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History

18th-century Britain, 1714–1815

The state of Britain in 1714

When Georg Ludwig, elector of Hanover, became king of Great Britain on Aug. 1, 1714, the country was in some respects bitterly divided. Fundamentally, however, it was prosperous, cohesive, and already a leading European and imperial power. Abroad, Britain's involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). It had acquired new colonies in Gibraltar, Minorca, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson's Bay, as well as trading concessions in the Spanish New World. By contrast, Britain's rivals, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, were left weakened or war-weary by the conflict. It took France a decade to recover, and Spain and Holland were unable to reverse their military and economic decline. As a result Britain was able to remain aloof from war on the Continent for a quarter of a century after the Hanoverian succession, and this protracted peace was to be crucial to the new dynasty's survival and success.

War had also strengthened the British state at home. The need to raise men and money had increased the size and scope of the executive as well as the power and prestige of the House of Commons. Taxation had accounted for 70 percent of Britain's wartime expenditure (£93,644,560 between 1702 and 1713), so the Commons' control over taxation became a powerful guarantee of its continuing importance.

Britain's ability to pay for war on this scale demonstrated the extent of its wealth. Agriculture was still the bedrock of the economy, but trade was increasing, and more men and women were employed in industry in Britain than in any other European nation. Wealth, however, was unequally distributed, with almost a third of the national income belonging to only 5 percent of the population. But British society was not polarized simply between the rich and the poor; according to writer Daniel Defoe there were seven different and more subtle categories:

1. The great, who live profusely.
2. The rich, who live plentifully.
3. The middle sort, who live well.
4. The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want.
5. The country people, farmers etc., who fare indifferently.
6. The poor, who fare hard.
7. The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.

From 1700 to the 1740s Britain's population remained stable at about seven million, and agricultural production increased. So, although men and women from Defoe's 6th and 7th categories could still die of hunger and hunger-related diseases, in most regions of Britain there was usually enough basic food to go around. This was crucial to social stability and to popular acquiescence in the new Hanoverian regime.

But early 18th-century Britain also had its weaknesses. Its Celtic fringe—Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—had been barely assimilated. The vast majority of Welsh men and women could neither speak nor understand the English language. Most Irish men and women spoke Gaelic and belonged to the Roman Catholic church, in contrast with the population of the British mainland, which was staunchly Protestant. Scotland, which had only been united to England and Wales in 1707, still retained its traditional educational, religious, legal, and cultural practices. These internal divisions were made more dangerous by the existence of rival claimants to the British throne. James II, who had been expelled in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, died 13 years later, but his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, pressed his family's claims from his exile in France. His Catholicism and Scottish ancestry ensured him wide support in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands; his cause also commanded sympathy among sections of the Welsh and English gentry and, arguably, among the masses.

Controversy over the succession sharpened partisan infighting between the Whig and Tory parties. About 50 Tory MPs (less than a seventh of the total number) may have been covert Jacobites in 1714. More generally, Tories differed from Whigs over religious issues and foreign policy. They were more anxious to preserve the privileges of the Anglican church and more hostile to military involvement in continental Europe than Whig politicians were inclined to be. These attitudes made the Tories vulnerable in 1714. The new king was a Lutheran by upbringing and wanted to establish wider religious toleration in his new kingdom. As a German he was deeply interested in European affairs. Consequently he regarded the Tory party as insular in its outlook as well as suspect in its allegiance.

Britain from 1715 to 1742

The supremacy of the Whigs

Even before he arrived in Britain, George I had decided to exclude the two leading Tory ministers, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. In their place he appointed two Whig politicians, Charles, Viscount Townshend, and James, Viscount Stanhope, as secretaries of state. Townshend's brother-in-law, Robert Walpole, became paymaster general. Walpole, who came from a minor Norfolk gentry family, was an extremely able politician, shrewd, greedy, and undeviatingly Whig. He encouraged the new king's partisan bias, turning it unremittingly to his advantage. A general election was held in February 1715, and, due in part to royal influence, the Whigs won 341 seats to the Tories' 217. In December the Old Pretender landed in Scotland, provoking an armed rebellion that was quickly suppressed. The proved involvement of a small number of Tory landowners led to Tories being purged not only from state office but also from the higher ranks of the army and navy, the diplomatic service, and the judicial system. To make their capture of the state even more secure, the Whigs passed the Septennial Act in 1716. It allowed general elections to occur at seven-year intervals instead of every three years, as mandated by the Triennial Act of 1694. The intention was to tame the electorate, which during Anne's reign had shown itself to be volatile and far more inclined to vote Tory than Whig.

Having defeated their Tory opponents, the Whig leaders began to quarrel among themselves. In 1717 Walpole and Townshend left office and went into open opposition. Stanhope stayed on, with Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, now serving as secretary of state. At the same time the heir apparent to the throne, George, Prince of Wales, quarreled with his father and began to flirt with Opposition groups in Parliament. These events set the pattern for future political conflicts. From then on until the 1750s the Opposition in Parliament would be a hybrid group of Whig and Tory sympathizers. And from then on until the early 19th century Oppositions in Parliament would enjoy sporadic support from successive princes of Wales. In 1717 the rebel Whigs were a serious threat in large part because Walpole was such a skillful House-of-Commons politician. As peers, Sunderland and Stanhope were confined to the House of Lords and lacked spokesmen in the Commons who could match Walpole's ruthlessness and talent. He showed his power by mobilizing a majority of MPs against the Peerage Bill in 1719. Had this legislation passed, it would have limited the king's prerogative to create new peers, thereby cementing the Whig administration's majority in the House of Lords. To prevent further blows of this kind, the Whig elite ended its schism in April 1720. The royal family temporarily buried its differences at the same time.

The restoration of unity was just as well, as 1720 saw the bursting of what became known as the South Sea Bubble. The South Sea Company had been founded in 1711 as a trading and finance company. In 1719 its directors offered to take over a large portion of the national debt previously managed by the Bank of England. The Whig administration supported this takeover, and in return the company made gifts (in effect, bribes) of its new stock to influential Whig politicians, including Stanhope and Sunderland, and to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal. In 1720 investing in the South Sea Company became a mania among those who could afford it and some who could not; South Sea stock was at 120 in January and rose to 1,000 by August. But in September the inevitable crash came. Many landed and mercantile families were ruined, and there was a nationwide shortage of specie. Parliament demanded an inquiry, thus raising the possibility that members of the government and the royal family would be openly implicated in financial scandal. This disaster proved to be Walpole's opportunity, and he did not waste it. He used his influence in the Commons to blunt the parliamentary inquiry and managed gradually to restore financial confidence. The strain of the investigation killed Stanhope, and Sunderland too died in 1722. Walpole duly became first lord of the treasury and chancellor of exchequer, while Townshend returned to his post as secretary of state.

Walpole's position as the king's favourite minister was finally assured when he exposed the Atterbury plot. Francis Atterbury was bishop of Rochester. Always a Tory and High Churchman, he drifted after the Hanoverian succession into Jacobite intrigue. In 1721–22 he and a small group of conspirators plotted an armed invasion of Britain on behalf of the Old Pretender. The plot was uncovered by the secret service, which was more efficient in this period than it was until World War II. Atterbury was tried for treason by Parliament and sent into exile. This coup, one politician aptly wrote at the time, was the “most fortunate and greatest circumstance of Mr Walpole's life. It fixed him with the King, and united for a time the whole body of Whigs to him, and gave him the universal credit of an able and vigilant Minister.”

Robert Walpole

Walpole has often been referred to as Britain's first prime minister, but historically this is incorrect. The title had in fact been applied to certain ministers in Anne's reign and was commonly used as a slur or simply as a synonym for first minister. During Walpole's period of dominance it was certainly used more frequently, but it did not become an official title until the early 20th century. Some historians have also claimed that Walpole was the architect of political stability in Britain, but this interpretation needs to be qualified. There is no doubt that from 1722 to his resignation in 1742 Walpole stabilized political power in himself and a section of the Whig party. Nor can there be any doubt that his foreign and economic policies helped the Hanoverian dynasty to become securely entrenched in Britain. But it should not be forgotten that Walpole inherited a nation that was already wealthy and at peace. He built on foundations that were already very strong. And, although he was to dominate political life for 20 years, he never succeeded in stamping out political, religious, and cultural opposition entirely, nor did he expect to do so.

Opposition to Walpole in Parliament began to develop as early as 1725. When William Pulteney, an ambitious and talented politician, was dismissed from state office, he and 17 other Whig MPs aligned themselves with the 150 Tory MPs remaining in the House of Commons. These dissidents (who called themselves Patriot Whigs) grew in number until, by the mid-1730s, more than 100 Whig MPs were collaborating with the Tories against Walpole's nominally Whig administration. Some were motivated primarily by disappointed ambition. But many Whigs and Tories genuinely believed that Walpole had arrogated too much power to himself and that he was corrupt and an enemy to liberty. These accusations were expressed not just among politicians in London but also in the growing number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain at large. In 1726 Pulteney and the one-time Tory minister Lord Bolingbroke founded their own journal, The Craftsman (the implication of the title being that Walpole governed by craft alone). It was widely read among the political classes, not least because many of the most gifted writers working in London had been drawn into the Opposition camp. Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and, for a time, Henry Fielding all wrote against Walpole. So did John Gay, whose triumphantly successful The Beggar's Opera (1728) was a satire on ministerial corruption.

