Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 3
Montagu piloted the Bank of England Act through parliament in 1694, on the understanding that he would become chancellor of the exchequer. He even pledged the considerable sum of £2,000 as his own subscription to the bank. The money for the new venture came in quickly enough. It was proposed to raise £1.2 million from wealthy subscribers, at an annual interest of 8 per cent. Such terms were tempting enough to fill the list within ten days. The king and queen were among the investors who included merchants, financiers and businessmen. It was seen to be a largely Whig enterprise, therefore, with that party closely associated with the City of London. The Tories, who represented the landed classes, considered it to be nothing more than a ‘front’ to maintain the war. Certainly it had military and political consequences. France had no such financial scheme in operation, and so was placed at a disadvantage in funding hostilities.
This has been considered to represent a financial revolution that laid the ground for steady, if not always competent, government. Parliament, in the first place, was now in supreme command of the nation’s funding; it raised the taxes that paid for the interest on the large loans. Within twenty years an annual ‘budget’ would be presented to its members. In the late seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries emerged a number of smaller banks, London ‘private’ banks and ‘country’ banks, which specialized in short-term credit and the forwarding of remittances. Their advances to business and public authorities helped to ease the passage of finance and of trade.
The City had been the home of credit ever since the time of the Roman occupation, but the extraordinary growth of business in the latter years of the seventeenth century convinced many contemporaries that it was a wholly new phenomenon. A Fellow of the Royal Society, John Houghton, wrote in 1694 that ‘a great many stocks have arisen since this war with France’; he added that ‘few that had money were willing it should lie idle’, and suggested that greater profits were to be recovered from sources other than those of ‘lands, houses or commodities’. The new methods became known very quickly as stock-jobbing; money might be made in the buying and selling of shares like those, for example, in the Bank of England itself. It was described by Defoe in 1724 as ‘a trade, which once bewitched the nation almost to its ruin’.
Exchange Alley, near the Royal Exchange, became the centre for these transactions. Two coffee-houses in particular, Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, were the principal resorts of financial business. An advertisement of 1695 informed the public that at Jonathan’s ‘may be bought and sold . . . all stocks and shares’. A broker, John Castaing, published lists of stock prices and exchange rates together with the state of the markets in Genoa, Dublin, Rotterdam and elsewhere. It was also the place where wagers were taken, on matters public or private. What will you pay me if I do not drink wine, ale or brandy before Michaelmas 1696? What are the bets that war will be declared against France before Christmas Day? A contemporary print shows several bewigged gentlemen, with tricorne hats, standing and conversing in a large room; they are wearing formal waistcoats and coats. They invested, or represented investors, in government contracts, industrial enterprises, and the stocks of the great companies even then being formed. On the wall behind them are images of a bull and a bear, and one of a lame duck. A bull was supposed to be a financial optimist, and a bear was the opposite; they no doubt represented a mixture of both parties.
Their conversations are reproduced in a play of the period. Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1717) sets a scene in Jonathan’s:
First broker: Who does any thing in the civil list lottery? Or caco [coffee beans]? Zounds, where are all the Jews this afternoon? Are you a bull or a bear today, Abraham?
Second broker: A bull, faith – but I have a good putt for next week.
The call goes out from the waiter for ‘Fresh coffee, gentlemen, fresh coffee?’ or for ‘Bohea-tea, gentlemen?’
This was a new, and for some an alarming, practice. The Tories in particular disliked the idea of a rising ‘moneyed interest’; they believed that wealth lay in the land of England, and not in financial manipulation. It was argued that those who possessed the soil were the best judges of the country’s strengths. The moneyed men were also largely established in London, a Whig stronghold, and the assorted ranks of merchants, financiers, office holders and professionals contained a large number of dissenters and nonconformists. As a rule of thumb, it was said that dissent went with money and Anglicanism with land. As long as the war lasted, and the government was in need of funds, the new rich were assured of large profits from the institutions of public credit. The land suffered in contrast, and there were fears that the market was about to collapse. In The Conduct of the Allies (1711) Jonathan Swift returned to the attack upon the Whigs by declaring that the war was being continued unnecessarily ‘to enrich usurers and stock-jobbers, and to cultivate the pernicious designs of a faction by destroying the landed interest’.
A further, but related, division arose between Whigs and Tories. Some of the latter group favoured the return of the exiled king or of his son; but if the Stuarts came back they might easily repudiate the national debt worked out by William III and his Whig supporters. The consequence would be financial chaos and ruin for the rich subscribers. It could not be allowed to happen.
The intimations of doom, on both sides, were of course misplaced. In a short period of time, beyond the hot circles of war, the common interests between the moneyed and the landed became obvious to all concerned. As Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, in the autumn of 1711, ‘the trader is fed by the product of the land, and the landed man cannot be clothed but by the skill of the trader’. The representatives of the landed and financial interests came soon enough to entertain certain common ideals of ‘the gentleman’ and of ‘gentle society’ that animated social conventions for the next 150 years; the presence of an aristocratic elite, tantalizingly within grasp, wonderfully concentrated the minds of those who aspired to it.
