy felt by the agricultural classes towards those who enriched
themselves by trade. Such a feeling, if it was aroused by irritating
legislation, might very probably turn to the advantage of the exiled
house, especially as the majority of Englishmen were to be found on the
Tory side. It was therefore advisable that government should content
itself with as little action as possible, in order to give time for old
habits to wear themselves out. The landing of the Pretender in Scotland
(1715), and the defeat of a portion of his army which had advanced to
Preston--a defeat which was the consequence of the apathy of his English
supporters, and which was followed by the complete suppression of the
rebellion--gave increased strength to the Whig government. But they were
reluctant to face an immediate dissolution, and the Septennial Act was
passed (1716) to extend to seven years the duration of parliaments,
which had been fixed at three years by the Triennial Act of William and
Mary. Under General Stanhope an effort was made to draw legislation in a
more liberal direction. The Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act
were repealed (1719); but the majorities on the side of the government
were unusually small, and Stanhope, who would willingly have repealed
the Test Act so far as it related to dissenters, was compelled to
abandon the project as entirely impracticable. The Peerage Bill,
introduced at the same time to limit the royal power of creating peers,
was happily thrown out in the Commons. It was proposed, partly from a
desire to guard the Lords against such a sudden increase of their
numbers as had been forced on them when the treaty of Utrecht was under
discussion, and partly to secure the Whigs in office against any change
in the royal councils in a succeeding reign. It was in fact conceived by
men who valued the immediate victory of their principles more than they
trusted to the general good sense of the nation. The Lords were at this
time, as a matter of fact, not merely wealthier but wiser than the
Commons; and it is no wonder that, in days when the Commons, by passing
the Septennial Act, had shown their distrust of their own constituents,
the peers should show, by the Peerage Bill, their distrust of that House
which was elected by those constituencies. Nevertheless, the remedy was
worse than the disease, for it would have established a close oligarchy,
bound sooner or later to come into conflict with the will of the nation,
and only to be overthrown by a violent alteration of the constitution.
Walpole's ministry.
The excitement following on the bursting of the South Sea Bubble (q.v.),
and the death or ruin of the leading ministers, brought Sir Robert
Walpole to the front (1721). As a man of business when men of business
were few in the House of Commons, he was eminently fit to manage the
affairs of the country. But he owed his long continuance in office
especially to his sagacity. He clearly saw, what Stanhope had failed to
see, that the mass of the nation was not fitted as yet to interest
itself wisely in affairs of government, and that therefore the rule must
be kept in the hands of the upper classes. But he was too sensible to
adopt the coarse expedient which had commended itself to Stanhope, and
he preferred humouring the masses to contradicting them.
The struggle of the preceding century had left its mark in every
direction on the national development. Out of the reaction against
Puritanism had come a widely-spread relaxation of morals, and also, as
far as the educated class was concerned, an eagerness for the discussion
of all social and religious problems. The fierce excitement of political
life had quickened thought, and the most anciently received doctrines
were held of little worth until they were brought to the test of reason.
It was a time when the pen was more powerful than the sword, when a
secretary of state would treat with condescension a witty pamphleteer,
and when such a pamphleteer might hope, not in vain, to become a
secretary of state.
It was in this world of reason and literature that the Whigs of the
Peerage Bill moved. Walpole perceived that there was another world which
understood none of these things. With cynical insight he discovered that
a great government cannot rest on a clique, however distinguished. If
the mass of the nation was not conscious of political wants, it was
conscious of material wants. The merchant needed protection for his
trade; the voters gladly welcomed election days as bringing guineas to
their pockets. Members of parliament were ready to sell their votes for
places, for pensions, for actual money. The system was not new, as Danby
is credited with the discovery that a vote in the House of Commons might
be purchased. But with Walpole it reached its height.
Such a system was possible because the House of Commons was not really
accountable to its constituents. The votes of its members were not
published, and still less were their speeches made known. Such a silence
could only be maintained around the House when there was little interest
in its proceedings. The great questions of religion and taxation which
had agitated the country under the Stuarts were now fairly settled. To
reawaken those questions in any shape would be dangerous. Walpole took
good care never to repeat the mistake of the Sacheverell trial. When on
one occasion he was led into the proposal of an unpopular excise he at
once drew back. England in his days was growing rich. Englishmen were
bluff and independent, in their ways often coarse and unmannerly. Their
life was the life depicted on the canvas of Hogarth and the pages of
Fielding. All high imagination, all devotion to the public weal, seemed
laid asleep. But the political instinct was not dead, and it would one
day express itself for better ends than an agitation against an excise
bill or an outcry for a popular war. A government could no longer employ
its powers for direct oppression. In his own house and in his own
conscience, every Englishman, as far as the government was concerned,
was the master of his destiny. By and by the idea would dawn on the
nation that anarchy is as productive of evil as tyranny, and that a
government which omits to regulate or control allows the strong to
oppress the weak, and the rich to oppress the poor.
