They that rule in England
in stately conclave met
William Thomas
RIOT, RISINGS AND REVOLU- TION: GOVERNANCE AND VIOLENCE IN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY ENGLAND by Ian Gilmour Hutchinson, f25, pp. 504 The theme of this clever, bitter book is in its subtitle. Sir Ian Gilmour has written a continuous history of the interaction of popular discontent and political authority in the century following the Revolution of 1688. He has mastered, along with much of the conventional literature, the huge volume of writing which academic historians have been pouring out over the last 30 years. During that time, tastes and fashions have changed a good deal. A pre- dominantly Whiggish and aristocratic ver- sion of Georgian England, based on the archives of political families and imbued with more than a little envy of the elegance and ease of the way of life of a landed elite, has been challenged; first, by a radical or revolutionary version which harps on popular discontent, riot, disorder and the savagery of the penal code, and latterly by a Tory version which stresses the durability of the Anglican Church, the vigour of its doctrine and even the popularity of the Jacobite cause. Of the three, Gilmour is least sympathetic to the first, and draws most from the last two. In fact what sur- prises the politically innocent reviewer is not so much his sympathy with the radical tradition, which has always had much in common with Tory paternalism, as the energy of his assault on the rich and espe- cially the rich landowner. He is at his most Tory in dealing with the critics of the Whigs like Swift and Gay. But when he approaches the French Revolution, his political comments are closer to those of Tom Paine than of Burke.
Of course, no modern Tory, outside Oxford at least, would side with the High Anglican doctrine of passive obedience against the Whig one of constitutional, limited monarchy, and Gilmour does not. He finds the High Tory clergyman Henry Sacheverell a powerful orator but a reli- gious hypocrite. 'Had his opinions not his ambition been his guide, he would have been a Non-juror.' But Sacheverell at least demonstrated the great latent power of the Church and the real hollowness of the Whigs' claim to represent 'the people'. So without sympathising with Tory doctrine, Gilmour shares Tory criticism of the Whigs. The government of Walpole was never popular and always insecure. 'The Tories were the popular party and, save in 1727, won more votes than the Whigs in every election down to 1747.'
It follows that the Jacobite cause must have been more popular than its opponents ever admitted. Gilmour pays close atten- tion to the '15 and the '45, not from any sentimental feeling for the Scots, but because, having shown that the Hanoverian dynasty rested on the strength of its army, he is obliged to treat seriously any military challenge it faced at home. If two thirds of the English people really were Tory, as William Pulteney once assured George II, why were they so cool about the Young Pretender? Because, we are told, Charles Edward was a blunderer, and 30 years of Hanoverian rule had numbed them into passive indifference to any political author- ity.
Nor is Gilmour persuaded by the later Whig claim to have established liberty by protecting property. In some sardonic central chapters he deals with what he calls `patterns of recurrent violence' in 18th- century society. 'Those wishing to stick to the narrative can skip this section,' he says. If they do, I think they may miss the point of the book. For these chapters cleverly intersperse accounts of the licensed vio- lence of the elite (army discipline, the press gang, electoral corruption, the game laws, duelling) with the punishable violence of the lower orders (crime, food riots, indus- trial disputes). The point of this is evidently to show that in Georgian England violence more often than not proceeded from the top downwards. It was under the 'Whig Supremacy' that 31 statutes were passed imposing the death sentence for various offences, and the foundation laid for `Europe's most barbarous criminal code'. The property of the rich was secure. They did not need to plunder each other, because they plundered the state. So crime became what the philosopher Godwin could define as 'those offences which the wealthier part of the community has no `There's another piece of cutlery, isn't there?' temptation to commit'. Gilmour instances the case of Dr Dodd, a clergyman whose execution for forgery in 1777 excited enormous sympathy, while that of Joseph Harris, a 15-year-old who had stolen £1.8s and was hanged the same day, excited none. The Bloody Code, he argues, origi- nated because the rich allowed the lawyers a free hand in elaborating its penalties, and it survived as long as it did because its vic- tims came overwhelmingly from among the poor.
If the propertied classes enforced their rule with such callous savagery, why did their inferiors submit so patiently? As he comes, through some splendid narrative chapters, to the last two decades of the century, Gilmour seems reluctant to draw the conclusion he has led his readers to expect, that the British state did indeed come very near to a revolution like the French. He has a fine account of the Gor- don Riots (`much the biggest civil tumult since the Monmouth Rebellion') and he describes very graphically the fleet mutinies of 1797, but the treatment of the underly- ing causes of the failure of revolution is much less convincing, and the narrative flags. Perhaps this is because the contrasts in the earlier part of the book are too sharply drawn. When it comes to a decade of unprecedented social and political unheaval, he seems to be inhibited by his earlier assertions. By his own showing he cannot say revolution was defeated by a widespread respect for law and constitu- tional process. He cannot say it was defused by rising prosperity because he loathes the laws of the market which are supposed to account for it, and besides, lit- tle of that prosperity ever reached the poor. He thinks 'British opinion is seldom excited by abstract argument', so he cannot use Professor Christie's claim that the radi- cals lost the ideological debate. On the other hand, he has too much respect for order to idealise revolution or sentimen- talise the mob, which he thinks was throughout the century a conservative force. So in the end it is his respect for mil- itary force which marks him out from the radical historians he uses so much. Britain escaped revolution because its government acted in time to placate its soldiers and sailors, and they went back to their duty. This is a fine book, which attempts a big- ger theme than most academic works in the field. Its scholarship is unobtrusive. Its dry style and sharp wit do not distort the story it tells. It takes no sides in the often bitter controversies between professional histori- ans, condensing its references, with a fine disregard for their political provenance, and putting them all at the end. But just because it is not an academic's book, one can say that, for a work covering Britain's not inglorious history in the 18th century, it is bleakly devoid of optimism.
William Thomas is a history tutor at Christ Church, Oxford.
Previous page