But, despite its flamboyance and innovative tactics, the Opposition for a long time lacked high-level support. Frequent disagreements occurred between its Patriot Whig and Tory sectors. These weaknesses helped Walpole to keep the Opposition at bay until 1742. But there were other reasons for his prolonged stay in power: he retained the support of the crown, resisted military involvement in Europe, pursued a moderate religious policy, and adopted a skillful economic policy. Moreover, in the general elections of 1727 and 1734 he was able to manipulate the electoral system to maintain himself in power.

George II and Walpole

George I died in June 1727 and was buried in Hanover. He was succeeded by his eldest son, who became George II. Initially the new king planned to dismiss Walpole and appoint his personal favourite, Spencer Compton, in his place. Closer familiarity with Walpole's gifts, however, dissuaded him from taking this step, as did his formidable wife, Queen Caroline, who remained an important ally of the minister until her death in 1737. Walpole cemented his advantage by securing the king a Civil List (money allowance) from Parliament of £800,000, a considerably larger sum than previous monarchs had been able to enjoy. Royal favour, in turn, shored up Walpole's parliamentary majority. Because the monarch appointed and promoted peers, he had massive influence in the House of Lords. In addition, he appointed the 26 bishops of the Church of England, who also possessed seats in the House of Lords. He alone could promote men to high office in the army, navy, diplomatic service, and bureaucracy. Consequently, MPs who held such offices (the so-called placemen), and those who wanted to hold them in the future, were likely to support Walpole as the king's minister out of self-interest, if for no other reason. Walpole, however, could never take royal support for granted. George II was an irritable but by no means an insignificant figure who retained great influence in terms of patronage, military affairs, and foreign policy. He demanded respect from his minister and had to be carefully managed.

Foreign policy

Once the Hanoverian succession had taken place, Whig ministers became as eager to remain at peace with France as the Tories had been. Walpole certainly adhered to this view, and for good reasons. Although Britain now possessed the world's most powerful navy, it could not match France in land forces. War with France, moreover, was likely to lead to an invasion of Hanover, which was naturally unwelcome to George I and his successor. It would also give the Old Pretender the prospect of French military aid to launch an invasion against Britain itself. In 1717 Stanhope negotiated a Triple Alliance with the French and the Dutch. This treaty was maintained by Walpole and Townshend throughout the 1720s. By 1730, however, it was attracting considerable criticism from the Opposition, and in the Second Treaty of Vienna, signed in March 1731, Walpole jettisoned the Anglo-French alliance in favour of an alliance with Austria. But whether forming an alliance with the French or the Austrians, Walpole always considered it his primary aim to keep Britain out of war in continental Europe. In 1733 Austria, Saxony, and Russia went to war against France, Spain, and Sardinia in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–38). The Austrians asked for British aid under the terms of the Treaty of Vienna, but Walpole refused to give it. By keeping out of European entanglements for so long, Walpole appeased some of the traditionally insular Tory MPs. He also kept direct taxation low, which pleased many landed families. The land tax was cut to two shillings in the pound (10 percent) in 1730 and to one shilling in the pound two years later.

Religious policy

Walpole's religious policy was also designed to foster social and political quiescence. Traditionally the Whig party had supported wider concessions to the Protestant dissenters (Protestants who believed in the doctrine of the Trinity but who refused to join in the worship of the state church, the Church of England). They had been given freedom of worship under the Toleration Act of 1689 but were barred from full civil rights and access to university education in England. In 1719 the Whigs had repealed two pieces of Tory legislation aimed against dissent, the Schism and the Occasional Conformity acts. These concessions ensured that Protestant dissenters would be able to establish their own educational academies and hold public office in the localities, if not in the state.

There was always a danger, however, that too many concessions to Protestant dissent would alienate the Church of England, which enjoyed wide support in England and Wales. There were 5,000 parishes in these two countries, each containing at least one church served by a vicar (minister) or a curate (his deputy). For much of the 18th century these Anglican churches provided the only large, covered meeting places available outside of towns. They served as sources of spiritual comfort and also as centres for village social life. At religious services vicars would not only preach the word of God but also explain to congregations important national developments: wars, victories, and royal deaths and births. Thus churches often supplied the poor, the illiterate, and particularly women with the only political information available to them. Weakening the Church of England therefore struck Walpole as unwise, for at least two reasons. Its ministers provided a vital service to the state by communicating political instruction to the people. The church, moreover, commanded massive popular loyalty, and assaults on its position would arouse nationwide discontent. Walpole therefore determined to reach an accommodation with the church, and in 1723 he came to an agreement with Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. Gibson was to ensure that only clergymen sympathetic to the Whig administration were appointed to influential positions in the Church of England. In return, Walpole undertook that no further extensive concessions would be made to Protestant dissenters. This arrangement continued until 1736.

Economic policies

Finally, Walpole's long tenure of power was assisted by national prosperity. The gross national product rose from £57.5 million in 1720 to £64.1 million in 1740, an increase of 11.5 percent. Walpole encouraged trade by abolishing some customs duties, but his main economic concerns were to reduce interest payments on the national debt and to foster agriculture by switching taxation from land to consumption. He succeeded in reducing interest payments on the debt by 26 percent during his time in office, but his efforts to reduce the land tax in favour of more excises almost led to political disaster. In 1732 he revived a duty on salt, which enabled him to cut the land tax to one shilling in the pound. In 1733 he proposed to levy excise taxes on the sale of wine and tobacco, but the Opposition in Parliament launched a ferocious and successful campaign against these proposals. It claimed that excises weighed unfairly on the poor, whereas the land tax was mainly paid by the prosperous. It claimed, too, that excise collectors, and there were more than 6,000 of them employed by the state by this time, intruded into citizens' private affairs and were a danger to British liberties. This crisis led to nationwide riots and demonstrations, and Walpole's House-of-Commons majority seemed in jeopardy. In April 1733 he decided to retreat. He continued, however, until 1740 to keep the land tax at a low rate, thereby winning important support from the nation's dominant landed class.

The electoral system

The fiasco over the excise might have toppled Walpole, since a general election was scheduled for 1734. In fact, however, his administration retained a comfortable majority in the House of Commons. One reason for this was that Britain's electoral system at this time did not adequately reflect the state of public opinion. Until the Reform Act of 1832 England returned 489 MPs. Eighty of these were elected by the 40 county constituencies; 196 smaller constituencies called boroughs returned two MPs each, and two other boroughs, including London, the capital city, returned four MPs each. Oxford and Cambridge universities were also allowed four representatives in Parliament. Wales returned only 24 members of Parliament and Scotland 45. Their limited representation indicated the extent to which these countries were subordinated to England in the British political system at this time.

The system was not even remotely democratic. Power in this society was intimately and inextricably connected with the possession of property, particularly landed property. To be eligible for election as an MP, a man had to possess land worth £600 per annum if he was representing a county constituency and worth £300 per annum in the case of a borough constituency. To vote, adult males had to possess some kind of residential property or, in certain borough constituencies, be registered as freemen. Women were not given the vote until 1918.

In all, some 350,000 Britons may have been able to vote in the 1720s, which was roughly one in four of the adult male population. There was no secret ballot, and voting took place in public. Consequently, many voters were liable to be influenced or coerced by their landlords or employers or bribed by the candidates themselves. Bribery was particularly widespread and effective in the smaller boroughs where there were often fewer than 100 voters and sometimes fewer than 50. These constituencies were called rotten or pocket boroughs. In the borough of Malmesbury, for example, in the English county of Wiltshire, there were only 13 voters, few of whom voted strictly in accordance with their own conscience or opinions: “It was no odds to them who they voted for,” one inhabitant declared, “it was as master pleased.” Large electorates could be found, however, in some areas. The northern English county constituency of Yorkshire had 15,000 voters in 1741. In Bristol, a major port on the western coast of England, 5,000 men had the vote—approximately one-third of the city's adult male population. In these larger constituencies public opinion could make itself felt at election time. The problem for the Opposition in 1734 was that there were few such populous, open constituencies but very many rotten borough seats such as Malmesbury. Since government candidates usually had more to bribe voters with in the way of money and favours, Walpole was able to win the majority of these boroughs and therefore retain his majority in the House of Commons despite his unpopularity after the excise crisis.