George II. 1727-1760.
Walpole's administration lasted long enough to give room for some feeble
expression of this feeling. When George I. was succeeded by George II.
(1727), Walpole remained in power. His eagerness for the possession of
that power which he desired to use for his country's good, together with
the incapacity of two kings born and bred in a foreign country to take a
leading part in English affairs, completed the change which had been
effected when William first entrusted the conduct of government to a
united cabinet. There was now for the first time a prime minister in
England, a person who was himself a subject imposing harmonious action
on the cabinet. The change was so gradually and silently effected that
it is difficult to realize its full importance. So far, indeed, as it
only came about through the incapacity of the first two kings of the
house of Hanover, it might be undone, and was in fact to a great extent
undone by a more active successor. But so far as it was the result of
general tendencies, it could never be obliterated. In the ministries in
which Somers and Montagu on the one hand and Harley and St John on the
other had taken part, there was no prime minister except so far as one
member of the administration dominated over his colleagues by the force
of character and intelligence. In the reign of George III., even North
and Addington were universally acknowledged by that title, though they
had little claim to the independence of action of a Walpole or a Pitt.
The change was, in fact, one of the most important of those by which the
English constitution has been altered from an hereditary monarchy with a
parliamentary regulative agency to a parliamentary government with an
hereditary regulative agency. In Walpole's time the forms of the
constitution had become, in all essential particulars, what they are
now. What was wanting was a national force behind them to set them to
their proper work.
The Opposition.
War with Spain.
The growing opposition which finally drove Walpole from power was not
entirely without a nobler element than could be furnished by personal
rivalry, or ignorant distrust of commercial and financial success. It
was well that complaints that a great country ought not to be governed
by patronage and bribery should be raised, although, as subsequent
experience showed, the causes which rendered corruption inevitable were
not to be removed by the expulsion of Walpole from office. But for one
error, indeed, it is probable that Walpole's rule would have been still
further prolonged. In 1739 a popular excitement arose for a declaration
of war against Spain. Walpole believed that war to be certainly unjust,
and likely to be disastrous. He had, however, been so accustomed to give
way to popular pressure that he did not perceive the difference between
a wise and timely determination to leave a right action undone in the
face of insuperable difficulties, and an unwise and cowardly
determination to do that which he believed to be wrong and imprudent. If
he had now resigned rather than demean himself by acting against his
conscience, it is by no means unlikely that he would have been recalled
to power before many years were over. As it was, the failures of the war
recoiled on his own head, and in 1742 his long ministry came to an end.
Ministry of Henry Pelham.
After a short interval a successor was found in Henry Pelham. All the
ordinary arts of corruption which Walpole had practised were continued,
and to them were added arts of corruption which Walpole had disdained
to practise. He at least understood that there were certain principles
in accordance with which he wished to conduct public affairs, and he had
driven colleague after colleague out of office rather than allow them to
distract his method of government. Pelham and his brother, the Thomas
Pelham, duke of Newcastle, had no principles of government whatever.
They offered place to every man of parliamentary skill or influence.
There was no opposition, because the ministers never attempted to do
anything which would arouse opposition, and because they were ready to
do anything called for by any one who had power enough to make himself
dangerous; and in 1743 they embarked on a useless war with France in
order to please the king, who saw in every commotion on the continent of
Europe some danger to his beloved Hanover.
The Rebellion of 1745.
At most times in the history of England such a ministry would have been
driven from office by the outcry of an offended people. In the days of
the Pelhams, government was regarded as lying too far outside the
all-important private interests of the community to make it worth while
to make any effort to rescue it from the degradation into which it had
fallen; yet the Pelhams had not been long in power before this serene
belief that the country could get on very well without a government in
any real sense of the word was put to the test. In 1745 Charles Edward,
the son of the Pretender, landed in Scotland. He was followed by many of
the Highland clans, always ready to draw the sword against the
constituted authorities of the Lowlands; and even in the Lowlands, and
especially in Edinburgh, he found adherents, who still felt the sting
inflicted by the suppression of the national independence of Scotland.
