Penguin History of the United States of America (15 page)

Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!

Britons never never never shall be slaves!

You may, therefore, boldly defy the best-read historian to assign a single reign in all our annals when these great ends of government were more religiously intended or more generally obtained than under his present Majesty’s auspicious, mild, and steady administration: nay, you may boldly challenge the most discontented and querulous of all his subjects to point out that nation under Heaven where he will venture to assert, that he could live so happily, in all respects, as he does in England.

Thus an anonymous admirer of the constitution in 1748. His views are representative. Yet the Hanoverian -perhapsone ought to say the Walpolean – political system was, as has been said, the solution to the problems of Stuart England. To deal with the problems of Georgian Britain it would have had to be flexible and adaptable. Unhappily it was dangerously rigid.

For one thing, it was deeply aristocratic and oligarchical. On the eve of the great changes that collectively are known as the Industrial Revolution, landed wealth was still the supreme source of power and prestige. The gentlemen of England were wiser than the French
noblesse:
less insolent, spendthrift, exclusive, military, Court-oriented, selfish and crass. But (or perhaps therefore) they had an even firmer grip on their country. The great families of the Whig aristocracy had palpably gained most from the Glorious Revolution. Since 1689 the British political system had reflected their influence, their acres, their rent-rolls; but the lesser gentry, the squirearchy, secure in their manor-houses and their justiceships of the peace, were quite as deeply committed to the system as the grandees. Their lesser status only made them less intelligent, for it kept them mostly in the countryside with none but dogs, horses and huntsmen for company. In everything,
individually and collectively, they showed the effect of narrow horizons. Shooting, hare-coursing, fox-hunting and port were their pleasures; church-going was their religion; farming and gamekeeping their only business. Snobbish by vocation, for they were compelled to cherish the values of blood, land and cash which kept them at the top of the heap, they were also as besottedly insular as any of their most ignorant inferiors. In politics, whether in Parliament or out of it, they were deeply conservative; reluctant to pay, or to vote, taxes, though conscientiously doing so when obliged by law; contemptuous of merchants and of fortunes won in trade (unless lucky marriages brought such fortunes their way); loyal to the King, the Protestant religion and old customs; more reluctant than any duke or businessman to contemplate radical change, except perhaps for the enclosure of the common fields.

As to the Whig grandees, they had wealth, worldliness and intelligence enough to be rakes or reformers if they chose without much risk. Their basic conservatism did not become conspicuous until they were frightened by the French Revolution. They were as reluctant as the squires to contemplate the loss of power, or any alteration in the scheme of things which had given them ascendancy. But their position was complicated by this very instinct for power. According to the Whig tradition, they had wrested authority from the Stuart kings to exercise it themselves, in the name of Protestantism and the landed gentry; this left them with a residual suspicion of the Crown, no matter who wore it. All went fairly well while George I and George II let themselves be guided by the oligarchs; but the emergence of the active, opinionated George III soon revived the divisions and tensions within the oligarchy itself that had marked the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. A vigorous king made a vigorous opposition likely: it only needed an issue, which the times swiftly provided. Then, as long before, the role of the monarchical executive again became a leading question of British politics.

The tradition of such a full-bloodedly aristocratic society was bound to be that office was primarily a form of property, a source of income. No higher end could be imagined for the public service than that of providing for the dependants of the gentlemen and peers of Britain, men whose position entitled them to insist on decent provision, out of the national purse, for their younger brothers and other poor friends and relations. Hence the power wielded by the King, or his trusted Minister (a Walpole, a Pelham), through the medium of deaneries, bishoprics, clerkships, commissions in the army, colonial governorships, etc. – the whole vast machine of patronage. Even this was only part of the social system that it symbolized; for example, the municipal government of England had been falling into the hands of little local oligarchies since before the Civil War. But it was the part that mattered, for politics largely consisted of squabblings over the allocation of the patronage plums, and it was the part through which the Empire was governed. Inevitably we must ask, how efficient was it?

No simple answer can be given. Clearly, a system which could bring the British, in war and peace, to the pinnacle they had attained by the end of the Seven Years War was both vigorous and efficient, if only by the skin of its teeth. But it had conspicuous failings, for all that.