Walpole's loss of power

Walpole's luck and political grasp only began to fail in 1737. In that year Queen Caroline, one of his most important allies, died. At this time, too, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, George II's eldest son and heir apparent, followed Hanoverian family tradition; he quarreled with his father and aligned himself with the Opposition. This damaged Walpole's position in two ways. The king, born in 1683, was now in his 50s, which was elderly by the standards of the time. Many young ambitious MPs, such as William Pitt, were inclined to join Prince Frederick, because they saw in him the political future. Moreover, as Prince of Wales, Frederick owned a large part of the county of Cornwall and consequently controlled numerous rotten boroughs. In the 1734 election the Cornish constituencies had returned 32 pro-government MPs to Parliament; but at the next general election in 1741, when Prince Frederick used his electoral influence against Walpole, only 17 pro-government candidates were returned by this county. Walpole lost another important ally to the opposition, John, Duke of Argyll. Argyll was a member of the Cabinet, the most important Whig landowner in Scotland, and head of Clan Campbell. In the 1734 election his influence in Scotland helped to ensure that 34 of the country's 45 elected MPs were pro-government. But by the 1741 election he had defected to the Opposition, and the electoral repercussions were serious. On this occasion Scottish constituencies only elected 17 pro-government MPs.

But Walpole's main enemies were time and war. By 1737 he was in his 60s and had dominated politics for 15 years. Some ambitious Whigs resented his prolonged monopoly on power; others anticipated his retirement or death and judged it prudent to distance themselves from his administration. And some of Walpole's policies were now widely viewed as dubious, even anachronistic. Whereas he wanted to keep Britain out of war, many government and Opposition MPs, and even some members of Walpole's own Cabinet, favoured going to war with Spain to gain colonial and commercial objectives. Such a war policy was strongly backed by commercial opinion in London and in the nation's main trading cities.

It was a sign of Walpole's declining powers that he was unable to prevent the drift into war in 1739. The War of Jenkins' Ear (so called after an alleged Spanish atrocity against a British merchant navy officer, Captain Robert Jenkins) was initially successful. Admiral Edward Vernon became a popular and Opposition hero when he captured the Spanish settlement of Portobelo (in what is now Panama) in November 1739. But his victory was followed by several defeats, and Britain soon became embroiled in a wider European conflict, the War of the Austrian Succession. Walpole survived the general election of 1741, but with a greatly reduced majority. His political doom was sealed in the fall of that year when the Tory and Whig sectors of the Opposition managed finally to agree on a strategy to defeat him. Walpole eventually resigned from his offices in early 1742. He still retained the king's favour, and, although sections of the Opposition wanted to impeach him for corruption, he was given a peerage, entered the House of Lords as Earl of Orford, and died in his bed in 1745. Nonetheless, the fact that he had to resign despite George II's continuing support indicated an important development in the British political system. Although monarchs retained the rights to choose their own ministers, they could no longer retain a chief minister who was unable to command a majority of votes in the House of Commons. If they wanted to remain in office, chief ministers now needed to possess parliamentary as well as royal support.

Britain from 1742 to 1754

Political events after Walpole's resignation demonstrated once again the artificiality and inner tensions of the Opposition. Its Tory sector (some 140 MPs strong) had expected that a new administration would be formed in which some of their leaders would be given state office. They hoped that the proscription of their party, implemented after 1714, would be reversed and that various changes in domestic and foreign policy would be made. But now that Walpole was out of the picture many of their Patriot Whig allies wanted nothing more to do with Tories or Tory measures. The leading Patriot Whig, William Pulteney, accepted a peerage and became Earl of Bath. Six other Patriot Whigs accepted government office, including John, Baron Carteret (later Earl of Granville), who became the new secretary of state. Spencer Compton, now Earl of Wilmington, became the new first lord of the treasury and nominal head of the government. Fourteen former members of Walpole's administration retained their posts, including Henry Pelham and his older brother, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle. The Tories, as well as many people outside Parliament, had expected the fall of Walpole to result in a revolution in government and society, but this did not occur. Instead, all that had happened was a reshuffling of state employment among patrician Whigs, which caused widespread disillusionment and anger. It was with the Patriot Whigs in mind that Samuel Johnson, a staunch Tory, was later to describe patriotism in his Dictionary as the last resort of the scoundrel.

When Wilmington died in 1743, Carteret took over as head of the administration. He was a clever and subtle man, able to speak many European languages, and fascinated by foreign affairs. These qualities naturally endeared him to the king. His status as a royal favourite was confirmed when he accompanied George on a military expedition to Germany in defense of the electorate of Hanover. In June George commanded his British and Hanoverian troops at the Battle of Dettingen (the last battle in which a British monarch commanded), defeating the opposing French forces. But the victory was not followed up and aroused little patriotic enthusiasm in Britain. Instead, accusations that the king and Carteret were sacrificing British interests to Hanoverian priorities were openly expressed in Parliament and in the press. The Pelham brothers took advantage of this discontent (and Carteret's absence) to undermine his political position. In November 1744 he was forced to resign, though during the next 18 months George II continued to consult with him privately on political business. These intrigues infuriated Henry Pelham, who was now first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer, and his brother Newcastle, who was secretary of state.

The Jacobite rebellion

Britain's involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession, Tory and popular anger at the political deals that followed Walpole's resignation, and the infighting among the Whig elite were the background to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 (the Forty-five). Since Britain was now at odds with France, the latter power was willing to sponsor an invasion on behalf of the Stuart dynasty. It hoped that such an invasion would win support from the masses and from the Tory sector of the landed class. Although a handful of Tory conspirators encouraged these hopes, the degree of their commitment is open to question. A large-scale French naval invasion of Britain in early 1744 failed in part because these men would not commit themselves to action. In July 1745 the Old Pretender's eldest son, Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender), landed in Scotland without substantial French aid. In September he and some 2,500 Scottish supporters defeated a British force of the same size at the Battle of Prestonpans. In December, with an army of 5,000 men, he marched into England and got as far south as the town of Derby, some 150 miles from London.

Charles's initial success owed much to the ineptitude, the unconcern even, of Britain's rulers. One problem was that the standing army was too small, consisting of some 62,000 men. Because of Britain's involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession, the bulk of this force was in Flanders and Germany. Only 4,000 men had been left to defend Scotland, and most of them were raw recruits. Moreover, hampered by internal divisions, the administration was slow to respond. When the Young Pretender landed, the Pelhams were anxious but Carteret, now Earl of Granville, was not. Nor, at the beginning, was George II, who was actually in Hanover when his rival for the throne landed. As a result of these squabbles and misunderstandings, Parliament did not assemble until Oct. 17, 1745. Because by law only Parliament could authorize money to pay the militia (Britain's civil defense force), this delay seriously impeded early resistance to the Jacobite force. The city of Carlisle in the north of England surrendered to the rebels in November largely because its militia had received no pay from the government or from anyone else for two months.

Some historians have argued that the mass of Britain's population cared little which dynasty ruled them at this time and that the Young Pretender would have regained the kingdom for the Stuarts if only he had pressed on to London. Clearly, this thesis can never be proved one way or the other. The Jacobites, however, did not try to march on to London but retreated to Scotland. Nonetheless, it is probably significant that the Young Pretender attracted scarcely any English supporters on his march to Derby. Only in Manchester, which had a large Catholic population, did he gain recruits—some 200 men, mostly unemployed weavers. No Tory landowner or politician joined him, nor did any men of influence or wealth come out in his favour. By contrast, once the seriousness of the invasion was recognized, many individuals joined home-defense units or subscribed money against it. Between September and December 57 civilian loyal associations are known to have been founded in 38 different counties. Merchants and traders in the prosperous towns—Liverpool, Norwich, Exeter, Bristol, and most of all London—were particularly prominent in loyalist activity.

Although many Britons had become disillusioned by events after Walpole's fall, probably few were seriously tempted by the prospect of a Jacobite restoration. The Young Pretender, a Roman Catholic, was viewed as the pawn of France, Britain's enemy and prime commercial and imperial competitor. Traditionally the Catholic religion and French politics were associated with absolutist government, religious persecution, and assaults on liberty. These prejudices worked against the Young Pretender's appeal, as did prejudices against the Scottish Highlanders, the bulk of his armed supporters, who were regarded as terrifying barbarians by many of the English. The lack of mass English support for the Stuarts in 1745 dissuaded the French government from sending substantial military aid to the rebels. On April 16, 1746, the Duke of Cumberland (George II's second son) defeated the Jacobite army at Culloden in northern Scotland. This was the last major land battle to occur in Great Britain. The Young Pretender escaped to France and finally died in 1788, sodden with drink and disillusionment.