The British army was in as chaotic a condition as the British
government, and Charles Edward inflicted a complete defeat on a force
which met him at Prestonpans. Before the end of the year the victor, at
the head of 5000 men, had advanced to Derby. But he found no support in
England, and the mere numbers brought against him compelled him to
retreat, to find defeat at Culloden in the following year (1746). The
war on the continent had been waged with indifferent success. The
victory of Dettingen (1743) and the glorious defeat of Fontenoy (1745)
had achieved no objects worthy of English intervention, and the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle put an end in 1748 to hostilities which should never
have been begun. The government pursued its inglorious career as long as
Henry Pelham lived. He had at least some share in the financial ability
of Walpole, and it was not till he died in 1754 that the real
difficulties of a system which was based on the avoidance of
difficulties had fairly to be faced.
Moral and religious atmosphere.
Wesley and Whitefield.
The change which was needed was not any mere re-adjustment of the
political machine. Those who cared for religion or morality had
forgotten that man is an imaginative and emotional being. Defenders of
Christianity and of deism alike appealed to the reason alone. Enthusiasm
was treated as a folly or a crime, and earnestness of every kind was
branded with the name of enthusiasm. The higher order of minds dwelt
with preference upon the beneficent wisdom of the Creator. The lower
order of minds treated religion as a kind of life assurance against the
inconvenience of eternal death. Upon such a system as this human nature
was certain to revenge itself. The preaching of Wesley and Whitefield
appealed direct to the emotions, with its doctrine of "conversion," and
called upon each individual not to understand, or to admire, or to act,
but vividly to realize the love and mercy of God. In all this there was
nothing new. What was new was that Wesley added an organization,
Methodism (q.v.), in which each of his followers unfolded to one another
the secrets of their heart, and became accountable to his fellows. Large
as the numbers of the Methodists ultimately became, their influence is
not to be measured by their numbers. The double want of the age, the
want of spiritual earnestness and the want of organized coherence, would
find satisfaction in many ways which would have seemed strange to
Wesley, but which were, nevertheless, a continuance of the work which he
began.
Ministry of Newcastle.
Ministry of Pitt and Newcastle.
As far as government was concerned, when Henry Pelham died (1754) the
lowest depth of baseness seemed to have been reached. The duke of
Newcastle, who succeeded his brother, looked on the work of corruption
with absolute pleasure, and regarded genius and ability as an awkward
interruption of that happy arrangement which made men subservient to
flattery and money. Whilst he was in the very act of trying to drive
from office all men who were possessed of any sort of ideas, he was
surprised by a great war. In America, the French settlers in Canada and
the English settlers on the Atlantic coast were falling to blows for the
possession of the vast territories drained by the Ohio and its
tributaries. In India, Frenchmen and Englishmen had striven during the
last war for authority over the native states round Pondicherry and
Madras, and the conflict threatened to break out anew. When war began in
earnest, and the reality of danger came home to Englishmen by the
capture of Minorca (1756), there arose a demand for a more capable
government than any which Newcastle could offer. Terrified by the storm
of obloquy which he aroused, he fled from office. A government was
formed, of which the soul was William Pitt. Pitt was, in some sort, to
the political life of Englishmen what Wesley was to their religious
life. He brought no new political ideas into their minds, but he ruled
them by the force of his character and the example of his purity. His
weapons were trust and confidence. He appealed to the patriotism of his
fellow-countrymen, to their imaginative love for the national greatness,
and he did not appeal in vain. He perceived instinctively that a large
number, even of those who took greedily the bribes of Walpole and the
Pelhams, took them, not because they loved money better than their
country, but because they had no conception that their country had any
need of them at all. It was a truth, but it was not the whole truth. The
great Whig families rallied under Newcastle and drove Pitt from office
(1757). But if Pitt could not govern without Newcastle's corruption,
neither could Newcastle govern without Pitt's energy. At last a
compromise was effected, and Newcastle undertook the work of bribing,
whilst Pitt undertook the work of governing (see CHATHAM, WILLIAM PITT,
1ST EARL OF).
The Seven Years' War.