In the first place, the patronage machine, skilfully used, gave whoever commanded it an almost unbreakable hold on the politicians. The House of Commons could and did rebel from time to time, bringing down such long-dominant Ministers as Walpole and Lord North; but it did not do so often, and seldom or never succeeded in forcing an unwanted Prime Minister on the King, at any rate for very long. Throughout the Georgian age no ministry ever lost a general election. So it was dangerously possible for a government to persist in ruinous policies long after public opinion would have sanctioned their abandonment, and still longer after their unwisdom should have been clear to Ministers – or to the King.

Secondly, a system so riddled with jobbery, so studded with sinecures – a government service which had as so prominent an object the protection of politicians’ clients, or of retired politicians themselves,
⁵
was not very capable of putting the right man in the right place. This affected offices high and low. An exceptional man at the head of affairs, like the elder Pitt (1708–78), might know how to find the right person (say, General Wolfe) for the right job (the conquest of Canada); nevertheless there was all too much likelihood that an emergency would find a man of only passable competence in the place of urgency. More important, the everyday level of knowledge and capability in the middle and lower ranks of the public service was adversely affected. We need not take too seriously the case of the member of the Board of Trade who thought that Virginia was an island; but his like proliferated, and made it difficult to conceive and carry out wise policies. Surveying the Age of Walpole and the Age of Chatham,
⁶
we may think that the wonder was that the imperial and domestic administration was so well conducted; but its deficiencies were real, and were soon to emerge as fatally important.

Third, and last, we must note the most insidious, and perhaps the worst, evil of the system, which was that everyone – King’s friends, civil servants and Whig reformers alike – had a stake in it. Boards, committees and incompetents might proliferate to the general confusion. Everyone was conditioned, almost unconsciously, to avoid the thought of fundamental alteration. Some politicians’ actions might carry them and their countrymen
long leagues towards radical change: thus the younger Pitt greatly enlarged the scope and effectiveness of Edmund Burke’s ‘economical reform’, transmuting what had started as a mere attempt to curb royal patronage into a true modernization of English government. But the politicians’ vision remained bounded by horizons beyond which not even the Pitts, Burke or Charles Fox could look. This made them curiously helpless when a crisis arose which posed fundamental challenges to the old order. There is no sure evidence that even Chatham, in office and in health, could have settled the American question peaceably, to the enduring satisfaction of both sides. His assumptions were too much those of George III.

In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that the attitude of the British to the Empire which they had acquired was not very enlightened. Distinctions must be made. Some Britons still regarded the New World as potentially a most lucrative investment; others still hoped to find a better life by going there; others, especially in the political class, saw the Empire, east and west, as both a burden and a glory. But it seems safe to say that on the whole a profound indifference to, almost an unawareness of, the colonies’ existence was the commonest stance, even during the excitements of the Seven Years War. The colonists could thus count among their blessings a complete security against interference from British public opinion. The ending of this security was to make a great difference for the worse. The waking of the American Revolution in the Stamp Act crisis awoke the slumbering English too, impelling them to ask themselves what they thought of the colonies. They replied, as men always do in such cases, with a torrent of cliché, on this occasion about the Mother Country. They took great pride and pleasure, they decided, in owning an empire (provided it cost them nothing), and their tone (caught from their betters, the politicians) became highly patronizing. They could make nothing of the American view that the colonists owed allegiance, not to their British fellow-subjects, but to George III as their common King. As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Every man in England seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and talks of
our subjects in the Colonies.’
It was shallow, foolish and harmless – until the explosion of 1774, when the North ministry was able to fan this feeling into a flame of support for its severe American measures, and thus sweep aside all opposition in its drive to disaster.

But the great emergency was far below the horizon in 1750. In that year the Empire was still very much what it had always been, with nothing worse to perplex it than the perennial problems of the French, the Spanish and the Indians, and organized according to the set of economic and political principles commonly known as mercantilism.