The main result of the Forty-five was the British government's decision to integrate Scotland, and particularly the Scottish Highlands, more fully into the rest of the kingdom. Despite the Act of Union of 1707, clan chieftains had retained considerable judicial and military powers over their followers. But these powers were destroyed by the Abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act of 1747. Other statutes required oaths of allegiance to the Hanoverian dynasty from the Episcopalian clergy, banned the wearing of kilts and tartans in an attempt to erode distinctive Highlands practices, and confiscated arms. The administration also confiscated the estates of Highlands chieftains who had rebelled and used the proceeds to encourage trade and agriculture in Scotland. Indeed, the gradual pacification of Scotland and its partial integration into a united Britain probably owed more to growing prosperity than to legal changes. By the mid-1750s Scotland's population was estimated at 1,265,380, and it continued to grow at a rapid rate until the 1830s. Linen production doubled between 1750 and 1775, and coal mining, iron smelting, and agricultural productivity also began to expand. Economic and demographic growth was particularly dramatic in towns such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Dundee. The Act of Union had made Britain the largest free-trade area in Europe, and, as more Scots came to profit from trading and manufacturing links with England, more had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The rule of the Pelhams

Defeating the rebellion also strengthened the position of the Pelhams. In February 1746, George II attempted to replace them with Granville but failed. Thereafter Henry Pelham and Newcastle insisted upon and received the king's full confidence. The attempted invasion widened once again the gulf between the Whig and Tory parties. The Whigs became for a time more united, and the Tories did badly in the general election of 1747, winning only 110 seats. The only serious opposition Pelham faced after that date came from the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Although Frederick had abandoned the Opposition in 1742, his impatience to succeed to the throne soon prompted him to drift back into political intrigue against his father and his father's ministers. He claimed to be motivated by some of Lord Bolingbroke's political ideas. In 1738, during Frederick's earlier phase of opposition, Bolingbroke had written The Idea of a Patriot King, arguing that a future ideal monarch could unify and purify the nation by seizing the initiative to abolish faction and ruling over an administration based on virtue rather than on party. Frederick's avowed commitment to a nonparty government attracted Tory as well as a few Whig MPs to his support in the late 1740s. But their schemes and hopes were dashed when Frederick died in 1751. His eldest son, George (the future George III), became heir to the throne, and serious opposition to Pelham effectively ceased. Debate in Parliament became so muted, one politician wrote, that a bird might have built its nest in the Speaker's wig and never be disturbed.

Both Pelham and Newcastle were overshadowed by their more famous predecessor Robert Walpole and by their charismatic successor, William Pitt the Elder. Like Walpole, both brothers regarded themselves as staunchly Whig though their ideology was by no means clear-cut. Like Walpole, they had little enthusiasm for British involvement in European wars. They helped to negotiate the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which ended the War of the Austrian Succession. Like Walpole, too, the Pelhams sought to reduce the national debt and to keep taxation on land low. But unlike Walpole, they avoided corruption; both lost rather than made money during their political careers. And Henry Pelham was more interested in domestic reform than Walpole had been.

Domestic reforms

The Gin Act of 1751 was designed to reduce consumption of raw spirits, regarded by contemporaries as one of the main causes of crime in London. In 1752 Britain's calendar was brought into conformity with that used in continental Europe, previously 11 days ahead. It was once believed that protests against this change—“give us back our 11 days,” crowds are supposed to have chanted—represented nothing more than parochial ignorance. In fact the adoption of the new calendar, though it ultimately benefited commerce and international relations, initially played havoc with monthly rental payments and wages in the short term. In 1753 the Marriage Act was passed to prevent secret marriages by unqualified clergymen. From then on, every bride and groom had to sign a marriage register or, if they were illiterate, make their mark upon it. This innovation has been of enormous value to historians, enabling them to establish how many Britons were able to write at this time and, by inference, how many could read.

British society by the mid-18th century

Joseph Massie's categories

From the Hanoverian succession to the mid-18th century the texture and quality of life in Britain changed considerably but by no means evenly. Change was far more pronounced in the towns than in the countryside and among the prosperous than among the poor. The latter category was still very large; in the late 1750s an economist named Joseph Massie estimated that the bottom 40 percent of the population had to survive on less than 14 percent of the nation's income. The rest of his calculations can be summarized as follows:

Massie's calculations were not exact since no official census was implemented in Britain until 1800. But his figures were probably broadly correct and are the best available for this period. It is noticeable that his top three categories had close connections with the land, still the bedrock of wealth, status, and power. The greatest landowners (Massie's 310 families) owned estates ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 acres. Many of them belonged to the peerage, that is, they were dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, or barons. Such hereditary titles, which could only be granted by the crown, carried with them the right to sit in the House of Lords. In the reigns of George I and George II there were some 170 of these peers. Almost all of them possessed fine houses in London as well as one or more mansions in the counties where their land lay. The Dukes of Marlborough (Winston Churchill's ancestors), for example, dominated large parts of Oxfordshire from their stately home of Blenheim (built 1705–30). The Earls of Carlisle in Cumberland built Castle Howard in the same period, spending £35,000 on the house and a further £24,000 on the gardens. Together with the greater gentry and the squires, listed in Massie's second and third categories, great landowners such as these owned considerably more than half of the cultivatable land in Britain.

Not all wealthy men were landowners. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and other finance companies made it possible to make fortunes on the stock market, and the expansion of trade and industry forged powerful mercantile dynasties such as the Whitbreads (brewing), Smiths (banking), and Strutts (textiles). Some of these self-made families purchased landed estates to advertise their new wealth; others made do with smart town houses or country villas. But, although it was possible to be rich and influential in this society without owning broad acres, it was the landed elite that set the cultural tone and dominated positions of power in both central and local government. Every peer in the House of Lords and a majority of MPs in the House of Commons owned land. Landowners also monopolized the office of lord lieutenant. Lords lieutenant were the crown's leading representatives in each of the English and Welsh counties. (Only in the 1790s was this office extended to Scotland.) Appointed by the king, they were responsible for maintaining law and order in their counties and for organizing civil defense measures during time of war. To assist them in these tasks, they appointed deputy lieutenants and justices of the peace—offices usually held by the squires and lesser gentry in the countryside and by merchants and landed gentlemen in the towns. None of these offices carried salaries—a clear indication that they were confined to the prosperous. But they brought with them considerable local influence and status and were often much sought after.

Less is known about Massie's 4th, 5th, and 6th social categories than about the landowning classes. And much less is known about small merchants, tradesmen, professionals, artisans, and labourers in Wales and Scotland than about their English equivalents. Most historians believe that the middle-income groups were increasing in number in the mid-18th century. Professional opportunities in law, medicine, schoolteaching, banking, and government service certainly expanded at this time. In the town of Preston in Lancashire, for example, there was only one attorney in 1702; by 1728 there were 17. Growing prosperity also increased job opportunities in the leisure and luxury industries. Urban directories show that there were more musicians and music teachers and more dancing masters, booksellers, caterers, and landscape gardeners than in the 17th century. And there were more shops. Shops had expanded even into rural areas by the 1680s, but in the 18th century they proliferated at a much faster rate. By 1770 the new town of Birmingham in Warwickshire had 129 shops dealing in buttons and 56 selling toys, as well as 35 jewelers. Not for nothing would Napoleon Bonaparte later describe Britain as a nation of shopkeepers.

Urban development

The centre of this commercial culture was the city of London. As the only real national metropolis, London was unique in its size and multiplicity of functions. By 1750 it contained more than 650,000 citizens—just under one in 10 of Britain's population. By contrast, only one in 40 Frenchmen lived in Paris in this period. The Hague held only one in 50 of the inhabitants of the Netherlands, and Madrid was the home of just one in 80 Spaniards. Some of these great European capitals had no resident sovereign. Many others, such as Vienna and St. Petersburg, were grand ceremonial and cultural centres but effectively isolated from the economic life of their national hinterland. London was different. It was not only the location of the Court and of Parliament but also the nation's chief port, its financial centre, the home of its printing industry, and the hub of its communications network. Britain's rulers were brought into constant proximity with powerful economic lobbies from all parts of the nation and with a large and constantly fluctuating portion of their subjects. Britons seem to have been more mobile than their fellow Europeans in this period, and then as now many traveled to the capital to find work and excitement. Perhaps as many as one in six Britons spent a portion of their working life in London in the 18th century.

London easily dwarfed the other British towns. In 1750 its nearest rival, Norwich, had fewer than 50,000 people. Nonetheless, the provincial towns, although functioning on quite a different scale from that of the metropolis, were also growing in size and importance at this time. In 1700 only 10 of them contained more than 10,000 people. By 1750 there were 17 towns with populations of that size, and by 1800 there were more than 50. As towns grew, they became better organized and safer, more pleasant places to live in. Because more stone was used in buildings, the risk of destruction by fire began to lessen. Towns acquired insurance companies and fire engines to protect their citizens. Supplies of clean water improved. Urban planning and architecture became more sophisticated and splendid, and the results can still be seen today in towns like Stamford in Lincolnshire or Bath in Somerset. These provincial centres developed cultural lives of their own, with new theatres, assembly rooms, libraries, Freemason lodges, and coffeehouses. By mid-century there were at least nine coffeehouses in Bristol, six in both Liverpool and Chester, two in Northampton, and at least one in most substantial market towns. Such establishments supplied their customers with newspapers and a place to gossip as well as with liquid refreshments. They also often served as a base for clubs, debating societies, and spontaneous political activity. Schools grew in number, in both the towns and the surrounding countryside. In just one English county, Northamptonshire, the local newspaper press advertised the establishment of more than 100 new schools between 1720 and 1760.