The stability of the financial state was enhanced by a further measure introduced by Charles Montagu. In the year after the establishment of the Bank of England he decided to restore the true worth of the silver shilling, the value of which had been undermined by clipping and adulteration. Something like 95 per cent of the currency was counterfeit or underweight. Silver had never been more base.
Montagu had enlisted the assistance of Isaac Newton; they had both been Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, but Newton had subsequently astounded the world with his explanation of the force of gravity in Principia Mathematica. In the spring of 1696 Montagu had appointed his celebrated colleague as warden of the Mint, on Tower Hill, since in the previous year Newton had composed a short treatise ‘On the Amendment of English Coins’. The new warden was in the doubly fortunate position of being both a superb theorist and a determined experimenter.
A total recoinage was to be effected, and the old impure coins were to be removed from circulation. Montagu had initiated the proposal but had left Newton to administer and organize its implementation. The exercise was in large measure a success, and within months of Newton’s appointment the Mint was issuing some £150,000 worth of silver coinage each week. The monetary standard of the country was assured. The pillars of the state were in place.
The essential nature of that state, as a result of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, was now clearly recognizable. At its apex remained the monarch, of course. William III was on the throne by the agency of ‘the divine right of Providence’, however that phrase might be interpreted. It was an ambiguous formulation for an ambiguous position. Was he king by right of conquest or by consent of parliament? And what form of ‘divine right’ could he possibly claim? He never touched for the king’s evil, for example, although his successor Anne would do so, exercising her supposedly supernatural power.
His somewhat indefinite or at least unformulated authority was maintained by the patrician class, which is to say the aristocrats who had steered the new state ever since its foundati
on. The upper ranks of the aristocracy numbered perhaps 200, among them the dukes, earls and other lords; they had always represented a small but confident and coherent landed elite. Wealth was essential but was not necessarily enough. Blood lineage was equally, if not more, important. A landed estate, which conferred the right to hunt, was a prerequisite. The striving members of the upper gentry would rather join them than beat them and in truth the aristocratic code, and the aristocratic ideal, would pervade the social and political life of the century. Continuity, rather than change, was the key. It was established by habitual patterns of perception and by traditional patterns of activity, as self-evident as they were unexceptionable.
This does not represent some antiquated vision of ‘old England’ but the living reality of politics and of power. Much has been written about the supposed permeability of the upper class, open to the rich and even to arrivistes, but the reality was less promising. It was a fixed principle, even as late as the reign of George III (1760–1820), that no individual engaged in trade could become a peer of the realm.
The lords were also an effective power in the Commons. The head of the family would sit in the upper chamber, while his relations and dependants would sit in the lower; Pitt the elder once described the Commons as ‘a parcel of younger brothers’. The various families in turn set up marriage alliances, thus strengthening the power of the few. They stood above perhaps 15,000 of the lower gentry who were not of noble status but who did not have to till their own soil.
For most of the members of the gentry their Church was the state Church, their Anglicanism part of their birthright. Others of course were dissenters, and a few were atheistical, but the preponderance followed the familiar path to the village church or the town church. The Anglican authorities were in the early part of the eighteenth century wholly at the service of the administration. The archbishop of Canterbury had an official seat at the privy council, while of course the bishops were an intrinsic part of the House of Lords. When Bishop Hare once mildly threatened Lord Carteret, a Whig grandee, with the possible retraction of his vote, Carteret replied, ‘If I want you, I know how to have you.’ The bishops themselves were often of noble blood, and it was considered to be a matter of congratulation that after the rule of Cromwell the grandees were back in their palaces. The Church was viewed as one of the three great professions, alongside law and the emerging science or art of medicine, so it remained an integral part of the social hierarchy.
Orthodox Anglicanism, and it is hard to envisage any other, was primarily a religion of responsibilities and duties. It was reasonable, and not dogmatic. Morality, rather than Christ the Saviour, was the guiding presence. Its liturgy and canons had remained largely unchanged since their inception in the mid-sixteenth century. Habit and indifference completed the picture. Where the parson and the landowner are in agreement, the religious and secular state reflect one another. We may perhaps agree with that enemy of all things English, Napoleon Buonaparte, who remarked that ‘I don’t see in religion the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of the social order. It ties up to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being massacred by the poor.’ If this perhaps sounds too cynical then we may turn to that most English of observers, William Hogarth, who in The Sleeping Congregation shows the effect of a universal dullness covering all. In his etching the service is dominated by royal, rather than divine, images. Spirituality has been converted into sleep.
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 indu
strial 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.