The term is convenient, but treacherous. It was never a coherent, universally practised creed, and to present it as an obsolete economic theory, or, contrariwise, as a forerunner of the economic policies of modern nation-states, is to over-simplify. The word itself is nineteenth-century; Adam
Smith, in
The Wealth of Nations
(published in 1776), was the first commentator to identify the thing – he called it ‘the mercantile system’. Different countries adopted different varieties of it at different times. Generalizations about mercantilism are therefore certain to be unsound, and in what follows I confine myself to the British variant. Still, there was nothing unique about the English system, except the size of its success. Identifiably mercantilist doctrines were widely popular for many centuries, and at some time or other were adopted as government policy by every important state in Western Europe. In fact mercantilism was one of the most universal expressions of the old order of the West. Its rise and decline corresponded closely to the rise and decline of that order. It was scarcely coincidental that 1776 sawthe emergence not only of Adam Smith, the critic of mercantilism, but also of Jeremy Bentham, the critic of Blackstone, and Thomas Jefferson, the critic of the old politics. A moment of general crisis had arrived.

Yet the British mercantile system, if judged by its own tenets, was one of the old order’s most solid successes. In the mid-eighteenth century its achievements were clear for all to see. The Empire was the chief of them, for it encompassed, explained and made possible all the others.

Such a monumental structure could never have been erected by a purely economic theory. Mercantilism was a political as well as an economic doctrine. As one of its supporters asked, ‘Can a nation be safe without strength and is power to be compassed and secured but by riches? And can a country become rich anyway but by the help of a well-managed and extended traffic?’ Mercantilism reflected the realities of a world in which inter-state competition in all fields was deadly and incessant. It also intensified that competition: a large part of a mercantilist ruler’s purpose was to deny to his rivals, and secure to himself, as big a piece as possible of what was thought to be a largely static quantity: the wealth of the world. It was in part a system of defensive commercial regulation; but was also the continuing, institutionalized expression of the ambitious, aggressive, outward-looking spirit which had inspired the first American settlements, the first quest for the world’s trade. Other considerations had played a part in colonization, but commercial greed had never been lacking, and as greed was rewarded by success, the ever-wealthier merchants of an ever-wealthier England rose in influence. Their views began to colour those of statesmen and theorists. The great Earl of Clarendon (1609–74) urged the need for a strong navy, as encouraged by the Navigation Acts, to check the ‘immoderate desire’ of other states ‘to engross the whole traffic of the universe’. When the Second Dutch War broke out in 1664, General Monck commented on its origins, ‘What matters this or that reason. What we want is more of the trade the Dutch now have.’ Fifty years later John Withers, author of
The Dutch Better Friends Than the French
, remarked, ‘If those Froglands were once crushed the trade of the world would be our own.’ Such men demanded wars, plantations and Acts of Parliament to help on the quest for riches; the rulers of England, looking to the military strength,
prosperity and quiet of the realm, were happy to co-operate; and so mercantilism was born, to put its stamp indelibly on the Atlantic Empire, both in its creation and government.

The earliest theorists were not especially interested, for the most part, in colonies: they hoped to extinguish Dutch competition (for a time their chief problem) by other means. But by the late seventeenth century the English overseas possessions had come to play an essential part in mercantilist thought. Economic self-sufficiency was, as always, the aim, but now it was conceived on an imperial, not merely national scale. All members of the Empire – colonies and mother country – would contribute to the prosperity of all; outside supply, of skills or produce, would not be needed. From this basis the trade of the world would be captured, and thus the wealth and glory of England would be splendidly augmented. The colonies were merely an expedient. Not for a moment were they supposed to have any purposes of their own. They existed for the sake of the mother country which had founded and nourished and now protected them. There was no room for sentiment or imagination in the great maritime and commercial struggle. The colonists’ interests could never be allowed to take precedence over England’s. According to a commentator in 1696, ‘The same respect is due from them as from a tenant to his landlord.’ Their role was simply to provide, cheaply, those things – chiefly crops such as sugar, rice and tobacco – which the English could not or would not grow at home. They would thus emancipate England from dependence on foreigners. They would furnish the English merchant with a market which he could profitably monopolize, once effective laws had been passed excluding foreign competitors; and such laws, the celebrated Navigation Acts, were passed between 1651 and 1696.