The pursuit of glory, p.34
The Pursuit of Glory, page 34
If Sicily represented the acme of backwardness (and arguably still does), at the other end of the peninsula, Piedmont was already displaying the relative dynamism that was to prompt nineteenth-century nationalist historians to present it as the pre-ordained unifier of Italy, as a ‘southern Prussia’. In part this was due to the Duchy’s subjection to France during the long reign of Duke Charles Emmanuel II (1637–75). The creation and expansion of a standing army, the concentration of decision-making and the extension of bureaucratic control were all pursued in conscious imitation of the French, if not dictated by them. By the end of the reign there was a network of intendants in place, indeed in this regard the Piedmontese were ahead of their neighbours. Under two long-lived successors, Victor Amadeus II (1675–1730) and Charles Emmanuel III (1730–73), this absolutist policy was continued. It was both symptom and cause of a sustained effort to maximize resources and enhance the Duchy’s international position. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the standing army had been expanded to 40,000, an impressive total which was increased further to 70,000 by 1796. Combined with a favourable strategic position, this allowed Victor Amadeus II to become King of Sicily by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Obliged to cede that kingdom to Charles VI, in 1720 he became King of Sardinia by way of compensation.
Only the knowledge that Piedmont-Sardinia was eventually to ‘unite’ Italy can generate much interest in what was happening a century earlier. It was some measure of the political decadence of this geographical expression that the most progressive and original governmental initiative taken during this period was launched by an Austrian Habsburg. On the death of the Emperor Francis I in 1765, his widow Maria Theresa gave his Grand Duchy of Tuscany to her younger son, Leopold, as a ‘secundogeniture’. He proved to be one of the most intelligent, enlightened and effective reformers of the century. Much of what he attempted was familiar, informed by a wish for centralization, rationalization, standardization. What was new was his concern to expand participation in government, by reforming urban councils to involve both landowners and taxpayers. Beginning with Volterra in 1772, this scheme was extended to cover the whole Duchy by 1786. Less successful, indeed ultimately an outright failure, was his attempt to replace the regular army with a militia, but it also indicated a search to move from a top-down authoritarian state to one in which citizens (not subjects) accepted responsibility for their own affairs.
More interesting still were his plans for a constitution for Tuscany. In private correspondence he made it clear again and again just how much he disapproved of his elder brother Joseph’s abrasive approach to politics, condemning it as ‘despotism’. On his return from an extended stay in Vienna in 1779, he sent a draft constitution to his minister Francesco Maria Gianni, his aim being to find a structure that would allow ruler and people to work together for the common good and would guard against despotism. Indeed, according to Leopold’s most authoritative biographer, Adam Wandruszka, this concern to safeguard his Duchy against an arbitrary regime became something of an obsession. Partly this stemmed from his admiration of the traditional constitutions of the Austrian Netherlands and even Hungary, but more modern influences can also be detected. He was very well read in English and French enlightened theory, including Locke, Montesquieu and the physiocrats, and he also took a keen and sympathetic interest in the progress of the American Revolution. He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and owned a copy of the Pennsylvanian constitution in French translation.
Underlying Leopold’s constitutional theory was the belief in a social contract, from which he deduced the equal right of all citizens to happiness, welfare, security, property and liberty, restrained only by the need to respect the liberty of others. From this it followed that the ruler could never be more than the servant of the people, who had the right to monitor legislation and administration. Every state should be underpinned by a fundamental constitution, which would subject the executive to constant monitoring by the citizens’ deputies and by the public at large. Such an arrangement would be positively helpful to the ruler because it would guard against corruption and factionalism and would ensure popularity, trust, participation, self-sacrifice–and all the other benefits that spring from a sense of legitimacy. It would help the ruler to do good, but stop him from doing evil. He envisaged both provincial assemblies and a national Parliament, with the franchise extended to all property-owning males over the age of twenty-five. Among other powers, they would enjoy the crucial right to approve taxes and the annual budget. In private handwritten memorandum Leopold gave further compelling evidence of a commitment to constitutionalism:
The present systems of government are no longer viable…Every government must have a constitution…Limited monarchy, with executive power in the hands of one individual and legislative power in the hands of the representatives of the nation, is the best of all…The nation has the right of consent not only to laws relating to taxation but to all other laws as well, without exception.
Whether this project ever stood a chance of success is impossible to estimate. In the event, it was Joseph II who called a halt by informing Leopold that Tuscany was to cease to enjoy its quasi-autonomous status and was to be reintegrated into the Habsburg Monarchy. When he himself succeeded his brother as Emperor in 1790, Leopold had his hands all too full dealing with a crumbling inheritance, not to mention the French Revolution, but, as we shall see in a later chapter, his short reign suggested that his commitment to the Tuscan constitutional project had been sincere.
