Actually Queen Anne was alive
Kevin Sharpe
POLITICS, RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN ENGLAND, 1679-1742 by Geoffrey Holmes
Hambledon, £24.00 ecently an eminent young historian
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q am increasingly attracted to the adjec- tive young to describe contemporaries) lamented the state of British history. He regretted the fragmentation of the big Picture of the past as historians retreated into their studies to perfect smaller and smaller scholarly miniatures. He wrote nostalgically of that 'captivating' heroic' story in which 'century after century, rev- olution followed revolution'. He yearned for those old confident generalisations and clear patterns that made sense of the past. He decried the chasm that professional historians had placed between their narrow concerns and the desires of the reading Public and called upon scholars to sell the Product the people (supposedly) want: an exciting, confident, clear and uncomp- licated British history — not books con- cerned to show that 'less happened and also less dramatically than was once thought'. Many of us will sympathise, or at least share the nostalgia for a history that Was widely read, still more for history that le sees to be read, rather than decoded Info English prose. Yet scepticism about the confident generalisation and clear pat- te, rn may stem from more than intellectual timidity: it may rise from a suspicion that such history necessarily becomes simplistic and teleological. In the familiar old story the reign of Queen Anne was an aberration of little importance. As a Stuart she was a hang- over from the dynasty confined to oblivion by the revolution of 1688; in endeavouring to reign free of the dominance of party, she anachronistically arrested constitutional development. Like her, the Tories failed to discern the inevitable course of history. By contrast the Whigs saw it: realising (in Sellars and Yeatman's words) that 'the Queen had been dead all the time', they placed George I as king, a Whig oligarchy in government and so restarted the histor- ical clock. Twenty years ago, Geoffrey Holmes exposed the errors of such an account in his magisterial study, British Politics in The Age of Anne. 1688, he showed, did not determine the course of 18th-century politics. Rather the cond- itions of the 1690s, and 1700s, under William and Anne, were the antithesis of the circumstances of Hanoverian Britain.
Politics, Religion and Society is a collect- ion of Holmes's essays and papers, written over 20 years and developing his study of Augustan England. They do not all com- mand equal attention. Those penned be- fore his larger study might profitably have been revised, or excluded. Some, like that on the Hamilton affair, or the crisis over the malt tax in 1713, seem more immersed in the details of an episode than illuminat- ing of its broader political significance. There are inconsistencies and differences of emphasis that might have been ex- plained. More disappointingly, the author did not take the opportunity of the intro- duction fully to relate each particular piece to or integrate them in his broad picture of the Augustan world. But the best essays, while exhibiting the closest critical exam- ination of the evidence, neither eschew big questions nor shrink from bold suggest- ions. In contrast to the clichés about rotten boroughs and oligarchies, Holmes depicts the towns and electorate of England as fairly represented and fairly representa- tive. Where Gregory King is usually lauded as the impartial social analyst of his age, Holmes shows his statistics to be pre- cariously founded and his purpose in com- piling them political. Far from the inevit- able outcome of 1688, the triumph of the Whigs, he argues, was highly improbable; indeed 'without the succession crisis of 1713-14 it is hard to see how they could have escaped ultimate disaster'. As for the crown, the story is not the old one of
accelerating decline. The Septennial Act and subsidence of party after 1716 strengthened the monarchy by increasing the political value of royal patronage.
Such refinements and revisions compli- cate the historical picture, but Professor Holmes is not only an iconoclast more concerned to smash than reconstruct. Several of his essays are concerned with new answers to the most general problem of all: why after decades of instability and strife did the years from 1720 see a relative calm unbroken by ideological clashes, religious passion, popular uprisings, or even vituperative party conflict? Holmes looks for answers in high politics, in personalities and in broader social and economic changes. The settlement of the succession on the house of Hanover ended the prospect of a Catholic monarchy and so calmed fears of popery. What religious charge was left in politics was defused by patronage and by — a wonderful descrip- tion — 'the greatest bomb-disposal expert English public life has known, Sir Robert Walpole'. Most importantly and originally, beneath and explaining Walpole's stability, Holmes sees a society with decelerating population growth, rising wages and cheaper food for the poor, increasing trade and expanding opportunities (for all above the poor) in the bureaucracy and the profes- sions. (Opportunities there certainly were if, as was claimed, three-quarters of Lon- don's surgeons could make their living from venereal disease.) The link between political stability and such social change is enticing, but it is not clear why the changes that Holmes charts from the 1680s crossed with periods of political strife and instabil- ity as well as the 'ideological torpor' of Walpole's years. There is more to do here; the explanations are not yet clear.
This may of course confirm the despair of some about the state of British history. It should not. A sense that there were seldom simple correlations or neat explan- ations in the past should be attractive to most of us who fail to find them in the present; and that the improbable occurred is, if untidy, by no means a cause for despondency. Moreover, good scholarly history such as Holmes's may be rooted in archives — pamphlets and poll books, diaries and division lists — but it is not disengaged from present concerns. Profes- sor Holmes himself reflects on the applic-
ability of his discussion of the electorate to the politics of 1975. Other readers may well find of contemporary relevance observations on the failure of Harley's conspiracy to remove Cabinet colleagues, on the political orchestration of mob riot in 1710, or on the impossibility of dismantling 'a great edifice of state-employed profes- sionals once it had been erected'. This reader certainly better understood Wal- pole's success for learning of his belief 'that government intervention to remedy most social abuses was either irrelevant or un- wise'. 'We do it in the back of a Volvo, dearie.'
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