Change and continuity

Historians have differed sharply over the impact these commercial and cultural innovations had on British society as a whole. Some have argued that only a minority of men and women were touched by them and that the countryside, which contained the majority of the population, continued on in its traditional ways and values. This is certainly true of parts of Britain. The Scottish Highlands, the mountainous central regions of Wales, and some English regions such as East Anglia remained predominately rural and agricultural. Old beliefs and superstitions lingered on there and elsewhere, often into the late 19th century. Although Parliament repealed the laws against witchcraft in the 1730s, for example, many men and women, and not just the illiterate, continued to believe in its power. (John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was convinced that witches and the Devil had a real corporeal existence on earth.) It is true, too, that many of the new consumer goods that improved the quality of life for the prosperous—porcelain china, armchairs, fine mirrors, newspapers, and manufactured toys—were beyond the economic reach of the poor. And, although new styles of interior decoration transformed the dwellings of the landed and mercantile classes—the sale of wallpaper, for example, had risen from 197,000 yards in 1713 to more than two million yards in 1785, a 10-fold increase—they rarely reached the impoverished. Some agricultural labourers and miners had only one set of clothes and lived in mud-lined cottages, caves, or cellars. Beggars, vagrants, and the unemployed might not possess even these basic commodities.

Yet it would be wrong to postulate too stark a contrast in life-styles between the town and countryside, between the wealthy and the lower orders. Points of contact between the various layers of British society were in fact increasing at this time. More and more country landowners, their womenfolk, and their servants succumbed (without, one suspects, too much trouble) to the temptation of spending some months every year sampling the pleasures of their neighbourhood provincial town, consulting its lawyers and financial agents, and patronizing its shops. Many urban merchants, taking advantage of better roads and coach services, went to live in the countryside while maintaining their businesses in town. Lower down the social scale, hawkers and peddlers (itinerant traders) carried town-produced goods into the country areas and sold them there. Conversely, the growing demand for food in urban areas sucked in men and goods from the countryside. English drovers braved the old Roman roads and faltering bridle paths, the only routes available in Welsh counties such as Caernarvon and Anglesey, in order to purchase meat cattle for London and other towns. Every year tens of thousands of black cattle from the Scottish Highlands were driven southward until they reached the Smithfield meat market in London. Demand for manufactured goods fostered the spread of inland trade, as did increasing industrial specialization in the different British regions. Daniel Defoe illustrated this point by describing the multiple provenance of an affluent man's suit of clothes:

A coat of woollen cloth from Yorkshire, a waistcoat of cullamancoe from Norwich, breeches of strong drugget from Devizes and Wiltshire, stockings of yarn from Westmoreland, a hat of felt from Leicestershire, gloves of leather from Somerset, shoes from Northampton, buttons from Macclesfield, or, if metal, from Birmingham, garters from Manchester, and a shirt of handmade linen from Lancashire or Scotland.

In short, Britain was not a static society, and the towns and the countryside were not entirely separate spheres. Men and women moved about to seek pleasure, to do business, to sell goods, to marry, or to find work; and their ideas and impressions shifted over time.

The revolution in communications

Increased mobility was made possible by a revolution in communications. In the earlier 18th century long-distance travel was rare and the idea of long-distance travel for pleasure was a contradiction in terms. The speediest coach journey between London and Cambridge (just 60 miles) took at least a day. Traveling from the capital to the town of Shrewsbury by coach took more than three days, and the journey to Edinburgh could last as long as 10 days. Some travelers made their wills before starting, as coaches easily overturned on bad roads or in swollen rivers. By 1750, however, privately financed turnpike roads had spread from London and its environs to major English provincial centres like Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, and Birmingham. In the 1760s and '70s they spread further into Wales and Scotland. The postal service also improved in this period, though again much more slowly in the Celtic fringe than in England. In 1765 only 30 Scottish towns enjoyed a daily postal service.

But the most dramatic advance in inland communication came in the form of the printed word. London's first daily newspaper appeared in 1702. By 1760 it had four dailies and six tri-weekly evening papers that circulated in the country at large as well as in the capital. But the provinces also generated their own newspapers, their own books, dictionaries, magazines, printed advertisements, and primers. In 1695 Parliament passed legislation allowing printing presses to be established freely outside London. Between 1700 and 1750 presses were founded in 57 English provincial towns, and they proliferated at an even faster rate in the last third of the 18th century:

By 1725 no fewer than 22 provincial newspapers had emerged. By 1760 there were 37 such papers and by 1780, 50. In Scotland seven newspapers and periodicals were in existence by 1750, including the monthly Scots Magazine, which was printed in Edinburgh but could also be purchased from booksellers at Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling. Wales had no English-language newspaper until 1804, but many English papers found their way there.

By 1760 more than nine million newspapers were sold in Britain every year. Because they were expensive by the standards of the time (three or four pennies), one copy of a paper may have been shared and read by as many as 20 different people. There is little doubt that this explosion of newsprint helped to integrate the nation. All provincial newspapers and periodicals were parasitic on the London press. They borrowed large extracts from the more popular and controversial London papers and pamphlets. Increasingly, too, they broke the law and reprinted London journalists' accounts of debates in the House of Commons and House of Lords (printing parliamentary debates was illegal until 1770). Consequently, by the time of the Seven Years' War (1756–63), larger numbers of Britons than ever before had some access to political information. They were more aware of their country's military victories and defeats and more conscious of political scandals and protest. Politics was no longer just the preserve of the politicians at court, in Parliament, and in the country houses.

Britain from 1754 to 1783

Henry Pelham died in 1754 and was replaced as head of the administration by his brother, the Duke of Newcastle. Newcastle was shrewd, intelligent, and hard-working and possessed massive political experience. But he lacked self-confidence and a certain breadth of vision, and he was hampered by being in the House of Lords. In 1755 Henry Fox was appointed secretary of state and acted as the administration's spokesman in the Commons. Fox's promotion alienated a man who was far more interesting and remarkable than either of these ministers, William Pitt the Elder. Pitt had entered Parliament as an Opposition MP in the 1730s. In 1746 he had been appointed paymaster general, a highly lucrative state office. But Pitt, whose ambition was for fame and recognition rather than money, remained unsatisfied. The king, however, disliked him and successfully obstructed his career. In 1755 he dismissed Pitt, who began to attack Newcastle on imperial and foreign policy issues.

Conflict abroad

Although Britain and France had technically been at peace since 1748, both powers continued to harass each other in their colonial settlements in North America, the West Indies, and India. When the French attacked the British colony of Minorca in May 1756, war broke out; Britain allied itself with Prussia and France with Austria. Like every 18th-century war, this one began badly for Britain; it lost Oswego in North America as well as Minorca. There was an outcry in the press, and Newcastle and Fox resigned. In November Pitt was appointed secretary of state with William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, serving as nominal head of the new administration. But Pitt, still lacking royal approval or an adequate majority in the Commons, was dismissed by the king in April 1757. He returned to power in June, forming what was to be a highly effective wartime coalition with Newcastle. Pitt captured the attention and imagination of Parliament and of the people by his rhetoric and charisma; Newcastle employed his experience and industry to raise more than £160 million during the course of the war. But what cemented the coalition was Britain's naval and military successes. General Robert Clive defeated the French at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and subsequently managed to establish British dominance in Bengal and the Carnatic, the two most profitable regions of India for European traders. Two years later large sections of the French fleet were destroyed at the naval battle of Quiberon Bay. When Quebec fell to General James Wolfe in 1759, British control of Canada was effectively secured. The island of Guadeloupe was captured in the same dramatic year, as were French trading bases on the west coast of Africa.

Most of these gains were confirmed by the Treaty of Paris (1763), though Britain restored Guadeloupe to the French in return for control of Canada. In the short term these victories resulted in a mood of patriotic exultation, especially among merchants. They looked to the new colonies to provide both fresh stocks of raw materials and eager markets for British manufactured goods: “Trade,” Edmund Burke gloated, “had been made to flourish by war.” This global victory, however, had been purchased at a high price. The conquest of Canada freed the American colonists from the fear of a French invasion from the north. Anxiety on this score had helped to foster American attachment to Britain. Now these fears had been relieved, and as early as 1760 some Britons and Americans anticipated that this would lead to difficulties. Furthermore, the enormous cost of the conflict led to drastic and sometimes damaging postwar economies, not least the deterioration of the Royal Navy, which would be an important factor in Britain's defeat in the American Revolution (1775–83). Postwar economies also forced British governments to explore new fiscal expedients, which aroused discontent at home and in the American colonies. Finally, the apparent unity and strength of Britain's elite during the Seven Years' War was deceptive: Newcastle and many of his allies were elderly men, Pitt was difficult and unstable, and old Whig and Tory alignments had ceased to have much meaning. All these factors helped to make the early reign of George III a period of conflict and instability.

Political instability in Britain

George II died in October 1760 and was succeeded by his grandson, who became George III. The new king became one of the most controversial British monarchs. In the first 10 years of his reign administrations changed no fewer than seven times. In October 1761 Pitt resigned and Newcastle was made to share power with the royal favourite, John Stuart, Earl of Bute. In May 1762 Newcastle too resigned, and Bute alone led the government until his resignation in April 1763. Bute was replaced by George Grenville, who was in turn dismissed in July 1765. For the next year Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham, served as first lord of the treasury. But in July 1766 Rockingham was sacked and replaced by Pitt, now elevated to the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham. Chatham soon lapsed into manic depression, and from 1768 to 1770 Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, led the government. Only in 1770 did the king find a minister whom he felt he could trust and deal with: Frederick, Lord North. Such high political instability undoubtedly hampered British efforts to resolve the problem of its American colonies.