GREAT BRITAIN
Talleyrand is usually credited with the mot that the exiled Bourbons ‘learned nothing and forgot nothing’. It could be applied with equal justice to the returning Stuarts in 1660. Like their French successors, they managed to blunder through one reign, only to be sent on their travels again when an even more stupid younger brother squandered the last remnants of goodwill. In a neat juxtaposition of exiles, James II sought refuge in France in 1688, while Charles X fled to England in 1830. There the resemblance ends, for out of the prolonged constitutional crisis in England came a political settlement that has endured with periodic modifications until the present day, whereas France has worked its way through another monarchy, an empire and five republics–so far. The longevity of the settlement of 1688–9 has had much to do with its essentially conservative nature, for it was not so much a compromise as a compendium of what had worked in the past and seemed worth preserving. It has provided powerful support for Michael Oakeshott’s celebrated maritime metaphor to explain political success:
In political activity men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every inimical occasion.
The structure of the vessel on which the English political nation embarked in 1688 was described in ‘An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown’, better known as the ‘Bill of Rights’. It was to this document that William III and Queen Mary had to subscribe before being allowed to ascend the throne that James II was deemed to have abdicated. The Parliament that enacted the measure made clear in the preamble the source of their legitimacy: ‘Whereas the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons assembled at Westminster, lawfully, fully and freely representing all the estates of the people of this realm…’ They were not starting with a blank sheet of paper, on the contrary, they were embarking on a revolution in the old sense–of revolving back to the right order of things before the aspiring tyrant began his ‘endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom’. That also neatly sums up the revolutionaries’ objectives: to ensure that never again could there be an attempt to impose Catholicism and absolutism on England. Of these two demons, it was the first that loomed largest and required explicit exorcism, so it was enacted that:
all and every person and persons that is, are or shall be reconciled to or shall hold communion with the see or Church of Rome, or shall profess the popish religion, or shall marry a papist, shall be excluded and be for ever incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the crown and government of this realm and Ireland and the dominions thereunto belonging or any part of the same, or to have, use or exercise any regal power, authority or jurisdiction within the same.
To prevent any future encroachments on the laws and liberties of the country, the sovereigns were prohibited from suspending laws, interfering with the judiciary or juries, packing or muzzling Parliament, and maintaining a standing army or levying taxes without parliamentary approval. Crucially, in future Parliaments were to be convened regularly and frequently, a requirement reinforced by the Triennial Act of 1694, which stipulated annual meetings and a general election every three years. The subtle and determined William III managed to loosen some of the bounds Parliament drew around him, but his paramount need for war finance kept him under their ultimate control. By its durability this settlement proved that conservative liberty is an oxymoron, not a contradiction in terms. Of the encomia heaped on it during the course of the next century and more, the following from David Hume can stand as representative: ‘it gave such an ascendant to popular principles as has put the nature of the English constitution beyond all controversy…We, in this island, have ever since enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.’
If the men who made the Glorious Revolution were unanimous on the Catholic issue, they were more divided about Protestant nonconformity. The outcome was a compromise, the ‘Toleration Act’ of 1689 being in effect an admission by the Anglican establishment that it could never hope to extirpate Puritanism. On the one hand, England remained a confessional state, with access to all public offices and the universities confined to Anglicans; on the other hand, Protestant nonconformists (Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers, for example) were not punished if they failed to attend Anglican services and were permitted to establish their own chapels and schools. There followed a very rapid increase in organized dissent: by 1710 3,900 licences for the opening of dissenting meeting-houses had been issued, by which time there were probably around 400,000 nonconformists in England and Wales. In London there were twice as many dissenting meeting-houses as Anglican parish churches. Although still subject to various forms of discrimination, the most onerous being the continuing obligation to pay the church rate and tithe to support a church they never visited, the sting of dissent had been drawn. However distasteful Anglican domination might be, at least it was not Roman Catholic.
The same sort of consideration helped to keep the English elites more or less united. The spoonful of sugar that persuaded most Tories to swallow the rupture of such cherished principles as divine right, hereditary succession and non-resistance was the thought that at least William and Mary were not James II. The latter’s brutal trampling on individual and corporate property rights during his brief reign confined what Jacobitism there was to toasts to the ‘king over the water’. Although much ingenious effort has been devoted to talking up the Jacobite threat, the obstinate fact remains that outside the Highlands of Scotland support was thin in all ranks of society, even after the unappealing George I succeeded in 1714. His greatest asset was his Protestantism. When the Old Pretender decided that London was not worth a Mass, he also handed to his rivals a priceless advantage. Given the tiny size of the Catholic community in England and the confessional nature of the country’s politics, the Stuarts could now only hope to make good their claim to the throne with the assistance of Spain or France. So the associations between Protestantism and patriotism and between Catholicism and treason were correspondingly intensified. A Stuart restoration now meant foreign invasion. When James III’s second son, Henry, became a Catholic priest and a Cardinal to boot, the cost of a Stuart restoration became too high for all but a small and diminishing number of Jacobite diehards.