The war which had already broken out, the Seven Years' War (1756-1763),
was not confined to England alone. By the side of the duel between
France and England, a war was going on upon the continent of Europe, in
which Austria--with its allies, France, Russia and the German
princes--had fallen upon the new kingdom of Prussia and its sovereign
Frederick II. England and Prussia therefore necessarily formed an
alliance. Different as the two governments were, they were both alike in
recognizing, in part at least, the conditions of progress. Even in
Pitt's day England, however imperfectly, rested its strength on the
popular will. Even in Frederick's day Prussia was ruled by
administrators selected for their special knowledge. Neither France nor
Austria had any conception of the necessity of fulfilling these
requirements. Hence the strength of England and of Prussia. The war
seemed to be a mere struggle for territory. There was no feeling in
either Pitt or Frederick, such as there was in the men who contended
half a century later against Napoleon, that they were fighting the
battles of the civilized world. There was something repulsive as well in
the enthusiastic nationalism of Pitt as in the cynical nationalism of
Frederick. Pitt's sole object was to exalt England to a position in
which she would fear no rival. But in so doing he exalted that which, in
spite of all that had happened, best deserved to be exalted. The habits
of individual energy fused together by the inspiration of patriotism
conquered Canada. The unintelligent over-regulation of the French
government could not maintain the colonies which had been founded in
happier times. In 1758 Louisburg was taken, and the mouth of the St
Lawrence guarded against France. In 1759 Quebec fell before Wolfe, who
died at the moment of victory. In the same year the naval victories of
Lagos and Quiberon Bay established the supremacy of the British at sea.
The battle of Plassey (1757) had laid Bengal at the feet of Clive; and
Coote's victory at Wandiwash (1760) led to the final ruin of the relics
of French authority in southern India. When George II. died (1760)
England was the first maritime and colonial power in the world (see
SEVEN YEARS' WAR; CANADA: _History_; INDIA: _History_).
George III., 1760-1820.
Pitt's resignation.
In George III. the king once more became an important factor in English
politics. From his childhood he had been trained by his mother and his
instructors to regard the breaking down of the power of the great
families as the task of his life. In this he was walking in the same
direction as Pitt. If the two men could have worked together, England
might have been spared many misfortunes. Unhappily, the king could not
understand Pitt's higher qualities, his bold confidence in the popular
feeling, and his contempt for corruption and intrigue. And yet the
king's authority was indispensable to Pitt, if he was to carry on his
conflict against the great families with success. When the war came to
an end, as it must come to an end sooner or later, Pitt's special
predominance, derived as it was from his power of breathing a martial
spirit into the fleets and armies of England, would come to an end too.
Only the king, with his hold upon the traditional instincts of loyalty
and the force of his still unimpaired prerogative, could, in ordinary
times, hold head against the wealthy and influential aristocracy.
Unfortunately, George III. was not wise enough to deal with the
difficulty in a high-minded fashion. With a well-intentioned but narrow
mind, he had nothing in him to strike the imagination of his subjects.
He met influence with influence, corruption with corruption, intrigue
with intrigue. Unhappily, too, his earliest relations with Pitt involved
a dispute on a point on which he was right and Pitt was wrong. In 1761
Pitt resigned office, because neither the king nor the cabinet were
willing to declare war against Spain in the midst of the war with
France. As the war with Spain was inevitable, and as, when it broke out
in the following year (1762), it was followed by triumphs for which Pitt
had prepared the way, the prescience of the great war-minister appeared
to be fully established. But it was his love of war, not his skill in
carrying it on, which was really in question. He would be satisfied with
nothing short of the absolute ruin of France. He would have given
England that dangerous position of supremacy which was gained for France
by Louis XIV. in the 17th century, and by Napoleon in the 19th century.
He would have made his country still more haughty and arrogant than it
was, till other nations rose against it, as they have three times risen
against France, rather than submit to the intolerable yoke. It was a
happy thing for England that peace was signed (1763).
Bute and Grenville.
Even as it was, a spirit of contemptuous disregard of the rights of
others had been roused, which would not be easily allayed. The king's
premature attempt to secure a prime minister of his own choosing in Lord
Bute (1761) came to an end through the minister's incapacity (1763).
George Grenville, who followed him, kept the king in leading strings in
reliance upon his parliamentary majority. Something, no doubt, had been
accomplished by the incorruptibility of Pitt. The practice of bribing
members of parliament by actual presents in money came to an end, though
the practice of bribing them by place and pension long continued. The
arrogance which Pitt displayed towards foreign nations was displayed by
Grenville towards classes of the population of the British dominions. It
was enough for him to establish a right. He never put himself in the
position of those who were to suffer by its being put in force.
The American colonies.
The first to suffer from Grenville's conception of his duty were the
American colonies. The mercantile system, which had sprung up in Spain
in the 16th century, held that colonies were to be entirely prohibited
from trading, except with the mother country. Every European country had
adopted this view, and the acquisition of fresh colonial dominions by
England, at the peace of 1763, had been made not so much through lust of
empire as through love of trade. Of all English colonies, the American
were the most populous and important. Their proximity to the Spanish
colonies in the West Indies had naturally led to a contraband trade. To
this trade Grenville put a stop, as far as lay in his power. Obnoxious
as this measure was in America, the colonists had acknowledged the
principle on which it was founded too long to make it easy to resist it.