But division and instability were not just confined to the court and parliament. The 1760s were a period of bad harvests, rising food prices, and sporadic unemployment. These economic and social problems helped to fuel the public agitation over John Wilkes, a Protestant dissenter and the son of a London malt distiller. In 1757 he bribed a rotten borough to elect him as its member of Parliament. An interesting, irresponsible, and cheerfully immoral man, Wilkes became well known in London society but failed to obtain a government post. His disappointment, as well as a bent toward iconoclasm, pushed him into opposition journalism. In April 1763 issue number 45 of his paper, the North Briton (a reference to the then chief minister Lord Bute, who was Scottish), was judged seditious. The government reacted by issuing a general warrant under which Wilkes and 48 additional persons were arrested. But Sir Charles Pratt, chief justice of the court of commons pleas, determined that this was a breach of Wilkes's parliamentary privilege, and he acquitted him. Soon after Wilkes fled to France to avoid another trial, this time for obscenity. In 1764 he was expelled from the Commons and tried in absentia for sedition, libel, and obscenity. But, as he did not return, he was declared an outlaw for impeding royal justice. In 1768, deeply in debt, he returned and was elected MP for the county of Middlesex, the most populous county constituency in England.

Since Wilkes was still an outlaw, Parliament declared him ineligible for election, and for a time he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Due in large part to Wilkes's organizational and propaganda skills, this precipitated a nationwide agitation; Wilkes was seen not only in England but also in the American colonies as a martyr for liberty. His plight raised the question of whether the will of the people or the decision of a Parliament elected by only a fraction of the people was supreme. In 1769 the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights was founded to aid Wilkes and to press for parliamentary reform. Its members demanded parliamentary representation for important new towns such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester, the abolition of rotten boroughs, and general admission to the franchise for men of movable property (i.e., traders, merchants, and professionals). The English, as well as the American colonists, were becoming more interested in the connection between parliamentary representation (or the lack of it) and the obligation to pay taxes.

The American Revolution

The American issue was the final and most volatile element in the instability of the 1760s. Tension mounted, as far as British governments were concerned, primarily for two reasons. First, from this decade onward imperial organization received increased attention, and attempts were made to tighten British rule in Ireland and India as well as in the American colonies, a development that caused friction. Fiscal need was the second and more pressing problem. In 1763 the national debt stood at £114 million, and it continued to grow. Since the burden of taxation was already heavy for Britons, the government naturally looked to other sources of revenue. This was the background to George Grenville's decision, in 1765, to pass the Stamp Act, a measure designed to raise revenue in the American colonies by putting a tax on all legal and commercial papers. But it stirred up intense resentment in the colonies and, indirectly, in Britain, when the Americans boycotted British goods. In 1766 Rockingham repealed the Stamp Act while maintaining Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies. In 1767 Charles Townshend, then chancellor of exchequer, levied duties on certain imports into the colonies, including a duty on tea, and linked this proposal with plans to remodel colonial government. These measures exacerbated American discontent, though Parliament was not made to realize how much until 1774.

Historians have long disagreed over the question of how far George III himself was responsible for these tumultuous events. The Declaration of Independence (1776) unambiguously condemned the king as a tyrant. The so-called 19th-century British Whig historians also criticized the king in very harsh terms, maintaining, at their most extreme, that as a young prince he was indoctrinated with archaic and inflated ideas of royal power. When he came to the throne, he supposedly ousted his Whig ministers, replacing them with Tories, who were more sympathetic to royal ambitions. His arbitrary aims and policies, it was claimed, provoked the Wilkite agitation in Britain and drove the American colonists to rebel. George was consequently held directly responsible for the break-up of the British Empire. Finally, he was charged with employing bribery and corruption to persuade Parliament to do his bidding.

Twentieth-century historians, in particular the Polish-born scholar Lewis Namier, have revised many of these extreme judgments. It has now been established that the king was neither educated in arbitrary ideas, nor did he preside over a Tory revival. Ministers such as Bute, Grenville, Townshend, and North regarded themselves as Whigs. But by the 1760s and '70s “Whig” and “Tory” were terms that had lost precise ideological significance, and the breakdown of these old partisan divisions undoubtedly contributed to ministerial instability at this time. There is little evidence that the king used corrupt influence to make Parliament accept his American policy. Indeed, it is unlikely that he initially even possessed an American policy; royal correspondence shows that he was rarely closely interested in American affairs before 1774. The colonists' drift toward opposition and independence was probably caused as much by their distance from London and their increasing prosperity as it was by British fiscal measures.

But George III cannot be entirely exonerated. When he succeeded, he was only 22, immature, idealistic, and not well-educated. His appointment of his decorative favourite, Lord Bute, was a breach of the convention that monarchs should choose chief ministers possessed of political experience and proven abilities. In his dealings with other politicians George showed himself throughout his reign to be intransigent and obstinate, and he often confused his own personal feelings with the public welfare. He can scarcely be blamed for wanting to retain such an important part of his empire as the American colonies, but he can legitimately be criticized for insisting that the American war be continued after 1780, by which time it had become clear to his chief minister, Lord North, that Britain had lost.

Domestic responses to the American Revolution

Even at its outbreak in 1775 British attitudes to the American war were mixed. Many Protestant dissenters regarded the Americans as their brethren, for political and religious reasons. The City of London, and other commercial centres such as Glasgow, Norwich, and Newcastle, objected to the war because it disrupted highly profitable Anglo-American trade. Many British newspapers and cartoons adopted a pacifist and sometimes even a pro-American line. Other Britons believed, with George III, that rebellion against a monarch was sinful and that Parliament's authority must be preserved. Conventional patriotism became stronger after 1778, when France, Spain, and belatedly the Dutch, allied themselves with the Americans against Britain.

The next two years proved profoundly difficult. Fears that the French would invade Ireland as a prelude to invading the British mainland led ministers to encourage the creation of an Irish volunteer force some 40,000 strong. The Irish Protestant elite, led by Henry Grattan, used this force and the French threat to extract concessions from London. In 1783 Ireland was granted legislative independence, though it remained subject to George III. Declining British fortunes abroad also revived the issue of parliamentary reform. By 1779 three different reform groups had emerged, all of whom favoured peace with America. The Marquess of Rockingham and his parliamentary supporters (including his secretary, Edmund Burke) wanted to reduce official corruption and George III's influence in government. Another group, led by Christopher Wyvill, a one-time Anglican clergyman, wanted a moderate reform of the representative system. Wyvill and some of his supporters played with the idea of a national association, an assembly of reformers from each county in Britain, that would exist parallel to Parliament and be superior to it in constitutional zeal. A third small group, led by Charles James Fox, a Whig MP, and by former Wilkite activists, wanted more extensive political reform, including the secret ballot and annual general elections. In 1780 they founded the Society for Constitutional Information, which was designed to build public support for political change through the systematic production and distribution of libertarian propaganda.

It was unlikely that any of these reforms would be implemented. But the Gordon Riots of June 1780 made it certain that they would not be. In 1778 Parliament had made minor concessions to British Roman Catholics, who were excluded from civil rights. Anti-Catholic prejudice, however, had been a powerful emotion in Britain since the Reformation in the 16th century, and Roman Catholicism tended to be associated by many with political absolutism and persecution. A movement to repeal the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, the Protestant Association, started in Scotland under the leadership of an unstable individual called Lord George Gordon. The movement reached London and exploded there in riots that lasted for eight days. More than 300 people were killed, and more damage was done to property than would be done in Paris during the French Revolution. For a time these riots gave reform and popular agitation a bad name. To many, the very name of Wyvill's National Association was dangerously suggestive of the Protestant Association, and the parliamentary reform movement lapsed until the 1790s.

Disasters at home were followed by further disasters abroad. Late in 1781 Britain learned of General Charles Cornwallis' surrender in America at the Battle of Yorktown. Parliamentary pressure to end the war now became irresistible. When in March 1782 Lord North's majority in the Commons fell to nine votes, he resigned, against the wishes of George III. A new administration, formed under Lord Rockingham, was committed to peace with America and moderate constitutional reform at home. When Rockingham died in July 1782, William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, became first lord of the treasury. In November of that year it was he who had the thankless task of concluding peace with the Americans and formally acknowledging their independence and British defeat in the Treaty of Paris.

Britain from 1783 to 1815

Defeat abroad and division at home led many Britons to believe that their country was in irreversible decline. The war had cost more than £236.4 million and had apparently brought only humiliation and the loss of one of the most profitable regions of the British Empire. Yet recovery was rapid, and by the time Britain again went to war—in 1793, against revolutionary France—it was wealthier and more powerful than it had been at the beginning of George III's reign.