The Glorious Revolution settled the religious problems that had wracked the seventeenth century by tolerating nonconformists and suppressing Catholics in England. The same technique was employed in Ireland, although the situation there was very different because the Catholics constituted around three-quarters of the population (as opposed to c. 2 per cent in England). But following their decisive defeat at the Boyne in 1690, they were in a hopeless position: ‘once again it had been proved that the Stuarts’ efforts to reconquer England from Ireland was as fatal for the Irish as for themselves’ (Keith Feiling). Catholics were excluded from the Irish Parliament and were subjected to a series of penal laws: for example, in 1695 they were banned from owning weapons or a horse worth more than £5; in 1697 their bishops and regular clergy were banished; also in 1697 it was made next to impossible for Catholics to inherit Protestant land or to pass their owns lands intact to a single heir; in 1703 they lost the right to buy land or to acquire it on a long lease but were compelled to divide their own land equally among all heirs. As these last measures suggested, the Protestant Ascendancy was well aware that ownership of land was the key to control. In the course of the 1690s, massive confiscations from Catholic landowners tainted with treason created a new Protestant Anglo-Irish elite. The Catholic share of Irish land fell from 59 per cent in 1640 to 22 per cent in 1688 to 14 per cent in 1703. Just in case there was any doubt as to Ireland’s subjection, in 1720 an ‘Act for the better securing of the dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain’, better known as the ‘Declaratory Act’, was passed, spelling out the superiority of the English Parliament.
In Scotland it was quite a different story, for the good reason that there it was the Presbyterians who had been William III’s most enthusiastic supporters. There was no pretence here that James II had abdicated–he had been deposed, and what the Scottish ‘Convention of Estates’ had done once, it might well do again. Not only was William obliged to accept this version of events, he had to give the Scottish Parliament a free hand in reconstructing the country’s ecclesiastical arrangements. The result was the establishment of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church. More than a decade of upheaval followed, demonstrating yet again that the divisions between Highland and Lowland Scotland were as deep as those between Scotland and England. The domestic dimension of the conflict was dramatized by the massacre of Glencoe when Scots (Campbells) killed Scots (Macdonalds) on the orders of a Scot (John Dalrymple). Both the English and the Scottish political elites–the former rather earlier than the latter–came to see that only a union of the two countries could put an end to more than a century of periodic mutually destructive upheavals. In particular, Scottish reluctance to follow the English lead over the succession issue raised the awful prospect of a Jacobite king north of the border and the war that must inevitably follow. In January 1707 the Act of Union was passed, the very first article showing an impressive grasp of the importance of national semiotics:
That the two kingdoms of Scotland and England shall, upon the 1st day of May next ensuing the date hereof, and for ever after, be united into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain, and that the ensigns armorial of the said United Kingdom be such as Her Majesty shall appoint, and the crosses of St Andrew and St George be conjoined in such manner as Her Majesty shall think fit, and used in all flags, banners, standards and ensigns, both at sea and land.
To sugar a pill which was bound to be deeply unpopular in Scotland, the English negotiators had offered many attractive concessions, especially in economic affairs. In return for their cession of legislative independence, the Scots were given forty-five seats at Westminister (thirty county members and fifteen members for groups of burghs) and sixteen seats in the House of Lords, to be filled by an assembly of Scottish peers from their own members. Within a few years the latter became ‘in practice a government list’ (Hamish Scott).
Thus was created the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’, a kingdom that was indeed more united than ever it had been in the seventeenth century. The great winners of twenty years of political reconstruction after 1688 turned out to be the great aristocratic magnates. It was they who dominated the Westminster Parliament, so it was they who got their hands first on the pump of patronage. There were surprisingly few of them: just 173 English temporal peers in 1700, a number which held more or less steady as new creations balanced extinctions until Pitt the Younger’s flood of creations brought the total to 267 in 1800. Moreover, as John Cannon revealed, the reputation of the British peerage for being open to new men and new money was something of a myth, even towards the end of the century. Of the 113 peers in 1800 whose titles dated from 1780 and after, 25 were promotions, 17 were promotions from the Irish peerage, 7 were promotions from the Scottish peerage, and 2 more were younger sons called up in their fathers’ baronies. Only seven of the remainder did not already have some sort of family connection with the peerage and only one was a genuinely self-made man: the banker Robert Smith, the first Lord Carrington.