Another step of Grenville's met with more open opposition. Even with all
the experience of the century which followed, the relations between a
mother country and her colonies are not easy to arrange. If the burthen
of defence is to be borne in common, it can hardly be left to the mother
country to declare war, and to exact the necessary taxation, without the
consent of the colonies. If, on the other hand, it is to be borne by the
mother country alone, she may well complain that she is left to bear
more than her due share of the weight. The latter alternative forced
itself upon the attention of Grenville. The British parliament, he held,
was the supreme legislature, and, as such, was entitled to raise taxes
in America to support the military forces needed for the defence of
America. The act (1765) imposing a stamp tax on the American colonies
was the result.
The Rockingham ministry.
As might have been expected, the Americans resisted. For them, the
question was precisely that which Hampden had fought out in the case of
ship-money. As far as they were concerned, the British parliament had
stepped into the position of Charles I. If Grenville had remained in
office he would probably have persisted in his resolution. He was driven
from his post by the king's resolve no longer to submit to his
insolence, and a new ministry was formed under the marquess of
Rockingham, composed of some of those leaders of the Whig aristocracy
who had not followed the Grenville ministry. They were well-intentioned,
but weak, and without political ability; and the king regarded them with
distrust, only qualified by his abhorrence of the ministry which they
superseded.
The Declaratory Act and repeal of Stamp Act.
As soon as the bad news came from America, the ministry was placed
between two recommendations. Grenville, on the one hand, advised that
the tax should be enforced. Pitt, on the other, declared that the
British parliament had absolutely no right to tax America, though he
held that it had the right to regulate, or in other words to tax, the
commerce of America for the benefit of the British merchant and
manufacturer. Between the two the government took a middle course. It
obtained from parliament a total repeal of the Stamp Act, but it also
passed a Declaratory Act, claiming for the British parliament the
supreme power over the colonies in matters of taxation, as well as in
matters of legislation.
Burke's political theory.
It is possible that the course thus adopted was chosen simply because it
was a middle course. But it was probably suggested by Edmund Burke, who
was then Lord Rockingham's private secretary, but who for some time to
come was to furnish thought to the party to which he attached himself.
Burke carried into the world of theory those politics of expediency of
which Walpole had been the practical originator. He held that questions
of abstract right had no place in politics. It was therefore as absurd
to argue with Pitt that England had a right to regulate commerce, as it
was to argue with Grenville that England had a right to levy taxes. All
that could be said was, that it was expedient in a widespread empire
that the power of final decision should be lodged somewhere, and that it
was also expedient not to use that power in such a way as to irritate
those whom it was the truest wisdom to conciliate.
Arguments of Pitt and Burke.
The weak side of this view was the weak side of all Burke's political
philosophy. Like all great innovators, he was intensely conservative
where he was not an advocate of change. With new views on every subject
relating to the exercise of power, he shrank even from entertaining the
slightest question relating to the distribution of power. He recommended
to the British parliament the most self-denying wisdom, but he could not
see that in its relation to the colonies the British parliament was so
constituted as to make it entirely unprepared to be either wise or
self-denying. It is true that if he had thought out the matter in this
direction, he would have been led further than he or any other man in
England or America was at that time prepared to go. If the British
parliament was unfit to legislate for America, and if, as was
undoubtedly the case, it was impossible to create a representative body
which was fit to legislate, it would follow that the American colonies
could only be fairly governed as practically independent states, though
they might possibly remain, like the great colonies of our own day, in a
position of alliance rather than of dependence. It was because the
issues opened led to changes so far greater than the wisest statesman
then perceived, that Pitt's solution, logically untenable as it was, was
preferable to Burke's. Pitt would have given bad reasons for going a
step in the right direction. Burke gave excellent reasons why those who
were certain to go wrong should have the power to go right.
Ministry of Lord Chatham.
Scarcely were the measures relating to America passed when the king
turned out the ministry. The new ministry was formed by Pitt, who was
created earl of Chatham (1766), on the principle of bringing together
men who had shaken themselves loose from any of the different Whig
cliques. Whatever chance the plan had of succeeding was at an end when
Chatham's mind temporarily gave way under stress of disease (1767).
Charles Townshend, a brilliant, headstrong man, led parliament in the
way which had been prepared by the Declaratory Act, and laid duties on
tea and other articles of commerce entering the ports of America.