In February 1783 Britain made a far from disadvantageous peace with its European enemies. Minorca and Florida were ceded to the Spanish, but Gibraltar was retained. France was given settlements in Senegal and Tobago, but Britain recovered other West Indian islands lost during the war. Holland gave Britain freedom of navigation in its spice islands and an important trading base in India. Nonetheless, this peace damaged Shelburne's reputation, and he resigned. A coalition administration was formed, led by Lord North and Charles James Fox. The king disliked it and ruthlessly sabotaged it. The Fox–North coalition planned to cement its authority by passing a bill to reform the government of British settlements in India, previously administered by the East India Company alone. The India Bill passed the Commons but, like every other piece of legislation not directly concerned with taxation, it had to be approved by a majority in the House of Lords. In advance of the vote the king let it be known that he would regard any peer who supported the bill with disfavour. The Lords duly threw the bill out in December 1783, providing the king with an excuse to dismiss Fox and North and replace them with William Pitt the Younger, the second son of the late Earl of Chatham. The general election of 1784 supplied Pitt with a parliamentary majority.

William Pitt the Younger

Pitt lived and died a bachelor, totally obsessed with political office. He was clever, single-minded, confident of his own abilities, and a natural politician. But perhaps his greatest asset in the early 1780s was his youth. He had entered Parliament in 1780 and was just 24 when he became first minister in 1783. Consequently, he was not associated in the public mind with the American debacle but seemed instead to promise a new era. Moreover, although he and George III never developed a close relationship, he did enjoy the king's support. Knowing that the alternative to Pitt was Fox (whom he hated), the king dealt with Pitt in a responsible manner. In 1788–89 the king suffered a major bout of insanity (or, according to some scholars, porphyria, a hereditary blood disease). Although he recovered, he thereafter interfered in politics far less than in his early reign. Pitt in turn treated the king tactfully. He dropped his early enthusiasm for parliamentary reform, and in 1801 he resigned over the issue of Roman Catholic emancipation (the extension of civil rights to Catholics) rather than force the king to accept it.

Royal support aided Pitt's control of his cabinet and political patronage. But what sustained him most in the 1780s and early 1790s was the quality and success of his measures. He reduced the national debt by £10 million between 1784 and 1793, in part by increasing tax revenue. He fostered legitimate trade and reduced smuggling by cutting import duties on certain commodities such as tea. In 1786 he signed an important commercial agreement, the Eden Treaty, with France. It was in keeping with the argument made by the economist Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations (1776) that Britain should be less economically dependent on trade with America and become more adventurous in exploring trading opportunities in continental Europe. At home, Pitt strove for cheaper and more efficient administration; for example, he set up a stationery department to supply government offices with the necessary paper at a more economical rate. Abroad, he restored Britain's links with continental Europe and implemented imperial reorganization. In 1788 he signed the Triple Alliance between Britain, Prussia, and Holland, thereby ensuring that in a future war his country would not be bereft of allies as it had been during the American Revolution. In 1790 he demonstrated Britain's renewed power and prestige by negotiating a peace between Austria and Turkey. In 1784 he passed his own India Act, creating a board of control regulating Indian affairs and the East India Company. The board's members were nominated by the king from among the privy councillors. Finally, in 1791 the Canada Constitutional Act was passed. London became responsible for the government of both Lower and Upper Canada, but both provinces were given representative assemblies.

Economic growth and prosperity

Many of Pitt's reforms and policies, such as his India Act, had been devised by previous ministers. But even though he did not originate all of his schemes, Pitt nonetheless deserves credit for actually implementing them. For all his priggish ruthlessness and occasional dishonesties (perhaps because of them), Pitt undoubtedly contributed to the restoration of national confidence; indeed, for many people, he became its very personification. But British recovery had wider and more complex causes than just one man's measures. At bottom, it was rooted in accelerating economic growth and unprecedented national prosperity:

These figures illustrate two striking points. First, in the 1770s British export performance and industrial productivity were perceptibly damaged by the American war. But, second, Britain's economic recovery after the war was rapid and dramatic. Particularly noticeable is the fact that the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793–1802 and 1803–15) did not slow Britain's buoyant prosperity. Although Napoleon tried to blockade Britain in 1808 and again in 1811–12, he never succeeded in cutting the lifeline of its trade. In the period 1794–96 British exports averaged £21.7 million per annum. In the period 1804–06 the equivalent figure was £37.5 million, and during 1814–16, £44.4 million. These figures demonstrate how quickly Britain regained its American markets after 1783 and how extensive its other colonial markets were. But they are also one of many signs that the nation was experiencing the first Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution

Some historians have questioned whether the term Industrial Revolution can really be applied to the economic transformation of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain. They point out that in terms of employment the industrial sector may not have overtaken the agricultural sector until the 1850s and that even then the average unit of production employed only 10 people. Large, anonymous factories did not become common until the late 19th century. Other scholars have argued, rightly, that industry did not suddenly take off in the 1780s and that even in 1700 Britain was a more industrialized state than its European competitors. But, despite all these qualifications, the available evidence suggests that by 1800 Britain was by far the most industrialized state in the world and that, because of this, its rate of economic growth must have accelerated in the last third of the 18th century.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence one can cite for these statements (which are inevitably controversial, given the ferocity and rapid fluctuations of the debate on the Industrial Revolution) is Britain's ability to sustain an unprecedented growth in its population from 1780 onward without suffering from major famines or acute unemployment. In 1770 the population was about 8.3 million. By 1790 it had reached 9.7 million; by 1811, 12.1 million; and by 1821, 14.2 million. By the latter date, it is estimated that 60 percent of Britain's population was 25 years of age or below. By comparison, while a similar rate of demographic growth occurred in Ireland, there was no Irish Industrial Revolution. Partly as a result of this, Ireland suffered the great famine in the 1840s, whereas there was no similar famine in Britain.

To say this is not to deny the dark side of early industrialization. The conditions of work were often brutal, particularly for the young. Industrial safety was minimal, and environmental pollution and unguarded machines led to horrific injuries. Mechanization ruined the livelihoods of some skilled craftsmen, most notably the handloom weavers. Nonetheless, it is probable that without industrialization the social costs of rapid population growth in Britain would have been far greater.

Although it is not easy to account for Britain's early industrialization, some facts stand out. Britain, unlike its prime European rival, France, was a small, compact island. Except in northern Scotland, it had no major forests or mountains to disrupt or impede its internal communications. The country possessed a range of natural ports facing the Atlantic, plenty of coastal shipping, and a good system of internal waterways. By the 1760s there were already 1,000 miles of inland canals in Britain; over the next 70 years 3,000 more miles of canals were constructed. Britain was also richly endowed with coal and iron ore, and these minerals were often located close together in counties such as Staffordshire, Northumberland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire.

Most importantly perhaps, Britain could draw on an ample supply of customers for its goods, both at home and overseas. Its colonies fed it with raw materials while also serving as captive customers. And its expanding population meant buoyant demand at home even in wartime when foreign trade was disrupted. The best illustration of these advantages is the cotton industry. Its Indian settlements supplied Britain with ever-increasing amounts of raw cotton, and annual cloth production soared from 50,000 pieces of cloth in 1770 to 400,000 pieces in 1800. Much of this output in textiles was consumed by the home market. Some scholars have argued that the increased wearing of cotton (which could be easily washed) as distinct from woolen clothes (which could not) improved health conditions, thus contributing to Britain's population expansion.

Britain during the French Revolution

The outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789 initially heightened British national confidence. Some Britons welcomed it in the belief that civil commotion would weaken their prime European competitor. Many others, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft among them, felt confident that revolutionary France would become a new and enlightened state and that this process would in turn accelerate political, religious, and social change in Britain. By contrast, Edmund Burke's fierce denunciation in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) met with little immediate support, even among the political elite. Only when the new French regime guillotined Louis XVI and threatened to invade Holland did mainstream opinion in Britain begin to change and harden. In February 1793 Britain and France went to war.

There has been much debate over the degree to which British opinion on the war was united. Some historians have argued that Thomas Paine's best-seller, The Rights of Man (1791–92), fostered mass enthusiasm for democratic reform and mass alienation from Britain's ruling class. Paine attacked the monarchy, aristocracy, and all forms of privilege, and he demanded not only manhood suffrage and peace but also public education, old-age pensions, maternity benefits, and full employment. While he did not directly advocate a redistribution of property to fund these reforms, some contemporary radicals certainly did. A Newcastle schoolmaster, Thomas Spence, for example, issued a penny periodical, Pig's Meat (a reference to Burke's savage description of the British masses as “the swinish multitude”), calling for the forcible nationalization of land.

These developments in radical ideology were made more significant by simultaneous developments in radical organization. In January 1792 a small coterie of London artisans led by a shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, formed a society to press for manhood suffrage. It cost only a shilling to join, and the weekly subscription was set at a penny so as to attract as many members as possible. These plebeian reformers, making use of Britain's growing communications network, corresponded with similar societies that had sprung up in response to the Revolution in the English provinces and in Scotland. In October 1793 Scottish radicals held what they styled a British Convention in Edinburgh, and a few of the English corresponding societies managed to send delegates there. They issued a manifesto demanding universal manhood suffrage and annual elections and affirming their faith in the principles of the French Revolution.

In terms of the number of men involved, these initiatives were always limited. Corresponding societies were far more widespread in London and the industrial north than in predominantly rural areas such as central Wales. Only a small proportion of rural and industrial labourers, as distinct from artisans, seems to have joined them. Even in the radical bastion of Sheffield (population 31,000) the local corresponding society attracted only 2,000 members, and most of these did not attend its meetings regularly. A minority of these activists were overtly Francophile and some may have wanted a French invasion of Britain and the establishment of a republican regime. Most corresponding-society members, however, seem to have been deeply attached to the British constitution and to have wanted only to reform it. But if these societies were not extensive or proto-revolutionary, they were still important and recognized as such. Contemporaries realized that for the first time in the 18th century working men throughout the nation were beginning to organize to achieve political change.

Pitt's ministry acted ruthlessly to suppress them. Leading Scottish radicals were arrested and given harsh sentences. In England habeas corpus was temporarily suspended, laws were passed prohibiting public meetings and demonstrations, and Thomas Hardy was tried for treason but acquitted. By 1795 the corresponding societies had formally ceased to meet. A minority of radicals, however, continued to agitate for reform in secret, some of them engaging in sedition. Particularly prominent in this respect were Irish dissidents. By now large numbers of Irish immigrants lived and worked in British towns. Some of them sympathized with the Irish Rising of 1798 and formed secret societies to overturn the government. Several Irish agitators were involved in the Spithead and Nore naval mutinies of 1797 that for a time immobilized the Royal Navy. In 1803 an Irishman and former shipmate of Horatio Nelson, Edward Despard, was executed in London for plotting a coup d'état. Just how dangerous and well-supported these various incidents were is uncertain. But there can be no doubt that successive British wartime administrations felt obliged to devote extensive resources to maintaining order at home. even though they were also fighting an unprecedentedly massive war abroad.

The Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were massive in their geographic scope, ranging, as far as Britain was concerned, over all of the five continents. They were massive, too, in terms of expense. From 1793 to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 the wars cost Britain more than £1,650,000,000. Only 25 percent of this sum was raised by government loans, the rest coming largely from taxation, not least from the income tax that was introduced in 1798. But the wars were massive most of all in terms of manpower. Between 1789 and 1815 the British army had to expand more than sixfold, to about a quarter of a million men. The Royal Navy, bedrock of British defense, aggression, trade, and empire, grew further and faster still. Before the wars it had employed 16,000 men; by the end of them, it employed more than 140,000. Because there was an acute danger between 1797 and 1805 that France would invade Britain, the civil defense force also had to be expanded. The militia was increased, and by 1803 more than 380,000 men were acting as volunteers in home-based cavalry and infantry regiments. In all, one in four adult males in Britain may have been in uniform by the early 19th century.

Despite these financial and military exertions, British governments found it extremely difficult to defeat France. In part this was because Pitt the Younger's abilities were more suited to peace than to war. But the main reason the conflict was so protracted was France's overwhelming military superiority on land. The historian Paul Kennedy has written of British and French power in this period:

Like the whale and the elephant, each was by far the largest creature in its own domain. But British control of the sea routes could not by itself destroy the French hegemony in Europe, nor could Napoleon's military mastery reduce the islanders to surrender.

The first coalition of anti-French states, consisting of Britain, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and Austria, disintegrated by 1796. A British expeditionary force to aid Flanders and Holland was defeated, and Holland was occupied by the French. By 1797 the cost of maintaining its own forces and subsidizing those of its European allies had brought Britain to the verge of bankruptcy. For a time the Bank of England suspended payments in cash.

The British response to these developments was to concentrate on home defense and to consolidate its imperial and naval assets. Britain won a string of important naval victories in 1797, and in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile, Nelson defeated the French fleet anchored off Egypt, thereby safeguarding British possessions in India. Pitt also tried to solve the problem of Ireland. In 1801 the Act of Union took effect amalgamating Ireland with Great Britain and creating the United Kingdom. The Dublin Parliament ceased to exist, and Ireland's Protestant voters were allowed to return 100 MPs to Westminster. Pitt had hoped to sweeten the union by accompanying it with Roman Catholic emancipation, that is, by allowing Irish Catholics to vote and hold state office if they possessed the necessary property qualifications. George III opposed this concession, however, and Catholics were not admitted to full British citizenship until 1829. Pitt resigned and was succeeded as first minister by Henry Addington, the deeply conservative son of a successful doctor. It was his administration that signed the short-lived Treaty of Amiens with France in 1802.

War broke out again in May 1803. Once again, Britain demonstrated its power at sea but, until 1809, was unable to win substantial victories on land. Its fleet captured St. Lucia, Tobago, Dutch Guiana, the Cape of Good Hope, French Guiana, Java, Martinique, and other West Indian and African territories. Most importantly, in October 1805 Nelson defeated the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, thereby preventing an invasion of Britain. Napoleon, however, inflicted serious military defeats on the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians and invaded Spain. At one stage Britain's only remaining European allies were Sweden, Portugal, Sicily, and Sardinia; in short, the country was without any significant allies at all. Political leadership was uneven and sometimes weak, and the long duration of the war and its damaging effects on trade aroused increasing criticism at home. Pitt had resumed his post as chancellor of the Exchequer and first lord of the Treasury in May 1804, but he died worn out by work and drink in January 1806. None of the three men who succeeded him as premier, William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville (1806–07), William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Duke of Portland (1807–09), and Spencer Perceval (1809–12), was able to establish himself in power for very long or to capture the public imagination.

Yet the war began to turn in Britain's favour in 1809, in large part because of Napoleon's strategic mistakes. When the Spanish rebelled against French rule, substantial British armed forces were dispatched to assist them under the command of Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington. Spain's new anti-French posture meant that Spain was once again open to British manufactured goods, as were its colonies in Latin America. For a time this helped to reduce the commercial community's criticism of the conduct of the war. But demands for peace revived during the slump of 1811–12 and intensified when British relations with the United States, a vitally important market, began to deteriorate. One of the main irritants was the so-called Orders in Council, prohibiting neutral powers (like the United States) from trading with France. In 1812 commercial lobbies in Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and Birmingham succeeded in getting the orders repealed, an indication of the growing political weight exercised by the manufacturing interest in Britain. Although this failed to prevent the Anglo-American War of 1812, neither Britain's trade nor its war efforts in Europe was seriously damaged by that conflict. Russia's break with Napoleon in 1812 opened up large markets for British goods in the Baltic and in northern Europe.

From 1812 onward Napoleon's defeat was merely a matter of time. In June 1813 Wellington defeated the French army in Spain at Victoria. The forces of Austria, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia expelled the French from Germany in the Battle of Leipzig (October 1813). This victory allowed Wellington, who had already crossed the Pyrenees, to advance upon Bayonne and Toulouse. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, played the leading part in negotiating the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814, which clarified allied war aims (including the expulsion of Napoleon), tightened allied unity, and made provision for a durable European settlement. The subsequent squabbles over the spoils of war were interrupted for a time when Napoleon escaped from his genteel exile on Elba and fought his last campaign from March to June 1815. Although his final defeat at Waterloo was accomplished by the allied armies, Britain secured prime credit. This textbook victory was to help Britain dominate Europe and much of the world for the next 100 years.

Imperial expansion

Britain's ultimate success against Napoleon, like its importance in this period as a whole, owed much to its wealth—its capacity to raise loans through its financial machinery and revenue through the prosperity of its inhabitants and the extent of its trade. But British success also owed much to the power of its navy and to the energy and aggressiveness of its ruling class, which was particularly apparent in the imperial expansion of this period. Britain sought to extend its control by legislation, by war, and by individual enterprise. The Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707 and with Ireland in 1801 tightened London's rule over its Celtic periphery, as did the laws passed to erode the autonomy of the Scottish Highlands after the rebellion of 1745. In the 1760s Britain sought not only to increase the revenue it gained from its North American colonies but also to shore up its military and administrative influence there. These measures failed, but Britain had more success with its Indian possessions. Between 1768 and 1774, in fact, the House of Commons devoted far more time to Indian affairs than to those of North America. Its discussions culminated in the passing of the India Act in 1784, which indicatively increased the government's authority over the East India Company and therefore over Britain's possessions in India.

Every major war Britain engaged in during this period increased its colonial power. The Seven Years' War was particularly successful in this respect, and so were the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1793 and 1815 Britain gained 20 colonies, including Tobago, Mauritius, Malta, St. Lucia, the Cape, and the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in India. By 1820 the total population of the territories it governed was 200 million, 26 percent of the world's total population. Not all of these acquisitions were formally directed by London. Captain James Cook's explorations of Australia and New Zealand after 1770 were in part an exercise in private enterprise and scientific inquiry. Nonetheless, British settlement of Australia at New South Wales began in 1787, in part because the mother country needed another repository for transported convicts previously sent to the North American colonies. The East India Company also retained considerable initiative in its military strategies. In 1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles seized Singapore for the company and not on London's instructions. But, however acquired, all these acquisitions added to Britain's power and reputation. It was no accident, perhaps, that its two national anthems, “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” were composed in this period. For the privileged and the rich, this was preeminently an era of confidence and arrogance.